Teatro Nuevo on 27 April. The auditorium, with a capacity for around 2,500 people, could not cope with the human multitude that answered the CNT’s call, and many people had to content themselves with following the speeches on loudspeakers in the street outside. The majority of the speakers were older activists, such as Massoni, Joan Peiró, and Pestaña, the CNT’s general secretary. More inclined to syndicalism, and all of them veterans of the pre-1923 era, these militants had spearheaded the reorganisation of the CNT in the preceding months and were attempting to chart a course through the limited freedoms permitted by the dictablanda.
Tactical differences quickly came to the surface. Divergences were evident over the CNT’s relationship with the wider opposition to the monarchy, which included dissident army officers, renegade monarchist politicians, socialists, and republicans. Peiró, one of the many activists in contact with the political opposition, came in for fierce criticism for signing a manifesto with republican groups in support of a socially progressive democracy. Urales, always at loggerheads with the anarcho-syndicalists, inveighed against the ‘political’ compromises of leading CNT figures. Yet it was not just the more moderate anarcho-syndicalists who flirted with opposition politicians; for instance, Felipe Aláiz, a radical anarchist who later became Peirats’s most important mentor, shared a platform with leading Catalan republicans.68 While Peirats had much in common with the anarchist radicals, his social background and his quest for class struggle predisposed him towards the anarcho-syndicalists, and he was intoxicated by his new experiences within the CNT.69
The CNT’s struggle for economic demands resulted in a wave of social mobilisations and strikes during 1930–1 and this increasingly dovetailed with the campaign for political and civil liberties. Beset by its own internal and external contradictions, the monarchy buckled under the weight of the spiralling dynamics of protest that its very existence engendered until, on 14 April 1931, the Second Republic was proclaimed. This momentous event opened up a new phase in Peirats’s life, in which the ‘anarchist family’ would become his real family.
Chapter Three: The Second Republic:
The split in the anarchist movement and ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ (1931–33)
3.1 The short republican honeymoon
For José, 14 April 1931 began like any other working day: he rose and set off on foot to the Sants brickworks where he was employed. He would have been aware that, two days earlier, municipal elections had been converted by the liberal-left opposition into a plebiscite on the future of the monarchy. With the CNT leadership calculating that the unions would get a better deal under a democracy, many grassroots cenetistas had been encouraged to vote. It is highly unlikely that more anarchist-inclined activists like José, firm in their anti-political convictions as they were, participated in the proceedings. Yet many thousands of workers voted and, in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet, the monarchists failed to win a single council seat. As news spread of the leftist opposition victory in the major urban centres, anti-monarchist crowds took to the streets in a show of pro-republican feeling. By afternoon, José knew something big was in the air when he saw an animated group marching towards central Barcelona carrying the republican tricolour flag. As the hubbub outside grew, he left work and walked a short distance to Gran Vía, a major artery leading to the city centre, where he saw ‘a human wave’ coming from L’Hospitalet.1 Meanwhile, in the corridors of power, profound fissures opened up within the elite. Mindful of the isolation of the discredited monarch, General José Sanjurjo, head of the Civil Guard, respectfully informed the king that his erstwhile praetorian guard would not block a democratic opening. The path was now laid to the proclamation of a republic.
Peirats witnessed emotional scenes as workers from neighbouring barrios converged on Plaza de España to celebrate the demise of the monarchy, what for many was a despised authority structure. Amidst huge popular revelry, people climbed on tram roofs and waved republican flags. Peirats did not join the celebrations, though. Going against the flow of the wave of jubilant humanity descending on central Barcelona, he set off for the CNT’s La Torrassa office, where he met other activists keen to define their position in the face of these momentous events. Peirats and his comrades appreciated the need to gain maximum advantage from what they perceived was a fluid situation. This meant forcing events, in a bid to accelerate history. That afternoon, he was part of a crowd of ‘several thousand’ protesting outside the Modelo prison for the release of the social prisoners, who eventually regained their freedom.2 Later that evening, there was an armed clash between security forces and anarchists, as the latter attempted to seize weapons from a police station near the port. The confrontation left a soldier dead and several civilians wounded, including Conrado Ruiz Vilaró, a close comrade of Peirats, who later died from his wounds. With tensions running high, republican politicians were on the streets trying to defuse the situation, promising further change was possible only through legal channels: ‘It was the same old tune… We knew that their promises would go unfulfilled.’3 As well as promises, the newly ensconced republican ‘revolutionary committee’ hastily formed a ‘security guard’ to augment the public order role of the police and the army.4
With the coming of the Republic, militants like Peirats represented the left wing of the CNT and of the libertarian movement. A strategic-generational conflict developed, as some older activists, whose perspectives were heavily conditioned by the more or less continuing repression to which the movement had been subjected since 1921, were prepared to offer the Republic a degree of leeway, in the hope that democracy would allow for the CNT’s reorganisation. Yet, radicals like Peirats gave no quarter to the new regime. After the enforced interregnum of the dictatorship, they were primed and ready for direct action.
It is naïve to berate these ideologically committed libertarians for not becoming liberal democrats on April 14: they were doctrinally opposed to what they saw as an inherently limited bourgeois democracy that offered formal political equality but left the economic structure of oppression inherited from the monarchy intact. Likewise, in strategic terms, as activists committed to direct action as a means of wresting concessions from the authorities and employers, it made sense to them to build on the ascendant curve of mobilisation that had contributed to the fall of the monarchy. Convinced that the republicans were incapable of advancing the cause of social progress whatsoever, the radicals sought to intensify protest dynamics and channel them towards short-term gains on the road to liberation. They regarded any respite in popular mobilisation as a capitulation to the new authorities. As Peirats later reflected:
The vast majority of those leftist politicians… were individuals who, because of their mentality and political education, thought that by unseating the monarchists their hour had come.5 The republicans had reached the end of journey and had alighted from the train. For them, the revolution – their revolution – was already a fact. Their main leaders would soon find themselves suckling restlessly at the teat of money. We were now alone on the road to ‘complete emancipation’.6
Nevertheless, he and his associates were optimistic that the republican spring, and the limited political freedom accompanying it, would at least provide them with a new scope to develop their activism. Indeed, during the Republic, the worker-activists of José’s generation came of age. Part of a new mass working class formed by the accelerated industrialisation of the 1910s and 1920s, their youth had prevented them from playing a prominent role in the pre-1923 struggles. As we will see, these younger workers were the major protagonists of the struggles that radicalised the CNT in the prelude to the July 1936 revolution.
The day after the birth of the Republic, the CNT organised a general strike which, according to one militant, was ‘total in Catalonia’, but ‘the atmosphere was one of fiesta, not struggle.’7 Peirats went to the central Barcelona office of the Construction Union, a union that had radicalised during the final months of struggle against the monarchy and that would emerge as the flagship of radical anarcho-syndicalist practice prior to the civil war, constantly clashing against local employers and authorities. Besides debating the new political situation, the construction activists developed a strategy to defend the most pressing needs of the dispossessed – the struggle against unemployment and high rents.8 It is possible that later that day José was part of a mobile group which toured the city to gather intelligence and seize arms, since he was well informed of the extra guards posted