Murcia – like the first rising a year earlier, it was quickly snuffed out by the authorities. This was unsurprising. As prominent anarchist youth organiser Fidel Miró observed, following the split, the CNT was ‘losing power, both in terms of its membership and its revolutionary impetus’.90 The rising was the action of an armed vanguard with no real connection with the masses. Peirats later wrote how people were ‘cold, indifferent or afraid, holed up behind their doors’.91 With no organised anarchist presence in La Vall, José followed the march of the movement through the pages of the CNT daily, which he received from Madrid on the days it passed the state censor. Although he had grown attached to the village and its people, after a few months, by early March, the agricultural work dried up and he was restless. For a while, he worked in an espadrille workshop, as his parents had done before him, but the lure of Barcelona, his family, and his comrades – all that gave meaning to his life – was ever more powerful.92
His return to Barcelona marked the start of a new stage in his activism. He completely immersed himself in the organisational life of the anarchist movement, then in open crisis following the second failed uprising of January 1933, which had heightened internal conflicts. These conflicts caused Peirats great personal distress when the wrath of the radicals fell on Massoni, his first important mentor in anarcho-syndicalism and fellow brickmaker and one of the last signatories of the treintista manifesto to remain in a position of influence inside the CNT. Massoni evoked tremendous compassion in CNT circles due to the injuries inflicted upon him by right-wing gunmen, which left him unable to continue working as a brickmaker. In 1930, Massoni was elected administrator of Solidaridad Obrera, a position he occupied with great diligence despite the difficult financial and political circumstances and for which he was later re-elected. After signing the treintista manifesto, however, Massoni became the target of the ire of radicals in the print-workers union, the Sindicato de Artes Gráficas (Graphic Arts Union), whose campaign against him led to the deterioration of his precarious health. The tragic denouement came at the Regional Plenum of the Catalan CNT held in Barcelona on 5–13 March 1933, where Massoni was so unwell that a comrade had to read his report and respond to radical accusations that he had misappropriated funds.93 While there was no evidence to support such claims, Massoni was forced to resign from Solidaridad Obrera. For a noble activist who had given everything to the movement, this was a bitter moral blow and he suffered a heart attack in the middle of the plenum.94 With their erstwhile comrade on his deathbed, the radicals issued a manifesto denouncing Massoni as the spokesperson of all ‘splitters’.95 He fell into depression and died weeks later, having devoted most of his forty years to the CNT.96
His death coincided with the most violent phase of the split, which saw armed clashes between treintistas and radicals, as they disrupted each other’s meetings with coshes, knives, and pistols. Although Peirats was above the mêlée and had maintained his friendship with Massoni, the moderates identified him with the maximalist position; so, when he and Canela attended the funeral, they were forced to leave without having the chance to bid farewell to their mentor. For Peirats, this was a bitter reminder of the pointlessness of this fratricidal schism.97
Meanwhile, in L’Hospitalet, the CNT was effectively now run by the radical Tomás and his cronies. From their insurrectionist perspective, Peirats and his associates were little more than culture-obsessed reformists. As for Peirats, Tomás’s witless maximalism, coupled with his blundering sectarianism, embodied everything that was wrong with the radicals, whose futile uprisings only served to undermine the CNT, the anarchist movement, and the cultural initiatives he so valued.
Afinidad now rallied to change the movement’s orientation. During Peirats’s time in La Vall, Afinidad voted to join the FAI in an explicit bid to counter this ‘insurrectionary adventurism’.98 In particular, they opposed what they saw as the unaccountable vanguardism of the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver, whom they blamed for implicating the entire movement in their military fantasies.99 Like other groups, Afinidad believed the uprisings were minority actions of armed groups on the fringes of the movement. According to one prominent Barcelona faísta, ‘A considerable number of FAI militants were appalled by their constant use of demagogy and found their coup-style practices less acceptable still.’100 Once in motion, the insurrections presented the movement with a fait accompli, leaving activists conscious of their moral obligation to show solidarity. In effect, Nosotros benefitted from a glorious myth, in no small part fuelled by anarchism’s internal culture, which revered all that was secret and clandestine. This enabled its members to exert a charismatic authority over key sections of the CNT and the FAI. Yet, while Nosotros was publicly identified with the anarchist movement, frequently invoking its name, Afinidad correctly noted they had no democratic mandate from grassroots assemblies for their insurrectionary politics.101 Afinidad sought to open up a debate on the viability of armed struggle and to gauge the extent to which the CNT and the FAI actually endorsed the insurrections. For Peirats, this was the first of a series of occasions in which he would find himself in direct opposition to the movement’s ‘leadership’. Indeed, according to one critic of Nosotros, Peirats was ‘the main defender’ of the thesis that the group had to be isolated.102
Afinidad similarly rejected the armed fundraising tactics that were central to the radical repertoire. For the radicals, expropriations were another front in the growing insurrection against the existing order that also provided vital funds to purchase arms for their ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. Likewise, armed fundraising offset the decline in dues-paying members inside a fractured CNT, at a time when there was intense pressure on the funds of the Comité pro Presos to assist the rising numbers of social prisoners caused by the insurrections. Meanwhile, for those affinity groups inspired by the anarcho-individualism of Max Stirner, expropriations allowed them to finance their activities and constituted an alternative to paid work – something that clashed frontally with the worker ethos of Afinidad, who shared the anarcho-syndicalist belief in payment for a job well done.
Peirats’s rejection of expropriations was rooted in ethical and strategic considerations. We saw earlier that, in the 1920s, he subscribed to Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which was co-edited by López Arango, a brilliant organiser and anarchist propagandist, whose denunciations of ‘anarcho-banditry’ cost him dearly: he was gunned down at home in front of his wife and children by a member of the Severino Di Giovanni affinity group.103 Peirats’s direct experiences with Barcelona’s expropriators confirmed his hostility to this practice. Through Ginés Alonso, Afinidad member and co-founder of La Torrassa’s athenaeum, Peirats was introduced to the anarcho-individualist Ágora affinity group, of which Alonso was also a member. After several meetings with Ágora, Afinidad voted to break with what Peirats described as a ‘club of libertines’,104 whose fondness for smoking, drinking, and aversion to work was a world away from his strict conception of proletarian morality and ‘the dignity of flaunting callused hands’.105 The logic of Ágora’s actions was later writ large in a bungled armed robbery at a bar that left one waiter (and trade unionist) dead and most of the group, including Alonso, in jail.106
Afinidad’s frustration with the radical line turned to exasperation following the third insurrectionary essay, which started on 8 December 1933. It later became evident that the Barcelona police had prior warning of the action.107 Peirats witnessed first-hand the abysmal organisation of the rising in L’Hospitalet, one of its main foci. Those Afinidad members who specialised in direct action assembled at Canela’s flat with their pistols to discuss their stance in advance.108 The notable absentee was Pérez, always the boldest of the group, who was part of a team that had successfully executed an audacious plan to liberate inmates from the Modelo prison by digging a hole from the sewers into the building. Though opposed to the rising, as men of action, Peirats and the others were eventually drawn to the streets by the sound of gunfire and the knowledge that their comrades were fighting the security forces. Before midnight, they took to the streets individually, aware the police would be less likely to stop individuals. Peirats later confessed to being motivated by his curiosity to see the ‘revolution’ play out.109
He was singularly unimpressed. Confirming his view that revolution was impossible if the masses were unprepared, he witnessed insurrectionists hammering on doors to rally people, manu militari: ‘Women and children to their beds! Men to the streets! The revolution has broken out!’ When calls went unheeded, the insurgents became contemptuous: ‘The Spanish