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Chapter Four : The Early Years
Proletarian Anarchism
The founding of the Spanish Regional Federation opened an entirely new period in the modern history of Spain. Since the respectable Liberal parties had shut themselves off from the masses of Spain the lower classes would try to form organizations of their own. The political polarization of rulers and ruled merely paralleled one that had long since developed on an economic and cultural level, but it was to lead to increasingly bitter confrontations in the years to come.
The earliest of these were mild. The founding congress had evoked press attacks throughout Spain, particularly in Madrid where the Liberals and Republicans viewed the antipolitical stance of the new Federation as a threat to their waning influence on the working class. Fortunately, the most immediate practical result of the Barcelona congress was to furnish the Federation with the nucleus of its own national press; in addition to La Federacion in Barcelona and La Solidaridad in Madrid, the Internationalists acquired El Obrera and Revolucion in Palma and La Voz del Trabajador in the key industrial city of Bilboa. The propaganda of the Spanish Federation probably represents the most important achievement of its first six months of existence. Its literature reached thousands, eyoking an additional press response that gave it wide and continual publicity. The Federation began to acquire larger dimensions in the public mind than it actually possessed in fact, an image which the Federal Council in Madrid and the sections shrewdly reinforced with numerous leaflets, statements, arid public meetings.
But other areas of the Federation's activities were less satisfactory. The enormous enthusiasm generated by the founding congress soon gave way to lassitude. The Federal Council's attempt to achieve a working unity between the various sections throughout the country met with a disillusioning lack of response. Letters sent into the hinter lands of Spain went unanswered, responses were often delayed, and a chronic shortage of funds created difficulties for the Madrid organization and severe hardships for members of the Council, most of whom gave generously of their time and resources. This in turn exacerbated relations between some of the Aliancistas who constituted the Federation's center and were to lead to serious personal and political frictions.
Even more serious were the problems that faced the Barcelona movement. Although Catalonia provided the largest single bloc of working-class recruits to the Spanish Federation, the Internationalists constituted a very small proportion of the Barcelona proletariat.
Perhaps 9 percent of the working class in the city adhered to the new movement. Small as this figure is, it declined drastically when a yellow fever epidemic swept through the Catalan seaport, claiming many lives and stampeding thousands, into the countryside. Of the 10,000 members who belonged to the Barcelona movement in July 1870, only 1,800 remained in January 1871, and scarcely more than 2,500 in August, a full year after the founding congress. The commonly repeated notion that the International in Spain enjoyed a spectacular growth during the first year of its existence is a myth, certainly as far as Barcelona—its center of proletarian support is concerned.
Nominally, the Barcelona organization was controlled by Anarchists. Actually, the number of Anarchists in the sections was very small. In fact many outstanding figures in the Barcelona labor movement were pragmatic trade unionists whose social idealism was shallow at best. The International in the Catalan seaport was based on an alliance between a handful of Anarchists and a larger group of opportunistic unionists who had been driven into an antipolitical, direct-actionist position by the intransigence of the Barcelona textile manufacturers. Between these two tendencies of the Catalan trade-union movement existed an uneasy, even distrustful relationship which was to snap, reknit, and snap again in later years. The nature of this alliance and the maneuvering it entailed disturbed the gallant, honest Anselmo Lorenzo. Lorenzo had never forgotten Fanelli's words on libertarian organization. "How much more beneficial it would have been," he opined, years later, "if instead of finding agreements and solutions by surprise, the Alliance [of Social Democracy] had engaged in a work of education and instruction to show the way of obtaining agreements and solutions as a conscious sum of wills. Instead, the tensions in the fusion of trade-unionist demands with social revolutionary ideals was to have serious consequences throughout the history of the Spanish workers' movement.
Had the Catalan Anarchists rested their hopes solely on an alliance with an opportunistic union leadership, they surely would have lost the Barcelona labor movement to syndicalism of a reformist, French variety. Even the most dense, unreconstructed class of employers could not have deflected this development. What eventually gave Catalan Anarchism a mass following were the hordes of rural folk, the landless peasants and laborers, who streamed into Barcelona looking for work. Each year they came by the thousands, the great majority from the Catalan countryside itself, the next largest group from the Levant (Murcia, Valencia, Alicante, Castellon), followed by Aragonese from Saragossa, Huesca, and Teruel. Contrary to popular myth, only a small fraction of this inflowing labor force came from Andalusia. To the urbane Barcelonese, these destitute emigrants from the hungry Levant, vidth their country ways and course manners, were indiscriminately lumped together under' the name Murcianos, in Barcelona a word equivalent to "nigger." Pariahs in a strange, hostile urban world, the Murcianos encamped by the tens of thousands in squalid, miserable shacks. Their hovels ringed the great seaport and penetrated its suburbs, providing a huge reservoir of unskilled, menial labor exploited by the Catalan bourgeoisie. Disdained by nearly all the factions of the Liberals, later manipulated by such Radical demagogues as Lerroux, the Murcianos also provided a reservoir for the most volatile recruits to the libertarian movement in Catalonia. Without this transitional proletariat Anarchism would have lost its mass base in a broadly syndicalist labor organization, and it would have been impossible to reorient the reformist tendencies of the skilled and established Barcelona factory workers towards Anarchosyndicalism.
The role of the Murcianos in rooting proletarian Anarchism in Spain's largest industrial city, and the near-insurrectionary atmosphere they created, raises many fascinating problems. To Marx, the more the proletariat advanced from a craft to an industrial estate, and the more this class was "disciplined, united and organized by the process of capitalist production itself"—by the factory—the more of a revolutionary force it became. Marx's theory viewed the craft worker as a backward and undeveloped proletarian, a member of a transitional Saggiike the peasantry. It is certain he would have regarded the rural Murctanos, not to speak of los miserables of the Spanish cities generally, with disdain—as a declasse flotsam, a lumpen proletariat.
This contemptuous attitude toward decaying classes at the base of society is evinced most clearly in his remarks on the Franco-Prussian War. "The French need a thrashing," he wrote to Engels a day after the outbreak of hostilities.
If the Prussians win, then centralization of the state power is useful to the centralization of the German working class. Furthermore, German predominance in Europe would transfer the center of gravity of the West European labor movement from France to Germany, and one need only compare the movement from 1866 to the present in the two lands to see that the German working class is superior to the French in theory and organization. Its predominance 'over the French on the world stage would at the same time be the predominance of our theory over that of Proudhon. . . .
As it turned out, Marx was wrong—not only in prospect but also in retrospect. The classes that gave the cutting edge to the revolutions of 1848 were not primarily factory workers, but craftsmen and workers in small shops, precisely those decomposing, preindustrial strata whom Marx viewed with such contempt. The factory workers of Berlin, centered largely in the newly emerging locomotive industry, played a reactionary role in the insurrectionary movement of the period, even by comparison with petty-bourgeois democrats. Later, a year after Marx's letter to Engels, the d'eclasses of Montmartre and the craftsmen and workers in small industry (the "luxury goods workers," as Marx disdainfully called them) raised red flags and died by the thousands on the barricades in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871. And some sixty years afterward, it was not the sophisticated, highly centralized, and well-disciplined labor movement of Germany that was to take up arms against fascism, but the working class and peasants of Spain—both of which were unique in having retained the most preindustrial outlook in Western Europe.
Ironically, the "process of capitalist production itself," which Marx commended in Capital, served not-only to unite, discipline, and centralize the proletariat, but to vitiate its revolutionary attitudes. The more workers were conditioned to accept the factory routine, to bend their heads before the demands of its overseers, the more they tended to accept hierarchy, authority, and obedience as an unchallengable destiny. And the more the working class acquired a hereditary status in society, knowing no other way of life but the industrial routine, the less revolutionary were its descendants. It was precisely the continual flow of Murcianos into Catalan industry, the continual leavening ac tion of decomposing classes from the preindustrial pueblos, that re newed the revolutionary fervor of the Barcelona proletariat. These rural folk, uprooted from a precapitalist culture and life-style, imbued with values, codes, and tastes completely antithetical to the enervating culture of the cities, prevented the more stable and coopted sectors of the Catalan working class from hardening into settled social forms. The Murcianos were an immense social stratum that had abso lutely nothing to lose. Accustomed to illegality, ebullient and riotous almost by nature, they added an electricity to the atmosphere of Barcelona that was to make it the most exciting, unruly, and revolutionary city in Europe.
In the early 1870s, however, these large masses of semiproletarians had yet to be won to Anarchism. The most dedicated early supporters of the Spanish Federation were craftsmen, not d'eclasses or unskilled factory workers. As late as 1872, more than half of the delegates to the Cordoba congress of the Federation were printers, typographers, master masons, shoemakers, and bakers— in short, skilled or fairly skilled craftsmen who worked in small shops. Only one out of five delegates was a factory hand, and an even smaller proportion were peasants. The unruly miserables of Madrid, for in stance, were by no means uniformly friendly to the Federation. On May 2,1871, a day which Spain celebrates in honor of the first popular uprising against Napoleon's armies, the Internationalists held a public meeting to counter the chauvinistic, anti-French spirit engendered by the holiday. It was mobbed and broken up by the local poor.
A howling crowd laid siege to the Internationalists in a cafe well into the night.
Time was on the side of the Federation, however, and it soon began to make headway among the workers and urban poor. A few successful strikes in Barcelona, coupled with the growing notoriety of the International at home and abroad, brought new, dedicated adherents into the movement. The prospects of rapid growth seemed , highly promising. In Barcelona, membership figures began to rise sharply from the low of January 1871; new periodicals were started or planned; and agitation began to spread in earnest beyond the cities into distant reaches of the countryside.
But time was precisely what the Spanish Federation was to lack.
When in March 1871, the Parisian workers rose and established the commune, tremors of fear shook all the palaces and chancellories of Europe. In Madrid these fears were compounded by the increasing instability of the government. In December 1870, Amadeo of Savoy had arrived from Italy to occupy the vacant Spanish throne, but in stead of bringing peace to the warring political factions, his presence reopened all the infighting and intrigues that had led to the isolation and flight of Isabella. The new regime, high-strung and unsure of itself, became increasingly sensitive to the agitation initiated by the Internationalists. Soon press attacks began to give way to police repression. Internationalists were harrassed and jailed in growing numbers, and the Federal Council, alarmed by the turn in events, decided to emigrate to the less troubled atmosphere of Portugal. In June 1871, on Corpus Christi Day, Lorenzo, Morago, and Francisco Mora de parted for Lisbon with the records of the Spanish Federation, leaving Borrel and Angel Mora behind to keep an eye on events.
This flight was probably premature. The government was still too weak and divided to crush the labor organization, and the pressure began to lift. After three months, the Internationalists returned to Madrid. During this brief exile, they went through another bitter round of material hardships and internal friction, but their stay in Lisbon had not been a complete loss. There they met two young intellectuals, Jose Fontana and Antero do Quantal, who helped them establish the first stable nucleus of the International (and Bakuninist Alliance) in Portugal. A year later, the new Portuguese Federation claimed a membership of 10,000 in Lisbon and thousands more elsewligre in the country.
The Spanish Federation, on the other hand, was badly in need of repair. The Federal Council had suffered the loss of two members;
Borrel, who had dropped out of activity, and Francisco Mora, who remained behind in Lisbon, nursing personal and political grievances that were later to bring him into the Marxian-inspired Spanish Socialist Party. Most of the work in the Council fell on the shoulders of Angel Mora and the indefatigable Anselmo Lorenzo. Although the membership had held its own and La Solidaridad in Madrid had been augmented by a new periodical. La Emancipacion, the ties between the Federal Council and the various sections in Spain were looser than ever. The very life of the Federation as a national movement seemed in the balance.
To meet this crisis, fifty-four delegates of the Spanish Federation convened in Valencia on September 10, 1871 for a week of intensive organizational work. The conference met in secret owing to the at mosphere of repression that still lingered on from the spring. To firm up the organization, the conference divided the International in Spain into five large regional federations or comarca (north, south, east, west, and center). The trade sections or Secciones de oficio, which existed in a very decentralized form, were federated on an occupational basis and still further centralized into craft unions. Finally, the powers of the higher committees which knitted the craft unions to gether were greatly amplified, giving them considerable authority over the local sections.
In time, the new structure was to become so elaborate as to be virtually inoperable. By the end of 1872, the Spanish Regional Federation had turned into a bulky, complex organization composed of five hundred Secciones de oficio and oficio varios, 236 Federaciones locales, and ten Uniones de oficio. Each of these bodies had a committee, sub divided into commissions for administration, correspondence, organization, and propaganda. Anselmo Lorenzo estimates that it would have required nearly 7,500 people to staff all of the committees and local councils—a grave potential for bureaucracy, especially if one bears in mind that many Spanish workers were illiterate. Indeed, many committees could not find a single worker to keep the minutes of the meetings and often had to call upon friendly students and intellectuals for aid.
Had the members of the sections taken the structure and its requirements seriously (which they probably did not do), it would have been virutally impossible to have any concerted action and solidarity on any level beyond the locality. If a group of strikers wished to get support from sections outside their community or tried to draw on the strike funds of the organization, they were required to follow an elaborate procedure of "petitioning" the trade federation to which they belonged. It might easily have taken two months or more before the trade federation responded with some kind of decisive action. If the strike were strictly economic, it probably would have been defeated; if it were the opening act in a revolution, it almost certainly would have been crushed.
Following the return of the Federal Council from Lisbon then, heroic measures were certainly necessary to prevent the Federation from dissolving as a national movement. But the structure adopted at Valencia went far beyond what was needed to preserve the unity of the labor organization. Whence, then, came the impulse for the centralization of the Spanish Regional Federation? Frankly, the Federal Council was not composed entirely of Anarchists. In fact, it included the very men who in later years were to found the Spanish Socialist Party: Francisco Mora, Jose Mesa, and Pablo Iglesias. Within a few months of the Valencia conference, these men—the Autoritarios (Autoritarians), as they were called by the Anarchists—were locked in a furious conflict with the so-called Anti-Autoritarios. Neither side emerged very creditably.
Although the conflict had obviously been simmering for some time, it was sparked into an open war by events and interference from abroad. In the same month that the Valencia conference was held, Anselmo Lorenzo had gone to London to attend a world conference of the International. There he not only saw Marx, but observed at first hand the bitter infighting that was to culminate in the expulsion of Bakunin at the Hague congress a year later. From the stormy discussions in London it was clear that a split was unavoidable. Two months later, in December 1871, Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue appeared in Madrid, a refugee from the repression of the Paris Commune. Lafargue had been raised in Cuba and could speak Spanish fluently. Through Mesa and Iglesias he acquired control over La Emancipacion and began to press his attack against the Bakuninists in Madrid.
The conflict, dragging well into the summer of 1872, ended shabbily. The London conference had prohibited the existence of secret organizations within the International. Accordingly, the mam thrust of Lafargue's attack was to demonstrate that the Alliance of Social Democracy had never been dissolved and still played a hidden role in guiding the affairs of the Spanish Federation. Lafargue, of course, was correct. The Aliancistas, embarrassed by the attacks, dissolved their organization, at least formally. The dispute, however, did not center merely on organizational issues. Lafargue had come to Madrid not only to recover the Spanish Regional Federation for Marx but also to reqrient it toward political action. He favored an alliance with the Republicans and the formation of a workers' party. In Madrid, the dispute over these issues assumed a particularly bitter form when, in March 1872, the Marxian editors of La Emancipacion, representing virtually no one but themselves, proceeded to use the periodical in the name of the Federal Council to make a rapprochement with the Republicans. The editors were expelled, and the Madrid Federation was faced with the prospect of an open split.
One month later at Saragossa, the Spanish Regional Federation held its second national congress, where an attempt was made to heal the differences between the two factions. The editors of La Emancipacion were taken back into the organization. The congress prudently elected a Bakuninist Federal Council, with Lorenzo as secretary general, and transferred its headquarters from Madrid to Valenda. De spite the compromise, within weeks the battle was resumed in full fury—and this time it was waged on both sides without scruple. By publicly casting doubts on the sources of Bakunin's income, for example, the editors of La Emancipacion tried to revive the rumor that Bakunin was a police spy. The character assault occurred in September, well after they were expelled from the Madrid Federation, but it affords a glimpse of the murky depths to which the discussion" had descended. The Anarchists on the Federal Council, on the other hand, were not immune to dishonorable tactics of their own.
Suspidops of Lorenzo's personal friendship with Lafargue, they surreptitiously opened his mail from Madrid and surrounded him in an atmosphere of intrigue. Such tactics by his own comrades so in furiated Lorenzo that he resigned from the Federal Council and left Valencia. But he never gave up his Anarchist principles and soon returned to the Federation.
The serious political differences between the two groups were increasingly obscured by gossip, slander, organizational maneuvering, and bitter invective. The climax of the sordid conflict was reached on June 3,1872, when the Autoritarios were expelled from the Madrid Federation. A month later, they established a "New Madrid Federation" of their own and in reprisal for their expulsion they maliciously published the names of the Aliancistas in La Emancipacion Quly 27), exposing their former comrades to police reprisals. In the end, the conflict achieved virtually nothing for Lafargue, Mesa, Francisco Mora, and Iglesias. The overwhelming majority of the Madrid Federation, indeed of the entire Spanish Regional Federation, supported the Aliancistas.
But the skirmishes in Madrid presaged a more historic conflict internationally, one which was to have a profound effect on the revolutionary movement for decades to come. On September 2,1872, in a memorable congress at The Hague, Mikhail Bakunin and his young Swiss associate, James Cuillaume, were expelled from the International for creating a secret organizatiori. The evidence for the charge came from Paul Lafargue. To be certain of his vittory over Bakunin, Marx had packed the congress with his supporters, dispatched delegates with highly questionable credentials, made unprincipled deals with men who were soon to become his bitter opponents, and personally participated in the proceedings. He had even charged Bakunin with "swindling" for failing to return a modest publisher's advance for an unfinished Russian translation of Capital. "This attempt to rob a famous rebel of his good name, an act of character assassination now condemned, apologetically, by most Marxist historians," observes Max Nettlau, "was to poison well-nigh forever the anarchists' personal feeling toward Marx." Thereafter, Marx had the General Council transferred from London to New York, a move that virtually assured the death of the International.
Two weeks later, the Anarchist delegates to the Hague congress, representing primarily Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, met at St. Imier in the Swiss Jura and formed an International of their own. The delegates from Spain included Farga Pellicer and Gonzalez Morago.
After conferring with Bakunin, they hurried home and made plans to affiliate the Spanish Federation with the new International. With all restraints removed by the isolation of the Madrid Autoritarios and the split in the International, the Aliancistas decided to act boldly. They convened a new congress, four months earlier than the date stipulated by the Saragossa conference of April 1872. On December 25, 1872 , fifty-four delegates representing 20,000 workers in 236 local
federations and 516 trade sections convened in the Teatro Moratin at Cordoba for the third congress of the Spanish Federation . This was to be the last public national gathering of the original International in Spain for the next nine years . In many respects , it was also the most important one .
The Cordoba congress created what is generally regarded as the "typical" form of Anarchist organization in Spain . Although it is hard to speak of "typicality" with respect to the Spanish Anarchist movement , the congress basically abandoned the unwieldly structure created by the Valencia conference of the previous year . The Federal Council was shorn of its authority over local organizations and reduced to a mere "Federal Comission for Correspondence and Statistics".The trade sections and local federations were elevated to "sovereignly independent" bodies , free at any time to renounce their affiliation to the national
organization . All restraints were removed from acts of solidarity for local strikes and uprisings . By the same token , no trade section and/or local federation could be coerced into initiating or supporting any actions . Henceforth , the Spanish Federation was to be a formally decentrallized organization and its success as a movement was to depend largely upon initiatives from below .
Neverthelless , some kind of cohesion was necessary . The resposibility for
knitting the organization together was undertaken by the Anarchists , who , despite the formal dissolution of the Alliance , continued to retain close personal and organizational ties with each other . The Alliance , in effect , continued to exist , which now meant that the Spanish Federation had a de facto leadership , albeit a libertarian one . With his tipycal honesty , Anselmo Lorenzo , refuced to sugar - coat this fact . In the late years of his life , he wrote : "When a bourgeois expresses admiration for the working class organizations for not having a president who assumes the responsibility of leadership , the Internationals (Anarchists) smile with superior pride , as though they possess a secret that can not be penetrated by the short reach of the bourgeois interlocutor". This pretension irritated the old Anarchist and he added :"There was no such secret nor was it true that we had a total lack of authority . What we did have was a convention that deceived the very workers who employed it".
Yet in a sence , both Lorenzo and the complacent Anarchists he takes to task miss an essential point . The great bulk of Internationalists worked their jobs for long hours and low wages . They were burdened by the need to make ends meet for themselves and their hungry families . Ordinarily, these workers had little time or energy to give to their organization . Only the most high-minded working-men could play a routinely active role in the movement ,
which they did at enormous personal sacrifice. In these circumstances some kind of guidance was both unavoidable and necessary; to deny this fact would have been self-deception or hypocrisy.
Certainly the Spanish Anarchists deceived themselves often enough and it would have been miraculous if they were free of hypocrytes . What deserves emphasis is that they tned to create an organization in which guidance could exercised without coercion and a leadership, such as it was, removed easily when it was necessary or harmful. They also tried to encourage initiative from below and foster revolutionary elan in the sections, federations, indeed, in the factories and villages themselves. On this score, they were eminently successful, for until the outbreak of the Civil War, the Spanish libertarian movement never developed a bureaucracy. It had its share of those bureaucratic types and authoritarian personalities who are prone to flock into any effective mass movement. These people posed continuous problems for the original International and for its heirs. But their effect was neutralized by a structural flexibility, organizational looseness , and an atmosphere of freedom that has rarely been equaled by a mass labor movement in the history of our time. They had read their Bakunin well .
Brenan gives us a superb account of how well their movement suited Spanish conditions. "The first need", he writes , was to get hold of the half-starving, uneducated field laborers and factory workmen and fill them with a consciousness of their own grievances and their own power. These men could not, as a rule, afford to pay a regular subscription and they were suspicious of outside which might embroil them with their employers. Any reguIar trade-union organization with a paid secretariat, acting on orders from Barcelona or Madrid and leading its adherents like a bourgeois Republican party to the polling booths, would have been doomed to failure . But the Anarchist leaders were never paid—in 1936, when their trade union , the C.N.T. contained over a million members, it had only one paid secretary . Travelling about from place to place, on foot or mule back or on the hard seats of third-class railway carriages, or even like tramps or ambulant bullfighters under the tarpaulins of good wagons , whilst they organized new groups or carried on propagandist campaigns , these "apostles of the idea" as they were called , lived like mendicant friars on the hospitality of the more prosperous workmen .
Their first object was simply to enroll groups of poor workers , what - ever their political or religious opinions might be , for mutual protection against employers : now and then there would be a small strike , which , if it was successful , would at once double the membership of the section and lead to other small strikes in neighbouring districts . Then gradually the leaders would unfold their anarchist creed with its hatred of the church, its wild idealism, its generous and humane outlook, and the imagination of the hearers would be kindled. Thus it happened' that, at moments of enthusiasm, the number of the workers controlled by the Anarchists would double and treble themselves and, when the inevitable reaction came, would shrink back to a small kernel of convinced militants. This plasticity of the Anarchist movement enabled it to survive persecutions and, soon as they were over, to reappear stronger than ever.
The organizational plasticity created by the Cordoba congress was soon to receive a critical test. The political instability that had led to Isabella's exile and the enthronement of Amadeo was now reaching serious proportions. In this mounting crisis, the agitation and strikes conducted by Spanish Federation did not pass unnoticed.
Throughout the closing months of 1871, the Federation, its activities, and the fact of its affiliation to the "sinister" International beyond the Pyrenees had become the subject of increasing discussion within the Cortes. In January 1872, the Federation was officially ordered to dissolve by reason of its ties to a "foreign organization." But the government was too weak to enforce its order and the Federation continued to function as publicly as ever, even calling large rallies to protest the ban. But its days as an open movement were numbered, for if Spain was in upheaval and faced with revolution, she was also faced with a reactionary military pronunciamiento that would decide her future for decades to come.
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