Federación Anarquista Ibérica, FAI (Encyclopedia entry)

Shaping Neutrality Through the First World War, 2015

At the outbreak of the First World War the Spanish anarchist movement was in disarray. Four years earlier, the movement had succeeded in creating a national organisation of syndicates, named the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT). The CNT was initially a source of pride and optimism for the movement, however, in 1911 the organisation was repressed, and the movement's most active militants were arrested and forced into exile, while the mouthpiece of the CNT – the weekly periodical Solidaridad Obrera (Barcelona) – was closed. A gradual reconstruction of the organisation began in 1913, when Solidaridad Obrera returned to print and the Catalan Regional Federation of Labour (CRT) reformed, however this organisation had limited contact with groups in the rest of Spain. Lacking an organisational focal point, the movement was fragmented and prone to internal disputes. The spring of 1915 marked the beginning of a new era for anarchism in Spain. The decisions made at a meeting held from 30 April-2 May in Ferrol (La Coruña) laid the foundations for a full reestablishment of the movement and the adoption of syndicalism as its key organisational and revolutionary tactic. This meeting was crucial to the reconstruction and dramatic expansion of the CNT. Membership of the confederation rocketed upwards from 30,000 in 1915 to almost 800,000 in 1919, making the CNT the largest organisation associated with anarchist ideology in world history, a feat which was only surpassed by itself twenty years later at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. These developments were only possible because of the unprecedented economic and social upheaval brought about by the outbreak of the First World War. Although Spain remained neutral in the conflict, the First World War was a transformative event for the entire country. Industries which supplied both belligerent blocs boomed from 1914 onwards, sparking a huge shift towards urbanisation and industrial employment. Many other areas experienced a profound economic crisis. Across Spain, a dramatic spike in inflation saw prices of food and housing soar far beyond wage increases and basic living standards were eroded. The turmoil triggered by the First World War across Spain gave the CNT a context in which it could expand. Yet this would not have been possible had the war not also provoked a crisis within Spanish anarchism, in which a significant section of the movement challenged the longstanding anarchist position of neutrality in the face of war. The dispute which followed forced the leading anarchist militants in Spain to meet in Ferrol, and agree upon a direction and strategy for the movement.

2020

The Spanish Revolution began in the aftermath of a failed fascist coup by General Franco on the 18 July 1936. The coup, which was sponsored by conservative sections of big capital and the Church, failed in most of Spain in the face of armed resistance by workers and peasants, which was organised primarily by the giant revolutionary Anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the National Confederation of Labour (C.N.T.). "Within hours of the Franco assault, anarchist workers and peasants seized direct control over rural land, cities, factories, and social service and transport networks" (Breitbart 1979a: 60; also Geurin 1970: 130-1). This outcome was the direct result of the strength of a mass Anarcho-syndicalist worker and peasant movement (Amsden 1979; Breitbart 1979a), amongst whom, a German observer noted, "the problem of the social revolution was continuously and systematically discussed in their trade-union and group meetings, in their papers, their pamphlets and their books" (cited in Geurin 1970: 121). The C.N.T., which arguably commanded the support of a majority of workers and peasants, defined its goal as "libertarian communism", a programme which it defined in great detail in its Saragossa Programme of May 1936. Reasons of space prevent a discussion of this and other C.N.T. documents, but suffice it to say that the C.N.T. stood squarely within the tradition of anarcho-communism outlined above (for discussions of these programme, see Geurin 1970: 121-6; Guillen 1992: 8-11). At least two thousand self-managed rural collectives were formed, over fifteen million acres of land expropriated between July 1936 and January 1938, and between seven and eight million people were directly or indirectly affected by collectivisation in the nearly 60 percent of Spain's land area affected by this process (Breitbart 1979a: 60). Collectivisation was voluntary, and usually followed a village meeting at which a decision was taken to pool peasant plots and instruments of production, and land seized from the estate-holders into a single production unit. Artisans, barbers and other non-agricultural workers were also grouped into collectives (Geurin 1970). Within this unit, the land was divided between work teams (brigada) of ten to fifteen people on a technical basis. Within the brigada, less pleasant tasks were rotated and shared, and each person encouraged to perform those task (s) for which s/he had special competence (Breitbart 1979b; Geurin 1970). Management committees with regularly rotating memberships were elected to oversee the economic and social activities on each collective, and monthly general assemblies of both working and non-working members were held to review production plans, evaluate progress and redesign stages of production (Breitbart 1979b; Geurin 1970). Overall, no tasks were given status over others, no did any collective members get paid for doing administra

University of Leeds, 2016

This thesis analyses the opposition mounted by anarchists to the policy of state collaboration, which was adopted by the principal organisations of the Spanish libertarian movement at the outset of the civil war. Collaboration is understood in broad terms as the involvement of libertarian individuals and organisations in the reconstruction of the Republican state following its near collapse in July 1936, a process that implied not only participation in the organs of governance, but also in the ideological reconstitution of the Republic as a patriarchal and national entity. Using original sources, the thesis shows that the opposition to this process was both broader and more ideologically consistent than has hitherto been assumed, and that, in spite of its heterogeneity, it united around a common revolutionary programme. Focusing on the strategies adopted by oppositional anarchists over the course of 1937, from the radical interpretation of the CNT’s socialisation campaign to the insurrectionary mobilisation of May and finally to the defence of federalism within the libertarian organisations, the thesis also sheds light on the turbulent relationship between the responsible committees of the libertarian movement and its ‘mid-level’ union and affinity group delegates. The ‘conscience’ of the Spanish revolution, like its Russian precursor, both recognised and struggled against the role that the principal revolutionary organisation in the country had assumed in the reconstruction of the state. In the Spanish case, the resistance to state reconstruction was informed by the essential insight of anarchism: that the function and purpose of the modern state cannot be transformed from within. By situating the struggles of the radical anarchists within the contested process of state reconstruction, the thesis affirms the continued relevance of this insight to the study of the Spanish revolution.

in Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz & Jeanne Moisand (eds), "Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth". The First International in a Global Perspective (Leiden & Boston, Brill [Studies in Social Global History], 2018), pages 221-237, 2018

International Review of Social History

In July 1936, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was instrumental to the suppression of a military coup in several of Spain's major cities and towns. As this abortive coup gave rise to a civil war, the division of Spain was accompanied by a revolution in which the CNT was prominent. This was the 'anarchy' to which the present title by Ángel Herrerín, which focuses on the history of the CNT during the Second Republic (1931-1936), refers. The title is misleading, however, since the author does not present the CNT on the road to anywhere but nowhere in the years preceding the civil war. Presenting a top-down political history of the organisation which will be familiar to specialists in the area, Herrerín depicts the CNT as dominated by a bitter factional dispute which left it beholden to an unrepresentative minority of doctrinaire fantasists, who 'despite having taken the CNT to the edge of extinction, still controlled the organisation' on the eve of the civil war (239). The constructive role it was able to play in the conflict was, therefore, accidental. Herrerín accounts for this apparent contradiction with a single sentence at the end of the book: 'The CNT, which had sought via every means possible to bring about the revolution, would see how a military rebellion paradoxically cleared the road to anarchy' (249). Insofar as The Road to Anarchy narrates a prehistory , it is not that of the Spanish revolution, but of the collapse of republican democracy, of which the CNT's infighting and radicalisation appear as symptomatic. Born in 1931 amidst widespread jubilation, the young regime, anomalous in the Europe of the 1930s, was unable to consolidate itself. In its early years, under a liberal-social democratic coalition, it failed to rein in the violence of the police in response to strikes in the cities and unrest in the countryside, with fatal consequences. In this context, according to Herrerín, radical anarchists in the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) were able to enact an opportunist takeover of the CNT, unseating the moderate leaders who had been prepared to give the Republic a chance to stabilise. Consequently, the radicals led the CNT into two poorly supported and doomed attempts at insurrection in 1933, which left the organisation greatly weakened and divided. Both the first republican government and the CNT were thus guilty of failing to establish the pact that hindsight judges to have been the more intelligent option for both parties (250-252). In this and other judgements, the author's common-sense approach to working-class politics is projected back to a time in which even the moderate CNT leadership of 1931 considered that 'Spain was immersed in an "intense revolutionary tendency"' (55). Herrerín provides ample evidence to establish that, in their bid to remove these more moderate currents, radical anarchists in the CNT resorted on occasion to unsavoury methods based on a misapprehension of their own power. What is missing is any attempt to understand their perspective or the constituencies with whom it resonated. Herrerín depicts the CNT's membership as falling into three categories: anarchosyndicalists, anarchists and the broader mass of workers. Somewhat implausibly, and without reference to how individuals thought of themselves, these categories are presented as largely non-porous and clearly defined (6-7). This is because, in the present work, 'anarcho-syndicalist' and 'anarchist' serve as synonyms for, respectively, moderation and radicalism, rather than complex and overlapping ideological descriptors, while workers are thought to be unconcerned with ideological questions. We might wonder, in that case, why during the CNT's anti-electoral campaign of 1933, at the apex of radical control of the

2016

Most of mutual aid societies based on mutual aid and self-management, aimed to satisfy the social welfare needs of a working class, affected by the process of industrialization. In the Spanish case, these societies had its greatest development between the first third of the XIXth century and the first decades of the XXth century. In the absence of public policies and a legal framework that standardized them, the mutual aid societies adopted the rules of the brotherhoods of the Old Regime, in which both trust and reciprocity were key and adjusted them, to a greater or lesser extent, to the needs of an industrial society. This paper focuses on the Catalan mutualism, in particular on the societies in the province of Barcelona, which were mainly characterized by small or medium size and associative density above the Spanish average. First, their evolution as well as their main characteristics be analyzed and their collective action problems be highlighted. Secondly, an organization of s...

Social History, 2009

Critical Historical Studies, 2014

This article focuses on the relationship between the labor movement and the state in Spain. Its main object of analysis is unionized Spanish workers' indifference or hostility to state intervention in labor relations during the period when the first set of social reforms was discussed and implemented (1880-1923). The article shows that unionized workers' and reformist politicians' contradictory attitudes toward social reforms derived from their irreconcilable perspectives about the nature of labor conflicts and the role of the state. These attitudes were in turn based on different notions of "society" (contractual and organic) that prefigured the actions workers and reformists took to deal with labor conflicts. In analyzing this issue, the article builds from the main results of recent studies on the rise of "the social" and examines a heterogeneous array of primary sources (including union manifestos, official inquiries, and intellectual and political debates about social laws). T his article examines the relationship between the labor movement and political authorities during the rise of social reformism in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Spain. In particular, I explore unionized workers' widespread attitude of reluctance and even hostility toward social reforms. In Spain, Many thanks to the editors and reviewers for their insightful comments, to Miguel A. Cabrera, Geoff Eley, William Sewell, Margaret Somers, and the participants in the European History Workshop at the University of Michigan and the Spanish History Symposium at the University of California at San Diego for their generous advice on earlier drafts of this article, and to the Fulbright/Spanish Ministry of Education Program for Postdoctoral Researchers and Fundació n Españ ola para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT) for their financial support.