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up on literature and sociology during the eight-years’ peace of the dictatorship. We hadn’t wasted any time.50

      Issue one included José’s first published article ‘La palabra ladrillero, sinónimo de perversión’, a defence of his co-workers while also a fierce attack on the culture of gambling, drinking, and whoring prevalent among young brickmakers.51 If we recall Peirats’s adolescent nights in bars and brothels, he was well informed of the problem against which he rallied. His first writings display many of the qualities that came to characterise his journalism: a keen eye for synthesis and an aversion to the excessive use of adjectives; a preference for direct prose, based on short, clear sentences; the combative title; the vehement and implacable moral tenor and polemical tone; and the unyielding view that misery can be transcended by beauty. As in his later writings, he confidently grappled with a big question; in this case, what he saw as the main cultural problem facing brickmakers. His combative writing style and his refusal to back away from a struggle were in part inspired by his personal fight with the consequences of Perthes disease. He readily conceded to a friend that the ‘inferiority complex’ caused by his leg impairment conditioned his confrontational prose.52

      Testimony to his potential as a writer, even at this young age, José was named editor of El Boletín, just months after its launch. This is more remarkable still when we consider that he only started writing in Castilian when he was twenty, in 1928, the same year his first article appeared.53 Though Catalan remained his first language, his readiness to write in Castilian reflected a desire to address the newly arrived migrants and, moreover, to use a language capable of uniting the working class across the Spanish state. Although El Boletín was formally the mouthpiece of a specific occupational sector within the local union movement, given the limited press freedoms of the day, it acquired an echo within the clandestine Barcelona CNT and attracted contributions from some of the leading movement figures, such as Ángel Pestaña and Progreso Alfarache, thereby drawing Peirats into closer contact with prominent cenetistas. Further evidence of his cultural-propagandist inclinations came in 1929, when his short play La Venus desnuda was serialised in El Boletín.54

      So what of Peirats’s politics? He can best be described as an inter­nationalist anarchist syndicalist: he was a trade unionist, but this was subordinate to his overriding libertarian aims. This was reflected in the press he read: he subscribed to New York’s Cultura Proletaria, which was produced by Pedro Esteve, an exiled Catalan and former comrade of Anselmo Lorenzo. Meanwhile, Canela received Buenos Aires’s La Protesta, which advocated an ‘anarchist workers’ movement’, a formula associated with the Spanish-born Diego Abad de Santillán (Sinesio Baudilio García Fernández) and his Argentine ally, Emilio López Arango.55 Peirats backed this project of an exclusively anarchist syndicalism, even though it clashed with the ‘one big union’ anarcho-syndicalist conception of those rebuilding the CNT at the time, including his mentor Massoni, who conceived of a less ideo­logical movement. Later, as we will see, in the early 1930s, he broke with this schema after it contributed to a split in the CNT between the supporters of explicitly anarchist workers’ associations and those who wanted ideologically diverse unions.

      Besides following debates within transatlantic Hispanic anarcho-­syndicalism, Peirats was fully apprised of the CNT’s internal disputes at this time. He developed a profoundly classist and eminently anarcho-syndicalist dislike of the ideological anarchism of Juan Montseny (Federico Urales). Urales was the founder of La Revista Blanca, the flagship journal of Spanish anarchism, part of what Dolors Marín describes as his ‘publishing enterprise’.56 Peirats saw Urales as ‘an old anarchist converted into a petit bourgeois of libertarian publishing’ – a view that concurred with that of his old school teacher, Roigé, who described him as a ‘parasite [vividor] of ideas’. José also recoiled against Urales’s individualist anarchism, along with that of ideologues like Émile Armand, the French propagandist of ‘free love’ then much in vogue, whose ideas he rejected as ‘almost pure libertinism’.57 Most of all, he disliked Urales’s anti-CNT stance and the ‘poisonous and indiscriminate campaigns against union leaders’.58 Presaging the divisions that would split the CNT just a few years later, the young anarcho-syndicalists were stupefied at news that Federica Montseny (Urales’s daughter and one of the most polemical figures in Spanish anarchist history) had struck a member of a clandestine CNT committee during an argument over money collected by La Revista Blanca in the name of the social prisoners – money that the Urales refused to hand over to the CNT Comité pro Presos (Prisoners’ Support Committee).59 Peirats had a lingering distrust of middle-class anarchist intellectuals and, as we will see, he later clashed with Montseny, who inherited her father’s mantle as the leading theoretician of Iberian anarchism.

      With the CNT flexing its muscles after its enforced slumber, the focus of Peirats’s activism shifted into the streets. Years of declining living standards overseen by the employer-friendly dictatorship had left the brickmakers frustrated and, in late 1929, the Brickmakers’ Union declared a strike. Since the dictatorship’s official labour policy was rooted in arbitration courts (the Comités Paritarios – literally, Parity Committees), which forbade direct industrial action, the strike was a frontal challenge to the regime.60 To enforce the stoppage, the Brickmakers’ Union created action squads, of which Peirats was a member. Although deemed unfit for military service, his commitment to the cause compensated for his physical difficulties and, pistol in hand, he served capably in the CNT’s paramilitary squads.61 Distributed strategically across the city, these armed groups, as José explained, were directed at strike-breakers: ‘We stopped them and attempted to dissuade them from committing treasonous actions.’ Sometimes more robust methods were required, such as when José and his group overturned a cart carrying bricks in the street. At twenty-one, he was a ‘man of action’ or, as he described it, one of the ‘nerve cells that set in motion from below the machinery of the CNT’.62 When he later reflected on his motivations at this time, he recalled that:

      I was stimulated by revolutionary romanticism… I was attracted most of all by ideological problems. The business of sticking stamps on union cards and assembling the workers to preach to them did not appeal to me. I preferred getting involved in conflicts with the employers and confronting the security forces…63 I was a simple grassroots activist… In our movement, there ­existed two classes: the Areopagites and those who worked hard clashing with the scabs and the cops who protected them. We were the movement’s worker ants who organised and declared strikes, which we sustained with our blows and our coshes; we drew up the ‘demands’ which we later negotiated with the employers.64

      The landscape of struggle changed at the end of January 1930 with the ignominious collapse of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. Alfonso XIII replaced it with General Dámaso Berenguer’s ‘soft dictatorship’ (‘dictablanda’), which was conceived to manufacture a limited demo­cratic opening capable of saving the monarchy and returning to the political system that had been highly discredited by 1923. Peirats met the new dictator in person as part of the ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which was formed to save the lives of two brickmakers sentenced to death. The case dated back to the robbery and murder of a financial agent in January 1924 by a four-man gang. Only Remigio Climent and Enrique Guiot were detained; the former being found guilty of murder, the latter of being his accomplice. Having refused to reveal the identities of their two escaped associates, both men were sentenced to death in a military court, even though it was unclear ­whether either had fired the fatal shot. After spending three years on death row, in 1927 their sentences were reduced to life imprisonment.65 The ‘Guiot–Climent Support Group’, which included fellow brickmakers Massoni, Canela, and Peirats, then pushed for their release. José even corresponded with Guiot in jail on a regular basis in a bid to raise his spirits. Eventually, General Berenguer received members of the group, including Peirats, led by veteran Barcelona activist, Juan López. While Berenguer only offered vague promises, the collapse of the monarchy a year later ensured the release of the prisoners.66

      For Peirats, this was the start of an ‘infernal decade of action’.67 While still involved with his affinity group, Verdad, he was increasingly active in the clandestine CNT, participating in the struggle for the release of social prisoners and for new freedoms that would hasten the union’s reorganisation. He participated in the meetings that drafted the statutes of the Barcelona CNT, which were approved by the civil governor in April 1930. Nevertheless,

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