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of exaggeration: ‘My mother couldn’t open one of my drawers without shrieking at finding a grenade or a couple of pistols.’67

      While it is clear that young Peirats had a penchant for violent struggle, in keeping with his commitment to anarcho-syndicalist practice, these armed activities were intimately linked with concrete, day-to-day union struggles and the moral certainty that they would improve the lot of his fellow workers. The same cannot be said of the three insurrections organised by the radicals during the republican years. While these uprisings tapped the growing disenchantment of the dispossessed with the Republic, Peirats was fiercely critical of them due to their wholly negative consequences for his beloved CNT.68

      3.4 The cycle of insurrections’:

      Internal schism and demoralisation

      The first uprising occurred in January 1932 in Alt Llobregat, an isolated mining district in northern Catalonia. Localised and easily contained by the army, the authorities used the insurrection as a pretext to deport over 100 revolutionaries from across Spain to the Canary Islands and Spanish territories in Saharan Africa.69 Among the deportees were Durruti and Ascaso, probably the two most high-profile advocates of the maximalist position, and Canela, Peirats’s closest friend and comrade in Afinidad.70 Although Canela did not participate in the uprising, he had a police record and had been detained on several occasions since the birth of the Republic, which meant the authorities were happy to get him off the streets.71 Peirats’s love for his friend was channelled into a righteous indignation against both what he saw as the ‘authoritarian’ republican state and the fruitless insurrectionary tactic.

      The fallout of the rising and the deportations brought tensions between the CNT’s rival factions to a head. Although the moderates had no prior knowledge of the insurrection, the radicals berated them for not supporting the movement; meanwhile, the moderates criticised what they saw as the radicals’ reckless adventurism. The gulf between the two factions was exacerbated by the vendetta of the Montseny family towards the moderates, led by some of the Barcelona cenetistas who, during the dictatorship, as mentioned above, had questioned their authority to collect money in the name of social prisoners as unaccountable middle-class publicists. The charge was led by Federica, whose contempt for anarcho-syndicalism was such that she joined the CNT only in 1931. Known disparagingly among her critics as ‘Miss FAI’, Montseny directed her ire against the union moderates in family publications, such as La Revista Blanca and El Luchador, creating the climate for the most serious split in the union’s twenty-year his­tory.72 As we will see, this conflict between proletarian, autodidacts, and middle-class intellectuals would be repeated later during the civil war and in exile, when Peirats frequently crossed swords with Montseny.

      In what was the first but not last CNT schism that José would witness, one might be forgiven for assuming he would be an unconditional supporter of the radical position. His temperament, his style of activism, his youth, and his experiences in La Torrassa, where the moderates had few supporters, all inclined him towards the radicals, as did his friendship with Canela, who had introduced him to Ascaso, one of the leading advocates of the insurrectionary line.73 Likewise, Peirats’s first pamphlet, Glosas anárquicas (Interpretación anarquista de la historia), was a contribution to the movement’s internal debates at this time and constituted a sustained attack on the ‘organised’ trade unionism of French theoretician Pierre Besnard, then de rigueur with moderates like Pestaña.74 Although we cannot be certain of its publication date, Glosas anárquicas probably appeared in late 1931 or early 1932, when Peirats was twenty-four, and he revealed great sympathy for Hispano-Argentinian Abad de Santillán’s idea of an exclusively anarchist workers’ movement, which guided many of the radicals and the FAI.75 Yet he also outlined his conviction that a future revolution hinged on ‘educational propaganda and incitements to individual perfection’, through which ‘we can heat up the atmosphere while we educate the people in a revolutionary fashion, raising its cultural baggage.’ This led him to criticise ‘theatrical conspiracies’, which he saw as ‘irreconcilable with our libertarian principles’.76

      While Peirats’s activism deepened after the CNT split, he nevertheless refined his position. By mid-1933, when it was manifest that the pursuit of an anarchist workers’ movement had provided justification for a split and the expulsion of revolutionary syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists from the CNT, he rejected the idea of ideological purity in the unions.77 With hindsight, he appreciated how the ­moderates ‘saw things more clearly’ when it came to the need for revolutionary organisation, even if they committed ‘the mistake’ of exaggerating republican freedoms. Despite a small minority of the moderates (essentially the pestañistas, who later formed their own political party, evolving towards reformism), the majority consisted of activists with ‘positive values’, such as Joan Peiró, a lifelong anarcho-syndicalist and, ironically, a FAI member. These activists had not become ‘traitors’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ overnight, as demonstrated by their event­ual return to the CNT in May 1936. As for the radicals, Peirats was ­appalled by the intolerant ‘FAI sectarianism’, their exaggeration of the revolutionary inclinations of the masses, and their ‘absurd’ insurrectionary ‘adventures’.78 Unlike the leading protagonists on both sides of the split, Peirats lacked the petty, insular spirit required for an inter­necine conflict.79 If, in terms of the theory that guided him, Peirats was an anarchist (he claimed that ‘I have always considered myself more anarchist than syndicalist’80), his practice remained firmly grounded in the anarcho-syndicalist axiom that the CNT should preserve the unity of all those dedicated to anti-state revolution.81

      Years later, with the obvious benefits of hindsight, Peirats concluded that, notwithstanding the genuine divisions of the early 1930s, ‘a third way’ could and should have been found to avoid the split.82 Some CNT Regional Committees, Asturias being just one example, remained in the confederation with an orientation very similar to that of the moderates expelled from the Catalan unions.83 Equally, militants like Eusebi Carbó, who had long represented the most anarchist currents inside the CNT, saw the uprisings as ‘pure Bolshevism’, ‘a cold uprising decreed by order of a circular’.84 A participant in the 1915 El Ferrol anti-war congress, Carbó later rallied against the pro-Bolshevik current inside the movement and, while by 1931 he had embraced anarcho-syndicalist positions, he was clearly no reformist – although he would later occupy positions in the Catalan government during the war. Others rejected the insurrectionist road as it stymied the cultural struggle that would prepare the masses for a future revolution.85 Peirats and the rest of Afinidad belatedly backed this middle road,86 yet such voices were drowned out by the schismatic clamour of the radicals, who blocked all reasoned debate.87

      Towards the end of 1932, Peirats’s decision to leave L’Hospitalet and the family home provides evidence of his disillusionment with developments inside the Barcelona CNT. Certainly, this move also reflected the worsening economic crisis, which badly affected the construction industry and associated industries like brickmaking. The split in the CNT had reduced its muscle, making it harder for its unemployed activists to get work.88 As a twenty-four-year-old, Peirats doubtless sought adventure too, so he accepted an invitation from his uncle Benjamín to return to his birthplace in La Vall d’Uixó, where he found work as an agricultural labourer. He retained a deep emotional attachment to Benjamín and La Vall, ‘that uncomplicated world, with its aromatic mountains and its pure blue sky… the fertile nature, without fake adornments and almost bereft of traitorous hypocrisy’. Agrarian labour relations were less idyllic, as José discovered upon entering the miserable world of the rural working class. Despite hopes the Republic’s agrarian reform would improve the lot of the rural dispossessed, José was forced to stand in the square (­hacer plaza) while foremen selected the strongest looking hands from a multitude of hungry workers. The experience of rural work changed his perspectives and, years later, he still viewed the agrarian issue as ‘the most urgent of all problems’. Even though he would have a long and exhausting working day, José still found the energy to run evening classes in his uncle’s house. When alone, he and his uncle, a lifelong socialist, had long, amicable debates about politics, each defending their respective position – Benjamín accusing the anarchists of ‘doing the work of the Right’ by destabilising democracy and José denouncing the Republic’s repression.89

      This repression increased after the second anarchist insurrection of January 1933.

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