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Living Anarchism. Chris Ealham
Читать онлайн.Название Living Anarchism
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isbn 9781849352390
Автор произведения Chris Ealham
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Many Barcelona anarchists were hostile to these risings, convinced that the masses were unprepared.112 Peirats and Afinidad were left with a ‘disastrous impression’ of what they saw was a ‘catastrophic’ insurrection.113 In a letter to Aragonese anarchist Francisco Carrasquer, José explained the problem of revolution by decree: ‘One day a comrade would approach you and whisper in your ear, “The insurrection is tonight.”’ On a military level, there was no overarching plan: ‘Each group would fire into the air to proclaim the revolution without a genuine strategy worthy of the name.’114 Instead, it was simply an attempt to ‘make revolutionaries by force’.115 One participant described the rising as ‘a crazy dream… the people weren’t ready’ and the consequences left many ‘people demoralised’.116 Beside the fatalities, the repressive aftermath saw activists imprisoned and a comprehensive clampdown on CNT activities. The L’Hospitalet unions were forced underground and only properly reorganised in early 1936.117 Claims that these uprisings prepared the masses to defeat the military coup of July 1936 are disingenuous.118 As Peirats later observed, the repression weakened the CNT greatly in key areas where the December 1933 rising had been strong (Zaragoza, La Rioja, and western Andalusia), and these zones quickly fell to the military rebels at the start of the civil war.119 Meanwhile, Tomás, whose maximalist discourse did most to prepare the climate for the uprising in La Torrassa, was expelled from the L’Hospitalet CNT after his actions failed to match his valiant words: on the night of the rising, he was curiously absent from the streets and his comrades later found him at home. However, there was no immediate change in the L’Hospitalet CNT’s orientation, as Tomás was replaced by Josep Xena, a rationalist teacher sympathetic to the insurrectionist position.120
In what was a critical juncture in the movement’s history, Afinidad redoubled its campaign against ‘anarcho-syndicalist Jacobinism’.121 Reflecting a growing grassroots rejection of the radical stance, Peirats had been elected secretary of the Barcelona Local Federation of the FAI in the summer of 1933, while Canela was voted in as secretary of the Catalan Regional Committee of the FAI a year later, in April 1934. This left Afinidad members occupying the two most important positions in the anarchist movement in Catalonia.122 Committed to pursuing a ‘constructive’ approach to revolution, Peirats and Canela summoned the architects of the risings – the Nosotros group of Durruti, Ascaso, and García Oliver – to a meeting for them to justify their position to the rest of the movement.123 Given the repressive climate, this clandestine assembly was organised in the countryside outside Barcelona. To Peirats’s stupefaction, the ‘three musketeers’ did not show: ‘There were good comrades, modest, willing, selfless people, but none of the grand figures who roused the masses in meetings as they spoke in the name of the FAI.’124
Peirats called Nosotros to the next FAI meeting, where he intended to propose their expulsion. This time García Oliver and Ascaso attended. Peirats’s plan was hindered upon discovering, to his amazement, that ‘the big stars… without belonging to our organisation, have used its name as a scarecrow and they dragged it into every mess they could find!’ Nosotros, moreover, displayed a lofty arrogance towards their critics. Besides refusing to change their insurrectionary path, they defended their freedom to act unilaterally as they were not FAI members, despite invoking the organisation’s name. Peirats was no pacifist, either. As Barcelona FAI secretary, he organised arms smuggling across the French border via Puigcerdà, conscious that the anarchist movement would not achieve its ultimate aims with words alone.125 Still, he was adamant that democratic accountability was vital if these long-term goals were to be attained and that they were endangered by the tendency of Nosotros to trample on the norms of the movement, as it sucked everyone into a repressive vortex.
By now, Peirats was a totally committed activist, with experience across the diverse trade union, cultural, paramilitary, and, more specifically, anarchist wings of the movement. Yet, most of all, he was concerned with readying the workers culturally for revolution. In a world shaped by the forces of consumerism and individualism, some may struggle to appreciate he was motivated neither by personal ambition nor careerism. His was a transforming activism: he wanted to assist the anarchist movement achieve its higher, altruistic goals that would, so he believed, benefit the rest of humanity. In the course of this activism, he was prepared to risk both his freedom and, indeed, his life. If he believed he had much to offer to the movement, this was always couched with humility; indeed, at key moments, as will be seen, those around him had to push him to take new responsibilities. Nevertheless, when he overcame his diffidence, he went on to emerge as one of the most talented propagandists and writers of his generation.
Chapter Four: The revolutionary writer (1934–36)
In his mid-twenties, Peirats established himself as a revolutionary writer, closely resembling Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the proletarian ‘organic intellectual’.1 Both Peirats and Gramsci stressed the role of education in founding a counter-hegemonic revolutionary consciousness – an alternative culture that, in order to flourish, had to be rooted in everyday life. While Gramsci conceded that some ‘organic intellectuals’ might be middle-class renegades, he held in higher esteem worker-intellectuals of the kind typified by Peirats, since they could play a key role in the creation of class-based movements, the sine qua non for revolutionary transformation. Peirats typified the movement’s intellectuals who emerged from the proletarian ranks of anarcho-syndicalism. It is striking that middle-class intellectuals attracted to the libertarian camp, like Urales and Montseny, were hostile to syndicalism and, as we have already seen, periodically found themselves at odds with key sectors of the overwhelmingly proletarian CNT. In contrast, Peirats and those of his ilk were worker-autodidacts who, inevitably, had an intimate understanding of the conditions shaping the lives of other workers.
For Peirats, writing was a struggle in itself. Unlike professional propagandists like Urales, who lived and, indeed, prospered, from their publishing endeavours, Peirats not only had to overcome the cultural deficit imposed on him from birth but he frequently combined writing with manual labour. On the occasions that his words were remunerated, he received the wage of a semi-skilled labourer. Also in contrast to Urales, Peirats’s writing was intimately linked to his activism, and his emergence as a publicist did not mark the end of his phase as a ‘man of action’, even if it inevitably meant he spent less time engaged in some of the clandestine activities described earlier.
His first writings were both tentative and ambitious and reflected the quest of a young man searching for his place in the world and within the movement. Following his first published article in 1928, in El Boletín del Ladrillero, at the start of the 1930s he penned two short plays, which reflected his fascination with theatre and its communicative value: the unpublished Violín de Ingres and Revivir, which appeared in 1932.2 Unsurprisingly, given the intense internal debates within the anarchist movement at this time, his activist writings were destined to take precedence, as we saw with