28 The Alliance (Alianza) was a body that coordinated hand-picked militants to accelerate and further the advances made by the workers, and kept these safe from politicians during the act of revolution, which it believed was well within the capability of the masses. Marx and Engels reckoned that, initially at any rate, the proletariat needed to be committed to the political struggle (for several years or even decades). They did not believe in the capacity of the working man. As formulated by Lenin, this meant that the Party’s role was to introduce the elements of science and consciousness, or order and discipline. Bakunin was opposed to future leadership structures: “Were the International able to organise itself as a State, we, its heartfelt, impassioned supporters, should turn into its most rabid foes”. See Bakunin Crítica y Acción (Libros de Anarres 2006). For this very reason, the Alliance was at no time a party in the Leninist sense.
29 Pestaña declared: “I move that the Confederation should seek for the protectorate zone in Africa the very same political and social conditions as other regions of Spain are to enjoy. That the Moors in the Spanish Protectorate be deemed citizens just as we are, and enjoy the same rights and the same duties and be shown the same respect as any of us. That all our social legislation be enforced there, that the view not be taken that within Spain there is one region whose inhabitants enjoy a lower status […] the impact of this resolution might prove revolutionary in that it might trigger enduring malaise among the Moroccans who are under the rule of other countries”. Memoria del Congreso extraordinario celebrado en Madrid los días 11 al 16 de junio de 1931 (Barcelona 1932), pp. 85–86.
30 José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española (Toulouse 1953) Vol. I, p. 18.
31 Albert Balcells, El sindicalisme a Barcelona (1916–1923) (Barcelona 1961), p. 69.
32 The POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista/Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was an amalgamation of four Marxist groups active since 1930. One had been led by Andrés Nin, who, between 1921 and 1929, had been a supporter within the USSR of the dissident Bolsheviks and Trotsky—although he fell out with Trotsky in 1933 when Trotsky insisted on his entering the PSOE. The amalgamation was supposed to form a CP that would not be under Moscow’s thumb. Amalgamation was achieved in 1935 after a year of fraught discussions with an eye to the 1936 elections. The USSR-backed CP regarded the POUM as a gang of Trotskyist and fascist traitors, and Trotsky regarded them as bourgeois revisionists.
33 Makhaiski or Makhayev took the view that militants of bourgeois extraction were out to seize power for themselves, on the pretext of backing the workers. See Alexandre Skirda Le Socialisme des intellectuels, Jan Waclav Makhaiski (Paris 2001).
34 Not until the 1930s did Federica Montseny join the CNT, since she had previously espoused a critical line on anarcho-syndicalism.
35 Ferrer Guàrdia was a free-mason, and in that capacity, urged a de facto alliance between the atheistic, left-leaning bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement, a nonsensical view in that it involved no real pursuit of social revolution nor attempt to end wage slavery. Free-masons were quite commonplace within the CNT. One resolution moved at the 1926 Zaragoza congress—but not mentioned in the official summary published in exile in France—recommended that free-masons should not hold positions of responsibility, as borne out in the August 1983 written testimony of Manuel Fabra, a free-mason and CNT member, and of Ramón Álvarez, a CNT member hostile to free-masonry.
36 Renée Lamberet, Mouvements ouvriers et Socialistes (chronologie et bibliographie): L’Espagne (1750–1936) (Paris 1963).
37 Multatuli, who was a Dutch writer, and Panaït Israti, who was Romanian, were well known to older CNT members.
38 This was a logical Leninist stance, comparable to that of bourgeois politicians when their proposals are rejected at the ballot box. But in the USSR, the workers were already in the know; hence the sensitivity of the observations in Antón Ciliga in his 1938 book The Russian Enigma.
39 Pestaña attended the 1931 congress as representative of the administration of Solidaridad Obrera, which consisted of its editorial board (three employees), its administrators (three employees), its printing staff (five??), its panel of contributors (three), foreign correspondents (three), making a total somewhere between twelve and seventeen. See Memoria, Congreso extraordinario celebrado en Madrid del 11 al 16 de junio 1931 (a multi-copied text, no place, no date cited, published in France), 11th edition, p. 108.
40 Ángel Pestaña in Solidaridad Obrera, No. 409, 24 April 1934, reprinted in Ángel Pestaña, Trayectoria sindicalista (with foreword by Antonio Elorza) (Madrid 1974), pp. 678–679.
41 Maura Romero, writing in Government and Opposition, 1970.
42 A shrewd French (though actually Russian-born) observer at the 1931 congress, Nicolas Lazarévitch, noted: “As to the National Committee, it was taken to task for having failed to intervene with due vigour and forcefulness in response to the repression in Seville. The speeches were very violent, and some very harsh views were expressed. In spite of this, all it took was for Peiró, the director of Solidaridad Obrera, to adopt a hang-dog look of an accused man standing before the court and acknowledge his mistakes for the heartstrings of delegates to be given a tug and for them ultimately to decide not to proceed with any changes to the organisation’s leadership bodies”. N. Lazarévitch, À travers les révolutions espagnoles (Paris 1972), p. 20 (first published in La Révolution prolétarienne, No. 121, November 1931).
43 See Manuel Cruells El 6 d’octubre a Catalunya and Javier Tusell Las elecciones del Frente Popular (Madrid 1971).
44 Historia del Partido Comunista de España (Paris & Warsaw 1960), p. 111.
45 9 July 1936, front page headline.
46 12 July 1936, apropos of a strike in Sardañola at the Uralita (cement) plant.
47 14 July 1936, p. 1.
48 15 July 1936, p. 1.
49 16 July 1936, p. 1.