Excerpts from ANARCHISTS IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION by José Pierats #12

In July, 1918, an important regional congress, called to modernise the structure of the unions, was held in Barcelona. The sindicato unico (single union) was devised as a way of avoiding rivalries between unions.8 In December, the CNT sent its finest speakers on a propaganda campaign through remote parts of the country. Although many of them were eventually arrested and put into jails and ships anchored in Barcelona harbour, they had sown the seed. Unions sprang up everywhere. The CNT soon had more than a million members.

On February 21, 1919, a well-organized general strike took place against the powerful La Canadiense electricity company. This strike, the most successful for the anarchist working class in that period, marked the climax of the period of expansion. It was a united, disciplined action: it caused panic in the bourgeoisie and the government and they responded in the usual fashion. When the conflict had virtually been resolved by negotiation between the parties directly involved, the Barcelona military authorities broke up the talks and arrested many of the militant workers. Thus the second phase of the struggle was against the authorities. The strikers had returned to work with the promise that all prisoners would be freed. But some were kept in jail on the pretext that they had been indicted. The strikers contended that the trials should have been dropped by executive fiat. The truth is that the only reason the indictments had been issued was to keep certain prisoners in jail, and thus save face for the authorities. In ignoring this and insisting upon total victory, the strikers were excessively optimistic. In fact, they played into the hands of the authorities. What had at first been a great victory turned into a modest success.

The strike of La Canadiense gave an idea of the power, the degree of coordination, and the militancy of the worker movement. The bourgeoisie and the authorities knew that the defeat of so dangerous an adversary, by any means necessary, was a question of life and death. In the face of the dread Sindicato Unico, industrialists organized the Federación Patronal (Owners' Federation). Hostilities broke out at once: a dialogue of pistols. Who had fired the first shot?