Living Anarchism by Chris Ealham

Author:Chris Ealham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2015-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight: The limits of the ‘New anarchism’ (1965–75)

All that remains is the past of those who fought for a noble cause and ended up in a ditch.

—Manuel Reyes Mate Rupérez

The year 1965 marked the end of Peirats’s organised activism inside the anarchist movement.1 Thereafter, his pen became his principal form of expression. It is no coincidence that his letter-writing grew significantly after leaving the MLE-CNT; his few hundred corres­pondents constituting an alternative community. Meanwhile, he continued contributing to the anarchist press, right up until his death in 1989. Outside the MLE-CNT, Peirats developed his critique of cenetismo, an analysis that had slowly taken shape since his opposition to movement’s first experience of bureaucratisation during the civil war. As we will see, despite his distance from the organisation, he felt an enduring sentimental attachment to the CNT, to what it had been and what he believed it might become again, and this tie to the past, combined with his hopes for the future, constrained the scope of his critique.

This is somewhat surprising when we consider the denouement of the Montpellier Congress. Two years later, at the 1967 Marseille Plenum, the esgleísta leadership established the euphemistically named Comisión de Asuntos Conflictivos (CAC – Commission for Conflictive Issues). The CAC was integral to the leadership’s campaign to shore up its bureaucratic control over what remained of the movement. According to dissidents, it functioned as ‘a military tribunal’ on behalf of the Montseny–Esgleas clan. Indeed, over the next few years, around one-third of the total MLE-CNT activists (a few thousand) were purged. In some cases, entire local federations were expelled for resisting the CAC’s edicts, including the Paris Federation, with its almost 1,000 members, and the entire organisation in England.2 In the image of its creators, the CAC operated in a very personalist manner. According to one of its victims, any ‘disagreement with the Esgleas family was considered an offence.’3 The leadership was ruthless in its pursuits of opponents. One loyalist, Joan Sans, despite having been friends with Esgleas for most of his life, faced ‘complete ostracism’ and was treated like ‘a dangerous dissident’ merely for suggesting a policy revision inside rue Belfort.4 Among the high-profile expulsions were Fernando Gómez Peláez, ex-editor of Solidaridad Obrera; José Borrás, former Ruta editor; Roque Santamaría, ex-secretary of the MLE-CNT; and Cipriano Mera, an anarchist militia leader from the civil war.5 Out of these, Mera’s case was the most scandalous. Former secretary of the Madrid Construction Union, Mera worked as a labourer right up until his death in 1975 and enjoyed huge popularity in CNT circles due to his long militant history. Typifying the capricious charges of the esgleístas, Mera was accused of embezzling thousands of francs from the organisation and expelled as a ‘thief’.6

Veteran Asturian anarchist Ramón Álvarez Palomo has offered an interesting interpretation of the persecution of cenetistas in exile.7 His Historia negra de una crisis libertaria is a passionate and unrelenting attack on the Montseny–Esgleas couple by one of their staunchest critics. For this reason, some might impugn its reliability.

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