The Impostor by Cercas Javier

Author:Cercas, Javier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857056498
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2017-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Marco managed to arrive at the C.N.T. congress as national secretary general and leave having been all but expelled. “I was treated better at the police station,” he declared at the time in the libertarian magazine Bicicleta. Once again, he was not exaggerating, or at least not much. The congress took place in early December 1979 at the Casa de Campo in Madrid, and it was a pitched battle – the ultimate or penultimate battle in the ultimate or penultimate war between anarchists – during which members witnessed everything, from tricks and procedural irregularities, to shouts, insults, threats, beatings and people brandishing guns. Predictably, the young anarcho-syndicalists, most of whom had left the party or been expelled, were defeated; as was Marco: he could not be a consensus candidate or an intermediate alternative, and though he stood for re-election, he was far from garnering the votes required to remain in office. With the indestructible Federica Montseny controlling remotely from Toulouse, the veteran exiles, who had never trusted Marco, swept all before them and succeeded in imposing their agenda, and their candidate, José Buendía.

The rest of the story is also sad, or perhaps sadder, both for Marco and for the C.N.T., more so perhaps for the C.N.T. In the two years that followed, our man clung to his reputation and his role as a union leader in an attempt to regain his influence within the C.N.T., or within the trade union movement. Hardly had the congress at Casa del Campo ended than he founded the C.C.T. (Confederación Catalana del Trabajo), allied to the C.N.T., and with others who had lost at congress, attempted to challenge the results, but he succeeded only in getting himself expelled from the union in April 1980 for “his blatant attempts to foment splits within the Confederación” declared the Organising Secretary of the C.N.T. in Solidaridad Obrera in June, and for colluding with the government in undermining the reputation of the union and seeking to destroy it, according to the Coordination Secretariat in a denunciation in late May, also quoted in Solidaridad Obrera. These slanderous rumours accusing him of being a traitor, an infiltrator and a collaborationist – the result of the bitter clashes and the paranoid infighting within the C.N.T. at the time – have haunted Marco to this day, but, shortly after they began to circulate, he abandoned all hope of returning to a senior role in trade unionism. His decision came in 1984, when his old comrades, the young anarcho-syndicalists who had been defeated at the Madrid congress with him, formed the C.N.T.–Valencia Congress in conjunction with various other C.N.T. splinter groups and, doubtless remembering that Marco had distanced himself from them when they most needed him, they distanced themselves from him.

Marco was left alone: this ends his career as a trade unionist. It is true that, by this time, the union that had played such an important role in his life was also beginning to wane. In 1989, after a court decision determined they could no longer use the initials C.

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