The CNT’s Expropriators—An Excerpt from Anarchism and the City

Hi folks,

For those interested in anarchism’s storied past—and curious as to what its future may hold—we are happy (ecstatic) to present Chris Ealham’s new book, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6, “Militarised anarchism, 1932–1936,” which charts a period of insurrection, militarization, and expropriation for the CNT. Missing from below are thirty footnotes and a rose-colored-glasses view of the Barcelona working-class.

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In an attempt to save the organisation from collapse, the armed groups within the orbit of the CNT and the FAI initiated new forms of fundraising. It is not certain from where the instruction emanated. It has been suggested that the FAI Peninsular Committee issued an appeal to the defence committees and its own grupos for money. Yet it is far from certain that the FAI had authority in such matters, and it is more likely that the order came from the Catalan CRT, which was ultimately responsible for the unions, press and prisoners’ welfare in the region. However, what we can be sure about is the fact that the recourse to illegal funding strategies cannot be explained solely in terms of the economic crisis of the CNT, for many revolutionary groups faced economic limitations on their activities during the 1930s and did not follow this path. Rather, it was the rise of the radical anarchists, for whom armed actions were central to all social protest, which sealed the switch to illegal fundraising tactics. Indeed, in much the same way as the radicals justified the illegality of the unemployed, so also did they rationalise that which funded the movement, drawing a sharp distinction between the term ‘robber’ and those who requisitioned money for ‘the cause’. Thus, just as the armed grupos were called upon to fill the vacuum left by the decline in CNT syndical muscle, so too were they required to secure the internal funding of the Confederation.

There was no single funding mechanism. In some cases, a form of ‘revolutionary tax’ was levied against employers and companies, who were informed of the sum involved (which depended on company size and which might run into tens of thousands of pesetas for large enterprises), the method of payment and the sanctions for non-payment, which ranged from the threat of sabotage against plant to the murder of managers. Since the authorities discouraged employers from meeting these ‘tax’ demands, it is difficult to know how often it was paid. We can nevertheless get a sense of how the ‘revolutionary tax’ operated from anecdotal evidence in the memoirs of managers and activists and from the press following the killing of employers for non-payment. There is also evidence that the ‘revolutionary tax’ was imposed on businesses that had been involved in strikes with the CNT and were thus held responsible for exhausting the resources of both the movement and their supporters. In l’Hospitalet, the Comité libertario pro-revolución social (Libertarian Committee for Social Revolution) levied the ‘tax’ on high-profile businessmen, such as Salvador Gil i Gil, a local councillor active in the repression of street traders.

Yet the most common method of funding was armed expropriation, normally involving attacks on banks and payrolls. As one militant explained, ‘to raid a bank was an episode of the social war’. Although, as we saw in Chapter 2, this strategy was used by anarchist groups after World War One, it was first utilised by CNT squads in the republican period during the wood workers’ strike (November 1932 to April 1933), when pickets punished intransigent employers by expropriating their cash boxes and safes. Sometimes, businesses owned by right wingers were also deliberately targeted. This funding tactic became highly attractive because, as one activist explained, ‘one well prepared attack and you get away with a sum of money equal to four weeks collections’. By 1934, expropriations were a recurring feature of urban life, sometimes bringing as much as 100,000 pesetas into union funds at a single stroke.

The expropriations presented Companys, who replaced the recently deceased Macià as president of the Generalitat at the end of 1933, with a sharp dilemma. On 1 January 1934, in accordance with the devolution programme specified by the Catalan Autonomy Statute, the Generalitat’s newly formed Comissaria d’Ordre Públic (Public Order Office) assumed responsibility for policing. Determined to demonstrate its competence in the realm of public order to a suspicious centre-right government in Madrid and a critical Lliga in Barcelona, the Generalitat increased ‘the drive to persecute robbers, murderers and wreckers’, fearing that anything less would give the impression that order had been lost. Responsibility for the new autonomous Catalan police rested with Josep Dencàs and Miquel Badia, Generalitat interior minister and Barcelona police chief, respectively. While apparently Catalanising the security forces, Dencàs and Badia, both of whom had close links with the quasi-fascist ERC youth movement, the escamots, politicised policing in a way that had never been seen before. Along with his brother Josep, Badia drafted the violently anti-CNT, anti-migrant escamots into the Catalan police; the Sometent was also purged and replaced by escamots. Meanwhile, Jaume Vachier, an ERC councillor and businessman, took charge of the Guàrdia Urbana.

Because the expropriations were viewed as a deliberate attack on Catalan institutions, the grupistas were now repressed without quarter. The legal sanctions applied against grupistas and expropriators were stern: anyone found in possession of explosives could expect a prison term of up to twenty-two years; armed robbery normally meant a sentence of between thirteen and seventeen years, while the crime of firing at the police was normally punished with nine years in jail. Yet this did not deter the expropriators, who compromised the key professional claim of the police – that the force detected crime – for if the grupistas were not detained in flagrante delicto they proved difficult, near impossible, to apprehend. In fact, when cornered, the expropriators, who were equipped with a range of weaponry, including pistols, sub-machine-guns and grenades, were a genuine match for the security forces. Following a payroll heist at a factory in central Barcelona, one grupo used guns and grenades to break through a police cordon and, when they were later intercepted by an asalto patrol in Santa Coloma, another gun battle ensued, after which the expropriators disappeared.

The elimination of the ‘cancer of banditry’ was a key factor in the evolution of the new autonomous police. Police Chief Badia, who was known to his admirers as Capità Collons (Captain Balls), took personal responsibility for the repression of the expropriators, regularly joining the front line during shoot-outs and picking up a number of gunshot wounds in the process. According to one Barcelona faísta who had connections in catalaniste circles, Badia planned to establish a special police unit dedicated to the extra-judicial killing of anarchists, an initiative that was blocked by the personal intervention of Companys, who feared the consequences of a return to the pistolerisme of the early 1920s. Nevertheless, Badia succeeded in raising the stakes in the war against the expropriators and the grupistas, adding a new viciousness to the history of policing in Iberia. Independent doctors regularly confirmed that suspected grupistas leaving the Comissaria d’Ordre Públic had been brutally mistreated and, according to anarchists and communists who had experience with the police during the monarchy and the Republic, the autonomous Catalan security forces were the most vicious of all. In one notorious case, following a shoot-out between police and an armed gang on the outskirts of the city, Badia left wounded ‘murcianos’ without medical treatment, and it was only after a heated argument with a Guardia Civil commander that an ambulance was called to the scene. There is also evidence that the Generalitat police adopted a policy of selective assassination of ‘FAI criminals’. The first suspicious death occurred in early 1934, when the body of a young faísta was found on wasteland on the outskirts of Barcelona. Although the deceased had apparently earlier participated in a gunfight with the police, the fact that he died from a single shot from a police-issue revolver suggested that he had been summarily executed. In a separate case, an unarmed cenetista was shot and killed in broad daylight by an off-duty policeman in a Les Corts street. Memories of 1920s police tactics were evoked again when an unarmed grupista was shot in the back after he allegedly ‘attempted to escape’. Meanwhile, in mid-April, after a gunfight in which over 200 rounds were exchanged, Bruno Alpini, an Italian anarchist and expropriator, was killed on Paral.lel in what was regarded in anarchist circles as a classic act of Ley de Fugas. The following month, two more expropriators were shot dead by police in the drive to ‘clean up’ Barcelona.

Despite intense police pressure, the number of expropriations showed no sign of abating throughout 1934 and 1935, demonstrating that increased policing does not necessarily reduce illegality. This very point was recognised in a police report published in the press in April 1935: ‘When a trial for robbery or an assassination occurs, immediately new robberies are committed…an established chain of punishable events.…It is this continuity that it is vital to break’. There are several reasons for this ‘continuity’. First, it was impossible for the authorities to provide a permanent guard for the numerous large sums of money transported around and concentrated within the city that were targeted by well-drilled and selective expropriators, who apparently launched attacks when they knew they had a good chance of escape. Moreover, since speed was one of the expropriators’ main allies, they used cars, often hijacked taxis or stolen from the rich, that they knew were faster than police models. The expropriators also recognised that, if they were injured, they would be looked after by the organisation and could receive medical attention from doctors supportive of the CNT–FAI.

Second, the expropriation squads were deeply rooted in the social formation and were virtually impossible for the police to infiltrate. Recruited from proven activists from the defence committees and the prisoners’ support committee, as well as some of the more willing and capable members of the grupos de afinidad, the expropriators were trusted individuals, many of whom during earlier, less repressive times had organised union collections in workplaces and barris. Some expropriators were ‘professional revolutionaries’ in the classic sense; they had experience of evading the police from the postwar years, possessed the necessary pseudonyms and false identities and tended to move around, staying with comrades and in ‘safe houses’. In a positive sense, this commitment to the movement explains the high level of probity among the expropriators, who also needed little reminder of the sanctions that would have been applied to anyone who attempted to abscond with the organisation’s money.

In addition to the unity derived from a common ideology and shared objectives, the expropriators also relied on the affective ties of kinship and neighbouring. Many expropriators were recruited from local families with a history of anarchist and union activism. Moreover, the family structure, so often associated with the stability of the existing order, frequently gave considerable coherence to the high-risk activities of the expropriators. In one squad, a father and son worked together. Meanwhile, Los Novatos, a grupo de afinidad active in funding initiatives, included five brothers from the Cano Ruiz family and two other sets of brothers, all of whom resided within a square kilometre of one another in the La Torrassa barri.

The esprit de corps that so typifies such close-knit groups ensured that, when the security forces succeeded in detaining members of a squad, they stubbornly refused to betray their comrades by talking to the police or by passing information on to the authorities. Indeed, detained grupistas relied on a version of omertà, repeatedly informing police that they had occasioned upon their accomplices in a bar or cafe, that they could not remember anything about their appearance and that they had failed to ask their names. Grupistas also frequently told police that these same strangers had lent them any arms they had in their possession at the time of their arrest, a completely unbelievable story concocted not to appear credible but to frustrate police investigations. Meanwhile, anyone who gave in to police pressure ran the danger of being perceived as a traitor, a perfidy that was dealt with in summary fashion.

A few other observations can be made about the expropriators. They were invariably male. Women rarely participated and, when they did, their involvement was almost exclusively of an auxiliary nature. The expropriators were also predominantly young and single. Even the more seasoned activists in the squads were normally under forty, while the most active expropriators of the 1930s were in their early twenties, such as Josep Martorell i Virgili, dubbed ‘Public Enemy Number One’ in the bourgeois press, who was only twenty when arrested, by which time he had launched a series of bank robberies for the CNT and for the anarchist movement.

The expropriations provide yet another example of the readiness of the anarchists to mobilise beyond the factory proletariat and channel the rebellion of those deemed unmobilisable by other left-wing groups. This was perhaps epitomised by the presence of several former detainees from the Asil Durán borstal among the expropriators, such as the aforementioned Martorell. The eclectic tactical repertoire of the anarchists, their continuing ability to combine ‘modern’ with older protest forms, increased the vitality of their resistance struggle, and, in equal measure, scandalised the ‘men of order’.