A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneration: Strategy and organization in the history of Galician anarchism (1871-1936) By XESTA ORGANIZACIÓN ANARQUISTA GALEGA (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Libertarian socialist ideas have had a fertile field for expansion in 
Galicia since some delegates from the Bakuninist wing of the First 
International arrived in the country in the last third of the 19th 
century. The anti-authoritarian current of internationalist socialism 
caught on well in a people that at the time was in a process of 
proletarianization, and in a country where the principles of 
self-management, mutual support and collectivism had deep roots. ---- 
The first manifestation of this internationalist socialism was in the 
labor field, with the foundation in 1871 of the local labor federations 
of A Coruña, Ferrol and Ourense. It was the manual workers (stonemasons, 
seamstresses, shoemakers, tailors and carpenters, among others), and not 
the intellectuals, who promoted and disseminated libertarian ideas and 
principles in the country, causing anarchism to spread in Galicia hand 
in hand with class organizations. Since then, and throughout the 
following decades, Galician anarchism became popular. Attached to the 
material struggles of the Galician proletariat and peasantry, the 
country's anarchists built a true mass movement that was continuously 
growing.

This interweaving of anarchist ideas with the aspirations of the 
Galician working class only experienced a moment of refinement. This 
happened in the 1890s, in a context of enormous repression and disunity 
in the Galician labor movement. If on the one hand state persecution had 
led to the imprisonment and exile of many of the main internationalist 
militants, on the other hand the failure of the mobilizations of May 1, 
1892 had led to a raw confrontation between anarchists and socialists. 
In A Coruña the anarchists fought with the members of the newly founded 
Socialist Group for blaming each other for the failure of the May 
mobilizations. A tension that caused the detachment of the A Coruña 
proletariat from the Local Workers' Federation and a drastic reduction 
in its members, which in turn led to the loss of momentum to continue 
the work of publishing its mouthpiece, El Corsario. It was then, in 
January 1893, that some of the most prominent anarchists from A Coruña 
founded the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo , through which they assumed the 
direction of that newspaper. This event had repercussions throughout the 
country, given the ability of Herculean anarchism to influence the 
Galician libertarian movement, a leadership that increased after 
September, when the suspension of the Barcelona newspaper El Productor 
turned El Corsario into the unofficial spokesman for Spanish anarchism. 
The members of the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo then gave the newspaper a more 
ideological orientation, partially distancing themselves from the daily 
struggles of the Galician proletariat in the labor and social spheres. 
This orientation responded to a new strategic approach by some of the 
most unique anarchists from Herculaneum, who bet everything on the 
radicalization of the discourse, with an insurrectionist perspective 
that justified any attack against the established order and focused on 
the riots and rebellions that were taking place in the state territory, 
in which they guessed a kind of sign of the arrival of the Social 
Revolution. However, while labor rights were in alarming decline, the 
cost of living was increasing and colonial wars were decimating Galician 
families, the incendiary speeches and calls for the Social Revolution of 
the Ni Dios, Ni Amo group were not having the slightest impact on a 
Galician proletariat orphaned of concrete proposals and initiatives to 
fight against that situation of generalized misery. It was then that one 
of the members of this group, the tailor José Sanjurjo, recognized - in 
a text sent to the Third Libertarian Socialist Contest, organized in 
1898 in La Plata by the Argentine group Progreso y Libertad - the 
failure of this strategy and the suicidal isolation.which had led to 
anarchism, as well as the need to get closer to the working masses again 
and to revive their confidence in the anarchists. According to Sanjurjo, 
the anarchists, without renouncing their specific groups, had to rejoin 
the societies of resistance to capital, the mutual aid societies, the 
cooperatives and other organizations of the working class in order to 
"imprint the[labor]movement with the greatest possible revolutionary and 
emancipatory character". In the strategy proposed by Sanjurjo, which the 
Galician anarchists would implement in the coming years, the specific 
groups, far from being diluted in the class organizations, would act 
within them, thus having a greater field of action in which to spread 
their ideas and initiatives.

The re-entry of the anarchists into class organizations meant the 
establishment of a firewall over the growing influence that local 
socialist groups (in the sphere of the PSOE and the UGT) were spreading 
in the societies of resistance to capital since the anarchists had 
distanced themselves from them. This prevented the forces of the labor 
movement from being hegemonized by the sectors that wanted to channel 
them towards bourgeois institutions, strengthening the class 
independence of the Galician proletariat. Furthermore, under the 
influence of revolutionary syndicalism, inspired by the anarchists who 
were now rejoining, the grassroots organizations of the Galician 
proletariat passed from their primitive phase, as societies of 
resistance to capital, to a state of revolutionary maturity, adopting 
the form of single unions. Revolutionary syndicalism based its theory on 
the concept of class struggle, and on the idea that the economic should 
be the only field of action for the unions. In this field, unionists 
were to use the repertoire of direct action tactics, confronting bosses 
and owners without mediation of any kind. The deployment of these 
tactics, which included boycott, sabotage, the union seal and the 
strike, were to serve to achieve small victories and accumulate workers' 
power. A process that would culminate in a revolutionary general strike 
that would lead to social liquidation, that is, the expropriation of the 
bourgeoisie, the socialization of the means of production and capital 
and, therefore, the abolition of social classes. Since this task was 
incumbent on all workers, and could only be carried out through the 
union of the entire class, single unions were to be established for each 
trade or branch of production, which included all workers in each 
sector. For this union to occur, the unions had to give their members 
freedom to profess the political doctrine they considered, and to 
participate in the respective political organizations, as long as they 
did not bring political debates to the economic organization, that is, 
to the union.

Under the influence of revolutionary unionism, and with the full 
participation of anarchists, the local workers' federations of the 
country grew in militancy. This organic growth allowed the Galician 
workers' movement to extend its scope of action beyond the labor field. 
With the foundations laid in the professional unions, the local workers' 
federations promoted the generation of new organizations to defend the 
interests of the working class, such as tenant societies, agrarian 
unions or economic defense committees, with which to confront the 
problem of access to basic products. These were organizations that, like 
the professional unions, had the vocation of grouping the entire 
proletariat -beyond their ideological orientation- in a unitary struggle 
against the capitalists on each front of struggle. This process of 
accumulation of social force and extension of the areas of influence of 
the Galician libertarian workers' movement led the Catholic chronicler 
Pedro Sangro y Ros de Olano to assert, as early as 1908, that A Coruña - 
a stronghold of Galician anarchism - had become a sort of "libertarian 
colony in an organized regime". A libertarian colony whose area of 
​​influence already covered by 1914 an area of ​​more than 20km around 
the city, in which the Local Workers' Federation had the capacity to 
impose, through facts, and without any legislative mediation, the 8-hour 
workday. He nicknamed this territorial extension in which acratic 
workerism was the dominant force as the Syndicalist Canton . A canton 
that had been forged in barely a decade of work by the anarchists under 
the strategic parameters of revolutionary syndicalism.

The proliferation of unitary organizations of the working class struggle 
generated in Galicia a social space suitable for the diffusion of 
libertarian ideas among the proletariat. In the neighborhoods and towns 
of the country, the anarchists founded, through their specific groups, a 
number of atheneums and social studies centers, rationalist schools and 
popular universities. Those institutions, together with newspapers, 
pamphlets and other editorial production, helped to link the experiences 
of proletarian struggle with anarchist ideas, creating a framework for 
collective debate and training, and imprinting a revolutionary 
orientation on the Galician labor movement. This extension of 
libertarian ideas and the consequent radicalization of the Galician 
proletariat could only happen because anarchism was embedded in society, 
it was people, it was in the struggles of the people.

The outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the consequent influence of 
the Bolshevik model on the international labor movement, among other 
factors, caused the rupture of the unitary tendency that revolutionary 
syndicalism had managed to instill in the Iberian labor movement, and 
which had had its reference center in the National Confederation of 
Labor (CNT). Despite this split in syndicalism and the closure of the 
CNT's identity around anarchist ideas and principles, the Galician 
Regional Confederation of the CNT had a base of more than thirty 
thousand members during the Second Republic. Its union strength extended 
throughout the country, coming to dominate entire branches of 
production, such as fishing, whose network of unions covered almost the 
entire Galician coast, grouped around the Regional Federation of the 
Fishing Industry. The anarcho-syndicalists also led some of the largest 
strikes in the country's history during that period. This is the case of 
the strike of the paired vessels that began in July 1932 in Bouzas, 
which led the Vigo fishing employers to declare a lockout. An action 
that was responded to by the CNT with a general strike in the entire 
Vigo fishing fleet that would paralyze work activity in that port until 
December of that same year. The conflict, aggravated by the 
cross-attacks between employers and unionists, was able to be sustained 
by the Vigo workers for half a year thanks to the solidarity organized 
by the CRG as a whole, whose unions not only made financial 
contributions to the resistance fund, but also developed a network to 
welcome the daughters and sons of the striking workers throughout the 
country. Shortly afterwards, a strike in defense of the six-hour workday 
would paralyze all economic activity linked to the construction sector 
in A Coruña for several months. Since August 1933, a wave of class 
solidarity has swept through all the workers' societies in the city and 
the country, which, together with the creation of resistance funds, 
managed to organize themselves in their workplaces to produce extra in 
order to distribute the surpluses free of charge among the striking 
workers, and thus meet their basic needs, and those of their families. 
An experience of self-management struggle that could only be overcome 
through the repression unleashed in December of that year after the 
declaration of the revolutionary general strike throughout the territory 
of the Spanish State. This was the context of the revolutionary frenzy 
of 1933 that would extend beyond the union sphere, with some anarchist 
groups starring in insurrectionary episodes, such as the attempt to 
declare libertarian communism in the municipality of Oleiros, after the 
assault of a hundred anarchists on the town hall and the Guardia Civil 
Barracks in the town. The proclamation, two years later, of the 
Libertarian Agricultural Commune of Bendilló, in the municipality of 
Quiroga (Lugo), was another example of the pre-revolutionary situation 
in which Galicia found itself in 1936,and the advances that the 
libertarian socialist project had achieved within the Galician people. A 
process of accumulation of self-managed popular power, with a 
revolutionary orientation, which had been undertaken by Galician 
anarchists at the end of the 19th century, and which could only be 
interrupted by the military coup d'état of June 1936. The genocide 
derived from that coup, and the national-Catholic dictatorship, would 
manage to forcefully remove the anarchists from the Galician people. A 
removal that lasts to this day, but which can begin to be reversed 
through the strategic approaches of Social and Organized Anarchism.

Dani Palleiro
Xesta, Galician Anarchist Organization

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/11/21/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1871-1936/
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