The 1870 Barcelona Workers' Congress (officially: First Spanish Workers' Congress) was a congress that brought together, from 18 to 26 June 1870, 89 delegates from workers' societies in Barcelona and in which the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Workingmen's Association (FRE-AIT) was founded. It is considered the founding act of anarchism in Spain.
Background The Revolution of September 1868 opened a period of freedom in which workers' societies were able to emerge from the secrecy in which they had lived for most of the reign of Isabella II. In October the Provisional Government decreed freedom of association and that same month the Central Directorate of the Workers' Societies was founded in Barcelona, into which those that had subsisted during the clandestinity and other new ones that had survived were integrated. In December 1868 the Central Directorate held a Workers' Congress in which they were represented 61 societies. Among its leaders were men who would later become prominent figures of the FRE-AIT: Rafael Farga and Antonio Marsal Anglora, appointed secretaries of the organisation; and Juan Nuet, Jaime Balasch, Clement Bové and Juan Fargas.
Although the AIT founded in London in 1864 was already known in Barcelona, direct contact with it came through the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli, sent by Mikhail Bakunin, who arrived in Barcelona at the end of October 1868 where he met with the leaders of the Central Directorate. After passing through Tarragona, Tortosa and Valencia, accompanied by Élie Reclus, Arístides Rey, Fernando Garrido and José María Orense, Fanelli went to Madrid where he arrived on 4 November. There he held a first meeting at the home of the lithographer Julián Rubao Donadeu with the group of workers who frequented the cultural group "Fomento de las Artes". From there the initial nucleus of the International emerged in Madrid, made up of twenty-one people: five construction painters, four typographers —one of them Anselmo Lorenzo -, two tailors, two engravers —one of them Tomás González Morago -, two shoemakers, a carpenter, a gilder, a lithographer, a rope maker, a horseman and a journalist. The group was formed on 24 January 1869 but it would not officially become the Madrid section of the AIT until December of that year.
Fanelli provided them with official documents from the International but also from the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, the secret anarchist organization created in September 1868 by Bakunin. In December the Alliance had seen its request for membership in the AIT denied but Fanelli was unaware of it when he formed the International group, of which eight of its members also joined the Alliance, without being aware that what it was advocating was contrary to what was approved by the International, influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx. While the International had agreed at its 2nd Congress "that the social emancipation of the workers is inseparable from their political emancipation" and "that the establishment of political freedoms is a principal measure of absolute necessity", the Alliance rejected "all revolutionary action that does not have as an immediate and direct objective the triumph of the cause of the workers against capital" and advocated the disappearance of the State, replaced by the "universal union of free associations."
At the beginning of 1869 Fanelli arrived in Barcelona where he gathered a group of more than twenty workers in the workshop of the painter José Luis Pellicer, uncle of the typographer Rafael Farga, general secretary of the Federal Center for Workers' Societies and of the Catalan Athenaeum of the Working Class. The group became a Barcelona section of the AIT in May 1869, seven months before the Madrid section. In both cases with the same confusion between the International and the Alliance, as if they were the same thing. "Thus, the first Spanish affiliates to the AIT believed that the program of the Bakuninist secret society (suppression of the State, rejection of parliamentary politics, abolition of social classes and collectivisation of property) coincided with the principles of the First International". This "combination sui generis of Alliance principles and the International" would mark a particular course for anarchist socialism in Spain, providing it with an ideological amalgam that, strictly speaking, was not that of the International Workers' Association. In addition, these first groups were endowed with a double organizational level: one public and the other secret.
However, the majority of the corporate movement continued to support federal republicanism, although the failure of the insurrection of September and October 1869, as well as the failure to fulfil the promises of the Provisional Government to suppress consumption and Fifths, the "anti-political" sentiment grew, which led the internationalists to intensify their propaganda campaign against the Republican Party and against workers' participation in the elections. The harsh police repression that was unleashed on the occasion of the "mutiny against the fifths" in Barcelona in April 1870 also helped to spread their proposals of antipoliticism at the first Spanish labour congress, which took place in Barcelona in June of that year.
Call In January 1870, the Madrid group, which already had 23 office sections, brought out the newspaper La Solidaridad, whose writing staff included Vicente López, Hipólito Pauly, Máximo Ambau, Juan Alcázar, Anselmo Lorenzo, Francisco Mora and Tomás González Morago. In its 12 February issue, La Solidaridad proposed holding a workers 'congress in Madrid on the first Sunday of the month of May - which it invited to attend "all the workers' societies, constituted or in project, adhered or not to the International, but that are in accordance with its general statutes", but the Barcelona section claimed that the capital had few workers' societies, and the newspaper La Federación proposed that federal centres be consulted, organising a vote in which affiliates from 26 towns throughout Spain participated. Barcelona won, which obtained 10,030 votes, while Madrid obtained 3,370, with far behind: Zaragoza (694 votes), Valencia (648), Reus (20) and Alcázar de San Juan (8). Thus, it was decided that the Congress would be held in Barcelona instead of Madrid because most of the 149 workers' societies that had taken the initiative - and that had 15,216 associates— were Catalan.
The scheduled date of the first Sunday in May was postponed due to the declaration of the state of siege in Barcelona due to the "mutiny of the fifths" that had broken out that spring.
At the beginning of June, a few days before the start of the Congress, the Madrid Section approved the following resolution, clearly Bakuninist: "it is advised that the International completely separate itself from everything that could have a bourgeois political character".
Development
The congress began its sessions on 18 June 1870, according to Josep Termes, or on 19 June, according to Manuel Tuñón de Lara, at the Teatro Circo in Barcelona. 89 delegates attended, 74 from Catalan workers' societies -33 from the textile sector and the rest from pre-industrial trades such as tailors, shoemakers or bricklayers-, who would represent 15,000 members. In addition to the Catalans, there were delegations from the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Alcoy, Cartagena, Málaga, Arahal, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, Ezcaray, Valladolid, etc. On many occasions the representation of societies outside Catalonia was held by members of the Federal Center of Barcelona - Farga Pellicer himself represented the Center of Cartagena and the tailors, bakers and painters of Cádiz. The presidency was initially held by Farga Pellicer but he handed it over to André Bastelica, a French refugee who a year later would participate in the Paris Commune. The first two days were dedicated to the delegations presenting the situation of their organizations and workers in their localities. According to one of the attendees later, during those first two sessions:
From the first session, the congress appeared attached to the International Workingmen's Association. This was stated by Farga Pellicer in the opening speech: "you come here to affirm the great work of the International Workers' Association ... which contains in itself the complete emancipation of the proletariat ... [and] under whose banner they are already sheltering of three million workers, white slaves and black slaves." At the end of the Congress Francisco Tomás Oliver spoke to those gathered as "delegates of the Spanish sections of the International Workingmen's Association."
Three currents were represented in Congress: the Bakuninists which was antipolitical, anti-state, collectivist and only relatively favourable to the development of the workers' societies; the trade unionists, subdivided into an "apolitical" and a "political" trend, the latter in favour of continuing to participate in the federal republican movement; and the cooperativists, little interested in the declaration of strikes.
Four major issues were discussed in the Congress. The first was union action - "the resistance" - on which the need to create workers' societies and to declare vindictive strikes - at this point the Bakuninists accepted the postulates of the trade unionists and thus easily defeated the cooperative sector - although the latter were not considered an end in themselves but a means to advance towards the social revolution and thus achieve "The complete emancipation of the working classes" carried out by themselves. With this agreement, approved by 47 votes to 2 and 23 abstentions, "the resistance ceased to be an attitude of socio-professional type, to become socio-political, although the expression "politics" was so repugnant to those men". "A new type of union action was imposed, the "solidarity resistance", which meant overcoming the old "societarism" in which each workers' society was solely responsible for its own strikes, which it had to finance with its own funds." This was explained by one of the drafters of the opinion, the Bakuninist Anselmo Lorenzo:
The second topic was cooperatives. At this point the cooperatives were defeated again, since only the existence of the consumer cooperatives was accepted, but not the production cooperatives. Thus, "cooperation was subordinated to the initiation of the workers and to the propaganda for the repeated general emancipation". As has been pointed out Josep Termes, "Cooperativism as a formula for social emancipation suffered, at the Barcelona congress, a severe blow for which it was not compensated." The Bakuninist Tomás said: