International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The FAI was a clandestine organization of Spanish and Portuguese anarchists, mostly affiliated with the Spanish anarchosyndicalist trade union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The FAI became very active in the 1930s in Spain, first organizing revolutionary insurrections against the Second Republic and then during the Spanish Civil War . The FAI was founded at a conference in Valencia on July 25–26, 1927 by the National Federation of Anarchist Groups of Spain, which had been set up four years previously in Barcelona. First, the National Federation, and later the FAI, tried to force the CNT to adopt an anarchist orientation, which under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–30) meant remaining illegal and subject to persecution. This bond, where the anarchist organization was an ideological safeguard for the union, was known as the trabazón (“connection” or “link”) and aimed at transforming the CNT into a powerful and revolutionary anarchist working-class movement in Spain, after the expulsion of communists and the more reformist members from the ranks. The main theorists of this organizational principle were Emilio López Arango and Diego Abad de Santillán. The latter would later be general secretary of the FAI in 1935. The idea of founding an anarchist organization on the Iberian Peninsula had been previously expressed at a congress in Marseille in May 1926. Those ... log in or subscribe to read full text