Federación Sindicalista Libertaria

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The Federación Sindicalista Libertaria (FSL) was a syndicalist federation in Spain that officially existed between 1934 and 1936 . The so-called opinion syndicates , which the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) left in the course of disputes with one of the currents close to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), gathered in it . The conflict was based on differing assessments of an appropriate strategy for Spanish anarcho-syndicalism during the Second Spanish Republic .

Starting position

Within the Spanish libertarian movement in the early 1930s there were various assessments of the historical starting position at the beginning of the Second Republic. While the pure anarchists wanted to take up the existing revolutionary dynamics directly and advance them in order to prevent the new system from consolidating, the syndicalist anarchists in feudal Spain advocated developing and testing basic trade union structures within the framework of bourgeois democracy finally to replace the representative system with a radical democracy in the syndicalist sense.

The opposition syndicates

The latter position was still predominant within the CNT in early 1931. Its advocates, such as Ángel Pestaña and Juan Peiró , held leading positions on the national committee and in the organization's press organs. In the summer of 1931 there was an extensive wave of strikes. Proponents of pure anarchism such as Buenaventura Durruti and Juan García Oliver saw it as the beginning of a social revolution. They formulated a sharp criticism of what they considered to be the passive, reformist and bureaucratic attitude of the leading elected officials. In August 1931 they published the Manifesto of the Thirty , in which they criticized the stance of the faction close to the FAI as irresponsible and consequently as authoritarian. From this point on, this current was called Treintistas ( treinta ; Spanish: thirty). The wave of strikes continued into autumn 1931. Little by little the so-called FAIstas took over the leading positions within the CNT. In January 1932 and January and December 1933 there were anarchist insurrection attempts in various regions of Spain, with a focus on Catalonia . The military put down these riots. Subsequently, many insurgents were arrested and deported to Spanish Sahara or Fuerteventura , including Durruti. The CNT called for a special tax to be paid to support those arrested. Some syndicates, which did not want to support the strategy of spontaneous uprisings, refused to pay the special levy. They were then expelled from the CNT. Other syndicates showed solidarity with them and withdrew from the CNT.

Foundation and dissolution of the FSL

After a Catalan regional federation had already been established in 1933, the opposition syndicates organized a congress in Barcelona in July 1934 , at which the FSL was officially constituted. Her organizational focus was on Catalonia and the Valencian Community . At the congress a strategy was established according to which the trade unions were the nucleus of the socialist society, as well as a tactic, the united front (Spanish: Alianza Obrera ) against fascism . In this context, the FSL took part in the nationwide socialist uprising movement in autumn 1934. It was severely weakened by the wave of repression that followed the commune of Asturias . Within the organization, voices were voiced in favor of reunification with the CNT (including Peiró). The majority of the opposition syndicates finally rejoined the CNT at its Congress in Zaragoza in May 1936. In the course of this there was a convergence in terms of content: the CNT decided in the future to no longer rely primarily on spontaneous uprisings and a rapprochement with the other organizations of the labor movement , in particular the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), was advocated.

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