Manel Aisa Pàmpols,

Redes Libertarias

, 20/07/2026

Trying to understand the anarchist movement in Barcelona, Catalonia, and the surrounding area in the early 20th century is by no means easy, but ultimately it is a phenomenon that is by no means new – it is a class struggle in the truest sense, which emerged, as in so many other parts of Europe and the Americas, with the development of the Industrial Revolution, when the bourgeoisie required a large workforce in the cities or in the industrial regions, and steam-powered machinery began to drive mass production; and so, faced with the need for a large workforce, the great migrations of the modern world began.

Initially, workers were offered appalling working and living conditions, and the bourgeoisie and capital paid scant heed to the needs that arose upon their arrival in the major cities.

All this took place against the backdrop of the First World War, during which Catalonia became the breadbasket of belligerent Europe.

This led to the amassing of great fortunes, following in the footsteps of the “Indianos” (returnees from the Americas), many of whom had already made their fortunes through the slave trade in the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries.

On the other hand, the proletariat moved from the countryside to the city, fleeing the large estates where famine prevailed across much of Spain, in search of work to feed their children. By the start of the 20th century, as Joaquín Costa from Aragon noted, workers in the cities lived in veritable pigsties amongst the animals, whether in Paris, London, New York or Barcelona, where tuberculosis, cholera, measles and other diseases were wreaking havoc, particularly in working-class tenements with barely any ventilation, which is why the major cities had a higher mortality rate than in other towns and rural areas.

And the bourgeoisie—in this case, the Catalan bourgeoisie—eventually made use of all the state’s paramilitary forces to suppress trade union demands and social improvements that were not intended for the working class; these improvements had to be won day by day, through no small number of struggles and demands for social reform.

Not content with all the state’s police forces, employers had to hire and set up a syndicate of gunmen to assassinate the most militant workers, often applying the “

law of flight/escapes

“.

Thus, the imaginary of 20th-century cities had to be constructed, and the demands—not always well understood—took time to be fought for.

Meanwhile, the workers in Barcelona realised that, in order to debate and counter the arguments of the bourgeoisie, they had to educate themselves and acquire knowledge; and this thirst for learning spread even to those who could not read or write, and so it was that, first in the Andalusian farmlands and later in the dark corners of the Catalan working-class neighbourhoods, those who could read and write would, by the light of an oil lamp at night, read the newspapers that couriers brought from here and there, from across the Atlantic; later came the

Ateneos

as true temples of knowledge.

So, it all began with a hunger and curiosity for knowledge, so that one day they might be able to counter the tricks of the bourgeoisie, who always sought to mislead and manipulate the thinking of the workers, deceiving them time and time again.

There were moments of insurrection, which were short-lived due to a lack of organisation and conviction, but the constant activism of many anarcho-syndicalists – such as Ramón Archs, Adelaida Bou, Joan Pey, Salvador Seguí, Bruno Lladó, Ada Martí Vall, Pere Vandellós, Manuel Escorza, Mercedes Comaposada and a very long list of others. Through this, in the early years of the 20th century, they were able to organise the construction of the “parallel society” which they had, in a sense, structured at the 1918 Sants Regional Congress in Barcelona, ratified at the National Congress the following year, held at the Teatro de la Comedia in Madrid in 1919 – a period in which the workers, through consumer cooperatives, staff shops, the Tenants’ Defence Union, building cooperatives, rationalist schools, anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, libertarian and popular cultural centres, and the constant publication of books, pamphlets and magazines across all cultural and social spheres, collectively built a way of life that was a complete alternative to what capitalism had to offer.

Together, these projects gave rise to a …