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Title: José Pellicer Author: Miguel Amorós Date: April 27, 2004 Language: en Topics: José Pellicer, biography, Spanish Civil War, CNT, FAI, Spain Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/history/jos%C3%A9-pellicer-%E2%80%93-miguel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: Translated in March 2013 from the Spanish original. Source: http://gimenologues.org/spip.php?article366
The word that best describes José Pellicer is revolutionary, a
description that is related with a status of prestige that is hard to
understand today, since today popular prestige is linked to image more
than to example and the value of a man is determined by his ratings in
the spectacle rather than his courage or his integrity. If we allow the
facts to speak for themselves, José Pellicer was not just another
radical personality but a great revolutionary, someone who wanted to
radically extirpate injustice and exploitation and who devoted all his
intelligence and all his efforts to this goal, reaching very great
heights in the process. The course of his life in the service of the
proletarian revolution is more than enough proof of this. His advocacy
of the revolutionary cause was all the more deeply held and real insofar
as it was not based on economic motivations, as he grew up in a family
that had a comfortable standard of living. He became an anarchist out of
idealism; his dedication was always altruistic, putting his life in the
balance and looking for the dignity of the weak and the oppressed in the
struggle against the powerful and the exploiters. Pellicer attained the
dimensions of a historical figure because the virtues of all those who
accompanied him in the struggle were concentrated within him, and he
represented the ideal combination of the emancipatory thought of the
oppressed class and the effective struggle for its liberation. A CNT
militant since 1932, he participated in all the insurrectional struggles
of his time, earning persecution and prison sentences. We should call
attention especially to the role he played in the insurrectional strike
in Manresa, in October 1934, his activities as a militant in the FAI,
his participation in the defense committees of the CNT and above all his
intervention in the famous Iron Column, whose very name caused so many
supporters of the oppressive order to tremble when they heard it. With
barely a thousand men armed more with enthusiasm than with the
inadequate equipment they obtained in the assault on the Alameda
barracks in Valencia, they fought in SarriĂłn and Puerto EscandĂłn,
forcing the fascists to retreat to the gates of Teruel. A large region
was liberated from the fascists and this helped take the pressure off
CastellĂłn and Sagunto. He was outstanding not only for his courage, but
for his gifts as an organizer and strategist of the libertarian
revolution, which were comparable to those of Durruti, Máximo Franco or
Francisco Maroto. He was highly educated, multilingual, theoretically
proficient, with very clear ideas which he was capable of expressing
incisively, which, together with his tall stature and his steady voice,
impressed everyone who met him. Those who knew him and shared his ideas
and goals recognized in him an uncommon human dimension and charisma. He
needed these qualities in order to lead a column composed of people who
did not recognize any authority and had no leaders to give a
revolutionary meaning to their initiative. The Iron Column collaborated
with the peasants of the villages in which it was stationed, showing
them the way to live in freedom. The first experiences of libertarian
communism took place in the heat of the battles fought by the militias.
More than any other unit, even more than the Durruti Column, the Iron
Column acted as a militia and as a revolutionary organization at the
same time: it published the minutes of its assemblies, printed a
newspaper (“The Line of Fire”), and distributed manifestos and issued
communiqués, because it had to explain its actions in the rearguard and
justify its activities and decisions to the workers and the peasants.
Such an organization preached by example and gave proof of it. This was
its principal characteristic that Burnett Bolloten recalled in his book
The Grand Camouflage.
Historians have dealt very badly with him for the simple reason that
they never considered the civil war to be a failed revolution, the last
of the revolutions based on emancipatory ideals, and they instead
presented it as a military and clerical revolt against a legitimately
constituted democratic government. Proceeding in this manner, historians
took the side of the Republic and deliberately concealed the fierce
class confrontation that lay beneath the cloak of republican politics.
The independent and revolutionary action of an entire historical class,
the proletariat, was ignored, and along with it, its greatest social
achievements and its most outstanding figures. Even the pain and
suffering of the victims was passed over. The mass graves were only
excavated almost thirty years after Franco’s death. The political
interests of the future post-Francoist leaders required social amnesia
and their historians handed it to them on a platter. Spanish democracy
was built on forgetting.
But this is even more serious: our contemporary libertarians have not
paid very much attention to their heroes, either, beyond a deplorable
sanctification of Durruti. Insisting on making a myth out of Durruti,
they ended up killing the revolutionary Durruti. This is just as
understandable as the first time he was killed. The weight of the past
is too heavy for today’s libertarians, who are confused and depressed in
the face of their historical responsibilities. This is why they feel so
comfortable in the company of pathetic renegades like GarcĂa Oliver,
heroic moderates like Juan PeirĂł, or hollow figureheads like Federica
Montseny. Furthermore, we must not forget to mention the fact that many
cenetistas were hardly revolutionary and that their activities, in the
light of history, led to discouragement and bewilderment. If we also
consider the fact that important Valencian cenetistas like Juan LĂłpez
and the supporters of the Manifesto of the Five Points collaborated
during the sixties with Francoism, it should not surprise us that José
Pellicer would be indigestible for so many of his coreligionists.
Everyone knows that the libertarian movement was profoundly divided over
questions of principles, tactics and goals, and the Zaragoza Congress
did not resolve the problem. When the fascist revolt began on July 18, a
clear dividing line rapidly emerged among the anarchosyndicalists
between two antagonistic orientations for action, one that was
possibilist and prepared to make compromises, and the other that was
idealist and revolutionary. Pellicer was to be found among the latter,
and given his disposition it could not have been otherwise. In Valencia
the two positions, represented by the Strike Committee (syndicalist) and
the Defense Committee (FAI), respectively, became evident from the very
first day of the civil war. After the storming of the barracks both
tendencies found the road wide open to them; the former reestablished
republican legality via the Popular Executive Committee, an independent
entity that politically incorporated itself in the new reality
represented by the eruption of the CNT and the UGT. The latter, on the
one hand, created rank and file committees that took over factories and
towns, and on the other hand organized the militia columns that stopped
the advance of the military in Teruel, Andalusia and Madrid. José
Pellicer represents the revolutionary initiative of the Valencian
workers and peasants; Juan LĂłpez, his counterpart among the moderate
faction, represented the political cunning of the nascent libertarian
bureaucracy, which sought to get a foothold in a share of the power that
had been conquered, especially in the economic domain. The
accommodationist tendency of the CNT, which enjoyed majority support
among the militants, would tolerate the bourgeois forms of legality and
authority in order to participate in them, while the revolutionary
tendency would be trapped at the front, short of weapons and other
military supplies, only to discover a rearguard where everything went on
like before, without the least trace of revolutionary spirit. The
notorious expeditions of the Iron Column to the rearguard in search of
weapons in the armories of the Civil Guard or the new communist police
force known as the Popular Guard, or in search of money in jewelry shops
and the homes of the rich, not to speak of the burning of government
records or the assaults on the courts, made the collaborationist leaders
of the CNT look bad to their political partners. These leaders turned
their backs on the revolutionaries who were left to face the
reconstructed and rearmed republican legal system alone. The result was
the massacre of December 30 at the Plaza de Tetuán where Pellicer was
wounded, foreshadowing the May events in Barcelona. The revolutionaries
were caught in the grips of the moral blackmail of their own
organization: if they abandoned the front to return to Valencia and
start a civil war in the Republican camp they would hand victory to the
fascists. They could only postpone their revenge until better times. But
by surrendering on this point they surrendered on all of them; in the
dissolution of the Committees, in the entry into the Government of four
anarchist ministers, in the disarming of the peasant collectives and the
militarization of the militia columns. Once again, blackmail: either
adjust or disappear. The militarization order was agreed to with
ninety-two members of the Iron Column imprisoned in the Torres de Quart
for the events at Vinalesa. It would, however, be unjust to say that
José Pellicer submitted to circumstances as Mera suggests in his
memoires, for example. Within the FAI itself, Pellicer, as a member of
the group known as “Nosotros”, advocated an organic conduct more in
accordance with the ideas of liberation and only accepted transitory
alliances with the other self-proclaimed sectors of the anti-fascist
front for imperative military reasons. With funds provided by the
Column, his comrades founded the daily newspaper, Nosotros, providing
the Valencian anarchist groups with the best anti-authoritarian
newspaper published on the peninsula. Nosotros did not conform to the
official directives as long as it was controlled by Pellicer’s group,
and it was the mouthpiece for the best anarchist revolutionary spirit
until the FAI was transformed into a political party and the Peninsular
Committee selected it to be its organ, seizing it after cunning
machinations in the plenums.
The good times of the revolution would never return. Pellicer was
wounded in AlbarracĂn and separated from the 83^(rd) Brigade, the former
Iron Column, an event that was taken advantage of by the communists, who
were much more powerful in NegrĂn’s Government, in order to arrest him
through the use of SIM agents and he was sent from one secret prison to
another. They did not dare to assassinate him as they did Andrés Nin and
he was finally released and reintegrated into the Popular Army at the
front with the 129^(th) Brigade. During the last days of the war he was
in Alicante, entirely preoccupied, as always, with saving others, even
at the cost of his own safety. Arrested by the Italians, he was
denounced and savagely beaten by the victors. Torture was not enough and
since they could not destroy his manhood and his integrity with violence
and humiliation they tried to do so with the most treacherous methods:
they attempted to corrupt him in exchange for sparing his life. His
executioners did not know that someone like Pellicer did not sell
himself, that there was nothing in the world that could buy his honor.
Pellicer faced death with tranquility. He was shot in Paterna, together
with his brother Pedro, his comrade in the struggle. Although today
courage has very little meaning, perhaps because it has no price,
someone who feels the call of revolt stir within him may try to
understand that on that day a courageous man died. His executioners,
however, were unable to kill the symbol he represented.
The heroic life of José Pellicer is of no interest to the historians
that ignore the revolution and limit themselves to arranging appearances
in order to undermine the legitimacy of Francoism and little more. Nor
is it of interest to the heirs of state anarchism, for whom the past is
a murky chapter whose truths must be explained to the laymen from the
temple of organic orthodoxy. For revolutionaries, however, or simply for
those who are on the side of the truth, for those who do not see
anarchist ideology as something quaint and inoffensive to be used for
entertainment purposes only, the deliberate suppression of the memory of
José Pellicer is more than just a crime; it is the worst insult that
could be perpetrated against the ideals for which he fought and died. No
one may consider himself, especially in Valencia, an anarchist, and thus
a revolutionary, without maintaining in his heart the example of the
greatest anarchist of all. Memory is the only thing that defeated ideas
cannot do without. It is the only thing that can guide those who profess
them in the present. Therefore, with regard to the human patrimony of
the betrayed Spanish revolution, the biography of José Pellicer is a
subject that requires further attention.