Solidaridad Obrera (historical union)
The Marxists were expelled from the FRE-AIT in 1872; they went on to establish the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and its affiliate trade union federation the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT).
[3] In 1881, the libertarian remnants of the FRE reorganised into the Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region (FTRE), but this also fell to internal divisions between collectivist and communist anarchists.
[4] Continued political repression of and internal divisions within the Spanish anarchist movement made it difficult to establish a lasting libertarian workers' organisation.
Over the subsequent years, Catalan workers largely ceased trade union activity and joined Alejandro Lerroux's Radical Republican Party (PRR).
[15] Neither the anarchists nor the socialists held definitive control over SO, and the two factions cooperated with each other on the basis of trade union independence from political parties.
[23] Established in October 1907,[13] the paper attracted contributions from anarchist authors such as Anselmo Lorenzo, Ricardo Mella and Josep Prat.
They quickly brought the publication Solidaridad Obrera under an anarchist editorial staff, and on 13 June 1909, they influenced the SO congress to adopt the tactic of the general strike.
[27] Through the Barcelona Modern School and the production cooperative La Niotipia, the syndicalists of SO also briefly collaborated with the PRR and Anselmo Lorenzo's orthodox anarchist group.
In their publications, members of SO sought to differentiate their modern approach to syndicalism from the older generation of anarchists, who had aligned themselves with Lerroux's radical republicanism.
[32] On the night of 24 July 1909, the SO leader José Rodríguez Romero and the anarchist teacher Miguel Villalobos [ca] established a central committee to coordinate a general strike.
[39] The repression convinced the remaining members, largely made up of anarcho-syndicalists, that they needed to establish a national trade union centre which could organise a militant opposition to capitalism and the state.
[45] A number of these organisations began to request membership in the SO, which prompted it to expand its scope from the Catalan region into that of a national trade union centre.
[48] Within a decade, the CNT had grown to number hundreds of thousands of members, absorbing many of the old Catalan trade unions that had resisted joining SO.
