This concept of revolution, the son of the purest demagoguery, sponsored for dozens of years by all the political parties that have tried and succeeded many times to assault power, has, although it seems paradoxical, defenders in our media and has been reaffirmed in certain nuclei of militants.
The FAI advocated a radical and purist anarchism and rejected any notions of reformism or cooperation with the statist system, even of the newly founded Second Spanish Republic.
Within the anarchist movement, the FAI with its advocacy of simplistic revolution thus represented a radical faction of anarchism, which some more moderate elements in the CNT trade union network disagreed with.
[1] After the signing of the Manifesto of the Thirty, to whose principal signers belonged Ángel Pestaña, Joan Peiró and Juan López Sánchez, the unions that supported the moderate signatories were systematically expelled from the CNT network on pressure of the FAI-aligned radical purists.
[5] The 1936 Spanish general election ended in a close victory for the Popular Front, helped largely by the CNT's decision to not call upon its members to abstain as they had done in 1933.
On 3 November 1936, the CNT decided for the first time to take a role in statist politics in the Second Spanish Republic, and accepted the invitation into the government of Francisco Largo Caballero.
During his time as Minister of Commerce, Juan López Sánchez used his position to attempt to supply the anarchist communes in Catalonia with much-needed imports from abroad to alleviate resource shortages.
[16] The May Days also brought about to downfall of Francisco Largo Caballero, the Republican politician who had championed the acceptance of the anarchists and syndicalists into the government in the first place and who had now become, in the eyes of the increasingly dominant PCE and their Soviet overlords, a liability.
[15] After September 1938, when the Munich Agreement regarding Czechoslovakia demonstrated the unwillingness of the United Kingdom and France, both of whom were largely neutral in the Civil War, to oppose Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, both of whom had intervened on behalf of Franco's Nationalists, the involvement of the Soviet Union, the largest foreign supporter of the Republican side, began to be scaled back.
[17] The brief cooperation of CNT-aligned forces with the National Defence Council, which overthrew Juan Negrín, did and could not prevent the Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War.
[19] On 9 February 1939, Francisco Franco proclaimed on behalf of the Nationalist government the adoption of the Law of Political Responsibilities, which declared guilty the leaders and supporters of the Republican movement and banned their organizations, including the CNT.