Chapter X - The Socialists

Summary

In Chapters vii and viii I have gone at some length into the character and history of the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement. It will not be necessary to say so much about Spanish Socialism. Unlike Anarcho-Syndicalism it is a branch of a European family whose leading characteristics are well known everywhere, whilst the course it has followed south of the Pyrenees has been a perfectly normal one.

We have already seen how a small group of Autoritarios or Marxian Socialists, under the leadership of an old trade unionist and typographer called José Mesa, were expelled from the Bakuninist International in 1872. This group did not survive the collapse of the Republic and the proscription of the working-class organizations that followed, but its members continued to exchange views and to correspond with one another. A tertulia or circle of friends met every night in a Madrid café to discuss Socialist theories, and these discussions ended in a resolution to found a party. Thus it came about that on 2 May 1879 five friends met in a tavern in the Calle de Tetuan for a ‘banquet of international fraternity’ and founded – in secret, of course – the Partido Democrático Socialista Obrero.

This young Socialist party consisted for the most part of members of the Madrid union of printers and typographers with a few doctors thrown in. The leading figure was a typographer called Pablo Iglesias, who nine years before, as a youth of twenty, had joined the International. The son of a poor widow who earned her living by washing clothes in the Manzanares and suffering all his life from bad health due to early malnutrition, he had developed a tenacity and will power which made his companions ready to accept him as a leader in preference to older and perhaps more talented men.