CNT : 100 years

ANARCHIST HISTORY-SPAIN:
100 YEARS OF THE CNT:
This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Spanish CNT. I am already reading and getting the notices of "100 years of anarcho-syndicalism" from both of the Spanish organizations that claim the CNT's legacy, the eponymous CNT and the CGT. In the next little while I'll be presenting some items from both organizations to mark the occasion. While the Spanish CNT may certainly claim to have been the largest and most successful of the anarcho-syndicalist unions of the last century it was hardly the first. That honour belongs to the French CGT, founded in 1895, and its 'Charter of Amiens' in 1906 pretty well laid out the simple basic principles that anarcho-syndicalist groups would subsequently follow. Even though the CGT itself later strayed from the anarchist course due to its capture by the rising Communist Party of France.

Thus, this more properly called '100 Years of the CNT' rather than '100 Years of Anarcho-syndicalism'. From October 30 to November 1 of 1910 a congress of the Catalan union federation Solidaridad Obrero, meeting in Barcelona under the shadow of the previous years 'Semana Tragica', decided, in a burst of enthusiasm, to generalize their federation into one encompassing all of Spain. The Spanish anarchists were quite prone to "bursts of enthusiasm", and sometimes these worked out extremely well, as it did in this case. The following year, 1911, the newly formed Confederación Nacional De Trabajo (CNT) was formed. The rest, as they say, is history, the most glorious page written into the history books by anarchism.