David Devesa analyzes in this work the discourse of Catalan anarcho-syndicalism regarding the First World War. This study allows him to study the mostly pacifist attitude of the Catalan anarcho-syndicalists and assess the contrasts with other political forces of the left -like the Republicans or the Socialists- who chose to position themselves in favor of the allies. In the same way, the different positions against the war of the different sectors of anarchism are x-rayed.
The work that we present below under the name of “The Catalan anarcho-syndicalism before the First World War: the trade union press in Badalona and Mataró” aims to establish a careful analysis of how Catalan anarcho-syndicalism welcomes and interprets this event, which shook in an unusual way violent of the international political universe, but, at the same time, the public opinion of the whole planet, supplying a new image of the war phenomenon that characterized the interwar period.
Our aim is to be a vision in which we characterize the opposition that anarcho-syndicalism adopts in our face to a warlike conflict that intervened gravely in the daily life of the Catalans, even though Spain was not an involved party.
To carry out this complex task, and under the direction of Dr. Susanna Tavera Garcia, we agreed on the adequacy of the primary sources of journalistic nature to analyze the discourse that Catalan anarcho-syndicalist circles develop in this regard. In this sense, we decided our choice towards four publications of the cities of Mataró and Badalona, municipalities of the area of influence of the Barcelona syndicalism, and that, apart from their geographical situation, they shared a series of links and experiences that made their interrelated analysis adequate . These publications are Acción (1914) and Acción Fabril (1915-1916) for Mataró, and El Vidrio (1915-1920) and La Colmena Obrera (1915-1919; 1931-1932 i 1976-1978) for Badalona.
