Nosotros () was a Spanish anarchist militant group during the period of the Second Spanish Republic in the 1930s. The group was a reorganisation of Los Solidarios, a militant group that had resisted the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. After the proclamation of the Republic, Nosotros quickly came into conflict with the new government of Spain and provoked a number of insurrections during the early 1930s. Group members were deported following the Alt Llobregat insurrection of January 1932. The group, led by Joan Garcia Oliver, then incited the anarchist insurrection of January 1933. Following the 1933 Spanish general election, the group split over whether to carry out another insurrection, with Garcia Oliver calling for a focus on organisation, while Buenaventura Durruti went to Zaragoza to lead the anarchist insurrection of December 1933.
Many of the group's members were arrested during the Revolution of 1934, but managed to reorganise. They then shifted away from insurrectionary anarchism and began advocating for anarchists to organise, as they believed a civil war was imminent. During the July 1936 military uprising in Barcelona, Nosotros led the anarchist resistance to the coup, culminating in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. Group members then oversaw the organisation of the confederal militias, which participated in the war effort against the Spanish Nationalists.
Establishment Under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, political repression had forced activists of the anarchist group Los Solidarios to disperse. Some of the group's members, such as Joan Garcia Oliver, were imprisoned by the regime; others, including Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, Miguel García Vivancos and Gregorio Jover, fled into exile in Europe and Latin America. Ascaso and Durruti were among the first exiled anarchists to arrive in Barcelona after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic. When Ricardo Sanz informed Ascaso and Durruti about the regime change, they regretted the CNT's decision, believing Companys to be an agent of counterrevolution. They called for the CNT to return to its anarchist roots, respond to the prevailing socio-political problems in the country and refrain from stabilising the new government. Ascaso and Durruti believed that the new republican government would not bring any radical reforms and would instead allow the existing socio-economic conditions to persist. They concluded that popular support for the government would decline and that anarchists should be there to channel popular discontent into social revolution. Their position was criticised by other members of the CNT, who denounced them as "anarcho-Bolsheviks", as well as Marxists, who disregarded them as "infantile revolutionaries".
The regime change created problems for the CNT and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), as many of their militants remained in prisons throughout the country, due to the dictatorship having categorised them as common criminals rather than political prisoners. When the provisional government said it would review the encarcerations on a case-by-case basis, Solidaridad Obrera denounced the decision and demanded the immediate release of all anarchist prisoners. Los Solidarios took up the call, as many of their own members were still dispersed between various different prisons: Esteban Euterio Salamero, Juliana López and Rafael Torres Escartín were in ; Aurelio Fernández was in Cartagena; and Joan Garcia Oliver was in Burgos.
At a meeting of the CNT at Montjuïc, on 18 April, members of Los Solidarios spoke about the new Republic and their view that radical social and political reforms were needed. García Oliver, who had been released from Burgos prison and returned to Barcelona, made passionate invocations for revolution. Ascaso and Durruti gave similar well-received speeches, with the latter warning that Spain would head towards civil war if the government did not meet the demands of the working classes. As the CNT began to prepare for the celebration of International Workers' Day, Ascaso and Durruti were delegated to accompany foreign anarchists that were coming to the event: Marcel Dieu from Belgium; Louis Lecoin and Pierre Odéon from France; Helmut Rüdiger and Augustin Souchy from Germany; Camillo Berneri from Italy; Albert de Jong from the Netherlands; and Ida Mett and Volin from Russia. After the demonstration arrived at the Plaça Sant Jaume and a delegation attempted to enter the Palace of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Civil Guard began to shoot at the demonstrators. Durruti briefly managed to restore calm, but before long, a battle had broken out between the police and demonstrators. Soldiers were eventually brought in to stop the violence, and together with the demonstrators, they forced the police to withdraw.
In response to the repression of the International Workers' Day demonstration, the CNT and FAI called meetings to decide how to respond. The Catalan President Francesc Macià himself attempted to offer a truce, hoping the CNT would support him in the upcoming referendum on the Catalan Statute of Autonomy. Some members of the CNT supported a deal with the Catalan government, but others opposed it, worrying that it would lead to further political repression against the anarchist movement. Signs of a split showed at the CNT's meeting on the issue, which ultimately resolved to refer the issue to a National Congress of the CNT, which they hoped could provide a coherent response to the new political conditions. Thirty Catalan anarchist groups also held a joint meeting, where many of the old guard of the anarchist movement met new activists who had joined up during the years of the dictatorship. At the meeting, Los Solidarios discovered that one of the recently formed youth groups had taken the same name. Not wanting to press the issue, the ex-Solidarios renamed themselves to Nosotros ().
Social conflict Nosotros thought that the new Spanish Republic was being "held hostage" by men who had been part of the ruling class under the Kingdom of Spain, including conservative politicians such as Prime Minister Niceto Alcalá-Zamora and Interior Minister Miguel Maura, and reactionary military officers such as Gonzalo Queipo de Llano of the Carabineros and José Sanjurjo of the Civil Guard. They considered social and political reform to be impossible under these men. Nosotros believed that, as neither the state nor the capitalist class would be willing to institute the labour reforms proposed by Labour Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, the working class would be radicalised towards class conflict and eventually lead to political repression. They thus argued for revolutionaries of the CNT to prevent the new state from strengthening itself by practising "revolutionary gymnastics", through which workers would be exposed to revolutionary theory in practice and begin to work towards changing society. Moderate members of the CNT considered their analysis of social conditions in Spain to be overly simplistic and labelled the Nosotros group as Blanquists.
Class conflict soon broke out, with peasants throughout the province of Córdoba carrying out attacks against haciendas and looting the premises, which local socialist mayors divided between their citizens. Miguel Maura dispatched the Civil Guard to the area and begged Largo Caballero to rein in his radical colleagues, but attacks against haciendas only increased. Maura reacted by imprisoning socialist mayors and militant activists, replacing the local governments with committees of large landowners and caciques, and placing the province under Civil Guard occupation. Peasant revolts continued throughout Andalusia and New Castile, but they never escalated from rebellion to revolution, as the peasants were largely driven by desperation rather than conscious action and ideals. Nosotros dedicated itself to provoking insurrections, in which workers would bring the means of production under collective ownership and establish libertarian communism. They brought this proposal up at meetings of the FAI, which broadly accepted it, with Isaac Puente drawing up a programme for libertarian communism.
By this time, members of Nosotros were active in labour struggles throughout Spain; they attended meetings, organised militant groups and acquired weapons for future outbreaks of social conflict. Francisco Ascaso and Ricardo Sanz attended a number of CNT rallies in the Basque Country, including one organised in Bilbao by the Asturian miner . They then went to the factory in Eibar, where they discussed the delivery of 1,000 rifles purchased by Los Solidarios years earlier. The manufacturers responded that the delivery required authorisation from the governor , who in turn said that he required authorisation from Interior Minister Maura. When Ascaso went to Madrid and asked Maura to authorise the shipment of the rifles to the CNT, he rejected the request and instead authorised the shipment of the rifles to the Catalan government. Nosotros reluctantly accepted the cession of their weapons to the Generalitat, which used them to arm the militia.
In Barcelona, the new civil governor and police chief had begun to carry out political repression against the CNT. Activists were imprisoned, unions shut down and workers' meetings broken up. The majority of the members of Nosotros were blacklisted from their trades, requiring them to find jobs through the CNT, which had obliged owners in Barcelona's manufacturing and textiles industries to hire only unionised workers. In August 1931, some workers called a general strike to demand the release of political prisoners, but the call was not supported by the moderate leaders of the CNT, leading to its collapse. Workers in some sectors, including 20,000 metalworkers and 42,000 construction workers, continued the strike. Catalan business owners responded by closing factories and firing striking workers. The FAI attempted to channel the discontent into a coherent force, establishing an Economic Defense Commission, which organised a rent strike and mobilised large popular assemblies. On 2 August, a mass meeting was held at the Palau de les Belles Arts, where the FAI activists Buenaventura Durruti, Joan Garcia Oliver, , Vicente Corbi and Arturo Perera gave speeches. Construction workers continued to strike, even as metalworkers returned to work. On 4 September, Anguera de Sojo ordered the seizure of the Construction Workers' Union offices on Carrer dels Mercaders. When the Assault Guards approached the building, union activists shot at them, leading to a shootout. After several hours, the trade unionists ran out of ammunition and surrendered; 94 trade unionists, including Mariano R. Vázquez, were arrested and imprisoned on a former slave ship. The Assault Guards brought a dozen of the arrested workers to their headquarters, ostensibly for questioning, and shot them.
Split in the CNT-FAI