in order to exercise solidarity by providing them with an income, to prevent them from becoming strikebreakers and to spread the knowledge of the use of arms to the maximum number of militants. For these same reasons, and to prevent their “professionalization”, there were no full-time, permanent paid positions in the defense cadres. Throughout the entire republican phase there were armed pickets and trade union defense groups that defended demonstrations and strikes or promoted local insurrections.

The Presentation of the CNCD of October 1934 called for a new organization and orientation for the defense cadres, which tacitly accepted Alexander Shapiro’s criticisms directed at insurrectional “gymnastics” and the criticisms of the internal CNT opposition, as reflected in the Manifesto of the Thirty.

The Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness

In Catalonia, the practicalimplementation of this new structure of the Defense Committees was the theme of a presentation organized by the anarchist groups The Indomitables, Nervio, Nosotros, Tierra Libre and Germen, at the Plenum of the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Barcelona, which met in January 1935. This presentation inaugurated the founding, in Barcelona, of the Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness.

The preamble to the presentation characterized the historical moment as “a period of immense revolutionary perspectives due above all to the manifest incapacity of capitalism and the state to provide any equitable solutions to the economic, social and moral problems that are now overwhelmingly posed”. The international political breakdown after the end of the Great War was highlighted: “More than fifteen years of constant efforts on the part of the leaders