Blackwell Reference Online

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Joaquín Maurín, along with his friend and fellow POUM leader Andreu Nin , was one of the outstanding Marxists in Spain in the years leading up to the Civil War . Maurín was born in the village of Bonansa in the Aragonese Pyrenees in 1896. Trained as a teacher, like many of his contemporaries, he sympathized with working-class republicanism and advanced pedagogic methods. Radicalized by the Russian Revolution he joined the CNT and became one of the union's leaders in the city of Lleida where he lived and worked. Such was his impact on the small local workers' movement that his anarchist rivals would later refer to Lleida as Mauríngrad. Maurín was one of the leading figures in the pro-Bolshevik revolutionary syndicalists inside the CNT and edited this tendency's press: Lucha Social (1919–22) and La Batalla (1922–4). In 1921 he attended the founding congress in Moscow of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU) as part of a CNT delegation which acted as a bridge between the syndicalists and communists present. Meanwhile the anarchist majority among the CNT's activists, alarmed by reports of the Bolsheviks' persecution of the libertarian movement in Russia, managed to get the union to disaffiliate from both the CI and RILU in 1922. Maurín's evolution towards communism was slow; initially he was more influenced by Georges Sorel than Lenin . With the rupture of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text