Diego Abad de Santillán

In 1897, Santillán was born Sinesio Baudillo García Fernández in Reyero, a small, isolated town in the region of León.[1] His father was from a Leonese family of blacksmiths and his mother was from an Andalucian family of miners.[2] In 1905,[1] the family moved to Argentina,[3] settling in Santa Fe.[1]

After working a number of jobs,[4] in 1913, the young Sinesio returned to León and earned his bachelor's degree at a local university. After some travels around Catalonia and the Basque Country, in 1915,[2] he enrolled at the University of Madrid,[4] where he studied the humanities,[2] graduating as a Doctor of Philosophy.[5] In the Spanish capital, he began to live a bohemian lifestyle,[2] taking the pseudonym Diego Abad de Santillán while writing for dissident journals.[6]

Santillán participated in the 1917 Spanish general strike, for which he was imprisoned for a year.[4] After receiving an amnesty,[5] he returned to Argentina, briefly reuniting with his family in Santa Fe before moving to the capital Buenos Aires.[2] There he joined the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA), working as editor of its newspaper La Protesta. In 1922, he went to Germany and participated in the establishment of the International Workers' Association (IWA), staying behind in Berlin in order to study medicine.[4] There he met a number of famous anarchists, including Max Nettlau, for whom he helped translate his works into Spanish. In 1925, he briefly went to Mexico and helped organise the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) before returning to Argentina, where he took part in the Sacco & Vanzetti defense campaign and wrote a history of anarchism in Argentina.[5] In the wake of the 1930 Argentine coup d'état,[4] he was sentenced to death for sedition,[5] but managed to escape into exile in the newly-established Spanish Republic.[4]

In Spain, Santillán joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and became secretary of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), for which he edited their respective newspapers Solidaridad Obrera and Tierra y Libertad. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia and was appointed Minister of Economy in the Catalan government.[7] In the wake of the May Days, he took a critical line against the government of Juan Negrín and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE),[5] publishing After the Revolution, which outlined a program for workers' self-management under anarcho-syndicalism.[8] In the program, Santillán invoked British utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his attacks against capitalism, declaring:

Stuart Mill is right. We believe that such a society has no right to existence and we desire its total transformation. We want a socialized economy in which the land, the factories, the homes, the means of transport cease to be the monopoly of private ownership and become the collective property of the entire community.

When the Republic was defeated, Santillán fled into exile in France, before finally returning to Argentina. There he continued his historical work and contributed to dictionaries and encyclopedias,[9] notably writing Why We Lost the War, which his son Luis later adapted into film. He largely ceased political activities and gravitated increasingly towards reformism, defending anarchist collaboration with the Republican government during the war, while also coming to prioritise the abolition of the state over the abolition of capitalism.[10]

During the Spanish transition to democracy, Santillán finally returned to Spain, settling in Barcelona, where he died in 1983.[11]

• After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain (1937)[12]
• Why We Lost the War: A Contribution to the History of the Spanish Tragedy (1940)[10]

• Anarchist economics
• Gaston Leval
• Matteotti Battalion

• Diego Abad de Santillán papers at the International Institute of Social History
• Diego Abad de Santillán Archive at The Anarchist Library
• "Diego Abad de Santillán". Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (in Catalan).