Rafael Farga i Pellicer

Rafael Farga i Pellicer, also known as the "Just Pastor of Pellico", (1844, Barcelona - Aug. 14, 1890) was a typesetter, political cartoonist, painter, syndicalist, anarchist and journalist from Catalonia.

Rafael Farga i Pellicer c.1880

Major activities

He was considered a master of the typesetting craft and, from 1879, served as the manager of the Academic Press, owned by the Republican Evaristo Ullastres, whose presses printed most of the anarchist propaganda produced in Barcelona during the period of the First International. Farga was also musically gifted and, for a time, worked as a librarian. He was a member of the Catalan Athenaeum of the Working Classes and, in 1868, cofounded the Central Directorate of the Working Class Societies of Barcelona and served as its secretary.

Bakuninism

That same year, he participated in organizing the workers' congress of Barcelona, over which he presided. In September 1869, he attended the fourth congress of the First International in Basilea, representing the Federation of Workers' Societies of Barcelona. There he made the acquaintance of Mikhail Bakunin. They struck up a friendship immediately because of their common interest in music. He also became a member of Bakunin's International Alliance of Socialist Democracy and created an autonomous Catalan branch of that group. He was an organizer and president of the workers' congress of Barcelona in 1870, a constituent of the Spanish Regional Federation of the International Workers Association (IWA). Two years later he participated in the congresses of the IWA in The Hague, where he came out strongly against the expulsions of Bakunin and James Guillaume. For the remainder of his life, he was a determined advocate of Bakuninism as the foundation of anarchism in Spain.

Later years

He provided critical support for establishing the anarcho-collectivist Regional Spanish Federation of Workers, together with Josep Llunas and Anselmo Lorenzo. He joined with Juan Serrano Oteiza to support a federation that would not operate clandestinely and would reflect the triumph of legal approaches over insurrectionism. Between 1886 and 1888, he published the magazine Acracia (a word he coined to describe voluntary societal cooperation) and helped to establish the newspaper El Productor, while also collaborating in the production of the periodicals La Federación and Natura.

Works and collaborations

Garibaldi. Historia Liberal del Siglo XIX. Ideas, Movimientos y Hombres Importantes. Estudios Filosofico-originales de escritores italianos, franceses y espanoles. Bajo la direccion de Justo Pastor de Pellico. Barcelona, La Academia of Evaristo Ullastres, 1882, 2 vols.
Prolegómenos de la composición tipográfica. Barcelona: La Academia, 188?
Biografía de Miguel Bakunin with Miguel Bakunin sus ideales y tácticas & Bakunin's La escuela en el porvenir (The School of the Future). La Coruña, Aurora, (published posthumously c. 1916).
With Josep Llunas, "La familia; Datos de estadística universal", "¿Qué es anarquía?" y "La cuestión política", in Josep Llunas, Estudios filosófico-sociales. Barcelona, La Academia, 1882.

References

Various authors. Història de la cultura catalana. Barcelona, edicions 62.
Iñiguez Miguel. Esbozo de una enciclopedia histórica del anarquismo. Madrid, Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 2001.
Juan Gómez Casas, Historia del anarcosindicalismo español, Madrid: Editorial ZYX, 1968.

External links

Biography in 'Cuaderns d'inpertinencia' (in Catalán)

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.