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SPANISH REVOLUTION OF 1936 (from the Anarchist Page) http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/9820/
------------------------------------------------------------------------ When Franco's fascist troops invaded
Spain in July 1936 with the purpose of overthrowing the young and
unstable Republic, the Spanish working
class responded by making a revolution that went much further
toward realizing the classless and stateless ideal of proletarian
socialism than any preceding popular revolt.
Spontaneously and almost overnight,
workers seized factories and other workplaces; land was
collectivized; workers'
militias were formed throughout the country; the church--age-old enemy
of all working class radicalism and indeed, openly profascist--was
dismantled, and its property confiscated; established political
institutions disintegrated or were taken over by workers' committees. In a decade of cataclysmic worldwide
depression and spreading fascism, the revolution in Spain signaled a
message of renewed hope to the scattered forces of working-class
emancipation throughout the globe, not least in the United States.
American intellectuals and unionists Supporting the workers' revolution were
Spain's largest unions, the anarcho-syndicalist Confederacion Nacional
del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor: CNT) and its rival, the
Union Generale de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers: UGT), largely
led by the Socialist Party (then in a markedly Left phase), as well as
such revolutionary groups as the Iberian Anarchist Federation, the
independent Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM), and a small nucleus
of Trotskyists. The Spanish Communist Party, however, and many
socialists, maintained that Spain was not historically ripe for an
anticapitalist revolution and openly declared themselves for the
bourgeois republic. After Franco secured military assistance from
Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy, the Spanish Communist Party
(CP), which, in the early days of the revolution, had been a small sect,
rapidly became a major power in the land as Stalin's Russia sent
numerous military officers and political advisers, as well as some
military aid, to shield the fragile remnant of the republican
government. The anarchist movement in the United
States in the 1930s was not large, but it quickly mounted a nationwide
campaign in defense of workers' Spain that vastly exceeded its numerical
energies. The CNT's U.S. representative, Spanish-born Maximiliano
Olay--veteran of anarchist labor struggles in Cuba and among immigrant
cigar-makers in Tampa, Florida, and for many years a leading figure of
Chicago's Free Society Group--moved to New York and opened an office for
propaganda on lower Fifth Avenue. At his instigation, the
various U.S. Jewish, Russian, Spanish, and Italian anarchist federations
and groups, as well as English-language groups such as the New York
Vanguard group and several branches of the Industrial Workers of the
World, formed the ad hoc United Libertarian Organizations to produce a
paper of news and information titled Spanish Revolution. (Though not
actually affiliated, the Gillespie, Illinois, branch of the Progressive
Miners of America wholeheartedly supported the effort through a sizable
monthly assessment of its members.) Besides publishing Spanish
Revolution, the United Libertarian Organizations held mass meetings in
many cities and raised thousands of dollars for their embattled comrades
in Spain. The ULO's constituent groups also promoted the revolution in
their own papers, and issued separate publications of their own. The
Yiddish-language weekly Freie Arbeter Shtimme brought out an English
translation of Rudolf Rocker's pamphlet The Truth About Spain. The
Italian-language L'Adunata dei Refrattari carried important
communications from Spain by the renowned anarchist theorist Camillo
Berneri. The IWW's weekly Industrial Worker and One Big Union Monthly
featured reports by Pat Read and other Wobblies in the Spanish trenches.
In many countries the social-democratic
parties opposed the revolution, but in the United States the Socialist
Party, large sections of which had moved sharply to the left--a
development hastened by the influx of a disciplined and energetic group
of Trotskyists--took up the banner of the workers' revolution and even
organized and funded a substantial military unit, the [Eugene] Debs
Column, to fight in Spain. Ernest Erber, a leader of the Young People's
Socialist League, joined the editorial staff of the POUM's paper, La
Batalla. The Friends of Workers' Spain in Chicago existed primarily
to promote English-language POUM publications throughout the American
labor movement. Also oriented toward the POUM, though not without
sometimes severe criticisms of its policies, were Hugo Oehler's
Revolutionary Workers League and Albert Weisbord's Communist League of
Struggle. Oehler's oft-reprinted pamphlet Barricades in Barcelona
remains an important eyewitness account of the workers' "May
Days" revolt of 1937. Weisbord went to Spain as correspondent for
the Nation, and issued a "Special Spanish Issue" of his own
mimeographed journal, Class Struggle, in September 1937. The
Trotskyists, inside the Socialist Party but still producing publications
of their own, issued many polemics by Trotsky and others. Other small
Marxist groups, including the Proletarian Party and the Lovestoneites
[named after Jay Lovestone], also defended the revolution in Spain and
devoted much space to it in their press. When fascism emerged triumphant in
Spain in 1939, many Spanish revolutionaries sought political asylum in
the United States. By far the largest group rallied round Espana Libre,
a broad-based bilingual paper devoted to news of struggles in Spain as
well as of the widely scattered exile community. Produced in New York by
the Confederated Spanish Societies, Espania Libre continued to
appear monthly until the death of Franco in 1975. The first U.S. study of the Spanish
Revolution was Trotskyist Felix Morrow's pamphlet Civil War in Spain
(September 1936), followed a little over a year later by his
full-length Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain. American
radicals, especially anarchists, have written prodigiously on the
subject ever since. Noam Chomsky's essay "Objectivity and Liberal
Scholarship" in his American Power and the New Mandarins
(1969), Sam Dolgoff's anthology The Anarchist Collectives (1974),
and David Porter's Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution
(1983) are among the more influential works that have emphasized the
revolutionary nature of the struggle in Spain. --written by Franklin Rosemont
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