‘Living Utopia (The Anarchists and the Spanish Revolution)’ – Film (Norwich)

[DJP]

As someone asked..

Vernon Richards wrote:

To be consistent, the anarcho-syndicalist must, we believe, hold the view that the reason why the workers are not revolutionary is that their trade unions are reformist and reactionary; and that their structure prevents control from below and openly encourages the emergence of a bureacracy which openly takes over all initiative in its own hands, etc. This seems to us a mistaken view. It assumes that the worker, by definition, must be revolutionary instead of recognising that he is as much the product (and the victim) of the society he lives in as we all are more or less. And trade unions, just like other self-contained concentrations of human beings, such as prisons armies, and hospitals, are small scale copies of existing society with its qualities as well as its faults.In other words, the trade unions are what they are because the workers are what they are, and not vice versa. And for this reason, those anarchists who are less interested in the revolutionary workers' organisation, consider the problem of the organisation as secondary to that of the individual; that there is today no shortage of people able to absorb themselves in the day to day negotiations between worker and employer, but there are only too few to point out the futility of such action as an end in itself. And we have no fears that when sufficient workers have become revolutionaries they will, if they think it necessary, build their own organisations. This is quite different from creating the revolutionary organisation first and then looking for the revolutionaries (in the reformist trade unions in which most workers are to be found) afterwards.

[ALB]

I agree that the workers had no alternative but to resist the fascist action to overthrow political democracy. In fact the only practicable outcome of some benefit to the working class there would have been the consolidation of political democracy, which would have allowed them to organise to fight the class struggle on the economic front and for socialist and other ideas to be propagated and discussed. But this was not to be either, due to the intervention of outside dictatorial powers. Germany and Italy on the fascist side, and Russia on the Republican side though this presented a problem since Russia wasn't really in favour of political democracy.A statement that appeared in the May 1937 Socialist Standard (Baltrop in The Monument mistakenly says it appear in March) gave general support to defending political democracy but left it up to workers on the ground in Spain to decide how best to try to defend it:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1937/no-393-may-1937/spgb-and-spainBarltrop said it caused a controversy, from two different directions: those who said it did not go far enough in its support for those (literally) fighting for democracy and those who said it went too far. The same sort of issue came up 60 or so years later over the movements for political democracy in Eastern Europe though not complicated by the question of armed resistance.

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

But this was not to be either, due to the intervention of outside dictatorial powers.

From the beginning foreign intervention (or non-intervention) shaped the outcome of the conflict. If Germany had not supplied an airlift to Franco's forces in Morocco (the first major airlift of its kind) they would have remained stuck there, as the Navy remained loyal to the Republic and the planes the rebels had were not sufficient for the job.

[Anonymous]

The so called Spanish revolution, I will not call it revolution. The main purpose was to establish a democratic bourgeois republic, and the great majority of fighters were not the Anarchists, they were the Syndicalist, and the Leninist and the Stalinists were a minority group. This is one of the saddest moment of history where members of the working class will kill each others defending a republic. These articles written by the SPGB described in very objective manner what took place in Spain, it is in agreement with others books written by others historianshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1936/no-385-september-1936/civil-war-spainhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1997/no-1109-january-1997/book-review-remember-spain-anarchist-and-syndical

[Author]

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