Workers' Liberty

Though Trotsky’s writings on Spain fill a large volume he wrote no concise overview of the Spanish revolution. This “diary” is culled from the commentaries he produced all through the last decade of his life: the last item here is dated 20 August 1940, the day Trotsky was assassinated.

What I heard over the wireless, read in the newspapers and saw on the films made me decide to go to Spain to fight for the workers. I joined the International Brigade.

On Wednesday 5 May at 8am, a large force of police suddenly appeared at the Central Telephone Exchange of Tarragona, plentifully armed with weapons and grenades for taking it by assault. They occupied it without encountering any resistance whatever from the workers.

It has been asserted in the Communist press that the so-called uprising in Barcelona was a carefully prepared effort to overthrow the Government and even to hand Catalonia over to the fascists by provoking foreign intervention in Barcelona. The second part of this suggestion is almost too ridiculous to need refuting.

Let us examine the real points at issue between the Communist International and the revolutionary workers of Spain, including the POUM.

The workers took control of the factories. The revolution came from below. From above, in other words from the leadership of the workers’ parties, came only curbs.

I propose to give an account of what I saw while in Spain, and of the further developments since my return. The work of economic reconstruction commenced immediately after the various barracks and buildings occupied by the fascists had been retaken by the armed workers, and it is being carried on parallel with the military activities against fascism.

The Spanish civil war was not primarily a struggle of “democracy against fascism”. It was a class struggle of the Spanish workers and peasants against capitalist, landlord and priest rule in Spain. This working class struggle was subverted by the Stalinists, who came to dominate the Republican areas from which the old ruling class had fled.

A programme blurb for the recent Aye Write book festival in Glasgow advertises a “special session to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War”.

Daniel Gray’s “Homage to Caledonia” is about the Scottish men and women who mobilised against fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 – either by going to fight in Spain itself, or by buil

Though Leon Trotsky’s writings on Spain fill a large volume, he wrote no concise overview of the Spanish revolution. Our “diary” is culled from the commentaries he produced all through the last decade of his life: the last item here is dated 20 August 1940, the day Trotsky was assassinated.

The great Spanish revolution of 1936-7, tragically betrayed and defeated, has gone down in history as “the Spanish Civil War” (1936-9). Civil war it surely was, but that designation, civil war, embodies the politics and the slant on history of those who crushed the workers’ revolution in Catalonia and elsewhere.

Today’s Guardian Review contains a miserable apology for Stalinism in Spain by Eric Hobsbawm.

He says events in Spain 1936-39 were about fascism vs anti-fascism. And he can’t resist a good old ad hominem amalgam: “It was not, as the neoliberal François Furet argued it should have been, a war against both the ultra-right and the Comintern - a view shared, from a Trotskyist sectarian angle, by Ken Loach's powerful film Land and Freedom (1995).”

Earlier this week I found out that Mary Low Machado had died on 9 January, aged 94. I have been researching the Spanish revolution, one of the great events of the twentieth century, which she participated in as a Trotskyist. This is what I know of her life:

Second only to Russia in 1917, the Spanish Revolution of 1936-7 is the most important workers' revolution of the 20th Century. That aspect of the "Spanish Civil War" has almost been written out of history. Here we describe what the Spanish workers did, before they were crushed, first by the Stalinists, and then by the Francoite fascists. Read it here.

7.30pm, Thursday 12 October
The Plough, Museum Street
Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road

In 1936, in response to a fascist coup, the Spanish workers rose up and seized the factories and land, but could not consolidate their power. What happened? Why did the fascists win? What role did Marxism and anarchism play in the struggle? And what can the Spanish revolution teach socialists and the labour movement today?

A leaflet advertising the meeting is attached. For more information email office@workersliberty.org or ring 020 7207 3997

It is usually called the “Spanish civil war”, the thirty month struggle that began in July 1936, when the Spanish military, led by three generals, Franco, Mola and Sanjurgo — of whom one, Franco, would emerge as dictator — revolted against the Popular Front government which had been elected five months earlier.

In many respects there were very close parallels between the proletarian revolutions of [Russia] 1917 and [Spain] 1936. Spain and Russia were both gripped by profound economic crises rooted in their semi-feudal land systems. Both were agricultural economies based on a poverty-stricken peasantry.

'Today' today had a feature on the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War featuring historian Anthony Beevor and none other than Michael Portillo, who was there so that he could patronise his father who fought on the Republican side as a naïve intellectual. Their conclusion was that the best way to commemorate the Civil War was to forget all about it