Spanish Revolution 1936-7

The 1936-37 Spanish Revolution and those who killed it: a chronology

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. The workers had effective power in society, but, led by anarchists who did not believe in class power, the Spanish workers did not consolidate that power. The Spanish Communist Party, under the military discipline of Stalin, defended in the Republican areas...

A Stalinist betrayal? Aye Write!

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”. The blurb goes on, “Scotland played a major role in the war with 500 volunteers. Daniel Gray (Homage to Caledonia) discusses the war with Chris Dolan, author of An Anarchist’s Story: the life of Ethel Macdonald, an embedded reporter from Motherwell known as ‘The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’, and doyen of Spanish history and the war, Paul Preston, whose latest book, We Saw Spain Die, is the story of the journalists who reported the war...

The Scottish Volunteers in 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 building support ‘on the home front’ for the anti-fascist forces. The Scottish desire to intervene in Spain, writes Gray, was “typical, though in its scale unique.” Around 2,400 British nationals fought in the International Brigade in Spain. Although Scots accounted for only 10% of the British population, over 20% of British volunteers – just under 550 – were Scottish. And many of them never returned. At the...

The Spanish Revolution and the Civil War, 1936-9 - A "Diary" of Events, by Leon Trotsky

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. 25 May, 1930 The Primo de Rivera dictatorship has fallen without a revolution, from internal exhaustion. In the beginning, in other words, the question was decided by the sickness of the old society and not by the revolutionary forces of a new society… The workers’ struggle must be closely linked to all the...

Alone with our day

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. It was buried in life by Stalin’s political police and its collaborators in Spain; it is “buried” in history under a grave stone mislabeled “the Spanish Civil War”. This was one of the most important working class revolutions since October 1917 in Russia. (See Workers’ Liberty pamphlet...

Hobsbawm’s miserable apology for Stalinism in Spain

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...

Mary Low Machado (1912-2007)

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:

Mary Low was born in London of...

London Workers' Liberty forum. Spain, 1936-9: the revolution betrayed

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

Revolution and betrayal in Spain 1936-7

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. It was a civil war, a tremendous civil war in which German and Italian “volunteers”, British and Irish (Blue Shirt) fascists and many others fought for the Francoite, and “anti-facists”, British, American, French, German, Italian, and Irish (Republican) volunteers fought for the Spanish...

Spain 1936/7: A Study in Workers’ Power

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. Capitalism had made little headway in Spain because of its inability to compete with the great industrial nations which had got into the field ahead of it; and because of the restricted internal market open to it Spanish industry struggled along by supplementing the economies of the major powers. The...

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