Lessons of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War

bristol | protests | event notice Friday October 16, 2009 08:34 by martin - East Bristol Socialist Workers Party

7.30pm, Hawks Gym, Roman Road, Easton

A discussion meeting led by Dick North.

There are several reasons why Spanish events in the 1930s are worthy of our attention. In its initial moments, events in the summer of 1936 showed how workers were capable of preventing a right wing coup and taking power in their own localities and workplaces. Some 80 percent of the workplaces in Barcelona were collectivised as was much of the land in Catalonia and Aragon. A genuine but faltering revolutionary process opened up new possibilities for workers, peasants, women, national minorities and Spain's colonial subjects. The considerable achievements of that revolution were both limited and jeopardised by the rebuilding of bourgeois state power. The question of the state could not be ignored and an alternative source of state power based on the popular movement had to be nurtured and encouraged if the revolution was to survive.

The memory of the Spanish Civil War is thus an important part of the anti-fascist tradition in Britain. Hundreds of British workers went to fight in Spain against fascism. At the same time the British state had a rotten record - unofficially supporting Franco and pushing the hypocritical sham of international non-intervention. Many of the issues confronted by the left during the Spanish civil war have a present day relevance: whether the Soviet Union was socialist, how to fight fascism, what does a revolution look like and what kind of organisations are needed to achieve it.