Spain

An article published in July 1937 by The Friends of Durruti, large portions of which appeared in the pamphlet “The Revolutionary Message of the ‘Friends of Durruti’” (PDF) that was translated into English via French. Here it is translated in full directly from Spanish for the first time.

The life of Francesc Sabaté Llopart, aka ‘El Quico’, reads like the story of an anarchist action film: participating in the Spanish Civil War, the anti-Nazi resistance in France and armed struggle against Franco, Sabaté carried out assassinations of fascists, illegal border crossings across the Pyrenees and armed robberies to fund the resistance.

A short essay by the former director of the Spanish Section of the International Institute of Social History on the so-called “dilemma” of the Spanish Civil War, in which the author claims that there was no “dilemma” at all for the Republicans and Stalinists, who simply wanted to use the war to stop the revolution, while the Socialist Party (Largo Caballero), riddled with traitors and communist infiltrators, totally failed to even explicitly address the “dilemma”, which was finally suppressed among the libertarians by the “committee-ocracy”, a precursor of the forms of the social democratic welfare state of the postwar period.

A chronicle of the rise and fall of the fortunes of the assembly movement in Spain during the early 1970s, with brief accounts of strike movements all over Spain, the rise of assemblies as forms of autonomous organization of the struggle, and the subsequent repression and police violence, highlighting the nefarious role played by the Communist Party and its trade union front organization at a time when it seemed that Spain was on the verge of a social revolution and that only the Communist Party and its allies could effectively prevent the workers’ assemblies from associating, organizing their self-defense, and becoming a system of workers councils.