¡No Pasarán!

  I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

Not historically accurate

Franco moves to attack

Thanks to the splendid heroism of the working class, which was unshakeably determined to fight to the death to prevent the victory of fascism, the military insurrection was crushed on 19 July in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Thanks to that prodigious heroism in the battlefields by thousands of workers who immediately and enthusiastically joined the militias, Franco was unable to achieve the victory which he thought quick and certain but which, after ten months of civil war, appears less and less likely.

At the same time as the fascist insurrection was crushed in the most important cities, and the military struggle at the front began, the workers formed revolutionary committees and seized control of the factories, the peasants took possession of the land, they burned down convents and churches – the centres of fascist reaction – in a word, the revolution began, and the old organs of bourgeois power were turned into phantoms. War and revolution, therefore, appeared inseparable from the first moment. Having defeated the insurrection, the workers set about the revolutionary work, whose conquests they defended, and continue to defend, in the trenches. To claim, as the Spanish Communist Party and the PSUC in Catalonia do, that the workers at the front are fighting for the democratic republic, is to betray the proletarian and prepare the ground for a new and victorious attack by fascist reaction.

No one should accept the argument that the struggle in the rear for the socialist revolution favours the plans of the enemy at the front. On the contrary, only an audacious revolutionary policy in the rear, one that is unequivocally socialist, is capable of giving the fighters the courage and moral strength that will make them invincible, and of organising the economy and the war industries with the efficiency necessary to achieve a rapid and overwhelming military victory.

Andrés Nin - The May Days in Barcelona

LONG LIVE THE COMMITTEES FOR THE DEFENCE OF THE REVOLUTION! LONG LIVE THE WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT!