 Good morning everyone and the talk is about mainly about the Spanish revolution in 1931-37. But I will also try to explain the implications of that revolution for the situation today in Spain. As you know, a very turbulent situation has opened in Spain since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007-2008. But particularly after 2011, with the beginning of the Indignados movement, the movement of the enraged, where hundreds of thousands of young people and not so young people took to the streets, occupied the squares, and basically challenged a system which has been in place in Spain since 1978, when the fall of the Franco dictatorship. And the Franco dictatorship is obviously the result of the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 31-37. So a lot of discussions have taken place about the Spanish revolution, its meaning, the legacy of the dictatorship and so on. And for instance, the recovery of what is called historical memory, the truth of what happened and the Franco, the truth of what happened in the Spanish Civil War, is a big part of arming the revolutionary movement today. And it's something in which many young people take a strong interest now. And it's something that has been really blocked from Spanish official history for the best part of the last 35 years. The official history taught in schools is basically that there was a civil war, which is a very bad thing. A war between Franco and the Spanish people. And that's one of the official versions. The other official version is that there was a democratic republic which was overthrown by fascist coup, which also doesn't tell you what really happened, which is a revolutionary movement, a real revolution in which the workers took power for a few months. And this is completely blacked out from the official history. You will never know about that. In the same way, the revolutionary struggle of Spanish workers and youth in the 1970s to overthrow the Franco dictatorship was also erased from official memory. And what you are told is that basically there was an agreement of all democratic forces and Franco regime was dismantled and that was it. So that's why it's important to study the Spanish revolution. Leon Trotsky said that the Spanish workers in the 1930s could have won not one, but ten victories. And that the proletarian content of the Spanish revolution was perhaps ten times stronger than that of the Russian revolution, which had happened 30 years earlier. At the beginning of last century, in the 1910s, 1920s, Spain was a very backward country, one of the most backward countries in Europe. A country in which the bourgeois democratic revolution had not been carried out in any significant way. And this was in a distorted way the result of the imperial past of Spain, the Spanish crown conquered America and expoliated the American continent. But this was a feudal monarchy, a very backward system, which meant that the big majority of the money that was looted from the American continent did not go to the development of capitalism in Spain, but rather filtered through other more advanced nations in Europe and helped the development of capitalism in other countries in England, in Holland and so on. And Spain remained backward and never really developed throughout most of the 19th century. There were attempts at bourgeois revolutions, which were very soon suppressed by military coups and periods of reaction. And there was never real development. In 1930, Trotsky wrote a very interesting article called the Spanish Revolution, in which he set out the main tasks of the Spanish revolution, and most of them were the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. One was the question of the land, the agrarian reform. In Spain, still the big majority of the land, particularly in the south of the country, was owned by absentee landlords. And up to one million landless laborers worked in these lands for very little money, and they were unemployed between 90 to 150 days every year. There was a situation of extreme poverty in Andalusia, in Extremadura, in Galicia, in other rural areas. But the problem at this time was that these landlords had become completely linked and united with the capitalist class. Many bourgeois had interests in the land, the landowners had the money in the banks, the banks had interests in the land. And so it became a reactionary bloc, a united reactionary bloc that prevented the development of the country. The second problem of the Spanish revolution was the question of the church. And this was not just a question of religion, it was also a question of power, money and wealth, particularly land. It is calculated that the Spanish church owned one-third of the land in 1930, and also owned about one-third of all the wealth in all the private wealth in the country. So it was a powerful institution which prevented any development of progressive ideas, any development of the agrarian revolution and so on, and had a very strong hold on the minds of millions of people who lived in the countryside. The other question was the question of the army. The army in Spain was a massive army, completely out of proportion with the needs of the country, with a very big officer caste. The sons of the ruling class will be sent one to inherit the business, the second one to the church and the third one to the army. So probably the most of these officers just had a job, but they had no military inclination, they had no knowledge and they were very backward and ignorant. This was shown, for instance, in the Spanish adventure in Morocco, which ended in a massive defeat for the Spanish army, and a victory for the forces of the Moroccan nationalist in 1920. But this question of the army had been simmering through the 1910s, the 1920s. In 1909 there was one week long general strike and uprising in Barcelona called the Tragic Week, which was an uprising of the workers against the conscription of sons of the working class to fight in the Moroccan war, showing also a high degree of internationalist spirit. But this was a constant question. Forgot to say that because of the role of the church in society, every single revolutionary uprising in Spain was accompanied with the burning of churches. And this is a very good, old, very well-established tradition in Spain. In 1909 there was burning of churches, in 1919 there was burning of churches, and in 1931, when the Republic was proclaimed, there was also burning of churches. There was also strong anti-cladical tradition in the Spanish working class, particularly amongst the anarchists. The fourth problem of the Spanish Revolution was the question of the national and colonial question. Spain had lost most of its remaining colonies in 1898, Cuba and the Philippines, but it still remained the colonial power in Morocco. And this was a constant source of reactionary ideas. And as we will see later, the fascist uprising started with those troops that were stationed in Morocco, and Franco was the main commander of the Moroccan troops. At the same time there was the national question. The Basque country and Catalonia had been fighting for some degree of autonomy or self-rule for many years. And the backward Spanish ruling class had never managed to unify the country on a progressive basis. On a basis that would be progressive for all the peoples that were part of the Spanish state at that time. And this had given rise to a lot of centrifugal tendencies, nationalist tendencies in Catalonia and the Basque country mainly. And this had always been repressed by the Spanish ruling class in a very ruthless way. So these were the main tasks of the Spanish Revolution at that time. But at the same time Trotsky pointed out that Spain at that time already had a very strong proletariat concentrated mainly in Barcelona and in Catalonia, which amounted to about 50% of all workers were in this region. And then in strong pockets of industrial working class concentration in Madrid and in Biscayar, in the mines in Asturias, and then a large section of rural proletariat in the south. And therefore Trotsky explained that in order to carry out the tasks of the national democratic revolution, the progressive section of the bourgeois will not be trusted because throughout history they had been more afraid of mobilising the working class for fear of losing their own privileges than afraid of the old feudal regime, the ancient regime that had to be overthrown. And this was proven to be correct, we will see in a minute. The regime had reached a very deep crisis by the late 1920s. And the 1929 world crisis of capitalism was the last straw for Spanish capitalism. We saw the overthrow of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and then a short period in which Alfonso XII was the king. But by 1930 there was widespread mobilisation. There was an agreement between socialist and left republican forces to struggle for a republic. And in 1931, April 14th, the left republican-socialist coalition won the municipal elections. These were not national elections but they were considered as a test of the amount of support for the republic. People came out on the streets and the republic was proclaimed on the 14th of April 1931. This was a very significant event which opened the Spanish revolution. At that time there were a number of different political forces in the country and it's important to see which policies each of them defended and what specific weight they had. But the first thing to say is that Alfonso XII had to flee the country. The republic was proclaimed and this was the opening shot of the Spanish revolution. The main political parties of the working class were the Socialist Party, which had been established in the late 1800s. And one of the characteristics of this Spanish party is that it never paid much attention to theory. And so the party had gone through different phases. But the phase that the party had gone through immediately before the proclamation of the republic in 1931 was a very conservative phase. The Socialist Party had accepted the position in the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the main leader of the party, Largo Cavallero, which then became a very left-wing figure during the Spanish Revolution, had been an advisor to the minister of labor under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. And the Primo de Rivera dictatorship had played the UGT, which is the Socialist Trade Union, against the CNT, which was the anarcho-syndicalist trade union. They established compulsory arbitration so that there would be no strikes and the UGT accepted this wholesale. And Largo Cavallero was the leader of the UGT. At that time the Socialist Party was divided in different factions that developed through the Spanish Revolution. Largo Cavallero became the leader of the left and he became very left-wing. At one point he was known as the Spanish Lenin, which he was not. But he spoke in a very radical language and as we will see later in 1934 he was even talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat, the failure of the bourgeois democracy and things like this. Prieto, on the other hand, was the leader of the right-wing, a more conciliatory reformist wing of the party. But at that time in 1931 all the different wings of the party were united on this idea that the coalition with the left republicans was necessary. The left republicans were led by a man called Afanya and they progressively lost support because as the revolution developed the workers became more mobilized, more radical, they demanded more and the bourgeoisie became more and more afraid and they progressively drew the conclusion that the only solution to the problems they were facing was an open dictatorship, which is what they attempted in 1936. The Communist Party of Spain was a very small organization. In Spain the Russian revolution had had a massive impact. The main organizations of the Spanish workers had voted to adhere to the Third International. Not only the Socialist Party, which voted in its congress to adhere, although it then reversed the decision, the Socialist Youth, which went on to form the original Communist Party as a whole, the whole organization went on to form the Communist Party, but also the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, which organized the most militant layers of the Spanish working class that was particularly strong in Barcelona and in Catalonia. They had a revolutionary tradition. They voted in 1919 to join the Third International and they sent delegates to the founding congress, although then when they came back the decision was also reversed. But some of the early leaders of the Communist Party in Spain, like Andres Nín, Maurín and others, had been leaders of the CNT. But by 1930 the Communist Party was a very small organization. The reason for this was Stalinism. The Party in Spain was never allowed to develop. Its leadership was forged once and again. Every single mistake, and they made many big mistakes, was blamed on the old leadership, the new leadership was imposed from Moscow and there was never an organic development of the Party because of all these approaches. In 1930-31 the Party was following a very ultra-left line. So when the Republic was proclaimed there were enormous illusions on the Republic, but the line of the Communist Party was down with the Republic for support of the Soviets. At the time when the Republic had just been proclaimed they were very isolated, although they had pockets of support in Seville and so on, but they were very isolated. To the point where the Spanish Communist Left was now a bigger organization than the official Party. The official Party had been reduced to maybe 500 or 800 members. The Spanish Communist Left had been founded by Nín, Andréo Nín, who was, as I said, a former leader of the CNT, and he had gone to Russia to participate in the International Trade Union Organization, and he worked closely with Trotsky in 19, and he became a supporter of the ideas of the left opposition, of Trotsky's left opposition. He came back to Spain, but from the very beginning Trotsky was very critical of him. Instead of trying to establish a strong organization of the left opposition, he spent quite a lot of time trying to convince other people, like Maurín, who was the leader of a Catalan right Communist organization, I supported of Buharin and the right Communist, because he was a personal friend of Maurín and he tried to convince him to have a joint newspaper or a joint magazine. He wasted a lot of time, and if you look through the correspondence between Nín and Trotsky, you can see Trotsky's growing impatience at the fact that they were not organizing the Party, they were not organizing their forces to intervene in the movement, they were wasting a lot of time. But finally an organization was formed, which had some pockets of support in Extremadura and in other places, and the organization in 1931 must have had about a thousand members, more or less. And it was the organization that had the most correct program in the Spanish Revolution, that basically advocated that there should be no support for the left Republicans, that the workers should have a policy of class independence, combining the struggle for democratic demands with the struggle for workers' power, that Soviets should be organized in one name or another, i.e. workers' committees in the localities, in the neighborhoods, in the factories and so on. The CNT, as I said, was the largest organization of the Spanish workers, the most militant and radical of all of them, but they also were riddled with lots of contradictions. There was a strong anti-political tendency within it, but at the same time other leaders of the CNT formed what was in fact a political party called the FI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation, to intervene in the CNT in an organized way to pursue an anarchist line. So you see the contradiction. They were against politics, but they were in fact conducting themselves as a political faction within the CNT. And the main leaders of the CNT were Durruti, I will talk about him a bit more later, Durruti and Ascaso, they belonged to the, let's call it, the direct action wing of the CNT. They've been involved in the 1920s and earlier in physical struggle against the bosses. The bosses in Barcelona set up what they call the Free Union, which in fact was a group of thugs, which were breaking up strikes, killing workers' leaders, and there was a number of gun battles in the streets of Barcelona between anarcho-syndicalist activists and the bourgeois thugs. Interesting thing that he had to emigrate to Latin America, where he spent some time robbing banks in Argentina and Cuba and in other countries in Mexico to fund the cause. So you see the picture. He was very well liked by the anarchist masses because he was a man of action. They could trust him to go until the end in defending their ideas, which were revolutionary ideas, but he was not a theoretician in that way. On the other hand, people like Oliver and Federica Monsen, they were on the more conciliatory wing of the CNT. And very quickly they came under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion and as we will see later they entered the Republican coalition involvement. And then there was another smaller formation, the Catalan Republican Left, which was more or less the Catalan equivalent of the Left Republicans. But in Catalonia it had mass support among small peasants, so it had certain popular support. And Trosti pointed out that it was important for Marxists to differentiate between the reactionary character of the Catalan nationalism of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois and the progressive democratic character of the Catalan nationalism of the working masses and the small peasants and so on. And the only policy correct for Spanish revolutionaries to adopt in relation to the national question was to defend the right of self-determination of Catalonia. And in this way, the unconditional defense of this right, they could win over the trust and confidence of Catalan workers. This is something that is still very relevant today in Catalonia and in Spain. So basically this is the situation that we find ourselves in at the beginning of 1931, April when the Republicans proclaimed. The problem was that the workers and peasants of Spain had a lot of hopes and expectations in this Republican government. This Republican government was completely unable to fulfill any of the hopes and aspirations, mainly because of the block exercised by the Left Republicans, which were really bourgeois organizations. For instance, in relation to land reform, the Republican Socialist Coalition government proposed a plan for land reform which will take about 100 years to complete. The peasants in Spain had not 100 years to wait for a genuine land reform, so they started taking over the land. And in many towns and villages in Andalusia, the peasants occupied the land, they divided it among themselves and started working the land. And what was the response of the Republican government? The response was to send a civil guard, which was the most hated repressive force in Spain that had been used in the countryside for many decades to attack the workers and so on, landless peasants and so on. There was a famous incident in 1932, I think, in Casas Viejas where the local peasants occupied the town hall and divided the land, occupied the land owners. And the civil guard was sent by the Republican Socialist government. 23 peasants were killed and hundreds were injured. And there was no official protest by the Socialist Party in the government. They didn't resign from the government. There was no action. By the January 1932, most of the illusions the workers and peasants had in the Republican government had dissipated. And there were a number of uprisings in the end of January 1932 in a number of towns where impatient, ultra-left elements within the CNT declared libertarian communism in a number of towns. In Catalonia, for instance, there were two mining villages where communism was declared and the workers ran the whole town for about a week until they were put down by the forces of repression sent by the Republican Socialist government. So you can see how progressively, as a result of this also, the abstentionist wing of the CNT became stronger. They said, look what's the point in participating in politics. We only get a government that finally attacks the workers. The workers have no other solution but to struggle in the streets and not get themselves involved in politics. By 1933, November, there were new elections. These were early elections. They all go and collapsed. And the right wing won this election. The right wing and center parties won majority. Now the center party, so-called center party, was the radical party of LaRouche who started as a left wing populist and ended up as a right wing populist. And he had the most votes in the new parliament and he formed the government. This government was extremely repressive against the workers. But then there was the thorny question of the SEDA. The SEDA was the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right and this was the main party of the ruling class. And this party contained a strong fascist element within it. And the intention of the ruling class was to establish a fascist regime in Spain already in 1933-34. If you look at the international situation, you had the coming to power of fascism in Germany and later on the coming to power of fascism in Austria where the workers were defeated without a fight, practically, particularly in Germany. And so this had a very powerful impact on the Spanish workers, a very radicalizing effect. And they said, and on their organizations, they said, we're not going to allow the same thing to happen here. If there's any hint of the fascists coming to power, we'll declare an insurrectionary general strike and we'll bring this government down. The SEDA originally didn't, of Hill Robles, it was the main leader of the SEDA, the SEDA originally did not participate in the government for fear of provoking the workers' backlash. But by 1934 they felt confident enough and they joined the government in October. And this was the signal, the workers' organizations had threatened and had warned that the minute the SEDA joined the government they will declare a revolutionary uprising. The problem with this was that the workers trusted their leaders and trusted that their leaders had clear plans for this revolutionary uprising, which was not the case. Even the more radical of the leaders of the socialist party, like Larvo Caballero by this time, he was making speeches basically saying that bourgeois democracy is dead, doesn't serve the purposes of the Spanish Revolution and we need a proletarian dictatorship. This is the language that they used. There were meetings, this is another interesting thing about the split within the socialist party. There were meetings in towns and cities where the socialist party was strong. In many cases the representatives of the right wing were chased out of the town by armed workers. They didn't want to hear the leaders of the right wing of the socialist party. They only wanted to hear the leaders of the left. Larvo Caballero went on a speaking tour and this was very interesting because you remember that this guy had been minister or advisor to the on labor issues to the dictatorship in the 1920s and now here he was. He was considered the Spanish Lenin, talking very radical and as he delivered a very radical speech to an audience of workers, the workers will take it as a given word and this will have a more radicalizing effect on the speaker and vice versa. By the end of this speaking tour and the speeches were published in the daily paper of the socialist party, the position that he was putting was very radical. The socialist youth and the UGT, the Socialist Union, was fully behind him. It was the most radical section of the socialist movement. But the socialist youth became even more radical. I will explain this in a bit. But the socialist youth and the socialist party had armed militias. They had a military training and they were preparing for a fascist coup and how to fight against it. But interestingly, they saw the struggle as mainly a technical military question and this was a complete mistake. In fact, in the three or four weeks before the SEDA joined the government, the socialist youth suspended all their meetings and all their public activity, all the agitation in the factories and in the neighborhoods and they just retreated into military training. They went into the woods, they trained on firing ranges and stuff like that. This was a complete mistake because in reality the struggle against fascism is not militarily in the main, it's a political struggle. The leaders of the UGT had organized some big strikes, for instance the construction workers' strike in Madrid, the land laborers' strike in Andalusia and Extremadura, but they brought all these strikes to a halt in order to prepare for defeating the fascist uprising that was coming. When in reality the situation should have been the opposite, to agitate and to increase the activity of the working class as a whole, not small advanced detachment with guns, but to weld the whole of the working class into the movement against fascism. This was the only way to defeat fascism. So when the uprising came, or sorry, there was also the formation of the workers' alliances, more or less at this time and there was a strong unity feeling in the Spanish workers and these workers' alliances were formed. In some cases at the initiative of the communists left around Nín. At the beginning these workers' alliances where they had a weakness which is that they were mainly local agreements between the leaders of the different organizations. But the strong point was that they involved most of the working class organizations, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Union. In many cases it also involved the CNT and the communists left. So the main workers' organizations were at least coordinating their efforts at the local level. In Asturias the CNT had joined the workers' alliance which was not the case nationally because there was a strong anti-political feeling amongst the CNT workers. But Asturias was the place where the insurrection was best prepared. Come October 1934 the seder joins the government and there is an uprising stronger in Madrid in Catalonia and in Asturias. The struggle was quickly defeated because the workers' organizations left the leadership to the left Catalan republicans and they basically betrayed the struggle after two or three days. They just gave up, they refused to arm the workers and that's it. In Madrid the struggle was defeated also earlier on but in Asturias the struggle lasted for 10 days. And for 10 days the workers controlled this mining region. The workers had no weapons and no dynamite. They improvised tanks and they basically resisted for 10 days and for 10 days there was a regime of what they called communism or the workers they called it libertarian communism. Money was abolished it was replaced by coupons issued by the workers' committees and there is a very interesting scene that happened in these towns in the mining towns like Pola del Angreo, Mieres, Llanes and the mining villages and what happened was that the leaders of the committees i.e. the leaders of the organizations fled the struggle after two or three days. The workers in arms they chased them, they arrested them they brought them back to the committee rooms which are now in the town halls and set an armed guard to rule and flee the struggle again and this in essence shows you the tragedy of the Spanish revolution that the workers were prepared to go until the end sacrifice their lives for the victory of the revolution but the leaders were fleeing at the earliest possibility. Finally the movement was defeated and it's interesting to note that in the defeat of the movement the role of the CNT railway workers' union was important the CNT railway workers' union was dominated by the extensionist factions and they basically refused to participate in the general strike to the point that they allowed the railways to be used to transport the troops with which the republican government the right wing republican government was to crush the studian uprising and these troops were led by the general Franco who was the head of the Moorish detachment of the Spanish troops in Morocco and they were particularly brutal about 3,000 workers were killed most of them after surrendering 10,000 people were jailed workers, activists were jailed throughout the country and this period between 33 and 35 is called the two black years it's also interesting to note this because we consider the Spanish Revolution having lasted between 1931 and 1937 but within that revolution there were two periods of there was two years one period of black reaction in which the workers' organizations were suppressed the leaders were jailed and killed the papers were closed down and so on so you see that revolution is not straightforward march advances setbacks and so on but the most interesting thing about the October uprising is two one that it prevented the coming to power of fascism in Spain at that time they couldn't establish a fascist regime and second that it provoked a massive further radicalization of the socialist organizations particularly the socialist youth the socialist youth came out with a pamphlet written by one Santiago Carrillo who later on played a treacherous role in the Spanish Revolution in the 1970s but he was at that time the leader of the socialist youth sorry and in jail he wrote a pamphlet a pamphlet it's not available in English but it's called October a new stage and basically it says he analyzes the reasons for the defeat of the revolution which he puts down to the treacherous role played by the leaders of all the different factions he basically says that in the international arena the second international has betrayed and is dead the third international has become Stalinized and bureaucratized and therefore it's not an instrument for revolution and the fourth international should be set up on the basis of working class independence dictatorship of the proletariat basically the situation was open and the radicalization had been provoked by events Trotsky at that point this was a phenomena that was not only happening in Spain radicalization of the social democracy particularly of the youth of the social democracy was also happening in other countries like in France and in other countries faced with the danger of fascism Trotsky advocated, advised his followers in Spain to enter the socialist youth as a matter of fact the socialist youth general secretary Santiago Carrillo wrote a letter to Nin asking Nin to join the socialist youth and there isn't a change of letters between Carrillo and Nin the Spanish Trotsky refused Trotsky's advice to join the socialist youth on the grounds that the socialist party was reformist organization that couldn't be transformed and that the Spanish Marxist needed to have a clean and separate banner and the slogan of the day was Marxist unification and they went on to form a new party called the party the workers party of Marxist unification the poem in the correspondence between Nin and Carrillo is very interesting because Carrillo is basically putting forward Trotsky's arguments for enterism while Nin is playing with sectarian arguments Carrillo says to Nin look even if what you say is true that the socialist because the invitation was for the Spanish Trotsky to join the socialist youth as they were the more first sighted theoreticians of the Spanish revolution to help them arm themselves theoretically and wage a struggle for the bolshevization of the socialist organizations this was the appeal in their own words Nin said this is not possible and Carrillo replied look even if this let's assume that this is not possible what do you have to lose you join with us and we try if we fail then we will form a separate party of Marxist unification but you will bring with you the ranks of the socialist youth thousands of members and 10,000 members in arms and Nin refused at this point Trotsky broke relations with Nin he considered this to be a sectarian mistake of the first order and the betrayal of the Spanish revolution and all links were broken Nin went on to form the poem together with Maurin who was the leader of the Catalan as I explained before the Catalan workers and peasants block which was a right Buharinist organization and that was it and very shortly afterwards the socialist youth was absorbed by the Stalinist the Stalinist invited Carrillo to go and all the leaders of the socialist youth to go to Moscow by this time 1935 the Stalinist changed tack and instead of a policy of ultra leftism of saying the socialist party is the same as fascist they now said we need a broad democratic front, a popular front of all progressive forces against fascism including the progressive bourgeois and so on and they invited the leaders of the socialist youth to Moscow obviously the Soviet Union exercised a powerful influence and impact on these young militants and finally there was a fusion between the socialist youth the socialist youth and the communist youth which gave rise to a new organization called the united socialist youth and this gave the Stalinist for the first time a mass base in Spain which they had not had before and they went on to use this mass base to betray the Spanish Revolution by 1936 February there were new elections and the popular front won just to give you an idea there were two coalitions standing in these elections the popular front on the one hand which was composed of the republican left the socialist party, the communist party the syndicalist party which was a party set up by one of the leaders of the CNT in order to participate in elections very funny thing to do for an anarchist but at this time there was a very strong anti-abstentionist feeling amongst the CNT masses and most of them voted for the popular front and the poem, this is interesting because the poem joined the popular front despite the fact that they were a party they were formally opposed to the idea of the popular front with progressive elements of the bourgeois they signed the agreement of the popular front they participated in the electoral coalition the other block that stood in the elections was called the counter-revolutionary front so the situation was quite clear for everyone the workers wanted revolution the ruling class wanted the fascist coup bourgeois democracy had been completely exposed as not serving the interests of any class the workers had not gotten anything of the first republican government and the ruling class realized that by democratic means they couldn't smash the workers and keep them under control so the period between February and July everyone knew that the fascist coup was being prepared and everyone prepared, apart from the workers' leaders the workers' leaders continued with the policy of asking the government to purge the army of fascist elements of calling on the workers for restraint particularly the leaders of the communist party with the most ardent advocates of this policy stopping strikes advocating against strikes while the masses of the UGT and the CNT were moving forward and there were big strikes in a number of different sectors of the economy and cities and so on, regional general strikes and so on the republican left had become an empty shell because most of the serious bourgeois had sided with the open counter-revolution they had decided that they needed the fascist coup so really the socialist party and the communist party were moderating the program of socialist revolution they were not advocating socialist revolution, they were not even advocating proper agrarian reform separation of the church and the state they were not even advocating the democratic revolution on the basis of not scaring away the republican left which was an organization that represented no one represented no serious political force they described it as the shadow of the bourgeois they didn't represent the bourgeois because the bourgeois were all on the counter-revolutionary side they represented the shadow of the bourgeois and if you read, and it's in Felix Morro's book if you read the program of the popular front stood in February 36 it's really ironic because it says the republican delegation, there were talks between the socialists and the republicans the republican delegation rejects the demand for agrarian reform and this is then put in the program the republican delegation rejects the socialist party proposal for this and that and the other basically it was the program of the republican left while it was the socialist party that was providing most of the votes and the militants and the forces for this coalition and this is the essence of the counter-revolutionary of the popular front by July 17 July 17 the fascist uprising started but only in Morocco, led by Franco by July 18 the fascist uprising started all over Spain and in the first hours and in the first day of the uprising, the republican government was trying to deny there had been an uprising they established talks with the fascists who had organized the coup and they attempted to establish a government of peace trying to reach a deal with the fascists but the workers were out in the streets demanding arms which the government refused to give them and in a number of towns and cities, particularly in Barcelona and in Catalonia the workers rose up whatever weapons they could get kitchen, knives the assaulted rifle shops, they managed to get some from the local police and they basically established barricades everywhere, this is in Barcelona as you can see right at the end of the street there's the Columbus statue, if you've been in Barcelona you know where that is and they established barricades everywhere, they surrounded the military barracks and they basically defeated the coup in Barcelona on the basis of revolutionary policy this was not one on the basis of relative strength of the weaponry of each side this was one on political lines the workers will jump through the barricades and approach the soldiers and ask them what they were fighting for told them that they were fighting for fascist school and that the workers were fighting for revolution and many soldiers basically gave up their weapons and joined the uprising by July 19th by July 19th there was no bourgeois state force remaining in Catalonia, the workers had taken power the army had disbanded the police had disbanded the assault guards had disbanded all the police forces no longer existed and the only power in Catalonia was the power of armed workers because they given themselves weapons organized in committees and this was carried out mainly by the workers from the CNT and also with the strong participation of the PUM, many people died in those days including the Iberian communist youth the youth of the PUM and leaders of the CNT and so on and the workers had power in Catalonia and they established committees everywhere there were defence committees in the neighbourhoods there were workers control committees in the factories the workers for instance controlled the border with France, the Catalonia with France and they set up day after what was known as the central committee of anti-fascist militias this central committee of anti-fascist militias was a very peculiar body because it included representatives of the main workers' organizations but also included representatives of the left republican the Catalan left republicans but the balance of power was clear the power was in the hands of the CNT workers and the local rank profile committees and what happened next shows the bankruptcy of anarchist ideology when actually put to the test because they went central committee of anti-fascist militias they went for a meeting with Companj who was the leader of the republican left in Catalonia and was the president of the Catalan government and the president of the Catalan government told them gentlemen, I have served you in the past, he had been a lawyer for the CNT in the 19th I have served you loyally in the past you have now power in Catalonia and I will be a loyal servant of your power if you so ask me and the leaders of the CNT said no, no, no, we anarchists we don't want power and we just interested in winning this war and defeating the fascist but you can remain in your position the relationship was very strongly skewed in favor of the workers' organizations and the workers' militias but leaving the generalitat, the regional government in place leaving the generalitat in place meant that progressively in the months that go from July until May, 37 the generalitat slowly re-established its power re-established its police and the same in Madrid re-established the popular army as opposed to the militias and they progressively roll back the power of the workers' committees with the support and acquiescence of the workers' leaders we are part of these bodies a coalition government was formed in Barcelona which included the poem so this was the most radical party advocating workers' power dictatorship of the proletariat and then they entered into a government whose first action in September already was to disband the central committee of anti-fascist militias then in October it disbanded all the committees although they never were actually disbanded but they issued a decree disbanding the committees and banning individuals carrying weapons i.e. banning the workers' organizations from having the workers militia and establishing the monopoly of force on the hands of the police and the official army and this process lasted for all these months from July until May and the workers resisted the workers attempted to fight back in the first weeks this was a revolutionary war that was being fought Durruti was a man of action as I said before immediately set up a workers' militia 40,000 armed workers men and women they went into the front and they rolled back the fascists from Aragon and they did so through revolutionary means I recommend you to watch the London Freedom Film where this is very clearly expressed the workers' militia will enter one village or peasant village in Aragon they will immediately set up a committee distribute the land amongst the peasants and burn down the local church or occupy it for other purposes and therefore they created a bastion of the revolution those towns and villages were the last ones to be taken by the fascists in 1939 and they established in Aragon basically a workers' government which was called the Aragon Defense Junta which was run mainly by the CNT but also by the Poles and this was the last part of Spain that was taken over by the fascists and there was this debate the Stalinists the Republicans and some of the leaders of the socialist party they argued first we must win the war so that then we can make the revolution but in fact this is completely mistaken because a civil war cannot be won by military means and even less in Spain where Germany and Italy were supporting the fascist supplying it with weapons artillery and air force and so on while the democratic powers were continuing with the farce of non-intervention it was impossible to win that war on military basis it had to be won on revolutionary policies and the argument of Trotsky was that only the thorough expropriation of the bourgeoisie and giving the peasants the land, giving the workers the factories can create the political conditions for them to win the civil war he was obviously basing himself on the expedience of the civil war in Russia where they had been in a much worse position isolated in maybe one or two big cities and they had nevertheless defeated 17 armies of foreign intervention and the local whites but this was not the policy that was followed by the leaders of the popular front by the leaders of the socialist party or by the leaders of the CNP because the leaders of the CNP after having been advocating not taking power not participating in policy in politics and so on they ended up joining the popular front government the same government that was disarming the workers destroying the committees and so on and they had two of what they were known as Garcia, Oliver and Federica Montsen were known as the anarcho ministers and they played a dreadful role in covering up for all the crimes of the popular front by January, February 1937 the situation was really bad in the republican camp as well as the advance of the fascist troops you saw a situation where there was censorship of the press in the republican camp so the CNP newspapers could not report the fact that for instance in Malaga the republican forces had arrested the main leaders of the CNP and they had put them in jail the CNP members were not aware because the CNP papers were not allowed to report they came out with blank pages and the leaders of the CNP were part of this government and they were not doing anything maybe they were protesting behind the scenes they were not doing any public agitation and this is the reason why the war was lost in 1937 was the last episode sort of is supposed to come before this is the workers militias and you can see the this is one where you can see the strong unity between the CNP and the POMP and there is even it says Trotsky in this homemade tank I guess it says Viva Trotsky and it says also UHP which is the union of proletarian brothers or the brotherhood of proletarian unity something like this it was a slogan unity of workers and workers power in Spain the POMP itself went from a small organization with few thousand members to having 40 or 60 thousand members in 8 weeks they had an armed militia of 10 thousand members but also the POMP betrayed the Spanish revolution because they also joined the republican government NIN was a minister of justice in the Catalan republican government at the same time that this Catalan republican government was dissolving the committees disarming the workers, disarming the militias and establishing a bourgeois republican army and as I said before on this basis the war could not be won. May 37 is the last episode of the Spanish revolution there was a Stalinist provocation in Barcelona if you've been to Barcelona there's the main Catalonia square and in one corner of this square there was a small building and that used to be the telephone exchange and the telephone exchange had been taken over by the workers at heavy cost of life in July 18 and it was controlled by a joint committee of CMT and UGT workers and they had an armed guard in the building and this was a reflection or graphical example of that is that the regional government would not use the phones without the permission of the workers and the workers could listen in in any conversations that the government was having with anyone so the government decided that this was enough and there was a Stalinist provocation they went in and tried to take over the building by force this was the official police the workers resisted war went out that this was happening and the whole of Barcelona erupted barricades again the working class neighbourhoods were taken over by the workers the factories were occupied barricades were erected all over the city and basically the workers were in power again but they were once again betrayed by the leaders the leaders of the CMT advocated moderation this happened on Monday Monday the 4th of May by Tuesday the CMT leaders said okay, the issues now been sorted we've talked to the regional government and there's a pact of non-aggression and everyone should give up the weapons and dismantle the barricades go back to work the workers refused and they stayed on the barricades for 2, 3, 4 more days Federica Monseng had to come all the way from Valencia where now the republican government was seated to advocate to speak on the radio the workers in the barricades demanding that they should leave the barricades the workers still refused to leave the barricades in Tarragona the workers had also taken control of the situation and they warned the CMT leaders, the CMT national leaders that assault guards were being sent by the republican government from Valencia to Barcelona to crush the workers' rebellion the CMT leaders refused to report these to the workers in Barcelona because they were trying to convince them that there had been a peace deal and that they should go back to to work but particularly the worst role played in all this was by the poem because the poem was the party that had been advocating workers' power dictatorship of the proletariat and all these things what did they do on these crucial days the CMT workers were looking towards the poem for leadership as they were getting none from their own leaders and the poem had a reverential parliamentary approach to the whole thing they said no look, I mean we are a small organization the main responsibility in this is the CMT leaders if the CMT leaders don't give leadership we can't give leadership it's completely crazy position if they had given a clear lead in those days they could have taken over the leadership of that movement and taken power in Barcelona which would have had a big impact throughout the Republican camp at that time but they refused to do so and by Thursday they were also advocating leaving the barricades on the argument that successful uprising was not possible and the best way was to regroup with the forces impact there was some regroup with the forces impact because immediately after they work as a band of the barricades the poem was illegalized the Executive Committee of 40 members were all arrested Nin was taken from Barcelona and shot at the secret Stalinist prison in Madrid the papers were closed, the party was banned and this was the result of the wrong policies of those days what's in here is a very interesting leaflet by an organization that was created in the late 1936 within the anarchist movement and this was a number of anarchist activists who basically were reacting against the betrayal of their leaders and they advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat that the workers should take power so they basically broke with anarchist conception and they advocated the formation as it says here of a revolutionary junta the summary execution of all those found guilty the disarming of all armed forces the socialization of the economy the dissolution of political parties which have acted against the interest of the working class remain on the streets, revolution above all and they also says we greet our comrades from the poem which have fought with us in the streets long-lived social revolution down with counter-revolution these were the positions that were being advocated by the left wing of the CNT on those days unfortunately the friends of the Routy as they call themselves arrived on the scene too late to play an effective role but on those days if there had been a joint work on the part of the poem leaders the friends of the Routy the elements within the CNT in Barcelona they could have turned the situation around after 1937 the revolution was finished and as the revolution was finished the civil war was completely defeated it took another two years until meet 1939 but at that time it was just a purely military affair and the state of affairs that existed in the republican camp and the state of affairs that existed in the fascist camp from the point of view of the fascist organizations was exactly the same CNT was later expelled from the government the members were in jail the papers were closed down same as the poem so this farce of bourgeois democracy or the democratic republic that workers were supposed to be defending there was no way to be seen and this led to massive demoralization and finally the defeat of the Spanish republic in 1939 1939 when the fascist troops entered Barcelona most of the anti-fascist militants working class militants from the poem the CNT they were in jail and the republic handed them over with the jails locked to the fascist and similar things happened in the Basque country where the left the republican nationalists in the Basque country the bourgeois nationalists they basically reached a deal with Franco so the factories will be taken over intact and they prevented the workers who wanted to blow them up so they couldn't be used by the war effort of the fascists from doing so and so on it was a bloody defeat of the Spanish revolution which led to 40 years of Franco dictatorship hundreds of thousands of people forced into exile tens of thousands killed many of whom in shallow graves and common graves did not be found up until this day and none of this has been settled none of these scores have been settled in Spain and they remain very much alive in the historical memory of the people they are now coming back to the fort that's it the subject of the Spanish revolution in the 1930s is so vast that you can't cover it all even in one lidoff and there's many things that I didn't mention and some have been brought up by different comrades Rob spoke for instance of the question of Stalin the role of Stalinism which I only mentioned in passing and you can see it clearly I mean the policies of the Soviet Union Stalinist Soviet Union in the Spanish revolution even went through different phases first of all they were late in supporting the revolution any military aid of the Soviet Union arrived at least one month or month and a half after the start of the battle at the beginning there was no real help secondly when help arrived it was with strings attached strings attached means that through the conduit of the military help which was the only country providing any sort of military help to the republic the Stalinist basically determined all the policies of the republican government there was for instance an incident in which the poem was asked to join the national government the national republic the popular front government which they were not part of and they were discussing this and the Soviet ambassadors said if they enter there's not going to be any more help I mean that was quite clear then they also used the international brigades the international brigades were obviously very courageous and dedicated young working people from many different countries went to fight fascism in Spain they were mostly organized around these international brigades created by the Stalinist and the international brigades were also used for political purposes to show the strength of the Soviet Union and impose the political domination over all aspects of the Spanish revolution for instance the Stalinists were pushing for Largo Caballero to be removed from prime minister and he was eventually removed replaced by Negrin they had a whole network of secret prisons in Spain the GPU was very active it's interesting also that many of the Soviet many of the Stalinists who went and were active in the Spanish revolution as soon as they were recalled back to Russia they were shot in the trials people like Antonov of Senko Orlov Krivitsky and other people like that some were shot, some defected Stalin was clearly very worried that anyone who had been in Spain living side by side with the real revolution taking place could have been infected and bring this virus back back home but the whole policy was determined by the interest of smashing the revolution but the reason for smashing the revolution was two-fold one that Rob explained that Stalin was worried that the revolution in Spain was producing a revolutionary renewal amongst the workers in Russia and that this could threaten the bureaucracy but there was another reason and that is that at that time the foreign policy of the Soviet Union of Stalin was one of reaching a deal with the democratic powers England and France and obviously the democratic powers will not have been the democratic bourgeois France and Britain will not have been very happy with the revolution in Spain and this is the main reason why the Republic never considered autonomy or independence for Morocco which as Alan explained will have dealt a severe blow to the Franco forces and the reason was this because obviously the other colonial power in Morocco was France and France and immediately if there had been any sort of autonomy or independence in Japan is Morocco the French Morocco will have risen up as well and the democratic republic ruled by the people of France will have not been very happy with that but by the end of the war in 1938 even Stalin realized that his alliance with the democratic powers was not going to work out the democratic powers were not really interested in fascism and his whole policy shifted towards reaching a deal with Germany and in order to reach a deal with Germany he had to put an end to the Spanish Civil War so by 1938 the whole thrust of the Stalinist policy in Spain was to finish the war and there were a whole number of incidents in which Communist Party supported people try to establish a new junta to reach a deal with Franco and end the war and Franco's terms was a really treacherous set of movements at that time the international brigades were withdrawn in January 1938 I think it was and the whole situation came to an end on those basis that is the policy as Trosti explained the policy of socialism in one country and the defense of the Soviet Union in one country the foreign policy of the Soviet Union took precedence over the genuine interest of world revolution as we can see clearly there is also the question of the Spanish so called transition to democracy in it the Stalinist Communist Party led by Carrillo who had been the leader of the socialist youth in the 1930s and became a Stalinist they were completely treacherous because it was based on first of all the regime was about to fall because of the revolutionary movement of the masses there were regional general strikes all out general strikes and so on revolutionary ferment the workers in the millions were joining trade unions and left wing political parties and the regime was about to collapse and basically what the so called democratic transition started off as an agreement between the regime the remains of the regime and the workers leaders so that there will be a transition to a bourgeois democracy in which the main pillars of the old regime will not be touched this was based on impunity for the crimes of the dictatorship which still remains to this day there are people who were torturers and ministers in the Franco dictatorship who then became democratic politicians leading democratic politicians and so on they are still active today some of them dying out obviously but the role of the monarchy the monarchy in Spain had been overthrown by the republic in 1931 and only restored by the Franco dictatorship so the king we have now in Spain or rather he is the son of the king who was put in by Franco who took an oath of loyalty to the principles of the Franco movement the role of the church which was maintained the church which blessed the Franco uprising and sided with the Franco troops in the civil war maintained a privileged position in bourgeois democracy for instance there is a state funding for catholic schools there's catholic priests teaching religion in the state education system the church is funded to this day by the state and so on this is no real separation the question of the flag that Ben mentioned the Spanish flag that we have now is the flag of the Franco dictatorship the flag that the workers organizations had adopted was the republican flag of the 1930s and all these betrayals the betrayal of the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities and so on produced this so called democratic transition which was basically the betrayal of the second Spanish revolution and this is now being put into question people becoming active in politics now the main ideas that we must do away with the 1978 regime 1978 being the year in which the new constitution was passed and this is what is being questioned today on the question and as Alan says this is a life issue today for instance not so long ago one year ago I think 2014 there was a big gathering in Tarragona in which the church paid homage to the beatification I think is that how you call it the becoming is the first step to what we are saying so the beatification of the martyrs of the church under the republic Franco supporting priests who were killed or died in different circumstances they were being paid homage and made into saints or they will be made into saints and the ceremony was presided thousands of people there the ceremony was presided by the media of the Spanish woman the minister of justice the president of the Spanish parliament and the president of the Catalan woman supposed to be so anti-Spanish and pro-independence he was also there because basically defends the same kind of interest and this is something that is still an issue in Spain there has been a question about the Catalan independence and this is the subject of another discussion we could talk a lot about that but basically you have a situation which is not dissimilar to what Trotsky described in the 1930s on the one hand the leaders of this movement i.e. the Catalan president Artur Mas is cynically using the nationalist sentiment of the Catalan people for his own political purposes he is a Catalan president who's made a deal with the Spanish government to implement policy of repression against the social movements privatization, cuts, austerity and everything there is no fundamental political difference between the two of them only one defends the Spanish flag the other one defends the defense in inverted comments the Catalan flag but at the same time there is behind this there is a genuine feeling of national oppression there is a genuine feeling of people in Catalonia they don't want to be part of this reactionary regime that exists in Spain and in fact the pro-independence movement has two separate wings the more bourgeois respectable wing around Artur Mas and then there is another organization the COOP the popular unity candidature which is basically saying that they want independence in order to break with the regime in order to create a Catalan republic and they declare themselves anti-capitalist anti-austerity and so on so obviously there are two wings this movement the position of Marxist is to defend the right of self-determination up to and including separation if the Catalan people so wish and this would be a major break in the whole of the 1978 regime because the unity of Spain guaranteed by the armed forces which is something that comes from the Franco regime is also part of the betrayals of the Spanish Revolution in the 1970s my last point is this there is a bibliography here I would recommend the Congress to read all of these books not necessarily in this order but there is another short pamphlet which I think summarizes the whole of the Spanish Revolution that was written by Trotsky and it contains many lessons for today and it's called the class, the party and the leadership and he wrote it in I think 1939 in response to a French group sect that argued that the Spanish workers had been defeated because their level of consciousness was not high enough to create a leadership that would have brought them to victory and Trotsky basically says this is the opposite of the truth at every single juncture of the Spanish Revolution the workers went in a direction that was almost every single time opposite to the direction of the leadership as we've seen in the Asturias commune the anarchists creating workers militias and so on the leaders of the socialist youth moving to revolutionary Marxist conclusions at every single stage the workers attempted to break the treacherous policies of the leaders and Trotsky draws the main conclusion is that in the course of a revolution it is extremely difficult for the workers to improvise a new leadership and the difference between Spain and Russia is precisely Russia 17 is precisely that in Russia there was a leadership that had been prepared not in the heat of events but beforehand over decades of patient work in the factories in the working class developing the theory and so on and having gained certain footholds in the movement so that when events broke out in Russia they could in a short space of time take over the majority of the working class and this is basically and lead it to victory this is basically what we are engaged in now assembling the first skaters building ourselves theoretically turning towards the workers movement preparing for when revolutionary events inevitably will break out in this country and others so that we can intervene in a decisive manner and lead the working class to victory which is the best homage we can pay to the previous generations who paid with their lives for the betrayal of the leadership in this case of the Spanish Revolution