By George Volkov (edited by Leon J Williams)
“It was the first time that I had 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 flags of the anarchists, every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of revolutionary parties”
“every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black, waiters and shop keepers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal”
George Orwell- homage to Catalonia
I ask you dear reader, does this sound like the big and evil socialism of the soviet union?
No
During the Spanish civil war, the working class had power in the republican areas. Factories were ran by the workers, not the bosses. This did not decrease production, no. The workers didn’t have the bosses on their backs, no, they had an ideology, they produced for the people of the Spanish republic. This in fact, increased production.
Where collectivisation had been implemented industrial productivity almost doubled and agricultural yields being 30-50% higher.
The shops were not ran for profit. Then why did the people run them? For the common good, for the people that did the same for them; for those who made their clothes, their shoes. Anarchists set up exchange shops, where you bartered for commodities.
Thousands of people joined to fight the Fascists and defend democracy! The international brigades attracted people from all over the globe.
Some of the people that fought and reported in the Spanish civil war:
Martha Gellhorn- future wife of Ernst Hemmingway.
Ernst Hemmingway- wrote “for whom the bell tolls”
George Orwell- 1984, animal farm, homage to Catalonia.
Of course, as with all socialist revolutions under the Stalinist 3rd international. It was betrayed by Stalin’s gangsters and agents who were more interested in finding Trotskyists than killing fascists.
Non-Stalinist militias were denied the good, modern weapons and were arrested and killed.
The POUM militia (partido obrero de unificado marxista- workers party of Marxist unification) which Orwell fought with, had its leaders arrested and killed for daring to oppose Stalin. Andres Nin, Trotsky’s former secretary in France, was arrested and shot by Stalin’s secret police.
The capitalist west set up a non-intervention committee, attempting to ignore the rise of fascism, content to let the barbarians kill and overthrow democracy.
Mexico and the USSR sent aid to the republic, whilst Mussolini and Hitler sent aid to Franco and the nationalists.
As I said before, what you saw in the USSR, that horrible police state, with food queues and repression, was not socialism. Stalin and his bureaucratic thugs used the word socialism to retain power, and attempt to fool the masses. Those who saw through the illusion were lost in the tundras of Siberia.
The description at the start of the text is socialism in action, where the power is given to the majority!
The west refused to fight the fascists and and paid for it in 1938, when Hitler began his conquest of Europe, taking the Sars, Rhineland and Czechoslovakia. We can not let this cancer of nationalism and these right wing extremists take power, or we face a bleak future.
Keep up the good fight comrades. The fascist EDL and BNP in the UK, the tea party and Nazis in the US; these racists shall not take power whilst we remain.
¡No Pasaran! They shall not pass!
ACA The Underground 