Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Spanish Civil War

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jul 28, 2018 John from Working Class History joins Brett to discuss the Spanish Civil War! This is a long-anticipated episode on a deeply important and relevant historical event. We spent a LOT of time editing and producing this episode, so we hope you find it informative as well as genuinely moving.  Here is the reading guide from WCH on the Spanish Civil War: https://libcom.org/library/spanish-civil-war-1936-39-reading-guide   Working Class History website is here: https://workingclasshistory.com ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

When I see the animals and the dead people in the picture, I remember that night when I went along the road to Gernika, after we left the air-ed shelters. It was full of dead animals, and people covered in sacks. Dead. I have always been filled with emotion to see that woman burning on. that woman burning on the balcony with her arms outstretched. I think she could be my grandmother.

Picasso's painting, Gernica. For two survivors, the town's bombing in the Spanish Civil War has a personal memory, but for nearly 50 years it has echoed in the conscience of the world. Spain, in the 1930s, was in many ways still struggling out of the 19th century, but it found itself the arena and battlefield for ideologies of the 20th. Men and women from all over the world fought for dreams of democracy, or communism, or fascism. Those ideas were later given a bitter, new meaning by the hindsight of global conflict and the Cold War. Revolution.

Revolution! Revolution! Revolution! Revolutionary left radio now. Oppose the system any way you know how. Unite the left against the capitalist lies and liberate the proletariat's mind. Fight for all the working class. Five for equality. Fight against the right free. Fascist ideology Tune it in and turn it up loud

Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Hello everyone and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea and today we have on John from working class history to talk about the Spanish Civil War. This is an episode that people have really wanted for a long time and I think this is a particularly relevant historical episode to what we're facing today all over the world

with the rise of fascism and capitalism and crisis, et cetera. So I'm really excited for this episode. John, would you like to introduce yourself and maybe introduce working class history for anybody that doesn't know what that is? Hi, yeah. Well, I'm John, and I help run the working class history project, which is basically an online project

with the aim of researching and promoting working class radical in people's history. I've been a big fan of working class history for you, Years. Why did you and your comrades start working class history? And what was the goal of it? Thanks very much. Yeah, well, a couple of main reasons. Primarily, you know, we think that solidarity, working people, fighting together collectively to improve our lot is like the most important thing in the world, essentially. And we are big people's history nerds. So we think that learning about past struggles is important because we need to learn lessons from them to guide us organizing in the

present and yeah we just thought we started with a social media project thinking we'll try and do something that's kind of viral and to appeal to people and as a way of spreading and popularizing kind of people's history and I guess finally we wanted to be an example of the interrelatedness of different struggles so say how struggles against racism feminist struggles anti-clonial movements that sort of thing and class struggle all inherently related so yeah yeah that's wonderful and I think in a lot of ways your project and our project here share a lot of the same goals. We have a focus on history and we both kind of share this idea that we want to get this historical understanding out, not only because it's fascinating in its own right, but because we need desperately to learn

from our comrades that came before us and fought this struggle, dedicated their lives to it. And so we definitely have a lot of camaraderie between our projects and I love it. Let's go ahead and just get into it because this is a huge topic and we have a lot of ground to cover. So I think we should just dive in. I think the best way to start all of these historical episodes is to talk about the conditions leading up to the conflict. So what was going on in Spain in the early to mid-30s leading up to the Civil War?

Well, yeah, as you say, a very complex sort of set of events. So I'll try and be brief as possible. So basically Spain, that kind of time, early 20th century, it was economically pretty backwards. It was a largely peasant economy, although Barcelona and Catalonia was the center of industry in the country. What made Spain unique in Europe at that point was the influence of anarchism in the working class. So anarchism came to Spain in the 1860s, brought by a guy called Finnelli from the first international,

so the big socialist international with Karl Marx and Bakunin and people. And they set up a branch in Spain, which grew to be the biggest section, of the international with 50,000 members. In Spain, working-class people and peasants really, you know, the idea of anarchism really kind of grabbed them. And lots of people just became imbued with, as they called it, the idea. And they would go out and they'd proletize it all over the place. And, you know, people were quite fanatical about it.

You know, it spread widely in all areas of life. So a guy called Francisco Ferrer, who is a Spanish anarchist, set up this thing called the modern school, which was, it was an idea of secular modern education, particularly for the children of working people. They set up schools for working class kids and people in the countryside. And the CNT, the National Confederation of Labor, was set up as an anarchist trade union in 1910. And all over the country, there were lots of struggles going on. So there were struggles in the countryside, land struggles, and there were, you know, fights and workplaces going on. Now, were very violently repressed by authorities, particularly the civil guards who were a kind of

armed police unit. So peasants on the land would maybe take over some land, but then civil guards would come in and kill them, or workers would go on strike, and they would be locked up or killed by civil guards. There were also a number of very big strikes going on, and employers used extremely violent methods to break the strikes and fight the CNT in particular. So they would hire gunmen to kill union militants. And then the CNT sort of responded by setting up its own units of gunmen who would then, you know, kill assassins and, you know, rob banks and that sort of thing. So it was quite a violent period in Spanish history.

Much of it was marked by dictatorship. So in 1923, there was a coup by right-wing Prima de Rivera who set up a dictatorship, you know, outlawed the CNT and brutally tried to repress any kind of struggles. And then a bit later in 1931, the second Spanish Republic was declared. And so under the Republic, the government, it was a kind of democratic government. So they took a less hardline approach on peasants and workers. they implemented minor kind of land reform and that sort of thing. But peasants and workers used this kind of democratic space to step up their demands. So there were uprisings all over the country, even little ones where, you know, in a small town,

people would raise a red and black flag, you know, take over all the land and businesses and then declare libertarian communism in a little town. Then, you know, the police or an army would have to come in and break it up, sometimes, kill, you know, kill everyone. And there was a major uprising in Asturias of minors who were organized in the Socialist UGT Union and the Anika CNT Union. That was a big uprising in 1934,

and that was then heavily repressed by the Republic. Socrates Gomez was a member of the socialist youth. We felt there had been a serious regrettable, very grave, in the politics Spanish. out there'd been a serious regression in Spanish politics, and we were well aware that even without a civil war, fascism could come to power in Spain, perhaps camouflage behind politicians such as Hill Robles. And this is what led us to strike.

You must realize that this wasn't just another strike, for things like wages or better working conditions. This was a revolutionary strike. and our aim was to overthrow the government and take power. The Socialists summon the workers to rise against the elected government, but the insurrection was easily defeated everywhere, except in the northern mining district of Asturias. There are the whole left for once united in rebellion.

Socialists and anarchists, communists and Trotskyists seized control and declared the revolution. The coal miners shut down their pits and marched out eagerly to fight for red Asturias. We felt this tremendous excitement. We had dynamite ready to blow everything up, and everybody was behind us. The whole village was ready to go.

Even the kids, men, women, children, everybody. It was open war against the Madrid government. The miners drove back local army units and murdered some of their political enemies. But the government now sent Moroccan troops and the Spanish foreign legion into the battle. A fortnight after it had begun, the austerious rising had been broken. another thing in the background was in in 1936 there was another election where the left wing essentially won the election in 1936 and the popular front of left parties won the election and at that time Spain was still had a colonial empire, it still owned Morocco, but the republic did not give up Morocco and it kept it in the hopes of well the justification given that they didn't want to upset the French because Morocco was spit between Spanish Morocco and French Morocco and they didn't want to upset their French allies by giving up their half, which would then spur on

pro-independence movements in French Morocco. And that proved to be a massive error that we'll get onto that later. That was a big question because we're talking centuries of history. You have peasants first landlords, you have workers versus bosses, you have a history of monarchism and colonialism. and the sort of conservatism that those things give rise to. You have the Catholic Church, which is a huge sort of, for the most part, reactionary force in Spanish society. And then as you said, in 1936, we see the left-win elections. And you mentioned the popular front.

And I was wondering if you could just inform people on what the popular front was and all of the groups that were included in that popular front that won in 1936. So the popular front was an left-wing electoral coalition, which included the major groups that we're going to refer to later in the episode. So there was the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, generally referred to as a socialist party, largely a social democratic party, but it did have a kind of revolutionary faction, which became more so as the war continued. And that party was linked to the UGT Union.

Then there was the Communist Party, the PCE, which was the official Communist Party linked to the communist international. So essentially, you know, run from Moscow. The PCE was active in all of Spain apart from Catalonia, where in Catalonia, it was called the PSUC, which is a kind of communist Catalan nationalist party. And then there was the group called the PUM, which was essentially a non-Salinist Marxist party that was quite small. And then there were some left-wing, some left-wing Republican groups and Catalan nationalists in the Popular Front. Also kind of related to the Popular Front was the CNT, the Anarchist Trade Union, which was the largest union at that time, which typically always advocated abstention in elections.

But in this election, they did not advocate abstention as an organization. and kind of lots of individuals and groups within it did, but the main part of the Union dropped their advocacy of abstention because the Popular Front had said they would release all of the CNT prisoners, political prisoners. So those are the main kind of groups in the Popular Front. As the results came in, it became clear that the Popular Front had won the largest block of seats. The release of political prisoners began. Dolores Ibaruri, known as La Pascinaria,

had been elected as a communist MP for Asturias. so then I went to the prison the governor had run away but his deputy was there he said I haven't received any orders I replied I'm the MP for Asturias I was beginning to sound very grand I said please give me the keys the prisoners are coming out today

he finally said here they are so I ran along the corridors of the jail shouting comrades all out It was very moving. It was very moving. All Barcelona turned out for the return from prison of Luis Campanche, Catalonia's president. The working class parties refused to join the government.

The left Republicans were now tracked between the panic of conservative Spanish. and the excited hopes of the workers. Strikes and land seizures broke out as workers tried to win back what had been lost in the last two years. As the prisoners marched out into the fresh air, the Reich concluded that Heel Robles' parliamentary politics

had let them down. Conservative hopes now followed a new star, Jose Calvo Sotelo, but for some, the time for parliamentary compromise had already passed. Thomas Garikar Nongone was a young conservative officer. I was not a member of any political party, but we felt there was no way out.

As Hill Robles wrote later, peace was not possible. For me, this was only too true, and there's something else, perhaps too embarrassing to recall, but that one has to admit, at that time we couldn't stand each other. Divisions and tensions had reached such a point that even seeing a socialist, not to mention a communist, was the same as seeing the devil.

The so-called, I mean, they were called the Republican government, and under the Republican umbrella, I don't know if this falls in the popular front or is just popular front adjacent, but wasn't the Republicans mostly just sort of like liberals, progressive liberals? yeah with the in the socialist party um a lot and the left wing republican groups you could most of them you could have with that sort of label yes okay and then pome uh you said it was a non-stalinist marxist party is it fair to call it trotskyist or was it it would be better to call it a left communist party kind of broader than trotskyism yeah a lot of people refer to it as trotskyist

but it wasn't neither is it specifically left common because left communist has got a particular tradition in terms of like the Dutch and German kind of extra-parliamentary left. So, I mean, I'd just call it either a Marxist party or a non-Stalinist party or something like that. Okay, it's cool. So we see the popular front, the Republican government, one in 1936, runs the gamut from basically liberals all the way to communist and anarchist. Anarchist were hesitant to join electoral politics whatsoever, but because it promised

the release of their comrades. in prisons who were political prisoners from the more reactionary regime that came before it. They did sort of join forces with the broader popular front in support of that election. What were some major groups and individuals on the right-wing side during this time? On the other side, broadly they're referred to as the nationalists. Now, they included the most important group, the kind of amusingly named but not amusing group, Falange, who were the fascist party. of which Franco was a part. It also included the Cedar, who were right-wing Catholics, basically,

and broadly there were two rival groups of monarchists, and the Carlists and the Alphonsists. As the war went on, all of those groups merged into the flange, which then became the only legal party in Spain after the Civil War up until Franco's death. Yeah, and I think we're going to get into it a little bit later, but one of the advantages that they were able to do on the right that the left wasn't able to do was to cohere into one big party i.e. the nationalists and on the left there was to a larger extent more infighting which we'll get to in a bit so we have the the players we have the long history we have tumultuous times leading up to the 1936 election in 1936 on may day there was this huge showing of radicals all across the

spectrum taking to the streets it scared the hell out of the right but the right was also coalescing its forces, kind of in the lead-up to this conflict. But what was it that ultimately sparked the right-wing military coup that began the Civil War? Yeah, basically, the coup was an open secret. Everyone knew it was going to happen. You know, the, the CNT, sort of in its newspapers, you know, they were talking about the coup that was planned and preparing their response. You know, people did ask the Republic to arm the workers, but the Republic refused, you know, which is something similar governments have also done subsequently to their own to their own detriment.

So yeah, it was an open secret was going to happen. Essentially because the, you know, the riot believed that there was this Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy to turn Spain communist and also, you know, the struggles that were going on against employers and landowners, the Republic wasn't being brutal enough in repressing these struggles. So, you know, for the right and for the rich in Spain, something had to change. The specific thing which triggered the coup when it happened was a few events in mid-July. So on the 12th of July, socialist police officer, quite a rare, quite a rare animal. But essentially, the Republicans had set up a policing body called the assault guards

as a kind of rival to the hardline conservative civil guards. So an officer in the assault guard called Jose Castillo, he was assassinated by four phalanjists. The following day, on the 13th, a group of assault guards assassinated a right-wing opposition leader, Jose Calvo Sotelo. He'd been a minister in the prima de Rivera dictatorship before. So this assassination of this politician,

triggered the actual start of the coup. So Franco was flown, General Franco, who became leader of the nationalists, was flown from the Canary Islands to Morocco to take charge of the Army of Africa and launch the military rebellion. Right. So just to put some historical numbers on this, we are coming up on the 82nd year anniversary of the Civil War's beginning, because it was in July of 36.

and you mentioned the parallels of other, you know, governments that didn't arm the people when push was coming to shove. And we did an episode relatively recently on Chile and Allende and Pinochet. And that same sort of pattern played out where the left had the government. They were trying to go about it in a democratic way. The fascist right came together with the bourgeoisie, the landlords, etc. teamed up, staged a coup. There was like a refusal to arm the people because they were trying to

abide by democratic norms and that proved fatal both in Chile and as we'll see it ultimately proved fatal among many other variables here in Spain but as fighting broke out and this was in a lot of ways the first war the first conflict the first battle the real full on battle of world war two in it although world war two hadn't officially started yet this was sort of a prelogue to that so as the fighting broke out countries across the world took notice how did other countries get involved? Which countries took the side of the fascist and which countries backed up the left wing forces? The way that the Spanish Civil War is normally spoken about is, especially sort of in the media and things like that, is as a conflict between democracy and fascism, much the

way that World War II is promoted. So you would expect then that the democratic countries would have backed the Democratic Republic and that the fascist countries would back the fascists. And while the latter is true, the former most definitely is not. So when the conflict started, most countries, including the European democracies, signed a non-intervention agreement where they would basically be neutral in the conflict and blockade Spain, so not allow weapons or anything to get into Spain. things like the UK and France were part of that. Now, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany completely ignored this blockade and they supplied

planes, heavy weaponry, troops and the Portuguese dictatorship provided semi-official support and 20,000 volunteer troops to the nationalists, whereas on the other side, the democracies ignored the fact that the non-intervention agreement was completely ignored by the pro-fascist, you know, by the fascist countries and kept up the blockade on their side so effectively they starved the Republic of arms and were effectively backing the fascists.

I think things that's worth remembering at this time were in the British ruling class many people actively, you know, supported fascism as a bullock against communism. Even like the British Labour Party was split, the Catholic element in it supported the fascists and supported the blockade of space.

and a faction within the Labour Party that supported the Republic got expelled from the Labour Party, although later on in the conflict, some elements the Labour Party did voice, did start voicing some support for the Republic. France at that time was ruled by the Popular Front under Leon Blum, so this was an alliance of socialist and communist parties. So you would have thought that at least they would support the Republic. While they did sign the non-intervention agreement, covertly, they provided. provided a small number of aircraft to the Republic, along with some pilots and engineers, but it was very small support, and effectively they kept up the blockade. So the only country is to actively back the Republic were the USSR and Mexico.

Mexico provided like money and some small arms and ammunition. Later, their support was really important because they provided diplomatic and refugee support, so a lot of Spanish refugees ended up in Mexico. The Soviet Union provided substantial military equipment, not so much as aid, but they sold them. This aid was not exactly unconditional, and it was not without strings, so we'll go more into that later. But that's essentially the main elements of the international response. Absolutely, and I just want to kind of harp on the cowardice and the hypocrisy of the so-called Western democracies, including the U.S. who also took a non-interventionist stand,

when their big fear was, at least their stated big fear, most of them was that they didn't want to escalate tensions and create World War II. But the irony of it is that they did create World War II, and by not helping the left-wing forces of democracy in Spain, they actually lent Spain to the fascist who would later come back and bite them in the ass. So the cowardice of liberal democracies can't be overstated here.

It's really gross. I know France was kind of trying, but when England refused to help and wanted to stay neutral in the conflict, France more or less had to because they didn't want to be the only one being targeted by the fascist, etc. But the USSR, and we'll get into some of the nuances in that because the USSR wasn't exactly quick to give aid and they didn't stick around all the way to the very, very end. But when they did support the Spanish, you know, leftist forces, there wasn't. was a, for a brief moment, a real sense of love and international solidarity. And I remember watching a documentary, which we're going to play clips in throughout the show, of Soviet planes coming overhead. And the people anarchists, leftist, of all stripes, were kind of expecting these planes to be fascist planes. But when they realized that they were Soviet planes

and some of the Soviet planes were shooting down nationalist planes, there was this big uproar of the sort of solidarity all across the left for a beautiful brief moment. The world was very different in 1936. America was not the fulcrum of the world's foreign policy decisions, still in dogged isolation from Europe's affairs. Roosevelt ignored the Spanish conflict and allowed the Texas oil company to supply Franco with fuel. In London, the non-intervention powers examined allegations of Italian, German and Portuguese intervention. The committee was chaired by the British. British. No one wanted the charges to stick and they didn't.

Von Riventrop, the German ambassador later joked, a more appropriate name for the organization would have been the Intervention Committee. Nowhere was this intervention clearer than in a battle for Madrid. Until October, the skies were dominated by the rebels, reinforced by German and Italian planes. The Spanish Republic in Air Force was no match until Soviet planes arrived. Just before the Soviet aid arrived, I had seen a demonstration of women marching along the Grand Via, the principal street, Madrid,

shaking their fists at the German and Italian planes, and shouting, no pass around, they shall not pass. Two weeks later, there was another flight of planes over Madrid. This time they flow very low, and dropped no bombs. Everyone looking up from the streets suddenly saw that they were no longer Germans or Italians, they were Russian planes.

And the clang went up that ran right through the city. Son Neuestres, they're ours, they're ours. One day we were surprised to see some new machines in the sky and we saw these small ones with snub noses. They flew around at a tremendous speed and shot down a nationalist plane occasionally. people began to get excited, started shouting, long live Russia. They started to hug each other.

I've done some research on this, and there were corporations like Texaco and GM who supplied the fascist forces, Franco and his forces in the fight. They illegally shipped oil and money and aid over to the fascist side. So U.S. corporations, the international bourgeoisie, if you will, kind of came to the side of the forces of reaction, as we would expect. But on the other side, in addition to the USSR support, was the international brigades. So what were the international brigades? How did they get to Spain?

And how effective were they ultimately? The international brigades are one of the most kind of enduring, you know, one of the most enduring features of the conflict, especially in kind of popular imagination, outside Spain at least. The fight of Spanish workers did inspire people all over the world. and tens of thousands of men and women traveled to Spain to fight the fascists. So the official international brigades were set up by the Communist International and organized by the official Communist parties. And so lots of the volunteers, although not all of them, were from Communist parties of different countries, predominantly France.

In addition to them, lots of Jewish people from Anglophone countries and Eastern Europe came from the United States, over 3,000 Americans, including a good number of African-Americans and others like Japanese-American volunteers joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. People who volunteered who were opponents of Stalin joined other units like the militia of the Pum, like George Orwells, probably the most famous international volunteer

with the Pum, or they joined anarchist militias. Although the CNT in Spain actually told foreign anarchists not to come to Spain. They said instead, advocate for the Spanish workers, organise in your home countries and send us money and weapons. But, you know, some people did travel from abroad and volunteer in those militias. Speaking of international volunteers, while lots of people did fight for the Republic, some people did also travel to support the nationalists. Probably the biggest group of these were people from Ireland. So in Ireland, and public opinion, majority of public and clerical opinion, was very much pro-Franco.

And so from Ireland, while 320 men did volunteer with the international brigades, over 7,000 volunteered to fight for Franco. But what happened with them is actually quite amusing. They were led by a former IRA leader called Owen O'Duffy. So they were kind of very nationalist, anti-communists and defenders of Catholicism. but of the seven or thousand volunteers only 700 of them actually got to Spain where how useless they were led the writer Brendan Behan to joke that they were the only army in history to return with more men than they left with in their first deployment their first deployment they ended up getting into an hour-long battle with phalanjists their allies in the following month they like refused orders to attack a village and then um but the rest of the time they were too drunk and unruly to follow any orders, so they all got sent home shortly after.

But going back to the international brigades, in terms of the military effectiveness, it was a mixed bag. They played like an important role in a couple of battles. The participants were extremely politically committed and very brave, but they did have spectacularly high casualty rates, a third of all volunteers of all international volunteers were killed and nearly all the rest were wounded some studies show that only seven percent of international brigaders emerged unscathed wow yeah it's a pretty catastrophic you know casualty rates the military conflict went badly for the republic in general but international brigade volunteers did play a key role in one of the few outright victories of the republic and that was at guadalajara and this this was a particularly great result because Mussolini had insisted that Italian troops take a lead role in the assault on Guadalajara to demonstrate their superiority, and they were attacking a group that included a large number

of Italian anti-fascists, and the Italian anti-fascists and the Spanish Republicans won, and it ended up with hundreds of these Italian fascist troops surrendering to the Italian anti-fascists. At the beginning of the conflict, lots of people came. came and volunteered. As the conflict drew on, people had heard about the high casualty rate, so the number of volunteers dipped. Also, people started to desert. There were other issues like volunteers started being jailed in re-education camps or executed by Communist Party types for a variety of things, for example, them being accused of being Trotskyists, even though most of them weren't. And the Republic ended up disbanding the international regates in 1938,

primarily in the hope that it would end the blockade by the democracies on the republic. But, of course, that was unsuccessful. And the blockade didn't end. You know, it's worth pointing out, it's beautiful and it's tragic in the same, in the same sort of breath. On the fascist side, you have a highly organized, systematic military with other highly organized state-run militaries having their back. And with the exception of the USSR for the leftist forces in Spain, you just had regular people both on the ground in Spain themselves who weren't necessarily like well-trained military fighters,

but they were just regular workers standing up for themselves. And then you had regular workers from around the world, communists coming in and helping out the left-wing forces. So they were, they had disadvantages and those disadvantages were abundant. But just the solidarity to put nation aside and to focus on your class comrades, I think is beautiful. And your story about Italian anti-fascist turning their guns on other Italians, you know, the fascist Italians and fighting in the name of liberation and not in the name of nationalism is just a beautiful sort of proletarian internationalism that shouldn't be forgotten. And connecting up other historical events, talking about the Irish, this was 20 years after the Easter Rising. where the Irish leftist had their own attempt to try to liberate themselves and take over

their own lives. And that was crushed by the forces of reaction. And here again, you have the forces of reaction crushing a proletarian movement. But this wasn't just a military conflict for members of the left. This was also a social revolution in which workers and peasants took over land and industry in certain areas to run them along socialist lines. What did this revolutionary activity look like and what were some of its accomplishments? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, think this is the most important aspect of the Spanish Civil War, which is often forgotten, because, yeah, it wasn't a fight between democracy and fascism. It was a real genuine social revolution, perhaps, you know, the deepest social revolution, but certainly, you know, one of the

most significant. In the areas where workers managed to crush the military rising, workers set about taking over workplaces and peasants took over the land. So, Catalonia, you know, so we talked at industry first. Catalonia was the center of industry, and it was the main urban strongholder of the CNT. So there, the CNT collectivized all industry. In the Levant, 70% of industry was collectivized. In a roundabout, in Castile, a good part of industry was socialized. And in the Republican zone, in general, over half of all land,

was collectivised and expropriated by peasants. As the chaos subsided, this new revolutionary society began to function. Much of the Catalan economy was now being run by the workers themselves. In Barcelona, trams and cinemas, factories, department stores and even greyhound tracks were run by their own employees. The trade unions sought a food supplies. Union Norris drove out to the villages with goods to exchange for food. Barta, not purchasing, kept Barcelona fed for the first weeks of the Civil War. In some places, money itself, seen by anarchists as inherently evil, was abolished.

Shopping was done with vouchers, issued by local committees. committees. What are these vouchers represent? Well, they had to represent hours of production, the hours spent by a carpenter building a piece of furniture, or the hours spent by a peasant harvesting, working on the fields.

Everything was calculated in hours of production. The peasants liked it because it meant making them equal to the industrial workers, making all work equal. Vouchers bought bread at the bakers. But they now also bought lunch to the Barcelona Ritz. The big hotels have been turned into hospitals. Or into canteen serving cheap meals to militiamen and working-class families.

As this anarchist newsre proclaimed. are the food for what's going to the hotel to saviour your appetite. The amplers that once occupied maquillades and frivolous damisela, grand financiers, captains of industry, aristocrats, ociosos, and adventurers international of allaya, now are barrotated of women and women humildes that are still the rhythm of the society that is creating. Barcelona and comes

That is his force and his virtue. Now that the now that the factories and workplaces were in the hands of the workers, anarchist union leaders like Giuseppe Costa

fought to start production again. We told the workers to get back to the factory and wait for our instructions. Immediately we called all the factory owners and executives to a meeting at the town hall. We told them, well gentlemen, something big has happened here. I don't know what's going to happen, but the factories have to continue functioning.

We ask you to be at work again tomorrow at whatever hour you're supposed to start, 5 o'clock or 8 o'clock. Agreed? Agreed. But we have to warn you. Labor relations will be very different from now on. The C&T, the anarchist trade union, have been taken by surprise when the revolution began.

It was anarchist militants who rallied the workers to take over their industries. Where the old bosses remained, they had to take orders from these workers' committees. Nearly 2,000 enterprises were collectivised in Catalonia. The greatest experiment in workers' self-management Western Europe has ever seen. The workers now set about improving their working conditions, free medical care, and adequate pensions were introduced. So, like, overall, it's estimated that 7 to 8 million people out of Spain's 24 million population

were directly or indirectly involved in this revolution experience. So George Orwell was in Barcelona at this time, and he kind of, in his book, Homage to Catalonia, he vividly describes how the city was transformed, and he says that human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. And he describes how, like, in barber's shops, and tipping was abolished. And, you know, and in the shops there were anarchist notices, solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.

So, in industries, ownership by shareholders and bosses or whatever was abolished, obviously, because, you know, they were expropriated. And managers, technicians, et cetera, was replaced by workers' self-management. The way it worked, there was kind of bottom-up delegate structure for workers' control. The main unit of decision-making in an enterprise was a workers' assembly. So, you know, an assembly of all the workers in an enterprise. So these workers then elected delegates to management committees who would oversee day-to-day running a factory. And then these elected committees were charged with carrying out the mandate that the assemblies gave them. So, you know, the assemblies would give them a mandate to do a certain thing,

which then the management committees had to do and then report back. So they were then accountable to the assembly of the workers. It's not like they were elected and then had the power over the workers. Then if they didn't do what they were mandated to do, then the workers' assembly would just get rid of them and elect someone else. Then in each industry, they would gather delegates from each branch of work in that industry. So in one city, in the textile industry, they considered there were five branches of work. There was like weaving, threadmaking, knitting, hosing, and carding.

Workers in each branch elected a delegate who formed a committee for industry-wide administrative issues. So that was broadly how the industries worked in terms of workers' control. The collectivized industries functioned a lot better than the previously competing private industries, public transport was massively improved in Catalonia, so with low affairs, almost equal pay for employees. In Catalonia, the health service was socialised, and this improved healthcare for working class people significantly. Doctors, instead of, you know, being placed in areas where there were lots of rich people, were placed in areas according to need. And within the first year of the revolution, there'd been six new hospitals built in Barcelona. So in terms of other, you know,

things like the electricity production was collectivized. And, you know, so workers reorganized how electricity was produced. So they shut loads of small inefficient power stations, which made a profit under capitalism, but they weren't a good use of labor power, essentially. So by closing those, they freed up time for workers to increase overall electricity generation. And the textile industry saw similar changes. While this is all going on, the civil war is still raging, and there was scarcity of goods in lots of areas. So, while especially the goal of the CNT, in particular, was to establish libertarian communism, but they weren't able to do that overnight.

But in areas of the countryside is where the revolution was deepest. So collectivization in the countryside, it wasn't the sort of collectivization that took place in, say, China or the Soviet Union. which was organized by the state on a kind of enforced basis. In Spain, peasants came together. They expropriated land, and they voluntarily collectivized it. So any kind of small landowners or peasants who didn't want to take part in the collective, they were given a proportionate section of land they could farm by themselves. The only rule being they couldn't hire wage laborers.

So places like, well, in Aragon, three quarters of the land was collectivized by the CNT. And so as an example of how it worked, the collectives there, they pulled all of their resources. They shared tools, they shared all the raw materials, seeds they distributed according to the needs of different areas. And across the areas a whole, they did things like they set up a number of experimental farms to find what were the best ways of improving yields in different things. So depending on the geographical area, systems which were set up by local collectives were more, or less close to libertarian communism. So in a lot of places, money was abolished. And instead of money, there was a family ration book.

And in some areas where there was not a scarcity of certain goods, those goods were just made completely free. So people could take what they wanted from collective warehouses. And goods that were scarce were distributed by a ration. So in the collectivized areas, output increased massively. the collectors produce 50% more per unit of area than the individualist farmers. So over time, a lot of individualists ended up joining the collectives and living standards in the countryside increased massively.

Estimates are between 50 to 100% increase in the sort of standard of living in those areas where people were incredibly poor. Unfortunately, in Aragon, collectivization suffered a significant setback when the collectors were attacked by the Communist Party Armed Forces in August 1937, but that's something we can go into later. On the last bit that needs mention in terms of the revolution is about the lives of women in Spain. Spain was a deeply Catholic and patriarchal society where women were very much sort of second-class citizens. In the revolution, women started to transform their lives.

shortly before the war started, women in the C&T set up a group called Moheris Libres, free women, which in its words aimed to end the triple enslavement of women to illiteracy, to capital, and to men. So when the war started, a lot of women took part in the street fighting and then volunteered for the front, although quite shamefully women were later banned from the militias by government order again so as to avoid scaring off support from the democratic allies which never came so after that lots of former women fighters instead worked in munitions factories or in field hospitals during the the revolutionary period there was a big push from the unions to unionize

women workers and particularly in the CNT so there were a number of improvements over that period such as the abolition of peace work because lots of women workers then had peace work you know had piecework so they were paid per item that they sowed rather than an hourly rate or something like that. It's abolition of peacework, better wages and short hours, and some childcare was provided by the collectives. And things like construction workers' collectives built some recreational areas for kids and converted churches into useful things like daycare and schools for work as children. The Moheras Libres also helps set up

childcare facilities and factories and set up training programs to prepare women for work that are traditionally been reserved for men, specifically stuff like being a mechanic, driving trams, that sort of thing. You know, there were these sort of improvements, but, you know, that's not to say

that gender equality was achieved because it wasn't. You know, there was still wage differentials between men and women. Pretty much everywhere, childcare and housework responsibilities were seen. as the responsibility of women.

And even, you know, the Moheras Libres didn't address that issue, didn't question, you know, the fact that childcare and that was women's work. And that did really restrict women's participation in the collectives. And because the way that decisions were made, they were using anarchist syndicalist method, you know, the CNT was an anarchist syndicalist organization that considered wage workers, you know, workers as, you know, as the main. thing, women who weren't wage workers who weren't working in industry then couldn't really participate in the decision making either. You know, other things that happened with the

Moheras Libres, you know, set up education programs to teach women and girls about sexuality, about women's bodies, about sexual pleasure and contraception and stuff like that, which was, you know, a big step forwards in that kind of Catholic, you know, very traditional society. Yeah. All these revolutionary attempts from the most anarchist, to the most Marxist Leninist or Maoist. They're all experiments. They're all attempts to build a better world, but they are also deeply flawed in their own unique ways.

And realizing the flaws as well as the achievements is essential. We can't block out the flaws or refuse to look at them. We have to learn from them and do better the next time. But I absolutely think, especially when you're talking about the CNTFAI and the anarchist in Catalonia, I think you can draw a straight line. I mean, a linear line from the Paris commune through the, the anarchist Catalonians to Rojava and Chiapas today. I think it's very much a tradition that follows

that pattern, very much the same sort of horizontal organizing methods and a sort of anarchist or libertarian communist outlook. And so when you see this history, you can see that there's been progression, I mean, even just on the women's front, there's been wonderful progression from the Paris commune through Catalonia up into Rojava and Chiapas today where women are much more empowered than they were in previous attempts. So it's just worth considering, worth thinking about

and worth learning from. But we've hinted at this throughout this conversation about the left wing infighting and the sort of lack of infighting on the fascist right. So during the war there was certainly lots of this infighting on the left and even murder especially between communists, loyal

to the Soviet Union and various left opposition Marxist and anarchists. this is still a sore spot for so many people on the left today it still gets brought up in debates about marxism versus anarchism so can you talk about this infighting why it happened who was to blame and what its effects were on the left in their fight against franco ultimately yeah yeah i mean you're right it is still it is the sore point uh today and i know like whenever our page posts about things related to this you know people do get upset people do get upset about it But yeah, it was a real tragedy in the conflict.

So in the Republican zone, there was basically a civil war within the civil war. So I think how it sort of came about was the Communist Party in Spain. Going back a little bit, when the war started, the Communist Party in Spain was tiny. You know, really small, a couple of thousand people. You know, nothing compared to, say, the CNT, which was a million, one and a half million strong. or the FAA, which was the Anacus Federation, which was within the CNT, which was tens of thousands. The Pum also had tens of thousands, and the Socialist Party had tens or hundreds of thousands of members. But because Russia was the only country which was supplying proper weaponry to the Republic,

that gave the very small number of Communist Party members in Spain, ability to essentially gain control over the republic, you know, because ultimately, if you're a government, your power relies on your control of weapons, you know, arms, institutions of violence, you know, otherwise you're not really a government. Also, Russia sent NKVD agents, so secret police agents to Spain to work as advisors. But obviously, these were people who were very skilled at, you could call it, manipulate. and that sort of thing. So the Communist Party maneuvered itself

through their control of Russian arms into a position of power within the Republic. So they became the most powerful organization within the Republic. And they were essentially beholden to Russian foreign policy. And so to understand what happened, you've got to understand Russian foreign policy

at that time. So at that time, the Comintern, the Communist International, supported a strategy of pursuing popular front, So that was collaboration with socialist and liberal and social democratic parties like in France. And they also, they didn't want to annoy the European democracies. So they didn't want a revolution in Spain. Whereas, you know, on the other side, the anarchists and the Pum, they not only wanted a revolution,

but workers and peasants had created one regardless. And they saw that the revolution and the fight against fascism as being the same thing. Whereas what the Communist Party said was that the fight against fascism had to come first. So unfortunately, this wasn't really a thing where people could have like a friendly disagreement and agree to disagree. So basically what the what the Communist Party would do is they would only give Russian weapons to their loyal units. And units that were either anarchist or Pum that weren't loyal to the agenda were starved of weaponry, even if they were tactically better placed. So through sort of doing this,

they were also pushing for for militarization of the militias. So, you know, like you said earlier, the militias, these were rag-tag armies of, you know, barbers and railway workers and healthcare workers and stuff like that. You know, they were not, for the most part, trained military officers. And, you know, you can see if you look at video of them, they weren't wearing uniforms. They were wearing their workmen's outfits.

But the, you know, the Communist Party wanted to turn them into a regular discipline army with uniforms and, you know, the militias had elected officers. You know, they didn't have military discipline. So the Communist Party wanted to change that because the Republican Army wasn't doing great. And they thought that they may have, you know, genuinely believed that installing proper military discipline would help. But unfortunately, it didn't. But so, yeah, eventually they succeeded and got the militias dissolved and turned into regular military units. A bit, you know, further on, and the Communist Party decided they wanted to consolidate their hold over the Republic. So they needed to get rid of the PUM, which was, you know, part of this Popular Front government.

One of the two Communist Party government ministers at the time, Jesus Hernandez, he in his memoirs kind of explained what they did to get rid of the Pum. and it's quite telling, you know, story. He basically was sitting down and these Russian NKBD agents said, basically they're going to say the story that the PUM were Trotskyists. And at that time, the general claim, which official Communist Party has made, was they said that they talked about Trotsky fascists. In Spain, they kind of adjusted that slightly and often called it like Trotsky anarchist fascists. And basically, they said that Trotskyists were,

fascist plot so that they were working with with like Hitler and Franco and all that to kind of destroy the republic and Hernandez even though you know obviously he's he's a CP government minister but he says these agents that's ridiculous you know it might work in Russia but Spanish people are never going to believe that because you know they know they've been fighting with you know people in the Pum and you know it's been risking their lives and and dying, sort of fighting the fascists. But the NKBD, people are like, you know, we're going to go through with it anyway. So they arrested a bunch of PUM members and put some fake evidence on them.

So they got this letter which they signed Andrew Ninn, who was the leader of the PUM. And, you know, they wrote it in Invisible Inc, a letter from NIN to Franco. And then they said, oh, look, you know, Nin is working with, with Franco. So they then outlawed the poom, arrested loads of his members, including Nin. They then tortured him for days to try and get him to confess to this fascist plot, basically ripped the skin off his face, you know, trying to get him to confess. And he wouldn't. So then they just shot him. So that was, that was the poom gone. And the next step they took to consolidate their hold over the Republic was a crucial building in Barcelona was the telephone

exchange. This was particularly crucial back then because all phone calls had to go through a telephone exchange. You know, you couldn't communicate without, you know, so someone had to call the exchange and then the people who worked there would, I'm sure people have seen in like old movies or whatever, you plug out the cables from one thing and you plug them in the other and you can listen to the whole conversation, you know, the people who work there. So that building, most of the people who worked there were anarchists in the CNT. So as soon as a revolution happened, the CNT took the telephone exchange. But that meant that Catalonia couldn't be governed without the CNT knowing everything that was going on.

So that had to be stopped. So they basically besieged the telephone exchange. then the CNT and workers in Barcelona then threw up barricades across the city to defend the telephone exchange and to defend the revolution in Barcelona from this basically power grab by the Communist Party.

So there were a few days of fighting which are referred to now as the May days in 1937. But eventually the leadership of the CNT called on its members to put down their arms basically in the name of revolutionary unity.

And they did. They took down the barricades. The CP took the telephone exchange. And that was a really key turning point in the end of the revolution. And so after that, the Communist Party began more efforts to kind of break up the revolutionary collectives and purge their rivals. So arresting, jailing, torturing and killing hundreds, basically, of anarchists and other dissident revolutionary workers, socialists and communists.

But these squabbles over regional rights were far less ominous than the collision between communists and their political rivals over the whole future of the Republic. At this meeting in March 1937, Jose Diaz, the Communist General Secretary, asked, who are the enemies of the Republic? He answered himself, fascists, uncontrollables, and Trotskyists.

He was following Stalin's policy, in the Soviet Union. There, the uncontrollables, the anarchists, had already been purged. The Spanish Civil War coincided with the height of Stalin's purges of his political rivals. Leon Trotsky had been exiled in 1929. Bolshevik veterans like Zinovian and Kamen have also seen here in 1926 at a state funeral were executed in 1936. Trotskyist was a label given to any independent Marxist

who defied the instructions of Stalin and the Comintern in Moscow Communists in Western Europe justified these purges Trotsky was pilloried as a Nazi agent Bill Bailey was an American communist fighting with the international brigades We had heard that Joe Stalin was trying to

to keep the country secured and safe and get rid of all the enemies that were trying to constantly tear down the Soviet Union. Therefore, he was conducting these type of perjures, and we were led to believe that they were enemies of the people, enemies of the Russian people, consequently the enemies of the working class, every place. And later on, of course, it proved that he was wrong,

that he was nothing but a paranoid, sick, SOB in many cases. And these people that were purged came from the background of fighting for the great ideals of socialism. They want you all the aches and pains and a terror to create this society only to be taken out later as dogs and shot.

The Pum was an independent Spanish-Marxist party which loudly attacked Stalin's dictatorship. Following the Moscow line, the Spanish communists called the Pum Trotskyist, which it wasn't, and accused it of collaborating with fascism. Frank Degan was a Liverpool docker who had volunteered to fight in Spain. Well, we were informed by our political commissars that our troops who were on the Aragon Front who were mainly composed of anarchist divisions and members of the Poole who were commonly in Holes Stotskis

were fraternising with the enemy, even people. Played football matches. By the 1st of May, 1937, the political tension in Barcelona was so acute that the May Day parade had to be cancelled. The anarchists and the Pum were still powerful in the city. The communists were impatient for a showdown, as was the central government, with the exception, of course, of the anarchist ministers.

The conflict began here at the Barcelona telephone exchange, which was still run by anarchists. One of the girls on duty that day was Enriquezegatia Tavavera. I was at the switchboard near the window. The anarchist guards were half asleep over their rifles. At about three o'clock I looked out and saw three lorri-loads of assault guards pull up outside. jumped out and raced into the building. They started going up the stairs.

I think most of the anarchist guards were on the first floor. Then I heard shots and I was even more frightened. The anarchists saw this as the all-out challenge they had been expecting. They raised barrakees throughout the city. Shooting began in the streets. on the Aragon front some anarchist units began to march back to Barcelona

the anarchist Juan Manuel Molina was defense under secretary in Catalonia I phoned all the commanders of the divisions at the front and told them to stay put and secure their sectors that everything was quiet I told them everything was under control in Barcelona

and that we had more than enough men here on the Barcelona On the Barcelona streets, the anarchists could have used their superior strength before the government reinforcements arrived. The truth is that in Barcelona we control the situation. I hadn't intervened yet. All the military barracks were in my hands. Except for the Karl Marx barracks, and we had it surrounded by the people,

just waiting for my orders to attack. The anarchist ministers rushed to Barcelona. One of them Federica Monsigny appealed to her followers over the radio. She argued that they could not afford a civil war behind the lines. I tried to make them understand that they couldn't go on fighting, that they had to lay down their weapons and end that fight, that the battle fronts would collapse and it would all end shamefully in front of the whole world. This appeal horrified the anarchist militants of the barrican,

Their leaders they thought had betrayed them. To lay down their arms would mean the end of their revolution. At the barricades, you heard all the insults you can possibly imagine. Old militants were saying that the ministers have forgotten what it was like to be a worker. That the revolution had to be carried out of the barricades and not of the ministers, and they were going to shoot those ministers. There I heard all those threats from people who were disappointed, and they all remembered what had happened to the anarchists

under the Bolsheviks in Russia. And they feared the same would happen here, as it did eventually, that they would be victims of the repression of the communists. The Republic brought us. fought in troops to put down the insurrection. Five days of fighting had left about 500 dead. The anarchist power and their revolutionary vision of the future now lay shattered. That's where we lost the war.

The revolution and all the hopes of the Spanish people had placed in the transformation. That's where it all ended in the May events. Yeah, now people. that listen to this show know that my tendency is somewhere in the general realm of Marxist-Leninist Maoist. But when I hear the stories of what happened in Spain and how the left was undermined in these brutal, horrifying ways, I am 100% in sympathy with anarchists who are still to this day pissed off and disgusted by that sort of treatment. And that not only was a disgusting, uncomradly brutal crackdown on other leftists fighting for their lives, men, women, and children

who were desperately fighting for a better world. But it ultimately fed the forces of reaction because when you're fighting fascism, just like we're fucking starting to fight fascism today again, you need all hands on deck. And when you have other so-called leftist murdering, you know, sabotaging, attacking, killing, torturing other members of the left, when you are being faced with Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Francoist forces in Spain, that is just a disgusting betrayal of a revolutionary force. And I mean, there's not much more I can say on that except that it's horrifying. And as somebody more on the Marxist side of things, tendency-wise,

I can honestly and forthrightly say that that episode is fucking disgusting. Let's hope to God that if anything happens in the future, we don't repeat that mistake because that is just a betrayal of the liberationist movement. But you mentioned it when you started this answer. You talked about the motivation of the USR. I was hoping that you could kind of touch on that again. What was the reason generally overall? You gave the specific reasons for specific actions,

but broadly what was the purpose coming out of the USSR for why they ultimately wanted to have total control over this? The foreign policy of the Soviet Union at that time was not to unduly antagonize Western democratic powers. So they didn't want to be seen to be promoting uprisings and revolutions in these countries. They were participating in capitalist elections. You know, they wanted to be voted in. And, you know, in places like France, they were elected into power, into government in these Western democracies.

So that was the foreign policy of the Soviet Union at that time. As part of that, they were promoting cooperation with socialist parties, whereas that was a reverse from their previous strategy where they called social Democrats, social fascists, and said that they couldn't be collaborated with at all. I can't say exactly what, you know, as to what the motivations of Stalin and Moscow were at that point. But, you know, also there could well have been, and certainly amongst many of the communists. Spain, I'm sure there was a very genuine belief that if they had control, you know, they had a kind of disciplined United Army under their firm and singular authority, they might have a better chance at beating the nationalist who were united under a firm hand and a firm central authoritarian leader. That could have been a genuine belief. And I'm sure that was a genuine belief that

many of them had. I see. Yeah, it's extremely complicated because as you said earlier, On one hand, you see this horrific actions of undermining the anti-fascist and liberatory struggle. On the other hand, USSR was crucial at certain points in the fight, supplying air support and whatnot to the leftist forces. So, I mean, we're not going to be able to contain all of the complexities and nuances in one discussion. But I do urge people to continue going out and studying and learning more about this because you could go down these roads for hours at a time. And it's worth doing because it's worth understanding the nuances and the consequences and the. complexities of this historical conflict. But moving on, sort of getting towards the end of the war, obviously, this was only a two-year sort of uprising and counter-revolution. And in that two

years, the forces of fascism made a steady march. They were defeated in certain crucial battles and beautiful blossomings of proletarian resistance. But ultimately, they stampeded across the landscape. They had their colonial army from Morocco helped them in their fight. They had Nazi Germany and the Italian fascists backing them up, and this was ultimately won by the fascists. So wrapping up sort of this part of this conversation, I think it's worth talking about some of the crimes against humanity that were committed by the fascists. Now, certainly on the left-wing side, there were also acts of brutality and what could be called atrocities. I mean, thousands of churches were burned. Gravesites of nuns were dug up and the bones scattered about.

priests were killed fascists were killed anarchist and marxist units would go out and see compete with one another to see how many fascists they could kill which is not an atrocity that's just that's just a revolution but on the fascist side there was not only these brutal atrocities but after they won there was also this bloodletting in revenge so can you talk about some of the most brutal atrocities committed by the fascists in Spain yeah it is true that there were excesses committed by revolutionary forces in Spain. Obviously, in a civil war, you know, it's a violent situation, so there's going to be people killed in it. And there were some, you know, widespread killings of fascists and bosses and landowners and that sort of thing by the Republican side. So that's often referred to as the red terror. And that was small in comparison to the white terror, the terror, the terror of the Francoists. So the red terror, it was mostly, you know, people would kill individual fascists or people who had done terrible things, essentially. So, you know, like a priest who had told at the time of the rising, you know, in a lot of towns, the rebel military would turn up and a fascist sympathizer like a priest would say, oh, here are all the union members, you know, here's the CNT members, the UGT members, etc. and then they would go and shoot them all.

And then, you know, when the Republicans came through, the rest of the town would then take vengeance on the people who, you know, snitched on them and that sort of thing. Bad stuff did happen. But, yeah, the scale of the white terror, the nationalist terror, was just an order of magnitude larger. So the estimates on a number of people killed is between 2 and 400,000. And from the perspective of the nationalists,

this was basically something that they had to do. Whereas for the working class side, that was not the case, because their enemies really were the ultra-rich and, you know, the clergy and people like that. Not a numerically very large group, but for the nationalists, the enemy was a huge part of the working class. You know, so someone asked a nationalist leader like, what would they do to win? Because it seems like to win, they'd have to shoot half of the, shoot half of Spain. and the nationalist leader was like, yeah, we'll do it because they had to wipe out a militant chunk of the working class which in Spain at this time was huge.

You know, there were huge numbers of active, dedicated, committed revolutionaries who, you know, would never just submit to a kind of fascist dictatorship. So, yeah, they killed 200 to 400,000 people through many of them in mass graves and, you know, touch on it a bit later, but, you know, many of these mass graves are still there today with unidentified bodies in them. Franco's troops, I mean, really they carried out too many atrocities to name, but they were gang rapes of Republican women by Franco's troops. Republican women, they would shave their heads and force-feed them castor oil,

which is a powerful laxative, and then they'd parade them through the streets while the women sawed themselves sort of publicly. They would brand their breasts of Republican women with the phalanjus symbol, which is like kind of their equivalent of a swastika when the war ended they executed loads of people including like large numbers of women including even one group of 20 pregnant women from a maternity hospital

nationalist troops would do things like march around towns and from their rifles they'd hang on their rifles the underwear of women that they'd raped and murdered so in addition to those kind of individual acts of violence another thing which really characterized the Spanish Civil War, which has kind of set the scene for how nearly all wars

have been subsequently, is it was the first kind of conflict where there was mass aerial bombardment of civilian populations. So, you know, Barcelona was bombed relentlessly, and kind of most famously, the Basque city of Guernica was largely obliterated by the Luftwaffe. That is the German Air Force alongside the DeFascist Italian Air Force, which is, I guess, so famous. because it was depicted by Picasso in his painting, Guernica. But here the methods were systematic and justified as a crusade to purify Spain. A lawyer called Francisco Paiatus Lopeth,

escaped from Republic of Madrid to the nationalist zone. He saw the crimes of both. Nothing happened in one zone that didn't in the... other. Nobody committed a crime which the other side didn't also perpetrate. The big difference was that in the red zone, it was popular fervor which spilled over and killed people. On the other side, it was those in authority who coldly condemned people to injustice. The moral difference is striking, because it's one thing for an ignorant populist to do something spontaneously. Another thing for people in authority to carry something out coldly,

bloodyly, talking about a holy crusade in God's name, which is blasphemy, because God cannot condone anything like that. As far as anyone knows, God was not consulted. Nobody seemed to mind. At the beginning, outside Viadolid, 40 Republican prisoners were shot every dawn. It became spectator sport. An opportunist vendor set up a snack bar.

The nationalist authorities rationalized their brutalities, by the obligation to purge the motherland of alien ideologies. Atheistic, Masonic, Marxist, or, for that matter, liberal. Hamas never shrieked the propaganda. Nor was this modern inquisition concerned only with politics. Federico Gadio Loka was the avant-garde of an artistic renaissance. Conservatives thought that his themes, sexual freedom, justice and compassion, undermine the moral fabric of Spain.

He levyo caminanded between fusiles, for a calle Larga, to comepofrio even with stars of the madrugada. Matarone a Federico when the light awesomabah.

Lorka died in his head, hometown Granada, where, out of a population of 150,000, there were more than 4.5,000 deaths. Dozens of the town's leading intellectuals were shot at the cemetery wall. Lorca was not a revolutionary, or even a politician. His death, like so many of them, was meaningless. Three days after the uprising, Lorka had fled his family home for the supposed safety of a nationalist friend's house. Two weeks later, he was arrested, and without trial or sentence,

sent by the authorities to his death. The last sight of Lorca was with a truckload of other victims on the road to their anonymous execution in the hills outside Granada. No one knows who pulled the trigger. It's believed that Lorca now lies. beneath this olive tree in an unmarked grave.

I mean, it's tragic. It hurts my heart to even like with the episode on Chile and this episode, it's just atrocious what they did. And we should never forgive and we should never forget what they did because the people that were slaughtered by these fascists

are our comrades. They just happened to live a few decades or half a century before many of us did. But they're people that believed in the same ideals. They had the same. same impulses for liberation and they gave their lives and their bodies fighting for a better world and we carry on that legacy today and you know hearing about how especially women were treated not only by fascist in Spain but by fascist everywhere fascism arises women are always

always one of the primary victims of these assholes and these barbarians and these historical accounts as heartbreaking and as tragic as they are are also reminders of what we're up against and what the stakes are. Because although fascism is not as in full bloom as it was in the 30s and 40s, it's coming back and it's coming back in a very real way. And we have to be knowledgeable about what these people are and what they fucking do when they have the chance to do it. And don't fool yourself for a second to think that if the fascist here in the U.S.

got a chance to do what they wanted to do here, it would be just as bad if not worse with what they did in Spain and what they did in Nazi Germany. and we can't ever, ever fucking let that happen again. Three days later, Yagwe was interviewed by an American reporter. Yagwe had his own estimate of the killings. Do you think I was going to take 4,000 red prisoners, he said, while my column marched against the clock?

Of course we shot them. Should I have left them free behind me to let Badaoth become a red town again? No one knows even now. How many died in the Mada'ath massacre? The nationalists allowed them no memorial. They took the prisoners from the bullring to the cemetery and disposed of the bodies. I could see a cloud of smoke hanging over the cemetery,

over this corner of the cemetery, and the following day I came straight to the cemetery to find out what was happening. And it was then that I had the most dante-esque vision of my life as a journalist. There were bodies of people who had been shot piling up in one of the wings of the cemetery. They had been set on fire with petrol to be destroyed. I recall as if it was day the day I came here and left utterly distressed. and I was so distressed that a priest looked at me

and realizing I was so hurt and so sad asked me what was wrong with me. I sighed and he shrugged. They deserved it, they deserved it, he said. This was my last sight of Badajof in those first days after the town had been taken over. And I swore I would never come back here, but here I am to give my testimony,

since I feel that I can no longer hide the sad memories I have of that time. The terror did not end with the battle. A month later, prisoners were still being executed in the bullring. To be a Republican in Badaoth was to ask for death. Such a one was a husband of Therese Villalobos. He was the town photographer. I don't mind saying it. Republican. When the Republic was declared, he was the first to put out the fair.

He said, let's go back to Badahos. He said, I don't think they'll detain me, even though I'm left-wing. I certainly don't think they'll kill me or anything. So we came back and they caught him. Well, of course, they jailed him, and I went to look for him. I said, What's up? He didn't do anything. He wasn't with the fighters or anything. That was wasted effort, and they took him to the bullring. My father-in-law and I went to the bullring to see him. I went in and there was a window, but I couldn't go near him or he near me.

But he stretched out his hand, and I kissed it, and he kissed mine. But I couldn't go near him to kiss his friend. His face was like yellow wax. He had big blue eyes. His eyes were glued on me and his father and it was pitiful to see him. He said, Father, these are the worst moments of my life. Do what you can. Because they'll kill me.

We went away because the guard said we couldn't talk anymore and had to wait till the morning. Then we went to the cemetery. It took several days for the terrible truth of the Bada Hoth massacre to reach the rest of Spain. In Madrid, the news coincided with the first air raids on the capital. Together they provoked a new wave of spontaneous vengeance against anyone suspected of nationalist sympathy.

But having said that, again, The left lost, the forces of reaction won. How did the Civil War officially end? And what was the outcome for Spain and the revolutionaries who fought against Franco's forces? Yeah, so the official end was, yeah, victory the nationalists, defeat for the Republic. When, you know, in 1939, when it became clear that the fascist victory was inevitable, large numbers of Republican refugees started having to flee to France. you know so they crossed the border into france and as the as franco won you know huge numbers of

refugees and crossed over into to France to get away from what was going to be essentially certain death and even for people who might not have been linked to the revolution or who may have survived especially for women in republican Spain they were going to be thrown back to even further than they were to these sort of quasi-medieval, you know, patriarchal, Catholic sort of values, you know, it's quite sort of reminiscent of the handmade's tale, you know, a work of fiction, but of an equivalent thing where, you know,

going from a situation of relative freedom and hope into this kind of fascist clerical barbarism, you know, it doesn't really bear thinking about. So, yeah, huge numbers fled across the border to, France, where, unfortunately, the wonderful democratic authorities in France interned them in prison camps. And these people that had fought for democracy, like in France, got interned in prison camps. And many of them were still in these camps. When the Nazis took over France, then the Nazis just then put these people into concentration camps. And tragically,

a fair few of them died. But lots of Spanish people who were refugees in France actually joined the French resistance. It's not very well known, but actually there were a large number of, you know, Republican fighters. These people by this point were hardened fighters as well as being about the most dedicated anti-fascists that you would ever find. They're known as the Spanish marquee, and they're particularly active in the French countryside, fighting in the French resistance and taking out Nazi units and and things like that. And actually, Spanish units who were formed into the ninth company called La Nueve. They were actually the first units to enter Paris during its liberation. They

had half-track tanks called things like Guadalajara and Madrid and Don Quixote. And these vehicles with Spanish anarchists and Republicans went in to, you know, liberate Paris from Nazi occupation, which is a pretty inspiring kind of. of image considering the you know what they went through losing in Spain but unfortunately many of these these resistance activists and Spanish refugees were then extremely disappointed because they kind of believed allied propaganda in World War II that it was a fight against fascism so Hitler and Mussolini were defeated and then they thought okay now Franco but obviously that didn't happen and the Western democratic powers were only too happy to have a relationship with

Franco after that point. In this ruined Spain, the first years of peace were even harder in their way than the war. The country lost hundreds of thousands of refugees who were forced to remain in exile, and in Spain to the physical destruction were added famine, mass unemployment, impoverishment. Many thousands died of starvation. Thousands more were shot, for there was no magnanimity in Franco. No gift of reconciliation.

And nationalists everywhere at every level became infected with their leader's lust for revenge. What happened in Masterless Matters happened throughout Spain. A Molineer family had worked this plot of land for many years. Juan Molineer was a young man in 1938. He and his family were socialists. When the Nationalists swept into Aragon, they had fled with other refugees towards Valencia. And when the war finished, Franco said we shouldn't be afraid to return to our villages.

And of course, since we weren't guilty of anything, we came back. When we arrived here, they arrested us. They wouldn't even let us out of jail. Molyneus' father was imprisoned by the local Falanke, who now control masterless matters. One was never to see his father again. Forty years later, the memory of his death still pains him. Of course I remember. Those were very critical moments, crucial moments.

I wouldn't wish that on anyone. On top of it all, one has to live with those people, knowing that they had killed him. But you have to go on living with them without saying a word. After every civil war, hatred is the real survivor stifled behind closed doors hidden in neighbors

who avert their faces on the village street the poison trickles down the years so it was in Spain where almost every family had a hatred to nurse and yet as time passed locked minds began timidly to open again as my children grew up

they used to chide me because I'd been a friend supporter. Mom, how on earth could you support Franco? I think that he saved us. How can you say that? Then they began bringing me books and books and more books, and I started to realize that it had been terrible, that there had been as many monstrosities on this side

as there had been on the other side, because I already knew about the other side. But I didn't know what had happened here. And so gradually you evolved, and you realize that there is neither good nor evil, as they used to tell you, that you can think for yourself, that something you do not like, someone else may think is fine, that you are in no position to judge others, that someone, can think one way while you think another, and he could be just as good a person as you. That is what my children taught me.

a significant number of former sort of Republicans and their children, so people who were too young to have fought in the civil war, started an underground guerrilla movement where they did take the fight to Franco's regime for a couple of decades. They were extremely brave group of people who carried out a number of kind of daring attacks on Francoist authorities for a prolonged period of time. And it wasn't really until the 1960s, the early 60s, that they kind of succeeded in breaking the last of the resistance cells. Here in the U.S., we talk about the greatest generation. I mean, these people were the greatest generation,

the people that faced down Franco, that faced down Mussolini, that faced down Hitler, you know, these people that dedicated their lives to the anti-fascist cause. It's incredibly inspiring as well as tragic. But what has the effect on Spaniards been since the end of the war? And to what extent are the political rifts that sparked the Civil War still alive and well in Spain today? I mean, the effect was, was understandably huge. Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975. So that's nearly four decades of fascist rule right in the heart of Western Europe,

which is something which people don't really talk about much, you know, which is quite strange. I mean, also in Spain, unlike, you know, in places like Italy or Germany, there wasn't any process similar to like denastification where there were purges. of, you know, fascist officials and war criminals from, you know, even though obviously they were incomplete in those places, very, very incomplete. You know, in Spain, they didn't even, there wasn't even a pretence of any of it because the, it was the fascist government that set up the process of the transition to democracy. And, you know, as, as they did that, funnily enough, they pardoned themselves of all crimes, you know, so in 77, they pardoned themselves

of any of any crimes that were carried out during the civil war in the subsequent period. And loads of Francoist officials remained in positions of power. While after democracy came back, the actual phalanches, you know, the Francoist parties have never got much of the vote. You know, I think about 2% is like the most that they've sort of managed. But the popular party, the kind of main conservative party, has a kind of residual acceptance of much of the values of the dictatorship. And today, you know, you still, like I mentioned before, there's still mass graves filled with unidentified victims. There's symbols of the flange and the dictatorship everywhere, you know, so the little flange symbols on road signs and there's even a massive kind of mausoleum to Franco called the Valley of the Fallon, which he'd

built for himself, which kind of perversely also contains the bodies of thousands of people that he helped murder. And, you know, so those families of those victims, you know, I think that there hasn't been any kind of closure for them. So, you know, no one's been punished for anything. There's been no apology for anything. There's never been any acknowledgement that anything that happened was, was wrong or illegitimate in any way. And it's just, kind of brushed under the carpet. I mean, also another big legacy of Franco's rule was regional, was on, you know, regional nationalisms in the Spanish state.

So Franco ruthlessly repressed Catalan and Basque culture and their language and nationalism. So, you know, we've seen the legacy of that today and things like the recent, the recent independence referendum in Catalonia. Yeah, absolutely. So that legacy is still very much alive and well in Spain, as a legacy of fascism is alive and well in every country and the world, in fact, and it's on the rise again. So I've mentioned this many times, so let's just go ahead and address this. Today, we are once again seeing the rise of fascism all across the globe. What can we on the revolutionary left in 2018 learn from the successes as well as the failures of the left in the Spanish Civil War, in your opinion? yeah I guess I kind of I don't want to disappoint in my answer here um which I'm afraid that I might as I think the the fascism in Spain and how it came about is is kind of quite different to the rise of fascism in places like Italy or Germany because it wasn't like it was a mass grassroots movement um in that same way um it was it was more kind of imposed by

top-down kind of right-wing nationalist Catholic types by brute force, you know, in quite a sort of different way. So I think there are lessons from it, but I don't think these are the same sort of lessons that we can learn from, say, experiences in Italy or Germany when you really had rise of fascism from a small movement to essentially absolute power over the period of a few years and how people tried to to fight that. But I still think it's instructive in a number of ways, the, you know, the experiences in, in, but I think they're more kind of broad political lessons as opposed to one specifically related to anti-fascism. I still think the Spanish Civil War and Revolution is instructive in a number of ways. I think firstly, you know, it shows that that

anarchism, the anarchism is a practical and workable ideology, both in terms of creating a revolutionary movement and in, you know, running a functioning industrial society in a non-hierarchical fashion. Secondly, I think it's as an example of how revolutionaries trying to use the state has not been successful. So rather than dismantle the capitalist state in the Republican Spain, you know, the C&T and the FAAI, the anarchist leadership and the PUMM joined the Republican government rather than, you know, dismantling it. And this turned out to be a huge tactical error on both their parts. And in many ways was an abandonment of both anarchist and, you know, Leninist, depending on your shade of Leninism, you know, of Leninist ideology. So there was an abandonment of that theoretical idea, which was in the name of being practical and pragmatic, but it ended up not being pragmatic.

And I think it also shows that fighting fascism and winning a revolution aren't necessarily two different things. You know, in Spain they were inseparable. Like to mobilize people to essentially risk their lives, you know, to fight, to kill and potentially to die. in a in a conflict people have to feel like they're fighting for something worthwhile and you know fighting for just a different set of bosses wasn't didn't didn't do that um you know whereas when when people felt they were fighting for a new world you know that was something that they could believe in and something that that you know that they would fight for and unfortunately you know it's i mean it has some lessons about the ideas of left unity it's you know it's a nice

idea, but in some instances, it's, you know, it's not workable if people are killing you. Yeah. Well, actually, I do actually agree with that, that the idea of left unity is nice to think about, but in reality, it's much more complicated. And, you know, whatever your ideas of left unity or leftist working together more generally are, I think that this is an example of what happens objectively when the left, faced with the forces of global capitalism and global fascism turn on one another. And, you know, I just hope from the bottom of my heart that those mistakes aren't repeated in the future. But sometimes

the discourse between different sides on the left, you know, makes me lose optimism on that front. But I think what you said generally was extremely well articulated and well said. And I largely agree we may have some differences on the role that state power could play in a revolutionary movement but this conversation is not about that and all of my listeners span the spectrum from anarchist to leninist to Maoist to democratic socialist and they can engage with this idea and this historical event in a critical way and come to their own conclusions but one thing I do know and I think we can all agree on is that we can never ever ever allow fascism to win again we can never allow that fucking horrific poisonous ideology to take root and to dominate us

and our comrades of all stripes who rose up and fought against these monsters are inspirations to us and we need all hands on deck when we're facing these forces of reaction and as capitalism continues to bump into crises after crises as neoliberalism circles the drain the rise of fascism is only going to to intensify and so we have to be ready we have to be prepared but yeah do you have any last words before we end yeah well i did have two more kind of lessons. I think another thing that the conflict showed is that, you know, for us, for the working class, it is never worth sacrificing any of our principles or potential advantage to try and look respectable or to get support from, you know, liberal or even left-wing kind of capitalist

enterprises. You know, the Republic did this kind of time and again, and they were, and it got them nowhere. So they lost their, you know, they lost their advantage. So they didn't seize, you know, they didn't seize the Bank of Spain's gold, you know, which the CNT could have done. You know, they disbanded the international brigades. They banned women from the front. You know, they did all this. So it's not to upset their allies and they got, and their allies abandoned them. And the final thing is that, you know, you can't create a free society in a country that colonially dominates another.

You know, Republican Spain didn't free, didn't give. Morocco independence, and then that meant that Franco then used Moroccan troops to help, you know, drown the Republic in blood. And, you know, the Moroccan troops didn't have a problem doing that, because for them, there was no different if there was a fascist government or a nice, lefty Republican one. They were still colonial subjects, you know, who didn't count. Well said, beautifully articulated. Thank you so much for coming on. This was a huge historical event and these questions are enormous and you handled them extremely well. I really appreciate it. John, before I let you go, can you maybe toss out some recommendations for anyone

who wants to learn more about the Spanish Civil War and definitely let us know where listeners can find you and working class history online? Cool, yeah. Well, with some friends, we've kind of put together a reading guide on Spanish Civil War, so maybe we could put a link to that in the show notes. In terms of the military history, there's a really good military history, which politically pretty neutral and even-handed. So it's by Anthony Beaver, and that's called Battle for Spain. And that's a pretty definitive military history. In times of an eyewitness account, you know, for if you like that, I know personally, I like, you know, personal accounts of things. Orwell's homage to Catalonia is excellent. If you're someone that prefers, you know,

visual things, then the Ken Loach film, Land and Freedom, is really good as well and kind of brings brings this stuff to life in terms of the revolution there's a book Collectives in the Spanish Revolution by Gaston LaValle which goes into how the collectives functioned and another book called The Anacus Collectives by Sam Dolgoth and those are really good at kind of the nitty gritty

of worker controlled industry and agriculture and you know and these attempts to create real communism and how they how they how that went so they're good yeah so those those are some recommendations oh and finally marie bookchin's book the spanish anarchist the heroic years is a really good overview of the development of the spanish anarchist movement before the civil war so how they basically grew a revolutionary movement to the point where it could kind of take over and run society in a directly democratic way so finally WCH. We've got a website, working class history.com. That links to our various social media accounts

like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and all that. And we've got a podcast as well called Working Class History. You can just search for that on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Awesome. Well, thank you again, John, for coming on. It's been an honor. It's been fascinating. You know, I really enjoyed kind of doing it. So thanks for that. Also, I really like the way that you kind of do podcasts as well and like I really enjoyed the chat your input and and your comments and everything were really great and I really sort of appreciate them you can really sort of tell that you really like care about this shit you know and and it's important and I don't know if it's being British or something but it's kind of hard to you know I do care about this stuff

you know like more than more than like anything but it's hard to talk about anything and a kind of genuine and emotional way. I think we're quite a stunted people sort of generally. So I don't know if it's that or if it's just me personally. But yeah, I thought that was really cool. And yeah, and I think that's a really good thing about your podcast.