Spain

Spanish holidays and dialectics

Perhaps Woody Allen is just a dirty old man. His relationship with, and marriage to, his adoptive step-daughter is well publicised. And recent films, such as 2005’s Match Point, have centred not so much around the philosophical conflicts and neuroses of his earlier works as on his latest muse Scarlett Johansson's cleavage. After a series of damp-squib releases set in London, Allen has moved onto Barcelona — and taken a great deal of controversy with him. The involvement of the Catalan tourism authorities in funding Vicky Cristina Barcelona sparked a debate around whether the film was anything...

The Spanish Revolution and the Civil War, 1936-9 - A "Diary" of Events, by Leon Trotsky

Though Leon Trotsky’s writings on Spain fill a large volume, he wrote no concise overview of the Spanish revolution. Our “diary” is culled from the commentaries he produced all through the last decade of his life: the last item here is dated 20 August 1940, the day Trotsky was assassinated. 25 May, 1930 The Primo de Rivera dictatorship has fallen without a revolution, from internal exhaustion. In the beginning, in other words, the question was decided by the sickness of the old society and not by the revolutionary forces of a new society… The workers’ struggle must be closely linked to all the...

Alone with our day

The great Spanish revolution of 1936-7, tragically betrayed and defeated, has gone down in history as “the Spanish Civil War” (1936-9). Civil war it surely was, but that designation, civil war, embodies the politics and the slant on history of those who crushed the workers’ revolution in Catalonia and elsewhere. It was buried in life by Stalin’s political police and its collaborators in Spain; it is “buried” in history under a grave stone mislabeled “the Spanish Civil War”. This was one of the most important working class revolutions since October 1917 in Russia. (See Workers’ Liberty pamphlet...

London Workers' Liberty forum. Spain, 1936-9: the revolution betrayed

7.30pm, Thursday 12 October The Plough, Museum Street Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road In 1936, in response to a fascist coup, the Spanish workers rose up and seized the factories and land, but could not consolidate their power. What happened? Why did the fascists win? What role did Marxism and anarchism play in the struggle? And what can the Spanish revolution teach socialists and the labour movement today? A leaflet advertising the meeting is attached. For more information email office@workersliberty.org or ring 020 7207 3997

Revolution and betrayal in Spain 1936-7

It is usually called the “Spanish civil war”, the thirty month struggle that began in July 1936, when the Spanish military, led by three generals, Franco, Mola and Sanjurgo — of whom one, Franco, would emerge as dictator — revolted against the Popular Front government which had been elected five months earlier. It was a civil war, a tremendous civil war in which German and Italian “volunteers”, British and Irish (Blue Shirt) fascists and many others fought for the Francoite, and “anti-facists”, British, American, French, German, Italian, and Irish (Republican) volunteers fought for the Spanish...

Spain 1936/7: A Study in Workers’ Power

In many respects there were very close parallels between the proletarian revolutions of [Russia] 1917 and [Spain] 1936. Spain and Russia were both gripped by profound economic crises rooted in their semi-feudal land systems. Both were agricultural economies based on a poverty-stricken peasantry. Capitalism had made little headway in Spain because of its inability to compete with the great industrial nations which had got into the field ahead of it; and because of the restricted internal market open to it Spanish industry struggled along by supplementing the economies of the major powers. The...

How not to remember the Spanish Civil War

'Today' today had a feature on the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War featuring historian Anthony Beevor and none other than Michael Portillo, who was there so that he could patronise his father who fought on the Republican side as a naïve intellectual. Their conclusion was that the best way...

What is ETA?

The Basque Country, Euskadi, is a region in the north-east of Spain with a distinct language and culture. About two million people live there. There is also a smaller Basque population in France. Under the dictatorship of General Franco, from 1939 to 1976, the Basque language and all Basque self-assertion were rigidly suppressed. ETA, the group which was first accused of the Madrid bombings, but has denied them, was founded in 1959 to fight for Basque independence. In 1973 it killed Franco's prime minister, Luis Carrero Blanco. Generally its attacks have been of a similar character - against...

Victims' families speak out

No more lies! We reproduce a statement signed by 'The Families of the victims of the 11 March', delivered at 2am to the demonstration on 14 March. It appears in Spanish on the website of El Militante , a group linked to Socialist Appeal in Britain. The families of the victims of the bombing are furious at the government's manipulation of the facts of this crime. We consider ETA a group of assassins and gunmen and think their members should be judged accordingly, but to assign to them a crime they did not commit only strengthens them. Everyone knew from the first hours of 11 March that the...

After Madrid

Against the terrorists - international working-class solidarity The bombing which killed over 200 people at three railway stations in Madrid in the morning rush hour of 11 March was an unspeakable atrocity. Whoever did it is as much an enemy of the working class and democracy as were the Italian fascists who killed 85 people by bombing Bologna railway station in 1980, or the American right-wing terrorists who killed 168 with a bombing in Oklahoma in 1995. It would be plain stupid for socialists to translate what the bombers do and aim for into our liberationist concerns, and conclude that they...

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