This is the first of a series of posts I intend to make on the 19th of every month. It is part of a personal decade of remembrance of the Spanish Revolution that will stretch from 19 July 2026 until the centenary of the initial suppression of the Fascist rising in Barcelona – 19 July 2036. The intention is to highlight the relevance of the experience of the Spanish Revolution for praxis today, for our time and our historic conjuncture.
By way of preface I offer the following extract from Daniel Guerin’s For a Libertarian Communism:
The twentieth century is, for the anarchists, one of revolutionary practice. They played an active role in the two Russian Revolutions and, even more, in the Spanish Revolution.
Daniel Guerin: For a Libertarian Communism (PM Press 2017, pg 42)
The study of the authentic anarchist doctrine, as it was formed in the nineteenth century, shows that anarchy is neither disorganization, disorder, nor atomization, but the search for true organization, true unity, true order, and true centralization, which can only reside, not in authority, coercion, or compulsion exercised from the top down, but in free, spontaneous, federalist association from the bottom up. As for the study of the Russian and Spanish revolutions and the role played in them by the anarchists, it shows that contrary to the false legend believed by some, these great and tragic experiences show that libertarian socialism was largely in the right against the socialism I’ll call “authoritarian”.
