A-Infos (en) Irish Anarchist Review #8 - Shadows of a revolution - Nick Lloyd's Spanish civil war walking tour reviewed

Ask an anarchist for an example of a time and place where their ideas were put to the test 
and they will most likely reply with “Barcelona, 1936”. In July of that year, the workers 
of Barcelona, mainly organised around the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del 
Trabajo (CNT; "National Confederation of Labour") rose in opposition to the fascist 
generals' coup that was gripping the south of the Spanish state. ---- Over the following 
months, the workers of Catalonia, guided by anarchist ideas, attempted to create a new 
society, based on the principles of solidarity, equality and mutual aid and fight a civil 
war against the generals, along side the forces of the republic, at the same time. ---- 
The tragedy that was the crushing of the revolution by the fascists on one side, and the 
Stalinist controlled state forces on the other, is well known to anyone with an interest 
in anarchism and revolutionary history.

Nick Llyod's Spanish civil war walking tour, however, brings those events from the pages 
of our history books to life. The tour begins at Plaça Catalunya, where Nick, holding a 
copy of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, goes through the basics for those not so 
familiar with the various groups who took part in the conflict. He goes on to describe the 
events of the 21st of July 1936, when armed workers and the the civil guard prevented the 
fascist coup from taking Barcelona and the crucial battle at Plaça Catalunya.

Equality and Freedom
The next stop is at the site of the hotel on Las Ramblas, where Orwell stayed while he was 
not fight- ing at the front. Here, he reads a famous passage from Homage to Catalonia, 
describing the city under workers control.

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the 
saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was 
draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was 
scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; 
almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were 
being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an 
inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been 
collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you 
in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had 
temporarily disappeared... Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue 
overalls or some variant of militia uniform... Above all, there was a belief in the 
revolution and the fu- ture, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality 
and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the 
capitalist machine."

Afterwards, he plays a recording of the CNT anthem, a las barricadas (to the barricades), 
and asks participants to squint as they look down las ramblas and imagine the scene 
described by Orwell. It is an emotional moment, if you are an anarchist, to feel like you 
are in the midst of social revolution, at a time where wealth and power has crumbled 
before a working class armed with libertarian socialist ideas (and guns of course). As you 
imagine the militias leaving for the front, while social relations are being transformed, 
a little sadness will grip you as you think of what happened afterwards.

Anticlerical violence
The next part of the tour deals with anti-clerical violence during the revolution. In 
front of one of Barcelona's many churches, while other tours consider the architecture and 
hear stories of the medieval city, Nick describes how the liberated workers took revenge 
on the catholic church, an institution that was firmly in league with the landowning 
classes and who had oppressed them for centuries. Despite the pleas for restraint from 
official CNT channels, churches were burned and many clergy were executed. We are shown 
images of workers dancing with their corpses that were used as pro-fascist propaganda in 
Ireland and other countries.

As the war raged on, the gains of the revolution were eroded, in part due to the 
compromises of the CNT leadership, participation in the popular front government and in 
part, due to the balance of power in Barcelona shifting to the Stalinists, who were now 
receiving supplies from the USSR. Nick describes the may days and other events that saw 
the return of capitalist social relations as we wind through Barcelona's narrow streets.

Days of darkness
The 1938 bombing of the city by Mussolini's air force is described in great detail. On the 
18th of March that year, seventeen air raids took place at three hour intervals. The 
bombing wasn't restricted to military targets and the use of delayed fuse bombs devastated 
the whole city. Around a thousand died and two thousand were injured. You can still see 
bomb damage in the walls of some buildings. Photo's of the damage and casualties give you 
an idea of scale of this atrocity.

The final stops on the tour, deal with the defeat of the revolution and the fascist 
victory in the civil war. At a church we get to see a stone carving depicting “bad” 
workers destroying a church in 1936 and another depicting “good” workers rebuilding it in 
1940. Finally, we return to las ramblas to the place where Andreu Nin, erstwhile 
Trotskyist and then leader of the left wing marxist POUM, who were allied with the CNT, 
was last seen alive before his kidnap and death at the hands of Stalinist agents. It is a 
poignant ending to a tour that takes us from the hope of 1936 to the dark days of the 
Franco regime's victory.

The tour then decamps to la libertaria, a bar run by the local CNT, where Nick gets a 
discussion going on the revolution and civil war and european politics today. Though, as 
Sergio, a member of the CNT told me, “Today, Barcelona is not the most important city for 
anarchism in the Spanish state, Madrid is the cutting edge of the class struggle”, it was 
the city where our hopes and dreams came closest to being realised. Nick Llloyd's tour is 
probably the best way to experience that today and if you go at the beginning of your 
visit, the rest of your holiday will certainly be enriched.

Words: Mark Hoskins
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