90 years ago this July, the military forces led by Franco launched a coup d’Etat against the Spanish Republic. The workers of Barcelona responded with their own methods of struggle: massive strikes and the formation of workers’ militias. But very quickly this proletarian response was dragged onto the bourgeois terrain of defending the Republic against fascism, and the ensuring ‘civil war’ was turned into an inter-imperialist slaughter, a dress rehearsal for the even bigger massacre of World War Two

Today the working class is also confronted with the spread of imperialist wars across the globe, even if the conditions which led to World War in the 1930s are not the same – above all because the working class has not suffered from a historic defeat as it did with the crushing of the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. But the dangers posed by capitalism’s accelerating dive into the chaos and self-destruction of a system in terminal decline are no less real.

In the 1930s only a handful of revolutionary organisations, and above all the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, were able to understand the real nature of the war in Spain and put forward an internationalist positions against all those – from the Stalinists and Trotskyists to the anarchists - who called on workers to rally to the defence of bourgeois democracy. Faced with today’s wars, this intransigent defence of internationalism is as vital as ever.

In a brief presentation and through interventions during the two and a half hours of open discussion, we will present our analysis of the events in Spain 1936-39. To enable the maximum of political clarification, we recommend that those interested come prepared to take position on the topic and in particular to pose any questions or divergences they may have. To assist with this preparation, we suggest comrades read the following two texts which provide an orientation on the ICC’s position:

https://en.internationalism.org/content/2547/bilan-lessons-spain-1936 [1] (International Review 4)

The War in Spain - No Betrayal! [2] (chapter 5 of our book The Italian Communist Left, available on our website:  https://en.internationalism.org/content/17626/pamphlet-italian-communist-left-1926-45 [3]  )