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.
This meeting will outline our analysis of the events in Spain 1936-39 and the lessons that need to be drawn from this crucial experience in the history of the workers’ movement.