Dear Subversion
I read your article 'The End of Anarchism' when it was first published ten years ago. I thought then that it was a good article and I thought so again when I re-read it in issue no. 18 of Subversion. The article effectively warned against seeing self-managed capitalism as a solution to our problems and showed that much of what passed for the 'Spanish Revolution' had no communist content whatsoever.
However, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that there were those in Spain at the time who were committed to the same sort of communism that Subversion stands for. Indeed, it would have been strange if that were not the case, because communist initiatives have generally been present in all the major upheavals of capitalism, all the way back to the Diggers in the English Civil War in the seventeenth century, let alone in the more advanced circumstances of the Spanish Civil War three hundred years later.
When I visited Spain in 1995, I attended a public meeting in Barcelona which was addressed by an old militant of the Civil War era, Abel Paz. Some of his reminscences were sufficiently exciting to persuade me to read his "Durruti: the People Armed" (Montreal: Black Rose, 1976) when I got back to England. In this book there are various examples given of communist initiatives, such as the armed uprising by miners around Barcelona in January 1932 which 'led to the proclamationof libertarian communism, the abolition of private property and money' (p.117). To this Paz adds the footnote: 'The destruction of the State and the abolition of classes are born from the same act: the abolition of money and property' (p.124).
Perhaps the most eye-catching of these examples is a first-hand account of one incident in which Paz participated in 1936. It is worth letting him tell the story in his own words:
'The author took part in various actions of this kind on the morning of July 20th. The one which impressed him most was the attack on a branch bank in Calle Mallorca in Barcelona. Nobody in the bank resisted the people. However a group of women, assisted by only a few men and children had seized the building and made a bonfire in the street with the furniture. Throwing this furniture into the fire the people were full of rage but also of pleasure, as if they were the judges in a cause which had been waiting to be judged for a millenium. Among other things boxes full of bank notes were thrown into the fire and absolutely no one had the idea of putting the money in their pockets. They seemed to be saying that the world of trade, the world of salaries and exploitation were really disappearing forever.' (p.217).
Sadly, they were wrong, because such initiatives were overwhelmed by the kind of developments which your article skilfully explained. Yet, in our eagerness to debunk the myths that cling to Republican Spain, let us not forget that some working men and women of the time were inspired by communism. It is important to remember the countless occasions when such initiatives have occurred (in Spain and many other parts of the world). Were we not to do so, communism would become nothing more than a disembodied ideal, a nice idea perhaps, but remote from the real struggles of this world. I know for a fact that Subversion does not see communism like that.
JC