Revolutionary Catalonia Remembered and Revisited

REVOLUTIONARY CATALONIA REMEMBERED AND REVISITED


 



SERIOUS DIVISIONS - SECTARIANISM AMONG ANARCHISTS, SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS : WHAT ARE LESSONS FOR TODAY ?

THERE WERE SERIOUS MISTAKES ON ALL PROGRESSIVE SIDES IN SPANISH CIVIL WAR.

WHY CANNOT COMMUNISTS AND SOCIALISTS LEARN FROM ANARCHISTS AND ANARCHISTS LEARN FROM  SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS ?

DO WE SHARE THE SAME STRATEGIC AIM ? ARE OUR DIFFERENCES 
TACTICAL ?

HERE ARE THE VIEWS OF KANG SHENG EXPRESSED TO MAO ZEDONG ON SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN 1964.

(K’ang Sheng: ‘On New Democracy is of great significance for the world communist movement. I asked Spanish comrades, and they said the problem for them was to establish bourgeois democracy, not to establish New Democracy. In their country, they did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all.’) These are the policies of Ch’en Tu-hsiu! (Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘They say the Communist Party organized an army, and then turned it over to others.’) This is useless.

(Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘They also did not want political power, nor did they mobilize the peasantry. At that time, the Soviet Union said to them that if they imposed proletarian leadership, England and France might oppose it, and this would not be in the interests of the Soviet Union.’)

How about Cuba? In Cuba they concerned themselves precisely to set up political power and an army, and also mobilized the peasants, as [we did] in the past; therefore they succeeded.

(Comrade K’ang Sheng: ‘Also, when they [the Spanish] fought, they waged regular war, in the manner of the bourgeoisie, they defended Madrid to the last.[20] In all things, they subordinated themselves to Soviet foreign policy.’)

SOURCE: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_27.htm

Democracy and Class Struggle says the passage of time reveals the truth that Fascism was not defeated by Anarchism but by Leninist discipline which some call Stalinism during the Second World War - that discipline did not exclude spontaneous acts of personal courage like at Stalingrad but exceptional military and organisational ability some of it learnt from defeat in Spain - defeats are sometimes more instructive than victories.

Know the past to understand the present to correctly understand contradictons among the people and not confuse them with the enemy