Insurrection The Bloody Events of May 1937 in Barcelona Agustín Guillamón Translated by Paul Sharkey AK Press / Kate Sharpley Library Dedication To César, taken from us by a lethal impact, because this book is indebted to his generosity and shared enthusiasm Epigraph Revolutions like volcanoes have their days of flame and their years of smoke. Victor Hugo, Post-Scriptum de la vie What is known to none barely exists. Apuleius, Metamorphosis Historical memory is a theatre of the class struggle. Fight For History: A Manifesto The role of history will then be to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and that historians tell lies. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended No more leaders and no more State To leech upon our battles. Raoul Vaneigem, Life Goes By, Life Slips Away Introduction In and of itself, the investigation, disclosure, and deepening of knowledge about the history of revolutions—rebutting the lies, misrepresentations, and slanders spewing from Sacred, Subsidized Bourgeois History and lifting the veil from the genuine history of class struggle, written from the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat—is a Fight For History. Workers’ striving to discover their own history is but one of the many battles being fought in the class war. It is not a matter of mere theory, nor is it abstract and banal, because it is part and parcel of class consciousness itself and can be classified as a theorization of the world proletariat’s historical experiences. In Spain it must, necessarily, embrace, digest, and take ownership of the anarcho-syndicalist movements in the 1930s. The mission of bourgeois History is to conjure up myths about nationalism, liberal democracy, and capitalist economics in order to persuade us they are timeless, immutable, and irreplaceable. A perpetual, complacent, uncritiqued present renders the past banal and is harmful to historical awareness. We are moving on from Sacred History to post-history. “Post-truth” is a neologism that describes a cognitive situation—commonplace these days—wherein the information source creates public opinion by subordinating facts and reality to emotions, prejudices, ideologies, propaganda, and beliefs. So post-truth can be a lie served up as a truth, but reaffirmed as a belief, ideology, promotional ad, or prejudice widely spread throughout society. If it has the appearance of truth and also flatters our vanity or satisfies our emotions, while reinforcing our prejudices or identity, it deserves to be true. A good advertising campaign can turn lie, deceit, and falsehood into a pleasant and handy post-truth. Post-history ceases to be what happens subsequent to the End of History (Fukuyama) and turns into the narrative that hacks of every hue and ideology fabricated for the publishing market, over and above the facts and historical reality that are these days deemed as secondary and dispensable, or exotic symbols for something we cannot quite put our finger on (Gallego). The proletariat is drawn into the class struggle by its very nature as a waged and exploited class and does not need anybody to teach it anything; it fights because it needs to survive. Once the proletariat assumes the mantle of a conscious revolutionary class at odds with the party of Capital, it needs to digest the experiences of the class struggle, lean on historical gains (theoretical and practical alike), revolve issues not resolved in their time: it needs to learn the lessons offered by history itself. But this learning process can only be conducted through the practice of class struggle by the various affinity groups and sundry organizations of the proletariat. Smoothing the way for this learning process is the point of each and every one of my books, the purpose throughout being to let the protagonists of history speak for themselves, respecting the reader’s judgment, while at all times highlighting the fact if she is dealing with the author’s opinion (indicated by italics) to which the reader need not subscribe. The earliest books I published in 2007 and 2010 were Barricades in Barcelona and Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona 1933–1938. Barricades explained how the ideology of antifascist unity was the ploy that allowed the higher committees to jettison all anarchist principles for the sole purpose of winning the war. My book on the defense committees in Barcelona brought to light how the Catalan CNT laid the groundwork for a clandestine revolutionary army. It deals with the origins of the CNT defense committees, the conversion of these into revolutionary committees in July 1936, their subsequent hibernation that December, how they overwhelmed the higher committees in May 1937, as well as how they were later dismantled and shut down once and for all. It is a local history zeroing in on the city of Barcelona and surrounding areas, and the justification for this is that that was the place where those committees were most fully developed and where they pushed the libertarian revolution the furthest. Ready for Revolution, The Bread War, and The Repression Targeting the CNT and Revolutionaries (1937–1938) constitute the first, second, and fourth volumes of a quartet with the overall title “Hunger and Violence in Revolutionary Barcelona.” They were published in 2011, 2014, and 2015, respectively. This present book, devoted to the bloody May 1937 events is, chronologically speaking, Volume Three of that quartet (although it was published in 2017). Further volumes given over to significant aspects of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution in Catalonia were The Friends of Durruti Group, History and Anthology of Texts, and The Stalinist Terror in Barcelona (1938), both published in 2013. Ready for Revolution offers an exhaustive explanation on the basis of previously unpublished, unknown, or unexploited documentation of how, in July 1936, the defense committees not only raised the frontline militias for Aragon but established barrio-based revolutionary committees throughout the city of Barcelona that spearheaded and defended one of the most profound social revolutions in history. There was a double TRANSFORMATION of these defense cadres: into the people’s militias that defined the Aragon front during the early days, launching collectivization of the lands in liberated Aragonese villages; and into revolutionary committees (RCs) that, in each barrio of Barcelona, and in many villages around Catalonia, enforced a “new revolutionary situation.” The “bread war” waged by Comorera against the barrio committees is the topic explored on the basis of exhaustive and often unpublished documentation in the quartet’s second volume, The Bread War: From December 1936 to May 1917. The Bread War was designed for the sole purpose of wresting every vestige of power away from the defense committees, even though it meant the depletion of supplies in Barcelona and food shortages. Comorera was out to destroy the revolutionary war committees because he had identified them as potential organs of workers’ power. The barrio committees’ supply warehouses controlled what, how, how much, and at what wholesale price, foods could be supplied to retail outlets, after the “revolutionary” needs of the barrio had been met—meaning its sick, its children, its unemployed, the people’s dining halls, etc. Comorera called for an end of those revolutionary barrio-level committees and pushed for a free market. He was also aware that the one was implicit in the other and that, unless the defense committees could be done away with, the free market would be just a mirage. Rational, far-sighted, and adequate provisioning of Barcelona and Catalonia would have meant caving in to the plans of the CNT’s economy councillor, Joan Pau Fábregas, who battled unsuccessfully from October to December 1936 against opposition from all other political factions in Generalidad cabinet meetings for a monopoly on foreign trade. Meanwhile, on the Paris cereals market, ten or twelve major private wholesalers competed with one another, forcing up prices. But that foreign trade monopoly, which was not even a revolutionary proposition, but rather one appropriate for an emergency war-time situation, was a violation of the free market philosophy pushed by Comorera. There was a thread linking bread queues in Barcelona and the irrational competition between wholesalers on the Paris cereal markets. A thread that would have snapped with the introduction of a foreign trade monopoly. Comorera’s free market policy strengthened it. But in addition, the PSUC encouraged speculation by shopkeepers who imposed a virtual dictatorship over the pricing of all foodstuffs, lining their pockets by keeping workers hungry. The fourth volume in my quartet The Repression Targeting the CNT and Revolutionaries (1937–1938) runs through the period from 8 May 1937 until 1 October 1937, that is, from the ending of the May Events to the storming of the Los Escolapios building by the PSUC and the bourgeois forces of order. From June 1937 onward, with the Control Patrols disbanded, there was a reconquest of various localities and comarcas by the Assault Guards and Civil Guard who deployed brutal repression against CNT personnel—especially against the erstwhile “patrollers” and the most prominent militants—to the extent where the CNT as an organization disappeared in many places. This crackdown on anarcho-syndicalists was accompanied by a passive attitude in the higher committees, who chose to defend the prisoners on an individual, case-by-case basis rather than on a collective, political basis. The thousands of anarcho-syndicalist prisoners demanded greater commitment and solidarity from their higher committees, but all that was achieved was a safety valve response whereby the RCs of the CNT and FAI agreed to tolerate a clandestine press that mounted a campaign in support of the prisoners and exposed the brutality of the Stalinist repression. Bit by bit, prisoners and revolutionary minorities distanced themselves from the collaborationist policy of the higher committees until a point was reached where a split seemed inevitable.