Only once for a very brief period in the modern era have anarchists come close to organising society along decentralised lines on a fairly large scale and that was in Catalonia and Andorra during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It was crushed of course by a combination of the Stalinist left and the liberal right of the Government of the Spanish Republic, who considered the anarchists to be a greater evil than the fascist Franco!! Both agricultural and industrial production was conducted through decentralised peasants and workers councils but it lasted only four months. More than a decade of hard mobilisation and awareness work preceding the civil war, by the anarchists, among the peasants and workers, in a region which more or less had third world status despite being a part of Europe, resulted in the masses not only seizing the means of production but organising production successfully thereafter along decentralised and democratic lines. Things have become much tougher now when capitalism has penetrated every nook and cranny of the world and it is very difficult to do such grass roots mobilisation any more. The Spanish Civil War seemed to be the last frontier for revolutionaries and romantics of all kinds and many flocked to it from all over Europe and America. Two of them produced two classic works in English, one fiction and the other non-fiction. The first is For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and the second is Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. Texts that have been my inspiration and continue to be so. Here is what Hemingway has to say about the feelings of El Sordo, one peasant soldier, as he faces certain death on top of a hillock where he has made his last stand - Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 15:30:20 +0000
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