Barcelona May Days | Wikipedia audio article
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Date: 2018-11-27

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Barcelona May Days

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SUMMARY
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The May Days of 1937, sometimes also called May Events, referring to a series of clashes between 3 and 8 May 1937, were a period of civil violence in Catalonia, when factions of the Republican side engaged each other in street battles in various parts of Catalonia, in particular in the city of Barcelona, during the Spanish Civil War.
In these events the supporters of the Spanish Revolution were outmanoeuvred by the recently expropriated bourgeoisie, represented by the Comintern-affiliated P.S.U.C. (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) and Catalan nationalists. It would, however lead to the latter surrendering Catalan autonomy to the central government, a major factor in the collapse of the front before the Nationalist invasion the following year. It was a major turning point in the confrontation between the interests of foreign capital, especially Britain and France, supported by the Soviet Union, and the Spanish Revolution, which had been the fatal faultline in the Spanish Republic. All these powers were essentially hedging their bets with regard to fascism, as none wanted to take on Germany and Italy directly.
For Stalin especially, the Spanish conflict was a holding pattern to be prolonged until the fascists threatened the British Empire directly. His popular front policy, of courting 'progressive bourgeois parties' in stark contrast to the 'class against class' position of the 1920s, was threatened by events in Spain, which had been sliding inexorably into all out class war for thirty years, with regular spontaneous insurrections. Most Spaniards lived on the brink of starvation and were tired of waiting for reform.   The coup had been preceded by a wave of land expropriations and general strikes. The impotence of the popular front government and the revolt of the military had removed any basis for legitimate authority, and a profound social revolution was in full swing with workers and peasants spontaneously organising themselves according to the principles of libertarian communism. The Soviets were determined to prevent this at all costs, so they began by engineering a coup against the anarchists in Catalonia. Their immediate objective was to destabilise the Socialist government of Largo Caballero, who was regarded by his followers as the 'Spanish Lenin', using the right wing of his own party against him. They had chosen as his successor the right-wing social democrat finance minister Juan Negrin, who was much more in tune with Soviet foreign policy. This would allow them to eliminate dissident (i.e. non-Comintern) Marxists from positions of responsibility and, as a bonus, end Catalan autonomy - the better to attack the anarcho-syndicalists.

Long before the first shot was discharged in Barcelona, English and French cruisers were hurrying toward the port as if they had a prophetic presentiment of the things to come. If one takes all this into consideration, one asks oneself how much faith in the triumph of the anti-Fascist cause still exists among those people who invoke foreign protection against the workers of their own country?