The North American linguist and political scientist publishes the essay ‘On anarchism’, where he analyzes the fall of Spanish anarchism during 1936-37
Anarchism, one of the great utopias of the 20th century, and the only one that never achieved real power in a State, is analyzed in the new essay by the Massachusetts MIT linguist and political scientist Noam Chomsky (USA, 1928). ‘On anarchism’, edited in Spain by Captain Swing, is not a history book or a review of one of the ‘isms’ (communism, fascism, capitalism…) that participated in the last great wars. It is a meeting of, above all, two great reflections on this proposal for a libertarian and collectivized society, one of which is dedicated to what happened during the Spanish Civil War, in the years 1936 and 1937, when anarchism, after the coup of State of Franco, was imposed in bastions as important as Aragon and Barcelona, ”a social revolution of an unprecedented scope” that was “crushed by force” by communism, increasingly the owner of the Government. The “right” of the Republic, as Chomsky calls it.
“The Spanish Civil War is one of the crucial events in modern history,” the academic begins. Without “revolutionary vanguard” and “spontaneously” they succeeded in industrial and rural collectivization, but between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, fascism and, on the other, communism with the Civil Guard completing a bloody repression in Barcelona, as Chomsky concludes from the bibliography studied, including Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’.
While the troops of the rebels advanced, with German, Italian and British help -reveals Chomsky- the anarchist «revolution» and the Soviet «counterrevolution» faced each other. The seconds had the upper hand. “We must not forget that the central government had enormous gold reserves that would soon be delivered to the Soviet Union,” maintains the author, who warns of the “loss of objectivity” about Spanish anarchism. It ends with a memory of the town of Membrilla, “the poorest” and “just” under the libertarian protection of 1937.
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