Chapter XVI Barrack Room Lawyer Again; Twilight of Francoism; The Angry Brigade; Bitov What You Fancy; The Brief Morning of Anarchy; Trials and Tribulations Barrack Room Lawyer Again When the Center was established in Haverstock Hill, Miguel and I plunged into a series of meetings up and down the country, and throughout Europe, speaking on behalf of the Spanish prisoners. We encountered a lot of enthusiasm on behalf of the Resistance, and this coincided with a rise in industrial resistance at home, so I was kept busy. Fleet Street printworkers usually worked a seven-day week, and a lot of my spare time was devoted to bringing out Black Flag and working for the Black Cross, all voluntary. It may sound impossible, but a lot can be achieved with a laidback approach. For instance, I would take weeks on end without days off and then have them in lieu, traveling to Cologne or Copenhagen, and combining a holiday with a tour spe...
The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936Preface These essays are less an analysis of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War of 1936-39 than an evocation of the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries. Although they contain a general overview and evaluation of the Anarchist and Anarchosyndicalist movements (the two should be clearly distinguished) in the three-year struggle at the end of the 1930s, they are not intended to be a full account of those complex events. It is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish Revolution was the farthest-reaching movement that the Left ever produced, for reasons the essays that follow will make clear. The Spanish proletariat and peasantry, led largely by Anarchist militants whose names will never be known to us, strained the limits of what we in the 1930s called "proletarian socialism" and went appreciably beyond them. Far more than the leaders of the Anarchosyndicalist National Confederation of Labor and the Iberian Anarchist Fede...