I spend 2,5 years on reading this book. Not because it is very complicated, but because it is big (almost 700 pages) and I was reading it non-regulary.
That’s “Collectives of the Spanish revolution” by Gaston Leval, the guy who participated directly in this greatest anarchist experiment. He describes the structure of the cooperatives and agricultural collectives, the work of the factories and the pluralities of the forms of economic organizing. Watching on this all makes clear that the anarchism of Spanish revolution was not ideal, but it was certainly the best that could be offered for this historical period for Spanish society.
This book will make you sure: anarchism is real. Abolishing of money is real. Non-capitalist, mutual-benefit economy is real.
A special attention was payed to a betrayal of stalinists, who played a crucial role in destroying the anarchist order and giving up the Spain to Franco.
This is the quotation I have chosen for you:
“What is in the core? The vivid creativeness of the masses. Without organic preparation no social and truly socialist revolution is possible.
Our constructive revolutionary achievement was destroyed by the Francoist victory and by the sabotage and betrayal of Stalin and his agents. But
it remains in history as an example and a proof that it is possible to avoid the dictatorial stages when the capacity to organise the new society quickly is present; and dispense with the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat or more exactly the revolutionary party usurping the representation or delegation of the proletariat which those drunk with power — their power to which the people must bow — persist in wanting to impose on us under pain of massacring us as counter-revolutionaries. Just as in their time Marx and Blanqui, and more recently Lenin and his henchmen and all dictatorial maniacs, they have riot the faintest idea of how to reorganise social life after capitalism. But just as Lenin did, they would very quickly organise a police force, a censorship, and in due course concentration camps.
A new way has been indicated, an achievement which emerges as a beacon light of which all revolutionaries who seek mankind’s emancipation and not its subjection to a new slavery will have to follow. If they do, yesterday’s defeat will be largely compensated for by tomorrow’s victories”.
