Barcelona 1936: a Workers’ Revolution

Abstract

What would a revolution look like? How would people power and workers’ power operate? Of course, it will partly depend on circumstances but we can also learn from past experience. In this article Andy Durgan offers a vivid picture of one the greatest actual examples of workers’ power: Barcelona in 1936. His account brings out the immense radicalism, energy and creativity of a risen people while not losing sight of the point made by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme that socialism, in its initial phase, ‘as it emerges from capitalist society... is still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges’.