Let's Guillotine the Bourgeoisie Tonight Qomrades

Is formatted to be as unconvincing to the nonbeliever as possible

Shrine at a spring.

[Image description: a large group of women in a field, holding weaved baskets and doing the leftist salute.]

LIFE ON A COLLECTIVIZED FARM-TOWN.

Photos from Amposta (Catalonia), 1937.

Context: Amposta is a city in the southern tip of Catalonia. In the 1930s, anarchism was very popular among the working class of Catalonia, organized in the CNT-FAI union. In Amposta, most of the population was affiliated to the CNT, and so, following their anarchist ideals, the union collectivized the land and divided it among the poor farmers, turning the city of Amposta into the Collectivity of Amposta.

[ID: a meeting in front of the Collectivity’s offices. A group of people is meeting in the middle of the street in front of a building with a banner that reads “Offices. General collectivity”.]

The Collectivity of Amposta was organized through a series of committees, among which the Control committee coordinated the different sections, including Farmers, Rice Industry, Fishing Industry, Salt workers, Painters, Builders, Bakers, Cattle workers, Wood, Poultry, Grocery stores and Exchange.

[ID: in the center of an empty street or square, there’s a big pile of rice. A group of women and a few men filling are their woven baskets with rice.]

[ID: a group of men working in the rice fields.]

[ID: a group of people working in the field using a threshing machine.]

[ID: women carrying rice sheaves.]

[ID: men carrying sacks to a carriage.]

[ID: the sewing room. Many women are sewing together in the same room, where they have sewing supplies and at east one sewing machine. In the back there’s three men, not working but talking to some of the women.]

Amposta is just one example, but collectivization took place all across Catalonia, reason why this period of our history is known as “Revolutionary Catalonia”. The workers organized themselves into militias when the fascists in the Spanish army, led by general Francisco Franco, gave a coup d’etat in 1936. Even without the help of any foreign powers (only the USSR sold some old weapons to the Republic that was fighting fascism), the militias resisted for years against the fascist Spanish army, that Franco led with the support of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, who sent troops and tried out on our population the bombings, weapons and strategies that they later used in the Second World War.

The workers’ society came to an end in 1939, when the fascists ultimately won the war and occupied all the territories that still nowadays are under Spanish occupation.

On the 17th of July 1936, the fascists in the Spanish army started a coup against the democratically-elected Republic government in Melilla (one of the Spanish-controlled cities in the coast of Northern Africa). This coup spread to the Iberian peninsula the next day, July 18th. Catalonia was one of the places with a strongest resistance (together with the Valencian Country and Madrid city), which managed to stop the coup in their homelands thanks to the workers' antifascist organisations (anarchist, pro-Catalan, and communist unions, parties, social centres, and other grassroots organisations).

From the places where the coup had been successful, the fascists kept trying to expand their dictatorial rule through military invasion of everything they considered should be Spain, met with resistance. This is how the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was started.

With the emergencies of war, workers saw the need and opportunity to create an equal society based on the principles of anarchism. Factories and farms were collectivised, luxury hotels and restaurants were turned into shelters and community kitchens, and the mansions of the bourgeoisie and nobility who were fleeing to fascist-controlled areas were shared by working class families. The hope, cheerfulness, and conscience of collaborating with the creation of a better future for all is what explains why people look so happy in the photos taken in the earliest days of the war in Catalonia. Workers excitedly took up arms to go fight against fascism and assist the creation of the future.

The other European countries signed a pact of no intervention, saying that it was an "internal affair" and they would not assist the legitimate democratically-elected government against the army who wanted to impose a fascist dictatorship. Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy violated the pact and strongly helped Franco, trying out new weaponry (specially aerial bombing of civilian villages, towns, and cities) for the first time, techniques which some years later they used against the civilians of those same democratic countries who had refused to help fight fascism, during the Second World War (1939-1945). The only country who gave some help was the USSR, but with nowhere near as much involvement as the fascists. Still, thousands of antifascist volunteers came to join the International Brigades.

The war was very unequal when it comes to the resources, weaponry, and international support of its sides. In the end, the anarchist dream of an equal society with respect and dignity for all came to an end with the fascists' victory in the war, giving way to a nightmare 40-year-long fascist dictatorship that killed, jailed, and tortured the opposition, where speaking leftist ideas set a danger to your life, where speaking our languages (Catalan, Basque, Galician, Aranese, Asturian) was forbidden, where the imposition of Catholicism and women's control was absolute. A regime of terror and psychological control that has left many of our older relatives still unable to speak of parts of their life without breaking down.

We have never recovered from everything that was lost. The lives, the hopes and dreams that were cut short, the children that were stolen by the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, the interiorized self-hatred of national minorities where many have been left to believe we have no place in the modern world and must completely assimilate and abandon our culture for the supposedly superior Spanish one, the workers' organisations' buildings and libraries and budgets that were given to the Church or burned down, the records of our history and language and literature that were purposely destroyed, the trauma always present in the ones who were arrested, tortured, publicly humiliated, even the children beaten by the teachers for being heard speaking their mother tongue. The institutions that are still inheritors of the fascist ones: police, judicial system, the main Spanish political parties, the companies whose owners are as rich and powerful as they are because of their implication with the dictatorship. The way that Spain is, still, a fascist state.

And yet, the memory of the Social Revolution has lived on, same as our language has. Sometimes whispered at home or at clandestine meetings, sometimes shouted in the squares and recklessly at the police at the torture cells. It has inspired people all around the world. Now, with a global rise of the far-right again which has also reached here and many young men turning to it, it is a time to remember what happened, what can be done, and what we cannot ever let happen again.

-> Phonics For Adults <-

According to Wikipedia, it works by hidden rubber mallets on the naturally-musical stalactites that tourguides have been knocking on for over a century. The guy who made the organ may have gotten the idea when his son whacked his head on a stalactite.

Here’s a video. It is hauntingly beautiful.

https://youtu.be/HsKUUn29tSs