In this text based on a presentation delivered in 1985 at a conference on the POUM held in Madrid, the former leader of the Iberian Communist Youth, and the last general secretary of the POUM, reviews the history of the POUM and discusses the background of its leading militants in the CNT and Spanish communism, its leading role in the founding of the Workers Alliance and the October 1934 insurrection in Asturias, it founding in 1935, the Popular Front and the February 1936 elections, its fight against Stalinist repression and its persecution under the Negrín government during the civil war, and the fates of the party’s militants underground and in exile.
This was the first book in English that is devoted to the experiments in workers’ self-management, both urban and rural, which constituted one of the most remarkable social revolutions in modern history. Libertarian communism was truly the creation of workers and peasants a “spontaneous” creation, for which the groundwork had been laid by decades of struggle and education, experiment and thought.
Esperanto & Anarchism - Xavi Alcalde Examination of the links between Esperanto and the Libertarian movement, and a brief biographical sketch of one of the leading Esperanto speaking Anarchists Eduardo Vivancos.
Esperanto & Anarchism
“Paroli Esperanton estis iam esenca parto de anarkiismo.”
(There was a time when speaking Esperanto was an essential part of being an anarchist.)
When 97-year-old, Barcelona-born Eduardo Vivancos walks down the streets of Toronto where he has lived as an exile since 1954, he never comes across another Esperanto speaker.
However, when he first learned the language in June 1937, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, he thought that it was a natural element of the libertarian world.