Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 18:18:15 +1000
From: Steve Wright <pmargin-AT-xchange.anarki.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: doomed to repeat the past?


Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:

>
> I would have liked to some time get the time to read more
> of the wealth of material in Spanish on the CNT in general
> as well as the particular period here in question. But I
> have read enough, and talked to enough Spanish anarchists
> with an extremly detailed knowledge of this period, that I
> find reason to question if it is really posssible to get
> an in-depth understandings of this time by relying pri-
> marily on what has been written or translated into English.

One of the reasons why _Workers Against Work_ was so interesting to read is that
it was the first social history of the mid-1930s in Spain that I had seen, apart
from _Blood of Spain_. And even the latter tends, like so many of the histories
I have seen of the Spanish anarchists, to focus upon the world views of
self-defined militants.

So I don't doubt that you are right about the problems of what is available in
English - the accounts that I have seen over the years, pro and anti, tend to
offer a narrowly political history of the FAI and CNT (and often only the peak
bodies of these). I think a similar thing happens as soon as one has access to
Italian language material from and about the Autonomia of the 1970s - you get a
very different sense of things than what English-language sources provide . . .

Steve



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