In her account of a recent visit to Iceland [''News From Nowhere,' October] Rebecca Solnit makes a brief reference to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 and thereby wanders astray. The "loyalists" (usually spelled with an upper-case L) did not "deploy" direct democracy in their fight against the right-wing military coup of Francisco Franco. The forces who defined themselves as the Loyalists were loyal to the elected governments in Madrid and Barcelona, and loyal as well to preserving capitalist property relations. The directly democratic forms of social organization Solnit aludes to came into being as the result of a mass revolutionary movement spearheaded by Spain's anarcho-syndicalist union, the CNT. This movement was antagonistic to the class interests of those who defined themselves as Loyalists. An awareness of this antagonism of interests was general throughout Republican-held territory during the war, and the Loyalist forces used every method at their disposal, from subterfuge to police terror, to undo the social gains of the revolutionary movement, strip it of effective power and restore capitalist law and order.

The end-run around the conventional decision-making structures of representative government that took place in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War wasn't about opting for a kinder, gentler management strategy for market society, or about choosing direct democracy over representative democracy. In July 1936 several million working people attacked the fundamental social relations of capitalism -- wage labor, money and commodity production -- and began to collectivize the economy and transform society to meet their needs. This social revolution and its subsequent supression was movingly described by George Orwell in "Homage to Catalonia." The world of revolutionary anarchism in Barcelona seventy-two years ago is a far cry from today's global cyber-consumer dystopia. But as the international market order lurches toward ever-greater mayhem and ecological collapse, an awareness of the high points of past efforts to abolish social relations based on market exchange is a more useful point of departure in a fight for liberatory social change than the small-is-beautiful shibboleths pursued in vain in Iceland by Rebecca Solnit.



Kevin Keating

San Francisco

(Also, see "Stalinist Spanish Civil War Artwork Vandalized in San Francisco" on various places on the internet)