14. The Conquest of Aragon¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Chapter 14 — The Conquest of Aragon¶
This chapter chronicles the revolutionary transformation of Aragon and its subsequent violent dismantling by the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc, presenting it as a microcosm of the broader betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Aragon is depicted as the sole province wrested from fascist control by force of arms, a victory achieved almost exclusively by the CNT and POUM militias within days of the Barcelona uprising. The chapter argues that the military success was inseparable from social liberation: under Durruti’s leadership, every captured village was immediately converted into a revolutionary fortress. Land titles and mortgages were burned, large estates were collectivised, and village committees were democratically elected. This fusion of military advance and social transformation ensured that every liberated village would fight to the death to defend its newly won land, welding the militias into an invincible force.
The chapter provides detailed evidence of the collectives’ material success. At least three-quarters of the land was tilled collectively, with only ten of four hundred collectives adhering to the UGT. Individual farming was permitted only if no hired labour was employed. Agricultural production increased by thirty to fifty per cent, and enormous surpluses were voluntarily turned over to the government for the front. A family-wage system was introduced, paying producers according to need — a principle the chapter identifies as central to Marx’s ‘to each according to his needs’. This is used as a polemical weapon against the Stalinists, who hypocritically contrasted Aragon’s wage disparities with the Soviet Union, despite the USSR under Stalin being infinitely further from this goal than under Lenin and Trotsky. The chapter concedes a weakness: the family wage encouraged skilled technicians to migrate to areas with greater wage differentiation, but notes that ideological conviction among libertarian professionals temporarily compensated.
The narrative then pivots to the destruction of this achievement. The chapter argues that the revolution’s manifest benefits were irrelevant to the bourgeois-Stalinist programme, which required the liquidation of every vestige of social revolution to win favour with Anglo-French imperialism. After Negrin came to power, a three-month propaganda barrage preceded the military invasion of Aragon on 11 August 1937. The Council of Aragon was dissolved and replaced by a Governor-General operating under reactionary legislation. The real work was done by Stalinist military forces under Enrique Lister, who forcibly dissolved elected municipal councils, broke up collectives, and jailed their leaders. Joaquin Ascaso, the Council’s president, was imprisoned on the absurd charge of stealing jewels, with the government censoring news of his arrest and refusing to disclose his whereabouts. The chapter compares this assault to Lopez Ochoa’s subjection of Asturias in 1934.
The chapter savagely dissects the Stalinist justification for the invasion. It reproduces the fantastic allegations published in Frente Rojo — that the Council had installed fascists as mayors, hoarded vast arsenals for a counter-revolutionary coup, and terrorised peasants into collectives — and dismisses them as police-minded poppycock. The rebuttal is devastating: if the charges were true, why was Ascaso released on 18 September without trial? The chapter also exposes the subsequent alibi, advanced by Ralph Bates in the New Republic, that the dissolution was necessary to reorganise the Aragon front. This, it argues, was a cover for the fact that the central government, which had controlled the front since May, had produced only disastrous offensives. The chapter closes by promising to examine the military question itself, framing the conquest of Aragon as part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the revolution from within.