Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
simply and completely. There was, in January, not even a system
of rationing in Barcelona. Workers were simply left to get their
bread, with wages which had hardly changed since May, at
increased prices, as well as they could. In practice it meant that
the women had to form queues from four o'clock in the morn
ing onwards. The resentment in the working-class districts was
naturally acute, the more so as the scarcity of bread rapidly
increased after Comorera had taken office. 89
In short, the workers of Barcelona were not merely giving way (Q "feelings of
resentment and of somehow having been cheated" when they learned of "the
unsuspected complexity of modern society." Rather, they had good reason (Q
believe that they were being cheated, by the old dog with the new collar.
George Orwell's observations are also highly relevant:
Everyone who has made twO visits, at intervals of months, ro
Barcelona during the war has remarked upon the extraordinary
changes that rook place in it. And curiously enough, whether
they went there first in August and again in January, or, like
myself, first in December and again in April, the thing they said
was alway.s the same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished.
No doubt ro anyone who had been there in August, when
the blood was scarcely dry in the streets and militia were quartered
in the small hotels, Barcelona in December would have
seemed bourgeois; to me, fl."esh from England, it was liker to a
workers' city than anything I had conceived possible. Now [in
April] the tide had rolled back. Once again it was an ordinary
city, a little pinched and chipped by war, but with no ourward
sign of workingclass predominance .... Fat prosperous men, ele
gam women, and sleek cars were everywhere .... The officers of
the new Popular Army, a type that had scarcely existed when I
left Barcelona, swarmed in surprising numbers ...[wearing] an
elegant khaki uniform with a tight waist, like a British Army
officer's uniform, only a little more so. I do not suppose that
more than one in twenty of them had yet been to the front, but
all of them had automatic pistols strapped to their belts; we, at
the front, could not get pistols for love or money .... '" A deep
change had come over the town. There were twO facts that were
the keynote of all else. One was that the people-the civil population-had
lost much of their interest in the war; the other
was that the normal division of society into rich and poor, upper
class and lower class, was reassening itself.90
55
'Orwell had JUSt returned from the Ara g on fro nt, where he had been serving with the POUM
militia in an area heavily dominated by left-wing (POUM and anarchist) troops.