Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 1. Monday, February 25, 1963

[introduction]

Anarchist ideas on factory organisation and village communities worked in Spain during the civil war, said Werner Droescher, who fought for the anarchists.

Now a lecturer at Auckland University, he was speaking to the Anarchist Association.

Droescher went to Spain as a "non-political radical." as he described himself. A German, he detested the Nazi regime but was himself politically unaligned. When the Civil War broke out his sympathies lay with the opponents of fascism—including liberals, radicals, socialists of many varieties, communists and the arnarchists, who at the height of their power numbered about two millions.

Like author George Orwell, he enlisted with the POUM—a Marxist group with trotskyite sympathies. His platoon was attached to an anarchist column—an ideology introduced to Spain by an emissary of the famous, revolutionary. Michael Bakunin.

The great mass of the Spanish workers enlisted in the CNT whose adherence to syndicalis' principles (worker control in todays parlance) forced Marx to terminate the International. This anarchist-inspired trade union was; Spain's largest, but its greatest strength was in Catalonia. Where most of its million members wen concentrated.

Increasing communist influence brought about a suppression of the POUM and Droescher found himself fully incorporated with the anarchist column.

A student, he was appointed as a teacher and thus afforded a position of independence from which he could form impartia' Judgments of anarchism.

What did they believe in? They were, on the one hand, inspired by a tremendous hatred of Roman Catholicism which had so hypo critically overthrown Christianity while, on the other hand, they embraced the principles of mutual aid.