May Days
Barcelona May Days is a term covering the events between May 3 and May 8 1937, when factions on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War engaged each other in violent street battles in the city of Barcelona (Catalonia).
Clashes began when units of the Guardia Civil — under the influence of the Stalinist Communist Party of Spain and its local wing, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia— attempted to take over an Anarchist-run telephone building in Barcelona. The telephone workers fought back, sparking a city-wide conflict. Five days of street fighting ensued, with Anarchist workers and their allies (Friends of Durruti Group), supporters of the non-Stalinist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), building barricades and exchanging fire with the Guardia Civil.
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) workers were eventually persuaded into a compromise by Juan García Oliver, amongst others. The Republican government sent 10,000 Assault Guard troops to Barcelona to quell the fighting. The ultimate result of the battle was the further erosion of worker control of the city and the consolidation of government power over the major labor organizations in Catalonia, the CNT and its subgroup, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (known collectively as the CNT/FAI).
The British author George Orwell describes these events, which he witnessed and took part in, in his famous book Homage to Catalonia.
Communist perspective
The Communists were the most powerful faction in the crumbling Republican government and were bitter enemies of the Anarchists. Their perspective is expressed in the memoirs of leading Communist Party figure Dolores Ibárruri (more commonly known as La Pasionaria). She described the street-fighting in the context of a
- fascist anarchotrotskyist putsch ("anarchotrotskyist" is meant to include the POUM, a faction which the communist accused of being Trotskyist, while Trotsky himself repeatedly has attacked POUM and POUM itself resented trotskysm).
The purpose Ibárruri ascribes to the events is an attempt at shutting down the Republican government on orders from General Francisco Franco, acting in tandem with Adolf Hitler. According to her, the violence was the culmination of an Anarchist plot which included plans to stop the movement of trains and cut all telegraph and telephone lines; she cites an
- order [from the Catalan government] to its forces to control the telephone building and disarm all people whom they encounter in the streets without proper authorization
as the aim of the Anarchist plan (Memorias de Dolores Ibárruri, p. 383). She does not provide any evidence to support these claims, which were widely held by fellow Party members at the time but have since been discredited.
The communist party alleged the anarchist "putsch" to be motivated by their desire to monopolize the political power and resentment to a centralized military command, which was saught for by the communist and its ally the catalan government under Companys.