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Saturday, January 18, 2014

Ready for Revolution


AK Press snapped these neat pics of my cover design for Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938 by Agustín Guillamón. I think it came out well, but even better is the book. From what I've read of the text (and Barry Pateman's excellent introduction), it's well worth getting. As Stuart Christie blurb notes:

Agustín Guillamón’s latest work, Ready for Revolution, is one of the most illuminating and stimulating books on the CNT to appear since José Peirats’s The CNT in the Spanish Revolution. The structure and role of the union’s defense and action groups is of crucial importance not only in understanding the anarchist core of the CNT unions during that pivotal period in Spain’s history, but it provides today’s industrial, commercial, environmental, and social activists with useful organizational insights—a must have.

 Barry makes a similar point in the introduction:

Chapter 11, “The Barcelona FAI Radicalized by the Defense Committees,” is a wonderful opportunity for the reader to see the various groups discussing the situation they find themselves in. It’s rare to find this type of material in English that is not written from memory and in reflection long after the events described. The discussion leaps off the page and is full of contradiction, confusion, affirmation, and certainty, all served with a high level of sophisticated perception. There is an immediacy to it, not least because these are not the voices of the more sophisticated speakers and writers who we are used to reading, but those of the ordinary militant... This is radical history at its finest as the anarchists attempt to deal with the actions of the Stalinists, their other supposed allies, and the behavior of the CNT’s “higher committees.”

The book is not scared to take a critical look at the events of the Spanish Revolution, and as a result, brings fresh insights to this inspiring period of working class struggle.

You can get your very own copy or e-book here: http://www.akpress.org/ready-for-revolution.html

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