Els fets de Maig del 1937.  The events of May 1937

Since the military rebellion fail in July 1936 Barcelona and Catalonia had been under the control of the workers’ militias, especially the anarchist union CNT-FAI, but also the socialist UGT. After, the anarchist leaders met with Companys (president of Catalonia) and because of the meeting, the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Catalonia was created.

The CNT-FAI divided militia brigades organized in columns, as Durruti Column. The other organizations (UGT, PSUC ERC, PSOE, PCE, POUM…) they all went to fight to the front. The militias often paid more attention to the guidelines of their own parties and trade unions than to the military commanders of the Republic.

Successive defeats on the Republican side throughout 1936 and the first half of 1937 suggested the necessity for a radical change in the Republican armed forces to win the war.

In addition, the only European power that helped (although very little) to the republican government was the Soviet Union, that caused a pro-Soviet movement within the republican government, which culminated with the appointment of Juan Negrin as the president of the Spanish Republic.

This fact, and the repeal of the militia system to replace it with a regular republican army, were the cause of outrage for the sectors anarchists, libertarians and Trotskyites, especially the CNT-FAI and POUM (POUM) of Trotskyist tendency.

The CNT-FAI and POUM felt persecuted and despised within the republican system. Anarchists (theoretically apolitical) defended the Republic from the beginning to fight against fascism and liberate the working class through revolutionary tactics.

However, the government sector, consisting of several socialist parties, communists and ERC wanted to postpone the social revolution after the war, "first win the war, then we will make the revolution."

This accumulated tension brooked out in May 1937 in Barcelona’s streets. On the 4rt of May, armed men of the Government and the republican Government, supervised by members of the PSUC, occupied the phone’s building of Barcelona, located between Plaza Catalunya and Las Ramblas (building that still exists today). The CNT-FAI responded identically to the aggression government is Adir, with the use of violence.

Telefonica was then a vital and strategic military orders and directives to inform executives. That controlled communications long monopolized power.
The government response was immediate. Republican Armed Forces and the Mossos d'Esquadra dug into Catalonia Square and University Square, while the militants were anarchists and libertarians to become strong in the Raval and the Gothic Quarter. 

                                                     La Rambla during the events of May 1937

The streets of Barcelona broke a genuine civil war within the civil war, a series of clashes between members of the POUM and the CNT against the forces of the government of the Republic.

The confrontation lasted a few days, until May 7, but the scar left was enormous persecution of members of the CNT and the POUM, proclamation of a state of emergency, suppression of freedom of expression and training a new government even more prone to the directives of Moscow.

But above all, think that the facts of May stage the date of caducity of the democratic project republican to the peninsula, the maximum expression of the inability to share a political and social project based in the understanding and the mutual respect.

For last, it is necessary to highlight that the big benefited of the internal disputes of the Republic was not any other that the side francist. I think that Franco did not win the war to the fields of battle, if no that it was the Republic what lost the war, especially because of the collapse of a model of democratic management and the self-evident inability to do common front against the military and the fascist threat.