of economic life and just as many attempts of a manifold variety on the part of the state, not to forget the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, have not produced a minimum of tolerable equilibrium for the broad masses, but have only aggravated the general unrest and have led us to the verge of physiological ruin and the threshold of another military hecatomb.” Against the background of a truly horrifying historical panorama—the rise of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, Stalinism in the Soviet Union and economic depression with massive permanent unemployment in the United States and Europe—the presentation offered the hope of the revolutionary proletariat: “In the universal collapse of ideas, parties, and systems, all that remains standing is the revolutionary proletariat with its program of reorganizationof the foundations of labor, of the economic and social reality and solidarity.” The optimism of the authors of the presentation saw the workers movement in Spain as strong enough and capable “of unleashing the final battle against the old edifice of capitalist morality, economy and politics”.

One may detect in the presenters’ definition of the revolution a profound critique of the puerile tactics, abandoned in October 1934, of revolutionary gymnastics and improvisation: “The social revolution cannot be understood as an audacious coup, along the lines of the Jacobin coups d’état, but will rather be the consequence and the result of the unfolding of an inevitable civil war whose duration cannot be predicted”. Not only did the presentation provide a surprisingly clear anticipation of the Civil War, which was