Gaston Leval | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Pierre Robert Piller (1895-10-20)20 October 1895 Saint-Denis, Paris,France |
| Died | 8 April 1978(1978-04-08) (aged 82) Saint-Cloud, Paris, France |
| Movement | Anarcho-syndicalism |
Gaston Leval (20 October 1895 – 8 April 1978) was a Frenchanarcho-syndicalist, combatant and historian of theSpanish Revolution.
Leval was born in 1895,[1] by the name Pierre Piller inSaint-Denis,[2] the son of a FrenchCommunard.[3] DuringWorld War I, he fled France to Spain, in order to avoidconscription.[4] There he joined the local anarcho-syndicalist trade union, theConfederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).[3] In 1921, Leval traveled to Moscow to attend the3rd World Congress of the Communist International, together with the CNT's Spanish delegation. When he returned from the Congress, he argued that theBolsheviks had transformed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" into a "dictatorship over the proletariat".[5] The rise of thedictatorship of Primo de Rivera forced him to leave Spain for Argentina, where he would live until 1936.[2]
Following the outbreak of theSpanish Civil War, he returned to Spain and joined theconfederal militias.[1] He was deployed to theAragon front, where he fought in the sectors ofZaragoza andHuesca.[2] In November 1936, he was sent toMálaga, where he was put on thewar committee. There he reported strong local support for the CNT-FAI and popular distrust with the Spanish Republican government, which he claimed to have "systematically sabotaged" the war effort by failing to provide the city with weapons or ammunition.[2]
Leval then returned to Aragon, where he lived among the local agrarian collectives and reported on their activities.[1] He wrote that labour was done collectively and agricultural produce was held undercommon ownership, with all inhabitants of the collective deciding on its distribution for consumption or for exchange.[3] He described the Aragonese collectives as the first mass experiment in the distribution of resources "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", with some villages using alocal currency, while others hadabolished money entirely.[6] He likewise outlined the reorganisation of the industrial economy along the lines ofanarcho-syndicalism, in which different industrial sectors were federated together under one administration.[7] Leval claimed that, in total, 75% ofsmallholdings in Aragon had been voluntarily collectivised.[3] In the summer of 1937, he reported on the forced dissolution of the collectives by the Republican authorities. He reported toLe Libertaire that "low politics" had been the main cause of the Republican military defeats.[2]
He decided to leave Spain and returned to France, where he was arrested for his desertion during World War I and sentenced to four years in prison.[4] By the outbreak of theMay 1968 events in France, Leval claimed that the anarchist movement had reached a historic low point in both its numbers and theoretical developments.[8] Leval died in 1978.[3]
