The Spanish Revolution wasn’t spontaneous. The clandestine armed wing of the anarchist workers’ movement became the building block and rampart in the fight against fascism, church, and state. Tensions and betrayals on the streets of Barcelona were more complex than simple narratives suggest, and Ready for Revolution places readers in the middle of the fray. 

“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.” —Stuart Christie, author of We the Anarchists: A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927–1937

Agustín Guillamón is an independent historian, editor of Balance, a magazine dedicated to new research on the Spanish Revolution, and the author of The Friends of Durruti Group, 1937–1939 and The Committees Revolution.

Paul Sharkey has made a vast body of anarchist texts available in English.