George Orwell arrived in Barcelona at the tail end of 1936, just months into the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Long before claiming iconic literary status for his anti-authoritarian themes and unflinching criticism of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the thirty-three year old writer had come to Spain, in his words, “with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but . . . had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.”

The atmosphere Orwell encountered was that of a sweeping social revolution carried out by the Spanish working class’s rank and file. At the start of the tumultuous events of July 1936, which plunged the country into civil war, farm and factory had been spontaneously commandeered by armed and organized workers across vast swaths of Spain. Abortion was legalized and women enjoyed a newfound liberation from the shackles of traditional marriage. The resulting period has been labeled “the greatest experiment in worker self-management Western Europe has ever seen.”

Having dropped into the heart of revolutionary Spain in the region of Catalonia, Orwell went on to record his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, his first-hand account of a war and revolution. In its pages, he reflects on the indelible impression of being, for the first time, “in a town where the working class was in the saddle”: