Showing posts with label spanish revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spanish revolution. Show all posts

Monday, October 14, 2019

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- On The 80th Anniversary Of The Entry Of The International Brigades Into The Spanish Civil War All Honor To The Memory Of The "Premature" Anti-Fascist Fighters-Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's Spanish Civil War Salute "Jarama Valley"

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the International Brigades and their role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's Spanish Civil War Salute "Jarama Valley"

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

"Jarama Valley" Lyrics- Woody Guthrie

there's a valley in spain called Jarama
its a place that we all know so well
it was there that we fought against the fascists
we saw a peacful valey turn to hell

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

we were men of a laken battelion
we're proud of the fight that we made
we know that you people love the valley
we're remember a laken vrigade

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

you will never find peace with these fascists
you'll never find friends such as we
so remember that valley iof jarama
and the people that'll set that valley free

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

all this world is like this valley called jarama
so green and so bright and so fair
no fascists can dwell in our valley
nor breathe in our new freedoms air

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

Friday, July 12, 2019

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- *Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- Woody Guthrie's Spanish Civil War Salute "Jarama Valley"

Click on the title to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Woody Guthrie performing his Spanish Civil War tribute, "Jarama Valley".


In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

"Jarama Valley" Lyrics- Woody Guthrie

there's a valley in spain called Jarama
its a place that we all know so well
it was there that we fought against the fascists
we saw a peacful valey turn to hell

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

we were men of a laken battelion
we're proud of the fight that we made
we know that you people love the valley
we're remember a laken vrigade

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

you will never find peace with these fascists
you'll never find friends such as we
so remember that valley iof jarama
and the people that'll set that valley free

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

all this world is like this valley called jarama
so green and so bright and so fair
no fascists can dwell in our valley
nor breathe in our new freedoms air

from this valley they say we are going
but dont hasten to bid us adue
even though we lost the battle at jarama
we'll set this valley free before we're through

Wednesday, November 07, 2018

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-*"The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION" by Victor Serge

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives and his acclaimed "Year One Of The Russian Revolution". Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.

YEAR ONE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION by Victor Serge

Book Review 

Present At The Creation 

I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. See his The Case of Comrade Tulayev. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.

The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.

Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And then stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated that Russia as the weakest link in the international capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its own road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.

The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as, at best, utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the Russian Question as a factor in world politics on a day to day basis anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.

Some of the books reviewed here may not be readily available at local libraries and bookstores. Check Amazon.com/books for availability there, both new and used.

Saturday, October 27, 2018

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *"THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LEON TROTSKY" by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives. Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.

BOOK REVIEW

HOMAGE TO A FALLEN REVOLUTIONARY


As far as I know Victor Serge’s biography of Leon Trotsky was the first comprehensive evaluation from a left-wing perspective of the Bolshevik leader’s life and work after his death. From that perspective it is valuable for two reasons. Serge himself was a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 and witnessed many of the events described in the book. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism that formed in the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International in the 1920’s.

Additionally, Serge wrote this book in collaboration with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova who provides many of the personal insights into Trotsky’s life, work and behavior that round out Serge’s historical narrative. This is a task she also performed in Trotsky’s memoir My Life and there is some overlap of the material used. Most importantly this biography fills out the last ten years of Trotsky’s life not covered in his memoir. If a reader wants a rewarding insider’s view of the whirlwind of Trotsky’s life from prophetic rise to leadership to subsequent fall and isolation for his steadfast beliefs I would recommend reading both books.

The main task Serge sets himself here is to place the dramatic and ultimately fateful events of Trotsky’s life in the content of his role in the peaks and valleys of the Russian revolutionary movement from the turn of the 20th century until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Those included his leadership of the defeated Revolution of 1905, his internationalist fight against World War I, his organizing the October Revolution, his creation of the Red Army in the Civil War against the Whites, his various positions as a Soviet official, the defeat of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition by Stalin and his henchmen and his failure to create a viable leftwing alternate to Stalinist rule in while in exile. Just to summarize these highlights of his career indicates that we are dealing with a very big task and a very big historical figure. Although Serge had broken politically with Trotsky several years before this biography was written he senses this and mainly lets Trotsky’s accomplishments and mistakes speak for themselves.

As I noted in my review of Trotsky’s My Life (see March 2006 archives) many of the events depicted in this biography such as the seemingly arcane disputes within the Russian revolutionary movement, the very real attempts of the Western Powers to overthrow the Bolsheviks by force of arms in the Civil War after the Bolshevik seizure of power and the struggle of the various tendencies inside the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International in the 1920’s discussed in the book may not be familiar to today's audience. Nevertheless one can take the measure of the man from the strength of Trotsky's commitment to his cause and the fight to preserve his personal and political integrity against overwhelming odds. As the organizer of the October Revolution, creator of the Red Army in the Civil War, theorist, orator, writer and fighter Trotsky was one of the most feared men of the early 20th century to friend and foe alike. Today, the natural audience for the book, especially those trying to find a way out of the impasse that the international labor movement as the victim of a one-sided class war finds itself in, needs to critically assess Trotsky’s life and times. This book will help.

********************

Victor Serge 1936

Letter to Leon Trotsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Victor Serge, La Lutte contre le stalinisme. Maspéro, Paris, 1977;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

August 10, 1936

Dear Leon Davidovich

Excuse me for not yet having responded to your letter of July 30. I've twice started to and had to stop. I'm overwhelmed with work and don’t know what is what.

And given the fact that despite it all there are no essential disagreements between us (our appreciation of the personal qualities and work capacities of the comrades of RP[1] can’t be considered essential) we can put these subjects off for later. It’s not you that I accuse of sectarianism, but our entire movement. Alas, I think I can prove this very convincingly. But work now permits us to escape from sectarianism! What a shame and even how disgusting it is to see how much paper is blackened concerning the personal chicanery of Molinier, when we haven’t found the means to publish even one pamphlet on our comrades thrown into Stalinist prisons! What! Hundreds of French proletarian comrades know of the disputes about Molinier, but they don’t know the names of Iakovin and Pankratov! This is truly monstrous. But the rising wave of the revolutionary movement will sweep away these monstrosities. Right now something very comforting is occurring. Everyone is rushing to Spain. I just received a desperate letter from Ver[eeken]: all his young people are leaving, they're all en route! He asks that I intervene so that some remain here. I'll try. In Paris it’s the same thing. Two Italian comrades from Marseilles were killed near Saragossa. (And it is again impossible to work; what a filthy article La Lutte Ouvrière dedicated to them.) Rosmer has left. And among the Socialists close to us Collinet. Louzon, too. Anarchists from all over are going there en masse.

It was only after long conversations that I was able to hold back my son (sixteen, he’s quite young). I sent a proposal to the International Secretariat on the subject of the anarchists and the syndicalists. We must ward off the serious conflict which those Spanish Stalinist canaille are mixed up in. Here’s the declaration Hernandez [2] made to the press: “This revolution will be a bourgeois revolution. In no way will it be a social revolution (sic). We'll manage to have done with the anarchists.” (sic, newspaper of August 8). In Barcelona the anarchists killed the Socialist bureaucrat Trillas. Among them those who say: “We're not going to let the Stalinists do whatever they want, we'll kill them first,” are very strong. It’s possible that a civil war will break out in the proletarian ranks! The Spanish anarchists are uncontestably in the majority in Catalonia, an industrial region of decisive importance. Here is the line I propose to choose and the appeal I propose to make:

1. We revolutionary Marxists, considering the reinforcement of the revolution’s rear indispensable, proclaim that the dictatorship of the proletariat must and will mean true freedom for the workers. We will fight along with you in order to assure the freedom of thought and tendencies within the revolution, and solemnly vow to do everything to ensure that no bureaucrat of any color transforms the revolution into a prison of the Stalinist type for the workers.

2. We are partisans of total democracy, and at the same time of total discipline in combat and in production.

3. We consider you anarchists and syndicalists class brothers and devoted revolutionaries and propose to you the maximum collaboration, and at the same time implacable criticism and an ideological struggle in a fraternal atmosphere.

In the name of the IVth International we are the only ones able to speak in this way to the anarchists and the syndicalists. Neither the Socialists like Caballero nor the Stalinists can act in this way. In this we have an immense superiority, which could play a salutary role.

Our press must adopt this line. (The anarchist Ascaso met an exemplary death. Why was our press silent on this! I tried to the best of my ability to repair this error.)

Your last letter leads me to believe that you didn’t receive one of my letters, written by hand in Russian, in which I announced to you that my Soviet citizenship (as well as that of my family) was taken from me, which for the moment prevents me from going to Paris. It would be quite “strange” if this letter were to not reach you. Keep me up to date on this.

I'll go to Paris when I receive the papers allowing me to move around. And I'll come to see you without delay. I'll write you expressly on this subject.

In connection with the events in Spain I proposed to the comrades that they energetically launch the slogan of worker’s control of the army:

1. As a propaganda slogan instituting the duality of powers in the heat of events;

2. And most of all as a propaganda slogan which will permit the unmasking of the adversary and will have the following practical application: every worker will consider himself in the army as a representative of worker’s control and demonstrate a maximum amount of vigilance.

The editor wants me to send him the translation[3] little by little. (I'm pleased by the completely novel way with which you pose the problem of the state. This is a great contribution on the theoretical plain.) I'll wait for your remarks before sending my first batch to the editor.

I strongly and cordially shake your hands, you and N.I.[4]


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnotes
1. La Révolution Prolétarienne, revue founded and Pierre Monatte and edited by Robert Louzon.

2. Jesus Hernandez, leader of the Spanish Communist Party.

3. Translation of the revolution betrayed.

4. Natalia Trotsky.

Friday, October 26, 2018

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- ***From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-On The Anniversary Year Of The Defeat Of The Spanish Revolution-"The Lessons Of Spain:The Last Warning"

Click on title to link to Leon Trotsky's seminal article on Spain written in 1937, "The Lessons Of Spain: The Last Warning". This should be read in conjunction with today's other entry on the POUM by the International Communist League (and link to Andy Durgan's POUM defensist article).

Markin commentary:

If the old military cliche about starting off a new war with the thinking of the last war in mind has any positive application it should apply to the lessons of the defeat of the Spanish revolution. In one of those ironies of history that are always slapping us in the face(and here I am thinking primarily of we Marxists) has any application Spain represents for the Western leftist militant labor movement, arguably, the last serious effort to, in its own name, struggle for state power. Hence, the lesson of Spain are the starting point for our present tasks. Dismiss Trotsky's analysis at your peril.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/xx/spain01.htm

Markin on the POUM


As a look at the archives of this blog will testify to, I have been interested, seriously interested, in drawing the lessons of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s since childhood. As many of the blog entries will also testify to as well, I have probably spend more time, with the exception of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Paris Commune of 1871, thinking through the problems of that struggle in Spain than any others. Why? Well, as not less than of an authority than the great Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky has pointed out, the situation in Spain during the 1930s posed the question of the creation of the second workers state point blank. In short, the Spanish working class was class conscious enough, Trotsky would argue more than the Russian working class of 1917, to carry out this task. I believed that proposition, in a much less sophisticated form than Trotsky’s, to be sure, well before I read his views on the situation. Why did it fail?

Obviously, depending on the point of view presented (or ax to grind) there are a million possible subjective and objective reasons that can be given for the failure. Some, such as the general European situation, the perfidious role of the Western democracies, the shortcomings of the various bourgeois governments are examples of situations that I had believed at one time to be the prime reasons. However, since I have come of political age, in short, have gone beyond the traditional liberal explanations for the failure in Spain I have looked elsewhere for an explanation.

That elsewhere hinged more on the role that the various working class organizations and their policies than the objective world situation or other factors that have been used to argue the impossibility of success. Again, some organizations came up short. For a long time I followed the reasoning, in a general sense at least, of Trotsky’s dictum, repeatedly argued out all through the 1930s, about the crisis of revolutionary leadership. With this proviso- for a long time, a very long time I absolved the POUM (Party Of Marxist Unification in English) and the Nin/Andrade leadership from political responsibility for the debacle, especially in Catalonia. I was more than happy to blame the Stalinists (blameworthy in the end on other grounds, without question), the vacillations of the Social Democrats (ditto the Stalinists) and the theoretical idiocies of the Anarchists. But not the POUM, after all they were the most honest revolutionaries in Spain (along with, perhaps, the Friends of Durritti). Honest I still believe they were but revolutionary in the Bolshevik sense. Hell, no.

The leading cause of that long time absolution of the POUM, initially in any case came from my reading of George Orwell’s “Homage To Catalonia”. Orwell found himself in a POUM military unit and spent much of his time in Spain before being wounded with that unit, as well around POUM organizations. Hey, they were fighting Franco, right? They had their own militias, right? That was enough for me for a while. But then the fatal mistake occurred many years ago. I read Trotsky’s work on Spain in the 1930s, “The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39, and, more importantly, the Trotsky/Nin correspondence in the appendix. No one who truly reads those documents and looks at the real POUM actions (including that left/right unification with friend Maurin to form the POUM in 1935) will ever be the same after. That is where every mistake that the POUM made becomes a veritable indictment against them.

Okay, so I got ‘religion’ on the POUM. So, as the linked article points out, why then, and now did serious leftist militants alibi this group. Well, read the article. But, bear this in mind, if those who defended the POUM and Nin/Andrade then, and now, are right that means that, subjectively they believe that Spain could not be a workers state in the 1930’s. That same subjectivity has led to their view of the Russian October revolution of 1917 as a failed experiment as well. But, my friends, such reasoning leaves only this conclusion. Outside the short-lived Paris Commune we have to go back to the revolutions of 1848 for our models of what is possible for the modern international working class to do. If that is the case then we better start thinking about a possibility that Trotsky pointed to in the 1930s- the working class may be organically incapable of ruling in its own name. As an orthodox Marxist I cringe at that notion. Better this- abandon this abject defense of the POUM and accept that, honest party that it may have been, however, in the final analysis it was a roadblock to socialist revolution in Spain.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Sunday, October 14, 2018

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Don Bateman-Georges Kopp and the POUM Militia

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

*********
Leon Trotsky
The Lessons of Spain:
The Last Warning
(1937)

Written: End of 1937
First Published: Socialist Appeal [New York], January 8th and 15th, 1938
Translated: Socialist Appeal
Transcription/HTML Markup: Matt Siegried
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 1999. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

All general staffs are studying closely the military operations in Ethiopia, in Spain and in the Far East in preparation for the great future war. The battles of the Spanish proletariat heat lightening flashes of the coming world revolution, should be no less attentively studied by the revolutionary staffs. Under this condition and this condition alone will the coming events not take us unawares.

Three ideologies fought – with unequal forces – in the so-called republican camp, namely, Menshevism, Bolshevism, and anarchism. As regards the bourgeois republican parties, they were without either independent ideas or independent political significance and were able to maintain themselves only by climbing on the backs of the reformists and Anarchists. Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that the leaders of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism did everything to repudiate their doctrine and virtually reduce its significance to zero. Actually two doctrines in the so-called republican camp fought – Menshevism and Bolshevism.

According to the Socialists and Stalinists, i.e., the Mensheviks of the first and second instances, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a united front with the “democratic” bourgeoisie was indispensable. From this point of view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy are not only premature but also fatal. Furthermore, on the agenda stands not the revolution but the struggle against insurgent Franco.

Fascism, however, is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletariat revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts.

The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda. Moreover, during the very first stages of the revolution, the Spanish workers themselves posed in practice not merely democratic problems but also purely socialist ones. The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy signifies in practice not a defense of the democratic revolution but a repudiation of it. Only through an overturn in agrarian relations could the peasantry, the great mass of the population, have been transformed into a powerful bulwark against fascism. But the landowners are intimately bound up with the commercial, industrial, and banking bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois intelligentsia that depends on them. The party of the proletariat was thus faced with a choice between going with the peasant masses or with the liberal bourgeoisie. There could be only one reason to include the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie in the same coalition at the same time: to help the bourgeoisie deceive the peasantry and thus isolate the workers. The agrarian revolution could have been accomplished only against the bourgeoisie, and therefore only through the masses of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no third, intermediate regime.

From the standpoint of theory, the most astonishing thing about Stalin’s Spanish policy is the utter disregard for the ABC of Leninism. After a delay of several decades – and what decades! – the Comintern has fully rehabilitated the doctrine of Menshevism. More than that, the Comintern has contrived to render this doctrine more “consistent” and by that token more absurd. In czarist Russia, on the threshold of 1905, the formula of “purely democratic revolution” had behind it, in any case, immeasurably more arguments than in 1937 in Spain. It is hardly astonishing that in modern Spain “the liberal labor policy” of Menshevism has been converted into the reactionary anti-labor policy of Stalinism. At the same time the doctrine of the Mensheviks, this caricature of Marxism, has been converted into a caricature of itself.


“Theory” of the Popular Front
It would be naive, however, to think that the politics of the Comintern in Spain stem from a theoretical “mistake”. Stalinism is not guided by Marxist Theory, or for that matter any theory at all, but by the empirical interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. In their intimate circles, the Soviet cynics mock Dimitrov’s “philosophy” of the Popular Front. But they have at their disposal for deceiving the masses large cadres of propagators of this holy formula, sincere ones and cheats, simpletons and charlatans. Louis Fischer, with his ignorance and smugness, with his provincial rationalism and congenital deafness to revolution, is the most repulsive representative of this unattractive brotherhood. “The union of progressive forces!” “The Triumph of the idea of the Popular Front!” “The assault of the Trotskyists on the unity of the anti-fascist ranks!” ... Who will believe that the Communist Manifesto was written ninety years ago?

The theoreticians of the Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that is, addition: “Communists” plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not suffice here. One needs as well at least mechanics. The law of the parallelogram of forces applies to politics as well. In such a parallelogram, we know that the resultant is shorter, the more component forces diverge from each other. When political allies tend to pull in opposite directions, the resultant prove equal to zero.

A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.

Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war.

These simple truths are least of all the products of pure theoretical analysis. On the contrary, they represent the unassailable deduction from the entire experience if history, beginning at least with 1848. The modern history of bourgeois society is filled with all sorts of Popular Fronts, i.e. the most diverse political combinations for the deception of the toilers. The Spanish experience is only a new and tragic link in this chain of crimes and betrayals.


Alliance with the Bourgeoisie’s Shadow
Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie’s place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front. The overwhelming majority of the exploiters of all political shades openly went over to the camp of Franco. Without any theory of “permanent revolution,” the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures.

That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azaña, Companys, and the like – political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of the political representatives of yesterday in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in “republican” territory.

Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies – the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists – these political phantoms played decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the “democratic revolution,” that is, the inviolability of private property.


The Stalinists in the Popular Front
The reasons of the rise of the Spanish Popular Front and its inner mechanics are perfectly clear. The task of the retired leaders of the left bourgeoisie consisted in checking the revolution of the masses and the regaining for themselves the lost confidence of the exploiters: “Why do you need Franco if we, the republicans, can do the same thing?” The interests of Azaña and Companys fully coincided at this central point with the interests of Stalin, who needed gain the confidence of the French and British bourgeoisie by proving to them in action his ability to preserve “order” against “anarchy.” Stalin needed Azaña and Companys as a cover before the workers: Stalin himself, of course, is for socialism, but one must take care not to repel the republican bourgeoisie! Azaña and Companys needed Stalin as an experienced executioner, with the authority of a revols time not at all thanks to high and mighty foreign patrons who supplied “this time not at all thanks to be dared to attack the workers.

The classic reformists of the Second International, long ago derailed by the course of the class struggle, began to feel a new tide of confidence, thanks to the support of Moscow. This support, incidentally, was not given to all reformists but only to those most reactionary. Caballero represented that face of the Socialist Party that was turned toward the workers’ aristocracy. Negrin and Prieto always looked towards the bourgeoisie. Negrin won over Caballero with the help of Moscow. The left Socialists and Anarchists, the captives of the Popular Front, tried, it is true, to save whatever could be saved of democracy. But inasmuch as they did not dare to mobilize the masses against the gendarmes of the Popular Front, their efforts at the end were reduced to plaints and wails. The Stalinists were thus in alliance with the extreme right, avowedly bourgeois wing of the Socialist Party. They directed their repressions against the left – the POUM, the Anarchists, the “left” Socialists – in other words, against the centrist groupings who reflected, even in a most remote degree, the pressure of the revolutionary masses,

This political fact, very significant in itself, provides at the same time the measure of the degeneration of the Comintern in the last few years. I once defined Stalinism as bureaucratic centrism, and events brought a series of corroborations of the correctness of this definition. But it is obviously obsolete today. The interests of the Bonapartist bureaucracy can no longer be reconciled with centrist hesitation and vacillation. In search of reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, the Stalinist clique is capable of entering into alliances only with the most conservative groupings among the international labor aristocracy. This has acted to fix definitively the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism on the international arena.


Counter-Revolutionary Superiorities of Stalinism
This brings us right up to the solution of the enigma of how and why the Communist Party of Spain, so insignificant numerically and with a leadership so poor in caliber, proved capable of gathering into its hands all reins of power, in the face of the incomparably more powerful organizations of the Socialists and Anarchists. The usual explanation that the Stalinists simply bartered Soviet weapons for power is far too superficial. In return for munitions, Moscow received Spanish gold. According to the laws of the capitalist market, this covers everything. How then did Stalin contrive to get power in the bargain?

The customary answer is that the Soviet government, having raised its authority in the eyes of the masses by furnishing military supplies, demanded as a condition of its “collaboration” drastic measures against revolutionists and thus removed dangerous opponents from its path. All this is quite indisputable but it is only one aspect of the matter, and the least important at that.

Despite the “authority” created by Soviet shipments, the Spanish Communist Party remained a small minority and met with ever-growing hatred on the part of the workers. On the other hand, it was not enough for Moscow to set conditions; Valencia had to accede to them. This is the heart of the matter. Not only Zamora, Companys, and Negrin, but also Caballero, during his incumbency as premier, were all more or less ready to accede to the demands of Moscow. Why? Because these gentlemen themselves wished to keep the revolution within bourgeois limits. They were deathly afraid of every revolutionary onslaught of the workers.

Stalin with his munitions and with his counterrevolutionary ultimatum was a savior for all these groups. He guaranteed them, so they hoped, military victory over Franco, and at the same time, he freed them from all responsibility for the course of the revolution. They hastened to put their Socialist and Anarchist masks into the closet in the hope of making use of them again after Moscow reestablished bourgeois democracy for them. As the finishing touch to their comfort, these gentlemen could henceforth, justify their betrayal to the workers by the necessity of a military agreement with Stalin. Stalin on his part justifies his counterrevolutionary politics by the necessity of maintaining an alliance with the republican bourgeoisie.

Only from this broader point of view can we get a clear picture of the angelic toleration which such champions of justice and freedom as Azaña, Negrin, Companys, Caballero, Garcia Oliver, and others showed towards the crimes of the GPU. If they had no other choice, as they affirm, it was not at all because they had no means of paying for airplanes and tanks other than with the heads of the revolutionists and the rights of the workers, but because their own “purely democratic”, that is, anti-socialist, program could be realized by no other measures save terror. When the workers and peasants enter on the path of their revolution – when they seize factories and estates, drive out old owners, conquer power in the provinces – then the bourgeois counterrevolution – democratic, Stalinist, or fascist alike – has no other means of checking this movement except through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. The superiority of the Stalinist clique on this road consisted in its ability to apply instantly measures that were beyond the capacity of Azaña, Companys, Negrin, and their left allies.


Stalin Confirms in His Own Way the Correctness of the Theory of Permanent Revolution
Two irreconcilable programs thus confronted each other on the territory of republican Spain. On the one hand, the program of saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible democracy from Franco; on the other hand, the program of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat. The first program expressed the interest of capitalism through the medium of the labor aristocracy, the top petty-bourgeois circles, and especially the Soviet bureaucracy. The second program translated into the language of Marxism the tendencies of the revolutionary mass movement, not fully conscious but powerful. Unfortunately for the revolution, between the handful of Bolsheviks and the revolutionary proletariat stood counter-revolutionary wall of the Popular Front.

The policy of the Popular Front was, in its turn, not at all determined by the blackmail of Stalin as supplier of arms. There was, of course, no lack of blackmail. But the reason for the success of this blackmail was inherent in the inner conditions of the revolution itself. For six years, its social setting was the growing onslaught of the masses against the regime of semi-feudal and bourgeois property. The need of defending this property by the most extreme measures threw the bourgeoisie into Franco’s arms. The republican government had promised the bourgeoisie to defend property by “democratic” measures, but revealed, especially in July 1936, its complete bankruptcy. When the situation on the property front became even more threatening than on the military front, the democrats of all colors, including the Anarchists, bowed before Stalin; and he found no other methods, in his own arsenal than the methods of Franco.

The hounding of “Trotskyists”, POUMists, revolutionary Anarchists and left Socialists; the filthy slander; the false documents; the tortures in Stalinist prisons; the murders from ambush – without all this the bourgeois regime under the republican flag could not have lasted even two months. The GPU proved to be the master of the situation only because it defended the interests of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat more consistently than the others, i.e., with the greatest baseness and bloodthirstiness.

In the struggle against the socialist revolution, the “democratic” Kerensky at first sought support in the military dictatorship of Kornilov and later tried to enter Petrograd in the baggage train of the monarchist general Krasnov. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were compelled, in order to carry the democratic revolution through to the end, to overthrow the government of “democratic” charlatans and babblers. In the process they put an end thereby to every kind of attempt at military (or “fascist”) dictatorship.

The Spanish revolution once again demonstrates that it is impossible to defend democracy against the methods of fascist reaction. And conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution. Stalin waged war against “Trotskyism” (proletarian revolution), destroying democracy by the Bonapartist measures of the GPU. This refutes once again and once and for all the old Menshevik theory, adopted by the Comintern, in accordance with which the democratic and socialist revolutions are transformed into two independent historic chapters, separated from each other in point of time. The work of the Moscow executioners confirms in its own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution.


Role of the Anarchists
The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism. More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime.

The Anarchists revealed a fatal lack of understanding of the laws of the revolution and its tasks by seeking to limit themselves to their own trade unions, that is, to organizations permeated with the routine of peaceful times, and by ignoring what went on outside the framework of the trade unions, among the masses, among the political parties, and in the government apparatus. Had the Anarchists been revolutionists, they would first of all have called for the creation of soviets, which unite the representatives of all the toilers of city and country, including the most oppressed strata, who never joined the trade unions. The revolutionary workers would have naturally occupied the dominant position in these soviets. The Stalinists would have remained an insignificant minority. The proletariat would have convinced itself of its own invincible strength. The apparatus of the bourgeois state would have hung suspended in the air. One strong blow would have sufficed to pulverize this apparatus. The socialist revolution would have received a powerful impetus. The French proletariat would not for long permitted Leon Blum to blockade the proletariat revolution beyond the Pyrenees. Neither could the Moscow bureaucracy have permitted itself such a luxury. The most difficult questions would have been solved as they arose.

Instead of this, the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to hide from “politics” in the trade unions, turned out to be, to the great surprise of the whole world and themselves, a fifth wheel in the cart of bourgeois democracy. But not for long; a fifth wheel is superfluous. After Garcia Oliver and his cohorts helped Stalin and his henchmen to take power away from the workers, the anarchists themselves were driven out of the government of the Popular Front. Even then they found nothing better to do than jump on the victor’s bandwagon and assure him of their devotion. The fear of the petty bourgeois before the big bourgeois, of the petty bureaucrat before the big bureaucrat, they covered up with lachrymose speeches about the sanctity of the united front (between a victim and the executioners) and about the inadmissibility of every kind of dictatorship, including their own. “After all, we could have taken power in July 1936 ...” “After all, we could have taken power in May 1937...” The Anarchists begged Stalin-Negrin to recognize and reward their treachery to the revolution. A revolting picture!

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.

No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course, that their program is realizable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it. They hid from power not because they are against “every kind of dictatorship” – in actuality, grumbling and whining, they supported and still support the dictatorship of Stalin-Negrin – but because they completely lost their principles and courage, if they ever had any. They were afraid of everything: “isolation,” “involvement,” “fascism.” They were afraid of France and England. More than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses.

The renunciation of the conquest of power inevitably throws every workers’ organization into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society. In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution. The leaders of the CNT and FAI not only helped the bourgeoisie hold on to the shadow of power in July 1936; they also helped it to reestablish bit by bit what it had lost at one stroke. In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Thus anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments – counter-revolutionary.

The Anarchist theoreticians, who after the great test of 1931-37 continue to repeat the old reactionary nonsense about Kronstadt, and who affirm that “Stalinism is the inevitable result of Marxism and Bolshevism,” simply demonstrate by this they are forever dead for the revolution.

You say that Marxism is in itself depraved and Stalinism is its legitimate progeny? But why are we revolutionary Marxists engaged in mortal combat with Stalinism throughout the world? Why does the Stalinist gang see in Trotskyism it chief enemy? Why does every approach to our views or our methods of action (Durruti, Andres, Nin, Landau, and others) compel the Stalinist gangsters to resort to bloody reprisals. Why, on the other hand, did the leaders of Spanish anarchism serve, during the time of the Moscow and Madrid crimes of the GPU, as ministers under Caballero-Negrin, that is as servants of the bourgeoisie and Stalin? Why even now, under the pretext of fighting fascism, do the Anarchists remain voluntary captives of Stalin-Negrin, the executioners of the revolution, who have demonstrated their incapacity to fight fascism?

By hiding behind Kronstadt and Makhno, the attorneys of anarchism will deceive nobody. In the Kronstadt episode and the struggle with Makhno, we defended the proletarian from the peasant counterrevolution. The Spanish Anarchists defended and continue to defend bourgeois counterrevolution from the proletariat revolution. No sophistry will delete from the annals of history the fact that anarchism and Stalinism in the Spanish revolution were on one side of the barricades while the working masses with the revolutionary Marxists were on the other. Such is the truth which will forever remain in the consciousness of the proletariat!


Role of the POUM
The record of the POUM is not much better. In the point of theory, it tried, to be sure, to base itself on the formula of permanent revolution (that is why the Stalinists called the POUMists Trotskyists). But the revolution is not satisfied with theoretical avowals. Instead of mobilizing the masses against the reformist leaders, including the Anarchists, the POUM tried to convince these gentlemen of the superiorities of socialism over capitalism. This tuning fork gave the pitch to all the articles and speeches of the POUM leaders. In order not to quarrel with the Anarchist leaders, they did not form their own nuclei inside the CNT, and in general did not conduct any kind of work there. To avoid sharp conflicts, they did not carry on revolutionary work in the republican army. They built instead “their own” trade unions and “their own” militia, which guarded “their own” institutions or occupied “their own” section of the front.

By isolating the revolutionary vanguard from the class, the POUM rendered the vanguard impotent and left the class without leadership. Politically the POUM remained throughout far closer to the Popular Front, for whose left wing it provided the cover, than to Bolshevism. That the POUM nevertheless fell victim to bloody and base repressions was due to the failure of the Popular Front to fulfill its mission, namely to stifle the socialist revolution – except by cutting off, piece by piece, its own left flank.

Contrary to its own intentions, the POUM proved to be, in the final analysis, the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party. The platonic or diplomatic partisans of the Fourth International like Sneevliet, the leader of the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, who demonstratively supported the POUM in its halfway measures, its indecisiveness and evasiveness, in short, in its centrism, took upon themselves the greatest responsibility. Revolution abhors centrism. Revolution exposes and annihilates centrism. In passing, the revolution discredits the friends and attorneys of centrism. That is one of the most important lessons of the Spanish revolution.


The Problem of Arming
The Socialists and Anarchists who seek to justify their capitulation to Stalin by the necessity of paying for Moscow’s weapons with principles and conscience simply lie unskillfully. Of course, many of them would have preferred to disentangle themselves without murders and frame-ups. But every goal demands corresponding means. Beginning with April 1931, that is, long before the military intervention of Moscow, the Socialists and Anarchists did everything in their power to check the proletariat revolution. Stalin taught them how to carry this work to its conclusion. They became Stalin’s criminal accomplices only because they were his political cothinkers.

Had the Anarchist leaders in the least resembled revolutionists, they would have answered the first piece of blackmail from Moscow not only by continuing the socialist offensive but also by exposing Stalin’s counterrevolutionary conditions before the world working class. They would have thus forced the Moscow bureaucracy to choose openly between the socialist revolution and the Franco dictatorship. The Thermidorean bureaucracy fears and hates revolution. But it also fears being strangled in a fascist ring. Besides, it depends on the workers. All indications are that Moscow would have been forced to supply arms, and possibly at more reasonable prices.

But the world does not revolve around Stalinist Moscow. During a year and a half of civil war, the Spanish war industry could and should have been strengthened and developed by converting a number of civilian plants to war production. This work was not carried out only because Stalin and his Spanish allies equally feared the initiative of the workers’ organizations. A strong war industry would have become a powerful instrument in the hands of the workers. The leaders of the Popular Front preferred to depend on Moscow.

It is precisely on this question that the perfidious role of the Popular Front was very strikingly revealed. It thrust upon the workers’ organizations the responsibility for the treacherous deals of the bourgeoisie of Stalin. Insofar as the Anarchists remained a minority, they could not, of course, immediately hinder the ruling bloc from assuming whatever obligations they pleased toward Moscow and the masters of Moscow: London and Paris. But without ceasing to be the best fighters on the front, they could have and should have openly dissociated themselves from the betrayals and betrayers; they could and should have explained the real situation to the masses, mobilized them against the bourgeois government, and augmented their own forces from day to day in order in the end to conquer power and with it the Moscow arms.

And what if Moscow, in the absence of a Popular Front, should have refused to give arms altogether? And what, we answer to this, if the Soviet Union did not exist altogether? Revolutions have been victorious up to this time not at all thanks to high and mighty foreign patrons who supplied them with arms. As a rule, counterrevolution enjoyed foreign patronage. Must we recall the experiences of the intervention of French, English, American, Japanese, and other armies against the Soviets? The proletariat of Russia conquered domestic reaction and foreign interventionists without military support form the outside. Revolutions succeed, in the first place, with the help of a bold social program, which gives the masses the possibility of seizing weapons that are on the territory and disorganizing the army of the enemy. The Red Army seized French, English, and American military supplies and drove the foreign expeditionary corps into the sea. Has this really been forgotten?

If at the head of the armed workers and peasants, that is, at the head of so-called republican Spain, were revolutionists and not cowardly agents of the bourgeoisie, the problem of arming would never have been paramount. The army of Franco, including the colonial Riffians and the soldiers of Mussolini, was not at all immune to revolutionary contagion. Surrounded by the conflagration of the socialist uprising, the soldiers of fascism would have proved to be an insignificant quantity. Arms and military “geniuses” were not lacking in Madrid and Barcelona; what was lacking was a revolutionary party!


Conditions for victory
The conditions for victory of the masses in the civil war against the army exploiters are very simple in their essence.

1.The fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the reestablishment of the old (“democratic”) forms of exploitation.
2.The workers and peasants in the rear of the revolutionary army as well as in the rear of the enemy must know and understand the same thing.
3.The propaganda on their own front as well as on the enemy front and in both rears must be completely permeated with the spirit of social revolution. The slogan “First victory, then reforms,” is the slogan of all oppressors and exploiters from the Biblical kings down to Stalin.
4.Politics are determined by those classes and strata that participate in the struggle. The revolutionary masses must have a state apparatus that directly and immediately expresses their will. Only the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies can act as such an apparatus.
5.The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the redivision of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers’ control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy.
6.Enemies of the socialist revolution, that is, exploiting elements and their agents, even if masquerading as “democrats,” “republicans,” “Socialists,” and “Anarchists,” must be mercilessly driven out of the army.
7.At the head of each military unit must be placed commissars possessing irreproachable authority as revolutionists and soldiers.
8.In every military unit there must be a firmly welded nucleus of the most self-sacrificing fighters, recommended by the workers’ organizations. The members of this nucleus have but one privilege: to be first under fire.
9.The commanding corps necessarily includes at first many alien and unreliable elements among the personnel. Their testing, retesting, and sifting must be carried through on the basis of combat experience, recommendations of commissars, and testimonials of rank-and-file fighters. Coincident with this must proceed an intense training of commanders drawn from the ranks of revolutionary workers.
10.The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with the tasks of the social revolution. Not only in propaganda but also in military operations it is necessary to take into account the social composition of the various military units of the enemy (bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, or as in Franco’s case, colonial slaves); and in choosing lines of operation, it is necessary to rigorously take into consideration the social structure of the corresponding territories (industrial regions, peasant regions, revolutionary or reactionary, regions of oppressed nationalities, etc.). In brief, revolutionary policy dominates strategy.
11.Both the revolutionary government and the executive committee of the workers and peasants must know how to win the complete confidence of the army and of the toiling population.
12.Foreign policy must have as its main objective the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the exploited peasants, and oppressed nationalities of the whole world.

Stalin Guaranteed the Conditions of Defeat
The conditions for victory, as we see, are perfectly plain. In their aggregate they bear the name of the socialist revolution. Not a single one of these conditions existed in Spain. The basic reason is – the absence of a revolutionary party. Stalin tried, it is true, to transfer to the soil of Spain, the outward practices of Bolshevism: the Politburo, commissars, cells, the GPU, etc. But he emptied these forms of their social content. He renounced the Bolshevik program and with it the soviets as the necessary form for the revolutionary initiative of the masses. He placed the technique of Bolshevism at the service of bourgeois property. In his bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, he imagined that “commissars” by themselves could guarantee victory. But the commissars of private property proved capable only of guaranteeing defeat.

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to victory, its own organizations stood as the chief obstacles. The commanding clique of Stalinists, in accordance with their counterrevolutionary function, consisted of hirelings, careerists, declassed elements, and in general, all types of social refuse. The representatives of other labor organizations – incurable reformists, Anarchists phrasemongers, helpless centrists of the POUM – grumbled, groaned, wavered, manuevered, but in the end adapted themselves to the Stalinists. As a result of their joint activity, the camp of social revolution – workers and peasants – proved to be subordinated to the bourgeoisie, or more correctly, to its shadow. It was bled white and its character destroyed.

There was no lack of heroism on the part of the masses or courage on the part of individual revolutionists. But the masses were left to their own resources while the revolutionists remained disunited, without a program, without a plan of action. The “republican” military commanders were more concerned with crushing the social revolution than with scoring military victories. The soldiers lost confidence in their commanders, the masses in the government; the peasants stepped aside; the workers became exhausted; defeat followed defeat; demoralization grew apace. All this was not difficult to foresee from the beginning of the civil war. By setting itself the task of rescuing the capitalist regime, the Popular Front doomed itself to military defeat. By turning Bolshevism on its head, Stalin succeeded completely in fulfilling the role of gravedigger of the revolution.

It ought to be added that the Spanish experience once again demonstrates that Stalin failed completely to understand either the October Revolution or the Russian civil war. His slow moving provincial mind lagged hopelessly behind the tempestuous march of events in 1917-21. In those of his speeches and articles in 1917 where he expressed his own ideas, his later Thermidorean “doctrine” is fully implanted. In this sense, Stalin in Spain in 1937 is the continuator of Stalin of the March 1917 conference of the Bolsheviks. But in 1917 he merely feared the revolutionary workers; in 1937 he strangled them. The opportunist had become the executioner.


“Civil War in the Rear”
But, after all, victory over the governments of Caballero and Negrin would have necessitated a civil war in the rear of the republican army! – the democratic philistine exclaims with horror. As if apart from this, in republican Spain no civil war has ever existed, and at that the basest and most perfidious one – the war of the proprietors and exploiters against the workers and peasants. This uninterrupted war finds expression in the arrests and murders of revolutionists, the crushing of the mass movement, the disarming of the workers, the arming of the bourgeois police, the abandoning of workers’ detachments without arms and without help on the front, and finally, the artificial restriction of the development of war industry.

Each of these acts as a cruel blow to the front, direct military treason, dictated by the class interests of the bourgeoisie. But “democratic” philistines – including Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists – regard the civil war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, even in areas most closely adjoining the front, as a natural and inescapable war, having as its tasks the safeguarding of the “unity of the Popular Front.” On the other hand, the civil war of the proletariat against the “republican” counterrevolution is, in the eyes of the same philistines, a criminal, “fascists,” Trotskyist war, disrupting ... “the unity of the anti-fascist forces.” Scores of Norman Thomases, Major Atlees, Otto Bauers, Zyromskys, Malrauxes, and such petty peddlers of lies as Duranty and Louis Fischer spread this slavish wisdom throughout our planet. Meanwhile the government of the Popular Front moves from Madrid to Valencia, from Valencia to Barcelona.

If, as the facts attest, only the socialist revolution is capable of crushing fascism, then on the other hand a successful uprising of the proletariat is conceivable only when the ruling classes are caught in the vise of the greatest difficulties. However, the democratic philistines invoke precisely these difficulties as proof of the impressibility of the proletarian uprising. Were the proletariat to wait for the democratic philistines to tell them the hour of their liberation, they would remain slaves forever. To teach workers to recognize reactionary philistines under all their masks and to despise them regardless of the mask is the first and paramount duty of a revolutionist!


The Outcome
The dictatorship of the Stalinists over the republican camp is not long-lived in its essence. Should the defeats stemming from the politics of the Popular Front once more impel the Spanish proletariat to a revolutionary assault, this time successfully, the Stalinist clique will be swept away with an iron broom. But should Stalin – as is unfortunately the likelihood – succeed in bringing the work of gravedigger of the revolution to its conclusion, he will not even in this case earn thanks. The Spanish bourgeoisie needed him as executioner, but it has no need for him at all as patron or tutor. London and Paris on the one hand, and Berlin and Rome on the other, are in its eyes considerably more solvent firms than Moscow. It is possible that Stalin himself wants to cover his traces in Spain before the final catastrophe; he thus hopes to unload the responsibility for the defeat on his closest allies. After this Litvinov will solicit Franco for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. All this we have seen more than once.

Even a complete military victory of the so-called republican army over General Franco, however, would not signify the triumph of “democracy.” The workers and peasants have twice placed bourgeois republicans and their left agents in power: in April 1931 and in February 1936. Both times the heroes of the Popular Front surrendered the victory of the people to the most reactionary and the most serious representatives of the bourgeoisie. A third victory, gained by the generals of the Popular Front, would signify their inevitable agreement with the fascist bourgeoisie on the backs of the workers and peasants. Such a regime will be nothing but a different form of military dictatorship, perhaps without a monarchy and without the open domination of the Catholic Church.

Finally, it is possible that the partial victories of the republicans will be utilized by the “disinterested” Anglo-French intermediaries in order to reconcile the fighting camps. It is not difficult to understand that in the event of such a variant the final remnants of the “democracy” will be stifled in the fraternal embrace of the generals Miaja (communist!) and Franco (fascists!). Let me repeat once again: victory will go either to the socialist revolution or to fascism.

It is not excluded, by the way, that the tragedy might at the last moment make way to farce. When the heroes of the Popular Front have to flee their last capital, they might, before embarking on steamers and airplanes, perhaps proclaim a series of “socialist” reforms in order to leave a “good memory” with the people. But nothing will avail. The workers of the world will remember with hatred and contempt the parties that ruined the heroic revolution.

The tragic experience of Spain is a terrible – perhaps final – warning before still greater events, a warning addressed to all the advanced workers of the world. “Revolutions,” Marx said, “are the locomotives of history.” They move faster than the thought of semi-revolutionary or quarter-revolutionary parties. Whoever lags behind falls under the wheels of the locomotive, and consequently – and this is the chief danger – the locomotive itself is also not infrequently wrecked.

It is necessary to think out the problem of the revolution to the end, to its ultimate concrete conclusions. It is necessary to adjust policy to the basic laws of the revolution, i.e., to the movement of the embattled classes and not the prejudices or fears of the superficial petty-bourgeois groups who call themselves “Popular” Fronts and every other kind of front. During revolution the line of least resistance is the line of greatest disaster. To fear “isolation” from the bourgeoisie is to incur isolation from the masses. Adaptation to the conservative prejudices of the labor aristocracy is betrayal of the workers and the revolution. An excess “caution” is the most baneful lack of caution. This is the chief lesson of the destruction of the most honest political organization in Spain, namely, the centrist POUM. The parties and groups of the London Bureau obviously either do not wish to draw the necessary conclusions from the last warning of history or are unable to do so. By this token they doom themselves.

By way of compensation, a new generation of revolutionists is now being educated by the lessons of the defeats. This generation has verified in action the ignominious reputation of the Second International. It has plumbed the depths of the Third International’s downfall. It has learned how to judge the Anarchists not by their words but by their deeds. It is a great inestimable school, paid for with the blood of countless fighters! The revolutionary cadres are now gathering only under the banner of the Fourth International. Born amid the roar of defeats, the Fourth International will lead the toilers to victory.

Saturday, October 13, 2018

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- ***"MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY" by Victor Serge

Click on title to link to Victor Serge's Internet Archives. Serge was an important addition to the international communist movement coming over from the pre-World War I anarchist movement. His political fate at the end is murky, to say the least. What is not murky is his defense of the non-revolutionary actions of Andreas Nin and the POUM in Spain in the course of the revolution there in the 1930's. More later.


BOOK REVIEW


REVOLUTIONARY WITNESS TO HIS TIMES


As I have noted in my review of Leon Trotsky’s memoir My Life ( see my review elsewhere in this space) today’s public tastes dictate that political memoir writers expose the most intimate details of their private personal lives in the so-called public square. Here, as in Trotsky’s memoir, Serge will offer up no such tantalizing details. These old time revolutionaries seem organically averse to including personal material that would distract from their political legacies. That is fine by me. After all that is why political people, the natural audience for this form of history narrative, appreciate such works. Contemporary political memoir writers take note.

Serge was a militant from his youth. However the October 1917 Russian Revolution is the real start of his political maturation and wider political influence. I believe the reader will find the most useful information and Serge’s most insightful political analysis dates from this period. Serge became a secondary Communist leader after the Bolshevik seizure of power and in various capacities, most notably as a journalist for the Communist International, witnessed many of the important events in and out of Russia in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Moreover, for a long period of time he was a key member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition to the rise of Stalinism which formed in the Russian Communist Party and later in the Communist International in the 1920’s. Serge eventually broke politically with Trotsky in the late 1930’s over the class nature of the Soviet state and organizational differences on the role of the revolutionary party in the struggle and in power. Serge's later politics and activities are murky, somewhat disoriented and the subject of controversy (see the Appendix in Memoirs and my review of Serge’s book Kronstadt). However, Serge’s analysis and insights as a witness to this period of history retain their value, especially his analysis of the, for leftists, very troublesome Stalinist purges and terror campaigns of the 1930’s.

Here, as with Trotsky’s memoir, you will find a thoughtful political self-examination by a man trying to draw the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the subsequent defeats of the international working class movement, the devastating destruction of fellow revolutionary cadre who made and administered the early Soviet state while still defending the gains of that revolution. Overshadowing these concerns is a constant personal struggle to maintain one’s revolutionary integrity at all costs. That is, the struggle not to wind up like Bukharin or Zinoviev and the like, compromised and lost to the struggle for socialism. On top of that, moreover, and perhaps hardest of all, be able tol maintain a sense of revolutionary optimism for the future organization of human society.

Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin once commented that in the run-up to the October Revolution the political whirlwind stirred up by that revolution inevitably brought those individuals and organizations looking for the resolution of the revolutionary dilemma into the Bolshevik orbit. This was most famously the case with Trotsky’s St. Petersburg Inter-District organization that fused with the Bolsheviks in the fateful summer of 1917. That same whirlwind later drew in the best elements of the Western labor movement as word of the revolution reached the outside world. Previously, Serge had been close to the French anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement but as happens in great revolutions he, like other militant anarchists, was drawn to the reality of the Soviet experiment despite political differences over the question of the state. Able to override this difference he, generally, like many non-Bolshevik militants served the revolution with distinction. Thus, this fateful political decision to cast his personal fate with the Russian Revolution led him to the series of political adventures and misadventures that enliven his memoir.

At the beginning of the 21st century when socialist political programs are in decline it is hard to imagine the spirit that drove Serge to dedicate the better part of his life to the fight for a socialist society. However, at the beginning of the 20th century he represented only a slightly younger version of that revolutionary generation of Eastern Europeans and Russians exemplified by Lenin, Trotsky, Martov and Luxemburg who set out to change the history of the 20th century. It was as if the best and brightest of that generation were afraid, for better or worse, not to take part in the political struggles that would shape the modern world. Those same questions posed at the beginning of the 20th century are still on the agenda for today’s generation of militants to help resolve. This is one of your political textbooks. Read it.

*************


Victor Serge
Marxism in Our Time
(1938)

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From Partisan Review, vol.5, no.3, 1938, pp.26-32.
Reprinted in David Cotterill (ed.), The Serge-Trotsky Papers, London 1994, pp.176-83.
Reproduced here with the kind permission of the Victor Serge Estate.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


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1
Since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, Marxism has gone through many metamorphoses and suffered many attacks. Critics still exist – and sometimes men of good will – who insist that it has been cancelled, refuted, destroyed by history. The confused but energetic class-consciousness of the last defenders of capitalism, however, sees in Marxism its most dangerous spiritual and social enemy. The preventative counter-revolutions of Italy and of Germany justly proclaim themselves “anti-Marxist”. On the other hand, almost all workers’ movements which have won any appreciable power have been inspired by Marxism. The CNT of Spain is almost the only exception to this rule, and experience has shown only too well the seriousness of its ideological bankruptcy, at a moment when the consciousness of the masses was called on to become one of the decisive factors in a revolution in the making – a revolution perhaps aborted today precisely because of the political incapacity of the revolutionaries.

The historic achievements of Marxism are not to be denied. The Marxist parties of the Second International united and organised the pre-war working class, raising it to a new dignity, shaping it democratically. In 1914 they showed themselves prisoners of the capitalism which they fought even as they adapted themselves to it. (They adapted themselves, in reality, a good deal more than they fought.) But it was a Marxist party which, in the chaotic currents of the Russian Revolution, knew how to disentangle the main lines of force, to orient itself constantly according to the highest interests of the workers, to make itself, in the truest sense of the word, the midwife of a new world. Marxists bore the brunt of the class wars of the post-war period; Spartacists in Germany, Tiessriaki in Bulgaria, Communists everywhere. Later, at the moment of its highest flight, the Chinese revolution was strongly influenced by the revolutionary Marxism of the Russians – already much deformed, incidentally, by the reaction even then arising inside the USSR. It is true that German Marxism in its two forms – Social Democratic and Communist – showed itself impotent before the Nazi offensive. Along with the degeneration of Bolshevism, this is without question, let us note in passing, the greatest defeat that Marxism has ever suffered. Nonetheless, Marxism continues to mount the ladder of world history. While irreconcilable oppositionists are persecuted and exterminated by Stalinism, the Austrian Socialists carry on a struggle, desperate but heroic, which saves them from demoralisation; the Socialist miners of the Asturias in ‘34 deal a set-back to Spanish fascism.

It would be absurd to isolate Marxist thought from these social realities. Even more than it is a scientific doctrine, Marxism is an historic fact. If one is to understand it, one must embrace it in all its scope. One then perceives that since the birth, the apogee and the corruption of Christianity, there has been no more considerable event in the life of humanity.



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2
This fact goes far beyond the boundaries of the class struggle and becomes an integral part of the consciousness of modem man – no matter what his attitude towards Marxism. It is of secondary importance to ask one’s self if the theories of value, or of surplus value, or of the accumulation of capital are still completely valid. An idle question, essentially, and even somewhat puerile. Science is never “finished”; rather, it is always completing itself Can science be anything except a process of continual self-revision, an unceasing quest for a closer approach to truth? Can it get along without hypothesis and error – the “error” of tomorrow which is the “truth” (that is, the closest approximation of the truth) of yesterday. It is of minor importance, also, to point out that certain predictions of Marx and Engels have not been confirmed by history and that, on the contrary, many events have taken place which they did not at all foresee. Marx and Engels were too great, too intelligent, to believe themselves infallible and play the prophet. It is true – but not important – that their followers have not always reached this level of wisdom. It still remains true that Marxism has modified the thinking of the man of our modem times. We are in debt to it for a renewing, a broadening of our consciousness. In what way? Since Marx, no one seriously denies the part played by economics in history. The relationship between economic, psychological, social and moral factors appears today, even to the adversaries of Marxism, in an altogether different light from that in which it appeared before Marx. It is the same with the role of the individual in history, and with the relationship of the individual to the masses and to society. Marxism, finally, gives us what I call the “historical sense”; it makes us conscious that we live in a world which is li-i process of changing; it enlightens us as to our possible function – and our limitations – it is this continual struggle and creation; it teaches us to integrate ourselves, with all our will, all our talents, to bring about those historical processes that are, as the case may be, necessary, inevitable or desirable. And it is thus that it allows us to confer on our isolated lives a high significance, by tying them, through a consciousness which heightens and enriches the spiritual life, to that life – collective, innumerable, and permanent – of which history is only the record.

This awakening of consciousness insists on action and, furthermore, on the unity of action and thought. Here is man reconciled with himself, whatever be the burden of his destiny. He no longer feels himself the plaything of blind and measureless forces. He looks with clear eyes on the worst tragedies, and even in the midst of the greatest defeats he feels himself enlarged by his ability to understand, his will to act and to resist, the indestructible feeling of being united in all his aspirations with the mass of humanity in its progress through time.



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3
One is no more able to deny the part played by economics in history than the fact that the earth is round... And even those who argue the point do not in the least deceive themselves. I should like to emphasise here an important point to which not enough attention has been paid in the past. The enemies of the working class have themselves largely assimilated the lessons of Marxism. The politicians, the industrialists and bankers, the demagogues sometimes bum the works of Marx and throw his followers into prison; but, dealing with social realities, they pay tribute to Marxist economists and political leaders. And if scholars refute the theory of surplus value, their masters do not put any less energy and stubbornness into the defence of the surplus value they appropriate as their plunder from the revenues of society. This sub-rosa Marxism of the enemies of socialism is in a fair way to become one of the most formidable means of defence of the privileged classes.



4
Marxism undergoes, in its own history, the conditions of development which it analyses. It is able to rise above them only in a small degree, since every gain of consciousness is an effect before it becomes a cause, and remains subordinate to pre-existing social conditions. “Social being determines consciousness.”

The Marxism of the imperialist epoch was split. It was nationalistic and wholely reformist. Very few of its adherents – a Rosa Luxemburg, a Lenin, a Trotsky, a Hermann Gorter [1] – saw beyond the moment to horizons vaster than those of capitalist prosperity. Either this Marxism dwelt on the heights of philosophy far removed from immediate action, or it was merely reminiscent of the ancient Christian utopianism (which was, in our culture, Hebrew before it was Christian: read the Prophets!).

The Marxism of the imperialist epoch was split. It was nationalistic and counter-revolutionary in the countries where it had been reformist; it was revolutionary and internationalist in Russia, the only country in which the foundering of an ancien régime forced the proletariat to carry out completely its historic mission.

The Marxism of the Russian Revolution was at first ardently internationalist and libertarian (the doctrine of the Communist State, the federation of Soviets); but because of the state of siege, it soon became more and more authoritarian and intolerant.

The Marxism of the decadence of Bolshevism – that is to say, that of the bureaucratic caste which has evicted the working class from power – is totalitarian, despotic, amoral, and opportunist. It ends up in the strangest and most revolting negations of itself.

What does this mean except that social consciousness even in its highest forms does not escape the effect of the realities which it expresses, which it illuminates and which it tries to surmount.



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5
Marxism is so firmly based in truth that it is able to find nourishment in its own defeats. We must distinguish here between the social philosophy – scientific, to speak more accurately – and its deductions for, and applications to, action. (These are actually inseparable, and this is the case not only with Marxism but also with all those intellectual disciplines which are closely tied to human activity.) It is our business neither to force events, nor to control them, nor even to foresee them – even though we are constantly doing all these things, with varying success; our activity, being creative, boldly ventures into the uncertain; and, what we do not know generally getting the better of what we know, our successes are rather astonishing victories. As to the Marxist line of action, it would be enough to list the prodigious success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 (Lenin–Trotsky), the predictions of Engels about the world war of the future and its consequences, some lines from the resolution adopted at the Basle Congress of the Second International (1913) – for the Marxist line to be justified as the most rigorously, scientifically thought-out of these times. But even when it comes to the very depths of defeat, it is still the same. Do you wish to understand your defeat? You will be able to only by means of the Marxist analysis of history. Marxism showed itself impotent in Germany before the Nazi counterrevolution; but it is the only theory that explains this victory of a party of the declassed, paid for and supported during an insoluble economic crisis, by the chiefs of the big bourgeoisie. This complex phase of the class struggle, prepared by the national humiliation at Versailles and the massacres of proletarian revolutionaries (Noske, 1918-21), is made completely intelligible to us only by the scientific thought of the defeated class. And this is one of the reasons which make Marxist thought such a threat to the victors.

It is the same with the terrible degeneration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR. There too, the punishment of the Old Bolsheviks, exterminated by the regime which they have created, is no more than a phenomenon of the class struggle. The proletariat, deposed from power by a caste of parvenus entrenched in the new State, can take an accounting of the basic reasons for its defeat and can prepare itself for the struggles of tomorrow only by means of the Marxist analysis.



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6
The Marxism of the era of capitalist prosperity naturally lacked revolutionary ardour. It dared neither imagine nor hope for the end of the society in which it lived. Lacking this audacity, it disavowed itself when it became necessary. But there are times when to live is to dare.

The Marxism of the first great revolutionary crisis of the modem world, chiefly represented by the Russians – that is to say, by men formed in the school of despotism – has given proof of a lack of boldness of another sort, and one quite as ruinous: it has not dared to take a libertarian position. Or rather, it was libertarian in words and only for a short time, during the brief period of Soviet democracy which extended from October, 1917, to the summer of 1918. Then it pulled itself together and resolutely entered on the path of the old “statism” – authoritarian, and soon totalitarian. It lacked the sense of liberty.

It is easy to explain – and even to justify – this development of Bolshevik Marxism by referring to the constant mortal danger, the Civil War, the superbly energetic defence of the public safety by Lenin, Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky. Easy and just to recognise that this policy, in its early stages, made certain the victory of the workers – and a victory won in the face of difficulties that were truly without precedent. But one must realise that later on this policy brought about the defeat of the workers by the bureaucracy. The Bolshevik leaders of the great years lacked neither the knowledge nor intelligence nor energy. They lacked revolutionary audacity whenever it was necessary to seek (after 1918) the solution of their problems in the freedom of the masses and not in government constraint. They built systematically not the libertarian Communist State which they announced, but a State strong in the old sense of the word, strong in its police, in its censorship, its monopolies, its all-powerful bureaus. In this respect, the contrast is striking between the Bolshevist programme of 1917 and the political structure created by Bolshevism in 1919.

After victory had been won in the Civil War, the Socialist solution of the problems of the new society should have been sought in workers’ democracy, the stimulation of initiative, freedom of thought, freedom for working-class groups and not, as it was, in centralisation of power, repression of heresies, the monolithic single-party system, the narrow orthodoxy of an official school of thought. The dominance and ideology of a single party should have preshadowed the dominance and ideology of a single leader. This extreme concentration of power, this dread of liberty and of ideological variations, this conditioning to absolute authority disarmed the masses and led to the strengthening of the bureaucracy. By the time Lenin and Trotsky realised the danger and wished to retrace their steps – timidly enough, at first: the greatest reach of boldness of the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party was to demand the restoration of inner-Party democracy, and it never dared dispute the theory of single-party government – by this time, it was too late.

The fear of liberty, which is the fear of the masses, marks almost the entire course of the Russian Revolution. If it is possible to discover a major lesson, capable of revitalising Marxism, more threatened today than ever by the collapse of Bolshevism, one might formulate it in these terms: Socialism is essentially democratic – the word, “democratic”, being used here in its libertarian sense. One sees today in the USSR that without liberty of thought, of speech, of criticism, of initiative, Socialist production can only go from one crisis to another. Liberty is as necessary to Socialism, the spirit of liberty is as necessary to Marxism, as oxygen to living beings.



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7
In the very wake of its sensational victory in the Russian Revolution, Marxism is today threatened with a great loss of prestige, and in the working-class movement, with an unspeakable demoralisation. It would be futile to pretend otherwise. We have seen, in the country of Socialist victory, the Marxist party – enjoying the greatest, the most deserved prestige – in the space of fifteen years undergo the most disconcerting degeneration. We have seen it reach the point of dishonouring and murdering its heroes of yesterday, drawing from their very loyalty, for the purposes of judicial frame-ups based on glaring forgeries, confessions which are even more sinister than they are disconcerting. We have seen the dictatorship of the proletariat transform itself insensibly into a dictatorship of bureaucrats and of police agents over the proletariat. We have seen the working class, still in the flush of its recent victories, condemned to a moral and material level decidedly below that which it had under the Czarist regime. We have seen the peasantry dispossessed and exiled by millions, agriculture ruined by forced collectivisation. We have seen science, literature, thought literally handcuffed, and Marxism reduced to formulae which are frequently manipulated for political ends and emptied of all living content. We have seen it, furthermore, falsified, crudely adapted to the interests of a regime which in its mores, its actions, and the new forms of exploitation of labour it has superimposed on the base of common ownership of the instruments of production. We have seen, we still see the indescribable spectacle of the black terror, permanently established in the USSR. We have seen the cult of “the Beloved Leader”, the corruption of the intellectuals and the workers’ organisations abroad, the systematic lies broadcast by a huge journalistic apparatus which still calls itself Communist’, the secret police of Moscow murdering or kidnapping its adversaries as far away as Spain and Switzerland. We have seen this gangrene spread throughout revolutionary Spain, compromising, perhaps irretrievably, the destiny of the workers. And it is not over yet. All the values which comprise the greatness of Socialism from now on are compromised, soiled, obliterated. A fatal division, between the blind and the clear-sighted, rascals and honest men, deepens in the ranks of the working class, already provoking fratricidal conflicts, rendering all moral progress impossible for the time being. For it is no longer possible to discuss with good faith and intellectual courage a single one of the theoretical and practical questions that grow out of Marxism. The social catastrophe in the USSR taints in its growth, in its very life, the consciousness of modem man.

I wrote to André Gide in May 1936, before he left for Russia: “We make a common front against Fascism. But how can we bar its way with so many concentration camps behind our own lines? One’s duty is no longer simple, and it is no longer permitted to any one to simplify it. No new orthodoxy, no sacred falsehoods can any longer dry up this running sore. In one sense only does the Soviet Union remain the greatest hope of mankind in our day; in any sense that the Soviet workers have not yet said their last word.”

Every social conflict is also a competition. If socialism is to win out over fascism, it must bring humanity social conditions which are clearly superior.

Is it necessary to emphasise again that the confused, distorted and bloody Marxism of the gunmen of Moscow – is not Marxism? That it negates, belies and paralyses itself? The masses, unfortunately, will take some time to realise this. They live not according to clear and rational thought but according to impressions which the lessons of experience slowly modify. Since all this goes on under the usurped banner of Marxism, we must expect that the masses, unable to apply Marxist analysis to this tragedy, will react against Marxism. Our enemies have it all their own way.

But scientific thought cannot regress below the Marxist level, nor can the working class do without this intellectual weapon. The European working class is still recuperating its strength, sapped by the blood-letting of the world war. A new proletariat is arising in Russia, its industrial base greatly extended. The class struggle goes on. For all the dictators’ replastering, we hear the framework of the old social edifice cracking. Marxism will go through many vicissitudes of fortune, perhaps even eclipses. Its power, conditioned by the course of history, none the less appears to be inexhaustible. For its base is knowledge integrated with the necessity for revolution.



Note
1. Herman Gorter (1864-1927), a member of the Dutch Socialist Party, opposed the war in 1914. He helped found the Dutch CP in 1918 and the German CP in 1920.