This article by Walter Held first appeared in
Quatrième Internationale March-April 1937, and has been
translated by Ted Crawford
The dialectic of history allows the paradox of a revolution in one
country becoming the greatest obstacle to the revolution in another. It is true
that the same tragedy was played out ten years ago on the stage of the Chinese
revolution. There too the Soviet bureaucracy threw into the scales the whole
material weight of the state that it had usurped in order to prevent the victory
of the Chinese workers and peasants. This case has not been enough to compromise
the Communist International in their eyes. But it may be different today when
the same process is played out in Spain in front of them. Today there is no task
more pressing for revolutionary workers than to show the proletariat that the
Comintern has been transformed into a counter-revolutionary body. If anyone
doubts this they only have to read the last resolution of the Executive of the
Communist International on the Spanish question which among other things states
that:
The Praesidium of the EC of the CI approves the political line of
the Spanish CP, which is mobilising its followers and the popular masses for the
struggle against the Fascists who want to destroy the Parliamentary regime and
install a Fascist dictatorship. It approves the line followed for this and
states that the parliamentary democratic republic, the Republic of the Popular
Front, which guarantees the rights and liberties of all Spaniards, in which the
Fascist base is challenged and where there will be no place for Fascism and in
which the people can express their own choice and decide their own future for
themselves.
The absurdity of these phrases is so clear that it is hardly
worthwhile to refute them. The ‘parliamentary democratic republic’, in which
‘there will be no place for Fascism’? On the contrary, Fascism is the most
legitimate child of the democratic republic, so legitimate that today in the
epoch of capitalist decay there is hardly a single democratic republic which
does not contain strong bodies of Fascists. Their presence is then the clearest
sign that, thanks to the treachery of the Second and Third Internationals, the
proletariat has already missed the most convenient moment to seize power. The
demagogic lies of the Popular Front not merely do not hinder Fascism but
increase its chances. Insofar as the Popular Front government of France is
compromised in the eyes of the masses the chances of de la Rocque
[1] and Doriot
[2]
steadily grow. Equally, Doriot is the direct result of Stalinist
degeneration.
In a word: there is no better natural base for the growth of Fascism than the
parliamentary republic and only the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will
replace it, can eradicate Fascism completely. Let us note that
Internationale Communiste already says what Azaña [3] and Companys [4] have
not dared to utter up until now – ‘The re-establishment of private
property’.
The Praesidium of the EC of the CI declares that the position taken
by the party against nationalisation is correct. As long as nationalisation is
based on the interests of the defence of the republic [and which will no doubt
cease to be necessary at the end of the Civil War – WH] and is
undertaken to counter the attempts of enemies of the people to sabotage and
shake the economy, so following this position nationalisation will only be
undertaken in those firms which belong to direct or indirect supporters of the
military uprising.
Those who believe that we are giving a prejudiced interpretation of
the resolution of the EC of the CI must read the manifesto of the Spanish CP of
18 September 1936, which reads ‘Any seizure of property by the workers is only a
temporary measure in the interests of defence.’ We can add quotations from the
speeches of Pasionaria, the leader of the Hernandez Party and of other
Stalinists who say the same thing. After all the resolution of the EC of the CI
had as its aim the wish solemnly to confirm this ‘line’ of the Spanish CP. The
aim of the Stalinists was then the ‘re-establishment of private property and of
the democratic republic’ after which the Stalinists can play their games of
cabinet shuffles again.
To justify the reactionary politics of the Comintern in Spain on the orders
of the great Stalin – the Borgia of our time – one can see sprouting like weeds
all over the world theoreticians who, with great seriousness, prove that Spain
today is living through its 1789 and not its 1917, and that it is necessary to
deliver bourgeois society from the feudal yoke, and not the worker from the yoke
of bourgeois society. One blushes with shame to have to contradict such
theories.
Spain then, is the only country untouched by 150 years of capitalist
development, a development which has with its extraordinary power reached into
every corner of the civilised world! Spain has been as fast asleep as the
‘Sleeping Beauty’ and has only been awakened by the diabolical kiss of Prince
Franco, in order that she may fight for the Rights of Man, private property and
for the ideas of the eighteenth rather than the twentieth century.
Back to Menshevism
In Spain today the Stalinists are defending in a comical manner
what the Mensheviks defended from 1905 to 1917 and what Stalin-Bukharin defended
in China from 1925-27 and what was defended up until now in Spain by the
reformists such as Prieto, Besteiro etc. ... a theory already drowned by the
events of the twentieth century.
The paradox that it is the Soviet Union which is trying to prevent the
sovietisation of Spain, on the pretext that this country is not yet ready for
the workers’ revolution, is accentuated by the fact that it is being done by the
usurpers of the revolution in a country which in 1917 was incomparably more
backward than Spain today. Some statistics will show this. In Spain in 1920
the number of industrial workers was 25 per cent of the total employed, and
since then there has been an enormous growth in Spanish towns, so that since the
Great War this proportion has grown considerably. In Tsarist Russia no more than
16.7 per cent were workers and even in 1928 the Soviet proletariat was no more
than 17.3 per cent while 40 per cent of the Spanish population are urbanised and
several cities such as Madrid and Barcelona have more than one million
inhabitants. In Tsarist Russia only 20 per cent of the population was urbanised.
It is true that one cannot deny that Spain’s railway system is extremely
undeveloped, but it is still much greater than that of Tsarist Russia just
before the world war (3.1 kilometers for every 100 square kilometers against 0.4
kilometers for every 100 square kilometers.)
But it is evident that the question of knowing whether an isolated Spain is
ready or not for Socialism is an abstract one. In this sense no country is ready
for Socialism and for the strongest of reasons neither is Russia. Socialism is
international or it cannot occur. The shameful trials in Moscow have shouted out
this simple truth to the world. Spain is ready for Socialism in this sense that
there too finance capital has created a bourgeoisie which is so reactionary that
capitalism no longer has any progressive role to fulfil: it is ready for
Socialism as part of the whole body of world capitalism, which has entered the
stage of decay and which threatens to hurl the world into the abyss of
barbarism.
Only the Stalinist epigones of Menshevism try to explain why the liberal
bourgeoisie has not succeeded in creating a democratic parliamentary republic in
over one hundred years. Has not the bourgeoisie constantly called the generals
to its aid because it is afraid of the working class? The Spanish revolution of
1930-31 was, like the German revolution of 1918, a case where the proletariat
lost the fruits of victory because of the absence of revolutionary
leadership.
Just as the French revolution of 1848 produced the coup d’état of Cavaignac,
the Russian Revolution the Kornilov rising, the Weimar Republic the Kapp Putsch
together with the attempts of Hitler and Ludendorf and then Fascism – so the
Spanish democracy has constantly given birth to both putsches and uprisings from
Primo de Rivera and Sanjurjo to Franco. What member of the Comintern could have
thought in 1920-23 that Kapp and Ludendorf were representatives of feudalism
against progressive capitalism and would have then, on this basis, have formed a
Popular Front for the defence of the republic with the republicans Wirth and
Streseman? Such brilliant flashes of insight could not even be found in the head
of a Walcher. [5]
Those theories which state that Spain is not ready for Socialism and only
finds itself today at the dawn of bourgeois development are even more grotesque,
since the Spanish workers, lacking such Menshevik scruples, have already taken
the collectivisation of the economy into their own hands. Despite the
sabotage by their political leadership which stands for the principle of private
ownership of the means of production, they have, notably in Catalonia, obtained
magnificent results. And not only the war industries, railways and the
commanding heights have been socialised but also the tramways, taxis, department
stores, cinemas, theatres, hotels, cafes and the food processing industry – all
find themselves in the hands of the workers and unions. How much better would
have been the results of the collectivisation if there had been a centralised
political leadership which would consciously continue this process, which would
actively defend it and which would enforce on the economy a direct and clear
plan. But the political direction of events was always in the hands of bourgeois
republicans and their Stalinist agents, who, it is true, followed the movement,
but only the better to betray it when the right moment came.
However, one would be confusing cause with effect if one thought that the
Stalinist treason in Spain arose as a result of the political neo-Menshevism of
the EC of the CI. The Stalinists have always had the most profound contempt for
theory and degraded it to a tool of their own opportunist and material
interests. The reputation of Stalin as a theoretician and the ‘best pupil of
Lenin’ is less based on the strength of his own intellectual arguments than on
the material resources of the GPU which has extremely efficacious ways of
dealing with any attempt to contradict the ‘ideas’ of Stalin.
This hostile position to the Spanish revolution is also motivated by the
Russian military entente with French imperialism. Stalin and Litvinov fear that
by taking a position in favour of a Soviet Spain they will throw the French
general staff into Hitler’s arms – the bureaucrats have no confidence in the
spontaneous power of the French working class. As they tried to do at its start
the Soviet leaders would prefer to stay completely neutral vis-a-vis the civil
war in Spain. Then they said that they would be prepared to help in an effective
blockade against both sides in the whole of Spain. Thus the fact that the French
CP has given full powers to Blum [6] to prohibit
the movement of volunteers across the Spanish border is part of their political
line.
However, the neutrality of the Soviet Union while Hitler and Mussolini are
actively helping Franco brings them another danger. Franco’s victory would both
enormously increase Hitler’s pressure on France and to a great extent strengthen
his foreign policy. On the other hand, if the Kremlin openly betrays the Spanish
workers it would as a result be cut off from the working class of the world and
would leave the field clear for Trotskyism, which it hates and fears like death
itself.
Under this double pressure it was decided to send some modest, very modest,
help to Republican Spain, but as a condition of such aid there must be the
following programme. No nationalisation, but the preservation of private
property: no Soviets, but the preservation of bourgeois democracy:
no Red Army of workers’ militias, but the rebuilding of a ‘Republican Army’
commanded by bourgeois officers and lastly the destruction of ‘Trotskyism’,
by which is understood all anti-Stalinist working class initiatives.
In close conjunction with considerations of a foreign policy nature internal
necessities force the Stalinist bureaucracy to adopt this attitude. After having
succeeded in transforming the proletarian revolution in the Soviet Union into a
bureaucratic morgue it cannot admit that in another part of the world a young
Soviet Republic with an independent working class, conscious of its strength, is
forming itself.
The contrast leaps to the eyes of the whole world. Sensing a new force in the
world because of the initiative of the Spanish workers, their Russian brothers,
seeing in this ardent example the memory of their own glorious past, will raise
themselves again and sweep away the tyranny and privileges of the bureaucracy.
That, Stalin and his supporters are aware of, and that is why they must appear
as the Messiahs of a national religion where the gods, Marx, Lenin and Stalin,
have provided Socialism to the chosen people of Russia. That is why they fear
and suppress all independent action of the working class wherever it may be.
However, it is an axiom, not a Stalinist axiom to be sure but a Marxist one,
that the situation in the Soviet Union can only be guaranteed and strengthened
permanently by the creation of new workers’ states. Through that one can see to
what degree the interests of the Soviet Union (and its proletarian conquests)
are opposed to those of the bureaucracy, and one can estimate the unbelievable
cynicism of the bureaucracy and of its friends (in whose ranks one finds names
like Romain Rolland, Heinrich Mann etc) who identify the interests of the Soviet
Union with those of the bureaucracy and slander all criticism of the latter as
from ‘a paid agent of the Gestapo and a close ally of Hitler’.
Agent of the Gestapo? Stalin and his bureaucracy have done more for Hitler’s
victory by their politics of ‘national and social liberation’, their policies of
‘red unions’, and by the imbecile ‘theory’ written by Stalin himself of ‘Social
Fascism’, than Adolf himself. Conspiracy for the re-establishment of Fascism?
Stalin and his bureaucracy, who have re-established the unconditional right of
inheritance, who have made the managers of factories exploit their workers, who
praise as Socialist forms of labour the worst sorts of piece work, who replace
Marxism by the most stupid forms of nationalism and who give new importance to
the forms of bourgeois life? Stalin and his bureaucracy who by their idiotic
‘all-out collectivisation’ during the First Five Year Plan ruined agriculture
throughout the country so that it has not yet recovered and who are responsible
by their poor administration for the huge numbers of factory and rail accidents
in the Soviet Union?
The Strategy of the POUM
The POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was formed by a
fusion of the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc led by Maurin with the Left Communists
of Andres Nin. Inasmuch as the question was posed in an abstract manner it
recognised the proletarian characteristics of the Spanish revolution, which gave
it an incontestable advantage compared with the Stalinist position. Because of
past faults on the national question (the Maurin heritage) the POUM only had any
sort of mass base in Catalonia. That is why we are forced when talking about the
politics of the POUM to consider the situation in Catalonia, and it turns out to
be very relevant, since the position of the Caballero-Del Vayo
[7] government essentially corresponds with that of the
Comintern which we have criticised in the first part of this article.
The POUM took a position for the Socialist Revolution against the democratic
parliamentary republic (without however, as we will show, posing the necessary
practical consequences of this) and this, most honourably, brought upon it the
hatred of the scab Executive of Moscow. In the resolution already quoted of the
EC of the CI in which the POUM is constantly identified with ‘Trotskyism’,
unhappily however without meriting this accusation, it is said:
The Praesidium of the EC of the CI approves of the struggle waged by
the CP and supported by the other organisations of the Popular Front against
Trotskyism, the agent of Hitler and of General Franco which carries out work of
local espionage for them, which seeks to destroy the Popular Front, which wages
a campaign of lies against the USSR and which uses all sorts of intrigues and
demagogic strategies to hasten the advent of Fascism in Spain. Seeing that the
Trotskyists carry out underground struggle in the interests of Fascism in the
midst of the Republican armed forces, the Praesidium approves the line of the
Party which leads on to the complete and definite wiping out of Trotskyism in
Spain as necessary for the victory against Fascism.
The Deutsche Volkszeitung (Stalinist) which
printed this resolution complained in another part of the article that the
German Fascist troops made themselves perfectly at home in Spain. In the same
way this complaint concerns the Stalinist bureaucracy who attempt to transplant
into Spain their Russian witchcraft. And in the same way that this disgusting,
crazed brute without a spark of imagination, the Borgia in the Kremlin, dirties
all the old Bolshevik party leaders, dishonours them as agents of the Gestapo
and the Mikado and shoots down the most prominent figures of the Russian
revolution like ‘mad dogs’, so, in the same way, the accomplices of Stalin in
Spain set out to slander in the most venomous fashion a whole party, which is an
important section of the Spanish proletariat, in order to prepare a pogrom
against it.
Even if, as we have already said, we have numerous and deep political
differences with the POUM, which we have already met in the SAP [8] (the German fraternal party of the POUM) and the
latter employs all its influence in Barcelona to prevent open criticism of
Stalinism, we openly and totally defend the POUM. All sane and honest parties of
the world’s working class must demand an end to the incredible slanders against
the Trotskyists, the Old Bolsheviks and the POUM. If the workers’ movement in
the world does not wish to perish it must forbid the methods of Goering in its
own camp.
But our complete solidarity with the POUM will not prevent us from explaining
in a loud clear voice our differences with them. It is not a question of ‘who is
right’ or ‘how many angels are there on the point of a pin’ but of the destiny
of the Spanish Revolution itself. And if our criticism is too late in the day to
affect events in Spain we must understand these happenings in an international
context. In order to define our position vis-à-vis the POUM permit us to call
upon our masters Marx and Engels. In the same way they put themselves
unconditionally on the side of the Paris Commune and defended it against all
sorts of lies and suspicions and thus gave themselves the right to criticise its
weaknesses and its faults.
The friends of the POUM internationally (some of whom, such as the German
SAP, are of extremely doubtful quality and are ready to sell the POUM to the
Popular Front for a ‘mess of pottage’) often claim that it is the ‘Party of
Spanish Bolshevism’ which will lead the working class to victory. Unhappily the
POUM does not represent Bolshevism (and does not claim this historic role for
itself as we shall see by some quotations) it is rather the left wing of
Menshevism against the right Menshevism (Kerensky, Plekhanov and Dan) of the
Stalinists.
Since the POUM was a signatory to the Spanish Popular Front in January 1936,
only, it is true, to condemn it very gently a few weeks later, it has not
stopped wobbling on the policy. Each time that it takes a step on the right path
which gets it the sympathies of the revolutionary masses it starts to have
qualms, and then goes to seek a deal with the ‘majority’ of this same Popular
Front of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the great barrier on the road to a
Socialist Spain.
With the aid of the POUM’s own explanations we are going to see an
intensification of this wavering. We will show that these are genuine
hesitations, and not merely tactical subtlety, which is not only permitted but
necessary. In the first number of their bulletin appearing in French,
Revolution Espagnole, the POUM declares in a leading article on
the ‘Political Principles of the POUM’ that: ‘The Popular Front government is in
the hands of the Left Republican Azaña and its programme, supported by all
parties, does not go beyond bourgeois reformism. This new experiment in
bourgeois Liberalism can only end in disaster.’
Bravo! But are you going to call us sectarians because we said that at
the very time that you helped in the creation of the Spanish Popular Front,
or have you forgotten that this ‘bourgeois reformist’ programme could only lead
to disaster?
At that time the POUM went into opposition to the Catalan government of M
Companys, unhappily without drawing out the necessary conclusions:
In Barcelona the government of the Generalidad [9] (that is those who wish to say National Community and not
“Generalité”) represents an official facade without any power. Real authority is
held by the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias of which the majority
of members are representatives of workers’ organisations.’
Then, apparently, there existed dual power which is the result of
all proletarian revolutions.
However, the POUM recoiled before this event which signified an overturning
of old and now empty forms of power. And in this very article which reaches a
Leninist revolutionary position and which forms the most leftward point of the
POUM’s swing of the pendulum, confusion already starts. ‘What is called dual
power does not then exist in Catalonia. The working class effectively controls
the whole of society.’
So then instead of combatting the government of Companys one liquidates it by
phrases. And we are going to see this non-existent Companys government,
nonexistent according to these phrases, liquidate, and not by phrases but
properly, the all-powerful Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias and
all those who help the POUM. By its support for the Economic Council of the
Community the POUM committed another error. In the article already cited it is
said, ‘With the Militia Committee the Economic Council has as its objective
the organisation of the Catalan economy in a revolutionary sense’. However,
the Economic Council is nothing else than an instrument of the Companys
government, which tolerates the seizure of factories by workers only because it
lacks the means to oppose them and which continues to remain faithful to the
principles of private capitalism, for which it prepares a rebirth with great
diplomatic skill.
The task of the POUM as a revolutionary party cannot in consequence be that
of glorifying and supporting the Economic Council of the ‘Esquerra Catalana’ [10]; on the contrary, it must declare that one
can only imagine a permanent and real socialisation after the seizure of
power by the working class and after the installation of its dictatorship.
The task of the POUM was to deliver the proletariat from the petit bourgeois
ideologies of Azaña, Companys, Caballero, Stalin-Hernandez and also the
Anarchists, and to declare war on the bourgeois and petit bourgeois tendencies
by agitation, by propaganda and by clarifying matters among the masses, and not
to cover up a deceit by calling for ‘unity’ – a unity with traitors to the
revolution.
Another article, which appeared in No.2 of Revolution
Espagnole, on the relationship between the Central Committee of the
Militias and the Catalan government, deepened the programmatic confusion of the
first issue. The POUM compares the role of the Central Committee of the Militias
with that of a general staff in a war and against which the civilian government
has no apparent power. Here the POUM contradicts its own argument. If it is true
that the civilian government’s power is enormously reduced, it is also true that
this power is never reduced to nothing. The question is also one of knowing what
will happen after the war. Either the civilian government maintains its power or
the general staff makes a military putsch and removes the civilian government.
If this last would result in the rational conduct of the war the general staff
would not fear to make a coup even during the war. In our case the dilemma is
all the greater since the civilian government represents the bourgeoisie and
petty bourgeoisie while the Central Committee of the Militias represents the
working class.
It is certain that for a short time of transition a dual power is possible,
and the revolutionary party must obey the government up to the moment when it
has persuaded the immense majority of the working class that it must overturn
the last remnants of the old state of affairs. It is precisely this necessity
that the POUM attempts to deny, and it joins in all kinds of diplomatic games
which may serve to hide the fact that dual power, which means in reality the
Central Committee of the Militias, is becoming an instrument of the government
and is not, as the POUM believes with the best faith in the world (but
revolutionary honesty is not sufficient to make a revolution if it lacks
revolutionary understanding) making the government an instrument of the
Militias’ Central Committee.
Let us look first at the description in the French paper of the POUM of the
first steps taken to liquidate the Central Committees of the Militias:
The scene, which made the Central Committee of the Militias look
like the Smolny Institute during the revolutionary days of 1917, is no more. The
Central Committee of the Militias as well as the War Committee have moved their
headquarters into the Defence Ministry ... This removal is not merely
geographic but corresponds to the development of relations between the Central
Committee and the government of Catalonia. Two ideas have made this possible:
the first is that it is only a diplomatic facade ... the majority of the
anti-fascist side has thought it better to leave apparent authority with the
Companys government. In a similar way one is determined to transform the Central
Committee of the Militias into a section of the official Defence
Ministry.’
Kerensky would have been reconciled with the Revolutionary
Committee at Smolny if it had been as submissive. The POUM does not defend
intransigent Bolshevik opposition against the efforts of the petit bourgeois
traitors who seek to put the working class under their orders; it submits – with
a bad conscience just like Martov – to the majority and to the impersonal word
‘one’. Instead of showing to the proletariat the real role of Companys,
Tarradellas and their Stalinist agents, the POUM consoles itself with confused
pseudo-Marxist phrases.
One cannot talk of dual power in Catalonia. The traditional pattern
inspired by the Russian Revolution where workers’ councils find themselves
facing a bourgeois government, is not the same as the situation in Barcelona.
The Companys government does not represent the interests of the capitalist
bourgeoisie: it is of republican petit bourgeois composition, and under the
pressure of a series of events it wavers, and these waverings have their origin
in the economic weakness of the petit bourgeoisie. In October l934 Companys and
his friends were shown to be incapable of leading capitalist reaction. In l936
they could not – even if they had the intention – resist the huge wave of the
proletariat. Were is only one power in Catalonia: it is the working class and
behind it the peasantry and the petit bourgeoisie.’
In all of that one cannot find the shadow of rational thought. For
Companys and his party the civil war is just a national disaster without any
meaning. And if they submit in appearance, for a short period, to the measures
taken by the working class,
it is only to keep power in their hands,
little by little, to disarm the proletariat politically and to prepare a rotten
compromise with the Francos and the Molas. The POUM seems to imagine that it is
enough for the proletariat to exercise power by putting pressure on a petit
bourgeois government. Is it that Nin and Andrade, who are not men without
historical sense, do not remember the Stalin-Kamenev position of February 1917
[11], and do not know of the reply which
Lenin gave in the April Theses to the conciliatory wing of the Bolsheviks? It is
true that we will see the POUM, after other odysseys, having a more correct view
of the role of Companys, but our greatest reproach to the POUM is that they did
not foresee these events after making a Marxist analysis of the class forces
involved but only followed event empirically.
The confusion of the POUM on the fundamental question of the state and
revolution then led it to take the fatal step of 26 September: entry into the
government of Tarradellas.
Some weeks previously one had mocked the republican government of the
Caballero-Giral coalition and had pointed out that Catalonia was much more
progressive given that the real power was in the hands of the Central Committee
of the Militias and other proletarian bodies. However, in the same number of the
Revolution Espagnole in which we are told of the creation of a
new government with Andres Nin as Minister of Justice, we are told of the
liquidation of the Central Committee of the Militias. This is surely too high a
price for a ministerial seat. Anatoly Lunarcharsky, who was saved from execution
and slandering by his premature death, tells us in his Revolutionary
Silhouettes the only phrase that Trotsky pronounced about the entry of
Chernov into the Kerensky Government: ‘What miserable ambition to give up his
historic role for a ministerial portfolio.’ Nin, whom the world’s press
willingly presents as a pupil of Trotsky, seems, alas, to be closer to Chernov
than to his claimed master.
As a member of the Companys-Tarradellas government Nin also signed decrees on
the new commercial organisation in Catalonia. In the revolutionary current,
committees were formed all over the place spontaneously, committees which were
generally called ‘Houses of the People’. It is evident that the ‘Esquerra
Catalana’ was not particularly enamoured of this initiative of the revolutionary
masses but the task of the POUM, which called itself a revolutionary Leninist
party, would be to support such initiatives, to broaden them and to help in
organising them centrally in order completely to destroy the old state
bureaucracy.
The decrees of the Tarradellas-Nin government liquidated the Popular
Committees, prevented such initiatives by legal penalties and imposed on the
communes a new bureaucracy. Like a real Martovian centrist party the POUM
accompanied the new decrees with crocodile tears: ‘one can regret the
suppression of the local revolutionary initiatives but one must, on the other
hand, recognise the need for the whole of Catalonia to be under the same
legislation’. Furthermore in No.8 of the Revolution Espagnole
we read:
In our conception each people must learn from its own struggles. As
educative as the lessons of the Russian Revolution are, they are not completely
applicable to the Spanish Revolution. From the political point of view one
cannot think for a moment that one can in Spain, and still less in Catalonia,
establish the rule of a proletarian party in the middle of the war. Looking at
the real situation of the organisations, parties and unions and the balance of
forces one can hardly say we have here a deplorable outcome.
The POUM here makes the tragic error of all centrists, which
consists of thinking of their own party as a lifeless object, instead of
thinking of it as a living factor in the revolution. There are in Catalonia four
principal political currents: the ‘Esquerra Catalana’, bourgeois-republican, the
Stalinist PSUC, the Anarcho-Syndicalists and the POUM. The Esquerra and the
Stalinists fight for the Republic, the Stalinists being in other words agents of
the Esquerra in the proletarian camp. The anarcho-syndicalists are in confusion
and join the side which is the strongest, and the POUM, it says, is for
Socialism. What then does the renunciation of hegemony by the POUM mean? It can
mean nothing else but this: the POUM does not take its own programme seriously,
it refuses to apply it in order to have peace with the Esquerru and the PSUC.
How then can the POUM explain to the workers so that they will understand the
depth of its differences with the Stalinists?
Do not these half measures, this self-castration, really prepare the way for
the hypocritical work of the Stalinists? For Stalinism is not at all ‘generous’
enough to give away its hegemony. It is true that it has never been Stalin’s
method to carry out an open political struggle to persuade the masses. But
instead of arguments it has available an immense material power, the greatest
perhaps that a despotism ever possessed, and which it uses without any scruples.
Thus it makes its support for Spanish anti-Fascism dependent on the liquidation
of the POUM as a political factor. At the same time it sends its gutter
journalist Michael Koltsov, a specialist in the pogrom, who learnt his
honourable trade when employed by Petlura [12], the hangman of the Ukraine, to start up a campaign of
slanders and lies against the POUM.
In this way Stalin prepares his hegemony, which is a denial of Marxism, a
denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a denial of victory. Of course a
Marxist party, the only conscious representative of the interests of the
proletariat, should not forcefully oppress other political currents. The sarcasm
of Bukharin, ‘One party in power, the others in prison’ is neither a principle
nor an axiom as the dim epigones of Stalin would have us believe: in Russia it
was nothing else but the most bitter necessity of the terrible years of the
Civil War. That is why it is entirely possible that the POUM can, with a correct
political line, come into a long term coalition with the anarcho-syndicalists.
But a revolutionary Marxist party can never deny the struggle both for
leadership and for the victorious application of its beliefs. In the
Temps, the most respectable paper of French bourgeois opinion
we find on 22 January 1937 the following idea of the situation in Catalonia:
One gets there. The revolutionary horrors stick in one’s throat. The
leaders. who from Russian experience know that it is dangerous to go too far,
try to rein back their troops. The troops go on in the way that their leaders
used to point out to them not so long ago. In Russia Lenin brutally cut the
knot. But in Russia he had an authoritarian regime which knew how to make itself
obeyed. In Barcelona the only method is propaganda. They make a great effort to
unify the proletariat in unions, to make Socialists, Communists and Anarchists a
single party, in order to create a solid base for the building of an
authoritarian anti-Fascist state. They spare nothing in their efforts to achieve
this, neither conferences, meetings and press campaigns, but the results are
poor.
It seems that this employee of the Comité des Forges
[13] has better understood the dangers that menace the
Spanish working class than the host of leaders of the POUM. What is
indispensable for the Spanish revolution so that it can conquer Franco, Hitler,
Mussolini and Stalin, is an
iron fist, the authoritarian regime of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say the hegemony of the
revolutionary party of the proletariat. And in denying itself this role the POUM
reinforces our main argument: the tragedy of the Spanish working class is that
it does not have a true Marxist vanguard. The correspondent of the
Temps talks rather clumsily of installing an authoritarian
anti-Fascist regime. There is nothing astonishing in that but a negation is not
a positive programme. These attempts can only lead to the resolution of the
crisis in a counter-revolutionary manner, that is to say against the proletariat
and for the businessmen of the Esquerra. And these latter in their turn will
give way to Franco and Mola.
In one of his speeches when Minister of Justice, Nin himself talked of the
organisation of the economy:
Another problem is that of collectivisation and socialisation. The
spontaneous movement of the masses has shown their Socialist wishes. But we must
deliver ourselves from deviations and errors which we can now see in this area.
In some cases the collectivisation of a factory has meant that we seize it
without taking account of the necessities of the war and the whole economy. This
must stop. The collectivisation or confiscation of a factory is not done for the
needs ot a union or just a section of the working class.
That is correct comrade Nin. But how would you establish economic
order, how would you organise that sort of thing for the needs of the whole
working class without establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat? How can
you join in a government which the POUM itself characterises in the following
fashion: ‘If it is not bourgeois democratic it is not proletarian either.’ On 21
January you published a number of La Batalla in honour of
Lenin, where you have printed some of Lenin’s theses on the dictatorship of the
proletariat: but would it not have been better to remember the decisive lessons
of Lenin on the decisive steps of the Spanish revolution as for example in the
following statement that you quoted:
The main thing that the Socialists do not understand and which
appears in our eyes as theoretical blindness, dependence on bourgeois prejudices
and political treason to the proletariat, is that in capitalist society when the
class struggle that lies at its base reaches a climax, there can be no middle
way between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Any dream of a truce is only a petit bourgeois cry of
despair.
The exit of Nin from the government thanks to the strength of
Stalin’s representative in Barcelona, Antonov-Ovseyenko
[14], (who, in spite of all, will soon be shot as a
‘Fascist-Trotskyist’ and a ‘mad dog’) triggered a new turn of the POUM to the
left without however taking stock of its main error, which left the field open
to other fatal faults. Companys and Tarradellas have confidence and are not at
all put out, and make speeches in the style of Azaña, of Caballero and of Del
Vayo condemning a Republic of Soviets and glorifying the League of Nations and
Mr Eden. The difference between the central government and the government of
Catalonia, a difference so often underlined by the POUM, begins to disappear.
La Batalla fears that the petit bourgeois politicians
impertinently take a more and more prominent position and seek to diminish the
influence of workers’ organisations. It is above all the valiant organisation of
POUM Youth, the JCI, whose heroic leader Vidal
[15] fell in the fight against Franco, which I found the right
tone.
La Batalla of 6 January announces in enormous headlines:
‘It is necessary to recall to life the committees to create instruments of
workers’ power’. Right on – that is the correct slogan. But comrades, do you
believe that the workers will forget that it is you yourselves who signed the
decrees to dissolve the committees? Goethe, whom modern Marxists could still
read with profit, wrote, ‘... for that man, who in uncertain times, has an
uncertain spirit, multiplies and enlarges his troubles more and more. But those
who stick firmly to an idea recreate the world.’
The POUM and the Anarchists
The POUM leaders frequently emphasise their friendly relations with
the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Certainly it is the correct political line to create a
stable front with the Anarcho-Syndicalist organisations against the blackleg
treason of the Stalinists, but without for a moment ceasing to criticise the
theoretical errors and pragmatic faults of Anarchism.
At the start of the Civil War the POUM had its own independent trade union
organisation (FOUS); that was already an error that the POUM recognised soon
enough. But instead of unifying with the mass Anarcho-Syndicalist organisation,
the CNT; and then resolving in a positive way the conflict with the UGT, a
reformist reactionary trade union body led by Stalinists (instead of ‘trade
union unity at any price’, ‘trade union unity on a revolutionary position’), the
POUM brought its members into the UGT, probably in order to avoid a serious
theoretical discussion with the Anarcho-Syndicalists.
The result was quite different from what they had wanted: the POUM, instead
of controlling the Anarcho-Syndicalist leaders through their influence on the
revolutionary masses within the CNT, were excluded from all the negotiations on
trade union unity, and the eventual resolution signed by the UGT and the CNT
contained a certain number of points which one could consider as a direct threat
to the fractional work of the POUM (point 15)’We will wage a struggle against
all cell work of undisciplined trades union groups, which either by
misunderstanding or maybe by ill-will, may be dangerous for the achievement of
this programme.’ (Revolution Espagnole, No.9) On the trades
union question the POUM is coming apart and at the same time is helping the
leaders of the CNT and UGT.
It is not very different concerning the question of the formation of the
government. Instead of leading with the CNT a joint opposition against Companys,
and of fighting for the seizure of power by the soviets, the POUM helped and
encouraged the transformation of the Anarchist deniers of the state into a party
talking about coalition with the Republicans. Now, after the expulsion of the
POUM from the government, it naturally tries to win over the CNT by its renewed
opposition to Companys. But how can they show the masses that this is not pure
party egoism on the part of the POUM? They will be asked: does the character of
the Companys government depend on whether Nin is, or is not, the Minister of
Justice? Are not our Anarchist ministers sufficient guarantees of almost a joint
opposition against Companys, of the ‘Socialist’ character of the government?
We have already pointed out that it is these waverings of the POUM that make
the Stalinist campaign of pogroms so dangerous. The workers will not understand
that the differences between the POUM and PSUC are about the dictatorship of the
proletariat as opposed to bourgeois reaction, and is it not a fact that backward
layers of the working class are willing to sacrifice the POUM for Russian aid?
It will only be by a firm, clear, brave position that the battle can be won by
the POUM. It is still not too late, but much precious time has already been
lost.
The POUM and the International
As part of its inheritance from Maurin
[16], the POUM belongs to the London Bureau
[17], the bureau of independent Socialist parties, or what is left
of the ‘Two and a Half International’, which, formed in confusion, creates even
more confusion around it. Six whole parties still belong to this bureau. One of
them has only a purely imaginary existence: the Independent Socialist Party of
Poland, which does not exist save in the imagination of the famous hero-comic Dr
Kruk, and two others can only produce feeble little groups, the Italian
Maximalists and the German SAP
[18]; apart
from that there is the ILP and the Swedish Socialist Party.
When the Bureau met at the beginning of October to prepare the conferences
which it loves to have and which are always without any result, because they
forget to take any position on the most important questions (such as the USSR or
the new International), they were unable to get a unanimous resolution because
of the lack of a common point of view.
Here are some other proofs of this curious ‘unity’: the POUM rightly calls
the policy of neutrality of the workers’ movement vis-à-vis the Spanish conflict
a crime. But the French wing of this London Bureau, Marceau Pivert [19], belongs elsewhere to Blum’s General Staff, and
Blum is one of those principally responsible for this policy of neutrality!
The Swedish Socialist Party supports the Swedish government’s policy of
neutrality. La Batalla of 28 January published the speech of
the Swedish Minister of Justice, Westman, in which he defended in Parliament the
policy of neutrality. Unhappily the article forgot to mention that the leader of
the POUM’s fraternal party in Sweden, Flygg, said that he agreed with Westman on
essentials. Today the POUM, after long hesitations, calls the Popular Front a
bourgeois treason against the revolution and at the same time the SAP signs a
manifesto in favour of a new Weimar Republic with the living corpses of Weimar.
By a happy ‘chance’ the call for a German Popular Front appeared in the same
number of the Deutsche Volkszeitung (the organ of the German
accomplices of the Moscow murderers) as the resolution of the EC of the CI on
Spain in which are published the most gross attacks against the POUM, ‘the spy
of Hitler and Franco’. In the interests of the German Popular Front, with its
wimpish liberals and Stalinist pogromists, the SAP is itself becoming an
instrument of Stalin, and takes a great deal of trouble to pacify the POUM and
to push it into dropping all its criticism of Stalinism.
Inasmuch as the POUM still holds the formula that the SAP used yesterday
(that is to say, that one must establish the bases for the creation of a new
Marxist International, etc) these last have already started negotiations with
Stalin’s German mercenaries. The Neue Front (paper of the SAP)
for this reason takes aim at the dreadful position of the POUM with following
prediction:
We are very well aware that a necessary and fundamental renewal of
the workers’ movement cannot be done by simple acts of will and resolutions at a
conference. But a victorious revolution in Spain would greatly improve the
chances of a huge proletarian International capable of going places. However
today, when victory in Spain is a hope and not a reality, and where we still do
not know what consequences that such a victory would have for the USSR, one
cannot foresee whether the result of this would be a new International or a
renewed International.
Evidently we cannot explain how those who are floundering up to
their necks in the swamp cannot see further than the end of their own noses. And
so the SAP, which fears all moves to the left by the POUM like death, and utters
a sigh of relief after each move to the right, has done all that it can to
prevent the victory of the Spanish proletariat, so that Stalin can both decimate
the Old Bolsheviks by the firing squad and get a pogrom against Spanish
revolutionaries under way, wants to ... ‘renew’ this kind of International.
In the second German number of Revolution Espagnole we find
a resolution of the POUM on the International question from where we draw the
following quotation:
In order to conquer, the proletariat needs revolutionary parties
which submit to international discipline. This International does not exist. The
Second and Third Internationals cannot be the instrument of world revolution.
Neither, because of its sectarian character, can the Fourth International,
founded by Trotsky. Historic events have made our party the centre of the world
revolutionary struggle, and our party the vanguard of this struggle, the meeting
place for independent Socialist parties and groups from different
countries.
As we have seen, international discipline does not exist unless it
is that of the London Bureau. The Marxism of these parties does not go very far,
for they have understood nothing of the subjective role that is played by a
revolutionary party. The only response that the POUM makes to us is to call us
‘sectarian’. On the other hand the POUM knows very well that the Fourth
International has not been founded by Trotsky or indeed founded at all. What is
true is that we are working hard and consistently to build it, under an
international bureau which co-ordinates our theoretical and practical work, and
that we are proud to have amongst us the strength, experience and science of
comrade Leon Trotsky.
And our sectarianism? Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were forced to be
sectarian in the years when, with all their strength, they worked to persuade
the masses of the collapse of the Second International. The struggle against the
Third International, which disposes of enormous material resources, and
possesses the halo of the first proletarian state, is incomparably harder and
longer. Our sectarianism consists in the fact that we remain faithful to our
ideas and that we tell the world what is. Inasmuch as it is associated with the
worst sectarians, such as the Zionists or Dr Kucky Field, the London Bureau
increasingly decays, while the Fourth International continues to consolidate its
forces and is already in contact with the masses in several countries such as
Belgium and France. If the comrades of the POUM wish to become the Spanish
Bolshevik Party, they must not go towards the Kautsky and Longuet of 1937, that
is to say Schwab, Pivert and Maxton, but rejoin the platform and the methods of
struggle of the Fourth International.
Last of all the leaders of the POUM talk about the ‘unjustified attacks on
the part of the Third and Fourth Internationals directed against the POUM’.
After all that we have said we think that the comrades of the POUM should
recognise that this is a demagogic, dishonest argument which we would have
thought was beneath their dignity. The Third International spreads the most
venomous slanders, lies and provocations in order to prevent the Spanish working
class from freeing itself. On the other hand, the Fourth International spreads
the critical light of Marxism and has no other interest than in preparing the
road for proletarian revolution. That is why it is time to create such a new
path towards revolutionary Marxism. Everything possible must be done for this in
the interests of both Spain and the world.
Walter Held
5 February 1937
Footnotes
1. Colonel Casimir de la Rocque
(1886-1946): the leader of the semi-fascist
Croix de Feu which made a
violent attack on the French parliament building in February 1934. [
Note by
Editors 1988]
2. Jacques Doriot (1898-1945):
Stalinist mayor of St Denis, who broke with the Communist Party in 1934 over its
refusal to advocate a United Front. In June 1936 he formed his own Fascist
organisation, the
Parti Populaire Français. [
Note by Editors
1988]
3. Manuel Azaña y Diaz
(1880-1940): Leading liberal and anti-clerical who was Prime Minister of the
republic. Dying in 1940 he accepted Extreme Unction from the Bishop of
Montauban. [
Note by Editors 1988]
4. Luis Companys y Jover
(1883-1940): Catalan nationalist politician who was Prime Minister of the
regional government in Catalonia. He was handed back to the Spaniards by Petain
in 1940 and was promptly shot. [
Note by Editors 1988]
5. Jakob Walcher (1887-19–): One
of the leaders of the SAP, later a bureaucrat in East Germany after the war. See
footnote 8. [
Note by Editors 1988]
6. Leon Blum (1872-1950): Leader
of the French Socialist Party and Premier of the Popular Front government of
1936-7.
7. Julio Alvarez del Vayo
(1891-l975): Supposed left Socialist and trusted lieutenant of Largo Caballero
and Foreign Minister in his government. In fact a secret Stalinist, he was
responsible for refusing help to the Moroccan Rif rebels and for transferring
Spain’s gold reserve to the Soviet Union, so placing the Popular Front
government at the mercy of Stalin. He was not expelled from the Socialist Party
until April 1946, but always in search of an infallible leader, he later flirted
with Titoism and Maoism, becoming the president of FRAP. Some years ago the
organisation of the Spanish Maoists in London was appropriately named after this
Judas. [
Note by Editors 1988]
8. The SAP (Socialist Workers
Party of Germany) came into existence when the German Social Democracy expelled
its own left wing, which organised itself as a party in 1931. A year later its
leadership was taken over by a group of ex-Brandlerites led by Jakob Walcher.
[
Note by Editors 1988]
9. Generalidad. The name
of the Catalan regional government established by the statute of Catalan
autonomy in 1932. [
Note by Editors 1988]
10. The German government of
November 1918, Ebert-Scheidemann, also created ‘Socialisation Committees’ and
the German ‘Independents’ participated in this contrickery instead of exposing
the lie. [Note by Held.] [The
Esquerra Catalana or Catalan Left was the
nationalist party of the small businessmen and lower middle classes in
Barcelona. –
Note by Editors 1988]
11. Incidentally: in the Soviet
Union today all differences of opinion with Lenin at any time in the past play a
decisive role in the accusations of the Menshevik Vishinsky, who once was on the
other side of the barricades. But do they accuse Stalin for his own error in
March 1917? [
Note by Held]. [Thanks to
Glasnost it has just
been revealed that Vishinsky, while a legal officer of the Provisional
Government, actually signed the warrant for Lenin’s arrest during the July days!
He certainly had something to hide and what is more had to do as he was told.
The Trotskyists did not then know that! –
Note by Editors 1988]
12. The Hetman, Semyon Petlura
(1877-1926): a notorious anti-Semite and military dictator in the Ukraine during
the Russian Civil War. [
Note by Editors 1988]
13. The
Comité des
Forges. Very right wing association of largest French capitalists – then in
the iron and steel industry. [
Note by Editors 1988]
14. V.A. Antonov-Ovseyenko
(1884-1938): Stalin’s Consul-General in Barcelona who planned the provocation
against the POUM, was himself recalled in 1937 and was shot on Stalin’s orders
at the end of 1938 or the beginning of 1939. He had led the assault on the
Winter Palace in 1917. He was rehabilitated by Khrushchev. [
Note by Editors
1988]
15. Germinal Vidal (?-1936):
Secretary of the POUM Youth, fell during the assault on the troops of the
Generals in the Plaza de Catalona. [
Note by Editors 1988]
16. The Fourth International
also honours the memory of Joaquim Maurin, murdered by Franco’s troops. But,
nothing could be more dangerous than to canonise his terrible theoretical and
practical errors because of this martyr’s death, which, to a considerable
extent, is what Gorkin is probably trying to do. [
Note by Held] [Gorkin
(1912-?) was a journalist and a leading POUM member. He later collaborated with
El Campesino to write
Listen Comrades. On Maurin’s fate, see
above. The date given for his birth by Hugh Thomas in the
Spanish Civil
War is incorrect. –
Note by Editors 1988]
17. The London Bureau,
otherwise known as the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity,
was founded in Paris in August 1933. Its secretary was Fenner Brockway.
[
Note by Editors 1988]
18. Both German and Italian
groups were, of course, exiles from Fascism. [
Note by Editors 1988]
19. Marceau Pivert (1895-1958):
Leader of the left wing of the SFIO, the French Socialist Party, and later,
after a split, the PSOP (Workers and Peasants Socialist Party) in 1938.
[
Note by Editors 1988]
