Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
The ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona
From Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer
1988. Used by permission.
This article first appeared in the January 1988 issue of
La Verité and is translated by John Archer.
Every workers’ revolution in the twentieth century bears the
characteristic mark that a situation of duality of power appears at its
beginning. This is between the old organs of the state, whether rejuvenated or
not, which have generally passed into the control of a government of
‘conciliators’ with the first phase, and the organs of the mass movement,
organisations of struggle which have become the organs of a new power.
Our readers will know the analyses which Trotsky made on this matter in the
History of the Russian Revolution, about the duality of power
created by the first revolution in February 1917, between the old state, with
the Provisional Government at its head, and the new workers’ state in the
process of formation, that of the Soviets.
The appearance of the duality of power marks only the beginning of the
struggle between them, the struggle which ends in the victory of either the
revolution or the counter-revolution, through the victory of one power or the
other. Study of the revolutions in the period since October 1917 reveals the
decisive role of the general staffs on the side of the revolution, of their
party, of the party which fights for the victory of the new power. That party
has neither provoked nor engineered the revolution, any more than it can stop
it, without joining the counter-revolution. The authority of the party may be
widely recognised, even by a majority of the masses, but it enables it only to
act as a brake on an offensive which may be premature or isolated – this was the
case of the July Days of 1917 in Petrograd – or, on the contrary, to clear the
way for the final assault, by helping the masses to overcome the obstacles on
their road to power. This is the case of the insurrection of October 1917 in
Russia.
What has been called the ‘May Days of 1937’ in Barcelona are an event of this
kind, independently of the fact that the event took place within one of the two
opposing camps in the course of a civil war, the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the
duality of powers began in July 1936, with the victorious counter-stroke of the
workers in a number of large cities, including Barcelona, against the military
coup d’etat of General Franco.
In May 1937 it was the Popular Front government of the Generalidad of
Catalonia – under the pressure of the Stalinists in the PSUC – which took the
counter-offensive. It tried to seize a telephone exchange, which was in the
hands of the militia of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The latter resisted, arms
in hand, and the workers in Barcelona replied to the attempt by a general
strike. Several days of street fighting followed in the Catalan capital.
The supporters and agents of Stalin speak of a ‘Fascist putsch’. Other
elements in the Popular Front speak of a ‘tragic misunderstanding’. The
Trotskyists agree on the general significance of what happened, but are divided
in their appreciation of the incident itself. Trotsky believed that victory was
possible and that, therefore, we have here an ‘October’ which failed, because
there was no revolutionary leadership which wanted to fight to win. His comrade,
the Italian Blasco (Pietro Tresso), regarded the event as ‘July Days’ ending
badly for lack of a firm leadership, which could have prevented the retreat from
turning into a rout.
In this month of May 1937, the atmosphere was tense. In the last days of
April there had been violent incidents at Molins de Llobregat, where a PSUC
leader was killed. Eight CNT militants were killed at Puigcerda in the course of
an attack by armed police to recover control of the frontier for the government.
On 1 May the government prohibited street demonstrations, which might provoke
the outburst of workers’ anger which it feared, or might give to that anger the
means to bring them together to hit back.
At the Telephonica
The explosion came on 3 May. That afternoon the Barcelona police
chief, an active member of the PSUC named Eusebio Rodriguez Salas, presented
himself in front of the central telephone exchange, the Telephonica, in
the Square of Catalonia in Barcelona. The exchange belonged to the American
Telegraph and Telephone Company; it had been seized during the revolutionary
days, and was under the control of a committee and of members of the CNT
militia. It is located in the heart of the Catalan capital, and what happened to
it came to be a symbol for the fate of the revolution and the workers’
positions. The initiative by Rodriguez did not get a green light from the
government, which had not been consulted, but it had the approval of the
government’s public order adviser, who, as everyone knew, was completely devoted
to the PSUC.
The police chiefs escort got into the building by surprise and disarmed the
militiamen whom it caught unawares on the ground floor. The militiamen on the
upper floors were warned and began to resist this unexpected attack and to fire
on the attackers. Two senior police officers, members of the CNT named Asens and
Eroles, were warned at once and rushed to the Telephonica to stop the
shooting. They did their utmost to convince their comrades not to keep up their
resistance, which, they said, would only make things worse. In response to their
persuasion, the militiamen agreed to vacate the Telephonica, which
remained in the hands of the police.
But the peace-making efforts of the two mediators were in vain. The sound of
shots had alerted the people of Barcelona, who were in a state of extreme
tension and were, in fact, expecting some move to be made, if not by the
government, at any rate by the extremists of the PSUC. The news of the attack on
the Telephonica spread like a trail of gunpowder. The workers went on strike in
order to paralyse the advance of the counter-revolution. They erected barricades
to prevent the government’s forces of repression from moving freely around. The
branches of the CNT at its base, particularly its ‘defence committees’ were also
there, and their members were armed.
George Orwell, in his book Homage to Catalonia, bears
witness to having experienced the early hours of these ‘Days’ as acts of
aggression against the working people of Barcelona, carried out by those whom he
calls by their old name, the ‘Civil Guard’, former policemen who had been
integrated into the new police forces which their chiefs were now throwing into
attacks on the workers’ barricades in Barcelona. The Barcelona workers were led
by the elements organised in the ‘control patrols’ – the last vestiges of the
workers’ militias for maintaining order in the rear – and by the defence
committees. They counter-attacked and came out of the workers’ districts. The
battle raged in the centre of the city against the forces of order, which had
their headquarters in the Karl Marx barracks of the PSUC. Their spearhead,
directed towards the Ramblas, was located in the Hotel Colon, in Square of
Catalonia, at the top end of the Ramblas.
Several victorious attacks were directed against the police strong-points in
the Exhibition Palace and the American cinema. The Anarchists even found some
tanks, which enabled them to break the encirclement of the workers’ fighting
nuclei.
The leaders of the CNT maintained their policy of pacification, while at the
same time they defended the militants, who, they said, were the victims of an
act of aggression and of provocation. The same evening, 3 May, there was a
meeting of the leaders of the CNT, the POUM and their youth organisations. One
of the POUM leaders, Gorkin, declared:
Either we place ourselves at the head of this movement to destroy
the enemy within, or the movement will collapse, and this enemy will destroy
us.
No one denies that the situation was favourable for liquidating the
undertaking and the forces of the PSUC. However, despite the enthusiasm of its
youth section (Young Libertarians), the CNT maintained its waiting stance of
‘protestation’, and the POUM did not want to be isolated from it.
The fighting continued on 4 May, with sudden silences following brutal
outbursts. La Batalla, the newspaper of the POUM, spoke of ‘the
provocations with which the counter-revolution is testing the pulse of the
ability of the working masses to resist’ and ‘the preparations for a
thorough-going attack on the conquests of the revolution’. The article goes
on:
But the counter-attack by the proletariat could not be more
powerful. Thousands of workers have taken to the streets, arms in hand.
Factories, workshops and shops have ceased work. The barricades have gone up
again in every part of the city. The majority of places in Catalonia have copied
the gesture of its capital. The working class is strong and will know how to
crush every effort by the counter-revolution. We must live on the alert, rifle
in hand. We must maintain the magnificent spirit of resistance and of struggle,
which guarantees our victory. We must prevent counter-revolution from raising
its head again.
The POUM journal also demanded that Rodriguez Salas be dismissed,
that the decrees be annulled, that ‘public order be in the hands of the working
class’ and that a workers’ revolutionary junta be formed, with the creation of
‘committees to defend the revolution in every quarter, every place and every
workplace’.
All the evidence goes to show that in this article we have a policy made up
on the spot. Victor Alba, the historian of the POUM, assures us that this is not
what the POUM wanted to do, but only what it could do, bearing in mind that it
was determined not to cut itself off from the CNT! Indeed, the leader of the
CNT, Garcia Oliver, appealed on the radio for a ceasefire; he called on people
not to speak any more about ‘provocations’ or to ‘go on about the dead’.
Companys, the president of the Generalidad, called for calm. He denounced the
initiative of Rodriguez Salas, but he demanded that the workers must leave the
streets and return to their homes before peace could be restored. The regional
committee of the CNT, between two attacks by the forces of order on its
premises, called for a truce and for calm. All the personalities of the ‘left’
of the Popular Front rushed to its help on the radio.
State terror
On 5 May the forces of order mounted what was nothing less than a
terrorist attack. Armed groups of men in uniform arrested the Italian Anarchist,
Berneri, who criticised the policy of class collaboration of his Anarchist
comrades with the Popular Front. His dead body was found the next day. But,
during this time, the CNT was working with the UGT (the reformist trade union
federation) to issue a joint appeal for work to be resumed, explaining that the
cessation of industry in ‘these moments of anti-Fascist war is equivalent to
collaborating with the common enemy by weakening ourselves’.
The Friends of Durutti, an organisation of dissident Anarchists, who had
opposed the absorption of the militias into the army, issued an appeal for the
formation of a ‘revolutionary junta’ to include the POUM. It criticised the
leaders of the CNT who called for a ceasefire, and demanded that the
‘provocateurs’ be executed. Every leading organ of the CNT repudiated this
declaration and the organisation which issued it, in extremely violent terms.
Barcelona was vibrating with rumours. The 29th Division, commanded by the
Anarchist Jover, and the 26th, under the POUMist Rovira, were forbidden to march
on the capital. In fact these commanders had thought of doing so, but were
dissuaded by their organisations. Leaders of the JCI (Jeunesses Communistes
Internationalistes) and the committee for defence in north Barcelona organised a
column, based on officer-cadets from the military academy, to seize the central
headquarters of the PSUC and of the Generalidad. It was the POUM leader, Andres
Nin, who put a stop to this operation. British warships were anchoring in the
roadstead.
Federica Montseny, the Minister for Health in the Popular Front government at
Valencia, which was headed by Largo Caballero, protested against the fact that
all the ceasefire negotiations took it for granted that the Telephonica
had been taken over by the forces of order. The UGT in Catalonia decided to
exclude from its ranks all those members of the POUM who did not expressly
repudiate their comrades who were taking part in the insurrection!
The death of another minister, a member of the PSUC and of the UGT, named
Antonio Sese, who was shot by unknown murderers as he was going to take up his
appointment, perhaps gave the central government a pretext for taking public
order out of the hands of the Catalan Generalidad. From that time onwards,
public order was entrusted to General Pozas, a professional soldier, former head
of the Civil Guard, who appears to have been linked to the PSUC by connections
of a hardly political nature. There was total confusion. Both the arrival of
troops sent by the Valencia government and a possible foreign intervention were
expected. The new government included none of the PSUC people who had played a
role in the provocation.
On 6 May the body of Berneri was found; he had been well and truly
assassinated. The workers who followed the CNT were disorientated by the
disorder and confusion, as well as by the appeals from their leaders. They began
to desert the barricades in large numbers. The POUM, in its own way, buried the
movement, with comments about ‘these three magnificent days’ and ‘this
tremendous experience’. It put on record that it had been with the masses in the
streets at the beginning, and observed that ‘under the repeated injunctions of
their leaders, the masses have begun to withdraw from the struggle’. Yet it
presented the result as being largely positive:
Beyond any doubt it [the proletariat] has won a great, partial
victory. It has defeated the counter-revolutionary provocation. It has won the
dismissal of all those who were directly responsible for the provocation. It has
struck a serious blow at the bourgeoisie and reformism. It could have won more,
much more, if those in the leadership of the organisations which stand at the
head of the working class of Catalonia could have risen to the level of the
masses.
On 7 May the police took over the abandoned barricades, which were
to be demolished amid great publicity by girls belonging to the PSUC. The trams
began to run again. Two hundred militants were freed from jail. Shots were fired
at the car of Federica Montseny, the Anarchist minister. The issue of La
Batalla for 8 May once again urged a return to work. At the same time,
the local committee of the POUM in Barcelona sharply criticised the executive of
its party, which it accused of having ‘capitulated’ in the course of those days,
in the face of the counter-revolution, under the pressure of the conciliatory
leaders of the CNT.
Little by little we are now uncovering the long list of revolutionary
militants with whom the specialised groups in the service of Stalin settled
their accounts in the course of these ‘days’ – Berneri and his friend Barbieri,
Alfredo Martinez, the leader of the Libertarian Youth, and the German Trotskyist
Freund, known as Moulin, who was the link between the small group of Trotskyists
and the Friends of Durutti – and ‘disappeared’. This was only the beginning of
the repression.
POUM nonsense
There can be no doubt that La Batalla was
publishing complete nonsense on 6 May, when it presented the May Days as having
turned out positively. These days were the first stage in the unfolding of a
counterrevolution, the first victims of which, a few weeks later, were to be the
POUM itself and, in particular, its principal leader, the old revolutionary,
Andres Nin.
How can this mistaken appreciation be explained if we consider the
extraordinary strength which the huge movement of the working class of Barcelona
had revealed a few days, indeed a few hours, earlier?
The fresh memory of that movement hovers over the discussion which opened
within the POUM in the following days, in preparation for a congress which the
Stalinist repression prevented from ever being held.
We have little information about the attitude of the right wing in the POUM,
apart from an editorial of 15 May in its Valencia newspaper, El
Communista. This condemned the workers in Barcelona and even the
leaders of the POUM on the grounds that ‘one cannot swim against the stream with
impunity’ and denounced, ‘after the provocateurs’, ‘those who played their game
and cleared the ground in front of them’. We also know that the POUM
organisation in Sabadell issued a manifesto condemning the action of the workers
in Barcelona, and that Luis Portel, a member of its executive, judged the
attitude of the leadership during these May Days to have been
‘adventuristic’.
The thesis of the executive was drafted by Nin. He drew a parallel with the
‘July Days’:
In July 1917 the workers in the Russian capital took to the streets
arms in hand, rising up against the policies of the democrat, Kerensky. The
Bolshevik Party considered this movement to be ill-timed and dangerous. None the
less, the Bolsheviks played an active part in it, placed themselves at its head,
led it and guided it in such a way as to prevent it from becoming a disaster for
the revolutionary proletariat.
Nin started from the provocation by the forces of the police. He
declared that the workers had defended the interests of the proletariat in the
streets. As to the policy of his party, he wrote:
If it had all depended on us to start things off, we would not have
given the order for insurrection. The moment was not favourable for a decisive
action, But the revolutionary workers, rightly indignant at the provocation of
which they were the victims, flung themselves into battle, and we could not
leave them to their fate. To act otherwise would have been an unpardonable
betrayal.
Nin declared that the activity of the POUM aimed at ‘canalising a
movement which, because it was spontaneous, had many chaotic aspects, and to
avoid its transforming itself into a fruitless putsch, which would have fatal
consequences for the proletariat. It was necessary to provide limited slogans
for the movement.’
A third position, that of J. Rebull and of Cell 72, reproaches the leadership
of the POUM for having ‘run after the events’ and having ‘once again waited on
the opinion of the opportunist elements in the confederal leadership’. Their
counter-theses declared:
The first results of the workers’ insurrections are a defeat for the
working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic
bourgeoisie.
Trotsky’s verdict
Trotsky devoted a number of writings to the Spanish Revolution and
several times discussed the May Days. He conceded to the defenders of the
policies of the POUM that there was a superficial resemblance between the
movement of the masses before the July Days in Petrograd and that of May 1937 in
Barcelona. However, he was concerned in particular to emphasise the deep
differences between the two – according to him, the essential differences lay in
the fact that in 1937 the Spanish masses had a more serious experience of their
revolution than those had in Russia in 1917. Trotsky wrote:
In Spain, the May events took place not after four months, but after
six years of revolution. The masses of the whole country have had a gigantic
experience. A long time ago they lost the illusions of 1931, as well as the
warmed-over illusions of the Popular Front. Again and again they have shown to
every part of the country that they were ready to go through to the end. If the
Catalan proletariat had seized power in May 1937 – as it had really seized it in
July 1936 – they would have found support throughout all of Spain. The
bourgeois-Stalinist reaction would not even have found two regiments with which
to crush the Catalan workers. In the territory occupied by Franco not only the
workers but also the peasants would have turned toward the Catalan proletariat,
would have isolated the Fascist army and brought about its irresistible
disintegration. It is doubtful whether under these conditions any foreign
government would have risked throwing its regiments onto the burning soil of
Spain. Intervention would have become materially impossible, or at least
extremely dangerous.
Naturally, in every insurrection, there is an element of uncertainty
and risk. But the subsequent course of events has proved that even in the case
of defeat the situation of the Spanish workers would have been incomparably more
favourable than now, to say nothing of the fact that the revolutionary party
would have assured its future (L Trotsky, A test of ideas and individuals
through the Spanish experience, The Spanish Revolution
1931-1939, New York, l973, p278-279)
In Trotsky’s opinion, it was a revolutionary party which was
lacking in May 1937. This is the reason for his ferocious criticism, not merely
of the Anarchists but also of the policies of the POUM, and what he calls its
‘indecision, its equivocations, its hesitations and its lack of a clear
programme’, which prevented it from providing for the masses ‘the revolutionary
leadership without which victory was not possible’.
Perhaps a little more light can be shed on Trotsky’s position on the
insurrection, which failed in May 1937 for lack of a revolutionary party, and on
his divergences with his comrade Blasco, which were never expressed in writing
in a direct debate, if we look back to his preface to Volume Three of the
Russian edition of his works, which we know under the title The Lessons
of October.
There we find that Trotsky directed precisely the same criticisms against
what he called the ‘right wing’ of the Bolshevik Party, Zinoviev and Kamenev,
who opposed the insurrection which Lenin proposed, as those which he directed
against the POUM in 1937 or the German Communist Party at the time of its failed
insurrection in 1923:
A party which has been carrying on revolutionary agitation for a
long time, tearing the proletariat little by little from the influence of the
conciliators, and which, once it is lifted to the height of events by the
confidence of the proletariat, begins to hesitate, to look for midday at two
o’clock, to turn its back and to tack about, paralyses the activity of the
masses, provokes disappointment and disorganisation among them and leads the
revolution to defeat ...
He analysed the position of the ‘Old Bolsheviks’, who advanced
against Lenin in April 1917 the old formula of ‘the democratic dictatorship of
the proletariat and peasantry’, which they counterposed to that of the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for Soviet power:
Their method ... consisted in exerting on the leading bourgeoisie a
pressure which did not go outside the framework of the bourgeois democratic
regime. If this policy had been victorious, the development of the revolution
would have proceeded outside our part y, and we would have, in the end, had an
insurrection of the masses of workers and peasants which was not led by the
party, in other words, July Days on a vast scale, that is, a
catastrophe.
It seems to us that this formula permits conclusions to be drawn
about the May Days by settling at least the ambiguities which may have survived
in the historic debate about the analogies with the Russian Revolution. About
these ambiguities, Trotsky himself took pleasure in emphasising that he himself
had not introduced them, though he was often blamed for doing so, and he made
clear that, for his part, he had been very deeply convinced that ‘Spain was not
Russia’, a conclusion which did not in the slightest justify the policy which
led to catastrophe.
Pierre Broué
