From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Hugo Oehler-The Barricades In Barcelona (1937)

... 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

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. 
******** 

Hugo Oehler

Barricades in Barcelona

The first revolt of the proletariat
against the bosses’ Popular Front [1]

From Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used by permission.

Under the Iron Heel of Spanish Democracy

The armed uprising of 3-7 May in Catalonia against the Generality, the boss class state, by the working class, cannot be understood, nor properly explained without hard study of the events that led to this unorganized effort to capture power. For nearly six years before this struggle, the ‘Republic of workers of all classes’, established after the overthrow of King Alfonso, attempted vainly to solve the contradictions of Spanish economic life, caught within the web of the chief European imperialists, who were making ready for the redivision of the earth through a second world war. The bourgeois republic proved its utter bankruptcy, revealed the impotence of capitalist democracy in the age of decay of the system. It was unable to solve any of the problems arising from the carryovers of feudalism, nor could it consolidate its victories as ‘executive committee’ of the exploiters, in Marx’s phrase. These six years marked a period of relentless class struggle between the workers and the bosses with their Socialist and Stalinist servants.

Once more, capitalism displayed itself as the greatest barrier in the road of human evolution. And again, the ‘democratic’ capitalists were trapped between the menace (to them) of proletarian revolution and fascism; both ways led to civil war.

At every ebb and flow of this six years strife, from the Asturian rebellion (1934) to the Popular Front electoral triumph (February 1936) and the July attack of the Fascist generals, the struggle disclosed the fundamental international pattern of imperialism interwoven with the civil war of classes in Spain.

The July Outbreak

By July 1936 all objective factors were ripe for proletarian revolution. All the subjective requirements for working class success were present except one – the absolutely necessary party of revolutionary Marxism. Without the capable class leadership of a party that could interpret the events preceding July and guide the militant masses, the proletariat of Spain lost precious ground and time. The workers being vanguardless, the forces of reaction took the offensive, not against the puny ‘republican’ boss class, but against the danger of labor’s revolt, which the Popular Front regime had not the strength to restrain and destroy.

The Fascist assault in July was an offensive to prevent the inevitable proletarian revolution.

Instead of pursuing an independent class policy, which would convert the poor middle class into an ally, the ‘leaders’ of the proletariat strove to subordinate the workers to the exploiters by means of the Popular Front, with a policy of class peace. The masses defended themselves against the Fascists; despite the cowardice and sabotage of the Popular Front and the petty capitalist shopkeepers and farmers, a vigorous counter-offensive was launched against Franco and Mola. In more than three-quarters of Spain the Capitalist- Monarchist-Fascist reaction, representing a part of the bourgeoisie and landowners (including the Catholic Church), were trounced.

Alongside the boss class regime appeared the embryonic government of the working class; the seeds of proletarian councils (soviets, juntas) were the Anti-Fascist Militia Committees of Catalonian labor; similar crude organs of the revolutionary class were created in other sections of Spain, forecasting the workers’ state, the dictatorship of labor.

The Dissolution of Dual Power

In this critical time, when power was almost in the grasp of the proletariat, when the Popular Front government was tottering, the masses found themselves headless, without a revolutionary Marxian party. No labor organization was willing to break free from capitalism by declaring for the establishment of a proletarian army, a federation of factory and farm councils, and the dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the poor peasantry. The finance capitalists of France and England rushed to the assistance of the desperate Azaña regime (the prime ministers Casares Quiroga, Giral, and then Caballero could not deal with the crisis). Italy and Germany, anxious to expand their imperialist influence in the Mediterranean, backed Franco with money, men, machinery, defying the Franco-British empires. To the shame of Soviet Russia, the Stalinist administration placed itself at the service of the French and British warlords, parading under the white flag of ‘neutrality’, cutting off from the Spanish workers revolutionary aid.

The Anglo-French bosses had a double axe to grind: first, to block a proletarian revolution, second, to prevent the Italo-German alliance from conquering strongholds in the Western Mediterranean. The parliamentary bourgeoisie (Loyalists) was subservient to the Franco-British-Russian bloc; the Socialist and Stalinist parties (through the Popular Front) followed the middle class leadership and Russia; and the CNT and FAI [2] trailed behind the SP and CP and the POUM [3] became the tail of the CNT.

The Stalinists and Socialists seized the initiative to liquidate the crude developing forms of dual power, thereby serving the exploiting class in Spain proper. In Catalonia, where the class struggle reached a higher level than elsewhere, where the Stalinist-Socialist party of organic unity (PSUC) [4] had no mass influence, the boss class allowed the Syndicalists and the POUM to enter the government, the Generality. The grateful traitors of these groups then took the lead in dissolving the embryonic soviets, the Anti-Fascist Militia Committees.

Despite these defeats of the working class, capitalism turned out to be so rotten, disorganized, weak (historically with both feet in its grave, waiting for the workers to bury it entirely), that the heroic Spanish proletariat was able to continue the class war in the maze of imperialist conflicts and partisan struggles raging in Iberia.

Reaction in Front and Behind

With the dissolution of the budding organs of dual power, with the absence of a revolutionary Marxian party, the boss class never let a day go by without strengthening their supremacy over the downtrodden discontented proletariat and peasantry. Franco, as the agent of the German-Italian bankers, used one method to achieve this. The Valencia and Barcelona governments, as agents of the Anglo-French bourgeoisie, used an entirely different strategy. For fascism and parliamentarism are the right and left arms of one capitalist body. The ‘democratic’ bossdom, through its eager lackeys, the Socialists and Stalinists, took daily steps to suppress systematically the working class and the militant organizations of labor, the CNT-FAI and the POUM, with their indomitable rank and file.

By April 1937 these measures against the workers created alarm and turmoil that culminated in a series of armed clashes between the forces of the reactionary Popular Front, the Civil and Assault Guards, and the PSUC, on one side, and the fighting workers led by the CNT-FAI and POUM. These last organizations failed to explain the fundamental questions of the revolution to the masses; they failed to prepare them for the coming conflict with the bosses’ regimes of Valencia and Barcelona. Worse yet, they brazenly denied the necessity for the violent overthrow of parliamentary capitalism, the Popular Front. They boasted about the triumphs of the workers’ brigades and patrols, the concessions granted to the poor by the crafty capitalist state; they chattered that it was only a matter of consolidating these gains and defeating the reformists, then all would be well. There was no serious thorough analysis of the problems of social revolution; no scientific guidance of our class. In brief they failed to tell the toilers of Spain the following facts:

• That the Valencia and Barcelona governments were bourgeois governments, counter-revolutionary governments;
• That these regimes were under the domination of the French and English imperialists;
• That Soviet Russia and the Third International were agents of the Anglo-French bosses, lackeys of the League of Nations, with their servile Franco-Soviet Pact and Non-Intervention agreements;
• That the entrance of the CNT-FAI and the POUM into the Catalan capitalist government, and the consequent liquidation of the developing dual power was a criminal betrayal of the working class;
• That the independent class action of the proletariat is possible only through the political and organizational freedom and self-action of a revolutionary Marxian organization, standing for the creation of a Fourth (Communist) International;
• That the capitalist state will never disappear by itself, but must be smashed by armed insurrection aiming at the founding of the workers’ dictatorship;
• That toward this end the proletariat must build Workers’, Peasants’, Combatants’ Councils (soviets, juntas), as organs of dual power before the revolution and as the bodies of state power afterward, with an army of their own, a Red Army.

These are some of the basic lessons ignored by the above named organizations; their other errors are countless. These are the burning questions of the day, requiring daily detailed explanation to the class, through concrete examples from the history of class wars in other countries and in Spain.
 

The Treason of May Day

There was no celebration of the world holiday of labor on the First of May 1937 in Barcelona. The CNT, the UGT [5],the PSUC, the POUM, each informed the working class that demonstrations were all called off, and urged that work in the shops should continue – because of war necessity. They flaunted the slogan: War at the front; work in the rear. In the name of military need, of social order, the revolutionary workers of the city were prevented from assembling in the streets in solidarity with the wage-slaves of the world on the day of international protest against the system and the class which oppress them.

The canceling of the united front demonstration of the CNT and UGT, and the total failure of the POUM to prepare its own mass meetings, cannot be understood by taking their official statements at their word. Their May Day proclamations are only shallow excuses. The bosses’ governments of Valencia and Barcelona have suffered crisis after crisis since the July days, because of the terrible contradiction between the proletarian control over certain economic and military aspects of the nation and the bourgeois control over the state. The solution of this paradox can only be the violent overthrow of the capitalist state, which would advance humanity. A temporary way out for the bosses is the overcoming and disarming of the proletariat, possible through the surrender and treason of the workers’ leaders, weakening their resistance to counter-revolution. The last road, the road of reaction, leading to black barbarism, the boss class of Spain clearly took in May. No stumbling-blocks were placed on their path by the chiefs of labor, of the PSUC naturally, and the CNT and POUM. Since the breaking up of the Anti-Fascist Committees, the Spanish bourgeoisie has accelerated its speed down the reactionary road.

The 14 April strike and demonstration of the CNT against the Civil Guard for the murder of one of their comrades, and against the sixth anniversary of the capitalist republic, was followed up a week later with a Stalinist funeral and demonstration for one of their bureaucrats who had been mysteriously murdered. The Stalinist affair was the spearhead of a bourgeois demonstration; it was bigger than the CNT gathering and gave the bosses fresh courage. The next day, a prominent figure of the CNT was killed ...

Armed conflicts broke out between Civil and Assault Guards, the capitalist cops supported by the Esquerra [6], and PSUC, on one side and the Workers’ Patrols of the CNT and POUM on the other. Such clashes of the classes occurred throughout April. May Day seemed pregnant with menace for the exploiters.

In the Cerdagne region on the French border the Civil Guards tried to oust the CNT from Customs control, but the Anarchist fighters managed to beat the police and lock them up. The Generality sent agents who arranged a rotten compromise, whereby the first check on Customs of the CNT would be double-checked by the Civil Guard. This treaty of peace resulted in a second battle within 24 hours. The soldiers despatched by the Generality to the spot were thrown in jail with the Guards. Skirmishes between the master-class and labor were fought fiercely in some suburbs of Barcelona. Barricades were thrown up by the Workers’ Patrols. Just before May Day these towns were in the firm hands of the workers. Fora brief period the Anarchists claimed fulfillment of their dream, ‘libertarian communism’. Only workers with CNT-FAI and POUM cards were allowed in their streets.

At last the Civil Guard struck out in earnest. Over 300 workers were disarmed in Barcelona in a single week. Afoot and in autos the police attacked workers in homes and inns. The government issued a rattling warning on 29 April:

In the face of the abnormal situation of Public Order, the Generality Council cannot continue its work under the pressure, danger, and disorder caused by the existence in several parts of Catalonia of groups that attempt to impose themselves by coercion, imperiling the revolution and the war. The government therefore suspends its meetings and hopes those groups not directly dependent on the Generality Council will withdraw instantly from the streets so as to make possible the rapid elimination of the unrest and alarm that Catalonia is now enduring.

The council added that they had ‘taken all necessary measures for the purpose of assuring strict compliance with its decisions’.

The CNT-FAI and POUM papers said nothing about the armed struggles shaking Catalonia. Like the Generality they made only vague hints about unrest and alarm. The ‘leaders’ of labor capitulated in silence to the law and order of the Generality, too cowardly to explain the struggles to the class and urge solidarity in action with their fighting followers. No party exists in Spain to give these small skirmishes a united centralized strategy, to coordinate them by means of revolutionary Marxism into a powerful upsurge of the class to wipe out the capitalist state.

The CNT evening organ, La Noche, 30 April, carried the Generality announcement quoted above. On its front page was this patriotic appeal: ‘All arms, which are in excess in Catalonia and on the border, are needed at the front.’ The Anarchists supported the suspension of Generality meetings. When the civil war of classes was developing at home they called for the handing over of arms to the Aragon front!

Instead of dissolving the Council in this crisis, as was the case in all previous Generality predicaments, the bossdom simply suspended its meetings. Thus it established its dictatorship stronger than ever, for the powers of the Council passed to the President, its obedient servant. The capitalist state, freed of parliamentary red tape, functioned more freely, swiftly, ruthlessly, fulfilling the demands of the Anglo-French imperialists and their Stalinist lackeys. Without losing time, the government dissolved the People’s Tribunals, the democratic courts, which Andres Nin of the POUM so fondly spoke of as one of the means by which Spain would travel on to socialism. The excuse given by the Generality for abolishing the Tribunals was – the need for greater centralization.

The Popular Front of reaction next prohibited May Day demonstrations in Barcelona, denying the workers the democratic right of assembly. The CNT-FAI and POUM officials humbly submitted to the capitalist command, while the Republicans, Socialists and Stalinists were blowing bugles for the celebration of the sixth anniversary of the bourgeois republic.

The foremost lesson of the Barcelona May Day was without doubt this: the Anarchists and mock-Marxists, the CNT and POUM, were completely unreliable as vanguards of revolutionary labor; in order to resist the counter-revolutionary boss class and restore the lost gains of the proletariat a new party was needed, a party intelligent, armed with Marxian science, courageous, determined to battle to the end for the conquest of power.

The Fatal Third of May

The bloody struggles in Catalonia during the April period up to May Day, between the forces of the republican bourgeoisie and the militant proletariat, came to a head with the insurrection in Barcelona that started on 3 May. As in the July days, the working class paid the penalty for lacking a vanguard, a party equal to the needs of the time, with a policy of proletarian offensive against reaction. The Generality took the initiative and followed up a series of schemed measures against the workers with an armed attempt to capture the Telephone Building and kick out the CNT-UGT Central Committee in possession [7]. The Assault Guards occupied the Plaza Catalonia, where the building was located, and proceeded to carry out their orders. The workers refused to budge and barricaded themselves in the upper part of the structure. The government guards took over the ground floor and had the place surrounded.

This move of the Generality precipitated events that occurred with great speed. At 3.30 p.m. the attempt to take the Telephone Building was made; at 4.30 the first shot was fired in this advance skirmish of the May battles. By 5 o’clock the Anarchist youth headquarters a few blocks below the besieged building was an outpost of armed workers who flocked into the streets to assist their comrades in distress. At 5.15 these workers disarmed two Assault Guards passing by the territory, ignorant of what was going on. In less than one hour the working class were constructing barricades in all corners of its neighborhoods in front of its union offices and political quarters. As fast as the workers came home from the shops, they poured into the highways and took up arms to defend their class against the Generality.

The Ramblas, avenues which in the evening are usually thronged, were deserted. The first clashes between the workers and the government occurred. Among the most active barricade-fighters were left Anarchists, the Friends of Durruti.

At 7 p.m. in the Plaza Lesseps in the Gracia district, workers patrols were depriving Civil and other Generality guards of their arms as they traversed the area. While the heroic workers were gathering their guns, building their barricades, battling against the boss class and its Socialist-Stalinist gangsters, the Regional Committee of the CNT was ’phoning all unions and offices, pleading with the workers to abandon the streets, to throw down their weapons. The acid test of class war showed how worthless were these ‘leaders’.

On the evening radio programme President Luis Companys spoke. Not about the barricades that bristled all over the embattled city. Not about the bullets flying on almost every street. But about the Popular Front successes on the distant Aragon Front! The politician who spoke next informed the world that all was well in Barcelona, and quiet. When this statesman was talking of the tranquility of the city, a shot rang over the radio, and let the international listeners know that all was not well in Barcelona. This was the answer of the workers to the counter-revolution, to the Stalinists on the other side of the barricades, to the pleading of the CNT officialdom for peace.

All night long, while the lights of the metropolis were out, in the narrow dark streets, the two opposing forces of the boss class and the working class, searched everybody who passed for arms and documents. In the proletarian districts, past the barricades, only those with CNT-FAI and POUM passcards were allowed to move freely. In the capitalist camp only Esquerra, PSUC, and such groups’ passes were recognized. When workers fell into enemy hands, their cards were torn up, they were told to go home, or kept as prisoners.

May the Fourth

When the sun rose the following Tuesday morning, and it was light enough to see who was being shot at, Barcelona was a battleground with the Generality fighting for its life and the workers fighting for power. Only two papers appeared that morning, the CNT Solilaridad Obrera and the POUM La Batalla. The Regional Committee of the CNT had as their main headline, ‘The Counter-Revolution and the CNI’, and under it spoke of the insurrection as an ‘affair’ of yesterday, now over. They begged the workers to stay calm, and carried the news of two people being injured in the unpleasant affair. The POUM writers approved the struggle, called for ‘The Revolutionary Workers Front’, and for ‘Committees of Defence of the Revolution’. An editorial urged ‘the permanent mobilization of the laboring class’. The POUM Executive and POUM Youth presented the following demands as solutions for the crisis:

1. Resignation of Rodriguez Salas (Stalinist), Commissioner of Public Order, directly responsible for the provocations of 3 May.
2. Nullification of the Generality Decree dissolving the Workers’ Patrols of the CNT, POUM, etc.
3. Public order to be in the hands of the working class.
4. Revolutionary Workers Front of organizations standing for the triumph over fascism at the front and the victory (?) in the rear.
5. Creation of Committees of Defense of the Revolution.

The Regional Committee of the CNT by their Monday phone calls, by the 4 May issue of their organ, revealed their true, traitor colors. The POUM Executive, although standing to the left of the CNT officialdom, exposed their bankruptcy. The armed uprising was headless, leaderless ... and they magnanimously endorsed it. As for their ‘solution’ it is entirely adaptable to the framework of the capitalist state, of the Generality. Instead of pointing the way to the victory over capitalism, the POUM perpetrated a crime against the revolutionary proletariat of Barcelona.

Whereas the Regional Committee of the CNT, with its representatives holding seats in the Generality, tried to frustrate the forward movement of the class, the local FAI committees of Barcelona opposed their instructions and called on the barricade defenders to carry on the fight. The Generality, the PSUC counter-revolutionists, the CNT bureaucrats became terrified. A new provisional government was formed and proclaimed, to no avail. It was the same old rotten government of the boss class, with one more shift to the right and reaction, a few different individuals representing the same organizations: an Esquerra member, a Peasant Society delegate (dominated by the Esquerra), one UGT and one CNT man. Antonio Sese, General Secretary of the UGT, and influential Stalinist, was killed before he could sit at the first session of the new government; another counter-revolutionary took his place.

All day long the firing from the two camps continued. The Government Palace of the Generality witnessed the most important, the intensest battle. On three sides the rebellious workers surrounded it: but at night it was still in Generality possession. At the Hotel Colon, on the northwest side of the Plaza Catalonia, the Stalinists (many of whom had returned from the front to become policemen) were unable to protect themselves against the workers’ deadly fire. A large number of Assault Guards arrived to reinforce their weakening ranks. At 6 o’clock the rattle of rifles, pistols, and machine-guns was dulled by 13 thundering reports from a small cannon the proletarians had captured, after blasting their way into a Civil Guard barracks.

On Tuesday the workers endeavored to organize a Central Committee, a revolutionary junta of the barricades, but it failed to materialize. The organizations concerned not only did not take initiative to form such a council; they were sternly against it. The Left militants of the CNT-FAI and the POUM did everything possible to carry their great idea out, but in vain.

After the CNT Regional Committee committed the above-described acts of treason to the workers, Nin and Selana, of the POUM and its youth league, went to the CNT traitors and asked for a ‘revolutionary united front’, presumably to seize power – within the framework of the capitalist state, of course. Naturally the CNT chiefs declined. Having done their ‘duty’, the POUM spokesman retired! When the proletariat was on the barricades, and the treachery of its Anarchist leaders was apparent even to the blind, these ‘Marxist’ leaders appealed for united action with the wreckers of the class struggle! And united action for winning the capitalist government, not for breaking it to pieces, and building on the ruins the iron dictatorship of labor in alliance with the poor peasants!!

With darkness most of the shooting stopped, though infrequent sniping went on through the night. The radio conveyed to the people the chorus of Generality ‘hot-air artists’ and even CNT voices, informing Barcelona that the day’s ‘affair’ was over, and that all peaceful people should leave the streets and go home.

May the Fifth

Wednesday morning the Solidaridad Obrera (CNT) presented an editorial promising the workers – ‘Serenity, Concord and Unity of Action.’ The text pleaded with everybody to be calm: ‘This is the hour to foresee and prevent such a situation as has just passed.’ The printing shop of La Batalla (POUM) had been confiscated by the government, so the party only issued this day 500 copies of a little leaflet.

The third day of street fighting found the insurgent workers still without the leadership for relentless struggle and triumph. It found the workers deeply demoralized by the CNT cowardice and servility to the Generality. The streets were full of barricades, but many of them had been deserted. Only key points of the city were still barricades and manned by small crews of armed heroes. Durruti Street where the Regional Committee had a huge headquarters, a well fortified building, was the center of demoralization. In the proletarian region directly off Durruti Street the barricades were not only abandoned, they were torn down; their stones scattered over the street. In the outskirts of the city the workers scarcely felt the spirit of gloom that pervaded Barcelona; they still held their ‘forts’.; in the suburbs the solidarity and revolutionary passion of the workers was on the ascendant.

The forces of the bosses knew how to use knew how to use the breathing spells they got. While the CNT leaders confused and broke the morale of the masses, while the pseudo-Marxist POUM trailed behind the headless movement, the Generality, with its PSUC-UGT lackeys, consolidated their counter-revolutionary gains. The Stalinists were running the transport services which the Anarchists had abandoned. Police brutality roused the anger of workers, and again the barricades were manned, and bullets were spattering. With renewed energy, with fury, the proletariat attacked the class enemy. The Stalinists were the spearheads of the boss class, attacking the workers with red arm-bands, pretending to represent the poor who wanted law and order. The tradition and glory of the great October Revolution was used to crush revolutionary Spanish labor. The impression spread that the street battles were struggles within the working class, between contending proletarian organizations – not a war of antagonistic classes. The Government stepped forward as the power above the ‘squabble’, the peacemaker, and sowed dark confusion among the people, blinding open eyes to the true issue as stake – the question: which was to overcome the other and rule the nation: the bourgeoisie, which had committed so many crimes against the workers and peasants since July 1936, or the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry?

Fort Montjuich, overlooking the port of Barcelona, was in the hands of the workers. Its cannons were trained on the Generality building, were only waiting for the Marxian word to blow the citadel of counterrevolution sky-high. The Spanish Navy was neutral, even tending to sympathize with the revolution. Many sailors fraternized with the workers behind the barricades, and announced their confidence that the Navy could be used for any purpose the workers desired. The word of Marxism was wanting to ask them to assist in the struggle for power. The armed guardians of the Post Office were also neutral; a militant vanguard, with a clear concrete program of revolt could have made the Navy, at least the rank-and-file seamen, staunch allies.

Among others the Civil Guard barracks on Travesara Street surrendered to the proletariat, and the Guards of Hostafranche district. The first was deprived of weapons by the workers; the second they forgot to disarm. Revolutionary Marxism would not have forgotten.

From the Aragon front came a section of the Durruti Column and 500 soldiers from POUM divisions. They united forces hard by Lerido and were about to march on Barcelona, fully equipped with machine guns, light artillery, tanks and so forth. They were met at Lerido and turned back, persuaded (with the papers for ‘proof) that the ‘affair’ in Barcelona was all over. Their leaders corroborated this lie of the government. At the same time, Republican officers threatened the workers’ troops that if they marched on the city, the Government would rally soldiers from Valencia. The Durruti and POUM brigades departed, and the Valencia Government (headed by the Socialist Caballero) dispatched troops by land and sea to the embattled city.

The Friends of Durruti, the Left Anarchists, issued their first leaflet to the working people, to the fighters on the barricades. It was joyously greeted. The possessors of membership cards in the Friends of Durruti were honored highly by all barricade defenders. The leaflet was a clarion:

Disarm all the Bourgeois Forces. Socialisation of Economy. Dissolution of the political parties opposed to the working class. We will not surrender the streets. The Revolution before everything. We greet our comrades of the POUM who have fraternized with us in the streets. For the Social Revolution. Down with the Counterrevolution.

On Wednesday a second effort was made, with the backing of the Friends of Durruti, to establish a revolutionary junta. It failed. The City Committee of the FAI coordinated its defense committees but did not measure up to the vital needs of the time; they would not act for an organized offensive against the Generality. In the afternoon the Durruti group sent a delegation to the POUM, inviting participation in the forming of the revolutionary junta. Nothing materialized from the ensuing discussion; each blamed the other for the failure.

At nine o’clock the radio announced that the Central Government of Valencia would take charge of public order in Barcelona. The Minister of Justice in Valencia, an eminent member of the CNT, spoke. He deplored the continuation of the tragic ‘affair’, and said that the dead Assault Guards of Barcelona, those police executioners of the revolutionary workers, were ... ‘our brothers’. That night the CNT gave orders to its supporters to return to wage-slavery.

May the Sixth

Little sleep was had these critical nights by the vanguard workers. Small barricade crews kept awake, while others rested nearby, ready to rise at call. The workers, knowing their leaders better every day, expected the CNT and POUM morning papers would be against them. La Noche (CNT) had pointed out on the 5th what might be anticipated if the workers persisted on the 6th. Its main headline screamed: ‘Cease firing!’, and in an upper corner it howled: ‘We have one common enemy: fascism. To facilitate its victory is monstrous. All arms to the front.’ Yes – it is certainly monstrous to facilitate the triumph of fascism. The proletariat of Spain is learning daily that the democratic bourgeoisie cannot only not defeat fascism, but fear the revolutionary proletariat infinitely more than they fear the fascists. The governments of Valencia and Barcelona pave the way for fascism with every measure aimed at labor. The April struggles and the May uprising were beacons for the workers, lighting the way to the certain destruction of fascism – the road to the proletarian dictatorship.

Solidaridad Obrera (CNT) this morning announced, ‘The CNT and the UGT have both commanded return to work’. The same issue refused all responsibility for the leaflet of the Friends of Durruti. La Batalla (POUM) appeared and echoed the Anarcho-Syndicalist croaking: ‘Now that the counterrevolutionary provocations have been smashed, it is necessary to withdraw from the struggle. Workers, return to labor.’ On the back page the POUM editors boasted, ‘For three days the streets have belonged to the workers’. An editorial gloated: ‘In the face of the vigorous proletarian response, in the face of the energetic counter-offensive of the toiling masses, the armed forces were rapidly demoralized and almost generally gave up the streets to the laborers’. Instead of severe analysis of the struggle, Marxist self-criticism, the POUM penmen strutted like peacocks. When the POUM workers on the barricades beside the Hotel Falcon saw this sheet, they raged and refused to leave their posts. They denounced their leaders as betrayers. The Thursday issue of Soli, as the CNT paper was called, was burnt like previous issues on many barricades. Nevertheless these organs exerted a grave influence on the majority of the fighting workers, baffling, breaking the discipline and courage of the uprisen proletariat.

The Generality forces extended their spheres of power. Workers who ventured inside their bounds were arrested, disarmed. Methodically, the bosses were getting the situation well in hand. At 11 in the morning the Police, with some Stalinists, raided the La Batalla office which had been surrounded but resisted the enemy behind barricaded doors and windows. The cops knocked on the door and were admitted in peace. The POUM Executive retreated shamefully before the aggression of the Generality.

The Police, with their Stalinist aids, obtained a machine gun, 50 good rifles, several hundred hand-grenades. Molinas, a POUM official in charge of the building’s defense, offered to surrender the place without resistance, though some members favored fighting it out with the Guards. During these events the Central Executive Committee of the POUM reorganized itself by merging with the Barcelona Local Executive, then subdividing into a political and military under-committee. The purpose of this change in the party machine was clearly to shift responsibility for the acts committed unworthy of revolutionists calling themselves ‘Marxists’. The fury of the CNT rank and file compelled the resignation of the Regional Committee early in the day. But within six hours these Anarcho-Syndicalist scoundrels were back in the saddle.

Yet Thursday afternoon, defying the instructions of the CNT Regional and POUM Executive Committees, the workers were out on the barricades in full force. The heart of Barcelona labor beat high and proud, unconquered.

May the Seventh

Friday morning the Soli appeared with this caption: ‘The CNT and the UGT repeat the order to return to work’. La Batalla, more skilful in deceit than the reformist union leaders, called ‘For the withdrawal of the forces of public order from the streets’. It asserted that ‘the working class should keep its arms’. As if the Generality would withdraw its forces after it had been successful in beating back the armed workers. As if the capitalists could be defeated without smashing their state. To what end should the working class keep its arms? (It may be mentioned at this point that the official POUM thesis prepared by Nin declared that it was possible for the Spanish proletariat to take power without an armed insurrection. A counter-thesis by the left-wing POUM predicted the inevitable uprising which broke out on 3 May.)

For the first time since the upheaval the Stalinist papers started to appear. Le Traball, a CP organ, invaded proletarian neighborhoods without opposition. Barricades were quietly evacuated wherever it penetrated. It branded the POUM and the Friends of Durruti ‘agents of the Fascists’. The technique perfected by the Stalin machine in Moscow of discrediting labor groups opposing the Third International’s crimes was applied to Barcelona with immense success – among the middle class.

In Sabadell, suburb of Barcelona, the local POUM leadership rebelled against the party and denounced the insurrection in language as vicious as the Stalinists. (The next day these renegades were ‘rewarded’ by the Stalinists who suppressed their local paper.)

In Gerona the CNT and the POUM rallied masses in a movement to suppress publications of the Esquerra and the PSUC. Skirmishes between the police and the proletariat took place all day Friday. Three civil guards were killed by a workers’ bomb. Isolated workers caught with guns were shot down. The bosses’ agents threw down many barricades. Friday marked the beginning of the end for the civil struggle; the bureaucrats of the CNT and the POUM had ruined the chances of revolutionary success. Things were so peaceful in some parts of the city that children took over barricades and played at civil war.

Battleships of France and Britain rode at anchor in Barcelona Harbour, ready to shell the city in case the workers captured it; and the Soli of 7 May complained, ‘The friendly powers are worried by the events in Barcelona’. [8] All through the insurrection the Generality, the Popular Front, was only the busy puppet of the Anglo-French imperialists. If President Companys & Co had not been able to manage the rebellion, the ‘democratic’ bankers of London and Paris would have come down like tigers on Barcelona. Whoever thinks a proletarian revolution is achievable without overcoming certain imperialist intervention, whoever is afraid of class war because of the danger of such intervention is no revolutionist, is an opponent of working class revolution. Marxists rely on the workers of all countries to come to the rescue of any proletariat fighting for power, just as the exploited and oppressed of the world rushed to the assistance of Soviet Russia during 1917-1920 with strikes, mutinies, and revolutions.

May the Eighth

Saturday morning opened the last day of the struggle. From 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. the Valencia government troops marched into the city, armed to the teeth.

The guns they carried were of Russian make. Moscow supplied the arms to put down the insurrection of the workers against the parliamentary capitalist state. If a genuine communist party had stood at the helm of the Soviet Union, those guns would have gone to the making of a Soviet Spain.

The Valencia soldiers were mostly workers and poor middle class folk. Workers who talked with them expressed faith that about half of the troops would have rebelled and come over to the workers’ side if a clear-cut fight between the government and the workers had been fought. What a magnificent opportunity to attain a workers’ state, the best and only guarantee of the crushing of fascism, was lost in this May week! On Saturday the bourgeoisie flaunted its victory in the workers’ faces. The Stalinist-controlled UGT unions expelled all POUM activists. The Anarchist banner was torn from the autos of the CNT Marine Workers’ Union by government guards. The CNT holder of the Generality Ministry of Defense was ousted. CNT supervisors were removed from the mail and passport offices.

The 8 May Soli carried an editorial on ‘the pacification of the masses’. It bragged of the fact that the CNT press had been extremely effective in stopping the insurrection. The same day the editor of Tierra Y Libertad, central organ of the FAI, trumpeted:

‘Destroy the barricades, lay down your arms. Tomorrow all laborers should be at work, and the others fighting to capture Huesca and Teruel, to free Saragossa.’

La Batalla would not allow the CNT press to outdo the POUM in crass defeatism: ‘The working class should remain vigilant and not respond to provocations’, referring to the insolence of the government guards. In an editorial it stated: ‘Our party...has been, let no one doubt this, one of those which have contributed the most to restoring normalcy’. For the proletariat of Spain ‘normalcy’ meant only the re-riveting of the chains of wage-slavery.

President Companys, in the 15 May issue of the Paris journal, Ce Soir, presented his views on the May strife:

The first spark of the recent events burst forth a few days before when certain groups attempted coercion against the decision of the council of the Generality ... as a result of an order of the department of Internal Security concerning the telephone services, an order of elementary guarantee of services for the government. In the face of this indescribable attack on the government, the latter found itself with small means of defense; very small, not because it had not foreseen this development, but because of the impossibility of forestalling it. In spite of this the government put down the subversive movement without hesitation, utilizing the small forces at its disposal, aided by popular fervor, and by conversations held in the Generality with different trade union representatives, and with the assistance of several delegates from Valencia, commencing thus the return to normalcy.

Thus the capitalist president explains that his government was at first in no condition to handle the crisis, and had only a puny force to cope with the insurrection. But firm and decisive action by the Generality, coupled with open support of the Socialist: and Stalinists, together with the betrayal of the CNT and POUM officialdoms, was able to disintegrate the workers’ ranks and restore bourgeois law and order.
 

May the Ninth

Sunday morning boss normalcy was in full swing. The night before POUM news stands on the Plaza Catalonia had been set afire. All mass funerals were forbidden, though more than a hundred were reported dead in the revolt. The Stalinists held a large demonstration in honor of their dead Minister Sese in front of their headquarters. CNT and POUM militants were thrown in prisons. The vengeance of the boss class was felt by armed workers throughout Catalonia. In some villages dozens of POUM and CNT members were killed overnight for frightening the exploiters.
 

The Stalinist-Bourgeois Terror

By Monday morning scores of workers had been murdered or were mysteriously missing. In district five of Barcelona the Estat Catala (special guardsmen of the ruling class) and PSUC gangsters attacked the POUM headquarters but were driven off by policemen, not by the POUM. The Stalinist press yelled for the suppression of the POUM as agents of Italy and Germany, members of Franco’s fifth column. The Valencia regime posted a decree in all parts of Barcelona which threatened that all persons and organizations caught in possession of rifles, bombs, and machine guns would be considered as fascists and mutineers, and treated accordingly. The master class of Spain will drench Barcelona, all Spain, in blood rather than risk the revival of the proletarian revolution.
 

Military Review of the May Struggle

The defenders of the Generality were outnumbered by great odds; it is estimated that there were four insurgent workers to one fighter for capitalism. A liberal estimation of the bourgeois forces, Civil, Assault, and Palace Guards, Esquerra and PSUC gunmen, would not total over 3000. Some comrades claim they had no more than 2000 actually fighting. The workers had the enemy isolated all over the city; the proletarian sections and the suburbs of Barcelona were under the complete control of the workers. In a six mile ride from the city’s center to the village of Badalona, 56 barricades had to be passed. This is an example of the way the streets were defended. The capitalist forces were isolated in the following places: 1. the Presidential Palace and the City Hall across the way; 2. the Bank of Spain on Durruti Street and the section extending west from it to the Plaza Catalonia, which includes the Municipal Police Building; 3. the Plaza Del Pino, a small square with a church tower and an Assault Guards’ barracks, between the La Batalla office and the Ramblas, both places in the hands of the workers; 4. the Plaza Catalonia and the banks on the square; 5. the Paseo de Gracia near the Plaza Catalonia; 6. The Karl Marx barracks of the Stalinists.

With a centralized aggressive leadership, in short a revolutionary Marxian vanguard, an offensive against each of these points could have annihilated them or forced surrender, just as Civil Guard barracks in the industrial suburbs were captured and the Stalinist Voroshilov Barracks was besieged.

The three weak points on the workers’ side were the CNT Building across the street from the Bank of Spain, the POUM Building near the Plaza Catalonia, and the La Batalla office between the two. At none of these places were barricades built. Their occupants did not lift a finger to establish connections with the proletarian outposts in the heart of the enemy’s territory. A great quantity of arms in these buildings was never used. Next door to the POUM Building was a house containing 50 assault guards surrounded by workers on all sides. Not one shot was fired against the place. Next door to this was a big printing shop of the Stalinists, deserted. Nothing was done to take it over. The Plaza del Pino section of the capitalist guards, a snipers’ nest that had killed many of the best revolutionary fighters, could have been overcome without much difficulty by a concerted attack of the CNT and POUM centers that surrounded it. Barricades erected hard by the American consulate could have cut off the enemy on the Plaza Catalonia from real aid. The POUM Central Office was strategically located for accomplishing this. The gallant POUM Executive would not take advantage of the foe. The CNT Building on Durruti Street may best be described as a weakhold, from the standpoint of its value to the workers in the fighting. Yet in any military plans of revolutionists it would have been considered a stronghold. The CNT barracks contained over six hundred rifles which were never distributed to the hundreds of anxious workers who needed guns.

The CNT leadership to cover up its crimes chatters today about the ‘affair’ that lasted a single day. The POUM leadership for the same reason prattles of the ‘affair’ that lasted three days. These are the respective periods when the organizations named ordered the workers to give up the streets. Facts prove that the insurrection, despite all odds, lasted four days, and only died on the fifth, Friday, with ‘normalcy’ reached by bossdom only on the eighth, Monday.

On 15 May many of the workers’ barricades were still standing, prevented from being thrown down by those who understood what emergencies might arise, those who knew that the class issue had by no means been settled; that the near future held the possibility of bloodier class battles than the past May week had seen.

Retreat and Reorganization

It was possible for the working class to conquer state power in May, as in July. On both times one fatal factor was missing – the ultimately decisive requisite for vanquishing capitalism: the Marxist revolutionary, communist program, that is, the Marxist vanguard, the party that is ‘the most advanced and resolute group of the working class parties of every country, that section which impels forward all others,’ possessing ‘the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions and ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’. (The Communist Manifesto)

The anti-Fascist Popular Front proved to be a false union of two fundamentally antagonistic forces. It was only the subordination of the proletariat to the boss class which the Stalinists and Socialists used ‘democratically’ to stifle the independent fighting spirit of the workers. It was no more ‘anti-Fascist’ in reality than the ‘Iron Front’ alliance of the German Socialists with the ‘liberal’ Hindenburg was an obstacle to Hitler.

The May uprising revealed the true nature of the Generality, as a capitalist state, fearing the armed workers far more than the fascists.

May 1937 will be remembered in history as the first time that the Stalinists were on the bourgeois side of the barricades. The Socialists were there, too, but this is nothing new to those who know the bloody story of the Socialist International, with its Scheidemanns, MacDonalds, Blums. The Stalinists surrendered the red flag of class struggle for the white of class peace; they became defenders of ‘democracy’ against the fighters for the dictatorship of the workers and farmers. They were willing to shed their blood (certainly the blood of the poor) for the glory of the ‘liberal’ powers: France (that enslaves and tortures colonial masses in Syria and Morocco) and England (that enslaves and tortures millions every day in India and Africa).

The despicable role of the Anarcho-Syndicalist apparatuses in the class struggle was made clear as daylight to the workers in doubt, even before the CNT-FAI leaders accepted offices in the boss state. Mariano Vasquez, Secretary of the National Committee of the CNT, bragged in Madrid (according to the Solidaridad Obrera, 15 May), how:

The organization made great efforts to prevent the extension of the conflict. It decided to send a delegation to each regional committee to thwart alarm and the reproduction of the Catalonian conflict. It sent three delegates to the Aragon front to block the forces there from moving. It was but natural that, on knowing that their Barcelona comrades had been attacked, those at the front should try to help them. [This is not true! See above – author] In Barcelona the National Committee made incessant endeavors to terminate the struggle. There was really no need for the Central Government to take over the Public Order.

Isn’t this the death warrant of ‘anti-authoritarian’ Anarchism?

Only too true was the Revolutionary Workers League description of the POUM as hopelessly centrist, having corrupt roots in reformism, blown rightward and leftward with every wind of the class war. A disgrace to the name of Marxist, this organization is also a barrier which Spanish labor must overcome to reach soviet power.

The two dozen foreign comrades adhering to Trotskyism fighting in Spain are excellent brave men, whose most terrible handicap is their stubborn faith in Trotskyism. They issued a leaflet during the May struggle showing their healthy instinct but throttled by their adherence to Trotskyism: abstract, dry, unfit to solve the problems of the actual situation, the armed insurrection. It stated their perspective for the Barcelona barricade defenders:

For the revolutionary offensive. No compromise. Disarm the reactionary Civil Guards and Assault Guards. The moment is decisive. Next time will be too late. General strike in all industries not working for war until the resignation of the reactionary government. Only proletarian power can assure military victory. Full arming of the working class. Long live the unity of the CNT-FAI and POUM. Long live the unity of the Revolutionary United Front. Committees of revolutionary defense in the shops, factories, and on the barricades.

Bolshevik-Leninists Spanish Section. For the Fourth International.

To cry for the ‘resignation’ of the Generality, to shout for CNT-POUM ‘unity’ – this means to miss the whole meaning of the May days. In the first issue of their organ these Trotskyists pleaded for admission to the POUM – for the third time (in vain). When the workers stand in burning necessity for nothing less than a Bolshevik organization wholly independent of reformism and centrism, these Trotskyists persist in fulfilling the international line of their leader: the liquidation of the independent revolutionary organization into the swamp of the POUM! Compare this document with the declarations of the Friends of Durruti; the Left CNT fighters emerge superior in program. They published a second leaflet on 7 May, directed against their own Anarchist leadership, against the Generality – an additional step of the Friends in the direction of proletarian revolution.

At all times the workers struggle in May was on the plane of defensive action. Of themselves they could not coordinate the many barricades, neighborhoods, factories, towns, and so forth into a unified military structure and then take the offensive against the counter-revolution. It cannot be repeated too often: the revolutionary Marxian advance-guard was needed. Everything was favorable for such an offensive. It could have defeated the capitalist forces before the Valencia troops arrived. It would have swept those troops, or most of them, along with the revolutionary current. It would have kept the navy at least neutral, if not sympathetic. The workers of the world would have risen to the defense of victorious Spanish labor! The Stalinist strait-jacket could not have restrained the Russian masses from rallying to their aid men, money, machinery, and the strength of the workers’ state.

Although its second uprising has been beaten down, the proletariat of Catalonia has not yet met a crushing defeat. A third insurrection is ahead. The workers are in possession of more arms than they had before 3 May. They have learned precious lessons of the class war. On 15 May the Valencia government passed through a crisis. The new Negrin regime will launch a drive of unparalleled provocations against the discontented masses.

The odds are so far against the proletariat. The imperialist powers have Spain tight in their clutches. But there is still time, if we act with speed, courage, understanding, to fuse the scattered skirmishes of the war of the classes into a proletarian revolution that will burst the national limits and give world capital hell. The floodgates of the social revolution against imperialist Europe can be opened by the invincible arms of a working class led by a revolutionary Marxian party, vanguard of the Fourth (Communist) International.

Hugo Oehler
Barcelona 16 May 1937

Notes

1. Bosses’ Popular Front – a popular American expression for the Bourgeois People’s Front Government.

2. CNT – The National Confederation of Labor of Spain, syndicalists, similar to the Industrial Workers of the World in America, anti-Marxists. The FAI (Anarchist Federation of Iberia) composed of believers in the anarchist philosophy as distinguished from union members.

3. POUM – The Workers Party of Marxist Unification. Despite its name, non-Marxist, midway in politics between reformism and revolution; in short, centrists.

4. PSUC – The United Socialist-Stalinist Party of Catalonia, reformists, social-imperialists.

5. UGT – General Union of Labor (Socialist- Stalinist federation of unions).

6. Esquerra – Capitalist party of Catalonia; ‘liberals’.

7. The Generality violated its own law of October 1936, giving the Telephone Building over to the control of the industrial unions.

8. Solidaridad Obrera, 7 May, issued an extra containing these cries of class peace: ‘The struggle is over. Concord is reborn with peace. Workers, brothers, united as one man for fraternity and victory ...’ The Solidaridad Obrera was the first journal to foresee and condemn ‘the painful events which have taken place in Barcelona’. And this gem: ‘Today the Workers’ Patrols have made a noble gesture, which indicates their high sense of responsibility, placing themselves under the orders of the special delegation of public order of the government of the Republic’ – that is to say, in the hands of the agents of Anglo-French imperialism.

---

***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin – Don’t Call It Murder   

 

 

As readers know Tyrone Fallon, the son of the late famous Southern California private operative, Michael Philip Marlin (Tyrone used his mother’s maiden name for obvious reasons), and private eye in his own right told my old friend Peter Paul Markin’s friend Joshua Lawrence Breslin some stories that his illustrious father told him. Here’s one such story although not about himself but about an operative for the largest detective agency on the West Coast, John “Stubs” Lane. (Stubs nick-named for a habit picked while sitting alone endlessly in cold cars driving cold coffee and picking out cigarette stubs from the ashtray after the deck ran out). Marlin let Stubs tell it in his own voice and I will do so here.      

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-with kudos to Raymond Chandler

Tough hard guys, and once in a while a wayward gal, have been trying to commit the perfect murder since they invented murder with Cain slaying Abel, and maybe before. And some guys, some hard guys, have actually gotten away with it for one reason or another mainly by disposing of the body in some way so the damn thing would never be found and the cops would tire of the case and throw it in the cold files to lie there forever. But the average citizen, and I should know since it is my business, the private snoop business to know, trying to commit the perfect crime leaves too many moving parts and so winds up facing the hangman, facing those high-hung gallows and judgment day. The only way it happens, clean get-away happens and don’t take this as the norm, okay is if the thing is set up that way. Here’s what I mean.

The organization I work for, the International Operations Organization, got a call from a loner private eye, Michael Philip Marlin, down in Los Angeles saying he needed some help on a political case, political in that some reform politician he had known in the old days was murdered and it looked like a professional hit ordered by the in-power city machine.  I was sent down from my station in Frisco since I had worked with Marlin previously on a missing load of rare jade case that had turned south on him. As it turned out this reformer was nothing but a skirt-chaser and his ever-loving wife, tired of his sordid affairs, put a couple of slugs in him to even things up. Nothing unusual in that, happens all the time. What was unusual and put it in the perfect crime category is that before this guy died he set the crime scene up to point away from wifey. And she walked, walked when Marlin and I let her walk away without a murmur.           

But that is not the normal case, take the case of the Lampreys, Jim and Adele, and John Snyder.  Seems that this Snyder saved the Lampreys’ lives down in Mexico around the time of the revolution, you know Pancho Villa, Zapata and those guys. They were being held for ransom by some desperados and he coolly put together an attack that sprung them. That was their story anyway. So they were forever indebted to him and in return helped him on some shady capers back in the old U.S.A. One thing led to another and there was a falling out over what was supposed to have been done and what and who was supposed to get the bigger cut of the dough in a caper that went sour. Happens all the time.

So John Snyder wound up dead, very dead, in some forsaken ravine down around Del Mar near the cliffs. The insurance company that had insured Snyder called us in when they were getting ready to pay out on a big number policy to one Adele Snyder. It didn’t take much to turn that one over since Adele had actually been married to Snyder down in Mexico, had abandoned him for Lamprey and headed north. That was how Snyder got them to do his work in the states not some desperado tale down in Sonora. He was going to squawk to the coppers about bigamy after that failed caper and the pair beat him out of that thought one rainy night. The insurance reward money lured them out and once I got my mitts on them they broke like a cheap piece of china. So learn something will you and leave the murder racket to the professionals and stay away from such doings.             

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…

 

…Jesus, what the hell, no, what the high holy hell, was he doing in this damn tent, this tent with eight snoring guys, out in the middle of nowhere New Jersey getting ready to get up and do, do what, make his bunk exactly right, all hospital corners like even his mother did not insist upon, quick cold shower, dress and then fall out, fall in, some chow, if you could call it that, although some of the southern boys, and not just them either, thought they had died and gone to heaven, had shoes too, Jesus. Shoes to march the bejesus all day. Lights out, tired lights out at nine, Jesus, and the outside as dark as a cave not even street lights, street cars and other signs of civilization, his civilization.

No he was not built for this, this country boy stuff. He had tried to have a word with his friends and neighbors down at the Olde Saco Draft Board when his number was called about his importance to the civilian end of the war effort but they would not hear a word, thought he was a malingerer. Sure he didn’t, just like half the guys in town, sign up on the dotted line after Pearl but he was thinking, thinking maybe he was a conscientious objector or something like that. Some kind of pacifist like the few Quakers in town. He after all had taken the Oxford Pledge in college. So had a lot of other guys who once the war drums started beating tore the thing up. But Jesus he could have never held his head up in his strictly patriotic working-class town, never gotten another date, hell, maybe been even run out of town on a rail so, yes, he went when his number came up.

He couldn’t believe the stuff they threw at him here in basic training every time he squawked about the crazy stuff they, the drill sergeants they, made the troops do. Took more than his fair share of KP as a result but he was no lifer, he was a citizen- soldier and had rights, and so he squawked. Squawked until one day a guy, Prescott Lee by name, from down south, down in the hills and hollows country, down in coal country, Kentucky, some place like that and in his light southern drawl told him to stop whining, stop being a nuisance, and learn to be a soldier if he was going to be a soldier. He also told him to stop belly-aching so much since he had already lost two brothers at Guadalcanal and a cousin in Italy.

That stopped him cold and eight months later he comported himself not badly, not badly at all, in the Anzio landing …

 

***Preserving The Roots Anyway We Can- The Saga Of A Desperate Man’s Blues- Roots Music Preservationist Joe Bussard- A CD Review

A YouTube's film clip of the trailer for "Desperate Man's Blues".

CD Review

This CD review complements a DVD review of the same name: Desperate Man's Blues: Discovering The Roots Of American Music, Jose Bussard and a cast of thousands of old 78 speed records, Cubic Media, 2006

Desperate Man’s Blues, various artists from American roots songbook, Dust-to-Digital Records, 2006

In reviewing the DVD of "Desperate Man’s Blues" I mentioned the following which applies here as well:

“Recently I went to great lengths, and rightly so, to tout the “Antone’s: House Of The Blues” DVD that chronicled the trials and tribulations of the late Austin, Texas blues club owner Clifford Antone and his efforts to keep the blues tradition alive by keeping old time Chicago blues legends like Huber Sumelin, Eddie Taylor, Sunnyland Slim and Jimmy Reed gainfully employed. So they could pass the torch to the next generation of aficionados…”

“…Well, apparently running music clubs is not the only way to go in preserving American roots music, as this ‘reality’ film documentary of the saga of a fifty plus years journey by record collector Joe Bussard rather strikingly points out.”

“Joe Bussard‘s trial and tribulations are however of a different order than Clifford Antone’s. Joe has taken on the task of traveling many a mile to find rare old roots music wherever he could find it. In short, he has some of the same obsessive, traits that we saw in the ‘Antone” film. And that is to the good. Plus old Joe has an engaging, if definitely old-fashioned, sense of collecting. Nevertheless when he ‘played the platters’ of Clarence Ashley, Robert Johnson, Son House , Uncle Dave Mason, and a few I really didn’t know I was right there with him…”

And this compilation, sampler compilation really, just proves the point, again. Much of this esoteric material formed the old time American songbook that got passed on to modern blues guys like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, modern country guys like Hank Williams, modern bluegrass guys and gals like the late Doc Watson and the late Hazel Dickens. In short, the definition of what one commentator summed up rather neatly in one line-“the roots are the toots.”

A list of just the most recognizable names puts paid to that sentiment: Robert Johnson, the totally underrated Joe Hill Louis (incredible on When I ‘m Gone), fantastic Lonnie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Clarence Ashley, The foundational Carter Family, and heaven-bound Blind Willie Johnson.

Note on exclusion:

As I also noted in my commentary on the DVD and I will repost here as an aside I did have one problem with the DVD and now with the CD as well but I will get over it with a couple more listens:

“The only problem I have, a big problem I must confess, is old Joe’s dismissal of “rock and roll” music. Part of that is generational, his against my generation of ’68 rock break-out, to be sure. But part is a different understanding of the nature of American roots music. Jerry Lee Lewis when he was in high swamp redneck form, Elvis when young, hungry and tired of driving truck, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Chuck Berry and on and on in the rockabilly and rhythm and blues traditions that served as the foundation of the best of rock relied heavily on those very roots. No, I do not agree that rock break-out was all junk, as he put it. For the rest though, Joe I am right with you.”

***“The Roots Is The Toots”-Bruce Springsteen Comes Home- “Live In Dublin”-A CD/DVD Review

Live In Dublin, Bruce Springsteen and the Sessions Band, Bruce Springsteen, 2007
I have been all over the American songbook for the past couple of years. Old –time Appalachia hills and hollows (ya, I know hollas but what is a poor city boy to do) stuff from the Carter Family and Clarence Ashley, country blues stuff from the likes of Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, bluegrass from Doc Watson and Hazel Dickens, swamp cajun stuff from Clifton Chenier, Tex-Mex stuff, electrified come to the city blues via Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Then to the more “refined” playbook from the hills and hollows of, ah, New York City’s Tin Pan Alley by the likes of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, and Irvin Berlin. Onward to the “founding” fathers and mothers of rock and roll like Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Carl, Wanda Jackson and Lavern Baker. Finally, well almost finally, the 1960s folk revival minute around Cambridge and New York that drove my youth with the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter Seeger.

And it is that last name, Pete Seeger, that connects all of the above-mentioned genres with the CD under review, Bruce Springsteen’s epic (okay, okay, just monumental) “Live In Dublin” album, which is nothing (or almost nothing) but big kudos to his roots and to Pete’s efforts over a very long career to preserve some forgotten aspects of that American songbook. Peter is well known as a left-wing political activist and folksinger. Less well known is his role in keeping roots music alive (a task handed down from his musicologist father). So Bruce Springsteen, a rock and roll guy known to connect to his roots and to the people, is right at home here paying homage to the parts of the songbook that Pete has helped preserve.

The CD compilation I am reviewing is a two CD set with DVD of the Dublin performances complete with probably every known great session player available and, perhaps, every known western instrument from sexy sax to wailing kazoo (nice, right). The stick outs here include Jacob’s Ladder, We Shall Overcome, Jesse James, his version of Blind Alfred Reed’s How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live, and My Oklahoma Home. See the American songbook, and a couple of rock classics thrown in. Got it.

***Ancient dreams, dreamed-The Road Forward, Damn - Magical Realism 101

He (and his buddy, Friedrich, but let’s just keep it as he) said struggle. He, when asked by a wooden-headed journalist, “What is?” answered struggle. So struggle it is. He said, from his 19th century lonely graveside a head above his lot, push back, push back hard against, part one, Vietnam, and those who vouched for that war in somebody’s name, not mine or his. He said do not get mixed-message tied up with their politics, that McGovern do-good juggernaut but organize from the base and then strike the match, when it is time for such matters.

He said stay with your people, the wretched of the earth, who you have abandoned (hell, he didn’t know it was really run away from, run hard away from with Jack Kennedy/Bobby Kennedy, hell, Hubert dreams of forty years, a pension, a gold watch and whatever could be stolen along the way in the “service” of the people). He said it would not be easy. Hell, he didn’t know the half of it. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people, with those gold-flecked dreams of yours. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. Damn he was right.

He said look for a sign. He said, although he did not put it this way exactly but you will get the idea, the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy, again. He said it again and again and would not let it, or me, rest. He said what is struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1871, he said it in 1917, and he was ghost dream saying it in 1972. Whee, what a cranky, crazy old guy to disturb my sleep, huh.
*****
Struggle. But where to start as I sat, book in hand, Leon Trotsky’s History Of The Russian Revolution, down at a yogurt-devoured bench on the Charles River. Having devoured the Communist Manifesto, Class Struggle In France, Critique Of The Gotha Programme, What Is To Be Done?, and a few off-hand commentaries on them I was pushing for some sense of how to beat the monster. Straight up. For just that Charles River bench seat minute I knew that I had to get beyond books but books and struggle would be the combination to the golden age. Damn that old guy and his progeny too. Damn them.

***From The Big Muddy-Out In The Delta Saturday Night (And Sunday Morning) Night With Mississippi Fred McDowell

A YouTube film clip of legendary twelve- string country blues singer Mississippi Fred McDowell performing his classic “You Gotta Move.”


 Mississippi Delta Blues, Fred McDowell, Arhoolie Records, 1989
Recently I explained (and went mea culpa on and on about it) in a review of Elvis56 (no need for last names, right), his and our, my generation of’ 68 , break-out red scare cold war 1950s be-bop doo wop rock and roll creation time, that I listened to (and preferred) black -centered blues at that young age time. Reason: I was able via “magic” midnight airways to get a blues program, The Big Bopper Show, out of Chicago late at night, late weekend nights, on my transistor radio. (As I pointed out in that previously cited review for those too young, or those who have forgotten, look up that ancient communications transistor radio reference on Wikipedia. Basically though it was a small compact battery-driven unit that had the virtue, the very big virtue, it could be taken up into one’s bedroom, placed close to young ears and one’s parents would be blissfully unaware of the “subversion” until, well, until the big break-out came in 1956 and then they were caught flat-footed. At least at first.)

Now The Big Bopper Show (no relationship, as far as I know, to the rock performer who crashed out in a famous rock history plane crash with Buddy Holly, et. al), was mainly about rhythm and blues with the likes of Big Joe Turner and Ike Turner (pre-Tina) holding forth and about that post-World War II emerging big city, big Midwestern city, up river, up Mississippi River, black migrations to jobs and freedom, well, a little freedom anyway out of the Jim Crow South. Those electrified blues, taking country urban, were wailed by the likes of Muddy Waters (and his various famous band combinations) and Howlin’ Wolf (ditto on the bands).

However, intermingled with those genres was roots, black roots, Africa roots, Mother Earth primordial roots music, country blues, mainly from homeland Delta slave farms (pre-and post -slavery abolition) with some ‘Bama, Carolina Piedmont, Cajun swamp music mixed in. And that is where the performer under review here, Mississippi Fred McDowell, comes in, comes in almost accidentally. See the Big Bopper would play something like
Kokomo Blues or 61 Highway, serious classic blues, by various artists, electric and country, and more likely than not when twelve -string time came it was Brother McDowell whose recording was being used.

But here is the real revelation about black roots music, our Mother Africa transposed, disposed, reposed roots. In the early 1960s, after a bout with serious rock and roll (now called the classic age of rock, ouch) with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, that genre turned to dust (for a while) with the vanilla-ization (nice, huh) of rock. You know Fabian, Ricky Nelson, Booby (oops) Bobby Darren, Vee, all the Bobbys, okay. I turned away from rock and headed back to roots, or what I thought was roots, with the folk revival minute of the early 1960s (Baez-Dylan-Von Ronk-Paxton-Ochs, et. al time). Who do you think, among others, got “discovered” (really re-discovered) in that minute? Yes, Brother McDowell. And later in an effort to put paid to those discoveries when rock “discovered” it blues roots who do you think got his famous classic song “You Gotta Move” covered? Yes. By whom? The Rolling Stones. Like somebody said the roots, the roots is the toots. Let another generation “discover” that fact.

***Just One Year With You That Is All I Am Praying For- Elvis’ Break-Out 1956

Elvis 56, Elvis Presley (who else), RCA Records, 1956
I have beaten myself over the head, eaten humble pie, been flash-flayed, said ten acts of contrition, in short, confessed, confessed publicly, that when I was a know nothing pre-teenager in the 1950s be-bop, doo wop, red scare cold war rock and roll at the creation night I did not like Elvis. (Do I really need to say Presley among this crowd? Come on now there is only one Elvis when it comes right down to it). Now a lot of this was due to pure jealousy, pre-teen style, around the question of, ah, girls. Or maybe not so much girls as male vanity. No actually it was girls and my budding interest in them. And their very focused interest on Mr. Presley.

See I did not look, unlike my best friend Billy Bradley, remotely, like Elvis. I would have been very, very hard pressed, to imitate his side-burn driven hair style with my growing up blondish hair (moreover worn for saving household money sake buzz short). I would have been even more hard-pressed in my Podunk working poor neighborhood, alright, my projects neighborhood, to wear clothes even remotely as cool as Elvis’. Christ I was lucky to get cheapjack denim brothers hand-me-downs from the bargain center and off-color, off-cool color shirts. Worst, much worst when the deal came down in that first blush of school dance church dance last dance time held every once in a while to “keep us off the streets.” I was unable to swivel my hips like the “king.” And worst, although in that case not much worst, was my voice sounded like a frog from the local pond that graced one corner of our projects home.

Moreover I did not like Elvis because I did not like his songs, for the most part. See I was hung up on what I would now call that primordial Bo Diddley sound, that sound from some ancient mist dance around the fireplace to keep the wolves away and rock, rock to perdition time of our distant forbears. (I did know how to sway, hell, anybody could sway.) Even more moreover I was hung up on those black rhythm and blues guys like Big Joe Turner and Ike Turner. That was due to the fact that I was able to catch a midnight radio station, The Big Bopper Show, out of Chicago on the weekends on my transistor radio by some miracle and heard all kinds of stuff that drove me crazy. (For those too young, or those who have forgotten, look up that ancient communications transistor radio reference on Wikipedia. Basically though it was a small compact battery-driven unit that had the virtue, the very big virtue that it could be taken up into one’s bedroom, placed close to young ears and one’s parents would be blissfully unaware of the “subversion” until, well, until the big break-out came in 1956 and then they were caught flat-footed. At least at first.).

The best way to explain that musical taste difference is on the song “Shake, Rattle And Roll, Big Joe’s signature song covered by everybody, including Elvis here (and everybody since from Jerry Lee Lewis on). Elvis is just okay on that one even to fifty years later ears. Big Joe ruled and always will on that one. But here is where the “confession” part comes in and I grant Elvis his pardon. Several years ago I, by happenstance, watched Elvis in the break-out rock film (although the story line is so-so and predictable) “Jailhouse Rock.” I was mesmerized. By the gyrations, but more importantly, by the voice. Naturally, as is my wont, when I “get religion” I went out and gathered up every (early) Elvis compilation I could find, including this RCA break-out album. Big Joe might have been the max daddy of rhythm and blues but when Elvis swiveled for that little pre-military induction period in the mid-1950s, the time of my time, he was the king. Sorry for the delay, Mr. King.

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES -- 1914

In December, 1914, after months of slaughter during the First World War (it was supposed to be “The War to End all Wars”!), British and German soldiers declared an informal and spontaneous truce.  The story of their fraternization and holiday celebration is told in detail here and here.

 

 

Christmas In The Trenches VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9coPzDx6tA  

The event has been immortalized in a song by folksinger JOHN MCCUTCHEON, which you can hear and watch along with contemporary illustration and a moving introduction by the performer.

 

The song ends with this stanza:

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.

 

*    *    *    *

VIDEO: John Lennon – HAPPY CHRISTMAS (The War is Over) – updated for today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN4Uu0OlmTg

 

 

 

John Lennon

(killed on December 8, 1980)

VIDEO:   “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

http://vimeo.com/25005266

 

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

Yusuf Ibrahim (aka Cat Stevens)

 

 

VIDEO: “Peace Train”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wEctHyuc0