Sunday, July 17, 2016

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side-From "Revolutionary History" -Vol.4 Nos.1 & 2-The Spanish Civil War- José Rebull -On the Slogan of ‘A UGT-CNT Government’

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José Rebull
On the Slogan of ‘A UGT-CNT Government’

At the start of the situation that followed the ‘solution’ of the crisis of the Valencia government by the elimination of Largo Caballero and the ministers of the CNT, La Batalla on 20 May launched the slogan of “a UGT-CNT government”. This syndicalist slogan against which our party had fought for a long time is now put forward as a progressive stage that will get us out of the present situation. The same editorial adds that this does not mean abandoning the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government, but that it is only a question of a provisional solution that would allow us to move closer to the realisation of a real workers’ and peasants’ government.

Unfortunately, there is a fair amount of confusion about what this workers’ and peasants’ government would actually be. It is generally conceived of as a government of workers’ representatives, political as well as trade union, within the confines of the bourgeois state. Let us suppose that it was talked about in the editorial as if it were a question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Let us take the liberty of making a few remarks upon this subject. It is declared in La Batalla that a solution within the bourgeois state (a CNT-UGT government) is urgent, and that we should then proceed to the establishment of a truly proletarian government. Inasmuch as it concerns the course of our revolution, this is equivalent to the position of the Stalinists.

Against the false position of the Stalinists, who say “defeat Fascism first, and then make the revolution”, Marxists have intransigently maintained that you cannot separate these two tasks from one another. Subjective conditions demand a proletarian revolution today, and allowing yourself to believe that it can be postponed to tomorrow means to betray the interests of the working class. Since the objective conditions demand an implacable social revolution, Marxists cannot be in favour of a government that would not be the dictatorship of the proletariat. The character of the revolution and the forms of government for which we ought to struggle are only two aspects of the same problem. Fundamentally, there is no difference between the false position of Stalinism and that expressed by La Batalla on 20 May.

There cannot exist a progressive bourgeois government during the period of declining capitalism. The dilemma that is posed is: Fascism or Socialism. All bourgeois governments have a reactionary content. The same can be said of any party that is not Marxist. The party of the proletariat in our time cannot use the word ‘progressive’ whilst referring to certain bourgeois governments or to the political parties of the bourgeoisie. If they are progressive, that can only mean one thing, that they are instruments for holding back the proletariat in struggle, but have progressive methods of doing so. Exploiters use various methods of struggle against the working class. A progressive bourgeois government can only mean a more effective and more subtle method to frustrate and mislead the proletariat.

The leaders of the UGT and the CNT have already shown in action, and actions speak louder than words, that they are enemies of the proletarian revolution. That has been demonstrated by their previous actions in government and in the streets of Barcelona during the May Days. Isn’t it thanks to the CNT leaders that the Esquerra and the PSUC were able to eliminate the conquests of the revolution in Catalonia? Was it not Largo Caballero, the most influential leader of the UGT and the Minister for War, who abandoned the Aragon front to its fate? Was it not the united leaderships of the CNT and the UGT who renounced the revolution and opened the way for the counter-revolution? Will they change now, or much later when having the fate of the revolution in their hands, they will have betrayed it?

Their policy consists of separating the war and the revolution, which is the same as strangling the revolution and losing the war. And our leadership is proposing a coalition of these two reformist bureaucracies as ... a progressive step!?

Faced with our criticism of the slogan of a UGT-CNT government, we are mindful that our Executive Committee will appeal to the Russian Revolution. During the period of Kerensky Lenin launched the slogan “All the responsibility of power to the Mensheviks”, who at that time were a minority in the government, whereas they represented a majority in the Soviets. If we remind them of this explanation, perhaps they will seek refuge behind the formula of Trotsky, who in 1934 called for a Blum-Cachin (Socialist-Stalinist) government for France.

Lenin launched his slogan when organs of dual power existed. The Mensheviks were in a majority in the Soviets thanks to their great influence over the working class, whilst they were in a minority in the government. It was necessary to push them into power in order to force their contradictions and their anti-revolutionary character into the open. This permitted the Bolsheviks to free the Soviets from the influence of the Mensheviks, and bring to light their betrayals within the government. In such circumstances, with the existence of dual power, and with the sole aim of exposing the reformists, Lenin’s slogan was correct. But there is no dual power in Spain, since the reformist leaders have liquidated it at birth. Proposing a UGT-CNT government today means assisting reformism in fresh betrayals tomorrow, because the same bourgeoisie on which it depends and to whose needs it responds is yet again endeavouring to use these leaders to behead the new proletarian revolution that is to come.

Enough of centrist politics, and enough of reformist formulae. For a clear Marxist activity and for the victory of the proletarian revolution it is necessary to avoid spreading confusion amongst the masses, it is necessary to work effectively for the creation of organs of the second power, and it is indispensable to reorganise the party on the proper political basis.

Cell 72, Fifth Barcelona District of the POUM, May 1937

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky -On The POUM In The Spanish Revolution-"The Lessons Of Spain-The Last Warning"

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

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

Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The 76th Anniversary Of His Death- The Tasks In Spain (1936)

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This reference is only an opening shot starting point for your investigation of this historic event.

Monday, August 23, 2010

*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The 71st Anniversary Of His Death- The Tasks In Spain (1936)

Google to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist (I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.
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Leon Trotsky- The Task in Spain (April 1936)

Written: 12 April 1936.
Source: New International [New York], Vol.5 No.4, April 1939, pp.125-126.
Translated: New International.
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.
Public Domain: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive 2005; This work is completely free. In any reproduction, we ask that you cite this Internet address and the publishing information above.

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The letter reproduced below was written by Leon Trotsky to a Spanish comrade before the outbreak of the civil war in July 1936. It dealt with the tasks of the Bolshevik Leninists in Spain. Notwithstanding the date on which it was written or rather precisely because of that, the letter is exceptionally noteworthy for its analysis of the developing situation at the time and for its forecast of the fate which would inevitably overtake the policies of the Popular Front, and the working class or any section of it which adopted and practiced it. The recent catastrophe was not unforeseen! – Editor.



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THE situation in Spain is once more revolutionary.

The development of the Spanish revolution is taking place at a slow rhythm. In this way the revolutionary elements have obtained a fairly long interval in which to take shape, to rally around themselves the vanguard, in order to measure up to the task at the decisive moment. At present we must say openly that the Spanish “left communists” have allowed this extremely favorable interval to pass by completely and have revealed themselves as in no way better than the socialist and “communist” traitors. Really, there has been no lack of warnings! All the greater is the culpability of an Andres Nin, of an Andrade, etc. – With a correct policy the “Communist Left”, as a section of the Fourth International, might have been at the head of the Spanish proletariat today. Instead of this, it vegetates in the confused organization of a Maurin – without program, without perspective, and without any political importance. Marxian action in Spain begins with an implacable condemnation of the whole policy of the Andres Nins and Andrades, which was and remains not only false but criminal.

What does the removal of President Zamora signify? It signifies that the political evolution is once more passing into an acute stage. Zamora was, so to speak, the stable pole of the leading summits. In different conditions, he played the same rôle that Hindenburg played in Germany during a certain period; it was at the time when the reaction (even the Nazis), on the one side, and the social democracy on the other, placed their hopes in him. The Bonapartism of modern times is the expression of the extreme exacerbation of class contradictions in the period when these contradictions have not yet lead to the open struggle. Bonapartism may find its point of support in the quasi parliamentary government or else in the President “above the parties”; that depends only upon the circumstances. Zamora was the representative of the Bonapartist equilibrium. The exacerbation of the contradictions lead to each of the two principal camps wanting first to use and then to rid itself of Zamora. The right wing not having succeeded in this in its time, it is now the “Popular Front” which does it. However, that signifies the beginning of an acute revolutionary period. The profound effervescence of the masses as well as unintermittently violent explosions prove that the workers of town and country and the poor peasants along with them, deceived over and over again, are pushing with all their strength, again and ever, towards the revolutionary solution. And what rôle does the Popular Front play in face of this powerful movement? That of a gigantic brake, built and set in motion by traitors and servile scum. And only yesterday Juan Andrade signed the thoroughly infamous program of this Popular Front!

After the removal of Zamora, it is Azaña who, hand in hand with the new President of the Republic, must be charged with the rôle of a stable Bonapartist pole, that is, try to raise himself above the two camps in order all the better to direct the weapons of the state against the revolutionary masses who lifted him into power. But the workers’ organizations remain completely caught in the nets of the Popular Front. The convulsions of the revolutionary masses (without a program, without a leadership worthy of confidence), thus threaten to throw the doors wide open to the counter revolutionary dictatorship.

That the workers are pushing forward in the revolutionary direction is proved by the development of all their organizations, but especially by that of the Socialist party and the socialist youth. Two years ago, we posed the question of the entry of the Spanish Bolshevik Leninists into the Socialist party. The Andres Nins and Andrades rejected this proposal with the disdain of conservative philistines: they wanted “independence” at all costs, because it assured them tranquillity and committed them to nothing. Yet, adherence to the Socialist party in Spain would have yielded, in the given conditions, infinitely better results than, for example, in France (on the condition, of course, of avoiding the big mistakes committed by the leading French comrades). Meanwhile, Andrade and Nm have fused with the confusionist Maurin, in order to run together at the tail of the Popular Front. [1] The socialist workers, however, aspiring to revolutionary clarity, have become the victims of the Stalinist deceivers. The fusion of the two youth organizations (socialist and Stalinist) signifies that the mercenaries of the Communist International will abuse and destroy the best revolutionary energies. And the “great” revolutionists, Andres Nin and Andrade, stay on the sidelines to conduct with Maurin a wholly impotent propaganda for the “democratic socialist” revolution, that is, for social democratic treason. [2]

Nobody can know what aspect the next period will take in Spain. The tide which has brought to power the clique of the Popular Front is, in any case, too powerful to ebb in a short time and to abandon the field of battle to the reaction. The genuinely revolutionary elements still have a certain interval at their disposal, not too long, to be sure, to take stock of themselves, to gather their forces and to prepare the future. This concerns, in the first place, the Spanish partisans of the Fourth International. Their tasks are as clear as day:

1.To condemn and denounce mercilessly before the masses the policy of all the leaders who take part in the Popular Front.
2.To understand fully and to bring clearly before the eyes of the advanced workers the pitiful rôle of the leadership of the “Workers Party of Marxian Unification” [POUM] and especially of the former “left communists”, Andres Nin, Andrade, etc.
3.To rally around the banner of the Fourth International, on the basis of the Open Letter.
4.To join the Socialist party and the United Youth, in order to work there as a fraction in the spirit of Bolshevism.
5.To create fractions and nuclei in the trade unions and other mass organizations.
6.To direct their main attention to the spontaneous and semi spontaneous movements, to study their general traits, that is, to concern themselves with the temperature of the masses and not that of the parliamentary cliques.
7.To be present in every struggle in order to give it clear expression.
8.To insist always on the masses forming their committees of action, elected ad hoc (juntas, soviets) and to enlarge them constantly.
9.To oppose the program of the conquest of power, of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the social revolution to all the hybrid programs (à la Caballero or à la Maurin).
There is the only real road of the proletarian revolution. Another road does not exist.

April 12, 1936
Leon TROTSKY


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Endnotes
1. The “turn” made by La Batalla towards the Popular Front cannot inspire us with any confidence. You cannot say on Monday that the League of Nations is a band of brigands, on Tuesday invite the voters to vote for the program of the League of Nations, and explain on Wednesday that yesterday it was a question only of an electoral action and that you are now going to resume your real program. The serious worker must ask himself: And what are these people going to say on Thursday or Friday? Maurin seems to be the very incarnation of an agile, superficial and versatile petty-bourgeois revolutionist. He studies nothing, he understands nothing, and sows confusion all around.

2. Marx wrote in 1876 on the incorrectness of the term “social democrat”: socialism cannot be placed under the control of democracy. Socialism (or communism) is enough for us. “Democracy” has nothing to do with it. Since that time, the October Revolution has demonstrated vigorously that the socialist revolution cannot take place within the framework of democracy. The “democratic” revolution and the socialist revolution find themselves on two opposite sides of the barricades. The Third International confirmed this experience theoretically. The “democratic” revolution in Spain is already made. It has known a resurrection by the Popular Front. The personification of the “democratic” revolution in Spain is Azaña, with or without Caballero, The socialist revolution must be made in the implacable struggle against the “democratic” revolution, with its popular Front. What then does this “synthesis” of the “democratic socialist” revolution mean? Nothing at all. It is only an eclectic gallimathias

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side-From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- The Spanish Left (1930s version)in its Own Words-The Programme of the POUM in 1936

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This reference is only an opening shot starting point for your investigation of this historic event.


Sunday, September 19, 2010

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- The Spanish Left (1930s version)in its Own Words-The Programme of the POUM in 1936

Google the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

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

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Markin comment:

There is no question that in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s the prime driving force was the working class of Catalonia, and within that province its capital, Barcelona, was the key hot-bed for revolutionary action. The role of Barcelona thus is somewhat analogous to that of Petrograd (later Leningrad) in the Russian revolution of 1917 and deserves special attention from those of us later revolutionaries trying to draw the lessons of the hard-bitten defeat of the Spanish revolution. All the parties of the left (Socialist Party, Communist Party, left bourgeois radicals, Catalan nationalists, Anarchists, various ostensible Trotskyists, the POUM, and non-party trade unionists) had militants there, and had myriad associated social and political organizations that drove the revolution forward in the early days before the working class surrendered its hard-fought gains to the bourgeoisie or in Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky’s memorable phrase, “the shadow of the bourgeoisie.”

That said, the May Days in Barcelona take added importance for those of us who believe that in the ebb and flow of revolution that the actions taken there by the various parties, or more pertinently, those actions not taken by some, particularly the POUM (and left-anarchists) sealed the fate of the revolution and the struggle against Franco. A description of the flow of the events, a fairly correct description of the events if not of the political conclusions to be drawn, in those days by a militant who was there, Hugo Oehler, is an important aid in understanding what went wrong.

Note: Hugo Oehler was noting but a pain in the butt for Jim Cannon and others in the United States who were trying to coalesce a Trotskyist party that might be able to affect events that were rapidly unrolling here in the heart of the Great Depression. Nevertheless Cannon praised Oehler as a very good and honest mass worker. That meant a lot coming from Cannon. One does not have to accept Oehler’s political conclusions to appreciate this document. Moreover, his point about trying to link up with the Friends of Durritti is an important point that every militant in Barcelona should have been pursuing to break the masses of anarchist workers from the CNT-FAI. Time ran out before these links could be made decisive. But that is a commentary for another day. Read this (and Orwell and Souchy as well) to get a flavor of what was missed in those May days.

Additonal Note On The POUM Program

The editorial comment above the programmatic points makes the correct criticisms of the "omissions" in the POUM program. I would add that another problem is the issues that are not raised, especially on the specific question of the right to national self-determination on the Spanish peninsula (and not just the question of a socialist federation of nations which is raised) and the very thorny and devastating one one the colonial question, particularly on Spanish Morocco where Franco recruited heavily for his side.
Labels: barcelona 1937, leon trotsky, POUM, russian revolution, spanish civil war, spanish trotskyists


posted by Markin at 11:37 AM

2 Comments:
Renegade Eye said...
See this.

9:17 PM


Markin said...
I have seen this Renegade Eye provided video before and you should too. When one thinks about it, sadly, the Spanish Civil War is the last, almost chemically pure, example of the possibilities of a second Bolshevik revolution on the European continent. That chance was missed not only to our forebears' regret but to the hard fact of our regret that it has been over seventy years since those events. Let's get moving again. Forward!

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side-*From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives-“Negrín was right.” An interview with Gabriel Jackson

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This reference is only an opening shot starting point for your investigation of this historic event.


*From The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives-“Negrín was right.” An interview with Gabriel Jackson

“Negrín was right.” An interview with Gabriel Jackson

August 31, 2010

By Sebastiaan Faber [Editor’s note: this is an extended version of the interview published in the print issue of the September Volunteer. See here for 10-minute video excerpt.]

“Se nos ha ido Gabriel Jackson”—“Gabriel Jackson Has Left Us.” The March 25 headline in La Vanguardia, Catalonia’s newspaper of record, almost looked like an obituary. But it wasn’t: Gabe Jackson, who turned 89 this year, is alive and well. And yet the article in question, by Francesc de Carreras, a professor of Constitutional Law at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, was a lament about a deeply felt loss. After twenty-six years in Barcelona, one of the world’s most prominent historians of twentieth-century Spain was moving back to the United States. “It’s impossible,” the article said, “to imagine someone more down-to-earth—someone kinder, more educated, discreet, tolerant, austere, always ready to lend a hand to the weak, incapable of flattering those in power.”


Few foreign scholars command the respect and authority that Gabriel Jackson enjoys in Spain. In the English-speaking world, Jackson is best known as the author of two classic scholarly accounts of twentieth-century Spanish history: The Spanish Republic and the Civil War (1965) and A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (1974). In Spain, however, Jackson is an all-round public intellectual, known not only for his regular contributions to the op-ed page of El País or his frequent review essays in La Revista de Libros (the Madrid equivalent of the Times Literary Supplement) but also, until a couple of years ago, for his performances as semiprofessional classical flutist. The prestigious academic publisher Crítica has been reissuing his complete works in Spanish translation as a separate series (the “Biblioteca Gabriel Jackson”), which in addition to his Civil War work include the panoramic Civilization and Barbarity in Twentieth-Century Europe and Jackson’s 1969 memoir, Historian´s Quest. Jackson has also been a long-time ALBA Board member.

Negrín Was Right

For the past decade, Jackson has been working on a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic’s Prime Minister during much of the Civil War. Negrín was an accomplished scientist and Socialist politician—as well as a polyglot and bon vivant—whose insistence on winning the war above all else, acceptance of Soviet aid, and refusal to surrender to Franco even when there seemed little hope for a Republican victory earned him the contempt, if not hatred, of many on the Right and Left: the Nationalist supporters of General Franco, of course, but also the more violent factions within Anarchism, the revolutionary anti-Stalinist Left, and those factions of the deeply divided Spanish Socialist Party which sympathized with Largo Caballero, Besteiro, or Prieto. Not surprisingly, Negrín has been one of the most reviled figures of twentieth-century Spanish politics. Jackson tirelessly scoured through thousands of previously unseen archival materials to produce the most balanced and comprehensive account yet of the man’s life and significance. A year after the publication of the Spanish translation, his Juan Negrín: Physiologist, Socialist, and Spanish Republican War Leader has just come out with Sussex University Press.

His work on Negrín has strengthened Jackson’s conviction that the Prime Minister was justified in his refusal to surrender, and that the continued refusal on the part of the Western democracies to support the Spanish Republic was not only immoral and contrary to international law, but a huge political mistake. “Negrín’s policy of resistance and constant diplomatic effort was the right one—he visited Paris secretly a number of times during the war, to get the French to realize that they themselves were going to be the next victims. I am also convinced that if England and France had supported the Republic and stood up to Hitler, history would have taken a different course. Look at Hitler’s reactions when occasionally there was a moment of resistance—for instance in May 1938, when Chamberlain threatened the Nazi government with British action if the Heinlein Party in Czechoslovakia physically attacked their Czech neighbors. Hitler drew back immediately, and Heinlein shut his mouth. If the democratic countries had aided the Republic so that Franco would not have had the complete victory that he did, we need not have had a Second World War, or it would not have occurred in the terribly disastrous fashion that it did. The combined failure of courage and foresight on the part of the democratic powers was critical for Hitler´s successful Blitzkrieg in 1939-40.”

A Jewish New Yorker in Spain

In March of this year Jackson closed the Barcelona chapter of his life, moving to Oregon to live to in closer proximity to his daughter and grandchildren. The decision to leave Spain wasn’t an easy one, and neither was the move itself, which included the emotionally difficult but intellectually satisfying donation of more than a thousand books to several great libraries where he had worked—and been very well treated. And yet he had barely dropped his suitcases on the West Coast when he boarded another plane for a Midwestern lecture tour. In early April he visited Oberlin College, where we spoke.

What moves a Jewish New Yorker to dedicate his life to the study of Spanish history? “There is really no family connection, I have no Spanish relatives,. What first drew me to Spain, like so many of my generation, was the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1936. Although I was only fifteen, I was an avid newspaper reader and quite politically conscious already. I clearly remember the heated dinner table discussions on Spain between my father, who was a Socialist, and my Communist older brother. Then in the summer of 1942, after graduating from Harvard College, I got to spend two months in Mexico on a fellowship. I was supposed to have entered military service like all boys my age, but was given a six-month break to recover from an automobile accident. Now of course Mexico City in 1942 was full of Spanish Republican exiles. It was meeting and speaking with them that further opened my eyes to the history of Spain and Latin America.” Together with two Princeton students, Jackson stayed at the home of an exiled Republican physician. In the apartment upstairs lived the widow of President Manuel Azaña, who had died in France in 1939. “She often came down to have coffee and cigarettes; we played dominos after lunch.”

After spending World War II as a cartographer in the Pacific, Jackson considered a career as a college teacher, an ambition further strengthened by a three-year stint at the Putney School in Vermont. What he really longed for, though, was Europe. “I was jealous of my many friends who spent the war in the European theater and had had a chance to really learn to speak French and German. All I had done was to spend four years making maps of tropical islands. Europe drew me because I wanted to become bilingual, too. And although I was attracted to history as a subject, in reality my deepest personal interest has always been classical music. I had read biographies of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven much more than I had read biographies of political figures.” Entering in a European doctoral program required a Master’s degree, which Jackson earned at Stanford in 1950 with a thesis on the educational program during the first two years of the Second Spanish Republic.

In 1950, Jackson and his wife, who studied French literature, began their doctoral studies at the University of Toulouse in Southern France. Two years later, Jackson had finished a dissertation on the work of Joaquín Costa, the turn-of-the-century regenerationist. The fall of 1952 found the Jacksons reluctantly back in the States: “We would have happily stayed in France if it had been possible in the 1950s for Americans to get jobs in the French teaching system.”

The years in Toulouse were useful in more than one respect. “I did learn French and Spanish quite thoroughly, although I’m sorry to say I have always spoken them with a pretty horrible accent. But you have to remember that at the time we lived in Toulouse, a third or a half of the city’s population were Spanish refugees. I made a great many friends among Spanish fellow students and their parents. In later years these connections proved crucial. When I went to Spain to research the Republic, I carried letters from my refugee friends vouching that I could be trusted. That allowed me to speak to people and hear the unvarnished truth—despite the fact that I was an American and that the U.S. government supported Franco.”

On Roy Cohn’s List

The first decade back in the States was a difficult one, professionally speaking. Jackson quickly found he was haunted by his reputation as a leftist troublemaker. “In 1948, when I was teaching at the Putney School I was paid a visit by two agents from the FBI. Although they did not accuse me directly of being a Communist or a subversive, they wanted me to tell them everything about my college classmates’ political activities. I told them that I had not considered that to be any of my business. Apparently this was enough to be branded non-cooperative—which I was, of course: I was strongly opposed to these kinds of interrogation, treating people’s leftist political opinion as ‘evidence’ of ‘disloyalty,’ etc. From that moment on, however, my not having cooperated with the FBI followed me whenever I went looking for jobs. In the mid-1950s, for instance, I had a very favorable interview for a job in Spanish and Latin American history at Dartmouth College. When we were finished, one of the interviewers took me aside quietly and said: Listen, I am very sorry to have to say this, but we know you’re on Roy Cohn’s list—Cohn was McCarthy’s chief field investigator—and you’re not going to get an offer from Dartmouth. I figured I might as well let you know right away.”



After three years at Goddard College, five at Wellesley—where he became close friends with the exiled Spanish poet Jorge Guillén—and three at Knox College in Illinois, Jackson had almost given up on a tenured position when he finally landed a job at the University of California at San Diego, in 1965. Princeton had just published his The Spanish Republic and the Civil War.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Jackson’s first book. In the United States, it helped put twentieth-century Spanish history back on the academic map, earning him the 1966 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Its appearance did not go unnoticed in Spain, either. “I’ve been told it made a considerable scandal among regime circles—especially the appendix, which gave estimated numbers of victims of Nationalist repression. Together with Herbert Southworth’s La cruzada de Francisco Franco and Hugh Thomas’s book, which had come out in 1961, it motivated the Spanish government to initiate a whole new line of research to defend the Francoist record in the war.”

Stanley Payne

Jackson is the only one among prominent American scholars of Spain who was born early enough to consciously live the Civil War. His most well-known colleague, Stanley Payne, is from 1934. Payne, who specialized in the study of Spanish fascism, has long been Jackson’s ideological counterpart. Although the work of both was censored by the Franco regime, with Spanish translations initially published in Paris and smuggled into the country, Payne’s position has always been much less sympathetic to the Republic. Like Jackson, Payne is a well-known public figure in Spain, publishing prolifically and often interviewed in the media. In recent years, Payne has stirred up controversy by promoting the work of Pío Moa, a popularizing historian and Franco apologist, and by criticizing the current government’s support for the so-called recovery of historical memory. Jackson is sanguine: “Look, it’s perfectly obvious, and perfectly acceptable, that I am generally on the democratic Left, and Payne is generally on the democratic Right. Our different interpretations of Spanish history flow from that fact. But we have always remained friendly and on speaking terms with each other, without taking part in the slugfests of insults that occur a good deal in relation to the Spanish Civil War. The same is true for other scholars. I haven’t seen Juan Linz in many years, for instance, but when I was doing research in Spain in 1960-61, we’d have long nightly conversations walking in the streets of Madrid. We, too, were perfectly well aware of the fact that we occupied different political positions and were not going to interpret things the same way. Yet he was always very helpful. Of course, what Payne, Linz, and myself have in common is that none of us were direct victims; we had not been tortured or imprisoned.”

Objectivity

The Spanish Right, including Payne and Moa, has long charged liberal historians of the Civil War (Jackson, Preston, Graham) with a lack of objectivity. Jackson: “Is real objectivity, in the sense of emotional neutrality, possible? Well, maybe in some areas. I once took a course at Harvard College—not one of the ones I particularly enjoyed—about the economic development of the West. There were a number of lectures on the rise of the dairy industry in Wisconsin. I consider that to be a subject that can be dealt with without any emotions or any statement of personal beliefs in advance of the discussion. The Spanish Civil War, which can be honestly interpreted in such different ways, is a different kind of subject entirely. Here it’s impossible—and in fact not desirable—to try to conceal one’s emotions or political views. My idea of objectivity is that you don’t hide your emotions or pretend not to have them, but that you are honest and open about them from the outset. As an historian you have not only have to account for your sources, but also explain why you have the sympathies you have. The rest is up to the reader.”

Doing research in the 1950s and 60s, Jackson, as a foreign historian, enjoyed certain privileges over his Spanish colleagues. “Eisenhower was president, and I belonged to the first generation of Fulbright students. The thought process of Francoist officials was that if I was an American with a government scholarship under a Republican president, I must be okay—if not conservative, then at least neutral. Realizing this early on, I simply asked questions and kept my mouth shut about my own opinions.”

Foreign scholars had access to archives and documents that were barred to Spaniards. “Still, one of the places that I could not get into when I was researching my book on the Republic and the Civil War, around 1961, was the military archive. But I did have several interviews there.” Jackson chuckles: “I remember one of those meetings with the officer in charge of the archive. I was facing that famous mural of Franco as a kind of a medieval Christian warrior, which was painted over the archive’s entrance. The officer was chatting away, defending the coup, and complaining about us foreign academics. You foreigners, he said, you have no idea how many Communists came from outside during the war. I noticed there was a pile of documents on his desk, facing him. I tried my best to read them upside down. The one right on top seemed particularly interesting, because it appeared to be about the International Brigades. Like other researchers, I had been using the general figure of 40,000 international volunteers. You people just don’t understand, the officer said again, there were many, many more than that. And yet, when I was finally able to make out what was in the document on top of the pile in front of him, I saw that it, too, used the number of 40,000…”

Lincoln Brigaders

“I started meeting Abraham Lincoln Brigaders right after World War II. Among my long-time friends were Bill Sussman, Irving Weissman, and Abe Osheroff, all wonderful human beings, with whom I kept in touch right up to the time of their deaths. They were a feisty bunch, of course. Although I never had an actual fight with Bill Sussman, I was very much of aware of his disappointment in a novel that I wrote, in which the hero is a Spanish Anarchist, an illegal immigrant from Mexico to the United States. My evident sympathy for a certain kind of truly idealistic Anarchist was not something that Sussman appreciated. And yet Sussman was perfectly frank with me about his own problems with the Communist Party, as was Abe Osheroff.”

Jackson is a kind man. As an historian, he is a fundamentally sympathetic and forgiving student of human affairs. Yet there are limits: “For Franco I’ve never had the personal sympathy I’ve had for others who joined the military assault on the Republic. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, for example, the founder of Spanish fascism, meant to be a decent human being, although he was quite naïve about some political matters. I do hope I have recognized the real abilities of Franco—I don’t treat him as anybody’s fool. I think he deserves a certain amount of credit, for instance, for being the only dictator—that I know of—who took the trouble to be concerned with what would happen after he died. I think many Spaniards today take an overly negative view of the ‘Transition’ of the years 1976-79. It is certainly true that the people had to accept the dictator’s decision, made in 1967, that he would be succeeded by a Bourbon prince. But that Bourbon prince brought a larger measure of political liberty and civil peace to Spain than it had ever known, with the exception of the first two years of the Republic (1931-1933). And I am only one of many intellectuals who were asked by east European colleagues whether the Spanish transition might help them achieve a better post-Soviet future.”

What does Jackson think about the calls for “recovery of historical memory” that have polarized Spanish media and politics for the past ten years? “The emotional force of the historical memory movement, it seems to me, is very easily understandable. After all, for sixty or seventy years people have been unable to speak about the most intimate sufferings in their lives. So when there finally is enough political liberty for them to dare to speak frankly, it comes out with enormous force. I have always thought— not just in relation to the Spanish Civil War, but also Stalinism, Hitlerism, many a bloody dictatorship in Africa, Asia, or Latin America—that you can’t put something really behind you until you have recognized its truth. It is no use trying to neglect it or bury it. It seems to me a colossal mistake on the part of Spanish conservatives to say That’s far past, let’s not rake the old coals. There can be no real closure while the Right continues to say that the call for historical memory is an attack on the existing constitutional democracy.”

Both Cheeks

Jackson, who holds double passports, will miss living in Spain. His life-long connection with the country is emotional as much as it is scholarly and intellectual. “Personal relationships with Spaniards have always been very important to me, even more so after I retired from UC San Diego. I have had more deep adult personal friendships in Spain than in the United States, especially after moving to Barcelona in the1980s. It’s strange: I felt at home in Spain as soon as I got there. There was something so recognizable to the hospitality of the families that I knew in both Madrid and Barcelona. Later I have naturally wondered about that. At one point I realized that my Spanish hosts, the parents of fellow student friends that I met in Spain, simply reminded me of my own East European Jewish aunts and uncles in New York. There was something about the style of invitation and the interpersonal behavior that simply reminded me of my own cultural background. Apparently there are cultural traits—though it’s often hard to define them precisely—that can last for centuries, even though the official religion, the language spoken, and the education system have changed completely. So yes, I will miss living there. What I will miss most? I like kissing people on both cheeks.”

Sebastiaan Faber, Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College, is Chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Start Of The Spanish Civil War- All Honor to Those Who Fought On The Republican Side- In Honor Of The Working Class Militants In The Spanish Civil War- An Anniversary, Of Sorts

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). This reference is only an opening shot starting point for your investigation of this historic event.

From American Left History-Wednesday, June 08, 2011

In Honor Of The Working Class Militants In The Spanish Civil War- An Anniversary, Of Sorts

I have noted in other posts that some of our working class anniversaries like the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and the establishment of the Communist International are worthy of yearly commemoration. So, let us say, the 94th anniversary of the Russian revolution while awkward as a milestone is nevertheless, because of its world-historic importance (both in its establishment and its demise), an appropriate yearly commemoration. Others, like the Russian Revolution of 1905 are worthy of the more traditional five, ten and multiples observations. I have also noted previously my dismay (although that may be too strong a word) at the rise of odd-ball year anniversaries (30th, for example) and rise in the number of mundane occasions for such celebrations although I am not immune to that fever myself. Here, as the headline notes, I am observing a traditional milestone. However, the event itself, that I am observing has far less historic importance (actually far, far less importance) than as an occasion to make some point about the Spanish Civil War. The 50th anniversary designation is to commemorate the first time that I seriously studied the “lessons” of the Spanish Civil War. And the form that that study took was as the subject my very first high school term paper in 9th grade Civics class. I can hear the air being let out of the tires now. But hear me out on this one.

I make no pretense that I can zero in on when I first became interested in the subject of the Spanish Civil War but I was driven by two things in that direction- the general hatred of fascism as transmitted by family and others, the other, and this one is less precise as to origin, was a devotion to the fighters in the American-led Abraham Lincoln battalion of the 15th Brigade of the International Brigades. I believe it may have been hearing Pete Seeger doing a version of Viva La Quince Brigada but I am just not sure. In any case by the spring of 1961 I was knee-deep in studying the subject, including time after school up at the North Adamsville branch of the town’s Thomas Crane Public Library. My first stop, I remember, was looking through the Encyclopedia Americana for the entry on the Spanish Civil War for sources and then turning to the card catalogue. For those not familiar with those ancient forms of research the Encyclopedia was like the online Wikipedia today (except no collective editing, for good or evil, at a touch) and the card catalogue was just a paper version on, well, 3X5 cards, of the computerized systems in most libraries today. But enough of this history of research back in the Dark Ages because what this entry is about is the lessons of that event.

I have noted before, although here too I cannot remember all the details of the genesis of the notion, that on the subject of the Spanish Civil War I have been “haunted” (and still am) by the fact of the lost by the Republican side when in July and August of 1936 (and for about a year later as well) victory against Franco’s brutal counter-revolutionary forces seemed assured. In a sense Spain, and the various stages of my interpretation of events there, represents kind of a foundation stone for my political perspectives as I gained more understanding of the possibilities. I have, more recently, characterized 1930s Spain as the last serious chance to create a companion to the original Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia and so we had best look at its lesson closely, very closely.

Of course as a 9th grade political neophyte I was not even close to making that kind of observation just mentioned. I distinctly recall, and it was reflected in my liberal politics at that time, that the center of my argument on that term paper was the perfidy of the Western democracies in not coming to the aid of the Spanish republicans and further in not allowing the republicans to get arms from them or other sources, other than the Soviet Union. Mainly I was incensed that the British and French did not do more except cave in to Hitler when he called a tune. Now that was pretty raw stuff, pretty raw analysis, although probably not bad coming from that perspective. But depending on outside forces to save your bacon (or revolution) is always tricky and so as I moved leftward in my own political perspective I spent more time looking at the internal political dynamics driving the revolution. For an extremely long time I was under the spell (the proto-Stalinist derived spell) as articulated by the majority of the pro-republican organizations.- it was first necessary to win the war against Franco and then the revolution, presumably socialist, would be pursued under which all manner of good things like workers control of production, land to the tiller, some justice on the various national questions (Catalonia, Basque country) could take place, co-operative and collective government established, etc.

As I moved further leftward, leftward not just politically but also organizationally away from left-liberal and social democratic operations, and began to study more closely radical and revolutionary movements for social change I began to chaff under that war-revolution dichotomy and look more closely as the policies of the various organization within the republican camp. That was rather more eye-opening than not. The gist of it was that all the major organizations were working at cross purposes but most importantly they were putting brakes on the continuation of a revolutionary thrust in Spain. An so in the final analysis, although this was hardest to finally see in the cases of the CGT-FAI and POUM organizations and some individual militants, it was the failure to seek revolutionary solutions that would have galvanized the masses (or could have, rather than after 1937 left them indifferent, mainly, to the republican cause).

What was lacking? Obviously since even opponents agree there was a revolutionary situation in that period a party willing to go right to the end to achieve its goals, a Bolshevik-style party. Such things, as we are now painfully aware of, make all the different. And it is that little pearl of wisdom that makes this anniversary entry worth thinking about for the future.