The Cold Civil War Has Started- Escalate the Resistance to Inauguration Day!
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Wednesday, December 28, 2016
The Cold Civil War Has Started- Escalate the Resistance to Inauguration Day!
*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
*****I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind
Sam Eaton, nothing but the son of a son of a son of an old swamp Yankee, that’s a Yankee fisherman, a small tradesman, a farm hand and those who had, or their forebears had, come across the ocean not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude before getting under some high Brahmin's fist who did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged his way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought him and his every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought him down in Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as a “bogger,” a man who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner, so yes, a swamp Yankee as against the Beacon Hill Brahmins who reaped the benefits of the bloodstained freedom fight without the risks and settled into a quiet life of coin counting and merchandise buying, had been puzzled at the age of fourteen at a time when he first heard a blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years on a fugitive radio station down in Carver one night in the late 1950s (a song that later, much later, seemingly a technological millennia later, he would see done by Wolf on YouTube taken from a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s where the Wolf sweat rolling from his ebony cheeks and forehead flowing down his face like some ancient Nile River snaking its way to the sea, deep bass voice beyond deep seeming to get deeper with each drop of water would practically eat the harmonica he had in the cusp of his hand talking, no preaching to himself, taking himself to task, about some woman, some mean mistreating mama if the truth be known who had him in a sailor’s knot, has him all twisted up, had him so depressed and blue his wanted to go under the grasses but who in the end took the walk of the beaten down, beaten around and left old Minnie high and dry which Sam had sensed was happening way back when on that fugitive radio.).
That “fugitive” part just mentioned not being some pirate station off the coast which he had heard that some people who couldn’t get their music on the regular dial were doing somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean (he would find out later that this pirate station was out in the North Sea someplace and was there because of the uproar in England, like in the states over the demon effect rock and roll was having on the Queen’s subjects, her gaggle of children who somehow heard the fresh new breeze from America was heading their way and which he found out more about still later when he saw a film starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman about the subject) the result of some mystical still not understood airwave heading out into the atmosphere all the way from Chicago where occasionally around eleven o’clock (ten Chi town time) he would pick up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour over WALM, a station that billed itself as the “Blues is the dues” station.
He was not sure but he thought then that Be-Bop Benny was a black guy, a Negro (the “polite” word of common usage then to signify blacks, now far out of style and thus the need to explain to generations born after who accept the racial designation black or Afro-American or some other local derivative), although he heard his father, Prescott, who was the last of a long line of downtrodden independent Eaton boggers who would soon thereafter go belly up and sell out to the mega-growers, call them “n----rs” without a trance of rancor or self-consciousness and put “damn” in front of that term with rancor when he had been drinking rye whiskey and bemoaning his fate and said the “n” word were being treated better than he and his were).
Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.
Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.
See Sam had not really been happy when he heard that station come over the fugitive airwaves on late Sunday nights (although the song was okay, no, more than okay, cool even if he didn’t quite understand why the Wolf was letting some mean mistreating mama get him down, get him so crazy that he wanted to go six feet under which even naïve Sam knew meant old Wolf was losing it but that kind of hard-bitten lyric was not to his taste then since he was just getting that bug, just wanted to hear about roses and playthings, stuff like that, happily ever after stuff). As a dedicated fourteen old white boy from a town with no Negro families, not even people who were connected with those workers in the town like his father and a couple of older adult brothers and uncles who worked the cranberry bogs, he was not interested, or maybe consciously interested is better, the blues.
Sam was totally into rock and roll, totally into listening to WMEX the local radio station out of Boston which was being interfered with by that blues is dues station out of Chi town at eleven o’clock (remember ten Chi town time). Interfered with his listening to Bill Haley blast away on Shake, Rattle and Roll, Elvis doing Tomorrow Night and Good Rockin’ Tonight, Johnny Grey doing a great version of Rocket 88, Sam Jackson doing This Is Rock, Bobby Sams doing One Night Of Sin good rocking stuff that DJ Arnie Ginsberg would play on his At The Hop show where he played songs that had dropped off the charts but were diamonds of rock and roll. So at fourteen he could not figure out, nor could they when he asked his friend Jack Caldwell who knew everything about roll and rock, what the appeal was of that Wolf tune. But that beat, that chord progression, that going down to the messy forlorn earth and then coming back up again would follow him for a long, long time. He never really found an answer, a satisfactory answer until he looked beyond the fugitive sound, looked back to why the blues was even the blues. Looked more to the way it made him feel when times were tough, when he would get into his depressive shell, and a blues is dues song would break the bad ass spell.
Not until later did Sam figure some stuff out after he had kind of given up on rock and roll for a while, maybe around sixteen, seventeen, when the music seemed, well, square, seemed to be about blond-haired, blue-eyed guys searching for (and getting) blond-haired blue eyed girls with a “boss” car and dough as a lure, maybe a surfer guy cruising the beaches out west, out California way, none of which he and his had much of, the dough and car part, and Carver being kind of landlocked no surfer profile, and so kind of distant from the life of a son of a son of a son of a swamp Yankee.
Sam started figuring stuff out too when he got into his folk music thing for a minute, music which mainly made him go up a wall but which he put up with because Sara Leonard, his girlfriend or the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend got all excited about it when she saw Joan Baez in Cambridge at some club (the original Club 47 as it turned out where Joan and lots of other folkies hung out) and insisted that he like the songs or hit the road, you know how that is (this Sara by the way all dark hair and the whitest of white skin got hung up on the iron-your-hair-like Joan Baez craze and he would have to sit in the Leonard parlor cooling his heels while Sara did her ritual). Jesus. Part of that folk thing although he was not sure how and why was about the blues, about down south music from the plantations and sharecropper cabins, and how they made music to keep themselves from going crazy when the hammer came down and they needed some way to express their rage at their plight without getting hung up on a tree somewhere or shot in the back down some dirty road.
The critics, and don’t ever ask Sam who these guys are since all he cares about is the music, about the blues, who performs it and whether it will take the bite out of his depression or not and not some discursive history stuff although if you talked about the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, some guys called the Diggers (not boggers, not as far as he knew), or about the Renaissance he will listen all day, as long as you realize that you will be listening all night, say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code).
Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.
Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.
Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched nailed string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wooden churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” home truth low down mean mistreating mama, two-timing man, cut you if you run, weary tune blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights out in the back woods accompanied by Willie’s fresh made brew and then sang high white collar penance blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.
Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.
Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.
Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, big-voiced in a naked world, speaking of freedom trains with her brothers and sisters jam packed on the road, speaking of sweated field hand labor for damn Mister, man, women and child, speaking of that dirty bastard Mister James Crow and his do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t that like his charges were mere children to be ordered about, or hung from stange fruit trees or lying down in some shallow bottomland grave chains tied around the neck, speaking of the haunted northern star which turned Mister’s plantation indoors as it headed north, speaking of finding some cool shaded place where Mister would not disturb, couldn’t disturb and making lots of funny duck, odd-ball, searching for roots white college students whose campus halls she filled, marvel, mainly marvel, that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization, calling them back to where all, everything began.
And then Sam knew, or began to know, what that long ago fugitive beat that stayed in his head meant.
From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars
From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars
*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia
*****Important Mumia Abu Jamal Update-Free Mumia
Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
http://www.partisandefense.org/
Click below to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.
http://www.partisandefense.org/
The legendary social commentator and standup comic Lenny Bruce, no stranger to the American ‘justice’ system himself, once reportedly said that in the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls. The truth of that statement came home on Thursday March 27, 2008 as a panel of the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals voted two to one to uphold Mumia’s conviction. The only question left is that of resentencing- the death penalty or, perhaps worst, life in prison without parole. I have not yet read the decision but we are now a long way away from the possibility of a retrial-the narrow legal basis for even appealing in the legal system in the first place. Know this- in the end it will be in the streets and factories through the efforts of the international labor movement and other progressive forces that Mumia will be freed. That is the only way, have no illusions otherwise, whatever the next legal steps might be. ***** An Open Letter to Mumia Abu-Jamal Supporters-A Personal Commentary (April 2008 but the main point-freedom for Mumia is still front and center) The Partisan Defense Committee has passed "An Open Letter to All Supporters of Mumia‘s Freedom" to this writer. Those few who might not know of the torturous legal battles to free this innocent man can find further information at the above-mentioned Partisan Defense site. I make my own comments below. Normally I pass information about the case of political prisoner Mumia abu-Jamal on without much comment because the case speaks for itself. The case has been front and center in international labor defense struggles for over two decades. However, in light of the adverse ruling by a majority of a federal Third Circuit Court of Appeal panel in March 2008 that affirmed Mumia’s 1982 conviction for first-degree murder of a police officer and left the only issue for decision that of resentencing to either reinstate his original death sentence or keep him imprisoned for life without parole I have some things to say about this fight. Occasionally, in the heat of political battle some fights ensue around strategy that after the smoke has cleared, upon reflection, leave one with more sorrow than anger. Not so today. Today I am mad. Am I mad about the irrational decision by the majority of the Third Circuit panel in Mumia’s case? Yes, but when one has seen enough of these cases over a lifetime then one realizes that, as the late sardonic comic and social commentator Lenny Bruce was fond of saying, in the Hall of Justice the only justice is in the halls. What has got me steamed is the obvious bankruptcy of the strategy, if one can use this term, of centering Mumia’s case on the question of a new trial in order to get the ‘masses’- meaning basically parliamentary liberal types interested in supporting the case. This by people who allegedly KNOW better. The bankruptcy of this strategy, its effects on Mumia’s case and the bewildered response of those who pedaled it as good coin is detailed in the above-mentioned Open Letter. Read it. Today, in reaction to the Third Circuit court’s decision, everyone and their brother and sister are now calling for Mumia’s freedom. At a point where he is between a rock and a hard place. However, it did not have to be that way. Mumia was innocent in 1982 and he did not stop being innocent at any point along this long road. Freedom for Mumia was (and is) the correct slogan in the case. A long line of political criminal cases, starting in this country with that of the Haymarket Martyrs if not before, confirms that simple wisdom. Those who consciously pedaled this weak ‘new trial’ strategy as a get rich quick scheme now have seen the chickens come home to roost. And Mumia pays the price. I would point out two factors that made a ‘retrial’ strategy in the case of an innocent man particularly Pollyanna-ish for those honest militants who really believed that Mumia’s case was merely a matter of the American justice system being abused and therefore some court would rectify this situation if enough legal resources were in place. First, it is illusory that somehow, as exemplified in this case, a higher court system would remedy this egregious wrong. Long ago I remember a lawyer, I believe that it might have been the late radical lawyer Conrad Lynn no stranger to political defense work, telling a group of us doing defense work for the Black Panthers, that all these judges belong to the same union. They do not upset each other’s work except under extreme duress. Second, and this is where the ‘wisdom’ of the reformists about reaching the ‘masses’ by a stage-ist theory of defense work (fight for retrial first, then freedom) turns in on them. As witness the list of names of those who have signed the Partisan Defense Committee’s call for Mumia’s freedom, excepting professional liberals and their hangers –on, those interested in Mumia’s case (or any leftwing political defense case) will sign on just as easily for freedom as retrial. Thus, opportunism does not pay, even in the short haul. That said, Free Mumia- say it loud, say it proud. |
*****No Killer/No Spy Drones...
*****No Killer/No Spy Drones...
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective. Perhaps reflecting an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. In the post-9/11 period he like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions and have embraced some form of selected approval of various aspects of current military doctrine. Starting with the initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq which in the end left egg all over his face. Sam, nevertheless, argued that the high degree of accuracy, the “cleanness” of the method, and the destruction of the specific object (his word, I would say person or place, mainly person) without high casualties on the American side (that reduction of “boots on the ground” argument which underpins much of modern doctrine in the wake of Vietnam and even Iraq itself) to fight the “war on terrorism” which disturbs his old age has made him a partisan of such weaponry.
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
One night my friend from high school, Carver High Class of 1967 down in Southeastern Massachusetts Sam Lowell whom I hadn’t seen in a while and I were, full disclosure having a few high-shelf whiskeys at Jack Higgin’s Sunnyvale Grille in Boston, arguing over the increasing use of and increased dependence on killer/spy drones in military doctrine, American military doctrine anyway. Me, well again for full disclosure I am a supporter of Veterans For Peace and have been involved with such groups, both veteran and civilian peace groups, since my own military service ended back during Vietnam War days. I follow the line of VFP that killer/spy drones are qualitatively a no better (or no worse) part of the modern military arsenal that any other weapon and need to be opposed with the same rigor as we do for nuclear weapons and other all the military hardware used in the seemingly endless wars the American imperium has dragged us into. That “line” business in relationship to VFP is unlike various Marxist groups and quasi-Marxist collectives I hung around with in my younger days after discharge from the American Army as a matter of choice rather than obligation. In those old-time organizations hardly any of them around anymore or if so are peopled with the relics of those youthful endeavors (and good luck to them since the young these days except on rare and fleeting occasions are not picking up the torch) were guided they concept of democratic centralism from the Leninist Bolshevik organizational doctrine, if one disagreed with the organizational “line” would if in the minority keep quiet in public about the difference. VFP, based on more broadly-based democratic principles reflecting a different mission and different way to change the world, has no such restrictions although arguing for support of killer/spy drones would put one in opposition with the goals of the organization and one would in good conscience have to consider whether continued membership was appropriate.
Sam’s position, full disclosure he was granted an exemption from military duty during the Vietnam War period after his father had died suddenly in 1965 and he was the sole support, or close to it, of his mother and four younger sisters, was a little more nuanced if nevertheless flatly wrong from my perspective. Perhaps reflecting an “average Joe” position of a guy who did not serve in the military and had not seen up close what all the “benefits” of modern military technology have brought forth to level whatever target they have chosen to obliterate and under what conditions. In the post-9/11 period he like many from our generation of ’68 had made a sea-change in their former anti-military positions and have embraced some form of selected approval of various aspects of current military doctrine. Starting with the initial approval of the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq which in the end left egg all over his face. Sam, nevertheless, argued that the high degree of accuracy, the “cleanness” of the method, and the destruction of the specific object (his word, I would say person or place, mainly person) without high casualties on the American side (that reduction of “boots on the ground” argument which underpins much of modern doctrine in the wake of Vietnam and even Iraq itself) to fight the “war on terrorism” which disturbs his old age has made him a partisan of such weaponry.
As usual these days we argued for a few hours or until the whiskey ran out, or we ran out of steam and agreed to disagree. The next day though, no, the day after that I got to thinking about the issue and while not intending to directly counter his arguments wrote a short statement that reflects my own current thinking the matter. Here it is:
“Ever since the early days of humankind's existence an argument has always been made by someone and not always by the gung-ho warriors, many times rather by some safely-ensconced desk-bound soul who was too busy to become a warrior but was more than glad to let some other mother's son do the bitch work, that with some new technology, some new strategic gee-gad, warfare, the killing on one of our own species, would become less deadly, would be more morally justified, would bring the long hoped for peace that lots of people have yacked about in the abstract until some governmental decision to go to war gets their war blood up.
Those arguments are being retailed these days by the killer/spy drone aficionados who think they have found something new under the sun. Don't believe that false bill of goods, don't believe the insane war lies from warriors, arm-chair warriors, or the merely fearful, it is the same old killing machine that has gone on for eons. Killing from far away places like Nevada to the Middle East in war game rooms with screens set up like video games except tell that to the "sorry, collateral damage, no foul because not intended" victims who got in the way. Enough said and enough of killer drones killing and spy drones spying too.”
The Rebels Live-From The Star War Series-“Rogue One”(2016)-A Film Review
The Rebels
Live-From The Star War Series-“Rogue One”(2016)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Sam
Lowell
Rogue One,
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna and a cast of thousands of earthlings and
others from the inter-planetary, inter-galactic, inter-universe community,
2016
I am sure
that the writers, directors, and producers of the latest sci-fi adventure, Rogue One, in the now seemingly
never-ending Star War series did not intend to make a political
statement about current world politics, especially the latest developments in
America (they like the rest of us probably assumed that Hillary would win) but
the story line is a rather up-to-date commentary, a cautionary tale on what
lies ahead if you will. The idea that a small band of multi-cultural rebels
from various planets, solar systems, galaxies, the universe are compelled for
their own survival to fight the evil empire for a little freedom to breathe in
this wicked old universe was my take on this fast-paced (these scit-adventures always
are), super-special efforts heavy (ditto) and sometimes ironic and humorous
film.
The train of
thought that went into this film goes something like this-a super scientist and
expert bomb-maker is “kidnapped” by the evil empire (you know Darth Vadar-land
a bad guy we haven’t seen for a while in this series since he was wasted back
in the day) to make a doomsday bomb that will allow them to expand the empire
unto the extremes of the big bang theory. Manifest Destiny let’s call it. More
power and dough for the military, okay. That bomb-maker had a daughter, Jyn,
played by Felicity Jones who escaped with the “force”.
Fifteen
years later serious rumors are circulating among the small bands of rebels of
various political and strategic concepts that the evil empire had perfected a
super-weapon that would put paid to any rebellion that might pop up. And up
pops Jyn (remember with the “force” so this is a shoo-in for victory when the
deal goes down as we all know from the other films in the never-ending series)
who is the “hook” to get to her father and find out what is what with the
weapon. She is “accompanied” by a swash-buckling rebel pilot, Andor, played by
Diego Luna, who has a secret mission to kill her father (and extinguish any
romantic interest which you know down the road is going to happen from the
first glances at each other).
Eventually
after twenty-seven action scenes where everybody, all the good people show
their martial arts and sharp-shooter skills, they get to the father, who is
killed along the way after confessing to the evil scientist who administers the
bomb program that he had sent messages to the rebels about the weapon. The
message that he sent to his daughter was that he had created the weapon with a
built-in flaw. Find the flaw in the system and the evil empire is back to just
a super-power without teeth. After about twenty-eight action scenes where
everybody, all the good people once again, show their martial skills against
the hapless soldiers of the evil empire which makes me wonder how they were
able to create the empire in the first place they destroy the super-weapon and
head for home knowing there will still be battles ahead to bring the evil
empire down. As always a great entertainment and a nice cautionary tale as
well, intentional or not.
***From the Marxist Internet Archives- The 'May Days' in Barcelona 1937
Commentary
This is the second of a projected series of occasional commentaries on documents found on the Internet site-Marxist Internet Archives (MIA). For those not familiar with that site it features an incredible range of material by virtually any leftist, or anyone with leftist pretensions, who has put pen to paper over the last one hundred and fifty plus years. Today’s offering is a short article by well-known French Marxist historian and Trotsky biographer Pierre Broue concerning the events of May 1937 in Barcelona, the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution. It is fitting that as we approach the end of the year of the 70th Anniversary of that event we once again draw the lessons of that failed effort. Broue’s represents an orthodox Marxist view of the situation and of the role of the POUM, the most honest party on the scene. Despite it numerous defenders, then and now, the POUM, in the end was an obstacle to revolution. I have added below as my commentary on that situation parts of a review of Trotsky’s book on the Spanish Revolution posted in 2006. Read it and weep.
...The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which make up the volume reviewed here is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.
The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.
This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.
Trotsky's polemics in this volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.
Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.
The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn’, into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basic for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left ward organizations. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book.
The ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona, Pierre Broue
from Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used
by permission.
This article first appeared in the January 1988 issue of La Verite and is translated by John Archer.
Every workers' revolution in the twentieth century bears the characteristic mark that a situation of duality of power appears at its beginning. This is between the old organs of the state, whether rejuvenated or not, which have generally passed into the control of a government of 'conciliators' with the first phase, and the organs of the mass movement, organisations of struggle which have become the organs of a new power.
Our readers will know the analyses which Trotsky made on this matter in the History of the Russian Revolution, about the duality of power created by the first revolution in February 1917, between the old state, with the Provisional Government at its head, and the new workers' state in the process of formation, that of the Soviets.
The appearance of the duality of power marks only the beginning of the struggle between them, the struggle which ends in the victory of either the revolution or the counter-revolution, through the victory of one power or the other. Study of the revolutions in the period since October 1917 reveals the decisive role of the general staffs on the side of the revolution, of their party, of the party which fights for the victory of the new power. That party has neither provoked nor engineered the revolution, any more than it can stop it, without joining the counter-revolution. The authority of the party may be widely recognised, even by a majority of the masses, but it enables it only to act as a brake on an offensive which may be premature or isolated - this was the case of the July Days of 1917 in Petrograd - or, on the contrary, to clear the way for the final assault, by helping the masses to overcome the obstacles on their road to power. This is the case of the insurrection of October 1917 in Russia. *
What has been called the 'May Days of 1937' in Barcelona are an event of this kind, independently of the fact that the event took place within one of the two opposing camps in the course of a civil war, the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the duality of powers began in July 1936, with the victorious counter-stroke of the workers in a number of large cities, including Barcelona, against the military coup d'etat of General Franco.
In May 1937 it was the Popular Front government of the Generalidad of Catalonia - under the pressure of the Stalinists in the PSUC - which took the counter-offensive. It tried to seize a telephone exchange, which was in the hands of the militia of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The latter resisted, arms in hand, and the workers in Barcelona replied to the attempt by a general strike. Several days of street fighting followed in the Catalan capital.
The supporters and agents of Stalin speak of a 'Fascist putsch'. Other elements in the Popular Front speak of a 'tragic misunderstanding'. The Trotskyists agree on the general significance of what happened, but are divided in their appreciation of the incident itself. Trotsky believed that victory was possible and that, therefore, we have here an 'October' which failed, because there was no revolutionary leadership which wanted to fight to win. His comrade, the Italian Blasco (Pietro Tresso), regarded the event as 'July Days' ending badly for lack of a firm leadership, which could have prevented the retreat from turning into a rout.
In this month of May 1937, the atmosphere was tense. In the last days of April there had been violent incidents at Molins de Llobregat, where a PSUC leader was killed. Eight CNT militants were killed at Puigcerda in the course of an attack by armed police to recover control of the frontier for the government. On 1 May the government prohibited street demonstrations, which might provoke the outburst of workers' anger which it feared, or might give to that anger the means to bring them together to hit back.
At the Telephonica
The explosion came on 3 May. That afternoon the Barcelona police chief, an active member of the PSUC named Eusebio Rodriguez Salas, presented himself in front of the central telephone exchange, the Telephonica, in the Square of Catalonia in Barcelona. The exchange belonged to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company; it had been seized during the revolutionary days, and was under the control of a committee and of members of the CNT militia. It is located in the heart of the Catalan capital, and what happened to it came to be a symbol for the fate of the revolution and the workers' positions. The initiative by Rodriguez did not get a green light from the government, which had not been consulted, but it had the approval of the government's public order adviser, who, as everyone knew, was completely devoted to the PSUC.
The police chiefs escort got into the building by surprise and disarmed the militiamen whom it caught unawares on the ground floor. The militiamen on the upper floors were warned and began to resist this unexpected attack and to fire on the attackers. Two senior police officers, members of the CNT named Asens and Eroles, were warned at once and rushed to the Telephonica to stop the shooting. They did their utmost to convince their comrades not to keep up their resistance, which, they said, would only make things worse. In response to their persuasion, the militiamen agreed to vacate the Telephonica, which remained in the hands of the police.
But the peace-making efforts of the two mediators were in vain. The sound of shots had alerted the people of Barcelona, who were in a state of extreme tension and were, in fact, expecting some move to be made, if not by the government, at any rate by the extremists of the PSUC. The news of the attack on the Telephonica spread like a trail of gunpowder. The workers went on strike in order to paralyse the advance of the counter-revolution. They erected barricades to prevent the government's forces of repression from moving freely around. The branches of the CNT at its base, particularly its 'defence committees' were also there, and their members were armed.
George Orwell, in his book Homage to Catalonia, bears witness to having experienced the early hours of these 'Days' as acts of aggression against the working people of Barcelona, carried out by those whom he calls by their old name, the 'Civil Guard', former policemen who had been integrated into the new police forces which their chiefs were now throwing into attacks on the workers' barricades in Barcelona. The Barcelona workers were led by the elements organised in the 'control patrols' - the last vestiges of the workers' militias for maintaining order in the rear - and by the defence committees. They counter-attacked and came out of the workers' districts. The battle raged in the centre of the city against the forces of order, which had their headquarters in the Karl Marx barracks of the PSUC. Their spearhead, directed towards the Ramblas, was located in the Hotel Colon, in Square of Catalonia, at the top end of the Ramblas.
Several victorious attacks were directed against the police strong-points in the Exhibition Palace and the American cinema. The Anarchists even found some tanks, which enabled them to break the encirclement of the workers' fighting nuclei.
The leaders of the CNT maintained their policy of pacification, while at the same time they defended the militants, who, they said, were the victims of an act of aggression and of provocation. The same evening, 3 May, there was a meeting of the leaders of the CNT, the POUM and their youth organisations. One of the POUM leaders, Gorkin, declared:
Either we place ourselves at the head of this movement to destroy the enemy within, or the movement will collapse, and this enemy will destroy us.
No one denies that the situation was favourable for liquidating the undertaking and the forces of the PSUC. However, despite the enthusiasm of its youth section (Young Libertarians), the CNT maintained its waiting stance of 'protestation', and the POUM did not want to be isolated from it.
The fighting continued on 4 May, with sudden silences following brutal outbursts. La Batalla, the newspaper of the POUM, spoke of 'the provocations with which the counter-revolution is testing the pulse of the ability of the working masses to resist' and 'the preparations for a thorough-going attack on the conquests of the revolution'. The article goes on:
But the counter-attack by the proletariat could not be more powerful. Thousands of workers have taken to the streets, arms in hand. Factories, workshops and shops have ceased work. The barricades have gone up again in every part of the city. The majority of places in Catalonia have copied the gesture of its capital. The working class is strong and will know how to crush every effort by the counter-revolution. We must live on the alert, rifle in hand. We must maintain the magnificent spirit of resistance and of struggle, which guarantees our victory. We must prevent counter-revolution from raising its head again.
The POUM journal also demanded that Rodriguez Salas be dismissed, that the decrees be annulled, that 'public order be in the hands of the working class' and that a workers' revolutionary junta be formed, with the creation of 'committees to defend the revolution in every quarter, every place and every workplace'.
All the evidence goes to show that in this article we have a policy made up on the spot. Victor Alba, the historian of the POUM, assures us that this is not what the POUM wanted to do, but only what it could do, bearing in mind that it was determined not to cut itself off from the CNT! Indeed, the leader of the CNT, Garcia Oliver, appealed on the radio for a ceasefire; he called on people not to speak any more about 'provocations' or to 'go on about the dead'.
Companys, the president of the Generalidad, called for calm. He denounced the initiative of Rodriguez Salas, but he demanded that the workers must leave the streets and return to their homes before peace could be restored. The regional committee of the CNT, between two attacks by the forces of order on its premises, called for a truce and for calm. All the personalities of the 'left' of the Popular Front rushed to its help on the radio.
State terror
On 5 May the forces of order mounted what was nothing less than a terrorist attack. Armed groups of men in uniform arrested the Italian Anarchist, Berneri, who criticised the policy of class collaboration of his Anarchist comrades with the Popular Front. His dead body was found the next day. But, during this time, the CNT was working with the UGT (the reformist trade union federation) to issue a joint appeal for work to be resumed, explaining that the cessation of industry in 'these moments of anti-Fascist war is equivalent to collaborating with the common enemy by weakening ourselves'.
The Friends of Durutti, an organisation of dissident Anarchists, who had opposed the absorption of the militias into the army, issued an appeal for the formation of a 'revolutionary junta' to include the POUM. It criticised the leaders of the CNT who called for a ceasefire, and demanded that the 'provocateurs' be executed. Every leading organ of the CNT repudiated this declaration and the organisation which issued it, in extremely violent terms. Barcelona was vibrating with rumours. The 29th Division, commanded by the Anarchist Jover, and the 26th, under the POUMist Rovira, were forbidden to march on the capital. In fact these commanders had thought of doing so, but were dissuaded by their organisations. Leaders of the JCI (Jeunesses Communistes Internationalistes) and the committee for defence in north Barcelona organised a column, based on officer-cadets from the military academy, to seize the central headquarters of the PSUC and of the Generalidad. It was the POUM leader, Andres Nin, who put a stop to this operation. British warships were anchoring in the roadstead.
Federica Montseny, the Minister for Health in the Popular Front government at Valencia, which was headed by Largo Caballero, protested against the fact that all the ceasefire negotiations took it for granted that the Telephonica had been taken over by the forces of order. The UGT in Catalonia decided to exclude from its ranks all those members of the POUM who did not expressly repudiate their comrades who were taking part in the insurrection!
The death of another minister, a member of the PSUC and of the UGT, named Antonio Sese, who was shot by unknown murderers as he was going to take up his appointment, perhaps gave the central government a pretext for taking public order out of the hands of the Catalan Generalidad. From that time onwards, public order was entrusted to General Pozas, a professional soldier, former head of the Civil Guard, who appears to have been linked to the PSUC by connections of a hardly political nature. There was total confusion. Both the arrival of troops sent by the Valencia government and a possible foreign intervention were expected. The new government included none of the PSUC people who had played a role in the provocation.
On 6 May the body of Berneri was found; he had been well and truly assassinated. The workers who followed the CNT were disorientated by the disorder and confusion, as well as by the appeals from their leaders. They began to desert the barricades in large numbers. The POUM, in its own way, buried the movement, with comments about 'these three magnificent days' and 'this tremendous experience'. It put on record that it had been with the masses in the streets at the beginning, and observed that 'under the repeated injunctions of their leaders, the masses have begun to withdraw from the struggle'. Yet it presented the result as being largely positive:
Beyond any doubt it [the proletariat] has won a great, partial victory. It has defeated the counter-revolutionary provocation. It has won the dismissal of all those who were directly responsible for the provocation. It has struck a serious blow at the bourgeoisie and reformism. It could have won more, much more, if those in the leadership of the organisations which stand at the head of the working class of Catalonia could have risen to the level of the masses.
On 7 May the police took over the abandoned barricades, which were to be demolished amid great publicity by girls belonging to the PSUC. The trams began to run again. Two hundred militants were freed from jail. Shots were fired at the car of Federica Montseny, the Anarchist minister. The issue of La Batalla for 8 May once again urged a return to work. At the same time, the local committee of the POUM in Barcelona sharply criticised the executive of its party, which it accused of having 'capitulated' in the course of those days, in the face of the counter-revolution, under the pressure of the conciliatory leaders of the CNT.
Little by little we are now uncovering the long list of revolutionary militants with whom the specialised groups in the service of Stalin settled their accounts in the course of these 'days' - Berneri and his friend Barbieri, Alfredo Martinez, the leader of the Libertarian Youth, and the German Trotskyist Freund, known as Moulin, who was the link between the small group of Trotskyists and the Friends of Durutti - and 'disappeared'. This was only the beginning of the repression.
POUM nonsense
There can be no doubt that La Batalla was publishing complete nonsense on 6 May, when it presented the May Days as having turned out positively. These days were the first stage in the unfolding of a counterrevolution, the first victims of which, a few weeks later, were to be the POUM itself and, in particular, its principal leader, the old revolutionary, Andres Nin.
How can this mistaken appreciation be explained if we consider the extraordinary strength which the huge movement of the working class of Barcelona had revealed a few days, indeed a few hours, earlier?
The fresh memory of that movement hovers over the discussion which opened within the POUM in the following days, in preparation for a congress which the Stalinist repression prevented from ever being held.
We have little information about the attitude of the right wing in the POUM, apart from an editorial of 15 May in its Valencia newspaper, El Communista. This condemned the workers in Barcelona and even the leaders of the POUM on the grounds that 'one cannot swim against the stream with impunity' and denounced, 'after the provocateurs', 'those who played their game and cleared the ground in front of them'. We also know that the POUM organisation in Sabadell issued a manifesto condemning the action of the workers in Barcelona, and that Luis Portel, a member of its executive, judged the attitude of the leadership during these May Days to have been 'adventuristic'.
The thesis of the executive was drafted by Nin. He drew a parallel with the 'July Days':
In July 1917 the workers in the Russian capital took to the streets arms in hand, rising up against the policies of the democrat, Kerensky. The Bolshevik Party considered this movement to be ill-timed and dangerous. None the less, the Bolsheviks played an active part in it, placed themselves at its head, led it and guided it in such a way as to prevent it from becoming a disaster for the revolutionary proletariat.
Nin started from the provocation by the forces of the police. He declared that the workers had defended the interests of the proletariat in the streets. As to the policy of his party, he wrote:
If it had all depended on us to start things off, we would not have given the order for insurrection. The moment was not favourable for a decisive action, but the revolutionary workers, rightly indignant at the provocation of which they were the victims, flung themselves into battle, and we could not leave them to their fate. To act otherwise would have been an unpardonable betrayal.
Nin declared that the activity of the POUM aimed at 'canalising a movement which, because it was spontaneous, had many chaotic aspects, and to avoid its transforming itself into a fruitless putsch, which would have fatal consequences for the proletariat. It was necessary to provide limited slogans for the movement.'
A third position, that of J. Rebull and of Cell 72, reproaches the leadership of the POUM for having 'run after the events' and having 'once again waited on the opinion of the opportunist elements in the confederal leadership'. Their counter-theses declared:
The first results of the workers' insurrections are a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie.
Trotsky's verdict
Trotsky devoted a number of writings to the Spanish Revolution and several times discussed the May Days. He conceded to the defenders of the policies of the POUM that there was a superficial resemblance between the movement of the masses before the July Days in Petrograd and that of May 1937 in Barcelona. However, he was concerned in particular to emphasise the deep differences between the two — according to him, the essential differences lay in the fact that in 1937 the Spanish masses had a more serious experience of their revolution than those had in Russia in 1917. Trotsky wrote:
In Spain, the May events took place not after four months, but after six years of revolution. The masses of the whole country have had a gigantic experience. A long time ago they lost the illusions of 1931, as well as the warmed-over illusions of the Popular Front. Again and again they have shown to every part of the country that they were ready to go through to the end. If the Catalan proletariat had seized power in May 1937 - as it had really seized it in July 1936 - they would have found support throughout all of Spain. The bourgeois-Stalinist reaction would not even have found two regiments with which to crush the Catalan workers. In the territory occupied by Franco not only the workers but also the peasants would have turned toward the Catalan proletariat, would have isolated the Fascist army and brought about its irresistible disintegration. It is doubtful whether under these conditions any foreign government would have risked throwing its regiments onto the burning soil of Spain. Intervention would have become materially impossible, or at least extremely dangerous.
Naturally, in every insurrection, there is an element of uncertainty and risk. But the subsequent course of events has proved that even in the case of defeat the situation of the Spanish workers would have been incomparably more favourable than now, to say nothing of the fact that the revolutionary party would have assured its future (L Trotsky, A test of ideas and individuals through the Spanish experience,
The Spanish Revolution 1931-1939, New York, 1973, p278-279)
In Trotsky's opinion, it was a revolutionary party which was lacking in May 1937. This is the reason for his ferocious criticism, not merely of the Anarchists but also of the policies of the POUM, and what he calls its 'indecision, its equivocations, its hesitations and its lack of a clear programme', which prevented it from providing for the masses 'the revolutionary leadership without which victory was not possible'.
Perhaps a little more light can be shed on Trotsky's position on the insurrection, which failed in May 1937 for lack of a revolutionary party, and on his divergences with his comrade Blasco, which were never expressed in writing in a direct debate, if we look back to his preface to Volume Three of the Russian edition of his works, which we know under the title The Lessons of October.
There we find that Trotsky directed precisely the same criticisms against what he called the 'right wing' of the Bolshevik Party, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who opposed the insurrection which Lenin proposed, as those which he directed against the POUM in 1937 or the German Communist Party at the time of its failed insurrection in 1923:
A party which has been carrying on revolutionary agitation for a long time, tearing the proletariat little by little from the influence of the conciliators, and which, once it is lifted to the height of events by the confidence of the proletariat, begins to hesitate, to look for midday at two o'clock, to turn its back and to tack about, paralyses the activity of the masses, provokes disappointment and disorganisation among them and leads the revolution to defeat...
He analysed the position of the 'Old Bolsheviks', who advanced against Lenin in April 1917 the old formula of 'the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', which they counterposed to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for Soviet power: Their method ... consisted in exerting on the leading bourgeoisie a pressure which did not go outside the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime. If this policy had been victorious, the development of the revolution would have proceeded outside our part y, and we would have, in the end, had an insurrection of the masses of workers and peasants which was not led by the party, in other words, July Days on a vast scale, that is, a catastrophe.
It seems to us that this formula permits conclusions to be drawn about the May Days by settling at least the ambiguities which may have survived in the historic debate about the analogies with the Russian Revolution. About these ambiguities, Trotsky himself took pleasure in emphasising that he himself had not introduced them, though he was often blamed for doing so, and he made clear that, for his part, he had been very deeply convinced that 'Spain was not Russia', a conclusion which did not in the slightest justify the policy which led to catastrophe.
Pierre Broue
This is the second of a projected series of occasional commentaries on documents found on the Internet site-Marxist Internet Archives (MIA). For those not familiar with that site it features an incredible range of material by virtually any leftist, or anyone with leftist pretensions, who has put pen to paper over the last one hundred and fifty plus years. Today’s offering is a short article by well-known French Marxist historian and Trotsky biographer Pierre Broue concerning the events of May 1937 in Barcelona, the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution. It is fitting that as we approach the end of the year of the 70th Anniversary of that event we once again draw the lessons of that failed effort. Broue’s represents an orthodox Marxist view of the situation and of the role of the POUM, the most honest party on the scene. Despite it numerous defenders, then and now, the POUM, in the end was an obstacle to revolution. I have added below as my commentary on that situation parts of a review of Trotsky’s book on the Spanish Revolution posted in 2006. Read it and weep.
...The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which make up the volume reviewed here is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.
The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.
This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.
Trotsky's polemics in this volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.
Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.
The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn’, into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basic for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left ward organizations. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book.
The ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona, Pierre Broue
from Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used
by permission.
This article first appeared in the January 1988 issue of La Verite and is translated by John Archer.
Every workers' revolution in the twentieth century bears the characteristic mark that a situation of duality of power appears at its beginning. This is between the old organs of the state, whether rejuvenated or not, which have generally passed into the control of a government of 'conciliators' with the first phase, and the organs of the mass movement, organisations of struggle which have become the organs of a new power.
Our readers will know the analyses which Trotsky made on this matter in the History of the Russian Revolution, about the duality of power created by the first revolution in February 1917, between the old state, with the Provisional Government at its head, and the new workers' state in the process of formation, that of the Soviets.
The appearance of the duality of power marks only the beginning of the struggle between them, the struggle which ends in the victory of either the revolution or the counter-revolution, through the victory of one power or the other. Study of the revolutions in the period since October 1917 reveals the decisive role of the general staffs on the side of the revolution, of their party, of the party which fights for the victory of the new power. That party has neither provoked nor engineered the revolution, any more than it can stop it, without joining the counter-revolution. The authority of the party may be widely recognised, even by a majority of the masses, but it enables it only to act as a brake on an offensive which may be premature or isolated - this was the case of the July Days of 1917 in Petrograd - or, on the contrary, to clear the way for the final assault, by helping the masses to overcome the obstacles on their road to power. This is the case of the insurrection of October 1917 in Russia. *
What has been called the 'May Days of 1937' in Barcelona are an event of this kind, independently of the fact that the event took place within one of the two opposing camps in the course of a civil war, the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the duality of powers began in July 1936, with the victorious counter-stroke of the workers in a number of large cities, including Barcelona, against the military coup d'etat of General Franco.
In May 1937 it was the Popular Front government of the Generalidad of Catalonia - under the pressure of the Stalinists in the PSUC - which took the counter-offensive. It tried to seize a telephone exchange, which was in the hands of the militia of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The latter resisted, arms in hand, and the workers in Barcelona replied to the attempt by a general strike. Several days of street fighting followed in the Catalan capital.
The supporters and agents of Stalin speak of a 'Fascist putsch'. Other elements in the Popular Front speak of a 'tragic misunderstanding'. The Trotskyists agree on the general significance of what happened, but are divided in their appreciation of the incident itself. Trotsky believed that victory was possible and that, therefore, we have here an 'October' which failed, because there was no revolutionary leadership which wanted to fight to win. His comrade, the Italian Blasco (Pietro Tresso), regarded the event as 'July Days' ending badly for lack of a firm leadership, which could have prevented the retreat from turning into a rout.
In this month of May 1937, the atmosphere was tense. In the last days of April there had been violent incidents at Molins de Llobregat, where a PSUC leader was killed. Eight CNT militants were killed at Puigcerda in the course of an attack by armed police to recover control of the frontier for the government. On 1 May the government prohibited street demonstrations, which might provoke the outburst of workers' anger which it feared, or might give to that anger the means to bring them together to hit back.
At the Telephonica
The explosion came on 3 May. That afternoon the Barcelona police chief, an active member of the PSUC named Eusebio Rodriguez Salas, presented himself in front of the central telephone exchange, the Telephonica, in the Square of Catalonia in Barcelona. The exchange belonged to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company; it had been seized during the revolutionary days, and was under the control of a committee and of members of the CNT militia. It is located in the heart of the Catalan capital, and what happened to it came to be a symbol for the fate of the revolution and the workers' positions. The initiative by Rodriguez did not get a green light from the government, which had not been consulted, but it had the approval of the government's public order adviser, who, as everyone knew, was completely devoted to the PSUC.
The police chiefs escort got into the building by surprise and disarmed the militiamen whom it caught unawares on the ground floor. The militiamen on the upper floors were warned and began to resist this unexpected attack and to fire on the attackers. Two senior police officers, members of the CNT named Asens and Eroles, were warned at once and rushed to the Telephonica to stop the shooting. They did their utmost to convince their comrades not to keep up their resistance, which, they said, would only make things worse. In response to their persuasion, the militiamen agreed to vacate the Telephonica, which remained in the hands of the police.
But the peace-making efforts of the two mediators were in vain. The sound of shots had alerted the people of Barcelona, who were in a state of extreme tension and were, in fact, expecting some move to be made, if not by the government, at any rate by the extremists of the PSUC. The news of the attack on the Telephonica spread like a trail of gunpowder. The workers went on strike in order to paralyse the advance of the counter-revolution. They erected barricades to prevent the government's forces of repression from moving freely around. The branches of the CNT at its base, particularly its 'defence committees' were also there, and their members were armed.
George Orwell, in his book Homage to Catalonia, bears witness to having experienced the early hours of these 'Days' as acts of aggression against the working people of Barcelona, carried out by those whom he calls by their old name, the 'Civil Guard', former policemen who had been integrated into the new police forces which their chiefs were now throwing into attacks on the workers' barricades in Barcelona. The Barcelona workers were led by the elements organised in the 'control patrols' - the last vestiges of the workers' militias for maintaining order in the rear - and by the defence committees. They counter-attacked and came out of the workers' districts. The battle raged in the centre of the city against the forces of order, which had their headquarters in the Karl Marx barracks of the PSUC. Their spearhead, directed towards the Ramblas, was located in the Hotel Colon, in Square of Catalonia, at the top end of the Ramblas.
Several victorious attacks were directed against the police strong-points in the Exhibition Palace and the American cinema. The Anarchists even found some tanks, which enabled them to break the encirclement of the workers' fighting nuclei.
The leaders of the CNT maintained their policy of pacification, while at the same time they defended the militants, who, they said, were the victims of an act of aggression and of provocation. The same evening, 3 May, there was a meeting of the leaders of the CNT, the POUM and their youth organisations. One of the POUM leaders, Gorkin, declared:
Either we place ourselves at the head of this movement to destroy the enemy within, or the movement will collapse, and this enemy will destroy us.
No one denies that the situation was favourable for liquidating the undertaking and the forces of the PSUC. However, despite the enthusiasm of its youth section (Young Libertarians), the CNT maintained its waiting stance of 'protestation', and the POUM did not want to be isolated from it.
The fighting continued on 4 May, with sudden silences following brutal outbursts. La Batalla, the newspaper of the POUM, spoke of 'the provocations with which the counter-revolution is testing the pulse of the ability of the working masses to resist' and 'the preparations for a thorough-going attack on the conquests of the revolution'. The article goes on:
But the counter-attack by the proletariat could not be more powerful. Thousands of workers have taken to the streets, arms in hand. Factories, workshops and shops have ceased work. The barricades have gone up again in every part of the city. The majority of places in Catalonia have copied the gesture of its capital. The working class is strong and will know how to crush every effort by the counter-revolution. We must live on the alert, rifle in hand. We must maintain the magnificent spirit of resistance and of struggle, which guarantees our victory. We must prevent counter-revolution from raising its head again.
The POUM journal also demanded that Rodriguez Salas be dismissed, that the decrees be annulled, that 'public order be in the hands of the working class' and that a workers' revolutionary junta be formed, with the creation of 'committees to defend the revolution in every quarter, every place and every workplace'.
All the evidence goes to show that in this article we have a policy made up on the spot. Victor Alba, the historian of the POUM, assures us that this is not what the POUM wanted to do, but only what it could do, bearing in mind that it was determined not to cut itself off from the CNT! Indeed, the leader of the CNT, Garcia Oliver, appealed on the radio for a ceasefire; he called on people not to speak any more about 'provocations' or to 'go on about the dead'.
Companys, the president of the Generalidad, called for calm. He denounced the initiative of Rodriguez Salas, but he demanded that the workers must leave the streets and return to their homes before peace could be restored. The regional committee of the CNT, between two attacks by the forces of order on its premises, called for a truce and for calm. All the personalities of the 'left' of the Popular Front rushed to its help on the radio.
State terror
On 5 May the forces of order mounted what was nothing less than a terrorist attack. Armed groups of men in uniform arrested the Italian Anarchist, Berneri, who criticised the policy of class collaboration of his Anarchist comrades with the Popular Front. His dead body was found the next day. But, during this time, the CNT was working with the UGT (the reformist trade union federation) to issue a joint appeal for work to be resumed, explaining that the cessation of industry in 'these moments of anti-Fascist war is equivalent to collaborating with the common enemy by weakening ourselves'.
The Friends of Durutti, an organisation of dissident Anarchists, who had opposed the absorption of the militias into the army, issued an appeal for the formation of a 'revolutionary junta' to include the POUM. It criticised the leaders of the CNT who called for a ceasefire, and demanded that the 'provocateurs' be executed. Every leading organ of the CNT repudiated this declaration and the organisation which issued it, in extremely violent terms. Barcelona was vibrating with rumours. The 29th Division, commanded by the Anarchist Jover, and the 26th, under the POUMist Rovira, were forbidden to march on the capital. In fact these commanders had thought of doing so, but were dissuaded by their organisations. Leaders of the JCI (Jeunesses Communistes Internationalistes) and the committee for defence in north Barcelona organised a column, based on officer-cadets from the military academy, to seize the central headquarters of the PSUC and of the Generalidad. It was the POUM leader, Andres Nin, who put a stop to this operation. British warships were anchoring in the roadstead.
Federica Montseny, the Minister for Health in the Popular Front government at Valencia, which was headed by Largo Caballero, protested against the fact that all the ceasefire negotiations took it for granted that the Telephonica had been taken over by the forces of order. The UGT in Catalonia decided to exclude from its ranks all those members of the POUM who did not expressly repudiate their comrades who were taking part in the insurrection!
The death of another minister, a member of the PSUC and of the UGT, named Antonio Sese, who was shot by unknown murderers as he was going to take up his appointment, perhaps gave the central government a pretext for taking public order out of the hands of the Catalan Generalidad. From that time onwards, public order was entrusted to General Pozas, a professional soldier, former head of the Civil Guard, who appears to have been linked to the PSUC by connections of a hardly political nature. There was total confusion. Both the arrival of troops sent by the Valencia government and a possible foreign intervention were expected. The new government included none of the PSUC people who had played a role in the provocation.
On 6 May the body of Berneri was found; he had been well and truly assassinated. The workers who followed the CNT were disorientated by the disorder and confusion, as well as by the appeals from their leaders. They began to desert the barricades in large numbers. The POUM, in its own way, buried the movement, with comments about 'these three magnificent days' and 'this tremendous experience'. It put on record that it had been with the masses in the streets at the beginning, and observed that 'under the repeated injunctions of their leaders, the masses have begun to withdraw from the struggle'. Yet it presented the result as being largely positive:
Beyond any doubt it [the proletariat] has won a great, partial victory. It has defeated the counter-revolutionary provocation. It has won the dismissal of all those who were directly responsible for the provocation. It has struck a serious blow at the bourgeoisie and reformism. It could have won more, much more, if those in the leadership of the organisations which stand at the head of the working class of Catalonia could have risen to the level of the masses.
On 7 May the police took over the abandoned barricades, which were to be demolished amid great publicity by girls belonging to the PSUC. The trams began to run again. Two hundred militants were freed from jail. Shots were fired at the car of Federica Montseny, the Anarchist minister. The issue of La Batalla for 8 May once again urged a return to work. At the same time, the local committee of the POUM in Barcelona sharply criticised the executive of its party, which it accused of having 'capitulated' in the course of those days, in the face of the counter-revolution, under the pressure of the conciliatory leaders of the CNT.
Little by little we are now uncovering the long list of revolutionary militants with whom the specialised groups in the service of Stalin settled their accounts in the course of these 'days' - Berneri and his friend Barbieri, Alfredo Martinez, the leader of the Libertarian Youth, and the German Trotskyist Freund, known as Moulin, who was the link between the small group of Trotskyists and the Friends of Durutti - and 'disappeared'. This was only the beginning of the repression.
POUM nonsense
There can be no doubt that La Batalla was publishing complete nonsense on 6 May, when it presented the May Days as having turned out positively. These days were the first stage in the unfolding of a counterrevolution, the first victims of which, a few weeks later, were to be the POUM itself and, in particular, its principal leader, the old revolutionary, Andres Nin.
How can this mistaken appreciation be explained if we consider the extraordinary strength which the huge movement of the working class of Barcelona had revealed a few days, indeed a few hours, earlier?
The fresh memory of that movement hovers over the discussion which opened within the POUM in the following days, in preparation for a congress which the Stalinist repression prevented from ever being held.
We have little information about the attitude of the right wing in the POUM, apart from an editorial of 15 May in its Valencia newspaper, El Communista. This condemned the workers in Barcelona and even the leaders of the POUM on the grounds that 'one cannot swim against the stream with impunity' and denounced, 'after the provocateurs', 'those who played their game and cleared the ground in front of them'. We also know that the POUM organisation in Sabadell issued a manifesto condemning the action of the workers in Barcelona, and that Luis Portel, a member of its executive, judged the attitude of the leadership during these May Days to have been 'adventuristic'.
The thesis of the executive was drafted by Nin. He drew a parallel with the 'July Days':
In July 1917 the workers in the Russian capital took to the streets arms in hand, rising up against the policies of the democrat, Kerensky. The Bolshevik Party considered this movement to be ill-timed and dangerous. None the less, the Bolsheviks played an active part in it, placed themselves at its head, led it and guided it in such a way as to prevent it from becoming a disaster for the revolutionary proletariat.
Nin started from the provocation by the forces of the police. He declared that the workers had defended the interests of the proletariat in the streets. As to the policy of his party, he wrote:
If it had all depended on us to start things off, we would not have given the order for insurrection. The moment was not favourable for a decisive action, but the revolutionary workers, rightly indignant at the provocation of which they were the victims, flung themselves into battle, and we could not leave them to their fate. To act otherwise would have been an unpardonable betrayal.
Nin declared that the activity of the POUM aimed at 'canalising a movement which, because it was spontaneous, had many chaotic aspects, and to avoid its transforming itself into a fruitless putsch, which would have fatal consequences for the proletariat. It was necessary to provide limited slogans for the movement.'
A third position, that of J. Rebull and of Cell 72, reproaches the leadership of the POUM for having 'run after the events' and having 'once again waited on the opinion of the opportunist elements in the confederal leadership'. Their counter-theses declared:
The first results of the workers' insurrections are a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie.
Trotsky's verdict
Trotsky devoted a number of writings to the Spanish Revolution and several times discussed the May Days. He conceded to the defenders of the policies of the POUM that there was a superficial resemblance between the movement of the masses before the July Days in Petrograd and that of May 1937 in Barcelona. However, he was concerned in particular to emphasise the deep differences between the two — according to him, the essential differences lay in the fact that in 1937 the Spanish masses had a more serious experience of their revolution than those had in Russia in 1917. Trotsky wrote:
In Spain, the May events took place not after four months, but after six years of revolution. The masses of the whole country have had a gigantic experience. A long time ago they lost the illusions of 1931, as well as the warmed-over illusions of the Popular Front. Again and again they have shown to every part of the country that they were ready to go through to the end. If the Catalan proletariat had seized power in May 1937 - as it had really seized it in July 1936 - they would have found support throughout all of Spain. The bourgeois-Stalinist reaction would not even have found two regiments with which to crush the Catalan workers. In the territory occupied by Franco not only the workers but also the peasants would have turned toward the Catalan proletariat, would have isolated the Fascist army and brought about its irresistible disintegration. It is doubtful whether under these conditions any foreign government would have risked throwing its regiments onto the burning soil of Spain. Intervention would have become materially impossible, or at least extremely dangerous.
Naturally, in every insurrection, there is an element of uncertainty and risk. But the subsequent course of events has proved that even in the case of defeat the situation of the Spanish workers would have been incomparably more favourable than now, to say nothing of the fact that the revolutionary party would have assured its future (L Trotsky, A test of ideas and individuals through the Spanish experience,
The Spanish Revolution 1931-1939, New York, 1973, p278-279)
In Trotsky's opinion, it was a revolutionary party which was lacking in May 1937. This is the reason for his ferocious criticism, not merely of the Anarchists but also of the policies of the POUM, and what he calls its 'indecision, its equivocations, its hesitations and its lack of a clear programme', which prevented it from providing for the masses 'the revolutionary leadership without which victory was not possible'.
Perhaps a little more light can be shed on Trotsky's position on the insurrection, which failed in May 1937 for lack of a revolutionary party, and on his divergences with his comrade Blasco, which were never expressed in writing in a direct debate, if we look back to his preface to Volume Three of the Russian edition of his works, which we know under the title The Lessons of October.
There we find that Trotsky directed precisely the same criticisms against what he called the 'right wing' of the Bolshevik Party, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who opposed the insurrection which Lenin proposed, as those which he directed against the POUM in 1937 or the German Communist Party at the time of its failed insurrection in 1923:
A party which has been carrying on revolutionary agitation for a long time, tearing the proletariat little by little from the influence of the conciliators, and which, once it is lifted to the height of events by the confidence of the proletariat, begins to hesitate, to look for midday at two o'clock, to turn its back and to tack about, paralyses the activity of the masses, provokes disappointment and disorganisation among them and leads the revolution to defeat...
He analysed the position of the 'Old Bolsheviks', who advanced against Lenin in April 1917 the old formula of 'the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', which they counterposed to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for Soviet power: Their method ... consisted in exerting on the leading bourgeoisie a pressure which did not go outside the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime. If this policy had been victorious, the development of the revolution would have proceeded outside our part y, and we would have, in the end, had an insurrection of the masses of workers and peasants which was not led by the party, in other words, July Days on a vast scale, that is, a catastrophe.
It seems to us that this formula permits conclusions to be drawn about the May Days by settling at least the ambiguities which may have survived in the historic debate about the analogies with the Russian Revolution. About these ambiguities, Trotsky himself took pleasure in emphasising that he himself had not introduced them, though he was often blamed for doing so, and he made clear that, for his part, he had been very deeply convinced that 'Spain was not Russia', a conclusion which did not in the slightest justify the policy which led to catastrophe.
Pierre Broue
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