The history of the Spanish Civil War - the latter part of the events that eventually resulted in the defeat of the Spanish Revolution - has too often been distorted, especially by those from a Communist Party tradition who supported the idea of a 'Popular Front'. Its history therefore requires a more detailed analysis than in my previous posts on the Spanish Revolution.
Therefore, before looking at Trotsky's writings from this period (firstly, from the election of the Popular Front government, in February 1936, up to the May Days of Barcelona in 1937) in a further post, I have first tried to summarise the history from a Marxist perspective by quoting, in some detail (and admittedly just blatantly copying from works that should be read in full to get the complete analysis!), from Felix Morrow's two very readable accounts.
These are firstly his initial 1936 'Civil War in Spain', and then, secondly, his 1938 book 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain':
From 'Civil War in Spain':
The People's Front Government
"Who are the criminals and traitors responsible for making it possible that five months after the February days in which the workers drove the clerical-fascists from the government and the streets, the reactionaries can lead the army and police in such a powerful counter-revolution?
Every serious communist and socialist wants to know the answer to this paramount question ... the answer is: the criminals and traitors are the 'left' republican government and its supporters, the Communist Party and the reformist socialists.
When, the February elections approached, the left wing socialists were opposed to a joint election ticket with the republicans, because they did not believe the republicans had a real following, and because of the hatred of the masses for these men (who had failed to support the October 1934 revolt). ...
The left socialists were especially outraged when (leader of the right-wing of the socialists) Prieto and the Communist Party agreed to give these republicans a majority in the joint election tickets: the tickets that carried gave the republicans 162 deputies to 116 for the workers' organisations!
But this was not the real crime. Voting blocs for purely electoral purposes are not a matter of principle ... but such voting agreements must be limited solely to the exchange of votes. Before, during and after the election, the proletarian party continues to speak from its own platform, with its own programme ... For a so-called 'common programme' could be, and was in fact, only the programme of the class enemy. This was the real crime, that the Spanish workers' organisations underwrote and guaranteed another charter for the bourgeoisie, necessarily identical with that of 1931-33. ...
The People's Front programme was a basically reactionary document:
1. The agrarian question: The programme states: 'The republicans do not accept the principle of the nationalisation of the land and it's free distribution to the peasants, solicited by the delegates of the Socialist Party'. ...
2. Expansion of the economy: 'The republican parties do not accept ... the measures of the nationalisation of the banks proposed by the 'workers' parties' ... (nor) the subsidy to unemployment (dole) solicited by the workers' delegation. ...
3.The Church: (On combating their wealth and influence, the programme said very little!)
4. The Army: The officers' corps is left intact ... and in the five months that followed, the People's Front government put off any investigation of the Asturian massacres or other crimes perpetrated by the officers' corps!
5. The colonial and national questions: Not a word in the Popular Front programme. Morocco remained in the hands of the Foreign Legionnaires until they finally took it over completely on July 18. The semi-autonomous statutes of Catalonia were later restored, but further autonomy not granted. A less liberal arrangement for the Basques.
6. Democratisation of the state apparatus. Mixed labour boards, Supreme Court, president, censorship, etc. - all were restored as in 1931. ... And, as a final slap in the face. 'The republican parties do not accept the workers' control solicited by the socialist delegation."
For this mess of pottage the workers' leaders abdicated the class struggle against the bourgeois republic. ... The very programme for the sake of which the Stalinists and socialists pledged to support the bourgeois republican government, made inevitable the onslaught of reaction. The economic foundations of reaction were left untouched. in land, industry, finance, the Church, the army, the State. The lower courts were hives of reaction; the labour press is filled, from February to July, with accounts of fascists caught red-handed and let free, and workers held on flimsy charges.
On the day the counter-revolution broke out, the prisons of Barcelona and Madrid were filled with thousands of political prisoners workers, especially from the CNT, but also many from the UGT. The administrative bureaucracy was so rotten with reaction that it fell apart on July 18. The whole diplomatic and consular corps with a handful of exceptions, went over to the fascists.
The government 'impartially' imposed a rigid press censorship, modified martial law, prohibition of demonstrations and meetings unless authorised and at every critical moment authorisation was withdrawn.
... The day before the fascist outbreak the labour press appeared with gaping white spaces where the government censorship had lifted out editorials and sections of articles warning against the coup d'état!
Just as socialist support of the government in 1933 made impossible the warding off of reaction, so communist-socialist support in 1936 opened the gates for the counter-revolution".
The masses struggle against fascism, despite the People's Front
"Fortunately, ... the masses from the first day of the February victory gave no indication of ceasing the struggle. The lessons of 1931-33 had been burned into their consciousness. ...
The masses did not wait for Azana to fulfil his promises. In the four days between the elections and Azana's hasty entry into the government, the masses effectively carried out the amnesty by tearing open the jail's ... Nor did the workers wait for the government decree (which only came in September!) to get back the jobs of those dismissed after the October revolt. ...
The hated clergy ... were also dealt with in the time-honoured manner of oppressed peasants. Especially after it was clear the government would not touch the clergy, the masses took matters into their own hands. This consisted not only of burning churches, but of ordering the priests to leave the villages ...
(In early April) Azana made a speech promising the reactionaries that he would go no further than the limits fixed by the People's Front programme, and that he would stop the strikes and seizures of the land. ... Emboldened, fascists and Civil Guard officers shot up a workers' street in Madrid.
On April 17, the CNT declared a general strike in Madrid in protest against the fascist attack ... That evening, when in spite of them the strike had proved a huge success, the UGT and the Stalinists belatedly endorsed it before it was called off.
The bourgeoisie realised that the general strike of April 17, and the wave of economic strikes which it inspired, would develop into a proletarian offensive against capitalism and its agency, the government. How to stop this offensive? The army proposed to crush it forcibly. But even among the reactionaries there was serious doubt whether this was possible as yet.
Azana had a much better solution: let the workers' leaders stop the strikes. So, inducted in May as the new president of Spain to the tune of the 'International' sung with clenched fists by Stalinist and socialist deputies who had elected him (the reactionaries did not put up an opposing candidate), Azana asked Prieto to form a coalition cabinet.
Prieto was more than willing to become Premier. But the mere rumour produced such a storm of opposition in the Socialist Party, that he dared not accept. Caballero warned Prieto that he must not enter without the consent of the party; and behind Caballero, and decidedly to the left of him, was most of the party and the UGT.
Madrid, strongest of the party organisations, had adopted a new programme in April, and was presenting it for adoption by the national convention in June. The programme declared the bourgeoisie could not carry out the democratic tasks of the revolution, above all was incapable of settling the agrarian question and that therefore the proletarian revolution was on the order of the day. It was weakened by many grave errors, notably the continued failure to understand the role of Soviets. But it signified a profound break with reformism.
Logically, that programme, accepted by Caballero, should have been accompanied by a decisive break with the Popular Front policy. Logic, however, scarcely guides centrists. Declaring that the government 'has not yet entirely exhausted it's possibilities' and that trade union unity and merger of the Marxist parties must precede the revolution, Caballero continued to direct the left socialist deputies in alternately abusing the government but supporting it on every crucial question. ...
On the issue of Prieto's entry into the government, Caballero dare not break with his revolutionary following. Equally, Prieto dare not submit the question for decision to the national convention. There then took place an extraordinary campaign of pressure to induce the party to let Prieto become Premier. ...
The Stalinists sought to make support of this reactionary demand sound very radical. 'If the government continues on this false road (the road of 1931), we will work, not breaking the Popular Front, but strengthening it and pushing it toward the solution of a government of a popular revolutionary type' (Mundo Obrero, July 6 1936). ... But all that was required to make this government completely identical with that of 1931 was to include in it proletarian hostages!
Even the POUM, 'Workers Party of Marxist Unity', joined the chorus. ... On order to justify its refusal to enter the Socialist Party, as Trotsky proposed, and thereby throw it's forces - numbering only a few thousand even according to its own estimates - on the side of the left wing, it refused to see the profound significance of the development of the left wing. In fact, in La Batalla of May 22, it denied there was any real difference between the left and right wings.
This false estimate led to deplorable tactics: at a time when the left socialists were engaged in a struggle with the right wing on this question, the POUM called for 'an authentic Government of the Popular Front, with the direct (ministerial) participation of the Socialist and Communist Parties' as a means to 'complete the democratic experience of the masses' and hasten the revolution. ...
The miners of Asturias, once the stronghold of the Prieto group, now engaged in political strikes against the government: 30,000 of them struck on June 13, and on June 18 ... all 90,000 miners. ... In the face of these unambiguous indications of the revolutionary temper of the socialist proletariat, Prieto dared not risk entry into the cabinet.
Meanwhile, the strike wave reached the proportions of a revolutionary crisis. ... Every city of any importance had at least one general strike during those five months. Nearly a million were on strike on June 10; a half million on June 20; a million on June 24; over a million during the first days of July. The strikes covered both the cities and the agricultural workers; the latter shattered the traditional village boundaries of struggle, waging, for example, a five weeks' strike covering Malaga province and 125,000 peasant families. ...
The Popular Front government, and its provincial governors, threw the Civil Guard against the strikers in desperate attempts to halt the offensive. Particularly desperate measures were taken against the CNT. Companys filled the Barcelona jails with anarchists. In Madrid, their headquarters were closed and 180 of them arrested in a raid on May 31 ... on June 19, the government again closed the CNT headquarters. But this was not 1931, when Caballero himself led the attack on the CNT! The UGT now solidarized itself with its anarcho-syndicalist comrades, and the government had to retreat. ...
The reaction - which is to say Spanish capitalism - had pinned its hopes on Azana for a time; when he proved impotent to stop the workers, its hopes had shifted to Prieto; but the left socialists prevented that solution. There could be no hope, therefore, of a repetition of 1931-1933, and a peaceful return of reaction. The right wing socialists and Stalinists were powerless to prevent the revolutionary development of the Spanish proletariat.
Having armed and prepared for the worst, the reactionaries dared not wait until the revolutionary tide overwhelmed them. With ninety-nine per cent of the officer corps, the Foreign Legion and Moorish troops, and most of the fifty provincial garrisons in their hands, Spanish capitalism revolted against impending doom. ..."
Counter-Revolution and Dual Power
"On the morning of July 17, General Franco, having seized Morocco, radioed his manifesto to the garrisons. ... But the government did not divulge the news until 9 o'clock of the 18th; and then it issued only a reassuring note that Spain was completely under government control ...
Azana and the People's Front government answered the counter-revolution by attempting to come to terms with it. ...
The crushing of the counter-revolution will make infinitely more likely the establishment of a workers' and peasants government. The interests of the bourgeoisie are not, therefore, served by a victory over the fascist generals: the true interests of Spanish capitalism lie in a victory of the counter-revolution or, what is the same thing, a compromise with it. That is why the People's Front government behaved so treacherously in the first days of the counter-revolution. That is why the People's Front government continued to behave treacherously thereafter. ...
Rather than arm the workers ... Azana and the republicans were preparing to make peace with the fascists, at the expense of the workers. ...
But in the very hours that the ministers huddled together in the presidential palace, the proletariat was already mobilising ... without so much as a by your leave to the government, the proletariat had begun a war to the death against the fascists. Companys and Azana found themselves confronted by the first regiments of the Red Army of the Spanish proletariat. ...
No civil war as profound as the present one in Spain has ever been won without advancing a revolutionary social programme. ... the coalition government's slogan, 'Defend the Democratic Republic,' does contain a social programme; but it is the reformist programme of defending the 'kindest' political instrument of the bourgeois mode of production.
In the great French Revolution, the slogan of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' meant, quite concretely, land to the peasants, freedom from serfdom, a new world of labour and enrichment, wiping out the economic power of feudal oppressors, putting France into the hands of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
In the Russian Revolution, the slogan of 'Land, Bread and Freedom' successfully rallied the people against Kornilov and Kerensky, because it meant the transformation of Russia.
The proletariat of Spain will raise equally revolutionary slogans, or it will not win the civil war."
From 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain':
The Revolution of July 19
"The Barcelona proletariat prevented the capitulation of the republic to the fascists. On July 19, almost barehanded, they stormed the first barracks successfully. By 2pm the next day they were masters of Barcelona.
It was not accidental that the honour of initiating the armed struggle against fascism belongs to the Barcelona proletariat. Barcelona has always been the revolutionary vanguard. The parliamentary reformism of the socialist-led UGT had never found a foothold there. The united socialist and Stalinist parties (the PSUC) had fewer members on July 19 than the POUM. The workers were almost wholly organized in the CNT, whose suffering and persecution under both the monarchy and republic had imbued its masses with a militant anti-capitalist tradition, although its anarchist philosophy gave it no systematic direction.
As in Madrid, the Catalan government refused to arm the workers. … But CNT and POUM workers during the afternoon of the 18th were raiding sporting goods stores for rifles, construction jobs for sticks of dynamite, fascist homes for concealed weapons. With the aid of a few friendly Assault Guards, they had seized a few racks of government rifles. … That – and as many motor vehicles as they could find – was all the workers had when, at five o’clock on the morning of the 19th, the fascist officers began to lead detachments from the barracks.
Isolated engagements before paving-stone barricades led to a general engagement in the afternoon. And here political weapons more than made up for the superior armament of the fascists. Heroic workers stepped forward from the lines to call upon the soldiers to learn why they were shooting down their fellow toilers. They fell under rifle and machine-gun fire, but others took their place.
Here and there a soldier began shooting wide. Soon, bolder ones turned on their officers. Some nameless military genius – perhaps he died then – seized the moment and the mass of workers abandoned their prone positions and surged forward. The first barracks were taken. …With arms from the arsenals the workers cleaned up Barcelona. Within a few days, all Catalonia was in their hands.
Simultaneously the Madrid proletariat was mobilising. The left socialists distributed their scant store of arms, saved from October 1934. Barricades went up on key streets and around the Montaña barracks. Workers’ groups were looking for reactionary leaders. At dawn of the 19th the first militia patrols took their places. At midnight the first shots were exchanged with the barracks. But it was not until the next day, when the great news came from Barcelona, that the barracks were stormed.
Valencia, too, was soon saved from the fascists. Refused arms by the governor appointed by Azaña, the workers prepared to face the troops with barricades, cobblestones and kitchen knives – until their comrades within the garrison shot the officers and gave arms to the workers.
The Asturian miners, fighters of the Commune of October 1934, outfitted a column of five thousand dynamiters for a march on Madrid. It arrived there on the 20th, just after the barracks had been taken, and took up guard duty in the streets.
In Malaga, strategic port opposite Morocco, the ingenious workers, unarmed at first, had surrounded the reactionary garrison with a wall of gasoline-fired houses and barricades.
In a word, without so much as a by-your-leave to the government, the proletariat had begun a war to the death against the fascists. The initiative had passed out of the hands of the republican bourgeoisie.
Most of the army was with the fascists. It must be confronted by a new army. Every workers’ organisation proceeded to organise militia regiments, equip them, and send them to the front.
The sailors, traditionally more radical than soldiers, saved a good part of the fleet by shooting their officers. Elected sailors’ committees took over control of the Loyalist fleet, and established contact with the workers’ committees on shore.
The revolutionary-military measures were accompanied by revolutionary-economic measures against fascism. … Especially was this true in Catalonia where, within a week from July 19, transport and industry was almost entirely in the hands of CNT workers’ committees, or where workers belonged to both, CNT-UGT joint committees.
The union committees systematically took over, re-established order and speeded up production for wartime needs. Through national industries stemming from Barcelona, the same process spread to Madrid, Valencia, Alicante, Almeria and Malaga although never becoming as universal as in Catalonia.
As the news came from the cities, the peasants spread over the land. ... In many places, permeated by anarchist and left-socialist teachings, the peasants organized directly into collectives. Peasant committees took charge of feeding the militias and the cities, giving or selling directly to the provisioning committees, militia columns and the trade unions.
Everywhere the existing governmental forms and workers’ organisations proved inadequate as methods of organising the war and revolution. Every district, town and village created its militia committees, to arm the masses and drill them.
The CNT-UGT factory committees, directing all the workers, including those never before organized, developed a broader scope than the existing trade union organisations. The old municipal administrations disappeared, to be replaced, generally, by agreed-upon committees giving representation to all the anti-fascist parties and unions.
The most important of these new organs of power was the ‘Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias of Catalonia’, organised July 21. Of its fifteen members, five were anarchists from the CNT and FAI, and these dominated the Central Committee. The UGT had three members, despite its numerical weakness in Catalonia, but the anarchists hoped thereby to encourage similar committees elsewhere. The POUM had one, the Peasant Union (Rabassaires) one, and the Stalinists (PSUC) one. The bourgeois parties had four.
Unlike a coalition government which in actuality rests on the old state machine, the Central Committee, dominated by the anarchists, rested on the workers’ organisations and militias.
In those months in which the Central Committee existed, its military campaigns were inextricably bound up with revolutionary acts. … They conquered Aragon as an army of social liberation.
Village anti-fascist committees were set up, to which were turned over all the large estates, crops, supplies, cattle, tools, etc., belonging to big land owners and reactionaries. Thereupon the village committee organised production on the new basis, usually collectives, and created a village militia to carry out socialisation and fight reaction.
Much malicious propaganda has been spread by the Stalinists concerning the alleged weakness of the military activity of the anarchists. The hasty creation of militias, the organisation of war industry, were inevitably haphazard in all unaccustomed hands. But in those first months, the anarchists, seconded by the POUM, made up for much of their military inexperience by their bold social policies. In civil war, politics is the determining weapon. By taking the initiative, by seizing the factories, by encouraging the peasantry to take the land, the CNT masses crushed the Catalonian garrisons.
After the first tidal wave of revolution, of course, the committees revealed their basic weakness: they were based on mutual agreement of the organisations from which they drew their members, and after the first weeks, the Esquerra, backed by the Stalinists, recovered their courage and voiced their own programme. The CNT leaders began to make concessions detrimental to the revolution.
From that point on, the committees could have only functioned progressively by abandoning the method of mutual agreement and adopting the method of majority decisions by democratically elected delegates from the militias and factories.
The Valencia and Madrid regions also developed a network of anti-fascist joint militia committees, worker-patrols, factory committees, and district committees to wipe out the reactionaries in the cities and send the militia to the front.
How are we to characterise such a regime? In essence, it was identical with the regime which existed in Russia from February to November 1917 – a regime of dual power. One power, that of Azaña and Companys, without an army, police or other armed force of its own, was already too weak to challenge the existence of the other. The other, that of the armed proletariat, was not yet conscious enough of the necessity to dispense with the existence of the power of Azaña and Companys.
The ‘revolution of July 19’ was incomplete, but that it was a revolution is attested to by its having created a régime of dual power."
Toward a Coalition with the Bourgeoisie
"In every other period of dual power – Russia of Feb. – Nov. 1917, Germany of 1918–19 are the most important – the bourgeois government continued to exist, thanks only to the entry into it of representatives of the reformist workers’ organisations, who thereby became the main prop for the bourgeoisie. … In Spain, however, for seven critical weeks, no workers’ representative entered the cabinet.
Yet, the fact is, despite the rise of dual power, despite the scope of the power of the proletariat in the militias and their control of economic life, the workers’ state remained embryonic, atomised, scattered in the various militias and factory committees and local anti-fascist defence committees.
It never became centralised in nationwide Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils, as it had been in Russia in 1917. ... Only when dual power assumes such organisational proportions is there put on the order of the day the choice between the prevailing regime and a new revolutionary order of which the Councils become the state form. … there was no revolutionary party in Spain, ready to drive through the organisation of soviets boldly and single-mindedly.
Without developing soviets – workers’ councils – it was inevitable that even the anarchists and the POUM would drift into governmental collaboration with the bourgeoisie. For what does it mean, in practice, to refuse to build soviets in the midst of civil war? It means to recognise the right of the liberal bourgeoisie to govern the struggle, i.e., to dictate its social and political limits.
Thus it was that all the workers’ organisations, without exception, drifted closer and closer to the liberal bourgeoisie.
In August, the CNT entered the Basque ‘Defence junta’ which was not a military organisation at all, but a regional government in which the Basque big bourgeois party held the posts of finance and industry. … A great opportunity was presented to the POUM to win the CNT workers to struggle for a workers’ state, but the POUM made no issue of the Basque government – for the POUM acted identically in Valencia.
Finally, on August 11, the Council of Economy was formed on the initiative of Companys to centralise economic activity. Here it was, despite the bait of a radical economic programme, an undisguised question of socio-economic collaboration under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. But the CNT and POUM entered it.
Thus, in every sphere, the bourgeoisie edged its way back. Thus, the workers were carried, step by step, toward governmental coalition with the bourgeoisie".
The Politics of the Spanish Working Class
The Stalinists
"The Stalinists were the first to submit their press to the censorship. They were the first to demand liquidation of the workers’ militias, and the first to hand their militiamen over to Azaña’s officers.
In 1936 … the Comintern (had) adopted a new perspective, embodied in the Seventh Congress. The new course was to maintain the status quo as long as possible, this time not merely by preventing revolutions, but by active class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the ‘democratic countries’. This collaboration was designed, in the event of war breaking out, to provide Russia with England and France as its allies.
The price Russia was offering to pay for an alliance with Anglo-French imperialism was the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. ‘Socialism in a single country’ had revealed its full meaning as ‘no socialism anywhere else’.
‘It is absolutely false’, declared Jesus Hernandez, editor of Mundo Obrero (August 6, 1936), ‘that the present workers’ movement has for its object the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship after the war has terminated. It cannot be said we have a social motive for our participation in the war. We communists are the first to repudiate this supposition. We are motivated exclusively by a desire to defend the democratic republic.' ...
Recognising that the danger of a proletarian revolution came first of all from Catalonia, the Stalinists concentrated enormous resources in Barcelona. Having practically no organisation of their own there, they recruited into their service the conservative labour leaders and petty-bourgeois politicians, by way of a fusion of the Communist Party of Catalonia with the Catalan section of the Socialist party, the ‘Socialist Union’ (a nationalist organisation limited to Catalonia), and ‘Catala Proletari’, a split-off from the bourgeois Esquerra. The fusion, the ‘Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia’ (PSUC), affiliated to the Comintern. It had only a few thousand members at the beginning of the civil war but unlimited funds and hordes of Comintern functionaries. ...
But the biggest mass base of the Stalinists in Catalonia was a federation of traders, small businessmen and manufacturers (the 'GEPCI') which in July was dubbed a union and affiliated to the Catalan UGT. ...
When, after three long months of boycott, in the third week of October the first Soviet planes and guns finally arrived, the Communist party – which up to then had been on the defensive, unable to counter the sharp criticism of the POUM on Stalin’s refusal to send arms – received a terrific impetus. Thenceforward its proposals were inextricably linked with the threat that Stalin would send no more planes and arms".
Caballero: The Left Socialists and the UGT
"After the collapse of the 1931–33 coalition, a strong left wing developed, first in the Socialist Youth, demanding a re-orientation of the party. In 1934, Caballero unexpectedly declared for it.
... During the February–July (1936) strike wave, Caballero incurred sharp criticism, both from the CNT and his own ranks, for discouraging strikes. An ardent advocate of fusion of the socialist and communist parties, he was mainly responsible for the fusion of the socialist and Stalinist youth. He had recouped his standing with the left wing of the party, however, by leading the fight to prevent Prieto from accepting the premiership. ...
At the height of the workers’ movement during the first weeks of the civil war, Caballero came into sharp collision with the Azaña-Prieto-Stalinist bloc. ... the UGT organ, Claridad (declared): "Lenin said (State and Revolution): ‘ Every revolution, after the destruction of the state apparatus, shows us how the governing class tries to re-establish special bodies of armed men at “its” service, and how the oppressed class attempts to create a new organisation of a type capable of serving not the exploiters but the exploited.’ We ... must take care that the masses and the leadership of the armed forces, which should be above all the people in arms, should not escape from our hands". (Claridad, August 20, 1936.)
Nevertheless, Caballero and the rest of the left-socialist leadership, in those critical early weeks, drew closer to Azaña, Prieto and the Stalinists. The dual power was proving a cumbersome and inadequate method of organising the struggle against the fascist forces. Only two alternatives presented themselves inexorably: either join a coalition government, or replace the bourgeois power entirely by a workers’ régime. ...
Luis Araquistain, Caballero’s theoretician, argued that Spain needed no soviets. The April programme had consequently embodied in it the conception that ‘the organ of the proletarian dictatorship will be the Socialist party’. But the left socialists had been prevented by Prieto’s postponement of the congress from assuming formal control of the party, and had desisted from further struggle for control when the civil war broke out. Furthermore, according to their programme, they would have to wait until the party included a majority of the proletariat.
This programmatic failure to provide for united action through workers’ councils (soviets) in which socialists, communists, anarchists, Poumists, etc., would be gathered together with the deepest layers of the masses, this distorted notion of the lessons of the Russian Revolution, was a fatal error for the left socialists to make, and especially in Spain, with its anarchist traditions. They were saying precisely what the anarchist leaders had been accusing both communists and revolutionary socialists of meaning by the proletarian dictatorship. ...
The road to the proletarian dictatorship lay clearly before the proletariat. What was needed was to give the factory committees, militia committees, peasant committees, a democratic character, by having them elected by all of the workers in each unit; to bring together these elected delegates in village, city, regional councils, which in turn would send elected delegates to a national congress. ...The road lay clearly before the proletariat but, not accidentally, the programme for that road was not the heritage of the left socialists. Caballero would criticise, grumble, excoriate, but he offered no alternative to the coalition with the bourgeoisie. Finally, he became its head".
The CNT- FAI
"The anarchists’ traditional refusal to distinguish between a bourgeois and workers’ state led them slowly, but decisively, into the ministry of a bourgeois state.
Anarchism calls upon the workers to turn their backs on the state and seek control of the factories as the real source of power. The ultimate sources of power (property relations) being secured, the state power will collapse, never to be replaced. The Spanish anarchists thus failed to understand that it was only the collapse of the state power, with the defection of the army to Franco, which had enabled them to seize the factories and that, if Companys and his allies were allowed the opportunity to reconstruct the bourgeois state, they would soon enough take the factories away from the workers.
Intoxicated with their control of the factories and the militias, the anarchists assumed that capitalism had already disappeared in Catalonia. They talked of the ‘new social economy’, and Companys was only too willing to talk as they did, for it blinded them and not him".
The POUM
"Many had the hope that the POUM would take the lead in organising the soviets. Nin now stood at the head of the party. He had been in Russia during the early years of the Russian Revolution, a leader of the Red International of Labour Unions. Would he not resist the provincialism of the Maurinist cadres?
The POUM workers, better trained politically than the anarchists, played a great role, entirely out of proportion to their numbers in the first revolutionary weeks, in seizing the land and factories. From a party of about 8,000 on the eve of civil war, the POUM grew quickly, though remaining primarily a Catalonian organisation. In the first months it quadrupled its numbers. Even more quickly its influence grew, as evidenced by the fact that it recruited over ten thousand militiamen under its banner.
The rising tide of coalitionism, however, engulfed the POUM. The theoretical premises for it were already there, in the Maurinist ideology, to which Nin had signed his name in the fusion. The POUM leadership clung to the CNT. Instead of boldly contending with the anarcho-reformists for the leadership of the masses, Nin sought illusory strength by identifying himself with them.
The POUM sent its militants into the smaller and heterogeneous Catalan UGT instead of contending for leadership of the millions in the CNT. It organized POUM militia columns, circumscribing its influence, instead of sending its forces into the enormous CNT columns where the decisive sections of the proletariat were already gathered.
In the ensuing year, it never once made a principled attack on the anarcho-reformist leadership, not even when the anarchists acquiesced in the expulsion of the POUM from the Generalidad. Far from leading to united action with the CNT, this false course permitted the CNT-FAI leadership, with perfect impunity, to turn its back on the POUM."
The Caballero Coalition Government
"The (newly formed ) cabinet of three Caballero men, three Prieto men, two Stalinists, and five bourgeois ministers, which was established on September 4, 1936, was a bourgeois government, a typical cabinet of class collaboration.
Caballero succinctly enough summarised his government’s programme to the Cortes: 'This government was constituted, all those forming it previously renouncing the defence of our principles and particular tendencies, in order to remain united on one sole aspiration: to defend Spain in her struggle against fascism'. (Claridad, October 1, 1936.)
Instead of depending on the working class of Spain and on international working class aid, Caballero now put his hopes on winning the aid of the ‘great democracies’, Anglo-French imperialism. …
With Hitler’s ‘embargo’ on arms shipments ... and the Soviet’s declaration of adherence, it was clear that the Spanish blockade would be of long duration. The question was sharply posed: either fight the non-intervention blockade and denounce (the French Popular Front of) Blum and the Soviet Union for backing it, or accept the Stalinist perspective of gradually winning away France and England from the blockade by demonstrating the bourgeois respectability and stability of the Spanish Government.
Caballero understood quite well that to arouse the Spanish masses to supreme efforts, it was necessary to offer them a programme of social reconstruction.
A circular order to the political commissioners at the front from Caballero’s War Ministry (October 1936) emphasises: "It is necessary to convince the fighters who are defending the republican regime with their lives that at the termination of the war the organisation of the state will undergo a profound modification. From the present we shall go on to a structure, socially, economically, and juridically, all for the benefit of the working masses". ...
But the masses, Caballero presumably hoped, could be inspired with words, while the hard-headed imperialists of England and France would be content only with deeds.
To rouse the peasantry to struggle ... that could only be done by giving the land to the peasantry ... Propaganda for liberty, etc., is absurdly insufficient. Now the peasants and agricultural workers had seized land – not everywhere yet – but still had no assurance that the government was not permitting it merely as a provisional measure for the war which it would attempt to annul afterward. What the peasants wanted was a general decree nationalising the land throughout Spain. ...
The land decree of October 7, 1936, merely sanctioned division of estates belonging to known fascists; other wealthy landowners, peasant exploiters, etc., remained untouched. The aroused hopes of the peasantry were smothered.
The UGT workers in the factories, shops, and railroads were setting up their factory committees, taking over the plants. What would Caballero have to say to them? ... Not until February 23, 1937, was a comprehensive decree on the industries adopted (issued over the name of Juan Peiro, the anarchist Minister of Industry). It gave the workers no security for the future regime in industry; established strict intervention by the government. ‘Workers’ control’, by its terms, proved ... no real measure of workers’ control at all.
Thus Caballero and his Stalinist allies set their faces as flint against revolutionary methods of struggle against fascism.
In due time, at the end of October, came their reward: a modicum of army supplies from Stalin. In the ensuing months, came more supplies, particularly after great defeats: after the encirclement of Madrid, after the fall of Malaga, after the fall of Bilbao, supplies enough to save the Loyalists for the moment, but never enough to permit them to carry through a really sustained offensive which might lead to the total collapse of Franco.
Enough was given to prevent early defeat of the Loyalists and the consequent collapse of Soviet prestige in the international working class. And this fitted in, at bottom, with Anglo-French policy, which did not desire an immediate Franco victory. But not enough was given desire facilitate a victorious conclusion from which might issue-once the spectre of Franco was gone – a Soviet Spain.
There was one troublesome point: the anarchist-controlled Council of Defence of Aragon, comprising the territory wrested from the fascists by the Catalonian militias on the Aragon front, had a fearful reputation as an arch-revolutionary body. The price of four cabinet seats for the CNT was some reassurance on Aragon. … the anarchists took their seats in Caballero’s cabinet."
The Catalan Coalition Government
"On September 7, 1936, in a speech criticising the Madrid coalition with the bourgeoisie, Nin had raised the slogan: ‘Down with the bourgeois ministers’, and the crowd had gone wild with enthusiasm. But by September 18, La Batalla published a resolution of the Central Committee of the POUM, accepting coalitionism. … They received their ministry (in the Catalonian Generalidad) from the hands of President Companys.
The POUM leaders, in announcing entry into the Generalidad (justified their decision by explaining that): 'We are in a transition state in which the force of events has obliged us to collaborate directly in the Council of the Generalidad, along with other workers’ organisations ... From the committees of workers, peasants and soldiers, for the formation of which we are pressing, will spring the direct representation of the new proletarian power.
But this was the last swan song of the committees of dual power. For one of the first steps taken by the new cabinet of the Generalidad was to dissolve all the revolutionary committees which arose on July 1.
The Central Committee of the Militias was dissolved and its powers turned over to the Ministries of Defence and Internal Security. The local militia and anti-fascist committees, almost invariably proletarian in composition, which had been ruling the towns and villages, were dissolved and replaced by municipal administrations composed in the same proportion as the cabinet (Esquerra 3, CNT 3, PSUC 2, Peasants Union, POUM, and Accio Catala, the right-wing bourgeois organisation, 1 each).
The dissolution of the committees marked the first great advance of the counter-revolution. It removed the nascent soviet danger and enabled the bourgeois state to begin retrieving in every sphere the power which had fallen from its hands on July 19. Completely disoriented, the POUM made no attempt to harmonize its previous call for committees with its sanction for their dissolution two weeks later.
One more important step for consolidating the power of the bourgeois state was carried out on October 27, 1936: a decree disarming the workers. It concluded that 'those who retain such armament will be considered as fascists and judged with the rigour which their conduct deserves'.
The POUM and CNT published this decree without a single word of explanation to their following!
Thus the salvation of the bourgeois state was achieved. The POUM, having been utilised during the critical months, was kicked out of the government in a cabinet reorganisation, December 12, 1936.
The CNT with its great following was utilised longer, particularly since it increasingly adapted itself to the domination of the bourgeoisie, and was, therefore, kicked out only in July of the next year. But the power which the POUM and CNT had enabled the government to arrogate to itself remained in the government’s hands".
Revival of the Bourgeois State
The economic counter-revolution
"The eight months after the workers’ representatives entered the Madrid and Barcelona cabinets saw the proletarian conquests in the economic field slowly whittled down. Controlling the treasury and the banks, the government was able to force its will on the workers by the threat of withdrawing credits. In Catalonia, the chief industrial centre, the process moved more slowly but to the same end.
Comorera, (Stalinist) PSUC chieftain, had taken over the Ministry of Supplies on December 15, when the POUM was ousted from the cabinet. On January 7, he decreed dissolution of the workers’ supply committees which had been purchasing food from the peasants. Into this breach poured the speculators and traders of the GEPCI - holding UGT cards! - and the resultant hoarding and rise of food prices led to widespread malnutrition. ...
In the workers’ suburbs of Barcelona long queues stood throughout the day, supplies often exhausted before the end of the queues was reached, while in the bourgeois districts there was plenty".
Censorship
"To facilitate the success of their own propaganda, the bourgeois-reformist bloc resorted, through the government, to systematic curtailment of the CNT-FAI-POUM press and radio. The POUM was the chief victim.
Censorship and suspension were formal measures. At least equally efficacious were the ‘informal’ measures whereby the CNT-FAI-POUM newspaper packets ‘failed’ to arrive at the front or arrived weeks late. Meanwhile enormous editions of the Stalinist and bourgeois press, untouched by the censor and always delivered, were distributed free to the CNT, UGT and POUM militias. … Thus deceit supplemented naked force".
The Police
"The most extraordinary step in reviving the bourgeois police was the mushroom growth of the hitherto small customs force, the Carabineros, under Finance Minister Negrin, into a heavily armed praetorian guard of 40,000.
On February 28, the Carabineros were forbidden to belong to a political party or a trade union or to attend their mass meetings. The same decree was extended to the Civil and Assault Guards thereafter. That meant quarantining the police against the working class. The hopelessly disoriented anarchist ministers voted for this measure on the ground that it would stop Stalinist proselytizing! … By April the militias were finally pushed out of all police duties in Madrid and Valencia.
In the proletarian stronghold of Catalonia, this process ran into the determined opposition of the CNT masses. … But then the patrols were attacked from within. The PSUC ordered its members to withdraw (most of them did not, and were expelled from the PSUC). The Esquerra also withdrew from the patrols. Thereafter all the usual Stalinist methods of defamation were directed at the patrols, loudest when the patrols arrested PSUC and GEPCI businessmen for hoarding and profiteering on food.
On March 1, a Generalidad decree unified all police into a single state-controlled corps, its members prohibited from association with trade unions and parties and to be chosen by seniority. This meant abolition of the workers’ patrols and the barring of their members from the unified police".
Liquidation of the Militias
"There could, of course, be no hope of reviving a stable bourgeois regime so long as the organisation and administrative responsibility for the armed forces was in the hands of the unions and workers’ parties. ...
The Stalinist campaign for wiping out the internal democratic life of the militias, under the slogan of ‘unified command’, was countered by the simple and unanswerable question: why does a unified command necessitate re-establishing the old barracks régime and the supremacy of a bourgeois officer caste?
But the government eventually had its way. The militarisation and mobilisation decrees passed in September and October with CNT and POUM consent provided conscription of regular regiments ruled by the old military code. Systematic selection of candidates for the officers’ schools gave preponderance to the bourgeoisie and Stalinists, and these manned the new regiments.
By March the government had largely succeeded on the Stalinist-controlled Madrid front. On the Aragon and Levante fronts, manned chiefly by CNT-FAI and POUM militias, the government prepared the liquidation of the militias by a ruthless, systematic policy of withholding arms. Only after reorganization, the militias were informed, would they be given adequate arms for an offensive on these fronts.
In the last analysis, however, the government’s final success came not from its own efforts so much as from the politically false character of the CNT-POUM demand for a ‘unified command under the control of the workers’ organisations’.
Their slogan for a unified command under control of the workers’ organisations was false because it provided no method of achieving that goal. The demand which should have been raised, from the first day of the war, was for amalgamation of all the militias and the few existent regiments into a single force, with democratic election of soldiers’ committees in each unit, centralised in a national election of soldiers’ delegates to a national council.
In fact, the POUM forbade election of soldiers’ committees. Why? Among other reasons was the fact that opposition to the POUM’s opportunist politics was rife in the ranks and the bureaucracy feared that creation of the committees would provide the necessary arena in which the Left Opposition might conquer".
Disarming of the Workers in the Rear
"On March 12, the cabinet ordered the workers’ organisations to collect large and small arms from their members and to surrender them within forty-eight hours. This order was applied directly to Catalonia on April 17. National Republican Guards began officially to disarm workers on sight in the streets of Barcelona.
….While the workers were being deprived of rifles and revolvers, some of them in the possession of the CNT since the days of the monarchy, the cities were being filled with the rebuilt police forces, armed to the teeth with new Russian rifles, machine guns, artillery, and armoured cars".
The Spanish GPU
"On December 17, 1936, Pravda, Stalin’s personal organ, declared: ‘As for Catalonia, the purging of the Trotskyists and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.
The ‘legal methods’, however, moved too slowly. They were supplemented by organised terrorist bands, equipped with private prisons and torture chambers … these organised bands of the Spanish GPU exhibited toward the workers the ferocity of Hitler’s bloodhounds, for like them, they were trained to exterminate revolution".
The Counter-Revolution and the Masses
"It would be a libel on the socialist and anarchist-led masses to think that they were not alarmed by the advance of the counter-revolution. Discontent, however, is not enough. It is necessary also to know the way out. Without a firm, well-developed strategy for repelling the counter-revolution and leading the masses to state power, discontent can accumulate indefinitely and only issue in sporadic, desperate lunges which are doomed to defeat. In other words, the masses require a revolutionary leadership.
Especially in the ranks of the CNT and FAI the discontent was enormous … (as shown by) the rise of the 'Friends of Durruti
In the name of the martyred leader, a movement rose which had assimilated the need for political life, but rejected collaboration with the bourgeoisie and reformists. The Friends of Durruti were organised to wrest leadership from the CNT bureaucracy
In the last days of April, they plastered Barcelona with their slogans – an open break with the CNT leadership. These slogans included the essential points of a revolutionary programme: all power to the working class, and democratic organs of the workers, peasants and combatants, as the expression of the workers’ power.
An abyss was opening up between the CNT leaders and the masses within the CNT movement. Would the POUM step into the breach and place itself at the head of the militant masses? …The POUM did nothing of the sort.
Bureaucratic measures were resorted to by Nin and Gorkin (POUM leaders) to prevent the growth of the left wing. Dissidents were brought back from the front under guard, and expelled. Fraction organisations were forbidden.
More important than the repressions by the leadership were those of the government, which fell most heavily, naturally, on those workers who stood out in the ranks and in the factories. The left-wing workers of the POUM – those expelled constituting themselves the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists (Fourth Internationalists) – established close contacts with the anarchist workers, especially the ‘Friends of Durruti’.
But the regroupment took place too slowly. Before the revolutionary forces could come together and win the confidence of the masses, transform their discontent into the positive drive for power, substitute the objective strategy of leadership for the subjective desperation of the masses, the bitterness of the leaderless workers had already overflowed: the barricades went up on May 3".
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