Andy Durgan
The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM
This account of the history of non-Stalinist Marxism
up to the foundation of the POUM was written for us by Andy Durgan. It supplements
the full length history of the POUM by Victor Alba and Stephen Schwartz (Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism,
New Brunswick, 1988) which is more interested in the POUM’s Maurínist (Bloque)
antecedents than in its Trotskyist component led by Nin and Andrade (cf the
criticism by Al Richardson in Revolutionary
History, Volume 3, no 3, Spring 1991, p46).
Andy Durgan, who now lectures in modern history in
Spain, was a member of the Socialist Workers Party when he lived in Britain. He
gained his PhD in a study on the origins of the POUM, and so is well placed to
supply us with the information here, without which the rest of our compilation
would be far more confusing than it is. The extent of our gratitude to him will
be immediately recognised by our readers.
The most complete and thoroughly researched history
of the POUM published to date is Reiner Tosstorff’s Die POUM im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg 1936-39 (Frankfurt, 1987).
Victor Alba’s El marxismo en España
(two volumes, Mexico, 1973) is a general history of the BOC and POUM, and forms
the basis of the above book with Stephen Schwartz. Alba’s La revolución española en la práctica documentos del POUM (Madrid,
1977) is a useful collection of POUM documents. Articles from the theoretical
journals of the BOC and POUM can be found in V Alba (ed), La nueva era (Madrid, 1977).
Pelai Pagès’ El
movimiento trotskista en España (Barcelona, 1977) covers the ICE, and an
interesting anthology of articles from its theoretical journal is in Revista ‘Comunista’ (Barcelona, 1978).
There are two biographies of Nin, Francesc
Bonamusa’s Andreu Nin y el movimiento
comunista en España (Barcelona, 1977), which suffers from a positivist
approach and a lack of sympathy for its subject; and P Pagès’ Andreu Nin: su evolución política
(Bilbao, 1975), which is more useful and sympathetic. Nin’s principal writings
can be found in A Nin, Por la unificación
marxista (Madrid, 1978); La
revolución rusa (Barcelona, 1979); and Socialisme
i Nacionalisme (Barcelona, 1985). His books Las dictaduras de nuestro tiempo, Los movimientos de emancipación nacional, and Las organizaciones obreras internacionales have been republished
(Barcelona, 1977 and 1978).
Maurín’s books Los
hombres de la dictadura and La
revolución española have been republished (Barcelona, 1977), as has his
important Revolución y contrarrevolución
en España (Paris, 1966). Andrade’s daily columns in La Batalla have been reproduced in La revolución española dia a dia (Barcelona, 1979), and other
writings of his on the Civil War are in Notas
sobre la guerra civil (Madrid, 1986).
The Fundación Andreu Nin has issued various useful
pamphlets, including Los sucesos de mayo
1937: una revolución en la republica (Barcelona, 1988), on the POUM’s
activities during the May Days; El asasinato
de Andreu Nin (Madrid, 1988), on his assassination; El proceso de 1938 contra el POUM: Barcelona no fue Moscou (Madrid,
1989); and El proceso del POUM: Documentos Judiciales y Policiales
(Barcelona, 1989), which contains the full transcripts and official documents
relating to the POUM show trial of 1938. Also on this subject are Andrés Suarez
(Ignacio Iglesias), El proceso contra el
POUM (Paris, 1974), which is the best overall account; and the imaginative
account by the former POUM leader Julián Gorkin, El proceso de Moscou en Barcelona (Barcelona, 1974).
The most complete collection of Trotsky’s writings
on Spain is in LD Trotsky, La revolución
española (two volumes, Barcelona, 1977), which also contains excellent
notes by Pierre Broué and very useful appendices containing Trotskyist, POUM
and POUM opposition documents.
As yet unpublished, the most complete account of the
BOC is Andy Durgan’s Dissident Communism
in Catalonia 1930-36 (PhD thesis, London University, 1989).
In September 1935 the Spanish Trotskyist group, the
Communist Left (ICE), fused with the Workers and Peasants Bloc to form the
POUM. Both at the time and retrospectively, this decision was widely criticised
within the international Trotskyist movement. Whilst the political development
of the POUM, or at least Trotsky’s criticisms of it, are relatively well known,1 the history of the Spanish Trotskyists and
their reasons for helping to found this party are far less known.2
The Left Opposition in Spain
The Communist Opposition of Spain (OCE), as it was
first called, was founded in Liège, Belgium, on 28 February 1930 at a meeting
of Spanish Communist exiles resident in that country, Luxembourg and France.
The leader of this group, a founder member of the Spanish Communist Party
(PCE), was ‘Henri Lacroix’ (Francisco Garcia Lavid). Lacroix, a house painter
by trade, had spent some years in the Soviet Union, at least between 1925 and
1927, before living in Luxembourg and Belgium. It was here where he had entered
into contact with French oppositionists. Inside Spain a number of former
leading members of the PCE also sympathised with the Left Opposition, and soon
formed part of the OCE. The most important of these was Juan Andrade in Madrid,
a founder member and leader of the PCE and editor of its paper La Antorcha until 1926. Andrade had
opposed the increasingly bureaucratic tendencies inside the PCE, and had been
expelled from the party in 1927.
Following the fall of the dictator Primo de Rivera
in January 1930, many political exiles, including the Trotskyists, returned to
Spain to take advantage of the relative liberalisation. During 1930 the OCE was
able to establish groups in a handful of centres, and probably had some 50
militants at this time.3
The group was strengthened by the return of Andreu
Nin to Spain from the Soviet Union in September 1930. Nin, originally a
teacher, had first entered into organised political activity in 1911 at the age
of 19 as a member of a left wing Catalan nationalist group, but his concern for
social issues led him to join the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) barely two
years later.
In 1918, under the impact of the postwar
revolutionary upsurge, both in Spain and the rest of Europe, he joined the
Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union federation, the CNT, becoming one of its
leaders in its stronghold of Barcelona. A sympathiser of the Russian
Revolution, he had been fully won over to Communism after attending the
founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in 1921 as part of
the CNT delegation. Unable to return to Spain because his name was connected,
unjustly, with the assassination of the Prime Minister, Eduardo Dato, he stayed
in the Soviet Union. He became the Assistant Secretary of the RILU, joined the
CPSU, and was elected onto the Moscow Soviet. Nin sided with the Left
Opposition, probably in 1926, and consequently was stripped of all his official
responsibilities. He was expelled from both the CPSU and PCE in 1928. Until
1930 he lived precariously in the Russian capital, and only his status as a
foreigner saved him from arrest.4
Over the next few years the Spanish Trotskyist group
included in its ranks many talented militants, most of whom were later to play
a leading rôle in the POUM. Apart from Nin and Andrade, the other principal
intellectuals of the group were Esteben Bilbao, the Basque doctor José Luis
Arenillas, and Enrique Fernández Sendón (‘Ferson’). Bilbao, like Lacroix and
another leading Trotskyist militant, Gregorio Ibarrondo (‘Carnicero’), had been
founding members of the Basque PCE. Other militants of note were the lawyer of
the CNT miners’ union in Asturias, José Loredo Aparicio; the Catalan
journalist, Narcís Molins i Fábrega; the group’s organiser in Estremadura, Luis
Rastrollo; and a founding member of the Madrid PCE and former leader of the
Communist Youth, Luis Garcia Palacios.
The group’s many working class cadres included such
militants as the petroleum workers’ leader in Astillero (Santander), Eusebio
Cortezón; Emilio García, a leading member of the CNT woodworkers’ union in
Gijon, and like Cortezón a founder member of the PCE; Julio Alutiz, the railway
worker from Pamplona, Emiliano Diaz in Seville, and Manuel Sanchez in
Salamanca.
Among the many outstanding younger activists were
Ignacio Iglesias, a former Socialist Youth leader from Sama de Langreo
(Asturias); Enrique Rodriguez and Jesus Blanco, recruited from the Madrid
Communist Youth; G Munis (Manuel Fernández Grandizo) from Llerena
(Estremadura), who was also active in the Mexican Trotskyist movement, and
Julio Cid, recruited from the Socialist Youth of Gerena (Andalusia) in 1933.5
Although the OCE was small, it was able to take
advantage of the complete disarray of the PCE and the new political
opportunities opened up by the collapse of the dictatorship and the subsequent
rise in mass struggle. The PCE had barely 500 members during the late 1920s,
and most of these had either been in jail or exile.6
Moreover, many of its leaders, albeit for different reasons, were in opposition
to the official party line.
The establishment of the Republic on 14 April 1931
led to a further extension of political freedoms, a massive strike wave, and
the growth of all working class organisations, including the PCE.
Despite being relatively few in number, the
Trotskyists’ level of analysis was in stark contrast with the general
theoretical poverty of Spanish Marxism at this time. In particular, their
monthly theoretical journal Comunismo,
which was published from May 1931 through to October 1934, stands out as the
most serious Marxist journal published in Spain during the years prior to the
Civil War.7
Organisationally, however, the Spanish Trotskyists
were less successful. The domination of the Spanish workers’ movement by
Anarcho-Syndicalism and reformist Socialism was a problem for all the Communist
factions. Despite all its weaknesses, the PCE, as the defender of official
orthodoxy, proved more attractive to most workers sympathetic to Communism than
the much maligned and generally isolated Trotskyists. Only the Catalan
dissidents, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC), were able seriously to
challenge the PCE at an organisational level.
But although small, the Spanish group compared
favourably with Trotskyist organisations elsewhere in the world. According to
Pelai Pagès, by 1934 the ICE (as the OCE had become in March 1932) had around
800 members.8 They were mostly in small groups scattered
throughout the country. The exception was in the province of Badajoz
(Estremadura), where nearly half their membership was concentrated in and
around the town of Llerena.9 This was the
only area where the Trotskyists won a real mass base, mainly among farm
workers, in part thanks to their leadership of peasant strikes between 1932 and
1934, and the efforts of Luis Rastrollo and the peasant leaders José Martín,
Felix Galán and others. Elsewhere, there were relatively important Trotskyist
nuclei in Madrid, Asturias, Galicia, Seville, Salamanca and Astillero
(Santander), as well as scattered groups in Northern Castille, the Basque
Country and in and around Barcelona. In contrast, the PCE probably had some 10
000 members by 1934, and the BOC around 4000, mainly in Catalonia.10
The relationship between the Spanish Trotskyists and
the international movement of which they were a part was never very harmonious.
The first of various disputes arose in early 1931 over how the OCE should be
built. Nin was initially against an exclusive orientation towards the PCE, of
which the Trotskyists considered themselves a faction, proposing instead that
the OCE should also work inside the various dissident Communist groups, in
particular the Workers and Peasants Bloc in Catalonia.
This disagreement with the official line of the Left
Opposition at an international level was reflected in the correspondence
between Nin and Trotsky during the first half of 1931.11 Trotsky urged his supporters in Spain not
to waste their time trying to influence the BOC, which he considered as a
confused and rightist organisation, but to direct their energies to
strengthening their own independent organisation with its own publications, and
to orientate themselves towards the PCE. The official parties, despite all their
manifold weaknesses, still represented the political ‘centre’ of the
international Communist movement, unlike ‘national’ and ‘opportunist’ groups
like the BOC.
The BOC had been formed as a result of the fusion in
March 1931 of two groups: the former Catalan Federation of the PCE and the
Catalan Communist Party. The majority of the Catalan Federation’s leaders had
been members of a pro-Communist grouping inside the CNT in the early 1920s,
which had included Andreu Nin. Led by Joaquim Maurín, this group had not
formally joined the PCE until October 1924.
Due to its Syndicalist origins and the more or less
complete disorganisation of the PCE during the mid-1920s, the Catalan
Federation had never been fully integrated into the party. The bureaucratisation
of the PCE, in line with developments on an international level, was vigorously
opposed by Maurín, who was in prison from 1925 to the end of 1927, and then in
exile in France.
The opposition of the Catalan Federation’s leaders
came to a head in 1929-30. Not only did they oppose the bureaucratic methods of
the party leadership, but also its general analysis of the situation in Spain
and its call, inspired by the Communist International, for a ‘workers’ and
peasants’ democratic dictatorship’. The Catalans claimed that the forthcoming
revolution in Spain would be democratic, although given the political weakness
of the middle classes, it could only be completed under proletarian leadership,
thus leading to a Socialist revolution. The Catalan Federation also opposed the
PCE’s attempts to split the CNT. A similar position was taken by the PCE’s
Madrid and Levante Federations, as well as an important part of the party’s
organisation in Asturias.
The Catalan Federation was finally expelled from the
PCE in June 1930 as ‘bourgeois agents’, ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ and
for its relations with the ‘petit-bourgeois’ Catalan Communist Party. The
latter had been formed in November 1928 by young militants, some from a left
wing nationalist background, and others from the Catalan Federation itself,
although most of them were new to political activity. They were attracted to
Communism mainly on the basis of the Soviet Union’s apparent solution of the
national question.
Rather than join the PCE, which they saw as
bureaucratic and unsympathetic to the national liberation movement in
Catalonia, they decided to form a new party. The PCC was fairly loosely
organised, and by 1930 it was working closely with the dissident Catalan
Federation. At the unification congress it was decided to keep the name
Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation (FCC-B), and also to form a broader
organisation of sympathisers, the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC). In practice
the FCC-B and the BOC were the same organisation, having the same press, the
same leaders and, more often than not, the same membership.
Like other opposition groups in Spain, with the
exception of the Trotskyists, the Catalan dissidents initially blamed the PCE
leaders, rather than the Communist International, for the party’s disastrous
policies. In fact, until Maurín was formally expelled from the Communist
International in July 1931, they appealed to it to intervene in Spain and throw
out the party leadership. In the face of the divisions inside the Soviet party,
the Catalans adopted an abstentionist position, describing themselves as
‘neither Stalinists nor Trotskyists but Communists’. Events were to force them
to clarify their views of the international Communist movement, and to adopt an
increasingly anti-Stalinist stance.
Nin favoured working inside the BOC basically for
two reasons. Firstly, by early 1931 the majority of Spanish Communists were
outside the PCE, and the formation of an independent Communist grouping
appeared as a real possibility. During early 1931 Nin favoured forming part of
such a grouping rather than maintaining the fiction of the OCE being a faction
of the PCE. Perhaps more significant was Nin’s friendship with the BOC’s
undisputed leader, Joaquim Maurín. Outside the ranks of the Trotskyists, Maurín
was the most able Communist leader and theoretician in Spain. His writings on
the historical development of the Spanish revolution alone testify to that.12
In December 1930 Maurín, Nin and other Catalan
Communists found themselves in prison together following the failure of a
revolutionary uprising against the monarchy. Whilst in prison Maurín read
Trotsky’s letters to his Spanish followers and appeared to be in general
agreement with his analysis. Moreover, Nin wrote for the Federation’s press and
helped Maurín to draft the BOC’s first political thesis — the general line of
which was practically identical with that of the Trotskyists.13
Nevertheless, Nin does not seem to have taken into
account the general nature of the BOC, Maurín apart. Although in opposition to
the PCE leadership, the BOC’s leaders had yet to question the Stalinist
leadership of the international Communist movement. Despite Nin’s influence on
its first political programme, the FCC-B/BOC soon reverted towards more
‘official’ positions, because of its continued aim to avoid a final rupture
with the Communist International. Thus in April 1931, only two months after the
publication of its political thesis, the BOC stood candidates in the local
elections under the Third Period slogan of ‘class against class’.14
And despite breaking from the Communist
International as a result of Maurín’s expulsion in July 1931, references to
‘Social Fascism’ continued to appear in the BOC’s press until early 1932. In
addition, as Trotsky himself had feared,15
the Federation’s leaders were not prepared to tolerate open factional work by
the Trotskyists inside their organisation. Once this work started, Nin’s
apparently cosy relationship with the BOC came to an end. In May 1931 Nin’s
formal request to join the BOC was turned down, and mutual attacks soon began
to appear in the press of both groups. However, the formal constitution of the
OCE in Barcelona did not take place until September 1931.16 A tiny group of Trotskyists continued to
try and defend their ideas inside the BOC, but they were expelled in October
1931 for ‘factional activity aimed at destroying the party’.17
Thus by late 1931 the OCE finally appeared to be
taking a more orthodox position, presenting itself unequivocally as a faction of
the official party, and submitting the BOC’s ‘confused’ and ‘vacillating’
politics to the ‘pitiless and incessant criticism’ that Trotsky had advocated.
‘Maybe it would not be possible’, one Spanish Trotskyist leader wrote in April
1932, ‘to find in today’s working class movement an organisation crippled by a
more unhealthy opportunism than that from which the Catalan Federation
suffers.’18 The OCE’s attacks were centred on the
BOC’s initial refusal to take up a position in relation to the Communist International,
its organisational structure, its nationalism, its confusion over the question
of revolutionary power, and its trade union policy.
Maurín’s party, because of its ‘national’ outlook,
was seen by the Trotskyists as being on the right, close to the politics of
Bukharin or Brandler. Lacroix argued, as he had in 1930, that the real aim of
the leaders of the Catalan Federation was to replace the current PCE
leadership, hence their refusal to differentiate themselves openly from the
Stalinist line of the Communist International.19
The relationship between the FCC-B and the BOC was far from clear. Was the
latter a broad front, or was it a party? The OCE reminded the Federation of a
similar confusion that had been made by the Chinese Communists in 1927, with
terrible results. In reality the two organisations were increasingly one and
the same, as was later admitted by the BOC leaders themselves,20 although Nin had already pointed this out
as early as January 1932.21
Even more disturbing was the FCC-B’s position on the national question. Rather than just defend the right to self-determination of existing national movements, the BOC went much further. In June 1931 Maurín declared himself in favour of ‘separatism’, albeit not from Spain but from the Spanish state, the disintegration of which could give way to genuine Iberian unity. It was not sufficient, the BOC argued, to win over the leadership of existing national liberation movements, it was actually necessary to participate in their formation. Thus, where national movements did not exist, be it in Andalusia, Aragon, Castille or elsewhere, it was necessary for Communists to help create them.
Maurín believed that ‘the prospects for Socialist revolution were greatly favoured by the presence of a national problem’, so much so that ‘if it did not exist, it would be necessary to create it’.22 Not surprisingly, the Trotskyists were scathing in their attacks on what they described as the FCC-B’s predilection for ‘separatist rather than class politics’, and even described it as ‘more Catalanist than the Catalan Republican Left’, the principal petit-bourgeois nationalist party in Catalonia.23
Equally alarming was the FCC-B’s position on revolutionary power. After initially adopting a fairly benevolent attitude towards the new Republican regime, in June 1931 Maurín’s party, influenced by the increasingly radicalised strike movement led by the Anarcho-Syndicalists, suddenly lurched to the left. The FCC-B/BOC now called on the CNT itself to ‘take power’, arguing that the illusions of the masses in the bourgeois Republic were ‘burnt out’. Maurín defended his party’s position by claiming that the hegemony of the CNT in the strike movement, coupled with the radicalisation of its rank and file, meant that the Anarcho-Syndicalist unions could perform the rôle which soviets had played in Russia. The BOC leader argued that in the same way that a soviet system had developed in Russia, a ‘Syndicalist system’ could develop in Spain. He predicted that his position would ‘horrify the mimics of fossilised Marxism’ with their ‘grotesque equation of Spain with Russia’.24
The BOC leaders recognised, however, that the CNT, given its Anarcho-Syndicalist principles, was not interested in ‘taking power’. Thus the BOC’s task was to ‘create an atmosphere’ through its propaganda whereby the leadership would be swept aside, and the unions would pass into the hands of the Communists. Parallel with this call for ‘power to the CNT’, the BOC still defended the need to form workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils.
Understandably, the Trotskyists attacked the position of the FCC-B/BOC on a number of levels.25 To call for the CNT unions to take power was pure Syndicalism, and appeared to show that the BOC had forgotten all the most basic lessons of the Russian Revolution. In addition, the exact rôle of the unions in the revolutionary process was hardly clear when Maurín and his comrades continued to call for councils to be set up through a ‘congress of all working class organisations’.26 Moreover, by talking of a revolutionary movement based solely on the CNT, the BOC was ignoring the great mass of workers, especially outside of Catalonia, who were in Socialist or other unions, or, as in the case of the majority, still unorganised.
The Trotskyists also argued that despite the strike wave, the majority of workers and peasants still had illusions in the Republic. In order to dispel these illusions, Communists had to continue to call for partial demands and for the Socialists to end their collaboration with the bourgeois parties, and not to reject such agitation, as the BOC had done, in favour of generalised calls for ‘the proletariat to take power’.
The abortive Anarchist uprising in the Alt Llobregat region of Catalonia in January 1932, and the increasing persecution of Communists inside the Catalan CNT, led the BOC to drop its calls for the unions to take power. But the Trotskyists now saw another error arising in that the BOC saw itself as being forced to leave the CNT altogether. The ICE considered that whilst the BOC formally opposed any splits in the unions, many of its trade unionists did little to fight to stay in such a hostile environment. The Trotskyists, in contrast, recognised the importance of trying to remain at all costs within the CNT. The BOC’s decision in 1933 effectively to build a separate trade union federation would render later attempts to influence the Anarcho-Syndicalists that much more difficult.27
The confusion and opportunism that characterised the FCC-B/BOC’s politics, especially in 1931-32, was not merely due to its lack of programmatic clarity in relation to a Stalinised international Communist movement. As the Catalan Trotskyist and future POUM leader, Narcís Molins i Fábrega, was to point out, it was also a reflection of its social base.28 In the towns the BOC related to a ‘section of the working class which feels itself to be above the rest of the proletariat, and closer to the petit-bourgeoisie’. Most of its urban members were not factory workers, Molins claimed, but shop assistants and clerks. In the countryside the BOC was based on medium peasants, ‘who had no argument with the bourgeoisie other than over the right to land’. This social composition, he concluded, had led the Catalan Federation ‘to break its links with Communism’, and it was now in ‘the front line of the extreme left of the petit-bourgeoisie’.
After 1932 the attacks of the Trotskyists on Maurín’s party became less frequent and more moderate in tone. This was partly due both to changes inside the BOC itself and changes within the Trotskyist movement after 1933 in relation to the need to build parties independent of the Communist International. By mid-1933 the Trotskyists recognised that some sections of the BOC’s rank and file believed that there was little between themselves and the ICE on most major issues. However, ‘nothing could have been further from the truth’. The BOC may have made similar criticisms to the Trotskyists of other sections of the workers’ movement, but there was ‘no continuity in their politics’.29 Even as late as June 1934, when the two organisations were working quite closely, the ICE press described the BOC as ‘opportunist’ and ‘lacking any clear programme’. It was, the Trotskyists concluded, repeating Trotsky’s prediction of three years previously, ‘doomed to collapse’.30
If the Trotskyists were harsh in their criticism of the BOC, the latter was even more so in its treatment of Trotskyism. Maurín himself had been accused of ‘Trotskyism’ by the PCE leadership during the late 1920s, and this had been one of the reasons given for his eventual expulsion. Maurín and other Federation leaders were, however, quite contemptuous of Trotskyism, and dismissed the OCE as a divisive and irrelevant sect condemned to the sidelines of the working class movement, from where it ‘would blindly follow the positions handed down by Trotsky’. They even accused the Trotskyists of being the ‘mirror image of Stalinism’ whose same ‘mechanical centralist methods’ they had copied.
Nin, in an obvious reference to his stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, was accused of having deserted the Spanish workers’ movement in its ‘most difficult moments’, and of having at first sided with the PCE leadership against the Catalans. ‘Experience has shown’, the FCC-B stated in September 1931, that Nin could easily change his position, and that he would soon be ‘knocking on the door of the BOC’.31 The BOC’s attitude towards the Trotskyists remained basically unchanged over the next three years, although attacks on them became less frequent. At the end of 1933 Maurín described Trotskyism as ‘the antithesis of organisation’ which introduced ‘civil war’ wherever it intervened in the workers’ movement.32
Whilst the FCC-B/BOC were totally dismissive of Trotskyist organisations, they were less so when it came to Trotsky himself. Articles by Trotsky still occasionally appeared in the BOC press, and the former Bolshevik leader was even defended from Stalinist slanders, being described as ‘Lenin’s best comrade... the man of the October Revolution... a great fighter for the Communist cause’ and ‘one of the most extraordinary brains of world Socialism’.33 More contradictory was the BOC’s treatment of the speech which Trotsky gave to young Social Democrats in Copenhagen in December 1932. Whilst its weekly, La Batalla, praised his speech and printed extracts from it, Maurín was talking elsewhere of Trotsky’s ‘definitive political failure’.34
The ICE and the
International Trotskyist Movement 1932-34
Given the sharp tone of the polemic between the OCE and the BOC, it may seem surprising that barely three years later the two groups would fuse, apparently quite happily, into one united party. Changing political circumstances — both nationally and internationally — were to play an important part in preparing the way for unification, as would changes inside both of the organisations. The distancing of the ICE from the international Trotskyist movement was to be another contributing factor in the group’s move towards an agreement with Maurín’s organisation.
The Spanish opposition had been criticised by
Trotsky from the outset, initially over Nin’s slowness in establishing the
OCE’s own press and his illusions in being able to influence the FCC-B/BOC.
More direct contacts with the International Left Opposition [ILO], in the shape
of Raymond Molinier, who visited the OCE in 1931,35
did not improve matters. Nin was soon to blame Molinier for the dire economic
situation in which the Spanish group found itself, and for its consequent
inability to sustain its newspaper, El
Soviet.36
These differences, particularly with Molinier, probably discouraged the OCE from condemning Rosmer’s group immediately when it was expelled from the French section at this time. This in turn led Trotsky to berate Nin over the lack of involvement of the Spanish group in the ILO — a criticism that was to be repeated over the coming months.
But it was the OCE’s third National Conference in March 1932 that was to mark a more important turning point in the Spanish group’s relations with the international movement. Faced with what it described as the ‘experience of the practical impossibility of changing the line of the Communist International’, and the danger of the Opposition appearing only to favour reforming the PCE, the OCE opted to adopt a more independent stance. Whilst still claiming to be a faction of the PCE, the Spanish group decided to project itself as a more open alternative to the official party. This change took the form of renaming the group as the Communist Left of Spain (ICE) and agreeing to the possibility of intervening in elections in certain circumstances.37
The change in name also reflected the group’s relative consolidation both organisationally (it now claimed 1000 members) and politically. Despite their insistence on not having established themselves as an independent party as such, the Spanish Trotskyists’ decision appeared to the ILO to be just that.38 Moreover, the ICE, with the aim of posing this tactical change on an international level, called upon the International Secretariat to call a conference as soon as possible. The ICE also called for both the expelled Rosmer and Landau groups to be represented at the proposed conference, although not as official delegates, so that they could present their case.
This new crisis in the relations between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ILO was further complicated by the ‘Lacroix case’. At the third conference Lacroix had resigned as General Secretary of the Spanish Opposition, supposedly for ‘health reasons’.39 His subsequent factional activity gave his resignation a political character — although he did not state this explicitly until a year later.40 In fact Lacroix’s rôle in the growing crisis both inside the ICE and in its relations with the ILO is highly suspect. With hindsight, Lacroix’s activities were at least opportunist, if not, as Georges Vereeken has argued, a deliberate provocation.41
Internationally, the German and French sections were
particularly incensed by the ICE’s apparent defence of Landau and Rosmer. In
late 1932 first the Germans and then the French Trotskyists produced documents
criticising the position of the Spanish group.42
Apart from attacking the latter’s change of name, and its positions on
elections and the Rosmer and Landau cases, both groups spoke of the ICE’s lack
of a concrete programme for the Spanish revolution and of not wanting to pose
its differences openly with the International Secretariat. Basically similar
criticisms were made by the International Secretariat and by Trotsky himself.
The ICE replied to these attacks by pointing out that it still considered itself to be a faction of the PCE and not a new party.43 In fact in both the Catalan elections of November 1932 and the general election a year later, the Trotskyists not only called for a vote for the PCE (and not the BOC), but also distributed the PCE’s propaganda, and in a few areas held joint meetings with its local branches. The Spanish Trotskyists argued that they were obliged by circumstances to counter the influence and the tactics of the PCE in a more positive fashion. Moreover, both the French and US sections had changed their names from ‘Opposition’ to the ‘Communist League’. The ICE insisted on its complete ‘loyalty to the ILO, the International Secretariat and comrade Trotsky’. It had differences over questions of ‘detail and organisation but not fundamental political questions’. According to the Spanish section, the fact that it had defended the right of the Rosmer and Landau groups to put their case did not mean that it supported these groups in any way.
In retrospect, Trotsky’s criticisms of the ICE at this time seem particularly harsh. In August 1933 he was to describe the ‘struggle of Nin and company against the ILO [as]... violating every fundamental principle of Marxism’. The ICE’s position on the independence of its group with regard to the PCE would soon differ little from that adopted by the international Trotskyist movement during 1933. The severe tone of Trotsky’s polemic with the Spanish section was probably due to his fears that Nin would form a bloc with his old friend Rosmer.
The choice of Communist Left as the Spanish group’s new name, denounced by Trotsky as ‘an obviously false name from the standpoint of theory’, appeared particularly significant because it was the same as Rosmer’s group, the Gauche Communiste. Nin had, in fact, initially supported Trotsky and the International Secretariat over the question of Landau and Rosmer, only to change his attitude in late 1931. The failure of Molinier, one of Rosmer’s principal opponents in France, to provide the OCE with the financial support he had promised, may well have contributed to Nin’s change of position.
Parallel to these criticisms of the ICE inside the ILO, Lacroix formed an opposition faction, which in the first edition of its bulletin accused the ICE leadership of being opposed to the international movement, and of using ‘Stalinist practices’. In addition, it accused Nin, who had replaced Lacroix as General Secretary, of being a ‘petit-bourgeois opportunist’, and called on the International Secretariat to intervene inside the Spanish section.44 However, it was not until January 1933, that is after the International Secretariat and the French and German groups had attacked the ICE’s positions, that Lacroix came out with an identical line of argument. The ICE leaders initially tried to counter Lacroix’s opposition by inviting him to take up the post of General Secretary once more. This being refused, the Spanish section moved the headquarters of its Executive Committee to Barcelona to avoid the disruptive activities of Lacroix’s group in Madrid.
Meanwhile the International Secretariat had begun to talk of the ‘profound differences’ in the Spanish section, speaking of the ‘Lacroix current’ and the ‘Nin current’, thus giving each equal credibility. In fact, Lacroix’s group was based upon six or seven militants in Madrid.45 What is more, throughout this crisis the ICE Executive Committee received numerous motions of support from local branches. Thus when the ILO organised a pre-conference in Paris in February 1933 and called on both tendencies to send delegates, the ICE leadership angrily refused to comply, and denounced the International Secretariat for ‘wanting to give a political character to Lacroix’s dishonest and intolerable campaign against the Executive Committee’.46 In the event both tendencies were represented at the pre-conference, the official ICE delegate, and a delegate from Lacroix’s group who was invited without the knowledge of the Spanish group’s leadership.
The pre-conference referred to the situation inside the ICE, and demanded that disciplinary measures against Lacroix be stopped.47 It also condemned the ICE for supporting ‘confusionists and deserters’ such as Landau, Rosmer and Mill, and, seemingly oblivious of its recent campaign in favour of the PCE in the Catalan elections, of ‘tail-ending the petit-bourgeois nationalist and provincial phrasemonger Maurín’ and of favouring participation in parliamentary elections in a manner contrary to the policy of the ILO.
In reply, Fersen, the official Spanish delegate,
agreed to the establishment of an internal bulletin open to ‘all tendencies’,
and that nobody would be excluded from the organisation until a national
conference could be held. Nevertheless, Fersen defended the measures already
taken against Lacroix’s group as ‘necessary to maintain discipline and avoid
the degeneration of the organisation’s progress’. The ICE later bemoaned the
‘frank support’ of the pre-conference for ‘comrade Lacroix’s campaign of
sabotage and disorganisation’.48
Relations between the Spanish section and the international organisation were further undermined by the ICE’s criticisms of some of the decisions of the pre-conference. In particular, the Spanish section rejected as ‘totally exotic’ the imposition of the title ‘Communist Left Opposition — Bolshevik-Leninist’ on all national sections. For the ICE, the title Left Opposition already gave the impression both inside and outside the Communist movement that the differences of the Trotskyists with the Stalinists were only an ‘incomprehensible and harmful internal struggle’. Instead, the ICE advocated that there should not be one name applicable to all national sections, but that each national section should include the name of the international organisation.
The ICE also criticised the International Secretariat’s manner of dealing with internal problems, particularly in relation to the Rosmer group. Finally, the Spanish group claimed that the decision of the pre-conference that following events in Germany, the Opposition ‘should work systematically in all proletarian organisations... without modifying its attitude towards the [Communist] party’, was identical to the position adopted in Spain 11 months previously.49
Immediately following the pre-conference, the International Secretariat initiated a campaign against Nin and the ICE leadership. Trotsky based his attacks, although not explicitly, firstly upon the arguments of Lacroix and then on those of two other dissidents, ‘Arlen’ and Mariano Vela — both of whom had already left the Spanish section.50 The International Secretariat also published Nin’s correspondence with Trotsky of 1930-32 in order to illustrate Nin’s continued divergences from the international organisation. In April 1933 a long extract from a recent article by Lacroix attacking the ICE leadership was published without the slightest comment in the International Bulletin.51
Whilst it appeared that the International Secretariat was siding with Lacroix against Nin, Trotsky himself pointed out in a letter to Lacroix at the time that he had no intention of favouring one group against the other, and even accused Lacroix of having the ‘same ideas and methods’ as Nin.52 However, it remained the case that the statements of the International Secretariat on the internal crisis of the Spanish section were directed almost exclusively against Nin. This campaign culminated in August 1933 in a scathing attack by Trotsky on the ‘inadmissible conduct’ of Nin ‘and his friends’ whose policies had been ‘condemned by all sections of the International Left Opposition... without exception’ at the pre-conference in February. Nin’s ‘radically incorrect policy’ had prevented the Spanish section from ‘winning the place opened up to it by the conditions of the Spanish revolution’ and had led to the weakening of the ICE.53
Meanwhile, the ICE Executive Committee accused Lacroix of misusing party funds and of systematic obstruction of its work. Evidence relating to these accusations was sent to the International Secretariat, which in turn had to admit that Lacroix had ‘falsified official documents’.54 The whole ignominious affair finished in June 1933 with the expulsion of Lacroix and the disintegration of his faction.55
Subsequent events would shed more light on Lacroix,
and thus seemingly vindicate the position of the ICE leadership. In September
1933 he joined the PSOE and in a letter to its daily, El Socialista, renounced his Communist past and recognised his
mistaken rôle as a ‘sniper against Socialism’.56
Prior to this, however, Lacroix had attempted to rejoin the PCE. His total lack
of scruples are revealed in his letter of 15 July 1933 to the PCE Central
Committee, which has recently been found in the party’s archives in Madrid.57 According to this letter, only lack of
money prevented Lacroix from returning to Madrid (he was in Tolosa at the
time), as the PCE leadership had asked him to, in order to explain his recent
‘evolution back towards the party’. Lacroix concluded that ‘rapid action could
put an end to the residues of Trotskyism in Spain, and win back the good, if
mistaken, workers who still follow... the masked counter-revolution of
Trotskyism’.
This letter leaves little doubt as to Lacroix’s dubious (to say the least) activities inside the revolutionary movement, and gives some credence to Vereeken’s claim that Lacroix was a ‘Stalinist agent’.58 However, the fact that he was not allowed back into the PCE undermines Vereeken’s thesis; nor was he known to have sided with the pro-Stalinist wing of Spanish Socialism during the Civil War. Indeed, according to Pierre Broué, Lacroix, having led a division in the Republican army, was recognised by Stalinist troops whilst crossing into France at the end of the Civil War, and was lynched on the spot.59
The Lacroix affair only served to strain relations even further between the ICE and the ILO. Once he had joined the PSOE, the International Secretariat denounced Lacroix for his ‘violent and poisonous struggle... against the International Left Opposition and a number of leading comrades’, and described him as always having been ‘an alien element among the Bolshevik-Leninists, alien to their ideas and their methods’.60 This belated recognition of Lacroix’s rôle inside the Trotskyist movement was not very convincing, given the International Secretariat’s recent attacks on Nin and its effective support for this ‘alien element’.
The desertion of Lacroix must have been a blow to the Trotskyist movement; to the ICE, of which he had been a founder and one of its principal leaders, and to Trotsky, to whom he had always proclaimed his ‘total loyalty and agreement’. Whilst undoubtedly there were real differences between the ICE and the International Secretariat, particularly over the degree of political independence to be maintained in relation to the official Communist movement prior to August 1933, and over the differences around the Rosmer and Landau cases, the Lacroix affair was marred not only by its personal overtones, but also by the confusion surrounding its exact nature. Any examination of the documents of the ICE, Lacroix and the International Secretariat on the Spanish crisis, along with Trotsky’s writings of the time, confirms this confusion. The contradictory nature of the later statements of the International Secretariat on the question and on Lacroix’s subsequent betrayal serve to cloud the issues at stake even further.
The decision that the ILO took in August 1933 to form new independent parties and to establish the International Communist League (ICL) as the first step towards the establishment of a new International, was welcomed by the ICE. The Spanish group pointed out, however, that it had been the first to move towards more independent activity, and it criticised the ‘mechanical way’ in which the ILO’s change of line had been adopted, as if ‘obeying a military order’, and for its lateness.61 There was also some opposition inside the ICE during the autumn of 1933 to the idea of creating a Fourth International.62
Relations between the ICE and the (by now) ICL appear to have been relatively calm during the first half of 1934, until a new dispute broke out over the tactic of entrism. This tactic appeared particularly relevant in Spain, where, due to the disenchantment with their party’s participation in the Republican government between 1931 and 1933, many Socialist militants had turned sharply to the left. The threat of Fascism — both at home and abroad — reinforced this tendency. By mid-1934 the left wing of the Socialists controlled the trade union federation (the UGT), the Socialist Youth and many local and provincial sections of the party. Moreover, its language was increasingly revolutionary in tone.
The importance of the radicalisation of the Spanish Socialist movement was not missed by the ICE, but it baulked at following the example of the French Trotskyists of actually entering the Socialist Party. A national plenum of the ICE voted unanimously in September 1934 to reject the new tactical turn of the ICL. Whilst recognising the importance of the new mood in many countries in favour of united action, the ICE warned that this should not lead to ‘organic confusion’. The plenum concluded:
‘The guarantee of the future lies in the United Front, but also in the organic independence of the vanguard of the proletariat. In no way can we immerse ourselves in an amorphous conglomerate merely because of circumstantial utilitarianism... However sad and painful it may be for us, we are prepared to maintain the principled positions that we have learnt from our leader, even at the risk of having to separate from him on the road to victory.’63
The ICE also proposed the formation of a faction inside the international organisation to fight against the new turn.
The growing distance between the Spanish Trotskyists and the ICL is clearly illustrated by the resolution at the plenum. Not surprisingly, their rejection of entrism has sometimes been cited as the principal reason for their break from the international movement. Nevertheless, the final break would not take place for another 16 months, and the ICE’s refusal to enter the Socialist Party would be only one of several contributory factors.
The Basis of Unity
Apart from the ICE’s increasingly unstable relationship with the international Trotskyist movement, there were a number of other important reasons — objective and subjective — that would lead the Spanish Trotskyists to fuse with an organisation which they had so fiercely denounced in 1931-32.
The revolutionary strike of October 1934 in response to the entry into the government of the semi-Fascist CEDA64 had led to a general re-evaluation of tactics and strategy throughout the Spanish workers’ movement. The heroic but isolated struggle of the Asturian miners and the uneven nature of the strike movement in the rest of Spain led most of those who considered themselves as Marxists to see the need for strong centralised revolutionary leadership. The exact nature of this leadership, of course, was another matter. For the left wing Socialists this meant the unity of all Marxists inside the PSOE, the expulsion of its right wing, and its subsequent ‘Bolshevisation’. For the Stalinists it meant adherence to the line of the Communist International. For the ICE and the BOC it meant the construction of a new revolutionary party outside both the PSOE and the PCE.
The urgent need for the construction of a state-wide revolutionary party and the clamour for greater unity at all levels of the labour movement weighed heavily on all the workers’ parties. The Catalan-based BOC was particularly aware of this problem, and this, along with changes in the political lines of both itself and the ICE, brought the two dissident Communist groups closer.
At a practical level the establishment of the Workers’ Alliance in Catalonia in December 1933 had led to increasing cooperation between the two organisations. The BOC, like the ICE, had championed the United Front as the ideal way both to fight the threat of Fascism and to undermine reformism. In strict contrast with the sectarian ‘United Front from below’ of the Stalinists, Maurín and his comrades defended the classic United Front tactic of the Communist International of 1921.65 Formally, at least, the basis for agreement with the ICE on this important question had existed from quite early on. But the BOC, unlike the ICE, had the strength, in Catalonia at least, to put this tactic into practice.
The Workers’ Alliance was essentially an agreement among the leaderships of various workers’ organisations, and it never developed its own democratic structures at a rank and file level. But it did open up an unprecedented possibility of unity in action at a local and regional level. Above all, it reflected the growing demand for unity from working class militants of all tendencies. The Alliance united the BOC, Socialists, dissident Syndicalists (‘Treintistas’) and Trotskyists, and soon spread to many other areas of Spain. Only the CNT, with the notable exception of Asturias, remained outside the Alliances. The Stalinists, in a characteristic volte-face, joined the Alliances in September 1934, after spending the previous nine months denouncing them as a ‘counter-revolutionary manoeuvre’.
Inside the Alliances the BOC and the Trotskyists continually found themselves in agreement. Both groups defended the need to turn the Workers’ Alliances into organisations that could mobilise the workers on a daily basis, and consequently build up their confidence and militancy. In contrast, the left wing Socialists and Syndicalists saw the alliances as purely ‘insurrectional’ bodies. In fact, the Socialists opposed many ‘economic’ struggles throughout 1934 as ‘wasting the workers’ energy’. This puerile ultra-leftism, of which the Socialist Youth was particularly guilty, was consistently fought against in the pages of the BOC and ICE press. Inside the Catalan Workers’ Alliance, Maurín and Nin renewed their close collaboration of earlier years.
Apart from the practical joint work between the BOC and the ICE to which the establishment of the Workers’ Alliances led during 1934, there were other factors which opened up the possibilities of fusion. The BOC’s political evolution, although not completely abandoning the confusion that had characterised its initial existence, had encouraged the ICE to believe that unity was a real possibility.
In relation to the international Communist movement, the BOC had abandoned its earlier pragmatism and distance from both Stalinism and Trotskyism, and had adopted increasingly anti-Stalinist positions. As early as February 1932 Maurín had spoken of the ‘degeneration of the CI [Communist International] since Lenin’s death’, and in June that year La Batalla published a more general critique of the mistakes of the Communist International since 1924.66 Six months later, in a series of articles, Maurín denounced the bureaucratisation of the Soviet Communist Party under Stalin and its persecution of its ‘Communist opponents inside the Soviet Union’. The roots of the degeneration of both the CPSU and the Communist International, Maurín concluded, lay in the triumph of the theory of Socialism in one country, which had led to the subordination of the Communist International to the Soviet state.67 Similar statements increasingly appeared in the BOC’s press, culminating in Maurín’s declaration in late 1934 that ‘the triumph of Stalin over Trotsky was the victory of Russian Socialism over international Socialism’.68 Moreover, the BOC had continued to defend Trotsky from the Stalinists’ slanders and to publish his articles — even when he had disassociated himself from this,69 and whilst the BOC had continued to lambast his supporters. The BOC’s condemnation of the degeneration of the Communist International led it to recognise ‘the need progressively to build the base of a new International’.70 On this point, however, agreement between the BOC and the Trotskyists was more apparent than real.
The BOC had also turned away from its earlier sectarian attitude towards the Socialists, whom it had even described as ‘social Fascists’ during 1931 and early 1932.71 By 1933 the BOC effectively coincided with the Trotskyists in calling for an ‘all Socialist’ government. Maurín also clearly understood the importance of the radicalisation of much of the Socialist movement during 1934. Articles in the BOC’s press spoke of the significance of this development, whilst pointing to the weaknesses of the Socialist left — its ultra-left demagogy, lack of true Marxist politics, and its obsession with winning over the PSOE machine.
The national question proved another area where the positions of the BOC and the ICE had converged. By 1933 the BOC had dropped its earlier talk of separatism and the need to build national liberation movements throughout the peninsula, and now defended a more orthodox line of self-determination for the ‘historic nationalities’ — the Basques, Catalans and Galicians. The Trotskyists, in turn, had come to recognise the relevance of the national struggle in the Basque Country, which they had previously dismissed as ‘reactionary’.72
The BOC had attracted to its ranks many class conscious workers who, despite the opportunism of their leaders, were, the ICE believed, open to revolutionary Marxism.73 Nevertheless, the class composition of the BOC, as Molins had noticed in 1931, was still varied and equally attracted to opportunism. Perhaps more important for the ICE’s leaders, in particular Nin, was their belief that Maurín had moved significantly closer to authentic Marxist positions by the end of 1934. His book, Hacia la Segunda Revolucíon (Towards the Second Revolution), written in the aftermath of the October events,74 seemed to confirm this view.
Given Maurín’s overwhelming influence inside the BOC, the reticence of the ICE towards the politics of other BOC leaders was, in general, put to one side. The BOC’s leaders themselves were, in turn, encouraged towards thinking that an agreement was possible with the ICE because of its increasing estrangement from the international Trotskyist movement, and in particular its rejection of entrism.
Unification of the two parties also appeared as a means of overcoming their relative isolation and lack of significant growth. This was particularly the case for the ICE, which, apart from a few scattered groups, had been unable to overcome its organisational weakness. For the BOC, and Maurín in particular, it meant the gaining of a number of useful nuclei throughout Spain, and hopefully the beginnings of real expansion outside Catalonia. Despite the BOC’s declared intention to create a state-wide organisation, it had had little success apart from in nearby Castellon, Valencia and the Catalan-speaking area of Aragon. Away from Catalonia, its only group of any relative importance was in Asturias.75
Given the enthusiasm for unity throughout the working class movement and the general radicalisation following the events of October 1934, the hopes of both the Trotskyists and the BOC that a new unified party could attract many workers and peasants to its ranks were understandable.
The Foundation of the POUM
The first steps towards ‘Marxist unity’ took place in Catalonia — where the workers’ movement was most fragmented. In February 1935, and on two more occasions that April, six Catalan workers’ parties met with the declared intention of seeking some basis for unity. But the heterogeneous nature of those involved made this very unlikely. Apart from the BOC and the ICE, delegations also attended from the PSOE, the PCE, the Social Democratic Catalan Socialist Union (USC), and the radical left nationalist Catalan Proletarian Party (PCP).
None of the groups involved could have seriously believed that such unity was possible, least of all the revolutionary Marxists. The USC was more interested in Socialist unity with the PSOE, and it baulked at the radicalism of most of the others present. The Catalan Federation of the PSOE stated that it could not make any decision without the agreement of the party leadership in Madrid. The PCE insisted that any new Marxist party should accept the programme of the Communist International, and, unsuccessfully, attempted to get the Trotskyists thrown out, as they were ‘not a party’ but only an ‘opposition faction’. An agreement between, on the one hand, the BOC and the ICE, and, on the other, the PCP, proved impossible due to the insistence of the latter that the new party be a Catalan rather than a state-wide organisation. This left the BOC and the ICE. The other four parties would eventually unite in July 1936 to form the Stalinist United Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC).
Although the BOC’s intervention in the ‘unity’ talks was largely a propaganda exercise, it had hopes of winning over the leftist Catalan Federation of the PSOE and the PCP. Both these organisations were very weak and had frequently collaborated with Maurín’s party. The reasons for the participation of the Trotskyists were more complex. The ICE had agreed to take part in the Catalan talks both in order to get a platform for its ideas and to draw closer to the BOC. Nin had publicly warned in the BOC’s press in January 1935 that a party formed on the basis of a ‘monstrous cohabitation of irreconcilable tendencies’ would only paralyse the struggle of the proletariat. A party could only be formed on the basis of ‘revolutionary Marxist principles’.76
The question of entrism, despite the ICE’s vigorous rejection of the tactic in September 1934, continued to be debated within the Spanish section. Fersen, the author of the September motion against the new ‘French turn’, in prison following the October events, now changed his position and became the main advocate inside the ICE of the entry tactic.77
The ICE Executive Committee finally met in April 1935 to clarify its position over the question of building the party. A compromise position, proposed by Nin, was adopted with only Francesc de Cabo of the Catalan organisation voting against. The resolution pointed to the fact that the ILO had ‘failed to convert itself into the centre of attraction for the working masses’ or into ‘an independent force capable of grouping together the revolutionary vanguard’. Moreover, a ‘profound crisis’ had developed in most sections because of the entry tactic, consequently leading to ‘disorientation and a loss of confidence in the independent development of our forces’.78
But parallel to this crisis inside the Trotskyist movement, there was, according to the ICE’s leadership, ‘a growing hostility among workers towards groups that were outside the large mass organisations’. In Spain, in particular, it had to be recognised that thousands of workers had joined the PSOE since the fall of the monarchy in 1931. Neither the importance of the PSOE nor the development of its left wing could, therefore, be underestimated. It was not only a necessity but a duty to ‘guide the Socialist masses towards revolutionary Marxism’.
At the same time the resolution acknowledged that
the great tendency towards unity now prevalent in the workers’ movement was in
danger of turning into an ‘unprincipled fetishism of abstract unity... if a
tendency like ours is not involved’. From this ‘double reality’ the ICE decided
to form part of a new party in Catalonia, whilst applying for membership of the
PSOE in the rest of Spain. Once inside the PSOE the Trotskyists intended to
‘form a group that would tenaciously defend the need to unite with the party
created in Catalonia in order to form one political organisation of the Spanish
proletariat’. The motion continued:
‘Acting in isolation, our organisation, apart from having extremely limited possibilities for organic growth, would be incomparably less influential than it could be inside the PSOE. We should ask to join on the basis that our existence as a group is respected and that we can maintain our own publications. In support of our position, we could point to the precedent of our French section. We should give the maximum publicity to our decision to join so that the working class will understand clearly our reasons for doing so. If the Executive of the PSOE refuses to accept completely our conditions, we must make an effort to gain the maximum concessions, with the aim, however, to make our entry... understood by the working class.’
Compared to the ICE’s clear rejection of entrism eight months previously, this new position was a considerable volte-face. But in September 1934 the ICE National Plenum had noted that the new policy of the ICL would be unacceptable to the membership of the Spanish section — which now proved to be exactly the case.
A counterposition was put to the Executive Committee by de Cabo and Amadeu Robles. Essentially they argued that the Trotskyists would stagnate inside the PSOE. Instead, they needed to take advantage of the lever that the new party would create in Catalonia ‘to force a split inside the Socialist Party’. Hence the ICE should form groups of the new party in the rest of Spain. Inside the PSOE, de Cabo and Robles argued, the Trotskyists, with no independent presence, would be incapable of pulling behind them those revolutionary workers who were disillusioned with the constant vacillations of the Socialist leaders, as such workers were more likely to leave the party. In conclusion, they called:
‘1. For the creation of the party in Catalonia,
fusing with the other Marxist parties on the basis of a revolutionary doctrine.
‘2. Convert our groups in the rest of Spain into
part of the party formed in Catalonia, thus helping its growth in the rest of
the peninsula. This, moreover will give us more influence over the political
nature of the party that is formed in Catalonia.
‘3. Carry out a strong campaign about the rôle played by the Socialist leaders in the recent movement [the October general strike — eds].’79
In the weeks following the Executive Committee meeting, the latter’s resolution was discussed by the group’s members. A large majority rejected entering the PSOE, and the leadership had no choice but to accept the de Cabo-Robles position. Among the most vociferous in their opposition to the Executive Committee’s proposals was the Madrid branch, recently strengthened by the recruitment of 30 or so militants from the Communist Youth, which had had considerable experience of fighting the Socialist bureaucracy inside the local UGT.
Only a small group, consisting of five militants (according to Jean Rous80), decided to enter the PSOE, and even this was done without the specific agreement of the International Secretariat. This group did, however, include two prominent ICE leaders, Fersen and Bilbao, as well as Grandizo Munis, the future leader of the Bolshevik-Leninist group during the Civil War. The entrist group had no impact inside the PSOE, and Fersen soon moved away from Trotskyism altogether.
What was the attitude of Trotsky and the
International Secretariat to the ICE’s position? As is known, Trotsky had
continued to berate the ICE for not having entered the PSOE in 1934.81 However, the International Secretariat
initially approved of the talks with the BOC in Catalonia, with the proviso
that the ICE maintained itself as a faction inside any new party, and that in
the rest of Spain its members entered the PSOE — the same position as was
adopted by the Executive Committee of the ICE in April 1935. Once it became
clear that the Spanish section had changed its position in favour of a new unified
party, the International Secretariat wrote to its leadership condemning this
move.82 It accused the ICE of being in danger of
becoming absorbed into the BOC and, because of that party’s proposed adherence
to the centrist London Bureau, of being against the Fourth International. Worse
still from the International Secretariat’s point of view, the ICE had declared
it would not form a separate faction inside any unified organisation.
The reaction of the ICE to this latest criticism from the International Secretariat was to launch a bitter attack upon the methods and activities of the international leadership.83 It accused the International Secretariat of demoralising the membership of the ICE with its ‘incomprehension’ of the Spanish political situation and its attempts to manipulate the Spanish Trotskyists as if they were ‘puppets’. In contrast to what was believed in Paris, the ICE claimed that the BOC, long characterised by its ‘confusion’, had accepted ‘our fundamental principles’, which were thus reflected in the new party’s programme. The supposed similarity between this programme and that of the Trotskyists was used to justify why there was no need for them to maintain their own faction in the unified organisation.
As for the Fourth International — apparently the only real difference between the two groups — the ICE had not wanted to insist on the question to avoid any excuse for negotiations to be broken off. The ICE leadership was extremely optimistic that the new party could be won to the idea of the Fourth International and that it would then, in turn, fight inside the London Bureau for this perspective, as other Trotskyists were presently doing inside the Second International. The ICE finished by stating that it would not send any more information to the International Secretariat, given the latter’s ‘fundamental lack of understanding of Spanish affairs’, and that information sent in the past had obviously been ignored.
The final break between the Spanish section and the ICL appeared to have been consummated. However, as far as the International Secretariat was concerned, this was not necessarily the case. Work inside centrist parties could not be completely ruled out. Trotskyists were active in similar parties, such as the RSAP in Holland and the US Workers Party.
In order to get a closer view of exactly what was happening, the International Secretariat sent Jean Rous to Spain during the summer of 1935. After long discussions with Nin and other ICE leaders, Rous made a conciliatory report to the International Secretariat.84 Whilst the new party outside Catalonia would be based more or less solely upon the ICE, he claimed that given the emphasis placed on its orientation towards the Socialist Youth, all was by no means lost. The ICE’s leaders had also agreed to enter into contact with the Fersen-Bilbao group inside the PSOE, as Rous and the International Secretariat wanted.
Moreover, whilst the statutes of the new party did not recognise the right of faction, the Trotskyists would be able to form ‘groups of friends’ in order to pursue their aims. Finally, the Maurínists had effectively declared in favour of the Fourth International, ‘except for the number’, and the former ICE group saw winning the unified party to the new International as one of its principal tasks. So whilst officially there was now no Spanish section of the ICL, Rous concluded that this should be seen as only a ‘momentary disappearance’, and should be considered as a ‘stage on the road towards the constitution of the revolutionary party and the Spanish section of the Fourth International’.
Rous’ report seems to have placated the International Secretariat, at least for the time being. So without dropping its criticisms, the international organisation still considered that it had some links with the members of its former Spanish section. This attitude is clear in Trotsky’s response to the news of the formation of the new party: ‘The new party has been proclaimed. We take note. To the extent that this depends on international factors, we must do everything possible to make this party gain authority and influence. This is possible only through the means of intransigent and consistent Marxism. I am prepared to follow this road, and I am sure of the collaboration of all the comrades of the International Secretariat in all that is asked of us.’85
Nevertheless, the hopes of Trotsky and the International Secretariat of further collaboration proved illusory, and four months later all formal links were broken off with the former Left Communists when the POUM signed the Popular Front pact.
The Politics of the POUM
The POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) was formed on 29 September 1935 at a meeting of the leaders of the BOC and the ICE. A formal unification congress could not be organised because of the conditions of clandestinity forced upon the workers’ movement following the events of October 1934. A Central Committee, consisting of 28 BOC members and 13 from the ICE, was appointed, as was an Executive Committee, consisting of Maurín, Jordi Arquer, Pere Bonet and Josep Rovira from the BOC, and Nin and Molins i Fábrega from the ICE.86
To what extent was the claim of the ICE that the new party ‘adhered to all our fundamental principles’ and Rous’ cautious optimism justified? What can be discounted is the view that the POUM was simply the continuation of the BOC under a different name, and that Maurín had agreed to the fusion of the two organisations solely with the intention of strengthening his party’s leadership with the incorporation of the talented Nin. This line of argument became particularly common among some former BOC leaders after the Civil War as, consistent with their own political trajectory, they scurried towards Social Democracy or worse.87
The Spanish Trotskyists, as we have seen, were
confident that the new party’s programme was theirs. According to the ICE
leadership, in their last letter to the International Secretariat in July 1935:
‘The fusion will take place on the basis of a jointly [original emphasis] elaborated programme, which is the result of discussions that have continued for months, and which contains all our fundamental principles: the affirmation of the international character of the proletarian revolution; the condemnation of the theory of Socialism in one country and of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry; defence of the Soviet Union, but with the absolute right to criticise all the errors of the Soviet leadership; affirmation of the failure of the Second and Third Internationals, and the necessity to re-establish the unity of the international workers’ movement on a new basis.’88
A similar view was expressed privately by Juan Andrade in a letter to the Mexican A González in which he claimed that Maurín ‘had completely corrected his point of view after October 1934, and now coincided with the Trotskyists’.89 On the face of it the programme of the POUM90 differed little from that of the Trotskyists, except on the two major issues of entrism and the Fourth International. Nin was to state publicly that unification had been so easily achieved because there were no ‘fundamental differences’ between the two organisations, and that ‘neither side had made important concessions’.91
Despite the position adopted briefly by the ICE leadership in April 1935 on the question of entry into the Socialist Party, there were a number of factors that convinced the vast majority of the group’s membership that such a tactic was doomed to failure. Experience inside the UGT had shown them that they could expect little tolerance towards any factional activity from the Socialist leaders. The expulsion of the Trotskyists from the Socialist Youth in France helped strengthen this view. Instead, most members of the ICE believed that they had a better chance of influencing the radical elements of the Socialist Party by presenting them with a clear and independent alternative outside the party. During 1935 both the ICE and the BOC, and the POUM once it was founded, orientated strongly towards the left wing Socialists, as can be seen from their press. The party’s publications were read widely among the Socialist Youth,92 and various members of the latter’s leadership expressed their sympathy not only with the ICE and the BOC, but even with the idea of creating a new, ‘fourth’, International.93 Rous’ report in September 1935 reflected the POUM’s emphasis on the need to win over the left wing Socialists.
Nevertheless, the POUM’s influence among the left wing Socialists, particularly the youth, was more apparent than real. Apart from a handful of cases, few Socialist organisations were won over to the new party, the known exceptions being the local branch of the Socialist Youth in Gerena (Andalusia) and the PSOE in Sagunto (Valencia). It seems that in both of these cases the ICE had, in fact, previously entered these organisations.94 Despite the collaboration of various Socialist Youth leaders, including its General Secretary, Santiago Carrillo, in the BOC and POUM press in 1935, and their vague talk in favour of a ‘fourth’ International, none of them was subsequently won over. In fact, they nearly all became ardent Stalinists, as Trotsky had indeed warned could happen. The dramatically changed circumstances of the Civil War were largely what led to this development, and whether entry by the Trotskyists could have alone stopped this is doubtful. The very limited experience of winning over some local Socialist organisations in Gerena and Sagunto proves very little.
Another argument in favour of staying outside the PSOE was the need to win militants from the CNT.95 Obviously, any revolutionary party in Spain had not only to relate to, but win over important sectors of the great mass of militant workers who were organised inside the Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union federation. The Anarchists were traditionally hostile towards the Socialists — and often for good reasons. The Socialist leaders had collaborated with the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, taken part in the repression of the Anarchists when in government from 1931 to 1933, and organised scabbing on CNT-led strikes. An entrist group, therefore, would have arguably found it more difficult to relate to Anarcho-Syndicalist militants than an independent organisation.
The other major criticism initially made by the ICL of the POUM at its formation was its position regarding the Fourth International. The ICE answered by claiming that the BOC was ‘effectively’ in favour of a new revolutionary Socialist International, and that the Trotskyists intended to fight for this position inside the POUM. However, the former ICE leaders never seem to have taken the question of the Fourth International any further, and the new party held to the position previously defended by the BOC.
As we have seen, the BOC had moved towards a generally anti-Stalinist position since 1932, and towards an open identification with the politics of the first four Congresses of the Communist International. In April 1932,96 nearly a year before the first calls of the Trotskyists for a Fourth International, the BOC argued that there was a need for a ‘truly great International’. But this was a fairly vague formulation, and the BOC did not believe that the basis for such an International as yet existed. Instead it favoured cooperation in the short term with the ‘strong minorities’ which existed in many countries which ‘wanted to return to the traditions of Marx and Lenin’.
The BOC consequently supported the international conference organised by the Independent Labour Party in Paris in August 1933. It was the position defended by Maurín at the international conference in favour of an ‘international United Front’, as opposed to creating a new International, that was supported by the majority of the delegates. The conference concluded that it was necessary to reconstruct revolutionary parties in every country before the question of founding a new International could seriously be posed. An International Committee, usually known as the London Bureau, was established to ‘develop common international action between its own sections and with other revolutionary sections of the working class movement with the objective of preparing for the formation of a reconstructed International on a revolutionary Socialist basis’.97
The BOC’s defence of ‘the need to build progressively the base of a new International’98 apparently convinced the ICE leaders and Rous that the BOC’s members could be won over to the idea of the Fourth International. Such optimism proved misfounded, and the POUM leadership continued to have links with the London Bureau. It is worth noting that at least some POUM leaders became extremely critical of the London Bureau during the Civil War, but the subsequent repression of the party prevented this criticism from developing further and into an open split.99
The POUM and the Popular
Front
The insistence of the ICE leaders that they had made few concessions in unifying with the BOC did not convince the International Secretariat for long. The POUM’s signing of the Left Electoral Pact, which became known as the Popular Front, in January 1936 shattered any illusions that the international Trotskyist movement may have had in the nature of the new party.
The reaction of the POUM to the Communist International’s new Popular Front line had been to condemn it outright. When in July 1935 the French Communist Party signed its historic agreement with the Socialists and Radicals, Maurín denounced the Stalinists for negating the ‘historical concept of class struggle’ and reducing the proletariat’s actions to class collaboration.100 Similar attacks on the Popular Front tactic continued to appear unabated in the press of the BOC and then the POUM over the coming months. The former leaders of both the BOC and the ICE appeared to be in complete agreement in rejecting the Popular Front in terms little different from those used by Trotsky.101
The importance of winning the petit-bourgeoisie over
to the side of the proletariat was not underestimated, but this had to be done
on the basis of the workers’ movement maintaining its independence and
defending a revolutionary Socialist programme. The subordination of the
proletariat to the petit-bourgeoisie would only bring defeat. Talk of a struggle
between Fascism and democracy was denounced by the POUM as a dangerous
abstraction, as both were forms of capitalist rule and neither could be treated
as separate entities.
The position of the Communist International, Maurín wrote in May 1936,102 just showed its ‘total incomprehension’ of the nature of Fascism, and would only result in holding back the working class by keeping the struggle within a bourgeois framework, thereby giving the counter-revolution time to prepare itself. ‘In a word’, he concluded, the new line of the official Communists was the ‘repetition of what the Mensheviks had wanted in Russia in 1917’, and the same as the position of reformist Socialism which had led to disaster in Italy, Germany and Austria. Instead, the POUM counterposed Lenin’s position, symbolised by the Bolsheviks’ defence of the democratic republic against Kornilov, whilst submitting its head, Kerensky, to ‘implacable criticism’, and maintaining the complete independence of the proletariat. A handful of former BOC leaders disagreed with this line, abandoned the POUM in December 1935, and later joined the PSUC.103
Given the POUM’s apparently orthodox Marxist critique of the Popular Front, its decision to sign the Left Electoral Pact appears incoherent, to say the least. For the Trotskyist movement it was simply treachery, and only confirmed the vacillating and opportunist politics adhered to by Nin and his comrades since the advent of the Republic. However, little reference was made, or has been made since, to the POUM’s constant attacks on the Popular Front, both before and after the elections. Thus, how the POUM could justify signing an electoral pact which embodied the very politics of class collaboration that it condemned is of some interest.
We have noted how the pressure for workers’ unity had become increasingly intense since October 1934. When new elections were being proposed by late 1935, the idea of some kind of agreement with the Republicans, at least in order to obtain an amnesty for the 30 000 or so political prisoners, was very popular throughout the workers’ movement, even among the Anarcho-Syndicalists. But as the POUM continually pointed out, recognition of the need for an electoral agreement with the left wing Republicans to defeat the right at the polls was not the same thing as political capitulation to the petit-bourgeoisie. It appeared, however, that some of the Republican leaders had regained much of their earlier popularity since their imprisonment after the October events. The former Prime Minister, Azaña, attracted gigantic crowds to a series of open air rallies during the autumn of 1935. But the POUM did not consider this to reflect a new upsurge of mass support for the Republicans. The ‘immense majority’ of those attending these meetings were ‘revolutionary workers’ drawn there because of the lack of any other means of public protest. Azaña saw stretched out before him ‘thousands of clenched fists and red flags’.104
The BOC had favoured the Workers’ Alliances presenting lists in any eventual elections. But the hostility of the Syndicalists (the Treintistas) to such an idea, and the ambiguous attitude of the PSOE towards the Alliances, meant that these lists were never drawn up. By the summer of 1935 the future POUM leaders were openly recognising the need for some form of agreement with the petit-bourgeois left, albeit purely circumstantial and without the workers’ organisations making any concessions over their political independence.105
The POUM now wanted to form a Workers’ Front with other workers’ parties, which in turn would reach a tactical agreement with the Republicans.106 But such a Front failed to materialise. With the fall of the right wing government in mid-December 1935 and the subsequent calling of elections, a coalition of the Republicans, the PSOE and the PCE appeared inevitable. The POUM offered to support such an alliance, but only if it was transitory, and aimed at ‘defeating the counter-revolution at the polls’, securing an amnesty for all political prisoners, and re-establishing the Catalan Statute of Autonomy. If the electoral pact did not meet these requirements, then the POUM warned that it would stand alone.107
Yet in the coming weeks the POUM’s principled stand collapsed, and it ended up signing the very moderate and completely Republican programme of the Left Electoral Pact. Deliberately excluded by the right wing Socialists and the PCE from the meetings which drew up the electoral agreement, the POUM was presented with a fait accompli. It could either sign or not, it had no influence over the basis of the pact. The left wing Socialists, who had been most vociferous in opposing a renovated version of the old Socialist-Republican alliance of 1931-33, surrendered without a fight when faced with the ‘realities’ of the electoral system. On 15 January, after some last minute telephone calls to Barcelona,108 the ex-ICE leader Juan Andrade signed the pact in the name of the POUM.
This apparent about-face was justified in a number of ways. At the beginning of 1936 the POUM Executive Committee had expressed itself ‘extraordinarily interested in obtaining parliamentary representation’ which would allow the party to defend a ‘class position’ in the Spanish parliament, the Cortes.109 This would, it was hoped, also give them more leverage over the PSOE, thereby helping to draw closer to them sections of the left wing Socialists. The POUM leaders were disposed to defend their party’s right to be included in the electoral lists where they claimed to be strong — Asturias, Badajoz, Castellon, Huesca, Valencia and, above all, Catalonia. Nevertheless, given the lack of any real influence of the POUM inside the coalition, its representatives found all their proposals blocked, and in the end it was forced to accept places only in the lists of Barcelona, Cadiz and Teruel. Positions in the latter two provinces could not be taken seriously, because the POUM had virtually no members in either area.
When Nin and Gorkin arrived in Teruel and Cadiz respectively to participate in the election campaign, they found the local Socialist, Communist and Republican organisations completely unwilling to collaborate with them. Faced with this situation, the POUM candidates decided to withdraw on the grounds that, as they declared publicly, their presence could only create divisions and help the right.110 This left the POUM with Maurín in Barcelona as its sole representative.
The isolation of the POUM inside the Left Electoral Pact could not have been clearer, not only on a state-wide level but also in Catalonia. Despite the party’s optimism that its influence in the region would force the rest of the Catalan left to make concessions, this had not happened. Instead, because both the Catalan left wing Republicans and other workers’ parties saw the POUM as a rival, they sought to minimise its influence in the electoral lists. Hence the left wing nationalists were able to impose an agreement that left the POUM and the far weaker Catalan organisations of the PCE and the PSOE, along with the Catalan Proletarian Party, with one representative each. The Catalan Socialist Union, the only other workers’ party with any presence in the region apart from the unquestionably stronger POUM, and a faithful ally of the Catalan Republicans, was given four candidates in the pact’s list in Catalonia.111
Further justification for signing the pact was added by Andrade, who stated that the POUM and the left wing Socialists had been forced to recognise the ‘material existence of an electoral law’ that had obliged them to make ‘provisional agreements’ with the left wing Republicans ‘to avoid the victory of the bourgeoisie’.112 Andrade blamed the left wing Socialists for the programme of the coalition. Yet the desire of the POUM to enter parliament in order to promote revolutionary propaganda, the electoral law, and the failings of the left wing Socialists cannot justify the party’s decision to sign the pact. Given the political situation, the POUM had little choice but to support the pact against the right, but the only viable way to do this without confusing the party’s position was to do so independently from outside. Instead, for a lone voice in the Cortes, the pact was signed.
Even at this stage the POUM tried to impose some conditions on its participation in the coalition. The party rejected any limits on its own independent activity in the election campaign, and any collaboration in any future left wing government. It believed that once the elections were over, the best safeguard for the future was the unity of all factions in the workers’ movement, and for the continuance of a Workers’ Front based on the PSOE, the PCE and the POUM. The workers could expect no more than ‘vague promises’ from the Republicans, and the pact should ‘end on the day the election finished’.113
During the election campaign, the POUM persisted with a revolutionary message which had little to do with the electoral pact it had signed. According to the party press, the crowds which flocked to the left’s election meetings ‘listened with indifference, if not coldness, to the petit-bourgeoisie’, but, in contrast, reacted enthusiastically to the ‘revolutionary class language of October 1934’.114
Maurín, speaking to a ‘wildly enthusiastic’ crowd of 5000 in a Madrid cinema bedecked with giant portraits of Lenin and Trotsky, presented a singularly radical interpretation of the electoral campaign:
‘On the one side is the Socialist-democratic front, and on the other only thieves and murderers... We are going to the elections thinking not only of our dead and prisoners, but also of the victory of our revolution that will trace a diagonal line through Europe between Madrid and Moscow that will contribute to the sinking of Fascism throughout the world.’115
Jordi Arquer, speaking to a meeting of 12 000 in Barcelona, declared that the POUM did not ‘counterpose bourgeois democracy to Fascism, but Communism... the dictatorship of the proletariat’.116
The triumph of the left in the elections was greeted by the POUM as a great victory for the workers and peasants, and an important defeat for the counter-revolution. The POUM stressed that the success of the left was neither a victory for bourgeois democracy, nor did it represent mass support for petit-bourgeois Republicanism, but was a by-product of the revolutionary struggle of October 1934. The party was equally quick to point out that any new Republican government would be no better than the last. In fact, given the depth of the economic and social crisis by 1936, this new all-Republican administration, the POUM predicted, would be worse than that of 1931-33. Any attempt to carry out even the mildest aspects of the left’s electoral programme would provoke the fiercest resistance from the ruling classes. Two roads stood before the masses — that of Germany and Austria, and that of Asturias.117
Over the next few months the POUM continued to argue that revolution was the only solution open to the working masses. However, it also recognised that an important sector of the masses still had illusions in the Popular Front. The best way to dispel these illusions, the POUM claimed, was for a ‘true Popular Front’ government to be formed, involving all those who believed in such a solution — Republicans, Socialists and Stalinists. The formation of such a government, it was hoped, would show the impossibility of either solving the demands of the workers and peasants, or of dealing with the counter-revolution, through parliamentary reform.118
The masses themselves, both in spite of and because of the election victory of the Popular Front, were increasingly taking matters into their own hands. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1936 there was a massive wave of strikes and land occupations. The counter-revolution also began to prepare its move, both inside the army and on the streets. Faced with this situation, the Republicans, enthusiastically supported by the PCE and the right wing Socialists, opposed most strikes and land occupations, and called on the workers not to take any action that could ‘put the democratic Republic in danger’. At the same time the government did little to curtail the widely known activities of the military plotters, and instead generally tried to placate them.
The POUM unceasingly denounced the attempts of the Stalinists and the Social Democrats to subordinate the workers’ movement to petit-bourgeois Republicanism. Given the circumstances, Nin had written soon after the elections, it was ‘a crime and a betrayal’ to demand that the working class should renounce its maximum aspiration — the destruction of the bourgeois state and the conquest of state power — in the name of ‘consolidating the Republic’. This did not mean that the working class should launch itself on some ‘putschist adventure’, as the Anarchists would have liked to organise, nor did the fact that the conquest of power was not immediately on the agenda mean that it was a remote possibility, and that the masses should therefore limit themselves to a struggle for reforms. Instead, Nin concluded, in the short term it was necessary to create the conditions for the conquest of power, and this meant ‘forging the necessary arms for such a victory’ — the Workers’ Alliance and the revolutionary party — with the workers’ movement maintaining its complete ideological and organisational independence.119
Thus, from when the Communist International first broached its Popular Front policy through to the eve of the Civil War, the POUM maintained an orthodox Marxist position which apparently differed little from that defended by the ICL. Nevertheless, by signing the Left Electoral Pact, it put this position in doubt. Subsequent events during the war were to expose further the POUM’s weaknesses in this respect.
The Final Break
The signing of the Left Electoral Pact by the POUM signalled the final break between the ICL and the former ICE members. On 23 January 1936 Trotsky, after some months’ silence on the Spanish situation, attacked the POUM and its betrayal of the proletariat ‘for the sake of an alliance with the bourgeoisie’.120 As far as the international Trotskyist movement was concerned, there could no longer be any lingering illusion that the decision of the ICE to fuse with the BOC was justified. The former ICE, Trotsky wrote, ‘had turned into a mere tail of the “left” bourgeoisie’. It was hard to ‘conceive of a more ignominious downfall’. More harsh criticism followed, and Trotsky returned to the question of entry into the PSOE. The ex-ICE should be ‘stigmatised forever as criminals against the revolution’ for ‘having permitted the splendid Young Socialists to pass over to Stalinism’. The task of the Spanish supporters of the Fourth International was, on the one hand, to enter the PSOE and the Socialist Youth and, on the other, to ‘grasp in full the wretchedness of the leadership of the POUM... especially of the former Left Communists’.121
Trotsky also turned his attention to Maurín’s concept of the ‘Socialist-democratic revolution’,122 the theoretical basis of the POUM’s analysis of the Spanish Revolution. Neither Trotsky nor the ICL had singled out this aspect of the POUM’s politics when the unification process was taking place during 1935. Not even Rous, who had the closest contacts with the former Spanish section in the summer of that year, had made the slightest mention of it. The old Bolshevik leader now described Maurín’s theory as an ‘eclectic hodge-podge’. Trotsky argued that the ‘democratic and Socialist revolutions’ were, as the October Revolution in 1917 had shown, ‘on opposite sides of the barricades’. Not only had the democratic revolution been carried out in Spain, but the Popular Front was ‘renewing it’. The Socialist revolution could only be made by an uncompromising struggle against the ‘democratic’ revolution and its Popular Front. Maurín’s ‘synthetic democratic-Socialist revolution’ meant nothing.123
But what exactly was Maurín’s position?124 In the late 1920s Maurín had argued that the coming Spanish revolution would be democratic. This revolution would complete the ‘unfinished tasks’ of the bourgeois revolution — self-determination for the national minorities, land to the peasants, the separation of church and state, the disarming of the old monarchist army, etc. However, given the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie, only the working class, with the support of the peasants and national liberation movements could bring about such a revolution. Under the leadership of the proletariat, this democratic revolution would immediately develop into a Socialist revolution. The link between the democratic and Socialist stages of the revolution was to be given more emphasis in Maurín’s analysis following the events of October 1934. The term ‘Socialist-democratic’ rather than just ‘democratic’ was then adopted to describe the coming Spanish revolution.125
The Trotskyists had criticised Maurín’s position in the early 1930s as being ‘stagism’, ‘pre-1917 Bolshevism’ and even ‘reactionary’.126 Instead the ICE consistently defended the need to raise democratic slogans that would open up the road to Socialist revolution. Nin, however, shared Maurín’s view that the bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out the bourgeois revolution, and that the tasks of the democratic revolution could only be carried out by the proletariat with the support of the peasants. ‘To demand that the democratic revolution is really carried out’, he wrote at the end of 1931, ‘must be our battle cry today.’127 Thus the positions of the ICE and the BOC at this stage do not appear to be so different.
The content of the POUM’s position in 1935 was little different from that of Nin’s of 1931, that the democratic and Socialist revolutions remained completely inseparable. An article by Maurín attacking the concept of the Popular Front, which was published in the party’s theoretical journal in May 1936, emphasises this point. Contrary to what the Socialists and Communists believe, the present revolution, he wrote, ‘is not bourgeois-democratic but Socialist-democratic, or to be precise, Socialist’. For Maurín, his position was that of the Bolsheviks: ‘Whilst reformist Socialism, Menshevism, saw the Russian revolution as a bourgeois democratic revolution, revolutionary Marxism, represented by Lenin and Trotsky, believed that the proletariat must conquer political power in order to carry through the bourgeois revolution that the bourgeoisie is incapable of doing, and to initiate the Socialist revolution.’
Like other writings by POUM leaders at this time, the whole article demolishes the absolutely un-Marxist nature of the official Communist position — its abstract separation of democracy, Fascism and Socialism. Only the working class could install true democracy, and for the POUM this was inseparable from the Socialist revolution. Maurín concluded:
‘The seizure of power by the working class will entail the realisation of the democratic revolution that the bourgeoisie will not make — the liberation of the land and of the nationalities, the destruction of the church, the economic emancipation of women, the improvement of the material and moral situation of the workers — and at the same time it will initiate the Socialist revolution, nationalising the land, transport, mines, heavy industry and the banks.’128
Without wishing to enter here into the exactitude of the POUM’s analysis, it is apparent from Trotsky’s writings that he was only superficially aware of what Maurín was arguing. The term ‘Socialist-democratic’ is, however, hardly edifying. In fact, Trotsky effectively dismisses the POUM leader’s position as little more than a grotesque justification for the decision of his party to sign the Popular Front programme.
The international Trotskyist movement may have
broken unequivocally from its former Spanish section, but this did not spare
the POUM from the anti-Trotskyist phobia of the Stalinists. The campaign of
abuse and slander, as well as physical assaults, which was to come to its
bloody climax a year later during the Civil War, was well under way by the
spring of 1936. The POUM was the ‘enemy of the Soviet Union and the Popular
Front’, and ‘paid by Fascist gold’.129
The true significance of these attacks was, as yet, not clear. The POUM,
unimpressed by the histrionics of the traditionally weak official Communist
movement, confidently asserted in April 1936 that ‘experienced militants had
nothing to fear’ from such abuse.130
Unlike during the war, when the most right wing local sections of the POUM used their press to insist that they had ‘nothing to do with Trotskyism’, prior to the military uprising the party was far less defensive in its response to Stalinist attacks. Articles by Trotsky continued to appear occasionally in the POUM press,131 and in March 1936 Gorkin praised the old Bolshevik’s ‘magnificent’ analysis in 1931 of the ‘historic causes of Spanish backwardness’.132 Local POUM branches, especially those composed of ex-ICE members, were even more enthusiastic in their references to Trotsky, the only former Bolshevik leader who still ‘held high the banner of international revolution’.133
In even starker contrast to Trotsky’s denunciation of the POUM and its leaders, was an article by Maurín in La Batalla on 1 May 1936, entitled ‘I am not a Trotskyist, but...’. Replying to the Stalinist campaign against himself and his party, Maurín explained that whilst they were not Trotskyists, they were not insulted by being described as such. Despite disagreeing with Trotsky on a number of questions, this ‘could not cloud the truth’ that he had been and still was, in Maurín’s words, ‘one of the best organised brains that the Socialist movement has produced’. Not only was he not a counter-revolutionary, but he was the ‘man of October’ and the ‘major Bolshevik leader after Lenin’. In contrast the POUM leader listed many non-revolutionary aspects of Stalin’s policies, from the ‘division of the German working class’ through to his new-found patriotism and support for the League of Nations. Maurín concluded that although he was not a Trotskyist himself, ‘Trotsky stood head and shoulders above this rabble of Johnny-come-lately so-called revolutionaries’ who now led the Communist International.
Conclusions
The subsequent development of the POUM in the Civil War and the revolution — particularly its participation in the Catalan government and its relations with the CNT — was to lead historically to a general condemnation of this party by the Trotskyist movement as opportunist and centrist. According to this view, the roots of this centrism were to be found in the politics of the ICE since its foundation, not to mention those of the BOC. But between 1930 and 1935 the ICE undoubtedly constituted the most advanced section of the Spanish workers’ movement. Its analysis of the Spanish situation was unmatched by any other organisation, and it had within its ranks many of the most able cadres of Spanish Communism.
Far from being so inherently opportunist, as the ICE has often been portrayed, its politics were in general a constant defence of revolutionary Marxism. Its decision to unite with the BOC has also been presented as a break from these politics. Yet to evaluate the trajectory of the ICE it is necessary to take into account both the objective circumstances and how the Spanish Trotskyists, wrongly or rightly, understood them. The events of October 1934, the massive pressure for unity, the clarification of certain aspects of the BOC’s politics, and the isolation of the ICE provided the impetus for unification. Most importantly, the ICE leaders were aware of the weaknesses of the BOC, but were confident that they could draw its militants even closer to revolutionary Marxism.
Given the subsequent development of the POUM, it may appear that they were clearly mistaken. However, in 1935 there were a number of reasons to believe that this was not the case. The fact that such experienced revolutionaries as Nin and Andrade and the International Secretariat representative Rous were convinced that the new party’s programme would be based on revolutionary Marxism was not purely due to wishful thinking on their part. Even a cursory glance, let alone a more thorough reading, of the POUM’s publications between September 1935 and July 1936 reinforces this view. But formal programmes alone do not make a revolutionary party — as the war would show. There were a number of key weaknesses in the politics of the BOC which would bear fruit during the war. The signing of the Left Electoral Pact — even allowing for the POUM’s overall critique of the Popular Front — was a sign of things to come.
Despite being in a minority, the ICE leaders thought that there were reasons to be optimistic. Above all, Andrade’s claim that Maurín had ‘completely corrected his point of view’ and adopted the positions of the ICE,134 and Maurín’s intellectual and political domination of the BOC were central to the belief of the ICE that it could have a decisive influence over the new party. The loss of Maurín at the beginning of the war was a serious setback for the former Trotskyists.135 Jealous of Nin’s personal influence inside the party, and lacking Maurín’s political sophistication, many of the ex-BOC leaders, who naturally made up the majority of the POUM’s Executive Committee, reverted to their mistrustful and generally hostile attitude towards the ‘Trotskyists’.
External pressures in the form of the Stalinists’ campaign against the party strengthened this tendency. Despite Nin’s individual prestige, the party was too new and the ex-ICE members too few to shift the balance of forces inside the POUM in such a short time. Worse still, the most important groups of former ICE militants, apart from those in Madrid, were annihilated in the Fascist onslaught during the first days of the war. This was most notably the case in Estremadura, Seville, Salamanca and Galicia. Of those who survived the first days of the military uprising, the groups of former Trotskyists in the north of Spain — the Basque Country, Santander and Asturias — were isolated from the rest of the Republican zone, and they were destroyed in Franco’s victorious offensive in this area during the first half of 1937.
The most important group of former Trotskyists that still remained was in Madrid, but three-quarters of them died in the desperate defence of the capital in the autumn of 1936. This effectively left the small Catalan group, which was overwhelmingly outnumbered by the ex-BOC rank and file. The remnants of the ICE remained, with few exceptions, in silent opposition to the POUM leadership during the war. Only after the conflict did the latent conflicts inside the POUM come to the surface. Those former Trotskyist militants who survived the Civil War, the Stalinist terror and the Nazi terror in exile, were to be prominent in the left wing of the party during the 1940s. A few would later rejoin Trotskyist groups.
Of course, it was not just the ICE and an enlightened Maurín that gave rise to the belief that the POUM would become a full-blown revolutionary party. There were many BOC militants who were genuine revolutionaries, especially amongst the youth. It can be argued that neither the ICE nor the POUM were inevitably lost to revolutionary Marxism. Rous believed this in 1935, as did many foreign revolutionaries, most of whom were former or ‘dissident’ Trotskyists, during the Civil War. Even Trotsky himself did not rule out a reconciliation between the POUM and the Trotskyist movement during the summer of 1936.136 But Nin’s entrance into the Catalan government that October put an end to such a possibility.
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Notes
1. It is not the aim of
this article to comment on Trotsky’s extensive and generally excellent writings
on Spain between 1930 and 1940.
2. References to much,
although not all, of the material cited in this article can also be found in P
Pagès, El movimiento trotskista en España
1930-1935, Barcelona, 1977, and Pierre Broué’s extensive notes and
appendices to the Spanish edition of Trotsky’s writings on Spain, La revolución española, two volumes,
Barcelona, 1977.
3. V Alba, Dos revolucionarios, Madrid, 1975, p358.
We know of the existence of OCE groups at this time in Madrid, Bilbao, Asturias
and, perhaps, Valencia.
4. On Nin’s life in Moscow
at this time, cf V Serge, Memoirs of a
Revolutionary, Oxford, 1975, pp275-6.
5. Munis and Cid were
members of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the Civil War, Cid being
killed during the ‘May Days’ in Barcelona in 1937. Biographies of most of the
leading militants of the OCE can be found in Trotsky, op cit, Volume 2,
pp529-43.
6. According to one
Communist International leader at the time, Piatnitsky, the PCE had only 120
members by 1930 (Communist International,
20 February 1934).
7. An anthology of the most
important articles from Comunismo was
published in Madrid in 1978.
8. P Pagès, op cit,
pp70-94.
9. La Batalla, 5 June 1936, states that the POUM had 122 members in
Llerena at this time.
10. The PCE’s own membership
figures are notoriously unreliable. According to its own figures, the party
grew from around 3000 members in May 1931 to 8800 by the end of that year. By
February 1936 there were supposedly 20 000 members, and 83 967 in July, on the
eve of the Civil War.
11. Cf LD Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, New
York, 1973, pp370-400.
12. J Maurín, La revolución española, originally
published in 1931, and republished in Barcelona, 1977; Hacia la segunda revolución, originally published in 1935,
republished as Revolución y
contrarrevolución en españa, Paris, 1966.
13. La Batalla, 12 February 1931. The demands in the FCC-B’s first Political Thesis are similar to those
contained in Trotsky’s pamphlet The
Revolution in Spain (cf The Spanish
Revolution 1931-39, op cit, pp67-89). Nin mentioned his participation in
writing the Thesis in a letter to Trotsky dated 17 January 1931 (ibid,
pp371-2). Molins i Fábrega speaks of how Maurín and other BOC leaders read
Trotsky’s letters whilst in prison with Nin, cf ‘Una linea política: el Bloque
Obrero y Campesino’, Comunismo, April
1932.
14. La Batalla, 19 and 26 March 1931.
15. Cf Trotsky’s letter to
Nin, 15 March 1931, The Spanish
Revolution 1931-39, op cit, p386.
16. According to Molinier the
Catalan group had a dozen members at this time. Cf R Molinier, Rapport sur la delegation en Espagne, 21
September 1931.
17. La Batalla, 12 November 1931. The Trotskyist faction’s own account
can be found in the document Organización Comunista de Izquierda, Por la unidad de todos los comunistas de
España, Barcelona, December 1931.
18. L Fersen, ‘Acerca del
congreso de la FCC-B’, Comunismo,
April 1932.
19. La Verité, 13 June 1930; El
Soviet, 15 October 1931.
20. Cf for example the BOC’s
‘Organisation Thesis’, La Batalla, 11
May 1933.
21. A Nin, ‘¿Bloque, partido u
organización de simpatizantes?’, Comunismo,
January 1932.
22. La Batalla, 4 July 1931; J Maurín, La revolución española, op cit, p128.
23. ‘Tesis sobre las
nacionalidades’, Comunismo, April
1932; N Molins i Fábrega, ‘La posición política y fuerzas del Bloque Obrero y
Campesino’, Comunismo, December 1931.
24. J Maurín, La revolución española, op cit, p168.
25. See the article by Nin,
‘Los comunistas y el momento presente. A propósito de unas declaraciones de
Maurín’, El Soviet, 22 October 1931;
‘¿A donde va el Bloque Obrero y Campesino?’, Comunismo, September 1931; ‘La huelga general de Barcelona’, Comunismo, October 1931. Cf L Fersen,
‘El congreso del BOC’, Comunismo,
March 1932.
26. La Batalla, 30 July 1931.
27. Underestimation of the
Catalan CNT became widespread on the Spanish Marxist left. Nin claimed in May
1936 that the Anarcho-Syndicalists had ‘definitely lost their hegemony’ over
the region’s labour movement’ (La Batalla,
15 May 1936). The CNT’s dramatic loss of members in Catalonia between 1931 and
1936 — from 300 000 to 140 000, according to its own undoubtedly inflated
figures — led many to believe mistakenly that the Anarcho-Syndicalists were
losing their grip over the Catalan workers’ movement. Such a view is also
expressed by a member of the Bolshevik-Leninist group during the war, cf G
Munis, Jalones de derrota, promesa de
victoria, Madrid, 1977, first published in Mexico in 1948, p118.
28. N Molins i Fábrega, ‘La
posición política y las fuerzas del Bloque Obrero y Campesino’, Comunismo, December 1931.
29. Comunismo, July 1933.
30. La Antorcha, 30 June 1934; LD Trotsky, ‘A Narrow or a Broad Faction’,
The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op
cit, p165.
31. La Batalla, 17 September 1931.
32. J Maurín, ‘La quiebra del
trotskismo’, La Batalla, 26 October
1933.
33. La Batalla, 22 and 29 December 1932, 27 April 1933 and 26 October
1933.
34. La Batalla, 22 December 1932; J Maurín, ‘Trotsky al pais d’Hamlet’,
Front, 17 December 1932.
35. R Molinier, op cit.
36. Cf Nin’s letter to
Trotsky, 7 November 1931, The Spanish
Revolution 1931-39, op cit, p380.
37. P Pagès, op cit, p127.
38. There is no known
documentary evidence of the immediate reaction of the International
Secretariat, except the testimony of Ignacio Iglesias of the Asturias ICE many
years later, cf P Pagès, op cit, p128, but, given the subsequent development of
relations between the International Secretariat and the ICE, Iglesias’ version
seems very plausible.
39. Comunismo, April 1932.
40. ‘Informe sobre el caso
Lacroix’, Boletín interior de la
Izquierda Comunista de España, 15 July 1933.
41. G Vereeken, The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement,
London, 1976, pp48-67.
42. Both documents were
published in the Lacroix faction’s bulletin, Boletín interior de discusión del Comité Regional de Castilla la Nueva
y del Comité Nacional de Jovenes de la Izquierda Comunista Española, 3
January 1933.
43. ‘La Izquierda Comunista
Española y los grupos de Rosmer y Landau’, Comunismo,
September 1932.
44. Boletín interior de discusión..., 2 December 1932.
45. Both the Regional
Committee of New Castille and the National Committee of the ICE Youth consisted
of the same six militants, and were effectively set up by Lacroix to fight the
Executive Committee. Cf P Pagès, op cit, p134.
46. ‘Ante una grave situación
de la ICE’, Boletín interior de
discusión..., February 1933.
47. ‘Informe sobre el caso
Lacroix’, op cit.
48. P Pagès, op cit, p145.
49. Ibid.
50. ‘Arlen’ was the pseudonym
of an army officer who had joined the OCE from the PCE. Although he maintained
correspondence with Trotsky during 1933, he had left the ICE at the end of
1932. In 1936 he refused to accept the command of the POUM militia in Madrid,
leading a Socialist unit instead. Cf LD Trotsky, La revolución española, Volume 2, pp530-1, P Pagès, op cit, p135.
51. P Pagès, op cit, p148.
52. LD Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op cit,
p194. A copy of this letter was also sent to Nin.
53. Op cit, pp198-201.
54. P Pagès, op cit, p147.
55. According to Broué (LD
Trotsky, La revolución española,
Volume 1, p269n) most of Lacroix’s group stayed inside the ICE. One member,
Grandizo Munis, became a leader of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists during the
Civil War; another, Gomila, joined the Falange. Cf P Pagès, op cit, p148.
56. El Socialista, 29 September 1933.
57. It has been possible to
verify Lacroix’s signature. The letter, dated 15 July 1933, can be found in the
Archive of the Central Committee of the PCE in Madrid. The previous day (14
July) Lacroix had written to the party complaining that he had yet to receive
an answer to his request of ‘some days before’ to ‘rejoin’ the PCE, the ‘only
true Communist organisation’ that existed in Spain. He added that there were
‘many honourable workers’ in the ‘so-called opposition’, with whom he could put
the PCE in contact, who were waiting for the decision of the party leadership
on his case before joining the party.
58. G Vereeken, op cit, p66.
59. LD Trotsky, La revolución española, Volume 2, op
cit, p536.
60. G Vereeken, op cit,
pp59-60.
61. ‘Al pleno internacional de
la Oposición de Izquierda’, Boletín
interior de la ICE, 5 September 1933.
62. Boletín interior de la ICE, 20 November 1933
63. Comunismo, September 1934.
64. The CEDA (Spanish
Confederation of Autonomous Rightist Groups) was created in 1932 and was
similar ideologically to Dollfüss’ reactionary Social Christian Party in
Austria. Its youth organisation increasingly adopted Fascist methods during the
years prior to the Civil War, and later most of its members passed over to the
Falange.
65. Cf Maurín, ‘Necesidad de
la unificación nacional e internacional del movimiento comunista’, ‘Tesis
Frente Unico’, La Batalla, 18 May
1933.
66. La Batalla, 2 June 1932.
67. ‘Necesidad de la
unificación nacional...’, La Batalla,
29 December 1932, 12 January and 9
February 1933.
68. J Maurín, Revolución y contrarrevolución..., op
cit, p108.
69. LD Trotsky, La revolución española, Volume 1, op
cit, pp287-8.
70. J Maurín, ‘La capitulación
de la Internacional Comunista’, La
Batalla, 2 August 1934.
71. The term ‘social Fascism’
was periodically used as an insult by the BOC without it ever becoming part of
its general analysis. Maurín never used this term in his writings between 1930
and 1932.
72. For the ICE’s change of
line see the writings of the Basque Trotskyists, Jose Luis and Jose Maria
Arenillas, republished in 1981 in Barcelona under the title of Sobre la cuestion nacional en Euskadi,
and also JM Arenillas, The Basque
Country: The National Question and the Socialist Revolution, ILP pamphlet,
Leeds, 1974. Trotsky, however, had always supported the right of
self-determination for the Basque Country. Cf ‘The Revolution in Spain’, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op cit,
p78.
73. This point was made by
Andrade in his preface to A Nin, Los
problemas de la revolución española, Paris, 1971, p7.
74. Republished in 1966 as Revolución y contrarrevolución en España.
75. According to one local BOC
leader, it had around 50 members in the region in 1934. Cf M Grossi, La insurrección de Asturias, republished
in 1979 in Madrid, p14.
76. L’Hora, 26 January 1935.
77. P Pagès, op cit, p261.
78. ‘Resolución del CE de la
ICE’, Boletín interior de la ICE, 25
April 1935.
79. Roures i Tossal (Francesc
de Cabo and Amadeu Robles — AD), ‘Los deberes de la ICE ante el momento
actual’, Boletín interior de la ICE,
25 April 1935.
80. J Rous, ‘Rapport sur la
fusion de la Gauche Communiste d’Espagne (Section de la LCI) et le BOC (Bloc
ouvrier et paysan, Maurín)’, September 1935. A copy of this report appears in
Spanish in LD Trotsky, La revolución
española, Volume 2, op cit, pp362-70.
81. LD Trotsky, ‘On Entry into
the Spanish Socialist Party’, and ‘Passivity in the Face of Great Events’, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op cit,
pp202, 206.
82. ‘Carta del Secretariado
Internacional al Comite Ejecutivo de la ICE’, Boletín interior de la ICE, 1 August 1935.
83. ‘Carta del Comite Nacional
al Secretariado Internacional’, 21 July 1935, Boletín interior de la ICE, 1 August 1935.
84. J Rous, ‘Rapport...’ op
cit.
85. Referred to in ibid.
86. Boletín del Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, October 1935.
87. The argument that the POUM
was merely an extension of the BOC under another name is sustained chiefly by
Victor Alba in his El Marxismo en España,
Volume 1, Mexico, 1973, pp230-1, and J Coll and J Pané, Josep Rovira: Una vida al servei de Catalunya i del socialisme,
Barcelona, 1978, p53. In a letter to Alba dated 27 February 1972, Maurín
claimed that the principle reason for founding the POUM was to obtain the
collaboration of Nin, cf V Alba, Dos
Revolucionarios, op cit, p204.
88. ‘Carta del Comite Nacional
al Secretariado Internacional’, op cit.
89. Andrade’s letter, dated 29
June 1935, is reprinted in LD Trotsky, La
revolución española, Volume 2, op cit, pp348-52.
90. POUM, Què és què vol el Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista, Barcelona,
1936.
91. A Nin, ‘Un pacto de
unificación firme y sincero’, La Batalla,
19 July 1935.
92. Interview with Wilebaldo
Solano, 4 July 1986.
93. P Pagès, op cit, p254-8.
94. POUM, Acta del Comité Central, 5-6 January 1936; La Batalla, 22 May 1936.
95. Boletín interior de la ICE, 15 March 1935.
96. La Batalla, 14 April 1932.
97. La Batalla, 7, 14 and 21 September 1933; Revolutionary Socialist Bulletin, January 1936.
98. J Maurín, ‘La capitulación
de la Internacional Comunista’, La
Batalla, 2 August 1934.
99. See for example the letters
sent by ‘Rosalio Negrette’ (Russell Blackwell) from Barcelona to Hugo Oehler,
leader of the US Revolutionary Workers League, between November 1936 and
January 1937.
100. J Maurín, ‘Las relaciones
del proletariado con los partidos pequeños burguesas’, La Batalla, 19 July 1935.
101. Of the many articles by POUM
leaders against the Popular Front, the most interesting appeared in the party’s
theoretical journal, La Nueva Era,
for instance: J Arquer, ‘¿Frente popular antifascista o frente unico obrero?’ (February
1936); J Maurín, ‘¿Revolución democraticoburguesa o revolución
democratico-socialista?’ (May 1936); JL Arenillas, ‘Las clases medias en su
relación con el proletariado’ (July 1936).
102. J Maurín, ‘¿Revolución
democraticoburguesa o revolución democratico-socialista?’, op cit.
103. This group amounted to 40
militants at most, but it included several former BOC leaders such as Miquel
Ferrer, who was later to be General Secretary of the Catalan UGT during the
war, and Victor Colomer, who had been a founding member of the FCC-B and the
PCC, and a close collaborator of Maurín’s.
104. J Gorkin, ‘Retrato político
de Azaña’, La Nueva Era, June 1936.
105. For example see J Maurín,
‘Como se plantea entre nosotros la cuestión de las relaciones del movimiento obrero
con los partidos pequeños burguesas’, La
Batalla, 26 July 1935.
106. La Batalla, 15 November 1935.
107. La Batalla, 27 December 1935.
108. R Fraser, Blood of Spain, London, 1979, p566.
109. POUM, Acta del Comité Central, 5-6 January 1936.
110. Ibid; La Batalla, 14 and 21 February 1936.
111. By 1936 the USC had around
2000 members, the Catalan PCE less than 500 (they claimed four times that
figure), the Catalan Federation of the PSOE had 300, and the PCP had less than
100. The POUM had 6000 members in Catalonia on the eve of the Civil War, and
perhaps another 1000 in the rest of Spain.
112. J Andrade, ‘El Partido
Obrero de Unificación Marxista y el alcance y significación del bloque de
izquierdas’, La Batalla, 24 January
1936.
113. Ibid.
114. La Batalla, 7 February 1936.
115. La Batalla, 14 February 1936.
116. La Batalla , 10 January 1936.
117. Comité Ejecutivo del POUM
and Comité Central de la JCI, ‘Ante la nueva situación política. A todos los
trabajadores’, 10 March 1936, La Batalla,
13 March 1936.
118. La Batalla, 10 April 1936; cf Maurín’s speech in the Cortes on 15
April 1936, in J Maurín, Intervenciones
parlamentarias, Barcelona, 1937, pp7-11.
119. A Nin, ‘Depues de las
elecciones del 16 de Febrero’, La Nueva
Era, February 1936.
120. LD Trotsky, ‘The Treachery
of the POUM’, 23 January 1936, The
Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op cit, p209.
121. LD Trotsky, ‘Tasks of the
Fourth International in Spain’, 12 April 1936, op cit, pp211-4.
122. Maurín’s ‘revolución
democratico-socialista’ has usually been translated as ‘democratic Socialist’,
however ‘Socialist-democratic’ is a more accurate translation.
123. LD Trotsky, ‘Tasks of the
Fourth International in Spain’, op cit.
124. The first major exposition
by Maurín on the nature of the ‘democratic revolution’ can be found in his book
La revolución española, published
late in 1931.
125. Cf J Maurín, Hacia la segunda revolución, op cit.
126. L Fersen, ‘El frente contra
comunismo’, Comunismo, August 1931;
‘El congreso del Bloque Obrero y Campesino’, Comunismo, March 1932.
127. A Nin, El proletariado español ante la revolución, Barcelona, 1931.
128. J Maurín, ‘¿Revolución
democraticoburguesa o revolución democratico-socialista?’, op cit.
129. La Batalla, 17 April 1936.
130. La Batalla, 10 April 1936.
131. La Batalla, 13 September, 4 October and 8 November 1935; La Nueva Era, February, May and July
1936.
132. Gorkin is referring to
Trotsky’s pamphlet The Revolution in
Spain, cf J Gorkin, ‘Los problemas de la revolución española’, La Nueva Era, March-April 1936.
133. El Comité de Salamanca del
POUM, ‘A todos los trabajadores’, leaflet issued by the Salamanca branch on 1
May 1936.
134. Cf Andrade’s letter of 29
June 1935, reprinted in LD Trotsky, La
revolución española, Volume 2, op cit, pp348-52.
135. This, in particular, was
Andrade’s opinion, cf his preface to A Nin, Los
problemas de la revolución... op cit, p7.
136. Cf LD Trotsky, ‘Letter to Jean Rous’, 16 August 1936, and ‘For Collaboration in Catalonia’, 18 August 1936, The Spanish Revolution 1931-39, op cit, pp239-42. Cf P Broué in LD Trotsky, La revolución española, Volume 2, pp22-4.