The crisis in Spain is neither new nor unexpected. After its brief
and reckless period of glory at the dawn of the modern era, Spain was thrust
back into obscurity by the short-sighted policies of its rulers and the advance
of northern capitalism. For more than three hundred years it has wallowed in
ignorance and squalor, the heavy hand of the Church combining with an odd
mélange of semi-feudal lords, the monarchy, great landed proprietors, a
small and corrupt native bourgeoisie, and foreign enterprisers, to exploit and
oppress the Spanish people. The capitalist revolution was never completed in
Spain; its backward economy has been a hopelessly entangled mixture of
capitalism combined with the remains of another age. And at this late day, with
capitalism in decline on a world scale, and the great powers struggling to the
death for the possibilities of exploitation which remain, capitalism can solve
not a single one of the great problems of the Spanish economy.
The land of the great estates for the millions of peasants? But
the banking and credit system rests upon land mortgages, and to distribute the
land would destroy the banking system, that is, destroy Spanish capitalism. The
development of Spanish industry? But, on a capitalist basis, this could he
accomplished only in an open and expanding world market, whereas the world
market is monopolized by the great powers; and even the internal market could
not long remain in native hands against the pressure of cheap goods produced by
advanced techniques in the imperialist countries. Separation of Church and
State, secularization of the nation, and abolition of the political power of
the Church? But the Church is itself the greatest capitalist of Spain.
Democratization of the army? But the army, the foundation of power, was in the
hands of reaction. Freedom for Morocco and autonomy for the Basques and
Catalonia? But Spanish capitalism depended upon the exploitation of Morocco and
the national minorities.
No, not a single major problem of Spain can be solved by
capitalism. The solutions can be discovered only through the workers’
revolution and through socialism–and indeed, not through the Spanish
revolution alone. Socialism, by destroying the capitalist order and doing away
with the iron bands of capitalist property relations, can give the land to the
peasants, expand a socialized industry, liquidate the Church as an oppressive
institution, build a workers’ and peasants’ army, and form a free
federation of Iberian Socialist Republics.
Such, however, is not the opinion of reformists. After the
abdication of the King in 1931, the Socialist Party of Spain entered a
coalition government of bourgeois democracy. Two years were enough to expose
the hopeless weakness and completely false policy of the coalition; and in
1933, after an electoral victory, a Right coalition took over the reins of the
government. The advance of reaction continued unhampered by the parliamentary
maneuvers of the reformists. But the alarmed workers took things into their own
hands. In 1934, strikes followed one after another in rapid succession. In
October, the workers forced their leaders into acquiescence in a revolutionary
general strike which developed into an attempted insurrection. The insurrection
was drowned in blood by the Foreign Legion, but only after a display of the
most magnificent courage and heroism. Far from being disheartened or set back,
the workers were in actuality greatly strengthened by the struggle, and the
forces of the counter-revolution injured. Once again not class collaboration
and reformism but the methods of revolutionary class struggle proved themselves
the decisive weapon to serve the interests of the masses.
The workers had suffered a temporary defeat. But their morale was
high, their sense of organization strong; they had learned from their bitter
experience, and were prepared to enter the path of revolutionary struggle for
power and for socialism. Then: enter the People’s Front, putting a new
face on the reformist policies that had lead to the disasters of the past. In
1935, the People’s Front program was signed by the workers’ parties
and the “left” bourgeois republican parties. It is a document quite on a par
with its sister document in France, a little to the right of the New Deal. It
bases itself on the defense of democratic capitalism, and rejects–not merely
implicitly, but in many cases flatly and explicitly–every even near-socialist
demand.
Nevertheless, the People’s Front parties won an electoral
majority (though a minority by a small margin in popular vote) and formed the
government under Azaña in February, 1936. From the beginning, as in
France, the policy of the People’s Front was, has been, and will continue
to be the policy of, the “republican” bourgeoisie. To break with that policy in
favor of a proletarian policy would mean to break the People’s Front; and
that, according to our reformists, is of course “counterrevolution.” How amply
the nature of the People’s Front was displayed during the months from
February to July, 1936! The masses thought they had won a victory through the
election of the government, and began to act accordingly, began to take over
the land, to strike, to strive for control of factories and railroads. And the
government, after drawing back in alarm, then, for the sake of “order” and to
avoid “antagonizing” the republican allies or “provoking” the reaction–the
government naturally sent the Civil Guard against the peasants who were taking
over the land, ordered the strikes to stop, arrested the strikers, broke up
workers’ meetings. The government even censored long columns from the
papers of the parties–for example, the Communist Party–which supported it! In
May, 23 peasants were killed, and 30 wounded by the Civil Guard; and the
Minister of the Interior sent a telegram of congratulations–to the Civil
Guard.
Meanwhile the counter-revolution, aided by support from abroad in
Portugal, Great Britain, Germany and Italy, prepared its forces. It controlled
the army, and the government did not dare touch the army. It controlled
Morocco, and the government did not dare touch Morocco. Openly, brazenly, it
laid out its campaign, and chose its time to strike. On the other side, the
proletariat was blocked by the government and by the whole People’s Front
policy, from making ready its own class forces: it could not form and arm and
train its militia, could not select its factory and peasant committees to
coordinate activities; its leaders tried to teach it to put all faith in the
government–that is, in the political executive of the bourgeoisie–and in
return the government would handle the fascists. But in spite of and against
the policy of the People’s Front, the masses went over to direct action,
and in these actions were further tested and prepared. The months between
February and July witnessed a continuous series of strikes by the workers and
seizures of land by the peasants.
On July 17, the counter-revolution struck. The answer of the
People’s Front government–the defender against fascism–was: an attempt
to come to an understanding with the fascists, and a refusal to arm the
workers. But the proletariat took things into its own hands, began its own
mobilization, began simply taking the arms from arsenals and barracks. The
government was forced by the pressure of the masses to reverse its policy,
distribute arms, and call for resistance to the counter-revolution. Once again
direct class action, though hampered and obstructed by the treacheries of
People’s Frontism, had proved the answer and the only answer.
The People’s Front was thus responsible for the untrained and
unprepared condition in which the proletariat and peasantry found itself in
July. A revolutionary policy would have put the workers in a position to handle
the counter-revolution with a few sharp blows, since Spanish fascism had a
comparatively small and uninfluential mass base. As it is, the Civil War drags
on endlessly, with hundreds of thousands already killed and many more thousands
yet to die. The crime of the People’s Front, however, does not end in
July.
In the first weeks after the start of the Civil War, the
proletariat and peasantry took, spontaneously, major steps toward setting up
their own councils and committees in the factories and shops and villages;
established their own police forces and de facto revolutionary courts;
and began the formation of their own independent class militia, the foundation
of a workers’ Red Army. In this way they were laying the basis for a new
state, a revolutionary workers’ state, which, by drawing all power into
its own hands and doing away with the existing bourgeois state and its
mechanisms, could conduct a revolutionary war against the fascists, and begin
the building of socialism. And only through such a state and such a war can the
workers succeed in Spain. For the war against the fascists must be a
revolutionary war, conducted in terms of a revolutionary perspective. This is
true not merely from the point of view of military effectiveness, but, above
all, politically. In order to undermine Franco’s African base, and draw
the Moorish masses to the side of the Spanish workers, freedom had to be given
to Morocco. In order to assure full support from the Basque country and
Catalonia, autonomy had to be granted the Basques and Catalonians. In order to
solidify a genuine alliance between the peasantry and the workers, and thereby
also to make it impossible for Franco to consolidate his lines of
communication, the land had to be given outright to the peasants. In order to
protect the factories against sabotage, the workers had to have control of
them. In order to have an armed force that could he relied on to fight
consistently for the revolution and to be protected against any utilization
against the workers and peasants, a new workers’ army, divorced in control
from the bourgeois state machinery, had to be built.
All of these, however, are revolutionary acts; and, therefore,
cannot be properly carried out by a bourgeois government, whether that
government is called by the name of “People’s Front” or any other. The
task of Marxists in Spain was to promote and lead the process of the extension
of workers’ power; to transform the war against Franco into a
revolutionary war for workers’ power and for socialism; to act along the
perspective of the transfer of state power to the workers’ and
peasants’ and soldiers’ committees. The People’s Front leaders
of the Spanish working-class parties did just the opposite. After the first
weeks of the Civil War, when the People’s Front government had become
little more than a helpless shell–the Communist and Socialist parties entered
the People’s Front government, and Caballero, “the Spanish Lenin,” became
the premier of a bourgeois coalition government. In this way, the workers were
shunted aside from the revolutionary path, taught to give up confidence in
their own class organs, their own committees and councils, to put reliance on
the government. The struggle was thrust back into the treacherous “defense of
bourgeois democracy” against Fascism; Caballero dropped all his loud talk about
“Soviets” and proclaimed to Spain and to the world that he was interested only
in protecting the “democratic republic.”
Step by step the consequences have been drawn out. The government,
as a bourgeois government, has been compelled to check the extension of
proletarian class power, and progressively to liquidate the steps that had
already been taken. In the name of a “unified command” it has cut off the
development toward a genuine workers’ army, and reconstituted the militia
into a republican army. In the name of law and order, it has eliminated the
workers’ police in the cities, enforcing proletarian justice, and has set
up a republican police force, incorporating institutions and individuals
already demonstrated to be betrayers of the workers’ struggle. In the name
of efficient production, it breaks down genuine workers’ control of the
factories. It’s great positive accomplishment to date, proudly hailed and
announced by Caballero, is–to have balanced the budget! In this manner, the
People’s Front government becomes a second line of defense for capitalism.
If the workers succeed, in spite of the government, in defeating the armies of
Franco, they will only find themselves bound to the capitalist order as
enforced by the People’s Front. Unless they break with Popular Frontism,
they will find–and this is the real tragedy of Spain–that they have given
their lives and their blood in vain, that their selfless and heroic
sacrifice, far from bringing emancipation, will have left them where they
began, tied hand and foot in the property relations of capitalist
exploitation.
Even more treacherous is the role of the People’s Front in
Catalonia, for in Catalonia the process of extending workers’ power had
gone much further than in the rest of Spain. Nevertheless, the workers’
parties in Catalonia, instead of carrying through that process to its
culmination in the actual transfer of state power, likewise, under the
impulsion of the ideas of the People’s Front, entered the Catalonian
coalition government. Even the P.O.U.M., though it had abstractly maintained
against the other parties that the issue in Spain was “Socialism vs.
Capitalism” and not “Democracy vs. Fascism,” followed along into the
government. And just as in Spain proper, the consequences of this step became
at once apparent. The workers were turned aside from the revolutionary path.
The government strove to gather into its own hands the organs of power that had
slipped away to the proletariat: control over the army, the police, the
factories. The autonomous committees of the workers became “no longer
necessary”–as even the P.O.U.M. explained–because, of course, the government
itself was a “workers’ government.” In this way, the bourgeoisie, acting
through the coalition government, was preparing the re-consolidation of
capitalism in the event that Franco should be defeated on the military
front.
With startling suddenness, in November and December, the true
character of the Catalonian government became obvious to the world. It was
disclosed that representatives of the left republican parties in the government
were secretly negotiating in Paris for a “separate peace.” A conspiracy was
unearthed through which a group from the left republican parties was aiming to
assassinate the leaders of the workers’ parties. A campaign against the
P.O.U.M. was started by the republican parties in collaboration with the
Stalinists (including the Soviet consul-general, Antonov-Ovseënko), on the
grounds that the P.O.U.M. was a disruptive and counter-revolutionary force
through its insistence on its slogan of socialism vs. capitalism. The campaign
culminated in the P.O.U.M.’s being driven out of the government, under the
threat of the withdrawal of Soviet material aid if this were not carried
through. Impelled thus by necessity rather than by its own clear will, the
P.O.U.M. has again turned toward the revolutionary path, and now calls for a
break with the policies of the People’s Front, the transformation of the
war into a revolutionary war, and the building of workers’ power.
The reply of the People’s Fronters to the new turn of the
P.O.U.M. toward a revolutionary course has not been long in coming. Busily
re-constituting the Loyalist Army under a unified command on a bourgeois basis,
the leaders of the People’s Front declare that the insistence of the
P.O.U.M. on a revolutionary war proves it the military as well as political
ally of Franco. The Madrid radio station of the P.O.U.M. is raided and shut
down; its journals are suppressed; a “Peoples’ Tribunal” consisting of
four judges, one from the Stalinists, one Socialist, and two from the “left
republican” parties, is appointed to try the P.O.U.M. leaders for treason and
“counter-revolution.” The campaign for the physical annihilation of the
P.O.U.M., under the whip of the Stalinists, continually mounts, and is checked
only by the resistance it meets from the rank and file of the militia and the
workers’ mass organizations. There should be no surprise. Such also was
the reply of the reformists in Germany to Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The policy
of class collaboration, of the People’s Front, can no more endure the
proletarian revolution than the counter-revolution of fascism.
Posted: 30 April 2005