Machine-Gun Strafing, Shelling, Repression – This Is How the Popular Front Responds to the Barcelona Workers Who Dare Fight Back Against the Capitalist Attack

PROLETARIANS!

On July 19, 1936, the proletarians of Barcelona, WITHOUT WEAPONS, fought off the coup of Franco’s regiments, who were ARMED TO THE TEETH.

On May 4, 1937, these same proletarians ARMED WITH WEAPONS left on the ground a much higher bodycount than they had lost in winning the victory against Franco, and it is the antifascist government, including anarchists and linked with the POUM, through many wheels of its apparatus, that has unleashed a wave of repressive forces against the workers.

On July 19, the proletarians of Barcelona were an invincible force. Their class struggle, independent of the bourgeois State, spilled over into the bosom of Franco’s regiments where it brought about a similar class independence of the soldiers against their generals: the strike nailed a safety spring of security in the guns and cannons of Franco who was thus defeated.

History knows only fleeting intervals during which the bodies of the proletariat can limit themselves to holding a position of simple autonomy towards the capitalist State; a few days after July 19, events came to the crossroads. Well, either the proletariat passed to the higher phase of its struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois State, or this State was re-forging the chains of its bloody oppression of the proletariat. In this phase of the struggle in which instinct no longer suffices and consciousness becomes the decisive factor, the workers can only save themselves and win on the condition that they develop in all its breadth, the painful work matured over many years, the work they had done through the fractions in order to build the class party. The anguished tragedy of the proletariat of Spain is the price it has to pay because of its immaturity in creating the class party, the brain which, ALONE, can give life force to all the members of its social body.

In the course of the first days of the struggle, autonomous bodies of workers had grown out of the class ground where the proletariat stood and fought. In the second phase of the struggle, the dilemma posed itself in all its terrible significance: either to complete, through the political struggle against the capitalist State, the successes achieved in the economic and military order, or to see these successes dissolved in the organs of the capitalist State.

Classes fight each other with the means of struggle that are imposed on them by the situations and the degree of their tension. In the face of a class fire, capitalism could not even think of resorting to the classical methods of legality. What threatened it was the independence of the workers’ struggle, its powerful autonomous struggle, able to reach the other stage of the struggle for revolution. What capitalism needed here was to mend the ranks of its control over the exploited. These ranks, which once belonged to the judiciary, the police, the prisons, became, in the extreme situation of Barcelona, the Militia Committees, the socialized industries, the unions managing of the most important departments of the economy, the vigilance patrols.

These events repeated the dilemma that led the proletariat of Italy and Germany to disaster. The workers are simply preserving, for themselves, the organism that they conquered in the struggle against the enemy on the condition that they direct it against the State, the machine of bourgeois oppression. The workers simply nurture their future executioner if they don’t have the strength to overcome the enemy who wants to draw them into its repressive apparatus. The proletarian militia of July 19 is a proletarian organism, the “proletarian” militia of the following week is a capitalist apparatus appropriate to the situation of the moment. In order to succeed in its cynical and bloody plan, the bourgeoisie had to appeal to the centrists, the socialists, the CNT-FAI, the POUM who made the workers believe that THE STATE CHANGED IN NATURE BECAUSE THE PERSONNEL WHO MANAGED IT HAD CHANGED IN COLOR. Capitalism, disguised under the red flag was again preparing to draw the sword of its repression and May 4th was prepared by all the forces that, on July 19th, broke the class back of the Spanish proletariat. The son of Noske and the Weimar Constituent is Hitler, the son of Giolitti and workers’ self-management is Mussolini and the son of the anarchists, socialists, centrists, Spanish POUM, socialization, “proletarian” militias, is the May 4th massacre in Barcelona.

Only the Russian proletariat responded to the fall of czarism properly with the October insurrection of 1917, because it alone had built a mature class party from the previous fraction work.

PROLETARIANS!

It was under the direction of a government supported by the Popular Front that Franco had meticulously prepared his attack. It was in the way of conciliation that Barrios sought, on July 19, to form a single ministry to direct the affairs of the domination of capitalism, a single ministry under the direction of Franco and under the mixed direction of his right and left staff, fraternally united. It was the workers’ revolt in Barcelona, Madrid, and Asturias that forced capitalism to split the ministry and to entrust the republican one and the military one with two functions intimately linked by an indissoluble complicity.

Wherever Franco had not arrived to obtain his immediate victory capitalism called you to follow him to fight fascism. A cruel trap that you have paid with thousands of dead. You believed the pied piper of the Popular Front and its appendages that, without fighting the republican and capitalist government under its direction, controlling it, you could crush the legitimate son of capitalism: fascism.

And you set out for the hills of Aragon, the mountains of Guadarrama, of Asturias for the victory of the anti-fascist war. Once again, as in 1914, it is on your corpses, on your lives, that history has carved out the terrible, fatal and bloody class opposition. The Military Fronts, a necessity imposed on the workers by the situation? No, a necessity for capitalism to encircle and crush you: May 4, 1937 luminously proved that the necessity for the proletariat was to fight against its republican enemy in the same way as against Franco. The Military Fronts were your cemeteries because they were the fronts of capitalism against the proletariat. To this war you could only oppose the uniform of the Russian proletariat, which consists in acting for the military defeat of the two governments: that of Franco and that of the Republic, in order to transform the war of capitalism against the proletariat in civil war of the working class fighting for the destruction of the two sections of the bourgeois State.

The Italian fraction alone, in a cruel isolation intended to stifle the only solidarity by the current of the League of Internationalist Communists of Belgium, which later founded the “Belgian fraction of the international communist left”, these two currents alone sounded the alarm while everywhere there was shouting about the need to safeguard “the conquests of the revolution”, to beat Franco in order to better fight Caballero afterwards, to wear the stripes of the revolution by leaving for the Military Fronts. The events of Barcelona have given a grim confirmation of our fundamental positions and it is with a cruelty equal to that of Franco that the Popular Front, integrating the anarchists and the POUM in itself, threw itself on the proletarian insurrectionaries of May 4, 1937!

The vicissitudes of the military battles were as many occasions for the Republican government to reinforce its control over the exploited. In the absence of a conscious and class-based policy for military defeat, the successes, like the military losses of the republican army, were employed by the enemy for the sole purpose of massacring the workers. In Badajoz, Irun, Toledo, St. Sebastian, the Republican defeat represented the Popular Front leaving behind disarmed proletarians to Franco who could thus exterminate them, while, by reflex, the Republican government profited from the defeat to weld the bonds of the Sacred Union under the pretext that a centralized and disciplined army was necessary to win the anti-fascist war. On the other hand, the victorious resistance of Madrid against Franco provided the occasion for Caballero and Companys for a provocation by the Popular Front that could get rid of its servant of yesterday, the POUM, and prepare the attack of May 4, 1937. The fall of Malaga once again welded the bloody ranks of the Sacred Union and it was the military victory of Guadalajara that opened the period that was to end with the carnage of Barcelona. Everywhere people were shouting about the Plan of Victory and it was in an atmosphere of intoxicated anti-fascist warfare that the attack of May 4th was prepared.

Meanwhile, in all countries, capitalism’s war against the proletariat in Spain was fueling the cruel repression against the workers. The fascist and anti-fascist dead of Spain bore in their graves the murdered of Moscow, the machine-gunned of Clichy, while by evoking the slaughter of the anti-fascist proletarians the traitors urged the workers of Brussels to form a bloc with capitalism in the elections of April 11, 1937.

“Arms for Spain”, such was the main watchword that the workers of all countries followed as led by their traitors. And these arms were used to gun down the workers of Barcelona! Russia, which had sent arms for the successes of the anti-fascist war, was the capitalist backbone for the recent massacre. At the orders of Stalin, who drooled over his anti-socialist rage on March 5, the PSUC of Catalonia took the initiative in the massacre. Once again, as in 1914, weapons served capitalism for the workers to kill their class brothers instead of serving the destruction of the regime of capitalist oppression.

PROLETARIANS!

On May 4, 1937, the workers of Barcelona resumed the path they had taken on July 19, from which capitalism had been able to dislodge them by relying on the Popular Front and all its appendages. They went on strike everywhere, even in those areas which were presented to them by the traitors as “conquests of the revolution”. They fought against the Republican government in the same way that they would have fought against Franco’s government. And the republican government responded with as much savagery as Franco did at Badajoz, Irun, while the Salamanca government did not at all take advantage of the weakening of the Aragon front to unleash a military attack because it felt that its leftist accomplice was doing admirably well in the service of executioner of the proletariat.

Exhausted by ten months of war, of class collaboration, whose architects had been the CNT-FAI and the POUM, the proletariat of Barcelona suffered a terrible defeat. But this defeat is also a stage in the victory of the proletariat, a moment of its emancipation because it marks the end of all the ideologies that had allowed capitalism to save its regime shaken by the gigantic proletarian uprising of July 19th.

The proletarians who fell on May 4th cannot be claimed by any of the organizations that, on July 19th, by allowing the extirpation of the proletariat from its class terrain, and throwing it into the opposite terrain of capitalism and anti-fascism, thus laid the groundwork for the massacre of May 4th 1937.

The fallen proletarians belong to the proletariat and only to it. These proletarians represent the membranes of the brain of the world working class, of the class party of the communist revolution.

The workers of the whole world lean over all the dead and raise their corpses against all the traitors: those of yesterday, as well as those of today. The world proletariat salutes, in Berneri, one of its own, and his immolation on the anarchist ideal, his corpse is a protest against a political school that collapsed in the course of the events of Spain: it is under a government with anarchist participation that the police repeated, on Berneri’s body, the deeds of Mussolini on Matteotti’s body.

PROLETARIANS!

The Barcelona massacre is merely a prelude for an even more violent repressions on the Spanish workers and of the whole world, but it is also the sign announcing social storms in other countries. Capitalism has had to use up, in only ten months, the capital it had in reserve in order to demolish the proletariat and to disrupt the work it does to found, through its class party, the weapon of its emancipation, of the construction of the communist society. Stalinism and anarchism have joined social democracy: they have, in Spain, reached the end of their evolution, like the Second International, which was reduced to the state of a corpse by the war of 1914.

An international battle, and on the capitalist front, took place in Spain: that of fascism and anti-fascism, a battle which, because it developed through the extreme form of arms, also reveals an extreme tension of class relations on an international scale.

The Barcelona deaths clear the ground for the construction of tomorrow’s party of the working class. All the political forces that have called the workers to fight to take away the struggle for revolution from a war of capitalism against the proletariat, are now ALL on the other side of the barricade and, before the workers of the world opens, bright, the horizon in which the dead of Barcelona have written, with their blood, a new page in addition to those written by the dead of 1914-18: the workers’ struggle is proletarian on the sole condition that it is directed against capitalism and its State; it serves the interests of the enemy if it is not directed against it, in all instances, in all fields, in all organisms that situations give rise to and that become instruments of the enemy if they do not remain in constant opposition against it.

The world proletariat will fight against capitalism even when it will turn to repression against its servants of yesterday. It is the working class and never its enemy who is in charge of settling the account of those who have expressed a phase of its evolution, a moment of the struggle for emancipation from the slavery of capitalism.

The international battle of capitalism against the proletariat taking place in Spain opens a new international chapter in the life of the Fractions in all countries. The world proletariat, which continues to fight against the builders of internationals, knows that it can only found these organizations when the situations determine an upheaval of class relations, thus opening the way to communist revolution. But, in the face of an international battle that announces the outbreak of revolutionary storms in other countries, the world proletariat feels that the time has come to proceed to the construction of the first international link of the fractions of the communist left.

PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES!

Your class is invincible, it is the engine of historical evolution; the events in Spain prove it, because it is your class alone that has been the driving force behind events that have shaken the whole world.

It is not the defeat that can discourage you: from this defeat you will learn the lessons for tomorrow’s victory.

You will reconstitute your unity on a class basis, beyond the frontiers and against all the mystifications of the capitalist enemy!

To the attempts to compromise in order to end the war in the “social peace” of capitalist exploitation, respond with the fraternization of the exploited of the two armies, for the simultaneous struggle against capitalism!

Stand up for the revolutionary struggle in all countries!

Long live the proletarians of Barcelona who have turned, with their blood, a new page in the book of the Communist Revolution!

Forward for the establishment of the International Bureau of Left Fractions in all countries!

Let us raise the banner of the communist revolution, which the fascist and anti-fascist hangmen are incapable of destroying. Proletarians fall in all countries to pass it on to their brothers who continue the struggle. Capitalism has shredded the hundreds of hands that held it in Barcelona!

We are worthy of our fallen brothers!

Long live the world communist revolution!

THE BELGIAN AND ITALIAN FRACTIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST LEFT