The Counter-Revolution and the Spanish Imperialist War – Three Articles from Bilan (Foreword)

1986 Foreword

The Spanish events of 1936 did not – as the falsifiers of history would have us believe – mark the beginning of a period of huge democratic advances culminating in the 1938-45 crusade of the democratic nations against fascist Barbarism; they mark, on the contrary, the ending of a revolutionary period, from which the Proletariat emerged defeated on an international scale. Today, half a century later, there is still not much sign of a recovery.

The Communist International committed an enormous tactical blunder when it proposed the United Front to the Social-Democratic parties; this front blurred the clear-cut distinctions between Communists and Socialists, and encouraged the opportunism of the centrist leaders who had joined the International out of political self-interest. But whilst the United Front did not actually represent an alteration or formal revision of the Marxist revolutionary program, the Popular Front which succeeded it distorted the fundamental class basis of communism by linking the proletariat to the fate of Capitalist Democracy.

In its initial platform the Communist International announced that it supported the workers’ demands because, at a certain point in their development, they would break out of the purely economic framework and provoke ‘disorder’, or rather, that social crisis which would allow the organized proletariat to take power and exercise its dictatorship. That was in 1920. In 1936, on the contrary, Stalin’s ‘communists’ would see ‘disorder’ as nothing but the work of reactionaries and Fascists; the workers would thus be asked to sacrifice their own immediate demands and defend the ‘order’ of those who exploited them, who starved them, and sent them off to be massacred in the name of patriotism.

Other accomplices in the counter-revolution were those political groups (anarchists and trotskists) of revolutionary inspiration who, when faced with the ruin of Democratic institutions, would soften their intransigent principles. For them it was necessary, above all, to safeguard the social and juridical framework which seemed to most favour class activity and organization. They aimed to save Democracy not because they considered it an ideal political regime but because they mistakenly believed that struggling against capitalism would be easier under parliamentary democracy. Thus, by manoeuvring in such a way, these political groups deceived not only themselves about the true nature of Fascism, but they also lost sight of the proletariat’s specific tasks.

In 1936 the cycle of degeneration named after Stalin was already a fait accompli. There were still plenty more infamies for Opportunism to commit, both before and after the dissolution of the Third International, but it was from that point on that our current’s warning to the International in 1920 – that the United Front tactic would be fatal if the global proletariat was forced to retreat – was proved correct.

The Popular Front served as an intensive preparation of the workers in the ideology of war, and, simultaneously, resurrected patriotism and even chauvinism. It destroyed everything Lenin had achieved in drawing workers away from capitalist ideology. In France, in 1938, the Popular Front would die a natural death when Daladier betrayed it to repress the general strike set in motion by the CGT against the ‘Decree-Laws on Poverty’.

If the Popular Front in France – where it had never gone beyond the limits of classically reformist ballot-box coalitions – was reduced to a classical electoral farce, in Spain it took on tragic proportions. Here the bourgeoisie’s totalitarian offensive was a reality and the workers reacted with an armed insurrection. Consequently the real significance of ‘anti-fascism’, the real political role of its promoters and the counter-revolutionary nature of the degenerated communist parties, was brought to light. In Spain, anti-fascism was essentially the annulment of the expropriations made during the workers insurrection; the restoration of the politics and authority of the bourgeois State in the name of military discipline; and the murder of revolutionaries under the pretext of the struggle against ‘the 5th column’ and ‘Unity against Franco’. In 1965 we wrote:

In Lenin’s formulation, war between modern states signifies imperialist war of competition directed against all proletarians; whilst civil war is a class war of the international proletariat against all sections of the bourgeoisie. The complex nature of the war in Spain derived from the fact that it partook of both aspects. Civil war because the proletariat intervened, violently, and dislocated the bourgeois State institutions. In Spain, the revolution was immediately defeated by the counter-revolution; in Spain, two equally bourgeois governments – the Republican and the Francoist – aspired to run the same class state, these are the two reasons the Spanish proletariat was deceived about the true nature of its struggle, and it is on this basis that proletarians throughout the world could be convinced that, within the same mode of production, exploiting and oppressor States could fight for “liberty” against others which denied it. Underneath every armed struggle there lies a conflict of material interests. Those of Franco’s fascist reaction were all too obvious; those of the workers who responded to it with an insurrection were no less mysterious. The initial conflict was between capitalism and proletariat. Only by diverting the proletarian insurrection from its original objectives could it be transformed into a conflict between ‘democratic ideals’ and ‘fascist barbarism’. The workers’ response to the Francoist offensive breaks out at a time when international war, sole capitalist solution to the capitalist crisis, is just around the corner. The principal conditions for its outbreak are united, then, from the moment when the proletariat, the only class able to oppose it, is defeated, and its international party, become simple appendage of Russian foreign policy, has resigned itself to war’s inevitability. (Il Programma Comunista, 13/1965)

The Spanish bourgeoisie, for whom life was difficult up to the end of the 1st World War, achieved relative prosperity under the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera: a dictatorship supported by the Socialist party and in particular by Largo Caballero, the ‘Spanish Lenin’ and future anti-fascist figurehead. Rivera’s downfall, in 1930, would open up a particularly stormy period in Spanish political life. The Bourbon monarchy would quietly pack its bags and go, but the Republic would prove to be just as incapable of resolving the political and economic difficulties. After each election the lefts would take power and drown the increasingly effective economic protest movements in blood. In 1931, the republican Azana and the socialist Caballero declared the ‘Republic in danger’ and instituted an obligatory arbitration of social conflicts. In January 1932, the socialists would congratulate the government on its firm repression of the striking workers. In September, a miscarriage of agrarian reform prompted a peasants’ uprising. In January 1933, there were strikes in Malaga, Bilbao and Saragossa. The bourgeois Left and the socialists, having taken on the role of guard dogs of capital, handed over the government to the Right. In 1934, the strike in the Asturias was violently repressed. Participating in all these repressive actions were those political men who, as members of the Popular Front, would later claim to be opposing the fascist advance.

In the elections of February 1936, the Popular Front obtained an overwhelming majority and a government was formed composed of bourgeois republicans with the external support of the ‘workers parties’. The Socialist party, sensing what was ahead, defended the necessity of retaining its independence and the demagogue Largo Caballero tried to anticipate the manoeuvres of the competition by cosying up to the anarchists, and by agitating in the name of the ‘workers government’, and even of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Meanwhile, after Azana had declared to the Cortes that: “Any fascist danger was ruled out”, Francisco Franco was quietly plotting under the noses of the republican ministers at army headquarters.

On 17 July, Franco carried out his coup. The army’s insurrection was successful in Andalusia, the North, at Saragossa, Oviedo, and in all the agricultural areas which had been disarmed by the suppression of peasant rebellions. The October Revolution stands as proof that in the agricultural areas it is the stance of the peasants that decides the outcome of civil wars. Franco would have been powerless against a massive rebellion of the Spanish peasantry, but the Republican government, by confiscating from them the land they had taken by force from the landed proprietors, threw them back into the camp of ‘reaction’, or at the very least, made them indifferent towards a struggle from which they could expect nothing.

Nevertheless, Franco’s original plan – which consisted of landing in force and rallying the entire government military apparatus around him – failed because of a lightning counterstrike by the workers, who, in many cities but above all in Barcelona, fraternized with the soldiers, disarmed the officers, and made themselves masters of the streets.

The response of the ‘legal’ government to this initial skirmish was to quickly make themselves scarce; the civil guards hid themselves away, and the proletariat remained the sole master of the situation. This allowed the unleashing of a ‘terrorism of the masses’, which struck remorselessly all those who the workers hated most: priests, bosses large and small, bourgeois politicians, the police, torturers, spies, etc, etc. The trade-union organisations took steps to confiscate and control businesses, transport, the public sector, etc.

The Spanish proletariat, completely taken up with its programme of expropriation, neglected the essential aspect of any revolution: political power and class dictatorship.

Anarchism, which in the Spain of 1936 had its chosen land, could now prove its revolutionary credentials. But with the revolution going at full tilt it renounced taking over the leadership of the revolt, and delivered the armed proletariat back into the hands of the democratic capitalist powers. Anarchism, whose feeble theories and practices the revolutionary Marxist school has always denounced, would show the true content of its apoliticism, of its hostility to centralism, of its democratic and libertarian ideology. None of the political forces, trotskists included, put on the agenda the problem of overthrowing the Bourgeois Republic, as incarnated in the Giral government, because the latter: “had lost all importance”. The anarchists, sworn enemies of all forms of State, would refuse to install their own dictatorship whilst leaving in place the power already there; eventually they would even take part in the democratic government, and the anarchist ministers would shamelessly impose a democratic dictatorship on the working class.

The tragedy of the workers’ insurrection in Spain was that it didn’t have a party of the same calibre as the 1917 Bolshevik party; without such a party, the glorious and heroic acts of the rebellion of the Spanish workers were squandered uselessly. Every initiative in the name of the libertarian ideal was local. Each enterprise, each town, each village operated independently without bothering to prepare an overall plan and strategy. The anarchists would even go so far as to boast about their treacherous impotence: “We could have acted alone, enforcing our absolute will, proclaiming the Generalidad of Catalonia fallen and enforcing in its place the true power of the people; but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was used against us, and didn’t want it when we in our turn could have used it against others”. Analogous declarations and lines of conduct emerged from the trotskists of the POUM.

Thus it was that on the 4th September the State bourgeoisie, which had remained prudently waiting in the wings, gave birth to the “Workers government” of Largo Caballero; considered by his bourgeois predecessor Giral as the only one able to govern a restless Spain. The Government resumed its role relying heavily on the State police. The workers militias and the organizations born out of the insurrection were deprived of all political privileges and became simple appendages of the bourgeois government. On 1st October, The Central Committee of the Militias in Catalonia was dissolved. On 9th October, the peoples committees were all dissolved and expropriated industries were returned to their ‘legitimate’ owners.

Soon after the formation of the new government, and after some typically parliamentary discussions about how many portfolios they would get, the anarchists would wave good-bye to their alleged principles and entered the central government.

The following explanation of this ignoble volte-face was the one supplied to the armed proletariat: “The international bourgeoisie refused to provide us with arms. We needed to give them the impression that our leaders weren’t the revolutionary committees but the legal government; it was that or nothing. We had to adapt to the inexorable circumstances of the present, in other words, we had to co-operate with the government”.

Was it really only a question of giving the international bourgeoisie a false impression? Of getting them, by this clever ruse, to arm the revolution? The sad epilogue of these “brilliant stratagems” occurred in May 1937 in Barcelona, when the glorious proletariat of that city, who had a year earlier speedily despatched the Francoist plot, would erect barricades against the intolerable capitalist/democratic dictatorship: in Barcelona, the proletariat found the strength to build barricades and resist behind them for three days. The legal power would then try to terrorise them by sending gunboats into the port, and some anarchist chiefs (Federica Montseny and Garcia Oliver, “State anarchists”) in order to brutalize them. And the motorized column of 5,000 assault troops that was sent from the front to shoot the proletariat of Barcelona, would re-establish order not to cries of “Down with the revolution” but “Long live the FAI!”. The Spanish insurrection had been drowned in blood, and the Spanish War could now start in earnest.

From that moment on, Anti-Fascism was no longer bothered about concealing its counter-revolutionary nature. For several months the Popular Front government, strictly organised by the “communists”, who had been installed following the concluding of military aid agreements with Moscow, had been striving to recover everything the workers had conquered through hard struggle a year before, and particularly their management of the expropriated enterprises (…) The repression (…) gave Stalin’s men the opportunity for a good “purge”, which was something they had wanted for a long time. Andrés Nin, the trotskist, was taken away and killed by “irregular elements”; Berneri, the anarchist, was arrested and executed at the Barcelona police headquarters. The despicable campaign orchestrated around the Moscow trials showed clearly who was the inspiration for these crimes. The CNT and POUM protested, but didn’t sever their links with the government, showing the degree of subjection into which the last of the organisations laying claim to the revolutionary tradition had fallen. In exchange for selling aid to the republicans, the U.S.S.R had demanded the replacement of Caballero by Negrín. The latter, very obediently, immediately made the POUM illegal and unsuccessfully attempted to mount Moscow type show trials against them. It was this same government which would mask the weariness and discontent of the masses with the slogan, “Resistance to the End”. In reality it would abandon Madrid and Valencia, then Barcelona; and that would be the end of that. Of the sorrow procession of refugees and republican soldiers who crossed over the border, some would arrive on the other side of the Pyrenees only to be put into concentration camps by democratic comrade Blum. If the Spanish war made the true role of the popular front governments, as servants of reaction, abundantly clear, it was equally fatal for the extreme left fractions who supported these governments. Anarchism, which had always been horrified by the very idea of a proletarian State, would discredit itself by sending its representatives to sit as as ministers in a Bourgeois government. The POUM, who as followers of Trotski counted on the possibility of a revolutionary intervention of the Proletariat to exploit the antagonism between democracy and fascism, had to witness not only the murder of the Spanish revolution, but also a bolstering of the Stalinist lie, and the defamation of Lenin’s old comrade who, two years later, would be killed in Mexico by an assassin in the pay of the Russian NKVD with a blow from an icepick. Our current, in the line of the Italian Communist Left, drew the correct lesson from the Spanish events. Fascism and Democracy are not two conflicting methods of capitalist domination, but rather two different positions of one and the same class, according to whether there is a threat of revolution or not. The proletariat shouldn’t “opt” for one or the other of these methods, it must destroy them both. (Il Programma Comunista, 14/1965)

The following articles are drawn from the review “Bilan”, the organ of our Left fraction in the thirties, and they require no further commentary. They are perfectly in line with the revolutionary “red thread”, which links the past generations of proletarians who launched into the attack against the citadels of capital to the revolutionary vanguard who resisted falling victim to the Sirens of “Anti-fascism”; and to the revolutionary proletariat of tomorrow; destroyer of the infamous capitalist regime and all its right, and left-wing, supporters.