A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  Thorez was right that conditions were not yet ripe for workers to take power, any more than they had been ripe in February or even July 1917. But they were such that the Communists could have put into effect the slogan they had ritually raised until only two years before – for the creation of soviets, structures of workers’ delegates which could oversee and challenge the power of the state and big business. However, Thorez did not even mention this, although the mood of workers would have ensured a favourable reception for such a call.

  The omission was not an accident. The abandonment of the absurd ‘third period’ policy had depended on changes in Comintern (Communist International) thinking in Moscow, as had the adoption of the policy of Popular Front alliance with a bourgeois pro-capitalist party. Stalin wanted foreign policy allies to cement the defence pact with the USSR signed by the right-of-centre Laval government in 1935. Communist support for a ‘liberal’ capitalist government seemed to make such an alliance easier. The Comintern accordingly argued that it was the only ‘practical’ way of blocking the path of fascism – although its central arguments were no different to those used by people like Bernstein 40 years before.

  The Communists could not ally with parties like the Radicals without dropping any concrete revolutionary alternative to the crisis hitting the world system. Talk of revolutionary change became something to be projected into the distant future, while they ‘tolerated’ governments committed to keeping capitalism intact, in the hope that this would stop the capitalists being attracted to the options of the far right. But toleration meant holding back the workers’ movement until it was demoralised and the capitalists had enough confidence to take the offensive.

  There was a celebration of the Popular Front movement in France on 14 July 1936. A demonstration of up to a million people commemorated the anniversary of the French Revolution in Paris, while there were other demonstrations thousands-strong in towns across France. People dressed in the costumes of the revolutionary years. There were giant pictures of revolutionary and Enlightenment heroes – Robespierre, Voltaire, Marat, Victor Hugo. The Radical Party leader Daladier stood on the speakers’ platform in Paris alongside Thorez and Blum. A banner carried by Renault workers bore the emblem of the Radical Party alongside those of the Socialist and Communist parties. The whole affair was designed to convince people that if only they stood together, regardless of party or class, and identified with a single French republican tradition, then the nightmare of fascism would go away. Here were the ‘practical’ politics of Popular Front unity.

  Three days later events took place across the Pyrenees which put this ‘practical’ politics to the test. Inspired by the victories of the fascists in Italy, Germany and Austria, generals staged an uprising against the republican government of Spain, which immediately requested arms from France to defend itself. Léon Blum wanted to provide the arms, but leading Radical politicians were vehemently opposed. On 30 July Blum assured the Chamber of Deputies that no arms were being sent, and had soon agreed a ‘non-intervention’ policy – even though this meant abandoning the elected republican government to the attacks by fascist-inspired forces armed by Germany and Italy. The Communist Party in France objected strongly to Blum’s stance. It even abstained in a no-confidence vote in the chamber in December 1936. Yet it had no alternative to offer, since it too preferred a coalition with the liberals to building a movement to confront French capitalism.

  It was a policy which could no more work domestically than in international affairs. The Radicals were only prepared to go along with reforms in favour of workers so long as the wave of strikes continued – as it did through much of the second half of 1936, although in a more subdued manner than in late May and June. As the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the CGT leaders succeeded in cooling things down, the Radicals began to revert to demanding deflation to deal with the symptoms of economic crisis. After experimenting with ‘reflationary’ policies designed to create jobs, such as the shorter working week, Blum began to concur with the Radicals early in 1937, announcing a ‘pause’ in his programme of expansion and reform. It was not enough.

  In July 1937 he resigned after the Senate rejected his Finance Bill amid a financial crisis caused by a flight of capital. In the meantime the state had shown how little it had been changed by the spell of Popular Front government – the police had opened fire on an antifascist demonstration in a Paris suburb in March 1937, killing six demonstrators.

  Radical Party governments with Socialist Party participation ruled France for the next nine months. A new world depression began in the US even before the previous one had finished, and the government reacted with the old Radical policy of cutting expenditure – a policy that could only demoralise those who had placed hope in the Popular Front. A crisis caused by Hitler’s march into Austria and the collapse of French foreign policy in eastern Europe brought Blum back to office for 26 days before he was replaced by Daladier. The employers now felt strong enough to take on the workers, and the Daladier government set out to reverse one of the most important reforms of two years before – the reduction of the working week to 40 hours. The police intervened to suppress the strikes and occupations which followed. At Renault a 20-hour battle followed after 1,500 armed police invaded the factory. 209 The police forced the defeated workers to march out of the factory making the fascist salute and shouting, ‘Long live the police’. 210

  As Julian Jackson observes in his history of the period:

  The Popular Front, born out of the general strike of 12 February 1934, finally died of that on 30 November 1938. Ironically the 12 February strike had originally been conceived to protest against the forced resignation of Daladier, and the strike of 30 November was called to protest against the labour policy of the same Daladier. 211

  The first phase of the Popular Front had seemed to offer hope, and the left parties and the unions grew rapidly. Communist Party membership increased from 29,000 in 1933 to 90,000 in February 1936 and 288,000 in December 1936, and that of the Communist Youth from 3,500 to 25,000 and then 100,000. The Socialist Party grew from 131,000 in 1933 to 202,000 in 1936, the Young Socialists from 11,320 in 1934 to 56,640 in 1937, and the CGT union federation from 785,700 in 1935 to around four million in 1937. 212 But by 1938 disillusionment with the record of the Popular Front was having the opposite effect, and the left parties were beginning to lose members and support. Thousands of sackings and victimisations after the defeated strike of late 1938 devastated the parties and the unions, and their memberships sank. 213

  By the outbreak of the Second World War the following August the French ruling class was in a powerful enough position to get the same parliament that had been elected on a wave of exhilaration only three years before to outlaw the Communist Party and expel its deputies. Nine months later the same parliament – including the majority of the Socialist Party deputies – voted to give dictatorial powers to Marshal Pétain, who formed a government containing French fascists, to collaborate with the German Nazis in occupation of the northern half of the country.

  There are still historians, such as Eric Hobsbawm, who invoke the Popular Front as an example of how the left can withstand an onslaught by the right. The French experience certainly does not bear this out. The fighting unity French workers displayed in 1934 certainly threw the far right onto the defensive. But the attempt to establish unity with a mainstream pro-capitalist party in 1936 had the same effect as the Social Democrats’ ‘toleration’ policy in Germany, enabling the right to regain the initiative after a brief lull. Tragically, this was also to be the experience in the third great example of resistance to fascism in the 1930s, in Spain.

  Spain: fascism, revolution and civil war

  English writer George Orwell wrote of Barcelona in November 1936:

  It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically any building of any size had been seized by the workers. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying it was col
lectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black.

  Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as equals. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. There were no private cars; they had all been commandeered.

  It was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.

  Above all there was belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in a capitalist machine. 214

  Barely four months earlier Spain’s military, headed by General Franco, had attempted to seize power. Their efforts had been thwarted in more than half the country by workers’ uprisings. Civil war followed – the culmination of six years of increasingly bitter class struggle.

  The defeat of the workers’ movement in the early 1920s had allowed a dictator, Primo de Rivera, to rule Spain for the rest of the decade. He relied on the military to crush opposition and was able to prevent militant workers organising. Most anarcho-syndicalist and Communist leaders went into exile. But de Rivera had no great social base of his own and had to balance between different social groups, even collaborating with the Socialist trade union leader Largo Caballero. His weak dictatorship collapsed in 1930, unable to cope with the effects of the world crisis. A few months later the left won an overwhelming victory in local elections, the king abdicated, and enthusiastic crowds proclaimed the republic, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid.

  A bourgeois republican government ruled for the next two years, with Caballero as minister of labour. It was a government which promised much in the way of reform and delivered little – for example, its land reform benefited only 2,000 peasants out of two million. There was open disillusionment as police shot down peasants occupying the land in the village of Casas Viejas in the south and broke strikes in cities like Barcelona.

  However, the mere talk of reform was enough to antagonise the upper classes. A section of bourgeois republicans split away to form an alliance with a new party, CEDA, backed by the great landowners, certain big business interests, leading army officers, monarchists, open admirers of Mussolini, and the bishops of the Catholic church. CEDA leader Gil Robles wanted to graft fascist methods onto Catholic dogma, as Dollfuss was doing in Austria, and held rallies reminiscent of those of Mussolini and Hitler. Electoral victory for the right seemed to put a CEDA government on the cards. Even the leaders of the Socialist Party and its UGT union saw this as a grave threat, agreed to oppose it physically, and united with some smaller working-class organisations to form a united ‘Workers’ Alliance’.

  The hostility to CEDA came from the industrial workers of the major cities and the vast numbers of semi-employed rural labourers on the great estates of the south. But it was also shared by a section of the middle class, especially in Catalonia, where they feared a right-wing onslaught on their autonomous government and language. Yet when CEDA finally took office in October 1934 only the miners of Asturias in the north of the country rose up, arming themselves with dynamite and taking control of the area. The anarcho-syndicalists who dominated much of the working-class movement refused to take part in a national rising out of distrust for all politicians, the Catalan nationalists stood aside at the last minute, and the Socialist Party and union leaders restricted protests to a short general strike in Madrid. The government was able to smash the Asturian miners, using troops from Spanish Morocco under the command of General Franco, and imposed a reign of terror in the area. Elsewhere in Spain, Socialist Party members (including Caballero) and trade unionists were thrown into prison. The left referred to the period that followed as ‘the two black years’. But the defeat of the workers’ movement in Spain in 1934 was not like that in Austria the same year. The right-wing government was unable to solve the political crisis and fell apart. Early in 1936 another election was called in a climate of increasing class polarisation and political bitterness.

  In the meantime the same ‘Popular Front’ ideas as in France had come to influence much of the left. The small Communist Party, which prior to October 1934 had opposed unity with socialists and anarcho-syndicalists, now campaigned vigorously for all to unite with the bourgeois republicans. Such ideas were accepted with enthusiasm by the right wing of the Socialist Party, and a joint list of Socialist, Communist and bourgeois republican candidates contested the elections. Even the anarcho-syndicalists urged their supporters to vote for it, hoping to see their activists freed from prison.

  The electoral system meant that the Popular Front won an overwhelming majority of seats on a vote that was only marginally up on 1933. The new government was composed of the same republican politicians who had so disappointed people in 1931–33. But pressure from below caused them to free left-wing political prisoners, and there was general elation on the left. Workers’ confidence led to a growing wave of strikes and demonstrations. People flooded into both the anarcho-syndicalist CNT and the Socialist UGT unions, while the Socialist Party moved sharply to the left. Caballero claimed he had been won to Marxism in prison and declared, ‘The revolution we want can only be achieved by violence’. 215 The Socialist Youth referred to him as ‘the Spanish Lenin’ as they raised their fists and chanted slogans for a ‘workers’ government’ and a ‘red army’. 216

  There was a growing sense of panic among the country’s conservative forces. CEDA activists flooded towards an even more overtly fascist organisation, the Falange, and upper-class thugs launched violent attacks on the left. There were reports that senior army officers were planning a coup, but the government did nothing except swap their posts around. In just four months 269 people were killed and 1,287 wounded in street fights, 381 buildings were attacked or damaged, 43 newspaper offices were attacked or ransacked, and there were 146 bomb attempts. 217

  The right finally made its move on 17–18 July. The generals tried to seize control of every city in Spain and Spanish Morocco. The republican government was too terrified to do anything, and even issued a statement denying that a coup was taking place. The prime minister, Quiroga, resigned. His replacement, Barrio, tried to reach an accommodation with the rebellion and then resigned in the face of hostile workers’ demonstrations.

  The military had expected to take power in a matter of hours. The cowardice and confusion of the Popular Front republican politicians gave them their chance. What upset their calculations was the reaction of workers. The UGT and CNT called for a general strike. But workers did not simply engage in passive stoppages. In most of the cities and towns of mainland Spain they moved to seize control of the barracks and disarm the army. Militants from the CNT, UGT and workers’ parties grabbed guns from wherever they could. Sometimes they succeeded in winning over sections of the generally pro-republican Assault Guard and even, as in Barcelona, the traditionally anti-working class Civil Guard. But what mattered was their initiative. Where they moved decisively, without vacillation or conciliation towards the right-wing officers, they were nearly always successful.

  The coup’s successes were mostly in cities where workers’ leaders accepted claims by officers to support the republic. In places like Seville, Cádiz, Saragossa and Oviedo these officers waited until the armed workers had dispersed before declaring for the coup and shooting down anyone who resisted. 218 Such was the price workers paid for having faith in those sections of the traditional ruling elite who claimed to be ‘republicans’. It was only because this faith was not universal that Franco’s forces won control of less than half of Spain in July 1936 rather than the whole country.

  In places where the rising was crushed it was not only Franco’s followers who suffered defeat: ‘The state, caught between its insurgent army and the armed masses of the people, had shattered to pieces’. 219 Although the official government still held office in Madrid, real authority in the localities was in t
he hands of a multitude of revolutionary committees. The workers who held power in an area used it in their own interests: factories were taken over and collectivised; peasants began to divide the land, knowing that the workers’ militias would protect them; armed workers arrested local dignitaries with a record of hostility to their demands. With the disintegration of the army, the bourgeoisie seemed finished throughout most of the republican areas, hence the conditions Orwell found in Barcelona. Effective power was in the hands of the workers’ organisations, while the official republican government held office without effective power. This was also true of the autonomous government of Catalonia, the most important industrial region. Its president, Companys, invited the leaders of the most powerful workers’ organisation in Catalonia, the CNT, to a meeting at which he told them:

  You are the masters of the town and of Catalonia, because you have defeated the fascist soldiers on your own … You have won and everything is in your power. If you do not need me, if you do not want me to be president, say so now, and I shall become just another soldier in the anti-fascist struggle. 220

  A situation of ‘dual power’ existed – as in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and at points during the German Revolution of 1918–20 – with the official government dependent on networks of revolutionary committees and organisations to get things done. However, the republican government did have one advantage over the revolutionary committees. It had a centralised structure and they did not. This was a vital matter. The fascist armies were centralised and so able to pursue a single strategy across the whole country. The anti-fascists needed to be centralised as well, otherwise the fascists would be able to win the war simply by moving their troops to points on the front where the opposing forces were weakest, knowing the anti-fascists would not be able to respond by concentrating their forces.