Although the largest working-class party, with the second largest trade union organization (after the CNT), in Catalonia at the start of the war, the POUM was accorded only one seat by the CNT on the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee, the same as the nascent communist PSUC.28 In a few weeks, the POUM had grown ten-fold to nearly 40,000 members; yet it was not a question of numbers alone – the PSUC soon had the same number – but of political weight. At the national level, the party, which had been in existence for only ten months at the start of the war, had not had time to develop. Lacking a real base except in Catalonia, its political influence on a national scale was considerably less than that of other parties. And within Catalonia, it had to prove to the CNT militants that its positions were the only ones which could defend the revolution they had made against their own organization’s original decision.
In the eyes of some of its leading militants, the POUM made a number of political mistakes. The first, underlined by IGLESIAS, was to have dissolved its own trade union into the UGT rather than the CNT when the latter ordained that only two trade union organizations – itself and the UGT – should exist in Catalonia, and decreed obligatory membership of one or the other.29 The party lost its union base without the corresponding advantage of establishing a channel to the CNT workers and militants in their unions.
The POUM followed the CNT into the Generalitat government, having lost the long battle against liquidation of the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee. This was an even greater error, in the view of Wilebaldo SOLANO, secretary of the party’s youth movement. To allow the Generalitat to take over the Anti-Fascist Militia Committee when the committee should have become a workers’ government and taken over the Generalitat – what a tremendous mistake!
—The CNT must bear the responsibility. We didn’t carry enough weight on our own to prevent it happening …
Juan ANDRADE, the ‘only party executive member’ to voice opposition to the POUM’s collaboration with a bourgeois government, knew that he would be expelled from the party if he voted against it. An editorial he had just written in La Batalla calling the formation of the Largo Caballero Popular Front government ‘counter-revolutionary’ had raised a storm of protest in the party, and a central committee plenum had decided he should no longer be permitted to write editorials. None the less, the real problem that faced the party in its decision whether or not to join the Generalitat government concerned the POUM’s legality.
—If we refused to join, the Stalinists would have used it as a pretext to outlaw us, and we wouldn’t have been able to maintain our militia forces. This would have been an additional reason for refusing us recognition as an anti-fascist party. We had no intention of outlawing ourselves in a revolutionary situation, cutting ourselves off, in this way, from influencing the masses. We knew the fate that awaited us as Russian influence grew, but we wanted to continue making our positions known to the workers for as long as possible …
—The POUM was already under attack for various reasons, recalled SOLANO. Many militants feared our isolation, particularly from the CNT, if we didn’t join. Once in the Generalitat, it escaped the CNT completely that it could use it as an instrument to develop the mass struggle in order to create a real workers’ government. Without a political line, the CNT was lost. The notion of forming a bloc with the POUM, which we put to them, went unanswered. But I don’t believe events would necessarily have changed if we hadn’t joined. I’m not sure we could have convinced the CNT to change course. It had the mass of the workers, it was a tremendous popular force, a mixture of primitivism and idealism. It hadn’t evolved towards revolution; it was an organization that had sprung from the country’s guts with a fighting revolutionary spirit. A colossus – with a head of clay … 30
When, after less than two months, the POUM was evicted from the Generalitat under communist pressure, ANDRADE observed, the CNT referred to the matter as a ‘quarrel between two marxist parties’ and said it wanted nothing to do with such disputes.
—Little did they realize that our fate would be theirs in due course. It was them the Stalinists wanted to liquidate. But with its love of rhetoric, the CNT simply answered: ‘No one can attack the lion of the CNT’ …
If the CNT leadership remained intractable, what of the CNT membership? Could a sizeable section be brought over to the POUM’s positions? One phenomenon was apparent to ANDRADE: the CNT workers saw no need to join a revolutionary marxist party because, when they contrasted the (superficially) revolutionary positions of their own organization with the simply democratic ones of the socialists and orthodox communists, they believed their organization’s tactics still held the guarantee for the continued development of the revolution. In other words, the anarcho-syndicalists believed that their organization, like their revolution, was sufficient unto itself. Was enough done, however, to criticize openly these superficial revolutionary positions to the CNT membership? Or did the POUM ride on the CNT leadership’s coat-tails?
—Sometimes, frightened of breaking with the CNT, I believe we did, explained SOLANO. We should have pursued a tougher policy. Before the war, when we had to fight the anarchists in order to be able to hold meetings in certain Barcelona barrios they dominated, our toughness paid off. They respected that. If Maurín had been with us, perhaps things would have been different; he was a lot more abrasive than Nin. The CNT was more critical of Maurín, liked Nin better, but the former carried more weight with them …
To impose the POUM’s policies, thought Ignacio IGLESIAS, required more than ‘the correct political line’; it required strength. The former did not guarantee the latter. And it was the CNT which had the strength. To appeal to its base we would have had to speak in an idiom that was acceptable to those who had been formed, or at least influenced, by another, anarcho-syndicalist language.
—We didn’t succeed. We were too demagogic, like most minority parties. We sloganized, instead of tackling real problems in the way the anarcho-syndicalists could understand …
But the question of what was explained was even more crucial. Calling for the working class to take power – ‘get the bourgeois ministers out’ – Nin told the libertarians six weeks after the uprising that if they were prepared to take over, bourgeois power would be destroyed. The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat admittedly separated marxists and anarchists; but this dictatorship must be understood, said the POUM leader, as including ‘the whole working class, the dictatorship of the popular classes. No organization, whether political or trade union, has the right to exercise its dictatorship over the other organizations in the name of the revolution’. Working-class monopoly of power abolished the class enemy’s political rights and freedoms.
Calling on the anarchists to draw the practical conclusions from the fact that, at that moment, the bourgeoisie exercised no freedom or political rights, and to accept his definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he went on: ‘compañeros, I can assure you then that today the dictatorship of the proletariat exists in Catalonia.’
This was patently untrue; hardly a kilometre away an exclusively petty bourgeois Catalan government was sitting at that moment, however powerless it might seem. (Less than three weeks later, the POUM would, moreover, join it, together with the other working-class organizations.) The bourgeoisie’s power had been gravely damaged but it had not been destroyed. However, as Wilebaldo SOLANO understood it, Nin was trying to explain, didactically, to the libertarians that their view of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of what had happened in Russia, was wrong. He was trying to get them to understand the need to create a workers’ government, to get them over their hostility to dictatorship, which they had recently repeated, so that they would establish the political power to articulate and consolidate the economic and armed power they had already won.
—He was misunderstood then, as he was misunderstood when, in April 1937, calling again for a workers’ and peasants’ government, he maintained that the working class could still take power with
out recourse to armed insurrection. What he meant was that the weight of the working class remained so great that, with sufficient political will, bourgeois power could still be overthrown. The strength of the CNT and POUM in the factories and army was such that insurrection was unnecessary, given that the workers were armed. It would be sufficient for them to announce to the Generalitat that they had taken power. The government would probably have given way without bloodshed. But it required a determined political will. All this was a far cry from the charge levelled at Nin that he was in favour of the peaceful road to revolutionary power. How could anyone think that when, in fact, the working class was armed? …
Ignacio IGLESIAS also felt that Nin was correct – but only inasfar as he was referring to Catalonia. ‘The fact of the matter was that at that moment Catalonia’s importance with respect to the rest of Spain had considerably diminished. By then the republican state had been recreated.’ If Nin’s perspective had been pursued, it would have meant Catalonia’s secession or independence from the rest of Spain, he felt. In every revolutionary movement there tended to be a loss of perspective as the focus narrowed on to the immediate; Nin had suffered from this, as he had also from the ‘very Spanish fault of making categorical statements and seeing issues in local rather than national terms’. Real possibilities of making a revolution and winning the war had existed for the first three months of the war, but these had died with the formation of Caballero’s government and the Soviet Union’s intervention.
To what extent these political errors affected the course of the CNT’s development remained an open question. Few CNT militants, even among the growing numbers who feared for their revolution, conceived of allying with a political party, but believed rather in returning to pure anarchist principles or consolidating trade union power.31 Even the more ‘politicized’ CNT militants could not conceive of an alliance with the POUM. ‘The POUM was a political party, the CNT was not,’ said Joan MANENT, a former treintista, by way of explanation. Moreover, the POUM, like the communist party, was critical of anarchist collectives – ‘trade union capitalism’ – and opposed to ‘forced’ land collectivization.32 Many libertarians might agree with the POUM on these points; but they were not attracted to marxism by hearing it from the minority POUM.
At the one level where the POUM might have expected CNT comprehension and solidarity – its unremitting anti-Stalinism and denunciation of the Moscow show trials then taking place – the party found that the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s reaction was ‘to keep quiet’.
—‘What’s going on in La Batalla?’ the editor of the CNT’s Solidaridad Obrera asked me when we met in the street one day, recalled SOLANO. ‘You’re shooting trotskyists every day.’ I exploded. ‘You receive the same Havas newsagency reports as we do. We publish them and you throw them in the wastepaper basket, that’s the difference.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about Russia. We’ve got our own problems here.’ ‘What! All these years you’ve reproached us about Kronstadt and the terror in Russia,’ I said, ‘and now that it is really happening and they’re shooting revolutionary leaders you’re all keeping quiet. In fact it’s you who are helping to shoot them by not publishing the news’ …
The CNT leaders were willing to make many sacrifices not to alienate the main supplier of arms. Even their traditional ‘anti-communism’ was not a cause for rapprochement with the POUM. And in the last resort, and however unwillingly, the CNT ‘base’ followed its leadership, as events in Barcelona would shortly prove.
Like the CNT leadership, the POUM had been overwhelmed by the revolution at the start. The question of working-class power had not been on its agenda, and when it was placed there by the force of events, the party concentrated on it to the exclusion of many other problems.
Perhaps the most important of these, as Ignacio IGLESIAS found to his surprise on his arrival in Barcelona early in 1937, was the question of the petty bourgeoisie. In a series of articles in La Batalla, he attempted to formulate the party’s position.
‘Up to the present the workers’ organizations have not practised the correct revolutionary strategy with respect to the petty bourgeoisie … In the name of an intransigent and infantile revolutionaryism, the petty bourgeoisie has been rejected, or else the working-class organizations have fallen under that class’s domination, hegemony and leadership. That is the meaning of the Popular Front policy at the present, a policy which binds the working class unconditionally to the organizations and parties of the petty bourgeoisie and, through them, to the big bourgeoisie. The correct policy does not lie in this route, but in attracting the petty bourgeoisie to the revolutionary movement.’
To achieve this, he wrote, it was necessary to ‘demonstrate that the working class is not opposed to the petty bourgeoisie or to its particular interests. Neither the small carpenter’s tools nor the tailor’s sewing machine are socializable objects to be taken from their owners. We must destroy the legend that the revolutionary proletariat is opposed to the small industrialist.’
The expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie undertaken in the first moments and which was justified by the need to impose a sort of ‘war communism’ was the antithesis of socialism. ‘The passage to socialism cannot be made in a brusque and sudden manner, leaping intermediary stages … At the moment, only large industry, transport, large commercial enterprises and the banks should be socialized. That is more than sufficient (for the working class) to keep power. Socialization of small industries and workshops is of no interest … ’
But a point of importance remained to be stressed. ‘We, the revolutionary proletariat, want to win the petty bourgeoisie for the revolution, which will resolve our common problems. But we are opposed to the petty bourgeoisie exercising political hegemony. We support its economic demands and work for the solution of its problems, which can only be satisfied within the framework of the revolution and socialism; but we deny it (political) leadership, for when it enjoys that it inevitably falls under the dominion of the bourgeoisie.’33
—By the time I wrote the articles it was already too late. It should have been done at the beginning. For if we weren’t able to attract the petty bourgeoisie to the revolution by solving its problems (instead of criticizing or neglecting it as was done at the start), it would swing behind whoever did – and in this case it was the communist party …
*
War and revolution; revolution and war. How often, recited backwards or forwards, these three words were used. The triumph of the revolution to ensure victory in the war, the victory in the war to ensure the triumph of the revolution. Words can be a terrible trap. The terms of each slogan were as much separated as joined by the simple word ‘and’. How rarely the conjunction was removed to form an adjectival phrase: revolutionary war – to furnish an answer to the twin questions: Which type of revolution? What sort of war? The two were more than ‘inseparable’; they had to be fused into a new whole.
—But no one tried to make the synthesis; or if they did, they didn’t come up with an effective answer, observed Albert PEREZ-BARO, of the Catalan collectivization commission. Instead, the political struggle polarized around the two slogans, around the question of Soviet aid, which the communist party used to strengthen its positions continually throughout the Popular Front zone …
It was not totally idle to speculate whether such a fusion could have been achieved, as Paulino GARCIA earlier suggested. It would have required a shift of the communist party to ally with a sector of the libertarians and revolutionary socialists. Was such a solution totally impossible, particularly in Catalonia where it would have served as an example to the rest of the zone? Josep SOLE BARBERA, lawyer and PSUC militant, believed that failure to work in that direction was one of the two major errors committed by his party during the war. The PSUC’s policies were far too influenced by the Comintern.
—The latter’s political perspectives, conditioned by situations and problems totally foreign to the problems and interests of the republic,
deformed many of the PSUC’s positions. This was most evident in the party’s line on the POUM and the CNT. Durruti was no Ukrainian anarchist who had raised the smallholding peasantry against the revolution – and yet we frequently used the same denunciations that Lenin had used against Makhno in the 1920s. The POUM was not a trotskyist organization as anyone with a concern for politics was fully aware. Trotsky was hostile to the policies Nin and the POUM were pursuing. But the PSUC acted as though it were …
The PSUC should have made the maximum effort, he felt, to attract the sector of the CNT which had understood Durruti’s famous phrase about sacrificing everything except victory to positions closer to its own. He believed it could have been done.
—Instead of which, the PSUC committed the cardinal sin of doing the opposite. It made charges that weren’t true, accused militants of the CNT and POUM of being virtual traitors, enemy collaborators. The party’s views on the adventurism and infantilism of the more extreme CNT sectors should have been made as political charges, with proven examples as they arose, rather than anything else. But that wasn’t how things were done: the party applied an entirely too mechanistic policy in its relations with the CNT and POUM …
The result was to lead to two civil wars within the civil war; to communist victory in the first and defeat in the second. And with it, finally, defeat in the war.
* * *
AGRARIAN REFORM DECREE
Article 1. It is agreed: that the state expropriate without compensation all rural property, of whatever size and use, belonging to persons, their spouses and legal entities on July 18, 1936, who intervened directly or indirectly in the insurrectional movement against the republic …
Blood of Spain Page 51