Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  *

  The rising made a deep impression on the right. But, in the view of a prominent falangist, Dionisio RIDRUEJO, this was subjectively transformed into more optimistic perspectives. At first, the bourgeoisie was very frightened by Asturias.

  —But then, believing that a revolution could be put down with relative ease, they became over-confident. They did not have the means, however, of effecting what their confidence led them to believe they could do. It meant relying as always on the only force available to them – the army …

  *

  On the left, the aftermath of October favoured the communist party rather more than the socialists, most of whose leaders were in gaol and who were racked by polemic over the outcome of the insurrection and future aims.

  Claiming a membership of about 20,000 at the time of the October insurrection, the communist party had grown very considerably under the republic, which, at its inauguration three years before, had found it with only 800 members. However, it was still no match for the 70,000-strong socialist party, which controlled more than 1 million members in the UGT, nor for the CNT which had a similarly large membership. Although the party had joined the Workers’ Alliance only at the last moment, its militants had played a significant role in Asturias. Raising the banner of October in the months thereafter, while the socialist party carried it furled, the communist party’s influence increased. Six years of extreme ultra-left sectarianism during the Comintern’s ‘third period’, in which no collaboration with social democratic leaderships was possible and the latter were labelled ‘social fascists’, were drawing to a close. Nationally, they had led the Spanish party into an impasse, while internationally they had led to Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933.

  Under a new leadership since 1932, the PCE was one of the first communist parties to herald a shift in line when, in March 1933 – ‘against the opinion of many members and of the Comintern delegate’, according to José SANDOVAL (see below) – the party proposed an anti-fascist front to the socialists and anarcho-syndicalists which both rejected. In May 1934, the Comintern gave the signal that its national sections could propose united action to the socialist leaders; pacts were rapidly sealed in France and Italy, and in Spain – the proposal having been rejected by the socialist party – the PCE joined the Workers’ Alliance despite the presence of trotskyists in it.72 On the eve of the October rising it declared: ‘When the struggle begins, the Workers’ Alliance will take the leadership into their hands; they are the fundamental organism in the struggle for power.’

  José SANDOVAL, communist militant (who later belonged to the commission that wrote the party’s official history of the civil war, and a member of the party’s central and executive committees), recalled the communist party’s position at that moment. It was not, like that of the left-wing of the socialist party, to struggle for the socialist revolution but rather to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution.

  —Capitalism was the dominant mode of production in Spain; the dominant contradiction was thus between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But there were still strong feudal vestiges remaining in the countryside which were holding back the full development of capitalism. The bourgeois democratic revolution, which could abolish these, could not be completed unless it was led by the working class and peasantry – precisely because no other class interests were as closely concerned with achieving such a revolution. It was Lenin’s position of 1905 in Russia, and it went back virtually to the founding moments of the PCE …

  A timid start, in the party’s view, had been made to initiating the bourgeois democratic revolution under the republic. But it had not reached half-way to its final objectives. In believing that this revolution must be completed, the party by no means discounted the fact that in the course of carrying through this first stage of the revolution, higher aims could be posited and achieved. ‘That is to say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could transform itself into the socialist revolution.’

  —But there was one thing that differentiated the 1905 strategy from the new situation: the rise of fascism. From 1933 on, the major problem which informed the communist party’s strategy and tactics was this threat, the need for working-class unity and the need for that unity to seek alliance with all anti-fascist social classes and strata who were willing to seek a democratic solution to the country’s problems …

  In June 1935, following the French example, the PCE proposed the formation of a Popular Anti-Fascist Bloc. In a speech, José Díaz, the party’s secretary-general, put forward a minimum programme for all anti-fascists: the confiscation of large landowners’ and church lands which should be given over immediately to the poor; the return of the right of self-determination to Catalonia (which had lost its autonomy statute as a result of the abortive October rising), and its application to Euzkadi, Galicia, etc.; general improvement in working-class living standards; amnesty for political prisoners and the formation of a provisional revolutionary government to put this programme into practice. At the same time, he said: ‘The proletariat must be the leadership (‘fuerza dirigente’) of this anti-fascist concentration. This is the best guarantee that this programme of struggle will be carried through.’73

  The following month, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern set its official seal on this new line of collaboration with sectors of the bourgeoisie and called for the formation of Popular Fronts to meet the threat of fascism. The nucleus of this new type of alliance was to be the united front of all proletarian parties. ‘The entire political activity of our party must revolve around the task of organizing Workers’ and Peasants’ Alliances. We must give these alliances a revolutionary programme, turn them in practice into the mainspring of the entire united front movement of the workers and peasants … transform [them] into live organs of the struggle for the immediate demands of the labouring masses and for preparing the seizure of power,’ said Ventura (Jesús Hernández) on behalf of the Spanish communist party.74

  The post-October repression by the centre-right government made not only the proletarian parties receptive to the need for unity of action,75 but also the left republicans: Manuel Azaña had been imprisoned and viciously attacked by the right on the unsubstantiated charge of having taken part in the uprising in Barcelona. With the prospect of general elections, the Popular Front became a reality within six months of its being mooted. However, it was not the pact that the communist party had proposed. The concept of a united front within it was watered down by the socialist party, which remained the dominant left-wing force, to a commission to negotiate terms with the liberal republicans; gone – as the ‘mainspring of the entire united front movement’ – were the Workers’ and Peasants’ Alliances; and soon to go in the negotiations were all but two of the PCE’s minimal programme points of six months earlier: the concession of an amnesty and autonomy statutes for the nationalities.

  The workers’ organizations represented on the negotiating commission in Madrid were the socialist party, UGT and socialist youth, the communist and syndicalist parties and the POUM. Juan ANDRADE represented the latter. In the commission it was the socialists who dominated and Largo Caballero who dominated them.

  —Everything he suggested was approved. He was given too much latitude. One has to understand the feeling of the time: Caballero was like a god, he could do what he wanted – and what he wanted was to reach agreement, whatever the difficulties, in order to fight the elections united. He was prepared to compromise to do so. A man of goodwill, he was fundamentally a trade union bureaucrat and not very intelligent at that …

  It was useless, ANDRADE soon saw, to try to object to the terms of the pact, to attempt to achieve working-class political leadership within it.

  —The socialist party was bent on suicide. And the rest of us, as we say in Spanish, were no more than poor relations; we were there thanks to the socialists. Caballero said he wanted to exclude no working-class tendency; the POUM was represented due to him. At the first meeting, the communist
party representative, Jesús Hernández, posed the problem of the POUM’s exclusion. Making considerable play of the fact that his attitude had nothing to do with me personally, he said it was motivated by my party’s policies. Caballero put an end to the matter with a ‘No one is being expelled from here.’ Hernández didn’t return to the charge.

  Reading the pact now one can see that it was a mistake; personally, I wasn’t in favour of signing it. The final agreement was delayed while I spoke by phone to the POUM’s executive in Barcelona who told me to sign. In fact, there was no alternative; we had to go into the elections united, the POUM would have split if we hadn’t signed. Moreover, it gave our newly created party a magnificent opportunity to make itself known at electoral meetings which, as part of the Popular Front programme, reached hundreds of thousands of people. Once the point had been made of the need to support the Popular Front at the polls, each party was free to develop its own policies at these meetings.

  The POUM was allocated four candidates on the Popular Front lists. But only Maurín could stand in Barcelona. The three other candidates, who included Nin and Gorkín, were rejected by the communists in the provinces where they were due to stand …

  The pact – ‘a common political plan which will serve as basis and programme for the coalition in the coming elections and as the norm of government’ in case of victory – was essentially a statement of the liberal republicans’ position and their refusal of socialist demands.76 On the burning problem of agrarian reform it said only that it would stimulate cooperation and the collective exploitation of the land and ‘carry out a policy of settling peasants and providing them with the necessary technical and financial resources’. Thus it promised more help to the smallholding peasantry than to the landless, considering the former the ‘firmest base’ of national reconstruction and offering them fiscal and financial help, as well as a new lease law. A decent minimum agricultural wage was to be established.

  In the industrial sector, it proposed protecting small industry and commerce, and setting in motion a large public works programme, which would include rural areas, and would serve to absorb unemployment. The catalogue of socialist demands, including nationalization of the land and banking, and unemployment benefits was explicitly rejected.

  This could hardly be called a large step forward to completing the bourgeois democratic revolution under the leadership of the working class and peasantry. But the ‘struggle of democracy against fascism’, in the communist party’s eyes, now overrode all other objectives.

  —The task of creating an anti-fascist alliance occupied the strategic foreground, imprinting its particular mark on the situation and the party’s policies, asserted José SANDOVAL. It was necessary to make every possible concession to the petty bourgeoisie and sectors of the bourgeoisie to attract them to the anti-fascist camp; they had to be given the widest scope for participation, even the leadership of the struggle. It was this that modified the Leninist strategy of 1905; it made it impossible to dispute the petty bourgeoisie’s leadership of the government, and it altered the fundamental strategy of the phases of the bourgeois democratic revolution. It meant that the subsequent socialist revolution would now be pursued as far as possible in conjunction with all those sectors involved in the anti-fascist struggle; en route, some of them would drop out and others would continue – and we would continue with them, giving them participation in the whole process of democratic transformation.

  The Popular Front alliance, I am convinced, contained within it enormous possibilities of social transformation. The role of the working class within it after the 1936 elections was growing stronger day by day. And though it sounds paradoxical, since the outcome was a civil war, the Popular Front contained the possibility of a peaceful development, the strengthening of the democratic revolution and even its transformation into a socialist revolution …

  The party’s strategy of six months earlier – not to mention the Comintern’s pronouncements – had been fundamentally altered. Not the working class and peasantry but the petty bourgeois liberal republicans were to lead the struggle between ‘democracy and fascism’.

  It was this concept that the dissident communist POUM attacked. Fascism was the ‘last and desperate attempt’ by the bourgeoisie to resolve the internal contradictions of the capitalist system and to ensure its continued dominance as a class.

  At a moment when capitalism was living an unparalleled crisis, fascism could not be fought by subordinating the working class to the bourgeoisie, socialism to the ‘rebirth of a form of capitalist domination that is already transcended – bourgeois democracy’.77 To hold back the democratic-socialist revolution, to deny demands that went beyond bourgeois-democratic freedoms in order to attract the petty bourgeoisie to the anti-fascist camp, was to invite the victory of fascism. When, as was inevitable, the petty bourgeoisie’s own political parties would once again fail to satisfy their needs and resolve their problems, they would, in their disappointment, become the social base which fascism in Spain had lacked. Only the democratic-socialist revolution could solve these problems, could swing over the petty bourgeoisie and popular masses.78 Implicit in the POUM’s view was that the failure to make the revolution would provide the conditions for the successful fascist counter-revolution. If this was the case, why had the POUM signed the Popular Front pact?

  —We joined because it was simply an electoral bloc which, in Catalonia where our major strength was, had no written platform and was called the Left Front of Catalonia. Given the electoral system that then existed, a bloc was necessary to win. We wanted no Popular Front as organization; indeed, the communist party was the only one to use the expression. We wanted the unity of the working class, to free political prisoners and to set the revolutionary process in motion again …

  This position, put by Wilebaldo SOLANO, later to become the secretary of the POUM’s youth movement, had to be understood in terms of electoral strategy which the working class knew required electoral pacts.

  —Trotsky attacked us very violently for joining. He maintained that the workers would reproach the POUM for having compromised itself. The contrary was the case: the workers would have reproached us if we hadn’t joined. There was a tremendous feeling of working-class unity in the face of the need to overthrow the right; the working class knew that the system obliged the POUM to join if it wanted to make any headway. But the workers equally well understood that tactical conditions could dictate elections one day and armed struggle the next, as indeed happened: the essential task – the seizure of power and the destruction of the bourgeois state – might require the use of a variety of tactics. If the situation we were living through had been properly explained to Trotsky, he would have understood. But living in Mexico, where communications were slow, and going through the worst period of his life, he was inevitably out of touch …

  The POUM’s position after the elections was that the working class should strive for the leadership of the struggle. But for the communists and many socialists, the perspective was not that: ‘it was simply for the establishment of the Popular Front’.

  In Asturias, Ignacio IGLESIAS, a POUM veteran of the October rising, saw the consolidation of the Popular Front policy as an extreme mistake. Rather than prepare the proletariat for revolution, the communist party’s policy and actions gave the petty bourgeois republicans a role which they had lost.79 ‘Their failure in the first two-year period of the republic was notorious; there was no reason for allowing them to retain the leadership.’ It was not, however, the communist party’s fault, he thought.

  —The blame lay with the Comintern, and in particular the Soviet Union which, in the face of the very real threat of fascism, was attempting to reach alliances with the bourgeois democracies, England and France. This explained their policy in relation to the indigenous bourgeoisie …

  The Comintern Seventh Congress had defined the central slogan for the communist parties as ‘the fight for peace and for the defence of the USSR’. The idea,
however, that the Popular Front solely served the needs of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy was ‘tendentious’ in José SANDOVAL’S view.

  —The Soviet Union’s needs and those of the Spanish democratic revolution were complementary, not contradictory. Logically, all communist parties at the time had the theoretical duty to defend the Soviet Union; but this duty was best carried out by engaging in the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country. The Seventh Congress and the new line certainly served the interests of the Soviet Union; but this determination to create as wide an alliance as possible against fascism did not contradict the interests of the working classes of each specific country. Concretely, we in Spain saw the need for such a Popular Front and neither thought of nor considered the Soviet Union’s interests …

  In fact, the USSR’s need to seek anti-fascist alliances with the bourgeois democracies found a perfect ‘fit’ in the need, at the national level, for alliances between the Comintern’s national sections and the bourgeois parties which could be brought into the anti-fascist struggle. This was clearly perceived by a Madrid socialist youth member, Antonio PEREZ. However necessary to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, the Popular Front was an absolute necessity in Spain. ‘The example of Austria and the slaughter of the social democrats had alerted us to the necessity of combating fascism … ’

  —The radicalization which we of the socialist youth had undergone, recalled another member, Sócrates GOMEZ, did not prevent us from believing that it was necessary to renew our experience of collaborating with the bourgeoisie. Without for a moment denying our hopes of repeating – successfully this time – October 1934 …

  The socialist youth, in PEREZ’S opinion, lacked theoretical preparation, knew very little of marxism, and by and large were unable to answer the communists with positions of their own.

  —When the communists talked about completing the bourgeois democratic revolution before being able to pass on to the socialist revolution we didn’t know what to reply. Our political education was virtually nil, 98 per cent of us had never read a word of Marx. The communist youth, which carried out the policies of its parent party, were better prepared than us; they were also more dogmatic and virulent. And what was true of us was true of our parent party: the majority of its leaders had never read a word of Marx either …