It is in the period of
decadence, when the capitalist system, as a whole, enters into its decline and
when the development of its contradictions has become insurmountable, that the
global unity of the system is mast apparent. This being the case it is a
diversion to focus an analysis on the basis of the particularities of each
country and the degree of capitalist development each has reached, on the
pretext of applying the law of ‘unequal development’. There are numerous analyses
which have as their point of reference the backward state of the Russian
economy, taken in isolation, and thus came to reject the very possibility of a
socialist revolution and, consequently, deny any proletarian significance to
the October Revolution in 1917. This is a typically Menshevik approach and in
the final analysis means applying the schemas and norms of the bourgeois
revolution to the crisis of capitalism and to the proletarian revolution. The
Communist International of Stalin/Bukharin went back to this schema in order to
justify its policy of a bloc of four classes in China, and in so doing rediscovered the bourgeois-democratic
revolution ten years after the October Revolution took place. This approach
was shared by those who fought for the, proletarian revolution in Germany, but denied
it could happen in Russia; by those who invented the theory of a ‘dual
revolution’ (bourgeois and proletarian at the same time); as well as those who
continue to see a progressive movement in ‘national liberation’ wars and
persist in seeing the bourgeois-democratic revolutions on the historical agenda
for the under-developed and colonial countries, while simultaneously preaching
quite happily a sermon on the proletarian revolution in the industrialized
countries.
The first difficulty,
the first obstacle, which Bilan came
up against regarding the events in Spain, was the approach of all those who put
forward the idea that Spain was a ‘special case’ and talked about “feudalism
and the struggle against reactionary feudalism”. The backward state of the
Spanish economy became a thing in itself, and served as a justification for all
the compromises and opened the door to all the betrayals. By putting Spain back
into the world economy, Bilan pointed
out the capitalist nature of this country and demonstrated that it was only
within the framework of the world capitalist economy in crisis that the
situation in Spain could and had to be understood.
No less important, Bilan situated the struggle of the Spanish
proletariat within the context of the overall global evolution of the
proletarian struggle. On what course of action did the proletariat in the 1930s
find itself set? On a course of mounting revolutionary struggle? Or a course in
which, having suffered profound defeats, the demoralized proletariat would let
itself be integrated into the mobilizations for national defence, under the
slogans of defending democracy and anti-fascism - a course which would inevitably
lead to the imperialist war? Trotsky recognized that the victory of Hitler in
Germany had opened the way to war and he denounced this as such; but with the
advent of the Popular Front in France and Spain his analysis altered completely
and he boldly announced in 1936 that, “The Revolution had started in France”. Bilan’s analysis was totally different.
They did-not see the triumph of the Popular Front as a reversal of the course
towards war, but on’ the contrary considered it to be a reinforcement of this
course. They saw that the Popular Front was an appropriate response by the democratic
countries to the hysterical war-mongering of Germany and Italy - a way, and one
of the most effective ways - to make the proletariat leave its class terrain
in order to mobilize it for the defence of ‘democracy’ and the national
interest; a necessary preparation before leading the proletariat off to fight
another imperialist war.
What perspective could
there be for, the heroic struggles of the Spanish proletariat within this
context? It is undeniable that the Spanish proletariat gave a magnificent
example of combativity and decisiveness in its vigorous struggle against the
uprising carried out by Franco’s armies - especially in the early days. But no
matter how remarkable the combativity of the Spanish working class was, the
development of events showed only too quickly that it was, not within the power
of the Spanish proletariat to go on to a revolutionary victory, while there was
a world reflux and immobilization of the international working class.
Bilan, and using as their only criterion
the combativity of the Spanish workers, they imagined that the Spanish working
class now had a chance to reverse the general process of reflux and inaugurate
a new revolutionary movement. Carried along by revolutionary sentimentalism
rather than by rigorous analysis, they did not see in the events in Spain the
last ripple of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-20 - the last convulsive
movement of a world proletariat engulfed in a tide of national unity and war.
By announcing that the events in Spain were a reawakening of the revolution, they
thus took up Trotsky’s perspective.
It is hardly
surprising, then, that by clinging to the vain hope for a miracle that could
never happen, they were led to see such things as the workers’ militias and
participation in government as victories for the working class when they served
only to reinforce capitalism. And they thereby closed their eyes to the tragic
reality of the completely disoriented Spanish proletariat being handed over to
the very worst capitalist massacre. These communist groups found themselves
foundering politically, becoming ‘critical’ accomplices and touts of the war,
just like the Trotskyists and POUMists.
The tragic events
experienced by the Spanish proletariat in 1936 have left us with this precious
lesson: just as October 1917 showed us the possibility of victory for a
proletarian revolution in a backward capitalism because it was borne along by
a general revolutionary wave which the Russian proletariat only expressed and
initiated, so Spain in 1936 showed us how impossible it was for a proletariat
in an under-developed country to reverse a general process of triumphant
counter-revolution, no matter how combative that proletariat might be. This has
nothing to do with fatalism or standing passively to one side. As Bilan wrote: “The task of the moment
was not to ‘betray!” In Spain in 1936 it was not the victory of the
revolution that was at stake; the essential point was to prevent the
proletariat abandoning or being thrown off its class terrain and sacrificing
itself on the altar of the counter-revolution, whether in its fascist or
democratic form. If the Spanish proletariat was not able to make a successful
revolution, it could and had to remain firmly on the terrain of the class
struggle, rejecting any alliance or coalition with bourgeois factions and
rejecting the anti-fascist war as a lie which would lead to its crushing defeat
- a war that would serve as a prelude to six years of uninterrupted massacre of
millions of proletarians in a second imperialist world war. Such was the first
task and first duty of revolutionaries at that time as Bilan made clear in denouncing with all its might that false
‘solidarity’ that consisted of appealing for men and arms to send to Spain. The only outcome of this could be the
prolongation and growth of the war to the point where a local capitalist war
would be transformed into a general imperialist war.
The war in Spain rejuvenated and produced yet another myth,
another lie. At the same time as the class war of the proletariat against
capitalism was replaced by a war between ‘democracy’ and ‘fascism’ and class
frontiers were replaced by territorial frontiers, the very content of the
revolution itself was deformed by replacing its central objective - the
destruction of the bourgeois state and the taking of political power by the
proletariat - for so-called socialization measures and workers’ control in the
factories.
It was above all the
anarchists and certain tendencies claiming to come from councilism who were
conspicuous in extolling this myth the most - going so far as to declare that
in Republican, Stalinist, anti-fascist Spain, socialist positions were more
advanced than those reached by the October Revolution.
We do not want to
enter here into a detailed analysis of the importance and significance of
these measures. The reader will find a sufficiently clear answer to those
questions in the following texts taken from Bilan.
What we do want to make clear is that even had these measures been more radical
than in fact, they were, nothing could change the fundamentally
counter-revolutionary nature of the events that took place in Spain. For the
bourgeoisie, as for the proletariat, the crux of the revolution can only be the
preservation or destruction of the capitalist state. Not only can capitalism
temporarily accommodate itself to self-management measures or a so-called
socialisation of farming (in other words the formation of co-operatives),
while still waiting for a chance to restore order at the first propitious
moment (see the recent experiences in Portugal) it can also perfectly well
instigate these measures as a means of mystification to derail the energies of
the proletariat in the direction of illusionary ‘victories’ in order to divert
it from the central objective - the stakes of the revolution - the destruction
of capitalism’s focus of power, its state.
To glorify these
alleged social measures as the summation of the revolution is only a verbal
radicalism which at best masks the same old reformist idea of a gradual social
transformation. But this radical phraseology meant more than that in Spain in 1936: it was a capitalist mystification
attempting to divert the proletariat from its revolutionary struggle against
the state. Themselves duped by mystifications and appearances, in the first
place currents supporting such measures became accomplices to this diversion
doing their utmost to blur and confuse the clear view of the primary task of
proletarian revolution. Against these radical phraseologists, and in complete
agreement with Bilan, we affirm that a
revolution which does not begin with the destruction of the capitalist state
can be anything you like to call it, but not a proletarian revolution. The
events that took place in Spain in 1936 have only tragically confirmed the
revolutionary principle which the Bolshevik Party recognized and applied in
1917 and - which was one of the decisive factors in the victory of October 1917.
In Spain in 1936, the proletariat sustained one of its
most bloody defeats followed by forty years of ferocious repression. Reduced
in the course of defeat and triumphant reaction to small groups who found a
vehicle for their voice in Bilan, the
communist left was painfully aware of its isolation and powerlessness in terms
of the immediate situation. Just like the Bolshevik Party and the handful of
other revolutionaries of 1914, they remained faithful to communism by going
against the stream. If the war and forty years of victorious counter-revolution
finally got the better of its organization, the lessons of the struggle and the
revolutionary positions developed by the communist left in the thirties have
not been lost. Today with the reawakening of class struggle and with the
perspective for its revolutionary development, communists are rediscovering
and renewing the thread of this political continuity. In republishing these
texts from Bilan we hope to make them
an instrument for the political rearming of the proletariat today, and from the
lessons of yesterday’s defeats, to forge weapons for the final victory
tomorrow.
M.C.
Revolution Internationale
August 1976.
The simple general assertion that in Spain today there is a bloody struggle in progress between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, far from helping to take up a political position favourable to the defence and ultimate victory of the proletariat, could actually lead to the most terrible disaster and massacre of the workers. In order to arrive at a positive assessment it is first of all necessary to see whether the masses have been fighting on their own class terrain, and thus whether they are in a position to move forward, to develop the capacity to drive back the attacks of their class enemies.
At the moment there are several explanations of the political situation. Let us deal first with the one put forward by the Popular Front, to which the centrists have given a ‘theoretical’ gloss. According to them ‘the dissidents, the rebels, the fascists’ are fighting a life or death struggle against the ‘legal government which is defending bread and freedom’. The duty of the proletariat is thus to defend the government which represents the progressive bourgeoisie against the forces of feudalism. Once the workers have helped it to defeat these feudal elements, they can then advance to the next stage of the struggle: the fight for socialism. In our last issue we showed that while Spanish capitalism was incapable of achieving the same kind of social organization as exists in other European countries, nevertheless, it is the bourgeoisie which is in power in Spain, and only the proletariat and it alone is capable of overhauling Spain’s economic and political structures.
The Popular Front in Spain, as was the case in other countries, has in the course of events shown itself to be not an instrument of the workers but a powerful weapon of the bourgeoisie in its effort to smash the working class. We only have to recall that it was under the Popular Front government that the Right was able to organize its activity in a methodical way; thus the Right was given all the room it needed to prepare its plots and conspiracies (though this more theatrical side of its activities was actually the least important). More significant than this was the fact that the actions of the Popular Front government have led to the demoralization of the peasant masses and to a profound hostility on the part of the workers, who once again had been moving towards another big wave of strikes like those of 1931-2 that were crushed by the terror carried out by a left-wing government, by a crew very similar to today’s Popular Front government.
Right from the beginning of the present situation the Popular Front adopted a policy of compromise with the Right, as can be seen by the setting up of the Barrios government. Hence there is nothing surprising in the fact that Franco did not arrest Azaña right at the beginning, even though he could have done so without any problem. The point is that the whole situation was very uncertain and, although the capitalists opted for a frontal attack in every town, they were unsure as to whether their extreme right wing would be able ‘to immediately win a complete victory. Because of this the arrest of Azaña was put off, and it was really the subsequent actions of the Popular Front which gave the capitalist offensive its greatest chance of succeeding.
First in Barcelona and then in other working class centres, the right-wing attack was met by a popular uprising which, because it took place on a class basis and came into conflict with the capitalist state machine, could have very quickly led to the disintegration of the army: as the events of the uprising unfolded on the streets, the class struggle broke out in the regiments and the soldiers rebelled against their officers. At this point the proletariat was moving directly towards an intense political armament, which could only have resulted in an offensive directed against the capitalist class and towards the communist revolution.
Owing to this vehement and powerful response of the proletariat, capitalism felt that it had to abandon its original plan of a uniform, frontal attack. In the face of the insurgent workers who were developing a powerful class consciousness, the bourgeoisie saw that the only way it could save itself and win out was to give the Popular Front the task of directing the political action of the workers. The arming of the masses was tolerated only so that it could be strictly contained within the limits of a ‘united command’ with a specifically capitalist political orientation. Today Caballero is in the process of perfecting this instrument from the technical point of view. At the beginning the workers were poorly armed in material terms but well armed politically; after this, however, the workers were laden with sophisticated arms but they were no longer fighting on their own instinctive class basis: they had been gradually shifted onto the opposite terrain, the terrain of the capitalist class.
Rapidly in Madrid, less easily in the Asturias, and after an even more complicated process in Barcelona, the Popular Front was able to achieve its aims and today the masses find themselves trapped by a logic that maintains the capitalist state machine is inviolate, that it must be allowed to function as freely as possible so that the Right can be defeated, since the crushing of the ‘rebels’ is the supreme duty of the hour.
The proletariat has laid down its own class weapons and has consented to a compromise with its enemy through the medium of the Popular Front. In the place of a class line-up (the only one which could have put Franco’s regiments out of joint and restored confidence in the peasants who had been terrorized by the Right) a new line up has emerged, a specifically capitalist one, and the Union Sacrée (trans. ‘Holy Alliance’) has been achieved. Now the imperialist carnage can set town against town, region against region in Spain, and by extension, state against state in the struggle between the two democratic and fascist blocs.
The fact that a world war has not yet broken out does not mean the Spanish and international proletariat has not already been mobilized for the purpose of butchering itself under the imperialist slogans of fascism and anti-fascism.
After the Italian and German experience, it is extremely depressing to see politically developed workers, basing their analysis on the fact that the Spanish workers are armed, come to the conclusion that, even though the Popular Front is leading these armies and in the absence of a total change in the situation, the conditions exist for the victory of the working class. No, Azaña and Caballero are worthy brothers of the Italian and German socialists whom they have ably emulated - in an extremely difficult situation they have succeeded in betraying the workers. They have allowed the workers to keep their arms only because they are being used in a class struggle which is not that of the proletariat against Spanish and international capital, but that of capital against the working class of Spain and the whole world - a struggle that has taken the form of an imperialist war.
In Barcelona reality is hidden behind a façade. Because the bourgeoisie has temporarily withdrawn from the political scene, and because certain enterprises are being run without bosses, some people have come to the conclusion that bourgeois political power no longer exists. But if it didn’t really exist then we would have seen another power arise: the power of the proletariat. And here the tragic answer provided by the reality of events is cruel. All the existing political formations, even the most extreme (the CNT), openly proclaim that there can be no question of attacking the capitalist state machine - for even headed by Companys it can be ‘of use’ to the working class. Our position on this question is absolutely clear: there are two principles opposing each other here, two classes, two realities. It is a question of either collaboration and treason, or struggle. In such an extreme situation the forces of collaboration also resort to extreme methods. If in the course of a social conflagration like the one that took place in Barcelona, the workers are pushed not towards attacking the capitalist state, but towards defending it, then it is class collaboration and not class struggle which has won the day. Class struggle does not develop through a series of material conquests which leave the enemy’s apparatus of power untouched, but through the outbreak of genuinely proletarian actions. To socialize an enterprise while leaving the state apparatus intact, is a link in the chain which ties the proletariat to its class enemy, both on the home front and on the imperialist front of struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, whereas the outbreak of a strike based on the simplest
class demand and even in a ‘socialized’ industry can be a moment in the eventual triumph of the Spanish and international proletariat.
It is just as impossible to identify the proletariat with the bourgeoisie as it is to identify the present territorial front, the armies of the Union Sacrée, with a class line-up and a class army. The difference between the two is fundamental and is not a question of detail. At the moment there is an apparent contradiction between the details and essentials, between the ardour, the sacrifices, the heroism of the workers enrolled in the armies of the Popular Front and the historic political function of the latter. Like Lenin in April 1917, we have to go to the heart of the problem and it is here that the only real political differentiation can be made. The capitalist attack can only be answered on a proletarian basis. Those who ignore this central problem are deliberately placing themselves on the other side of the barricades. As for the much-vaunted social conquests, they are nothing but a mesh tying the workers to the bourgeoisie.
In the present situation in which the proletariat is caught between two capitalist forces, the proletariat can only go forward by following the path that leads to insurrection. It is impossible for the armies of Catalonia, Madrid, or the Asturias to evolve in a positive direction: a brutal, unequivocal break with them is the only course open to the class. The essential precondition for the salvation of the Spanish working class is the re-establishment of class frontiers in opposition to the present territorial divisions. Above all in Catalonia, where the energy of the proletariat is still powerful, it is necessary to channel this energy towards class strugg1e. It is necessary to foil the plans of the capitalists, which consist in crushing the peasant masses with naked terror while using political corruption to seduce the industrial masses into joining the ranks of Spanish and international capital. NO to the Union Sacrée, at any stage of the struggle, at any moment of the battle! It may be that this step in the imperialist war may not immediately lead to a world-wide conflagration. In that case unless there is a total change in the situation, the present conflict in Spain will end in a victory for the Right, because the Right has the role of massacring the workers in their thousands, of installing a regime of total terror like the ones that exterminated the Italian and German proletariat. The Left, the Popular Front, has a different capitalist function: its role is to make a bed for the reactionaries, a bloody bed in which thousands of Spanish workers and workers of other countries have already lain.
The working class has only one bastion: its own class struggle. It cannot be victorious when it is imprisoned in the bastion of the enemy and that is what the present military fronts represent for the class. The heroic defenders of Irún were condemned in advance. They had been led onto the capitalist terrain by the Popular Front which succeeded in obliterating their own class terrain and in so doing made them a prey for the armies of Franco.
Armed struggle as part of an imperialist front is the grave of the proletariat. The only response of the proletariat is an armed struggle on its own class terrain. Instead of competing for the conquest of towns and regions, the class must mount an attack on the state machine. This is the only way to disintegrate the regiments of the Right; the only way of foiling the plans of Spanish and international capital. Otherwise, with or without the French proposals about non-intervention, with or without the Coordination Committee composed of fascists, democrats, and centrists (all the important countries are represented on it), capital will have its bloody triumph and the arms merchants of France, Britain, Germany, Italy and the Soviet State itself will deliver the goods to the two general staffs - Franco’s and Caballero’s - so that they can finish off the massacre of the Spanish workers and peasants.
In all countries, whether the bourgeoisie is for or against neutrality, for or against sending arms to Franco or the government, the workers must respond with their own class demonstrations, with strikes against the legal shipment of arms, with struggles against each imperialism. Only in this way can they express their solidarity with the cause of the Spanish proletariat.
(Bilan, no.34, August-September 1936)
…If we reflect on the profound difference between the first and second phase of events, we can begin to understand the cruel logic of the present situation. On 19 July (1936) the proletariat rose up against the fascist attack and unleashed a general strike. The proletariat was on its feet, the class itself, the only class capable of beating back the fascist offensive. And it was fighting with its own weapon of struggle - the strike. Armed struggle? Yes, but in the service of class resistance. And at that moment there was no government at the workers’ side, no Republicans, no separatists.
The proletariat was terribly strong, because it was terribly alone. After that the whole situation changed. From then on the Spanish workers had the Popular Front government next to them and the sympathy of other powerful governments: the French, the British, the Russian. But the proletariat no longer existed as a class, since once it had left its own elemental class terrain it was nailed to a terrain that was not its own, and was actually in opposition to it - the terrain of its class enemy.
And so the tragedy began. The fascists grew in strength the more the workers - through the Popular Front government - clung to their own bourgeoisie. In Barcelona the capitalist state machine was not only left intact, it was made inviolate, because the workers were being persuaded to make it function as effectively as possible in order to wage the war. The strengthening of the state machine in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and its corollary - the strengthening of the same machine in Seville and Burgos - allowed the fascist attack to have an even greater chance of success.
The traitors of various countries are urging the workers to call for government intervention. What would be the result of that? The lesson of 1914-18 is tragically and eloquently applicable. Even if a world conflict did not ensue and an improvement in the military position of the ‘loyalist’ armies allowed them to defeat the generals, the Spanish workers fighting under the leadership, control, and for the objectives of the Popular Front government would discover, just like the French and British workers in 1918, that the price of falling for the deceptions of their exploiters would be an intensification of their slavery. Even if the manoeuvres of capitalism, setting worker against worker, were limited to Spain, even if they do not lead to a world conflict, it doesn’t mean that the Spanish proletariat will be alone in paying the price.
But this hypothesis (of a victory of the Popular Front) does not seem to correspond to the evolution of the terrible events in Spain. Our initial impressions seem to have been confirmed. Capitalism was forced to undergo a bloody conversion from its extreme left to its extreme right - the initial plan of crushing the workers of Spain in one fell swoop did not succeed. To achieve that the bourgeoisie has had to make use of a force which acts in a complimentary manner to the general’s frontal attack. This force is represented by the Popular Front.
The manoeuvres of the Popular Front have succeeded in tearing the workers away from their own class front, from street battles against the bourgeoisie, in order to push them onto a purely territorial front. And with every defeat on this front capitalism has fortified its positions of strength within the masses. The defeat at Irún was accompanied by the formation of the extreme-left Caballero government; the fall of Toledo was followed by the entry of the POUM and the anarchists into the Barcelona Generalitat. In this way Spanish capitalism has suffocated the slightest response of the class.
The workers of Spain and of the entire world will remember today’s horrible tragedy. They will add it to the list of similar tragedies in Germany, Italy, Russia, and other countries. The capitalist enemy will enter it into its list of victories against the proletariat, but in historical terms capitalism is definitively condemned. In revenge for being incapable of developing the productive forces it is piling up a mountain of proletarian corpses. But from these countless victims will spring up anew the invincible power that will build a communist society. The workers of Spain are fighting like lions, but they are being beaten because they are being led by traitors, led to fight within the enemy’s bastion on the territorial fronts. From their defeat will arise that wall of steel of class struggle against which the weapons of capital will be powerless, because the workers will no longer be fighting against their brothers but against their class enemies and for the victory of the revolution.
(Bilan, no.35, September-October 1936)
THE ORDER OF THE DAY: DON’T BETRAY!
Our position can be utterly destroyed by a single sentence. Which? That when the Spanish workers are struggling resolutely against the fascist attack, fighting like lions against an enemy which gets its arms and ammunition from Hitler and Mussolini with the complicity of Blum and Eden; when they are making barricades out of their own bodies to stop the advance of the fascist hordes; when, in every country, there are hundreds and thousands of workers who are ready to join the battle front - your position serves only to demoralize the ranks of the fighters, facilitates the advance of the fascist enemy, and fragments the fronts where the workers are contesting every inch of the ground with Franco, behind whom stands the coalition of international fascism.
However, this sentence doesn’t constitute an argument. And, even if it’s able to get a bigger hearing - because of its demagogic appeal - than that found by our position, this doesn’t mean it expresses a genuine solidarity with the Spanish workers. It represents, in short, nothing but one more twist in the rope used to bind up the proletariat before turning it over to the forces who are leading the workers, their institutions and class, to the scaffold. Let us say again that in a discussion between different currents who claim to be working for the liberation of the workers from the capitalist yoke, it is not a question of engaging in a polemical battle aimed at alienating and silencing one’s adversary and his arguments. It is a question of presenting political positions and mobilizing those forces that can shape the struggle for the defence and the victory of the working class against the capitalist enemy. It is only on this terrain that political divergence can correspond to the interests of the workers in Spain and in every other country; only on this front can the energies of the working class be concentrated on building the barricades of defence and victory.
Waves of demagogy may drown us, but the ruthless momentum of events has not only left all our political positions intact, it has also confirmed them in the most tragic way; and this only because we remain unshakably anchored to the class interests of the proletariat. If we thought it could help the Spanish workers, we would swallow our words down to the last syllable. But we have, no choice but to view the anger of those militants who oppose us, not as a positive element in the resistance of the Spanish workers, but as another expression of the triumph of our class enemy’s stratagems. Capitalism can only win this new battle if it succeeds in mobilizing the most advanced sectors of the class and the revolutionary militants who struggle within these sectors. And it is doing this with the aid of the colossal mystification of anti-fascism, which is yet again proving to be a bed for fascism.
What is happening today is a most tragic confirmation of marxism. Much more than in an intermediary situation, the position of the working class in decisive moments can only be salvaged on the basis of class positions: anything else can only lead to the worst possible massacre of the workers. The slightest compromise brings with it (in exchange for illusions about having got something out of the struggle) the dismal certainty that the enemy has penetrated the ranks of the workers and is methodically preparing their downfall.
Yes. We have taken up a firm unshakeable decision concerning the events in Spain. At no price, under no circumstances, will we fall into the trap that is being laid for us. Our reply to the enemy who calls us to arms to fight against fascism is to proclaim the necessity to struggle against our own capitalism. The millions of workers who fell in the 1914-18 war believed that they were fighting in order to uproot the main obstacle preventing the emancipation of the working class, whether this was Czarism or Prussianism. But in reality they fell in order to safeguard the capitalist system and their corpses on both sides built a macabre barricade, the barricade of the bourgeoisie against the revolutionary onslaught of the masses. We will never ever forget this tragic lesson, and our watchword will be to strike against each sector of capitalism in order to undermine the system throughout the world.
On the question of bourgeois power, our watchword is again quite clear: the lesson of 1914 has taught us that under no pretext can we collaborate with the bourgeoisie. Against the alluring idea of penetrating the capitalist state in order to work within it either for socialism, or to block an attack by the forces of reaction, the millions of workers who fell in the struggle for ‘liberation’ are proof that collaboration with the bourgeoisie means the imprisonment and ruin of the workers. It means delivering the workers into the hands of the enemy.
Now we come to the events in Spain. What remains of the tragic lessons of 1914? Some people began to talk about the emergence of a revolutionary situation, only to add immediately that to unleash class struggle, to attack the capitalist state, destroy it and set up a proletarian power - all this would not be in the interests of the workers, but rather the fascist aggressors. One thing or the other is true: either a revolutionary situation does exist and you have to fight against capitalism, or it doesn’t. If the latter is the case then to speak of revolution to the workers, when unfortunately what is on the agenda can only be a defence of partial gains, is to hurl the masses into an abyss where they will be slaughtered. “The workers believe that they are fighting for socialism” Of course! It couldn’t be otherwise. It was the same in 1914. But is the task of revolutionary militants to go among the workers and say that the road to socialism is the one which leads to the destruction of the capitalist regime or the one which leads to the imprisonment of the workers within that regime?
But, we are told, we are not in 1914. In Spain there is not a confrontation between two imperialist armies in the service of contending states - or in any case, not yet. Today, fascism is on the attack and the workers are defending themselves. By participating in the armed struggle of the workers, by working for a military victory over fascism, we are not at all repeating the actions of those who led the workers to slaughter in 1914.
The lesson of the last war is indeed still cruelly vivid in the memory of the workers. Even the bait of a war against fascism is insufficient, and as soon as the workers see the various capitalist states enter the lists they will quickly understand that they are fighting and dying not for their own interests, but for the interests of their class enemy. Before the last war, the nationalist movements of each country were directed against each other, while socialism raised the banner of the unification of all peoples in order to maintain peace. Today the rightist movements in each country have established themselves everywhere, and it’s here that we have a re-edition of 1914 in a new form. The difference in form is a result both of the extreme tension in the relationship between the classes and the fact that capitalism today is forced to mislead and deceive the workers in order to be able to slaughter them by putting a new emblem on the same old flag - the flag defending and safeguarding the capitalist system. But, we are so often told, the events in Spain have not yet unfolded in the same way as the events in 1914, though they may do tomorrow. Still, as long as they haven’t reached that point, we must defend territories threatened by the fascist attack.
But isn’t the future something real? Can tomorrow be anything else than the development of what is happening today? The moment the workers set foot on a path which could lead to war, they have left their own path and have become the victims of forces which they can no longer outwit, because they have been politically disarmed by those forces the moment they get mixed up with them. Of, course a militant or a group can wash his hands of the whole thing as soon as there is no longer any doubt about the situation and the contending imperialist states intervene openly, but how can the mass of workers disengage themselves from the resulting turmoil? Moreover, wasn’t it clear that from the very beginning of the events in Spain, the different capitalist states were pulling the strings of the situation in order to ensure that the Spanish workers got crushed? And that means all states, the fascist and the democratic states, as well as the Soviet state. And what other way is there of dislodging these states except the class struggle in every ‘country? Doesn’t the slogan “Lift the blockade” simply prepare the ground for the next imperialist war? Isn’t it simply to go the way of Jouhaux, of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, who have succeeded in suffocating movements of the class (the only response of the workers which can really express solidarity with the Spanish workers) by tying the workers to the capitalist state and pushing the latter towards a new imperialist war?
Our central position follows from the thesis (which everyone seems to admit as being beyond dispute) that fascism is simply the most savage expression of capitalism, so that it is only by attacking capitalism that the proletariat can defend its interests and thwart the enemy’s offensive. And it is really disconcerting when we hear that waging a class struggle against capitalism could actually serve the interests of capitalism. It is obvious that when we compare Barcelona to Seville there is a much greater possibility in Barcelona of waging a struggle against, capitalism, and it is incomprehensible that the energies of the proletariat there should be channelled not towards the struggle against the bourgeoisie, but in the opposite direction: towards the integration of the proletariat into the capitalist state. It should be recalled that the anarchists, in order to justify their entry into the Caballero government, argued that this was the only way of permitting the real arming of the workers which had been sabotaged by previous governments. We can understand the panic suffered by those who are caught up in the whirlpool of events, but to us this argument of the CNT is simply a repetition of what the reformists have always said: that we have to enter the ‘state’ apparatus in order to prevent it serving the interests of capitalism. The Spanish tragedy has added a new and dismal note to the tragedy of 1914.
“Unleashing the class struggle in regions which are not under fascist control would result in the fall of these territories and their occupation by Franco’s hordes.” That is the reply we get, an attempt to prove the impossibility of applying the positions we have defended since these events began. Apart from the fact that this has in no way been proved, there is another consideration: even if the defence of a class position had the result of hastening the tragic outcome of the situation - which would in any case show that the situation had been an extremely unfavourable one for the workers - then at least the arrival of the fascists would take place when the energies of the proletariat or at least part of the proletariat would still be strong. In such a situation, after a struggle which could only result in defeat, the enemy would at least have been unable to strangle the best elements of the proletariat by demoralizing the class as a whole.
Immediately after the workers’ uprising of 19 July Spanish capitalism followed a dual strategy in its efforts to strangle the proletarian class struggle. In the rural areas it resorted to the White Terror; in the working class centres it integrated the masses into the state apparatus, putting them under a general staff which would inevitably lead them into a massacre. Right from the beginning there were two main aspects to the situation. On the one hand, we saw capitalism each day gaining new positions of strength within the proletariat until it was able to direct the workers onto the fronts where they were slaughtered; on the other hand, we saw the workers, after fighting on their own class terrain in the first week, being pushed off it by the very forces in whom they had put their trust. Each time that the workers could have redressed the situation and rediscovered their terrain (ie after each military defeat), capitalism widened its field of manoeuvre and went from the Giral government to the Caballero government, and in the end to a government in which the anarchists participated. Thus capitalism was able to prevent the proletariat from drawing the lessons from its defeats, ensuring that the workers would continue to put their trust in those who could only lead them to the slaughter. Once you have been integrated into the apparatus of the class enemy, you are no longer working for the proletariat, but for capitalism.
In today’s extremely difficult situation, when the chances of resistance and victory are becoming more and more limited, those militants who still defend the need to return to struggle on a class basis find themselves exposed to the blows of a capitalist apparatus which in Valencia and in Catalonia can count on the support of all the organizations operating inside the proletariat. As in 1914 - indeed, even more so than in 1914 - the means for silencing the sightest voicing of class positions seem to have been found. Our fraction, which in Spain as in other countries has not neglected any possibility open to it, no matter how modest, of defending its positions; our fraction, which has always been guided, by the principle that, in order to earn the confidence of the masses, you must remain firmly on the terrain of the class struggle, and that any position won by the workers by struggling on a capitalist front is a position which can only, serve the interests of the class enemy; our fraction, which finds itself in a situation of agonizing isolation tragically illustrated by the corpses of the Spanish workers, remains convinced that what is being buried today is not the proletariat, but all those ideologists and forces which, because they are not armed with marxism, with the theory of the proletarian class, can do nothing but lead the workers to the slaughter.
The fascist hyenas can cynically say that, confronted ,with only 50,000 of its assassins, millions of workers have been unable to resist and win. But the hyena well knows that this has only been made possible because the workers have been forced from their own class terrain, because they have been led by the direct accomplices of Franco: the anti-fascists of all varieties.
The only way of remaining on the side of the workers, even if the crushing superiority of the enemy precludes any possibility of reversing the situation, is by refusing to betray, just as Lenin did in 1914. To desert the military fronts in Spain as an example for the whole proletariat is to disassociate oneself from capitalism. It is to struggle against capitalism and for the working class.
In every country to struggle against one’s own capitalism is to fight in solidarity with the Spanish workers. Any other position, no matter whether it is embellished with socialist, centrist, or anarchist justifications, can only lead to the crushing of the proletariat in Spain as in the rest of the world.
(Bilan, no.36, October-November 1936)
First of all we must draw attention to certain facts. When news of the movement of 17 July in Morocco reached Madrid and Barcelona, the reaction of the capitalists was to wait and see how the proletariat would respond before deciding themselves what course of action to take. At first, as we pointed out in the last issue of Bilan, the Quiroga government was replaced by the government of Barrio in an attempt to carry out a peaceful move to the right. But because of the extent of the workers’ uprising in Catalonia and Madrid, this attempt failed miserably and Giral came to power. Meanwhile Barrio went off to Valencia where, in the name of the government, he tried to institutionalize the workers’ revolt.
The manner in which events unfolded after 17 July confirms our analysis. On 17 July the Barcelona seamen’s union seized a supply of arms from the ships Manuel Arnus, Argentina, Uruguay, and Marquis de Comillas (150 rifles plus ammunition). The union took them to its local. On the 18th, the eve of the military uprising, the police took away some of these arms.
After the 17th, leaders of various workers’ parties went to ask Companys for arms since it was public knowledge that the army would be out on the street at dawn on the following Sunday, only to have the leader of the Generalidad assure them that the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard were perfectly capable of dealing with the situation, and in any case, if they were beaten, the workers could then take the rifles from the dead and go into action. For Companys the best thing the workers could do on Saturday night and Sunday was to go home and wait for the outcome of the struggle.
But the turbulence of the Barcelona proletariat was reaching bursting point. On Sunday morning the entire proletariat – some armed in a make-shift way, but most unarmed – was in the streets. At five o’ clock the battle, broke out. Surrounded by the workers the Assault Guard and part of the Civil Guard were forced to march against the army. Soon the courage and heroism of the workers (among whom the militants of the CNT and FAI particularly distinguished themselves) had enabled them to take command of the most important positions in the city; here and there the soldiers fraternized with the workers, as for example at the Tarragona barracks. By that same evening the soldiers had been defeated and General
Goded capitulated. At this point the armament of the proletariat became general.
As for the Generalidad, it hid itself timidly in the face of the workers’ combativity. But despite the fact the workers who had previously asked it for arms had now taken them by force, it did not believe they would turn their guns against the Generalidad itself.
On Monday the 20th, the CNT followed by the UGT called for a general strike throughout Spain. But everywhere the workers were already in the streets. They had taken up arms but were putting forward their own class demands. The old differences between the CNT and the UGT, over the 36- or 40-hour week and the question of wages, all came up again during the course of the struggle since the workers had already begun to take over a number of companies. Also, on the 20th, militias to clean up Barcelona were formed. The Generalidad published a decree on the 21st which said, “First: citizens’ militias have been set up for the defence of the Republic and the struggle against fascism and reaction.” The Central Committee of the militias was comprised of a delegate from the advisory committee to the government, a delegate from the general commission for public order, and representatives of all the workers’ or political organizations struggling against fascism.
Thus from the 21st onwards, the Generalidad was trying to set its stamp on the initiative of the armed workers in order to contain their struggle within the limits of’ bourgeois legality.
On the 24th, the general strike continued and the POUM spoke of carrying on with it until fascism was crushed everywhere. But already the CNT, which dominated Barcelona, was calling for a return to work in the food industries and public services. The POUM published this appeal without criticism. However, class demands were still being discussed. The workers expropriated the central tram depot – the Metropolitan – and all other means of transport, including the railways. Once again, the Generalidad intervened to legalize the situation by making its own expropriations. Later on it took the initiative of expropriating certain companies before the workers could do so.
On the same day, the Esquerres front, which regrouped all the parties of the bourgeois left, received a letter from the POUM. At Companys’ invitation the POUM agreed to collaborate with all parties against fascism; but, after discussing it in its Executive Committee, refused to collaborate in a Popular Front government.
It seems that from the 24th onwards, under the pressure of the Generalidad, the majority of the workers’ organizations tried to hold back the movement of class demands. The social-centrists of Barcelona were against the strike; the CNT was calling for a return to work; the POUM still kept up its programme of demands but didn’t say whether it was for or against a return to work.
After the 24th, the departure of the militia columns to Saragossa was being organized. But it was necessary that the workers should go off feeling that their demands had been met. The Generalidad issued a decree saying wages for the strike days would be paid. But here again in the majority of the factories the workers, arms in hand, had already obtained some partial concessions.
Since the bourgeoisie had managed to bring the general strike to an end thanks to the role played by parties and trade unions who claimed to be a part of the proletariat, and since in the factories occupied by the workers, the 36 hour week had been established ipso facto – the Generalidad issued a decree on 26 July introducing the 40 hour week with a 15% increase in wages.
And so, while the Generalidad is strengthening its efforts to tame this outburst of social conflict, we come to the 28th, which already marked an important turning point in the situation. The POUM, which through the F.O.U.S. controlled the employees’ union (‘Commercial Union’) and a few other small companies, called on those workers who were not in the militias to return to work. It was necessary for them to create a mystique around the march on Saragossa. Let’s take Saragossa, the workers were told, then we can settle our scores with the Generalidad and Madrid.
By calling for a return to work, the POUM clearly expressed the change that had taken place and the success of the bourgeoisie’s manoeuvres. The bourgeoisie had managed to bring the general strike to an end first by issuing decrees to stifle the workers’ response, and finally by pushing the workers outside the towns towards the siege of Saragossa. But in Saragossa the general strike continued through phases of retreat and acceleration, and it was only much later that the workers would accede to Cabanellas’ ultimatum to return to work or be massacred. After that the workers no longer hoped for a resurgence of the strike movement, but for the victory of the government forces, and this allowed Cabanellas to organize the ferocious and bloody repression of the class.
According to the 29 August edition of La Batalla, the POUM’s newspaper, the workers of Saragossa continued the general strike for fifteen days. This is what their paper says: “On Sunday morning, 19 July (when the army came out onto the streets – editorial note), the workers immediately organized their resistance and the struggle lasted for a number of days. The strike was absolutely general fifteen days later and the shooting at the workers’ barricades continued long after that. There were still some unconquerable heroes who preferred to die rather than accept the rule of fascism.”
From 28 July onwards, the movement in Catalonia took on a different aspect. The expropriation of factories and the election of workers’ councils continued, but all this took place with the agreement of the delegates of the Generalidad, which obviously didn’t try to resist the armed workers since it knew that as long as the majority of the workers were engaged in the war, it would get what it wanted.
Already the outline of Spanish capital’s plan of attack was becoming clear. In the agricultural regions that had already experienced ‘repression at the hands of the Popular Front and where there was no longer a concentrated proletariat, the agrarian problem would be resolved by Franco through ferocious and bloody repression. In this department Franco is quite the equal of Mussolini or Hitler. In the industrial centres, especially in Catalonia, where the agrarian problem does not exist, it was necessary to attack the proletariat sideways on. Push it into a military trap, fragment its unity from within, but at all costs succeed in liquidating it as a class. In Madrid this task fell to the Popular Front. By making formal insubstantial concessions in Catalonia concerning economic management and political leadership, the Generalidad managed to incorporate the CNT and the POUM (that opportunistic party attached to the London Bureau, which has as one of its leaders the ex-Trotskyist, Nin, who is today Minister of Justice).
In Madrid after 19 July the general strike was simply the prolongation of the big building strike, which had lasted since June. And it came to an end only a few days after the strike in Catalonia was over, owing to the extreme state of confusion in the capital. Here the workers went out onto the streets on the Monday only, when in Barcelona the army had already been crushed. The Barrio government only lasted a few hours and its successor, formed by Giral, promised to give everything except the arms that the workers’ organizations had asked for. On Monday, without arms, the workers of Madrid made for the Montana barracks, which they soon took over. From then on all the barracks in Madrid began to fraternize with the workers and there was also a short battle on the outskirts of Madrid when the army tried to march on the city. On Tuesday the workers, now on general strike, were looking for their enemies and since everyone from the CNT to the social-centrists was proclaiming that the Popular Front was their ally – the avenging hand of the armed proletariat – the workers dispersed to the provinces of Madrid and took on the army at Guadarama. Here after a bloody but confused struggle the workers withdrew and the majority of them went back towards Madrid. There and then came the call for an end to the strike and the organization of the columns.
As in Barcelona and the rest of Spain, the workers, who from February 1936 had been told to regard the Popular Front as a trusty ally, had gone into the streets on 19 July without being able to use their arms in a way that would have allowed them to smash the capitalist state and beat Franco. They left Giral in Madrid and Companys in Barcelona at the head of the state apparatus contenting themselves with the burning of churches and the ‘cleaning up’ of capitalist institutions like the social security, the police, the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard. Certainly in Catalonia they expropriated the essential branches of production, but the banking system was left intact with the same capitalist function as before.
We shall examine these events in greater detail elsewhere, when we have more thorough documentation.
From the 19-28 July, the situation was such that the armed workers, at least in Barcelona, could have taken power – albeit in a confused manner, but nevertheless in such a way as to constitute a powerful historic experience. The march to Saragossa saved the bourgeoisie. La Batalla, organ of the so-called ‘marxist’ party, declared that the eyes of the world revolutionary movement were concentrated on Saragossa. But from 27 July the bourgeoisie was already cautiously feeling its way forward. At Figueras, after beating the fascists, militants of the CNT were disarmed by the Civil Guard and the militias of the Popular Front. At this point the CNT issued an appeal to the masses, calling on them to shoot anyone who tried to disarm them. The Generalidad took heed of the warning. From now on it would use other methods.
On 2 August there was a new attempt by the Generalidad to institutionalize the situation: it decided to call several classes to arms. The soldiers refused to go off to the front unless they were in the militias. The CNT immediately took up a position: “Militiamen - Yes! Soldiers - Never!” Meanwhile the POUM called for the dissolution – not the destruction – of the army. Of course the Generalidad tolerated all of this, satisfied with being able to tie the Central committee of Anti-Fascist militias to the Generalidad’s Department of Defence.
The composition of the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist militias was as follows: 3 delegates from the CNT, 3 delegates from the UGT, 2 delegates from the FAI, 1 delegate from the Republican Left, 2 from the United Socialists, 1 delegate from the ‘League of Rabassaires’ (small farmers under the influence of the Catalan Left), 1 delegate from the coalition of Republican parties, 1 delegate from the POUM and 4 representatives of the Generalidad (the defence councillor, Colonel Sandino; the general commissioner of public order, the prefect of Barcelona; and 2 delegates of the Generalidad without fixed responsibilities).
From the point of view of the political evolution of the situation the proletariat of Madrid was quickly shunted on to the bourgeoisie’s terrain; in Barcelona this process took several weeks more of war and further manoeuvring.
On 30 July in Madrid, La Pasionaria declared that it was a question of defending the bourgeois revolution, which still had to be completed. On 1 August the police remained active in Madrid and Mundo Obrero, following Giral’s attempt to take away the militia’s right of arrest, spoke of the need to clear up the ‘confusion’ by convincing the Popular Front that the militias were acting in the interest of order.
On 3 August Mundo Obrero proclaimed that it would defend the property of the friends of the Republic. And it also said: “No strikes in democratic Spain.” There was to be no rest for the workers on the labour front! Its whole programme can be summed up in a few words: after having beaten fascism, the Republican Left would remember the workers’ actions leading up to 19 July and would do everything possible to prevent a return to that situation.
On 8 August, Jesus Hernandos made a resounding speech, toasting the workers’ struggle for the bourgeois democratic Republic and nothing else. On 18 August the centrists were able to say that the struggle in Spain had taken on the aspect of a national war, a war for the independence of Spain. For them what was necessary was the creation of a new peoples’ army composed of the old officers and the militias. From this point on they would become the partisans of severe discipline.
When the Giral cabinet came into being all the Caballeros and the Prietos called for the formation of a Commission of the Popular Front, linked to the Ministry of War, in which they would participate. By this means they would become ‘official’ ministers.
As for Barcelona – now that it had entered into the latest phase of the war for Saragossa, which was presented as a precondition for ‘resolving’ the social question, Solidaridad Obrera (Workers’ Solidarity) of 1 August greeted the dawn of a new era, the beginning of the period leading to the establishment of libertarian communism.
When the Casanova administration was set up following the departure of the delegates of the PSUC (United Socialist Party of Catalonia, members of the IIIrd International) from the government, the CNT insisted that while the newly formed government was not a true expression of all the gains the workers had made, nonetheless, the CNT would give it total support.
Throughout the first week of August, the CNT mobilized the masses to fight on the Aragon front, insisting that this was no regular army, but a battalion of volunteers in which every officer of the old army would be supervised by a militiaman. In the end, it put forward an idea previously completely unknown to the anarchists: that of military discipline. But then the CNT was soon to be absorbed in the problem of controlling the initiative of the workers in the economic sphere as well, in order to keep up maximum output for the war.
On 14 August, Solidaridad Obrera openly declared that relations of war production had been set up in the economic sphere. We will however examine this aspect of the question separately when we look at the economic measures and the new social and political institutions that emerged in Catalonia.
We have yet to mention the position of the POUM. Far from being a party capable of moving towards revolutionary positions, the POUM is simply an amalgam of opportunist tendencies (Left Socialists, Communists of the extreme Right, Trotskyists), and an obstacle to any revolutionary clarification. The schema that has determined the POUM’s intervention has been more or less the following: the Bolsheviks fought first against Czarism, then against the bourgeoisie and its Menshevik agents. Without the Cheka and the Red Army, the Bolsheviks would have been unable to defeat their internal and external enemies (La Batalla, 4 August). Thus, the POUM should fight first against fascism, then against the bourgeoisie: just like Nenni fighting Mussolini first, then the bourgeoisie: just like Breitscheid fighting Hitler first, then the bourgeoisie… As if Lenin in April 1917, in opposition to Stalin and Kamenev, did not defend a programme of struggle against all forms of bourgeois rule. As if it were possible to fight against fascism without engaging in a struggle against the whole capitalist system.
First of all we must mention something of central importance that sheds a great deal of light on the whole situation. When the capitalist attack came in the form of Franco’s uprising, neither the POUM nor the CNT even dreamed of calling the workers to go out into the streets. They organized delegations to go to Companys for arms. On 19 July the workers came out spontaneously – by calling for a general strike the CUT and UGT were simply acknowledging a de facto state of affairs.
Since Companys, Giral, and their ilk were immediately regarded as allies of the proletariat, as the people who could supply the keys to the arms depot, it was quite natural that when the workers crushed the army and took up arms no one would think for a moment of posing the problem of the destruction of the state which, with Companys at its head, remained intact. From then on an attempt was made to spread the utopian idea that it is possible to make the revolution by expropriating factories and taking over land without touching the capitalist state, not even its banking ‘system.
The constitution of the Central Committee of the militias gave the impression that a period of proletarian power had begun; while the setting up of the Central Council of the Economy gave rise to the illusion that the proletariat was now managing its own economy.
However, far from being organs of dual power, these organs had a capitalist nature and function. Instead of constituting a base for the unification of the proletarian struggle – for posing the question of power – they were from the beginning organs of collaboration with the capitalist state.
In Barcelona the Central Committee of the militias was a conglomeration of workers’ and bourgeois parties and trade unions; not an organ of the soviet type arising spontaneously on a class basis and capable of providing a focus for the development of proletarian consciousness. The Central Committee was connected to the Generalidad and disappeared with the passing of a simple decree when the new government of Catalonia was formed in October.
The Central Committee of the militias represented a superb weapon of capitalism for leading the workers out of their towns and localities to fight on the territorial fronts where they are being ruthlessly massacred. It is the organ that established order in Catalonia, not in conjunction with the workers, but against the workers who had been dispersed to the fronts. It is true that the regular army was practically dissolved, but it is gradually being reconstituted within the militia columns whose general staff – Sandino, Villalba and Co. – are clearly bourgeois. The columns are made up of volunteers and this will probably remain the case until the intoxication and illusion in the ‘revolution’ is over and capitalist reality is restored. Then we will soon see the official re-establishment of a regular army and obligatory service.
Far from being the embryo of a Red Army, the columns were set up on a basis having nothing whatever to do with the proletariat. If this were not the case, we would have seen the workers destroying the capitalist state and taking power, or at least turning their guns against the state. The militia columns did nothing of the sort. All that happened was that the Catalonian columns went off, to Saragossa and Huesca; the Madrid columns to Toledo and Guadarama. The armed workers were thrown into the struggle against fascism, not against capitalism in all its forms. Under these conditions all the democratic forms that in the beginning existed within the columns, have no real importance. What is important is the tendency the militias follow and this was quite clearly that of the Popular Front: the anti-fascist struggle which not only respects the organs of capitalist domination, but actually strengthens them, thanks to the support given them by the anarchists and the POUM who have entered into the ministries of government.
In Madrid the militias were practically under the control of Caballero’s Department of War, which supplied non-commissioned officers to the different organizations that were forming columns.
While the main part of the regular army went over to Franco, the Popular Front and its allies, by organizing the militias, have been trying to push the workers away from the terrain of the class struggle towards the formation of a new regular army. This is why, despite all their courage, the workers are being crushed. On the military terrain Franco is in his element, whereas men like Companys and Caballero are pursuing a social not a military strategy, designed to get the workers massacred. With their incorporation into the army, the workers have lost the strength needed to rediscover the path that allowed them to beat the army in Barcelona and Madrid on 19 July.
Let us now take a look at the other instruments of capitalist rule. The Civil Guard (which distinguished itself in the massacre of the workers under the monarchy) was transformed into a Republican National Guard. It is true that in Barcelona the CNT proceeded to clean up this institution, but it still remained intact and was even embellished by the entry of anarchist militants into its ranks. In Madrid the Civil Guard remained intact and jealously guarded the strong-boxes of capitalism: the banks.
The only real exception occurred in Valencia where the workers of the Iron Column (CNT) opposed the agreement fixed on by their own organization, which merely asked the Civil Guard to give up its rifles. In this instance the workers came back from the front, forced the Civil Guard at the point of their machine-guns to disarm itself completely, and burnt the police archives. In Madrid it was soon understood that it would be best to withdraw the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard and allow the setting up under the auspices of the Popular Executive Committee (a sort of Popular Front) of an Anti-Fascist Popular Guard, which would also maintain order behind the lines. The Assault Guard (which the workers came up against under the Republic) remains intact and in Barcelona is extremely well armed.
Concerning the Department of Criminal Investigation, there was simply a clean-up operation of this institution, which remained intact. In France Blum replaces functionaries by decree and democratizes the state: in Spain functionaries are replaced at gunpoint in order to ‘proletarianize’ capitalist institutions. In Barcelona the anarchists have taken command of the Department of Criminal Investigation first in the form of an Investigation Section of the Central Committee of the militias, today in the form of the Department of Safety whose general secretary is the CNT militant, Fernandez.
In Madrid, at the beginning of October, after the proclamation of the militarization decree, all the vigilance committees of the political and trade union organizations were subordinated to the Department of Public Safety. Neither in Barcelona nor in Madrid have the lists of spies, sent by the political police into the workers’ organizations, been published. And this is significant.
Tribunals were quickly set in motion again, through the utilization of the magistrate apparatus of the old regime and the participation of the ‘anti-fascist’ organizations. The popular tribunals of Catalonia, both the initial version, then the ‘extremist’ version (following the decree by the POUM minister, Nin), were always based on collaboration between the professional magistrates and the representatives of all the parties, though Nin’s suppression of the popular jury was an innovation. In Madrid the percentage of professional magistrates was higher than in Barcelona, but after October Caballero issued decrees aimed at simplifying the procedure for passing judgment on fascists. Thus he achieved the same exalted ends as Nin.
Only one institution was swept away in earnest in Catalonia: the Church. Since the Church is not an essential instrument of capitalist rule, this simply gave the masses the impression that a real transformation had taken place, whereas it is actually very easy to rebuild churches and equip them with new priests as long as the essentials of the capitalist regime still exist.
If one considers another, factor, it can immediately be seen that the Church is not the nub of the problem. The banks and the Bank of Spain remained intact, and everywhere precautionary measures were taken to prevent them being taken over by the masses, by force of arms if necessary. The contrast between the extremism exhibited in the demolition of the churches and the passivity displayed in regard to the banks is the key to the present events, in which the masses have been pushed to demolish the marginal elements of the capitalist system, but not the system itself.
Let us now look at two forms of organization that were set up in opposition to each other: the factory councils and the Council of the Economy of Catalonia.
When the workers went back to work in the factories where the bosses had fled or had been shot by the masses, factory councils were set up as an expression of the expropriation of these companies by the workers.
Here the trade unions intervened very quickly, setting up a procedure that would allow proportional representation in places where the CNT and the UGT had members. Moreover, although the workers returned to work on condition that they would be getting a 36 hour week and a wage increase, the unions intervened to defend the need to work at full output for the war effort, without worrying too much about the regulation of work or about wages.
The factory committees and the committees for the control of industries which were not expropriated (out of consideration for foreign capital or for other reasons) were thus immediately smothered; transformed into organs for stimulating production, they lost their class content. They were not organs created during an insurrectionary strike in order to overthrow the state; they were organs whose function was the organization of the war, and this was an essential precondition for the survival and reinforcement of the state.
After being put under the control of the unions to further the anti-fascist war effort, from 11 August onwards the factory committees were linked to the Council of the Economy which, according to official decree, was “the deliberative organization for the conclusion of agreements on economic matters between the various organizations represented on it (Catalan Republican State, 3; United Socialist Party, 1; CNT, 3; FAI, 2; POUM, 1; UGT, 3; Catalan Action, 1; Republican Union, 1) and the Generalidad government, which would carry out the agreements reached through these deliberations.”
Henceforward the workers became prisoners inside the factories, which they thought they could take over without destroying the capitalist state. Soon afterwards, in October, the workers in the factories were militarized under the pretext of opening up a new era and winning the war. Right from the beginning, the Council of the Economy claimed to be working for socialism in harmony with the Republican parties and the Generalidad. No more, no less. The man who – on paper – was carrying out this “first step from capitalism to socialism” was Mr. Nin, who elaborated the Council’s eleven points. By the end of September the new ‘workers’’ minister in the Generalidad was given the task of making this first step, but by then the mystification and dupery of the whole thing was more obvious.
The most interesting fact here is this. Following the expropriation of companies in Catalonia, their co-ordination through the Council of the Economy in August, and the government decree of October laying down the norms for ‘collectivization’, after each one of these steps came new measures for disciplining the workers in the factories – discipline they would never have put up with under the old bosses. In October the CNT issued an order forbidding defensive struggle of any kind and stating that the workers’ most sacred duty was to increase production. Apart from the fact that we have already rejected the Soviet fraud, which consists of the physical assassination of the workers in the name of “building socialism”, we declare openly that for us the struggle in the factories cannot cease for a moment as long as the domination of the capitalist state continues. Certainly the workers will have to make sacrifices after the proletarian revolution, but a revolutionary will never advocate the cessation of defensive struggles as a way of achieving socialism. Even after the revolution we will not deprive the workers of the strike weapon, and it goes without saying that when the proletariat is not in power – as is the case in Spain – the militarization of the factories is the same as the militarization of the factories in any capitalist state at war.
To become the weapon of the revolution, the factory councils would have had to allow the workers to enter into a struggle against the state; but since the workers’ organizations immediately allied themselves with the Generalidad, this was impossible without a struggle against the CNT, UGT, etc. Thus all talk of ‘dual power’ in Catalonia is just empty chatter. It is obvious that these forms of working class struggle did not appear in Valencia or Madrid, but we lack the space to examine in more detail the initiatives taken by the workers in these two centres.
Before returning to an analysis of the actual events, we would like to say a few words about the agrarian question. It is true that there were a lot of innovations in this sphere. In Catalonia a decree was issued for the obligatory ‘syndicalization’ of various agricultural activities (sale of products, buying of agricultural materials, insurance, etc). In addition, it is clear that after 19 July the ‘rabassaires’ (small holders) got rid of a whole series of rents and taxes, while in areas where the land belonged to owners suspected of fascist sympathies, the land was divided up under the auspices of anti-fascist committees. But following this, first the Council of the Economy, then in October the Council of the Generalidad, set about containing these initiatives and channelling them towards the needs of the war economy which was being set in motion.
Already in August, part II of the programme of the Council of the Economy spoke of “the collectivization of big, landed property which will be cultivated by the peasants’ unions with the help of the Generalidad” (our emphasis). Following this, and particularly in September and October, the slogan of the CNT and the other organizations was: “We respect the property of the small peasants”. In other words, peasants, get back to work! Finally, there was a reaction against forced collectivization and the Agricultural Council hastened to reassure the peasants who were only interested in certain general measures to do with the selling of goods and the purchase of materials, that “the collectivization of land must be limited to big landed properties that have been confiscated”. In Valencia when things went into a reflux, there was also a tendency to set up committees for the export of oranges, rice, onions, etc, while the land belonging to fascists was confiscated by the peasants who worked these estates in a collectivized manner because of the sheer necessities of cultivation (eg the problem of irrigation).
In Madrid the Communist Minister of Agriculture, Uribe, issued a decree in October in which he specified “the authorization of the expropriation, without compensation and with the state’s favour, of agricultural properties of whatever size or type, belonging after July 1936 to natural or legal personages who intervened directly or indirectly in the insurrectionary movement against the Republic.”
In essence these were no more than the measures of war which any bourgeois state would take against the ‘enemy’. The only difference was that Uribe and Co. had to take into account the intervention of the peasant masses, who after 19 July went much further than the provisions set out by such decrees. But even if it were conceded that an ‘agrarian revolution’ was carried out in Spain, it would still have to be shown that this was the crux of the situation and not the reinforcement of the capitalist state in the cities, which is precisely what makes such a mockery of any idea of a profound and lasting revolutionary transformation of agriculture and economic relations. We have not exhausted all these problems in the brief examination we have attempted here. We will deepen this analysis in further studies with the aid of documentation.
Throughout the month of August the rush towards the territorial fronts continued, amid the enthusiasm of the workers. “We are threatening Huesca, we are marching triumphantly on Saragossa, now we are encircling Teruel.” Such was the recurring theme all the organizations repeated to the workers for two months. But parallel to this, all the organizations intervened in an attempt to substitute the decisions and initiatives taken among themselves for the initiatives taken by the workers behind the lines.
On 19 August the POUM intervened with an editorial whose main message was: “The regular organs created by the Revolution itself, are the only organs responsible for the administration of revolutionary justice.”
Round about the same time, the Barcelona edition of Anti-Fascist Spain published an interview with Companys in which the latter insisted that the CNT and FAI are today representatives of order and that the Catalan bourgeoisie is not a capitalist bourgeoisie, but a humanitarian progressive bourgeoisie…(1)[1] [4]
On the 22nd, under the slogan “Hasta el fin!” (To the end!), an expedition to Majorca was organized. Thousands of Catalan workers were thrown into this adventure, the majority of whom had to be evacuated back towards Barcelona, amid a total silence on the part of the anti-fascist front. This experience, which clearly showed the willingness of the ‘humanitarian’ bourgeoisie of Catalonia to plunge the workers into a military massacre, led to the establishment of a closer liaison between the War Committee of the Central Committee of the militias and the Generalidad’s Department of War.
On the 25th, the aggravation of the military situation had its repercussions on the relationship existing between the various organizations. The POUM echoed this by demanding that the cordial relations between the militiamen at the front should also exist behind the lines. Addressing the CNT, the POUM said that they both totally shared the same revolutionary élan and that the masses’ unity of action must be maintained at all costs. But on the 25th Solidaridad Obrera wrote that at its last plenum, the CNT had drawn up an agreement providing for the disarmament of 60% of the militiamen belonging to the different parties. The militiamen would carry out this act themselves or else the CNT would make sure it was done. The main slogan of the plenum was: “all arms to the front.”
The CNT thus made it clear that as far as it was concerned the violent struggle behind the lines – in the cities – was now finished and there was only one front left for the workers to fight on: the military front.
All the parties shared this point of view. On the 29th a decree of the Central Committee of the militias was published, saying that those who were in possession of arms must immediately hand them over or go off to the front. From now on Companys could rub his hands together in satisfaction.
All this time the whole farce of non-intervention was going on. All the capitalist states and Soviet Russia were in agreement about facilitating the dispatch of powerful arms to Franco and the expedition of columns of foreign workers to Companys and Caballero. All the states were keen to intervene in Spain in order to lend a hand to the massacre of the workers, all within the framework of ‘non-intervention’. Italy and Germany supplied arms to Franco, Blum facilitated the formation of “proletarian foreign legions” (Solidaridad Obrera), but kept watch over the sending of arms.
From this point on, the POUM and the CNT understood the help of the international proletariat to mean the workers putting pressure on their governments to send “aeroplanes to Spain”. These aeroplanes and tanks would come from Russia when militarization had been carried out in Spain and the Spanish workers had lost any chance of avoiding a massacre at the hands of Franco. We will examine all this later on.
On 1 September Mr. Nin, at a meeting of the POUM, defended the idea that “our revolution is more profound than the one Russia made in 1917”. Perhaps the reason for this is that in Spain the masses are being called upon to make the revolution without destroying the capitalist state? For him, the originality of the Spanish revolution resides in the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat is being exerted by all the parties and trade union organizations (including the parties of the bourgeois Left under Mr. Companys). But on 1 September during the time leading up to the fall of Irún, the Barcelona newspapers and above all La Batalla issued a joyful cry: “The fall of Huesca is imminent.” The day after they were saying that, “We are in the outlying streets of Huesca”, but the days and weeks passed without any outcome and, in the end, they were whispering that the Commander-in-Chief of the government forces, Villalba, was a traitor, that it was all his fault, etc… On 2 September, the POUM further ‘deepened’ the revolution by dissolving its trade union organization into the UGT (2)[2] [5] under the pretext of injecting a revolutionary vaccine into the latter.
But the defeat at Irún, and the betrayal by elements of the Popular Front, was soon known about. In La Batalla and Solidaridad a campaign was launched against those who, like Prieto, were in favour of a compromise with the fascists.
“What happened at Badajoz? What happened at San Sebastián?” asked the POUM. And the POUM’s answer was that what was needed was a workers’ government.
The reaction of the CNT and the social-centrists in Barcelona to the Majorca adventure and the betrayals at Badajoz and Irún was to launch a mighty campaign for the unification of the command and centralization of the militias. But at this point, the attention of the masses was directed towards Huesca, since it was being said everywhere that “the encirclement of Huesca is complete” and that its fall was imminent.
Here the Caballero government made its debut, presenting itself with a ‘constitutional programme’ and setting itself the task of creating a unified command for waging the war. “Hasta el fin!” Badajoz and Irún were quickly forgotten and when the Basque nationalists handed San Sebastián over to Franco’s armies, the Caballero government set up a Basque Department to formulate legal statutes for a free Basque state.
Caballero, who had tried to bring the CNT into his ministry, now contented himself with the technical support the latter gave him, and got down to organizing the defeat at Toledo and the fall of Madrid.
Before this had happened, the POUM (La Batalla, 11 September) saluted the Caballero cabinet as a progressive government compared to Giral, but declared that if it was to be a true workers’ government, it would have to incorporate all the proletarian parties and above all the CNT and FAI (and of course the POUM). For these reasons it stuck to its slogan of a workers’ government based on a Constituent Assembly of workers and soldiers. Mundo Obrero, organ of the Madrid centrists, who held several ministries in the government, issued an appeal which demanded “everything for the government and by the government.”
On the 12th we were “on the outskirts of Huesca”.
But on the 13th Huesca had still not been taken, and it became necessary to try to normalize life in Catalonia in expectation of a long war. The CNT made an address to the peasants, stating that it only wanted to collectivize the big estates and that it would respect the small-holders. Its slogan was: “To work, peasants”. The POUM publicly expressed its agreement with this and continued miserably to tail-end the CNT, regularly throwing bouquets in its direction, only to have them publicly disavowed by the CNT.
On the 20th a campaign began in Madrid in favour of re-establishing a regular army. The social-centrists were the ones who started it. The POUM accepted the principle of ... a Red Army. The CNT maintained a disdainful silence and got on with organizing the national plenum of its regional bodies in Madrid.
This plenum took the following decisions: to begin a campaign for the creation of a National Council of Defence based on regional Councils, which would have the task of leading the struggle against fascism and the struggle for the construction of a new kind of economy. The composition of the National Council of Madrid should be: five representatives for the CNT, five for the UGT, four for the Republican parties. Largo Caballero would become President of the Council with Azaña remaining at the head of the Republic. The programme included the elimination of voluntary service, a unified command, etc....
These propositions immediately gave rise to an animated polemic. But two essential things had happened: the anarchists would enter the ministries providing they changed their names. Claridad, Caballero’s paper, said this was not too much of a problem. Secondly, the anarchists accepted the principle of militarization – the same anarchists who on 2 August had told the workers of Barcelona to refuse to be soldiers, to agree only to be the people’s militiamen.
In the meantime, the military situation got worse. Toledo was about to fall and we were still “in the outlying streets of Huesca.” The threat to Madrid grew sharper.
On 26 September the crisis of the Generalidad government began. The next day the new government was constituted: the CNT, the POUM, and the social-centrists participated in it. The programme of this ‘workers’ government’, in which the parties of the bourgeois Left participated as representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, included a unified command, discipline, elimination of voluntary service, etc
A few days later Mr. Caballero judged that the moment had come to issue his famous decree on the militarization of the militias and the application of the military code in this new military army. In Madrid the decree came into force after 10 October; in the surrounding regions where it was necessary to manoeuvre much longer against the proletariat, the decree wasn’t put into effect until the 20th. The setting up of the new Council of the Generalidad and Caballero’s decree came just in time to prevent workers from asking: “What happened at Toledo? Why are we always ‘about to take Huesca’? How come Oviedo, which was going to be taken by the miners, was so easily rescued by fascist reinforcements? Why are we getting massacred, and for whose benefit? Caballero, Companys, Sandino, Villalba, the whole Republican general staff – now joined by people like Grossi, Durruti, Ascasso – aren’t they the same people who in 1931, 1932, and 1934 made a red carpet out of our corpses and laid it at the feet of the Right? When we’ve got traitors leading the military operations, is it any wonder we are being defeated and massacred?”
The workers didn’t have time to ask themselves these questions. If they had’ve had it would have meant abandoning the territorial fronts and unleashing an armed struggle against both’ Caballero and Franco. The workers didn’t have time to take such a course of action, which is still the only one that would make it possible for the workers to put an end to fascism because they would be putting an end to capitalism as well. The new Council of the Generalidad is keeping them in line in Catalonia. The decree concerning the militarization of Madrid, with its threat of serious punishments for those who resist, is doing a similar job in the other regions.
Things now began to develop very quickly. In Catalonia a simple decree dissolved the anti-fascist Central Committee (that had lent a ‘revolutionary’ gloss to the manoeuvres of capital), since as the CNT delegate Garcia Oliver said, “We are all represented on the Council of the Generalidad.” All the anti-fascist committees were dissolved and replaced by ‘ayuntamientos’ (the traditional municipalities). Not one institution from 19 July survived, and a second decree stated that any attempt to reconstitute organs outside the municipalities would be considered an act of sedition.
On 11 October came the CNT’s “Trade union regulations”: the decree on the militarization and mobilization of Catalonia. On the same day the Soviet ship, Zanianine, put in at the port of Barcelona to indicate with much pomp that the USSR had broken with the policy of ‘non-intervention’ and had come at last to the aid of the Spanish workers.
The trade union regulations of the CNT absolutely forbade any demands for new working conditions “as long as we are at war”, especially if they threatened to aggravate the economic situation. They stated that in branches of production directly or indirectly related to the anti-fascist struggle, it was not possible to demand the maintenance of working conditions, either in terms of wages or the length of the working day. Finally, the workers could not ask to be paid for the extra hours put into production useful for the anti-fascist war; instead they had to produce even more than before 19 July.
It was up to the trade unions, the committees, and delegates from factory, shop and yard, with the “co-operation of revolutionaries”, to make sure that these regulations were enforced. The militarization of the militias replaced the levy of workers and peasants collected to fight on the fronts in the name of a war for ‘socialism’; the appeal to class interests was replaced by an appeal to the whole population to fight fascism as an ‘armed nation struggling for freedom’.
Certainly the POUM and CNT had to carry on with their manoeuvres in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the masses, to disguise militarization as a vital necessity which class vigilance (?) would prevent from being transformed into a measure for strangling the workers. But the essential point is that militarization was strictly carried out. All this shows us that capitalism had succeeded in crucifying the workers at the front, that Caballero and his ‘revolutionary’ allies had meticulously prepared these military catastrophes. Henceforth, the massacre of the workers in Spain took the form of an essentially bourgeois war in which the workers were slaughtered by two regular armies – that of democracy and that of fascism.
And on the same day that the militarization decree was passed, in Barcelona the Soviet ship Zanianine docked, symbolizing Russia’s turn towards Spain. Russia intervened with arms and technicians only after the constitution of Caballero’s regular army had clearly shown that what was going on was a bourgeois war. Let us not forget that at the beginning of these events, Russia had been busy with the murder of Zinoviev, Kamenev and all the others. Now it could pass directly on to the business of murdering the Spanish workers, for whom Russian tanks and planes would be a powerful argument in favour of their being incorporated into a bourgeois army, led by men well versed in the massacre of workers.
In Madrid up until the constitution of the new ministry (or Council as the anarchists called it), the CNT was against militarization. In Frente Libertario (the publication of the confederated militias of the CNT in Madrid) of 27 October, one could still find this position: “Militias or National Army? We are for popular militias!” But here again the position of the CNT was based on shameful opportunism. As long as it was not part of the government and was unable to control military operations, it kept up a token opposition.
As we know, Caballero managed to kill two birds with one stone, reshuffling his cabinet eight days before fleeing to Valencia. The anarchists entered the ‘Council’ and thus sanctioned not only militarization and the creation of a National Army, but also the whole work of Caballero, who after the fall of Toledo allowed and even facilitated the fascist advance on Madrid. Each time the proletariat was plunged into a bloodbath, the bourgeoisie took another step towards the extreme left. From Giral to Caballero in Madrid; from Casanovas to Fabregas-Nin in Catalonia; and today Garcia Oliver is a minister and representatives of the Socialist and Libertarian Youth of Madrid have entered the Defence Junta.
This then was the rhythm of events. In Catalonia under the banner of the ‘revolutionary’ Council of the Generalidad, we had the alliance between the anarchists and the social-centrists to prevent the workers from struggling for their class interests and to keep them out in the murderous rain of bullets and shells. “Hasta el fin!” In Madrid Caballero left for Valencia, but the workers stayed behind to be massacred – the price they paid for the tragic aberration that had led them to entrust their fate to agents of capitalism and traitors. How right was General Mola when he said: “I have five columns marching on Madrid: four outside the city and one on the inside.” The fifth column – Caballero and Co. – has done its work in Madrid and now, fraternally united with the CNT and the POUM, they are going to follow up that work in the other regions. After Madrid capitalism will mount its frenzied assault on the proletariat of Barcelona and Valencia.
Here we must finish our study of the events in Spain, even though we are well aware of the insufficiency of our analysis of this period we describe as that of “the massacre of the workers”. We will come back to this in the next issue of Bilan; right now we must finish with a brief declaration of the positions our fraction defends against the mystification of anti-fascism.
We address ourselves vehemently to the proletarians of all countries so that they may not sanction the massacre of the workers in Spain by sacrificing their own lives. They must refuse to go off to Spain in the international brigades, but instead engage in class struggle against their own bourgeoisie. The Spanish proletariat must not be supported at the front by foreign workers, whose presence gives the impression that the struggle is really for the international cause of the proletariat.
As for the workers of the Iberian Peninsula, they have but only one road today, that of 19 July: strikes in all industries whether engaged in the war or not; class struggle against Companys and against Franco; against the ukases (edicts) of their trade unions and the Popular Front; and for the destruction of the capitalist state.
And the workers should not be alarmed if people proclaim that to fight like this would be to do the work of fascism. Only charlatans and traitors can pretend that by fighting against capitalism – which holds sway in Barcelona no less than in Seville – you are doing the work of fascism. The revolutionary proletariat must remain loyal to its own class conceptions, its own class weapons; every sacrifice that it makes in this cause will bear fruit in the revolutionary battles of tomorrow.
(Bilan, no.36, October-November 1936)
[1] [6] “Question: Isn’t the daily preponderate role of’ the CNT in Catalonia injurious to the democratic government?
Companys: No. The CNT has taken up the responsibilities abandoned by the bourgeois and fascists who fled: it is establishing order and defending society. It is now the incarnation of Strength, Legality, and Order.
Question: Don’t you think that once the revolutionary proletariat has crushed fascism it will then wipe out the bourgeoisie?
Companys: Don’t forget that the Catalan bourgeoisie is different from the bourgeoisie of certain democratic countries in Europe. Capitalism is dead, completely dead. The fascist uprising was its suicide. Our government, though bourgeois, doesn’t defend financial interests of any sort; it defends the middle classes. Today we are moving towards a proletarian order. Our interests will perhaps suffer a bit because of this, but we see it as our duty to remain useful to the process of social transformation. We don’t want to give exclusive privileges to the middle classes. We want to create democratic individual rights without social or economic compulsion.” , (From an interview Companys gave to the News Chronicle on 21 August and reproduced by La Vanguardia of Barcelona, paper of the Catalan government, and by Anti-Fascist Spain, the publication ofthe CNT-FAI, 1 September.)
[2] [7] General Union of Workers (reformists).
How many times haven’t we heard it said: “Caballero and Companys are merely a facade. In reality the workers are in power and the proletariat is hiding the real state of affairs to prevent foreign intervention”. For four months now the workers have been served up this same old refrain, along with another one - that we’re in danger of seeing a repetition of the scenario of the Kornilov affair. No doubt about it - the demagogues are still going strong and the mere sight of thousands of workers’ corpses will not silence them or make them think again.
According to this refrain, Companys is just a facade. Caballero is nothing but a screen - and that’s enough to put the capitalist states on the wrong scent. Do these gentlemen truly take the workers for imbeciles? Because it is difficult to believe that the anarchists, the POUM, the Social-Centrists would have gone to so much trouble to join the government if it were only a facade. Since the national plenum of the regional organizations of the CNT in September, the CNT has been feverishly struggling to be part of the Caballero government (now sanctified by the name ‘Council’), while the POUM could find no rest until it was given a portfolio in the Council of the Catalan Generalidad.
But let’s look at things again more closely. Is it or isn’t it the case that the so-called facade in Madrid has control of the military forces of ‘democracy’? Wasn’t it this fact that forced the anarchists to demand so stridently that they be allowed to participate in this facade? It’s a funny kind of ‘revolutionary’ who says that the revolution depends on war, and who then gives the leadership of this war to Mr. Caballero.
But if you really want to prove that the bourgeois governments of the Spanish Popular Front are devoid of any importance, you should at least be able to show that there are other, real organs of power existing outside them. But since this is a bit difficult to do it is necessary to resort to other arguments: like, for instance, the idea that the entry of workers’ organizations into various ministries changes the nature of the state. Certainly, (the argument goes on) in appearance the new state is quite similar to the old one, just like one drop of water resembles another. But this is, you see, just an ‘exterior facade’ .... The old reformists used the same arguments when they participated in the governments of the bourgeoisie. But the problem is to see .who or what gets changed: the bourgeois state which absorbs the ‘workers’ ministers’, or the workers’ representatives who take on state functions. A half century of reformism has resolved this problem, and Lenin was right in October 1917 when, faithful to the teachings of Marx, he advocated the violent and total destruction of the capitalist state.
When we look at the concrete example of Spain, it will not be very difficult to prove that the ‘façade’ is in fact the reality of the situation, while on the other hand the so-called reality put forward by the anarchists and POUMists is truly a vulgar facade.
What does the Spanish bourgeoisie want to do? It wants to put an end to the workers’ movement for a whole period, since the latter is an obstacle to the establishment of a stable regime capable of ‘peacefully’ ensuring the exploitation of the workers and peasants. It could only achieve this end by means of a monstrous massacre of the workers who rose up on 19 July; and this massacre was effected through a holy war, an anti-fascist crusade, which the workers fought in the belief that they were fighting for their revolution.
An essential bourgeois rule had to be observed: leave the mechanisms of the bourgeois state intact and reinforce it with the help of the workers’ organizations, who were given the supporting role of Peter the Hermit for the anti-fascist crusade. Of course, the factories expropriated by the workers were collectivized, big areas of land belonging to fascists were divided up; but always in conformity with the maintenance and strengthening of the bourgeois state, which was able to grow and develop in a situation in which the collectivized factories became militarized factories where the workers had to produce “more than before 19 July” and where they were no longer allowed to put forward the slightest class demand. The bourgeois state lives and strengthens itself the more the war effort prevents workers from living and strengthening themselves in the class struggle. “Everyone to the front or to the factory.” It is this situation which has allowed the bourgeois and workers’ organizations to replace the characteristic activity of the proletariat with the characteristic activity of the bourgeoisie……..
Let us proceed with our study and take a look at the battle fought around Madrid. Who was responsible for Franco’s advance? It’s all well and good to rail against Italy and Germany for providing arms and troops to Franco’s fascists. The truth is that the Caballero government, allowed Toledo to fall and left Franco to concentrate his troops when its own were scattered across a vast front deprived of any chance of success. However, Caballero claimed - along with the rest of the anti-fascist front - that Madrid was the real stake in the battle. But, after the flight of the government to Valencia - determined by the entry of the anarchists into it - was the reality of the facade thought worthy of notice? But of course not, the ‘Junta for the Defence of Madrid’ placed itself under the authority of the Madrid government and assumed the appearance of the old ‘façade’. And all our fine speechifiers, our demagogues with their pretty revolutionary phrases, our commercial travellers-in-arms did not dream that it would be monstrous and criminal to call on the workers of Madrid and the international brigades to get themselves butchered for the sake of orders coming from their worst enemies.
If the proletarian revolution had developed in Spain, the workers would have quickly demanded that the understanding of the situation be translated into deeds. How can you demand, call to the workers of other countries to come to the rescue when your actions are being lied about and distorted? The transfer of power from one class to another is the least conformist and traditional act imaginable. The question of ‘facades’ just doesn’t come into it when what is demanded is the total overthrow of the old state of affairs and the establishment of a new one.
The reality of the situation is really quite straightforward. Those who ask the workers to applaud the ‘façade’ of Companys and Caballero are the very same people who think that you can make the proletarian revolution with the permission of the democratic bourgeoisie and set up a proletarian power by reforming the bourgeois state. These intentions are what the proletariat should ponder, and not the reality of this vulgar facade.
Everything would be fine if only events didn’t speak so cruelly for themselves.The workers would get killed on the fronts, the economic and social legislation of the ‘new society’ would develop little by little and .... Franco would be advancing militarily. But facts like these tend to give rise to disquiet among the workers. Hence, the Catalan bourgeoisie lately has been sending out feelers to Franco. Perhaps by proclaiming Catalonia an independent Republic Franco would be able to finish off Madrid more quickly? The ‘conspiracy’ has been discovered, the guilty have been punished (?) and order has been restored, because the anarchists don’t want the imposition of a ‘medieval republic’. But in its 2 December issue, Avangardia - a publication controlled by the Generalidad - denounced the lack of discipline within the rearguard. Since all the workers’ parties and organizations are represented in the government, those who act without representation in the government must be regarded as fascists. As you can see, the ‘façade’ government isn’t doing at all badly. The bourgeoisie can also send out feelers among the workers and nobody can act outside the state.
Then there is the POUM, bewailing its so-called pseudo ‘workers and petty bourgeois government’. The Socialist ministers of Valencia claim that a quarter of an hour after a decision has been taken, their own civil servants will transmit it to Franco. The whole of the old bourgeois state apparatus remains intact.
And when the Cortes met in Valencia, there was stupefaction everywhere. The CNT decided that its ministers would not participate in the debates - perhaps for the sake of decency. But it let the parliamentary comedy be played out without saying a word. The anarchists are great statesmen who understand Caballero’s foreign policy and want to avoid disturbing it at all costs.
The POUM allows the representatives of its left wing to blather on about the fact that the bourgeois state still exists and explain the need to base the revolution not on the Cortes but on a Congress of workers’ and peasants’ committees. Four months after July, it can write that the bourgeoisie is making a symbolic gesture that signifies the preservation of the form and content of the bourgeois democratic state.
The ‘revolution’ in Spain is truly a ‘profound’ one. It is tempting to blame the massacre of the workers and peasants on the verbiage of the demagogues alone. But what is needed is struggle and an appeal to the workers of all countries to come to the aid of the Iberian proletariat, to help it get out of this massacre. Already it is impossible to deny that the increasingly active intervention of Germany, Italy and Russia is making the Spanish events a moment in an imperialist war. The resistance of the Republicans around Madrid is heightening the tension of the international situation and is making the real nature of the struggle quite clear.
Only through the intervention of the workers of all countries struggling against their own bourgeoisie, and only through the intervention of the Spanish workers turning their guns against the ‘facade’ government of Valencia and Barcelona as well as against Franco, only through the workers unleashing their defensive struggles, struggles representing moments of a generalized attack on the capitalist state - only this can allow the world proletariat to rediscover the path leading to the proletarian revolution.
(Bilan no.37, November-December 1936)
Basing our work of today on the example of the Bolsheviks after 1914, we are trying in vain to discover those rare, isolated, marxist groupings who, confronted with the war in Spain and the world-wide wave of betrayals and abrupt changes of course, stand firm - those who, despite the activity of that rabid pack of traitors of yesterday and today, continue to proclaim their loyalty to the independent struggle of the proletariat for its own class goals.
How many of them are there? Where are they? The facts of the situation provide us with a laconic and sinister reply. It seems that all have gone under and that we are living in a lamentable epoch of the bankruptcy of the few remaining revolutionary elements.
Our isolation is not fortuitous. It is the consequence of a profound victory by world capitalism which has managed to infect with gangrene even those groups of the communist left whose spokesman up until now was Trotsky. We do not claim that at the present moment we are the only group whose positions have been confirmed by every turn of events, but what we do claim categorically is that, good or bad, our positions have been based on a permanent affirmation of the necessity for the autonomous class activity of the proletariat. And it is on this question that we have seen the bankruptcy of all Trotskyist and semi-Trotskyist groups.
At no price and under no pretext do we want to depart from a principled position in determining the groups with whom we can pursue joint work and with whom we can set up a centre for international liaison with a view to establishing the programmatic foundations of the International which tomorrow’s revolutionary wave will allow us to build. The criterion we use consists of a merciless rejection of those elements who have succumbed to the course of events or who are openly working on the side of the enemy. We must bear in mind that any agreement with opportunists of this kind on a question that the proletariat must approach with brutal intransigence the question of the formation of parties - could cause irreparable harm to the future of the working class.
Even before Hitler assumed power and before Trotsky began his campaign to create a IVth International, the first issue of Bilan laid down the programmatic basis of our break with Trotsky, as a result of his orientation towards a compromise with the left of social democracy on the question of founding new parties. Subsequent events have only served to widen the gulf separating ourselves from Trotsky: which on his side has taken the form of a re-entry tactic into the traitorous parties of the Ilnd International; then leaving these parties to create a type of IVth International composed of brawlers and demagogues who use the name of Trotsky as political capital in order to introduce their rubbish into the revolutionary proletariat. It is impossible to come to any agreement with these people in a situation where, despite the enforced silence of Trotsky, they are participating in the bloody masquerade of intervention in Spain. To do so, what’s more, would be a grave betrayal. We have got to fight against the buffoons of the IVth International, the Navilles and Cies in France, the Lesoil-Dauges in Belgium. When they joined with the traitors in demanding “arms for Spain”, when they jumped on the bandwagon behind the opportunists of the POUM, when they sent young French militants to their death under the pretext of sending military aid to the POUM - then the Trotskyists placed themselves on the other side of the barricade, among the battalions capitalism has dispatched to greet the proletariat with salvoes of fire and steel. We don’t know whether Trotsky - who has to remain silent because he is in prison - will follow his followers in their policies of capitulation and treason. Let us hope that he will not sanction opportunistic politics by disavowing his glorious past of 1917.
We can expect nothing from this utterly bankrupt tendency. From now on events themselves will justify the marxist criticism of these organizations and sweep them away. This is the only way of freeing a number of militants precious to the revolutionary struggle. At the present time the ‘IVth International’ has two important (?) sections - France and Belgium. In the USA the Trotskyists entered the official Socialist Party after fusing with an independent socialist party, and they are still there today. Within the Italian emigration, Blanco and Cie have widened their field of activity to encompass the movement for going off to Spain; they are now talking pompously about an Italian group of the IVth International. But this is all a farce, the kind of farce which the conditions of life in the emigration frequently produce.
Neither in France nor in Belgium do the two Trotskyist parties have anything to do with the life and struggle of the proletariat. They have replaced the search for a programmatic basis for a new party with a faction fight between Naville’s clique and Molinier’s ,clique. When the June wave of strikes broke out in France the new party was formed on the basis of a compromise, wherein adventurism and demagogic positions were dressed up as a programme (armament of the workers, the creation of armed militias, etc). After this, the Molinier clique was liquidated and we had the Spanish events in which (despite Trotsky calling Nin a traitor) the French Trotskyists went full steam behind the POUM.
In Belgium, where the working class character of the Trotskyist groups is much more marked than in France, we saw at Trotsky’s instigation their entry into the Parti Ouvriere Belge (Workers’ Party of Belgium). This was resisted by the Brussels group, not on principle but for ‘tactical’ reasons (in France it was justified, but not in Belgium, etc ....). Within the POB we had the alliance between the orthodox Trotskyists and the ex-left of Minister Spaak, deprived of its old leader, who was replaced by Walter Dauge. The circumstances in which the faction ‘Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire’ (Revolutionary Socialist Action) was expelled are not very edifying: it was over an electoral incident when the POB decided to remove Dauge from its list of candidates unless the latter was prepared to accept certain preconditions which would have finished him as a leftist. After various attempts to come to a deal the split took place, and after the elections there was a campaign for the creation of a revolutionary socialist party, which has recently been founded, taking in the Spartacus group of Brussels. On Spain, they have the same position as in France: arms to Spain, the struggle against neutrality, sending young workers to the battlefields of Spain, etc .... It is thus clear that our differences with the Trotskyist groups over Spain have now become .a gulf, the same gulf which separates those who are struggling for the communist revolution from those who have taken up capitalist ideology.
But already last year at the Congress of our fraction, we expressed our concern about the isolation of the fraction and we looked to see what groups could be approached with a view to joint work. First of all we rejected the proposal of the American group, Class Struggle, who wanted to call an International Conference which would draw up the programme of a New International. Against this we put forward the more serious idea of setting up a centre for liaison with those groups who claim continuity with the IInd Congress of the Communist International, have broken with Trotsky, and see the necessity to make a fundamental critique of the whole experience of the Russian Revolution.
Our proposition didn’t have any outcome and our relations with all other groups remain the same. In Belgium relations with the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (International Communist League) are still marked by a mutual desire for discussion and confrontation, and this has been the only place where our fraction has encountered the desire for work in a positive direction. Today the only internationalist voices daring to make themselves heard amid the din of the Spanish debacle are in the Ligue, and it is a real joy for us to be able to publicly salute these comrades, who remain loyal to the basic principles of marxism.
The majority of the comrades of the Ligue1 have profound differences with our fraction, but our co-operation with them, including the project of setting up a liaison centre, is based on the fact that the Ligue like our fraction is evolving on a working class terrain and the programmatic documents of the Ligue do not show any break with this evolution.
As for France, it is time to draw up a balance-sheet summarizing our attempts to come to an agreement with groups of revolutionary militants.
The failure of the group Union Communiste (Communist Alliance) is not accidental. It is a result of the fact that, despite many invitations and warnings from us, they have refused to follow the historic route which will eventually lead to the formation of a proletarian party. A conglomeration of conflicting tendencies, the Union Communiste has always shied away from a strict delineation of its programme. Its political positions are nothing but an eternal compromise between orthodox Trotskyism and a confused attempt to break away from Trotskyism. When the events of June took place, the Union collapsed and a section of its membership went back to the Trotskyist party. At that time we intervened in France in order to push the comrades of the Union to use this latest split as a signal for drawing up a programme. We proposed the organization of meetings at which different communist groupings (including the Union) would confront each other, each one bringing its own specific political contribution, and justifying its existence as a separate group, in order to give some direction to the workers’ movement in France today. Here again, our efforts met with failure because of the inability of any of these groups to make the slightest step forward, because of their desire to give faithful expression to the degeneration of the French proletarian movement rather than reacting against it. The Spanish events sorted things out here as well. Thus we saw the debris of the Union Communiste falling in step with the POUM and more or less defending the positions of the Trotskyist groups. We don’t doubt for a moment that within the Union there are militants who want to remain loyal to internationalism and marxism. But if, in the light of the massacres in the Iberian Peninsula, they are unable to break out of the rut and prepare themselves for a rupture with the past and with the political premises of the Union, they will be lost to the proletarian cause.
We say openly that we were mistaken about the possibility of engaging in a process of clarification with the Union Communiste. The positions which it has more or less put forward on Spain force us to have the same attitude to it as to any other groups that we may encounter.
It would be useful to see what class organizations of the proletariat exist in Spain. On this question we refuse to regard the POUM as anything but a counter-revolutionary obstacle to the development of consciousness in the class.
First we know that the Spanish Trotskyists refused to enter the Socialist Party as Trotsky had asked, but what they did do was jump into the opportunist party of Maurin, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. It is also fitting to point out the Catalan regionalism of the POUM which it styles ‘marxism’ in the name of the right of the people to self-determination. (Regionalism is the result of this political marriage.) This allowed it to enter the government of the Union Sacree in Catalonia without having to worry about Madrid (just like the CNT). Finally, we should not forget that the POUM is a member of the London Bureau alongside the Independent Labour Party; that it works with the left of the French Socialist Party (Pivert, Collinet and Cie); that it is in close contact with the Italian maximalists of Balabanora and the Brandler group which, while continuing to stand for the reform of the IIIrd International and the defence of the USSR, has decided to give every assistance to the POUM.
The POUM has never really broken with the parties of the Esquerra Catalan with whom, in the name of the united front with the petty bourgeoisie, it has made all kinds of compromises. After 19 July, the POUM was connected to the Generalidad like the other Catalan organizations. It didn’t find it very difficult to move from its confused demand for a Constituent Assembly based on Committees of Workers and Soldiers and for a workers’ government, to participating in the Generalidad which is not exactly a workers’ government.
All the tendencies of the POUM Gorkin (who is the heir of Maurin’s policies), Nin, Andrade - gravitate around the same political axis without having any fundamental differences. They all participated in the strangling of the class response of the Spanish workers by organizing the military columns, and though Andrade attempted to differentiate himself in the POUM’s Madrid publication by using pseudo-marxist phraseology, in reality he still supported the overall policies of the POUM leadership. The Spanish Trotskyists wanted to concretely practice the ‘Leninist’ (?) notion of entering an opportunist party in order to win it over to revolutionary positions.
The result has been the transformation of the leaders of the former communist left into avowed traitors to the proletarian cause. It’s not by chance that Mr. Nin is now Minister of Justice in Catalonia, applying ‘class’ justice under the aegis of Mr Companys. Nin has forgotten his ‘Trotskyist’ interlude in Russia and has gone back to being the clown of the ISR that he was before. As for Andrade’s left faction, it’s also not by chance that it has associated itself with the POUM’s military campaign. And like Nin and Gorkin, it calls us counter-revolutionaries for daring to denounce the monstrous and criminal dupery to which the Spanish workers have fallen victim. The POUM is a field of activity for the class enemy and no revolutionary tendencies can develop within it. Just as the workers who want to rediscover the path of the class struggle must seek a radical transformation of the present situation in Spain, opposing the territorial fronts with their own class front, so the Spanish workers who want to lay the basis for a revolutionary party must first of all break with the POUM, opposing the capitalist terrain on which it is operating with the class terrain of the proletariat. Andrade and company have the function of tying the most advance workers to the counter-revolutionary politics of the POUM. Our task is not to give them credibility by supporting them politically; it is to denounce them with the utmost vigour.
Our fraction has no intention of coming to any agreement with anyone in the POUM (here it must be said that the minority in our fraction has a different position), or giving any support to the so-called Left in the POUM. The fact is that the proletariat of the Iberian Peninsula has still to lay the basic foundations of a marxist nucleus. This is something that can’t be accomplished by means of ‘revolutionary’ manoeuvres with opportunists. The only way to do it is to call upon the workers to act on a class basis, independently of any capitalist interest, outside of and against all the parties who defend the interests of the bourgeoisie, such as the POUM and the FAI, (Iberian Anarchist Federation), who have constructed a firm Union Sacree with the Republican Left and the Popular Front.
Thus we must conclude that in Spain, as in the rest of the world, there is no sign of the kind of historical political evolution the Italian workers underwent through several years of civil war against fascism, an evolution which our fraction, for all its limited resources, has attempted to express. We are profoundly aware of the impossibility of changing this international situation (which is simply the manifestation of a balance of class forces unfavourable to the proletariat) through proposals for creating new Internationals or through alliances with opportunists like the Trotskyists and the POUMists. If the defence of revolutionary marxism today means total isolation, we must accept this and understand that it is an expression of the terrible isolation of the proletariat, betrayed by everyone and cast into oblivion by all the parties who claim to stand for its emancipation. We do not hide the dangers that this situation could represent for our organization, knowing full well that it is not the perfect repository of marxist understanding. Only the social movements of the future, by setting the proletariat back on its class terrain, will give real strength to revolutionary marxism and the organizations which defend it, including our fraction.
(Bilan no.36, October-November 1936)
1 The current represented by comrade Hennaut fights energetically against our positions but has not fallen into a Trotskyist-type interventionism.
A few ‘Spanish’ lessons
Forty years ago, on July 19th 1936, the Spanish workers hurled themselves barehanded into battle against Franco’s ‘pronunciamento’. Their spirited resistance, emerging without any order or directive having been issued from the mass organizations, demonstrated the fierceness of their class instincts. At that point they constituted an autonomous force moving towards an ideological break with the state. By the evening of that memorable day, the working class had spontaneously created its own organ of struggle, the workers’ militia, which was made up of all those who were exploited. Sectional and trade union divisions along with differences of political maturity amongst the militiamen were disregarded. The militia was actually the only gain made by the proletariat during this time. It was the proletariat’s only material weapon at a time when the CNT leadership was trying to get the workers to go back to work for the good of the ‘social’ Republic, the same Republic which had previously massacred them and armed Franco’s insurrection from top to bottom.
The Spanish proletariat was capable of blocking the Francoist uprising - but it was too weak to seize power, to preserve and develop its own organs of struggle. An intimate cause-and-effect relationship existed between the world situation and this powerlessness. With the Moscow trials in 1936, the last sods of earth were thrown onto the coffin of the world revolution. But the shots of the firing squads exterminating the last of the Bolsheviks, were drowned out by the clamour of anti-fascism.
What kind of social revolution is it when the international conditions for world revolution are completely non-existent and the state remains intact? Generally, this question is answered with lies that explain the defeat of the class by referring to the ‘betrayal’ of the anarchist leaders, or the ‘non-intervention’ policies of Daladier and Chamberlain (sic), or by accusing the POUM of being incompetent in executing its tasks.
In the epoch of the decadence of capitalism there can be no intermediate stage between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence the working class is faced with an insoluble dilemma when it is fighting within a national framework: either it can carry on fighting alone or enter into an alliance with factions of the bourgeoisie. In Spain the class took the second path, dragged along by anarchist leaders who had been cured as if by magic of their phobia about ‘politics’. From a class war against the capitalist enemy, the struggle was transformed into a conflict between the democratic and fascist factions of the bourgeoisie. Instead of resolutely following the path of revolutionary defeatism - in the tradition of the October victory in Russia - the class was used as cannon fodder in a war fought to serve the ambitions of Franco and the survival instincts of the Negrin-Caballero government.
As a militant who had, together with a handful of internationalists, raised the banner of revolutionary defeatism in opposition to the slaughter of the First World War, Trotsky now opted for perjury. He inculcated in his Spanish followers the idea of defending democracy, no matter how rotten it was, under the pretext that democracy (unlike fascism) did allow the proletariat the freedom to organize. A piercing strain in the writings of all kinds of people at the time was the need to support anti-fascism in order to ensure the military victory of the legal government. When you look through issues of La Batalla, Solidaridad Obrera and Mundo Obrero it is impossible to suppress your disgust. All of them demanded a wholesale alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie. All of them abased themselves before the militarist state. The ‘marxists’ of the Union Sacree and the POUM did not blush a bit when they called the Republican government an expression of the will-to-struggle of the toiling masses. The anti-statists of the CNT-FAI did not hesitate to turn themselves into its lackeys, a role which made them the alter-ego of Stalinism: “First the war (an imperialist war, mind you:) then the fight for bread!” Thanks to them the state was able to regather into its criminal hands the momentarily-broken thread of control it had lost over the class and its organs of struggle.
From the moment the proletariat allowed itself to be drawn away from its own class terrain, the road was open for capitalism to massacre it. What was the proletariat defending? A fundamental position from which to launch a revolutionary offensive, or the cardboard conquests of agrarian reform and workers’ control over production? We have no choice but to insist that even while they were crushing the fascist hydra under the leadership of the Republican government, the Spanish workers were rapidly and decisively being led into defeat. While the proletariat everywhere was rushing to attack the fascist menace (had this monster arisen from the putrid mould of a decaying bourgeoisie or the fevered brain of the disloyal military staff?) capitalism was able to celebrate in blood - dancing a saraband over the corpses of hundreds of thousands of ‘blacks’ and ‘reds’. Franco came to power and managed to keep Spain out of the second imperialist war, for which Spain (like the Sino-Japanese conflict and the Italian military operations in Abyssinia) was simply a preparatory episode, sealed with the blood of thousands. Once again in the name of humanist and democratic principles, peacetime production was transformed into the production of human cadavers on an unheard of scale.
As soon as the imperialist brigands signed the diplomatic agreements putting an end to hostilities, the bourgeoisie could set about restoring the world from a state of smoking ruin. At the price of terrible exploitation and unspeakable deprivation, the capitalist order was able to heal the awful wound of war, which the bourgeoisie presented as a humanitarian operation. ‘In the name of humanity I wreak havoc; in the name of humanity I reconstruct the ruins!’ Such is the ship that capitalism will sail until it is broken on the reef of proletarian struggle.
Today, a new act in the world-wide struggle of the proletariat against capitalist society is being played out on the Spanish stage, precipitating a whole development of events. Far from leading to a stabilization of the system, the death of Franco (who counted on the church as the most stable mainstay of his dictatorship) has opened up a new era of instability for Spain.
The recent decades of capitalist reconstruction brought with them profound changes in the structure of the Spanish economy. Taking advantage of the possibilities of the boom, the Spanish bourgeoisie developed and concentrated Spain’s productive apparatus. Shining new industrial sectors sprung up on soil fertilized by a rain of cash, generously splashed about by other western countries. But the post-war boom was followed by a world-wide recession in industrial production and trade. Today the world economy is forced to breathe the stale air of protectionism. For Spain the changing situation has taken the concrete form of a fall in demand for its products.
Despite the active support given the Spanish economy primarily by the US and the Common Market countries in the hope of integrating Spain fully into the Atlantic community, the Spanish bourgeoisie under Juan Carlos has shown itself to be incapable of undertaking a quiet transition to a post-Franco regime. Spanish capitalism so infatuated with its success that it believed some of its factories were about to eclipse their French and Italian rivals, now appears to the proletariat in the light of the hideous reality of hunger, falling wages, material insecurity, and state violence. The false perspective of a continual improvement in workers’ living standards under capitalism and the theory of the smoothing-out of class contradictions, once triumphantly put forward by the ‘transcenders’ of marxism - all this has had its day. The working class in Spain had to pay a heavy tribute for the industrialization of the previous decade which reached a growth rate of more than 10%; it also had to be content with a meagre reward for its labour. Today not only is it being told to pull in its belt, but also to identify with the policy of national reconciliation.
Political life in Spain is a swamp exuding the pestilential stink of decadence. Who would have thought that one day Stalinists and monarchists would be allies? Who could have predicted that those ‘proud rebels’, the anarchists, would shamelessly enter the vertical trade unions in order to “play off corporatism in favour of the workers”? But those whose eyes are open and who know their history will not be astonished. All factions of the Spanish bourgeoisie are able to join together in a Union Sacree in order to save their economy. However, this does not mean they can control class antagonisms. Today we are faced with the historical exhaustion of the bourgeoisie, a class totally incapable of resolving a problem which has outdistanced it: the increasingly explosive contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the form of social organization in which they are contained.
The working class in Spain never fell on its knees and renounced its struggle. Even before the end of the ‘Spanish miracle’ (blown away like a straw in the wind by the world crisis), the spares of social conflagration were being lit in the majority of the country’s economic centres. The determination of the workers was manifested not only in work stoppages, but also in street-fighting. As intrepid as ever, braving the bullets of the Civil Guard, the Spanish proletariat toward the end of the 60s, resolutely launched itself into the struggle. In recent weeks hundreds of thousands of strikers have made an indelible imprint on Spanish social life. The bourgeoisie is finding it extremely hard to make the working class accept the need for sacrifices. The strike movement broke out in full force when the Arias-Navarro government stupidly tried to impose a wage freeze while lengthening the working day. Beginning with the strike of the Madrid metro, the chain of class solidarity was forged link by link in the heat of the struggle against the militarization of the strikers and the intervention of the troops. Of its own accord, the movement took on a political character. The dockers of Barcelona, the electricians of Standard in Madrid, the bank employees of Valencia and Seville had only to show themselves to be fighting on their own class terrain to inflict insomnia on the government and the opposition, which aspires to install itself in power with a minimum of social unrest.
The heroic Spanish proletariat has come to the fore in this political setting, indicating capitalism’s entry into a whole series of violent upheavals. The class which the ‘innovators’ and ‘transcenders’ of marxism saw to be a non-revolutionary class; the class which the system thought it had domesticated with the crumbs of its much vaunted prosperity - once again that class is on the move.
Their combativity has put the Spanish workers in the vanguard of the world proletarian movement. In the 30s, owing to its tragic isolation in terms of the international situation, each battle-field of the proletariat in Spain became a mass grave. But today the Spanish proletariat constitutes the advanced detachment of that immense proletarian army in the process of raising its head from east to west. As one of the most decisive centres of world class struggle, the situation in Spain allows us to understand the magnitude of the effort the international bourgeoisie is making to shore up the last ramparts of its system.
The proletariat has re-emerged on a terrain which will enable it to propel events toward a revolutionary conclusion. That terrain is the class autonomy of the proletariat; that conclusion is the seizure of political power. The chances for the whole of humanity to extricate itself from the mire in which it has languished for three-quarters of a century depend on the proletariat’s ability to take up this banner, a banner which has been raised by the class ever since its first efforts to storm the heavens.
The enemy and its weapons
Faced with a whole number of strikes which have developed like a powder-trail despite the firm vigilance of the workers’ commissions in their efforts to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy, the forces of the Left are putting all their skills into action. They are trying to derail the workers’ response, to cut it down to ‘peaceful’ dimensions, to transform the workers’ consciousness into a vulgar ‘public opinion’.
Long before the military victory of Franco the Stalinists and Social Democrats were terrorizing the workers in the 30s. Give yourselves up body and soul to the needs of the struggle against fascism or we will strike you down like dogs: In May 1937 the Stalinist-reformist riff-raff engaged in the armed destruction of the final battle of the proletariat of Barcelona and other working class suburbs, when the workers had the audacity to go on strike in sectors that were supposed to be ‘conquests of the revolution’. Once again they asked the workers to show themselves to be ‘responsible’ by respecting the law. For them, any will to autonomous struggle or any independent action of the class was akin to the proverbial bull in the china shop. The holy alliance concluded by the Stalinists, POUMists, Socialists, and anarchists functioned to smother any sign of strength in the proletariat as soon as it appeared.
Every democratic slogan, every transitional demand pushes the proletariat into a union with the left wing of the Spanish bourgeoisie. The leftists play the role of gadflies. The Stalinists will respect “the verdict of the ballot, no matter what the result”. The Trotskyists will also respect it so as not to cut themselves off from the masses. The Stalinists will make the workers go back to the very factories they have deserted in order to come out onto the streets. The Trotskyists will issue warnings against provoking the ‘reactionaries’ who-are-only-waiting-for-an-excuse-to-repress-us. In all cases, the leftists will reveal their intention of guaranteeing social peace for the bourgeoisie by holding back the increasingly huge numbers of workers who are coming to consciousness.
The fact that capitalism can no longer govern within the framework of Francoist authoritarianism is shown by the relaxation of the ‘sumarismo’ procedure and by the amendments to the anti-terrorist law passed during the summer of 1975. The Spanish bourgeoisie must move toward making the necessary political changes the situation requires. A country which for thirty-five years has lived under the single-handed reign of an autocrat needs the democratic envelope to serve as a lightning conductor for social electricity. In Spain, anti-Francoist sentiments are rife and slogans about ‘winning democratic rights’ have an exceptional importance in attempts to dupe the working class. The democratic parties will be legalized, the CSN will be converted into ‘genuinely representative trade unions’ in order to cushion as much as possible a direct confrontation with the working class.
The proletariat must not allow itself to be taken in by this. It must be aware what all those who talk about ‘democratic rights’ are on about. The state, whatever its constitution, remains a machine for oppressing the working class. When the class struggle has reached a higher level and the workers move toward the seizure of power, this ‘purified’ state will spill the blood of the workers as they pursue the path leading to armed insurrection.
The sirens of democracy make all kinds of noises, promising the working class a journey to a land of milk and honey. But this formal democracy is nothing but bourgeois dictatorship in disguise. The more decrepit the tart, the more she uses rouge and make-up. The bourgeoisie uses the same seductive weapons in its period of decadence. It is true that Franco, like the Hindu Thugs, practised state murder with the aid of the garotte. But what did the Spanish Republic get up to during its interregnum?
As each successive dictatorship fell like a rotten fruit, the bourgeoisie achieved a more advanced concentration of its forces in preparation for the physical crushing of the working class. From 1931 to 1936, the government of the social Republic machine-gunned, bombed, and deported to its African prisons whole batches of insurgent workers. It more or less integrally maintained the police and judicial apparatus of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The coalition of Republicans and Socialists in the Azana government very quickly showed its worth. The 114 Socialist Deputies in the Constituent Cortes covered up all the crimes committed by the liberal cannibals. Among the interminable series of legal murders perpetrated in the name of ‘democracy’ there was Arnido and Casas Viejas. Even more horrible was the repression in the Asturias. The conscripts, both regulars and legionaries of the ‘Tercio’, plunged the miners of Oviedo and the workers of Giron into a bloodbath, with the full blessing of the Church. It was the Republic which gave its soldiery a licence to spread terror through the working class districts; and today the creation of a Republic is being called for once again by the whole crowd of the ‘Left’ and the ‘extreme Left’.
Fifteen years earlier, at its first Congress, the Communist International honoured the victims of the White Terror, a terror which was being further incensed by the calumnies of the Social Democrats against the soviet power in Russia. It declared that: “In its struggle to maintain the capitalist order, the bourgeoisie is using the most outrageous methods, in the face of which all the cruelties of the Middle Ages, the Inquisition and colonization pale into insignificance.”
As the inheritor of a coherent communist programme through the Fractions which came out of the Third International, the ICC insists that the establishment of a Spanish Republic elected by universal suffrage will in no way create constitutional conditions favourable to the proletariat. On the contrary, the setting up of such a Republic will result from the need of the bourgeoisie to carry out repression under the cover of juridical rules and regulations ‘legalized’ by the will of the majority of the ‘people’. As the somewhat rickety last hope of capitalism, it is logical that the ‘democratic’ parties should now come forward with their soporific phrases about the ‘need for compromise’ and ‘anti-fascist unity’. To oppose these parties, to denounce them for what they are - strike-breakers, butchers of workers’ uprisings - is one of the fundamental political duties of a revolutionary.
The proletariat in Spain has given itself with ardour to the revolution, but the bourgeoisie is making use of all its supporters - its lawyers, journalists, parliamentarians, and separatist agents in an effort to reduce the class to impotence.
The political lessons of events in Spain stand out in particularly bold relief. The Spanish tragedy of yesterday must serve as a guide to the struggle today and as a warning to the world proletariat. The class must first of all take political power since in contrast to previous revolutionary classes, it has no economic base within society. This is the sine qua non for any socialization of the productive forces. Though strikes are a vital necessity of working class struggle, they are simply the point of departure for the movement toward the complete emancipation of the working class which can only come into being after the destruction of the state.
R.C.
Revolution Internationale
I. “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer.
They merely express in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.” (Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1847)
II. The last fifty years have been ravaged by the counter-revolution which has systematically masked and falsified all theoretical expressions defending the historic interests of the proletariat. This veil of distortion has naturally kept buried all the central questions of marxism as the theory of the historic development of the working class. The question which is fundamental for revolutionaries (the nature of the movement which drives the class and party forward - the party being the organization of revolutionaries defending class positions) has been caricatured and perverted as much by the Leninist version as by the anti-Leninists - both of whom ignore the very essence of the class/party relationship, which is the development of consciousness.
III. The understanding of ‘how the working class becomes conscious of its historical task’ (how the proletariat constitutes itself as a united class) is the very heart of an understanding of the role of revolutionaries.
IV. For us, as marxists, the consciousness of the proletariat is the consciousness of what it is within the mode of production and therefore what it will be forced to carry out: the communist revolution. This consciousness of ‘what it is’ can only be achieved by itself, through its daily class struggle, through its praxis.
V. It is by virtue of its role as creator of new value in the capitalist process of production that the proletariat alone is able to have a collective (that is class) consciousness of its interests and its future. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.” (Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)
VI. The process whereby consciousness develops in the working class - the passage from its being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself - is necessarily a collective process because the working class carries out associated work in capitalist production which necessitates collective participation by the workers. The workers can only defend their interests collectively because they only have collective interests.
VII. The communist revolution, as distinct from all previous revolutions, can only be accomplished by a class highly conscious of its historic task, since the working class has no economic base in capitalist society to aid it in making its revolution. Its only weapons are its class consciousness and the organization it creates to realize its aims.
VIII. The constitution of the proletariat into a conscious and united class takes place at the conjuncture of a certain number of objective factors which act as catalysts. Among these factors economic pressure is indeed an indispensable, but still insufficient condition for the development of consciousness, The whole history of the workers’ movement has indicated that, while such economic pressure is necessary, it can only be really effective within the decadence of the system, that is in that period when the system can be materially destroyed.
IX. The intervention of revolutionaries (organized at first internationally as a fraction and later as a world party) has the role of diffusing the past experiences of the working class and of foreseeing future perspectives for the class struggle (based on the past experiences of the class and a socio-economic analysis). Because of this role, the intervention of revolutionaries is also an active factor in the impetus within the class towards the development of consciousness by and for the class, as well as in its generalization. (This is a necessary task as the consciousness of the class is never a homogeneous phenomenon.)
X. The communist fractions organize themselves on the basis of agreeing, both theoretically and practically, with the class positions (the communist programme), and they have the responsibility to the proletariat of organizing themselves in the same international, unified and centralized manner as the working class, in order to constitute a coherent revolutionary pole (fraction or international communist current).
XI. Once this revolutionary pole has been constituted, then it must be transformed into a world communist party. This transformation can certainly only take place in a period of mounting class struggle internationally and at a time when the international fraction has an effective influence within the working class.
XII. The party is a political expression secreted by the very experience of the class (the revolutionary theory defended by the party), which acts on the class by encouraging the unleashing and generalization of class consciousness, produced by and for the proletariat itself. There is, therefore, a dialectical relationship between the class and the party based on the fact that the party, produced by the class, becomes at the same time an active factor within the class.
XIII. The conception defended by Lenin in What is to be Done? (1902), asserts that the constitution of the proletariat as a unified class is not a product of the daily struggles of the class but is a product of a ‘socialist consciousness’ imported from outside the class. This theory creates an ideological split between being and consciousness; between the brutal, dirty being, the worker, and the ‘pure-as-the-driven-snow’ consciousness of the bourgeois intellectuals who deign to bring this consciousness to the masses. This dichotomy between matter and the idea which stands above matter, is an expression of an all pervasive idealism that claims that a higher idea pre-exists matter and that only a mediator (such as religion, philosophy, the Leninist Party, etc) can unite the idea and matter together.
The proletarian movement is basically a natural series of historic phenomena subject to laws which are not only independent of the will, of the consciousness and intentions of the proletariat, but which, on the contrary, determine the workers’ will, their consciousness and their intentions; “For me the movement of thought is only a reflection of the real movement, transported and transposed into man’s brain.” (Marx, Capital)
XIV. Similarly, the so-called ‘councilist’ conception, which adopts the opposite point of view to What is to be Done?, ends up with the same idealist deformation, but the other way round. For ‘councilism’ consciousness can only come from the class itself; any theoretical expression of the interests of the class by a revolutionary group cannot help but be a substitution for the real movement. And these individuals, guilt-ridden by Lenin’s errors, refuse to intervene at all, thereby denying that the revolutionary theory diffused within the working class is, as we have seen an active factor in the process of the development of consciousness. Refusing to carry out their responsibilities to the class, they accept the Leninist dichotomy between being and consciousness, but more sheepishly.
XV. “However, the effort of the class to develop its consciousness has existed at all times since its origins and will exist until its dissolution into communist society. This is why communist minorities have existed in every period as an expression of this constant effort.” (Platform of the ICC, International Review, no. 5)
Marc M.
The texts we are publishing here are contributions to discussion on the period of transition, which has always been an open question in the workers’ movement, and one to which revolutionaries must address themselves without making ‘recipes for the future’, or oversimplifying such a complex question, or drawing up class lines around problems which the practical experience of the class has not yet settled.
The debate within the ICC on this question began as soon as the ICC was formed, and the following texts are a continuation of the discussion initiated in the first issue of The International Review. The debate is still going on within the Current, and we have not yet come to a homogeneous position, particularly on the question of the state in the period of transition which is dealt with in these texts.
I. The nature of transition periods
Human history is made up of different stable societies based on a mode of production, with corresponding stable social relations within that society. These societies are based on the dominant economic laws by which they are defined, are composed of fixed social strata, and are supported by the appropriate superstructure (primitive communism, Asiatic productive mode, Ancient, feudal, and capitalist).
Every mode of production has an ascendant phase during which it is able to develop the productive forces, and a decadent phase, in which the mode of production becomes a brake on this development, and finally leads to its exhaustion and decomposition.
A period of transition begins after a more or less lengthy period of decadence during which the seeds of the new mode of production develop to the detriment of the old, thus enabling the old contradictions to be resolved and transcended, and leads finally to the establishment of the new dominant mode of production. The transition period has no mode of production of its own, but the old and the new modes both exist, entangled together. This period of transition is an absolute necessity, because the decay of the old society doesn’t automatically bring about the maturation of the new, but merely produces the conditions for this maturation. Thus, capitalism tended to socialize production on a world scale - to create a real community - but, at the same time, this would have immediately abolished the raison d’etre of commodity exchange and directly posed the realization of communism. But, with the creation of the world market which placed definite limits on accumulation, capital undermined the basis for the complete socialization of humanity: it destroyed modes of production in the non-capitalist world but wasn’t able to integrate them into capitalist production. Capitalism had entered its decadent phase.
II. Communist society
All periods of transition are born of the same conditions which give rise to the new society which will follow. In order to analyze the nature of the transition period between capitalism and communism and to see what distinguishes this period from all previous periods we must describe the nature of communist society or rather how it’s distinguished from all other societies:
- Contrary to past societies - with the exception of primitive communism - which have all been class divided and based on property and the exploitation of man by man, communism is a society without classes and without any kind of property; it is a unified and harmonious human community.
- The other societies in history were founded on the insufficient development of the productive forces in relation to the needs of man: they were societies of scarcity, dominated by natural forces and blind socio-economic laws. Communism is the full development of the productive forces in relation to the needs of man, the abundance of production capable of satisfying human needs: it is the world of liberty, the liberation of humanity from the domination of nature and the economy.
- All previous societies carried with them the anachronistic vestiges of economic and social relations, of ideas and prejudices of past societies, because they were all founded on private property and exploitation. In contrast to this, breaking with all these characteristics, communist society cannot tolerate within itself any surviving elements of the preceding society.
- The low level of development of the productive forces in past societies brought with it the uneven development of different sections of society: as well as being based on class divisions, these societies were divided into regions and nations. Only the productive forces developed by capitalism since its zenith allow for the first time in history a true interdependence between different parts of the world. Communism is universal from its inception or it is nothing; it demands that all parts of the world develop together simultaneously.
- There is neither exchange nor the law of value under communism. Production is socialized in the fullest sense of the word: it is planned completely according to the needs of the members of society and for their satisfaction. And such production, based on use-values, and where distribution is direct and socialized, excludes trade, markets, and money.
- All past societies - with the exception of primitive communism - have been divided into classes with antagonistic interests and have only been able to exist and survive by creating a special organ which seems to stand above classes, but which in fact imposes the domination of the ruling class over society; this organ is the state. Communism, knowing no such divisions, has no need of a state. Moreover inasmuch as it is a human community no organism for the government of men can exist within it.
III. Characteristics of the period of transition
Up until now all periods of transition in history have had this in common, that they developed inside the old society. The political revolution of the new ruling class was no more than the culmination of its economic domination which had developed progressively inside the old society. This situation proves that the new society, like the old one, blindly obeys the imperatives of laws produced by the scarcity of the productive forces, and that the new ruling class simply brings with it another form of exploitation and class division.
Communism is the total break with all exploitation and all class divisions, as well as being a conscious organization of production which permits an abundance of the productive forces. This is why the transition period to communism can only begin outside of capitalism after the political defeat of capitalism and the triumph of the political domination of the proletariat on a world-wide scale. The first preoccupation of the proletariat, then, is the taking of power on a world scale and the total destruction of capitalist institutions: the state, the police, the army, the civil service etc.
Thus the transition period which then begins is an unceasing movement of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist relations to be replaced by communist relations. The transition period must abolish all capitalist relations, for capital is a process in which every moment is inextricably linked to another, (the sale of labour-power, extraction and realization of surplus-value, capitalization etc). Therefore trade, markets, and money all disappear (and with them wage-slavery).
It is important to see that any check to the revolutionary transformation of society presents the danger of a return to capitalism. Indeed, the whole system of market relations will only definitively disappear under full communism when classes have ceased to exist, since the perpetuation of classes means the perpetuation of commodity exchange. Equally, we insist that there is no transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism. During the period of transition, “What we have to deal with .... is a communist society not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme)
IV. Economic measures
Although it is difficult to say precisely what economic measures will be taken during the transition period, we can state that we are in favour of measures which tend directly to regulate production and distribution in collective, social terms, rather than measures which demand calculation of distribution in terms of individual contributions to social work.
It is necessary to criticize the system of ‘labour time vouchers’ which perpetuates the division of the working class into an aggregate of individuals who obtain the means to live on the basis of their individual work. Under this system, each worker receives, in exchange for one hour of work, a voucher representing one hour of work with which he can get a number of products, equal to the time he has given. It is a wage form without the wage content. In such a system, concrete work, real time, the effort crystallized in a product are of little importance; only abstract work time, necessary labour time determined by the global productivity of society is taken into account and this divides the workers on the basis of their productivity. But above all this system is impracticable: indeed, in order to calculate an ‘average hour’ of labour, productivity would need to be uniform in each branch of production; and even if this could be achieved, then a form of calculation on a world scale would need to be developed which was able to continually keep track of the changing levels of productivity throughout the period of transition. It would necessitate a monstrous bureaucracy on a scale previously unknown in the history of man in order to prevent each producer or production unit from ‘cheating’, from declaring unworked hours, etc. This system also runs the risk of an easy degeneration into money wages during a moment of reflux in the revolution.
All measures taken must, be guided by the need to tend towards collectively controlled production for the satisfaction of social needs based on use-values and real labour: towards the reduction of working hours and the assimilation of other strata into associated work. It is necessary to insure that all the good, essential for human life are collectivized and freely distributed as quickly as possible, especially in industrialized sector where socialization will be able to proceed more quickly.
V. The revolutionary civil war
Because the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are both world classes, when the workers take power in one country t this will lead to a world civil war against the bourgeoisie. Until it is victorious, until the proletariat has conquered world power, we can’t really talk about a period of transition or a communist transformation of society.
During the world civil war everything wi1l be subordinated to the interest of the civil war: production still won’t be based principally on human need, which is what define communist production, but on the urgent need to extend and consolidate the international revolution. Even if the proletariat is able to eradicate the formal characteristics of capitalism while it is arming itself and producing for the civil war, one can’t refer to an economy oriented towards war as ‘communism’. As long as capitalism exists in any part of the world its laws continue to determine the real content of productive relations everywhere else. Nevertheless, as soon as it has taken power in one area, the proletariat must begin the assault on capitalist relations of production:
a. Because any blow struck against capitalism will result in a profound disintegration of world capital which will deepen the world-wide class struggle.
b. In order to facilitate the political direction of a zone under the control of the proletariat. Because the political power of the workers will depend on their capacity to simplify and rationalize the processes of production and distribution, a task which is impossible in an economy totally dominated by market relations.
c. In order to lay the foundations of the social transformation which will follow the civil war.
Moreover it is important to note that, if the communist transformation of society can only be fully embarked upon after the establishment of the world-wide political power of the proletariat - after the world civil war has been won - it is nevertheless the case that the proletariat will set up its organs of power immediately after taking power in one area of the globe. In this area these organs have the same character as during the entire period of transition; this applies not only to the workers’ councils, but also to the state which is already the state of the period of transition.
VI. Principal aspects of the period of transition
Here we can only enlarge upon the tasks that the proletariat will have to accomplish during the transition period; they are enormous and many. The proletariat will have an entire society to build.
1. The dictatorship of the proletariat
Several classes will still exist in the transition period. But the proletariat is the only one whose interest is communism. Other classes can be drawn into the struggle that the proletariat wages against capitalism, but they can never, as classes, be the bearers of communism. It is for this reason that the proletariat must constantly guard itself against blurring the distinction between itself and other classes or dissolving itself into other classes. It can only ensure the forward movement towards a classless society by asserting itself as an autonomous class with political domination over society. This is because economically the proletariat remains exploited since the world is still dominated by the law of value. It must keep all political power and all its armed force in its own hands. It is the working class in its entirety that has the monopoly of arms.
While the working class must take other classes into account in economic and administrative life, because in the beginning these classes will constitute the majority of society, it must not allow these classes the possibility of autonomous organization. These numerous classes and strata will be integrated into the territorial soviet administrative system as citizens, not as classes. These classes will progressively be dissolved and integrated into the working class. Of course this only applies to the non-exploitative classes; the whole capitalist class and all of the old upper classes of capitalist society will be directly excluded from political life.
The proletariat in order to assert its dictatorship must give itself two organizational forms: the workers’ councils and the revolutionary party.
If in all other previous class societies, the ruling class exercised its dictatorship openly or hypocritically over the other classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat is different from previous class dictatorships:
- Its dictatorship is directed solely against the old classes of society. It doesn’t bring with it new privileges, or new exploitation, but suppresses all privileges and all exploitation. Far from being a guardian of the status quo, its aim is the uninterrupted transformation of society.
- For this reason unlike other classes it has no need to conceal its aims, to mystify oppressed classes by presenting its dictatorship as the reign of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
- It sets itself the task of destroying all specializations and hierarchical divisions within society. It. must guarantee that the whole of the working class has the right to strike, to bear arms, to have complete freedom of assembly and expression, etc. All relations of force and all violence inside the proletarian camp must be rejected.
2. The Workers’ Councils
The workers’ council is the historic form for the self-organization of the proletariat in revolutionary struggle; it is an autonomous organization regrouping the entire class, the form of power developed for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The councils are assemblies of delegates elected and revocable at all times by general assemblies of workers, carrying out the decisions taken by these assemblies. The councils centralize themselves on a worldwide basis for they must enforce the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, the proletariat’s world political power and the whole revolutionary transformation of society.
- Therefore, political power is exercised through the workers councils and not through a party.
- The councils are the autonomous organization of the working class. Of the two dangers which can arise in the formation of the councils, the infiltration of bourgeois elements and the containment of the workers within the rigid confines of the factory, the second has shown itself to be the most dangerous. The danger of infiltration by bourgeois elements was the reason given by German Social Democracy for refusing Rosa Luxemburg access to the workers’ councils. The party is a fraction of the class and so intervenes freely within the councils.
- The councils are not organs of self-management. The isolation of workers in ‘councils’ composed simply of productive units can only serve to reinforce the divisions imposed on the working class by capitalism and leads to certain defeat. The councils are above all instruments of centralized political power.
- The councils are not an end in themselves: they are the best means the proletariat can use to bring about the communist transformation of society. If the councils become an end in themselves this will simply mean that the process of social revolution has been arrested, which means the beginning of a return to capitalism.
3. The Revolutionary Party
The revolutionary party, formed by revolutionary fractions during a. revolutionary period, is a fraction of the class which has a clear vision of the communist aims carried by the proletariat. Its only task is the generalization of revolutionary consciousness within the class. In no case can it take power ‘in the name of the class’, or organize the class.
The party will have an active role to play within the class until communism is achieved and, therefore, the practical realization of the communist programme. Right through the period of transition the party will express the unity of proletarian consciousness while there is still heterogeneity of consciousness within the class, and will continue to pose the problem of class autonomy, thus fulfilling its role as the party.
4. The State
The class antagonisms which are fermenting within society constantly threaten to explode into struggles which put at risk the equilibrium and indeed the very existence of that society. To prevent this, the bourgeoisie, like the classes which preceded it, has been forced to create institutions and a superstructure of which the state is the highest expression and whose basic function is to maintain class struggle within an acceptable framework, and to safeguard and strengthen the existing social order. This is why as a general rule, the state remains the expression of the ruling class par excellence and is identified with that class.
The period of transition to communism is still a society which is divided into classes. Therefore this super-structural organism, this unavoidable evil - the state -will inevitably arise to prevent the violent disintegration of this hybrid society. The proletariat as long as it is the politically dominant class will use the state to maintain its power and to defend the gains of the communist transformation of society. This state will be different from all states in the past. It will in fact be a semi-state. For the first time the new ruling class, the proletariat, will not ‘inherit’ the old state machine and use it to serve its own interests, but will overthrow and destroy the bourgeois state and build its own organs of power. This is because the proletariat does not use the state to exploit other classes, but to defend a social transformation which will lead to the disappearance of exploitation forever, which will abolish all social antagonisms and lead to the state becoming extinct.
But the proletariat will continue to be the exploited class in society for its domination of society is entirely political and not economic. Because of this it cannot identify with the state, the instrument of social preservation which reflects the obstacles to social development posed by other classes who are vestiges of the past, and which expresses the continued existence of class society and therefore of exploitation. It is because the function and the interests of the bourgeois state are closely bound to those of the economically dominant class, ie the preservation of the existing social order that the bourgeois state can and must identify with that class. This is not at all the case with the proletariat which does not try to preserve the existing state of affairs, but to overthrow and continually transform it. This is why the historic dictatorship of the proletariat cannot find its true expression in that institution of preservation par excellence the state. There can be no such thing as a ‘socialist’ or a ‘communist’ state. Communism is the real development of the historic interests of the proletariat, and by definition there cannot be an identification between communism and the state. As a result, in so far as one speaks of a communist proletariat, one cannot speak of a ‘workers’ state’ or a 'proletarian state'. There are arguments which support this conception of the state in the period of transition:
- To identify the proletariat with the state - as the Bolsheviks did - leads at a time of reflux to the disastrous situation in which the state, considered as the ‘embodiment of the working class’, is allowed to do anything to maintain its power while the working class as a whole remains defenceless.
- On a world scale, the proletariat is only a minority of the population. The majority of the world population (peasants, artisans, etc, mainly in the third world) cannot be integrated into the workers’ councils by the proletariat as the proletariat would lose its class autonomy. Neither can they be suppressed, nor ignored. This majority will have to be allowed to organize itself (with the exception of the bourgeoisie), and to form councils. The negative example of the Russian Revolution has shown us that violence must not be employed against classes, other than the bourgeoisie, except as a last resort. But just as the other strata will only be integrated into associated production as individuals, so the proletariat will only allow them to express their interests as individuals and not as classes within civil society. This implies that the representative organs, through which these interests are expressed, in contrast to the workers’ councils, will be based on territorial units and forms of organization. All this allows us to say that while making use of the state, the proletariat expresses its dictatorship not through the state but over the state. In order to ensure the subservience of this state, a certain number of measures will have to be taken:
- The workers organized in councils have ultimate authority with regard to all measures taken by the state; no measure is taken without their agreement and active participation
- The workers have a monopoly of arms and are ready to/use these arms against the state if necessary.
The workers are represented in the state in maximum proportion, that is, in relation to the balance of forces at any time.
- All members of the state are elected and recallable at any time; the workers’ representatives report to the councils on all measures and steps which are taken.
- The councils can decide to make any changes which are necessary in the state and also in society taking account of the evolution of the balance of forces.
M. Lazare
(Treignes – 1975)
Only the historical experience of the proletariat can provide revolutionaries with a real basis for the elaboration of the communist programme. Against the philistines, the armchair intransigents and the alchemists of the revolution, revolutionaries affirm the fundamental unity of the theory and practice of the working class. Only by referring to concrete examples of class struggle can they trace the long-term perspectives of the revolutionary movement, put the proletariat on guard against many dangers awaiting it and theoretically clear away the obstacles which will undoubtedly arise along the path to revolution. If revolutionaries cannot definitively settle the questions which concrete proletarian experience has not yet decided in practice, they can nevertheless, on the basis of historical lessons, try to develop the theoretical groundwork for the understanding of certain problems.
Far from being confined to mere mental activity and speculation, the communist programme is a real problem linked to the development of consciousness in the proletariat, a development of consciousness which can really only be the practical and theoretical destruction of capitalist social relations. That is why the theoretical work undertaken by revolutionaries is constantly enriched by both the proletariat’s historical experience and present-day actions. It is from these struggles that revolutionaries draw the lessons for the elaboration of general perspectives and predictions for the workers’ movement:
“To predict is therefore not to invent but to reveal the new content which lies buried in the old society, by going beyond phenomenological appearances. Only in this way can theory become an active factor and a guide for action and socialism become the conscious transformation' of society.” (Parti de Classe, no.1)
It was by drawing the lessons from the experience of the insurrections of 1848 and, more important, of the Paris Commune of 1871, that Marx and Engels were led to abandon the perspective they developed in the Communist Manifesto that the proletariat was to take over the bourgeois state. In the same way, revolutionaries today must analyze the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, (the first large-scale attempt of the proletariat to affirm itself as a revolutionary class conscious of its historical role, the taking of power), so that all the lessons about the organization of the proletariat and the taking of power can be assimilated.
The Russian Revolution has taught us that the working class must affirm its autonomy and must organize in workers’ councils. For the first time in the history of humanity, the concrete objective basis of the conscious transformation of capitalist social relations by an exploited and revolutionary class was posed. But, to simply say that the material economic conditions of capitalism’s decline ‘permit’ or ‘determine’ the proletarian revolution is not sufficient:
“The objective economic premises are not enough to determine the victory of communism because communism cannot develop independently of the growth of proletarian consciousness; it cannot come as the result of a pre-ordained mechanistic process going on behind the back of the proletariat.” (Parti de Classe, no.1)
Right from the outset the communist revolution is a conscious dialectical process sweeping away the concrete obstacles in the way of the development of the productive forces. Theory and practice are therefore indissociable. From its beginnings, the proletariat as an exploited class has shown its violent opposition to the existence of the capitalist system; the proletariat has always affirmed the need to create the essential instruments of the development of its consciousness. The experience of the Russian Revolution confirms the need of the working class to acquire an overall consciousness of society as a whole and of its place within it. The role of the Bolshevik Party, its inability to solve a series of problems which proletarian practice had not yet decisively clarified, its degeneration into the counter-revolution, are all essential elements towards forging the understanding and clarity of revolutionaries participating in the process of consciousness today.
To claim to preserve the lessons of the Russian Revolution while at the same time using the substitutionism and many other serious errors of the Bolshevik Party to deny the decisive role of the Bolsheviks in that revolution is to engage in futile ‘purism’, and to fall into the emptiest bourgeois sociology. Revolutionaries do not deliver moral judgments about the past, nor do they mechanistically imitate the past; sociological ‘objectivity’ is not their instrument either. Revolutionaries theorize the experiences of the past in relation to the final goal; that is why they form revolutionary organizations to intervene in the workers’ movement, and do not form ‘discussion groups’:
“The task of theory is not to reflect immediate reality (which would imply that theory only comes after the fact and would therefore have no active role to play) but to predict the major historical tendencies which are evolving within this reality.” (Parti de Classe)
Only through the fullest understanding of the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into state capitalism and all the implications flowing from this can we develop any general perspectives about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and specifically the state, in the period of transition.
The dictatorship of the proletariat in the period of transition
The political position that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be exercised through workers’ councils, centralized on a world scale, is a fundamental tenet of the revolutionary movement today. In the past the slogan “All power to the Soviets” expressed the understanding revolutionaries had of the seizing of political power by the proletariat and the rejection of any class collaboration or compromise with the bourgeoisie.
But the dictatorship of the proletariat is not an end in itself, nor a definitive answer to all the problems raised by the transformation of the capitalist mode of production into communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat is an indispensable precondition of this transformation but it is not a panacea. The conscious action of an entire class to change outdated social relations cannot be condensed into the imposition of political power over other classes. In the last analysis, the dictatorship of the proletariat is but the transition to the abolition of all classes, to the establishment of a mode of production without classes. The historical mission of the proletariat cannot be limited to the simple political domination of society. As both a revolutionary and exploited class, the proletariat’s mission is to lead humanity to make the leap from “the reign of necessity to the reign of liberty” and to free it from all forms of exploitation. In itself the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be a guarantee of this mission; it is only an instrument in a complex process which requires the conscious intervention of the working class as a whole. After the proletariat’s seizure of power, the change from capitalism to socialism cannot be carried out by decree; it requires a long period of transition during which the proletariat will eliminate the vestiges of the old society, and integrate other classes into the productive process, in sum, begin to create a new society.
This period of transition between capitalism and communism is burdened with “the traditions of all the dead generations which weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living” (Marx); this period will still bear the traces of capitalist society: “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme)
This means concretely: the continued existence of social classes and class antagonisms, the subsistence of the law of value (even though it will undergo profound changes in its very nature so as to be progressively eliminated), and the existence of social intermediaries destined to disappear but necessary for the maintenance of social cohesion. Thus the proletariat will have recourse to the state, the embodiment of social coercion: “an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.” (Engels, ‘Introduction’, (1891), The Civil War in France, (Marx)) The state is an evil which is necessary and unavoidable because of the continued existence of social classes.
But the existence of this state must never be a hindrance to the dictatorship of the proletariat or to the conscious transformation of society. The dictatorship of the proletariat must affirm its autonomy in relation to other classes and must stand resolutely against any dictatorship of the party and any form of substitutionism, concerning either the state and the party, the class and the state or the party and the class.
By refusing to let a minority of ‘professional’ revolutionaries exercise power in its place, the working class organized in workers’ councils affirms the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the conscious activity of the working class as a whole. Although the revolutionary party continues to play a decisive role during the period of transition, it remains distinct from the councils[1] and does not seek to exercise a separate power within them:
“The communist party of the future will have no other weapons than its theoretical clarity and its active commitment to the communist programme. It cannot seek power for itself but must fight within the general organs of the class for the implementation of the communist programme. It can in no way force the class as a whole to put this programme into action or implement it itself because communism can only be created by the conscious activity of the entire working class.” (‘The Proletarian Revolution’, International Review, no.1)
The problem of the state in the period of transition
When the proletariat is victorious and the revolution has spread to the entire world, a state will arise in the period of transition between capitalism and socialism. It will be a very different state to the bourgeois state (which the proletariat has destroyed during the civil war) but one which still maintains a fundamental characteristic of all states: coercion. In this context, how can we explain the apparent contradiction between the existence of a conservative social form (the state) and the need for the proletariat to proceed with a radical transformation of society? The answer is to be found in the ambiguous nature of the period of transition itself. The proletariat will have only two weapons against this ambiguity: its class consciousness and the power of its workers’ councils.
1. Destruction of the Bourgeois State
“The proletariat appears as the first revolutionary class in history which must destroy the ever-more-centralized bureaucratic and police machine which all exploiting classes have, up to now, used to crush the exploited masses. In his Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx emphasized that ‘all political revolutions have only perfected this machine instead of destroying it’. The centralized power of state goes back to the absolute monarchy; the rising bourgeoisie used it to fight against feudalism; the French Revolution rid the state of the last feudal fetters and the first Empire completed the creation of the modern state. Developed bourgeois society transformed the central power into an oppressive machine against the proletariat.” (Mitchell, ‘Problemes de la Periode de Transition’, Bilan)
The proletariat, the first revolutionary exploited class in history, cannot take over the bourgeois state but must attack it directly and destroy it completely so as to impose its class power through the workers’ councils created by the proletariat in arms.
(The class as a whole will be armed and not simply a specialized body, a ‘Red Army’.) But this process of destruction is not only directed against the elimination of the bourgeois state. The proletariat will have a second task: the gradual destruction of the state in the period of transition. This state is necessary for a certain time but nonetheless it constitutes an expression of the conservation of the status quo. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not therefore consist of taking over the bourgeois state nor of destroying it to create a ‘workers’ state’ identified with the class.
The proletarian revolution is fundamentally a political one which affirms the power of the entire, conscious, revolutionary class. But, although the seizure of power by the proletariat opens the way to the overthrow of capitalist social relations and to the beginning of communist society, this new society will not develop spontaneously or automatically from the old:
“The working class is not separated from the old bourgeois society by a wall of China. When the revolution breaks out, things do not happen as they do when a man dies and his body is simply taken away and buried. When the old society declines, its remains cannot be nailed into a coffin and put in the grave. It decomposes in our midst; it rots, and its decay affects us all. No great world revolution has happened in any other way, nor can it. That’s why we must fight to protect and develop the seeds of the new society in the midst of this atmosphere infested with the poisoned air of decaying corpses.” (Lenin.)
2. The Need for a State in the Period of Transition
As we have seen, when the proletariat takes power, social classes will not have been completely eliminated. As long as classes exist a state will arise to contain class antagonisms and prevent the society from tearing itself apart. The proletariat will not use this state to exploit other classes but to gradually integrate other sectors of the society into the productive process. The proletariat will have absolute control over the state and will use it to regulate relations with other classes and sectors of the population. Generalizing from this statement to assume that the proletariat and the state are identical is only a small step but it must not be taken. To identify the state with the proletariat is to confuse the issue and pose the problem very badly. The confusion of the class with the state in fact reveals a misunderstanding of the profoundly political nature of the proletarian revolution and of the motor force which propels it.
The period of transition is therefore completely encapsulated within this contradiction: that on the one hand the proletariat possesses political power through the armed workers’ councils; but on the other hand, other classes still exist, as does the law of value, and the proletariat remains an exploited class, a class which possesses no particularistic economic power within the society.
It is this apparent contradiction which stimulates the revolutionary dynamic towards the elimination of commodity relations, towards the socialization of production and the gradual forging of new social relations. This conscious transformation cannot be carried out unless the proletariat integrates all of society into itself. This process not only takes place outside of the state but is profoundly-antagonistic to the state in that it tends to destroy the state, to render it more and more unnecessary. The proletariat thus remains an exploited class during the period of transition and this exploitation is inversely proportional to the destruction of the state and of other social classes.
Unlike past revolutions which used a political revolution to consummate an already established economic power, the proletarian revolution and the passage from the capitalist mode of production to communist production requires an overall consciousness of the nature of the transformation. Although the bourgeois state was progressive during a certain period because it uprooted feudal relations and confirmed capitalist ones, by its very nature the state in the period of transition expresses an unavoidable conservatism. Although it does not put the dictatorship of the proletariat in question, it expresses the whole social context of the period of transition, a turning point in history when, little by little, the proletariat will destroy the capitalist corpse, the last decaying vestiges of commodity production.
3. The proletariat must remain independent of all other classes and must consciously transform all of society. The state, however, incarnates the existence of social classes. It is the concrete expression of the need for regulation and exchange between the proletariat and the remaining social classes; it concretizes the coercion necessary in this period, after the taking of power, when other classes will still exist. To some extent the state is the super-structural materialization of the existence of exploitation (linked to exchange and the social division of labour) of the proletariat during the period of transition. Even if negotiations between the proletariat and other classes will be done in the interests of the working class and under the control of the councils, the state tasks during the period of transition on the one hand, and the conscious transformation of social relations on the other, while being parts of the same overall process - the dictatorship of the proletariat - are two different things:
“The proletariat alone contains within itself the seeds of communist social relations; the proletariat alone is capable of undertaking the communist transformation. The state at best helps to guard the gains of this transformation (and at worst becomes an obstacle to it) but it cannot, as a state, undertake that transformation. It is the social movement of the whole proletariat in creative self-activity which actually ends the domination of commodity fetishism and builds up a new social relationship between human beings.” (‘The Proletarian Revolution’, International Review, no.1)
We must not confuse the instrument with the person who uses it.
4. It is essential for the development of proletarian consciousness that the state be distinct from the class because the proletariat must always act in accordance with the final communist goals of its movement. These goals are not the maintenance of exploitation and of social classes nor are they the dictatorship of the proletariat as an end in itself but rather the abolition of all classes through a conscious change in production relations. These final goals of the proletariat are in contradiction with the very function of the state and its conservative nature. As the old popular saying affirms, an enemy known as an enemy is better than too many unknown friends. In distinguishing itself clearly from the state, the proletariat becomes conscious of the existence of this useful ‘enemy’ over which it must exercise vigilant control. (Only something separate from oneself can be controlled; if it is not separate in some way, control is no longer possible.) Only a clear idea of what to destroy and what to build constitutes a guarantee that the proletariat will indeed change social relations in a conscious way.
Thus the state is a necessary social form but it must be progressively destroyed:
“We must keep in mind that the hypothesis of the withering away of the state is bound to become the touchstone of the content of proletarian revolutions. We have already indicated that the revolution breaks out in a historical milieu which obliges the proletariat to tolerate the existence of a state. But this can only be a ‘state in the process of withering away, that is, a state so constituted that it begins to wither away from the start and cannot but wither away’ (Lenin)”. (Mitchell, ‘Problemes de la Periode de Transition’, Bilan)
The apparent contradiction between the essentially dynamic character of the period of transition, (the dictatorship of the proletariat), and the need for the state, (the guardian of the status quo); the apparent contradiction between the existence of this state and the goal of the proletariat which is the destruction of this historically conservative institution and the abolition of all classes - all these ambiguities go to the heart of the nature of the period of transition and reveal the fundamentally difficult and painful character of this period as well as the immense tasks which the proletariat will have to undertake. This is the.sine qua non of the proletariat’s awareness of its class interests, and of the ever-present danger of a return to capitalism, a danger which arises because the seeds of communism will have to develop in an atmosphere infested by the poisoned air of the decaying corpse of capitalism.
J.L.
1. This is true even if the influence of revolutionaries grows enormously, even if the unity of theory and practice during this period becomes such that the proletariat considers the organization of revolutionaries as the spokesman of their goals.
In the present period of rising class struggle, revolutionaries all over the world must regroup their forces in order to be able to intervene effectively in the movement of the working class towards revolution. After fifty years of triumphant counter-revolution, in which the organic continuity with the past workers’ movement was brutally interrupted, the constitution of the International Communist Current as a pole of revolutionary coherence and clarity is a vital moment in the process of international regroupment which will ultimately lead to the re-emergence of the world communist party.
This break in organic continuity is especially obvious in Britain where there has been no tradition of left communism since the disappearance of the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1924. Today the revolutionary movement in Britain is extremely restricted and elements who come toward revolutionary ideas are still struggling to break out of the influence of Trotskyism, libertarianism, marginalism, and other bourgeois ideologies. All this can only increase the importance of the presence of the ICC in Britain in the form of World Revolution. As the class struggle deepens, WR will have a heavy responsibility in acting as the pole of communist regroupment in Britain. In this context, this Congress
* regrets that other expressions of the re-emerging communist movement in Britain specifically the elements who now constitute the Communist Workers’ Organization - have failed to understand the need for regroupment and have fallen into a sectarian attitude which can only serve to fragment the revolutionary movement today.
* affirms that the historical experience of the revolutionary working class is expressed in the platform of the ICC
* calls upon all revolutionary elements in Britain to recognize the need for the centralization and unification of all revolutionary activity, to regroup with the ICC and help to make it an indispensable, active factor in the reconstitution of the world party of the communist revolution.
REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
The ICC section in Britain, World Revolution, held its First Congress in April of this year. The Congress confirmed the work achieved by World Revolution in 1975, and the discussions at the Congress centred on the perspectives for the crisis and class struggle in Britain and the role and participation of World Revolution in the work of the ICC as a whole.
The First Congress was above all a ‘working’ congress in that it permitted World Revolution to consciously account for its resources, maturity, and capacity to intervene in the class struggle. It was also the occasion for a balance-sheet to be drawn up or World Revolution’s origins and its activities since it began to participate fully with the groups which later constituted the ICC.
The Congress endorsed the intention of publishing the magazine, World Revolution, more regularly as soon as possible. Other resolutions and documents, which expressed the level of clarity achieved by WR on vital issues confronting the working class today, were also endorsed. Among these documents were the ‘Theses on the Class Struggle in Britain’ and the ‘Perspectives on the Crisis and Class Struggle in Britain’, both of which are included in World Revolution no.7. In this issue of the International Review we are presenting another document which was discussed and approved by the Congress: the ‘Address to Revolutionaries in Britain’. This ‘address’ is a contribution of WR in regard to a central concern of revolutionaries in our period: the need for all revolutionary forces to unify and regroup their forces around the basic lessons of the historical struggle of the proletariat. After fifty years of counter-revolution, this necessity is all the more urgent, all the more crucial, when the forces of the proletariat, dispersed and weak, face immense tasks in this epoch of crisis and rising class struggle.
The fundamental gain of WR’s First Congress was that it reaffirmed WR’s participation in the work of the ICC, and as part of that whole, it pledged itself to play an increasingly decisive role in the struggles of the proletariat in Britain.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1936-spain
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/21/united-front
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/006_bilan36_july19.html#_ftn1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/006_bilan36_july19.html#_ftn2
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/006_bilan36_july19.html#_ftnref1
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/006_bilan36_july19.html#_ftnref2
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/content/17499/basic-texts-6-state-and-dictatorship
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left