1995 introduction by Rob Sewell

This was an introduction written for Ted Grant’s The Spanish Revolution 1931-37 in 1995 to counter renewed attacks on the facts of the Spanish Civil War by the Stalinists following the release of Ken Loach’s film, Land and Freedom.

The release of Ken Loach's new film Land and Freedom has generated renewed interest in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. 1996 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Popular Front, Franco's uprising and the revolutionary events of the civil war. As a consequence, we are reproducing this work on the Spanish Revolution by Ted Grant as well as a short article by Leon Trotsky analysing these events and explaining the reasons for the ultimate defeat of the Spanish working class.

The article by Ted Grant was originally published in 1973 as part of the discussions that were taking place in the Spanish underground movement against Franco. It summed up the lessons of the Spanish revolution and served as a contribution to the rearming of the new generation of workers and youth in the Spanish young socialists, the UGT and the PSOE. At that time, they were faced with the immanent collapse of the Franco regime and a new revolutionary offensive of the Spanish working class. Again, the Spanish 'Communist' Party, which played such a disastrous role in 1936-37, was also attempting to resurrect the old class collaborationist policies of popular frontism.

By the 1970s, the Spanish proletariat had grown in renewed strength and confidence. The whole of the Iberian Peninsula was experiencing new revolutionary upheavals. The overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship in Portugal in the mass movement of April 1974, pushed the revolution forward. Every attempt by the bourgeois to reestablish its control resulted in a greater swing to the left. But, with the lack of a clear Marxist leadership, the leaders of the Socialist Party and the CP used their authority to side track the movement and prepared the way for counter-revolution. In Spain, after the death of Franco, the movement reached new heights. Nevertheless, as the bourgeois representatives rushed to throw off their fascist uniforms and collect their 'democratic' credentials, the leaders of the workers parties moved rapidly to the right, seeking an accommodation with the new regime. The trade unions looked for a pact with the employers, while the CP defended the monarchy and the national flag! They gave credence to the new 'democratic' capitalist parties. This lead to colossal disillusionment amongst the militant layers of the working class. As a result, the general elections called in 1977 saw the victory of the 'Centre' Parties. This provided only a temporarily respite, and they were forced to call new elections only two years later, which again were won by the 'Centre'. The workers parties offered no alternative. However, the attempted military coup led by General Tejero in 1981, reflected the fragile nature of Spanish 'democracy'. Yet, given the class balance of forces, the coup failed to gain support and turned into a comic affair. Rather than prepare the way for reaction, it led in 1982 to a landslide victory for the PSOE in the general election.

In power, the PSOE leaders moved rapidly to the right. Given the weak nature of Spanish capitalism, the PSOE government abandoned its reforms and moved to counter reform. Gonzales, the once 'radical' leader, turned into an extreme rightwinger. However, the boom of the eighties and the disarray amongst the bourgeois parties, together with the worn but deep seated loyalty of the workers, kept the PSOE in office throughout the 1980s.

Unemployment at officially 23% is the highest in Europe. The employers' offensive and the attacks of the government against the Spanish workers has led to a number of bitter clashes and a series of general strikes. Recently, there have been violent protests over the attempt to close steel plants and shipyards. A new School Students Union has sprung up which has given militant leadership to important struggles affecting millions of youth.

The recent scandal of government ministers being involved in the creation of death squads used against ETA in the 1980s, has rocked the PSOE. The withdrawal of parliamentary support by the Catalan nationalists has prepared the way for new elections in which the PSOE is likely to be defeated. A new bourgeois government, as in France, will be met with grave economic and social difficulties. Given the pent up frustration of the workers and the revolutionary traditions of the Spanish workers, the scene is being set for mighty class battles. This new period corresponds with a new volatile period internationally. Weak Spanish capitalism cannot afford the reforms of the past. On the contrary, counter reforms are on the order of the day. Many workers on the basis of their experience in the post war period never believed that they would witness war on the mainland of Europe. But the bloody conflict in former Yugoslavia has brought home the nature of the new period. The mighty revolutionary events of the past also will return. The need for a militant fighting leadership for the workers' organisations will be posed again and again. At the same time, the weakness of the CP, which has splintered into a number of groups, will mean that they will not be able to play the same role as in the past. For the new generation of worker activists, it is necessary nevertheless to learn the lessons of history, especially the lessons of 1931-37, and prepare ourselves for the future.

The release of the film Land and Freedom, which highlights the treacherous role of the Stalinists during the civil war, has provoked a series of major articles in the Morning Star regurgitating all the old lies and arguments of the 1930s. They are attempting to cover up their disastrous role in 1936 and 1937. They are a blatant attempt to rewrite history.

Distorsion

In the Morning Star of 1st September 1995, Michael O'Riordan, chairman of the Irish Communist Party and former International Brigader lambasted the film as a "distortion" under the title "Damn good anti-Communist stuff". He says the film is based on George Orwell's book, Homage to Catalonia, and proceeds to deride him: "Orwell went up to the hills, fires a few shots in the air and, with his book under his arm, left for Britain to be embraced by the Tory establishment..." In fact the picture described by Orwell is derived from his own personal experiences and is a crushing blow against the actions of the Stalinists in Spain, and its view is backed up by many historians, notably Hugh Thomas, as well as the classic contemporary account by Felix Morrow.

This is a complete distorsion. A quick glance at the press of the CNT, POUM, FAI and even UGT will show you that these organisations had been demanding a general offensive on all the fronts as the best way to help Madrid, but the Republican government consistently refused to act. The Aragón front had been boycotted (arms, ammunitions, food, etc.) by the republican government because it was composed mainly by CNT and POUM militias which were conducting a semi revolutionary war by collectivising the land. Despite this sabotage, the Aragón front was very active. In fact, Orwell was wounded during an offensive on the road to Jaca. This was part of the offensive to take Huesca, which failed because the Republican government refused to provide the promised air cover.

Orwell stayed four months on the Aragón front. After being wounded (he was shot through the neck) during the Huesca offensive, he was sent back to Barcelona on the 17/18th June. A day earlier, the POUM had been illegalised, all its buildings occupied by the police, the leadership imprisoned and all its members were under threat of arrest. Orwell had never been a member of the POUM, but had fought in the 29th Lenin Division of the POUM and as a result was on a police "suspects" list. He stayed in Barcelona until the 23rd June, sleeping in the streets (all boarding houses had to report about foreigners), and hiding during the day. That was the reason why he left Spain, not because he had "a book under his arm".

In the Morning Star, O'Riordan stands things on their head. He accuses the anarchists of "antagonising the peasantry" by "a forcible collectivisation of peasants' land down to the last shovel". In reality, the anarchists favoured voluntary collectivisation. It was the Stalinists in the USSR that carried out a programme - against the warnings of the Left Opposition - of forced collectivisation between 1928-30 which led to the death of millions of people in the famine which followed. In fact, Soviet agriculture never recovered fully from this debacle. And now the Stalinists have the temerity to suggest it was the policy of their opponents!

Another critic, Bill Alexandre, writes in the Morning Star (7th Octobre 1995): "Orwell and the small ILP group remained without serious fighting until, on April 27 1937, they turned their backs on the enemy, leaving the front open, to retreat to Barcelonan to guard the POUM headquarters".

Slander

This is another slander. We have already commentated on the "lack" of fighting on the Aragón front. Let us remember that during the offensive on Huesca 3,000 people died! Orwell and the small ILP group left the front on official leave permits. At that time those permits were only issued every 3 months. When they arrived in Barcelona they became involved in the May Days, and played an important role in defending the POUM headquarters from Stalinist attacks (what Bill Alexander doesn't explain is why it was attacked). After the May Days, they went back to the front line to participate in the Huesca offensive and did not leave until mid-June when the POUM had been illegalised, the 29th Lenin Division disbanded by the Republican Army and most of their members arrested.

The only troops that left the front during the May Days were the government troops. Six thousand soldiers were sent from Valencia to disarm the workers in Barcelona. Companys, the Catalan president, even asked for the air force to bomb the CNT headquarters in Barcelona. The 29th Lenin Division (POUM) and the 23rd Division (CNT) at the Aragón front wanted to go to Barcelona to defend their comrades from being slaughtered but were prevented by their own leaders in Barcelona.

The Morning Star 4th August attacks Loach's film for denigrating communists and the International Brigade. "Without the room to catalogue all the film's calumnies," states the article, "from the assertion that the communists didn't organise volunteers into Spain (who asserted this?) to the charge that they murdered and tortured their allies - suffice to say that they are lies born of Trotskyite dogma." This is no 'Trotskyite dogma', it is a fact. Leopold Trepper in his memoirs, The Great Game, who was the head of Soviet intelligence in occupied Europe during World War Two, reveals what was happening: "I saw General Berzin again after his return from Spain, and he seemed a different man. He had learned there that Tukhachevski and his staff had been liquidated. He knew that the 'evidence' gathered against them was false, and he had been stunned.

"Further, he was too lucid to nourish any illusion about his own fate: the wave of repression that had swept away his comrades would drown him also. In spite of danger, he had come back, on his own initiative, to protest to Stalin against the massacres of communists that had been perpetrated by the OGPU (later known as the NKVD and ultimately the KGB) in Spain." (page 87) This is not an isolated example, thousands of Stalinists who came back after fighting in Spain were liquidated by Stalin in case they had been inflected by the revolution.

This is no invention, but was simply the continuation of the great Purge Trials of 1936-38 where millions were sent to their death as "enemies of the people". Trepper recalls: "The members of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, who were on assignment in Paris or fighting in Spain, were summoned to Moscow ...they arrived suspecting nothing. The united anti-fascist front ended, for them, in the cellars of the NKVD, where old militants like Adolf Varsky or Lenski, who was known as the 'Polish Lenin', disappeared forever. The liquidation of Bela Kun and the leaders of the Polish party was confirmed to me, with details I had not known, by survivors who shared my cell in Lubianka after the war....

"Yugoslavs, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs - all disappeared. By 1937, not one of the principal leaders of the German Communist Party was left, except for Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht. The repressive madness had no limits. The Korean section was decimated; the delegates from India had disappeared; the representatives of the Chinese Communist Party had been arrested. The glow of October was being extinguished in the shadows of underground chambers. The revolution had degenerated into a system of terror and horror; the ideals of socialism were ridiculed in the name of a fossilised dogma which the executioners still had the effrontery to call Marxism....

"And yet we went along, sick at heart, but passive, caught up in machinery we had set in motion with our own hands. Mere cogs in the apparatus, terrorised to the point of madness, we became the instruments of our own subjugation. All those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine are responsible, collectively responsible. I am no exception to this verdict." (pp. 53-55).

These methods were imported into Spain by large numbers of GPU 'advisers', who established murder squads, torture chambers, and underground prisons to carry through Stalin's counter-revolutionary policy in Spain. As Ted Grant explains, Stalin feared the Spanish revolution because it could act as an impulse to the Russian working class and the overthrow of Stalinism. On the other hand, Stalin wanted to prove to the Western powers that he could act in a respectable fashion - the sabotaging of the Spanish revolution was part of this strategy.

In early 1936, Roy Howard, an American journalist, interviewed Stalin.

"Howard: Does this statement of yours mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions to bring about a world revolution? 
Stalin: We never had any such plans or intentions. 
Howard: You appreciate, no doubt Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has for long entertained a different impression? 
Stalin: This is the product of misunderstanding. 
Howard: A tragic misunderstanding? 
Stalin: No, comic. Or perhaps tragicomic.." (Communist International, March/April 1936)

The attempt to woo the imperialist democracies failed miserably. Instead, Stalin turned to Hitler, cementing a pact with him in August 1939. As the deal meant the abolition of Poland, Stalin got around this little problem earlier by dissolving the Polish Communist party and murdering practically all its leaders as "fascists"!

The Morning Star (4th August 1995) berates the Loach film for daring to suggest the betrayal of the revolution was "an actual criminal conspiracy hatched in the evil mind of Joseph Stalin..." It is as if Stalin, who had butchered millions, could not rise to such an 'evil' deed! The Soviet archives in Moscow were opened and examined by Spanish journalists who discovered evidence that the GPU kidnapped and later murdered Andreu Nin, the leader of the POUM, in Alcala, just outside Madrid. Michael O'Riordan (Morning Star 1/9/95) repeats the old Stalin lie that Durruti, the anarchist leader, "was shot by one of his own column after he tried, in a threatening last vain effort, to make them (the anarchists) stay at their post." Historian, Huge Thomas, says there is no truth in this Stalinist rumour: "there is no proof, nor is it likely." The anarchists made many mistakes and blunders, but murdering one of their own was never their method. On the contrary, it was always the method of the Stalinists to murder opponents and blame it on their own supporters.

Durruti

The case was not only of Durruti, but Nin and Trotsky also. With the outlawing of the POUM after the 'May Days' in Barcelona, the GPU kidnapped and assassinated Nin and then blamed his murder on his so-called fascist collaborators. This was recounted by Jesus Hernandez, the Communist Minister of Education in the Negrin government. He revealed in La Grande Trahison, that Nin was tortured to the limits and then, according to a scheme devised by Vidali (alias Contreras) "liberated" by supposed agents of the Gestapo disguised as members of the International Brigade, leaving behind "evidence" indicating that he was a German spy. Even Santiago Carrillo, the CP youth leader at the time, who describes himself as "a sort of Minister of the Interior, at Madrid, in the Junta of Defence", says it was "possible that he was executed in our (Soviet) zone." (Dialogue on Spain, p 53).

But Carrillo, whose supporters ended up on the rightwing of the PSOE, has much to hide. He and other Stalinists were charged in April 1937 by Rodriguez, CNT member and Special Commissioner of prisons, of illegally seizing workers arrested by Cazorla, but acquitted and "taking said acquitted parties to secret jails or sending them into communist militia battalions in advance positions to be used as 'fortifications'."

They were carrying through Stalin's orders. On 7th December 1936, Pravda declared: "As for Catalonia, the purging of the Trotskyists and the Anarcho-syndicalists has begun: it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR."

Carrillo was asked to comment on this in his book' Dialogue on Spain: "It has often been said that the Soviet political police - the GPU, as it was called in those days - had ramifications in Spain, its own secret prisons. There are even issues of Illustration which show photographs (whether genuine or bogus) of the dungeons of the GPU in Barcelona in 1938." All Carrillo could say was: "Perhaps there were some later; perhaps there were some even then....I personally have no proof that there were and I never saw one, even though I believe the Soviet people (!) must have had certain services in Spain, connected with the presence of their volunteers who were fighting at the front." (pages 51-52)

The Stalinist justification for the suppression of the revolution was "first win the war, then the revolution". Under this slogan they carried through the reestablishment of the bourgeois state apparatus, ended the workers' control of the factories, opposed the collectivisation of land, dissolved the worker' militias - in a word - carried through the counter-revolution. As Carrillo admitted: "In that period we didn't talk about socialist revolution, and we even criticised those who did." In fact, they not only criticised but murdered those who advocated revolution. He continued: "If we didn't talk about it, this was primarily because of the international context. We wanted to neutralise the bourgeois forces in the European democracies... It is obvious that during that period the Soviet Union was interested in an alliance with the parliamentary powers against fascism. In my opinion that policy was correct." It was this policy that strangled the revolution. The limited arms that arrived from the USSR came after three months delay, and came with a political price. Stalin wrote to Caballero directly urging him not to harm the interests of private property. "To sum up on this," says Carrillo, "it is clear that at that time the European bourgeoisie would not have tolerated a situation in which a small isolated country like Spain could victoriously carry through a socialist revolution." (pp 160-61). Whenever have they 'tolerated' a socialist revolution?

From these statements it is absolutely clear that the policy of the Stalinists was the subordination of the revolution to the foreign policy needs of the Kremlin. It is a confirmation of the criticisms Trotsky made at the time. Those who refused to comply with this policy were denounced as Trotsky-fascists, and accomplices of the Fascist powers. That is precisely why the POUM militias were deprived of arms.

Following the May events in Barcelona, the forerunner of the Morning Star, the Daily Worker, published an article from its Spanish correspondent, Cockburn, entitled "Trotskyist Rising As Signal", in which it stated: "We know now that the German and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly in order to 'prepare' the notorious 'Congress of the Fourth International', had one big task. It was this:

"They were - in co-operation with the local Trotskyists - to prepare a situation of disorder and bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians to declare that they were 'unable to exercise naval control on the Catalan coats effectively', because of 'the disorder prevailing in Barcelona', and were, therefore, 'unable to do otherwise' than land forces in Barcelona...In the past, the leaders of the POUM have frequently sought to deny their complicity as agents of a fascist cause against the People's Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union." (Daily Worker, 11 May 1937)

The POUM was never a Trotskyist organisation, as the Stalinists maintained. The policy of the POUM as bitterly criticised by Trotsky as being centrist - revolutionary in words, but in practise trailing behind the coat-tails of the CNT and the republican government. Nevertheless, all who opposed the Stalinists were labelled Trotskyists or Anarchists, and had to be eliminated. The events in Barcelona in May 1937 were deliberately provoked by the Stalinists who attempted to seize control of the CNT-run telephone exchange. It was used as the pretext to ban the POUM and arrest and murder its leaders.

The Stalinists are still today trying to portray these events as fascist inspired and organised. This time they use the old edition of Huge Thomas' book as evidence. "In fact, as Hugh Thomas reminds us, Hitler's ambassador to Franco Spain, Wilhelm von Faupel, admitted that 'Franco had confirmed' that the counter-revolutionary events in Barcelona in 1937 were sparked by his own agents who were eager to exploit the divisions between the anarchists and communists", states Jeff Sawtell in the Morning Star (4 August 1995). Whereas Hugh Thomas in the first edition of his book The Spanish Civil War accepted this view as plausible, in his third revised and enlarged edition he dismisses the idea: "But spies are boastful, and that one may have attributed the spontaneous outbreak of the fighting to his own intrigues. Franco must also have been anxious to suggest the efficacy of his intelligence services to the Germans." (p 656, 1977 edition)

Revolutionary

As Ted Grant explains, the war against Franco could only be won as a revolutionary war, where the factories are owned and controlled by the workers and the peasants are given the land. On military terms, Franco was in a stronger position. Trotsky made the same point repeatedly: "I believe that I have expressed it in many interviews and articles: The only way possible to assure victory in Spain is to say to the peasants: 'The Spanish soil is your soil.' To say to the workers: 'The Spanish factories are your factories.' That is the only possibility to assure victory. Stalin, in order not to frighten the French bourgeoisie, has become the guard of private property in Spain." (The Case of Leon Trotsky, p 294).

The new generation of young workers and youth should learn the lessons of history. The tragedy of the Spanish revolution is a painful lesson of cynical betrayal. In Leopold Trepper's memoirs he states: "Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves." He goes on to say: "Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not 'confess', for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism." We must learn from the defeats as well as the victories of working people to prepare ourselves for the mighty events that lie ahead. To this end, we hope this work will assist and also create a thirst to study the more detailed classic writings on the Spanish civil war, most notably Felix Morrow's Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain, and Leon Trotsky's Spanish Revolution 1931-37.

Rob Sewell 
15th November 1995.

The Revolution In Spain

By Leon Trotsky

This article by Trotsky was written early on in the revolutionary process and lays out, in detail, the class balance of forces existing in Spain in early 1931.

1. Old Spain

The capitalist chain is again threatening to break at the weakest link: Spain is next in order. The revolutionary movement is developing in that country with such vigour that world reaction is deprived in advance of the possibility of believing in a speedy restoration of order on the Iberian peninsula.

Spain belongs unmistakably to the group of the most backward countries of Europe. But its backwardness has a singular character, weighed down by the great historic past of the country. While the Russia of the czars always remained far behind its western neighbours and advanced slowly under their pressure, Spain knew periods of great bloom, of superiority over the rest of Europe and of domination over South America. The mighty development of domestic and world commerce surmounted more and more the feudal dismemberment of the provinces and the particularism of the national parts of the country. The growth of the power and significance of the Spanish monarchy was inextricably bound up in those centuries with the centralizing role of mercantile capital, and with the gradual formation of the Spanish nation.

The discovery of America, which at first enriched and elevated Spain, was subsequently directed against it. The great routes of commerce were diverted from the Iberian peninsula. Holland, which had grown rich, broke away from Spain. Following Holland, England rose to great heights over Europe, and for a long time. Beginning with the second half of the sixteenth century, Spain had already begun to decline. With the destruction of the Great Armada (1588), this decline assumed, so to speak, an official character. The condition which Marx called "inglorious and slow, decay" settled down upon feudal-bourgeois Spain.

The old and new ruling classes—the landed nobility, the Catholic clergy with its monarchy, the bourgeois classes with their intelligentsia—stubbornly attempted to preserve the old pretensions, but alas! without the old resources. In 1820, the South American colonies finally broke away. With the loss of Cuba in 1898, Spain was almost completely deprived of colonial possessions. The adventures in Morocco only ruined the country, adding fuel to the already deep dissatisfaction of the people.

The retardation of the economic development of Spain inevitably weakened the centralist tendencies inherent in capitalism. The decline of the commercial and industrial life in the cities and the economic ties between them, inevitably led to the decline in the dependence of individual provinces upon each other. This is the chief reason why bourgeois Spain has not succeeded to this day in eliminating the centrifugal tendencies of its historic provinces. The meagreness of the resources of national economy, and the feeling of indisposition in all parts of the country could only foster the separatist tendencies. Particularism appears in Spain with unusual force, especially alongside of neighbouring France, where the Great Revolution finally established the bourgeois nation, united and inseparable, over the old feudal provinces.

Not permitting the formation of a new bourgeois society, the economic stagnation also decomposed the old ruling classes. The proud nobleman often cloaked their haughtiness in rags. The church robbed the peasantry, but from time to time it was compelled to submit to robbery by the monarchy. The latter, in the words of Marx, had more features of resemblance to Asiatic despotism than to European absolutism. How is this thought to be construed? The comparison of czarism to Asiatic despotism, which has been made more than once, seems much more natural geographically and historically. But with regard to Spain, as well, this comparison retained all its force. The difference is only in the fact that czarism was constituted on the basis of an extremely slow development of the nobility and of the primitive urban centres. But the Spanish monarchy was constituted under the conditions of the decline of the country and the decay of the ruling classes. If European absolutism generally could rise only thanks to the struggle of the strengthened cities against the old privileged estates, then the Spanish monarchy, like Russian czarism, drew its relative strength from the impotence of the old estates and the cities. In this lies its indubitable proximity to Asiatic despotism.

The predominance of the centrifugal tendency over the centripetal in economy as well as in politics undermined the ground beneath Spanish parliamentarism. The pressure of the government upon the electorate had a decisive character: during the last century elections unfailingly gave the government a majority. Because the Cortes (the Spanish Assembly) found it self-dependent upon the alternating ministries, the ministries themselves naturally fell into dependence upon the monarchy. Madrid made the elections but the power appeared in the hands of the king. The monarchy was doubly necessary to the disconnected and decentralized ruling classes, incapable of governing the country in their own name. And this monarchy, reflecting the weakness of the whole state, was—between two overturns—strong enough to impose its will upon the country. In general the state system of Spain can be called degenerated absolutism, limited by periodic promunciamentos. [Military plots, military coups d'etat.] The figure of Alfonso XIII expresses the system very well: from the point of view of degeneracy and absolutist tendencies, and the point of view of fear of pronunciamentos. The king's playing to wind. ward, his betrayals, his treason, and his victory over the temporary combinations hostile to him are not at all rooted in the character of Alfonso XIII himself, but in the character of the whole governmental system: under new circumstances, Alfonso XIII repeats the inglorious history of his great grandfather, Ferdinand VII.

Alongside of the monarchy, and in union with it, the clergy still represents a centralized force. Catholicism, to this day, continues to remain a state religion, the clergy plays a big role In the life of the country, being the firmest axis of reaction. The state spends many tens of millions of pesetas annually for the support of the clergy. The religious orders are extremely numerous, they possess great wealth and still greater influence. The number of monks and nuns is close to 70,000, equalling the number of high school students and exceeding double the number of college students. Is it a wonder that under these conditions forty-five per cent of the population can neither read nor write? The main mass of illiterates is concentrated, it is understood, in the village.

If the peasantry in the epoch of Charles V (Carlos I) gained little from the might of the Spanish empire, it was subsequently burdened with the heaviest consequences of its decline. For centuries it led a miserable, and in many provinces, a famished existence. Making up even now more than seventy per cent of the population, the peasantry bears on its back the main burden of the state structure. The lack of land, the lack of water, high rants, antiquated implements, primitive tilling of the soil, high taxes, the requisitions of the church, high prices of industrial products, a surplus of rural population, a great number of tramps, paupers, friars—that is the picture of the Spanish village. The condition of the peasantry has for a long time made it a participant in the numerous uprisings. But these sanguinary outbursts proceeded not along national but along local radii, dyed in the most multi-colored, and most often reactionary, colors. Just as the Spanish revolutions as a whole were small revolutions, so the peasant uprisings assumed the form of small wars. Spain is a classic country of "guerilla warfare."

2. The Spanish Army In Politics

Following the war with Napoleon, a new force was created in Spain—officers in politics, the younger generation of the ruling classes who inherited from their fathers the ruins of the once great empire and were in a considerable measure declassed. In the country of particularism and separatism, the army of necessity assumed great significance as a centralized force. It not only became a prop of the monarchy but also the vehicle of dissatisfaction of all the sections of the ruling classes, and primarily, of its own: like the bureaucracy, the officers are recruited from those elements, extremely numerous in Spain, which demand of the state first of all their means of livelihood. And as the appetites of the different groups of "cultured" society are far In excess of the state, parliamentary and other positions available, the dissatisfaction of those remaining unattached nurtures the republican party, which is just as unstable as all the other groupings in Spain. But insofar as genuine and sharp revolt is often concealed under this instability, the republican movement from time to time produces resolute and courageous revolutionary groups to whom the republic appears as a magic slogan of salvation.

The total number of the Spanish army is nearly 170,000. Over 13,000 of them are officers. 15,000 marines should be added to this. Being the weapon of the ruling classes of the country, the commanding staff also drags the ranks of the army into its plots. This creates the conditions for the independent movement of the soldiers. Already in the past, non-commissioned officers burst into politics, without their officers and against them. In 1836, the non. commissioned officers of the Madrid garrison, in an uprising, compelled the queen to promulgate a constitution. In 1866, the artillery sergeants, dissatisfied with the aristocratic orders in the army, rose in insurrection. Nevertheless, the leading role in the past has remained with the officers. The soldiers followed their dissatisfied commanders even though the dissatisfaction of the soldiers, politically helpless, was fostered by other, deeper social forces.

The contradictions in the army usually correspond to the branch of service. The more advanced the type of arms, that is, the more intelligence it requires on the part of the soldiers and officers, the more susceptible they are, generally speaking, to revolutionary ideas. While the cavalry is usually inclined to the monarchy, the artillerists furnish a big percentage of the republicans. No wonder that the fliers, piloting the modern type of war machine, appeared on the side of the revolution and brought into it elements of the individualist adventurism of their profession. The decisive word remains with the infantry.

The history of Spain is the history of continuous revolutionary convulsions. Pronunciamentos and palace revolutions follow one another. During the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century a continuous change of political regime occurred and within each one of them—a kaleidoscopic change of ministries. Not finding sufficiently stable support in any one of the propertied classes even though they were all in need of it—the Spanish monarchy more than once fell into dependence upon its own army. But the provincial dismemberment of Spain put its stamp on the character of the military plots. The petty rivalry of the juntas was only the external expression of the fact that the Spanish revolutions did not have a leading class. Precisely because of this the monarchy repeatedly triumphed over each new revolution. However, sometime after the triumph of order, the chronic crisis once more broke through with an acute revolt. Not one of the regimes that supplanted each other sank deep enough into the soil. Every one of them wore off quickly in the struggle with the difficulties growing out of the meagreness of the national income, which is incommensurate with the appetites and pretensions of the ruling classes. We saw in particular how shamefully the last military dictatorship came to the end of its days. The stern Primo de Rivera fell even without a new pronunciarnento: the air simply went out of him like out of a tyre that runs over a nail.

All the Spanish revolutions were the movement of a minority against another minority: the ruling and semi-ruling classes impatiently snatching the state pie out to each other's hands.

If by the permanent revolution we are to understand the accumulation of social revolutions, transferring power into the hands of the most resolute class, which afterwards applies this power for the abolition of all classes, and subsequently the very possibility of new revolutions, we would then have to state that in spite of the "uninterruptedness" of the Spanish revolutions there is nothing in them that resembles the permanent revolution: they are rather the chronic convulsions in which is expressed the senile disease of a nation thrown backward.

It is true that the Left wing of the bourgeoisie, particularly personified by the young intellectuals, has long ago set itself the task of converting Spain into a republic. The Spanish students who, for the same general reasons as the officers, were recruited primarily from the dissatisfied youth, became accustomed to playing a role in the country altogether out of proportion to their numbers. The domination of the Catholic reaction fed the flames of the opposition in the universities, investing it with an anti-clerical character. However, students do not create a regime. In their leading summits, the Spanish republicans are distinguished by an extremely conservative social programme: they see their ideal in pre8ent.day reactionary France, calculating that along with the republic they will also acquire wealth; they do not at all expect, and are not even able, to march the road of the French Jacobins: their fear of the masses is greater than their hostility to the monarchy. If the cracks and gaps of bourgeois society are filled in Spain with declassed elements of the ruling classes, the numerous seekers of positions and income, then at the bottom, in the cracks of the foundation, this place is occupied by the numerous slum proletarians, declassed elements of the toiling classes. Loafers with cravats as wall as loafers in rags form the quicksands of society. They are all the more dangerous for the revo1ution the less it finds its genuine motive support and its political leadership.

Six years of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera levelled and compressed all the forms of dissatisfaction and rebellion. But the dictatorship bore within it the incurable vice of the Spanish monarchy: strong towards each of the separate classes, it remained .impotent in relation to the historic needs of the country. This brought about the wreck of the dictatorship cu the submarine reefs of financial and other difficulties before the first revolutionary wave had a chance to teach it. The fall of Prisno de Rivera aroused all the forms of dissatisfaction and all hopes. Thus, General Berenguer has become the gateman of the revolution.

3. The Spanish Proletariat And The New Revolution

In this new revolution, we meet at first view, the same elements we found in a series of previous revolutions: the perfidious monarchy; the split-up factions of the conservatives and liberals who despise the king and crawl on their bellies before him; the Right republicans, always ready to betray and the Left republicans, always ready for adventure; the plotting officers, some of whom want a republic and others of whom a promotion in position; the dissatisfied students, whom their fathers view with alarm; finally, the striking workers, scattered among the different organizations, and the peasants, stretching out their hands for pitchforks and even for guns.

It would, however, be a grave error to assume that the present crisis is unfolding according to and in the image of all those that preceded it. The last decades, particularly the years of the world war, produced important changes in the economy of the country and in the social structure of the nation. Of course, even today Spain remains at the tail-end of Europe. Nevertheless, the country has experienced the development of its own industry, on the one hand, extractive, on the other—light. During the war, coal mining, textile, the construction of hydro-electric stations, etc., were greatly developed. Industrial centres and regions sprouted all over the country. This creates a new relation of forces and opens up new perspectives.

The successes of industrialization did not at all mitigate the internal contradictions. On the contrary, the circumstance that the industry of Spain, as a neutral country, bloomed under the golden rain of the war, was transformed at the end of the war, when the increased foreign demand disappeared, into a source of new difficulties. Not only did the foreign markets disappear—the share of Spain in world commerce is now even smaller than it was prior to the war (1.1% as against 1.2%)—but the dictatorship was compelled, with the aid of the highest tariff walls in Europe, to defend its domestic market from the influx of foreign commodities. The high tariff led to high prices, which diminished the already low purchasing power of the people. That is why industry after the war does not rise out of its lethargy, which is expressed by chronic unemployment on the one hand, and the sharp outbursts of the class struggle on the other.

Now even less than in the nineteenth century, can the Spanish bourgeoisie lay claim to that historic role which the British or French bourgeoisie once played. Appearing too late, depending on foreign capital, the big industrial bourgeoisie of Spain, which has dug like a vampire into the body of the people, is incapable of coming forward as the leader of the "Nation" against the old estates even for a brief period« The magnates of Spanish industry face the people hostilely, forming one of the most reactionary groups in the bloc of bankers, the industrialists, the large landowners, the monarchy, its generals and its officials, corroded by internal antagonisms. It is sufficient to refer to the fact that the most important supporters of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera were the manufacturers of Catalonia.

But the industrial development raised to its feet and strengthened the proletariat. Out of a population of 23,000,000—it would be considerably greater were it not for emigration—there are nearly 1,500,000 industrial, commercial and transportation workers. To them should be added an approximately equal number of agricultural workers. Social life in Spain was condemned to revolve in a vicious circle so long as there was no class capable of taking the solution of the revolutionary problem into its own hands. The appearance of the Spanish proletariat on the historic arena radically changes the situation and opens up new perspectives. In order to grasp this properly it must first be understood that the establishment of the economic dominance of the big bourgeoisie, and the growth of the political significance of the proletariat, definitely deprive the petty bourgeoisie of the possibility of occupying a leading position in the political life of the country.

The question of whether the present revolutionary convulsions can produce a genuine revolution, capable of reconstructing the very basis of national existence, is consequently reduced to whether the Spanish proletariat is capable of taking into its hands the leadership of the national life. There is no other claimant to this role in the composition of the Spanish nation. Moreover, the historic experience of Russia succeeded in showing with sufficient clarity the specific gravity of the proletariat, united by big industry in a country with a backward agriculture and enmeshed in a net of semi-feudal relations.

The Spanish workers, it is true, already took a militant part in the revolutions of the nineteenth century: but always on the leading string of the bourgeoisie, always in the, second rank, as a subsidiary force. The independent revolutionary role of the workers was reinforced in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The uprising in Barcelona in 1909 showed what power was pent up in the young proletariat of Catalonia. Numerous strikes, turning themselves into direct uprisings, broke out in other parts of the country too. In 1912, a strike of the railroad workers took place. The industrial regions became fields of valiant proletarian struggles. The Spanish workers revealed a complete emancipation from routine, an ability to respond quickly to events and to mobilize their ranks, and courage in the offensive.

The first post-war years, or more correctly, the first years after the Russian Revolution (1917-1920), were years of great battles for the Spanish proletariat. The year 1917 witnessed a general revolutionary strike. Its defeat, and the defeat of a number of subsequent movements, prepared the conditions for the dictatorship of Primo do Rivers. When the collapse of the latter once more posed in all its magnitude the further destiny of the Spanish people; when the cowardly search for old cliques and the impotent lamentations of the petty bourgeois radicals showed clearly that salvation cannot be expected from this source, the workers by a series of courageous strikes, cried out to the people We are here!

The "Left" European bourgeois journalists with pretensions to learning, and following them, the social democrats, philosophize on the theme that Spain is simply about to reproduce the Great French revolution, after a delay of almost 150 years. To expound revolution to these people is equivalent to arguing with a blind man about colors. With all its backwardness, Spain has passed far beyond France of the eighteenth century. Big industrial enterprises, 10,000 miles of railway, 30,000 miles of telegraph, represent a more important factor of revolution than historical reminiscences.

Endeavoring to take a step forward, a certain English weekly, The Economist, says with regard to the Spanish events: "We have the influence of Paris of '48 and '71 rather than the influence of Moscow of 1917.[Reranslated from the Russian] But Paris of 71 is a step from '48 towards 1917. The comparison is an empty one.

L. Tarquin wrote last year in La Lutte de Classes infinitely more seriously and profoundly: "The proletariat (of Spain), supporting itself on the peasant masses, is the only force capable of seizing power." The perspective in connection with this is depicted as follows: "The revolution must bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat which would carry out the bourgeois revolution and would courageously open the road to socialist transformation«" This is the way -the only way—the question can now be posed.

4. The Programme Of The Revolution

The republic is now the official slogan of the struggle. However, the development of the revolution will not only drive the conservatives and liberals, but also the republican sections of the ruling classes under the banner of the monarchy. During the revolutionary events of 1854, Canovas del Castillo wrote: "We are striving for the preservation of the throne, but without a camarifla which will disgrace it." Now this great idea is developed by Senores Romanones and others. As though a monarchy is even possible without camarillas, especially in Spain ! .… A combination of circumstances is possible, to be sure, in which the possessing classes are compelled to sacrifice the monarchy in order to save themselves (example: Germany I). However it is quite likely that the Madrid monarchy, even though its eyes are blackened, will survive until the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The slogan of the republic is, it is understood, also the slogan of the proletariat. But for this, it is not merely a matter of replacing the king with a president, but of thoroughly purging the whole of society of fedual refuse: The first place here is occupied by the agrarian question.

The relationships in the Spanish village present a picture of semi-feudal exploitation. The poverty of the peasants, particularly in Andalusia and Castille, the oppression of the land-owners, the authorities and the caciques,[The unofficial rulers of their respective regions.] have already more than once driven the agricultural workers and the peasant poor to the road of open mutiny. Does this, however, mean that in Spain, even though through revolution, bourgeois relations can be purged of feudalism? No. This only means that, under the conditions of Spain, capitalism can exploit the peasantry in no other way than in the feudal form. To aim the weapon of the revolution against the remnants of the Spanish Middle Ages means to aim it against the very roots of bourgeois rule.

In order to break the peasantry away from localism and reactionary influences, the proletariat needs a clear revolutionary-democratic programme. The lack of land and waters the cabal of landlords, pose acutely the question of the confiscation of the privately owned land for the peasant poor. The burden of state finances, the unbearable government debt, bureaucratic pillage, and the African adventures, pose the problem of cheap government, which can be achieved not by the owners of large estates, not by bankers and industrialists, not by titled liberals, but by the toilers themselves.

The domination of the clergy and the wealth of the church put forward the democratic problem: to separate the church from the« state, and to disarm the former, transferring its wealth to the people. Even the most superstitious sections of the peasantry will support these decisive measures, when they are convinced that the budgetary sums which have up to now gone to the church, as well as the wealth of the church itself, will, as a result of secularization, go—not to the pockets of the free-thinking liberals -but for the cultivation of the exhausted peasant holdings.

The separatist tendencies pose before the revolution the democratic task of national self-determination These tendencies were accentuated, to all appearances, during the period of the dictatorship. While the "separatism" of the Catalonian bourgeoisie is only a weapon in its play with the Madrid government against the Catalonian and Spanish people, the separatism of the workers and peasants is only the shell of their social rebellion. One must distinguish very rigidly between these two forms of separatism. However, precisely in order to draw the line between the nationally oppressed workers and peasants and their bourgeoisie, the proletarian vanguard must occupy the boldest and sincerest position in the question of national self-determination. The workers will fully and completely defend the right of the Catalonians and Basques to lead an independent state life, in the event that the majority of these nationalities have expressed themselves for complete separation. But this does not, of course, mean that the advanced workers will push the Catalonians and Basques on the road of secession. On the contrary, the economic unity of the country with an extensive autonomy of national districts, would represent great advantages for the workers and peasants from the viewpoint of economy and culture.

The attempt of the monarchy to ward off the further development of the revolution with the aid of a new military dictatorship is not at all out of the question. But what is out of the question is the serious and durable success of such an attempt. The lesson of Primo de Rivera is still too fresh. The chains of the new dictatorship would have to be wound over the sores that have not yet healed from the old ones. Insofar as can be judged by the telegraphic news the king would like to try: he looks about nervously for a suitable candidate but finds nobody to volunteer. One thing is clear: the breakdown of a new military dictatorship would be very costly to the monarchy and its living bearer, and the revolution would acquire a mighty impulsion, Faites vos jeux, messieurs! [Place your bets, gentlemen!] the workers can say to the ruling classes.

Can it be expected that the Spanish revolution will skip the period of parliamentarism? Theoretically, this is not excluded. It is conceivable that the revolutionary movement will, in a compatively short time, attain such strength that it will leave the ruling classes neither the time nor place for parlianentarism. Nevertheless, such a perspective is rather improbable. The Spanish proletariat, in spite of its first class qualities for struggle, has as yet not recognized revolutionary party, nor is it accustomed to Soviet organization. And besides this, there is no unity in the not numerous Communist ranks. There is no clear programme of action visible to everybody. Nevertheless, the question of the Cortes is already on the order of the day. Under these conditions, it must be assumed that the revolution will have to pass through the stage of parliamentarism.

This does not at all exclude the tactic of a boycott of the fictitious Cortes of Berenguer, just as the Russian workers successfully boycotted Bulyqin's Duma in 1905 and brought about its collapse. The specific tactical question of the boycott has to be decided on the basis of the relation of forces at the given stage of the revolution. But even while boycotting Berenguer's Cortes, the advanced workers would have to set up against it the slogan of revolutionary constituent Cortes. We must relentlessly disclose the charlatan character of the slogan of the constituent Cortes in the mouth of the "Left", bourgeoisie, which in reality, wants a conciliationist Cortes by the grace of the king and Berenguer, for a dicker with the old ruling and privileged cliques. A genuine constituent assembly can be convoked only by a revolutionary government, as a result of a victorious insurrection of the workers, soldiers and peasants. We can and must oppose the revolutionary Cortes to the conciliationist Cortes; but to our mind, it would be incorrect at the given stage to reject the slogan of the revolutionary Cortes. To oppose the course directed towards the dictatorship of the proletariat to the problems and slogans of revolutionary democracy (republic, agrarian overturn, the separation of church and state, the confiscation of church properties, national self-determination, revolutionary constituent assembly), would be the most sorry and lifeless doctrinarism. Before the masses can seize power, they must unite around the leading proletarian party. The struggle for democratic representation, as well as for participation in the Cortes, at one or another stage of the revolution, may do an irreparable service towards the solution of this problem.

The slogan of arming the workers and peasants (the creation of a workers' and peasants' militia) must inevitably acquire an ever greater importance in the struggle. But at the given stage this slogan too must be closely connected with the questions of defending the workers' and peasants' organizations, the agrarian revolution, the assuring of free elections, and the safeguarding of the people from reactionary pronunciamentos.

A radical programme of social legislation, particularly unemployment insurance; the shifting of the burden of taxation to the wealthy classes; free popular education—all these and similar measures, which in themselves do not exceed the framework of bourgeois society, must be inscribed on the banner of the proletarian party.

Alongside of this, however, demands of a transitional character must be advanced even new: the nationalization of the railroads, which are completely private; in Spain the nationalization of mineral resources; the nationalization of banks; workers control of industry; and finally, state regulation of industry. All these demands are bound up with the transition from a bourgeois to a proletarian regime, they prepare this transition in order afterwards, following the nationalization of banks and industry, to be dissolved into a system of measures of planned economy, preparing the socialist society.

Only pedants can see contradictions in the combination of democratic slogans with transitional and purely socialist slogans. A programme combined in this manner, reflecting the contradictory construction of historic society, flows inevitably from the heterogeneity of the problems inherited from the past. To reduce all the contradictions and tasks to one coefficient—the dictatorship of the proletariat—is a necessary operation, but altogether insufficient. Even if one should run ahead and assume that the proletarian vanguard has grasped the idea that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can save Spain from further decay, the preparatory problem would nevertheless remain in full force: to weld around the vanguard the heterogeneous sections of the working class and the still more heterogeneous masses of the toilers of the village. To contrast the bare slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the historically conditioned tasks which are now impelling the masses towards the road of insurrection, would mean to replace the Marxian conception of social revolution by Bakunin's. This would be the surest method of ruining the revolution.

It is needless to say that the democratic slogans under no circumstances have as their task to draw the proletariat closer to the republican bourgeoisie. On the contrary, they create the basis for a victorious struggle against the bourgeoisie of the Left, making it possible at every step to disclose its anti-democratic character. The more courageously, resolutely and implacably the proletarian vanguard fights for the democratic slogans, the sooner it will conquer the masses and undermine the ground beneath the feet of bourgeois republicans and socialist reformists, The more faithfully their best elements join us, the sooner the democratic republic will be identified in the mind of the masses with the workers' republic.

For the correctly understood theoretical formula to be transformed into a living historic fact, it must be conveyed to the minds of the masses on the basis of their experiences their needs, their requirements. For this it is necessary not to lose oneself in details, so as not to diffuse the attention of the masses; the programme of the revolution must be changed in accordance with the dynamics of the struggle. This is precisely what revolutionary politics consists of.

5. Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Social Democracy

As usual the leadership of the Comintern started out by over-looking the Spanish events, Manuilsky, "the leader" of the Latin countries, only recently declared that the Spanish events do not deserve attention. There you are! In 1928, these people proclaimed France on the eve of the revolution. After having so long accompanied funerals with wedding music, they could not but greet a wedding with a funeral march. For them to act otherwise would mean to betray themselves. When it appeared, nevertheless, that the events in Spain, not foreseen in the calendar of the "third period," continued to develop, the leaders of the Comintern simply shut up: this, at any rate, shows far greater prudence« But the December events made further silence impossible. Once more in rigid conformity with tradition, the leader of the Latin countries described an arc of 180 degrees over his own head: we have in mind the article in Pravda of December 17.

The dictatorship of Berenguer, like the dictatorship of Primo de Rivers, is proclaimed in this article a "Fascist reqime" Mussolini, Matteoti, Prime de Rivera, MacDonald, Chiang Kai Shek, Berenguer, Dan—all these are variations of fascism. Once there is a ready word, why think? To be thorough, there only remains to include in this series also the "fascist" regime of the Abyssinian negus. As to the Spanish proletariat, Pravda informs us that it is not only "adopting the programme and slogans of the Spanish Communist Party with increasing speed" but that it has already "become conscious of its role of hegemony in the revolution" Simultaneously, the official telegrams from Paris speak of peasant Soviets in Spain. It is known that under the Stalinist leadership, the Soviet system is adopted and realized first of all by the peasants (China!) If the proletariat has already "become conscious of its role of hegemony," and the peasants have started to build Soviets, and all this is under the leadership of the official Communist Party, then the victory of the Spanish Revolution must be considered guaranteed—at any rate, till the time when the Madrid "executors" are accused by Stalin and Manuilsky of an incorrect application of the general line which, on the pages of Pravda, once more appears before us as general ignorance and general light. mindedness. Corrupted to the very marrow by their own policy, these "leaders' are no longer capable of learning anything!

In reality, in spite of the mighty sweep of the struggle, the subjective factors of the revolution—the party, the organization of the masses, slogans—are extraordinarily behind the tasks of the movement-and it is this backwardness that constitutes the main danger today.

The semi-spontaneous spread of strikes, which have brought victims and defeats or have ended with nothing, is an absolutely unavoidable stage of the revolution, the period of the awakening of the masses, their mobilization and their entry into struggle. For it is not the cream of the workers who take part in the movement, but the masses as a whole. Not only do factory workers strike, but also artisans, chauffeurs and bakers, construction, irrigation and finally agricultural workers. The veterans mould the limbs, the new recruits learn. Through the medium of these strikes, the class begins to feel itself as a close.

However, the spontaneity—which at the present stage constitutes the strength of the movement—may in the future become the source of Its weakness. To assume that the movement also in the future will be left to itself without a clear programme, without its own leadership, would mean to assume a perspective of hopelessnes. For the question involved is nothing less than the seizure of power. Even the most stormy strikes—all the more so the scattered ones—do hot solve this problem. If the proletariat were not to feel in the process of the struggle of the coming months that its tasks and methods are becoming clearer to itself, that its ranks are becoming consolidated and strengthened, then a decomposition would set in its own ranks. The broad sections, aroused by the present movement for the first time, would once more fall into passivity. In the vanguard, to the extent to which the ground slipped out from under its feet, moods of partisan acts and adventurism in general would begin to revive. In such an eventuality, neither the peasantry nor the city poor would find authoritative leadership. The awakened hopes would very quickly be converted into disappointment and exasperation. A condition would be created in Spain reproducing in a certain measure the situation in Italy after the autumn of 1920. If the dictatorship of Prime de Rivera was not fascist but a typical Spanish dictatorship of a military clique supporting itself on certain parts of the wealthy classes, then with the conditions pointed out above—the passivity and the hesitancy of the revolutionary party and the spontaneity of the movement of the masses—genuine fascism would find a base in Spain. The big bourgeoisie would conquer the unbalanced, disappointed, and despairing petty bourgeois masses, and would direct their revolt against the proletariat. Of course, we are far from that point yet. But no time should be lost.

Even if we should assume for a moment that the revolutionary movement led by the Left wing of the bourgeoisie—officers, students, republicans- leads to victory, then the fruitlessness of this victory would in the final analysis become equal to defeat. The Spanish republicans, as we have already said, stand completely on the basis of the present property relations. We need expect from them neither the expropriation of the big landowners, nor the liquidation of the privileged position of the Catholic church, nor the purging of Augean stables of the civil and military bureaucracy. The monarchist camarilla would simply be replaced by a republican camarilla, and we would have a new edition of the short-lived and fruitless republic of 1873-1374.

The fact that the socialist leaders drag at the tail end of the republican leaders—is quite in the nature of things. Yesterday, the social democracy dressed its Right shoulder to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Today, it dresses its Left shoulder to the republicans. The principal task of the socialists, who have not and cannot, have an independent policy, is participation in a solid bourgeois government. On this condition, they would not, under the worst circumstances, refuse to make peace even with the monarchists.

But the Right wing of the anarcho-syndicalists is in no way insured against the same road: in this connection, the December events are a great lesson and a stern warning.

The National Confederation of Labour indisputably embraces the most militant elements of the proletariat. Here the selection has gone on for a number of years. To strengthen this Confederation, to transform it into a genuine organization of the masses is a direct obligation of every advanced worker, and above all, of the Communists. This can be assisted also by work inside the reformist trade unions, tirelessly exposing the betrayals of their leaders, and calling upon the workers to weld themselves into the framework of a single trade union Confederation. The conditions of revolution will be of extraordinary assistance to this work.

But at the same time we have no illusions about the fate of anarcho-syndicalism as a doctrine and a revolutionary method. By the lack of a revolutionary programme and an incomprehension of the role of the party, anarcho-syndicalisin disarms the proletariat. The anarchists "deny" politics until it seizes them by the throat: then they prepare the ground for the politics of the enemy class. This is what happened in December!

If the social democratic party were to acquire a loading position over the proletariat during the revolution, it would be capable of only one thing: to spill the power conquered by the revolution into the sieve of the republican wing, out of which the power would then automatically pass to its present possessors. The great conception would result in an abortion.

As far as the anarcho-syndicaliets are concerned, they could head the revolution only by abandoning their anarchist prejudices. It is our duty to help them in this. In reality, it may be assumed that a part of the syndicalist leaders will go over to the socialists or will be cast aside by the revolution: the real revolutionists will be with us. The masses will join the Communists, and so will the majority of the socialist workers.

The advantage of a revolutionary situation lies in the fact that the masses learn fast. The evolution of the masses will inevitably produce a differentiation and splits not only among socialists but also among the syndicalists. Practical agreements with revolutionary syndicalists are inevitable in the course of the revolution. These agreements we will loyally fulfill. But it would be truly fatal to introduce into these agreements elements of duplicity, of concealment, and deceit. Even in those days and hours when the Communist workers have to fight side by side with the syndicalist workers, there must be no destruction of the division in principle, no concealment of differences, or any weakening of the criticism of the wrong principled position of the ally. Only under this condition will the approaching development of the revolution be secured.

6. The Revolutionary Junta And The Party.

The extent to which the proletariat itself Iis striving for unity of action is witnessed by the day of December 15, when the workers rose simultaneously not only in the big cities but also in the smaller towns. They utilized the signal of the republicans because they have not a sufficiently loud signalman of their own. The defeat of the movement did not, it appears, call forth a shadow of dismay. The masses conceived their own actions as experiences, as a school, as preparation. This is to the highest degree an expressive feature of revolutionary ascent.

In order to enter the broad road, the proletariat needs even now an organization rising over all the present political, national, provincial and trade union divisions in the ranks of the proletariat and corresponding to the sweep of the present revolutionary struggle. Such an organization, democratically elected by the workers of the factories, mills, mines, commercial enterprises, railway and marine transport, by the proletarians of the city and village, can only be the Soviet. The epigones have done immeasurable damage to the revolutionary movement of the whole world, fixing in the minds of many the prejudice that Soviets are created only for the needs of armed insurrection and not otherwise, except on its eve. In reality, the Soviets are created when the revolutionary movement of the working masses, even though still far from an armed insurrection, creates the need for a broad, authoritative organization, capable of leading the economic and political struggles, embracing simultaneously the different enterprises and the different trades. Only under the condition that the Soviets are rooted in the working class during the preparatory period of the revolution, will they be able to play a leading role at the time of a direct struggle for power. It is true that the word "Soviet" after thirteen years of existence of the Soviet regime, has now acquired a different meaning to a certain degree than it had in 1905 or in the beginning of 1917, when the Soviets appeared not as organs of power but only as the militant organizations of the working class. The word Junta, [council] closely connected with all of Spain’s revolutionary history, expresses this thought better than anything else. On the order of the day in Spain stands the creation of workers' juntas.

With the present state of the proletariat, the building of juntas presupposes the participation in them of the Communists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, and the non-party leaders of the strike struggles. To what extent can we count on the participation of the anarcho-syndicalists and social democrats in the Soviets? This cannot be foretold from afar. The sweep of the movement will undoubtedly compel many syndicalists, and perhaps a part of the socialists, to go further than they wish, provided that the Communists are able to pose the problem of workers' juntas with the necessary energy. In view of the pressure of the masses, the practical questions of the building of Soviets, the ratio of representation, the time and method of elections, and so forth, can and should become the object of agreement, not only of all the Communist factions among themselves, but also with those syndicalists and socialists who consent to the creation of juntas. It is understood that the Communists appear at all the stages of the struggle with their banner unfurled.

In spite of the newest theory of Stalinism, the peasant juntas, as elected organs, will hardly appear, at any rate, not in any considerable number, prior to the seizure of power by the proletariat. In the preparatory period in the village, different forms of organization will sooner develop, based not upon elections, but upon individual selection: peasant unions, committees of the village poor, Communist nuclei, a labour union of agricultural workers, and so forth. The propagation of the slogan of peasant juntas, based on a revolutionary agrarian programme, can even now, however, be put on the order of the day.

The correct posing of the question of soldier juntas is very important. Because of the very character of military organization, Soviets of soldiers can appear only in the final period of the revolutionary crisis, when the state power loses control over the army. In the preparatory period, it will be a matter of organizations of an intimate character, groups of revolutionary soldiers, party nuclei, and in many cases, personal connections of workers with individual soldiers.

The republican uprising in December 1930 will undoubtedly go down into history as the Rubicon between two epochs of revolutionary struggle. It is true that the Left wing of the republicans established connections with leaders of workers' organizations in order to bring about unity of action. The unarmed workers had to play the. role of a chorus under the Corypheus [Choir-leader] of the republicans. This aim was carried out—to an extent, in order to reveal once and for all the incompatibility of an officers' plot with a revolutionary strike. Against the military plot, which opposed one branch of the service to another, the government found sufficient forces within the army itself. And the strike; deprived of an independent aim and of its own leadership, was necessarily reduced to nothing as soon as the military uprising was crushed.

The revolutionary role of the army, not as an instrument of officers' experiments, but as an armed part of the people; will be determined in the last analysis by the role of the worker and peasant masses in the course of the struggle. For the revolutionary strike to be victorious, it will have to bring about the confrontation of the workers with the army. No matter how important the purely military elements of such a clash may be, politics outweigh them. The masses of soldiers can be won over only by clearly posing the social tasks of the revolution. But it is precisely the social tasks that frighten the officers. It is natural that the proletarian revolutionists should direct the centre of attention even now to the soldiers, creating nuclei of conscious and dating revolutionists in the regiments. The Communist work in the army, politically subordinated to the work among the proletariat and the peasantry, can be developed only on the basis of a clear programme. But when the decisive moment arrives, the workers, by the sheer weight of numbers and the force of their assault, will sweep a large part of the army to the side of the people, or, at any rate, neutralize it. This broad revolutionary posing of the question does not exclude a military "plot" of the advanced soldiers and officer sympathizing with the proletarian revolution, in the period directly preceding the general strike and insurrection. But such a "plot" has nothing in common with pronunciamentos: Its task is of a serviceable character and consists of insuring the victory of the proletarian uprising.

For a successful solution of all these tasks, three conditions are required: a party; once more a party; again a party.

How will the relations between the various existing Communist organizations and groups be arranged, and what will be their fate in the future? It is difficult to judge from afar. Experience will show. Great events unmistakably put to the test ideas, organizations and people. Should the leadership of the Comintern appear incapable of offering anything to the Spanish workers except a wrong policy, apparatus commands and splits, then the genuine Communist Party of Spain will be constituted and tempered outside of the official framework of the Communist International. One way or another—a party has to be created. It must be united and centralized.

The working class can under no circumstances build its political organization on the basis of federations. A Communist party is needed -not in the image of the future state order of Spain, but a steel lover for the demolition of the existing order. It can be organized only on the principle of democratic centralism. The proletarian Junta will become the broad arena in which every party and every group will be put to the test and scrutinized before the eyes of the broad masses. The Communists will set up the slogan of the united front of the workers against the practice of coalitions of socialists and a part of the syndicalists with the bourgeoisie. Only the united revolutionary front will enable the proletariat to inspire in itself the necessary confidence of the oppressed masses of the village and city. The realization of the united front is conceivable only under the banner of Communism. The junta requires a leading party.

Without a firm leadership, it would remain an empty organizational form and would inevitably fail into dependence upon the bourgeoisie.

Upon the Spanish Communists lie glorious historic tasks. The advanced workers of the world will follow with impassioned attention the course of the great revolutionary drama, which will a day sooner or later require not only their sympathy but also their co-operation. We will he ready!

Prinkipo 
January 24, 1931

The Lessons of Spain: 
The Last Warning

By Leon Trotsky

This article was written well into the revolutionary process, nearing the ultimate defeat of the Spanish working-class and peasantry.

Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

All general staffs are studying closely the military operations in Ethiopia, in Spain, in the Far East, in preparation for the great future war. The battles of the Spanish proletariat heat lightening flashes of the coming world revolution, should be no less attentively studied by the revolutionary staffs. Under this condition and this condition alone will the coming events not take us unawares.

Three ideologies fought—with unequal forces—in the so-called republican camp, namely, Menshevism, Bolshevism, and anarchism. As regards the bourgeois republican parties, they were without either independent ideas or independent political significance and were able to maintain themselves only by climbing on the backs of the reformists and Anarchists. Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that the leaders of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism did everything to repudiate their doctrine and virtually reduce its significance to zero. Actually two doctrines in the so-called republican camp fought—Menshevism and Bolshevism.

According to the Socialists and Stalinists, i.e., the Mensheviks of the first and second instances, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a united front with the “democratic" bourgeoisie was indispensable. From this point of view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy are not only premature but also fatal. Furthermore, on the agenda stands not the revolution but the struggle against insurgent Franco.

Fascism, however, is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletariat revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts.

The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda. Moreover, during the very first stages of the revolution, the Spanish workers themselves posed in practice not merely democratic problems but also purely socialist ones. The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy signifies in practice not a defense of the democratic revolution but a repudiation of it. Only through an overturn in agrarian relations could the peasantry, the great mass of the population, have been transformed into a powerful bulwark against fascism. But the landowners are intimately bound up with the commercial, industrial, and banking bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois intelligentsia that depends on them. The party of the proletariat was thus faced with a choice between going with the peasant masses or with the liberal bourgeoisie. There could be only one reason to include the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie in the same coalition at the same time: to help the bourgeoisie deceive the peasantry and thus isolate the workers. The agrarian revolution could have been accomplished only against the bourgeoisie, and therefore only through the masses of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no third, intermediate regime.

From the standpoint of theory, the most astonishing thing about Stalin’s Spanish policy is the utter disregard for the ABC of Leninism. After a delay of several decades—and what decades!—the Comintern has fully rehabilitated the doctrine of Menshevism. More than that, the Comintern has contrived to render this doctrine more “consistent” and by that token more absurd. In czarist Russia, on the threshold of 1905, the formula of “purely democratic revolution” had behind it, in any case, immeasurably more arguments than in 1937 in Spain. It is hardly astonishing that in modern Spain “the liberal labor policy” of Menshevism has been converted into the reactionary anti-labor policy of Stalinism. At the same time the doctrine of the Mensheviks, this caricature of Marxism, has been converted into a caricature of itself.

"Theory” of the Popular Front

It would be naive, however, to think that the politics of the Comintern in Spain stem from a theoretical “mistake”. Stalinism is not guided by Marxist Theory, or for that matter any theory at all, but by the empirical interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. In their intimate circles, the Soviet cynics mock Dimitrov’s “philosophy” of the Popular Front. But they have at their disposal for deceiving the masses large cadres of propagators of this holy formula, sincere ones and cheats, simpletons and charlatans. Louis Fischer, with his ignorance and smugness, with his provincial rationalism and congenital deafness to revolution, is the most repulsive representative of this unattractive brotherhood. “The union of progressive forces!” “The Triumph of the idea of the Popular Front!” “The assault of the Trotskyists on the unity of the antifascist ranks!”....Who will believe that the Communist Manifesto was written ninety years ago?

The theoreticians of the Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that is, addition: “Communists” plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not suffice here. One needs as well at least mechanics. The law of the parallelogram of forces applies to politics as well. In such a parallelogram, we know that the resultant is shorter, the more component forces diverge from each other. When political allies tend to pull in opposite directions, the resultant prove equal to zero.

A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.

Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war.

These simple truths are least of all the products of pure theoretical analysis. On the contrary, they represent the unassailable deduction from the entire experience if history, beginning at least with 1848. The modern history of bourgeois society is filled with all sorts of Popular Fronts, i.e. the most diverse political combinations for the deception of the toilers. The Spanish experience is only a new and tragic link in this chain of crimes and betrayals.

Alliance with the bourgeoisie’s shadow

Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie’s place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front. The overwhelming majority of the exploiters of all political shades openly went over to the camp of Franco. Without any theory of ’permanent revolution,” the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures.

That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azana, Companys, and the like- political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of the political representatives of yesterdays in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in “republican” territory.

Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies—the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists—these political phantoms played decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the “democratic revolution,” that is, the inviolability of private property.

The Stalinists in the Popular Front

The reasons of the rise of the Spanish Popular Front and its inner mechanics are perfectly clear. The task of the retired leaders of the left bourgeoisie consisted in checking the revolution of the masses and the regaining for themselves the lost confidence of the exploiters: “Why do you need Franco if we, the republicans, can do the same thing?” The interests of Azana and Companys fully coincided at this central point with the interests of Stalin, who needed gain the confidence of the French and British bourgeoisie by proving to them in action his ability to preserve “order” against “anarchy.” Stalin needed Azana and Companys as a cover before the workers: Stalin himself, of course, is for socialism, but one must take care not to repel the republican bourgeoisie! Azana and Companys needed Stalin as an experienced executioner, with the authority of a revolutionary. Without him, so insignificant a crew never would have dared to attack the workers.

The classic reformists of the Second International, long ago derailed by the course of the class struggle, began to feel a new tide of confidence, thanks to the support of Moscow. This support, incidentally, was not given to all reformists but only to those most reactionary. Caballero represented that face of the Socialist Party that was turned toward the workers’ aristocracy. Negrin and Prieto always looked towards the bourgeoisie. Negrin won over Caballero with the help of Moscow. The left Socialists and Anarchists, the captives of the Popular Front, tried, it is true, to save whatever could be saved of democracy. But inasmuch as they did not dare to mobilize the masses against the gendarmes of the Popular Front, their efforts at the end were reduced to plaints and wails. The Stalinists were thus in alliance with the extreme right, avowedly bourgeois wing of the Socialist Party. They directed their repressions against the left—the POUM, the Anarchists, the “left” Socialists—in other words, against the centrist groupings who reflected, even in a most remote degree, the pressure of the revolutionary masses.

This political fact, very significant in itself, provides at the same time the measure of the degeneration of the Comintern in the last few years. I once defined Stalinism as bureaucratic centrism, and events brought a series of corroborations of the correctness of this definition. But it is obviously obsolete today. The interests of the Bonapartist bureaucracy can no longer be reconciled with centrist hesitation and vacillation. In search of reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, the Stalinist clique is capable of entering into alliances only with the most conservative groupings among the international labor aristocracy. This has acted to fix definitively the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism on the international arena.

Counterrevolutionary superiorities of Stalinism

This brings us right up to the solution of the enigma of how and why the Communist Party of Spain, so insignificant numerically and with a leadership so poor in caliber, proved capable of gathering into its hands all reins of power, in the face of the incomparably more powerful organizations of the Socialists and Anarchists. The usual explanation that the Stalinists simply bartered Soviet weapons for power is far too superficial. In return for munitions, Moscow received Spanish gold. According to the laws of the capitalist market, this covers everything. How then did Stalin contrive to get power in the bargain?

The customary answer is that the Soviet government, having raised its authority in the eyes of the masses by furnishing military supplies, demanded as a condition of its “collaboration” drastic measures against revolutionists and thus removed dangerous opponents from its path. All this is quite indisputable but it is only one aspect of the matter, and the least important at that.

Despite the “authority” created by Soviet shipments, the Spanish Communist Party remained a small minority and met with ever-growing hatred on the part of the workers. On the other hand, it was not enough for Moscow to set conditions; Valencia had to accede to them. This is the heart of the matter. Not only Zamora, Companys, and Negrin, but also Caballero, during his incumbency as premier, were all more or less ready to accede to the demands of Moscow. Why? Because these gentlemen themselves wished to keep the revolution within bourgeois limits. They were deathly afraid of every revolutionary onslaught of the workers.

Stalin with his munitions and with his counterrevolutionary ultimatum was a savior for all these groups. He guaranteed them, so they hoped, military victory over Franco, and at the same time, he freed them from all responsibility for the course of the revolution. They hastened to put their Socialist and Anarchist masks into the closet in the hope of making use of them again after Moscow reestablished bourgeois democracy for them. As the finishing touch to their comfort, these gentlemen could henceforth, justify their betrayal to the workers by the necessity of a military agreement with Stalin. Stalin on his part justifies his counterrevolutionary politics by the necessity of maintaining an alliance with the republican bourgeoisie.

Only from this broader point of view can we get a clear picture of the angelic toleration which such champions of justice and freedom as Azana, Negrin, Companys, Caballero, Garcia Oliver, and others showed towards the crimes of the GPU. If they had no other choice, as they affirm, it was not at all because they had no means of paying for airplanes and tanks other than with the heads of the revolutionists and the rights of the workers, but because their own “purely democratic", that is, anti-socialist, program could be realized by no other measures save terror. When the workers and peasants enter on the path of their revolution—when they seize factories and estates, drive out old owners, conquer power in the provinces—then the bourgeois counterrevolution—democratic, Stalinist, or fascist alike—has no other means of checking this movement except through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. The superiority of the Stalinist clique on this road consisted in its ability to apply instantly measures that were beyond the capacity of Azana, Companys, Negrin, and their left allies.

Stalin confirms in his own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution

Two irreconcilable programs thus confronted each other on the territory of republican Spain. On the one hand, the program of saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible democracy from Franco; on the other hand, the program of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat. The first program expressed the interest of capitalism through the medium of the labor aristocracy, the top petty-bourgeois circles, and especially the Soviet bureaucracy. The second program translated into the language of Marxism the tendencies of the revolutionary mass movement, not fully conscious but powerful. Unfortunately for the revolution, between the handful of Bolsheviks and the revolutionary proletariat stood counterrevolutionary wall of the Popular Front.

The policy of the Popular Front was, in its turn, not at all determined by the blackmail of Stalin as supplier of arms. There was, of course, no lack of blackmail. But the reason for the success of this blackmail was inherent in the inner conditions of the revolution itself. For six years, its social setting was the growing onslaught of the masses against the regime of semi-feudal and bourgeois property. The need of defending this property by the most extreme measures threw the bourgeoisie into Franco’s arms. The republican government had promised the bourgeoisie to defend property by “democratic” measures, but revealed, especially in July 1936, its complete bankruptcy. When the situation on the property front became even more threatening than on the military front, the democrats of all colors, including the Anarchists, bowed before Stalin; and he found no other methods, in his own arsenal than the methods of Franco.

The hounding of “Trotskyists", POUMists, revolutionary Anarchists and left Socialists; the filthy slander; the false documents; the tortures in Stalinist prisons; the murders from ambush—without all this the bourgeois regime under the republican flag could not have lasted even two months. The GPU proved to be the master of the situation only because it defended the interests of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat more consistently than the others, i.e., with the greatest baseness and bloodthirstiness.

In the struggle against the socialist revolution, the “democratic" Kerensky at first sought support in the military dictatorship of Kornilov and later tried to enter Petrograd in the baggage train of the monarchist general Krasnov. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were compelled, in order to carry the democratic revolution through to the end, to overthrow the government of “democratic” charlatans and babblers. In the process they put an end thereby to every kind of attempt at military (or “fascist") dictatorship.

The Spanish revolution once again demonstrates that it is impossible to defend democracy against the methods of fascist reaction. And conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution. Stalin waged war against “Trotskyism” (proletarian revolution), destroying democracy by the Bonapartist measures of the GPU. This refutes once again and once and for all the old Menshevik theory, adopted by the Comintern, in accordance with which the democratic and socialist revolutions are transformed into two independent historic chapters, separated from each other in point of time. The work of the Moscow executioners confirms in its own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution.

Role of the Anarchists

The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism. More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime.

The Anarchists revealed a fatal lack of understanding of the laws of the revolution and its tasks by seeking to limit themselves to their own trade unions, that is, to organizations permeated with the routine of peaceful times, and by ignoring what went on outside the framework of the trade unions, among the masses, among the political parties, and in the government apparatus. Had the Anarchists been revolutionists, they would first of all have called for the creation of soviets, which unite the representatives of all the toilers of city and country, including the most oppressed strata, who never joined the trade unions. The revolutionary workers would have naturally occupied the dominant position in these soviets. The Stalinists would have remained an insignificant minority. The proletariat would have convinced itself of its own invincible strength. The apparatus of the bourgeois state would have hung suspended in the air. One strong blow would have sufficed to pulverize this apparatus. The socialist revolution would have received a powerful impetus. The French proletariat would not for long permitted Leon Blum to blockade the proletariat revolution beyond the Pyrenees. Neither could the Moscow bureaucracy have permitted itself such a luxury. The most difficult questions would have been solved as they arose.

Instead of this, the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to hide from “politics” in the trade unions, turned out to be, to the great surprise of the whole world and themselves, a fifth wheel in the cart of bourgeois democracy. But not for long; a fifth wheel is superfluous. After Garcia Oliver and his cohorts helped Stalin and his henchmen to take power away from the workers, the anarchists themselves were driven out of the government of the Popular Front. Even then they found nothing better to do than jump on the victor’s bandwagon and assure him of their devotion. The fear of the petty bourgeois before the big bourgeois, of the petty bureaucrat before the big bureaucrat, they covered up with lachrymose speeches about the sanctity of the united front (between a victim and the executioners) and about the inadmissibility of every kind of dictatorship, including their own. “After all, we could have taken power in July 1936..." “After all, we could have taken power in May 1937...” The Anarchists begged Stalin-Negrin to recognize and reward their treachery to the revolution. A revolting picture!

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.

No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course, that their program is realizable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it. They hid from power not because they are against “every kind of dictatorship"—in actuality, grumbling and whining, they supported and still support the dictatorship of Stalin-Negrin—but because they completely lost their principles and courage, if they ever had any. They were afraid of everything: “isolation,” “involvement,” “fascism." They were afraid of France and England. More than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses.

The renunciation of the conquest of power inevitably throws every workers’ organization into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society. In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution. The leaders of the CNT and FAI not only helped the bourgeoisie hold on to the shadow of power in July 1936; they also helped it to reestablish bit by bit what it had lost at one stroke. In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Thus anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments- counterrevolutionary.

The Anarchist theoreticians, who after the great test of 1931-37 continue to repeat the old reactionary nonsense about Kronstadt, and who affirm that “Stalinism is the inevitable result of Marxism and Bolshevism," simply demonstrate by this they are forever dead for the revolution.

You say that Marxism is in itself depraved and Stalinism is its legitimate progeny? But why are we revolutionary Marxists engaged in mortal combat with Stalinism throughout the world? Why does the Stalinist gang see in Trotskyism it chief enemy? Why does every approach to our views or our methods of action (Durruti, Andres, Nin, Landau, and others) compel the Stalinist gangsters to resort to bloody reprisals. Why, on the other hand, did the leaders of Spanish anarchism serve, during the time of the Moscow and Madrid crimes of the GPU, as ministers under Caballero-Negrin, that is as servants of the bourgeoisie and Stalin? Why even now, under the pretext of fighting fascism, do the Anarchists remain voluntary captives of Stalin-Negrin, the executioners of the revolution, who have demonstrated their incapacity to fight fascism?

By hiding behind Kronstadt and Makhno, the attorneys of anarchism will deceive nobody. In the Kronstadt episode and the struggle with Makhno, we defended the proletarian from the peasant counterrevolution. The Spanish Anarchists defended and continue to defend bourgeois counterrevolution from the proletariat revolution. No sophistry will delete from the annals of history the fact that anarchism and Stalinism in the Spanish revolution were on one side of the barricades while the working masses with the revolutionary Marxists were on the other. Such is the truth which will forever remain in the consciousness of the proletariat!

Role of the POUM

The record of the POUM is not much better. In the point of theory, it tried, to be sure, to base itself on the formula of permanent revolution (that is why the Stalinists called the POUMists Trotskyists). But the revolution is not satisfied with theoretical avowals. Instead of mobilizing the masses against the reformist leaders, including the Anarchists, the POUM tried to convince these gentlemen of the superiorities of socialism over capitalism. This tuning fork gave the pitch to all the articles and speeches of the POUM leaders. In order not to quarrel with the Anarchist leaders, they did not form their own nuclei inside the CNT, and in general did not conduct any kind of work there. To avoid sharp conflicts, they did not carry on revolutionary work in the republican army. They built instead “their own” trade unions and “their own” militia, which guarded “their own” institutions or occupied “their own” section of the front.

By isolating the revolutionary vanguard from the class, the POUM rendered the vanguard impotent and left the class without leadership. Politically the POUM remained throughout far closer to the Popular Front, for whose left wing it provided the cover, than to Bolshevism. That the POUM nevertheless fell victim to bloody and base repressions was due to the failure of the Popular Front to fulfill its mission, namely to stifle the socialist revolution—except by cutting off, piece by piece, its own left flank.

Contrary to its own intentions, the POUM proved to be, in the final analysis, the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party. The platonic or diplomatic partisans of the Fourth International like Sneevliet, the leader of the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, who demonstratively supported the POUM in its halfway measures, its indecisiveness and evasiveness, in short, in its centrism, took upon themselves the greatest responsibility. Revolution abhors centrism. Revolution exposes and annihilates centrism. In passing, the revolution discredits the friends and attorneys of centrism. That is one of the most important lessons of the Spanish revolution.

The problem of arming

The Socialists and Anarchists who seek to justify their capitulation to Stalin by the necessity of paying for Moscow’s weapons with principles and conscience simply lie unskillfully. Of course, many of them would have preferred to disentangle themselves without murders and frame-ups. But every goal demands corresponding means. Beginning with April 1931, that is, long before the military intervention of Moscow, the Socialists and Anarchists did everything in their power to check the proletariat revolution. Stalin taught them how to carry this work to its conclusion. They became Stalin’s criminal accomplices only because they were his political cothinkers.

Had the Anarchist leaders in the least resembled revolutionists, they would have answered the first piece of blackmail from Moscow not only by continuing the socialist offensive but also by exposing Stalin’s counterrevolutionary conditions before the world working class. They would have thus forced the Moscow bureaucracy to choose openly between the socialist revolution and the Franco dictatorship. The Thermidorean bureaucracy fears and hates revolution. But it also fears being strangled in a fascist ring. Besides, it depends on the workers. All indications are that Moscow would have been forced to supply arms, and possibly at more reasonable prices.

But the world does not revolve around Stalinist Moscow. During a year and a half of civil war, the Spanish war industry could and should have been strengthened and developed by converting a number of civilian plants to war production. This work was not carried out only because Stalin and his Spanish allies equally feared the initiative of the workers’ organizations. A strong war industry would have become a powerful instrument in the hands of the workers. The leaders of the Popular Front preferred to depend on Moscow.

It is precisely on this question that the perfidious role of the Popular Front was very strikingly revealed. It thrust upon the workers’ organizations the responsibility for the treacherous deals of the bourgeoisie of Stalin. Insofar as the Anarchists remained a minority, they could not, of course, immediately hinder the ruling bloc from assuming whatever obligations they pleased toward Moscow and the masters of Moscow: London and Paris. But without ceasing to be the best fighters on the front, they could have and should have openly dissociated themselves from the betrayals and betrayers; they could and should have explained the real situation to the masses, mobilized them against the bourgeois government, and augmented their own forces from day to day in order in the end to conquer power and with it the Moscow arms.

And what if Moscow, in the absence of a Popular Front, should have refused to give arms altogether? And what, we answer to this, if the Soviet Union did not exist altogether? Revolutions have been victorious up to this time not at all thanks to high and mighty foreign patrons who supplied them with arms. As a rule, counterrevolution enjoyed foreign patronage. Must we recall the experiences of the intervention of French, English, American, Japanese, and other armies against the Soviets? The proletariat of Russia conquered domestic reaction and foreign interventionists without military support form the outside. Revolutions succeed, in the first place, with the help of a bold social program, which gives the masses the possibility of seizing weapons that are on the territory and disorganizing the army of the enemy. The Red Army seized French, English, and American military supplies and drove the foreign expeditionary corps into the sea. Has this really been forgotten?

If at the head of the armed workers and peasants, that is, at the head of so-called republican Spain, were revolutionists and not cowardly agents of the bourgeoisie, the problem of arming would never have been paramount. The army of Franco, including the colonial Riffians and the soldiers of Mussolini, was not at all immune to revolutionary contagion. Surrounded by the conflagration of the socialist uprising, the soldiers of fascism would have proved to be an insignificant quantity. Arms and military “geniuses" were not lacking in Madrid and Barcelona; what was lacking was a revolutionary party!

Conditions for victory

The conditions for victory of the masses in the civil war against the army exploiters are very simple in their essence.

1. The fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the reestablishment of the old ("democratic") forms of exploitation.
2. The workers and peasants in the rear of the revolutionary army as well as in the rear of the enemy must know and understand the same thing.
3. The propaganda on their own front as well as on the enemy front and in both rears must be completely permeated with the spirit of social revolution. The slogan “First victory, then reforms,” is the slogan of all oppressors and exploiters from the Biblical kings down to Stalin.
4. Politics are determined by those classes and strata that participate in the struggle. The revolutionary masses must have a state apparatus that directly and immediately expresses their will. Only the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies can act as such an apparatus.
5. The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the redivision of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers’ control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy.
6. Enemies of the socialist revolution, that is, exploiting elements and their agents, even if masquerading as “democrats,” “republicans," “Socialists,” and “Anarchists,” must be mercilessly driven out of the army.
7. At the head of each military unit must be places commissars possessing irreproachable authority as revolutionists and soldiers.
8. In every military unit there must be a firmly welded nucleus of the most self-sacrificing fighters, recommended by the workers’ organizations. The members of this nucleus have but one privilege: to be first under fire.
9. The commanding corps necessarily includes at first many alien and unreliable elements among the personnel. Their testing, retesting, and sifting must be carried through on the basis of combat experience, recommendations of commissars, and testimonials of rank-and-file fighters. Coincident with this must proceed an intense training of commanders drawn from the ranks of revolutionary workers.
10. The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with he tasks of the social revolution. Not only in propaganda but also in military operations it is necessary to take into account the social composition of the various military units of the enemy (bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, or as in Franco’s case, colonial slaves); and in choosing lines of operation, it is necessary to rigorously take into consideration the social structure of the corresponding territories (industrial regions, peasant regions, revolutionary or reactionary, regions of oppressed nationalities, etc.). In brief, revolutionary policy dominates strategy.
11. Both the revolutionary government and the executive committee of the workers and peasants must know how to win the complete confidence of the army and of the toiling population.
12. Foreign policy must have as its main objective the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the exploited peasants, and oppressed nationalities of the whole world.

Stalin guaranteed the conditions of defeat

The conditions for victory, as we see, are perfectly plain. In their aggregate they bear the name of the socialist revolution. Not a single one of these conditions existed in Spain. The basic reason is—the absence of a revolutionary party. Stalin tried, it is true, to transfer to the soil of Spain, the outward practices of Bolshevism: the Politburo, commissars, cells, the GPU, etc. But he emptied these forms of their social content. He renounced the Bolshevik program and with it the soviets as the necessary form for the revolutionary initiative of the masses. He placed the technique of Bolshevism at the service of bourgeois property. In his bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, he imagined that “commissars” by themselves could guarantee victory. But the commissars of private property proved capable only of guaranteeing defeat.

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to victory, its own organizations stood as the chief obstacles. The commanding clique of Stalinists, in accordance with their counterrevolutionary function, consisted of hirelings, careerists, declassed elements, and in general, all types of social refuse. The representatives of other labor organizations—incurable reformists, Anarchists phrasemongers, helpless centrists of the POUM—grumbled, groaned, wavered, manuevered, but in the end adapted themselves to the Stalinists. As a result of their joint activity, the camp of social revolution—workers and peasants—proved to be subordinated to the bourgeoisie, or more correctly, to its shadow. It was bled white and its character destroyed.

There was no lack of heroism on the part of the masses or courage on the part of individual revolutionists. But the masses were left to their own resources while the revolutionists remained disunited, without a program, without a plan of action. The “republican” military commanders were more concerned with crushing the social revolution than with scoring military victories. The soldiers lost confidence in their commanders, the masses in the government; the peasants stepped aside; the workers became exhausted; defeat followed defeat; demoralization grew apace. All this was not difficult to foresee from the beginning of the civil war. By setting itself the task of rescuing the capitalist regime, the Popular Front doomed itself to military defeat. By turning Bolshevism on its head, Stalin succeeded completely in fulfilling the role of gravedigger of the revolution.

It ought to be added that the Spanish experience once again demonstrates that Stalin failed completely to understand either the October Revolution or the Russian civil war. His slow moving provincial mind lagged hopelessly behind the tempestuous march of events in 1917-21. In those of his speeches and articles in 1917 where he expressed his own ideas, his later Thermidorean “doctrine” is fully implanted. In this sense, Stalin in Spain in 1937 is the continuator of Stalin of the March 1917 conference of the Bolsheviks. But in 1917 he merely feared the revolutionary workers; in 1937 he strangled them. The opportunist had become the executioner.

"Civil war in the rear"

But, after all, victory over the governments of Caballero and Negrin would have necessitated a civil war in the rear of the republican army! - the democratic philistine exclaims with horror. As if apart from this, in republican Spain no civil war has ever existed, and at that the basest and most perfidious one —the war of the proprietors and exploiters against the workers and peasants. This uninterrupted war finds expression in the arrests and murders of revolutionists, the crushing of the mass movement, the disarming of the workers, the arming of the bourgeois police, the abandoning of workers’ detachments without arms and without help on the front, and finally, the artificial restriction of the development of war industry.

Each of these acts as a cruel blow to the front, direct military treason, dictated by the class interests of the bourgeoisie. But “democratic” philistines —including Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists —regard the civil war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, even in areas most closely adjoining the front, as a natural and inescapable war, having as its tasks the safeguarding of the “unity of the Popular Front." On the other hand, the civil war of the proletariat against the “republican” counterrevolution is, in the eyes of the same philistines, a criminal, “fascists,” Trotskyist war, disrupting..."the unity of the anti-fascist forces.” Scores of Norman Thomases, Major Atlees, Otto Bauers, Zyromskys, Malrauxes, and such petty peddlers of lies as Duranty and Louis Fischer spread this slavish wisdom throughout our planet. Meanwhile the government of the Popular Front moves from Madrid to Valencia, from Valencia to Barcelona.

If, as the facts attest, only the socialist revolution is capable of crushing fascism, then on the other hand a successful uprising of the proletariat is conceivable only when the ruling classes are caught in the vise of the greatest difficulties. However, the democratic philistines invoke precisely these difficulties as proof of the impressibility of the proletarian uprising. Were the proletariat to wait for the democratic philistines to tell them the hour of their liberation, they would remain slaves forever. To teach workers to recognize reactionary philistines under all their masks and to despise them regardless of the mask is the first and paramount duty of a revolutionist!

The outcome

The dictatorship of the Stalinists over the republican camp is not long-lived in its essence. Should the defeats stemming from the politics of the Popular Front once more impel the Spanish proletariat to a revolutionary assault, this time successfully, the Stalinist clique will be swept away with an iron broom. But should Stalin —as is unfortunately the likelihood —succeed in bringing the work if gravedigger of the revolution to its conclusion, he will not even this case earn thanks. The Spanish bourgeoisie needed him as executioner, but it has no need for him at all as patron or tutor. London and Paris on the one hand, and Berlin and Rome on the other, are in its eyes considerably more solvent firms than Moscow. It is possible that Stalin himself wants to cover his traces in Spain before the final catastrophe; he thus hopes to unload the responsibility for the defeat on his closest allies. After this Litvinov will solicit Franco for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. Al this we have seen more than once.

Even a complete military victory of the so-called republican army over General Franco, however, would not signify the triumph of “democracy.” The workers and peasants have twice placed bourgeois republicans and their left agents in power: in April 1931 and in February 1936. Both times the heroes of the Popular Front surrendered the victory of the people to the most reactionary and the most serious representatives of the bourgeoisie. A third victory, gained by the generals of the Popular Front, would signify their inevitable agreement with the fascist bourgeoisie on the backs of the workers and peasants. Such a regime will be nothing but a different form of military dictatorship, perhaps without a monarchy and without the open domination of the Catholic Church.

Finally, it is possible that the partial victories of the republicans will be utilized by the “disinterested” Anglo-French intermediaries in order to reconcile the fighting camps. It is not difficult to understand that in the event of such a variant the final remnants of the “democracy" will be stifled in the fraternal embrace of the generals Miaja (communist!) and Franco (fascists!). Let me repeat once again: victory will go either to the socialist revolution or to fascism.

It is not excluded, by the way, that the tragedy might at the last moment make way to farce. When the heroes of the Popular Front have to flee their last capital, they might, before embarking on steamers and airplanes, perhaps proclaim a series of “socialist” reforms in order to leave a “good memory” with the people. But nothing will avail. The workers of the world will remember with hatred and contempt the parties that ruined the heroic revolution.

The tragic experience of Spain is a terrible —perhaps final —warning before still greater events, a warning addressed to all the advanced workers of the world. “Revolutions,” Marx said, “are the locomotives of history.” They move faster than the thought of semi-revolutionary or quarter-revolutionary parties. Whoever lags behind falls under the wheels of the locomotive, and consequently —and this is the chief danger —the locomotive itself is also not infrequently wrecked.

It is necessary to think out the problem of the revolution to the end, to its ultimate concrete conclusions. It is necessary to adjust policy to the basic laws of the revolution, i.e., to the movement of the embattled classes and not the prejudices or fears of the superficial petty-bourgeois groups who call themselves “Popular” Fronts and every other kind of front. During revolution the line of least resistance is the line of greatest disaster. To fear “isolation” from the bourgeoisie is to incur isolation from the masses. Adaptation to the conservative prejudices of the labor aristocracy is betrayal of the workers and the revolution. An excess “caution” is the most baneful lack of caution. This is the chief lesson of the destruction of the most honest political organization in Spain, namely, the centrist POUM. The parties and groups of the London Bureau obviously either do not wish to draw the necessary conclusions from the last warning of history or are unable to do so. By this token they doom themselves.

By way of compensation, a new generation of revolutionists is now being educated by the lessons of the defeats. This generation has verified in action the ignominious reputation of the Second International. It has plumbed the depths of the Third International’s downfall. It has learned how to judge the Anarchists not by their words but by their deeds. It is a great inestimable school, paid for with the blood of countless fighters! The revolutionary cadres are now gathering only under the banner of the Fourth International. Born amid the roar of defeats, the Fourth International will lead the toilers to victory. 

The Class, The Party and the Leadership

By Leon Trotsky

This was an unfinished article, first published in 1940, in which the lessons from the failures of the Spanish Revolution were used to write this vital piece on the need for a revolutionary party and leadership.

THE extent to which the working class movement has been thrown backward may be gauged not only by the condition of the organisations but by ideological groupings and those theoretical inquiries in which so many groups are engaged. 

In Paris there is published a periodical “Que Faire" (What To Do) which for some reason considers itself Marxist but in reality remains completely within the framework of the empiricism of the left bourgeois intellectuals and those isolated workers who have assimilated the vices of the intellectuals.

Like all groups lacking a scientific foundation, without a programme and without any tradition, this little periodical tried to hang on to the coat-tails of the POUM — which seemed to open the shortest avenue to the masses and to victory. But the result of these ties with the Spanish revolution seems at first entirely unexpected: the periodical did not advance but on the contrary retrogressed. As a matter of fact, this is wholly in the nature of things. The contradictions between the petty bourgeoisie's conservatism and the needs of the proletarian revolution have developed in the extreme. It is only natural that the defenders and interpreters of the policies of the POUM found themselves thrown far back both in political and theoretical fields. The periodical "Que Faire" is in and of itself of no importance whatever. But it is of symptomatic interest. That is why we think it profitable to dwell upon this periodical's appraisal of the causes for the collapse of the Spanish revolution, inasmuch as this appraisal discloses very graphically the fundamental features now prevailing in the left flank of pseudo-Marxism.

"Que Faire" Explains

We begin with a verbatim quotation from a review of the pamphlet "Spain Betrayed," by comrade Casanova: "Why was the revolution crushed? Because, replies the author (Casanova), the Communist Party conducted a false policy which was unfortunately followed by the revolutionary masses. But why, in the devil's name, did the revolutionary masses who left their former leaders rally to the banner of the Communist Party? 'Because there was no genuinely revolutionary party.' We are presented with a pure tautology. A false policy of the masses; an immature party either manifests a certain condition of social forces (immaturity of the working class, lack of independence of the peasantry) which must be explained by proceeding from facts, presented among others by Casanova himself; or it is the product of the actions of certain malicious individuals or groups of individuals, actions which do not correspond to the efforts of 'sincere individuals' alone capable of saving the revolution. After groping for the first and Marxist road, Casanova takes the second. We are ushered into the domain of pure demonology: the criminal responsible for the defeat is the chief Devil, Stalin, abetted by the anarchists and all the other little devils; the God of revolutionists unfortunately did not send a Lenin or a Trotsky to Spain as He did in Russia in 1917."

The conclusion then follows: "This is what comes of seeking at any cost to force the ossified orthodoxy of a chapel upon facts." This theoretical haughtiness is made all the more significant by the fact that it is hard to imagine how so great a number of banalities, vulgarisms and mistakes quite specifically of a conservative philistine type could be compressed into so few lines.

The author of the above quotation avoids giving any explanation for the defeat of the Spanish revolution; he only indicates that profound explanations, like the "condition of social forces" are necessary. The evasion of any explanation is not accidental These critics of Bolshevism are all theoretical cowards, for the simple reason that they have nothing solid under their feet. In order not to reveal their own bankruptcy they juggle facts and prowl around the opinions of others. They confine themselves to hints and half-thoughts as if they just haven't the time to delineate their full wisdom. As a matter of fact they possess no wisdom at all. Their haughtiness is lined with intellectual charlatanism. Let us analyse step by step the hints and half-thoughts of our author. According to him a false policy of the masses can be explained only as it "manifests a certain condition of social forces," namely, the immaturity of the working class and the lack of independence of the peasantry. Anyone searching for tautologies couldn't find in general a flatter one. A "false policy of the masses" is explained by the "immaturity" of the masses. But what is "immaturity" of the masses? Obviously, their predisposition to false policies. Of just what the false policy consisted, and who were its initiators: the masses or the leaders — that is passed over in silence by our author. By means of a tautology he unloads the responsibility on the masses. This classical trick of all traitors, deserters and their attorneys is especially revolting in connection with the Spanish proletariat.

Sophistry Of The Betrayers

In July 1936 — not to refer to an earlier period — the Spanish workers repelled the assault of the officers who had prepared their conspiracy under the protection of the People's Front. The masses improvised militias and created workers' committees, the strongholds of their future dictatorship. The leading organisations of the proletariat on the other hand helped the bourgeoisie to destroy these committees, to liquidate the assaults of the workers on private property and to subordinate the workers' militias to the command of the bourgeoisie, with the POUM moreover participating in the government and assuming direct responsibility for this work of the counter-revolution. What does "immaturity" of the proletariat signify in this case? Self-evidently only this, that despite the correct political line chosen by the masses, the latter were unable to smash the coalition of socialists, Stalinists, anarchists and the POUM with the bourgeoisie. This piece of sophistry takes as its starting point a concept of some absolute maturity, i.e. a perfect condition of the masses in which they do not require a correct leadership, and, more than that, are capable of conquering against their own leadership. There is not and there cannot be such maturity.

Our sages object: but why should workers who show such correct revolutionary instinct and such superior fighting qualities submit to treacherous leadership? Our answer is: There wasn't even a hint of mere subordination. The workers' line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force.

In May 1937 the workers of Catalonia rose not only without their own leadership but against it. The anarchist leaders — pathetic and contemptible bourgeois masquerading cheaply as revolutionists — have repeated hundreds of times in their press that had the CNT wanted to take power and set up their dictatorship in May, they could have done so without any difficulty. This time the anarchist leaders speak the unadulterated truth. The POUM leadership actually dragged at the tail of the CNT, only they covered up their policy with a different phraseology. It was thanks to this and this alone that the bourgeoisie succeeded in crushing the May uprising of the "immature" proletariat. One must understand exactly nothing in the sphere of the inter-relationships between the class and the party, between the masses and the leaders in order to repeat the hollow statement that the Spanish masses merely followed their leaders. The only thing that can be said is that the masses who sought at all times to blast their way to the correct road found no new leadership corresponding to the demands of the revolution. Before us is a profoundly dynamic process, with the various stages of the revolution shifting swiftly, with the leadership or various sections of the leadership quickly deserting to the side of the class enemy, and our sages engage in a purely static discussion: why did the working class as a whole follow a bad leadership?

The Dialectic Approach

There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and furthermore that the order of these governments doesn't at all proceed in one and the same direction: from despotism — to freedom, as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals. The secret is this, that a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing "maturity" of a "people" but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces — alliances, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d'etats, counter- revolutions, etc., arise.

The very same dialectic approach is necessary in dealing with the question of the leadership of a class. Imitating the liberals our sages tacitly accept the axiom that every class gets the leadership it deserves. In reality leadership is not at all a mere "reflection" of a class or the product of its own free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes pre-disposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may "tolerate" for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events. A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading party. The Marxist, i.e. dialectic and not scholastic, interpretation of the inter-relationship between a class and its leadership does not leave a single stone unturned of our author's legalistic sophistry.

How The Russian Workers Matured

He conceives of the proletariat's maturity as something purely static. Yet during a revolution the consciousness of a class is the most dynamic process directly determining the course of the revolution. Was it possible in January 1917 or even in March, after the overthrow of Czarism, to give an answer to the question whether the Russian proletariat had sufficiently "matured" for the conquest or power in eight to nine months? The working class was at that time extremely heterogeneous socially and politically. During the years of the war it had been renewed by 30-40 per cent from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, often reactionary, at the expense of backward peasants, at the expense of women and youth. The Bolshevik party in March 1917 was followed by an insignificant minority of the working class and furthermore there was discord within the party itself. The overwhelming majority of the workers supported the Mensheviks and the "Socialist-Revolutionists" i.e. conservative social-patriots. The situation was even less favourable with regard to the army and the peasantry. We must add to this: the general low level of culture in the country, the lack of political experience among the broadest layers of the proletariat, especially in the provinces, let alone the peasants and soldiers. What was the "active" of Bolshevism? A clear and thoroughly thought out revolutionary conception at the beginning of the revolution was held only by Lenin. The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a considerable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin's political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. These elements of the "active" worked wonders in a revolutionary situation, that is, in conditions of bitter class struggle. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond with Lenin's conception, to correspond that is with the actual course of the revolution.

Thanks to this it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution the party was able to convince the majority of the workers of the correctness of its slogans. This majority organised into Soviets was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants. How can this dynamic, dialectic process be exhausted by a formula of the maturity or immaturity of the proletariat? A colossal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin's slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres, even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the confidence of the cadres in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one's calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution, to substitute for it an abstraction, the "relationship of forces," because the development of the revolution precisely consists of this, that the relationship of forces keeps incessantly and rapidly changing under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.

Relativity Of "Maturity"

The October victory is a serious testimonial of the "maturity" of the proletariat. But this maturity is relative. A few years later the very same proletariat permitted the revolution to be strangled by a bureaucracy which rose from its ranks. Victory is not at all the ripe fruit of the proletariat's "maturity." Victory is a strategical task. It is necessary to utilise in order to mobilise the masses; taking as a starting point the given level of their "maturity" it is necessary to propel them forward, teach them to understand that the enemy is by no means omnipotent, that it is torn asunder with contradictions, that behind, the imposing facade panic prevails. Had the Bolshevik party failed to carry out this work, there couldn't even be talk of the victory of the proletarian revolution. The Soviets would have been crushed by the counter-revolution, and the little sages of all countries would have written articles and books on the keynote that only uprooted visionaries could dream in Russia of the dictatorship of the proletariat so small numerically and so immature.

Auxiliary Role Of Peasants

Equally abstract, pedantic and false is the reference to the "lack of independence" of the peasantry. When and where did our sage ever observe in capitalist society a peasantry with an independent revolutionary programme or a capacity for independent revolutionary initiative? The peasantry can play a very great role in the revolution, but only an auxiliary role. In many instances the Spanish peasants acted boldly and fought courageously. But to rouse the entire mass of the peasantry, the proletariat had to set an example of a decisive uprising against the bourgeoisie and inspire the peasants with faith in the possibility of victory. In the meantime the revolutionary initiative of the proletariat itself was paralysed at every step by its own organisations. The "immaturity" of the proletariat, the "lack of independence" of the peasantry are neither final nor basic factors in historical events. Underlying the consciousness of the classes are the classes themselves, their numerical strength, their role in economic life. Underlying the classes is a specific system of production which is determined in its turn by the level of the development of productive forces. Why not then say that the defeat of the Spanish proletariat was determined by the low level of technology?

The Role Of Personality

Our author substitutes mechanistic determinism for the dialectic conditioning of the historical process. Hence the cheap jibes about the role of individuals, good and bad. History is a process of the class struggle. But classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and simultaneously. In the process of struggle the classes create various organs which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations. This also provides the basis for the role of personalities in history. There are naturally great objective causes which created the autocratic rule of Hitler but only dull-witted pedants of "determinism " could deny today the enormous historic role of Hitler. The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917, turned the Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to victory. Our sages might say that had Lenin died abroad at the beginning of 1917, the October revolution would have taken place "just the same." But that is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was necessary in order to mobilise the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process. Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programmes? Why theoretical struggles?

Stalinism In Spain

"But why, in the devil's name," asks the author as we have already heard, "did the revolutionary masses who left their former leaders, rally to the banner of the Communist Party?" The question is falsely posed. It is not true that the revolutionary masses left all of their former leaders. The workers who were previously connected with specific organisations continued to cling to them, while they observed and checked. Workers in general do not easily break with the party that awakens them to conscious life. Moreover the existence of mutual protection within the People's Front lulled them: since everybody agreed, everything must be all right. The new and fresh masses naturally turned to the Comintern as the party which had accomplished the only victorious proletarian revolution and which, it was hoped, was capable of assuring arms to Spain. Furthermore the Comintern was the most zealous champion of the idea of the People's Front; this inspired confidence among the inexperienced layers of workers. Within the People's Front the Comintern was the most zealous champion of the bourgeois character of the revolution: this inspired the confidence of the petty and in part the middle bourgeoisie. That is why the masses "rallied to the banner of the Communist Party." Our author depicts the matter as if the proletariat were in a well-stocked shoe store, selecting a new pair of boots. Even this simple operation, as is well known, does not always prove successful. As regards new leadership, the choice is very limited. Only gradually, only on the basis of their own experience through several stages can the broad layers of the masses become convinced that a new leadership is firmer, more reliable, more loyal than the old. To be sure, during a revolution, i.e., when events move swiftly, a weak party can quickly grow into a mighty one provided it lucidly understands the course of the revolution and possesses staunch cadres that do not become intoxicated with phrases and are not terrorised by persecution. But such a party must be available prior to the revolution inasmuch as the process of educating the cadres requires a considerable period of time and the revolution does not afford this time.

Treachery Of The POUM

To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM, which undoubtedly embraced revolutionary proletarian elements not previously firmly tied to anarchism. But it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution. It could not become a mass party because in order to do so it was first necessary to overthrow the old parties and it was possible to overthrow them only by an irreconcilable struggle, by a merciless exposure of their bourgeois character. Yet the POUM while criticising the old parties subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. It participated in the "People's" election bloc; entered the government which liquidated workers' committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising. From the standpoint of determinism in general it is possible of course to recognise that the policy of the POUM was not accidental. Everything in this world has its cause. However, the series of causes engendering the centrism of the POUM are by no means a mere reflection of condition of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat. Two causalities moved toward each other at an angle and at a certain moment they came into hostile conflict. It is possible by taking into account previous international experience, Moscow's influence, the influence of a number of defeats, etc., to explain politically and psychologically why the POUM unfolded as a centrist party. But this does not alter its centrist character, nor does it alter the fact that a centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution. It does not alter the fact that the Catalonian masses were far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership. In these conditions to unload the responsibility for false policies on the "immaturity" of the masses is to engage in sheer charlatanism frequently resorted to by political bankrupts.

Responsibility Of Leadership

The historical falsification consists in this, that the responsibility for the defeat of the Spanish masses is unloaded on the working masses and not those parties which paralysed or simply crushed the revolutionary movement of the masses. The attorneys of the POUM simply deny the responsibility of the leaders, in order thus to escape shouldering their own responsibility. This impotent philosophy, which seeks to reconcile defeats as a necessary link in the chain of cosmic developments, is completely incapable of posing and refuses to pose the question of such concrete factors as programmes, parties, personalities that were the organisers of defeat. This philosophy of fatalism and prostration is diametrically opposed to Marxism as the theory of revolutionary action. Civil war is a process wherein political tasks are solved by military means. Were the outcome of this war determined by the "condition of class forces," the war itself would not be necessary. War has its own organisation, its own policies, its own methods, its own leadership by which its fate is directly determined. Naturally, the "condition of class forces" supplies the foundation for all other political factors; but just as the foundation of a building does not reduce the importance of walls, windows, doors, roofs, so the "condition of classes" does not invalidate the importance of parties, their strategy, their leadership. By dissolving the concrete in the abstract, our sages really halted mid-way. The most "profound" solution of the problem would have been to declare the defeat of the Spanish proletariat as due to the inadequate development of productive forces. Such a key is accessible to any fool. By reducing to zero the significance of the party and of the leadership these sages deny in general the possibility of revolutionary victory. Because there are not the least grounds for expecting conditions more favourable. Capitalism has ceased to advance, the proletariat does not grow numerically, on the contrary it is the army of unemployed that grows, which does not increase but reduces the fighting force of the proletariat and has a negative effect also upon its consciousness.

There are similarly no grounds for believing that under the regime of capitalism the peasantry is capable of attaining a higher revolutionary consciousness. The conclusion from the analysis of our author is thus complete pessimism, a sliding away from revolutionary perspectives. It must be said – to do them justice – that they do not themselves understand what they say. As a matter of fact, the demands they make upon the consciousness of the masses are utterly fantastic. The Spanish workers, as well as the Spanish peasants, gave the maximum of what these classes are able to give in a revolutionary situation. We have in mind precisely the class of millions and tens of millions. "Que Faire" represents merely one of these little schools, or churches or chapels who, frightened by the course of the struggle and the onset of reaction publish their little journals and their theoretical etudes in a corner, on the sidelines away from the actual developments of revolutionary thought, let alone the movement of the masses.

Repression Of Spanish Revolution

The Spanish proletariat fell the victim of a coalition composed of imperialists, Spanish republicans, socialists, anarchists, Stalinists and on the left flank, the POUM. They all paralysed the socialist revolution which the Spanish proletariat had actually begun to realise. It is not easy to dispose of the socialist revolution. No one has yet devised other methods than ruthless repressions, massacre of the vanguard, execution of the leaders, etc. The POUM of course did not want this. It wanted on the one hand to participate in the Republican government and to enter as a loyal peace-loving opposition into the general bloc of ruling parties: and on the other hand to achieve peaceful comradely relations at a time when it was a question of implacable civil war. For this very reason the POUM fell victim to the contradictions of its own policy. The most consistent policy in the ruling bloc was pursued by the Stalinists. They were the fighting vanguard of the bourgeois-republican counter-revolution. They wanted to eliminate the need of Fascism by proving to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie that they were themselves capable of strangling the proletarian revolution under the banner of "democracy". This was the gist of their policies. The bankrupts of the Spanish People's Front are today trying to unload the blame on the GPU. I trust that we cannot be suspected of leniency toward the crimes of the GPU. But we see clearly and we tell the workers that the GPU acted in this instance only as the most resolute detachment in the service of the People's Front. Therein was the strength of the GPU, therein was the historic role of Stalin. Only ignorant philistines can wave this aside with stupid little jokes about the Chief Devil.

These gentlemen do not even bother with the question of the social character of the revolution. Moscow's lackeys, for the benefit of England and France, proclaimed the Spanish revolution as bourgeois. Upon this fraud were erected the perfidious policies of the People's Front, policies which would have been completely false even if the Spanish revolution had really been bourgeois. But from the very beginning the revolution expressed much more graphically its proletarian character than did the revolution of 1917 in Russia. In the leadership of the POUM, gentlemen sit today who consider that the policy of Andres Nin was too "leftist", that the really correct thing was to have remained the left flank of the People's Front. Victor Serge, who is in a hurry to compromise himself by a frivolous attitude toward serious questions, writes that Nin did not wish to submit to commands from Oslo or Coyoacan. Can a serious man really be capable of reducing to petty gossip the problem of the class content of a revolution? The sages of "Que Faire" have no answer whatever to this question. They do not understand the question itself. Of what significance indeed is the fact that the "immature" proletariat founded its own organs of power, seized enterprises, sought to regulate production, while the POUM tried with all its might to keep from breaking with bourgeois anarchists who, in an alliance with the bourgeois republicans and the no less bourgeois socialists and Stalinists, assaulted and strangled the proletarian revolution! Such "trifles" are obviously of interest only to representatives of "ossified orthodoxy." The sages of "Que Faire" possess instead a special apparatus which measures the maturity of the proletariat and the relationship of forces independently of all questions of revolutionary class strategy.

The Spanish Revolution 1931-37: 1995 Introduction by Rob Sewell Questions

Distortion

1. Why was the Aragón front boycotted by the Republican government?
2. Why was Orwell (and the main character in Loach's film) on a suspects list?
3. What does the Morning Star accuse the anarchists of?  What is the bitter irony of this baseless accusation?

Slander

1. Contrary to the lies of the Stalinists, Orwell left the front on an official leave permit, and thus became involved in the May Days, defending the POUM headquarters from Stalinist attacks.  Why did the government troops leave the front, were they were fighting the fascists?
2. The Morning Star claims that the film exaggerates, or rather fabricated, the repression in Spain.  What did the OGPU (later the NKVD and the KGB) do in Spain? 
3. Why were these acts of repression undertaken in Spain?  Why did the Moscow bureaucracy fear the revolution of the Spanish workers and peasants?

Durruti

1. What were the implications and ramifications of the Stalinist slogan of "first win the war, then the revolution" for the Spanish Revolution? 
2. Why did the Stalinists use this slogan?  Whose interests did it benefit?
3. The Stalinists accused the POUM of being "Trotskyists" in league with the fascists.  Of course, the events in May '37 in Barcelona were not part of a devious fascist conspiracy orchestrated by Trotskyists and anarchists, but was the POUM even a "Trotskyist" organization?

Revolutionary

1. What would have been the only way to assure success in Spain ?

The Revolution in Spain Questions

1. Old Spain

1. Spain was one of the more backward countries of Europe in 1931, but how was its backwardness of a unique character given its history?
2. The exploitation of America by the Spanish initially enriched and elevated Spain?  Dialectically, what happened next?
3. Why had Spain seen such difficulty in the establishment of a unified nation, in contrast to its neighbor France?
4. How did the monarchy in Spain develop?  How was this development different than the rest of Europe making it far more similar to Asiatic despotism than European absolutism?
5. Alongside the monarchy, what other social grouping was of great importance in Spain?  Describe.
6. What was the condition of the Spanish peasantry in 1931?

2. The Spanish Army In Politics

1. Why did the army assume such great significance in Spanish politics?
2. Why was Spanish history essentially a succession of “pronunciamentos” (coups d'état)?
3. Was this "uninterrupted" succession of pronunciamentos an expression of the "Theory of the Permanent Revolution”?

3. The Spanish Proletariat and the New Revolution

1. Describe the dialectic of Spanish industrialization in relation to the war that Trotsky explains here.
2. What new possibilities did Spanish industrialization offer to the endless cycle of political transformation?
3. What had the role of the Spanish proletariat been in revolutionary upsurges prior to industrialization?

4. The Programme of the Revolution

1. The slogan for a republic was the slogan of diverse sectors of Spanish society in the struggle against the monarchy.  But this slogan had a different meaning for the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie than it did for the toiling masses.  Explain.
2. Describe the "revolutionary-democratic programme."
3. More specifically, how does Trotsky argue the question of the oppressed Catalonian and Basque nationalities should be dealt with?
4. In Trotsky’s opinion, might the Spanish revolution pass through a stage of parliamentarianism?  If so, what position should the revolutionary party take towards it (the Cortes)?
5. How should the slogan for a workers' and peasants' militia be framed?
6. Trotsky argues that a radical programme of social legislation should be drawn up that stays well within the bounds of bourgeois society, but do the demands end there?

5. Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Social Democracy

1. What was the "main danger", as Trotsky refers to it, facing the movement in Spain?
2. What does Trotsky cautiously warn of if the movement remains with out a leadership with any clear programme?
3. What was the task that the Social Democrats set for themselves?
4. How does anarcho-syndicalism "disarm" the proletariat?
5. What relation should there be between the communists and the anarcho-syndicalists?

6. The Revolutionary Junta and the Party

1. What was on the order of the day, according to Trotsky?
2. Who do we presuppose will participate in these juntas (councils)?
3. In what way should practical questions be resolved, such as the time and method of elections?
4. What about peasant juntas?
5. When can soldiers' juntas be expected to develop?   What should be done until then?
6. What is necessary for the successful solution of these tasks?
7. Trotsky counterposes the united front of workers to the Stalinist "popular front" coalition of workers with the bourgeoisie (or rather its fictional "progressive" layers).  Why?

The Lessons of Spain :  The Last Warning Questions

Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

1. What ideologies fought in the so-called republican camp?  Why were the bourgeois republican parties not counted amongst their ranks?
2. What group does Trotsky refer to as the "Mensheviks" of the Spanish Revolution?  Why does he make this claim?
3. Why is the Menshevik view not just incorrect and, particularly in this case, fatal to the revolutionary movement?
4. What did the theory of the permanent revolution have to say on the questions facing Spain?
5. How could the peasantry have been turned in a bulwark against fascism?  What was the choice facing the Spanish proletariat here?
6. What does Trotsky say is the difference between Russian Menshevism, decades before, and the doctrine of Spanish Menshevism in 1937?

"Theory" of the Popular Front

1. What guided Stalinism during the Spanish Revolution (and throughout the 20^th Century)?
2. The Popular Front seems logical from the perspective of formal logic:  Stalinists + "progressive" bourgeoisie + anarchists = greater than the sum of the individual parts.  Why is this fundamentally incorrect when we approach the question from a dialectical class-based perspective?
3. More specifically, why must a coalition with the bourgeoisie be ruled out at this point in history? 

Alliance with the Bourgeoisie's Shadow

1. In reality, did the bourgeoisie even participate in any significant way in the "Popular Front"?  Why was this the case?
2. How then did they exert influence?

The Stalinists in the Popular Front

1. Against what backdrop did the Spanish Popular Front take form?  Why was this situation most conducive to its formation?
2. Who did the Stalinists turn to in order to bolster the Popular Front?  Against whom did they direct their repression?
3. How is this an expression of the further degeneration of the Moscow bureaucracy?

Counterrevolutionary Superiorities of Stalinism

1. How did the Spanish Communist Party, which was initially tiny, gain the reins of power, despite the greater number of anarchists and socialists? Why did other Menshevik-minded leaders turn to the Stalinists to take the necessary measures to make sure the revolution stayed within bourgeois, democratic bounds?

Stalin confirms in his own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution

1.       In what way did Stalin confirm in his own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution?

 Role of the Anarchists

1. What does Trotsky mean when he says that the anarchists did not play an "independent" role in Spain?
2. What was the fatal flaw of the anarchists?
3. What does Trotsky suggest would have been a likely outcome of the formation of revolutionary, democratic soviets?
4. The anarchists did not take power several times when they could have and then bragged about it as if they wanted credit for this act.  Why is this a reactionary position?
5. In what ways were the anarchist’s theories and methods exposed as useless and even dangerous from the point of view of the proletarian revolution?

Role of the POUM

1. What grave mistakes did the POUM make? 

The Problem of Arming

1. Why is the excuse of the Anarchists and Socialists for their capitulation to Stalinism based on their need for arms an unskillful lie?
2. What should they have done when the blackmail first occurred?
3. Trotsky also points to the fact that revolutions have always been able to succeed without foreign intervention.  What were another alternatives to reliance on Moscow?

Conditions for Victory

1. In this short but powerful “12 step guide to revolutionary war”, what specifically does Trotsky say about the need to link the revolutionary war up with the achievement of socialist measures?  The need for a government that represents the oppressed to wage the war?  Understanding the social composition of the enemy's ranks (and why is this important)?  Revolutionary foreign policy?

Stalin Guaranteed the Conditions of Defeat

1. Stalin took many of the “outward practices” of Bolshevism and attempted to artificially inject them into Spain.  What did he not understand and what was the result?
2. Was the Spanish Revolution defeated for a lack of effort by the working class?

"Civil War in the Rear"

1. Why was the moral repulsion shown by national-democratic philistines about not wanting to spark a “civil war in the rear” nothing but empty phrase mongering?

The Outcome

1. Trotsky says that it is necessary for us to think out the problems of a revolution to its “ultimate concrete conclusions”.  He then leaves us with a warning about caution.  What is this warning, and why is an excess of caution so dangerous?

The Class, the Party, and the Leadership Questions

"Que Faire" Explains

1. What was Casanova's explanation for why the Spanish Revolution failed?  What is Que Faire’s explanation?  What is the tautology in their explanation?

The Sophistry of the Betrayers

1. How are the actions of the POUM in the case Trotsky describes in July of 1936 a direct example of how the masses can take a correct line, but the leadership can still manage to betray the movement?
2. What does Que Faire's  argument assume as a necessary level of maturity for the masses to be "ready" to complete their historic task?
3. If the workers showed such correct revolutionary instincts, then did they simply "subordinate" themselves terrible leadership?

The Dialectic Approach

1. Do "People get the government they deserve"?  Is the leadership of a class merely a reflection of that class?  If not, then what is leadership?
2. Describe the process by which the growing contradictions between leadership and class are revealed, and how the ensuing crisis and collapse of the old leadership should be utilized by the revolutionary party?

How the Russian Workers Matured

1. Briefly, how do these three components interact in the lead-up to October:  Lenin – Bolsheviks – Russian Proletariat?  What does this say about the "maturity" or "immaturity" of the Russian masses?  Is maturity something that is static?
2. Why are simple explanations like "the relationship (or balance) of forces", without further explanation, just empty abstractions? Why is the existence of a revolutionary party so vital?

Relativity of "Maturity'

1. What important example does Trotsky give here of the relativity of this so-called maturity as a condition for victory?

Auxiliary Role of the Peasants

1. Why is a claim that the "lack of independence" of the peasantry was a cause of the failure of the Spanish Revolution at least as abstract as saying it was due to the "lack of maturity" of the proletariat?

The Role of Personality

1. History is a process of class struggle, but why then is the denial of the role of leadership, parties, and programs still incorrect?

Stalinism in Spain

1. Did the masses "leave their former leaders"?
2. Why did they "rally to the banner of the Communist Party"?
3. What is necessary for a small party to become a large one in the course of a revolution?

Treachery of the POUM

1. Why did the POUM not become a mass party?
2. What mistakes of the POUM does Trotsky list here?
3. While the centrist character of the POUM can certainly be explained, does that mean that this centrism was simply a reflection of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat or their "maturity"?

Responsibility of Leadership

1. How do programs, parties, and leaders, on the one hand, and the "conditions of class forces", on the other, interact?  What comparison does Trotsky make here?
2. Trotsky says of Que Faire, "It must be said – to do them justice – that they do not themselves understand what they say. As a matter of fact, the demands they make upon the consciousness of the masses are utterly fantastic."  What does he mean by this?  Based on what you have read, what demands do they make on the consciousness of the masses?

Repression of the Spanish Revolution

1. What role did the GPU play in this?  Who did they defend, and in whose interests did they act?

The Spanish Revolution Study Guide ANSWERS

Part 1 - The Spanish Revolution 1931-37: 1995 Introduction by Rob Sewell ANSWERS

Distortion

1. Why was the Aragón front boycotted by the Republican government? 
   The Republican Popular Front government boycotted the Aragón front of food, arms, and ammunition because this front was made up mostly of CNT and POUM militias which were conducting a semi-revolutionary war by collectivizing the land.  This was part of the campaign of sabotage carried out by the Popular Front government against the social revolution.  
   
2. Why was Orwell (and the main character in Loach's film) on a suspects list? 
   Although never a member of the POUM, he had fought in the 29^th Lenin Division of the POUM on the Aragón front, and as a result, was on a police “suspects” list when the POUM was illegalized. 
   
3. What does The Morning Star accuse the anarchists of?  What is the bitter irony of this baseless accusation? 
   The Morning Star [the paper of the British Communist Party] accuses the anarchists of “antagonizing” the peasantry, by carrying through forced collectivizations of the land.  The irony is that in reality, it was the Stalinists who carried out this policy to disastrous effect in the Soviet Union.

Slander

1. Contrary to the lies of the Stalinists, Orwell left the front on an official leave permit, and thus became involved in the May Days, defending the POUM headquarters from Stalinist attacks.  Why did the government troops leave the front, where they were fighting the fascists? 
   6,000 government soliders were sent from Valencia to disarm the workers in Barcelona, thereby abandoning the front lines. 
   
2. The Morning Star claims that the film exaggerates, or rather fabricated, the repression in Spain.  What did the OGPU (later the NKVD and the KGB) do in Spain?  
   The Stalinist GPU used the same methods to repress genuine revolutionaries in Spain as they did in the Soviet Union: murder squads, torture chambers, underground prisons, etc.  These methods became “business as usual” for the GPU around the world. 
   
3. Why were these acts of repression undertaken in Spain?  Why did the Moscow bureaucracy fear the revolution of the Spanish workers and peasants? 
   The Stalinist bureaucracy feared the Spanish revolution because it could act as an impulse to the Russian working class and the overthrow of Stalinism. On the other hand, Stalin wanted to prove to the Western powers that he could act in a respectable fashion - the sabotaging of the Spanish revolution was part of this strategy.

Durruti

1. What were the implications and ramifications of the Stalinist slogan of "first win the war, then the revolution" for the Spanish Revolution? 
   Under this slogan they carried through the reestablishment of the bourgeois state apparatus, ended the workers' control of the factories, opposed the collectivisation of land, dissolved the worker' militias - in a word - carried through the counter-revolution. 
   
2. Why did the Stalinists use this slogan?  Whose interests did it benefit?  
   The policy of the Stalinists in Spain was the subordination of the world revolution to the narrow foreign policy needs of the Kremlin. They defended private property in Spain in order to prove to their parliamentary allies (Britain and France) that they were not interested in upsetting the status quo. It was a confirmation of the criticisms Trotsky made at the time. Those who refused to comply with this policy were denounced as Trotsky-fascists, and accomplices of the Fascist powers. That is precisely why the POUM militias were deprived of arms. It was this policy that strangled the revolution. 
   
3. The Stalinists accused the POUM of being "Trotskyists" in league with the fascists.  Of course, the events in May '37 in Barcelona were not part of a devious fascist conspiracy orchestrated by Trotskyists and anarchists, but was the POUM even a "Trotskyist" organization? 
   The POUM was never a Trotskyist organization, as the Stalinists maintained. The policy of the POUM was bitterly criticized by Trotsky as being centrist - revolutionary in words, but in practice trailing behind the coat-tails of the CNT and the republican government. Nevertheless, all who opposed the Stalinists were labeled “Trotskyists” or “Anarchists”, and had to be eliminated. The events in Barcelona in May 1937 were deliberately provoked by the Stalinists who attempted to seize control of the CNT-run telephone exchange. It was used as the pretext to ban the POUM and arrest and murder its leaders. To this day, the Stalinists try to portray these events as fascist inspired and organized.

Revolutionary

1. What would have been the only way to assure success in Spain? 
   The war against Franco could only be won as a revolutionary war, where the factories are owned and controlled by the workers and the peasants are given the land. On military terms, Franco was in a stronger position. Trotsky made the same point repeatedly: “I believe that I have expressed it in many interviews and articles: The only way possible to assure victory in Spain is to say to the peasants: ‘The Spanish soil is your soil.’ To say to the workers: ‘The Spanish factories are your factories.’ That is the only possibility to assure victory. Stalin, in order not to frighten the French bourgeoisie, has become the guard of private property in Spain.”

Part 2 - The Revolution in Spain ANSWERS

Old Spain

1. Spain was one of the more backward countries of Europe in 1931, but how was its backwardness of a unique character, given its history? 
   While the Russia of the czars always remained far behind its western neighbours and advanced slowly under their pressure, Spain knew periods of great bloom, of superiority over the rest of Europe and of domination over South America. The mighty development of domestic and world commerce surmounted more and more the feudal dismemberment of the provinces and the particularism of the national parts of the country. The growth of the power and significance of the Spanish monarchy was inextricably bound up in those centuries with the centralizing role of mercantile capital, and with the gradual formation of the Spanish nation. 
   
2. The exploitation of America by the Spanish initially enriched and elevated Spain?  Dialectically, what happened next? 
   The discovery of America, which at first enriched and elevated Spain, was subsequently directed against it. The great routes of commerce were diverted from the Iberian peninsula. Holland, which had grown rich, broke away from Spain. Following Holland, England rose to great heights over Europe, and for a long time. Beginning with the second half of the sixteenth century, Spain had already begun to decline. With the destruction of the Great Armada (1588), this decline assumed, so to speak, an official character. The condition which Marx called "inglorious and slow, decay" settled down upon feudal-bourgeois Spain. 
   
3. Why had Spain seen such difficulty in the establishment of a unified nation, in contrast to its neighbor France?  
   The retardation of the economic development of Spain inevitably weakened the centralist tendencies inherent in capitalism. The decline of the commercial and industrial life in the cities and the economic ties between them, inevitably led to the decline in the dependence of individual provinces upon each other. This is the chief reason why bourgeois Spain has not succeeded to this day in eliminating the centrifugal tendencies of its historic provinces. The meagreness of the resources of national economy, and the feeling of indisposition in all parts of the country could only foster the separatist tendencies. Particularism appears in Spain with unusual force, especially alongside of neighbouring France, where the Great Revolution finally established the bourgeois nation, united and inseparable, over the old feudal provinces. 
   
4. How did the monarchy in Spain develop?  How was this development different than the rest of Europe making it far more similar to Asiatic despotism than European absolutism?  
   The Spanish monarchy was constituted under the conditions of the decline of the country and the decay of the ruling classes. If European absolutism generally could rise only thanks to the struggle of the strengthened cities against the old privileged estates, then the Spanish monarchy, like Russian czarism, drew its relative strength from the impotence of the old estates and the cities. In this lies its indubitable proximity to Asiatic despotism.
5. Alongside the monarchy, what other social grouping was of great importance in Spain?  Describe. 
   In the years before the Spanish Revolution, the clergy, in union with the monarchy, represented a centralized force. Catholicism was the state religion, and the clergy played a big role in the life of the country, being the firmest axis of reaction. The state spent many tens of millions of pesetas annually for the support of the clergy. The religious orders were extremely numerous, possessing great wealth and still greater influence. The number of monks and nuns was close to 70,000, equalling the number of high school students and exceeding double the number of college students. It is no wonder that under these conditions forty-five per cent of the population could neither read nor write. 
   
6. What was the condition of the Spanish peasantry in 1931?  
   The peasantry was subsequently burdened with the heaviest consequences of the decline of Spain. For centuries it led a miserable, and in many provinces, a famished existence. In 1931 it made up more than seventy per cent of the population, bearing on its back the main burden of the state structure. The lack of land, the lack of water, high rants, antiquated implements, primitive tilling of the soil, high taxes, the requisitions of the church, high prices of industrial products, a surplus of rural population, a great number of tramps, paupers, friars - that was the picture of the Spanish village. The condition of the peasantry had for a long time made it a participant in the numerous uprisings.

2. The Spanish Army In Politics

1. Why did the army assume such great significance in Spanish politics? 
   In a country of such particularism and separatism, the army of necessity assumed great significance as a centralized force. It not only became a prop of the monarchy but also the vehicle of dissatisfaction of all the sections of the ruling classes. 
   
2. Why was Spanish history essentially a succession of “pronunciamentos” (coups d'état)?  
   During the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century a continuous change of political regime occurred and within each one of them a continuous change of ministries. Not finding sufficiently stable support in any one of the propertied classes even though they were all in need of it, the Spanish monarchy more than once fell into dependence upon its own army. But the provincial dismemberment of Spain put its stamp on the character of the military plots. The petty rivalry of the juntas was only the external expression of the fact that the Spanish revolutions did not have a leading class. Precisely because of this the monarchy repeatedly triumphed over each new revolution. However, sometime after the triumph of order, the chronic crisis once more broke through with an acute revolt. Not one of the regimes that supplanted each other sank deep enough into the soil. Every one of them wore off quickly in the struggle with the difficulties growing out of the meagerness of the national income, which is incommensurate with the appetites and pretensions of the ruling classes. 
   
3. Was this "uninterrupted" succession of pronunciamentos an expression of the “Theory of the Permanent Revolution”? 
   No.  The constant instability that marked Spain’s political life was not an expression of Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Pevolution. Rather, the chronic convulsions were an expression of the senile disease of a nation thrown backward, with no revolutionary class to lead society out of the impasse.  This changed in the early 20^th Century, with the rise and development of the proletariat, in particular in the more industrialized regions of Catalunya and the Basque country.

3. The Spanish Proletariat and the New Revolution

1. Describe the dialectic of Spanish industrialization in relation to the war that Trotsky explains here. 
   As a neutral country during World War I, the Spanish economy “bloomed under the golden rain of the war”.  Coal mining, textile, the construction of hydro-electric stations, etc., were greatly developed. Industrial centers and regions sprouted all over the country.  But this turned into its opposite at the end of the war, when foreign demand dried up. Not only did the foreign markets disappear - the share of Spain in world commerce was even smaller than it was prior to the war (1.1% as against 1.2%).  The Primo de Rivera dictatorship was compelled, with the aid of the highest tariff walls in Europe, to defend its domestic market from the influx of foreign commodities. The high tariff led to high prices, which diminished the already low purchasing power of the people.  This crisis was expressed by chronic unemployment on the one hand, and the sharp outbursts of the class struggle on the other. 
   
2. What new possibilities did Spanish industrialization offer to the endless cycle of political transformation?  
   The industrial development raised to its feet and strengthened the proletariat. Out of a population of 23,000,000 -it would be considerably greater were it not for emigration - there were nearly 1,500,000 industrial, commercial and transportation workers. To them should be added an approximately equal number of agricultural workers. Social life in Spain was condemned to revolve in a vicious circle so long as there was no class capable of taking the solution of the revolutionary problem into its own hands. The appearance of the Spanish proletariat on the historic arena radically changed the situation and opened up new perspectives. In order to grasp this properly it must first be understood that the establishment of the economic dominance of the big bourgeoisie, and the growth of the political significance of the proletariat, definitely deprive the petty bourgeoisie of the possibility of occupying a leading position in the political life of the country. 
   
3. What had the role of the Spanish proletariat been in revolutionary upsurges prior to industrialization?  
   The Spanish workers had played a militant part in the revolutions of the nineteenth century: but always on the leading string of the bourgeoisie, always in the, second rank, as a subsidiary force. The independent revolutionary role of the workers did not emerge until the first quarter of the twentieth century.

4. The Programme of the Revolution

1. The slogan for a republic was the slogan of diverse sectors of Spanish society in the struggle against the monarchy.  But this slogan had a different meaning for the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie than it did for the toiling masses.  Explain.  
   For the “progressive” bourgeoisie, the struggle for a republic meant that they would benefit from the exploitatoin of the toiling classes instead of the monarchy. But for the proletariat and the peasantry, it was not merely a matter of replacing the king with a president. It was a matter of thoroughly purging the whole of society of fedual refuse.  It was a question of the social revolution. For example, the solving of the agrarian question was one of the most pressing needs of the masses.  But because of the belated and organically weak nature of the Spanish bourgeoisie, it was unable to solve this question.  It was tied by a thousand threads to the old feudal classes.  Feudal landlords had become capitalist speculators and vice versa. Therefore, to aim the weapon of the revolution against the remnants of the Spanish Middle Ages meant to aim it against the very roots of bourgeois rule.   This is the case throughout the ex-colonial world today, and is a vivid example of Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Revolution. (See the study guide on the Permanent Revolution for more detail). 
   
2. Describe the "revolutionary-democratic” programme. 
   This refers to the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, which had not yet been accomplished in Spain.  This includes breaking up the landed estates (land for the peasantry), establishing the nation-state, achieving national independence from foreign powers, establishing a democratic republic, separating the church from the state, etc. In the “classic” countries of capitalist development (Britain, France, the United States, etc.), these tasks were historically accomplished by the bourgeoisie. But in economically backwards countries, as we have seen above, these tasks could not be carried out by the bourgeoisie.  Lenin later changed the term to “national-democratic revolution”, to reflect the fact that in the epoch of imperialism, with the world already divided up between several super-powers, the bourgeoisie of the under-developed countries could no longer play the same historically progressive role as its class brothers did in the past.  While these tasks remain pending in many countries, only the proletariat can resolve them. 
   
3. More specifically, how does Trotsky argue the question of the oppressed Catalonian and Basque nationalities should be dealt with?  
   The separatist tendencies pose before the revolution the democratic task of national self-determination These tendencies were accentuated, to all appearances, during the period of the dictatorship. While the "separatism" of the Catalonian bourgeoisie is only a weapon in its play with the Madrid government against the Catalonian and Spanish people, the separatism of the workers and peasants is only the shell of their social rebellion. One must distinguish very rigidly between these two forms of separatism. However, precisely in order to draw the line between the nationally oppressed workers and peasants and their bourgeoisie, the proletarian vanguard must occupy the boldest and sincerest position in the question of national self-determination. The workers will fully and completely defend the right of the Catalonians and Basques to lead an independent state life, in the event that the majority of these nationalities have expressed themselves for complete separation. But this does not, of course, mean that the advanced workers will push the Catalonians and Basques on the road of secession. On the contrary, the economic unity of the country with an extensive autonomy of national districts, would represent great advantages for the workers and peasants from the viewpoint of economy and culture. 
   
4. In Trotsky’s opinion, might the Spanish revolution pass through a stage of parliamentarianism?  If so, what position should the revolutionary party take towards it (the Cortes)?  
   To oppose the course directed towards the dictatorship of the proletariat to the problems and slogans of revolutionary democracy (republic, agrarian overturn, the separation of church and state, the confiscation of church properties, national self-determination, revolutionary constituent assembly), would be the most sorry and lifeless doctrinarism. Before the masses can seize power, they must unite around the leading proletarian party. The struggle for democratic representation, as well as for participation in the Cortes, at one or another stage of the revolution, may play an important role. This does not at all exclude the tactic of a boycott of the fictitious Cortes of Berenguer, just as the Russian workers successfully boycotted Bulyqin's Duma in 1905 and brought about its collapse. The specific tactical question of the boycott has to be decided on the basis of the relation of forces at the given stage of the revolution. But even while boycotting Berenguer's Cortes, the advanced workers would have to set up against it the slogan of revolutionary constituent Cortes. We must relentlessly disclose the charlatan character of the slogan of the constituent Cortes in the mouth of the "Left", bourgeoisie, which in reality, wants a conciliationist Cortes.  
   
5. How should the slogan for a workers' and peasants' militia be framed at the given stage?  
   Trotsky advised that this slogan must be closely connected with the questions of defending the workers' and peasants' organizations, the agrarian revolution, the assuring of free elections, and the safeguarding of the people from reactionary pronunciamentos. 
   
6. Trotsky argues that a radical programme of social legislation should be drawn up that stays well within the bounds of bourgeois society, but do the demands end there?  
   Alongside these demands, demands of a transitional character must be advanced: the nationalization of the railroads, which are completely private; the nationalization of mineral resources; the nationalization of banks; workers’ control of industry; and finally, state regulation of industry. All these demands are bound up with the transition from a bourgeois to a proletarian regime, they prepare this transition in order afterwards, following the nationalization of banks and industry, to be dissolved into a system of measures of planned economy, preparing the socialist society. A programme combined in this manner, reflecting the contradictory construction of historic society, flows inevitably from the heterogeneity of the problems inherited from the past.

5. Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Social Democracy

1. What was the "main danger", as Trotsky refers to it, facing the movement in Spain? 
   The spontaneous nature and broad sweep of the struggle was one of its early strengths – but this can quickly turn into its opposite.  Despite the mighty upsurge of the struggle, the subjective factors of the revolution - the party, the level of organization of the masses, and the slogans were extraordinarily behind the tasks of the movement - and it was this backwardness that constituted the main danger.  Unfortunately, history showed Trotsky’s concerns to be well-founded, as the necessary reveolutionary leadership with a clear program was never consolidated, and the revolution was destroyed despite the heroic efforts of the masses. 
   
2. What does Trotsky cautiously warn of if the movement remains with out a leadership with any clear programme?  
   If the proletariat were not to feel in the process of the struggle of the coming months that its tasks and methods were becoming clearer to itself, that its ranks were becoming consolidated and strengthened, then a decomposition could set in its own ranks. The broad sections, aroused by the recent movement for the first time, would once more fall into passivity. In the vanguard, to the extent to which the ground slipped out from under its feet, moods of partisan acts and adventurism in general would begin to revive. In such an eventuality, neither the peasantry nor the city poor would find authoritative leadership. The awakened hopes would very quickly be converted into disappointment and exasperation. A condition would be created in Spain reproducing in a certain measure the situation in Italy after the autumn of 1920. The dictatorship of Prime de Rivera was not fascist but a typical Spanish dictatorship of a military clique supporting itself on certain parts of the wealthy classes.  But under the conditions pointed out above - the passivity and the hesitancy of the revolutionary party and the spontaneity of the movement of the masses - genuine fascism would find a base in Spain. The big bourgeoisie would conquer the unbalanced, disappointed, and despairing petty bourgeois masses, and would direct their revolt against the proletariat.  Again, unfortunately, Trotsky’s concerns were proven all-too-real with the eventual victory of Franco. 
   
3. What was the task that the Social Democrats set for themselves?  
   The principal task of the social democrats, who did not and could not, have an independent policy, was participation in a solid bourgeois government. 
   
4. How does anarcho-syndicalism "disarm" the proletariat? 
   Through their lack of a revolutionary program and an incomprehension of the role of the party, anarcho-syndicalisin disarms the proletariat. The anarchists "deny" politics until it seizes them by the throat: then they prepare the ground for the politics of the enemy class. 
   
5. What relation should there be between the communists and the anarcho-syndicalists? 
   The communists must help them abandon their anarchist prejudices: the best rank and file revolutionaries will be with the Marxists. Practical agreements with revolutionary syndicalists are inevitable in the course of the revolution. These agreements must be loyally fulfilled. But it would be truly fatal to introduce into these agreements elements of duplicity, of concealment, and deceit. Even in those days and hours when the communist workers have to fight side by side with the syndicalist workers, there must be no destruction of the division in principle, no concealment of differences, or any weakening of the criticism of the wrong principled position of the ally.

6. The Revolutionary Junta and the Party

1. What was on the order of the day, according to Trotsky? 
   Soviets. In order to enter the broad road of struggle for power, the proletariat needs an organization rising over all the present political, national, provincial and trade union divisions in the ranks of the proletariat and corresponding to the sweep of the present revolutionary struggle. Such an organization, democratically elected by the workers of the factories, mills, mines, commercial enterprises, railway and marine transport, by the proletarians of the city and village, can only be the Soviet (juntas in Spanish). 
   
2. Who do we presuppose will participate in these juntas (councils)? 
   The Communists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, and the non-party leaders of the strike struggles. 
   
3. In what way should practical questions be resolved, such as the time and method of elections? 
   Trotsky explained these should become the object of agreement, not only of all the Communist factions among themselves, but also with those syndicalists and socialists who consent to the creation of juntas. 
   
4. What about peasant juntas?  
   Trotsky explained that peasant juntas, as elected organs, could hardly appear, at any rate, not in any considerable number, prior to the seizure of power by the proletariat. He explained that in the preparatory period in the village, different forms of organization would develop sooner, based not upon elections, but upon individual selection: peasant unions, committees of the village poor, Communist nuclei, a labor union of agricultural workers, and so forth. But he stressd that the propagation of the slogan of peasant juntas, based on a revolutionary agrarian program, should already be put on the order of the day. 
   
5. When can soldiers' juntas be expected to develop?   What should be done until then? 
   The correct posing of the question of soldier juntas is very important in a revolutionary situation such as occurred in Spain. Because of the very character of military organization, Soviets of soldiers can appear only in the final period of the revolutionary crisis, when the state power loses control over the army. In the preparatory period, it is a matter of organizations of a more intimate character, groups of revolutionary soldiers, party nuclei, and in many cases, personal connections of workers with individual soldiers. 
   
6. What is necessary for the successful solution of these tasks? 
   Trotsky explained that for a successful solution of all the tasks of the socialist revolution, only three conditions are required: a party; once more a party; again a party. 
   
7. Trotsky counterposes the United Front of workers to the Stalinist "popular front" coalition of workers with the bourgeoisie (or rather its fictional "progressive" layers).  Why?  
   The tactic of the United Front of the workers stands in complete contrast to the Stalinist / Menshevik tactic of the Popular Front, which is a policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. In practice this means subordinating the interests of the working class to the interests of the exploiters. It was precisely this policy which led to the wrecking of the Spanish revolution, as well as many other revolutions over the last 70 years (for example in Nicaragua).

The Lessons of Spain :  The Last Warning ANSWERS

Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

1. What ideologies fought in the so-called republican camp?  Why were the bourgeois republican parties not counted amongst their ranks? 
   Menshevism, Bolshevism, and anarchism. The bourgeois republican parties were without either independent ideas or independent political significance and were able to maintain themselves only by climbing on the backs of the reformists and Anarchists. 
   
2. What group does Trotsky refer to as the "Mensheviks" of the Spanish Revolution?  Why does he make this claim? 
   The Socialists and Stalinists, who revived the Menshevik theory of “two stages” – “first bourgeois democracy, then in the distant future we can worry about socialism.” They also revived the discredited and deadly policy of class collaboration, of subordinating the working class’ parties and organizations to the bourgeois parties. For them, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a popular front with the “progressive” bourgeoisie was indispensable. In their view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy were not only premature but also fatal.  But it was precisely this approach that led to the defeat of the revolution.   
   
3. Why is the Menshevik view not just incorrect but, particularly in this case, fatal to the revolutionary movement? 
   Because fascism is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts. 
   
4. What did the theory of the permanent revolution have to say on the questions facing Spain? 
   The Theory of the Permanent Revolution, and the entire experience of the 20^th Century shows that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda. Moreover, during the very first stages of the revolution, the Spanish workers themselves posed in practice not merely democratic problems but also purely socialist ones. The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy signifies in practice not a defense of the democratic revolution but a repudiation of it.  
   
5. How could the peasantry have been turned into a bulwark against fascism?  What was the choice facing the Spanish proletariat here?  
   Only through an overturn in agrarian relations could the peasantry, the great mass of the population, have been transformed into a powerful bulwark against fascism. The landowners were intimately bound up with the commercial, industrial, and banking bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois intelligentsia that depends on them. The party of the proletariat was thus faced with a choice between going with the peasant masses or with the liberal bourgeoisie. There could be only one reason to include the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie in the same coalition at the same time: to help the bourgeoisie deceive the peasantry and thus isolate the workers. The agrarian revolution could have been accomplished only against the bourgeoisie, and therefore only through the masses of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no third, intermediate regime.  This is also the case in Venezuela and throughout Latin America and the rest of the ex-colonial world. 
   
6. What does Trotsky say is the difference between Russian Menshevism, decades before, and the doctrine of Spanish Menshevism in 1937?  
   Despite being false even at that time, the formula of “purely democratic revolution” had behind it immeasurably more arguments than in Spain in 1937 – or in Latin America today - due to the far more backwards economy and lower specific weight of the working class in czarist Russia in 1905. In Spain, however, the already historically discredited ideas of Menshevism were converted into the reactionary anti-labor policy of Stalinism. The doctrine of the Mensheviks, a caricature of Marxism, was converted into a caricature of itself.

 "Theory" of the Popular Front

1. What guided Stalinism during the Spanish Revolution (and throughout the 20^th Century)? 
   Stalinism was not guided by Marxist Theory, or any theory at all for that matter. It was guided by the narrow empirical interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. In practice, this meant abandoning, selling out, and betraying the proletarian revolution in one country after another. 
   
2. The Popular Front seems logical from the perspective of formal logic:  Stalinists + "progressive" bourgeoisie + anarchists = greater than the sum of the individual parts.  Why is this fundamentally incorrect when we approach the question from a dialectical,class-based perspective?  
   A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.

1. More specifically, why must a coalition with the bourgeoisie be ruled out at this point in history?  
   The bourgeoisie can no longer play a progressive, revolutionary role.  Its historical mission has long since been accomplished – it is not the young, dynamic, vivacious bourgeoisie which overthrew feudalism. It is now a dying and decaying class, grasping at straws to stay afloat, threatening to bring down the whole of humanity with it. The workers and peasants in Spain could have assured victory only by waging a struggle for their own emancipation. Under modern conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie is the surest recipe for defeat. The modern history of bourgeois society is filled with all sorts of Popular Fronts, i.e. the most diverse political combinations for the deception of the toilers. The Spanish experience was only a new and tragic link in this chain of crimes and betrayals.Alliance with the Bourgeoisie's Shadow

1. In reality, did the bourgeoisie even participate in any significant way in the "Popular Front"?  Why was this the case?  
   No.  Without any theory of "permanent revolution," the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures. That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azana, Companys, and the like:  political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of the political representatives of yesterdays in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in "republican" territory.

1. How then did they exert influence?  
   Through their allies - the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists. These political phantoms played a decisive role in the revolution by incarnating the principles of the "democratic revolution," that is, the inviolability of private property and the defense of bourgeois society despite their "radical" pronouncements.

The Stalinists in the Popular Front

1. Against what backdrop did the Spanish Popular Front take form?  Why was this situation most conducive to its formation? 
   As Trotsky explained: “The reasons of the rise of the Spanish Popular Front and its inner mechanics are perfectly clear. The task of the retired leaders of the left bourgeoisie consisted in checking the revolution of the masses and the regaining for themselves the lost confidence of the exploiters: “Why do you need Franco if we, the republicans, can do the same thing?” The interests of Azana and Companys fully coincided at this central point with the interests of Stalin, who needed gain the confidence of the French and British bourgeoisie by proving to them in action his ability to preserve “order” against “anarchy.” Stalin needed Azana and Companys as a cover before the workers: Stalin himself, of course, is for socialism, but one must take care not to repel the republican bourgeoisie! Azana and Companys needed Stalin as an experienced executioner, with the authority of a revolutionary. Without him, so insignificant a crew never would have dared to attack the workers.” 
   
2. Who did the Stalinists turn to in order to bolster the Popular Front?  Against whom did they direct their repression?  
   The Stalinists were in alliance with the extreme right, avowedly bourgeois wing of the Socialist Party. They directed their repressions against the left - the POUM, the Anarchists, the “left” Socialists - in other words, against the centrist groupings who reflected, even in a most remote degree, the pressure of the revolutionary masses. 
   
3. How is this an expression of the further degeneration of the Moscow bureaucracy?  
   It had degenerated form a form of “bureaucratic centrism”, characterized by hesitation and vacillation, into an openly counterrevolutionary force.   In search of reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, the Stalinist clique was capable of entering into alliances only with the most conservative groupings among the international labor aristocracy. This acted to fix definitively the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism on the international arena.

Counterrevolutionary Superiorities of Stalinism

1. How did the Spanish Communist Party, which was initially tiny, gain the reins of power, despite the greater number of anarchists and socialists? Why did other Menshevik-minded leaders turn to the Stalinists to take the necessary measures to make sure the revolution stayed within bourgeois, democratic bounds?  
   The standard answer to the question of how the Spanish Communist Party ended up gaining the reins of power is that it was simply a matter of a trade of power for weapons, which is a gross oversimplification. The real reason is because the Stalinists were the best suited and most experienced executioners of revolution, having all but drowned the Russian Revolution in rivers of blood.   The "purely democratic", that is, anti-socialist, program of the left bourgeoisie could be realized by no other measures save terror. This is because only means of checking a revolutionary movement of the masses is through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. The superiority of the Stalinist clique on this road consisted in its ability to apply instantly measures that were beyond the capacity of Azana, Companys, Negrin, and their left allies.

Stalin confirms in his own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution

1. In what way did Stalin confirm in his own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution?  
   Because as in Russia in 1917, the Spanish revolution once again demonstrated that it is impossible to defend democracy against the methods of fascist reaction. And conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution.

Role of the Anarchists

1. What does Trotsky mean when he says that the anarchists did not play an "independent" role in Spain?  
   Because all they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism. More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime. 
   
2. What was the fatal flaw of the anarchists?  
   They revealed a fatal lack of understanding of the laws of the revolution and its tasks by seeking to limit themselves to their own trade unions, that is, to organizations permeated with the routine of peaceful times, and by ignoring what went on outside the framework of the trade unions, among the masses, among the political parties, and in the government apparatus. Had the Anarchists been revolutionists, they would first of all have called for the creation of soviets, which unite the representatives of all the toilers of city and country, including the most oppressed strata, who never joined the trade unions.  
   
3. What does Trotsky suggest would have been a likely outcome of the formation of revolutionary, democratic soviets?  
   The revolutionary workers would have naturally occupied the dominant position in these soviets. The Stalinists would have remained an insignificant minority. The proletariat would have convinced itself of its own invincible strength. The apparatus of the bourgeois state would have hung suspended in the air. One strong blow would have sufficed to pulverize this apparatus. The socialist revolution would have received a powerful impetus.  
   
4. The anarchists did not take power several times when they could have and then bragged about it as if they wanted credit for this act.  Why is this a reactionary position?  
   Because to renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.  
   
5. In what ways were the anarchist's theories and methods exposed as useless and even dangerous from the point of view of the proletarian revolution?  
   Despite all their rhetoric, the Anarchists in Spain defended the bourgeois counterrevolution from the proletariat revolution. No sophistry will delete from the annals of history the fact that anarchism and Stalinism in the Spanish revolution were on one side of the barricades while the working masses with the revolutionary Marxists were on the other. Anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments – outright counterrevolutionary.

Role of the POUM

1. What grave mistakes did the POUM make?  
   Instead of mobilizing the masses against the reformist leaders, including the Anarchists, the POUM tried to convince these gentlemen of the superiorities of socialism over capitalism. In order not to quarrel with the Anarchist leaders, they did not form their own nuclei inside the CNT, and in general did not conduct any kind of work there. To avoid sharp conflicts, they did not carry on revolutionary work in the republican army. They built instead “their own” trade unions and “their own” militia, which guarded “their own” institutions or occupied “their own” section of the front. By isolating the revolutionary vanguard from the class, the POUM rendered the vanguard impotent and left the class without leadership. Politically, the POUM remained throughout far closer to the Popular Front, for whose left wing it provided the cover, than to Bolshevism.

The Problem of Arming

1. Why is the excuse of the Anarchists and Socialists for their capitulation to Stalinism based on their need for arms an unskillful lie? 
   Because by all their actions, they themselves acceded to Stalin’s demands and methods.  Long before the military intervention of Moscow, the Socialists and Anarchists did everything in their power to check the proletariat revolution. Stalin merely taught them how to carry this work to its conclusion. They became Stalin’s criminal accomplices only because they were his political cothinkers. 
   
2. What should they have done when the blackmail first occurred?  
   The only real way to combat that kind of blackmail would have been to deepen and extend the revolution through revolutionary expropriations and the establishment of soviets, to publicly expose the blackmail, and to force the Stalinist bureaucracy to choose openly between the socialist revolution and the Franco dictatorship. 
   
3. Trotsky also points to the fact that revolutions have always been able to succeed without foreign intervention.  What were other alternatives to reliance on Moscow?  
   The Spanish war industry could and should have been strengthened and developed by converting a number of civilian plants to war production. This work was not carried out only because Stalin and his Spanish allies equally feared the initiative of the workers' organizations. A strong war industry would have become a powerful instrument in the hands of the workers. The leaders of the Popular Front preferred to depend on Moscow. 

Conditions for Victory 

1. In this short but powerful “12 step guide to revolutionary war”, what specifically does Trotsky say about the need to link the revolutionary war up with the achievement of socialist measures?  The need for a government that represents the oppressed to wage the war?  Understanding the social composition of the enemy's ranks (and why is this important)?  Revolutionary foreign policy? 
   Trotsky explains that the fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the reestablishment of the old ("democratic") forms of exploitation, and that the entire population must be aware of this as well. Politics are determined by those classes and strata that participate in the struggle.  
    
   The revolutionary masses must have a state apparatus that directly and immediately expresses their will. Only the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies can act as such an apparatus.  
    
   The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the redivision of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers’ control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy. 
    
   The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with he tasks of the social revolution. Not only in propaganda but also in military operations it is necessary to take into account the social composition of the various military units of the enemy (bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, or as in Franco’s case, colonial slaves); and in choosing lines of operation, it is necessary to rigorously take into consideration the social structure of the corresponding territories (industrial regions, peasant regions, revolutionary or reactionary, regions of oppressed nationalities, etc.). In brief, revolutionary policy dominates strategy. 
    
   Foreign policy must have as its main objective the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the exploited peasants, and oppressed nationalities of the whole world.

 Stalin Guaranteed the Conditions of Defeat

1. Stalin took many of the “outward practices” of Bolshevism and attempted to artificially inject them into Spain.  What did he not understand and what was the result? 
   Stalin tried, it is true, to transfer to the soil of Spain, the outward practices of Bolshevism: the Politburo, commissars, cells, the GPU, etc. But he emptied these forms of their social content. He renounced the Bolshevik program and with it the soviets as the necessary form for the revolutionary initiative of the masses. He placed the technique of Bolshevism at the service of bourgeois property. In his bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, he imagined that “commissars” by themselves could guarantee victory. But the commissars of private property proved capable only of guaranteeing defeat. 
   
2. Was the Spanish Revolution defeated for a lack of effort by the working class? 
   Not at all.  There was no lack of heroism on the part of the masses or courage on the part of individual revolutionists. But the masses were left to their own resources while the revolutionists remained disunited, without a program, without a plan of action. By setting itself the task of rescuing the capitalist regime, the Popular Front doomed itself to military defeat. By turning Bolshevism on its head, Stalin succeeded completely in fulfilling the role of gravedigger of the revolution.

 "Civil War in the Rear"

1. Why was the moral repulsion shown by national-democratic philistines about not wanting to spark a "civil war in the rear" nothing but empty phrase mongering?  
   Because in republican Spain there was already an ongoing civil war: the war of the proprietors and exploiters against the workers and peasants. This uninterrupted war found expression in the arrests and murders of revolutionists, the crushing of the mass movement, the disarming of the workers, the arming of the bourgeois police, the abandoning of workers' detachments without arms and without help on the front, and finally, the artificial restriction of the development of war industry.

 The Outcome

1. Trotsky says that it is necessary for us to think out the problems of a revolution to its “ultimate concrete conclusions”.  He then leaves us with a warning about caution.  What is this warning, and why is an excess of caution so dangerous? 
   Trotsky explained that it is necessary to adjust policy to the basic laws of the revolution, i.e., to the movement of the embattled classes and not to the prejudices or fears of the superficial petty-bourgeois groups who call themselves “Popular” Fronts and every other kind of front. During revolution the line of least resistance is the line of greatest disaster. To fear “isolation” from the bourgeoisie is to incur isolation from the masses. Adaptation to the conservative prejudices of the labor aristocracy is betrayal of the workers and the revolution. An excess “caution” is the most baneful lack of caution. This is the chief lesson of the destruction of the most honest political organization in Spain, namely, the centrist POUM.

The Class, the Party, and the Leadership Questions

"Que Faire" Explains

1. What was Casanova's explanation for why the Spanish Revolution failed?  What is Que Faire’s explanation?  What is the tautology in their explanation? 
   Because the Communist Party conducted a false policy which was unfortunately followed by the revolutionary masses.  Que Faire avoids any real explanation, instead it resorts to empty phraseology about the need for “profound explanations” like the “condition of social forces”. Because of their lack of faith in the working class and total lack of understanding of the Marxist method, in the end, the only “explanation” they give is the alleged “immaturity of the masses”. This is a complete tautology in that they explain the idea of a "false policy of the masses" by the "immaturity" of the masses. But what is "immaturity" of the masses? Obviously, their predisposition to false policies.  It’s a logical closed circle that gets us nowhere closer to understanding the real reasons for the defeat of the Spanish revolution. 

The Sophistry of the Betrayers

1. How were the actions of the POUM in the case Trotsky describes in July of 1936 a direct example of how the masses can take a correct line, but the leadership can still manage to betray the movement? 
   The Spanish workers repelled the assault of the officers who had prepared their conspiracy under the protection of the People's Front. The masses improvised militias and created workers' committees, the strongholds of their future dictatorship. The leading organizations of the proletariat on the other hand helped the bourgeoisie to destroy these committees, to liquidate the assaults of the workers on private property and to subordinate the workers' militias to the command of the bourgeoisie, with the POUM moreover participating in the government and assuming direct responsibility for this work of the counter-revolution. In short, despite the correct political line chosen by the masses, the latter were unable to smash the coalition of socialists, Stalinists, anarchists and the POUM with the bourgeoisie.  Revolutionary processes cannot be simply explained by empty phrases such as “immaturity of the masses”. 
   
2. What does Que Faire's  argument assume as a necessary level of maturity for the masses to be "ready" to complete their historic task?  
   Que Faire takes as its starting point a concept of some absolute maturity, i.e. a perfect condition of the masses in which they do not require a correct leadership, and, more than that, are capable of conquering against their own leadership. There is not and there cannot be such maturity under capitalism.  So, essentially Que Faire has placed revolution off in a misty, “pie in the sky” future where there will be an ideal level of maturity of the masses and presumably streets paved in gold. 
   
3. If the workers showed such correct revolutionary instincts, then did they simply "subordinate" themselves to terrible leadership?  
   No, in reality there wasn't even a hint of subordination. The workers' line of march at all times cut a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force. The masses sought at all times to blast their way to the correct road but found no new leadership corresponding to the demands of the revolution. A revolution is a profoundly dynamic process, with the various stages shifting swiftly, with the leadership or various sections of the leadership quickly deserting to the side of the class enemy.  And yet Que Faire engages in a purely static discussion: why did the working class as a whole follow a bad leadership? 

The Dialectic Approach

1. Do "People get the government they deserve"?  Is the leadership of a class merely a reflection of that class?  If not, then what is leadership? 
   Not at all. History shows that one and the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and furthermore that the order of these governments doesn't at all proceed in one and the same direction: from despotism — to freedom, as was imagined by the evolutionist liberals.  
    
   Governments do not express the systematically growing "maturity" of a "people" but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces — alliances, wars and so on. To this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d'etats, counter-revolutions, etc., arise. 
    
   A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or the friction between the different layers within a given class. Having once arisen, the leadership invariably rises above its class and thereby becomes pre-disposed to the pressure and influence of other classes. The proletariat may "tolerate" for a long time a leadership that has already suffered a complete inner degeneration but has not as yet had the opportunity to express this degeneration amid great events.  
   
2. Describe the process by which the growing contradictions between leadership and class are revealed, and how the ensuing crisis and collapse of the old leadership should be utilized by the revolutionary party? 
   A great historic shock is necessary to reveal sharply the contradiction between the leadership and the class. The mightiest historical shocks are wars and revolutions. Precisely for this reason the working class is often caught unawares by war and revolution. But even in cases where the old leadership has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilizing the collapse of the old leading party.

How the Russian Workers Matured

1. Briefly, how do these three components interact in the lead-up to October:  Lenin – Bolsheviks – Russian Proletariat?  What does this say about the "maturity" or "immaturity" of the Russian masses?  Is maturity something that is static?  
   Of all the Bolsheviks at the beginning of 1917, a clear and thoroughly thought out revolutionary conception of the revolution was held only by Lenin (Trotsky was not yet formally a member at that time). The Russian cadres of the party were scattered and to a considerable degree bewildered. But the party had authority among the advanced workers. Lenin had great authority with the party cadres. Lenin's political conception corresponded to the actual development of the revolution and was reinforced by each new event. The party quickly aligned its policy to correspond with Lenin's conception, i.e. with the actual course of the revolution. 
    
   Thanks to this it met with firm support among tens of thousands of advanced workers. Within a few months, by basing itself upon the development of the revolution the party was able to convince the majority of the workers of the correctness of its slogans. This majority organized into Soviets was able in its turn to attract the soldiers and peasants. How can this dynamic, dialectic process be exhausted by a formula of the maturity or immaturity of the proletariat? During a revolution the consciousness of a class is the most dynamic process directly determining the course of the revolution.   
   
2. Why are simple explanations like "the relationship (or balance) of forces", without further explanation, just empty abstractions?  Why is the existence of a revolutionary party so vital? 
   To substitute for the living revolution an abstraction - the "relationship of forces" – is to ignore the revolution itself. This is because the development of a revolution consists precisely of this, that the relationship of forces keeps incessantly and rapidly changing under the impact of the changes in the consciousness of the proletariat, the attraction of backward layers to the advanced, the growing assurance of the class in its own strength.  
    
   A colossal factor in the maturity of the Russian proletariat in February or March 1917 was Lenin. He did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary tradition of the working class. For Lenin's slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres, even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the confidence of the cadres in the leadership, a confidence based on the entire experience of the past. To cancel these elements from one's calculations is simply to ignore the living revolution. The vital mainspring in this process is the party, just as the vital mainspring in the mechanism of the party is its leadership. The role and the responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal.

Relativity of "Maturity'

1. What important example does Trotsky give here of the relativity of this so-called maturity as a condition for victory? 
   The victory of the October revolution was a testimonial to the “maturity” of the proletariat. And yet a few years later the very same proletariat permitted the revolution to be strangled by a bureaucracy which rose from its ranks.  “Maturity” is therefore a very relative thing, not at all static, and subject to changing conditions. 

Auxiliary Role of the Peasants

1. Why is the claim that the "lack of independence" of the peasantry was a cause of the failure of the Spanish Revolution at least as abstract as saying it was due to the "lack of maturity" of the proletariat? 
   Because never has there been in capitalist society a peasantry with an independent revolutionary programme or a capacity for independent revolutionary initiative. The peasantry can play a very great role in the revolution, but only an auxiliary role. In many instances the Spanish peasants acted boldly and fought courageously. But to rouse the entire mass of the peasantry, the proletariat has to set an example of a decisive uprising against the bourgeoisie and inspire the peasants with faith in the possibility of victory.

The Role of Personality

1. History is a process of class struggle, but why then is the denial of the role of leadership, parties, and programs still incorrect? 
   Because classes do not bring their full weight to bear automatically and simultaneously. In the process of struggle the classes create various organs which play an important and independent role and are subject to deformations. This also provides the basis for the role of personalities in history. There are naturally great objective causes which created the autocratic rule of Hitler but only dull-witted pedants of “determinism” could deny today the enormous historic role of Hitler. The arrival of Lenin in Petrograd on April 3, 1917, turned the Bolshevik party in time and enabled the party to lead the revolution to victory. Some might say that had Lenin died abroad at the beginning of 1917, the October revolution would have taken place “just the same.” But that is not so. Lenin represented one of the living elements of the historical process. He personified the experience and the perspicacity of the most active section of the proletariat. His timely appearance on the arena of the revolution was necessary in order to mobilize the vanguard and provide it with an opportunity to rally the working class and the peasant masses. Political leadership in the crucial moments of historical turns can become just as decisive a factor as is the role of the chief command during the critical moments of war. History is not an automatic process. Otherwise, why leaders? Why parties? Why programmes? Why theoretical struggles?

Stalinism in Spain

1. Did the masses “leave their former leaders”? 
   Not entirely. The workers who were previously connected with specific organizations continued to cling to them, while they observed and checked. Workers in general do not easily break with the party that awakens them to conscious life. Moreover the existence of mutual protection within the People's Front lulled them: since everybody agreed, everything must be all right.  
   
2. Why did they “rally to the banner of the Communist Party”? 
   The new and fresh masses naturally turned to the Comintern as the party which had accomplished the only victorious proletarian revolution (in Russia) and which, it was hoped, was capable of assuring arms to Spain. Furthermore the Comintern was the most zealous champion of the idea of the People's Front; this inspired confidence among the inexperienced layers of workers. Within the People's Front the Comintern was the most zealous champion of the bourgeois character of the revolution: this inspired the confidence of the petty and in part the middle bourgeoisie. That is why the masses “rallied to the banner of the Communist Party.” 
   
3. What is necessary for a small party to become a large one in the course of a revolution? 
   During a revolution, i.e., when events move swiftly, a weak party can quickly grow into a mighty one provided it lucidly understands the course of the revolution and possesses staunch cadres that do not become intoxicated with phrases and are not terrorized by persecution. Only gradually, only on the basis of their own experience through several stages can the broad layers of the masses become convinced that a new leadership is firmer, more reliable, more loyal than the old. But such a party must be available prior to the revolution inasmuch as the process of educating the cadres requires a considerable period of time and the revolution does not afford this time.

Treachery of the POUM

1. Why did the POUM not become a mass party? 
   Because it could only do so by overthrowing the old parties, and it was possible to overthrow them only by an irreconcilable struggle, by a merciless exposure of their bourgeois character. Yet the POUM, while criticizing the old parties, subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. 
   
2. What mistakes of the POUM does Trotsky list here? 
   It participated in the “People’s” election bloc; entered the government which liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising.  In short, it subordinated the interests and class independence of the working class to the interests and parties of the bourgeoisie – the surest recipe for defeat in a revolutionary situation. 
   
3. While the centrist character of the POUM can certainly be explained, does that mean that this centrism was simply a reflection of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat or their "maturity"? 
   Not at all. Despite all the reasons given for the centrist character of the POUM, it does not alter the fact that the Catalonian masses were far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership.  It is not at all a matter of simply unloading the responsibility for “false policies” on the “immaturity” of the masses.

Responsibility of Leadership

1. How do programs, parties, and leaders, on the one hand, and the “conditions of class forces”, on the other, interact?  What comparison does Trotsky make here? 
   They interact in a complex, highly dialectical manner. It is true in the final analysis that the “condition of class forces” supplies the foundation for all other political factors; but just as the foundation of a building does not reduce the importance of walls, windows, doors, roofs, so the “condition of classes” does not invalidate the importance of parties, their strategy, their leadership. 
   
2. Trotsky says of Que Faire, “It must be said – to do them justice – that they do not themselves understand what they say. As a matter of fact, the demands they make upon the consciousness of the masses are utterly fantastic.”  What does he mean by this?  Based on what you have read, what demands do they make on the consciousness of the masses? 
   They demand that the masses more or less spontaneously and automatically reach some mystical form of “full maturity of revolutionary class consciousness”, at which point they will be able to lead the revolution to success.  This is a one-sided and undialectical understanding of the revolutionary process, which does not take into account the complex realities of the living class struggle and the experience of the entire 20^th Century: i.e., the decisive role played by the party and its leadership.

Repression of the Spanish Revolution

1. What role did the GPU play in this?  Who did they defend, and in whose interests did they act? 
   The Stalinists and their secret police, the GPU, were the fighting vanguard of the bourgeois-republican counter-revolution. They wanted to eliminate the need of Fascism by proving to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie that they were themselves capable of strangling the proletarian revolution under the banner of “democracy”.