The Programme of the Early Comintern, and the Transitional Programme (14/18)
The Spanish revolution begins in 1931. At this time, the Stalinists have entered the sectarian Third Period, following the debacle of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution. The Third Period ran from 1928 to 1934. As a result of Stalin's apparent left turn, the United Opposition dissolved, with Zinoviev and Kamenev returning to the Stalinist fold. They were to be repaid when Stalin once more made an abrupt turn to the Right. In 1935, they were executed as the Stalinist show trials got under way. In 1931, republican parties win majorities in elections, and almost immediately face opposition from the fascists (falangists).
The Republican government is a Popular Front comprising the Socialist Party, as largest party, and bourgeois-liberal, republicans. The Left Republican Manuel Azana became Prime Minister. As is the nature of such governments it acts to demobilise the workers' struggles themselves. A general strike in Seville, in July-August 1931, is crushed by military force by the republican government. As a result of the Stalinist Third Period, the Spanish Communist Party refuses to offer any support for the Republican government against the growing fascist threat. In August 1932, there is an unsuccessful Monarchist coup, and in the municipal elections, the following Spring, rightist forces show big gains. Another big change in 1933, is that, in Germany, Hindenberg makes Hitler Chancellor. Hitler begins to remove opposition to him in the Reichstag, organising the Reichstag fire as pretext to remove the Communists, and secure a majority. Germany joins with Japan, and Italy in forming an “anti-Comintern Alliance”.
This is the start of Stalin's switch back to the former position, as he now seeks to win support from the camp of “democratic imperialism”, i.e. Britain, France, and the US against Germany, Japan, and Italy. He seeks to do this by convincing the former that he has no intention or desire to ferment or support proletarian revolution anywhere in the world, but seeks to promote and defend bourgeois-democracy against the rising threat of fascism. In fact, Stalin also in secret, worked with the fascists to destroy his enemies to the Left. When Trotsky moved to Norway in 1935, the GPU worked with the fascists to break in and steal his archives, for example. But, this shift back to the Popular Front strategy was formalised by the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935.
In September 1933, Azana resigned as Prime Minister. The following month, the fascist Falange Espanola was founded in Madrid. In the November elections, the rightists and Monarchists won a majority in the Cortes, as the Anarchists of the CNT abstained. The following year, this right-wing government, which has been repealing the reforms previously introduced by the republicans also acts to crush a rising strike wave by both industrial and rural workers. It calls on Franco to crush the rising of Asturian miners. In the aftermath, 5,000 are killed in a vicious reprisal reminiscent of the aftermath of the Paris Commune, and 30,000 political prisoners are incarcerated. But, it is a Pyrrhic victory for the Right, as it provokes a new upsurge. Elections, in February 1936, bring the Popular Front back into government, and now the Spanish CP, is providing uncritical support to it. However, at this time, the Spanish CP is tiny. In 1931, it had only about 800 members, which had grown to around 10,000 by the beginning of 1936, but this number was overshadowed by the 40,000 members of the centrist POUM, let alone the 1.5 million members of the anarchist CNT. The Spanish Socialist Party, which was on the left of most of European social-democracy, had several hundred thousand members. The Trotskyists of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninist group were even more tiny. The Stalinists and bourgeoisie attempted to portray the centrists of the POUM as Trotskyists, but they were not. They were centrists wavering between reformist and revolutionary politics, that led them into providing support for the Popular Front, which led to disaster.
Understanding the disaster of the Popular Front strategy in Spain, the strategy that Paul now wants the Left in the LP to adopt, requires examining it from the perspective of the attitude of the centrists of the POUM, as well as the Anarchists, to the Popular Front government, i.e. the alliance between the Stalinists and bourgeois liberals, as well as from the perspective of the Stalinists to the bourgeois-democratic parties themselves. The former made a terrible mistake that Trotsky had warned them against, in a calculation that they could draw revolutionary forces to their side, and in overestimating their own social and political weight as against the CP, which, as stated above, was, in 1936, still small in comparison. By the end of the Civil War, the Stalinists had become by far the biggest element of the Popular Front, whilst those to its Left had been destroyed. They failed to take into account, as Trotsky pointed out, that the Spanish CP had the full might of the USSR standing behind it, and of its ability also to mobilise from amongst global Stalinist parties, reflected in the International Brigades. By contrast, the position of the Stalinists was not one based upon error, but one based upon being the active executioner of proletarian revolution, as it sought an alliance with democratic imperialism to fight Germany and Japan in particular. The Stalinists were more concerned to defeat their political opponents to their Left than defeating the fascists, as a number of writers described.
“To [the CP], winning the war meant winning it for the Communist Party and they were always ready to sacrifice military advantage to prevent a rival party on their own side from strengthening its position.”
(Gerald Brennan, The Spanish Labyrinth)
“[The infantry were far worse armed than an English public school Officers' Training Corps with worn out Mauser rifles which usually jammed after five shots; approximately one machine gun to fifty men; and one pistol or revolver to about thirty men. These weapons so necessary in trench warfare were not issued by the government and could be bought only illegally and with the greatest difficulty...
A government which sends boys of fifteen to the front with rifles forty years old, and keeps its biggest men and newest weapons in the rear, is manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists.”
(George Orwell, Controversy, August 1937)
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