The Popular Front
The actions of the Spanish Stalinists were driven by the machinations in Moscow. In the Third Period, the Spanish Stalinists refused to adopt the strategy of the United Front to defend the Popular Front government against the increasing attacks of fascists. Such defence, as Trotsky set out in his Action Programme for France, does not at all mean having to water down or liquidate your own politics and organisation. On the contrary, the principle of march separately strike together means that you maintain your own organisation, and that, if anything, you intensify your criticism of the politics and tactics of the bourgeois parties and reformist workers' parties, illuminating their deficiency, even in confronting the fascist menace, whilst standing alongside, in action, all of the workers that continue to have illusions in those parties.
Marxists, of course, could never take up any such positions in a Popular Front government, precisely because of its bourgeois nature, and is why Trotsky argued against communists joining the Popular Front governments in Spain, France and elsewhere. We call on the reformists amongst the workers' parties to form Workers' Governments and to expel the capitalist elements, act against the interests of capital, and so on, not because we have any intention of joining such formations, but purely because we are not yet strong enough ourselves to take power. The concept of The Dictatorship of the Proletariat drawing the peasantry behind it, is one in which it is only where the leading role is taken by a revolutionary workers party that we can enter such a government.
“the participation of the proletariat in a government is also objectively most probable, and permissible in principle, only as a dominating and leading participation. One may, of course, describe such a government as the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, a dictatorship of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligentsia, or even a coalition government of the working class and the petty-bourgeoisie, but the question nevertheless remains: who is to wield the hegemony in the government itself, and through it in the country? And when we speak of a workers’ government, by this we reply that the hegemony should belong to the working class.”
(Trotsky – Results and Prospects”
The demand for a Workers Government, as Trotsky sets out in The Transitional Programme, is a demand aimed at the reformist and centrist workers parties, the social-democrats, Stalinists and anarchists, precisely in order to expose them for what they are.
“The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: “Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!” had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks.”
(Trotsky – The Transitional Programme)
The problem in all these cases is that, unlike the situation in 1917, there is no sizeable revolutionary party able to draw out these lessons, and to win over the majority of the working-class to its banner. That is the task that Marxists have to address. In Spain, the Stalinists maintained a pretence that they were making an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, via their representatives in parliament. The reality was that those bourgeois parliamentarians no longer had the support of that liberal bourgeoisie, which had already lined up with Franco. The parliamentary representatives of the bourgeoisie, or “shadow bourgeoisie”, as Trotsky was to call them, were there only because of the Popular Front, and because of the support given to them by the Stalinists and Socialists.
The approach of the Spanish Stalinists was dictated by the interests of the Moscow bureaucracy. The theory of building Socialism in One Country, developed by Stalin in 1924, meant that the USSR sought to undertake whatever international manoeuvres left it free from external interference. That meant continual diplomatic manoeuvres to make deals at one point with "democratic imperialism", at another with the fascists. In both cases, it meant the Stalinists positioning themselves as hangmen of the revolution. Everywhere, the national communist parties were subordinated to the interests of the USSR, in its dealings with these vying global powers. As the Stalinists sought to obtain the support of "democratic-imperialism", as they saw Japan threatening the USSR to the East, whilst fascist Germany and Italy threatened it from the West, and were all now joined into an “anti-Comintern Alliance”, so they had to assure "democratic-imperialism" that it had no intention of allowing the workers in those countries to engage in proletarian revolution, and would act to demobilise and limit their struggles.
In France, the Popular Front government demobilised the growing general strike wave of the French working-class, channelling it into safe parliamentary limits, contained within demands for bourgeois reforms inside capitalism. Once contained with some reforms and increases in nominal wages, even those reforms were reversed. In two years, nominal wages rose 48%, but inflation rose by 46% even on the rigged price indices used by capitalist governments. The other labour reforms such as recognition of shop stewards, right to strike, to collective bargaining, were simple bourgeois-democratic rights that were long overdue, but in any case irrelevant when, on the ground workers were engaged in a massive strike wave, were already bargaining collectively and not waiting for employer approval as to who they could elect as shop stewards!
But, in any case, as even these reforms contradicted the interests of French capital, as it began its rearmament programme, Blum abandoned them! The determining element of Blum's government was that rearmament, which itself also failed in its goal, as France was defeated quickly, in 1940, by Germany, leading to the victory of fascism, both in the form of the German occupation and the Vichy government. The French Communist Party played the same role in May 1968, when, with a General Strike, and workers occupying large numbers of workplaces and operating them under workers' control, it used its support amongst the workers to advise them to end the occupations, and settle for bourgeois elections. Having demobilised the workers' direct action, DeGaulle knew that he had the upper hand, and won the subsequent elections, offering merely relatively minor reforms to workers and students, well contained within the limits of capitalism.
It was this diplomatic turn of the Moscow bureaucracy that led to the reverse from the madness of the Third Period, and adoption of the Popular Front strategy. To show to the forces of "democratic imperialism" its good faith, the Stalinists made clear that they had no desire for revolution in Spain.
Jesus Hernandes, Editor of the CP's daily newspaper, El Mundo, wrote on August 6th 1936,
“It is absolutely false that the present workers' movement has for its object the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship after the war has terminated. It cannot be said that we have a social motive for our participation in the war. We communists are the first to repudiate this supposition. We are motivated exclusively by a desire to defend the democratic republic.”
As with the French CP in 1968, the Spanish CP also fleshed out the words of Hernandes, by also standing against the direct action of the workers as they established their own factory committees and engaged in occupations. Jose Diaz, speaking in March 1937, to the CP Central Committee opposed this direct action saying,
“At the present time when there is a government of the Popular Front, in which all the forces engaged in the fight against fascism are represented, such things are not only not desirable, but absolutely impermissible.”
(Communist International, May 1937)
But, the truth was that, just as the representatives of the bourgeois parties in parliament represented only a shadow bourgeoisie, so that the Stalinists, Socialists and other workers' parties had liquidated their own politics only in order to seek unity with a ghost, and only acted to provide Left cover for those bourgeois representatives who, without the Popular Front, would not have been able to retain their positions, so too the attempts by Moscow to build an international Popular Front with the forces of "democratic imperialism" was also chasing after a mirage. In fact, as Trotsky was to point out in relation to Germany itself, this policy of the Comintern hung the German Communists, because Hitler could point to the alliance of Stalin with that democratic imperialism, and use it as a means to rally the German masses around his nationalistic rhetoric and banner.
Trotsky wrote,
"Fascism is a form of despair in the petit-bourgeois masses, who carry away with them over the precipice a part of the proletariat as well. Despair as is known, takes hold when all roads of salvation are cut off. The triple bankruptcy of democracy, Social Democracy and the Comintern was the prerequisite for fascism. All three have tied their fate to the fate of imperialism. All three bring nothing to the masses but despair and by this assure the triumph of fascism...
The democracies of the Versailles Entente helped the victory of Hitler by their vile oppression of defeated Germany. Now the lackeys of democratic imperialism of the Second and Third Internationals are helping with all their might the further strengthening of Hitler’s regime. Really, what would a military bloc of imperialist democracies against Hitler mean? A new edition of the Versailles chains, even more heavy, bloody and intolerable. Naturally, not a single German worker wants this. To throw off Hitler by revolution is one thing; to strangle Germany by an imperialist war is quite another. The howling of the “pacifist” jackals of democratic imperialism is therefore the best accompaniment to Hitler’s speeches. “You see,” he says to the German people, “even socialists and Communists of all enemy countries support their army and their diplomacy; if you will not rally around me, your leader, you are threatened with doom!” Stalin, the lackey of democratic imperialism, and all the lackeys of Stalin – Jouhaux, Toledano, and Company – are the best aides in deceiving, lulling, and intimidating the German workers."
(“Phrases and Reality” in Writings 1938-9)
What is more, Stalin got nothing from "democratic imperialism" from this servility. The Popular Front governments refused to arm the workers and peasants to defend themselves, be it in Spain or France, fearful that the workers and peasants might use those weapons to pursue their own agenda. The same disastrous approach was taken by the Allende Popular Front government in Chile, in the 1970's, leading to the same catastrophe, as Pinochet launched his coup.
Yet, all the time, the German and Italian fascist regimes were shipping the latest arms to Franco and the Falangists, who already had the benefit of superior arms, as well as use of ships and aeroplanes. At the very least, you might have expected that the forces of "democratic imperialism" would do the same for a democratically elected republican government, as recognition of Stalin's obeisance to them. But, no, the governments of the "democratic imperialists" insisted on refusing to sell arms to the Spanish government, instead implementing a policy of “non-interference”. And, who was it that proposed this policy? None other than the socialist, Leon Blum, head of the French Popular Front, whose existence itself depended upon the support of the French Stalinists!
The approach of the Stalinists to the Popular Front was not an error, but a conscious betrayal of the working-class and proletarian revolution. It is the inevitable consequence of the adoption of the Theory of Socialism in One Country, which meant, in practice, the sabotage of proletarian revolution everywhere else, in order to seek the support of "democratic imperialism", or at least to dissuade it from intervention in the USSR. The Stalinists, as in Spain, also sought to avoid proletarian revolution, because they feared that, in practice, what this meant was that forces to their Left would also overtake them. In particular, in the 1930's, they feared that it would be the Trotskyists that would gain in power and influence, which would undermine the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow itself.
That the Spanish Socialist Party should align itself with the bourgeoisie was no surprise, because, even though verbally, it stood on the Left of European social-democracy, in practice, it continued to act as with all social-democratic parties, as a defender of bourgeois property and interests. Social democracy is the ideology of the middle-class which simply transfers its role in society as a mediating, and managerial layer into an ideology, which seeks simply to operate the mechanism of capitalism and bourgeois society more efficiently, and, thereby to conciliate the interests of workers and capital within that framework. But, the actions of the other workers' parties such as the centrist POUM, and the Anarchists are different, they represent not a simple betrayal of the working-class, as in the case of the Stalinists and Socialists, but an error. It is an error, nevertheless, that flows from their own inadequate petty-bourgeois politics.
Those petty-bourgeois politics have also been described in the series I have been writing on Economic Romanticism, and also, thereby, the arguments put forward today by the “anti-imperialists”, who also put forward similar Popular Frontist strategies that subordinate workers to the nationalist bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie. In the age of colonialism, Spain was a major colonial power. It, at least, equalled England in that respect, with large colonies in the Americas, as well as in Asia and Africa. But, emphasising the difference between colonialism, based upon mercantilism - the power of merchant and financial capital in alliance with feudal landed property - as against imperialism, based on industrial capital, by the 19th century, Spain's power had waned. In the 1930's, Spain was one of the less developed capitalist economies in Europe. This fact was used by the POUMists to argue that this meant that the Spanish bourgeoisie was not like the bourgeoisie in other developed European countries, and that the situation in Spain was more akin to that of a colonial country engaged in an anti-colonial struggle. This is the same argument that the “anti-imperialists” use today to justify their own popular front type alliances with the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements. It is completely false.
Trotsky's rejection of the POUM's argument that the special conditions justified a bloc with bourgeois parties is set out in Trotsky's article “The Treachery of the POUM”, written in January 1936. In it can be found Trotsky's condemnation of the same kinds of petty-bourgeois demands that had been put forward by the Narodniks and criticised by Lenin.
“How ironical is the name “Marxist Unity” ... with the bourgeoisie. The Spanish “Left Communists” (Andres Nin, Juan Andrade and others) have more than once tried to parry our criticism of their collaborationist policies by citing our lack of understanding of the “special conditions” in Spain. This is the customary argument put to use by all opportunists – for the first duty of a genuine proletarian revolutionist lies in translating the special conditions of his country into the international language of Marxism, which is accessible even beyond the confines of one’s own country. But today there is no need of these theoretical arguments. The Spanish bloc of the tops of the working class with the left bourgeoisie does not include in it anything “national,” for it does not differ in the least from the “People’s Front” in France, Czechoslovakia, Brazil or China. The “Party of Marxist Unity” is merely slavishly conducting the same policy that the Seventh Congress of the Comintern foisted upon all its sections, absolutely independently of their “national peculiarities.” The real difference in the Spanish policy this time lies only in the fact that a section of the London International has also adhered officially to the bloc with the bourgeoisie. So much the worse for it. As far as we are concerned we prefer clarity. In Spain, genuine revolutionists will no doubt be found who will mercilessly expose the betrayal of Maurin, Nin, Andrade and Co., and lay the foundation for the Spanish section of the Fourth International!”
Trotsky points out that the bourgeoisie in Spain, or in colonial countries, is not below the position of the bourgeoisie in Russia, and yet the Bolsheviks saw no basis for an alliance with that bourgeoisie, quite the contrary. But, even were it the case that the bourgeoisie in Spain or some other colonial or less developed country were below that of the Russian bourgeoisie in 1917, there is no basis for any such alliance, Trotsky says, because as Lenin set out in the Theses On The National and Colonial Questions,
“the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.”
In other words, here, Lenin sets out the basic principle of the United Front, as against the Popular Front. The communists wage a determined struggle against the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois movements that attempt to portray themselves as something they are not, in order to garner the support of the proletariat. They forge temporary unity in revolutionary action, but the communists refuse to merge with these other forces, or, thereby to subordinate their politics or organisation, which is the hallmark of the Popular Front.
Not even such unity in action is possible unless the communists are able to bring together and train the proletariat and peasantry for such revolutionary activity, and that revolutionary activity is, from the start, stated clearly as being aimed not only against any colonial power, but also against the national bourgeois-democratic movements that ultimately act as the local agent of that colonial power, in opposition to the revolutionary proletariat. That is in complete contrast to the policy of the Popular Front, which is itself based upon the Stalinist/Menshevist stagist theory, in which the proletariat is required to subordinate its own revolutionary ambitions to those of the bourgeois-democratic or national revolution, having to postpone its own struggle to some unknown future date.
The other problem with the position of the POUM and the Anarchists in relation to the Popular Front was their failure to properly calculate the strength of their own forces as against the strength of their opponents, in particular the Stalinists. They based themselves on formal logic, rather than the dialectic, in determining how those current relations of forces were likely to change in the course of the war. In particular, as Trotsky says, they failed to take into account the fact that, behind the Spanish Stalinists stood the USSR, as well as the Communist parties of France, Britain, Italy and even the United States. Money and weapons could be shipped to the Spanish Stalinists, bypassing the republican government, and cutting off such supplies to the fighters of the other workers' parties, who, as Orwell's account demonstrates, were woefully ill quipped. The Spanish Stalinists had all of the power of the Communist International for propaganda, which daily spread lies about the other workers parties.
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