In Spain, the bourgeois Republican government, as Orwell said, kept the best weapons for itself, so as to slap down the workers if need be, whilst the Spanish Stalinists were armed by the USSR and other Stalinists, and, as in China, with Stalin seeking to sabotage proletarian revolution, and court the support of “democratic imperialism”, they too were kept in their grasp, and used to suppress their revolutionary opponents.
“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 position of the Stalinists themselves was summed up by their Spanish representatives.
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 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)
As Trotsky points out, in relation to China, whilst Lenin, and The Theses On The National and Colonial Questions, does talk about the revolutionary forces organised by the communists, in any such struggle, making temporary, tactical alliances with the forces of bourgeois-democracy, against imperialism/fascism, this did not at all mean alliances with the bourgeois-democratic parties/governments, but with the petty-bourgeois masses themselves.
“Lenin, it is understood, recognized the necessity of a temporary alliance with the bourgeois-democratic movement, but he understood by this, of course, not an alliance with the bourgeois parties, duping and betraying the petty-bourgeois revolutionary democracy (the peasants and the small city folk), but an alliance with the organizations and groupings of the masses themselves – against the national bourgeoisie.” ( p 267)
Again, here, today's social-imperialists, many of whom, still ludicrously claim to be “Trotskyists”, in fact, push the same opportunist, class collaborationist line as that of Stalin/Bukharin, in China, Spain etc., but worse. They not only propose an alliance with bourgeois parties, but with bourgeois, indeed imperialist governments/states!
The consequence of that opportunism, in China, was that the KMT was able to organise its coup, and slaughter the workers. We've seen the same repeated time and again, in Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Iran, Iraq and on ad nauseum, with only the degree of slaughter, and pace of its execution different. Yet, the petty-bourgeois, nationalist “Left” never learns, and still insists that support for these nationalists is “Trotskyism”! In turn, in conditions where the social weight of the peasantry, in the CP, increased, that manifest as a turn towards guerrilla warfare, establishing a new trend, as Stalinism branched into Maoism/Guevarism, and so on, each as petty-bourgeois deviations, owing more to anarchism than to Marxism.
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