[In the lead up to the 85th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, we share the following text, which we translated from Bilan – Journal of the Italian Communist Left in exile in Belgium and France.]
Lead, Shrapnel, Prison: This is how the Popular Front Responds to the Workers of Barcelona who Dare to Resist the Capitalist Offensive
Proletarians!
On July 19th, 1936, the proletarians of Barcelona, ARMED WITH BARE FISTS, repelled the attack of Franco’s battalions, WHO WERE ARMED TO THE TEETH.
On May 4th, 1937, these same proletarians, ARMED WITH GUNS, left many more dead on the pavement than in July, when they had to repel Franco, and it was the anti-fascist government—including the anarchists and with which the POUM was indirectly in solidarity—which unleashed the scourge of the repressive forces against the workers.
On July 19th, the proletarians of Barcelona were an invincible force. Their class struggle, freed from the bonds of the bourgeois state, reverberated through Franco’s regiments, breaking them up and awakening the class instinct in the soldiers: it was the strike that jammed Franco’s guns and cannons and shattered his offensive.
History records only fleeting intervals during which the proletariat can acquire complete autonomy from the capitalist state. A few days after July 19th, the Catalan proletariat reached a crossroads: either it entered the UPPER PHASE of its struggle to destroy the bourgeois state, or capitalism reconstituted its apparatus of domination. At this stage of the struggle, when class instinct is no longer enough and CONSCIOUSNESS becomes the decisive factor, the proletariat can only win if it has at its disposal the theoretical work patiently and relentlessly accumulated by its left-wing fractions, which can become parties under the explosion of events. If, today, the Spanish proletariat is experiencing such a dark tragedy, it is due to its immaturity in forging its class party: the brain which, ALONE, can enliven its activity.
In Catalonia, from July 19th onwards, the workers spontaneously created, on their class terrain, the autonomous organs of their struggle. But immediately the agonising dilemma arose: either to engage fully in the POLITICAL BATTLE for the total destruction of the capitalist state and thus complete the economic and military successes, or to leave the enemy’s oppressive machine standing and allow it to distort and liquidate the workers’ conquests.
Classes fight with the means imposed on them by the situation and the degree of social tension. Faced with a class fire, Capitalism cannot even think of resorting to the classic methods of legality. What threatens it is the INDEPENDENCE of the proletarian struggle, which conditions the next revolutionary stage towards the abolition of bourgeois domination. Capitalism must therefore mend the threads of its control over the exploited. These threads, which were previously the magistracy, the police, the prisons, become, in the extreme situation of Barcelona, the Militia Committees, the socialised industries, the unions managing essential sectors of the economy, the vigilance patrols, etc. Thus, in Spain, history once again poses the problem which, in Italy and Germany, was solved by the crushing of the proletariat: the workers keep for their class the instruments they create for themselves in the heat of the struggle as long as they turn them against the bourgeois State. The workers arm their executioner of tomorrow if, lacking the strength to bring down the enemy, they allow themselves to be drawn back into its domination.
The workers’ militia of July 19th is a proletarian organisation. The “proletarian militia” of the following week is a capitalist organisation adapted to the situation of the moment. And, to carry out its counter-revolutionary plan, the Bourgeoisie can call upon the Centrists (1) , the Socialists, the CNT, the FAI, the POUM, all of whom would have the workers believe that THE STATE CHANGES ITS NATURE WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO MANAGE IT CHANGE COLOUR. Concealed in the folds of a red flag, Capitalism patiently sharpens the sword of repression which, on May 4th, was prepared by all the forces which, on July 19th, had broken the class vertebrae of the Spanish proletariat.
The son of Noske and the Weimar Constitution was Hitler; the son of Giolitti and the “control of production” was Mussolini; the son of the Spanish anti-fascist front, of the “socialisations”, of the “proletarian” militias, was the carnage in Barcelona on May 4th, 1937.
THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT ALONE RESPONDED TO THE FALL OF TSARISM WITH OCTOBER 1917, BECAUSE IT ALONE SUCCEEDED IN BUILDING ITS CLASS PARTY THROUGH THE WORK OF THE LEFT-WING FRACTIONS.
Proletarians!
It was in the shadow of a Popular Front government that Franco was able to prepare his assault. It was through conciliation that Barrios tried, on July 19th, to form a single ministry capable of carrying out the overall programme of Spanish Capitalism, either under Franco’s leadership or under the mixed leadership of the Right and Left, fraternally united. But it was the workers’ revolt in Barcelona, Madrid and Asturias that forced Capitalism to split its Ministry into two, and to divide the functions between the Republican agent and the military agent, both linked by indissoluble class solidarity.
Where Franco had not managed to impose his immediate victory, Capitalism called on the workers to follow him to “beat fascism.” It was a bloody ambush that workers paid for with thousands of corpses, believing that, under the leadership of the Republican government, they could crush the legitimate son of Capitalism: Fascism. And they left for the hills of Aragon, the mountains of Guadarrama and Asturias, for the victory of the anti-fascist war.
Once again, as in 1914, it was through the slaughter of proletarians that history underlined in bloody strokes the irreducible opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Military fronts: a necessity imposed by the situation? No! A necessity for Capitalism in order to encircle and crush the workers! May 4th, 1937, provided the striking proof that, after July 19th, the proletariat had to fight Companys, Giral and Franco. The military fronts could only dig the grave of the workers because they represented the fronts of capitalism’s war against the proletariat. To this war, the Spanish proletarians—following the example of their Russian brothers in 1917—could only respond by developing revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie: republican and the “fascist”, and by transforming the capitalist war into a civil war with a view to the total destruction of the bourgeois state.
In its tragic isolation, the Italian left-wing fraction was supported only by the solidarity of the current of the Belgian League of Internationalist Communists (2), which had just founded the Belgian faction of the International Communist Left. These two currents alone sounded the alarm, at a time when people everywhere were proclaiming the need to safeguard the conquests of the Revolution, to defeat Franco in order to better defeat Caballero later on.
The latest events in Barcelona grimly confirm our initial thesis and show that it was with a cruelty equal to that of Franco that the Popular Front, supported by the anarchists and the POUM, threw itself against the insurgent workers of May 4th.
The vicissitudes of the military battles were all opportunities for the Republican Government to tighten its grip on the exploited. In the absence of a proletarian policy of revolutionary defeatism, the military successes and failures of the Republican army were merely stages in the bloody class defeat of the workers: in Badajoz, Irun, San Sebastian, the Popular Front Republic contributed to the concerted massacre of the proletariat while tightening the bonds of the Union Sacrée (Sacred Union), because, to win the anti-fascist war, you need a disciplined and centralised army. The resistance in Madrid, on the other hand, facilitated the offensive by the Popular Front, which was able to get rid of its former servant, the POUM, and thus prepare for the attack on May 4. The fall of Malaga rekindled the bloody threads of the Union Sacrée, while it was the military victory in Guadalajara that opened the period that ended with the shootings in Barcelona. In this atmosphere of intoxication from the war, the attack of May 4th could germinate and blossom.
At the same time, in every country, the war of extermination of Spanish capitalism was fuelling international bourgeois repression, and the fascist and “antifascist” deaths in Spain accompanied the assassinations in Moscow and the shootings in Clichy; and it was also on the bloody altar of antifascism that the traitors rallied the workers of Brussels around democratic capitalism during the elections of April 11th, 1937.
“Arms for Spain” was the central slogan that rang in the ears of the proletarians. And these weapons were fired on their brothers in Barcelona. Soviet Russia, in cooperating in the arming of the anti-fascist war, also provided the capitalist backbone for the recent carnage. On the orders of Stalin—who displayed his anti-communist rage on March 3rd—the PSUC in Catalonia took the initiative in the massacre.
Once again, as in 1914, the workers used their weapons to kill each other instead of using them to destroy the oppressive capitalist regime.
Proletarians!
On May 4th, 1937, the workers of Barcelona returned to the path they had taken on July 19th and from which capitalism had been able to eject them by relying on the multiple forces of the Popular Front. By launching strikes everywhere, even in the sectors presented as CONQUESTS OF THE REVOLUTION, they raised a front against the republican-fascist bloc of capitalism. And the Republican government responded as savagely as Franco had done in Badajoz and Irun. If the Salamanca government did not exploit this shaking of the Aragon front to launch an attack, it was because it felt that its left-wing accomplice was admirably fulfilling its role as executioner of the proletariat.
The Catalan proletariat, exhausted by ten months of war and class collaboration between the CNT, the FAI and the POUM, had just suffered a terrible defeat. But this defeat is also a stage in tomorrow’s victory, a moment in its emancipation, because it signals the death warrant of all the ideologies which had enabled capitalism to safeguard its domination, despite the gigantic upheaval of July 19th.
No, the proletarians who fell on May 4th cannot be claimed by any of the currents which, on July 19th, led them away from their class terrain and into the abyss of anti-fascism.
The fallen proletarians belong to the proletariat and to it alone. They represent the membranes of the brain of the world working class, of the class party of the communist revolution.
The workers of the whole world bow their heads before all the dead and raise their corpses against all traitors: those of yesterday, as well as those of today. The proletariat of the whole world salutes in Berneri one of its own, and his immolation to the anarchist ideal is yet another protest against a political school which collapsed during the events in Spain: it was under the direction of a government with anarchist participation that the police repeated on Berneri’s body the deeds of Mussolini on the body of Matteotti!
Proletarians!
The carnage in Barcelona is the harbinger of even bloodier repression of workers in Spain and around the world. But it is also a harbinger of the social storms that will sweep through the capitalist world tomorrow.
In just ten months, capitalism has exhausted the political resources it intended to devote to demolishing the proletariat, by obstructing the work the latter was doing to found its class party, the weapon of its emancipation, and of the construction of communist society. Centrism and anarchism, by joining social democracy, reached the end of their evolution in Spain, as was the case in 1914 when the war reduced the Second International to a corpse.
In Spain, capitalism has unleashed a battle of international significance: the battle between fascism and anti-fascism which, through the extreme use of arms, heralds an acute tension of class relations in the international arena.
The deaths in Barcelona clear the way for the building of a working-class party. All the political forces which called on the workers to fight for revolution by engaging them in a capitalist war have passed over to the other side of the barricade, and before the workers of the whole world opens the luminous horizon where the dead of Barcelona have written with their class blood already traced by the blood of the dead of 1914-18: THE WORKERS’ STRUGGLE IS PROLETARIAN ON THE SOLE CONDITION THAT IT IS DIRECTED AGAINST CAPITALISM AND ITS STATE; IT SERVES THE INTERESTS OF THE ENEMY IF IT IS NOT DIRECTED AGAINST IT, AT ALL TIMES, IN ALL TERRAINS, IN ALL THE PROLETARIAN ORGANISATIONS THAT THE SITUATION GIVES RISE TO.
The world proletariat will fight against capitalism even when the latter turns to repression against its former henchmen. It is the working class, and never its class enemy, which is responsible for settling accounts with those who have expressed a phase in its evolution, a moment in its struggle for emancipation from capitalist slavery.
The international battle that Spanish capitalism has waged against the proletariat opens a new international chapter in the life of the fractions of all countries. The world proletariat, which must continue to fight against the “builders” of artificial Internationals, knows that it can only found the proletarian Internationale in a global turbulence of class relations, which would clear the way to Communist Revolution, and only in this way. Confronted with the Spanish War, which signaled the outbreak of revolutionary upheaval in other countries, the world proletariat felt that the time had come to forge the first international links between the fractions of the communist left.
Proletarians of All Countries!
Your class is invincible; it is the driving force of historical evolution: the events in Spain are proof of this, because it is your class, ONLY your class, that is at stake in a struggle that is convulsing the whole world!
It is not defeat that can discourage you: from this defeat you will learn the lessons for your victory tomorrow!
On your class basis, you will reconstitute your class unity across borders, against all the mystifications of the capitalist enemy!
In Spain, to the attempts to compromise in order to establish the peace of capitalist exploitation, respond by fraternising with the exploited of both armies in a simultaneous struggle against capitalism!
Stand up for revolutionary struggle in every country!
Long live the proletarians of Barcelona who have turned another bloody page in the book of the World Revolution!
Forward to the formation of the International Bureau to promote the formation of left fractions in all countries!
Let us raise the banner of the Communist Revolution, which the fascist and anti-fascist executioners cannot prevent the defeated proletarians from passing on to their class heirs.
Let us be worthy of our fallen brothers!
Long live the World Communist Revolution!
The Belgian and Italian Fractions of the International Communist Left
Bilan no. 41 – May-June 1937.
(1) Stalinists
(2) Our namesake, to whom we pay homage.
League of Internationalist Communists 