Anarchism fails its grand test

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S celona fought valiantly to defend their revolution eventy-five years ago this May, the workers of Baragainst an attempt by a Popular Front government of capitalist, Stalinist, and anarchist parties to crush it. In the end the workers lost, and a massive wave of repression was launched to pave the way for Spain’s ruling class to recover the properties that had been seized by the country’s workers and peasants.

This anniversary would be worth noting for no other reason than the heroism of millions of Spanish fighters against capitalism and fascism, and for the example they set of a potentially successful overthrow of the system—much as we remember the Paris Commune of 1871 even though it too went down to defeat.

But we also need to draw from the Barcelona battles, and from events surrounding them, the correct lessons for revolutionary strategy today. With mass demonstrations and general strikes occurring one after another throughout the Middle East and Europe (including Spain), and an Occupy movement sweeping the U.S.—but without a successful overthrow of capitalism yet occurring in any one of these countries— the lessons of Spain are more salient than ever.

This is particularly so because of the advice of anarchists and academics to follow some of the same policies that doomed the Spanish Revolution: recommendations to avoid taking power (e.g. John Holloway, Marina Sitrin, the Zapatistas, etc.), to not seek to build a revolutionary party, to avoid coordinating and centralizing actions, for “diversity of tactics,” “horizontalism” and “autonomy”—in short, the classic anarchist menu for avoiding strategic and programmatic responsibility.

The Spanish Revolution also provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of centrist parties, i.e., those trying to straddle the gap between reform and revolution. This is becoming more relevant once again as revolutionaries and ex-revolutionaries try to decide how to relate to new parties that attempt to regroup a broad array of political forces.

In this article we focus on the betrayals and mistakes of the anarchists, i.e., the leadership of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, or CNT) and Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation, or FAI) and the centrists, i.e. the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM). Because it is so well documented elsewhere—and 6 Socialist Action may 2012 much less of an immediate danger in today’s movements—we address the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinists (the Communist Party) in Spain mostly through the prism of how the CNT/FAI’s and POUM’s lack of strategy hamstrung the fight against Stalinism. Spain under dual power The largest forces in the Spanish labor movement were the Socialist-dominated Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, General Union of Workers) and the anarchist-led CNT (led by the FAI). In Catalonia, the UGT was soon to be led by the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, or PSUC), the result of a merger between the Socialist and Communist Parties.

The strategic and ideological weaknesses of the anarchists were manifest in their role in the upsurge that blossomed in the first years of the Republic. The militant actions that their members led in various parts of the country were undertaken without coordination, without any attempt to fit them into a strategy to unify and politicize the swelling revolt of a radicalizing proletariat and peasantry. Instead, this militancy was frittered away in isolated, easily repressed incidents. And these disorganized actions were rationalized theoretically by the CNT’s insistence on “federalism,” i.e. the inviolable right of each unit to make its own decisions.

An anarchist official quoted in Burnett Bolloten’s “The Spanish Civil War” stated: “Within the CNT everyone had his own opinion, everyone acted according to his own judgment, the leaders were ceaselessly criticized and challenged, the autonomy of the regional federations was inviolable, just as the autonomy of the local federations and unions was inviolable within the regional federations. To get a decision accepted ... a militant had to exhaust himself making speeches, personal contacts, moving from place to place. Among the libertarians the ballot was repugnant; the unanimity they sought required interminable debates.” Such was the leadership nominally at the head of the radicalizing masses in Catalonia when the fascist rebellion broke out.

When Gen. Francisco Franco’s troops revolted in July 1936, the bourgeois government froze in paralysis. But the masses of workers and peasants moved immediately to organize neighborhood and workplace armed units to put down the fascist revolt and to weed out their collaborators in the cities and rural areas where the fascists had been put down. The fascists gained control only in those parts of the country where the Institutions: The Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias.” Oliver describes a CNT delegation visiting Luis Companys, head of the Generalidad, the Catalonian wing of the Popular Front government. (Companys belonged to La Esquarra Catalana, the Catalan Left, a bourgeois nationalist party.) Companys told his visitors: “You’ve won. Everything is in your hands. If you do not want or need me as president of Catalonia, tell me now, so that I can become another soldier in the war against fascism.

At the meeting of the Catalan Regional Committee of the CNT, anarchist leader (and later Popular Front government member) Federica Montseny rejected the idea of the new grassroots committees taking power “because the installation of an anarchist dictatorship, because it was a dictatorship, could never be anarchist.” The CNT voted with only one dissent its support of Companys’ government.

By early 1937, the state being propped up by the Anarchists was confident that through the collaboration of the CNT they had sufficiently weakened the position of the revolutionary workers and peasants to try to decisively reverse the revolution’s momentum. Barcelona was chosen as the battleground.

The May Days in Barcelona Felix Morrow in his article “The War in Spain” (New International, February 1938), neatly summarizes the context, the unfolding, and the theoretical conclusions to be drawn from the May Days:

“The workers and peasants had signified in the very first days of the civil war their desire to end capitalism by their seizures of the land and factories. Only naked counter-revolutionary terrorism could hurl back the masses: and the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc openly took the road of counter-revolution. And the Barcelona proletariat rose to halt the counter-revolution—and those whom they looked to for leadership joined the counter-revolution in tearing down the barricades.

“On the barricades anarchist workers tore up copies of the anarchist press appealing to them to leave the streets, and shook their fists and guns at the loud speakers from which came the voice of their leaders exhorting them to disperse. The CNT leaders did not hesitate to denounce the left wing anarchists—the Friends of Durruti—as agents provocateurs. Camillo Berneri, spiritual head of Italian anarchism, died under the stiletto points of Stalinist assassins while his erstwhile friends, Montseny, Garcia Oliver, etc., were handing over the Barcelona proletariat to his executioners.

“The government representatives had promised (continued on page 7)

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(continued from page 6) that if CNT troops did not come from the front, the government would not bring troops into Barcelona; the government broke its promise; and the CNT leaders … suppressed the news that government troops were on the way. The government violated its agreement with the CNT for the withdrawal of both sides from the Telephone Building; so the CNT leaders suppressed the news that the government had occupied the building! While one terrible event after another piled up to reveal that the government was utilizing the peace pact with the CNT leaders to carry through its counter-revolutionary repressions, the CNT leaders occupied themselves with issuing manifestos to calm the masses. And when the government had broken all its promises, the CNT leaders came fawningly to ask more promises, none of which was ever kept… “Hitherto, in the history of the working class, anarchism has never been tested on a grand scale. Now, leading great masses, it has received a definitive test.”

Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué, in “The ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona,” describes how the anarchists and their centrist followers snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. He quotes a POUM leader: “‘No one denies that the situation was favourable for liquidating the undertaking and the forces of the PSUC. However, despite the enthusiasm of its youth section, the CNT maintained its waiting stance of ‘protestation,’ and the POUM did not want to be isolated from it.’”

We can hear the same story, of retreat counseled and defeat rationalized, in the words of CNT public relations chief Augustin Souchy in his “The Tragic Week in May”: “The CNT acted loyally toward the anti-fascist cause when the new government was formed. It wanted to stop fighting among the political parties. … By eleven o’clock in the morning [of May 3] the delegates of the CNT unions were holding a special meeting where they agreed to do everything possible to re-establish calm. A special committee was elected to negotiate with the government for a solution to the conflict.

“The CNT issued appeals to both sides: ‘Workers of the CNT and the UGT! Remember the road we have travelled together… Put down your weapons! Embrace as brothers! ... We must work to beat fascism!’”

Souchy admits that “the anarchists could also have called in their columns from the front, as well as armed forces from other parts of Catalonia, and there is no doubt that they could have been victorious within 24 hours. But they did not want to break up the anti-fascist front.”

The POUM tails the CNT And what of the POUM? They were the first targets of the Stalinist-led repression. But tragically their own policy had disarmed the workers, both theoretically and literally, setting the stage for that repression.

Felix Morrow, in his “Proposed Solutions to the Spanish Crisis” (Socialist Appeal, January 1937), wrote: “The POUM’s entry into the Peoples Front Government set up on September 26th left no revolutionary force to continue the campaign for a revolutionary war against fascism. … The POUM could not both be in the government and build independent workers’ organs of action, nor could the POUM carry on a consistent campaign for the revolutionary slogans—land to the peasants, workers control of production, freedom for Morocco, etc. etc.—which were completely alien to the POUM-endorsed cabinet.”

The POUM shared the CNT’s lack of shame in admitting the opportunities it had voluntarily foregone. Thus POUM leader Andrés Nin, in “The May Days in Barcelona, May 1937,” could write: “Our party has repeatedly insisted … on the need to provide a political solution to the problems which have arisen during the war and revolution. We even declared that the working class could take power without the need to resort to armed insurrection: it would be enough to bring its enormous influence into play for the relationship of forces to decide in its favour, to achieve a workers’ and peasants’ government without violence of any kind [!]. Failure to confront the problem in these terms, on the political plane, would sooner or later produce a violent explosion, of the accumulated anger of the working class and, as a result, a movement that would be spontaneous, chaotic and lacking in immediate perspectives.”

In fact, the POUM’s policies facilitated that very end, i.e. “a violent explosion … lacking in immediate perspectives”—but one in which the Stalinists handed power back to the ruling class and launched a murderous repression against the POUM and CNT.

Yet Nin, like Souchy, admits workers could have seized power: “… it would have been possible [for the workers] to take power. But our party, as a minority force within the workers’ movement, could not take the responsibility of issuing such a slogan given the attitude of the leaders of the CNT. ... In these circumstances, to call on the workers to take power would inevitably have been to launch a putsch which would have had fatal consequences for the proletariat … we advised the workers to abandon the fight and return to work.” Roots of betrayals in anarchist theory In their March 1938 article “Anarchist Tactics in Spain,” the editors of The New International, the monthly journal of the U.S. Trotskyist movement, uncovered the source of the seemingly mysterious flipflop of the anarchists vis-à-vis their relationship to the state: “Anarchism … is based upon a petty bourgeois idealistic conception of the state. The bourgeoisie admonishes the workers: Don’t take power, it is corrupting by its very nature. The anarchists echo this warning. The state is not a class organ to them; it is, per se, Evil Incarnate, regardless of what class is in power. … “It is not surprising, then, that when the concrete ‘emergencies’ of real life jerk the anarchists out of the blue sky of abstraction; when, as a mass movement imminently imperiled by fascism, they find themselves forced to employ all the weapons of power they can lay hands on, including the most concentrated weapon of power, namely, the machinery of state— they do not try to create such a political weapon in a new (proletarian) form but simply fall back upon it in its existing (bourgeois) form.”

What of the left-anarchist FOD? Did they draw the right conclusions from their leaders’ betrayals? One key source is George Fontenis, “The revolutionary message of the Friends of Durruti” (dedicated to Buenaventura Durruti, the Spanish anarchist leader who was killed in 1936). In a preface to this work, Daniel Guerin describes the politics to which the FOD was reacting: “the infantile idyll of a jumble of ‘free communes,’ at the heart of the Spanish CNT before 1936. ... This soft dream left Spanish anarcho-syndicalism extremely ill-prepared for the harsh realities of revolution and civil war on the eve of Franco’s putsch.”

Fontenis too traces the roots of the FOD to the weaknesses of the CNT and the FAI. He describes an internal opposition that opposed “the superficial analysis, the simplistic and catastrophic conception of revolution, the cult of violence for its own sake, which seemed to them to be characteristic of the militants of the FAI… “Certainly, it was far from being true that all the members of the FAI were hooligans. However, it is true that adventurist revolutionary attempts had been attempted and were to be attempted in the period that followed, at the instigation, or with the support of some groups of the FAI. These attempts were doomed to failure and resulted in fierce repression.”

Their later entry into a bourgeois government is traced by Fontenis to similar flaws: “We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the Spanish anarchist movement, while it was predominantly working class, was not immune from some of the weaknesses of the international anarchist movement. ... Bourgeois idealism, ill(Above) Militia members pose on a home-made tank in Barcelona, 1937.

(Left) Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti.

defined humanism, the substitution of hollow philosophical talks for solid political reflection, individualism and dilettantism were common especially among the intellectuals. … The leaders, under the cover of the magic phrases, federalism and autonomy, hung on to power.”

The FOD sought, in the midst of battle and with inadequate preparation and cadres, to rectify as best they could these defects and to provide an alternative leadership. On the question of the need for revolutionary theory (against which today’s anarchists counterpose the notion that every idea is as good as any other, that we “make the road by walking”— i.e., we discover what we need to do as we go along), the FOD wrote in their newspaper: “Revolutions cannot succeed if they have no guiding lights, no immediate objectives. ... Although it had the strength, the CNT did not know how to mould and shape the activity that arose spontaneously in the street.”

Fontenis reminds his readers that despite the FOD’s valiant efforts to chart a new course away from this ideological bankruptcy, “It is certainly true that it isn’t easy to create a constructive and critical force in the middle of civil war, coming from a completely insufficient doctrinal basis. They knew practically nothing of the theoretical efforts carried out in the course of the previous decade in the international movement, efforts which nobody else had capitalised on in a coherent whole at that time.”

Trotsky on Spain In his 1937 “The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning,” Trotsky summarized the role of the anarchists in the revolution: “The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism.”

The anarchists’ claim 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,” wrote Trotsky, “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 of power.”

Trotsky said of the CNT’s enablers, 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. … But the revolution (continued on page 10, in “Puerto Rico student leader: ‘Never give up!’”)

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Kamran Nayeri Cliff Conner

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‘It is impossible to lead the masses toward insurrection without preparing for the conquest of power.’ — Leon Trotsky