Historia de Barcelona

Categoría: Spanish Marxism Versus Soviet Communism

Alba////Victor////Schwartz////Stephen//// //// ////2009////Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A history of the P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War//// //// ////New Brunswick, New Jersey////Transaction Publishers

  • La vuelta de Andrés Nin desde Moscú, entrismo trotskista

    In September 1930, [Andrés] Nin returned [from Moscow] to Barcelona… [Joaquín] Maurín hoped that he would enter the new party [Bloque Obrero y Campesino]. But Nin, with all the friendship that linked him to Maurín and the sympathy he felt for the new party, was too closely tied to Trotsky. The latter demanded that his Spanish followers preserver their identity and continue working within the official P.C.E., under the banner of the «Communist Opposition.»

    On October 23 1930, Nin wrote to Trotsky his impressions following his return to Spain. Excerpts from their correspondence, as translated and circulated by Trotsky’s «secretariat,» included Nin’s observations:

    Now we have: 1) the official [Communist] party [PCE], which has no effective force and no authority among the masses; 2) the Communist federations of Catalonia and Valencia, which have been excluded from the party and which, in reality, together with the most influential groups of [Asturias] and a few other places, constitute in fact an independent party; 3) the Catalan Communist Party [Partit Comunista Català], which has a good elite leadership, counts on a certain influence among the dock workers of Barcelona and dominates the workers’ movement in Lérida; and 4) the Left Opposition (Trotskyist) [Izquierda Comunista de España]. The latter has no force in Catalonia.

    A week later (November 12), Nin wrote to Trotsky regarding Maurín, who, «notwithstanding his hesitations, is very intelligent, and above all, a very honest comrade.» «La Batalla» seemed to him to be «confusionist» and he hoped Maurín would soon become a Trotskyist…

    At the end of December 1930, Nin also found himself in the Model Prison, arrested after the general strike in Barcelona…, and he wrote … an article for «L’Hora,» in which he defended the same point of view as Maurín on the necessity of the proletariat completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

    Nin found himself … between a rock and a hard place: he wanted to enter the party that was being set up, and he knew that within it he would find a good place, but at the same time, out of loyalty to Trotsky, he felt this entry should be undertaken to conquer the new party and convert it into a Trotskyist organization.

  • Escaramuzas rompen la tensión

    On [Monday] May 3, with fighting at the Telefónica, the open conflict began. [Cusick] points out the somewhat enthusiastic reponses of Barcelona’s anarchist masses to the provocation of Erno Gerö: «At last there was something to DO, something to release the unbearable tension … Again time slowed down and sped up simultaneously.»

  • Subida en la reputación del POUM

    [Cita de Lois Cusick (1979). The anarchist millenium, memories of the Spanish revolution, 1936-37. Unpublished.]

    [On Tuesday], the city was in the grip of a complete work stoppage.

    The Patrols of Control took Montjuic fortress and trained its cannon on the Palau de la Generalitat … The block-long Popular Army poster on the communist Karl Marx House came down to reveal machine guns controlling the Passeig de Gracia, which the defense committees took over … Tuesday morning, the C.N.T. printers allowed only two papers to appear, Solidarida Obrera and the P.O.U.M.’s La Batalla … The Friends of Durruti and the genuine Trotskyites (Munis and Moulin) separately printed handbills calling for a revolutionary Junta to take over the government buildings. Josep Rebull’s P.O.U.M. left wing tried to win over the syndicalists at the barricades in another part of town for a march on the government buildings. Nothing came of these isolated initiatives … But the reputation of the P.O.U.M. shot up in the anarchist ranks. C.N.T.-F.A.I.-P.O.U.M. was the password at the barricades.

  • La CNT pierde el control sobre sus miembros, que se pelean con la UGT

    [Cita de Lois Cusick (1979). The anarchist millenium, memories of the Spanish revolution, 1936-37. Unpublished.]

    Wednesday morning the general strike continued. The workers stayed at the barricades and ignored Casa C.N.T.’s orders [to abandon the strike and leave the barricades]. The city’s life was suspended in a will conflict between the anarchist masses and their leadership … The communists tried to take advantage of their truce with Casa C.N.T. to put the city’s bus system back to work. They used U.G.T. members the anarchists had always said were scabs from a big strike years ago. The sight of their red and black pointed trams run by communist scabs started the fighting all over. Barricades went up across the tracks, and the trams stopped running.

  • PSUC y la Generalidad intentan de hacer olvidar las Jornadas de Mayo

    [Diario Lois Cusick] In the wake of the May tragedy, «the P.S.U.C. and the Generalitat mounted one … event after another … We had a week devoted to the Battle of the Egg (La lluita de l’ou). This was a four-year plan to make Barcelona self-sufficient in eggs by having a chicken on every balcony. Then, the first week of June, we had Book Week. The carnival revolutionists filled the Ramblas with colorful bookstalls selling old parchment manuscripts from the burnt-out churches and new bright paperbacks of communist-approved authors. No more Kropotkin or Bakunin. This was the week we learned the Russians had arrested Bob Smillie of the P.O.U.M.’s [English] I.L.P. column while he was in Valencia.»