Trotsky Draws Do Spanish Struggles

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Continuing our series of articles on the writings of Leon Trotsky in this, the centenary year of his birth, Henry Phillips looks at Trotsky's writings on Spain, published as The Spanish Revolution by Pathfinder Press, New York, 1973. The best edited and fullest edition, however, is in French: La Revolution Espagnole, edited by Pierre Broue, Editions Spain late in 1916 he can hardly have imagined what a significant role the country was later going to play in his political concerns.

At that time hę knew no Spanish, spent his time in art galleries and museums and was arrested because, as the Madrid Chief of Police put it, his "views were a little too advanced for Spain"!

In the final decade of his life, Trotsky was to have occasion many times to express his advanced views on Spain and his writings fill a large volume.

Revolutionary potential It is entirely made up of the letters and brief articles through which Trotsky reacted from a distance to the struggle of revolution and counter-revolution which filled the ten years following the downfall in 1930 of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the fail of the monarchy.

The writings are dominated by Trotsky's faith in the reality of the revolutionary potential of the Spanish working class.

The parallels between the downfall of Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII and that of the Tsar in February 1917 were oniy too obvious to Trotsky of all people.

Yet the striking thing about his writings on the Spanish events is his penetration of the differences.

Incisive observations "In its specific gravity in the country's economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917...

...from the very beginning the revolution expressed much more graphically the proletarian character than did the revolution of 1917 in Russia'' (pp.322 and 366—all references to Pathfinder Press edition).

Troitsky's commentaries are suffused with incisive theoretical observations on socialism, fascism, popular fronts and proletarian revolutionary questions But these emerge in the form of very detailed discussions of the practical questions facing revolutionaries.

These especially concern the period 1930-31 after the fall of the dictatorship and then the period just before the civil war when the centrist party, the POUM, led by former supporters of the Trotskyist International Left Opposition entered the Popular Front with the reformists,, Stalinists and capitalist parties and helped to prepare the way for the tragic defeat of the Spanish proletarjat.

Correct strategy

In both periods Trotsky's position is one of a practical search for the. correct strategy and tactics for revolutionaries as against opportunists and secta rians.

"It is a truism'", he writes, 'that our epoch is characterised politically by a relentless Anti-fascist dies in battle aga struggle between socialism (communism) and fascism. But unfortunately this does not mean that the proletariat is already and •everywhere conscious of this alternative, nor that in any given country, at any given moment, it may ignore the partial struggle to safeguard its democratic liberties.

"The fundamental alternative, communism or fascism, established by Lenin, has become for many a hollow formula which the left centrists use only too often to cover up their capitulations, or the sectarians to justify their inaction"

"The whole political task" to Trotsky in 1937 lay in how "to transform this hybrid, confused, half-blind and half-dead revolution into a socialist revolution." (P.295).

The method imperative for Bolsheviks was to relate to the existing struggles and concerns of the masses, and so to deserve and to win a position of leadership on which a fight for power could be based.

United front

What this required was a bold united front tactic with the revolutionary party in the vanguard of the drive for proletarian unity.

Such a united front must be based around what the masses were able to perceive as their needs-such as the extension of democracy, the fight for national self-determination and so on.

Trotsky all the time stresses the need to sum up the immediate tasks facing the proletariat in a set of a few slogans which evolved with the changing struggle and consciousness of the masses.

A constant theme de Minuit, Paris 1975.

perioo 1930-32 is the rejection of any search for magic revolutionary slogans which are good for all situations.

"In order to issue such slogans we must not be guided by doctrinaire abstractions but by the state of consciousness of the masses and the way they react to the various partial successes.

"Simply counterposing the slogan of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "workers and peasants republic" to the present regime is entirely inadequate because these slogans do not move the masses." (p.144).

The writings on 1930 and 1931 are also important because they contain Trotsky's fullest explanation of the role in the revolutionary struggle of Soviets lor "workers' juntas" as he believed they should be called in Spain).

His view on the role of the juntas was the organisational side of his political insistence that 'the immediate task of the Spanish communists is not the struggle for power but the struggle for the masses".

He goes on:

"The creation of workers' juntas is undoubtedly the principle task of the day. But it is absurd to counterpose the juntas to democratic slogans ...

"At the present stage, juntas the organisational forms for united proletarian front-for strikes; for the expulsion of the Jesuits, for participation in the elections to the Cortes, to establish contact with the soldiers, as well as to provide support for the peasant movement.

"Only through juntas embracing the basic core of the proletariat can the communists assure their hegemony in the proletariat, and thus also in the "Only to the extent that the influence of the communists grows in the working class will the juntas be transformed into organs of struggle for power •.. to counterpose the slogan of soviets as organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the realities of the present struggle means to convert the slogan of soviets into a suprahistorical divinity, into a superrevolutionary icon, which individual saints may worship but which the masses will. never follow." (p.129)

Transformed If the emphasis of the early parts of the Spanish Revolution is often against the sectarianism of these "saints" it is because Trotsky was referring to the Comintern which was still at the height of its ultraleftist "Third Period" policy, which was to split the powerful German working class and open the door for Hitler.

In the later period after 1935, of course, the emphasis is transformed, From then on Trotsky's writings on Spain become a sustained and. profound political polemic against the counterrevolutionary class collaboration of the Stalinists and reformists.

"Fatal role"

And Trotsky wages a ceaseless struggle against the "fatal role" of adaptation to this popular frontism played by the "revolutionary" Workers Party of Marxist Unification-the POUM-whose leaders were ironically persecuted and murdered for their "Trotskyism"

Trotsky's uncompromising analysis of the Popular Front and its role in opening the door to fascism is relatively well-known and there is no space to quote from it here.

But one particular article with which the Spanish Revolution ends must be mentionedin fact it could almost claim an article in this series all to itself.

It is The Class, the Party and the Leadership, an article which was left unfinished when he was murdered.

It is a fitting culmination to Trotsky's long struggle for socialism, since it presents probably the best theoretical account written in the history of the communist movement of the inter-relations between: the mass movement and its leadership.

Despite its unfinished state this article provides an essential component of a scientific understanding of that most central of all questions for revolutionaries -the winning of the leadership of the masses.

But there are relevant lessons, too, for today on virtually every page of Trotsky's writings on Spain The very parallels of the Spanish events after 1930 and those in some countries today presents a danger-that of simply 'lifting' Trotsky's conclusions about Spain and applying them in a wooden way to other circumstances.

The best safeguard against this danger is perhaps to see how in relation to Spain Trotsky himself was able to apply the lessons of Russia-not as a dead parallel but as a living political analogy.

Trotsky

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