 |
Workers Vanguard No. 875 |
1 September 2006 |
|
|
TROTSKY |
LENIN |
Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War (Quote of the Week)
Seventy years ago, the Spanish working class rose up against General Franco’s attempt to overthrow the Republican government, which touched off the 1936-39 Civil War. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and his Spanish comrades stressed, the road to defeating Franco’s fascist forces lay in the seizure of state power by the proletariat. But the treacherous leaders of the working class—centrally the Stalinists, joined by the social democrats, anarchists and the centrist POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification)—allied with the Republican bourgeoisie in a popular-front government. Their collaboration in the suppression of the insurgent workers paved the way for the victory of Franco’s forces.
According to the Socialists and Stalinists, i.e., the Mensheviks of the first and second instances, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a united front with the “democratic” bourgeoisie was indispensable. From this point of view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy are not only premature but also fatal. Furthermore, on the agenda stands not the revolution but the struggle against the insurgent Franco.
Fascism, however, is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts.
The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda.
—Leon Trotsky, “The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning,” 17 December 1937, reprinted in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (Pathfinder, 1973)
|
