The Dutch Internationalist Communists and the Events in Spain (1936–7)

chapter 9 The Dutch Internationalist Communists and the Events in Spain (1936–7)

While the civil war in Spain did not cause a crisis in the gic, it nonetheless had a profound importance in the group’s history. It was the test-bed of the Dutch group’s revolutionary theory, confronted with a civil war which was to prepare the Second World-War, in the midst of revolutionary convulsions and an atmosphere of ‘anti-fascist’ popular fronts. Although often identified with anarchism, Dutch ‘councilism’ vigorously set itself apart from this current and denounced not its weaknesses, but its ‘passage into the camp of the bourgeoisie’. The gic defended a political analysis of the ‘Spanish revolution’ close to that of the Italian communist left. Finally, the events in Spain gave rise to the gic’s last attempt before 1939 to confront the revolutionary political milieu to the left of Trotskyism in Europe. This attempt was not without confusion, and even political ambiguity. Following the creation of the Republic, the internationalist Dutch communists followed the evolution of the Spanish situation with great care. In 1931, the gic denounced not only the Republican bourgeoisie, which supported the Socialist Party of Largo Caballero, but also the anarchist movement. The cnt abandoned its old ‘principle’ of hostility to electoralism, and had its adherents vote en masse for Republican candidates. Far from seeing the cnt as a compon- ent of the workers’ movement, the gic insisted that anarcho-syndicalism had crossed the Rubicon with its ‘collaboration with bourgeois order’. The cnt had become ‘the ally of the bourgeoisie’.As an anarcho-syndicalist current, and thus a partisan of trade-unionism, the political action of the cnt could only lead to a strengthening of capitalism. If it were to take power, it would establish nothing other than state-capitalism: ‘[the cnt] is a union aspiring to the conquest of power by the cnt. That necessarily leads to a dictatorship over the proletariat by the leadership of the cnt (state-capitalism)’.1 Faithful to the positions of the German left on the nature of revolutionary syndicalism, the gic saw nothing revolutionary in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism. As a union, the cnt could only take on the management of the capitalist economy, and not the destruction of the state. That is why any attempt to

1 ‘Die Rolle der cnt in der spanischen Revolution’, pic, December 1931, in German.

‘renovate’ the cnt in order to give it a ‘revolutionary’ orientation was doomed to failure. Its left wing, along with Durruti’s fai, were nothing other than attempts to revive the corpse of syndicalism. The gic declared forcefully that ‘anarchist opposition is a deceitful illusion’.2 When the election of 16 February 1936 gave power to the parties of the Frente popular, the gic denounced the united front of all the parties of the left for diverting the class-struggle away from its own objective: the formation of a ‘general workers’ class-front’. The Spanish workers were ‘prisoners of the united front’. They could only regain their autonomy through a merciless fight against ‘their mortal enemy’ (the parties of the united front), and by setting up their own organs: ‘It is not parliaments that must take power in hand, but ourselves, in our action-committees, in our workers’ councils. It is only as a power of organised councils that we can conquer’.3 In July 1936 came the military pronunciamiento. Against the will of the Popular Front, which was quite ready to reach an understanding with the military, the workers of Barcelona and Madrid took to the barracks. They armed themselves and formed militias. In the town and countryside, above all in Catalonia, some industrial and agricultural ‘collectivisations’ were enacted under the leadership of both the anarchist union, and the Socialist union, the ugt (Unión General de los Trabajadores). But the workers had not overthrown the Republican government of the left wing of the bourgeoisie: the government of the Generalitat of Catalonia survived with the support of the poum and the cnt. Some ‘workers’ committees’ certainly were created, but they were more a combination of the different parties and unions than they were real workers’ councils. Was this really a proletarian revolution on the march, with its ‘collectivisations’ and the arming of the workers, or was it a ‘bourgeois revolution’ in which the Spanish proletariat participated as a contributory force, or even nothing more than proletarian convulsions diverted into the Popular Front and the military combat on the fronts? Was it necessary to fight first on the ‘military front’, before fighting on the ‘class-front’ against the Republican government? Such were the concrete questions were posed in the internationalist camp at the time. In the Netherlands, the anarchist groups and Sneevliet’s semi-Trotskyist rsap gave their ‘critical’ support to the Popular Front government in the fight against Franco, in the name of anti-fascism. Their position was thus little

2 Ibid. 3 ‘Verkiezing en eenheidsfront in Spanje!’, pic, No. 3, February 1936.