Chapter 34 : The POUM: Trotsky and the POUM

The POUM: Trotsky and the POUM

The POUM was formed in 1935 by an amalgamation of the Communist Left, a Trotskyist organization led by Nin and Andrade, and the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC — Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc). In January 1936, the POUM’s decision to sign the Popular Front agreement promoted Trotsky to denounce the POUM in an article on 22 January entitled The Treason of the Workers′ Party for Marxist Unification (POUM). Trotsky’s anathema led to a cooling of relations between the POUM and the supporters of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International and severely damaged the credibility of Spanish Trotskyists.

Unable to understand Spanish and with his relationship with Nin broken off, Trotsky had no reliable source of information on what was happening inside Spain. When the revolution came he was one of the few who failed to greet it with the joy felt by the masses of people everywhere. Maybe the knowledge that Trotskyism would play no part in the revolutionary process was the reason for his refusal to interest himself in what was happening in Spain. Had it not been for the existence of the POUM it is unlikely Trotsky would have written much on the Spanish Revolution and civil war. All of his contemporary articles were polemics written with the express purpose of combating the POUM.

According to Trotsky, the main problem facing the revolutionaries was not a shortage of arms but a revolutionary party with a correct program to implement it. What the correct policy was has never been very clear. If it is to be judged by its practical effects then it is purely a matter of pragmatism and achieved aims , something in which Trotsky, the archetypal loser, was sadly lacking. Unable, or unwilling, to face up to the realities of the Soviet Union, Trotsky saw the crisis of mankind as a simple question of leadership; get rid of the bad guys and replace them with the good guys.

Jorge Semprun assesses Trotsky and Trotskyism’s contribution to political thought as a search for confirmations:

“To sum up: Marxism was not, for Trotsky, a tool with which to probe the concrete contents of reality but rather something with which to locate those features of it which bore out his ready-made interpretation. From which it follows that, not only the Church will be found to be orthodox but so will its sects and monks.”

Trotsky’s otherwise clear, critical faculties had a tendency to cloud when it came to assessing his own analyzes. His arguments were, for him, irrefutable and mathematically calculable. He had an intolerance of mind that turned political disagreements into heresy. Failures and errors were always due to other people’s lack of understanding of the “fundamental line”. Trotsky himself was immune from all criticism: “Marx made mistakes, Lenin made mistakes, the Bolshevik Party as a whole made some, too. But these mistakes were corrected in time, thanks to the correctness of its fundamental line”. [135] This “fundamental line” was the exclusive property of Bolshevik Leninism, the only ideology empowered to act in the name of the proletariat. All other parties and organizations were traitors to the working class.

Trotsky’s dealings with the POUM and its leaders, particularly Nin, were arrogant. He refused to listen to any argument which differed from his own and chose to portray the facts to suit himself. He even went as far as accusing the POUM of supporting views it never held. Trotsky’s main disagreements with the POUM were: that it signed the Popular Front pact of February 1936; that it failed to seize power in July 1936; that it joined the Generalidad; that it failed to be implacable in its denunciations of every other organization; it had been conciliatory towards the anarchists. For Trotsky, the Russian revolution was the flawless paradigm, the only paradigm. When it was suggested to him that conditions in Spain were not those that existed in Russia in 1917, he replied, sneeringly, that this was “…The old, old argument of every opportunist” and that “…abstract concepts of that ilk cannot be taken seriously.”[136] In a talk given in April 1937, Andrés Nin made a direct reply to Trotsky when he stated that “the formulas of the Russian revolution, applied in mechanistic fashion, will lead to disaster”. He added “We must take the spirit from the Russian revolution, and not the letter.”[137] To Trotsky the spirit and the letter were one and the same thing.

These are some of the reasons why Trotsky was so hostile towards the party that was, in every respect, closer to his ideas than any other, and towards men like Nin and Andrade who had been closely involved with the Fourth International. Certainly Nin’s decision to form his own party instead of infiltrating the Socialist Party as Trotsky wished was another reason for the disagreement. Another may have been the fact that the Stalinist secret service had managed to plant one of its agents, a Russian-Pole by the name of Zborowski or “Etienne” in the international secretariat of the Fourth International, who had been ordered to sour relations between Trotsky and the POUM. [138]

The non existence of a Trotskyist movement in Spain at the outbreak of the war led to foreign Fourth International sympathizers to attempt to “enter” the POUM during the early months of the war. These sympathizers, mainly French, Italian and Belgian Trotskyists, who referred to themselves as “Bolshevik-Leninists”, were few in number, perhaps around 50, and were to be found mainly in Madrid and Barcelona. They attempted to infiltrate the POUM in August 1936, but were refused admission by the POUM Executive Committee on the grounds that the spokesmen, Jean Rous and Benjamin Péert, wanted recognition as a Bolshevik-Leninist faction that was unacceptable to them. In spite of this failure to infiltrate the POUM en masse, around 20 Trotskyists managed to enlist in the Lenin battalion together with the POUM’s international volunteers and fought bravely in Huesca.

Andrés Nin’s role as councilor of Justice in the Generalidad created an unbridgeable gap between the Trotskyists and the POUM. It was a minuscule party and could ill afford to be deprived of the talents of one of its most capable militants. Two rival groups eventually emerged from among the foreign Trotskyists; the Voz Leninista group and the El Soviet group, these being the name of their respective papers. Voz Leninista whose main contributors were “Munis” (Manuel Fernández Grandizo), Benjamin Péert, the surrealist painter and the Polish/German exile “Moulin”, was the officially recognized section of the Fourth International in Spain. The El Soviet group, led by the Italian Nicola di Bartolemeo (Fosco) while calling itself Trotskyist, refused to recognize the Secretariat for a Fourth International. It was supported by the International Communist Party (PCI) whose paper La Commune was edited by Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank.

By May 1937 the El Soviet group was down to seven or eight people (according to ‘Fosco’s’ companion, ‘Sonia’ — Virginia Gervasini) and its involvement in the May Days was limited to putting in an appearance on the barricades. El Soviet published no leaflets between 3 and 9 May. The Voz Leninista group, with 15 members in Barcelona managed to issue one short text on the second day of the fighting, Tuesday 4 May, calling for a general strike, the arming of the working class and “unity of action of the CNT-FAI-POUM”.

At no time, either during the “May Days” or afterwards did the Trotskyists and the Friends of Durruti publish or sign any joint text, nor was any reference made in El Amigo del Pueblo to the Voz Leninista. The only common ground between the Trotskyists and the Friends of Durruti was their opposition to the cease-fire.

Pavell and Clara Thalmann met Erwin Wolf, Trotsky’s secretary, and Munis, “the real political head of the Spanish Trotskyists”, in Barcelona immediately after the May Days who explained the Trotskyist “fundamental line”. Spain was, apparently, in a phase of ascendant revolution. The evidence for this was the May Events had truly exposed to the world the unbreakable elan of the workers and their self-defense capability. It only remained to capture more ground: the Caballero government, sorely weakened was shortly about to be brought down.“