From the series Spain 1936
Spain, Marx observed in 1854 in the article Revolutionary Spain, was the first European feudal State to develop absolutism in its most unmitigated form
, but political and fiscal centralisation never really took hold there. Similarly, it was Spanish caravels that opened up the era of the world market, and the Kingdom of Spain was the first great bourgeois maritime-trading empire. Yet that early and rapid rise ended up transforming itself from a favourable precondition for development into the cause of Spain's subsequent failure. In fact, the maritime overextension of the empire, combined with the failed political and fiscal centralisation of the Iberian heartland, resulted in stagnation and a subsequently inglorious and protracted putrefaction
. While the economic and social arteries were becoming sclerotic, the State brain was moving away from European absolutism and taking the form of Oriental despotism. Thus, Spain, like Turkey
, to quote Marx again, remained an agglomeration of mismanaged republics with a nominal sovereign at their head
.
On the eve of the French Revolution, Spain seemed to Napoleon a lifeless corpse
. The French revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic invasion represented a historic collision that determined Spain's awakening from its long stagnation. But the 19th century convulsions of the Spanish bourgeoisie's rise to power bear the mark of that fragmentation. Class struggles shattered into many confused and hardly ever decisive battles, where the recurring trait of endemic localism was precisely the venomous sting left by a long history. Marx also observes that, while in centralised France every revolution tends to begin and complete its cycle in three days
, in Spain three years seems to be the shortest limit to which she restricts herself
.
It is a paradox that a bourgeoisie that inherited a maritime empire never fully managed to break free from its legacy. On the contrary, as the Iberian bourgeoisie modernised and industrialised over the course of the 19th century, it increasingly championed a sustained federalist dispute against the Madrid centre – precisely from the regions experiencing the most rapid acceleration of capitalist development (Catalonia and the Basque Country). Traces of this paradox can still be found today: Castilian Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world (500 million native speakers), while large areas of Spain still jealously guard their linguistic autonomy.
Coming to terms with the venomous sting of federalist ideology is necessary for a scientific materialist analysis of class struggles in Spain and, consequently, for a reconstruction of the history of the revolutionary currents of the Iberian workers' movement. For, as Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology, the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force
.
Therefore, one cannot study the political history of Spanish revolutionary currents without encountering the influence exerted by ideologies born of localism and fragmentation – in how they were used by the bourgeoisie, in the hold they had on the petty bourgeoisie, and, as a consequence, on the wage-earning class. To begin with, socialism arrived in Spain in the form of Proudhonian federalism through the writings of the Catalan Francisco Pi y Margall.
Mutualist federalism would become the gateway through which the young Spanish workers' movement was influenced by Bakuninism in the late 1860s. From that moment, the movement's story was on a slippery slope that made the reception of Marxist science increasingly difficult.
The idea that the working class should isolate itself from the influence of socialist intellectuals, that it should not let itself be swept off course by theory, science, or politics, but should instead follow its own spontaneous economic course, would ultimately prove to be the Trojan horse of bourgeois ideology, mediated by ideas of anarchist and petty-bourgeois inspiration. The result was that both the anarcho-syndicalist and the reformist-trade unionist strands of the PSOE would completely conquer the field, and the great spontaneous combativeness of the Spanish working class would never find a connection with revolutionary science. The passion and indomitable courage of the masses were never wedded to the Marxism of What Is To Be Done?.
For this reason, the Spanish revolutionary movement, at the dawn of the imperialist era that culminated in the crisis of the Great War, lacked a compass to address and resolve the complicated national and international implications of the change of an era. Spontaneously, the masses became passionate about the great events of 1917 in Russia and just as spontaneously, they interpreted them through the distorting lens of Spanish ideology. The late founding of the PCE itself would play only a marginal role, powerless to contend with the two rival siblings of trade unionism: the CNT-FAI and the PSOE-UGT, which respectively would never be more than a trade union-party, as opposed to a party-trade union.
The great struggles of the 1920s and early 1930s were thus destined to repeat those same identical mistakes, which were never really subjected to a radical critique. Marx's pages on the anti-Napoleonic insurrection and Engels's on the cantonal insurrection of the 1870s remained an unheeded lesson. The petty-bourgeois federalist myth of the patria chica, a legacy of the historical tradition through which, as Marx notes, the dead grasp the living
, has continued to operate to this day. So much so, that all the great class movements of the first 40 years of the last century ended up shattering against the rock of federalist tradition. Revolutionary efforts were fragmented, turned against one another, and disarmed, without ever succeeding in raising the question of political power.
Even in 1936-37, the Spanish proletariat did not lack heroism or self-sacrifice, but it had failed to assimilate revolutionary science: it lacked the party and the idea of the centrality of the political struggle for power. So, even in 1936, instead of breaking the bourgeois State machine and replacing it with the Commune, the Spanish proletariat allowed itself to be led by the anarchists (supportive of the POUM) and ended up being duped by the Stalinist deception of the Frente Popular. Once again, as had already happened, our class placed itself in tow of the republican bourgeoisie, content to set up a number of new, small States
. The epilogue was the tragedy of the workers' insurrection in Barcelona in May 1937, crushed by the concerted forces of reaction under the genetically intertwined guises of social democracy, Stalinism, and fascism.
It is plain to see the significance that those events had for revolutionary theory and politics, in the analysis and lessons drawn from them by Lotta Comunista in Italy. This began with the first steps of its original group, the GAAP (Gruppi Anarchici di Azione Proletaria, the Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action
), founded in 1951 precisely in the name of libertarian communism. It is worth dwelling on some of the fundamental lines of that reflection.
The first is its general theoretical and political character. Spain 1936, up to the heroic workers' insurrection of May 1937 in Barcelona, was the greatest class assault since the days of October 1917 in Russia and the attempt of the Councils in Germany, alongside perhaps the Canton Commune of December 1927. Certainly, the Chinese assault was more explicit in proclaiming proletarian power, following the example of the Paris Commune and the Soviets, but it was also more limited in terms of duration and the forces involved. Above all, the unique feature of the Spanish episode was that it revealed, in the heat of the civil war, all the forms of counter-revolution: fascism, democracy, and Stalinism were united in the repression of the workers' movement and the physical elimination of the internationalists.
Arrigo Cervetto – theorist, historical political leader, and founder of Lotta Comunista, as well as one of the leaders of the GAAP and the Italian Movimento della Sinistra Comunista (Communist Left Movement
) in the 1950s – in a 1958 speech on the lessons of the Spanish Revolution
, lamented how the ideological immaturity
of the leaders of the Spanish revolutionary movement had ultimately squandered the possibility of a gigantic modern Commune
. Of course, that assault would have been doomed to defeat anyway; at that time, the conditions in Europe were not such that the proletarian revolution could escape isolation. The bloodbath of the counter-revolution was to take place in any case, but if it had led to a Commune, that sacrifice would have been a brilliant lesson
. The bourgeoisie, the Church, Franco, and the Stalinists would have all lost their masks (together with Hitler, Blum, Stalin, etc.) in order to crush it
; the myth of anti-fascism would have collapsed, the interclassist and democratic myth collapsed, and the Stalinist myth collapsed
.
It should not be overlooked that this brilliant lesson
, which failed on a practical level in the historical test of a Commune, was at the heart of Cervetto's thinking on a theoretical and political level in all the decades that followed. It is as if revolutionary science had to draw the theoretical and political conclusions that the class struggle of 1936 in Spain and 1937 in Barcelona had left half-finished. Consider the Marxist theory of the State and imperialist democracy, as analysed in The Political Shell. In about 40 pages, Leon Trotsky's overly tactical theses on democracy for the 1930s are discussed: stagnation pushes the bourgeoisie towards fascism, so the defence of democracy becomes a weapon for the proletariat. In every passage of Cervetto's writing, we can glimpse the subtextual refutation provided by Spain and even more so by the Second World War. The ruling class demonstrated that it was not at all true that only fascism could guarantee civil peace
. Democracy, social democracy, and Stalinism also did so with the Popular Fronts.
Is it not schematic thinking to imagine that the bourgeoisie must travel the obligatory road of fascism and that the proletariat has no other means of fighting the bourgeoisie than to combat fascism only? The tree of life is green, warned Lenin. The bourgeoisie has more than one string to its bow and the proletariat must fight on all fronts if it wants to preserve its theoretical, political, and organisational independence
.
Cervetto's basic thesis was that Trotsky's strategic inadequacy
stemmed from his failure to provide a theoretical solution to the question of capitalist development in the imperialist era and of the nature of Russian State capitalism as part of that development. The failure to recognise imperialist development led to the idea of stagnation and the consequent tendency towards fascistisation, which tactically was believed to make democracy a weapon of the proletariat. The failure to recognise the USSR as State capitalism led to the moniker of Super Wrangel
for Adolf Hitler, after the White Army commander supported in 1920 by the Entente powers against the Bolsheviks. Nazi Germany had supposedly concentrated the attack of international capital against the USSR. Again, the failure to recognise Russian State capitalism led to the idea that Moscow had been brought to crisis and ruin by Stalin's policies, thereby misunderstanding the imperialist rise of the USSR.
With these premises, Cervetto notes in his Quaderni (Notebooks
) on strategy, Trotsky had imprisoned himself in an ideological vision of the USSR. He could not analyse the complex movement of imperialist tendencies
. He could not formulate even simple hypotheses of a 'combination of various factors'
that determined alliances and concrete alignments of powers. He could not formulate hypotheses that did not include an imperialist attack on Russia
, nor could he see the tendencies that led Russia into the camp of inter-imperialist alliances
.