POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) ANDREW DURGAN The Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) (POUM) was the most important of the dissident communist groupings that emerged internationally in the 1930s in opposition to Stalinism. It played a leading role in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–7 before becoming victim of the Soviet government’s first intervention against a foreign revolution The POUM was founded in September 1935 with the fusion of the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc) (BOC) and the Izquierda Comunista de España (Communist Left of Spain) (ICE). The origins of the BOC lay in the pro-communist faction of the CNT led by Joaquín Maurín. This group formed the nucleus of the Spanish Communist Party’s Catalan Federation which in 1930 broke with the party in opposition to its ultra-leftism and its increasingly bureaucratic methods. In March 1931 the Catalan Federation united with another dissident communist grouping which had emerged from sectors of left Catalan nationalism in 1928, the Partit Comunista Català, to form the BOC. The BOC was the largest workers’ party in Catalonia, with some 5,000 members by 1935. It also had branches in the Valencia region and elsewhere. Politically and socially it was squeezed between the mass anarchosyndicalist movement, the CNT, and the left nationalist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. It main base was in the Catalan provinces, particularly among peasants in Lleida and Girona, in smaller industrial centers and, in Barcelona, among white collar workers. The BOC championed the necessity for workers’ unity and helped establish various trade union united fronts in Catalonia and the Workers’ Alliances, which would have a decisive role in the rebellion of 1934. The BOC argued the forthcoming revolution in Spain would be “socialist-democratic,” whereby an alliance of the peasantry, national liberation movements (Catalonia, the Basque Country, etc.), and the working class, under the hegemony of the latter, would both carry through the “unfinished” democratic revolution, which the petty bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out, and move directly onto the socialist stage. The inability of the Republic (1931–6) to satisfy either demands for social justice or deal with the growing threat of the extreme right appeared to confirm the BOC’s prognosis. The ICE was formed in 1930 as the Spanish section of the International Left Opposition (Trotskyists). Like the BOC, it included in its ranks many founding cadres of Spanish communism, in particular Juan Andrade and Andreu Nin. With 800 members, the ICE’s most important nuclei were in Madrid, Seville, Estremadura, and the North. The Trotskyists’ theoretical level compared favorably with the paucity of much of Spanish Marxism. Initially, the ICE was very critical of what it saw as the confused politics of the BOC. The BOC were never followers of Bukharin as has often been asserted. In fact, by 1933, Maurín’s organization had adopted a critique of Stalinism closer to Trotskyism. The ICE, in turn, had distanced itself from the international Trotskyist movement, in particular rejecting the turn towards “entrism” in the socialist parties in 1934. This evolution in the The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Edited by Immanuel Ness. © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2009 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp1204 2 POUM (WORKERS’ PARTY OF MARXIST UNIFICATION) two organizations, combined with working closely together in the Workers Alliances and the general clamor for unity following the defeat of the October 1934 uprising, led to the convergence of the BOC and ICE. The new party represented a synthesis of the programs of the two organizations rather than just an extension of the BOC as has been claimed. Both adversaries and historians alike usually label the POUM as Trotskyist, but this was never the case. The POUM shared with Trotskyism its critique of the theory of socialism in one country, its defense of working-class and party democracy, and its internationalism. However, the POUM’s decision to sign the Popular Front pact led to a breakdown of the tenuous relationship that still existed between the former ICE members and the international Trotskyist movement. The POUM, in fact, denounced the Popular Front both before and after the elections as class collaboration and defended their decision to participate in the electoral pact in order to “defeat the Right at the polls” and assure an amnesty for the thousands imprisoned after October 1934. The POUM participated actively in opposing the military uprising in July 1936 in Barcelona and elsewhere. In Catalonia its influence grew significantly, and it played an important role in many of the local revolutionary committees and in the first militia columns to leave for the Aragon front. However, the POUM was plainly in a minority in a revolutionary movement dominated by the CNT. The party grew from some 6,000 members on the eve of the war to a claimed 40,000 by the spring of 1937, the majority in Catalonia. During the first ten months of the war it published five daily and numerous weekly newspapers, as well as having radio stations in Barcelona and Madrid. It organized over 6,000 militia in the Lenin (later 29th) Division on the Aragon front, mainly around Huesca, the experience of which was described in George Orwell’s classic Homage to Catalonia and depicted in Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom. The party also had battalions on the Madrid and Teruel fronts. The POUM argued the war and revolution were inseparable; that the urban and rural working class were not fighting just to defend republican democracy but to carry through the social revolution that had erupted in July 1936. Andreu Nin, who had become the party’s central leader in the absence of Maurín, would claim that the working class had “solved” in five days what the Republic had been unable to do in five years: the distribution of the land, the destruction of clerical power, and a profound socioeconomic transformation in benefit of the working class. By subordinating both the military and social struggle to winning middle-class support, the POUM argued, the Republic would be defeated. Nevertheless, unlike the anarchists and many left socialists, the POUM did not dismiss the need, at least, to neutralize petty bourgeois hostility towards the social revolution. Thus the party opposed forced collectivization and arbitrary measures against small businessmen and shopkeepers. Basing itself on the experience of the Russian Revolution, the POUM defended the need for the establishment of a new proletarian power: a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government elected by an assembly of delegates from workers’, peasants’, and fighters’ committees. Such a government would in turn organize a unified revolutionary army, the Red Army under Trotsky being the model, and centralize the collectivization of industry and the land. Without the CNT, the POUM was incapable of imposing a new revolutionary power, but the anarchosyndicalists were opposed in principle to the building of any new form of state structure. Having failed to persuade the CNT to take power through the Catalan POUM (WORKERS’ PARTY OF MARXIST UNIFICATION) Militia Committee, the POUM felt it had little choice but to follow the anarchosyndicalists into the newly reorganized Catalan government (Generalitat) in late September 1936. The new regional government served to both “legalize” the revolution and to eventually undermine it. The dissolution of the revolutionary committees in favor of municipal councils meant both the POUM and CNT lost much of their power base at a local level. Trotsky and his followers would severely criticize the POUM for participating in a Popular Front government and accuse the party of having betrayed the revolution. The POUM itself was divided internally over this and other questions. The reconstruction of the republican state and the undermining of the revolution were paralleled with the rapid growth in influence of the communists. Stalinist methods and demonology soon became a central part of the republican counterrevolution. The POUM were identified as Trotskyist and thus by extension as fascist. The fact that the POUM denounced the Moscow Trials and reclaimed the mantle of the Bolsheviks was particularly irksome for the communists. Moreover, as the weaker sector of the revolutionary left, the POUM was a far easier target than the CNT. The CNT initially refused to take sides in the growing divisions between the POUM and the communists, seeing it as a “family” affair between Marixsts. Worse still, for the POUM, the anarchosyndicalists were prepared to enter a pact with their trade union rivals the socialist UGT, which was firmly under Stalinist control in Catalonia, on the basis that this was a sindical and not political-based collaboration. The POUM itself had lost its trade union base during the summer of 1936. Faced with the Generalitat’s decree making trade union membership obligatory and the growing polarization 3 between the anarchist CNT and the “Marxist” UGT, the dissident communists decided to join the latter. The POUM had organized its own union federation in May 1936, the Federación Obrera de Unidad Sindical (FOUS), as the first step towards trade union unity. With around 50,000 members the FOUS had briefly challenged the hegemony of the Catalan CNT in the weeks leading up to the war. Given the relative weakness of the local UGT and the difficulties of working inside the CNT since the BOC-led unions had been expelled in 1932–3, the POUM thought they could use the socialist union as a platform from which to argue for unity with the anarchosyndicalists. Instead, the massive and rapid growth of the Catalan Stalinist party, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), which united local communists and socialists, meant the UGT provided an important mass base for the POUM’s adversaries. The Stalinist campaign against the POUM began in earnest first in Madrid, where the party was weaker. In October 1936 members of the unified Communist-Socialist Youth, the Juventud Socialista Unificada, assaulted the headquarters of the POUM’s youth organization, the Juventud Comunista Ibérica. Under pressure from the Soviet ambassador the POUM was denied representation on the Madrid Defense Junta and its press in the capital was heavily censured and eventually suppressed altogether. Its troops, which had been decimated at the front during the battle for Madrid, denied arms and supplies, were absorbed into the CNT-led 38th Mixed Brigade in January 1937 to avoid complete obliteration. Meanwhile in Catalonia, also a result of direct Soviet interference, the POUM was ejected from the Catalan government in December 1936. By early 1937 verbal and, increasingly, physical attacks on the POUM by the communists were intensifying. Calls were repeatedly now made for the POUM 4 POUM (WORKERS’ PARTY OF MARXIST UNIFICATION) as a “fascist” organization to be repressed. Excluded from the UGT and with its militia denied arms on the Aragon front, the POUM tried desperately to persuade the CNT to take a stand against the counterrevolution. An exception to the lack of unity on the revolutionary left was the formation of the Frente de la Juventud Trabajadora Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Young Workers’ Front) by the POUM and CNT youth organizations in February 1937, which mobilized thousands of young workers to demonstrate in defense of the “conquests of the revolution.” But this experience was short-lived, as the CNT soon blocked this collaboration with a “political” organization. The attempts to undermine the revolution finally provoked an armed uprising of CNT activists in Barcelona in May 1937. The POUM had sided with the workers on the barricades, but rather than see this insurrection as an opportunity to seize power, the party saw it as a way of halting the assaults on “the gains of July 1936.” Having failed to persuade the CNT leadership to bring the entire city under their control, the POUM felt it had little option but to follow the anarchosyndicalists when they abandoned the streets for the sake of maintaining anti-fascist unity. Accused of having organized an insurrection against the Republic, the POUM was made illegal on June 16, 1937. For the communists, the May events were the definitive proof of the fascist character of the POUM and they called for its arrested leaders to be shot. Andreu Nin was abducted and murdered by Soviet agents. Several hundred POUM members were imprisoned and dozens more murdered. The party continued to operate clandestinely, bringing out its press and its members fighting at the front in units usually controlled by the CNT. At the trial of the POUM leadership in November 1938, unable to prove the Stalinist accusation that the party was a fascist spy organization, the defendants were instead sentenced to long prison sentences for having aimed to overthrow the Republic. The international outcry over the murder of Nin guaranteed, in part, that a Moscow-style show trial could not be mounted in republican territory. In the late 1940s the POUM was reorganized clandestinely in Catalonia and played an active role in the anti-Francoist movement. The advent of the Cold War, the indifference of the democracies and subsequent consolidation of Franco’s regime soon undermined most of this opposition. The POUM was undermined by a split in 1945 which lead to the founding of the social democratic Moviment Socialista de Catalunya. By the early 1950s the POUM had become principally an exile organization based in France and Latin America. With the democratization of Spain in the 1970s the remnants of the POUM attempted to reorganize in Spain. It attracted some new younger members but a failed attempt to unify with other small revolutionary groups really marked the end of the party. The last issue of the POUM’s by now bi-monthly paper, La Batalla, came out in May 1980. SEE ALSO: Asturias Uprising, October 1934; Bolsheviks; Confederatión Nacional del Trabajo (CNT); Leninist Philosophy; Maurín, Joaquín (1896 – 1973); Nin, Andreu (1892–1937); Spanish Revolution REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Alba, V. (Ed.) (1977) La revolutión española en lapráctica. Documentor del POUM. Gijon: Ediciones Júcar. Alba, V. & Schwartz, S. (1988) Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the POUM. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Bolloten, B. (1991) The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. POUM (WORKERS’ PARTY OF MARXIST UNIFICATION) Broué, P. & Témime, E. (1972) The Revolution and Civil War in Spain. London: Faber & Faber. Durgan, A. (1996) B.O.C. El Bloque Obrero y Campesino 1930–1936. Barcelona: Laertes. Durgan, A. (2006) Marxism, War and Revolution: Trotsky and the POUM. Stalinism, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Revolutionary History 9, 2: 27–65. Durgan, A. et al. (1992) The Spanish Civil War: The View from the Left. Revolutionary History 4, 1–2. 5 Iglesias, I. (2003) Experiencias de la revolutión. El POUM, Trotsky y la interventión soviética. Barcelona: Laertes. Orwell, G. (2001) Orwell in Spain. London: Penguin. Pagès, P. (1978) El movimiento trotskista en España (1930–1935). Barcelona: Ediciones Península. Solano, W. (1999) El POUM en la historia. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata. Trotsky, L. (1973) The Spanish Revolution (1931–1939). New York: Pathfinder Press.