Source: Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.2, Summer 1989. Used with permission;
First published: La Voz Leninista, no.1, 5 April 1937.
Translated into English in The Alarm, February/March 1981.
Although our edition was closed for this issue, the crisis of the Generalitat obliges us to comment, holding up our publication a little bit.
It is public knowledge that these periodic crises of the Generalitat represent the flowering of a continuous friction between the various forces integrated into the Council. What is making impossible the normal functioning of the government is the contradiction between the bourgeois or petit-bourgeois republican forces, the PSUC and the UGT, and the workers’ forces (CNT). But the aim of these governments is precisely to defeat the revolutionary resistance of the proletariat through integration of its organisations into the bourgeois state. The bourgeoisie, through its Stalinist and Socialist servants, will get rid of the CNT, as soon as the collaboration of this organisation has created the necessary conditions. If the government that is formed continues to count on the collaboration of the CNT, however slightly, the crisis will have served the bourgeoisie to overcome a little more resistance to it and to prepare the next phase. In this way, if the crisis shows that in the bourgeois state there are class forces alien to it, the resolution will show to what point the bourgeoisie can utilize against the revolution the proletariat’s own organisations. For this reason there is no possible positive outcome for the road of the Generalitat. The return of the CNT to the government will accentuate the latter’s reactionary, antiproletarian character. It is the bourgeois state that is in crisis. The proletarian forces should not aid but should destroy it, and make way for a revolutionary state.
The way out can never be, as the Central Committee of the POUM has said, ‘A government formed by the representatives of all the political and union organisations of the working class’. However radical the programme that it might propose, this is a parliamentary conception of the revolution without the least viability. We point in passing to the speed with which the POUM leaders lost their heads once they smelled the aroma of Power. Their own youth today shout with all their strength, while harshly deprecating the slogan of Committees, ‘A Workers’ and Peasants’ Government in the Generalitat’ (our emphasis).
We affirm, on the contrary, that the only revolutionary solution is the total abandonment of collaboration, but preventing this action from having repercussions in insurrectionary adventures, and constituting a Revolutionary Front of the proletariat which will demand from the street what cannot be gained through the bourgeois state, and open the way toward revolution by launching the constitution of committees of workers, peasants and soldiers. The revolutionary force of the proletariat, freed from its chains, will ably stop the counter-revolutionary forces of Stalinism, the reformists, and the republicans, and will guarantee the further development of the Revolution. With their collaboration, the leaders of the CNT condemn the proletariat to death.
Last updated on 25.9.2004