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From New Interventions, Vol. 7 No. 4, Spring 1997.
Transcribed by Paul Flewers.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Andrew Charles Durgan
BOC 1930–1936, El Bloque Obrero y Campesino
Laertes, Barcelona 1996, pp. 616
Andrew Durgan’s book is the first documented history of the group which merged with the Trotskyist Izquierda Comunista (IC) in 1935 to form the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), which suffered such bloody repression from the Stalinists during the Spanish Revolution. Stalinists saw the POUM as Trotskyist, and therefore an agent of the Nazis. The fact that Andreu Nin, the POUM’s best-known leader until his murder in 1937, had been a member of the IC made the Trotskyist label plausible. Trotsky, on the other hand, was highly critical of the POUM, and most Trotskyists have seen the POUM as naively sleep-walking to destruction because of its illusions in the Popular Front.
The POUM’s own attempts at historical explanation have been disappointing, so Durgan’s book is welcome. The BOC emerged from the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) because of disagreements over the party’s policy in Spain. Its supporters were unconcerned about Stalin’s counter-revolution in Russia. To Joaquín Maurín, the outstanding Catalan leader, and the majority of activists, it seemed that the Spanish party’s leadership, not the Russian one, was to blame for the PCE’s failure. The difficulties of working under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship were compounded by frequent purges of the leadership, and a lunatic ultra-left line. The Catalan members, mainly recruited from the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, were hardly integrated into the party when the dictatorship was installed in 1923. The PCE’s Catalan and Balearic Federation (FCC-B), forced to act on its own initiative, hoped that the Communist International would recognise it, remove the PCE’s sectarian leaders, and recreate a unified Spanish Communist Party. When the Communist International ignored its pleas, the FCC-B fused with a tiny group, the PCP, and became independent.
A major reason for dissension within the PCE was the vastly different conditions in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. The Socialist Party (PSOE) and its associated trade union, the UGT, were dominant in most of the country, but in Catalonia the CNT was much stronger. In addition, those Catalan workers who were not convinced by the CNT’s call to abstain in the elections tended to vote for the left nationalist ERC. In the first elections under the Republic in June 1931, Maurín, impressed by the ERC’s sweeping victory, persuaded the BOC to change its demand from the right to national self-determination to support the call for independence. When this demand was extended to include Andalusia, an area with no tradition of nationalism, it provoked hostility from most of the left.
The unresolved differences on the national question provoked continual disputes within the BOC’s own ranks, but it would be quite wrong to see the group as merely a camp follower of the nationalists. Maurín thought that the bourgeoisie could never achieve self-determination for Catalonia, but that it was necessary to support the nationalists to the extent that they fought for it. Marxists should try to win over activists from the ERC, just as they did from the PSOE elsewhere in Spain. The BOC had considerable success in this, but it was a two-way traffic, as many of its leading members ended up in the ERC.
In the summer of 1931 the BOC had hoped that the militant FAI tendency within the CNT could be won to Bolshevism, and lead the CNT to take power. Maurín claimed that only fossilised Marxists could fail to see the CNT’s revolutionary potential. Other Marxists saw that position as a reversion to revolutionary syndicalism. Later, in 1932, after the CNT had taken to breaking up BOC meetings and assaulting its activists, the BOC turned sharply against the anarchists. As the CNT was fiercely anti-political, belonging to the BOC or speaking at one of its meetings were grounds for expulsion. Many union branches were excluded from the CNT, or left because of disagreements with the policies of the FAI’s leadership. By the end of 1933, the BOC tried to group such branches together in a federation (the FOUS) with other tendencies which were abandoning the CNT. The BOC’s initial illusions in the CNT were replaced by a gross underestimation of its strength. On the other hand, the BOC corrected its sectarian anti-PSOE line, which it had inherited from its origins in the PCE, and made serious efforts to involve it in a united front with other workers’ organisations
The BOC’s attitude to soviets and to the united front were among its best points. Maurín argued that Spanish soviets would not be a simple copy of a Russian model. The greater incidence of trade unionism, however fragmented, meant that unions would be the main base for soviets. That observation had often been made by union leaders in order to deny the need for united working-class organisations, but Maurín’s intention was the opposite. In its attitude to workers’ unity and to the united front, the BOC was indeed ‘Trotskyist’ despite its disagreement with Trotsky and his Spanish followers on many other issues. The tactic was demonstrated in its leadership of a successful strike of commercial employees, a traditionally non-militant group, in 1933. The BOC obtained the support of left nationalists and of minority trade-union and political forces, which, combined with the energetic support of the BOC’s action groups, produced a remarkable victory at a time when more militant sectors of the working class had been defeated. The success was limited, as in Barcelona a united front without the CNT was by definition a minority affair. Being right was not enough while the core of the working class followed rival sectarian leaders.
The united front strategy was continued when the BOC, with the Izquierda Comunista, launched the Alianzas Obreras following the right-wing electoral victory in November 1933. The Alianzas called on all the workers’ organisations to unite in struggle. The leaderships of the main unions and parties were forced to give some support to these initiatives. However, at best, even when the UGT and CNT moderated their sectarianism, they saw the Alianzas as specific agreements between established organisations, and not as a means to overcome divisions at rank-and-file level. Democratically-controlled organisations would have threatened the leaders’ hold over their own members.
The BOC’s assessment of the development of Spain’s counter-revolutionary forces was remarkably perceptive. Maurín’s view was that their model was Dolfüss rather than Hitler, and that they still looked to a military coup, which is exactly what happened. As the prospect of counter-revolution loomed, the BOC’s pleas for unity got more of a hearing, and it was involved with a number of small parties in an attempt to create a united Marxist movement. However, as the Communist International abandoned ultra-leftism for the Popular Front, it attracted many of the forces with which the BOC tried to unite. Attempts to achieve unity at a Spanish level produced a split of the BOC’s more Catalanist elements. Many of those involved in the discussions ended up in the Stalinists’ Catalan section, the PSUC, as did some leading members of the BOC. By 1936 only Maurín and David Rey remained from the regional committee of the FCC-B expelled from the PCE in 1930. The limited result of the drive for unity was the creation of the POUM, formed by the fusion of the BOC with the IC, which had broken with the Trotskyist movement in 1933. Neither section of the new party saw their merger as a final step. As the name – the Workers Party of Marxist Unification – indicated, it was an attempt to unite all of the splintered sectors of the Marxist movement.
While the charges of Catalan nationalism levelled at Maurín were justified at some periods, uniting with the IC, at the cost of splits within the BOC, was the result of a serious determination to break out of a restricted geographical base. The BOC had few members outside Catalonia, whereas the IC had sections in Castille, the Basque country and Estremadura. It was very weak in Catalonia – estimates of its membership there varied from 11 to 60.
This book will not end the controversy over the role of the BOC. It changed a great deal over six years, so that criticisms which were true at one point did not always remain so. In its early years it shared some of the attitudes of other Right Opposition groups, praising Stalin as late as 1931, but as the PCE was able to claim that it was the party recognised by the Communist International, that position could not be maintained. In February 1932 Maurín declared that the degeneration of the Communist International had begun ‘after Lenin’s death’, which was a recognition that the rot had set in before the ultra-left Third Period. The BOC went on to criticise the suicidal policy of the German Communist Party in rejecting united anti-Nazi activity. The fact that the BOC, and later the POUM, had most of their members in a separate trade-union federation, the FOUS, was not the blindly sectarian policy which it might seem, but a consequence of FAI/CNT intolerance. The FOUS became the BOC’s union federation and therefore the source of its militia once the war started, but that was not the party’s intention. The BOC only slowly realised that the PCE had become the most dangerous enemy of revolutionary Marxism. That was understandable given the PCE’s weakness during the BOC’s formative years. Our knowledge of Stalinism’s role from 1936 onwards can make us forget the much greater strength of the ERC and CNT until Russian support made the PCE a state within a state.
BOC 1930–1936 helps establish the material basis for the politics of the group by providing a detailed account of its membership and social and geographical composition. Most members were Catalan speakers. It was strongest in Lleida and weak in Barcelona, where its members tended to be white-collar workers, reflecting its origins in the PCE and the CNT’s overwhelming hegemony among Barcelona’s industrial workers. That explains Maurín’s difficulty in winning its members to revolutionary positions. It is impossible in a review to do justice to the author’s depth of scholarship, in a work which is clearly a labour of love, not a factional account. It seems to me that he establishes that the BOC should not be labelled as a typical product of the Right Opposition. Until an English edition appears readers will have to be content with Durgan’s contribution to Revolutionary History, Vol. 4 Nos. 1/2. The book is a worthy complement to Pelai Pagès’ El movimiento trotskista en España, on the IC.
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