- Re: @Keith. The Spanish Civil War and Revolution
Posted by Mick Travis
on May 22, 2020, 8:30 am, in reply to "@Keith. The Spanish Civil War and Revolution"
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Later, the communists would destroy these anarchist collectives. Stalin feared the example of a social revolution more than he feared the fascists. Like his Bolshevik mates, Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin, in the October 1917 Russian revolution, the very last thing he wanted was to see power in the hands of the ordinary people. The western democracies (France and Britain in particular, but also the US) were of a similar mindset. The Spanish people were on their own. It is nonsense to say that “the last thing that Stalin wanted to see was power in the hands of ordinary people”. Stalin worked his entire life to see power in the hands of ordinary people. The anarchist collectives often posed a problem to the political/military strategy of the Republican side as a whole because they were an undisciplined lot (well who’d have thought it?); at worst, they were guilty of committing ultra-left “revolutionary” excesses against “enemies of the people”, which did the Republican cause no good at all (have you not read Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”?); it should not surprise us at all that they were infested with provocateurs - just as are today’s Black Bloc, who can always be relied upon to cause loads of violence and damage in street protests, without getting arrested by police. The people’s militias on the Republican side at the outset of the conflict were in dire need of professional military training and unified political leadership; the International Brigades under Communist Party leadership provided this; without it, there is no way the Republican side could have lasted 3 years against the Fascists as it did. It is true that the revolutionary stance of the Republican side was watered down under Stalin’s direction - from advocating a social revolution in Spain to supporting the continuation of a democratic republic; this strategy was understandable given Stalin’s attempt to pitch for the support of Britain and France at the time, although arguably misguided in hindsight, given that events proved that Britain and France in fact had no interest at all in an anti-fascist victory.. |