7. The Programme of the Catalan Government¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 7: The Programme of the Catalan Government¶
This chapter dissects the catastrophic political trajectory of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) during the autumn of 1936, exposing how the party abandoned fundamental Marxist principles in favour of a ruinous coalitionism. The analysis begins with a stark contradiction: on September 7, Nin denounced bourgeois ministers, yet by September 18, the POUM had embraced coalition government, justifying this volte-face by claiming the Esquerra was ‘of a profoundly popular nature’. This represented a direct violation of the Marxist tenet that the working class must smash the bourgeois state apparatus, not seek to take it over. Nin’s theoretical degeneration was complete when he redefined the dictatorship of the proletariat as a mere agreement among workers’ organisation leaders, rather than a concrete state form based on workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils.
The consequences of this political error were immediate and devastating. The Generalidad cabinet, in which the POUM now participated, moved systematically to dismantle the revolutionary committees that had spontaneously arisen on July 19—the nascent organs of dual power. A decree of October 9 dissolved these committees, threatening to treat resistance as fascist, while a decree of October 27 disarmed the workers. The POUM and CNT published these decrees without explanation, effectively collaborating in their own disarmament. The economic programme was equally damning: banks and land were not nationalised; ‘workers’ control’ of banking was temporary; land remained a commodity; and the collectivisation decree left compensation for former owners as a future charge on the enterprises, placed government agents in factory councils, and froze council composition for two years.
Internationally, the POUM’s failures were compounded by strategic blindness. The party wrongly believed the Soviet note of October 7 would force Blum to send arms, and sent no delegations abroad to campaign among workers. The chapter concludes with a devastating illustration of the CNT’s political naivety: Federica Montseny argued that England, due to its intelligence, would recognise that a fascist state south of France was contrary to its interests, asserting that the fate of the world depended on England. This faith in imperialist reason, the chapter argues, was the logical endpoint of abandoning revolutionary Marxism.