Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
This postscript, dated May 5, 1938, delivers a searing indictment of the Popular Front strategy that dominated Loyalist Spain from November 1937 to May 1938. The core argument is that the alliance with the ‘republican’ bourgeoisie, pursued by Stalinists, socialists, and anarchist leaders alike, directly enabled Franco’s military breakthrough to the Mediterranean, splitting the remaining anti-fascist forces. The narrative thrust is one of catastrophic betrayal: the jailing of workers and peasants by their own supposed allies, combined with the opening of front lines by ‘republican’ officers to the fascists.
The key claim is exemplified through General Sebastian Pozas, a career officer who served every regime from monarchy to the bienio negro and, as chief of Catalan and Aragon forces, purged CNT and POUM units, sending whole divisions to destruction without artillery or air cover. Pozas now sits in a Barcelona prison, charged with betraying the Aragon front—a figure who ‘adequately symbolises the period’. The evidence is the military outcome itself: the fascists have reached the Mediterranean, and the race between Franco and proletarian regroupment has been won by the former.
The chapter draws on the immediate historical context of the Spanish Civil War’s terminal phase, referencing the suppression of Catalan autonomy and the subordination of CNT troops to the bourgeois regime. It situates this within a broader European crisis, invoking Berneri’s image of the Spanish proletariat crushed between ‘Stalino-Prussians and the Franco-Versaillaise’. The polemic is directed against three targets simultaneously: Stalinists (the PSUC), the Prieto and Caballero socialists, and the anarchist leaders. All are declared ‘equally guilty’ of betraying their followers to fascism. The author anticipates their inevitable recriminations, insisting no alibis will suffice.
The postscript then pivots sharply to the American working class, arguing that the ‘tragic lessons of Spain’ have immediate bearing on ‘purely American’ problems. American capitalism, it claims, has reached an impasse where it can no longer feed its slaves, with unemployment and production decline exceeding 1929-1932 rates, and war being prepared as a ‘way-out’. Since 1929, America has been ‘Europeanised’. Pessimism and defeatism are dismissed as reactions of the few; the American proletariat’s ‘vast, inexhaustible vitality’ is the international movement’s richest capital, evidenced by its organisation in steel, rubber, and autos. The book’s task is to provide materials for understanding why the Spanish proletariat was defeated and by whom betrayed, so that American workers, with a vanguard that has assimilated the lessons of Russia, Spain, and France, can take up the banner of struggle against capitalism to victory.