Page 301 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 291
propagandistic and programmatic independence in order not to be politically
compromised by the pursuit of collaborationist policies.
Viewed in terms of its effects, however, Trotsky’s prognosis was not
particularly influential in mediating the events of the Spanish Civil War to either
the Spanish or the international working class. In Spain itself, the Partido Obrero
de Unificación Marxista (POUM) came closest to embracing a Trotskyist
position, but the links between this organization and the international Trotskyist
Left Opposition were severed when André Nin led POUM into a coalition
government in 1936. Internationally, of course, Trotsky’s analysis of the Spanish
situation was circulated only within the pages of the Bulletin of the Left
Opposition. Put simply, the Trotskyist forces lacked a mass newspaper through
which to make their definition and interpretation of the Spanish situation count,
to make it a widespread part of working-class consciousness and thus an
effective ingredient within that situation itself.
Not so the Communist Party. In accordance with the logic of socialism in one
country, the policy of popular frontism was officially adopted by the Comintern
in 1935. Briefly, according to the prognosis of the Comintern, revolution was no
longer an objective possibility in Europe; the issue of the day was ‘democracy
versus fascism’. Politically, this meant that communists should seek alliances
with socialist and bourgeois-democratic opponents of fascism and that the Soviet
Union should seek treaties of alliance with the western democracies, France and
Britain in particular, against Hitler. This entailed that distinctively communist
objectives were to be temporarily abandoned in favour of an ameliorative
political stance which would facilitate the building of such alliances. Given this
perspective, it was highly inconvenient that the Spanish workers took to
barricades in the way they did. For whilst the Comintern would clearly have
forfeited all credibility on the left had it failed to intervene in support of the Spanish
workers, it would have proved impossible to forge the alliances required by the
political perspective of the Popular Front had that intervention assumed too direct
or revolutionary a character.
The logic of events in Spain was accordingly redrawn in accordance with
Popular Front conceptions. The issue, it was said, was not socialism versus
fascism but democracy versus fascism. The first task was to defend the
bourgeois-democratic forms of the Republic against the insurgent forces and to
consolidate this ground before going on to develop a struggle for socialism
against bourgeois democracy. The strategy of the Communist Party in Spain was
thus that communists should enter into formal alliance with the bourgeois-
democratic forces in the Republic and, as the price of doing this, abandon the
distinctively proletarian forms of organization that had been created in the
republican camp in order to make sure of a solid front with the bourgeois-
republican forces in defence of democracy. The disbanding of workers’ and
soldiers’ committees; the return of factories and of the land to private ownership;
the disarming of workers’ militias—all of these measures were initiated and