Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M | Hispanic American Historical Review (2024)

Hispanic American Historical Review (1989) 69 (3): 567–568.

Suppression of the Independent Marxist-Leninist party known as the POUM in 1937 became a cause célèbre of Spain during the Civil War. The POUM was far from a major force, yet in some respects it constituted the real Spanish Communist party, since the official PCE was little more than a Soviet tool. For that reason, Soviet power was determined to destroy the POUM, the achievement of this goal being one measure of the degree of Soviet hegemony within the wartime republic.

The present work presents a brief history of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista from origins to formal suppression. It is a translation and an abridgment of Víctor Alba’s earlier, more detailed El marxismo en España, originally published in 1973. Stephen Schwartz did the abridgment and translation, adding a limited amount of new material and concluding chapter on “Orwell and the Others: Foreigners and the POUM.” This version does not, however, substantially go beyond the original.

The viewpoint of Alba (himself a member of the POUM in his youth) is conveyed by his original title, which strongly suggests that the POUM was the only independent revolutionary Marxist party in Spain, clearly the position taken by the party leaders, Joaquín Maurín and Andrés Nin, during 1931-37. The first mass worker movement in Spain was anarcho-syndicalist, while the Socialists, who eventually grew to equal size, long teetered between reformism and radicalism, with an uncertain relationship to revolutionary Marxism. The theoretical purity espoused by the POUM was nonetheless of limited advantage, for it was never really able to compete with the major leftist organizations. Its categorical anti-Stalinism made it the premier rival of the Communists, who inaccurately charged it with Trotskyism, and, in standard Stalinist style, with collaboration with fascism. Nin was tortured and killed by Communist police, a fate avoided by Maurín primarily because he languished in Franco’s prisons on the other side of the barricades.

Despite its limited role and tragic fate, the POUM is of some note in comparative political history because it was perhaps the first example of a vigorous non-Soviet and anti-Stalinist Marxist-Leninist party, an organization with a guaranteed status in political taxonomy and an important place in the political symbolism of the Spanish Civil War. The treatment by Alba and Schwartz is, needless to say, sympathetic and falls far short of a critical account, but will be useful for students, though scholars will want to make use of the original.

Copyright 1989 by Duke University Press

1989

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