Paul Mattick 1937
Source: International Council Correspondence, Volume 3 Number 11&12, December 1937, pp. 21-22;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
The conflicting economic forces in Spain have been here disentangled and traced to their sources. Mussolini and Hitler seek the mineral deposits of Spain, together with areas that will give them control of the Mediterranean. England and France, knowing that a victory by either Franco or the Loyalists may cut them off from their colonies, as well as jeopardize their interests in Spain, protract the war so as to exhaust and render helpless to their domination both sides of the struggle, as well as to prolong the drain on Italy's and Germany's resources, Russia, impelled by the threat of the anti-Soviet alliance combining Japan, Italy and Germany, creates an alliance of her own with France and England, and her interests in Spain become allied with the interests of these countries. Her shipments of arms to Spain began, therefore, only when the Loyalists were losing ground and, though dearly bought with Spanish gold, were thenceforth doled-out in proportions sufficient only to equalize, and thus protract, the war. The anti-Fascist Front, dependent upon Russia for arms, becomes subject to her policies--which are the policies of France and England. The class-war is abandoned; the bourgeois character of the united front becomes more and more manifest; revolutionists are displaced from leading positions. In a word, whatever proletarian character the anti-Fascist Front had, has been emasculated.. Thus the whole camouflage of neutrality-pacts, democracy, People's Front, is stripped away from the various powers and we see each nation, Fascist, Democratic or Bolshevik, as predatory Capitalism, after all.
But though this picture of the Spanish situation is commendibly clear and free from the usual confusion of detail, it is not complete. The author has not indicated what the class-conscious workers should do in the face of the bourgeois character of the united front and the treacherous reactionism of the Communist Party. Apparently the murder of revolutionists and the butchery at Barcelona have taught him nothing. Apparently he believes that workers should continue pouring out their blood in a cause that is not their own. But had he reviewed his own facts, he might have seen that the Spanish Civil War is only a struggle between rival groups for the privilege of exploiting the masses. He might have reasoned that only treachery and betrayal for the proletariat can follow their alliance with either side. He might have seen that if, as he indicates, the slogan of Democracy versus Fascism will be used to betray workers into the next world war, it has been used already to betray them in the struggle in Spain.
After all, democracy and Fascism serve the interests of the same system. Workers must therefore carry the class-war against them both. They must fight Capitalism everywhere regardless of what disguises it wears and what aliases it assumes. If workers must fall on the field of battle, let them fall fighting, not that one group of exploiters instead of another should have domination over their lives--but fighting in the cause of their own liberation.