Talk:Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] What did they achieve?
POUM got in the way of the war effort, which might have avoided World War Two if it had defeated Franco, or even produced a stalemate.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Book Of The Year 1939 Spain, Civil War In: The history of the Spanish Civil War represents a striking triumph of material over moral factors in war. The defence of the Spanish Republican cause has not been conducted without a considerable measure of political disharmony between Communists, Anarchists, and moderate Republicans, nor has it been wholly free from outbreaks of criminal disorder, but it is probably that no offensives of modern time have been initiated with greater enthusiasm... and that no defensive tasks have been faced with grimmer resolution than have those of holding Madrid and Barcelona.
Spain: The trial in Barcelona, for complicity in the May 1937 rising, of nine Unified Marxist leaders (P.O.U.M), five of whom were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, though all were cleared of the charge of having fascist sympathies; and a series of trials following the discovery of a spy ring in Catalonia.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1993 edition Spain: The Civil War: The role of the workers in defeating the [military-fascist] rising made their organisations the power in the Republican zone. The legal government was by-passed or totally supplanted by local committees ad trade unions; the workers militia replaced the dissolved army... The English novelist George Orwell well described Barcelona, where the CNT [the anarcho-syndicalist trade union] was all-powerful... This revolution was distasteful to the Left Republicans and to the Communist Party, which rapidly grew in numbers and in political influence because it controlled the supply of arms from the Soviet Union. In the name of an efficient war effort and the preservation of 'bourgeois' elements of the Popular Front, the Communists pressed for a popular army and central government control...
A small Marxist revolutionary party .. P.O.U.M, which rejected the Popular Front in favour of a workers' government, set off a rebellion in Barcelona in May 1937. The Communists, Republicans and anti-Caballero Socialists used this as an excuse to outs Largo Caballero, who had proved insufficiently pliable to Communist demands, The government led by the Socialist doctor Juan Negrin was a Republican-Socialist-Communist concern. The great unions, the UGT and CNT, were replaced by political parties.
The Communists were correct in arguing that the committee-militia system was militarily ineffective. General Franco's army, ferried over from Morocco, cut through the militia and arrived before Madrid by November 1936. The successful resistance of the city, which was stiffened by the arrival of the International Brigades and Soviet arms, meant that the Civil War would be prolonged for two years...
Most other sources say the same.
--GwydionM 19:38, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
"POUM got in the way of the war effort, which might have avoided World War Two if it had defeated Franco, or even produced a stalemate."
It could equally be argued(Orwell's account supports this)that the decision of the leadership of the International Brigades to spend as much time fighting the POUM as they did fighting the fascists was responsible both for the victoy of Franco and the onset of World War Two. A strong case exists that, had the Brigades focused exclusively on fighting the Falangist forces and had left the POUM and the anarchists alone, the Spanish Revolution would have triumphed and a non-Stalinist model of revolutionary Marxism would have emerged. Ken Burch 1:13, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Redirect
I have redirected references to the Communist Left of Spain to this article: I hardly think that the party was important on its own, and all mentions of it fit on this page. That is also less confusing. Dahn 23:11, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
- Looks like someone reverted that; if you are going to do that again, I suggest that it ought then to be mentioned in this article. - Jmabel | Talk 02:42, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
This doesn't forward from poum, only from POUM (ie, the capitalised version.) Ironiocally, this Party was founded on the principle of anti-capitalisation :-) Can someone change this please?
- clever, clever. But since someone might type that, I've added a hatnote to Poum, which is a placename. - Jmabel | Talk 04:30, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Popularity
"During the Civil War the party began to grow in popularity and, alongside the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), commanded the support of most of the proletariat in the zone not controlled by Francisco Franco's forces during the war." Is there any evidence for this? --Henrygb 14:14, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
