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The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 7, 2026
Concise. Well-written. Well-researched with sufficient citations. Hard to imagine in 2026 having a conscious organization of the left of 10s of thousands of people in a country with a population of 20% or so of the US in 1936. And they still lost to the fascists... Sigh.
pp98-103, 105-107: POUM's relatively significant but limited commitment to women's liberation
pp110-11, 118-22, 136, 142-5 inter-left strategy: alliances and betrayals (note implicit argument that leadership mistrust between the anarchists and the POUM was crucial to not being able to have a serious chance at beating fascism).
See esp p78 (but the assumption of ill intent as opposed to the possibly wrong call under difficult circumstances is a bit pathetic): For Trotsky and his followers, the POUM's participation in the Catalan government, meant subordinating the workers' movement to a bourgeois government, and would represent the party's betrayal of the revolution. The dissolution of the committees would be the definitive example of the consequences of this treachery. Nin himself had opposed the dissolution of the committees within the Catalan government. However, once passed, the party's Central Committee saw no alternative to implementing the new decree. This would prove a significant step towards the reestablishment of bourgeois Republican order in Catalonia. As one of the party's leaders, Enric Adroher (Gironella), would comment, a few months after the end of the Civil War, the new Government of the Generalitat had had "a single historical mission [...] the liquidation of the committees", while the POUM had been given the task of "convincing the revolutionary forces" outside of Barcelona "of the need to accept that sacrifice, which would turn out to be a further step in the retreat of the revolution". Once this "invaluable service" had been carried out, in December 1936, the POUM was excluded from the Government.
pp98-103, 105-107: POUM's relatively significant but limited commitment to women's liberation
pp110-11, 118-22, 136, 142-5 inter-left strategy: alliances and betrayals (note implicit argument that leadership mistrust between the anarchists and the POUM was crucial to not being able to have a serious chance at beating fascism).
See esp p78 (but the assumption of ill intent as opposed to the possibly wrong call under difficult circumstances is a bit pathetic): For Trotsky and his followers, the POUM's participation in the Catalan government, meant subordinating the workers' movement to a bourgeois government, and would represent the party's betrayal of the revolution. The dissolution of the committees would be the definitive example of the consequences of this treachery. Nin himself had opposed the dissolution of the committees within the Catalan government. However, once passed, the party's Central Committee saw no alternative to implementing the new decree. This would prove a significant step towards the reestablishment of bourgeois Republican order in Catalonia. As one of the party's leaders, Enric Adroher (Gironella), would comment, a few months after the end of the Civil War, the new Government of the Generalitat had had "a single historical mission [...] the liquidation of the committees", while the POUM had been given the task of "convincing the revolutionary forces" outside of Barcelona "of the need to accept that sacrifice, which would turn out to be a further step in the retreat of the revolution". Once this "invaluable service" had been carried out, in December 1936, the POUM was excluded from the Government.
April 2, 2026
A short history of the POUM, the most important 'dissident communist' group that arose in the inter-war years, from a Trotskyist perspective. While decent enough account, it engages only with the head and not the heart. The disappearance, torture and murder of Andreu Nin, the POUM's leader, is dealt with in few sentences. The big poster campaign around the slogan 'Where's Nin?' is ignored. George Orwell's book on the Spanish civil war -- in which he fought as part of the POUM militia -- gets barely a sentence, and a critical one at that. Nin and the POUM deserve better than this.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews