Benito Toribio Morales
PRESENTATION
From Rudolph Klement Publishing House we present this publication that is the result of the transcription of a talk given by Benito Toribio Morales within a study and work conference carried out viavideo call for hundreds of militants from various South American countries and the Spanish state about the road of the Trotskyists in the 1930s towards the foundation of the IV International.
A very important part of those battles carried out by the Trotskyists was the intervention in the Spanish Revolution and the key lessons that the revolutionaries drew. This Revolution in the Spanish state shocked the world during the 1930s and concentrates the main theses that divide waters between Trotskyist revolutionaries and the reformism of Stalinists, Social Democrats, Anarchists and ex-Trotskyists.
BTM presented this conference as a Trotskyist leader of the FLTI (Collective for the Refoundation of the IV International) and was enthusiastically followed by revolutionary militants of all generations, but especially young people, many of whom enthusiastically intervened with interesting questions that enriched the conference. Some of those questions are also transcribed in this publication because they can make it easier for the reader to understand this lecture in greater depth.
The reader will thus be able to read this publication and take an important step into these events of the revolution and counter-revolution that took place in Spain in the 1930s. Due to cruel defeats and betrayals to the proletariat, this revolution, one of the most profound ones that have occurred in history,wasled to fail. The betrayals of the Stalinist PCE and the Popular Front played a crucial role in the defeats that fell on the Spanish proletariat and gave way to a bloody 40-year-old fascist dictatorship. The role played by the reformism of the anarchist CNT and the POUM, submitting to the politics of the PCE and the Popular Front, is analyzed in this lecture, as well as many other issues, such as collectivizations, workers’ militias, etc.
INTRODUCTION
BTM: This is not going to be a college lecture on history. Here we are going to deal with the historical facts and key political battles of Trotskyism. The objective of this talk is to arm ourselves against Stalinism and reformism, which have different historians with the official speech of the left, such as Hugh Thomas, Gabriel Jackson and Paul Preston. For them, there was no revolution in the Spanish Civil War. They defend the bourgeois republic, which is the heart of the discourse of the bourgeois republican and Stalinist reformism.
Secondly, the objective of this talk is to arm ourselves with the Trotskyist theses against some renegades of Trotskyism, who stand with the POUM and not with Trotsky and the Trotskyists. We are talking about cliffism, with its leading historian, Andy Durgan, admirer of Maurín's BOC and adviser to Ken Loach on “Land and Freedom”. We are also talking about Mandelism, which has the historian Pepe Gutiérrez Álvarez, who belongs to "Anticapitalistas" and who has several books such as "Poumist Portraits". In fact, Anticapitalistas set up the “Andreu Nin Foundation” here in Spain to defend poumist politics today.
This means that the two international tendencies of the two largest renegades of Trotskyism parties (the British SWP and the French NPA) are poumists, not Trotskyists. In addition, Lambertism, with its historian Pierre Broue, is alsopoumist, having written several books together with another French historian, Témime).
With these two objectives (arming against Stalinism and the ex-Trotskyists) we arm ourselves, thirdly, against the very fashionable historical revisionism of the Far Right, with historians such as Stanley Payne and his book "Collapse of the Republic", and Pio Moa with "Myths of the Spanish Civil War", where they place the Revolution of 34 in Asturias at the origin of the civil war and justify the coup of July 36 as legitimate.
Before starting, I also want to point out that many say that Spain is out of sync and that the Spanish Civil War is unrelated to the international situation. We have to say that this is not true. We can see this, for example, with the popular front policies of the PCE, which is a pseudo-theory based on Stalin's international interests towards France and the United Kingdom. We have to know, for example, how the end of the Spanish Civil War was directly related to the Munich Pacts of 1938 and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939. Or, for example, we will see that the debates Andreu Nin with Trotsky had, for example, the one about the “French turn”, are international, not just Spanish.
This talk is to show that in the Spanish Civil War there was a revolution and a counter-revolution, an issue that they want to hide. Also, as we have been saying in previous conferences, to demonstrate that Trotskyism was in the Spanish Civil War.
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Las Ramblas in Barcelona, May 1937
Banner in Madrid against fascism
“They shall not pass!”
Photograph “Death of a Militiaman” by Frank Cappa
Proclamation of the Republic, 1931
The prime minister in the reformist biennium Manuel Azaña, the first President Niceto Alcalá Zamora, the socialist Julian Besteiro with members of the clergy and the business community
 Alejandro Lerroux, of the Radical Party (prime minister in the second government of the Second Republic), and his partner Gil Robles of the right-wing CEDA
Poster commemorating the Revolution
of 1934 in Asturias
Workers defending position
Company collectivized by unions in 1936
Government of the Popular Front of bourgeois republicans, socialists, Stalinists, anarchists and Catalan and Basque nationalists
Andreu Nin, Minister of Justice in the government of the Popular Front of the Catalan Government
Militiamen forming at the POUM's Lenin Quarters, where George Orwell can be seen in the background
Durruti Column militiamen
Collectivizations in the countryside in 1936 and 1937
Barricade built in Barcelona in May 1937
Headquarters of the Catalan party PSUC PCE in Barcelona
Regional Committee of the CNT in Barcelona
Hotel Falcón de Barcelona, incautado por el POUM
Durruti Friends' leaflet pasted in Barcelona during
the May Events
Leaflet distributed by the Spanish Leninist Bolshevik Section in Barcelona during the days of May 1937
Cover of The Leninist Voice of the Trotskyist Group SBLE
 Militia workers parading
Fifth Regiment of the Popular Front, well-armed and uniformed
VII Stalinist Comintern Congress that adopted the Popular Front policy
A group of militiamen looks out on an embankment on the Navacerrada (Madrid) front in late July 1936
Banner of the POUM
CNT militiawoman
Propaganda with the face of Stalin of the Ministry of Public Instruction
Andreu Nin, ex-Trotskyist and POUM leader
Trotsky, founder of the IV International
Prime Minister Juan Negrín, together
with President Manuel Azaña
Writings on the walls after the disappearance of Andreu Nin, boycotted by Stalinists
The Stalinist military man Enrique Lister who repressed the anarchist and poumist militias of the Aragon Front
Statements by the Stalinist leader of the PCE, La Pasionaria, against Trotskyism
Poster on a Stalinist Radio station
Trials against the POUM. Members of its Executive Committee sitting on the bench of accused
Puerta de Alcalá in Madrid with the figure of Stalin in the middle
Segismundo Casado and Cipriano Mera of the CNT at the XIV Headquarters Division of the People's Army
Stalin Hitler Pact, 1939
Repelling the rebellious fascist military
Hitler and Franco in Hendaya
POUM leaders, with whom current ex-Trotskyists
have a lot in common
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