POUM 1937
Source: La Révolution Espagnole. First year, no. 13, February 15, 1937
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.
The Spanish petit-bourgeoisie, supported by the orthodox communist elements throughout the world, are attempting to present the anti-fascist war as a war of national independence in which the entire Spanish people has risen strictly against the Germanic and Roman invaders. This anti-fascism, the expression of a disastrous international policy, has assumed the character of an anti-fascism exclusively Italo-Germanophobe. Its Spanish propagators knowingly forget that fascist Spanish generals were the initiators of the uprising and that a Spanish fascist movement dominates half of Spain through terror. They hide and want to make people forget the fact that the anti-fascist and revolutionary triumph will not stop at the defeat of the Italian and German mercenaries, but will continue until it has completely exterminated Spanish fascism itself.
No one can forget that the Spanish petit-bourgeois republicans bear an enormous responsibility for the preparation and realization of the uprising of July 19. Their ineptitude and pusillanimity already placed them outside Spanish politics. The proletariat will not tolerate their reducing of the anti-fascist movement to a bourgeois republic. It is the workers alone who, through their initiative, have vanquished fascism. Through their organization they will crush it. They alone have the right to construct Spain’s new regime.
The militiaman with his rifle, the worker with his hammer, and the peasant with his scythe all fight against Spanish fascism and its supporters Hitler and Mussolini, at the same time that they combat the bourgeoisie of their own country. Taking over the factories and the land, they are in the process of constructing the Iberian Socialist Republic. No national or international force can make them deviate for their chosen path.