[Militant No. 354, 6th May 1977, p. 9]
Dear Comrade.
The Marxist theory of the state is far more complex than is understood by G Selva (15th April), who assumes that Republican Spain (1936-39) could only have been either a bourgeois or a workers’ state.
Marx and Engels saw the state “as a rule (as) the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class.” However Engels also instanced “by way of exception periods in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a degree of independence of both.” Marx showed that the class that rules economically is not always the same class as governs politically.
Marx and Engels declared their objective in Germany in 1847-50 to be “the capture of political power by the proletarians, small peasants and petty bourgeois.” The Bolsheviks struggled up to 1917 that the February had realised this “in a certain form and to a certain extent” in the shape “unparalleled in history” of dual power, which Marx and Engels never envisaged. Marxism is not a dogmatic system completed in 1917 and excluding the possibility of the emergence two decades later of yet other transitional state forms not foreseen by Lenin either!
Already in September 1936 Dimitrov discerned in Republican Spain “a particular form of democratic dictatorship of the working class and the peasantry.” It represented a transitional stage between the old bourgeois state and a workers’ state into which the Communists aimed to transform it.
I never argued that in a democratic regime working class consciousness would automatically “bloom like a ‘million flowers’ into Socialist consciousness”! I merely followed Marx, Engels and Lenin in recognising that, until capitalism can be overthrown, a democratic regime provides the best possibilities for revolutionary Marxist parties to work to develop this consciousness in the course of open class struggles.
This is not Menshevism! The forms deemed appropriate for Popular Fronts against the international menace of fascism in the thirties differed from country to country.
May I take this opportunity to correct the report that appeared in ‘Militant’ of the debate on Spain between ‘Militant’ and the Young Communist League? This stated that I “confidently predicted the formation of an alliance of parties in Britain like those on the left ‘in France, Italy and Spain’, i.e. Popular Front coalitions.” The tape recording of the debate shows that I uttered no such idiocy, but in fact advocated a Labour government carrying out left-wing policies in Britain and went on: “We are not against other parties joining us on a programme of advance towards socialisms. What we oppose in the Labour government is a capitulation to capitalism and a unity with capitalist parties on the basis of that.”
In addition I did not say, as you report, that the Barcelona Rising of May 1937 was “aided by fascists agents from Hitler’s Germany.” I did however refers to Nicolas Franco’s boast to the German ambassador that the instruction has been given to Franco’s agents in Barcelona before the uprising to exploit the existing tensions to provoke the disorders to damage the Republic militarily – thereby indicating, as Trotsky had initially recognised, that such uprisings were “all to the advantage of the fascists.” (Trotsky, ‘Writings 1937-38’, 1st ed., p.84)
Yours fraternally
Monty Johnstone
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