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Socialist Appeal, March 1937, Volume 3 No. 3, Page 43-44
Transcribed and Marked Up by Damon Maxwell in 2009 for the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line.

Resolution Adopted on Defense of the POUM

The defense of the Spanish Revolution is impossible without having the international working class come to the defense of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity (POUM) against the attacks of the Spanish Communist party and the People’s Front Government.

Throughout Spain the Stalinists are conducting a campaign for the physical destruction of the only party in Spain fighting for socialism. In Madrid the People’s Front Government has already illegalized the POUM, suppressed its press and radio, and arrested its leaders.

Like their “democratic” class collaborationist predecessors, the Kerenskys, the Noskes and the Scheidemanns the Stalinist carry on a pogrom against the revolutionists under the despicable pretext that they are agents of reaction – of Franco and of the German Fascists.

The campaign of terrorism against the revolutionists is intensified as the bankruptcy of the policies of the People’s Front Government becomes more and more evident. The “democratic” imperialist powers, the “friends of Spanish democracy” have now joined an international people’s front with Fascist Germany and Fascist Italy for sham non-intervention. All that in the name of peace and humanity.

In the Spanish army virtually reconstituted on a bourgeois basis the irresponsible and unreliable military leaders not only threaten the progress to workers’ power but weaken the immediate defensive struggle of the Spanish people against the Fascist army. Even the Communist party is compelled to call for the “removal of incompetent military leaders.”

Those who have been and are calling for a centralized red army under workers’ control, for a workers’ and peasants’ government based on councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, and for an international campaign for working class aid to Spain, irrespective of the government policies in the various countries, are being suppressed in the name of “democracy.”

The Spanish revolution is in danger! The Anarcho-Syndicalist National Confederation of Labor (CNT) has, according to report, joined with the POUM against Stalinist attacks and is now itself under attack. We must defend the democratic rights of all workers’ organizations.

We propose to the National Executive Committee of our party to do the following:

1. Call upon the Valencia Government and the Madrid Defense Junta for an immediate termination of the persecution of the POUM and the syndicalists and for the restoration of their full democratic rights.

2. As an affiliate of the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy ask that body to join with the Socialist party in protesting the suppression of the democratic rights of the POUM.

3. Reexamine the conditions under which the Debs column will operate in Spain so as to assure that it will struggle for socialism and not against the Spanish revolutionary Socialists.

4. To carry on a campaign to send material aid to the POUM as requested in a recent letter from that organization to the NEC of our party.

 
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