Conditions for Victory in Spain 1936-39 The conditions for victory of the revolutionary people in the [Spanish] civil war against the Fascist Army [of General Franco] are very simple in their essence: 1. The fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the re-establishment of the old forms of exploitation. 2. The workers and peasants in the rear of the revolutionary army as well as in the rear of the enemy must know and understand the same thing. 3. The propaganda on their own front as well as on the enemy front and in both rears must be completely permeated with the spirit of social revolution. The slogan “First victory, then reforms,” is the slogan of all oppressors and exploiters from the Biblical kings down to Stalin. 4. Politics are determined by those classes and strata that participate in the struggle. The revolutionary masses must have a state apparatus that directly and immediately expresses their will. Only the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies can act as such an apparatus. No to Popular Front participation! 5. The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the re-division of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers’ control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy. 6. Enemies of the socialist revolution, that is, exploiting elements and their agents, even if masquerading as “democrats,” “republicans,” “Socialists,” and “Anarchists,” must be mercilessly driven out of the army. 7.At the head of each military unit must be placed commissars possessing irreproachable authority as revolutionists and soldiers. 8.In every military unit there must be a firmly welded nucleus of the most self-sacrificing fighters, recommended by the workers’ organizations. The members of this nucleus have but one privilege: to be first under fire. 9.The commanding corps necessarily includes at first many alien and unreliable elements among the personnel. Their testing, retesting, and sifting must be carried through on the basis of combat experience, recommendations of commissars, and testimonials of rank-and-file fighters. Coincident with this must procede an intense training of commanders drawn from the ranks of revolutionary workers. 10.The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with the tasks of the social revolution. Not only in propaganda but also in military operations it is necessary to take into account the social composition of the various military units of the enemy (bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, or as in Franco’s case, colonial slaves); and in choosing lines of operation, it is necessary to rigorously take into consideration the social structure of the corresponding territories (industrial regions, peasant regions, revolutionary or reactionary, regions of oppressed nationalities, etc.). In brief, revolutionary policy dominates strategy. 11. Both the revolutionary government and the executive committee of the workers and peasants must know how to win the complete confidence of the army and of the toiling population. 12. Foreign policy must have as its main objective the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the exploited peasants, and oppressed nationalities of the whole world. Leon Trotsky Bugün 13:04 Osmanli Tokadi Gözde Seyis yes definetely
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:08:48 +0000
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