Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) (POUM) was the most important of the dissident communist groupings that emerged internationally in the 1930s in opposition to Stalinism . It played a leading role in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–7 before becoming victim of the Soviet government's first intervention against a foreign revolution The POUM was founded in September 1935 with the fusion of the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (Workers' and Peasants' Bloc) (BOC) and the Izquierda Comunista de España (Communist Left of Spain) (ICE). The origins of the BOC lay in the pro-communist faction of the CNT led by Joaquín Maurín . This group formed the nucleus of the Spanish Communist Party's Catalan Federation which in 1930 broke with the party in opposition to its ultra-leftism and its increasingly bureaucratic methods. In March 1931 the Catalan Federation united with another dissident communist grouping which had emerged from sectors of left Catalan nationalism in 1928, the Partit Comunista Català, to form the BOC. The BOC was the largest workers' party in Catalonia, with some 5,000 members by 1935. It also had branches in the Valencia region and elsewhere. Politically and socially it was squeezed between the mass anarchosyndicalist movement , the CNT , and the left nationalist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. It main base was ... log in or subscribe to read full text