Murray Bookchin

See Fifth Estate introduction in this issue.

Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”

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Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”

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Next issue: Part II of “Notes on the Death of Franco” will cover an analysis of modern Spain and the state of the revolutionary movement today. Murray Bookchin is the author of a forthcoming book The Spanish Anarchists which is on the press and will be published this year.

Death normally invites eulogy--even for a Mafia capo. Accordingly it is not surprising that the death of Francisco Franco summoned up the usual tribute from the acolytes of “relevancy”--a genre of people who are likely to praise any dictator from Stalin to Franco for “modernizing” their countries and ushering them into the “industrial age.” In the case of El Caudillo, Nixon happened to lead the pack. He praised Franco as “a loyal friend and ally of the United States...who brought Spain back to economic recovery and “unified a divided nation through a policy of firmness and fairness toward those who had fought against him.” At the other end of the spectrum, according to some press accounts, unmeasured numbers on both sides of the Spanish frontier opened their wine flasks and got drunk. I suspect that immense section of Spanish public opinion is reflected by those young Madrilenos who, when asked by American television interviewers why they filed past the coffin, bluntly declared that they wanted to see if the “old fascist” was really dead.

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In Part I of Notes on the Death of Franco, the historic rise of fascism under Franco was outlined. Part II analyzes modern Spain and the state of the revolutionary movement today.

Spain alone carried the classical tradition well into our own century. Here, every classical working class Movement, indeed, almost every revolutionary sect, played out its programmatic role with guns in hand. Each exhibited its possibilities and limitations within the traditional framework that had been created by the 1840s. With the collapse of the Spanish revolution a full history of proletarian socialism--whether syndicalist or Marxist, libertarian or authoritarian--came to an end.

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Murray Bookchin is the editor of Anarchos magazine, a periodically appearing journal of anarchist thought published in New York City. Copies of his magazine and other writings are available from Anarchos, P.O. Box 466, Peter Stuyvesant Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10009 or may be picked up in person only at the Fifth Estate office.

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This is an excerpt of Murray Bookchin’s 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! A longer version appeared in the May 1976 Fifth Estate, which is available in our archives at FifthEstate.org.

“[The essay that follows] is not a series of hypothetical inferences; it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century--the Social Democrats, the communists, and the Trotskyists.

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