good thesis statement for the civil war

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Letters About the Civil War

Source:  Letters About the Civil War retrieved 4/3/2012 from http://www.civilwarhome.com/letters.htm

What makes a good thesis statement?

The Thesis Statement

A thesis statement identifies a specific part of your writing topic.  The statement declares your unique perspective on the topic.  It gives you the necessary focus and direction to develop your essay.  As your ideas evolve, you may find it necessary to revise your thesis once or twice.  The following informtion will help you write clear, effective thesis statements.

A thesis statement:

• is usually a single sentence and appears in the opening part of an essay
• may be based on a feature of the topic or on a particular stand that you want to defend

The Process

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Research Project Ideas

54th Massachusetts Regiment

Abolitionists

Abraham Lincoln

African Americans in the war

Andersonville Prison

Appomattox Court House

Battle of Shiloh

Battle of the Wilderness

Causes of death in the Civil War

Civil War foods

Civil War weapons

Clara Barton

Emancipation Proclamation

Frederick Douglass

George McClellan

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Tubman

Jefferson Davis

John Wilkes Booth

Medical Personnel of the Civil War

Medical Practices during the Civil War

Navy's role

Railroads in the war

Robert E. Lee

Rose Greenhow

Slavery in America

Sojourner Truth

Southern plantation life & buying slaves

Stonewall Jackson

Transportation during the Civil War

Ulysses S. Grant

Underground Railroad

William Tecumseh Sherman

Women in the war

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Interesting 50 Civil War Topics For Research Paper

Are you looking for an interesting research topic for your next civil war project, homework, or assignment? When you’re assigned a research paper task, it can be tough to draft new and interesting civil war topics to write about. But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered! In American history, the Civil War was a conflict lasting from 1861 to 1865. The Civil War took place due to growing tensions between Northern and Southern states. The primary reason for the conflict was that Southern states wanted to preserve slavery, while Northern states frowned upon it.

Civil War Topic Ideas for Students

Best civil war research paper topics, educative united states history research topics, straightforward topics on civil war research projects, captivating civil war thesis topics, outstanding civil war debate topics, thoughtful us history term paper topics, interesting us history topics for research paper, exciting historical argument topics, talk to us for the most interesting topics in history.

This article provides a list of 50 possible civil war paper topics to choose from. Whether you are a high school student or a graduate student, there is sure to be a topic that interests you. So get started today and get that grade you’ve always wanted. And more so, prepare your way to become an expert on the issues around the civil war.

Essentially, students need to think about their paper mission before exhausting the civil war topic ideas. The same applies when answering questions about the civil war causes. Here are some interesting civil war research paper topic ideas:

• Arguing for or against is one of the most common disputes over the war.
• Expounding on what states gain by interfering with civil war.
• Do most residents nobly fight to defend their land and honor?
• Discuss a lesser-known conflict that took place in a particular community.
• You can also come up with topics about healers, women, soldiers, nurses, and their relationship with civil war.

Whether you are working on civil war writing prompts or the final civil war research project in your course, give the best. Some topics that trigger civil war debate questions include:

• Civil and how government control comes into play.
• Why civil war was not a natural occurrence.
• The cultural changes were witnessed in the US after the war.
• What economic interests made people fight during the civil war?
• Who was the Civil war mastermind?

Students looking forward to writing a potentially interesting research paper on the civil war subject need to do some basic research. These history topics are a game-changer:

• Civil war duration and mental health of participants.
• What triggered the English civil war? The real mistake.
• Was slavery that extensive during the civil war?
• How civil war helped US authorities.
• A retrospective view on women and civil rights violations during the civil war.

Your topics of the civil war must show your prowess in what you write. That’s why you need to be very keen on civil war topics to write about. Here’s a list of 10 civil war topics for a research paper worth considering:

• How the Southern culture of honor contributed to the coming of the civil war
• How politics changed after the civil war
• Ethnic Polarization and civil war length
• The long-term impact of the war on soldiers
• Civil war and economic growth in the United States

Are you struggling to write civil war topics? Worry not. The best US history paper topics and the battle of Gettysburg project ideas in this list will enable you to achieve what you want. They include:

• How the North strategized the war for a win.
• Civil war problems still stand to date.
• What days did the civil war happen at maximum?
• The role of rivers in civil war.
• How religion and civil war collided.

If your civil war topics for research capture what your examiners want, be ready for top grades. As you sit for your civil war research paper, these topics about the civil war will come in handy:

• Civil war and long-term effect on future generations.
• How the west determined the side that won the war.
• The significance of communication among the societies during the civil war.
• Civil war, slavery, and participants of civil war: The ultimate relationship.
• North Carolina leadership contributions that transformed the civil war.

Just like you need the best civil war project topics for your civil war research papers, your civil war paper on debate also deserves an outstanding civil war topics list. That said, here are interesting history paper topics to consider:

• How the North succeeded in winning the war.
• Was the South able to rebuild fast after the Civil War?
• Does racial injustice root down from the days of civil war?
• What civil war chronology would have worked during the civil war?
• Did the civil war change how American history used to trend?

Whether your goal is to settle on the best argumentative history topics and deliver an excellent paper or come up with random us history topics for a research paper, you must get the best. Let’s look at some of the best topics for American history research papers.

• The significance of geography in determining which states seceded from the Union
• The civil war cause that will forever be remembered in American history
• The role of African-American soldiers in winning freedom.
• The most notable battles of the civil war
• The cultural, political, and social impact of the civil war

Civil war topics for projects that need detailed analysis must be well thought out. You need war research topics that enable you to write a civil war thesis statement that converts. Use these civil war ideas for your research papers on the civil war:

• The role of blockades in winning the war.
• Abraham Lincoln’s effects on American history: Ending slavery.
• Effects of slavery: A significant factor in causing the war.
• The collapse of the economy and society in the South following the Civil War.
• How African-American soldiers fought for their freedom.

Topics for history papers don’t have to be boring. If you’re keen enough, many good questions about the civil war will allow you to write very exciting argument topics. Here are American history topics to write about :

• Were women a major cause of the Civil War?
• Was the United States able to avoid civil war before it happened?
• To what extent did civil war contribute to industrialization: An expert view.
• Relationship between civil war and feminism: Dating back in 1861.
• The reality of civil war on men.

Some civil war discussion questions you might have come across will give you civil war project ideas for high school or university paper writing. But are these civil war project ideas enough? You must think over and beyond.

Talk to us for history assignment help and get the best topic and a civil war thesis statement that will convince your examiner. Remember, a good research paper will guarantee an excellent final grade and a full academic scholarship.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Civil War

Essays on Civil War

Civil war essay topic examples.

The American Civil War is a significant part of our nation's past, filled with fascinating stories, debates, and events. Whether you want to argue, compare, describe, persuade, or narrate, we have a wide range of essay topics that will take you on a journey through this pivotal period in American history. Join us as we delve into the heart of the conflict, examine key figures, analyze strategies, vividly depict battles, and explore the moral imperatives that shaped the course of the Civil War. These essay topics will guide you on your historical voyage, offering insights into the complexities and enduring legacies of this era.

Argumentative Essays

Argumentative Civil War essays require you to analyze and present arguments related to this historical conflict. Here are some topic examples:

• 1. Argue whether the Civil War was primarily about slavery or states' rights.
• 2. Analyze the role of key political figures, such as Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, in shaping the outcome of the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War stands as a monumental chapter in our nation's history, marked by conflicting ideologies and profound repercussions. In this essay, I will argue that at its core, the Civil War was a struggle over the institution of slavery and its implications for the United States.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for an Argumentative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the argument for the centrality of slavery in the Civil War underscores its deep-rooted impact on our nation's evolution. As we reflect on this defining period, we are challenged to confront the enduring legacy of this conflict and its implications for our society today.

Compare and Contrast Essays

Compare and contrast Civil War essays involve examining the differences and similarities between various aspects of the conflict. Consider these topics:

• 1. Compare and contrast the strategies and leadership styles of Union and Confederate military commanders.
• 2. Analyze the impact of the Civil War on the lives of soldiers and civilians in the North and the South.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: The American Civil War featured diverse military strategies and leadership styles, alongside varying experiences for those directly affected. In this essay, I will delve into the differences and similarities between Union and Confederate military commanders and the profound effects of the war on individuals on both sides of the conflict.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Compare and Contrast Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the comparison and contrast of military leaders and civilian experiences during the Civil War provide a multifaceted view of this historic event. As we examine these aspects, we gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of this period in American history.

Descriptive Essays

Descriptive Civil War essays enable you to vividly depict events, battles, or notable figures from the era. Here are some topic ideas:

• 1. Describe the Battle of Gettysburg, emphasizing its pivotal role in the outcome of the war.
• 2. Paint a detailed portrait of Abraham Lincoln, focusing on his leadership qualities and the challenges he faced during the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: The American Civil War witnessed significant battles and iconic figures that have left an indelible mark on our history. In this essay, I will immerse you in the vivid details of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the conflict, and provide a descriptive portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the leader who steered the nation through this tumultuous period.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Descriptive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the descriptive exploration of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's leadership underscores the indomitable spirit of a nation in crisis. As we reflect on these historical aspects, we gain insight into the resilience and determination that defined this era.

Persuasive Essays

Persuasive Civil War essays involve convincing your audience of a particular perspective or interpretation of the conflict. Consider these persuasive topics:

• 1. Persuade your readers that the Emancipation Proclamation was a turning point in the Civil War and a moral imperative.
• 2. Argue for or against the notion that the Reconstruction era effectively addressed the issues arising from the Civil War.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: The Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction era represent critical chapters in the aftermath of the Civil War. In this persuasive essay, I will present the argument that the Emancipation Proclamation not only altered the course of the war but also marked a moral imperative in the struggle for freedom.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Persuasive Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the persuasive argument for the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation challenges us to acknowledge the moral dimensions of the Civil War. As we examine this transformative period, we are urged to consider the enduring impact of this historic document on the journey toward equality.

Narrative Essays

Narrative Civil War essays allow you to tell a compelling story from the perspective of a historical figure or a fictional character during the Civil War era. Explore these narrative essay topics:

• 1. Narrate a day in the life of a Civil War soldier, conveying the challenges and emotions they faced on the battlefield.
• 2. Imagine yourself as a journalist covering the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and recount your experiences and emotions during that historic event.

Example Introduction Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: The American Civil War was a time of upheaval and turmoil, experienced firsthand by soldiers and civilians alike. In this narrative essay, I will transport you to the battlefield and the tumultuous events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, offering a personal perspective on these historical moments.

Example Conclusion Paragraph for a Narrative Civil War Essay: In conclusion, the narrative accounts of a Civil War soldier's life and a journalist's experiences during the Lincoln assassination bring history to life in a profoundly human way. As we immerse ourselves in these narratives, we gain a deeper appreciation for the individuals who lived through these tumultuous times and the resilience they displayed.

The Economic and Political Causes of The Civil War in The United States

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Harriet Tubmans Greatest Achievement

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The Civil War in America

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African Americans During The Civil War

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April 12, 1861 - April 26, 1865

United States

Confederate States of America, United States

Battle of Antietam, Fort Pillow Massacre, Battle of Gettysburg, Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, Battle of Monocacy

Abraham Lincoln, who served as the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln's leadership and steadfast commitment to preserving the Union were instrumental in guiding the Northern states to victory. General Robert E. Lee, who served as the commander of the Confederate Army. Lee's military prowess and strategic genius earned him respect even among his adversaries. Clara Barton, known as the "Angel of the Battlefield," made a lasting impact as a nurse and humanitarian during the war. She later founded the American Red Cross, which continues to provide humanitarian assistance worldwide.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, was a defining moment in the history of the United States. It emerged from a complex set of circumstances and prerequisites that spanned several decades. One of the primary prerequisites was the issue of slavery. The institution of slavery had long been a divisive issue between the Northern and Southern states. The expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories, such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, heightened tensions and fueled regional conflicts. Economic differences also played a significant role. The Northern states had undergone rapid industrialization, while the Southern states relied heavily on agriculture, particularly cotton production. This led to differing priorities and conflicting interests between the two regions. Political factors, such as debates over states' rights and the balance of power between the federal government and the states, further exacerbated the tensions. The election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860, who opposed the expansion of slavery, intensified the divide and prompted several Southern states to secede from the Union. The historical context of the American Civil War was characterized by deep-rooted divisions over slavery, economic disparities, and political conflicts. These factors ultimately culminated in a devastating conflict that reshaped the nation's history and had long-lasting consequences for both the United States and the institution of slavery.

One of the most significant effects was the abolition of slavery. The Civil War served as a catalyst for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declared slaves in Confederate territories to be free. Ultimately, the war led to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865, officially abolishing slavery nationwide. The Civil War also had far-reaching political consequences. It solidified the power of the federal government over the states and established the supremacy of the United States as a single, indivisible nation. The conflict clarified the relationship between the federal and state governments, paving the way for the expansion of federal authority in subsequent years. Moreover, the war's aftermath brought about significant social and cultural changes. Reconstruction efforts aimed to rebuild and integrate the Southern states into the Union, but the process was marked by challenges, resistance, and the rise of racial segregation. These struggles set the stage for the civil rights movement in the following century. Economically, the war transformed the United States into a more industrialized nation. The demand for supplies and weaponry during the war accelerated industrialization in the North. Additionally, the emancipation of slaves created a labor force that contributed to the country's economic growth.

In the Union states, there was a prevailing sentiment that the war was necessary to preserve the Union and end the institution of slavery. Many Northerners supported the cause, viewing it as a fight for justice and the preservation of the nation's democratic ideals. Abolitionists and those who opposed the expansion of slavery were particularly vocal in their support of the Union cause. In the Confederate states, public opinion leaned towards defending their perceived rights to self-governance and the institution of slavery. The idea of states' rights and the defense of Southern traditions resonated strongly among many Southerners. They believed in the necessity of secession to protect their way of life and preserve their economic system. Public opinion within individual communities could also vary. Families were often divided, with some members fighting for the Union and others for the Confederacy. People in border states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, experienced particularly complex and nuanced views due to their proximity to both sides. Over time, public opinion on the Civil War has evolved. The war's causes and consequences have been reevaluated and interpreted through different lenses, leading to ongoing discussions and debates. Today, the Civil War is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in American history, with public opinion encompassing a range of perspectives that continue to shape our understanding of the conflict.

Films: "Gone with the Wind" (1939), "Glory" (1989), "Lincoln" (2012). Literature: "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane, "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier, "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara.

The topic of the American Civil War holds immense importance for academic exploration and essay writing due to its significant impact on American history and society. This conflict, fought between the Northern and Southern states from 1861 to 1865, centered on fundamental issues like slavery, states' rights, and the preservation of the Union. Studying the American Civil War allows us to delve into the complexities of the nation's past and comprehend the deep-rooted divisions that led to this brutal conflict. It provides a platform to analyze the moral, political, and socioeconomic factors that shaped the war's outcomes and repercussions. Furthermore, exploring the Civil War fosters a deeper understanding of the struggle for civil rights and the long-lasting consequences that continue to shape the United States today. By examining primary sources, historical narratives, and varying perspectives, essays on the American Civil War can shed light on pivotal events, influential figures, military strategies, and the experiences of individuals affected by the war. It offers an opportunity to critically analyze the causes, motivations, and legacies of this watershed moment in American history, ultimately contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the nation's past and its ongoing pursuit of equality and justice.

1. Foner, E. (2010). The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company. 2. McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. 3. McPherson, J. M. (2003). Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam. Oxford University Press. 4. McPherson, J. M. (2007). This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford University Press. 5. Miller, R. J. (2003). Lincoln and His World: The Civil War Era. University of Nebraska Press. 6. Oakes, J. (2012). Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. W. W. Norton & Company. 7. Potter, D. M. (1990). The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. Harper Perennial. 8. Robertson, J. I. (2002). Civil War: America Becomes One Nation. DK Publishing. 9. Symonds, C. L. (2001). The American Heritage History of the Battle of Gettysburg. HarperCollins. 10. Ward, G. C. (1990). The Civil War: An Illustrated History. Alfred A. Knopf.

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Pioneering Perspectives: Navigating Civil War Topics for Your Research Paper

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The Allure of the Past

The fascinating domain of history beckons with tales of epic battles, transformative revolutions, and pivotal social changes. When you’re immersing yourself in the study of the past, few eras are as captivating as the American Civil War. Using the lens of “Civil War topics for research paper”, you can dissect an intricate period that indelibly sculpted the contours of modern-day United States. This tumultuous era, punctuated by fierce debates over slavery and states’ rights, coupled with landmark battles that decisively altered the war’s trajectory, offers a veritable treasure trove of enthralling topics for your research paper.

Strategy in Selection: The Crucial Choice of a Topic

In the theatre of academic research, selecting an engaging topic is akin to devising a winning battle strategy. A well-chosen topic ignites your curiosity, fuels your research, and ultimately shapes the architecture of your final paper. Remember, your quest is to unearth a topic that not only adheres to the guidelines of your assignment but also resonates with your interests, thereby transforming a scholarly pursuit into an intellectual adventure.

The Portal to the Past: Historical Research and the Civil War

Engaging in historical research is the equivalent of launching a thrilling expedition through the corridors of time. It empowers you to scrutinize the Civil War through a multifaceted political, economic, social, and cultural prism. This exploration into the annals of history enriches your comprehension of the epoch, sharpens your analytical prowess, and strengthens your ability to construct persuasive arguments steeped in well-sourced information.

Diving Into the Depths: Civil War Topics for Your Research Paper

Now, let’s plunge into the heart of our discourse – a roster of intriguing Civil War topics that could grace your research paper:

• Slavery: The Tinderbox of the Civil War
• Economic Dichotomies: The North versus the South
• Emancipation Proclamation: The Clarion Call for Freedom
• The Battle of Gettysburg: A Crucible of Conflict
• Women of War: The Feminine Footprint on the Civil War
• Unshackling Potential: African American Soldiers in the Civil War
• The Aftermath of Lincoln’s Assassination: A Nation in Mourning
• Southern Economy: Scars of the Civil War
• Naval Might in the Civil War: Battles on the Blue Frontier
• Life Beyond the Battlefront: The Civil War Home Front
• The Influence of the Abolitionist Movement on the Civil War
• The Underground Railroad: A Path to Freedom
• Technological Advancements during the Civil War
• Confederate Secession: Causes and Consequences
• The Role of Photographs in Depicting the Civil War
• The Evolution of Civil War Medicine
• The Effect of the Civil War on American Literature
• The Impact of the Civil War on the Women’s Rights Movement
• Civil War Prisons: A Study of Living Conditions
• The Role of Music during the Civil War
• The Impact of the Civil War on Children
• Espionage and Spying during the Civil War
• A Comparative Study of Union and Confederate Armies
• The Role of Railroads in the Civil War
• Analysis of Key Civil War Battles
• The Effect of the Civil War on American Religion
• Impact of Civil War on Agriculture in the South
• The Role of Immigrants during the Civil War
• Freedmen’s Bureau: The Aftermath of the Civil War
• Military Strategies of the Union and Confederacy
• Foreign Diplomacy during the Civil War
• The Significance of Civil War Memorials
• Influence of Civil War on Future American Wars
• The Effects of Blockades during the Civil War
• The Role of the Press during the Civil War
• The Changing Role of African Americans Post Civil War
• Civil War and Its Impact on Education in the South
• The Role of Nurses in the Civil War
• The Development of Trench Warfare during the Civil War
• The Rise of Industrialization after the Civil War
• The Impact of the Civil War on Native American Tribes
• Reconstruction Era: Successes and Failures
• The Cultural Divide: The Civil War’s Impact on Regional Identity

Each topic presents a distinctive perspective on the Civil War, serving as a fertile ground for investigation and revelation.

Finishing the Journey

Selecting a Civil War topic for your research paper sets you on a path of adventure into a defining period in American history. Engaging with the multifaceted layers of this era bestows upon you a wealth of learning opportunities, expanding your historical knowledge and refining your research and analytical capabilities. Remember, the journey through the labyrinth of the past is as enlightening as the final treasure of knowledge you unearth.

So, equip yourself with your historian’s quill, select your topic, and embark on your expedition through time!

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American Civil War

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Theses and Dissertations Full-Text Online

• ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global Citations for dissertations back to the 1860s, with almost 100,000, from approximately 1997 forward, in full PDF format for immediate download.

Tracking Down Other Theses and Dissertations

• WorldCat Most university libraries catalog their theses and dissertations, although they may not assign subject headings.
• American Historical Association Directory of History Dissertations The Directory contains 56,702 dissertations that were completed or are currently in progress at 202 history departments in the United States and Canada.

Requesting Theses and Dissertations On Loan

• Interlibrary Loan Since dissertations and theses are often available only at the issuing institution, they may be difficult to borrow and there may be a charge for those completed out of state.

Purchasing Copies of Theses and Dissertations

• UMI Dissertation Express You may personally purchase copies of available dissertations from UMI Dissertation Express for $38.00 each PDF, $39 unbound paper, or $56 softcover. The last resort for seeing some theses and dissertations is to visit the library of the issuing institution.

UT-Tyler Masters Theses in History dealing with Civil War era

These theses are available at the Robert R. Muntz Library: Owens, Jeffrey Alan. “The Civil War in Tensas Parish, Louisiana: A Community History.” 1990. F377.T45 O84 1990. Newsom, James Lynn. “Grand Phalanx of Intrepid Infantry: The Seventh Texas, 1861-1865.” 1993. E580.5 7th .N49 1993. Cowan, Terry. “The Stone Movement and “The Christians in the West” in Texas, 1824-1865.” 1994. BX7316 .C69 1994. McIntyre, Stephanie. “Ties that Bind: Railroads, Sectionalism, and the Civil War.” 2004. HE2751 .M35 2004. Roberson, Bea.  "Domestic Ambivalence:  Elite Southern Women and the Institution of Slavery."  2010. E441 .R63 2010.

The following theses are available online: Harvell, Elle.  " Cope, Cooperate, Combat:  Civilian Responses to Union Occupation in Saline County, Missouri, During the Civil War. "  2012. Hughes, Sharon.  " Isaac Merritt Singer:  A Womanizer who Liberated Women. "  2014.

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Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Introductory Essay: Slavery and the Struggle for Abolition from the Colonial Period to the Civil War

How did the principles of the Declaration of Independence contribute to the quest to end slavery from colonial times to the outbreak of the Civil War?

• I can explain how slavery became codifed over time in the United States.
• I can explain how Founding principles in the Declaration of Independence strengthened anti-slavery thought and action.
• I can explain how territorial expansion intensified the national debate over slavery.
• I can explain various ways in which African Americans secured their own liberty from the colonial era to the Civil War.
• I can explain how African American leaders worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

Essential Vocabulary

Slavery and the struggle for abolition from the colonial period to the civil war.

The English established their first permanent settler colony in a place they called Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early seventeenth-century Virginia was abundant in land and scarce in laborers. Initially, the labor need was met mostly by propertyless English men and women who came to the new world as indentured servants hoping to become landowners themselves after their term of service ended. Such servitude was generally the status, too, of Africans in early British America, the first of whom were brought to Virginia by a Dutch vessel in 1619. But within a few decades, indentured servitude in the colonies gave way to lifelong, hereditary slavery, imposed exclusively on black Africans.

Because forced labor (whether indentured servitude or slavery) was a longstanding and common condition, the injustice of slavery troubled relatively few settlers during the colonial period. Southern colonies in particular codified slavery into law. Slavery became hereditary, with men, women, and children bought and sold as property, a condition known as chattel slavery . Opposition to slavery was mainly concentrated among Quakers , who believed in the equality of all men and women and therefore opposed slavery on moral grounds. Quaker opposition to slavery was seen as early as 1688, when a group of Quakers submitted a formal protest against the institution for discussion at a local meeting.

Anti-slavery sentiment strengthened during the era of the Revolution and Founding. Founding principles, based on natural law proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and in several state constitutions, added philosophical force to biblically grounded ideas of human equality and dignity. Those principles informed free and enslaved blacks, including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Quock Walker, and Belinda Sutton, who sent anti slavery petitions to state legislatures. Their powerful appeal to natural rights moved legislators and judges to implement the first wave of emancipation in the United States. Immediate emancipation in Massachusetts, gradual emancipation in other northern states, and private manumission in the upper South dealt blows against slavery and freed tens of thousands of people.

Slavery remained deeply entrenched and thousands remained enslaved, however, in states in both the upper and lower South , even as northern leaders believed the practice was on its way to extinction. The result was the set of compromises the Framers inscribed into the U.S. Constitution—lending slavery important protections but also preparing for its eventual abolition. The Constitution did not use the word “slave” or “slavery,” instead referring to those enslaved as “persons.” James Madison, the “father” of the Constitution, thus thought the document implicitly denied the legitimacy of a claim of property in another human being. The Constitution also restricted slavery’s growth by allowing Congress to ban the slave trade after 20 years. Out of those compromises grew extended controversies, however, the most heated and dangerous of which concerned the treatment of fugitive slaves and the status of slavery in federal territories.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 renewed and enhanced slavery’s profitability and expansion, which intensified both attachment and opposition to it. The first major flare-up occurred in 1819, when a dispute over whether Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state generated threats of civil war among members of Congress. The adoption of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 quelled the anger for a time. But the dispute was reignited in the 1830s and continued to inflame the country’s political life through the Civil War.

A cotton gin on display at the Eli Whitney Museum by Tom Murphy VII, 2007.

“U.S. Cotton Production 1790–1834” by Bill of Rights Institute/Flickr, CC BY 4.0

Separating the sticky seeds from cotton fiber was slow, painstaking work. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (gin being southern slang for engine) made the task much simpler, and cotton production in the lower South exploded. Cotton planters and their slaves moved to Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama to start new cotton plantations. Many planters in the Chesapeake region sold their slaves to cotton planters in the lower South. This created a massive interstate slave trade that transferred enslaved persons through auctions and forced marches in chains and that also broke up many slave families.

In 1831, in Virginia, a large-scale slave rebellion led by Nat Turner resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 whites and more than 100 blacks and generated alarm throughout the South. That same decade saw the emergence of a radicalized (and to a degree racially integrated) abolitionist movement, led by Massachusetts activist William Lloyd Garrison, and an equally radicalized pro slavery faction, led by U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

The polarization sharpened in subsequent decades. The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) brought large new western territories under U.S. control and renewed the contention in Congress over the status of slavery in federal territories. The complex 1850 Compromise, which included a new fugitive slave law heavily weighted in favor of slaveholders’ interests, did little to restore calm.

A few years later, Congress reopened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery, thereby undoing the 1820 Missouri Compromise and rendering any further compromises unlikely. The U.S. Supreme Court tried vainly to settle the controversy by issuing, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most pro-slavery ruling in its history. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, a rising figure in the newly born Republican Party, declared the United States a “house divided” between slavery and freedom. In late 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown alarmed the South when he attempted to liberate slaves by taking over a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He was promptly captured, tried, and executed and thereupon became a martyr for many northern abolitionists.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video: Dred Scott v. Sandford for more information on the pivotal Dred Scott decision.

Leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, and James Forten all worked for the cause of abolition and equality.

As the debate over slavery continued on the national stage, formerly enslaved and free black men and women spoke out against the evils of slavery. Slave narratives such as those by Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs humanized the experience of slavery. Their vivid, heartbreaking accounts of their own enslavement strengthened the moral cause of abolition. At the same time, enslaved men and women made the brave and dangerous decision to run away. Some ran on their own, and others used the Underground Railroad, a network of secret “conductors” and “stations” that helped enslaved people escape to the North and, after 1850, to Canada. The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, who traveled to the South about 12 times to lead approximately 70 men and women to freedom. Free blacks faced their own challenges. Leaders such as Benjamin Banneker, James Forten, David Walker, and Maria Stewart spoke out against racist attitudes and laws that sought to limit their political and civil rights.

This map shows the concentration of slaves in the southern United States as derived from the 1860 U.S. Census. The so-called “Border states”—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and after 1863, West Virginia—allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. Credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

By 1860, the atmosphere in the United States was combustible. With the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November of that year, the conflict over slavery came to a head. Since Lincoln and Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery and called it a moral evil, seven slaveholding states declared their secession from the United States. And in April 1861, the war came. The next five years of conflict and bloodshed determined the fate of enslaved men, women, and children, and of the Union itself.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What actions were taken to oppose slavery in the colonial period and Founding era?
• Why did the Constitution not use the words “slave” or “slavery”?
• The invention of the cotton gin
• The Mexican-American War
• Dred Scott v. Sandford
• The election of Abraham Lincoln as president
• How did formerly enslaved and free black men and women fight to end slavery?

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• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

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Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

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The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

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Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

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The Causes of the American Civil War: Trends in Historical Interpretation, 1950-1976

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This thesis examines the trends in historical interpretation concerning the coming of the American Civil War. The main body of works examined were written between 1950 and 1976, beginning with Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union and concluding with David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. It also includes a brief survey of some works written after 1976. The main source for discovering the materials included were the bibliographies of both monographs and general histories published during and after the period 1950-1976. Also, perusal of the contents and book review sections of scholarly journals, in particular the Journal of Southern … continued below

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Tate, Michael Joseph May 1992.

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• Tate, Michael Joseph
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• Kobler, J. F. (Jasper Fred), 1928- Minor professor
• Smallwood, J. B.
• Lowe, Richard G.
• University of North Texas Publisher Info: www.unt.edu Place of Publication: Denton, Texas

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• Level: Master's
• Grantor: University of North Texas
• Department: Department of History
• Discipline: American History
• Name: Master of Arts
• PublicationType: Master's Thesis

This thesis examines the trends in historical interpretation concerning the coming of the American Civil War. The main body of works examined were written between 1950 and 1976, beginning with Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union and concluding with David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. It also includes a brief survey of some works written after 1976. The main source for discovering the materials included were the bibliographies of both monographs and general histories published during and after the period 1950-1976. Also, perusal of the contents and book review sections of scholarly journals, in particular the Journal of Southern History and Civil War History, was helpful in discovering sources and placing works in a time chronology for the thesis narrative.

• American Civil War
• United States history
• historical interpretation

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• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Causes.
• Thesis or Dissertation

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Tate, Michael Joseph. The Causes of the American Civil War: Trends in Historical Interpretation, 1950-1976 , thesis , May 1992; Denton, Texas . ( https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500242/ : accessed April 8, 2024 ), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu ; .

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Good Thesis Statement On War And Terrorism

Introduction.

Terrorism is defined as the use of illegal force against either a person or property for the purpose of intimidating them or a government, civilians or any division of a population for either political or social objectives. Terrorism usually incites war either within a nation or between nations. Nations have designated strategies to counter terrorist activities. There is a war on terrorism. (Cook, 2004)

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Good Thesis Statement About Three Major Aspects Of Industrialization Between 1865 And 1920 That Impacted The Communities, Economy, And Politics Of The United States.

Thesis and outline: industrialization after the civil war.

Thesis Statement An analysis of the period that followed the American Civil War reveals changes in the economic, political, and social spheres as the country shifted from an agrarian society to an industrial one.

Essay Outline

Expertly crafted thesis statement on three major aspects of industrialization between 1865 and 1920:, industrialization after the civil war: thesis and outline.

Part 1 Thesis Statement: Industrialization after the Civil War expanded the United States economy and helped transform American social values, but it also introduced more corruption into the American political sphere.

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Introduction and thesis statement Industrialization in the United States society, politics, and the economy was influenced immensely after the Civil War. The way of living of the citizens of the United States changed to a more convenient place to live but during this time, the government dealings were very corrupt.

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The civil rights movement, free greek mythology thesis statement sample.

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Thesis: american civil war.

Sample Thesis Paper

Discuss how the following factors worked as advantages for the North and South during the American Civil War: geography, political, leadership, manpower, industrial capacity, economics, and ideology/motivation. How great was the Southern chance for victory in your opinion? How did the North overcome the South’s advantages to win the war?

From 1861 to 1865 The Union and the Confederacy fought in a fierce battle which took more than 600,000 lives in the American civil war. The war resulted in the loss of lives, funds and brought freedom to 4 million black slaves under the command of President Lincoln (Encarta).

The two regions themselves had several differences that ultimately decided the fate of the war. The dependence on slavery in the south brought it great profitability in terms of cotton crop. The north was by contrast an industrial society with factories and railroads. While the north manufactured their own goods, the south had to depend on import theirs due to their resistance to industrialization. While the south had great loyalty to the confederacy, the north only formed their unions to serve a singular purpose. The confederacy though being a much weaker power than the north believed that dragging a war to the point where the north could no longer sustain it from an economic standpoint guaranteed them victory (Encarta).

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Theses on the Spanish Civil War and the revolutionary situation created on July 19, 1936 - BALANCE (Agustín Guillamón)

A 2001 text summarizing the results of the research carried out by Agustín Guillamón for the Spanish journal, BALANCE , concerning the lessons of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia, denying the existence of “dual power” in Catalonia in 1936, discussing the struggles of the CNT rank and file against militarization and in favor of socialization, emphasizing the revolutionary potential of the ubiquitous committees and their neutralization and eventual destruction due to a lack of coordination and centralization, and claiming that the proletarian revolution requires the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a centralized workers power based on workers councils.

Theses on the Spanish Civil War and the Revolutionary Situation Created on July 19, 1936 in Catalonia - BALANCE 1

“The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.” Karl Marx, Letter to Schweitzer (February 13, 1865)

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.” George Orwell, 1984

“The function of history would therefore be showing that the laws deceive, that the kings play a part, that power deludes and that historians lie.” Michel Foucault, The Genealogy of Racism

“It is ‘no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present, but of risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in ... the will to knowledge’.” Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

“The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time.” Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“Historical memory is a battlefield of the class struggle.” Combate por la historia. Manifiesto (July 8, 1999)

Hundreds of books have been written about the Spanish War and its historiography batters our minds with an accumulation of clone-books, which cite each other and repeat one after another the same errors or identical ideological interpretations, depending on the political tendency, without exhibiting even the least trace of critical spirit, when they do not restrict their ambitions to self-justification or castrate themselves in the Francoist moral, “that should never happen again”.

The manipulation of the facts, when they are not simply concealed, the theoretical confusionism in analyzing what took place and the errors accumulated by historiography and the compilers are on such a scale and magnitude that refuting them would require the (useless) work of an entire lifetime.

Let us take one of the most outstanding examples: the question of the existence of a situation of dual power in Catalonia, involving the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and the government of the Generalitat. This question regarding the existence of a SITUATION OF DUAL POWER IS UNDOUBTEDLY FUNDAMENTAL for any analysis of the Spanish War. It is generally accepted so dogmatically that any doubts concerning the existence of a situation of dual power might appear to be foolishness. Nonetheless, those who participated in these great events, with ideologies as different as those of Tarradellas, Nin, Montseny, García Oliver, Azaña, etc., deny the existence of such a situation of dual power.

The theses we set forth below are the products of the study, published in various issues of BALANCE , of the diverse interpretations offered by the revolutionary minorities that intervened in the Spanish War concerning the historical facts and the prevailing ideologies of the period, 1936-1939. We exclude, because it is of no interest to us, the bourgeois view; nor are we interested in confronting the interpretations that issue from counterrevolutionary and/or Stalinist camp. The theses we elaborate here constitute an attempt to arrive at a theoretical synthesis concerning the Spanish War and the revolutionary situation that arose in July 1936, from the perspective of the revolutionary proletariat that was defended by the revolutionary minorities that existed at the time: Bordiguists, Bolshevik-Leninists, Josep Rebull and The Friends of Durruti.

Augustín Guillamón On behalf of BALANCE

Thesis no. 1. From July 17 to 19, 1936, there was a military uprising against the government of the Republic, an uprising that was supported by the Church, the majority of the Army, fascists, bourgeoisie, landlords … whose preparation had been tolerated by the republican government, which had won the elections in February 1936 thanks to the Popular Front coalition. The military, the fascists and the parliamentary REPUBLICAN democratic and the monarchist parties, parties of the left and of the right, pursued the policy that was most advantageous for the Spanish bourgeoisie, and for its preparations for a bloody coup d’état. The military uprising was defeated in the major cities and provoked, as a reaction (in the republican zone), a revolutionary movement, which emerged victorious from its armed insurrection against the army. The Defense Cadres and Committees of the CNT-FAI, which had been prepared since 1931, played a preponderant role in this insurrectionary victory. The loss of Zaragoza was due, among other reasons, to the lack of preparation and resolve on the part of a secret leadership, which was operating from a hidden refuge, and engaged in constant negotiation with the republican authorities and the “undecided” military elements, instead of organizing and leading the workers insurrection on the basis of the Defense Cadres.

The fact that the revolutionary movement of July 19, 1936 emerged as a reaction to a military uprising does not mean that it would not have taken place without the military uprising. In fact, since October 1934, and throughout the entire electoral campaign of February 1936, both the CNT and the POUM thought that a confrontation with the fascist forces was inevitable, concerning whose plans for a coup d’état they were aware, and against which they were conscientiously preparing for an armed confrontation, although they never rejected maintaining ties and collaborating with the republican parties or the government of the Generalitat.

In any event, the defeat of the military uprising cannot be attributed to the leadership of any political or trade union organization, but to the clandestine military organization of the confederal defense cadres, to the neighborhood defense committees, and to the “federation of the barricades” in Barcelona; and to the local committees in the various Catalonian towns.

Thesis no. 2. This victorious armed insurrection of the proletariat, in the republican zone, neutralized the coercive apparatus and therefore the capacity for repression of the capitalist state. This insurrection also led to a series of “revolutionary conquests” of a social and economic type. The republican state broke up into a multitude of local or sectoral powers, and many of its functions were “usurped” by the working class organizations. THERE WAS A VACUUM OF STATE POWER. Having lost its capacity for coercion, the republican state witnessed the emergence of autonomous regional powers, totally independent of the central government, which in turn (such as the government of the Generalitat in Catalonia) saw how its authority collapsed; and how the various revolutionary, local, sectoral, neighborhood, factory, defense, supply, trade union and party committees and popular and rearguard militias performed those functions that the government was incapable of exercising, because of the loss of its repressive apparatus and the general arming of the working class organizations. In many places, the revolutionary committees, which Munis theorized as government-committees, exercised all power on a local level, but there was no coordination or centralization of these local committees: there was A VACUUM OF CENTRAL OR STATE POWER. NEITHER THE REPUBLICAN STATE NOR THE AUTONOMOUS REGIONAL GOVERNMENTS (Generalitat) EXERCISED CENTRAL POWER; but neither did the local committees.

Thesis no. 3. The revolutionary committees—defense, factory, neighborhood, workers control, local, supply, etc.—comprised the embryo of the organs of working class power. They initiated a methodical expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie, undertaking industrial and agricultural collectivization, organizing the popular militias that stabilized the fronts during the first days of the war, and organized control patrols and rearguard militias that imposed the new revolutionary order through the violent repression of the Church, employers, fascists and yellow trade unionists and their pistoleros . But these committees were unable to coordinate among themselves and create a centralized working class power. The initiatives and activities of the revolutionary committees bypassed the leaders of the various traditional organizations of the workers movement, including the CNT and the FAI. There was a revolution in the streets and the factories, and some POTENTIAL organs of the power of the revolutionary proletariat: THE COMMITTEES, which no party, organization or vanguard was able or wanted to COORDINATE, REINFORCE AND TRANSFORM INTO AUTHENTIC ORGANS OF WORKING CLASS POWER.

The majority of the leadership of the CNT opted for collaboration with the bourgeois state in order to win the war against fascism. García Oliver’s slogan of July 21, “go for broke”, was nothing but a Leninist proposal for the CNT bureaucracy to seize power; a proposal, furthermore, that Oliver himself knew would be rendered unviable and absurd when, at the CNT plenum, he posed the false alternative of “anarchist dictatorship” or antifascist collaboration. García Oliver’s spurious “extremist” proposal, Abad de Santillán’s warning about isolation and foreign intervention, and Durruti’s suggestion that they wait until Zaragoza was taken, led the plenum to vote for “provisional” antifascist collaboration. The revolutionary alternative of destroying the republican state and transforming the committees into organs of working class power and the militias into a proletarian army was never proposed.

One cannot speak of a situation of dual power, involving the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA) and the government of the Generalitat, at any time during the existence of the former, because there was never a pole of centralized workers power at any time; we can, however, speak of an opportunity, already forfeited during the first few weeks after July 19, to establish a situation of dual power between the revolutionary committees and the CCMA. Some trade union, local and neighborhood committees expressed from the very beginning their mistrust and fear of the CCMA, because they foresaw the counterrevolutionary role that it would play.

Many of those who played their parts in the events, along with the historians, speak of a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat. It is a profound error, however, to believe that the CCMA was anything other than what it really was: a pact between the workers organizations and the bourgeois organizations and state institutions, an institution of class collaboration, a Popular Front government in which representatives of the government of the Generalitat, the bourgeois republican parties, the Stalinists, the POUM and the CNT participated.

The leaders of the CNT based their power on the “proximity” of the revolutionary committees, if only because the majority of their members were also members of the CNT, but at the same time they mistrusted the committees because they did not fit into their organizational and doctrinal plans, and also because, as a bureaucracy, they felt threatened by their activities, which they were unable to direct.

The CCMA in Catalonia was unlike the other similar institutions that arose in other regions of Spain, insofar as it was dominated by the CNT, and due to the fact that the CNT owed its power to the revolutionary committees, in which the majority of the elements were members of the CNT.

It was in Catalonia where the latter were most widespread and most enduring. In other institutions similar to the CCMA that had arisen in other parts of Spain, the impact, profundity, scope and duration of the committees was much less and/or they only lasted for a few days or weeks.

The revolutionary committees constituted the self-organization of the working class in a revolutionary situation, as was as the embryo of the organs of power of the Spanish revolutionary proletariat. But we must understand their weaknesses, and above all their inability to coordinate among themselves for the purpose of centralizing proletarian power in a workers state. There was no revolutionary party or workers vanguard capable of transforming these committees into workers councils, characterized by the democratic election of their delegates in assemblies, revocable at any time, and capable of coordinating their activities on a regional and national level, up to the formation of a State of Workers, Militia and Peasants Councils. The CNT and FAI ISSUED NO DIRECTIVES TO THEIR MILITANTS until July 28, when they threatened to shoot any “uncontrollables” who continued to expropriate the bourgeoisie and persisted in taking fascists, bourgeois, priests and former members of the yellow trade unions (the pistoleros of the employers) “for a ride”. In July 1936, the workers knew what to do without orders from their leaders, and proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie and suppress some of the institutions of rule of the capitalist state (army, Church, police), in such a manner that they went beyond not only the state structures, but also their own political and trade union organizations; but they were incapable of acting against their leaders, they respected the state apparatus and its officials, and in May 1937 they grudgingly accepted, but accepted nonetheless, capitulation to the class enemy.

Furthermore, these revolutionary committees, although they were potentially the organs of workers power, were hamstrung by the overwhelming influence of the ideology of antifascist unity and many of them were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees, composed of workers and bourgeoisie, in the service of the program of the petty bourgeoisie. The entry of the anarchist ministers in the Madrid government, and of anarchists and POUMistas in the government of the Generalitat, made it possible, in October 1936, without the least armed resistance, to dissolve the local committees and replace them with the antifascist municipal councils. The defense and factory committees, along with a few local committees, resisted, but could only postpone, their final dissolution.

Thesis no. 4. The overwhelming predominance of the anarchist movement in Spain cannot be explained by racial or psychological causes or reasons of character. Nor can it be explained by certain backward economic traits, such as the survival of “feudal relations” in the Andalusian countryside, or the predominance of small industry in Catalonia. And much less by the mythical evangelical influence of Fanelli in 1868, and his “indelible” legacy.

The evident difference between the Spanish and the international workers movements, with regard to the contrasting predominance of the anarchists in the Spanish workers movement and of the social democrats in the rest of Europe, is fundamentally due to the fact that it was possible to engage in the parliamentary, democratic and reformist struggle to obtain substantial reforms in the standard of living and the political representation of the working class in the rest of Europe. From 1919 to 1923, the Spanish employers created and financed a trade union of pistoleros (the Free Trade Union), which, with the help of the police and the government, proceeded to physically eliminate the working class leaders and militants. This unequal battle concluded with the establishment of the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the outlawing of the CNT.

The parliamentary road, or the possibility of achieving social reforms, was not opened up in Spain until the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. During the thirties the extremely robust anarchist tradition, the recent unstable experiences of Spanish parliamentarism, and especially the extreme sluggishness and timidity that characterized social and political reform, were factors that made the anarchist movement very powerful and caused it to continue to enjoy the support of most workers. The committees that spontaneously arose everywhere in July 1936, were imperfect and incomplete organs of workers power. They were unlike the workers councils due to the fact that the delegates were not democratically elected by the workers in general assemblies in the factories, to whom they would have to be responsible for their policies. The committees were dependent on the trade union or political bureaucracies that had appointed them. This dependency hindered the coordination of the committees among themselves, the possibility of creating higher decision-making institutions, characterized by class unity, and the exercise of workers power in the economy or the militias. The committees were therefore transformed into the subordinate institutions of trade unions or parties, and the creation of powerful unified institutions of workers power was rendered impossible. Thus, instead of a revolutionary army of the working class, a centralized expression of workers power, a federation of militias arose in which each party or trade union competed to create its own army, more or less coordinated on the front with the other workers organizations. Instead of a socialized economy, directed by a Government of the Workers Councils, there was collectivization that unfolded within the framework of a kind of trade union capitalism, when it was not managed or coordinated by the bourgeois government of the Generalitat, at the service of the program of the petty bourgeoisie.

The entry of the trade unions and parties in the autonomous government of the Generalitat, and in the republican central government of Valencia, also meant the dissolution of the committees, and the end to the danger that they might be able to transform themselves into workers councils.

Thesis no. 5. Without the destruction of the capitalist state one cannot speak of a proletarian revolution. One may speak of a revolutionary situation , a revolutionary movement, a victorious insurrection, the “partial” and/or “temporary” disappearance of the functions of the bourgeois state, political chaos, the loss of real authority on the part of the republican administration, a VACUUM OF CENTRALIZED POWER or an atomization of power, but not of a proletarian revolution.

The REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION of July 1936 never led to a proposal to establish a working class power in opposition to the republican state: therefore, there was no proletarian revolution. In the absence of revolution the revolutionary situation rapidly evolved in the direction of the consolidation of the republican state, the weakening of the revolutionary forces and the definitive victory of the counterrevolution after the May Days of 1937, with the outlawing and political persecution of the POUM in June 1937, as well as with the driving underground of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain (SBLE) and The Friends of Durruti Group.

For the same reasons, one cannot speak of a situation of DUAL POWER, since there was no pole of workers power that proposed to destroy the capitalist state: it would be more proper to speak, in the Catalonian case, of a duplication of powers between the Generalitat and the CCMA. The CCMA was an institution of CLASS COLLABORATION, which acted as shock absorber and mediator between the myriad of revolutionary committees and the broken down apparatus of the capitalist state. But the CCMA was above all the only instrument of the antifascist front that was CAPABLE of sterilizing, channeling, truncating and subduing the popular revolutionary initiatives that were undertaken by the revolutionary committees, BY MEANS OF their integration in ambiguous institutions (subordinated to the CCMA), which were characterized by their SUBMISSION to the antifascist program and the government of the Generalitat. This process was exemplified in institutions like the Central Committee for Supply, the Rearguard Militias, the Control Patrols, the Revolutionary Tribunals, the Committee of Investigation, the Workers Control Committees, the Councils of Workers and Soldiers, etc., which were created to REPLACE, DESTROY OR CHANGE THE CLASS NATURE of the popular and working class initiatives of a revolutionary character; after a transitional period of two or three months, during which time they functioned as institutions subordinated to the CCMA, they were integrated into the structure of the government of the Generalitat, and were later dissolved or replaced by institutions of the republican state apparatus. The anarchists, however, thought they were clever enough and powerful enough to manipulate the state as a technical instrument in their service of their plans. On August 11 the CNT and the POUM joined the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat, whose purpose was the coordination and planning of the Catalonian economy.

The participation of the CNT (and also the POUM and FAI) in the bourgeois institutions, with its corresponding offer of public responsibilities, together with a massive influx of new trade union members, and the departure to the front of the best militants, the most experienced in the social struggle and the most theoretically advanced, favored a rapid process of bureaucratization in the CNT.

The revolutionary militants found themselves isolated in the assemblies and condemned to a permanent minority status they could not overcome. The fundamental principles of anarchosyndicalism collapsed and gave way to an opportunism disguised by the ideology of antifascist unity (“renounce the revolution to win the war”) and the pragmatism of loyal and faithful collaboration with the parties and the government of the republican bourgeoisie, with the exclusive goal of enforcing the program of the bourgeoisie. THE TRADE UNION BUREAUCRACY OF THE CNT DEMONSTRATED ITS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY NATURE IN MAY 1937. The struggle against fascism was the alibi that permitted the renunciation of the destruction of the republican bourgeois state, defended by the counterrevolutionary forces of the PSUC and the ERC. The confrontation between the revolutionary proletariat and the CNT bureaucracy, which was now in the counterrevolutionary camp, was inevitable. The CNT-UGT pact of March 1938 established a de facto state capitalism similar to that which prevailed in the Soviet Union.

Thesis no. 6. No revolutionary organization existed that was capable of proposing the destruction of the capitalist state: therefore one cannot speak of a situation of dual power. This does not mean that there were not organized revolutionary nuclei, nor do we have to doubt the (subjective) “revolutionary will” of POUMistas or anarchists. It means that the class struggle in Spain, during the 1930s, had not generated a revolutionary movement that was capable of proposing the program of the proletarian revolution (and the social dictatorship of the proletariat) and its ANTAGONISM to the existence of the capitalist state. BECAUSE THIS ATOMIZED POWER, incapable of centralizing itself and coordinating itself in a WORKERS POWER, confronted the republican state power, usurped the functions of the capitalist state, which were taken from the republican authorities against their will, but most of all, DUE TO THE FACT THAT IT DID NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY ABILITY TO COORDINATE ITS ACTIVITIES AND TO THE FACT THAT NO WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION TOOK THE INITIATIVE TO DO SO, a few weeks after the victorious insurrection, the situation of the VACUUM OF CENTRAL POWER caused all the working class organizations to put themselves at the service of this same republican state. The revolutionary potential of the proletarian committees was transformed into the submissiveness of the antifascist committees, or else they were replaced, at the local level, by the new popular front municipal councils beginning in October 1936.

THERE WAS NO WORKERS POWER THAT WAS ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS THE CAPITALIST STATE. THE STRUGGLE FOR A WORKERS STATE THAT WAS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE EXISTENCE OF THE CAPITALIST STATE NEVER TOOK PLACE. There was never a situation of dual power, because there was never a struggle for workers power, nor was there even a pole of attraction for the formation of such a workers power. In any event (in Catalonia, and only for two or three months), one must speak of a REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION polarized between two antagonistic alternatives: the revolutionary committees, WHICH WERE NEITHER COORDINATED AMONG THEMSELVES NOR CENTRALIZED, AND WERE UNAWARE OF THEIR OWN ROLE; and the CCMA, AN INSTITUTION OF CLASS COLLABORATION formed of representatives of the government of the Generalitat, the antifascist republican and workers organizations, and the extreme left of the Popular Front—the CNT-FAI and the POUM. This antagonism between the committees and the CCMA cannot be defined as a situation of dual power, insofar as there was never a workers power, not even an attempt to coordinate and centralize these committees in order to form a pole of attraction for such a workers power. The CNT and the POUM, instead of reinforcing these revolutionary committees as organs of a new workers power, felt left behind and threatened by the “incontrolados”, so much so that not only did they not issue any directives to coordinate the committees, but their very first directives and measures consisted precisely in threats and denunciations directed against the “incontrolados”. These threats, regardless of whether or not there were any acts of vandalism, were to bear fruit in the summary shooting, in obedience to these directives “against the ‘incontolados’” issued by the superior committees of the CNT, of José Gardeñas of the Construction Trade Union and Fernández, president of the Food Supply Trade Union. Months later, once the counterrevolution had already been underway for some time, it would be the Stalinists and republicans who would bestow this undeserved moniker of “incontrolados” upon the POUM and the CNT, for the purpose of physically and politically eliminating them.

The predominant school of historiography not only fails to view this revolutionary situation as one posing two antagonistic alternatives, the revolutionary committees or the CCMA; it speaks of a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat!

Thesis no. 7. The capitalist state was not destroyed and continued to perform (even if in a “diminished”, “nominal” or “partial” capacity) its functions. Furthermore, the state’s repressive apparatus—the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard and the carabineros—was not dissolved, but confined to their barracks to wait for better times, which were to come a few months later. The economic internationalization of capitalism in the wake of the First World War signaled the end of the epoch of bourgeois revolutions and the beginning of the epoch of proletarian revolutions. In the absence of a revolutionary vanguard, one that would be capable of proposing the antagonism between the proletariat and the capitalist state and positing the dictatorship of the proletariat, any revolutionary movement, regardless of its proletarian composition, was destined to fail. Given the inability of the workers organizations to seize power, or, more accurately, to coordinate and centralize the local powers of the various revolutionary committees on a regional and national scale, in order to constitute a workers pseudo-state, the only way left was that of collaboration with the other bourgeois political organizations and with the CAPITALIST STATE, which could have no other goal than the restoration and reinforcement of the republican state. The bases of the counterrevolution were solid enough to facilitate a rapid recovery of the capitalist state, which soon recouped all its functions and, after the “inevitable and necessary” bloody defeat of the proletariat in May 1937, decapitated any revolutionary threat that the workers movement posed, by way of a double policy of repression of the “permanent ‘incontrolados’” (revolutionaries), and the social-democratization and integration of the working class organizations into the apparatus of the capitalist state, via the cooptation of the trade union and political bureaucracies and their incorporation into the bureaucracy of the state.

Thesis no. 8. The CNT and POUM were the extreme left of the Popular Front. Actually, neither of these organizations was part of the Popular Front; both, however, made a decisive contribution to its success in the elections of February 1936. After July 19, 1936, both organizations were left behind by the events. In the midst of the revolutionary euphoria they were incapable of issuing any directives until July 28—“to warn the ‘incontrolados’”! On July 20 a planned radio broadcast announcing a “progressive” labor agreement signed by the Minister of Labor of the Companys government and the Catalonian employers, which granted the 40-hour week, a 15% wage increase and a reduction of rents by 50%, was cancelled, because several of the eminent employers who had signed the agreement had received warnings not to return to their homes because patrols of armed men were waiting for them. The revolution proceeded by fits and starts, and the stage of economic demands had been surpassed. The revolutionary committees had spontaneously proceeded to carry out the expropriation of the bourgeois class. Collectivization was not undertaken because the employers, technicians and directors had fled and it was necessary to pay the weekly wages of the workers (as some of the protagonists and historians have claimed), but because the revolutionary committees were carrying out a methodical expropriation of the bourgeoisie. The leaders of the workers organizations (CNT and POUM) PROVISIONALLY replaced the state with regard to those functions that the latter had lost, and created institutions of class collaboration in cooperation with reformist and counterrevolutionary workers organizations (PSOE, PSUC, PCE) and bourgeois organizations (ERC, Estat Catalá, Izquierda Republicana) with the goal (conscious or not) of restoring all its functions to the capitalist state and thus helped to fill the VACUUM OF STATE POWER created by the victory of the workers insurrection.

The CCMA could have exercised all the functions of a provisional “revolutionary” government, because the local revolutionary committees, which were trying to coordinate and centralize their activities, turned to the CCMA for help, directives, solutions, orientations, etc.; but the CCMA never performed any other function than that of a LIAISON COMMITTEE for these local revolutionary committees in their dealings with the Generalitat. Furthermore, these local revolutionary committees, in accordance with the policy and the collaborationist nature of the CCMA, were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees, and thus lost their revolutionary and proletarian origin and potentials.

Thesis no. 9. The CCMA was the product of both the victory of the insurrection of July 19-20 and the political defeat of July 21. For the first time in history, a militarily victorious workers insurrection was defeated politically on the very next day after its triumph due to its political incapacity and its refusal to seize power. The CCMA was never an organization of workers power or of dual power, but an organization of class collaboration. And this is just what Munis, Nin, Molins, Tarradellas, Companys, Azaña, Peiró, García Oliver, Montseny, Abad de Santillán, etc., have already said, and it was the product of its own nature as an institution of antifascist unity and class collaboration, formed by the diverse workers, reformist, Stalinist and republican organizations. And there was no revolutionary organization that was capable of opposing the CCMA, capable of creating an institution of coordination and centralization of the local committees, that is, an organ of WORKERS POWER opposed to the government of the Generalitat, to the Popular Front-style government known as the CCMA, and to the central government of the Republic.

Paradoxically, a posteriori , the dissolution of the CCMA was characterized, by many of those who have revealed the CCMA’s nature as an institution of class collaboration, as the end of a stage of “dual power”. The advance of the counterrevolution and the loss of revolutionary impulse on the part of the masses seems to be reflected in the weakness of the theoretical analyses of the revolutionaries.

The real power of the CCMA has always been greatly exaggerated. After its first month of existence this power was already reduced, with the creation of other institutions like the Council of the Economy, the Control Patrols, the Supply Committee, etc., to that of just one more CNT institution of technical collaboration with the government institutions, an institution of antifascist collaboration in the command of the militias, thus losing (if it every really possessed it) its capability of exercising “government” functions. Furthermore, the military expedition to Mallorca, staged by the Generalitat in mid-August 1936, in collaboration with the CNT Maritime Transport Trade Union, without the involvement or even the knowledge of the CCMA, constituted irrefutable proof that the CCMA did not even have full control of command over the militias.

Once the CNT decided that antifascist collaboration was necessary and inevitable, the pressure imposed by the government apparatus (both the central government and the autonomous regional governments), among which the refusal to deliver arms (or currency to buy them) to the confederal militias particularly stands out, caused the anarchosyndicalist leaders to accept the necessity of dissolving the CCMA, the revolutionary committees and the Militias, and with them all revolutionary possibilities, in order to participate in the government apparatus (central and autonomous regions) like any other “antifascist” organization.

At the beginning of September 1936 the CNT proposed the dissolution of the CCMA; this proposal was approved by the other antifascist forces, which, over the course of the last meetings of the CCMA, had approved the formation of a new government of the Generalitat with representatives from all the antifascist organizations that formed the CCMA. The only other things that were discussed were the name and the program this government would adopt. A “verbal” concession was made to the principles of the CNT by calling the new government “the Council of the Generalitat”, and its program would be the one that had already been established by the existing “Council of the Economy”.

Thesis no. 10. A war in defense of a democratic state, for the victory of the latter against a fascist state, could not be a revolutionary civil war; it was a war between two fractions of the bourgeoisie—the fascist and the republican fractions—in which the proletariat had ALREADY been defeated. This was not because the July insurrection was militarily suppressed in the republican zone (as it had been in the fascist zone), but because the nature of the war AT THE SERVICE OF A DEMOCRATIC BOURGEOIS STATE had transformed the class nature of the revolutionary insurrection of July. The methods, goals and class program of the proletariat had been replaced by the methods, goals and program of the bourgeoisie. That is, when the proletariat fights with the methods and for the program of the bourgeoisie, even if it does so in favor of the democratic fraction and against the fascist fraction, HAS ALREADY BEEN DEFEATED. The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing. The proletariat either fights with its own class methods (strike, insurrection, international solidarity, revolutionary militias, destruction of the state, etc.) and for its own program (suppression of wage labor, dissolution of the army and police, abolition of international borders, the dictatorship of the proletariat organized in workers councils, etc.), or it collaborates with the bourgeoisie, renouncing its class methods and program, and then it has ALREADY been defeated.

Thesis no. 11. The collectivizations meant nothing, and were incapable of further development in the future, if the capitalist state was not destroyed. In fact, the collectivizations ended up serving the imperative needs of a war economy. The situation rapidly evolved, assuming a wide variety of forms between the expropriation of the factories from the bourgeoisie in July 1936 and the militarization of industry and labor, which largely characterized the situation in 1938. It was, and still is, impossible to separate the political revolution from the social and economic revolution. Revolutions are always TOTALITARIAN, in both meanings of the word: total and authoritarian. THERE IS NOTHING MORE AUTHORITARIAN THAN A REVOLUTION: expropriating a factory from its owners, or a rural estate from its owner, will always be an authoritarian imposition. And it can only take place when the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie, the army and the police, have been defeated by a revolutionary army that imposes the new revolutionary legal system IN AN AUTHORITARIAN MANNER. Anarchosyndicalism and the POUM, due to the theoretical incapacity of the former and the numerical weakness, verbalism and lack of audacity of the latter, never posed the question of power, which they abandoned to the hands of the professional politicians of the republican bourgeoisie and the socialists: Azaña, Giral, Prieto, Largo Caballero, Companys, Tarradellas, Negrín … or they shared it with them, when their participation was necessary to thwart the development of a revolutionary alternative.

On the economic terrain, the historiographic myth that can be encompassed by the generic concept of “COLLECTIVIZATION” underwent (in Catalonia) four stages:

1. The expropriation by the workers (July to September 1936);

2. The adaptation of the confiscated enterprises to the Collectivizations Decree (October to December 1936);

3. The attempt by the Generalitat to direct the economy and control the collectives, in confrontation with the attempt to socialize the economy spearheaded by the radical sector of the CNT militants (January to May 1937);

4. The gradual state intervention and centralization (on the part of the central government) imposed a war economy and the MILITARIZATION of labor (June 1937 to January 1939).

Thesis no. 12. The antifascist ideology, the sacred union of all the antifascist working class and bourgeois parties, justified the abandonment of class frontiers in favor of the practice of class collaboration. Antifascism was the extension of the electoral Popular Front policy of February 1936, in a situation of war, after a victorious working class insurrection. The need for antifascist unity in order to win the war against fascism ALREADY implied the defeat of the revolutionary alternative. Failure to recognize this, and to devote oneself to making attempts to differentiate, as Trotsky did, a rejected Popular Frontism from a “temporary” antifascism, necessary until fascism had been defeated, meant to objectively fall into the nets of antifascist unity, to the same degree and for identical reasons as the POUM and the CNT. THE POPULAR FRONT (after the purging of the most right-wing parties after July 19) AND THE ANTIFASCIST FRONT WERE NOT SO DIFFERENT, AND AS THE WAR PROGRESSED THEY TENDED TO MERGE. In fact, it was the CNT and the FAI, after May 1937 and the fall of the Largo Caballero government, which led the movement to form an ANTIFASCIST POPULAR FRONT, as a means of exerting pressure to once again obtain libertarian representation in the republican government. This actually led to an accelerated process of social-democratization of all the workers organizations that rapidly obtained a majority position in all of them, thus bringing about the absolute marginalization of the revolutionary minorities, which were totally residual, powerless and very confused, which facilitated the rise and seizure of state power by the Stalinists, with their reactionary, but very clear and resolute, program of strengthening the republican state.

Thesis no. 13. The so-called “revolutionary conquests” were simultaneously the culmination of the insurrectionary victory of the workers organizations and the political defeat of the proletarian revolution.

The CCMA was the product of the victory of the workers insurrection, but it was also the product of the inability of the workers organizations, especially the CNT, as it was the most powerful force, to destroy the capitalist state. These social, economic, political, cultural, and quotidian “conquests” responded perfectly to the anarchosyndicalist ideology of apoliticism “ tout court ”, which was not interested in the “seizure of power”, but with carrying out the social revolution by destroying the army, abolishing the Church and taking over management of the factories. To many anarchosyndicalist workers, the question of whether to “go for broke” or not was absurd; they already had everything they were interested in: a gun, control of the factory, control over public order, the municipal council….! Why seize power? Why replace the republican state with “another”, workers, state?

WITHOUT REVOLUTIONARY THEORY THERE IS NO REVOLUTION. Very quickly the anti-militarists became militarists, and soon thereafter staunch advocates of an efficient professional bourgeois army. It did not take long for the anti-statists to become the best support for the reconstruction of the capitalist state, and the government of the Republic had four anarchist ministers among its ranks. Anarchist ministers! Nor was this the greatest contradiction in which the Spanish anarchist movement would become enmeshed. Faced with a lack of alternatives and directives from the CNT, the expropriated enterprises were transformed into collectives, which were nothing but the establishment of a kind of trade union capitalism—powerfully centralized and coordinated by the government of the Generalitat—which degenerated within a few months into the militarization of the enterprises and labor.

Thesis no. 14. The revolutionary committees—of defense, labor, enterprise, locality, supply, neighborhood, rearguard militias, etc.—were the potential organs of workers power, which often exercised the only real power, on a local or sectoral level, in July 1936. But they were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees or trade union committees for enterprise management, or else underwent a prolonged period of dormancy (like the confederal defense committees) or were transformed into state institutions, like the Control Patrols, which were nothing but control exercised by the (revolutionary or radical) “incontrolados” and the defense committees, neighborhood committees and rearguard militias (although they were at the same time the new organization that supplanted government control over public order). The ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the Control Patrols, the collectives, the Militias, the defense committees, and ultimately the whole “Revolution of July 19”, was the direct consequence of the ambiguity and ambivalent nature of the organizations of the extreme left of the Popular Front themselves (the CNT and POUM), which were not only incapable of seizing power and championing the historical program of emancipation of the proletariat against the counterrevolutionary forces, but also opted for class collaboration with the bourgeois parties and the capitalist state with the goal of defeating fascism. They were ambiguous because the CCMA was the product of the insurrectionary PROLETARIAN victory of July 19, but also of the political fiasco of July 21, WHEN CLASS COLLABORATION WAS ACCEPTED.

Thesis no. 15. On July 21, 1936 the CNT opted for collaboration with the other antifascist forces, without issuing any political directives concerning either the seizure of power, the economic organization of the enterprises, the coordination of the revolutionary committees or that of the different economic and industrial sectors. On August 11, 1936, at the request of the CNT, the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat assumed the responsibility for coordinating and reorganizing the Catalonian economy.

The provisional character of the enterprise expropriations, which were implemented in the heat of the moment of the insurrectionary victory of July, in a situation of a power vacuum, caused them to be oriented towards the sole objective of guaranteeing the everyday functioning of the enterprises. Only in a few economic sectors (food, health and sanitation, education), to a limited extent, and in some isolated enterprises, was there an attempt to carry out a process of socialization in which the trade union acted as both initiator and organizer. The Collectivizations Decree of October 1936 legalized a fait accompli, that is, the confiscation of the enterprises by the workers, but only for the evident purpose of centralizing the Catalonian economy through the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat, eliminating the organs of workers power from the enterprises, and nipping in the bud the socializing experiments of certain sectors and enterprises.

Collectivization in the Catalonian economy underwent four stages:

1. The expropriation of the enterprises. The revolutionary committees, which the counterrevolutionaries called “incontrolados”, once the military uprising had been defeated, proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie, and to take priests, bourgeois, caciques and former members of the employers’ pistoleros trade union “for a ride”. Not only was there a total absence of political or economic directives from the superior committees of the CNT and the CCMA, but the latter also threatened to shoot the “incontrolados”. They faced a fait accompli, however: the factories had been confiscated. The CNT, faced with its own inability and lack of will to coordinate and manage the Catalonian economy, proposed to the Generalitat the creation of a Council of the Economy: it handed over to the petty bourgeois government of the Generalitat the management and coordination of the Catalonian economy!

2. Adaptation to the Collectivizations Decree. In October 1936, together with the dissolution of the CCMA, the entry of the POUM and the CNT into the government of the Generalitat, the Decree on the militarization of the Popular Militias, the dissolution of the local committees—which were replaced by Popular Front Municipal Councils—and a long etcetera of counterrevolutionary measures of lesser importance, the Collectivizations Decree was approved with the indispensable support of the CNT. What it actually did was establish a trade union capitalism in the enterprises, with major state intervention and centralization on the part of the government of the Generalitat, and this was called COLLECTIVIZATION. The former bourgeoisie, the private owners, had been replaced by management by the trade union delegates of each enterprise, organized in Workers Control Committees (which were often the result of a pact between manual, technical and administrative workers and even some of the former owners), whose activities were completely mediated by and subject to the tutelage of the inspectors appointed by the Generalitat, which nonetheless considered the enterprise to be the property of the trade union.

3. COLLECTIVIZATION versus SOCIALIZATION (December 1936-May 1937). On the one hand, the government of the Generalitat, relying on its social base that consisted of the petty bourgeois sectors—administrative, technical, former business owners, members of the liberal professions and even workers professing a right wing ideology, often members of the UGT—initiated an offensive to expand its control over the enterprises, based on the Collectivizations Decree and the implementation of a series of financial decrees, approved by Tarradellas at S’Agaró in January 1937. At the same time the radical sector of the CNT militants was attempting to SOCIALIZE production, which implied increasing the power of the Trade Union Industrial Federations in the enterprises.

SOCIALIZATION, for this radical sector of the CNT, meant the direction of the Catalonian economy by the Trade Unions (of the CNT) and a break with the dynamic of trade union capitalism, and the establishment of an equitable distribution of wealth that would put an end to the scandalous differences between workers in rich and poor collectivized industries, and between the former and the unemployed. Such a form of direction over A SOCIALIZED Catalonian ECONOMY required in turn the creation of the necessary organs within the CNT, that is, the replacement of the Sindicatos Únicos (which were appropriate for directing a strike, but not for managing the enterprises) by Industrial Trade Unions (better adapted for managing the various economic sectors), which was implemented in the first months of 1937. The SOCIALIZATION of the Catalonian economy meant the direction of the economy (and of the war) by the CNT, and this in turn required the abolition of the government of the Generalitat.

The counterrevolutionary offensive of the Generalitat to expand its control, extending it to every enterprise, therefore clashed head-on with the socialization program of the radical sector of the CNT. A struggle was waged, one enterprise at a time, in which the assemblies that were supposed to vote for socialization were subjected to a wide variety of forms of pressure and manipulation, from the most despicable political intrigues to the use of the police. In this bitter struggle, unfolding in one enterprise at a time, a struggle that the superior committees of the CNT never wanted to centralize, because to do so would have implied breaking with the antifascist unity pact, an increasingly more obvious and “painful” division emerged among the trade union militants, between the collaborationist sector and the radical sector of the CNT. During the course of this campaign to socialize the Catalonian economy, the radical militants of the CNT attempted to compete with the collaborationist militants in an attempt to obtain the support of the majority of the trade union members. The radical militants, however, were almost always in the minority in the factory assemblies, due to the flood of opportunists who joined the CNT in the wake of July 19 and attrition caused by the revolution itself among the ranks of the revolutionaries, many of whom joined the Militias or had been promoted to positions of responsibility.

A major role in the opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias (decreed in October 1936) was played by the fourth company of the Gelsa unit of the Durruti Column, which, after narrowly avoiding an armed confrontation with other forces of the Column, which supported the militarization decree, decided to abandon the front (in February 1937) and return to Barcelona, taking their weapons with them.

These militiamen, together with other radical CNT militants who were involved in the ongoing struggle for socialization in the enterprises, founded The Friends of Durruti Group in March 1937, which soon attracted between four and five thousand members and constituted, in Catalonia, a revolutionary alternative to the (collaborationist) superior committees of the CNT-FAI.

4. From June 1937 until the end of the war, the radical sector of the CNT, the Trotskyists and the POUM were subjected to persecution, driven into hiding, and physically annihilated.

During this same period, the CNT (its revolutionary minority having been amputated) continued to collaborate faithfully with a Stalinist state that imposed the militarization of labor and of life, the most draconian rationing and a war economy. STATE ANARCHISM consolidated its collaborationism with the republican bourgeoisie, embraced its program of victory over fascism, repressed any revolutionary threats within its ranks and assumed the tasks that are natural to any bureaucracy that aspires to integrate itself into the state apparatus.

Thesis no. 16. May 1937 marked the armed defeat of the most advanced sector of the revolutionary proletariat that was required by the counterrevolution so it could proceed to implement its counteroffensive. The causes of May were rooted in the rising cost of living, the scarcity of basic goods, the resistance to the dissolution of the control patrols and the militarization of the militias, and the constant struggle being waged by the workers in the collectivized enterprises to preserve their control over production in the face of the growing interventionism of the Generalitat, facilitated by the implementation of the S’Agaró Decrees. It was not by chance that the May events began at a collectivized enterprise, the Telephone company, with the armed opposition mounted by the rank and file CNT workers against its seizure by the Generalitat’s forces of repression. The rapid extension of the struggle throughout the entire city of Barcelona was the work of the defense committees and the neighborhood committees, linked by telephone, which acted independently of the superior committees of the CNT.

On the one side of the barricades were the forces of public order, the Stalinists of the PSUC, and the Catalanist Pyrenees Militias under the command of the government of the Generalitat. On the other side of the barricades were the workers of the CNT. Only the anarchists of The Friends of Durruti Group and the Trotskyists of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain attempted to provide any revolutionary objectives to the struggle of the barricades.

The CNT militants as a whole, however, were incapable of, and did not know how to act in opposition to the COLLABORATIONIST directives issued by the leaders and the superior committees of the CNT. Some actually fired their guns at radios that were broadcasting the conciliatory speeches of García Oliver and Federica Montseny, but in the end they complied with their directives.

The Friends of Durruti Group referred to the activity of these leaders and superior committees as an “enormous betrayal”.

After May 1937 the attempts ON THE PART OF THE SUPERIOR COMMITTEES OF THE BUREAUCRATIZED CNT to expel The Friends of Durruti Group from the CNT failed, as no trade union assembly would ratify this proposal.

A split that could have clarified the contradictory and irreconcilable positions within the CNT never took place, however.

Subsequent historiography underestimated, or ignored, the important role played by the Group, and the CNT bureaucracy even succeeded in recuperating for its own benefit “the true revolutionary prestige” of a Group that it had persecuted and attempted to expel from its ranks. Ambiguity always favors the counterrevolution. AND TODAY WE CAN SEE, WITHOUT ANYBODY BEING SCANDALIZED, HOW THE CNT AND THE FAI CLAIM THE “LEGACY” OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PRESTIGE OF THE FRIENDS OF DURRUTI GROUP. Bureaucracies and capitalism are capable of recuperating anything, even what they slandered and persecuted for constituting a revolutionary alternative, antagonistic to the bureaucracy and capitalism.

Thesis no. 17. The characteristics of the Stalinist counterrevolution were and are:

a) Incessant, ubiquitous and omnipotent police terrorism;

b) The indispensable misrepresentation of its own nature, and the nature of its enemies, especially the revolutionaries;

c) Exploitation of the workers by a form of state capitalism, directed by the Party-State.

The Negrín-Stalin government transformed the initial class collaboration of the CCMA, and the ideology of antifascist unity, into NATIONAL UNITY and orderly government; it converted the reformist impotence against the revolution of the socialists, Catalanists and anarchosyndicalist bureaucracy into a complete counterrevolutionary program, which abolished the least vestige of workers democracy, and transformed the bourgeois democracy into the police dictatorship of the GPU and the SIM.

The Stalinists have never been a reformist sector of the workers movement. No collaboration of any kind is or ever has been possible with Stalinism, only unremitting war. Stalinism, always and everywhere, leads and guides the counterrevolutionary forces, finds its power in the idea of national unity, in the practice of a policy of law and order, in its struggle to establish a strong government, in the penetration of the militants of the Stalinist party into the state apparatus, and above all by disguising their reactionary nature within the workers movement.

Thesis no. 18. It is necessary to set forth a chronology, because a defense committee was not the same thing in 1931 as a defense committee in July 1936, nor was the latter the same thing as a defense committee was one week later, when it might have been transformed into an antifascist committee, nor in January 1937 when the defense committees had gone into hibernation, nor in May 1937 when their existence rose to the surface with the “spontaneous” organization of the insurrection, nor in December 1937 when they could be said to have disappeared. Similarly, a self-managed enterprise in July 1936 could have come under the financial control of the government of the Generalitat in 1937, and the same enterprise might have been militarized in 1938.

The Popular Militias, voluntary, popular and of a revolutionary character, after several months (between October 1936 and May 1937) of discussions about whether or not to accept militarization, became regiments or divisions of a regular army, and the militiamen were turned into soldiers.

THIS CHRONOLOGY MAY BE CATEGORIZED (for Catalonia) in four stages:

1. The revolutionary stage (July 19, 1936 to September 26, 1936);

2. The advance of the counterrevolution (September 26, 1936 to June 16, 1937);

3. The repression of the revolutionary movement (June 16, 1937 to April 1938);

4. The disappearance of the revolutionary movement (April 1938 to the end of the war).

Thesis no. 19. July 19, 1936 to September 26, 1936:

The “revolutionary” stage or the stage of the victory of the insurrection and the revolutionary movement. VACUUM OF (CENTRALIZED) STATE POWER. ATOMIZATION OF POWER and confusion of powers. Local revolutionary committees and revolutionary defense committees, neighborhood committees, supply committees, workers control committees, popular militias, workers and soldiers councils, rearguard militias. The bourgeois state was “partially broken down” but preserved its legal authority, and did not fail to legalize and proclaim the revolutionary conquests that had taken place. Above all, however, it impeded and hindered the capacity for coordination and centralization of the revolutionary committees, which held all power at the local level. The CCMA acted as an institution of class collaboration, as an intermediary between the real local powers of the committees and the legal power of the Generalitat. The CCMA’s Juridical Office imposed a popular justice extraneous to the existing laws (and supported spontaneous popular justice). A very theoretical and historical-analytical error that is very widespread among both the participants in the CCMA and subsequent historians consists in positing a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat, which is in this version said to have disappeared with the dissolution of the CCMA.

We maintain that the CCMA did not create a situation of dual power with respect to the Generalitat and that at no time did the CCMA imply any more than a duplication of powers previously exercised by the Generalitat, which was necessary in order to reestablish the authority of the latter.

Thesis no. 20. September 26, 1936 to June 16, 1937:

The advance of the counterrevolution. Retreat of the revolutionary movement and offensive by the Generalitat to reconquer all its functions (even assuming some of the powers of the Valencia Government). Dissolution of the CCMA, entry of the POUM and the CNT into the government of the Generalitat. DECREE DISSOLVING THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEES AND FORMING POPULAR FRONT MUNICIPAL COUNCILS. Nin, the Minister of Justice, abolished the Juridical Office. The CNT and the POUM facilitated the dissolution of the revolutionary committees and their replacement by Popular Front municipal councils. Nin and Tarradellas went to Lérida to compel the local committee there, controlled by the POUM, to submit to the decree. The Decree ordering the militarization of the Popular Militias was proclaimed. In mid-December the Stalinists expelled Nin from the Government and established an alliance between the ERC and the PSUC to reduce the power of the CNT and to abolish the “revolutionary conquests” of July, which were only temporary concessions and transfers of state functions. May 1937 signified the final defeat of the revolutionary movement. The PSUC and the ERC led the counterrevolution, but the POUM and the CNT were OBJECTIVELY indispensable collaborators when the revolutionary movement was still strong enough to constitute a workers power.

Thesis no. 21. June 16, 1937 to April 1938:

Dissolution of the Control Patrols. Outlawing and repression of the POUM and the revolutionary movement. The CNT was divided into a critical sector that was repressed (or removed from its positions and deprived of its functions in the organization) and a governmental sector that integrated itself into the state apparatus. Stalinist repression of the revolutionary movement. In July 1937 the FAI renounced its organization by affinity groups and adopted a territorial form of organization instead. The affinity groups based on shared ideological conceptions had permitted the emergence of The Friends of Durruti Group (between four and five thousand members) as a revolutionary opposition to the collaborationism of the FAI. The FAI’s new territorial form of organization, of a pyramidal and hierarchical character, granted the superior committees absolute control over the organization, and also converted the FAI into an efficient political party, capable of assuming positions in all the administrative levels of the state apparatus. The Council of Aragón was abolished in August 1937. The Aragón collectives were dissolved by the military expedition of the division under the command by the Stalinist Lister. In September Los Escolapios, the headquarters of the confederal Defense Committee, was taken by assault, without any other response on the part of the ruling bureaucracy of the CNT than the order to surrender.

Thesis no. 22. April 1938 to January 1939:

Disappearance of the revolutionary movement. The militants who had not been assassinated or imprisoned tried to carry on their work in strictly clandestine conditions, joined the army or went into hiding. All the revolutionary publications either disappeared or acquired a purely apologetic character. The CNT-UGT unity pact. The FAI and the CNT campaigned for the creation of an ANTIFASCIST POPULAR FRONT as a pressure tactic to obtain the readmission of libertarian representatives to the republican government. War economy, Stakhanovism and the militarization of labor and of everyday life. The Negrín government attempted to establish a dictatorial Stalinist state.

Thesis no. 23. THE ERRORS OF THE POUM:

1) The POUM never posed the question of working class power, not in July 1936 and not at any time during the revolutionary stage of July, August and September 1936.

2) The POUM accepted the liquidation of the committees, which were the potential organs of workers power. That is, the leadership of the POUM called for the suppression of the revolutionary committees instead of working for their extension, democratization and coordination. It never proposed a struggle for the destruction of the capitalist organs of power, or for the destruction of the capitalist state. The committees, although incomplete and defective, were the potential organs of workers power. The task of a revolutionary party (the POUM was never a revolutionary party) would have been to reinforce, democratize and coordinate these committees in such a way as to transform them into workers councils, elected by general assemblies and revocable at any time, capable of constituting a government of workers councils.

3) The POUM was incapable of making the fundamental distinction between the Party and the Popular Front, and followed the latter road, which led to government collaboration.

4) The leadership of the POUM was always following behind the CNT-FAI, whose leaders it considered to be revolutionaries, instead of engaging in a powerful, consistent and objective polemic against the series of false positions assumed by the CNT-FAI.

5) The leadership of the POUM never really understood the relation between war and revolution, insofar as it made a distinction between the two. The slogan, “War or Revolution” is false in and of itself.

6) The POUM, almost as rapidly as the other groups, sacrificed the revolution to what seemed to be the interests of the “war” (government collaboration, an indecisive policy with regard to the question of the Army, etc.) instead of clearly demonstrating that the war did not merit the sacrifices of the working class except to the extent that it was an integral part of the revolutionary process, that is, insofar as it was subordinated to the decisive question of power. It did nothing to establish the foundations of the organs of a new power (revolutionary workers Front), not even in those locations where the party’s influence was preponderant. The POUM leadership allowed members of the party, the commanders of the Lenin division, to sabotage all political activity oriented towards the militiamen, thus helping the plans of the counterrevolution instead of favoring agitation for workers democracy in the mass organizations.

7) The leadership of the POUM shared certain obsolete ideas concerning nationalism and regional autonomy with the Catalonian petty bourgeoisie.

8) The POUM never engaged in any critique of the collectivization of industry as a new form of “trade union capitalism”.

9) Nin dissolved the FOUS under the erroneous trade union slogan of “CNT-UGT”, instead of issuing the directive, “Neither CNT nor UGT: one central trade union”.

10) The capitulation of May:

a) the leadership had no independent, clear line;

b) it took no independent initiative of its own;

c) it tried to provide a cover for the treason of the anarchist leaders;

d) it learned nothing: it even claimed that May was a workers victory.

Many of these errors of the Executive Committee of the POUM were personally attributable to Nin, whether or not he was supported by the other members of the Executive Committee of the POUM, who sometimes opposed Nin’s personal decisions, or were not even consulted. On the other hand, we must not forget that the policy of the Executive Committee of the POUM, which was largely determined by Nin, was considered by a broad critical sector of the party as a catastrophic policy for the revolution, and moreover as an abandonment of the founding principles of the POUM:

1) Nin’s entry, as a representative of the POUM, in the Council of the Economy signified the recognition of the government of the Generalitat’s authority over and prerogatives for planning of the Catalonian economy.

2) The merger of the FOUS into the UGT instead of the CNT.

3) Nin’s acceptance of the position of Minister of Justice (which Andrade also referred to as a mistake) in the government of the Generalitat (which he held from September 26 to December 13, 1936, when he was forced out as a result of pressure from the Stalinists), because it strengthened the government of the Generalitat, laid the ground-works for the dissolution of the local committees and constituted a practical rejection of the calls for a workers government.

4) Nin’s first job as Minister of Justice was to accompany Tarradellas, the Prime Minister of the government of the Generalitat (“ conseller en cap ”), to Lérida, which was at the time governed by a Committee dominated by the CNT and the POUM, to REESTABLISH THE AUTHORITY OF THE CATALONIAN GOVERNMENT in that city.

5) Nin asserted that the dictatorship of the proletariat existed in Catalonia and also (in contradiction with this first assertion) that it was possible for the working class to take power peacefully.

6) On October 9, 1936, the government of the Generalitat—WE MUST NOT FORGET THAT this was made possible thanks to the participation of the POUM and the CNT, WITHOUT WHOSE INVOLVEMENT AND HELP THE GOVERNMENT OF THE GENERALITAT WOULD HAVE BEEN POWERLESS—was able to decree the dissolution of the local committees, OF A REVOLUTIONARY OR POTENTIALLY REVOLUTIONARY NATURE, which were to be replaced by Popular Front Municipal Councils; on October 13 a decree drafted and signed by Nin himself nullified the revolutionary work of Barriobero (and of the cenetistas) in the justice tribunals; on October 24 the decree ordering the militarization of the Popular Militias and the decree regarding public order were approved by a Junta of Internal Security. NIN WAS THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE GENERALITAT THAT TOOK THESE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY MEASURES.

7) In January 1937 Nin wrote to the Executive Committee of the PSOE proposing the participation of the POUM in the unification conferences being held between the PSOE and the PCE. Only a few days later the Stalinist repression of the POUMistas began in Madrid.

8) In May 1937 he issued an order by telephone to disband the column formed in Gracia by militants of the POUM and the CNT for the purpose of seizing the center of the city held by counterrevolutionaries.

9) In May 1937 he rejected the plan to seize power elaborated by Josep Rebull … because power was not a military question, but a political one.

10) Nin thought that May 1937 was a workers victory!

Thesis no. 24. CRITIQUE OF THE POSITIONS OF BILAN : Bilan was the French-language journal of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (Bordiguists), best known during the thirties as the Prometeo Group ( Prometeo was the Italian-language journal of the Fraction). Bilan has been sanctified by various left organizations as the nec plus ultra of the revolutionary positions of the 1930s. Bilan denied, in a brilliant and flawless analysis (with which we agree), that a proletarian revolution had triumphed in Spain in 1936. Bilan also claimed, however, that, due to the lack of a (Bordiguist) class party, there was not even a possibility for a REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION (we think this is a serious error, with important consequences). According to Bilan the proletariat was immersed in an antifascist war, that is, it was enrolled in an imperialist war between a democratic bourgeoisie and a fascist bourgeoisie. In this situation, the only appropriate positions were desertion and boycott, or to wait for better times, when the (Bordiguist) party would enter the stage of history from the wings where it had been biding its time.

The analyses of Bilan have the virtue of decisively highlighting the weaknesses of and dangers that threatened the revolutionary situation after the triumph of the workers insurrection of July 1936, but they are incapable of formulating a revolutionary alternative. In any event the revolutionary defeatism of abandoning the Spanish proletariat into the hands of its reformist or counterrevolutionary organizations, as proposed IN PRACTICE by Bilan , was certainly not a revolutionary alternative. The incoherence of Bilan is made evident by its analysis of the May Days of 1937. It turns out that the “revolution” of July 19, which one week later ceased to be a revolution, because its class goals had been turned into war goals, now reappears like the Phoenix of history, like a ghost that had been hiding in some unknown location. And now it turns out that in May 1937 the workers were once again “revolutionary”, and defended the revolution from the barricades. Was it not the case, however, that, according to Bilan , a revolution had not taken place? Here, Bilan gets all tangled up. On July 19 (according to Bilan ) there was a revolution, but one week later, there was no longer a revolution, because there was no (Bordiguist) party; in May 1937 there was another revolutionary week. But how do we characterize the situation between July 26, 1936 and May 3, 1937? We are not told anything about this. The revolution is considered to be an intermittent river [“Guadiana”: a river in Spain that runs on the surface, then underground, then reappears on the surface—Translator’s note] that emerges onto the historical stage when Bilan wants to explain certain events that it neither understands, nor is capable of explaining. The revolution is viewed as a series of week-long explosions, separated by ten months of inexplicable and unexplained limbo. And these revolutionary explosions, May 1937 as well as July 1936, are so inconsistent with the theses of Bilan concerning the non-existence of a revolutionary situation, that we are led to affirm its absolute lack of understanding of the characteristics and nature of a proletarian revolutionary process.

On the one hand, Bilan acknowledges the class character of the struggles of July and May, but on the other hand not only denies their revolutionary character, but even denies the existence of a revolutionary situation. This viewpoint can only be explained by the distance of an absolutely isolated Parisian group, which placed a higher priority on its analyses than on the study of the Spanish reality. There is not even one word in Bilan about the real nature of the committees, or on the struggle of the Barcelona proletariat for socialization and against collectivization, or on the debates and confrontations within the Militia Columns concerning the militarization of the Militias, or a serious critique of the positions of The Friends of Durruti Group, for the simple reason that they are practically totally unaware of the existence and the significance of all these matters. It was easy to justify this ignorance by denying the existence of a revolutionary situation. Bilan ’s analysis fails because in its view the absence of a revolutionary (Bordiguist) party necessarily implies the absence of a revolutionary situation.

On July 19, 1936, throughout all of Spain, but especially in Catalonia, there was a victorious workers insurrection. This insurrection, which was dominated by its libertarian element, faced the competition of other political forces, such as the POUM and the republicans, and of some units of the forces of public order, like the Assault Guards and the Civil Guards, which remained loyal to the government of the Generalitat and the Republic. But it is certainly true that the result of this insurrection, thanks to the assault on the barracks of San Andrés, meant the arming of the Barcelona proletariat, and by extension the proletariat of all of Catalonia. The indisputable hegemonic power that resulted from this revolutionary insurrection was anarchist. The rest of the working class forces, the Generalitat and the overwhelmed forces of public order were, in Catalonia, in an absolutely minority position.

The product of this revolutionary insurrection was the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (the CCMA). The CCMA, however, was simultaneously the product of this victory and also of the refusal of the anarchists to seize power. The CCMA was not an organ of workers power to confront the power of the republican bourgeoisie, that is, the Generalitat, but an institution of collaboration of the anarchists with the other political forces, both the working class forces as well as those of the bourgeoisie: it was therefore an institution of class collaboration. In practice, the CCMA performed the functions of public order, and recruiting and training antifascist militias, which the government of the Generalitat was incapable of performing. The CCMA acted as a kind of Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of War OF THE GENERALITAT. Regardless of how much autonomy and independence it had, it was still a Ministry of the Generalitat.

Neither the CCMA, nor the CNT-FAI, nor the POUM issued any directives (except the order to end the general strike), or gave any orientation, or proclaimed any orders, until July 28, when the CNT and the CCMA issued a communiqué and decree, respectively, which coincided in threatening “incontrolados” who were acting without the authorization of the CCMA with harsh repression. The insurrection of July 19 spread the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the process of collectivization to the majority of Catalonian enterprises, WITHOUT ANY DIRECTIVE FROM THE WORKERS ORGANIZATIONS, AND WITHOUT ANY ORDER OR RULING FROM THE CCMA.

We must, however, clearly and precisely identify the characteristics of this revolutionary situation: rather than dual power (which did not exist because the CCMA was not created to oppose the Generalitat, but to serve it) we must speak of a vacuum of centralized power. The power of the autonomous government of the Generalitat had fragmented into hundreds of committees that held all power at the local and enterprise level, most of which were in the hands of the working class.

These committees, however, incomplete and deficient, were not coordinated among themselves, and were not reinforced as organs of workers power. The CNT-FAI were neither capable nor desirous of giving these committees any coordination, WHICH WAS ESSENTIAL for the triumph of the revolution. The organizational structure of the CNT, articulated in Sindicatos Únicos , its weakness resulting from its recent period of clandestine activity and the treintista split, but above all its glaring theoretical shortcomings, rendered the CNT incapable of coordinating these committees, which held all power in their hands at the local and enterprise levels. Even the organization of economic life in Catalonia, and the indispensable coordination of the various economic sectors, was left in the hands of the government of the Generalitat, for which purpose the Council of the Economy was created on August 11, 1936. An unstable and transitory revolutionary situation prevailed, which had defeated the fascist bourgeoisie and overwhelmed the republican bourgeoisie, but one that had also escaped the control of the workers organizations themselves, which were incapable of organizing and defending the “revolutionary conquests” of July and of decisively tipping the scales in favor of the final triumph of the revolution, by seizing power, installing the dictatorship of the proletariat and destroying the apparatus of the republican state, simply because anarchosyndicalist theory and organization proved to be alien and foreign to the organization of the revolutionary proletariat. For the spontaneity of the masses has its limits. The inability of the CNT Trade Unions to stabilize and further motivate the revolution was acknowledged by the participants themselves. The CNT, as a trade union organization, was inadequate and incapable of performing the tasks that would have corresponded with the mission of a revolutionary vanguard or party, and the same thing was true of the other organizations of the working class. This is why the revolutionary situation, instead of moving in the direction of a full-blown revolution, was rapidly transformed into a counterrevolutionary situation that favored a rapid consolidation of the structures of the bourgeois state.

Not taking power in July meant leaving it in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and sharing it with the bourgeoisie within the CCMA meant “helping” the bourgeoisie to recover and fill the power vacuum that had been produced by the July insurrection. Furthermore, the collectivization process was not viable nor did it have any meaning at all if the capitalist state remained intact. And this is all the more true if we take into account the fact that the anarchists compensated for the shortcomings of the government of the Generalitat so that it could take over planning of the Catalonian economy, which it was itself incapable of coordinating.

The government of the Generalitat took into its hands, beginning in August 1936, nothing more or less than economic planning, financing of enterprises, the possibility of controlling every enterprise through an inspector appointed by the Generalitat, and the power to enact laws concerning the collectivizations. This was the foundation of the rapid recovery of political power by the Generalitat. If we add to the foregoing the fact that the Civil Guards and Assault Guards had not been dissolved, but only confined to their barracks in the rearguard, far from the front, we may safely conclude that the counterrevolution in Catalonia had some very solid foundations, which explain the rapid restoration of all the prerogatives of the capitalist state.

There is, however, an important difference between claiming that the insurrection of July 1936 was not a revolution, or even that it did not entail a revolutionary situation (as Bilan , the ICC and Robert Camoin, among others, assert) and claiming that the revolutionary situation of July came to naught due to a series of insufficiencies, incapacities and errors on the part of the existing workers organizations. In July 1936 there was a revolutionary situation that imposed the hegemony of the working class and its revolutionary threat on the republican bourgeoisie for ten months, despite the fact that there was no CENTRALIZATION OF POWER of the workers, because that power had been fragmented into hundreds of local committees, enterprise committees, the committees of various workers organizations, and the militias of various parties, in control patrols, etc.

In July 1936 the working class masses knew how to go into action without leaders, without directives from their trade union and political organizations; in May 1937, however, these same masses were incapable of acting in opposition to their leaders, and against the directives of their trade union and political organizations.

May 1937 did not fall out of the clouds, it was the result of the rising cost of living and the shortages of staple foods and basic goods, of the resistance to the dissolution of the control patrols and the militarization of the militias, but above all it was due to the working class offensive/resistance in the enterprises, one by one, totally isolated, in an attempt to consolidate and exercise control over the process of socializing the Catalonian economy, in confrontation with the liquidation of the “conquests of July”. The “normalization” offensive of the Generalitat, which sought to implement the S’Agaró decrees, signed by Tarradellas in January 1937, implied the elimination of the “revolutionary conquests” and absolute control over the Catalonian economy by the government of the Generalitat.

The lessons that should be learned from this are evidently the need to totally destroy the capitalist state, to dissolve its forces of repression, and to establish the social dictatorship of the proletariat, which the anarchists organized in The Friends of Durruti Group identified with the formation of a Revolutionary Junta, composed of all those organizations that had participated in the revolutionary battles of July 1936.

May 1937 was the consequence of the errors committed in July 1936. There was no revolutionary party in Spain, but there was a profound and powerful REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY of the working class which suppressed the fascist coup, outside the control of the workers organizations that existed in July 1936, and which in May 1937 confronted Stalinism, although it finally failed because it was incapable of confronting its own trade union and political organizations (the CNT and POUM), when the latter were defending both the bourgeois state and the program of the counterrevolution. The fact that the revolutionary movement that existed in Spain between July 1936 and May 1937 failed, and was turned aside from its class goals toward antifascist goals, does not obviate the existence of this revolutionary situation. No proletarian revolution has won yet, and the failure of the Commune and the success of Stalinism is no refutation of the revolutionary character of the Commune and October.

It is obvious that, without the seizure of power and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Spanish collectivization process could not but fail, and that all the collectivizing experiences would be conditioned and distorted by this absence of the seizure of centralized power; but it is no less obvious that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, entailed by the collectivization process, with all of its limitations, was the fruit of the proletarian revolutionary movement of July. The fundamental lesson of the “Spanish Revolution” (or more precisely of the Spanish revolutionary situation) is the ineluctable need for a vanguard that would defend the revolutionary program of the proletariat, the two first steps of which are the total destruction of the capitalist state and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, organized in workers councils, which would unify and centralize power. But to assert on the basis of these considerations that without a party there is no revolution, or even a revolutionary situation (as Bilan , the ICC and Robert Camoin claim) reflects the lack of understanding of the fact that not the party, but the proletariat, makes the revolution, although a proletarian revolution will inevitably fail if there is no vanguard capable of defending the revolutionary program of the proletariat (as The Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain unsuccessfully attempted to do). Bilan put the cart in front of the horse. The analyses of those who assert their claim “to be the party” never cease to be tragicomic; they do not know how to see the revolutionary situation that is unfolding right under their noses. The analyses of Bilan are very valuable with regard to its denunciations of the weaknesses and errors of the Spanish revolutionary process; but they are unfortunate and pathetic when its analysis leads it to the absurdity of denying the revolutionary and proletarian nature of the historical process experienced by the Spanish working class between July 1936 and May 1937. Bilan ’s denial of the existence of a revolutionary situation is the product of its Leninist, totalitarian and substitutionist concept of the party: if there is no party there is not even the chance for a revolutionary situation to arise, regardless of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. The consequences of this denial of the existence of a revolutionary situation in Catalonia in 1936-1937 led Bilan to advocate (solely on the theoretical plane) reactionary political positions such as breaking up the military fronts, fraternization with the Francoist troops, cutting off weapons to the republican troops, etc. It is not at all surprising that Bilan , or more precisely the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, underwent a split as a result of open debate over the nature and characteristics of the Spanish Revolution.

To summarize: it is true that without a revolutionary party or vanguard, a proletarian revolution will fail; and this is the lesson of the Spanish example and the magnificent analysis of Bilan . But it is not true that a proletarian revolutionary situation cannot arise if a revolutionary party does not exist. And this claim is the one that led Bilan to make a false analysis of the situation created on July 19, 1936 in Catalonia, and also explains its failure to understand the events that led the proletariat to engage in a second revolutionary insurrection in May 1937.

Thesis no. 25. There are a number of shared revolutionary political positions that allow us to distinguish, in 1936-1939 in Spain, revolutionary from reformist, bourgeois or counterrevolutionary groups. These positions, which are in addition class frontiers, are based on the defense, not just theoretical but above all active and political, of the following points:

A) Advocate the necessity of the destruction of the capitalist state;

B) Opposition to political collaboration with bourgeois organizations and parties;

C) Advocate the establishment of a social dictatorship of the proletariat;

D) Opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias;

E) Defense of the future organs of workers power, which are usually identified with the committees;

F) Deny the validity of or any future at all for the collectivizations without the political conquest of power by the working class.

These common denominators that identified, during the Spanish War, the revolutionary as opposed to the non-revolutionary groups, are shared, with greater or lesser emphasis on one point or another, and with varying degrees of theoretical clarity, by Balius and The Friends of Durruti Group, Josep Rebull and Cell 72 of the POUM, Munis and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, Fosco and the Bolshevik-Leninist Group “Le Soviet”, as well as the (Bordiguist) militants of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, which split as a result of its internal debate concerning the nature of the Spanish Revolution and War.

The theoretical and practical differences between these different revolutionary groups are important, and were the outcome of the weaknesses of the revolutionary movement of that time. A rigorous study of these groups, unimpaired by ideological prejudices, which restrict inquiry to labeling and/or embalming them as anarchist, Trotskyist, Bordiguist or Marxist, as well as a critique of their errors and the deficiencies of their positions is rendered imperative due to the lack of knowledge concerning these issues, because there is no movement with a future that has no knowledge of its past, and this is all the more true of a revolutionary movement.

Thesis no. 26. The Civil War was not a fratricidal war, as the propaganda of the Francoist dictatorship taught us for forty years and was we have been told by the formal democracy of the post-Franco period for the last fifty years, but a war of extermination of “the reds” by the fascists. In the so-called nationalist zone, from July to August 1936, the rebel military implemented, in their lightning advance from Andalusia and Estremadura, a war of extermination of the enemy, of an arbitrary and class nature and utilizing colonialist methods, for the purpose of sowing terror in a hostile rearguard and imposing political cleansing, directed against neutral elements as well as potential enemies. The goal was to destroy the social base of the workers movement and the left wing parties.

This extermination plan, carefully planned before the uprising, and justified by the need to ensure the victory of a colonial army that confronted the vast majority of the population of the country, was extended not only throughout the three years of warfare, but was legalized and institutionalized in the new Francoist state.

Thesis no. 27. The war did not end on April 1, 1939; it was the beginning of the Victory. A Victory whose first priority was to destroy the vanquished and quench the thirst for vengeance of the victors by assuring them total impunity. After a period of mass executions, imprisonment and torture of hundreds of thousands of persons, a regime of terror was imposed in which all of Spain became one vast prison. The Francoist state was a genocidal state , if we define genocide as the condition of systematic criminalization of a group, or as systematic extermination of a social group for religious, ethnic or political reasons. The essence of the Francoist state throughout its entire existence, and despite its unquestionable evolution over the course of the years, was the persecution, repression and extermination of the “reds”, a concept that was particularly applied to the organizations of the workers movement, but also to the militants of all the leftist, republican or liberal parties, as well as anyone who engaged in the mere defense of the most basic democratic rights and freedoms, and of course the national demands of the Basque and Catalonian people against whom an implacable cultural and linguistic genocide was waged.

Thesis no. 28. The war of extermination waged against the reds by the nationalist bloc and the Francoist genocidal state were not denounced as such during the Transition to democracy.

The post-Francoist heirs granted an amnesty to the political prisoners of Francoism for a handful of crimes that were only crimes because they had been legislated as such by the genocidal Francoist state.

The pact between Francoism and anti-Francoism also imposed another amnesty: an amnesia regarding the past. The first attempts to expose the notorious genocidal acts and to locate and identify the remains of those shot or disappeared in mass graves were interrupted by the attempted coup d’état of February 23, 1981. The future of the democracy, social and political stability and economic progress of the country seemed to be dependent on the forgetting of history and of the Francoist genocide as well as on the renunciation of any attempt to identify the bodies of those who were murdered and buried in mass graves, and even the mere memory of the location of these graves. The fear of the vanquished was prolonged in the form of the fear of the children of the vanquished, which continued to prevail in this curious “vigilant and endangered” democracy. Everything was nicely wrapped up.

Thesis no. 29. Genocide and crimes against humanity, however, are not subject to any statue of limitations. The Francoist genocide cannot be forgotten. It is no longer a matter of prosecuting individuals, but of the right to know the whole truth about what happened and also, of course, of the right to unhindered access to archival materials. It is a matter of vindicating the memory of those who were disappeared, assassinated, shot and thrown into mass graves, the exiles and all those fighters for liberty or for utopia who suffered imprisonment or forced labor without having committed any other crime than being reds, that is, members of the collective of the defeated in the war, whom the Francoist state sought to exterminate. A state that was based on the alliance of the military, reactionary bourgeoisie, big landowners, Falangists and the Catholic Church. It is also about destroying or transforming those places, monuments or plaques that commemorate fascist crimes and war crimes. Especially the “Wall of those who Died for God and Spain”, built by enslaved prisoners of war. And it is above all about recovering historical memory and uncovering concepts that have been hidden under the flood of fascist and clerical propaganda:

1. The Spanish civil war was not a fratricidal war , between brothers: it was a war of extermination against the “reds”;

2. Academic debates about whether the Franco dictatorship was a fascist or an authoritarian regime are of little importance; in any event it was a genocidal state , based on nothing but the victory of the military, the clergy and the fascists in a war against the people and the working class;

3. It is true that the Catholic Church suffered from religious persecution in the republican zone during the first ten months of the war that produced a total of seven thousand martyrs (who have now been beatified ); but it is no less true that it was an active and terrible accomplice , necessary and indispensable at the beginning of the war, in its character as a war of extermination and in the subsequent genocide of the defeated by the Francoist state. It was a martyr for ten months and executioner for forty years.

Translated from the Spanish original in November 2013.

Spanish original published in: BALANCE. Cuadernos de historia del movimiento obrero , Cuaderno No. 21, Barcelona, June 2001 (2nd edition).

Source: http://www.ecn.org/ab-imis/testi/Tesis.pdf

• 1 BALANCE . Cuadernos de historia del movimiento obrero , Cuaderno No. 21, Barcelona, June 2001 (2nd edition).
• bureaucracy
• Spanish civil war
• Friends of Durruti
• Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)
• Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI)
• Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM)
• Agustín Guillamón
• The Italian Fraction of the Communist Left

This article is tagged

This article is tagged 'Bilan', but presumably it a different Bilan from the left communist 'Bilan'

Quote: Bilan was the

Bilan was the French-language journal of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (Bordiguists), best known during the thirties as the Prometeo Group (Prometeo was the Italian-language journal of the Fraction).

Appears to be referring to the same

Having no idea whatsoever…

Having no idea whatsoever where this should be posted, I'll post it here:

The CWO's review of 'Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939' by Danny Evans:

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-11/revolution-and-the-state-anarchism-in-the-spanish-civil-war

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Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 31). Slavery and the Civil War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/

"Slavery and the Civil War." IvyPanda , 31 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Slavery and the Civil War'. 31 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." December 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

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Brazil Supreme Court strikes down military intervention thesis in symbolic vote for democracy

SAO PAULO — Brazil’s Supreme Court unanimously voted Monday that the armed forces have no constitutional power to intervene in disputes between government branches, a largely symbolic decision aimed at bolstering democracy after years of increasing threat of military intervention.

The court’s decision came in response to an argument that right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies deployed in recent years. They have claimed that Article 142 of Brazil’s Constitution affords the military so-called “moderating power” between the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Bolsonaro presented this interpretation in an April 2020 meeting with his ministers, telling them that any of the three powers can request the armed forces take action to restore order in Brazil. In the years since, posters invoking Article 142 became a fixture at rallies calling for military takeover – and culminated in an uprising by Bolsonaro supporters seeking to summon the military to oust his successor from power.

All of the 11 justices — including both justices appointed by Bolsonaro — rejected that thesis.

While the constitution empowers the military to protect the nation from threats and guarantee constitutional powers, “that does not comport with any interpretation that allows the use of the armed forces for the defense of one power against the other,” the case’s rapporteur, Justice Luiz Fux, wrote in his vote.

Article 142’s vague wording had allowed room for some interpretation — although the one espoused by Brazil’s far right was “absolutely crazy,” said João Gabriel Pontes, a constitutional lawyer at Daniel Sarmento e Ademar Borges in Rio de Janeiro.

“This is not a Supreme Court ruling that will safeguard Brazilian democracy from new attacks,” Pontes said by phone. “However, it sends an important message to society that a military intervention has no constitutional basis.”

The constitution dates from 1988, three years after the country cast off its 21-year military dictatorship.

Bolsonaro’s 2018 election in a sense marked the return of the armed forces to power. The former army captain who openly waxed nostalgic for the dictatorship era appointed high-ranking officers to his Cabinet and thousands of active-duty service members and reservists to civilian positions throughout his administration.

For his 2022 reelection bid, he tapped a general as his running mate and tasked the military with auditing electronic voting machines whose reliability he cast doubt upon, without ever providing evidence. Following his defeat to leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , his supporters set up camp outside military barracks for months to demand military intervention.

Bolsonaro never conceded defeat nor asked them to demobilize, and on Jan. 8, 2023 they stormed the capital , Brasilia, invading and vandalizing the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidential palace.

Federal Police later confiscated the cell phone of Bolsonaro’s aide-de-camp and found conversations between close advisers and military officials debating whether conditions and the constitution allowed for military intervention. The seizure was part of an investigation into whether the former president and top aides incited the uprising to restore him to power. He has denied any involvement.

Debate over the constitutional role of the armed forces reflects “the historic vice of an institution that never conformed to subordinating itself to civil order,” and the court’s vote reaffirms what is clear from any constitutional law textbook, said Conrado Hubner, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Sao Paulo.

“Nothing has the power to avoid a coup in the future. Nothing,” Hubner said. But the court’s position helps to combat justifications for a coup, he said.

Meantime, Lula has endeavored to stay on good terms with the military’s top brass. Last week, he forbade any official events observing the 60th anniversary of the date the military deposed the president and ushered in Brazil’s dictatorship, on March 31, 1964.

Virtually all historians characterize it as a coup. Others disagree, including Bolsonaro’s then-vice president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão, who wrote Sunday on X that the date represents the day “the nation saved itself from itself!” and that history cannot be rewritten.

In his vote, Justice Flávio Dino wrote that “echoes of that past stubbornly refuse to pass,” and that the court’s decision should be forwarded to Lula’s defense minister for dissemination to every military organization in the country.

Doing so “would aim to eradicate misinformation that has reached some members of the armed forces,” Dino wrote. “Any theories that go beyond or distort the true meaning of Article 142 of the federal constitution must be eliminated.”

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