Grandizo Munis (
Torreón
Torreón () is a city and seat of Torreón Municipality in the Mexican state of Coahuila. As of 2021, the city's population was 735,340. The metropolitan population as of 2015 was 1,497,734, making it the ninth-biggest metropolitan area in the ...
,
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
, 18 April 1912
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
, 4 February 1989) was a Spanish
Trotskyist
Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a rev ...
politician. He is considered to have become a
left communist
Left communism, or the communist left, is a position held by the left wing of communism, which criticises the political ideas and practices espoused by Marxist–Leninists and social democrats. Left communists assert positions which they rega ...
following his break with the Fourth International.
Biography
Grandizo first entered revolutionary politics as a member of the
Izquierda Comunista de España (ICE). This group was led by
Andrés Nin
Andreu Nin Pérez (4 February 1892 – 20 June 1937) was a Spanish communist politician, translator and publicist. In 1937, Nin and the rest of the POUM leadership were arrested by the Moscow-oriented government of the Second Spanish Republic o ...
and was in sympathy with the views of
Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian ...
and therefore affiliated to the
International Communist League.
Trotsky was opposed to the name of the group, which he argued was imprecise and badly expressed the program of the
Bolshevik-Leninists. In addition, he entered into a dispute with Nin and the ICE when they refused his suggestion to enter the youth organisation of the
Spanish Socialist Workers Party
The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party ( es, Partido Socialista Obrero Español ; PSOE ) is a social-democraticThe PSOE is described as a social-democratic party by numerous sources:
*
*
*
* political party in Spain. The PSOE has been in gov ...
(PSOE). The majority of the ICE then split with Trotsky, leaving a small remnant grouping which included Grandizo Munis.
With the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...
in 1936, Munis was a member of the tiny
Seccion Bolshevik-Leninista
Grandizo Munis (Torreón, Mexico, 18 April 1912Paris, 4 February 1989) was a Spanish Trotskyism, Trotskyist politician. He is considered to have become a left communist following his break with the Fourth International.
Biography
Grandizo fi ...
. This organisation sought to influence the ranks of the larger Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (
POUM) and also worked closely with the more left-wing anarchists of the
Durruti Column
The Durruti Column (Spanish language, Spanish: ''Columna Durruti''), with about 6,000 people, was the largest anarchist column (or military unit) formed during the Spanish Civil War. During the first months of the war, it became the most recogniz ...
.
The Trotskyists were among the very few to oppose the
Popular Front government and openly took part in the
May Days
The May Days, sometimes also called May Events, refer to a series of clashes between 3 and 8 May 1937 during which factions on the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War engaged one another in street battles in various parts of Catalonia, ...
of 1937. This event led to their suppression by the government, which was now dominated by the Stalinists. This meant that Munis was forced into illegality and had to flee for fear of his life. , a number of Spanish anti-fascist fighters
He was arrested on February 13th, 1938 but the next year, shortly before the
fall of Barcelona
The Catalonia Offensive ( ca, Ofensiva de Catalunya, es, Ofensiva de Cataluña) was part of the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalist Army started the offensive on 23 December 1938 and rapidly conquered Republican-held Catalonia with Barcelona (t ...
, he was able to escape the
Monjuic Prison, cross Franco's lines and eventually pass over the border to France. He made his fate public in an interview with the French Trotskyist newspaper ''La Lutte Ouvrière'' published in its February 24 and March 3, 1939 issues.
In the spring of 1940 Munis fled France to Mexico, where he had a meeting with Trotsky, then to New York, where he attended the May 1940 Emergency Conference of the
Fourth International. Back in Mexico, that August he spoke at Leon Trotsky's funeral.
Munis spent the remainder of the war years in Mexico, where he reestablished a section of the Fourth International among Spanish exiles. He managed to produce two issues of a printed magazine ''19 de Julio'', then began a mimeographed periodical, ''Contra la Corriente''. Some of the articles in these journals were translated into the SWPs theoretical organ ''Fourth International''. He was assisted in this effort by the French
surrealist poet
Benjamin Péret
Benjamin Péret (4 July 1899 – 18 September 1959) was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.
Biography
Benjamin Péret was born in Rezé, ...
, who had also fled to Mexico.
During the war and immediate post-war years Munis began to have differences with the Fourth International Secretariat based in New York, and with the
Socialist Workers Party of the United States. These first began with a critique of the SWP leaders' actions during the Minneapolis trials. On an ideological level he claimed that the USSR was no longer a
workers' state of any kind, but
state capitalist. He also rejected
united front
A united front is an alliance of groups against their common enemies, figuratively evoking unification of previously separate geographic fronts and/or unification of previously separate armies into a front. The name often refers to a political a ...
s with Stalinist parties and key parts of the
Transitional Program including
nationalization
Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to pri ...
and a government of traditional workers parties. He also had organizational differences with the Fourth International. He was supported in some of these criticism by
Natalya Sedova
Natalia Ivanovna Sedova (russian: Ната́лья Ива́новна Седо́ва; 5 April 1882 Romny, Russian Empire – 23 January 1962, Corbeil-Essonnes, Paris, France) is best known as the second wife of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutio ...
, the widow of Leon Trotsky.
At the Second World Congress of the Fourth International Munis
bloc
Bloc may refer to:
Government and politics
* Political bloc, a coalition of political parties
* Trade bloc, a type of intergovernmental agreement
* Voting bloc, a group of voters voting together
Other uses
* Bloc (code school), an educational we ...
ked with
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman (; September 10, 1904 – November 4, 1972) was an American Marxist theorist. He went from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL–CIO President George Meany.
Beginnings
S ...
of the
Workers Party but was eventually condemned by the Secretariat.
After the war Munis settled in Paris and began publishing a new periodical ''Revoluciòn'', which proclaimed its official break with the Fourth International in November 1948. By 1949 his following was calling itself the Grupo Comunista Internacionalista de España. In 1951 Munis and J. Costa returned to Spain to organize an underground movement in the wake of the Barcelona tramway strike. They were unsuccessful and arrested by the Francoist authorities in 1952 and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. Munis was released in 1957 and returned to Paris, where he began publishing a new organ, ''Alarma''. With the relaxation of the Francoist regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Munis group was able to establish a small following within Spain, though Munis himself continued to live in France. By the time of Franco's death, in the mid-1970s this group numbered about 50 people. However, differences between the exiles in Paris and the younger personnel in Barcelona precipitated a purge by the exiles of the Spanish group until there were only two or three members left in 1983.
Munis also had followers in several other countries and in the late 1970s these were organized into the
Revolutionary Workers Ferment with sections in France, Italy, Greece and the United States. The American group, the
FOR Organizing Committee of the United States or FOCUS left in 1981 in solidarity with the expelled Spanish members.
[Alexander p.250]
Munis wrote many articles and books in his life, the best known being ''
A Second Communist Manifesto
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes'' ...
'' and a history of the Spanish Civil War.
References
Selected works
Unions Against Revolution*
Qua son las Alianzas Obreras' Madrid : Ediciones Comunismo, 1934
External links
at
Marxists Internet Archive
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Munis, Grandizo
Left communists
1912 births
1989 deaths
Spanish Trotskyists