In the May 1936 issue of the APCF paper, Advance, R. Bunton wrote that "Today, an atmosphere of despair envelops the working class". There were good reasons for making this observation. The working class in Britain was weakened and demoralised after the Great Depression. At its peak in January 1933, unemployment had reached nearly 3 million, or over 20% of all insured workers. The numbers employed in the core industries of the traditional (blue-collar, manual) working class - mining, engineering, shipbuilding - had been declining steadily, and, simultaneously, subject to higher than average rates of unemployment.
In the geographical areas where these industries were concentrated, this had a devastating effect. Meanwhile, with Nazism's rise to power in Germany, and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1935/36), the outbreak of a Second World War was increasingly being discussed in terms of probability rather than possibility.
Only when seen against this depressing background can the APCF's response to the war in Spain be understood. When a Popular Front government took power in Spain in February 1936 - even though it had been elected on what the APCF admitted was a "liberalistic and reformist" programme - the APCF stated that "The recent events in Spain have given the international proletariat the first welcome news for some time" (Advance May 1936). In similar vein, when large numbers of Spanish workers resisted the fascist generals attempted coup against the government on 19 July 1936, Guy Aldred of the United Socialist Movement wrote: "The Spanish struggle... is the mighty proletarian movement that Europe needed" (Regeneracion 2 August 1936).
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Spanish civil war was almost as much of an inspiration to the anti-parliamentarians in Britain as the Russian revolution had been 20 years before. The atmosphere of despair which R Bunton had spoken of appeared to have been dispelled; the anti-parliamentarians flung themselves enthusiastically into support for the Spanish struggle: "I was never so active in speaking at street corners as in 1936 to 1939 during the Spanish crisis" noted Willie McDougall of the APCF, while John Caldwell, a survivor of the USM, has also recalled that public meetings then "drew bigger crowds than at any time since the general strike".
Since its origins, within the APCF there had been some members who considered themselves primarily as marxist communists, and others who regarded themselves first and foremost as anarchists. The relatively sizeable support for anarchism among the Spanish workers, and the strong anarchist admixture in many of the events surrounding the civil war, had the effect of rejuvenating many British anarchists, and the APCF was one of the organisations in which these anarchist elements came to the fore. In fact, it is said that such was the domination the anarchists established within the APCF at this time that the marxist members were at one stage banned from speaking for the group on its public platform. The result of this was that as far as the APCF was concerned, the sudden burst of activity sparked off by the events in Spain made a negligible contribution to the cause of communism.
On the positive side, the APCF interpreted the attempted fascist coup as a confirmation of their view on the futility of parliamentary action; as one of the APCF's members, AS Knox warned "wherever the ruling class decides that parliament fails to administer to their express desires, parliament will be abolished!" (Workers Free Press Sept 1937). The same lesson is also drawn in Section I on Parliamentarism in the APCF's Principles And Tactics, and M.G.'s article on The People's Convention, both of which are included in the first section of this pamphlet.
When it came to a practical response, however, the APCF did not take to heart this lesson which it itself had drawn, that "Constitutionalism and Parliamentarism has surely now proved a failure" (Advance Sept.1936). The APCF's appeals largely remained confined to the terrain of bourgeois legalism: they spoke of the fascists "breaches of international law" in trying to overthrow "an orthodox democratic government" (Advance Aug-Sept 1936), and criticised the British government for refusing to supply arms to the Republicans even though "The Spanish Government satisfies the legal requirements according to orthodox international legal standards" (Fighting Call 1st Feb 1937).
They urged protest strikes and demonstrations, not to help the Spanish workers directly, but to pressurise the government into lifting its arms embargo and changing its neutralist policy of 'non-intervention'.
Another feature of the APCF's response to the events in Spain was its completely uncritical support for the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI. From October 1936 to February 1937 the APCF co-operated with the anarchists of the Freedom group in London to publish four issues of the Fighting Call, the contents of which were compiled almost entirely from issues of the CNT-FAI's Boletin de Informacion, with no critical comment or analysis added. Along the same lines, in February 1937 the APCF published the text of a speech made by the anarchist Minister of Public Health, Frederica Montseny, as a pamphlet titled Militant Anarchism and the Reality in Spain, in which statements such as the following were allowed to pass without comment or criticism: "in these tragic times, we must put aside our point of view, our ideological conditions, in order to realise the unity of all anti-fascists from the Republicans to the Anarchists
In short, the APCF at this stage seemed capable neither of seeing beyond the false, diversionary issue of democracy versus fascism, nor of posing the real issue of communism versus capitalism, in all its forms.
By calling on the British state to drop its policy of non-intervention and take sides in a war between fascist and democratic factions of the same capitalist class, the APCF had in fact taken up an objectively anti-working class position, and it was this which enabled it to publish, without comment or criticism, the statements of bourgeois politicians such as Montseny. When an analysis which was opposed to capitalism in all its forms, fascist or democratic, did appear in the APCF's press, it came not from any member of the APCF but from Ethel MacDonald of the USM, who wrote that "Fascism is not something new, some new force of evil opposed to society, but is only the old enemy, Capitalism, under a new and fearful sounding name...
Anti-Fascism is the new slogan by which the working class is being betrayed" (Workers Free Press Oct 1937).
Interestingly, Ethel MacDonald had actually gone to Spain in October 1936 to work for the propaganda section of the CNT-FAI. She was accompanied by Jane Patrick, whose involvement in the revolutionary movement dated back to the time of the original Glasgow Anarchist Group. When Patrick went to Spain she was disowned by the APCF and she joined the USM soon after returning to Britain. The reports which Patrick and MacDonald sent back from Spain were published in the single-issue papers News From Spain (a USM publication) and Barcelona Bulletin (a joint APCF-USM effort), both of which came out in May 1937.
Patrick fiercely attacked the counter-revolutionary actions of the Stalinist PSUC, but also criticised the reformist orientation of the CNT-FAI leadership and its naive attachment to anti-fascist unity, stressed the importance of working class self-activity, and rejected the idea that democratic capitalism was preferable to fascist capitalism. Patrick's ideas, like Ethel Macdonald's, but unlike the APCF's, thus expressed revolutionary opposition to a capitalist war.
Very few other groups took up a similar stance at the time, notable exceptions being the International Council Correspondence group in the United States and the Bilan group in France.
The two articles on Spain from Solidarity which follow show some signs of an approach which was more critical than that adopted by the APCF itself. An Armistice? at least characterises the Popular Front as a "capitalist government"; in the same issue in which this appeared, the APCF criticised the British ruling classes "damnable treachery to Loyalist Spain" - Loyalists being supporters of... the capitalist government! The second article, by the Spanish anarchist group The Friends of Durruti, titled The Friends of Durruti Accuse, represents a great advance on the APCF's position, with its criticisms of the CNT-FAI and of the dissociation of the war from the revolution, and its statement that "Democracy defeated the Spanish people, not Fascism".
Before the war in Spain ended, the anarchists in the APCF broke away from the group, forming the Glasgow Anarchist-Communist Federation in 1937. The precise reasons for this split are obscure. At the beginning of the Second World War the Glasgow group of the Anarchist Federation Of Britain was formed on the basis of an alliance between the Anarchist-Communist Federation and the Glasgow Marxian Study Group. One of those prominent in the Marxian Study Group was Jimmy Kennedy, two of whose articles, originally published in Solidarity, appear elsewhere in this pamphlet.
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