Andy Durgan’s book, The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution, published by Resistance Books in November 2025, is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate POUM’s centrist politics and downplay the important lessons of the Spanish Revolution. Resistance Books, the publishing wing of the International Socialist Tendency (IST), is largely influenced by the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This connection is intentional and influences how Durgan presents the Spanish events of 1936–39.
Durgan is closely linked to Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has historically contributed to its media publications, including Socialist Worker and its main theoretical journal, International Socialism. He specialises in the Spanish Civil War and is particularly noted for his research on POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). His background includes political activity with the SWP in the UK, academic research on the origins of POUM, and teaching modern history in Spain. Additionally, he served as a historical adviser for Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom, which illustrates the POUM’s involvement in the Spanish Revolution.
However, as Ann Talbot notes, “Durgan’s conception of the relationship between class and society is derived ultimately from the anti-Marxist conceptions of the sociologist Max Weber, who developed an ahistorical view of society as a series of static ideal types. This approach proved influential for self-declared Marxists such as Louis Althusser, who developed structuralism, a major theoretical influence on the SWP. This theoretical background allows Durgan to adopt Graham’s theory of modernisation without as much as a hiccup. The Spanish Civil War, according to Helen Graham, was one of many European civil wars that reflected differing responses to modernity.[1]
Talbot believes that Durgan’s political affiliation is of minor significance when compared to his political approach, which is deeply rooted in the IST/SWP tradition. The publication of The POUM through Resistance Books in 2025 confirms that the institutional link between Durgan and that tendency remains. The SWP tradition provides the platform, distribution channels, and political support for his revival of POUM centrist views.
Any Marxist writer who has engaged with Durgan’s work has observed that, while he was willing to engage critically with Trotskyism in earlier writings, by 2007, he had fully embraced the Popular Front framework, disguised as “modernisation theory.” As Dave Hyland detailed in a three-part WSWS critique in November 2012, Durgan consistently downplays the role of the PSOE and anarcho-syndicalists in the defeat of the 1934 Asturian uprising, neglects the Stalinist GPU’s campaign of murder against Spain’s revolutionary opposition, and most importantly, fails to address Trotsky’s actual positions on the POUM seriously.[2]
Durgan’s 2025 book on the POUM represents his most sustained effort to rehabilitate that organisation and to counter the Trotskyist critique. The POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was established in 1935 through the merger of the Communist Left of Spain led by Andreu Nin, a former Left Oppositionist and former secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, and the Workers and Peasants Bloc, led by Joaquín Maurín. Nin had distanced himself from Trotsky in 1930, refusing to endorse the Fourth International and instead forming an opportunist alliance with Bukharin’s Right Opposition. This was more than a tactical disagreement; it was a profound political mistake with disastrous repercussions.
Trotsky’s assessment of the POUM differs sharply from Durgan’s and, contrary to Durgan’s suggestion, was not a retrospectively harsh judgment. It was a direct political intervention made in the midst of events. In The Class, the Party, and the Leadership, written in 1940 and published on the WSWS, Trotsky wrote:
“To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM, which undoubtedly embraced revolutionary proletarian elements not previously firmly tied to anarchism. However, it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution. It could not become a mass party because, in order to do so, it was first necessary to overthrow the old parties, and it was possible to overthrow them only by an irreconcilable struggle, by a merciless exposure of their bourgeois character. However, the POUM, while criticising the old parties, subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. It participated in the “People’s” election bloc; entered the government, which liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising. From the standpoint of determinism in general, it is possible, of course, to recognise that the policy of the POUM was not accidental.
Everything in this world has its cause. However, the series of causes engendering the Centrism of the POUM is by no means a mere reflection of the condition of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat. Two causalities moved toward each other at an angle, and at a certain moment, they came into hostile conflict. It is possible, by taking into account previous international experience, Moscow’s influence, the impact of several defeats, etc., to explain, politically and psychologically, why the POUM developed into a centrist party. However, this does not alter its centrist character, nor does it alter the fact that a centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution. It does not alter the fact that the Catalan masses were far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership. In these conditions, to unload the responsibility for false policies on the “immaturity” of the masses is to engage in sheer charlatanism frequently resorted to by political bankrupts.”
A significant political distortion in Durgan’s earlier work, which persists in this new book, is the consistent underestimation of Stalin’s role in the GPU in Spain. As Hyland’s 2012 critique observes, Durgan “remains silent about the part played by Stalin’s murderous secret police, the GPU, and its impact on the Spanish workers’ movement.”
This silence is deliberate, aiming to rehabilitate the Popular Front framework by downplaying its realities, including the torture and murder of Andreu Nin, the framing of POUM leaders as “Trotskyite-Fascist” agents of Franco (mirroring Moscow Trials slanders), and the physical elimination of those opposing Stalinist class collaboration. Hyland’s work is further elaborated by Alejandro López’s 2025 lecture writing “The Stalinist bureaucracy intervened to forestall revolution in Spain, launching a murder campaign against anyone even suspected of political links to Trotsky. The machinery of repression built in Moscow and refined in the Comintern was exported to Spain.[3] Ramón Mercader, who would later assassinate Trotsky, was specifically trained in Spain for this purpose. The GPU’s activities in Spain were not an anomaly; rather, they exemplified Stalinism’s core principle: repressive efforts to quash socialist revolution in order to protect the Soviet bureaucracy’s privileges and maintain its diplomatic ties with the so-called “democratic” imperialist powers.
The SWP’s stance on the POUM has gradually shifted to the right, revealing a clear trajectory. Ann Talbot’s two-part WSWS review of Durgan’s 2007 book reports that Britain’s SWP supports the Stalinist perspective on the Spanish Civil War. In his earlier work, especially his 1990 article “The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM” in Revolutionary History, Durgan and the SWP tradition indulged in what Talbot describes as “hero worship” of the POUM. They idealised its political mistakes while only superficially criticising the Popular Front. The POUM was portrayed as a brave, tragically defeated revolutionary group, martyred by Stalinist repression. This narrative aimed to conceal the POUM’s own significant political role in the revolution’s failure.
Durgan’s new book should be understood within a broader context. It stands as the SWP tradition’s most comprehensive, book-length effort to offer a sympathetic portrayal of the POUM — likely more nuanced than a simple apology, yet still based on the same core political evasions that Marxists have identified over the years. Publishing it via Resistance Books, the IST’s own imprint, is a political statement: it represents the official account of its preferred historical perspective. For workers and young people looking to understand the Spanish Revolution, the key resources are Trotsky’s writings — The Lesson of Spain — A Last Warning (1937) and The Class, the Party, and the Leadership (1940) — along with the WSWS’s historical analyses.
Notes
En Lucha’s Andy Durgan: Historical distortions to justify political betrayal of Spanish workers- A Three-Part Article by David Hyland https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/11/dur1-n07.html
Britain’s SWP lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 1 Ann Talbot- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp1-s16.html
The Spanish Revolution, 1931-39 by Leon Trotsky (Author), George Breitman (Editor), Naomi Allen (Editor
Homage To Catalonia-George Orwell April 25, 1938.
Review: Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War: The Journal of Contemporary History-published online June 25, 2009
[1] Britain’s SWP lends credence to Stalinist line on Spanish Civil War—Part 1-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/swp1-s16.html
[2] En Lucha’s Andy Durgan: Historical distortions to justify political betrayal of Spanish workers- A Three-Part Article by David Hyland http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/11/dur1-n07.html
[3] The Stalinist counterrevolution during the Spanish Civil War-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/26/opjp-s26.html
A Trumpet of Sedition 