Joaquín Maurín
Encyclopedia
Joaquín Maurín Juliá was a Spanish
Communist
politician and revolutionary, leader of the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC) and of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
(POUM). He was active mainly in Catalonia
.
, Huesca
(Aragon
), Maurín engaged in revolutionary politics from early youth, standing trial on several occasions. After law studies, he practiced in Lleida
(Catalonia), where he became affiliated with the Anarchist
trade union
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
(CNT). In 1920, Joaquín Maurín was elected local secretary for the CNT, as well as the editor of its weekly Lucha Social. In 1921, he represented the movement at the Profintern
Congress in Moscow
, the capital of Bolshevist Russia
. Upon his return, he was elected general secretary of the CNT, shortly before being arrested and detained (February 1922). After his release, Joaquín Maurín founded the Comités Sindicalistas Revolucionarios ("Revolutionary Trade Union Committees") as a Bolshevik
group within the CNT. He also gave the Committees their own press tribune, La Batalla (in December).
, Maurín was arrested and jailed (January 1925). He was released in 1927, opting to leave Spain for Paris
. However, he returned to Barcelona
in 1930, and worked for the reanimation of La Batalla in the months before the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic
(early 1931). He became opposed to Stalinist
policies in the Soviet Union
, taking a stand which saw him grouped with the emergent international Right Opposition
. He split with the Spanish Communist Party, leading the FCCB into independent politics (the wing’s place in the Stalinist body was quickly taken over by the Communist Party of Catalonia
).
and, in 1933, became the Iberian Communist Federation
(declaring its goal to occupy a place on the national stage). The unified body of the FCCB and the Catalan Communist group became the mass front BOC, having Maurín for its general secretary. The party was to reach a dominant position in Catalonia.
During the riots provoked by the centrist stance of the Alejandro Lerroux
government in 1934, Maurín advocated the forming of United Front
-type Alianzas Obreras ("Workers’ Alliances") throughout Spain (following a pattern that was proving its force in the Asturias
). With the undecisive end of the movements, his party opened itself to an alliance with Andreu Nin’s Trotskyist
Communist Left of Spain
. The merger was carried out in September 1935, when the two groups formed the POUM – Maurín was elected its general secretary.
In line with his views on unified workers’ action, the POUM joined the Spanish Popular Front
in the run up for the elections of February 1936. Joaquín Maurín was elected to the Spanish Congress of Deputies
on Popular Front lists.
’s coup d'état
in July of the same year and the start of the Spanish Civil War
, Maurín found himself in Francoist Galicia. Attempting to escape through Aragon, he was captured in Jaca
and detained until 1944. A witness to both the rise of the Francoist dictatorship and the crushing of the POUM by Stalinist forces, he took exile to the United States
together with his close family, creating his own press agency and publishing his writings. Maurín died in New York City
.
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
Communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
politician and revolutionary, leader of the Workers and Peasants Bloc (BOC) and of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification
The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War...
(POUM). He was active mainly in Catalonia
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
.
CNT and Profintern
Born in BonansaBonansa
Bonansa is a municipality located in the province of Huesca, Aragon, Spain. According to the 2010 census , the municipality has a population of 102 inhabitants....
, Huesca
Huesca (province)
Huesca , officially Huesca/Uesca, is a province of northeastern Spain, in northern Aragon. The capital is Huesca.Positioned just south of the central Pyrenees, Huesca borders France and the French Departments of Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Hautes-Pyrénées...
(Aragon
Aragon
Aragon is a modern autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon. Located in northeastern Spain, the Aragonese autonomous community comprises three provinces : Huesca, Zaragoza, and Teruel. Its capital is Zaragoza...
), Maurín engaged in revolutionary politics from early youth, standing trial on several occasions. After law studies, he practiced in Lleida
Lleida
Lleida is a city in the west of Catalonia, Spain. It is the capital city of the province of Lleida, as well as the largest city in the province and it had 137,387 inhabitants , including the contiguous municipalities of Raimat and Sucs. The metro area has about 250,000 inhabitants...
(Catalonia), where he became affiliated with the Anarchist
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo
The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo is a Spanish confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions affiliated with the International Workers Association . When working with the latter group it is also known as CNT-AIT...
(CNT). In 1920, Joaquín Maurín was elected local secretary for the CNT, as well as the editor of its weekly Lucha Social. In 1921, he represented the movement at the Profintern
Profintern
The Red International of Labor Unions , commonly known as the Profintern, was an international body established by the Communist International with the aim of coordinating Communist activities within trade unions...
Congress in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, the capital of Bolshevist Russia
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic , commonly referred to as Soviet Russia, Bolshevik Russia, or simply Russia, was the largest, most populous and economically developed republic in the former Soviet Union....
. Upon his return, he was elected general secretary of the CNT, shortly before being arrested and detained (February 1922). After his release, Joaquín Maurín founded the Comités Sindicalistas Revolucionarios ("Revolutionary Trade Union Committees") as a Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
group within the CNT. He also gave the Committees their own press tribune, La Batalla (in December).
In the Communist Party
In 1924, he led his La Batalla into a merger with the Communist Party of Spain, taking charge of organizing the latter's local wing, the Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation (FCCB). During the crackdown on opposition parties ordered by dictator Miguel Primo de RiveraMiguel Primo de Rivera
Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, 2nd Marquis of Estella, 22nd Count of Sobremonte, Knight of Calatrava was a Spanish dictator, aristocrat, and a military official who was appointed Prime Minister by the King and who for seven years was a dictator, ending the turno system of alternating...
, Maurín was arrested and jailed (January 1925). He was released in 1927, opting to leave Spain for Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. However, he returned to Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
in 1930, and worked for the reanimation of La Batalla in the months before the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
(early 1931). He became opposed to Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
policies in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, taking a stand which saw him grouped with the emergent international Right Opposition
Right Opposition
The Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...
. He split with the Spanish Communist Party, leading the FCCB into independent politics (the wing’s place in the Stalinist body was quickly taken over by the Communist Party of Catalonia
Communist Party of Catalonia
Communist Party of Catalonia was the branch of the Communist Party of Spain in Catalonia. PCC was formed in 1932, substituting the Catalan-Balearic Communist Federation . In 1936 PCC merged with other groups to form the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. At that time PCC had around 2000...
).
BOC and POUM
On March 1, 1931, the FCCB joined with the Catalan Communist PartyCatalan Communist Party
Catalan Communist Party was a political party in Catalonia, Spain. PCC was founded in 1928. It had its origins in l'Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular, which had been formed in 1926, and in the Marxist sectors of the Catalan separatist movement...
and, in 1933, became the Iberian Communist Federation
Iberian Communist Federation
Catalan-Balear Communist Federation was a communist group in Spain. Formed in 1924, it joined the Communist Party of Spain , and functioned as the PCE federation in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands...
(declaring its goal to occupy a place on the national stage). The unified body of the FCCB and the Catalan Communist group became the mass front BOC, having Maurín for its general secretary. The party was to reach a dominant position in Catalonia.
During the riots provoked by the centrist stance of the Alejandro Lerroux
Alejandro Lerroux
Alejandro Lerroux y García was a Spanish politician who was the leader of the Radical Republican Party during the Second Spanish Republic...
government in 1934, Maurín advocated the forming of United Front
United front
The united front is a form of struggle that may be pursued by revolutionaries. The basic theory of the united front tactic was first developed by the Comintern, an international communist organisation created by revolutionaries in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.According to the theses of...
-type Alianzas Obreras ("Workers’ Alliances") throughout Spain (following a pattern that was proving its force in the Asturias
Asturias
The Principality of Asturias is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain, coextensive with the former Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages...
). With the undecisive end of the movements, his party opened itself to an alliance with Andreu Nin’s Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
Communist Left of Spain
Communist Left of Spain
Communist Left of Spain was a Trotskyist political party during the Second Spanish Republic. Its central leader was Andres Nin, who had been a supporter of the Left Opposition while living in Russia...
. The merger was carried out in September 1935, when the two groups formed the POUM – Maurín was elected its general secretary.
In line with his views on unified workers’ action, the POUM joined the Spanish Popular Front
Popular Front (Spain)
The Popular Front in Spain's Second Republic was an electoral coalition and pact signed in January 1936 by various left-wing political organisations, instigated by Manuel Azaña for the purpose of contesting that year's election....
in the run up for the elections of February 1936. Joaquín Maurín was elected to the Spanish Congress of Deputies
Spanish Congress of Deputies
The Spanish Congress of Deputies is the lower house of the Cortes Generales, Spain's legislative branch. It has 350 members, elected by popular vote on block lists by proportional representation in constituencies matching the Spanish provinces using the D'Hondt method. Deputies serve four-year terms...
on Popular Front lists.
Capture and exile
With Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
’s coup d'état
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
in July of the same year and the start of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, Maurín found himself in Francoist Galicia. Attempting to escape through Aragon, he was captured in Jaca
Jaca
Jaca is a city of northeastern Spain near the border with France, in the midst of the Pyrenees in the province of Huesca...
and detained until 1944. A witness to both the rise of the Francoist dictatorship and the crushing of the POUM by Stalinist forces, he took exile to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
together with his close family, creating his own press agency and publishing his writings. Maurín died in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
External links
- Joaquín Maurín biography by Pedro Bonet y Luis Alonso at the Fundación Andreu Nin (in Spanish)
- Joaquín Maurín archive at Marxists Internet Archive (in Spanish)