Spanish Civil War: Beginnings and Colliding Forces

Women militia fighters

This Maoist analysis of the Spanish Civil War offers an important and scathing critique of the Communist International’s Popular Front strategy — where, after 1934, Communist Parties made the defense of bourgeois democracy (and strategic alliances with “anti-fascist” powers) the center of their political work.

This history provides a look at a living revolutionary opportunity — where things do not unfold as models, where sometimes bourgeois governments fall into the hands of left and revolutionary forces, where complex waves of struggle push the question of revolution forward and back.

It also gives an opening for a critical examination of the historic relations of anarchist, communist and other socialist forces. In the Spanish Civil War the forces of anarchists, communists and the left POUM party were in complex struggle within a loose anti-fascist coalition.  And there is much to learn (and grieve) about in the way that struggle unfolded.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

This article originally appeared in Revolution magazine (June 1981)

2. The Asturias Rebellion: Dress Rehearsal for Civil War

In the late 1920s, as the world crisis was beginning to hit Spain full force, the British and French imperialists, who dominated the Spanish economy, began to export their own beginning economic crisis by dumping cheap coal onto the Spanish market. Spain replied with tariff barriers, the British and French in turn cut off trade in key Spanish agricultural commodities. The bottom quickly dropped away from the Spanish economy and the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Soon after the fall of the governing military junta, Spain’s King, Alfonso XIII, resigned also – to avoid, he said, the “disaster of civil war.”[6]

On April 14. 1931, for the second time in its history, Spain was declared a Republic. The bourgeoisie hoped to draw the petty bourgeoisie – led by Republicans and Socialists – into the running of the bourgeois state, and provide the stability which the ruling class so desperately needed. Suddenly, generals and other lackeys who had served the old monarchy became enthusiastic supporters of the Republic. “The regime was changed in order not to change,” as a Socialist put it.[7]

The honeymoon lasted only two short years. The year 1933 was the hardest year of the depression in Spain, driving the proletariat and poor peasantry into open, often armed rebellion, and ruining the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie. The Republican government showed itself as repressive as any of the hated constitutional monarchies of the past.

The new situation culminated in the October, 1934 uprising by workers in the mining valleys of the northern Asturias region. This revolt, the last of several large and small rebellions which shook Spain in the early 1930s, directly set off a 20-month chain of events which led to the outbreak of civil war.

On October 5. 1934, miners armed with homemade dynamite charges occupied the police station at Sama; at Mieres, a hundred workers surrounded the barracks of the Guardia Civil, firing their ancient rifles from many points to make it seem as if they were heavily armed. Within forty-eight hours, nearly seventy Guardia Civil outposts had been occupied by the workers’ militias. In a few days, over ten thousand workers had been mobilized, town halls occupied, in many cases flying red flags, and “soviets” set up to run local affairs.

An account of a talk with one Socialist youth member shows something about what the workers felt their aims were: “In the small township of Figueredo, just south of Mieres in Asturias, Alberto Fernandez of the Socialist youth had been waiting two nights for the signal. At 2 AM on 5 October, he heard the sound of an old car advancing and jumped out onto the road. It was the Avance car (the Oveido Socialist newspaper). Antonio Llaneza, son of the great mineworkers’ leader, was in it.

“He took my hand and said with great feeling: ‘This is what we have been waiting for. A la calle (Into the street)’ ‘To the very limit?’ ‘Yes’. That meant it was the revolution. The seizure of power. The inauguration of socialism. Not simply to restore the Republican regime to what it had been in its first two years, as some later said. We set off…”[8]

But despite the feelings of this rank and file militant, and in all probability the similar sentiments of the many workers who inscribed hammers and sickles on their red flags (and later visited the Soviet Union by the thousands), the left wing of the Socialist Party (PSOE) that led the rebellion never intended it as a revolution or preparation for revolution. Overall, it was ill-prepared, half-serious at best. Only in Asturias was there much fighting; elsewhere, after the failure of some initial forays, the rebellion collapsed. The Socialist and left Republican leaders who initiated it had no plans to carry it through. Instead, they spent most of the rebellion hiding in an attic, waiting for it to be over. The PCE, although at that point much smaller than the Socialists, did play an active part.

The Socialist and left Republican leaders never intended to seize power. The leading Socialist J. Alvarez del Vayo (later associated with the PCE) makes this painfully clear in describing the original call for insurrection made by the Socialist Executive in January, 1934:

“Confronted with threatened aggression by the reactionaries, and a government incapable of Republican defense, the Left had no choice but to take the defense of the Republic into its o p hands, making known to the government and the country that it would not tolerate a Monarchist or Fascist coup d’etat cloaked in a fictitious parliamentary proceeding…if power were handed to the right, the Socialist Party would start a revolution… “[9]

The “parliamentary proceeding” to which del Vayo refers was the entry of the Church-sponsored fascist-like political organization, the CEDA (Confederaci6n Española de Derechas Aut6nomas), into the government, which probably was meant to lay the groundwork for a move to fascism. But the response of the Socialists and the PCE, even though it involved armed struggle, was entirely within the confines of bourgeois “pressure group” politics.

The problem was not that they had opposed a move towards fascism, and certainly not that they had acted without a guarantee of victory, but rather that they had no thought at all of ever winning, of seizing power. Instead they limited the uprising’s objective to keeping the CEDA out of the government, to maintaining the Republican form of the ruling class dictatorship, rather than carrying through the insurrection, if not yet as the action of a class ready to seize power, at least as a powerful means of preparation for the eventual seizure of power. The result of course was the Socialists and the PCE worked to strengthen bourgeois democratic illusions among the workers, while the bourgeoisie, far from giving in to this “pressure,” instead lashed out at the revolutionary movement.

After street fighting in Asturias

In all, the Asturias rebellion raged for two weeks. Workers effectively controlled and administered the region for this time, all the while fighting local police forces, and defeating and winning over troops from the local barracks. Only with the arrival of troops under General Franco, trained in counter-insurgency warfare in Spain’s recently-ended colonial war against the Moroccan people, was the revolt crushed. It was followed by a wave of savage political repression.

The Asturias revolt became the pivot point for all the major forces in Spain, as will be detailed below. The uprising is often referred to as a sort of “dress rehearsal for revolution” like the 1905 revolution in Russia. But. given the line that led it, it was even more a dress rehearsal for betrayal. Amid the burgeoning resistance of all the oppressed classes in Spain, a new force had emerged more fully than ever before – the proletariat. But the sorry leadership of the Socialists and their PCE allies indicated what was in store: the arising, increasingly radicalized proletariat was in the coming years to be tailed, fed with illusions, suppressed, and betrayed by those who claimed to be its revolutionary leadership. But never was it trained in a class-conscious way, in a Marxist understanding of the dangerous but also fertile new situation opening up before it, as a force which could lead all the oppressed to advance towards communism.

3. Spain’s Ruling Class and the World Crisis

For a year and a half following the Asturias events, the “solution” favored by the big bourgeoisie was quite obvious: the most important sections of the ruling class were openly preparing to “restore order” by a repressive move against the masses. The CEDA, whose leader, Gil Robles, had visited Hitler and called himself, Nazi-style, “el Jefe” (the Chief), now had five ministers in the government. Others in high positions, generals and monarchists, contacted the Italian Fascist government, and began to solidify Italian help for the planned move. Moreover, it would seem the opportune time to make such a move, from the point of view of the Spanish ruling class, having brutally put down the 1934 rising and imprisoned tens of thousands of its militants and leaders.

 

Billboard of Gil Robles over downtown Madrid

Nonetheless, the move could not be made. It was only in July, 1936 that the bourgeoisie was able to act in the way it had long ago deemed necessary, consolidating forces only a few days before the coup. which even then. of course, ended in initial failure. In fact, while the government of the period 1934-36 measured up formally to the worst fears of the Socialists – that is, the CEDA was a major influence in the government – these months are marked not by the strength of the ruling class but by its weakness, and even some concessions to the mass movement. For example, only two leaders of the Asturias rising were ever executed, many others released.

 

The ruling class, weak and divided, could not take decisive action on its own. The “reserves” necessary for a fascist move would have to come from outside Spain’s own borders, from more powerful imperialists. The problem was, for the Spanish ruling class, that they could not accept such help from Britain, because the British imperialists’ “help” was already squeezing so hard on their weaker and somewhat unwilling partners.

This weakness went very deep in the history of Spanish capitalism. During the nineteenth century, a nascent bourgeoisie arose and challenged the landed aristocracy in a series of wars. This class consisted of some small manufacturers, landowners who had accumulated capital from colonial oppression, and along with them, a vocal intelligentsia. But these forces were too flabby to seize power, and by the end of the abortive First Republic in 1873,different warring classes had come to terms. The landowners, urban bourgeoisie and Church all began to merge into one ruling class.

The Spanish bourgeoisie had never been strong enough to carry through a bourgeois-democratic revolution and free the country’s industrial development from feudal fetters, as had happened elsewhere in Europe. Far more importantly, in terms of its development, it was too weak to compete successfully with the imperialist great powers, not only within Spain itself, but also in the export of capital and the division of the world. Spain had been stripped of its most important, most profitable colonies by the U.S. in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Even in those colonies it continued to hold on to, the lion’s share of the benefits of imperialism were reaped by Spain’s “protectors,” especially Britain, who both really did “protect” Spain (in the sense of keeping other imperialists out of Spain’s remaining empire), but in true gangster-style forced Spain to pay dearly for that protection.

 

Morocco and Canary Islands (click to enlarge)

Spain held three sets of islands – the Balearic in the Mediterranean, the Canaries in the Atlantic, and Fernando PO, off the coast of “Spanish Guinea” (today, Equatorial Guinea). On the African mainland, aside from the latter, it held Rio de Oro (the so-called “Spanish Sahara”), Ifni and a zone of Morocco just across the Straits of Gibraltar. Important banking and other interests were maintained in Latin America and the Philippines. This was often in league with Church interests, particularly in the Philippines. There, too, the feast was shared with the now-dominant U.S. imperialists.

 

Many of these holdings were enormously profitable; but just as important was the strategic position of certain of them. Morocco in particular became the lynchpin of the Spanish “arrangement” with British imperialism. This strip had been assigned to Spain as part of the “Entente Cordiale,” a gangster-like imperialist division of colonial territory among Britain and France, which was arranged in 1904. Among the terms of this agreement, Britain allowed France to move into Morocco, but insisted that Spain be given the zone of Morocco immediately across from the important British military base and colony at Gibraltar. This flanked the key British routes to the Middle East and India the which at all costs had to be kept out of the hands of Britain’s rival, France. Secret protocols were attached to this agreement, certainly including worldwide and Spanish domestic trade and other agreements between England and Spain. But Spain was barred from fortifying the territory, that is. from using it to its own advantage in pressuring Britain. Spain was also expected to pacify the territory – and it was this that was to become a towering problem for the Spanish ruling class.

The Moroccans were enraged at this cynical carving and crushing of their country. By 1923, Spain had over 200,000 troops tied down, and was taking a beating at the hands of the nationalist forces of Abd el-Krim. Over 10,000 Spanish troops were annihilated by the Moroccans in one battle alone, at Anual. (It should be noted that this enormous commitment would be equivalent in its impact on Spanish society to a U.S. force of 2 million troops.) Large numbers of Spanish troops were only withdrawn after Moroccan fighters also attacked into the French zone, bringing the French into the war.

 

Spanish troops pinned down by Moroccan fighters

In Morocco can be seen the dead-end alley into which the Spanish bourgeoisie had run. Spain’s military dictator during this period, Primo de Rivera, summed it up quite well in a 1924 interview with a UP1 reporter: “I personally am in favor of withdrawing entirely from Africa and letting Abd el-Krim have it. We have spent untold millions of pesetas in this enterprise, and never made a centimo from it. We have had tens of thousands of men killed for territory which it is not worth having. But we cannot withdraw because England doesn’t want us to.”[10]

 

 

Of course, this is more than a little exaggeration. (For instance, Primo de Rivera neglected to mention Spain’s extensive holdings in Moroccan iron mines.) Spain’s ruling class certainly got more than a few centimes from its status as the junior pig at the imperialist feed trough. In fact, it grew rather fat and bloated, with not only finance capitalists and landowners linked to finance capital, but also an enormous Church and army bureaucracy, both part of the legacy of the colonial era, sharing in the spoils.

Within Spain itself, the Spanish bourgeoisie’s holdings were most concentrated in industries, which produced for the world market, such as fishing, leather, copper, coal, iron ore and shipping. Because of the semi-feudal nature of much of Spain’s countryside and its overall underdeveloped state, there was little national market. Industry as a whole was stunted and distorted. Foreign capital often edged out Spanish. (For instance, the telephone/telegraph system was foreign-owned, as was the railway system.) But at the same time, the Spanish ruling class did enjoy a profitable relationship with this foreign capital, which was another aspect of its links to world finance capital. Often this took the form of Spanish financiers literally becoming junior partners of British-owned firms in Spain. As one historian describes it:

“A certain number of Spanish capitalists were shareholders in the [British-owned] Basque-Asturian mining company and in the companies which brought out the mercury from Almaden or worked the iron deposits of Penarroyo or the copper of the Rio Tinto. Spanish ministers and Spanish generals sat on the boards of directors of these companies. The collusion between Spanish oligarchical forces and foreign capital guaranteed to the latter a de facto monopoly over the major activities of the Peninsula.”[11]

What resulted from all this was a ruling class both in contradiction to the dominant imperialist powers, especially Britain, whose grip the Spanish rulers found far too crushing – and at the same time dependent on their financial arrangements with foreign capital and their “share” of imperialism, as well as their ownership of capital in Spain itself and of the vast tracts of land that was controlled by them. This ruling class had little interest in developing Spain’s backward economy – in fact, through their control of finance (and through, in turn, the control of foreign finance), such industrial and all-around economic development was strangled.

The dry Spanish farmlands, for example. would have needed large capital expenditures for irrigation and other improvements in order to increase their productivity, but this kind of expenditure could gain much larger and more immediate profits elsewhere. Consequently vast stretches of farmland lay fallow. The huge unworked stretches of land owned by absentee owners seemed to mock the small peasants and braceros (rural laborers) who starved for want of land and work. This stagnation in agriculture was the main obstacle to the development of an internal market for industry.

Another result, particularly in industry, was the most extreme uneven development. Spain, like Czarist Russia, is a “prisonhouse of nations.” The geographically, economically, culturally and linguistically distinct Basque (Euskadi) and Catalan regions, oppressed nations within the Spanish state, were actually far more economically advanced than the rest of the country. Especially in Euskadi there was massive foreign {mainly British) investment in mining, as well as shipbuilding. There was also considerable foreign (especially French) investment in Catalonia. In fact. Catalonia had almost half of Spain’s total industry and over half of its workers, concentrated principally in the textile industry, which consisted of over 400,000 workers laboring in relatively small factories. The upshot was that a kind of a “sphere of influence within a sphere of influence” developed in the industrial areas, with bourgeois forces there either tied to foreign capital and/or more or less independent of the central ruling classes, adding to the national contradictions which had long existed between these oppressed nationality regions and the central government in Madrid. These two areas tended to form a counterweight, favorable to England and France, against Madrid. The industrial bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals there were the core of Republicanism, which, significantly, included the autonomy of these regions as one of its central tenets.

During the 1920s, the Spanish ruling class enjoyed the post-war boom that swept through all the powers feasting on the spoils of the world’s redivision. The war years, in fact, had been especially good for the Spanish ruling class, which while openly pro-German (out of desire to be free of British “protection,” and because the Germans enticed them with certain colonial bait), still made profitable sales to all sides. It was during this period that the Spanish ruling class moved to strengthen its position within Spain, buying the railroads from Britain and buying into the foreign-owned power monopoly. But all this, rather than resolving Spain’s contradictions, only exacerbated them. By the 1930s. with the beginning of the intensification of all the contradictions of international imperialism heralded by the stock market crash, the Spanish rulers found themselves squeezed ever tighter out of world and domestic markets. Politically, both the international situation – especially the growing formation of two blocs for a new world war – and the internal class struggle (which was sparked mightily by the Russian revolution as well as by the desperate situation of the proletariat and poor peasants) meant growing crisis.

Most of the proletariat and poor peasantry had been driven to the wall, while the Spanish ruling class had developed only a flimsy petty-bourgeois “buffer.” In the international arena the bourgeoisie was drained and battered by its “arrangement” with the British, but its moves to gain a better position were countered by the powerful influence of British imperialism right within the Spanish economy – and opposed, too. by the English-leaning class of small industrialists and intelligentsia, and other segments of the people under their influence, including a section of the workers. Yet, these were the very “better off” strata whose support for the Spanish ruling class was so desperately needed as a stabilizing factor among the masses. As a result, this loose grouping, which came to be represented by the left Republicans under Manuel Azaña, came to play a crucial role far out of proportion to its size or economic weight.

Because of Spain’s position in the international imperialist order, the ruling class could not afford to bribe these intermediate strata to the degree that was done, for instance, in Britain, France and the U.S. Add to this the fact that these strata and much of the proletariat itself were concentrated among the oppressed nationalities, and the weakness of the Republic as a form for suppressing the masses, and it is clear why, as far as the Spanish ruling class was concerned, the Republic had to go – at least for now – and why this had to be done principally through an open military move, rather than a more disguised maneuver. At the same time, underlying all this was above all an attempt to change Spain’s international position that could be accomplished only by hooking up with the other imperialist powers arrayed against Britain and its allies.

The ruling class had no choice but to gamble everything on a radical move, to tear apart much of the existing institutions and accepted social relations that had been so long and carefully built up in a political crisis which drew the masses of people into political life and struggle – into civil war – on a scale so vast the whole West shook with the reverberations.

Many historians have searched for something specific about Spain, something in its economic and political structures or in its “national character” to explain why fascism arose the way it did there, and why Spain came closer to revolution than any other country in Europe in the period preceding WW 2. (Although, of course, towards the end of WW 2 and immediately afterwards there were revolutionary upheavals and revolutions in a number of European countries, not to mention the revolutionary warfare raging particularly in China and developments elsewhere in the colonies and neo-colonies.) But even what is most particular about Spain in this period – its very backward agriculture, the volatile character of its petty bourgeoisie, its relatively revolutionary-minded working class – was tied up with what was going on on a world level: the worldwide imperialist financial, political and military web which Spain was caught in, and especially by the crisis sweeping through the entire imperialist world and pushing it towards world war, which, as Stalin had said of WW 1, “gathered all these contradictions into a single knot and threw them on to the scales, thereby accelerating and facilitating the revolutionary battles of the proletariat.”

Spain became one weak link of imperialism, one of the places where the gigantic forces of the historic conjuncture, which was to result in WW 2, were concentrated and burst into open warfare between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and its allies. Blinded by nationalism and reformism, the PCE and the Comintern failed to see things in this way, failed to see the revolutionary possibilities that this conjuncture opened up for the proletariat internationally. Instead, they saw only the difficulties, only the possibilities of minimizing defeat and subordinated everything to the defense of the Soviet Union. This, in Spain and wherever this line of the Comintern dominated, is what lies behind the fact that a tremendous opportunity for the advance of the world revolution was simply and criminally thrown away.

4. Forces Line Up

The early years of the thirties saw the contradictions in Spanish society stretch to the breaking point.

Certain events symbolized this, such as the rising and brutal repression of anarchist-led peasants and braceros at the village of Casas Viejas in 1933. The masses here had risen as part of a larger rebellion. seizing rich lands in the immediate vicinity of the village – lands which were used to raise fighting bulls. In the furious retribution directed against the peasants and braceros by the Republican government, units of the Guardia Civil moved from house to house, slaughtering whole families, and burning homes in their wake. All this became the focus of a massive political movement, including among the working-class parties, reflecting the explosion of anger and disgust that had been building against the Second Republican government.

The events at Casas Viejas show that Spain, though dominated by finance capital, was still a mainly rural society, where land remained a crucial question. Even at the outbreak of the civil war, 66% of the people lived in the countryside. These included an immense and smoldering agricultural proletariat – the 1 1/2 million braceros – who worked the huge latifundia estates of the south, lands stretching over Andalucia and Estremadura. These workers earned barely enough to survive by their summer earnings, and this had to last the five or six months out of the year that they were unemployed. They were drawn in huge numbers to the anarchists.

Smallholding peasants also existed throughout the countryside, their pitiful lands further divided up at each lapse of their short-term lease arrangements. Only in Navarre and some other scattered portions of the country were a class of middle-peasants managing to hold their own – these formed the base for Church and monarchist social movements. But it was the proletariat which was really the cutting edge in the social movements that had been shaking and splintering Spanish society in the twentieth century – in the general strikes which swept the country following the February 1917 Russian revolution, in the bitter struggles against the imperialist war in Morocco, in the uprisings and revolts which marked the first three years of the 1920s (called by Spanish historians, “The Bolshevik Triennium”). The class was growing fast in numbers. By 1930 over 26% of the country were industrial workers, double the number in 1910.

 

The Russian revolution had a huge impact

The Russian Revolution had been an especially catalytic revolutionary element among the proletariat in Spain, as elsewhere in the world. As one reactionary historian, Cattell, has to admit:

 

“Symbols, terminology, and methods were copied from the Russian Revolution, without regard for the Communist Party [of Spain]. It was not unusual for a village without one communist member to revolt and establish a Soviet on the Russian model. They would often raise the hammer and sickle and call themselves communists without any reference to the Communist Party of Spain. Likewise, Russian movies and stories of revolutionary heroism appealed to the masses, and as a result Russian novels and showings of movies were widespread.”[12]

As Cattell implies, this enormous respect and enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution was not the same thing as a conscious movement for proletarian revolution. But even this spontaneous movement and revolutionary sentiment pointed a powerful threat at the Spanish bourgeoisie.

The Republicans

On a cold, sunny fall day in 1935, Manuel Azaña looked out over the crowd flowing unendingly over the gentle hills in the town of Comillas, just outside of Madrid. Over 400,000 people had gathered for this speech, the largest political meeting in Spanish history. Red flags mingled with the tricolor of the Republic, and many of the hundreds of thousands were workers. Azaña’s speech would be an appeal to these masses to oppose the fascism that everyone could see coming – and rally around the flag of bourgeois democracy. The Republic “must destroy absolutely the privileges of the moneyed classes who now subjugate the people.. .All Europe today is a battlefield between democracy and its enemies, and Spain is not an exception. You must choose between democracy, with all its shortcomings, with all its faults, with all its mistakes or errors, and tyranny with all its horrors. There is no choice. Ours is made. In Spain one hears frivolous and vain talk of dictatorship. We find it repugnant, not only by doctrine but by experience and through good sense… “[13]

The infamously arrogant Azaña had been jailed after the Asturias revolt although he had pointedly kept his distance from the action. (The government was not exactly acting irrationally in jailing him, though – Azaña had also signaled that he would be available for the Presidency should the revolt succeed.) President of the Second Republic for its first two years, leader in the re cent merger of three “left Republican” parties, Azaña had become the outstanding symbol of English-leaning bourgeois democracy in Spain.

The Republicans were really an assortment of groupings. Their economic core could he found in the small industrialists of the country, and as part of this they looked to the oppressed nationality bourgeoisies, especially the Catalans, as natural allies. By 1934, Azaña was characterizing the Catalan nationalist party, the Esquerra (“Left”), as “the only true Republicans left in Spain.” (The Basque bourgeoisie had an ambivalent relationship to the Republicans. Tied closely to the British, it had contradictions with Madrid and natural sympathies for the Republicans. But five out of the six leading Spanish banks were located in Bilbao, reflecting that the Basques were also tied in to the Spanish big bourgeoisie certainly more than the Catalans. This made for a politically centrist role for the Basque bourgeoisie.

Aligned with the small industrialists were the urban non-exploiting petty bourgeoisie-professionals, white-collar workers, civil bureaucrats, teachers, students and others whose numbers had greatly expanded during the relative boom times of the 1920s. but were restricted and crushed down by the big bourgeoisie. The intelligentsia especially came to articulate the interests of all the groupings who labeled themselves Republican. Meeting in literary salons, such as the Ateneo of Madrid, the intellectuals hammered out a programme expressing open admiration for “English-style parliamentarism.” giving voice to the needs of industry, and hitting particularly at the Church whose general backwardness and control of education and other parts of the superstructure stood squarely in the way of the intelligentsia.

The Ateneo became a center for the Republican movement. During the beginnings of the Second Republic in 1931. it was rumored that the Ateneo librarians had stocked guns between the books. Here, Azaña, who was secretary of the Ateneo, grouped around him figures who would play crucial roles in the civil war.

The Republicans tended to oppose the ruling class in its international dealings, also. In the speech at Comillas, for example, Azaña held that “Spain is too weak a power to engage in further adventurist expansion…” This was a warning to the big bourgeoisie not to break with its status as junior-partner to the English, a position long held by Azaña. (In fact, Azaña came to prominence in WW 1, when he led mass demonstrations in support of the Anglo/French imperialist bloc, in opposition to the openly pro-German sympathies of the ruling class.)

Yet, despite these sharp contradictions with the Spanish big bourgeoisie, the Republicans also had much in common with it. The first years of the Second Republic had been nothing but a crass collaboration between the Republicans and the Spanish rulers, in spite of the revolutionary fanfare with which the founding of the Republic in 1931 was surrounded. These years deserve the same terse description which Lenin applied to the Kerensky government: “reforms shelved, distribution of official jobs accomplished.” He also says, and this also snugly fits the Second Republic: “In particular, it is the petty-bourgeoisie who are attracted to the side of the big bourgeoisie and are largely subordinated to them through this [state] apparatus, which produces the upper sections of the peasants, small artisans. tradesmen, and the like with comparatively comfortable, quiet and respectable jobs raising their shoulders above the people.”[14]

The first years of the Second Republic were just such an attempt to “subordinate” the Republicans and use them as a buffer against the masses. But by 1935, as the crisis ripped open all actual contradictions in society, this arrangement fell apart. The honeymoon was over; Azaña’s speech at Comillas is fighting words.

As can be seen by their history, the Republicans were opposed to the coming fascist move, but they were also opposed to a revolutionary break with the existing order. This was strikingly symbolized as the speech at Comillas concluded and tens of thousands of clenched fists were raised by the cheering crowd in a revolutionary salute. Azaña watched. refused to return the salute in kind, turned his back, and left the stage.

Socialists and Anarchists

Closely linked to the rise of the Republicans was the Socialist Party, which had originated among the printers and other skilled workers in Madrid at the turn of the century. These social-democrats had a long and opportunist history paralleling that of the Republicans: mass struggle against the regime with the aim of securing a niche in society for those they represented. . and open collaboration whenever that niche seemed to be in the offing. Largo Caballero for example, later to be the leading figure in the plans for the October, 1934 Asturias revolt, had been made Councillor of State under the military dictatorship of the 1920s, and Minister of Labor in the early Second Republic.

The Socialists’ political ties to Republicanism were even more clear and direct in the case of Caballero’s traditional rival in the party bureaucracy, Indalecio Prieto, who had risen politically under the sponsorship of the Basque hanker Horacio Echeverría. There were big differences in the social base of each of these two politicians, however. In contrast to the business-like Prieto, Caballero represented the trade-union base of the party which was strongest around Madrid and central portions of the country. Caballero had made his career as demagogue; with fewer direct ties to the Republicans, and engaged in constant competition with the more militant CNT (the anarchist-led union), Largo Caballero was forced to, and did maintain a social base of his own.

The 1934 Asturias revolt signified a major turn in the Socialist Party. The party’s membership had quadrupled in the preceding eighteen months, with nearly half now members of the poor and middle-peasant Landworkers Federation. Despite this, the Socialists still mainly represented relatively upper’ stratum workers and, even more than earlier, the petty bourgeoisie, but these groups had been crushed down by the terrible crisis of 1933 and disillusioned by the brutal repressive policies of the Second Republic. In short, the Socialists and their base had been radicalized. They were willing to take the most extreme measures – but still with the aim, as we have seen, of Republicanism, bourgeois democracy.

The Socialists began to attract large numbers of revolutionary-minded youth who openly admired the Comintern. They advocated the “Bolshevistic” of the Socialist Party and actually moved to merge with the PCE. (The Socialists and the PCE merged in Catalonia during this period, and the youth groups of the two parties eventually merged in early 1936.) How the PCE would “train” these forces when they did merge we shall touch on later. The point here is that the changes in the Socialists reflected a radical shift in the mood of the masses. Much more was happening here than (as it is usually put by bourgeois historians), “Largo Caballero read Marx when he was in jail.”

 

Young fighters in FAI hats, Barcelona, 1936

The anarcho-syndicalists, including the more or less purely anarchist FA1 (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) and the more syndicalist trade union it led (the CNT – Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores) were mainly absent in the events of October 1934, having exhausted their followers in the insurrections launched earlier in the 1930s (there were three major ones), and additionally, no doubt, had their own opportunist reasons for not joining the 1934 Asturias revolt. Even so, the spread of the anarcho-syndicalist movement was one important barometer of the changing character of the mass movement, along with the radicalization of the Socialists and the enormous prestige of the Soviet Union.

 

Anarcho-syndicalism had arisen among the rural semi-proletariat of the south, who brought it with them when they were recruited into the textile mills of Catalonia. It flourished in these and other small factories, usually of less than a hundred and very often only 20 or so workers, and among fishermen and woodcutters, as well as rural laborers. These were conditions especially favorable to the idea of factories (and farms) being taken over and run as autonomous economic and political units by those who worked them. As anarchist leader Isaac Puente wrote, “There is no need to invent anything, to create a new organism. The nuclei of the organization around which the economic life of the future society will be organized already exist in the present society; the trade union and the free municipality… “[15]

This doctrine is at bottom conservative, closer to the outlook and interests of the petty bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It sees no need for the proletariat to seize power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat because it really sees no need to transform society. Instead of doing away with classes and the material and ideological basis for class differences in order to liberate all mankind, the anarcho-syndicalists advocated a “liberation” factory by factory and farm by farm, where workers and peasants would “liberate” themselves by (co-operatively) going into business for themselves.

There is much to criticize in the anarchist line, but it is unarguable that something about the spirit and style of their work much more challenged the masses, was much more rebellious, than the stuffed-shirt trade-unionism of the Socialists and what was soon to be the ‘respectable antifascism” of the Communist Party.

Why wouldn’t revolutionary-minded people be drawn to ideals, such as those expressed by the anarchist Durruti in this interview with the Canadian reporter Van Paasen, a more revolutionary statement than the Communist Party ever made during the war:

“Van Paasen: You will be sitting on top of a pile of ruins if you [the anarchist programme] are victorious.

“Durruti: We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For you must not forget, we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. The world is growing, this minute.”[16]

Nothing comes to mind so much as Lenin’s admonition that “anarchism was not infrequently a sort of punishment for our own opportunist sins.”[17]

The problem, however, was that without Marxism-Leninism, and by and large opposed to it, the anarcho-syndicalist movement became a tail on various reformist dogs, including the Socialists, its members criticizing the PCE from the “left” in a way that concentrated on tactics and forgot about political power.

The Falange and the World’s Redivision

In the 1930s, the whole division of the world was thrown into question, with each of the imperialists desperate to redivide it to its own benefit. Spain both sought such a redivision and became a part of the ambitions of more powerful predators.

For the great powers, influence in Spain was a key part of being able to dominate Europe. A position in Spain would enable each of the opposing blocs to turn the flank of the other. Germany would be able to encircle France, while England would retain in Spain a link to the Mediterranean.

Beyond this important strategic role, Spain and the Spanish colonies provided other advantages to the great powers. The Iberian Peninsula and the colonies together fronted the Atlantic trade routes in four places, including, most significantly, the Gibraltar passage be tween the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Additionally, Germany eyed Spain as a possible stepping stone back into Africa (in fact. before the war German economic penetration into Spain had concentrated in Spanish Morocco and not on the Peninsula itself). Finally there was of course, the high-grade iron ore that was produced in the Asturias region, with its cheap and convenient access to European industry.

From the point of view of the Spanish ruling class, this sharpening international situation opened up some new possibilities. Already, after an abortive coup attempt by General Sanjurjo in 1932, contacts had been made with the Italian Fascist government by the Spanish military, and from this time on, links were progressively strengthened. Visits to Italy were made by monarchists of both the Alphonsine and Carlist parties; paramilitary troops of these parties were even trained in Italy.

To the Spanish bourgeoisie, more and more it began to seem that the Italian connection was “the way out.” Italy could provide the military might and the reliable forces which the Spanish rulers did not possess but desperately needed to suppress the growing mass movement. At the same time, the Italians might become the pry-bar with which to loosen or even break the hold of the British imperialists. Further, there was reason to hope that a new imperialist redivision of the world – and especially the defeat of Britain (and, to a lesser degree, the U.S.) – could mean that Spain could achieve the spheres of influence and opportunities for capital accumulation that were now being denied it.

Of the several groups which made connections to Italy during the Civil War. and which openly put forward the idea of the fascist form of dictatorship, the Falange was destined to become the leading political party under Franco. Formed in 1933. the group was financed by Juan March, Chairman of the Central Office of Spanish Industry and certainly had other important ties to the bourgeoisie as well, as indicated by the fact that its leader was none other than Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the military dictator to whom the bourgeoisie had turned in the 1920s. After the February 1936 elections, when the Church-sponsored CEDA failed miserably, most of CEDA’s membership moved en masse into the Falange. The Falange programme was, then, in advance of most of the groupings within the Spanish ruling class, but nevertheless, well-concentrated its aims: to “restore order.” to “eradicate Marxism,” and fulfill the so-called Spanish “will to empire.” What other, more-entrenched forces were unwilling to do, at least so openly, the Falange did wholeheartedly: it took on the English imperialists, condemning the current division of the world, and the status of Spain within it. Its programme called for the establishment of “Hispanidad,” an imperialist “Spanish unity” stretching from Latin America to the Philippines. This was not exactly a new idea. The Spanish rulers had long retained important interests in former colonies, and carefully kept alive their cultural ties in Latin America. But now the Falange proposed to seize on the world conjuncture, and cash in the chips.

The PCE

 

PCE poster

The Asturias rebellion also set the stage for the rise of the PCE (Communist Party of Spain) and the influence of the Comintern in Spain. Before this, the PCE had remained small in numbers and influence, and wildly uneven in its line. But starting with the major role played by the party in the rebellion itself and in the turmoil and struggle which followed it, the PCE expanded until, in the course of the war it was to become the single most important influence on the course of the Republic. The party began in 1921, as a grouping of about 10,000 mainly young revolutionaries split off from the anarchists and Socialists. It passed through a period of effective illegality during the 1920s, during which time its numbers shrank to perhaps 800. In 1931, a letter from the Executive Committee of the Comintern laid out the course the party was to follow until at least the end of 1933: it would “win the majority of the working class” by gaining organizational leadership of the immediate struggles of the proletariat, and these struggles, especially the economic struggle, would lead straight to the overthrow of the “bourgeois-landlord government,” and the establishment of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.”[18]

 

In general, there was a certain revolutionary potential in the party at this time, bursting out at such moments as in the 1927 mutiny among sailors in Cartagena, led by PCE cadres in opposition to the war in Morocco. Nevertheless, and without attempting to follow the many shifts and contradictions in the PCE’s early line, it can be said that the PCE was early bogged down in “left” economism, tailing the furious battles of the masses for reforms and against repression, hoping that these would lead to revolution. The PCE, like most Comintern parties at the time, saw a veritable dream road to revolution: automatically as the crisis played out, “millions will he awakening, and are already losing their illusions,” and as the masses increasingly looked to the PCE as the leadership in their immediate struggles, all other forces would soon openly oppose the masses and stand thoroughly exposed. As for the bourgeoisie, the jig was up – the crisis would drive it in a straight line down.

What a shock, then, to this mechanical and narrow way of thinking when by 1935, Azaña was able to mobilize nearly a half-million people at Comillas, when the CEDA won a social base among the peasants and upper petty bourgeoisie, when the Socialists’ numbers exploded, and the anarchists began challenging the very heart of “responsible trade-unionism” in Madrid and elsewhere (although they had lost a lot of support in their traditional base, Catalonia). Nor did the PCE seem to be fully aware of the Spanish bourgeoisie’s international “reserves” – its ability, and necessity, to reach abroad to other powers to aid in propping up its rule.

The point is not that the small size and relative isolation of the party sealed its fate. The rapid development of world events reverberating in Spain were soon to provide extremely favorable conditions for a party guided by a revolutionary line to play a decisive role in the future of Spain and to deeply affect the world. Nor did the fact that they had been so weakened by economism mean that they could not change into a party capable of playing this role, although it did mean that a powerful inertia had been gathered, pushing it along the wrong course. But for the PCE, as for other Comintern parties during this same time, as it became clear that the “left” economist line would not lead to revolution, what got dropped was the goal of revolution, which while not eliminated from the party’s programme was at least dropped into the indefinite and meaningless future.

If the PCE was already set up for a retreat, the trumpet call for the step backward was sounded by the line of the Cominform’s Seventh Congress, which although it took place in July-August 1935. consolidated and announced a line formulated by the Comintern leadership some time earlier.

The effects of this line were broad, deep-going, and utterly bad. As stated in the RCP document appearing elsewhere in this issue:

“Especially after the crushing defeat of the communists in Germany with the rise of the fascist form of dictatorship (19331, heavy defensive and defeatist tendencies grew in the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Comintern. Together with the growing danger of world war, especially of attack on the Soviet Union, openly rightist deviations, of a fundamental nature, became predominant – the promotion of nationalism, reformism and bourgeois democracy, the subordination of everything to the defense of the Soviet Union, etc.. in a qualitatively greater way than before…all this was concentrated in the Dimitroff Report to the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern (1935) and the implementation and further development of this line – which, as we know, involved, among other things, as one of its key ingredients, the basic repudiation of the Leninist position on ‘defense of the fatherland.’ This whole line was in its essence erroneous… “

In June 1935, to implement this Comintern line the PCE called for the formation of a Popular Front Coalition on the basis of a five-point programme of lukewarm reforms (excluding even the PCE’s former, more revolutionary democratic demands, such as independence for Morocco and agrarian revolution), designed to be acceptable to the Republicans and to the British and French imperialists. Just as the class struggle in Spain was approaching the boiling point, the PCE decided to become an electoral party – in the name of fighting off the danger of fascism.

Part 3: It All Goes Up For Grabs