Spanish Civil War: A Bitter War Over the Future

This is Part 3 of a 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 appeared in Revolution magazine (June 1981) with the original title “Critique of Comintern in Spanish Civil War.”

5. It All Goes Up For Grabs

The orientation of the PCE that it was in a bad position for revolutionary advance and in a good position only to “hold back the fascist tide” was not borne out by events. A great wave of struggle was about to break over Spain and spread in ripples throughout the world.

At the end of 1935. a falling-out between forces on the Right caused the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, to be dissolved, and new elections called. Especially the CEDA looked forward confidently to the elections, fully expecting to consolidate its base and become an unchallenged reactionary center.

On the part of the mass groups and parties, an electoral Popular Front was formed, including several petty bourgeois Republican parties, the Catalan Esquerra representing the Catalonian industrialists, the Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists, and semi-Trotskyite Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). Other Republican parties representing big bourgeois and rural petty bourgeois interests, the Catalan big bourgeois Lliga, and the Basque separatist and autonomist parties formed a Center. The anarchist-led CNT, though not officially represented in the coalition by political choice, supported the Popular Front also. The programme of this coalition was almost entirely the longstanding set of Republican demands: minor industrial and agrarian reforms (not including redistribution), educational schemes, measures to promote industry. It also included a demand which caught fire among the masses of people, the call for the release of the Asturian political prisoners.

When the voting on February 16,1936 came to a close, millions had cast their ballots against the bourgeoisie and landlords – and for the Popular Front. A shaken Right coalition went down to a narrow defeat.

Jose Diaz speaking before a presidium of PCE leaders during the Civil War

But the election results were just the beginning. As it turned out, the Republican programme was considerably more conservative than the mood of the masses of people, who were quick to jump on the opportunity provided by the election victory. On the very day following, huge crowds descended on the prison in Valencia, and forced the release of the political prisoners there. In the town of Oveido in Asturias, and many other parts of Spain, this “demand” was enforced before any law was passed.

The poor peasants and braceros swept over many of the big holdings, occupying them forcibly. These asentamientos – seized land farmed cooperatively – occurred first in Badajoz and Cáceres, but then spread to many other parts of the country.

Strikes also multiplied including many political strikes for the suppression of fascism. On several days alone, the number of strikers reached 450,000.

Along with this, political debate, struggle and mass meetings took place on every street, in every city. One bourgeois observer says, “there were meetings of tens of thousands at which workers applauded with enthusiasm the speakers who announced that the end of capitalism was near, and for them to do as they did in Russia.”[19] Thousands of Socialist Youth marched in Madrid in uniform on May Day, chanting slogans for a “red army” and ‘*a workers’ government.”

Still relatively small but with rapidly growing influence, the PCE found itself carried forward on the crest of this struggle. The masses were occupying lands and overturning city councils, as José Diaz, party general secretary, described it, “not through legal channels, but through revolutionary channels, placing them in the hands of Communists, Socialists, and Left Republicans.”[20] Dolores Ibarruri and other Communist deputies in the Cortes pressured the regime to grant land to the poor peasants (of course, this would in effect have only legalized what had already been taking place).

The PCE was walking a certain line here. It was not yet the major influence in events as it was to be later; nor were the interests of the Soviet Union yet directly involved. It would in some ways support the raging struggles of the masses, while at the same time it was already beginning its long honeymoon with the “antifascist” elements of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, especially the group around Azaña.

The military’s plans for a coup became an open secret. Rightist newspapers and politicians consistently hinted and threatened that such plans were in the works as the various class forces maneuvered. The Azaña group, which was now in power, pushed to come to some arrangement with the forces grouped around the fascist generals. This is admitted in effect by the editor of Azaña’s writings, Juan Marichal, who says that the preparations for a military move “did not play in Manuel Azaña’s anguished mind the same role as the attitudes and actions of the extreme left.”[21] Azaña writes that, in a private talk with Gil Robles, he told the CEDA leader, “Your friends should give me a margin of confidence. They should not make difficulties for me. I have enough problems on the other side.”[22]

Certain moves were made by Azaña to supposedly tie the hands of the golpistas (coup plotters). Franco was sent to the Canary Islands (from where, however, a secure and convenient command post was easily set up with his main base of support, the Moroccan-based Army of Africa); Gen. Goded was sent to the Balearic Islands (from where he ultimately directed forces in Catalonia); and Gen. Mola to Pamplona (the base of monarchist support, within striking distance of, and directly across the Guadarrama mountains from Madrid). As one right-wing historian sneers, the government assumed it possessed “control of the army from above, the most effective method, based on the operation of hierarchical discipline in the armed force.”[23] It did not possess such control, despite the illusions and deceptions of the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois Republican politicians and their supporters, including the PCE.

The Generals Move

By early July, the various sections of the ruling class had ceased their mutual throat-cutting long enough to agree on a plan of action. Falangist and monarchist cadres were unleashed in a wave of bombings and assassinations, in order to “destabilize” the situation and whip up mass sentiment for “law and order.” By now the mass movement was straining at the bounds in which the Republican and left organizations had wrapped it. The unions and every major political party had created militias, among which the best-organized and fastest-growing was the Fifth (Quinto) Regiment of the PCE. One issue of the Caballero Socialist newspaper Claridad displayed huge headlines: “Armas! Armas! Armas!” as the masses pressed for arms. But this the Republicans would not do, since as one said. arms in the hands of the masses would be “pregnant with inconceivable dangers politically.”[24]

The masses were tense, but these policies had put them on the defensive, waiting for the bourgeoisie to make its move.

On July 17, Franco made plans to fly out of his exile in Las Palmas in a plane piloted by a British agent. On the 18th, the military launched attacks from the Moroccan garrison at Melilla; at the same time, Franco touched down in French Morocco where a pronunciamiento was issued: “The Army has decided to restore order in Spain…”

From barracks around the country, often in long-planned collaboration with “Republican” mayors and local politicians, the military moved on union and party headquarters, the working-class barrios, town halls and other strategic points. In every city, crowds, sometimes numbering up to hundreds of thousands, came out into the streets demanding arms. Now finally, a certain amount of weaponry was distributed to the people, while others dug up the rifles that had been buried since the defeat of the 1934 uprising. But with or without weapons, where the masses were in the streets in great numbers and took the offensive, the fascist troops soon found themselves cut off and paralyzed. In Barcelona, hundreds of thousands of people fought the troops in unequal battles where lines of people were mowed down, only to be replaced by those behind. In Madrid, the soldiers were caught in the Montaña Barracks and annihilated there.

Franco with Spanish Army officers and troops

The generals had counted on swift, violent action, using a minimum of forces. Leaders of the mass organizations sometimes hesitated – they were fooled by reactionary government officials promising “the support of the authorities,” or were intimidated by a show of force, or simply tailed after the Republican officials when they vacillated…but where the masses had a healthy disrespect for “bourgeois legality” they took action immediately, and smashed the military in their barracks.

Of the eight fascist divisions assigned to the equivalent regions of Spain, three were given the crucial role of marching on and suppressing the capital. With the collapse of these plans at the hands of the aroused masses, all was staked on Spain’s occupation army in Morocco, the so-called Army of Africa, which was to land at southern ports and sweep northward to the capital. However, the Spanish sailors, in their great majority from a working-class background, had been deeply influenced by the upheavals among the civilian working class. When a radioman at the Communications Center of the Admiralty in Madrid discovered the officers’ plans, he telegraphed the radio personnel on all ships, and all hell broke loose. Keepers of the ship arsenals seized arms and distributed them to the sailors. Bloody battles ensued between officers and crews. At 5 p.m. July 20, a telegram was received by the “liberated” Communications Center from the ship Jaime Primero:

“We have had serious resistance from the commanders and officers on board. and have subdued them by force. Killed in the fight were one captain and one lieutenant. , .urgently request instructions as to bodies.”[25]

The mutineers seized nearly all the fleet for the Republic, putting a major barrier between the generals’ only reliable and consolidated force in Morocco and their strategic objective, Spain. Several thousand troops had to be flown over the Straits in Italian and German aircraft, the first major intervention of these powers. The mutiny in the fleets had established a critical bottleneck for Franco’s troops.

The coup failed to be decisive. The major population centers, industrial areas, and most of the richest farmlands were left in the hands of the people. Politically, the country was splintered and largely up for grabs – nationalist bourgeois governments were soon to coalesce in Catalonia and the Basque country, while the strengths of the various parties varied from region to region.

People’s War in Madrid

Madrid shaped up as the setting for the first major showdown between the Army of Africa and the Republic. The promised German support to the generals had been predicated on capture of the capital; so too, the Republicans, already set on their “English strategy.” believed that the other European “democracies” and especially Britain would come to their aid if they held control of Madrid. And from a purely technical view. Madrid was an invaluable center of road, rail and communications, as well as a major location of military stocks.   

Troops were deployed defensively: the regular troops of the Madrid garrison, many of whom had stayed loyal, were sent to the Guadaramma passes to defend against Mola; other troops were called in from Badajoz and Murcia. As for the militia, by its very nature it fell into a defensive posture. Units were formed within each town, operating according to no overall plan. They fought bravely, but were outflanked, surrounded and annihilated again and again by the Foreign Legion. The militias took to defensively bunching along the roads, ready to retreat, but in this way fell prey to artillery and strafing runs by aircraft.

By November 6, ten thousand of Franco’s troops were fighting through Madrid’s outer suburbs and an equal number of reserves fast coming up in the rear.

The PCE, though it did not begin the battle of Madrid as the largest political force in the city, soon developed into its leadership. In truth, the party had no choice but to take on this task if it was to play any kind of further leading role in the Republic. Moreover, Madrid would have to be defended by people’s warfare, as we shall see, since at the outset the city faced the organized and well-armed fascist troops with little more than the will to resist of a million inhabitants.

The government ministers, now headed by Largo Caballero, had evacuated several days earlier, designating one General Miaja as the “President of the Junta of Defense.” The eminent “People’s Ministers” of the government had left hurriedly, early in the morning so as to “avoid an impression of flight.” However they had got no farther than the suburb of Taranc6n when they were intercepted by the infuriated Rosal Column of the anarchists, threatened with execution for desertion, and sent scurrying back to the city. That night they left by air.

Meanwhile, the Junta of Defense which the government had so formidably named, existed only in Caballero’s mind. Miaja’s calls to government offices, including those in charge of military stocks and personnel, mostly went unanswered; others greeted Miaja with a laugh and hung up. Miaja was becoming desperate; he knew he had but ten rounds of ammunition for each of the ten thousand rifles left in the city. In the War Ministry, the Chief of Operations and six top assistants deserted. Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov, pictured the sorry state of affairs:

“I went to the war ministry…I climbed the stairs to the lobby. Not a soul! On the landing, two old employees are seated like wax figures, wearing livery and cleanly shaven…waiting to be called by the minister at the sound of his bell…Rows of offices! All the doors are wide open.. .I enter the war minister’s office. , .Not a soul! Further down a row of offices – the central general staff with its sections; the general staff of the central front, with its sections; the quartermaster corps with its sections; the personnel department with its sections. All the doors are wide open. The ceiling lamps shine brightly. On the desks there are abandoned maps, documents, communiques, pencils, pads filled with notes. Not a soul!”[26]

Around the world, Franco’s victory was thought to be imminent. Winston Churchill predicted that “this disagreeable Spanish situation” would be finished in a week. The U.S.-bankrolled managers of the Madrid phone company prepared a banquet to greet “the new government.”

But Miaja’s call to the headquarters of the PCE’s Fifth Regiment found a very different picture. The Quinto had grown to a size of at least 60.000. It included not only military but block organization, and plans for mobilization of the entire population in defense and support work. Committees were organized to root out fifth column agents (the word originated in Madrid: the fascist troops were marching on Madrid in four main columns, the fifth “inside the city”). A few days later, in the midst of the fighting, Miaja was to receive a telegram from Caballero requesting the silverware that had been left at the Prime Minister’s residence. Miaja shot back a message: “We who remain in Madrid are still eating!”

The masses again rose to meet the attackers: at least fifty thousand militia men and women laid down a wall of human bodies. Brigades from the unions – railway men, barbers, construction workers; an artists and graphics workers battalion; a sports battalion; a women’s battalion engaged in bitter fighting at the Segovia Bridge. Miners from the Asturian region formed sapper units, the dinamiteros, and distinguished themselves in anti-tank fighting. The elite troops of the Foreign Legion, who reveled in their reputation of brutality and the bizarre slogan “Down With Intelligence. Long Live Death!” now found themselves nailed to the very edge of the city. Bitter hand-to-hand fighting erupted even from floor to floor in the university, but the militias wouldn’t back off. (One unit reported sending an inquiry to its headquarters asking what position it should retreat to if necessary. “To the cemetery” came the answer.)

It was the tanks, planes and artillery which most threw the inexperienced militiamen. At first there was not much at hand to fight off the tanks. One U.S. newspaper reported in all seriousness that the Spanish militias had invented a new anti-tank device called “echando conjones al asunto” (literally, “putting your halls on the line”), for that was the answer to the tanks which fighter after fighter had given: “guts.” Militiamen, consciously imitating the Soviet films playing all over Madrid, threw themselves in the path of enemy tanks, let them approach to a few feet, and threw dynamite charges.

 

International Brigade fighters

With the first arrival of the International Brigades, organized by the Comintern, the fighters learned to dig trenches and also deal more scientifically with tanks and artillery. The impact of the Brigades filled the Madrileños with inspiration. Disciplined cadres of the Commune de Paris (French and Belgian) Edgar André (German and British), and Dabrowski (Polish) Battalions marched through the streets singing the Internationale, fists raised. Other signs of the influence of the international communist movement: huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin dominated the city, especially during the celebration of the Russian Revolution which took place at the height of the fascist attack. As part of this, minute-by-minute accounts of the fighting were broadcast to Moscow, and played on loudspeakers to crowds gathered in Moscow for the celebrations of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

 

The Brigades brought more than help – they brought military training.

For one thing, they mostly came from countries which, unlike Spain, had fought in WW1, so that many were veterans. Many, too, were veterans of another sort: of the 1919 Hungarian insurrection, of street battles in Germany and so on. The small British contingent in the Commune de Paris Battalion was from Oxford and Cambridge, upper-crust British colleges whose curriculum included some useful military education. Such people became valuable teachers-but their necessary technical knowledge was accompanied by a bourgeois military line that the PCE later embraced wholeheartedly. During these November days, and in the major battles following in which the Republic beat back attempts to encircle the capital, the enthusiasm and rich creativity of the masses in war came flooding forward.

Typical is this description by a Communist union leader, written after the first Soviet arms shipments were sent to the Republic.

“When they received their first Soviet tanks, crews had to be rapidly trained; a specialized business which in the Soviet Union could take a year. Madrid taxi drivers were pressed into service. ‘This is exactly like driving a taxi, except that instead of a wheel you’ve got two levers.’ People who knew trigonometry were needed to operate the rangefinders; the latter were removed. So, too were the radio receivers which were replaced by signal flags. Where the radio had been there was room for three more shells. The Soviet advisors found it difficult to believe the crews were being trained in forty days. They came to see. Julian watched the taxi-drivers maneuver their tanks in perfect formation .”[27]

An armaments industry had to be rigged up – but where could it be located in a city subject to daily carpet bombing? One city engineer drew up a plan to use the incompleted tunnel of the Madrid subway; when the various small plants were moved into this area, the Republic had probably the safest, and most strangely shaped, arms factory in the world.

The front finally stabilized on the outskirts of the city. The following battles to the southeast at Jarama Valley, and north of Guadalajara, also resulted in stalemate. The PCE, with nothing to rely on but the masses of people, had made its most prestigious achievement. But it was the last time the party was to lead in this manner. From now on, just as it relied on bourgeois politics, the PCE was also to stand, above all else, for bourgeois warfare.

6. “They Did Not Want Political Power”

“They did not want political power.” These words could serve as the epitaph for the PCE during the period of the Popular Front and the Civil War.

This summation, expressed in the conversation with Mao cited earlier, is ironic, since according to countless bourgeois historians, the PCE was “guilty” of a ruthless power grab. The truth is that while the PCE was quite ruthless in combating the bourgeois forces in the Republic who wanted to capitulate to Franco, and was certainly involved in plenty of jockeying within the government to keep these forces from winning out, overall they subordinated the war against Franco to what was acceptable to the British and French imperialists. While they might have lost anyway, this subordination in fact weakened the war against Franco considerably. To put it another way, they fought to maintain a bourgeois state and society even in the midst of a war against the main forces of the Spanish bourgeoisie and Spanish state.

The revisionist “parliamentary road” adopted by the PCE in 1934 under the influence of the Comintern developed into the politically capitulationist line carried out by the PCE when that parliamentary road failed and the masses were thrown into armed struggle against the bourgeoisie by the bourgeoisie itself. The 1964 comments by Kang Sheng, expressing what seems to have been Mao’s views, are worth quoting more extensively:

“On New Democracy is of great significance for the world communist movement. I asked Spanish comrades, and they said the problem for them was to establish bourgeois democracy, not to establish New Democracy. In their country, they did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all. (Mao: These are the policies of Chen Tu-hsiu!) They say the Communist Party organized an army, and then turned it over to others. (Mao: This is useless.) They also did not want political power, nor did they mobilize the peasantry. At that time, the Soviet Union said to them that if they imposed proletarian dictatorship, England and France might oppose it, and this would not be in the interests of the Soviet Union…Also. when they fought, they waged regular war, in the manner of the bourgeoisie, they defended Madrid to the last. In all things, they subordinated themselves to Soviet foreign policy.”[28]

The heart of these comments is not that Spain had to go through an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal (new-democratic) stage exactly of the sort suited to the conditions in a colonial or neo-colonial country before going over to the socialist stage of the revolution. Clearly, Spain’s revolution had very crucial democratic tasks to accomplish, especially in relation to the oppressed nations within Spain and the semi-feudal survivals in the countryside; but it is also clear that Spain was not primarily a feudal country nor a semi-colony like China. (Here there are some similarities to Russia which, though not a neo-colonial country, was backward and still went through a democratic stage.) The point here is that it was wrong to make the PCE’s strategy the defense of bourgeois democracy and not the seizure of political power.

Without defining a programme for revolution in Spain (which is far from our purpose), there are some general questions which must he dealt with. The civil war did not represent a “revolt against the legitimate Spanish state” by Franco & Co., as the PCE claimed. What the PCE “forgot” was the same thing it had “forgotten” when it formulated the parliamentary road line: that the state in bourgeois society represents a dictatorship by the bourgeoisie (and other reactionary classes) over the masses of people, a dictatorship which, while sometimes adorned with the trappings of parliamentary democracy, ultimately rests on the bourgeoisie’s armed forces. This Leninist truth was demonstrated by the fascists themselves – when the Popular Front’s parliamentary majority and the Republic itself proved to be in contradiction with the ruling class’ interests, they resorted directly to their army, navy, police, etc. to suppress the opposition and institute a new form of rule. In other words, regardless of the Popular Front’s election, and even without taking into account that the programme of the Popular Front was simply a series of reforms and in no way revolutionary, even regarding purely democratic questions – still, no matter what the programme of the Popular Front might have been, the bourgeoisie still had the army and essential elements of the police forces, courts, bureaucracy, etc. – in other words, the bourgeoisie still had power.

What was launched by Franco and the other generals in June 1936 was not an “insurrection” as the PCE called it. nor were these men “rebels,” although this was the terminology used to paint the anti-Franco forces with the brush of bourgeois legality. The fascists were not out to overthrow the state – in fact they were part of and utilized the main armed forces of the state. They certainly did not represent a different ruling class from that which had previously ruled through the Republic. This fascist move represented an attempt to change the form of bourgeois rule, as well as Spain’s place within the web of international imperialist relations. But once the bourgeoisie, having overcome a period of near paralysis, had launched this civil war for aims completely in contradiction to the revolutionary interests of the masses, the proletariat had no choice but to fight – and civil war became the main form of class struggle.

Although the bourgeoisie had seized the initiative, the international and national political and economic conditions were very favorable to the revolutionary proletariat. The Spanish bourgeoisie had become unable to govern through the Republican form of rule and unable to impose fascism either. The international crisis of imperialism had a concentration point in Spain, and the jockeying of all the imperialists in preparation for war to redivide the world made it impossible for them to gang up on revolution in the way they might have during other periods. There is no guarantee that the Spanish proletariat could have successfully seized power, but there is every reason to believe they could have waged a battle for power that at least would have changed the political climate in Europe and affected the whole world, a struggle which, even if it had not been successful (and it might have been), would have constituted a powerful dress rehearsal for a revolution.

The central task and the main form of struggle facing the Spanish working class was the defeat of Franco. This constituted a particular phase or substage of the Spanish revolution no matter what other stages it might or might not have had to go through after the defeat of Franco. Certainly there were powerful bourgeois forces that had to be united with or neutralized, that couldn’t simply be driven into the camp of the enemy. These forces were mainly those who had traditionally rallied around the banner of the Republic. But even if it was correct to continue to raise the banner of the Republic in order to facilitate isolating Franco’s forces to the maximum – and insofar as the Republic at least symbolized, for instance, opposition to the oppression of nations within the Spanish state – still, in such a situation the Republic would represent mainly “an order of battle.” to borrow a phrase from Lenin, a temporary and conditional alliance of forces for the duration of the civil war against Franco and not, principally, a form of state to be consolidated.

The essential question was whether the proletariat and its strategic allies would he politically and militarily prepared to establish socialism, even if the proletariat had to share political power with more temporary allies before going over to the dictatorship of the proletariat – or whether the proletariat’s leadership would attempt to restrict the struggle to defending bourgeois democracy in order not to offend those they saw as allies. And in regard to these allies, the question was whether the proletariat would lead them or be led by them. whether it would unite all who could he united to move forward toward ending all exploitation and oppression as part of the international struggle of the proletariat and oppressed peoples, or would fight to continue a form of exploitation and oppression – its “democratic” form which had already proved intolerable to so many millions.

Franco’s “revolt” posed the question of power. This was not grasped by the PCE’s “left” critics, the anarchists and the Trotskyites. The anarchists in particular were determined to carry out a kind of wartime economism, concentrating the struggle on seizing land and factories and establishing co-ops, without regard to the central question of the war. Their programme, which called for seizing the wealth of the landlords and capitalists and opposed seizing political power, actually had much in common with the outlook of the petty proprietor. Since the main form the revolutionary struggle had to take under the circumstances was the civil war against Franco, the insistence by the anarchists and others that the war had to take a hack seat to the “Revolution” – that. for instance, the wealth of the “rich” should be seized indiscriminately, without regard to who could be won over to the war against Franco and who could he neutralized, or that any kind of centralized command in the armed forces and the economy was wrong, no matter what was needed to wage the war – all this was not revolutionary at all, despite the widespread revolutionary spirit and heroism among the ranks of the workers and rural poor attracted to the anarchists, and despite the fact that many members of the anarchist organizations actually “betrayed” these anarchist principles and fought for revolution.

 

Dolores Ibarruri, leader of Spain's Communist Party

The PCE did grasp the centrality of the war, but “they did not want political power.” This latter, and decisive, point they actually had in common with the anarchists, though the PCE’s programme in this regard was more reformist, less revolutionary in spirit. They did not see the war as a method for building up the forces of the proletarian revolution and isolating and annihilating the forces of the enemy. Their whole point of view was that the proletarian revolution had to be in recess during the war, that instead of being the main form of revolutionary struggle, the war was an interlude in the revolutionary struggle which could only proceed again after the defeat of Franco,i.e. after the re-establishment of bourgeois democracy.

 

Compare the view expressed in the conversation with Mao with the PCE’s views, as expressed by Dolores Ibarurri, also known as “La Pasionaria,” probably the most famous PCE leader:

“It would have been nothing but criminal adventurism had the Communist Party attempted to seize power in a Spain divided by a civil war of such a special nature, and in the midst of a capitalist world pandering to Hitler and preparing for World War 11. We would have had to push aside all our allies in the Popular Front, thus clearing the way for the Fascist Powers and international reactionary circles to intervene openly in Spain….neither the Socialist Party nor the Anarchists would have sat back peacefully before a change of this nature… .”[29]

Santiago Carrillo, a former Socialist youth (JSU) leader who rose rapidly into the PCE leadership, put it this way:

“There are some who say that at this stage we should fight for the Socialist Revolution, that we are practicing a deception …nevertheless, comrades, we are fighting for a democratic republic, and furthermore for a democratic and parliamentary republic…we know that if we should commit the mistake of fighting at this time for the Socialist Revolution in our country – and even for some considerable time after victory – we should see in our fatherland not only the fascist invaders, but side by side with them the bourgeois democratic governments of the world that have already stated explicitly that in the present European situation, they would not tolerate a dictatorship of the proletariat in our country.”[30]

 

Santiago Carrillo at the front of a JSU demonstration

Another PCE leader, Jesus Hernandez, was also extremely explicit:

 

“It is absolutely false that the present workers’ movement has as its object the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship after the war is terminated. It cannot be said that we have a social motive for our participation in the war. We, communists, are first to repudiate this supposition. We are motivated exclusively by the desire to defend the democratic republic established on April 14, 1931, and revived last Feb. 18 [with the election of the Popular Front].”[31]

The way the question is posed here is wrong. The PCE leadership used the position of some anarchists and especially the POUM Trotskyites (that the proletariat should make the bourgeois Republican forces the main target of its struggle) as a straw man, as though the only alternative was to completely capitulate and tail these forces. Even if the immediate object of the struggle was not the dictatorship of the proletariat (but rather some form of dictatorship by the proletariat in alliance with other classes over the main reactionary classes), and even given that the class struggle had to he adjusted to unite all who could be united against Franco, still, to promise that “for some considerable time after victory” Spain would continue to he a “democratic and parliamentary republic” was to consign the peoples of Spain and those oppressed by it to the hell this republic had already proven to be. Further, while Spain’s imperialist neighbors could not fully gang up on the revolution there, at the same time the attitude taken by Britain and France – fellow “parliamentary and democratic republics” – towards the Spanish Republic was itself a complete exposure of the class nature of such governments; though tom by contending imperialist interests, they clearly preferred Franco’s fascism. Of course such governments would not tolerate the dictatorship of the proletariat – in fact, they would not tolerate anything less than a fully consolidated bourgeois dictatorship subservient to the interests of one or another of the great powers – but since when had the proletariat ever been hound by what the bourgeoisie will tolerate!

All the imperialist governments were wracked by crisis and on the verge of even greater crisis as world war approached, and their room to maneuver and much of their economic and political reserves were squeezed more and more tightly. Mussolini’s government, which seemed to be the Spanish revolution’s strongest enemy, was to collapse in the midst of World War 2, only a few years later. This approaching world war certainly involved grave dangers – but it also was stretching the whole imperialist system to the limit, creating increasingly favorable conditions for proletarian revolution. Mao recognized this in terms of the Chinese revolution, yet the PCE and the Comintern saw this situation as an excuse not to make revolution in Spain.

On the part of the PCE’s leaders, what was clearly going on was something not exactly unknown in the previous history of workers’ parties: in the face of the grave dangers and tremendous opportunities presented by the conjuncture, they saw only the dangers and politically capitulated to the bourgeoisie – specifically to bourgeois forces in Spain, and to Britain and France – at the same time that they were leading the military struggle against Spain’s ruling class. (As we will see, other forces in the Republic, especially those around Azaña, were willing to capitulate directly to Franco.] The PCE’s capitulation fit in with and was encouraged by the line taken by the Comintern on Spain, a line which grew out of the Comintern’s line on the overall conjuncture.

The “English Strategy”

 

Molotov, Stalin and Voroshilov in 1937

At the end of 1936, after the successful defense of Madrid, Stalin, along with his foreign minister, Molotov, and Voroshilov, head of defense, sent a famous letter to Largo Caballero, then head of the Republican government:

 

“The Spanish Revolution traces its own course, different in many respects from that followed by Russia. This is determined by the differences in the social, historic, and geographic conditions, and from the necessities of the international situation….It is very possible that in Spain, the parliamentary way will prove to be a more effective means of revolutionary development than in Russia… .The Republican leaders must not be rejected, but on the contrary, they must be attracted and drawn closer to the government. It is above all  necessary to secure for the government the support of Azaña and his group, doing everything possible to help them to overcome their vacillations. This is necessary in order to prevent the enemies of Spain from regarding her as a Communist Republic. and in this way to avoid their open intervention. which constitutes the greatest danger to republican Spain.”[32]

What is being said here, is this: the revolutionaries must not do anything that might offend Britain and France. Stalin is not proceeding from a general theoretical statement that Spain might see the first “peaceful” transition to socialism – nor could he, because the proletariat was already at war with the bourgeoisie. Nor was he necessarily wrong in principle to call for unity, at least some tactical unity – above all, a battlefield alliance – with the Azaña forces linked to British imperialism. Such a course might have resembled the efforts of the Chinese Communists led by Mao to establish a united front with the pro-U.S. Chiang Kai-shek KMT against the Japanese invaders (although it should be kept in mind that what was going on in Spain was not principally an invasion by foreign imperialism, but a civil war). But Stalin is saying much more than this. He is saying that due to “the necessities of the international situation,” the struggle must be confined to bourgeois democracy.

What are these necessities?

The “open intervention” of “the enemies of Spain.” Leaving aside the formulation “enemies of Spain” (which is more than a little laden with great-nation chauvinism – the Spanish state, after all, itself oppressed other nations), which enemies of Spain was he referring to? Italy and to a lesser extent Germany were already intervening. Did he think that the “greatest danger” was that Britain and France would also intervene? This was not likely, nor did he likely think so. Frankly, the “greatest danger” here is the danger a Soviet-backed revolution or openly revolutionary struggle in Spain might have presented to the USSR’s strategy for defending itself through an alliance with Britain and France.

 

Soviet truck captured by fascist forces -- important aid from the USSR

At bottom, there is Stalin’s line that the defense of the USSR and the world revolution were identical, and that the world revolution, in order to progress, should everywhere be subordinate to the defense of the USSR. The Comintern and the USSR defended the Republic while the bourgeois democracies feared it and worked to see it crushed – but at the same time, Stalin and the Comintern opposed revolution in Spain. This line was the inevitable result of a wrong overall line on the world conjuncture and the defense of the USSR in that context.

 

The revolutionary goal was to disappear from the party’s agitation, the independent revolutionary preparation of the masses was to be dropped. And why? “The essential thing is to seek the collaboration of the European democracies, particularly that of England,” explained Juan Comorara, secretary-general of the PCE’s sister party in Catalonia. “In the democratic bloc of powers, the decisive power is not France, but England.” Comorara also said, “It is essential for party comrades to realize this so as to moderate their slogans at the present time.”" The truth is, though, that what the PCE called for was not a tactical adjustment of the revolutionary struggle but its complete abandonment.

This course followed the diplomatic strategy of the Soviet Union, that of attempting to align Russia and the Anglo-French bloc directly against Germany. In 1935, the Soviets signed a mutual defense treaty with France, but this remained largely a paper alliance; the key, as Comorara stated, was to win Britain to such an agreement. Nothing was to stand in the way of this projected alliance. It became the reactionary policy of the PCE to wean the British away from Franco by proving that the imperialists had nothing to fear in Republican Spain, even one with major PCE influence. Britain, however, was looking out for its own imperialist interests which, as it turned out, did not involve defending the Spanish Republic against fascism. In fact, for Britain, what was involved was more than its interests in Spain – these were to take a back seat to Britain’s overall interests, particularly their schemes to achieve the most favorable conditions to isolate and defeat Britain’s most important rival, Germany.

Winston Churchill, for example, first looked forward eagerly to a Franco victory, but then towards the end of the war, with German influence somewhat on the upswing, and the “danger” of revolution in Spain ebbing thanks to the PCE and its allies, Churchill changed his position, saying, “Franco has all the right on his side because he loves his country. Also Franco is defending Europe from the communist danger – if you wish to put it in those terms. But I, I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins. because Franco could be an upset or a threat to British interests, and the others no.”34 But despite this, Britain continued to pursue a policy of “non-intervention.” including organizing a naval blockade of the Republic to prevent it from receiving arms from abroad, while Franco continued to receive huge arms shipments and troops from Italy and Germany. Why? Because for Britain, its attempts to block the development of the Italian-German alliance and win Italy over to its bloc or at least neutralize it – and even more. its maneuvering to have Germany tied down in a war with the USSR while Britain avoided directly clashing with Germany for as long as possible – were far more important than whether or not Italy increased its influence in Spain at Britain’s expense.

Britain had even gone along with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), which more or less fell within Britain’s “sphere of influence.” In early 1936, the English were pushing for detente with Italy in the Mediterranean, an extremely crucial part of Britain’s empire. To this end an Anglo-Italian Naval Agreement was drawn up, and it actually came into effect in the course of the civil war. In the period before the civil war, especially, this idea of winning over or at least neutralizing Italy was not a forlorn hope (although it obviously did not work out, at least not fully), since Italy and Germany already had conflicting interests in the Balkans, over Austria, and over the Mediterranean generally. In line with this, the British were not about to oppose Italian fascist intervention in Spain – and they were not displeased in the slightest by Franco’s efforts to restore “order” and keep the virus of revolution from spreading to where it could infect all Europe.

Britain’s dealings in Spain with Italy were quite different from Britain’s dealings with Germany. It was Italy which, by tacit agreement with Germany, took on the main role in the massive intervention, including sending in very large numbers of ground troops, aircraft, and armor. Germany, by contrast, sent only the Condor Legion air fleet, and a good flow of materiel. Since Germany never did intervene in a really massive way, the British imperialists were able to carry out their policy of avoiding a direct collision with Germany, while keeping a wary eye on it (and on Franco’s dealings with it). Germany, for its part, did keep its distance. But its policy was not a passive one, any more than was Britain’s. Rather, by allowing Italy to take the front lines in the Spanish intervention, it hoped that this unpredictable and volatile war would drive Britain and Italy further apart rather than bring them together.

In sum, Britain did not oppose a Franco victory, nor Italian intervention, although it continued to have grave and growing reservations about German influence. This made for a contradictory (but again, not hostile) stance. The best solution, from the point of view of the British imperialists, was not a straight-out Franco victory, but rather some kind of imperialist compromise. The British and their political representatives in the Republic consistently pushed for a big-power agreement dividing Spain into spheres of influence, and quite possibly would have achieved this if the war had stalemated. (In fact. much to Hitler’s disgust, Spain remained neutral – though pro-Axis – during WW2.)

This was Britain’s motive in becoming the moving force in the so-called International Committee for the Application of Nonintervention in Spain. Twenty five big and smaller imperialist countries ultimately joined the Committee, and of course worked within it to strengthen their own world positions; the Committee became quite a complex forum for the maneuvering leading to world war. Still, as the French charge in Berlin put it, “The committee and its Powers are. . an invention of the English.” As such the Committee was aimed at stemming the arms and volunteers to the Republic. as well as granting a degree of legitimacy and thus freedom of action to Franco and his Italian ally. This it did very effectively, choking off most arms from everywhere except the me Soviets and Mexico. The Committee also provided a vehicle for the British collusion (and contention) with Italy, focusing on their gangster-like “detente” in the Mediterranean. Italy was not a member of the League of Nations; for this and other reasons, the Committee was set up outside the League’s structure.

The Non-Intervention Committee also became a form of contention between Britain and France. France had originated the idea for a nonintervention committee. But its motives were very different from those of the English – it genuinely wanted to oppose German and Italian intervention. This was not because of the Popular Front (including the French Communist Party) running the French government and its supposed “progressive ideas.” and not simply because a Franco victory would put France’s old rival Italy in a menacing position on her southern flank. The French imperialists also were. it would seem, unhappy about the whole policy of “appeasement.” England’s Spanish policy would, like all its strategic moves of that period, strengthen Germany and Italy, and even if this was intended to pit Germany against the Soviet Union, France would sooner or later absorb the first and greatest blows of war on the continent. France hoped that the Committee’s diplomatic “controls” would make it difficult for Italy and Germany to aid Franco – or at least expose Axis duplicity so sharply that France would gain freedom to carry out its own policies.

 

Despite the leftist popular front government in France (headed by Leon Blum and the CP's Thorez) their policy was "non-intervention"

Thus France occasionally opened the border to materiel being shipped through France to the Republic, and to a degree funneled arms through Mexico. But the dominant policy in the French bourgeoisie, carried out scrupulously by the socialist Leon Blum, was founded on the Anglo/French entente. Thus, after Blum shipped some weaponry to the Republic right at the outbreak of hostilities, a French journalist reported from England : “It is not well recorded here.”[35] The British were not abut to allow such aid. By December 1936, it was already clear that Britain had the “eaten up” the French in this hidden battle. What started as a loose but genuine initiative for nonintervention by the French was taken over and used as a screen and a weapon against the Republic by the British. Said Blum, “A certain number of our hopes and expectations have been disappointed.”[36]

 

The U.S. was not a formal member of the Non-intervention committee, in line with its own “neutrality” strategy of hoping to see its rival imperialist powers and the Soviet Union weakened before the U.S. stepped into the coming conflict. Nevertheless, like its soon-to-be allies, the U.S. was neutral on the side of Franco. U.S. oil companies supplied Franco with a major portion of the fuel supplies without which there could have been no successful invasion and no large-scale use of mechanized warfare. The trucks transporting Franco’s troops through Spain were more often than not provided by the U.S. as well. At the same time, of course, the U.S. government used its pious claims of strict neutrality to try to prevent American citizens from fighting on the side of the Republic. (Later, starting in the midst of World War 2 itself, the U.S. was to begin to emerge as Franco’s main backer and eventually the dominant foreign power in Spain – a development which sheds some light on the imperialist appetites behind the U.S.’s “neutrality” during the civil war.)

Meanwhile, even in the midst of the most cynical and thoroughly reactionary maneuvering over the issue of Spain by all the major imperialist powers, in order to win over the British and other imperialists and in line with overall Soviet policy, the Comintern did its best to portray the Spanish Civil War as principally a great patriotic war waged against the fascist invaders, Germany and Italy, against whom the whole world should unite. Togliatti, the chief Comintern representative in Spain, declared in October 1936, “The struggle of the Spanish people bears the character of a national revolutionary war. This is a war for the rescue of the people and the country from a foreign enslavement because victory of the rebels would mean an economic, political and cultural degeneration of Spain, her dissolution as an independent state, and the enslavement of her people by German and Italian fascism.”[37]

In this way, the work done by the Comintern to build support for the Spanish Republic, probably one of the most extensive worldwide campaigns in history, rather than building proletarian internationalism – the support of the world’s proletariat and oppressed peoples for the advance, anywhere and everywhere, of the world revolution – instead built up illusions about bourgeois democracy and twisted the support of the world’s peoples for the masses in Spain into support for one imperialist bloc against the other.

As the PCE-leaning Socialist del Vayo put it after the war: “Not a day passed almost until the end when we did not have fresh reasons to hope that the Western democracies would come to their senses, restore us their right to buy arms from them. And always our hopes prove illusory.”[38]

Betrayal of Morocco

 

Front rank fascist troops included Moroccans

The PCE, of course, seldom argued that revolution in Spain had to be held back for “internationalist” reasons, that is. for the sake of the USSR’s alliance with Britain and France. Instead they argued, as we have seen, that flying into the arms of British and French imperialism was the only way out for the “Spanish people.” The example of Morocco is one of the sharpest exposures of how what the PCE was clinging to was imperialism.

 

By the end of the war, over 135,000 Moroccan troops had fought under Franco. Especially in the first few months they were probably decisive. They constituted at first the only large reliable force, and continued to be the fascists’ most effective shock troops, snipers, and commandos. But from the first, the Moroccan masses had opposed and even in some places had risen in arms against Franco – only the Caliph and Grand Vizir were on friendly terms with the generals, while the main nationalist leaders were antagonistic. Why couldn’t the Moroccans be neutralized or won over? Why didn’t the Republic declare that Morocco should be unconditionally independent?

From even before the generals’ move, a series of appeals to the Popular Front government had been made by Moroccan nationalists in the camp of Abd el-Krim. In the fall of 1936, two leaders. Muhammed Hassan al-Ouezzani and Omar Abdeljalil, visited Republican Spain, promising to organize against Franco in Morocco in return for a promise of regional autonomy such as had been granted to Catalonia. But they were refused and sent packing. Why?

The official history of the PCE complains,

“If Spain’s Socialist leadership could have liberated itself from the sick obsession of ‘not irritating England and France’ if they could have taken a clear and positive position on the nationalist aspirations in Morocco, then a most difficult situation indeed would have been created for Franco.”[39]

All the evidence shows that this is hypocritical bullshit.

It is true that particularly the Socialist Indalecio Prieto, aligned with the Azaña group, was responsible for turning down the Moroccan delegation and even denying them a hearing in the Cortes (parliament). But one has to ask. not why did the social democrats act like social democrats, but why did not the PCE itself continue to press for independence for Morocco?

There were fertile grounds for a different and revolutionary course for the PCE. The party had a history of struggle against the colonial wars in Morocco, while the small party in Morocco (at one time a branch of the PCE Andalusian District) had itself led rebellions against Spanish domination. And, of course, all this had taken place in the context of a protracted struggle for national liberation on the part of the Moroccan people. (Even after the betrayals of the PCE and Comintern, some Moroccan revolutionaries showed genuine internationalism by still fighting with the Fifth Regiment of the PCE and the International Brigades.)

But during the whole period of the civil war, the party did no consistent work to raise the issue, even later when the PCE was largely determining the course of the Republic. Even in the first Popular Front government platform, the Moroccan question appeared only as the demand for “introduction of a democratic regime”[40] (which was vague to the point of being meaningless), and the PCE built no public opinion even around this. A weak excuse is offered by Alvarez del Vayo: the Moroccan troops were “totally immune from all political propaganda of a democratic nature.”[41]

The problem was not that the Moroccan people were “immune” to revolution. The problem was that the leadership of the Republic was opposed to it. The Socialists feared “irritating Britain and France” because what they were fighting for was the preservation of the existing imperialist world order, including not only the dominant position of these great powers in Europe, but also Spain’s position within that worldwide imperialist system, including its colonies and all the bloodsucking that Spain’s ruling class lived on in Spain and abroad.

With the civil war against Franco, history had thrown the revolutionary proletariat and the masses of people together with many other forces in a common battle; and in the sense that the bourgeois forces were divided and on opposite sides in this civil war, this was a very good situation. But to let the outlook and interests of these forces determine the course of the war and then to complain that it was their pro-imperialist “sick obsession” which prevented the PCE from carrying out the most basic revolutionary duties – this claim by the PCE cannot be allowed to stand. The truth is that in the name of defending the USSR, the PCE was passing over to the camp of imperialism.

Barcelona and the Ebb of the Revolutionary Upsurge

 

Barricades in Barcelona

As previously stated, Franco’s attempted coup came in the midst of (and was in part a response to) a massive revolutionary upsurge. This upsurge took a qualitative leap after Franco’s move, as the masses, liberated by the breakdown in the bourgeois order, rose up in their millions to take the initiative and beat down the tottering ruling class. We have described, in the beginning of this article, the exhilarated mood of the masses and their heroic actions which, for a time, stopped Franco’s forces dead.

 

This revolutionary upsurge did not last. Beginning in the winter of 1936-37, and especially by the following spring, the PCE led the way in restoring the bourgeois order. By the following winter, the militias were disbanded and replaced with a bourgeois-style army. Certainly the militias could not remain the main military force if Franco were to be defeated, but the PCE’s alternative was worse than the militias. In August, many of the peasant co-ops were forcibly disbanded. There had been a serious problem with poor peasants seizing the land and politically alienating many better-off peasants and small landowners who need not have been driven over to Franco, but the PCE’s alternative was to let the rich peasants and landowners who remained loyal to the Republic determine policy in the countryside.

The workers’ “collectives” in the factories whose owners fled to safety with Franco, taken over by the government, were smothered as arenas of political struggle. Certainly “workers’ power” does not mean that the workers in each factory become its owners and in the most immediate sense there had to he more central control, but the PCE’s alternative was just to send in bureaucrats or old bosses and confine the workers’ committees in the factories to. at best, “winning the battle of production.”

Linked to all this was demoralization spreading among the people about the course of the war itself, a mood not unrelated to the way in which the war was being fought – and the course of the war itself was greatly determined by its conduct.

The end of this first revolutionary period was punctuated by the May events in Barcelona, the capital city of Catalonia, following an attempt by the Catalonian Generalitat (Catalonian nationalist government) to clear out the anarchist and POUM-led “collective” which controlled the telephone exchange, an occupation which had allowed these opponents of the government to freely determine communications be tween Catalonia and the rest of Spain. (The POUM upheld the Trotskyite line of no unity at all with the bourgeois forces in the Republic, although for complex reasons, its leaders, who had been former followers of Trotsky, had come to oppose him.)

This is probably the single most controversial event in the entire Spanish Civil War, infamous at the time and a cause celèbre for “anti-Stalinists” ever since. It is certainly not our intention here to relive it. But a few words must be said to describe the political course of the war within the Republican zone.

The attempt by the Generalitat police and security forces organized by the PSUC (the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya – the PCE’s sister party in Catalonia, formed by the PCE, the Socialists and others) to dislodge the men holding the telephone exchange led to gunfire, and the fighting extended throughout the downtown area. It raged for five days, with several hundred people shot dead by one side or the other.

We cannot here settle the argument as to whether this was a deliberate prove cation by the PCE to create an excuse to wipe out the forces opposed to it in Catalonia, as anarchists and Trotskyites claim down to today, or whether it was a provocation by a section of the anarchists who sought the immediate overthrow of the Republic and especially the POUM, with some egging on by Franco agents. Frankly, it does not seem out of the question that both sides have some truth to them. (It should be pointed out that, especially after it became clear that the situation was one that Franco could and was taking military advantage of on the northern front, most of the main anarchist leaders in Spain strongly opposed the Barcelona uprising. It should also be said that regardless of the question of the role played by counter-revolutionaries and actual imperialist agents, a great many of the workers and others who were swept up into the fighting against the security forces still were undoubtedly motivated by righteous revolutionary anger at the way the PCE and the bourgeois forces were trying to halt the general revolutionary upsurge.)

The point is this: the anarchist and POUM line (for similar reasons) was counterrevolutionary. The PCE quite rightly pointed to the deathly stillness on the nearby Aragon front, where militia units led by the anarchists and POUM had failed to mount any kind of offensive against the fascists and thus allowed Franco’s forces free rein to split up the Republican zone. But the PCE did not oppose the anarchists’ and POUM’s thinly disguised reformism and military passivity with something more revolutionary. It simply aligned itself with the forces of the small industrialists and well-to-do grape growers of Catalonia and their counterparts throughout Spain to restore things to the way they had been before all this messy disruption. Looking at how things developed, especially after the Barcelona events, can it really be said that the PCE’s line was any better?

After the Barcelona affair, the Republican government openly moved rapidly rightward. The left-talking Socialist demagogue Caballero, who had been lionized by the PCE and hailed by journalists as “Spain’s Lenin,” was dumped. He was replaced as prime minister by Juan Negrín, a more right-wing Socialist tied to the Republican President, Azaña. Indalecio Prieto, from the most extreme right of the Socialist Party, the man who had threatened to resign if the Moroccan delegation was allowed to present its case to the Cortes, was made Minister of Defense. The PCE maneuvered to get Negrín and Prieto in, with the excuse that this was necessary to step up the war effort – yet Prieto, once in charge of the war effort, was such a notorious capitulationist, so sure of Franco’s eventual victory and so unwilling to mount any real opposition to Franco’s forces, that Jesús Hernández a PCE leader who later became a rabid anti-communist, claims that the PCE kept Prieto in check through blackmail by threatening to reveal all this to the masses.[42]

Whether or not this is true about the PCE, it is clearly an indication of what kind of men and line it promoted. Their appointment seems to have had one sole purpose – to please Britain. All this bourgeois politicking and flagrant sacrifice of the war effort in the name of securing the conditions for winning it could not but further demoralize the masses. Among civilians, especially, political life and activity trickled off. The war became something for the soldiers to take care of – and increasingly, the soldiers were not volunteers, but draftees.

Especially in the countryside, many people apparently concluded that it was all the same no matter what happened. There the failure to carry out revolutionary political work and a revolutionary agrarian policy was one of the Republic’s greatest weaknesses. In the areas which fell to Franco’s forces. Franco was able to draft and use for the bulk of his army hundreds of thousands of peasants as well as others. Why didn’t the PCE carry out work behind Franco’s lines among these strata – and especially why didn’t it rely on them to carry out guerrilla warfare? Because the Republicans (and Britain) recoiled in horror from the idea of mass peasant revolution, which, even if centered on democratic and not directly socialist tasks, still would have unleashed a revolutionary torrent. Rather than relying on the poor peasants and rural laborers and, as part of raising their political consciousness, winning them to a policy of alliance with the middle strata in the countryside so as to isolate the main enemy, instead the PCE became the strongest champion of private property in the countryside. relying on the middle peasants (who joined the PCE in huge numbers) and small landowners and opposing, including by force of arms, the land seizures carried out by the rural poor at the start of the war. Thus a large part of the rural population who should have been activated under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat was instead kept passive and utilized by Franco.

In fact, it was this overall tailing of the Republicans that was to be the most direct cause of the defeat of the Republic. Azaña, the President whom the PCE and Stalin considered the most essential asset of the Republic, never believed that a victory against Franco was possible – nor did he really want to see the army which had been the pillar of bourgeois rule in Spain destroyed by another one which, although also fairly bourgeois, was of more doubtful stability. In reality, he and Prieto and the forces around them devoted their energies to achieving the conditional capitulation to Franco that corresponded to British imperialism’s interests and instructions.

“From the beginning of the war,” wrote Juan Marichal, who was Azaña’s editor, “he saw that his only possible role was the very limited one of representing a symbolic brake on the revolutionary violence.”[43] And as Azaña himself admitted, writing in a letter after the war. “No one is unaware of the fact that I did everything possible from September, 1936, to influence a compromise settlement, because the idea of defeating the enemy was an illusion.”[44]

Throughout the war, there was constant struggle between the PCE and these Republicans, with Azaña and Prieto doing everything they could to limit the role of the PCE and the Comintern, on the one hand, and to negotiate a settlement with Franco on the other. For its part, the PCE used its influence among the masses, which these Republicans lacked, and the ace in the hole of Soviet arms funneled through the PCE, to keep Azaña and Prieto in line, until these forces finally did surrender to Franco.

Our point is not that it was completely wrong for the PCE to have made some compromises with Republican forces. however vacillating, who could be united for the purpose of defeating Franco. But in relying on them and in failing to build the independent political and military strength of the proletariat, the PCE was only setting up the masses for an inevitable betrayal – inevitable not because it was inevitable that all those who vacillated would go over to Franco, but because only the independent strength of the proletariat could keep them from capitulating, or keep the revolution from necessarily being defeated if they did.

7. Military Line and Policies

Since the main form of class struggle was the civil war itself, the military line of the PCE and the Comintern concentrated the political questions.

It would be wrong to think that with a correct political line in command, victory in the Spanish civil war would have been inevitable. Our point is just the opposite: the whole war needs to be seen from the point of view of the advance or retreat of the worldwide proletarian revolution, whose interests are higher than taking or losing state power in any one country. But it is also true that the proletariat faced a relatively favorable situation in Spain, which the line of the PCE and the Comintern failed to take advantage of.

The military struggle in Spain unfolded in roughly three stages. The first extends from the July 1936 coup attempt through the revolutionary upheavals in the weeks following, and reaches a culmination in the battles in and around Madrid in November ‘36-March ‘37. It was a back-and-forth period, with the fascist offensive giving rise to a series of popular insurrections, but overall the Franco forces maintained the initiative and continued to gain ground until the astounding victory at Madrid in November and the Republican triumphs at the battles of Jarama and then Guadalajara, in which Franco was fore ed to throw increasingly greater forces into thwarted attempts to surround the capital. This period ended in a stalemate, with the fascists occupying the west and part of the north of Spain.

The second stage, the year 1937, comprises a complicated picture. The PCE had, after Madrid, risen to political and military leadership, and concentrated on building a regular and unified armed force. Franco’s forces launched an offensive against the north, which surrendered in October. By the end of the year, the regular Republican People’s Army was ready for action, but at the same time men and materiel had poured into Franco’s Nationalist zone. Meanwhile it had become clear that Western aid was not an immediate prospect, and Soviet aid was limited by various factors. The upshot of all this was that by the time the PCE-led regular army was consolidated, the Franco forces had attained a vast technical and strategic advantage.

In the last stage, stretching from December 1937 to the end of the war, the Republican People’s Army fought a series of engagements with great courage and against increasing odds. By the end of 1938. the Franco forces numbered a million men, mainly conscripts but also including 50,000 Portuguese troops, 50-80,000 Italian volunteers, 135.000 Moroccans, and German technical personnel. At the opening of 1938. the Nationalists outnumbered the Republic in armor and guns by about 2 to 1. By the end of the year the Republican army was fighting virtually without air or artillery support. This series of battles included the Republican offensive which temporarily took Teruel (December 1938), the great crossing of the Ebro (July 1938), the defense of Valencia province (December 19381 and some other smaller-scale battles. These battles were. aimed at holding the line against Franco and demonstrating to the imperialists that the Republican army was still alive and capable of battle. At no time was there a strategic plan to change the balance of forces in preparation for an eventual strategic counter-offensive. The Republican forces spent this stage, as indeed the whole war, strategically buying time, pending aid in weaponry from abroad.

The fragility of Franco’s strategic position in the first months is evident. In the north his forces were overextended. precariously banging on to Valladolid and Saragossa. In Seville, the old anarchist and PCE base, a vulnerable Nationalist island of control existed. The main body of Franco’s troops moving across the Straits of Gibraltar was exposed to attack at this bottleneck. However, as we have seen, the Republic fell back into defense of the capital, while the militias were eaten up piece by piece, the very same way that the Spanish ruling class had defeated peasant uprisings for hundreds of years.

Kang Sheng’s criticism of the PCE for “defending Madrid to the last” is somewhat wrong, somewhat reflecting the idea that in Spain, the revolution had to first build up strength in the countryside and then surround the cities. This form of protracted warfare, where the revolution must pass through a long period of strategic defensive before it is strong enough to go on the offensive, was necessary in China but not in Spain, where what happened was different in its development. The popular forces held Madrid from the start, and while the PCE and others basically looked at this as necessary to their strategy of winning support from England and France, still there were good political (and military) reasons to strive to keep control of the capital city. In fact, the political impact on the masses (in Spain and internationally) of the victory there was electric. But it was not pursued. Still, Kang Sheng does have an important point here: the Republican forces centered everything on the defense of Madrid (which Franco had besieged), not daring to send forces to attack Franco at his weak points, and thus generally neglecting the main point of warfare, which, as Mao pointed out, is not to preserve yourself but to destroy the enemy.

What was needed above all was the revolutionary policy of attack. Any concentration of force which threatened Franco’s lines of communication to the fascist outlying areas would have had serious consequences. An attack on the enemy bridgehead at Algeciras was certainly called for, as was a declaration of Moroccan independence.

The navy, in the hands of radical sailors who had mutinied, could have snapped shut the bottleneck in the Straits, cutting Franco off from his rearguard, and moved against Franco’s forces in Algeciras. But such a move, revolutionary warfare in the Mediterranean, would have angered Britain, which considered the Mediterranean its “sphere of influence,” and perhaps even led to open conflict with it, since Britain maintained warships in the area to prevent such an occurrence. (In fact, British warships moved into Barcelona harbor during the May 1937 fighting there, presumably poised to intervene if the Republic proved incapable of controlling the situation.)

As the war continued. Franco’s technical strength became formidable indeed. Even in the early going, when the fascist forces were far outnumbered, they still possessed large numbers of tanks and artillery of fairly uniform make and supplied with ammunition. The Republican troops, who fought with widely different makes of weapons assembled from many different sources, often found themselves unable to match up their weapons with the right ammunition – and often their weapons were so old as to be practically useless. Later the Germans provided Franco which new and fine weaponry such as the fastest planes in the civil war, the Messerschmidt, and the feared 88-millimeter artillery. The Republicans were hampered very much by inexperience, and the fascists could use their weaponry in a far more coordinated and effective manner.

But technical inferiority, as Mao points out, is always a condition of revolutionary forces. In coming to grips with this problem in China’s war against Japan, Mao makes a very different kind of assessment: “The enemy forces, though strong (in arms, in certain qualities of their men, and certain other factors), are numerically small, whereas our forces, though weak (likewise, in arms, in certain qualities of our men, and certain other factors) are numerically very large. Added to the fact that the enemy is an alien nation invading our country while we are resisting his invasion on our soil…”[45]

Similarly in Spain, Franco’s forces were numerically very small both in relation to the Republicans’ military (until quite near the end) and among the masses, a largely isolated repressive force. This meant that Franco’s lines would often be spotty, held by patrols moving among fortified points, vulnerable to a sudden thrust (as the People’s Army often proved). Often, although an area might be “occupied,” it could not be secured for lack of personnel (even after the usual round of executions and terror). This made for long. exposed lines of communication back to secure bases. Finally, Franco’s forces were beset by a weakness which the Japanese imperialists did not suffer from – although not a foreign invader, he was dependent on the strength of other powers, and this support was not as firm as the Republicans and PCE made it out to be.

By the end of 1937, even after the fall of Santander and the north, unexpected resistance by the Republic had seriously concerned Italian Foreign Minister Ciano, who “feared a Republican offensive to push back the whole nationalist front. ‘Either we strike the first blow,’ he mused on Jan. 14 [I9381 'or skillfully disengage ourselves, and rest content having inscribed on our banners the victories of Malaga and Santander.'"[46]

The defensive strategy of the Republic, however, could not seize on this contradiction. The Italians thereafter decided not to pull out but to step up their support. As a result, the Republic increasingly became locked into this defensive strategy. After the fall of the north in 1937, the Republic was fighting on interior lines, having lost its chance for the time being of an immediate strategic offensive; men and materiel poured into the Nationalist zone, widening the technical gap; the party failed to maintain a political movement among the masses in the rear, and as a result, guerrilla and militia auxiliary forces became less possible.

The typical pattern of military operations in the war might see a long period of gathering forces on both sides. The People’s Army might stage a break-through at some point through surprise and pure boldness. A certain amount of territory would be seized: Franco would then concentrate all available forces on the occupied zone and force the People’s Army back at great cost to both. The Republic would fight to hold this territory so bitterly because, after all, the Point was not to defeat the fascist army but to impress the Western imperialists (or sometimes to divert a major enemy offensive elsewhere). Upon seizing the initiative, the Republicans would then concede it back to the enemy.

But as before, the party did not look to change this situation, to find ways to take the initiative. As Mao says,

“In any war, the opponents contend for the initiative, whether on a battlefield, in a battle area, in a war zone or in the whole war, for the initiative means freedom of action for an army. Any army which, 10sing the initiative, is forced into a passive position and ceases to have freedom of action, faces the danger of defeat or extermination.”[47]

Lacking the initiative, the People’s Army found itself on exactly this downhill slide.

Why, especially in the early stages of the war when they faced more favorable conditions, did the PCE and the Republic fail to seize on the contradictions underlying Franco’s military position and seek to annihilate Franco’s forces? Many of the military advisers the Comintern sent to aid the Republic were aware of the ineffectiveness of the Republic’s military line and were quite capable of implementing another one, since they had gained tremendous experience and skill in rapid mobile warfare and guerrilla fighting as well during the Russian civil war and elsewhere (including in China). But the military strategy served the overall political line and goals of the PCE and the Comintern.

Discussion of an alternative strategy of people’s war is beyond the scope of this article. But certain elements of such a strategy are apparent: the need for less rigidity in holding territory and strong points, the need for a policy of concentrating troops to attain local superiority in operations, the need to disintegrate the enemy’s troops, the need for a political movement in the rear. the need for guerrilla and militia components.

The Republican People’s Army adhered to a rigorously conventional military strategy. In certain situations, such as the defense of Madrid and the crossing of the Ebro, the People’s Army had no choice but to rely on some of the basic principles of people’s war. But for the most part, in the conventional bourgeois manner of the time. it maintained a rigid front and tended to hold territorial strong points at any cost. It abandoned the use of political agitation at the front and rear to disintegrate the enemy forces. It did not rely on the masses for logistical support but became almost wholly dependent on conventional supply systems. Perhaps most telling, guerrilla warfare was not a component of the Republican strategy.

The Republican army, working in a relatively small and blockaded territory, needed to hold a certain amount of territory. But within this. there was room for much more fluidity, including the use of strategic retreat and establishment of partisan base areas in the enemy’s rear, that is, guerrilla warfare. Not that guerrilla warfare should have somehow become the main form of combat – nor even as a secondary form. was it the “missing link” of the Spanish civil war – it would not solve all problems. Still, the lack of guerrilla warfare as a part of Republican strategy throws a glaring spotlight on key factors in the PCE’s military line as well as its line on agrarian revolution.

Guerrilla warfare has a long history in Spain. The very word derives from the popular struggles against the French in the early nineteenth century. Partly this is because the Spanish terrain is very favorable. Nearly every part of the country is accessible from mountainous areas. Moreover, conditions in the civil war contained advantages for guerrilla fighting. Franco tended to deploy his numerically inferior troops in a chain of strong points and troop clusters, with lightly patrolled gaps existing between these points. This made them very vulnerable to infiltration. His troops tended to be “road-bound,” existing at the head of long lines of communications, making them sensitive to attack and harassment in the rear.

There was spontaneous large-scale guerrilla fighting in the Estremadura. But the systematic organization of guerrilla fighting was limited to tactical ‘diversionary” operations, tied closely to action on the front lines. It is hard to find a source which defends this policy. Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov specifically suggested employing guerrilla warfare as a (not the) strategic component of the war in their letter to Largo Caballero quoted earlier. While it is not clear exactly how much the failure to do so is directly due to the PCE and how much of it due to the PCE’s tailing of even more backward Republican forces, there was an important political obstacle to waging guerrilla warfare successfully. Guerrilla warfare is linked to the revolutionary principle of arming the masses – it must be based on the conscious, active role of great numbers of people. Whether units are composed of “part-time” fighters or professional partisans, this form of combat cannot be widespread or consistent if it is not based on a political movement. But as one lower-level PCE cadre bluntly put it. “There was virtually no politics in the rear guard at all. We were all so adsorbed in our tasks at the front that it was left to a few political leaders to express their parties’ views in the rear. There was almost no mass political movement. That made us very vulnerable.”[48]

Obviously the effect of this lack of political work in the rear had significance far beyond the question of guerrilla warfare. What was true of the rear areas in the Popular Front zone was doubly true behind Franco’s lines, especially given the PCE’s line against agrarian revolution. It goes without saying that an underground movement behind the lines, including guerrilla warfare, would have had a powerful effect on demoralizing and disintegrating enemy forces. Neither the PCE nor any other force set out to build clandestine organization that could continue political work in areas that were or might be occupied by Franco. Since they opposed the political arousal and mobilization of the rear in the conditions of the Popular Front zone, it can come as no surprise that they also failed to do so in enemy territory.

Next in the final part 4: The Republican “People’s Army”