In 1931, a revolutionary wave in Spain swept away the monarchy, establishing the Second Republic. It was a moment of immense hope for workers and peasants. By 1939, that hope was crushed. General Francisco Franco stood victorious, ushering in nearly four decades of brutal dictatorship. This outcome was not inevitable. The tragedy of the Spanish Revolution is not that it was crushed by a superior fascist force. It was strangled from within.
The leaders of the major workers’ organisations — socialists, anarchists, and communists — entered a government with the liberal bourgeoisie, the Popular Front. This strategy, they argued, was necessary to defend democracy and defeat fascism. As Leon Trotsky warned, it became the main obstacle to the revolution, disarming the working class politically and militarily, and paving the road for Franco’s victory.
Spain was among the most backward countries in Europe at the time. The vast wealth plundered from its colonies was not invested in developing domestic industry. Industrial development was retarded, uneven and decentralised. The majority of the country lived off agriculture. Vast estates, called latifundios, owned by a tiny elite, were worked by landless labourers and sharecroppers living in destitution. A mere 50,000 people controlled half the land, because the Spanish ruling class failed to carry out a successful capitalist revolution to sweep away feudalism. Unable to rule through democratic consent, the monarchy relied on three backward, centralised and parasitic institutions: the Church, the Army and the Civil Guard, and the country had become a dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera.
Primo de Rivera’s forced resignation in January 1930 triggered a period of intense class struggle. A wave of strikes swept the country, culminating in a general strike in Madrid in November 1930. The strikes were increasingly political, driven by mass discontent with the monarchy. The municipal elections of April 1931 resulted in a massive victory for the Republican-Socialist coalition, forcing King Alfonso XIII to abdicate. The Second Republic was proclaimed. As Trotsky noted, the Republicans owed their place in government not to their own revolutionary initiative, but to the pressure of the mass democratic movement.
The new government passed a series of modest reforms, but these reforms were utterly inadequate. Trotsky and the Communist Left argued that the crisis required radical measures: confiscation of all church wealth, expropriation of the landed estates, and abolition of the officer corps. The Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and its affiliated trade union bureaucracy acted as a brake on the rank-and-file militancy. They discouraged strikes and even supported government repression.
These developments unfolded in the context of global turmoil and crisis. Fascism was on the march across Europe: Mussolini’s regime in Italy, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 and fascist mobilisations in the UK. The Communist International, under Stalin’s bureaucratic control, had abandoned revolutionary internationalism. After Hitler’s victory, it pivoted to the “Popular Front” policy, which called for alliances with liberal bourgeois parties against fascism. Stalin’s priority was not world revolution, but an alliance with France and Britain, which required proving that communist parties could be trusted to uphold “order” and bourgeois democracy.
In February 1936, a Popular Front coalition was formed, uniting capitalist republican parties with workers’ organisations: the PSOE, the Stalinised Communist Party, the anti-Stalinist Workers party (POUM), and the anarcho-syndicalist union federation, or CNT. It won a narrow victory. Its strategy, dictated by Stalin’s Comintern and echoed by the reformist socialists, held that Spain’s revolution was only at the “democratic” stage. Its tasks required the proletariat to subordinate itself to the “progressive” bourgeoisie. To go beyond this was declared to be premature and fatal. The Popular Front held further that to antagonise the bourgeoisie would be to push it into Franco’s camp. The revolution must be halted, private property respected and class struggle suppressed.
For the Stalinists, this meant becoming the chief enforcers of this policy, using their growing influence to crush any attempt at social revolution. The Popular Front’s promise of reform was a fuse. The working class was not waiting for permission to solve its problems. In the months after its election, millions of workers launched strikes. Super-oppressed peasants began occupying the latifundios. This mass movement terrified the Spanish ruling class, which threw its full support behind the military conspiracy led by General Francisco Franco.
On July 17, 1936 the army staged a coup d’état. The Popular Front government refused to arm the workers, but the workers acted independently. In Madrid, Barcelona and other cities, they stormed barracks, seized weapons and crushed the military uprising in key areas. For a brief moment, power lay in the streets.
Faced with this dual power situation, the Popular Front parties moved to reconstruct the bourgeois state. The Communist Party, armed with Soviet influence, grew rapidly. It did not use this influence to lead a socialist revolution. The Stalinists acted in alliance with the extreme right wing of the Socialist Party. Their task was to prove to the French and British bourgeoisie that they could preserve “order” against “anarchy.”
In May 1937 in Barcelona, the CNT and POUM fought street battles against the Stalinist-led assault on their revolutionary strongholds. The POUM was declared illegal. Its leader, Andrés Nin, was tortured and murdered by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. The Stalinists directed their repression not against Franco, but against the revolutionaries to their left. The revolution was being crushed from within.
By subordinating the working class to a capitalist state, suppressing the land collectives and demobilising the militias into a regular army, the Popular Front destroyed the only force capable of defeating fascism: the independent, revolutionary initiative of the masses.
The Popular Front strategy was a disaster. By bolstering the capitalist state and demobilising the working class, it did not fight fascism. It saved the capitalist order from its own workers, delivering them piecemeal to Franco. This is a vindication of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution: the democratic tasks could only be solved by the working class taking power, which would then open the road to socialist tasks. The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy was, in practice, a repudiation of democracy itself.
The Spanish working class was incredibly militant, but their energy, as Trotsky said, dissipated “like steam not enclosed in a piston box.” They flooded into the mass organisations but lacked a party with a correct revolutionary program and experienced leadership. A revolutionary party is needed to provide strategic analysis, to unite the most advanced workers, and to provide leadership firmly rooted in the struggles of the grass roots, immune to the pressures and blackmail of the bourgeoisie.
One cannot rely on factions of the bourgeoisie to fight fascism. The Spanish bourgeoisie understood that their class interests lay with Franco. The “democratic” bourgeoisie who stayed in the Republican zone had no power. They were puppets used to disarm the workers. Fascism is capital’s final weapon to save itself. When the economy disintegrates and bourgeois parliamentary democracy can no longer hold the “peace” between capital and labour, the bourgeoisie will crush workers’ capacity to revolt.
In the fight against fascism today, we must mobilise independently of the bourgeois state. We must build a united front from below, uniting all of fascism’s targets: workers, migrants, refugees, people of colour, First Nations and queer and trans people. This struggle is not separate from the fight for socialism. As Trotsky wrote, a successful fight against bourgeois reaction “can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution.” Only the working class, united in its diversity, has the power to smash the capitalist state that breeds fascism. We must build a revolutionary party capable of leading this fight, a party that champions the leadership of the oppressed and remains firmly anchored in the working class. Only then can we ensure that the next revolutionary upsurge does not end in a fascist dictatorship, but in a socialist world.
The lessons from the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War are a prescient warning of the perils of fighting against fascism and capitalism without a revolutionary party and program. The conditions in 1930s Spain and 21st century Australia differ greatly, but the fight is the same. While the far right becomes increasingly confident and mainstreamed, we are witnessing increasingly draconian anti-protest laws being pushed through Parliament and increased state violence inflicted on peaceful protesters by state governments. In Australia today, as in Spain in the 1930s, when the ruling class feels its property is threatened, it will tear up democratic norms.
The current capitalist crisis and reactionary growth of fascism and the far right, in Australia and internationally, necessitate that we, the working class, realise our power and fight to end our exploitation and protect our communities. The capitalist state has shown time and time again that it is not to be trusted with protecting us from the threat of fascism. To do away with the scourge of fascism and capitalism once and for all, we need an independent revolutionary party of the workers that unites all of fascism’s targets and destroys the foundations of our exploitation, the capitalist system.
The Freedom Socialist Party is building that organisation. We invite you to join us in putting the lessons learned from the Spanish Civil War into practice.
The cost of the political mistakes was huge — 39 years of fascist rule. After the Republican city of Malaga was captured, thousands of civilians fled in an attempt to evacuate. Many were massacred in an event known as La Desbanda. From Jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net
