THE REVOLUTION IN SPAIN, 1936-76 Public meeting on anniversary of workers militia victory in Barcelona Wednesday 21 July, 7.30 p.m. Speakers include Robin Blackburn, also pare film on defence of Madrid. UNIVERSITY OF LONDON UNION. (Room 2D), Malet Street, WC1 The upsurge of the workers movement had begun in February 1936 with the election of the Popular Front Government. This was an alliance of the Socialist and Communist parties with a number of small bourgeois republican parties.
The Spanish CP in 1936 still represented very little. A party of a few hundred in 1931, it had not grown substantially. In Catalonia, the heartland of the revolution, its main base was the federation of small traders and shopkeepers (GEPCI). The Catalan CP (PSUC) obtained membership of the UGT (Socialist union federation) for GEPCI, strengthening its own position in relation to the left Socialists and the anarcho-syndicalists who had the allegiance of the working class.
The backbone of the Popular Front was the Socialist Party. This was sharply divided into a small parliamentary clique led by Prieto, which was to find almost total accord with the Stalinists, and a militant mass left wing. This left wing was in many ways the most advanced stratum of the workers movement, sympathetic to revolutionary politics.
Its leader, Largo Caballero, had even called for the formation of a Fourth International. But it did not constitute a revolutionary party, and Largo Caballero, for all his rhetoric, could not es cape une perspectives or rerormismn.
Most importantly, Largo Caballero did not understand the question of the capitalist State. This led to two important errors iat would be exercised through the see the importance of building the of developing organs of workers the Russian Revolution.
quences in the insurrection of 1934.
as genuinely representative bodies.
and repressed by the State. Mistake flowed from the first. If workers power was to be exercisea Dy une Socialist Party and not by workers to enter the Popular Front in order to win a slice of governmental could never be an adequate instruit was wedded to the perspectives of went no further than that of the republicans in 1931. Free distribution alisation of industry under workers control were reiected. The vast finan. cial interests of the Church also remained untouched.
Firstly, the left Socialists imagined that the dictatorship of the proletarSocialist Party. Therefore they did not kind of united action between workers organisations which would be capable power. Workers councils were seen not as the essential apparatus of the future workers state, but as a peculiarity of This had had disastrous conseThe Workers Alliances were not built with the result that they were unable to co-ordinate national opposition to politicians. the right-wing government. Therefore the most militant section of the workers movement, in Asturias, was isolated counted for nothingThe left Socialists' second mistake tion.
councils, then it was quite acceptable Yet in reality the Popular Front ment of the workers movement, since the "liberal bourgeoisie'. Its programme of land to the peasants and the nationit.
The national question in the penint! sula was to be resolved by autonomy statutes but not the right of selldetermination, while Morocco remained the most crass reformism and accom in Spanish hands so as not to offend British and French interests in North Africa. The overblown officer corps in the Army was left intact - one ofticer to every six men, and each one of them sympathetic to the extreme The irony was that these allies among the liberal" bourgeoisie represented no-one but themselves - the shadow of the bourgeoisie, Trotsky called them. Only one of the bourgeois parties, the Basque nationalists, was a representative organisation. The others were small cliques of career To the extent that they were genuine parties of the capitalist class, they could be relied upon not to resist Franco. But in general they exceeds a instrument to hold back the revoluDespite this thoroughly reactionary character of the Popular Front its victory was the signal for events which went far beyond its own political perspectives. Just as in France in the same year, the electoral victory sparked off a series of factory occupations, strikes and land seizures.
In truth the Civil War had already begun. Armed workers and fascists fought openly on the streets of Madrid, but the Government insisted that the fascist threat was illusory Those left papers which dared to-warn of the impending rise of the army and fascists appeared with whole pages blanked out by the government censor The prisons, so recently emptied of the 1934 revolutionaries, were filled - SPI again with militant workers Insofar as the leadership of these actions devolved upon any organisati it was on the anarcho-syndicalist unic federation, the CNT. The CNT had within its ranks many of the most militant workers, particularly in Catalonia. To its credit it had held back from participation in the Popular Front, though the mass of CNT workers were encouraged to vote for The crucial weakness of the CNT as of the Caballero Socialists, came o the question of the State. Unable, like all'anarchists, to distinguish between a bourgeois and a workers State, it was soon to degenerate into modation to the Popular Front. When the army uprising finally came on 17 July, the Popular Front Govern ment of left' republicans attempted to come to terms with Franco. News of the rising was kept secret until the following day, and even then the Government issued a note confirming "the absolute tranquility of the whole peninsula'.
This was manifestly untrue. Alread
ly 1976 lost of rural southern and western pain was in fascist hands. Here was nother warning of the disastrous onsequences of failing to give land › the peasants - if any of the workers' aders bothered to take notice.
The story was different in the big ities of north, west and central pain. There it was the workers who ok the initiative: in Madrid workers atrols rounded up fascist sympathisis and trew mem mto tne model rison; tens of thousands of workers arched upon Bilbao demanding ms; in Barcelona the predominantly narchist workers surrounded the bel troops, capturing the leader of le revolt in Catalonia, General Goded. The Government, more afraid of le revorunon unan or tne rascists, was irown into panic. The attempt to me to terms with Franco had been re-empted by mass action. The Governent was changed three times in one ay until a new cabinet, headed by the celess Giral, was forced to arm the orkers.
There now opened a period in which le real power in most of Republican ain was held by the new organs of orkers democracy. Two antagonistic ate powers existed alongside each her. This process of workers power as most developed in Catalonia. The al government of Catalonia from ly to September was the Central mmittee of Anti-fascist Militias. 1e Generalidad, the autonomous talan government, was powerless. Companys, the president of the Generalidad, was forced to make a demagogic appeal to the anarchists: 'If you do not need me, tell me now and I shall become one soldier more in the struggle against fascism.' But the CNT was incapable of understanding the need to go forward and smash the Generalidad. Comparis offer was declined.
For the moment, however, the Generalidad seemed impotent. The military struggle was directed by militias under the control of the party and union organisations. These militias marched into Aragon to meet the fascists. As they went, they sponsored village anti-fascist committees to defend the gains of the revolution.
By 19 July the peasants had seized the land and driven out the landlords. The land was now collectiv. ised under the control of democratic village committees. In the towns, too, all industry and enterprises came under workers control.
George Orwell describes the atmosphere in Barcelona as late as December 1936: There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies.
*Above all there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices solemniy explaining that barbers were no longer slaves.
The example of the barbers' shops of Barcelona is one of the most graphic cases of collectivisation. Before 19 July there were 1,100 barbers' shops in Barcelon, mostly small concerns running at a loss, filthy and badly maintained. The 5,000 workers earned only 40 pesetas weekly, compared with 60 to 80 pesetas for building workers.
Immediately a 40-hour week and a 15 per cent wage increase were instituted, driving most shops out of business. Thence the CNT sponsored the collectivisation of the industry. The number of shops was cut to 235, massively reducing overheads. All the former workers and owners were employed in these new, modernised establishments with wages equalised and increased by a further 40 percent.
the major industries and services:
cases the number of plants was cut and efficiency enhanced. As Orwell observed, 'even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black.
Nor were these developments confined to Catalonia. Numerous accounts testify to the extent of collectivisation in the whole of Republican Spain.
There is no doubt that this was genuine 'dual power". Organs of the working class had taken over many of the functions of the State. Equally, at this period, the collectivisations constituted real workers control of industry and agriculture.
But this is not a situation which can last as long as the capitalist State remains intact. Either one or the other state power must be broken.
The basic weakness was that the dual power remained on a fragmented, local basis. No revolutionary leadership existed to weld it into a state power on a national basis. Hence the POUM and the CNT were free to mislead the workers into believing that power was already theirs.
foundly his former comrades of the POUM. A Central Committee resolution of 18 September announced: "The Central Committee believes now, as always, that this Government must be composed exclusively of representatives of the workers parties and trade union organisations. But if this point of view is not shared by the other workers organisatons, we are willing to leave the question open."
to disregard the principle that the State is not a neutral body, but the instrument of one class or another. It (and the CNT) entered the new Generalidad Government, whose first This process was duplicated in all transport, food, communications, war and manufacturing industry. In most bodies.
COUNTERNovember. one revoltion Trotsky was right to mistrust proRepublic alive.
Cially starved of arms.
So the POUM was finally prepared ¡NO PASARAN PASTRINKS step was the dissolution of the dual power: the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias, the local antifascist committees, the supply committees, and the local militias were all dissolved and replaced by official Nationally, as well as in Catalonia, these revolutionary" organisations were prepared to acquiesce in the rolling back of the gains of 19 July. Also in September, Largo Caballero, the darling of the left, formed a Government dedicated to reasserting the control of the bourgeois State, a Government in which the Stalinists, the right-wing Prieto Socialists and the bourgeois ministers had an overwhelming majority. The CNT was brought into this Government in If the role of the anarchists and the POUM can be described as one of bizarre and disastrous misleadership, that of the Socialist Party and Stalinist bureaucracies was one of conscious and deliberate betrayal of Stalinist thinking was dominated by the need of the Moscow leadership to make an alliance with France and Britain against Germany. Obviously a real Franco victory would not be in Moscow's interests, but neither would a proletarian revolution which would doubtless frighten off its democratic imperialist allies. It was this consideration which dictated Moscow's policy on the supply of arms to Republican Spain -enough to make possible a final push for victory, but sutticient to keep the This hamstrung the military struggle throughout the Civil War, and in general those units, such as the militias in Aragon, which were run on proletarian lines were especThe interests of the Moscow bureaucracy also determined the CP's attitude to the revolution which was taking place. From the very start it was the Stalinists and the Prieto Socialists who were most concerned to stop the revolution and reassert state control. The Stalinist press Spain 7 abroad attempted to conceal the fact that there was a revolution taking place. According to the Daily Work er, those who denied that the Spanish workers were fighting merely for bourgeois democracy were downright lying scoundrels.
Even the left Socialists, or at least their leadership, arrived at similar conclusions. The crucial question for Caballero was foreign aid. Caballero, who had opposed the formation of a conscript army, presided over this scheme in office so as to win Russian This 'Spanish Lenin', as Caballero was dubbed by the Stalinists, refused land to the peasants (which would have undermined Franco's peasant army) in order to curry favour with imperialist Britain and might break with 'non-intervention'.
'Non-intervention', of course, was a dead letter from the start. The other signatories to the agreement, fascist Italy and Germany, poured troops and arms into Spain to aid their ideological brothers. Yet not one of the leaders of the Spanish working class understood that the bourgeoisie was no ally against fascism, and that only the proletarian revolution could be a sufficient mobilising force to rouse the population in Franco's Thus it was that Largo Caballero formed a new government of counterrevolution.
NEXT WEEK: The victory of the counter-revolution.
19/6 Te OF SPAIN Stop the murder and torture of Spanish workers:
Break all inks:
Boycott Fascist Spain
Red Weekly 15 July 1976 In the first of a new tions of the left ALAN JONES looks at the
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POPULAR FRONT OR WORKERS POWER?
The events of July 1936 were far more than a struggle between the ing of a period in which organs of workers power grew up alongside was a real possibility that the entire capitalist state could be over- thrown. The rising of Franco's army in Morocco therefore ushered
BIRTH OF WORKERS POWER
CLOUDS OF REVOLUTION
SOLIDARITY WITH THE WORKERS