Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, the first of a series, establishes the theoretical and historical framework for understanding the Spanish Civil War as a direct expression of capitalist crisis, not a feudal relic. Its core argument is that Franco’s rebellion was a deliberate, pre-emptive assault by the entire Spanish ruling class—landowners, industrialists, and bankers—against the organised working class, whose economic and political organisations had become incompatible with capitalist profitability. The author insists that Spanish fascism is structurally identical to Italian and German fascism, a special form of capitalist domination resorted to when bourgeois democracy and reformist concessions become untenable for the bourgeoisie itself.
The chapter grounds this claim in a comparative analysis. It contrasts fascism with earlier reactionary regimes like the Spanish monarchy or the Tsarist empire, which, despite brutal repression, permitted a restricted existence to workers’ organisations and reformist leaders. Fascism’s unique character, the author argues, is the total extirpation of all independent working-class organisation. This necessity arises from capitalism’s declining ability to make even minimal concessions. Evidence is drawn from the trajectories of Italy and Germany: Italy’s weak industrial base and inability to compete in imperialist markets; Germany’s post-Versailles handicaps and the world economic crisis. In both cases, the bourgeoisie hesitated, preferring social-democratic mediation, before finally unleashing fascism to destroy workers’ organisations that had become an “intolerable burden” on profits.
The Spanish case is then examined in detail. The chapter argues that Spanish agriculture, the dominant sector, was in a desperate structural crisis. Land distribution was the worst in Europe, with primitive methods and the lowest yields per hectare. The brief boom of 1914-1918 was capitalised into mortgages, not reinvested. Post-war collapse, compounded by tariff barriers, produced mass unemployment. The rise of the Republic in 1931 spurred agricultural unionisation, and even a wage of six pesetas a day menaced landowner profits in a period of declining European agriculture facing competition from South America and Australia. The “two black years” of reaction (1933-1936) temporarily crushed wages, but the masses rallied, and the Popular Front victory of February 1936 unleashed a massive strike wave—nearly a million strikers by June 10, over a million by early July. Spanish capitalism, unable to expand markets externally or internally (which would require land reform), could only “solve” its problems by destroying the unions endangering its profits.
The chapter contains a sharp polemic against Stalinist and social-democratic interpretations. It directly attacks the theory that Spanish fascism’s roots are feudal, denouncing it as a “new theory, concocted ad hoc” to justify collaboration with the liberal bourgeoisie. The author counters that while Spanish agriculture is backward in method, land has been a commodity for two centuries, making the land question a capitalist one. The polemic is sharpened by a critique of journalist Louis Fischer, who notes the “strange” fact that industrialists supported the landlords. The author dismisses Fischer’s own explanation—that industrialists feared loss of political power—as revealing the truth: the weakening of police power allows workers to organise and cut into profits. Spanish fascism, the chapter concludes, is the weapon of capitalism, not feudalism, and can only be fought by the working class and peasantry alone.