3. The Revolution of July 19¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter’s core argument is that the Spanish Revolution began not with a governmental decree but with the spontaneous, armed intervention of the proletariat, most decisively in Barcelona on 19 July 1936. The narrative thrust is that this uprising, though initially almost barehanded, defeated the fascist generals and created a revolutionary dual power that existed alongside—and in defiance of—the bourgeois republican state. The honour of initiating the armed struggle belongs to the Barcelona proletariat because Catalonia concentrated nearly half of Spain’s industrial working class, was untouched by the reformism of the socialist-led UGT, and was overwhelmingly organised in the CNT, whose militant anti-capitalist tradition, despite its anarchist philosophy lacking systematic direction, drove the workers to storm the barracks. The chapter details how the Catalan government refused to arm the workers, forcing them to raid sporting goods stores for rifles and construction sites for dynamite. With only a few guns and pistols saved since 1934, and aided by a handful of friendly Assault Guards, they faced the fascist detachments at dawn on the 19th. Political weapons compensated for inferior armament: workers stepped forward to call on soldiers to stop shooting their fellow toilers, and when soldiers began to turn on their officers, the masses surged forward, took the first barracks, captured General Goded, and within days controlled all Catalonia. The same pattern unfolded in Madrid, Valencia, Malaga, and Asturias, where miners outfitted a column of five thousand dynamiters. The proletariat, without so much as a by-your-leave to the government, began a war to the death against fascism, and the initiative passed out of the hands of the republican bourgeoisie.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the October 1934 Asturian Commune and the massacres at Casas Viejas, Castilblanco, and Yeste, where Azaña’s troops murdered peasants for taking land. It argues that the revolutionary-military measures were accompanied by revolutionary-economic measures: in Catalonia, transport and industry passed into the hands of CNT workers’ committees or joint CNT-UGT committees, which took over production for wartime needs and sent delegations abroad to arrange exports and imports. Peasants spread over the land, organising collectives and feeding the militias. Everywhere, existing governmental forms proved inadequate, replaced by militia committees, factory committees, and the Central Committee of Anti-fascist Militias of Catalonia, dominated by the CNT and FAI, which issued the only law in Catalonia and organised the conquest of Aragon as an army of social liberation, turning over estates to village committees and burning property titles. The chapter polemicises sharply against the Stalinists (PSUC) and the Stalinist-democrats, who claimed the struggle was merely for “defence of the republic” while the masses were simultaneously carrying out a social revolution. It also critiques the anarchist leaders for making concessions detrimental to the revolution after the first weeks, and notes the fundamental weakness of the committees: they were based on mutual agreement rather than majority decisions by democratically elected delegates. The regime that emerged is characterised as a dual power, identical to that in Russia from February to November 1917—one power, that of Azaña and Companys, without an army or police; the other, that of the armed proletariat, not yet conscious enough to dispense with the bourgeois state. This equilibrium, the chapter concludes, could not last; either one or the other must soon prevail.