4. Towards a Coalition with the Bourgeoisie¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter dissects the critical seven-week period following the July 1936 military uprising in Spain, during which a unique and paradoxical form of dual power existed. Unlike the classic revolutionary precedents of Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1918-19, where reformist leaders like the Mensheviks or Ebert actively propped up bourgeois governments by entering them, the Spanish bourgeoisie under Giral and Companys was initially isolated. No workers’ representatives joined the Madrid cabinet, and the anarchists forced the Stalinists out of the Catalan government within days. The bourgeois state was denuded of its essential instruments: the regular army had defected, and the police had been absorbed into the armed workers’ militias. The government lacked sovereignty.
Despite this immense, spontaneous power of the proletariat—control of the factories, the militias, and the streets—the workers’ state remained embryonic and atomised. It never coalesced into a centralised, nationwide system of soviets or workers’ councils. The chapter identifies this as the central paradox: real power was greater than in Russia before November, yet the bourgeois government survived. The explanation is blunt: there was no revolutionary party prepared to drive through the organisation of soviets. This failure was not a passive omission but an active political drift. The chapter argues that in a revolutionary civil war, refusing to build soviets is a political act that effectively recognises the bourgeoisie’s right to govern the struggle and dictate its limits.
The text draws a sharp polemical contrast with Lenin’s tactics during the Kornilov affair. Lenin advocated a military-technical alliance with Kerensky to defeat the counter-revolution, but only on the precondition that the masses were organised in democratically elected soviets where the Bolsheviks could win a majority. The Spanish workers’ organisations—the CNT, the POUM, and the Stalinists—failed to establish this precondition. Consequently, the bourgeoisie, controlling finance capital and the gold reserves, methodically recovered its nerve and its power. The chapter details this incremental restoration: officers reasserted direct command over militias; the government used its control of the treasury and banks to curb collectivisation; press censorship was reimposed. The CNT entered the Basque regional government, and the POUM entered the Valencia “Popular Executive,” directly contradicting its own slogan for an all-workers’ government. The formation of the Council of Economy in Catalonia, under bourgeois hegemony, was the final step in a process that made governmental coalition with the bourgeoisie inevitable. The chapter concludes by framing the subsequent analysis as an examination of the political conceptions that led to this collapse of revolutionary will.