5. The Politics of the Spanish Working Class¶
Core Argument¶
The Spanish Civil War exposed the catastrophic failure of every major working-class organisation to lead a revolutionary struggle, each in its own way capitulating to the bourgeoisie. The right-wing socialists—Prieto, Negrín, and Besteiro—openly argued that Spain required prolonged capitalist development before socialism could be contemplated. Prieto, a wealthy Basque industrialist, acted as a bridge between Basque capital, Azaña’s intellectuals, and the Stalinists, denouncing strikes and preparing to fuse with the Republican Left. The Stalinists themselves, following Moscow’s dictates, wanted no proletarian revolution. In 1931, the Kremlin feared that Spanish revolution would disturb European peace during the Five-Year Plan; by 1936, the Comintern’s Seventh Congress sought to maintain the European status quo through class collaboration, aiming to secure Britain and France as allies in a coming war. The civil war thus became an opportunity for Moscow to prove it would crush revolution. Spanish Stalinists joined Prieto and Azaña in opposing property seizures, demanding the liquidation of workers’ militias, and campaigning against the POUM and anarchists, insisting the struggle was merely to defend the democratic republic. After Soviet arms arrived in October 1936, Ambassador Rosenberg and Consul-General Antonov-Ovseyenko openly backed the bourgeoisie.
Largo Caballero, head of the UGT, had collaborated with Primo de Rivera and supported Azaña from outside the cabinet. During the war, he clashed with the Azaña-Prieto-Stalinist bloc over the creation of a separate government army. The left socialists’ April 1936 programme declared for the dictatorship of the proletariat but argued Spain needed no soviets, holding that the Socialist party itself would be the organ of dictatorship. This failure to provide for workers’ councils was fatal, leaving no alternative to coalition with the bourgeoisie—and Caballero ultimately became head of that coalition.
The anarchist-led CNT, commanding a majority in Catalonia, faced its first definitive test on a grand scale. Anarchism’s refusal to distinguish between a bourgeois and a workers’ state led it into opportunist errors: it greeted the bourgeois republic in 1931, refused to join republicans and socialists against Gil Robles in 1934, and by July 1936 entered a bourgeois ministry. Its anti-statism collapsed under the pressure of running Catalan industry and militias, yet it still failed to recognise the distinction between workers’ and bourgeois states. Class collaboration is inherent in anarchist philosophy, surfacing in revolutionary periods of dual power. Anarchists also underestimated state power, believing factory control would make the state collapse, failing to see that reconstructing the bourgeois state would allow it to reclaim the factories.
The POUM, though suited to create soviets, had basic weaknesses. Its majority came from Maurin’s Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc, which had collaborated with Stalin’s disastrous Chinese policy. The fusion with Nin’s Communist Left was unprincipled, adopting Maurin’s old conceptions. The POUM entered the February 1936 electoral coalition, called for a Popular Front government, and clung to the CNT instead of contending for leadership. It never made a principled attack on anarcho-reformist leadership, and its international connections stood to the right. Nin renounced Trotskyism and the Fourth International, abdicating the opportunity to lead the Spanish revolution.