6. The Programme of the Caballero Coalition Government¶
Core Argument¶
The Programme of the Caballero Coalition Government¶
This chapter delivers a devastating Marxist critique of the government formed on September 4, 1936, under Largo Caballero, exposing it as a bourgeois coalition government of class collaboration, not the "provisional revolutionary government" claimed by the Socialist Party of the USA as late as May 1937. The cabinet comprised three Caballero men, three Prieto men, two Stalinists, and five bourgeois ministers. Giral's own remark on handing over the premiership—that the new government was "an amplification of the old"—is deployed as damning testimony against any revolutionary pretension.
The core argument is that Caballero renounced his principles to preserve the bourgeois order, while the bourgeoisie and Stalinists renounced nothing. The government's programmatic declaration subordinated everything to military victory, containing not a single word about land or factory committees. The chapter traces Caballero's transformation from his earlier denunciations of separating revolution from war to becoming the chief architect of reconstructing the bourgeois state. The decisive shift occurred when Caballero abandoned reliance on the Spanish and international working class, instead pinning his hopes on winning aid from Anglo-French imperialism. A revealing interview with the Havas Agency shows Prieto expressing pleasure at French non-intervention initiatives, while El Socialista openly argued for renouncing revolution to curry favour with the democracies.
The chapter's most powerful polemic targets the refusal to enact revolutionary land reform. Drawing on a Stalinist functionary's involuntary testimony about peasants dying of hunger in Estremadura, Albacete, and Andalusia, it argues that only a decree nationalising the land and granting usufruct to those who till it could rouse the peasantry to fight. The October 7 land decree is exposed as a fraud, merely sanctioning division of estates belonging to known fascists while leaving other exploiters untouched. Similarly, factory committees were swiftly neutered by government directors, and the February 1937 industry decree established "workers' control" as little more than a collective contract.
The chapter concludes with a devastating analysis of Stalin's arms policy as a calculated spigot: enough supplies to prevent early defeat and preserve Soviet prestige, never enough to permit a victorious offensive that might produce a Soviet Spain. The anarchists' entry into the cabinet on November 4 is presented as the final capitulation, with the Aragon Council's grovelling assurances to Caballero destroying any remaining revolutionary credibility.