The Civil War in Spain¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter opens with a stark vignette: fascist soldiers and workers’ militiamen shouting across the lines. A militiaman appeals to class solidarity; the reply cuts to the bone: “What did the Republic give you to eat?” In that exchange, the author argues, lies the entire problem of the Spanish Civil War. The peasantry—seventy percent of the population—has not been won to the proletariat’s side. It played no part in bringing the Republic in 1931, its passivity enabled the reactionary victory of November 1933, and it sat out the proletarian October revolt of 1934. Only in Catalonia, Valencia, and parts of Andalusia, where land confiscation has begun, are rural workers rising.
The core argument is that no civil war as profound as Spain’s has ever been won without a revolutionary social programme. Yet the coalition government under Largo Caballero offers only military struggle, postponing all social questions until after victory. Its slogan, “Defend the Democratic Republic,” is in fact a reformist programme: defence of the bourgeois state’s “kindest” political form. The author draws a sharp historical parallel. In the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” meant land, freedom from serfdom, and the destruction of feudal power. In the Russian Revolution, “Land, Bread and Freedom” rallied the masses against Kornilov and Kerensky because it promised transformation. The Spanish proletariat must raise equally revolutionary slogans or lose.
The chapter notes that the Catalonian proletariat has already grasped this truth, and that a new party formed after the October revolt—the Syndicalist party, composed of anarcho-syndicalists who accepted the need for political participation—has demanded a socialist programme to win the war. Caballero’s premiership itself is a distorted recognition that the masses will not fight to preserve capitalism, but his former prestige cannot substitute for concrete revolutionary content.
The polemic is directed squarely at the Popular Front strategy of subordinating class demands to a “democratic” alliance. The author argues that the coalition’s programme is not neutral but actively bourgeois, and that postponing social revolution guarantees military defeat. The chapter frames the Spanish experience as adding profound lessons to those of the Russian Revolution, with the Spanish proletariat learning, through concentrated historical experience, to take its destiny into its own hands. The text is dated New York, September 22, 1936—barely two months into the war.