1. The Birth of The Republic – 1931¶
Core Argument¶
The Birth of the Republic – 1931¶
The chapter opens by demolishing the myth of Spain's "glorious, bloodless, peaceful, harmonious" revolution of April 14, 1931, noting that this was virtually the only bloodless event connected with the revolution before or since. Spain had spent over a century attempting to birth a new regime, with four major revolutions before 1875 followed by four white terrors, punctuated by peasant revolts, army mutinies, civil wars, and court conspiracies.
The core argument is that Spain's modern bourgeoisie never prepared for a bourgeois revolution. Modern industry dated only from the Spanish-American War (1898), and the industrialists who flourished during the "national renascence" of 1898-1914 vied with ancient landowners in loyalty to the monarchy. Some, like Count Romanones, combined old and new economies through ennoblement and land purchases; others cemented bonds through mortgages and intermarriage with the landed aristocracy. The bourgeoisie secured from Alfonso XIII the conquest of Morocco (1912), and his profitable neutrality during World War I endeared him further. When post-war markets closed and workers launched great struggles, Catalan industrialists financed Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923-1930), whose programme of public works, tariff walls, suppression of anarcho-syndicalists, and compulsory arbitration boards for socialist unions gave industry new impetus. Only when the world crisis ended Spanish prosperity and the monarchy faced mass insurrection did the bourgeoisie belatedly decide Alfonso was a cheap sacrifice.
The chapter offers a devastating portrait of the Radical Party of Lerroux, the oldest and largest republican party, which "did nothing to bring it into being" and was soon to ally with monarchists. Three decades of Spanish parliamentarism are filled with charges of bribery, blackmail, and trickery against this party, whose anti-clerical demagogues had served the monarchy against Catalan nationalism. The Radicals' normal method of polemic was mutual accusations of corruption.
The only real support for the republic came from the socialist and trade union proletariat, which meant the republic could only be a transition to a struggle between fascist-monarchist reaction and socialism. However, the socialist leadership—Prieto, Caballero, de los Rios, Besteiro, del Vayo, Araquistain—shared the petty-bourgeois outlook of the Azañas, modelled on the French Revolution of 1789, imagining decades of peaceful bourgeois-democratic development before socialism. Anarcho-syndicalism, commanding half the unionised workers through the CNT, was hopelessly anti-political, playing no role in bringing the republic before swinging from passive support to wild putschism.
The chapter polemicises sharply against the Stalinist Communist Party, which in its "third period" (1929-1934) denounced united fronts, built empty "Red unions," propagandised for an "intermediary democratic workers and peasants revolution" repudiated by Lenin in 1917, and played a "thoroughly reactionary role." The real Bolshevik tradition was represented only by the tiny Communist Left (Trotskyist), which Trotsky himself guided through two major pamphlets. But this group was a handful, not a party, and failed to follow Trotsky's estimation of the leftward development in socialist ranks—first veering into "leftism," then opportunism by signing the Popular Front programme. The proletariat thus arrived at the republic without revolutionary leadership, and would pay dearly.