2. The Tasks of the Bourgeois-democratic Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that the Spanish Republic of 1931 was structurally incapable of accomplishing the five essential tasks of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and that this failure condemned it to be a brief transitional regime, to be superseded either by reaction or by a workers’ state. The agrarian question is presented as the decisive problem: with 70 per cent of the population on the land and the worst distribution of property in Europe, the only adequate solution was the immediate expropriation of the two-thirds of land held by landowners. The coalition government’s alternative—purchase through an Institute for Agrarian Reform—would, by its own figures, take a century. The text insists that confiscation was blocked not by feudal survivals but by the fact that land was already capitalised, mortgaged, and integrated with bank capital; to expropriate the landlords would be to strike at Spanish capitalism itself.
On industry, the chapter draws a parallel with Russia: Spain’s belated industrialisation, concentrated in a few cities and a handful of large enterprises, produced a proletariat whose weight was disproportionate to its numbers. But late development under capitalism meant that Spanish industry could expand only in a growing world market, whereas the market was contracting. Tariff protection was blocked by the threat of retaliation against agricultural exports. The republic’s reliance on the hope that the crisis would lift was a delusion; unemployment reached a million and a half by 1933.
The Church is treated as an entrenched economic and political power, not merely a spiritual one. The text cites the estimate that the Jesuits alone held a third of the country’s wealth, and notes that religious orders operated industrial establishments with unpaid labour. The government’s response—dissolving only the Jesuits after a delay, ending state subventions on paper while continuing them through education payments—is denounced as pathetically inadequate. The Communist Left demanded confiscation of all Church wealth and dissolution of all orders, and called on the peasantry to seize Church lands directly.
The army is analysed as a privileged caste, with one officer for every six men, tied by kinship and class to the landowners. Azaña’s reform—voluntary retirement with pay for 7,000 officers—left the officer corps unchanged in spirit. The revolutionary demand was for dismissal of the entire officer corps and election of officers from the ranks. The chapter frames democratisation of the army not as a weapon for proletarian insurrection but as a necessary defence against reaction.
On the colonial and national questions, the text argues that the republic continued the monarchy’s rule in Morocco through the Foreign Legion and mercenaries, and that this force would be the first used in a reactionary coup. The demand for immediate withdrawal and independence is presented as a matter of self-defence for the Spanish masses. The Catalan and Basque questions are treated through the Bolshevik model: support for national liberation as the only means to detach workers and peasants from clerical or petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership. The republic’s restricted autonomy for Catalonia and its delay on the Basque question are condemned as identification with Spanish bourgeois-imperialism.
The polemic is directed throughout against the republican-socialist coalition, and implicitly against the reformist strategy that sought to solve democratic tasks within the framework of bourgeois property. The chapter’s theoretical anchor is the Trotskyist position that the belatedness of Spanish capitalism, the integration of landed and banking capital, and the contraction of the world market made a stable bourgeois republic impossible; the proletariat would have to carry out the bourgeois-democratic tasks itself, as a prelude to socialist revolution.