3. The Coalition Government and the Return of Reaction, 1931-1933¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: Chapter 3 — The Coalition Government and the Return of Reaction, 1931–1933¶
This chapter traces the rapid degeneration of Spain’s republican-socialist coalition from its inception into a regime that crushed working-class militancy, preserved the old state apparatus, and paved the way for reaction. The core argument is that the Spanish socialists, by subordinating the proletariat to a bourgeois republican government, betrayed Marxism and repeated the fatal errors of German and Austrian Social-Democracy. The narrative opens with the May 1931 church burnings and monarchist attacks, in which workers took independent action against the Church and monarchy. The socialist leadership, however, responded by ordering their militia to assist the police and Civil Guard, who shot ten workers. The provisional government declared martial law, giving workers their first taste of “socialist participation in a bourgeois government.”
The chapter’s key claim is that the socialist justification — that Spain was undergoing a bourgeois revolution requiring republican consolidation to ward off reaction — flies in the face of Marxist tradition. The author invokes Marx’s 1850 Address to the Communist League, which insisted that after victory the proletariat must direct its distrust not against the defeated reactionaries but against its petty-bourgeois ally, and must erect independent workers’ organisations alongside the new government. This strategy was applied in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 through the creation of soviets. The German and Austrian revolutions, by contrast, demonstrated that reformist-dominated soviets, lacking a revolutionary programme, were dissolved once capitalism stabilised. The Spanish socialists ignored these lessons.
The chapter details the constitution drafted by the coalition, adopted in December 1931. It limited voting to those over 23, favoured coalition tickets, gave the President power to dissolve the Cortes, established a Court of Constitutional Guarantees, and included Article 42 permitting suspension of all constitutional rights. The “Law for the Defence of the Republic,” copied from Weimar Germany, criminalised spreading “news likely to disturb public order,” lightning strikes, and refusal to work, and empowered the Interior Minister to suspend meetings, close unions, and seize arms. Largo Caballero, as Minister of Labour, introduced compulsory arbitration and declared that unions refusing to submit would be outlawed. The author notes that not a single deputy voted against this legal framework; 368 voted aye, 102 abstained.
The consequences were immediate and severe. Strikes were driven into arbitration boards; socialist organisers advised CNT strikers to join “the union of the government.” The clergy reasserted themselves: the Vicar General of Seville was caught smuggling documents on concealed Church property, but Catholic ministers Maura and Zamora suppressed publication. Zamora, elected President with socialist votes, aided clerical reaction from his first day. When socialist Finance Minister Indalecio Prieto attempted to take control of the Bank of Spain, the government forced a compromise that handed the Finance Ministry to a capitalist. Peasants at Castilblanco who resisted the Civil Guard were imprisoned. At Casas Viejas in January 1933, under direct orders from Interior Minister Quiroga to “take no prisoners,” the Civil Guard massacred twenty peasants who had occupied uncultivated land. Azaña delayed investigation; the socialist deputies voted confidence in the government. The monarchist and Catholic parties seized the opportunity, denouncing the government’s repression and even proposing amnesty for political prisoners, to the cheers of anarchists.
The chapter’s polemic is directed squarely at the Spanish socialist leadership — particularly Largo Caballero, Prieto, and the parliamentary deputies — and, by extension, at the German and Austrian reformists whose example they followed. The author argues that the socialists’ policy was “completely alien to Marxism.” The socialist militia, created with government consent and used as police auxiliaries, could never be a genuine class weapon. The UGT’s growing membership was no bulwark against reaction so long as it supported a bourgeois government. The coalition’s record of “maintaining order” meant throttling strikes, jailing workers, and leaving reaction untouched.
The denouement came in 1933. Zamora dismissed the coalition and dissolved the Cortes; Lerroux became Premier. The November elections delivered a decisive victory to the rightist “anti-Marxist front.” The socialists