5. The People’s Front Government and its Supporters: February 20 to July 17, 1936¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, the author delivers a devastating Marxist indictment of the People’s Front government formed in Spain after the electoral victory of February 1936, arguing that its policies and the support given to it by the Communist Party and reformist socialists were directly responsible for making possible the fascist counter-revolution of July 18. The core argument is that the People’s Front was not a progressive alliance but a class collaborationist trap: by subordinating the working class to a bourgeois republican government, the workers’ leaders disarmed the proletariat and left the economic and institutional foundations of reaction entirely intact.
The chapter dissects the People’s Front programme to demonstrate its fundamentally reactionary character. On the agrarian question, the programme explicitly rejected land nationalisation and free distribution to peasants, offering instead the same failed policies of 1931—credits, tenancy security, and state purchase of estates for rental. On industry and finance, it promised tariffs and public works but refused nationalisation of the banks and even the dole for the unemployed. On the army, it offered only investigation of police abuses, leaving the officers’ corps untouched; on the Church, only tepid educational reforms. The colonial question was entirely ignored. Most damningly, the republican parties refused workers’ control. The author argues that this programme made the onslaught of reaction inevitable because it guaranteed the survival of the economic power of the landowners, the military caste, the judiciary, and the state bureaucracy. Evidence is marshalled: the prisons filled with workers while fascists were freed; the government imposed censorship and banned working-class demonstrations; strikers were arrested in batches and union headquarters closed. The author cites the Communist Party’s own Jose Diaz admitting in Mundo Obrero on July 6, 1936, that the government was “commencing to lose the confidence of the workers” and following “the wrong road of April 1931.”
Two extended examples are used to illustrate the fatal logic of the Popular Front. The Yeste massacre of May 28, 1936, where the Civil Guard killed 23 peasants who had seized an estate, is presented as a direct repetition of the Casas Viejas massacre of 1933. The Communist Party’s response—demanding that the struggle be confined to parliamentary pressure for accelerated agrarian reform—is exposed as a policy of preventing militant action by the peasantry to avoid “breaking the People’s Front.” Similarly, the Madrid construction workers’ strike for a 36-hour week was betrayed when the U.G.T. and communists accepted a government-imposed 40-hour settlement, arguing that prolonging the strike would bring workers into conflict with the government and endanger the coalition. The author’s polemic is sharp: this policy meant that the Communist Party’s duty was to stop strikes before the government got angry, a logic that could only lead to the defeat of the masses.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical context of 1931-1933, presenting the People’s Front as a repetition of the earlier disastrous coalition. It invokes Trotsky’s theoretical analysis to lay bare the anatomy of the People’s Front: the officers’ corps is the guard of capital, and a bourgeois government cannot abolish it; the only solution is a people’s militia, which is incompatible with capitalist domination. The polemic is directed squarely against the Stalinist Communist Party and the reformist socialists (especially Prieto), who are denounced as “criminals and traitors” for having abandoned the class struggle and underwritten a bourgeois programme. The author also attacks the Stalinists’ rewriting of their own history, noting in a footnote that they denounced their own 1931 leadership for raising slogans like “Down with the bourgeois republic” which the Comintern itself had previously endorsed. The chapter concludes that had the workers followed Popular Front policy, the Spanish proletariat would have been defeated without a fight.