6. The Masses Struggle Against Fascism Despite the People’s Front: Feb. 16 to July 16, 1936¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that between the Popular Front’s electoral victory in February 1936 and the military uprising of July 18, the Spanish masses conducted an independent revolutionary offensive against both fascism and the bourgeois state, in defiance of the very Popular Front government they had helped to install. The core narrative thrust is that the workers and peasants, having learned from the betrayals of 1931–1933, refused to disarm politically or industrially. They did not wait for the Azaña government to fulfil its promises: they tore open the jails to enforce the amnesty, reinstated dismissed workers by direct confrontation with employers, and drove priests from villages under threat of death. The chapter presents these actions not as spontaneous excesses but as a conscious, plebeian method of revolutionary justice.
Key claims are supported by a dense catalogue of evidence. The government’s conciliatory gestures toward the right are itemised: Azaña prolonged press censorship and the state of alarm, postponed municipal elections on the reactionaries’ demand, and delivered speeches pledging to halt strikes and land seizures. Calvo Sotelo and Gil Robles’s spokesmen publicly endorsed these assurances. The chapter then charts the strike wave with precise figures: nearly a million on strike on June 10, over a million in early July, including a five-week strike of 125,000 peasant families in Malaga province. Political strikes in Asturias and Lerida targeted government ministers directly. The chapter argues that the Stalinists and right-wing socialists actively opposed this militancy, denouncing church burnings as aid to counter-revolution, pleading with workers to leave matters to the government, and slandering the CNT as fascist-linked. The government responded by closing CNT headquarters, arresting anarchists, and threatening to outlaw syndicalism, but was forced to retreat when the UGT solidarised with the anarcho-syndicalists—a decisive break from 1931.
The theoretical and historical context is the failure of the Popular Front strategy as a vehicle for proletarian revolution. The chapter draws on the experience of 1931–1933 to argue that the bourgeoisie could not complete the democratic tasks of the revolution, and that the masses understood this. It situates the leftward shift within the Socialist Party: the Madrid organisation adopted a programme declaring proletarian revolution on the order of the day, and Caballero was re-elected UGT secretary by overwhelming numbers, even as he refused to break decisively with the Popular Front. The chapter polemicises sharply against the Stalinists, the right-wing socialists (Prieto), and the POUM. The POUM is criticised for refusing to recognise the significance of the left wing’s development and for calling for an “authentic” Popular Front government with socialist and communist ministers, which the chapter dismisses as a demand for “proletarian hostages.” Trotsky’s proposal that the POUM should enter the Socialist Party to strengthen the left wing is invoked as the correct alternative. The chapter’s central polemical target is the Popular Front itself: it is presented as a mechanism for bourgeois control that the masses repeatedly broke through, and which the reactionaries finally abandoned when they realised Azaña and Prieto could not stop the revolutionary tide. The fascist revolt, the chapter concludes, was a pre-emptive counter-revolution by Spanish capitalism, armed with ninety-nine per cent of the officer corps, against an impending proletarian victory that the Popular Front had failed to contain.