Salute the Spanish Working Class¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter digest commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War’s outbreak, using the occasion to draw sharp political lessons for the present. Its core argument is that the Spanish working class was defeated not by Franco’s military superiority but by the political treachery of its own leadership. The Popular Front government of Azaña, it charges, actively refused to arm the workers against the fascist uprising of July 1936, instead suppressing news of fascist gains to lull the proletariat into passivity. The workers of Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia did not wait for permission; they seized rifles from sporting goods stores and fascist homes, stormed barracks, and within days had placed transport and industry under the control of committees drawn from the CNT and UGT. The revolution spread to the countryside, where peasants expropriated landlords and formed collectives.
The chapter’s key claim is that this spontaneous revolutionary movement could have succeeded—and could have ignited socialist revolution across Europe, particularly in France, where massive sit-down strikes had just erupted—had there existed a revolutionary Marxist party deeply rooted in the working class. Instead, the workers were betrayed by their own misleaders: the Socialist, Stalinist, Anarchist parties, and the POUM (the Spanish ILP). These organisations, terrified of socialist revolution, entered a coalition government that systematically stripped the workers of the positions they had won. Behind the slogan of ‘Unity’, they enforced a programme of class collaboration that led step by step to certain defeat.
The historical context is the entire trajectory of the civil war, from July 1936 to Franco’s victory. The chapter draws on the theoretical axiom that capitalism breeds fascism and that only socialist revolution can smash both. Its polemic is directed squarely at the Popular Front strategy—the alliance of working-class parties with bourgeois liberals against fascism—which it denounces as a noose around the proletariat’s neck. The polemic extends to the present: ten years on, the same Socialist and Stalinist leaders are preparing to repeat the same fatal error, joining hands with new Azañas and Martínez Barrios in a revived Popular Front, while British Labour’s Ernest Bevin props up Franco’s tottering regime. The chapter concludes that the Spanish working class must break decisively with Popular Front politics and build a revolutionary party on the programme of the Fourth International—the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists. The spirit of 19 July lives on, but will to struggle is not enough.