Kasama

This Maoist analysis of the Spanish Civil War offers an important and scathing critique of the Communist International’s Popular Front strategy — where, after 1934, Communist Parties made the defense of bourgeois democracy (and strategic alliances with “anti-fascist” powers) the center of their political work.

This history provides a look at a living revolutionary opportunity — where things do not unfold as models, where sometimes bourgeois governments fall into the hands of left and revolutionary forces, where complex waves of struggle push the question of revolution forward and back.

It also gives an opening for a critical examination of the historic relations of anarchist, communist and other socialist forces. In the Spanish Civil War the forces of anarchists, communists and the left POUM party were in complex struggle within a loose anti-fascist coalition.  And there is much to learn (and grieve) about in the way that struggle unfolded.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

This article originally appeared in Revolution magazine (June 1981).  It is reprinted here on Kasama in four parts over the next few days. We have made a few minor editorial changes, largely in updating spelling.

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“In Spain, to be blunt, the possibilities for big revolutionary advances in that country and worldwide were sacrificed …”

I. Introduction

”The people milling around Madrid’s railway station at Antocha could hear the gunfire from the lower barrios in the suburbs of Usera and Carabanchel. see the flashes in the sky. Victoria Roman, a university student, saw young children beginning to drag cobblestones to where men and women were raising barricades. She was due to leave the city but now felt she couldn’t go.

” ‘I’m staying,’ I told the evacuation people who wanted me to accompany the children I had been looking after to the Levant. ‘No one can leave Madrid at a time like this,’ I told them.
“Franco’s troops had reached almost to the very outskirts of the city. ‘To the front, five centimos,’ the tram conductors began calling out, for you could take a streetcar right to the front lines by now. José Bardasano, a painter and poster designer, saw a tram leaving – it was full of barbers who hadn’t even had time to take off their white smocks and were still carrying their combs… “[1]

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During the month of July, 1936, mighty social forces – forces which convulsed the whole world and were at that time beginning to shove the world irreversibly towards its greatest interimperialist conflict – erupted in Spanish society.

On July 18 and the days following, the Spanish Army, with General Francisco Franco soon to emerge as undisputed leader, rose up to overthrow the Republic, now run by a Popular Front coalition which had won recent parliamentary elections. With the backing of virtually all of Spain’s ruling class, the active support of Italy and Germany and the consent of Britain. Franco’s forces struck in eight strategic military areas of the country with the aim of quickly converging on the capital, Madrid. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, this attempt to impose fascism gave rise to the broadest and deepest revolutionary upsurge to hit Europe in the entire pre-WW2 period. In all but the most conservative and socially backward area of the country – the Navarre – the masses flooded the streets, seized arms and formed militias, surrounded and won over many of Franco’s troops, and beat back the ruling class’s attempt to save the reactionary order that had been crumbling since the beginning of the decade.

The masses of workers, small peasants and rural laborers arose in such a way as to defy the most basic foundations of bourgeois rule. Symbolic of this was spontaneous and extremely popular revolt against the Catholic Church, one of the major spokesmen for the ruling class left behind in Republican-held territory, as the big capitalists and landlords fled for the safety of Franco’s lines. The Spanish Church was far more than a religious symbol. It owned more than 15% of all arable land, with large holdings in bank capital and other financial enterprises. As a legacy of Spain’s colonial empire and sign of the continued parasitism of its ruling class, its 35.000 priests, 20,000 monks and friars and 60,000 nuns – out of a population of 24 million – formed a political machine which was one of the ruling class’s main props, especially in the countryside.

The Church hierarchy supported Franco, not only politically, but in more direct ways as well. In Teruel, where Franco’s army was besieged by Republican forces, the bishop gave his blessing to holding the town’s women and children hostage to guarantee the fascists’ safety. Captured, he replied to demands that he explain his actions by saying “No one resigns himself easily to defeat.” During the opening months of the civil war, churches were burned down by the hundreds and laughing crowds danced in the ashes. Not only the most exploited sections of the people who most hated the Church but also a great many intellectuals (such as teachers sick of the Church’s anti-educational control of education) cheered the church burnings, although some better-off sections were aghast.

The factories and farmlands left by the capitalists who fled to the safety of Franco-held territory were taken over. Trade unions, factory committees, peasant co-ops and the quickly formed militias ran much of daily life, especially in Barcelona. Here, in Spain’s most industrial city, visitors from “civilized” Europe felt they had touched down in another world: the cafes, street corners and trolleys vibrated with the intense political debate going on among the workers. The feeling that it was these workers who were now in command was so strong that people from every class dressed in work clothes. Even the remaining financiers took to describing themselves as “bank workers.”

Only in the colony of Spanish Morocco were the generals able to consolidate a reliable force of Foreign Legion mercenaries and Moroccan troops (whose participation was not inevitable, as we shall see). Italian and German aircraft airlifted these troops from Morocco over the Straits of Gibraltar into the cities of southern Spain from where they swept towards Madrid.

But after three months of advances in which Franco’s Nationalist armies broke through Republican resistance and freed many of the besieged garrisons, they were finally stopped dead in their tracks on November 7. in the outskirts of Madrid, where hastily armed workers and others, organized by their political parties and unions, fought Franco’s well-equipped professionals to a standstill in a ferocious battle that raged from building to building and floor to floor in the University City and in the trenches cutting through the city’s western suburbs. The next day, the Republican militiamen and women were joined by the first of the International Brigades, formed of revolutionary-minded volunteers from all over the world to aid the Republic, and the line held. From this point on. Spain coalesced into two parts, two opposing regimes, fighting a civil war be tween them that would last for three years. Organizing support for the Republic, and soon, leading the Republican forces in the Civil War. became the main work of the Communist International (Comintern) during that period.

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“Now the line was decimated, there was nothing between us and the fascists but disorganized groups of weary war-wrecked men… I saw another IRA comrade, Jock Cunningham, assembling a small crowd, we hurried up, joined forces…The crowd behind us was marching silently… I remembered a trick of the old days when we were holding banned demonstrations in Ireland. I jerked my head back, ‘Sing up ye sons of guns!’ Quavering at first, then more lustily, the song arose from the ranks-the Internationale boomed out over the ruined countryside. “On we marched nearer the front; stragglers in retreat stopped in amazement, then turned around and joined us, cheered, the song continued. I looked back; behind the forest of upraised fists, what an unkempt band! ‘Manuel, what’s the Spanish word for forward?’ ‘Adelante!’ he yells back. ‘Adelante!’ we shout in a half-dozen foreign accents… ”[2]

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The victory by Franco’s forces in March, 1939 marked the conclusion not only of three years of civil war, but in fact a decade of intense and intensifying class struggle by the Spanish masses, especially the proletariat. The civil war, however, saw this revolutionary spirit progressively extinguished. By the time Franco’s forces again attacked and finally took Madrid at the end of the war, the professional army that the Republic had come to depend on crumbled under the defeatism and treason of its own generals. The civilian masses whose armed heroism had previously saved the city now watched in silence. The decade of revolutionary struggle had led neither to revolution nor to any advances; instead, the wine turned sour, as the Spanish saying goes. After accumulating this whole rich body of experience, the Spanish proletariat was left without revolutionary understanding or organization. Despite the awesome achievements of the masses in the war, it is simply a fact that even had the Republic somehow defeated Franco’s forces militarily, the war as a whole would have resulted in a setback for the proletariat anyway: the revolutionary leadership, the Comintern and the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), had capitulated politically well in advance of the military defeat.

How did this happen?

At the root of it was the Comintern’s entirely wrong – and disastrous – view of the kind of historic conjuncture into which the world was heading at that time. As Bob Avakian put it in his report to the Central Committee of the RCP in 1979, in a passage which applies strikingly to Spain:

“The rub is this: it is precisely the bringing to a head of the contradictions on a world scale – the approach of the resolution of a major spiral, with the imminent prospect of world war – that at one and the same time creates the very great likelihood that the socialist country will face all-out attack by an imperialist power or powers, sharpens, brings into being, or brings closer, the objective conditions necessary for revolution in many countries, perhaps even including the imperialist powers themselves. This raises the contradiction between defending the socialist country and assisting, supporting and accelerating the revolutionary struggle in the other countries to a much intensified level. How have the socialist countries and the international communist movement handled this so far?

“Not too well. In general, as we know, the overwhelming tendency has been to subordinate everything to the defense of the socialist country.”[3]

In Spain, to be blunt, the possibilities for big revolutionary advances in that country and worldwide were sacrificed to the defense – on a state-to-state level – of the Soviet Union. The strategy of the Soviet leadership called for an alliance with the Anglo-French bloc against Germany. Nothing, including revolution, could be allowed to jeopardize the possibility of that alliance, as a Soviet-backed revolution in the British junior-partner Spain certainly would. Moreover, this analysis of the Comintern coincided with the capitulationist views the PCE was developing on its own, that the masses in Spain and the party were in over their heads, particularly after the invasion of the fascist powers, and really could only hope for intervention or massive aid from the “democratic” imperialists, England and France.

Many revolutionaries around the world have long sensed that this was not a revolutionary course. But on the other hand, the military move by the Spanish ruling class against the masses, and the intervention by Italy and Germany, unarguably created a difficult situation for the Spanish proletariat; moreover, the world crisis was fraught with danger to the socialist state. Was any other course possible? What is needed is not only a summation of the Spanish Civil War, but a clear and correct understanding of World War 2 in order to help dispel a murky, defeatist aura around the whole question of the possibilities of revolution during times of inter-imperialist war, or impending war.

This article is not in any way a complete and definitive summation of the Spanish Civil War, nor still less an attempt to answer all the basic questions concerning the nature of Spanish society and the course the proletarian revolution must follow there. Rather, it is an examination of the Spanish Civil War done in the context of and to serve a broader summation of the historic conjuncture which confronted the world’s revolutionaries around WW2, and the wrong line taken by the Comintern on the nature of this conjuncture and the relationship between the defense of the USSR and the advance of the world revolution. The international communist movement needs no more excuses on behalf of the Comintern.

It needs the kind of blunt appraisal we can find in the discussion between Mao Zedong and Kang Sheng concerning the Spanish experience. In it Kang Sheng says (in the context of what is mainly a long talk by Mao, and clearly expressing Mao’s view-point also):

“They did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all.”[4]

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“The scene remained engraved on his mind. The jubilant right-wingers sweeping through the working-class quarter; the workers didn’t attack them, didn’t shout back. It was the look of hatred and despair on their faces that José Vergara would never forget. ‘They knew there was nothing they could do. They had lost the war.’

” ‘It was easy to say,’ thought Paulino García, communist student and commissar, ‘that the war was being lost because Germany and Italy were helping Franco, and England and France were not helping the Republic. Who could deny the importance of this? But it was not the sole answer. We had to be asking, what lay in our power to do, what possibilities were there which we hadn’t seized, what tasks we hadn’t carried out… ‘ “[5]

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next in part 2: . The Asturias Rebellion: Dress Rehearsal for Civil War