The Spanish Revolution

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Burnett Bolloten's landmark study:

SECTION, 50th This month we are devoting a special section to an examination of the Spanish Revolution and the reasons for its defeat. This section features: (1) A review of Burnett Bolloten's "The Spanish Revolution"; (2) "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning," written by Leon Trotsky in 1937; (3) An analysis of the role of the Anarchists and the POUM in the Spanish events; and (4) An interview with a veteran of the Spanish Civil War—The Editors.

BOOK REVIEW The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power During the Civil War, by Burnett Bolloten, University of North Carolina Press, 664 pages, 1979, $9.95.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. It was on July 17, 1936, that the fascist uprising began in Spanish Morocco and spread to Spain, engulfing the country in three years of war between General Francisco Franco's fascists and the Republican forces of the People's Front government.

Much has since been written about the Spanish Revolution, but unfortunately a great deal of misrepresentation concerning its nature still exists. Burnett Bolloten's "The Spanish Revolution," however, is one book that does much to illuminate the facts behind the social revolution at the heart of the Spanish events.

Bolloten was a United Press correspondent in Spain during the Civil War, and in the years since has devoted himself to researching the history of the revolution. "The Spanish Revolution" is actually a revised and vastly expanded version of his original study, "The Grand Camouflage," which was published in 1961.

Bolloten sets the theme for his study in the opening lines to "The Grand Camouflage: " Although the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp-more profound in some respects than the Bol -shevik Revolution in its early stages-millions of discerning people outside of Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range, but even of its existence by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history.

"Foremost in practicing ; this deception upon the world," Bolloten observed, "and in misrepresenting in Spain itself the character of the revolution were the communists," who grew from a small minority at the outset of the Civil War into the dominant force in the anti-Franco camp.

Heritage of backwardness

Spain in 1936 remained a barely industrialized country. Ownership of land was highly concentrated and the majority of the population lived at a starvation level for most of the year. Near-feudal social relations in the countryside were combined with, and in fact, reinforced by the links connecting the propertied classes with the capitalist world market.

After the dictator Primo de Rivera was forced to resign in January 1930, the workers and peasants in Spain began a relentless drive to improve their lives. It was a struggle that, with the outbreak of civil war in 1936, rapidly accelerated into a challenge to the capitalist system in that country.

Alvarez del Vayo, a "left-wing" socialist and ally of the Communist Party during the Civil War, explained that after the fighting broke out, "the state collapsed and the Republic was left without an army, without a police force, and with its administrative machinery decimated by desertions and sabotage."

A Communist Party leader put it even more bluntly: "The whole state apparatus was destroyed and state power lay in the street."

"Landed properties were seized," Bolloten noted, "some were collectivized, others divided among the peasants, and notarial archives as well as registers of property were burned in countless towns and villages."

In the cities, Bolloten described how "railways, street -cars, and buses, taxicabs and shipping, electric light and power companies, gas works and water works, engi -neering and automobile assembly plants, mines and cement works, textile mills and paper factories, electrical and chemical concerns, glass bottle factories and perfumeries, food processing plants and breweries, as well as a host of other enterprises were confiscated or controlled by workmen's committees....

Mikhail Koltzof, a leading Soviet journalist and Stalin's personal agent in Spain, wrote in Pravda (Sept. 26, 1936) that approximately 18,000 industrial and commercial enterprises had been taken over by the workers' unions and by the state.

Committees of workers or local bodies under the authority of the unions and the left-wing parties assumed control of the ports, borders, municipalities and other local governing bodies in the Republican zone.

In the navy, authority was exercised by committees largely under the influence of socialists and anarchists. Hundreds of churches and convents were burned to the ground since the Catholic Church was so closely identified as a pillar of the reactionary state. Even jails were raided, their records destroyed, and inmates freed.

People's Front aids capitalists Things were looking bad for the industrialists, bankers, and landlords. However, the People's Front government that was elected to power in February 1936 had as its common program the establishment of a liberal democractic state based on capitalist property relations. This coalition government, which the Communist Party entered in September 1936, included the Socialist Party and forces from the bourgeois republican left.

Communist Party leader Dolores Ibarruri explained in the party's newspaper Mundo Obrero (July 30, 1936) that "the revolution that is taking place in our country is the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution that was achieved over a century ago in other countries, such as France."

The Communist Party's line stemmed from the adoption of the Popular Front policy by the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935. As the fascist threat gained momentum in Europe, Stalin had tried assiduously to cultivate an alliance with the "democratic" capitalists in Britain and France. This meant, according to Stalin, that the Republican forces had to reassure France and Britain that the Spanish Revolution posed no threat to the capitalist system.

An anti-capitalist, socialist revolution that would break the power of the landed aristocracy and the in -dustrialists was thus opposed by the People's Front government, even though the workers and peasants were in actual fact taking over factories and occupying land.

As exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky noted at the time, the Stalinists "wanted to eliminate the need for fascism by proving to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie that they were themselves capable of strangling the proletarian revolution under the banner of 'democracy."

These efforts were in vain, however, as France and Britain refused to assist the fight against the Spanish fascists. Moreover, the program of limited social reform advocated by the communists and socialists forced the People's Front to actively sabotage the unfolding social revolution—and subsequently undermine its ability to mobilize the population against the fascists.

Even those parties that stood to the left of the communists and socialists-the anarchists, who controlled the National Confederation of Labor (CNT), and the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM)-failed to provide a clear alternative to the People's Front, giving "critical" support to its limited program.

Bolloten provides ample documentation of how the People's Front actively sabotaged the social revolution. In Barcelona, on May 3, 1937, the communist police commissioner ordered an attack on the telephone exchange, which had been occupied by the CNT since the start of the Civil War.

Immediately, barricades went up all over the city. POUM militia members, anarchist workers, many of whom had broken with their leaders over support to the Republican government, and others took control of most of Barcelona. But by May 7, the anarchist leaders quelled (continued on page 10, in “Civil War veteran recalls fight as Trotskyist in Spain”)

SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1986 7

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