Ish Civil War

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When, on July 17th 1936, General Franco took command of Spanish troops in Morocco. and issued his manifesto calling for an authoritarian state in Spain one thing was very clear. The army was not in this case supporting one bourgeois fac tion against another as it had done so often in the past. The programme advanced by Franco was the same in its essential points as that of Mussolini or Hitler. The workers and peasants of Spain faced the deadly threat of i fascism.

Fascism is the method of rule 'that the capitalist class resort to ¡hen they can no longer tolerate : existence of independent worang class organisations. As long is the capitalists can dominate the working class through the reformist leaders of the Social Democracy they will do so. But in a period of acute economic crisis even the existence of social democracy and trades unions which provide a rallying point for working class resistance can become an intolerable burden for the ruling class. In order to impose measures of slump on the working class, the capitalists can feel the need to put an end to all independent working class organisations.

In preparation for this, Fascist parties which have for years remained small in size, rejected by the bourgeoisie as unnecessary for the time being, suddenly receive the full support of the ruling class, from the banks funds pour in, enabling the fascist party to grow in strength, attacking workers organisations and polarising layers of support, particularly amongst the petty-bourgeoisie.

Where it takes power fascism immediately sets about smashing up the political parties and trades unions of the working class. Once working class organisations are des troyed, and state-run bodies substituted for them, workers confront the bosses from a position of extreme weakness and are open to the most ruthless repression and exploitation.

Before the fascists could come to power in Spain, however, they had to defeat a powerful working class resistance, which fought the stronger because it had seen Hitler's liquidation of the German labour movement after his victory in 1933.

It was not simply a question of the bourgeoisie "deciding" to impose fascism, but only decided in prothe most dire economic and political crisis forced the bourgeoisie to take the fascist road.

For over a century, Spain had been a monarchy straining to give birth to a new regime. But if a bourgeois democracy was to be able to develop, a number of tasks would first have to be carried out by the Spanish capitalist class. It was their inability to solve these fundamental problems that led to the crisis in which the alternatives of socialism or fascism were posed.

Spanish capitalism had only been able to develop in the period before and during the First World War. Spanish neutrality had then opened the world's markets to its capitalist class. But the end of the war meant that Spanish industry had to compete on the world markets with other, industrially more advanced nations, a task for which it was ill-equipped.

"PROTECTED"

Not only was Spanish capitalism incapable of competing on world markets, it was even incapable of producing goods for the home market cheaper than its foreign rivals. In order to- protect the home market, Spanish Dictator, Primo de Rivera introduced enormous tariffs on imported goods. This in turn led to retaliation, particularly by England and France which devastated the prospects of Spanish agriculture.

Agriculture in Spain accounted for over half the national income, two thirds of Spain's exports and half the government's income. The division of land was the worst in Europe. Of the five million peasant families in Spain, only two million owned their land.

Most of these holdings were on such poor land that these famities like the other three million landless peasant families were forced to hire themselves out to the big landowners, some of whom owned half a province.

The peasantry lived in a state of perpetual poverty and frequent starvation. There were continual raids on granaries, seizures of land and even guerrilla warfare. The First World War gave Spanish agriculture a boost fiom which the landowners benefited, but not the peasant. When Spanish agriculture collapsed after the war, however, the landowners were very quick to pass on the effects to the peasantry.

The biggest blow to Spanish agriculture came in 1930, when Britain and France raised tariff barriers against Spanish agricultural products. It was this crisis that ushered in the Republic.

The bourgeois democratic revolution began in April 1931 with the creation of the bourgeois republic. The bourgeoisie, however, proved incapable of carrying through the tasks this development posed.

Spanish industry could only develop in an expanding world market but in the early 1930's the world market was contracting as a consequence of the Wall Street Crash. Spanish industry could only be developed with the protection of a monopoly of foreign trades The bourgeois government could not introduce this because it feared further reprisals from the imperialist powers.

Similarly with agriculture. The only solution to the terrible starvation and poverty confronting the peasants was the redistribution of the land amongst the whole peasantry. But even this in itself which called for dispossessing the landowners would not be enough. State aid on an enormous scale would be needed to help the peasant introduce more modern techniques of farming and increase the productivity of his land. Confiscation of the land would also mean confiscation of bank-capital. That is why the bourgeois republican government, committed to defence of private property, felt unable to confiscate the land.

Two major institutions also stood in the way of the bourgeois democratic revolution, the army and the Church. The army had always palyed a large part in the government of Spain even when the government had been a civilian one. The army was very top heavy, with one officer for every six men in the ranks and it was provided with an enormous budget.

Because the middle class in Spain was so small the officers were mainly drawn from the old ruling class and had ties of kinship and friendship with the major industrialists and aristocratic landowners. The army therefore represented a threat to the republic but the republic refused to break the power of the army CHURCH The Church was also the enemy of the republic. It had opposed every previous revolution of the 19th century and wielded enormous economic power. In 1931 the Jesuits owned a third of the country's wealth. The task of separating the Church from the State was therefore posed, but again the republican government, valuing the restraining influence of the Church on the working class, refused to tackle the problem despite enormous anticlerical feeling throughout the masses.

For Marxists, the failure of the bourgeoisie to complete the tasks through its won independent class organisations. In Russia these had taken the form of the Soviets. In Spain the call had to be likewise -for committees of workers and peasants to safeguard and take forward the gains of the revolution. To tie the struggle of the working class to a bourgeoisie that fears the masses is to invite retaliation at a later stage. In Spain, by July and August 1931, Republican artillery was being used to crush a strike wave, while the socialists claimed "Spain is a republic of workers of all classes" - this was written on their initiative as the first article of the new Spanish Constitution.

Despite the collaboration of the socialist leaders with the bourgeoisie, the working class and peasantry continued to try and solve the democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution in their own way, through attacks on the Church, the seizure of land and economic and political strikes against the government.

REPRESSION

The refusal of the socialist leaders to support the masses in these struggles and their open support for increasingly repressive measures against the masses led to a government crisis in 1933 in which the right wing were elected to power. This reactionary government stepped up the repression of the working class and this led to greater unity between the political organisations of the working class movement, particularly at a local level.

The largest trade union in Spain was the UGT, the socialist trade union. The anarchists, who were particularly strong in Catalonia were organised in the CNT. The Stalinist Communist Party at this time was still extremely small. The Socialist Party was the largest single workers party in Spain and its forces were organsied around Caballero on the left and Prieto on the right.

None of these organisations were imbued with a Marxist understanding • of the need to organise the proletariat supported by the peas antry to take the power in Spain as the only way to complete the tasks of the bourgeois revolution and defeat the reactionaries and fascists.

Apart from POUM, a centrist organisation of ex-Trotskyists, only Claridad, the paper of the Socialist Party left wing, put forward anything like a Marxist position.

Because this was a centrist tendency, however, it tended to waver from a correct policy exactly at those times when it was most urgent that a correct policy should be fought for.

THREAT Despite the class collaboration and inadequacy of the leadership of these organisations, there can be no doubt that they, and their members doubly so, recognised the threat to their existence nosed bv fascism.

Despite the losses and the setback of this confrontation (3,000 workers were killed in Asturias, mainly after the surrender) it in no way weakened workers' resistance to the continuing fascist offensive. Realising that the real battle was still to come, they meantime set about fighting for an amnesty for all those arrested in the General Strike.

A highpoint of this was May Day 1935, when despite the preparations of the government, a general strike paralysed the entire country except only the public services manned by government troops.

MASS RALLIES

Great anti-fascist rallies demanded dissolution of the Cortes and new elections. Meetings of a hundred thousand became common.

Pressure on the right-wing government grew so intense that in February 1936 they called fresh elections expecting the centre parties to win.

In the 1936 elections the left socialists rejected a joint election ticket with the bourgeois republican parties. The right socialists under Prieto and the Communist Party, however, agreed a joint programme with the republicans won the elections and formed a Peoples Front government.

In order to arrive at a joint programme with the bourgeois republicans, the programme could only be that of the bourgeoisie.

The programme thus opposer nationalisation of the banks and industry, proposed more effective tariffs, opposed the nationalisatior and free distribution of the land to

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SOCIALIST PRESS, W the peasants, and left the church esday August 6th 1975 ist parties (PSUC) had fewer mentality as regards women. Could there be more damning prodf of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow