Coming of the Spanish Civil War

Paul Preston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134923267
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This classic text is made newly available in a substantially revised and updated second edition.

1
THE ORIGINS OF THE SOCIALIST SCHISM: 1917–31

The Spanish army officers who took up arms in 1936 had a variety of grievances. They were outraged at attempts by the Republic to bring an end to the privileged position of the military within civilian society. This had taken the form of a series of military reforms which had threatened their promotions and their status. They were equally, if not more, infuriated by the Republic’s programme of conceding regional autonomy to the historic nationalities of Spain, Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia. In an army which had lost many battles, officers were obsessed with a determination to win the last battle, that for national integrity. They were also motivated by a belief, carefully cultivated by the rightist press, that the Second Republic had both been deeply anti-Catholic and done nothing to protect property against a rising tide of social disorder.

That many officers could hold such ideas and were prepared to risk their careers and their lives in a coup d’état pointed to a failure of conventional parliamentary politics. When the Second Republic was established on 14 April 1931, it faced social, economic and political problems which had bedevilled Spain for decades. The loss of imperial status and the consolidation of economic backwardness had coincided with the emergence of modern left-wing movements. In consequence, the century before 1931 had seen the profound division of Spain into two antagonistic social blocs. In simplistic terms, there were, on the one hand, the armies of urban and rural proletarians, bitterly split between socialism and anarchism, and the liberal intellectual petty bourgeoisie of enlightened lawyers and professors. And, on the other, stood the Church, the army, the great landowners, the industrial and mercantile bourgeoisie and the great mass of Catholic conservative smallholding farmers. The expectations of the Left exploded in April 1931 in an atmosphere of popular fiesta in the streets of many cities and in the workers’ taverns of southern villages. Equally, there was much gnashing of teeth in the officers’ messes of many garrisons, in the big houses of the great fincas (estates) and in churches all over Spain.

Nevertheless, on 14 April 1931, only the tiniest fractions of the most lunatic fringe of the extremes of Left and Right believed that the problems which lay deep in the social and economic structures of Spain would have to be resolved by war. Yet, five years and three months later, large numbers of the politically literate population had reached the sad conclusion that war was inevitable if not exactly desirable. When sections of the army rebelled on 18 July 1936, they did so with considerable civilian support. That would be starkly clear in the division of Spain over the next few days. The successes and failures of the rebels replicated the electoral geography of the 1930s. The rising, with a few exceptions, was defeated in areas of working-class strength and was successful in areas where the parties of the Right had won in the elections of the Second Republic.

The extent to which the politics of the Second Republic were reflected in the configuration of the war zones is not perhaps surprising. None the less, it stresses the fact that the reasons for the breakdown of parliamentary coexistence during the Republic are better sought in the failures of the mass parties of the period than in the activities of the extremists of Left and Right. The two great parliamentary parties of the time, the Socialist Party or PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español) and the Catholic authoritarian CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), represented the incompatible interests of landless labourers (braceros) and big landowners (latifundistas), of industrial workers and industrialists, particularly of miners and mine-owners. The PSOE, from 1931 to 1933, and the CEDA, throughout 1933 and 1934, attempted to use the power of the state to defend the interests of their supporters. In a context of world economic depression, the well-being of the Socialist rank and file could be defended only at the cost of major challenges to the economic power of the backers of the CEDA, and vice versa. Accordingly, the two parties brought to Madrid from the provinces, and especially from Andalucía, Extremadura and Asturias, the most embittered agrarian, mining and industrial struggles. Since it was impossible for such social conflicts to be contained within the parliamentary arena, they returned back to the fields and streets more embittered than before.

As the biggest party of the Left, the PSOE provided three ministers in the reforming governments of 1931–3 and the backbone of their parliamentary support. During the period of Centre-Right dominance from 1933 to 1935, the Socialists were the only major opposition force, both in parliament and in the street, and even took part in a major insurrection in 1934. Without participating in them, the CEDA used its parliamentary power to dominate the Radical governments of 1934 and then, after October of that year, controlled a series of coalitions throughout 1935. From the so-called Popular Front elections of February 1936 until the outbreak of war in July of that year, the Socialists and the CEDA were both out of government. They were each bitterly divided, yet powerful sections of each advocated a move towards extreme solutions of violence.

The readiness to make way for the military had been apparent in the CEDA since the late summer of 1934. The appeal to violence was the most obvious symptom of a growing radicalisation of the PSOE which began in 1933 as a result of disillusion with the paucity of the Republic’s reforming achievement; of fear that a less militant line would lead Spanish Socialists to share the fate of their German and Austrian comrades; and of a major reassessment of the ideology and tactics of the party.¹ The radicalisation or ‘bolshevisation’, as its advocates called it, was never complete and was advanced only at the cost of the most bitter polemic within the party. In fact, it was the continuing internal power struggle that virtually paralysed the more moderate groups of the Socialist Party and prevented them from contributing to the defence of the Republic when it was under threat in the spring of 1936. It is presumably to this fact that Salvador de Madariaga refers in declaring that ‘what made the Spanish Civil War inevitable was the Civil War within the Socialist Party’.²

There has been considerable debate over the origins of the radicalisation of the Socialists. The present work interprets it in terms of acute social conflict in the great estates of the south and in the northern coalfields, probably the two areas of most endemic social violence during the Second Republic. In both areas, the hegemonic trade union was the Socialist Union General de Trabajadores. Hundreds of thousands of landless labourers had flocked into the UGT’s landworkers’ union, the Federación Nacional de Trabajadores de la Tierra (FNTT), at the beginning of the Republic. They became one of the largest sections of the UGT and were in the front line of the social war fought in the area. The daily violence to which members of the FNTT were subjected was matched by the experience of another UGT union, the Asturian coal-miners’ Sindicato de Obreros Mineros Asturianos.³

In the wake of defeat in the Civil War, many militants of the PSOE, and not only those who took the moderate side in the polemic, were harsh in their judgements of the attempts to ‘bolshevise’ the party.⁴ In the case of the moderates, this is not difficult to explain. Apart from an understandable resentment of the personal attacks to which they were subject, as long-standing militants they also opposed what they saw as an attack on the traditions of the party, which were anything but extreme. In the case of the repentant bolshevisers, it is also not difficult to explain their change of heart. One of the results of the ‘bolshevisation’ was that large sections of the PSOE fell under the influence of the Communist Party, whose behaviour during the Civil War left a legacy of great bitterness among its erstwhile Socialist and Republican allies. In the aftermath of defeat, they clearly regretted the part they had played in helping the Communists to prominence. In fact, neither of these critical stances substantiates the view of Madariaga, although both help to explain why such a view has been widely accepted as an explanation of the outbreak of hostilities in 1936. Criticisms of the attempted ‘bolshevisation’, however, should not blind us to the extent to which the radicalisation of the PSOE was a response, albeit a misjudged one, both to a series of provocations by the Right at national as well as local level within Spain and to the context of the rise of fascism.

The radicalisation remains to be explained, not least because it made the Spanish Socialist Party unique in Europe at a time when most socialist movements were evolving towards ever more moderate positions. The contrast was even greater in relation to the PSOE’s own past history of deeply rooted reformism and its lack of a tradition of theoretical Marxism.⁵ The party never broke away from its origins among the working-class aristocracy of Madrid printers. Pablo Iglesias Posse, its founder, never gave his party much in the way of independent theory. Pablismo, as his ideas were later termed by Trotskyist critics, was always more preoccupied with cleaning up existing politics than with the class struggle, adopting an austere and monkish tone which made the party seem to at least one observer like a brotherhood of moralists. In fact, pablismo was a mixture of revolutionary ideology and reformist tactics, which, given the party’s numerical weakness, was for Iglesias the only realistic alternative to either destruction or clandestinity. Julián Besteiro, his successor as party leader, also felt that austerity and aloofness were the only viable tactics in the corrupt politics of the restoration era.⁶ Thus, after the tragic week of 1909, the PSOE joined the Republican forces in what was virtually a civil-rights campaign. In 1914, even though Spain was not involved in the hostilities, the PSOE leadership failed to take the opportunity to condemn the war and followed the French lead in breaking international solidarity, much to the chagrin of several groups within the party.

The aspirations of the reformist leadership were, until the 1930s, focused on the need to replace the discredited monarchy with a popular republic and hardly at all concerned with notions of social revolution and class struggle. Indeed, El Socialista, the party newspaper, at first ignored the Russian Revolution, then roundly declared it to be a sad deviation from Russia’s real duty—the defeat of Germany.⁷ A consequence of the poverty of the party’s Marxism, the lack of revolutionary fervour was also partly the result of the fact that, from the PSOE’s foundation in 1879 to the boom of the Great War, prices and wages remained relatively stable—albeit among the highest prices and lowest wages in Europe. Perhaps as a partial consequence of that stability, the Spanish working class remained largely demobilised.⁸ In 1914 those circumstances began to change. Spain’s position as a nonbelligerent allowed her to assume the role of supplier of food, clothing and equipment to both sides. A vertiginous industrial boom was accompanied by fierce inflation, which reached its height in 1916. It was in response to the consequently deteriorating social conditions that the PSOE and its union organisation, the UGT, became involved in the nationwide reform movement of 1917. In complex circumstances, three anti-establishment movements shared a rhetoric of anti-monarchical reform while pursuing contradictory goals. The summer of 1917 saw a military protest about pay and promotion conditions, a bourgeois rebellion against a central government run in the interests of the landed oligarchy and a working-class determination to fight against rapidly crumbling living standards. Even when the UGT took part in a national general strike in mid-August 1917, the maximum aims of the Socialists were the establishment of a provisional republican government, the calling of elections to a constituent Cortes and vigorous action to deal with inflation.⁹ Despite, or because of, its pacific character, the strike was defeated with relative ease by the government by dint of savage repression in Asturias and the Basque country, two of the Socialists’ major strongholds—the other being Madrid. In Madrid, the strike committee consisting of the PSOE vice-president, Julián Besteiro, the UGT vice-president, Francisco Largo Caballero, the editor of El Socialista and leader of the printers’ union, Andrés Saborit, and the secretary-general of the railway workers’ union, Daniel Anguiano, was arrested and very nearly subjected to summary execution. They were finally sentenced to life imprisonment and spent several months in prison until they were freed on being elected to the Cortes in 1918.¹⁰

The repression of 1917 had a twofold effect on the Spanish Socialist movement. On the one hand, the leadership, and particularly the syndical bureaucracy, was traumatised, determined never again to risk their legislative gains and the movement’s property in a direct confrontation with the state. On the other, those who had opposed the party line on the world war began to adopt more revolutionary positions. The consequent polarisation became increasingly apparent in the following years. Between 1918 and 1923 there was considerable revolutionary activity (mainly in the rural south and in industrial Barcelona), to which the Socialist leadership maintained an attitude of studied indifference.¹¹ Yet the continuing inflation and the rising unemployment of the post-war depression had created, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, a climate of opinion within the Socialist movement, particularly in Asturias and the Basque country, in favour of a revolutionary orientation. This view was expressed in the journal Nuestra Palabra, which under the direction of Ramón Lamoneda and Mariano García Cortés adopted the view that events in Russia and the failure of the 1917 reform movement in Spain pointed to the irrelevance of the bourgeois democratic stage on the road to socialism. This brought them into conflict with the syndical bureaucracy and especially three key figures, the railway workers’ leader, Trifón Gómez, the secretary-general of the Asturian miners’ union, Manuel Llaneza, and one of the senior figures in the UGT, Francisco Largo Caballero, who were determined not to repeat what they saw as the senseless adventurism of 1917.¹²

There followed a lengthy, bitter and debilitating debate over what was to be the attitude of the PSOE and the UGT to the Russian Revolution and to the Third International. The pro-Bolshevik tendency was defeated in a series of three party congresses held in December 1919, June 1920 and April 1921. In a closely fought struggle, the leadership won the day by being able to rely on the votes of the strong union bureaucracy of paid permanent officials.¹³ The defeated Left departed to form the Spanish Communist Party. Numerically, the Communist schism was not a serious blow, but it accentuated the Socialists’ ideological weakness at a time of grave economic and social crisis. The party’s fundamental moderation was strengthened and there was a plunge of morale which lasted for some years.¹⁴ In the aftermath of the defeat of 1917, the 1921 split left the Socialists without a clear sense of direction and somehow remote from the burning issues of the day. The syndical battles which raged elsewhere attracted less Socialist attention than the parliamentary campaign against the Moroccan war and the King’s alleged reponsibility for the great defeat of Annual.

The defensiveness and ideological conservatism of the Socialists became patently apparent with the coming of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera on 13 September 1923. His seizure of power was largely a response to the social agitation of the previous six years. Yet the Socialists neither foresaw the coup nor showed great concern when it came, despite the fact that the new regime soon began to persecute other workers’ organisations. A joint note of the PSOE and UGT executives announced that they had ‘no tie of solidarity or political sympathy’ with the political élite being overthrown by the army and questioned the right of the conspirators to take power but ordered workers to take no initiatives without instructions from the executive committees of the Socialist Party and the union. Rejecting CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) calls for a general strike, the Socialist leadership did nothing to impede the establishment of the regime, did little to analyse its nature and were soon to be found collaborating with it. Having failed to see any great significance in the rise of Mussolini, the Spanish Socialists were not tempted to make any comparisons between the Italian and Spanish dictatorships.¹⁵ This reflected the extent to which the ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PROLOGUE
• 1 THE ORIGINS OF THE SOCIALIST SCHISM: 1917–31
• 2 BUILDING BARRICADES AGAINST REFORM
• 3 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CONFLICT
• 4 THE POLITICS OF REPRISAL
• 5 A BLUFF CALLED
• 6 THE LEGAL ROAD TO THE CORPORATE STATE
• 7 SOCIALISM UNDER STRESS
• 8 THE ABANDONMENT OF LEGALISM
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY