Spain’s Social Revolution Against Fascism
Francisco Franco launched his uprising against the Spanish Republic 90 years ago today. The resistance to fascism developed into a social revolution in Republican-held areas that challenged the power of capitalists and landowners.
In the parts of Spain that remained under republican control during the civil war, the struggle against fascism took on a revolutionary form. The revolution’s cornerstone was a unique experiment in workers’ self-management of industry and agriculture. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis via Getty Images)
The Spanish Civil War is often portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism. But such an approach clashes with the sociopolitical reality of Spain in the 1930s. Social, economic, and political polarization in Spain in the years leading up to the civil war, along with the resulting failure of a bourgeois-democratic republic (1931–36), led to the outbreak of both the war and the revolution.
The Popular Front’s electoral triumph in February 1936, rather than ushering in a new era of social reform, laid bare the inability of Republican democracy to overcome a ruling class determined to prevent any challenge to its power. The Popular Front’s victory sparked a new wave of mobilizations by the working masses, both urban and rural, which the Republican government attempted to suppress, as it had in 1931. The Right, for its part, abandoned any hope of dismantling the republic from within and opted for a military coup.
The Workers’ Movement
The future of the republic depended not only on its right-wing enemies but also on the labor movement. In the case of the Socialist Party (PSOE), the “revolutionary” left faction, led by Francisco Largo Caballero, refused to repeat the experience of the Republican-Socialist government of 1931–33 and insisted that the Socialists (PSOE) should not participate in the new government, leaving it to the Republicans to “complete the bourgeois revolution.” This simplistic view of Marxism meant that Largo Caballero and his followers had no strategy for seizing power; instead, they were to wait passively for the Republicans to pave the way for a socialist government.
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