Edgar Hardcastle
Source: Socialist Standard, March 1979.
Transcription: Socialist Party of Great Britain.
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Forty years ago. after three years of bloody civil war, the victorious Franco supporters came to power in Spain and imposed their long rule of savage repression. The war cost 600,000 lives, including about 100,000 "who may be supposed to have died by murder or summary execution"(The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas).
Propagandists for both sides presented the issues in simple terms—the Francoists' "defence of religion against Communism and Russian influence," opposed to the Republicans' "Defence of Parliamentary democracy against reaction and German and Italian invasion". However, the outstanding feature of the civil war was that hardly anything was what it seemed to be, and in the confusion, misjudgement was general.
There were Catholics on both sides. Many of the poorer priests in Spain sided with the Republicans, and in this country a number of Catholics like Dr. Morgan, Labour MP and medical adviser to the TUC, gave active support.
Although the Franco revolt included part of the Spanish armed forces, most continued to support the government and in spite of his monarchist backing Franco did not restore the monarchy. Neither did he join his German and Italian allies in the second world war which quickly followed the end of the civil war, at which time the Stalin government which had been providing arms to Spain to fight the German troops, entered into its pact of friendship with Hitler.
While the Conservative Party in Britain mostly supported Franco, an influential group actively campaigned to get the British Government to intervene on the side of the Republicans, on the ground that British capitalist interests would be imperilled if Germany got control of Spain and, through it, of the Mediterranean. Other sections of the Conservative Party, while aware of the force of the argument, took the view that British intervention might provoke the war with Germany for which they were not yet ready.
The Civil War from the start was overshadowed by the rivalry of capitalist interests between the Powers, Germany seeking to get a base in the Mediterranean and Britain, France and Russia wishing to prevent it. In addition German capitalism aimed to get control of mineral wealth in Spain. Hugh Thomas says that Germany's condition for arming the Franco forces "was German participation in all the important iron ore projects in Spain. In return for this rich prize Germany committed enough war material to Spain to tip the balance finally towards the Nationalists."
This was also the view of the Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists:
The rebellion could not have taken place if the Spanish fascists had not already come to an arrangement with Hitler and Mussolini, who agreed to a mutual aid arrangement against Spain, in furtherance of their imperialist ambition. (Three Years of Straggle in Spain. Freedom Press).
Also, Germany and Italy as well as the French Popular Front government, seized the opportunity to try out new weapons of war in battle conditions.
Inside Spain the line-up on the Franco side rested largely on the big landowners and the Church, both of which saw their privileges threatened by the Popular Front government. It was estimated in 1931 that more than half the total land was owned by less than one per cent of the population and it was the declared intention of the Government to break the landowners' stranglehold. It was not the capitalists who in the main supported the Franco rebellion—they also saw the big landowners as their enemy.
Capitalist parties belonged to the Popular Front, and the government which held office at the time of the rebellion was entirely composed of "radicals" and "progressives". Although the Spanish "Socialist Party" (similar to the British Labour Party in outlook) was the largest party in Parliament, they were not in the government until some six months after the start of the war.
The declared aim of the Popular Front government was to establish in Spain a "Parliamentary democracy on the English model", but to what extent did this represent the views of the voters and parties in the Popular Front? It was certainly the aim of the "Socialists" and the trade unions with whom they were allied, as well as of the capitalist parties in the government, but most of the other Popular Front supporters were completely opposed to it.
The Spanish Communists said that that was their aim too, and for saying so they were condemned by the Trotskyists and Anarchists. It would have been very odd if the Spanish Communists, who supported the Stalin dictatorship in Russia, had really favoured democracy. In fact it was for them merely a temporary political manoeuvre, as the Communist Jose Diaz put it:
To have attempted to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat would have meant skipping a necessary stage of development. . . . (Lessons of the Spanish War, 1936-1939).
He argued that premature disclosure of the real aim would have hampered the government in getting aid from abroad.
The largest body of supporters of the Popular Front, the Anarchist and trade union bodies which jointly published Three Years of Struggle in Spain made no secret of their total opposition to "parliamentary democracy" and determined to prevent its operation. They ridiculed the idea that "the revolution for which we were fighting" was "a new kind of democratic republic: that our politics should circulate in the orbit of the western democratic tradition of England and France."
Their aim in the war had been, they said, "that the proletariat should repulse the State, no matter what political and economic parties stood in the way." They complained that republican governments since 1931 had been hardly less repressive than had been the monarchy. Writing when the war was over, they had to admit that, in taking part in the government, helping to form a regular army and allowing Russian control, they had had to compromise—"no one knows it better or regrets it more keenly than we do."
It is obvious that the Popular Front was a facade, and there never was working class unity for "parliamentary democracy". The course of the war brought the bitter antagonism of the rival factions to the surface with mutual charges of murder and betrayal and the declaration: "neither in war nor revolution has anti-fascist Spain had a worse enemy than Stalinism." They charged the Communists with holding the view "Better lose the war than allow the revolution."
The fact is that democratic political methods require a degree of development, including working class maturity, which did not exist in Spain in 1936. Oliverra, himself a supporter of democracy, writing in the Labour Party journal Labour (September 1936) noted that the industrial capitalists were either neutral or pro-republican and described the Franco rebellion as "the last fling of feudalism". But he believed that at that time "Liberal institutions" could not take root in Spain.
Spain is very different today. Great advances have been made in industrial development and Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas have lost much of their appeal. Spanish capitalism, with its limited monarchy and parliamentary system, is now in course of coming into line with those of the European powers in the Common Market.