ResoluteReader: Héctor Puente Sierra - Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War

In 1936 a revolutionary movement swept the Spanish state. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918/1919 it was one of the most important workers' revolutions in history. It saw a powerful working class movement take control of cities, towns and the countryside, running it in the interest of the producers and expelling the capitalist class. George Orwell famously said that his arrival in Barcelona was the first time he had see a city were "workers were in the saddle". But Orwell's experiences must not blind us to the depth of workers' control that was seen in 1936.

Héctor Puente Sierra's new book is published for the ninetieth anniversary of the Spanish Revolution. His book is first, and foremost, a celebration of the potential for organised workers to defeat capitalism and build a society based on mass participatory democracy. Delightfully he quotes a Communist railway worker in Catalonia:

It was incredible, the proof in practice of what one knows in theory... All one's doubts are suddnely stripped away... Suddenly you feel their creative power; you can't imagine how rapidly the masses are capable of organising themselves. The forms they invent go far beyond anythign you've dreamt of, read in books.

An anarchist leader wrote:

The Antifascist Militias Committee was recognised as the only effective power in Catalonia... It was everything, supervised everything, the transformation of the peacetime industries into war industries, propaganda, relations with the goernment in Madrid, help for all the fighting centres, relations with Morocco, the cultivation of available land, health... and a thousand and one problems of every kind... The Antifascist Militias Committee was simultaneously a ministry of war, a ministry of the interior, and a ministry of foreign affairs.

In the countryside, poor peasants "sponsored and favoured collectivisation", while richer peasants were "more sceptical", but interestingly "the first harvest under the collectivised system would show a 20 percent increase over the year before". This was not because the system was more efficient, but because it was a system run by, and for, the poor peasantry.

But Sierra doesn't limit his account simply to the gains of the Revolution. The Revolution itself was a spontaneous response to the threat from the far-right to the Spanish "Popular Front" government. Understanding how this arose requires an understanding of the growth of the Spanish left, its various forms (communist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist and so on) but more importantly the late and uneven development of Spanish capitalism. By the 1930s Spain was expreiencing the tensions caused by the contradictions of advance industrial capitalism in some regions, and backward agrarian capitalism elsewhere. The class struggles that arose from this, as well as the need for the capitalist class to throw off any restriction on their ability to accumulate capital, fuelled a contradictory push for development - one that was both attractive to Spain's capitalist interests (and their friends abroad) but also antagonised sections of Spain's rulers.

Spain's powerful workers movement was part of this. It's general political affiliation was to the Popular Front, but it was also self confident and developed enough to fight for its own interests when needed. When the right rose up in a military coup against the Popular Front government the Spanish working class responded by creating a situation of dual power across much of the country. While this quickly became a war to stop Franco and his military forces it was, at every stage, a political battle.

These tensions are brilliantly explained by Sierra, no more so than in his discussion about the influnce of Stalin and Russia, and the debates from other sections on the left about how to win. Sierra argues that the nature of the Soviet Union was now very much a State Capitalist society, and foreign affairs were subordinated - not to the development of revolutionary forces against capital - but to the protection of Soviet national interests. Throughtout the latter half of 1936 and into 1937 Russian support for the Republic, militarily and politically, was coloured by this factor. Those who argued otherwise were denounced as opponents of Russia, Trotskyists and fascists - somehow simultaneously people who supported the Republic and revolution and supported Franco.

While Franco's forces used the most appalling violence against the revolution - from massacres to systematic rape and destruction, Sierra also notes the problems caused by Stalinist strategies. In Madrid, over two thousand supporters of the military coup were imprisoned by the Republicans. These were "summarily shot". Sierra writes that

The indiscriminate massacres of prisoners flowed from the Stalinists' efforts to centralise all decisions to do with public orders into their hands. It also signalled the import of the brual methods associated with the Soviet secret services into republican politics.

This also saw those Marxists forces that did not support the Stalinist strategy, or the Soviet Union, starved of resources, isolated, repressed and murdered. The most important of these organisations, the POUM, is studied in detail by Sierra, not least because its strategy and tactics offer perhaps the most useful way of learning the lessons of 1936 today.

The POUM argued that the way to win the Civil War was to extend the revolution - to give full rein to workers' power across the country and to develop mass participation in the war. This would have seen the encouragement of workers' and peasants' participation in government, locally and nationally and would have also seen revolutionary methods extended to areas that mainstream politicians were terrified of going. This would have meant further challenges to capitalist interests and, perhaps of most importance tactically, support for the independence of Spanish colonies.

One of Franco's most significant bases was the Army of Africa, principly made up of troops from Morocco. Offering freedom to Morocco would have potentially split that army apart. Yet the bourgeois participants in the Popular Front government and representatives of Stalin's Communist International opposed this. Their attempts to keep on board the soft right and placate the capitalists of Britain, France and America, doomed the Republic and the revolution.

Two final parts of Sierra's analysis must be discussed. The first is his analysis of the POUM. The POUM was a Marxist organisation that had some of its roots in Trotsky's opposition to Stalin. On the eve of the revolution they were a relatively small organisation of a few thousand members. Sierra says they "had shown promising signs in the years leading up to the revoution that they could build the kind of mass revolutionary force... that had been sorely missed in decades of struggle." Sierra's analysis of how the POUM used the united front tactic is particularly relevant today. But the POUM made a series of tactical errors, but as the "revolutionary situation" developed, their mistakes became "magnified and had fateful ramifications". At crucial moments the POUM were unable to capitalise on events, or placed themselves in positions, that made it hard to winning mass numbers to a revolutionary position. This was particularly true of their attempts to engage and win over anarchist and anarcho-syndiclist workers whose leaders had failed to advance the revolution.

While Sierra is critical of the POUM, his anger is aimed at their main opponents on the Republican side. The betrayals of the Communist Party have been mentioned. But those anarchists today who continue to celebrate the Spanish Revolution as a great moment in anarchist history ought to read Sierra. While his criticism of the anarchists who ended up joining governments are well documented on the Trotskyist left, I was more interested in how Sierra draws out the implications of anarchist theory for revolutionary periods. For instance, anarchist belief that money was something that could simply be abolished might seem like a theoretical discussion that could be safely ignored. But, Sierra points out, it meant that anarchist revolutionaries simply ignored banks and then found that they were unable to run the economy in a transitional revolutionary period.

The final point to make concerns Sierra's discussion of fascism in Spain. Sierra concludes, I think rightly, that Franco's regime was not a fascist one. Again this is not an abstract point, but has implications both for how the War was fought, and for what came after. Sierra rightly acknowledges the centrality of mass fascist organisations like the Falange to Franco's victory - and the scale of the crimes they committed. But he argues this was only one part of a coalition, which Franco tamed in order to protect his new regieme. Franco, Sierra says, walked a "tightrope" between the Third Reich and the Western powers. But most of the forces that made up Franco's coalition were opposed to closer ties to the fascist powers, especially as WW2 loomed. After the war, and the military defeat of fascism in Europe, it was the Catholic Church that "would play the greater role in defining the new Francoist state".

Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War is an impressive book. It takes one of the most complex periods of working class history, places it in its context and develops a series of interacting analyses of the different forces and interests to explain a sometimes complex history. It celebrates the power of the workers, and the gains of the left. But it is always critical of the mistakes and strategic errors made by different forces.

Another strength of the book is that it never patronises it's audience. Not all readers will be familiar with the arguments and concepts that Sierra uses. So it's good that he backs up some of the more theoretical arguments with reference to other revolutionaries such as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. In addition, Sierra is approaching these debates from a different direction to others on the left. Orthodox Trotskyists have tended to be critical of the POUM because of some of their tactical disagreements with Leon Trotsky himself. Similarly Sierra is highly critical of the Communist Parties and the Stalinised Communist International of the 1930s for their mistakes then. So it's good that Sierra also roots his arguments in the ideas of those from the revolutionary left who historically have been critical of orthodox Trotskyism and Stalin's Communists.

Today, the Spanish Revolution probaly does not get the attention on the British left that it deserves. The mass movement that erupted in 1936 offers us a glimpse of workers' power. But it also offers use much to learn from. Héctor Puente Sierra's book is thus an important contribution to the development of a new revolutionary movement rooted in the belief in workers' self emancipation.