This month marks ninety years since the working class and peasants of Spain rose up against General Francisco Franco’s fascist forces and capitalist exploitation in general. ADAM POWELL-DAVIES draws out the lessons of that heroic struggle for the situation facing Marxists today.
World events in 2026 confirm that capitalism today is in a new era of turmoil. Life for billions is increasingly marked by war, falling living standards, environmental breakdown, and attacks on democratic rights. On the other side of the coin, there is the heightened outbreak of new mass uprisings and revolutionary movements across the world, which in recent years have shaken all continents.
To find such an equivalent level of global volatility and polarisation it is necessary to go back to the two decades between the first and second world wars. This was a period of revolution and counter-revolution, in many ways epitomised in the major class battles which erupted in Spain throughout the 1930s.
Writing at the end of that volatile decade, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”. These famous lines find crushing confirmation in the events of the Spanish revolution, when no party was prepared to match the audacity of the Spanish masses with the leadership needed to assist the working class in consolidating power, and to begin the task of building a socialist society which would have fundamentally changed the course of world history.
Why Russia is relevant
A correct analysis of what happened in Russia in the twentieth century is essential for understanding not just the trajectory of the Spanish revolution, but also how to apply its lessons today. 1936 is notable for also being the year in which Trotsky finished his exceptional book, The Revolution Betrayed. It remains today the greatest Marxist analysis of what happened to the Soviet Union following the Russian revolution of October 1917, which established the world’s first ever workers’ state.
On the one hand, Trotsky explained, by eliminating capitalism and concentrating the means of production in the hands of the young workers’ state, it was possible to develop a plan of the economy which allowed the Soviet Union to make enormous advances in a short period of time. For example, while advanced capitalist economies like the US and Britain were still reeling from the global economic downturn after 1929, industrial production in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1936 grew by 250%.
But the rise of an authoritarian bureaucracy under Stalin, which by 1936 had consolidated its power through a bloody political counter-revolution, denied the working class or peasantry any role in the running of society. Without the ‘oxygen’ of workers’ democracy, Trotsky warned that Stalinist rule was preparing “an explosion of the whole system that may completely sweep out the results of the revolution” – that is, the restoration of capitalism. Trotsky concluded that there would need to be a new revolution in the Soviet Union, a political revolution to free the planned economy from the chains of the bureaucracy and to introduce genuine workers’ participation at all levels of society.
He also saw the success of workers’ revolutions in other parts of the world as a key part of the struggle to re-establish a democratic, ‘healthy’ workers’ state in the Soviet Union. In The Revolution Betrayed, he wrote: “The first victory of a revolution in Europe would pass like an electric shock through the Soviet masses, straighten them up, raise their spirit of independence, awaken the traditions of 1905 and 1917, undermine the position of the Bonapartist bureaucracy”.
The outcome of the Spanish revolution therefore had enormous implications, not just for Spain but for the Soviet Union and indeed the entire global struggle for socialism. As Trotsky commented in 1936: “The problems of the Soviet Union are now being decided on the Spanish peninsula”.
Legacy of Stalinism’s collapse
Ultimately, the “explosion of the whole system” that Trotsky had warned of was detonated from the late-1980s and early-1990s, with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe.
In the final analysis, Stalinism represented the greatest counter-revolutionary force in history. Yet its existence had rested upon a form of economic planning, however monstrously misrun, which was distinct from capitalism. The collapse of Stalinism therefore opened up a worldwide capitalist offensive against the working class, in which capitalism and ‘the market’ became widely accepted in popular consciousness as ‘the only way’.
Amidst this wave of capitalist triumphalism, traditional workers’ parties were transformed into wholly capitalist formations, stripped of democratic structures which had previously allowed a working-class base to potentially apply effective pressure to its leaderships. Workers’ leaders, who had previously paid lip service to socialism, stopped doing even that.
While the current new world era has many parallels with the interwar period, the ‘crisis of leadership of the working class’ that Trotsky observed at that time not only persists today but is compounded – and in turn reinforced – by an additional crisis of political organisation, with the absence of mass workers’ parties. The result is that the gap – or ‘scissors’ – between the objective situation of capitalism in crisis, and the preparedness of the working class globally to replace its chaos with a democratically planned socialist society, is even more stark than when Trotsky was writing.
Yet we are at the beginning of a period in which this gap can be closed, potentially at a rapid rate, on the basis of the new mass movements and revolutions that will continue to erupt from the faultlines of twenty-first capitalism in decay. While the legacy of the collapse of Stalinism, its effects on workers’ consciousness and organisation have not yet been fully overcome, the working class in recent years has begun to re-enter the scene of history. The lessons of the Spanish revolution are arguably more important now than ever in preparing a new generation of class fighters to take on this brutal system – and this time, to win.
Lessons from Spain
For Marxists, the Russian revolution is proof of the crucial role of a revolutionary party. The Bolshevik party, led by Lenin and Trotsky, was essential to the working class sweeping away capitalism for the first time in history.
The Spanish revolution is like a photo negative in that sense. It proves the fatal consequences for the working class and oppressed if a genuine revolutionary party is not available during a revolution, when the masses – searching for a way out of the existing order governing their lives – move to take history into their own hands.
By remaining ‘neutral’ through the world war of 1914-1918, Spain was able to enjoy a period of rapid industrial growth through its exports to warring countries. Yet this also brought with it a strengthening of the position of the Spanish working class. After the Russian revolution effectively brought an end to the war and to Spain’s war-time boom, the class struggle in Spain intensified.
Against the background of a workers’ movement rapidly gaining in confidence, not least under the influence of the Russian revolution, and then a Spanish military disaster in Morocco in 1921, General Miguel Primo de Rivera launched a coup which established a military dictatorship by monarchical assent in 1923. The Primo de Rivera dictatorship oversaw an economic upturn over the rest of the decade, built on the brutal suppression of the trade unions. But this period of growth was abruptly ended by the global economic depression that followed the Wall Street crash of October 1929.
When the new downturn eventually led to the resignation of Primo de Rivera in January 1930, it was like a shockwave through the working class. It awakened hopes that events could be pushed even further in their favour and boosted its confidence to struggle. The whole of 1930 was marked by an uptick in workers’ uprisings, including revolutionary strikes in September. Primo de Rivera’s replacement, General Dámaso Berenguer, could only last a year.
It was against this backdrop that King Alfonso XIII was forced to schedule municipal elections for 12 April 1931, the first elections to be held in nine years. In the towns, mass demonstrations greeted the announcement of the election results, which showed a sweeping victory for candidates who supported the establishment of a republic in Spain. Just two days later, Alfonso was forced to flee into exile. A republic was declared and the Spanish revolution begun.
First republican government
Over the revolutionary years that followed, the working class and the peasantry – 70% of Spain’s population in 1930 – rapidly accumulated experience, revealing to them the many obstacles that still blocked their path to a life free from the constant struggle for existence. Those obstacles would include not just the parties of private industry and the big landowners, but also the supposed leaders of the workers’ organisations.
Fighting to implement their demands for improved wages and conditions, workers experienced how the republican government ordered the police and army to brutally crush their strikes, just like the dictatorship of the 1920s. The famous retort of the peasantry, summarising the failure of the republican government to take land from the big landlords and give it to the peasants, went: ‘What did the Republic give you to eat?’
The republican government formed in 1931 could not deliver for the working class or peasantry, because all parts of it were committed to maintaining capitalism. That meant defending the right for the Spanish capitalists and landowners (often the same people!) to hoard society’s resources in their hands, with the right to maintain an oppressive state apparatus which forced this unequal arrangement on the Spanish masses.
The republican government was a coalition that included the largest workers’ party, the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party), together with other so-called ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ and ‘nationalist’ pro-capitalist parties. The PSOE was a workers’ party in that it was seen by wide sections of workers as ‘their’ party. Despite ultimately propping up the capitalists in action, the PSOE subscribed to the ideal of socialism in words, and this was mirrored in the consciousness of its mass base. It also led the UGT trade union federation, which grew from 277,000 to 958,000 members in the course of the revolutionary events of 1931.
All the PSOE leaders at this time believed that the Spanish republic formed in 1931 would herald a prolonged period of capitalist development, which at some stage would go far enough so as to lay the basis for socialism as the next, higher stage of economic development.
This theory of ‘stages’ came historically from a mistaken understanding of the tasks facing the working class in countries, like Spain or Russia, where capitalist industry was still underdeveloped and the peasantry represented a large section of the population. According to the theory’s adherents – chief among them Stalin and the Comintern – the task of the working class in these ‘backward’ countries was to support the so-called ‘progressive’ wing of the capitalists in building up their economy.
At the same time, the stages theory proved useful for leaders of workers’ organisations who in reality wished to avoid serious confrontation with the ruling classes at home and abroad. These ‘leaders’ could claim theoretical justification for postponing the struggle for socialism into some indefinite future, never themselves being prepared to ‘look over the precipice’ and lead the construction of a new type of society.
So although the PSOE was the largest party in the government, with 117 deputies, their leaders’ coalition policy left them unable to seriously fight for the demands of the working class, nor those of the peasantry. After all, their demands were diametrically opposed to the interests of the weak Spanish capitalists, whose economy these ‘socialists’ had pledged to help build!
Scene set for 1936
The betrayals of the first republican government led to a widespread wave of disillusionment, out of which a more right-wing government was elected at the next general election in November 1933. Then in October 1934 the far-right CEDA, led by Gil Robles, entered government. In response to the ferocious reaction from below, the UGT, supported by the left wing of the PSOE, called for a revolutionary general strike across the country. The Spanish workers had witnessed Hitler coming to power a year earlier and were determined to prevent a similar fascist seizure of power. Under the influence of this mood, the leader of the PSOE left wing, Largo Caballero, had secretly been organising the importation of arms.
The general strike went furthest in Asturias in northwest Spain, where an armed uprising led by the miners established the Asturian Commune. The Commune lasted 15 days, eventually being put down in blood by the troops of General Franco. Five thousand workers were killed and 30,000 more injured. Felix Morrow, who wrote an indispensable Marxist account of the Spanish revolution, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Spain, reported a common Spanish saying at the time that “had there been three Asturiases, the revolution would have been successful”.
The tragedy of Asturias signalled the beginning of the ‘two black years’, a time when state repression was ramped up against the working class and its organisations. Yet the ‘whip of counter-revolution’ also steeled the determination of workers to fight back. Instances of strike action increased during 1935, including general strikes in response to the execution of workers who had risen up in October 1934. Major anti-fascist rallies took place around the demand for new elections.
Believing it would let off steam and deliver a less right-wing, more ‘liberal’ government to stabilise things, the capitalists relented to the demand for new elections, which were held in February 1936. The result was the election of a new cross-class republican coalition government, this time including not just the PSOE as the largest party, but also the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party (PCE).
A year earlier, the seventh and final World Congress of the Communist International had formally adopted the policy of ‘the People’s Front’, which called for alliances between workers’ parties and ‘progressive’ capitalist parties as a means of blocking the rise of fascism. In reality, it was also a means of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow holding back workers’ revolutions that could have inspired the working class in Russia to likewise throw off their own oppressive rulers.
The coalition government elected in February 1936 was therefore called the Popular Front government. In its composition it was of the same fundamental type as the ‘socialist’-republican coalition government of 1931. In both cases – whether to justify an indefinite period of capitalist development, or to bloc against the threat of fascism – the Popular Front tactic strangled the ability of the working class to carry out the tasks ahead of it.
Lessons learned from Popular Front 1.0
The Spanish revolution is testament to how far the masses in a revolution can go in spite of the policies of their leaderships. Having learned from the experience of the first Popular Front government of 1931-1933, the workers and peasants this time knew not to wait for their programme to be enacted in parliament. They took to the streets and within 48 hours had implemented their demands themselves. Land and factory occupations took place. A 44-hour week was introduced by the workers. Sacked and victimised workers were given their jobs back. An estimated 30,000 political prisoners were released from the jails. Managers with known links or sympathies to the fascists were driven out of the factories.
Between February and July 1936, 133 general strikes were called. The election of the Popular Front had unleashed a massive revolutionary wave. But where was the party and leadership needed to meet the initiative of the workers and peasants with a programme to defend, extend and consolidate their gains? In its absence, the fascist forces, bosses and landowners were granted time to plot and prepare their counter-offensive.
The fascist revolt came on July 17, beginning with a military rebellion in Morocco. The Popular Front government attempted to negotiate with the fascists. In fact, it pronounced over the radio its confidence that the Spanish mainland would be exempt from the plot!
Meanwhile, the working class knew it had to take matters into its own hands. Responding to the news of the fascist threat, hundreds of thousands took to the streets throughout Spain, demanding arms. However, the government refused; while the Spanish capitalists had now gone to the side of Franco and the fascists, their ‘shadow’ in the Popular Front feared the working class coming to power more than they did fascism.
This makes it all the more incredible that a largely unarmed working class proceeded to march into action and defeat the fascists in most towns. Within days workers had established de facto power across up to four-fifths of Spain. They seized the factories, while the peasants seized land. Appealing to the rank-and-file troops and police, the working class succeeded in dispelling the ‘armed bodies of men’ under the control of the government.
Although power was in the hands of the workers and peasants, it was not organised. One of the key steps necessary to take the revolution forward to victory was the establishment of democratically elected workers’ councils, comprising workers in every factory and workplace, and peasants in all the different collectivised farms, and their coordination at a local, regional and national level. That would have allowed a collective plan of mass action to be hammered out through debate and discussion, as a means of coordinating the revolution countrywide. It would have provided the base for building a democratic workers’ state, which could guard against counter-revolution and begin to develop a worked-out plan of production to dramatically raise the living standards of the workers and peasants.
However, no party nor faction of a party supported the formation of workers’ councils. The left wing of the PSOE argued that it should instead play that role. In other words, the task of establishing a workers’ state should wait until the PSOE had allegiance from the majority of workers. Compare that to the position of Lenin in 1917, who saw the crucial role of the soviets (workers’ councils) and argued for the Bolsheviks to energetically struggle for its programme within them, even if it meant initially being in a minority.
What route to a revolutionary party?
In his preface to The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky explained the relationship between the masses and the revolutionary party with a famous analogy. He wrote: “Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box. But nevertheless, what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam”. In the Spanish revolution, steam was found in abundance but the piston box was missing.
Was it inevitable that a revolutionary party and leadership was not available in July 1936, or indeed at any other stage of the Spanish revolution? In contrast to today, at the outset of the Spanish revolution there existed more than one mass workers’ organisation which could have gone on to play a decisive role in assisting the working class to take power, but for the absence of a Marxist leadership. These included not just the PSOE but also the formally anarchist CNT trade union federation, which by 1936 had two million members and a significant base in Catalonia, where the working class after July 1936 went furthest.
The existence of a mass workers’ party in the form of the PSOE was an indication that a significant section of the working class had entered the revolution already with a sense of its power to transform society. And at the same time, the Spanish mass workers’ organisations acted as a forum – with elements of a workers’ parliament – within which the working class could debate the way forward, drawing conclusions from its experiences and making a collective assessment of the next steps needed. Their existence helped to speed up and sharpen the consciousness of the working class as the revolution developed.
The scale of debate that would rage within the working class and its organisations during the revolution was foreshadowed at the PSOE congress of July 1930, when 8,326 delegates were narrowly outvoted by 10,607 delegates in favour of the PSOE taking part in a future coalition government with pro-capitalist parties.
That a very significant minority of PSOE delegates in 1930 voted against an alliance with the agents of capitalism stands in stark contrast to the situation today. At its most recent congress in 2024, prime minister Pedro Sánchez was re-elected unopposed as party leader for a third successive term. More than 90% of delegates cast their votes in favour of this pro-austerity leader, who since 2018 has led various bourgeois coalition governments to carry out brutal attacks on the working class and young people. This reflects the ideological and organisational collapse that has taken place within the former mass workers’ parties since the collapse of Stalinism.
That is not to prettify the past role of the PSOE. Its leadership, both right and left, was a decisive factor in the betrayal of the Spanish revolution. But its existence allowed working-class pressure to be exerted on the ‘socialist’ leaders, who at various key points were then compelled to take action which took the revolution forward – for example, Caballero in helping to arm the working class. But once leaders like Caballero – who vacillated between revolutionary words and reformist deeds – had exhausted their usefulness to the working class, there had to be an alternative at hand.
A grave mistake was made by Trotsky’s supporters in Spain, the Communist Left, when they did not accept the offer made by the PSOE youth federation in 1934 to join and help ‘Bolshevise’ it. By this stage, Morrow commented that “to have rallied the masses in spite of the socialists [PSOE] would have required a revolutionary party of such calibre and mass proportions as simply did not exist in Spain”. The existence of a strong Marxist tendency, able to patiently explain the necessary programme and the limitations of the leaders like Caballero, the straitjacket of the Popular Front policy, the need to prepare to build workers’ councils etc, could have been decisive.
The CNT and the anarchist leaders, who initially called for boycotting elections and abstention from ‘bourgeois politics’, joined the Catalan version of the Popular Front government in Barcelona in 1936. The CNT had been forced in this direction by the vigour of the anarchist workers, who through their experience of struggle understood the need for the working class to establish its own state power. The anarchists in May 1937 held almost 90% of Barcelona and its suburbs. Yet the anarchist leaders settled on ordering the striking workers to go back to work, effectively allowing the revolution in Spain to be crushed.
The other party that could have offered a way out for the working class was the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), which was formed in September 1935 and grew from 1,000 to 70,000 members during 1936. Especially strong in Catalonia, the POUM could have emerged as a genuinely mass revolutionary Marxist party had it put forward a bold socialist programme within the CNT ranks. But while the POUM made correct criticisms of the CNT and other parties, in deeds it subordinated itself to the anarchist leadership and the Popular Front. It too failed to fight for the establishment of workers’ councils which would have been essential for the revolution to win.
Dual tasks or popular front?
In all cases, the workers’ leaders were found wanting. And unfortunately, as Trotsky explained, “even in cases where the old leadership [of a workers’ organisation] has revealed its internal corruption, the class cannot improvise immediately a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period strong revolutionary cadres capable of utilising the collapse of the old leading party”.
In preparation for new revolutionary movements today, the building of sound Marxist revolutionary parties, and cadres – or leaders – within them, is a vital task. That task requires a dialogue with the working class, a constant testing-out and proving of ideas in the real experience of struggle. Through that approach, a revolutionary party, and individual Marxists within it, can build up authority among important sections of workers and young people, in advance of new revolutions breaking out.
At the same time, for the ideas of Marxist parties and leaders to find mass support, it is necessary that a significant section of the working class is conscious of its potential power to transform society, to one day be a governmental alternative to the capitalist ruling class.
In this era, when the world-historic effects of the collapse of Stalinism are only just beginning to be overcome, the re-development of class consciousness is therefore a vital pre-condition for the working class to successfully overthrow the ruling class and begin the construction of a new socialist society. That will ultimately come out of the experience of workers themselves struggling under this system – but Marxists have a key role to play in speeding up that process, including by raising the demand for new mass workers’ parties, which would help enable the working class to develop from being ‘a class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself’.
In that sense, there is a ‘dual task’ facing Marxists today: on the one hand helping to rebuild mass workers’ parties, while at the same time striving to build the revolutionary parties that are needed to hammer out a socialist programme, strategy and set of tactics for the working class and oppressed in each country.
In the absence of mass workers’ parties with a programme to improve people’s lives, far-right and right-populist forces have made significant gains in a number of countries. Not understanding the character of the era we are in, and flowing from that the dual tasks for Marxists, some on the left are calling again for Popular Fronts to block the rise of reactionary forces.
For example, the Morning Star has published an article commemorating ninety years since the election of the 1936 Popular Front government in Spain, which concludes: “We still need a Popular Front”. But this completely ignores the real lesson to be learned from Spain’s Popular Front, which was that it could not defeat the forces of reaction because it was unwilling to mobilise the working class in a struggle that would challenge not just fascism but the capitalist system that the government itself rested upon.
While the right-populist threat today is not the same as fascism, Popular Fronts or so-called ‘progressive alliances’ involving capitalist parties are still no answer. It is the austerity and misery enforced by capitalist politicians which provide the fertile ground for the populist and far right. The way to really win people away from the propaganda of these right-wing forces is to fight to rebuild mass workers’ organisations, armed with a revolutionary socialist programme, as part of the struggle to end capitalism and build a socialist future internationally.