MAY MARKS 70 years since the most important battle of the Spanish Civil War. Studying the history of the Civil War is important for any person concerned about the struggle for democratic rights today.Between July 1936 and March 1939, a war raged between the capitalist class and large landowners, represented by the fascist General Franco, and the working class and peasants, led by the leftist Popular Front (PF) government.

In effect, it was a revolution about which class should rule Spain. In the end Franco won, establishing a dictatorial regime that would last until his death 40 years later.

The problem was the confusion among the left parties about what they were fighting for. The more conservative sections of the left, especially the Stalinist Communist Party (CP), wanted to limit the fight to parliamentary democracy. Others wanted to the fight to be transformed into creating a new socialist society. But there was confusion on how to achieve it.

The divisions between the Left would be played out behind the frontlines in all the major cities, the most important of which was Barcelona.

In Spain's most industrial city, the left parties and union federations vied for influence. This included the Socialist Party (similar to the modern ALP) and its union federation UGT, the anarchist FAI and its CNT, and the Communist Party, which had merged its union federation into the UGT.

A smaller left party, the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) also grew in the heady days of the revolution in Spain.

Masses arise

The revolutionary process began in 1931 when Spain's King was toppled. Successive rightwing and left-coalition governments ruled the country until the election of the Popular Front (PF) government in February 1936.

Even as Spain was gripped by the effects of the Great Depression, the power of the landowners and capitalists remained. For example, a few thousand landlords owned two-thirds of Spain's arable land.

It soon became clear that the PF was incapable of dealing with the crisis by balancing the competing interests of the ruling and exploited classes.

Bourgeois historian E H Carr wrote of the PF, "Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the [PF] programme was the absence of any serious social or economic demands." Workers and peasants demands were "not reflected or encouraged in the program."

However, the PF's electoral victory sparked a wave of strikes, land seizures and popular violence against the most hated figures of the far right.

The PF had promised to release the 30,000 political prisoners, leftist and anarchists, languishing in the jails. When the PF was too slow in releasing them, mass action sped up the process.

In June, 70,000 Madrid building workers struck and clashed with the police and the fascist Falange. Peasants in Aragon in the north, and especially in Andalusia in the south, began seizing the land on which they worked.

By July, after months of open talk of a military coup, the head of the military, General Franco, had gathered all the forces of reaction behind him-the fascist Falange, the Catholic Church hierarchy, the police, large landowners and the whole of the capitalist class.

He used these forces as a base from which to launch a military coup.

But neither Franco nor the dithering PF government had counted on the political will of Spain's workers and peasants.

The top-down approach of the PF meant it tried to negotiate with Franco. It then tried to conceal the reality of the coup from workers for several days.

Workers instinctively armed themselves with whatever they could obtain, including shotguns from shops and dynamite from the dockyards. Anarchist wharfies seized guns from ships in Barcelona harbour.

Despite being poorly armed and lacking central direction, they disarmed the police and military in their barracks. At the same time, rank-and-file soldiers in Barcelona mutinied against their officers.

Workers seized key offices and installations in cities across Spain. Within days workers controlled two-thirds of the country. The most famous description of this living workers' power is provided by George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, written after his visit to Barcelona:

"It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.

"Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.

"Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black.

"Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal… There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black…

"In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist…"

The PF government continued to exist in name only as its authority crumbled away. Countless local committees were the new revolutionary power. But they were not linked together or centralised. This would be the crucial question of the revolution.

Russian

foreign policy

Many workplaces were run under workers' control, such as Barcelona's central telephone exchange. But the PF government in Madrid was hostile to workers' power. This hostility became stronger as crisis deepened and as the CP began to exert greater influence over the government.

The Communist Party had been small in the early 1930s. But it grew during the political upheaval. This was partly because it represented the prestige of the Russian Revolution, which seemed to offer one solution to the crisis.

But by the time of the Spanish Civil War, Russia's isolation had seen it degenerate into a bureaucratic state capitalist regime, driving the masses of the old Russian empire into unimaginable hardship.

The Communist International increasingly encouraged the CPs to act as appendages of the Russian bureaucracy's foreign policy, rather than instruments for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Unfortunately the depth of the crisis in Europe at the time meant that many leftists developed a semi-religious attachment to the CPs, despite their conservative strategy.

With a non-intervention pact signed by Britain and France, the PF government increasingly relied on Russia for arms.

But they came at a price. Stalin insisted Spain's struggle must be limited to parliamentary democracy, and the CP must unite in a "popular front" with the pro-capitalist, republican parties.

The intervention of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on the side of Franco, with the use of the latest military hardware and planes, deepened the PF's reliance on Russia.

But Russia wanted a military alliance with France and Britain against Nazi Germany. This meant avoiding moves that might upset negotiations.

For example, it meant the Spanish CP opposed independence for Spanish Morocco, even though most of Franco's troops were Moorish and Moroccan nationalist leaders approached the PF government to support their independence struggle.

Russia did not want Spain to upset French rule in Morocco.

The logic of this strategy began to damage the anti-fascist struggle. For example, the CP opposed land reform-even though this would undermine rural support for Franco.

The logic of Stalinism was played out with the CP's seizure of the Barcelona central telephone exchange, on behalf of the PF, in May 1937. The CP then persecuted any leftwing critics of its strategy, especially the POUM.

The POUM, led by Andres Nin and Juan Andrade, had its origins as a Trotskyist organisation in the early 1930s. It was critical of the Stalinist popular front strategy.

But it eventually broke with Trotsky because its leaders were prepared to unite with militants who lacked consistently revolutionary politics.

Confusingly, POUM was prepared to support the re-arming of the capitalist state, joining both the right and left of the Socialist Party, and even the anarchists, in backing the CP's effort in order to preserve "anti-fascist unity". The state's arms were then turned on many of these same leftists.

Following the CP's armed assault on the Barcelona telephone exchange, the Barcelona working class rose up and surrounded it with barricades.

But the workers lost this critical battle. The anarchist CNT convinced their supporters to end the barricades. Even POUM, increasingly isolated, acquiesced. Over 500 workers were killed and 1500 wounded, almost all after the retreat. Hundreds more were killed and wounded over the following weeks across the country.

In the days and weeks after May 1937, the CP arrested and murdered the leadership of the POUM.

Anarchists

self-destruct

Why did the powerful CNT, an anarchist organisation officially opposed to political power, convince the workers to cave-in?

The heart of the problem is the weakness of anarchism as a strategy and as a body of ideas. For example, Jose Peirats, historian of the CNT, wrote, "There is no such thing as revolutionary power for all power is reactionary by nature."

But there is a difference between force exercised by the oppressed and the oppressor. But Trotsky wrote, "The renunciation of conquest of power inevitably throws every workers' organisation into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society.

"In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution… In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."

Barcelona was the base of the anarchist CNT, which while avowing politics, ended up joining the PF.

Leaders such as Jose Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny, ended up tailing the increasingly CP-dominated PF government. The CNT, headed by the National Secretary Vasquez, then tailed behind its anarchist PF ministers.

By entering the PF government, the CNT strengthened the government's prestige among workers. It was therefore in a weak position when the government turned on its own supporters.

By Tom Orsag