Revolution and the Civil War in Spain by Pierre Broué, Emile Teminé lacks the depth and scope of Broué’s indispensable book on the German Revolution and you really can feel the join between Broué’s section and Teminé’s. The most stimulating part of the narrative is Broué’s account of the short period when the revolution ended and it became a civil war. What follow is a very condensed version of a much richer description.
Broué is well disposed towards the Anarchists, who he implies, were the most consistently revolutionary of the big workers’ organisations. In Aragon they collectivized three quarters of the farming land, cutting the Gordian knot of the land issue for the peasantry. In Barcelona they took much of the service and industrial sectors under forms of workers’ control.
Revolutionary power was administered though a range of councils which had some similarities to soviets or the German Rate. It was the differences that were their undoing. They were composed of leaders of political parties and trade unions and, in the early period of the revolution could be described as the expression of the revolutionary will of the thousands of militants who took part in them. A major positive feature was the willingness of these militants to disregard the instructions of their own party. In the light of the bloodbath that the Communist Party and the NKVD inflicted on Anarchists, the POUM and Trotskyists the imposition of this form of discipline was a major tool in suppressing the revolution. However nowhere in Spain did the parties raise the demand that power be transferred to the councils. They were not subject to election and recall and the parties did not yield power to them.
By the autumn of 1936 the issue of power was posed between the two main currents in the revolutionary process. The Popular Front wanted to reestablish a police force, courts and old style forms of local government – in effect a modernised bourgeois state. The revolutionary wing of the movement wanted a revolutionary government of councils, justice administered through revolutionary tribunals and militias of armed workers. This was articulated by the POUM and the anarchists who were developing similar conceptions of a workers’ power.
The international situation in 1936 was much less favourable than it had been for the wave of revolutions which broke out after World War One. Fascism had come to power in Italy and Germany and Stalin was murdering the last of the surviving Bolsheviks. Supporters of the Popular Front used the fear of the revolution’s isolation to argue for limits which would keep Britain and France well disposed to the Republican government. In calling for a functioning state that respected private property they were strongly supported by the Communist Party. Its General Secretary Jose Diaz explicitly ruled out the prospect of a revolution and insisted that the struggle had to be restricted to that against Fascism. In this he was strongly supported by the Soviet ambassador who directly intervened in cabinet discussions to argue for a halt to the revolutionary transformation of areas under Republican control.
What quickly followed was the destruction of almost all the organs of mass power and their replacement by the institutions of a bourgeois state. The last word belongs to the anarchist Santillan who summed up how by ending the revolutionary process the Republican government abandoned its only chance of carrying the war through to victory. He commented after Franco’s had taken power “we sacrificed the revolution itself without understanding that this sacrifice also implied sacrificing the aims of the war”
Liam redux 
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