The betrayal of the Spanish revolution: Workers' Liberty 3/6

The Spanish Revolution and the Civil War, 1936-9 - A "Diary" of Events, by Leon Trotsky

Though Leon Trotsky’s writings on Spain fill a large volume, he wrote no concise overview of the Spanish revolution. Our “diary” is culled from the commentaries he produced all through the last decade of his life: the last item here is dated 20 August 1940, the day Trotsky was assassinated. 25 May, 1930 The Primo de Rivera dictatorship has fallen without a revolution, from internal exhaustion. In the beginning, in other words, the question was decided by the sickness of the old society and not by the revolutionary forces of a new society… The workers’ struggle must be closely linked to all the...

Revolution and betrayal in Spain 1936-7

It is usually called the “Spanish civil war”, the thirty month struggle that began in July 1936, when the Spanish military, led by three generals, Franco, Mola and Sanjurgo — of whom one, Franco, would emerge as dictator — revolted against the Popular Front government which had been elected five months earlier. It was a civil war, a tremendous civil war in which German and Italian “volunteers”, British and Irish (Blue Shirt) fascists and many others fought for the Francoite, and “anti-facists”, British, American, French, German, Italian, and Irish (Republican) volunteers fought for the Spanish...

Spain 1936/7: A Study in Workers’ Power

In many respects there were very close parallels between the proletarian revolutions of [Russia] 1917 and [Spain] 1936. Spain and Russia were both gripped by profound economic crises rooted in their semi-feudal land systems. Both were agricultural economies based on a poverty-stricken peasantry. Capitalism had made little headway in Spain because of its inability to compete with the great industrial nations which had got into the field ahead of it; and because of the restricted internal market open to it Spanish industry struggled along by supplementing the economies of the major powers. The...

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