The CNT-FAI was the main trade union force in Spain and the largest anarchist movement in the world. In 1936 it put ministers into a bourgeois government, and kept them there until the government no longer needed them.
The justification was the exceptional circumstances of the fascist threat and the defence of democracy. Trotsky’s objection was not that the anarchists had compromised. It was that they had made an exception to their one non-negotiable principle, rejection of the state, in order to join a state, and had done it at the exact moment when the alternative was available. François Moreau, in “Combats et Débats de la IVe Internationale”, treats the Spanish Revolution of 1936 to 1939 as the decisive test of anarchism, and this is why. The doctrine broke on contact with the situation it had been built for.
The situation that was available
A Popular Front coalition won the Spanish elections in February 1936 on a minimal democratic programme. The reactionary ruling classes found even that intolerable, and in July 1936 the army moved under Franco. The coup failed in much of the country because the working class reacted en masse, and Spain split into a Republican zone and a Francoist one.
Inside the Republican zone there was dual power, which is a phrase worth unpacking because it names something concrete. There was the official Republican government. There were also workers’ militias that had formed spontaneously and had gone as far as establishing a central committee, an embryo of a rival government. Two authorities existed, and one of them was going to be dismantled.
The political ground was complicated further by the oppressed nationalities in Catalonia and the Basque Country, and by the variety of currents inside the workers’ movement.
Who was in the room
The CNT-FAI, mass and anarchist, the country’s main union force.
The POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, formed from a fusion of the Spanish Left Opposition led by Andrés Nin with a right communist opposition group. It grew quickly to tens of thousands of members, which made it very much larger than the Trotskyists in France.
And the Spanish Communist Party, which Moreau describes as the most zealous champion of bourgeois normalisation in the Republican zone. Its programme is worth listing because it is a programme, pursued deliberately: restore a regular bourgeois army, return seized enterprises to their owners, repress the struggles of workers and peasants, and repress the left.
How the dismantling was done
The POUM went first, excluded from the government. Then the left wing of the Socialist Party, with Largo Caballero replaced by the right-wing socialist Negrin at the head of the government in early 1937.
The Communist Party could do this because of Soviet material aid, which gave it steadily increasing weight, and because of the support of the Soviet secret police. The counter-revolution had a supply chain, and the revolution did not.
May 1937
The workers rose in May 1937 and the POUM’s base was at the front of it. The POUM leadership offered its good offices towards a negotiated solution.
Having been expelled from the coalition already, the POUM was then targeted for repression. This is the sequence Trotsky attacked, and the criticism is precise: not that the POUM was insufficiently militant in general, but that at the one moment its own membership had already moved, its leadership went looking for a settlement.
The two failures are different in kind and it is worth keeping them apart. The CNT-FAI’s was doctrinal, a principle that could not survive being applied. The POUM’s was a failure of nerve at a datable moment by a leadership that had the forces and did not use them. Moreau’s account calls this centrism and a lack of decisive revolutionary leadership.
What the Fourth International took from it
The International was not formally founded until 1938, near the end of the war. Its origins in the Left Opposition meant it had been following Spain closely throughout, and its reading matches Trotsky’s: the anarchist leadership failed to seize a revolutionary opportunity, and the POUM lacked the decisiveness to lead one.
The conclusion drawn was the one the Fourth International then built itself around. A revolutionary Marxist party, independent of bourgeois forces, is not a preference among organisational forms. It is the thing whose absence you can watch producing a defeat.
The cost is measurable in what happened next. The anarchist current, having been the predominant force in the Spanish workers’ movement, became insignificant in the country afterwards. That is what an irreparable defeat looks like: not losing an argument, but ceasing to be a factor.
Why this argument is still live
Anyone who prefers movements to parties is making a version of the CNT-FAI’s bet, and it is not an unreasonable one. Movements are more democratic, harder to capture and better at mobilising than any party committee.
Spain is the case that says what the bet costs. A movement without a settled answer to the question of state power does not avoid the question. It gets an answer imposed on it, by whoever does have a plan, which in 1937 meant a party with Soviet aid and a secret police behind it.
The question to carry away is not whether to have a party. It is: when the moment arrives and your own base has already moved, who in your organisation is authorised to decide, and what have they been prepared to decide?
Alan Thornett wrote a short article on the Spanish Revolution in 1995, summarising his longer treatment in Ending the Nightmare, the Socialist Outlook book on European fascism.