Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

Civil War in Spain 1936 - 1939

The Comintern had recruited 31,369 comrades for the International Brigades as of 30 April 1938

The Legion Condor stationed about 4,500-5,000 at the fronts at any one time.

Mussolini dispatched about 74,300men in Spain from August 1936 to the end of the war.

MESSAGE OF THE COMINTERN (SH)

ON OCCASION OF THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY

OF FASCIST VICTORY IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

March 28, 1939 – March 28, 2014

Today, 75 years ago, the fascist forces of Franco finally occupied Madrid on March 28, 1939, after a three-year war that transformed Spain into an amount of ruins entirely vulnerable to the harshest capitalist exploitation and oppression.

When the Popular Front won the bourgeois elections in Spain, the darkest forces of reaction couldn’t accept it. The large landowners, the industrial tycoons and their fascist lackeys that were already present in Spain were worried about a government that, although not Marxist-Leninist neither communist, was however a bourgeois-democratic government which wanted to provide workers with some formal “social and labour rights”. These “rights” and the overall policy of the Spanish Popular Front had a bourgeois character and they never represented any kind of serious menace to capitalist mode of production, as the Popular Front never aimed at changing the bourgeois socio-economic order through revolutionary violence. On the contrary, it defended “peaceful ways” and it included reformists and opportunists of many types: Trotskyists, anarchists, social-democrats, republicans, etc. It is true that it also included some communists, but it must be stated that communist participation at the Spanish Popular Front was already influenced by the revisionist tendencies of the “popular front” theories that would culminate in the VII World Congress of the Comintern. Indeed, the Spanish Popular Front could even be positive to bourgeois-capitalist interests, because it would have allowed them to provide proletarians, workers and other exploited and oppressed classes with some fake “rights” that difficult the acquisition of a truly communist consciousness, because it could submerge them in the illusion that capitalist state was now concerned about their “welfare rights” and had not oppressive class nature anymore, all this without basically touching profit accumulation and maximization.

This could have indeed been the case if it was not for the character of Spanish exploitative capitalist-aristocratic classes, which are among the most aggressive and backward of Europe. Spanish exploitative classes have spent their history soaked in the blood of the oppressed classes and peoples. In the XIV and XV centuries, in search for gold and for cheap labour force, they invaded American continent, brutally enslaving Amerindian populations and causing an immensurable genocide that left dead tens of million of native Americans. And it was not by chance that Spain was the last country in the world to abolish Inquisition. In the early XXth century, there were still people in Southern Spain who received harsh physical punishments for having offended the rules of the “Holy Office”. And we could give many other examples of extreme reactionarism by Spanish exploitative classes. Therefore, they were not eager to let workers get with not even some alms provided by the bourgeois “social rights” advocated by the Popular Front. And so they launched a civil war relying on one of their most faithful and valuable instruments: the army. In 1936, Spanish army was full of fascist officials and it was led by generals like Franco who didn’t even try to hide their sympathy for Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In their war plans, Spanish exploitative classes also counted with another useful ally: Portuguese exploitative classes, who had established their own fascist regime some years earlier and were willing to provide all means to overthrow the Popular Front and replace it with a fascist rule similar to their own and which, in their perspective, was the best manner to prevent socialist revolution.