Fascism and Popular Front The Politics of Retreat, 19301938

Fascism and

Popular Front

The Politics of Retreat,

19301938

FORGING THE POPULAR FRONT

Until the last minute, unity was overshadowed by fierce Socialist- Communist animosities. The PCF sternly applied the Cominterns 1928 line, denouncing the SFIO not only as a tool of the bourgeoisie but as an instrument of the capitalist attack against the working class. Social Fas- cism obliterated distinctions between fascism and other bourgeois pol- itics, indicting socialists precisely for defending liberal institutions and fos- tering reformist illusions, diverting workers from the revolutionary path. Unfortunately, such slogans conveyed the PCFs experience of the system. In 1928, the partys million first-ballot votes brought only 14 parliamentary seats, while the same support for the right-wing Union Republicaine De- mocratique brought 142! Preventive arrest was used routinely against Com- munists, and the PCFs 1929 Congress was surrounded by police. Socialists ceded nothing to Communists in enmity. Le Populaire declared: We shall never ask anything from the Bolsheviks, well kick their teeth in.⁷

Moves toward unity in France took a double track. First, party lead- erships buried the hatchet. On 27 July 1934, a unity pact was signed, fol- lowed by a joint memorial for the assassination of Jean Jaure`snicely sym- bolizing the mixture of history, solidarity, and patriotic countermemory identifying the Popular Front. These events were carefully watched else- where, and a month later PSI and PCI also signed a pact. Reviving the United Front was a badly needed boost to left-wing morale. Between De- cember 1933 and August 1934, initiatives occurred in Catalonia, Asturias, the Saarland, Austria, and Belgium, plus many localized actions. In Spain, independent socialists set the pace. Local Communists were pulled along too, but the Comintern still dragged its feet.

This was the second track. Comintern endorsement was needed for na- tional pacts of Socialists and Communists to stick. The domestic preoccu- pations of Soviet leaders in 193035 made enough room for allies of a United Front to maneuver, but the vital impetus was the fascist threat. The Nazi seizure of power, and right-wing violence in France and elsewhere, impelled the first United Front initiatives in 193334, reopening debate in ECCI for the first time since 1928. Georgii Dimitrov moved the Comintern toward antifascism, backed by Dmitri Manuilski and Cominterns man in the PCF, Evzhen Fried (Clement).⁸ On 28 May 1934, Pravda endorsed an SFIO-PCF pact. The German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian CPs still

balked, but the French, Italian, Czechoslovak, and Polish parties were now on board. From June 1934, United Front from Above became the official Third International line.

In the Labor and Socialist International (LSI), the Cominterns social democratic rival, resistance to unity was more entrenched, so while the Third International was emerging from its bunker, the Second continued digging itself in. Alignments in the LSI Executive repeated the battle lines of 191723, when an anti-Communist northern bloc had squelched left- socialist efforts led by the SPO to keep lines open.⁹ After an LSI Emergency Conference rebuffed Comintern overtures in August 1933, the Austrian, French, Italian, Spanish, and Swiss socialist parties joined the Menshevik and Polish sections in a left-wing Group of Seven, and the divisions paralyzed social democracy internationally. Despite informal contacts from Comintern in autumn 1934, LSI still refused talks.¹⁰

Comintern sought alliances elsewhere, shifting from the United to the broader Popular Front in May and June 1935.¹¹ French Communist lan- guage shifted dramatically from the class struggle to people and nation instead. Extraparliamentary mobilization of the masses gave way to insti- tutional vocabularies of parliament and constitution. In Spain, the PCE also moved officially from sectarianism to support for United Fronts, appealing to socialists, anarchists, republicans, nationalists; everyone in one bloc facing the fascist bloc of the various monarcho-fascist parties of the bour- geoisie.¹² On 20 May 1935 the PCEs pact with the Republican parties was signed.

Any doubts about Stalins support were removed by the Franco-Soviet defensive treaty of 2 May 1935, with an accompanying Moscow Declara- tion on the two countries needs for strong armies. Acknowledging the legitimate security needs of an imperialist power was a hard pill for a party like the PCF to swallow. But Thorez could now wear the Jacobin mantle of 1792, and embracing national defense helped the Communists credi- bility as coalition partners. Defense of the Soviet Union was de facto sub- stituting for the world revolution. But the debacle of the Third Periods sectarianism after 1928 lent this more modest strategy greater appeal.

All this set the scene for the Third Internationals Seventh Congress in Moscow, on 25 July 1935. The ritualized triumphalism of the occasion couldnt disguise realities of loss and retreat. Dimitrov delivered the main address, presenting ECCIs freshly minted definition of fascismas the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.¹³ This badly misrecognized Nazism, which was never an instrument of big business or the straightfor- ward vehicle of capitalist interests in that way. But by contrasting the pro- fascist parts of the dominant classes with the democratic ones, it created a basis for antifascist alliance with the latter. By contrasting fascist regimes with bourgeois states respecting democracy, an opposition rejected at the Sixth Congress in 1928, Dimitrov embraced bourgeois democratic free-

doms per se as something worth defending in their own right, as a source of lasting political good.

In a time of retreat, the Left should not only emphasize working-class unity for defending democratic rights, Dimitrov argued, but embrace other social groups interested in democracy too, including parts of the dominant classes. It should work with nonsocialistsliberals, radicals, and republi- cans; peace movements; humanitarian organizations; where possible the churches; even conservative groups willing to defend democracy. It should support bourgeois governments upholding democratic rights, especially in the interests of international antifascist coalitions, both for containing Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and for removing the Soviet Unions isolation. In short, the politics of the revolutionary Left underwent a major post-

1917 reorientation.

This was the Peoples Front. It was a defensive regroupmentfor raising obstacles to fascisms spread and encouraging resistance where it had won. It was meant to overcome CP isolation by finding the Lefts common ground. But building the broadest cooperation required democratic rather than socialist principles, because working-class parties by themselves werent strong enough to win. Furthermore, if the Left managed to establish its democratic credentials, coalitions might pass beyond existing democracy to the groundwork of socialist transition. The Popular Front strategy had this other, ulterior dimension: it was more than a temporary defensive tactic, or even a strategy for eventually turning defeat into offensive. It was also a carefully considered strategy of advancing to socialism.¹⁴

This Popular Front strategy contained some vital recognitions. It was the first revision of the revolutionary optimism driving Communism since the foundation years of 191921 and the first questioning of the Bolshevik model from the inside. Communists began withdrawing from their van- guard claims: they were not the workers sole legitimate voice, and their working-class support was not guaranteed but shared with others. Nor could a countrys working class achieve victory by itself. It needed social allies, whether peasants, white-collar and professional groups, or intelli- gentsia, or even the small business class. The more complex the society, the more essential alliances became. Only exceptionally could CPs entertain seizing power alone. Above all, their sectarian isolation needed to be over- come.

In contrast to the short-term and instrumental strategies of the 1920s, this was a new departure. Alliances had to be principled, because alliances to deceive ones partners (supporting them as the rope supports a hanging man, in Lenins notorious image) were self-defeating. To achieve them, Communists should even be willing to relinquish their leading role and take a junior place. As the Popular Front strategy evolved, it envisaged concentric circles of cooperation: United Fronts of workers for elections, general strikes, and other mass actions to heal the splits of 191421; anti- fascist Peoples Fronts embracing nonsocialists to resist foreign aggres-

sion from Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan; and an international front of gov- ernments against fascism and war.

Democracy became the unifying theme of this approach. Internation- alism was still upheld, but democratic patriotism replaced the purism reigning since Lenins extreme Zimmerwaldism of 191516. This meant speaking the language of national democracy, in the syntax of what Gram- sci called the national-popular, drawing on a countrys distinctive traditionsthe radical Leveller and Chartist versions of parliamentary de- mocracy in Britain, Jacobinism in France, democratic traditions of Risorgimento in Italy. As Thorez said: We will not abandon to our ene- mies the tricoleur, the flag of the great French Revolution, or the Marseil- laise, the song of the soldiers of the Convention. The CPs now claimed the mantle of a nations best democratic traditions.¹⁵

Popular Frontism recast socialism as the highest form of older progres- sive traditons rather than their implacable opponent, and this affirming of universal humanist values also implied a different politics for culture and the arts. In marking the distance from bourgeois culture, the Third Pe- riods sectarian isolation had forced Communists into greater inventiveness, embracing agitprop, a formalistic left modernism, and the avant-garde. In contrast, Popular Fronts now resutured the Lefts cultural imagination to the progressive bourgeois heritage, rallying it to the antifascist banner. Anti- fascist appeals were directed especially toward intellectuals in literature, theater, and the arts, as well as popular arts like film.¹⁶

The Popular Front was a huge departure, produced by the scale of the fascist threat. For Otto Bauer, for example, fascism was an ultraright at- tempt to burst the fetters of 191819, because the costs of democracy, typified by the welfare state and union rights, exceeded what the needs of capitalist restabilization and political order could bear. While capitalism had tottered in 1918, the Left had failed to realize its revolutionary advan- tage, and a temporary equilibrium of class capacities ensued. Initially, Bauer had seen this transitional equilibrium optimistically, stressing the po- tential for socialisms future gains. But by the end of the 1930s, he saw the scope for fascist counterrevolution instead. It was not a revolutionary crisis that provoked the rise of fascism, in Bauers view, but the Rights desire to sweep away the democratic gains in the republican system. Nazism fed not on Communism per se but on hatred of the Weimar Republics freedoms:

The turn to fascism is provoked less by capitalist fear of revolution than by a determination to depress wages, to destroy the social reforms achieved by the working class, and to smash the positions of political power held by its representatives; not to suppress a revolutionary situation but to wipe out the gains of reformist socialism.¹⁷

If, contrary to the Third Periods maximalism, Europe wasnt on the verge of revolution during the Great Depression but direly vulnerable to fascisms counterrevolutionary assault, then the Lefts priorities shifted ac- cordingly. The Cominterns new leadership edged toward this view in

193234. And while ultraleft proclivities survived in parts of the Comintern

(some Communists believed nothing had changed; that the Popular Front was simply a short-term expedient), the more democratic view implied reevaluating revolution in the capitalist West. This went furthest in the PCIvia Gramscis influence and the strategizing of Togliatti, Gramscis legatee. For Gramsci and others, something had fundamentally changed. Their thinking was

based on the assumption that the lost opportunity of 191720 would not recur, and that Communist Parties must envisage not a short front offensive but a lengthy war of positiona policy of the long haul. In effect, they must win the leadership of a broad alliance of social

forces, and maintain this leadership during a prolonged period of tran- sition, in which the actual transfer of power was only one episode.¹⁸

This was now the revolutionary Lefts main division. On one side was the classic insurrectionist approach: a mass uprising of the oppressed; vi- olent destruction of the state; confrontation with the dominant classes to uproot the bases of their power; retribution and reprisals against the old order; extreme vigilance for the security of the revolution. This originated in the French Revolutions Jacobin phase, continuing through the nineteenth-century insurrectionary tradition of Buonarotti and Blanqui. Un- der the Second International, it survived where parties faced illegality and police repression, as in Russia, resurfacing in the Bolshevik seizure of power.¹⁹ On the other side was gradualism. This stressed not the revolu- tionary climacteric but a different set of modalities: building popular sup- port slowly over a long term, drawing progressive aspirations from all parts of society, commanding ever greater public influence via existing institu- tions, building the working-class movements moral authority into the dem- ocratic foundations of the transition. This approach redirected attention from armed struggle and pitched confrontations to changing the system from within by incremental advance.

The democratic quality of the restructuring was crucial. The Left was to build the new society in the frame of the old, both prefiguratively by exemplary institutions and behaviors in the working-class movement and legislatively by reforms. This more gradualist perspective was built on some key recognitions: the lower-than-expected electoral ceiling of support for socialism (rarely more than 40 percent of the vote at best, usually much lower); the necessity of coalitions with nonsocialist forces; the inevitability of periods of moderation, defensive consolidation, and slow advance. Above all, confrontational violence, intolerance, and coercion isolated the Left from the rest of society. Breadth of consensus was essential to socialist success.

By its gradualism, this second perspective confused the differences opened by the splits of 191721between Communism and social de-

mocracy. The Gramscian understanding of Popular Front converged in many ways with the left-socialist strands of the Second International. There was also much congruence with reformist socialism since 1917, both in the foregrounding of democracy and in the gradualist stress on existing insti- tutions. A third convergence occurred with a new radical liberalism, most developed in Italy in the ideas of Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli, who opened liberal thinking to the permanence of conflict and an ethics of civic activism.²⁰ It was unclear where the boundaries were now drawn.

THE POPULAR FRONT GOVERNMENT IN FRANCE

The French Popular Front took off when the Radicals joined the mass meeting of PCF and SFIO on Bastille Day in 1935. Moved by distaste for Pierre Lavals right-wing government of June 1935, with its deflationary social agenda and profascist foreign policy, and by fear of the right-wing Leagues, the Radicals realigned with the Left. The tripartite coalition was sealed in the Popular Front Program of 11 January 1936. The Left mobi- lized for another huge demonstration of over half a million when the SFIO leader Leon Blum was almost lynched by the Action Francaise on 13 Feb- ruary 1936 and the momentum built impressively toward the elections of May 1936, which brought the Popular Front a decisive majority, with the balance shifting markedly from the Radicals to the SFIO and PCF.²¹ The new government took office in June 1936 under Blum, with the PCF sup- porting from outside the cabinet. The masses gave spectacular acclaim on

24 May, when six hundred thousand marched to commemorate the dead of the Paris Commune.²²

The twin coordinates of this Left resurgence, antifascism and economic distress, were immediately visible. On 11 May 1936, a week after the elec- tion, in the hiatus before the new government, the previously nonmilitant workers of the Breguet aircraft works in Le Havre occupied their factory, secured immediate victory via the arbitration of the local mayor, and then flocked into the CGT, thereby triggering a massive strike wave. By June, two million workers had downed tools, complementing the Popular Front with a general strike.²³

The strikes were remarkable in form. Three-quarters of them were fac- tory occupations, challenging employers prerogatives and evoking the Eu- ropean direct-action insurgencies of 191721. Not planned by unions or politically organized militants, the strikes were a spontaneous response to the labor movements entry into government, which reversed the European trend of fascist success and left-wing defeat. The mood of popular empow- erment was palpable. This was an explosion of popular desire, composing scenes of extraordinary visual power. In the Paris suburbs, building after buildingsmall factories and large factories, even comparatively small

workshopswere flying red, or red and tricoleur flagswith pickets in front of the closed gates.²⁴ The joy was licensed by political expectation. On 7 June 1936, the employers met with the CGT in the Ho tel Matig- non, and made remarkable concessions.²⁵ The Matignon Agreement hon- ored union rights and recognized the CGT, with collective agreements in- dustry by industry, wage increases of 715 percent favoring the lowest paid, and elected works committees in factories of over 10 people. Blum attached a political rider, promising collective bargaining, the 40-hour week, and two weeks paid vacation. This was an extraordinary victory for labor, rem- iniscent of European trade unionisms dramatic gains of 191819. In one fell swoop, it gave the CGT leadership national corporative influence, in- stituted shopfloor representation, and committed a Left government to so- cial reform. It was a moment of rare decisiveness by a newly elected so-

cialist government. For once, the Left seemed ready to act.

There were three dimensions to the departure. First, it was trade union- isms historic breakthrough in France. The 40-hour week was one long- standing central demand. The CGT also gained a legitimate national voice. In one year, CGT membership scaled unprecedented heights, from around

778,000 when the strikes began to almost 4 million in March 1937. Sec- ond, the government showed an impressive political willnot only banning the right-wing Leagues (where the SPD had tolerated them, for instance) but also acting immediately on its program. It passed 133 new laws in only

73 days, including partial nationalization of the Bank of France, nation- alization of arms industries, public works, creation of the Wheat Marketing Board, and raising the school leaving age to 14. Third, the Left invaded the public sphere. The exuberant theatricality of the factory occupations pervaded the atmosphere. The rally of 14 July 1936 mobilized a million people for the most spectacular pageant of the streets; new paid holidays brought workers into the countryside and onto the beaches, disrupting es- tablished topographies of social privilege. In year one, six hundred thou- sand people benefited from the peoples annual holiday ticket that was introduced by the Socialist minister responsible for sports and leisure, Leo Lagrange.²⁶

From this peak, however, came rapid descent. The Popular Fronts pro- gram was a wager on consumption: it sought to reflate the economy via increased purchasing power and the social legislations stimulus to produc- tivity. Capital went on strike. Between April and September 1936, the Bank of France gold reserves dropped from 63 to 54 billion francs, with another

1.5 billion fleeing the country during 416 September. Blum reneged on a central commitment by devaluing the currency. Production also failed to respond. By October, Blum demanded a change of pace, and his New Year message sacrificed further reforms to social reconciliation.²⁷ The fiscal policies of March 1937 reverted to extreme conservatism, cutting public spending and abandoning the promises on pensions, unemployment bene- fits, indexing of wages, and public works. Blum became isolated in his own

governing coalition. The PCF criticized from the left, the Radicals broke to the right. On 22 June 1937, Radical defections in the Senate denied Blum the powers for the new fiscal emergency, and he resigned. There were no protests in the streets.

What explained this plummeting from the proud heights of June 1936? The PCF was the Popular Fronts true beneficiary, as it passed from margins to mainstream, raising its membership from 40,000 (1934) to some

330,000 (1937). It straddled both worlds of the movement, with one foot in the legislature and one in the streets. It held Blum to the common pro- gram, while shaping popular militancy into disciplined support. While the PCF deployed its militants in the factories and recruited strikers, it sought to leash militancy as much as driving it on. In the bright glow of the gov- ernments inception, this strategy could work. Restraint, respect for pro- cedures, high productivity for the national economy, discipline, unityall were needed for the governments success. But workers would buy the rhet- oric if gains ensued. Given Blums retrenchment after September 1936, these abruptly ceased.²⁸

After Blums resignation, things fell apart. Dramatic strikes occurred in December 1937, with a huge battle at the Goodrich tire factory and a public services strike in the Seine region. In MarchApril 1938, 150,000

Paris metalworkers came out. In November 1938 wildcat strikes against increasing the 40-hour week climaxed in an abortive general strike on 30

November. The problem had already been dramatized at Clichy on 16

March 1937: the Communist council and Socialist deputy called a coun- terrally against a fascist meeting the government had refused to ban; the police fired on the Left, with five deaths and several hundred wounded; and the gap between the government and its working-class supporters was exposed.

The post-Matignon political logic was depressingly familiar.²⁹ It recalled the SPDs situation in Germany after November 1918: early strength cre- ated by an extraparliamentary movement, temporary collapse of the dom- inant classes, and initial decisiveness in the legislative arena; compromises and deals with the forces of order; the alienation of a disappointed but still mobilized rank and file; and finally the loss of government power amid demoralization, repression, bitter recriminations, and a deep political split. In retrospect, this logic was inscribed in SFIO attitudes from the start. Amid the strike wave, the new minister of the interior, Roger Salengro (driven to suicide by right-wing vilification later that year), a key architect of Matig- non and the reforms, declared; For my part Ive made my choice between order and anarchy. I will maintain order in the face of all opposition.³⁰

The wonder was that Blum ever began. After the panic of MayJune 1936, the dominant classes also recovered their nerve, subjecting the government to ever-tightening constraint, in an unstoppable logic of disablement, for which the Radicals became the unfailing barometer.³¹

DECISION IN SPAIN

How might this have been avoided? The Blum government had two sources of momentum: its party-political breadth and its popular support. Both gave the Left unparalleled inclusiveness, stretching its legitimacy past the previous boundaries of socialist strength. But if one key to the Popular Fronts initial momentum was its temporary ownership of patriotism, an- other was its equally fleeting political resolve. Far from dissipating post- elections, the Popular Fronts impetus grewthrough immediate introduc- tion of popular reforms, domination of public space (the massive demonstrations and their iconography), social breadth of the rhetoric, ap- peals to history, and the bid for leadership of the nation-in-general. This situation needed leaders of vision who commanded the necessary political willcapitalizing on the opening of June 1936, feeding the sense of historic opportunity, driving the advantage home against the dominant classes, and finding the broadest unity in the PCFs sense.

The Spanish Civil Warbeginning with the nationalist uprising of 17

18 July 1936 against the Spanish Popular Front government formed from the elections of 15 Februarywas the test. The electoral victory of Popular Fronts in two large and contiguous countries was a golden chance for cross- national solidarity. Indeed, the polarized rhetoric of the 1936 elections marked the new Spanish government as a bulwark against fascisms further advance. The military rebellion produced an outpouring of emotional sol- idarity from what survived of democratic Europe. Aid for Spain seemed an obvious priority for the Blum government to pursue.

However, rather than honoring the Republics military contracts with Spain, Blum caved in to pressure from the French Foreign Office, the British government, the Radicals in his own administration, and the right-wing press and suspended military aid, substituting an international Non- Intervention Agreement to block Italian and German aid for the nationalist rebels instead. This was a catastrophe for the Spanish Republic. But it also undermined the Popular Front in France. It disregarded left-wing morales international dimension in 193336. It squandered the potential for anti- fascist rallying via combined internationalist and patriotic identification. Polarization in France would have ensuedbut on the Lefts own terms rather than via constant retreat and with rhetorical advantage constantly given away.³²

Spains Popular Front was ambiguous from the start. It embraced the broadest spectrum of the LeftSocialists and their unions (the UGT), Com- munists, smaller ultraleft sects, and left Republicans. But its core was more specific, the Republican-Socialist coalition of 193133. In the 1933 elec- tions, the PSOE had broken with left Republican prime minister Manuel Azana, opening the way for a right-wing victory.³³ The ensuing backlash

was appalling, reversing progress toward land reform and labor laws and wreaking endless harassment on the labor movement. While the reactive PSOE uprising of October 1934 symbolized resistance to fascism, it pro- voked vicious repression. In response, a potent dialectic of electoral co- alescence and popular mobilization was released. Azana rallied Socialists and left Republicans for democratic restoration, capturing popular imagi- nation by his oratory in massive rallies during MayOctober 1935. But popular hopes raced past these parliamentary horizons, embracing more radical desires for change.³⁴

The government elected in February 1936 needed to rally republican defense without driving the middle classes to the Right. However, the PSOE was bitterly split.³⁵ The rightist Indalecio Prieto backed coalition with Azana. But the PSOE majority, based in Madrid, the Socialist Youth, and militant parts of the UGT had veered to the left. Under Francisco Largo Caballeroveteran PSOE leader for three decades, architect of the UGTs accommodation to Primo de Riveras dictatorship in the 1920s, minister of labor 193133, and now freshly declared revolutionarythe Socialists ab- stained from constructive government politics just when they were needed most. In November 1933, Largo exchanged bourgeois democracy for the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was behind the fiasco of October 1934 and the intransigence of 1935. He refused talks with Azana, thereby disa- bling Prietos republican defense. By 1936, he left the PSOE Executive to form an alternative leadership. He eventually endorsed the Popular Front but from outside the resulting government, fueling the verbal polarization and incipient violence of the coming months. He demanded a wholly So- cialist government but tolerated the drift to civil war, denying the Popular Front its own majority partys full support.

Largo was a disaster for the Republic, strutting on the stage of history while its real chances were missed. A Johnny-come-lately of revolution, he hijacked the militancy of 193336, denouncing reformist illusions and fir- ing utopian hopes but with no idea of how power could be seized, given the Lefts divisions and the Rights fearsome strength. Largo was a consum- mate corporatist politiciannow the labor bureaucrat, negotiating a mo- dus vivendi from regimes in power and securing his members the best avail- able deal (the Primo de Rivera years); now the reforming Socialist minister

(193133); now the neosyndicalist voice of militancy (193334). But Spains societal crisis required greater political vision than this. When Largo struck the pose of revolutionary tribune after 1933, he sidestepped this responsibility, urging the masses into confrontations he had no strategy for winning. As things fell apart in May 1936 and Prieto secured Azanas el- evation to the presidency, leaving the premiership for himself, Largo still withheld PSOE support. Yet, when forming a government two months after the military revolt, his reformist course was indistinguishable from the one he refused in May. After forming his government on 4 September 1936, he abandoned Madrid to the Nationalist advance on 6 November, leaving its

defense to General Jose Miaja, with no prior warning and no plans for arming the people.³⁶

Madrid was saved by its citizens. Largo had left a vacuum, into which the Communists stepped, fortified by the International Brigades and the all- important Soviet aid arriving from November 1936.³⁷ Aided by Largos self-styled bolshevism, the PCE already had its foot in the Socialist door, with the Communist CGTU joining the UGT and the two youth movements merging under Santiago Carillo, who was already attending PCE meetings. Communists drew huge prestige from the defense of Madrid, boosting membership from a few thousand to a quarter of a million by May 1937. With direct lines to government under Largo, they relentlessly pressed the Cominterns guidelines for Popular Fronts, urging the need at all costs to avoid alienating either the British and French governments or bourgeois democrats inside Spain by fear of revolution. Winning the war took utmost priority over social reforms. The PCE stood for centralizing authority, con- ventional military discipline, and respect for small property.

These goals were advanced against the popular hopes unleashed by the Republics defense. A vast militant sector was unintegrated into the Popular Front, the anarcho-syndicalism of the CNT, based in Aragon, Valencia, Andalusia, and industrial Catalonia (where it dwarfed the Socialists).³⁸ In the summer of 1936, even the CNT was outflanked by revolutionary spon- taneity. After defeating the military rebels in five of the seven biggest cities and half the countryside, militants pushed on to form revolutionary com- mittees, seizing local government, and collectivizing industry and agricul- ture. In Barcelona, anarcho-syndicalisms urban capital, CNT leaders were paralyzed: neither willing to run the Catalonian government nor ready to proclaim the revolution, they simply called for solidarity with the Republic, and watched while their supporters seized the city regardless. The social landscape explodedflags, banners, insignia, posters, badges, workers with rifles, everyone in blue dungarees, the exuberant stylistics of the people capturing public space. As a Communist railwayman, Narciso Julian, who arrived in Barcelona the night before the popular insurrection and was swept up in its fervor, said, It was incredible, the proof in practice of what one knows in theory: the power and strength of the masses when they take to the streets. Suddenly you feel their creative power; you cant imagine how rapidly the masses are capable of organizing themselves. The forms they invent go far beyond anything youve dreamt of, read in books.³⁹

Julians next sentence was: What was needed now was to seize this initiative, give it shape; and this was the rub. Barcelonas anarchism was inspiring, everything a revolution should be. But anarcho-syndicalists re- fused state power once the people controlled the economy via self-managed collectives, and this apoliticism removed CNT leaders from the republican coalition. The movements utterly incorrigible localism was worsened by the autonomy of workplace collectives, rogue militias, the shadowy influ- ence of charismatic bosses, and the violent intransigence of the FAI, the

CNTs interior vanguard.⁴⁰ This spelled irresponsible disorder to the Cat- alan government, where the newly formed PSUC and the Esquerra were dominant.⁴¹ By the spring of 1937, half the Communists members were now peasant owners, shopkeepers, artisans, and white-collar workers wor- ried by collectivization in town and country. As the Republics military fortunes sank, the passive dual power of the anarchistskeeping their parallel power structures but abstaining from governmentbecame intol- erable. The government moved to evict them from the Telephone Exchange, and after a week of street fighting (38 May 1937) took control of Bar- celona. Largo was replaced as prime minister by the moderate Socialist Juan Negrin.

The Republics defeatBilbao fell to the Nationalists in June 1937, Gi- jo n in October, Aragon in MarchApril 1938, Barcelona in January 1939, and finally Madrid on 27 March 1939, with the Republics surrender on 1

Aprilowed much to this internal strife. Largo had squandered the chance to stabilize the government in early 1936, immobilizing the one party ca- pable of grounding the Popular Front. Then, by abruptly switching to re- publican consolidation on forming a government, he left his supporters militancy dangerously high and dry. The PSOE was also haughtily hostile to the CNT, and these two Lefts dominated separate regions. To political divisions was therefore added geographical fragmentation, plus the rivalries of countless local committees, jealously guarding their autonomy. Com- munists, easily the most effective republicans, embraced these divisions. Licensed by the indispensible Soviet aid and by their own vanguardism

(undiminished by Dimitrovs strictures at Cominterns Seventh Congress), the PCE behaved with increasing arrogancemaneuvering to monopolize key positions, especially in the reprofessionalized army; showing sectarian disregard for allies and contempt for opponents; ignoring democratic pro- cedures; and finally resorting to terror against rivals in 1937 (notably the Partido Obrero de Unificacio n Marxista (POUM), stigmatized as Trots- kyist and so for Stalinists tantamount to fascism), in a disgraceful copy of the Soviet purges.