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Why did the spanish revolution fail? I have been wondering about this for quite some time, not really managing to draw up any conclusions. How come the russian revolution suceeded in getting to power and maintaining itself in it even with the foreign armies, but spain didn't?

I already have formed most of my own opinion thanks to reading, even though I must reread several things and get on with some new ones to reafirm my position, expand and get some data to make my be able to last in a debate, although I'd appreciate a book with as much detail as the history of the russian revolution for the spanish one. I'll just say for now that I don't like the popular front wink However, the point of the thread is another one. What do you think?

I have never discussed with you this topic specifically, just one slightly related one almost two years ago via voice chat in skype with you and Hero. I know that your views are known, it's just that I've never really known them smile



I will point here for the cause of the defeat to the decisions that the leaders of the revolutionary organisations took, not only during the civil war but also during the whole period of the second republic (here I'm speaking of almost all parties), especially by joining the popular front. I don't see how making an alliance with the capitalists and bourgeois intelligentsia and leaders could prove good for the revolution, no true support coming from them for the aims of the revolution. The whole 'antifascism' thing was naive and ignorant, and just begging for a defeat. The organisations should have focused in trying to play a role similar to the one that the bolsheviks played in the russian revolution, but there was no such party existing. I'd love to add more things here, but I don't have the time right now to prepare a longer post. Generally speaking, I find this to be quite true:

"But because there was no revolutionary party in Spain, and because there was instead a multitude of reactionaries imagining themselves as Socialists and Anarchists, they succeeded under the label of the Popular Front in strangling the socialist revolution and assuring Franco’s victory"



I'll check that one out as soon as I can manage (although my reading list is starting to take considerable proportions)

So to translate what you said, it is because there was no revolutionary organisation with disciplined and educated cadres, with the support of the workers. Rather, the workers, without leadership, engaged in heroic measures of self defense, organisation, and expropriation, but in the end were unwilling, unable, or just unknowing enough to carry s**t through to the end, in defiance of the opportunists.

Your posts seem rather confused to me. On the one hand, you've said that any revolution which fails to put power in the hands of the workers is essentially historically premature and shouldn't have happened. So the workers were simply not conscious enough, organized enough, or whatever enough, to take power in their own hands. But on the other hand you say the failure of the workers to take power is not the fault of the workers themselves and is due to betrayal. 

But anyway, your description of what happened:
Actually; the workers were betrayed by CNT leadership who willingly ceded power to the Popular Front reformist government. They were also betrayed by the Soviet bureaucracy who sought to co-opt and control the struggle, and who imprisoned many of the anarchists, socialists, and POUMists who stood in their way.
Is perfectly in line with my post you replied to, though you just seem to not recognize it: you say 'actually' as if to correct me, but what you've said is just a historically specific version of what I said in general: the workers supported objectively counter-revolutionary organizations which proceeded to hold back the revolution and lead to the victory of fascism. Where they didn't support the counter-revolutionary 'republicans' they engaged in heroic measures of self-defense against the fascists, organization, and expropriation of the capitalists.

You seem to imply, by your 'correction' of my post that the CNT, which betrayed the workers, was revolutionary ( what else could your objection to "it is because there was no revolutionary organisation with disciplined and educated cadres, with the support of the workers." mean?). The implication is that this was such an organization, and yet it betrayed the revolution. Isn't this absurd?

You then go on to protect the virtue of the workers, denying that they could possibly be at fault or blame for the failure of a revolution, which is kinda silly. Certainly the workers are not morally at fault. However it was the demoralization of the workers, who had been bled white through the civil war, their best elements dead on the battlefield, after the defeat of the German Revolution, which failed due to a rash of bad decisions on the part of the German and international leadership, in part due to inexperience of the German party, and in part due to the dominance of the then adventurist leadership of Zinoviev and Stalin in the international, giving bad advice, which was accepted due to the understandably high position the movement held these representatives of a successful revolution. 

After the failure of the German revolution, the Russian workers became demoralized, and ceased to offer much real opposition to the bureaucratic tendencies in the party, while those bureaucratic tendencies themselves received an impetus through the perceived impossibility of international revolution, encouraging and emboldening them.

I don't know if you'll try to express outrage at 'laying blame on the workers' or whatever, but there it is.

About privilege and power, well, sure. If someone has certain rights over the mass of the population, then yeah, they may certainly come to cease identifying with the workers. That's the 'secret' behind the bureaucratisation of the soviet union. So what's the solution? Abolish all power? In a time of civil war, social breakdown and economic collapse, that's stupid. Make power accountable, revocable at a moments notice through the decision of the workers themselves? Certainly. that's exactly what Lenin pushed for. See his article "purging the party, available by clicking the RTFM pic in my sig.

I will quote a little:
At such a time improvements at home are the major achievements of the revolution; a neither salient, striking, nor immediately perceptible improvement in labour, in its organisation and results; an improvement from the viewpoint of the fight against the influence of the petty-bourgeois and petty-bourgeois-anarchist element, which corrupts both the proletariat and the Party. To achieve such an improvement, the Party must be purged of those who have lost touch with the masses (let alone, of course, those who discredit the Party in the eyes of the masses). Naturally. we shall not submit to everything the masses say, because the masses, too, sometimes—particularly in time of exceptional weariness and exhaustion resulting from excessive hardship and suffering—yield to sentiments that are in no way advanced. But in appraising persons, in the negative attitude to those who have “attached” themselves to us for selfish motives, to those who have become “puffed-up commissars” and “bureaucrats”, the suggestions of the non-Party proletarian masses and, in many cases, of the non-Party peasant masses, are extremely valuable. The working masses have a fine intuition, which enables them to distinguish honest and devoted Communists from those who arouse the disgust of people earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, enjoying no privileges and having no “pull”.

Unfortunately, the next two years of civil war lead to further bureaucratisation, which was partly unavoidable, but combined with the constant destruction of the best elements of the working class in the war, as well as the disintegration of the proletariat in the factories through moving back to the farms and collapse of industry, then at the end of the war, the drawing of these 'peasantified' workers, and other peasant elements who were drawn to the cities with the rebuilding of industry, this led to a vast reduction in the political level of the proletariat. This reduced cultural and political level of the proletariat, combined with the decreased cultural and political level of the party and soviets, resulted in the bureaucratisation of the revolution.

Again, this is to not place moral blame on the workers, but it is to plainly acknowledge the place the workers, their culture, and their representatives occupy in a revolution.

Finally your understanding of capital is wrong. Power isn't capital, nor a form of capital. Capital is a social relationship, yes, characterized by social power and compulsion to force people to work for a wage and create commodities. Capital rests on power, yes, but it isn't power, nor is 'part of it' power. But that is only tangentially related, since if it were so, the while you would be able to describe the collectivized economy of the Soviet Union as 'capitalist' it would also mean all class societies are/were capitalist, which is kinda silly.