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“Though economically weak the Spanish bourgeoisie had not been deprived of its repressive apparatus. While Franco led the military attack, the Republican bourgeoisie manoeuvred in the most consummate manner in order to disarm the workers ideologically “by the judicial legalisation of the arming of the workers” and the incorporation of the militias into the state. But it was above all the POUM and the CNT which played the decisive role in enrolling the workers for the Front. The two organisations ordered an end to the general strike without having played any part in unleashing it. The strength of the bourgeoisie was expressed not so much by Franco, but by the existence of an extreme Left able to demobilise the Spanish proletariat.

When the capitalist attack was unleashed by Franco‘s uprising, neither the POUM nor the CNT dreamed of calling the workers into the streets…

Through its slogan of a return to work, the POUM clearly expressed the turning point in the situation and the bourgeoisie‘s manoeuvre of putting an end to the general strike, then by issuing decrees to avoid a workers reaction and finally, by pushing the workers out of the towns towards the siege of Zaragossa.

Bilan no. 36, Oct.-Nov. 1936, “La Leçon des événements d‘Espagne”

Certainly, as Bilan recognised, at the end of July, the regular republican army had been “practically dissolved”, but thanks to there two parties and the Stalinist PSUC “it was gradually reconstituted with the columns of militiamen whose general staff remained clearly bourgeois…”

Finally, Bilan added, the power of the Republican state was definitely consolidated on 2 August, when the Catalonia Generalidad decided “to call several classes to arms”. The civil war between bourgeoisie and proletariat became a plain war between rival bourgeois factions, under the leadership of the coalition Republican government supported by the Poumists and the anarchists.”

– Philippe Bourrinet summarizing Bilan’s analysis of the Spanish civil war in The “Bordigist” Current, 1912-1952: Italy, France, Belgium, USA

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Image: Stalingrad by Asger Jorn, 1972