Leon Trotsky: The Leadership Crisis in Spain

From “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”

November 26, 1931

[The Spanish Revolution (1931-39). New York 1973, p. 169 f.]

1. The Spanish revolution has created the general political premises for an immediate struggle for power by the proletariat. The syndicalist traditions of the Spanish proletariat have now been revealed as one of the most important obstacles in the way of the development of the revolution.

The Comintern was caught unawares by the events. The Communist Party, totally impotent at the beginning of the revolution, occupied a false position on all the fundamental questions. The Spanish experiences have shown — let it be recalled once more — what a frightful instrument of the disorganization of the revolutionary consciousness of the advanced workers the present Comintern leadership represents! The extraordinary delay of the proletarian vanguard lagging behind the events, the politically dispersed character of the heroic struggles of the working masses, the actual assurances of reciprocity between anarcho-syndicalism and Social Democracy — these are the fundamental political conditions that made it possible for the republican bourgeoisie, in league with the Social Democracy, to establish an apparatus of repression, and by dealing the insurgent masses blow for blow, to concentrate a considerable amount of political power in the hands of the government.

By this example, we see that fascism is not at all the only method of the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the revolutionary masses. The regime existing in Spain today corresponds best to the conception of a Kerenskiad, that is, the last (or next-to-last) "left" government, which the bourgeoisie can only set up in its struggle against the revolution. But this kind of government does not necessarily signify weakness and prostration. In the absence of a strong revolutionary party of the proletariat, a combination of semi-reforms, left phrases, and gestures still more to the left, and reprisals, can prove to be of much more effective service to the bourgeoisie than fascism.

Needless to say, the Spanish revolution has not yet ended. It has not solved its most elementary tasks (the agrarian, church, and national questions) and is still far from having exhausted the revolutionary resources of the popular masses. More than it has already given, the bourgeois revolution will not be able to give. With regard to the proletarian revolution, the present internal situation in Spain may be characterized as prerevolutionary, but scarcely more than that. It is quite probable that the offensive development of the Spanish revolution will take on a more or less protracted character. In this manner, the historical process opens up, as it were, a new credit account for Spanish communism.