The country remained a loose federation of mutually antagonistic small national entities. 
		The Castilian state bureaucracy was in alliance with an all-powerful church. The army, 
		manned chiefly by officers who came from middle class landlords’ families, was intertwined 
		with the state bureaucracy and the church. The bourgeoisie, closely linked to the big 
		feudal landlords, was incapable of carrying forward the bourgeois democratic revolution – 
		unable to break the agrarian, semi-feudal yoke, to solve the national question, or the 
		break the power of the clergy.{1}

      
		They wanted to go forward, they weren’t satisfied simply with the release of political 
		prisoners and the return to their jobs of all those who had been sacked as a result of 
		the revolutionary insurrection of October 1934. Instinctively, they were pressing 
		forward, not necessarily to take power, not to create soviets, but to push forward 
		the revolution begun with the Republic’s proclamation.{4}

      
		It was out of the question. Independence for Spanish Morocco would inevitably bring 
		renewed rebellion in French Morocco. But the whole purpose of the People’s Front 
		was to cement a deal between the French and British Empires and the USSR. So the 
		Moorish troops, offered nothing, stayed with Franco.{7}

      
		As soon as you cross the frontier, you are halted by armed men. Who are these men? 
		Workers. They are militamen – that is, workers with their normal clothes – but armed 
		with rifles or revolvers and with signs on their arms indicating their functions or 
		the power they represent … They are the ones who … will decide … not to let you in 
		or to refer it to the “committee”. … It is the committee who formed the militia, armed 
		it, and supplied it with food and lodging from the funds raised by a levy imposed on 
		all the local inhabitants. They are the ones who give you permission to enter or leave 
		the town, who closed down the local fascist shops and carried out essential requisitions.{8}

		It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. 
		Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with 
		red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the 
		hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church 
		had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically 
		demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had 
		been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes were painted 
		red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. 
		Servile and ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. … There were no private 
		motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the 
		other transport were painted red and black. … In outward appearance it was a town where the 
		wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. … Practically everyone wore working-class 
		clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform.

		Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly 
		emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human 
		beings and not as cogs in a capitalist machine.{9}

		The entry of the CNT into the central government is one of the most important events in 
		the history of our country. The CNT has always been, by principle and conviction, anti-state 
		and the enemy of every form of government… But circumstances… have changed the nature of the 
		Spanish government and state… The government has ceased to be a force of oppression against 
		the working class, just as the state is no longer the entity that divides society into classes. 
		Both will stop oppressing the people all the more with the inclusion of the CNT among their 
		organs.{13}

		To renounced the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power to those who wield it, 
		the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists of putting a new class 
		in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war 
		and reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing 
		for the conquest of power.{14}

		Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants 
		self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their 
		own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the 
		bourgeoisie beforehand means to assure defeat in the civil war.{15}

      
		Now things were returning to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people 
		wolfing down expensive meals, while for the working-class population food prices had jumped 
		enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness of everything, 
		there were recurrent shortages of this or that, which, of course, hit the poor rather than the 
		rich. The restaurants and hotels seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, 
		but in the working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries were 
		hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the absence of beggars; now 
		there were quantities of them. Outside the delicatessen shops at the top of the Ramblas gangs of
 		barefooted children were always waiting to swarm round anyone who came out and clamour for scraps 
		of food. … The waiters were back in their boiled shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the 
		familiar manner. … In a furtive indirect way the practice of tipping was coming back. The workers’ 
		patrols had been ordered to dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One 
		result of this was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been closed 
		by the workers’ patrols, had promptly re-opened.{16}

 
		The Spanish revolution was socialist in essence: the workers attempted several times to 
		overthrow the bourgeoisie, to seize the factories; the peasants wanted to take the land. 
		The Popular Front led by the Stalinists strangled the socialist revolution in the name of 
		an outlived bourgeois democracy. Hence the disappointment, the hopelessness, the discouragement 
		of the Republican army, and as a result, the military collapse.{17}

1. Tony Cliff, Trotsky: the Darker the Night, the Brighter the Star; 1927-1940, Volume 4, (London: Cox and Wyman Ltd, Reading, 1993), 235.
2. Charlie Hore, Spain 1936: Popular Front or Workers’ Power?, (London: East End Offset, 1986), 7.
3. E.H. Carr, the Comintern and the Spanish Civil War, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 3.
4. Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: an Oral History of the Spanish Civil War, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 44-45.
5. Hugh Thomas, the Spanish Civil War, (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 127.
6. Ibid, 88.
7. Duncan Hallas, the Comintern, (London: Cox and Wyman Limited, 1989), 151.
8. Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, the Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1972), 127.
9. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, (San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1980), 4-5.
10. Quoted in Hallas, 131.
11. Hore, 15.
12. Quoted in E.H. Carr, 87.
13. Broue and Timeme, 207-208.
14. Trotsky, 316.
15. Leon Trotsky, the Spanish Revolution (1931-1939), (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 309.
16. Orwell, 114.
17. Trotsky, 167.