Showing posts sorted by date for query ARAB ANARCHISM. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query ARAB ANARCHISM. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

 

Russia’s bloody shift from subimperialism to new old imperialism


By Simon Pirani
Published
Stand with Ukraine protest

Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology
By Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev 
Stanford University Press, 2026

In October 2022, just before the Ukrainian army retook the southeastern city of Kherson, retreating Russian soldiers exhumed the remains of the 18th-century Prince, Grigory Potemkin, from St Catherine’s Cathedral.

Potemkin’s bones were removed to Russian-held territory on the left bank of the Dnieper river, along with statues to him, to Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov and Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, who, like Potemkin, served under Catherine the Great. Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-appointed governor of the occupied part of Kherson region, said: “These are sacred objects that I believe needed to be saved.”1

In the 1770s and ’80s, when the American and French revolutions lighted beacons of republican hope, the empire Potemkin fought for was growing into a reactionary monster. He was a key figure in the colonisation and attempted “Russification” of southeastern Ukraine; the founding of Yekaterinoslav (“to the Glory of Catherine”, now Dnipro); the annexation of Crimea in 1784; the crushing of the Zaporizhzhia cossacks; securing Black Sea ports; and war with the Ottoman empire, an important precondition for Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century.2

Now, Potemkin is in a pantheon of state functionaries venerated by Kremlin ideologists from Vladimir Putin downward, by the education system and by the media. For Putin, these heroes are direct predecessors to the Soviet army in World War II, the tinpot dictatorships established in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 and the Russian troops that invaded Ukraine in 2022. They were all defenders of his imagined “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” from one enemy after another: Poland, Austro-Hungary, Bolshevism and the “anti-Russia project” that led to the Soviet Union’s demise.3

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, in their Marxist analysis of 21st century Russian imperialism, interrogate the relationship between this ideology — strong enough for the officers commanding the Kherson retreat to risk lives for bones and statues — and the economic, political and social dynamics in which it is anchored.

Budraitskis and Matveev’s starting point is the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. Not only have its consequences done untold damage, economically and geopolitically, to the Russian elite but, as they argue convincingly (p2, 81 & 121), much of this damage would have been done, even if the initial military objective of imposing a puppet government in Kyiv had been achieved.

An explanation must be found for such a self-defeating strategy. Why did a far-reaching action by the state, long seen by Marxists as the instrument of capital, cut across capital’s economic interests so dramatically? It was by no means the first time: citing David Harvey, Budraitskis and Matveev point to the Vietnam war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, “examples of imperialist ventures that are not easily attributable to the requirements of capital accumulation” (p15).

But the Russian case must be explained on its own terms, and they start with the Putin regime’s ideology of imperial mythmaking and “civilisational” conflict with the West, showing how it grew on the soil of post-Soviet Russian capitalism and its discontents. They write in their Introduction (p7):

Russian imperialism since 2014 has been counterproductive, largely irrational, and rooted in the historical myths of empire. But it was the modern experience of primitive accumulation, as well as recent events such as the Arab Spring, that enabled the ideological consolidation of Putin’s regime.

Here I consider four themes through which this argument is developed: (1) the understanding of post-Soviet Russia as a subimperialist power; (2) the development of imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the Russian elite prior to 2014; (3) the threat posed by the Maidan uprising in Ukraine to the Kremlin, and how it reacted; and (4) the driving forces that took the Kremlin from its initial military intervention in Ukraine (2014) to all-out invasion (2022).

The subimperialist model

A first key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the “internationalisation of Russian capital” that began in earnest after the 1998 crisis, when a banking crash and four-fold ruble devaluation weakened the financial-industrial groups that grew rich on rent-seeking in the 1990s (p19-26). Productive investment flourished (oil prices rising steadily between 2000–08 helped), and “the two channels of integration into the global economy — namely, exports [primarily of oil, gas and metals] and borrowing — reinforced each other.”

Russian capital was exported, in the first place, to Ukraine and other post-Soviet states: foreign direct investment by Russian entities multiplied 20 times over between 1999–2007.

In these years, Putin remade the relationship between capital and the state. He centralised state control of the media and punished Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man. The economic elite lost its “direct, unmediated political power”; chunks of the energy sector were brought back into state ownership; and by 2007 seven of the top 20 companies, including the top three (Gazprom, Rosneft and Sberbank), were majority-owned by the state.

Putin’s relationship with the owners of Russia’s largest businesses “could aptly be described as ‘Bonapartist’,” Budraitskis and Matveev write, citing Karl Marx’s famous argument that “in order to save its purse [the bourgeoisie] must forfeit the crown, and the sword that is to safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its own head as a sword of Damocles.”4 Russian capitalists lacked social legitimacy and felt threatened by labour unrest: Putin “re-ordered state-business relations” and they benefited.

But it did not stop at that. Leadership of state companies was handed to Putin’s closest associates: this was a more direct fusion of state and capital. “The economic elites lack public legitimacy and independent sources of political power. They exercise power through the Kremlin, and only in this way” (p31).

To explain Russia’s integration into global capitalism, Budraitskis and Matveev look to dependency theory, developed by Ruy Mauro Marini to describe Brazil under the military dictatorship of the 1960s. Brazil then, and Russia in the 2000s, were “subimperialist” powers that exported raw materials and low-value-added goods to the rich countries and imported high-value-added products.5

Moreover, they assess the Kremlin’s geopolitical strategy up to 2014 as “antagonistic cooperation” with the US and its allies (which had, by the way, either ignored Putin’s genocidal wars on Chechnya, or claimed them as part of the “global war on terror”). Russia facilitated logistics and supplied aircraft for NATO’s operation in Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding Putin’s rhetoric against the “unipolar world order” at Munich in 2007, and even after the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, “the Kremlin sought pragmatic cooperation with the US in areas that corresponded to its own perceived interests” (p37).

The weakness of this “subimperialist” model — its dependence on volatile commodity and finance markets — was cruelly exposed by the 2008–09 financial crisis, Budraitskis and Matveev write (p23). The Kremlin responded to the slowdown that followed in 2012–13 with efforts to stimulate investment, but these failed “as they faced the limitations imposed by the very nature of Putin’s personalist dictatorship” (p26) — that is, the way he remade the relationship of state and capital.

The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism argue that these political and economic policy factors alone can not explain Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, and the annexation of Crimea that burned many of its bridges with Western powers and capital markets. Rather, they present a more fundamental double shift — in the form of imperialism, from rational to irrational; and in foreign policy, from pragmatism to ideological decision-making.

The early 2000s formula [in foreign policy], placing interests above ideas, was replaced by the opposite belief that there is a global struggle of ideas, and national interest is determined by one’s place in this struggle6... Russia’s transition from its “rational” economic imperialism of the 2000s to the “irrational” ideologically motivated imperialism of 2014 and beyond is part of the same process (p39).

Budraitskis and Matveev offer a discussion of ideology understood broadly as “a set of core ideas about the world and human relations that serves as the basis for making political decisions.” These ideas are formed at a “first level” (“the collective life experience of certain social groups and dominant perceptions (‘common sense’) in society as a whole”, and then articulated by intellectuals as a world view, at a “second level” (p39-40).

They track the emergence in the 1990s of a “cynical” Russian elite ideology,7 grounded in what it perceived as “liberation” from Soviet strictures on the pursuit of private interest, and entwined with violence. An “attitude of permanent conflict”, echoing the street gang culture that security services officials of the 2020s lived through as young men, became the “unspoken rule of political life” (p50-54).

Ideology and military intervention in 2014

A second theme in Russia’s New Imperialism is the way that strands of articulated “second level” ideology, rooted in this “first level”, were drawn together in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Conservative and anti-democratic ideas, previously used pragmatically, were increasingly internalised by the elite. In this long-term, multi-layered process, Budraitskis and Matveev see Putin’s return to the presidency in 20128 as a turning point.

The rhetoric of his election campaign this time differed markedly from the depoliticised and technocratic style of the 2000s. He was no longer a manager whose main task was to ensure economic growth, but a patriotic leader of a great nation’s majority and the defender of the nation’s sovereignty against Western influence. (p60)

The philosophical component of this state ideology is influenced by Ivan Ilyin, an early 20th century conservative and anti-Communist, who saw the authoritarian state as morally right against its citizens, who must submit to it. In response to the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and elsewhere, the Kremlin reimagined another idea from anti-Bolshevik émigres, Eurasianism, as the “Russian world”, understood as an alternative value system to Western liberal democracy.

Other key elements in Putinist ideology are the Russian Orthodox church and the special role of the security services, which, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, harks back to the oprichnina, a repressive institution that carried out mass terror under Ivan the Terrible.

Putin’s idea of the Russian state echoes 19th-century historians, who saw it as the “form” of the Russian people that mystically reproduces itself, and of their successors in the late Stalinist period who saw its centralisation and expansion as “historically progressive,” and anything that stands in its way as reactionary.

Putin’s narrative differs in one crucial respect, though: there is no forward progress, only a cyclical pattern. “The West is [eternally] trying to destroy the Russian state through military aggression, importing false ideas, and supporting radical opposition” (p65). The eternal need to resist this pattern produces the imperative for Putin’s gauleiters in Kherson to protect Potemkin’s sacred bones.

Budraitskis and Matveev emphasise that Putinist ideology came together untidily and patchily, emerging fully-formed only in the 2020s. In the months before Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Putin described himself alternately as “conservative” and “liberal”.

But in this jumble, the outlines of irreconcilable conflict were emerging. By 2013, “Ukraine’s choice between tightening relationships with the EU, and joining the [Russia-dominated] Eurasian Union was framed by the Kremlin as mutually exclusive, not only for political and economic reasons but also for ideological reasons” (p68).

In November 2013, then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of talks on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU, opting instead for a range of energy and other subsidies from Russia. A student-led demonstration against this shift was subjected to a vicious attack by police. That brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets of Kyiv in anti-government protests, and became the Maidan uprising that brought down Yanukovych’s government in February 2014.

Maidan: The existential threat

This brings us to a third key theme in Russia’s New Imperialism: social control was a key element in the Kremlin’s decisions to go to war, in 2014 and 2022. The “personalist regime” consolidated by Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 was in large part a reaction to protests against rigged parliamentary elections in December 2011. Behind these protests, and the alarming sight of the Arab Spring pulling down regimes across the Middle East and North Africa, the Kremlin saw only the hand of the West and its existential threat to the “Russian world”.

Considerable progress made in 2009–10 in the Kremlin’s negotiations with the Barack Obama administration — for example, a nuclear arms limitation agreement, reversal of George Bush’s decision to deploy a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, and joint positions on Iran — made no difference to this.

In the Kremlin’s view, the authentic sources of anti-Putin protests lay not in internal contradictions but in external ill will. Oppositionists were merely its conscious or unconscious agents. In this way, the confrontation became historical and cultural, not political (p78).

The Kremlin applied these same ideologised assumptions to social protest in Ukraine. Budraitskis and Matveev show the Russian elite was by no means united around Putin’s belief that the Maidan protesters were “pawns controlled by foreign hands” — but that view prevailed. Ukraine’s choice between closer economic ties with Europe or with Russia was perceived as “civilisational”. Yanukovych was the guarantor of “traditional values”. Ideology trumped economic policy, resulting in self-harming military intervention.

The imperatives of social control again forced the Kremlin’s hand in the run-up to the all-out invasion in 2022. Increasingly the perception of the West as a “historically unchanging source of existential threat to Russia as a state” determined both domestic and foreign policy decisions. “The refusal of the post-Maidan Ukrainian governments to return to Moscow’s orbit of influence was seen as part of the West’s large-scale project to ‘contain’ Russia, which was also expressed in the growth of oppositional sentiments across Russian society” (p113).

Putin viewed the heterogenous protests in Russia in 2018–19 and Aleksei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign as the work of Western intelligence services; he compared them to Maidan and the Arab Spring. By mid 2021, both military preparations for what Putin assumed would be a very brief operation, and ideological preparations articulated in his July 2021 article on the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”,9 were complete.

Budraitskis and Matveev set their explanations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — ideological conviction, supercharged by fear of social protest — against other interpretations current in universities. The claim that Russia was pursuing its economic interests is easily dealt with. “If the Ukrainian market was so important to Russia, why would the Kremlin risk losing it by annexing Crimea and fomenting violent separatism in Donbas?” they ask (p81). And lose it Russia did: its exports to Ukraine in 2015 were less than half of the 2012 level.

A more significant target is the claim that Russia’s hand was forced by “geopolitical and security considerations”. In one crucial article, the “realist” scholar John Mearsheimer — no kind of Marxist, but heavily relied on by many would-be Marxists — wrote that it is “Geopolitics 101” that “great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory”. But was the threat real or perceived?

Mearsheimer says NATO took steps to “assuage Russian fears,” for example by never permanently stationing military forces in its new Eastern European member states — but that that matters little, because “it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.”10 This gives the lie to the whole argument. “The subjective perception of threat replaces the objective correlation of forces as a key explanatory factor in Mearsheimer’s analysis” (p82).

And what a distorted perception it was. As Budraitskis and Matveev point out, “the security situation has actually improved for Russia during the period of NATO eastward expansion.” The number of US troops in Europe in 2010 was 30,000, one tenth of what it was during the Cold War; the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1991 to zero in 2014; the German army’s own tank fleet fell from 7000 in the Cold War to 244 in 2017, only 95 of which were fully operational. No wonder that one of Putin’s own military experts, Alexander Khramchikhin, wrote in November 2013 that the US “does not intend to fight a war in Europe — neither an aggressive nor a defensive one.”

In this reviewer’s experience, discussions about Ukraine in Western “left” political circles are replete with references to Mearsheimer’s shoddy logic, supported by myths such as “Western arms supplies to Ukraine rose sharply before 2021” (untrue) and “Ukraine was close to joining NATO” (untrue), allied to fantasies about “Ukraine’s ethnic cleansing in the Donbas”, and so on.11 Ideology can indeed be a powerful social force.

Budraitskis and Matveev also respond to interpretations of Russia’s actions that emphasise their provisional, unplanned character. While there is evidence of the Kremlin improvising its support for the Donbas “republics”, they stress Crimea is different. Its annexation “created an unprecedented situation” (p84). Putin must have known there would be “no way back” and that sanctions and diplomatic distancing were inevitable.

From annexation to invasion

However profound the shift of Kremlin policy in 2014, all-out war was still not predetermined. The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism do not consider the full-scale invasion an “inevitable continuation” of Tsarist or Soviet imperialist policies; rather, it was “largely determined by internal political dynamics that led to a transformation in the worldview of the Russian elites” (p75). A fourth key theme is how these dynamics played out between 2014–22.

The impact of the war on corporate Russia was overwhelmingly negative. Russian investments were increasingly shut out of Ukraine. Further west, sections of international capital pressed on with collaboration — European gas companies’ support for the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany being the emblematic example — but Russian corporates’ access to Western financial markets was severely restricted.

Budraitskis and Matveev compare Russia’s failure to recover from the 2015–16 global economic doldrums with Brazil’s rapid rebound. Investment turned inward: the arms industry, always enormous, was pumped up still further, and the state-controlled corporations that controlled it reached into other economic sectors.

Russia added “economies of plunder” to its repertoire, that is investments “linked to the violence of Russian military and paramilitary formations” (p99). The results were mixed. Occupied areas of eastern Ukraine have been a net drain on the Russian economy; the Donbas, with its broken supply chains and damaged industry, even more so than Crimea. In Africa, where paramilitaries’ seizure of resources “resemble early modern European imperialist modes of plunder” (p101), paramilitaries such as the Wagner group profited but it is doubtful that the Russian economy benefited overall.

Against this background, the ideology that had taken shape in the 2010s now began to dominate statecraft. The Donbas conflict was portrayed as one between “traditional values” and degenerate, “globalist” western forces. But this was not just a tool to create a new social coalition behind Putin; rather, Budraitskis and Matveev argue, moral values were seen by the Russian ruling class “as an integral part of the strategy to defend sovereignty” (p107).

Similarly, a “large scale infrastructure to implement state historical policy” (p108) went far beyond rewriting school textbooks: a view was being propagated that the Russian ruling elite rests not on democratic legitimacy or international law, but on “the imperial legacy of the past”, which is “inevitably linked to territorial expansion” (p112).

None of this ensured that the Russian ruling class — let alone the majority of the population — was united in support of Putin’s decision in 2022 to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics”, and then invade the rest of Ukraine.

But the “personalist regime” provided no opportunity even for factions in the Kremlin to influence the president’s strategic decisions (p124). Politicians and businessmen were actually compelled to rally to the cause: the “special military operation” was justified not only in foreign policy terms but as a means of strengthening the ideological homogeneity of the elite (p127).

The failure to defeat Ukraine within days again brought Russian imperialism to uncharted territory. Budraitskis and Matveev catalogue the regime’s relative success in redirecting the economy: Russia remains a major commodities exporter, has shifted its trade from Western powers to China, India and others, and centred its domestic economy on arms production and associated sectors. The military-industrial complex has siphoned off resources from civilian industries (p132).

This was not capital directing the state, but the state directing capital: Putin created “‘facts on the ground’ to which businesses had to adapt”, thus demonstrating “the extent to which his personalist dictatorship has expropriated the political power of the economic elite” (p134).

Like all good books, this one raises questions in the reader’s mind.

Broadly, I agree with Budraitskis and Matveev’s answers to the question, “what brought Russian imperialism to the point of the all-out invasion?” I think it is also useful to pose it counterfactually: why did Russia not move towards some sort of “normal” capitalism — such as Brazil, for example — instead of this fascist-like authoritarianism and war?

Working as a journalist and researcher of Russian businesses in the 2000s, I believed that there could be hard times ahead for the labour movement and opposition organisations, and that Russian bullying of its former colonies had not ended. But war, dictatorship and a new gulag? Not on this scale.12

One factor in my thinking was that the Russian economy and state were being seriously weakened, year after year. Russia had lost economic control of Azerbaijan in 1994, when it signed the “contract of the century” with Western oil majors; Russian company Lukoil hung on in a secondary role.

In central Asia, Russia ceded dominance: Chinese and Western oil companies acquired the biggest production assets in Kazakhstan; China, Japan and South Korea made the running in Uzbekistan; and the completion of the central Asian gas pipeline in 2009, switched control of Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth largest gas producer, from Russia to China at a stroke.

But empires in decline can become more violent, not less. The murderous Russian onslaughts on Chechnya in 1994–96 and 1999–2002 turned out to be a foretaste of the Donbas conflict. Russia’s economic weakness reinforced the Kremlin’s descent into the irrational, ideological decision-making that Budraitskis and Matveev so carefully describe.

A second, related, question concerns Russia’s relationship with international capital. I am entirely persuaded by Budraitskis and Matveev’s argument that Russia carved out a “subimperialist” role, which unravelled after 2014. Were there other ways out of it — alternatives to Putin’s way?

Towards the end of the 2000s, some sections of the elite voiced a strong desire to escape from this subordinate position, in discussions about the danger of “Dutch disease” — over-reliance on commodity exports — and the need to invest in technology and value-added sectors. These ideas did not cut across the “Russian world”; indeed some elite figures saw them as the best way to reinforce that world.

As I see it, these alternative routes out of the subordinate role in which Russia was being integrated into the world economy were, in part, closed off by factors outside the elite’s control: the 2008–09 economic crisis and its aftershocks; and the social movements that terrified the Kremlin, the Arab Spring at some distance, and Maidan uncomfortably close to home.

I do not want to say, though, that economic crisis or social protest left the Russian elite no choice. Of course it had a choice, and the ideological factors foregrounded by Budraitskis and Matveev are essential in explaining why it made the choices it did.

The attention paid in Russia’s New Imperialism to social processes and their impact on elite ideology helps it to stand out from mountains of superficial commentary about the causes of the war on Ukraine, whether from those who see it as an inevitable product of an incorrigible imperialist mindset or those who imagine, with the Kremlin, that Western powers were to blame.

A third question concerns what the single case of Russia tells us about 21st century capitalism more generally. In an Epilogue, Budraitskis and Matveev draw attention to Donald Trump’s reelection to the US presidency in 2024, his “clear affinity with Putin” and the similarity of the two governments’ ideological content and political style.

They discuss the extent to which the Putin regime might be defined as fascist. An argument “that the regime’s fascistisation is underway” can be based on “its effort to ideologise and reeducate Russian society in the spirit of militarism and imperialist nationalism”, they write.

But “analogies with fascism must not be applied singularly to portray Putin’s Russia as an anomaly but rather must seek to understand its place within a global trend.” To start with, the invasion of Ukraine has “increased antidemocratic and nationalist sentiment” across the EU, and contributed to the electoral success of far-right parties elsewhere (p170).

This should be the starting point for a great deal of collective thinking. For one thing, this advance of the right takes place against the background of extraordinary changes in world capitalism — the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturing power, the emergence of vastly powerful and infinitely rich US-based corporations, including those controlling new technologies, and all the changes in the character of labour that result.

Moreover, the advance of the right must be taken together with the constant explosions of progressive social protest — not in the forms we were inspired by in the late 20th century, and often only loosely connected to the organised labour movement — especially, but not only, in Global South countries.13

Can Russia’s new imperialism thrive in this world? What does it tell us about how elites elsewhere will react?

A last question that Russia’s New Imperialism brought to my mind concerns the fate of socialist thought in the 21st century. This book makes a real contribution. The authors start with the particular case, Russia, and proceed to examine the economic, political and social changes, in Russia itself and internationally, that conditioned the rise of Putinist authoritarianism.

They dissect the decisions to intervene in Ukraine, in 2014 and 2022, show how these cut across the material interests of Russian capital, and argue painstakingly that the elite’s ideology, not as a set of ideas but as a social force, is the driver here. From here they reflect on broader issues about contemporary imperialism generally.

This strikes a contrast with a great deal of “Marxist” writing on the war, not only by hardened post-Stalinists who deny that Russia is imperialist, but from others, who acknowledge that it is, but find ways to reinforce the illusion that “NATO expansion” caused the war, not the Russian elite.

For example, Alex Callinicos in a recent article starts from a general proposition — that a “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers” is underway — and, where the particular case of Russia’s war on Ukraine does not fit his preconceptions, distorts or omits realities.14

The danger is that Marxism becomes a way of moulding analysis to justify political dogma, instead of developing ideas that can inform struggles to defeat and supersede capital. Perhaps it will turn out that Budraitskis and Matveev’s most important contribution is that they eschew dogmatism, and so help point the way to developing Marx’s approach to capital, and the forces that oppose it, in the 21st century.

Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, August 09, 2026

Reflexions on the Spanish Revolution of 1936

Thursday 6 August 2026, by Andy Durgan



In the vast body of literature surrounding the Spanish Civil War, it is often presented as a struggle between democracy and fascism. This view is almost hegemonic among sectors of the left, many of them historically influenced by Stalinism. But such an approach clashes with the sociopolitical reality of Spain in the 1930s.

The democratic failure

The social, economic and political polarisation in the Spanish State in the years prior to the Civil War and the consequent failure of bourgeois democracy determined the outbreak of both the armed conflict and the revolution. [1] The electoral victory of the Popular Front in February 1936, instead of opening a new stage of social reforms, highlighted the inability of republican democracy to defeat the dominant classes determined to avoid any challenge to their power. The victory of the Popular Front unleashed a new wave of mobilisations by the working masses, both urban and rural, which the Republican government, as in 1931, attempted to repress. For its part, the right wing abandoned any hope of destroying Republican democracy from within and opted for a military coup.

The future of the Republic itself depended not only on its right-wing enemies, but also on the workers’ movement. In the case of the socialists, the revolutionary faction, led by Largo Caballero, refused to repeat the experience of 1931-1933 and insisted that the PSOE (social-democratic Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) not participate in the new government, leaving the republicans with the task of "finishing the bourgeois revolution." This schematic vision of Marxism meant that Largo Caballero and his followers lacked a strategy for seizing power and remained passively waiting for the Republicans to pave the way for a socialist government. In contrast, the more social democratic faction of Indalecio Prieto, supported by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), defended the need to return to a coalition government to complete the Republican reformist programme. It was this latter position that was adopted by the socialist movement in the midst of the Civil War. The left wing of the PSOE, having lost part of its base to Stalinism—especially the Socialist Youth (FJS), which would unite with the Union of Communist Youth to found the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU)—was overtaken by events and ended up accepting the same position as its social-democratic rivals.

On the eve of the Civil War, the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (CNT) continued to wield considerable influence within the Catalan labour movement—the most important on the Iberian Peninsula—and maintained a significant presence in Andalusia, Aragon, and the Valencian Community. Furthermore, in Asturias and Madrid, where socialists had historically held a majority within the labour movement, the CNT possessed a considerable strength. [2]

Activists and union leaders were divided between anarcho-syndicalists and various more purely anarchist sectors, the most important being the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). All these tendencies shared a common characteristic: apoliticism. However, weakened by repression and ideologically divided, during the first months of 1936, the CNT adopted a less intransigent position in its relations with the political left, which can be considered a prelude to its direct participation in the government during the war.

In the February 1936 elections, in order to secure the release of its thousands of imprisoned members, the CNT did not promote an abstention campaign, as it had done in 1933, and its "freedom of the vote" was a factor contributing to the Popular Front’s victory. In May 1936, the CNT held its Fourth Congress in Zaragoza, a landmark in the CNT’s history, both ideologically and for its apparent call for workers’ unity. Shocked by the repression of the Asturian commune in October 1934, the delegates advocated for a revolutionary alliance with the social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT) as a first step toward social revolution. But the Congress also revealed the limitations of the CNT’s political openness. While there was a long and abstract debate about the nature of libertarian communism, there was no discussion of the current situation or the threat of a military coup.

The newly formed POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) also advocated workers’ unity, but through the reorganisation of the Workers’ Alliances that had played a key role in the revolutionary movement of 1934. The POUM contrasted the Workers’ Alliance, as an essential element for overcoming capitalism, with the Popular Front, a political alliance subordinated to petty-bourgeois republicanism.

At the same time, it insisted on the need for a large revolutionary party, a missing element that doomed the 1934 movement to failure. The new party hoped to win over the most radical sectors of the socialists, especially the youth. The fall of the Federation of Socialist Youth under Stalinist influence in the spring of 1936 dealt a fatal blow to that hope.

Revolution

The revolution that erupted in response to the military uprising in July 1936 marked the end of the revolutionary cycle that had begun with the Bolshevik victory in 1917. In just a few days, as Andreu Nin would say, the working class, arms in hand, had resolved “the fundamental problems”—the agrarian problem, the Church problem, the Army problem, and the Catalan problem—that “the liberal bourgeoisie” had failed to resolve in five years. The working class was not fighting for a democratic republic, but for a socialist revolution. [3]

The cornerstone of this revolution was the collectivisation of industry and land: a unique experience of popular self-management in the history of the labor movement. In many cases, the takeover of companies or land was a spontaneous process, with the subsequent support of workers’ organisations. [4] Urban collectivisation went further in Catalonia, where, under the CNT’s control, half of Spain’s industry at the time was concentrated. In the Valencian Community, collectivisation was also widespread, especially in agriculture. Besides those in Valencia, the best-known agricultural collectives were those organised by anarchists in eastern Aragon. And although the presence of the CNT militias in the area was important for its development, the initiative was often local, especially in towns where the establishment of libertarian communism had been declared during the anarchist uprising of December 1933. Agricultural collectivisation also spread through Andalusia and Castile.

The revolution also meant the widespread occupation of urban space, with the seizure of buildings and their conversion into headquarters for anti-fascist organisations, schools, hospitals, and community restaurants. Furthermore, for many women, the revolution and the war meant “a break” from their “traditional confinement to the home and gave them, for the first time, collective public visibility.” [5] They first entered political activity by joining anti-fascist women’s organisations en masse, working in factories and, in a minority of cases, participating in the armed struggle.

At the heart of all resistance to the uprising were the workers’ organisations, and not only where the social revolution was strongest. Trade unions and workers’ parties organised militias to fight the rebels throughout the Republican zone. In the summer of 1936, there were approximately 150,000 militiamen fighting on various fronts. Beyond the revolutionary centres of Catalonia and the Valencian Country, in other areas trade unions intervened in industry, establishing different forms of workers’ control.

The Popular Front in the face of war and revolution

Faced with the rebels’ military superiority, heavily supplied by the fascist powers, the main parties of the Popular Front—Republicans, Socialists, and Communists—argued that it was necessary to present the war as a defense of bourgeois democracy in order to maintain the support of the middle classes and to secure military aid from Western democracies, primarily Great Britain and France. This position meant suppressing, or at least concealing, the social revolution underway in a significant part of the Republican zone.

Both at the time and in historiography, it was considered that the middle classes, or at least a sector of them, were represented by the left-wing republican parties. The fact that these parties played a central role in the republican governments of 1931 and 1936 has reinforced the idea of their political importance. However, their social and electoral base was ephemeral. Outside of Catalonia, the only place where it had massive support (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the Republican Left of Catalonia or ERC), the social base of left-wing Republicanism was quite limited, basically among the urban petty bourgeoisie and very specific sectors such as teachers.

The electoral results during the years of the Republic clearly illustrate the limitations of their support. In 1931, excluding Catalonia, 111 left-wing Republican deputies were elected in coalition with the PSOE and the Radical Party, and in 1936, 129 were elected as part of the Popular Front. In 1933, without being part of a state-level coalition, they only obtained 14 seats (compared to 21 in Catalonia), 9 of them thanks to local agreements with the Radicals and 5 due to the support, also local, of the PSOE. [6]

Internationally, the Republic’s seemingly natural allies—the liberal democracies, with the notable exception of Mexico—not only abandoned the legitimate government by refusing to send it the weapons necessary for its defense, but also promoted the farce of a policy of “non-intervention” that resulted in the near-total isolation of loyalist, republican Spain. The participation of Germany and Italy in the Non-Intervention Committee was the clearest example of the cynicism of this infamous policy.

In reality, neither France nor Great Britain had any interest in supporting a seemingly weak government in a context of significant political and social radicalisation. The French Popular Front government, cornered by the ruling classes, the military leadership, and British imperialism, quickly abandoned any intention of sending arms to the Republic. The British government considered Manuel Azaña, Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1933 and 1936), organiser of the Popular Front in 1935 and the last President of the Republic (1936–1939), to be the “Kerensky of Spain” and, when the Civil War began, believed that “Bolshevism” was about to seize power. Statements among its ministers abounded regarding how Franco was the best option to protect British imperial and capitalist interests. [7]

Stalinism

With the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s rise to power, the communist parties had become completely subordinate to Moscow’s political needs. The Comintern’s shift towards the Popular Front policy was primarily driven by the need to contain the threat posed by Nazi Germany to the very survival of the USSR. This threat made it urgent to create an international alliance with democracies, especially France, against the fascist powers. Thus, the Popular Front became the national expression of Soviet foreign policy. The uniform adoption of this new orientation by communist parties during this period was not based on any analysis of the sociopolitical situation in each country.

However, in contrast to the disastrous previous line that had identified socialist parties with social fascism and considered them the greatest danger to the working class, the Popular Front was in line with the need to confront the threat of the extreme right and led to a surge in the influence of communists in many countries, including the Spanish State. With the outbreak of war, the PCE became the most powerful political party in the Republican zone. By mid-1937, it had reached 300,000 members—ten times more than before July 1936—while the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia or PSUC) —its Catalan branch—had more than 50,000 and the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth or JSU, the party’s youth group), around 250,000.

This surge in influence was due to several reasons. The staunch defense by the communists of the Popular Front attracted newly politicised people to the party who opposed the military uprising and fascism, including sectors of the petty bourgeoisie frightened by the excesses of the revolution and the attacks on private property. By advocating military centralisation and strict discipline, the communists also gained the support of many professional soldiers who had remained loyal to the Republic. But above all, military support for the Republic from the USSR contributed to the rise in the prestige of the PCE.

One factor, which is often overlooked in explaining the growth of communist influence, was the enduring image of “the party of the Russian Revolution” and their self-identification as revolutionaries. The fact that the PCE, despite its commitment to the defense of republican democracy, spoke of the need for a “democracy of a new type”, a “popular revolution” and a “national revolutionary war” was a reflection of the political and social realities in the republican zone. The widespread use of Soviet imagery and revolutionary methods to mobilise the population of Madrid in November 1936 is another example of the seemingly confused relationship between communists and bourgeois democracy. Hence, it was not difficult to conclude that the Popular Front was a necessary tactical interlude, a preliminary phase, to the establishment of socialism. Such ambiguities help explain the appeal of Stalinism to a significant sector of the Federación de Juventudes Socialistas (Socialist Youth Federation or SYF) which joined the PCE. [8]

Ultimately, only the PCE (and, in Catalonia, the PSUC), with its discipline and Leninist structure, and not the liberal and reformist sectors, was able both to end the social revolution underway in the republican zone and to politically direct the war effort of the Popular Front.

Anarchism in the face of power

After the defeat of the military uprising in almost two-thirds of Spanish territory, power was exercised by countless committees, many of them from the Popular Front, with the direct participation of the CNT. In Catalonia, the committees reflected the influence of the revolution. Largely referred to as “revolutionary” or “anti-fascist” committees, their composition depended on the local strength of the various organisations. Generally, their members were appointed by their organisations; few were elected by the local population. [9]

To overcome the lack of coordination and the fragmentation of power in the first weeks in the Republican zone, different types of committees were organised at the regional and provincial levels, almost all supported by Popular Front organisations at the local level, with the addition of the CNT. Their autonomy and radicalism varied depending on the location. The most important of these was the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias (CCMA) in Catalonia. The Catalan government, unable to manage the situation, proposed to the workers’ and republican forces the creation of a unified committee to coordinate the fight against the rebel forces. Thus, on July 21, the CCMA was formed with a Popular Front majority, although the decisions of the new committee reflected the strength of the revolution. [10] In addition to military organisation, the CCMA took the first steps to control the economy, blocking the bank accounts of people who had supported the uprising and taking measures to help worker-owned businesses continue to pay wages.

Throughout much of the Republican zone, committees were formed which, like the CCMA, effectively held power during the first weeks of the Civil War. The political orientation of most of these committees reflected the influence of the Popular Front organisations. However, the situation was so polarised that in several places they acted in a markedly radical way, as happened with the committees of Cartagena, Gijón, Málaga, Valencia and, above all, with the Council of Aragon, organised in October and dominated by the anarchists.

But because the power of the committees, which remained completely fragmented, failed to consolidate, the revolution could not fully succeed. Given this reality, the future of the revolution depended on the CNT, which doubled its membership during the war, reaching 1,500,000 members. For the anarchists, the revolution was a reality in the sense that, in much of what would become the Republican zone, the working class controlled the streets, the factories, and the land. However, the workers’ organisations did not control communications, foreign trade, or banking. Above all, with the organisation of the People’s Army in the autumn of 1936, they lost control of the key element of the war and the revolution: the armed forces.

Faced with the vacuum left by the near disintegration of the Republican State, the dilemma for the anarchists soon arose. As early as July 21st, at the regional plenary session of the Catalan CNT, the day after the defeat of the military rebels in Barcelona, Juan García Oliver, one of the most influential leaders of radical anarchism, stated that the CNT had two alternatives: “to go for broke,” which would mean establishing “an anarchist dictatorship,” or to collaborate with the other anti-fascist forces. Since “a dictatorship” was anathema to the anarchists, and given the significant presence of other forces (especially the socialists), particularly outside Catalonia, they opted for “collaboration.” Thus, almost from the beginning, the anarchist leaders were caught in the ambiguity of their advocacy for revolution and their practice of collaboration with the state. In reality, the dichotomy was not between “dictatorship” or “collaboration”, but between workers’ unity, beyond the anarchist ranks, for the seizure of power or subordination to the Popular Front which, sooner or later, would mean the end of the revolution.

Opposed to creating another state, they ended up collaborating with the existing state, or, to be more precise in the case of the Spanish state in 1936, with the reconstruction of the Republican state. In early November 1936, with the military situation becoming increasingly critical, four anarchists joined the Republican government.

The counter-revolutionary process within the republican zone reached its peak with the street fighting of early May 1937. [11] A week later, the formation of a government headed by the moderate socialist Juan Negrín, without the participation of the anarchists, represented the definitive strengthening of the bourgeois state and the suppression of the most revolutionary sectors, especially the POUM, victims of a fierce campaign of slander by Stalinism. The last bastion of the revolution was the Council of Aragon, controlled by anarchists, which was dissolved in August. In February 1938, the CNT, by then fully committed to collaborating with the Republican State, returned to the government.

Was a revolutionary alternative possible?

It is necessary to consider whether there was an alternative to the Popular Front’s approach of waging war in defense of democracy at the cost of social revolution. The Republican government’s military strategy rejected the use of unorthodox or revolutionary tactics, partly due to the Republican government’s need to maintain control of the political situation in its zone and to present itself to the world as a liberal government. However, given the enemy’s great material advantage, the Republican government’s adherence to an orthodox military strategy had little chance of success.

The idea that the Popular Front, and the annihilation of the revolution, was only a “practical” position due to the military needs of the Republic is a fallacy.

The Popular Front policy, especially its subordination to imperialist interests, had military consequences. For example, the withdrawal of the naval fleet from the Strait of Gibraltar from the outset, under pressure from the British government, left the way clear for the rebel forces to move thousands of troops from North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula. And the refusal, in order not to harm the interests of French imperialism, to declare the independence of Morocco and support a nationalist insurrection in the fascist rear, also favoured the rebel forces.

An alternative strategy would have included the mass mobilisation of the population (as would be the case during the Battle of Madrid in November 1936), a defensive, positional war, and the use of more limited, lightning raids, combined with guerrilla warfare, thus avoiding massive clashes between two armies with markedly unequal capabilities. At the same time, measures such as the declaration of Morocco’s independence and military support for the Moroccan independence movement, or the declaration of land distribution to peasants, could have contributed to undermining the enemy’s rear. [12]

Of course, it’s impossible to know whether a strategy of revolutionary war could have succeeded, although the defense of Madrid is illustrative in this regard. Furthermore, the international situation, in which both communist and social democratic parties wielded considerable influence, was far from favourable. It is impossible to know what impact the existence of a revolutionary power in Spain would have had on the labour movement beyond its borders. The precedent of 1917 raises the possibility that it could have acted as a catalyst and, consequently, led to other political currents having a greater influence on the class struggle.

War and revolution

Often, the historiography of the Civil War presents the division among anti-fascist forces as a division between those who wanted to prioritise the war (communists, republicans, and socialists) and the CNT and the POUM, who put the interests of the revolution before those of the war: a division between war or revolution. It was never like that. Both the CNT and the POUM advocated the need to wage war and revolution simultaneously, to wage a revolutionary war. The two were intrinsically linked. The POUM, above all, had a clear military policy that proposed the creation of a revolutionary army, taking as a model the Soviet Red Army during the Russian Civil War. But such an Army could not be built without a revolutionary government based on democracy from below, in committees of workers, peasants and militia. [13]

The POUM maintained that, to consolidate the revolution, at least in Catalonia, the working class needed to seize power. However, without the CNT, such a goal was impossible. Convincing the CNT, or at least part of it, of this soon became the main political concern of the POUM, but, as has been seen, it had to overcome the conviction of the anarchists that any form of revolutionary power or state would inevitably lead to a dictatorship.

Ultimately, the great absence in the Spanish revolution was the existence of a revolutionary organisation with the necessary strength to lead the seizure of power. There were a number of obstacles preventing the POUM, the “only party of the revolution” according to Andreu Nin, from becoming such an organisation. Beyond its own mistakes, its lack of a base outside Catalonia and its short history—it had been formed just a year earlier—were difficult obstacles to overcome. And without political leadership, the revolution was doomed to defeat.

11 July 2026

Translated by David Fagan for International Viewpoint from viento sur 201.

REFERENCES
Bernecker, Walther (1982) Colectividades y revolución social. El anarquismo en la Guerra Civil española. 1936-1939. Barcelona: Crítica.

Beevor, Antony (2005) La Guerra Civil española. Barcelona: Crítica.

Casanova, Julián (2010) De la calle al frente. El anarcosindicalismo en España. Barcelona: Crítica.

Claudin, Fernando (1975) The Communist Movement. From Comintern to Cominform. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Durgan, Andy (1992) “The 1933 elections in Spain and the Defeat of the Left”, Journal of the Association of Contemporary Iberian Studies, vol. 5, n º 2. Londres.

(2013) “The People in Arms: Spain 1936”, en Gonzalez, Mike & Barekat, Houman (eds.), Arms and the People. Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring, Londres: Pluto Press: pp. 123-148.

(2017) “La democracia de los trabajadores en la Revolución española, 1936-1937”, en Azzellini, Darío & Ness, Immanuel (eds.), Poder Obrero. Autogestión y control obrero desde La Comuna hasta el presente. Madrid: La Oveja Negra: pp. 211-242.

(2021) “90 aniversario de la II República. Razones de un fracaso”, viento sur, 175: 99–108.

(2022) Voluntarios por la revolución. La milicia internacional del POUM en la Guerra Civil Española. Barcelona: Laertes.

(2025) El POUM. República, revolución y contrarrevolución. Barcelona: Sylone- viento sur.

Ealham, Chris (2026) La lucha por Barcelona. Clase, cultura y conflicto 1898-1937. Madrid: Ediciones La Tormenta.

Fraser, Ronald (1979) Recuérdalo tú y recuérdalo a otros. Historia oral de la Guerra Civil española. Barcelona: Crítica.

Guillamón, Augustín (2017) Insurrección. Las sangrientas jornadas del 3 al 7 del mayo del 1937. Barcelona: Editorial Descontrol.

Guillén, Abraham (1980) El error militar de las “izquierdas”. Barcelona: Hacer.

Maurin, Joaquin (2023) Hacia la segunda revolución. Toledo: El Perro Malo.

Moradiellos, Enrique (1996) La perfidia de Albión. El gobierno británico y la guerra civil española. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno.

Nash, Mary (2006) Rojas. Las mujeres republicanas en la Guerra Civil. Madrid: Taurus.

Peirats, José (1989) La CNT en la revolución española. Madrid: Hamelyn.

Pozo González, Josep Antoni (2012), Poder legal y poder real en la Cataluña revolucionaria de 1936. Sevilla: Espuela de Plata.

P.S.

If you like this article or have found it useful, please consider donating towards the work of International Viewpoint. Simply follow this link: Donate then enter an amount of your choice. One-off donations are very welcome. But regular donations by standing order are also vital to our continuing functioning. See the last paragraph of this article for our bank account details and take out a standing order. Thanks.

Footnotes

[1] On the “failure” of the Republic see: Maurin (2023) and Durgan (2021).

[2] Amongst the extensive bibliographies on anarchism before and during the Civil War, the following can be consulted: Peirats (1989), Casanova (2010) and Ealham (2026).

[3] Durgan (2025) pp. 88-89.

[4] The most complete history of the collectivisation process remains: Bernecker (1982).

[5] Nash (2006) p. 92.

[6] Durgan (1992).

[7] Moradiellos (1996).

[8] For examples of the contradictions in the position of the communists in relation to the Popular Front see Fraser (1979) Volume II, p. 30 and Durgan (2022) pp. 30, 43-44.

[9] Regarding the committees, see, for example: Pozo (2012) and Durgan (2017).

[10] There were five Republican delegates, three from the CNT, three from the UGT, two from the FAI and one each from the POUM, the PSUC and the Unió de Rabassaires, a Catalan agricultural trade union.

[11] Among the bibliographies on the Acts of May of particular interest is Guillamón (2018).

[12] On the debate about the alternative of revolutionary war see: Claudin (1975) pp. 210-242; Guillén (1980); Fraser (1979) volume II, pp. 27-38; Beevor (2005) p. 464; Durgan (2013).

[13] Durgan (2025) pp.113-118.

  • Andy Durgan

    Andy Durgan has written extensively on the Spanish revolution. Among others The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution, 2025, London, Resistance Books and forthcoming in Haymarket paperback Volunteers for the Revolution:The International Militia of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War in November 2026.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)