A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion - The Popular Front of 1936: Bread for Today, Hunger for Tomorrow. The Tactic of Addressing the Urgent, Forgetting the Important. By Ángel Malatesta (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Ninety years ago, Spain held elections framed almost as a plebiscite 
between the radical right and the anti-fascist labor movement. The 
elections of February 16, 1936, appeared as the last stand before 
barbarism. The existence of the fascist enemy was an undeniable reality; 
however, the construction of an interclass front to combat it completely 
ignored the determined struggle against capitalism.

Counterrevolutionary historiography-both Stalinist and 
liberal-subsequently imposed a dichotomous narrative that artificially 
separated these two issues, presenting them as disconnected struggles. 
The victory of this narrative in historical memory today seeks to revive 
a spirit that reflects the great defeat of our working class on its path 
to emancipation: to treat antifascism and anticapitalism as if they were 
distinct eras and tasks.

In recent years, debates in Spain about the revival of anti-fascist 
electoral fronts have resurfaced cyclically. Each crisis of the regime 
reactivates yet another attempt by social democracy to convince 
itself-and the working class-of a path that has already been tried 
numerous times with null or downright adverse results in the medium and 
long term. The historical experience of the labor movement offers 
demonstrable results: this is a tactic that leads to a dead end and 
leaves our class even more defenseless against its antagonistic enemy.

The rise of the radical right this decade, the fragmentation of social 
liberalism, and a rudderless neo-reformism-though still endowed with 
social legitimacy-repeatedly revive the popular front narrative. The 
idea that the left's "infantilism" lies in its lack of cohesion and 
unity has taken hold, reducing analysis to a superficial voluntarism 
that avoids the nature of the disagreements. Unity, however, is neither 
a moral slogan nor an abstract desire. Approaching it from that 
perspective means neglecting fundamental strategic issues. Historical 
experience shows that fronts against fascism have always entailed 
concessions on red lines for our class and the introduction of a 
veritable Trojan horse within the workers' movement.

Class unity is the result of collective work on the consciousness and 
political struggle of the exploited; popular fronts, on the other hand, 
have been-and are-an interclass unity for the defense of the bourgeois 
regime against a supposedly common enemy. The limits of the struggle for 
this unity are set by the bourgeoisie. It is a pact between 
bureaucracies and political families constituted as intermediaries 
between the working class and the bourgeoisie, and outside the realm of 
real emancipation. The space that progressive forces attempt to dominate 
is markedly outside the positions of social power that we, as 
revolutionary organizations, must build.

Republic, Popular Front and class strategy: the actors and the 
international scenario

The Popular Front policy was not a circumstantial improvisation of 1936, 
but a strategic orientation promoted by the Communist International 
after its Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935. Stalinism's Popular 
Front turn sought broad alliances with republican and liberal sectors 
under the premise of halting the fascist advance in Europe. In France, 
the electoral victory of Léon Blum's Popular Front in May 1936 seemed to 
confirm the viability of this formula: an interclass bloc that, 
supported by workers' mobilization, won the government without breaking 
with the capitalist order.

In Spain, the formula took on its own distinct characteristics. The 
Popular Front of February 1936 brought together bourgeois 
republicans-with Manuel Azaña as its central figure-alongside socialists 
and communists. The Communist Party of Spain, still a minority but on 
the rise, dutifully adopted the line of defending the "democratic 
Republic" as a necessary preliminary stage, subordinating social 
revolution to the consolidation of the anti-fascist bloc. The strategic 
priority was not a break with capitalism, but rather the stabilization 
of the republican regime against the reactionary threat.

In contrast to this trend, the National Confederation of Labor (CNT) 
formally maintained its historical abstention, although in practice 
there were ambiguous calls and diverse positions within its ranks. The 
decisive factor was not so much the electoral slogan as the widespread 
awareness among broad sectors of the anarchist movement: if the right 
wing won, it would be necessary to fight it in the streets and advance 
toward revolution; if the Popular Front won, the reactionary forces 
would not passively accept the result and would also have to be 
confronted, equally with weapons.

In other words, for organized anarchism, the central issue was not who 
administered the state, but the balance of power and the proletariat's 
readiness for an inevitable clash. The possibility of insurrection did 
not depend on the political leanings of the government, but on the 
development of the class conflict.

The French experience reinforced this interpretation. Under Blum's 
government, the large-scale strikes and factory occupations of 1936 
overwhelmed institutional limits, but the Popular Front itself worked to 
channel them toward agreements that would preserve the economic 
structure. Government antifascism acted as a buffer against the 
revolutionary impulse. In Spain, the process would be even more 
dramatic: after the July coup, the organized workers' response opened a 
revolutionary scenario that the Popular Front bloc itself-already at 
war, and including CNT sectors-would help to redirect toward the 
restoration of state order. This established a disastrous idea in our 
history of the workers' struggle: the notion that waging war against 
fascism and revolution against capitalism were separate categories that 
could be addressed at different times.

To this prior crisis of the parliamentary left and the shift in 
international strategy, we must add the enormous repression against the 
workers' movement during the Asturian Revolution of 1934, a decisive 
factor in the rethinking of political strategies. Anarchists, with the 
exception of Ángel Pestaña's Syndicalist Party, were the ones proposing 
a fully revolutionary path. However, something crucial to our assessment 
was already being discussed at that time: the aforementioned question of 
creating an interclass front or a front comprised of workers' forces. 
Analyzing this historical juncture is not about seeking a better 
past-because there was none-but rather about being better prepared for 
the struggles of the present, acknowledging the distance from the 
historical context.

The Popular Front never dissolved, although it never formed a unified 
government, because after the February 1936 elections, each party had 
its own parliamentary group or was united in small coalitions. However, 
throughout the spring of 1936, some municipal governments attempted to 
introduce motions for changes in mayoral positions, proposing new mayors 
with the support of Popular Front parties. Once the coup d'état of July 
1936 was carried out, and following the organized workers' response, 
governments were formed in some regions, and later at the national 
level, under the spirit of the Popular Front, including political actors 
as diverse as the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) and the CNT (National 
Confederation of Labor). The result of reviving that interclass front in 
the midst of the struggle against the ruling class in the revolutionary 
armed conflict of 1936, resulted in the loss of the workers' initiative 
to have completed a longer-term project, and this revolutionary work was 
decimated by the anti-revolutionary liberal and Stalinist sectors that 
acted.

Left-wing coalitions and broad fronts after 1945 in Europe and America

The defeat of fascism in 1945 did not signify the triumph of revolution 
in Western Europe; on the contrary, it led to the consolidation of a new 
global balance under the shared hegemony of the United States and the 
USSR. In this context, the policy of broad alliances-under different 
names and with varying nuances-became a constant feature of the 
international communist movement and of large sectors of the 
parliamentary left. The logic was similar to that of 1936: to expand the 
democratic bloc, stabilize the regime against reaction, and postpone the 
break with capitalism to a later stage.

In France, the prestige of the Resistance allowed the French Communist 
Party (PCF) to participate in coalition governments after the 
Liberation. However, its integration into the institutional framework of 
the Fourth Republic meant accepting capitalist reconstruction and the 
emerging political order. The wave of strikes in 1947 was suppressed, 
and the PCF was ultimately expelled from the government in the context 
of the Cold War. The broad-front strategy had allowed for social 
progress, but it did not alter the power structure; rather, it 
contributed to stabilizing it. Two years ago in France, a new attempt at 
a Popular Front was launched, this time as the Republican Front, led by 
Emmanuel Macron. Under the pretext of a cordon sanitaire against the far 
right, it once again confirmed the consolidation of neoliberalism, 
supported by the legitimacy of the parliamentary left.

In Italy, the Italian Communist Party played a similar role in the 
transition from fascism to the Republic. The "Italian road to 
socialism," later formulated by Enrico Berlinguer as a "historic 
compromise," relied on agreements with the Christian Democrats to ensure 
governability and curb the far right. Again, institutional integration 
strengthened the democratic legitimacy of the new regime but diluted any 
prospect of structural rupture.

In Latin America, the second half of the 20th century and the beginning 
of the 21st offered diverse experiences of broad fronts, progressive 
coalitions, and transformative processes with varying degrees of 
radicalism. The paradigmatic case was Chile with the Popular Unity 
government led by Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and its commitment to a 
peaceful transition to socialism within the framework of institutional 
legality, which clashed with the combined offensive of the local 
bourgeoisie, US imperialism, and the Armed Forces. The outcome-the 1973 
coup-revealed the limitations of a strategy that relied on transforming 
the state without dismantling the hard core of economic and military 
power. This even extends to 2019 with the cycle of uprisings that began 
in Chile, where the constituent process and the parliamentary majority 
of Gabriel Boric's Broad Front quickly encountered the limitations of 
the inherited institutional framework. That popular energy was absorbed 
by a governance formula that restored normality without altering the 
foundations of the political model and that has resulted in a 
consolidation, even an advance, of the Chilean far right.

Decades later, the so-called Latin American "turn to the left" revived 
broad-front formulas. In Uruguay, the Broad Front governed for three 
consecutive terms starting in 2005, combining redistributive policies 
for the national economy with macroeconomic stability and respect for 
the rules of the capitalist market. In Brazil, Lula da Silva's Workers' 
Party promoted social inclusion programs without altering the ownership 
structure or financial dependence. In both cases, material improvements 
coexisted with the persistence of the pillars of peripheral capitalism; 
the subsequent conservative Bolsonaro offensive demonstrated the 
fragility of progress when there is no work being done on the 
self-organization of workers and peasants to transform the structural 
base of power.

In Western Europe, the 2008 crisis revived the idea of united fronts. In 
Greece, the arrival of Syriza to power in 2015, led by Alexis Tsipras, 
was seen as an opportunity to break with the austerity imposed by the 
European Union. The referendum against the memorandum and its subsequent 
acceptance starkly revealed the limitations of a strategy that sought to 
negotiate from within European institutions without severing ties with 
the financial and monetary mechanisms of continental capital. This 
approach was soon revived by his former finance minister, Yanis 
Varoufakis, in an attempt to forge a coalition of the European left.

On the Iberian Peninsula, the transitions following the dictatorships 
offered another testing ground. In Spain, the Communist Party of Spain 
and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party accepted the framework of the 
parliamentary monarchy during the so-called Spanish Transition. The 
constitutional consensus defused the cycle of labor unrest of the 1970s 
in exchange for meager freedoms and limited social rights with no 
transformative potential. The balance of power did not shift in favor of 
a profound bourgeois rupture, but rather toward a negotiated reform that 
integrated the left into the new regime.

And within Spain itself, the progressive coalitions that emerged after 
the 15M movement-such as Unidas Podemos and its subsequent participation 
in coalition governments with the PSOE-exhibited similar tensions. 
Partial reforms coexisted with the continuation of structural 
commitments to the European Union, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization), and the 1978 constitutional framework. Institutional 
antifascism is consistently presented as a strategic priority in the 
face of the rise of the far right, reigniting the debate about whether 
electoral containment can replace building an independent social force.

The historical and current revolutionary theses offered to us by the 
popular fronts and anti-fascist cordons

The comparative assessment from 1945 to the present reveals a recurring 
pattern: broad fronts and progressive coalitions can open spaces and 
windows of principle within a right-leaning narrative, can initiate 
reforms, and can temporarily curb reaction, albeit in a very limited 
way. But constructed as interclass pacts primarily oriented toward 
managing the bourgeois state, they tend to stabilize the existing order 
rather than overcome it. Where a working-class power 
strategy-organization, autonomy, and structural rupture-has not been 
simultaneously developed, institutional antifascism and expanded 
reformism have ended up acting as bulwarks against the revolutionary 
impulse. This stabilization of the bourgeois order always occurs through 
the reduction of the working-class program itself, which implies a 
disaffection of the masses with reformist projects and their immediate 
betrayal, ultimately favoring a rightward shift within the working class.

This historical overview does not seek to deny contextual differences or 
territorial nuances, but rather to highlight a strategic constant: the 
separation between immediate social democratic struggle and structural 
anti-capitalist transformation has repeatedly acted as a fracture that 
weakens the possibility of comprehensive emancipation. With this review, 
the thread connecting 1936 to the present is not a simplistic analogy, 
but a historical warning about the limitations of popular front politics 
when it replaces-instead of strengthening-the independent construction 
of class power.

We are not advocating a sectarian stance that isolates us in ideological 
and strategic purity, and separates us from mass movements, but rather 
we are committed to fighting on broad fronts and mass fronts where we 
can connect with the entire working class while maintaining our 
strategic and critical independence, in order to politically gain ground 
and develop the working class towards the struggle in favor of its own 
interests.

The historical lesson is not that antifascism was-or is-unnecessary, but 
that when it is articulated as an interclass front, subordinating the 
political independence of the proletariat, it becomes the instrument 
that disarms the working class at the decisive moment. The Spanish 
Popular Front of 1936 was not the inevitable prelude to defeat, but it 
was the political form that prevented the response to fascism from 
becoming a social revolution. Attending to the urgent-stopping the right 
wing-while sacrificing the important-destroying the material bases that 
give rise to it-ultimately left the ground untouched on which reaction 
could reorganize itself.

Ángel Malatesta, a member of Liza Madrid.

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/03/09/frente-popular-de-1936-pan-para-hoy-hambre-para-manana/
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