Socialism and War : The Spanish Socialist Party in Power and Crisis, 1936-1939

Book Description
This book recovers the lost history of Spanish socialism during the turbulent years of the Civil War (1936-39). Just as the energy of the socialist movement had sustained the pre-war Second Republic as an experiment in reform, so too it underwrote the Republican war effort in the crucial years of the conflict which would determine Spain's long-term future. Leading Socialist Party (PSOE) cadres formed the bedrock of the government, while thousands of Party and union militants helped bear the tremendous weight of the war effort. The role of the PSOE in the construction of Republican political unity during the Civil War was pivotal. Yet, paradoxically, previous accounts of wartime Republican politics have virtually written the PSOE out of the script by concentrating exclusively on the fierce ideological dispute between anarchists and communists. But the key issues of revolution and State power marked all the forces in Republican Spain, none more so than the Socialist movement. As the traditional party of the working class and the only mass party in Spain as late as 1931, PSOE militants were to be found on both sides of the revolutionary/reformist divide which split fatally the Republican forces during the Civil War. The PSOE's disintegration was a function of that of the Republic itself; but the reverse was no less true. The book investigates the responses of organised socialism to the complex issues raised by the conflict, as it charts the PSOE's devastating experience of political power and desperate crisis in a war it could not win.


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This book tells the story of the Spanish socialist movement (Party and trade union) during the crucial years of the Civil War fought between Republicans and Nationalists, 1936-1939. These were vital years that determined the long-term future of Spain itself, and the Spanish socialist party (PSOE) was the axis of the Republican war effort. Yet there is no data, no account in any language of its role during the war, nor any analysis of the internal crisis that the Party underwent during the war years. The war crisis is the key to the socialists' lengthy political eclipse under Franco. It also provides the key to the socialists' difficult relations with the other major party of the Spanish left--the PCE (Spanish Communist Party). The book will therefore be an important contribution for all those working on the 1930s, whether concerned with labor movements or the political right.


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