Spain

[Y Chwyldro Comiwnyddol Cymraeg]

In Spain, the republican coalition won the elections and the bourguoise, church and military rebeled and started the war (am i right?)
How did this coalition work, and intend to run Spain?

[syndicat]

That's not quite how it happened. The Popular Front was an electoral alliance in Feb. 1937. But the liberal Republican parties got most of the votes and ran the government. They were very timid in practice and had no solution to Spain's main problems. For example, there were 750,000 landless farm workers in the region of massive estates, in the southern part of Spain. The liberals were afraid of offending the elite and the military by expropriating the parasitic capitalist owners. So the farm workers took matters in their own hands, seizing thousands of acres.

The liberals were less repressive towards Spain's revolutionary labor movement than the right wing government that had been voted. So workers took advantage of that to launch the farm occupations and a massive strike wave in the cities.

The elite in Spain were frantic over the massive mobilizations of the revolutionary labor movement in Spain. That's why they demanded that the army generals overthrow the government. They didn't care that much about the liberals in government, it's just that they viewed them as ineffective because they wouldn't repress the labor movement.

When the army and most of the police revolted and became part of a fascist takeover movement in July, the unions fought back. The state authority collapsed. The union millitias were formed to fight the army. The unions also seized and expropriated 18,000 enterprises, and millions of acres of land. Most of the country's economy. The army didn't revolt right after the election because it was the rising momentum of worker actions that provoked the military coup.

The most popular elected leader of the labor militia was Buenaventura Durruti. In a radio speech in Oct. 1936, he said: "The workers of Spain aren't fighting and dying to defend the bourgeois Republic. They are fighting for the factories and the fields, for a new way of life."

A good essay on the Spanish revolution is here:

http://www.workersolidarity.org/spain.pdf

[Spartacist]

The union millitias were formed to fight the army.

Many of those militias existed BEFORE the civil war broke out.

[syndicat]

Both the CNT and UGT did have caches of weapons, for example, left over from the rebellion in Asturias in Oct 1934. The CNT had formed an armed worker defense organization in the Barcelona area, organized into 200 neighborhood groups, 2000 activists, and coordinated by a regional workers defense committee. This was formed before the army coup because the CNT was expecting the army to try a takeover.

However, when i refer to the militias formed begining in July, i'm referring to the more formal labor army, the armed and organized militia columns, especially the army created by the CNT union defense committee, beginning in July 1936. This used arms captured from the collapse of the Spanish army, plus things like armored vehicles they began making.

The neighborhood defense groups were a separate organization and it also continued to exist after July of 1936.

[Y Chwyldro Comiwnyddol Cymraeg]

So in the elections the government was ot a leftist coalition as such, but a left os centre party who where less represive and allowed the proleterians to seize land etc. Then the army rebeled and that is when the anarchists, POUM etc. came together to fight