The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 87 - May 2026 Page 8 From the series Spain 1936 The USSR’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War was one of those combinations of factors and one of the moments in Stalin’s manoeuvring among the imperialist camps. Moscow moved from the tactics of social-fascism to the Popular Fronts , then to an alliance with Nazi Germany, and finally to a coalition with the Atlantic powers in the Second World War – all in accordance with its own power interests, to which it had subordinated the International. In 1936, the great trials against the Bolsheviks began in the USSR; in Spain, Stalinism revealed itself as a force of the international counterrevolution . Thus, the crucial lesson of 1936 and 1937 in Spain and Catalonia lies in the strategic inadequacy that ultimately united Trotsky with the anarchist and centrist currents of the POUM: that assault lacked ...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 8 From the series Spain 1936 Spain, Marx observed in 1854 in the article Revolutionary Spain , was the first European feudal State to develop absolutism in its most unmitigated form , but political and fiscal centralisation never really took hold there. Similarly, it was Spanish caravels that opened up the era of the world market, and the Kingdom of Spain was the first great bourgeois maritime-trading empire. Yet that early and rapid rise ended up transforming itself from a favourable precondition for development into the cause of Spain's subsequent failure. In fact, the maritime overextension of the empire, combined with the failed political and fiscal centralisation of the Iberian heartland, resulted in stagnation and a subsequently inglorious and protracted putrefaction . While the economic and social arteries were becoming scl...