Spain (2026)

Book Review from the September 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Have You Done For Victory? A Cultural History of the Spanish Civil War. By Jo Labanyi. Reaktion books. October 2026. 490 pages.

This year is the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War when a part of the armed forces under General Franco revolted against the Popular Front government elected earlier in the year. It ended three years later with 600,000 dead and victory for Franco and the rebels.

This anniversary has seen the publication of a number of books on the subject including this, a detailed blow-by-blow account of the culture wars that preceded, accompanied and followed the war. It has a useful introductory chapter setting out the events leading up to and the course and outcome of the war.

The Franco side rested largely on the big landowners and the Church, both of which saw their privileges threatened by the Popular Front government, one of whose declared intentions was to break the landowners’ stranglehold on the countryside. The rebellion was not supported by the capitalists; they also saw the landowners as their enemy. Openly capitalist parties, ‘radicals’, ‘republicans’ and ‘progressives’, were part of the Popular Front.

The government said it wanted a ‘parliamentary democracy’. The ‘Communist’ Party said that that was their aim too but, as supporters of the Stalin dictatorship in Russia, what they were really favouring was state-capitalist Russia’s foreign policy of trying to prevent Germany gaining a foothold in Spain.

The anarchists and the syndicalist trade unions were opposed both to ‘parliamentary democracy’ and to the Stalinists. Their aim was a revolution to destroy the state. Their attempts to organise production without capitalists or money confirmed that this could be done but were never going to last whichever side won.

There never was working-class unity for ‘parliamentary democracy’ and the course of the war brought the bitter antagonism of the rival factions to the surface with mutual charges of murder and betrayal.

In the end the working class lost everything they had before. Franco’s victory ushered in thirty-six years of savage repression of the working class, deprived of elementary political and trade-union rights.