The Republic in Spain (Engels)

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

It is hard to say which has sunk lower in the last three years, the monarchy or the republic. The monarchy - on the continent of Europe, at least - is everywhere assuming its final form, Caesarism, at an increasing pace. Everywhere sham constitutionalism with universal suffrage, an overgrown army as the buttress of government, bribery and corruption as the chief means of government, and enrichment through corruption and fraud as the sole end of government, are irresistibly undermining all the splendid constitutional guarantees, the artificial balance of forces, of which our bourgeois dreamt in the idyllic days of Louis Philippe, when even the most corrupt were still angels of innocence compared with the “great men” of today. As the bourgeoisie daily loses the character of a class temporarily indispensable in the social organism, shedding its specific social functions to become a mere gang of swindlers, its state turns into an institution for the protection, not of production, but of the overt theft of products. Not only does this state carry its own condemnation within itself; it has actually already been condemned by history in Louis Napoleon. Yet it is also the last possible form of monarchy. All other forms of monarchy are worn out and obsolete. After it, the only possible type of state left is the republic.

The republic, however, is not faring any better. From 1789 to 1869, it was the ideal of enthusiastic freedom fighters, always aspired to, attained after a hard, bloody struggle, and scarcely attained - fleeing again. Since a King of Prussia¹ succeeded in setting up a French republic all that has changed. From 1870 — and this is the progress attained — republics are no longer made by republicans, precisely because there are no pure republicans left, but by royalists despairing of the monarchy. To avoid civil war, the monarchist-minded bourgeois are consolidating the republic in France and proclaiming it in Spain² — in France, because there are too many pretenders; in Spain, because the last possible king is on strike.

Herein lies a twofold advance.

First, the magic that hitherto surrounded the name of the republic has been dispelled. After the events in France and in Spain, only a Karl Blind can cling to the superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of a republic. The republic is finally seen in Europe, too, for what it is in essence, and in America in actual fact-as the consummate form of the rule of the bourgeoisie. I say "finally in Europe, too", because republics like Switzerland, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and the ex-free city of Frankfort - God rest her soul - are irrelevant here. The modern republic, with which alone we are concerned at this point, is the political organisation of a great people, not the provincial political institution of a city, a canton or a club of cantons that has been historically handed down from the Middle Ages, assuming more or less democratic forms, and, at best, replacing patrician rule with a peasant rule that is scarcely any better. Switzerland exists partly through the indulgence and partly through the jealousy of its great neighbours; whenever these are united, it is forced to swallow its republican phrases and obey orders. Such countries exist only as long as they do not attempt to intervene in the course of history, which is why they are neutralised and thus prevented from doing so. The era of the true European republics dates from September 4, or rather from the day of Sedan, even if a brief Caesarist setback (under no matter which pretender) might be possible. And in this sense, it might be said that the Thiers republic is the final realisation of the republic of 1792; the republic of the Jacobins without the self-deception of the Jacobins.

From now on, the working class can no longer have any illusions about the nature of the modern republic: the type of state in which the rule of the bourgeoisie achieves its final, consummate expression. In the modern republic political equality, which is still subject to certain exceptions in all monarchies, is at last fully implemented. And this political equality - what is it but the declaration that class differences do not concern the state, that the bourgeois have as much right to be bourgeois as the workers to be proletarians?

Yet this final, consummate form of bourgeois rule, the republic, is only introduced by the bourgeois themselves with the utmost reluctance; it forces itself on them. Why this curious contradiction? Because the introduction of the republic means breaking with all political tradition; because it requires every political institution to justify its existence; because, therefore, all the traditional influences that support the powers that be under the monarchy fall away. In other words: if the modern republic is the consummate form of bourgeois rule, it is also the type of state that frees the class struggle from its last fetters and prepares the battleground for it. The modern republic is, in fact, nothing but this battleground. And this is the second advance. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie feels that its end is near as soon as the ground of the monarchy is whipped away from under its feet and, with it, all the conservative power that resided in the superstitious belief of the uneducated masses, particularly in the countryside, in the traditional supremacy of the royal houses - no matter whether this superstition worships the kingdom of God’s grace, as in Prussia, or the legendary peasant emperor Napoleon, as in France. On the other hand, the proletariat feels that the funeral dirge of the monarchy is simultaneously the clarion call for the decisive battle with the bourgeoisie. The modern republic is nothing but the stage cleared for the last great class struggle in world history - and this is what gives it its tremendous significance.

In order, however, for this class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat to be decided, these two classes must be sufficiently developed in the countries concerned, at least in the large towns. In Spain this is only the case in individual parts of the country. In Catalonia, large-scale industry is relatively highly developed. In Andalusia and some other areas big landed property and large-scale agriculture - landowners and wage-labourers - prevail; in most of the country small farmers prevail in rural areas, small industry in the towns. The conditions for a proletarian revolution are thus relatively poorly developed, and, for precisely this reason, there still remains a great deal to be done in Spain for a bourgeois republic; above all, its mission here is to clear the stage for the imminent class struggle.

A primary necessity here is the abolition of the army and the introduction of a people’s militia. Geographically, Spain is so favourably situated that it can only be seriously attacked by one neighbour, neighbour, and even then only along the short front of the Pyrenees; a front that does not even comprise an eighth of its total perimeter. Moreover, the conditions of the terrain in the country are such that they complicate mobile warfare by large armies in the same measure as they facilitate irregular popular warfare. We saw this under Napoleon, who at times despatched up to 300,000 men to Spain, but they were always defeated by the people's dour resistance; we have seen this countless times since then and see it to this day in the impotence of the Spanish army in the face of the few gangs of Carlists in the mountains.A country like this has no pretext for an army. Furthermore, since 1830 the army in Spain has merely been the lever of all those generals' plots which have brought down the government every few years with a military revolt, in order to replace old thieves with new. To dissolve the Spanish army is to release Spain from civil war. This, then, would be the first demand the Spanish workers should make on the new government.

Once the army is abolished, the main reason that the Catalans, in particular, are demanding a federal state organisation disap-pears. Revolutionary Catalonia, the great working-class suburb of Spain, as it were, has hitherto been kept down by heavy concentrations of troops, just as Bonaparte and Thiers kept Paris and Lyons down. This is why the Catalans demanded the division of Spain into federal states with independent administration. If the army goes, so does the main reason for this demand; it will be possible to achieve independence in principle without the reactionary destruction of national unity, and without reproducing a larger Switzerland.

The financial legislation of Spain, as regards both internal taxes and border tariffs, is nonsensical from start to finish. A bourgeois republic can do a great deal about this. The same applies to the confiscation of the landed property of the Church, which has often been confiscated but has always been amassed once again, and, last but not least, the provision of highways, which are nowhere in a worse state than here.

A few years of peaceful bourgeois republic would prepare the ground in Spain for a proletarian revolution in a way that would surprise even the most advanced Spanish workers. Instead of repeating the bloody farce of the previous revolution, instead of staging isolated, easily crushed rebellions, it is to be hoped that the Spanish workers will make use of the republic in order to join together more firmly and organise themselves with a view to an approaching revolution, a revolution they will command. The bourgeois government of the new republic is merely seeking an excuse to suppress the revolutionary movement and shoot down the workers, as the republicans Favre and consorts did in Paris. May the Spanish workers not give them the excuse!

¹ William I

² Amadeo I