Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributor
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- The formation of the French Popular Front, 1934–6
- The origins and nature of the Spanish Popular Front
- The French Radicals, Spain and the emergence of appeasement
- The Spanish army and the Popular Front
- Soldiers and Socialists: the French officer corps and leftist government, 1935–7
- The Spanish Church and the Popular Front: the experience of Salamanca province
- ‘La main tendue’, the French Communist Party and the Catholic Church, 1935–7
- Trotskyist and left-wing critics of the Popular Front
- The development of marxist theory in Spain and the Frente Popular
- The other Popular Front: French anarchism and the Front Révolutionnaire
- The French Popular Front and the politics of Jacques Doriot
- The Blum government, the Conseil National Economique and economic policy
- Social and economic policies of the Spanish left in theory and in practice
- Women, men and the 1936 strikes in France
- From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front
- A reinterpretation of the Spanish Popular Front: the case of Asturias
- Le temps des loisirs: popular tourism and mass leisure in the vision of the Front Populaire
- The educational and cultural policy of the Popular Front government in Spain, 1936–9
- French intellectual groups and the Popular Front: traditional and innovative uses of the media
- Index
Summary
After the death of Lenin, the Comintern increasingly saw its activities subordinated to Stalin's changing conceptions of the interests of the Soviet state. Never the source of flexible or progressive developments in terms of marxist theory, the Comintern was, however, forced by the advent of Hitler's regime in 1933 to abandon its sterile ultra-sectarian policy of the previous decade. This had been marked by a damaging excoriation of all social democratic parties as ‘social fascist’. The Comintern's new direction culminated in the adoption of Popular Frontism at its Seventh Congress in 1935. The Popular Front strategy, though, was not adopted solely with the short-term aim of defeating fascism. Rather, Popular Frontism was seen also in terms of using bourgeois democracy's institutions to ‘prepare the masses for the overthrow of the power of capitalism and to achieve proletarian democracy’.
Such talk of capitalism's overthrow did not seem far-fetched in the context of contemporary developments. In particular, the New York stock exchange crash in 1929 had been taken by European marxists as evidence of the impending collapse of the capitalist mode of production; fascism, in turn, was seen as representing a last-ditch effort to stave off this collapse by suppressing the working class. Although in this fascism had proved distressingly effective, it did represent, in marxist terms, a response to capitalism in crisis. In Spain, as in the rest of Europe, the looming threat of fascism had for some years been exercising the minds of marxists concerned to analyse the phenomenon and formulate a viable response.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The French and Spanish Popular FrontsComparative Perspectives, pp. 116 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989