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Socialism and war : the Spanish Socialist Party in power and crisis, 1936-1939
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ISBN: 0521392578 0511523610 Year: 1991 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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Abstract

This book recovers the lost history of Spanish socialism during the turbulent years of the Civil War (1936-39). Just as the energy of the socialist movement had sustained the pre-war Second Republic as an experiment in reform, so too it underwrote the Republican war effort in the crucial years of the conflict which would determine Spain's long-term future. Leading Socialist Party (PSOE) cadres formed the bedrock of the government, while thousands of Party and union militants helped bear the tremendous weight of the war effort. The role of the PSOE in the construction of Republican political unity during the Civil War was pivotal. Yet, paradoxically, previous accounts of wartime Republican politics have virtually written the PSOE out of the script by concentrating exclusively on the fierce ideological dispute between anarchists and communists. But the key issues of revolution and State power marked all the forces in Republican Spain, none more so than the Socialist movement. As the traditional party of the working class and the only mass party in Spain as late as 1931, PSOE militants were to be found on both sides of the revolutionary/reformist divide which split fatally the Republican forces during the Civil War. The PSOE's disintegration was a function of that of the Republic itself; but the reverse was no less true. The book investigates the responses of organised socialism to the complex issues raised by the conflict, as it charts the PSOE's devastating experience of political power and desperate crisis in a war it could not win.

Marxism and the failure of organised socialism in Spain, 1879-1936
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ISBN: 0521374928 0521530563 0511523653 0511876327 Year: 1990 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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This is the first full-length study in English of the role of Marxist theory in the Spanish Socialist movement prior to the outbreak of Civil War in 1936. In particular, the author stresses the intellectual poverty of this aspect of leftwing politics in Spain. In concentrating on the Partido Socialista Obrero Espafiol (PSOE), the major organised party of the left prior to the Civil War, the study seeks to achieve two main aims: first, to attempt to isolate the political, social and intellectual factors which led to a particularly distorted version of Marxism which became established in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century; and second, to demonstrate how this particular conception of Marxism had a crucial negative impact on the political formulations and fortunes of the PSOE between 1879 and 1936. The central argument of the book is that the significance of Spanish Marxism lay precisely in its poverty, since it was this 'decaffeinated' version of the theory which set the parameters within which the PSOE formulated its strategy for socialism.

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