On the 90th Anniversary of the 1936 Fascist Coup d'État in Spain

Republican militia fighters at the start of the Spanish Civil War

Statement of the Political Bureau of the PCTE on the 90th Anniversary of the 1936 Fascist Coup d'État

On July 18, 1936 a significant section of the Army, supported by the big bourgeoisie, landowners, the Church hierarchy, the most reactionary sections of the State apparatus, and the European fascist powers, rose up against the working people. That coup was the violent response of the ruling classes to guarantee their offensive in all the spheres; it was their response against the advance of the workers', peasants', and popular organization.

Ninety years later, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain pays tribute to those who fought fascism on all fronts. From trenches and factories, in the villages, in prisons, in exile, and everywhere the working class and the working people refused to accept the victory of reaction. We remember all those who fought for our future, especially those who, as members of the International Brigades, came to our country to give their best to stop fascism.

The memory of 1936 is a battleground today. For decades, the political regime that emerged from the Transition has built its legitimacy on a particular interpretation of the civil war that followed the fascist coup — the war as a "tragedy between brothers," the Francoist dictatorship as a past overcome without conflict, and the Transition as an example of reconciliation. This interpretation turns a war born from class struggle into a moral lesson on moderation as well as fascist violence into an isolated excess. Above all, it turns the defeat of our class and our people into the ideological foundation of the current consensus.

Against this falsification, we strongly claim that there were not two equally responsible Spains. There was a ruling class that resorted to fascism when the ordinary mechanisms of political domination were no longer enough to contain the growth of the workers' movement. The military uprising was the particular form taken for the defense of property, productive relations, and the traditional power structure against an organized working class that was beginning to challenge —in practice— the limits of the bourgeois Republic.

Spanish fascism was a political response by the bourgeoisie during a profound crisis of its dominance. When parliamentarism ceases to suitably guarantee the reproduction of the social order, the key sections of capital can resort to more overt forms of class dictatorship. The 1936 coup was, in this sense, a counter-revolutionary operation aimed at destroying workers' organizations, restoring social discipline, crushing the peasant struggle, and ensuring the continuity of capitalist accumulation.

That is why anti-fascism cannot be reduced to sentimentality or institutional ceremonies. It is not enough to condemn Franco if, at the same time, the economic, political, judicial, military, police, and cultural structures that enabled the continuity of much of the power after 1978 are preserved. It is not enough to speak of democracy while concealing the fact that the monarchy was restored by the dictatorship and subsequently made a central pillar of the new regime. It is not enough to extol reconciliation while the ditches remain full and the fortunes generated during the Franco regime remain untouched.

The events of 1936 teach us that any consistent struggle against reaction must raise and be linked, both theoretically and practically, to the question of power. The experience of the National-Revolutionary War demonstrated the heroic capacity of the working class to fight, organize, produce, educate, create culture, raise a People's Army, and sustain resistance under extreme conditions. But it also revealed the limitations of a strategy that, in the name of anti-fascist unity, ultimately subordinated the political independence of our class to inter-class alliances and political forms that failed to resolve the question of which class should lead society.

This is one of the key lessons we must learn for the present. Anti-fascism cannot become a policy of accommodating allegedly progressive bourgeois sections. It cannot be the pretext for chaining the working class to governments that manage capitalism, increasing military spending, repressing social protest, upholding Spain's membership to imperialist alliances, and burdening the costs of the crisis onto the workers. The struggle against fascism only retains its revolutionary content if it is strategically subordinated to the independent organization of the working class and the struggle for socialism-communism. Fighting reaction does not mean trusting that a faction of the bourgeoisie will defend the interests of the working class to the bitter end. It means intervening in the particular reality, uniting the working-class masses in the struggle, but always doing so from our own political perspective, our own organization, and our own vision of power.

Reaction advances nowadays under new conditions. It does not always appear in blue shirt or with the same rhetoric as in 1936. It feeds on impoverishment, precariousness, fear of the future, the housing crisis, the degradation of public services, racism, sexism, militarism, nationalism, and social despair. It advances because capitalism in crisis breeds insecurity and offers scapegoats. It advances because social democracy has disarmed the working class for decades, replacing organization with institutional management, struggle with parliamentary representation, and socialism with the benevolent administration of exploitation.

It is also advancing because war is once again taking the center stage of world politics. War is not an anomaly of capitalism, but rather one of its normal forms of existence in its imperialist stage. The struggle for markets, resources, trade routes, spheres of influence, and military positions drives capitalist states toward rearmament, militarization, and an offensive against the living conditions of the working class.

Spain is today no stranger to this dynamic. It is part of NATO, participates in the imperialist European Union, hosts strategic military bases, maintains rearming commitments, integrates its armed forces into international command structures, participates in missions abroad, and contributes to the Euro-Atlantic bloc's war policy. Therefore, the slogan "the main enemy is within" must return to the forefront, because it means fighting our own bourgeoisie, its governments, its monopolies, its military industry, its alliances, and its state.

The struggle against the imperialist war and the fight against reaction are one and the same. We cannot combat yesterday's fascism by supporting today's militarism. We cannot honor those who resisted the 1936 coup by accepting increased military spending, subordination to NATO, a war economy, or the criminalization of social protest. We cannot defend anti-fascist memory by turning a blind eye to repression, institutional racism, the persecution of internationalist solidarity, or the whitewashing of Francoism in the media, courts, barracks, and parliaments.

The anniversary of the fascist coup should also serve as a reminder that the working class can only win through organization. The experience of the Spanish labor movement demonstrates that when communists have exerted a real and organized influence on the trade-union movement, the class has advanced in consciousness, unity, and fighting capacity; and that when such influence has weakened, trade unionism has tended toward fragmentation, economism, or subordination to the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Therefore, ninety years later, the tribute to the anti-fascist fighters cannot consist of looking at the past with melancholy, but must be translated into present work: into cells at workplaces, into organization in the working-class neighborhoods, into intervention among the working-class youth, into struggle for the women of our class, into ideological struggle against anti-communism, into a cultural reconstruction of a proletarian understanding of the world and into the frontal opposition to the imperialist war.

The Political Bureau of the PCTE calls for transforming the 90th anniversary of the fascist coup into a campaign of class memory and current struggle. Not merely to contest the past, but to contest the categories through which the present is understood. Not to demand recognition from the State, but to organize those exploited, repressed, and sent to pay for the crises and wars of capital by this State.

Our memory cannot be contained in official events. Our memory resides in strikes, assemblies, picket lines, working-class neighborhoods, the organizing youth, the fighting working women, those who oppose NATO, those who defend solidarity with attacked peoples, and those who raise the red flag of the working class every day.

Honor to those who fought fascism.

Honor to those who fell for the cause of the working class

Political Bureau of the PCTE.

July 2026