´Mobilizing all our forces´: Comintern Operations in Spain 1923 – 1936

Resumen

This paper demonstrates that the adaptability of communist slogans and tactics before and after the Popular Front period never changed the central aim of the Comintern in Spain: To turn what they saw as an ongoing bourgeois-democratic revolution into a Communist-controlled proletarian revolution through the armed seizure of power. The standard Comintern playbook for achieving this in Spain, as it was elsewhere, is reflected in the sections of this paper: Work in the non-communist unions and among cultural influencers; pursuit of revolutionary agitation with maximum sensitivity to local conditions, training for armed insurrection and work in the army, and deployment of anti-fascist and popular fronts to achieve merger of the unions and youth sections under communist control. This paper completes a missing link in the literature by treating the early transition period to the Popular Front, never before fully covered.