PSOE right-wing leader, Speaker of the Cortes; joined Casado's coup, refused exile, and died in Franco's prison
"The great majority, the masses, they cannot leave, and I, who have always lived with the workers, will continue with them and with them I will stay. Whatever is their fate will be mine," to the socialist daily La Voz, March 1939
A Marxist revisionist who started as a philosophy professor in Madrid and succeeded Pablo Iglesias as leader of the PSOE and UGT in 1925. As Speaker of the Constituent Cortes (1931) he held to a moderate parliamentarism, and his opposition to the armed rising of October 1934 cost him his party base. During the Civil War he stayed in Madrid seeking a negotiated peace, and in March 1939 joined Colonel Casado's coup against Negrín, serving on the National Defence Council; but Franco demanded unconditional surrender. When every other council member fled, Besteiro refused, telling the socialist daily La Voz that he had always lived with the workers and would share their fate; a Francoist court martial sentenced him to life imprisonment and he died in Carmona prison.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1912Joined PSOE and UGT; appointed chair of Logic at Complutense University
- 1917Revolutionary general strike committee; sentenced to life imprisonment, amnestied 1918
- 1925–1931President of PSOE and UGT; collaborationist stance during Primo de Rivera dictatorship
- 1931–1933Speaker of the Constituent Cortes of the Second Spanish Republic
- 1934Resigned as UGT president after opposing the October armed rising
- 1937.05Republic's representative to George VI's coronation; met Anthony Eden seeking peace mediation
- 1939.03Joined Casado's coup; Foreign Affairs councillor on the National Defence Council
- 1939.03–1940.09Arrested by Franco's forces, court-martialed and sentenced to 30 years; died in Carmona prison
Related historical events
A Marxist revisionist: 'Marxism and Anti-Marxism'
Besteiro was a Marxist revisionist who admired Karl Kautsky and opposed introducing the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Bern Conference of February 1919, however, he defended it as an exception for the Russian case, an apparent contradiction he later explained by saying Russia faced a choice between socialist dictatorship and anarchy. In "Democracia y dictadura" in El Socialista on 12 April 1923 he argued, in Marxist terms, that saying the proletarian dictatorship was necessary for socialism to triumph meant no more than that political action was necessary, and did not mean destroying existing democratic forms, abandoning the weapons democracy had forged, or handing society's future to a group of "more or less sincere redeemers." In 1933 he told Amaro del Rosal that establishing socialism by proletarian dictatorship was an impossible absurdity in the circumstances and, if attempted, would fail and only stimulate reaction.
On 28 April 1935 he entered the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences with an address titled "Marxism and Anti-Marxism," read as another episode in his conflict with the party's Caballerista line. There he held that contemporary thought, even in its most anti-socialist forms, had been infected by Marxism, analysed the similarities between fascist and proletarian dictatorship, and argued that a socialist party in power must solve economic problems on its own terms or risk becoming just another bourgeois party; a socialist party out of power must not seek power by violence, which could degenerate into a violent reformism resembling fascism, but must build a mature governmental programme on the model of British Labour. During the Second Republic he also proposed a bicameral system with a corporative second chamber representing socio-economic interests.
Assessments differ. Stanley Payne considered him possibly the party's only Marxist theorist of importance; Gerald H. Meaker called him a "Spanish Menshevik." Paul Preston, by contrast, judged his effective contributions to Marxist thought very slight, hampered by a certain "moral rigidity." Ricardo de la Cierva held that he was never a "true Marxist" but a doctrinaire open to the evolutions of European social democracy.