Florida Atlantic University

The Spanish Socialist Party must bear primary responsibility
for the failure of the second Republic's agrarian program.
The need of Spanish Socialism to achieve acceptance as a
legally constituted political movement conflicted with its
need to maintain ideological purity. This contradiction
was manifested in the agrarian reform legislation. Socialist
leaders, caught between these two needs, were unable to
provide viable solutions to Spain's agrarian problems.
Their inability to perceive Spain's real agrarian needs
resulted from the party's gyrations on agrarian reform and
from internal, ideological conflict. By the end of 1933,
this conflict divided Spanish Socialism into two camps:
moderate and revolutionary. Therefore, the Socialists'
agrarian reform program, which in 1931 was committed to
changing the land tenure system within a democratic, rational,
economic framework had to be discarded in favor of agrarian
revolution.