Spain: Cracks In The Column

...Only when unemployment threatens or some injustice arises in connection with work do the workers mobilize for action, and even then only in large enterprises and for limited demands...

...220...

...N 1812 A LIBERAL CONSTITUTION for Spain I was ratified in the hope that political freedom would lead to social stability and economic modernization...

...None of these things happened...

...There such new developments have been osmotic...

...It is composed of elements within the Opus Dei which are associated with the daily Madrid...

...Had the opposition not existed and made the regime feel uneasy, there would have been no liberalization...

...A guilty conscience among older people...

...Now Spain has arrived at a stage of "liberalization...

...Falangist elements disappointed by Franco's policies chose the "syndicates" as their field of operations...

...In the 158 years since then, Spain has known exactly 35 years of either liberal or revolutionary government...

...These "syndicates" sufficed to control but not to appease the working class, so that for years the old workers' parties, especially the Anarchists, preserved all their prestige and clandestinely organized local committees...

...The world press, however, pays less and less attention to Spain...

...The fact that the Ministry of Information does not permit the other partisan groups within the opposition to publish helps create the impression that the entire opposition is under the control or influence of the Communists...

...the rest of the time, the country has been ruled by conservative or reactionary regimes...

...others, particularly among the Falangist, want to make the syndicates more independent and worker-oriented so that they may become a major center of power in the future...

...were organized, with both employers and workers included in their membership...

...But not forever...

...For the moment, the predominant group in Spain consists of the pseudo-liberal technocrats and business milieu grouped in the Opus Dei...

...Involuntarily, the opposition, being also an elite, has played the regime's game...

...The peasants have abandoned arid regions and moved onto newly irrigated lands—and the owners of the latifundios, thus deserted, have been unable to recruit other farm labor...

...Masses of restive Catholics thought they were being persecuted because the Republic (elected in April 1931) had separated church and state—and taken a series of related measures, as flamboyant as they were unessential, such as forbidding crucifixes in schools and cemeteries, expelling the Jesuits, etc...

...As the Spanish worker sees it, he is a nouveau riche constantly menaced by his former poverty...

...In the Middle Ages, Spain did not share in the typical feudal experience...

...At least half their readers must have been born after the Civil War, yet the subject continues to fascinate them...

...In the last three decades, the world has undergone tremendous industrial development and intensive mechanization, and the nations of Western Europe have enjoyed a considerable rise in their living standards...

...All these groups calculated that the Pretender, Don Juan, would be Franco's successor...

...They accepted help from his supporters and were caught short when Franco named Juan Carlos instead—all of which leaves this conglomerate of opponents without much influence...

...The students do not say what changes they want, for they have assumed the abstract position of French and American campus revolutionaries...

...The elitists are all with and for the system...

...disabused Falangist groups who want no part of a monarchy but do want a syndicalist movement that would be more independent though still essentially controlled by them...

...but the exiled leftist groups were opposed and managed to block every effort in this direction...

...219 PEDRO LOPEZ the past, has learned a few lessons, and will be able to play a political role...

...but in the Modern Age the country has taken on feudal characteristics...

...Franco's opponents had really never expected to dislodge him on their own...

...It is no small thing that an opposition exists at all and that it has persisted for 30 years—hard, asphyxiating years...

...The church had lost its accustomed ascendancy over the government and thereby considered itself a victim of persecution...

...There is, however, one segment of the opposition that is more realistic, has ties with * With the late 1969 reorganization of the Franco cabinet eliminating the old Franquiata elements, this has in part taken place...

...All these assorted opposition groups have no contact with the people and no real power, except for the pro-Russian Communists, who exercise some influence in the Workers' Commissions and have some militant supporters...

...The priests know what they want—modernization of the ecclesiastical structure and, in Catalonia, church support for local nationalist demands...

...Strikes, repressive police action, student demonstrations, divisions among the clergy, the proclamation of an eventual new king, a consular treaty with Poland—none of these items seem to interest either journalists or readers...

...the pro-Chinese group, which enjoys some (passing) prestige among students...

...To undermine the system's paternalism is to weaken it and, simultaneously, to foster among the people an awareness of their own interests and the will to defend them...

...In a new Russian noved by Shevtsov, Trotsky is called a "typical Zionist agent" planted for subversive purposes in the Communist movement by International Zionism In the new book, Josef Stalin, who was once downgraded by the Krushchev regime, is praised for purging Trotsky...

...The titled proprietors of the latifundios saw their privileges threatened by moderate but effective agrarian reforms...

...In the nineteenth century, every revolutionary thrust in Spain was flanked by conservative power in Europe...

...This attitude is due not merely to a shift from proletarian to semi-middle-class status, as has occurred among American and European workers, but also to peculiarly Spanish conditions— such as no political guarantees, no freedom of organization, no genuine security...

...It is reduced to proclaiming opinions it is incapable of defending, not to speak of imposing them on the country...

...2) Opposition on the fringes of the system...

...Over the last 30 years, Spain has escaped from its post-Civil War isolation into a qualified international "respectability...

...Older people are for a strong-arm policy and against "liberalization," not only because they lived through the Civil War and deem themselves the victors but also because they will not have to live in the Spain of the future...

...Accordingly, what strength we can have lies at the base of society...

...It has endured four civil wars, two republics, four periods of avowed dictatorship, one experiment with fascism, and now, for nearly 25 years, a regime born out of fascism that has become a potpourri of authoritarianism, religious intransigence, capitalistic planning, church-inspired technocracy, and even "liberalization...

...This analysis of the current Spanish situation may seem to derive from discouragement and to be itself discouraging...

...Little by little, in fact but not in law, the "syndicates" lost their nonclass character and endeavored, without disturbing the life of the regime, to win benefits for the workers...

...Anarchists who are similarly divided (the exiles are extremely intransigeant in principle, whereas those in Spain tend to be syndicalists who have abandoned pure Anarchist principles...

...Ironically, Trotsky, a Soviet Jew, had been bitterly anti-Zionist in his lifetime and today's Trotskyites in Europe and America are anti-Israel...

...To affirm this is to leave pessimism behind...

...All this has encouraged a population shift from the countryside to the cities...

...Probably, the opposition cannot be otherwise, given the political situation in Spain and in the world at large...

...For example, the Republican government had prepared irrigation projects which the Civil War brought to a halt...

...Because the situation in Spain is far from romantic...

...At the moment, the students comprise a wide political spectrum — Maoists, Castroites, neo-Marxists, Marcuseites—and they view the pro-Russian Communists as rightists...

...But what role...

...For the moment, this is the utmost we can hope for, which is not to say that we relinquish our ultimate objective, in a still distant Spain, of a socialist society...

...True, in the rest of Western Europe or in the U.S., a man had all those things and paid for them with only eight hours' work a day, five days a week, while in Spain they cost a man 12-14 hours' work 216 SPAIN: CRACKS IN THE COLUMN a day, six days a week, not counting what his children and wife could earn...

...Catholics and Communists succeeded in occupying lower-echelon positions in the vertical "syndicates," and thus they were able to develop their contacts with the workers and to exercise some influence on the only labor pressure group in the country...

...Why not...

...Finally, as a pressure group the opposition is powerless since it does not command the allegiance of the majority of Spaniards, being unable to count on the active support of the middle class or the militancy of the working class...

...Another point of similarity is that, ideologically, the opposition groups all live from hand to mouth...

...The 1931 Republic came into existence just when elsewhere the world economic crisis brought power to the rightists...

...This opposition aspires to pressure the regime into greater "liberalization," hoping 217 PEDRO LOPEZ thereby to wield a certain influence in the post-Franco period...

...He neither dares nor wants to muddy the waters...

...The Communists succeeded in capturing control of some of these units, and since then Catholics and Communists have maintained not a collaboration but an amicable coexistence—which is, of course, not free of rivalries—both in the syndicates and the Workers' Commissions...

...This is a strategy...

...3) The impatient opposition...

...It is my impression that there are individuals and even groups among the opposition who are beginning to think more or less in these terms: The system is strong and probably will survive for one or two generations more...

...But the Communists get along well enough with the progressive Catholics, and they control, or at least influence, a number of publishing houses and the one Catalan periodical, which can be published only because it is brought out by a religious congregation...

...Yet the term must be employed with much caution, for the country is still in a gray condition...

...But, I repeat, it is my impression that a small sector of the opposition, even of the young people, is ready for this silent labor that will proceed without fanfare or immediate apparent results...

...Let us try to see what is happening...

...But meanwhile the vertical "syndicates" were amassing great capital resources through obligatory dues from their members...

...and with the support of some foreign unions—notably, the German metallurgical union—they were a force to be reckoned with...

...Or because what is happening in Spain does not seem to differ greatly from what is happening under other dictatorships, and because readers are fed up with news of persecutions, demonstrations, strikes, and proclamations...

...Spain always seems to have been out of step with history...

...Oldline Communists then believed that, because the regime had sent the Blue Division to fight with the Nazis on the Russian front, the U.S.S.R...

...Within the pro-Soviet group there is a "purifying" splinter element opposed to the Pasionaria-Carrillo leadership...

...Such popularity required a three-year-long civil war, with almost a million dead out of a population of 25 million The causes of the Civil War were many...

...However, it is disturbing that the people who appear to have moved farthest in this direction, albeit not yet very far, are of elitist persuasions— as, for example, the Communists and progressive Catholics...

...would declare war on Franco and thus prod the Allies to intervene...

...WRILE THE PEASANTRY is changing, in TV some measure, into a class of small landowners and, in larger measure, into groups of emigrant laborers living in the cities or abroad, the urban working class also has not remained as it was at the end of the Civil War...

...At that time, the workers found themselves exactly where they had been before the Republic was proclaimed: wages low, jobs uncertain, and their predicament exacerbated by the absence of unions...

...The opposition appears to rely on certain army personnel (young officers and others from the General Staff ) and hopes that, when the moment comes, these military men will dismiss Juan Carlos and seize power...

...one might even say that the majority of Spaniards outside the big cities and some workingclass areas do not know it exists...

...but quite the contrary...

...Because, despite some public unrest, nothing warrants prophecies of radical changes in the near future...

...A by no means negligible number of traditionalists believed in the monarchy and 214 SPAIN: CRACKS IN THE COLUMN feared all change...

...Socially and politically, the country is no longer quite so immobilized by the extreme repression that characterized the Franco regime in its early years...

...Now that the country is beginning to be "liberalized," the world again is shifting to the Right...

...There was no organized power in the country except for the church and the army, both completely dominated by Franco, and for the "syndicates...

...With the disintegration of the student movement into small dogmatic factions (aping the French), the opposition has lost the one real if uncertain shock-troop potential it had...

...Men under fifty favor "liberalizing" in one way or another: some want to give the throne to Don Juan, a possibility now excluded by Franco's having designated Prince Juan Carlos as his successor...

...A romanticism compensating the middle-aged for an uninvolved existence...

...This is a genuine advance over the old reliance on clichés about agrarian reform, civilian control of the army, separation of church and state, etc...

...Their dread of Communism (which the facts do not justify) makes middle-class people hope that the Communist party will be defeated but also leads them to aid the Communists with money on the chance that their defeat is not absolutely certain...

...The Civil War and its revolution took place while fascism came to the fore in Europe...

...For the family of a workingman whose grandfather had been imprisoned under the Republic as an Anarchist, whose father had been imprisoned at the end of the Civil War as a Republican, and who himself had for years held down two jobs in order to eat badly and run into debt—for such a workingman's family suddenly to find itself in a position to buy a television set, a washing machine, a car, and perhaps even an apartment represented comfort...

...the changes that have occurred are not so much the work of the regime as the result of international events...

...But he also did not want to risk losing it in any antigovernment adventures...

...There is one other group among the "impatient opposition"—a minority among the workers who want their living standard raised, precisely because it has already somewhat improved...

...they want changes, but for themselves as individuals...

...The A.S.O...

...Vertical "syndicates" (ConfederaciOn Nacional Sindicalista, or C.N.S...

...It is only by going to the people, mingling with the people, and awakening the people that the opposition can ever become not the critic of, but the successor to, the regime...

...last, the Communists, who are divided into a pro-Russian group, the best-organized and -financed, a pro-Italian or polycentric faction (the Claudin group), and a proChinese group...

...In Trotsky—Zionist ! LEON TROTSKY, the first Soviet foreign minister, is faring badly in Soviet literature now that Russia has put all its marbles on the Arabs...

...They all import some ideas from France, especially from the New Left, but they make little attempt to study the Spanish situation in depth or to formulate concrete solutions to Spanish problems...

...He did not identify his well-being with the regime...

...The opposition sees this in practice but refuses to accept it in theory, while the exiles quite simply refuse to recognize it at all...

...Identification on the part of the young...

...Newsday, March 23, 1970 Spain a worker who is arrested or fired loses not only his freedom or his job but also his apartment, TV, washing machine, car...

...While the latifundio system is still powerful, it is gradually disappearing, and everyone is convinced that within a decade the entire Spanish agrarian structure will have changed...

...Today in Spain we are living through the first steps of this slow and difficult process of integration...

...218 SPAIN: CRACKS IN THE COLUMN ALL THESE OPPOSITION GROUPS, diverse as they are, have some things in common...

...Although to oppose the regime no longer requires the heroism it did immediately after the Civil War, opponents of the government know they must face veiled harassment, the loss of their job, or even imprisonment, and they know also that they are renouncing the material advantages the regime provides even for those who are neutral...

...Francoism must be replaced not by a group or party or ideology but only by the Spanish people...

...However, if we have no strength we can exert no pressure...

...The old people still talk revolution, without much believeing in it...

...in recent years, these plans have been carried out by the Franco regime, with considerable social consequences in rural areas...

...At the same time, the workers' economic condition was changing, for several factors were bringing about a measure of prosperity in Spain: the contagion of Europe's prosperity, American aid, massive tourism, and the emergence of a new generation of businessmen and technicians...

...The Spanish working class had such a strong tradition of belligerency that the new re215 PEDRO LOPEZ gime realized workers would have to be both controlled and appeased...

...What tactics can be used to implement it...

...Later . . . well, later one will see what it is that Spaniards want, and one will fight so that they may fight to force the system to grant or to accept what Spaniards want...

...None of this would suffice to make Spain a subject for best-sellers...

...Now the labor opposition within Spain came to see that it was necessary to work against the regime and for the workers within the syndicate structure...

...The economic situation has improved, thanks to a number of factors, among them the growing influence of technocratically-minded younger men in government, an increase in foreigncapital investments, an invasion of tourists, and certain development programs revived from the Republican era...

...and finally there are those who hope to move slowly toward a democratic system, taking advantage of the "liberalization...

...it seems to have no fear that, a la grecque, they may become military dictators...

...Since the late fifties some small part of all this has filtered into Spain...

...Even within the system, opinions about this policy vary...

...As Franco advanced in years, people began to think of the future...

...Therefore, in the eyes of most Spaniards, the opposition does not constitute a real alternative to the Franco regime...

...For 30 years, by police action, censorship, and economic pressures, the regime has succeeded in reducing the political life of the nation to a game for elitists...

...Democratic elements so far have not found a language for communicating with the submerged masses...

...Although for political reasons Spain had not been accepted into the Common Market, any more than the country had benefited from the Marshall Plan, these factors helped create a consumer society...

...One can already point to a growing interest in an objective study of the country's problems...

...Catholic syndicalists...

...That strength has to be created...

...What I have written here is not intended as a criticism...

...this in turn contributes to keeping the middle class simultaneously fearful and sympathetic...

...In Spain there is fertile political ground for campaigns (obviously, they would entail some risk) through which certain sectors of the submerged masses would begin to participate in organizations that must deal with their problems...

...The consumption was primarily for the rich, of course, but the masses have benefited also...

...This left the field wide open, both to the Catholics, who organized the Worker Brotherhoods (Hermandades), and to the Communists, who proved to be less rigid than the Socialists and Anarchists in exile...

...Whoever wants that to come to pass must be integrated with the people...

...The army continued, in the main, to be ideologically and emotionally bound to the old political structures and let itself be manipulated by church and nobility...

...Around 1960 the Catholics managed to create the Workers' Commissions, through which they were able to exert a kind of aggressive pressure the official syndicates did not dare attempt...

...The opposition maintains these military men are democratic and liberal in their thinking and wish to establish a constitutional government...

...the Anarchists, who retain a sentimental appeal for the Catalan working class and who, three years ago, undertook a "dialogue" with elements of the confederaciOn Nacional Sindicalista which, however, did not lead to any concrete results...

...We must begin at the beginning Today we are in the same situation in which the workingclass movement was a hundred years ago...

...And the young people care nothing about revolution...

...Simultaneously, new industries have been created in the cities—before 1955 by the government (in particular, by the Institute Nacional de Industrias, the chief organ of the partisans of economic self-sufficiency), and since then either by foreign concerns or by domestic firms that can obtain the kind of bank financing traditionally hard to come by in Spain...

...My personal impression is that both these elements and the opposition will be displaced and outdistanced in the long run by forces that will spring up spontaneously...

...For all these reasons, the Spanish countryside has been gradually depopulated...

...The students know that the police will be tough with them, and the workers consider police brutality inevitable...

...WHAT IS TO BE DONE...

...So long as the opposition labor groups had some hope that the Franco regime would disappear at the end of the Second World War, they thought in terms of a simple reestablishment of their old organizations— the Socialist Union General de Trabajo (UGT) and the Anarcho-syndicalist ConfederaciOn Nacional de Trabajo (CNT...

...He had had enough experience with the vertical "syndicates" to know that the regime had not voluntarily given him this "well-being...

...These groups include the students and the young priests, who demand immediate changes...

...And there was the impact that Hitler's electoral victory in 1933 and Mussolini's military triumph in Ethiopia left on middle-class Spanish youth...

...The timid Spanish bourgeoisie possessed neither the vigor to dominate the Republic nor the imagination to adapt to the growing potential of the workingclass movement...

...For some years, it will be work that produces small victories and big failures...

...was eventually disbanded by the police, whereupon, with the assistance of the Catholics, this working-class minority formed the Workers' Commissions...

...This includes leftist Demo-Christians...

...Previously, these workers were organized in the Alianza Sindicales Obreras (A.S.0...

...still others favor a government, with or without a king, that would be controlled by the army...

...When the Reformation was transforming Europe, the Counter-Reformation was powerful in Spain...

...In my view, the Spanish democratic opposition would find it profitable to learn from the spirit and the techniques of the struggle for civil rights and political participation, not from the theorizing of the French New Left or instructions from Moscow, Peking, or Havana, but from the experience in the United States...

...Now, what organizational forms this effort will assume is for the moment unforeseeable...

...We must go to the people, work with the masses—the laborers, the peasants, the uprooted...

...It can be pressured into accelerating its "liberalization" which will permit us to speed up modernization— that is, hasten the transformation of an oligarchic feudal-capitalist society into a more open capitalist society that requires a political democracy...

...and it places its hopes not in any action of its own but in a possible anti-monarchical coup once Franco will have left the scene...

...they erected office buildings as their headquarters, created splendidly equipped "workers' universities" (actually, professional schools) and mutualidades (pension and retirement funds), as well as a vast bureaucracy, appointed by the one legal political party and the government...

...Socialists living in the country as well as those who follow the exiles' political line...

...IN SPAIN, TODAY, one finds three kinds of opposition to the regime: (1) Opposition within the system, tolerated but held in check, and occasionally put down for form's sake...

...After the Second World War, when slow changes began to occur throughout the world, Spain remained static...

...Finally, since 1962 more than a million Spanish workers have emigrated to West Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Holland, and in lesser numbers to Switzerland, England, and France...

...the DemoChristian group allied with the former Franco Minister Ruiz Jiménez and his monthly Cuadernos para el Dialogo...

...In a short while, the regime itself will have to decide about its future and very possibly will absorb some elements from the opposition —the younger churchmen, militant students, philo-Communist bourgeois, and intellectuals from the pseudo-New Left.* Historically, such a move will have no importance, for these groups are politically powerless...

...No one really knows...

...Franco seems to TV have an answer: create conditions that will allow the system to continue after his death, while making some concessions— termed "liberalization...

...And Franco displayed sufficient political aplomb to frustrate whatever vague diplomatic attempts the Allies did make to replace him...

...This state of affairs is temporary, but for the moment it exercises a decisive influence...

...But even at this price, having these things represented well-being to the Spanish worker, who knew nothing about the rest of Europe or about the U.S...

...The literature of the opposition, now "legal," consists mainly of denunciations or generalities...

...People must be won over one by one...

...The big landholders, not knowing how to cope with the new labor shortage, have sold their holdings to the state, to newly formed agricultural enterprises, or to the peasants...

...THE OPPOSITION long ago gave up any expectation of overthrowing Franco and became resigned to waiting for his death...

...At the end of the Second World War, the Alianza di Fuerzas Democraticas hoped that an Allied victory would topple Franco...