GROWING PAINS OF SPANISH SOCIALISM: II: MAY DAYS OF A LIVELY MOVEMENT
Sexton, Patricia Cayo
On the first of May in Palma, Mallorca (Majorca), I asked my non-Spanish friends whether there would be a May Day parade in town. Nobody knew; some had never heard of May Day. A taxi driver...
...Like other European unions, they are organized on the basis of ideologies (or at least international affiliations) and, unlike American unions, lack government-backed rights to "exclusive collective bargaining" in any given workplace...
...Though they are now the dominant group in that International, they are hardly its most popular, at least not with those affiliates who believe they pursue rightwing socialist politics (a tendency that may also, in these troubled times, be keeping them in power...
...and on the Catalonian side, the gentle Franciscan Fray Junipero Serra—Mallorquin, born on a farm in Petra—who became missionary founder of California's San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco...
...The Marxists look to the left, but Gonzalez seeks 440 to include the uncommitted middle in the party's appeal for votes...
...The Linkages with Catalonia, indeed a Socialist stronghold, can only help them...
...The Spaniard's affinity for the French, the Italians, and Yugoslays is not surprising...
...Hundreds of marchers gathered in the Plaza de Espana, most with banners or insignia of their own party or union, and a few with both Socialist and Communist emblems...
...The terror spread by the Basque ETA (a nonsocialist, bourgeois group) makes the Irish IRA provisionals look like pacifists, and even dwarfs the horrors of the Italian Red Guard assassins...
...In 1978, in Italy, 30 political murders were reported...
...Basic union rights were restored by Parliament in mid-1977, and the new Spanish Constitution, adopted in December 1978, confirms these rights...
...Like Santiago Carrillo, who persuaded the Communist party in 1978 to drop its "Leninist" label (making it the first Communist party to do so), Gonzalez also sought to clean up his party's image and dissociate it from the Russian-Stalinist connotations that mistakenly adhere to Marxism and that surely are not at all applicable to Spain's Socialist party...
...The Spanish Basque cities (but not the countryside) tend to resemble Belfast, and I wonder if the terror generated in these diverse places does not in fact arise as much from industrial blight as from ideology...
...Portraits of Pablo Iglesias, the Socialist party's poet founder, and of "Largo Caballero" ("the big man," worker, disciple of Iglesias, pre-Franco head of the UGT, leftwing Socialist leader) hung on the walls—but no Marx...
...The German Social Democrats, almost alone among the large parties in the Second International, are still in power...
...At the time of the first post-Franco elections in mid1976, the UGT lacked any significant membership...
...Why would a construction worker join the CCOO rather than the UGT...
...Spain is moving toward provincial autonomy, as provided in the new Constitution...
...Their implacable resistance to Fascism (and centralism) cost them not only the symbol of their liberties, Guernica—the revered home of the Basque assemblies, which was leveled by Nazi bombs in the Civil War—but also incurred a good deal of retribution during the Franco years...
...The parade in Palma, and elsewhere in Spain, was sponsored jointly by the Socialist and Communist parties...
...The UGT claims about 2 million members, the CCOO about 2.5 million and real figures are said to be lower...
...Most of them are workers and Socialists...
...The PSOE membership of about 1,000, much higher than the Communist, is overwhelmingly in favor of at least some forms of cooperation with the Communists...
...they wouldn't want it...
...In France, the Socialists joined forces with the Communists and threatened the conservative government...
...Indeed, as Pope John Paul II is showing us, these opposite numbers are learning to live together, perhaps too well, and someday, if a second Aquinas appears, there may even be a reconciliation of Catholic and Marxist theology...
...Carlos Marx AT LEAST A DOZEN BILLBOARDS in Palma bore the fist-and-rose emblem and the brief message "28 Congress, PSOE, Madrid...
...It is indeed a political irony that the generous support given by the Swedish and German Socialists has played a key role in the successes of Spanish Socialists...
...Your program refers to the `emigrants.' Why are they important...
...in Spain 88 , and 61 of them traceable to the ETA...
...The Avis man next door, obviously a Socialist, referred me to the union office down the block, a large, modern building, filled with people, most of them surprised and pleased to find an American woman among them, and anxious to offer information...
...Of the 27 councillors, the UCD had 13, the PSOE 11, the Communist party 2, 437 and the PSM (a Mallorquin nationalist yet socialist party) had 1. With the latter two groups, the Socialists put together a majority of one and chose a mayor and new commissioners, including members of the coalition parties and even one UCD member, reportedly a "social democrat" at heart...
...We don't know, it's too early to tell...
...Hence they must sit down at the same side of the bargaining table when agreements covering these workers are negotiated...
...In Palma, I saw the now popular revival of the film For Whom the Bell Tolls, an Anglo version of the war, in dubbed Spanish: the Spanish heroine, Ingride Bergman, in brown face...
...There can hardly be much love lost, even by the gallant Spaniard, on such gross quantities of culturally aloof and often politically hostile strangers, even though they are vital to Spanish prosperity...
...and the Russians want the state and the party to run everything...
...The UGT, General Workers Union, is affiliated with the Socialist party and now its main support...
...He had proposed that the party drop its Marxist label in order to attract voters who liked the party's program but recoiled from the label, and perhaps by that means to win the next parliamentary elections...
...The result of this split may be that the Socialists themselves will divide, and be conquered...
...Fearing further Socialist gains at the polls, the government of Adolpho Suarez set up rules for the elections of plant committees that gave Communist unions an edge, and by mid-1978 the Communists had elected 66,000 plant delegates, the Socialists 41,000, and nonaffiliated unions 35,000...
...Like, say, Yugoslavia...
...But today's Spanish Socialists are young and have no personal memories of those years...
...Socialists claim that votes were miscounted and that their margin of loss was only 10 rather than 20 percent...
...people were apathetic, distrustful, afraid to have opinions...
...It contained no blazing red emblems, no sign of class struggle, but instead depicted city life under socialism—a giant park, trees, birds, games, a puppet performance of Hamlet "presented by Garcia Lorca," a library, a "House of Culture," park benchers reading the socialist paper, and also the striking, widely known PSOE emblem (the fist holding a red rose, rather than a torch or a hammer and sickle) and the legend Cambriar su Cuidad del los Socialistas"change your city with the Socialists...
...They also seek to rationalize the city's development, since hotel capacity far exceeds demand and growth has been (under the order of the Caudillo) rather chaotic...
...In the parliamentary elections of 1979, the Socialists won 29 percent of the votes and about as many parliamentary seats, a success those I spoke with attribute to the demography of class: at least 50 percent of the votes are cast by workers contrasting with 10 percent by an elite of wealth, 40 percent by those who are middle class and "nonideological," they say...
...Is there some country you can look to now and say, `we want to move in that direction...
...so it goes, and each year workers' incomes are falling further behind living costs...
...That's part of it, but the major difference is that they're not Marxists...
...One can be too certain, based on some past performances, about who the good guys and the bad guys are...
...Yet, Andalusians do not learn the Catalan language, the carrier of this unique culture...
...Instead, it stresses "democratizing the institutions of local government," "reinventing the participation of people in government," "giving people the feeling that the Council belongs to them...
...In 1977, living costs in Spain rose by more than 26 percent, yet wage rises of only 22 percent were imposed...
...We have to be socialists before we're Marxists...
...Few police, no violence...
...they all are Mediterranean people...
...We want to be neutral in the battle between the superpowers, and we want to find a new way, not capitalism and not state communism...
...And after that...
...There was, after all, a Torquemada and a Catholic slaughter of heretics...
...Their fervor raises several issue for Socialists...
...You have wounded me badly," Gonzalez told the Congress on the eve of what was to be his almost unanimous reelection—and he resigned...
...The government denies these emigrants the vote and makes it difficult for them to return to Spain...
...The government is doing very badly and we don't expect it to last out its term in office...
...How does it affect the practical decisions you have to make...
...I evoked a similar response in everyone I spoke with later: so far as they know, American unions are all company unions...
...Spaniards have been patient with their northern friends, remembering how their own country was used as an early battleground againt Fascism, while their Anglo, French, and Russian friends ho-hummed and allowed the German and Italian Fascists to defeat the Republic and then launch the Second World War...
...They claim that the Communist party, while more highly centralized than the Socialist, is nevertheless an "omnibus party" that even contains many Social Democrats...
...I asked the Mallorquins, "Why is Marxism so important to you...
...Unlike the Basques, rather few Catalonians seek independence...
...While the Russians may not have come this far, Stalin is dead, and the range of views in parties elsewhere is easily as wide as the Church's...
...a central hero and ultimate Anglo, Gary Cooper...
...The Catalonians, including the Mallorquins (who are only 132 miles from Barcelona) are less nationalistic, fanatic, and religious than the Basques, and far more integrated into the language and culture (especially the French) of Europe...
...The Socialist program extends in many directions but says nothing about "socializing the means of production" in Palma, hardly an immediate issue...
...the Spanish character, Akim Tamiroff...
...In the first half of 1979, 17 people died in Italy, 61 in Spain—of these, 39 at the hands of the ETA and 14 killed by GRAPO (the lunatic First of October anti-Fascist Revolutionary Groups), 2 by the extreme right, and 6 by the police...
...Differences between the Catalonians and Basques are also highly visible in the cities...
...It's important because it indicates the direction we want to move in...
...seized by Franco, and "Laudos" to the old Fascist habit 435 of controlling collective bargaining and forcing unacceptable settlements on labor (a habit that is as addictive in the Communist as in the corporate state...
...A strange people, probably the most fanatic nationalists in Europe, perhaps in the world...
...Once disarmed, these dogmas (or at least the frenzy they inspire) might be laid to rest, so that we could all go to the seashore, or at least to Lorca's puppet show in the park...
...As a result, the Socialists have lost ground to the nationalist right in the highly industrialized, unionized Basque regions where Socialists should be shoo-ins...
...Autonomy is an old and passionate issue in Spain, especially for Basques and Catalonians...
...The Carlists lost, betrayed the Basques and the Catalonians by seizing their lands for a time, and a half-century later embraced Franco...
...But, how exactly does Marxism affect your party's program...
...nobody had any say...
...We will do what is needed to make the economy work and keep it from being controlled by a few individuals...
...The image of the bomb-throwing radical is an indelible one, however innocent the accused may be...
...They are exiles...
...The banners, I learned featured three demands: "Paro, No...
...A million and a half people left Spain under Franco...
...Finding no bell downstairs and almost not clue to the PSOE's location, I groped my way to the floors above and pushed a buzzer at an unmarked, locked, yet likely door...
...Gonzalez had not at all anticipated so hearty a defeat on this and other issues...
...The rebirth of the UGT, a potent preFranco force, has a strange history...
...But don't you think that's because the Social Democrats in the northern countries have had power in their governments, and know how hard it is to change things, while the French and Italian parties haven't come to power yet...
...I find Mallorquins consistently eager to talk and help once the slightest interest is shown in them, and irrepressible when some knowledge of their cherished culture and history is displayed...
...We want to go the way of the French Socialist party, or some elements of the Italian Communist party, or the way of the Yugoslays, rather than the way of the Social Democrats of Germany and Scandinavia and Britain...
...We're not doctrinaire, we don't believe in absolutes, and none of us are Leninists, none of us...
...It was closed, with no change-of-address posted...
...Paro"unemployment—is estimated by Socialists at 10 percent of the work force, a figure driven up sharply, Socialists say, by government stress on controlling inflation...
...and when the time came in mid-May, all the Spanish media focused on that Congress, the first fully legal one since the Civil War, 439 producing hours of TV coverage and daily press headlines...
...The office, two small rooms and a larger one, was decorated with the handmade flag of the Second Republic (red, yellow, and purple stripes) and another handmade Mallorquin flag (the multi red-and-gold stripes of Catalonia, plus a single purple border stripe for the Arab Almudiana...
...Cultural differences are exemplified in their proudest offspring: the Basque Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founding general of the Jesuit order, and his follower, Saint Francis Xavier—puritanical zealots, "soldiers of Christ" (often compared, with whatever accuracy, to Leninist cadres...
...Some 35 percent of the Spanish labor force is organized, a figure about 10 percent higher than that for the United States...
...Another anomaly involves workers' job security...
...Fortunately for Socialists, this heritage is inseparable from the egalitarian, democratic politics Franco sought to suppress but that now flourishes again...
...The budget for social security is bigger 441 than the total of all other budget items for the whole nation, but again, it's centralized and controlled by a few people who administer it very badly...
...442...
...Genoa and Marseille are only an overnight trip by boat from Palma, a proximity that inevitably links cultures, religions, politics...
...The parade started punctually, marched in an orderly, spirited fashion, chanting and singing along its planned course through the city streets, with only minimal help from a cheerleader and a flying squadron to help turn the corners, gathering several thousand marchers on its way, and terminating in the Plaza Major for speeches and the final event, a rock band that raucously dispersed the crowd...
...The money is there, but the people who need it can't get it...
...Socialists are also trying to rationalize government by coordinating services of various municipalities along the Bay of Palma, including taxis, sewage, and water districts...
...Now again the Basques seek autonomy, and some will kill almost anyone for their goal of independence...
...Since the same discontent presses upon the Spanish government, Socialists search for votes to achieve a margin of victory...
...The upshot is that, while Socialist and Communist federations are separate, they compete for the same workers (in the same jurisdictions—hotel, contruction, etc...
...Patrimonial Syndical, Si," and "Laudos, No...
...The UGT has grown despite the odd favoritism shown by government to the Communist unions...
...Only 31 percent of the delegates dissented...
...The Spanish way, whatever the new and constantly improvising politics of the young will make it, can touch every norteamericano, surrounded as we are by a world in which, it is said, more people speak Spanish as a mother tongue than any other single language—and most especially by the swelling numbers of sudamericanos in our midst, who look to Spain for models...
...Delegates responded by voting to describe the party as "class-based, of the masses, Marxist, democratic, and federalist...
...A giant poster (used persuasively, I learned, in the local elections of March 1979) covered one wall...
...The system is inefficient, it doesn't care about the people, and it pays out to political favorites...
...Marxism being so pivotal an issue, I itched to probe it further with Mallorquin Socialists, knowing from experience that many "Marxists" assume "dialectic" to mean merely a conversation between two people...
...Under this system, employers settled disputes easily: they called in the police...
...among service workers of various kinds, including taxi drivers who were on strike when I arrived, membership is more evenly divided...
...Perhaps neither the Swedish nor the German party is a galvanizing role model for the fledgling Socialists of Spain...
...Guillermo Mansito—handsome, bespectacled architect, hardly past 25 years of age— spoke of the new Town Council of which he was a newly elected member and its new Commissioner of Properties, Rights, and Contracts...
...They wish to recover their heritage, a passion that may be more potent than any political or religious ideology...
...These absolutes bury Marxism more than do the capitalists themselves...
...At any rate, people usually turn to the right and to "law-andorder" when their physical security is threatened...
...It may be just as well...
...In other words, what do you do differently from the Social Democrats...
...Many of them were exiled with the Republican army, others went elsewhere to find jobs...
...Under the circumstances (including their absorption with the upcoming 28th PSOE congress in Madrid) I was warmly welcomed, and during that and later visits spoke many hours with party people, all of them lively, friendly, businesslike, and young...
...The job was not easy, for nobody I asked, including the American Consul Agent, knew how to locate them...
...Only later did a small band of blackclothed marchers appear to protest the murder of a Communist youth in the Madrid parade...
...We expect to have new elections before the end of next year, and we expect to win them...
...We now want to change that...
...They mean we want to move toward a return on investments, and we want to stimulate new investments...
...most will settle for more autonomy...
...Carlos Marx was the central issue, or at least a surrogate for others, at the Congress...
...They are competitors, but they are allies in bargaining sessions and also, it follows, in the politics that affect union rights...
...I finally found an address in the phone book and, after searching for it much of one day, I found the office...
...The CIA has agents everywhere...
...And the social welfare system, what about that...
...Since the newly created council of the Balearics is controlled by conservatives, based largely on votes from rural areas and the islands of Ibiza and Menorca, autonomy may injure the Socialists...
...The first national congress of workers was held in 1870 in Barcelona (center of industry, unionism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism), and nine year later, exactly 100 years ago, the PSOE was founded...
...Also on the ecclesiastic front, loyalists burned many of Barcelona's churches in their struggle against the Church-backed insurrection, but the Basque clergy so fully endorsed the Republic, for nationalist more than political rasons, that even today the Basque churches are crammed with the devout...
...Efforts to dilute it, and to punish the Catalonians for their ardent anti-Fascism, included a Franco-backed immigration of the southern poor into the province, to the point where, Socialists say, Andalusians are now as numerous there as Catalonians...
...we want it in a hundred...
...Its Mallorquin membership of about 35,000 is somewhat larger than that of the CCOO, the Workers' Commissions Trade Union Confederation, an affiliate of the Communist Party (PCE...
...To achieve this, the Socialists plan to set up community governments in each district and to give them some significant decison-making authority: "Before 1975, we had no politics at all...
...On Mallorca, the UGT has more members than the CCOO among the hotel employees (hotels are big business in the island's economy...
...But its growth was spurred by the electoral success of the Socialist party...
...Maybe because the Communists are a little more revolutionary," was the answer, "though only a little...
...Union General de Trabajadores THE PARADE'S SUCCESS, and my own success in finding it, stimulated me to seek out the Socialist party offices...
...We want votes, jobs, and an open door for the emigrants...
...How do you interpret those words...
...the contrary is the case among construction workers...
...But being in no position to quiz them in these arcane topics, I simply asked: "Do you have any model of a society in mind...
...The Socialists won almost every major city in Spain, including Madrid and Barcelona...
...On the mainland, the proportions are reversed and the Communist unions are somewhat larger than the Socialist unions...
...While Socialists would go further than the UCD in granting Basque autonomy, they do not go far enough to satisfy the independistas...
...Still, some people claim that the Andalusians, basking in the beauty, hope, and good living of Barcelona, have become more Catalonian than the natives...
...After the transition period, we hope to stimulate public investments and provide some competition to private ownership...
...But, no mistake, ethnicity is a compelling emotion for the Catalonians, whose language, under Franco, was banned from print, the schools, and even public usage...
...Patrimonial syndical" refers to the demand that unions and left parties be reimbursed for the property (funds, buildings, vehicles, etc...
...What is the difference between the Socialist and Communist unions," I asked...
...Both straddle the SpanishFrench border (which helps keep their militant ethnicity alive), and both, in the savage 19th-century wars of the Bourbon succession, for the sake of autonomy even supported the ultra-reactionary Carlists...
...Given the shaky economies of Europe (and the world for that matter), pressures from below threaten most governments and topple some...
...The party, Gonzalez said, confronted different realities from those prevailing at its founding 100 years ago...
...The final results of this forced wedding are unpredictable...
...I had found it, and luckily during its two daily hours of business...
...I pointed to the single economic issue in the party's "transition program" for the '79 elections: "Hacia el Retorno de la inversion...
...I do, however, feel some empathy for their peculiarities, since my own ancestry is Basque...
...This was their war...
...Now employers agitate for easier dismissal rights, and workers worry about job security...
...The second irony is the virtual occupation of Spain (including the Balearics) by northern settlers and tourists...
...A taxi driver finally located the parade and took me to it, insisting all the way, with gestures, that all politicians are banditos and not to be trusted...
...but under pressure from both employers and the 436 UCD, it came out so antilabor that it made no mention at all of the union's role in the plant...
...My Palma informants, a majority of them Marxists, had confidently predicted that the Congress would split at least 60-40 in favor of the Marxists...
...During the Franco years, these unions were outlawed, the Italianinspired corporate-Fascist model was imposed, and the OSE (The Spanish Syndical Organization), an arm of government, included both workers and employers in the same units and controlled their agreements...
...There are tensions, mainly for displaced Catalonians and the cultural impact is bound to be deep (the Andalusians' Flamenco, for instance, now rivals the sardanas in popularity...
...and engage in coordinated "pluralistic" bargaining...
...But the Spanish church, hardly the noblest of bodies even now, no longer sheds the blood of dissenters...
...The use of the word "revolutionary" in this context was, I think, more symbolic than specific, for both the Socialists and the Communists denounce insurrectionary tendencies...
...So vital is his memory for Spanish Socialists (reputedly over the years the most Marxist of European Socialist parties) that it unseated the party's popular leader, Felipe Gonzalez, a 37-year-old former Seville labor lawyer, who has guided the party since its rebirth...
...I ask you, comrades, that you acquire Marxism with a critical spirit, because Marx is not an absolute that divides the good from the bad...
...Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol MY NEXT STOP was the Socialist party office, recently relocated on the third floor of a nice but slightly decrepit house on the Alejandro Rossello...
...A pause and a hesitant response: "The main difference is that we don't want to support the UCD government any longer...
...I struck a responsive chord, without recalling at the moment the Catalonian tendency to anarcho-syndicalism and worker self-management., "We like the Yugoslav model very much," they responded eagerly, "or at least many aspects of it...
...Government was highly centralized...
...The Catalonians can boast of one of the most beautiful and exciting cities in the world— Barcelona...
...History can be misleading, but Socialists might jog their memories with George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and his chilling accounts of Communist terror against other leftists, including himself, during the Civil War...
...The theater was filled, with expectations as well as patrons, but the children squirmed and many adults understandably dozed off...
...An anomalous situation exists in which the unions have developed more quickly than employer organizations, but the Spanish Conference of Employer Organizations (CEOE) has been launched and its leadership has moved close to the governing UCD...
...The workers own and operate industry, and it works...
...It's also more democratic because the people run things, rather than the government or a few private corporations...
...When workers saw the Socialists spurt ahead and become strong challengers to the conservatives, many of them left the Communist CCOO and joined the Socialist UGT...
...Since politics is new to Spain, its leadership in all parties is almost shockingly youthful...
...Of course, since the launching of the PSOE, Sweden's Social Democrats have lost their long tenure in office...
...Under Franco workers had few rights but, once accepted as regular employees, they could be fired or laid off only for serious misbehavior...
...Why not the way of the Social Democrats...
...But we think that the CIA, the Russians, and our own military would block that...
...Consequently, the Congress of Deputies, the key lower house of Parliament, drafted a labor law in 1978...
...but the left coalition fractured and so the elections were lost...
...Because the Social Democrats want socialism in a thousand years...
...The Basque provinces have submitted their instituto (plan for autonomy) to Parliament and so has Catalonia, but the Balearics have not yet done so...
...Some Spanish Socialists, at least for now and for specific aims, are working with the Communists...
...I asked marchers for a clearer translation of the banners, and in the exchange that followed they laughed incredulously when I told them that there are real unions, as distinct from what they call "yellow unions," in the United States...
...but we do regard ourselves as Marxists and we want to be identified that way...
...The main obstacle to discourse is that few of them speak much English and most of them speak a dialect of Spanish that is heavily accented with their other language, Mallorquin, an antique dialect of Catalan and the principal language spoken on the island...
...In most respects, Spanish unions resemble other European far more than American unions...
...While many blame the governing UCD for 438 failing to control the terror, others reflexively associate terror with the left (as many Italians falsely blamed the Communists for their terror...
...The Basques—whose strenuous disposition can now be seen in their favorite game, Jai alai, and in the yearly Pomplona bull runs— resisted both the Roman and Germanic conquests and retained a language and culture like no other, remaining the oldest surviving racial group in Europe...
...Autonomy TWO OF THE HOTTEST ISSUE for Socialists are provincial autonomy and Marxism...
...In Italy, the Communist party's cooperation with the ruling Christian Democrats was withdrawn because it cost the party too much ground among its own supporters...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
