THE LEFT IN SPAIN, 1956-1975

THE LEFT IN SPAIN, 1956-1975 Abdón Mateos, Javier Muñoz Soro, Emanuele Treglia 2 Chapter I. A New Scene (1956-1967) General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship was founded on the ashes of what has been called the “Spanish Holocaust”. In order to eliminate those in favor of emancipation, freedom, and social justice, “anti-Spain” ideals, the regime fiercely repressed those who had supported the Republic during and after the Civil War. The regime shot, imprisoned, and tortured Republican supporters, forcing many into a long period of exile. At the same time, the dictatorship sought to control structures that would indoctrinate and discipline Spain’s population. Under these circumstances, there was only one union, which was obligatory to join. The Spanish Trade Union Organization (OSE), also referred to as Vertical Syndicate, was based on fascist corporatism aiming to suppress forms of class struggle. Labor strikes were prohibited. Similarly, the Spanish University Union (SEU) sought to mold new generations that would uphold the regime’s values, especially National Catholicism. At first, the dictatorship was entirely excluded from the new international order that took shape after the Second World War because of its connection to the defeated Nazi fascism. Forced economic autarky, as a result of this isolation, led to the “hunger years” of the 1940s. Quality of life dropped significantly in comparison to before the Civil War. In the 1950s, however, the Franco regime began an international insertion campaign signing pacts with the United States and the Roman Catholic Church (Concordat of 1953). Spain was also admitted to the United Nations (UN) in 1955, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank in 1958. This campaign also involved opening the Spanish economy to international markets. A group of “technocrats” that entered into government during the second half of the 1950s led the charge initiating a process of modernization and development that would later be referred to as the Spanish economic miracle of the 1960s. For the left, the 1940s were years of dispersion and disorientation. After their hopes for an Allied intervention to overthrow the dictatorship were lost, they had serious problems finding effective ways to fight against the regime. New anti-Francoist projects would not emerge until the second half of the 1950s, together with student and labor mobilizations that began to gain strength in 1956. However, the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) approached this new phase differently and did not 3 establish any sort of collaborative efforts with one another. The PCE launched the National Reconciliation Policy, which called for a multilateral unified alliance against the dictatorship. The Communists were also trying to reform their identity, theories, and agenda, so that the group would be more compatible within a Western liberal democratic framework. At the same time, the party strongly supported the development of mass mobilizations, especially the extension and consolidation of the Workers’ Commissions, which became the largest of the opposition movements. During this time the PCE became the political protagonist, establishing itself within Spain as the “anti-Francoist party” as an antonomasia. Spanish socialism, on the other hand, went through a period of fragmentation until the end of the 1960s as new groups defining themselves as socialists began to gain ground. These organizations stemmed primarily from university and professional circles. Socialist actions in defiance of the dictatorship that sought international support, established a Republic presidency in exile, and participated in the European Movement and International Labour Organization was no longer sufficient during the resurgence of anti-Francoist protest and dissidence in the transformed Spanish society that was living under the regime. A new scene was beginning to take shape. 1. From Antifascism to Anti-Francoism The war in Spain concluded not only with the defeat of the Popular Front, but also with the war on the left. Colonel Casado’s coup on March 1939, with the support of a sector of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), the General Union of Workers (UGT), the anarchist National Labor Confederation (CNT), and leftist Republicans but excluding Communists, signaled the rupture of the Popular Front. The breakdown of this leftist coalition in Spain was anticipatory of the events that would, in a few months, shock antifascist forces after the signing of the German-Soviet pact in August 1939, which resulted in the outbreak of war in Europe after the invasion of Poland. This European fracture had no major consequences within Spanish leftist formations. Only a few militants broke from the Communist Party of Spain (PCE, established in 1921), the Unified 4 Socialists Youth (JSU), or the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, which was created in the spring of 1936. In fact, the pact between Hitler and Stalin saw the reestablishment of Catalan socialism as a natural consequence, which rejected the Bolshevization of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) 1. The breakdown of the left’s previously unified actions would continue without interruption during the long years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Not until after the dictator’s death, would the left come together with the goal of establishing a new democracy, in an antiFrancoist formation known as la Platajunta. Unlike other European countries, after the transition to democracy, Spain did not see electoral pacts or national coalition governments on the left. This sort of collaboration was limited to regional and municipal elections. Catalonia was the only territory that had seemed to recover from the rupture between the Socialists and Communists. A new left linked to universities was established in the late 1950s, which led to the creation of an anti-Francoist coordination in 1969. This simple antiFrancoist collaboration grew with the incorporation of the Socialist Movement of Catalonia (MSC) in 1966 and the PSOE in 1972. The defeat of the Spanish left in the Civil War (1936-1939) was incomplete because of the voluntary diaspora of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the survival of the Second Spanish Republic’s political institutions in exile. In addition to the relocation of different political parties and unions outside of Spain, previous parliamentary representatives continued to meet in France or in Mexico, creating organized aid for Spanish refugees. These groups primarily discussed the government’s survival and the presidency of the Republic and its autonomous institutions in exile. The defeat of the left was partial for two main reasons. First, because after the Prime Minister Manuel Azaña resigned in February 1939 following the French and British acknowledgment of Franco’s leadership, the President of the Republic would not take on the equivalent role in exile until 1945, when the former government leaders were able to meet in Mexico. Second, Casado had discussed the legality of the Juan Negrín’s government, which forced him to leave Spain. The majority of the leftist political parties represented in parliament would not acknowledge the option of establishing a government in exile in July 1939. This new point of contention provoked a greater division within parties like the PSOE and the Republican Left, although the major factions disowned 5 Juan Negrín, forming solidarity with the socialist leader Indalecio Prieto in order to provide assistance for refugees2. In reality, this parliamentary majority echoed the Republican-Socialist coalition, established in 1909 and reformulated during the 1930s, prolonging its existence during the Second World War and lasting until the beginning of the Cold War in 1947. However, it overstepped the politics of the Popular Front, which only briefly reappeared without the followers of the former President Negrín between March 1946 and July 1947. This was the time of the Republican government in exile, led by the Republican José Giral and Socialist Rodolfo Llopis3. The Republican-Socialist coalition would go on to impose the policy of replacing the Republican antifascist front with a new anti-Francoist policy that would not necessarily equate Republic with democracy. This brought together dissidents of the reactionary coalition between those advocating for a liberal monarchy or Christian democrats. Evidently, the end of the Spanish Civil War did not just involve the rupture of the leftist parties that composed the Popular Front, but it also involved the PSOE’s division, the principal formation of the left in Spain. Some historians and political scientists have suggested that the Socialists, under Francoism, endured the dictatorship as a period of eclipse or decline4. Many scholars have identified the real “anti-Francoist party” as the PCE, characterizing the Socialists as passive and divided, with aging cadres. Naturally, communist parties were better adapted to operating clandestinely in comparison to the Socialists’ form of organization of the masses, which did not facilitate an easy conversion to covert activity. Furthermore, the international support that the USSR and the Communist Bloc gave to the PCE, at least until the late 1960s, was unparalleled under Francoism. The Socialists, on the other hand, only found significant support at the end of the dictatorship and during the transition to democracy. The only substantial aid that the Socialists received under Franco’s regime was from trade unions, through the International Federation Trade Unions (IFTU) that was founded in 19495. After the end of the war in Spain, the parties belonging to the Socialist International or the unions in association with the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) would be able to help support the socialist militants of PSOE and the UGT. The PSOE’s leadership had 6 been relatively unified in exile until the dispute between Indalecio Prieto and Juan Negrín in the summer of 1939. In Mexico, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, a delegation of Socialist executives was established that Indalecio Prieto swiftly began to lead. Meanwhile, the party’s Secretary General Ramón Lamoneda led the Socialist exiles in France, who supported Juan Negrín and the allied war against Hitler. Despite the German-Soviet pact, the socialists backing Negrín did not break all ties with the Communists, yet they did not maintain the close relationship that had been established during the civil war. The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 prompted Negrín’s socialists and the Communists to renew their unity. Together with a sector of the Republican left, they created an antifascist formation in Mexico, the Spanish Democratic Union (UDE). What was going to be the first attempt at reestablishing an accord of action between the Spanish left was short-lived. In September 1942 the PCE created the new national policy, severing ties with Negrín and his isolated followers. The majority socialist faction in Mexico reunited the former followers of Julián Besteiro, who had died in prison, Francisco Largo Caballero, who would be imprisoned in Germany, and the “centrist” leader Indalecio Prieto. In 1940 the group established the Círculo Pablo Iglesias. Shortly after, they formed new governing bodies for the party, UGT, and the reconstituted Socialist Youth 6 . It was the beginning of a new constellation of socialists, working to transcend divisions from the 1930s and returning to Pablo Iglesias’s founding doctrine through a cohesive effort on behalf of the party, trade unions, and youth affiliations. This sort of refounded socialism, which culminated with the liberation of France in 1944, rejected any sort of bilateral support from the PCE. However, the newly reintegrated socialists that were initially in favor of the restoration of the Republic became open to other provisional options that would terminate Francoism, as the Socialist parliamentary leader Indalecio Prieto voiced during the end of the Second World War in 1945. In fact, the Junta Española de Liberación that reunited Republicans, socialists, and Catalan nationalists since 1943 was in favor of the allies and of a republican government in Spain, yet they did not advocate for a mere return to the Second Republic of 1939. 7 This socialist possiblism broke with the politics established after the Tragic Week of 1909 involving collaborative action with Republicans of the “bourgeois” left. It was not yet complete democratic accidentalism because, after the transitional period that would follow Francoism, the socialists voiced their stance in favor of a Republic and elections to establish a constitutional parliament. Not until many years later, in 1961, and shortly after with the 1962 Congress of European Movement in Munich, did the socialists show that they would accept a parliamentary monarchy if that was what the Spanish people desired. At that time, in the summer of 1947, the PSOE worked on a project to terminate the Republican government in exile. The Socialist Secretary General Rodolfo Llopis led the initiative. This signaled the end of unity and antifascist, Republican hope that lasted through the end of the Second World War. The allied forces, while Great Britain still led in terms of Europe, had revised their non-intervention policy concerning Spain, only to show support for pacific solutions that would lead to the unification amongst Spaniards and the reestablishment of democracy. Parallel to the position of the allies, Indalecio Prieto began speaking with Catholic antiFrancoists and monarchists who were initially represented by José María Gil Robles, former leader of the Confederation of Autonomous Right-wing Groups (CEDA). Ernest Bevin, the foreign affairs officer of Clement Attlee’s government, facilitated these conversations, which ushered the signing of a common declaration between the PSOE and the Confederation of Monarchical Forces in August 19487. The Pact San Juan de Luz was the first attempt to heal the wounds of the Civil War vis-à-vis the democratic reconciliation of the Spanish people. Furthermore, both the Socialists and monarchists pronounced their support for the North Atlantic Treaty, siding with the European countries that would sign the agreement. With this anti-Francoist pact, which ended the period of Republican antifascism, a sector of anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary Marxists from the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) banned together. Basque nationalists and Catalan Republicans sympathized with the new anti-Francoist politics. However, this pro-democracy coalition against the dictator did not resolve the shape of a future government they were advocating for, nor were they able to accomplish significant advances. Ultimately, the inability of this 8 sector of the non-communist left to instigate action benefitted the Monarchical agenda of Juan de Borbón. The Socialists broke with the pact in 1952, initiating a period of isolation. This also presumed the end of other agreements between the Socialists and additional groups, until new anti-Francoist, democratic parties began to emerge. This isolation was also a result of the loss of hope in an allied intervention and/or a military, monarchical coup that would force Franco to relinquish power. The Socialists had refused the possibility of making pacts with communist parties since their first assembly that reunited different sections of the diaspora in 1946. However, they compromised that decision when they allowed the PCE to join the National Alliance of Democratic Forces. Shortly after, José Giral’s government in exile allowed the former director of the Socialist Youth, Santiago Carillo, to join them in the spring of 1946. The Socialist’s previous exclusion of the PCE stemmed from resentment originating during the war in Spain and for communist violence towards some militant socialists during the liberation of France in 1944. The Socialists’ isolation had another implication, as the group began to doubt the importance of the Republican left’s role in Spain’s future. The PSOE decided to orient its political actions without depending on other formations of the bourgeoisie center, representing not just workers’ unions but also the middle classes. In a way, even without theoretical elaboration, the Spanish Socialists anticipated the actions of British labor revisionism or German social democrats of the late 1950s. The trajectory of Spanish communism plunged in the period immediately following the Civil War8. The militarized party from the Republic at war continued towards Stalinization. With the exception of Dolores Ibárruri, the group’s main leaders in exile were dying or disappearing from the stage: José Díaz in 1942, Jesús Hernández in 1944, and finally Vicente Uribe between 1954 and 1956 9 . In a similar fashion, their partners in Hitler’s Europe or operating clandestinely, such as Heriberto Quiñones or Jesús Monzón, maintained the party’s continuity but not without struggle 10 ; they wound up suffering both repression and convictions on behalf of fellow Communists. At first, until 1941, when Moldavian Quiñones arrived in Madrid, the Bolshevized militants of the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) played a 9 decisive role in the reunification of war survivors, while providing aid to prisoners. However, JSU was inexperienced in operating covertly; they suffered massive raids and some were killed. Meanwhile, Santiago Carrillo began taking on a leadership role, leading the Communists who were living in Spain along with his former JSU colleagues, such as Fernando Claudín. On a political level, as soon as the PCE joined forces with the factions of other parties that defended the legitimacy of Negrín’s government in exile, after the close of the Second World War, the party was briefly incorporated into the antifascist union. This group reunited the reconstituted Republicans in exile led by Republican liberal José Giral and Socialist Rodolfo Llopis between March 1946 and July 1947. However, the onset of the Cold War, together with the prior resent and disputes that dated back to the Civil War, caused opposing parties to sever ties with the PCE: the Spanish Communists were ostracized and it would take them more than two decades to begin the processes of recovery. The principle line of Communist activity in Spain during the 1940s was guerilla struggle. Thousands of cadres who were sent to fight were killed or died in prison. The most important operation in this arena was called the “Reconquest of Spain”, an attempted invasion of the Valley of Aran in the Pyrenees in October 1944, shortly after the liberation of Paris. The operation was poorly organized and lacked support, resulting in the retreat of thousands of mobilized maquisards to France just a few days after the invasion began. The Communist project aimed to create a bridgehead in the Pyrenees that, together with other insurrections, would justify an intervention of the Allies to overthrow Franco. The leaders of the PCE tried to attain more logistical support, even from Tito’s Yugoslavia, but in 1948 Stalin himself recommended adopting the traditional Leninist strategy to work within the legal system and official institutions of the dictator. However, it was not until after the popular protests against the rise in prices of Barcelona’s commuter trams in the winter of 1951 that the Communists would begin to seriously implement entryism as a strategy, entering into the union and university systems of the regime in order to create change11. Only after this point, when the Maquis were almost completely annihilated by the repression, did the PCE organize the evacuation of some of the most important groups of surviving guerilla 10 fighters in Aragon and Valencia12. This was one of the most profound changes that, from the 1950s on, would mark the beginning of a new period in the history of the Spanish left. 2. The Communists and the Pursuit of Reconciliation In September 1954 the PCE held their Fifth Congress in exile, the first since the end of the Civil War. The conclave coincided with a moment of important transformations both in the context of Spain and that of the Cold War. In 1953 the Francoist regime had begun a process of international reinsertion, signing pacts with the United States and the Vatican. The same year, Joseph Stalin died: not only did his death mark the close of the tensest period of confrontation between two superpowers, but it also corresponded with the ascending phase of the international communist movement. The Fifth Congress marked a before and after of the PCE’s evolution: on one hand, it signaled the end the party’s erratic and disorderly organization, which had lasted more than a decade; on the other hand, it initiated a new path with objectives that the PCE would continue to elaborate upon until Spain’s transition to democracy. The PCE began to seek a way out of their isolation, although it would take many years before the party would achieve this. The Secretary General Dolores Ibárruri, known as Pasionaria, launched the National AntiFrancoist Front, an alliance between a broad spectrum of political and civil groups against the dictator. The objective was to overthrow Francisco Franco and build a revolutionary provisional government that would restore democratic freedoms through the establishment of a republic based on political pluralism. The principal partners of this project were the groups that had been integrated in the republican coalition from 1936-1939. The socialists were particularly important, as the axis of the new front would involve a “unity of action” between the two major left-wing parties “despite differences” that separated them. For this reason, the PCE constantly exhorted the PSOE using letters, articles, and official documents13. The Communist line of action presented another notable novelty, only partially anticipated by the ephemeral formation of the National Union in 1942: the party effectively desired to collaborate with Catholic groups, monarchists, and those of the liberal right that were interested in establishing a democracy and were beginning to express their opposition to the 11 Franco regime. The Communists adopted a stance that broke with the rigid norms of class struggle, asserting that the petite and middle bourgeoisie (the so-called non-monopoly bourgeoisie) were potential allies for workers and peasants in their struggle against the dictatorship that, according to this analysis, managed to survive mostly thanks to the support of monopolistic oligarchy and North American imperialism. The congress also paid special attention to the party’s need to develop more activity amongst the masses, avoiding the reduction of their activity to the small clandestine cells isolated from the social fabric. This became an official aspect of PCE’s policy, and inserted into the new statues as a course of entryism: penetrating the unions of the regime, through the participation in periodic elections, would give the Communists the chance to erode and later takeover the institutions of the dictatorship from within. In this way, as legally recognized representatives of workers, these individuals would work to defend the interests of the masses, and would be in direct and constant contact with the workers that they represented in the workplace14. Since 1948, Communist leaders feared that the systematic application of entryism would result in accusations of the party’s collaboration with the regime. In the months following the congress, PCE militants and supporters presented themselves at union elections for the first time and achieved positive results, particularly in some larger factories based in Madrid and Barcelona 15 . Finally, the PCE’s Fifth Congress determined that the party’s leadership should include more representation from its young members. Forming around Santiago Carrillo, the younger generation of the PCE began to take the reins of the organization. In 1954 the PCE began to plant new seeds that, germinating in the 1960s, would transform the party into the antonomastic “anti-Francoist party” 16. This new direction encountered a decisive moment in 1956, when the party coined the term “national reconciliation”, the foundation of all of PCE’s theories and actions for the following two decades. The same year began with large student protests carried out by the “sons of the victors and the vanquished”. These events demonstrated two key developments in Spain. First, a generation that had not lived through the Civil War was calling for mobilization and for freedom for the first time. Second, the student protests attested to the emerging phenomenon of Francoist opposition on behalf of sociopolitical groups that had not previously voiced their opinions in a public. 12 For example, Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez’s 1956 resignation is proof of this. He dismissed his former title as Minister of Education and, since then, became a prominent figure of the Christian democratic dissent. In March, in light of these events, Carrillo wrote to Dolores Ibárruri: “I think that the perspective of an era that puts an end to civil wars is needed [...]; a period when civil strife is dealt with [...] in the arena of democratic law, a legal system with a place for those of us who defended the Republic and those who were against us”17. This was this fundamental idea of the politics surrounding “national reconciliation” that was publically voiced that June. The core of the proposal, which invoked healing wounds and reassessing rivalries inherited from the Civil War, enabled the establishment of an extensive network of collaboration amongst diverse forces that came from both sides of those who fought in 1936-1939, now seeking a democratic and peaceful change. According to the PCE, the new hostility towards the dictatorship was beginning to acquire significant strength. The joining of forces made the prospect of overthrowing the Franco regime feasible, through a combination of political action and mass mobilization, without sparking another civil war. National reconciliation included the same base elements as the National Anti-Francoist Front, however it also presented some novel goals. In fact, the PCE no longer sought out just the organizations of the old Republican coalition. Instead, the party oriented itself towards new groups and currents that were emerging onto the national stage18. The Communists paid special attention to the increasing dissent of Catholics. In fact, they began forming several small democratic Christian parties. Meanwhile, labor branches of Catholic Action, such as the Brotherhood of Catholic Action (HOAC) and the Young Catholic Workers (JOC), had been inspired by the Church’s social doctrine and actively participated in strikes and other labor protests. This is not to say that PCE was not going to give up the pursuit of a close relationship with the socialists. Dolores reminded: “Regardless of the current degree of disorganization in the Spanish Socialists Workers’ Party in the country, the Spanish Socialists Workers’ Party plays and will continue to play a role in Spanish politics” 19 . The Communists hoped that the 13 attitudes of a new generation of Socialists in Spain, which were more favorable in order to cultivate collaborative relations with the PCE as part of fight against Francoism, would help mitigate the strong anticommunist posture of the PSOE leaders in exile. In 1959, in a long article published in Nuestra Bandera, Carrillo directly addressed the controversies within the socialist family regarding relations with the Communists. Carrillo presented a reply to the various stances that Prieto had voiced against communist totalitarianism, which he compared to Francoism. Furthermore, he repudiated Prieto’s rejection of the proposal put forth by Socialists living in Spain to collaborate with the PCE during the PSOE Congress in 1958. Finally, Carrillo claimed that Prieto was inspired by “the old social democratic opportunism” and wrote about the difficulties and barriers that separated the leadership of the two parties: “There are two paths before the PSOE: one, which Prieto advocates for, is an anticommunist and degenerative path, the way of Franco and the [American] State Department. [...] The other, which the Socialists living in Spain favor, is a path of antiFrancoist action, one in which differences must be overcome in order to unite forces against the common enemy. [...] A softened, gentrified PSOE, or an antifascist PSOE that is loyal to its best traditions, closely united with the Communist Party”20. In this case, the credibility of Carrillo’s call for unity and reconciliation was dependent on the Communist party’s potential allies. The PCE needed to be presented as a responsible, moderate, and plainly democratic party, in contrast to the orthodox and dogmatic nature of its past. In order to achieve this, for example, Carrillo renounced the revolutionary character of the future provisional government that he had previously defended in 1954; he also stressed his support for the future establishment of a democratic parliamentary system. After Franco, this new system would allow for greater social harmony and provide a platform for the open debate of ideas. While Carrillo favored the reinstallation of the Spanish Republic, he affirmed that Spaniards must decide the form of their future government in a free referendum. In emphasizing this plebiscitary stance, which the Socialists had already adopted during the previous few years, the PCE would sound more appealing to a wider range of anti-Francoist groups, including dissident monarchists. 14 This redefining of the theoretical and programmatic nature of the PCE affected some events that later had an impact on throughout the international communist movement. In fact, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was held in February 1959, where Khrushchev officially instated a new doctrine of peaceful coexistence and denounced, in his famous secret speech, the crimes that Stalin and his cult of personality committed. Two months later, the Cominform was dissolved. The changing winds of Moscow’s Kremlin convinced the PCE that it was possible to establish more flexible standards. This worked for the Spanish party, which was convinced that peaceful coexistence was possible and would make for a more conductive political environment in Western Europe, engendering collaboration between the Communists and other groups. Carrillo, in a plenary session of the Central Committee (CC) held in August, discussed his ideas concerning Khrushchev’s revelations: “The condemnation of the cult of personality, and Stalin’s personality specifically, has caused an undeniable concern in our party. [...] We did not imagine that [...] Stalin, abusing the great authority that he possessed, had become excessively powerful, [...] abusing his position and committing injustices”. Carrillo pronounced his alleged ignorance of the dark side of “Socialism’s patria”: a hardly tenable explanation, as Spanish Communist exiles had collided with the Soviet reality in the 1940s, which was drastically different from their idealized image of communism. In a similar vein, Pasionaria admitted that the PCE had committed the sin of dogmatism and was blind to the negative aspects that had unfolded in the USSR: “In our deep and sincere feelings of trust and unity with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, too dogmatic of an interpretation has been involved; there has been a lack of critical spirit and a predisposition not to accept that the Soviet Union had defects and insufficiencies” 21. However, according to the PCE, the deformations that Khrushchev denounced were essentially attributable to Stalin. Therefore, the great achievements of the socialist society were not invalidated and the movement’s superiority in the West was not undone. Maintaining the “iron link” with the USSR proved to be a debilitating factor that limited the 15 PCE’s ability to pursue a direction different from the Soviets, until the Prague Spring in 1968. This was proved in autumn, a few months after the launch of the national reconciliation campaign, when the PCE backed Soviet military intervention in Hungary, justifying their stance with the argument that it was necessary in order to halt a fascist counterrevolution22. Carrillo took advantage of the 20th CPSU Congress to advance his position within the party’s leadership. During the August CC, he sharply criticized one of PCE’s historic leaders, Vicente Uribe, making him sound like a Spanish version of Stalin. Carrillo accused Uribe as being guilty of having created a cult around his personality and of being authoritarian. The bottom line was: Uribe was turned into a scapegoat used by the younger generations of the PCE in their struggle against the old guard. In need of self-assessment, Uribe accepted his newly marginalized status as a consequence. Pasionaria also needed to reassess her agenda, as she acknowledged that she had been wrong when, a few months prior, she had condemned the USSR’s approval of Spain’s incorporation into the UN. She admitted that Carrillo had been right in seeing it as a positive step towards the development of peaceful coexistence in Spain. At this point, Carrillo had solidified his position within the party’s leaders; this was officially confirmed in 1959 when he was elected as the new Secretary General at the 6th Congress. Carrillo was surrounded by a loyal team both in the Executive Committee (EC) and in the CC, including individuals such as Santiago Álvarez, Manuel Azcárate, and Francisco Romero Marín. After the congress, Pasionaria became the party’s president, a position that had been created specifically for her. From then on, her decision-making power within the party reduced considerably, yet her figure was transformed into an important mobilizing symbol within the PCE’s militant culture23. In establishing the goal of a peaceful change to democracy, the reconciliation policy emphasized the need for the opposition’s unified political action in addition to a broad, mass struggle. Consequently, the PCE drafted a plan for a national strike between 1957 and 1959. It was presented as an extensive mobilization on behalf of all anti-Francoist social and political sectors. In catalyzing the Spanish people’s deeply felt discontent, the strike would be able to accelerate the regime’s crisis and provoke its downfall in the near future. It would consist of widespread general strikes throughout the country in addition to other forms of protests such as street demonstrations, university activities, public displays of allegiance on 16 behalf of intellectuals, civil servants, and other professionals, etc. What the PCE proposed, unlike the traditional general strike of the workers’ movement, was not marked as revolutionary or anti-capitalist, simply anti-Francoist. In fact, the adjective “national” served to emphasize the strike’s transversal nature24. The Communists’ hopes of the possibility of a great mobilization were augmented between 1956 and 1958, when seasoned labor movements reconvened. These principal labor strikes took place in Asturias, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. Tens of thousands of workers took part in the protests against layoffs while advocating for increased salaries and improved working conditions. The collective action of workers in Franco’s Spain assumed a clear political position independent from the particular conditions of individual demonstrations. During these years, the strike returned to the public scene as a mode of resistance 25 . Furthermore, in the 1957 union elections the entryist tactic recorded slight gains in comparison to 1954. The PCE found that the time was right to launch tests of the national strike throughout the country. The first so-called National Reconciliation Conference was held in May 1968 and the second, titled the Peaceful National Strike, in June of the following year. In both cases, the party called upon Spaniards to demonstrate more than their dissatisfaction with the high living costs; the PCE urged protesters to manifest their desire for democratic freedoms and amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. The party dedicated substantial resources during these two events in order to develop and delegate the creation of propaganda and organize acts of resistance in universities and workplaces. Some prominent leaders, such as Carrillo’s right-hand man Fernando Claudín, travelled from France to Spain in order to help with these tasks. Furthermore, the PCE invited all those opposing the dictatorship to participate in the conferences vis-à-vis letters and manifestos. However, almost all anti-Francoist organizations declined the invitation; only in 1959 did the emerging Popular Liberation Front (FLP) and University Socialist Group (ASU) decide to work with the PCE, the latter contravening a veto imposed by PSOE’s leaders. Both attempts to organize a national strike were unsuccessful. Not only did the efforts disrupt normal public order, but many Communists also suffered repression and were 17 detained before and after these organizational conferences. The PCE, having adopted an overly ambitious perspective, overestimated the workers’ levels of political awareness and willingness to mobilize. Effectively, the strikes of 1956-1958 had emerged “from below”, largely spontaneously and predominantly oriented towards economic demands, whereas the Communists had called for action “from above” for explicitly political purposes. Workers were willing to overcome their fears of repression in order to protest for feasible short-term goals like salary increases. However, they were not as willing to stand up for objectives they saw as distant and related to partisan causes. Furthermore, the PCE’s success in organizing these strikes was hindered by diffuse anti-communism rooted both in the general population and other anti-Francoist organizations. Moreover, the Communists in 1958 and 1959 undoubtedly lacked sufficient organization and resources needed in order to orchestrate these strikes on such a grand scale. During the following years, the PCE made no further attempts of this sort. Carrillo admitted that it was impossible to call for a national strike by simply “pressing a button at a certain time” 26. Therefore, the Communists turned their efforts to the patient work of organization and progressive politicization of the masses “from below”, specifically tailored to needs arising in factories and local communities. As a report from July 1959 stated: “Today the Spanish population does not know how to ‘read’, and we need to teach Spaniards how to ‘spell’. We will make new mistakes if we are to insist on speaking a political language to those who are not willing to understand because they lack an adequate vocabulary” 27. The ideas of the national strike, however, were maintained until the end of the dictatorship as a sort of mobilizing myth, an idealized horizon that new forms of resistance would gaze towards. Meanwhile, other anti-Francoist activities in Spain were about to experience an extraordinary leap in qualitative and quantitative support during the early 1960s. 3. The Generation of ’56 Spain’s most prominent intellectuals died, were incarcerated, or often forced into exile as a result of the Civil War 28 . This deeply distressing problem had lasting effects. After the Republican defeat, almost half a million people fled the country, including many 18 professionals, intellectuals, and scientists of various disciplines. While in exile they restored the main institutions of the Republic, the government and the courts, anticipating the expected fall of Franco after the defeat of the Axis powers. However, the role of the Republic in exile ceased to be relevant during the 1950s, as Francoism had been rehabilitated within the international panorama with the onset of the Cold War. Still, the democratic legitimacy of the government in exile did not dissolve thanks to the support of its cultural initiatives and the intellectuals that were involved with them. This included some prestigious figures such as: the writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, the historians Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the physician Severo Ochoa, the latter two were honored with the Nobel Prize in the 1950s. The Republican intelligentsia in exile was considered, almost exclusively, the Spanish voice not only in academia after 1945, but also in nascent major multilateral organizations such as the UN and UNESCO. Professor Friedrich Hayek invited Salvador de Madariaga to the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. The group of scholars met in Switzerland in order to discuss liberalism. Madariaga went on to lead Liberal International and attended the founding Hague Congress in 1948 together with other Spaniards such as the President of the Basque government in exile José Antonio Aguirre and PSOE’s leader Indalecio Prieto. Meanwhile, intellectuals living in Franco’s Spain were denied the opportunity to participate in these international meetings. The victors of the Civil War, despite showing off their fundamental anti-intellectualism, built upon the Republican ruins of the Free Educational Institution, the Student Residence, and the Committee for Extension of Studies and Scientific Research, creating new institutions such as the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institute of Political Studies (IEP). These new institutions were formed in accordance with the “real” principles of Catholic tradition and the imported modern totalitarianism from Fascism. At the same time, Franco’s regime severely repressed the first clandestine attempts to reunite intellectuals in Spain, especially that of the Union of Free Intellectuals (UIL) and the Student University Federation (FUE). Between 1946 and 1947 some members of these groups were imprisoned, such as Ricardo Muñoz Suay, while others like Nicolás SánchezAlbornoz and Manuel Lamana ended up at the Cuelgamuros concentration camp, where the 19 Valle de los Caídos was under construction. Finally, others such as the historian Manuel Tuñón de Lara managed to escape to France29. During these years of Francoism’s international isolation, the Republican institutions and political parties in exile made an effort to maintain a presence in cultural associations, even establishing new formations such as: the Junta de Cultura Espñola (JCE), founded in Paris in 1939, the first assembly of the Union of Spanish Emigrant University Professors (UPUEE), held in Havana in October 1943, and the Union of Spanish Intellectuals (UIE), established after the liberation of France in October 1944. After the mid 1940s, publications from Spanish exiles turned ubiquitous, prominent titles included L’Espange Republicaine, Revista de Catalunya (printed in Catalan) and the UIE’s Boletín. The majority of these new publications were linked to political parties: PSOE’s Adelante, Claridad, Renovación, El Socialista; CNT’s Arte y Cultura, Cénit, Horizontes, Impulso, Tiempos Nuevos, Universo; and PCE’s Cultura y Democracia, España Popular, Independencia, Mundo Obrero, Nuestro Tiempo, Nuestra Bandera, and Reconquista de España. The Communists also controlled Independent Spanish Radio, also known as “La Pirenaica”, broadcast from Moscow and Bucharest. In Toulouse, the capital of Spanish exiles living in France, Antonio Soriano founded the bookstore Librairie des Editions Espagnoles, which turned into a pilgrimage destination for several generations of Spanish exiles until the end of the dictatorship. The cultural activity of Spanish exiles was concentrated primarily in Mexico. Some projects initiated in France were transferred to America such as the writer José Bergamín’s journal España Peregrina. Bergamín also launched JCE’s publishing house Séneca and in 1956 the Boletín of the Union of Spanish Intelectuals in Mexico (UIEM)30. The French authorities’ 1950 ban of Spanish Communist communications prompted exiles to publish in Mexico. With the support of the Mexican poet and essayist Alfonso Reyes, emigrants were able to print the bimonthly Cuadernos Americanos (beginning in 1942 with a long trajectory). Reyes also helped facilitate the creation of the Casa de España, where exiled intellectuals were able to continue working, and the Colegio Madrid, an education center for the children of Spanish exiles. These are just a few examples of the many cultural initiatives that were established in Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s. One of the most prominent magazines during this period was Las Españas, created in 1946, which was converted to Diálogo de las Españas in 20 1957 with the idea of establishing a dialectical bridge between Spaniards living in Spain and exiles abroad: “[...] Our long-standing belief, increasingly felt more deeply amongst those who fought in the trenches in 1936, having willed to sacrifice our own lives for a greater cause, and the generations that have since matured but were not yet old enough to fight in that tragic war, feel that it is essential to save our sunken country from the miserable situation that Francoism has imposed” 31. Many of these initiatives helped to unify various groups against the common enemy, Francoism, but others were tainted with frictions inherited from the war. One predominant antagonism existed between the socialists, anarchists, POUM militants, and Republican nationalists on one side, and the Communist Party on the other. Many exiled intellectuals became involved with radical anti-communist movements, collaborating with the United States in their intense propaganda campaign during the Cold War, organized in secret by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and reinforced with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), fist held in 195032. Although few Spanish exiles attended the congress, their presence was significant. Salvador de Madariaga was named honorary president in December 1950, replacing the deceased Benedetto Croce, and served alongside Bertrand Rusell, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain. A number of intellectuals associated with POUM were present at the first CCF meeting, having strong anticommunist sentiments after having experienced war in Spain. It is important to note that the former Republican government had repressed POUM, a revolutionary party inspired by Trotskyism, after the events in May 1937; communist media outlets had accused several of POUM’s militants of treason and Soviet NKVD agents had captured and killed the party’s leader Andreu Nin33. The main CCF initiative for the Spanish-speaking world was the publication of the journal Cuadernos del Congreso por la Libertad de la Cultura (1953-1965), joining ideologically with: the monthly French Preuves, directed by François Bondy, the German Der Monat, directed by Melvin Lasky, Freidrich Torberg’s Austrian Das Forum, the prestigious The Encounter, directed in London by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender, and Tempo Presente, founded in Rome by Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chairomonte. Similar to these magazines, run by former 21 communists or militants of leftist anti-Stalinist parties, the creation of Cuadernos reunited various former POUM members, starting with the journal’s director and exile living in Mexico, Julián Gómez García (alias Julián Gorkin); also involved were the journalist Pere Pagès i Elies (alias Víctor Alba) who also worked for Reuters in Mexico, Ignacio Iglesias as the assistant director of the publication, and the former POUM leader Joaquín Maurín who had founded the esteemed American Literary Agency (ALA) in New York. Cuadernos tried to counteract some Latin American intellectuals’ attraction to communism and their resentment towards North America. To do so, important figures such as Germán Arciniegas, Rómulo Gallegos, and Eduardo Santos collaborated with the publication. However, almost all of these men were part of the ruling elite of their respective countries, which undoubtedly undermined Cuadernos’ appeal among the most active intellectuals. This limited the publication’s circulation, which hardly exceeded 7,000 copies. As a consequence, Spanish exiles dominated the journal’s content (Madariaga, Francisco Ayala, Américo Castro, Rodolfo Llopis, Ramón J. Sénder, Guillermo de la Torre, Fernando Valera, José Ferrater Mora, María Zambrano, and Luis Araquistáin, among others) and they set the ideological agenda of the publication. Most importantly, Cuadernos created a bridge between intellectuals in exile and those living in Spain, who began distancing themselves from the dictatorship during the mid 1950s, despite the fact that some had played a major role in the early establishment of the regime. This was true for Dionisio Ridruejo, chief of propaganda immediately following the war, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Antonio Tovar, José Luis L. Aranguren, and others of this circle who had gathered around the Falangist magazine Escorial34. This bridge linking the geographically segregated groups, helped create new collaborative initiatives such as the 1962 European Movement’s congress in Munich or the publication Mañana: Tribuna Democrática Española, published in Paris between 1965 and 1966 thanks to the close personal relationship established between Ridruejo and Gorkin. As the latter wrote, it was not easy for Spanish exiles to vindicate intellectuals that had been associated with Francoism. Nevertheless, he felt that they needed to fill the great “void, created by our previous errors and our present incredulousness, between this real Spain and the emigrate one,” as the only way to awaken “an authentic national conscience, separate from the chasm of the past, focused on the constructive and productive needs of the present” 35. Gorkin saw 22 this as a way for a new generation of university students and intellectuals, brought up under the dictatorship’s Falangist and Catholic institutions, to break away from the regime. A rupture symbolized by the events of 1956. The consolidation of Franco’s regime in the 1950s and the end of Spain’s isolation, coinciding with the situation sparked by the Cold War and resulting in the nation’s collaboration with international organizations, allowed for the revival of groups aiming to mobilizing Spain’s youth, the future of the nation’s ruling elite. The Catholic and Falangist ideologies of student groups like the Spanish University Union (SEU) were amplified in the cultural realm during the 1950s, most prominently in magazines like Alféres, La Hora, and Laye, and in cinemas and theatres36. Many members of the University Labor Service (SUT) volunteered during the summers in factories or in the fields. Some participated in literacy campaigns or spent their Sundays visiting shantytowns that were emerging on the outskirts of major cities in order to help the massive influx of immigrants from the countryside. These sorts of initiatives were vital to the increasingly active students, mostly from bourgeois families supporting Francoism, and helped to close the great gap that existed between propaganda and reality. Encountering the “other” (the vanquished, the atheist, the worker, etc.) worked to prompt an ethical orientation that would later develop into important political activity in the years to come37. The 1951 change of government, with the arrival of a team of Falangist and Catholic intellectuals in the National Ministry of Education led by Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, was the tipping point for those youth yearning for social justice and regeneration. However, new national policies sought to resume a secular line of government. This novelty was in accord with Laín Entralgo’s book España como problema (1949) and was backed by the “Generation of ‘98” and figures like Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. The most conservative sectors met the new secular program, together with a feeble educational reform that would preserve the government’s position over the hegemony of the Catholic Church within the education system, with considerable aversion 38 . This unprecedented cultural polemic (with blatant political overtones) provoked public scenes for its visibility and intensity, such as those surrounding the death of Ortega y Gasset in October 1955 and concluding with dramatic outbreaks in February 1956 that included assaults on university classrooms, student 23 demonstrations in the streets of Madrid, dozens of detainees, and the suspension of some civil liberties39. For the first time since the Civil War, students took to the streets and publically announced “the intense divorce between the theoretical university, according to the official version, and the real university formed from students of flesh and bones, men from here and now with their own opinions and desires” 40 . Their memories of the war were only those they experienced as children and the stories that their parents or older siblings had told them. In a few short years, months in some cases, these students would abandon their first political socialization associated with Falangist and Catholic values, adopting new communist and socialist ideas. Spanish universities, which the regime had conceived of as a space for privileged power for the ruling minority, went on to become the epicenter of the new dissent. Some of the students and young graduates involved had family names closely linked to the regime, such as Pradera, Sánchez Mazas, Kindelán, Herrera Oria, Bustelo, Gurbau, and Cerón41. This emerging movement, coming from a new generation of activists, worked against the lasting memories and conflicts that had their origins in the Civil War. “We, sons of the victors and vanquished” is how they signed a public manifest that was written by members of the Socialist University Group (ASU) and the PCE on April 1, 1956, the anniversary of the end of the war 42 . Another small socialist group, led by Enrique Tierno Galván, pragmatically affirmed in a document from the same year that it should “be assimilated that the war was a dark and historic event and that the nature of the guilt was collective”, therefore the words “victors” and “vanquished” should cease to make sense in Spain 43 . Similar sentiments towards the past that have appeared in testimonies of young figures during this period led to the formation of new organizations, providing distinct alternatives from historical workers’ parties like the Popular Liberation Front (FLP), commonly known as “Felipe” 44. These ideas from the student mobilizations did not go unnoticed among Spanish exiles. Santiago Carrillo and Fernando Claudín were now leading the PCE, which was in the middle of a generational and political transformation, while Gregorio López Raimundo led the PSUC. In April 1954 the PCE published Mensaje a los intelectuales patriotas, characterizing the 24 group as “the party of Miguel Herández, during his final years, and of the work of Antoni Machado, the party of Pablo Picasso”, in sum, “the party that has actually valued the function of intellectuals in national life”. The text called upon these figures, distancing themselves from the dictatorship, in order to fight for national freedom, peace, and independence together with the working class. This fundamental shift in strategy which marked the June 1956 launch of the national reconciliation policy was not all that different from the events that had taken place three months prior both in Spain and in Moscow at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (PCUS). The PCE shifted to tactically incorporate figures from the realm of culture and intellectuals as key components to “end the open divisions created during the Civil War” 45. In fact, the party began different sorts of activities in Spain during this time, beginning with the curious participation of the writer and concentration camp survivor Jorge Semprún (alias Federico Sánchez). Semprún was sent to Madrid in 1953 and took part in the university students’ rebellion and the formation of the National Committee of Intellectuals (the PSUC would later establish their own in 1956 in Barcelona) 46. These committees were not limited to academics and Communists quickly became associated with these groups, which dedicated substantial effort to create films, theatrical productions, visual art, and literary works. Militants like Ricardo Muñoz Suay and Juan Antonio Bardem, who had collaborated in Luis García Berlanga’s movie Bienvenido Mister Marshall (1953) and later directed Calle Mayor (1956), became significant PCE figures in the Spanish cinema. They formed part of the editorial board of the magazine Objetivo and celebrated personalities appearing in the socalled “Conversaciones de Salamanca” in 1955 (which noted the influence of Italian neorealism, confirmed in the following years through their close relationships with PCI directors and film critics like Cesare Zavattini47). Alfonso Sastre and José María de Quinto were active in the realm of theatre and plastic arts, first in the SEU’s Spanish University Theatre (TEU) and later in the Theatre for Social Agitation (TAS), and in the arts vis-à-vis indicatives like Estampa Popular. Above all, PCE’s presence was felt in the literary world, through poets like Eugenio de Nora, Gabriel Celaya, Ángel González, and Blas de Otero, and novelists Antonio Ferres, Jesús López Pacheco, Juan García Hortelano, Alfonso Grosso, and Luis Goytisolo48. 25 Other intellectuals also shared the same objectives as the PCE-PSUC. They were like “traveling companions” who did not face the risks associated with militant clandestine operations. Some collaborated with the party in activities as external individuals because it was the strongest and most active dissident group in Spain (or because in making Communists the principle enemy of the Francoist repression, the party ironically became prestigious). This allowed for the PCE to better resist the crises of the coming years, in comparison to other European nations, provoked by Soviet militancy with the invasion of Hungary in 1956 (in Spain this year marked a new beginning, not an end49). The poet Jaime Gil described the situation in Spain, although his own admission into the party was denied for his homosexuality, “I ignore the question of whether communism will be good with power, but it is good that it exists. While it is not in power, I will stand by it; after, I will have to see. The important thing is to finish with what is now [in power]”50. Juan Marsé, Josep M. Castellet, Carlos Barral, Juan Goytisolo, Jesús Fernández Santos, Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Ignacio Aldecoa, and a long list of the most relevant Spanish authors working under Francoism had a relatively long militant or sympathetic relationship with what was, in the mid 1950s, considered the anti-Francoist party. In the following years the PCE intensified their energies put towards the so-called “forces of culture”. In 1954 the PSUC published Cultura Nacional in Paris, originally intended to circulate in Catalonia, and in 1957 Nuestras Ideas appeared in Brussels, a trimestral publication focusing on “theory, politics, and culture”. Nuestras Ideas was an attempt to open up the restricted perspective of the PCE’s historical journal Nuestra Bandera, which was redefining its image at this time as the “the Communist Party of Spain’s political and theoretical publication”. Fernando Claudín oversaw the content of Nuestras Ideas. Veteran Communist intellectuals like Jorge Semprún and the poets Marcos Ana and Gabriel Celaya collaborated, in addition to a new generation of party members like Javier Pradera, Manuel Sacristán, Jordi Solé Tuara, and others. In 1960 the PSUC began to publish their cultural mouthpiece Nous Horitzons and in 1963 Nuestras Ideas would be replaced with Realidad, published in Rome and directed by Manuel Azcarate after the commotion surrounding Claudín and Semprún’s expulsion from the party in 1964. 26 Both Claudín and Semprún questioned some of the party’s official strategies. They thought that a “national revolutionary crisis” could be successful, when it was the regime in crisis, not the capitalist system. For them, an oligarchic alternative replacing the dictator was a legitimate option. This would establish a new, more open, political framework but would not result in an authentic socioeconomic transformation. In this way, the only option for progressive forces would have been to support changes that would not exclude the proletariat, while advocating for a political system that would establish new liberties and civil rights51. The two men’s expulsion implied few immediate consequences, given that the intellectual committees abided by the Central Committee’s standards with few exceptions, such as Javier Pradera in Madrid and Jordi Solé Tura and Francesc Vicens in Barcelona. However, Claudín and Semprún’s dismissal from the party did cause long-term consequences. Some PCE members felt uncomfortable with intellectuals holding leadership roles. In a party where the postwar circumstances did not precisely favor the cultural milieu of its leaders, it was like an inverse alienation for intellectuals like Claudín and Semprún, who were raised in bourgeois families, on behalf of the alleged superiority of the working class as the revolutionary motor for historical change. As Semprún had written to Pasionaria: “And this I am not, Dolores, from working roots; this class’ consciousness is not part of my moral compass [...] I am the son of a defeated class, a shattered world” 52 . Moreover, as Manuel Sacristán explained (although he remained faithful to the party), the PCE largely misunderstood the role that intellectuals could play in professional leadership positions, as they were often subjugated to sterile activism as an external appendix similar to a decoration53. This crisis demonstrated the growing variance between those leaders living in exile and the militants living in Spain. When trying to make sense of what was going on at home, the separate groups did not perceive the same “reality”, particularly after the failure of the 1958 and 1959 general strikes and this became even more evident just before the success of the spontaneous wave of strikes in 196254. Despite these ruptures, Communist hegemony among young intelligentsia living in Spain remained uninterrupted, yet exiles worried that this could change. In order to counteract this, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) created various initiatives, funded by the CIA, 27 like the Centro de Documentación y de Estudios Españoles in 1959 and the Spanish section of the Comité d’Écrivains et d’Éditeurs, with the omnipresent Gorkin as secretary. These organizations worked to unify elite liberal exiles, including prestigious figures such as: Madariaga, Américo Castro, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Ramón J. Sénder, Bosch Gimpera, Pau Casals, and Ferrater Mora. Some important individuals, formerly linked to Francoism, were also involved like Ridruejo, Laín Entralgo, Aranguren, and young writers, filmmakers, actors, and artists in Spain. Many of these latter figures were already Communists at this point, as was made evident at the International Seminar on Realism and Reality in Contemporary Literature, held in Madrid in October 1963. This event was one of many activities funded by the CCF. There, in the middle of heated debates about the validity of social realism, old rivalries surfaced surrounding the role of communism in the Spanish Civil War while the Franco regime tried to exploit the internal debates among the Communists. It was a paradoxical situation, typical for the time. Yet the underlying issue was not “between free and dogmatic writers” and Communists, “but between free writers and others who desperately aspired for freedom”, as Luis Martín Santos, author of the novel Tiempo de silencio and clandestine PSOE leader, recalled55. The nature of the relationship between the opposition in Spain and abroad, increasingly frequent during the early 1960s, was predominantly cultural, intellectual, and symbolic. Antonio Machado’s paradigmatic words testify to the value of culture in opposing Francoism during this period, although the regime unsuccessfully sought to belittle the political nature of culture56. The PCE organized a ceremony to honor Machado in the Collioure cemetery on February 22, 1959. They had commissioned Picasso, with help from a circle of French intelligentsia including Aragon and Sartre, to illustrate a work for the twentieth anniversary of the poet’s death. The act served as a pretext for the reunification of the opposition living in Spain and the exiles, as the former Republican diplomat in London, Pablo de Azcárate, declared. He claimed that the boarder between the “two Spains” was abolished. This marked the beginning of a new political, moral, and literary initiative, catalyzing important works like the anthology Veinte años de poesía española and the collection Colliure, both led by Josep Maria Castellet, launched for a new generation of realist writers. The anarchist José Martínez also linked his editorial Ruedo Ibérico to the memory of the “people’s poet”, immortalizing 28 him as a civic symbol and instituting the Antonio Machado Awards for novels and poetry. The first prizes in 1962 were awarded to two Communists, Armando López Salinas and Ángel González. In 1966 another tribute to the poet was scheduled but banned by the government. Those attending the event organized to inaugurate Pablo Serrano’s bust sculpture of Machado were met with criminal charges57. Divisions within the opposition affected both the PCE-PSUC and the PSOE. However, these divisions and the differences between the leadership in exile headed by Rodolfo Llopis and socialist groups living in Spain, many of which followed Professor Enrique Tierno Galván’s lead, did not prevent unified anti-Francoist action. Increasingly, these groups with a common enemy worked together, especially in acts of protests that were cultural in nature. It is true that the Spanish left was faced with a tremendously difficult task after the Civil War. Creating a unified opposition, after the deep wounds caused by the war, the traumatic experience of living in exile, and the paradoxical situation of the Franco regime beside Western democracies during the Cold War, was far from easy to fight. However, it is important to remember that beyond the political struggle against the dictatorship, the left shared other ethical and symbolic values. One of them was reconciliation, which was evident in many of the cultural initiatives during this period. For example, the previously mentioned 1959 homage to Antonio Machado was sponsored by both the PCE and the CCF: Semprún interpreted this in Nuestas Ideas as in line with the PCE’s new policy of national reconciliation, while the socialist director of Cuadernos Luis Araquistáin saw it as a sign of the birth of “a third Spain, the Spain of definitive reconciliation” 58. Europeanism, associated with ideals of liberty and democracy, was another value linking the opposition in Spain and abroad. The old liberal Madariaga was the president of the Consejo Federal Español, the only body that was officially recognized by the European Movement. Together with the Socialist Movement for a United States of Europe, Madariaga worked alongside former POUM members like Enrique Adroher Gironella and the Socialists, represented by the PSOE leader Rodolfo Llopis. After the late 1950s, the opposition was in contact with various Europeanist associations that had recently been established in Spain. These leaders collaborated with the Spanish Association of European Cooperation (AECE), despite its Catholic origin under the regime. Under the leadership of the Christian 29 Democratic politician José María Gil-Robles, the association was converted into an antiFrancoist space for collective action59. The merging of Europeanism and reconciliation, and the support they received in different factions of the opposition, engendered the primary political and cultural initiative during this period: the IV Congress of the European Movement celebrated in Munich on June 7-8, 1962. In Munich, politicians and intellectuals living in Spain or in exile that had fought on different sides of the war convened for the first time in twenty-five years. The last resolution of the conference established Spain’s future integration into Europe once the nation established authentic institutions that would safeguard fundamental liberties and human rights, while rejecting the use of violence during a future transition from dictatorship to democracy. In the words of Madariaga, “the Civil War began on July 18, 1936, which the regime has continued to keep artificially alive through censorship, media control, and victory parades, and has ended on June 6, 1962”60. The response of the Spanish government, on the contrary, resulted in a fierce propaganda campaign against the participants attending the congress. Franco’s press pejoratively referred to the event as the “Contubernio de Múnich” and the regime forced several of the attendees into exile and sent others to the Canary Islands to live in confinement. Despite the regime’s reactionary response, what had happened in Munich marked not the beginning but, as Madariaga stated, the end of an era. The return to democracy would take place fifteen years later, without the role of the old exiles as protagonists. 4. Socialist Dilemmas In 1956 the British Labor Party politician Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism, which opened up the ideological revision of social democracy. The Germans followed suit a few years later in Bad Godesberg and the Italian Socialists abandoned their antifascist front with the PCI after the Soviet invasion and squashing of the Hungarian Revolution. 30 Meanwhile in Spain, the Socialist Juan Negrín died on November 12, 1956. He had led the Popular Front between 1937 and 1939 and the Republican government in exile until 194561. It was the end of the antifascist era, as the PSOE had declared at their congress held in August 1955 that also unified the party’s new direction based in Toulouse. It was also a moment that saw the emergence of a new generation; the children of the war had grown up, and as the Socialists declared: “In addition to the forces that have fought against Franco since July 19, 1936 (...) new reinforcements, prompted by disillusion, have appeared in universities and laboratories (...) we respect and will continue to respect their religious beliefs and political ideologies as they are; know that we are all equally Spanish; finally, know that our responsibility requires us to work together for Spain’s reconciliation” 62. On Sunday, February 26, 1956, after the university protests in Madrid, a group of young students created the Socialist University Association, which quickly modified its name to Socialist University Group (ASU). During these events, young intellectuals like the philosopher Miguel Sánchez Mazas and Víctor Pradera wrote a manifesto that called for reconciliation for the children of the war (of both “the victors and the vanquished”) to create a new democratic Spain. That summer, the ASU contacted Rodolfo Llopis, Secretary General of the PSOE, pedagogue and former President of the Republican government in exile in 1947. The Socialist leader, perhaps in response to Luis Araquistáin’s account of new labor currents taking place in London, recommended that they establish a society similar to the Fabian Society in order to renew the socialist project with the hopes that Spain would soon be different63. Many of the young members of the ASU decided to emigrate, some in response to having been incarcerated. They established an exterior delegation that, with the help of PSOE leaders, published the university bulletin “Unión”, mouthpiece for the Democratic Students’ Union (UDE). Some of the most active members were: Miguel Sánchez Mazas, Francisco Bustelo, Manuel Ortuño, Vicente Girbau, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, and Juan Manuel Kindelán. The new UDE platform essentially replaced the University Scholar Federation (FUE), created during the Second Republic. The UDE was formed from a new Republican 31 generation who did not fight in the war, living in Spain or exile, as was the case with Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, Enrique Cruz Salido, and Carlos Vélez. The ASU established a strong presence in Madrid and extended to Salamanca and Valencia. The group also made ties with the university students associated with Catalonia’s Socialist Movement and Socialist intellectuals in the Basque Country. This included, with the help of Antonio Amat, contact with the psychiatrist and novelist Luis Martín Santos, who formed part of the clandestine PSOE leadership in Spain. The ASU approach, from an ideological standpoint, oscillated between a social democratic revisionist line and that of the “new left”, represented in Spain since 1958 by the Popular Liberation Front (FLP). The “Felipes” were an emerging leftist force that rejected both Soviet Communism and European social democracy. FLP admired the Cuban Revolution, criticized Soviet intervention in Hungary, but also the actions of Guy Mollet’s French Socialist government in the Suez Canal. Many ASU members accepted a solution that would transfer power from the dictator to the monarchy. At the same time, they had no issues working collectively with Communists to bring down the regime, although they did not establish any official relations with the PCE. In a cunning operation led by the clandestine Communist Jorge Semprún, some of the newest ASU members were captured in an act of bad faith, which provoked the young socialists to become outraged64. The clandestine Socialist leaders shared sentiments, in reality, with the Communists. They would fraternize vis-à-vis their mutual hatred towards Francoism when they were found together in prisons, factories, or universities. However, the difference in their political cultures, particularly their views concerning the memory of past grievances and postwar Stalinism, inhibited the ability of these two parties to establish a closer relationship. Naturally, activism amongst the youngest Socialists was popular, often resulting in an unproblematic unity of action with the Communists because these young militants had not yet experienced the blows of repression or political disagreements. As was presented in the 1958 PSOE Congress, “like it or not, we are now closely aligned with the Communist workers to accomplish the task at hand: to destroy the dictatorship. Later we will see who will shoot whom”. 32 Many members of the ASU were children of the Francoist victors of the Civil War. Their social and family backgrounds, in addition to their different political culture and new ideological approaches that radicalized after the Cuban Revolution, provoked numerous conflicts with the leadership of the PSOE. Some ASU militants, particularly veterans, finally decided to join the Socialist party or rebuild the Socialist Youth of Spain in Madrid in 1961. This rebuilding happened shortly after the Socialist Youth had also been reestablished outside of Spain, both in Mexico and in France, with second-generation exiles ascending the ranks. The young Socialists prepared a radical speech for the 1961 PSOE Congress, defending revolutionary socialism and seeking to distance themselves from social democratic international movements. The unsuccessful presentation, delivered and defended by Luis Gómez Llorente, criticized North American imperialism and defended those of the NonAligned Movement and the easing of tensions between military blocs. As a tactical strategy, the Socialist Youth thought that the PSOE’s leadership should be living in Spain and its militants should work within Franco’s institutions. Finally, they defended the use of armed acts of protest. Some former ASU militants, like Carlos Zayas and others, wound up supporting the Popular Liberation Front that, in the mid 1960s, sympathized with leftist socialist organizations such as the Lelio Basso’s PSIUP or Michel Rocard’s PSU. During this time, the “Felipes” were distancing themselves from the ideology of traditional labor movements and Stalinism, partially based on the reformist ideas of the French philosopher André Gorz 65. Beyond the realm of Spanish universities, the FLP established a strong presence amongst Catalan workers. However, in May 1968, FLP adopted a radicalized Marxist-Leninist position until the group imploded into Trotskyist factions leading to the founding of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and autonomous workers’ groups. After the disappearance of the Popular Liberation Front in 1969, some of its militants moved towards the PSOE, especially Catalonia’s refounded socialism. Some of the former ASU members, in opposition to the views of the PSOE leaders (save for the longstanding Socialist leader Indalecio Prieto), ended up promoting the UGT “split” and the Workers’ Trade Union (ASO) after the strikes of 1962. However, the ASO was dissolved 33 in 1967, despite financial support from Germany and the International Metalworkers’ Federation. Francisco Bustelo and Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, together with the Catalanist Josep Pallach, the lawyer Josefina Arrillaga, and some UGT and CNT members, tried to renew socialist unity through a pact of collaborative action. This pact sought to bring together democratic unions, excluding Communists, and would potentially incorporate Christian workers’ groups. The ASO briefly established ties to trade unions without party affiliations, like the young Catholics of the Young Christian Workers (JOC) and new illegal unions like the Catalan Christian Workers’ Solidarity (SOCC) and the Workers’ Syndical Union (USO). Cooperating with Catalan groups was the most significant at this point, given the effervescence of new socialist and union activity surrounding groups like the Workers’ Front of Catalonia, briefly coupled with UGT, and the Federal Socialist Force. The ASO also established itself in Valencia, through Valencia’s new Socialist Party, as well as in Madrid and Vizcaya, albeit to a lesser extent. At the same time, without much success, the ASO tried to consolidate an Iberian socialist organization, which held some meetings outside of Spain in locations like Imperia, Italy. In 1963 the Galician Socialist Party was founded, formed from Galician nationalists of the Second Republic. These groups, just like the FLP, implemented the reemergence of Republican federalist culture, now inspired by socialism. The vitality of the new socialist federation enabled the PSOE to recover its old formulaic vision of Spain’s future. At the 1964 PSOE Congress the party articulated their desire for a republican confederation of Iberian nationalities. Still, UGT leaders in Toulouse and the strongest socialist unions in the Basque Country and Asturias were reluctant to band together with the Workers’ Trade Union, impeding the ASO’s consolidation. Despite UGT’s support for the creation of trade and industry federations, the group defended using official elected posts after the 1963 and 1966 syndicate elections, participating in the establishment of working commissions. By 1966 ASO had entered into crisis. The young workers of the ASO participated in the creation of the Workers’ Commissions in Barcelona in the fall of 1964. They also participated in subsequent protests in Catalonia, but they did not have a strong presence in other labor movements, with the exception of the USO in Asturias and the Basque Country that was linked to ASO in 1966. 34 Union reform talks that occurred between the Spanish Trade Union OFICIAL Organization and a sector of the CNT66 (that was cooperating with the ASO) led to the rejection of many of the new socialist groups. Members of these rejected groups ended up dispersing or reinforcing the USO, in the case of Catalonia, they joined the Catalan UGT. This new socialist inspired syndicalism prompted decisive changes concerning the UGT’s leadership in exile. Leaders in Spain and their international relations were growing stronger, they established circumstantial unified action with the Communists in social protests and in the workers’ committees, and they collaborated with union leaders and Christian union groups. The Workers’ Syndical Union, promoted by the former head of the Young Christian Workers, Eugenio Royo, became radicalized in the late 1960s. As a result, the group became fragmented in 1971, especially in Asturias and Castile. However, from then on, under the direction of Manuel Zufiaur, the union sought to reinforce its self-proclaimed socialist identity. This was similar to the French CFDT, as the USO renewed their contact with the revamped PSOE and UGT leadership67. ASU activity lasted in Madrid’s university until 1963, at which time the police began new repressive raids of its militants and those associated with the nascent Democratic University Federation of Spain (FUDE). However, the events of 1965 that provoked Enrique Tierno Galván’s expulsion, who was newly affiliated with the PSOE, gave Madrid’s young students and recent graduates a new reason to protest. They demonstrated their support for the “old professor”, despite the mistrust of older ASU members like Miguel Boyer and Luis Gómez Llorente (among others) who had joined PSOE from JS in 1965. In January 1968, two-dozen university PROFESSIONAL who backed Tierno Galván participated in the creation of the dissident Socialist Party in Spain. Tierno Galván’s supporters received logistical aid from the Germany’s social democracy via Friedrich Ebert’s foundation, and established contacts with Italian social democrats and Mario Soares, from the Portuguese Socialist Action. The new socialist group postulated a social democratic revision of socialism, opening itself up to the middle classes and depending less on workers’ unions, although they supported the burgeoning Workers’ Commissions. 35 They defended the monarchy as a means of replacing the dictatorship, as they felt that a transition including the historical parties of the Second Republic, with their leaders living in exile, was an improbable ambition. They were not very receptive to the emerging socialist federalism developing in many regions throughout Spain, although Tierno Galván took part in some discussions concerning this philosophy amongst dissident intellectuals of Catalonia and Castile. Meanwhile, many of the young followers of the poet and former Falangist chief of propaganda, Dionisio Ridruejo, who had established the group called the Social Party of Democratic Action in 1956, were leaning towards postulates of the socialist left. Among them were expatriates such as the Marxist philosopher and political scientist Ignacio Sotelo, Fermín Solana, Fernando Baeza, and Vicente Ventura. Ridruejo ended up reorganizing the group’s structure and changed its name to the Social Democratic Union, although many of the group’s followers became associated with the PSOE after the poet’s death in 1975. Many of the exiles that collaborated with Ridruejo in the European Movement and the Congress for Cultural Freedom did the same, as was the case of Enric Adroher Gironella and the former POUM militant Julián Gorkin68. Ridruejo ultimately tried to help link the democratic left living in exile and the new, moderate opposition living in Spain, part Christian democrat and part liberal 69. His social democratic (or social liberal) group also tried to represent middle class professionals, a sector that the PSOE leaders in exile had a difficult time representing. Political parties of the moderate left in nearby nations such as France or Italy, and later Great Britain, were in vogue and socialist parties often depended on support from liberal political formations. Ridruejo’s PSAD communicated with the PSOE directors in exile, headed by Rodolfo Llopis. However, their tentative anti-Francoist and democratic pact was put off until just before Franco’s death, with the establishment of the Democratic Convergence Platform. In fact, between 1959 and 1961 the PSOE had negotiated the end of their self-imposed isolation following the party’s failed pact with the monarchists. Manuel Giménez Fernández, 1935 CEDA Minister of Agriculture and member of the small party Christian Democratic Left (IDC), played a key role in the negotiation. The new PSOE platform incorporated the party’s 36 traditional values into a transitional period, led by a neutral interim government, “without an institutional sign”. Furthermore, given its collaboration with Basque (and to a lesser extent Catalan) nationalists, the party began to acknowledge the need to recognize regional diversity in a future democratic Spain. Ridruejo was not formally involved in the 1961 Union of Democratic Forces pact, although he tried for years to establish closer relations with the Christian Democrats (led by director of the Christian Social Democracy and former Republican conservative José María Gil Robles) in addition to liberal monarchists. This first opportunity for the Socialists to join forces with conservative anti-Francoist factions took place in the Spanish subdivision of the IV Congress of the European Movement, also known as the “Conturbernio de Múnich” of June 1962. Representatives from virtually all of the democratic opposition groups were in attendance, save for the PCE and other extreme-left groups (although some of their members were present) 70. Before the death of Indalecio Prieto in February 1962, the PSOE had acknowledged the advantages of establishing a constitutional monarchy in order to replace the ignominious dictatorship. The party would defend this change, despite their desire to reinstate the Republic, if it was the will of the Spanish people. During the European colloquium in Munich, the PSOE privately reiterated to the monarchists that they would support the monarchy if it were to reestablish a democracy in Spain. However, the question of Spain’s future form of government was overlooked in the PSOE’s congress communications, including the idea of an “evolution” that would slowly convert Francoism into a democratic system, necessary for the nation’s incorporation into the European Economic Community (EEC). In addition to advocating for democratic elections and freedom for trade unions, the PSOE made a point to recognize the “identity of the different natural communities”. In June 1969, Juan Carlos I was officially named Prince of Spain and designated to become Franco’s successor. After this event, the Socialist’s plan to find a peaceful “national solution” to end Franco’s dictatorship, which excluded the PCE and the extreme left, became obsolete. The Socialist tried to align with the new syndical alliance between the CNT and the Basque Workers’ Solidarity (STV), as they had done with anti-Francoist Christian unions in the Union 37 of Democratic Forces, but in 1966 they were surpassed by the consolidation of the Workers’ Commissions. New socialists in Madrid, mostly from well-educated middle-class families, were pushing for a renewal of Spanish socialism separate from the PSOE via the ASU and subsequent initiatives. Perhaps these attempts came just a little too soon.... 5. The Communists and the New Labor Movement The “light of Asturias” illuminated and fortified the anti-Francoist movement during the early 1960s. In the spring of 1962, mining regions of Northern Spain began strikes that lasted two months and inspired other areas throughout the country to join them. Some 300,000 workers from 28 different provinces participated in the strikes between April and May. The quantity of workers’ participation was unprecedented in Spain. Many were fired or arrested, but attempts to halt the protests were met with increased solidary and further expansion of the strikes. Furthermore, for the first time since the Civil War, Western European countries showed their support for the Spanish workers against Franco’s regime just after the dictator had asked for entrance into the EEC. In July, Franco went on to restructure the government in response to both the tremendous support for the strikes and the events of the “Contubernio de Múnich” 71. The new labor movement that emerged between 1956 and 1958 initiated a period of rapid growth. It was a workers’ movement that was closely linked to the dynamics of modernization and economic development launched by technocrats during the late 1950s. Many workers, primarily from the postwar generation, migrated from rural areas to find jobs in cities during this period. . They had high hopes for a prosperous future, as a result of the so-called economic miracle in Spain. They created new social networks in factories and around the emerging industrial zones in places like Madrid and Barcelona, sharing values that clashed with the dictatorial structures of the regime. In this way, they constituted the new anti-Francoist militancy. Some measures that Franco unintentionally initiated during this period even helped the opposition. The shift from an autarkic economic system to an 38 open system provided workers with new possibilities to organize and act within a legal framework. For example, with the 1958 Law on Collective Bargains, employers could negotiate directly with OSE representatives concerning working conditions formerly imposed by the government. The purpose of the new legislation was to make the dynamics of production more efficient. However, one inadvertent consequence was increased labor unrest, which augmented the chances of mobilizing workers around common goals and gave more power to their representatives72. The Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) spearheaded the PCE’s opposition during the final years of Francoism. These commissions were originally configured to facilitate communication between workers’ representatives and the companies they worked for, bypassing OSE mediation. During breaks or while entering or exiting the workplace, employees selected those who they thought could best speak on their behalf. They formed spontaneously, outlined specific objectives and dissolved once they had achieved them. These groups were diverse and included militant Communists, but also Catholics, Socialists, and others without any particular political affiliation. The first workers’ commission was established in the 1940s, but it was not until the strikes of 1956-1958 that this model began to popularize, later serving as the foundation of the 1962 protests73. The PCE realized that the commissions fit well within their national reconciliation agenda, thanks to their popularity, ability to bring together a broad range of workers, and proven effectiveness. However, the Communist Party still saw the commissions as unseasoned and in need of greater development to establish a more permanent position. Only then could the PCE help coordinate the CCOO on a national scale and gradually work to show that their activities as not just labor related but also clearly anti-Francoist. According to the PCE, the best way to organize the commissions was with a strong, central body possibly formed from the CCOO representatives and activists of the masses that would come together in assemblies and demonstrations. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Communists decided to dedicate substantial efforts and resources to begin to develop this line of unified action74. During the spring of 1962, the PCE’s project began to materialize. Over the next two years, the first permanent workers’ commissions were founded in the Basque Country, Madrid, and 39 Barcelona thanks to the indicatives of the Communists and Catholics in these regions. The model later extended quickly throughout the country. Meanwhile, the Workers’ Commissions formalized their activity while reaching unprecedented levels of participation. At first, the PCE had tried to apply the name Workers’ Union Opposition (OSO) but retracted the label after it did not seem to stick. The 1966 union elections helped ease the processes of structuring the new movement. Around 1,200 Communist were elected to serve as union representatives alongside many others who shared the values of the Workers’ Commissions. Even if CCOO remained a minority in general terms, they attained important positions in large cities and important companies like Barcelona’s SEAT, Madrid’s Standard, and Seville’s Hispano Aviación. Entryism was proving to be an effective strategy to erode OSE’s structure75. During the mid 1960s, PCE leaders in France held various meetings with labor party militants living in Spain in order to guide their projects. The Communists were the driving force behind the CCOO’s articulation and dissemination throughout Spain. In fact, the prominent Communist leaders of Madrid Marcelino Camacho and Julián Ariza drove to a number of different regions of the country, including Asturias, Andalucía, and Valencia encouraging the creation of new commissions and social networks to support them. This process culminated with the first assembly of the CCOO General Coordinator in June 1967. Some 70 delegates from throughout the nation attended the meeting in Madrid. The PCE relied on the leaders of labor movements. A number of figures like Camacho and the Catalan Cipriano García had been integrated into the commissions as part of the Party’s strategy since their VII Congress in 1965. Meanwhile, the PCE managed to clearly establish itself as the majority force within the CCOO76. The CCOO, although grounded in clandestine structures, began to plan activities in public spaces unlike traditional anti-Francoist organizations. The assemblies were part of a strategy that helped to establish a stronger support base for the movement. These events were, generally speaking, democracy schools: whether legal or not, the gatherings represented a place of political socialization where new generations were exposed to democratic values and practices. Meanwhile, the CCOO took advantage of the liberalizing dynamics of the Vertical Syndicate’s national delegate José Solís, who was trying to revitalize the OSE in the 1960s. They infiltrated popular meetings organized by the official trade unions 40 in order to spread their discontent. Their actions endorsed the creation of new centers like Manuel Mateo and Paloma’s Trade Union School, where they could legally meet, network, coordinate, and promote protests77. The Workers’ Commissions public image was strengthened as its leaders became more vocal. For example, Camacho and Nicolás Sartorius, obviously hiding their affiliation with the PCE, spoke before different sorts of audiences and regularly published in prestigious legal journals like Cuadernos para el Diálogo and Triunfo. They would leave out an anti-capitalist tone and emphasize the absence of social liberties in Spain, ultimately attracting CCOO sympathizers. This sort of discourse even appealed to liberal sectors, with their eyes set on an open market while hoping for Spain to transform its economic structure similar to other European models. In effect, the CCOO began to seek both the working class and the general public’s endorsement as the honest representatives of workers. In Gramsci’s terms, the CCOO built a “fortress and casemates” that defied the dictator’s rigid framework and social control, contributing to the emergence of an alternative public sphere that would make a return to civil society in Spain possible. The regime, as we will see in the following chapter, would soon react with repression. The strong relationship that the PCE established with the CCOO positively impacted Communist politics in multiple ways. It helped the Communists implant their “reconciliation from below” while bringing the Party out of isolation. In fact, within the Commissions, Communists always acted alongside militants of other political parties or workers without political affiliations. Even if diffuse anti-communist attitudes made collaboration with other opposition groups difficult, common interests overrode ideological differences in daily workplace struggles, which strengthened interparty relations and new habits of coexistence. These relationships helped to improve the perception that others had of the Communists. Furthermore, the new PCE militants were exposed to different groups and perspectives, ultimately empowering the Communists to be more flexible and open to cultural dialogue78. Members of Catholic workers’ organizations were particularly helpful during the CCOO’s early years especially because they offered logistical support. For example, they opened up local parish churches to hold CCOO meetings. The “unusual” relation between Catholics and 41 Communist made the regime uneasy during this time, as the two groups worked together to dismantle “prolific Spanish corporatism” and attain “freedom of assembly” 79 . These objectives were backed by the HOAC, JOC, the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, and the Second Vatican Council. Meanwhile, the PCE abandoned anticlerical ideologies in a quest to strengthen their relationship with religious organizations. They even praised progressive Catholics, constantly offering their collaboration to achieve a “democratic reconstruction of Spain” 80. This attitude helped to reinforce the credibility of the new image put forth by the PCE with their national reconciliation plan. Furthermore, it moved towards mending one of the key divisions that had solidified during the Civil War. However, HOAC and JOC withdrew from the CCOO in 1967-1968 due to a Catholic Action crisis. Nevertheless, the Communists continued to work together with grassroots Christian groups in both social and labor movements. Some Catholics even entered into the Communist ranks, such as the Jesuits José María de Llanos and Francisco García Salve who ascended to the Party’s Central Committee, while Alfonso Comín represented the Christian voice in the mid 1970s when he joined the PSUC, the Catalan branch of the PCE. With the help of the CCOO, the PCE could finally begin to fight alongside the masses against the dictatorship. By the mid 1960s, the Commissions were growing rapidly and constantly promoting acts of resistance. As a result, in addition to the favorable results of the 1966 union elections, the Communists decided to organize two major events in 1967. The first took place on January 27th and the second on October 27th. Both were based on the concept of the national strike, a plan that was developed in the late 1950s, but their execution was significantly different from the 1958-1959 attempts. Most importantly, the Communists now relied on the help of the CCOO. In fact, this time the Workers’ Commissions were the official organization backing the events, not the PCE. This way, the Communists were able to take advantage of the broad CCOO support and organizational resources, while avoiding the potential danger that anti-communists could do to the campaign. These acts, unlike those in the 1950s, focused directly on local levels. Communist leaders decided to center their action in Madrid, as the nation’s capital but also for its well-developed labor organizations. Furthermore, the January and October protests of 1967 were based on ideas “from below”, discussed in numerous preparatory assemblies and meetings. The workers perceived the 42 mobilization as something they created, not as something dictated “from above”. On these two days, participants called for action against: rising prices, increasing layoffs in the capital, and the regime’s new Trade Union Act that was underway. Protesting on these days, alongside the Communists, were CCOO’s Madrid-based Christian labor unions, such as the USO and the Workers’ Trade Union Action (AST). However, the PSOE’s absence was palpable, as not all anti-Francoist groups participated in these protests81. Even though the regime preemptively arrested some of the movement’s leaders, the mobilizations demonstrated the PCE and CCOO’s remarkable strength and support. Some 10,000 workers went on strike (or temporary strike) on January 27th while around 80,000 people took to the streets of Madrid. The regime’s repression caused the figures in October to decline, although some 60,000 people still showed up for the demonstration that autumn. These were the largest mobilizations that had taken place in Madrid since the Civil War. On both days, there were university protests and progressive intellectuals expressed their support, which led the PCE to talk about creating the Alliance of Labor and Cultural Forces (AFTC). The events of 1967 demonstrated the growing politicization of the labor movement. The CCOO’s objection of the new Trade Union Act and their call for freedom of assembly were no longer purely economic interests; the group had moved on to question the dictatorial system itself. The Workers’ Commissions began to define themselves as the motor of a new sociopolitical movement. The two events that sought to recover aspects of the failed national strike began to take on a new meaning in 1968. The PCE and CCOO assumed the vision that the national strike was not a single, unified event, but it was the culmination and fusion of different events that extended to various different parts of the country82. While the “anti-Francoist Party” was beginning to take shape in the early 1960s, the PCE faced two internal ruptures. The first was the result of the divorce between the USSR and China. In 1964 a small Marxist-Leninist PCE was created. The Maoist formation fused individuals with and without prior associations with the Communist Party and accused Carrillo’s followers of revisionism. The other internal PCE disruption involved important figures from the party’s leadership: Fernando Claudín, Carrillo’s right-hand man, and Jorge Semprún, the leader of Communist intellectuals in Spain. Both Claudín and Semprún criticized the party’s subjective analyses, they insisted that the regime’s collapse was 43 imminent and overestimated the opposition’s ability to contend, which led to failures like those of 1958-1959. Furthermore, they considered that the bourgeoisie monopoly, contrary to Carrillo’s beliefs, would have been able to detach from the dictatorship and maintain their integrity and economic power structures in a future democratic Spain. Claudín and Semprún were labeled defeatists and expelled from the party in 1965 while Juan Berenguer, who had supported their reasoning, was dismissed from the PSUC shortly after. This episode, among other points, proved that the PCE remained firmly tied to the principle of democratic centralism and made no exceptions for those who strayed from the official party philosophy83. By 1967 some 10,000 PCE militants were living in Spain, in addition to a couple thousand sympathizers. After many long years of isolation, the Communists had finally established a position of prominence and began to demonstrate a great capacity for mobilization and public projection while collaborating with popular movement organizations. At the same time, the PCE began to outline the concept of “political and social democracy”, a model in which political democracy would be complemented by mechanisms of democratic participation in both economic and social spheres. The plan opted for a scheme that would respect pluralism and it shaped a theoretical foundation for a democratic transition to socialism in Spain through elections, ideas that Eurocommunism would enunciate as well84. A 1967 government report made it clear that the Communists were the most active resistance group. It stated that through the Workers’ Commissions (“an instrument of the PC”) the Communists had assumed “the broadest base and they posed a threat to the Spanish regime”85. 6. The Emergence of a Dissident Culture For those on the losing side of the Civil War, from the first moment of the Republican defeat in the refugee camps in France such as Argelès-sur-Mer or Saint-Cyprien where they were already publishing titles like Cultura Española, Barraca, El Boletín de los estudiantes, and 44 L’llot de l’Art, it became clear that the struggle against the dictatorship would be a cultural fight86. Impotently facing the armed forces and brutal repression of Franco’s “New State”, culture ended up being central to the strategy of numerous political resistance groups. In a desperate effort to save their own identity, organizations harnessed culture and used it as a powerful tool to undermine the regime (both for conviction and in response to circumstances) within and beyond Spain. For this reason, investigations concerning the antiFrancoist left cannot be limited to political history or the history of the clandestine or exiled reconstruction of Republican institutions. Leftist periodicals, pamphlets, journals, and magazines reflected on the causes of their defeat and sketched future plans towards the end of the dictatorship. They discussed the possibility of an inclusive nationalism, very different from Franco’s “official” articulation. In this way, culture became a weapon used to delegitimize the regime and its injustices. The Spanish left denounced the dictatorship, sharing their opinions with the rest of the world. They employed culture, with an almost excessive confidence, as an instrument capable of prompting change and redemption. At the same time, this culture that was anchored in the past began to incorporate new elements, and eventually changed the left itself in a previously unthinkable way. The PSOE and the PCE wound up supporting the foundation of a democratic political culture, a great contrast to how these two parties had acted in the 1930s. Beginning in the mid 1950s, the Spanish left helped to slowly reconstruct a canon of cultural modernity, or at least a version that was disillusioned with the fascist utopia, comparable to other democratic nations in the Western world. This process was not uniform. Instead, it involved liberating spaces that were previously controlled by the regime. Opening up the media and creating spaces for people to communicate and share experiences were critical for the construction of genuine citizenship in a new public sphere87. Cultural historians have deemed this as “learning democracy” while sociologists have described the process as the “emergence of a civil society”, apart from the regime 88 . Through censorship and a less indiscriminate yet relentless repression, the regime sought to maintain its monopoly on matters of truth, ideology, and culture, despite having given up its totalitarian pretensions in order to adapt to changes while seeking new ways to legitimize its rule. As a result, the regime tried to renew its base of social consensus and stabilize an international repute as a 45 lawful, peaceful government. The dictatorship promoted Spain’s economic development while applying for entrance to the EEC in 1962, which eventually turned into a window of opportunity for new, leftist social and political movements. The process of constructing this new culture was slow but comprehensive, at first limited to the cultural sphere, but later extending to the realm of politics, especially after 1968. It began with a simple but revolutionary change, a return to reality as opposed to propagandistic rhetoric and political cynicism. For example, new novels provided social criticism and an objective view of reality, as seen in Los Bravos (1954) by Jesús Fernández Santos, and El Jarama (1956) by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. During the following years, the “social novel” became tremendously popular with titles like: Central elétrica (1958) by Jesús López Pacheco, La piqueta (1959) by Antonio Ferres, La mina (1959) by Armando López Salinas, and La zanja (1960) by Alfonso Grosso. These authors, as we have seen, formed part of the intellectual committee of the Communist Party in Spain. Time of Silence (1961) by Luis Martín Santos, spurred another dramatic change, for its vanguard narrative style, influenced by Joyce and Proust. Martín Santos was a militant socialist and used tremendous baroque metaphors to project his views on the realities of Spain at the time. This quest to define reality in disguise of propaganda was also evident in the development of the social sciences, often beyond the academic sphere still controlled by the regime. The Association for Europe’s Functional Unity, created by Tierno Galván in the Universidad de Salamanca, published Boletín Informativo between 1954 and 1956. The publication introduced some of the most important debates taking place in Western societies to Spanish readers. Another socialist, Miguel Sánchez Mazas, the son of a well-known writer and Falangist politician, together with the philosopher Carlos París, a former Falangist who turned into a Communist sympathizer, founded the journal Theoria (1952-1956). This publication sought to break away from the Francoist orthodoxy against scientific studies and to expose new scientific methodologies and analytic philosophical trends89. The psychiatrist José Aumente published Praxis between 1960 and 1961, a societal mental health journal in which he theorized on the convergence of Christians and Marxists. Praxis was censored by the regime. 46 At the time, Aumente was part of the solid PLF group, who would leave behind the long literary and essayist tradition of Spanish intellectuals, opting for the new trend set by social novelists. This included authors like: Ignacio Fernández de Castro, Alfonso Carlos Comín, José Antonio González Casanova, Salvador Giner, and the younger José María Maravall, and Manuel Castells. The political scientist Ignacio Sotelo and sociologists Luís García San Miguel, Carls Moya, and Sergio Vilar began to work in a mode similar to the followers of Tierno Galván. However, many young members of the opposition pursued acts of resistance within legal studies, for two major reasons. First, they wanted to change the nature of the Catholicdominated philosophy of law. Second, they wanted to defend the increasing number of detainees and those who were being tried for claiming their labor rights or for meeting in illegal organizations. For example, in 1966 the socialist Elías Díaz published the book Estado de Derecho y sociedad democrática, which highlighted the dictatorship’s false attempts to present the government as a genuine “State of Law”. The regime banned the book and seized copies, claiming that it contained “extremely grave” contents. It was prohibited for being an attack on “the truth and fundamental laws of the State” with consequences that could disturb “public order and the prestige of public institutions”90. The regime’s repression, however, could not stop the student movements that became one of the central spheres of resistance beginning in the early 1960s, together with labor movements, and later neighborhood associations. The ASU, the University New Left (NIU, FLP’s project), and the clandestine university union together with the Democratic Students’ Union (UDE) mobilized against “the university and cultural landscape of Spain […] unbelievable in its mediocrity and deceit” 91. This campaign spurred the events of January and February 1965 at the Universidad de Madrid, which led to the termination of Professor Aranguren, Tierno Galván, and García Calvo. In September of the following year, similar protests were held in Barcelona, causing 68 professors to be suspended for one year and 27 students to be expelled. The regime’s strategy of repressive retaliation backfired. Many intellectuals, who were gaining national and international recognition in their respective fields, decided to unite against the dictatorship, and opposition in Spain’s universities would not stop until the 1969 State of Exception declaration. Part of the growing response from intellectuals was labeled the “letter’s war” (guerra de cartas), which began around 1962 in 47 response to the Asturias miners’ strikes. Throughout the following years, many professors, writers, and liberal professionals (later including actors, actresses, singers, and artists) signed letters and public manifestos in defense of civil, political, and labor related rights while seeking to establish a “genuine national pacification” 92. During these years, a number of new journals, magazines, and other publications helped to develop a progressive culture. As the exiled Francisco Ayala noted with surprise, this occurred despite Francoism’s attempt to isolate young Spaniards93. However, these young Spaniards were unable to escape from their anomalous situation within the framework of Western Europe. They lived in a nation fighting a surviving dictatorship from a fascist era. Even though the regime began to promote modernization, it also took great measures to avoid the “dangers” of modernity, leaving Spain’s youth with an unfulfilled desire for cultural consumption and generational concerns not unlike many other young Europeans. Magazines became popular because of their low cost and greater chances of circumventing censorship. After the 1966 Press and Printing Act they became even more popular, although publications were still far from liberated. Some publications that were established as closely linked to the regime or its followers began to distance themselves, ultimately contributing to the weakening of the dictator’s legitimacy and the reconstruction of “democratic reasoning”. For example, Triunfo was converted into an icon of the left, the former Minister Ruiz-Giménez’s Cuadernos para el Diálogo turned into a democratic magazine, and Destino shifted to a more liberal orientation in Catalonia. The same thing happened with many Catholic publications such as Signo, Aún, Juventud Obrera, Boletín HOAC, Serra d’Or, and Vida Nueva. The Falangist Índice and literary magazines that worked to connect Spain with those living in exile also changed their tune, like Ínsula and Papeles de Son Armadans, directed by the future Nobel Prize recipient Camilo José Cela. Beyond Spain, the libertarian activist José Martínez founded the publishing house Ruedo Ibérico in Paris in 1961. Ruedo Ibérico published the first English historiographical titles concerning the Spanish Civil War, breaking away from the crude Francoist propaganda, and four years later it began to print Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico94. Publishing houses were rapidly changing enterprises closely linked to Spain’s intelligentsia. Contemporary 48 discoveries and debates were made available to Spanish readers thanks to publishing companies like Taurus, Seix Barral, Ariel, Ciencia Nueva, and Edicusa. Francoist authorities found themselves unable to control this progressive culture (the most prestigious and almost hegemonic among intellectuals), although they tried to stop it nevertheless. When they found that this was an impossible task, they sought to limit culturally progressive publications to a small circle of cultivated elites. Even after the 1966 Press and Printing Act, censorship continued. Fines, administrative seizures, and direct actions against publishing companies continued. The regime put pressure on the Church to control printed material from all of its associated organizations and ordered the shut down of some titles like ¡Tú! and Aún. Finally, hundreds of articles about to be published were directly censored and many that had already been printed in magazines like Destino, Cuadernos para el Diálogo, and Triunfo were banned. The dictatorship turned the Registry of Periodical and Publishing Companies into “the sword of Damocles”, and was especially strict when censoring companies that published popular or pocked-sized editions such as Seix Barral, Edicions 62, Nova Terra, Siglo XXI, Edicusa, and Estela. Estela’s registry was even canceled and had to resume printing under another name, Laia. After the events of 1956, the most important legacy of the Spanish left was the appearance of “committed” intellectuals, which were inseparable from culture in Spain and the entire European left. There were no non-committed intellectuals, as there could not be intellectuals who did not situate themselves on the left. In the realm of Catholicism, commitment was driven by faith, as González Ruiz spoke of in his canonical Creer es comprometerse. He explained, “Christian doctrine should understand capitalism as intrinsically wicked”, and to oppose it there is no “other alternative besides socialism…. The Second Vatican council is a great step forward: returning to its origins, the Church reconciles with socialism” 95. Even former members of the Falange began to shift ideologically towards the left. They interpreted this change a posteriori as a genuine search for a an ideal, having left behind their “youthful illusions”, they would find “in the communist concept of a society without classes, a society of free association, in Marxist terms, and the authenticity of the revolutionary ideal” 96. This new commitment also found inspiration in figures from the past 49 like Antonio Machado, Manuel Azaña, Julián Besteiro, and Jiménez de Asúa, who had died in exile or in prison. “Many democrats and intellectuals” understood the acts of these men, “as genuine and meaningful: committed to their time and to the Spanish people” 97. They valued the social function of art and literature because they felt that in believing these to be mere “spiritual phenomena without direct relation to society, in their development, is to fall into a very old trap”, as the Communist Antonio Ferres wrote98. Commitment was valuable in itself, as Lenin used to paraphrase Napoleon, “you commit, and then you will see” (on s’engage, et puis on voit), although at first it was a matter of democratic cultural values in Spain, as opposed to showing loyalty to a political party… at least until the great wave of political events that characterized a later date: 1968. 50 2. Preparing the Democracy (1968-1975) 2.1 The Cultural Defiance of ‘68 Between 1968 and 1975 the left’s discourse suffered from an intense process of ideologization. The ethical and pre-political core that propelled the opposition since 1956 was giving way to an ideological ethos that was attentive to what was going on beyond the country. This new way of thinking developed for two reasons. The first was due to the clandestine political opposition’s growth, fragmentation, and radicalization. The second was due to the emergence of a progressive culture that proved to be no less intense ideologically, yet more plural and expressive in representing different social demands. With its strong Marxist influence, this anti-Francoist culture reached its zenith during these years. However, at the same time this culture also showed some signs of diminution and rupture, which revealed other, more profound, divisions of a political nature. Exile activity was recovered as an essential cultural and symbolic reference, but at the same time its last push to create real political change came to a halt with the 1962 Munich conference. During a 1969 trip back to Spain, Max Aub bitterly described his experience of alienation that seemed to him “inconsistent, obvious, unconscious, and far from any sort of rebellion or perjury”, with the worst being “not that there was no freedom” but that “its absence seemed to go unnoticed” and no one asked him about the Civil War, Gernika, or Sierra de Teruel99. Aub’s judgment, however, failed to recognize non-majority views, which included an expansive portion of Spanish society that tenaciously rebelled against the dictatorship in favor of a democratic change. Student and workers’ mobilizations were the most important, with increasing support from “penenes” (non-tenured educators) and older, established professors like those who had been dismissed in 1965. In the early 1970s, university campuses became the breeding ground for “new left” political groups and the physical site of a new generation’s acts of resistance. Demands for educational reform were linked to a more general struggle that sought emancipation from the authoritarian structure of family life, the academic realm, and Spanish society 100 . The nearly permanent state of conflict resulted in the closing of the Universidad de Valladolid and the suspension of the statutes in Madrid’s Autónoma and 51 Complutense universities. Furthermore, the Policía de Orden Universitaria (POU) was established after the January 1968 events 101 . The following year, student protests concerning the death of the young Enrique Ruano while police detained him led to the declaration of a state of exception throughout the nation. This permitted the regime to harshly punish those connected to university and cultural opposition groups during a period of two months. Dozens of professors were confined to sites far from their homes and censorship was reestablished. This “new left” contributed to the ideological radicalization of the anti-Francoist opposition, with ideas that even spread to the old workers’ parties, pitting them against the new formations. At the same time, this movement bolstered the liveliness of more recent sociopolitical groups that had been poorly organized beforehand. Feminism and lesbian and gay movements became more publically visible despite the obstacles and mentality against such ethos that broad sectors of Spanish society shared. Furthermore, they entered into the reluctant left, which was still anchored in values with a “virile” militant identity 102 . The repressive legislation and censorship of Franco’s regime sought control over such movements. For example, the magazine Triunfo was suspended for four months and fined with the highest amount that the Ley de Prensa allowed after publishing a special edition on marriage103. During these years, neighborhood associations, environmentalist and pacifist movements, and other “new social movements” started to emerge in response to new demands related to: the chaotic growth of urban centers, environmental consequences of accelerated development, and the destruction of the Spanish coast for tourism. Groups also sought to address themes such as legal separation and divorce, sexual identity, the role of women in society, non-violence, the Third World, and Spain’s place in the international order. The emergence of these new formations and social demands found eminent expression via cultural means, not only because of the limits that the dictatorship imposed upon political organizations but also because the need for greater freedom was closely linked to the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity. Craving for cultural consumption that had been suppressed for years explains the editorial boom during this period, in addition to the launching of new magazines, in a process that would culminate during the first years of the transition to democracy, although its rapid decline would follow shortly after, during the late 52 1970s. Spain experienced an authentic cultural transformation with three main qualities. First, the left attained hegemony over written, artistic, and cinematographic culture. The regime could do little to fight this after it failed in its attempt to create a high fascist and Catholic culture though totalitarian imposition. However, the regime did not fail to control popular culture that appeared on television, the radio, or in other forms of mass consumption within a population with very low literacy rates 104 . Second, was the left’s historical acceleration, which took less than two decades to dramatically change in the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Third, related to this rapid shift, was the contradictorily nature of the period. Debates imported from the Western world, with the ideological confrontation of the Cold War always on the horizon, and other idiosyncratic issues particular to the situation in Spain were paradoxical. For example, the country’s socioeconomic underdevelopment coincided with the omnipresence of a developmental dictatorship that, at the same time, abhorred the consequences of modernity. Francoist policies for economic development and their effects on incipient mass consumption were still far from the “opulent” societies of the West. Reflections that these initiatives gave rise to, such as that of Marcuse on the new forms of “fascism” concealed as publicity and advanced forms of capitalism, clashed with the reality of the surviving regime from an authentic era of fascism. Novels like Tiempo de silencio (1962) by Luis Martín Santos and films like El Verdugo (1963) directed by Luis García Berlanga soon reflected this paradoxical situation. Economic development and social justice were problems in Spain, hence young university students that were inclined to study social and economic sciences tried to be faithful to Marxist maxim but understanding reality was not enough, it needed to be transformed. However, this process came with inherent tensions, for example the difference between “mechanical reasons” and “dialectical reasons”. In other words, there were discrepancies amongst the scientific analysis of facts and their interpretation within a Marxist frame of social classes105. Another obstacle was combining democratic institutions with socialism, or at least with a deep socialization of the economic and social structures, but this objective became an “unavoidable historical perspective” that if it were not to be carried out “peacefully, it would lead to a violent, inexorable day” 106. 53 The distinction between “formal democracy” and “real democracy”, or economic democracy, became a central topic within progressive discourse. Even for a social democratic intellectual, far removed from the revolutionary Marxism that the PSOE had adopted during those years, “to choose representatives every five years from lists made by political parties in elections that the mass media has manipulated” was no more than a ritual that left little room for citizens to actually participate in the democratic process107. In fact, one of the fundamental themes of the 1968 protest was the postwar parliamentary system’s poor representativeness and the denunciation of new modes of social control, including the media and commercial advertising, which were not democratically regulated. Such control, in a parliamentary democracy, is paradoxical, as was the case in Spain as the struggle against a dictatorship aimed to establish democratic freedoms and defend human rights. The antiFrancoist opposition in exile had also been fighting for these same objectives. However, after Franco’s death this “socialism in liberty” wound up being significantly watered down, as expressed in the first article of the 1978 Constitution: “A social and democratic State under the rule of law”. In 1968 Spain participated in the great wave of collective action that took place throughout Europe and much of the world under very different governments ranging from consolidated democracies to communist dictatorships108. The Spanish left lived these moments with great expectations despite continued censorship that banned books written by witnesses of these events such as La revolución de Mayo by Antonio Luis Marzal and El poder está en la calle by Sergio Vilar. Slogans written on walls and demonstrations in the streets of Paris seemed to have captured the tone of a utopic revolution different from previous ones. It seemed to be a revolutionary “situation” in which individual and collective action for the emancipation from the neocapitalist production, social, and ideological framework would end up becoming partners in a common struggle109. In the same year the play Marat/Sade written by Peter Weiss was performed in Spain with great success. The well-known Communist militant Adolfo Marsillach translated the script into Spanish, which represented the dichotomy of the two coexisting poles within the progressive culture of the 1960s. On one extreme was scientific Marxism and romanticism on the other. One side was committed to the subversion of socioeconomic structures and the other the liberation of the individual 110 . As many 54 women and some gays who strategized undercover understood, the idea of a class struggle that would transform the whole of society did not always go hand in hand with the defense of individual identities or civil rights. During the phase of maximum politicization beginning in 1968, the substantial unity of the anit-Francoist movement began to fracture. First, the radical left began to criticize social democracy and the Communist Party’s revisionism, which even led some Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups to adopt strategies that included armed struggles. Second was the emergence of a rich libertarian culture, only partly (or romantically) linked to the culture of the prewar anarchist movement. During the following few years, left-wing Nietzschean philosophers, thinkers and writers became heirs to a hippie attitude sparked by events in Paris and California that May. They became spokesmen of what was then called “counterculture”, declared enemies of Communist dogmatism and asceticism and the left in general111. In turn, they were accused of being irresponsible and reactionary individualists if not pseudo-fascists acting upon irrational whims. Literature was far from removed from this tension; in fact it became the field of an intense controversy that erupted in 1970. The political role that the “social novel” had played since the mid 1950s began to dwindle as critical journalism and new literary tendencies began to emerge. A group of authors affiliated with the PCE including Jesús López Pacheco, Antonio Ferres, Armando López Salinas, and Issac Montero began to lose steam with the rise of the Nouveau Roman, the “latest” from Barcelona’s Gauche Divine, and the boom of Latin American novels by García Márquez and Vargas Llosa112. Alfonso Sastre wrote a controversial book in favor of the social function of literature and against “art for art’s sake”. La revolución y la critica de la cultura (1970) defended socially committed works of art and literature against fashions of the “satisfied bourgeoises”, despite their claims of supporting the left. However, more and more people were beginning to understand the social or “objective” novel as a consequence of Spain’s underdevelopment, they even disrespectfully referred to such authors as belonging to the “berza generation” as a comment on their supposed primitive way of understanding the political commitment associated with literary creation113. Similar debates circled in the field of visual art. For example, the Communist critic Moreno Galván accused Rafael Canogar, who painted the iconic anti-Francoist work El abarazo (1973), of “passing as a revolutionary even 55 though he exhibits in official events, receiving prizes from militaristic countries, and selling works in the United States for millions” in addition to “being a painter who only knows how to paint” 114, something that was not exactly taken as a compliment at the time. At this point nobody defended social realism nor did they cite the Soviet Zhdanov, although perhaps Brecht. Instead, Marxist structuralism or the Frankfurt School’s radical humanism was favored, with unavoidable references to Gramsci, Marcuse, Althusser, Lukács, and Poulantzas. This way of thinking turned into a dogma that often gave rise to a rigid progressive moralism. Therefore, mass culture was interpreted as a mere instrument used to integrate citizens into the neocapitalism championed by “bourgeois formal democracies”. This condemnation included: music boxes, frivolous magazines, comics, crime fiction, science fiction, literature by Dos Passos, Kerouac, and Salinger, and erotic or violent films. All of these examples were classified as “systematic means of collective alienation” 115 . Moving on from existentialism, which certain bourgeois intellectuals interpreted as the result of hatred towards the philosophy on behalf of their own particular social class, all of the defining characteristics of intimismo turned into dated, or even immoral qualities. For this reason, condemnations like “culturalismo”, “aestheticism”, and “artistocratism” were applied to writers who shut themselves up in the metaphorical ivory tower with ease 116. Intellectuals in Communist formations were also denounced, although sometimes with an irremediable ambiguity, such as the accusation of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn’s descendants of being cynics, opportunists, and even filonazis117. Generally, despite dramatically different circumstances, Spanish progressive culture was comparable to much of the Western world regarding its topics, contradictions, and concerns. There was no shortage of reflections concerning necessary violence, based on Merleau-Ponty’s influential Humanisme et terreur, especially regarding the denunciation of the Vietnam War and “Yankee” imperialism in Latin America. This also spawned fascination for the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara’s guerrillas, an indispensable icon in the contested aesthetic of the moment. However, few actually made the jump from words to actions 118 . At the same time, Christian-Marxist dialogue imported from Italian and French Catholicism (with Roger Garaudy as the author of reference), proponents of democratic socialism (such as theorists Maurice Duverger, Adam Schaff, and André Gorz), and Erich Fromm’s attempt to conciliate psychoanalysis and 56 Marxism resulted in the emphasis of the absolute value of the individual pitted against totalitarianism, pacifism, and the gradual establishment of socialism. Furthermore, despite the abundance of politically engaged literature during these years, many intellectuals discovered the works of authors like Gadda, Musil, Joyce, Proust, and Falkner, in addition to alternative spaces to express individual (real or imagined) freedom through travel, sex, music, or drugs. An outstanding Communist writer like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán could now write texts with provocative titles such as Manifiesto subnormal (1970) and Crónica sentimental de España (1971), obviously with little enthusiasm from within the Party, in which he tried to recover aspects of popular culture (folklore, soccer, television, etc.) from their Francoist appropriation. In Spain, it was not a question of demanding the impossible as it had been in Paris in May 1968, but a petition to rebuild lost reason and, paraphrasing Dürrenmatt, to fight for the obvious cause. 2.2 The Winds from Prague In 1968, Czechoslovakia was the scene of an ambitious sociopolitical, democratizing project in the countries of the Soviet bloc. It was an attempt to build “socialism with a humane side”. The first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ) since January, Alexander Dubček, launched a series of reforms that prompted a dose of liberalization and pluralism in the life of the nation. This paved the way for freedom of assembly, association, and the press and introduced elements of the free market into the economy. The Prague Spring, even though it never questioned Czechoslovakia’s position as part of the Communist camp, prompted hostility on behalf of the Soviet Union, which did not tolerate the development of an alternative model within its own bloc. The Kremlin repeatedly exerted pressure on Dubček, urging him to reverse his reforms until finally, on the night of August 20th, tanks from the Warsaw Pact entered Czechoslovakia. The country’s “normalization” began, orchestrated from Moscow, as the new freedoms that had been established with the reforms of the previous months were undone. The events that took place in Prague marked a point of no return in the decline of the Soviet myth and the slow yet inexorable process of the International Communist Movement’s decomposition. As Tony Judt wrote, with the 57 repression of the Czechoslovak experiment “the soul of Communism had died” 119 . These winds from Prague had a profound impact on the PCE. Until this point, the party had remained faithful to a basic principal of the “proletarian internationalism” shaped by the heat of the October Revolution: the unconditional defense of “socialism’s homeland”, in other words, obedience to the Kremlin’s mandates. Maintaining this stance was the most obvious obstacle that the party dealt with during its new course beginning in the mid 1950s. The PCE questioned its autonomy and democratic credibility, which considerably hindered their pursuit to form broad alliances against the Franco regime. The events that took place in Czechoslovakia led the PCE to break from the internationalist discipline for the first time, as regulations had become increasingly contradicting concerning the party’s national strategy. Within a few years, the PCE would become the most heterodox Communist party in Western Europe. From the beginning, the Spanish Communists watched the Prague Spring unravel with understanding and enthusiasm, applauding Dubček’s attempt to reconcile socialism and freedom. They plainly referred to this case as their new model. This was affirmed in the May edition of Mundo Obrero: [The Prague Spring] tends to overcome the negative aspects that have manifested themselves in socialist society in recent years (bureaucratization, use of authoritarian and administrative methods, etc.) […]. Greater democratization of political life has prevailed […] The comrades of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia whose socialist society has strived for a perfect democracy, although varying in some ways, is akin to the type of socialist society that […] we think should become a reality in Spain120. In July, Carrillo wrote about the need for Western Communist parties to definitively cut “the umbilical cord from Stalinist thesis of one single party”, as the KSČ was doing121. In the same month, the Secretary General and other Spanish leaders met with the Soviet ambassador in Paris. They told the ambassador that if the Kremlin’s hypothesized military intervention in Czechoslovakia had occurred, they would have been forced to publically criticize the CPSU for the first time. Therefore, after Prague was invaded with tanks the PCE promptly articulated its disapproval, considering it as an event that inevitably provoked “the loss of 58 prestige of the Communist cause” and of “the socialist countries” in addition to framing the act as “an exacerbation of global communism’s division” 122 . The two major Communist parties in the West, the Italian and French, also failed to act upon the Warsaw Pact, which was a serious challenge to Moscow’s authority. In September, the PCE published and article in Mundo Obrero that opened with a discussion about the Czechoslovak question, highlighting the nature of the PCE’s force within national politics and as an independent entity. “We cannot understand or allow the hypothesis […] that the day in which our Party comes to power in Spain […] another socialist power […] dictates politics to us, let along military intervention in our territory” 123. From this point on, the relationship between the PCE and CPSU was constantly tense. In fact, in January 1969 the Spanish party sent the Soviet party a letter that denounced the “normalization” taking place in Czechoslovakia and warned that the USSR’s will to control Communist parties in other socialist states could seriously hinder the Communist movement’s legitimacy and exacerbate already existing problems within it. The letter pointed out that “no amount of power or force” should lead to underestimating “this immense danger”, because “the political and moral factors are more important, in the long run, than strength and power” 124 . From this perspective, the Spanish party judged the doctrine of limited sovereignty that Leonid Brezhnev enunciated concerning the countries in the Soviet bloc as a “political aberration” 125. The PCE claimed its right to criticize in order to emphasize the party’s differentiation from real socialism while embracing the idea (originally one of Togliatti’s) of a Communist movement “unitary in diversity”. This notion lacked central leadership and was composed of parties that were free to develop different models tailored and adapted to their national circumstances. The Spanish party also defended this perspective at the International Conference of Communist and Workers’ parties held in Moscow in June 1969. Despite pressure from the CPSU for the party to return to a more orthodox internationalism, the PCE reaffirmed its dissenting position while drawing attention to the obvious problems and contradictions within the socialist states and their mutual relationships. Even though the PCE made their reservations clear, the party ended up signing the conference’s final document. This was a tactical choice that favored a cautionary impulse towards renovation 59 over a sharp rupture within the sphere of the Communist movement, at least for the moment. While developing its new international policy, the PCE attempted to balance the search for democratic legitimacy with the maintenance of another form or legitimacy, which stemmed from the October Revolution and was fundamental to the formation’s identity. It is important to take into consideration the PCE’s internal situation at a time when it was necessary to combine veteran forces with new members, which mean not only problems of age but mentality as well. In fact, the new direction that the party took in 1968 was well received by the militancy living in Spain as well as new generations within the party. However, this turn also caused pro-Soviet divergences led by PCE members Enrique Líster, Eduardo García and CC representative Agustín Gómez, who were all expelled from the Spanish party between 1969 and 1970. The pro-Soviets that founded the VIII PCE Congress promoted the splitting of the party, which proved effective in some, mainly socialist, countries. In Moscow, for example, an assembly of more than two hundred Spanish Communists condemned Carrillo’s trajectory. Similarly, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the majority of PCE committees in Berlin and Dresden sided with the Soviets. The CPSU and other Communist parties in power encouraged this division; they financed the split and through different measures put pressure on Spanish Communists living in their respective territories to disavow the PCE’s official policies. As a result, the Spanish party repeatedly protested against their Soviet counterparts 126 . The VIII PCE Congress only managed to attract a small portion of the party’s militants. In 1973 the PCE split, with the departure of Líster who then founded the Spanish Communist Workers’ Party (PCOE). However, it is important to note that not all traditional, pro-Soviet attitudes disappeared from the PCE ranks with this division; such sentiments seemed to remain dormant at the time, but they wound up resurfacing with great intensity during the end of the decade and contributed to the party’s later crisis that lasted from 1979 to 1982. At the same time that the PCE began to distance itself from Moscow, since 1969 the party redefined and expanded its relationship within the Communist movement in order to back their new concept of internationalism. In Western Europe, they strengthened ties with the PCI. Their Italian neighbors, with their autonomist approach to socialism and commitment to democracy, turned into the PCE’s chief partners given that each party held strikingly 60 similar views regarding international issues. Furthermore, the PCE began to work more closely with the Communist parties in power that had also moved away from Moscow in order to substantiate their claims about independence and the validity of different national solutions for socialism. In this way, the party also sought to reduce the damage of their financial situation, as the CPSU and its satellite parties dramatically reduced PCE funding during 1968 and 1969. The Romanian Communist Party (RCP) showed “unconditional solidarity” with the Spanish party while giving their support without exerting political pressure. For example, in 1972 the RCP printed and distributed some 10,000 copies of material from the VIII PCE Congress in addition to their continued support of Radio España Independiente, which was based in Bucharest127. The Spanish party’s new course of action was especially exemplified when they resumed contact with the Communist Party’s most unorthodox example, the Chinese. In legitimizing its diversity, the PCE could no longer support Moscow in its attacks against the Beijing government as it had been carrying out since 1960. As early as 1969 the Spanish party opposed, together with other groups like the RCP and PCI, the CPSU’s intention to turn the International Conference into a forum to launch a collective conviction of the People’s Republic of China. This decisive step to reestablish relations with China happened towards the end of 1971, when a delegation of Spanish leaders visited several cities in Mao’s nation. The CPSU and its satellite parties evaluated how the PCE and other Communist parties were renewing contact with Beijing: “Beijing keeps trying to win the favor of those parties which hold a special position in relation to Beijing's disintegrating activities. […] In autumn 1971 leaders of Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and some other parties arranged bilateral meetings which confirmed and reinforced nationalist principle and separatism […]. In their public speeches during the meetings […] they repeatedly referred to “independence” and “autonomy” etc. which in the context of these declarations expressed their effort to liberate from internationalist obligations in relation to other fraternal parties and the whole Communist movement”128. Nevertheless, the PCE’s main interests concerning their international activity no longer involved their relationship with Communist parties in power. Neither the Kremlin nor 61 dissident regimes in Romania or China could serve as adequate referents for the Spanish party, whose willingness to maintain unity with the rest of the Communist movement was giving way to the PCE’s quest to emphasize their diversity in order to strengthen their credibility. For this reason, the Spanish party redefined itself, in an act that considered Western Europe and the progressive forces of the Viejo Continente as the scene with its privileged interlocutors of its new internationalism. A decisive step in this direction took place during the VIII Congress (1972) that favored, for the first time, the processes of European integration. Opting for this new policy, which was also due in part to the PCE’s desire to forge stronger alliances with Spanish democratic that also backed Europeanism, intertwined with possibilities that seemed to be opened up with the “easing of tensions” between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in 1969. The PCE embraced this easing of tensions, as the party believed it allowed for the possibility of Western European nations to gradually detach from both blocs. Pressure to define themselves as “anti-Soviet” or “anti-American” diminished and this meant that they could actively contribute to overcoming this bipolar logic. This was an idea that, fueled by phenomena such as Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, emphasized the transnational aspects of the continental integration process with the PCI as its main supporting force. According to one of the Spanish party’s speeches, Europe could and had to play a central role in the “democratization of international relations” due to its geographic location, constituting the nation as a bridge between East and West. Furthermore, the PCE thought of the Viejo Continente as the most favorable site for the flourishing of a new model that would synthesize the best qualities, in terms of freedom and equality, defended by different progressive forces throughout time: “A Europe (as the party championed in September 1975) that links the democratic achievements of the bourgeoisie… with socialist accomplishments that will give a new and genuinely egalitarian dimension to democracy” 129. In recognizing the capitalist nature of the common market, the PCE believed that the conditions were advantageous for “Europe’s monopolies” to decidedly turn towards the left. On the one hand, this perspective was based on the conviction that both the capitalist model implemented after World War II and United States imperialism were in a moment of weakness, as supposedly demonstrated when the economic crisis erupted in 1973 and the 62 American defeat in Vietnam. On the other hand, this decision was strongly influenced by the remarkable growth of several Western socialist and social democratic parties, which began governing in some countries such as Germany and Austria and were able to gain power but more slowly in other nations such as France during the first half of the 1970s. In 1973, Carrillo stated in an executive meeting that with the exception of Italy, “the possibilities of revolutionary change” in the West no longer resided solely with Communist parties. “The potential forces of the revolution […] today, are, to a great extent, part of this movement led by social democrats and Socialists” 130. In recognizing that historically social democracy was prevailing over communism, the PCE proposed to mend the fracture within the Spanish left that had came with the founding of the Third International in 1920. Leading the way for a progressive transformation in Europe, the PCE renewed their relationship with the Socialists. This seemed feasible because the Communists had abandoned their narrow vision and opposition to democracy while the Socialists no longer pushed for such excessive reform. This should have led to what Carrillo defined as “revolutionary labor parties”. The PCE admitted that it was still a rather ambitious objective, but they believed that concrete steps were already being taken in that direction, as demonstrated in the French Communist and Socialist signing of the Common Program in 1972. The new type of internationalism that stemmed from these formations was central to Eurocommunist discourse in Spain because they modeled overcoming the restrictions of the Communist movement in order to move towards the creation of a broader progressive front on the European and global scale. As a result, the PCE tried to strengthen its relations with the parties of the Socialist International, winning the favor of the Swedish led by Olof Palme and the Portuguese, especially within the context of the Carnation Revolution. This European Socialist campaign, albeit still with modest results, should have affected the PCE’s situation within Spain as well. Their new allies would help reduce the PSOE’s reluctance to collaborate with the Communists at home131. Meanwhile, tensions were rising in real socialist countries. In internal meetings, the PCE criticized itself for historically having contributed to the idealization of the USSR and for condemning events such as the Leningrad trials against Jewish dissidents. The group also disdainfully looked to the Polish regime for its brutal modes of repressing workers’ 63 demonstrations during the late 1970s. In addition, the PCE refused to retain relations with the post-normalized CPC because they did not consider the party to represent its people. Another factor that proved to augment friction between the Spanish Communists and the Soviet bloc was the fact that several socialist states initiated rapprochement with the Franco regime beginning in the late 1960s. Between 1970 and 1972, Spain signed extensive trade agreements with Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the USSR. In 1973 the country established full diplomatic relations with GDR and China. The PCE vehemently denounced these relations that did not take into account the Hitler-like origin of the Franco regime and which represented a betrayal to the Spanish people’s aspiration for democracy. The PCE declared that such relations constituted as “a scandalous way of endorsing the farce of Franco’s government”, as was also demonstrated in the press of socialist countries that diminished content dealing with the lack of freedom in Spain. Furthermore, these trade agreements sometimes resulted in paradoxical situations. For example, during the Asturian miners’ strikes, the government in Madrid was able to purchase coal from Poland132. In April 1943 the PCE made an important decision concerning its international perspective. The party considered that the CPSU was attacking them in various ways. At the same time that the Soviet party was fighting against fracturing parties and allowing nations east of the Iron Curtain to collaborate with the Franco regime, Moscow tried to isolate the PCE within the Communist movement through encouraging “brother or sister” parties to reject official bilateral cooperation. Consequently, Carrillo argued that the party was at a crossroads: they could give in to the Kremlin’s pressures and return to more orthodox ideology or they could elaborate on their new direction that began in 1968, moving more decisively, theoretically, and practically away from the Soviet bloc. The Secretary General stated that he preferred the second option, claiming that it would provide the PCE’s general plan with more credibility and open up new doors: “it is nothing to be ashamed of, on the contrary: while we have issues with some parties in power, the possibilities of developing better relations with the socialist left, the left of social democracy, and the Catholic left in Europe and throughout the world [improves]”. The rest of the EC unanimously endorsed Carrillo’s idea133. In accordance with this decision, the director of the party’s international relations, Manuel Azárate, presented a report to the CC containing harsh criticism in regards to the current 64 model of government in socialist countries. He pointed out that a “phenomenon of fusion between the Party and the State” had taken place both in the USSR and China, stating “such distortion of the essence of socialism, with the limitation or suppression of democracy… have resulted in the diminishing and reduced role and weight of the working class, of the masses in society”. Azcárate went on to show that in this “process of bureaucratization, in the interior” the socialist countries contributed to “a setback in revolutionary attitudes in the exterior”. This process has led these countries to entertain relations “with a number of governments, including the most reactionary ones”, as was evident vis-à-vis agreements with Francoist Spain134. The CPSU bitterly replied to Azcárate in February 1974 through an article published in Partinaia Jisn. The Soviets condemned “the falseness and absurdity” of the Spanish representative who had, according to this account, altered “grossly the essence of the USSR’s foreign policy along with other socialist countries”. After accusing Azcárate, among other things, “of expressing all sorts of inventions about the absence of democracy in the USSR” while mimicking “the declared enemies of the Soviet Socialist regime”, the article declared that such interventions were unwelcome and hindered “the reestablishment of amity and even the development of normal relations between the PCE and other Communist parties” 135. In October, Spanish and Soviet leaders met in Moscow in an attempt to appease relations that appeared more deteriorated than ever before. The discrepancies between the two parties that had been crystallizing in recent years resurfaced during the meeting, although both parties were prepared to make compromises in order to restore relations. Both parties ended up signed a contract that reaffirmed the independence of Communist parties and condemned both anti-Sovietism and “any renegade activity aimed at undermining the internal unity of brother or sister parties” 136. While the CPSU did not intend to negotiate with the hostile PCE, the Soviets considered that great changes were about to take place in Spain and that it would be advantageous to adopt a patient attitude before making another move in order to see what role the Communists would play in the act of Franco’s disappearance. At the same time, the CPSU began to secretly maintain contact with Ignacio Gallego, who went on to act as a covert Muscovite agent within one of the Spanish party’s leadership roles. For these reasons, the 1974 truce was precarious. The PCE was unwilling to abandon its new model of internationalism and continued to develop it, just as 65 Spain embarked on its transition to democracy, which turned out to be one of Eurocommunism’s major feats. 2.3 Renewal or Remaking The end of the 1960s brought with it the fragmentation of clandestine socialism due to the rigidity of the politics in exile. In addition to Professor Tierno Galván’s group in Madrid, new socialist collectives appeared in Galicia and Valencia, coordinated by Catalan Socialists. The generation of the former madrileño youth circles, largely members of the ASU until 1962, had unsuccessfully promoted the operation of the Workers’ Trade Union Alliance in cooperation with peripheral neo-socialist formations that had revitalized the federalist Republican culture. A new promotion of young Socialists in the Basque Country, Seville, and Barcelona took on the role of the renewal’s protagonists, in addition to the second generation of exiles from postwar expatriate families, children of refugees from 1939 and economic emigrants. In fact, at the end of the 1950s, sections of the Socialist Youth were reestablished in France, Belgium, and Mexico. Young expatriates from political persecution or emigrants for economic reasons joined these groups. Many of these members were from middle class families or had relatives that supported the Franco regime, novel characteristics within the militancy. Furthermore, a determined group of women reconstituted the Feminine Secretariat in 1964. In 1967, young activists held a clandestine meeting in Portugalete. Members of the leadership in exile and representatives of other European socialist youth groups attended. Even though Llopis had been incorporating younger, second-generation members into the party’s leadership roles, the group that organized the meeting demanded that the direction be transferred from the exile to within Spain while calling for more anti-Francoist action. In 1970 the Youth Congress in exile decided that they should transfer the direction to Spain, with pressure from the UGT and PSOE, including some members who threatened to leave the organizations should the direction remain in exile. 66 During the same year at the Socialist Party’s congress, some young Socialists, including Felipe González, openly intervened with the tribune and managed to attain that the party’s direction would be shared between the exile and within Spain. The executive committee in exile was reduced to seven members, with the same amount of clandestine permanent members in Franco’s Spain. However, in November 1970 at the general meeting of clandestine federations, the party decided to include nine members in the country, distributed according to the weight of different federations. This included three Basque directors, two for Asturias, and only one for each Madrid, Castile, Barcelona, and Seville. Some living in Madrid were insulted by this decision, as the majority of the underground leadership had previously been formed from madrileños selected in the capital. At the same time, restructuring the federations within Spain left out, in many cases, veteran leaders in zones like Madrid and Seville. Old militants that were not particularly active were sidelined in favor of a more energetic anti-Francoist militancy. Some veterans supported this reactivation of clandestine activism, while others considered the change unjust considering the many, long years that the older leaders had suffered through. For this reason, veterans such as Juan Gómez Egido, who had headed a clandestine group in Madrid during the post-war period, and the Sevillian Alfonso Fernández Torres decided to join a provisional national committee together with veterans of other provinces. Furthermore, in a reflection regarding the traumas experienced during the war, they accused the reformists of collusion and Communist infiltration. It is true that some of the reformists were previously involved with the PCE, POUM, CNT, or even the recently dissolved Popular Liberation Front. However, the majority of the more than one thousand active militants in the organizations were young people without previous affiliations or traditional workers living in the Basque Country, Asturias, or Alicante. In terms of the socialist organization’s renewal, the point of no return took place during the UGT Congress in the summer of 1971. The executive committee’s management was rejected and only five members were chosen to represent the group, leaving out the historic leaders Rodolfo Llopis, Manuel Muiño and Miguel Calzada. It is important to remember that the union had suffered a leadership crisis since the 1968 resignation of its longstanding 67 secretary general, Largo Caballero’s follower, Pascual Tomás. Manuel Muiño, formerly second-in-command to Tomás and married to a French woman, took over the post but not without protest. Muiño stepped down in 1969. The veteran Madrid union leader had been a follower of Professor Julián Besteiro’s philosophy, the party’s former president and government representative until 1933, who died in prison in 1940. The representatives at the congress also approved of a unity of action with all anti-Francoist forces (without exclusions), specifically referring to the PCE and Workers’ Commissions. This was not just an authorization for circumstantial collaborative action with Communists and social protesters, as they had agreed to at the end of 1970 because of pressure from those living in Spain, but the establishment of an anti-Francoist front. A portion of the veteran sections left the conclave to show their disapproval with the committee that would continue to select the party’s new leaders137. The old guard in exile tried to stop this shift in socialist politics in calling for an external meeting, because theoretically the UGT’s decisions were independent. Even though the leaders of both the Socialist party and the workers’ union agreed to work together, Llopis ended up consulting just the militancy in exile who decided to postpone the party’s congress and the establishment of relations with the PCE to form an anti-Francoist front. The meeting would not take place until the summer of 1972. The consolidation of the veteran’s committee in Spain and the support of Enrique Tierno Galván’s group seemed to neutralize the reformists’ actions for the time being. The clandestine leadership authorized the Madrid and Catalan federations to participate in a new roundtable for democracy and the nascent Assembly of Catalonia. Meanwhile, the UGT members in Asturias collaborated with the Communists in the Unitary Fund of Workers’ Solidarity and those of Vizcaya later agreed to work on a platform for protest with the PCE and USO. However, in January 1972 the Basques, who acted as the center of coordination for the clandestine organization, became skeptical about the possibilities of shared antiFrancoist political action beyond the workers’ protesters. They questioned whether or not they should work with reluctant groups like their traditional nationalist allies and the moderate liberal opposition. 68 No ideological division separated the Socialists regarding relations with the PCE, only differences regarding political culture and strategy. Both “históricos” and “renovadores” saw Marxism-Leninism as a degeneration of Marx’s philosophy. The Socialists rejected bilateral relations via liaison committees with the Communists and also refused to entertain the possibility of uniting with the Communists, as had been debated during the Civil War. The reformists, influenced by the emergence of the “new left”, tended to conceive of socialism as something alien to both Soviet bureaucratic communism and European social democracy’s commitment to capitalism. The labor federations in northern Spain began to include in their proposals important factors like self-management and workers’ power, in addition to the denunciation of imperialism and of military blocs. According to the new political secretary Nicolás Redondo, the party needed to radicalize its discourse while enhancing the Marxist and anti-imperialist content. This, he believed, would neutralize the new left’s criticism towards traditional workers’ organizations as being “revisionistas” or social democratic. Nicolás Redondo was the son of a former Socialist leader from Vizcaya, who had been expatriated for three years in France during the Civil War. Before he turned eighteen, Redondo had began working as an apprentice in the prominent factory La Naval. The emergence of a radical left and new trade union movements, together with the failed PCE attempts to organize general strikes focused on local issues, impacted the radicalization of the Basque Socialists. In 1967, a protest movement spread through Vizcaya that initiated with a conflict in the company Laminación de Bandas and the Francoist government’s declaration of a state of exception. From then on, Viscaya’s UGT members promoted unitary factory committees that worked together with other vanguards and even held open assemblies. This activity led to the clandestine organization that called for a general strike to be held in January 1969, following conflicts that took place in large factories on the left bank of Bilbao’s estuary. The call did not attract a following beyond the Basque Country, but the initiative was important because it marked the opening up of collaborative action between the Socialists, Communists, and the new left. The call for a general strike coincided with university activist events, which caused the government to declare a state of exception throughout Spain for three months. The regime retaliated against Socialists, imprisoning a great number of activists. For veteran leaders in Spain like Ramón Rubial, the call 69 demonstrated how risky it was to have an executive committee within Spain, while the young UGT leaders believed in changing to a more active approach to combat the Franco regime. During the Burgos Trial against ETA members in December 1970 and the approval of a new trade union law in 1971 resulted in new attempts to create a unity of action. Furthermore, the majority of the workers’ opposition groups supported the UGT during their boycott of the syndicate elections that same year. In May 1972 El Socialista published and article by Alfonso Guerra that criticized the veterans in exile, stating that it was inappropriate for them to condemn the risks of clandestine activism. Llopis perceived the article as offensive and used it as an excuse to postpone the party’s congress. Guerra was a young man from a large family of workers in Seville. He studied industrial engineering and earned a degree in Philosophy and Letters. Together with the son of the historic veteran Alfonso Fernánzed Torres, they formed the nucleus of a group that reactivated the Andalusian Socialists beginning in the early 1960s. The majority of the executive committee, with the support of just two of the members of the residents in exile, decided to continue with the congress as had been planned. Most of the sections attended, although more than 700 affiliates did not send their delegates such as the Agrupación de Mexico. During the meeting, a five-member group was elected into leadership roles, but the position of secretary general was left vacant. During the PSOE Congress in August 1972, Felipe González (with the alias “Isidoro”) emphasized that the era of the Christian Democrats had passed in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Representatives from the Catalan Socialists of the MSC and the self-managed Socialists of the USO attended the congress, which had also suffered from internal divisions in 1966 and 1971 respectively. Meanwhile, those following Tierno Galván ended up supporting the historic faction led by Llopis with their congress held in December 1972. Approximately one third of the PSOE members followed Llopis during the party’s split, with the majority being exiles or veterans living in Spain. From the outset, many wanted to reconcile with the other group since the only point of contention was that some veterans did not agree with some of the new leader’s living in Spain due to their different political cultures. 70 Even though French delegates attended both of the PSOE congresses that were held in France, the reformists counted on Mitterrand’s support of the party’s new direction. In fact, renewals within French socialism were directly related to parallel transformations within the Spanish party138. In 1969, Alan Savary had replaced the veteran Guy Mollet as the party’s leader. However, Francois Mitterrand was the one to achieve the unification of the different sectors of French socialism in 1971 with the party’s reform. Many Spanish exiles, both refugees from 1939 and younger second-generation expatriates, were active in French Socialist groups, especially the union Force Ouvriere. The influential Socialist from Marseille, Gaston Deferre, suspended the weekly PSOE publication Le Socialiste after the split, as it had been in the hands of Llopis followers. The renewed PSOE received support from Belgian Socialists to print the same publication in Brussels, which was done entirely in Spanish beginning in 1973. The former French Socialist secretary, Alan Savary, who presided over the region of Toulouse, attended the 1973 UGT Congress and supported the reformists. Given that the renewed PSF was opposed to the Franco regime and it had few affiliates compared to other European social democratic organizations, they could only provide logistical support for the renewed PSOE while reinforcing the party’s legitimacy with the prestige of their new leader, Mitterrand. Nevertheless, the Spanish Socialists of the PSOE would not accept a partido de corrientes model, nor a shared political project or electoral with the Communists, something Mitterrand needed given the nature of the French two-round electoral system. The shared beliefs between the two parties were reduced to the French ideological influence on aspects concerning self-management and the rejection of imperialism. French Socialists also sponsored meetings for Spanish Socialist organizations. During the beginning of 1974, the PSOE brought groups together in France including the self-managing union USO, the Catalan Socialists of the MSC, and other emerging regional associations. This platform was called the Iberian Socialist Conference. However, after the PSOE Congress in Suresnes and the party’s rejection of the alternative of a Socialist federation of different parties, these groups worked independently from 1975 until shortly after the first democratic elections after the Franco era in June 1977. Similarly, the Italian Socialists supported the PSOE’s renewal. Toulouse’s relations with the Italians had been in favor of Saragat’s social democrats, but since Nenni’s participation in the 71 center-left governments since 1963, contacts were reestablished, especially with the surge of anti-fascism in Italy. Italian support for the anti-Francoist cause reached new heights beginning in the 1960s, both in terms of society and political institutions themselves, while Saragat served as President of the Republic with Nenni as Vice-President. Shortly after the PSOE division, the party’s Secretary of Organization, Antonio García Duarte, a former clandestine militant of the post-war, began to lead the reformists. García Duarte visited the Italian Socialists and managed to confirm the support and collaboration. Through Bettino Craxi and Nerio Nessi, the party’s Secretary De Martino provided the PSOE with economic aid. The British labor movement, in power again since 1974, never maintained a close relationship with the Spanish Socialists. However, the left wing then represented by Michael Foot did have certain connections to anti-Francoist aid organizations, such as the Spanish Democrats Defense Committee. The London-based Secretary of Socialist International, with the efforts of the Vice-Secretary Rodney Balcomb, formed a closer relationship with the PSOE because Curro López Real and Pablo Castellano traveled to London to defend the causes of the reformists139. Balcomb had been in Spain and recognized the predominance of those in favor of the PSOE renewal over the more traditional model that Tierno Galván advocated for. As for the German social democrats, relations with the PSOE were scant. Since the early 1960s, Willy Brandt and Fritz Erler had promoted a new policy that went beyond the mere denunciation of Francoism, in an attempt to prompt an evolution that would lead to democratization140. The German trade unions and the Ebert Foundation had provided aid for the operations of some dissident Spanish Socialist groups, such as the Trade Union Alliance and the Partido Socialista en el Interior. Even though the attempt to encourage a new unitary syndicate without Communists had failed, Tierno Galván’s public image only augmented after the university events of 1965 and his expulsion from academia. The “Old Professor” had asked to participate in the Socialist International as an observer. Before the petition was blocked and the PSOE’s division, Tierno Galván tended to support Rodolfo Llopis and the veterans living in Spain. This loyalty led to the signing of a protocol that effectively unified his followers with the historical members, despite the two group’s substantially different political stances. Tierno Galván considered that the monarchy could be the way to end the 72 Francoist evolution, represented social democratic views, and supported the new unions of the Workers’ Commissions. The Socialist International decided to create a special committee for Spain that tried to mediate between the PSOE’s opposing factions. By the summer of 1973, upon realizing the impossibility of achieving any short-term collaborative solution amongst the three factions, this committee recognized the legitimacy of the reformists. The final decision ended up being postponed until the Socialist International’s executive meeting in January 1974. The German social democrats, however, abstained from taking sides and only began to favor the PSOE after their congress in Suresnes in October 1974. The congress in Suresnes, just outside Paris, had been planned since September 1974. The PSOE prepared a statement that demonstrated their solidarity with the Basques and Andalusians and advocated for a “democratic rupture”, the anti-Francoist front, and selfdetermination for Spanish nationalities within a federal republic. The setting was nicely arranged and some extraordinary figures were in attendance such as Mitterrand and Carlos Altamirano, who represented the Chilean Socialists after the overthrow and death of President Allende141. The Congress completed the transfer of the PSOE’s executive leadership to within Spain. However, a delegation of executives continued to reside in France until 1977 led by Juan Iglesias. The Basque militant and former clandestine liaison later served as president of the Basque Socialists during the transition to democracy and, alongside Ramón Rubial, was an advisor to the cabinet before the establishment of Spain’s autonomous communities. The exiles seemed to have been pushed aside, although this was shortly forgotten because as soon as Franco died, the cadres of the second generation entered into the central nucleus of the party’s leadership. Additionally, in the case of the UGT, which was beginning to differentiate its governing bodies from those of the PSOE, the leadership was shared between those living in exile and those in Spain until the XXX Congress held in Madrid in 1976. Many of the UGT exiles remained in executive positions until the end of the transition. By this time, both Portugal and Greece’s dictatorships had fallen. In Spain, Franco had provisionally ceded leadership of the State to Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón. This period of 73 change encouraged the PCE to hurriedly launch their Democratic Junta. Some important figures took part in this initiative, together with a Maoist group, but the Junta lacked support from anti-Francoist Socialists, Christian democrats, liberals, and nationalists. The Socialist Congress, in which only 3,500 members were represented after the division, elected a new First Secretary using the terminology of the French Socialists. Felipe González, a 32-year-old lawyer from Seville, was selected. His election took place a few months later, after the former Secretary General Rodolfo Llopis left his position in the Congress of the PSOE’s dissidents and was replaced by Víctor Salazar, an exile living in Mexico in his sixties. González had moved in Christian democratic circles as part of the Young Christian Workers and around those associated with Professor and former Minister Manuel Giménez Fernández who was allied with the PSOE and expanding studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. Therefore, González was a moderate and pragmatic politician with the support of a compact group of young militants, mostly professionals in academia. While the Seville Socialists generally sympathized with the European socialist left, one of their most remarkable actions was supporting the new socialist generations as they entered into PSOE leadership roles. The demand for a “democratic rupture” was a sort of euphemism for the political revolution that was to liquidate the Francoist institutions, especially the “repressive apparatuses” of the state. However, the process of political transformation ended up silencing the demand for a provisional government without any “institutional sign” defined as monarchical or republican that would prepare to consult the Spanish population. The PSOE advocated for the establishment of a federal republic that would allow different nationalities selfdetermination and regions autonomy within the federal system. However, it soon became apparent that the monarchy could guide the democratization and period of transition. Media coverage of the congress and election of the PSOE’s new leader was broadcast on the French radio and in various international locations. The Spanish press printed some information, although this provoked censorship. The new semi-clandestine Socialist delegates were able to attend the meeting in Suresnes because Francoist intelligence officers authorized their travel, as an attempt to neutralize relations with Civil War veterans in exile in addition to European socialism. The congress marked a new period of the party’s public 74 presence in a transformed Spanish society during a time of political change and the conquest of what the new PSOE leaders coined as “free spaces”. Willy Brandt did not attend the Suresnes Congress, nor did any other qualified leader from the German Socialists. A few days later, Felipe González had the opportunity to contact the German leader at the Portuguese Socialist congress, where the two established the beginning of a solid friendship. Since their meeting, the SPD was more committed to supporting the PSOE once Tierno Galván became linked to Carrillo’s Junta and reestablished his group as the Partido Socialista Popular. When Felipe González returned to Seville he was arrested by the Public Order Court (TOP) together with Enrique Múgica, Nicolás Redondo, and four veteran Socialists who had been living in Madrid since 1971. During this late stage of Franco’s regime, there were hardly any political prisoners associated with the PSOE. Most of the proceedings were dismissed or resolved with a fine. The clandestine organization had not experienced mass general detention since 1958 and 1960. Due to the workers’ protests and states of exception, a sizeable number of Socialists had been prosecuted in the 1960s. However, the regime had not dismantled mass groups associated with clandestine committees. The last legal proceedings against PSOE executives had taken place in 1964, with the main leader Antonio Amat, and in 1970 with Ramón Rubial and other veteran militants that had already been punished during the immediate postwar period. By then, the former clandestine coordinator and lawyer Antonio Amat had retired in Vitoria, while Ramón Rubial held a position as the party’s director. Rubial was a young Socialist during the 1930s. He had actively participated in the 1934 revolutionary strike and was one of Indalecio Prieto’s followers. Rubial was imprisoned until 1956. The PSOE’s presidency had been vacant since 1955 and during the end of the 1960s, Rubial was considered the party’s President, although this was not formally recognized until 1976. He served as the President of the PSOE until his death in 1999. German social democratic leaders directly intervened, sending former Minister of Justice and his compatriot Otto Kersten, the leader of the International Confederation of Free Trade 75 Unions (ICFTU), to Madrid to convince the Arias government not to hold the trial142. Finally, the TOP proceedings against PSOE executive leaders were suspended sine die. Despite the Socialist International’s recognition of the PSOE’s reformists in January 1974, the European Socialists were rarely involved with the Spanish party. The Portuguese Socialists had invited Tierno Galván and Santiago Carrillo to congresses in order to neutralize accusations concerning anti-communism and to improve their relations with Alvaro Cunhal’s group of powerful Communists. The primary concern in the West, however, was not the agony of Francoism, but the radical drift of the Portuguese revolution. The PSOE’s new leader moved to Madrid, often traveling to different European capitals and exchanging ideas with foreign diplomats and correspondents. He discussed politics with the United States ambassador Wells Stabler143. Felipe González’s residence in Madrid allowed the PSOE to establish an operative center, despite the reluctance of some of leaders in the capital such as Pablo Castellano and Fancisco Bustelo, who soon lead a so-called critical sector and later a branch of the party called the Socialist Left. At the same time, many former youth members of anti-Francoist formations (including the PSOE), were returning to partisan commitment. However, before Franco’s death the party’s growth was still extraordinarily precarious. At this point, the Agrupación Socialista Madrileña included just over 300 affiliates, while many others remained faithful to the historic PSOE, Tierno Galván’s PSP, or the recently founded Convergencia Socialista. Even though PSOE leaders were cultivating relations with European socialist parties and related trade unions, it was important to contact the leaders of theses movements, especially those in charge of the British Labor Party and the German Social Democratic Party. Wilson’s government was very unstable and direct aid for Spain was hindered because of the Gibraltar question. The German social democrats insisted, until well into 1975, that they supported a democratizing evolution of Arias Navarro’s government. However, in fearing that the Communists would rise to power or acquire hegemony in governments in the south of Europe, the SPD ended up backing the PSOE in the wake of the first elections and the founding of the party system in Spain. At a time when anti-Francoist parties had very few members and no state funding, financial support from the “German friend” was decisive. The 76 Friedrich Ebert Foundation and its delegate for Spain, Dieter Koniecki, delivered this aid. The German foundation, like other foundations with different ideologies, financed the opening of PSOE offices in main cities, the acquisition of copy machines, and the full-time salaries of dozens of PSOE workers. Before, only a handful of militants were remunerated for their efforts, mostly with the help of international trade unions. In the end, there was no break with the exile, as most of the second-generation exiles decisively drove the PSOE’s process of renewal, which divided the party for both political and generational reasons within and beyond Spain. Nor was there a remaking of the Spanish Socialists in 1974, as had been the case with the Socialists of France, Greece, and Portugal. New policies that abandoned Communist exclusion in anti-Francoist pacts and demanded a provisional government with a popular consultation concerning Spain’s future were significant political changes within the party. However, there were also significant elements that remained continuous with the exile PSOE model, specifically the political culture and the defense of an autonomous political project. The renewal process of Spanish socialism was delayed for many years due to the dictatorship’s survival and the 1968 and 1972 ruptures that the PSOE ended up reabsorbing in 1976 and 1978. Some of the Socialists who had fought against the Franco regime did not wind up entering the renewed PSOE later on, as some re-established a small sector of the historic party with the support of new dissidents with the Partido de Acción Socialista (PASOC) in 1983. 2.4 Clandestine Parties and Organic Intellectuals As Gramsci argued, culture was a privileged field of revolution, understood not as an “assault on the Winter Palace”, but as a war of positions. Intellectuals played an irreplaceable role in the construction of an ideological hegemony, later converted into an awareness recognized as a general reality “against the popularist conception of the bourgeoisie, against mass culture and bourgeois cultural mandarinism” 144. Intellectuals no longer had to compromise themselves, but proletarize themselves, overcoming “their (false) petty-bourgeois selfconsciousness, assuming their proletarian reality” and allowing “the ascending social bloc […] to configure its own organic intellectual, dissolve the dominant ideology and 77 ideologically come together as such a bloc” 145. However, the formation of this working-class organic intellectual was not always that simple, beginning with the insertion of intellectuals in the party. It is important to remember that the repressive legislation of the Franco regime forced publications and cultural initiatives that were explicitly linked to parties of the left into exile or clandestinity. This environment led to the collaboration of various sorts of intellectuals with different ideologies working under the dictatorship’s control of the media without any defined partisan ascription, at least not yet. This was the case in the most emblematic progressive culture magazine, Triunfo. This publication reached its highest circulation between 1970, when it broke from its previous publisher, and January 1976, when it reappeared after being suspended by the government for four months and sold the majority of that edition’s 166,000 copies. The same was true of Cuadernos para el Diálogo, which left behind its original Christian democratic ideology after 1968 and evolved towards democratic socialism. Articles in this publication, however, were signed by figures ranging from militant liberal monarchists, Christian democrats, and progressive Catholics to Socialists, Communists, and even Maoists or Marxist-Leninists of the extreme left. In Paris, Ruedo Ibérico published the Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico (CRI) in the summer of 1965. Fernando Claudín and Jorge Semprún collaborated after they were expelled from the PCE. The Communist’s political and theoretical publication Nuestra Bandera published texts from those that had been dismissed from the party around the same time. The early editions of CRI, each with only 30 copies until 1973, proved to be the most important because they contributed to the articulation of an intellectual opposition to Francoism. Some articles caused controversial repercussions within Spain: “La Falange en la guerra” by Maximiano García Venero, “Antifalange” by Herbert Southworth, “La prodigiosa aventura del Opus Dei” by Jesús Ynfante, and “La crisis del movimiento comunista” by Fernando Claudín. Even though this publication’s headquarters was located abroad, the regime tried to censor CRI’s circulation in Spain at all costs. In 1971, a court-martial sentenced the Basque writer Luciano Rincón to three years in prison for writing a biography about Franco for Ruedo Ibérico under a pseudonym, which was, obviously, considered disrespectful146. 78 Something similar occurred when an alternative to the official editorials emerged that included content from several different ideological sectors. First, a line linked to progressive Christian thought: the Catalan Edicions 62, Península y Estela (later changed to Laia), Edicusa in Madrid, the JOC’s Nova Terra, and the HOAC’s ZXY. These new editorials were an expression of the rapid ideological evolution of some lay groups and Catholic workers’ organizations that brought postwar religious fundamentalism to the aggiornamento endorsed by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. Furthermore, these editorials brought on an authentic boom in religious texts in Spain, with the diffusion of works by European progressive theologians and thinkers like Maritain and Mounier. In the early 1970s, however, these types of publications were already beginning to wane as a result of the progressive discourse concerning secularization and the transfer of militants of Catholic origins towards left-wing political organizations. The other large publishing sector involved editorials linked to scientific Marxism: Ciencia Nueva, with the pocket-size collection “Cuadernos de Ciencia Nueva”, Siglo XXI de España, Grijalbo, Ediciones Halcón, Ricardo Aguilar, and Ariel with the collection “Ariel Quincenal” directed by Manuel Sacristán. Tecnos published collections of analytical philosophy like “Estructura y Función” directed by Enrique Tierno Galván and “Filosofía y Ensayo” directed by Manuel Garrido. Alianza Editorial, directed by Javier Pradera, also published in this same field. Other texts could be situated in what could be called an “alternative cultural leftism”. This included neonietzscheano publishing companies: La Gaya Ciencia, Kairós, Seix Barral, Anagrama (during this period), and especially Taurus. This last editorial had evolved from a progressive Christian perspective under the direction of Jesús Aguirre, a former priest linked to the FLP, and published works from authors like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Walter Adorno, and Max Horkheimer for the first time in Spain. Similar to magazine and periodical publishers, these editorials had to navigate their way through censorship, sometimes unsuccessfully. In 1967 the regime shut down Ciencia Nueva, which was linked to the PCE. The following year, the same was true for Ediciones de Cultura Popular. In 1969, during the state of exception, ZYX was also forced to halt operations, but it began operating again just a few months later under the title Editorial Zero 147 . It is not surprising that Francoist authorities were concerned about the dissent and already apparent 79 intellectual opposition. A 1972 classified report from the Ministry of Information and Tourism indicated 21 different “conflictive” publishers. The report also included a “blacklist” of intellectuals, with names like: former Franco supporters Laín Entralgo, Aranguren, and Ridruejo, together with Communists like Jesús López Pacheco, López Salinas, Alfonso Sastre, José María de Quinto, Isaac Montero, Nicolás Sartorius, and Eloy Terrón, Socialists like Tierno Galván, Raúl Morodo, and Ángel Fernánzez Santos, Christian democrats like Mariano Aguilar Navarro, Eduardo Cierco, Jaime Cortezo, Pedro Altares, and Gregorio Peces-Barba, liberal monarchists like Manuel Jiménez de Praga, Jaime Miralles, and Antonio Menchaca, and Christian Catalan nationalists like Josep Maria Piñol and Maurici Serrahima148. The simple testimony of many intellectuals was effective in delegitimizing the dictatorship both within and beyond Spain. Exiled activists and the contacts that the Spanish clandestine political parties and unions made with similar groups abroad, especially in Europe and America, turned into a nightmare for the regime, which was powerless to stop cultural demonstrations that had obvious political intentions. In Italy, for example, left-wing intellectuals (including many, but not exclusively Communists) held numerous meetings, organized the “Spagna Libera” traveling art exhibition since 1964, and created associations in solidarity with Spain like the Comitato Italiano per la Libertà del Popolo Spagnolo founded in 1965 by Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte, Bruno Zevi, and Aldo Garosci. Well-known writers like Sciascia and Pasolini, editors like Einaudi and Feltrinelli, filmmakers like Cesare Zavattini and critic Guido Aristarco, musicians like those in the group Cantacronache, and controversial authors from the collection Canti della nuova resistenza spagnola, 1939-1961 all played an important role in the Spanish left as a cultural model and, at the same time, an example of solidary commitment. During these final years of the dictatorship, intellectuals also played outstanding roles in different anti-Francoist initiatives. As the regime’s censorship began to increase, these individuals signed numerous manifestos in protest of the repression between 1969 and 1977, which resulted in the death of at least seventeen citizens. The primary demands discussed in letters sent to the government during this period or presented to the German Foreign Minister and the United States Secretary of State during their 1970 visits were: freedom of association and the right to political association, amnesty and respect for human 80 rights, separation of Church and State, and definitive reconciliation for Spaniards and the recognition of regional autonomy, including the right to self-determination. Sometimes, those who had signed these documents were heavily fined. Middle-class professional sectors also became involved in these sorts of manifestations, a novelty that was unexpected, as the sector had, until shortly before, supported the interests of the pro-Franco elites. This group, continuously expanding during this time, was led by lawyers and jurists but also included officials in public administration, teachers, professors, doctors, journalists, and other liberal professionals 149 . Despite internal divisions, the bar associations, particularly those in Madrid and Barcelona, and the National Congress of Lawyers held in León in 1970 turned into public sounding boards in favor of amnesty, abolishing special jurisdictions and military and civil courts (the famous TOP) for political crimes, and eliminating the death penalty. Another mobilization, running parallel to the emergence of an extensive network of labor dispatches and linked to the PCE-CCOO and the PSOE-UGT, sought to defend the growing number of workers who were sanctioned or fired for defending their rights until the famous “proceso 1001” trials took place against the CCOO leadership in 1973150. Among these unitary initiatives that intellectuals promoted was the 1966 assembly of nearly five hundred students, together with their professors, to create the University of Barcelona’s Democratic Stundents’ Union (SDEUB) in the Capuchins’ convent in Barcelona’s Sarrià district. The event transformed into an act of confinement with a police presence. The “Caputxinada” marked the origin of a roundtable discussion (Taula Rodona in Catalan) with the different political forces of the opposition in Catalonia. In 1970, another confinement was organized in the Montserrat monastery. Around three hundred professionals and artists came together in protest of the military councils involved in the Burgos Trial against several ETA members. This demonstration helped to facilitate, in the following months, the constitution of the first unitary platform for the anti-Francoist opposition. The Assembly of Catalonia brought together various groups including the nationalists of the Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC), the Socialists of the Moviemiento Socialista de Catalunya (MSC), the Communists of the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC), clandestine unions, numerous social associations, university students and professors, representatives of 81 progressive Catholic and Christian grassroots sectors, and the Assemblea Permanent de Intel·lectuals. Catalan intellectuals, despite some initial delay in relation to the organization of their counterparts in Madrid, were at the forefront of the anti-Francoist mobilization. This was both because of Catalonia’s expansive social intellectual network and the region’s mobilizing capabilities in demand of political and cultural autonomy. This long process, which began in the 1950s with the recovery of Catalan culture after its repression during the postwar period, greatly impacted Catholic sectors of society, represented by editorials like Edicions 62 and magazines like Serra d’Or and El Ciervo, although by the mid 1960s Marxism began to show its cultural hegemony in this sector 151 . This resulted in a double, converging movement. Catalan nationalism was used to attract workers, primarily from outside of the region, while Catalan nationalist workers’ claims were incorporated into the programs of the labor unions led by the PSUC. This process prompted important books like Joan Fuster’s emblematic Nosaltres, els valencians (1962) that argued in favor of the “Països Catalans”, Francisco Candel’s Els alters Catalans (1964) on immigration, and Jordi Solé Tura’s Catalanisme i revolución burgesa (1967), a polemic attempt to integrate Marxism and Catalanism into the idea of a popular nation. In the competition for ideological hegemony, both against the dictatorship and within the left itself, the historical class parties tried to empower their own organic intellectuals. The PSOE made an effort to make up for lost time with respect to their relationship with the Communists within intellectual organizations in Spain, while taking advantage of the fact that a significant portion of their new militants were university graduates. This was especially true in Madrid, as compared to Socialist nuclei in Bilbao and Seville that were more closely linked to working-class traditions. Most of the university students read the journal Cuadernos para el Diálogo, which had evolved from its initial Christian democratic perspective towards socialism. In 1970, this change was confirmed when Gregorio PecesBarba, Lepoldo Torres Boursault, José Félix Tezanos, Tomás de la Quadra, Fernando Ledesma, Virgilio Zapatero, Liborio Hierro, Emilio Menéndez del Valle, and other important figures were left on the margin of the renewed Izquierda Demócrata Cristiana (IDC) with Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez as president. 82 Almost all of these figures would join the PSOE in the early 1970s through connections with Pablo Castellano and Luis Gómez Llorente, even though the party was going through a difficult period. The PSOE’s division between the leadership in exile and that in Spain was not conductive to the construction of collective intellectual action. Further complicating the situation was the 1966 split of the Moviemiento Socialista de Catalunya and the creation of the Partido Socialista en el Interior (PSI) in January 1968. Tierno Galván led the PSI, alongside many intellectuals in leadership positions. The party ended up becoming an ally with one of the PSOE sectors led by Llopis in exile. Paradoxically, accusations of bourgeois elitism, intellectualism, and lacking a relationship with the working class were frequently exchanged between different sectors. For the exiles, this had to do with the former reformists and their Catholic militancy and their proclivity to understand the Communists 152 . It is important to point out that while the PCE emphasized there should be a dialogue between Marxists and Christians, PSOE and PSI militants insisted in a negative assessment of religion entering politics, which they accentuated with contemporary examples like the 1973 events in Chile or Italy’s Christian democratic government153. Coming from the same circle as Cuadernos para el Diálogo, the first edition of Sistema. Revista de Ciencias Sociales was released in January 1973. The Instituto de Técnicas Sociales (ITS), established in 1970, published the new journal using the Fundación Fondo Social Universitario (led by Ruiz-Giménez) as a legal cover. Soon, it became the first mouthpiece for “academic socialism” that brought together a vanguard of young Spanish critical sociologists under the direction of Elías Díaz and José Félix Tezanos 154 . The ITS also supported the realization of doctoral theses, the first studies within the university’s pioneer programs, and publications in collaboration with Edicusa on prewar Republican and Socialist institutional culture (of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza) 155. However, the PSOE ended up looking to solve its internal conflicts and waiting for the party to become legal after Franco’s death before they launched their own cultural platforms and publications. The PCE tried to re-launch its cultural policy in the mid 1960s, alleviating the effects of the 1964 crisis. This initiative was insidious, so much that the party wound up implicitly accepting some of the “dangerous” expelled revisionist’s ideas. As a result, the Alianza de las Fuerzas del Trabajo y de la Cultura was established, a group that Carrillo outlined in his 83 pamphlet “La lucha por el socialism hoy” (1968) and supported by the Central Committee plenum in August 1970. This alliance had to conform to a new social bloc while overcoming the classical Marxist doctrine of the alliance between workers and peasants (the latter drastically reduced as a result of Francoist development). Now, intellectuals would be incorporated not only as tactical allies but also as a key sector in the reconquista of democratic liberties, an initial and necessary step towards the transition to socialism. In this construction of a new hegemony, the militants living in Spain took on a more prominent role. The new PSUC cultural magazine Nous Horitzons, directed by Manuel Sacristán, Francesc Vallverdú, and Josep Fontana, demonstrated this, even though tensions with the Parisian party leaders did not cease. For example, the sociologist and new party member Sergio Vilar (who was based in Paris) released a book that criticized the “normalized” image of an anti- Francoist opposition divided between several “chapels” that the regime basically tolerated156. The leadership in exile also criticized the party’s weak official condemnation of the Warsaw Pact’s troops and their 1968 invasion of Prague. During the reorganization process after the crisis, the Intellectual Committees were no longer organized homogenously. From 1965 on, the cells that used to be grouped according to professions or academic areas (which had been effective) were mixed together and ended up being much less productive. Once again, intellectuals were destined to participate in sterilized activism, at least in their mission to establish a Marxist alternative to the hegemonic bourgeoisie. As Manuel Sacristán wrote, in realty, you could not speak of Communist intellectuals, “but only of Communists who, away from and beyond their militancy, are Communists” 157. In 1968 the “Jornadas de los intelectuales comunistas” were held in Barcelona. Central to these discussions was the party’s organizational agenda to promote the autonomous work of intellectuals. The leaders seemed preoccupied with the salaries of intellectuals, an expression of the process of proletarianization that seemed unavoidable at the time. Potential Communist organic intellectuals were becoming increasingly disenchanted and feeling alienated by the PCE-PSUC’s decisions, which was now, paradoxically, leaning towards an allied effort to end the dictatorship. 84 2.5 Communists and Preparation for the Transition Starting in the middle of 1967, the Franco regime tried to counter the opposition’s escalated acts of resistance with a sharp increase in repression. The dictator proclaimed several states of exception, both on local and national levels, and significantly increased the activity of the Brigada Político-Social (his political police force). This special force became increasingly visible in student and workers’ environments, while the number of the TOP’s hearings and sentences multiplied exponentially. The main targets of the repression were the PCE and CCOO during this period, with TOP condemning 1,767 of these groups’ members between 1968 and 1975158. Consequently, the size and capacity to mobilize within these organizations suffered momentarily. Numerous arrests and sanctions of all sorts decimated the ranks while many grassroots militants and sympathizers were alienated, from fear of being fired or detained. Pressure from the police made it increasingly difficult to hold meetings, and even when groups were able to come together, the number of participants was dramatically decreased. The Communists used a multifaceted approach in reaction to this escalation of repression. The priority was to neutralize the regime’s attacks. Lawyers linked to the PCE and CCOO played a key role in this task, such as the Madrid attorneys María Luisa Suárez, Jaime Sartorius, and Cristina Almeida. Economic solidarity also played a decisive role. The Delegación Exterior de Comisiones Obreras (DECO), founded in 1970, managed to collect significant sums of money thanks to the donations of Spanish exiles and emigrants and the unions with which it had relations, particularly those linked to the PCI and PCF. Furthermore, the party launched several recruitment campaigns in order to fill the vacancies caused by the detentions and those that severed their ties in fear of persecution. Beginning in 1970, new exile and emigrant militants were sent to Spain to help. For this reason, between 1971 and 1972 the Communists’ capacity to mobilize entered into phase of recovery. For example, major CCOO strikes were organized in 1972 such as the Bazán protest in Ferrol, construction workers’ protests in Madrid, and the SEAT strike in Barcelona. Additionally, it is important 85 to note that beginning in the final years of the 1960s, the Communists had significantly implemented their presence in new arenas as part of their struggle. For example, they entered into the neighborhood associations, which played an important role in vindicating and building democratic values during the final years of the dictatorship. At the same time as this increase in repression, the PCE also had to face the challenges that came with the radical left’s growth. In the heat of global events in 1968, the radical left in Spain was becoming stronger. Some of its new supporters came after the PCE and PSUC divisions, while others from Maoist PCE (international, PCE(i)) formations. Still, others were the fruit of the transformations of the new left’s organizations, like the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) from the FLP and the pro-Chinese Revolutionary Workers’ Organization (ORT) that emerged from the AST 159 . These new groups attacked Carrillo’s party head on, criticizing its moderation, conciliatory program, and its class alliance policy that was titled “Pact for freedom” in 1969, which was a version of their former National Reconciliation formula with some linguistic alterations to update it. Both the Trotskyists and Maoists were able to establish a significant presence in universities and most also participated in the CCOO, taking over from Catholic organizations that had been distancing themselves from the commissions because of a crisis that affected Acción Católica and the repression during these years. Within the commissions, relations between the radical left and the PCE were frequently abrasive, with frictions that sometimes created divisions within the movement. For example, in the Basque Country the Comisión Obrera Nacional de Euskadi, with leaders from the PCE, began opposing the Euskadi CCOO group, in which the ORT, the LCR-ETAVI, and the Movimiento Comunista de España (MCE) all participated. Beyond these problems with other sectors of the left, the PCE began to gradually come out from isolation beginning in the 1960s. The party began to participate in several political platforms of the opposition like the Comisión Coodinadora de Seville, the Assembly of Catalonia, and the so-called Mesas Democráticas that were organized in several different regions. The party began to break from its ostracized status through strengthening its democratic credentials and because other opposition organizations were beginning to realize the party’s important strategic position. In order to end the dictatorship, other parties 86 could not ignore how important it was to cooperate with the CCOO, the broad anti-Francoist movement with great strength and mobilizing capacity, which the PCE controlled de facto. After participating in these local unitary platforms, the PCE took a qualitative leap forward on July 30, 1974 when the Junta Democrática de España (JDE) was born. The opposition, at least part of it, had finally managed to set up a unitary body with a national scope. Furthermore, the JDE was, unlike the Republican governments formed in exile, run from within Spain. At the time of its founding, the Junta brought together the PCE, Enrique Tierno Galván’s Partido Socialista Popular, the Alianza Socialista de Andalucía, and the Partido Carlista (initially). In the following months, the CCOO and the Partido de Trabajo de España (PTE) with their new name, PCE(i), joined the JDE. At the same time, a number of important individuals joined. These independent figures carried with them significant political weight through their relations with important economic circles or certain social sectors. This was the case with the monarchist and outstanding Opus Dei member Rafael Calvo Serer and the lawyer Antonio García-Trevijano. The latter helped to launch the JDE, talking with different opposition and dissident groups since the end of 1973. He found that PCE representatives were enthusiastic interlocutors and the party immediately became the JDE’s leading partner in the project’s development. The JDE was established at a time when the winds of change were blowing forcefully. Arias Navarro’s government did not seem capable of effectively responding to the deep crisis concerning the perception of the regime’s legitimacy. On April 25th, the lyrics of the song “Grândola, Vila Morena” announced the end of the Portuguese dictatorship. In June, Prince Juan Carlos had temporarily assumed the position as Head of State after Franco’s health declined, whose death was beginning to seem imminent. In this context, the JDE took on the responsibility of promoting the process Spain’s democratization. The group’s central objective was the so-called democratic rupture, which involved the abolition of the Francoist legislative and institutional apparatus and the establishment of a provisional government that would be formed from a broad coalition of the opposition’s forces. This temporary government would restore freedoms and construct the legal framework for a new democratic state, leaving the decision to institute a republic or monarchy up to Spanish citizens vis-à-vis a popular referendum. The JDE condemned the dictator’s appointment of 87 Juan Carlos, declaring it an arbitrary act. The group promoted themselves to the public as an example of what the provisional government could look like, declaring that there could be “no political change without a political alternative, without bodies of power to offer the country” that could “occupy the political vacuum that the regime invented in order to justify its own continuity” 160. From this perspective, the JDE began to encourage the creation of Juntas Democráticas (JJDD) in 1974. These groups were organized on both local and regional levels and closely linked to other initiatives within social fabric. For example, they collaborated with neighborhood associations. The JJDD’s goals were to plant the seeds of democratic power in cities and towns so that bodies of the opposition were prepared and capable of taking over power at a moment’s notice. For the PCE, its role in the JDE represented the party’s greatest achievement concerning its policy of interclass alliances. The dynamic between these two organizations was characterized between two differing dimensions. The PCE was the main beneficiary of any of the JDE’s progress, as it was the preponderant political group driving the collective. At the same time, the perception of Communist hegemony was attenuated by the participation of well-known liberal and reformist figures, whose involvement facilitated the JDE’s legitimacy among the national and international public. A testament to the organization’s success occurred in March 1975, when the European Commission and the European Parliament received a JDE delegation in Strasbourg161. Even though the PCE played the role of the protagonist during the final years of the Franco regime while securing a place in the construction of a future democratic system, the party’s program was problematic. Underpinning the party’s perspective was the idea that popular forces were incapable of instigating change on their own, therefore, it was necessary to resolutely orient their search for allies to the political and social right, including conservative and neocapitalist sectors supposedly dissatisfied with the dictatorial framework. The PCE no longer addressed solely the non-monopoly bourgeoisie, partially incorporating the theses of Claudín and Semprún. Meanwhile, the party saw that collaborating with the revolutionary left detracted from its mission, instead of bolstering its agency. The 1973 coup in Chile worked to reinforce this vision, emphasizing the importance of not running away and establishing some level of empathy with moderate groups and bodies in power. Under these 88 circumstances and more than a year before the PCE adopted the slogan “ruptura pactada”, in January 1975 Carrillo declared: The rupture will be an agreement. […] Someone from the inside will have to open the door. […] This rupture will be the result of the coming together of the majority of the mobilized community with a decisive part of the state apparatus, […] the actual power, which will get along with us 162. Speaking about an agreed upon rupture, the Secretary General was not yet referring to the establishment of a dialogue with the pro-Franco political class or with Juan Carlos, which he categorically rejected. However, Carrillo did point out that the opposition needed support from within the actual system of power. In fact, in the spring of 1974, JDE promoters had asked Juan de Borbón to act as an arbiter and mediator in the nascent project during the transitional period without success. The PCE’s orientation involved both compromises and resignations. In fact, as far as the JDE was concerned, Carrillo explained that it was different from a popular front and, for this reason, the party’s program needed to include transversally shared agreements. No one entity should consider another’s claims as radical within this formation, such as the right to self-determination for regions and nationalities. The Communist leader, referring to the fact that within the party’s ranks there was suspicion regarding the excessive moderation of their new allies, affirmed, “what this is about today is not that these bourgeois become revolutionaries with our propaganda, nor that they are frightened more than they already are, but to get them to go with us, even just for a moment, to end this” 163. According to this attitude, the JDE was a temporary solution. Meanwhile, the PCE had a different, more longterm strategic objective. The party wanted to establish free socialism, together with progressive bloc formed around the Alianza de las Fuerzas del Trabajo y de la Cultura. It was a goal that needed to pass through the middle phase of political-social democracy first. According to this plan, the sacrifices that the party was making at the time were justified as necessary steps to take. The PCE was positioning itself to facilitate the realization of deep transformations in a not-too-distant future. 89 The party was trying to convoke the development of a pragmatic scheme. Their aims, in Sorelian terms, came with mythical expectations that were necessary in order to galvanized militancy. As a result, the PCE found itself in a precarious position during a period of change. The party harbored a seemingly permanent tension between the dreams and aspirations linked to the workers’ identities and the demands that their partners in coalitions dictated to them164. The PCE’s ambition to harmonize often-antagonistic tendencies was a complex task that inevitably yielded contradictions. For example, the party’s leadership demonstrated this in September 1974 when they judged that it would be opportune to start silencing the denunciation of the United States military bases in Spain, in spite of the PCE’s traditional anti-American views. This decision had to do with the party’s relationship to other groups in the JDE, but also their agenda not to upset the government in Washington D.C. nor the Spanish Army. In terms of alliances, the JDE had a crucial drawback. It had failed to bring together all of the main forces of the opposition and, consequently, could not realistically be presented as the basis of a future provisional government. Carrillo stated in the JDE’s official documents “we say that it is the only alternative body of power. […] However, between us, I think we must recognize that today the JDE is only a trend; it reflects a style that […] could actually become that alternative form of power”. However, a fundamental failure of the JDE was their inability to cooperate with the PSOE and the Izquierda Democrática (ID) led by Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez. This was not only important on a national level, but also “because of the weight” and power that social democracy and Christian democracy had in Europe165. The Communists believed that they needed to cooperate with the director of Cuadernos para el Diálago within the JDE. His participation would have been decisive in attracting “very important forces, the wealthy right”. Furthermore, the PCE considered that Ruiz-Giménez would have been an ideal candidate to serve as the group’s president, and through extension, that of the provisional government because he would have been able to find supporters among the anti-Francoist movement, civil society, and even part of the actual forces in power. The ID leader seemed optimistic concerning this plan, but wound up aligning with the PSOE and other Christian democrat groups and the Socialists had no intention of supporting an initiative that they considered to be manipulated by Carrillo’s party, with which they competed directly for 90 hegemony on the left. The PCE, on the other hand, was willing to make concessions in order to collaborate with the PSOE, like changing the JDE’s name or even partially modifying its program. The Communists even thought to try and reason with European socialist parties with which they were on good terms, like the French, to see if they may be able to help persuade Felipe González to collaborate166. Nevertheless, the PSOE was convinced that they needed to maintain their distance from the Communists while defending their autonomy and the Socialist project in order to win this battle. González refused to join the JDE and in June 1975 he began to promote the birth of the Plataforma de Convergencia Democrática, which included the ID, the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, the UGT, and other socialist and revolutionary groups. With this, the historic division between the anti-Francoist opposition was perpetuated. Even though this new platform publically advocated for a democratic rupture, Carrillo was convinced that it was really a façade. He stated that the group was a “political conglomerate that Juan Carlos” could lean on, “a fluffy opposition” like a “cushion” for the future king. The party’s Secretary General believed that the platform would end up negotiating a limited democratization with Juan Carlos. He considered that the PSOE, fully aware that the bourgeoisie would have to “use” them, preferred this sort of solution over creating a deeper rupture that would have given more power to the Communists 167 . Nonetheless, despite polemic issues and accusations, the JDE emphasized the need to initiate discussions with the Plataforma de Convergencia Democrática in order to arrive at the mutual agreement, among other things, that the Acción Democrática Nacional (ADN) could materialize. This was what the PCE and JDE considered to be the most important instrument that would lead to a democratic rupture. The project needed to include a general mobilization, a conglomerate of multiple forms of protest (strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, etc.), which would represent the Spanish people’s powerful cries for freedom as a whole. This would then enable the collapse of the Francoist structure and the provisional democratic government’s seize of power. ADN represented the culmination of a process of accumulation and convergence, bringing together many local democratic forces promoted by the JJDD. The formation was similar to that of the National Strike. Its emphasis on an interclass and unitary nature served to clearly distinguish the group from a “general workers’ strike”, which, 91 according to Carrillo, had “a more profound propensity for revolution” but did “not stand a chance at winding up victorious”. The Communist leader himself affirmed, “the general strike alone […] does not achieve a political goal, because […] we cannot take over power, today. Even with a general strike, we cannot take over power” 168. The Communists believed that the materialization of a provisional government that personified the democratic alternative was an imperative condition. This was the only way they saw to communicate the “indignation” and “anger” of the Spanish citizens with a “plausible objective to satisfy the whole population”. The party finally decided to support ADN. Carrillo, positioning himself in a way that would be decisive the following January, explained in October 1975 “with ADN we can achieve substantial strength […] when we can tell our communities: ‘we are going to stop and take to the streets with real power’. […] Stopping, and taking to the streets without an alternative […] is something that the people are unable to grasp” 169 . As other leaders pointed out just a month later, an “element of strength and continuity” resided in the fact that Juan Carlos was a “figura concreta”. Meanwhile the opposition’s proposal “in the eyes of the general population” still appeared to be something “vague” and ambiguous, they “lacked names and figures”, they were in need of clarity170. In this context, the dynamics of the struggle had to be formed based on the coalition’s demands. In order to ensure that different social classes collaborated with the workers’ forces in the protests and to avoid the risk of isolation, the Communists had to censor their behavior so that the middle and the bourgeois classes would not interpret their actions negatively. Meanwhile, the CCOO had to take into account that the “National Strike” advanced due to “agreements made between employees and the companies they worked for”. Carrillo justified this angle, which significantly dulled the principles of class struggle, stating, “it does not mean that class struggle will become softened. It means making a political pact to end the dictatorship, precisely so that the class struggle can develop more profoundly” 171. It was a position aligned with the idea of seeking temporary support from the actual bodies in power, presenting the PCE to those in business as a reasonable entity, one with which it was possible to empathize. For this reason, the party instructed its active members in the CCOO to prevent labor struggles from becoming too radical without allies and to always be open to 92 new possibilities and negotiations. In 1974, the United States ambassador in Madrid noted that the Communists did indeed fulfill the paradoxical role of both promoting and moderating conflicts at the same time172. Towards the end of 1974, the PCE had been strengthening and amplifying its presence in Spain in order to progressively expand the spaces of freedom and to prepare the party to be able to effectively manage the enormous tasks on the horizon. Militants were returning from abroad and beginning in March 1975 Mundo Obrero began publishing weekly. At the same time, the labor movement was gathering steam. In 1974, there was a frenzy of labor disputes (2,290 in total) and early in 1975 the CCOO were fueling important centers of protest throughout the country, from Andalucía to Catalonia and Galicia to Madrid. Labor mobilizations acted alongside other sectors, including student groups, neighborhood associations, and lawyers. Under these circumstances, the PCE decided that the time had come to start promoting local democratic actions. The party’s leadership decided that the first call to action should take place in Madrid, not only because it was the epicenter of national politics but also because the JDE in the capital had achieved remarkable results extending throughout the social fabric. The date was set for June 4th and the mobilization was prepared using a sensitive and unprecedented propaganda campaign. Nearly one million posters and flyers were printed, those linked to the CCOO organized numerous assemblies in different companies, and the twenty-five neighborhood associations in Madrid also met, bringing together neighbors and housewives, to join the JDE’s cause and discuss the upcoming date. On June 4, 1975 between 90,000 and 110,000 workers participated in Acción Democrática. Furthermore, in the nation’s capital the streets of the center were filled with scenes of mass rallies and demonstrations. The protests affected schools, universities, and dozens of institutes, which were forced to suspend classes because of students and teachers’ absences 173 . The cracks forming at the base of the Francoist structure were beginning to deepen during that summer. In the last union elections held under the dictatorship, the CCOO candidacies and others from the opposition gained power; in some of the most important areas, such as Madrid and Catalonia, these forces took hold of more than 70 percent of the inferior levels of Sindicato Vertical. The union, as 93 Barcelona’s Governor stated, was essentially “populated with Communists” after these elections174. On the eve of the death of Caudillo, the PCE, with its renewed international program and its position as the leader of the JDE, had established itself as the protagonist of the imminent political change that was about to come. At the same time, acts like the Madrid Acción Democrática and the union elections both catalyzed and made visible civil discontent. It was becoming clear that an irreversible process was underway that would exhaust the dying Franco regime’s moral and political resources. 1 José Luis Martín Ramos, Rojos contra Franco. Historia del PSUC, 1939-47, Bacelona, Edhasa, 2002. 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Pons, 2005. 140 Antonio Muñoz, El amigo alemán, Barcelona, RBA, 2012. 141 Santos Juliá, Los socialistas en la política española, Madrid, Taurus, 1997. 142 Antonio Muñoz, op. cit., 162-163. 143 Charles Powell, El amigo americano, Madrid, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011. 144 Antoni Jutglar, “Pueblo y cultura”, Cuadernos para el Diálogo, 23-24 (August- September 1965), pp. 17-19; Antonio Gramsci, Cartas desde la cárcel, Madrid, Edicusa, 1975. 145 Cuadernos para el Diálogo: Roberto Mesa, “La ideología revolucionaria de los estudiantes europeos”, 97 (October 1971), p. 49; Clases medias, Extraordinario XXXIX (June 1974); Equipo Comunicación, “Polémica sobre clases medias”, 130 (July 1974), pp. 35-37; Daniel Lacalle, “Polémica: los nuevos técnicos”, 133 (October 1974), pp. 18-19. José F. Tezanos, Las nuevas clases medias, Madrid, Edicusa, 1973. 146 Luciano Rincón, Franco. Historia de un mesianismo, Paris Ruedo Ibérico, 1964; Aránzazu Sarria Buil, Cuadernos de Ruedo Ibérico (1965-1979). Exilio, cultura de oposición y memoria histórica, unpublished thesis, Universidad de Zaragoza, 2001. 147 Francisco Rojas, “Una editorial para los nuevos tiempos: Ciencia Nueva, 1965-1970”, in Javier Muñoz Soro (ed.), Intelectuales y segundo franquismo, Historia del Presente, 5 (2005), pp. 103-120; Jesús A. Martínez Martín (ed.). Historia de la edición en España 1939-1975, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2015. 148 Tendencias conflictivas en la cultura popular, April 1972; AGA-SC, caja 580; Pere Ysàs, Disidencia y subversión. La lucha del régimen franquista por su supervivencia, 1960-1975, Barcelona, Crítica, 2004, pp. 58-59 and 245-247. 149 Santos Juliá, Nosotros, los abajo firmantes. Una historia de España a través de manifiestos y protestas (1896-2013), Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg-Círculo de Lectores, 2014, pp. 87-92; Tamar Groves, 102 Teachers and the Struggle for Democracy in Spain, 1970-1985, London, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, 2014. 150 Claudia Cabrero, Irene Díaz, José Gómez Alén and Rubén Vega, Abogados contra el franquismo. Memoria de un compromiso político, 1939-1977, Barcelona, Crítica, 2013. 151 Jordi Amat, El llarg procés. Cultura i política a la Catalunya contemporània (1937-2014), Barcelona, Tusquets, 2015. 152 Criba, 129, November 25, 1972, and 161, July 7, 1973. 153 Rafael Díaz-Salazar, El factor católico en la política española: del nacionalcatolicismo al laicismo, Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), PPC., 2007. 154 Elías Díaz, “Breves notas para la prehistoria y la intrahistoria de Sistema”, Sistema, 100 (January 1991), pp. 5-15. 155 Elías Díaz, “Pensamiento socialista durante el franquismo”, en Santos Juliá (coord.) El socialismo en España, Madrid, Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 1986, pp. 367-399. 156 Sergio Vilar, Protagonistas de la España democrática. La oposición a la dictadura, 1939-1969, Paris, Librería Española, 1969. 157 Cited in Giaime Pala, op. cit., p. 118. 158 Las sentencias del Tribunal de Orden Público, Madrid, Fundación Abogados de Atocha, 2010, cd (datas elaborated by Emanuele Treglia); Nicolás Sartorius and Javier Alfaya, La memoria insumisa, Madrid, Espasa, 1999. 159 Consuelo Laiz, La lucha final, Madrid, La Catarata, 1995; José Luis Martín Ramos (ed.), Pan, trabajo y libertad, Barcelona, El Viejo Topo, 2011. 160 Declaración de la Junta Democrática de Madrid, June 1975, and Manifiesto de la Reconciliación, 1/4/1975, AHPCE, Documentos, carpeta 56; «Declaración de la Junta Democrática de España al pueblo español», Nuestra Bandera, 76, 1974, pp. 11-15. 161 Status Report on Two Opposition Alliances, 23/10/1974, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Central Foreign Policy Files (CFPF). 162 Reunión del CE, January 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 134. 163 Reunión del CE con cuadros del movimiento obrero, November 1974, AHPCE, FS, DVD 132. 164 Xavier Domènech, «El PCE en el proceso de cambio político. La voluntad de ser arte y parte», Viento Sur, 115, 2011, pp. 95-104. 165 Reunión del CE, April 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 141. 103 166 Reunión del CE, January 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 134. 167 Reunión del CE, June 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 145. 168 Reunión del CE, January 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 134; Informe del CP para la discusión interna, April 1975, AHPCE, NyR, Asturias, jackets 457-458. 169 Reunión del CE, October 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 151. 170 Reunión del CE con camaradas del movimiento obrero, November 1975, AHPCE, FS, DVD 152. 171 Reunión del CE, September 1974, AHPCE, FS, DVD 130; Huelga Nacional y Pacto para la libertad, February 1972, AHPCE, Documentos, carpeta 53. 172 Spanish Strikes and Labor Situation, 29/11/1974, NARA, CFPF; Reunión del CE con cuadros del movimiento obrero, November 1974, AHPCE, FS, DVD 133. 173 Carta de Alejandro, 1/6/1975, AHPCE, Activistas, caja 93; «Parados, pero, ¿cuántos?», Triunfo, 14/6/1975. 174 Rodolfo Martín Villa, Al servicio del Estado, Barcelona, Planeta, 1984, p. 15. 104