11. The National Question
The national question has always played an important part in the history of Spain. It has many components, geographical, linguistic, cultural and economic. It has its roots in the complex and frequently-bloody history of the Iberian Peninsula, which would require a whole volume to deal with. Here I can only hope to trace that history in very general terms.
Nature itself has endowed the Iberian Peninsula with clearly marked boundaries. As early as the fifth century the Spanish priest Paulus Orosius wrote that “by the disposition of the land, Spain as a whole is a triangle and, surrounded as it is by the Ocean and the Tyrrhenian Sea, is almost an island”. At the centre lies the vast arid tableland called the Meseta. Surrounded by formidable mountain barriers, communications between this high plateau and the coastal regions of the peninsula were always difficult, making inevitable important regional differences and promoting particularism.
These physical divisions have provided a natural basis for the extraordinary diversity of the peninsula, which is at once the source of its cultural richness, and also the source of endless conflict. The reasons for these conflicts cannot be found in geography, but rather in history. What is now called Spain was not always united.
Before the Roman conquest, it was a collection of tribes that can loosely be described as Celt-Iberians. For a time, it fell under Carthaginian domination. It was conquered by the Romans as part of their struggle for supremacy in the western Mediterranean in the Punic Wars. Hispania, from which the modern name Spain is derived, was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula and its provinces.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, this land was repeatedly invaded by different Germanic peoples: the Suebi, Vandals, Alans and Visigoths. But since the people they conquered had a higher cultural level, a variant of Latin continued to be spoken by nearly all of the population. The exception was the people living in the mountainous northern area, bordering France along the Bay of Biscay. The people who have inhabited this land from time immemorial speak a language that is unrelated to Latin, or to any other European language, that is, Euskara or Euskera, the language of the Basques.
Spain had long hosted the three religions of the book. Jews appeared first, while Roman legionaries brought Christianity and Islam arrived with overwhelming force when North African invaders swept across Spain in the eighth century. For almost seven centuries most of Spain was under the domination of the Arabs (or Moors, as they were called by the Christian Spaniards). Under their rule, Spain knew a great era of prosperity and cultural advance. Muslim Cordoba was a centre of learning without parallel in the whole of Europe, with numerous schools, libraries and a university – something that was unknown to the rest of Europe at that time. It produced 60,000 books a year, while the largest library elsewhere in Europe boasted just 600.
One of the architectural wonders of the medieval world was the magnificent mosque of Cordoba, with its forest of arches stretching in all directions. But this Islamic architectural marvel fell victim to the spirit of blind religious fanaticism, when an enormous Christian cathedral was planted in the very heart of the mosque. This monstrous eyesore still remains today, a blatant insult to the great culture of a conquered and humiliated people. Mercifully, despite the destruction of an important part of this building, enough of it has been left for future generations to marvel at.
The Reconquista
The Reconquista (Reconquest) is the name given to a long series of wars and battles between the Christian Kingdoms of the north of Spain and the Muslim Moors, which lasted from 718 to 1492. The long and bloody struggle by which Christians gradually wrested control of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims had a profound influence on Spanish history, and it set an indelible mark on the psychology of the Spanish ruling class.
The Reconquista, about which so many romantic myths have been woven, was a brutal war fuelled in equal measure by greed for gain and religious fanaticism. This was regarded as a crusade, a holy war, the Christian equivalent of the Islamic Jihad. From all corners of Europe, knights and mercenaries flocked to the banner of Isabella and Ferdinand when they launched the final onslaught against Granada. Some were motivated by religious fervour; many more were motivated by a ravenous thirst for plunder. This was a turning point in Spanish history.
On 2 January 1492, the Catholic monarchs Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon finally conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, ending the 700 years of Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula. The Moors of al-Andalus were not just regarded as a conquered people, but as aliens, inferior in race, culture and religion. The Christians set about demolishing the beliefs and culture of their enemies with a truly religious zeal.
There was nothing in all Christianity, and certainly not in the kingdom of Aragon and Castile that could compare with the wonders of Granada’s Alhambra. Evidently, it made a favourable impression on the royal couple, because they decided to keep it for themselves. But no such mercy was shown to the population of Granada. At first, they were subject to a grudging degree of tolerance, but very soon that was replaced by a remorseless campaign of pressure to force them to convert to Christianity. In order to save themselves, most of them did formally convert. But many of those who did so continued secretly to persist in their former beliefs and practices.
The Inquisition – that monstrous Gestapo of the sixteenth century – kept a watchful eye over the unfortunate inhabitants of Granada, paying close attention to the so-called moriscos who had converted to Christianity. This spiritual thought police devised a large number of cunning devices to trap the deviants, including the obligation to keep a leg of ham hanging in the house. This would be regularly checked to ensure that it was being consumed.
In the end, the dominant Christians resorted to ethnic cleansing on a mass scale to solve the problem of these intransigent people. The entire population of moriscos was expelled from Spain. For good measure, the Jews suffered the same fate. This act of madness caused severe and lasting damage to the Spanish economy, and particularly to al-Andalus, which was reduced to a state of poverty and degradation, from which it never really recovered.
The Spanish people were never allowed to forget that their nation was forged by blood and steel. To this day, during the annual fiestas of many Spanish towns and villages, the battles of the Reconquista continue to be fought, although the swords are made of wood, and the fake gunfire kills nobody. Nevertheless, the ancient game of Moors and Christians is a constant reminder of Spain’s bloody past.
These events occurred long ago. But they left an indelible stain on the character and psychology of the Spanish ruling class. Born out of a long and bloody struggle against the Moors, the combination of a sense of national and racial superiority went hand-in-hand with ferocious religious fanaticism. To be Spanish was to be Christian, and to be Christian was to be Catholic. No other religion was to be tolerated. Heretics and unbelievers were to be consigned to the flames, together with their books.
These confused but powerful notions were further strengthened by the conquest of the peoples of South America, an even bloodier episode in history, which began soon after the conquest of Granada. The defeat and enslavement of an entire continent by a tiny handful of conquistadores (conquerors) was clear proof, if any was needed, of the superiority of the Catholic faith. The fact that the conquistadores, along with the Bible, were armed with steel weapons, horses and gunpowder, was scarcely worthy of comment.
The Castilian aristocracy considered themselves to be the natural born rulers of the land. Their overbearing pride was always indistinguishable from arrogance. And ever since the Reconquista, when they conquered and enslaved the Moors, they have regarded themselves as a superior race. It would be no exaggeration to say that this ruling-class mindset is closely related to a kind of racism.
Racism, the doctrine that one race or nationality is superior to others, is the distilled essence of imperialism. The feeling of national superiority, the notion that Spain was for the Spaniards and no one else, coloured the attitude of the ruling class towards other people, people with different languages and cultures, who for centuries had shared the same territory. The Basques, Catalans and Galicians were regarded merely as curiosities, or at best regional deviations from the national norm.
Spain’s Slow and Ignoble Decline
The unification of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had laid the foundation for national unity. When the monarchs conquered Granada, Spain was probably the leading nation in Europe. Subsequently, the influx of enormous quantities of gold and silver from the Americas provided a tremendous axis of power to the Spanish monarchy. For a time, Spain flourished. But subsequently, everything turned into its opposite. In the words of Marx, Spain entered into a long period of slow and ignoble decline.
Marx wrote about the circumstances which destroyed Spanish commerce, industry, navigation and agriculture:
As the commercial and industrial life of the towns declined, internal exchanges became rare, the mingling of the inhabitants of different provinces less frequent, the means of communication neglected, and the great roads gradually deserted. Thus the local life of Spain, the independence of its provinces and communes, the diversified state of society originally based on the physical configuration of the country, and historically developed by the detached manner in which the several provinces emancipated themselves from the Moorish rule, and formed little independent commonwealths – was now finally strengthened and confirmed by the economical revolution, which dried up the sources of national activity. And while the absolute monarchy found in Spain material in its very nature repulsive to centralisation, it did all in its power to prevent the growth of common interests arising out of a national division of labour and the multiplicity of internal exchanges – the very basis on which alone a uniform system of administration and the rule of general laws can be created.1
The decline of Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hampered the development of the economy and prevented a genuine national unification. The poor state of communications strengthened the tendencies towards regionalism. The weak and decadent Spanish bourgeoisie proved incapable of creating the basis for such unity, a fact that is reflected in the present crisis over Catalonia, and the rise of regionalist and separatist movements. These tendencies assumed dramatic proportions with the Carlist Wars that plagued Spain in the nineteenth century.
It is interesting to consider how Spain would have developed if its historical evolution had not been distorted by the discovery and exploitation of the New World. In France, the national question was resolved by revolutionary means after the storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution was fought under the banner of ‘the Republic, one and indivisible’. The Gascons, Bretons and other nationalities were absorbed into the French nation as a result of the rapid development of capitalism and industry that was made possible by the revolution. But the tardy development of the Spanish bourgeoisie prevented such a development from taking place.
Throughout the twentieth century, nationalist tendencies asserted themselves increasingly. During the Republic, the struggle for social improvement was linked to the struggle for national rights. Thus, on 14 April 1931, the leader of the Catalan Republican Left, Francesc Macià, proclaimed the idea of a “Catalan Republic within an Iberian Federation”. A certain degree of self-rule was, in fact, achieved, particularly in Catalonia. But with the victory of Franco, all those gains were wiped out.
In reality, the Spanish ruling class has always regarded the people of Spain as its slaves, whose only role is to serve their masters and obey them without question. When Franco waged war against the Republic, he described it as a crusade, drawing a clear parallel with the events of that distant past. His armies were blessed by the Church, just as they were in the fifteenth century, although paradoxically they contained many Moorish soldiers in their ranks.
The fascists regarded Basque and Catalan nationalism as an evil, comparable only to that of communism. When he came to power over the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of people, Franco brutally crushed the national aspirations of the Catalan, Galician and Basque peoples. The rights they had gained under the Republic were immediately cancelled, and the national culture of these peoples was completely suppressed.
The Basque region of the Iberian Peninsula, which extends culturally and linguistically into south-west France, is in many ways strikingly different from the rest of Spain. The people of this land are of a strong character, and are stubbornly independent in spirit. Although they have never had a state, they are fiercely attached to their land, their customs, their traditions and their ancient language (Euskera), which, as we have pointed out, bears no relation whatsoever to Spanish or indeed, to any other European language.
Lying to the west of the Pyrenees, the dark green steep-sided, flat-topped hills of the Basque Country are dotted with large stone farmhouses known as the caseríos, which traditionally formed the heart of rural Euskadi. On the valley floors, industrial plants have sprung up, providing much needed work for the people. This green and fertile land stands in complete contrast to the arid Meseta, which is the Castilian heartland.
It was in Euskadi that the feeling of resentment against national oppression was felt most keenly. Franco took his revenge against the Basque people, treating them in effect as an occupied and subjugated nation. The Civil Guard, drawn from other parts of Spain, particularly the south, acted like an army of occupation, losing no opportunity to humiliate the Basque people in all kinds of ways, both great and small.
The Basques Under Franco
It is not at all difficult to express horror at violence. But the natural reaction of most human beings towards bloodshed does not help us to understand the factors that cause it. For many years, pacifists have denounced the evils of war, but unless one understands the reasons why wars occur, such demonstrations are both impotent and futile. The great philosopher Spinoza once said that the task of philosophy is neither to weep nor to laugh, but to understand. This profound thought will be a useful starting point for analysis of the phenomenon we are about to describe.
For decades, the Basque people suffered terrible oppression and violence at the hands of the Franco regime. In the absence of the most elementary democratic rights, all legal avenues of protest were denied to them. It is therefore hardly surprising that a layer of the youth began to look to the armed struggle as the only road open to them. It goes without saying that no sane human being will risk his or her life by taking up arms against a powerful and ruthless dictatorship without very serious reasons. Before we pass judgement on these young people, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of those reasons.
On 19 June 1937, the Francoist army entered Bilbao. The Basque Government, the Autonomy Statute, the Economic Agreement, together with the co-official character of the Basque and Spanish languages, were revoked. In June 1938, José María de Areilza was appointed Mayor of Bilbao. In one of his first speeches he made the intentions of the new regime clear: “Bilbao has not surrendered, instead it has been conquered by the army and its weapons (…) there have most certainly been victors and vanquished.” Areilza did not lie. Fifty-nine per cent (1,120 out of 1,914) of municipal workers were dismissed from their jobs and a further seventeen per cent were suspended from work.
The Basque working class was to be taught a harsh lesson for their disobedience. And the national identity of the Basque people was trampled underfoot. Under Franco the Basque language was banned, Basque culture suppressed, and Basque intellectuals harassed, imprisoned and tortured. The people were forbidden from using their mother tongue and its teaching in school was outlawed. Even the Basque inscriptions on tombstones were chiselled away in the graveyards of the Basque Country. In this manner, political and social oppression were compounded by national oppression in these regions. The most minor infringement of the prohibition of the Basque language was met with severe punishment.
A Basque friend of mine told me the following incident. His grandmother went to the railway station to say goodbye to her son who was leaving for the army. In a moment of forgetfulness, the tearful old woman uttered the Basque word for goodbye – agur. At that moment a Civil Guard stepped forward and fined her the sum of five pesetas on the spot. This fine was kept in a drawer of their house as a silent reminder of the way in which the Basque people were treated under Franco. I interviewed a man who was born in 1948 in a Basque-speaking area, Ordizia, in Guipúzcoa. We will call him Joxemi. He related his experiences:
My family was poor and I lived through the hardships of the post-war period. My brother and I studied in the Lasalle school, which was run by priests, as was normal in those times. My sister was educated by the nuns. It was religious education, which was imposed on us then. When I was a kid every morning before entering class, we were forced to sing Spain Triumphant, with our arms raised in the fascist salute, of course… In the schoolyard, before going to class, we sang this song, which went:
“The anvils and the wheels sing to the beat of a new dawn,
“The country triumphs that knew how to follow the sea of blue
“And walk towards the sun…” Or something like that…
AW: “And they forbade you to speak Euskera?”
Joxemi replied:
Not only did they ban the use of Euskera, but all the kids who did not know Spanish were mocked and tormented. They called them stupid, and said they were ignorant, backward little kids that came down from hill-billy country, and they wanted to involve us in it so that we also laughed at them too. That kind of contempt was very general at that time. Oh, yes, and we had to be one hundred per cent catholic, or else. On Fridays you had to go to say your prayers, go to raise money for some mission or other – to give money to the poor little Chinese children, or God knows what for. I never knew what they did with the money that we sent. (Laughter) They made us a kind of thermometer, showing the results of each class to motivate us, and the class that put more money in was taken for a walk on Thursday afternoon.
That was the kind of education that I remember. And in each class, there were about fifty kids. Now they tell me that there are sixteen in each class. Amazing! Fifty! Of course, everything was ruled by the rod of the teacher. You were completely under his thumb and anything you wanted to do had to be done secretly. This type of education was well-structured towards what they wanted to achieve, especially to make sure that the Basque language was forgotten, that Spanish was spoken, that Spain was the be-all-and-end-all and that Euskadi was just some kind of fairy tale someone had made up. But strangely enough, when we got older, it was in Catholic Action where we started to rebel, and that was where the workers’ movements started, and where the intellectuals came from.
Under the dictatorship there was repression in the whole country, but in Euskadi there was also an additional oppression – the feeling of national oppression. I ask Joxemi to expand on this subject. Was there really national oppression and how did it express itself?
That was already evident inside the school. Everything was calculated so that you did not move a finger, and you did not incline towards nationalism. Nationalism was like a devil, with horns and tail. For them, there was only one national ideology – the Spanish. That was all. Practically until the age of sixteen, there was no one who thought anything else.
The Birth of ETA
It was the rapid growth of industry and the beginnings of a wave of workers’ strikes that inspired many of the young Basques who later joined the ranks of ETA, as Joxemi explained:
From 1960 onwards, the companies began to open factories, workers began to arrive. Moving from one town to another we ended up in Ordizia. I did not start thinking until I was sixteen or seventeen years old when I entered a vocational school, where they made trains. That is where I joined the labour movement and began to think along different lines to the ones laid down by the Spanish government.
I began to take an interest in politics when I was in Catholic Action. In some places where there were rebel priests working in secret, the movement began to develop a little, and people began thinking about other things. For example, the class struggle, workers’ solidarity in the community and so on.
AW: Then for you also the workers’ movement was the main driving force.
Joxemi: Exactly! I believe that the workers’ movement is where class consciousness comes from. I started there, claiming rights both for myself and for others, because these are things common to us all. I remember that at that time there were no unions, so I went to the assemblies. They were totally open assemblies where you voted by a show of hands, and you decided what you had to do: whether there was to be a strike, or a protest… Everything was decided there, from the workers’ movement. And that’s where it started, and I’m talking about the year 1965.
AW: How was ETA formed?
Joxemi: In 1958, ETA was born. It came out of the university, and so did the PNV. There was a movement called EGI, which was the youth wing of the PNV. The members of EGI and EKIN in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya wrote to Juriaguerra, who was one of the leaders of the PNV in Paris (from the time of the war), saying that they wanted to meet the Lendakari Aguirre in exile, to press for the establishment of a movement that would confront the Franco regime. The reply of the PNV was to throw them out, saying that they must not get involved in such matters. And that’s where ETA came from. They carried out some minor actions. And then ETA became involved in a spiral of action-repression-reaction.
Like all movements of this nature, the first militants of ETA were drawn from petty bourgeois elements, mainly university students. Over the course of the years immediately prior to the fall of the dictator, the organisation suffered a number of splits, some of which were coloured by Marxist, or semi-Marxist ideas. The left wing of the movement questioned individual terrorism, reflecting the influence of the struggle of the Basque workers. It is interesting to note that ETA itself set its goals as an independent and socialist Euskadi.
On 18 July 1961, the anniversary of the fascist coup, ETA carried out its first violent action when it tried to derail a train carrying supporters of Franco. On 7 June 1968, ETA shot and killed Civil Guard José Pardines Arcay at a checkpoint. Later in the same year, ETA assassinated superintendent Melitón Manzanas, the hated San Sebastian police chief, a known torturer. The police responded with increased repression: road controls, house searches, arrests and torture, all of which poured petrol on the flames of anger and resentment among the Basque people.
AW: Can you give me some examples of repression?
Josemi: Arrests, tortures… some were killed. In 1968 they committed the first armed action that was to kill a torturer named Melitón Manzanas. This man, who established notorious interrogation centres and collaborated with Nazi Germany, recently received a posthumous decoration. He was awarded the medal of Civil Merit by Aznar. They consider him to be a victim of terrorism – a self-confessed torturer like Melitón Manzanas!
AW: What kind of torture are you talking about?
Joxemi: The most typical was to push splinters under your fingernails and set fire to them. They would do this nail by nail and it burned the flesh inside the nails. They would wedge it in tight and then put a match to it. That was one of the most typical tortures – the one they liked best. Then, if the decision was made to get rid of the prisoner, they just killed him.
If they caught some ETA commandos, they were executed on the spot. That is where it all starts: action, repression, action. With a big catch, for example the case of Wilson and such like, that was due to a mole. From that time on, there were already differences within the organisation.
The Burgos Trial
The ferocious repression that the Franco regime inflicted upon the entire Basque people created fertile terrain for ETA, which presented the armed struggle as the only alternative. The death and torture of many of its activists gave it the aura of martyrdom that served to boost its social support. For many working-class activists, and especially youth, the militants of ETA at that time appeared as staunch anti-Franco fighters. The repression, torture, systematic elimination of dissent and the suffocating atmosphere that stifled society aroused the hatred and indignation of thousands of young people in the Basque Country.
Matters were brought to a head by the so-called Burgos Trial in 1969. This was intended as a show trial the end of which was meant to be the execution of sixteen ETA members, arrested after an attack that had killed Melitón Manzanas. But instead, it became a turning point in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. The defendants used the trial to denounce the national, ethnic and linguistic oppression suffered by the Basque people. The Burgos Trial provoked big demonstrations and protests, both in Spain and abroad. The response of the Basque labour movement was unanimous, and a general strike was convoked in the Basque Country. This, alongside the international outcry, forced the death sentence to be commuted.
Then, as we have seen, on 20 December 1973, there was an earthquake that shook Spain to the foundations: the assassination of the prime minister, Admiral Carrero Blanco. In addition to being one of Franco’s closest collaborators, he was in charge of carrying out the regime’s repressive policies and counter-insurgency. As head of the intelligence service (SECED), he was also responsible for implementing the frequent states of emergency, with no right to trial, the systematic use of torture, shoot-to-kill policies and death squads used to murder any suspected subversive elements. He was therefore seen as a prime target by ETA.
The assassination of Carrero Blanco provoked a big crisis in the regime, which reacted with brutal severity. Over the following months, the Basque Country was in a constant state of emergency, with continuous police raids and mass arrests. In 1975 alone, 4,625 people were arrested, and 628 prisoners were sentenced to a total of 3,500 years in Spanish prisons. But the protests and strikes continued to grow, and ETA increased its armed activity. The state resorted to new methods to crush the opposition. The hand of the intelligence services could be clearly seen behind the intensification of the actions of extreme right-wing paramilitary organisations, which attacked Basque political refugees in the south of France.
On 27 September 1975, the Spanish government executed ETA activists Txiki and Otaegi and other Spanish left-wing activists, ignoring numerous protests and diplomatic interventions. These executions, which took place only eight weeks before Franco’s death, increased the already-bitter hatred that working-class activists felt towards the regime. The executions were met by further protests in the Basque Country, where a general strike was organised.
A wave of revulsion ensued on an international level that left the regime diplomatically isolated. Some European countries boycotted Spanish products and companies, and several Spanish diplomatic delegations were attacked. The European Common Market broke off its commercial negotiations with Spain, and Mexico proposed a motion to expel the country from the UN.
Many young people took the path of individual terror believing that this was the most effective way to fight the dictator. Most of the blame for this must be laid at the door of the reformist labour leaders, who were constantly drifting to the right. The abandonment of the right to national self-determination by the PSOE and PCE, and their abandonment of a revolutionary socialist programme in general strengthened the position of ETA and radical Basque nationalism.
An example of this is a former radical Basque activist who I will call Santi. He described in his own words the effect that the Burgos Trial had on him as a young worker. I asked him why he was attracted to ETA:
One of the reasons was the Burgos Trial. The Trial of Burgos was special, it was a military trial, in which the accused were a group of leading members of ETA, and that had an impact even abroad and here in Vitoria too. Here at the height of the dictatorship there were demonstrations against that trial and against the death sentences that the military were demanding for the militants of ETA.
On the eve of the death of the dictator, we had the execution of Txiki, Otaegi and three other FRAP militants, I do not remember their names now. They were condemned to death and shot by Franco’s military. Here in Gasteiz [Vitoria] there were demonstrations, street protests against these murders, which had international repercussions, although we did not know about it then because no news got through. I heard about that later. For us, it was our baptism of fire in solidarity, from the social point of view and from the political point of view, in the fight against the dictatorship.
That was the background that I and my family lived in. From little kids playing games in the streets, through gangs of young people in adolescence, we graduated, me and my friends together, to acquiring a certain level of awareness and knowledge that grew rapidly after the death of the dictator. Here is where we started to engage in clandestine activities.
Here, in a few words, we have encapsulated the experience of very many young people in the Basque Country in those dark days of the dictatorship. They burned with a deep sense of indignation – an unquenchable anger tormented their soul and they longed to take revenge on a monstrous regime that oppressed their people and crushed the life out of them. Many of these youths took up arms and tried to fight against their oppressors in a kind of heroic but futile single combat. I asked Joxemi how he had joined ETA.
That was in the year 1979. I was already old enough – 31 years old.
AW: And why did you join?
Joxemi: There were a lot of things going through my mind. And what really impacted me was the execution of the three FRAP boys and the two ETA men. That was in the year 1975, shortly before Franco died. It was 27 September 1975. I remember perfectly because it’s my birthday. Baena, Sánchez Bravo, and I do not remember the other one of the FRAP and then Txiki and Otaegi. And Paredes Manot [Txiki], as I’ve heard, I do not know for sure, but I think he was the son of a Civil Guard. And they have never said anything about that.
That struck me as cruelty – because I said: “They will commute the sentence for life imprisonment, or something like that” – I remember that that day we went to the mountain to pick mushrooms and then we cooked them to celebrate my birthday, we thought that they were not going to shoot them, but when we came down from the mountain, they had already been shot! After that, at the first opportunity I had, I signed up, and I was fully aware of where I was going.
AW: But when exactly did you enter? That was later, no?
Joxemi: Yes, that was in 1979, because until then I could not join. You could not go and ask to join. You had to be asked. The time comes and then it is your turn. They recruited me and I was directly put in contact with Txikierdi and Santi Colts. I told them “give me a week to think about it” and the next week I went and said OK. I started as a messenger boy. In the end I did everything. I had to cook, run errands, anything and everything.
That “everything” included armed actions, for which he spent years in Spanish prisons.
Basque Autonomy
A very important element in this equation was the abandonment of the defence of the national democratic rights of the Basque people on the part of the workers’ parties, particularly of the right of self-determination, the implementation of which would have eliminated at one stroke the arguments of the nationalists. The traditional parties of the working class – the PSOE and the PCE, and their fraternal trade unions the UGT and the CCOO – strengthened their membership, their organisations and their influence in the labour movement as a whole. But this influence was squandered over the years by the constant sell-outs and betrayals of the labour leaders.
In 1978, Spain’s new constitution granted broad autonomous powers to a Basque government in the provinces of Álava, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, with a parliament, police force, control over education, and tax-raising powers. The following year the autonomy statutes for the Basque Country and Catalonia were passed by the government and approved in a referendum. However, in the Basque Country forty per cent of the population abstained.
These statutes did not recognise the right to self-determination. Both the Socialist and Communist Parties had previously defended that right, but it was quietly dropped as part of the deal with Suárez. In the Basque regional elections in 1980, the PSOE paid a high price for the policy that it had pursued with regards to the national question. From being the largest party in 1977 it fell to third place, behind the PNV and the HB (Herri Batasuna – Popular Unity Party), which came in second. The national question remained unresolved and the violence continued. The abandonment of the right of self-determination by the PCE and PSOE and their cowardly recognition of the monarchy and servile attitude to the reactionary Spanish state, the army generals, the police and the intelligence services was the main factor that pushed large numbers of militant Basque youths into the blind alley of individual terrorism. This was yet another consequence of the betrayal of 1978.
In the years 1976 and 1977, a debate was raging in the ranks of ETA around whether or not to lay down their arms. The Basque national liberation movement had set up a political wing, Herri Batasuna, to press for full independence for the three provinces and the neighbouring province of Navarre. But ETA had continued to carry out what it called armed struggle with the support of a significant layer of Basque society. This was due to a large extent to the brutal and indiscriminate repression conducted by the armed bodies of the state, which nurtured a deep hatred towards those bodies among the population.
In 1979 Madrid’s airport and two railway stations were the target of simultaneous bombings, causing six deaths and 130 injuries. One year later, 118 people were killed in what was ETA’s bloodiest year to date. Between 1974 and 1977, ETA attacks left sixty-three people dead, but the period from 1978 to 1981 saw 265 people killed. The state replied with a violent campaign of repression, with arrests, killings and the torture of suspects. This poisoned the political life of the Basque Country for a long time without achieving the desired results. In the meantime, the demoralisation of the working class created the conditions of a sharp swing to the right. Joxemi recalls the situation on the eve of the attempted coup on 23 February 1981:
Shortly before the coup there was Operation Galaxy and the death of Arregui. The generals launched the coup d’état because things were getting out of hand. The military was saying it was a scandal that ETA was getting away with murder, that the Basque Country was getting everything it wanted, and nationalism was destroying the state. That is when the Tejero coup occurred, which, in my view, was supported by the king.
ETA continued its terrorist activities. These activities were completely senseless from any point of view. Far from weakening the Spanish state, they served only to strengthen it and particularly provided ammunition to the most reactionary and repressive sections. The incessant waves of arrests and imprisonment gradually wore down the fighting spirit of the etarras (members of ETA). Some, especially in the prisons, began to question the wisdom of the methods of armed struggle. Then came the Barcelona bombing.
In Prison
When Joxemi was arrested and put on trial, he was given a lengthy prison sentence for a crime he did not commit, although he freely admits to have committed others for which he was never caught. He accepted his fate with the kind of fatalistic stoicisms that one finds in soldiers who accept that they are going into battle and may never come out alive.
There followed years of punishments designed to break the spirit. The prison regime was harsh in any case, and made much worse by the policy of continually moving the prisoners from one prison to another, the so-called policy of dispersal. In an act of petty spitefulness, the authorities deliberately sent Basque prisoners to prisons in remote places that were difficult to access. This was a cruel way of punishing both the prisoners and their families.
One of the most terrible punishments a prisoner can suffer is to be put in solitary confinement. Complete isolation from other human beings is, in fact, a form of torture. It can break even the strongest personality. That was what Joxemi had to endure for years, as he explained:
It was as if they have you living in the toilet. There was a little window above and enough room to take three steps forward and three steps back. They took me out one hour a day. I was allowed to have either two books or two newspapers. I had a filthy table, which was anchored on the floor. The head prison officer was a real bastard. So, when I heard him coming, I put a newspaper on the table.
He said: “He has two books and a newspaper here. This cannot be!” And I said to him: “You can see that this newspaper sheet serves as a tablecloth, because this table is disgusting.” And he says: “No, it is not a tablecloth. It’s a newspaper. I will take one of the three, you choose which.” What a cheek he had, huh!
In Ocaña prison, they put me in a gallery that they called the tube. It was very famous before because they inflicted many barbarities on the common prisoners. There were thirty-one cells and I used them all. Every two weeks they moved me to another cell. In the new cell, everything was changed. All the dressers where I kept my things were on the left side, whereas in the old cell they had been on the right side.
That is a system that must have been thought up by some psychological torturer because it is a method that totally disorients you. After a couple of weeks, you get used to having your things on one side, and then you find that they are somewhere else entirely. This might seem a small detail, but, believe me, it is not. Everything was carefully thought out. I was alone for a long time in Ocaña. They kept me in solitary confinement for six years in a row.
AW: That’s like being buried alive. I once met an old man in Pakistan who had been a member of the Communist Party, he was caught and brutally tortured. Then they condemned him to solitary confinement for I do not know how many years – they were a lot – and he told me the following: “Sometimes I wanted to be called to be tortured, just so I could hear a human voice”.
Joxemi: Yes, it does not surprise me. The isolation is terrible. But perhaps more terrible was the dispersion. And with the dispersion in Spain they have deceived everyone. The dispersion was meant to force us to think differently. When they began the policy of dispersing the prisoners, they sent me away alone. Soon they brought someone else, but they soon left me on my own again. And in the time I was allowed in the prison courtyard, I did forty minutes running and twenty minutes of gymnastics, every day… rain, sun or snow. When I was exercising there was a prison officer present, but never anyone else.
All these measures were intended to break the prisoners’ morale. But with Joxemi, they never succeeded. He noted with a laugh:
When I was in solitary, the officers had to treat me with some respect, because I always stood my ground and would fight for anything I asked for. I said: “I want to go to the shower”. “You should have showered during your exercise time.” “No, no, no. As a person I have the right to a shower and the yard is the yard, and the shower is the shower.”
In the end they had to give in. Joxemi was given time to shower. But years of solitary confinement were a refined form of torture:
To keep myself occupied in those six years I did a history course. For that they have to let you have the books, so that is how I kept my mind active, doing a degree in history. It didn’t help me at all, but it well and truly helped to pass the time. It helped to keep you alive.
The Barcelona Bombing
Then came the blast.
At approximately 4.12 pm, a timer activated the bomb. Witnesses said the blast caused panic and started a fire at the supermarket. People were fleeing in panic. One woman was seen running from the building with her hair in flames. In another part of the building, firemen evacuated thirty people undergoing dialysis in a special kidney unit.
The bomb had been placed in a car on the first level of the three-storey car park beneath the five-floor store. It exploded, destroying twenty vehicles parked nearby and causing a hole of around five metres in diameter in the ground floor of the shopping centre through which a huge ball of flame penetrated.
The explosion caused a ceiling to collapse in a shopping area of the Hipercor department store in central Barcelona and started a fire that filled several levels of the parking garage with smoke. Several of those who had escaped the flames were asphyxiated by the toxic gases.
The damage at the scene was so extensive that several of the corpses could not be located until two hours later. The bombing killed twenty-one people and injured forty-five. Among the victims was a thirty-year-old mother and her two small children, and a young pregnant woman. Some had been burned so severely that identification was impossible.
ETA had made a series of warning phone calls to Catalan newspapers at around 3.00 pm saying that bombs would go off at Hipercor half an hour later, but it was not clear exactly where the bombs were and the timing was wrong. Therefore, the warnings were useless. Maybe by now the ranks of ETA had been so depleted that they were now full of inexperienced and inept recruits, or maybe the bombers simply showed a shocking indifference to the lives of ordinary people. It makes no difference whatsoever to the end result. Whether by accident or design, ETA had committed an act of mass murder.
The shock waves from the explosion rocked the whole of Spain, and its effects were felt in the ranks of ETA itself. Joxemi had been actively involved in armed struggle for some time. But the barbarity and senselessness of the Barcelona atrocity shook him to the core. At first, he could hardly believe it, as he told me:
I was with Santi Colts that day – I had not been caught yet – and I just said: “My God, how can you do this?” It looked to me as if our enemies had done it. It’s just unthinkable. They are crazy! But they did it again. They put a car bomb in front of the Puerto police station in Colón. An Englishman passed by at that moment, it exploded, and – good night! And another one was killed with him.
There comes a time when you see armed actions that go against the population, which seems to have been done by the enemy instead of you. Then there comes a moment that you say: “Stop!” And you just think, how can they do this, have they lost their minds? In other words, the thing was quite strong and there came a time when I reconsidered everything, the loneliness of my cell.
AW: How did you break with ETA?
Joxemi: You do not leave ETA. In 1994 they expelled me from the organisation and sentenced me to death for being a dissident. They said that I had collaborated with the Spanish state! They told that lie without even blushing. And then they threw me out. But the truth is that I was already clearing my thoughts, little by little, and I said “all this is senseless”, all those indiscriminate bombings and fighting, at a time when we are losing all the actions… That Barcelona thing – that was terrible!
Joxemi joined with other Basque prisoners to demand a change of course. He was later released under an amnesty. But the experience has marked him for the rest of his life. He told me that for years after leaving prison, he would always be looking over his shoulder to see whether there was someone following him to put an end to his life. He never knew where the bullet would come from: the agents of the state who saw him as a terrorist or ETA who saw him as a traitor.
The tragic life of Joxemi is typical of many former supporters of what was called the armed struggle. It destroyed a whole generation of youngsters who could have played an important role in the revolutionary workers’ movement. Instead, they were led into the blind alley of individual terrorism. His life outside the prison walls has hardly been any easier than it was before. But despite everything, he is incredibly resilient, and bears his lot with a calm stoicism that arouses admiration. Having passed through a Calvary of suffering for most of his life, he still believes firmly in the cause of the emancipation of the working class and the Basque people.
Marxism and Terrorism
When speaking of the Basque Country, the news invariably concentrated on the Basque separatist movement and the actions of ETA. But they largely ignored the most important factor in the Basque Country’s struggle against Franco: the labour movement. From the early 1960s, the strikes and demonstrations of the Basque workers shook the dictatorship. And following Franco’s death this widespread strike movement continued to grow.
Marxists reject the tactic of individual terrorism. But this rejection has nothing in common with the hypocritical denunciations of the bourgeois politicians and their tamed media. The violence perpetrated by the state is infinitely greater than the actions of any terrorist organisation, and their denunciations of terrorism lack any moral value. Our rejection of terrorism is not dictated by any abstract moral consideration, but simply because it is ineffective and counterproductive. Small groups of armed individuals can never overthrow the power of the bourgeois state, and merely invite reprisals, which are directed not just against the terrorists but against the working class as a whole.
Even if their desire for revenge was understandable, their methods were badly mistaken. The assassination of Carrero Blanco – despite its spectacular nature – added nothing to the struggle against Franco. On the contrary, it forced the calling off of the popular mobilisations that were being prepared against the so-called ‘1,001 Court Process’, in which the leadership of the CCOO were to be tried, and numerous activists were forced to go underground.
The notion that by eliminating individuals, however much they are identified with this repressive order, we can bring about the overthrow of capitalism and end national oppression is false from start to finish. Capitalism as a social system does not base itself on individuals, but on the domination of a class of bankers and capitalists over the rest of society. The ruling class uses the state apparatus (the army, police, judges, laws, etc.) to secure its power, while the system of formal bourgeois democracy and the reformist leaders are used to channel the resistance of the working class within the existing order.
Individuals can be easily replaced. If one reactionary minister is assassinated, he will be replaced by another one, usually even worse than his predecessor. Moreover, terrorist actions provide a useful pretext for the state to augment its repressive capacity by justifying its actions before the rest of the population. New reactionary laws are passed, giving the state even more powers to use against the working class. Far from weakening the state, such methods only serve to strengthen it.
In order to achieve its ends, the bourgeois state utilised a special force operating outside the law that resorted to the most violent and illegal methods in order to destroy ETA. Those years witnessed an eruption of terrorism by fascist bands, fuelled by sectors of the state apparatus and the most reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie. Workers, youth and members of the Basque nationalist left fell victim to these hyenas of big capital. There were numerous instances of beatings and attacks carried out by these thugs, composed for the most part of the sons of the military and of the fascists, the police, the Civil Guard and criminal or de-classed elements.
In Spain there were many terrorist groups, not just the Basque ETA, but the FRAP (Revolutionary Anti-fascist Patriotic Front) and the so-called First of October Anti-fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO). The latter – as we have already seen – was suspected by many on the left of being an organisation of provocateurs manipulated by the intelligence agencies, if not actually set up by them. As far as I know, there is no proof that was the case. What is very clear is that terrorist organisations can very easily be penetrated by agents of the state and manipulated for dubious ends. It is sufficient to note that the British MI5 intelligence services succeeded in infiltrating an agent at the very top level of the IRA, a fact which was only exposed after the Good Friday Agreement.
ETA was no exception to the rule. Joxemi told me:
They put moles in our ranks whenever they want. And they do not even need to do that, because they have enough technology to get information whenever they want. Wilson was arrested as the result of a mole called El Lobo (The Wolf). They even made a movie about that. A certain Lejarza infiltrated the organisation, acting with the police. He shopped all the commandos that were active in Madrid and Barcelona. He is still alive, hidden with a false name and a new identity.
Now, after more than forty years and the deaths of more than 800 people, ETA has given up the armed struggle. Already in 1998, the group declared its first indefinite ceasefire. That was already an admission of failure. In 2011 ETA announced “the definite cessation of its military activity,” and its appeal for a “direct dialogue” with the governments in Madrid and Paris. The belated appeal for a dialogue naturally fell on deaf ears. Nevertheless, in April 2018, while I was in the Basque Country interviewing veterans of the anti-Franco struggle for this book, ETA made a public apology for its actions, accepting that it bore “direct responsibility” for years of bloodshed and suffering: “We know that we caused a lot of pain during that long period of armed struggle, including damage that can never be put right,” it said. “We wish to show our respect for those who were killed or wounded by ETA and those who were affected by the conflict. We are truly sorry.”
The Spanish government, in a predictably contemptuous statement, said the apology was long overdue and hailed it as further proof that “ETA has been defeated with the weapons of democracy and the strength of the rule of law”. It would be more correct to say that the violence of terrorism was defeated by the far superior violence of the state, utilising methods that violated every principle of legality and democracy for the purpose of exterminating its enemies.
The outcome of that unequal struggle was never in doubt. Those who were not killed in action suffered years of imprisonment, torture and despair. In order to defeat the monstrous state directly inherited from Franco, different methods were required: the methods of mass struggle, the methods of the proletarian revolution. Individual terrorism therefore acts to hinder the development of class consciousness and represents an obstacle in the way of socialist revolution. If it is possible to end oppression through force of arms alone, then why do we need political parties? Why do we need trade unions? For that matter, why do we even need a socialist revolution?
The method of individual terrorism attempts to substitute the revolutionary methods of the working class – namely, mass struggle, the strike, the general strike and insurrection – with the pistol, the bomb and the ArmaLite submachine gun. The most negative feature of such methods – quite apart from their inefficacy against the far-greater firepower of the state – is that they downplay the role of the working class, relegating the workers to mere passive observers.
The truth is that the part played by ETA in the struggle against Franco pales in insignificance beside the magnificent movement of the Basque working class. Bilbao, Vitoria, Pamplona and the industrial areas of Guipúzcoa became the centre of a massive proletarian resistance movement that shook the dictatorship to its core. As we have seen in previous chapters, the revolutionary movement of the Basque workers reached its culmination with the heroic general strike in Vitoria in March 1976. Only the conscious self-movement of the class – working-class organisation, solidarity and collective mass action – can bring about the socialist transformation of society.
Andalusia
The question of the autonomy statute for Andalusia also polarised opinion, although in Andalusia there had never been a nationalist feeling or tradition, or even a mood in favour of regional autonomy. But the word Spain had become so odious on the lips of the Franco regime and so much hatred had accumulated towards the centralism of the Falange, which was linked in people’s minds with the traditional feeling of neglect, poverty and underdevelopment of this region, that this feeling in favour of autonomy, stimulated by the examples of Catalonia and Euskadi, developed with extraordinary vigour.
Lenin once remarked that the phenomenon of nationalism, in the last analysis, can be reduced to a question of bread. In the case of Andalusia, one can see exactly what he meant. In all the demonstrations for autonomy the slogans were invariably the same: for agrarian reform, for the return of the emigrants, for the elimination of illiteracy (the highest in the country) and for the promotion of culture, schools, hospitals, industrial development and the ending of unemployment (also the highest in the country).
In every workers’ and leftist demonstration in Andalusia, the white and green Andalusian flag has remained present ever since then, flying defiantly alongside the red flag, as a symbol of struggle. On 4 December 1977, 1 million people demonstrated throughout Andalusia demanding autonomy and a statute of self-government. In Malaga, there was a demonstration of 200,000 people that ended in a police provocation, which resulted in the murder of a young CCOO worker, José Manuel García Caparrós. The riots, which lasted all day, devastated the city centre. Angry groups of workers set fire to the headquarters of the fascist Fuerza Nueva party. The civil government decreed a state of exception in Malaga lasting three days.
No one was ever convicted or investigated for this murder. Even today the Caparrós case prepared by the civil government of Malaga at that time remains a ‘state secret’. Only parliamentary representatives have been allowed access to it under oath that they must not communicate its content to anyone. Dozens of other police crimes committed during the Transition are still classified as ‘state secrets’ to protect the identity, positions and political and professional careers of the police and political leaders of the regime of those days, while the families of the victims are left to grieve in silence.
Catalonia
Catalonia was a region that industrialised earlier than the rest of Spain. The Catalan capitalists, mainly around the textile industry, required a protectionist policy so that their products would not face foreign competition. However, the dominant faction of the backward Spanish ruling class was firmly committed to free trade policies and opposed industrialisation. The political project of the Catalan bourgeois was, throughout the nineteenth century, one of trying to intervene in the political affairs of Spain in order to modernise the country. They used nationalism, or rather, at the time, regionalism, in an attempt to mobilise the Catalan population behind their ambitions.
However, by the beginning of the twentieth century they faced a dilemma. The development of industry had created a powerful working class in Catalonia, which was acquiring revolutionary traditions. Any mobilisation of the masses in Catalonia threatened to turn against capitalist interests. Thus, the Catalan capitalists abandoned any idea of reforming or modernising Spain and at all crucial junctures in the twentieth century sided with reaction, even though that meant repression of Catalan national rights, language, etc. Thus, Cambó’s Regionalist League backed Franco during the Civil War, and Catalan industrialists and bankers were crucial financiers of the fascist uprising.
The leadership of the Catalan national movement passed on to the petty-bourgeois elements around the Catalan Republican Left. Twice, in 1931 and in 1934 they declared the Catalan Republic, but that was only short-lived because of their own limitations. By that time there was a powerful working-class movement organised around the revolutionary syndicalist CNT. The revolutionary movement of the 1930s in Catalonia went further than it did anywhere else. The workers defeated the fascist uprising in 1936 and became the masters of the situation. The capitalist army was replaced by workers’ militias; workers’ committees everywhere had taken on the tasks of the capitalist state. This was one of the reasons why Franco’s repression was particularly harsh in Catalonia. The memory of workers’ power had to be erased from the minds of the proletariat.
After the victory of Franco in 1939 an awful fate awaited the people of Catalonia. Paul Preston writes:
A good example of what redemption by Franco really meant could be found in the experience of Catalonia after the region’s capture in January 1939. The formal parade into Barcelona was headed by the Army Corps of Navarre, led by General Andrés Solchaga. They were accorded this honour, according to a British officer attached to Franco’s headquarters, “not because they have fought better, but because they hate better. That is to say, when the object of this hate is Catalonia or a Catalan”.
A close friend of Franco, Víctor Ruiz Albéniz (‘El Tebib Arrumi’), published an article demanding that Catalonia needed “a biblical punishment [Sodom, Gomorrah] to purify the red city, seat of anarchism and separatism, as the only remedy to extirpate these two cancers by implacable thermo-cauterisation”. For Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and Minister of the Interior, Catalan nationalism was a sickness that had to be exterminated. The man he appointed as civil governor of Barcelona, Wenceslao González Oliveros, claimed that the Civil War had been fought with greater ferocity against the regions than against communism and that any toleration of regionalism would lead once more to “the putrefaction represented by Marxism and separatism that we have just surgically eradicated”.2
Francoist repression in Catalonia also had a national angle to it. The Catalan language was banished from the public sphere and Spanish was imposed as the official language of public administration, the education system and the mass media. Schools were banned from teaching anything related to Catalan culture or history. Street signs were changed into Spanish. From the mid-1960s mass was officiated in Spanish instead of Latin, even though many in rural areas could not understand the language. Parents were banned from giving their children Catalan names. The Catalan language was forced to retreat into the family.
The banning of Catalan from all public affairs also meant that, when millions of immigrant workers came into Catalonia in the 1960s and 70s from other parts of Spain, they had no way of learning the language. When the movement against the Franco regime started, it was only natural that general demands for democratic and social rights became mixed with demands for national rights (self-rule, language rights, etc.) The mainly-Spanish speaking working class, organised above all in the PSUC (the Catalan Communist Party) played a key role in fighting for the Catalan language in the underground. Semi-legal Catalan schools were organised and the Neighbourhood Associations in working-class areas undertook Catalan adult classes.
In 1976, for the first time, there was a public celebration of 11 September, la Diada, the Catalan national day, in defiance of a ban by the regime. Tens of thousands gathered in Sant Boi de Llobregat, near Barcelona, perhaps as many as 100,000, under the slogan “Llibertat, amnistia i Estatut d’Autonomia” (Freedom, amnesty and Self-Rule Statute). There was a sea of Catalan flags mixed up with Republican, Communist, Basque and Andalusian flags. The left and particularly the PSUC and CCOO banners dominated, many with slogans for self-determination, but the leaders of the workers’ organisations made sure that the speakers came mainly from the nationalist right, including some linked to the Regionalist League, which had supported Franco in 1936!
That was just a prelude for the 11 September demonstration in 1977, which gathered a million-and-a-half people. This time the demonstration had been authorised by the ailing regime. All layers of the population were present, but there was a clear domination of working-class elements. Again, Catalan flags dominated but they were mixed with red flags and there was a significant presence of Andalusian flags as well. The stewarding, 2,500 strong, was mainly composed of workers from the SEAT car factory, who guarded the rear of the march from fascist provocateurs. At that time, it was clear to everyone that the struggle for national-democratic rights was one of the tasks of the workers’ movement.
Jordi Martorell remembers being present at the Diada in 1977:
I was only a child, not even six, but my parents took us to the demonstration. It was a massive affair. I can’t remember much of it, other than there was a huge sea of people at Passeig de Gracia filling the central lanes as well as the sidewalks and into the side streets. There were many banners, flags and placards as far as the eye could see (I was on my dad’s shoulders). I made a point of collecting stickers from all the organisations which I wore proudly on my t-shirt. The mood was exhilarating, celebratory.
‘Operation Tarradellas’
The Catalan proletariat was always in the vanguard of the class struggle in Spain. In the stormy years of the 1920s and 30s, the anarchist-inspired CNT carried out a whole series of strikes, general strikes and insurrections. In his celebrated novel Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell gives an inspiring picture of the workers of Barcelona in the white heat of the revolution.
Although the CNT had virtually vanished from the scene, the revolutionary spirit and class consciousness of the Catalan workers lived on. It was entirely free from the narrow nationalism of the Catalan bourgeoisie, who the workers correctly saw as their worst enemies. This militant class consciousness was reflected in the 1977 general election in Catalonia, where the socialists and communists won an overwhelming majority on a turnout of almost eighty per cent. The results, shown in Table 11.1, speak for themselves.
These were the four main parties with the largest share of the vote. The remaining fifteen parties accounted for five per cent or less. The Socialists of Catalonia became the first political force with 28.56 per cent of the votes and fifteen deputies. They were followed by the communists of PSUC with over 18 per cent. The moderate nationalists of Pujol (standing as PDpC) came fourth, although, by winning in the more rural provinces of Girona and Lleida, they managed to get more deputies than the PSUC. The left in Catalonia amounted to almost fifty per cent of the electorate and was in a position to impose a policy contrary to the wishes of Adolfo Suárez and the UCD.
| Table 11.1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Vote (%) | Seats | No. of votes |
| PSC-PSOE | 28.56 | 15 | 870,362 |
| PSUC-PCE | 18.31 | 8 | 558,132 |
| UCD | 16.91 | 8 | 515,293 |
| PDpC | 16.88 | 11 | 514,647 |
The Catalan bourgeoisie was terrified by the strength of the proletariat and the fact that the left parties had a clear dominance in the electoral field. Their concerns were shared by the government in Madrid. In order to cut across this dangerous trend, Suárez and the king decided to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the person of Josep Tarradellas i Joan, a man who for decades had remained in well-deserved obscurity in exile.
Tarradellas, who had been the leader of Esquerra Republicana during the Civil War, called himself President of the Generalitat in exile. This ridiculous pretence serves to cloak the incompetence, cowardice and dishonesty of a man who had been hidden in an obscure corner of France for decades. An irrelevant figure in exile, Tarradellas had played absolutely no role in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. In order to present this wily old fraudster to the Catalan public, it was necessary for the Spanish state to resort to the ‘invention’ of Tarradellas. He was in fact a product of the central power of Madrid, which needed his services to stop the political situation in Catalonia from slipping out of its hands. This was the real meaning of the so-called Operacion Tarradellas. Not for the first or last time, the Catalan bourgeoisie concealed its reactionary character by hiding behind the banner of Catalan nationalism.
Backed by the Spanish state, the king and the Army, the theatrical return of the exiled Catalan leader was finally arranged after lengthy negotiations and haggling. Following the elections on 15 June 1977, in an operation organised by President Suárez and some close collaborators, Tarradellas travelled to Madrid where he negotiated the restoration of the Generalitat (Catalan Regional Government). Tarradellas returned to Barcelona on 23 October 1977. The fake president of a fake Generalitat was placed on a balcony to pronounce the words “Ja soc aqui” (Here I am again) to an adoring crowd. It was a performance worthy of a circus – which in effect was all that it was. He was named President of the Provisional Generalitat with the agreement of all the major Catalan political parties and formed a ‘unity government’ in which, scandalously, both the Socialists and the Communists participated.
This was yet another of the fraudulent operations of the so-called Democratic Spanish Transition. The Tarradellas affair was a blatant fraud from start to finish. The workers’ parties had a majority in Catalonia and they should have been allowed to head any provisional Catalan government. But by cynically playing the card of Catalan nationalism in order to halt the progress of the left, the Spanish ruling class was entering dangerous territory. Some decades later it had to pay the bill. The Catalan bourgeoisie was more convinced each passing day that they could not halt the labour movement’s advance using the UCD, and preferred the more moderate image of the bourgeois-nationalist Jordi Pujol.
This was confirmed by the results of the 1979 municipal elections in Catalonia, where the left parties won a crushing victory, taking all four provincial capitals, all of the largest cities in the red belt around Barcelona, as well as a majority of all comarca (county) capitals and towns over 25,000 inhabitants.
| Table 11.2 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Party | Votes | Vote (%) |
| PSC-PSOE | 720,165 | 26.86 |
| PSUC | 543,165 | 20.26 |
| CiU | 509,128 | 18.99 |
| Centristes de Catalunya-UCD | 362,405 | 13.52 |
The ruling class was worried that the left would take over the Catalan Parliament in the forthcoming elections in 1980. They launched what was known as ‘Operation Foment’ in which the Catalan business association Fomento Nacional del Trabajo invested millions of pesetas in an advertising campaign against the left, throwing all their weight behind Pujol’s newly-formed coalition, CiU. The message was clear: the danger of a ‘Marxist’ Catalan government had to be stopped by backing the ‘reasonable’ forces of ‘moderation’ and ‘progress’. As well as the paid advertisements, the Catalan capitalists funded those parties which were best positioned to prevent a PSC-PSUC victory, chiefly CiU, the nationalist party of Jordi Pujol.
Pujol was a banker and a declared enemy of the working class, although his party tried to put on a progressive mask in order to attract working-class votes. Despite his nationalist rhetoric, his overriding concern was to placate the central government: “The Madrid government has nothing to fear”, declared Pujol after the election. And he was quite right. In the first elections to the Catalan Parliament in 1980, the socialist and communist vote sharply declined, falling behind that of the bourgeois-nationalist CiU, which got the highest number of seats (forty-three, compared to thirty-three for the PSC-PSOE).
| Table 11.3 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Vote (%) | Seats | Votes |
| Convergencia i Unió | 27.68 | 43 | 752,943 |
| PSC | 22.43 | 33 | 606,727 |
| PSUC | 18.77 | 25 | 507,753 |
| CC-UCD | 10.61 | 18 | 286,922 |
| ERC | 8.9 | 14 | 240,871 |
This was a crushing defeat. How can the loss of votes for the Communist and Socialist Parties be explained? It is clear that the Socialists lost votes in two directions: the votes of the middle class went to the nationalist parties, while many workers abstained (the turnout was only sixty-one per cent, almost eighteen percentage points less than in 1977). The main reason was that the socialists had no real understanding of the national question. It was not enough to change the name of the party from PSOE to PSC (Catalonian SP). What was necessary was to present a concrete socialist alternative to nationalism.
Even so, CiU did not have a majority in the Catalan parliament and was only able to form a government with the backing of the UCD and the more radical nationalists of the ERC, headed by the rabid anti-Communist Heribert Barrera, which also received financial backing from Foment.
The only way to win a majority in Catalonia and in the whole of Spain was to fight on the basis of a genuine socialist programme, which satisfied the social and national aspirations of the working class and the majority of the population. Failure to do so inevitably handed the leadership to the Catalan bourgeois nationalists. The tendency however was clear: a decline of the left, which had betrayed the revolutionary movement and abandoned the defence of national-democratic rights, and a consolidation of the rule of bourgeois nationalists, who went on to govern Catalonia for the following twenty-three years.
The Right of Self-Determination
Marxists are not nationalists. In principle, we are not in favour of erecting new frontiers that separate one people from another. On the contrary, we are in favour of sweeping away all frontiers, and establishing the Socialist United States of Europe, as a first step towards a Socialist World Federation. But before we can do this, there are some matters that need to be resolved. That includes the fight for democratic rights. But one of the first democratic rights that was sacrificed by the leaders of the PSOE and PCE was the right to national self-determination. That has had very serious consequences, which are being felt to this very day. We are often told that the separation of Catalonia from Spain would be a bad thing for everybody. That may or may not be the case, but it is not the point at issue.
The right to self-determination is an elementary democratic right, which can be compared to the right to divorce and abortion. If I am asked if divorce is a good thing, I will answer that it is not a good thing if it can be avoided, but sometimes it is a lesser evil. Marriage is a pact between two free individuals, who agree to live together and share their lives. But this is a voluntary contract, and it will last only as long as the sentiments that created the conditions for it to succeed continue.
If those conditions continue to exist, well and good. But if they break down, as sometimes occurs, the marriage bond will be broken and a separation will perhaps be necessary. One may regret this fact, but life shows that it happens, and what are we to do in such circumstances? To compel two people to live together when the bond between them is irrevocably broken would be quite intolerable, as most people would agree. Even if one of the two parties wish to leave the arrangement and the other does not, nobody can force a person to remain in a relationship against their will. And if that is the case for two free individuals, why should it not also apply to two free nations?
The case of abortion has important differences, but the underlying principle is the same. If I am asked am I in favour of abortion, I will answer that of course I am not, but I will add that in some cases, it is justified because it is a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body. Nobody has the right to compel a woman to give birth against her will. That is also an elementary right. It therefore seems strange that some people who regard themselves as lefts, and defend the right to divorce and abortion, are not prepared to defend the right of the people of Catalonia to determine their own future, free from any interference and coercion from the Spanish state.
Let us add that the Spanish state was inherited from the Franco dictatorship, and is indelibly marked by that fact. The same bureaucracy, the same reactionary generals and police chiefs, the same rotten and corrupt political leaders, the same undemocratic, unelected monarchy. Is it any wonder that many people do not wish to be ruled by that state, and see no alternative but to break away from its tender embraces?
The pact between the Franco regime and the leaders of the workers’ parties – PCE and PSOE – included the wholesale adoption of the state apparatus and many of its legal structures, which remain to this day, poisoning the political life of Spain. In these conditions, the struggle for a Catalan Republic has a progressive and potentially revolutionary significance. If it were to be linked to an appeal to the workers and youth of the whole Spanish state it would provide a powerful impulse to a general struggle against the 1978 regime. That is the prior condition for a success.
The Only Solution
Marxists are internationalists, not nationalists. Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the working class has no country. That statement is as true today as it was then. We do not advocate the setting up new frontiers, but the radical abolition of all frontiers. Nor do we advocate the breaking up of large states and the creation of small ones as a point of principle. Our attitude to this depends on concrete circumstances. We are for unity, all other things being equal. But all other things are not always equal. If one state oppresses another state, what position should we take? That is the issue here.
Many people on the left in Spain oppose Catalonia’s right to self-determination on the grounds that it is better for the working class to remain united, and not be divided by nationalism. It goes without saying that we are proletarian internationalists, and therefore opposed to nationalism. It is the duty of Catalan workers to oppose the Catalan bourgeois nationalists. But it is the duty of Spanish workers to oppose reactionary Spanish nationalism.
In the present emotional atmosphere, this elementary duty tends to be forgotten. When we talk about “the need to defend the unity of the Spanish state”, we must ask ourselves what state are we talking about? Let us remind ourselves that the Spanish state is the same state that was taken over lock, stock, and barrel forty years ago from the Franco dictatorship, and anointed with a little bit of ‘democratic’ oil. Forty years later that oil has begun to smell rancid.
Are we seriously telling the people of Catalonia that it is the internationalist duty to defend unity with the reactionary monarchy, which resides over a corrupt regime dominated by landlords, bankers and capitalists? Are we seriously asking them to embrace the same Civil Guard that beat up old ladies in the streets of Barcelona? In what way does this kind of unity benefit the workers, either of Catalonia or of Spain?
You may well reply that the bankers and capitalists of Catalonia are just as bad as those of Spain, perhaps even worse. We agree. We warn the people of Catalonia that independence on a capitalist basis will solve none of your problems. Instead of being exploited and oppressed by the Spanish bankers and capitalists, you will be oppressed and exploited by the Catalan bourgeoisie, who are the worst enemies of the Catalan working class.
We remind you of the words of that great Irish revolutionary Marxist, James Connolly, who was murdered by the British Army after the defeat of the Easter Rising of 1916:
If you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.
Those words are just as applicable to Catalonia as they were in Ireland, where the truth was subsequently demonstrated beyond question. The Catalan bourgeoisie throughout history has never defended the genuine national interests of the people of Catalonia. It was only ever interested in one thing: profit.
The selfish and corrupt Catalan bourgeois would sell their grandmother to the devil, if that suited their interests. In fact, the Catalan bankers and capitalists are staunch enemies of independence and showed it clearly during the 1 October 2017 referendum. The parties which used to be the political representatives of the Catalan bourgeois, mainly the old CiU, have used the issue of independence for selfish political reasons in order to stay in power and divert attention from their austerity policies. They would do a deal tomorrow with their class brothers in Madrid, if the latter are prepared to give them a suitable economic reward and if they were not afraid of the Catalan masses, who they have aroused with their nationalist demagogy, and who, unlike themselves, are prepared to carry out a serious struggle.
Yes, all that is true. But the fight against the Catalan bourgeoisie is the task of the Catalan working class. The task of the Spanish workers is to conduct a remorseless struggle against the corrupt and degenerate Spanish bourgeois and its reactionary state. To join forces with that state in its attempts to crush the people of Catalonia is simply a crime. Moreover, it is utterly self-defeating. Far from overcoming Catalan separatism, it merely serves to pour oil on the flames, encouraging the desire for separation.
I remember a time when the workers of Spain, and especially the workers of Euskadi and Catalonia, were in the forefront of the fight against the Franco dictatorship. They fought together, under a common banner against a common enemy. The workers would never allow themselves to be divided on national lines, or to line up shamefully behind their ‘own’ bourgeoisie. Nationalism was pushed to one side by the class struggle of the workers. That is always the case. But it is also the case that when the class struggle ebbs, the workers are pushed to one side by the middle-class politicians and careerists, whether they are reformist politicians in Madrid, who serve the interests of the Spanish bourgeoisie, or the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Catalan nationalists who try to manipulate the natural sentiments of the masses as a bargaining chip for their own cynical purposes.
If the workers of Spain wish to maintain unity with Catalonia, they must first of all prove that they have no interest in oppressing the Catalans, or of denying them their democratic rights. The people of Catalonia must see that the Spanish working class, its parties and organisations are not their enemy but their friends and allies.
But in order for this to be the case, the Spanish left must break once and for all from the reactionary Spanish state, break with the monarchy, and fight for a genuinely democratic republic, which will offer a hand in friendship to the Basques, Catalans, Galicians and Andalusians in a Socialist Federation of free Iberian peoples.
In a word, the only solution to the national question in Spain is a radical break with the reactionary regime of 1978.