13. The Turn of the Tide: The Sick Man of Europe
In 1977 Spain was getting ready for democracy. The first democratic elections had been held and a new constitution was being drafted. There was a mood of expectation, even hope, in the air, but it was overshadowed by anxiety. Above all, on the economic front all was not well. The seriousness of the economic situation can be seen from the fact that industry was only working at eighty per cent of capacity, whereas in certain key sectors such as steel the figure was seventy-four per cent and shipbuilding, only sixty per cent.
In past decades, emigration acted as a safety valve for unemployment. Many people left regions like Andalusia, Extremadura and Galicia to find work, not only abroad, but also inside Spain, in areas such as Madrid, Catalonia (mainly Barcelona) and the Basque Country (mainly Bilbao). But the international crisis led to increasing pressure against Spanish exports by protectionist lobbies in Europe and the USA. With over 6 million unemployed in the European Common Market, the old escape route was now firmly closed. And it was precisely those industrial areas, geared to exports and industrial production, which were hardest hit.
Protectionist measures by the European Common Market had a shattering effect on Spanish steel and textiles, with catastrophic consequences in Catalonia, where pressure was building up for autonomy, as well as in the Basque Country, Galicia, Andalusia and a whole series of other regions.
The economic crisis was made worse by the hard-line tactics of the government on monetary policy, which soon aroused the heated protests of those same industrialists who earlier had been demanding sharp cuts in state expenditure and financial discipline to curb inflation. As in all countries, the Spanish capitalists only object to state expenditure that benefits the workers, the unemployed and underprivileged. But in Spain, more than any other European country, the capitalists depended entirely on the hand-outs of the state.
Under the iron chancellor Enrique Fuentes Quintana, the rate of increase of the money supply was cut back from twenty-three per cent to seventeen per cent – a measure designed to prevent the inflation caused by the emission of worthless paper money by the Bank of Spain. In their zeal to carry out the new policy of monetary discipline the treasury officials succeeded beyond the minister’s wildest dreams: by October 1977, the rate of increase of the money supply fell not to seventeen per cent but to ten per cent. This was hardly the way to get the economy on its feet!
Fuentes Quintana had got it all wrong. After years of existing on free hand-outs and cheap credit from the state, the Spanish industrialists suddenly found the taps turned off and the supplies of money dried up overnight. Like an aged junkie whose supply of heroin is suddenly cut off, Spanish capitalism went into convulsions. Factory after factory went bankrupt. Not only small firms but major industries such as steelmaking and shipbuilding were forced to close their gates and lay off workers.
The giant steel company Babcock and Wilcox in the Basque Country could not afford to pay the arrears of wages to workers and threatened to close. This would have meant the loss of 30,000 jobs in the Bilbao area if we take into consideration the subsidiary firms that were dependent upon the company. The social consequences of such a move were all too evident to the government in Madrid, which felt itself to be sitting on a powder keg.
In the troubled Basque region, torn by national strife and terrorism, there were 127,000 unemployed out of a total active population of 972,700. There was an average of two factory closures every single day in the first three months of the year. In Guipúzcoa (the province where Basque is still the most widely spoken and where ETA and other radical nationalist organisations had most support) the rate of unemployment stood at 24.54 per cent. In March alone, there were eighty-eight bankruptcies in the province.
The relative improvement in Spain’s balance of payments, which nevertheless still had a deficit of nearly 6.4 billion dollars at the end of 1977, was due, on the one hand, to the temporary boost in exports caused by the devaluation of the peseta, which made Spanish goods cheaper and imports more expensive. But the main reason for the sharp fall of imports was the profoundly depressed situation of the home market, where wage restraints, mass unemployment (generally put at 1,300,000 in a country of 35 million) and poverty led to a steep drop in demand.
The boastful declarations of the chancellor about the balance of payments could not conceal the fact that the loss of the home market constituted an unmitigated disaster for Spanish capitalism. The healthy picture painted of the economy reminded one of the flush on the face of a man dying of consumption. Within a few months, increasing domestic inflation had completely cancelled out the advantages of the devaluation of the peseta. Spanish capitalism found itself unable to compete on the world market and also with a shrinking internal market; in other words, it found itself in a crisis of absolutely catastrophic dimensions.
A Death in Andalusia…
The new constitution being drawn up stated that some regions, which historically had had the right to self-government, could quickly set up new autonomous parliaments with extra powers. These included Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. Initially, it was not foreseen that Andalusia would be in that first wave of devolution and instead the region looked set to follow a longer, five-year process, along with the rest of Spain.
On 4 December 1977, some 2 million people joined festive marches across the region, claiming the right to be treated the same way, on what was dubbed at the time the first Day of Andalusia. The peaceful rally had been organised to urge central government to allow Andalusia to achieve devolved power in the shortest period possible. It was felt that Madrid was denying “a historic right” of the region. The tensions had already started to rise when a protester climbed up the front of the Diputación provincial authority’s building on the Plaza de la Marina to raise the Andalusian regional standard against the wishes of the authorities. He was detained on the balcony and riot police were sent out. As the march was finishing, an overreaction by officials and police to the crowd’s high spirits led to an innocent young trade union activist being shot. Manuel José García Caparrós, who was eighteen years old, died on his way to hospital. The police action, in a period when Spain was living a nervous transition from dictatorship to democracy, caused shock and outrage across the city and the region, and there were three days of disturbances in response.
…And Terror in San Fermín
The famous festival of San Fermín takes place in the capital of Navarre, Pamplona, each summer, from 6 to 14 July. For a whole week the city is filled with a jovial atmosphere, with lots of eating and drinking – especially the latter. Bands of youths dressed in the traditional white shirt and trousers are dancing in the streets, passing round a leather bota filled with red wine, so that their white costume soon turns various shades of pink. There are parades and nightly firework displays and everybody is swept along by the carnival atmosphere, like an irresistible torrent.
At the heart of this much-loved fiesta there are the famous encierros, where groups of youths run before the bulls that are being driven into the arena. This activity carries its own dangers, which are obvious to anyone, although the local lads are well trained and experienced to avoid being trampled and gored by the bulls. But there was one year in which the deadliest danger was not posed by the animals but by something altogether more sinister.
In the latter days of the Franco dictatorship, the Festival of San Fermín had developed a semi-political character. The audience at the bullfights sang political songs against Franco and the more hated personalities of the dictatorship. For that reason, the state-owned Spanish television (TVE) always had ‘problems’ with televising the bullfights and the other typical events: suddenly, the sound was cut because a political song was being sung; suddenly the image was cut because a Basque or a red flag was being waved.
But the 1978 festival was on an entirely different level. The political question was bound to put in an appearance. As usual in such a case, cheers from one part of the crowd were followed by boos from another part and there was some fighting on the stands. But normally that would have been followed, at least for the Festival days, by a general mood of peace and harmony among the people wanting to enjoy themselves. Matters would have gone no further.
Instead, without warning, the riot police erupted into the bullring and surrounded it on the outside. Then the nightmare began. The police fired rubber bullets and smoke bombs, causing panic as frightened people fled to the overcrowded exits. Then they fired real bullets, which wounded seven people. The civil governor, who was present, denied having given any order to the police to carry out these brutal actions.
The fury of the population was expressed in street demonstrations and protests, during which a young man from Pamplona, Germán Rodríguez, a member of the Revolutionary Communist League, was shot dead by the police, and more than 100 others were injured.. The following day, with the centre of Pamplona wrecked and the population traumatised, the San Fermín festival was suspended. Everything had been quite normal up to the moment the police burst in on the scene. This was a blatant provocation. What was the reason for their intervention? The police claimed that a small group of nationalists came down to the bullring waving a banner with the slogan “AMNISTIA TOTAL, PRESOAK KALERA, SAN FERMÍN SIN PRESOS” (Total Amnesty, Freedom for Prisoners, San Fermín without prisoners).
That month, there had been some demonstrations for the release of ETA supporters arrested in the previous months. The protesters were asking for amnesty for their arrested comrades. These militants were accused of the killing of a sub-lieutenant of the Civil Guard in April (the evidence about their guilt was highly dubious). After the funeral of the assassinated Civil Guard, the fascists marched through the old part of the city, together with uniformed riot policemen and other army officers in plain clothes, beating up civilians, shopkeepers and students as well as separatists and counter-demonstrators.
The whole thing confirmed that the police and the fascist thugs were working together. Gangs like the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey and the Falangists were carrying out violent and terrorist activities repeatedly without any serious measures taken against them by the police. There are many photographs showing riot police and fascist thugs speaking together calmly and beating up unarmed civilians. The fascists acted with complete impunity. They were armed to the teeth with clubs, pistols and knives, and the police said nothing to them. On the other hand, as soon as they detected suspected left-wingers carrying a bag, they were immediately arrested.
In San Sebastián, José Ignacio Barandiarán was killed by the fascists the day after the Pamplona events. The fascist party Fuerza Nueva held a public meeting shortly after the murder. Again, the fascist gangs were in action – shooting guns in the streets, beating people up – and again the police took no action against them. These events were all too common in the Basque Country. Most of the police officers came straight from the dictatorship. The state apparatus was controlled by the same people.
The new rights promised by the democratic regime were all on paper. There was supposed to be the right to assembly, but not in every case. There was freedom for political parties, but not for all. There was the right to demonstrate, but not always. There was the right to free expression, but not about everything. You could shout whatever you liked, but you must not ask for amnesty and freedom for the Basque separatists. The contradictions were so many and the injustice so blatant that it was bound to produce an explosion. And it did.
The Workers’ Movement
In early 1978, the first union elections were held in which workers were able to choose their own representatives for the Workplace Committees. The victory for the class-based unions, the UGT and the CCOO, which together took over seventy per cent of trade union delegates, was resounding. Despite the salary caps accepted by the union leaders, the workers’ struggles continued to rage with every new agreement, with particularly noteworthy general strikes in the metal and construction industries. Strikes and demonstrations against the rising cost of living, which continually eroded the purchasing power of workers’ wages (between four and six per cent in 1978), were also numerous.
Although, overall, the number of strikes and working days lost due to labour disputes decreased in 1978 when compared to 1977 and 1976, the number of workers involved, at 3.8 million or thirty-two per cent of all wage workers, was much higher than in previous years and reflected the racing pulse of social conflict. Unlike in previous years, however, the demands were almost entirely economic in nature.
Around this time the UGT and the CCOO reached their historic peak of organisation, with 4 million affiliated workers between the two organisations or almost fifty per cent of the entire working class, a level of union organisation altogether unknown in Spain up to that point and which, even today, has not been surpassed. The first six months of 1979 witnessed the last great movement of the Spanish working class in the period of the Transition. The impetus for the upturn in the strike wave was the continual rise in the cost of living and the attempts of the bosses to move onto the offensive at the first symptom that the struggle of the working class had begun to stagnate.
From early January, virtually every sector was swept into the struggle with irresistible momentum. The number of workers involved in these strikes numbered 5.7 million, which was almost sixty per cent of wage workers in the whole of Spain, with some 171 working hours lost per striker. There was a one-day general strike in protest against unemployment in Andalusia. These were clear warnings to the capitalist class as to the social and political consequences of the continuing spread of unemployment and factory closures.
The workers’ leaders, instead of taking the opportunity to re-launch the struggles against the government and the employers, accepted the government-imposed salary caps when the latter refused to negotiate, and formed pacts behind the backs of the workers, shipwrecking most of the struggles.
The PCE in Parliament
There is a strange disease for which medical science knows no remedy and which almost invariably is terminal. It is known as parliamentary cretinism. The strange fascination felt by reformist politicians for the institutions of formal democracy exercises a powerful spell that deprives them of their critical faculties, lulls them to sleep and turns them into slaves of routine and the empty formalism of parliamentary procedure.
On 16 June 1977, for the first time in its history, the Communist Party of Spain became a parliamentary group. One can imagine the sense of wonder with which these former revolutionaries entered the hallowed halls of bourgeois parliamentary rule. Just as one lowers one’s voice on entering a great cathedral, so the atmosphere of Parliament tends to blunt the edge of radicalism, creating the comforting environment of a privileged club in which, despite all appearances of political antagonism, an impression is created that, after all, we are all members of the same club.
No one was more infatuated with the parliamentary spirit than the leader of the PCE. His whole demeanour was one of a bourgeois political statesman: moderate, calm, realistic, passionless and respectful even of his most implacable political enemies. He took to the life of Parliament as a duck takes to water. Now the storms and stresses of his earlier life were behind him. From this moment on, all his energies were based on Parliament, its rules, its debates, its intrigues and its endless combinations. In the election campaign Carrillo had decided that the most appropriate slogan would be: “To vote communist, is to vote democracy”. To his deep disappointment, the slogan proved not to be the vote winner he had confidently anticipated. To the communist militants, the struggle for democracy was only a means to a greater end: the revolutionary struggle against capitalism, for socialism. For the bourgeois democrats, on the contrary, it was an end in itself.
Carrillo was aiming for a coalition government involving both the left and right, in which the Communist Party would play a prominent role. This was supposed to be ‘political realism’. In point of fact, as we have seen repeatedly, it was quite the opposite: “A fantastic delusion born of obstinate wish-fulfilment. The election result did not corroborate this analysis in the slightest degree”. Morán is probably correct when he writes:
The greatest surprise of Santiago Carrillo was not his weak number of votes and seats, with this being important, but the failure of Popular Alliance (1.5 million votes and sixteen deputies) and the irresistible establishment of the PSOE (more than 5 million votes and 118 deputies).1
Following the logic of his own arguments, Santiago Carrillo became a faithful servant of Adolfo Suárez. So attached was he to his political ally that in the end the PCE was his only reliable support in parliament, as Morán points out:
The support of the PCE to the government of Adolfo Suárez was, at a certain moment, the only source of security that remained for the president. He could not even say the same about his own party, subject as it was to internal tensions that eroded him week after week… Without the PCE the ‘consensus’ could not have functioned as a form of government.2
But Carrillo’s attempt to bolster the political centre came at a time when that centre was about to shatter into pieces. The situation in Spain following the Transition remained one of sharp social and political polarisation to the right and to the left. If the Communist Party had concentrated on building its social base outside parliament, leading strikes and fighting for better wages, pensions and conditions, it could have consolidated itself as the hegemonic force on the left. But they did no such thing. Through their excessive concentration on the parliamentary field, they neglected the mass struggle precisely at the time when it was developing a new momentum.
The Workers Commissions, over which they still maintained considerable control, failed to play the militant role it could have done. As a result, it was gradually overtaken by the socialist UGT. In the end, the Communist Party lost control of its trade union organisation without having made any progress as a parliamentary and electoral force. They ended up in the worst possible situation.
Throwing Lenin Overboard
In April 1978, at the Ninth Congress – its first congress legally held in Spain since the Civil War – the PCE formally abandoned Leninism. In May 1977, Carrillo had published a book entitled Eurocommunism and the State (Eurocomunismo y Estado). The title was clearly inspired by Lenin’s famous book State and Revolution. But all similarities end there. From the first page to the last Carrillo’s work represents a most thorough and comprehensive break with Marxism.
The central idea is that the historical split between social democracy and communism no longer had any relevance. Apparently, it was all just a misunderstanding. The consequences of this analysis are spelt out clearly when he says: “There is no reason not to overcome the split of 1920 and reach a convergence on the basis of scientific socialism and democracy.”3
This is a most astonishing admission for a leader of the Communist Party to make. It turns out that decades later the Communist Party never had any reason to exist! All the sacrifices made by the communist rank and file for the past half-century are thus frivolously written off at the stroke of a pen. Reading these lines, many Communist Party members must have wondered why they had given their lives to a cause that was merely the result of a slight misunderstanding.
The ‘slight misunderstanding’ was entirely on the part of Santiago Carrillo. The break between communism and social democracy was the result of the betrayal of the leaders of the Second International in 1914, when they abandoned the principles of revolutionary socialism (Marxism) and went over to the position of chauvinism (‘patriotism’).
The leaders of the Second International justified their betrayal by claiming to represent the interests, not of the working class, but of the ‘nation’. But every nation is divided into antagonistic classes: the bankers and capitalists that really rule the nation, and the majority of exploited and dispossessed men and women who are dominated by these privileged layers. To pretend to stand above classes, to represent the ‘nation’ in the abstract, is in reality to represent the interests of the ruling class. This was precisely what occurred in 1914, and it was the basis upon which Lenin advocated a complete break with the treacherous leaders of the social democracy.
This historic break is represented by Carrillo as a historic mistake, the basis of which had been removed. If that was the case, there was no objective reason for the PCE to exist. Following this logic, it should have disbanded or fused with the PSOE. Once this objective was reached, it would be possible to approach sections of the nation that it would be unthinkable for a Communist Party unless they were in power:
“The transforming and revolutionary forces tend to always speak in the exclusive name of one class, the proletariat… they have – we have – to learn to speak on behalf of the vast majority of society, on behalf of the nation.”4
The declared policy of the Spanish Communist Party was for a government of national concentration, including all the parties represented in parliament, from the PCE to the ultra-right-wing Popular Alliance, which still publicly declared its loyalty to Franco. Carrillo succeeded in foisting upon the Communist Party a policy which was far to the right even of the Italian Communist Party, which itself was described by the British journal The Economist as being to the right of the policies of the right-wing of the British Labour Party. The tradition of discipline and obedience to the leadership, plus the belief that what it really involved was a temporary tactic (a belief which had been explicitly rejected by Carrillo in public) enabled the leadership to win all its positions in the Congress.
The abandonment of Leninism at the Communist Party’s 1978 Congress was just a formal recognition of the fact that the party had long ago abandoned any genuine revolutionary position. Very few people even noticed the difference. Morán correctly concluded that Santiago Carrillo was not a communist at all: “He is above all a patriot, a politician who was defined not in relation to parties or classes, but as he himself expressed it, [a man] with a vocation to represent the vital forces of the nation.”5 That is to say, the leader of the PCE had abandoned socialism altogether and gone over to the position of a petty-bourgeois democrat. The truth of the matter was that he had always been just that.
There is a certain logic in what Carrillo wrote. The fact of the matter is that for many decades the Stalinists had abandoned the revolutionary line of Lenin and the Bolshevik party. Behind the revolutionary phrases repeated in a mechanical fashion at party congresses, the reality was that the leaders had been consistently pursuing a line of reformism and class collaborationism that was essentially no different from that of the Social Democracy. All that Carrillo was doing was to admit publicly what he had known privately for a very long time.
Therefore, if there was really no fundamental difference between social democracy and communism, then the PCE had no reason to exist.
Crisis of the Centre
The Suárez government had shown itself to be far too feeble an instrument to carry through an effective policy of wage cuts. Despite all its pretensions, the UCD was not a party at all, but a loose ragbag of disparate, and even contradictory tendencies and personalities held together by the power of attraction to one man, the president, whose success seemed to offer them a promising political future. This cement therefore could only remain strong to the degree that the leader guaranteed them success. The moment that this was called into question, the centrifugal forces that were there from the very beginning were bound to assert themselves, ultimately bringing about the destruction of the so-called union of the centre.
The weakness of the government became apparent at every turn. Suárez the Superman stood exposed as a giant with feet of clay. The crisis of February 1978 and the resignation of Enrique Fuentes Quintana came at a critical moment in the economy. He was replaced by a nonentity by the name of Fernando Abril Martorell. Fuentes Quintana had lasted for seven months and eighteen days. The more perceptive section of the ruling class was compelled to seriously consider other options.
The Spanish press had been filled with rumours about the possibility that the major workers’ party, the Socialist Party, might join a coalition. The party leaders did not deny such a possibility and confined themselves to making mysterious Delphic utterances to the effect that the PSOE was an “alternative of power”. Alfonso Guerra, who liked to describe himself as the Number Two of the PSOE, stated publicly that he had been in contact with five different ministers in the Suárez government who sounded him out individually as to which section of the centre the socialists would be prepared to govern with.
Guerra boasted that the PSOE could “bring down the government in forty-eight hours”, but that the socialists were not sure, at this moment in time, if certain sections, among which he cited the banks, high finance, the Church hierarchy and the army, “would accept a socialist government”.6
The problem was that the Spanish bankers and industrialists realised that the entry of the socialists into the government, even with the guarantee of a coalition with politicians of the centre, could represent a very serious danger to them. They recalled only too well the wave of radicalisation which had swept through Spanish society in the aftermath of the municipal elections, which led to the Socialist-Republican coalition of 1931, and even more so, the enormous mass movement sparked off by the electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936.
The government was constantly torn by splits and divisions, reflecting the inner tensions of the ruling class, which felt itself to be at an impasse, trapped between the inexorable pressures of the economic crisis and the implacable resistance of the working class to any attempt to make them pay for it. It is worth noting that, out of the 165 deputies of the UCD, no fewer than fifty-four were described as ‘independents’. Incredibly, even Suárez himself stood in the election as an independent – presumably independent from his own party! This little detail in itself gives us an indication of the extremely fragile and artificial nature of this political construct.
The Suárez government, faced with a rapidly deteriorating situation, was forced to change course. Fear of social explosions, and a growing realisation that the tight monetary policy was leading to the collapse of Spanish industry, forced Suárez to make an abrupt about-face early in the year. By the end of 1980, the crisis in Spain affected every level of economic, social and political life. The bosses lived in dread of a head-on confrontation with the militant Spanish labour movement. But the depth of the economic crisis made it impossible to arrive at a consensus. There could be no repeat of the Moncloa Pacts.
One of the first acts of the new minister was to offer credit to industry on the most favourable terms. But there were few takers. The Spanish capitalists’ nerves were badly shaken, both by the economic crisis and the increasingly aggressive mood of the workers, now organised in legal trade unions that, between them, accounted for about 4 million members – a higher figure than in the 1930s – and their ranks continued to swell.
At the end of the first quarter of 1978, the general picture of Spanish industry was one of total stagnation, with empty order books, a further reduction of the productive capacity in use and an inexorable growth of stocks of finished products. According to Antonio Garrigues, a prominent industrialist, the only investment came from the state. In a desperate effort to stave off economic collapse, the government was once again handing out money and credit to industry. But this in turn signified a new increase in the money supply, a further rise of inflation, the erosion of the competitive edge gained by the devaluation of the peseta, and, in a few months, a new crisis, another devaluation and a further slamming on of the brakes.
The first months of the new crisis witnessed a great wave of strikes, affecting practically all layers of the working class. Television, refuse collectors, transport, engineering, textiles, chemicals, mining, airport workers, bar staff, building workers, were all involved in bitter disputes over the renewal of labour contracts in the pre-electoral period. These strikes often had an extremely sharp and militant character, owing to the intransigence of the employers who, in many cases, resorted to lockouts, sackings and victimisations, sometimes even refusing point-blank to negotiate with the trade unions or recognise the elected shop stewards’ committees.
The magnificent general strike of the engineering workers in Pamplona, with street demonstrations, barricades and running battles with the police was the most militant action of those workers since the war, exceeding even the general strike of 1973. The main reason why Suárez was forced to call the elections at all was the failure to reach an agreement with the leaders of the main trade unions on the question of a new social contract. After eighteen months of the Pact of the Moncloa, opposition from the Spanish workers compelled their union leadership to oppose another pact. There was no other way out: Suárez had to seek a fresh mandate.
The General Election of 1979
It was in this context that the general elections of 1 March 1979 were held. It was generally expected that the PSOE and PCE would emerge from the elections with increased support. Given the explosive social situation in Spain, the workers’ parties should have done well. Since 1977, unemployment had soared to about 1,300,000. In the Basque Country in particular, one of the most industrially developed parts of Spain, there were two or three factory closures taking place every week.
Yet the leaders of these parties used all their influence to put the brakes on the strike movement, under the ridiculous pretext that such strikes could only further the interests of the extreme right. Instead of leading a serious struggle against the Suárez government, the leaders of the PSOE and PCE leaned over backwards to facilitate its work. On the one hand, the Moncloa Pact had led to the acceptance of wage restraint and falling living standards and, on the other, workers were faced with massive factory closures and an inexorable rise in unemployment.
Despite all this, Adolfo Suárez’s party won 168 out of 350 seats, compared to the PSOE’s 121. Yet only a few months before, the PSOE had been easily leading the UCD in all the polls. Against all the odds, the UCD was returned to power as the party of government, but without the confidently anticipated absolute majority.
Important layers of the working class, having seen their expectations betrayed, opted for abstention, which favoured the UCD. Turnout was eleven points down compared to 1977. With no class alternative to the problems facing the autonomous communities, a whole plethora of small nationalist groups, of both a left- and right-wing character, won sufficient votes to gain seats in parliament. Nevertheless, the total number of votes obtained by the PSOE and the PCE (7.4 million) was greater than the combined vote of the UCD and the CD (Democratic Coalition, formerly the AP) of 7.3 million, but the trickery of the electoral setup allowed the latter to walk away with more deputies.
In reality, the UCD’s success was an illusion. It only won three new deputies, going from 165 to 168, eight fewer than what was needed for an absolute majority. The Socialist Party increased by three deputies, as did the Communist Party. By contrast, Fraga’s new right-wing CD lost seven seats. Suárez had no choice but to look to the party of Fraga for support.
Fraga’s Popular Alliance (Alianza Popular) had tried to present a new and more respectable party of the right, changing its name to the Democratic Coalition (Coalición Democrática) with a view to hiving off the more right-wing elements of the UCD. But they were the great losers in these elections, winning only six per cent of the vote, retaining only nine of the sixteen seats they had previously held. The openly fascist National Union, intimately linked to the sinister Warriors of Christ the King, got only two per cent of the vote, and returned just one MP, Blas Piñar.
If the UCD had lost these elections, all the inner rivalries and tensions which Suárez had managed, with difficulty, to keep under control, would have burst to the surface. On the left of the UCD, self-styled ‘social democrats’ like Fernández-Ordóñez were putting out feelers to the Socialist Party as to the possibility of collaboration in the event of an election defeat. But events took an altogether different turn from what had been expected by these politicians.
The PSOE and the Election
As we have seen, the PSOE increased from 29.3 per cent in 1977 to 30.4 per cent. Its vote went up by 98,000 and it won three more seats, passing from 118 to 121. But this result could have several readings, because it was produced after the incorporation of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) of Tierno Galván and Raúl Morodo and the arithmetical sum of both was higher in 1977 to that obtained in 1979. Mass unemployment and real hunger existed in Andalusia. Yet here the PSOE lost five seats, and the Socialist Party of Andalusia (PSA-PA) increased its number of seats from one to five.
The most striking feature of these elections, however, was the massive drop in the turn-out, which fell from 78.8% in 1977 to 68%. Here, already, we see clear signs of disillusionment with the results of the policy of pacts and consensus that both the PSOE and the PCE were pursuing with a fixation that came close to an obsession. During the election campaign, a massive strike wave swept through Spain. This, far more than the election results, provides a barometer of the mood of the Spanish working class. If the militant mood of the workers was not reflected in increased support for the PSOE and the PCE, it was entirely due to the role of the leadership in the previous eighteen months and particularly during the election campaign itself.
The explanation for the PSOE’s failure, having only taken a similar percentage to that of the previous election, lies principally in their lack of clear opposition to the UCD government. Sections of the population (mainly from the middle classes) could see no fundamental difference between one and the other. With malicious satisfaction, the Financial Times remarked: “The PSOE election programme refers only to one nationalisation – that of the high-tension transmission lines [already partly government-controlled] – and is scarcely more socialist than that of the UCD.”
Reading the speeches of the PSOE leaders, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, in the months before the election, one could form the impression that they were already comfortably installed in the Palace of Moncloa. The only doubt about the elections was the size of their majority. The statesmanlike posturing of the PSOE leaders, their studied moderation and strenuous efforts to avoid anything remotely resembling a serious opposition to the Suárez government bore all the hallmarks of a dress-rehearsal for the moment when they would be called upon to shoulder the burdens of power.
They acted, spoke and thought in a way scarcely distinguishable from the capitalist politicians of the UCD, imagining, no doubt, that this was how moderate labour politicians ought to behave, in order to curry favour with the electorate. All these ridiculous illusions suddenly burst like a soap bubble. The mass of the population, not only the workers but also the small shopkeepers, peasants, pensioners and housewives were disillusioned with the UCD government, but many did not see the PSOE as a viable alternative. The main election slogan of the PSOE was: “A strong government for a secure country.”
To the leaders it all seemed so clear and logical. But in the rank and file there was a growing sense of bewilderment and scepticism. In contrast to 1977, few outdoor rallies and public meetings were held. The politically-advanced workers were obviously disgusted by the shameful campaign of the workers’ leaders. All this accounted for the massive drop in participation. If it was a question of ‘safety first’, Felipe González could not compete with Suárez, who skilfully played the fear card: ‘Either chaos or me’. The only existing TV channel was shamelessly used to whip up a climate of fear, denouncing the PSOE in a scandalous manner. Ninety per cent of the air time was given over to the speeches and posturing of the UCD leader Suárez and his entourage.
On the last day of the campaign at peak viewing time, Suárez appeared on television to accuse the PSOE of defending free abortion subsidised by the taxpayer, the abolition of religious education and advocating a path that leads to “a collectivist and self-managed economy.” Ever the skilful actor, Suárez pronounced these words with a sad voice and the tender look of a kindly uncle who has been forced to tell you in strict confidence some kind of terrible secret. If that was the choice, the electors shrugged their shoulders and voted for the Centre Party on the basis of ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.’
The conduct of González and Carrillo produced a mood of apathy and inertia. The membership of the PSOE had plummeted, and the Young Socialists was wrecked by arbitrary expulsions. This undoubtedly had a negative effect on the morale of socialist activists in the election campaign, when Felipe González veered sharply to the right. Another slogan of the PSOE was “One hundred years of honesty”, to which the prominent PCE leader Ramón Tamames added: “and forty on vacation”. But the Communist Party campaign was no better.
The PCE and the Elections
The PCE’s slogan was an even stranger concoction than that of the PSOE: “Put your vote to work” – whatever that might have meant. The excessively moderate tone of the party’s electoral campaign failed to mobilise the masses or infuse the party rank and file. The most active elements were frustrated and alienated. And for everybody else it made no sense whatsoever to vote for the Communist Party if it was completely indistinguishable from the Socialist Party or the UCD.
Carrillo and the other PCE leaders regarded themselves supreme realists. In reality, they were the worst kind of utopians. There is a law that when there are two parties on the left that defend very similar programmes, the working masses will turn to the one that seems larger and more likely to come to power. Therefore, the PCE’s turn to the right caused an even greater transfer of votes and support to the PSOE.
The PCE increased its share of the vote very slightly from 9.3 per cent to 10.7 per cent (an increase of 228,000 votes) and its number of seats rose from twenty to twenty-three. There were significant increases in areas of high conflicts such as Asturias and Valencia, where the PCE vote went up from ten per cent to 13.7 per cent and from 9.8 per cent to thirteen per cent respectively. Although almost half of the votes and fifteen of the twenty-three deputies had been obtained in two regions (Catalonia and Andalusia), the increases were general in all the provinces, except Barcelona, Girona, Tarragona and Navarre.
The PCE’s electoral campaign was based on the idea that the main and only enemy was Fraga’s Democratic Coalition, and the main and only ally was President Suárez. Consequently, it was the latter that gained and the PCE that lost. The Socialist Party were not afraid to display republican flags in their rallies, while for the PCE it was strictly forbidden, considered to be a provocative act. Jaime Ballesteros regularly reported on this to José María Armero, who in turn could pass on the information to President Suárez to assure him that Carrillo was keeping his word.
There were frequent occasions at PCE rallies where people who dared to raise the tricolour flag were severely beaten, not by the police but by Communist Party stewards. I have already commented on one such incident, which occurred in a PCE rally in Valladolid. When Suárez complained that two republican flags appeared in the rally, the answer came back promptly: “Yes, but we gave the provocateurs hell.”7
The Communist Party experienced similar upheavals, with opposition in the ranks being met with purges. The only party that was keen to support Suárez was, incredibly, the PCE. They were prepared to prop up his government without any conditions, without even asking him to put them in the government. So desperate was Santiago Carrillo to achieve respectability that it seemed he would be prepared for anything.
Even before the election dust had settled some of the PSOE leaders were talking about a parliamentary agreement with the UCD. The Financial Times on 1 March gleefully remarked:
The credit in no small measure should go to the responsible way the PSOE and Communist Party leadership have acted in consensus with Señor Suárez to achieve a stable transition… But this, of course, is harder for the public to see, and in the case of the PSOE and Communist Party militants not so easy to explain.
Despite everything, in the municipal elections of 3 April, the workers’ parties won a crushing victory in the big cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, Malaga, Asturias and others). The combined votes of the PSOE and PCE gave victory to left-wing mayors in the most important municipalities across the country, a result which represented the first clear electoral victory over the UCD.
The National Question and the Election
Perhaps the biggest change in the composition of the new Cortes was the sharp increase in the number of deputies representing radical nationalist and regionalist parties. This reflects one of the most acute problems facing the Spanish ruling class. The national question once again came to the fore with the success of the Basque National Party (PNV, Partido Nacionalista Vasco) and Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union).
After forty years of the most ruthless repression of the different nationalities by Franco, it was inevitable that the accumulated frustrations and national antagonisms would erupt in a violent fashion. The ruling class and its principal party, the UCD, met this elemental movement with a policy that vacillated between the two extremes of repression and concession.
While paying lip-service to the recognition of national identity and aspirations, the Suárez government did its best to reduce the powers of the projected regional assemblies, and rejected outright the right of self-determination. It turned the Basque Country into one enormous prison-house, held down by what amounted to an army of foreign occupation of armed police and Civil Guards.
To their shame, the Socialist and Communist Party leaders, while encouraging the spread of autonomist moods, publicly identified themselves with the basic position of the Suárez government. Prominent labour leaders stated publicly that the solution to the problem of terrorism in the Basque Country was “both by police methods and political methods”.
In these elections, the PSOE saw its gains wiped out by the rising tide of nationalism, losing one seat in Navarre and only returning one MP in the Basque stranglehold of Guipúzcoa. The PNV returned seven MPs and lost one. However, in a truly dramatic development, the left-wing nationalists (the abertzales) represented by two coalitions, Herri Batasuna and Euzkadiko Ezkerra, got 170,000 and 89,000 votes with three seats and one seat respectively.
The PSOE lost a seat in each of the Basque provinces. The leaders’ support for the constitution, which denied the right of self-determination, undermined it in the eyes of the Basque electorate. Txiki Benegas, one of the most prominent leaders of the PSOE in the Basque Country stated that the reason for the electoral failure of the socialists was the so-called policy of “consensus” pursued by Felipe González and the other main party leaders in the previous twelve to eighteen months. That was undoubtedly the case.
The demand for amnesty for all political prisoners resulted in a mass demonstration of workers, which was fired on by Civil Guards, killing one. The reply of the workers was a twenty-four-hour general strike in the Basque Country involving 500,000 workers. This was joined by shopkeepers and small business people, professional people and practically every section of the working population. Yet the Communist Party refused to support the Basque general strike. Had it not been for the sabotage and strike-breaking of the Communist Party and the leaders of the Workers’ Commissions, the general strike would have spread all over Spain and profoundly affected and quickened the tempo of events. But once again, the failure of leadership prepared the way for a swing to the right.
The Workers’ Statute and the AMI
After the March 1979 elections, the government of the UCD was left once more without an absolute majority. The dire economic situation demanded drastic measures, but Suárez knew full well that any attempt to launch a frontal attack against the conditions of the masses could have unpredictable consequences; in fact, 1979 witnessed impressive demonstrations. The second congress of the UCD had to be postponed because of a strike of air traffic controllers.
During the autumn of 1979 Spain witnessed the last great upswing of the struggles of the workers and youth under the UCD government, with 5.7 million workers taking strike action, the defeat of which would deepen the retreat of the labour movement.
For this reason, Suárez had to base his entire policy on a permanent pact with the workers’ parties and the unions. He was constantly forced to recur to a policy of patching things up, which of course failed to satisfy anyone – neither the working class, on the one hand, nor the bourgeoisie, on the other, could be satisfied with such a policy. His economic policy involved a constant yo-yoing between an inflationary policy (stimulating the issue and circulation of money to encourage economic activity) and a deflationary policy (cuts in spending and limitation of the amount of cash in circulation).
The economy grew by a mere 1.5 per cent, followed by a figure of just 0.5 per cent. Unemployment soared, and the confidence of the bourgeoisie sank. As such, the bourgeois press began accusing Suárez of incompetence and posed the need for a reshuffle within the ranks of the UCD, where division and criticisms against Suárez were also multiplying.
The impotence of the Suárez government in the economic field provoked a growing unease among the ruling class. The only solution lay in deepening the cuts in workers’ living standards to increase profit margins. But such a task was impossible without the consent of the workers’ leaders, who were at the same time compelled to demand concessions so as not to completely lose control over the working class. As such, the requirements of the bourgeoisie were never satisfied to the degree that they demanded. This situation was at the root of the permanent crisis of the UCD and the Suárez government throughout those years. The UCD government was weak and ridden with crisis from the very beginning. To the extent that the pressure of the masses decreased, as explained previously, the impatience and irritation of the bourgeoisie with Suárez became daily more evident.
In September, the UCD government submitted its draft ‘Workers’ Statute’ to parliament. This law was widely contested by the ranks of the unions, as it represented a clear step backward – in many cases even with respect to the labour laws that the workers had fought for and won under the Franco regime – on issues such as casualisation, termination of employment, holidays, trade union rights, retirement, etc., whilst certain sectors of the labour market remained entirely unregulated (civil service, domestic work, etc.)
On 14 October, 400,000 workers gathered in Madrid in response to the call of the CCOO. There were general strikes in Granada, the Basque Country and Asturias as well as stoppages in many workplaces; resolutions flooded in from hundreds of workplace union branches across the country against the Workers’ Statute. The union leaders never posed the question of generalising and taking the struggle to its end. Instead, like the leaders of the workers’ parties in parliament, they limited their attempts to applying pressure aimed at improving the law as, in their own words, they had “no intention of overthrowing the Suárez government.”
But this view was not shared by the rank-and-file communists and socialists. Marcelino Camacho, the general secretary of the Workers Commissions and member of the executive committee of the PCE, resigned his seat in parliament in protest at the PCE’s support for the UCD’s labour policies. The frustration and anxiety that existed in every corner of society also broke out among the youth. Hundreds of thousands of students in secondary education, and to a lesser extent in the universities, took to the streets in the most significant student protests in the history of Spain up to that point against the Teaching Institutes Statute and the University Autonomy Law (LAU), which the UCD had drafted. These reactionary laws gave a tremendous impetus to privatisation of public education and the cutting of budgets, whilst they failed to advance the democratic rights of students by so much as an inch.
The centre of the struggle was Madrid but the provinces also bore witness to significant mobilisations during the struggle. ‘Student Co-ordinations’, charged with organising the struggle, were formed by representatives elected in assemblies. These bodies organised strikes and demonstrations across the entire country on the 5, 6 and 7 December 1979. Police repression was brutal, with dozens of students injured in police custody. The police themselves were assisted by fascist bands in attacking the demonstrations. On 6 December, a rally of students in Madrid attracted 25,000 participants.
The struggles reached their highest point by 13 December. The student strike was solid across the schools and universities. By the morning, more than 100,000 students had gathered at the demonstration in Madrid. The same afternoon, the CCOO had convoked its own demonstration against the UCD’s ‘Workers’ Statute’ and in solidarity with the struggle of the Chrysler workers (now Peugeot Talbot) following the sacking of eight workers.
Around 300,000 workers and thousands of students attended the union demonstration. At the moment at which the parallel student demonstration attempted to merge with the union march, which was beginning to dissolve, the police launched a brutal attack firing live ammunition upon the protesters and killing two young students, Emilio Martínez Menéndez and José Luís Montañés, and injuring others. The police detained dozens of students across the entire country.
Yet again the PCE leaders were presented with an opportunity to call a general strike against the ‘Workers’ Statute’, the ‘Teaching Institute Statute’ and the ‘Autonomy Law’ after the enormous display of power and indignation by the workers and students unleashed by these cowardly killings, but they once again failed to take the initiative. With a broad mobilisation, a general strike being the obvious form to take, the leaders of the left could have brought down the Suárez government and forced new elections, which the workers’ parties would have almost certainly won.
Despite this impasse, more student demonstrations were called the next day across the entire Spanish state in protest at the murders and detentions, and workers went on strike in many workplaces. The student protests continued until Christmas and into the New Year, with mobilisations in January and February 1980. As the struggle drew to an end, a young student and militant of a left-wing organisation, Yolanda González, was kidnapped and murdered by two fascist gunmen of the Fuerza Nueva. Again, the workers leaders failed to respond to the stupor that gripped millions of workers and youths in the face of the latest crime of the fascists. Finally, deprived of the necessary support from the workers’ movement, the student mobilisation dwindled into a state of complete exhaustion.
Scarcely had the Workers’ Statute been approved when the UGT signed another social pact with the government and the bosses, the ‘Inter-Sectoral Agreement Framework’ (the AMI), which revolved around salary caps and a driving down of living standards along the same lines as the Moncloa Pacts. In 1979 alone, workers’ salaries lost on average four per cent of their purchasing power. Although the CCOO did not, on account of the opposition from below, initially sign the AMI, neither did they pose working-class struggle against a new accord as an alternative.
The Unions Legalised
As we have seen, the PSOE was legalised in February 1977, while the workers’ unions were finally legalised in April, along with the PCE. Under conditions of illegality, the total number of workers affiliated to the unions remained small: only five per cent of all wage workers by the end of 1976, although the illegal unions were growing. In 1971, the CCOO managed to capture a very significant segment of the enlaces and jurados positions that came up for election.
The situation of the unions changed rapidly when they were legalised during the period in which the pressure of the working class peaked in 1977 and early 1978. Hundreds of thousands of workers and youth joined these organisations, which grew from just 200,000 members between them at the beginning of 1977, to nearly 4 million members by 1978. In this year, fifty-four per cent of all workers were members of a trade union.
In early 1977, soon after emerging from illegality, the UGT, which had long historical traditions and roots in the Spanish working class, was beginning to overtake the Workers’ Commissions in members and influence. Although the Workers’ Commissions maintained themselves as an organisation and an apparatus, they also moved rapidly in the direction of opportunism and class collaborationism.
The signing of the Moncloa Pacts represented a decisive turning point. Under the pressure of Carrillo and the Communist Party leadership, the leaders of the Workers’ Commissions also moved to the right, competing with the UGT to prove which of the two were more anxious to placate the government and the employers. In the end, there was no real difference between the two unions, because of their class collaboration.
Although they did not suffer the same collapse as the Communist Party, the Workers’ Commissions also suffered heavy losses as a result of the opportunist policies of the leadership. They lost their overwhelming support in the working class, which they had earned as a result of many years of struggle and sacrifice on the part of the most militant sections of the class. The policies of the leaders demoralised the activists, many of whom fell into apathy and inactivity.
Like the UGT, the Workers’ Commissions suffered a process of hollowing out and bureaucratisation. They became a mere shadow of their former powerful and militant self. The decline of the Workers’ Commissions was clearly reflected in the union elections in 1982. For the first time the UGT secured a dominant position, gaining 36.5 per cent of the votes throughout the country, against 32.74 per cent for the Workers’ Commissions.
The UGT won majorities in the chemical industry, the energy and transport sector, the food industry, the civil service as well as in the construction business and the mining industry, while CCOO secured majorities in forestry and the garment and leather industries. The defeat of the CCOO in the trade union elections in 1982 was a heavy blow to the morale of the Communist industrial militants.
The Workers’ Movement Begins to Ebb
The previous months marked a turning point in the social and political activity of the masses. All the energies of the bourgeoisie had, since the fall of the dictator, been focused on utilising the workers’ leaders to save Spanish capitalism and restore their control over society little by little. The effectiveness of this policy with respect to the workers’ leaders would have dramatic consequences.
From the fall of the dictator, the broad mass of workers, women and youth had entrusted everything in their leaders. Reluctantly, they accepted as good coin the policies of “consensus, the tightening of belts, the need to make sacrifices to save democracy”, etc., with the hope that all these efforts might serve some purpose, that they might guarantee a dignified life, and with the hope of a better future to come. But, in the course of a few short months, the workers, peasants and housewives came to understand that, despite the calming and demagogic phrases, the change that had taken place had not gone far enough.
Living conditions did not improve. The same people occupied their old posts: the same bureaucrats, the same speculators, the same police, military and torturers, the same bankers, bosses and landlords. The workers were confused, disorientated and demoralised. The ebb of the mass movement led to a loss of confidence. The masses began to doubt their own ability to change the situation. By contrast, the bosses and the old reactionaries acquired a new sense of purpose and assertiveness. Everywhere one saw the same old faces. The idea began to spread that nothing had changed. This created a thoroughly depressed mood, particularly among the activists, which lead to paralysis.
The situation was made still worse by mass unemployment, which deepened the workers sense of helplessness and loss of power. The new economic crisis, which loomed large over the capitalist nations that year, caused the situation to deteriorate even further. The phenomenon of mass unemployment, barely known a couple of years previously, took workers by surprise and stood as a constant threat hanging ominously over them. Inflation (at sixteen per cent in 1979) devoured wages, and in the majority of cases, workers’ struggles went down to defeat.
To the degree that the most active and conscious elements fell into inactivity and despair, their place was taken by those who saw in the new democracy a golden opportunity to enrich themselves, occupying positions of power in the unions and the political parties. This set the final seal on the degeneration of the workers’ organisations in Spain, which in turn became a powerful factor in deepening the mood of depression and alienation.
The years of 1979 to 1982 were years of profound ebb in political and trade union activity of the masses. El reflujo (the ebb) was a period of semi-reaction at all levels of society. The decline in active participation of the working class created favourable conditions for the rise of bureaucracy, corruption and careerism.
Right, Turn!
After four decades of fascism it was inevitable that powerful illusions in bourgeois democracy would grip the minds of the majority. A vague desire for social change without clear understanding of parties and programmes existed at almost all levels of Spanish society. This was fertile ground upon which the reformist leaders of the PSOE and PCE could establish a mass base that would flood the workers’ organisations and dilute their most conscious and militant elements. This process was particularly evident at election time, when the weight of the politically untutored masses made itself felt most clearly.
The right-wing leaders were able to assert themselves more and more. Under legal conditions they enjoyed a freedom of movement that enabled them to acquire a greater independence from the activist base. There began a kind of Dutch auction in which the leaders of the PSOE and PCE competed with themselves to prove who was the most ‘moderate’, respectable and statesmanlike.
The leaders no longer felt any need to prove their socialist or communist credentials to the rank and file. Instead, they addressed themselves to the ruling class and its political representatives. After all, it was necessary to furnish proof that they were no longer any danger to the existing order, and therefore could be trusted with a share in government.
The workers’ parties were inundated with an influx of naive and politically backward elements, together with a layer of careerists, who sensed an opportunity for personal advancement under the new conditions without incurring any risk to themselves. The voracious petty-bourgeois place-seekers, the people who could express themselves eloquently, elbowed aside the old militants to occupy key positions. By degrees, the nature of these parties was transformed.
The workers’ movement was rapidly hollowed out, and the vacuum was filled with new elements who had played no role in the fight against the dictatorship but were now eager to grasp the fruits of a victory that had been won by the sacrifice of others. This transformation was not realised without opposition. There were a series of splits in which the more radical elements attempted to establish new parties of the left.
Since reformist leaders maintained a firm grip on the party apparatus and above all its name, such splits did not cause them any particular concern. They held onto the headquarters, the party press, the paid activists and the cash. Above all, they held onto those names and symbols that were well-known to the masses and acted as a powerful magnet. The attempts to set up alternatives in the form of small and unknown groups were doomed to failure from the start. By excluding themselves in this way, they assisted the right wing in strengthening its grip on the mass organisations.
The Problem of Leadership
The heroism and determination of the working class of Spain was an inspiration to everyone that experienced it. But the movement also had a contradictory character. There are definite limits to what can be achieved through purely spontaneous action without a conscious leadership and a clear programme and perspective. In the struggle against the dictatorship, the Spanish working class attained heights of militancy unequalled by the workers of any other European country. Yet, in the end, they found themselves betrayed and politically expropriated. This magnificent revolutionary movement ultimately ended in defeat. This demands an explanation.
The older generation had been decimated by defeat in the Civil War. Many were killed or imprisoned, others died or withdrew from activity. The new generation had tremendous courage and élan but lacked experience. They were strong enough to overthrow the dictatorship, but they were not strong or conscious enough to stop the fruits of victory slipping through their fingers. In the end, the movement was hijacked by a generation of careerists, social climbers and opportunists of all sorts who elbowed the worker militants to one side and occupied the leading positions.
In the first few months of 1976, or even later, it was entirely possible to have carried out a radical transformation in Spain. The balance of forces was decisively in favour of the working class and against the regime, which really lacked any kind of mass base and was split and completely rotten from the inside. But the process was aborted from the top.
By their actions, the leaders of the Socialist and Communist Parties created an abortion – now known by the comically inappropriate term ‘Democratic Transition’. Of course, it was no such thing. Under the influence of these leaders, the masses took what appeared to be the easy way out: the line of least resistance. They paid a very heavy price for it.
In the decades following the defeat of the Transition, the traditional organisations of the working class experienced an unprecedented degeneration. These new elements brought with them, not only the abandonment of socialism and communism, but in many cases the seeds of overt corruption. The slogan of this new breed of social climbers was: “I am in favour of the emancipation of the working class – one by one, commencing with myself.”
This degeneration was even more severe, if that is possible, in the case of the trade unions. The old militancy was replaced by a cowardly spirit of compromise and so-called realism, which was merely a fig leaf to conceal a policy of class collaboration, retreat and betrayal.
The union leaders – both those of the Workers’ Commissions and the UGT – put forward the slogan of ‘service union’, that is to say, a union that replaces class struggle and militant action to defend workers’ rights and living standards with one that takes membership subs in return for certain services, such as insurance, etc., as a means of diverting them from struggle.
This in turn deepened the disillusionment of the rank and file, leading to a collapse of trade union membership and a loss of authority of the unions in the eyes of the mass of the workers. The membership of the Workers’ Commissions suffered a decline, although not a catastrophic one. On the other hand, the more moderate UGT initially grew in membership, as the new layers of workers under changed circumstances looked for practical solutions to their pressing everyday problems.
The leaders of the Workers’ Commissions came to the conclusion that this was the way to go. For a whole period, there was a competition between the leaders of the Workers’ Commissions and the UGT to see who was the more moderate, the more reasonable, and the more willing to compromise – that is to say, to capitulate to the employers.
The trade union leaders attempted to justify their conduct on the grounds of ‘realism’. In reality, it was precisely the opposite. For every step back that the trade union leaders accepted, the employers demanded three more. Weakness invites aggression. In the end, the hollowness of so-called moderate trade unionism led to a general collapse of trade union membership and even the discrediting of the idea of trade unionism among broad layers of the Spanish working class.
The decline in union membership that began in late 1978, continued through the early 1980s, leaving the union confederations with a dwindling membership and serious financial problems. This served to make the bureaucrats even more cautious, less inclined to back strike action and more inclined to seek deals with the government and the employers behind the backs of the workers.
[1] Gregorio Morán, Miseria y grandeza del Partido Comunista de España (1936-1985), p. 555.
[2] Ibid., p. 584.
[3] Santiago Carrillo, Eurocomunismo y Estado, 1977, p. 133.
[4] Quoted in Gregorio Morán, Miseria y grandeza del Partido Comunista de España (1936-1985).
[5] Ibid., p. 559.
[6] Quoted in Diario 16, 8 May 1978.
[7] See Gregorio Morán, Miseria y grandeza del Partido Comunista de España (1936-1985), p. 555.