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Seventy years since the Spanish Civil War
by repost Tuesday, Mar. 14, 2006 at 11:33 AM
Right wing in Spain attempts to rehabilitate
Franco
Part One
By Paul Mitchell and Vicky Short
13 March 2006
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This is the first of a three-part series
On November 20, 1975 Spanish dictator General
Francisco Franco died. Unlike Adolf Hitler, whose
dreams of a "Thousand Year Reich" ended as the Soviet
Red Army entered Berlin in 1945, or the Italian
fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who was hung upside
down by partisans in a Milan market place, the
dictatorship established by Franco (1892-1975)
survived for nearly 40 years.
Yet some 30 years after his passing, the Franco period
has become the subject of an increasingly bitter
"history war" within Spain. On one side stand
often-serious historians who are generally sympathetic
to the Popular Front government of bourgeois
republican parties elected in 1936, led by President
Manuel Azaña and supported by the Socialist Party
(Partido Socialista Obrero Español—PSOE) and Communist
Party (Partido Comunista de España—PCE). On the other
side stand the right-wing "revisionist" historians
supported by sections of Spain's ruling elite, who are
seeking to revive the old fascist myths that portrayed
Franco as the saviour of democracy.
In truth, Spain's history cannot be properly
understood from either of these two standpoints. It
was not at heart a question of Franco versus the
Popular Front. Rather, what took place in Spain was a
counter-revolution, prepared by the Popular Front and
consummated by Franco's coup, whose consequences
continue to reverberate to this day.
What cannot be disputed is the terror unleashed after
the Spanish garrisons were instructed to seize the
cities on July 17, 1936. Franco oversaw the execution
by the Nationalist Army and Falangist death squads of
approximately 300,000 political opponents, the
imprisonment of 500,000 more, and the forced exile of
another 500,000 during and after the Civil War
(1936-1939).
He used slave labour to rebuild Spain's infrastructure
and construct a gigantic monument to the Nationalist
victory, the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los
Caídos), which now houses his tomb and the tomb of
José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the
fascist Falange.
Under Franco, the country's cultural institutions were
purged. Nearly all of the nation's university
lecturers and journalists were removed and 7,000
school teachers were imprisoned. Many were executed
using a much-favoured method—the garrotte. Political
parties and trade unions were outlawed and a massive,
repressive state apparatus was built to stamp out
opposition and dissent.
To this day, tens of thousands of Franco's victims lie
in unmarked mass graves outside the main cities of
Spain. Yet nobody has ever been prosecuted for these
crimes, nor have the sentences passed by Franco's
military tribunals been overturned. Successive
governments have refused to support the small groups
of volunteers who have tried to exhume the bodies.
While the revisionist historians are unable to ignore
the atrocities, they seek to justify them instead. One
such historian, a favourite of the right-wing Popular
Party (PP), is the former Maoist Pio Moa. In his
latest book, Franco—a Historical Balance, Moa tries to
justify the repressive measures carried out by the
dictatorship. Noting that Franco's uprising against
the Popular Front government was fundamentally
directed at the working class and the "multifarious
revolution" it had undertaken, he identifies the PCE
as the leadership of this revolutionary movement and
claims that if the Communists had been successful the
repression would have been much greater.
Moa uses the stock-in-trade falsehoods of the right
wing, equating communism with the
counter-revolutiona
established by Stalin in the Soviet Union. But the
usurpation of power by the Stalinist bureaucracy in
the Soviet Union involved the destruction of all those
genuine Marxists who fought for the perspective of
world socialist revolution that had inspired and
guided the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was a conflict
that witnessed the transformation of the parties of
the Third (Communist) International into
counter-revolutiona
bureaucracy.
Between the opening of the Moscow Trials of the Old
Bolsheviks in August 1936 and the assassination of
Leon Trotsky four years later, every significant
representative of Marxism in the Soviet Union was
executed. In Spain, the PCE and Stalin's secret
service (GPU) death squads directed their repression
at all their left-wing opponents, particularly the
supporters of Trotsky, in order to bring the
revolutionary movement of the working class back under
the control of the liberal bourgeois forces in the
Popular Front, and prevent a social revolution that
would have radicalised Europe and threatened the rule
of the bureaucracy in the USSR. It was the betrayal of
the revolution by Stalinism, aided and abetted by
social democracy and the anarchists, which enabled
Franco to succeed.
Moa's work is ideological propaganda in defence of
fascism. That he is able to present such a perspective
as serious history, however, is due in part to the
pact of silence about the Franco era that the PSOE and
PCE made with the political representatives of the
fascist regime during the transition from dictatorship
to parliamentary rule in the 1970s. They feared that
the revolutionary struggles that erupted in
neighbouring Portugal in 1974 as the fascist regime
there disintegrated would spread to Spain and rekindle
the struggles that were left unresolved since the
defeated revolution.
While the right wing feels emboldened enough to
rewrite history, it warns its left opponents in the
political establishment not to break their pact of
silence. Such a warning came from one of the most
notorious representatives of the fascist regime,
Manuel Fraga, Franco's ex-information minister, who
instead of spending the last decades in jail, has
spent most of them as president of the Galician
autonomous government. He founded the hated Francoist
Popular Alliance and moulded it into today's PP.
After remarking, "I have no doubt that the judgment of
history on Franco will be positive," he warned PSOE
Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero not to give in to
pressure to compensate the victims of the Franco
regime. "It is best to leave the dead in peace.
History needs to be respected, but it should not be
opened up again," he said. (1)
The PSOE's response to Francoism
Fraga need have no fear. Diego López Garrido, PSOE
general secretary, declared that Franco was "part of
pre-history" and chose to focus on celebrating the
30th anniversary of Juan Carlos I's crowning as the
king of Spain.
By promoting the democratic credentials of the king,
groomed since childhood by Franco to be his successor,
the PSOE and the PCE-led United Left (Izquierda
Unida—IU) lend credence to the argument that Franco's
dictatorship was the necessary precursor to the
establishment of a parliamentary monarchy in 1978.
Spanish daily El Pais, founded in 1976 during the
transition to democracy and a close supporter of the
PSOE, published a 72-page eulogy to the king entitled
"El Rey del Cambio" (The King of Change). It included
contributions from Felipe González, PSOE prime
minister from 1982 to 1996, the ex-general secretary
of the PCE, Santiago Carrillo, and Miguel Primo de
Rivera, the brother of Falange founder José Antonio
Primo de Rivera.
Gaspar Llamazares, the IU leader, declared in El Pais
that despite the king being Franco's chosen successor,
it did not stop his party "valuing the services
rendered by the king during the transition and
especially during the coup of February 23, 1981" (2)
Llamazares is referring to the occasion when army
officers, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero,
stormed a televised session of the new Spanish
parliament and held deputies hostage for several
hours. Llamazares's remarks are a stark reminder that
the PCE rallied behind the king as the Franco regime
came to an end and helped the bourgeoisie prevent the
working class from overthrowing capitalism and
settling accounts with fascism. During the abortive
coup of 1981, the Stalinist PCE organised mass
demonstrations together with the PSOE in support of
the king Juan Carlos.
Spain at Franco's birth
The Spain into which Franco, the son of a civil
servant in the naval office, was born in the year 1892
had, as Karl Marx pointed out, long since "exhibited
all the symptoms of an inglorious and protracted
putrefaction." (3)
In 1898, Spain suffered a humiliating defeat at the
hands of the newly emerging imperialist power, the
United States, and lost almost all of its remaining
colonies, including Cuba. At that time, Spanish
agriculture accounted for over half the national
income and almost two-thirds of exports, and was
concentrated in large and medium-sized estates.
Although most of the population lived on the land, the
majority were landless wage labourers or sharecroppers
subsisting and working in the most primitive
conditions.
Spanish manufacturing, concentrated in Catalonia and
the Basque Country, had expanded between 1898 and
1918, generating explosive struggles by the working
class. The working class movement exhibited a strong
tendency toward anarchism, expressing itself most
strongly in influence of the anarcho-syndicalist
National Confederation of Labour (Confederació
Nacional del Trabajo—CNT), which was founded in 1911.
The CNT's wide influence was due in part to the fact
that followers of the anarchist leader Bakunin had
older roots in Spain than the Marxists. However, it
was also a result of the policies of the social
democratic PSOE, founded in 1879 by Pablo Iglesias,
and the General Workers Union (Uníon General de
Trabajadores—
At the end of the nineteenth century, the PSOE shared
the "two-stage" perspective of the other social
democratic parties of the Second International,
according to which countries with a belated capitalist
development and lacking the economic prerequisites for
socialism would first have to go through a
bourgeois-democrati
protracted period of capitalist rule involving
republican forms of government, land reform, and
separation of church and state before there could
eventually be a socialist revolution. In this
two-stage theory of revolution, the role of a Marxist
party was limited to using the pressure of the working
class to force the liberal bourgeoisie into an
alliance so as to complete the bourgeois-democrati
revolution.
However, Trotsky, in his theory of Permanent
Revolution, first formulated in 1905, insisted that
the starting point of any perspective had to be the
international development of capitalist economy and
the world class struggle, and not the economic level
or internal class relations of any particular country,
which were only a specific expression of these
international tendencies.
In the epoch of imperialism, with the world's markets
and resources divided between the major powers, the
bourgeoisie of the more backward countries could no
longer carry out the tasks once associated with the
democratic revolution. They feared the independent
action of an already developed working class far more
than the threat from the old feudal order or from the
imperialist powers.
Only the working class could carry out the democratic
revolution, but having taken power, it could not limit
itself to democratic tasks. It would be compelled to
carry out measures of a socialist character. The
limitations on the construction of socialism imposed
by backwardness and isolation could be overcome only
through the development of the revolution by the
working class in the more advanced countries,
culminating in a global socialist transformation.
In Spain, the task of carrying out a social revolution
was posed clearly. Its economic and political
development had been highly uneven, involving all
sorts of compromises with the old feudal order, and
had given the military great political weight. (Some
50 pronunciamentos or coups took place between 1814
and 1923 in support of one ruling faction or another.)
Spain was, nevertheless, a capitalist power ruled by a
bourgeois-landlord class that still had colonial
possessions in Africa. Its ruling elite was far more
concerned with suppressing Spain's highly militant
working class than eliminating feudal remnants and
perfecting Spanish democracy. Particularly after the
Russian Revolution of October 1917, preventing a
revolutionary struggle by the working class became the
essential aim of all sections of the ruling elite,
whether or not they were formally democrats.
The development of the workers' movement in Spain
With the outbreak of the First World War, the parties
of the social democratic Second International rallied
to the defence of their own national states. (In
neutral Spain, the PSOE supported Britain and France).
The end of the war saw a wave of revolutionary
struggles sweep across Europe, reaching its high point
with the October Revolution.
The PSOE leader Iglesias is said to have sunk into a
deep gloom on hearing of the Bolshevik victory and the
enthusiasm with which it was met by the Spanish
working class. The country's first nationwide general
strike took place in the same year, and there were
rural revolts by landless labourers and insurrections
in the cities, leading to a state of war being
declared in Barcelona. There were ten changes of
government in the period 1919-1921, known as the
"three Bolshevik years."
Franco, who had been sent to Morocco in 1912 as a
young military officer, where he fought in a brutal
colonial war, showed his value to the ruling classes
by applying the lessons he had learnt in North Africa
to suppressing the struggles of the Spanish working
class. Brought back to mainland Spain, he participated
in the murderous assault on the 1917 miners strike in
Asturias in which eighty workers were killed. Soon
after, he was rewarded with an appointment as
second-in-command of the newly formed Spanish Foreign
Legion and gained a reputation for his ruthless terror
methods against tribal fighters in North Africa.
The revolutionary wave in Europe was defeated, either
through the betrayal of the social democratic parties
or the inexperience of the young Communist parties.
But in Spain, the "Bolshevik years" had had a profound
effect on the PSOE, and a split within its ranks led
to the formation in 1923 of the Communist Party of
Spain (PCE). This included a faction called the
Oposicíon Comunista Española, led by Juan Andrade,
that was sympathetic to Trotsky's Left Opposition in
the Soviet Communist Party.
The Left Opposition was formed in 1923 in response to
the growth of bureaucracy within the Bolshevik party
and took up the fight against Stalin's theory of
"socialism in one country." This theory advanced the
reactionary and nationalist position that the Soviet
Union could realise socialism within its own borders
independently of the struggles of the international
working class. The growth of a bureaucracy within the
Bolshevik party and the state apparatus fed upon the
protracted isolation of the Soviet Union that was
bound up with the defeats of the European
revolution—particula
leaders of the Communist Party failed to mobilise the
working class for the seizure of power.
The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union
fatally affected the prospects for world revolution.
Under the influence of Stalinism, the Comintern
rejected the perspective of Permanent Revolution and
adopted a two-stage theory of revolution, which
justified collaborating with bourgeois forces and
politically subordinating the working class. The most
disastrous example of the application of this policy
occurred in China, where the Communist Party was
instructed to subordinate itself to the bourgeois
Kuomintang, leading to the bloody defeat of the 1927
revolution. In the same year, Trotsky and the Left
Opposition were expelled from the Russian Communist
Party and the sections of the Comintern were purged of
their supporters.
Primo de Rivera's coup
During this period, the bourgeoisie took advantage of
the ebbing revolutionary wave to mount an
international offensive against the working class. In
Italy, the king appointed Benito Mussolini as prime
minister in 1922, after tens of thousands of his
fascist supporters marched on Rome. In Spain, General
Miguel Primo de Rivera, backed by the industrial
bourgeoisie, carried out a coup in 1923 sanctioned by
King Alfonso XIII, initiating seven years of military
dictatorship. In 1928, Rivera's regime recalled
Franco, who by now was commander of the Spanish Legion
in Morocco, to Spain and amalgamated the four military
academies into one under his directorship.
The world economic crisis that ushered in the Great
Depression in 1929 had a huge impact on Spain. As
Trotsky explained, just as with previous military
regimes that had struggled to satisfy the appetites of
the ruling class out of a meagre national income,
Primo de Rivera "fell even without a new military
coup, he simply deflated, like a tire that runs over a
nail." (4)
To be continued
Footnotes:
(1) Tremlett G., "Silence Over Franco Broken by New
Spanish Generation," November 20, 2005, The Observer
(2) El Pais, November 23, 2005
(3) Marx K., Articles on revolutionary Spain in the
New York Herald Tribune 1854
(4) Trotsky L., "The Revolution in Spain," January 24,
1931, in The Spanish Revolution (1931-1939), published
by Pathfinder Press, New York, 1973, Page 72.
Gràcies als USA, Cuba, P, Rico, Filipines deixaren de ser colònies espanyoles. Gràcies als USA s'independitzà Irlanda d'un Estat fins i tot tradicional aliat dels USA (Anglaterra)
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