50 years after Franco's death: ending the unfinished struggle that led to the fall of the dictatorship

20 November marks the 50th anniversary of the death of the dictator Franco, one of the most sinister and despicable figures in Spanish history. But he was nothing more than the representative of the military caste and the social class that elevated him to his position: the big Spanish bankers, industrialists, and landowners. 

Only through ruthless repression – with hundreds of thousands of people murdered in the Civil War and in the 40 years of dictatorship that followed – was the Spanish bourgeoisie able to crush the revolutionary aspirations of a working class that sought to combat fascism and solve its misery, exploitation, and suffering in the socialist revolution.

[Originally published in Spanish at comunistasrevolucionarios.org]

For more on the Spanish Transition to democracy following Franco’s death, we strongly recommend Alan Woods’ ‘The Great Betrayal’, which combines the author’s first-hand experience of the period, original interviews, a wealth of documentary material, and Marxist analysis. ‘The Great Betrayal’ is available from Wellred Books here.

Today, everyone – from former Francoists, to liberals, to the career politicians of the official left – is congratulating themselves on the ‘democracy’ and the ‘wonderful’ democratic Transition that was established after the dictator's death. 

This ‘Transition’ was so exemplary that, between 1976 and 1982, it claimed the lives of 198 people: workers and youth activists, neighbourhood activists, labour lawyers, left-wing militants, and Basque nationalists. All at the hands of the police, the Civil Guard, members of the army, and fascist gangs protected by the state apparatus. This amounts to one murder every 11 days for six consecutive years.

It is not surprising that the parts of the left that integrated into the regime, represented by the leadership of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the Communist Party (PCE), approve of what happened during the Transition, given their direct responsibility for it. But it is striking that it is the heirs of Francoism, such as the Partido Popular – founded by seven Francoist ministers – and demagogic right-wing Vox, who present themselves as the greatest champions of this period of our history and of the 1978 Constitution.

There is something that does not add up about this ‘model’ Transition. Those who celebrate what happened in those years with the most enthusiasm are those who never condemned Franco's fascist uprising or the crimes of the dictatorship.

The dictatorship died in the streets, not in bed

The reality is that, although the dictator died in bed, the dictatorship died in the streets. The conquest of democratic freedoms was in the first place the product of the struggles of the working class. And also of women, students, and the demands for democratic-national rights in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. 

These freedoms were not brought about by figures such as King Juan Carlos or former Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez. Nothing could be more pathetic than portraying those who were elevated to the highest positions of government by Franco's dictatorship as heroes of democracy. 

Juan Carlos was named Franco's successor by the dictator himself in 1969, and swore allegiance to the principles of the ‘glorious’ National Movement (the fascist declaration of principles that launched Franco's military coup) when he was inaugurated as king on 22 November 1975. 

Adolfo Suárez, before being handpicked by Juan Carlos as prime minister in July 1976, had been national secretary of the National Movement, the Franco regime's sole party. At no time in the years prior to the dictator's death did Juan Carlos or Suárez utter a single complaint or criticism of the lack of freedoms in our country. Juan Carlos was named Franco's successor by the dictator himself in 1969, and swore allegiance to the principles of the ‘glorious’ National Movement / Image: public domain

There was no protest from these people about the torture in police stations, about the workers killed by the police in illegal strikes, or about the death sentences handed down by the dictator's last governments.

These statements are even more pathetic and false today after the publication of the memoirs of this scoundrel and villain, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, officially our ‘King Emeritus’. This scoundrel, who no longer has anything to hide, pours out his hatred for the left in the Spanish State today in these pages, accusing it, for reasons that he does not explain, of having de facto exiled him from the country. 

In reality, Juan Carlos was exiled because of the popular hatred and contempt for him, expressed in countless demonstrations and opinion polls. Like his ancestors – his grandfather Alfonso XIII and the latter's grandmother, Isabel II – the ruling class kicked him out for his corruption and thieving, in order to save their system and, in the case of Juan Carlos, to save the monarchy itself. The former monarch now enjoys a ‘golden exile’, paid for by Spanish taxpayers, in the ‘exemplary’ democracies ruled by his good friends, the satraps of the Persian Gulf. 

In his memoirs, Juan Carlos states unequivocally that: “If I was able to be king, it was thanks to him [Franco].” And he says of the fascist butcher, without blushing: “I respected him enormously, I appreciated his intelligence and his political sense.” Juan Carlos does not stop there, and says openly that: “I never let anyone criticise him in front of me.” 

Here we see the true face of this scoundrel and, in a way, the truth of what happened. But those sycophants who knew the truth and yet servilely flattered the Bourbon king for ‘bringing democracy’ – from former ‘socialist’ Prime Minister Felipe González to former ‘communist’ politician Santiago Carrillo – will forever bear a stigma of infamy engraved on their foreheads.

Who was really afraid of the Transition?

There is a particularly outrageous part of the ‘official’ account of the Transition, that has permeated the discussions of the leadership of the left over the last 50 years, and continues to be repeated with relentless intensity. Its main argument is as follows.

‘Nothing more could be achieved’. ‘The monarchy had to be accepted’ and ‘an amnesty for the crimes of the Franco regime had to be accepted’. ‘We had to leave the big businessmen who supported the dictatorship alone’. ‘We couldn't purge the state apparatus of judges, military personnel, torturers, and those who collaborated with the dictatorship’. ‘We had to agree to the 1978 Constitution’, because ‘there was fear’ among the majority of the population, fear ‘of the continuation of the dictatorship and of a military coup by the ‘hard line’ of Francoism’.

We thoroughly disagree with this blatant lie. If there really was ‘fear’ among the majority of the population, why did Franco's side need to make significant democratic concessions? Would it not be more plausible to conclude that if the decisive sector of Franco's regime was forced to make democratic concessions, it was because they were the ones truly afraid?

We shall present a few facts that support this position. The most significant factor in the struggle against the dictatorship was the role of the working class. From the early 1960s onwards, Spanish workers launched a strike movement that was unprecedented in the history of the dictatorship. 

The upward curve of the strike movement shows how their consciousness developed: in the three-year period 1964-66, 171,000 working days were lost to labour disputes; in 1967-69, 345,000; in 1970-72, 846,000; and in 1973-75, 1,548,000. Subsequently, after Franco's death, the strike movement took on unprecedented dimensions: from 1976 to mid-1978, no less than 13,240,000 working days were lost in labour disputes.

The main driving force behind these struggles was the CCOO trade union, led by the Communist Party (PCE). In 1975, the CCOO took over responsibility for the majority of workers in large companies that had previously been part of the Francoist union (the so-called Vertical Union). The labour agreements of the Franco regime were smashed by the direct action of the workers, who elected their own representatives through what were called ‘Representative Committees’. And all this during a dictatorship!

The workers' unions and left-wing parties were only legalised because of the fears of the Suárez government and big business / Image: public domain

At the same time, between 1975 and 1977, hundreds of Neighbourhood Associations were created throughout Spain. These were mass popular organisations in working-class neighbourhoods and villages, with tens of thousands of participants, who fought against the poor conditions and infrastructure in working-class neighbourhoods. Here too, the PCE was the determining force.

All the institutions on which the old regime rested – such as the army and the Church – were fractured and in crisis. An example of this was the clandestine creation in August 1974 of the Democratic Military Union (UMD), made up of dozens of officers and non-commissioned officers of the Spanish army who opposed Franco's dictatorship. 

By the time the dictatorship was dismantled (July 1975), it had 200 members, with a presence even in the Civil Guard. If this was the atmosphere among the officers, we can imagine the atmosphere among the rank-and-file troops.

In the Catholic Church, a growing number of grassroots clergy sympathised with the workers' struggles and left-wing movements, allowing parish halls to be used for all kinds of clandestine meetings. The Catholic Action Workers' Brotherhood (HOAC) and the Catholic Workers' Youth (JOC), designed by the Church to spread religion in working-class neighbourhoods, shifted to the left to the point that they considered ‘socialism’ as the true Christian ideal.

The truth is that every time the ‘hard-line’ sectors of Francoism moved towards bloody repression (Vitoria in March 1976, Montejurra in May 1976, the crimes against labour lawyers in Calle Atocha in January 1977, or the Week for Amnesty in the Basque Country in May 1977), what they provoked was a radicalisation and an insurrectionary response among the working class and youth. 

It was this – and nothing else – that gave rise to the internal struggle within the Francoist bureaucracy in which the ‘reformist’ sector prevailed. The workers' unions and left-wing parties were only legalised because of the fears of the Suárez government and big business of a popular uprising following the crimes of Atocha.

In reality, a revolutionary crisis similar to that which had occurred a couple of years earlier in Greece and Portugal was brewing in Spain in 1975-1977. An attempted military coup in those years would have provoked a revolutionary uprising. The attempts by a sector of the Francoist apparatus to push in this direction simply reflected their losing touch with reality, which is why they were displaced.

The role of the left-wing leadership

We must say it clearly: it was not the strength of the reaction, but the betrayal of the left-wing leadership (PCE and PSOE) that was responsible for the fact that the mass struggle against the Franco regime did not culminate in a radical transformation of Spanish society along socialist lines.

The regime and the monarchy lacked authority. Big business, fearful of a revolutionary outbreak, moved capital and foreign currency abroad, leading to numerous factory closures and a sharp rise in unemployment. If the leaders of the PCE and PSOE had called for the organisation of a revolutionary Constituent Assembly, to elect an alternative government to the official one, this would have received massive support. 

The basis for convening such a Constituent Assembly already existed in the form of workers' committees representing workplaces, neighbourhood associations, and student assemblies in universities and colleges. What was needed was to extend them to all workplaces and to all cities and towns in the country. A Constituent Assembly of delegates elected from these grassroots organisations would have been a million times more representative than the parliament that emerged from the semi-democratic elections of June 1977. 

In these elections, young people between the ages of 18 and 21 (two million people) and Spanish emigrants (one million people), who overwhelmingly supported the left, were prevented from voting. Excessive weight was given to the votes of the most depopulated provinces, in order to dilute the weight of the large cities where the working class was concentrated. 

In fact, the left-wing parties won more votes than the right-wing parties, but the latter won an absolute majority of MPs and senators! They were then able to draft the 1978 Constitution. 

The 1978 Constitution was not a ‘social contract’ amicably signed between two parts of society, but the result of a political betrayal of the majority of people’s expectations of revolutionary change / Image: Wikimedia Commons

The truth must be told. Instead of calling for a boycott, the leaders of the PCE and the PSOE agreed to participate in these semi-democratic elections. They had agreed in advance with Suárez that it would be the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD), the party of former Francoists that had ‘converted’ to democracy, that would steer the ‘Transition’, which included preserving the monarchy. 

A left-wing government of the Communist Party and the two socialist parties (PSOE and PSP) would have won by a large margin if the elections had been truly democratic. But it would have been subjected to unbearable pressure from below to proclaim the republic, radically purge the state apparatus and implement socialist expropriation measures. This was the last thing that the leaders of these parties, Carrillo and González, wanted to do.

A government of the working class, of the progressive sectors of the middle class, of the youth, and of the oppressed nationalities would have been followed by millions. Given the power demonstrated by the workers' movement at that time, a well-prepared and organised indefinite general strike, flooding the streets with millions of workers, would have paralysed any attempt at a coup or popular repression. 

The repressive forces of the state would have been split in half, with a decisive sector at the base of the police and army going over to the side of the workers. A relatively peaceful transition to socialism could have taken place. The fundamental levers of the economy could have been nationalised through democratic grassroots organisations, and the democratic republic proclaimed with maximum freedoms, including the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities, which would overwhelmingly have chosen to remain in a voluntary union of Iberian socialist republics.

Unfortunately, the leaders of the left lacked the slightest confidence in the struggle of the working class and the oppressed. Particular responsibility lies with the leaders of the PCE, who at that time had a hegemonic position in the workers' movement, the neighbourhood associations and the youth.

The most serious failing was that the leaders of the PCE and the PSOE did not use the enormous force of millions of workers, women, young people, professionals, impoverished small landowners and progressive intellectuals to ensure a democratic socialist regime. They didn’t even achieve a more advanced form of bourgeois democracy. The monarchy inherited from Francoism was maintained with its hated flag, the Francoist apparatus with its hundreds of fascists, torturers and murderers remained intact, the ‘indissoluble unity’ of Spain under the surveillance of Franco's army was accepted, etc. 

The labour and left-wing leaders also endorsed all kinds of ‘social’ and economic pacts (such as the Moncloa Pacts) that placed the entire burden of the capitalist crisis of those years on the shoulders of working-class families. All this led to a decline in the class struggle and to profound political disappointment and demoralisation that lasted for decades.

The 1978 Constitution was not a ‘social contract’ amicably signed between two parts of society, but the result of a political betrayal of the majority of people’s expectations of revolutionary change. It was the leadership of the left, mainly the PCE, that invented the story of the danger of a military coup if popular demands went too far, which was used to contain and frustrate the revolutionary process that was gestating within Spanish society.

The state apparatus: Francoism without Franco

The farce and fraud of the so-called ‘Transition’ is best expressed in the state apparatus we have today. It is a direct and unpurified legacy of the Franco dictatorship, despite 50 years of ‘democracy’. In Portugal and Greece in the 1970s, and even in France or Italy at the end of the Second World War, there was a significant, albeit partial, purge of the military personnel, police officers and judges involved in the military and fascist dictatorships. In Spain, not a single individual was purged. On the contrary, most of them were promoted during the years of ‘democracy’, including police torturers.

This was the case with police officer Antonio González Pacheco, better known as ‘Billy the Kid’, who achieved enormous fame for the torture he carried out in the Political-Social Brigade – the police branch specialising in prosecuting political ‘crimes’ – and who never paid the price for it. 

Another notorious case is that of torturer José Sainz González, known as ‘Pepe the Fat’, who became the first director general of the police under Spain’s ‘democracy’ and received numerous decorations. In the 1980s, Felipe González's government appointed him delegate of the Ministry of the Interior in the Basque Country. There, he accumulated a long list of accusations for torturing left-wing activists, nationalists, trade unionists and demonstrators with no political affiliation. 

Another torturer decorated by Spain’s democracy was Manuel Ballesteros García, honorary police commissioner, famous for his reprisals against trade unionists, democrats, communists and Basque nationalists. The same is true of Antonio Juan Creix, who retained his decorations and pay after the Transition, despite his long record of torture and murder in Barcelona.

These are just a few notable examples, to which hundreds more could be added. In the Civil Guard, a force with a long history of crimes against the working class and farm labourers, we see the same thing. Suffice it to say that the current head of the Civil Guard in Madrid, Diego Pérez de los Cobos, who was reinstated to his post by court order after being dismissed by the Sánchez government, was the son of a member of the fascist Fuerza Nueva, to which he himself belonged in his youth.

In the judiciary, 10 of the 16 judges, and several of the prosecutors, who served on Franco's Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP) – responsible for trying political crimes from 1963 to 1976 – were promoted under Spain’s ‘democracy’ to the Supreme Court and the National Court. Among them, we would highlight Timoteo Buendía, José F. Mateu, Antonio Torres-Dulce, Jaime Mariscal de Gante, Enrique Amat, José de Hijas, José Garralda, Antonio González, Luis Poyatos and Félix Hernández. 

Right up to the last days of the regime, they were accomplices to the tortures carried out by the Political-Social Brigade. They never opened an investigation into them, not even for injuries, for 50 years. For his part, Judge Ismael Moreno, a notorious right-winger who currently serves in the National Court, comes from the Francoist police force, which he joined in 1974.

The situation is similar for the senior officials of the Franco regime. A few years ago, political scientist and journalist Lluc Salellas published a book entitled El franquismo que no marcha, about which he said: 

“I researched the lives of Franco's last 50 ministers and found that none of them were demoted under democracy. On the contrary, half of them ended up on the boards of large companies, and the other half in politics.”

A clear example was Rodolfo Martín Villa, a former senior official under Franco since the 1950s and Minister of the Interior in 1976, when five workers were murdered in Vitoria. He ended up as a director of utility company Endesa and then president of television company Sogecable. The honorary president of La Caixa, José Vilarasau Salat, was appointed managing director of Telefónica in 1966, and later held several senior positions in the Ministry of Finance during the Franco regime.

Another example was Antonio Barrera de Irimo, first vice-president of Franco's government, who had the anarchist activist Salvador Puig Antich assassinated. He later became a director of Telefónica, Banco Hispano, Hipotecario and Hispamer. As Salellas states: 

“Félix Millet said it. We are 400 families and we are always the same ones.”

One case mentioned by Salellas is that of Demetrio Carceller, a Falangist and minister under Franco, who founded the Estrella Damm beer empire. Another is the case of the Urquijo family: one brother was a minister and the other was president of the electricity utility company Iberdrola. Other prominent figures from the late Franco era, having converted into ‘democrats’, also did very well. The son of Torcuato Fernández Miranda, Enrique Fernández Miranda, chairs the Price Waterhouse Coopers Foundation.

And what about the army's officer corps? As in the case with the police and judicial apparatus, all the senior military leaders remained in their posts. They have retained to this day all the material privileges granted to them by the Franco regime: private hospitals and holiday homes, high salaries, etc. 

The handful of officers suspected of leftist sympathies have been purged without any objection from the socialist governments in power. This was the case with the members of the UMD, who would never regain their military careers. Meanwhile, several of those sentenced for the pro-Francoist 23-F coup attempt – lieutenants and captains – continued their careers, with significant promotions.

To see the democratic credentials, not of the old Francoist dinosaurs in the army (most of whom are now dead) but of their heirs apparent, who reached the peak of their careers during ‘democracy’, let us recall an episode that occurred a few years ago. In a WhatsApp chat of retired air force officers, one of them suggested, with the approval of the others, that “more than 26 million sons of bitches should be shot” for their left-wing sympathies. That is 60 percent of the population. 

This year, more than 40 retired military personnel, all of whom held high positions in the army ‘under democracy’, signed a manifesto defending Francoism, called Plataforma 2025. It defines Franco as “a heroic soldier” and invokes the name “Crusade of Liberation” for Franco's civil war of 1936-1939.

The police, military and judicial apparatuses are the quintessence of reaction in the Spanish State today. They enjoy outrageous material privileges by plundering the public coffers which are fed by the sweat and exploitation of the Spanish working class. Demolishing this state apparatus is the basic condition, not only for socialism, but even for achieving greater democratic rights.

Lessons

Neither the current regime nor its Constitution are capable of undertaking the basic changes necessary to satisfy the social and democratic needs of the majority of the population. We must point out the unfinished democratic tasks that require resolution: the proclamation of a democratic republic; the complete smashing of the state apparatus of judges, military and police left intact from Francoism; the complete separation of Church and State; as well as the right of the oppressed nationalities to decide their own fate.

Genuine sovereignty cannot consist of a series of political rights listed on paper. It must be complemented by the collective ownership of the fundamental levers of the economy and the natural resources of our territories, in order to plan them democratically in the interests of people’s welfare and fully satisfying pressing social needs.

In short, we must link the struggle for a democratic Republic of the Iberian peoples, voluntarily federated on an equal footing, to the struggle for the socialist transformation of society. That would be the first step towards the establishment of a socialist federation of Europe, a prelude to a socialist world without borders.

To achieve this task, the new generation must apply itself to a study of the revolutionary struggle against Francoism and the so-called ‘democratic Transition’. We must draw the correct lessons from these historical processes and avoid the mistakes of the past, so as to ensure the success of our current struggle.