Fiery souls
Raymond Carr
Dictatorship and Political Dissent: workers and students in Franco's Spain Jose Maravall (Tavistock Publications £7.95) This book has cheered me up considerably for two reasons. Firstly, much sociology since Weber and Durkheim is an unread able collection of jargon-riddled statements of the obvious. Dictatorship and Dissent is eminently readable; it has style. Secondly, it is a proof that a Spanish intellectual has merged from the .trauma of forty years of Francoism uncontaminated by the windy rhetoric begotten by the regime and, alas, inherited by some of its most dedicated opponents. Maravall is a scholar of Euro pean stature; a proof that the old Francoist tourist slogan 'Spain is different' no longer describes the cultural landscape of that country in its totality.
Maravall asks: Where does Francoism fit in the taxonomy of authoritarian political systems? By the 1970s Falangism, the Spanish edition of Fascism, had been quietly shelved for a new meld of the American way of life and Catholic authoritarianism in a state committed to rapid industrial growth. Its apostles were the pious whizz kids of the Opus Dei. Social conflict, the planners of this Holy Mafia predicted, would vanish when per capita incomes doubled. With television sets, Franco once remarked, why should people want politics?
But, as Maravall points out, the new product was unstable. A market economy dependent on Western Europe could not maintain a cordon sanitaire to keep out ideas more attractive than the poor pro ducts of the regime's intellectuals. By the seventies you could buy 'subversive' lit erature from Gide to Marx in any book shop. But a modicum of ideological tolerance, as a concomitant of consumer's choice in a booming economy, did not bring the power to transmute ideas into criticism at the level of organized politics. Repression was a Damocles sword held over any polit ical activity. 'Management by the regime of the boundaries between the two worlds (ideological tolerance and repression) was skilful and it conveyed an image of change, liberalization and abundance.' The opposition for years prophesied the imminent collapse of Francoism. Franco died in his bed with the arm of St Teresa at his side and plugged into a battery of ultra-modern medical machines —a symbol of the Spain he ruled.
Maravall deals with two streams of opposition to Francoism: that of the workers and the students. In democratic societies students rebel from frustrated idealism in a milieu where there are no great causes, from a desire to practise on the defenceless microcosm of a university the social engineering they learn in books, at worst from boredom. l'ous les comediens ne sont pas au theatre'. Their self-obsession is rewarded by a certain notoriety which vanishes when they have obtained —or failed to obtain —their degrees.
In authoritarian societies there is a great cause — liberty — and the reward of successful action can be prison or political office in a successor regime. Student radicalism is altogether a more serious affair. Maravall traces with precision its evolution in Franco's Spain. Starting as the concern of a self-selected elite coming from dissident backgrounds, it became a mass, organized movement with its own subculture — a derivative of the Marxism which it was the regime's declared intent to 'burn from the Spanish soul'.
By 1956 fifteen years of total domination of the university apparatus had failed to produce a conformist youth. By 1965 the claim for a democratic student union produced a succession of sit-ins. Politics became obsessional. 'I was utterly absorbed by politics, in conspiratorial activities, with political meetings the whole fucking day'. Now, in a democracy, student radicals find their occupation gone; with most of the student body saturated with public politics only the graffiti on the walls remain as a monument to a movement now silent.
In its last stages the student rebels aimed at the abolition of the university itself as an instrument for the transmission of culture and its utilization as a field for sexual and social experiment. They did not succeed, but the legacy of Francoism is a mass university (Madrid has 150,000 students) discredited and without a purpose.
That the Spanish universities had become mass universities illustrates the profoundest oontradiction of latterday Francoism. It wanted to foster a modern industrial society within an authoritarian regime set in Western Europe. A capitalist society demands universities to turn out its trained servants; but the Schools of Economics and Political Science produced, not docile technocrats, but student radicals.
Maravall shows the same contradictions at work in the world of labour. It was not only the workers who demanded the replacement of the old official, hierarchical unions by representative unions; go-ahead entrepreneurs wanted to make productivity deals with leaders who could make the deals stick on the shop floor. Francoism, which had set out to destroy trade unionism, was
torced to recognize collective bargain and the election of shop stewards. Give that any genuine workers' union could n be contained within the system, `ordinan working-class demands spiralled into ra ical attacks on the regime itself; or, Maravall puts it in the language of his cra 'isolated changes in the production syste led to dysfunctions with other institution areas'. Politicization came within the CO munist party's policy of `entrism' (standin: for election in the official unions), a Troia horse tactic rejected — mistakenly — by lb' Socialists who have paid a heavy price go their syndical virginity. This is a fine study of the politics an sociology of opposition under a die' tatorship. It helps to explain the total col' lapse of Francoism in the election of 1971. Maravall argues that the success of the Socialist party was the result of `persistini ideological loyalties in working-class coin' munities'. It was also due to hammering home at every electoral meeting that Socialism = real democracy. This won vote including from those who were uncoil' vinced by Carrillo's leopard-like change r° Eurocommunism and democratic pie alism. The future of the Spanish len depends on whether what Eurocommunist! call the 'alliance of workers and forces 01 culture' can be forged and win votes frole Felipe Gonzalez. If the results in Alicante and Asturias are an indication it is —surprig surprise — the Communists who are making ground.
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