More Spanish history I didn't learn

From the Working Class History Facebook page.
www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073.1073741830.294706370714520/891601351025016/?type=3


​On this day, 11 June 1973, workers in Pamplona, Spain defied general Franco's dictatorship and went on strike. The stoppage spread through the auto industry and eventually to bars and restaurants and lasted at least a week. This is a great short book on the mass strikes which swept Spain following Franco's death:




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Wildcat Spain encounters democracy, 1976-1978 - Los Incontrolados

Comrades,
When the situation after the death of Franco cried out to the capitalists 'make your play', the workers answering with their strikes said 'not any more'. By enthroning Juan Carlos, the neo-francoists still believed that they could at their bidding and under the conditions laid down by them accord a place in the democracy, to the bureaucrats of the opposition. From the beginning, however, they had to accept the help the opposition could not but otherwise proffer them, an assistance which they provided effectively and which was the determinant cause in liquidating the most important strike movement since the civil war.
Since the first Government of the Monarchy (1), some 100,000 workers, principally in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country have been on strike. The movement spread and at the same time became more radical. With its practice of assemblies and the formation of flying pickets, it surpassed all organisations and endangered the legalism of the bureaucrats. By January, strikes were taking place all over Spain. But it was in Madrid where the autonomous movement of the workers fought its first great battle involving 320,000 workers, principally in the building and metal working industries. The minister for union affairs called for a cease-fire to which the USO, CC.OO and UGT agreed, saying, 'it's neither a question of retarding nor of radicalising the strikes but of finding a negotiable solution.' The principal liquidators of the strikes were to be the Stalinists who while unable to control them, could at least block them. They were the first to accept the promises of the bosses, the bosses the first to renege on them, and the Stalinists, in turn, the first to accept this reneging. Ariza (2) himself, dismissed from Perkins, (3) called on his work-mates to 'continue working normally', which illustrates in caricature the impotence of the CC.OO, and the consciousness of such impotency in utilising the strike as a support for Stalinist politics. In managing to smash the most important strike - Standard Electric (4) - with false information, cheating at the polls, underhand agreements and unrepresentative delegates and everything else that the Stalinists long experience in manipulation and the art of lying had taught them, they succeeded in breaking and demoralising the strike front. First came the big engineering firms, then the smaller ones, then all of the others on strike. The government militarised the post, Renfe (5) and the metro: dismissals, sanctions, arrests and threats did the rest.
Following the principle, sustained with every trick in the book, of an 'ordered retreat so as to regroup at a later date', one by one the strikes collapsed in El Bajo Llobregat, in Malaga, in Valladolid, Barcelona, Tarragona, Elda, Allicante. . . the strikes that continued, like Laforsa in Bajo Llobregat, the three Michelin factories, Roca in Gava, Vers Hutchinson and Terpel in Madrid, remained isolated and doomed to collapse from exhaustion. And in Vitoria, where the strikers' assembly movement had come to the point beyond which only revolution lies, where all recuperation was disarmed and bullets alone could stop it, the guns of the police spouted democracy's last word while the moralising lamentations of the opposition provided harmony. All the defenders of the bourgeois order with their tear-soaked handkerchiefs had been saved for the day.
The battle that started in Madrid and ended in Vitoria the first collision of the proletariat with an opposition henceforth in tow to francoism. The sharing out of repressive tasks was settled and the police completed what the lies and manoeuvres of the bureaucrats could not. Camacho speaking about 'strike mania' opportunely recalls Jesus Hernandez (6) commenting on the 'mania for seizing and collectivising'. In Madrid and in the rest of Spain the return to work was a very costly victory for the battered opposition, they paid dearly to keep their union dyke standing. As a result, the Stalinists had to abandon their project of taking over the CNS vertical union 'with all the lifts in working order', because it was really 'out of order', and a useless vehicle for all concerned. Having to resort to the base to recuperate the assemblies, the Stalinists had to renounce assuming from above the monopoly of workers representation. Forced to go along with the UGT and USO, whose liquidationist capacity was appreciably less, they joined in the negotiations with government and the bosses. Although they recuperated the parallel unionism of the committees formed in each company and the negotiating committees set up from above and outside of the assemblies, it didn't help them. But this parallel unionism, obliged to go through the assemblies, could not last for very long when the latter ceased to function. And when the assemblies were in ascension the lies of parallel unionism had to triumph completely if it did not want to 1ose in one assembly everything achieved in the rest. The assemblies of strikers, however imperfect their control over the struggle, contain the possibility of total autonomy in making and carrying out decisions and have to suppress all external representation. In conclusion, the sad role that the politico-union opposition played throughout the present historical period was that of supporting the government no matter what, even to its own detriment, without ever being able to guarantee peace.