The Formation of a New Workers' Movement

With the establishment of the Franco regime (1939–1978) after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the workers' movement practically disappeared as a political and social subject. This destruction was obviously quantitative but was also qualitative—with the quantitative identifying the magnitude of the project and the qualitative representing its ultimate purpose.

On the quantitative side, according to the most recent calculations, 75,527 persons were executed by the new regime. This calculation excludes over one-half of the Spanish provinces, for which we lack reliable research. Therefore, the actual number has been estimated as 140,000 executions. This number is most likely too low because of two important facts that should be kept in mind. First, the levels of repression varied. Among the provinces that were not fully investigated are some (such as Badajoz or Madrid) that because of the intensity of the repression that they experienced probably had a death toll that would exceed a simple estimate based on what occurred in other provinces with—most likely—less repression. Moreover, if this were not enough, Francoism not only was a regime that denied memory and history through its public actions but also drastically manipulated the historical archives that were supposed to document its actions. Thus, it is not unusual to find in the records of this period—if an event was recorded at all—that the cause of death from repression is listed as “internal hemorrhage,” “traumatic shock,” or “traumatic bulbar hemorrhage.” Indeed, all of these cases presented shock or hemorrhage, but these clinical signs were not the cause of death; rather, it was the bullet that had produced them. This concealment of the causes of death has led to an exhaustive analysis of the case of Huelva province, which concluded that if 2,500 persons were recorded in the archives as victims of the Francoist repression, there were an additional 2,500 victims who were never recorded. Therefore, we can project that the repression is underestimated by at least 50 percent and that an estimate of 280,000 victims is most likely closer to the truth.Footnote ³ To these executed victims, we must add the 280,000 who were jailed, the 440,000 who were in exile, and the 325,000 who were purged.

Analyses of the fascist phenomenon usually reveal a distinction between the coercive aspect of this type of regime and its generation of a social consensus. If fascism is projected, both in its own era and in the historical images that we have inherited, to be one of the political systems with the highest extermination rates in the twentieth century, then it is also true that these regimes were built with the consent—and at times the applause—of part of their populations. Thus, there would be two types of fascism—two ways of seeing and perceiving it for those who lived its reality. However, in the Spanish case, if this statement is true for an analysis of the forty years of dictatorship, it is not true for the origins of Franco's fascism. Repression was also the beginning of the path to consensus. The systematic nature of repression, which was crowned by imposing a General Case—the investigation, indictment, and trial of crimes allegedly committed under the Republic—on the whole country, has led an important historian to state that “not even in Nazi Germany … did such a system with those characteristics exist.”Footnote ⁴ The evident purpose of this system was to break the traditional forms of solidarity, using a forced informing that did not permit turning back, but that also heralded something more: the foundation of new networks that effectively supported Francoism.Footnote ⁵ In this sense, it was not an indiscriminate repression, a product of revenge, typical of a country that experienced a civil war. The repression primarily affected the Republican social base (producing a 71 percent increase in suicides in Spain during the 1940s of those who preferred death to confronting the new Francoist world),Footnote ⁶ and among them the political, social, and cultural cadres of the civil society of the Republic stood out. The children of these cadres were also victimized to ensure that what the regime considered to be a Marxist psychopathology did not reproduce itself in the next generation. The repression also targeted the liberal professionals who had participated in the great reformist works of the previous period and, notably, the popular classes. This policy was clearly a class-based repression (unlike the Nazi racial repression), which explains its intensity, but also its limits.

The objective was to build a new national community that was spiritually and materially purged, regenerated, and entirely integrated into the New State fascist project. However, in Spain, this process of political domination and economic exploitation, which other fascist regimes partly externalized in the construction of their respective empires, was applied to a part of their own population. One of the main objectives of the regime was a total despoiling of the culture and organization of the Spanish working class; the guarantee that it would not reconstitute itself was based on rhetoric and an organization that replaced the old class-based unionism: national-syndicalism and the Vertical Trade Union, or the Spanish Trade Union Organization (OSE in Spanish), which workers were forced to join as producers, comparable to businessmen, and which was controlled by a Francoist union hierarchy.

That was the reality of the initial repression when most leftist activists either were disappeared and murdered, imprisoned, or exiled while the Republican social base experienced a broad process of purging, repression, and existential enclosure. Furthermore, the creation of mass organizations was imposed with the purpose of reigning in and controlling the population, particularly the working class. Francoism aimed not only to eradicate the past but also to install the future, not only to repress but also to persist. Doubtless, this period was not a propitious one for labor unions. But despite this fact (and surprisingly, if we compare it with similar realities under homologous dictatorships), it was this defeated workers' movement that organized strikes in such cities as Manresa in 1946, such provinces as Vizcaya in 1947, and such metropolises as Barcelona in 1951.Footnote ⁷ From the start, the workers' movement was the only protagonist capable of defying the dictatorship.

During the period from 1956 to 1962, the explosion of isolated conflicts yielded to a new model of “waves of conflict.” In this model, the strike action would begin in an epicenter characterized by great class homogeneity in economic, social, and cultural terms. Class-based communities, such as the metal workers of Vizcaya Province in 1956 or, particularly, the miners from the Asturias region in 1958 and 1962, maintained strong internal solidarity ties and clear markers of class identity that allowed them to initiate strikes despite coordination difficulties and the context of dictatorship. This epicenter quickly attracted the concentration of repressive resources, usually in the form of a State of Emergency decree for a defined territory, “liberating” the other class-based communities from police pressure. In this new context, these latter groups were given the opportunity to initiate conflicts that previously were impossible without paying a huge cost in terms of repression. The conflicts were ended by quickly forged agreements on salary increases as the only way to stop the extension of the strike wave. Finally, the necessity for the government to regain social control led to the initiation of direct or indirect negotiations with the strike epicenter. In this model and with uneven success, depending on the cycle, the class centers became mobilizing legends (the Asturias myth was renewed during those years in the frame of class representation); furthermore, these groups and their external networks gained significant salary increases in a syncopated form and within the context of the concrete tempo of the wave. Thus, the 1956 wave recovered, for the first time, the compensation levels that preceded the Civil War; the 1962 wave produced significant salary raises that partly alleviated the effect of the 1959 Stabilization Plan on worker incomes. Moreover, a logic that associated salary raises with increases in the cost of living was established. The 1962 strike wave was the most complete and extended of this model (with the mobilization of 200,000 to 650,000 workers according to different sourcesFootnote ⁸) but was also the last of its type. Indeed, when that wave dissipated, what followed as a business reaction against previous worker victories was the extension of a new model of labor relations based on the 1958 Collective Bargaining Law. This law legalized the implementation of a new standard of labor flexibility at the factory level in large enterprises and a production sector that increased productivity by promoting the extension of the Fordist model of intensive labor, rather than the introduction of new technologies to the production process. However, although the law was approved in 1958, it was not until the end of the 1962 conflicts that its accelerated application began, characterized by an entrepreneurial reaction against previous labor victories.

Together with the 1963 minimum-wage decree that, in practice, reduced some of the gains obtained at the end of the 1962 strike wave, the progressive establishment of agreements at the factory and sector levels allowed the extension of work for bonuses, linking compensation and wage increases to greater productivity. Previously, beginning in 1956 within the “waves of conflict” context, improvements in working conditions were achieved by private pacts between workers and entrepreneurs. After 1962, the entrepreneurs took the initiative, establishing specific labor models at the level of the factory and sector and marking their own negotiation tempo with contacts and representatives of the Spanish Trade Union Organization, which was the regime's union. This new model of labor relations fragmented the different worker realities, ending the possibility of “waves of conflict.” But, as a result, it created a key opportunity for social protest. During these years, political and social activists internalized and processed the new realities, producing a transition toward a new type of workers' movement.Footnote ⁹

The preceding conflict model moved from a general wave to a specific conflict, which occurred precisely because of the wave's existence; subsequently, the specific conflict, which originally had developed in large companies that had reached an agreement and that had sufficient resources to confront the conflict by themselves, no longer extended to the State arena but remained within local areas of influence. However, this change in the morphology of working-class conflict would still take a number of years to mature. At the start, during the first half of the sixties, this new conflict model obtained partial successes in the large enterprises, although it would soon display its weaknesses. The model's sequence usually followed these stages: 1) small labor conflicts in the enterprise; 2) formation of a worker commission to negotiate; 3) partial success; 4) escalation of the conflict; 5) failed attempts to externalize the conflict beyond the enterprise to obtain solidarity in the form of strikes in other companies, demonstrations, and money to sustain the conflict; 6) the company's firing of all of the workers with the possibility of rehire on an individual basis in order to end the strike; and 7) the workers' return to the company, which fires the principal organizers of the strike. In this context, the limited improvements won through this conflict model guaranteed its reproduction during a short period of time, but the repression against the main activists in the factory and the lack of resources to address a sustained conflict produced a syncopated collective action.Footnote ¹⁰ Furthermore, if this scenario was the reality in large companies, it was in medium and small enterprises that the implementation of the productivist model yielded the harshest consequences on workers. During the 1963–1966 cycle, medium-sized businesses were subjected to several of the most intense conflicts in terms of duration. There the establishment of the new model assumed an aggressiveness that took back all previous worker gains. While this phenomenon occurred in medium-sized companies, in small companies lacking their own collective agreements working conditions were at the whim of negotiations within the regime's unions, in which the workers did not have any real representation.

The perception of these limitations and their slow metabolization by worker activists resulted in the creation of organizing centers in the form of worker commissions that transcended the factory. The first formulations of worker commissions emerged on different paths between 1962 and 1964. In certain cases they were still associated with the previous negotiation model and the “waves of conflict” morphology, such as the Vizcaya Provincial Workers Commission.Footnote ¹¹ In other cases involving an accelerated transition, the centers were linked to the penetration of opposition union connections within the official Spanish Trade Union Organization (as was the case of the Madrid Metal Workers CommissionFootnote ¹² or the Seville Commission of Members, Associates, Juries, and Metal WorkersFootnote ¹³) or outside the structures of the Vertical Trade Union (as with the formation of the Barcelona Workers CommissionFootnote ¹⁴). Nonetheless, the organizational diversity in the birth of the new workers' movement structures maintained as a common characteristic the attempt to link the diverse challenges and typologies of worker concentration to an organization that transcended the sphere of the factory. Thus, through a process that began in 1963 and reached a certain maturation in the main concentration of workers of the country in 1966, these new organizational formulas allowed them to establish the relationship between the different problematics that faced the workers' movement.Footnote ¹⁵

Thanks to this organization, large factories would begin to nourish themselves on new solidarity from other sectors of the labor movement in the form of material and organizational resources. This solidarity would allow the conflict to be sustained for a time; while on certain occasions, solidarity strikes would occur in other enterprises, thereby amplifying the conflict until it became a visible problem of public order. Medium and small enterprises also benefited from this new morphology of labor conflict that was supported by new organizational formulas. On the one hand, when the conditions were right, the mobilization rhythms of large concentrations of workers were adapted to the negotiation of local and provincial collective agreements that affected the majority of the workers. On the other hand, when the pooling of organizational resources began to rise, especially during the 1966 union elections, so did the capacity of worker representatives to infiltrate the Spanish Trade Union Organization and participate in the negotiation of working conditions.Footnote ¹⁶ This process, despite interruptions and strong regional inequalities, eventually produced a strongly integrated worker movement model and an accelerated and sustained growth of labor conflict in Spain, particularly after 1967. The process had its own privileged, local sphere of action and organization where it promoted relationships between diverse forms of worker concentrations; however, parallel to this transformation and deepening, this process had profound political consequences. It was simultaneously political and social, in which one could not be explained without the other because the Spanish economic development model in the sixties was not comprehensible outside the political factors that promoted an intensive Fordism model. In the absence of the social policies of welfare states, this production model depended on the ability of managers to discipline the working class during the act of production.

Expanding the Scope of the Possible

During one of the first meetings to organize a Workers Commission [CCOO], a 17-year-old youngster inaugurated the assembly with the following words: “that this is public, and everybody can come here, and that the concerns of workers were going to be discussed.”Footnote ¹⁷ The affirmation that the new movement was public and that it would address the concerns of workers (which might seem obvious to us today) under Francoism meant the end of an opposition that could only act through clandestine political militancy and whose only objective was producing the fall of the regime. Until then, except in the case of the student movement that in a limited way presaged the process that the blue-collar workers' movement would extend and would affect many other sectors,Footnote ¹⁸ opposing the regime meant that a militant had to join an existing political organization and engage in clandestine political activity. The arrival of the workers' movement, which organized openly in the work and public spheres, allowed the interrelation of different militants and, importantly, the integration of people who were not necessarily politically committed but who were willing to fight for concrete demands. In this way, a potentially unlimited space was opened up to militants. In addition, the will to form a public movement implied a struggle to redefine what was impossible under the Franco regime. This determination, integrated with the requirement that the movement be public if it expected to attain its main objective of improving life for the majority, was rooted in and obtained strength from a conflict model with successful results. Without this success, the movement's capacity to survive despite the repression, on a path where others had failed, would be incomprehensible. This capacity implied a new exercise of the rights of assembly, association, expression, demonstration, and strike; furthermore, these rights would broaden gradually, undoubtedly at the cost of repression. This process posed a basic challenge to Francoism and its control of public space because the broadening of these rights meant the erosion of one of the constitutive facets of the regime: the eradication of all forms of social and political dissidence.

With these new practices, the workers' movement not only opened a political space (or secured spaces of freedom in the terminology of the period) for itself but also paved the way for other actors with a less solid social base. At the same time, the labor movement provided a repertoire of proven collective actions that could be used by others, and the movement opened up the field of possible action. Furthermore, as in the case of the first gender, youth, and local residents' movements, the organizational advances outside the factory allowed these sectors to start organizations (including the Young Workers Commission, the Women's Democratic Movement, and even the Neighborhood Workers Commissions) within the very bosom of the labor organization and to await their maturation into autonomous movements during the seventies.Footnote ¹⁹ This not only allowed the emergence of additional social movements, but also facilitated the initial mobilization of resources from civil society or the cultural world. Admittedly, these actors could not confront the regime during those early times, but they could express their solidarity with the new social movements via manifestos or public actions.

In fact, the ability of the workers' movement to maintain its dual identity as a strongly integrated social movement and as the main political force under the Franco regime was the key to its survival. It was not for nothing that the worker commissions of this period were not defined as union movements, but as sociopolitical movements.Footnote ²⁰ This process was clearly demonstrated when the regime initiated its fullest attempt to put an end to this new phenomenon during 1967–1970, explicitly banning the Worker Commissions (which were never legal) in March 1967, annulling collective bargaining in November 1967, imposing a 5.9 percent cap on wage increases in 1969, and decreeing a State of Emergency from January to March of 1969. All of these events were accompanied by increasing arrests of the new Worker Commission activists. In this short period of time, the workers' movement suffered a major organizational diversification, which was partly polemical because of the diverse responses to the new situation and because of the different political options that were presented within it. In this context, the radical Left in Catalonia, which was then led by the Workers Front of Catalunya (Front Obrer de Catalunya–FOC), came to dominate and lead the labor organizations in the Catalan capital, first advocating the deepening of the Enterprise Worker Commissions and later promoting expansion of the Zone Worker Commissions. In the Basque Country, the Workers Commissions were dominant, comprised of a host of groups, such as Euzkadiko Sozialisten Batasuna (ESBA), Euzkadi Union Action (ASE), Euskadi Ta Askatasuna-Berri (ETA-Berri), and Labor Front-Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (FO-ETA). At the same time, the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista Español–PCE) and the Unified Catalan Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya–PSUC), the predominant communist parties in Spain and Catalonia, impelled the first Galician National Meeting of Worker Commissions, the creation of the Catalan National Worker Commission (CONC in Spanish), and the celebration of the First Assembly of Valencian Worker Commissions. This process, for its part, ensured the continuous territorial extension of the new organizational model, maintained the organizations' presence in the public space, and increased the coordination level. The organizational diversification also correlated with the diverse repertoire of collective actions among those groups that defended the centrality of the struggle in the factory (in order to break salary caps and dampen down the repression of public actions) and those groups that even more intensely defended actions in the streets and neighborhoods, with new ways of acting in order to avoid the repression.Footnote ²¹ These mutations were also accompanied by a double phenomenon associated with the central political characteristics that the new social movement had developed: solidarity and the replacement of fallen militants. These two factors were deeply intertwined with the changes that provoked the emergence of the workers' movement, and the movement's perception of the repression and its consequences—without which, along with the phenomenon of constant territorial expansion of the new workers' movement, it is not possible to understand the movement's survival under the worst conditions.

The fact that the workers' movement was a public movement not only transformed the movement itself, but also transformed the characteristics of the repression in a concrete way. From the start of the movement's irruption into the public sphere and its use of public action, clandestine militants whose activities were unknown (sometimes even to their close associates) were no longer arrested, tortured, and jailed. Instead, repressive force was exerted against a fellow worker who had fought for workers' rights, and with him a collective struggle was suppressed; repressive force was exerted against a social worker who had struggled to improve life in a neighborhood, and with her the possibility of improving living conditions was suppressed; and repressive force was exerted against a young man who had attempted to create social centers where people could live a better life, and with him that possibility was suppressed. If these new activists were well-known, then the repression was also publically exposed. This reality distilled the attitude of the social networks closer to the workers' movement. Now when a militant was detained and imprisoned in the principal centers of the new workers' movement, he would not be economically helpless, thanks to the solidarity committees; moreover, his job could even be saved for him in certain enterprises in which the labor movement was particularly strong.

At the same time, in the different organizational forms that the workers' movement took and in the spaces of its collective actions, the imprisoned militants were replaced by new militants who arrived at the front lines through a process of distilling of attitudes that increasingly affected the most diverse social sectors. For example, before a May Day demonstration, if the police disarticulated the principal organizers, they would encounter the surprise that the city's priests had taken over; alternatively, if the coordination for a group of worker commissions was dismantled, then it would be rapidly reconstituted by young militants, who were sometimes extremely young.Footnote ²² In the end, this phenomenon guaranteed the very survival of the workers' movement, despite the fact that in certain places the repression successfully (but temporarily) short-circuited the movement,Footnote ²³ producing a new relationship between political and social militancy and the fabric of society. In fact, the very appearance of the movement created a new subject between the regime and the anti-Franco opposition that completely changed their tactical and strategic relationship. With regard to its capacity to overcome the repressive phenomenon, the main centers of political organization, whose constant destruction had been typical of the fifties and early sixties, now had more space, as the regime concentrated on dismantling the social movement. This process allowed stabilization of clandestine political organizations that regenerated the social movements when the latter were hit by the repression.Footnote ²⁴

In this new framework, in which the political subject was constructed from the realities and necessities of the social subject, generating a completely new reality, the workers' movement survived and stabilized itself as a phenomenon under Francoism. During the seventies, the workers' movement extended itself and pluralized its reality, affecting increasingly broad bands of territory and social sectors. In fact, the very survival of the workers' movement during the 1969 State of Emergency (when Francoism made its most serious effort to completely eradicate the movement) resulted as much from the capacity to resist that the movement demonstrated at its main centers as from the fact that it was a complete surprise at the time. What was repressed in the traditional centers of the labor movement (Catalonia, the Basque Country, Madrid, or Asturias) now expanded way beyond them. So, in 1970, the number of workers in conflict was higher outside the spaces where the workers' protest had begun.

During this process, the solidarity network that wove together the workers' movement with other social movements and with an alternative society to the official one, constituted a central pole of anti-Francoism. This network was articulated around concentric solidarity circles and a capacity to respond that went from the emblematic factories to the medium and small plants; from the workers' movement to other social movements, particularly in neighborhoods; and finally, from social movements to an emerging social fabric composed of committed entities and individuals. It was certainly an uneven reality, depending on the territory. In Catalonia, this continuum was particularly dense, symbolized in the articulation of almost the entire political, social, and cultural opposition on a single platform, such as the Catalonia Assembly; in the Basque Country, where the opposition also had an undeniable strength, anti-Franco unity was articulated more around the struggle against repression than at the social or political level; whereas in Madrid, the workers' movement was a protagonist that was less integrated into a weaker civil society and was defined by its location in the capital of the national State.Footnote ²⁵ Although the process was uneven, it eventually penetrated almost all of the country, way beyond the principal provincial capitals.Footnote ²⁶

Moreover, it is precisely in the process of articulating an anti-Francoist civil society where we find the genetics of the relationship between social movements, collective action, and political change that surreptitiously but profoundly was taking place during the early seventies. The social movements generated spaces of freedom, common objectives for the opposition, and alternative programs for society. The civil society associated with these movements metabolized and amplified these proposals, creating an alternative culture to the official one, which extended itself to different social sectors. Finally, in the principal industrial centers of the country, the political power was forced to abandon the public social spaces and seclude itself behind the social control that was guaranteed by a repression that, precisely because of this process, was increasingly ruthless toward the end of the dictatorship. It was a struggle to control the public arena in terms of social, cultural, and, finally, political hegemony. The battlefield was located in the communication links that every complex society establishes, and its heart resided in the social movements.Footnote ²⁷ But it was with the “biological fact” of Franco's death, that the rhythms of the social, cultural, and political dynamics (which in history follow different and sometimes separate tempos) came together in a single temporal space. If the bases of the relation between social movements and political change were generated during the sixties by the workers' movement, producing specific responses from activists of the workers' movement, the changes that they internalized, in turn, generated profound transformations in the forms and possibilities of political action. It was at the end of 1975 that all of the resources of the anti-Franco opposition were put in play, among them the workers' movement itself.

A Movement in Times of Political Change

With the death of the dictator, the struggle over public space assumed a new dimension. Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who was Minister of the Interior during the dictatorship, made that clear by affirming, “The street is mine.” Certainly, at a time when the regime was politically disoriented, knowing to whom the streets belonged in a country that lacked the mechanisms for assessing what the population really thought became a virtual plebiscite. Fraga's challenge was settled during the first half of 1976; labor conflict exploded beginning in December 1975. From November 1975 on, labor conflicts took off. During 1975, half a million workers had lost 10 million work hours because of conflicts; in 1976, the number reached 3.5 million workers, who lost 110 million work hours. Spain, a country in which the rights to associate, gather, demonstrate, and strike were forbidden and penalized by law, was at the top of European labor conflict.

The province of Barcelona, the three provinces of the Basque Country, and Navarra, Madrid, and Asturias spearheaded this “battle for the street,” as it was defined by Barcelona's civilian governor. However, the battle also went well beyond these locations, affecting the urban geography of the entire country. In northern Spain, worker mobilization reached its peak in March, starting with the solidarity strikes that were initiated by events in the city of Vitoria, in which the police killed five workers. In response, 150,000 workers went on strike in Vizcaya province, and another 150,000 workers went on strike in Guipúzcoa, paralyzing the Navarra region, which lived through strong confrontations for four days in its capital city of Pamplona.Footnote ²⁸ Although the mobilization initiated by the events in Vitoria was a conflict catalyzer, each province followed its own rhythms during the 1976 conflict wave. In Vizcaya, during a year in which the province had thirteen general strikes, the culmination occurred during the great general strike of September 27.Footnote ²⁹ In Navarra, the struggle for a Provincial Contract Agreement began early in the year, transcending the struggle within the enterprise and the industrial sector in an attempt to unify the dispersed interests of the working class, mobilizing 35,000 people on February 22, 1976. Parallel to the contract dispute, a constant mobilization in search of amnesty completely paralyzed Pamplona and northern Navarra on September 27, where even before, following a policy of occupying public spaces, 100,000 people had protested during the celebration of the feast of San Fermín.Footnote ³⁰ After years of dampened conflict, Asturias reentered the struggle at the top of the list of labor conflicts, with strikes in the metallurgical companies Duro-Falguera and Endesa, which completely paralyzed Aviles province. A new confrontation occurred in the Hunosa mining company after years of unrest, resulting in a 20,000-person pro-amnesty demonstration on July 15.Footnote ³¹ Nor was the Galicia region a stranger to this situation, with agitation that focused on the construction and metallurgical strikes in the cities of Vigo and La Coruña and with the intense conflict that occurred throughout the year in Astano (in the city of Ferrol).Footnote ³²

Madrid, the national capital and State headquarters, was paralyzed in January 1976, even without a declaration of an open general strike, by a gathering of up to 300,000 strikers from different sectors.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, in Barcelona, which was the other great metropolis of the Francoist State and a center of conflict during the final years of Francoism, the strikes of the services sector expanded, while the factory conflicts grew exponentially.Footnote ³⁴ Finally, the great mobilization cycle of 1976 affected almost all of Spain. In many locations, this cycle heralded the first emergence of open labor conflicts, and many sectors unexpectedly joined the conflict for the first time. However, somewhat isolated conflicts existed within the mobilizations, with a character that was qualitatively distinct. There were local or regional political general strikes that contained and contributed, in those moments, elements of political rupture with the old regime, introducing new variables during the decisive years of political change. Despite being localized phenomena, the Baix Llobregat county general strike in January 1976, the strike in the city of Sabadell in February 1976, the Vitoria strike in March, and the strike in Córdoba were the most visible parts of a process that demonstrated the impossibility of addressing the future outside of the demands expressed on the street if there was no substantial political change.Footnote ³⁵

In fact, the worker mobilization during the first half of 1976 produced, by the end of that year, the fall of the first government under the restored monarchy, which operated within a Francoist and reformist context that did not prefigure a liberal democracy. This mobilization also shaped the political agenda of the monarchy's second government, which was formed in June 1976 with an acceptance of the unavoidable demands for amnesty for the anti-Francoist political prisoners and the acceptance of multi-party electoral competition in the future.Footnote ³⁶ In a sense, it was the action of the social movements—especially the workers' movement—that brought about the ultimate democratization of the country. Certainly, this mobilization, despite its breadth and depth, did not bring about the fall of the regime. In this sense, the loyalty of the coercive apparatus of the State to the regime until its end was key; but this apparatus could not survive, despite any number of internal reforms, without controlling the conflicts that were occurring throughout entire regions such as Galicia, Asturias, the Basque Country, Navarra, Madrid, or Catalonia. In this context, any political alternative—whether from the regime or the opposition—that wanted to be viable had to take into account the following reality: Only by addressing the major political demands expressed on the street was it possible to guarantee the political and economic survival of the elites in the country, even though this meant an absolute transformation of the political regime and, with it, the end of the dictatorship. And this reality ultimately prevailed. For the most active component of the workers' movement it was a victory—but also a defeat.

During the summer of 1976, the pre-institutionalization of part of the anti-Francoist opposition began: what was at stake was no longer whether the regime would fall, but who would have the best cards to play in the new political system. It was through this process that the relationship between political anti-Francoism, the social movements, and civil society started to change. The social movements that were previously at the center of change—particularly the workers' movement—now became cards that could force a change of rhythm at the negotiating table, which was no longer located in the street. With a social conflict that was increasingly detached from politics, a transition from offensive mobilizations to defensive mobilizations occurred by the end of the decade. Wages increased above capital gains in Spain during the first half of the seventies, only to decrease toward the end of the decade, with the entrepreneurs recovering the initiative they had lost. Probably, it was then that one of the greatest periods of social and political protagonism of the Spanish workers' movement in the twentieth century came to a close.Footnote ³⁷