A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: Franco Died, But Francoism Didn't - Fifty Years of a Transition Orchestrated by Spanish Fascism By Liza (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

And so, the story ends... that seems to be the watered-down ending of a 
criminal dictatorship imposed by the narrative of the Transition, which 
is nothing more than the story agreed upon by the dominant elites in the 
Spanish State. The Franco regime was the project of the national 
bourgeoisie, supported by international capitalism, which, in different 
phases, protected its economic interests by consolidating a dictatorship 
around the figure of Franco as the guarantor of that bloody order.

Franco's death shortly before 9 p.m. on November 19 marked the turning 
point of a process that had already begun years earlier. An idyllic 
closure of Francoism had been negotiated since at least 1968, 
subsequently concealing a complex process of reformed continuity. Same 
dogs, but also same collars.

Beneath the official narrative, presented as a feat of consensus and 
democratic moderation, lay a profound underlying political logic: the 
need for the economic, political, and military elites, consolidated 
after 1939, to reorganize their hegemony in the face of an international 
and social context that rendered the continuation of a dictatorship 
untenable, a dictatorship that had already fulfilled its role as 
guarantor of their privileges. Spanish fascism had done its job, but the 
curtain would neither fall nor leave the stage; it was granted a leading 
role as a consolidator and shock force, a role it continues to this day.

If we can identify a common thread throughout 20th-century Spain, from 
the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de 
Rivera, the Second Spanish Republic, Francoism, and the current 
monarchical regime, it is the economic power held by virtually the same 
families and driving forces of Spanish capitalism. The Spanish 
Transition should be understood not as a rupture, but as a recomposition 
of power, where a significant portion of the Francoist elites and 
dominant economic interests retained key positions, reshaping the 
institutional system.

Forty Years of Francoism: Fascism's Mark on Spain

The Francoist regime was born directly from the power granted by the 
military coup of July 1936, and extended throughout the territory 
through a war of extermination against the working class and popular 
forces. From the outset, it was a project with a counter-revolutionary 
objective, serving the economic and military elites of oligarchic Spain, 
anticipating the realistic potential for success had the organized labor 
movement launched a full-scale offensive to build popular class power. 
It was not a historical tragedy, nor a civil conflict between brothers, 
nor an outbreak of aimless violence: it was the conscious and planned 
gamble of landowners, large industrialists, the ecclesiastical 
hierarchy, and army commanders to crush a possible victory by 
revolutionary popular forces, which posed a serious threat to the power 
structure built over centuries. The military coup was not against the 
republican government; rather, the violence was directed against the 
working class, and this is the first point we must understand in a 
revolutionary analysis. There were not two Spains, but two antagonistic 
social classes: the dominant class and the exploited class.

The Spanish bourgeoisie's prior project was to build a republican and 
social-democratic government as a fire extinguisher against the growth 
of the labor movement, and this republican government, as a simple 
historical review would demonstrate, was the very breeding ground for 
the preparation and development of Spanish fascism. The Francoist 
victory in 1939 reinstated an authoritarian, militarized state 
characterized by psychological and physical terror, based on systematic 
repression, censorship, social control, and the destruction of all forms 
of workers' organization. The state apparatus-from the Catholic Church 
to the Civil Guard, from the National Movement to the military 
tribunals-functioned as a perfectly coordinated machine to guarantee the 
brutal restoration of the most reactionary capitalist order after the 
people's social revolution. Francoism did not merely discipline: it 
aspired to mold an obedient, battered, and subjugated society, where all 
political or trade union dissent was considered a crime against the nation.

In its first phase, Francoism extended the extermination of tens of 
thousands of members of the working class, and its project was firmly 
aligned with Italian fascism and German Nazism, which took the offensive 
initiative until 1943 in the world conflict. During the forties the 
regime shifted its focus to distance itself from Nazi Germany, and to 
survive the new global reordering of the victorious powers. Francoism 
was tolerated and even seen as a political bulwark against Marxism in 
Europe. By refusing to grant social and political concessions, 
imperialist capitalism developed new strategies to crush the workers' 
movements born from the struggle against fascism in the global conflict.

The 1940s and early 1950s were marked by the autarkic economic model 
imposed by Francoism, which benefited business groups aligned with the 
regime, plunging the country into hunger and misery while consolidating 
an oligarchic capitalism protected by the State. The postwar repression, 
with hundreds of thousands imprisoned, deported, executed, and purged, 
was not an "excess," but rather the pillar upon which the regime's 
stability was built and, to some extent, the return to the political 
structures normalized by capitalism. The working class was subjected to 
a mandatory, vertical union system, designed to neutralize any capacity 
for conflict and ensure its subordination to the regime.

The Cold War allowed the dictatorship to achieve international 
rebranding: anti-communism had become its safe passage. The United 
States and the Western powers integrated Spain as a functional piece of 
the capitalist bloc, opening the door to technocracy, developmentalism, 
and a controlled "modernization" that never challenged the foundations 
of power. The 1959 Stabilization Plan coincided with the visit of US 
President Eisenhower, and the economic growth of the 1960s was by no 
means a neutral takeoff: it consolidated new factions of the 
bourgeoisie, reinforced inequalities, and used mass emigration to Europe 
as a social safety valve. Repression became more selective, but no less 
effective.

Throughout those four decades, Francoism mutated, but its nature never 
changed: it was always a militaristic and ultra-Catholic regime that 
defended the interests of the bourgeois class and ensured the continuity 
of the economic and political exploitation by the business elites. The 
workers', students', and neighborhood struggles that arose were met with 
violence perfectly calculated to prevent any erosion of their 
legitimacy. Repressive laws, the Public Order Court, the Civil Guard, 
and the Political-Social Brigade of the police acted as the main 
apparatus of control and punishment.

The Transition: A Pact of Silence and Reform by the Oligarchy from Above

Far from representing any grassroots-driven rupture, the Transition was 
the result of a pact among the Spanish oligarchic elite. A segment of 
the old Francoist guard understood that maintaining the regime as it was 
was incompatible with its integration into European markets and with the 
control of a working class that had been highly mobilized since 1968. 
Therefore, they opted to direct the regime's evolution themselves. The 
structures of the state apparatus born in 1939 had to be preserved; the 
judicial and police hierarchy would remain intact; In addition to 
guaranteeing the continuity of the monarchy designated by Franco in the 
person who would be crowned Juan Carlos I, the inherited authoritarian 
framework was not dismantled; it was merely given a makeover to adapt it 
to the repressive and social control norms established by Western 
imperialist democracies.

The student movement that erupted in 1968 had allied itself with the 
demands of the working class and acted as a catalyst for a profound 
questioning of the Franco regime. University assemblies and strikes 
expressed solidarity with workers' struggles. Meanwhile, concern 
intensified regarding the political and armed insurgency represented by 
organizations such as ETA, FRAP, and later MIL, which, while not posing 
a real threat to state power, did represent a symbolic challenge to its 
capacity for total control. Cracks opened in the legitimizing narrative 
of Francoism, leading to a resurgence in repression and its increasing 
sophistication. They began to devise a plan of reforms negotiated from 
above.

The assassination of Carrero Blanco in December 1973 was the symbolic 
blow to the Franco regime needed to set in motion the Transition that 
had been brewing since the beginning of that decade. Those sectors most 
resistant to the reform negotiated from above had to be tamed; their 
structure would not be destroyed, only the plan for a Francoism without 
Franco but with die-hard Francoists would be dismantled. The economic 
and political elites assumed a recomposition within the power bloc, and 
a transition was orchestrated to neutralize the working-class movement. 
Workers' struggles were experiencing explosive growth; tens of thousands 
of workers were overflowing the vertical union system, generating a 
potential social counter-power of coordinating bodies and commissions, 
strikes, and mass assemblies in working-class neighborhoods. Therefore, 
the Transition had to address as its main objective the neutralization 
of this political entity that was developing outside the regime's 
established channels.

In this context, the international role also carries significant weight; 
and the United States, through the CIA, sought to guarantee a stable 
ally within NATO, loyal to imperialist interests. Hence the "recycling" 
of parliamentary social democracy at the Suresnes Congress (1974), from 
which a rejuvenated, moderate, and functional PSOE (Spanish Socialist 
Workers' Party) emerged, aligned with the new project. The PSOE, through 
Felipe González, was selected as the ideal actor to offer a controlled 
exit, capable of appealing to young and urban sectors without 
jeopardizing the economic structure of Francoism. In this way, an 
escalation like the Portuguese Carnation Revolution was avoided, where 
more decisive action was required to prevent a rupture that would 
destabilize capitalist interests.

The neo-reactionary offensive is combated with class organization.

The Francoist apparatus was not purged, and repression remained active, 
with hundreds of workers murdered during that period. In 1975, when 
Franco died, Francoism was not dying; it had merely completed its 
functional historical cycle. The dictatorship, which was born as a 
counter-revolutionary project, left behind a matrix that has remained 
intact to this day, because Franco died, but Francoism did not.

The persistence of Spanish fascism is evident not only in institutions, 
but also in the social agenda and the media through its partisan 
branches, collectives, and criminal groups. Anti-fascist historical 
memory must act as an active element, not to cover the past with 
tributes, but to keep the current struggle against domination and 
reaction alive. Resistance to fascism is not an act of nostalgia, but a 
duty of historical justice based on class consciousness.

To break the chains of what is tightly bound requires strategy and 
revolutionary struggle. The confrontation against fascism, both past and 
present, is the struggle against capital. Therefore, an anti-fascist 
front must, in any case, include a revolutionary organization against 
capitalism. The proven collusion of liberalism and social democracy 
always ends up opening the door to the expansion of fascism because it 
fails to address its root cause: the capitalist system of exploitation. 
Building real alternatives for emancipation and strategies for 
intervening in the daily lives conditioned by economic exploitation is 
the path forward in the face of the extreme right.

In the 21st century, we are witnessing how, following the advancement of 
rights for women, migrants, and the LGBTQ+ community-won through 
political struggles-as well as the increase in workers' struggles, a 
major reactionary offensive is underway due to an organic crisis of 
capitalism and global imperialism. The narratives and actions of Donald 
Trump, Bukele, and Marine Le Pen directly attack all of society and 
promote a rhetoric of nationalism, order, and security.

Ultimately, the regime of the Spanish Transition, underpinned by the 
December 1978 Constitution, consolidated a model of capitalist 
exploitation, based on a Spanish nationalism with a historically 
colonialist and inquisitorial mindset. Only a comprehensive strategy of 
anti-capitalist struggle and for libertarian socialism is the sole 
guarantee of defeating fascism. Against fascist barbarism: let us build 
utopia.

Ángel Malatesta, activist with Liza Madrid.

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/12/16/franco-murio-pero-el-franquismo-no/
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