The Early Left-Wing Roots of Spanish Fascism

The political regime of General Francisco Franco, which came about following the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War, is often described as being conservative, clerical, and authoritarian. The distinctive features of the fascist rule under General Francisco Franco are revealed in a curious episode from history, on his death, the very first flowers laid at his coffin came from China, signed by Communist leader Zhou Enlai. It just happened to be about the same period when communist Cuba led by Fidel Castro observed three days of national mourning.

Superficially, it is beyond irony for communist regimes to express such friendliness to a fascist dictator. However, looking closer, the earlier features of the Franco regime, before it suffered an internal coup, utilized the rhetoric, symbols, and even some aspects of the organizational structure characteristic of National Syndicalism as the pre-cursor to their Spanish fascism. The earlier Spanish National Syndicalism did not emerge from the typical right-wing Spanish conservatism. Rather, the radical ideology was formed in the early 1930s and the main authors of this movement were Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and Onésimo Redondo Ortega. Being inspired by the far-left ideologies that dominated the European left of that period, such as Sorelian Marxism (revolutionary syndicalism), anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, and anti-imperialism, National Syndicalism rejected any attempts to preserve the existing capitalist or liberal order in favor of a total revolution of the working class.

Between 1936 and 1937, however, due to the physical elimination of the leadership of the movement and the purely tactical actions of Franco, who managed to seize military and political power, the National Syndicalist movement in Spain was thoroughly co-opted by Franco. Having deprived the ideology of its social-revolutionary nature and keeping the symbols and slogans of the movement, Franco transformed the movement of total state transformation into a means of labor control.

National Syndicalist movements within Spain

To see how Franco managed to pervert National Syndicalism, it is necessary to look at the ideological origin of the movement. The main ideologist of National Syndicalism, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, created his political newspaper “La Conquista del Estado” (The Conquest of the State) in March 1931, stating from the very beginning that his purpose was to channel the revolutionary spirit of the Spanish proletariat for the sake of the national project. His paper even became a subject of debate in a CNT assembly, yet, it did not have the intended impact. Ledesma was well-versed in continental philosophy and embodied what is called the greatest assimilation of Georges Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism in Spain. The syndicalism of Sorel proclaimed direct action as a means for workers’ syndicates to crush bourgeois capital structures.

The key reference point of Ledesma on the left side of Spain was the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), a strong anarcho-syndicalist labour union. It was obvious that Ledesma admired the fighting spirit, anti-bourgeois combativeness, and revolutionary passion of the masses of the CNT. In his opinion, anarcho-syndicalists were the best combat forces in Spain, and it was his main aim to “nationalize” the CNT, that means to redirect revolutionary power of CNT from internationalist anti-statism to the national state.

It is important to note that this influence was not only theoretical. The early National Syndicalist cells included many former members of anarchist and communist organizations. One of the leaders of CNT, Alvaro de Sotomayor, became the head of the National Syndicalist union of taxi drivers in Madrid. Similarly, Dr. Santiago Montero Díaz from the Communist Party of Spain also joined them. Both National Syndicalists and anarchists shared the following superficial values: their common hatred of the bourgeois democratic system, opposition to gradual reforms, and support of direct action through workers’ unions.

Similarly, the relations between National Syndicalism and Marxism were also very similar. The movement was defined by structural mimicry and fierce ideological rivalry. First, Ledesma admired Karl Marx as a great philosopher and agreed with the basic ideas of his criticism of bourgeois liberal capitalist systems. Even though the ideology of National Syndicalism was also anti-capitalist, condemning the liberalism of the capitalistic economy for making workers economic slaves and making labor a commodity, Ledesma and Redondo sharply denied two fundamental ideas of the Marxism:

• Historical materialism, because according to their opinion it was destroying the spirituality, culture, and nationalism of humanity, reducing the history to purely economic interactions;
• Class struggle, considering it a destructive civil war that divided the nation and made it vulnerable for foreign domination.

Thus, to answer the challenge of Marxism, the JONS (Councils of National-Syndicalist Offensive), formed because of the merger of the Ledesma and Redondo organizations in October 1931, and presented their sixteen-point manifesto— which included radically leftist economic policies in the frame of nationalist ideology. The document demanded:

• The compulsory syndicalization of all production processes and placing of the private enterprises under the control of the state to prevent the exploitation of workers;
• The nationalization of credit, banks, and transport;
• Expropriation of vast semi-feudal estates owned by absentees and their transfer to peasants’ syndicates and peasant family farms;
  Severe criminal prosecution of the financial speculators and capitalists exploiting the misery of the working class.

With such demands, the JONS claimed to provide the Spanish proletariat with “bread, justice, and dignity”.

The Falangist Synthesis and Internal Fractures

On February 28th, 1934, because of financial difficulties and lack of electoral success along with the beginning of the attacks from the left, the JONS joined forces with Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange Española into FE/JONS. Although the charisma and aristocratic connections of Jose Antonio, the son of the former dictator of Spain General Miguel Primo de Rivera, provided the new organization with the funds and the speaker, his party was lacking a coherent programmatic doctrine.

It is Ledesma who formulated the Twenty-Seven Points of the platform of the new alliance based on his Sixteen Points. Nevertheless, ideological conflicts started appearing very soon after the unification of the organizations.

The Leadership Vacuum and Franco’s Usurpation

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 marked the final absorption of the movement into the mainstream. Four months after the beginning of the war, all the leaders of the National Syndicalist political faction had been liquidated.

Onésimo Redondo was murdered in a roadside clash at Labajos on July 24, 1936. Ramiro Ledesma Ramos was executed by republican militiamen in Madrid on October 29, 1936. José Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in a prison of Alicante on November 20, 1936.

Once the leaders were gone, the burgeoning ranks of Falangist militants, who were primarily composed of newly-recruited young men who were ideologically inexperienced, lacked a leader strong enough to prevent military domination.

Realizing the value of the Falange for propaganda purposes, General Francisco Franco decided to take control of the movement. In 1937, on April 19, he issued the Decree of Unification, forcing the merger of the Falangist party (FE/JONS) with the ultra-conservative, religious Carlist monarchists in order to form a unified state party called “Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FET/JONS)”. Franco proclaimed himself the undisputed leader (Caudillo) of this fabricated alliance.

From National Syndicalism to Dictatorship

The substantive objectives of National Syndicalism were deliberately perverted under Franco. While the idea was for the economy to be controlled by the workers through the use of vertical syndicates that were supposed to end the exploitation of workers, under the “Spanish Syndical Organization” system, vertical syndicates were formed but with the opposite meaning. Rather than giving the workers power, these syndicates served to ensure labor discipline, prohibit strikes, and keep the wages constant so as to increase the profits of the capitalists and landowners. Syndicates membership was compulsory for both employers and employees.

The true early supporters of the movement, the “old shirts” who had joined before 1936 and who maintained social radicalism, were ignored, jailed, or silenced if they resisted. Besides, they had been outvoted by millions of new opportunists and post-war members of the party who saw the party as just a means for bureaucratic advancement. Through the glorification of the dead founders, especially José Antonio, as sacred martyrs, Franco mythologized them and put their portraits on streets everywhere and even inscribed their names on the walls of churches throughout Spain. Through this substitution of ritualistic hagiography for radical and activist doctrine, he ensured that their original teachings of “national syndicalism” never become a challenge to the new social order of his regime.

Conclusion

The hijack against the Spanish National Syndicalism movement by Francisco Franco is one of the great examples of political co-optation in the twentieth century. Beginning as a radical syncretism of revolutionary syndicalism, and Bolshevik influenced state-controlled economy of the kind appropriated by Sorel with integral nationalism, National Syndicalism was a militant response to both capitalist liberal democracy and internationalist socialism. By making use of the deaths of Ledesma, Redondo, and José Antonio, Franco took control of the movement’s revolutionary symbols, flags, and organizational system. He incorporated it with reactionary monarchism and Roman Catholicism, thus neutralizing the movement’s threat to the Spanish landowners and industrialists. He succeeded in transforming the revolutionary anti-bourgeois workers’ movement into the ideological facade of an aristocratic and conservative dictatorship.

As Alexander Reid Ross stated in the book Against the Fascist Creep:

“The leading three fascist political figures of the interwar period in France were all former leftists: a former member of the inner committee of the Communist Party, a former anarcho-syndicalist, and the leader of the “neo-socialist” faction of the Socialist Party (then called the French Section of the Workers’ International). The movement was led by a host of frustrated and powerful leftists joining with sectors of the nationalist radical right to attack liberalism.”

And as Robert O. Paxton stated in the book The Anatomy of Fascism:

“By 1914, part of the Left’s traditional following had become disillusioned with what they considered the compromises of moderate parliamentary socialists. After the war, looking for something more uncompromisingly revolutionary, they went over to Bolshevism, or, as we have seen, via national syndicalism to fascism.”

It is apparent that the far-left Bolshevism and socialism to fascism pipeline thrived through proto-fascist movements like national syndicalism. This dynamic unfolded across multiple countries through proto-fascist movements like national syndicalism, demonstrating that the trend was structural rather than an isolated anomaly.