Working on Rights: Labor Protest and Democratic Opposition in Spain and Poland, 1960–1990 9783110768916, 9783110768855

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Anna Delius Working on Rights

Work in Global and Historical Perspective

Edited by Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Christian G. De Vito Work in Global and Historical Perspective is an interdisciplinary series that welcomes scholarship on work/labor that engages a historical perspective in and from any part of the world. The series advocates a definition of work/ labor that is broad, and specially encourages contributions that explore interconnections across political and geographic frontiers, time frames, disciplinary boundaries, as well as conceptual divisions among various forms of commodified work, and between work and ‘non-work.’

Volume 17

Anna Delius

Working on Rights Labor Protest and Democratic Opposition in Spain and Poland, 1960–1990

D188

ISBN 978-3-11-076885-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-076891-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-076894-7 ISSN 2509-8861 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944685 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: 1965, Kraków Nowa Huta, Polska. Fot. Romuald Broniarek/KARTA. BRONIAREK_413-04 Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To M. and F.

“Eine Landkarte, worauf das Land Utopia fehlt, verdient nicht einmal einen Blick.”1

 Ernst Bloch, Widerstand und Friede: Aufsätze zur Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 15 [“A map on which you cannot find the land Utopia is not even worth looking at”].

Acknowledgements This book is the edited version of my dissertation that I wrote between 2015 and 2019 at the Department of History and Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. A lot of people have contributed in various ways to this book. Finally, I have the opportunity to express my gratitude. I would like to thank my supervisor Arnd Bauerkämper (Freie Universität Berlin) for his calm and structured supervision. It is thanks to him that I never lost faith in myself because he did not, either. My deepest gratitude goes to Claudia Kraft (Universität Wien) whose academic guidance and personal mentoring were extraordinary: Her brilliant thinking, her ability to solve intellectual problems with the most accurate and beautiful language and her unconditional solidarity with her students have defined for me what a true scholar is. I would moreover like to thank Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin). The fact that I was able to count him as one of my supervisors at the end of my research period is one of the lucky turns of events that accompanied my doctoral thesis. I was very fortunate to pursue my research as a doctoral fellow of the Human Rights Under Pressure graduate program at FU Berlin and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I would like to sincerely thank the directors of the program, Helmut Aust (Freie Universität Berlin) and Tomer Broude (Hebrew University Jerusalem). They sparked my enthusiasm for the beauty of international law. I am grateful for the unique experience of being part of an inspiring group of researchers from all continents, united by their common interest in exploring the different dimensions of human rights. Thank you for three incredible years, Thibaud Bodson, Danny Evron, Joe Farha, Michael Giesen, Despoina Glarou, Schira Kaiser, Michal Kramer, Hila Levi, Lena Riemer, Ana Rozman, Bruck Teshome and many more. Thank you for becoming friends for life, Shani Bar-Tuvia, Ioannis Kampourakis, Magda Pacholska, Kyriaki Pavlidou, Lê Phan-Warnke, Misha Plagis, Frederik Schmidinger, Juliana Streva, Julia Teschlade and my dearest Marie Walter-Franke. I am thankful for the generous research stipend offered by the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, for the academic mentoring by Felix Ackermann and for the inspiring conversations with Piotr Filipkowski. I am deeply grateful for Jan Olaszek’s generosity to share his digitalized source material with me. I am thankful to Joanna Michałowska and all employees of the Karta Center. Thank you, Katharina Kinga Kowalski for becoming my dear friend after our time together in Saska Kępa. I would like to thank the archival experts in Madrid; José Babiano, Mayka Muñoz Ruiz, Coro Lomas Lara as well as their colleagues from the Archivo PCE and the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Thank you, José Faraldo (Universidad Complu-

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tense) for sharing my passion for Spanish and Polish connections and for inviting me to Madrid. I had the pleasure of working with the participants of the Colloquium on Comparative and Entangled History at the Freie Universität Berlin and the doctoral colloquium of Claudia Kraft and I am grateful for the inspiring debates and the mutual support. Clara Maddalena Frysztacka, thank you for our friendship and for making me a better researcher. Thank you for all the conversations and for reading what I wrote, Agnes Arndt, Rory Archer, Roland Burke, Julia Dehm, Alexandre Froidevaux, Anna Catharina Hofmann, Annina Gagyiova, Sheldon Garon, Andreas Guidi, Paweł Machcewicz, Silvia Madotto, Goran Musić, Florian Peters, Christoph Plath, Hannah Ricker, Mariam Salehi, Katharina Seibert, Nelli Tügel, Bernard Wiaderny and Agnieszka Wierzcholska. Ned Richardson-Little, thank you for always coming up with an answer to my questions and for countless coffee breaks at Stabi. Thank you, Rabea Rittgerodt, Verena Deutsch and Andreas Eckert for publishing my book in this honourable series and for your kind supervision of the publishing process. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and my family, including my new family in Hamburg and in New York/ Washington D.C. I am grateful for all the support and the distractions to my cousin Andreas and to my great friends Hermance, Elgin, Francesca, Jonas, Lena, Claudia, Meike, Narges, Judith, Paul, Laura, Kris and Tina. Thank you, Hannah, for being my best friend for so many years now. My Polish grandparents survived the German occupation when they were young and later became friends with my German grandparents: They will always be my ethical role models. At the same time, listening to all their very different stories shaped my way of thinking about history, which I am immensely grateful for. I would like to thank my parents, my mother Barbara, my father Friedrich and my stepmother Rezvan for their love and for passing on to me their love for exploring the unknown. Thank you, my dear sisters Tabea and Nora for always being there for me. Finally, I would like to thank the love of my life: Martin, I am so lucky to share my life with you and our wonderful daughter. Thank you for everything. This book is dedicated to you two.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

IX XIII

1

Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990 1 1.1 European Semi-peripheries as Centers of Democratic Protest in the Twentieth Century 1 1.2 Research Questions, Methodology, and Conceptual Approach of the Study 8 1.3 Crises and Breakthroughs: Global Labor History, Human Rights History, and Democratic Labor Oppositions 25 1.4 Brief Overviews: Workers’ History in Two Authoritarian Regimes 43

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Emerging Oppositions – Citizens Starting to Organize 59 2.1 Infiltrating Workplaces from Below in the 1960s: Spanish Labor Activists between Global Norms, National Legislation, and Local Struggle 63 2.2 Fighting the Atomization of Society: Contextualizing Labor Conflicts and Explaining Rights in a Polish Samizdat Magazine for Workers 129 2.3 Comparison: Workers’ Demands Translated into Mere Social Necessities, Democratic Liberties and Human Rights 182

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Illiberal Backlashes – State Reactions to Oppositional Dynamics 201 3.1 Hijacking a Show Trial From Below: The Spanish Labor Opposition and the Proceso 1001 in the Early 1970s 204 3.2 After the Success of 1980. Re-organizing Polish Protest during Martial Law 263 3.3 Comparison: Crises as Waiting Rooms for Different Futures 319

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Conclusion – Working on Rights under Authoritarian Rule

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Sources and Bibliography

Index

373

341

332

List of Abbreviations CCOO CGT CNT CRZZ EEC ETA FLP HOAC IBRD ICFTU ILO IMF IPN JOC KOR MKS NSZZ Solidarność OEEC OSE PCE PRL PSOE RENFE ROPCiO TKK TOP UGT USO WRON ZOMO

Comisiones Obreras (“Workers’ Commissions”) Confédération Générale du Travail (“General Confederation of Labor”) Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (“National Confederation of Labor”) Centralna Rada Związków Zawodowych (“Central Council of Trade Unions”) European Economic Community Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (“Basque Homeland and Liberty”) Frente de Liberación Popular (“Popular Liberation Front”) Hermandades Obreras de Acción Católica (“Brotherhood of Workers Catholic Action”) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development International Confederation of Free Trade Unions International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (“Institute for National Remembrance”) Juventud Obrera Católica (“Catholic Workers’ Youth”) Komitet Obrony Robotników (“Workers’ Defense Committee”) Międzyzakładowy Komitet Strajkowy (“Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee”) Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy “Solidarność” (“Independent Self-Governing Labor Union ‘Solidarity’”) Organization for European Economic Co-operation Organización Sindical Española (“Spanish Trade Union Organization”) Partido Comunista de España (“Communist Party of Spain”) Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (“Polish People‘s Republic”, PPR) Partido Socialista Español (“Spanish Workers’ Party”) Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles (“National Network of Spanish Railways”) Ruch Obrony Praw Człowieka i Obywatela (“Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights”) Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna (“Interim Coordination Committee”) Tribunal de Orden Público (“Tribunal for the Public Order”) Unión General de Trabajadores (“General Workers’ Union”) Unión Sindical Obrera (“Workers’ Syndical Union”) Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego (“Military Council of National Salvation”) Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej (“Motorized Reserves of the Citizens’ Militia”)

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1 Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990 1.1 European Semi-peripheries as Centers of Democratic Protest in the Twentieth Century Violence can spark radical empathy. When Polish police forces shot protesting workers in the summer of 1976, a previously invisible line had been crossed. It caused outrage among fellow citizens about how brutally the government had reacted to the sudden riots. In the industrial centers of the country in particular, workers had organized spontaneous protests against drastic price increases for meat, sugar, and other daily goods, which had been introduced overnight in a TV announcement. The riots erupted towards a proper battle between Polish workers and Polish police entities – hundreds were injured, and many died from police shots. It was not the first time in the Polish People’s Republic that the state had employed physical violence against its own citizens: everybody remembered the deadly outcome of the workers’ protests from 1970. But had the new First Secretary, himself a son of working-class people, not promised that workers would never again be shot by police on Polish streets, a workers’ state after all? With a mixture of remorse and optimism, Edward Gierek had back then driven up north to refresh the alliance between workers and the state, whose police force had just killed fourty workers and injured thousands, when workers protested in Gdańsk in 1970. Had he back then not assured all citizens that they were all cut from the same cloth, workers and party elites? Had not the answer to his laconic yet legendary question of whether they would help him in achieving the party’s goals gone down in thundering applause? This time, six years later, no politician drove through the country to visit the traumatized workers. Instead, people were legally persecuted for participating in the riots. This was the moment when a group of intellectuals from Warsaw, as surprised by the workers’ anger as the government, realized two important aspects: that workers had a massive impact on Polish politics and that they had no one to defend them in the Polish People’s Republic. Sitting on Persian carpets in an elderly professor’s living room in Warsaw, surrounded by antiquities and oil paintings, this loose group of intellectuals formed the Komitet Obrony Robotników, KOR (“Workers’ Defense Committee”). This committee then offered material and legal help for repressed workers and their families, after the breadwinners had been imprisoned, dismissed, or killed. But the intellectuals, many of whom identified as socialists, were interested in a long-term cooperation and aimed at keeping workers politically active. To keep in touch with workers, in the summer of 1977, they founded the magazine Robotnik (“The Worker”), where intellectuals https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-001

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1 Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990

and workers contributed reports of repression and protest actions. In addition, they addressed workers’ self-management and independent trade unionism. At a time when the Polish workers were still organized in a party-dependent union organization that rarely stood up for their social interests but rather justified the party’s actions, on the other side of the European continent, in Spain, workers were now able to join and form trade unions. This freedom was, however, only possible thanks to a recent union law which the Spanish parliament had adopted over the course of the democratic Spanish transition in March 1977. The Francoist regime had repressed workers over decades; many were imprisoned, exiled, or had even lost their lives, whereas labor conflicts increased steadily. Beginning in the early 1960s, nonetheless, Spanish workers formed loose Comisiones Obreras (“Workers’ Commissions”) and started electing representatives on the shop-floor level. These commissions became more and more powerful over the years and constituted the core of the democratic Spanish labor opposition. They fought for democratic labor structures, workers’ and civil rights with legal and illegal methods until they were finally legalized in 1977. The Polish activists of the Workers’ Defense Committee, in turn, were convinced that the history of Spanish workers should also be told to their Polish colleagues, which is why in January 1978 an anonymous author published an enthusiastic article on the political situation in Spain on the pages of this underground magazine: One of the most interesting phenomena of the last few years is the democratization process taking place in Spain. [. . .] This process is taking place unexpectedly fast and, until now, in a calm, orderly and bloodless manner. This is of course possible primarily because Spain is a fully sovereign and independent country with no foreign intervention from enemies or, more importantly, friends.1

Comparing the Spanish options for democracy with the Polish ones, the oppositional journalist explained the political success of the Comisiones Obreras during the Francoist regime. Full of awe, he described how the Spanish activists fifteen years earlier had been able to infiltrate factories all around the country and empowered fellow workers to elect their own representatives: “They emerged underground. Usually, it began with small groups of trusted people operating in individual departments, then committees for the entire factory were created, which step by step and by maintaining the highest caution, got in touch with similar committees in other factories.”2

 Robotnik, January 1, 1978.  Robotnik, January, 1978; the article was signed with the initials “K. Gr.”; the journalist was probably Kazimierz Dziewanowski, who published under several pseudonyms during state so-

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Francoist Spain and state socialist Poland differed with regard to ideology and repression of citizens. Yet, in both countries, workers and unions were controlled by the state and lacked fundamental rights. The Polish activists, thus, suggested to “adapt the Polish conditions” to the Spanish case, wistfully gazing at a country that was experiencing an extensive political transition at that time.3 The intellectuals were convinced that only cooperation between different social groups would bring any political change to the country as they had lost any trust in the government. Disillusioned by the real socialist violence exerted in socialism’s “transitional moment”4 of 1956 and the repressive policies of 1968, left-leaning and socialist-minded Poles, too, strived for a political turnaround and a democratization of the society. The Poles were right to associate the overall changes in Spain with their own workers’ activism: Spanish workers’ protests and strikes had impacted the country since the early 1960s. At that time, Spain underwent a broad socio-economic modernization and a political opening that ended the previous phase of political and economic autarky following the Civil War (1936–1939). Like some years later in state socialist Poland, the Spanish workers’ protest of the 1960s and 1970s became a carrier for claims demanding overall democratization. Protest actions were mainly organized from below, but not exclusively, since left leaning and lay Catholic intellectuals engaged in the protest and supported workers. Working conditions and the overall economic misery of workers could be criticized without immediately revealing an oppositional attitude towards the regime in general. Social and economic demands were intertwined with civil right claims and calls for democratization of labor and overall state structures. Despite such transnational transfers on the one hand and the similar demands of workers on the other, the history of Eastern and Western Europe is still often considered as being genuinely different due to the different political and economic overall conditions.5 Yet this dichotomy, following an almost “Mani-

cialism, oftentimes under “Karol Grodkowski.” After 1989, the lawyer and journalist became the first Polish ambassador to the United States. Jan Olaszek, email to author, November 6, 2017.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978.  Pavel Kolář, Der Poststalinismus: Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche (Köln: Böhlau, 2016), 11; Kolář used the caption Übergangsmoment in German. (AD).  This dichotomic depiction of European contemporary history dominates the field but there are some progressive exceptions, such as: Robert Gildea and James Mark, eds., Europe’s 1968: Voices of revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) or Marcel van der Linden, “European Social Protest, 1000–2000,” in The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective: A Survey, ed. Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 175–209. For a slightly different perspective, see: Christoph Boyer, “Die Einheit der europäischen Zeitgeschichte,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 3 (2007). Even if social changes connected to 1968 are discussed transnationally, the European South remains a terra incognita to many. Apart from the here quoted

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1 Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990

chean vision of an ideologically divided Europe,” has little to do with historical realities.6 It rather seems to be a product of a highly politicized mental mapping stemming from the Cold War.7 European citizens’ lives were deeply affected by the same global economic trends, regardless of whether they lived in a capitalist or socialist economy, which is especially true for workers.8 The Iron Curtain was indeed a real existing border, dividing formerly connected regions and people, but it was not hermetic. Seamstresses in Polish factories sewed shirts for Canadian buyers; the Polish government borrowed money from Western banks; Polish economists exchanged ideas with proto-neoliberal colleagues from the United States that were applied easily after 1989.9 Poland was of course not the only state socialist country that provided cheap workforces and laboratories of innovation for the Western market: “The two systems had already begun to interact in the 1970s, when Eastern European state enterprise served as extended workbenches for Western firms and joint ventures were set up in Poland, Hungary, and Romania.”10 Spain, after ending its autarky policy towards the West, became economically reintegrated into the global market economy in exchange for an US-American missile base that constituted an important asset in the smoldering nuclear conflict between the two blocs during the Cold War. At the same time, foreign investment and the re-discovering of Spain by interna-

volume by Gildea, Mark, and Warring and apart from this Special Issue aiming at bridging the gap between Southern and Eastern European perspectives: Kim Christiaens, James Mark, and José M. Faraldo, “Entangled Transitions: Eastern and Southern European Convergence or Alternative Europes? 1960s–2000s,” Contemporary European History 4 (2017).  Christiaens, Mark, and Faraldo, “Entangled Transitions,” 585–586. On mental mapping and mental maps, see: Frithjof B. Schenk, “Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion von geographischen Räumen in Europa seit der Aufklärung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 3 (2002); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).  While the Cold War as a historical phenomenon was historicized as soon as in the early 1990s, sometimes even equaling its finishing with the “End of History,” its divisive power simultaneously persisted and impacted social and humanities’ research on European cultures and societies. Cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006 [1992]).  Others have used the terminus “semiperiphery” for the respective regions. See, for instance: Krzysztof Ruchniewicz and Stefan Troebst, eds., Diktaturbewältigung und nationale Selbstvergewisserung: Geschichtskulturen in Polen und Spanien im Vergleich (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2004); Manuela Boatcă, “Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences,” Journal of World-Systems Research 2 (2006).  Johanna Bockman and Gil Eyal, “Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism,” American Journal of Sociology 2 (2002).  Andrea Komlosy, “Western Europe,” in Handbook Global History of Work, ed. Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 157–80, 157.

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tional tourists created an economic boost to Spain’s national economy. However, the fact that workers in both countries lacked fundamental rights was not an obstacle for foreign private companies. Based in Western democracies with regulated labor markets, they profited from cheap and union-free labor forces in Southern and Eastern Europe. Here, people lacked union rights as well as the right to strike, and the right to associate and assemble freely. Labor in general, as well as living and working conditions of workers, became a globally discussed topic within the framework of international norms and agreements, including the 1966 European Covenant on Social and Economic Rights and the publications of the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965).11 Transnationally relevant moments such as the promulgation of the Helsinki Act in 1975 did not only diffuse widely to different European regions but were simultaneously shaped by actors from these regions, including those from Francoist Spain and state socialist Poland.12 This study, thereby, intends to overcome the dichotomic narration of European postwar history, without blurring out the important differences between the Eastern and Southern semi-peripheries of Europe concerning history, culture, politics, and economy.13 Consequently, I conceive European processes on both sides of the Iron Curtain as “variants” of global phenomena in line with more recent research bridging Eastern and Western (or rather Southern) history.14 Relevant global moments include the worldwide impact of the 1973 oil crisis as well as

 This passage on the de-parochialization of European history is based on thoughts I published in this article: Anna Delius, “Writing (for) Workers: Alternative Workers’ Magazines in Francoist Spain and in State Socialist Poland in the 1960s and 1970s,” Labor: Studies in Working–Class History of the Americas 3 (2020).  See, for instance: Wanda Jarząbek, “Lost Illusions? The Polish government and human rights issues from Helsinki to Belgrade 1972–1978,” in From Helsinki to Belgrade: the first CSCE Follow–up meeting and the crisis of détente, ed. Vladimir Bilandžić (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 305–20; Francisco J. Rodrigo Luelmo, “España y el proceso de la CSCE: La conferencia de Helsinki, (1969–1975)” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2015); Sarah B. Snyder, ed., Human rights activism and the end of the Cold War: A transnational history of the Helsinki network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).  On the concept of semi-peripheriality, please refer to: Boatcă, “Semiperipheries in the WorldSystem: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences”; Clara M. Frysztacka, Zeit–Schriften der Moderne: Zeitkonstruktion und temporale Selbstverortung in der polnischen Presse (1880–1914) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); see also this volume on labor history in Southern Europe: Lī´ da Papastefanákī and Nikos Potamianos, eds., Labour History in the Semi-periphery: Southern Europe, 19th-20th centuries (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021).  Hella Dietz, Polnischer Protest: Zur pragmatistischen Fundierung von Theorien sozialen Wandels (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015), 15. See also: Christiaens, Mark, and Faraldo, “Entangled Transitions.”

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the dynamics unfolding in the year 1968, standing pars pro toto of the “[. . .] political and cultural radicalism during which the authority of governments, institutions and ways of thought were challenged across Europe.”15 These dynamics were shaped by different factors: whereas the most prominent activists in Western Europe (and Northern America) were students coming from bourgeois families who developed their fascination for socialist and communist thoughts and politics in the context of more or less liberal democracies, it was mainly workingclass anarchists, socialists, and communists (in some cases also members of the clergy) who fought the right-wing authoritarian governments in the European South.16 In Eastern Europe, in turn, intellectual and working-class activists were either seeking for what they hoped to be a better socialism within the existing system or were opposing the regime from an anti-communist and sometimes nationalist perspective.17 Simultaneously, in this context, human right discourses and related ideas spread globally and created a regionally diverse value-oriented narrative.18 As Sebastian Conrad noted about the transfer of ideas, “[. . .] connections need to be embedded in processes of structural transformation, and this on a global scale.”19 This study, hence, is a contribution to a transnational European history of labor, thereby focusing on global labor norms and human rights. At the same time, it tells a transnational history of human rights, focusing on workers and their allies. In this study, I demonstrate how politically active citizens in authoritarian regimes addressed repression and whether they developed a language of rights in the light of a globally dynamic human rights discourse. With my analysis of Spanish and Polish labor oppositions, I entered a grey zone of historiography in many regards: not only did I analyze (and compare) Southern and Eastern European history by using the same toolset; I moreover intertwined the history of

 Gildea and Mark, Europe’s 1968, 1.  Western Europe faced intensive labor protests in the 1970s and 1980s, too, for instance in Britain during the Great Miners’ Strike of the mid-1980s, but also in the industrial regions of WestGermany, for instance in Duisburg-Rheinhausen. In Yugoslavia, students protested Tito’s government in 1968.  Gildea and Mark, Europe’s 1968; also in Western Europe, the number of strikes increased after 1968. Marcel van der Linden, Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Florence: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 122–123.  Samuel Moyn, The last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).  Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 64–65. See also: Sebastian Conrad, Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (München: C.H. Beck, 2013), 122.

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labor rights with the history of political (or civil) rights, that have so far been treated separately from each other. This book makes two main arguments: first, that the democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland were both variants of emancipatory and democracy oriented social movements with global interconnections that emerged in the beginning of the 1960s. Second, these opposition movements both empowered their fellow citizens through discourses of necessity and solidarity but also employed different languages of rights: Polish activists employed human rights language only when repression needed to be explained to an outside, international audience that was not directly affected by repression. By contrast, the Spanish opposition created an everyday language of protest directed at their fellow citizens, connecting international human rights to their cause to highlight the democratic, non-violent character of their movements and to ennoble their political demands. Polish and Spanish workers alike suffered from bad working conditions and health problems caused by their working environments. When they wrote in letters and underground press publications about their everyday lives in factories, workers described pressure and repression simultaneously: they experienced long working hours, unsafe working conditions, and low salaries. Being under pressure by the requirements of either the socialist planned economy or the beginnings of a globalized capitalism that also affected the communist bloc, workers were oftentimes punished for mismanagement in higher ranks. The outcomes included withdrawals of promised bonus-payments, paid and unpaid overtime, but also dismissals and violent forms of repression, especially as a reaction to workers’ protest or forms of self-organization. Neither in Spain nor in Poland could workers draw back on representations that might defend their interests in front of the management. In both countries, free trade unionism that had traditionally been an element of their republican past was submitted to state-controlled organizations, concentrating employers and employees in one single framework that was moreover dependent on the government. Consequently, workers’ protests addressed not only labor-related issues but also the question of labor rights and democratization of both the workplaces and the entire society. In both countries, other citizens that conceived the workers’ cause as an important trajectory of democratic protest joined the workers. Regardless of if they lived in a right-wing or a state socialist dictatorship, those citizens who supported workers had often leftist and/or Catholic worldviews that they contextualized with respective political conditions. Extrapolating the complexity of these various attitudes and practices in different local settings is the aim of this study. The periods in focus constitute late phases of the respective ideological frameworks. In Spain, two periods from the phase of Tardofranquismo will be at the center of this analysis (1966 to 1968 and

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1972 to 1974). For the analysis of the Polish labor opposition, I selected two different periods of time (1976 to 1979 and 1981 to 1983). They are especially relevant for understanding the late socialist phase after 1968. Workers and other citizens of Spain and Poland were exposed to global economic trends on the one hand and national authoritarian regimes on the other one. The authoritarian governments, while employing strong progress-oriented rhetoric, sometimes even by utilizing a human rights language, in fact denied their citizens’ various fundamental rights.20

1.2 Research Questions, Methodology, and Conceptual Approach of the Study In this book, I shed light on repressed workers and their allies in two authoritarian European regimes at a time when a global human rights discourse became increasingly dynamic. Against this backdrop, I ask the following questions: how did workers and their allies address repression and how did they translate situations of repression into political activism? Which were the most pressing demands? Which role did international labor norms and human rights play in this context? In other words: how did Polish and Spanish labor oppositions address human rights violations and which practices did they develop to fight them? Did they develop a language of rights in the light of a globally dynamic human rights discourse? And if so, how? By comparing Spain and Poland through the lens of labor and rights, I pursue a twofold approach: on the one hand, I aim at bringing back labor history to the history of social movements.21 On the other one, I show when it made sense for social movements to use a language of rights. While the two societies did differ from each other in many regards, they also shared certain values, desires, fears, and ideas. This friction between commonalities and differences is what makes this comparative analysis so appealing. Comparing workers’ protest and related debates in Francoist Spain and state socialist Poland, this study offers an alternative narrative to the traditional East-West divide in European historiography, conceiving the socialist experience of East-Central Europe as an alternative model of development in the twentieth century. In this way, Central and Eastern European history does not appear as exceptional as it is sometimes suggested but becomes part of a  See, for instance: Ned Richardson-Little, Hella Dietz, and James Mark, “Socialism and Human Rights in East-Central Europe since 1945: Special Issue,” East Central Europe 2–3 (2019).  Stefan Berger, “‘German Labour History is Back’: Announcing the Foundation of the German Labour History Association,” International Labor and Working-Class History 97 (2020).

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broader European history narrative. It reveals, moreover, a global historical approach of this study, since it acknowledges that “other pasts were history, too.”22 The Francoist dictatorship, hence, can be seen as yet another example of the diversity of socio-political developments existing within “multiple Europes.”23 Such an integrative approach attempts to clear the concept of modernity of its positivist and teleological connotation and its Eurocentric and Western bias that is oftentimes entailed in historical comparisons, as will be laid out further in this section.24 When dealing with transnational comparative research on European regions, it is therefore especially fruitful to integrate a Southern European perspective in the sense of a “connecting category of space” which helps to overcome the traditional historiographical division into East and West.25 A common perspective on Southern and Eastern Europe was, for instance, taken in Phillip Ther’s important analysis on the economic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. In light of the European financial crisis starting in 2008, the historian asked whether the European South was now “the new East,” thereby playing with common stereotypizations of societies at the margins of Europe.26 Nevertheless, why Spain and Poland should be compared in a historical study might not be immediately obvious. The answer to the question of why and how these two countries serve as excellent cases of comparison becomes more palpable when looking at scholarly debates on comparative and transnational history. Before dealing with methodical questions of comparison, it has to be highlighted that the dictatorships as such are not the object of this comparative analysis; neither

 Conrad, What Is Global History?  Manuela Boatcă, “Die zu Ende gedachte Moderne: Alternative Theoriekonzepte in den lateinamerikanischen und osteuropäischen Peripherien,” in Die Vielfalt und Einheit der Moderne: Kulturund strukturvergleichende Analysen, ed. Thomas Schwinn (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), 281–304.  These thoughts were inspired by this talk by Florian Peters, “Polnische Zeitgeschichte jenseits etablierter Zäsuren” (paper presented at the 4. Kongress Polenforschung, Frankfurt an der Oder, March 23, 2017); the problem of ethnocentricity and a Western bias in trans- or international historical comparisons is problematized, for instance, in this volume: Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, eds., Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015).  Schenk and Winkler, for instance, have pointed out the fact that in contrast to “Eastern European history,” “Southern European history” never managed to become its own research discipline within the German-speaking academia and proposed to rethink the division into “East” and “West” history and to overcome it in the sense of an all-encompassing European historiography. Frithjof B. Schenk and Martina Winkler, eds., Der Süden: Neue Perspektiven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 13.  Philipp Ther, Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent: Eine Geschichte des neoliberalen Europa (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), Chapter 8.

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is it the degree or the quality of repression.27 However, what is understood by ‘repression,’ in such a study has to be clarified, especially since it also appears in many of the quoted sources. In this book, as a concept of analysis, repression is understood as: restrictions on the rights of citizens to criticize the government, restrictions on the freedom of the press, restrictions on the rights of opposition parties to campaign against the government, or, [. . .] the outright prohibition of groups, associations, or political parties opposed to the government. [. . .]28

In the case of Spanish and Polish labor oppositions, “political police force and [. . .] extremely severe sanctions for expressing and especially for organizing opposition to the government” were part of the repressive toolbox of both governments.29 Hence, I speak of repression when the oppositionists were persecuted legally for organizing workers’ representations or when they were imprisoned or beaten up on the streets or placed under arrest for either demonstrating against the government or striking. As will be shown, it was this kind of repression that oftentimes provoked workers’ democratic activism in the first place. The regime of Francisco Franco used violence as a constitutive element of its politics, even though there were gradual differences between the earlier and the less repressive later phase of the dictatorship. Francoist Spain was a country in which one part of the society oppressed the other – or at least tolerated this oppression – following the cleavage lines of the Civil War and beyond. In the Polish People’s Republic, the regime repeatedly carried out violence against its own citizens, sometimes with a lethal outcome. However, the complex discussions that the violent eruptions of state socialisms all around Europe and the globe caused, also among party members and the respective civil societies, show that violence as a political practice played a different role in the Polish context. It was heavily contested although it was sometimes dressed up as a lesser evil.30 This book is

 Cf.: Arnd Bauerkämper, “Historische Komparatistik in der Diktaturforschung,” in Diktaturen: Perspektiven der zeithistorischen Forschung, ed. Johannes Hürter and Hermann Wentker, Zeitgeschichte im Gespräch 29 (München, Wien: De Gruyter, 2019), 135–49, 136; Bauerkämper mentioned the prevalence of political history in the context of comparative analyses of dictatorships, whereas a citizen’s perspective had been neglected.  Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33.  Ronald Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33.  For instance in the context of the installation of Martial Law 1981. This negative realm of memory until today causes much discussion in the Polish society, oscillating between being interpreted as the real face of the state socialist dictatorship and having constituted the overwhelmed

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therefore not to be seen in the context of the comparison of totalitarianisms. It differs strongly from this current of research that, considering the introductory remarks, stands in the tradition of binary Cold War narratives.31 By analyzing rhetoric and practices of workers and their allies, with this book, I want to show European history from below.32 Fidelis, Klich-Kluczewska, and others have criticized how an anti-totalitarian approach camouflages the agency of societies under authoritarian rule. In such an approach, they argue, the party-state is omnipotent, imposing any action on its citizens by means of repression. Consequently, in such a “spoiler state,”33 the citizens themselves become passive and powerless.34 This study, in contrast, sheds light on citizens’ actions and thoughts. Its protagonists are people living in the dictatorships and not the regimes’ policies – even though they have a major impact on the actions of this study’s main actors. In line with Małgorzata Fidelis, “I prefer to use voices of historical actors over statistical [. . .] data” to understand democratic citizens’ protest.35

“Why Compare?” – on Apples and Oranges You can’t compare apples and oranges,36 the adage goes. But, in fact, you can: apples and oranges share the properties of fruit. As fruit, they are the same; as types of fruit, they dif-

but caring reaction of a national Polish government that wanted to prevent its nation being invaded again by Soviet troops. In an essay examining the 2015 elected Polish right-wing government against the background of it being accused of human rights violations, historian Felix Ackermann has shed light on the absolute taboo that state violence constitutes in contemporary Polish politics. See: Felix Ackermann, “Herr Grzesiek und mein Großvater,” Merkur 836 (2019).  On the debates regarding the applicability of totalitarianism theories, see: Lars Rensmann, “Totalitarismus,” in Politische Theorie: 22 umkämpfte Begriffe zur Einführung, ed. Gerhard Göhler, Mattias Iser, and Ina Kerner (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004), 367–84. On the impact of the “totalitarian school” on the study on dissent in Eastern and Central Europe, see: Barbara J. Falk, “Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe An Emerging Historiography,” East European Politics & Societies 2 (2011).  Małgorzata Fidelis and Barbara Klich–Kluczewska, Kobiety w Polsce, 1945–1989: Nowoczesność – równouprawnienie – komunizm, with the assistance of Piotr P. Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz (Warszawa: Universitas, 2020), 32.  The notion is borrowed from: Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 236.  Fidelis and Klich–Kluczewska, Kobiety w Polsce, 1945–1989, 32.  Małgorzata Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12.  This titled is borrowed from these two corresponding articles, namely: Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” New Literary History 3 (2009); Susan Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?,” PMLA – Journal of the Modern Language Association of America 3 (2011).

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1 Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990

fer. The concept of fruitness depends on a comparison of what apples and oranges have and do not have in common.37

This book compares citizens’ political rhetoric and practices in two semi-peripheral European authoritarian regimes in three decades (1960–990). Having in mind the two types of comparison, the one that highlights differences and the one that contrasts differences, this study is one that rather looks for similarities.38 Nevertheless, in the course of the analysis, it became noticeable that these similarities were rather strategical ones, for instance with regard to social groups involved. The deep anchoring of the study in local contexts and the analysis of locally produced source material has revealed differences predominantly in rhetoric. Comparative researchers can either make universal statements or identify singularities through a “controlled reduction of complexity” and “limited decontextualization.”39 In the given context, the reduction of complexity is achieved by selecting actors (workers’ movements and allies) and topics (repression of workers, violation of rights). The question of nationalities and regional nationalisms in Spain, for instance, will only marginally be touched upon in this book. Likewise, gender relations won’t be at the center of analysis; however, the role of women’s labor and women’s protest will be touched upon occasionally, since protesting women shaped the labor oppositions in both Spain and Poland and gender equality was indeed one of the rights demanded by Spanish workers.40 In the context of the trending transnational approaches in humanities, historical comparisons have strongly been criticized for upholding the national paradigm

 Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?,” 755.  Marc Bloch, “Für eine vergleichende Geschichtsbetrachtung der europäischen Gesellschaften,” in Alles Gewordene hat Geschichte: Die Schule der Annales in ihren Texten 1929–1992, ed. Matthias Middell and Steffen Sammler (Leipzig: Reclam, 1994), 121–67; John S. Mill, A system of logic, ratiocinative and inductive: Being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation, 9th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1875).  Arnd Bauerkämper, “Wege zur europäischen Geschichte. Erträge und Perspektiven der vergleichs– und transfergeschichtlichen Forschung,” in Vergleichen, Verflechten, Verwirren? Europäische Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Theorie und Praxis, ed. Agnes Arndt, Joachim C. Häberlen and Christiane Reinecke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 45.  There is a plethora of literature on gender relations, women’s labor and women’s protest for both countries’ labor oppositions. See, for instance: José Babiano, ed., Del hogar a la huelga: Trabajo, género y movimiento obrero durante el franquismo (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2008); Eva Antón Fernández and Diana García Bujarrabal, eds., Sindicalistas: Mujeres en las Comisiones Obreras (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2021); Shana Penn, Solidarity’s secret: The women who defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008); Natalia Jarska and Jan Olaszek, eds., Płeć buntu: kobiety w oporze społecznym i opozycji w Polsce w latach 1944–1989 na tle porównawczym (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2014); Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland.

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instead of overcoming it.41 Furthermore, postcolonial researchers like Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan have criticized the link between Western-centered concepts of modernization and the practice of comparing:42 “[C]omparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”43 Radhakrishnan argued that comparative studies never really served for “the production of new and destabilizing knowledge” but rather for reproducing (colonial) power structures and “calibrating value.”44 He thereby touched upon the Eurocentricity and the Western bias that is entailed in numerous research perspectives taking the perspective for granted and treating it as neutral. The compared entity, in contrast, is degraded towards being different from a Western norm. The tertium comparationis was too often a merely Western category, for instance when assessing the levels of “modernization” of different societies.45 Analyzing human rights discourses in two societies at the margin of European historiography that did not comply with this Western norm.46 When comparing, the selectivity and subjectivity of historical research become even more obvious than in other studies.47 The postcolonial cri-

 Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, “Die Welt Beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens,” in Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, ed. Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015), 7–31, 9. For a comprehensive analysis of the critique, see: Thomas Welskopp, “Vergleichende Geschichte,” http://www.ieg-ego.eu/welskoppt-2010-de, accessed April 2, 2023.  Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, “Die Welt Beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens,” in Die Welt beobachten, 15; Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?.”  Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” 454.  Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” 454.  Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, “Die Welt Beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens” in Die Welt beobachten, 15. Cf, also Koselleck’s expression of the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous,” as in: Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 175.  Radhakrishnan’s criticism, being only one example for a post-colonial critique of Western normativity in international academia, provoked a reaction by Susan Stanford Friedman. She in turn argued that a full stop of comparisons and a “refusal to compare” could turn into a “retreat into the particular and identity-based, a resistance of the cosmopolitan,” because “comparison across cultures defamiliarizes what one takes as natural in any given culture.” While acknowledging the normative and epistemic problems Radhakrishnan touched upon, Friedman proposed a “juxtapositional model of comparison,” which, however, is negatively defined: it does not set up one element as the standard of measure for the other, neither does it use one as an instrument to serve the other. Instead, it relies on the three modes of comparison, which are “collision,” “defamiliarization,” and “collage.” Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?,” 756 and 758.  Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and transnational history: Central European approaches and new perspectives, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 15.

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tique articulated in a global historical context is of relevance for this study, too, although it seems to be a mere European history. Yet it is not entirely true: Spain and Poland are semi-peripheries of Europe whose societies constantly discussed their relationship with Europe and their position in Europe, oftentimes also in the contexts of a third, non-European region. While Poland dealt with its complex relationship with Russia (or the Soviet Union), for Spain it was the Latin American continent that was an important point of reference. However, the cases differed in their relationships with the semi-peripheral regions. While Russia and later the Soviet Union was traditionally more powerful than Poland, which manifested in Russian imperialism and Soviet dominance, it was the Spanish that had colonized a major part of Latin America, thereby imposing their culture and language upon the continent after 1492, exterminating indigenous peoples and engaging in the slave trade.48 Finally, also within Europe itself, cultural asymmetries exist. Oftentimes, they go hand in hand with modernization narratives. Inner-European discourses are, in a way, comparable to those in the Global South. However, Europeans at the semiperiphery struggle to position themselves when confronted with global discourses on post-colonialism.49, 50 This struggle is mirrored in Chakrabarty’s anecdote on how Central-Eastern European colleagues told him he should have named his famous book “Provincializing Western Europe.”51 That the European South as a space  On Polish culture as a colonizing one, see for instance this study on conceptions of temporality: Frysztacka, Zeit-Schriften der Moderne.  Recently, a new debate on whether and, if yes, how one can grasp Eastern and East Central Europe with postcolonial vocabulary emerged. A good introduction into the topic can be found here: Alfred Sproede and Mirja Lecke, “Der Weg der postcolonial studies nach und in Osteuropa,” in Überbringen –Überformen –Überblenden: Theorietransfer im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Dietlind Hüchtker and Alfrun Kliems (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2011); Claudia Kraft, Alf Lüdtke, and Jürgen Martschukat, eds., Kolonialgeschichten. Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010); see also this debate between Spivak and Condee: Gayatri C. Spivak, “Are you postcolonial? To the teachers of Slavic and Eastern European literatures,” PMLA – Journal of the Modern Language Association of America 3 (2006); Nancy Condee, “The Anti-imperialist Empire and After: In Dialogue with Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Are You Postcolonial?’,” PMLA – Journal of the Modern Language Association of America 3 (2006).  Recently, a new debate on whether and if, yes, how one can grasp Eastern and East Central Europe with postcolonial vocabulary emerged. Alfred Sproede and Mirja Lecke, “Der Weg der postcolonial studies nach und in Osteuropa,” in Überbringen –Überformen –Überblenden; cf., for instance, this debate: Spivak, “Are you postcolonial? To the teachers of Slavic and Eastern European literatures” versus Condee, “The Anti-imperialist Empire and After”; Anna V. Wendland, “Imperiale, koloniale, postkoloniale Blicke auf die Peripherien des Habsburgerreiches,” in Kolonialgeschichten. Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen, ed. Claudia Kraft, Alf Lüdtke and Jürgen Martschukat (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010), 211–35.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Europa als Provinz: Perspektiven postkolonialer Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2010), 10.

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category can help to bridge these asymmetries, as elaborated by Schenk, becomes particularly salient in this context.52 A comparative analysis examining human rights through labor history has to be especially careful not to pose questions that are “tendentious” or that “calibrate value,”53 and that are moreover accompanied by a teleological narrative of rights as a salvation history of humanity.54 The shared semi-peripheral status regarding an imagined European center is one of the reasons why Spain and Poland serve well for comparison. Discourses on modernization and related concepts rarely took place contrasting each other, but rather through positioning one’s own society towards and/ or within a global West or Europe. Concretely, this means to acknowledge that transnational discourses on rights and repression did not only permeate national containers and softened their margins, such as the example from the beginning, but that they were qualitatively shaped by global events and institutions including the International Labour Organization (ILO) or the Vatican.55 Hence, discourses on repression and rights were not only related to one another but also functioned “[. . .] through one another, in terms of relationships, interaction and circulation.”56 In this book, the nation will remain an important spatial frame – it evidently structures important historical phenomena that play a major role in this study, including legislations. But it functions as a permeable container and shall not become an “immobile object.”57 Coming back to the question of why it might be fruitful to compare two or more cases, the answer is an epistemological one: comparisons allow the scholar

 Frithjof B. Schenk and Christiane Winkler, “Einleitung,” in Der Süden: Neue Perspektiven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion, ed. Frithjof B. Schenk and Martina Winkler (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 7–20, 15; see also: Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala, eds., Southern Europe? Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece from the 1950s until the present day (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015).  Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” 454.  Cf, for instance, the depiction of Poland as a “success story,” as in: Thomas Risse-Kappen, Stephen C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2. For a critical stand regarding these narratives, see: Ned Richardson-Little, “Human Rights as Myth and History: Between the Revolutions of 1989 and the Arab Spring,” Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 2–3 (2015); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” Past & Present 1 (2016).  Marcel van der Linden, “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History,” in Global histories of work, ed. Andreas Eckert, Work in global and historical perspective (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015), 25–47.  Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 1 (2006).  Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 1 (2006).

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1 Introduction: On Democratic Labor Oppositions in Spain and Poland 1960–1990

to address problems and questions that otherwise would not have been solved.58 Similar to the “cosmopolitan” argument of Stanford Friedman, Kocka and Haupt have underlined that: [. . .] [C]omparison can help to de-familiarize the familiar. When examined in light of observable alternatives, a specific development can lose the ‘matter of course’ appearance it may have possessed before. [. . .] Comparison leads to de-provincializing historical observation.59

In other words: comparing helps finding the unexpected, it is open to surprises. This book is full of them: the important role that Catholic and Marxist actors repeatedly played for labor movements in European postwar history can only be understood after examining their activism in different political and ideological systems. While the strong role of the Polish Catholic Church during state socialism is one of the commonplaces of even non-academic knowledge of the recent history of Europe, one rarely reads about the ambivalences of Catholic actors during Francoism.60 Yet, when mirroring their activism with the Polish example, explanations appear that can transcend the national scope. Is it only the much-praised cultural anchoring of the Catholic Church in the respective Polish and Spanish cultures? A comparative historian, in such a situation, is able to seek transnational or even universal explanations, for instance by referring to Catholic social teachings and intertwining them with a national or local context. In this book, I follow Marcel van der Linden’s approach to comparison when he stated that, “The question [. . .] is never ‘Are two items comparable?’, but ‘In which respects are they comparable?’”61 This being said, it is the workers’ movements of both countries that makes their history so important for the understanding of human rights in the twentieth century. The specific relationship of individual and collective rights as articulated by the democratic labor oppositions is only visible when comparing Spain and Poland, where the fight for workers’ rights became trajectories for a general democratization. The fact that both workers’ movements simply created facts by installing independent workers’ representations at the factory level in a dictatorial surrounding is specific to Spain and Poland. This historical peculiarity is the reason why I chose Spain and Poland as comparative cases, since they challenge the relationship between different rights’ “generations” in a particular way. The question of what

 Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond,” in Comparative and transnational history: Central European approaches and new perspectives, 4.  Jürgen Kocka and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparison and Beyond,” in Comparative and transnational history: Central European approaches and new perspectives, 4.  Of course, this does not apply to publications dealing with Spanish history as such but rather a general knowledge of Francoism outside Spain.  van der Linden, Transnational Labour History, 174.

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happened in dictatorships when workers created spaces of labor democracy is hence only to be answered through a comparison of Spanish and Polish history in a transnational setting. This specific comparison enables one to make more general assumptions about social alliances and democratic activism as well as the interrelationship of collective rights and individual rights. Last but not least, this study demonstrates that the traditional understanding of rights’ “generations” should be addressed more carefully, since the comparison carved out how collective rights could appear simultaneously or even prior to civil rights.62

“Why not Compare?”63 Spain and Poland are especially well suited for comparison. The recent historical context bears two tertia comparationis: the political framework of authoritarian (even though ideologically opposing) regimes and the interconnectivity of workers’ protests and general democratic claims. In this context, the support for the protesting workers by an ideologically and politically heterogeneous opposition is of particular relevance. These engaged citizens were oftentimes left-leaning members of the intelligentsia and students, lay Catholics or even members of the clergy. What is more, labor conflicts in Spain and Poland gained international momentum, although Poland sparked a higher international interest than Spain. This is also true for the periods of system transformation. In the context of social protest and labor conflicts, it is especially intriguing that the two states were shaped by different and even opposing political and ideological systems – however, both being authoritarian dictatorships.64 Following Juan Linz’ definition, I regard both cases as “authoritarian”, since they were: [. . .] Political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor intensive political mobilization, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or occasionally a small group exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones.65

 Cf. Christian Tomuschat, Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25–27.  Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?”.  In this book, I refer to the Polish People’s Republic as “state socialist,” following the dominant language of the English-speaking literature in the field. If not quoting others, I won’t use the terminus “communist Poland,” since I deal with “communist” actors in the Spanish case who did not live in a socialist state. I write about Francoist Spain as “Francoist” or “right-wing authoritarian.”  As quoted in: Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and post–communist Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 38.

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Francoist Spain was a fascist (especially until 1942) and right-wing authoritarian regime based on an ideology that, apart from a cult of their caudillo (“leader”) Francisco Franco, focused on national and ethnic purity, anti-communism, and a nationalized version of Catholicism. Economically, Francoism combined elements of capitalism and planned economy, supporting landowners, entrepreneurs, and the banking sector.66 Ideologically, Francoism was rooted in a fascist syndical organization, the Falange (“Phalanx”) that had traditionally fought against strong anarchist, socialist, and communist labor movements before the Civil War (1936–39). A highly repressive fascist phase until the 1950s (recent historiography emphasizes the year 1942 as a first turning point) was followed by an economic and somewhat cultural opening of the country that did not only create a new middle-class but strengthened oppositional dynamics at the same time. The Church was an important player and a supporter of the Francoist state. It was characterized by militant anti-communism and nationalism. However, some union-friendly and left-leaning currents within the Catholic Church advocated for the workers’ cause and became part of an anti-Francoist opposition beginning in the 1960s. State socialist Poland, in turn, was highly dependent on the Soviet Union and had adopted communism as a state ideology after being relegated to the Eastern Bloc in 1945. Vulgarizing Marxist thought, state socialist Poland highlighted the workers’ role as the “constitutional sovereign”67 which did not stop the government from repeatedly exercising power against them, such as in 1956, 1970/71, 1976, and during martial law in 1981–83. Furthermore, Polish citizens lived through a more repressive phase during the immediate postwar years of severe Stalinism and a subsequent more liberal, opening phase after 1956. Spain and Poland both experienced repressive backlashes that can be considered reactions to the results of the liberalization dynamics. The position of the Catholic Church was in both states crucial, however, different: in contrast to the Spanish regime, the Polish government did not rely on the Catholic Church that was considered an antagonist of communism, but – due to its anchoring in Polish society – had to tolerate and integrate it into the state system. In no other state socialist society did the Church or any other player manage to reach such a high level of political influence. The main difference between Francoist Spain and State Socialist Poland was unquestionably their affiliation with different political blocs and their positioning towards a democratic-liberal West. This is especially true when considering the global normative, economic, and political dominance of liberal democracies after

 Arnd Bauerkämper, “Fascism and Capitalism,” Moving the Social (2022): 95; See also: Arnd Bauerkämper, Der Faschismus in Europa 1918–1945 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 128–31.  Włodzimierz Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (München: C.H. Beck, 2010).

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1945 as well as the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as global powers in a multipolar world order with an increasing number of players emerging from the Global South. As Christiaens, Mark and Faraldo stated correctly: Indeed, the very creation of a divided Europe had an important East-South angle. Both of these European peripheries initially understood each other through the logic of the military and political confrontation of the early Cold War: their own countries’ political projects were on the ‘right side’ of a broader battle for ideological supremacy that spanned the continent and the world.68

This positioning was not only important for the governments’ politics, but it was equally important for the respective oppositions. The global human rights context and the normative reputation of their own governments impacted highly on the national oppositions’ transnational communication with regard to cooperation partners and rhetoric. In this context, both left-leaning oppositions faced challenges: the Spanish opposition, a heterogeneous movement with a strong Eurocommunist current, reached out to International Organizations and left-leaning national institutions abroad, such as trade unions. Yet it rarely addressed foreign governments and did not expect any support from them, since many Western states maintained close ties with their own fascist government. Left-leaning Poles faced a similar problem, only the other way around: when they contacted Western left-leaning actors they shared several political convictions with, they had to break with Westerners’ leftist illusions about real existing socialism while at the same time feeling an urge to underline that they were not ardent anti-communists.69 The channels of communication were thus dominantly at the level of civil society which, however, referred to supranational institutions regularly. Also from a longue durée perspective, Spain and Poland share common features. Some of them are a product of their semi-peripheral position. Having been at the geographical margins of Europe and viewing their own culture as detached from various historical modernization processes enhanced steady debates about their own positioning towards Europe. These debates, however, were traditionally characterized by discourses of inferiority and backwardness and contributed to a specific mental mapping of their own nation.70 Oftentimes, this mental mapping was embedded in a narrative of decay, having in mind Spain’s colonial past

 Christiaens, Mark, and Faraldo, “Entangled Transitions,” 591.  See, for instance: Robert Brier, ed., Entangled protest: transnational approaches to the history of dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2013).  On complexes of inferiority in Poland and Spain see also: Marek J. Chodakiewicz and John Radzilowski, Spanish Carlism and Polish Nationalism: The Borderlands of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Transaction Publishers, 2003).

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(1492–1898) as a global power and Poland’s imperial past in Early Modern Times, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) was an important player in Central Europe until the Partitions of Poland.

Alternative Press and Underground Publications as Sources The analysis is dominantly based on sources that have been published either illegally (abroad and underground) or legally, but then within certain boundaries of what was possible to say. While the national peculiarities and contexts of the sources will be explained in the respective case study chapter, this section provides general remarks about the intertwining of underground publishing, oppositional movements, and the creation of an alternative public sphere. In order to reconstruct the rhetoric of workers and their oppositional allies, it made sense to combine legally published material and publications produced underground, which, in both countries, constituted a central form of communication for the democratic opposition and added another layer to the national and transnational public spheres. This is especially true for Central and Eastern Europe. Having its roots in the Soviet dissidence, or rather “start[ing] in kitchens and at the dachas of a few dozen citizens,”71 the term samizdat was introduced to describe underground publishing by contemporary historical actors and then later by contemporary historians and other scholars. “In many ways, underground publishing was the nucleus of an alternative culture that evolved in Eastern Europe,” Thomas Lindenberger argued.72 Samizdat stems from Soviet dissident circles and is a syllabic compositum, typical of Soviet neologisms. It combines the Russian word сам [sam] (“self”) and a certain grammatical form of the verb издавать [izdavat’] (approx. “to publish,” “to give out”). Its literal translation is “self-publishing.” Accordingly, independent publications that were published in exile were called tamizdat, as там [tam] means “there” in Russian, i.e., “published over there.” In the Central and Eastern European context, the Polish underground publishing scene was one of the richest and most important ones. Like in the entire region, Polish underground publishing was not restricted to the national context but was read and produced outside Poland as

 Thomas Lindenberger and Jan C. Behrends, “Underground publishing and the public sphere. Some introductory remarks,” in Behrends, Lindenberger (Hg.) 2014 – Underground publishing and the public sphere, 3–30, 9.  Thomas Lindenberger and Jan C. Behrends, “Underground publishing and the public sphere. Some introductory remarks,” in Behrends, Lindenberger (Hg.) 2014 – Underground publishing and the public sphere, 3–30, 9.

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well. Publications reached not only Western Europe but also other state socialist societies, for instance Czechoslovakia, where the dissident movement underheld close ties with Polish partners.73 Polish oppositional actors could draw back on a long tradition of underground publishing that dated back to the nineteenth century. During state socialism, for the Polish case, the expression of drugi obieg, a “second circuit,” was common.74 It refers to publications that were published in private basements, which over time could develop towards semi-professional printing plants. The Polish samizdat was not restricted to leaflets, pamphlets or magazines but also novels and academic monographs that were printed and read thanks to this wide network of collaborators of which the majority was female.75 The topics raised in this context were often historical taboos, such as Soviet crimes during the Second World War76 and the relationship to neighboring nations and states, including Germans, and served as an arena for addressing anti-Semitism as a major problem in Polish history.77 Generally speaking, the 1970s were not only a phase of blossoming for the Polish samizdat, but also one of politicization of samizdat as they “signified a shift from literary and artistic to overtly political forms of underground publishing.”78 With the emergence of the Solidarność (“Solidarity”) in 1980, the Polish samizdat witnessed a peak, whereas the introduction of martial law (1981–83) narrowed down the number of self-published literature and press. Despite the imposition of martial law, which entailed a prohibition of printing

 See, for instance: Gregor Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft: Oppositionelles Denken zur Nation im ostmitteleuropäischen Samizdat 1976–1992 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).  Justyna Błażejowska, Papierowa rewolucja: Z dziejów drugiego obiegu wydawniczego w Polsce 1976–1989/1990 (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2010).  Ina Alber and Natali Stegmann, “Einleitung: Samizdat und alternative Kommunikation,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 1 (2016): 7.  Some topics were of central relevance to many Poles, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the role of the Red Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 or the massacres of the NKVD in 1940 that are oftentimes named after one of the sites where they have been committed, i.e. Katyn/ Katyń. A prominent novel describing the reality in a Soviet Gulag was written by Gustaw Herling–Grudziński. It was translated to English under the title “A World Apart” (Polish: Inny Świat). See: Wlodzimierz Bolecki, A World Apart by Gustaw Herling (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015).  Jan J. Lipski, “Dwie ojczyzny, dwa patriotyzmy: Uwagi o megalomanii narodowej i ksenofobii Polaków,” in Ile ojczyzn? Ile patriotyzmów?, ed. Michał Syska (Warszawa: Książka i Prasa, 2007), 9–35.  Thomas Lindenberger and Jan C. Behrends, “Underground publishing and the public sphere. Some introductory remarks,” in Behrends, Lindenberger (Hg.) 2014 – Underground publishing and the public sphere, 10.

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and proliferating written documents, Polish activists tried to keep up an active publishing scene and continued the production as far as possible. The Spanish opposition also published magazines and other documents underground and abroad, first and foremost in Paris (this is a commonality of the Polish and the Spanish exiled community) and in Mexico City. Yet, compared to the Polish underground publishing, its social impact on the opposition was less strong. Instead, progressive legal publications appeared after the liberalization of the Spanish press law in 1966 (see: Chapter 2.1) which heavily fueled the emerging social practice of public debates, a phenomenon that had been silenced in the earlier, more repressive phase of Franco’s dictatorship. Publications published underground have been called prensa clandestina (“clandestine press”). One of the most active groups in publishing clandestine press was reminiscent of the Spanish Communist Party that, as will be shown, was also of crucial importance to the Spanish labor opposition. Considering the different academic and historical contexts under which the countries in question and their underground publishing history have been studied, I decided to speak of “alternative publications” or “alternative press” when referring to both cases. Both types of sources, the illegal and the legal ones, have one aspect in common: they provided arenas for alternative debates within the authoritarian state system. In this context, the creation of a “public sphere” serving as a space of communication is crucial.79 These alternative publications that are at the core of this analysis created alternative public spheres and alternative interpretations of society and politics.80 They were both a reaction and a product of the “paradox of modern dictatorships aiming simultaneously at controlling and mobilizing their populations.”81 Yet, constituting an alternative public sphere, samizdat and clandestine press could navigate outside the borders of power and control structures and were able to fill this new public sphere with alternative patterns of meaning that differed from the official narratives. Although it is true for both legal and underground publications that they contributed to the creation of an alternative public sphere, only the underground publications could navigate beyond the borders of censorship and thereby ignore structures of power. Haber-

 Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).  For an overview of the accessed sources and archives, please see the introductory remarks to the section “Sources and Bibliography.”  Thomas Lindenberger and Jan C. Behrends, “Underground publishing and the public sphere. Some introductory remarks,” in Behrends, Lindenberger (Hg.) 2014 – Underground publishing and the public sphere, 5.

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mas developed his theory for an ideal-typical bourgeois society, but identified it as “only one historical model”: [. . .] [M] any others have existed and continue to exist. They have their own rules and produce their own cultures – like those of censorship and underground publishing – but they also fulfill specific functions for different regimes.82

Following Ina Alber and Natali Stegman and their assessment of the Central and Eastern European samizdat, underground publishing has to be analyzed by taking into account the concepts of “opposition” and “communication.”83 This approach shifts the attention towards the actors. The protagonists of this study are the authors of alternative press publications, i.e. oftentimes politically active intellectuals and writing workers. In both studied countries, they formed an integral part of the political opposition against the existing regime. Inspired by Gregor Feindt who has presented a definition of the term “opposition” for the Polish contemporary history, in this comparative dissertation “opposition” is understood as a publicly expressed critique of the regime, while dissidence is its non-public preliminary stage. Having in mind the different forms of oppositional practices and rhetoric, when speaking of “oppositional actors,” I refer to a group of people that regularly cooperated in order to criticize and fight against the authoritarian system. Given the socialist convictions of many oppositional actors especially in Poland but also considering the Catholic socialization of many activists in Francoist Spain, both forms of critique of the system are valid, the fundamentally delegitimizing one as well as critique that tried to improve the system from within.84 This definition shows how important the factor of visibility is in the context of the study of oppositions in authoritarian regimes. It is closely connected to the concept of civil societies that, like the Habermasian notion of a public sphere, has been developed while having Western liberal societies in mind. In an increasingly transnational manner, the notion of a civil society was an object of scholarly interest and political debates over the last decades.85 In the 1980s, moreover, the especially diverse and historically rich concept of civil society or sociedad civil or społeczeństwo obywatelskie regained momentum in the context of Latin Ameri-

 Thomas Lindenberger and Jan C. Behrends, “Underground publishing and the public sphere. Some introductory remarks,” in Behrends, Lindenberger (Hg.) 2014 – Underground publishing and the public sphere, 16.  Alber and Stegmann, “Einleitung,” 2.  Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 7.  See also: Arnd Bauerkämper and Christoph Gumb, “Towards a Transnational Civil Society: Actors and Concepts in Europe from the Late Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century,” SP IV 2010–401 (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, 2010); Discussion Paper.

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can and Central and Eastern European protest movements.86 Situated between the state and the private sphere, civil society is according to Arnd Bauerkämper understood as the sphere of social self-organization which is neither controlled nor regulated by state-institutions and shaped by “[. . .] free interaction, the recognition of pluralism and tolerance, accountability, mutual trust, the willingness to cooperation and specific forms of peaceful conflict management.”87 Eastern and Central European underground publishing in general and Polish underground publications during state socialism (but also before88) have been studied intensively on an international scale.89 The emergence of legal liberal media in Francoist Spain, too, has enjoyed some scholarly and archival attention in the past years, yet, mostly in the Spanish-speaking world. Isabelle Renaudet, however, published the most detailed study in French.90 As a common feature of all publications that emerged underground in Francoist Spain, Renaudet has identified a strong  Manfred Hildermeier, Jürgen Kocka, and Christoph Conrad, Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000), 18. On Polish debates on civil society see: Agnes Arndt, Intellektuelle in der Opposition: Diskurse zur Zivilgesellschaft in der Volksrepublik Polen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007); Agnes Arndt, “Renaissance or Reconstruction? Intellectual Transfer of Civil Society Discourses Between Eastern and Western Europe,” in Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond: Transnational media during and after socialism, ed. Friederike Kind–Kovács and Jessie Labov, 156–72, Studies in Contemporary European History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Andrew Arato, “Civil Society Against the State: Poland 1980–81,” Telos 47 (1981).  Arnd Bauerkämper, “Einleitung: Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft.: Akteure und ihr Handeln in historisch–sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” in Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft: Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Arnd Bauerkämper (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003), 7–30, 9.  See, for instance: Jan T. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Klaus-Peter Friedrich and Karol Sauerland, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord und das polnisch–jüdische Verhältnis im Diskurs der polnischen Untergrundpresse 1942–1944 (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2006).  The most detailed publications on Central and Eastern samizdat, according to the author, are the following: Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov, eds., Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond: Transnational media during and after socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Ina Alber and Natali Stegmann, eds., Themenheft: Samizdat und alternative Kommunikation: samizdat and alternative ways of communication (Marburg: Verlag Herder–Institut, 2016); Jan C. Behrends and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Underground publishing and the public sphere: Transnational perspectives (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2014); for the Polish context, see, for instance: Jan Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy: Niezależny ruch wydawniczy w Polsce 1976–1989 (Warszawa: Trzecia Strona, 2015); Angela MurcheKikut, Monographien im polnischen Zweiten Umlauf: Druki zwarte w polskim drugim obiegu 1976–1990 (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2008); Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft.  Julián Ariza and Julio Aróstegui, eds., Amordazada y perseguida: Catálogo de prensa clandestina y del exilio: hemeroteca de la Fundación 1° de Mayo (Madrid: Fundación 1° de Mayo, 2005); Isabelle Renaudet, Un parlement de papier: La presse d’opposition au franquisme durant la dernière décennie de la dictature et la transition démocratique (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003);

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commitment to democracy: “Despite their diversity, all these publications therefore claimed to uphold the values of democracy.”91 More has been written about liberal legal Spanish media, first and foremost the Cuadernos para el Diálogo (“Papers for Dialogue”), a Catholic magazine that served as an arena for progressive debates on labor, rights, and democracy, especially after the Second Vatican Council. It served as the main arena of communication for a Catholic left-leaning milieu and offered communists, Catholics, and other democrats in Francoist Spain a space to publish their opinions – however, within the boundaries of the press law.92 The actors of this study shared many common values and convictions but were nevertheless heterogeneous. It is difficult to find non-simplifying labels for them when addressing them in toto since their positioning oscillated repeatedly over the course of the years, for instance towards the government. I therefore decided to refer to them as “democratic labor oppositions” or just “democratic oppositions,” thereby drawing on the (partly self-descriptive) terminus from the Polish activists’ context.93 While this first section of the introduction has contextualized the selected sources, thereby providing definitions of the central concepts used in this study, the next section situates this study within a broader research context between global labor history and the history of human rights.

1.3 Crises and Breakthroughs: Global Labor History, Human Rights History, and Democratic Labor Oppositions This book connects contemporary European and global labor history and the history of human rights: it seeks to integrate the histories of democratization in Eastern and Southern Europe in the late twentieth century and shows how these regional developments were intertwined with global economic and political dynamics. By focusing on labor mobilization and social rights, it also challenges the widespread assumption that the history of human rights under dictatorships, and worldwide, was centered on the problem of political freedoms alone. It reveals that the demands for free and independent trade unions, which in both countries became a flashpoint in

Francisco J. Davara Torrego, “La aventura informativa de ‘Cuadernos para el diálogo’,” Estudios sobre el mensaje periodístico 10 (2004).  Renaudet, Un parlement de papier, 12.  Javier Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1963–1976: Una historia cultural del segundo franquismo (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2006); Javier Rupérez, “Cuadernos para el diálogo en la distancia del medio siglo,” Cuadernos de pensamiento político FAES 38 (2013).  See, for instance: Łukasz Kamiński and Paweł Piotrowski, eds., Opozycja demokratyczna w Polsce w świetle akt KC PZPR 1976–1980: Wybór dokumentów (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo GAJT, 2002).

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the fight for broader democratic demands, were not predominantly discussed in terms of rights, but rather presented as an inevitable necessity of everyday life from a workers’ perspective. At the same time, these labor movements morally delegitimized state repression against workers and thereby employed the concepts of democracy, participation, solidarity, progress, and, eventually, rights. In so doing, this study seems to prove one of the axioms of labor history interpreting “work” as one of the “key issues” of society and claiming that “once the problem of work is solved, all other problems will be solved more easily.”94 By linking the history of human rights and the history of labor protest in Europe, this book offers new explanations regarding the vernacularization of human rights ideas in workers’ communities. In so doing, it provides insights into the alleged dominance of human rights rhetoric as an empowerment tool after 1968 and fills important research gaps: the South of Europe in general and Spain in particular have remained blank spots on the international map of both labor and human rights historians, not to mention their integration into a global history perspective.95 On the other hand, human rights histories and the history of democratic protest until now have suffered from a strong civil rights bias concentrating on intellectual elites as actors.96 However, if one considers this gap in human rights historiography as a chance, labor historians can now step in and bring “labor” as a category of analysis into a thriving field of research that is, moreover, oftentimes characterized by a global history approach. The turning towards global approaches is typical of both fields of research, labor and human rights history: while labor history is said to

 Andreas Eckert and Marcel van der Linden, “New Perspectives on Workers and the History of Work: Global Labor History,” in Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World, ed. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmeier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 145–62.  Andreas Eckert and Marcel van der Linden, “New Perspectives on Workers and the History of Work: Global Labor History,” in Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World, ed. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmeier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 145–62; Andrea Komlosy, Arbeit: Eine globalhistorische Perspektive. 13. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Wien: Promedia, 2014); none of these volumes contains a contribution on Southern Europe and/ or Spain. Spain, if ever, appears as a colonizing power but not as an area of research. Cf: Jan Lucassen, ed., Global Labour History: A State of the Art (Bern: Lang, 2008); Jan Lucassen, The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Lucassen mentions Spain and Poland, but only in a brief sentence about forced labor (Spain) and as the home country of enslaved laborers during Second World War (Poland); Karl H. Roth, ed., On the Road to Global Labour History (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Marcel van der Linden, “The “Globalization” of Labour and Working-Class History and its Consequences,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, ed. Jan Lucassen, International and Comparative Social History 9 (Bern: Lang, 2008), 13–37; Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the world: Essays toward a global labor history (Leiden: Brill, 2008).  After the first criticism was raised, Samuel Moyn presented a study on social rights: Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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have undergone a major crisis in the 1990s only to come back as a global labor history in the 2010s, human rights histories have emerged in the late 2000s, however, focusing on questions of starting points rather than on actors and regions. The next sections, thus, present the two research areas and lay out how this study contributes to filling research gaps in two innovative fields of historical research.

Global Labor History as a Key: Understanding the History of Human Rights as a History of both Civil and Social Rights Despite their historical and philosophical vicinity, civil rights and social rights are oftentimes pictured as being opposed to each other.97 Additionally, their history is oftentimes presented as one of mutual competition, playing off against each other individual and collective rights.98 This is also grounded in the history of the Cold War, which, so the mainstream narrative goes, since the 1990s produced two distinct “cultures” of human rights: Western democracies put an emphasis on political and civil rights while social and economic rights were more important to the governments of the Eastern bloc and other communist countries.99 The Global South, in turn, had concentrated on the so-called third generation rights, for instance the right to development.100 The research literature mirrors this division: until very recently,

 Samuel Moyn, for instance, constructed a historical interdependency between human rights and social rights, however, a negative one: human rights had failed in addressing social and economic (in)equality; instead, a sufficiency discourse was made strong in the course of globalizing capitalism.  Cf.: Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).  Ned Richardson–Little, Hella Dietz, and James Mark, “New Perspectives on Socialism and Human Rights in East Central Europe since 1945,” East Central Europe 2–3 (2019); Introduction to the Thematic Issue.  For recent scholarship on the NIEO see the special issue of: Humanity: An interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development (Spring 2015). In this context, studies on the debates concerning the New International Economic Order (NIEO) have emerged, which, however, focus on global inequalities. Julia Dehm, for instance, has shown how a transnational “basic needs” discourse “represented a response to the crisis of inequality that deliberately focused attention on poverty (rather than wealth)” and how this discourse converted inequality into a problem of individuals rather than states: Julia Dehm, “Highlighting inequalities in the histories of human rights: Contestations over justice, needs and rights in the 1970s,” Leiden Journal of International Law 4 (2018); many of these contributions seek to return a historical agency to actors from the Global South that should not be viewed as mere passive victims of globalization processes taking place in the 1960s and afterwards, but are presented as important global players that shaped important debates on an international level. Johanna Bockman, in this context, has bridged the Global South with the socialist bloc and investigated their influence within the

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human rights literature rarely touched upon social or explicitly labor topics, while labor history was in turn rarely understood as a contribution to a human rights historiography. With this book, I therefore aim at bridging these two fields, which, from my point of view, are closely tied – especially when one studies workers in nondemocratic environments. The protagonists of this study, oppositional workers and intellectuals in authoritarian regimes, discussed civil rights and social rights in the same breath, without necessarily always employing a language of rights. Most contact points between labor and human rights history have so far been identified by labor historians, but this cooperation between labor and human rights historiography states an important exception: Małgorzata Mazurek and Paul Betts presented a special issue dedicated to the intertwining of human and social rights, arguing that social rights were often addressed in the context of justifying social reforms. They depicted T.H. Marshall’s “Citizenship and Social Class” as central to the idea that social rights were logical successors to European civil rights.101 Labor historians approached the topic from an institutional perspective, focusing on the history of the International Labour Organization ILO. Marcel van der Linden, for instance, proposed a periodization of the organizations’ history, whereby he detected a break at the end of the 1960s and a period of “soul-searching” for the ILO, starting in the 1970s. A symbolic peak for the ILO constituted the year 1969 when the organization was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.102 Such an event uplifted the question of labor to the global scale and contributed to the visibility of labor topics, he argues. That Spanish workers constantly referred to this supranational institution starting in the mid-1960s underlines this argument, however, from a bottom-up, semi-peripheral perspective. One reason for the division of labor and rights histories may lie in the fact that labor struggles were oftentimes not directed at rights discourses but circulated around other concepts, as will be also shown in this book, too.

United Nations Organization; Johanna Bockman, “Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1 (2015).  Małgorzata Mazurek and Paul Betts, “Preface: When Rights Were Social,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3 (2012); cf.: Thomas H. Marshall, Citizenship and social class: And other essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). See also: Katharine Lebow’s contribution on Polish workers’ memoirs and their intertwining with global human rights regimes in the same volume: Katherine Lebow, “The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3 (2012).  Marcel van der Linden, “The International Labour Organization, 1919–2019,” Labor 2 (2019): 23.

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In this book, by “workers” I mean wage-dependent workers.103 Apart from the fact that the Polish Solidarność movement started in a shipyard, workers in mines, factories, and the railway industry are at the center of analysis in both countries of analysis. Marcel van der Linden explained why these groups were especially prone to syndicalism, since their working conditions had been restructured by the second industrial revolution: “They experienced dilution of skills, labour intensification, reorganization of work processes and increased job mobility.”104 These processes, consequently, stimulated workplace disputes. It will be shown in this book how the creation of workers’ representations was rooted in the necessity to solve existing conflicts or situations of contend. But when did workers contend? A very broad answer was delivered by Chris and Charles Tilly: Work generates contention through its impact on opportunity structure, interaction networks, means of coordination, work incentives [. . .], and preferred configurations of power, quality and efficiency, as filtered through shared definitions of possible actions and their outcomes.105

This book demonstrates that the starting point for workers’ protest was not necessarily directed at the overall political situation but mostly dealt with classic topics of labor: like workers in democratic societies, the protagonists of this book protested against over hours, low payments, cut bonuses, and holidays. As will be shown, they did so without necessarily connecting these problems to rights.106 As the state-dependent (vertical) syndicates did not represent the workers’ interests in front of the management or the higher ranks, their deficits were hard to camouflage. This is why, in contrast to democratic societies, workers’ disputes in Spain and Poland could be broadened to demands for democratic structures at the workplace and beyond. Although it might be obvious, I consider it important to flag that workers rarely worked alone.107 Workers were not only vertically organized as employees or citizens in an authoritarian system, but they were also somebody else’s co-workers: “In all known societies, as a rule, people work together with others [. . .] and their mutual, horizontal, relationships are an intrinsic part of labour history.”108  Cf. the broad definitions of work in other contexts, including domestic work, forced labour, and other forms of labour, e.g. in the introduction to Lucassen’s opus magnum: Lucassen, The Story of Work, 2–3; see also the list of definitions provided by Karin Hofmeester, as in: Karin Hofmeester, “Introductory Remarks,” in Handbook Global History of Work, ed. Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 317–28, 323f.  van der Linden, Transnational Labour History, 73.  Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work under capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 237.  Jürgen Schmidt, Arbeiter in der Moderne: Arbeitsbedingungen, Lebenswelten, Organisationen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015), 97.  Karin Hofmeester, “Introductory Remarks,” in Handbook Global History of Work, 319.  Lucassen, The Story of Work, 9.

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The mutual solidarity of workers (and the solidarity with workers by other societal groups) is an important key concept of this book. Occasionally, the treatment and the sanctions of diverging colleagues, strike breakers or collaborators will be mentioned. This book demonstrates how two different social movements managed to establish (or maintain) trade-union-like structures despite a hostile political environment. Spain in particular is a country with a rich history in different currents of syndicalism since the nineteenth century. Even though this study concentrates on the most influential oppositional group during Francoism, the communist Comisiones Obreras, it is important to mention the different ideologies underlining certain milieus’ actions. They are mirrored in writings and in the practices of Spanish and Polish workers and their allies. In the nineteenth century already, two basic currents had emerged: Christian (mostly Catholic) trade unionism on the one hand and socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist trade unionism on the other. Christian trade unionism stood for cooperation. Open conflict was only necessary in “exceptional circumstances.”109 The other position, taken by anarchists, syndicalists and socialists regarding workers and employers as representants of different classes, “that, in principle, have antagonistic interests,” called for class struggle.110 Even more radical representants called for a “class war” and guerilla actions. Socialists, in turn, since they were also organized in political parties, relied on the state to achieve their goals.111 During the 1960s and 1970s, a manifold variety of concepts on how to organize labor existed worldwide. With regard to Western Europe, Aldcroft and Oliver stated: “The post-war years were undoubtedly labour’s finest hour.”112 Countries like Israel or Yugoslavia but also Peru and Algeria tried new models, so-called third ways, by implementing workers’ self-management structures in their economies. Hence, many players under diverse regimes strived for re-structuring labor structures. Spain’s vertical syndicalism stated quite an exception, which went hand in hand with its formerly isolated status. Beginning in the 1960s, the ILO,

 Lucassen, The Story of Work, 390; on Christian Labor in Europe, see, for instance: Lex van Heerma Voss, Patrick Pasture and Jan de Maeyer, eds., Between cross and class: Comparative histories of Christian labour in Europe 1840–2000 (Bern, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006); it has to be noted that Spain, again, is not part of this collection of articles. The selection of countries of analysis might be one of the reasons why I came up with a different assessment of the relationship of Socialists and Christians, considering that Patrick Pasture wrote: “[. . .] [S]ocialists and Christian labour were engaged in a rhetorical war [. . .] demonizing each other to a point that made cooperation indeed inconceivable,” 19.  Lucassen, The Story of Work, 390.  Lucassen, The Story of Work, 390.  Derek H. Aldcroft and Michael J. Oliver, Trade unions and the economy, 1870–2000 (Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2017), 88.

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too, sent representatives to check on their member states, for instance, in 1968 to Spain. There, the ILO officials met with representatives from both the Francoist Organización Sindical Española OSE and imprisoned workers’ activists.113 Like Fascist Italy under Mussolini in the 1930s, Spain hoped to turn the ILO into a “forum” for promoting their own corporatist (vertical) “trade union” system.114 Spain had re-entered the organization over the course of its overall political opening in 1955 and the attempt to reintegrate into a global community of states after the Second World War and Spain’s open alliance with the German Reich. Poland, a founding member of the ILO, while itself a freshly re-created state, had an ambivalent position within the organization: like all states dependent on the Soviet Union, it was, “[. . .] the exception in the ILO fold,” since its “state-and-society model was incompatible” with the ILO’s structures and values.115 The ILO intervened in 1959 for the first time and again in 1982, at the time of martial law in Poland.116 As will be demonstrated later in this book and as Sandrine Kott pointed out, Polish Solidarność members “took up” the 1948 Convention for freedom of association to pressurize their government.117 The 1960s were moreover a phase of international regulations in the realm of labor, sometimes with a legal character, sometimes with a rather normative one. For instance, the Second Vatican Council taking place from 1963 to 1965 put workers’ rights back on a Catholic agenda, moreover on a global scale, when the Pope published documents that contained a commitment to the right to strike.118 While this was hardly acknowledged by Polish activists, Spanish workers’ activists permanently referred to these Papal encyclicae – as the Church was traditionally rather an ally of the Francoist regime that they fought against and was simultaneously a global moral authority for many. Another moment that was taken up regularly by both Spanish and Polish activists was the United Nations’ International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights from 1966, oftentimes in combina-

 International Labour Organization, “Interim Report: Report No 103, 1968,” http://www.ilo. org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=1000:50002:0::NO::P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID,P50002_LANG_ CODE:2899092,en:NO, accessed March 31, 2023.  Sandrine Kott, Globalizing social rights: The international labour organization and beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 6.  van der Linden, “The International Labour Organization, 1919–2019,” 16.  International Labour Organisation, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry,” https://www.ilo. org/public/libdoc/ilo/GB/227/GB.227_3_6_engl.pdf, accessed April 5, 2023.  Kott, Globalizing social rights, 7.  Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world: Gaudium et spes; promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965 (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1998).

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tion with references to the 1948 Convention N° 87 of the International Labour Organization, which addressed freedom of association.119 Here, civil rights and social rights went hand in hand, as freedom of association is a necessary condition for the right to join and form trade unions. These references demonstrate the diversity of labor history in terms of methods, approaches, and aspects, “ranging from straightforward economic history to cultural constructivism, including the analysis of institutions and politics.”120 Writing about labor history seems to be impossible without pointing out the severe crisis the field has experienced in the last couple of decades.121 Beginning in the early 1990s until the late 2000s, publications moaning its “dark days”122 or even its “end”123 or its “death”124 appeared, blaming the actual crisis of labor movements and trade unionism in the 1980s and 1990s and the emergence of newer research interests such as postcolonial studies, urban studies or gender history (or how its predecessor was contemporarily called “women’s history”125) later on. This crisis, however, occurred after a peak in the 1970s126 that was marked by a national research paradigm.127 Ironically, this peak caused another intellectual aspect of the crisis, since it led to a “fragmentization” of the field of labor history now covering a broad range of topics that seemed to had lost a “cen International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), https://www.ohchr. org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cescr.aspx, accessed November 9, 2017; International Labour Organization, “Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87),” http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRU MENT_ID:312232, accessed April 5, 2023.  Jürgen Kocka, “Work as a Problem in European History,” in Work in a modern society: The German historical experience in comparative perspective, ed. Jürgen Kocka, New German historical perspectives v. 3 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1–16.  Beverly J. Silver, ed., Forces of labor: Workers’ movements and globalization since 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Andreas Eckert, ed., Global histories of work (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); Andreas Eckert and Marcel van der Linden, “New Perspectives on Workers and the History of Work: Global Labor History,” in Global History, Globally; Marcel van der Linden, ed., The End of Labour History? (Cambridge, Amsterdam: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  Berger, “German Labour History is Back.”  van der Linden, The End of Labour History?.  Valerie Burgman, “The Strange Death of Labor History,” in Bede Nairn and Labor History, ed. Bob Carr (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1991), 69–81.  Marcel van der Linden, “Editorial,” in The End of Labour History?, vol. 38, ed. Marcel van der Linden, International Review of Social History 1 (Cambridge, Amsterdam: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–3.  van der Linden, Transnational Labour History.  Marcel van der Linden, “The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History,” in Global histories of work.

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tral concern, or even the makings of one.”128 In a remarkably self-condemning manner, prominent representatives of the discipline painfully reflected on the inadequateness of “traditional frameworks” and approaches of labor history, such as Marxist or Weberian theory, since they were deduced from a Western perspective.129 By dominantly concentrating on wage labor in the Global North, labor history had moreover omitted many important topics and oversaw the “diversity of voices” that is inherent to global history approaches.130 Slave labor, unwaged labor, care work, and illegal work such as prostitution had remained blank spots. If the Global South was taken into account, Western researchers oftentimes concentrated on Europe’s colonies but even there did not research the labor of enslaved or unfree individuals.131 This changed in recent decades: thanks to decolonization dynamics, historians from the Global South entered an international discourse (or rather one that was perceived in the “West”). Although this could also be said for Western researchers, Southern historians were confronted with national histories shaped by colonization and slavery: “Often, African and Asian historians wanting to write the history of their own countries could not escape the realization that unfree labour had played a vital role in it.”132 With the emergence of global history approaches, hence, many labor historians embraced the rise of global labor history as a research discipline, interpreting it as both a reaction to the crisis discourse in labor history and the emergence of a new conceptual approach of global history.133 It has therefore benefitted from global and transnational turns in recent historiography, taking into account new regions and new methodologies, but also new categories of analysis, and over recent decades it became one of the “leading research paradigms of social history.”134 But what made global labor history so attractive to many and why does it seem to be well suited to bring to light new insights and dynamics of history? Historians of global labor history are challenged with focusing on “necessarily specific historical trajec-

 Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, eds., Prolegomena for a Global Labour History (Amsterdam, 1999).  Marcel van der Linden and Jan Lucassen, eds., Prolegomena for a Global Labour History (Amsterdam, 1999); see also: van der Linden, Transnational Labour History.  Conrad, What Is Global History?.  Karin Hofmeester, “Introductory Remarks,” in Handbook Global History of Work.  Karin Hofmeester, “Introductory Remarks,” in Handbook Global History of Work.  Jan Lucassen, “Writing Global Labour History c. 1800–1940: A Historiography of Concepts, Periods and Geographical Scope,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, ed. Jan Lucassen, International and Comparative Social History 9 (Bern: Lang, 2008), 39–90.  Adrian Grama and Susan Zimmermann, “The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 1 (2018).

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tories in certain localities in Europa [sic] or Asia or Africa and across specific patterns of regional migration, without losing sight of the wider context.”135 Accordingly, by analyzing human rights discourses among workers as a new research category, this study, too, is characterized by a combination of “specificity and comparison, which sees shared entanglements as bi- or multi-directional rather than unidirectional, and that does not impose a model from one period, nation, or region onto another.”136 Trying to make sense of “global connections” and their impact on day-to-day lives of workers worldwide, global labor historians ask for conditions under which workers worked in the past, their salaries and renumerations and – most importantly for this study – if workers ever protested and how their “disaffection” was “expressed.”137 This is exactly what this book is about: it explores the practices and rhetoric of workers and their allies in the light of state repression and rights violations. “Protest,” in this context, did not only occur in form of strikes or demonstrations but was also exercised through underground literature, i.e. samizdat and prensa clandestina.138 But how can a history of Spanish and Polish workers be part of global labor history? Aren’t their stories just mere national histories, moreover so since they do not share a single borderline with each other? The answer lies in the connection of global labor history and human rights history: when one looks at Spanish and Polish workers asking about which role human rights played for them and whether they expressed their struggle in a language of rights, the researcher automatically includes a global framework to the analysis – not only abstractly in terms of conceiving human rights as universal but also concretely: the lives of Spanish and Polish workers were shaped by both national and global dynamics, by national policies and international rights norms, by national cultures and a globally diffusing normative framework stemming from Catholic faith on the one hand and its political manifestation, the Vatican, on the other one. In addition to that, the Cold War and Western anti-communism played a vital role for both Spanish and Polish oppositions’ practices when addressing a foreign audience. Global labor history does not necessarily have to deal with globalized processes alone (even if one will be confronted with a globalized industry in this book), but,

 Eckert, Global histories of work.  Eckert, Global histories of work.  Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden, Handbook The Global History of Work (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).  It has to be noted that even though enforced labor existed in Francoist Spain, this study concentrates on wage-dependent workers that are not to be seen in the light of slavery. Moreover, “race” plays a role only as a reference, for instance when Polish workers in the 1970s compared their situation to slaves in the United States.

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as Sebastian Conrad noted for global history in general, “[i]t is often more a matter of writing a history of demarcated (i.e., non-‘global’) spaces, but with an awareness of global connections and structural conditions.”139 The global perspective in this study is used in multiple directions: it helps to situate local or national contexts. But it can also be located at the end of the analysis, being explained through processes and contexts on the local or national level. Bearing in mind the discourses on power structures and global inequalities underlining global history and global labor history discourses, the perspectives of Spanish and Polish workers and intellectuals referring to European and global norms, standards, institutions, and rights add an important aspect to postcolonial debates.140 It sheds light on the grey zones or rather semi-peripheries of the world that are neither only bipolar nor characterized by a dichotomy of the “West” and its “non-Western” counterparts. Interestingly, both regions have not been part of a larger global (labor) history approach so far. For the East of Europe, Adrian Grama and Susan Zimmermann have even identified a “mismatch” between the new global labor history and Eastern European labor history. It seems to be one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, “in the double sense that this historiography has often been self-referential and that labor historians invested in promoting global perspectives have barely engaged with this scholarship.”141 In this study, hence, I want to overcome this mismatch and offer a new perspective on Eastern and Southern European labor history whilst simultaneously adding these regions to the spectrum of global labor history research. As has been insinuated, the histories of Spanish and Polish workers have rarely been analyzed within a global history approach but were rather studied in a national context. In an essay relating Polish labor historiography to the new global labor history, Natalia Jarska has pointed out how Polish historiography in the twentieth century was limited by its own “nationalism” despite the transnational history of partitioned Poland, interpreting the history of Polish workers in Prussia, the Russian empire or Habsburg dominantly as “Polish” history.142 Moreover, Polish labor  Conrad, What Is Global History?.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).  Grama and Zimmermann, “The art of link–making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions”; studies on the GDR in a global context constitute an important exception here: Eric Burton et al., Navigating Socialist Encounters (Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021); Marcia C. Schenck, “Negotiating the German Democratic Republic: Angolan student migration during the Cold War, 1976–90,” Africa 1 (2019).  Natalia Jarska, “The periphery revisited: Polish post-war historiography on the working class and the new global labour history,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d‘histoire 1 (2018).

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historians during communism, even though they were not necessarily contributing to the “Hofwissenschaft”143 of state socialist labor historiography nor were they ardent communists, contributed a narrative of backwardness, one that is fundamentally questioned by global labor historians.144 The Polish labor opposition and its intellectual allies during state socialism have been studied at large by both national and international researchers in the context of the system transformation – some publications were even published before 1989 in sam- or tamizdat conditions.145 It is noticeable that there is a strong difference between the international interest for Spanish and Polish labor oppositions. With some important exceptions from the United States and Germany,146 Spanish oppositional history has dominantly been studied by Spanish scholars.147 Workers during Francoism,

 Grama and Zimmermann, “The art of link–making in global labour history: subaltern, feminist and Eastern European contributions.”  Jarska, “The periphery revisited.”  This is a selection of the most relevant contributions in the field: Jan Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power: The rise of Solidarity and the fall of state socialism in Poland (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Michael H. Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Michael Bernhard, “Civil Society and Democratic Transition in East Central Europe,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (1993); Timothy G. Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Andrzej Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL: 1945–1980 (Londyn: Aneks, 1994); Andrzej Friszke, Czas KOR–u: Jacek Kuroń a geneza Solidarności (Kraków: Znak; Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2011); Andrzej Friszke, Rewolucja Solidarności: 1980–1981 (Kraków: Znak Horyzont, 2014); Jerzy Holzer, ‘Solidarność’ 1980–1981: Geneza i historia, Reprint of the 1984 edition (Warszawa: Agencja Omnipress, 1990); Jan J. Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).  Walther L. Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1993); Walther L. Bernecker, Gewerkschaftsbewegung und Staatssyndikalismus in Spanien: Quellen und Materialien zu den Arbeitsbeziehungen 1936–1980 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1985); Walther L. Bernecker, Spaniens Geschichte seit dem Bürgerkrieg [Spain’s history since the Civil War] (München: C.H. Beck, 2010); Walther L. Bernecker, Geschichte Spaniens im 20. Jahrhundert (München: C.H. Beck, 2010); Alexandre Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982) (Nettersheim: Graswurzelrevolution, 2015); Andreas Baumer, Kommunismus in Spanien: Die Partido Comunista de España – Widerstand, Krise und Anpassung (1970–2006) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008).  Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress: Ordinary lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939–1975 (Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2010); Robert M. Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); José M. Maravall, Dictadura y disentimiento político: Obreros y estudiantes bajo el franquismo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1978); see also the English translation: Jose Maravall, Dictatorship and political dissent: Workers and students in Franco’s Spain (London: Tavistock, 1978).

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however, were dominantly studied as an important part of the democratic opposition but also highlighted was the complex structure of labor relations within the Francoist repression apparatus.

Human Rights Histories In contrast to labor history, which can be considered a traditional field of historical research, dealing with human rights is a relatively new endeavor for historians. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has called them the “doxa” of our time, whereby he emphasized the lack of historicization of human rights.148 In so doing, he pointed at their uncontroversiality in particular (academic) circles and that “those ideas and sentiments are tacitly presumed to be self-evident truths and not in need of any justification.”149 “Who is opposed to human rights today?” Hoffmann asked in 2016.150 But writing about human rights from a scholarly perspective does not only mean to position yourself normatively, especially the case of historical research. It means to contextualize their use historically and to explain when, how, why, by whom, and in which contexts they were employed.151 Over the past decade, a heated debate on how to tell the story of human rights has emerged among historians. Lynn Hunt’s argument of human rights which emerged during the Enlightenment period thanks to an “imagined empa-

 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights,” in Human rights in the twentieth century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–28, 2. See also: Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” 279.  On state socialist conceptions of human rights, please see: Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History” .  Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History.” Bearing in mind the processes that stand behind the publication of scholarly articles, Hoffmann probably wrote down this question much earlier than it was published in 2016, a year when international politics would answer his rhetoric question quite drastically – also by politicians in the Euro-Atlantic world, a region where “the resonance to human rights is universal and so unassailable” (AD).  In this book, I conceive “human rights” as an umbrella term for both civil and social rights. Such an approach is also in accordance with the contemporary legal situation as social rights were added to the family of human rights subsequently. This is not only true for some social rights entailed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) but especially for the rights mentioned in the UN Covenant of 1966. This study does not provide a definition of human rights but rather an answer to the question of what people meant when they employed a (human) rights language. Nonetheless, if “human rights” are not used as a source term here, I refer to rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: United Nations/ General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/ doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/043/88/PDF/NR004388.pdf?OpenElement, accessed March 31, 2023.

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thy” between individuals,152 which reached a new starting point with the United Nation’s Declaration of 1948, was challenged dramatically by Samuel Moyn. He interpreted the direct aftermath of the Second World War as a phase of absence of human rights in international politics – regardless of the symbolic event of the UN Declaration – and argued that the political use of universal human rights emerged not earlier than in the 1970s. For a large group of transnationally acting actors and groups that had been disillusioned by the promises of the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth century and their concrete reflections in the real world, human rights had become a “last utopia.”153 Consequently, the most debated question that human rights historians asked in the last ten years was not so much the question of what one understood under the concept of human rights; rather the debate circulated the question: when did human rights emerge?154 By analyzing writings of workers and their allies about repression and rights, I want to go a different way and at the same time bring back workers as rights activists and agents of democratic change in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, who have been ignored by human rights historians so far. According to scholars like Samuel Moyn, Jan Eckel or Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, it was particularly the transnational network of (mainly Western) intellectual human rights activists that gave practical meaning to the abstract political concept of human rights in the 1970s. The decade was also associated with nothing less than a “breakthrough” phase for human rights that became a salient concept in international politics and political activism.155 This mainly Western academic activism, however, was directed at individuals or groups that were very often situated on another continent than the activists, thereby presenting a rather detached group of actors as the central agents of human rights history.156 A prominent example of transnational human rights activism is the transnational spread of Amnesty International groups and solidarity campaigns for political prisoners all over the world and thereby had to be translated from and to different groups.157

 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007).  Moyn, The last Utopia.  Cf. Devin O. Pendas, “Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights,” Contemporary European History 1 (2012).  Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., The Breakthrough: Human rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Jan Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (2009).  Cf. also, the research debates on “New Social Movements” in the 1960s and 1970s: Steven M. Buechler, “New Social Movement Theories,” Sociological Quarterly 3 (1995).  Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” 459. For a larger study on Amnesty International, see: Stephen Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). For the Central and East-

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More recently thus, several monographies and articles have illuminated which role human rights played for Eastern and Central European dissidents’ and oppositionists’ philosophy during the Cold War. This is especially true for the impact of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. At the famous Helsinki conference, the leaders of Central and Eastern European state socialisms had expressed a certain commitment to civil rights in exchange for a closer economic cooperation with Western countries. However, in this context, it was especially the “Helsinki Effect” on actors in East-Central Europe that was investigated, whereas the bottom-up processes triggered by Central and Eastern European actors themselves were not at the center of interest.158 Rather, Eastern Europe was depicted as a mere receiver of global diffusion processes, a stand that was later challenged by extrapolating particularly local characteristics of these diverse East-Central European contexts that were explained, such as in the works of Hella Dietz on the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee, Robert Brier’s contributions dealing with individuals like Adam Michnik, the Workers’ Defense Committee and the Solidarność movement or Ned Richardson-Little’s analysis of the German Democratic Republic’s ambivalent human rights policies.159 Robert Brier, moreover, has pointed out the problem of a tradi-

ern European context, Christie Miedema has only recently presented this monography on Amnesty International: Christie Miedema, Not a Movement of Dissidents: Amnesty International Beyond the Iron Curtain (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019); Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Menschenrechte als Übersetzungsproblem,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2 (2012).  Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Daniel C. Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 2 (2005). See also: Snyder, Human rights activism and the end of the Cold War. Wanda Jarząbek has highlighted the Polish state’s role in this context: Wanda Jarząbek, “Lost Illusions?” in From Helsinki to Belgrade; Wanda Jarząbek, “Troublesome Human Rights: The Polish Strategy between the Belgrade and Madrid CSCE Follow-up Conferences,” in Die KSZE im Ost-West–Konflikt: Internationale Politik und gesellschaftliche Transformation 1975–1990, ed. Matthias Peter and Hermann Wentker (München: De Gruyter, 2012); Wanda Jarząbek, Hope and Reality: Poland and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 1964–1989 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008). Rodrigo Luelmo has studied the Spanish role in Helsinki: Rodrigo Luelmo, España y el proceso de la CSCE.  Dietz, Polnischer Protest; Ned Richardson–Little, The Human Rights Dictatorship: Sovereignty, Dissent, and Revolution in East Germany 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Robert Brier, “Adam Michnik’s Understanding of Totalitarianism and the West European Left: A Historical and Transnational Approach to Dissident Political Thought,” East European Politics & Societies 2 (2011); Robert Brier, A Contested Icon of Human Rights: Poland’s Solidarity and the Transformation of International Politics (Warsaw, 2014); Robert Brier, “Broadening the Cultural History of the Cold War: The Emergence of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee and the Rise of Human Rights,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4 (2013); see also: Michal Kopeček, “Human Rights Facing a National Past,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (2012); Kacper

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tional, dichotomous narrative of human rights during the Cold War, as it constructed an absolute juxtaposition between a cold-blooded power-obsessed realm of international politics and human rights (activists) as their pure humanistic antagonist.160 As will be laid out in this study, such a perspective was visible in many contemporary sources written by oppositional actors. In this study, I show how people empowered each other: they got in touch with other citizens and motivated them to act against authoritarian powers in general and concrete injustice and wrongdoings. In some cases, a human rights language was used in these situations, but oftentimes different rhetoric was employed. Hence, I do acknowledge that a certain Zeitgeist, which indeed involved human rights, shaped the years between “1968” and “1989.”161 Yet I agree with Hoffmann, who mentions neighboring concepts’ importance, and I argue that human rights were not the only reference framework but were part of a broader attitude connected to concepts like democracy, morality, and the renunciation of violence. Moreover, I am convinced that the diverse intellectual and cultural origins of human rights are indeed important and should be part of a comparative analysis such as this one, even if “synchronous global conditions of their overall acceptance and [. . .] their fusion with local genealogies [. . .]” are studied simultaneously.162 Overcoming the debates about peaks and emergences, I consider it more fruitful to address the question of how human rights were understood by certain actors at a time that many describe as special.163 Consequently, this study focuses on the

Szulecki, “Hijacked Ideas Human Rights, Peace, and Environmentalism in Czechoslovak and Polish Dissident Discourses,” East European Politics & Societies 2 (2011); while (dominantly elitist) dissidents’ positions have been investigated by many, Paul Betts pointed out how little attention was paid to the communist state’s conceptions of human rights: Paul Betts, “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3 (2012); on state socialist conceptions of human rights, please see: Richardson-Little, Dietz, and Mark, “New Perspectives on Socialism and Human Rights in East Central Europe since 1945.”  Robert Brier, “Menschenrechte und Politik im Denken und Handeln ostmitteleuropäischer Dissidenten. Das ‚Leben in Wahrheit’ und die Geschichte der Menschenrechte in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren” (2016); Unpublished document.  Konrad H. Jarausch, “1968 and 1989: Caesuras, Comparisons, and Connections,” in 1968, the world transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Detlef Junker and Philipp Gassert, Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 461–78; Richardson-Little, “Human Rights as Myth and History.”  Conrad, What Is Global History?, 77.  Cf. these publications focusing on the 1970s as a particular period in the twentieth century: Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A new global history from civil rights to economic inequality, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

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content of rights claims as well as language and practices of their use, not so much on policies, effects or results. In the context of human rights studies in particular, it is important to explore concrete claims and their manifestations. Set in the context of workers’ struggles and human rights claims under authoritarian rule and in times of political change, workers are among the main actors. They are, however, still an understudied group in human rights historiography. Thus, many examined sources constitute vernacular interpretations of global rights.164 If one seeks to understand why human rights gained momentum at a certain time, why the concept made sense to particular actors and groups and whether their meaning changed over time, one has to analyze their translations in their specific local setting, which is more than analyzing their mere reception. Put in the context of those political regimes, it means to analyze how universal meanings were “[. . .] appropriated by regional, national, and local social movements and used to criticize everyday practices of violence.”165 When considering local appropriations of rights as vernacularized, I thus draw on the writings of the anthropologists Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry. They are convinced that: [. . .] [o]ut of th[e] [. . .] field of international human rights law, values, and philosophy that circulates transnationally, ideas and practices are seized within particular sites and translated into a language and form that makes sense in that cultural space.166

Vernacular studies or a vernacular approach has become a popular tool also in human rights research, especially bearing in mind the multileveled dynamics that occur in the context of international human rights policies in specific local contexts. They oftentimes come into play when studying the interface between globally acting players belonging to global political elites and working for (international) NGOs and their local partners rooted in regional traditions and a partic-

 Against the backdrop of the social situation of the actors in question, it has to be noted that the term vernacular does not necessarily imply a subaltern position of the actor – it rather sheds light on the concrete local appropriation of universal concepts. Robert Brier for example, who studied Eastern European dissidents and their understandings of human rights, proposes to interpret Pope John Paul II’s statement about Auschwitz being a “modern Golgatha” as a vernacularization of universal human rights discourses. Robert Brier, “Beyond the Quest for a ‘Breakthrough’: Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights,” Jahrbücher für Europäische Geschichte (2015): 165.  Sally E. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1.  Peggy Levitt and Sally E. Merry, “Making Women’s Human Rights in the Vernacular: Navigating the Culture/Rights Divide,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 81–100, 87.

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ular local setting.167 Analyzing the vernacularization of human rights discourses in workers’ circles is therefore a perfect way to understand their contextualization in different settings. How do these debates on points of origin and the intertwining of human rights, social rights, and labor relate to the present study? How can the question of local appropriations be connected to it? David Pendas has underlined that differences in interpreting and reading the history of human rights can be explained by the selection of methodology and sources used. Moreover, he wrote about the geographical uncertainty and enormity of human rights that historians want to integrate into a transnational narrative by choosing different archives and reading sources in different languages.168 This dissertation is located at the interface of human rights histories and European labor history – in particular the first one is prone to be told as a teleological success story, even despite today’s contemporary backlashes. Keeping in mind the discussed breakthroughs and peaks, Marc Bradley criticized the search for points of origin or “takeoff moments” as being ahistorical and bound to linear narratives: But what human rights were understood to be by actors in the historical moment was always a considerably messier process, one that linear narratives can obscure.169

In this study, I reconstruct these messy processes.170 For the protagonists of this study, the illegal status of free and independent trade unions always touched upon traditional civil rights, including the freedom of speech and freedom of association and assembly. This impacted strongly on the analyzed debates and is one of the reasons why I do not follow the historiographical juxtaposition of both types of human rights.

 Memory studies have also used the concept of vernacular interpretations. John Bodnar’s research on American public memory served as an inspiration in this context: John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lars Breuer and Anna Delius, “Jak jest zrobiona pamięć wernakularna? Wybrane wyniki międzynarodowego badania w Niemczech, Polsce, Hiszpanii i Wielkiej Brytanii,” kultura współczesna 87 (2015).  Pendas, “Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights,” 96.  Mark P. Bradley, “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination,” Diplomatic History 1 (2014): 4.  A similar approach to historicizing human rights discourses was taken by: Robert Brier, Poland’s solidarity movement and the global politics of human rights (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

1.4 Brief Overviews: Workers’ History in Two Authoritarian Regimes

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1.4 Brief Overviews: Workers’ History in Two Authoritarian Regimes Since Eastern and Southern European history are rarely told in the same context, only a few readers will be familiar with Spanish and Polish history alike. The following pages, hence, offer a brief overview on both countries’ workers’ history under authoritarian rule.

Workers and Vertical Syndicalism in Francoist Spain Dealing with the labor movement in Francoist Spain means working on a defeated group of actors. In post-civil-war Spain, any trade union that had existed in prewar times became illegal.171 Instead, so-called vertical syndicates were established, a Falangist concept that had already been installed in 1938. Francoist Spanish labor politics were one element of what was called “organic democracy” in the official terminology and stood on three pillars: “unity, totality and hierarchy.”172 Being a contradictio in adiecto, these state-steered unions, the flagship of the national syndicalism, consisted of three major ideas that also reflect the above-mentioned keywords: first, to eliminate and overcome the class struggle; second, to concentrate workers and entrepreneurs in a single organization within the official state-order; and third, not to give autonomous rights to those organized in the national syndicates.173 National syndicalism and membership in the Organización Sindical Española OSE was therefore the only legal union structure in a highly authoritarian state whose ideology was dominantly based on anti-communism. Labor in Spain was organized according to the Spanish Labor Code from 1938,174 one of the eight Fundamental Laws of Francoist Spain that were installed instead of the previous

 See, for instance: Xavier Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” International Labor and Working-Class History (2013): 73–75. See also this monography in Spanish: Xavier Domènech Sampere, Cambio político y movimiento obrero bajo el franquismo: Lucha de clases, dictadura y democracia (1939–1977) (Barcelona: Editorial Icaria, 2012).  The terminology was introduced in 1945. See: Stanley G. Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 494.  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 65–68.  Jefatura del Estado, “Fuero de Trabajo,” https://www.boe.es/datos/pdfs/BOE/1938/505/A0617806181.pdf, accessed April 5, 2023.

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Republican Constutution. It was “rather a declaration of ideological order than a regulatory norm.”175 Due to the workers’ historical affiliation with anarchist and socialist movements, the Francoist authorities regarded most of them as hostile. Workers who tried to maintain pre-war self-management structures faced severe repressions and violence by the state authorities, with the same true for striking workers or any other deviant behavior. Generally, all supporters of the Spanish Republic that had not already emigrated abroad were affected by harsh repressions, imprisonments, torture and executions.176 Women were another social group facing discrimination, yet their legal status was dependent on overarching political developments in Spain. The nationalCatholic ideology of Francoism defined the women’s role, especially married women, within the household, being first and foremost mothers and wives. It has to be noted that this cultural and legal status of Spanish women constituted a radical break with the Republican Spanish past of the Second Spanish Republic where women enjoyed a set of new civil rights, including the right to be elected or the right to end a pregnancy.177 Already as children, boys and girls were separated. Girls left school at an earlier age. This matched the two pillars of Francoism, a “fundamentalist Catholicism with a strictly reactionary nationalism.”178 If women worked outside the house, this was seen as an addition to their husbands’ roles as breadwinners.179 While (married) Spanish women were “freed” from the work in workshops and factories according to the Spanish Labor Code from 1938,180 the 1961 Law on Women’s

 José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo: Materiales para un análisis histórico,” in Del hogar a la huelga: Trabajo, género y movimiento obrero durante el franquismo, ed. José Babiano, Investigación y Debate 12 (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2008), 25–57, 25.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain.  Ana Fernández Asperilla and Mayka Muñoz Ruiz, “María Luisa Suárez Roldán: De la institución libre de Enseñanza a la Defensa de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras,” in Sindicalistas: Mujeres en las Comisiones Obreras, ed. Eva Antón Fernández and Diana García Bujarrabal (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2021), 25–45, 27.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 25.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 25.  José Babiano, director of the CCOO Archive, draws a line of continuity between this ideology and Spanish liberal thought during the nineteenth century; José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 26. See also: Carmen Bravo Sueskun, “Prólogo,” in Del hogar a la huelga: Trabajo, género y movimiento obrero durante el franquismo, ed. José Babiano, Investigación y Debate 12 (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2008), 9–16, 11.

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Political, Professional, and Labor Rights aimed at changing women’s labor in Spain. The law addressed the equalization of the rights of men and women in a typically Francoist manner. Married women were allowed to stay in the workplace after the marriage and were to receive the same salary as their male colleagues, provided that the “performance of women and men was the same.”181 These legislatory changes have to be seen in the context of the overall modernization aspirations of Spain and more concretely as a result of the Falange’s Sección Femenina’s pressure on the government.182 However, discriminatory measures prevailed and hindered many women from working. For instance, husbands of working women would lose their “family plus,” a payment to support families. In 1971, only 24.1 percent of the working population in Spain was female, in contrast to 36.1 percent in Western Germany183 and 42.5 percent in Poland (in 1976).184 The late 1950s and the early 1960s were a period of overarching economic and political change for the country that had been ruined socially and economically not only due to the Civil War but also as a result of the Francoist autarky politics afterwards. This policy of autarky had obviously failed. In the 1950s, Spain was one of Europe’s poorest countries; even famines were not uncommon.185 In 1957, consequently, Franco was forced into reforms that changed the traditional equilibrium of power within the government. While taking away power from his former political base organization Falange, he now empowered “technocrats” from the Catholic organization Opus Dei and made several of its members ministers in the new cabinet. This was a clear decision in favor of the economic progressive forces within the regime, led by Luis Carrero Blanco. He propagated the desarollismo-strategy,186 pushing forward economic modernization on the one hand and political institutionalization of the authoritarian regime

 Jefatura del Estado, “Ley 56/1961, de 22 de julio, sobre derechos políticos profesionales y de trabajo de la mujer,” https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1961–14132, accessed March 30, 2023. The law was implemented per decrete in 1962.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 29.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 29.  Melanie Tatur, “Merkmale der Erwerbstätigkeit der Frauen in Polen,” Osteuropa 3 (1979): 220; see also: José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 32.  Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress, 6.  The noun desarollo means “development” in Spanish. Consequently, the contemporary neologism desarollismo refers to the ideology/ the political idea focusing on the primacy of economic development.

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on the other.187 This meant that the “[. . .] political and social basic structure of the authoritarian regime, especially the primacy of the public order should be maintained under all circumstances, as it was regarded to be the precondition for the economic development.”188 Consequently, in 1959, Franco introduced a so-called stabilization plan that had been projected in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC).189 After a short phase of recession that was the result of the lack of international competitiveness of Spanish companies, a Spanish “economic miracle” happened. The economic reforms catapulted Spain from the level of a developing country towards the average Western European level with regard to life expectancy, birth rates or consumer habits within less than fifteen years.190 During the years of the restructuring, the military, the Falange, and the wealthier middle-class, who benefited a lot from the opening, remained loyal to the regime. Even if the Falange had lost power due to the remodeling of the government, it would have been able to remain the dominating power in the Organización Sindical Española. In opposition to that, apart from the traditional anti-Francoist milieus, i.e. workers, students, and parts of the peasantry, it was the Catholic Church – originally one of the institutional pillars of the Francoist regime – where oppositional activities emerged. One of the reasons lies in the publication of the Second Vatican Council of 1965 that pushed forward Catholic social thought. It was anyway popular among lower clergy members who oftentimes lived in poor conditions. Another one, according to Froidevaux, lies in the existence of the Hermandades Obreras de Acción Católica, HOAC (“Brotherhood of Workers Catholic Action”)191 that was not only the only legal interest group for workers beyond the state organization OSE, but

 Another element of this policy referred to Spain’s official state form and who should be Franco’s successor. Spain was called a “traditional, Catholic, social and representative monarchy.” See: Uwe Cusnick, Übergangsprobleme von autoritären Regimen zu demokratischen Systemen am Beispiel Spanien (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), 104.  Uwe Cusnick, Übergangsprobleme von autoritären Regimen zu demokratischen Systemen am Beispiel Spanien (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1997), 105.  Anna C. Hofmann, Francos Moderne: Technokratie und Diktatur in Spanien 1956–1973 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019), 9.  Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 316.  Since 1956, this was the name of the follow-up organization of the above-mentioned Young Christian Workers, JOC.

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also laid the ground for the type of grass-root trade unionism that would later be typical of Spanish workplaces.192 While these were domestic manifestations of the new era, one of the most important external factors for change was Spain’s geopolitical position during the Cold War. After decades of being internationally isolated – Spain had also been excluded from the United Nations until 1955 due to its close ties with National Socialist Germany and the axis powers – in 1953, the United States took up relations with the country again, first and foremost to establish military bases on the peninsula. In exchange, Spain got economic and military aid. Beginning with the late 1950s, Francoist Spain joined diverse international organizations and institutions, i.e. the IMF in 1958, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the Organization for European Cooperation (OEEC). It was with the help of the two European institutions, the IBRD and the OEEC, that Spain adopted a new stabilization plan based on the reduction of inflation, the liberalization of exchange rates, the removal of the interventionist policy to foster private entrepreneurship, and the promotion of foreign investment.193 Civil rights, labor rights or trade unionism as such were not on the agenda, nor were democratic structures at the workplace and beyond made a condition for international support. Being forced to catch-up with Western capitalist societies, Spaniards faced enormous price rises that did not coincide with higher wages. Despite the harsh repressions against any kind of social mobilization or unrest, workers (and students) reacted with protest and strikes. In this context, the Ley de Convenios Colectivos (“Collective Agreements Act”) was implemented in 1958, legalizing agreements between workers and entrepreneurs dealing with “social and economic conditions.” Even if wage negotiations were still the sole responsibility of the government, the Collective Agreements Act created a space for action that would enable the Spanish labor movement to infiltrate factories from below. Beginning in the early 1960s, industrial disputes regarding salaries, working hours or working conditions were accompanied by spontaneous gatherings of workers electing representatives to coordinate further action. In the literature, the origins of this grass-root unionism that rejected to cooperate with the official structures bear a legendary aura: “As the story goes [. . .],” miners in the pit of La Camocha founded the first clandestine union in Asturias, one of the hotspots of the strikes, in 1957.194 Yet,

 Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 317.  Pilar Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain: The Transition to Democracy, 1959–77 (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2001), 11.  Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress, 182.

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these loose commissions dissolved after a certain issue was solved and had no political importance or impact outside the region of Asturias. But then the strikes of 1962 shattered the whole country: the head of the official Trade Union Organization Juan Solís Ruíz had to make concessions to the rioting working class and was forced to prepare minimal reforms to the existing labor legislation. He integrated newly emerged workers’ representatives into the existing structures of the Organización Sindical Española and excluded labor actions “for nonpolitical ends” from prosecution. Nevertheless, striking remained illegal for the entire Francoist period. Strikes with a more political character were repressed and the leaders persecuted, as were any anti-Francoist activists. This was especially true after a Tribunal de Orden Público (TOP, “Tribunal for the Public Order”), was installed in 1963. Even though in late Francoism mass executions and forced labor camps were no longer part of the dictatorial politics, the repressive legislation prevailed. Also, the death penalty was frequently applied.195 The regime reacted in different ways and introduced a minimum-wage decree in 1963. Moreover, some improvements in working conditions were achieved “by private pacts between workers and entrepreneurs.”196 This new model of labor relations did not only “fragment” the different worker realities, as Domènech Sampere noted, but it also “created a key-opportunity for social protest.”197 In the course of the mid-1960s, the previously loosely connected Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) managed to establish more stable structures and spread throughout the country.198 They managed to become the predominant force in the labor movement and marginalized the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and the anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) that had both been very strong before the Civil War. In order not to become [. . .] just one more clandestine labor organization, [. . .] the Comisiones stressed the need to maintain its participatory, movementlike quality and to operate in the open as much as possible by making use of all available legal (illegal) opportunities . . . 199

 Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975, 507; Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 316.  Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 74.  Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 74.  In Spanish, double letter usage indicates a plural. Sometimes, these letters are separated with a dot. In this dissertation, Comisiones Obreras will be abbreviated as follows: CCOO (see, also: List of Abbreviations).  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97.

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The Comisiones Obreras were very heterogeneous not only in terms of their personal composition but also with regard to their practices: they were known for being unitary, for carrying out open and public action, their use of legal means to fight for workers’ interests, but also illegal ones when it was inevitable. Their demands were labor related but were sometimes also of political nature, starting with the claim for trade union rights and the right to strike. It is true that their strength lay in the fact that they united workers of different ideologies in their framework. Alongside communists, leftist Catholics constituted the majority; many of the CCOO’s meetings took place in churches. This heterogeneity did not only lead to their success within the workers’ body: the management preferred to cooperate with CCOO representatives, too. They had simply been elected by their fellow colleagues and enjoyed much more trust than the official representatives from the Organización Sindical Española. Consequently, the workers would comply much more with the agreements set up with their own representatives, which on a broader scale satisfied the managements as well.200 Presenting themselves as a movement and not a trade union arm of a political party was part of the strategy to camouflage those who dominantly stood behind these Commissions, i.e. the Partido Comunista de España (PCE). In the early 1960s, the party was surprised by the sudden emergence of numerous workers’ commissions across the country, at a time when it was itself trying to establish its own clandestine union named Oposición Sindical Obrera. But given the CCOO’s success, it then focused entirely on collaborating with the Comisiones. The oppositional concept now consisted of a dual strategy between public action and a secret core organization, which, however, had no absolute controlling power. Communist men and women joined the Comisiones Obreras but did not reveal their communist party identity, such as the engaged activists Marcelino Camacho or Julián Ariza.201 The Spanish Communist Party was the strongest among all oppositional parties during Francoism. Only the PCE had been able to maintain party structures within the country, whereas all other parties eked out their existence in exile. The PCE’s Party Congresses were also held abroad, for instance in Prague in 1960, where Santiago Carillo was elected as a General Secretary, while the figurehead of the Spanish communists Dolores Ibárruri Gómez became president. The popular female veteran of the Civil War had lived in Moscow since and only returned to Spain after Franco’s death. Because of the repression, Carillo did not live in Spain either, but organized

 Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 53.  Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 323f.

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the party as an exiled activist abroad – most of the time he lived in France. Carillo was known for an authoritarian style of ruling the party. Over all the decades of activism, the Spanish communists were eager to underline that the CCOO were not just the trade union arm of the party but wanted to present them as a movement that would be able to gather all currents, such as socialists and anarchists but also Christian trade union streams and organizations, under its name. The Spanish communists had undergone an intensive process of ideological and institutional transformation in the late 1950s, avowing themselves to an early form of Eurocommunism, a current within communist parties worldwide that is generally associated with the seventies. Although Eurocommunism had different national flavors, one common denominator was its distancing from the Moscow Party central and the deep impact of the Soviet intervention in Prague in 1968.202 Its Spanish variant was connected to the memory of the Civil War and the subsequent idea of “national reconciliation” that involved the concept of refraining from violent acts. As is also noticeable in many of the leaflets and pamphlets of the Comisiones Obreras, but also in the communists’ clandestine monthly magazine Mundo Obrero (“A Workers’ World”), the communists’ idea of revolution was a very democratic one. Spanish communists had left behind the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and embraced a pluralist party-state: We, the communists, have oftentimes insisted on the necessity of a national agreement without exclusions, from the right to the left in order to secure a transition from dictatorship to democracy without violent ruptures. It is about democracy and freedom for everyone. We said a thousand times that the option between ‘Francoism or communism’ is a false dilemma. The dilemma set out is about dictatorship or democracy. Nobody – and of all groups the Communist Party the least – believes that there is a matter of establishing communism today. However, what some people have to realize is the idea that in a democratic regime, the Communist Party will have the same rights as the other groups in order to act and to defend their solutions.203

It has to be noted, however, that the PCE did not always live up to these values and that some currents remained Stalinist and anti-democratic. Given the repressions against communists by the government, but also the pre-war conflicts between communists and anarchists, it seemed more effective to hide their political affiliation in the context of the Comisiones Obreras. Thanks to this mix of strategies, which consisted of underground agitation on the one hand and open activities on the on the other, the Comisiones gained power among other illegal workers’ repre-

 Nikolas R. Dörr, “Eurokommunismus als Teil der historischen Kommunismusforschung,” https://docupedia.de/zg/Eurokommunismus, accessed April 5, 2023.  N.N., “La libertad es indivisible!,” Mundo Obrero, February 6, 1967.

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sentations (Socialist UGT and anarcho-syndicalist CNT) operating underground since Franco’s coup d’état. Despite the strong influence of the PCE, the composition of the first Comisiones Obreras was rather heterogeneous: their personnel was composed of either highly politicized anti-Francoist activists, often coming from the PCE, but also leftwing Falangists, Catholic labor activists, independent socialists, and communists.204 Women were active CCOO members, too.205 This mélange already points to the paradox duality of trade unionism in Francoist Spain: the official regime union and the opposing groups were not only working against each other, but also constantly influencing each other mutually.206 Taking into account that there was only one legal umbrella structure – a fact that was exploited successfully by the Comisiones Obreras through infiltrating it – this could also mean that particular people were active on both sides.207 The Comisiones Obreras infiltrated the national vertical syndicates and mobilized workers in illegal forms of protest and strike. By purportedly supporting mere economic and social claims that even some state officials affiliated with the Falange regarded as justified, the new union-like organization managed to mobilize large amounts of workers and was even tolerated by the regime in the earlier years, i.e. between 1962 and 1967. This oscillation between liberalizing certain areas of social and political life on the one hand and sticking to an authoritarian and repressive politics on the other was typical of late Francoist politics and has been called a “pseudo-liberalization” by Andreas Baumer.208 The apertura, the opening of the country that started with the reforms of 1957 and 1959, should not be mistaken for a smooth way of democratization and “should not be attributed to any inspired policy on the part of the dictatorship.”209 It was rather a way to incorporate social groups into predetermined pathways and at the same time

 Pere Ysàs, “La imposible ‘paz social’: El movimiento obrero y la dictadura franquista,” Historia del Presente 9 (2007): 13.  Eva Antón Fernández, “Introducción,” in Sindicalistas: Mujeres en las Comisiones Obreras, ed. Eva Antón Fernández and Diana García Bujarrabal (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2021), 9–24, 9.  It should be pointed out that this hybridity also applied to the Polish opposition, whose members could also be party members in a single-party state.  Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, “Order, Progress, and Syndicalism? How the Francoist Authorities Saw Socio-Economic Change,” in Spain transformed: The late Franco dictatorship, 1959–75, ed. Nigel Townson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 97–117.  Baumer, Kommunismus in Spanien, 127.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259–70, 259.

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maintain authoritarian structures.210 However, in comparison with the earlier years of Francoism, scholars have stressed that “[. . .][t]he system of the late 1960s was beyond all doubt more open, moderate, and responsive than that of ten or twenty years earlier.”211 During the mid-1960s, the issue of the Comisiones Obreras became more politicized and the regime aware of its threatening potential. At the 1966 syndical elections that were held in the framework of the OSE, the CCOO surprised the Spanish public with their enormous success. They were immediately prohibited. Nonetheless, they remained the strongest underground workers’ movement in Francoist Spain, which is also why they were extraordinarily strongly persecuted. Due to their historical relevance for the overall democratic opposition landscape in Francoist Spain, they and their supporters are the main Spanish protagonists of this study.

Workers and the State in the Polish People’s Republic In state socialist Poland’s official rhetoric, the working class formed the “constitutional sovereign.”212 Workers were therefore central to the ideological setting of the Polish People’s Republic and – in contrast to Francoist Spain – were not regarded as of being a priori hostile towards the government. On the contrary, the “working people” constituted a legal person and category: “In the Polish People’s Republic the power belongs to the working people of the city and the countryside [. . .],”213 Art. 1, §2 of the Polish Constitution stated. Despite this alleged privilege, labor was controlled by the state in state socialist Poland. Even if “constitutionally, it would appear that workers and workers’ rights are more than adequately protected in Poland, [. . .] Polish workers [. . .] [did] not perceive the ‘republic of the working people’, whose laws purportedly express their ‘interests’ and ‘will’, as actually safeguarding their rights.”214 A party-steered Centralna Rada Związków Zawodowych CRZZ (“Central Council of Trade Unions”), had been implemented in 1949, thereby absorbing all previously existing workers’ representations – membership was com See: Cusnick, Übergangsprobleme von autoritären Regimen zu demokratischen Systemen am Beispiel Spanien, 106.  Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975, 516.  Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert.  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej: Uchwalona przez Sejm Ustawodawczy w dniu 22 lipca 1952 r. Jednolity tekst z dnia 16 lutego 1976 r. (16 February 1976),” http://libr.sejm.gov.pl/tek01/txt/kpol/1976.html, accessed April 7, 2023.  Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander J. Motyl and Adolph F. Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West: A Comparative Study of Trade Union and Workers’ Rights in Western Democracies and Eastern Europe (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), 66.

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pulsory for Polish workers. Although “the Polish People’s Republic guarantee[d] to its citizens the right to unite in public organizations,” and although, according to the constitution, “Political organizations, trade unions, and other social organizations unite the citizens for active participation in political social, economic, and cultural life,”215 the day-to-day reality for workers in Poland was different from what was envisioned in their constitution. It will be shown that it was particularly this paradoxical tension between rhetoric and reality that infuriated people. Whereas in neither the Polish Constitution nor the Polish Labor Code was the issue of strikes explicitly mentioned, strikes were effectively illegal by illegalizing “serious violations” of “worker’s obligations,” a formulation that could entail any action of workers.216 Nevertheless, in combination with street protests, strikes were workers’ main instrument of political articulation, and they made use of this tool at regular intervals. An important difference to the Spanish case was the situation of women in Poland. Here, the two systems contrasted immensely, since the role of women was conceived differently, especially with regard to the question of labor: “Women’s industrial labor was central to the communist effort to build a new society free of inequalities.”217 The ideal of a female citizen was the one of a working woman who at the same time took care of her family and moreover aimed at educating herself constantly.218 Yet the communist ideal and the state socialist reality in Poland differed, offering many “paradoxes of emancipation” as Claudia Kraft put it.219 Researchers like Fidelis and Kenney argued that gender differences continued being “a primary

 These translated articles (Art. 83, §1–2 of the Polish People’s Republic Constitution) are quoted from Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander J. Motyl and Adolph F. Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West: A Comparative Study of Trade Union and Workers’ Rights in Western Democracies and Eastern Europe (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980).  See: Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander J. Motyl and Adolph F. Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West: A Comparative Study of Trade Union and Workers’ Rights in Western Democracies and Eastern Europe (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), 71–72. The Polish Constitution was reformed in 1976. See: Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej.”  Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 2.  Accordingly, the League of Women within the Polish United Workers’ Party (“Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza”, PZPR) lobbied for “spreading ‘political enlightenment’ among housewives and encourage them to join the workforce.” Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 61.  See the title of Claudia Kraft’s article on the matter: Claudia Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation: Regime, Opposition und Geschlechterordnungen im Staatssozialismus seit den späten 1960er-Jahren,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 3 (2006), https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/ 3–2006/id%3D4564, accessed April 3, 2023.

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way of demarcating and understanding social hierarchies [. . .].”220 Gender roles remained inflexible even in state socialist societies, including Poland. Not only was domestic work almost entirely the responsibility of women – the labor market itself was not equal. In particular in the earlier phases of Polish state socialism, work was organized around gender differences. Women earned less than men and their presence in leading positions and higher skilled positions was marginal.221 However, women’s overall participation in the labor market was much higher than in Spain (but also than in other democratic capitalist societies): in the 1970s, women constituted more than fourty percent of the working population in Poland and they had better access to education and schooling than their Western European counterparts.222 This implied, among others, that married Polish women were not as dependent on their husbands as their counterparts in many Western societies.223 The massive increase of women in factories and other workplaces in the 1950s constituted an enormous change for the Polish society that was still shattered by the trauma of World War II, the German Vernichtungskrieg, and the Holocaust.224 “In the perception of the majority of society, however, this development had nothing to do with Polish national traditions and was understood as a direct import of the Soviet model.”225 The socialist “paradoxes of emancipation”226 becomes tangible when looking at how the new ideas were implemented in the realm of labor: women were considered biologically different from men, which led party officials to define “female” and “male” qualities that would have an impact on their work tasks.227 According to Małgorzata Fidelis, “the official recognition of the difficulty of

 Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 2; see also: Padraic Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” American Historical Review 2 (1999): 399–425.  Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation,” 389.  Tatur, “Merkmale der Erwerbstätigkeit der Frauen in Polen”; Małgorzata Fidelis, “Gender, historia i komunizm,” in Kobiety w Polsce 1945–1989: Nowoczesność – równouprawnienie – komunizm, ed. Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz et al. (Kraków: TAiWPN Universitas, 2020), 25–44, 41.  See also: Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why women have better sex under socialism: And other arguments for economic independence, first trade paperback edition (New York: Bold Type Books, 2018).  Andrzej Leder has pointed out how the atrocities of the World War II and the subsequent Stalinist phase after 1945 completely changed the social configuration of the Polish society, since two important social groups that had shaped Polish culture before the war were absent: Jews and landowners. Andrzej Leder, Prześniona rewolucja: Ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2014).  Markus Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs: Kulturgeschichte Polens seit 1945 (Paderborn, 2015), 176.  Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation.”  Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 3.

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combining productive and reproductive roles of women had a strong impact on how the communist regime justified and institutionalized gender discrimination.”228 This discrimination did not only have an impact on women’s jobs but also influenced how women’s protest was perceived: since the Polish authorities considered women as ideologically “retarded” in comparison to men due to their close ties with the domestic sphere, their actions against the government were regarded more as a lack of political consciousness than of political protest. The “retarded” women needed political enlightenment rather than punishment. The vernacularization of state socialist gender politics had yet another effect on how private gender relations worked: having in mind the deep mistrust towards Soviet culture and the Soviet union after the Soviet atrocities against Polish civilians during and after World War II, “Polishness” could be cultivated in the private space: “Family and gender relations became safe social spaces in which Poles could assert what they perceived as their cultural differences from the Soviets.”229 It is not surprising, hence, that Polish women were a major driving force of political protest, either as striking workers (women had gone on strike already in the 1950s and even more prominently in Łódź in 1971), as consuming citizens, as members of the Solidarność after 1980 (however, not as their leaders)230 or by engaging in the production and proliferation of underground press, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 3.2. The 1970s in Poland were an ambivalent period between cultural liberalization and political repression as well as economic ups and downs – another parallel to Spain. Poland opened in cultural terms, which was noticeable in the ways (especially younger) people dressed or which kind of music they preferred. This process was accompanied by the liberalization of every-day-life of which the increase of tourism and the consumption of international press publications were important parts. In Polish collective memories, this phase is strongly associated with the figure of the First Party Secretary Edward Gierek, and is until today regarded as relatively positive in relation to other phases of the Polish People’s Republic.231 Although the changes were noticeable primarily for the urban elites in  Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 12.  Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, 10.  Shana Penn, “Women in Poland’s Solidarity,” in The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, ed. Katalin Fábián, Janet E. Johnson and Mara I. Lazda, Routledge handbooks of gender and sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 2022), 133–42.  Gierek as a person especially remains a father-like, caring figure in memory discourses of “ordinary Poles”; see Jürgen Gerhards, Lars Breuer, and Anna Delius, Kollektive Erinnerungen der europäischen Bürger im Kontext von Transnationalisierungsprozessen: Deutschland, Großbritannien, Polen und Spanien im Vergleich (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016); Breuer and Delius, “Jak jest zrobiona pamięć wernakularna?”.

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state socialist Poland, some workers benefitted. They could travel with the newly created Orbis travel agency that offered organized national and international group trips, often for an entire team of colleagues and co-workers, sometimes also to Western countries. However, repression and violence against citizens was likewise typical of this period of “ironic liberalization.”232 Many people had turned away from real existing state socialism, due to the transnational dynamics of 1968, when citizens’ protests in Prague had been violently crushed and Soviet tanks had entered the Czechoslovak capital. In Poland, moreover, the government had launched an antisemitic campaign to shift away attention from students’ and other citizens’ protests in March 1968. Not only did many Jewish citizens have to leave their homeland only twenty-five years after the Holocaust, it was also a decisive changing point for many left-leaning and socialist intellectuals, of whom many later became members of the Workers’ Defense Committee. In 1970, the military and police forces had shot workers in Gdańsk and brought back dark memories from 1956, a year that had become a first turning point for the Communist world.233 During the workers’ protest in Poznań in June 1956, when thousands of workers protested against their working conditions. In order to demise the protests, more than 10,000 soldiers and 400 tanks crashed the workers’ protest. As a result, seventy-three people were killed and hundreds injured and/ or arrested.234 After the first years of Gierek’s consumer socialism had brought Polish citizens several improvements, in the second half of the decade it could not be ignored or camouflaged that the economic situation was critical. Gierek’s new strategy of an acceleration of economic growth through a modernized industry went hand in hand with a “technocratic” or rather “goal oriented” approach towards the economy that aimed at satisfying the “rising expectations of Polish consumers.”235 This approach seemed to work out at the beginning of the decade: Gierek had turned to the West to borrow money for his investments in different branches of industry, which caused a rise in the standard of living for many Poles (over fifty percent in five years). In 1971, wages rose by over five percent within

 Mark Keck–Szajbel, “A Cultural Shift in the 1970s: “Texas” Jeans, Taboos, and Transnational Tourism,” East European Politics & Societies 1 (2015).  Kolář, Der Poststalinismus; for an analysis of workers during the earliest years of postwar Poland, see: Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and communists, 1945–1950, Cornell paperback ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).  Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 317.  Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980, 42.

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only one year.236 Western observers admiringly spoke of a “holy grail of legitimacy,” referring to the unspoken deal between the government and the people that received an improved consumer lifestyle in exchange for political loyalty.237 From a sociological point of view, this led to “[t]he emergence of a distinctive class of well-educated urban professionals who did not experience the atrocities of the Second World War [. . .]” as one of the most important “socio-economic currents in the Eastern Bloc from the late 1960s onwards.”238 Nevertheless, ca. fifteen percent of the wages that had been raised at the beginning of the decade could not be spent on consumer goods – these goods were simply not available whereas the amount of money circulating had doubled since 1971.239 Moreover, the costs of the social politics of the Gierek era, including twelve work-free Saturdays, the expansion of maternity-leave from twelve to eigtheen months, and the lowering of women’s retirement age to sixty, stopped the economic growth remarkably. But most importantly, foreign debt rose as the investments in new branches of industry such as chemistry, electronics, and automobiles had been very cost intensive. Despite the hopeful spirit that had accompanied Gierek’s coming into power, [. . .] under Gierek’s leadership, the political situation in Poland reached the same impasse at the end of only six years that Gomułka was facing at the end of twelve. The patterns of events repeated itself in a way that suggests that the underlying causes of malaise were essentially the same.240

Given the euphoric praises of the new secretary of state in the early 1970s, this time the disappointment about the politic and socioeconomic failure was even bigger. In June 1976, like six years before, the government tried to compensate parts of the problem with price increases. In so doing, the regime ended the freezing of prices from 1971 that had been agreed on after the disastrous events at the shore in 1970. The presented price increases, announced by Prime Minister Jaroszewicz in a televised address on the eve of June 24, were drastic: sugar would be

 Jack M. Bloom, Seeing through the eyes of the Polish revolution: Solidarity and the struggle against communism in Poland (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 101.  Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 140.  Patryk Wasiak, “Media images of ‘conspicious consumption’and private entrepreneurs in post-communist Poland,” in Soziale Ungleichheit im Visier: Wahrnehmung und Deutung von Armut und Reichtum seit 1945, ed. Eva–Maria Gajek and Christoph Lorke (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016), 181–204, 186.  “Polen: Wenig Hoffnung,” Der Spiegel 50 (1976).  Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A history of Poland. 1795 to the present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 450.

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a hundred percent more expensive, butter and cheese fifty percent more, and meat and poultry would cost around sixty-five percent more than before. The workers’ reaction quickly followed, which surprised the government and intellectual dissidents alike: people protested almost all over Poland. In most of the country’s factories, workers went on strike. Strikes took place in ninety-seven factories in twenty-four Polish voivodeships. About 55,000 people took part in the protests over two weeks. Most prominent were the protests in Ursus, a suburb of Warsaw, where workers captured the Paris-Moscow express after having blocked the tracks. In Radom, where protesters burned down the party house, two of them were killed. Even though the police did not fire their arms, they acted relatively brutally against the protesting workers. In Nowa Huta near Cracow, Poland’s socialist model town, workers abandoned their workplace in the steelworks and the military was called in to intervene.241 After they had crushed the protests, the authorities’ next steps addressed different social realms. The state-steered press launched a campaign discrediting the protesters as “hooligans” and “ringleaders,” a wording that reminded many Poles of the past press covering of the previous strikes, as it tried to depict the situation as if there was massive public support for the government. In terms of repression, the state acted on three levels: trials were held at court, misdemeanor tribunals expressed summary sentences, and tens of thousands of people were dismissed from work.242 The stories about the brutal treatment in Radom’s and Ursus’ police stations “aroused amazement and disbelief as it was difficult to imagine such a display of brutality and disrespect for the law in relatively liberal Gierekian Poland.”243 The state’s brutality did not only cause irritation, but it also triggered other social groups to engage with the protests and take a stand in the conflict. It constituted a political watershed, since this new eruption of state violence changed the oppositional strategies and social structures: gradually, the workers’ milieus and the traditional intellectual dissident milieus approached each other. Out of this cooperation, an alliance of workers and intellectuals emerged that would later be continued in the work of the Solidarność movement. Consequently, this group and the political milieu forms one of the protagonists of this study.

 Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980, 50–53; Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL; Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 353; Davies, God’s Playground, 471–473.  Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980, 64.  Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 340.

2 Emerging Oppositions – Citizens Starting to Organize This chapter examines the emergence of oppositions in the two authoritarian regimes. Analyzing historical processes through the lens of what I call ‘alternative press’ allows for an inductive definition of different phases without ignoring the well-known political milestones. With a few exceptions, this study dominantly relies on press material including illegal publications published underground. Oftentimes political events triggered the emergence of these publications. At the same time, in both countries, the quality and the political strength of the opposition was strongly intertwined with the existence of both underground publications and debates carried out on the pages of liberal and progressive press publications stretching the boundaries of what was possible to say in public.1 People started to write and publish magazines, because they felt either particularly repressed or particularly strong or both. Their writings could be reactions to changed legislations that in turn were implemented because of social protest, to events entailing violent repression or reactions to the sudden emergence of political scopes of action that have not existed before, like the possibility to actively participate in elections. Especially in human rights historiography but also in the context of studies on transitions and transformations, debates on caesurae and starting points have shown that the identification of certain points in history – may they be points of departure or origin – simplifies complex structures and ignores important continuities or marginalized aspects.2 Moreover, having in mind the historiography on Polish contemporary history, others have pointed out how “accurately portioned” pieces of time enhanced a certain idea of ‘history’ interpreting it as a sequence of “more or less static constellations.”3 In such a perspective, these constellations were shattered from time to time by breaks or upheavals, which, in turn, opened the gates towards a new order. This “caesuritis” in historical scholarship, according to Peters, tends to “exoticize” the past by highlighting the differences between

 On oppositional writings and publishing in state socialist Europe and in Francoist Spain, see most prominently: Renaudet, Un parlement de papier; Alber and Stegmann, Themenheft KindKovács and Labov, Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond. Cf. also the concept of “hidden transcripts” as proposed by James Scott who introduced it to point out the secret communication between members of oppressed groups. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale: Yale University Press, 1990).  See, for instance: Brier, “Beyond the Quest for a ‘Breakthrough’”.  Peters, “Polnische Zeitgeschichte jenseits etablierter Zäsuren.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-002

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the past and the present.4 In so doing, this obsessive search for caesurae camouflaged contradictory developments and contingencies for the sake of linearity. This is especially true when dealing with political transformations that changed an authoritarian political system towards a parliamentary republic or, in the Spanish case, a parliamentary monarchy. It is even more tempting when working on the history of (human) rights that bear a modern, civilizational connotation. Human rights historians like Ned Richardson-Little have criticized the enthusiastic and mystifying narratives that depicted the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe as “[. . .] the result of a mass moral epiphany regarding universal human rights.”5 Not only had certain narratives contributed to a dehistorization of historical processes, but also, vice versa, the “revolutions of 1989” constituted “a central element in the mythology of human rights.”6 By drawing on the terminology of Roland Barthes, he argued that historical events had been transformed “from history into nature.”7 This, in turn entailed a certain inescapability of a triumph of human rights, as if they were inherent to human nature.8 While I attempt to demythologize human rights and their use, in this study, I analyze how and under which circumstances they were employed by repressed groups. While having in mind the critique regarding portions of time, it remains without doubt that certain categorizations, also in terms of time and periodization, have to be made when studying and comparing historical processes. Still, it is important to bear in mind that periodization and the subdivision in different phases occur out of subjective assessment criterions and out of certain foci regarding actors or topics. It is in the nature of modern societies that political events and processes shape the perception of people more than this is the case with culture or other realms of society. But also when shedding light on ordinary citizens and vernacular actors, the institutionalized political context plays an important role. This is not only true because the actions of vernacular and institutionalized actors were oftentimes interdependent, but also because it is not always possible to draw a clear line between both groups. Being citizens of authoritarian regimes, those with oppositional mindsets could also be part of official

 Peters, “Polnische Zeitgeschichte jenseits etablierter Zäsuren.”  Richardson-Little, “Human Rights as Myth and History,” 151.  Richardson-Little, “Human Rights as Myth and History,” 151 (own emphasis, AD).  As quoted in: Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall, Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’ Today: Readings of Contemporary Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 150.  The Central and Eastern European bias of these debates shows once more that the history of this region and the Cold War context have been studied much more by international academics than the South of Europe.

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structures, for instance when being a member of the ruling party. Another example is the following example, when the Comisiones Obreras participated in the elections of the Organización Sindical Española that they actually fought against. Depicting the state and its citizens as hermetically sealed entities would be an artificial divide blurring out historical complexities in the lives of ordinary people and functional elites alike. Moving away from strict synchronicity, in this study, I compare two different periods of time, in order to explore the similarities of emerging oppositions as the consequence of similar social transformation processes that Spain and Poland underwent in different decades. The starting points of the analysis, i.e. 1966 in Spain and 1976 in Poland, coincide with the beginnings of a visible, more or less permanent and organized opposition focusing on questions of labor and democracy. In Spain, the opposition entered legal state structures through taking part in the Organización Sindical Española. In Poland, the opposition underwent a shift in strategy, too. From 1976 on, the oppositional activists concentrated on their fellow citizens as allies, whereas before they had still hoped to exert influence on the government itself. The empirical base for the following chapters consists of alternative press. This entails clandestine and legal publications from Spain and samizdat publications from Poland.9 Compared to Poland, the Spanish society discussed labor topics more broadly – they had stronger anchoring in the overall political culture of the remaining civil society. This anchoring equaled a longue durée continuity of the strong anarchist and socialist traditions in the country. Moreover, national politics in general had a strong labor-oriented focus – it should not be forgotten that the Francoist invasion was oftentimes justified with or presented as a pacification of a chaotic republic that could not control its violent workers’ upheavals. Due to these historical, political, and cultural differences of the role of labor in Spain and Poland, the empirical sources in the next two chapters differ with regard to the diversity of sources. I selected them according to the scope of actors associated with them, which led to a certain quantitative asymmetry regarding the types of publications. While Chapter 2.1 is based on different alternative publications and discusses articles in legally published press but also leaflets and flyers illegally published by the Comisiones Obreras, Chapter 2.2 focuses on the milieu of the Polish KOR and is dominantly grounded on the magazine Robotnik (“The Worker”), a magazine directed at workers. In order to examine the impact of the different audiences and contexts, an intellectual magazine called Kultura

 These sources will be further introduced in the respective case studies.

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(“Culture”) was partially examined, too. Sporadically, other types of sources, for instance letters, were integrated into the analysis. Robotnik was the only explicitly labor-related samizdat magazine at this time (the vast part of illegal workers’ magazines emerged in the context of the creation of the Solidarność movement after 1980). It also gathered all aspects under its umbrella whereas the Spanish sources could only provide such a variety through combining different types of publications. To have an insight into the workers’ perspective itself, I selected Carril (“The Track”), a Madrilenian railway workers’ publication that was published by the Comisiones Obreras. This examination will be enriched by both an analysis of service-articles and educative texts from the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral (“Information Bulletins for Labor Legislation”), edited by secret communist lawyers, and a debate from the Cuadernos para el Diálogo (“Papers for Dialogue”), where communist and Catholic authors, intellectual and sometimes working-class, could contribute. This selection of sources enabled me to compare certain milieus of actors that were of crucial importance to the emergence of the labor oppositions in both Spain and Poland. In both countries, printing and proliferating press was part of early oppositional practices. Therefore, in the first empirical part of this book, I compare the emergent oppositions and their oscillation between open and secret action. For both Spain and Poland, I concentrated on two periods, each comprising more or less two years. It is, however, important to take into account that these opposition movements did not appear out of nowhere. Polish oppositional activists drew back on socialist concepts from the interwar period, underground strategies during German occupation and early post-Stalinist years. Spanish workers’ activists and their intellectual allies could look back on a strong workers’ movement tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century but especially to pre-Civil War structures of a rich trade union landscape and diverging workers’ movements in the Spanish Republic (1931–1939). For the Comisiones Obreras it was very important to gain sovereignty over all these competing currents. This was achieved through presenting oneself as “a movement of a new type,”10 and not a trade union, which would help in depicting itself as an umbrella for all anti-Francoist groups. Coming back to the question of historical caesurae, rather than extinguishing them, the socio-political ruptures in the form of the Civil War in Spain and the Second World War in Poland added another layer onto the earlier traditions and ideas. Therefore, historical continuities and discontinuities have be taken into account at all times.

 Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 323.

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2.1 Infiltrating Workplaces from Below in the 1960s: Spanish Labor Activists between Global Norms, National Legislation, and Local Struggle In the 1960s, Spanish politics were all about progress. The high-tide of ideologies was over; one could read in contemporary Spanish publications such as Fernández de la Mora’s “The Twilight of Ideologies,” a Spanish example for the transnational contemporary debate on the alleged overcoming of ideologies.11 Social conflicts over the distribution of goods and power were typical of the “underdeveloped” and young countries of the African continent, whereas the progressive Western world witnessed the vanishing of ideologies including liberalism, socialism, and nationalism, the Spanish writer argued.12 Yet, as this chapter will show, Mora was wrong in his assumption about social conflicts being an anachronism. They would remain an important factor in Spanish politics. In this chapter, I focus on the second Francoism, the late, more open phase of the dictatorship that followed the harsh and economically miserable 1940s and 1950s when the country was economically, politically, and culturally autarchic.13 The 1960s, in turn, were shaped by a strong progress-orientation in the Francoist government, nurtured by the economic boom of the Spanish Wirtschaftswunder and the cultural opening of the country after the first fascist phase of Francoism. The ideology of desarollismo had taken over Spanish politics and was heavily debated among the different currents of Francoist politics, technocrats and Falangists. In cultural terms, an important element of the overall opening of Spain was the loosening of press censorship. A new press act was brought into being in 1966 by the Minister of Information, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, a representative of the Falange wing of the government. This “pseudo-liberalization” was not equivalent with genuine freedom of speech, even though the law’s rhetoric insinuated such a freedom:14

 Hofmann, Francos Moderne, 206; Gonzalo La Fernández de Mora and Carlos G. Apesteguía, eds., El crepúsculo de las ideologías (Hildesheim: Olms, 2013). See also: Javier Fernández Sebastián, “The notion of ‘ideology’ in the ideological struggles of 20th–century Spain,” Journal of Political Ideologies 3 (2009).  Hofmann, Francos Moderne, 206.  See for instance: Nigel Townson, ed., España en cambio: El segundo franquismo, 1959–75 (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España, 2009).  Baumer, Kommunismus in Spanien, 127.

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The right to freedom of expression of ideas, awarded to the Spaniards in article twelve of their jurisdiction will be exercised when they diffuse through printing products, in accordance with the provisions in the aforementioned jurisdiction and the present law.15

The “freedom of expression” was a mere rhetorical figure within the law as it simultaneously imposed boundaries (“in accordance with the provisions . . . ”). Now everybody had to assess on their own whether an article would fulfil the requirements of the authorities or not. The new law was therefore rather a step from censorship to self-censorship, but it enhanced the emergence of new liberal magazines and a relatively free arena of public debate. Even anarchist and Marxist writings could be published and sold.16 After years of political apathy, interested Spaniards were now able to read and take part in press debates – and they could finally read about strikes, even if these were still illegal.17 This oscillation between liberalizing certain areas of social and political life and sticking to authoritarian and repressive politics in general was typical of late Francoist politics. As Paul Preston pointed out, “[. . .] [t]he post-1957 commitment to modern capitalist economic development ended the dominance of the Falange but did not alter the repressive nature of the regime.”18 The opening was hence not a true overarching liberalization but rather a hidden regulation of social dynamics, following the desire of catching up economically with the global ‘West’.19 However, in comparison with the earlier years of Francoism, “[. . .][t]he system of the late 1960s was beyond all doubt more open, moderate, and responsive than that of ten or twenty years earlier.”20 The relative openness of the country manifested itself through several important events and political developments. This chapter highlights the dynamics between 1966 and 1968: the electoral campaign and the subsequent electoral success of the Comisiones Obreras during the elections at the Organización Sindical Española in Autumn 1966, their first General Assembly in June 1967, and their illegalization by the Supreme Court in November 1967. At a time when the Comisiones

 Jefatura del Estado, “Ley 14/1966 de Prensa e Imprenta,” https://www.boe.es/eli/es/l/1966/03/18/ 14/con, accessed September 25, 2019.  Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 317; see also: Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 265.  Nevertheless, politically active Spaniards constituted a minority.  Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (London: Routledge, 1996), 6.  See: Cusnick, Übergangsprobleme von autoritären Regimen zu demokratischen Systemen am Beispiel Spanien, 106.  Payne, The Franco Regime, 1936–1975, 516.

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Obreras started to be visible and engaged in official state structures by participating in the elections, workers started publishing their own magazines, empowered by the new realities at their workplaces.21 However, these publications were still illegal, as the workers never asked for publishing permission. In the documents of the Comisiones Obreras, the summer of 1966 was retrospectively described as a point of emergence. Considering the geological conditions of the Asturian mines, the beginnings of the CCOO in the early 1960s have oftentimes been called “embryonic” or having started “in the caves,” which evokes parallels to the evolution of humans or humankind as such.22 The elections of 1966 however, almost equaled a resurrection in the rhetoric of the Comisiones Obreras: “June 1966 marked a milestone in the history of the CCOO, as it really was the concrete date of them coming out into the light as a workers’ movement with a permanent character.”23 The new situation shaped by the electoral campaign, the surprise of the high success in the elections, and the repressive reaction by the government functioned as a catalyst for political activism. What is more, international financial and economic dynamics influenced this activism, for instance the recession of 1966/67 that collaterally caused an increase of labor conflicts on the Iberian Peninsula.24 In the late 1960s, moreover, the Catholic Church experienced a major transformation that followed a crisis of being detached from its members. The global shifts in the Catholic Church had their very own Spanish version, where the high level of disenchantment fostered a major split between a conservative majority in the Spanish Catholic Church and a small but increasing anti-Francoist minority. This split between pro and anti-Francoist priests and lay Catholics was dominantly based on the question of how just the workers’ protest was. Some priests even became workers’ activists in this process.25 I thus consider this period a window of opportunity for the labor opposition, because the Spanish gov-

 See, for instance: Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 14.  See, for instance, the titles in this collection of CCOO documents, published autonomously: Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas, eds., CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976) (Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987), 3.  See, for instance, the titles in this collection of CCOO documents, published autonomously: Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas, eds., CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976) (Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987), 3.  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 142.  Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress, 136–137. “Worker-Priests” were not a Spanish peculiarity but evolved in several European countries with a strong Catholic tradition after 1945, such as in the form of preti operai in Italy or as prêtres-ouvriers in France and Belgium. See for instance: Tangi Cavalin and Nathalie Viet-Depaule, “Des prêtres-ouvriers au mouvement missionnaire

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ernment introduced several participation mechanisms that were immediately used by the Comisiones Obreras to gain influence over the working-class and, to a certain extent, also over an emerging public sphere. The months between the electoral campaign and the electoral success, March 1966 until November 1967, were shaped by ambivalence: on the one hand, workers’ hopes were raised, but on the other one state repression rose. Workers’ activism did not cease but was channeled and minimized noticeably. For the labor opposition movement this period constituted a time of inner rapprochement: several communists and lay Catholics or left-leaning priests openly discussed ways and possibilities of cooperation and ideological overlaps. Nonetheless, these labor-friendly stands constituted a minority within the Spanish Catholic Church at least until the 1970s: “The most prominent Catholics not only supported the regime that brought so much suffering to the poor; they were openly proud of it. Church representatives and Francoist authorities literally walked hand in hand.”26 The proliferation of labor-friendly convictions among crucial actors of the emerging opposition was also shaped by dynamics of change in Catholic and communist circles. In terms of history of ideas, both Catholics and communists pertained to broader currents of thought active in the articulation of globally relevant rights discourses, especially with regard to the situation of workers and labor in general. This is especially true for the Second Vatican Council and the Papal Constitution Gaudium et Spes published in 1965.27 In their various writings, Spanish leftwing and Catholic intellectuals and workers either positioned themselves towards these globally circulating ideas or linked them to the concrete repressive situation they were experiencing. This window of opportunity for labor activism between March 1966 and November 1967 constitutes the time frame for the following chapter. Here, I examine the rhetoric and practices used by those who wanted to push forward a broader political movement against the Francoists. In this context, I show the most pressing demands of workers and their allies and their translation into political activism, thereby highlighting the role of international labor norms and human rights.

Français: Bilan historiographique et nouvelles Perspectives,” Histoire et missions chrétiennes 9 (2009).  Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress, 135.  Pope Paul VI, “Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world,” http://www.vatican. va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en. html, accessed April 2, 2023.

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Alternative Press in Francoist Spain in the 1960s Despite the formal ending of state censorship, the dictatorial and repressive context of Francoist Spain has to be taken into account at all times, as it shaped not only what was possible to discuss openly, but also how it was articulated rhetorically. On the backdrop of state repression that – despite the civil rights rhetoric in the national legislation – was a possible outcome and reaction to political writings, it is particularly interesting to investigate the oppositional rhetoric and to compare legal to clandestine publications. The above-mentioned events were discussed in several different publications pertaining to the milieu of the Comisiones Obreras. The authors oftentimes remained anonymous, which is why it was only occasionally possible to introduce them individually. Their writings were hence read as exemplary for a distinct milieu. The empirical basis for this chapter thus constitutes a heterogenous foundation for an analysis of the major currents of anti-Francoist labor opposition, i.e. party communists, Catholics, and Christian democrats, as well as those organized in the Comisiones Obreras. Consequently, this chapter is mainly grounded in “clandestine”28 workers’ press steered by the Comisiones Obreras, as well as a special “service,” an information bulletin on labor rights written by labor-friendly lawyers. This will be enriched sporadically by articles from the illegal Communist party organ Mundo Obrero (“Workers’ World”) and legal liberal press, namely the liberal Catholic magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo (“Papers for Dialogue”).29 Furthermore, illegal flyers and leaflets that were distributed among workers were evaluated. Not only was Madrid one of the hotspots of workers’ activism, but metal and railway industry belonged to the branches that were most active in opposing the authorities. Carril was a magazine written by workers themselves, not by their intellectual allies. Readers could inform themselves about strikes in other factories and everyday problems from time to time, but the main emphasis of the magazine lay on publishing demands and on reporting repression. It was politically motivated from its first issue onwards. Here almost all articles were written anonymously (See Fig. 1).

 Whereas Central and Eastern European dissidents’ and oppositions’ publications are referred to as samizdat (“self-publishing”) and tamizdat (“publishing in exile”), or drugi obieg (“second round”) in Poland particularly, Spanish-speaking scholarship and contemporary sources call the unofficial underground publications “clandestine.” See, for instance: Ariza and Aróstegui, Amordazada y perseguida. One of the authors, Juan Ariza, was himself a CCOO activist during Francoism.  Renaudet, Un parlement de papier, 91.

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Fig. 1: Carril, October 1966, Fundación 1° de Mayo, Madrid.

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The Cuadernos para el Diálogo were one of the most important publications that legally emerged in the new climate of the apertura, even before the official adoption of Fraga’s press law. They can be regarded as the medial flagship of liberal Catholic social thought in Francoist Spain and were a constant thorn in the government’s flesh – the magazine was also the most important arena for the rapprochement of Catholics and communist ideas, especially after the Second Vatican Council in 1965.30 The Cuadernos’ history mirrors the history of the development of Catholic thought and Catholic politics in Francoist Spain. Furthermore, having in mind the social and political heterogeneity of the democratic opposition, they are regarded as having been a “microcosm of the opposition to the regime where there were those who were to have a political career on the Right and future leaders of the Left.”31 Its founder Joaquín Ruiz-Gimenez had been the president of the international Catholic students’ union Pax Romana. In the early 1950s, he was the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican and then minister of education until Franco removed him in 1956 as a reaction to massive riots and a university crisis. Not only did he provide a platform for Christian social thought and Communist ideas in his Cuadernos, but he also tried to find a common ground between democristianos, i.e. Catholic democratic forces, and Francoists. The magazine can therefore be considered of having had a bridging function between different social and political milieus. In the years of the analysis, it covered labor issues more often than in other periods, another indicator for the salience of labor topics within this specific political milieu. While legal liberal publications like the Cuadernos were a new phenomenon, clandestine anti-Francoist press had existed since the Civil War – oftentimes trying to continue Republican traditions, like the magazine Mundo Obrero, the official organ of the Spanish Communist Party. However, most issues of Mundo Obrero were produced in exile, which is one reason why there the names of the authors were sometimes printed on the pages of the magazine.32 They became part of the Spanish democratic diaspora life outside the country, with a strong emphasis on Paris and Mexico City.33 Their distribution network inside the coun See, for instance: Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1963–1976.  Cristina Palomares, “New Political Mentalities in the Tardofranquismo,” in Spain transformed: The late Franco dictatorship, 1959–75, ed. Nigel Townson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 118–39, 123.  Julián Ariza and Julio Aróstegui, “Nota técnica,” in Amordazada y perseguida: Catálogo de prensa clandestina y del exilio: hemeroteca de la Fundación 1° de Mayo, ed. Julián Ariza and Julio Aróstegui (Madrid: Fundación 1° de Mayo, 2005), 15–19.  Spanish scholars therefore differentiate between “clandestine” and “exile” press, comparable to the differentiation between samizdat and tamizdat in the Soviet and Central/Eastern European context. See: Carlos Gordon, “Prensa Clandestina y Movimiento Obrero en el Franquismo,” in

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try was concentrated on the industrialized and urban centers, i.e. Catalunya, Madrid, the Basque Country, and Galicia, but many issues never reached Spanish soil.34 More successful in reaching Spanish workers were the publications of the Comisiones Obreras distributed in the factories. Lawyers engaged in the process of publishing alternatives to the previously homogenous Francoist media landscape, too. One prominent example is the Madrid-based lawyer José Jiménez de Parga y Cabrera who founded the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral (“Information Bulletin for Labor Legislation”) after he was permitted to publish a magazine in January 1966. One of its regular contributors was María Luisa Suárez Roldán, a female lawyer and therefore an exception to the male dominated scene of people with higher legal education in Spain. Suárez Roldán was also an activist in the Comisiones. She defended a number of workers against the TOP.35 The monthly magazine started with a circulation of 1,000 copies and was directed at workers with the clear aim of making them familiar with the existing labor legislation. Yet it lasted only eight issues long until it was shut down.36 Among its writers was Nicolás Sartorius, who was both a lawyer and secretly a communist workers’ activist. He had been among the founders of the Comisiones Obreras and had already been in prison in 1962 because of participating in strikes in the Asturias region. It was one of his articles, in the sixth issue of the Boletín, that made the authorities prohibit the magazine in 1967. In this contribution, Sartorius suggested that the elections in the Organización Sindical Española might be rigged.37 Another famous name that had strong ties with the Bulletin, the Communist Party as well as the Comisiones Obreras was Marcelino Camacho. The metal worker was one of the most important characters in the Comisiones Obreras and a frequent target of Francoist repression. He was born in 1918 in central Spain, northeast of Madrid and was the son of the local leader of the socialist union UGT. During the Civil War, he joined the Popular Front and was deported to a Francoist labor camp in 1940, after the Francoist victory. Yet, Camacho escaped

Amordazada y perseguida: Catálogo de prensa clandestina y del exilio: hemeroteca de la Fundación 1° de Mayo, ed. Julián Ariza and Julio Aróstegui (Madrid: Fundación 1° de Mayo, 2005), 267–97.  Carlos Gordon, “Prensa Clandestina y Movimiento Obrero en el Franquismo,” in Amordazada y perseguida: Catálogo de prensa clandestina y del exilio: hemeroteca de la Fundación 1° de Mayo, ed. Julián Ariza and Julio Aróstegui (Madrid: Fundación 1° de Mayo, 2005), 269.  See: Ana Fernández Asperilla and Mayka Muñoz Ruiz, “María Luisa Suárez Roldán: De la institución libre de Enseñanza a la Defensa de los Trabajadores y Trabajadoras,” in Sindicalistas.  Renaudet, Un parlement de papier, 31. When Suárez Roldán finished her studies in 1944, she was the only female student of law at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid.  N.N., “Encuesta,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966).

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when he was deported to work in Tangier during the Second World War. He fled to France and became a member of the French syndical anarchist union CGT. Over the course of the general liberalization of Spain, in 1957, Camacho returned to his homeland, where he immediately engaged in union activities – in the same year, his colleagues elected him as their representative, a very early example of the CCOO’s entrismo.38 Being one of the most prominent figures of the workers’ movement, the metalworker was repeatedly imprisoned during the dictatorship. The worship of his person had tendencies of a cult. “Marcelino’s” knitted jumper became his very own trademark.39 People affiliated with the antiFrancoist opposition viewed him as especially charismatic, loyal and having integrity – Camacho fulfilled almost all aspects of what became a common concept in popular culture, too: a working-class hero. This appraisal reached a peak with the imprisonment of Camacho and nine of his collaborators during the “Process 1001,” when he, like Sartorius, the “movement’s leading intellectual,”40 were sentenced to jail for having engaged in trade union activism.41 In the first issue of the Boletín, the founder and director of the editorial board, Jiménez de la Parga y Cabrera, explicitly listed their motivation. He was in general a supporter of workers during Francoism. At the end of 1965, together with other colleagues, he founded the law firm of labor lawyers in Calle de la Cruz, a pioneer in the defense of workers, when the first strikes had already taken place. He organized defense lawyers for dismissed workers when they faced trials and later personally defended them in front of the notorious Tribunal de Órden Público.42 In this editorial, Jiménez de la Parga drew the boundaries of their scope of actions, dictated by the national jurisdiction: Our “Bulletin” intends to address in a clear way all those affected by labor norms, which is the majority of Spaniards: It intends to inform about the labor legislation without any complications nor useless technicalities; leaving behind what we consider superficial and emphasizing what we believe to be important. Our “Bulletin” intends not only to inform, but to provide practical help for the pursuit of the interests recognized in the laws while at the

 Hans-Werner Franz, “Vorwort,” in Gespräche im Gefängnis: Die gewerkschaftliche Arbeiterbewegung in Spanien, ed. Marcelino Camacho, Marxistische Taschenbücher Reihe ‘Marxismus aktuell’ 94 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1976), 5–17, 6.  Sánchez del Pozo, José Luis, “Marcelino Camacho. Una figura clave del nuevo sindicalismo: Fuentes para su estudio,” Hispania Nova: Revista de historia contemporánea 1 (1998), https://dialnet. unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=297043, accessed April 2, 2023.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 100.  See Chapter 3.1.  María L. Suárez, “In Memoriam: José Jiménez de Parga, abogado,” El País, October 20, 2009. Comment: María Luisa Suárez, who wrote the article about Jiménez de Parga, had also been a writer for the “Bulletins”; whose editor-in-chief was Jiménez de Parga. (AD).

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same time indicating legal ways and adequate proceedings. Our “Bulletin” was created, in one word, in order to help and give orientation to the world of labor when pursuing their labor rights, recognized by our juridical order through the diffusion and knowledge of our laws and through indicating ways to follow for an effective realization.43

Nonetheless, the editors wanted the magazine to become a forum of explanation and one where this problematic jurisdiction could be used positively for the defense of workers’ interests. Anthropologists studying the proliferation of international human rights have highlighted the role of people who bridge the gaps between global discourses and local contexts, especially when they actively vernacularized global norms so that they resonated with the local setting. Here, Spanish lawyers explained national legislation to deprived citizens and fulfilled the role of “brokers,”44 since they translated and explained national legal legislation to those who felt insecure or did not know the law. In so doing, these “brokers” but also the magazine as such had a bridging function. Bearing in mind that the scholarly debates on human rights were the most important empowering instrument for social movements, I consider it important to extrapolate when and by whom these concepts were brought into play, when a ‘language of rights’ was used more generally and how ‘rights’ were discussed, although they were violated on a daily basis. Since this is not a semantic study on rights conceptions but one that deals with the question of how repression was addressed, it is also important to analyze how people addressed labor conflicts and everyday problems when they did not employ a human rights orientated language. I will show in this chapter that the explicit use of a human rights language was employed in the context of addressing international partners and when asking people abroad for help. Within the national framework, nonetheless, a rhetoric focusing on ‘democracy’ and ‘participation’ was more important for the repressed.

Trade Union Rights and Civil Rights as Joint Demands of the Spanish Labor Opposition In 1968, the International Labor Organization sent a study group to Spain to examine the labor and trade situation in the country. In the preface to their study report, one can read the following positive diplomatic remark:

 Jiménez de Parga y Cabrera, José, “Editorial,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 1 (1966): 1.  Sally E. Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle,” American Anthropologist 1 (2006).

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At every stage of the visit, the mission encountered the same friendly atmosphere. Although the talks were sometimes protracted, the persons interviewed never showed any signs of impatience.45

The visit of the ILO officials must have taken place under exceptional circumstances: in fact, from the early 1960s, Spanish workplaces witnessed numerous violently crushed labor protests and strikes. The riots were the biggest in Spanish history since the Civil War.46 Workers in particular showed signs of impatience: they repeatedly called for social reforms and pointed out their own precarious situation by protesting and going on strike, although this was illegal. It was in these years that the underground labor movement in Spain gained political momentum for the first time during the Francoist dictatorship, where independent trade unions had to give way to one single, vertical state organization. Spanish workers were trapped in a triangle of problems: they suffered under a variety of bad working conditions, including low salaries, long working hours, and deficits in safety and hygiene. Lacking authentic workers’ representations and participation possibilities, workers were not able to negotiate them with their managements. The only remaining way of articulating protest was to go on strike or to slow down work for a couple of hours or days – actions that were met with hard repression since there was no right to strike either. Apart from violent treatments by the Spanish police forces, striking workers were often punished by dismissal. Even though the country witnessed liberalization processes in numerous political and cultural realms, factories, mines, and enterprises remained being part of the most repressive environments. This permanence of repressive structures for deprivileged members of the Spanish society is yet another indicator for the government’s illiberal attitude, as its opening was almost entirely a reaction to “pressures and conditions at home and abroad” and “should not be attributed to any inspired policy on the part of the dictatorship.”47 In cases of conflict or protest at the workplace, the government massively deployed police and ordered the notorious Public Order Court (Tribunal de Orden Público; TOP) to impose “draconian penalties”48 for violations of labor law. “It was no coincidence that the ‘Public Order Act’ was passed in 1959 simultaneously with the economic reform, as the authorities expected social dis-

 International Labour Organisation, The trade union situation and industrial relations in Spain: Report of an ILO mission (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1985).  Ysàs, “La imposible ‘paz social’,” 10.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 259.  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 134.

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satisfaction in the wake of the restrictions and price increases associated with economic reforms.”49 Among the bad working conditions, the low salaries was the most pressing issue. The matter became especially problematic in the course of the so-called economic miracle. Not only was domestic trade liberalized or foreign investments stimulated, but also new branches of production were created, including cars, household appliances, engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, plastics, shipbuilding, and steel. Whereas before the Stabilization Plan the industrial sector covered twenty-five to fourty percent of the Spanish GDP, it was ca. sixty percent in the 1970s.50 Costs of living increased steadily, but Spanish salaries remained low. Considering the European context, the differences were extreme: While the upper classes benefited from the lowest tax levels in Europe, the working class suffered extreme exploitation. In 1969, a worker in Spanish industry worked an average of 55 hours per week, compared to a European average of 44 hours, while earning just half the European average.51

That Spanish real wages in the industrial sector increased by fourty percent in these years only shows how much bigger the gap had been before the transformation.52 Marxist historians have stressed the entanglement dynamics between the “economic miracle” and the situation of the workers, or rather how the companies were only able to accumulate so much capital because the productivity increase did not coincide with an adequate pay rise.53 The discrepancy between naming the official trade union structures “syndicates” and their dependence on the government or rather their entanglement with the enterprises was another factor of conflict. Being under pressure by this political paradox situation, workers had to engage and interact with a political state institution that claimed to be their own interest group, but in fact acted against them. Magazines like the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral thus stepped in and supported workers morally and intellectually. The Boletín de Información  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 134 (own translation, AD).  The service sector was even more transformed, thanks to the tourist boom of the 1960s and 1970s. See: Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 260f.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 264.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 262.  See, for instance: Hans-Werner Franz, Klassenkämpfe in Spanien heute (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1975), 33.

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de Legislación Laboral, a Madrid-based service magazine designed by legal scholars from the communist milieu, addressed everyday workers’ problems and questions more than other publications. The magazine was not so much a political organ linked to a political aim, but rather dedicated to supporting workers on a short-term scale (as opposed to the clandestine Comisiones Obreras’ publications that always envisioned the bigger aim, i.e. a peaceful anti-Francoist revolution in the form of a nationwide general strike). Some workers gratefully accepted the service that the lawyers working for the Boletín provided. Oftentimes, workers directly wrote to the magazine when they needed support or also just to inform or educate themselves about legal possibilities, as the following example illustrates. They did not sign their letters with their names, but remained anonymous, even if they did not raise any political issues, like the “group of chemical workers” that asked the editors of the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral whether they had a right to extra payments. The chemical workers had heard that other workers handling toxic material at work did receive such danger bonuses. They also asked the editors of the magazine whether they “had the right to have a medical doctor in the enterprise.”54 The group of workers received a long answer with reprinted passages from the national legislation and a suggestion to raise the matter in front of the regional bureau if, “[. . .] after reading this article from the regulations [. . .] [you] consider yourselves being affected by these.”55 The answer to the second question was very clear. The obligation to hire a medical doctor for an enterprise was subject to specific labor rules and was dependent on the number of employees and the toxicity of the materials used in the working process. Hence, the authors of the text suggested denouncing this grievance towards the authorities and checking if their workplaces could be counted among those obligated to guarantee access to a doctor.56 Spanish workers were aware of their relatively bad situation. Not only could they draw back on the tradition of the Second Spanish Republic, when they were citizens of a democratic republic end enjoyed several labor rights that were later abolished by the Francoists, but they were also aware of how workers in other European societies lived and worked. This was even more the case since at the beginning of the 1960s Spanish workers oftentimes worked abroad, as Gastar-

 N.N./ Un grupo de obreros de I. Químicas, “Cartas de los lectores,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966).  N.N./ Un grupo de obreros de I. Químicas, “Cartas de los lectores,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966).  N.N./ Un grupo de obreros de I. Químicas, “Cartas de los lectores,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966).

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beiter in the Federal Republic of Germany or in other industrial core regions including Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. These perspectives, one directed backwards, the other one outward, were important references for workers and their supporters. Why is such an interaction between lawyers and workers interesting, even more so as it took place in a legally published magazine? The lack of independent trade unions had created a socio-political vacuum that was thus filled by the people engaged in the Comisiones Obreras and their allies that were oftentimes intellectuals with a communist worldview, such as the editors of the Boletines. That people reacted to the invitation of sending in questions or comments shows how the lawyers engaged in this magazine fulfilled tasks that theoretically would have been the task of trade unions or their contact persons in the factories. The fact that they had to overtake basic informative and educative tasks like explaining the national labor legislation additionally shows how little workers trusted their official representatives and how much more open they were to discussing problems with people whom they only had interacted with in written form. In opposition to how Polish intellectuals wrote about their national labor legislation ca. ten years later and who tried to carve out what might be helpful for workers in cases of uncertainty or labor conflicts, the Spanish labor lawyers sometimes had trouble in finding anything helpful in the Spanish legislation. A typical article explaining changes to workplace security legislation to the working-class readers shows the dilemma for worker-friendly lawyers, when one of them wrote an article on changes to the legislation regarding workplace security: In my opinion, the worst thing that can happen to a legal provision is that it becomes unnecessary, because then it lacks the cause or ‘ratio legis’ that justifies it. If, moreover, it is an anti-economic law it may even be unfair. Well, much of this is happening to the Social Security Law in terms of its regulation of Occupational Accident Insurance.57

This example is typical of the Boletín’s language and of the entire milieu of supporters of the Comisiones Obreras. Apart from depicting the Francoist government as immoral, they depicted it as incompetent. This made their own claims appear as just necessary, without any ideological layers added to it. This way, their own group was depicted as politically mature, which stood in opposition to the immaturity (politically and morally) of the Francoist government. The dilemmatic situation workers faced led to a combination of different claims. Workers expressed them constantly and in different forms. These demands can be categorized in two groups; first, the basic political demands, i.e. the

 Gabriel Usera, “Problemas de la nueva regulación de los Accidentes de Trabajo,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 4 (1966): 27.

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right to strike and the call for independent trade unions.58 These claims formed the basis for the second group, i.e. labor-related claims, such as minimum wage or the eight-hour workday. In the following I thus engage with the typical claims formulated by the Comisiones Obreras and their surroundings at a time when they started to become visible to a broader Spanish public sphere, or, as others have called it, when “civil society returned” to Spain.59 Based on the example of the Madrilenian metal industry and Madrilenian railway employees, I show how the Comisiones Obreras contextualized and legitimized their demands and political positions. People articulated these demands in the factory magazines and on leaflets rather than on the pages of the legal magazines. Following the division of demands into two groups, I show how the concept of rights presented in the context of these claims was a twofold one: rights could appear as guarantees for regulated procedures and as entitlements. For the Comisiones, the workers’ cause was always one of changing the entire political system. It was always revolutionary in the genuine literal sense of the terminus, aiming at overthrowing Francoism and installing a democratic republic.60 Therefore, the problems on the ground were constantly connected to the big picture, which meant to see them grounded in the overall situation of not living in a democratic state. This becomes especially palpable when reading publications that were designed to express who the CCOO were and what they aimed at. The magazine was therefore also designed to attract new like-minded workers and to broaden the influence of the Comisiones Obreras within the workers’ body. In the first issue of Carril, the magazine for workers employed by the Spanish railways in Madrid, the authors described the character of the magazine, but also the major demands in the editorial. In so doing, they connected political demands with labor-related ones. Alongside demands for a minimum wage and an eleva-

 In this context, it is important to distinguish between the call for independent trade unionism and the demand for securing the right to join and form independent trade unions. Here, I explicitly mean the call for independent trade unions.  Víctor Pérez Díaz, The return of civil society: The emergence of democratic Spain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).  This assessment is not to be equalized with neglecting different periods and/ or foci. I refer to the organized, political movements that fought for independent labor structures and not to workers’ protest in general. The latter could be spontaneous and individual and – if it did not happen in the context of political movements like the CCOO – could contain mere social demands, like higher salaries etc. However, observers agree that until 1967 strikes and protest focused on social issues whereas they politicized after this date and did not lose their political bias until the end of the Francoist dictatorship. See, for instance: Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 131f.

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tion of salaries, the anonymous authors explained why they wanted independent trade unionism: It’s obvious that we cannot expect anything good from the ‘verticals.’ [. . .] They are not the ones who will solve our problems. These will have to be solved by us ourselves and the best form to do it – as the experience of fighting has demonstrated is by way of the Workers’ Commissions. [. . .] These Commissions should have the awareness that for liberating the workers from tyranny, which has held us reduced to the condition of servants for the entire 20th century, it becomes indispensable to secure the Freedom of Trade Unions, the Right to Strike, Freedom of Association, of Assembly and the Press. Democratic liberties, in total.61

The argument for free and independent trade unionism is very concrete here: as the current organization in charge did not “solve [their] problems,” there had to be a way found through which the agency would be returned to the workers themselves. In order to secure them, the magazine continued in pushing forward the idea of electing workers’ commissions – however, within the framework of basic “democratic liberties,” i.e. the right to strike, the right to free assembly, free press as “democratic liberties.” Hence, in this perspective, ‘rights’ and ‘democracy’ went hand in hand. The Comisiones Obreras were thereby subtly equaled with independent workers’ representations, and at the same time with the introduction of free trade unionism in general, as if the CCOO were a prototype of free trade unionism and not a platform of people closely affiliated with the Spanish Communist Party. That CCOO activists referred to rights by calling them “democratic liberties” in many illegally published documents, indicates, moreover, how salient the concept of democracy was to them. Clearly constituting an “essentially contested” concept,62 it remained the object of political and cultural projections of many. ‘Rights’, on the other hand, were oftentimes presented as one essential democratic element. This means that they were employed as part of a wider set of normatively connoted conceptions, of which they constituted an important element, but not the final aim. The high level of political socialization and education of communist workers and those affiliated with the structures of the Comisiones Obreras led to a situation in which some workers were eager to teach and to politicize their colleagues. The activists writing for Carril translated daily problems as being caused by the lack of “democratic liberties.” Yet they did not base their claim on a concrete repression example but deduced the demand for labor and civil rights from their overall bad situation that they equaled with “tyranny” and “being servants.” In-

 Carril, December 1965.  This notion was introduced in the 1950s by Walter B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955).

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terestingly, the aspect of “liberating the workers from tyranny”63 points out to the duality of the concept of rights depicted here: tyranny can be understood as the opposite of freedom. Being free was at the same time equaled with having rights, while the civil rights that in this source appeared as “democratic liberties” would primarily ensure a regulated process. In their envisioned scenario – a democracy – even the Comisiones Obreras themselves had to be reminded of the democratic procedures, because it was these procedures that were necessary for the implementation of self-governing.64 Given the general politicization (and ideological socialization) of the Spanish labor movement, it is not surprising how workers’ activists constantly connected their own labor-related claims with broader demands addressing the overall political situation in their country. Free and independent trade unionism was one of their central claims, but it was almost always connected with broader demands for democratic structures or “democratic liberties.”65 In Carril, international labor norms were vernacularized to the concrete context of their labor conflicts. In Spain, the claim for free trade unionism (libertad sindical) was constantly expressed in the publications of the Comisiones Obreras milieu, be it in leaflets66 or, in a language of rights, in their clandestine press, also in Carril: No more repression against our comrades. No more layoffs or forced relocations. No more inhuman Regulations or Circulars [sic!]. No more dispossessions of union officers. Stop the repression! For Internal Rules of Procedure [sic!] that respect the most basic needs of railway workers. And for the right to form our own unions . . . And to edit workers’ press . . . And to have recourse to strike action when necessary. And for assembling ourselves freely . . . And for being able to speak, also freely. This is what we want, that the trade union rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be restored to us. [The rights that are] advocated by the International Labour Office. What the Spanish Episcopal Conference demands in its recent Declaration. [. . .]67

This passage is in many ways significant: first, it shows that the workers organized in the Comisiones Obreras argued on the base of the international labor norms and that they referred to global moral authorities and to human rights. In this context,

 Carril, December 1965.  See: Tim König, “Habermas’ Theorie der deliberativen Politik,” in In guter Gesellschaft?, ed. Tim König, (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012), 5–25, 13.  Carril, December 1965.  Las Comisiones Obreras de Barcelona y Provincia, A los trabajadores y al Pueblo de Barcelona y su Provincia, 1966.  Carril, August/ September 1968; comment: The “International Labour Office” is the permanent secretariat of the International Labour Organization.

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the question emerges of how strong the PCE’s influence on the workers organized in the CCOO was. Despite the liberalizing dynamics in the course of the ‘Eurocommunization’of the Party, the Spanish Communists were still strictly structured and very hierarchical. Would an ordinary worker know about the existence of the ILO or was such a wording rather symptomatic of higher ranks of the party exerting influence on people engaging from below? It can be assumed that the articles in Carril were written by authors that were secretly also members of the PCE and therefore exposed to transnationally organized and steered communist rhetoric. Apart from the references to the UN and its suborganization ILO, the Catholic Church was mentioned as a supporter of the own demands. Whereas the CCOO in other statements oftentimes referred to the Vatican, in this very example it was its Spanish Episcopate that served as a legitimating authority. Secondly, the passage is relevant, because it reveals a typical conception of ‘rights’ pushed forward in the publications of the Comisiones Obreras. In their writings surrounding the electoral process, ‘rights’ were oftentimes presented in a twofold way; they appeared as a regulating instrument and simultaneously as entitlements. The call for a regulated process, here called “internal rules of procedure,” was a recurrent issue on the pages of Carril.68 It resembles the Habermasian process-oriented democracy theory (Rationalität des Verfahrens) that focuses on the procedurality of rule of law channeling the political content of demands. These demands shall be possible to express by everybody in the framework of respective processes and the ideal situation of an unobstructed flow of information reaching everybody and constituting a public discourse.69 Like in the discourse theory utopia, the demands on this leaflet focused on the procedures, not on the contents, of politics. Together with the ending of repression in this list of demands, the authors explicitly called for “internal rules of procedure,” thereby highlighting the necessity of these rules for the implementation of self-governing.70 In the appeal, the workers demanded that their rights be “restored.” In so doing, the authors made a subtle reference to the Second Spanish Republic. This form of government was terminated by the Francoist coup d’état in 1936. Based on a republican constitution, the Spanish Republic constituted a

 For instance, in the first issue: Carril, December 1965.  “According to discourse theory, the success of deliberative politics depends not on a collectively acting citizenry but on the institutionalization of the corresponding procedures and conditions of communication, as well as on the interplay of institutionalized deliberative processes with informally developed public opinions.” Jürgen Habermas, Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, with the assistance of William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 298.  See: Tim König, “Habermas’ Theorie der deliberativen Politik,” in In guter Gesellschaft?, 13.

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positive realm of memory for many opponents of the Francoist state. Many democrats perceived the Second Spanish Republic as more progressive than the present system, which is why it oftentimes served as a reference point to construct a narrative of Francoist backwardness and civilizational decay. Like in many other European democracies of the interwar period, in the Spanish Republic a democratic constitution officially enshrined basic civil rights and labor rights. Connecting the lack of rights with the necessity of installing a democracy was typical of the rhetoric of the Spanish workers’ movement. Basic civil liberties, including the right of association and assembly, were often called “democratic liberties,” like in this central document from June 1966, explaining the character and the aims of the CCOO to fellow workers. The issue of freedom of association is symptomatic for the character of political reforms in late Francoist Spain. In 1964, the government approved the “long-awaited” Ley de Asociación.71 Yet the law did not entail freedom of associations with a “political aim,” which kept independent trade unionism but also students’ associations and even groups within the Francoist movement illegal, much to the discontent of more progressive forces in the Spanish government and the workers’ movement.”72 Hence, the CCOO activists listed their objectives as follows: The fight for democratic liberties, especially for the conquest of the syndical rights and liberties so that we workers can make our voice heard in the general concert of society and to participate in the collective decisions. In this way, we will fight for the full right of association and assembly, the right to vote and to strike, the right to [have a] [free] workers’ press, etc. [. . .]73

The claim for a right to strike and its connection to the notion of democracy was a constant element of the CCOO’s documents and publications. Yet rights did not constitute a value per se; they only gained momentum in their entanglement with democracy. In the manifesto, rights were conceived as an instrument of securing participation, which was almost poetically expressed as “making our voices heard in the general concert of the society.” The understanding of “rights,” as expressed here, is twofold. On the one hand, “rights” or “democratic liberties,” how they were called in this example, ensure regulated procedures in accordance with rule of law. An implementation of these (mostly civil) rights mentioned here would ensure such a procedure and

 I.e. the “Law of Associations.” See: Cristina Palomares, “New Political Mentalities in the Tardofranquismo,” in Spain transformed, 122.  José A. Gómez Roda, Comisiones Obreras y represión franquista: València 1958–1972 (València: Universidad de Valencia, 2004), 12.  As quoted in: Zamora Antón and Ibañez Rozas, CCOO (emphasis by me, AD), 17–18.

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would enhance the political participation of citizens at the margin. Interestingly, the concept of equality, which stands at the core of leftist thought, was not raised in these writings. The fight against Francoism was not defined around class differences but as one between good and evil, or between rightful and unrightful players. At the same time this understanding of rights points out at them being understood as the opposite of arbitrariness and despotism. This becomes even more noticeable in the successive listening of “democratic liberties” first and “the conquest of syndical rights and liberties” second. Democratic liberties (1) allow for the articulation of (2) trade union rights and liberties. These, in turn, can be translated into material and political demands. Consequently, “rights” appear as a regulating instrument and simultaneously as entitlements. Both aspects of this understanding are however interdependent. The claim of the right to join and form trade unions (“syndical rights”), in combination with the claim for certain civil rights (“democratic liberties”), was connected with the possibility of participating in the elections at the Organización Sindical Española but also more broadly as a precondition for taking part in social tasks. This interpretation of rights securing channels of participation reminds one of Martha Nussbaum’s approach to interpret entitlements as capabilities. Based on Amartya Sen’s writings, Nussbaum argued that only if a government provides one with the “actual political and material circumstances,” in which an ability can be used, is the “capability of free speech,” for instance, guaranteed.74 In this context, capabilities are not to be equaled with rights, although their meaning can overlap. When the CCOO author wrote that s/he wanted to have their “voice heard in the general concert of society,” the possibility to take part in the official trade union’s organization’s elections could be interpreted as a capability for free speech. Moreover, the capability to be elected, i.e. the active right to vote, would also be guaranteed. Nonetheless, the capability is obviously not guaranteed anymore when the overall circumstances actually are not liberal, as the immediate prohibition of the CCOO after their electoral success would prove. Despite the lack of democratic labor structures, workers oftentimes reached out to the official syndicalist structures and tried to participate in the decisionmaking process within the given boundaries. Thanks to changes in the legislation in the year 1958, Spanish workers had been able to elect jurados de empresa, i.e. workers representatives or enlaces sindicales, which can be translated as “syndi-

 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Capabilities, Entitlements, Rights: Supplementation and Critique,” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 1 (2011): 25. See also: Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development 2 (2005).

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cal contact persons.”75 They were to negotiate collective contracts within the OSE framework, which took off decades of top-down orders and decrees through the new bargaining procedures. As José Maravall underlined: [. . .] [D]espite the precautions taken, collective bargaining introduced a fundamental contradiction into the corporate edifice of [. . .] [Spain, AD], since if agreements were to be effective, some form of democratic workers’ representation was inevitable.76

Spanish activists had therefore experienced that the government reacted to situations when the effectiveness of production was endangered, since the implementation of the Collective Agreements Act in 1958 that legalized particular agreements between workers and entrepreneurs had already been a reaction to increasing social unrest. This concession of the government was highly discussed, as the regime did not implement the policy in the context of a truly democratic opening of the country. Scholars who have wondered why a “procapitalist, exclusionary authoritarian regime [. . .] creates a space for the representation of workers’ interests [. . .]”77 have explained the government’s decision with the overall economic transformation and the increased need of economic performance and productivity after the economic transformation of the country.78 As has been mentioned earlier, the broad anchoring of the CCOO’s elected representatives had led to a higher compliance with agreements among the workers in many enterprises so that management themselves noticed a beneficiary effect of these basis-democratic elements after the implementation of the Ley de Convenios Colectivos in 1958.79 Consequently, even the government believed that economic efficiency was to a certain degree linked to workers’ satisfaction. This new legal situation cannot be underestimated: “The regime’s decision to introduce the election of worker representatives at the factory level was to substantially alter the form of union activity.”80 The fact that it was now legal to elect delegates certainly lowered the bar for getting in touch with the officials. It is understood that these structures also enabled an infiltration of enterprise structures by people affiliated with the Comisiones Obreras.  According to Fishman, the initial regulatory steps to introduce the function position of the jurados were taken in 1947 but did not properly work until the early 1950s. It was the 1958 Collective Agreement Act that really changed the situation significantly. See: Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 90–91.  José M. Maravall, Regimes, Politics, and Markets: Democratization and Economic Change in Southern and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 48.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 91.  See: Maravall, Dictatorship and political dissent.  “Collective Agreements Act”; Bernecker, Gewerkschaftsbewegung und Staatssyndikalismus in Spanien, 53.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 90.

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Workers contacted different state authorities: they sent letters to either the leaders of their particular branches or directly to the Minister of Labor, José Solís Ruiz.81 In the case of Madrilenian metal workers, these contact persons listed nineteen demands in an open letter, prior to a plenary meeting that would be held a little later. The enlaces sindicales who were affiliated with the Comisiones Obreras introduced their list of demands by addressing the functionaries of the OSE: We believe that in your agenda, you have written down the primary problems that affect us, but we would like to contribute from our side to the implementation of some of them, in order to support those who are affected by them. At the same time, we would like to remind [everyone] of our lively presence in the fight for the redemption of our class, of the working class that has been converted into an instrument to gain benefits by the predatory capitalism, the capitalism of the era of monopolies.82

In this introduction to the listing of demands, the enlaces sindicales did not attack the Organización Sindical Española directly but pretended to believe in their “representatives.” They wanted to participate in decision-making processes that affected them directly, which they expressed in a complicated language. The letter from the contact persons to the higher ranks of the OSE shows how the vertical syndicalism constantly excluded these elected representatives from decisionmaking processes. Moreover, it indicates how the workers perceived the transformed Spanish economy as an even bigger threat, now that it opened up to international cooperation. The sudden appearance of foreign capital and the “peculiar character of [it] entering Spain [. . .],” i.e. the close intertwining with Spanish capital and Spanish banks resulting in foreign ownership of Spanish enterprises, added even more layers to the complex structure of anti-Francoist communistinfused attitudes.83 The international context of the Spanish economy was also touched upon in the lists of demands and the justifying text under each of them. The tenth demand in the list of demands was the right to strike – here, it was contextualized transnationally:84

 Comisión de Enlaces y Jurados de la Industria Metalúrgica de Madrid, Letter to D. José Solís Ruiz, February 22, 1966.  Comisión de Enlaces y Jurados de la Industria Metalúrgica de Madrid, Letter to D. José Solís Ruiz, February 22, 1966.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 262.  The other demands were identical to many other CCOO’s documents and changed only with regard to the length of the lists. In this case, they were as following: 1. minimum wage; 2. equal pay for women and younger workers; 3. eight-hour working day and a working week of 40 hours; 4. safety; 5. sanctions for enterprises that do not comply with the labor legislation and

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Given the fact that Spain is another capitalist country, it is necessary to make use of th[e] right that the immense majority of capitalist countries recognize.”85

On the backdrop of the recent opening of the country, it is interesting that the authors referred to other “capitalist” and not ‘European’ or ‘Western’ countries to indicate a role model. This can be interpreted as a critique of the system at its own game, even though they make strong use of the concept of “class” earlier in the letter. It moreover points at the strong interconnectedness of the PCE and the CCOO. At the same time, the connection of capitalism and rights highlighted the deficits of the transformation process taking place in Spain. Within this perspective, it only introduced one aspect of free market economy but did not connect it with rule of law. In so doing, the authors of the letter pushed forward an argument of a political necessity. If other countries were successful in linking rights and capitalism, why should Spain be able to separate the two if the government wanted to increase economic success? When referring to the “right to strike,” even the traditional antagonist, capitalism, that was in other contexts identified with the Francoist state, became a legitimizing argument. In this example, capitalism outside Spain was associated with rule of law, while the Spanish form of capitalism was depicted as an inferior version. Almost laconically, the contact persons concluded that the right to strike had to be installed, because the Spanish system was a capitalist one. This argument was ambivalent: on the one hand, the demand for a right to strike was grounded in the capitalist character of the Spanish economy. How else were workers to defend themselves? On the other hand, by pointing out other capitalist countries and by counting Spain among them, the syndical contact persons wrote about striking as inherent to capitalism. The alleged incontestability of their own claim was also enforced through the use of the word “necessary.” The claims stopped being a political claim by a particular interest group but were translated into a mere political necessity. Having in mind that ‘equality’ was not at the core of the workers’ demands here, capitalism could appear as an almost positive reference point, however, only when being carried out in a democratic society.

hygiene and safety standards; 6. redistribution of national capital (here, the Communist bias was not really hidden); 7. break the foreign capital (also in this case, the Communist bias was noticeable); 8. housing; 9. modifying the Collective Agreement Act; 10. right to strike; 11. joint management within the enterprises and factories; 12. social security; 13. a mutual aid system at the workplace; 14. a basic law for trade unions (here, they openly demanded democratic structures); 15. reforming the system of contact persons; 16. watching the upcoming syndical elections; 17. workers’ councils; 18. trade union sections in the factories; 19. solidarity.  Comisión de Enlaces y Jurados de la Industria Metalúrgica de Madrid, January 18, 1966.

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The enlaces sindicales, the syndical contact persons from the ranks of the CCOO, referred to a global sphere in two ways: the first reference was the mentioning of the international enterprises that invested in Spain, the second was the reference to capitalism as a global economic system. Here, “rights” were presented as quasi-inevitable byproducts of these globally existing phenomena. Moreover, in this quote mentioning other capitalist countries, “rights” again appeared as a regulatory instrument ensuring the rule of law. The claim for a right to strike was a constant element of almost all publications of the Comisiones Obreras. It was linked to almost all other problems that seemed to circle round the right to strike. For instance, in Carril, the employees of the RENFE, the Spanish Railways, raised the problem of equal treatment when they complained about how they had to pay for the financial deficit in the company. The company had reduced the bonus payments as a reaction to the deficit but did not touch the management’s salaries. Furthermore, they had increased the ticket prices, but not the salaries, which was criticized by the workers. When they loudly wondered about the reasons for this treatment, they linked the problem with the lack of a right to strike: The benefits of the oligarchs are untouchable. The government defends them. All this is legal and is regulated. However, if we go on strike to defend our interests, it’s not legal anymore and we are sent to the police and the people of the official trade unions [orig.: the “verticals”, AD] tell us we have strayed from the right channels. But these channels are not leading anywhere because our exploiters made sure they won’t.86

The passage shows that the workers were consciously debating the question of legality and had a certain view of the national legislation that favored the wealthier and more powerful social groups. They, speaking with Nussbaum, were not granted the capability to participate properly. Spanish workers did not feel protected, neither abstractly by the Spanish legislation nor concretely by the government, and saw no other way than to leave the legal framework. By using the word “oligarchs,” they pointed at the strong ties between the management and the government and thereby the authoritarian version of capitalism. This can also be read as part of a legitimization on the one hand and a motivating strategy on the other one. If all other relevant players, the management and the government, were structurally acting against them and if this was enhanced by the existing legislation, the only possible way out was the one breaking the law. Therefore, the activists made sure that their readers would understand that they had to get active outside the legal frame-

 Carril, April/ May 1967.

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work of the state and published the following appeal: “The path is clear: Fight! Because legalism does not serve us.”87 In their argumentation, the railway workers writing for the CCOO magazine Carril underlined both the hostile character of the Francoist legal system and the ineffectiveness of the labor structures. Yet, the workers’ activists working in the Madrid railway works did not only depict a dilemmatic situation, but also presented a way out: only if also acting outside the legal structures, which most of the times meant to call for strike action or to support strike actions solidary, would the workers have a chance to succeed. However, as the next section illustrates, the workers did not only resort to illegal strikes but tried to use the existing legal ways within the Francoist system.

The Syndical Elections of 1966 as a Window of Opportunity The Comisiones Obreras’ main distinguishing characteristic with regard to other oppositional actors was the combination of illegal and legal practices, including strike and protest on the one hand, and the cooperation with official institutions and making use of their participatory elements on the other.88 In the Francoist state, as is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, mechanisms existed that were supposed to simulate participation of the people, especially since the political opening in 1959.89 In autumn 1966, elections were held within the official Organización Sindical Española. Through participating in the elections of the official syndicate organization OSE, voters had a real choice, a rare case in the authoritarian state.90 They immediately took advantage of this situation and voted for the alternative candidates. For the Comisiones Obreras, this event constituted an opportunity to gain dominance within the oppositionist landscape of workers – they wanted to lead the workers’ opposition against the state and were at the same time busy declaring their political and ideological independence and pluralism. At the same time, the metallurgic sector in Madrid, important to one of the most  Carril, April/ May 1967.  See: Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97.  See: Barbara Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?” (University of California, March 2006); revised version of a paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington DC, 2005, https://www.daniellazar. com/wp-content/uploads/authoritarian-elections.doc, accessed April 5, 2023. This internet document was the only accessible version of this article, which, although unpublished, entails important observations (AD).  During the referendum on the Ley Orgánica del Estado (“New Organic Law of the State”), only some weeks later, this was not the case anymore, as will be discussed in the next section.

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central branches of the CCOO and home to its prominent representatives Marcelino Camacho and Julián Ariza, faced a new set of strike actions. Even though the government had imprisoned 1,600 contact persons (enlaces sindicales) and increased the repressive measures in cases of breaking the authoritarian national labor laws, the candidates sent by the CCOO won the elections easily.91 The members of oppositional groups used these events for complex debates. As will be detailed in the following pages, labeling authoritarian political institutions with words from the semantic field of democracy, including “syndicate” or “referendum,” triggered debates on the foundations and mechanisms of democracy, in legal as well as in illegal magazines and with arguments by workers and intellectuals alike. This was even more the case as the government introduced political practices resembling democratic proceedings in order to pacify the unrest in the society. In this context, it is fruitful to look at the political function of elections in non-democratic, authoritarian regimes like the Francoist one. Political scientist Barbara Geddes, who argued that holding elections is still less risky for authoritarian regimes than allowing party-pluralism, also addressed the downsides of these participatory elements for dictators: Sometimes ‘normal’ authoritarian elections eventually provide regime opponents with a focal point for organizing against the dictatorship [. . .]. [E]lections are potentially risky for dictators, since they may promote the mobilization of the latent opposition that exists in any dictatorship.92

This is exactly what happened in the elections of the official Organización Sindical Española in Spain in 1966: the Comisiones Obreras, who had become relatively powerful as a shadow organization behind individual players, called for broad participation. By being able to send their own independent delegates, they hoped to be able to exert more influence within the official structures of the Organización Sindical Española and to step out of illegal activism. In opposition to the later-to-be-held referendum, these elections bore some democratic potential, since the opportunity existed to set up one’s own candidates. This had been possible thanks to changes in election regulations for company workers’ representatives, coming into being gradually from 1960. The changes entailed a passage stating that all representative positions of the OSE should be filled with people that have been elected in “equal, free and secret

 Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 135.  Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?,” March 2006.

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ballots.”93 Nevertheless, the alternative candidates were constantly harassed and repressed by the authorities and the police forces as well as by civilians who were sent by the OSE. Not only were CCOO activists dismissed from work and/ or imprisoned, they were also hindered from gathering or talking to groups, which equated to an impeding of integral parts of campaigning and a lack of capabilities simultaneously.94 In Carril, workers complained about the harassments against Marcelino Camacho, the prominent CCOO activist and leader: Mr. Camacho of Perkins [name of motor engine works; AD] took the floor to inform the gathered people better and more widely. While us, the workers listened to him with great attention, the provocateurs tried to interrupt him with profane insults and threatening gestures. Seeing that they could not silence him, they resorted to violence; they took out [. . .] pieces of steel cable, topped with thick steel balls [. . .] and attacked the Enlaces and the Jurados.95

Apart from hoping to win against the official vertical candidates, another reason why the CCOO considered it so important to participate in the elections was to gain dominance within the anti-Francoist opposition. However, Camacho was not allowed to actively take part in the OSE elections, as only a little earlier, in June, he had been accused of presiding an “illegal organization.” The indictment moreover pointed out at Church members offering space for illegal meetings. His colleagues at Perkins would vote for him anyway, which resulted in support from ninety-two percent of his coworkers.96 Participating in the elections was highly contested among the workers since voting would mean acknowledging the structures of the official vertical syndicalism. This becomes noticeable, for instance, when looking at the results of a little survey that the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral conducted among their subscribers. Following the interactive character of the magazine, that called for sending in letters and comments and even cooperating with the editors, the survey was meant to give a voice to the readers and subscribers of the publications.97 Ten percent of the participants opinioned that the elections were interesting, but that people should pay more interest to them; twenty-one percent considered them essential for the renovation of the syndical leaders; and twenty-eight percent thought they were essential for transforming the structures of the vertical syndicate. Some twenty-four percent, however, were not interested in the elections as  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 135; Cf. Manuel Ludevid, Cuarenta años de sindicato vertical: Aproximación a la Organisación Sindical Española (Barcelona: Laia, 1976).  Nussbaum, “Capabilities, Entitlements, Rights: Supplementation and Critique.”  Carril, October 1966.  Hans-Werner Franz, “Vorwort,” in Gespräche im Gefängnis, 7.  N.N., “a Encuesta,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966).

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the “results were little representative” and twelve percent did not express any opinion on the matter.98 Even though the majority of the participants of the survey considered the elections somehow “interesting” or “essential,” more than one third was negative or indifferent towards such events. Despite these survey results showing little motivation, and despite the threats and repression by official bodies, the de facto turnout was much higher than ever before, with the liberalizing changes to the regulations having a massive impact on the election dynamics: 83.3 percent of Spanish workers, who were organized in the official Organización Sindical Española, took part.99 The lawyers who communicated to the workers through the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral were convinced that participating in the elections was important – this was also their message to their readers. The Spanish case of cooperation between workers and intellectuals has been studied under a Gramscian perspective ascribing intellectuals a major significance in the emergence and diffusion of alternative ideas and interests. This was possible thanks to their social relations with different social groups.100 The August issue’s headline of the Boletín motivated their readers to “participate resolutely in the elections”:101 And why despite the series of difficulties do we advise to participate and to do so enthusiastically? Because we are aware of these severe problems and because we deem that their solution cannot come from any another place but the engagement of the workers in the [vertical, AD] unions and from the enterprises themselves, this is why we maintain this position.102

Having in mind the workers’ doubts about the elections changing anything with regard to their concrete problems, the editors paid a tribute to the negative aspects linked with the elections, including a not very subtle suggestion that the elections would not “reflect the true will of the workers.”103 However, the answer to their own rhetoric question, of why it was still important to vote, was clear:

 N.N., “Encuesta.”  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 135; cf. Ludevid, Cuarenta años de sindicato vertical.  Robert M. Fishman, Democracy’s voices: Social ties and the quality of public life in Spain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 8.  N.N., “Participar resueltamente en las elecciones,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966).  N.N., “Participar resueltamente en las elecciones,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966).  N.N., “Participar resueltamente en las elecciones,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966).

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workers’ only way of participating in processes that concretely affected them was to take part in the elections. Historians have highlighted how the entrismo, the idea of infiltrating structures from below, became the main strategic feature of the Comisiones Obreras in comparison to other players.104 This appeal to enter the existing structures through voting in the elections can be regarded as the essence of this approach. Not only did the authors push forward the idea of participating in political processes, as poor as they might be, but they conferred the workers a political relevance and agency. In so doing, they empowered them politically and rhetorically converted them from passive objects of political processes to active subjects that could shape these processes themselves. Who else if not those affected by the problems would be able to change them? A few sentences later, the reforms of labor politics were expressed in terms of rights. The vision of workers participating in the debates over the changes in the syndical legislation was equalized with “a syndicalism that is in accordance with the natural law.”105 The authors called free trade unionism, which on a global institutionalized level was already a codified human right,106 a “natural law.” It equaled a Marxist-intellectual version – the authors of the article were probably lawyers – of the overall strategy of depicting one’s own claims not as politically contestable questions, but as mere social necessities. Analyzing state socialist human rights conceptions in the GDR, Paul Betts noted: After 1945, communist theorists were not shy about voicing their suspicion and disdain toward the ‘rebirth of natural law’ associated with universalist notions of human rights. For them, human rights wrongfully posited a metaphysical, natural, and/or ‘antihistorical’ conception of humanity, one that perniciously masked class-based injustice and violence.107

 See, for instance: Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97–98.  N.N., “Participar resueltamente en las elecciones.”  The ILO labor norms from 1950 entailed the right for workers “[. . .] to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organisation concerned, to join organisations of their own choosing without previous authorisation.” Art. 3 of: International Labour Organization, “Convention concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation,” http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/ en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C111, accessed March 31, 2023. Moreover, the right to join and form independent trade unions was enshrined in 1966, i.e. the very same year in which the elections took place under Art. 8 in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, see: International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.  Betts, “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights,” 408.

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In a Marxist understanding the notion of Naturrecht was also used in the context of taking back what was taken away.108 Although it is presented in the context of depicting independent trade unionism as something ‘given’ or undisputable, the concept of natural law has a strong moral bias. In legal theory, it constitutes the main opponent perspective to a legal positivism that does not necessarily see a connection between morale and law. Natural law becomes salient or relevant in the moment when the existing laws are not satisfactory. In this document, the class struggle, breaking existing legislation, is thereby legitimized morally, as it has a natural legal character itself.109 In Aquinas’ law theory, that strongly influenced Catholic social teachings, the law’s main purpose is the wellbeing of the community. Natural law constitutes the “basic principles of practical rationality for human beings.”110 Here, the “rational” quality of natural law serves for presenting one’s own claims as rational and not necessarily ideological demands which are, moreover, backed up by morale. Hence, in this document, the claim for more democratic participation of workers was not presented as a social necessity, but even higher – it was presented as part of human nature, as inevitable and therefore also uncontestable and untouchable.111 To call labor laws “natural law” was also a way of depicting hierarchies in a moral-political space. Natural law is superior to any other legislation; it is not even of the same category, as laws are (hu)man-made and codified, whereas natural law – closely associated with the concept of human rights – is deeply connected to the idea of the creation of the world and its moral underpinnings. Translated into a religious or deistic context, the natural law is divine whereas any other law is profane. Coming back to the day-to-day activism, the lawyers addressing workers through their magazine were convinced that a massive participation in the elections would be a central gateway into changing the structures from within, which is why they promoted it so eagerly. They did not only face the hostile attitudes from the authorities, but also the critique of other oppositionists who refused to take part in official political processes, especially the anarchists calling against participating in the elections, as they considered voting to be a “collaboration.”

 Betts, “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights,” 408.  Cf.: Andreas Arndt, Karl Marx: Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Theorie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 111.  Mark Murphy, “The Natural Law Tradition in Ethics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/, accessed March 20, 2018.  See also the distinction between a “discourse of needs” and a “discourse of rights” by scholars of humanitarianism as has been described by Lasse Heerten; Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6.

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This was in line with their anti-political tradition of not entering official state structures.112 Therefore, based on their conviction that only a mixed approach of legal and illegal means would bring beneficiary effects, the CCOO used different channels to convince potential allies of the importance to participate in the elections. In this context, in the illegal communist magazine Mundo Obrero, an anonymous author explained “Why one should vote” and why the act of voting within the official structures would not be a collaboration with the “fascists”:113 But if the workers vote for men ready to fight for their demands, to demand the right to strike and trade-union freedom, to develop and to strengthen, in the light of the bureaucratic apparatus of the trade-union organization, the Comisiones Obreras, men that are ready to organize the action of the masses – which at the end of the day is what is decisive –, in front of the leaders and the regime – how could anyone call this ‘collaboration’?114

The pseudo-democratic structures were very important for the CCOO, since it bore the chance to dominate the heterogeneous oppositional spectrum. Moreover, it raised hopes of being able to exert more pressure on the official structures from below. Even though they called the elections a “farce”115 and even though they questioned their democratic conduct, like Nicolás Sartorius, the communist lawyer and advisor to the Comisiones Obreras, did in the sixth edition of the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral, he himself continued convincing possible voters to participate in the elections. Facing the approaching elections, we cannot forget that we live in an old country, where, unfortunately, the practices of electoral rigging and chieftainship [orig.: pucherazgo y cacicismo, AD] were at all times a genuine and deeply rooted Iberian institution. Therefore, we should not be surprised at all, and no one should feel excluded or offended by it, if we, the workers, demonstrate, without being shy, some with cheekiness [orig.: castiza sorna, AD] a certain mistrust when they talk to us or propose to participate in the elections, no matter how authentic and democratic they announce them in the papers. Nevertheless, with that patient endurance that has always characterized our sector, we will try our luck again hoping to one day to exorcize [sic!] this magic goblin inside the urn that completely changes the meaning of our vote.116

 With the just as important exception of the anarchists’ involvement in the 1936 Popular Front (Frente Popular), an electoral coalition.  For this period of the dictatorship, I refer to Francoism as an authoritarian dictatorship, but not a fascist one. I hereby follow Juan Linz who classified the first phase of the Francoist dictatorship as “fascist,” but the latter years as “authoritarian.” There is a scholarly debate with regard to that, see for instance: Thomas J. Miley, “Franquism as Authoritarianism: Juan Linz and his Critics,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 1 (2011).  N.N., “Por qué se debe votar: Las elecciones sindicales,” Mundo Obrero, 1966.  Carril, December 1965.  Nicolás Sartorius, “La mesa electoral,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966).

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This comment by Sartorius was why the Boletín were prohibited a few months later by the government authorities. He depicted fraud and dishonesty as “deeply rooted Iberian institutions,” by which he touched a traditional inferiority complex of being backward in relation to other nations, especially in terms of political maturity and civilization. The political failures were depicted as typical of the Spanish culture. Again, the Spanish case was presented as a negative one, as if Spain was traditionally inferior to other countries. Not only is this a strong example for Spanish discourses of inferiority, but this interpretation can also be read as another legitimation for engaging in the elections since the lack of democracy and political honesty (read: the lack of rule of law) were interpreted as a logical consequence of Spanish historical traditions.117 At the same time, Sartorius expressed understanding for those who questioned any participation in the elections. His sarcastic evaluation should underline that he himself and others, who supported the idea of participating in the elections, were not naïve in their assessment of the government’s pseudo-inclusive rhetoric. Nevertheless, despite all the doubts in the democratic conduct of the OSE elections, the PCE’s organ, Mundo Obrero, called for participation in the elections, which they saw as an opportunity to stabilize and institutionalize (to a certain degree) the oppositional activities within the official structures: The participation in the elections, voting for the candidates of the Comisiones Obreras, means, [. . .] to broaden and to consolidate the rising platform of a powerful offensive against the present corporate fascist syndicates and for free trade unionism and the right to strike.118

The call demonstrates again that free trade unionism and the right to strike were the most central issues for the workers’ movement. In the run-up to the elections, the right to strike was constantly expressed in rights terms, however, the claim for free trade unions in general could have different forms. It could appear either as a right or even a natural right of humankind, but also as an additional feature of capitalism or just a necessary tool to secure workers’ needs. During the electoral campaign, the CCOO activists’ hopes were big. Consequently, the surprisingly high results at the elections of the official trade union elections in the summer of 1966 caused great excitement among the CCOO activists (and worries on the government’s side). The rail workers’ magazine Carril

 Spanish discourses on backwardness and inferiority and their interconnectedness with the so-called Leyenda Negra (“Black Legend”) will be discussed in detail in Chapter Hijacking a Show Trial From Below: The Spanish Labor Opposition and the Anachronistic Proceso 1001 in the Early 1970s.  N.N., “Por qué se debe votar.”

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interpreted the electoral result as a general victory – they opened their October issue with an innovative layout, saying “Workers’ victory” in big letters that circulated around the editorial article.119 In the issue, the workers envisioned how they would make use of the new situation and how they would differ from their predecessors, i.e. avoiding falling into old patterns of refusing to identify the problems and acting against the colleagues’ will.120 Now, even more than before the elections, the CCOO sought to gain dominance among all workers and to present themselves as the only alternative to the governmental structures. In Carril, they underlined that the only precondition to take part in the CCOO meetings was being a railway worker. No faith or ideology should stand “above” these “sectarianisms and partisanships.121 Being the organ of the CCOO who won the elections, they addressed their electorate directly, acknowledging that the “colleagues had put all their trust” in them and that they were waiting for the newly elected persons to start the “fight for the most pressing demands.”122 These demands were of social, economic, and political nature: in an illegal leaflet distributed among workers and ordinary citizens in Barcelona after the elections, the CCOO proclaimed them again, now that they had proof of their support among workers, and demanded minimum wage and an adjustment to the rising living costs together with different rights: At a moment, when the entire Spanish people demands authentic democratic changes that would open new pathways of wellbeing and freedom to the country, when the working class has demonstrated their right to wellbeing and this freedom through the recent trade union elections, again, they intend to perpetuate the situation that was condemned so strongly by workers, instead of responding to the enormous longing for changes that the entire people feels. Can workers really expect anything positive from the announcements and promises of reforms, about the national coexistence and the respect for civil rights? In the light of the unworthy minimum wage of 84 pesetas and the persecution of those who fight to defend the rights of the workers, these changes are nothing than a joke. But okay, given these announcements and promises, the workers again stand behind their unyielding decision to fight for their economic, social and political demands, which are as following: – Minimum wage of 300 pesetas for 8 hours of work; – A sliding scale that mirrors the rising cost of living [. . .] – Freedom of assembly for workers and their representatives, in the enterprises as well as in the locals of the syndicate [the OSE, AD]. – The right to strike without any restriction;

   

Carril, October 1966. Carril, October 1966. Carril, October 1966. Carril, October 1966, 1.

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– The right to form a workers’ union that is unitarian, democratic and independent of the government, the management and political parties; – Abolition of the discrimination between workers on the basis of age or sex. [. . .]123

The leaflet claimed that the Spaniards demanded “authentic democratic changes,” which conversely pointed at the deficits of the pseudo-participatory elements of the dictatorship.124 These envisioned democratic changes were expressed in terms of rights: the leaflet combined the problem of the prohibition of any trade union outside the official structures with the lack of the right to free assembly, which, in turn, was also linked to the lack of a right to strike. Interestingly, the explicit use of the concept of “civil rights” appeared in the context of the question of national coexistence. This points out the great political divide among Spaniards that had been enforced throughout the Civil War. In the traumatized Spanish society that was tired of violence and conflicts, the argument of peace and order was a very strong one. By connecting the rights issue to the one of a peaceful national coexistence, ‘rights’ gained more legitimacy. Consequently, the leaflet pointed at the failures of the government in terms of unifying the society, as the population had witnessed the deep social tensions and the eruptive social protest of workers and peasants. Having in mind the state’s propaganda against protesters and strikes, it was important to shift the responsibility for the riots to the government. This is also one of the reasons why the peaceful character of the demonstration was highlighted several times in the leaflet, including a sentence about a “peaceful dissolution” of the assembly. Clearly, not only fear of repression or violence, but also a public opinion of ordinary citizens, played a role here. By combining the question of civil rights with the one of a peaceful national coexistence, the CCOO connected their own demands with the broadly shared desire for social peace, however, without really explaining the link between the two concepts. As in many other CCOO documents or publications of the Communist Party PCE, the equal treatment of men and women was part of the listed demands.125 Even if the Francoist Spanish Constitution, the Fuero de los Españoles, entailed a passage ensuring “[a]ll Spaniards [. . .] the right to work and the duty to engage in some socially

 Las Comisiones Obreras de Barcelona y Provincia, A los trabajadores y al Pueblo de Barcelona y su Provincia, 1966.  Las Comisiones Obreras de Barcelona y Provincia, A los trabajadores y al Pueblo de Barcelona y su Provincia, 1966.  Las Comisiones Obreras de Barcelona y Provincia, A los trabajadores y al Pueblo de Barcelona y su Provincia, 1966.

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useful activity,” women were strongly discriminated.126 In Spain, the role of women was especially precarious, also when compared to women in Western Europe or the socialist bloc.”127 As has been insinuated before, the Francoist job market was difficult for women; many career paths were restricted for them, especially the higherranking ones including politics and administration, the jurisdiction, and academia. Nevertheless, despite the Francoist ideal of “domesticity,” in 1971, a quarter of the working population in Spain was female.128 Women who worked in paid jobs were dominantly found in offices or in the textile branch and rarely in the heavy industry.129 Only in 1961 – due to pressure by the feminist section of the Falange – was the legal situation for working women improved; for instance women could no longer be laid off when they got married.130 The government needed cheap workforces in certain industrial areas such as textile production; they were increasingly preoccupied with Spain’s image abroad and they reacted to the political lobbying by the Sección Femenina.131 Discriminatory measures, however, persisted. For instance, the husband would no longer receive family allowance if his wife continued to work. Married women who wanted to work still needed the approval of their husbands. Women who left the factory were awarded a special dowry. All these measures discouraged women workers from remaining in employment once they married.132 José Babiano pointed out how little effect these legal reforms had on the actual rise of female employees, since the percentage of working women older than twenty-five did not increase much.133

 Jefatura del Estado, “Fuero de los Españoles,” https://www.boe.es/datos/pdfs/BOE/1945/199/ A00358-00360.pdf, accessed April 7, 2023, 359.  Eric Solsten and Sandra W. Meditz, Spain. A country study (Washington, D.C: Library of Congress; Area Handbook Series, 1990), 106.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 26, 28.  Nerea Pérez Ibarrola, “Las mujeres en los movimientos sociales y de oposición franquista: Una aproximación a las formas de participación sociopolítica femenina en Navarra durante la dictadura,” Huartede San Juan. Gegrafía e Historia 26 (2019): 134, http://revista-hsj-historia.un avarra.es/article/view/2606/3227, accessed April 3, 2023.  Jessica Davidson, “Women, Fascism and Work in Francoist Spain: The Law for Political, Professional and Labour Rights,” Gender & History 2 (2011). For Feminism within the Francoist movement, see: Aurora G. Morcillo, True Catholic womanhood: Gender ideology in Franco’s Spain (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000).  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 29.  Carmen Bravo Sueskun, “Prólogo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 11.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 30. The activity rate of women under 24 was 56.4 percent, while only 28.8 percent of women over 25 worked in 1975.

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The demand to end gender discrimination at the workplace came just in time with the upcoming feminist movement in Francoist Spain, which, like many other social movements too, emerged in the 1960s and had its roots even in the 1950s. Despite the relative detachment of other feminist movements worldwide, the PCE’s organ vernacularized transnationally circulating demands in this list. The rhetoric (“on the basis of . . .”) strongly resembles the language of international human rights legislation and norms, for instance the language of the 1958 ILO Convention on Discrimination.134 It is difficult to trace in what way this ILO norm influenced the Spanish communists and the CCOO. Nonetheless, this leaflet from 1966, published in the same year as the broadly received United Nations International Covenant on Social and Cultural Rights, seems to reflect a globally established wording used in international organizations.135 Despite these demands to end gender discrimination, the Spanish opposition itself, just like many other leftist groups worldwide, followed traditional gender roles. Women active in the Spanish opposition criticized the “lack of an equality of opportunities within the political combat” and an overall culture of machismo.136 The analysis showed that the most pressing demands of workers were the right to strike and an independent trade unionism that would really defend their interests. These demands, although they were articulated in the form of lacking rights, were contextualized with democracy, and, in one case, even with a democratic capitalism. This argumentation was grounded in a great concern to participate in decision making processes. Spanish workers active in the CCOO did not wish to participate through illegal strikes, but wanted to be involved through more elaborate instruments, like in other countries, too. Moreover, being socialized in a Eurocommunist environment, the members of the Comisiones Obreras used an internationally infused language of anti-discrimination in the context of gender (and age). However, it was only negatively used (“discrimination”) and not mentioned in the context of equality. It is worth noting that even in a highly repressive surrounding like the Francoist one, women actively joined the workers’ movement and the oppositional activities. Their activism was diverse: as José Babiano has pointed out, in the 1960s, a

 International Labour Organization, “Convention concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation.”  International Labour Organization, “Convention concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation.”  Carme Molinero, “Historia, mujeres, franquismo. Una posible agenda de investigación en el ámbito político,” in Memoria e historia del franquismo: V encuentro de investigadores del franquismo, ed. Manuel Ortiz Heras, Almud 4 (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2005), 171–92, 189–90.

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new “female militance” emerged that called for better living conditions in the newly erected residential districts of the larger cities, i.e. Madrid, Barcelona or Bilbao.137 Even if women themselves did not work in the heavy industry, they did support striking workers, for instance in Asturias during the famous strikes of 1962 (which is said to be the catalyst for the creation of the CCOO). Women picketed the entrances to the mines or threw corn at workers who had left the strike. They moreover demonstrated at various agencies, collected financial aid, and often ensured the distribution of propaganda, as well as hid the equipment.138 Some women were even elected enlaces sindicales during the elections of 1966, for instance in Valencia.139 In addition to that, Spanish women formed organizations like the Seminario de Estudios de la Mujer (SEM), an organization for Women’s Studies, criticizing the discrimination of women and translating international feminist literature from Northern America and Europe into Spanish. In an open letter directed to the Vice Director of the Spanish Government in Summer 1967, moreover, the communist leaning Movimiento Democrático de Mujeres (“Democratic Women’s Movement”) demanded the end of gender discrimination, titled: “For the Rights of the Spanish Woman.”140 The document was signed by 1,500 people and was part of a broader call for “civic rights” directed to the government. However, the women’s rights’ call was printed separately and treated as a separate issue to the broader “civic rights” article. Here, again, the government was called to comply with international and global legal standards, as formulated by the United Nations or the Papal Encyclica “Pacem in Terris,” since “without their existence one cannot speak of Rule of Law,” as an unknown author in Mundo Obrero stated in 1967.141 The parallel naming of the United Nations’ legal documents and the Pope’s publications shows how the communist author considered them equally important in terms of functioning as a global authority and even more as a precondition for “rule of law,” which would mean a binding legal framework and not just global norms.

 José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 42.  José Babiano, “Mujeres, trabajo y militancia laboral bajo el Franquismo,” in Del hogar a la huelga, 42.  Vicenta Verdugo Martí, “¡Compañera! ¡Trabajadora!: Las mujeres en las CC.OO. del País Valenciano de la dictadura franquista a la transición democrática,” Historia, Trabajo y Sociedad 3 (2012): 22, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=4003974, accessed April 2, 2023.  Vicenta Verdugo Martí, “¡Compañera! ¡Trabajadora!: Las mujeres en las CC.OO. del País Valenciano de la dictadura franquista a la transición democrática,” Historia, Trabajo y Sociedad 3 (2012): 24, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=4003974, accessed April 2, 2023. See also: “Mundo Obrero: Órgano del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Espana,” 17 (July 1967).  N.N., “Representantes de las principales actividades profesionales reclaman los derechos cívicos,” Mundo Obrero, July 1967.

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Simulating Democratic Participation – Debates on the Referendum on the Ley Orgánica del Estado The government quickly closed the window of opportunity for the CCOO to gain power: shortly after their electoral success, the Ley Orgánica del Estado (“Organic Law of the State”) was reformed, a process that entailed nothing less than the illegalization of the Comisiones Obreras. The character of this law was constitutional, which was also reflected in the political rituals surrounding its coming into being. The law was adopted through a referendum in order to gain political legitimacy among the population. In the referendum held in December 1966, every Spanish citizen older than twenty-one could participate, another symptom of the “pseudoliberal” character of this opening.142 In anticipation of further repression and out of their general oppositional vision of ending Francoism, out of exile, the Central Committee of the Partido Comunista called for a boycott of the referendum, calling it a “joke to the people.”143 Their appeal was printed on the pages of the party magazine Mundo Obrero. The authors interpreted the participation in the syndical elections and a simultaneous abstinence in the national referendum as a “genuine plebiscite against the regime and for democratic rights.” In so doing, they connected the issue of the Comisiones Obreras and their success with the one of the general referendum that affected many aspects of Spanish legislation and politics. The communists acknowledged that some aspects of the referendum addressed necessary changes in the context of the international opening of the country and the integration into international markets, especially the common European market. Nevertheless, they warned of interpreting the referendum as a symptom of democratization and explained why the Francoist state was no democracy by pointing out the role of the “caudillo,”144 the “caricature of a parliament with all the elementary liberties condemned.” Spain, the communists argued, was “far from having rule of law.”145 In capital letters, the boycott appeal focused on Franco:

 Baumer, Kommunismus in Spanien, 120–121.  Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España, “¡Boicot Rotundo! ¡Abstención! ¡Que nadie acuda a votar el 14 de diciembre!: El referendum de Franco es una burla al pueblo,” Mundo Obrero, November 15, 1966, 1.  In political science, the figure of the caudillo has moreover been elevated to defining a certain authoritarian form of governing in Latin America.  Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España, “¡Boicot Rotundo! ¡Abstención! ¡Que nadie acuda a votar el 14 de diciembre!”.

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Franco the fascist cannot bring democracy. It’s him, the ‘demon’, [. . .] keeping Spain separated from the progressive currents of the epoch.146

The authors of the appeal in an almost mystical manner called Franco a “demon” that kept Spain from evolving towards progress, a progress that “the epoch” underwent while Spain did not participate in it. Equaling rule of law and democracy with progress, the communists juxtaposed their modernity notion with the idea of Francoism.147 This teleological understanding of history is connected to another neighboring perspective of equalizing democracy with progress and also maturity. For instance, in the December issue of the liberal legal weekly magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo, the referendum on the Ley Orgánica del Estado was addressed by problematizing its purportedly democratic character.148 In an article that called for “demystifying” the referendum from its democratic rhetoric, an unnamed author argued that a referendum had no participatory value if it was “isolated” from the process of democratic elections. Democratic elements, however, were equaled with “political maturity”: “If the referendum shall make sense, it has to be integrated in this very context of political maturity and democratic participation,” the anonymous author stated.149 This interpretation likewise entails a teleological understanding of the political development of a society. For both the party communists writing in Mundo Obrero and the anonymous author from the leftist Catholic spectrum surrounding the Cuadernos, democracy was a positive ideal that one should strive for.

 Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España, “¡Boicot Rotundo! ¡Abstención! ¡Que nadie acuda a votar el 14 de diciembre!”, 1 (emphasis in original, AD).  As will be shown in Chapter 3.1, the motive of depicting Francoism as an anti-modernist force that hindered Spain and Spaniards form evolving towards modernity would become even more salient in the 1970s at the threshold of Franco’s death.  Comment: how difficult it was for the magazine to provide a platform of exchange over the referendum is noticeable in their editorial of this issue. The editors described the problems in the context of gaining guest authors for opinion pieces, but also stated that they “cannot remain silent facing the perspective of the ‘referendum’.” The obsessively balanced rhetoric reached a peak in December 1966 when the editors wrote: “Faithful to our desire for dialogue and the founding purpose of making possible a serene confrontation of different criteria on the human problems of our time and, above all, of our homeland, we have asked people from very different professions and social backgrounds, and from very different ideologies, so that they could present here, with noble sincerity, their opinions and reasoning on the new constitutional text, always – of course – with submission to the demand of respect for the supreme State Magistracy, for the fundamental laws in force and for all the members of the social body”; N.N., “Meditación para un voto: (Editorial),” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966): 1 (emphasis in original, AD).  N.N., “Desmitificación,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966): 7.

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Like many other communists in- and outside the Soviet bloc, the PCE had also been debating its own political grounding during the course of destalinization. Having distanced themselves from Moscow in 1959, the Spanish communists envisioned a party-pluralist democratic state, where they would coexist equally with other political parties and currents. They constantly formulated commitments to democracy, such as in February 1967, again, in their party organ: We, the communists, have oftentimes insisted on the necessity of a national understanding without exclusions, from the right to the left in order to secure a transition from dictatorship to democracy without violent ruptures. It is about democracy and freedom for everyone. We said a thousand times that the option between ‘Francoism or communism’ is a false dilemma. The dilemma set out is about dictatorship or democracy. Nobody – and least of all groups the Communist Party – believes it is a matter of establishing communism today. However, what some people have to realize is the idea that in a democratic regime, the Communist Party will have the same rights as the other groups in order to act and to defend their solutions.150

The Spanish communists subordinated their party ideology to democracy and explicitly clarified that they did not intend to “establish communism.” Considering the Cold War context and the post-Stalinist critique of state socialist regimes inand outside the Soviet bloc, it is interesting that in this communist party organ Mundo Obrero distanced itself from a communist system as much as it happened here.151 Like many others, the Spanish communists had been shocked and repelled by the violent crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. In this regard, they had a lot in common with the Polish socialists that likewise underwent several distancing processes from party communism, which will be discussed in the next chapter. As has been pointed out earlier, the ideological renewal of the Spanish communists went hand in hand with open commitments towards a reconciliación nacional in order to overcome the divisions of the Civil War.152 Having in mind the connections of the PCE’s exiled leader Santiago Carillo to Eastern European communists, José Faraldo argued that: Eurocommunism was, indeed, a complete theoretical re-evaluation of the communist tradition, shaped by new ways of thinking about how a communist party should act in a parlia-

 N.N, “La libertad es indivisible!” (emphasis by me, AD).  Nonetheless, Mundo Obrero contained many appraising articles about daily life in state socialist countries around the globe.  Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982).

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mentary system, the result of both the experience of détente and the evidence of the disaster that Eastern European communism had become.153

The Catholics were also open to other social groups: following their dialogueoriented approach, in their December issue of 1966, the Cuadernos para el Diálogo published longer answers to a “survey” addressing the question of whether to participate in the referendum or not.154 In this survey, most of the respondents were intellectuals, like José María Gil-Robles, the prominent Catholic journalist and lawyer who combined a monarchist loyalty with a strong social and workerfriendly attitude, already since before the war, or Jímenez de Parga, the editor-inchief of the Boletines de Información de Legislación Laboral. Among the respondents was also one worker, Julián Ariza, a communist activist of the CCOO and a close friend of Marcelino Camacho. Ariza worked at Perkins motor engine works in Madrid. Together with his colleague Camacho, who was also secretly a member of the communist party, he had been personally active in establishing a Comisión Obrera at their factory.155 In his comment for the weekly magazine, he admitted being a “militant syndicalist” and advocated for refraining from voting in the referendum. He criticized that the law had been prepared in the Cortes, the Francoist pseudo-parliament, which entailed that it did not represent “all the interests that compete in a country.”156

 José M. Faraldo, “Entangled Eurocommunism: Santiago Carrillo, the Spanish Communist Party and the Eastern Bloc during the Spanish Transition to Democracy, 1968–1982,” Contemporary European History 4 (2017): 654.  The authors of the editorial of the Cuadernos carefully described how difficult it was to find respondents willing to openly express their opinion on the matter. Moreover, the editorial board commented on their position towards the political opinions raised in the articles: “Some of the invited persons have gladly reacted with articles of various signs or with answers to the questions of a very brief questionnaire; others have kindly declined the invitation, for reasons that we respect; and some have reacted with harshness. We feel this gesture since our request was cordial and sincere, which is also why we also regret the fact that in the group of those who rejected our appeal there were people who, because of their public attitudes, are likely to feel propitious to give an affirmative vote to the Law; thus, their absence from these pages has in some way caused a certain internal imbalance with respect to our initial broad scheme. It is obvious to warn that the Board of Directors of ‘Cuadernos’ does not make its own the judgments signed by the various authors, although it is more pleased with some than others”; N.N., “Meditación para un voto,” 1–2.  Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 327. During the Proceso 1001 in 1973, Ariza was one of the ten imprisoned workers. See Chapter 3.1.  Julián Ariza, “Encuesta sobre el Referendum, Respuestas,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966).

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Indeed, the Francoist Cortes did not fulfil a representative function, as would be the case in a democratic parliamentary republic based on rule of law (i.e. a Rechtsstaat).157 While in a parliamentary democracy, the parliament is designed for legislation and for controlling the government, in the Francoist “organic democracy” it was supposed to represent several fields of society, “considered the basic institutions of Spanish society: families, the municipalities, the universities, and professional organizations.”158 Lacking division of powers, the Francoist system was based on a “coordination of functions.”159 Having this in mind and by pointing out at the democratic deficits in the legislative process, in his article, the worker Julián Ariza criticized the referendum’s detachment from any other democratic processes and structures: [. . .] [T]he establishment of any juridical order should start from below; it should be democratic. And I cannot accept that the interests of the whole Nation should be represented in the Cortes that, without a single modification, approve this Constitutional Law at first reading. Those of us, who, although very young, have an idea of political voting in other countries, have known that, in general, the electoral mass always has at least one option. In our case, the yes and the no, theoretical poles of the dilemma, have come to mean the same. [. . .] It follows that, at least for me, voting is ineffective.160

Looking at the problem from a workers’ (movement) perspective, Ariza’s main vector of defining democracy was ‘participation.’ Not only did he point out to the lack of representability in the Francoist pseudo-parliament by juxtaposing it rhetorically with the “interests of the whole Nation,” Ariza also demasked the pseudo-democratic character by laconically summing up that voting in the referendum was “ineffective.” Carefully balancing out what was possible to publish in an open letter on the pages of the Cuadernos para el Diálogo, he did not directly say that the referendum was not a real plebiscite. Instead, Ariza identified the superficial rhetoric surrounding the referendum and its pseudo-democratic character when he almost lyrically described the two possible answers as “poles of a dilemma,” which, however, “have come to mean the same.”161 Regardless of the outcome, the present status quo would be upheld, Ariza argued.

 In another article published in the Cuadernos, the author criticized the lack of representation of workers (and other social groups) in the Cortes. N.N., “La Representación Sindical en las Cortes,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 45 (1967).  Catherine Delano Smith and Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “Spain: Government and Society,” https://www.britannica.com/place/Spain/Government-and-society.  Alvaro S. Carmona, “De las Cortes orgánicas a las Cortes democráticas,” Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 15 (1994): 110.  Ariza, “Encuesta sobre el Referendum, Respuestas.”  Ariza, “Encuesta sobre el Referendum, Respuestas.”

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The problem of enabling access to certain channels of participation, in the sense of Martha Nussbaum’s writings, was concretely described in Ariza’s opinion piece.162 He criticized that those favoring change had more elaborate campaigning possibilities because they were able to reach “all 32 million citizens,”163 whereas the opponents had to make use of word-of-mouth or, in rare cases like the given one, were only able to express their opinion in a limited way on the pages of the Cuadernos. Nevertheless, no other forms of media, not to mention TV or radio stations, were willing to proliferate their perspective. The Habermasian idea of an unhindered access to the public sphere comes into mind when reading Ariza’s critique of the unfair preconditions. Julián Ariza, the worker, connected different aspects of the dictatorship, i.e. the lack of a parliamentary opposition, the lack of unlimited freedom of speech, and the lack of democratic elections. He thereby subtly pointed out at the general defects of the state, especially in comparison with other countries. Interestingly, in this reference to other countries, he mentioned his relative age. By underlining that he “has an idea of political voting in other countries,” although he was “very young,” 32-year-old Ariza displayed a backwardness narrative, depicting the Francoist Spain as a country trapped in stagnation. Linking the lack of democracy with a traditional backwardness and a historical standstill was oftentimes reinforced by comparisons to other countries and sometimes by comparisons to one’s own national republican past. This narrative entailed the conviction that only the older ones knew how democracy looked and felt like, while younger Spaniards, born after the end of the Second Republic, could only passively learn how it worked to “have an idea of political voting.” Despite the vivid debates in different political and social circles, including Catholic and communist ones, only a minority within the Spanish population shared and/ or supported the arguments pushed forward here. Moreover, in the light of the official result of ninety-eight percent approving votes, it became obvious that the referendum was disconnected from democratic structures.164 The new Ley Orgánica del Estado came into being only a few weeks later, in January of 1967. It did encompass important policy reforms taking into account the new past processes of international political and economic integration and got rid of early-Francoist rhetoric: the preamble that had opened the Fuero del Trabajo, the Francoist labor code since 1938, was crossed out.165 Furthermore, ag-

 Nussbaum, “Capabilities, Entitlements, Rights: Supplementation and Critique.”  Ariza, “Encuesta sobre el Referendum, Respuestas.”  Josep M. Vallès and Dieter Nohlen, “Spain,” in Elections in Europe: A data handbook, ed. Dieter Nohlen and Philip Stöver, 1803–40 (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010), 1823.  Cf.: Jefatura del Estado, “Fuero de los Españoles,” 6178.

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gressive rhetoric against Marxism and “liberal Capitalism” was missing in the reformed law, which indicates a turning away from old habits obsessively focusing on the “crusade against communism.”166 Catalan historian Borja de Riquer and Permanyer highlighted the legitimacy aspect of these changes: “This discourse was not only ineffective by the mid-1960s, it was counter-productive [. . .], [as] the new Spaniards were beginning to think of the civil war as something of the past.”167 The binary structure of Francoism on the one side and communism on the other one, stating the only thinkable options as in the “outdated Falangist rhetoric,” did not convince Spanish citizens any more.168 Even though the progressive forces in the government had understood this, the conviction that the Spanish society was “not ready for democracy” was latently inherent in the government’s policy and politics. The new law affected the labor movement directly as it did contain the following passage about the organization of labor: “Spaniards, as long as they participate in labor and production, constitute the Trade Union Organization,” which meant that they were automatically members of the OSE.169 Consequently, in February 1967, the Comisiones Obreras became illegal; individuals affiliated to the Comisiones were persecuted and imprisoned.170 This reaction suggests the relatively high level of organization and institutionalization the Comisiones Obreras had been able to establish in the grey area between legal and illegal agitation. One of the most prominent victims of repression was the metal worker Marcelino Camacho, the most prominent figure within the CCOO structures. He had been elected as a delegate in the elections and was imprisoned in December 1966 together with other activists, including his colleague Julián Ariza, who, like Camacho, was also a member of the PCE. In January 1967, the Francoist authorities arrested them.171 As was mentioned earlier, both had been personally active in establishing a Comisión Obrera at their factory. From that moment on, the CCOO constantly protested against the imprisonment, also in the magazine for the railway workers:

 Cf.: Jefatura del Estado, “Fuero de los Españoles,” 6178.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 267.  Borja de Riquer y Permanyer, “Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 267.  Jefatura del Estado, “Ley Orgánica del Estado Núm. 1/1967,” https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/ 1967/01/11/pdfs/A00466-00477.pdf, accessed April 5, 2023.  See, for instance: Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97.  Hans-Werner Franz, “Vorwort,” in Gespräche im Gefängnis, 7.

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No more repression! 8 leaders of the Comisiones Obreras are detained the provincial prison of Carabanchel. These are: Marcelino Camacho from Perkins, Royo, Julián Ariza from Perkins, Goicoechea from Marconi, Traba, Bernal, Martinez Conde and Garcia. They are accused of having participated in an assembly where the future Trade Union Law was discussed [. . .].172

The Comisiones Obreras constantly printed calls like this one in the clandestine publications as well as on leaflets and flyers. The call for liberating the colleagues became a leitmotif of the CCOO’s demands and was directed towards foreign actors, for instance when some workers’ councils’ representatives from the Perkins engine factory wrote a letter to the League for Human Rights in Paris. In the letter, they explained the activities of Marcelino Camacho, whom they described as an “exemplary worker in every respect,” as “honorable actions facing the evil that afflict the Spanish working class.”173 He had been detained for “fighting for trade union rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and for legally demanding the respect for these rights [. . .].”174 Firstly, the letter shows how salient the concept of ‘human rights’ was for communist Spanish workers even at the factory level and that they referred to international human rights norms in the context of their own cause. Secondly, the letter demonstrates a certain social awkwardness perceived of its authors. It was written cautiously, apologizing for “the molesting that we might cause.”175 It is tangible how uncomfortable the authors of the letter must have felt addressing an organization abroad, nevertheless, they were convinced that this was an important step. The workers also mentioned how other letters and interventions to other “authorities” had not received a response and that they believed the “universal prestige” of the International Human Rights League could influence the proceedings in the case of Camacho, whereby they explicitly said why they addressed the League eventually.176 The Comisiones had agitated underground all the time already. But before 1967, the Comisiones were never officially institutionalized; they appeared and  Carril, April/ May 1967, 3 (emphasis in original).  Enlaces sindicales y vocales del Jurado de Perkins (Workers’ Council of Perkins, Motor Ibérica, S.A.), Letter to League of Human Rights, September 2, 1967.  Enlaces sindicales y vocales del Jurado de Perkins (Workers’ Council of Perkins, Motor Ibérica, S.A.), Letter to League of Human Rights, September 2, 1967.  Enlaces sindicales y vocales del Jurado de Perkins (Workers’ Council of Perkins, Motor Ibérica, S.A.), Letter to League of Human Rights, September 2, 1967.  Enlaces sindicales y vocales del Jurado de Perkins (Workers’ Council of Perkins, Motor Ibérica, S.A.), Letter to League of Human Rights, September 2, 1967. In 1968 moreover, workers writing for Carril grounded their demands on the fact that the ILO had proclaimed free trade unionism. See Carril, August/ September 1968, 1.

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disappeared in particular workplace situations and gathered a quite heterogenous group of people under their loose umbrella, including left Falangists, Catholic worker activists, and independent socialists.177 Robert Fishman explained the layering of the different actors within the CCOO before 1967 based on the example of the remnants of the socialist UGT that had participated in the Comisiones, “[. . .] as a sort of union within a union before it eventually withdrew to establish its own autonomy.”178 It had been the elections themselves that triggered their institutionalization – this was, in turn, the reason why they could be explicitly illegal, since [. . .] [d]espite the desire of some falangists and ‘verticalists’ [proponents of the Francoist model of vertical unionism, AD] to work with Comisiones, the essentially antiregime character of the new organization and the presence in its ranks of many Communists led the regime to declare it illegal in February 1967.179

The illegalization of the CCOO went hand in hand with an increase of repression on the one hand and a higher number of strikes and protests on the other one. For the Comisiones, it meant a turning point. They had to forego the legal infiltration strategy and concentrated on illegal protest, strikes, and anti-Francoist agitation and rhetoric. The years 1966/67 were characterized by enormous protest and strikes, with the social problems becoming more and more pressing. This had to be taken into account by the government that had to stabilize their position after the socio-economic transformation that had changed Spain so deeply. It was impossible for the government to react only with persecution and repression – consequently it simultaneously prepared a new reformist syndical law.180 To some extent, the New Syndical Law that would come into being not earlier than 1971 broadened workers’ participation possibilities and endowed the vertical syndicalist organization with more independence and more representativeness. It was a recurrent topic of public debate since the constitutional reform of 1966/67. The last section dealt with the debates surrounding the referendum of December 1966 and its political consequences. More than rights, democracy was a key concept when discussing the participation in the referendum. In this context, both communist authors and people affiliated with the Catholic magazine Cuadernos

 Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97–98.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 97.  The new law was mainly a project by José Solis Ruiz, the head of the National Syndicates since 1951 and General Secretary of the Falange since 1957. It shows how, on the backdrop of economic liberalization, the social aspects of economic politics remained a project of the conservative forces within the Francoist structure.

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para el Diálogo conceived “democracy” as a modern, “mature” state of politics that stood at the end of a political development. Francoism constituted its antagonist, simultaneously forcing Spain into a state of stagnation. In the context of the massive repressions that accompanied the illegalization of the CCOO in the aftermath of the new Ley Orgánica del Estado, rights were more salient again. Especially when addressing foreign institutions, i.e. when stepping outside the national container, workers also themselves referred to “human rights.” By calling the Parisbased institution for help, the authors of the letter depicted Camacho’s case as a human rights violation that should also be of interest for international players due to its universal character. Addressing a foreign institution, it made sense to universalize the particular cause of Marcelino Camacho. Within one’s own country and when entering a national public sphere, “democracy” was more important to the activists. It remained the most important positive political goal.

In the Search of Common Ground: Spanish Communists and Catholics after the Second Vatican Council One of the most important questions for the Spanish labor opposition was how they could gather as many people as possible in and outside the Comisiones Obreras without them being deterred by their communist bias and affiliation. The Spanish society was still heavily divided after the experiences of the Civil War. Yet in the light of the dictatorship, new ties between formerly divided groups could evolve within the oppositional milieus. This was especially true for the relationship between leftists and Catholics that was ambivalent in terms of a victimperpetrator-dichotomy: not only had the Francoist troops acted brutally against their opponents and civilians, republicans, too – although less in numbers – had murdered members of the clergy, including low-rank priests and inhabitants of monasteries during the war. Still, the Spanish Catholic Church and their suborganization Opus Dei were one of the pillars of the Francoist state that violently repressed and murdered leftist activists of all kind. As Audrey Brassloff has pointed out, “the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable privileges in its role as legitimizer of the dictatorship, willing instrument of social control and moral guardian of society.”181 Against this backdrop, the careful rapprochement was especially fragile and important at the same time. Anticommunism, anyway popular in many Western

 Audrey Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain: The Spanish Church in Transition, 1962–96 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 2.

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societies during the Cold War, had been an important feature of the Francoist state and its political rhetoric. The Francoists aggressively depicted anything seemingly leftist as dangerous and hostile. Therefore, the Comisiones Obreras were active in camouflaging their strong ties to the communist party, or – as Robert Fishman put it with regard to the communist individuals who dominated the Comisiones – they “[. . .] insisted on the independence of the movement from party control.”182 In this context, it is noteworthy to take into account the actual heterogeneity of the people constituting the Comisiones “at the mass level,” as many workers were not politically affiliated at all. Fishman argued that it “[. . .] would be a mistake to view Comisiones in this period as an exclusively Communist vehicle, or worse, as an instrument for the Communist domination of the working class.”183 Moreover, even though communist workers oftentimes had leading roles within the CCOO and in the second half of the 1960s dominated them, it had been Catholics whose contributions to the emergence and consolidation of the CCOO were crucial.184 The Comisiones Obreras were indeed very heterogeneous in their composition, with a strong leftist-Catholic current that constituted the second strongest group after communist actors within the CCOO.185 Another reason to appear as a broad and heterogeneous movement was the inner-oppositionist competition between the leftovers of the old socialist, anarchist and Catholic organizations.186 Together with the labor-related demands that were discussed earlier in this chapter, such as the call for a right to strike and independent trade unionism, a call for unity was made constantly.187 Not only did the CCOO engage in this matter, but also the PCE itself. For instance, in the 1967 mayday issue of their party organ, Mundo Obrero, they evoked a heterogeneous crowd of democrats from all affiliations, assuring their communist readers: “You are not alone.” Students, “broad

 Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 98.  Fishman, Working Class Organization and the Return to Democracy in Spain, 98.  Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties (Oxford University Press, 2015), 235.  On the Catholic influence on the early Comisiones Obreras, see also: José Babiano, “Los católicos en el origen de Comisiones Obreras,” Espacio Tiempo y Forma 8 (1995).  Cf.: José A. Díaz, Luchas internas en Comisiones Obreras: (Barcelona, 1964–1970) (Barcelona: Edición Bruguera, 1977).  Cf, for instance: Carril, October 1966; in the victory-issue of Carril in October 1966, the authors of the leading article invited their readers to participate in the processes to follow, i.e. take part in meetings and assemblies to guarantee a certain unity of the movement. In this context, they highlighted how important it was to stand together: “But in order to achieve to fight for these demands with a minimum of guarantees of triumph, it is necessary, it is fundamental, that we manage to agree among ourselves” (emphasis in original).

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circles of intellectuals,” peasants, and people from the “Catholic opinion sector” as well as priests were marching with them and supporting their demands, likewise called “democratic liberties.”188 The common ground was not the fight against Francoism. Instead, “democracy” was the glue holding all the different fractions together. The common ground was therefore not a negative one, but positively formulated. In line with their ambition to depict themselves as a movement and not a politically affiliated trade union, in the opener of the first issue of the magazine Carril, that was published in December 1965 unofficially, the rail workers pertaining to the CCOO highlighted the alleged heterogeneity of their addressees: The objective of ‘Carril’ is to be the mouthpiece of all the workers of RED [abbreviation of the company of Madrid Railways, AD] without distinction of political ideas nor religious beliefs.189

The rhetoric of the first issue was pluralist, inclusive, and participatory; the editors invited their readers to collaborate. Despite the above-mentioned intended institutional independence from the communist party, the communist bias of the magazine became virulent here, as the text called to “put an end to the hateful dictatorship of the monopolist capital.”190 The call for collaboration and participation was immediately heard. Already in the next issue, the magazine could reprint a letter to the editors, written by a worker named Pedro, a “militant convinced Catholic,” as he described his religious-ideological affiliation. Although Pedro, who did not reveal his last name, found the rhetoric of the magazine “a little old-fashioned,” he asked the editors “to be so kind and publish [. . .]” his letter.191 He supported the idea of uniting and appreciated that the editors had pointed out at admitting everybody “without distinction of beliefs or ideologies.” However, he criticized the “radical” rhetoric of the magazine and called for collaborating with the Catholic workers’ organizations, the Hermandades Obreras de Acción Católica, HOAC (“Brotherhood of Workers’ Catholic Action”), and their youth branch, the Juventud Obrera Católica, JOC (“Catholic Workers’ Youth”).192 Pedro’s estrangement with what he considered “radical” mirrors

 N.N., “Ante el Primero de Mayo. Llamamiento del Partido Comunista de España,” Mundo Obrero, May 1967.  Carril, December 1965.  Carril, December 1965, 4.  Carril, January 1966.  Since 1956, this was the name of the follow-up organization of the above-mentioned Young Christian Workers, JOC. Founded in 1946, the HOAC had been “designed to evangelize the Spanish working class.” They were initially modeled on their Italian pendant ACLI (Associazioni Cristiane dei Lavoratori Italiani) and had their roots in an idea by Pope Pius XII, who, given the “seemingly unbridgeable gulf between much of the Spanish working class and the Spanish Catholic church in the wake of the victory of the Francoist forces [. . .],” wanted to prevent a further alienation between both milieus. Yet the misery and desperation of workers in the Francoist state made the

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the stand of many Christian labor unions, not only in Spain: they refrained from taking actions against the management (or government):193 [. . .] When I say I find the bulletin a little ‘radical’ it is because I believe it can frighten many vocal people while at the same time pointing out at those of us who support it with a ‘name’ for which both His Holiness John XXIII and His Holiness Paul VI and the vast majority of the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, have spoken out with more respect and love than for the capitalists of our time, and with which dialogues of understanding have been established between Catholics and non-Catholics (perhaps because of how badly they are treated by those who ‘say’ they are). In any case, here is my letter and my support as a Catholic worker, in my personal capacity, for all Renfe [abbreviation for the Spanish Railways, AD] labor matters. As for the problem of the Comisiones Obereras, it would be very interesting to realize them so that they volatilize the power of fascist unions that have very few workers and Christians [in their ranks, AD]. They are the eternal Pharisees! These Commissions will be feasible if you agree with J.O.C. and H.O.A.C. mainly those of you who call yourselves trade union opposition. For this to happen, it will be necessary for you to be ‘a little’ more moderate and for Catholic organizations to advance ‘a lot.’194

The CCOO in turn wanted all postwar leftovers of the Spanish union landscape to merge with them, with the Comisiones as an umbrella. This is also one of the reasons why the Comisiones Obreras insisted on being a “movement” and not a trade union – they wanted to remain accessible and attractive for many and did not want to appear as one alternative to other organizations, but as the only alternative to the vertical state structures. This letter, written by a Catholic worker, is on several levels relevant: first, its publication demonstrates that the question of cooperating was important to both Catholics and communists. The vertical structures were a problem not only for communist workers. The hypocritical position of the official vertical syndicate between workers and state was articulated in a particularly religious rhetoric, when Pedro called the vertical syndicates “eternal Pharisees,” by which he had in mind that they were only superficially claiming to support workers.195 Second, it

organization stand up for the workers’ cause and their demands. HOAC and JOC had been active in grass-roots activism even before the emergence of the first Comisiones Obreras and had participated in the Asturian strikes of 1962. Already in the late 1950s both organizations “fiercely attacked the harsh social consequences for workers of the new industrialisation strategy [. . .]” as well as the strong ties between the Church and the regime. Horn, The Spirit of Vatican II: Western European Progressive Catholicism in the Long Sixties, 230.; Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain, 8.  Lucassen, The Story of Work, 390.  Carril, January 1966, 2.  Equaling Jews with Pharisees has also been described as a traditional anti-Semite motive in various Christian contexts. See, for instance: Luke T. Johnson, “The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,” Journal of Biblical Literature 3 (1989).

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shows how important the publishing of the Second Vatican Council and the surrounding assessments had been for many people of Catholic faith. Not only for Spain had the last years been a phase of overarching transformation; the Catholic Church also underwent a process of change in the first half of the 1960s. Until today, the Second Vatican Council constitutes the most important reform project in the Catholic Church’s modern history and its medial impact was without precedence: “Never before was an ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church so extensively covered and reported by the modern news media as Vatican II.”196 Initiated in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, who died before the end of the Council, and concluded by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the Catholic Church summoned a series of meetings that were supposed to formulate guidelines regarding the modern world.197 Pope John XXIII himself created a keyword of the Council when he called its central aims an aggiornamento, which can roughly be translated from Italian to “bringing up to date.”198 Whereas the Church had traditionally reacted to any modernization processes by opposing them and/ or trying to channel them as much as possible, this time it wanted to “be part of it” instead of only reacting to it.199 In other words: “There had been plenty of earlier responses to the modern world, but they were almost all unrelentingly negative.”200 Changes happened on all levels: masses could from now on be held in languages other than Latin, the infallibility doctrine that had been established at the First Vatican Council in 1890 was abolished, the relationship to other Christian churches was improved, the Catholic position towards Jews and Judaism was reformed, and many other innovations were established. But what was most impor-

 Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II.: Renewal within Tradition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.  Concretely, the Pope(s) invited hundreds of bishops from all over the world to discuss pressing contemporary matters. They met in regular frequencies over three years, i.e. between 1962 and 1965, in the Vatican. For a dense analysis including a chronology of the events, see: John W. O’Malley, What happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010).  As suggested by O’Malley; see: What happened at Vatican II, 9. In a German newspaper article on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Council, the Italian term was beautifully translated into German as Verheutigung. See: Joachim Frank, “Die ‚Verheutigung” der Kirche: Noch heute gilt das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil im Oktober 1962 als Referenzpunkt für das Selbst- und Weltverständnis der katholischen Kirche heute.” Frankfurter Rundschau, October 8, 2012.  Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain.  Andrew Brown, “How the second Vatican council responded to the modern world: The 50th anniversary of the council is a good time to reflect on the momentous changes that took place in the Catholic church,” The Guardian, October 11, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/andrewbrown/2012/oct/11/second-vatical-council-50-years-catholicism, accessed April 5, 2023.

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tant to many workers and labor activists in Spain was the Vatican’s commitment to labor rights and the poor: [. . .] [W]ith John XXIII came a shift in emphasis to a concern for the poor and the powerless, and a critique of the structures that kept them so. [. . .] Furthermore, in contrast to the two previous Councils of Trent and Vatican I, Vatican II was not called to reject a heresy, not even that of communism or marxism.201

In 1965, Pope Paul VI published a text titled Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”), one of the four constitutions published during the Council. In this “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” he pointed out at global inequalities as soon as in the introduction: Never has the human race enjoyed such an abundance of wealth, resources and economic power, and yet a huge proportion of the world’s citizens are still tormented by hunger and poverty, while countless numbers suffer from total illiteracy. Never before has man had so keen an understanding of freedom, yet at the same time new forms of social and psychological slavery make their appearance.202

Later in the document the right to strike was defended, even if it was considered the last resort that was only to be applied when other strategies had failed. In so doing, the Pope also ennobled workers’ demands as “just desires”: When, however, socio-economic disputes arise, efforts must be made to come to a peaceful settlement. Although recourse must always be had first to a sincere dialogue between the parties, a strike, nevertheless, can remain even in present-day circumstances a necessary, though ultimate, aid for the defense of the workers’ own rights and the fulfillment of their just desires. As soon as possible, however, ways should be sought to resume negotiation and the discussion of reconciliation.203

Having in mind the complicated entanglement of the Catholic Church and the Francoist state, this commitment to the right to strike expressed by the Vatican was of great impact to the Spanish workers’ activists. In the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral, the service-magazine for workers, the editors did not only refer to the Second Vatican Council; they even reprinted some of its publications, introducing these reprints by arguing that the Council was of “outmost importance” for workers.204 Here, they highlighted passages from the Papal Encyclical Gaudium  Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain, 12 (the term “Marxism” was written in lower case in the original text, AD).  Pope Paul VI, “Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world.”  Pope Paul VI, “Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world.”  N.N., “El Concilio Vaticano II y el mundo de trabajo,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966), 8. Although the editors announced a series of reprints over the following issues, the reprint in the second issue would remain the only one until the magazine was shut down.

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et Spes that dealt with the issue of liberty, working conditions, women’s rights, free and independent trade unionism, and the right to strike.205 However, this reprint was not interpreted or commented on apart from its introduction, but, given the limited possibilities of Spanish workers to access foreign or global discourses, it was brought to their attention by the editors of the magazine. The CCOO activists referred to this Papal statement frequently because it constituted a useful reference to underline Spain’s political deviance, a negative Spanish peculiarity. In the run-up to the syndical elections, two RENFE workers listed problems that should be tackled by the new enlaces sindicales when elected, first and foremost pushing forward the Right to Strike. In their article, they argued that the Right to Strike was globally binding and supported by the Vatican: [. . .] It is equally necessary considering the right to strike, which is binding in the entire world and recognized by the Catholic Church and the II Vatican Council. In a capitalist society like ours, neglecting this legitimate right to the workers is depriving them of their most efficient defense weapon that they possess and for the same reason, it is as if they were handcuffed.206

This reference but also the other examples clearly show how important the Vatican’s commitment to labor rights was for the Spanish workers. They truly longed for the Pope’s approval of their positions since some of them were practicing Catholics. Moreover, his positive mentioning of the right to strike was a possibility to exert moral pressure onto the Spanish government that had been criticized by the Spanish church already in the past when it came to the bad situation of the working class. The references to the Vatican are not only to be understood as a vernacularization of global norms but also in terms of “moral economies,” a concept introduced by Thompson. The concept grasps the shift from the exchange economy among poor English citizens in the eighteenth century towards the classical political economy.207 It sheds light on the moral aspect of economic systems and “provide[s] a reconciliation of the two spheres of human action.”208

 N.N., “El Concilio Vaticano II y el mundo de trabajo,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966), 8.  Martino de Jugo, José Luís, and Rosero Eduardo, “La RENFE: Ante las elecciones sindicales,” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966).  Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971).  Norbert Götz, “‘Moral economy’: its conceptual history and analytical prospects,” Journal of Global Ethics 2 (2015), 149.

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Returning to the Spanish workers, “moral economy” can be a helpful analytical tool to explain their motivation to strike and protest.209 According to Ute Frevert, “moral economies” are a “system of interactions and transactions whose agents behaved in a morally acceptable way.”210 The interpretation of being “handcuffed” by the existing legal order, in this perspective, provides a moral legitimation for strikes and protest. The church that during the Second Vatican Council had opened towards its members by holding services in languages other than Latin explicitly addressed less privileged social groups now. That it had expressed their approval of one of the workers’ most pressing demands – the right to strike – must not be underestimated and was an important factor in the “moral economy” of the striking workers. The CCOO and the proliferators of their publications made sure that the Church’s progressive writings were noticed by ordinary Spanish workers. Thereby, the CCOO vernacularized Catholic values and norms. In the context of the Spanish labor opposition and its struggle against the Francoist government, the Church took the role of a “global moral authority.” Referring to its writings was hence a political legitimation argument.

Connecting Rights and Morality: The Press Debate on the New Labor Legislation on the Pages of the Cuadernos para el Diálogo (1967) While the previous sections have traced the debates within the Comisiones Obreras, the debates on participating in the elections of the official Organización Sindical Española OSE and the nationwide referendum, this section now sheds light on the subsequent months and the debates on the new labor legislation over the course of 1967. In so doing, this chapter highlights a particular publication, the Cuadernos para el Diálogo, the most important intellectual platform for the communist/Catholic cooperation. The “Papers for Dialogue” were dominantly Catholic, but were also open to Marxist thoughts and communist topics. As has been shown with the example of Julian Ariza’s contributions the Cuadernos did not refrain from engaging activists from the CCOO. On the contrary: as the historian Muñoz Soro argues, the Cuadernos did not organize the CCOO actively, but many

 On the concept of moral economies, please see also this volume: Ute Frevert, ed., Moral Economies (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019).  Ute Frevert, “Moral Economies, Present and Past.: Social Practices and Intellectual Controversies,” in Moral Economies, ed. Ute Frevert, 13–44, Geschichte und Gesellschaft (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 17.

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people affiliated with the magazine did so, among them Marcelino Camacho, Julián Ariza, and Victor Martínez Conde, “the three militants of the PCE.”211 In the case of the magazine, nomen est omen: the Cuadernos para el Diálogo had been founded in 1963212 with the concrete aim of integrating progressive forces in the regime with people coming from the democratic opposition spectrum and without any exclusion. Its editorial board, however, consisted of men exclusively. This might be not surprising at first glance but is worth mentioning in the context of the comparison with the Polish opposition where women fulfilled an important role in the production of samizdat press.213 The Cuadernos aimed at an open dialogue between different democratic currents within the liberal pluralist oppositionist Spanish landscape, whereby they explicitly wanted a cooperation with communists. This opening towards the left would lead to a shift in the magazine’s own bias: like many of its editorial boards’ members, the Cuadernos underwent a political journey from Christian democratic beginnings to a center-leftist and eventually socialist character within only a couple of years.214 Their founder, Joaquín Ruiz Giménez,215 had close ties to the Catholic Church. He had also attended meetings of the Second Vatican Council as an observer, an experience that impressed him deeply. Ruiz Giménez’s magazine was one of the most influential publications in secular and Catholic circles alike.216 By cooperating with people like the prominent lawyer José María Gil-Robles, the Cuadernos even integrated people with monarchist attitudes, which shows how broad the spectrum could be as it reached from communists to monarchists.217

 Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1963–1976, 89.  The Cuadernos para el Diálogo ceased to exist in 1978.  Apart from the founder, Ruíz-Giménez, the members of the first editorial board in 1963 were: Gregorio Peces-Barba, Elías Díaz, Javier Rupérez, Francisco Sintes, Ignacio Camuñas, Juan Luis Cebrián, Mariano Aguilar Navarro, and Pedro Altares. Later, José María Riaza, Valentín Clemente o José María Guelbenzu joined the team. In 1966, Ruíz-Giménez was forced to leave the editorial team under the government’s pressure. His successor was Francisco José Ruiz Gisbert who tried to keep up with his predecessor’s legacy while at the same time modernizing the magazine. See: Davara Torrego, “La aventura informativa de ‘Cuadernos para el diálogo’,” 204.  See: Davara Torrego, “La aventura informativa de ‘Cuadernos para el diálogo’,” 204.  See also: Pedro Vega and Fernando Jáuregui, Crónica del antifranquismo: 1939–1975. Todos los que lucharon por devolver la democracia a España (Barcelona: Planeta, 2007), 340–343.  Brassloff, Religion and Politics in Spain, 17.  Gil–Robles had already in 1948 reached out to the socialist Indalecio Prieto. He was a representative of the monarchist wing of writers in the editorial board of the Cuadernos, while Pedro Laín Entralgo, the former head of the Madrid University, had been a Falangist in the past. Like him, another former Falangist, Dionisio Ridruejo, broke with their Falangist past and turned towards social democracy. See: Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskultu-

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Not only had the Vatican dedicated more attention to the workers’ cause; due to the ongoing nationwide strikes and labor conflicts, the workers’ cause had become one that was also debated outside traditional labor circles. For instance, the debate on reforming the Spanish labor was prominently conducted on the pages of the Cuadernos para el Diálogo. In line with their approach of reconciling the society, the general language of the Cuadernos was a balancing one. The editors had to handle the liberalized situation after the press reform with care. As if it wanted to soothe the disappointed opposition after the pyrrhic electoral victory on the OSE level and the success of the referendum that led to the prohibition of the CCOO, the magazine launched a series of articles discussing reforms to the union law and the Organización Sindical Española in spring 1967. In its introduction, the tightrope acts the journalists had to fulfil become tangible: We cannot make a general analysis of the last thirty years of union life in Spain, with all its lights and shadows, neither can we examine the role that the Organización Sindical has played in our public life in-depth. Our task is to approach this topic objectively and peaceably in the near future.218

This balanced language shows how difficult it was to conduct a public debate on the pages of newspapers and magazines. Apart from the dictatorial context of censorship and the possible threat of being shut down, this can be interpreted as a direct effect of the violent Spanish Civil War and the collective trauma it caused in the country. The official Francoist narrative of the Spanish Civil War was one of an upheaval against violent anarchist and socialist republicans that brutally murdered civilians and members of the clergy and the reinstallation of order by the Francoists.219 The mere idea of arguing and exchanging opinions had lost their innocence, as the historical cleavage lines were kept alive by the aggressive rhetoric of General Franco and the repression against opponents. The journalists, therefore, first had to withstand and pass the censorship and second had to win over ordinary citizens anxious of another war and tired of any conflict and aggression. Moreover, Franco’s manic anti-communism depicting communists as en-

ren und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982), 327.  N.N., “Hacia una Nueva Ley Sindical (Editorial),” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 1. “No podemos hacer ahora un detenido balance de los últimos treinta años de vida sindical en España, con sus luces y sus sombras, ni tampoco examinar a fondo el papel que la Organización Sindical ha desempeñado en nuestra vida pública. Nuestro proyecto es ocuparnos de ese tema con objectividad y sosiego en fecha próxima” (emphasis by me, AD).  On collective memories of the Civil War, see: Walther L. Bernecker and Sören Brinkmann, Kampf der Erinnerungen. Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft 1936–2006 (Nettersheim: Graswurzelrevolution, 2006).

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emies of the state, in combination with the negative memories of the conflicts foregoing the Civil War, put a historical connotation of conflict and violence onto labor issues – also in the public sphere. This was reinforced in the course of the 1960s, when numerous strikes and protests shattered the country and were depicted as disturbances to the social order by the authorities. In terms of moral economies, again, the strike actions were considered to be legitimate, since they were backed up by a common sense as expressed in global norms such as the Vatican publications and other institutions. Their illegality, hence, was equaled out by their legitimacy within this specific moral economic view of actions.220 In this context, for those promoting a democratic trade unionism, it was relevant to find a framing that was infused with humanism and positive norms and values. In the case of the debates about the new union law, these were expressed in terms of human rights, as will be shown in the following. Especially in contrast with the sole workers’ publications from the CCOO milieu, it is striking how on the pages of the Catholic-impregnated Cuadernos para el Diálogo a human rights language played a major role. One year later even, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary in 1968, the magazine reprinted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and juxtaposed it with the Spanish legislation.221 Catholicism had been one of the most important environments of human rights philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, as Samuel Moyn has convincingly illustrated222 – while Paul Betts has identified an “ongoing ‘Christianization’ of human rights reach[ing] its apogee in the early 1960s.”223 The Christian or rather Catholic reading of human rights entails a strong concentration on the person and its (human) dignity. The dignity of the human person was a Christian “response” to the Holocaust and became virulent in Christian and Papal writings of the 1940s.224 However, it was also the crystallization point for “civil society Catholics” whose understanding of the “human person” was focused on it as a bearer of dignity, “attempting to stave off both secular liberalism with its destitute atomism and corporatist reaction with its demand for clerical forms of authoritarianism” like in Franco’s Spain.225 Interestingly, the concept of dignity

 See, also: Ute Frevert, “Moral Economies, Present and Past,” in Moral Economies, 26.  In a similar debate on the pages of the same magazine one year later, the whole UN Declaration was reprinted and contextualized with the Spanish legislation. N.N., “Veinte Años de Derechos Humanos,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 53 (1968).  Samuel Moyn, Christian human rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). See also: Samuel Moyn, “Christian Human Rights: An Introduction,” King’s Law Journal 1 (2017).  Betts, “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights,” 411.  Moyn, Christian human rights, 37.  Moyn, Christian human rights, 36.

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was barely mentioned in the Cuadernos’ writings, while it was central to the Central European dissidents’ writings, both in a socialist and an anti-communist context. When debating reforms in the labor context, all commentators writing for the Cuadernos underlined that workers should finally participate actively in the decision-making processes that affected them. In the opinion article titled “Who is going to make the law and how is it going to look like,” the author José Corbella Madueño described the issue of free and independent trade unions as a “right of man.”226 As the title suggests, his article shed light on the question of political agency and participation processes. Its introduction as well as the last sentences highlighted the workers being excluded from any decision-making processes, which, according to the author, had been the case for centuries. To change this was “worth the effort.”227 He listed “liberty” and “unity” as the most important principles that should be taken into account by the new law and then continued: We understand the principle of free unions in two ways: one that looks at the exercise of this right of man because the worker must have the necessary independence to associate or not, according to the norms dictated by his own conscience, and another one that looks at the Union itself, as freedom or autonomy from any other power or interest other than that of the workers themselves; freedom to form and found trade unions; freedom of government stakeholders by freely and democratically electing those who will represent them at any level of the union or of the public life of the country; [. . .] and finally, and we believe it is important, the right to strike.228

In this article, the author divided the arguments for his claim of a free trade unionism into two groups: the first argument is that free trade unionism was a “right of man,” as “human rights” were sometimes called. Free trade unionism was connected to the issue of freedom of association. Interestingly, this legal argument was supported by other framings, i.e. the social necessity that in this article is depicted as of being intrinsic to human rights. Free trade unionism is a human right here because it is necessary. A similar belief was expressed by the legal scholar András Sajó, when he wrote:

 José Corbella Madueño, “Quien y como se hara la ley,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 9.  José Corbella Madueño, “Quien y como se hara la ley,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 9.  José Corbella Madueño, “Quien y como se hara la ley,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 9.

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If human rights are universal – that is, if they pertain to all humans everywhere – then they must reflect a ‘necessity of nature.’ Human rights as universals are expressions of what is necessary229

In Sajó’s philosophy, the necessity of human rights is linked to the conviction that they were universal. This universality, in turn, translated as pertaining to every human being “[. . .] because they are humans,” is the reason for them being globally valid.230 In this context, the question, “[. . .] [w]hether everyone, or even anyone, enjoys these rights is another matter.”231 Therefore, in his comment on possible changes to the Spanish labor legislation, Corbella Madueño could rhetorically split up “rights of men” and them being “exercised.” Because neither the abstract existence of human rights nor their recognition through the signing of international treaties led to a situation where Spanish workers were able to enjoy human rights, they alone were not sufficient as a political argument, but had to be endowed with particular attributions of meaning. One of these meanings was ‘morality.’ The text by Corbella Madueño argued that free trade unionism provided the worker with the possibility of associating or not “according to the norms that his own conscience” tells him. This reference to the “conscience” of the worker/ the human being can be read as a Catholic perspective on labor, perceiving humans as either morally or immorally acting creatures. Here, again, the “moral economy” of associating illegally comes into play.232 A connection of “conscience” and “associating” was also made by John Stuart Mill. Whereas he did not define ‘liberty’ as such, Mill listed three basic liberty categories: 1. liberties of conscience and expression; 2. liberties of tastes, pursuits, and life-plans; and 3. liberties of association.233 The nineteenth century liberal British philosopher and economist was quite popular in Spain’s oppositional democratic circles. The CCOO press repeatedly referred to his works.234 It is therefore

 András Sajó, “Ambiguities and boundaries in human rights knowledge systems,” in Global justice and the bulwarks of localism: Human rights in context, ed. Christopher L. Eisgruber and András Sajó (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2005), 17–41, 20. See also: Richardson-Little, “Human Rights as Myth and History,” 152.  András Sajó, “Ambiguities and boundaries in human rights knowledge systems,” in Global justice and the bulwarks of localism, 19.  Jack Donnelly, “The Relative Universality of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 2 (2007): 283.  Frevert, Moral Economies.  See: David Brink, “Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https://stanford.library.sydney.edu.au/entries/mill-moral-political/, accessed April 2, 2023.  An example of Mill’s popularity also outside academic circles is the review of his works in the earlier mentioned Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral, a magazine addressing first

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not unlikely that Cuaderno’s author Corbella Madueño knew Mill’s work or at least the discourse surrounding it, especially since he structured the article following different key words and titled the quoted passage with the word “liberty.”235 The second argument in Corbella Madueño’s comment was directed at the “union itself,” and not at the individual, the worker. Whereas the workers should be free in choosing the right union for their selves, unions should also have freedoms. They should be, for instance, free of government’s influence. In the debate conducted on the pages of the Cuadernos, a moral framing of the topic was typical. It was repeatedly connected to a language of rights, like in this comment by Victor Martínez Conde, the earlier mentioned secret PCE activist: We understand that forthcoming political laws shall, at all times, respect and also inscribe themselves in a frame of moral principles and of right, which, ultimately, can permit certain circumstantial conditions, but will hardly subordinate to them.236

The secretly communist author, a journalist schooled in Catholic institutions and an employee of the publishing house Edicusa, had also been active in the Catholic labor organization Acción Católica but also in the more or less social democratic Frente de Liberación Popular, FLP (“Popular Liberation Front”). In his comment, he clearly expressed a hierarchy of rights and norms.237 The reference to “moral principles and rights” has a similar purpose to the human rights reference of Corbella Madueño in the same issue: it underlined that the Spanish state and the legislature were not the absolute authority neither in a global political (human rights) nor a wider moral context (morality). The framing of moral principles within “certain circumstantial conditions,” again, can be understood in terms of “moral economies”. As mentioned earlier, the question of unionism was connected to peace in the sense of a social order that satisfied every member of society. Some commentators connected the framing of unions being a mere social necessity with the

and foremost the working class. The Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral entailed a book review section titled “We’ve read it for you . . .” where they reviewed the publication in its second issue. In so doing, the author discussed Mill’s relationship with socialist views and him being influenced by Marxist writings. See: S. Ruíz, “Hemos leído para usted . . ., ” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966). On Mill’s influence on Marx’s writings and thoughts, see: Bela A. Balassa, “Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill,” Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 83 (1959).  Over the course of the overall liberalization of printed media, a new Spanish version of his work had been published in 1965 in Madrid, with a foreword by Lucas Verdú, a professor at the Catholic University of Deusto in Bilbao; John S. Mill, De la libertad. Del gobierno representativo. La esclavitud femenina (Madrid: Tecnos, 1965).  José L. Rubio, “Ante una futura Ley Sindical,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 55 (1968).  Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1963–1976, 89.

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question of a peaceful coexistence. The two aspects were further connected to the concept of democracy: for instance, Gregorio Peces Barba, a Catholic legal scholar, opened his article on “Peace in the democratic society” by stating, that “[t]oday, the democratic society is the only legitimate form of association for the sake of the human co-existence [. . .].”238 Not only did he refer to reformed democratic Marxism, but also to Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain repeatedly. Being an expert on the philosophy of Maritain, he formulated the connection between peace and participation literally: The link between authentic peace and true participation connects us with the demand of relevant structures of social life that would favor this participation and that are nothing else than the demands of a democratic society.239

The argument of social and internal peace was a very strong one – it simultaneously functioned as a carrier for demanding (more) democracy and as a legitimization for the workers’ action (read: “moral economies”). The notion of “authentic peace,” however, subtly suggested that the ongoing situation was only a truce. Peces Barba then linked the argument to the concept of just “reacting to social realities” and at the same time to the concept of modernizing and developing the country that had underwent a Wirtschaftswunder after the opening of the Spanish economy. This miracle – however – only reached the middle classes who could now own a washing machine or a TV, but not so much the workers, despite the overall economic boost: The demands regarding this peaceful order are, in theory, some conditions that allow an integral development of the possibilities entailed in the human nature. In each historical situation, in each country, these ethical demands are concentrated around real circumstances. In Spain, there are two fundamental issues that need an urgent restructuring, the social-economic and the juridical-political structure so that they guarantee the protection of fundamental rights in an authentic way.240

 Gregorio Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 22.  Gregorio Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 22. Peces Barba would later become one of the “Fathers” of the democratic Spanish constitution of 1978. He would moreover make an “easy” transition from Christian social thought to Spanish Social Democracy and would be one of the few members of the PSOE that openly addressed matters of personal faith. See, for instance: Soledad Gallego–Díaz, “La muerte de un promotor del consenso,” El País, July 24, 2012, https://elpais.com/politica/2012/07/24/actualidad/ 1343123609_749643.html, accessed September 23, 2019.  Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” 22.

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It was typical of Spanish commentators to refer to other countries and to other times in history to depict a backwardness of their own country’s political situation. Here, the backwardness was communicated in terms of a negative Spanish exceptionalism, when Peces Barba juxtaposed “Spain” and “each historical situation” and “each country.” When explaining why the current situation (one without free trade unions and democratic labor structures) bore “conflict potential,” Peces Barba compared the Spanish context to “Europe” and North America, by which he also expressed a feeling of detachment of Europe:241 While the industrial revolution in Europe and Northern America generally took place under a regime of democratic-civil liberties (Parliament, orchestrated exchange of power242 or pluralism of parties, horizontal unions, regular elections, etc.), in Spain, it is executed following mechanisms that were inspired by a pre-democratic model.243

Apart from the construction of Spain’s backwardness that is linked to a historical teleology “towards democracy,” this comparison states an example of a conception of Europeanness. Here, ‘Europe’ (the desired ‘other’) was presented as democratic and modern – as in contrast to Spain. Given the anti-communist ideology of the Francoist state, the author highlighted that it was the free countries with civil liberties that did not experience a Marxist revolution – unlike China, Cuba or the Soviet Union.244 The message of this article could be read as: “If you enhanced civil liberties, you would not have to fear a communist revolution.” The concept of being politically backward entailed a certain concept of linear history and teleology, as if a democratic system stood at the end of any society’s development. A non-democratic system was described as a “pre-democratic” one. This connection between democracy, trade unionism, and a historical teleology was also tangible in the earlier discussed text by Corbella Madueño when he wrote: [. . .] Well, it is indisputable then, that [free trade unionism, AD] is the form of coexistence that governs so many countries, where the force of reason, dialectics, parliamentarism are the paths enabled for their societies to march ahead.245

In this example, the author described democracy in a stronger manner (paraphrased as “parliamentarism”), as the only path towards the future. In this context, he referred to perceived cultural differences between Spain and “so many

 Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” 23.  The Spanish word turnismo, used in the original text refers to orchestrated exchange of power between the main political parties in late nineteenth century Spain.  Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” 23.  Peces Barba, “La paz en la sociedad democrática,” 23.  Corbella Madueño, “Quien y como se hara la ley,” 9.

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countries,” when he depicted them as influenced by “the force of reason” and “dialectics.” They were the forces that made a social progress possible in the first place, whereas – this remained unwritten, but was subtly implied here – Spain was kept in social, political, and cultural stagnation due to its antiquated authoritarian labor legislation, that in this context functioned as both a proxy and evidence for the overarching lack of democracy in the country. The last sections shed light on the important Catholic current within the Spanish labor opposition. In this context, I showed how Catholics and communists carefully constructed a common ground of action based on the concept of democracy. Still being one of the most pressing demands, the right to strike was one of the most important topics when referring to the Second Vatican Council. The labor-friendly publications and expressions of the Pope were of utmost relevance for the Spanish labor opposition, as it provided them with arguments stemming from the highest Catholic authority against a Catholic nationalist state. The Cuadernos pare el Diálogo very carefully entered the debate on the Nueva Ley Sindical. Here, the ongoing situation was interpreted as a lack of democracy rather than as a lack of rights. “Morality” on the one hand and “peace” on the other one were moreover important concepts in the writings of the Catholic and left-leaning authors. Authors pushing forward labor rights oftentimes contextualized their demands with a humanist infused language to underline their peaceful intentions. This was grounded in the Spanish Civil War and the joint concern of not entering a violent military conflict again. It has to be noted that women’s rights were not mentioned at all in this context. Working women were at the margin for the Catholic writers, even if women’s rights and the ongoing discrimination of women were discussed by the authors of the purely communist writings from time to time.246 As the law itself was not reformed until 1971, the debates on how it could or should look emerged in irregular frequencies over the following years, as well as after the prohibition of the CCOO by the Supreme Court in March of 1967.247 The prohibition initiated a new phase of workers’ protest and state repression, which – due to its violent character – quickly became a matter for the broader Spanish population. As Sima Lieberman stated, “[b]y 1967, the CCOO constituted a major antiFrancoist movement, able to mobilize large masses of workers for its demonstra-

 N.N., “En torno al problema femenino,” Mundo Obrero, September 17, 1973.  Also later, in 1968, the magazine printed long articles on the possible shape of the “future” law, legitimizing the covering of labor issues in an intellectual magazine. See: Rubio, “Ante una futura Ley Sindical.”

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tions.”248 In January and October of 1967, the CCOO managed to gather more than 100,000 people for their “marches on Madrid,” where, in addition to the demands for independent trade unionism, claims were raised to free imprisoned colleagues that had been arrested out of political reasons. These demonstrations as well as the CCOO’s general assembly, where the “national character the CCOO had reached,”249 were ratified and led to massive arrests of CCOO activists. In November, a decree was passed that not only declared the Comisiones Obreras illegal but also put a one-year stop on collective bargaining processes. It was not least this relaxation of repressive legislation that had paved the way for the success of the CCOO, a situation that, in the government’s eyes, should not be repeated. The prohibition caused a major crisis for the Comisiones Obreras. The following years were therefore characterized by even more repression than before. The quality of strikes and conflicts also changed: Bernecker identified a “radicalization of forms of action” in this context: whereas between 1963 and 1966 only thirty percent of the labor conflicts entailed strikes and work stoppages, the quota increased to eighty-seven percent between 1967 and 1974, even though striking was illegal. The strikes resulted in dismissals, arrests, brutal police violence, and other forms of state pressure. The situation of Spanish workers was criticized, for instance, by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU)250 that likewise launched a complaint to the International Labour Organization in 1967, criticizing the treatment of both the Spanish workers and their own employees who had been expelled from the country. Since it hindered Spanish workers’ activists from maintaining international relations, the ICFTU argued this expulsion constituted a violation of the 1948 Convention on Freedom of Association and the Right to Organize.251 In their complaint to the ILO, the organization’s authors shed light on the precarious legal situation in Spain by underlining that the treatment of the Spanish workers was in line with the Spanish legislation: The Government points out that these detentions were made in accordance with the legislation in force in Spain and that representation before the competent courts and tribunals

 Sima Lieberman, The Contemporary Spanish Economy: A Historical Perspective (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 330.  CC.OO. Asamblea General, “Comunicado Final de la Asamblea Nacional de Comisiones Obreras: Junio de 1967,” in CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976), ed. Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas (Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987), 43–50.  The ICFTU was an organization founded in 1949 by Western trade unions that had left the World Federation of Trade Unions because of its close ties to the Soviet Union. Among others, the ICFTU had supported the protesting Polish workers in Poznań in 1956.  International Labour Organization, “Interim Report”; International Labour Organization, “Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87).”

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had been provided by members of the Spanish College of Attorneys, the only persons qualified to defend the interests of those they represent, as is the case with all judicial systems.252

Not only the overall repression but also the juridical situation in Spain was more and more repressive after 1966/67. This culminated in the proclamation of a State of Exception in 1969: the Spanish state’s reaction to the massive strikes and also general protests against the Francoist government by workers, students, peasants, and other social groups in the second half of the 1960s. Before, the Comisiones had been involved in more and more conflict situations on the shop floor level, and became increasingly self-conscious.253 The prohibition and the proclamation of the State of Exception can be regarded as an authoritarian backlash of a regime whose power structures were oscillating between reformists and conservatives – however, none of these forces was open towards democratic ideas, and at the very most was only willing to allow certain liberties in order to pacify the population.

Concluding Remarks This chapter addressed the phase of emergence of the Comisones Obreras while at the same time examining the surrounding debates on rights and repression. In the mid-1960s, Spain faced numerous strike actions. The chapter opened with debates surrounding the new press law of March 1966 and centered around important political events and/ or dynamics, such as the elections within the official Organización Sindical Española in October 1966 and the subsequent referendum in December 1966. The second part of this chapter analyzed the phase right after the prohibition of the CCOO in February 1967. These were the months between March and December 1967, when Catholic and communist oppositional circles discussed questions of democracy and labor on the backdrop of planned reforms of the Spanish labor legislation. In particular the first section demonstrated that the CCOO activists’ demands circulated around the same set of recurring rights claims: the right to join and form free trade unions, the right to strike, and the rights of free assembly and freedom of speech. By drawing on an analysis of the legal service magazine Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral, in this section, I discussed the scope of actions of the communist lawyers when they wanted to give real advice within the state’s legal realm. Not only was Spanish legislation repressive but it moreover did not seem to make any sense in terms of legal philosophy. According to

 International Labour Organization, “Interim Report.”  Bernecker, Arbeiterbewegung und Sozialkonflikte im Spanien des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, 14.

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the CCOO-affiliated lawyers, it was just not possible to succeed within the legal realm. Hence, they made use of the legal trajectories as long as they served them, in order to follow their dual strategy of legal and illegal action, a specifically Spanish way of employing a “moral economy” of political protest.254 The elections within the OSE triggered debates on the character of the elections: in the writings of the Madrilenian railway workers as well as in the Comisiones’ leaflets, a twofold understanding of rights was expressed: rights were understood as both entitlements and as regulators of democratic proceedings, a rhetoric by which the working-class authors writing for the railway workers’ magazine Carril showed a deep anchoring of democratic values in their philosophy. They discussed both aspects of rights regarding their candidates being harassed during the electoral campaign and compared their own campaigning conditions to those of the official groups. On this backdrop, rights were discussed as being enhanced through capabilities, as was proposed by Martha Nussbaum.255 The second section, in turn, addressed the debates on the reforms of the Spanish labor legislation in form of the planned Nueva Ley Sindical. In so doing, it highlighted the particular success element of the Comisiones Obreras, i.e. their ability to gather people of heterogeneous ideological backgrounds under their umbrella. This cooperation was exemplified on the CCOO-friendly Catholic publication, the Cuadernos para el Diálogo. In this context, it became obvious how important the Vatican and the publications of the Second Vatican Council were for the repressed Spanish workers – including the communist ones. They oftentimes referred to them as to a global moral authority, even more often than mentioning international organizations like the UN or the ILO. When connecting the lack of rights in Spain with democracy, the authors of the legal yet severely observed magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo displayed a strong teleological view on history. Moreover, they used transnational references in order to depict a Spanish deviance from a commonly shared norm, at a time when Spain had decided to turn away from its strongly autarkic economic and cultural politics that had governed the country until the end of the 1950s. In addition to that, the Spanish Civil War threw a long shadow on the debates on labor. Fearing a new outbreak of violence, regardless of which side, the Spanish oppositionists writing for the Catholic magazine aimed at presenting labor democracy as something securing inner peace and stabilizing social order. Only thirty years after the violent civil war, the Spanish society was not only deeply divided but also collectively traumatized by the war’s brutal character. Almost all articula-

 Frevert, Moral Economies.  Nussbaum, “Capabilities, Entitlements, Rights: Supplementation and Critique.”

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tions were therefore especially cautious, not only because they feared repression but also because they did not want to irritate anybody who might be in favor of democracy, but not at any price. ✶✶✶ Ten years after the convergence of Spanish communist and Catholic workers and intellectuals, in Poland Catholic and left-leaning people also jointly engaged in supporting workers. The next chapter, hence, shows how repression and labor conflicts were addressed almost three thousand kilometers further to the Northeast, in Warsaw and in other Polish cities. There, the oppositional dynamics became increasingly strong in the 1970s, which is why this would be not only a change in the region but also in the decade.

2.2 Fighting the Atomization of Society: Contextualizing Labor Conflicts and Explaining Rights in a Polish Samizdat Magazine for Workers Unlike in other Central and Eastern European societies, Poland’s industrial workers were part of the Polish political opposition from the mid-1970s.256 They would later form the core of one of the biggest social movements in contemporary European history, the Solidarność movement. That group, often viewed as a human rights movement,257 had its roots in the cooperation between intellectual and working-class oppositionists. This chapter addresses the ideological roots of the Polish opposition that witnessed an important social and political convergence during the 1970s. In this context, I demonstrate how the Polish intellectual opposition communicated with an international audience in the intellectual tamizdat magazine Kultura. This is important to show that authors from the same milieu very consciously used different rhetoric when interacting with different communities. Nonetheless, the protagonist of this chapter is the important Polish samizdat magazine Robotnik, which was the first to bridge the gap between intellectuals and workers and which was read by a significant number of citizens. It is analyzed in two steps: first, it deals with the question of how individual experiences were negotiated on the pages of Robotnik. In this context, it shows how individual struggle was translated into collective interests and how the idea of worker representation was re-politicized. The second part of this analysis

 Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980, 151.  See, for instance: Risse-Kappen, Ropp and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights, 219.

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demonstrates how Robotnik started constructing an oppositional identity of Polish workers against the backdrop of the political aims connected to the creation of the magazine. In so doing, it focuses on practices and rhetoric of identity-building and empowerment shortly before the creation of the Solidarność.258 The section is based on sources from early autumn 1977 until the summer of 1979, when a Workers’ Rights Charter was published on the pages of the magazine in its thirty-fifth issue. Considering the impact of the Charter on the subsequent social dynamics of Polish opposition that later incorporated many of its demands, I consider its phase of emergence as completed with the publication of this document. The violent crushing of workers’ protest in the aftermath of the announcement of price increases in June 1976 was a trigger moment for important changes in the Polish opposition’s strategy and self-conception. Although the identification of historical “turning points” risks simplifying complexities, the events of 1976 did indeed constitute a watershed, since it was then that the reaction to state violence changed.259 The brutal treatment of fellow citizens by the police truly shocked Polish dissidents and motivated a group of Warsaw-based intellectuals to form the Komitet Obrony Robotników (KOR, “Workers’ Defense Committee”) only a few weeks later.260 KOR’s main purpose was to provide material and legal support for workers, for instance when they faced court trials because of having participated in the protests. The events of summer 1976 led to changes on several levels: first, the actions were not as conspiratorial as before, but were now carried out in a relatively open fashion, “as if” Poland were a free country. This is how Adam Michnik, one of the most prominent KOR collaborators, formulated it.261 Second, dissidents had previously mainly addressed and protested against the government, while oppositionists now spoke to their fellow citizens, treating them as potential allies. On the other hand, this equaled giving up on the government as

 On workers’ identities, see also: Schmidt, Arbeiter in der Moderne, 21–23.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 115.  For the Polish contemporary historical context, the concepts of ‘dissidence’ and ‘opposition’ shall be distinguished, which is grounded in their strategies. Moreover, Andrzej Friszke proposed to apply the term opposition mainly to contrast it with a potentially violent resistance. Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 5; see also: Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 6; Robert Brier, moreover, pointed out how many East Central Europeans dislike the word “dissident” since it is rooted in Western narratives about Central and Eastern Europe. Robert Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (2017).  Jonathan Schell, “Introduction,” in Letters from prison and other essays, ed. Adam Michnik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), xvii–xlii, xxx.

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potential cooperation partners.262 In this context, Jacek Kuroń, one of KOR’s founders, was especially interested in creating “social movements” as he believed they would force the regime to negotiate and minimize the risk of a (Soviet) invasion.263 This matches Charles Tilly’s observation about “people all over the world recogniz[ing] the term [. . .] as a trumpet call, as a counterweight to oppressive power, as a summons to popular action against a wide range of scourges.”264 Through adopting a political agency and a new democratic self-conscience, the new oppositional actors pretended that democracy existed, that it was there, even if it was not.265 By “carving out public space in Poland” and remaining outside the official party-state political life, KOR, according to Michael Bernhard, contributed to a “self-liberation” of a Polish “civil society.”266 Keeping in mind that the term “civil society” was designed to describe Western liberal models and considering the extermination of Polish Jewry and the attacks against the intelligentsia and landowners between 1939 and 1956, one has to be careful, however, not to equal the Polish case too much with other societies.267

 Gregor Feindt pointed out at the fact that this differentiation between dissidence and opposition has not been successfully implemented; for instance Tony Judt “ostentatiously” wrote about “opposition,” but titled the respective article “Dilemmas of Dissidence.” See Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 7. Cf.: Tony Judt, “The Dilemmas of Dissidence: The Politics of Opposition in East-central Europe,” East European Politics & Societies 2 (1988).  Friszke, Czas KOR-u.  Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008), 3. Tilly had the twenty–first century in mind when writing this observation.  The underlying philosophy of “living as if” will be discussed later in this text. Cf. Judt, “The Dilemmas of Dissidence.”  Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980. Agnes Arndt has analyzed this very milieu and their conceptions of what “civil society” is. Maciej Janowski has pointed out how already in the nineteenth century Polish intellectuals had adopted “illegal tasks.” See also the broader academic debate on the applicability of the term ‘civil society’ in the Eastern European context: Arndt, Intellektuelle in der Opposition; Maciej Janowski, “Gab es im 19. Jahrhundert in Polen eine Zivilgesellschaft? Erste Überlegungen,” in Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft: Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich, ed. Arnd Bauerkämper (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003), 293–318; Arnd Bauerkämper, ed., Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft: Akteure, Handeln und Strukturen im internationalen Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003); Lisa Bonn, “Begriffskonjunktur Zivilgesellschaft: Zur missverständlichen Interpretation dissidentischer Bewegungen in Osteuropa,” in Demokratie– Kultur– Moderne: Perspektiven der politischen Theorie, ed. Holger Zapf and Lino Klevesath (München: Oldenbourg, 2011), 121–32; Hildermeier, Kocka, and Conrad, Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West.  Leder, Prześniona rewolucja. See, also: Bauerkämper, Die Praxis der Zivilgesellschaft; cf. also the problem of a “gendered” civil society that focuses on men as citizens. Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella goes to market: Citizenship, gender, and women’s movements in East Central Europe (London: Verso, 1993).

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This high level of social convergence, comparable to the Spanish case, is considered as one success factor of oppositional strategies. Based on the writings of the exiled revisionist Marxist philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, the new demeanor involved different political ideas and practices. The idea was grounded in a new self-understanding that differed from previous conceptions insofar as it adopted tasks that – under different conditions – would be part of a functioning state. One fundamental element of this new activism was the development and implementation of a broad independent underground publishing system of literature, leaflets, and political magazines that circumvented the state monopoly of both information and interpretation of politics and society.268 In Poland, the “second circuit,”269 how samizdat was called there, was particularly diverse, which mirrored the character of the opposition itself. Beginning with the late mid-1970s, different currents of political traditions were engaged in oppositional activities.270 The new strategy was not the only innovation: among the diverse oppositional groups, KOR was the only one that was heterogenous in terms of the ideological backgrounds of their members. In the Workers’ Defense Committee KOR, two main currents in Polish intellectual history met.271 Marxists and socialists cooperated with lay Catholics and even right-wing advocates of national sovereignty, even though the group was still dominated by left-leaning Marxist and socialist thinkers. Poland’s contemporary oppositional his-

 Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 2.  In Polish: drugi obieg. In her dissertation, Siobhan Doucette argued that the term samizdat was not suitable for the Polish opposition, because the infrastructure was so advanced that the publications were printed in independent underground publishing houses and not by individuals themselves. She instead proposed the formulation “independent publishing.” In order to highlight the transnational character of the phenomenon, nevertheless, in this study, I stick with the internationally implemented technical term samizdat. Siobhan K. Doucette, “Mightier than the sword: Polish independent publishing, 1976–1989” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2013), footnote 2.  Apart from students’ and peasants’ groups, the anti-communist nationalist Movement for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (Ruch Obrony Praw Człowieka i Obywatela, ROPCiO) was another prominent movement in Warsaw. It constituted a strategic counterplayer to KOR, as it absolutely rejected any cooperation between the opposition and the government. In their 1977 “Appeal to the Polish society,” they referred to the 1966 Covenant that had come into power in 1976 and was therefore binding in the Polish People’s Republic since its ratification. The samizdat publication that was affiliated with ROPCiO was called Opinia (“Opinion”). See Helga Hirsch, Bewegungen für Demokratie und Unabhängigkeit in Polen 1976–1980 (Mainz: Grünewald, 1985), 59–62.  See: Andrzej Walicki, “The three traditions in Polish patriotism,” in Polish Paradoxes, ed. Stanisław Gomułka and Antony Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), 21–40. See also: Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 316–318.

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tory was strongly influenced and shaped by left-leaning intellectuals like the Marxist philosopher Leszek Kołakowski or the two theorists of the Polish opposition Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń.272 Their position in the state socialist framework was unique, as they had to reformulate and redefine it repeatedly after experiencing repression and discrimination by state socialist governments. These activists had always been politically active by prominently outlining their own socialist or Marxist convictions, for example by writing a “Letter to the Party” in 1964.273 In social terms, in this letter, they addressed the precarious living conditions of workers in a workers’ state. Their political critique then aimed at the lack of democratic participation and the power accumulation within the hands of a few members of the state socialist nomenklatura.274 The anti-Semitic state campaign against Jewish citizens and the crushing of students’ protest in 1968 was as much of a shock for Polish dissidents as was the participation of Polish tanks in the violent demise of protesting citizens in Czechoslovakia. Ten years after the events, Michnik remembered that the “confrontation of humanist slogans with a totalitarian practice” had been pivotal.275 Within the history of oppositional thought in Poland, the 1970s bridged the reformist hopes for real existing socialism after 1956 and the “end of revisionism”276 after 1968 with the 1980s philosophy of the Solidarność.277 In so doing, he used a broad, open notion of totalitarianism that was likewise typical of

 Selected findings of this chapter have been published in the following article: Anna Delius, “Universal Rights or Everyday Necessities? Translating Human Rights between Local Workers and Transnational Activism in late 1970s Poland,” East Central Europe 2–3 (2019).  The “Letter to the Party” co-authored by Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski can be regarded a key document for the dynamics of the Polish opposition. Karol Modzelewski was one of the most important members of the Polish opposition since the 1950s. Born in Moscow in 1937, he came to Poland not earlier than in 1945. He became an academic historian in Warsaw and was repeatedly imprisoned and interned during Polish state socialism as he kept on criticizing the government also after 1956. He died only recently, in April 2019. Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski, List otwarty do Partii (Paris: Institut Littéraire, 1966).  When the two were persecuted by the government and faced imprisonment as a direct reaction to their initiative, fellow students like Adam Michnik but also professors like Leszek Kołakowski acted in transgenerational solidarity, even if the elderly did not agree with the economic analysis in the letter. Agnes Arndt, Rote Bürger: Eine Milieu– und Beziehungsgeschichte linker Dissidenz in Polen (1956–1976) (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 113–115. See also, Andrzej Leder’s stand on the question of distribution of wealth and power in Poland during and after the Second World War, as formulated in: Leder, Prześniona rewolucja.  Adam Michnik, Szanse polskiej demokracji: Artykuły i eseje (Warszawa: Agora, 2009), 59.  Arndt, Intellektuelle in der Opposition, 47.  The article from 1978 is reprinted in: Michnik, Szanse polskiej demokracji, 57.

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the Polish democratic opposition, concentrating on the political inertia of state socialisms not capable of reforms.278 Also, Kuroń viewed the Polish state as totalitarian, linking the label to the question of Polish sovereignty. Hella Dietz has shown how specific parts of the critical Marxist left and lay Catholics acquired a new model of communicating and interacting with formerly opposed milieus, which constituted another renewal for the Polish opposition. Both currents of thought had moved more towards individualism during the twentieth century and were therefore able to connect to a global human rights discourse.279 The combination of a disillusion with state socialism as it existed and the rise of human rights becoming more and more salient on an international level led to a concentration on human rights as both a political goal and a political weapon. Here, the transnationality of the oppositional activism became especially virulent. Several transnational dynamics, including Michnik’s travels abroad, the political radiance of the Helsinki Accords signed in 1975 as well as the massive protest against constitutional reforms in 1975/76 and the connected debates on civil rights contributed to a shift in interpreting social problems. The repression of Polish workers was not only viewed as a problem caused by the inadequacies and shortcomings of state socialism but as a violation of human rights.280 In the changes to the constitution, the role of the Party was underlined, as was the close connection to the Soviet Union, which was especially frustrating to many. Some intellectuals, many of them later KOR members, wrote in an open letter to the Party in early 1976 that civil rights such as freedom of religion or freedom of speech were only a farce in a state socialist country where religious believers or people who expressed their thoughts freely faced severe repercussions and were hindered in their careers.281 It should be noted for the further context of this analysis that in this letter they not only criticized the violation of human rights as a daily practice in state socialist Poland, for instance with regard to the “preventive censorship,” but also made a concrete reference to the Helsinki Final Accords.282 However, conflicts between KOR members did exist. One of the most important cleavage lines ran between the group around Adam Michnik and Jacek

 Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 293.  Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 32. See also: Moyn, Christian human rights, see especially Chapter 1.  Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 324–326. See also this contemporary article on the Polish constitutional changes by: Leon Shapiro, “Poland,” The American Jewish Year Book 77 (1977).  Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 324–325.  Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL, 326.

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Kuroń on the one side and Piotr Naimski283 and Antoni Macierewicz on the other.284 These conflicts were rooted in historical currents of political thought in Poland, i.e. a Socialist tradition on the one hand and a nationalist one, focusing on Polish national independence, on the other. This stream of thought was deeply infused by the experiences of Polish scouts, which is until today an important social activity for young Poles.285 Nonetheless, these cleavages were also symptomatic for the wider oppositional spectrum. Besides the successful integration of Catholic, Marxist, and partly conservative nationalists, the story of KOR is one of how different and traditionally separate social milieus began to cooperate. Contemporary social scientists have pointed out how fragmented and atomized Polish society was in the 1970s. This atomization was also enhanced by the government as a strategy to fight growing social protest that had emerged since the 1960s. As Maryjane Osa put it: “With the battle for ideological purity lost, the Party made use of society’s resurgent ‘bourgeois’ tendencies to prevent the emergence of a cohesive social structure that could oppose its rule.”286 Until the mid-1970s, group identities in the Polish People’s Republic were constructed almost exclusively within the family or the (Catholic) nation that had persisted culturally throughout the communist decades. These group identities were so salient that they managed to blur other collective identities, i.e. gender identities. As Robert Brier analyzed: “[. . .] few women came to understand their position in gendered terms [. . .]”,287 regardless of if they were active oppositionists or not.288 However, the narrative of persistence has to be viewed carefully, as Andrzej Leder has convincingly argued in an essay from 2019.289 The psychotherapist and

 Naimski was born in 1951 and was therefore one of the younger members of KOR. He was socialized in the Polish scouts’ movement and was a biochemist. See: Hirsch, Bewegungen für Demokratie und Unabhängigkeit in Polen 1976–1980, 48.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 65.  Jan Olaszek has written about how these cleavages influence the commemoration rituals of former KOR members until today. In the course of the increased political divide of Polish politics and society in the Third Polish Republic, the commemoration events have been conducted separately. Jan Olaszek, “Spór o KOR: Harcerze i komandosi — KOR wciąż podzielony,” Polityka, September 27, 2016.  Maryjane Osa, “Networks in Opposition: Linking Organizations through Activists in the Polish People’s Republic,” in Social movements and networks: Relational approaches to collective action, ed. Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, Comparative politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 77–104, 83.  Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” 22.  See also: Kenney, “The Gender of Resistance in Communist Poland,” 26.  Leder, Prześniona rewolucja.

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historical philosopher depicted the years between 1939 and 1956 as a massive revolution for the Polish population, which, nonetheless, was not realized by its beneficiaries who did not view themselves as historical subjects. Leder identified two factors that broke the essential configuration of the Polish society: the mass murder of Jewish Poles during the Holocaust and the violent Stalinization of Polish lands starting in 1944. The implementation of Soviet politics entailed the massive nationalization of factories and land depriving another important societal carrier group: Polish landowners. These voids could not be filled by the remaining Poles who partly took over these lands, houses, and other possessions.290 The members of KOR hence tried to find a language in which they could communicate with fellow citizens, whose everyday lives looked very different from theirs. Nonetheless, the situation of workers seemed to them to be symptomatic of the entire nation in the eyes of the intellectual activists who were convinced that only a cooperation between different social milieus could bring any change to the whole country. The cooperation should thereby go beyond the first phase of concrete legal and material support. Workers should be politicized and brought into action,291 a strategy that ironically has been described as genuinely Leninist by Timothy Garton Ash, as the KOR members contacted workers on the ground and radicalized them at their workplaces.292 Working-class citizens also independently asked for help: many letters and complaints prove that ordinary citizens, oftentimes wives or mothers of repressed workers, addressed national authorities repeatedly, criticizing the brutal treatment of their husbands or sons in the course of the crushing of workers’ protest in Radom and Ursus. Some even wrote letters to Amnesty International, like Janina N. from Radom, whose son had been beaten up brutally by the police in the

 Felix Ackermann, “Spätes Erwachen. Psychoanalytische, philologische und historiographische Bezüge in Andrzej Leders Werk: Eine Einführung,” in Polen im Wachtraum: Die Revolution 1939–1956 und ihre Folgen, ed. Andrzej Leder (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2019), 9–38.  The question of which social group can claim the dominant agency over the protest movements and later Solidarity was debated at large in historiography and social sciences, especially with regard to causality and starting points. Having this in mind, Roman Laba criticizes that many scholars have denied Polish workers a genuine agency and how they depicted the intellectuals as main motors for political action. He underlines how Polish workers established practices of protest like the sit-down strikes and even first structures of self-management by forming committees (especially in the shipyards of the Baltic shore) that later dissolved. See: Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working–Class Democratization, Course Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).  Ash, The Polish Revolution, 27.

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aftermath of the protests in the city.293 Without mentioning the respective key words, she described violations of fundamental rule of law, by complaining how he had been sentenced to several months of arrest without any “reason.”294 “Please, help me,” she ended her letter.295 In her own words, the woman described how her relative had been sentenced to prison without a properly conducted legal process. For intellectuals, it was much easier to raise international awareness, because they could travel more easily, and they had the possibility to publish abroad via tamizdat. The most important intellectual oppositional forum was the magazine Kultura (“Culture”), published in Paris. Until the mid-1970s, Kultura had served as a forum for “independent thought” for Polish dissidents, but after the turning-point of 1976 the function of Kultura also changed: the emergence of a rich samizdat culture in Poland itself made the magazine an important source of information for the Polish diaspora in the West. Yet, across the decades, articles published in Kultura were read on both sides of the Iron Curtain, making the magazine one of the most prominent vectors for transnationally entangled discussions between dissidents during the Cold War.296 When in June 1976 workers’ protests were violently crushed for a third time in the history of Polish state socialism, many intellectuals, especially those aligned with the soon to be created Workers’ Defense Committee KOR, felt a responsibility to (re)act. On the pages of Kultura, the intellectuals published several calls for solidarity with and support for the workers and explained why they as intellectuals considered it important to act: The obligation to identify solutions affects everyone. Yet, it is the intelligentsia in particular, whose task it is to analyze and to evaluate the situation. Our voice is needed especially today, when the workers’ protest has revealed the weakness of the current methods of governing. If we remain silent now – everything can repeat itself tomorrow.297

 On the role of Amnesty International in Eastern Europe, see this detailed study by Miedema, Not a Movement of Dissidents.  List Janiny N. do Amnesty International, October 23, 1976. With regard to personal privacy rights, the last name of the author was anonymized by me, AD.  List Janiny N. do Amnesty International, October 23, 1976.  Robert Brier, “Entangled Protest: Dissent and the Transnational History of the 1970s and 1980s,” in Entangled protest: transnational approaches to the history of dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, ed. Robert Brier (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2013), 11–42; see also this major volume on the magazine Kultura by Bernard Wiaderny, „Schule des politischen Denkens“: Die Exilzeitschrift ‚Kultura‘ im Kampf um die Unabhängigkeit Polens 1947–1991 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2018).  Wojciech Arkuszewski et al., “Oświadczenie jedenastu solidaryzujących się z robotnikami,” Kultura 9 (1976) http://static.kulturaparyska.com/attachments/94/17/9b9e609db613698bdbe280c5

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This sense of bearing responsibility for society at large is reminiscent of the Polish intelligentsia’s historical roots. The Partitions of Poland between 1772/75 and 1918 had contributed to the creation of a very particular social position for the Polish intelligentsia, which “developed from being a synonym of the educated aristocratic public towards an independent and democratic grouping,” forming a “state within a state.”298 To a special degree, this independent attitude is visible in this declaration of solidarity. The intellectuals rendered themselves independent of the government’s policies on the pages of Kultura and claimed for themselves the task of “identifying solutions.” Their democratic stance was also evident in a call for a show of solidarity and support from their Western counterparts. In an open letter, Polish intellectuals like Adam Michnik, the literary scholar Jan Józef Lipski, and Priest Jan Zieja addressed Western intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Heinrich Böll or Arthur Miller. They directed their letter to those “[. . .] who appreciate the matter of democratic socialism, to all those, who defended the persecuted in Chile and in Spain, in Czechoslovakia and in the USSR. [. . .] We address all people who are solidary with the workers’ struggle on liberating labor worldwide.”299 By comparing the situation of Polish workers with the struggle of workers in right-wing dictatorships like Chile or – until 1975 – Spain, the intellectuals inscribed the Polish experience within a transnational narrative. Chile in particular was an important point of reference for left-wing Western activism.300 After the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, moreover, the KOR intellectuals had to address Western left-wingers who were disillusioned with actually existing state socialism. By associating the Polish workers’ protest with other working-class upheavals against authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, the intellectuals not only universalized the repression to which they were subjected, but also translated the Polish workers’ struggle into a transnationally resonant language, thereby advancing democratic values and rights – in this case, labor rights. In order to illustrate the absence of rights and arbitrary justice in their home country, the “Group of Thirteen” ex-

d2eb14d3283e989d.pdf, accessed March 31, 2023. See also: Hirsch, Bewegungen für Demokratie und Unabhängigkeit in Polen 1976–1980, 44–46.  Denis Sdvižkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz: Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 118.  Stanisław Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich,” Kultura 9 (1976), http://static.kulturaparyska.com/attachments/94/17/9b9e609db613698bdbe280c5d2eb14d3283e989d.pdf, accessed May 12, 2018.  Jan Eckel, “‘Under a Magnifying Glass’: The International Human Rights Campaign against Chile in the Seventies,” in Human rights in the twentieth century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 312–42.

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plained to their Western audience how workers had been sentenced to long prison terms for having participated in the protests.301 The ultimate responsibility for the protests was however ascribed to the authorities, who had destroyed the “basic forms of workers’ democracy” as early as 1956 by “annihilating” the workers’ councils that had been created in the aftermath of the first massive protests in the Polish People’s Republic that same year. The authors of the letter propounded a rights-oriented argument: We believe that the only way to avoid similar dramatic events in the future cannot be repression against the participation of workers in strikes and other manifestations, but to reestablish the rights of those who labor. Polish society’s fight for these rights [. . .] is a fight for democratic socialism, which we understand according to the words of Karl Marx, as the opposite of ‘all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.’302

Explicitly referring to Marx, the thirteen Polish intellectuals differentiated between a democratic socialism respecting citizens’ rights and the existing socialist politics of contemporary Poland that violated them. This clear appeal to Marxism points to another important aspect of opposition within Polish state socialism that was mentioned in the introduction. Being an oppositionist in Poland did not necessarily imply an intention to undermine the entire system. Claudia Kraft was therefore right when she warned of a too dichotomous depiction of state socialist everyday life.303 Where the history of other state socialist countries is concerned, the analytical juxtaposition of categories like ‘protest’ and ‘approval’ would likewise seem to be unduly simplistic, when addressing the “reformulations” of ideological templates that took place “not only in the ‘island-milieus’, but simultaneously in the center of the ‘grey zone’ of the official and semi-official sections of the public sphere.”304 In the letter to the Western intellectuals, the demonstrations of Polish workers, who had primarily protested against the sudden increase in the cost of every-day products, were described as a “society’s fight for rights.” One year after the publication of the Helsinki Final Act, Central and Eastern European oppositionists knew that human rights rhetoric was well suited to resonate with the discourses of Western

 Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich.”  Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich,” 59; Marx’s quote from “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” was translated based on: Karl Marx and Joseph J. O’Malley, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy Of Right’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).  Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation,” 400.  Pavel Kolář, “Langsamer Abschied vom Totalitarismus-Paradigma? Neue tschechische Forschungen zur Geschichte der KPTsch-Diktatur,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung / Journal of East Central European Studies 2 (2006): 273, https://www.zfo-online.de/index.php/zfo/article/ download/2687/2687, accessed April 5, 2023.

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elites.305 As Robert Brier has shown, this was especially true for those “sections in a Western Left seeking an alternative to the discredited ideological blueprints of orthodox Marxism or consensus liberalism.”306 Consequently, the Polish intellectuals stated that the “rights of the working classes constituted an integral part of universal human rights.”307 By referring to “democracy” and “rights” simultaneously, they posited a connection with an international human rights discourse, which was thereby enriched by new regionally connotated meanings. After the Soviet interventions and invasions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also after the atrocities perpetrated in Pinochet’s Chile and Franco’s Spain, Poland should also now be placed in the category of non-democratic, rights-violating countries. This universalization of concrete repression and its translation into a democracy-focused human rights language lent credence to the intellectuals’ concern to render the Polish workers’ struggle readily comprehensible to an international audience. It was an integral part of the Polish (and other Central European) strategy to get support from the West. What were the difference between Western and Central Eastern European approaches to these discourses? The Western European “Second Left” that had re-arranged their ideology after the disillusions of the Prague Spring saw a certain apolitical purity in human rights, by virtue of their “not [being] tied to any specific political project.”308 Socialist Poles, however, did the opposite: they attached human rights to the idea of democratic socialism. In so doing, they included themselves within a transnational community of democratic socialists, which was mirrored in further open letters, such as Kuroń’s letter to Enrico Berlinguer, the head of the Italian Communist Party. Like many other Western communists, Berlinguer had turned towards Eurocommunism, which meant distancing himself from Moscow and embracing democratic elements in his political agenda. This was picked up by Kuroń, who explicitly addressed Berlinguer as both a fellow democrat and a communist: I appeal to you as the head of a workers’ party, as a politician who fights for a socialism in accordance with people’s rights, but also to you as a communist, because in my country, the communists indivisibly hold the power.309

 Moyn, The last Utopia, 136–139.  Robert Brier, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’: East European Dissent and the European Left in the ‘Long 1970s’,” in The ‘Long 1970s’: Human Rights, East-West Détente and Transnational Relations, ed. Poul Villaume and Rasmus Mariager (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 84–93, 86.  Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich,” 59.  Robert Brier, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’”, in The ‘Long 1970s’, 89.  Jacek Kuroń, “List otwarty Jacka Kuronia do Berlinguera,” Kultura 9 (1976): 61, chrome–extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://static.kulturaparyska.com/attachments/94/17/ 9b9e609db613698bdbe280c5d2eb14d3283e989d.pdf, accessed March 31, 2023.

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The letter to Berlinguer is not only an example for the transnational orientation of the Polish opposition, but also an example for the Polish variant of Eurocommunism or, rather, democratic socialism. It also shows how entangled contemporary European history was: Kuroń’s letter was reprinted in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, and caused a press debate in several Italian print publications.310 Kuroń’s letter was not only an expression of a strong feeling of belonging to a European cultural sphere. It was also strategy, clearly expressed through mentioning Berlinguer’s popularity. In the context of demanding a general amnesty for those imprisoned and dismissed after the protests, without clearly using the relevant semantics, freedom of speech was implicitly mentioned: Only a general amnesty for all participants of the demonstrations in June can put an end to the anti-worker terror. In countries, where public opinion is truly independent, it can take up the fight for amnesty. I know that Western Europe counts on your voice, the same is true for the Polish authorities. I appeal to your conscience. May it not be indifferent to that matter.311

In his letter, Kuroń combined two important rhetorical strategies that were designed to convince Berlinguer. First, he appealed to the latter’s pride as a democratic socialist, an ideology that in Kuroń’s perception was harmed by the rights violations of the “communists.” Second, he appealed to Berlinguer’s “conscience,” a concept that had strong Catholic connotations. Even an avowed atheist like Kuroń drew upon the semantic reservoir of Catholicism, a fact that underlines once again how adaptable and open the new communicative style was.312 Left-leaning oppositionists like Lipski, Michnik or Kuroń used the language of human rights when addressing social elites abroad. What had happened in Poland should be of interest not only to those interested in the fate of Polish workers in the mines and factories, but also to those who wanted a better socialism with democratic components or to those who stood up for human rights. However, due to the dominating conflict lines of the Cold War in general and the nationalism and anticommunism of many Central European dissidents, the “Western New Left could be a very problematic audience for East European human rights appeals.”313 The variety of Western or international addressees was broad: in 1977, KOR member Jan Józef Lipski wrote a letter (in German) to UN General Secretary Kurt Wald-

 Andrzej Friszke, “Z ziemi polskiej do włoskiej: List Kuronia do Berlinguera i jego konsekwencje,” in Przystosowanie i opór: Studia z dziejów PRL, ed. Andrzej Friszke (Warszawa: Biblioteka “Więzi,” 2007), 276–83.  Kuroń, “List otwarty Jacka Kuronia do Berlinguera,” 62.  Cf.: Maria Krawczyk, “W co wierzył Jacek Kuroń?,” Więź 664 (2016).  Robert Brier, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’”, in The ‘Long 1970s’, 86.

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heim, who was at that time visiting in Warsaw. Lipski reported the arrests of six workers and five KOR members and asked for Waldheim’s “intervention.” A language of rights was also used here, when Lipski wrote that “these people,” the persecuted workers, would defend their rights or carry out help for persecuted workers.314 After KOR had succeeded in some of its aims, for example by successfully demanding amnesty for the protesting workers of 1976, the group concentrated on larger problems in the area of labor. In the spring of 1977, they organized a workshop-like meeting in Radom for workers that was to serve as a space for political activism and defense from job-related repression. This attempt to get in touch failed, because the workers, according to how the KOR-activists perceived the situation, were overwhelmed by this sudden political agency. Instead, they had expected more concrete suggestions from the KOR activists and more concrete planning. Also, many still remembered the post-strike repressions from 1976 and feared getting politically active again. More successful attempts of ‘talking to each other’ can be traced in the magazine Robotnik (See Figure 2). It was at a meeting in Andrzej Celiński’s Warsaw apartment in summer 1977 where some younger KOR activists discussed new forms, strategies, and rhetoric. Several members of the Polish intellectual opposition were present, including Wojciech Onyszkiewicz, Seweryn Blumsztajn, Ludwika and Henryk Wujec, Helena and Witold Łuczywo, and Joanna Szczęsna. At a certain moment, Onyszkiewicz pushed forward the idea of creating a magazine for workers.315

‘Talking to Each Other’ Through an Underground Magazine The magazine Robotnik had a socialist bias: its authors wrote about labor affairs and other topics from a socialist, but not state-socialist standpoint. Many of its members were sympathizers of the pre-war Polska Partia Socjalistyczna (PPS, “Polish Socialist Party”), led by Józef Piłsudski and the people engaged in its editing process who were closely connected with the Workers’ Defense Committee. Some of them, like the literary scholar Jan Lityński, were members of both groups. The close ties between the two groups are visible on the pages of the magazine. For instance, in the second issue, Robotnik informed its readers about the renaming of the Workers’ Defense Committee KOR into “Committee for Social  Jan J. Lipski, List Jana Józefa Lipskiego do Kurta Waldheima w sprawie udzielenia pomocy represjonowanym uczestnikom czerwcowych protestów oraz członków KOR, July 12, 1977.  Bernhard, The Origins of Democratization in Poland. Workers, Intellectuals, and Oppositional Politics, 1976–1980, 159.

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Fig. 2: Robotnik, September 1977, Fundacja Ośrodka KARTA.

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Self-defense,”316 which showed the broader scope of activities and addressees of those organized in former KOR. It is insofar representative of the Polish opposition as it mirrors the dialogue-orientated left-leaning and conservative intellectual currents on the one side and the bottom-up workers’ perspective directly from the workplaces on the other. In Robotnik, people could find a mixture of diverse topics dealing with political repression, concrete problems or unfair treatment at the workplace. In contrast to official media, in this magazine, workers could read about miners’ strikes in Bolivia317 or Romania,318 about human rights activists in the Soviet Union319 or the activities of Amnesty International320 in the Eastern bloc. They were also informed about the underground academic seminars and lectures in private apartments all over Warsaw321 or could read about peasants’ problems.322 The magazine also served as a platform for reporting strikes all over the country. The topics became even more diverse after the magazine succeeded in recruiting correspondents in Gdańsk, Silesia, and Grudziądz.323 According to the new strategy of open opposition, the editors unveiled their names in each issue of the magazine. Not all articles, however, were signed. Moreover, not all contributors of articles could show their names in public as they feared losing their jobs and falling victim to repression.324

 In its publications, the group appeared as “KSS-KOR,” combining both abbreviations.  Robotnik, March 14, 1978.  Robotnik, December 1977.  Robotnik, December 1977.  Robotnik, June 17, 1978.  Robotnik, April 30, 1979, 2.  Robotnik, April 12, 1978, 2–3.  Anthony Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 219.  The most active workers among the writers were Władysław S. from Gliwice, Leopold G. from Radom, and Edmund Z. from Grudziądz. Even though they did not participate in editorial meetings, they helped to get information and contacts. Among the other editors, the workers’ names were also published on the last page of the magazine, whereby they were integrated into the new oppositional strategy of acting openly and acting together. It turned out later that Leopold G. had been cooperating with the Secret Service after he was threatened and repressed in the aftermath of the Radom riots. He was asked to impede the production and proliferation process of Robotnik, which he partly could fulfil, for instance, by bringing a whole stack of papers directly to the authorities. In the Polish historiography of the Polish opposition before 1989, scholars tend to identify with their studied actors and oftentimes evaluate certain processes normatively or express admiration for certain actions openly. Olaszek, however, writes quite understandingly about Gierek’s involvement with the Secret Service, highlighting the high level of repression he had been exposed to. See: Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 80.

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The magazine was not only produced by those authors whose names are partly visible on its pages. The whole process of organizing paper and printing without proper tools in basements or private apartments involved the work of many people. Many of them were women, even if the articles were written predominantly by men. In terms of physical quality, the magazine started very poorly but improved over the months. Most of the issues of the biweekly magazine (sometimes it was published with a lesser frequency due to political repression or infrastructural problems) consisted of four pages. The first issue had a print run of 400 and was produced in the “NOW-a” samizdat printing plant.325 But after the printing techniques had been professionalized, the print run expanded to between 10,000 and 20,000 copies. It has been estimated that each copy was read by three to five individuals, i.e. each copy could reach up to 100,000 people. In the pre-Solidarność years, it became the most read samizdat magazine all over Poland, even though its authors were not even among the most popular oppositional publicists of the country.326 Most exemplars were distributed at the cities of the Baltic shore, namely in Gdańsk and Szczecin. The idea of creating structures and institutions of self-defense (samoobrona) was central in Robotnik. Not only different social strata but also workers themselves were neither in touch with colleagues in other places nor used to selforganization.327 This core concept as a reaction to the state’s failures was detailed in the opening declaration of the magazine, together with further visions: Robotnik is a magazine, in which workers will be able to publish their independent opinion, exchange experiences and establish contact with workers of other factories. The goals that Robotnik set themselves, are to support actions aiming at: the solidarity in defense of work-

 NOW-a is short for Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, in English: “Independent Publishing Office,” NOW-a was Poland’s biggest samizdat publishing institution. It underheld close ties with the KOR milieu.  Matt Killingsworth, Civil Society in Communist Eastern Europe: Opposition and Dissent in Totalitarian Regimes (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2012), 126. The distribution of an underground magazine was only possible through the cooperation of the readers. In every single issue on the bottom of the last page, readers were asked to distribute and share their issue. After the establishment of a workers’ fund, it was enriched by a listing of (partly anonymous) people who had contributed. This fund did not only finance the publishing of the magazine, but was used to support repressed workers, the original task of KOR.  Polish workers had tried to establish forms of self-organization, for instance in the form of workers’ councils, already in the destalinization period, but they eventually merged with stateorganized structures. See: Zvi Gitelman, “The Limits of Organization and Enthusiasm. The Double Failure of the Solidarity Movement and the Polish United Workers’ Party,” in When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations, ed. Kay Lawson and P. H. Merkl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 421–46.

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ers’ interests, the increase of workers’ participation in negotiations of wages, working hours and working conditions, social conditions and housing, the support of independent workers’ representation [and] the support of independent workers’ representations, which should replace the current ‘dead’ institutions provided by the state.328

The new pluralistic rhetoric is dominant in this opening section. Workers were to change their way of dealing with problems and make them public by stepping out of their individual space of experience and sharing it with others that might live far away. They were to be able to express their opinion independently, whereby Robotnik subtly connected the issue of freedom of speech and labor rights. It was not only the repression and violence, it was also the aforementioned discrepancy between constitutional rhetoric and workers’ real experiences that evoked protest – especially since the official trade unions had “remained silent”329 after the repression against striking workers and thereby refused to take on a core task of unions. Also, compared with other publications of the rich Polish samizdat, Robotnik was unique because it had a relatively big circle of readers outside the traditional oppositional milieus and was read by the workers in the factories and became relatively popular over time.330 Unlike other magazines that addressed an intellectual audience, including the tamizdat magazine Kultura from Paris, Robotnik’s main target group was workers. As the core idea of Robotnik was motivating them to act, the robotnicy (workers) were invited to contribute articles, publish “independent opinions,” and exchange experiences.331 The magazine, thus, consisted of articles for the workers on the one hand and of those ones written by workers on the other.332 It was already in the very first issue that such a “different language for those who would dissent from the regime [. . .]”333 was presented to the workers. They, as many other Poles, had so far been exposed to official press publications that provided one single view and that certainly did not invite its readers to express their own standpoint. Jan Olaszek argued that the magazine played a major role in the shaping of oppositional standpoints in working-class milieus, even if most members of KOR considered commissions and not trade

 Robotnik, September 1977. See Fig. 2.  Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West, 71.  Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism, 219.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 68–70.  However, most of the articles were not written by the workers, but by activists with an academic background.  Tony Judt, “Radical Politics in a New Key?,” Northwestern University Law Review 4 (1987): 120.

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unions as the most efficient forms of self-management.334 This was part of their conviction to make use of existing structures, which can also be found in Jacek Kuroń’s appeal to create committees, not destroy them.335 The organizing principle was that Robotnik should have it all: it should be easy to read by people who were not passionate readers but was to be a highquality magazine that was well researched and edited. Most importantly, it was to empower workers politically and trigger the creation of a socially heterogeneous movement, as can be seen in the very first issue:336 In the history of postwar Poland, there were numerous attempts at organized resistance against the government’s conduct. However, different social groups acted separately. Examples that ended in defeat were the students’ protest in March 68, the passive attitude of the intelligent milieus during the workers’ rebellion in December 70. We partly broke through the lack of solidarity after June ’76. We want our common effort to initiate a cooperation in realizing [our] aspirations towards a just and independent Poland.337

This passage, written almost exclusively in main clauses, shows how the intellectuals tried to find a language in which they would be understood by the workers. Moreover, they took the blame for the lack of communication and solidarity between each other in the past, thereby reaching out to bridge the gap between the intelligentsia and the people.338 Reports about bad working conditions and unjust treatment at the workplace were explained in the light of wider questions of economy, politics, and rights. At the same time, the magazine offered an attractive alternative by creating an increasingly widening public space apart from the

 Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 81.  See: Jacek Kuroń, “Zamiast palić komitety zakładaj własne!,” Wolność i Solidarność 2 (2011).  The title of the magazine was already quite ambitious as it was identical to the Polish Socialist Party’s publication from before World War II, led by Józef Piłsudski. The KOR activists wanted their magazine to be as successful and popular among workers as its predecessor had been in the interwar period, but also during German occupation when it had already been published underground. See: Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 72.  Robotnik, September 1977; Olaszek pointed out that the editors argued about whether to include the formulation of an “independent Poland,” as some parts of the editorial board were convinced it would harm the strictly unemotional character of the paper. As can be seen, the advocates of mentioning the issue of independence succeeded eventually.  Hella Dietz argues that there were diverse reasons for the lack of support for the workers in 1970/71: firstly, the intellectuals were irritated by how the workers had been allowed to be instrumentalized in the course of the anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaigns of the government in 1968 and secondly, many intellectuals who had been arrested in the aftermath of 1968 had just left prison and were convinced that their ideas of reform communism were doomed to fail just like any other measure of resistance or opposition to the government. Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 153.

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state. This started by openly propagating an opposition in the first months and entailed concrete empowering strategies on how to organize and defend oneself over the next two years. Workers sent in reports about repression and problems. They were either reprinted or rephrased by the editorial team of Robotnik. The magazine had therefore a pivotal function between different social strata. It has been shown that the intellectuals associated with KOR used a human rights rhetoric when addressing Western intellectuals and a wider Western public. But did they also use such a language when talking to their fellow citizens and workers? Considering the broader research debate on the periodization of human rights and its special emphasis on the 1970s, the question is not whether human rights were a salient concept or not in this period.339 They were of course an important political and moral reference of this period and continued to be one ever since. The question is rather how situations in which international human rights and labor rights were harmed were addressed rhetorically. The following section thus addresses the question of in which contexts a language of rights was used or if other concepts dominated the discourse, that, after all, was meant to empower workers politically.

Everyday Struggle and Obvious Necessities Against the backdrop of numerous defamatory campaigns against protesting citizens and the palliative misinformation about the economic situation of the country, Robotnik’s editors claimed to report “the truth in opposite to the state propaganda.”340 In so doing, they opened a new space of communication. “It was there that the anonymous, impersonal and ‘institutional’ way of speaking was replaced by concrete, individual and distinct voices,” the sociologist Elżbieta Matynia wrote about the magazine.341 In this context, the individual stories by workers were of particular relevance – having in mind the above quoted introductory words from the first issue, these stories were simultaneously morally ennobled as “true.” Workers were asked to provide information directly from their workplaces and share their experiences, which was a truly new way of communicating in media and at the same time a democratically inspired rhetoric in the sense of “every voice deserves to be heard.” At the same time, this strategy brought a claim of authenticity in direct opposition to state media. In contrast to official  Moyn, The last Utopia.  Robotnik, September 1977, 1.  Elzbieta Matynia, “1989 and the Politics of Democratic Performativity,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3 (2009): 265.

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press publications, in Robotnik, people could read about concrete problems in different factories or in the everyday life of the Polish working class and were presented with a different narrative of Polish industry and economy. In this context, wider economic and political problems were discussed: “In ‘Robotnik’, we oftentimes cleared up what was going on in the economy – people were interested in that. We had to explain to them, why the situation was so bad,” Irena Wóycicka, a member of the editorial board, said.342 In its first months of existence, Robotnik’s main emphasis was on individual stories from factories. Any seemingly small incident of unjust treatment was placed within a broader socio-economic background analysis, such as the problem of unpaid overtime or (spontaneous) wage cuts. This was especially true for the period until late 1979, when the issue of strikes started to dominate the pages of the magazine. Most reports from the factories and mines showed a repetitive pattern of delegating responsibility from higher ranks to the lower ones. Workers described how they had to work longer than usual, how they had to recoup for lack of material or instruments or how they had to step in when the factory lacked enough employees. They sent in individual stories describing unpaid overtime, wage cuts, arbitrary dismissals, and other desperate measures to fulfil the plan, but also catastrophic hygienic conditions and problematic situations that the management put workers into. Often, workers asked for help directly. For example, in November 1977, only two months after its first issue, Robotnik published a “letter from Radom,” written by Wiesław K., a worker from the “Radoskóra” leather industry plant.343 The reprint of the letter written by a group of workers from the central Polish town that had been one of the centers of the 1976 riots shows how quickly Robotnik managed to become important in Polish factories.344 In the next issue, in the name of his colleagues, Wiesław K. wrote about how the factory leadership had imposed a new regulation that required one week of two 12-hour shifts per day as a consequence of not having met the aims of the production plan for the preceding quarter.345 The worker wrote that it was the factory’s “fault” that this had happened, as they had been lacking some essential tools needed for the production of leather

 Andrzej Friszke, ed., Przystosowanie i opór: Studia z dziejów PRL (Warszawa: Biblioteka “Więzi,” 2007), 286. See also: Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy.  Robotnik, November 1977.  The magazine, however, covered the case already before and had reported how workers in Radom had not had any Saturday free from work for over a year. Robotnik, October 1977.  To clarify: these two daily 12-hour shifts would be divided between different groups of workers.

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shoes.346 Therefore, they could not produce enough and, as there was nothing to do, the workers decided to go home. But management exerted pressure on the workers by threatening them with penal dismissals, meaning the staff was forced to agree to stay longer. Eventually, the gates of the factory were closed at night to prevent the employees from leaving factory territory. “[B]ecause of the protests of the workers, the management had to capitulate,” Wiesław K. said, summing up the events. The authors of the letter closed with an appeal to KOR to defend the workers involved. It becomes obvious in this context that the strategy to establish a new space of communication had been relatively successful, especially against the backdrop of the “[. . .] social conservatism of the blue-collar proletariat [that] made nonsense of the traditional claims of radical politics [. . .],”347 and therefore might have rejected forms of opposition that exceeded the workspace. Relatively quickly, an alternative public sphere had been created through Robotnik, despite censorship and repression. Other workers who may have experienced similar situations began to realize that their experiences were not unique, but rather symptoms of a structural problem. Apart from publishing the letter, Robotnik reacted to this case by referring to the Polish Penal Code and reminded their readers that working hours must not be extended more than 12-hours more than once a week by law. Accordingly, Helga Hirsch argued: The deprivation of the rights of Polish society was a double one: on the one hand, it was deprived of fundamental human and civil rights, and on the other, even rights enshrined in law offered no protection against attacks by state bodies.348

Having established an alternative space of communication in form of the samizdat, democratic activists could ironically point out the violations of Polish labor law: The question arises, whether the articles in the Labor Code oblige workers and the management of factories equally, or whether the management can go and choose convenient articles and throw out the inconvenient ones.349

This ironic tone, as well as juxtaposing concrete rights violations with national legislation, was typical of Robotnik. In the previous issue,350 the magazine had published a formal example of how workers could formulate an objection against

    

Robotnik, November 1977. Judt, “Radical Politics in a New Key?,” 118. Hirsch, Bewegungen für Demokratie und Unabhängigkeit in Polen 1976–1980, 55. Robotnik, November 1977. Robotnik, October 1977.

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being released and thereby referred to the Polish labor legislation as the “graceful and mighty” Labor Code.351 Just like in the “Radoskóra” case, threats of dismissals or dismissals themselves were commonly used as leverage by management. Dismissals were also used to save money, as unemployed citizens did not cost the state any welfare expenses. Since in a socialist state “there neither can be nor is any unemployment [. . .], there neither are nor can be, correspondingly, any unemployment benefits for workers who lost their jobs.”352 Nevertheless, the magazine pointed out that in the economic crisis the government faced and interpreted the dismissals as an act of despair, just like the withholding of payments to workers of the Gliwice coal mine.353 Rather than reading about the “systematic evil,” as Andrzej Friszke viewed it,354 in Robotnik, people were presented with examples that together showed a mosaic of systematic failure of their state. Some months later, in early spring 1978,355 Robotnik published an article about recent events at “Olimpia” shirts factory in Łódź.356 The article described how staff had to come to work on a free Saturday and “instead of taking a rest, was chasing the plan.”357 At a time when the factory lacked employees, it had received the order to produce more shirts, which, in the first place, led to higher wages for those employees who subsequently had to work “for two or three people.” These shirts passed the internal control mechanisms even though they did not meet quality standards. However, due to their poor quality, they were rejected by the Canadian client who had ordered them in the first place. In order to make up for the losses in production, the wages of the women went significantly reduced, and free Saturdays were cut out entirely. The article continued with an open question: “Who is guilty of this?” Jacek Kuroń, the intellectual, who himself was one of the dominant representatives of an anti-totalitarian democratic leftism, embedded the concrete situation in a broader socio-economic setting.358 At the same time, just like Wiesław K., the

 Orig.: „Miłościwie nam panujący kodeks karny.”  Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West, 75.  Gliwice is simultaneously the name of the Silesian city where the mine was located.  Friszke, Przystosowanie i opór; Andrzej Friszke, Robotnik 1977–1981: Unpublished Manuscript (not dated).  The authors of the issue dated it wrong; they wrote “1977” on the cover page. I suppose that this is an example of the very common habit to stick with the date of the previous year even though the new year has already proceeded. I don’t see a strategic purpose in this context.  The author was probably Jacek Kuroń, as the text was signed with the initials “J.K.”  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977).  Cf.: Paweł Śpiewak, Anti-Totalitarismus. Eine polnische Debatte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).

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author of the “Letter from Radom,” he used moralist rhetoric when he asked about “guilt.” What Małgorzata Mazurek stated for the 1950s and 1960s is also true for Polish labor in the 1970s, only that the scientific experts were joined by autodidactic intellectuals and that the arenas of debates were expanded through the samizdat: Labor as a political category in the ‘post-thaw’ People’s Republic of Poland was as much an imposed and top-down propaganda and party project as it was the subject of negotiation between party ideologues, socialist production managers, employees and scientific experts.359

Kuroń, the pedagogue, identified the planned economy as the root of the problem as every individual was eager to get bonuses and delegated possible problems to a lower level of responsivity. Everyone from the top to the bottom wants to earn more and be in accordance with their superiors, but this does not depend on whether you do good work, or whether you produce what is necessary, but on the fulfilment of the plan.360

Kuroń depicted the system as one that hindered “moral behavior,” because no one was really interested in a positive outcome for the society, but rather in their individual situation. In this context, Tilly’s analysis of workers under capitalism comes into mind, where Charles and Chris Tilly identified a tendency to connect labor conflicts to rights and morality: “Workers and capitalists alike commonly embed their preferred configurations in stories connecting the history of their relations with rights, justice, and moral obligations.”361 Not surprisingly, connecting labor and morale was not a privilege of capitalist societies but even more so a strong narrative in Polish state socialism, as will be shown in the following. When commenting on the case in the Olimipia factory, Kuroń framed the actions of people in moral terms: Healthy conditions in the economy and the society should be constructed in such a way that every human being guided by the will to earn a living and the perspective of a forthcoming reward can simultaneously act morally.362

 Małgorzata Mazurek, “W służbie przemysłu? Socjologowie w zakładach pracy w PRL (1956–1970),” in Socjalizm w życiu powszednim: Dyktatura a społeczeństwo w NRD i PRL, ed. Sandrine Kott, Marcin Kula, and Thomas Lindenberger, W krainie PRL / W krainie KDL (Warszawa: Trio, 2006), 25–37, 25.  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977), 2.  Tilly and Tilly, Work under capitalism, 235.  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977), 2.

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Acting “morally” in this context can be interpreted as acting in a way that the whole society could benefit, whereas immoral behavior would only help the individual themselves. Since the 1950s, morality and labor had been often combined in official party rhetoric and in speeches by the First Party Secretary, Władysław Gomułka. He had appealed to workers as consumers, criticizing alcoholism at work and the wasting of private means that, for instance, should be saved to buy an apartment. Wasting private goods was projected onto the behavior in workplaces, i.e. it was suggested that people who wasted their own money and thereby withheld it from their families simultaneously wasted time and materials at work.363 To a certain degree, Kuroń, the democratic socialist, adopted this rhetoric. Yet in opposition to state socialist rhetoric, he identified the structures as the problem, not a lack of predisposition towards morality among workers. On the contrary, according to Kuroń, in the current “unhealthy” system workers were forced to make “daily sacrifices” that were a result of their own “diligent conscientiousness” (“pracowita sumienność”). They had to decide between their own well-being and the public good. What started as a description of unpaid overtime turned into a morally framed examination of the entire economy, inviting readers to get into the minds of their superiors, who, just like them, were depicted as being trapped in the same situation as everybody else. Kuroń was able to connect this discourse to official doctrines, through slightly changing their orientation. Without alluding to an explicitly legal context, it was in the very last sentence of the article that Kuroń wrote about rights. In an almost cautious way, he wrote that workers had “every right” to demand working conditions that did not force them to choose between the individual and the public good. However, this “right” remained abstract; it was not connected to any existing rights and it remained in the moral realm, without transcending towards a legal one. Kuroń depicted a vision in which the public good goes hand in hand with individual advancement, but he did not mention the concept of ‘justice’ circumventing the question of who is guilty. What role did ‘rights’ play in this context? In this article, ‘rights’ did not appear as a tool of individual empowerment, and they were not integrated into a narrative of upheaval or protest. In Kuroń’s analysis, rights did not derive from any concrete legal context, but were framed in moral terms, as their main function in this text was to point out to a moral dilemma. The statement about people having “the right to demand” other work conditions was not linked to any labor legislation, nor did it refer to other legal documents, national or international ones. Under such logic, ‘rights’ do not exist independently, but function in relation

 Małgorzata Mazurek, “W służbie przemysłu?” in Socjalizm w życiu powszednim, 28.

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to other higher values, i.e. ‘morality.’ The convergence of vocabularies that has been identified with regard to international human rights becoming a “lingua franca”364 of international activism in the 1970s, hence, was a broader phenomenon. Hoffmann was therefore right when he argued that “[i]n the 1970s and 1980s ‘human rights’ coexisted and overlapped with other moral and political idioms [. . .] and included competing notions of rights [. . .].”365 Without democratic structures that would enable morally better behavior, and without the possibility of participation in decision-making processes, it made no sense in this very context to refer to rights alone. They had to be embedded in a broader set of values in order to gain momentum. The entire situation of the workers was not described as a violation of rights, but as an overstraining of the management that resulted from defective structures. Shifting the burden of workload and unfulfilled plans onto workers themselves was a major problem in Polish factories. Passing on responsibility was not only tied to the impossibilities of meeting the plan. In their letters to the editors, workers often complained that sticking to the rules was impossible since they sometimes contradicted each other. One example of Polish workers facing dilemmas was outlined in early 1978 in an article for Robotnik.366 In the Silesian town of Gliwice, employees of the transportation agency had been unable to attend compulsory medical examinations. The appointments overlapped with working hours due to overtime at the company. However, management reacted by cutting the bonuses for employees for not fulfilling the medical examination requirement. The employees later sent a common letter to the management asking for the return of their bonuses and suggested holding medical examinations in accordance with the employees’ schedule, even before the beginning of shifts at six o’clock in the morning. The affected workers reported that the director of the company suggested that workers get an appointment during their own leave. In Robotnik’s section called “The broken paragraph” the case was immediately confronted with Art. 261 of the Polish Labor Code. After quoting some of the “broken” paragraphs, the authors explained them in their own words to their readers: Thus, in order to be in accordance with the Labor Code, the management [. . .] in Gliwice should have either adapted the working hours of the workers, so that they could take care of the indispensable examinations or enabled them to carry them out during working hours. In this context, the question arises, whether the right people were punished by the

 Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” 458.  Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” 282.  Robotnik, January 15, 1978.

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deduction of bonuses? And yet another clarification for the director of PTHW367 in Gliwice: Holidays [in Polish language, it entails the word “relaxing”, AD], as the name already suggests, serve for relaxing and not for carrying out matters that serve the management’s convenience.368

The Polish Labor Code was the main argument against the unlawful treatment in this context. Workers were furnished with legal arguments that they would be able to push forward in any follow-up conflict. The use of the word “punish” equals a moral framing, which is also connected to a wider, social responsibility that Robotnik taught their readers. The magazine pushed forward collective social arguments in contrast to individual ones. The entire story took a surprising turn some months later: the workers from Gliwice, whose story had been published in January, wrote a letter in May 1978 – but this time the addressee of their complaint was the magazine itself: In issue no. 9 you wrote about overtime hours at the Company for Inner Transport in Gliwice [the afore-mentioned PTHW, AD]. The result is, that now, they took away the overtime hours from us and thus, we now earn a lot less. Robotnik should defend us, not lower our wages . . . 369

In accordance with their dialogue-orientated approach, Robotnik printed the letter and used it to explain their view on the issue of overtime. They argued that readers who may have thought they were benefiting from overtime financially and individually should learn that these extra hours were a key problem in labor harming workers’ interests, strengthening their dependence on management and destroying the economy. The identification of a stronger dependence on the employer seems to be derived from Marxist thought, as “the specific form in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship between those who dominate and those who are in subjection [. . .].”370 Again, an individual “immoral” behavior was juxtaposed with collective benefit – in a mix of colloquial and easy-to-understand language: In your letter, Sir, you touch two problems: working extra hours and the defense of workers’ interests. The income deriving from extra hours is an important element in the pay of

 PTHW: Przedsiębiorstwo Transportowe Handlu Wewnętrznego; abbreviation for the “Domestic Trade Transport Company.”  Robotnik, January 15, 1978.  Robotnik, May 31, 1978.  The quote was translated on the basis of: Stanley Aronowitz, The politics of identity: Class, culture, social movements (London: Routledge, 1992), 19; Piotr Filipkowski, who conducted oral history interviews with former workers, ca. in 2016, underlined in a private conversation how popular additional hours were among workers as they secured higher salaries, AD.

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many workers. There are companies, where, given the low wages, only 10–12 hours work allows one to make a living. In others chaos and constant standstills bring about a situation where one can only fulfil the plan by working more than a dozen hours at the end of the month or the quarter. There are three reasons why such a status is unacceptable. Firstly, constant extra hours constitute a hidden form of evading the constitutionally guaranteed eight-hour day, fought for by generations of workers. Secondly, working extra hours makes one dependent on the authorities, according to the motto: ‘Sit quietly, then we will give you a salary.’ Thirdly at last the general overtime work consolidates the chaos in the economy and demoralizes the workers, who oftentimes put off work to extra hours that could be done during a working day. This causes higher salaries, but in sum it brings serious social damage. Thus, we think that everywhere, where extra hours are a constant practice, workers should strive for their reduction without a lowering of wages.371

In this explanation, the problem of overtime is presented as a violation of hardwon workers’ rights and at the same time as a violation of the Polish constitution that guaranteed these rights. The legal framing has an interesting function in relation to other arguments: the constitutionally guaranteed eight-hour day is not the only argument but is embedded in a list of reasons of why overtime is not only illegal but also harmful. The second argument is the workers’ dependence on the management caused by the increase in working hours, as management could use bonus payments as a bargaining chip. Finally, by again alluding to state socialist wording, overtime constituted a threat to the workers’ “morale,” because they would misuse them as a possibility to work more slowly in order to add bonus payments for overtime to their salaries. Clearly, the letter appealed to higher values such as the common good of the society. The common good was contrasted with the individual benefit, a model of thinking that was also used in state socialist citizens’ education. Surveys conducted during state socialism showed that Polish citizens regarded their own society as not equal enough, whereby they had a positive conception of equality.372 Many Polish citizens were positive about the concept of the society as a whole and the state in particular fighting inequality, providing every citizen the infrastructure they needed for developing their potential. They believed that the state and the society were responsible for ensuring people’s basic needs, a model that they equated with socialism. Nevertheless, Poles did not identify with “Marxism” too much: [People] [. . .] were in favor of ‘the Polish road to socialism.’ This meant democratizing the political system, removing the most drastic limitations on citizens’ rights and the major sources of their fear, promoting freedom of speech and expression, increasing the influence

 Robotnik, May 31, 1978 [emphasis in original, AD].  See: Małgorzata Mazurek, “W służbie przemysłu?” in Socjalizm w życiu powszednim.

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of people on the government and [. . .] encouraging the participation of workers’ councils in the management of factories.373

Keeping in mind the strong anti-communist image of Eastern and Central European dissidents and oppositionists, these observations depict a rather differentiated image. Even though many Poles were unhappy with their government, their mindset was not genuinely anti-socialist. By the 1970s, many of them had mostly been socialized in times of state socialism. In view of the allegedly dominating role of global human rights for empowerment discourses of the 1970s, the situation is more nuanced here: rather than criticizing rights violations, Robotnik explained why these rights not only favored the workers, but how it caused “social damage” that they were not respected. This way, the text referred to the “demoralizing” effects of extra hours and therefore subtly alluded to the official doctrine: the question of demoralized workers was an often-raised issue in the rhetoric of the state authorities, for instance in the context of workers consuming alcoholic beverages (mostly vodka) in the workplace.374 But in contrast to Robotnik, the Polish government moralized about labor in a paternalistic way: any deviance from the economic plan could be interpreted as a refusal to contribute positively to the advancement of the national economy and Poland’s cultural growth. Kuroń’s article, however, closed with an appeal to protest against overtime and to contribute to the reduction of hours. The article hence combined two main objectives: empowering workers politically, and shifting their attention from the individual towards the collective – a tendency that would later become even more tangible when the magazine fostered solidarity among workers more explicitly.375 In June 1975, the magazine presented a case where miners in the Silesian town of Jastrzębie had gone on strike to protest overtime on Sundays and holidays.376 The situation had escalated when workers learned that they had to work an additional twelve hours the following Saturday. What is more, their official union’s representative claimed that he could not do anything about it as the issue was the management’s responsibility. Robotnik’s article highlighted some angry voices raised during the meeting: “What is your purpose in this council?”, “To sit around and to take the money?”, “Is this slavery and we are white negroes [sic!]?”, “Our fathers fought for the eight-hour workday,

   

Stefan Nowak, “Values and Attitudes of the Polish People,” Scientific American 245 (1981): 49. Małgorzata Mazurek, “W służbie przemysłu?” in Socjalizm w życiu powszednim. See next section of this chapter. Robotnik, June 25, 1978.

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not the twelve-hour workday”, “We are so tired already that we can hardly manage with an eight-hour workday. [. . .]”377

The workers who yelled at their official representative clearly depicted the imposed additional hours as a rights violation. On the one hand, they compared themselves to slaves – a metaphor that stands more than many others for the lack of rights and deprivation, but was also morally disavowed in state socialist countries that officially supported decolonization dynamics in the Global South.378 On the other, they referred to the history of the workers’ movements and their achievements in the legal sphere, i.e. the eight-hour workday as a labor right.379 The question of how repression was addressed and which role the language of rights played in that context seems to be connected to the social roles of speakers and audiences. When directing a claim towards their own management, workers described their situation by referring to human rights semantics. When, however, intellectuals tried to explain the context of concrete repressive situations to workers themselves, they rarely described these as rights violations, as this would not have helped the workers. They did not need to understand that what had happened to them was wrong, but they wanted to know why the government acted wrongly and what they could do to fight it. Apart from working extra hours, occupational safety and hygiene were major problems in Polish factories and, even more often, in Polish mines. Here too responsibility was shifted from higher to lower ranks, oftentimes directly to the victims of accidents. Robotnik dedicated many articles to the problem and provided numerous drastic examples, often focusing on female workers.380 In December 1977, Robotnik published a longer piece about “Safety and Hygiene at the Workplace,” writing about women in a match factory who had to touch the highly flammable materials with their bare hands. “Some women” had died in one single accident.381 In October 1979, an article depicting the disastrous conditions in the pharmaceuti-

 Robotnik, June 25, 1978.  Not only was slavery officially considered a historical injustice, but the countries of the Warsaw Pact were geopolitically affiliated with many post–colonial countries as opposed to the “imperialist West,” which had a strong impact on their human rights policies. See, for instance, Sebastian Gehrig’s study on the GDR, Legal Entanglements. Law, Rights and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021).  It remains unclear whether they referred to an international workers’ tradition or to those who had been engaged in such a movement in the regions that were now Poland. On the achievement of the eight-hour-workday in a global context, see: Lucassen, The Story of Work, 369.  Cf. the analysis of gender roles in the state socialist Polish labor context in the earlier period of the PPR: Fidelis, Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland.  Robotnik, December 15, 1977.

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cal branch was published, calling the machines “Eighteenth century-like” and describing the women’s hard situation. The women stood all day long in ankle-deep water mixed with blood and worked with dirty hands in a dirty environment.382 This kind of work was typical of the Polish labor market and the role it ascribed to women; they oftentimes worked in menial positions, supervised by male superiors. The dangerous situation for the female workers is yet another symptom of how disadvantaged women’s jobs oftentimes were, even if they were much higher represented in the workforce than in Western countries.383 Working in mines or shipyards was especially dangerous: Poland faced several lethal accidents during this period. Apart from single-casualty accidents, in 1980, an explosion at “North Shipyard” in Gdańsk killed eigthteen people, and accidents in mines affected the Silesian region. Robotnik reported twenty-three miner deaths in 1979 there alone.384 The accidents were predominantly caused by a lack of occupational safety. Robotnik reported on the accidents, listed the possible reasons for the catastrophes, and revealed and criticized the authorities’ coverup tactics: In Poland, approximately every 50th worker falls victim of an accident at the workplace. This is what official statistics say. From the daily practice it is well known, that this data does not entail the numerous little accidents, whose concealment lies in the interest of the management and the supervisors. To set the accident’s causes is an obligation of the team composed of the company’s director or the head of the department, one staff member of the health and safety at work dept., and – as a workers’ counsellor – a social work inspector or a representative of the employee representative committee [. . .] Studies conducted by the Central Council of Trade Unions in 600 factories show, that in practice, the issue is taken care of by the health and safety dept. member, who does not exert himself to timeconsuming accessing and interrogating of the witnesses, records what he considers applicable, and the rest of the staff signs. Studies show, that in 10 per cent of the cases the staff unlawfully deprived the casualty of benefits, arguing that there had not been an accident or that it happened through the workers’ fault. [. . .]”385

In the text, even more cases were listed showing how workers were made responsible for accidents that happened to them and how staff shifted the responsibility for accidents to the victims. This reminds one of Robotnik’s initial commitment to “telling the truth,”386 as a counter-measure to the lies of the authorities and the management at the factories:

    

Robotnik, October 2, 1979. Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” 29. As reported, for instance in: Robotnik, June 11, 1980. Robotnik, June 30, 1980. Robotnik, January 1, 1978. Robotnik, September 1977.

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Trade union representatives nod in agreement with judgments that disadvantage those who they are actually supposed to defend. The Polish Labor Code is violated, and there is no one there to enforce it.387

The editors of the magazine showed how the lack of functioning structures enabled the ongoing dangerous situations, as no one felt obliged to prevent further damage. More importantly, it targeted the official trade union representatives, arguing that they were not doing their job properly. In such a dysfunctional setting, ‘rights’ lacked power. Even national labor legislation, i.e. the Labor Code, was not enforced. Some weeks later, Robotnik juxtaposed theoretically existing laws with real life situations to show the discrepancy between the two. The authors had found out that only 30–50 percent of the required safety clothing had reached the companies, thereby going against national legislation that obliged companies to provide safety clothing and other safety tools for free. Keeping in mind the political milieu that Robotnik was rooted in, Polish interwar socialist thought, it is noteworthy that the editors ironically picked up the official “socialist” ideology of the Polish People’s Republic and implied that it did not do justice to its name by using quotation marks: This image all gives the lie to the official optimism of the authorities as well as to the theory of the special health care for workers in the ‘socialist system.’388

It was typical of Robotnik to provide concrete examples or individual stories, such as the drastic report from the pharmaceutical company, and to contextualize these reports either with national legislation and/ or the structures lying beneath the problem. In so doing, Robotnik repeatedly constructed a triangle consisting of the concrete case, the national legislation, and the political system. The main narrative, whether it came to unpaid overtime or the lack of hygiene, was that there were laws to protect workers, but that workers were not really powerful in an “unhealthy” system that lacked moral attitudes among those in charge and those exercising social control. Consequently, Robotnik offered an alternative: the workers should take over certain tasks themselves and thereby infiltrate the system from below. Yet many editors working for Robotnik were skeptical about implementing free and independent trade unions – they favored a system of making use of the existing structures and wanted to convince workers to establish structures of workers’ self-management and to organize themselves:389

 Robotnik, January 1, 1978.  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977).  Holzer, ‘Solidarność’ 1980–1981, 83.

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The fight against dangers to life and limb is one of the basic obligations of trade unions. In the PPR, they do not fulfil this obligation, as they serve the administration, not the workers. [. . .] In this situation, the workers themselves must exert influence on the improvement of safety and hygiene at the workplace. If a group of workers annoyed by the damaging conditions steps out in order to change them, the management will have to deal with this. At the moment, the opportunity arises, because in March and April the annual inspections of working conditions will take place. Workers should elect representatives, commissions, who would take part in the inspections at the same time representing the interests of the staff. [. . .] It is important, that the commissions actually represent the workers and are not yet another formal union organ.390

In this context, it is important to point out that many articles in Robotnik resembled a specific view of the society and its political potential that was popular among the Polish intelligentsia, later also perpetuated by the very much entangled historiography of this period and their protagonists. Even though this is not a study assessing the question of main agency or which social group should lay claim about the roots of the democratic revolution of the 1980s, such questions do arise at the margin when analyzing the role of Robotnik as a “broker”391 of rights and other normative concepts. Having this in mind, social historical research has underlined that workers had become politically active and organized themselves without any other social groups’ support in the past. Laba argued that the “main characteristics of Solidarity, its master frames were created autonomously by Polish workers six years before the creation of KOR and ten years before the rise of Solidarity.”392 This can be seen when considering the 1950s sit-down strikes, inter-factory strike committees, and the demands for free and independent trade unions. However, workers also had bad experiences in the past, not only with violent reactions to their attempts at democratizing their workplaces but also with regard to the party-state taking over efforts to do so from within.393 In early 1979, Robotnik editors wrote about how many reports about striking staff they received. They ended the list with an announcement about further help and included an appeal to their readers to send in information about strikes. The editors published their addresses and telephone numbers, as they did in almost all issues before where they asked for information from their readers.394 This time, however, they openly used the wording “free trade unions” and not only workers’

 Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977).  Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.”  Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization, 11.  Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization, 103.  Robotnik, January 4, 1979.

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representatives. They summed up that every “workers’ appearance” had had a “claiming character,” but that in their claims they never pushed forward new ideas or demands, but rather tried to defend their vested rights (“bronić stan posiadania”).395 According to the editors of the magazine, the short-sighted strikes were unsuitable as a regular instrument of protest, because they “did not take long.” Even if they were successful and, for instance, free Saturdays were reinstated by management, Robotnik characterized these measures as short-sighted. In Robotnik, such commentaries were always enriched by examples and explanations. Through the expression “to the discontent of the workers,” for instance, Robotnik cleared up that these agreements might entail paying bonuses instead of a higher salary which – in the end – did not provide any long-term guarantees. Even worse, after a certain time, workers active in the strikes were exposed to repression at the workplace and lacked their colleagues’ solidarity when, for instance, they were fired or transferred to worse work stations. Consequently, after identifying two main defects within the ongoing strategies of protest, they concluded: [. . .] Therefore, permanent forms of workers’ self-organizing, e.g. in Strike or Workers’ Committees or Free Trade Unions state an obvious necessity. They would represent the workers in the talks with the management, would take care of the strengthening of the rights that have been fought for by the staff, they would organize the defense of the repressed. KSS ‘KOR’ and the editorial board of the Robotnik inform that they provide and will provide help for the persecuted workers’ activists. [. . .]396

This support entailed legal advice and support as well as financial support in cases of dismissals out of the workers’ fund that the editors had founded.397 This call to action, moreover, reminds one of Tony Judt’s analysis on how the “strategy of the new opposition in Poland was not to advise the government on how to govern, but to advise the nation how to live.”398 When reading Robotnik regularly, it might have appeared to the reader that the only way out of the struggle would be more participation in decision-making at the factory and beyond. Even if laws and rights did exist, Robotnik had proved to their readers that these were violated constantly and would not be enough as long as either the peo-

 Ibid., January 4, 1979. See also a translated reprint of the article in question in: Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West, 113–114.  Robotnik, January 4, 1979.  Over the months, Robotnik had kept calling for paying into a special fund and had listed those who had given money in several issues of the magazine. They oftentimes repeated on the pages of their magazine that the fund was meant to serve workers’ interests and support them in times of repression. Also by repeatedly explaining the purpose of this workers’ fund, the editors of Robotnik presented to their readers how protest and opposition worked on different levels.  Judt, “Radical Politics in a New Key?,” 120.

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ple working in the system did not show more good will, or the system itself did not involve more social control from below. At this stage, the idea of workers’ representation was yet not framed in terms of rights. Instead, functioning labor representation was presented as a mere social necessity and not as an ideological counterpart against the ruling power. In so doing, the claim for participation and representation was de-ideologized, but not de-politicized. On the contrary, by explaining political connections and empowering the workers, the idea of trade unionism, that had become a mere semantic label under state socialism, was quasi re-politicized as it was led back to genuinely democratic principles of participation and workers’ representation. The “apolitical purity” that Westerners saw in human rights399 could be a suitable association with human rights, but the history of European societies during the Cold War is not only one of ideological battles and political conceptions but also one of ordinary citizens’ everyday problems and questions about how they could be solved. This first section of this chapter concentrated on the analysis of how repression was addressed by the editors of Robotnik, and the wider surrounding oppositional milieu affiliated with the Workers’ Defense Committee KOR. While a human rights language was actively employed in the correspondence with Western partners, this was rarely the case on the pages of Robotnik. Here, concrete conflicts or everyday problems were presented as symptoms of a wider democratic deficit, partly even a clear consequence of the lack of a proper trade union or self-management structures. Workers should not act in order to improve their individual situation or shortsightedly accept irregular payments and rewards but rather organize themselves for the longer term. Consequently, the next section sheds light on the creation of a workers’ movement.

Building an Identity and Fostering Self-organization In Robotnik, one can trace various forms of strategies that aimed to create a political movement out of the previously diffuse mass of workers in Poland. Whereas the early 1970s had been characterized by hopelessness among Polish dissidents disturbed by the events of 1968 in Prague and Warsaw, the mid-1970s were different. After 1956, when Polish dissidents had hoped for the system to reform itself “from above,”400 they discussed whether protest was likely to bring any success by looking for more progressive currents within the ruling power. But now, dissi-

 Robert Brier, “Beyond the ‘Helsinki Effect’”, in The ‘Long 1970s’, 89.  See: Judt, “The Dilemmas of Dissidence.”

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dents began to address their fellow citizens and not the party and the state. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, protest was linked to the “simple perception of reality,” and to the idea that the analysis of the systematic characteristics of the state socialist system would lead to a realization of the necessity of protest.401 It was the strong conviction of the leading thinkers of the Polish political opposition, including Adam Michnik, that workers constituted the most important social group in state socialist Poland. In his famous “New Evolutionism” from 1976, a “synthesis of the organic work on the one hand, and the radical civic determination to fight for freedom and sovereignty on the other hand,”402 Michnik explicitly voiced the hopes that the intellectuals placed in a politicized working class, positing a link between that politicization and the democratization of the country: It is difficult to foresee developments in the working class, but there is no question that the power elite fears this social group most. Pressure from the working classes is a necessary condition for the evolution of public life toward a democracy.403

Keeping in mind the strong ties between the magazine’s editorial board and the oppositionists of the Workers’ Defense Committee KOR, this section sheds light on how the editors of Robotnik attempted to empower workers to become politically active. It traces how they built a workers’ identity and lent them political agency, by first presenting them with positive examples of successful protests and eventually by imitating a democratic environment and ‘teaching’ opposition. Considering the atomized Polish society where identities did not exceed the family, the church or the nation, a new, oppositional identity of the workers should be built. Robotnik’s authors thus actively historicized the very recent past – they did so explicitly through the evocation of annual remembrances or implicitly through drawing narrative lines between particular events and the lived-in present. The evocation of a chain of events starting in Poznan in 1956, passing through the crushing of workers’ upheavals in 1970 on the Baltic coast and culminating with the violently put down protests in several Polish cities in 1976, was a recurrent phenomenon on the pages of Robotnik.404 Creating an identity through the construction of collective realms of memory was also connected to the question

 Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 176–177.  Kopeček, “Human Rights Facing a National Past,” 580.  Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism 1976,” in Letters from prison and other essays, ed. Adam Michnik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 135–48, 144–145.  Referring to this triad of events is also a traditional way to narrate Polish social and political history in mainstream historiography on Poland’s history during communism. See, for example: Friszke, Opozycja polityczna w PRL; Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert; Davies, God’s Playground.

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of truth. Polish workers and the editors of the magazine together created a memory discourse regarding the lethal events of December 1970 and June of 1976, but they also raised other contested topics that belong to the set of Polish-Soviet taboos in the years between 1939 and 1989.405 In early 1979, the magazine reported on how the citizens demanding the punishment of those who had killed protesting workers in 1970 were repressed.406 In this context, Robotnik used images, which was rare considering the difficult conditions of samizdat publishing, where there was a need to place as much information on as few pages as possible. An image titled “Let us remember: December 1970” was printed on the front page of the previous issue.407 It showed protesters holding a banner claiming to punish those guilty for “December 1970,” what the events were called pars pro toto.408 The “Szczecin issue” is especially relevant, as it actively contributed to constructing a realm of memory409 out of the events of June 1976. In this issue, published by the Robotnik cells in the city at the Baltic shore, the authors created a foundational myth of the events in June 1976. In the opening article, the workers of the “Dolna Odra”410 power station claimed that it had been these events (only two years earlier) that had made them a “true working class” recapitulating the strikes and struggles of June 1976.411 Interestingly, they framed the misinformation by the government (regarding the strikes all over Poland) in rights terms, as did they with regard to workers’ representation:

 These, however, were dominantly prominent in later phases of Robotnik, i.e. after the publication of the “Charter,” see for instance: Robotnik, October 2, 1979, 1–2; Robotnik, April 16, 1980, 1–2.  Robotnik, January 4, 1979, 1–2.  Robotnik, December 15, 1978.  In other issues, for instance in the special Szczecin issue, readers could find calls to send in information, photos, and reports on the events from 1970. The claim for official commemoration honoring the victims of 1970 would later become one of Solidarity’s main claims during the “hot summer” of 1980, when the strike committee demanded the erection of a monument. Robotnik (Wydanie szecińskie), March 1979.  On the concept of “lieux de mémoire,” please refer to Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989).  Dolna Odra means “Lower Oder River.”  The article was flanked by a poem by Jean Cocteau and goes as follows: “They attack us unjustly| but let them attack us | with the stones they throw at us | they build our statues.” The Polish version was: “Atakują nas niesprawiedliwie | Ale niech atakują nas dalej | Z kamieni którymi rzucają w nas | Budują nam pomniki.” It seems to have been retrieved from Cocteau’s diaries, cf.: Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau: A Life (Yale University Press, 2016).

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Why did we not have the right to know the truth back then? [. . .] The workers lacked a trade union representative who, paid by our monthly contributions, had the right and the obligation to be among us.412

The “right to be among us” was at the same time described as an “obligation.” The article did not say ‘we have the right to . . . ’, but referred to a wider group; i.e. the entire society towards whom an individual had certain obligations. This way, the claim for workers’ representation seemed even more legitimate and simultaneously insinuated a necessity – a common strategy of framing claims, as will be discussed further in this section. The workers proceeded by describing how they had been singing the “Internationale” throughout the strikes, which they would not forget “until the end of their lives.”413 Again, this example shows that the protesters were not genuinely anti-communist, but – in the course of evoking a workers’ identity – did refer to communist symbols that they considered to have been hijacked by the government. On the other hand, one should be careful in overinterpreting gestures like this one as it could also be a mere identity marker to sing a traditional, widely known song that also formed part of the ideological repertoire of the government. The references to communism were ambivalent, whereas the moral framing remained constantly salient. Interestingly, the self-identification as members of the “working-class” could take place simultaneously to criticizing “communist propaganda,” as can be seen in the following quote: However, the party reacted differently, this party that considers itself the protector of the working class. After this one-day strike we were crushed with communist propaganda. [. . .] This was a dirty deed against the working class. We were kicked when we were already down, lying on the ground.414

From time to time, these historical references went beyond the common triad of 1956, 1970, and 1976. This was the case when Robotnik reprinted passages from Bohdan Cywiński’s book Disobedient Lineages415 that had been published legally in 1971 in the liberal Catholic publishing house Więź (“Link”).416 The partial reprint of passages of Cywiński’s book Robotnik explicitly drew a line of continuity between the Polish uprising against the Russian Empire in January 1863 and the

 Robotnik (Wydanie szecińskie), March 1979.  Robotnik (Wydanie szecińskie), March 1979.  Robotnik (Wydanie szecińskie), March 1979.  The original title is: Rodowody Niepokornych. I owe this translation to the journalist Krzysztof “Kris” Kotarski, who helped me in this case (AD).  Więź publishing house was founded in 1958 by a group of lay Catholics under the leadership of Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

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contemporary protests: “[. . .] We defend ourselves like the generation from a hundred years ago.”417 This anti-Soviet narrative that externalized the ongoing communist rule entirely from Polish culture was not typical of the magazine, which highlights the political heterogeneity of the cooperating authors.418 Apart from this reference to national mythology, Robotnik’s group constructions, as its very name would already suggest, predominantly referred to the working class as a social entity within the political space of the Polish People’s Republic. Workers were given an important historical agency throughout Robotnik articles. This happened already in the very first issue, when the opening article claimed that “Poland’s fate and the living standards are on a big scale dependent on workers”419 followed by demands for workers’ participation and self-organization. This strategy matched Kołakowski’s idea of deriving the necessity of protest out of an observation of failures and systematic problems of the state.420 Deriving political claims from concrete problems was already established in the first issue of the magazine: Until now, however, they mainly influenced the authorities’ decisions throughout demonstrations. This evoked repressions. Workers were shot in December ’70. They were beaten and fired from their workplaces in June ’76. Therefore, a situation has to be created where workers could [sic!] defend their own interests and influence the authorities’ decisions on a daily basis, as matters arise. We want to initiate a discussion on ways to form workers’ representations, their role and their scope of entitlements and duties.421

The claims here were formulated more cautiously, not yet as rights claims. When stating that “a situation has to be created,” this subtly suggested a system change. Not only in the first issue, but throughout all issues, the articles constantly referred to workers’ upheavals from the previous years. For example, the seventeenth issue, published in June 1978, two years after the violent events of 1976, dedicated most of its space to an article about “Poznań ’56.” By recalling the main patterns of the events of 1956, 1970, and 1976, namely the primarily economic demands that were quickly accompanied by political demands and the harsh reaction by the authorities, the unnamed author connected the events to a narrative of protest.422 The unknown author depicted the protesting workers as the main

 Robotnik, November 25, 1978.  This narrative, however, is also noticeable in collective memory discourses after 1989. Participants of Polish focus groups tended to juxtapose “communism” and “Polishness” in their discourses. See: Breuer and Delius, “Jak jest zrobiona pamięć wernakularna?”; Lars Breuer and Anna Delius, “1989 in European Vernacular Memory,” East European Politics & Societies 3 (2017).  Robotnik, September 1977.  Leszek Kołakowski, “Theses on Hope and Hopelessness,” Survey 3 (1971).  Robotnik, September 1977.  Robotnik, June 17, 1978.

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agents of the changes in the governments as well as a change in the entire society’s attitudes towards the government:423 The Poznan incidents made the authorities aware of the possibility of workers’ demonstrations that may force changes within the governing team. These generated, especially after the events in December 1970, a certain feeling of threat among those in power. The new governments of ’56 and ’70 satisfied certain basic needs of the society after they got into power.424

In a society where the possibility of participation in political decision-making processes was quite limited, the idea that one’s own actions would have any impact can be regarded as part of an empowering strategy. The aim seemed to be to prove to the readers of the magazine that protest could have a meaningful political outcome. This power should now be used for creating “authentic” workers’ representation. Forms of “active self-management” were not a mere fantasy of intellectual elites but had been already discussed by workers themselves during the strikes in Gdańsk in 1970, as Roman Laba, who strongly opposes the “elite thesis,” pointed out.425 In an article from late 1977, in which Jan Lityński addressed the price increases of the previous year, the author called for an open debate about Poland’s economic problems. However, the question of workers’ representation was depicted as a purportedly logical result of the previous events: [. . .] Today it is already obvious that without a discussion with authentic workers’ representatives, and not with the management or representatives of the state’s own trade unions, any initiative of the government is doomed to fail.426

As if it were an unquestioned fact, the text asserted that the government “obviously” needed the workers as partners in carrying out labor policies. To form and join independent trade unions was formulated as a logical consequence of the previous events and not as an abstract right. Moreover, the use of the word “fiction”427 with regard to the actual state’s policy underlines the non-fictional, realist character of what the author called for. In contrast to the other cases, here workers’ representation was not depicted as a social but a political necessity, whereby

 As the gender of the author is unknown, in this text, I refer to the author as “they,” “their,” etc.  Robotnik, June 17, 1978.  Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization, 7, see, also; Jan B. de Weydenthal, “The Workers’ Dilemma of Polish Politics: A Case Study,” East European Quarterly 1 (1977).  Robotnik, November 1977.  Robotnik, November 1977.

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it was made valid for the authorities and citizens alike and therefore could not be rejected. At this point, perhaps the most important element of the empowerment process and strategy pursued in Robotnik was an ambivalent oscillation between two poles: on the one hand, the authors of the magazine criticized the ongoing repression and violations of rights, although it should be noted that they did so predominantly without using the language of rights. However, on the other hand, they imitated living in a democratic state by constructing an alternative discourse that spoke of rights as a mere necessity and of citizens as sovereign political agents. This imitation occurred in different manifestations and expressions and can be connected to Adam Michnik ’s notion to “live as if we were free.”428 This entailed, among others, the construction of a workers’ agency as if they were sovereign citizens and was typical of Robotnik’s future scenarios. In a text opening a series of articles about workers’ representation and unionism, Jan Lityński prophesied a “discussion” between workers and state representatives “at eye level” during which the authorities would have to justify their actions in front of the workers. He based this prediction on the idea that another act of violence against workers was the only other alternative, although an unthinkable one: Let’s assume, that soon the authorities will try to raise prices again. [. . .] We believe, that in remembering [the protests of] December [1970] and June [1976] they will not want to repeat these criminal mistakes. They will therefore propose a discussion. We think that one should take up this offer and discuss. [. . .] Workers will elect their representatives. The authorities will have to recognize them as discussion partners [. . .].429

The ostentatiously rational tone of this text was also part of the strategy of expressing a ‘mere political necessity’ of independent workers’ representation – as if there was no political ideology involved in the whole process but rather as if politics were just a form of fulfilling societies’ needs. On the other hand, by saying that the authorities “would have to accept them as discussion partners,” and that workers should “take up this offer,” Lityński created a power structure between workers (citizens) and the authorities (the state). Summing it up, workers were equipped with a workers’ story of protest that served as a basis for future identity building but also with a new historical and contemporary political agency. These methods of identity building and empowering went hand in hand with more concrete measures, i.e. the presentation and proliferation of success stories all over Poland and concrete advice on how to resist and oppose the authorities.

 Jonathan Schell, “Introduction,” in Letters from prison and other essays, xxx.  Robotnik, October 1977.

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‘Teaching Opposition’: Success Stories as Role Models A major part of Robotnik’s pages was dedicated to reporting strikes and other forms of worker protests. The magazine was eager to report on cases that ended successfully for the workers, as these examples could serve as role models for more protest actions or strategies of defense. Apart from several smaller reports about various strikes all over Poland, the magazine explained how trade unions in other democratic systems worked or wrote about successful strikes. This was, for instance, true in the iron and steel works named after Lenin in Nowa Huta near Cracow430 or in the electric light bulb factory of Pabianice, where workers who protested the withholding of bonuses “despite having fulfilled the plan” eventually succeeded.431 The events in Pabianice, however, are said to be the first strike action in communist Poland that was not immediately followed by any kind of repression.432 In September 1978, in a story titled “Workers win,” an author named Jan Ł., a worker and collaborator of both the renamed “Committee of Social Self-Defense KSS ‘KOR’”, and Robotnik reported the case of Jerzy K. from Myszków, a small Silesian town near Katowice. Jerzy K. had been fired due to an allegedly unjustified absence from work. “This was not the truth,” the author commented on the case.433 What had happened between the worker and management? After having applied for a day off in order to take care of his sick father, Jerzy K. received written approval from both his supervisor and the local Party representative. However, after his return, management suddenly neglected the previous approval, and dismissed him. He thus directed his protest towards the regional appointment committee, but the management intervened by stating that his own illnesses were a burden for the whole company and his claim was denied. “I advised him to write a letter to KSS ‘KOR’ and to send a copy to the appointment committee,” the author recounted.434 In a new commission meeting, the letter of approval was used as evidence. It turned out that not only had the management been unlawful but also very sloppy: the approving signatures had simply been cut off. Yet by accident, the management also cut Jerzy K’s own signature, which eventually revealed the betrayal. With a proud undertone the co-worker explained why he had been asked for help:

    

Robotnik, July 30, 1978. Robotnik, December 15, 1978. See: Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West, 73. Robotnik, September 25, 1978. Ibid., September 25, 1978.

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When asked, why he had contacted me, K[. . .] replied that he knew me as a collaborator of KOR and ‘Robotnik’ and knew that I would act in his defense. I was interrogated, too. One of the members of the committee wanted to know how the letter had reached KOR. I replied that this was my own business and that I am only interested in whether the dismissal of K[. . .] was cleared. [. . .] The management of the factory will have to pay out of its own pockets for the case that it lost. But the previous lost cases the workers had to pay from their own bonuses. But this time, the workers agreed that they will watch out that the perpetrators will pay. And I think this will work out.435

Jerzy K.’s colleague Jan Ł. clearly presented a success story here. He presented several strategies, for instance seeking out KOR’s help, but also using existing legal structures. Finally, he highlighted the workers’ solidarity after their first initial success. Generally, solidarity among workers was a major issue and it was propagated intensely in the magazine. The solidarity discourse was part of the identitybuilding and classic workers’ theories come into mind: workers’ identities were not only organized vertically, confronting the worker with the management or the employer. Much more salient for everyday situations were the “horizontal relationships” among each other.436 Solidarity was literally taught to the readers, as were other subjects. First and foremost, this entailed strategies on how to oppose the government, how to create solidary and independent structures in the workplace, and how to resist the authorities. The strongest advocating for worker solidarity took place in an emotional open letter by Władysław S. from Silesia who had been forced into exile as a result of his oppositionist activities. It was published in March of 1979. In his letter, he explained how he could not put up with the pressure exerted on him by the secret service and the government, as the harassment had been expanded to include pressure on his family. For him, solidarity was the central issue in the workers’ cause: Others have to take up the great cause that I sacrificed my whole life for until now. We have to find people who understand that the people of labor must fight for their basic rights on their own and will incessantly demand them. The people of Silesia have to learn the most basic principle: solidarity.437

“Rights,” that previously had not been a central point of reference in the writings of Robotnik but were rather expressed through mentioning national legislation or concrete political visions of establishing workers’ representation, became one of the central concepts in this letter, side-by-side with other “essentially contested

 Ibid., September 25, 1978, 1; 2–3.  Lucassen, The Story of Work, 6.  Robotnik, March 18, 1979.

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concepts.”438 In this letter – one that would be read by the secret service, the authorities, and the workers alike – the reference to rights became stronger in comparison with other articles. This is connected to the character of appeal in the letter. In contrast to the other published texts, it becomes obvious that a language of rights was used in an abstract context, for instance a general appeal to get people active rather than in the context of providing help and advice for workers in a situation of concrete repression. Given the equally abstract character of the concept of solidarity, Sulecki translated this political claim into more concrete words a little later: When someone publicly steps forward in your case, you must not turn away from him, you must not watch indifferently how they harass and wear him down. You have to defend these people.439

Taking into consideration the constant repressions against worker activists and oppositionists alike, S. explained how the government would try to persuade the workers to collaborate, i.e. to spy and to denounce colleagues. In an emotional appeal, he appealed to the “human dignity” of his readers: You must then have the strength to say NO, to keep your human dignity. The biggest money and the biggest treasures are not worth the loss of honor. Keep in mind those people who did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives and did not step away from what they believed in.440

Like in other articles, for instance Jacek Kuroń’s text about the “Olimpia” case from the beginning of this chapter, the author used a strong moral language, infused by notions like “human dignity” and “honor.” This has to be seen in the light of the official press coverage as well, where oppositionists were repeatedly defamed. Opposing the system had to be presented as morally superior in order to appear appealing – also because it was clear that immediate success would not be forthcoming. Nevertheless, other more practical reasons for resistance and opposition were presented in this case: “Better times than the current ones will not come on their own. We have to patiently work and fight for them.”441 Another popular form of protest were collective letters of solidarity. This was not only true for intellectual dissidents,442 but also for ordinary citizens such as

 Cf. David Collier, Fernando Daniel Hidalgo, and Andra Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially contested concepts: Debates and applications,” Journal of Political Ideologies 3 (2006).  Robotnik, March 18, 1979.  Robotnik, March 18, 1979.  Robotnik, March 18, 1979.  Cf. the “Letter of the 59,” signed by 59 Polish intellectuals that became an often-quoted document of contemporary history in the aftermath of the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.

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the inhabitants of the city of Grudziądz. They had written five open letters to the authorities in 1978. Robotnik reported on the letter-writing campaign and wrote about how citizens criticized the arrogant behavior of local political elites that did not respect the poor situation of workers.443 In another letter, citizens connected nothing less than the issue of Polish national independence with smaller local problems, including the construction of a public bath for men in their town. They also demanded the end of the post-1976 repressions against strike participants. This particular letter was even reprinted on the pages of the magazine, as it showed nationwide solidarity and highlighted the role of the Workers’ Defense Committee. We, the inhabitants of the city of Grudziądz, in solidarity with other cities in Poland that support the activity of KSS ‘KOR’, insist on the fulfilling of KOR’s demands that have remained unfulfilled until now. / . . . / In Grudziądz, there are 43 post-June victims. [This refers to June of 1976. AD]. / . . . / The PPR authorities are still repressing them due to their political beliefs, as they still dismiss from work those who took part in the June incidents.444

Here, the repressions based on “political beliefs” were not described in a language of rights, for instance as a violation of freedom of speech, but in terms of general repression. Yet, the mere idea of highlighting the repression of a person because of their political beliefs is part of the ideological tools rooted in the human rights tradition and the commitment to rule of law as political virtues. It also shows that official commitments to international human rights norms and/ or the use of humanrights-infused language that took place in official politics had an impact on the rhetoric of bottom-up dynamics. Keeping in mind the Cold War context, they constituted a certain bargaining chip, as it was obviously not possible to withdraw from these commitments or to neglect the normative strength of certain rights without losing face on the level of international and domestic politics alike. When commenting on the letter campaigns, the author highlighted the high number of participants, i.e. “almost one thousand citizens.”445 They were role models as “citizens taking care and being brave.” The comment contextualized the “beautiful tradition” of the mass action by the inhabitants of Grudziądz with recent Polish history and interpreted it as “one of the factors that forced the authorities to liberate the arrested workers and KOR activists [. . .]” in the aftermath of the June events of 1976. The authors connected the letter campaigns to the opposition’s overall approach of creating a space outside the party-and-state apparatus. This way, the authors of Robotnik conferred the ordinary citizens of Grudziądz (and possible

 Cf. Robotnik, January 24, 1979.  Robotnik, January 24, 1979.  Robotnik, January 24, 1979.

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imitators) with political agency: moreover, agency exemplified within a case that had already been successful in the past. In shedding light on the letter campaigns, they actively ‘taught opposition’ to their readers: There are no official social organizations that are independent from the party in our country. Hence, it is exactly these protest letters, signed by hundreds of citizens that became one of the forms of independent social activity, a form of action in solidarity with others. We have examples that this can be effective, that a letter with signatures is able to force the authorities to concessions.446

The authors of Robotnik not only put emphasis on carving out space within already existing structures in general, but also in the factories. The idea of getting people into action was first and foremost tackling the labor situation, which entailed more democracy on the factory level. Interestingly, the Polish opposition also looked towards Spain, where the democratization process was described as “one of the most interesting phenomena of the past years.”447 By portraying the Spanish Comisiones Obreras in the eighth issue of Robotnik, the idea of infiltrating factories from within was introduced and explained. In the style of Robotnik, i.e. by explaining everything very concretely, the author “Karol Grodkowski”448 narrated the “story” of the Comisiones Obreras in one of Robotnik’s longest articles: They emerged underground. Usually it began with small groups of trusted people operating in individual departments, then committees for the entire factory were created, which step by step and by maintaining the highest caution, got in touch with similar committees in other factories.449

This description of the beginnings of the Comisiones Obreras entailed instructions on how to start interacting on a factory level in a hostile environment, i.e. by finding like-minded people one could trust. “Grodkowski” looked at the Spanish example in amazement, especially since the “dismounting of the dictatorship” was well underway since Franco’s death in November 1975.450 The author compared the “vertical syndicates” in Spain to Polish structures, even if he admitted that there were no “factory owners” in Poland, but the trade unions were subordinated to the management and the Party. Not only was he able to tell a historical success story  Robotnik, January 24, 1979.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978.  This was a pseudonym. The real name of “Karol Grodkowski” was Kazimierz Dziewanowski. He was a Polish journalist and writer (1930–1998). In the 1990s, he was the ambassador of the democratic Polish state to the United States. Jan Olaszek, email to author.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978.

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against the backdrop of Spain’s democratic transition, but he also described this success as a logical consequence of actions that were just necessary and/ or inevitable because they were essential, i.e. creating workers’ self-management structures and treating workers as equal partners in discussions: A paradoxical situation emerged: management communicated with the committees, and conducted with them negotiations on payments, working conditions and problems of production. They did this basically illegally and secretly as the authorities continued not recognizing the existence of the commissions. Management simply had no other choice. [. . .]451

In the last passage of his text, “Grodkowski” referred to Poland again and – having in mind the Spanish example – wrote about some progressive managers and directors that were willing to conduct reforms, however cautiously. Interestingly, also among the technical supervisors and the more enlightened managers [in Poland; AD] one hears more and more frequently opinions stating that state-run factories would benefit if management could maintain contact with authentic staff representatives. Then, as a result of real discussions and reasonable compromises, one could reach agreements that would be respected by both sides, which is different from what is happening now where everyone seemingly agrees but nobody feels beholden to anything.452

Similar to the prophesies of Jan Lityński who predicted a discussion on equal terms, “Grodkowski” laid out a vision for what could be possible, referring to the real example of Spain.453 Since Robotnik attempted to push forward rational thinking in opposition to the overwhelmed and disavowed Polish government, “Grodkowski’s” vision followed a rational rhetoric, one that underlined how everyone would benefit from a truly representative system, even the party-owned factories. This strategy of taking over discourses and practices that in a functioning system would have been the tasks of the state was typical of the entire oppositionist mindset. As Tony Judt pointed out already in 1987: “The state, after all, was not available for the taking, and the genius of the new opposition lay in recognizing this [. . .].” As such, the article about the Spanish Comisiones Obreras highlighted the political roots of trade unionism in Poland and reminded readers that the “[. . .] slogan of class trade unions in prewar Poland was a slogan of the left and was supported by the Communists [. . .]” and that it had been “[. . .] only in the PPR that one stood up against this rule and opened ‘vertical’ unions that remind us of the Spanish syndicates.”454 By shedding light on the fact that the government had betrayed its own

   

Robotnik, January 1, 1978. Robotnik, January 1, 1978. Robotnik, October 1977. Robotnik, January 1, 1978.

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ideological roots, the author of this article discredited the state socialist government even more and delegitimized its position from within. The year 1979 witnessed many accidents, conflicts, and strikes in Polish workplaces. In some cases worker protests managed to reach short-term agreements with management, for instance in terms of formerly rejected bonuses. These cases were presented in the magazine as success stories. In this situation, the editors of Robotnik once more acted “as if they were free” and published a “Charter of Workers’ Rights” in their thirty-fifth issue that was printed in September 1979, three years after the big riots.455 Unlike the other articles in Robotnik that were inevitably also read by the authorities, this issue – characterized by a new self-understanding – was directed at the entire Polish public and therefore intentionally aimed at the authorities as well. If it is true, that “[. . .] [i]n order to secure the survival of Polish society, it was necessary to think and act as though the institutional constraints did not operate [. . .],”456 this document is particularly interesting. Whereas the articles and the support were clearly citizens’ activities, writing a Charter is a highly symbolic act. Here, a group of people that had no affiliation with any official or unofficial legal institution proclaimed rights and thereby took on authority. The document was signed by more than a hundred activists of different ideological backgrounds including KOR members, but also members of the right-wing ROPCiO and people without any affiliation.457 Soon-to-be famous workers’ activists like Anna Walentynowicz and Lech Wałęsa were among the signatories. In the document, workers were called “people of labor” (ludzie pracy), whereas in the Polish Constitution the formulation of “a working people” (lud pracujący) was used. This already touches upon the role of the individual; whereas “a people” is always considered to form an entity, the “people of labor” can have different needs, of which some have to be protected by the force of rights. More than 100,000 copies were distributed, and apart from labor rights, the “Charter” proposed concrete ideas on how to organize labor and social life in general (See Figure 3).458 The introduction of the Charter called for standing up against: [. . .] the deprivation of the citizens’ right to make joint decisions about issues concerning themselves; – the limitation of basic rights of the people of labor, – such as the right to safe and meaningful work, to a dignified salary, to rest; – the deepening of social inequalities and injustices;

   

Robotnik, September 17, 1979. Judt, “Radical Politics in a New Key?,” 127. Ruch Obrony Praw Człowieka i Obywatela. See: Lipski, KOR, 339f.

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Fig. 3: Robotnik, “Charter of Workers’ Rights”, 17 September 1978, Fundacja Ośrodka KARTA.

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– the lack of institutions defending the people of labor – the official trade unions are not doing so; – depriving workers of their basic right to defense, which is the right to strike; – overthrowing the costs of any errors of the authorities on the society, also the costs of the ongoing crisis. [. . .] We undertook actions whose long-term aim is the creation of a self-defense system for the people of labor, first and foremost, independent trade unions.459

According to Jan Józef Lipski who was both a historical protagonist and a chronicler of KOR, the effect of publishing the Charter was quite concrete. It constituted the coming together of a “network of workers’ groups, some of which had existed earlier as distribution groups for Robotnik, while others were only now becoming organized under the influence of the Charter, which played an important role in the strike movement of July and August 1980.”460 In the document, the editors of Robotnik combined labor-related issues like the 40-hour week or the demand to prohibit night shifts for women with forcing people to act “against their conscience.”461 “No one [. . .]”, the Charter claimed, [. . .] can be forced to immoral acts; to become an informant in matters of concern to the [. . .] Party [. . .] or the state security service. No one can be forced to participate in attacks on innocent people. It is impermissible for workers to engage in work which endangers their own safety and that of others, to conceal accidents, to give false testimony, etc.462

The issue of free speech was discussed in moral terms and connected to “conscience,” which, in turn, was a concept oftentimes used in religious semantics. “Conscience,” especially in the Catholic context, can almost take on the character of a divine law, as, for instance, in the writings of the Second Vatican Council: “In a wonderful manner conscience reveals that law which is fulfilled by love of God and neighbor.”463 Considering the deep anchoring of Catholic faith among the Polish population, this formulation had great normative power. The question of why and if women were treated differently from men was not further discussed. A moral framing was, however, not new for the readers of Robotnik. What was new was that this time the authors added another layer of legitimacy through international labor norms, i.e. the International Labour Organization Convention

 Robotnik, September 17, 1979.  Lipski, KOR, 340.  Cf. also the concept of the “prisoner of conscience,” introduced by Amnesty International in the 1970s. See among others: Padraic Kenney, Dance in chains: Political imprisonment in the modern world (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).  Robotnik, September 17, 1979; this translation was borrowed from Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West, 114–115.  Pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world.

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of 1951 and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1966, whereas in all the issues of Robotnik before the Charter was published in the summer of 1979 international labor rights norms and the institutions behind them were hardly mentioned.464 In the Charter, they played a more prominent role: Our activities are in accordance with the law. In ratifying the various international covenants and the International Labour Organization conventions, the government of the People’s Republic of Poland has agreed to the following: I: The right of workers to assembly. Convention 87, Article 2, of the International Labour Organization [. . .] Workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever, shall have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organization concerned, to join organizations of their own choosing without previous authorization. [. . .] Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 8, 1 The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure: (a) The right of everyone to form trade unions and join the trade union of his choice, subject only to the rules of the organization concerned, for the promotion and protection of his economic and social interests. No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of this right other than those prescribed by law and which are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public order or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. II. The right to strike International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 8, 1 (d) The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to ensure the right to strike provided that it is exercised in conformity with the laws of the particular country. [. . .].”465

Producing and publishing such a Charter is a good example for how “brokers” of human rights vernacularized global norms in a way that resonated within a given cultural space.466 Global norms were intertwined with a religiously inflected notion of “conscience” that Polish workers could immediately internalize. The Charter was designed to be read by Polish workers and national authorities, but also by an international (Western) audience, whose support had always

 Until 1979, the ILO was hardly mentioned in the magazine. Exceptions occurred in the context of reporting how the World Congress of Free Trade Unions took legal action against Czechoslovakia and how they repressed workers with regard to their political beliefs in May of 1978 and in the context of a report about the creation of an independent trade union in the Soviet Union that planned to register at the ILO. Robotnik, May 16, 1978; Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977).  Robotnik, September 17, 1979. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Karatnycky, Motyl, and Sturmthal, Workers’ Rights, East and West; International Labour Organization, “Convention concerning Discrimination in Respect of Employment and Occupation.”  Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle,” 40.

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been of great importance to the East Central European dissidents. The activists were not targeting workers exclusively anymore, but directed their actions towards another, broader audience that had been increasing since the important visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1979, when he openly supported the Polish opposition.467 The visit brought attention both inside and outside Poland. In opposition to the Spanish case where the Vatican and its encyclicals were referred to constantly, in Robotnik, the Pope and also statements from the Polish Primate Stefan Wyszyński were certainly mentioned, but rarely in the context of workers or their rights due to the complicated role of the Polish Catholic church in a Polish socialist state.468 Rather, like in this Charter, ‘faith’ played an underlying role as a moral compass. When discussing the situation of workers in state socialist Poland, international actors and institutions were virtually absent until the summer of 1979. Yet the Charter, which claimed to be a founding document of a new movement, not only used a language of rights, but also referred to international actors and institutions such as the United Nations and their sub-organization for Labor as “global moral authorities.”

Concluding Remarks This chapter demonstrated the vernacularization of universal norms on the pages of a Polish samizdat magazine. The analysis started with a short digression to Paris, where the Polish intellectual opposition had an important émigré hub. After the shock of the state’s brutality against workers in 1976, Polish intellectuals had asked Western partners for help and used a language of rights when referring to both the repression of workers and the limits of free speech and fundamental civil rights. This chapter argued that this was rooted in the particular political setting of this period, when the traumatic events of 1956 and the multifaceted lieu de mémoire of 1968 shaped a certain pro-democratic, rights-orientated rhetoric of the Polish intellectuals who had understood since Helsinki that ‘human rights’ functioned as a transnationally comprehensive code for addressing repression. The analysis then turned towards the magazine Robotnik. When addressing repression in Robotnik, a language of rights was absent, at least until 1979. Difficulties, repression or conflicts were negotiated in moral terms and de-individualized towards a commonly under The visit was covered on the pages of Robotnik; see for instance Robotnik, June 1, 1979; Robotnik, June 20, 1979.  One exception is the mentioning of Cardinal Wyszyński’s intervention regarding overwork in 1977. See Robotnik, October 1977.

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standable problem. The authors writing for Robotnik deduced demands for different forms of self-management directly from concrete problematic or repressive situations. Thus, they presented self-management structures as ‘necessities.’ In so doing, the claims were re-politicized instead of elevating them to an abstract sphere of morality and norms. The second part addressed the construction of a workers’ identity and an oppositionist identity. The editors of Robotnik aimed at constructing a workers’ identity through the construction of a common heroic past and through lending workers an important agency, now and in the past. Another strategy of empowerment was the presentation of success stories, either on a smaller scale, for instance when strikes ended with demands of the protesting workers being met, or on a bigger scale, when presenting the story of the Spanish Comisiones Obreras. The empowerment of workers entailed a new self-understanding. Related to expressing workers’ rights as mere social necessities was the strategy of showing workers that the government was overwhelmed and that it was the right time to act, because workers would be treated like equal players. This self-understanding culminated with the publication of the “Charter of Workers’ Rights” where ‘rights’ played a much more important role. Once entering this new rhetoric realm, international institutions came into play, whereby they were used as ‘global moral authorities.’ Nevertheless, these rights were adapted to the local Polish setting and entangled with locally resonant moral conceptions and religious semantics. In conclusion, this chapter showed how much the use of a language of rights depended on the audience. While it supports the mainstream human rights historiography in giving human rights rhetoric an empowering character, it also argues that other semantic concepts were equally important, many of them “essentially contested.”469 A rhetorical human rights framework allowed transnational social elites to communicate, rather than empowering the working-class. But also here, human rights were not the only rhetorical hub between Eastern and Western actors, as the references to ‘democracy’ and even ‘democratic socialism’ have indicated. An absolutely hegemonic role of human rights could therefore not be found in the sources from this decade. On the contrary: it could be shown that human rights were not a predominant part of the rhetorical framework for Polish workers who would later form one of the most relevant social movements in contemporary European history. Not needing a universalizing rhetoric frame, the activists constructed a particularly singularizing narrative of an alliance between workers and intellectuals that had learned from earlier failures and therefore proposed alleg-

 Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts”; Collier, Daniel Hidalgo and Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially contested concepts.”

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edly rational political solutions. In Polish state socialism, speaking about what is necessary and not about what one is entitled to was more convincing for social groups than translating their own cause into political human rights activism.

2.3 Comparison: Workers’ Demands Translated into Mere Social Necessities, Democratic Liberties and Human Rights How did Spanish and Polish workers deal with everyday problems in the workplace? The previous two chapters analyzed the phases of emergence of labor oppositions in Spain and Poland. These phases were characterized by the increased use of alternative media as fora for addressing repression. This increase was not a byproduct of a stronger, more visible opposition, but it was constitutive and essential to its emergence. While in Poland several oppositional magazines appeared underground and in exile, in Spain, in addition to underground publications, legal media also opened up and addressed labor issues. This is also true of labor–friendly articles written by (secretly) opposition activists, who, thanks to new legislation after 1966, could now express their thoughts in legal publications An inclusive, pluralist rhetoric was a constitutive element of both Spanish and Polish labor oppositional rhetoric. While the first parts of the previous chapters each dealt with concrete problems and demands of the activists, the second parts focused on practices of political and social consolidation of the opposition movement and on the construction of a common identity. In both cases, activists sought to build a broad movement. Given the increasing international regulation of labor norms since the 1950s, it is of particular interest to analyze if these international norms and rights played a role in this context and if so how activists adopted and reformulated them in the context of concrete struggles. However, not only international legal norms addressed the question of labor democracy but also more normative (and spiritual) documents published at the global level (see: the publications of the Second Vatican Council 1963–65). This section follows different categories of comparison. The first part of the comparison focuses on the actors. The key question here is: who was actively involved in the workers’ protest and its support? The second part of the comparison focuses on the contexts of the rhetoric surrounding the demands and the political activism.

Alliances of Central Actors – Social Heterogeneity as a Key It is fascinating that in both countries of investigation the emergence of organized and more institutionalized oppositional activism coincided with a rapprochement

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of previously divided groups or groups that previously had been ignoring each other. In both cases, this rapprochement was a central element of an oppositional strategy that fostered a heterogeneous movement supported by broad parts of the society. Working-class activists and their intellectual allies addressed the social heterogeneity of their own movements; it was therefore by no means a historical coincidence. In both Spain and Poland, emerging democratically minded groups and social movements brought together different forces, not only in terms of social class but also in terms of political beliefs and socializations. In Spain, the Comisiones Obreras actively tried to gather all anti-Francoist activists under their umbrella. This should be seen in the light of their aim to dominate the traditionally fragmented leftist trade union landscape. The Comisiones Obreras planned their positioning in an envisioned post-Francoist future in which they wanted to lead the entire labor movement as an umbrella organization during the dictatorship. In the Polish “Workers’ Defense Committee,” on the other hand, the political spectrum of activists included right-wing conservatives, but was dominated by lay Catholic intellectuals, as well as Marxists and socialists. In both, Spain and Poland, this heterogeneity within the labor opposition was an essential part of their strategies, whether in terms of gaining power over the Spanish oppositional landscape or in terms of establishing a truly pluralist version of a Polish society. I argue that this axiom of heterogeneity trained the actors well for the system transformations that occurred several years later, since they were trained to tolerate the differences within the own movement. Having in mind the ability to see ambiguity in other people without being too stressed out, psychologists speak of the “tolerance of ambiguity.”470 This tolerance, so to speak, was also developed by the members of the democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland. The heterogeneity of the oppositional movements was manifold: the individuals actively involved in the democratic labor opposition were often left-leaning activists and lay Catholics, sometimes also members of the clergy.471 In Poland, moreover, right-wing national conservatives also engaged in the activities and cooperated with people from other political camps. In terms of social strata, labor activism and democratic oppositional activism were primarily undertakings of workers and intellectuals; sometimes students and peasants joined the main carrier groups. In Spain, those people with academic degrees who helped workers were oftentimes lawyers (José Jiménez de Parga y Cabrera; Nicolás Sartorius) or journalists, while in Poland the disciplines studied by the intellectual activists  Else Frenkel-Brunswik, “Intolerance of ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable,” Journal of Personality 1 (1949).  For instance, Jan Zieja, a founding member of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee was a priest.

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ranged from history (Antoni Macierewicz) or pedagogy (Jacek Kuroń) to chemistry (Piotr Naimski). Robert Fishman interpreted the cooperation between left-leaning intellectuals and workers under Francoism as the result of their common experience of repression. This shared experience served as the basis for a collective identity even more than the actual political ideologies within the leftist spectrum.472 Bonds between the working-class and left-oriented theorists or intellectuals have been integral to the self-understanding of large sectors of the Left during much of the Twentieth century. Throughout Latin Europe, including Spain, these bonds form a vital, if sometimes problematic, strand in the history of both the communist and the socialist wings of the Left.473

Moreover, the Marxist focus on the working-class as a key group makes Fishman’s assessment not only applicable to the Spanish-speaking world but also other societies, including Poland. Although left-leaning activists dominated the Spanish labor opposition landscape, it was not exclusively left-leaning people who supported the workers’ cause. This can be seen in the decidedly pro-labor stance of the authors of the Catholic magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo, which was examined in the previous chapter. Outside of Spain, the Spanish Church in particular and Spanish Catholicism in general have often been seen as mere supporters of the Franco regime, without acknowledging the different currents within. But: [i]n terms of participatory practices, discourses of empowerment, and engagement with the marginalised and the working class, faith-based networks had a good deal in common with their secular counterparts. In addition, Catholics were heavily involved with organisations other than their own: political student groups, left-wing parties, neighbourhood associations and secular trade unions.474

Similar to Catholic communities worldwide, Spanish Catholicism experienced a major crisis and a renewal in the 1960s – fueled by the insights of the Second Vatican Council. While these were global factors in the changes within the Spanish church and among its members, the ongoing repression and misery of workers was a major domestic factor for the alienation between the church and the state in Spain. Thus, it was the situation of the workers, or rather their treatment by the government, that motivated various members of the clergy, “impelled to share the plight by their congregations,” to become worker-priests.475 A survey of

 Fishman, Democracy’s voices, 36f.  Fishman, Democracy’s voices, 31.  Tamar Groves et al., Social movements and the Spanish transition: Building citizenship in parishes, neighbourhoods, schools and the countryside (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 20.  Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, 11.

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18,000 worker-priests in 1969 clearly showed that there was broad support and even a high degree of identification with socialism.476 It can be concluded that ‘opposing the system’ and ‘being Catholic’ constituted no antagonism in Francoist Spain. Although the most important Catholic organizations in Spain supported the system, Catholic environments provided an arena for the “defense of a more pluralist society.”477 A reinforcing example for this argument is the composition of authors writing for the Cuadernos para el Diálogo. The Spanish cooperation between Catholics and communists is so remarkable because the brutal Civil War prehistory caused a split of Spanish society into “Two Spains”478 that was further deepened by the Francoist propaganda depicting society as divided into two genuinely incompatible antagonists. This propaganda was, like the regime itself, challenged by the reaching-out attitude of the “national reconciliation” as understood by the Spanish communists.479 In addition, the Comisiones Obreras themselves were an example of close interaction between Catholics and communists as José Babiano pointed out. Coming from a Spanish perspective and probably not being aware of the Polish history, he described this cooperation as “unique”: Another unique aspect of this experience was the fact that Catholic militants worked in unity with the communists, both in the enterprise commissions and in the local branch coordinators and at other levels of the movement.480

In the first Comisiones Obreras, that were said to have emerged in Asturias in 1957 and then disappeared again, communists, socialists, a priest, and a Falangist collaborated, according to Marcelino Camacho ’s memoirs. Camacho also engaged with the question of political pluralism as an essential element of the CCOO’s activities: Freedom in our country requires the existence and recognition of political pluralism, because it corresponds to the existence of different social classes and strata as an objective factor, and of different ideological and opinion currents, which, organized or not, represent the subjective factor. It is even difficult to overlook the necessary role that political pluralism has to play when thinking of socialism.481

 Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, 11. Concretely, 24.8 percent considered themselves socialists, whereas only 2.4 percent of the workers said they were Falangists.  Cristina Palomares, “New Political Mentalities in the Tardofranquismo,” in Spain transformed, 122.  See, for instance: Adriaan Kühn, Kampf um die Vergangenheit als Kampf um die Gegenwart: Die Wiederkehr der ‚zwei Spanien‘ (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012).  See, for instance: Froidevaux, Gegengeschichten oder Versöhnung? Erinnerungskulturen und Geschichte der spanischen Arbeiterbewegung vom Bürgerkrieg bis zur „Transición“ (1936–1982).  Babiano, “Los católicos en el origen de Comisiones Obreras,” 278.  Marcelino Camacho, ed., Gespräche im Gefängnis: Die gewerkschaftliche Arbeiterbewegung in Spanien (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1976), 67.

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Pluralism was part of his democratic conviction and part of strategy. At the same time, he was a supporter of the political independence of unions, while encouraging people to engage in labor parties, too. Not only Spain but also Poland witnessed a convergence between left-leaning and lay Catholic thinkers. In the Polish opposition, two main currents of Polish history of thought met, however, dominated by left-leaning Marxist and socialist thinkers.482 While Kuroń, like Adam Michnik, pertained to the Marxist fraction of KOR, Naimski and Macierewicz focused mainly on the issue of national independence from the Soviet Union. However, the left-leaning members dominated the group.483 In his study on the concept of the nation in the East-Central European opposition of the 1970s, Gregor Feindt pointed out how essential this cooperation between different world views was to the Polish opposition. Cooperating with people that had differing concepts of what a ‘Polish nation’ was and how it should be constructed was not just a tolerable compromise but an essential part of oppositional logics, and even a constitutive element of constructing a national identity, as the example of Jacek Kuroń shows. While he rejected the concept of nationalism, he was able to open up to integrate the concept of the nation into his political thinking, just like other antinational activists:484 This dilatory compromise did not work through a reduction of complexity or a sheer superficiality of political reasoning in the Samizdat, but explicitly acknowledged the complex heterogeneity of the people gathered in the opposition and their arguments. In the language of the opposition, it was this recognition that constituted pluralism.485

Jacek Kuroń claimed that pluralism was not only a form to organize social cooperation, but the only form to preserve a national identity.486 He and other editors of Robotnik tried to establish a collective oppositional identity, among others, by constructing a narrative of upheavals and by lending the workers a central political role in the national political narrative. One can conclude that both the Polish and the Spanish labor opposition drew strength not only from their heterogeneous composition and self-understanding; they also regarded this heterogeneity as an essential value per se. In this context, the question arises of what it meant for the understanding of rights that communists and Catholics worked together. This cooperation has to be seen in a global

 On the most important cleavage lines in Polish political thought in the twentieth century, see: Andrzej Walicki, “The three traditions in Polish patriotism,” in Polish Paradoxes.  See: Arndt, Rote Bürger, 15.  Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 292.  Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 292.  Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 292.

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context of rights and norms discussed simultaneously by various actors. However, as Hella Dietz has demonstrated, both groups underwent a shift towards the individual in their political thinking.487 The collective, however, is addressed in terms of solidarity and responsibility. Leftist activists in both countries spoke of the obligations of the individual towards the collective of workers. In so doing, nevertheless, they employed a moral framework that overlapped with Catholic philosophy. It is difficult to trace the political affiliations of ordinary workers based on samizdat sources, but thankfully sociological research has a strong tradition in Poland. Sociologists studied the Polish society intensively over the years of the Polish People’s Republic, with an exception of the Stalinist years and the destalinization turmoil.488 Many Polish workers were probably not interested in politics, but neither were they hostile towards the socialist ideology: surveys have shown that the broader society was positive about equality and that most Poles thought that that there was not enough equality in the social stratification of socialist Poland which was true for both the 1950s and the 1970s.489 Furthermore, many Poles identified with the idea of society as a whole and the state in particular being responsible for the equalization of life opportunities and for the development of the potential of all citizens as well as for the satisfaction of people’s basic needs, which was simultaneously what they associated with socialism. However, they did not identify with “Marxism” too much:490 Along with the new party leadership [of Władysław Gomułka, AD], people would stress that they were in favor of ‘the Polish road to socialism.’ This meant democratizing the political system, removing the most drastic limitations on citizens’ rights and the major sources of their fear, promoting freedom of speech and expression, increasing the influence of people on the government and, after the Yugoslavian model, encouraging the participation of workers’ councils in the management of factories.491

Comparable to Spain, a deeply rooted Catholic faith and religious convictions “[. . .] scarcely change[d] people’s acceptance of a nationalized economy, of social equality or of some form of socialism in Poland.”492 For Spanish workers, it can be assumed that a majority was at least prone to leftist politics, as the workers’ movement was rooted in so many different left-leaning fractions cov Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 32.  See, for instance, Mazurek’s study on labor sociologists in state socialist Poland: Małgorzata Mazurek, “W służbie przemysłu?” in Socjalizm w życiu powszednim.  Nowak, “Values and Attitudes of the Polish People.”  Nowak, “Values and Attitudes of the Polish People,” 49.  Nowak, “Values and Attitudes of the Polish People,” 49.  Nowak, “Values and Attitudes of the Polish People,” 49.

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ering all different currents from anarchists to social democrats. Moreover, Domènech Sampere has pointed out how strong an inner solidarity in the workers’ classbased communities was, especially in the industrial hotspots.493 Their sympathy for the Comisiones Obreras was moreover mirrored in the turnout of the syndical elections of 1966, when they won by far over the other candidates. In general, political activism was not symptomatic neither for Spain nor for Poland.494 Sociologists and historians have attested a major political apathy and a retreat into privacy for both countries, a phenomenon linked to the deep regimentation of the public sphere.495 Spanish and Polish labor activists transcended political, ideological, social, and cultural boundaries. In Spain, this cooperation was part of a strategy to gain power among the fragmented democratic opposition. In this context, the CCOO’s strong ties to the Spanish Communist Party PCE were oftentimes camouflaged or downplayed. Spanish labor activists constantly envisioned a post-Franco state, while the Polish activists wanted to implement a “better socialism”496 within the existing system, one that entailed civil rights and free trade unionism, including workers’ representations. They claimed to represent a societal mainstream that was at the same time diverse and pluralist and presented an alternative to the existing system – a system which had not only discredited itself through its actions but also by a rhetoric that denied social diversity or depicted it antagonistically as a fight between good citizens and “hooligans.” In both cases, social groups had to be mobilized for a common goal. Spanish workers were activated through CCOO-affiliated peers and intellectuals picked up the debate. Polish workers protested their government repeatedly but they did not form a country-wide movement until 1980. Intellectuals explicitly wanted to create a nationwide workers’ movement, but they did not trigger workers’ activism as such. A common identity had to be constructed in both cases. In Spain, this identity was constructed based on the concepts of democratic rights that, apart from the idea of a peaceful coexistence, contained a certain proceduralism constituting the antagonist to Francoist arbitrariness and violence. Sometimes a global sphere was brought into play, for instance when actors referred to human rights

 Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 73.  This assessment is true for the phases of emerging oppositions. In the 1980s, the Solidarność movement, which was strongly linked to the actors presented here, can be regarded as a true social mass movement. In 1980, over 80 percent of working Poles were members of the freshly founded trade union Solidarność, which equals ca. 9–10 million people.  See, for instance: Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, 11; Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert.  See: Gildea and Mark, Europe’s 1968, 1.

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enshrined in international agreements or international law. In Poland, in turn, the creation of a common identity of the movement functioned through evoking a common past, shaped by upheavals and repression of state authorities.

Translating Problems into Demands – Similar Claims Expressed in Different Rhetoric Although Spanish and Polish workers lived in different political environments whose ideological bases were even more sharpened by the international framework of the Cold War, they desired and strived for similar outcomes. Yet, the variations of articulating protest and pushing forward demands differed. Both labor protests were triggered by the overarching economic transformation processes that their governments had initiated to stabilize the national economies and, in a second step, by the repressive measures the governments undertook against these protests. In both countries, not only the standard of living but also living costs had risen, which in Poland literally happened overnight in June 1976. In Spain, however, the protests were a reaction to larger changes such as foreign investment and increased capitalist pressure on a country that had been economically isolated until the late 1950s. The first protests and strikes were wildcat strikes. The Comisiones Obreras took advantage of this socio-political constellation and successfully entered these conflicts on the side of the protesting workers. The ultimate goal of the CCOO was always to end Francoism, and they needed other workers to mobilize broad masses. The opening towards an international proto-globalized capitalist market provided communist voices within the opposition with another political antagonist, capitalism. But their main object of criticism and protest was the lack of democracy and rule of law. The Polish situation was the other way around: the left-leaning key activists in the Polish opposition of the 1970s did not want to put an end to state socialism, but they wished to find solutions within the state socialist framework. Moreover, they wanted to be less dependent on the Soviet Union. They addressed concrete problems in their reports to Robotnik because they had learned that KOR and its members had been helpful in the past (in the direct aftermath of the June events of 1976). Based on these experiences and following the appeals in the first issues of Robotnik, they asked for help on how to behave in particular conflict situations. Interestingly, in their letters and reports, Polish workers articulated concerns and insecurities about mismanagement or unfulfillable tasks. The intellectual editors of Robotnik then translated concrete workplace problems into political demands. In so doing, they deduced the need for truly functioning workers’ representations from concrete situations at the workplace. When it appeared helpful, the Robot-

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nik editors embedded these translations within the existing national labor legislation, the Polish Labor Code and sometimes the Polish Penal Code.

Repression, Violence, and Imprisonment All investigated publications constantly called for ending the repression of workers. Spanish and Polish authorities had harmed workers physically when beating them up on the streets. During protest actions, the police and other forces had even killed workers. In Spain, a large number of workers’ activists was incarcerated.497 Consequently, one of the most pressing issues for the Comisiones Obreras was the liberation of their colleagues, for example, the prominent metal worker Marcelino Camacho. When demanding Camacho’s and others’ liberation, Spanish workers called for a general de-criminalization of workers’ political activism and striking. Oftentimes, they demanded an end of state violence in combination with a demand for decriminalizing workers’ activism. In Poland, the violent crushing of workers’ protest in 1976 had caused a tremendous shock among both workers and intellectuals. Polish labor activists criticized repression and at the same time productively utilized it to construct a narrative oscillating between oppression and upheaval.498 In this context, the activists writing for Robotnik pushed forward a memorizing narrative that focused on the victims rather than on the perpetrators of the violence. However, ending repression was not among the continuous claims, because violence and repression were not day-to-day issues in 1970s state-socialist Poland, and was not perceived as such, as can be seen in this listing of violent actions from the first issue of Robotnik: “One shot workers in December 70; they were also beaten and fired from their workplaces in June 76.”499 This singularity is also mirrored in the Polish peculiarity of attributing a certain character and dynamic to months, which oftentimes went hand in hand with historicizing them.500 This subjectification of months was a recurrent motive, seen also in the third issue, when Jan Lityński wrote about “remembering December and June.”501 In Spain, on the other hand,

 In Poland, some KOR activists and workers were imprisoned, but not in such a high number as this was the case in Francoist Spain.  On the “productivity” of violence, cf.: Willem Schinkel, Aspects of Violence: A Critical Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 79–81.  Robotnik, September 1977.  See also expressions like kampania wrześniowa (“September campaign”) for the defense of Poland against the German invasion in September 1939.  Robotnik, October 1977.

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activists called for ending repression in almost every (illegal) publication. These calls were a constant echo to a state terrorizing its own citizens. Labor activists asked international actors for support in situations when the state repressed them. Oftentimes, they wrote letters to people in democratic third countries, for instance when Spanish metal workers directed a letter to the office of the International League of Human Rights in Paris in the cause of Marcelino Camacho in 1967 or when Jan Józef Lipski wrote to UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim with a call to help several imprisoned KOR members and workers in 1976.

Independent Trade Unionism and Workers’ Self-Organization Both movements, the Spanish Comisiones Obreras and the group around KOR and Robotnik, pushed forward arguments that dealt with different forms of workers’ self-organization, free and independent trade unionism, and participation in general. The claim was oftentimes a combination of two different aspects. As a first step, activists criticized the current structures and their ineffectiveness by demonstrating how the state-dependent unions worked against workers’ interests instead of supporting them. The second step was to call for alternatives: when Spanish workers felt that they “[. . .] cannot expect anything good from the ‘verticals’ [. . .]”502 or Polish workers complained that the employees of the state union organization would only nod to every directive coming from the managements,503 their lack of trust in the vertical or state-dependent trade unions became obvious. At this time, i.e. in the late 1960s in Spain and the late 1970s in Poland, the labor activists were not yet part of a broader movement. The differences in privileges and the obvious lack of support in conflict situations between employees and managements shed light on the hypocrite class-transcending rhetoric of both the Francoist and the state socialist regimes, as did the ineffectiveness of the organizations when it came to the problem of defending individual or collective workers’ interests. Workers in both countries complained how they had been acting against them or that they had not received support at all.

 Carril, December 1965.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978. See also: footnote 631.

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Similar Concepts with Multiple Meanings Ascribed When workers or their intellectual allies demanded independent workers’ representations, three major concepts, i.e. ‘necessity’, ‘morality’, and ‘democracy’ appeared on both sides, however, in different “variants.”504 They can be therefore understood as “essentially contested concepts” as described by Gallie and others, i.e. concepts that “inevitably involve endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users.”505 In both cases and in all sources investigated, authors depicted themselves as politically mature, a concept that was also of utmost importance for their selfimage. At the same time, they framed their claims for improved working conditions as mere social necessities. In doing so, the claims and demands were presented as allegedly non-ideological. The political concepts of the democratic labor oppositions should neither be associated with an essential historical social conflict (Spain) nor should they be understood as a fundamental questioning of the ideological pillars of state socialism (Poland). This alleged distancing from a partisan stand was an underlying strategy in both countries. This way, one’s own demands should appear rational and hence uncontestable. However, in the Spanish debate this attitude was less salient than in the Polish one, where the rhetoric of necessity matched the overall opposition strategy of taking over important social and political tasks because of a strong feeling of responsibility towards the society. The Polish authors writing in the samizdat press presented their demands as necessities in order to evoke the perception of pushing forward uncontestable, just demands that had to be discussed by everyone. Nonetheless, this self-portrayal as ideologically neutral appeared in different forms in the two countries. In Spain, the authors from the democratic labor opposition, especially those pertaining to the communist party or the CCOO, infused their articles with a peaceful and humanitarian rhetoric. The Polish intellectuals engaged in KOR did not need such an underlining of an own anti-violent stand. They had reacted to state violence and had helped victims of violence but were not associated with violent behavior. Due to the violent history of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist memory politics that dominated the public sphere, the Spanish left had to be careful to not be associated with the atrocities carried out by parts of the Republican military and its supporters during the Civil War. Moreover, both movements employed a strong moral bias. Interestingly, Spanish and

 Dietz, Polnischer Protest, 15. Dietz wrote about the emergence of local “variants” of the same global phenomena; see also the Introduction to this dissertation.  Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” 169.

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Polish oppositionists connected morality to both, ‘conscience’ and ‘rights’, as will be shown comparatively in the following. In the 1967 discussion about the new trade union law, morality was strongly entangled with rights in the Catholic weekly Cuadernos para el Diálogo, and was presented as one out of two reference points that “political law” had to adjust to.506 The “political law” was hence subordinated to “rights” and “morality.” Such a subordination also appeared in another article, where “conscience” was connected to the debate. The Catholic author Corbella Madueño argued that everyone should be able to choose an association according to their own “conscience.” In so doing, he subtly highlighted the political agency and maturity of citizens in a paternalistic authoritarian state. He integrated “ethics,” a term stemming from the same semantic field as morality, into this discourse and furthermore connected it to the issue of social necessities, when he argued that “ethic demands” follow “real circumstances.”507 In Jacek Kuroń’s articles written for Robotnik, morality was more concrete and linked to human behavior in social contexts, for instance when he demanded “healthy conditions in the economy and the society” that allowed for acting morally and pushing forward one’s own personal progress simultaneously.”508 Kuroń, who had repeatedly declared that the “gift of believing in God was not given to him,”509 put the human being at the center of his moral discourse, not the state or a legal framework. In his depiction of the Polish state and economy, citizens of all kinds, including those working for the government, were exposed to the same framework of a planned economy, which hindered everyone to act morally. In this context, the atheist also used the concept of “conscience,” thereby subtly referring to the moralizing and patronizing official labor discourse in Poland that elevated labor towards a moral contribution to the national well-being and progress.510 Consequently, he used the wording of a pracowita sumienność, which can be translated as “diligent conscientiousness.”511 The discourse on morality is underlined by a desire for structures that enable moral behavior and decisions based on ethic factors, mirroring the desire for non-arbitrary and reliable pro-

 Victor Martínez Conde, “Ley Sindical y Base Representativa,” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967).  Corbella Madueño, “Quien y como se hara la ley.”  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977), 2.  Krawczyk, “W co wierzył Jacek Kuroń?”.  This connection of work and productivity were, however, not a Polish or state socialist peculiarity but can be found, for instance, in the history of the nineteenth century in the context of German nation building or the history of the United States.  Robotnik, February 22, 1978 (1977).

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cesses binding for everyone. Finally, the conscientiousness also appeared in the Charter for Workers’ Rights that was published in Robotnik and through other samizdat channels all over Poland in late 1979. Here, consciousness was clearly directed at the social pressure that workers were exposed to in the existing structures. The Charter demanded that nobody should be forced to act against their “conscience.”512 Given the previous advising suggestions on how to act in solidarity when colleagues were repressed, this acting against their conscience also meant spying on colleagues or turning them in. ‘Democracy’ was another important concept discussed in the context of labor activism. While it constituted a positive future vision for both movements, its connotation differed within each national context. In the Spanish debate, democracy was interpreted in two dominant ways, first, as a system securing social peace and coexistence, i.e. the absence of violence, and second, it served as a rhetorical framework for rights. Yet in Spain, ‘democracy’ stood at the end of the claims, while ‘rights’ were one of democracy’s constitutive elements, also referred to as “democratic liberties.” The discourse on social peace and coexistence was strongly infused with a maturity narrative. On the one hand, democracy was teleologically depicted as the final state of a politically civilizing process that other countries had already gone through, and Spain was hindered to follow because of Francoism. On the other hand, democracy itself was considered mature because of its association with peaceful negotiation. Peacefulness as a constituent of democracy presented a mature counter-concept to war and violence, associated with the Francoist military coup, the ensuing Civil War, and the ongoing violent state repression. It was therefore an important element of the opposition’s strategy to show that it embraced peace and rejected any form of violence. Against the dual backdrop of violent acts committed during the Civil War and their exploitation by Francoist propaganda as atrocities only committed by Republicans, the rejection of violence became essential for Spanish communists. Within the narrative that depicted democracy as a framework securing rights, the Habermasian concept of a Verfahrensförmigkeit, a certain procedurality enshrined in democratic rule of law, became virulent. This was, for instance, noticeable when the Spanish communists argued that there was no decision to be made between Francoism and communism, but only between Francoism and democracy, while democracy would ensure the framework of a pluralist party competition where the communists would have “the same rights as the other groups,”513 or

 Robotnik, September 17, 1979.  N.N., “La libertad es indivisible!” (emphasis by me, AD).

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when CCOO activists demanded “rules of procedure” in their workers’ magazine, Carril.514 In the Polish sources, the notion of democracy appeared in a different context. It was not so much interpreted as the absence of arbitrariness or violence, but as both a marker for transnationally belonging to a concrete group of people who shared the same values and, simultaneously, as a framework that ensured the chance to exercise control over political elites. In the “Letter of Thirteen,”515 published in 1976, thirteen intellectuals justified their action of addressing their Western peers with their common appreciation of a “democratic socialism,” which in this case functioned as a transnational identification model and a common denominator. In Robotnik, in contrast to the analyzed articles published in the Spanish alternative press, democracy was not explicitly mentioned with the same frequency. Nevertheless, when referring to the notion of democracy, authors embedded their ideas in concrete contexts. The lack of democracy was, for example, connected to supply shortages or the lack of meat products, as has been shown prominently by the example of the Robotnik serial column titled “Why is there no meat” and its issue “Can you provide meat without democracy?”516 Here, but also in other articles, the lack of democracy was equalized to a lack of social control over authorities who did not fulfill their tasks correctly or morally. The most obvious solution, according to the articles in the magazine for workers, was to carry out social control through “the agency of organs they elected themselves,”517 which echoes the implementation of democratic structures on the factory level.

Labor-related Claims: Salaries, Safety, and Hygiene The claim to forms of self-organization oftentimes appeared in the context of problems at the shop-floor level. While the authors writing for Robotnik deduced these demands from a detailed description of a concrete problem situation, in Spanish publications these problems oftentimes appeared in the form of lists. Safety and hygiene were recurrent topics of concern in Robotnik, while in the Spanish workers’ publications, i.e. the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral and Carril, workers complained about their salaries. While these topics could also appear in democratic countries and are typical crystallization points of workers’ discontent,    

Carril, August/ September 1968. Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich.” Robotnik, April 12, 1978. Robotnik, March 14, 1978.

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in the Spanish and Polish opposition’s writings, they were intertwined with demands of independent trade unionism, whenever the ineffectiveness of existing structures became particularly palpable. It might be rooted in the differences between the sources that Polish workers described problems more concretely than their Spanish counterparts did. The magazine that served as a service-magazine comparable to the legal support offered in Robotnik, the Boletínes de Información de Legislación Laboral, had to shut down its presses after only a few edited issues. In the analyzed Spanish publications, they were rarely mentioned and not as central as in Robotnik, where they constituted a major focal point of the magazine’s critique of living and working conditions. It was oftentimes in this context that the defect character of the state trade union organization was criticized. For the Spanish workers, low salaries were another important issue but the topic was hardly mentioned in the Polish sources, although workers there also petitioned for a rise in salaries in the context of paid overtime. Both Spanish and Polish workers and intellectuals witnessed an extreme increase of living standards in their respective countries and a new form of consumption. In Poland, the state socialist structures could not catch up with the Poles’ material desires, especially not when it came to Western consumer products.

Uses of a ‘Language of Rights’ Interestingly, in many CCOO sources, the claim for “syndical liberty,” which can be translated into the legal claim to the right to join and form trade unions, oftentimes went hand in hand with other demands. This has to do with the pamphletlike character of many CCOO publications, not only leaflets as such, but also some of the articles published in Carril (and also the mouthpiece of the PCE, the Mundo Obrero (“A Workers’ World”), where claims appeared in the form of lists or bullet points). This led to a combination of different claims. For instance, Comisiones Obreras raised civil rights claims in the context of demanding the end of repression, embodied first and foremost by the freedom of assembly and association, and sometimes also freedom of speech. They were oftentimes subsumed under the label of “democratic liberties.”518 The freedom of association issue was particularly salient, as a new Law of Association had been introduced in 1964, only two years prior to the start of the period of investigation. The law, however, explicitly excluded political groups. Logically, the claim for the right to strike was also artic-

 See for instance: Carril, December 1965.

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ulated in this context. Not only did the narrow freedom of association prohibit assembling in public, but it was also explicitly illegal to strike, which would have been the only remaining form of articulating protest, apart from the collective agreements that were in some cases conducted on a factory level in the context of smaller labor conflicts. In contrast to Poland, where the opposition discussed different forms of selforganization within the existing framework, for the Spanish labor opposition, the desire to re-establish a plurality of free and independent trade unions accompanied their actions from the very beginning. However, the Comisiones Obreras made use of the dictatorial regime insofar as they successfully attempted to dominate the oppositional trade union landscape and to present themselves as a movement transcending their own political spectrum, and not just as a communist trade union. This way, they implemented the concept of an umbrella organization to their oppositional logics. Beginning with Robotnik’s first issue, the Polish democratic opposition pushed forward ideas of self-organization and workers’ participation. Yet, this occurred in different forms, for example by claiming “solidary defense of workers’ interests”519 or workers’ participation in wage negotiations: Until now, however, [workers] influenced on the authorities’ decisions dominantly throughout manifestations. This evoked repressions. [. . .] Therefore, a situation has to be created, in which workers could [sic] defend their interests and influence the authorities’ decisions on a daily basis and as matters arise. We want to initiate a discussion on ways to form workers’ representations, their role and their scope of entitlements and duties.520

Although the Spanish publications also display a strong dialogue-orientated rhetoric, the question of how workers’ representations might look in a more democratic environment was different, as it was oftentimes tied to the right to join and form trade unions. The question was therefore less open. The CCOO conjured up a prototype of free and independent trade unionism that was identical to their own form, i.e.: workers’ commissions. These, in turn, should secure basic rights, among these also the right to join and form trade unions, as proposed in Carril’s first issue.521 In Robotnik the concept of a “trade union” was not mentioned before 1979 – prior to this, workers’ councils had been promoted, as has been shown, also based on the Spanish example. Late 1979 was also the first time when “rights” became a more prominent issue in the magazine, whereas the same authors had

 Robotnik, September 1977.  Robotnik, September 1977.  Carril, December 1965.

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used a human-rights language already in 1976, when addressing foreign intellectuals and leftist politicians.522 These findings lead to two connected questions. First: why did the movements differ so much in their rhetoric and their use of a ‘language of rights’? And second: how did the flux of time influence the rhetoric in the context of repression and empowerment strategies? The reasons why the Spanish labor opposition considered it strategically relevant to make use of a language of rights are linked to the history of the Civil War on the one hand and Spain’s semi-peripheral European geography on the other. Spaniards linked their geographical location with self-marginalizing discourses on Europeanness that, in turn, were closely connected with conceptions of modernity. It was important to depict their own movement as peaceful and politically mature. The Spanish society was still deeply influenced by the Civil War that ended in 1939, only twenty-five years prior to the period of investigation. The period of autarky had enforced the perception of being at the periphery of relevant historical, economic, cultural, and political processes, which at the same time fueled the desire to be a part of a bigger picture and of universal processes, first and foremost of an envisioned human ‘progress’. Hence, two main social desires had to be met: the first wish of many Spaniards was to live in a peaceful society free of violence and social divisions and the second one was to live in a society that took part in a general transnational progress, exemplified by Western liberal democracies. This was partly met by the language of the Comisiones Obreras and their intellectual allies, when they referred to a linguistic set of tools that was not only semantically connected to human rights, but also to other normatively positively connoted “essentially contested concepts,”523 including democracy and rule of law. Consequently, the first reason why it was strategically sensible to use a ‘language of rights’ was its humanistic undertone and its peaceful connotation. If the labor opposition wanted to gain any moral authority over other political forces in the country, be it progressive Francoists or fellow oppositionists, they had to find a language that was focused on peace, progress, and stability. Women’s rights, however, and the role of women in labor relations and beyond were not at the center of interest, for neither the Spanish nor the Polish writings examined these areas. The communist

 See the documents published in the Paris-based tamizdat review Kultura: Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich”; Kuroń, “List otwarty Jacka Kuronia do Berlinguera.”  Collier, Daniel Hidalgo, and Olivia Maciuceanu, “Essentially contested concepts”; Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts.”

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authors in Spain, nevertheless, mentioned women’s rights when listing longer catalogues of demands, when they demanded the end of “discrimination.” The second one was the universal character of human rights or rather its universalizing power. By translating everyday problems, conflicts, and repression into a human rights language, their own struggle was universalized and in so doing made connectable for other discourses. This was especially important in a society whose majority wanted to belong to an imagined international community of modern and progressive states and who suffered under the self-image of being unique or “different” in a negative way.524 Simultaneously, this universalizing aspect of human rights discourses constitute the reason why it was only in certain situations relevant for the Polish opposition’s rhetoric: it has been demonstrated that the involved intellectuals indeed universalized the experience of Polish workers by framing it as rights violations and by comparing it to a variety of other experiences, including the Spanish workers’ history. However, they did so when addressing a wider audience outside the country, a Western left-leaning elitist milieu that in the 1970s was exposed to human rights discourse.525 Given the intensive debates conducted among the editorial board about how to reach ordinary workers, it is hardly a coincidence that the authors of Robotnik did not employ an international human-rights language in their first contributions addressing workers. The narrative that they constructed in order to create an oppositional identity among workers was not a universalistic one, but on the contrary a national one. It depicted the workers’ experience as a chain of repressive events linked to the national history that, within this narrative, was a history of repression by foreign power. The specific nature of the victimizing narrative of Polish workers led to a particularizing discourse. This particularity has to do with the second question that has to be answered: why did the language change in late 1979 and why did the authors writing for Robotnik not only decide to use a ‘language of rights’, but also apply it in the form of a Charter? The answer is connected to the different stages within the phases of emerging oppositions and the different dynamics of creating a movement in Spain and Poland and with the timing of becoming a visible opposition. In Spain, the moment of “coming to light” had come when a broad workers’ movement already existed and when a movement’s collective group identity was supported by the label of the Comisiones Obreras, which becomes noticeable for instance in signing up for the syndical elections of 1967.

 Cf. the notion of “Spain is different!,” introduced as a tourism slogan by Francoist Minister Manuel Fraga Irabarne at the beginning of the 1960s.  See Moyn, The last Utopia.

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In Poland, however, this visibility of oppositional activities occurred prior to the formation of a movement, i.e. the visibility of the samizdat and other oppositional dynamics happened before workers and other citizens started to identify themselves with a group movement. Therefore, as a first step that was directed at forming a movement, a particular narrative close to concrete events had to be constructed. Only shortly before the creation of the Solidarność movement, one of the most important mass movements in European history with regard to the overall population of a country, the language directed at those who should be motivated and empowered changed. Now that the situation had developed into the direction of creating workers’ councils – comparable to the development of the Comisiones Obreras – a more universalistic language, understood by people outside the movement, was included in the set of strategies.

3 Illiberal Backlashes – State Reactions to Oppositional Dynamics This book features four case studies, each investigating particular periods of Spanish and Polish oppositional history. While the first two comparative case studies (Chapter 2) aimed at shedding light on the phases of emergence of two oppositional labor movements in postwar Europe, this chapter (3) focuses on periods of backlashes. Given the increased use of the word ‘backlash’ in the course of today’s antidemocratic policy tendencies worldwide, one has to problematize what it exactly means. When looking at scholarly publications, it becomes noticeable that legal and social scientists operate with this concept, thereby dominantly referring to negatively associated reactions of states or other entities to the strengthening of previously marginalized groups.1 When people use the word ‘backlash’, especially when they do so in an academic setting, they oftentimes belong to a human rights research context. The “Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations” also connects “backlash” with “rights,” when it defines it as a “[h]ostile reaction to reform, especially white backlash against civil rights, and anti-feminist backlash.” People who looked up “backlash” often also looked for “reactionary,” the website informs its visitors.2 In less specified encyclopedias, the word has at least a strong political bias, just like in the Cambridge Dictionary that defines a backlash as a “strong feeling among a group of people in reaction to a change or recent events in society or politics.”3 Backlashes, hence, seem to be connected to dynamics of change. In contrast to social scientists, it is the core of any historical analysis to address changes – what is a backlash then for historians? How can we speak about backlashes in the context of human rights history without making them seem exceptional or unusual? As has been laid out in the introductory remarks to Chapter 2, the history of human rights is particularly prone to being narrated in a teleological manner. Its extraordinarily normative character oftentimes suggests a linear path  See, for instance: Alba Ruibal, “Movement and counter-movement: a history of abortion law reform and the backlash in Colombia 2006–2014,” Reproductive Health Matters 44 (2014). Or: Agnieszka Szpak, “How to deal with migrants and the state’s backlash: Polish cities’ experience,” European Planning Studies 6 (2019).  Garrett W. Brown, Iain McLean, and Alistair McMillan, “Backlash,” in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, ed. Garrett W. Brown, Iain McLean, and Alistair McMillian, Oxford Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://www.oxfordrefer ence.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199670840.001.0001/acref-9780199670840-e-92, accessed April 3, 2023.  Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, “Backlash,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio nary/english/backlash. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-003

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of history, one that improves gradually just as if humankind steadily developed towards the better and is only hindered by these backlashes from proceeding. But when having in mind that history was and keeps being contingent, then we can indeed historicize movements and their counter-movements, action, and re-action. Keeping these definitions and considerations in mind, I argue that backlashes occurred when authoritarian governments understood the power of democratic oppositions. Here, one can compare Spain and Poland easily: in both countries, the labor opposition had succeeded in gathering many more citizens than expected. In both countries, a massive strike wave had challenged the governments and the managements of the factories – it resulted in a further estrangement between these two groups. I identified two different variants of backlashes which, however, shall be compared to each other in Chapter 3.3. I hereby follow the definitions above and define a backlash as hostile and oftentimes repressive state reactions to dynamics of change emerging in the society. Simultaneously, I consider it important to underline that these backlashes did not emerge ex nihilo but were rather a new and more drastic way of dealing with the oppositions. Neither the Spanish nor the Polish government wanted to or could truly integrate the labor oppositions’ demands into their political agenda. Such an integration of demands would have meant a re-structuring of the countries into democratic states based on rule of law, which, although both regimes made some concessions, was not envisioned by the authoritarian ruling powers. What did this mean concretely? Spanish and Polish labor movements both contributed to a democratization of certain realms of labor and to a political transformation of actors and structures, however, to a different extent and in different forms. Nonetheless, political system transformations and an overall democratization of state structures were not the immediate consequence of workers’ activism. Being subject to different pressure logics and trying to put a stop to the increasingly successful integration of the workers’ activism into the mainstream society, the governments of Spain and Poland reacted with severity to the social uproar and the democratic efforts. In Spain, the government not only introduced a state of emergency (Estado de Excepción) in 1969 in order to pacify the country, but it also carried out a massive strike against the Comisiones Obreras in 1972 by arresting the ten leading figures of the movement and imposing draconian decades long prison sentences.4 This effectively decapitated the movement and weakened it enormously. On the other hand, in the early 1970s, Spaniards prepared themselves for a phase after Franco, given

 The sentences were lifted in the course of the General Amnesty during the Transition of Spain after 1976.

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the poor health situation of the Caudillo.5 This period is, therefore, characterized by an ambivalence between repression on the one hand and the perception of being in a final phase of a longer period of Francoism on the other, even if different actors imagined the post-Francoist phase differently. Although the Comisiones Obreras had strived for decades to become the umbrella organization of all workers’ movements and the leftovers of the pre-war trade union landscape, in July 1974 the CCOO joined the Junta Democrática (“Democratic Junta of Spain”), an overarching alliance of democratically minded unions, associations, and parties, including the PCE. This era was, moreover, a time when Spanish state violence was a topic of international salience: the imprisonment of Camacho and his colleagues caused a massive national and international solidarity campaign. In Poland, on the other hand, the backlash took the form of introducing martial law in December 1981, over a year after the big success of the Solidarność movement and its recognition as a trade union in August 1980. It lasted more than a year, until the summer of 1983, and had a profound effect on the movement. Polish workers’ leaders like the icon Lech Wałęsa but also intellectual supporters such as Jacek Kuroń were arrested and imprisoned. Although their leaders were in jail, the underground work of the Solidarność continued, primarily through underground writing activities and thanks to the women active in the movement. Given the disastrous supply situation, the Poles witnessed a massive solidarity campaign from Western countries. Both backlashes sent the oppositional actors into a crisis.6 While the Polish martial law was a de jure state of emergency for all Polish citizens and especially for the Solidarność activists, the Proceso 1001 equaled a de facto state of emergency for the workers’ activists at Comisiones Obreras since their leadership was in prison. Apart from constituting repressive backlashes, moreover, both periods shared another common feature: the severity of the states’ reaction caused a specific perception of temporality. Perceiving the present phase as one of crisis provoked people to formulate visions of the future. In the writings of the Spanish opposition, both the emergency phase and the backlash phase were depicted as a  Caudillo was Franco’s byname and means “leader” in Spanish. “Caudillo” and “Caudillismo,” moreover, became concepts to label Latin American dictators in the nineteenth and twentieth century and the respective political systems based on the figure of a charismatic yet authoritarian leader. See for instance: Eric R. Wolf and Edward C. Hansen, “Caudillo Politics: A Structural Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (1967).  Cf. Balfour’s and García’s assessment of the years 1969–1973 as a “crisis” for democratic syndicalism in Spain. Sebastian Balfour and Óscar J. M. García, “Movimientos sociales y transición a la democracia: El caso español,” in La sociedad española en la Transición: Los movimientos sociales en el proceso democratizador, ed. Rafael Quirosa-Cheyrouze y Muñoz, Colección Historia Biblioteca Nueva (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 43–59, 54.

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chance, as a period of relative temporal density, as a moment and not a period, as if time was passing by faster than in other periods of time. The Poles, in turn, felt a strong stagnation of action and adapted their rhetoric and practices accordingly. Crisis phases were phases in which utopian visions flourished, since these phases were clearly marked as a transition towards something new. The drastic actions of the governments showed the activists engaged in the democratic oppositions that the governments they were fighting against also considered the present phase as transitory. On an abstract level, the previous chapter addressed caesurae in history and the question of when one can speak of certain processes arising. This chapter, however, sheds light on the grey zones of history, the transitions before the actual transitions, which are oftentimes camouflaged by iconic caesural moments. In other words, Chapter 3 deals with the final crises that provoked the actual political changes that can be regarded as their beginning stage, depending on how one likes to portion time.

3.1 Hijacking a Show Trial From Below: The Spanish Labor Opposition and the Proceso 1001 in the Early 1970s In the near future the oral trial of a criminal case – 1001 of 1972 – against several persons accused of leading a subversive organization will be held before the Tribunal of Public Order. This fact has diffused widely and has generated a deep condemnation in the most diverse media. It is indeed striking, and it causes scandal and indignities the spirit of any citizen, that some Spaniards are considered delinquents, because – according to what the police say – they intended to organize and manage the defense of the interests of the workers.7

In this introduction to a legal report, secretly published in December 1973, in the light of a soon-to-be-announced sentence, a group of oppositional legal scholars and lawyers accurately summed up the dynamics surrounding the process against ten workers’ activists from the Comisiones Obreras. The process had started with their imprisonment in July 1972 and only ended with them being granted amnesty by King Juan Carlos right after Franco’s death in December 1975. Although the Spanish government repressed workers’ activism permanently, this attack stands out in the long line of Francoist state terror. The process against leading figures of the Comisiones Obreras in December 1973, named after its file number Proceso 1001, condensed the debates on repression and human rights in an unprecedented

 Grupo de Juristas Democratas, Documentos “Proceso 1001” visitado por un grupo de Juristas Democratas Españoles, December 1973, 1 (emphasis in English translation by me, AD).

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manner – even more than the state of emergence (Estado de Excepción) that had been called out some years earlier from January until March of 1969. The ten men were held in prison for more than a year before their trial and were later sentenced to extraordinarily long prison sentences, altogether more than 160 years. Alongside the economic and cultural opening of the country, the 1970s opened with an event that would be remembered as one of the repressive milestones of the Francoist dictatorship, i.e. the Burgos process. In this process, nine members of the Basque underground separatist group ETA were sentenced to death in 1970.8 The sentence, among others, triggered a debate on the death penalty in Spain over the following years and caused a massive solidarity campaign – a campaign that would later be taken as a blueprint for the solidarity with the imprisoned workers’ activists of the Comisiones Obreras.9 It can be noted that from 1973 labor conflicts intensified in a way that was “practically uncontrollable” for the Francoist government.10 In comparison with 1968, only five years earlier, the number of conflicts had quadrupled, and the unworked working hours quintupled.11 Bearing this in mind, the process and the solidarity campaign took place in an extremely conflictive period, which many Spaniards perceived as being the last phase of Francoism, constituting a threshold to a different political and social future. Considering the Proceso 1001 as a historical event, many currents of the Spanish democratic opposition amalgamated: the leaders of the Comisiones were imprisoned based on the accusation of being members of the illegal Spanish Communist Party (which was true) and their defense lawyers belonged to the liberal Catholic milieu that had traditionally strong ties to the workers’ activists. In chapter 2.1, I demonstrated the support Catholic milieus offered to the persecuted workers’ activists. It is, therefore, no surprise that the meeting of the Coordinadora General, i.e. the CCOO’s leading board, during which the activists were arrested, took place in a monastery in the town of Pozuelo de Alarcón, near Madrid. Moreover, the process or rather the trial in December 1973 coincided with the assassination of Luis Car-

 Abbreviation of Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (“Basque Homeland and Liberty”), a Basque separatist organization in Spain that used terrorism in its activism for an independent Basque state.  José Babiano, “Cuarenta años después: A modo de introducción,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 15–28, 17.  Carme Molinero Ruiz, “Comisiones Obreras: De la lucha antifranquista a la Acción Sindical en un nuevo escenario económico y político,” in La sociedad española en la Transición: Los movimientos sociales en el proceso democratizador, ed. Rafael Quirosa-Cheyrouze y Muñoz, Colección Historia Biblioteca Nueva (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 147–60, 148.  Carme Molinero Ruiz, “Comisiones Obreras: De la lucha antifranquista a la Acción Sindical en un nuevo escenario económico y político,” in La sociedad española en la Transición: Los movimientos sociales en el proceso democratizador, ed. Rafael Quirosa-Cheyrouze y Muñoz, Colección Historia Biblioteca Nueva (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011), 147–60, 148.

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rero Blanco, who, given the health situation of the dictator, had been installed as Prime Minister by General Franco in July. He was killed on the morning of the date of the pronouncement of the judgement by a car bomb that ETA had placed under his car. The perpetrator did so with the intention to connect the attack to the trial, as the central organ of the PCE, Mundo Obrero (“A Workers’ World”), speculated some days later, when it was still unclear who had killed the politician.12 According to José Babiano, the imprisonment of the ten leaders of the Comisiones Obreras had a double meaning for them: on the one hand, it symbolized the repressive character of the regime, as did the long prison sentences. But, on the other hand, the Comisiones hijacked the process, taking it beyond the concrete confrontation between the accused and the state and turning it into a trial of the state against the Comisiones themselves. In addition, the Comisiones Obreras presented it as a process against the entire workers’ movement and the Spanish working-class: “From this point of view, the solidarity campaign deployed went beyond the demand for freedom for the accused, becoming a real counterprocess to Francoism [. . .].”13 The “Ten from Carabanchel”14 quickly became heroes of the movement but also heroes of anti-Francoism in general, thanks to the writings in the Spanish underground press.15 Altogether, they were sentenced to 163 years imprisonment, which again caused a massive uproar and protest. The names of the interned were Marcelino Camacho, the famous worker from Perkins and one of the figureheads of the CCOO; Miguel Ángel Zamora Antón, a worker who had founded Comisiones Obreras in Aragón; Pedro Santiesteban, who worked for the company Babcock & Wilcox; Luis Fernández, an electrician; Eduardo Saborido, Francisco Acosta, and Juan Muñiz Zapico, three metal workers; Fernando Soto Martín, who worked in an aeronautical company as well as the communist lawyer Nicolás Sartorius and the worker-priest Francisco García Salve. The men experienced a lot of solidarity in- and outside Spain, reaching as far as Australia16 and

 N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen,” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973.  José Babiano, “Cuarenta años después,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, 17. Comment from the author: Babiano is the director of the CCOO’s archive in Madrid; also, Baumer interprets the trial as one “against the Francoist regime,” see: Baumer, Kommunismus in Spanien, 150.  Carabanchel was a suburb of Madrid and simultaneously the name of the prison located there (AD).  José Babiano, “Cuarenta años después,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, 17.  See for instance: N.N., “En defensa de los 10,” Mundo Obrero, April 26, 1973. See also the letter of the Secretary of the Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Association of Australasia; J. Cambourn, “Carta de la ‘Federated Engine Drivers and Firemen’s Association of Australia’ del

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Fig. 4: Gaceta del Derecho Social, December 1973, Fundación 1° de Mayo, Madrid.

13 de marzo de 1973,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 306.

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Vietnam.17 Simultaneously, they showed their solidarity with protesting or striking workers all around Spain and repeatedly sent open letters or calls out of the prison in Carabanchel. These were, for instance, printed on the pages of Mundo Obrero, the organ of the PCE. In the 1970s, in the course of a broader politicization and activization of allies, the magazine was even proliferated on the streets. This, however, was only possible thanks to a broader network of left-leaning multicopistas, i.e. distributors also stemming from other political and social movements.18 Their diversity points to the intertwining of the various movements and groups, for instance neighbor associations that emerged in Spain in this period.19 Although the Proceso 1001 became a symbol of anti-Francoism in general, it was the Comisiones Obreras in particular that were attacked by it, as was the Spanish Communist Party. The trial was held at the Tribunal de Orden Público, a Francoist institution that had been brought into being through a law in December 1962 to contain the social uproar and workers’ activism. In a Francoist language, it was designed to fight against “[. . .] the tendency in greater or lesser gravity to subvert the basic principles of the State, disturb public order or sow anxiety in the national conscience.”20 Being responsible for many crimes that pertained to the military legal infrastructure, the TOP was primarily created to “repress all forms of political or trade union opposition,” which was also mirrored in the increasing number of cases in the late 1960s and 1970s.21 The TOP was one of the most notorious and feared institutions of the Francoist state and it had a particular interest in destroying the democratic labor opposition that had become increasingly powerful on the streets. The meeting of the Coordinadora General of the Comisiones in June 1972 was a threat in the eyes of the authorities. In fact, the Coordinadora General, just like many other oppositional groups, was preparing for a political change. A document written jointly by the CCOO’s intellectual leader Nicolás Sartorius and the worker

 N.N., “Un saludo de Pham Van Dong, Primer Ministro de la R.D. de Vietnam,” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974.  Carlos Gordon, “Prensa Clandestina y Movimiento Obrero en el Franquismo,” in Amordazada y perseguida, 272.  On neighborhood associations and democratization, see, for instance: Groves et al., Social movements and the Spanish transition; Pamela B. Radcliff, “Associations and the Social Origins of the Transition during the Late Franco Regime,” in Spain transformed: The late Franco dictatorship, 1959–75, ed. Nigel Townson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 140–61.  “Ley 154/1963, de 2 de diciembre, sobre creación del Juzgado y Tribunales de Orden Público,” https://www.boe.es/publicaciones/anuarios_derecho/abrir_pdf.php?id=ANU-P-1963-30069600701, accessed April 7, 2023.  Clavell, Sara Nuñez de Prado, and Raúl R. Ruiz, “La oposición al franquismo en las sentencias del TOP: Organizaciones políticas y movimientos sociales,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 35 (2013): 268.

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Eduardo Saborido was supposed to serve as a base for the discussions at the meeting. The long text entailed the political visions and the program of the Comisiones. Likewise, it entailed clarifications about the character of the movement and what the Comisiones Obreras wanted to be. In this context, the pamphlet titled “On the unity of a mass movement” was supposed to reinforce and to underline the workers’ central role in the general anti-Francoist government but also its own position within the political landscape of workers’ organizations and trade unions.22 Being a member of the CCOO and being a member of a trade union, for instance the UGT, was not to be a contradiction but would ideally function simultaneously.23 This way, the CCOO were presented as the umbrella organization of all workers’ groups and trade unions, a concept that they had been pushing forward since their earliest days. The declaration opened with an assessment of the present times, which were perceived as transitory and as liminal in the sense that they were the last phase of a longer period, as can be seen here: The historical period that our country is going through is fundamentally characterized by the liquidation of a political Regime – the Franco dictatorship installed in power as a consequence of the civil war [. . .] – and by the growing efforts to conquer freedom and democracy. In carrying out this national task, the working class plays a decisive role, as the largest class in society, the producer of social goods, aware of its responsibilities in solving the serious problems that affect the entire nation.24

The document criticized the “neocapitalism” in Spain that allowed for a strong intertwining of multinational corporations and the Francoist state and it called against the negations of “fundamental liberties.” But the most important message this document spread was the importance of the “unity” of all members of the working-class.25

 Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, Sobre la unidad del movimiento obrero de masas, 1972, Fondo Abogado Laboralista José Manuel López Lópe, 18/2; 05/1972, AHT Fundación 1° de Mayo in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 283–95.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, Sobre la unidad del movimiento obrero de masas, 1972, Fondo Abogado Laboralista José Manuel López Lópe, 18/2; 05/1972, AHT Fundación 1° de Mayo in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 283–95.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, Sobre la unidad del movimiento obrero de masas, 1972, Fondo Abogado Laboralista José Manuel López Lópe, 18/2; 05/1972, AHT Fundación 1° de Mayo in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 283.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, Sobre la unidad del movimiento obrero de masas, 1972, Fondo Abogado Laboralista José Manuel López Lópe, 18/2; 05/1972, AHT Fundación 1° de Mayo in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 283–95.

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The author himself remembered how the document was written based on the conviction that the historical division of the Spanish but also European workers’ movement into many fractions had contributed to the defeat in the Spanish Civil War and helped the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy.26 In addition, fourty years later, in a text written in 2013, Nicolás Sartorius remembered how the meeting took place in an atmosphere of absolute certainty that the last days of the Francoist dictatorship had begun. It had not only been the physical weakness of the dictator but also the “exhaustion” of the regime itself and the symbolic gesture of installing Juan Carlos de Borbón as the successor of Franco in the year 1969 that demonstrated the government’s own awareness of its weakness.27 The massive national and international campaign against imposing the death penalty against the militant ETA activists in the Proceso de Burgos in 1970s was yet another weakening factor, especially with regard to the moral reputation of the country at international level. What is more, labor conflicts did not cease to be virulent. In 1971 and 1972, during strikes, the police shot two workers from the CCOO and the PCE alike, namely Pedro Patiño in Madrid and Ruiz-Villalba in Barcelona. Universities became hubs of protest actions, especially in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. In Ferrol and Vigo, two working-class towns, general strikes broke out in March 1972, which massively affected the atmosphere in Spain.28 These processes, according to Sartorius, lead to a broader solidarization of different social sectors. As examples for the “effervescence” in different social realms, he listed the Lawyers’ Congress in Leín in 1970, the celebration of the Catalan Assembly in November 1971, the foundation of the Justicia Democrática29 in spring 1972, and eventually the Joint Assembly of Bishops and Priests in May 1972. The Bishops had agreed on re-orientating the official standpoint of the church with regard to the regime.30 Other forces, including the democristianos around Ruíz-Giménez and Gil

 Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: Un documento para el debate,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 163–69, 165.  Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: Un documento para el debate,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 163.  Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: Un documento para el debate,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 163–69.  A loose organization of legal scholars, lawyers, judges, and state employees aiming at a democratization of juridical structures in Spain.  Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: Un documento para el debate,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 163–69.

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Robles, to name a few prominent figures, started processes of consolidation and institutionalization in order to form an alternative to the communist anti-Francoist opposition: “All these changes came about in the face of the shared idea that the dictatorship did not have a long life ahead of it and that it was necessary to begin to prepare for the future.”31 It was in this atmosphere and under these circumstances that the meeting of the Coordinadora General of the Comisiones in June 1972 was held. However, this was also the environment for a massive solidarity campaign after the meeting had been crushed and the participants were arrested in June 1972. The basis for this chapter consists of a broader range of publications from the milieu of the CCCOO: among others, Mundo Obrero and selected ego-documents and political brochures from the Comisiones Obreras. In cases in which they covered the matter, articles from a specific legal press publication, the Gaceta de Derecho Social (“Social Rights Gazette”), were examined. Like the Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral that had ceased to exist after a couple of published issues, the Gaceta was produced by lawyers in order to inform workers and others about their rights and the Spanish legislation, but also about their own work as labor lawyers connected to the emerging workers’ movement. The lawyers were not only communists, but – mirroring the spectrum of the anti-Francoist opposition – also belonged to the socialist UGT and the democristianos, democratic Catholics stemming from the Cuadernos para el Diálogo milieu.32 The Gaceta del Derecho Social was produced legally between 1970 and 1977 and increasingly became the mouthpiece for the CCOO during the Spanish transition. In the first analytical section of this chapter, the solidarity campaign for the imprisoned working activists is at the center of interest. It will serve as a framework for the examination of discourses on repression. In this context, I am especially interested in the question of how solidarity was generated rhetorically, which reasons for support and solidarity were expressed, and which role human rights played in this context. The second section shows how the Proceso 1001 and  Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: Un documento para el debate,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 164.  A mere translation of this political current into the transnationally used terminus “Christian Democrats” would, however, blur out the differences between this specific group of socially interested, democratic Catholics under dictatorship and their conservative brothers and sisters in the democratic European core region. It has to be noted, however, that there have been social and worker-friendly currents in European Christian democracy, too, for instance in the form of the Christian-Democratic Employees (Christlich-Demokratische Arbeitnehmerschaft (CDA)), a social wing group of the Christian Democratic Union in Western Germany. Moreover, Spanish communists did not share all features of other Western European communists, nor those of their brother parties in the Eastern bloc – despite strong connections between them.

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the lack of rights in Spain was connected with perceptions of time of the oppositional actors. As has been insinuated above, several factors, primarily Franco’s own physical weakness and the installation of its successor, but also an overall social unrest, led to a conviction among oppositionists that they were witnessing the very last days of Francoism. How did this affect their political rhetoric?

Supporting the Comisiones Obreras in Prison and on the Streets: National and International Solidarity for the Imprisoned Activists The ten activists meeting in Pozuelos were accused of being leaders of the illegal Comisiones Obreras and simultaneously of being members of yet another illegal organization, the Spanish Communist Party. In this context, they were accused of unlawful association.33 In the Spanish underground press, the imprisonment of the ten activists was immediately equaled to a blow against the labor movement as a whole. In Mundo Obrero, the official organ of the communist party, an article informed the readers about the imprisonment. In so doing, the anonymous author created a connection between the lack of workers’ rights and civil rights in Francoist Spain: Whatever the formal reason of the police for these arrests is, the basic reason, the cause is only one: the lack of rights for workers, the absence of civil liberties, which turn into a crime what in any civilized country is the normal exercise of the rights and duties of citizens.34

For the anonymous author of these lines, it was clear that the imprisonment of Camacho and the others was only possible in a country like Spain, where international human rights were not respected and therefore permanently violated. In this context, they juxtaposed their own country, Spain, with “any civilized country,” a motive that viewed human rights as a civilizatory achievement and would be very salient over the course of the process. Therefore, the lack of rights was equated with the civilizatory backwardness of Spain and, in addition, was turned into a historical anomaly. The absence of rights had “turned” actions into crimes that in other places were considered to be “normal.”35 It implies that these actions were not crimes in the first place but were artificially transformed into being criminal actions. By referring to the problem as an “absence” of rights, the short  Fernando Nistal González, El papel del Partido Comunista de España en la transición (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2015), 71.  N.N., “Marcelino Camacho nuevamente detenido,” Mundo Obrero, July 8, 1972.  N.N., “Marcelino Camacho nuevamente detenido,” Mundo Obrero, July 8, 1972.

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article furthermore revealed a certain understanding of their universality, i.e. that the imprisoned men had these rights – even though they were “absent” in Spain at that moment. The universality of rights is one of the essential features of human rights, and in legal philosophy: Included in the idea of universality is some conception of independent existence. People have human rights independently of whether they are found in the practices, morality, or law of their country or culture.36

In the context of the Proceso 1001, the universality of human rights provided the anti-Francoist activists with moral legitimization. If human rights independently exist, they existed in Francoist Spain as well. This way, the imprisonment of “the Ten of Carabanchel” was not only presented as amoral but also as unlawful. Therefore, in the quoted article the existence of rights was made the universal norm whereas its violation would be the deviation of the norm. The Francoist polity, consequently, would then become only a deviation from a “civilized country” – and be considered a non-civilized one. The depiction of the Francoist state’s legal system as deficient with regard to international human rights occured in different forms and was highly dependent on the context of the publication. A particularly interesting case in this context is the Gaceta del Derecho Social (“Social Rights Gazette”) that was founded in 1970 in the CCOO milieu and nevertheless became a legally produced monthly service magazine for labor law questions. In the Gaceta del Derecho Social, legal experts engaged with questions of labor and social rights. In doing so, they operated on the margins of the official discourse in Spain. Although the Gaceta del Derecho Social did not comment directly on the imprisonment of the workers’ activists, they sometimes published more general articles on labor legislation that can be read as subtle comments on the political processes. While they were not directly part of the launched solidarity campaign, these subtle comments can be counted as part of the discourse of solidarity dominating the Spanish opposition. One example of this can be found in the article “The Trade Union Movement in Spain.”37 The communist perspective of the author, writing for a legal publication, however, is hard to overlook when reading the introduction to the longer piece on the right to free association:

 James Nickel, “Human Rights,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/sum2019/entries/rights-human, accessed April 3, 2023.  Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).

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Since the first man in history decided to accumulate land, goods or money and manipulate it in order to subdue others, thus initiating the age of exploitation of the many by the few, the idea of all those who were exploited was to unite.38

The article started with portraying the human right to free association as essentially being the genuine reaction to exploitation and, therefore, as something natural being enshrined in the human nature. Later in the article, readers could find an overview of the most important developments in the Spanish and European workers’ history, thereby touching upon the ups and downs of workers’ movements’ successes and failures during the nineteenth century. After engaging with the situation in the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), the text shifted to the Francoist period that was simply named “the new regime.”39 The author, Rafeal Burgos, wrote about the introduction of a trade union act in 1940 and how its implementation effectively prohibited the “rest” of the other trade unions. He also subtly pointed out the Spanish deviance from international processes of coherence when he wrote: “Once the Second World War was over, trade unionism was reorganised in all the countries of Europe, with very different characteristics to those existing in our country.“40 This observation, however, was followed by a quotation of the Right To Organize Convention 1948 and by quotations of the ILO delegation members that had expressed concerns on the Spanish case in the past.41 Admitting that the recent Trade Union Act entailed some democratic elements, the author carefully called for a reform of the legislation in Spain when he stated that, “like in all fields, facts are ahead of the law.”42 Publishing such an article in May 1973 meant taking a stand in the public debate on the Proceso 1001 that had quickly become a major issue among the Spanish labor activists, general democratic oppositionists, and beyond. However, looking at this legally published piece, it becomes noticeable that the government was not criticized at any point and the concrete issue of people being imprisoned because they carried out trade union activities was not mentioned. Having in

 Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).  Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).  Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).  Namely the interventions from the Swiss delegate Bolin and his Dutch colleague Aldero in 1969. Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).  Rafael Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973).

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mind the article from Mundo Obrero, this careful positioning combined with suggestions of changing the law points out the importance of taking into account the agency and position of actors when analyzing the rhetoric of repression. It remains without doubt that human rights triggered an internationally resonant language to address repression and that the 1970s were an extraordinarily dynamic period in this context. Although I would not agree that human rights emerged “ex nihilo” in this decade,43 I do of course second the scholarship that ascribes them a political power and identifies them as being one (but not the) central category of evaluating morally good or bad politics in this decade.44 This power was especially strong in the context of transnational processes – human rights indeed formed a “lingua franca” for many activists worldwide.45 This has to be taken into consideration when analyzing the solidarity campaign in a national and international context. By presenting the repression of the CCOO activists as human rights violations and as a symptom of the overall lack of civil and workers’ rights in Francoist Spain, the Spanish opposition was able to make their own cause resonant with a transnational and national audience alike. This is especially true for those who were part of the Catholic or communist milieus and were, therefore, also part of an explicitly transnational community. In the context of the Proceso 1001, human rights were a salient rhetorical framework to address repression. The internees themselves also asked people for help and support. In an appeal from July 1972, written shortly after their imprisonment, they addressed “Workers, Democrats. Unionists [Sindicalistas] from the peoples of the Spanish state and of the entire world.”46 As they had been arrested when holding a meeting of the Comisiones Obreras and in so doing were carrying out union work, they addressed labor right activists and democrats worldwide and within Spain. Their only “crime,” as they wrote in quotation marks, was to pass by a “religious residence” – where they chanced upon the meeting held in the residence of the Monastery of Pozuelos.47 In the letter, the imprisoned internees quoted the au Moyn, Not Enough, 121.  For a discussion of the broad historiographical research on human rights in the twentieth century, please see the Introduction to this dissertation.  Eckel, “Utopie der Moral, Kalkül der Macht. Menschenrechte in der globalen Politik seit 1945,” 458.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.

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thorities’ motivation for the imprisonment. Their arrests had been grounded in the illegal demonstrations and other illegal activities, such as the repeated agitation, which were a threat to the peaceful coexistence.48 The letter commented on this by quasi re-translating the authorities’ “slang”49 that they called “police-like and fascist.”50 “Honest workers” were categorized as criminals in order to justify their detention. The opening of the Proceso 1001 was called an “arbitrariness.”51 This argument led to another, touching upon the dilemmas of the rule of law in authoritarian regimes. In his letter from prison, Camacho wrote: The Dictatorship, violating its own ‘legality’, cannot bear to see us on the street. Some of us sick, dismissed and repressed, encircled, our condition as militants, [some of us] who have suffered and suffer repression, without bowing down, [we] frighten them. We are a living accusation of their working-class hostility.52

The “legality” of the Francoist dictatorship, i.e. its legal system, was delegitimized by putting the word into quotation marks. But this process, from the perspective of the imprisoned, trumped the previous experiences, as it also violated the Francoist laws, even though it remains unclear which laws were meant here. The letter was supposed to present the Proceso 1001 as unlawful. Therefore, the accused presented the accusations as arbitrary and the legal system itself, firstly, as defective, and, secondly, as violated in any case, and therefore entirely useless and unserious. Consequently, the process was depicted as the result of an aggressive ideology not grounded in (rule of) law: by stating that the imprisoned, including all their individual features, were the “living accusation” of the governments’ hostility towards the working class, Camacho delegitimized the entire juridical process.

 Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.

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The arguments for such a delegitimization of the Francoist legal system were manifold: first, it did not respect international human rights nor workers’ rights, which excluded it from an international community of “civilized” states. Second, the Spanish legal system was depicted as arbitrary, which would be the opposite of a legal system grounded in the rule of law and striving to treat everybody equally. Third, the system was depicted as ideological, which is related to the accusation of the arbitrariness but is even more specific because it demonstrates a conscious violation of rule of law. In their letter from prison, the working activists were quasi prophetic when they correctly envisioned the opening of a “monstrous process” by the Francoist state: This is why [the state] tries to keep us unjustifiably in prison for two months (for not paying the fines), and opens up a monstrous process, by which, without any proof, they intend to sentence us to long years in prison, unless all the workers and democrats prevent it with their protest. For this reason we ask all of you, workers inside and outside, to act.53

The calls for help were successful. People in- and outside Spain supported the solidarity campaign surrounding the process, including several contemporary celebrities such as the Black American communist civil rights activist Angela Davis.54 Over the course of the solidarity campaign, respective committees were created in several Western European countries (especially those with a high number of Spanish [working] migrants, i.e. Belgium, the Netherlands, Western Germany, and, most dominantly, France) as well as in Northern America.55 As was shown earlier, Camacho himself directed calls for solidarity to the public, but also to a broad spectrum of national and international actors, for instance French trade unions, media like The New York Times, and international organizations including the ILO. Consequently, he and his colleagues were not only defended by the most prominent lawyers of the communist milieu but also by prominent and defenders from “more moderate” circles of the anti-Francoist opposition.56 Laura Rozalén

 Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al., “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” Caja 87/ 2.3 (Archivo PCE, July 1972); Letter from Carabanchel Prison.  “Mundo Obrero” (May 23, 1973), 11–12.  Laura R. Piñero, “Las Campañas de Solidaridad: Sus Protagonistas, su Dimensión y Repercusiones,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 89–137.  Laura R. Piñero, “Las Campañas de Solidaridad: Sus Protagonistas, su Dimensión y Repercusiones,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 90. The activists were defended by the following lawyers: Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, Adolfo Cuéllar, Marcial Fernández, José María Gil Robles, Manuel López, Francisco Cossío, Cristina Almeida, Francisca Sauquillo, Jaime Sartorius y Enrique Barón. Among

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Piñero has shed light on the debates within the PCE itself that coordinated the campaign in close cooperation with the CCOO. In order not to focus too much on the most prominent prisoner, Marcelino Camacho, the slogan Camacho y sus compañeros (“Camacho and his colleagues”) was changed to los 10 de Carabanchel, (“the 10 from Carabanchel”).57 On the basis of the examined sources, one can conclude that the campaign entailed several repeatedly occurring features. Firstly, the Proceso 1001 was presented as a process against the entire working-class, which has to be understood in the context of the CCOO’s aspirations of constituting the institutional framework for the anti-Francoist opposition in general. In this context, the question of rule of law played an important role: the accusations of the prosecutor were regularly delegitimized as not grounded in law but in his ideology. The regime was portrayed as dying, whereas the opposition was portrayed as broad and strong as well as ready to fight. Second, the public opinion in democratic countries abroad was an important factor in generating the feeling of being on the right side of history at home. Moreover, very concretely, the international level constituted another realm for actions of solidarity: not only were the activists supported by solidary citizens and trade unions in other countries, but they also called international institutions or national institutions abroad for help. The different features will now be discussed in detail with a special emphasis on audiences addressed.

Solidarity at Home: Supporting the Workers’ Activists as Part of an Anti-Francoist engagement When speaking to fellow Spanish citizens, the Comisiones Obreras – still pursuing an umbrella function within the labor opposition – intentionally broadened the solidarity for their people as an overall democratic fight against Francoism.58 In April 1973, their leading board published a call addressing their members and to “all workers and the public opinion of the peoples of the Spanish State.”59 In their them were also two women, Cristina Almeida and Francisca Sauquillo. Nicolás Sartorius’ son Jaime was also among the defenders.  Laura R. Piñero, “Las Campañas de Solidaridad: Sus Protagonistas, su Dimensión y Repercusiones,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 91.  See, also: Laura R. Piñero, “Las Campañas de Solidaridad: Sus Protagonistas, su Dimensión y Repercusiones,” in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?, ed. José Babiano (Madrid: Fundación 1º de Mayo, 2013), 93.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, “Llamamiento de la Coordinadora General,” in CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976), ed. Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas

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appeal, they commented on how different social groups had joined the fight against the dictatorship, including university and high school students, professors and teachers, lawyers, medical doctors and medical personnel. Even the Church was listed as an ally, however, a gradually evolving one. The unknown author highlighted that the Church took a position that was “increasingly firm” in favor of liberty and democracy and against institutionalized violence.60 The pamphlet continued: “Although the actions of the working class and the other parts of the population are grounded in the specific problems of each sector, they all have in common the struggle against the dictatorship for freedom and democracy.”61 In November 1972, shortly after the VIII Party Convent of the Spanish Communists, Mundo Obrero dedicated a longer text to the fate of Camacho and called for an “offensive against the repression” and an “immediate mobilization in the defense of the workers’ leaders.”62 Some of the unknown authors also combined the latest activities of the Tribunal for Public Order with each other. The TOP had not only issued a trial against the workers’ activists but also against a Catholic association named “Pax et Iustitia” because of “illegal propaganda.”63 The Catholics, according to Mundo Obrero, had insisted on being treated according to the agreements of the Joint Assembly of Bishops and Priests that contained the freedom of expression as well as the right to free association and trade union gatherings [libertad de asociación sindical]. The magazine depicted the current situation in a particular way. On the one hand, Spaniards were left with an entirely lawless and therefore hopeless government that did not shy away from attacking Christian groups. On the other hand, however, they were backed by a strong and welltrained workers’ movement that was able to gather all oppositional forces behind it. The solidarity campaign for Camacho and the others soon became a general

(Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987), 197–200. By “peoples of the Spanish state,” the CCOO referred to the different regional nationalities that exist in Spain, but were, however, oppressed in their language and culture during Francoism. Alongside workers’ protests, regional nationalisms, first and foremost the Basque independence movement and its terrorist branch ETA, contributed to a heated anti-Francoist mobilization during the dictatorship. Another anti-Francoist hotspot of regional nationalism was and is until today Catalunya and its capital Barcelona.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, “Llamamiento de la Coordinadora General,” in CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976), ed. Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas (Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987), 198.  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras, “Llamamiento de la Coordinadora General,” in CCOO: Diez años de lucha (1966–1976), ed. Miguel A. Zamora Antón and Fidel Ibañez Rozas (Zaragoza: U.S. de CCOO de Aragón, 1987).  N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión,” Mundo Obrero, November 22, 1972.  N.N., “Brutal Petición Fiscal contra Camacho y otros dirigentes obreros/ La Iglesia al Tribunal de Orden Público,” Mundo Obrero, November 22, 1972.

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appeal for standing up against the dictatorship, an appeal that was explicitly directed at all Spaniards. The workers were addressed and even subtly criticized for not having protested against the police actions against “their leaders.”64 Even if there had been important interventions by both the families of the repressed and some lawyers, “class-solidarity” was now needed.65 Thereby, the communist magazine called for spreading the news on the imprisonment and for raising awareness at workplaces all over the country. Nevertheless, Mundo Obrero believed “everyone” had to join the protest: There is no doubt that this response to repression, the broad and deep response that is needed, must be everyone’s task. [. . .] The Communist Party of Spain calls once again to close ranks against repression, to find a platform for struggle and unity for the majority of Spaniards in the common action against it. We hope that the Church, whose institutions and representatives are not even respected by the repressive services anymore, will openly speak out – as such Church – against the ongoing trials, against the violation of human rights. [. . .] We call upon the majority of Spaniards to reflect so that they see in this struggle against repression a struggle for their own safety and the safety of their children.66

Not only were Spaniards called to stand up, but the transnational solidarity campaign was also mentioned and compared to a similar campaign against the Burgos Process in 1970: And beyond our borders, in Europe and in the world, where there are numerous committees to help the Spanish people and thousands of emigrated compatriots, the protest must be heard through acts, pronouncements, following the tradition of solidarity that reached exciting summits when the Burgos process [took place]. Inside and outside Spain, we must reactivate the struggle against repression and reactivate the solidarity with the workers’ and the democratic movement.67

In accordance with the CCOO’s idea to foster solidarity through underlining the political character of the Proceso 1001, the articles published in Mundo Obrero argued that every citizen should engage in solidarity with Camacho and his colleagues, not only out of mere solidarity but because it would benefit all people. This almost utilitarian motive was explicitly articulated, for instance when the “safety of their children” was used as an argument to step up against Francoism. By turning the process against workers’ activists into a process against the democratic opposition, the CCOO universalized their own cause towards a more ab-

   

N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión.” N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión.” N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión.” N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión.”

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stract one, which was open for other interest groups to join and connected by the common language of portraying themselves as part of the democratic opposition. In so doing, they turned the process into everybody’s cause. How was the case universalized in order to cause empathy or an abstract identification with the repressed? Authors intended to create empathy through referring to the next generation and through appealing to “class-solidarity.” The latter can be regarded as an appeal to the class-consciousness and a connected self-understanding, but also the pride of workers. Since the more progressive elements of the Catholic Church had become an increasingly important partner for the workers’ activists, the Churches’ activities were increasingly covered by the Communist Party organ Mundo Obrero. In December 1972, the magazine reported on how the Church had called for amnesty by opening the respective article as follows: “Event of great importance.”68 The text reported how three of the “most representative members”69 of the Church had asked for a general amnesty for imprisoned priests, who were no different to all the other “political prisoners.” The government had tried to hide this fact from the public, because: So important is this positioning, so hard it is for the regime, and so positive it is for the victims of repression that the government has ordered the media and press to bury it in silence. [. . .] But the fact is already there. And the facts must be brought to bear, giving an unprecedented impulse to the national demand of amnesty. [. . .] Democrats, Spanish Catholics of labor, culture, advocacy, the Church [, all are] united in an immense mobilization movement to implement general amnesty.70

Again, Mundo Obrero envisioned a massive, socially heterogeneous anti-Francoist movement, united in the demand for a general amnesty, which meant a liberation of the political prisoners, not only from the workers’ milieu. In this context, it is worth mentioning that the CCOO, or rather the PCE, changed their attitude with regard to the other workers’ movements. They had always aimed at gaining dominance over the broad landscape of Spanish workers’ organizations and trade unions, but barely mentioned them in their press. In the early 1970s, nevertheless, this attitude changed: at the same time that Camacho and his colleagues were imprisoned in Carabanchel, another worker who had been active in the Catholic-leaning, left-wing Unión Sindical Obrera (USO)

 N.N., “La Iglesia se pronuncia por la Amnistia,” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972.  The three representatives were José Bueno Monreal, the Archbishop of Sevilla, Jacinto Argaya Goicoechea, the Bishop of San Sebastián, and José Maria Cirarda Lachiondo, the Archbishop of Córdoba.  N.N., “La Iglesia se pronuncia por la Amnistia” (emphasis in original).

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was detained.71 Whereas the earlier strategy of the CCOO would have underlined the differences between the CCOO as a movement and the USO as a union, in order to be able to function as an umbrella organization, the political context of the situation in the 1970s allowed for presenting the fate of the imprisoned USO activist as similar: They are processes of the same nature, aimed at decapitating the workers’ movement [. . .]. What do these processes, and the others that we do not enumerate, demonstrate? The lack of trade union and fundamental rights in Spain. The anti-labor [labor-hostile] and fascist character of the regime. The growing weakness of the Dictatorship that is attacked in its last strongholds and tries to contain the uncontainable.72

The unknown author continued that “repression” was the only political instrument left for the government that he depicted as dying and desperate: One has to dedicate more continuous efforts to the fight against repression. Increasing the extent and depth of solidarity with the repressed and opening new fronts in the political struggle [. . .], bursting through all the fissures offered to us by the crackdown and crisis of the regime.73

Here, the author clearly spoke out for a broad coalition of anti-Francoist activists that had to be achieved through “opening new fronts.” The massive street protests and the strikes by workers that had characterized Spanish everyday life for many years during the 1960s, as well as the success of the late 1960s when the CCOO won the internal elections in the official OSE in 1967, had strengthened the movement noticeably, even though it was now attacked so harshly. The political situation seemed to offer gateways to attack the dictatorship or to even terminate it – in such a situation the CCOO did not want to split up into different fractions, but rather concentrate on the common goal of all oppositional actors: ending the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. As has been discussed at the beginning of this section, the program for such a coerced action or a “unity of a workers’ mass movement” had already been formulated by Sartorius and others before getting detained.74

 After 1975, the USO split and integrated partly into the CCOO and partly into the UGT that was affiliated with the PSOE.  N.N., “El proceso represivo contra la clase obrera,” Mundo Obrero, May 19, 1973 (emphasis in original).  N.N., “El proceso represivo contra la clase obrera,” Mundo Obrero, May 19, 1973 (emphasis in orig.)  Coordinadora General de Comisiones Obreras in Proceso 1001 contra Comisiones Obreras: ¿quién juzgó a quien?.

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International Solidarity: Allies Abroad While other workers’ organizations, the Church, and other social movements in general were portrayed as allies inside the country, Mundo Obrero made sure that the actions of solidarity taking place abroad were also visible on the pages of the magazine. Declarations of solidarity by foreign trade unions, such as those in Scotland and West Germany, were reprinted or paraphrased in the magazine.75 In the May issue of 1973, Manuel Azcárate, executive member of the PCE, reported how he had undertaken a trip to Australia where the Communist Party of Australia was in solidarity with the ten workers imprisoned in Carabanchel.76 The youth organization of the British Labour Party had engaged in the protest of solidarity too and their statement was reprinted on the pages of Mundo Obrero. In this statement, the Young Socialists underlined that “putting aside ideological differences” (in the Spanish Party spectrum, the Partido Socialista Español, PSOE (“Spanish Workers’ Party”) would have been the ideological institutional counterpart of the British Labour Party) “that indeed existed,” what Spain now needed was actions of solidarity by all leftist groups.77 A little later, in September, Mundo Obrero reported that British trade unions planned a tribunal “in order to judge the Franco regime.”78 Transforming the solidarity with the “Ten” into a general anti-Francoist fight was a method frequently used in a transnational setting, not only in the domestic context. Out of prison, Camacho directed a letter at Benoît Frachon and Georges Séguy from the French trade union confederation CGT,79 as an “old veteran” of the organization during his time in exile in France, from which he had returned in 1957. Camacho wrote he was aware of the support and the calls of the big French trade unions and he was grateful. He did not care for the years spent in prison, nor for the thirty more years that were demanded by the prosecutor.80 In

 “Mundo Obrero” (May 10, 1973), 7, 10.  Manuel Azcárate, “Intensa solidaridad de los trabajadores australianos,” Mundo Obrero, May 10, 1973.  Delegación del PCE en la Conferencia anual del Labour Party Young Socialist, “Inglaterra: La juventud socialista por la libertad de los ‘10 de Carabanchel’,” Mundo Obrero, May 23, 1973.  N.N, “Los Sindicatos de G. Bretaña organizarán el Tribunal Internacional para juzgar al régimen de Franco,” Mundo Obrero, September 17, 1973.  The Conféderation Géneral du Travail had its roots in anarcho–syndicalism and underheld close ties with the French Communists until the 1990s. It is one of France’s largest workers’ organizations until today. For a history of the CGT, see for instance: Michel Dreyfus, Histoire de la CGT (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 2015).  Marcelino Camacho and N.N., “Haremos el proceso del régimen,” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973.

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his appeal, Camacho explicated his approach to universalize the Proceso 1001 into one against the dictatorship in general: “The Proceso 1001 will not be the process of the Comisiones Obreras. Our comrades, the French workers, those of Europe and the world, everybody, you and us, we will make the Proceso 1001 the process of Francoism [. . .]. More convinced than ever that no one can besiege life, I hug you.“81 In an explanatory comment, Camacho’s idea was again repeated by the unknown author of Mundo Obrero. Camacho’s “message” and his “solid expression of confidence that ‘no one can besiege life’” remained the “central idea”: [. . .] [T]he repressive process against the defenders of trade union liberty, against the Comisiones Obreras, shall be transformed into the process of Francoism. The process against the regime made by everybody. For the Spanish workers and their colleagues in the entire world.”82 The strategy to transform the Proceso 1001 into an anti-Francoist tribunal was openly communicated and even ennobled to be a “central idea.”83 At the same time, it was converted into a transnational action, when the author rhetorically integrated “colleagues in the entire world” into the group of supporters.84 Marcelino’s wife Josefina Camacho was one of the supporters. She stepped into the public and joined the actions of solidarity in France, which were covered in a bilingual French-Spanish solidarity brochure. “To defend my husband is my last right,” Josefina Camacho was quoted as saying.85 She published an appeal for solidarity on the pages of the brochure and called for sending protest letters to both the Spanish Ministry of Justice and the Tribunal of Public Order.86 In his study on foreign correspondents in Francoist Spain, Tobias Reckling has shed light on the importance of these contacts for the imprisoned because they underheld close contacts with the anti-Francoist opposition and, for instance, visited his wife and

 Marcelino Camacho and N.N., “Haremos el proceso del régimen,” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973.  Marcelino Camacho and N.N., “Haremos el proceso del régimen,” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973 (emphasis in original).  Marcelino Camacho and N.N., “Haremos el proceso del régimen,” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973.  Marcelino Camacho and N.N., “Haremos el proceso del régimen,” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973.  Comité d’Information et de Solidarité avec l’Espagne, Bulletin d’Information du C.I.S.E. / N° special, March 1973.  Comité d’Information et de Solidarité avec l’Espagne, Bulletin d’Information du C.I.S.E. / N° special, March 1973.

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daughter when he was imprisoned.87 In general, organizing support and letters of solidarity for imprisoned workers was also a typical form of female oppositional activism within the Spanish labor opposition. Potential partners or allies abroad were also directly addressed by the imprisoned workers’ activists. In May 1973 for instance, the “Ten” wrote a letter to the editor-in-chief of The New York Times “with the aim that – through your newspaper – the Northern American public opinion will be informed about our case.”88 In their letter, they mentioned that they were constantly persecuted although the ILO had issued a report which stated that they were arrested for activities that would be considered as legal activities in other countries. In addition, the activities were not only in accordance with ILO Conventions but also enshrined as rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.89 In so doing, they not only called upon a Western public for solidarity, but also used the ILO Convention as a common denominator and as a common framework for making their own cause understandable abroad.

Political Prisoners as International Icons of Repression Prominent members of communist parties also showed their solidarity, not only from other European but also Latin American sister parties. In the same issue, the icon of the American civil rights movement Angela Davis expressed her solidarity with the “Ten.” This was special insofar as Davis herself had faced legal persecution in her home country. The activist and public intellectual, who had fought in the civil rights movement in the USA and was a member of the American Communist Party, had not only been socialized in the United States; she had also studied in Europe. Moreover, she had done so on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain. She studied with the critical philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt and completed her doctoral studies in Philosophy at East Berlin’s Humboldt University. In October 1970, Angela Davis was arrested for her alleged involvement in the attempted prison escape of a friend and colleague and was later

 Tobias Reckling, “Foreign correspondents in Francoist Spain (1945–1975)” (PhD diss, University of Portsmouth, March 2016), https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/foreigncorrespondents-in-francoist-spain-19451975(fd597296-4470-410a-9bc6-4c74a8e538e1).html, accessed September 25, 2019, 213.  Francisco Acosta et al., Carta a la New York Times, May 1973.  Francisco Acosta et al., Carta a la New York Times, May 1973. The archival document entails a partly unreadable note that the document was published later without revealing the concrete date (AD).

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accused of the capital crimes of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping.90 The imprisonment and the trial of the activist “unleashed” a massive solidarity campaign around the globe and a “storm of protest,” although she was acquitted in 1972.91 Only a few months later, Davis wrote a statement of solidarity to the fellow communists, comparing their struggle and identifying with them on the base of being “political prisoners”: I myself have been a political prisoner and I know how much my freedom owes to the movement that began in this country and spread to the other countries of the world. I am aware that I was vigorously supported in Spain. At this moment, ten revolutionary leaders of the Spanish workers movement, some of whom participated in the movement for my freedom, are threatened by a process, they are repressed by Franco’s fascist regime. That is why I want to call on the peoples of the world to support the 10 of Carabanchel.92

The imprisoned activists themselves were eager to underline their status as “political prisoners” (presos politicos). This was an important distinction to the ground of indictment used by the authorities, who, in turn, negated the existence of political prisoners in Spain.93 But this solidarity was not mere political strategy. Support from outside was essential for political prisoners, as Padraic Kenney, in a study on political prisoners, wrote: [. . .] political movements outside the prison shape political prisoner’s behavior and identity. The political prisoner and the movement draw strength from one another: The prisoner needs human interaction, comfort, and material support; the movement values the symbolic power of its living martyrs and the experience they gain inside.94

The concept of political prisoners95 constituted an important political rhetoric tool in the 1970s, particularly with regard to intellectual dissidents in the Eastern bloc and within the traditional Cold War cleavages but also in the context of supporting

 Katrina Hagen, “Ambivalence and Desire in the East German ‘Free Angela Davis’ Campaign,” in Comrades of color: East Germany in the Cold War world, ed. Quinn Slobodian, Protest, culture and society volume 15 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 157–87, 157.  Katrina Hagen, “Ambivalence and Desire in the East German ‘Free Angela Davis’ Campaign,” in Comrades of color: East Germany in the Cold War world, ed. Quinn Slobodian, Protest, culture and society volume 15 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 157–87, 157.  Angela Davis, “Apoyar a los 10 de Carabanchel: Reprint of Solidarity Declaration,” Mundo Obrero, May 23, 1973.  See, for instance this report from AI: Amnesty International, Situación actual en las cárceles españoles, 1973.  Kenney, Dance in chains, 7.  Sometimes also called “prisoners of conscience”; see also Chapter 3.2.

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oppositionists in Latin American dictatorships. In transnational progress narratives of the twentieth century, grounded in processes of decolonization, technical progress, and democratization dynamics, political prisoners quickly became one of the main denominators for the international (moral) standing of states. In the context of an increasing focus on human rights, and a new “moral for the world”96 that shaped an international discourse on how citizens were treated by states, Kenney asked in his study whether there is “[. . .] any figure in the contemporary world who inspires greater respect than the political prisoner?”97 Amnesty International, in a report issued on the situation of prisoners in Spain in 1973, reported how the matter had traditionally been an object of heated legal debates between anti-Francoist oppositionists’ lawyers and the authorities since 1969. Spanish lawyers had also addressed the matter during an extraordinary meeting in January 1969 as one of only two points of discussion.98 The CCOO had already used the terminus presos politicos in the 1960s, thereby also referring to international human rights and human rights organizations, including the United Nations.99 Not being recognized as a “political prisoner” also meant sharing the prison with regular criminals. In July 1973, Camacho complained about the prison conditions in a letter that he directed at the Tribunal de Órden Público.100 In his complaint, he mentioned life threatening conditions including punches and a widespread “homosexualism,” by which he probably meant sexual violence in a contemporary discriminative wording. The article describes how Camacho and six of his colleagues had been encircled by over 100 “general” criminals. Thus, he insisted on having this incident as well as the mentioned complaint included in the summary for the process and demanded on having his “civil rights” respected.101 One of the prisoners, the workers’ priest Francisco García Salve, was separated from the others and was taken to a special priests’ prison in the town of Zamora in Western Spain. There, he went on a hunger strike. In an open letter directed “At the public opinion,” the remaining nine men also criticized the higher ranks of the Church who had not taken the responsibility for their priest and pointed out the harsh conditions in the priest’s prison that had

 See: Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).  Kenney, Dance in chains, 1.  Amnesty International, Situación actual en las cárceles españoles (1973), 8.  For instance, in 1968 in a letter of several imprisoned workers’ activists that called themselves “political–social prisoners.” See: A todos los Partidarios de la Convivencia Nacional! A los Democratas del Mundo Entero! (April 1968).  N.N., “Camacho Acusa,” Mundo Obrero, July 1, 1973.  N.N., “Camacho Acusa,” Mundo Obrero, July 1, 1973.

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“alarmed” them.102 In this context, they also mentioned the difficult conditions for imprisoned minors, who were exposed to a variety of “physical and moral dangers.”103 Apart from the complaints entailed in these articulations, it is important to read them as expressions considering oneself morally superior. The martyrs’ aura that surrounds many political prisoners was further strengthened through these expressions as they depicted themselves, the political prisoners, as victims of common criminals on the one hand and as responsible observers on the other, caring about fellow imprisoned younger people.

Reaching out to the International Labour Organization Over the course of the process, the imprisoned again called an international organization, the International Labour Organization (ILO).104 The ILO was of particular importance to the workers’ activists. Over the course of the Francoist years, it had engaged in a rather difficult relationship with the Spanish state, characterized by tensions over Francoist labor politics.105 The Francoist government, however, was not indifferent towards the ILO’s attitude: after Spain had left its autarky-policy behind in the late 1950s and had attempted to re-join an international community of states, primarily by cooperating with them economically and allowing for international trade and foreign investments, the authority of international institutions gained momentum.106 In 1969, over the course of the debates on the reforms on the trade union legislation and shortly before the imposition of the state of emergency in early 1969, an ILO mission had been invited to Spain to examine the labor situation and the legislation reforms.107 Francoist Spain had reentered the ILO in 1954. However, the official Spanish trade union organization OSE was never accepted by the UN suborganization, therefore the visit from the ILO representatives was an

 Marcelino Camacho et al., A la opinión pública, December 1973.  Marcelino Camacho et al., A la opinión pública, December 1973.  For an overview of the relationship between the ILO and Spain in general, see: Mateos López and Abdón Esther, La denuncia del sindicato vertical: Las relaciones entre España y la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (1939–1969) (Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social, 1997).  Another important international institution was the International Federation of Trade Unions, that, however, was not mentioned in the examined sources. Nevertheless, the IFTU intervened in Spanish labor politics and repressive policies repeatedly; this is true for the mid–1960s and the year 1970.  N.N., “Comisiones Obreras, UGT y USO incorporados al grupo de trabajadores de la O.I.T,” Mundo Obrero, June 19, 1974.  See Chapter 2; George Esenwein, “Spain,” in European labor unions, ed. Joan Campbell (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992), 400–17, 413.

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especially difficult diplomatic undertaking. The delegates sent to Spain were relatively high-ranking members of the ILO. They were Paul Ruegger of Switzerland, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Institute of International Law and of the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations of the ILO, Julio Augusto Barboza-Carneiro of Brazil, a former chairman of its Governing Body, and Pier Pasquale Spinelli of Italy, a former Director General of the UN office in Geneva.108 One of the most pressing issues back in 1969 was the situation of imprisoned trade unionists, which was a conflictive issue between the ILO representatives and the representatives of the Spanish government. They not only visited enterprises and factories, or met with official representatives, but also met also with labor lawyers, Church representatives, and imprisoned activists.109 Based on the information of international trade union organizations, they had asked to conduct interviews with twelve persons detained in jail, among them persons that were later imprisoned again in the context of the Proceso 1001. Now, in 1972, Camacho and his colleagues wrote an open letter to the ILO that was reprinted on the pages of Mundo Obrero. In this letter, the workers’ activists referred to the ILO report written after the 1969 visit to Spain.110 They underlined the fact that they had been imprisoned only because of carrying out trade union activities and that their arrest lacked any legal basis, which equated to a selfdescription as political prisoners. In so doing, they also quoted the report itself, using it as support for their own case. The ILO report had expressed concern about the possibility of a peaceful development of the labor situation in Spain while imprisonment and “other forms of arrest” continued being a “recognized sanction for activities that in other countries would be considered legitimate union activities [. . .].”111 The workers’ activists reminded the addressees within the ILO how they had interviewed one of the “Ten” in the very same prison building that was now also the place from which the letter was written. By referring to the Convention on the Freedom of Association, in their open letter, the workers called for an intervention from the International Labour Organization: Although Spain has not ratified the instrument on the freedom of association, it has adhered to the principles that inform this specialized organism of the United Nations which is the ILO. For this reason, in view of the monstrous penalties that have been demanded, and which constitute a clear violation of the aforementioned principles, we request that all members of the ILO be informed and that the appropriate measures be adopted to ensure

 See: Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain, 60.  Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain, 60.  International Labour Organisation, The trade union situation and industrial relations in Spain.  “Los Diez,” “Desde Carabanchel, Carta a la O.I.T,” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972.

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respect for the rights of workers, beginning with our release from prison. We insist: our activity is only that of a recognized trade unionist nature.112

The letter suggests that the ILO as an institution fulfilled the function of a “human rights institution,” contributing to a globally effective “human rights regime.”113 These “regimes” were special as – in contrast to other international regimes that were aiming at the cooperation of states – “the distinctiveness of such regimes lies instead in their empowerment of individual citizens to bring suit to challenge the domestic activities of their own government.”114 In the particular setting of the Francoist dictatorship, these references to international organizations can be compared those to the Vatican when it was quoted to have supported workers’ claims in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. In both cases, although being perceived differently by the regime, these institutions became ‘global moral authorities’ for the workers’ activists, which was not necessarily tied to their real political impact.

The Trial Although the campaign was not able to prevent the trial, several international observers joined the court room in December 1973 when the verdict was pronounced. This day, however, was overshadowed by another important political event that had not been foreseen by either the Comisiones Obreras nor by the Francoist government: as would be investigated later, ETA activists had placed a bomb under the car of Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s right hand and prime minister since June, who died as a result of the explosion. While the death of Carrero Blanco was interpreted as yet another sign of weakness of the regime – although an unexpected one – by the communist press, the judge tried to express neutrality by explicating that he had not been impacted by the “painful events” on the morning of the same day.115 On the other hand, the event caused sheer terror

 “Los Diez,” “Desde Carabanchel, Carta a la O.I.T,” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972; see also the original version of the letter: Marcelino Camacho, Carta a la O.I.T, November 22, 1972.  Andrew Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe,” International Organization 2 (2000): 217.  Andrew Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe,” International Organization 2 (2000): 217.  Amando Recio García, “La prensa jurídica en el tardofranquismo: El Proceso 1001,” Revista Historia y Comunicación Social 12 (2007): 183.

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among the democratic opposition as they feared revenge.116 Twenty-five years later, Nicolás Sartorius analysed the events on December 20, 1972 in retrospect and commented on their interconnectedness: “[These were] [t]wo very different forms of understanding the fight against the dictatorship: Either the mobilization of people or individual attacks. On that day, for a moment, the second form narrowed the possibilities of the first one.”117 At the trial, the prosecutor emphasized the connection between the PCE and the Comisiones Obreras, instrumentalizing it for his argumentation on which he based the sentence. The accused, on the other hand, followed a radical strategy of denial reliant on two different factors: firstly, they did not reveal any activities in the hope that this would impede the police’s work with regard to the remaining members of the CCOO whom they did not want to put at risk. Secondly, it was part of the strategy to highlight the trial’s political character in front of the “public opinion” in Spain and abroad.118 If the public opinion abroad was in fact a relevant factor for the judges, as was suggested by the CCOO, it remains questionable when looking at the outcome of the trial. The penalties, which were already known thanks to the public request by the prosecutors, were indeed “exorbitant.”119 What is more, the assassination of Carrero Blanco was a factor destroying all hopes for a later reduction of the sentences, although it had been expected by many. The objective behind this hard sentence, according to Recio García, was to “give a lesson of firmness” to any opposition to the regime on the one hand and to pacify the most extreme and violent right wing that “asked for the heads of the accused” after the president’s attack on the other.120 Mundo Obrero’s author highlighted that the assassination had to be carried out by a third party, one that “wanted to help himself for

 Esther Martínez Quinteiro, La denuncia del sindicato vertical: Las relaciones entre España y la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (1969–1975) (Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social, 1997), 358–360.  Nicolás Sartorius, “El 1001: reflexión 25 años después,” El País, December 19, 1998; see also: Recio García, “La prensa jurídica en el tardofranquismo,” 180.  Francisco Gago Vaquero, “El proceso 1.001 – Desmantelamiento de la coordinadora nacional de Comisiones Obreras,” Tiempo y Sociedad 13 (2013/14): 46.  Recio García, “La prensa jurídica en el tardofranquismo,” 180.  Recio García, “La prensa jurídica en el tardofranquismo,” 180–181. The individual sentences were as follows: Marcelino Camacho: 20 years and one day; Nicolás Sartorius: 19 years; Eduardo Saborido Galán: 20 years and one day; Francisco García Salve: 19 years; Fernando Soto: 18 years; Juan Marcos Muñiz Zapico: 18 years; Francisco Acosta Orge: 12 years and one day; M. Ángel Zamora Antón: 12 years and one day; Pedro Santiesteban Hurtado: 12 years and one day; Luis Fernández Costilla: 12 years and one day. The sentences were later reduced (between.six months and two years). See Recio García, “La prensa jurídica en el tardofranquismo,” 180–181.

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one second, [only] to unleash a day of violence.”121 Like Sartorius twenty-five years later, s/he connected the dots between the two different forms of antiFrancoist opposition and explicated how they were interrelated and how the violent individualist option harmed the peaceful, collective, variant. Apart from distancing the Communists from the assassinators of Carrero Blanco, the article, which constituted the magazine’s first reaction to the verdict and called for “amnesty,” concentrated on the “Ten” and how they had defended the workers cause and their interests “with honor.”122 These interests were: “the right [. . .] [of workers] to assembly, to elect their authentic representatives, to fight for better salaries and working conditions, [. . . and] an independent [. . .] union organization, to exercise the right to strike.”123 As could be demonstrated, the main demands had not been modified since the 1960s. The verdict was also covered by another publication deriving from the spectrum of the Comisiones Obreras, namely the Gaceta del Derecho Social. Even though the magazine oftentimes published articles taking a stand on contested issues of labor, in the context of the trial, the Gaceta reduced their coverage to a mere description of the events as well as a re-print of the verdict, which points to the difficult atmosphere under which the legal magazine had to publish. However, the Gaceta del Derecho Social also presented a special issue on the matter.124 The judges had convicted Camacho and his colleagues on charges of illegal association.125 The “unity known as Comisiones Obreras” was “patronized and directed” by the Spanish Communist Party, which “pursue[d] as an objective the destruction of the current political, social, economic and legal organization of the State [. . .].”126 In general, the prosecutors utilized the close ties between the CCOO and the PCE as a main argument why the Comisiones Obreras were to be evaluated as a subversive, threatening organization. Literally surrounded by descriptive articles dealing with the trial, the editors of the GDS wrote one opinion piece that clarified how the verdict could be realized. In this article, the authors used extremely careful language. It reminds one of the balancing language used in the Cuadernos para el Diálogo in the context of

 N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  N.N., “Libertad para los diez del proceso 1001: Amnistía para todos los presos políticos y sociales,” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973.  N.N., “Libertad para los diez del proceso 1001: Amnistía para todos los presos políticos y sociales,” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973.  N.N., “Sumario 1001,” Gaceta de Derecho Social (1973).  N.N., “Sumario 1001,” Gaceta de Derecho Social (1973).  N.N., “El T.O.P. condena con 162 años de carcel a diez trabajadores: Juicio 1001,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973).

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the debates on a labor law reform in the late 1960s. This is especially prevalent when reading the introduction to the legal discussion, which, the author promised, would take an “exclusive[ly] penal point of view, taking into account the respect for the res judicata and appealed before the Superior Court.”127 The short piece, written by Carlos García Valdes,128 engaged with the Francoist penal system that punished twice, firstly for the affiliation with the illegal organization and secondly for “performing other acts as a member,” including illegal meetings, clandestine propaganda etc.129 Carlos García Valdes, the author of the article and a legal expert on criminal law, called the permanence of the accusation of belonging to a “illicit association” problematic, as one would be permanently punished for the same crime, which he compared to other realms of Spanish criminal law. He exemplified his argument by comparing the case to charges on family desertion. Nobody would be punished multiple times for abandoning their own family and household, only once. The doctrine was however adopted by the court, García Valdes argued, “[. . .] must clash with the juridical feeling, and even more so in a legislation such as ours, which is so restrictive in its concept of the illegality of associations; which in practice reduces the exercise of fundamental rights to a mere theory.”130 Consequently, he advocated for a “reform” of the “political delicts” legislation. In this legal publication, by maintaining a balanced and purportedly neutral tone, the issue of the verdict stated a human rights violation was quasi en passant. That the legislation “in practice” reduced the ability to exercise fundamental rights was, however, a careful formulation, as the wording suggested that this reduction of rights might not be intentional and that its outcome would only be revealed when seen in practice. Hence, what would this mean for the question of the role human rights could have in the context of repression? By concentrating on the “juridical sense,” the author targeted the most sensitive spot of the judges – their legal expertise and competence – but he did not use a political framing for his critique. However, human rights – when not focusing on their literal use but

 Carlos García Valdes, “Asociación Ilícita Permanente: Reformar los Delitos Políticos,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973).  It was not easy to obtain reliable information on Carlos García Valdes, except from the fact that he was a professor for Criminal Law at the University of Alcalá in democratic Spain and that he is the author of several criminal legal publications, with an emphasis on penality. See, for instance: Carlos García Valdes, Los presos jóvenes: apuntes de la España del XIX y principios del XX (Ministerio de Justicia, Secretaría General Técnica, Centro de Publicaciones, 1991).  García Valdes, “Asociación Ilícita Permanente.”  García Valdes, “Asociación Ilícita Permanente.”

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conceiving of them as a “regime”131 that impacts societies in complex and various ways – continued being relevant for the argument. On the backdrop of the relatively high attention from abroad and the Spanish government’s attempts to present its country as a peaceful society that had left the civil war behind,132 the Spanish opposition used references to human rights or “fundamental rights” more subtly than just pointing to their violation. By comparing the case to other criminal legal issues, the political verdict was treated as if it had been aimed at solving a serious legal question – a comparison that almost equaled an ennobling of the tribunal towards a credible legal institution. This had to be done with regard to the threat of the magazine being shut down in case of it being too critical. Yet, the article concentrated on the penal and criminal legal questions so that the human rights violation could be mentioned almost casually and as something that nobody wanted, including the Spanish government, because it was presented as if it had turned out now, in practice, that the legislation equaled a rights violation, irrespective of its intention. In contrast to the legal publication, the illegal Mundo Obrero did not have to make any rhetorical compromises. Alongside a constant view on the process and the trial as a single human rights violation, in its coverage of the trial, the Mundo Obrero shifted the attention onto the “public opinion abroad” by shedding light on the fact that foreign observers had joined the trial and by printing more expressions of solidarity from people outside Spain. These foreign observers were not only correspondents but also representatives of human rights organizations. In addition, the Gaceta del Derecho Social mentioned the presence of foreign observers in their “juridical perspective” on the trial, namely “Mr.” Ramsey Clark, a privateer who had previously worked for the American President Jimmy Carter,133 and some unnamed persons, some observers from the human rights organization Amnesty

 Cf.: Moravcsik, “The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe.”  See, for instance: Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Carolin Victorin, “Was ist und wozu braucht man ‘Nation Branding’? Versuche eines neuen Zugriffs auf Macht und Kultur in den Internationalen Beziehungen am Beispiel der Spanischen Diktatur unter Franco,” in Internationale Geschichte in Theorie und Praxis: International history in theory and practice, ed. Barbara HaiderWilson, William D. Godsey, and Wolfgang Mueller, Internationale Geschichte 4 (Wien: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017), 695–719.  On Jimmy Carter and human rights, see, for instance: David F. Schmitz and Vanessa Walker, “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 1 (2004).

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International, representatives of the Italian trade unions, and of the World Federation of Trade Unions.134 Mundo Obrero re-printed a declaration formulated by these foreign observers: We are representatives of juridical professions, journalism, the labor movement, political parties and other human rights organizations. We have come here concerned about the fate of human rights and democratic freedoms in Spain. [. . .] That men who struggle to improve the living conditions of the workers are persecuted by virtue of a law that classifies the will of the workers’ leaders to agree or form associations as a crime, worries us gravely. We wish to express our solidarity with [. . .] these workers’ representatives, as well as their defenders, for the exercise of their rights, despite the difficult conditions that surround them. We return to our respective countries with the firm determination to expose to our peoples the meaning of this struggle and to exert all our influence to achieve the broadest support for the brave Spaniards of Carabanchel who teach us once again the importance of freedom.135

The joint declaration of the international observers shows how a human rights language could indeed function as a commonly understood language,136 first and foremost when repression in a national context was translated into an international cause. This human rights language, however, was not limited to the semantical catalogue of ‘human rights’ or international human rights organizations but also entailed neighboring conceptions, such as, in this case ‘democracy’ and ‘solidarity.’ Summing up the practices of the workers’ milieu in the context of the Proceso 1001, several features stand out. Most importantly, the process against the CCOO leaders was universalized towards a symbolic process against the efforts of the Spanish democratic opposition. Thereby, the Spanish regime and its juridical bodies were depicted as unlawful and even lawless – by presenting them as violating human rights and as being deviations from a European core. The right to associate was thereby at the core of the argument, either being presented as a human right or – less aggressively – as a logical consequence of a genuine human nature.

 “Juan de Nogales” (Pseudonym), “Perspectiva Jurídica: Juicio 1001,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973). See Fig. 4. The World Federation of Trade Unions (WTFU) has its roots in the 1945 founded World Trade Union Congress. Connected to the Cold War dynamics, frictions between the communist and the non-communist factions increased and led to a split. Whereas the noncommunist formed another organization in 1949, i.e. the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICTU), the communists stayed in the WTFU. Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, “World Federation of Trade Unions,” https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Federation-of-TradeUnions, accessed April 5, 2023.  N.N, “El Juicio: Declaración de los Observadores Extranjeros,” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973.  Eckel and Moyn, Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren, 458.

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The CCOO activists continuously depicted their own position as morally superior, among other things, through its connection to human rights and non-violence. The most important strategy, however, was to raise awareness in- and outside Spain and to launch a broad campaign of solidarity. This solidarity was reciprocal: the CCOO activists solidarized themselves with other repressed groups or actors, for instance the Basque nationalists and progressive parts of the Spanish Catholic Church. In so doing, an image of a deeply interwoven network of a diverse anti-Francoist opposition was created. This campaign addressed people from the workers’ milieu but also beyond and was based on the combination of protest actions such as strikes as well as declarations of solidarity and interventions from international players. In the context of the campaign, the supporters of the “Ten” generated solidarity by universalizing their cause: the imprisonment of Camacho and the others was not only presented as a violation of human rights but also as a strike against the labor movement and therefore against all values and rights connected to the transnational workers’ community of which some of the protagonists were indeed members, for instance Marcelino Camacho who had been a member of the French CGT. In this way, it was made resonant with two groups of people: those who cared about human rights and those who identified with the workers’ cause.

At the Wrong Time in the Wrong Place: Connecting the Lack of Rights with Perceptions of Time The months of the Proceso 1001 were in many ways unique: not only did the CCOO and their allies have to deal with the imprisonment of their most prominent members but they also experienced this massive attack at a time that was perceived by many as a final, or at least transitory, phase of the regime. Two aspects provoked a particular perception of time and temporality: the even for Francoist standards surprisingly harsh repression in the form of the high penalties and the long months without trial during which the “Ten” were imprisoned, as well as the perception of the present as the last phase of Francoist rule. Consequently, in this section, the debates surrounding the Proceso 1001 and the use of a language of rights will be contextualized with questions of time and temporality. Concepts of time and temporality became especially virulent in the context of human rights discourses: taking a teleological perspective on the history of humans as one being directed towards a positively imagined ending point, human rights discourses oftentimes entail notions of modernity and civilization. Indeed, the history of human rights is often told as a history of constant improvement,

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regardless of the contingencies and backlashes that occurred on the way.137 Progress becomes inevitable in this perspective. Such a stand is also noticeable in the contemporary sources: Spain was thereby oftentimes depicted as a country that had to catch up with others already modern. In contrast, Francoism was depicted as a historical anomality, stagnation or simply as backward – especially in comparison with other countries in Europe. In this context, the awaited and anticipated end of the regime in combination with its – perceived – last demonstration of power and the permanent and continuing violation of rights in the form of the imprisonment of workers’ activists were oftentimes associated with questions of modernity and democratization. First, thus, I engage with constructions of Spain’s own backwardness, on the pages of the underground press, positioning the country on the margins of European civilization. I then show how constructions of backwardness went hand in hand with a narrative of being situated in a particularly short and fast phase. This phase was presented as the last period preceding inevitable social progress, brought about by the pursuit of democratic liberties. This issue will be analyzed in the second part of this section.

Mapping Backwardness Spanish cultural history has a long tradition of backwardness motives and negatively connoted narratives about national history. In the historiography on Spain, this deficitary self-conception or rather the “paradigm of backwardness”138 already becomes tangible when paying attention to the way books on Spanish history were titled, starting with España: Historia de una frustración (“Spain. A frustrating history”).139 The same paradigm can be observed in introductions to bigger volumes reflecting on the state of research on Spain, including those written by international researchers such as Pamela Radcliff, who criticized a “marginalization of Spain in the English-language historiography.”140 Not only is the history as such perceived as “frustrating” but even the research interest in Spain

 Cf.: Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History.”  Mónica Burguera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Backwardness and its discontents,” Social history 3 (2004): 279.  Josep M. Colomer, España: la historia de una frustración (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2018).  Pamela B. Radcliff, Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), Preface, xii.

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is depicted as insufficient in comparison to other regions.141 For instance, Jo Labanyi and Helen Graham introduced their volume on Spanish cultural studies as follows: “The starting point of any volume that claims to have set as its aim the establishment of Spanish cultural studies as a discipline must be to ask why the discipline has been so slow to develop.”142 The perception of Spain being backward can be traced back to the eighteenth century: Spain was said to have lost touch with the economic and cultural development of other European countries during the Counter-Reformation period and since then to have remained in a state of “timeless standstill,” as Till Kössler laid out.143 More concretely, this image is connected to a set of negatively connotated historical experiences, combined with the semi-peripheral position on the European continent.144 These negative experiences include the “loss” of the Spanish colonies – or rather the process of independence of Latin American nations from colonial rule – in the late nineteenth century, and the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898.145 The international significance of a former world em-

 Cf., in this context, the blossoming of Spanish publications and research dealing with “Europe” and “Europeanization” beginning in the 1980s, as pointed out by: Birgit Aschmann, “Spanien: ‘Eine seltsame Ente im europäischen Teich’: Zur Bedeutung von Europa und Europabildern im spätneuzeitlichen Spanien,” in Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Elvert and Jürgen Nielsen-Sikora, Historische Mitteilungen Beihefte Geschichte (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009), 156.  Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, “Introduction: Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–19, 1. Comment: it is indeed noticeable, especially for someone working on a comparative research project as this one, how neglected Spanish history and “Spanish studies” are in the international context. It is especially tangible when comparing the interest for Spanish history with the one for the history of Poland or Eastern Europe. This is also mirrored in the academic landscape of Germany, where this dissertation is rooted and becomes virulent in the disposition of literature in libraries but also in the public display of academic events or also the allegedly trivial existence of fellow researchers working on Spain (AD).  Till Kössler, “Von der Nacht in den Tag: Zeit und Diktatur in Spanien 1939–1975,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2015).  Cf.: Boatcă, “Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences,” 325. See, also: Martin Baumeister, “Diesseits von Afrika? Konzepte des europäischen Südens,” in Der Süden: Neue Perspektiven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion, ed. Frithjof B. Schenk and Martina Winkler (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 23–47. One could discuss, in this context, whether – in the context of this study – the two regions should be considered peripheries or rather semi-peripheries of Europe, since the examined sources did not reveal references to a non-European Other but dominantly concentrated on Europe.  Cf. for instance the generation of writers born in the 1860s and 70s called “Generation 1898” because this experience impacted strongly on their formative years. See, for instance: Birgit Aschmann, “Spanien: ‘Eine seltsame Ente im europäischen Teich’” in Leitbild Europa? Europa-

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pire and global player was irretrievably gone and interpretations of time became a central element of Spanish political-intellectual debates and of social reform movements.146 Another related experience that strongly impacted the narrative of being different in a negative way was the proliferation of a certain image of Spain in other European countries, called Leyenda Negra. “The Black Legend” could take both a positive and negative form, depicting Spain as an archaic nation oscillating between barbaric historical atrocities and a picturesque, “pristine and unspoiled land.”147 References to religious wars from the Early Modern Times fueled the “Black Legend,” used in particular by protestant Anglo-Saxons to depict Spanish historical atrocities as especially cruel and barbaric. The idea of barbarism was oftentimes symbolized through references to atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisition or under Spanish colonial rule. At the same time, the motive of Spaniards acting cruelly was combined with a depiction of a Catholic, rural, and underdeveloped society whose only charming appeal lay in the folkloristic but simple traditions of the Spanish countryside as displayed in music, dance. and culinary culture.148 These two faces of Spain were not only a product of foreign narrations. Politically engaged intellectuals also used them as a political yardstick and as a framework for political self-positioning in early twentieth century debates. They became one major indicator for political cleavages between the Spanish left and right, just like in other contemporary societies that fought over the purportedly right dose of progress and tradition, whereby political and cultural actors reproduced the juxtaposition of the motives discussed above. While liberal politicians and intellectuals strived towards a social and political reformation and “Europeanization” of the country, the milieu of Catholic conservative rightwingers rejected these supposedly foreign models of progress.149 Having in mind the academic discourses on center and periphery that derive mainly from the field of post-colonial studies, this Spanish perception of being underdeveloped when compared to other European societies can therefore be understood as a reaction to a Northern European, protestant exoticization of Spain. This exoticization also took the form of a Spanish exceptionalism. This exception-

bilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, 159ff; Burguera and Schmidt-Nowara, “Backwardness and its discontents.”  Kössler, “Von der Nacht in den Tag,” 193; see also: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).  Kössler, “Von der Nacht in den Tag,” 193.  Radcliff, Modern Spain, Preface, xii.  Kössler, “Von der Nacht in den Tag,” 193.

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alism that some see already rooted in the counter-reformist politics of Philipp II and his opposition to political dynamics of change150 was later taken up prominently and in a self-confident manner in the tourism marketing slogan España es diferente (“Spain is different”), as will be laid out further in this section. These depictions of backwardness are one side of the issue. The other side tells the story of a failed modernization. In the twentieth century, this failed modernization motive was inextricably linked to the Civil War and the subsequent Francoist dictatorship that was not only conceived as a form of cultural “autism”151 but also regarded as the main factor of Spain’s economic underdevelopment compared to other European countries. Focusing on the Spanish case, Graham and Labanyi argue that the use of the term modernization is problematic, as the term entails an “unacceptable normative and determinist baggage loaded onto it.”152 On the backdrop of the Leyenda Negra, they remind that modernization often implies an oversimplified notion of tradition. On the one hand, this simplification can be observed when tradition is equaled with pre-industrial and ritualistic societies. On the other, simplification occurs through a juxtaposition of the concepts of modernization and tradition that is blind to entanglements and mutual influences. In an almost post-colonial style, Graham and Labanyi, however, criticize yet another aspect of the concept of modernization, i.e. its ethnocentric and normative bias: Rather than being seen as a conceptual framework for investigating a specific period of western development, modernization is projected as something that will transform the nonEuropean world in the image of contemporary western European and North-American society (far-from-homogeneous societies and cultures in themselves) where upon history will implicitly ‘end.’153

In the case of the Spanish democratic opposition of the early 1970s, the debates surrounding the process and the trial as such were prone to a reactivation of such narratives. Keeping in mind the general observations on modernity constructions and their polyvalent manifestations and cultural implications, it is worth pondering which arguments were pushed forward and which reasons were mentioned when authors writing in the Spanish underground and leftist

 Birgit Aschmann, “Spanien: ‘Eine seltsame Ente im europäischen Teich’”, in Leitbild Europa? Europabilder und ihre Wirkungen in der Neuzeit, 157.  Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, eds., Spanish Cultural Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Preface, xii.; it has to be noted that the medical condition of “autism” has entered a non-expert rhetoric and is used in an inflationary manner as a metaphor for “autarky” or “distancing.”  Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, “Introduction,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 10.  Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, “Introduction,” in Spanish Cultural Studies, 10.

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press formulated these discourses. The rhetoric practice of constructing a Spanish backwardness took various forms. Backwardness could be constructed within the framework of the national Spanish history or highlighted by embedding one’s own history within a transnational context. An example for this figure can be found in a Mundo Obrero article from December 1972, at a time when the “Ten” had already spent six months in prison, titled “In which country, in which century are we living?”154 On the backdrop of public defamation of the dominantly communist activists, the author contrasted the regime’s rhetoric on political values with achievements of humanity and global reform processes. This way, he was able to create an image of a pre-modern, fundamentalistically Catholic regime that even ignored reform dynamics from its own value system such as the Second Vatican Council and seemed unimpressed by cultural, social as well as technical progress, exemplified by the landing on the moon that had taken place only three years earlier. The author started his article with irony, taking up the Catholic-infused language of pre-modern regimes. He referred to a speech held by Carrero Blanco, in which Franco’s right hand had made use of old-fashioned anti-communist and national-catholic rhetoric: Thus, in the year of grace of 1972, while a third of the world’s population lives in Socialism and the scientific-technical revolution unfolds; while mankind reached the Moon and the Second Vatican Council has taken place, in Spain, the second figure of the regime, Carrero Blanco, continues to speak of the ‘crusade in defense of the faith’ [. . .], [thereby] declaring communists, liberals, Masons, the ‘desacralized Church’ as nefarious and predestined to [be burned] at the stake . . . In what country, in what century are we living? How is it possible to proclaim such a brutal mismatch with the political and cultural realities of the time? Carrero Blanco’s speech [. . .] is a declaration of war on today’s Spain, on Europe and on the world, which in 1945 witnessed the ‘victory’ of ‘communism’ and ‘liberalism’, ‘disobeying’ the ‘divine will’ that the defeat of these two forces had imposed on Franco in 1939.155

By quoting concepts associated with the medieval ages, such as “crusade,” the author did not need many of his own words to paint the regime in anachronistic colors. He depicted an antagonism between a global ratio (symbolized through technical achievements such as the landing on the moon) and a particularly Spanish religio, while at the same time ostentatiously expressing a disbelief for what they and all other citizens were exposed to. One year before the actual verdict, the penalties demanded by the prosecutors were made public. The extremely high sentences demanded by the prosecutors of the Tribunal de Órden Público triggered discourses on the backwardness of

 N.N., “¿En qué país, en qué siglo vivimos?,” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972.  N.N., “¿En qué país, en qué siglo vivimos?,” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972, 1.

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the Spanish legal culture. In the same issue of Mundo Obrero of December 1972, one can read about the shock of the oppositionists after hearing about the required sentences. In a long text, titled “Some thoughts on the 1001 summary,” the author who signed the article with their initials played with the figure of disbelief too, just like their colleague did in the example discussed above: Sometimes you have to rub your eyes to accept the year in which you live. When you read the prison sentences that the TOP [Tribunal de Órden Público] prosecutor asks for in the 1001 trial, it seems impossible for this to happen in 1972. One thinks that we are still in the year 1941 or 1942 when prison sentences of 20 or 30 years were imposed for the most elementary ‘crimes’ of opinion.156

The backwardness narrative in this article is twofold. This example points to the inherent anachronisms of Francoism. In this article, the Tribunal de Órden Público, with its extremely high penalties, did not even resemble the present Francoist state that, in turn, had undergone a process of partial liberalization and a slight decrease of repression. The high sentences reminded the communist author of the previous, more repressive phase. The comment thus has to be understood against this background: the sentences requested by the TOP were a symptom of backwardness even within the narrow evaluation frame of Francoism, as they reminded the author of the earlier days of constant state terror. In most cases, Spain was compared with other countries, which, in turn, were depicted as “civilized,” whereby civilization seemed to be grounded in their understanding of rights. In the same article, the author referred to Spain’s aspirations to integrate into global and European politics, also with regard to the socalled Helsinki Accords. Significantly, in this example, the reference object was not only Western as was insinuated in the quote above, but explicitly European.157 While the agreements were not finalized earlier than 1975, the Helsinki Accords had been preceded by diplomatic meetings taking place in 1972. In this

 M.A., “Consideraciones al Sumario 1001,” Mundo Obrero, December 7, 1972, 21.  That ‘Westerness’ is a mental map concept becomes visible, among others, when looking at the concrete geographical positioning of Spain, which is one of the most Western countries of the European continent. In this context, it is worth pointing out at purportedly political curiosities, such as the debates on which time zone Spain should pertain to. Interestingly, these debates were dominantly connected to questions of labor and work ethics. Beginning in the early 1960s, Spanish traditions like the siesta should be timely limited; people were called to come to work earlier. In a complex manner, Till Kössler has elaborated on how the “Spanish every-day-life was supposed to take place rather in the daytime than at night,” according to the regime. Already in the 1940s, Franco had left the Greenwich Mean Time Zone to which the United Kingdom pertained and joined the Central European Time in order to show its proximity to the Fascist movements of the European core region. Kössler, “Von der Nacht in den Tag,” 194–195.

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context, the author also referred to the prominent slogan of Francoist Spain España es diferente (“Spain is different”), by which Franco, beginning in the early 1960s, “[. . .] symbolized efforts by Spanish political and cultural elites to justify the Spanish political institutions and resist European values.”158 This resistance to European values – although not explicitly articulated – is symbolized by way of the ironic reactivation of the Francoist slogan: This process and the knowledge of the convictions that are requested is unfolding at a time when Francoist Spain has just attended the Helsinki conference and continues to knock on the doors of Europe, because ‘Spain is Europe.’ But – can these pro-Europeans imagine the ‘crime’ that would have to be committed and proven in any civilized country to deserve a 20-year prison sentence? An entire life in prison because of a supposed syndical activity . . . Spain is, indeed, different.159

“Europe” constituted a reference applicable in multiple ways for the workers’ activists. Contextualizing the Proceso 1001 with the Spanish aspirations of being reintegrated into the European and global community of liberal democracies and restoring its affiliation with the West,160 activists pointed out this discrepancy, interpreting Spain and Europe as incompatible. It becomes noticeable, though, that “Europe” continued functioning almost as a moral authority, when looking at the question asked in the newspaper comment. By posing such a rhetorical question, the author insinuated that if the decision-making bodies on the European level knew how judges issued sentences in Spain, they would have treated Francoist politicians “knocking at the doors of Europe” in a less welcoming manner. Referring to a European outer world almost always entailed a depiction of Spain as being trapped in backwardness, when authors affiliated with the CCOO or the PCE wrote in the underground press. This perspective matches with more general constructions of a juxtaposition of “Spain” and “Europe” that are to be understood in the light of the above-mentioned backwardness narratives. “Europe equals democratization,” Pereira Castañeras and Moreno Juste wrote in their analysis on Spain’s self-conception as a European “periphery,” and connected this to the democratic character of many European countries:

 Juan Díez Medrano and Paula Gutiérrez, “Nested identities: National and European identity in Spain,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 5 (2001): 764. Or, on the diplomatic marketing efforts of rebranding Spain in the 1960s: Jessica Gienow–Hecht and Carolin Victorin, “Was ist und wozu braucht man ‘Nation Branding’?” in Internationale Geschichte in Theorie und Praxis.  M.A, “Consideraciones al Sumario 1001” (emphasis in original, AD).  See, for instance, a reprint of an opinion article from “Cuadernos para el Diálogo” on the pages of the “Social Rights Gazette” that speaks of a “Western culture that protects these rights.” N.N., “Kiosco Social,” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973): 2.

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To speak of Europe was to speak of a Europeanism that, definitively, came to be tantamount to the idea of a Europe united around democratic values and with a high degree of economic and social development – a Europe of which Spain should form part.161

Although this analysis addresses the earlier years of post-Francoism after 1975, the documents published by the Spanish communists show that this stand was already rooted in the cultural conceptions of Spanish proponents of democracy during the dictatorship years. Consequently, lack of respect for these “values” led to a perceived negative Europeanness of Spain. In a letter written by the imprisoned Marcelino Camacho, Spain was presented as backward, which, in this context, was combined with a concrete reference to National Socialism. National Socialist Germany did commit military atrocities on Spanish soil as allies of the Francoist troops, thereby killing numerous Spanish civilians:162 Through observers and journalists, the character and the methods of the Court [. . .] has become clear to the public global opinion. It is not strange, then, that foreign delegations left the room scandalized, remembering the worst times of Nazism and wondering: Is such a systematic violation of human rights even possible, in the second half of the Twentieth century in Spain, when we commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Declaration [sic!] of these rights?163

Nevertheless, in this case, the connection to National Socialism is more abstract. This has to do with the exceptional positioning of National Socialism or rather the Holocaust in global collective memories of the late twentieth century. National Socialism was much more than a concrete historical reference in that period: it was universalized. According to Levy and Sznaider,164 Holocaust memory started to transcend ethnic and national boundaries in the 1970s and was remembered by groups or individuals that may have had no direct connection to the historical event itself.165 In the course of the global spread of medial representations of the

 Juan C. Pereira Castañeras and Antonio Moreno Juste, “Spain: In the centre or on the periphery of Europe?,” in Southern Europe and the Making of the European Union, 1945–1980s, ed. Antonio C. Pinto and Nuno S. Teixeira (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 41–80, 45.  The Spanish Left did not forget the participation of German troops called “Blue Division.” Their biggest war crime was remembered in an iconic way by the painter Pablo Picasso in his famous opus magnum Guernica, named after a town in Northern Spain (Basque Country) that the “Blue Division” had bombed in 1937 whereby a high number of civilians was killed.  Marcelino Camacho and others, A los Trabajadores, December 1973 (emphasis in original).  Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).  Not only the global scope of World War II as such but also the connected (forced) migration and exile dynamics that included migration to America, Asia, Africa, and Australia make it indeed difficult to find a region on the globe that was really “not affected” by the Holocaust.

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Holocaust, the concept of collective memories was extended to become a normative component necessary to a democratic education.166 Here, one can observe a proximity to questions connected to human rights, because the discourses could overlap. The universalization is thus twofold: firstly, the concrete geographical, social, historical, and political context was detached from the event. Secondly, Holocaust memory was inextricably linked to democratic values including tolerance, non-discrimination, and human rights. A critical evaluation of their own past was not only Germany’s task anymore but became a litmus test for democratic maturity and a developed political culture on a global scale. ‘Learning lessons from the past’, became a democratic virtue.167 Although one has to acknowledge that Spain was probably one of the European countries where these developments were relatively weak,168 the Spanish communists were not detached from international developments, which was already true for the institutional structures of their party. In his appeal, directed at fellow workers, Camacho further explained the lineage between National Socialism and Francoism that he suggested in the above quote. He made this comparison on the basis of the violation of human rights, which used the symbolic connotation of National Socialism, associated with a negative superlative, as pure evil, a process that belonged to the side-effects of the above-mentioned universalization. This was especially true for the mentioned foreign observers, who in this depiction of the process equaled a global public opinion. Like in the examples discussed above, Camacho also played with the motive of disbelief. In his text, he let the abstract foreign observers speak: through Camacho’s writing, these observers could articulate their estrangement on behalf of the discrepancy between a world that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and one that imprisoned workers’ activists for trade union activities. This appeal entailed a negative modernization narrative. This can be exemplified by the use of the “Twentieth century,” especially as

 See also: Harald Schmid, “Europäisierung des Auschwitzgedenkens?,” in Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive, ed. Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel, 174–202, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 24 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008).  See also Tony Judt’s statement of how official critical Holocaust memory became an “entry ticket” for Central and Eastern European states to the European Union, by which he reformulated Heinrich Heine’s famous quote about Jews baptizing in the context of Jewish assimilation in nineteenth century Europe. Tony Judt, “The past is another country: Myth and memory in postwar Europe,” Daedalus 4 (1992).  See also this article about Holocaust memory/ education and antisemitism in democratic Spain; Alejandro Baer, “The Voids of Sepharad: The Memory of the Holocaust in Spain,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 1 (2011).

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Camacho, writing this appeal in the early 1970s, referred to its “second half.” Whereas the first half was associated with the negative face of modernity when people used technology to kill their fellow human beings by committing massscale genocides,169 the “second half” was associated with having gained a civilizatory and cultural strength out of becoming normatively better and progressing in many fields, including technology, culture, economy, and morality. German historian and philosopher Reinhart Koselleck has elaborated upon the perception of living in a different time than one’s ancestors and identified this feeling as one of the markers for modern times.170 What is true for the years around 1800 can also be observed in the late twentieth century. After its first half was shaped by genocidal violence and military conflicts in Europe, including two World Wars, people distanced themselves from the quite recent past by marking it as culturally different, i.e. by historicizing it. One of the most important markers in this context was the role of human rights.171 This can also be seen in the light of modernization theories that, as has been touched upon earlier, entail a Western, even Anglo-Saxon bias. In the second half of the twentieth century, liberal democracies emerged as the most successful framework for national economies. In this context, modernization became associated with two main aspects, an economic power on the one hand and political order on the other, characterized by democratic constitutions, pluralistic interest groups (such as trade unions, for instance), and – very importantly – the peaceful solution of conflicts.172 Camacho perceived the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship as a historical anomaly that hindered Spaniards from progressing the way other nations did. In this context, it becomes visible that one’s history was not narrated as linear but as  Mark Levene, “Why is the Twentieth Century a Century of Genocide?,” Journal of World History 2 (2000). Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman connected “modernity” and the Holocaust in his writings, showing that the Holocaust was only possible due to the logics and nature of modernity and can only be understood when conceiving it as its product, not a counter-dynamic. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013).  See: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, new ed. (New York: University Press Group Ltd, 2004).  See also the study by Oriane Calligaro on how European institutions attempted to construct a European identity on the basis of a European heritage that, among others, excluded the direct ancestors from the democratically mature “in-group” of present Europeans. Oriane Calligaro, Negotiating Europe: EU Promotion of Europeanness since the 1950s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); see in particular Chapter 2.  M. R. Lepsius, “Soziologische Theoreme über die Sozialstruktur der ‘Moderne’ und die ‘Modernisierung’,” in Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt, ed. Reinhart Koselleck, 10–29, Industrielle Welt 20 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977). This is not meant to suggest that the liberal democracies really solved conflicts, whether military ones or between state and citizens, without the use of physical violence (AD).

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a contingent story that did follow a modernist path but was interrupted by the Francoist intervention and the dictatorship intermezzo of Primo de Rivera (1923–31). The Spanish constitution of 1876, in turn, was a positively connoted realm of memory, since it had guaranteed fundamental rights, which, however, were lost over the course of the Francoist attack, the war, and the following dictatorship: Until the war of 1936, except for the interlude of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, we Spaniards enjoyed a series of fundamental rights, conquered by our ancestors. One of these was that of association and assembly. While Spain was not an advanced country in the legislation of these rights, already in 1876, the Spanish Constitution stated, in Article 13: ‘Every Spaniard has the right . . . To assemble . . . Peacefully . . . To associate for the purposes of human life’ [. . .] We young and mature Spanish generations cannot remember, only our elders can tell us about the time Spain was closely following the path of European democratization. It is because we could not experience it ourselves that we want to claim, regardless of the consequences, what our ancestors achieved and lived, not without effort, sacrifice and abnegation. This attitude could be based on texts on Human Rights, the Second Vatican Council, the Encyclical Pacem in Terris, speeches by the last Popes . . . but it is not necessary, because what we are asking for are nothing more than fundamental rights. Rights, the lack of which is all the more painful since they are the secular patrimony of the civilized world.”173

This text stemming from a solidarity brochure edited by the Comisiones Obreras touched on the issue of different generations having different historical political experiences. In so doing, the text depicted those living in the present as doubly deprived: first, Spaniards, whether “young” or “mature,” could not enjoy the liberties enshrined in the Constitution of 1876 as these achievements had been erased by the subsequent political orders. In this sense they were deprived in comparison with their ancestors. Second, Spaniards were deprived in comparison with “the civilized world,” which made it even “more painful” to experience the lack of rights. The author portrayed Spain as deviant from any civilizatory modernization process, which in this example is identified with a process of a rightsoriented democratization that even spread to the Catholic Church in the form of the Second Vatican Council. For Camacho, “civilization” was equaled with having rights. Even more, by turning “rights” into the “secular patrimony of the civilized world,” they were elevated towards the main definitory category of “civilization” and – in this context – therefore also of “modernization.”

 N.N., Amnistia – Libertad.

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Constructing Inevitable Progress According to Achim Landwehr, a cultural historian and theorist, “time [is] often treated as if it had its own existence, independent of human beings, as if it were its own dimension, as if a giant clock ticking high above us [gave] us the absolute time we have to comply with.”174 This observation helps to understand the sources produced in the context of the Proceso 1001. The CCOO activists interpreted the process as a sign of despair of the Spanish government, which, as many believed, was facing an inevitable change, if not a political transformation towards democracy of the entire country. In order to maintain the image of the clock hanging over the people almost like a Damocles sword, one can observe how the Spanish opposition interpreted its situation in the early 1970s like a race, in which the participants had to catch up since they had already lost so much time due to the dictatorship. The clock, in this picture, was ticking faster than normal because certain real existing processes, such as Franco’s poor health, created a window of opportunity for political change. These perceptions, hence, will be connected to historic-philosophical scholarship on perceptions of time in revolutionary contexts, as proposed by Reinhart Koselleck.175 He identified a “temporalization” of the political vocabulary as one typical pattern of modern times. In the sources dealing with the Proceso 1001, this pattern was especially salient, and it was connected with debates on democracy and rights.176 In his book with the sounding title “Fear and Progress” that focuses on “ordinary lives in Franco’s Spain,” the historian Antonio Cazorla Sánchez told of the last years of the Francoist dictatorship from a citizen’s perspective.177 He underlined how much the fear of a new Civil War unified the Spanish society, which made them have mixed feelings about the anticipated passing away of their dictator, Francisco Franco: As Spain entered the last years of dictatorship, it was a complex society with an enormous amount of social, economic, political, and cultural diversity. There were many ‘Spains’, and

 Achim Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart: Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2014), 31 (own translation).  Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2015), 67–69.  See: Rüdiger Graf, “Zeit und Zeitkonzeptionen in der Zeitgeschichte,” http://docupedia.de/zg/ Zeit_und_Zeitkonzeptionen_Version_2.0_R%C3%BCdiger_Graf, accessed April 5, 2023; the translation of the German word “Verzeitlichung” was borrowed from: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Katrin Kollmeier, “Introduction: ‘Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’ Reloaded? Writing the Conceptual History of the Twentieth Century,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 2 (2012): 82.  Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress.

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people expected or hoped for many different things. [. . .] [E]verybody knew that Francoism without Franco was all but impossible, and so the future lay wide open.178

As mentioned earlier, the late Francoist phase witnessed several peak phases of protest actions and labor activism of which the early 1970s were one of the most intensive. In almost every issue of Mundo Obrero, one could read about strike actions, oftentimes strikes in solidarity with the imprisoned activists. Yet these social dynamics were repressively answered by the state authorities, first and foremost the Guardia Civil, the Spanish police that violently terminated strikes. Moreover, many workers were dismissed as a punishment for participating in strike actions, even if these aimed at realizing mere social or economic revindications. As suggested in the title of Cazorla’s book, “fear and progress” were indeed two constituting categories of thought for Spaniards in this period. They experienced economic reforms and an alignment of living conditions with Western industrialized societies without seeing a true political liberalization or democratization. Considering the two main associations that relate to the concept of modernization, economic progress and the embracing of liberal democratic values,179 Spaniards experienced a political-cognitive dissonance that provoked even more protest among the politically active. This mix of feelings and attitudes was fueled by a further perception, namely that the Francoist dictatorship – at least in the present form – was soon to be over. This collective perception was used as a strategic gateway by the communists and the CCOO milieu. In the underground press covering the Proceso 1001, Franco’s regime was depicted as repressive, but weak. The activists presented the repression carried out by the government as an act of despair but also as necessary in a struggle to survive. Social and political progress towards a more democratic future was anyway unstoppable and the regime only prolonged its life artificially, according to Mundo Obrero. Appeals like this one, where an unknown author called for standing up against violence in an article titled “An offensive against repression,” have to be seen in the light of the permanent state of terror and repression activists were exposed to: The repressive policy of the regime seeks to dismantle and decapitate the workers’ and the democratic movement. Repression is a necessity for the dictatorship to continue surviving. The struggle against repression is a necessity for the opposition, and especially for the workers’ movement, to develop and advance on the path of its social and political conquests. The

 Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress, 174.  See, for instance: M. R. Lepsius, “Soziologische Theoreme über die Sozialstruktur der ‘Moderne’ und die ‘Modernisierung’”, in Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt.

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repression will not be able to decompose the process towards freedom, but it limits it, temporarily, it allows the regime to breathe in the midst of its crisis. It is necessary to dismantle all its repressive artillery, because behind its barricade of fire, there is a decomposed enemy without any possibility of victory.180

The long appeal to stand up against repression entailed a theoretical consideration about the interconnectivity of dictatorship, opposition, and repression. The three components were presented as interdependent: whereas the dictatorship needed repression in order to secure its own survival, fighting repression was the one necessary task of the opposition “to develop and advance.” The wording reveals a quasi-organic vision of the dictatorship that had to be defeated. The “regime” appeared almost like a beast, when it was described as “breathing in the midst of a crisis.” This biologizing depiction of the Francoist dictatorship has to be seen in the light of the increasingly weak physical condition of General Franco himself. One of the main features of the Spanish dictatorship was the strong focus on Franco as a leading figure. In opposition to that, the opposition was presented as dynamic and long-lasting at the same time, open to developing and progressing. What is more, the “process towards freedom” was presented as something inevitable, as if it was the only possible path for humankind and Francoism was not much more than a brake pad but not a real obstacle. Having in mind Landwehr’s image of the merciless ticking clock hanging from an imaginary ceiling, the concept of progress as presented here is similar. Progress was presented as happening anyway, only not in Spain. It was almost equaled with the flux of time.181 Taking into consideration the focus on the physical constitution of the dictator and its equalization with a dying regime in the communist underground press, the lethal attack on Luis Carrero Blanco on the day of the trial was seen as another symptom of the precarious state of the Spanish government. The insecurity described above in terms of “fear and progress” became stronger, also because the Spanish opposition feared the government’s reaction to the violent terrorist attack. Mundo Obrero therefore wrote about the ambivalence of feelings, stating that “all Spaniards ask[ed] themselves today, with fear or with hope: What is going to happen?”182

 N.N., “Ofensiva contra la Represión” (emphasis in original, AD).  Cf. also the Marxist and Hegelian conviction of “history” equaling “progress,” as laid out by: Reinhart Koselleck, “Fortschritt,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1994), 351–423.  N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen” (emphasis in original; AD).

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The narrative of the regime facing a phase of crisis was actively pushed forward by the activists and was a recurrent motive of the debates surrounding the Process. In December 1973, when the verdict was known, a text was published that said: Compatriots! Our country is entering a critical phase, a phase whose transcendence cannot be minimized. The crisis of the dictatorial regime, which has for a long time been hidden, has been uncovered with the death of Admiral Carrero Blanco. Things have gone differently than everyone imagined: it is not General Franco who disappears, but the one who was destined to guarantee continuity in succession.183

In this example, the clandestine journalist described the present time as a “critical phase” that was characterized by its “transcendence.” In so doing, the communist author conferred a character on the category of time and simultaneously connected it to a wider set of associations that can be explained when looking at the writings of the philosopher-historian Reinhart Koselleck. By drawing back on sources originating in the context of the French Revolution of 1789, Koselleck argued that “revolution” became a “collective singular” which implies that “everything in this world is Revolution.”184 Revolution, Koselleck argued, had a [. . .] transcendental significance, it becomes a regulative principle of knowledge, as well as of the actions of all drawn into revolution. From this time on, the revolutionary process, and a consciousness which is both conditioned by it and reciprocally affects it, belong inseparably together.185

Although it is contested whether and how Koselleck’s observations of modern and early modern times can help to explain phenomena of contemporary history,186 it is hard to overlook how much these motives, which Koselleck observed in the Eighteenth century, also played a role in the context of the history of Francoism, if one interprets the Transición as a peaceful revolution. In the text written by the communist activist, the present phase of time gains an aura, one that adds a set of visons and ideas, which is expressed by the concept of transcendence. One of these ideas was to view the present time as a transitory phase preceding an inevitable democratic transition. This vision, in turn, was combined with projecting a political agency onto fellow democratic-minded citizens. Answering the above quoted question of what was going to happen, the magazine claimed:

   

N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.” Koselleck, Futures Past, 50; see also, Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 67–69. Koselleck, Futures Past, 50. Rüdiger Graf, “Zeit und Zeitkonzeptionen in der Zeitgeschichte.”

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Whatever the citizens of our country propose to do is going to happen. At this hour, no one may lock themselves into the role of the spectator; we must all consider ourselves responsible for the present and future of our peoples.187

I have argued earlier that the present time period was perceived as particularly short and fast, thereby having in mind Koselleck’s analytical observation of “the experience of acceleration” in revolutionary times.188 Koselleck, while having in mind technical inventions and industrialization processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, connected the issue of acceleration with that of progress and surprise: It necessarily follows that acceleration alone can satisfy the need to catch up. Here again we have a determination of the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous [. . .].189

Koselleck explained this phenomenon and argued that any history was shaped by change. But what is acceleration then? According to the German historian, only change that brings a new “experience of time.” One that suggests that everything is changing faster than anybody could have imagined before it was modern. He calls it an Unbekanntheitskomponente, a component of the unknown that is a necessary condition for perceiving time as progress.190 Such an experience of acceleration can be found in articles like the above quoted declaration, when the present phase was rhetorically narrowed down to “an hour,”191 but also in the perception that time is flowing faster and that processes (of change) are accelerated, such as through the assassination of Carrero Blanco at a time when Franco was already severely sick. The declaration of the Communist Party printed on the pages of Mundo Obrero addressed its readers “in the light of the regime’s crisis.”192 The anonymous author drew two different future scenarios whereby he took into consideration the widespread fear of a comeback of the Spanish Civil War and the degree of violence it entailed. While the negative scenario was a mere continuation of the status quo, described as “repressive,” “violent,” and “detached from social realities,” the positive scenario envisioned a dia N.N, “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft, 77. The translations of the concepts stem from: Koselleck, Futures Past, 50.  Reinhart Koselleck, ed., Sediments of time: On possible histories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann and Sean Franzel, 99. The famous German original goes as follows: “Daraus folgt zwingend, daß der Aufholbedarf nur beschleunigt gestillt werden kann. [. . .] [H]ierbei handelt es sich um eine Bestimmung der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen.” Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 175.  Koselleck, Zeitschichten, 164.  N.N, “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”

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logue between all “forces interested in realizing a step from dictatorship towards democracy,” “overcoming the Civil War” and “creating a new climate of civic coexistence that would bring Spain closer to Europe and the world of today.”193 This view of Spain having to catch up with a “world of today” is based on a conception of time that is closely connected to the problem of ‘modernization’ as discussed earlier. If Spain had to be brought closer to a “world of today,” this insinuates that Spain had not reached this world at the present moment. Not only is this a strong intertwinement of space and time categories, as “the world of today” seems to be positioned outside Spain, but the formulation is also a plastic example for the problem of non-contemporaneity of historical processes as perceived by Westerners. These in turn are closely tied to the notion of modernization and the normative, cultural, and socio-political predominance of the West. In this context, one has to take into account the different cultural positioning of Spain and the countries of Western Europe which, however, are associated with an Anglo-Saxon, mostly Protestant and liberal society model. While acknowledging the differences between the post-colonial positionality of extra-European regions and Eastern Europe, historian Clara Frysztacka in her study on temporality in the Polish press of the nineteenth century showed how the Polish society located itself through the construction of time at the semi-periphery of European modernity.194 Spain, that unlike Poland looks back on a long and diverse history of colonial subordination and exploitation of other societies, can also be regarded as a semi-periphery when positioning it on the European mental map of the 1970s – due to its political but also economic situation.195 When looking at Spain’s positioning in relation with an imagined European center, modernization discourses from post-colonial countries can help to understand certain constructions

 N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen” (own emphasis, AD).  Frysztacka, Zeit-Schriften der Moderne. Frysztacka connected the thoughts of Koselleck with post-colonial writings, adapting them to the nineteenth century Polish context.  Moreover, in the Spanish context, one has to take into account the “intra-Spanish” centerand-periphery-dynamics that were and are still negotiated between a Castilian dominant center and the other nations that are part of the Spanish state but were marginalized and repressed politically and culturally during Francoist rule, such as Catalans, Basques, Galicians etc. Poland was not only an object of colonizing German discourses, but looks back on a history of colonizing discourses of neighboring societies, such as Lithuania or Ukraine, oftentimes connected to a narrative of Christianization. See, for instance: Frysztacka, Zeit–Schriften der Moderne; Philipp Ther, “Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte: Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire,” in Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 129–48.

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of their own deficit.196 This can be exemplified by the linkage between time and modernity as analyzed by Prathama Banerjee: In modernity, [. . .] [t]ime itself becomes the universal parameter of judgement – that is of judging if a society, a people or an act is modern or ‘primitive’, advanced or backward, historical or timeless, distant from or contemporary to the subject author of knowledge. [. . .]197

The Spanish communists themselves, striving for a ‘modern’ Spain, judged their own country by using the parameter of time when they expressed that they were not living in a “world of today,” but, so to say, in the world of yesterday. The only solution for one’s own society or one’s own country, in such a perspective, is to catch up with the more modern ones, which, again reminds one of the problem of the “contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” in the light of the factor of “acceleration.”198 It can be summarized that the communist press followed a future-oriented pattern in the months surrounding the process. Many articles contained the following three components: first, they regularly pointed out at the crisis situation of the regime, oftentimes in combination with references to the physical weakness of the dictator and after the assassination of Carrero Blanco by referring to this event and the subsequent reshuffling of the cabinet. The crisis of the regime was oftentimes also connected with the perception of accelerated time. Second, looking back to many years of political agitation and oppositional work, the communists continued openly calling for a democratic change, which, at this moment, was presented as almost inevitable. Third, they pictured the post-transformative phase as one of national reconciliation. Based on the communists’ long-term concept of the reconciliación nacional, sometimes pushed forward as strategy and sometimes as demand, the future was imagined as a peaceful agreement of all democratic currents in Spain. In February 1974, Mundo Obrero published two almost similar articles, titled “Living better, living free”199 and “The democratic alternative.”200 Both articles discussed the current situation in the light of a closely approaching future and  This is, of course, not meant to insinuate a similarity between the history of both Spain and post-colonial regions.  Prathama Banerjee, Politics of time: ‘Primitives’ and history-writing in a colonial society (New Delhi, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.  Koselleck, Sediments of time, 99.  N.N., “Vivir mejor, vivir libres: Editorial,” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974.  N.N., “Alternativa democrática,” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974. Bearing in mind that the magazine was not only designed to inform readers and to provide background information about certain topics, but was primarily an organ of agitation and political fight, it has to be noted that articles were oftentimes redundant and repetitive.

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depicted the current phase as decisive. In the latter, the perception of acceleration became visible, as did the perspective on a future inevitably leading to more freedom. Loudly wondering about a prolongation of the status quo, the unknown author immediately discredited this option as “absurd” given the situation: We say that today this is absurd because what is new in the country’s situation, the change that has accelerated extraordinarily is the demand for freedom, the understanding that freedom is the unavoidable premise for any solution to the Spanish problem, has become something very general, which encompasses – and therefore unites in a certain sense – the vast majority of the country.201

Here, the current situation was portrayed as faster than other periods, based on a perception of accelerated change. Having in mind the period between 1750 and 1850, Koselleck argued that people had to perceive an innovative aspect in order to be able to see the time they lived in as different from a random period before. It is fruitful to keep this in mind for the analysis of the semantics used by Spanish communists in 1974: they argued that “what is new,” i.e. the new momentum, was “the demand for freedom” in combination with an understanding of its alleged unavoidableness. Moreover, the “demand for freedom” was presented as shared by the majority of the population. The “unity” of the people was a salient topic in this phase, because, as has been mentioned, the political dynamics and the loss of well-known constants, especially the decline of the Francoist regime’s leadership personnel, deeply unsettled people and reactivated the fear of violence and war. Mundo Obrero thus rightly observed a “sense of temporariness, of something unstable” among Spaniards.202 On the other hand, they evoked a sense of readiness when they discursively created a phase of time that differed from the previous phases, insofar as people were now demanding freedom on a broader scale. This portraying of society as more able to accept or conduct change could also be found in related publications, such as in the Gaceta del Derecho Social in May 1973, when Rafael Burgos wrote that, while the demands pushed forward by the workers’ movement were old, society was now “more dynamic.”203 Considering the debates surrounding the new trade union law in 1966/67 that were the object of analysis in Chapter 2.1, this is a reminder of one of the tendencies to link “political maturity” with “democracy.”204

   

N.N., “Alternativa democrática,” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974 (emphasis in original). N.N., “Alternativa democrática,” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974, 3. Burgos, “El Movimiento Sindical en España.” Cf.: N.N., “Desmitificación.”

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The maturity or readiness, was, however, slightly different than the one evoked in 1966. The article titled “Living better, living free” started with a list of imprisoned workers in different prisons and described the “persecuted workers’ movement” as “never having appeared with such a strength and breadth” than in the last few months. In so doing, the communist press added a quantitative argument to the set of reasons why the present moment was the right one to act.205 Yet, they also depicted the workers’ movement as more political than before and thus as qualitatively different from before. How constructions of time and temporality were linked to visions of rights can be exemplified with the next source. Standing at the ending point of a historical workers’ struggle, rights are identified with the post-Francoist future here. Considering the vocabulary of movement and time, it is striking that they were elevated towards being the “driving force” for the workers’ fight and simultaneously towards the common ground of all anti-Francoist groups, which are referred to as the “real Spain” here: The presence and the actions of the new workers’ movement goes beyond demands. The workers fight not only to live better, but also to live free; not only for their economic and social rights, but also for political rights; for the democratic liberties of all Spaniards. This is where its capital role in the anti-Franco opposition comes from, its driving force, its exemplary nature. Its convergence with other social forces and political currents which represent the real Spain.206

The role of rights is multifaceted here: on the one hand, ‘rights’ serve as a marker for depicting the workers’ movement as political in the sense of being interested not only in their own cause but in a more universal understanding of improving the situation for “all Spaniards.” Between the lines, the author drew back on the narrative of a maturing movement that starts by reclaiming the own demands and developed towards a mass movement that keeps in mind the interests of all citizens, which in this context was equal rights. On the other hand, “political rights” and “democratic liberties” (read: ‘human rights’) were elevated towards being the glue for all “social forces and political currents,” when the article claimed that rights demands were the reason why the workers’ movement had a leading role within the Spanish opposition. Finally, the convergence of all oppositional groups on the basis of rights was interpreted as the representation of the “real Spain”. The idea of cooperating with other oppositional groups was not only repeated but also explained. In the light of the prophecy of an imminent end of

 N.N., “Vivir mejor, vivir libres.”  N.N., “Vivir mejor, vivir libres” (emphasis in original).

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the present system, Mundo Obrero reactivated the concept that the Communists had first presented in 1959 and laid out how they understood an “authentic national reconciliation”:207 When we use this concept, we do not think of anyone – starting with ourselves – giving up their philosophical, political or religious opinions; we do not think of burying what is a reality in every capitalist society divided into classes, namely the struggle between them. We only think of the need to overcome the civil war and its aftermath of hatred and oppression, of restructuring Spanish political life according to the political realities of the country as it is today and not as it was more than 40 years ago.208

When explaining how to understand their idea of a national reconciliation, the Communists subtly integrated their conception of temporality: according to the Marxist conception of viewing history as a steady progress, in the perspective of the Communists, the Francoist dictatorship conserved and cultivated the division and the violence that had erupted during the Civil War and therefore hindered progress or a life “according to the political realities of today.” It thus formed a single anachronism that had to be overcome in order to ‘reach’ the present. As history was viewed as a teleological path leading to more and more progress, presenting a post-dictatorial future scenario quasi equaled the logical next step. In June 1974, Mundo Obrero thus published an article titled “Spain’s inevitable transformation into a democratic country.”209 Another factor could now be added to the future-oriented perspective: in April, Spain’s neighbor Portugal had witnessed the so-called Carnation revolution, when the military carried out a coup d’état against the right-wing dictatorship of António Salazar and his Estado Novo. The Portuguese system change became a positive reference for many democraticminded people in Spain (and elsewhere) as it was carried out without almost any physical violence, with hardly any shots fired. Of course, the Spanish communists closely watched what was happening on the Western part of the Iberian Peninsula, at a time when ten leaders of the CCOO were still imprisoned. They linked the events in Portugal to the fate of their own country, even if Portugal underwent a turbulent transformation process with subsequent power struggles. In Mundo Obrero, the PCE’s leader Santiago Carillo spoke of a “portugalization” of Spain.210 In this context, Carillo was convinced, a lot of people were interested in how the com-

 N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  N.N., “La inevitable transformación de España en un país democrático,” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974.  N.N., “La inevitable transformación de España en un país democrático,” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974 (comment: Carillo used the neologism portugalización in Spanish, AD).

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munists viewed a democratic transformation in Spain. Since Carrero Blanco’s assassination, Arias Navarro had overtaken the government under the auspices of Franco and the party. He had continued the repressive stand against the workers’ movement and other like-minded groups which, as argued above, was oftentimes regarded as a mere act of political despair and incompetence. On the other hand, the communist party envisioned the future as follows: As communists, of course, we strive for a socialist regime, but at the moment the solution for Spain is a democratic regime with liberties for all, by way of reconciliation among all Spaniards willing to accept that democratic game. One of the essential measures for reconciliation is amnesty for those of us who have been in opposition to the regime, but also for those on the other side. Today, we are the ‘criminals’, but if there is a change then they would be the criminals. Our conception of amnesty is that it must embrace both sides. In other words, it is necessary to abandon any spirit of revenge.211

Human rights were almost exclusively referred to as “liberties” in these visions of the future. They were interpreted like a spin-off of a democratic transformation that enabled every citizen to live freely. While in the past, the demands for amnesty had encompassed only their own group, the communists now called openly for a general amnesty in a democratic future, which simultaneously constituted a rhetoric power tool, as the communists designed the conditions for the future in their own magazine. At this moment, they could not know that this idea would actually be adopted after Franco’s death and that a general amnesty would be agreed on the basis of a country-wide referendum in 1977. This future vision was ostentatiously peaceful, and it became even more so with the explicit rejection of any revenge actions in case of a system transformation with a democratic outcome. That the assassination of Carrero Blanco was interpreted as a last lethal aspect of a collapsing system is visible in another article from Spring 1974 that interpreted the present phase as a transitory one. His assassination had brought Spain towards the “threshold of post-Francoism.” People were now “closing a historical period.”212 “Post-Francoism,” an anonymous author wrote laconically when he introduced this terminus to his/ her readers, would start in the moment when the “irresponsible” people in power would cease to be in charge.213 The communists and the CCOO used the months surrounding the “Process 1001” dynamics for political integration on several levels. For the CCOO especially, the year 1974 was moreover one of institutional changes, as it was accepted by

 N.N., “La inevitable transformación de España en un país democrático,” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974, 2.  N.N., “¿Aquí no ha pasado nada?,” Mundo Obrero, April 25, 1974.  N.N., “¿Aquí no ha pasado nada?,” Mundo Obrero, April 25, 1974.

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the International Labour Organization, alongside the social-Catholic Unión Sindical Obrera and the Socialist UGT: “From the point of view of the relations between Spain and the ILO, the results of the ‘Process 1001ʹ were called to have much more impact than the change of the government,”214 Esther Martínez Quinteiro stated in her study on the relations between the ILO and Spain in the Late Francoist Period. In the same year, as enthusiastically covered by the communist underground press, the CCOO and the PCE participated in the public presentation of the Junta Democrática, a loose constellation of democratic-minded groups, parties, and independent citizens.215 Mundo Obrero informed its readers about both integrative measures and interpreted them as another step towards a democratic future. In an article titled “La hora actual,” the author literally expressed a perception of accelerating time, which he connected to a teleological view of history inevitably leading towards democracy. Not only time but also history gained agency throughout these descriptions. Time and history were not given, but flexible and adaptable to human processes: The rhythm of history is accelerating in our country. Factors that push for change are accumulating. Everyone feels that the end of the fascist dictatorship, democratic change is approaching as a historical necessity. This environment creates much more favorable conditions for the increase of the struggles of the working class and for dialogue, the convergence of all the forces in favor of a democratic solution to crystallize in an actual alternative, in the pact for liberty. It is precisely because we live immersed in this acceleration of the historical process that it is essential to set the political clock; to know well at what moment we are. In the political struggle, time works in a specific, uneven way: there are weeks that count for years.216

This specific view on what ‘history’ or ‘time’ could appear hand in hand with a discursive creation of a well-suited moment, a window of opportunity for the “working-class” and “for dialogue,” was a conception that had already accompanied the communists and their allies for many years.217 This dialogue-oriented attitude helped them to cooperate with like-minded, i.e. democratic, actors and it was the integration into common institutional structures that led to joint declarations and statements, such as the declaration after having been accepted as official Spanish representatives by the ILO. In their declaration, the three groups recalled the persecution of the workers’ movement(s) by the Francoists and how the Francoist state repressed workers’ and trade union activities. Finally, they laid out what they fought for:

 Martínez Quinteiro, La denuncia del sindicato vertical, 360.  Confederación Sindical CCOO, Repensar el Sindicato (http://www.ccoo.es/0ab6c8384 35020427327a2df35b24dd7000001.pdf, 2016), 24.  N.N., “La hora actual,” Mundo Obrero, June 19, 1974.  N.N., “La hora actual,” Mundo Obrero, June 19, 1974.

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The rights of association, assembly and expression; free trade unions and the right to strike; the right of the different peninsular peoples to their own language, culture and personality; the release of political and social prisoners and the return of political exiles; the return of sovereignty to the Spanish people.218

In the joint declaration, social rights, civil rights, and many more topics were combined with a set of demands and political goals. It is noticeable that the catalogue of ideas and demands was broader than in the 1960s and that it was a joint declaration of several groups with a broader scope of actions and interests. However, when thinking of the declaration in terms of a compromise, a significant overlap with traditional CCOO documents becomes visible. These processes of convergence were also commented on by the “Ten” imprisoned workers’ activists. In an open letter, they enthusiastically addressed their supporters and called for massive protest and for supporting the convergence dynamics between communists and other democratic forces.219 In July 1974, the Junta Democrática was announced. In their joint declaration that entailed a set of propositions, the first bullet point already embraced civil rights. These rights, in turn, were presented as being the main feature of being a Spanish citizen. Consequently, the declaration suggested: [. . .] The formation of a provisional Government to replace the current one, to return to Spanish men and women over 18 years of age their full citizenship through the legal recognition of all democratic liberties, rights and duties.220

The events surrounding the Proceso 1001, including the government’s reaction to the assassination of Carrero Blanco and the installation of Arias Navarro, were observed with a lot of worries and fear by the opposition and the democratic countries abroad, as well as if Arias Navarro seemed to be a political compromise candidate who did not pertain to either the “bunker” section of the Francoist government or the progressive current.221 He, however, showed some signs of apertura, of an openness, when he gave a speech in January 1974 announcing some more participative structures “given the proven maturity of our people [. . .].”222

 N.N., “Comisiones Obreras, UGT y USO incorporados al grupo de trabajadores de la O.I.T.”  Marcelino e. a. Camacho, “El saludo de los presos comunistas de Carabanchel,” Mundo Obrero, July 3, 1974.  N.N., “Anunciada en España y en París la creación de la Junta Democrática de España!,” Mundo Obrero, July 31, 1984.  Martínez Quinteiro, La denuncia del sindicato vertical, 362.  Martínez Quinteiro, La denuncia del sindicato vertical, 362f.

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The “maturity” of the Spanish people was later proven during the months after the death of General Franco, when all democratic forces and the Spanish crown engaged in a so-called pacted transition that would be regarded as a positive role model by many scholars and politicians later on, among them, interestingly, also Poles such as Adam Michnik. The events surrounding the Proceso 1001, among other things, show how contingent historical democratization processes could be while at the same time being shaped by the continuity of the engagement of certain groups and philosophical currents of thought.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I shed light on the debates surrounding the Proceso 1001, the last big show trial of the Francoist regime before the transition to democracy. In the first section, I demonstrated how the Comisiones Obreras reacted to both the Proceso 1001 and the general political atmosphere in the country. Consequently, this section focused on the solidarity campaign launched by the activists of the Comisiones Obreras raising awareness about the fate of their ten imprisoned colleagues. The campaign was organized around two main ideas: human rights and democracy. The examined communist press articulated a certain understanding of human rights’ universality: the right to free association stood at the center of interest. While it was sometimes even depicted as being closely tied to the human nature, other sources called it “universal” and underlined its absence in the Spanish legal system. While the lack of human rights was identified as the main reason why political change was necessary, democracy and freedom were the main aims articulated by the activists. The two main ideas played a different role in the context of different audiences of the campaign: whereas the support of other fellow Spaniards, i.e. students, peasants, workers, and intellectuals, was presented and discussed in terms of democracy, the international support by individuals and institutions was presented as a human rights cause. In other words: every Spanish citizen who considered her or himself a democrat should be against such a process and every person worldwide caring about human rights should be against it, too. The semantics of human rights were enforced through the prominent support of US civil rights icons such as Angela Davis and effectively localized in a communist setting – the activist was herself a member of the American Communist Party. In this context, it is important to keep in mind the political power of certain terminologies, for instance the notion of the political prisoner. This labeling of prisoners was another matter of political contestation, which, as will be shown in the subsequent chapter on Poland, was not a Spanish peculiarity but typical of authoritarian regimes that did

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not want to be labeled as oppressive on the international stage. The human rights framing of the campaign allowed the activists to reach out to international (human rights) institutions, including unions, parties, and newspapers editors/ publishing houses in democratic states. One of the most relevant addressees, however, was the International Labour Organization that had accepted the Comisiones Obreras as members already before the actual political transition in 1974. In the second section of this chapter, I analyzed how categories of space and time were connected in the debates surrounding the Proceso 1001: Spain was presented as a particularly backward country that – due to its rightlessness – was doomed to a slower and more deficient development than others. This image was easily adaptable with long-lasting Spanish backwardness narratives that had traditionally accompanied Spanish cultural history from the sixteenth century. The Proceso 1001 was depicted as a singular anachronism, first comparing it to the (perceived) civilizational level of other (European) countries and second assessing the developments within the Francoist dictatorship itself. Its second phase, the Tardofranquismo, meant relative social and economic progress for many and a slight liberalization of the formerly even more repressive politics against any oppositional activity. State-socialist countries and liberal democracies were mentioned in the same breath in this context.223 The entire debate over the Process 1001 was overshadowed by the perception of living in a terminal phase of Francoism, which was fueled by a biologizing depiction of Franco’s dictatorship intertwined with his real physical weakness at that time. Contextualizing the activists’ publications with historical-philosophical theories on time and temporality, this section showed how the Spanish activists perceived an acceleration of time. This perception was grounded in the weakness of the dictator and the political processes in and outside Spain, for instance the assassination of head of state Luis Carrero Blanco and the peaceful revolution in Spain’s neighboring country Portugal in 1974. The perceived peripherality of Spain with regard to an imagined European center became visible in publications that linked the backwardness narrative with the Europeanization narrative, which was a modernizing one. In this context, the lack of rights in Spain was used as a marker of difference and of asynchronicity with a European civilized ‘norm’.

 Even if the Spanish communists had a clearly democratic profile and had detached their ideology from the Central Committee of the Soviet Union in the Post-Stalinist period after 1956 but even more after 1968, they still kept close ties to “brother parties” in the Eastern bloc and state socialist countries in the Global South, including Cuba and Vietnam. This becomes visible on the pages of their party organ, for instance, when delegations were sent to state socialist countries where they met with representatives of authoritarian or even dictatorial regimes, such as in the People’s Republic of Korea.

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In line with a future-oriented perspective, the communist underground journalists regularly called for democratic change. This, however, was presented as inevitable, which underlines the equation of progress with the flux of time, a Hegelian and Marxist concept mirrored in the communist visions. The post-dictatorial phase was pictured as one of national reconciliation, integrating not only the democratic forces but also the Francoists who should benefit from a general amnesty, just like the currently persecuted political activists. History, in this teleological view, was presented as a progress-oriented development in which a positively connoted ‘ending point’, a democratic Spain, was coming anyway, the question being how soon. Coming back to the question of which role rights played in this context, the answer is more complex: in the context of the solidarity campaign, ‘rights’ functioned as a marker to depict the Spanish anomaly (also in an international setting). Nevertheless, it became noticeable that they were much more important for the framework of the international campaign than in the appeals to fellow Spaniards. The different use of a language of rights depending on the international character of the audience proves that one has to be careful in monopolizing their significance for the political rhetoric of the 1970s.224 For social movements living in non-democratic regimes, the use of a broader set of value-related notions, including democracy, could be as important and salient as using a language of rights. Within the narratives of time and temporality, human rights were not as salient as in other contexts. They returned in the context of future-visions, as workers’ rights and as basic civil rights. In a democratic Spain, as could be read in the publications of the now jointly organized Junta Democrática, having rights was the main determinant for being a citizen.

3.2 After the Success of 1980. Re-organizing Polish Protest during Martial Law This chapter addresses discourses of the underground-Solidarność during martial law in Poland in the months between December 1981 and July 1983. Martial law constituted a state of emergency per definitionem.225 It was installed by the Polish authorities in order to be able to step out of their own socialist legal framework

 Cf.: Moyn, The last Utopia.  See, for instance. Armitage’s definition of the state of emergency, as offered here: “The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims.” John Armitage, “State of Emergency,” Theory, Culture & Society 4 (2002): 27.

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and to operate against the increasingly stronger Solidarność. Indeed, the installation of a military government and the suspension of general law for the sake of martial law caused a massive backlash in the actual union work. Part of what characterizes states of emergencies is that they are temporally limited. Constituting a very dense phase of crises, the legally defined periods have a clear starting point and a clear end. Hence, more than ever, this crisis situation triggered different constructions of a utopian post-martial law phase to follow. Martial law served therefore as a negative foil to express political hopes. Hence, some practices were directed at a post-martial-war scenario and had a preparatory character, while others, especially those directed inwards, aimed at immediate and concrete solidarity. Similar to the case studies before, the focus of this chapter lies on rhetoric and practices. Both the successes of August 1980 and the authoritarian backlash of December 1981 had caused a major international awareness for the political developments in Poland and also solidary actions, including food donations from Western Europe during the period of extreme supply shortages. Polish activists by now knew that the world was watching their government and their own actions more than before. On this background and given the fact that the Solidarność is frequently counted as one of Europe’s most important “human rights movements,” I especially focus on the question of whether a language of rights was used by the protagonists and how.226

From Movement to Trade Union: The Short-Term Success of the Solidarność in Summer 1980 The year 1980 started with the pessimistic conviction that Poland’s economic situation was hopeless. Any future-oriented, progressive rhetoric that had accompanied Gierek’s first years was gone. A last symbolic attempt to simulate political responsibility was the dismissal of Prime Minister Jaroszewicz by the First Secretary Gierek, but this did not help in convincing Polish citizens that the situation was under control. When the Polish government introduced price increases and changes in the system of meat sales again on July 1, strikes immediately began all across the country, most prominently in Wrocław and the outskirts of Warsaw. This time, the government reacted differently than in 1956, 1970 or 1976. “Local authorities, sometimes even factory managers, were soon empowered to settle  For instance, Mason discusses the question of whether the Solidarity movement can be regarded as a “New Social Movement” in the scholarly sense of the word and bases his assessment of the Solidarity standing in for “human rights” on their 21 demands and their overall program. See: David S. Mason, “Solidarity as a New Social Movement,” Political Science Quarterly 1 (1989).

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strikers’ demands for pay hikes.”227 This delegation of power was supposed to pacify the protesters on a case-to-case basis, but the situation escalated even more as the workers had witnessed that only those workers who actually went on strike got pay increases.228 Polish workers still lacked legally binding procedures to negotiate labor disputes. Although it was sporadically possible to find agreements, the dynamics of protest had become a dominating force in Poland; this time they were fueled with a new self-understanding and a new motivation.229 Again, the samizdat magazine Robotnik covered the strikes. Its circulation had reached 60,000 copies in July/August 1980.230 How relevant both KOR and Robotnik were for the movement becomes noticeable in Jan Kubik’s analysis: In some places, especially where the KOR, Robotnik, or other oppositional groups had established contacts with the workers before 1980, the demands included the formation of new trade unions, independent of the Party and the state.231

Whereas in early June the demands had been rather economic and focused on pay raises and a return to the old meat prices, claims became more political over the following weeks. The workers went on strike because, as Włodzimierz Borodziej commented, they attempted to enforce a “more efficient and more just modernity,” however “in its state socialist variant.”232 Many of the striking workers did not oppose socialism per se. However, they opposed the mismanagement and the dramatic consequences of the planned economy, especially with regard to basic social services like food supply. Over the previous months that oscillated between protesting social conditions and facing political repressive reactions, the demands were expanded, and political aspects were added. On August 14, the Lenin-Shipyard strike in Gdańsk began. Apart from pay raise demands, the striking workers demanded the reinstallation of their dismissed colleague, Anna Walentynowicz, who had been fired due to political engagement in one of the emerging free trade unions. Some KOR members, like Bogdan Borusewicz, supported the workers by printing the demands on posters.233 Among other  Jan T. Gross, “Introduction,” in Poland’s self-limiting revolution, ed. Jan T. Gross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 3–37, 3.  Jan T. Gross, “Introduction,” in Poland’s self-limiting revolution, ed. Jan T. Gross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 3–37, 3.  See also the debate on which social group was dominantly responsible for workers’ activism: Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization.  Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 184.  Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 184.  Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 184.  Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 185.

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things, the workers demanded the erection of a monument for their colleagues that had been killed during the workers’ protests in December 1970.234 Already in the late 1970s, as shown in Chapter 2.2, the deadly crushing of protesting workers constituted an important reference in collective memory. In their letters to Robotnik, workers constantly demanded public forms of remembrance of the events. In 1980 eventually, when the tragedy had its tenth anniversary, the topic returned as an important element of the workers’ demands. This concrete demand was new, however, it was not a revolutionary topic.235 Claims for the acknowledgment and recognition of historical atrocities belonged to the traditional vocabulary of the opposition, for instance in the context of Soviet war crimes. Nevertheless, the historicization of their own movement was new. After the demands were fulfilled, including the political ones, the strikes seemed to be over at first sight. Now, the appeals for solidarity became an important factor. These appeals had already been expressed in Robotnik earlier, but workers formulated them during strikes too. The liberated Anna Walentynowicz as well as her colleagues Alina Pienkowska and Henryka Krzywonos, three workers working at smaller enterprises collaborating with the Lenin-Shipyard, convinced the strike leaders not to stop at that point and to be solidary with them on a longer term because they needed their support.236 This paved the way for the creation of the Międzyzakładowy Komitet Strajkowy, MKS (“Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee”). This Committee constituted the “organizational embodiment of the solidarity of the workers of the Tri-City-Area”237 and published the movement’s famous twenty-one demands. The demands were the result of an intensive cooperation of Gdańsk-based workers like Lech Wałęsa and Alina Pienkowska and oppositional intellectuals like Bogdan Borusewicz, a studied historian who had been a member of KOR since the first days. After he had published his address on the pages of Robotnik, workers like Pienkowska approached him and established contact. His role is considered crucial for the successful cooperation of oppositional workers and oppositional intellectuals in a dominantly working-class city like Gdańsk.238 Interestingly, Anna Walentynowicz was a member of the MKS and signed the Gdańsk accords, the “mission statement”

 Cf. Kubik’s study on the symbolism of the Solidarity, when he quotes a worker that compares the oppression of publicly remembering the victims of 1970s with the taboo of remembering the massacre of Katyn. Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 184.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 115.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 116f.  Jerome Karabel, “The Origins of Solidarity: Workers, intellectuals and the making of an oppositional movement,” 19.  Jerome Karabel, “The Origins of Solidarity: Workers, intellectuals and the making of an oppositional movement,” 19.

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of the movement.239 Yet later, when Solidarność became a legal entity, she was not included in any leadership board, which can be regarded as one example of how women were excluded from the Solidarność’s leadership.240 The preamble of the twenty-one demands detailed a reference to the ILO Convention N° 87.241 Finally, the strikes were clearly not of a mere economic but also political nature as first demands for the creation of free and independent trade unions, the right to strike and freedom of expression as well as the liberation of all political prisoners.242 After days of negotiation, characterized by a moral superiority of the workers, in the so-called Gdańsk Agreement signed on 31 August, all demands were met. At that moment, the MKS represented 370 strike committees and 400,000 workers.243 The regime could not camouflage what had happened; the entire population learned that from now on independent trade unions were legal and that strikes had led to the reinstallation of previously dismissed workers. Gierek stepped back from his office. The Solidarność movement was transformed into a union called Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy „Solidarność”, in short NSZZ “Solidarność” (“Independent Self-Governing Labor Union ‘Solidarity’”). The following months saw a quasi-repetitive pattern of strikes and the conclusion of agreements. Workers connected with workers in other regions, which had not been the case before. The Solidarność had become an alternative powerful actor in the previously quite homogenic political landscape in state socialist Poland, but the monopoly of power, monopoly of information etc. remained in the hands of the single-party state until August 1980.244 Now, a process started that has prominently been labeled a “self-limiting revolution” by the Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis, only shortly after the events

 Shana Penn, “Women in Poland’s Solidarity,” in The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 134.  Shana Penn, “Women in Poland’s Solidarity,” in The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 134.  International Labour Organization, “Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87).”  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 116. In a previous version, the demand for free and independent trade unions had been missing: the oppositionists including Lech Wałęsa considered it too daring to claim. Jerome Karabel spoke of a “conspicuous absence” of the demand in this context, one that, however, was very much intended. The turn could only occur because the Interfactory Strike Committee was much more “combative and ideologically unified” than the groups that had negotiated with the management earlier. See: Jerome Karabel, “The Origins of Solidarity,” 17.  Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution, ed. Jan T. Gross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 48.  The Catholic Church constituted an important counter-weight to the regime, which was unique in the communist bloc.

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happened.245 According to Staniszkis, it was self-limiting, because by creating parallel power structures to the official ones, the Solidarność activists had to constantly limit themselves and work within the structures that they had been fighting against.246 As Tony Judt laconically stated, this was also because “no-one wanted to give the authorities in Warsaw or Moscow an excuse to send in the tanks.”247 In this context, a conscious shift in rhetoric occurred according to Staniszkis: The most striking characteristic of the initial period of the movement’s history was the painful process of cramming that radical wave of protest and class war into a ‘trade union’ formula. [. . .] Solidarity was not only perceived as a vehicle of upward mobility for the whole working class, but it seemed to satisfy anti-hierarchical desires. Workers rapidly decided to talk, some of them imitating the vocabulary of their leaders [. . .]. Many workers, however, made a conscious effort to change their habits of speech and to overcome limitations rooted in a restricted semantic code. [. . .] Orwellian ‘newspeak’ was also gone, any many workers had their former meaning restored.248

The first Solidarność congress was held in September 1981 and entailed an appeal to like-minded people in other state socialist countries, which was a major threat in the eyes of the Moscow regime given the strong ties between the Polish and Czechoslovak intellectual oppositions. Although the processes around Solidarność are particular, especially with regard to the mass movement character and the enormous importance of this organization, one can recognize an important similarity with the Spanish case: first, the harsh reaction of the government in the form of prohibiting the movement after a short legal phase, and second, the implementation of a state of exception (or martial law) reacting to the establishment of an institutionalized, openly active/operating opposition. However, one important difference is the fact that only the Polish case was heavily influenced by how the Soviet government would (re)act.

Oppositional Activism and Underground Press under Martial Law In December, the new head of state, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, announced martial law in Poland. Plans to dismantle the movement had existed longer. The

 Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution.  The demands have been reprinted in this volume: Jacek Luszniewicz and Andrzej Zawistowski, eds., Sprawy gospodarcze w dokumentach pierwszej Solidarności (Warszawa: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2008), 67–70.  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 588.  Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution, 19.

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Party transferred its power towards the newly created Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, WRON (“Military Council of National Salvation”), which was furthermore announced in a legendary TV statement that belongs to the iconic realms of memory of contemporary Polish politics.249 The severity of this political act cannot be underestimated: “Martial law was undoubtedly a body blow to the Polish opposition. It effectively destroyed the existing structure of independent society.”250 Everyday life changed entirely; almost all realms of public and private life were affected, for instance due to the curfew and the hard censorship of private communication. The first reaction, a strike in the Wujek mine in Katowice, was met with another violent state attack. The strike was crushed and nine miners were killed. This escalated reaction also set the tone for the new political style during martial law. Until the lifting of martial law in July 1983, it is estimated that between fifty-six and ninety-one individuals were killed and that around 5,000 were arrested in the first week. The leader of the Solidarność, the electric worker Lech Wałęsa that had become an international icon of democratic protest, was charged with house confinement until November 1982.251 Prominent opposition members, many of them former KOR activists, were interned and arrested. Jacek Kuroń, for instance, would not be liberated earlier than in 1984 when an amnesty act was carried out in July. Although it was much harder than before to associate in public, demonstrations with thousands of people were still frequent. Polish samizdat was a special target for the government. Under martial law, a decree was issued quickly stating that “[. . .] the distribution of all types of publications, publications and information by any means, the public performance of works of art and the use of any printing equipment is prohibited without the prior consent of the competent authority.”252 Although being strongly under attack, the Polish “second circuit” prevailed, in a different form, however. Whereas the Polish samizdat had been quite hierarchi-

 When choosing the name for the Military Council of National Salvation, the responsible individuals probably did not think of the abbreviation’s semantic connotation in Polish: WRON reminds a Polish speaker of wrona, the Polish word for “crow.” Given the then well-known fact that General Jaruzelski stemmed from the Polish noble family of Ślepowron that can be roughly translated into “Blindcrow” and whose coat of arms entailed this very bird (taking up a golden ring), Poles quickly started to name Jaruzelski “crow” and also used this image in many caricatures and cartoons in their underground publications – even under Martial Law. The “crow” became a constant symbol and companion in the underground workers’ press.  Siobhan K. Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 139.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 117–118.  See: Cecylia Kuta, “‚Słowo prawdy na wagę złota‘: Niezależna działalność wydawnicza w stanie wojennym,” Biuletyn IPN 11–12 (2011).

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cal before the introduction of martial law, now, in the new situation, the Solidarność structures were more “amorphous”253 and the autonomy of the underground press increased. In terms of political activism, the underground press itself overtook the role of the movement, or, as Siobhan Doucette put it: During martial law the Solidarity press no longer mirrored Solidarity’s structure but [. . .] created and constituted it. [. . .] Prior to martial law Solidarity had been hierarchical and its press had been subject to oversight from the Solidarity leadership and membership; in the underground Solidarity’s structure became amorphous while its press became autonomous.254

Workers who had started their own magazines since the creation of the Solidarność exchanged information about repression, called for solidarity with imprisoned colleagues, and criticized the government. Given the previous months that many described as a “carnival”255 and the atmosphere of liberalization that also entailed the broadening of certain civil rights, this massive authoritarian backlash must have felt even more brutal. In this chapter, this phase of repressive backlash after a short peak moment of liberalization is in the focus of interest. In this context, the analysis concentrates on descriptions of repression on the one hand and the strategies to maintain oppositional structures on the other. In view of the human rights aura that surrounds both the scholarship and non-academic publications dealing with the Solidarność, the role of legal language is very important here. In contrast to the 1970s, when the Polish samizdat was a rather elitist undertaking, the 1980s witnessed a sheer wave of underground publications from all social strata, including the working-class. After a short shock phase, the first printed publications re-emerged from the samizdat basements and conspiratorial living rooms. Samizdat as a “social practice”256 had reached the factories and the “people of labor.”257 Having in mind the phase of the carnival between August 1980 and December 1981, Włodzimierz Borodziej wrote that it altered the real existing socialism “beyond recognition” because it questioned its fundaments. This is also true for a certain selfunderstanding that prevailed even during the difficult months of martial law. Al-

 Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism, 139.  Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism, 139.  Cf. Padraic Kenney, A carnival of revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).  Alber and Stegmann, “Einleitung.”  Cf.: Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej.”

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though the monopoly of information was back in the hands of the state, it was seriously challenged by the alternative press. The first publication that re-emerged after the announcement of martial law was Z dnia na dzień, which can be translated into both “overnight” and “from day to day.” The magazine from Wrocław, whose first issue was published already on December 14, quickly reached a circulation of 20,000 copies.258 In this chapter, thanks to the variety of new samizdat publications dealing with labor issues emerging in the 1980s, two different magazines served as the main source. Hutnik (“The Steel-Worker”) from Cracow was one of the more important workers’ publications. It was moreover connected to a particular workplace, the Lenin-Steelworks in Nowa Huta, and therefore to a local Solidarność branch. In this case, this was the branch in the Małopolska region with its leadership centers in Cracow and Nowa Huta, the socialist model town near Cracow. The branches in the two cities, were, however, quite autonomous. The LeninSteelworks in Nowa Huta were moreover, “along with Gdańsk, one of the principal points of resistance in the country,”259 which was also noticeable by the fact that they started striking immediately after the announcement of martial law on December 13.260 Hutnik was brought into being by two workers of the mine, Jerzy Ostałowski and Zdzisław Jaworski, who sought for support at the neighboring University of Science and Technology,261 where they got in touch with Wojciech Marchewczyk who had some expertise in sports journalism. The magazine soon became one of the most popular samizdat publications in the region, which is, apart from its close connection to a particular working environment, another reason why I chose it to depict the workers’ perspective.262 During martial law, each issue was printed with 5,000 copies. Conceiving not only the production but also the proliferation and consumption of samizdat as a social practice, it has to be taken into account in the estimation of such a publication’s outreach that people read these magazines and passed them on to the next reader.

 Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 212.  Piotr Kapusta, “First days of martial law in Nowa Huta,” Journal of Education Culture and Society 1 (2012): 127.  Piotr Kapusta, “First days of martial law in Nowa Huta,” Journal of Education Culture and Society 1 (2012): 127.  It was literally called “Academy of Mining and Metallurgy,” a technical university in Cracow founded in 1919.  According to what was claimed by the editors themselves, Hutnik had a circulation of ca. 5,000 copies per issue. It has to be kept in mind that each copy was read by more than one reader and that samizdat was based on individual proliferation techniques, i.e. passing on an already read issue to another interested person. See for instance: “Hutnik,” 10/1982 (June 10, 1982).

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Fig. 5: Hutnik, 1/1982, Fundacja Ośrodka KARTA.

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Warsaw was, like already in the decade before, the hotspot of the independent publishing movement. The most important publication there was Tygodnik Mazowsze (“Mazowsze Weekly”),263 that, among other things, regularly printed announcements by the illegalized Solidarność leaders. It was formally the organ of the regional leadership of the Solidarność, but, “in practice, due to its wide scope, it was treated as a vote of the national authorities of the movement.”264 Tygodnik Mazowsze was mainly produced by non-working-class activists, and, what is also important: by women. Some of them, like Helena Łuczywo, had also been active in the creation of Robotnik. She cooperated with her colleagues Joanna Szczęsna and Anna Dodziuk: “In general, women constituted the majority there.”265 “Despite the cultural and legal constraints, some women, acting as a team, created powerful positions within the opposition and became de facto leaders of the resistance, both locally and nationally, when martial law was imposed.”266 However, women did not reclaim ownership over Tygodnik Mazowsze, but considered it a “mouthpiece for Solidarity’s all-male leadership.”267 According to Jan Olaszek, the predominance of female activists in the production of the Polish samizdat is, among other things, connected to the fact that many male activists, oftentimes husbands of the engaged women, were in prison during martial law.268 Robert Brier also notes: “With the imposition of martial law in December 1981 and the arrest of thousands of activists, women came to assume a central role in Poland.”269 This observation is interesting, especially in the context of inherent gender dynamics of the Polish opposition movement that is connected to a binary conception of the public and private sphere in state socialist Poland.270 The predominance of

 I use the translation used in: Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 221.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 222.  Penn, Solidarity’s secret, 137.  Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” 21.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 222; clearly addressing a rather conservative audience, the author laconically comments on the female dominance of the Polish samizdat as follows: “For a reader used to a traditional narration of the history of anticommunist opposition, that is dominated by men, this can be surprising.”  Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” 19.  Shana Penn proposes to analyze female activism by identifying a “third space” that developed between the public and private realm, where women could carry out both their political activism and their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Shana Penn, “Women in Poland’s Solidarity,” in The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

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women in underground publishing seems to be a widely acknowledged fact.271 However, as they were oftentimes involved in the production and proliferation of the writings, they did not attract sufficient attention from both scholars and ordinary citizens and in the collective memory of the Polish opposition. Women oftentimes used male pseudonyms. For instance, Helena Łuczywo published articles under the name “Paweł Hofer” and Joanna Szczęsna used “Jan Klincz.”272 Moreover, “[. . .] because open union activism henceforth led to imprisonment, Solidarność editors no longer signed their works and a shroud of anonymity overtook the independent press.”273 Only well-known activists like Jacek Kuroń or Zbigniew Bujak, who were either imprisoned (Kuroń) or hiding underground (Bujak), signed their articles.274 The self-understanding of the samizdat authors was shaped by a dichotomic depiction of opposition and state. In this context, they positioned themselves as strong opponents of the state.275 Not only did this depiction camouflage grey zones between official, public, and private actors and their position(ing) in the state socialist reality,276 but it moreover contributed to an ongoing invisibility of women in the historiography of the Polish opposition, according to Alber and Stegmann.277 This relates to the social realms in which opposition was carried out as a social practice, i.e. private kitchens or living rooms, which traditionally bear a female connotation. The female samizdat producers transcended the borders  See also, for instance: Gregor Feindt, “Opposition und Samizdat in Ostmitteleuropa. Strukturen und Mechanismen unabhängiger Periodika in vergleichender Perspektive,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 1 (2016): 32; however, historians have pointed out to the fact that in comparison to other societies in the Soviet bloc, in Poland, women engaged less in the opposition movement. See, for instance: Brier, “Gendering dissent: human rights, gender history and the road to 1989,” 19.  Jarosław Szarek, “Tygodnik Mazowsze,” http://www.encysol.pl/wiki/%E2%80%9ETygodnik_ Mazowsze%E2%80%9D, accessed April 2, 2023; it was, however, also quite common for women to choose female names as pseudonyms, like in the case of Anna Bikont (“Anna Mól”). Names had sometimes a semantic meaning, like in this case when Anna Bikont chose to name herself with the Polish word for “moth.” In the context of the conspiratory atmosphere of the Polish underground press, this can be interpreted metaphorically. Anna Bikont also continued being a journalist in the democratic Polish Republic, where she became quite known thanks to her contributions to the research on the anti-Jewish massacre in Jedwabne during the Second World War. See: Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2015); Helena Łuczywo created the media empire “Agora” after 1989 and is today one of the richest women in Poland. See: Karol Sauerland, “Zur Rolle der Frauen der Solidarność-Bewegung vor und nach 1989,” L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (2017): 93.  Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism.  Doucette, Books Are Weapons: The Polish Opposition Press and the Overthrow of Communism.  Alber and Stegmann, “Einleitung,” 8.  Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation,” 400.  Alber and Stegmann, “Einleitung,” 8–11.

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between private and public when they proliferated the writings. Against this background, Claudia Kraft has argued for a more nuanced view on the intrasocietal divisions in Polish state socialism when she criticized that “the dichotomous perception of ‘regime’ and ‘opposition’ is subsequently given a greater influence than it actually possessed in the grey areas of everyday state socialist life.”278 When questioning the binary logics of state and society in the People’s Republic of Poland, the intra-opposition conflicts become salient. Naturally, people had different opinions on how to react to the new situation, which became virulent when Kuroń wrote an article proposing a violent protest as the “lesser evil.”279 This turnaround from the non-violent Solidarność ethos caused a conflict between Joanna Szczęsna and Helena Łuczywo, who was against publishing this text. As will be seen later, Tygodnik Mazowsze eventually published the piece and contextualized it with dissenting articles by other Solidarność members. It was justified with the moral authority of the author and only possible thanks to the liberal stand of Joanna Szczęsna, who remembers herself saying: “I don’t want to work in a magazine where Jacek Kuroń cannot publish, even if he’s wrong.”280 These disputes were a result of the interconnectedness of the leadership of the Solidarność and the Tygodnik Mazowsze editors. The magazine temporarily also functioned as their information organ, which the editors claim to have perceived as “embarrassing.”281 Tygodnik Mazowsze regularly printed declarations of the Solidarność, which was another reason for being identified with the underground structures of the union.282 Considering the new situation, those Solidarność leaders who were not imprisoned launched a Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna, TKK (“Interim Coordination Committee”) in April 1982. The TKK’s instructions and appeals were frequently printed on the pages of Tygodnik Mazowsze. Its members were Władysław Frasyniuk from Wrocław, Bogdan Lis from Gdańsk, Władysław Hardek from Cracow and Zbigniew Bujak from Warsaw. Turning back to the question of private and public spheres in the context of the Polish samizdat, the lines between journalistic coverage and political action were blurred, as Szczęsna and Łuczywo regularly participated in the meetings of

 Kraft, “Paradoxien der Emanzipation,” 400.  Jacek Kuroń, “Tezy o wyjściu z sytuacji bez wyjścia,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 31, 1982, 8.  Joanna Szczęsna, “Tygodnik Mazowsze: Kobiety na wojnie,” Wysokie Obcasy/ Gazeta Wyborcza http://www.wysokieobcasy.pl/wysokie-obcasy/1,96856,3781145.html, accessed March 25, 2023; Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 225. The arguments in the article will be discussed later in this chapter.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 222.  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 222.

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the Mazowsze regional branch of the Solidarność. Following an ideal-typical vision of clearly fractioned realms of society, Olaszek stated that “the natural oppositionists’ need for independence collided occasionally with the editorial staff’s dependence on the leaders of the union.”283 Yet, the staff was part of the opposition, just like the samizdat was a social product of the opposition that could not be separated from the Solidarność. The magazine was produced from 1982 until 1989.284 After its dissolving, the editors engaged in the production process of the Gazeta Wyborcza (“Electoral Gazette”) that started as a newspaper accompanying the first semi-free elections in Poland in June 1989 and is today Poland’s biggest daily newspaper. The mere existence of the magazines was a reaction to repression and violence. Polish citizens discussed repression, political protest but also trade unionism and democracy on the pages of independent press publications. This chapter is based on an analysis of articles published in Tygodnik Mazowsze, written dominantly by people with a higher educational degree and proliferated all over Poland on the one hand, and of texts written for Hutnik, a workers’ magazine closely connected to a particular workplace and its own dynamics, on the other.285 The selection of sources allows for both the reconstruction and analysis of broader visions of society and the future in general and the reconstruction of concrete problems and topics on the ground that bothered the workers during martial law.

What is to be Done? Debates on Political Survival Martial law, especially in the first months after its announcement, provoked people to think about the future. People wondered loudly how long this status quo would be held up. Intellectuals and workers responded the same way: they simply did not know. At the same time, they faced a precarious situation that made it even more difficult to develop strategies. The installation of martial law primarily constituted a strong backlash for the Solidarność, especially, since so many of its protagonists  Olaszek, Rewolucja powielaczy, 222.  After its dissolving, the editors engaged in the production process of gazeta wyborcza (“Electoral Gazette”), that started as a newspaper accompanying the first semi-free elections in Poland in June 1989 and is until today Poland’s biggest daily newspaper; Adam Michnik became its editor-in-chief and still holds this position at present.  Despite the intellectual bias of the leading board, Zbigniew Bujak, member of the TKK and regular contributor of Tygodnik Mazowsze, was an electrician. He would obtain an academic degree many years later, namely in 1998, when he concluded his studies of political science at the University of Warsaw. Mateusz Konczal, “Jan Marek Cieselski,” https://web.archive.org/web/ 20201027120557/http://www.encysol.pl/wiki/Jan_Marek_Ciesielski, accessed March 18, 2023.

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were in prison and activists had “[. . .] little experience with underground work.”286 Nobody was prepared for such a reaction by the authorities: “The immediate effect of martial law was that the authorities succeeded in crushing the Solidarność as a mass movement and in ‘suffocating’ the social euphoria and energy that was invested in sustaining it.”287 Therefore, alongside with reporting repression, one of the main topics was how to keep up the pre-martial war structures and the spirit of a movement. One Hutnik article from May 1982, six months after the installation of martial law, was titled with Lenin’s famous question “What is to be done”?288 With the decapitation of the Solidarność movement in mind, an unknown author, who chose the pseudonym of a Polish politician and legal scholar from the Enlightenment period, mentioned that two questions were at the center of interest for many people he had been talking to.289 Not only “What is to be done” but also “what comes next” was now a central question, the author argued, as they expressed their worries: To live without a concrete idea of the future is, of course, hard. It is a veritable handicap – but still less dangerous than to be guided by illusions, that we know something, that we can count on something.290

While having no answer to how the future would look, “Barss” discussed what could be done even on a private scale to uphold “the idea of free trade unions that are independent of the employer”291 among the people. For this purpose, s/he developed a list of tasks. For instance, people should be in solidarity with imprisoned activists and keep close to the “Roman-Catholic Church” as it was “the only independent” institution in the country.292 The Catholic Church’s position in Poland during state socialism was indeed uniquely independent – a factor that was counted among the aspects in the Polish socio-political setting that fostered the development

 Sabrina P. Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 89.  Bogusław Potoczny, “Poland’s Underground Opposition in the 1980s: The breakdown of the “Solidarity” Movement,” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 1 (2010): 103.  “Hutnik” (May 2, 1982), 2. See: Vladimir I. Lenin, What is to be done? Burning questions of our movement (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, ca. 1960).  Franciszek Barss (1760–1812) was advisor to the Warsaw mayor Jan Dekert and a renowned lawyer in eighteenth century Poland. After the partitions of Poland, he moved to France and died in the course of Napoleon’s invasion in Russia. Cf.: Wacław Walecki, Polnische Literatur: Annäherungen vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Igel-Verlag Literatur & Wissenschaft, 2011), 92.  “Franciszek Barss” (pseudonym), “Co Robić?,” Hutnik, May 2, 1982.  “Franciszek Barss” (pseudonym), “Co Robić?,” Hutnik, May 2, 1982.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 127.

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of oppositional activities alongside a strong intellectual opposition.293 In the fourty years of the People’s Republic, despite several repressive measures against the Catholic Church, it was “[. . .] the only non-communist societal factor that the regime took seriously.”294 The strong social salience of the Catholic Church in Poland can also be explained considering the history of the nineteenth century and the partitions of Poland. In phases of political instability and/ or foreign rule, it had always been the Church that offered stability and continuity, that conjured the Polish nation against all outer enemies, and that provided concrete support for subversive activities. Even more interesting is what “Barss” wrote about trade unionism: the very first task on his list of how to endure the phase of martial law without losing too much of the earlier achievements was to uphold, enrich, and broaden of the idea of independent trade unions. Only “such unions,” and by this the author explicitly mentioned the Solidarność, could defend workers’ interests, “including our citizens’ rights and our freedom.”295 In this list of tasks, rights were described as something that can only be ensured through the instrument of free and independent trade unions. While Samuel Moyn, by referring to East-Central European dissidents, argues that socialist societies had a better understanding of the “unity” of political/ civil and social/ economic rights, I propose to analyze this very aspect more carefully than in terms of unity or division.296 It is fruitful to look at the relationship of both categories in the oppositional rhetoric: the labor right to free and independent trade unions does not appear in the form of a right, but as a tool to ensure other rights, such as “citizens’ rights” which appear in the same list of values like “freedom.” This positioning of different rights resembles the different categories of legally enshrined human rights through history and their dichotomic, partly hierarchical, perception in both politics and academia.297 In transnational legal historical perspective, individual civil rights, such as freedom of speech, were codified earlier

 Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 241.  Krzoska, Ein Land unterwegs, 127–28.  “Franciszek Barss” (pseudonym), “Co Robić?” (emphasis by me, AD).  Moyn, Not Enough, 125. Concretely, Moyn mentioned the Czechoslovak dissidents Zdena Tominová and Jiří Hájek on the one hand and the Polish groups/ movements KOR and Solidarność on the other.  See the critique of the “generations” concept with regard to the different categories of human rights, as formulated by Steven L. B. Jensen, “Putting to Rest the Three Generations Theory of Human Rights,” https://www.openglobalrights.org/putting-to-rest-the-three-generationstheory-of-human-rights/, last accessed August 27, 2019. This critique does not only address the problem of an “unclear time frame” underlining the “generations” conception but also its Eurocentric character that marginalizes dynamics in non-European legal traditions.

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than other rights that today belong to the family of human rights.298 According to the traditional doctrine of positive and negative obligations, civil liberties are considered negative human rights, as they “enjoin states to abstain from interfering with personal freedom.”299 Social rights, in turn, are considered positive rights, for instance, the right to work or the right to social security. They only entered European legal documents in the twentieth century.300 But in this statement published in the Polish workers’ magazine, the perceived hierarchy of rights was reinvented. While one could argue that only in a society where civil rights are ensured could an independent trade unionism emerge, the author presented the trade union as a bulwark against violations of civil rights and positioned them in the opposite direction. The Polish national context was even more salient than the state socialist, Soviet inspired understanding of human rights as enshrined in the legal documents of state socialist countries of this period. This, in turn, had to do with the uniqueness of the Solidarność in transnational comparison. Temporarily, in Poland, in 1980, the right to join and form independent trade unions was “carried out” at a time when several civil rights, like freedom of speech, were not guaranteed, although being contained in the Polish constitution. Historically, the workers’ protest and its success had indeed ensured a peak period of free speech, which, in this example, led to a particular understanding of the intertwining of individual and collective rights. Two months earlier, in March 1982, Tygodnik Mazowsze published an article by the anonymous “Archivist” titled “The Need for Free Speech.”301 Not only did the article proudly summarize the samizdat activities in Poland, but it also characterized them as a symptom of Poles’ “need for free speech.” The article presented the human right of “free speech”302 as something that could be exercised or not. This can be regarded as a specific vernacularized adaptation of the idea that human rights are inalienable and universal: in this article, “free speech” existed regardless of the political context and could be activated by the society if there was a need for it. The “need for free speech,” according to the author, seemed to be something that  In general, traditional legal historical rhetoric semantically borrows from the field of family relations, speaking of “generations” and “families” of rights. Cf.: Tomuschat, Human Rights, 25–26.  Tomuschat, Human Rights, 25.  Rights of the third generation emerged in the context of decolonization dynamics and entail, for instance, the right to development. They are, however, not binding internationally like civil and social rights. Tomuschat, Human Rights, 25.  “Archiwista,” “Potrzeba Wolnego Słowa,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 6, 1982.  While wolność słowa means “freedom of speech,” wolne słowo can be translated into “free speech” (the two expressions literally translate to “ freedom of the word” and “free word”).

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could be communicated to people through democratic experiences like the first successes of the Solidarność. Such an interpretation depicted human rights as something people could be ready for depending on their individual (political) maturity. It also entailed the idea of a path dependency, arguing that the Polish society could not step back from what it had already achieved on its own, meaning the government had to take this into account: A year and a half of Solidarność has developed such a great need for free speech in society that despite the internment of the majority of trade union journalists and printers and despite the takeover or destruction of printing equipment, four months after the imposition of martial law we are now witnessing an unprecedented blossoming of the press underground, unheard-of in the history of the country.303

The official suspension of fundamental rights that were also contained in the Polish Constitution, for instance freedom of speech, was obvious during martial law.304 Yet, already prior to 1981, the question of fundamental rights or citizens’ rights had been a more complex one. Since the 1960s, almost all state socialist countries in Eastern and Central Europe reformed their constitutions.305 As Paul Betts commented: While no one would deny state socialism’s infamous flouting of the law and due process, nor the remarkable reach and well-known exploits of Eastern European state security forces, rights issues were hotly debated themes in [these] countries [. . .] from the very beginning, reflecting as they did shifting ideals about the relationship between socialist citizen and society.306

This was also the case in Poland whose constitutional history is not only relatively long in comparison to other European societies but also rich in reform projects.307 In the Gierekian era, concretely, a discussion about the need for constitutional reforms emerged in order to be able to incorporate the new Gierekan mantra of building an “advanced socialist society.”308 In 1972, several amendments were

 “Archiwista,” “Potrzeba Wolnego Słowa,” 1.  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej: Uchwalona przez Sejm Ustawodawczy w dniu 22 lipca 1952 r (22 July 1952),” https://isap.sejm.gov. pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=wdu19520330232, accessed April 7, 2023.  Siegfried Lammich, “Neue Institutionen im Verfassungsrecht der sozialistischen Länder Osteuropas,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 3 (1977): 441.  Betts, “Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights,” 407.  The Polish Constitution of 1791 was one of the first proto-republican constitutions in Europe. Moreover, in the interwar period, especially in the 1930s, the young Polish state regularly conducted constitutional reform projects.  George Sanford, Democratic Government in Poland: Constitutional Politics since 1989 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 37.

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added to the Polish constitution signifying a massive shift in the socialist legality. A large number of nomenklatura members monitored and controlled the means of production and a large part of public life – almost everybody was somehow dependent on these “dictators, the self-appointed bureaucrats.”309 The entire rights discourse had changed in the 1970s, especially from 1976 when the Constitution was reconstructed despite the protest of Polish intellectuals. Having witnessed the negotiations in Helsinki one year earlier, they worried about the state of civil rights in their country. In the course of the Gierekian future-oriented rhetoric and the new state socialist self-understanding, the Party itself had opened a new discourse on the self-conception of the Polish state and was then overwhelmed when the opposition entered it. Although the Polish constitution did entail basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of association (in its eighty-third article), in fact, these rights were violated regularly.310 However, the government employed a humanist rhetoric with a state socialist flavor when it spoke of “the human thought”311 that had to be supported, just like equality between men and women312 or the freedom of religion and from religion in its constitution and in its political rhetoric in general. Although the Polish opposition, especially the people gathering in KOR, had already criticized the rights violations of the Polish People’s Republic earlier, the imposition of martial law changed the perception of the government extremely. The openly undemocratic act of illegalizing a social mass movement aiming for the democratization of labor relations in combination with its concrete repressive manifestations constituted an even bigger schism for Polish citizens than the chain of violent repression acts against workers and other social groups in the state socialist past. Moreover, the great success of 1980 and the hopes attached to the possible changes in the political system but also in society as such remained an important reference for the authors of underground press. They perceived society as being transformed in a positive way. The above quoted article interprets the success of the Solidarność in 1980 as a common experience that changed people’s “needs” for rights such as the freedom of speech, turning the Solidarność into an historical actor that shaped people’s minds. In such a view, after the summer of 1980, a backlash hurt even more than without having seen what could be possible in terms of democratization of labor and beyond. It moreover reveals a certain way of perceiving society as

 Davies, God’s Playground, 477.  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej.”  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej: Uchwalona przez Sejm Ustawodawczy w dniu 22 lipca 1952 r (22 July 1952),” Art. 63.  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Konstytucja Polskiej Rzeczypospolitej Ludowej: Uchwalona przez Sejm Ustawodawczy w dniu 22 lipca 1952 r (22 July 1952),” Art. 66.

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more mature than before as if people had not had the need for free speech before they tasted it. The idea that the Solidarność had triggered the salience of free speech among Poles was mixed with the underlying philosophy of “simply carrying out such activities”313 in an article printed in Hutnik in the summer of 1983, shortly before the ending of the martial law.314 Here, “Andrzej” asked the rhetorical question – at least it was one on the pages of the Solidarność underground press – of whether it was “worth” it to engage in underground activities. “Andrzej” argued: Acting independently enables us here and now to implement one of the main Polish demands: Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Belief, Freedom of Culture. Instead of fighting for the abolition of censorship, we simply ignore it.315

He argued that they already had free press and free literature and that he could not imagine his life without an unhindered access to free thought. Again, a language of rights appeared in the context of individual rights. In Andrzej’s text, however, these universal human rights were converted into “Polish demands” and thereby nationalized. The anonymous author concluded the article as follows: “Acting for the cause of a free Poland, I feel free already today.”316 This statement, aiming at convincing others to either keep up the political engagement or to step in, shows how much the mere act of participating in the oppositional activities morally empowered the activist. In contrast to the follow-up reactions to the events of 1976, the success of the Solidarność in the summer of 1980 triggered a stronger visibility of International Organizations in the workers-oriented Polish samizdat than before, also in the form of references to the International Labour Organization. ILO references could be found predominantly in workers’ magazines that appeared during the high tide of the Solidarność movement but are not the focus of this dissertation. Workers’ magazines such as Robotnik Wybrzeża (“The Coastal Worker”)317 have nevertheless been examined sporadically. In their September 1980 issue, for instance, the first page entailed a reprint of the prominent ILO Convention N°87 that deals with the right to form and join trade union organizations.318 It served as a legitimating reference in a phase of great success for the trade union move-

 Zbigniew Bujak, “Walka Pozycyjna,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 31, 1982.  “Hutnik,” 60/1983 (July 10, 1983).  “Hutnik,” 60/1983 (July 10, 1983), 1 (emphasis in original).  “Hutnik,” 60/1983 (July 10, 1983), 1 (emphasis in original).  This was an outsourced regional variant of the prominent Robotnik, mainly produced by workers.  Robotnik Wybrzeża, September 1980.

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ment in Poland as they had just created facts. The reprint did not refrain from mentioning that this agreement had already been ratified by the Polish communist government in 1956. Later, during martial law, when the Solidarność became illegal again, Tygodnik Mazowsze referred to the ILO more often. In March 1982, for instance, the magazine contrasted the anti-Solidarność stand of the Polish regime with international agreements. This is especially true for the already mentioned Convention concerning Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize (which entered into force in 1950) and the Convention N° 98 concerning the protection of the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining (which entered into force in 1951). The Polish government had signed both conventions twenty-five years earlier in December 1956. In March 1982, an unnamed author compared the latest propositions of the government with Art. 2 of Convention N° 87 dealing with the role of public authorities in the context of free association and called for refraining [. . .] from any interference which would restrict [. . .] or impede the lawful exercise [of the right to draw up their constitutions and rules, to elect their representatives in full freedom, to organize their administration and activities and to formulate their programs [. . .].319

He loudly wondered that they had to be binding in Poland as well since the Polish government had signed the Convention too.320 Although the Solidarność press drew on ILO references from time to time,321 these references were not the dominating rhetorical framework for the debates. Instead of legitimizing their own cause or discussing why the actions of the government were illegal or lawless, the underground press during martial law rather debated how to react to this lawlessness. In general, this chapter shows how ‘rights’ provided only one rhetoric framework for addressing repression and how ‘morality’ became a much stronger conceptual category. In particular in the earlier months, debates concentrated on the question of how long the status quo would be upheld and how to deal with the new situation. This was not only an important question for the leading circles of the Solidarność but also one for those active in the workplaces:

 International Labour Organization, “Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87),” Art. 3.  N.N., “Propozycje komitetu R[ady] M[inistrów] w świetle prawa,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 13, 1982.  See, for instance: Zbigniew Bujak and Wiktor Kulerski, “Wobec Przyszłości Związków Zawodowych w Polsce,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 25, 1982.

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It is difficult. Perhaps it won’t be soon that better times come. [. . . .] It depends on us how long it will last. [. . . .] [It depends on] the creation of a hard wall of workers’ solidarity, the unity of strength and perseverance. [. . . .] If the junta decides to dissolve Solidarność, we must be prepared to oppose it. We will respond to the lawlessness by means of a general strike.322

It is not only the Spanish word “junta”323 that reminds one of the Spanish workers who envisioned a nationwide general strike as a reaction to injustice. Given the difficult circumstances, the Solidarność activists, who oftentimes referred to martial law simply as “war,” employed a more aggressive language while at the same time showed that they did not know how things would proceed. This is why demands to end the illegal status of the Solidarność and to liberate the imprisoned colleagues can be found alongside thinkpieces on further ways of how “life” would go on.324 Despite being deeply shattered by the drastic reaction of their government, Polish activists had gained a new self-conscience due to previous successes. Workers themselves appealed to their colleagues to stay strong and appealed to their societal relevance and agency. They knew that the majority of the population backed them up morally. Summing it up, the relationship between social and civil rights was discussed in a particularly state socialist Polish way during martial law. Social rights were, moreover, the fundamental rights in the constitutions of state socialist societies. That both the Solidarność itself and the state mentioned the social rights first points to the paradoxes of the authoritarian state socialist regime. The activists themselves argued within a state socialist legal thinking. Their first reaction to the imposition of martial law integrated two main approaches, which, in turn, could not be realized without each other: first, the production and proliferation of underground press. This process was from early on, like in the quoted article, depicted as a massive success story given the circumstances. The common media were needed to uphold the communal spirit and the mass-movement identity of the activists. Second, the pre-martial-law-structures of the Solidarność were to be maintained. Nevertheless, a controversy evolved quickly on the concrete form of union work.

 “Hutnik,” May 2, 1982.  See also: “Hutnik,” June 10, 1982, 1. The word „junta“ is also used in secondary literature, for instance in: Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 369.  “Franciszek Barss” (Pseudonym), “Co Robić?”.

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Controversies “on a Solution to a Situation without Solution” Not being able to estimate the duration of this status quo also applied to the higherranking members of the Solidarność and it was the main topic on the pages of the Solidarność underground press including Tygodnik Mazowsze. Solidarność activists represented by Zbigniew Bujak, Wiktor Kulerski, and Jacek Kuroń considered three alternative strategies and they openly discussed these on the pages of the Solidarność press. The insecurities become tangible in an interview conducted with Zbigniew Bujak and Wiktor Kulerski in the first issue of Tygodnik Mazowsze. Bujak, born in 1954, was not only a leading Solidarność member, which is why he stayed underground during the months of martial law, but had also been one of KOR’s founding members. In this function, he had introduced the Warsaw intellectuals to the traumatized workers from the suburb Ursus after their protests had been crushed in June 1976. From the unknown place where he was hiding together with Kulerski, in a written form, he answered questions about the chances of the Solidarność and his assessment of the situation as follows: It is not possible today to draw simple conclusions and to assess our work. We do not yet know whether it is necessary to wait for a few years, or whether in three months’ time it will be possible to carry out actions that will force WRON to make concessions.325

Bujak openly expressed that he did not know what was coming. He admitted that there were different options now that needed to be discussed in the light of their dangers and risks they involved, primarily more spilling of blood. Like all Solidarność activists, he was not prepared for the situation. The question of what would be the best strategy that at the same time avoided more spilling of blood and allowed for maintaining the Solidarność’s work was also the framework for a controversy that evolved between Jacek Kuroń, Zbigniew Bujak, and Witold Kulerski. The controversy was also carried out on the pages of Mazowsze Weekly some weeks later. The main conflict circulated around the question of whether one should establish an “underground state” or an “underground society.”326 Not only was this a crucial debate for the self-understanding of the Solidarność but the debate also revealed specific understandings of rights. In his pamphlet titled “Theses on a So-

 N.N, “‘To było jedno z naszych wielkich powstań narodowych’,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, February 11, 1982; Comment: WRON is the abbreviation for Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, WRON (“Military Council of National Salvation”).  Potoczny, “Poland’s Underground Opposition in the 1980s: The breakdown of the “Solidarity” Movement,” 100f-; Witold Kulerski, “Trzecia Możliwość,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 31, 1982.

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lution to a Situation without Solution,”327 Jacek Kuroń, the moral authority for many, argued for a central organization of the underground structures and for a strong resistance movement. It was the only form that could “withstand the wave of terrorism.” According to Bogusław Potoczny, it was “less spectacular” than the revolutionary idea of a “underground state” but it “sought to shift responsibility from the leaders of the movement onto society by encouraging people to become more proactive.”328 It is among others also proof of how the massive engagement of 1980/81 had led to another perception of the Polish population in the heads of oppositional elites who had regarded the working-class as an angry but inactive social group.329 The current activities were characterized by demonstrations, leaflets, graffities, and shorter or longer strikes and had a positive impact on the collective “national spirit”; they also constituted a suitable strategy to exert pressure on the reform-oriented members of the government. The last resort was a general strike, Kuroń argued. But then he depicted a situation in which those open to dialogue would not be able to dominate the other individuals in the nomenklatura, which would lead to a “catastrophe.” He therefore called for a coerced attack as a last option: Therefore, the leadership of the resistance movement must prepare Polish society to eliminate the occupation in a collective, organized action, but at the same time, it must prepare for even the most far-reaching concessions in compromise with the authorities. I believe that such a contribution could consist of a simultaneous attack on all centers of power and information in the country. We need the people within the government camp to understand that there is only a strictly limited time window for them to agree to a compromise.330

Kuroń knew that his opinions had a great impact on the movement and he knew that this shift towards exerting violence as a last resort was unpopular, which is why he explained himself and underlined how he had always been an opponent to physical violence throughout his political activism. In this case, however, and given the aim of terminating the “occupation,” he considered a “coerced action” the “least evil.”331 This turn from non-violence to a gradual acceptance of violence can also be addressed in terms of “moral economies,” since it discusses a morally

 Kuroń, “Tezy o wyjściu z sytuacji bez wyjścia.”  Potoczny, “Poland’s Underground Opposition in the 1980s: The breakdown of the “Solidarity” Movement,” 102.  Cf. also the debate on the “origins of the Solidarity” and the dominating role of either the working-class (as argued by Roman Laba and Lawrence Goodwyn) or the intelligentsia (as argued by Timothy Garton Ash and David Ost) that has nicely been summed up here: Jerome Karabel, “The Origins of Solidarity.”  Kuroń, “Tezy o wyjściu z sytuacji bez wyjścia.”  Kuroń, “Tezy o wyjściu z sytuacji bez wyjścia.”

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acceptable way of acting in a situation of changed parameters of repression, as actions that were previously illegal were now legalized.332 Zbigniew Bujak and Witold Kulerski immediately answered this opinion piece in the same issue of Tygodnik Mazowsze in late March 1982. In an article titled “A Third Possibility,”333 Kulerski suggested creating an underground society, not an underground state. In this context, he used the exact wording used by other generations in the past, especially during the German occupation in the Second World War, i.e. państwo podziemne (“underground state”). This wording was, according to Borodziej, not a circumstance. The underground activists consciously connected to the historical past in their rhetoric and their practices: “The concept of the ‘civil struggle’ consciously resorted to historical patterns of behaviour dating back to the past, including the ‘underground state’ in the Second World War.”334 Kulerski explained how he understood a “underground society”: he called for a polycentric structure with few formalities and people who were only loosely connected. They should have more autonomy in their decisions, so that actions could be taken quickly. In so doing, he “[. . .] argued for an evolutionary approach that would sap governments’ institutions of their strength.”335 While expressing his deep respect for Kuroń, Bujak argued strongly against him and advocated for a decentralized structure. A centralized one was not possible anyway in his opinion and much more prone to infiltration from above. The society, he argued, had understood that a violent upheaval would not solve any problems but create more of them and even pave the way for a military attack.336 Like in Kuroń’s position paper, the fear of more use of violence was one of the dominant driving forces, although he found another answer: I do think that an effective and at the same time safe form of conflict is – [and I allow myself] to use military nomenclature – trench warfare. And this is the type of resistance I want to propose here.337

His proposition entailed the idea of different social groups and organizations building “opposition mechanisms” against the monopolizing actions of the au-

 Ute Frevert, “Moral Economies, Present and Past,” in Moral Economies.  Kulerski, “Trzecia Możliwość.”  Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 369.  Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation, 95.  As a matter of fact, Bujak would later regret this stand, also on the pages of the same magazine, while still hiding in an unknown place.  Bujak, “Walka Pozycyjna.”

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thorities that interfered in different realms of daily life. The mass-movement character of the Solidarność as well as the broad net of peasants’, craftspeople’s, and students’ unions opened the possibility for a mass opposition in a form that could enable the construction of structures independent of the current power: In workplaces, this means above all fighting for the right to continue trade union activities. The only method here is simply to carry out such activities, i.e. to defend workers’ rights by all means, including strikes (without leaders).338

In Bujak’s appeal, “defending” rights was equal with exercising them. The hiding activist argued for decentralized strike activity and for maintaining the existing structures on the ground. In his statement, he referred to workers’ rights by calling readers to ensure the survival of the trade union activities by “fighting for the right to continue trade union activities.”339 Bujak’s proposition to “simply carry out such activities” resembles Michnik’s earlier applied idea of living “as if we were free,”340 yet under more difficult circumstances than before. Bujak’s translation of this concept into the clear appeal to “simply carry out these activities” shows how this stand had become a salient element of the activists’ mindset. Bujak’s proposition of creating a decentralized structure of underground union cells was eventually the most convincing and would be applied later in the 1980s. The Solidarność activists hoped that a network of clandestine union cells would enhance the creation of a “future system of factory self-management.”341 Bujak’s appeal is one of the few documents where a language of rights was applied in the context of workers’ rights or labor rights and not only when having civil rights in mind. Until 1979, when the Charter of Workers’ Rights had been published in Robotnik, the press for workers did not employ a language of rights when demanding free trade unionism or other forms of workers’ democracy. I have argued before that the use of a language of rights depended on two factors: first, the position of the addressees (Western elites/ Polish working class), and second, the stage of development of the addressed working class. The second aspect points at the question

 Bujak, “Walka Pozycyjna.”  Bujak, “Walka Pozycyjna.”  Adam Michnik, ed., Letters from prison and other essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).  Ramet, Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation, 95. As has been mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, in April 1982, five months after the imposition of martial law and the de-legalization of the Solidarność, the Solidarność officially reemerged underground, founding a “Temporary Coordinating Committee” (Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna, TKK).

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of whether they were regarded as a proper political or social movement or rather as an amorphous, segregated group of angry, yet unorganized workers. The question of timing and audience also remained important after 1980. Under martial law, the situation had changed massively. Back in the 1970s, intellectuals felt that they had to communicate the idea of independent trade unionism to workers. In the spring of 1982, however, almost two years after the “Polish summer of 1980,” Bujak’s appeal was no longer only directed at workers. Therefore, he reminded his readers that their struggle equaled a “fight for workers’ rights.” The language of necessities that had dominated the pages of the 1970s Robotnik was not needed any more. Poland witnessed a broad and unprecedented social activism. The Solidarność had become a mass movement crossing social strata and also geographical borders in terms of visibility and individual contacts. Despite it being a mass movement, the division of power within the Solidarność should not be ignored, as Shana Penn pointed out: “Although women made up approximately half of Solidarity’s membership of ten million, which was proportional to their paid labor force participation, they were scarcely represented in Solidarity’s leadership structures, figuring only 8 percent.”342 Bujak wrote his comment after ten million people (out of thirty-four million Polish citizens) had joined the Solidarność during its peak. In contrast to the late 1970s, a societal quasi-consensus existed with regard to the issue that labor had to be reorganized and democratized, if not the entire country. As has been exemplified on the open press debate on the pages of Tygodnik Mazowsze, the discussions rather focused on the concrete ways of how to carry out this change and not whether one should be active. However, despite the well-organized strikes of 1980 and the high and professional level of cooperation and organization, no one was prepared for the imposition of martial law in December 1981. The discussions on how to react were conducted post factum under difficult circumstances. The debate on whether to conduct a general strike would last much longer and was a constant topic of the pages of Tygodnik Mazowsze. October 1982 constituted another backlash for the movement. The Polish government presented a law on trade unions that legalized the formation of trade unions on first sight and appeared in a democratic rhetoric but actually delegalized the Solidarność as a trade union.343 Tygodnik Mazowsze published a declaration by the Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna on its first page that criticized

 Shana Penn, “Women in Poland’s Solidarity,” in The Routledge handbook of gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 134.  Kancelaria Sejmu Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, “Ustawa o Związkach Zawodowych (8 October 1982),” https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19820320216, accessed April 7, 2023.

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the law as of being an “attack” on trade unions and that it aimed at the “liveliest interests of the nation.”344 In this context, they wrote about the Solidarność as an independent trade union having its origins in the “fight for workers’ and civil rights.”345 The declaration called all members and cells of the Solidarność to continue their work by showing massive presence in the factories and by demonstrating against the new law. Also, all meetings of the governmental trade unions were to be boycotted. The new legislation triggered a new wave of demonstrations that were met with state violence. Several protesters were killed by the military police. Eventually, the underground Solidarność acted similarly to the oppositional activists of the late 1970s, which entailed help for the victims of repression346 and their relatives, rebuilding the samizdat structures and strengthening channels of unofficial information, and fostering the illegal union structures on the ground.347 In addition, the boycott of state infrastructure such as refraining from buying press publications or using public transportation became a new practice of protest. These practices were consciously proliferated and taught, sometimes also with an almost aggressive undertone: “Does it really require such a big effort to break with old habits and to pass by a newspaper kiosk [. . .] not buying a paper?”348 Hutnik asked its readers. Zbiginiew Bujak, beyond supporting regional and local cells and networks, encouraged his audience to continue printing underground press and related material, when he said that “people are not waiting for explanations but for publishers, for journals, for flyers, instructions, schoolings, methods of organization.”349 The list of tasks and ideas published in Tygodnik Mazowsze, the mouthpiece of the remaining members of the Solidarność leadership, was mirrored in factory press like Hutnik. Indeed, this magazine documented repression and violence, gave out information on internees and arrested colleagues and called for being in solidarity with them, for instance by writing them morally empowering letters.350 Having in mind the high level of organization in these difficult circumstances, when the leadership published instructions and handouts like the one quoted  Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna NSZZ „Solidarność“/ Zbigniew Bujak, Bogdan Lis, Piotr Bednarz, Władysław Hardek, “Oświadczenie,” Hutnik, October 11, 1982.  Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna NSZZ „Solidarność“/ Zbigniew Bujak, Bogdan Lis, Piotr Bednarz, Władysław Hardek, “Oświadczenie,” Hutnik, October 11, 1982.  Free legal advice for dismissed colleagues was continued and announced on the pages of underground press, for instance here: “Hutnik,” 26/1982 (September 26, 1982), 2.  Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 369.  “Hutnik,” 47/1983 (February 20, 1983).  N.N., “To było jedno z naszych wielkich powstań narodowych,” 2.  “Hutnik,” September 26, 1982, 1.

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above, I consider these processes of documentation, information, and proliferation printed in samizdat publications like Hutnik not only as social practices but concrete strategies of political activism. Further political strategies aimed at different addressees and therefore had different objectives. Instructions and explanations of how to proceed, as well as the warning of spies and the call to monitor collaborators, were part of the conspiratorial work. On the other hand, hunger strikes (in prison or at the factories), strike actions, open protest marches, and Catholic services were part of the protest against the installation of martial law. Another strategy of protest was the boycott of public transport and mass media including TV and printed newspapers like Trybuna Ludu (“People’s Tribune”), the Party organ. Moreover, a collective identity was constructed. This was pursued through Catholic services, marches, and communicating through letters with interned and imprisoned people. To act morally became the main identifier in this context. While the time of martial law was dominantly one of insecurity and instability, one thing was certain: due to the legal character of martial law that had been imposed overnight, it simultaneously bore the promise of being only a temporary phase with a sooner or later to be awaited ending point. In this regard, the period of martial law was even more different from the late 1970s. It did not only change the overall conception of opposition, one that in the 1970s had envisioned a possible cooperation with progressive forces in Gierek’s government, but due to its legal and political emergency character it also changed people’s perception of the present. It has been shown in the context of the strategical discussions how the present phase was perceived as a formative or rather preparatory phase for an unknown future. Even though nobody knew how the period of martial law would end, nobody doubted that it would somehow end. Consequently, visions of a time afterwards were much more prominent in the discourses than in the phases less defined by legal changes. This is mirrored in the visions for a post-martial law phase, for instance with regard to future normative evaluations and possible justice measures against former wrongdoers. This section of the chapter discussed the immediate reactions to the imposition of martial law and discussions on how the Solidarność should be structured under the given circumstances. In the next section, I concentrate on reports of repression, practices of protest, and the debates on collaborators and spies, issues bearing a highly moral connotation. In this specific context, I shed light on constructions of an oppositional identity that functioned through the self-perception of being a historic movement worth being documented on the one hand and a deep conviction of basing one’s own actions on a moral, oftentimes religiously infused, fundament on the other.

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Telling Your Own Story: Documenting Repression, Denunciating Collaboration and Being Solidary with Imprisoned Colleagues The documentation of repressive acts, whether they occurred in the form of imprisonments and arrests, in the form of violence carried out by the notorious paramilitary forces ZOMO351 or by attempts of intimidation and/ or recruiting for collaborators, was an essential part of the underground press during martial law, especially in the workers’ press. The people engaged in the samizdat listed missing colleagues, for instance those who never came back from interrogations, and reported their absence.352 They also documented all kinds of repressive acts. This was done in a moralizing language depicting the authorities as evil and inhumane whereas one’s own group was presented as morally good. People coped in different ways with the situation that many of their fellow colleagues were imprisoned, interned or even killed. Under the title “They are missed among us,” in the first issue of Hutnik, the unknown author appealed not to forget about the arrested workers and their families. The author concluded this appeal with a patriotic reference: They worked together with us. We elected them to positions of authority in the Union [1980Solidarność]. They took care of our affairs. Currently, [four colleagues] are serving their sentences. The following people are staying in internment camps: [. . .]. [Four more colleagues] are in hiding. Today, these people are suffering and certainly count on us. They left their loved ones. Let’s think about them, their families who are waiting for moral and financial support. Let’s do everything so that these families can endure difficult times. Poles are known for their good hearts. There cannot be a lack of heart in the Solidarność.353

In line with their own name, “solidarity” was a dominating value in the context of repression. The appeal to the readers of Hutnik contained a reference to the outer world in claiming that Poles were “known for their good hearts.” By this subtle comment, the anonymous author suggested a visibility of the events in Poland and endorsed the concrete act of solidarity of supporting fellow activists towards a higher level, one of national character. Documentation and mourning could go hand in hand as a social practice during martial law. The government’s actions were oftentimes depicted as arbitrary, rightless, and immoral. For example, this holds true in the in the case of mass arrests after demonstrations aiming at commemorating the events of August 1980.

 ZOMO, Zmotoryzowane Odwody Milicji Obywatelskiej (“Motorized Reserves of the Citizens’ Militia”) was a motorized branch of the state militia.  See, for instance: “Hutnik,” 23/1982 (September 2, 1982).  “Hutnik,” 1/1982, 1. See Fig. 5.

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The majority of the arrests had had nothing to do with the demonstration, Hutnik criticized.354 By pointing out that the arrested people were not participants of the demonstration, the article underlined that even within their own, narrowed legal boundaries that prohibited strike during martial law the authorities acted illegally as they just arrested random passengers and not participants of an illegal demonstration. Appropriating and reformulating ‘freedom of opinion and speech’ in another issue, Hutnik wrote about the arrest of a colleague named Jan. The magazine reported Jan’s arrest and added a note that was directed to the government: “We remind the craw [i.e. Jaruzelski, AD]: you can only imprison people, not ideas!!!”355 In this context, ‘violence’ functioned as a key category for evaluating social dynamics. Workers developed a relatively high level of organized ritualization when they had to cope with physical violence. People made lists with names of killed colleagues and organized “minutes of silence” and funeral marches. They included them in their prayers and services. The names of killed colleagues oftentimes appeared at the top of the magazine’s cover page.356 The fate of their colleague Stanisław H. was of special interest to Hutnik’s readers. In almost every issue, anonymous authors mentioned his state or called for writing him letters of moral support. The rhetoric of mourning was very diverse, also in terms of genre.357 One friend wrote a poem for his arrested colleague and printed it on the pages of Hutnik. Poems were from time to time published on the pages of the magazine. However, they were oftentimes satirical and sometimes accompanied by caricatures of Jaruzelski, mostly depicting him as an ugly craw wearing the characteristic glasses. This poem, however, was written by a friend missing his imprisoned colleague: He says, there will be cake. / And seven candles/ which he will blow out/ blowing out to the whole world/ Two happy cheeks / In the end he only asks / Don’t come home then / They know / when I was born — Later, I heard / That nobody even came for me / The birthday party turned out well / the kids played ‘internment’ / And in the end / They shot the youngest one.358

 “Hutnik,” 24/1982 (September 10, 1982), 1.  “Hutnik,” 27/1982 (October 3, 1982), 2, emphasis in original (AD).  For instance: “Hutnik,” September 10, 1982.  See, also Lynn Hunt’s argument on how reading literature enhanced people to develop sympathetic emotions towards others during the Enlightenment period. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.  “Hutnik,” 17/1982 (July 21, 1982), original: „Opowiada, że będzie tort. / I siedem świeczek / które zadmuchnie/ wydymając na cały świat / Dwa wesołe policzki / I tylko prosi na pożegnanie / Nie przychodź wtedy do domu / Oni przecież wiedza / kiedy się urodziłem – Słyszałem potem / Że jednak nikt po mnie/ nie przyszedł/ A bal urodzinowy był udany / Dzieci bawiły się / w internowanie / a na koniec / Rozstrzelały najmłodszego.”

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The poem touches upon how martial law had an impact on the daily life of Poles and in a bitter tone refers to how even children, dominantly associated with innocence, integrated state violence into their games by “playing internment” and “shooting the youngest.”359 After the poem starts by alluding to positively connoted words like “cake” and “candles,” the atmosphere changes drastically on the transition from the first verse to the second one. Omitting to name the authorities/the ZOMO and referring to them as “they” is another literary trope to express danger and fear. The poem leaves it to the reader to decide whether the kids really shot the youngest player or whether they pretend shot them. Both variants, however, are in juxtaposition to the assessment that the party had turned out well, by which the anonymous poet underlined how the exceptional state had finally infiltrated even the most private realms of citizens’ lives. One way of ritualized mourning was the “minute of silence” organized to honor colleagues killed in the course of December 1981 when the first violent manifestations of the new order had occurred and nine miners had been killed in the “Wujek” mine in Katowice. In a short article titled “Memory and Repression,” Hutnik documented these practices and described how these practices were met with further repressive acts from the management: Similar to other Polish factories, [people] in the Lenin-Steelworks honored the memory of the tragic December days. On March 16 at 12 noon workers put down their tools in many departments. By [holding] a moment of reflection and silence, a tribute was paid to the murdered miners. Dept. W-3 saw a short leaderless strike. After these events a lot of workers faced repressions. Twenty-five persons from [department] W-3 were transferred to other departments. Their staff groups [payment groups] were lowered. [. . .] Krzysztof [. . .] was transferred to the agglomeration [part of the coal production process, AD] for turning on the acoustic signal. He was dropped two payment groups. [. . .] A worker from the Main hall [sic!] was detained. He is accused of having [. . .] posted a slogan on the announcement board that proclaimed: ‘As long as workers will sing the songs of Solidarność, the Union will exist.’360

And then they added: The union will continue to exist until we are in doubt, until we forget about our colleagues behind bars, until there are brave people among us”361

 “Hutnik,” 17/1982 (July 21, 1982).  “Hutnik,” 1/1982.  “Hutnik,” 1/1982, 1.

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The appeal at the end of this list of events shows how important it was for the authors of Hutnik to keep people motivated by conjuring a community of “brave people.”362 In addition to collective “minutes of silence” and decorating places where colleagues had been killed, the workers organized “funeral marches.” In so doing, they eagerly differentiated between mourning and protesting, for instance when they called against any political actions in the context of another “day of mourning” in September 1982. In this context, the authors of Hutnik insisted that nobody combine the honoring of the dead colleagues with any political articulations and reminded their readers that the “mourning day” that was planned for September 30 was a “day of reflection.”363 The workers’ press dedicated a lot of space to the mere documentation of victims of repression and cultivated their memory. Some issues of Hutnik, for instance the twenty-fourth issue from September 1982, nine months after the introduction of martial law, opened with a list of people who had been killed all over Poland. In opposition to actual colleagues of Hutnik’s readers, like in the case of Stanisław H., their deaths were not embedded in a morally infused rhetoric but rather announced as it was the purpose of newspapers or of black boards inside or in front of churches, in the Catholic context. The list of names and professions of workers who had been killed in Wrocław or Gdynia ended with the appeal “Hail to their memory!” Repression was hence addressed in a language of religious suffering, not one of rights. Readers were oftentimes called to be in solidarity with those who were imprisoned and to support their friends and family. When a man was shot in the belly during a Catholic mass by a member of the secret service in front of the church, Hutnik commented that they would decorate the location of their colleague’s killing accordingly. In an emotional appeal, they addressed the dead victim itself: “We promise, Boguś, your sacrifice won’t be forgotten. [. . .] Honor to your Memory.”364 By referring to his death as a “sacrifice,” Boguś’s death was converted to a martyrium. It was connected to a higher objective and therefore obtained a meaning. It is only one example for the strong messianic connection of ‘sacrifice’ and ‘heroism’ in the Polish tradition that served as a constant leitmotif of the workers’ underground writings. The moralizing language was embedded in a narrative of heroism and sacrifice, which in the Polish context was highly infused by the concept of messianism stemming from the nineteenth century. Andrzej Walicki explained the concept on the backdrop of the “national catastrophe” of 1831 when the Polish national uprising was crushed by the Russian forces. He therefore defined Polish messianism “[. . .] as a hope born out of despair; as an expression of  “Hutnik,” 1/1982, 1.  N.N., “Dzień Żałoby,” Hutnik, October 11, 1982.  “Hutnik,” 30/1982 (October 14, 1982) (emphasis in original, AD.); Boguś is the short version of the male names Bogusław and Bogdan.

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an increased feeling of self-importance [. . .] as an ardent search for religious consolation [. . .].”365 Messianism is moreover connected with an organic conception of the Polish nation. The Polish people, the Poles, were the true bearers of the national idea whereas those in power hijacked the nation alongside its inhabitants, so the narrative goes. This mindset was reactivated during martial law, sometimes by explicitly naming historical analogies but also without doing so. These references would remain a constant element in the Solidarność’s underground writings. The leadership of the Solidarność itself was aware of the shortcuts between nationalism and messianism in the Polish tradition and it was conscious of the messianic narrative that was being created in the meantime, among others, because the government agitated against it in official media and warned of the return of a “neomessianism.”366 This awareness is mirrored in comments published in Tygodnik Mazowsze, for instance an opinion article titled “Suffering and Values” from June 1982.367 The author reported how messianism had experienced a strong renaissance from the very first hours of martial law and how Poles tended to compare the fate of Poland to the fate of Christ as well as refer to the idea that Poles should save Europe and humanity through suffering.368 They wrote about how easy it was to detect a national megalomania of Polish people in this narrative and how the government tried to take away “its nimbus of sublimity, nobleness, purity and ethical highness [. . .].”369 It would indeed be the fault of the Solidarność if this ongoing “reflection of people’s messianism”370 led to nationalism and similar ideologies. However, as the article argued, this was not the case. Messianism, also in the nineteenth century, equaled a Christianization of politics and therefore constituted the pure antagonist of nationalism, as nationalism’s first task was always the detachment of morality. “Solidarność,” however, “[. . .] was and will be a great mass movement of moral rebirth, fighting for social justice. Under the threat of self-destruction, it must not give up on its ethical presuppositions.”371

 Andrzej Walicki, Polish Romantic Messianism in Comparative Perspective (1978), https:// eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5067/1/KJ00000113208.pdf.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.  “zet,” “Cierpienie i Wartości,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, June 23, 1982.

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Letters to and from Prison Since a lot of fellow workers and other activists were imprisoned, a common genre during martial law on the pages of the workers’ press was the reprint of letters from prison or calls to write letters to the imprisoned and to be solidary with them. This was also true for a group of prisoners conducting a hunger strike, which was covered in an issue of July 1982. In the Załęże prison near Rzeszów in the Eastern part of the country, several inmates had started a hunger strike and were offered transportation to different hospitals, as well as one in Cracow, specialized in cardiology. The magazine concretely reported how the hunger strike affected bodily functions and reported that the strikers consumed water, salt, and vitamins but nothing else.372 The description concluded with an appeal to the readers. The inmates who demanded the release of all internees, especially women and sick persons as well as political prisoners, and the re-legalization of the Solidarność union, hungered “for me, for you, for us,” Hutnik reminded its readers.373 Readers were asked to show solidarity by visiting them in the hospitals, bringing them flowers or writing them letters of support.374 Hutnik also provided its readers with the addresses of prisons where other workers or Solidarność activists were imprisoned, commenting: May everybody who still considers him or herself a member of [Solidarność] write them a card with words of comfort and hope. It will be a sign of our solidarity and of our memory, a symbol which will help them endure these horrible days of separation from their families, their loved ones, and us. Let us remember them. They suffer for us.375

The magazine, by deploying a messianic rhetoric, constituted an arena of communication between people underground or in prison and the other citizens reading the underground press. One of them was Jan Ciesielski, a technical worker who had been working in the Lenin Hat since 1975 and joined the Solidarność in 1980. He carried out different positions within the Solidarność between 1980 and 1981 and had to hide underground for having organized strikes in 1981.376 Ciesielski used Hutnik to answer questions about the impact of him being in a secret place

 On hunger strikes as a protest practice, see for instance: Maximilian Buschmann, “Hungerstreiks. Notizen zur transnationalen Geschichte einer Protestform im 20. Jahrhundert,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ) 49 (2015).  “Hutnik,” 18/1982 (July 29, 1982).  “Hutnik,” 18/1982 (July 29, 1982).  “Hutnik,” September 26, 1982.  Mateusz Konczal, “Jan Marek Cieselski.”

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that he had received from an “anonymous” author. The “content of the questions” made him believe that “the answers [did] not only interest the sender.”377 The anonymous interrogator wanted to know whether the long phase of living underground had not detached him from the everyday affairs that people faced at their workplaces. The activist’s response reveals a relatively high level of organization and coordination of the underground Solidarność, while the question is proof for the critical stand of many ordinary Solidarność members towards the higher ranks: I would not have thought that this game of ‘cat and mouse’ would last so long. Half a year has gone by. In the meantime, we set ourselves up for information streams from the factories. We ask about moods, living conditions, and their levels of organization. We try to evaluate the people’s state of mind as we do not want to undertake any unrealistic activities.378

In his letter, Ciesielski also engaged with Kuroń’s idea of organizing a general strike as the “least evil,” which he did not reject entirely, but he thought that the time for such was not then. However, Ciesielski argued that one had to “get used” to the idea and subordinate all activities to the broadest possible participation of several groups.379 At the end of the letter, he dealt with more personal questions and asked about Ciesielski’s own emotional state in the light of the long hiding and being separated from family and friends. He admitted that it was an “emotional rollercoaster” but that the “union work” allowed for some distraction. “Indeed,” he wrote, they were oftentimes wondering “how long as Poles [they] would have to hide in front of other Poles.”380 Writing the letter in July 1982, he believed that he would return to “normal life” in winter and maybe even earlier. The “unnormal” phase of martial law would last longer than till the next winter, however, and be banned only one year later in July 1983. Despite all difficulties and risks that “going underground” meant for the people affected, the possibility to continue any political activism, even if only exchanging thoughts about future strategies, was not only politically relevant for the movement but, in comparison to prisoners, affected the psychological constitution of activists positively. On the other hand, Padraic Kenney identified a certain uplifting effect on political prisoners once they lost their freedom: Crossing the cell’s threshold, the new prisoner suddenly uncovers a new world. Prison paradoxically makes the political struggle fresher and more palpable. Outside, there is always

   

“Hutnik,” 14/1982 (July 2, 1982), 1. “Hutnik,” 14/1982 (July 2, 1982), 1. “Hutnik,” 14/1982 (July 2, 1982), 2. “Hutnik,” 14/1982 (July 2, 1982), 2.

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the fear of arrest and worries about getting family or friends in trouble. Now, those doubts and preoccupations seem far away.381

For those interned or imprisoned, the elevation of common values and a heroic narrative of their movement helped to cope with the situation. Also, in Poland “the political prisoner and the movement dr[e]w strength from another.”382 Mieczysław G., who had been one of the leaders of the strike committee of the miners in 1980 and who was now detained in a prison in the Silesian city of Racibórz, addressed his fellow colleagues through a letter that was printed on the pages of Hutnik. The author combined several “framings,” i.e. an “interpretative package that surrounds a certain core idea that is shared.”383 In the context of the Polish workers in the 1980s, the core idea was a combination of strongly intertwined ideas: protest against non-democratic rule, Catholic faith, and nationalism in different shades. In his letter, the author conjured a historical “love for freedom” among Poles and referred to a mass held by John Paul II where the Pope had stated that “everybody has to be conscious of his rights. The right to truth, the right love, to justice.”384 The letter shows firstly that rights, if they appeared in the context of workers’ protest, almost always meant civil rights, however, here in a vernacularized version. Melting the legal matter of rights with the Catholic values of many Solidarność members, the Pope reformulated and recontextualized rights.385 In evoking a “right to truth, to love and to justice” he made them connectable with a particular social context or, to use the words of the researchers that first used the concept in the context of human rights studies, “[. . .] ideas and are seized within particular sites and translated into a language and form that makes sense in that cultural space.”386 Without referring to rights that would be enshrined in a legal document, but by evoking the “right to truth,” the Pope vernacularized human rights to the situation in Poland.387 Many citizens, especially those attending the

 Kenney, Dance in chains, 61.  Kenney, Dance in chains, 7.  Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.”  It is not clear which prayer/ speech by John Paul II the author of the letter referred to.  Cf. Primate Wyszyński’s explicit references to international human rights, for instance in a public sermon held in 1977 in Jasna Góra. As quoted in: Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power, 122.  See: Peggy Levitt and Sally E. Merry, “Making Women’s Human Rights in the Vernacular,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, 87.  Cf.: Yasmin Naqvi, “The right to the truth in international law: fact or fiction?,” International Review of the Red Cross 862 (2006).

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Pope’s visit, had an almost Orwellian understanding of the government’s propaganda.388 “Truth,” as has been already seen in other examples discussed here, was a key concept and often used in contrast to the ideological rhetoric of the government. The Pope’s vernacularized version of human rights was in turn picked up by the imprisoned worker who then added that these rights (the “right to freedom and to justice”) were “inalienable.”389 “Truth” and “rights” were presented as interrelated notions here. When describing the processes of the past months and years, Mieczysław G. called them “a defense of our workers’ rights.”390 Mieczysław G.’s wording, however, remains one of the few examples of a language of rights in the examined workers’ press. Still, ‘morality’ was the dominating normative concept. Hence, notions like ‘truth’ or ‘morality’ can be considered an important rhetorical framework for addressing repression for those directly affected. For the workers, these frameworks dominantly structured their perception of the situation. It might be possible that the increased presence of international agreements of the ILO led to a rise of awareness of “workers’ rights” among Polish workers.391 Not only could they read about them in the prominent Charter of Workers’ Rights of 1979 but the Solidarność’ leaders included them in the preamble of the twentyone demands from August 1980 as well as to their 1980 writings, as could be exemplified with the reference in the workers’ samizdat magazine Robotnik Wybrzeża from September 1980. Moreover, as has been shown at the beginning of this chapter, Tygodnik Mazowsze, the most influential publication of the Solidarność during martial law, contained references to the ILO as well, for instance when vernacularizing international labor norms in the context of the prohibition of the Solidarność through the imposition of martial law.392 Most importantly, however, after martial law was introduced in Poland in December 1981, the outcry abroad was massive. Solidary committees were funded in Europe and the US “to support the trade union in Poland by influencing public opinion in their countries and lobbying.”393 In this context, Jerzy Milewski, the head of the Coordination Bureau of the Solidarność abroad in Oslo, contacted several international organizations such as the UN Commission on Human and Civil Rights and the ILO, which, even

 See also: Laba, The Roots of Solidarity, A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-Class Democratization, 159.  Mieczysław G. and Mietek G, “List z Raciborza od Mietka G,” Hutnik, May 16, 1982.  Mieczysław G. and Mietek G, “List z Raciborza od Mietka G,” Hutnik, May 16, 1982.  Kott, Globalizing social rights, 7.  “Tygodnik Mazowsze,” 6 (March 13, 1982).  Idesbald Goddeeris, “Lobbying Allies? The NSZZ Solidarność Coordinating Office Abroad, 1982–1989,” Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (2011), Seitenzahl noch nachtragen.

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in 1982, established a commission of inquiry against Poland.394 In this context, the political prisoners were a particularly hot topic, as Robert Brier showed: The issue of political prisoners, moreover, remained a central element of Polish–West European relations, when West European visitors to Poland made it clear that the continuing incarceration of opposition activists was the main impediment to a more substantial improvement of bilateral relations.395

Another imprisoned worker, who gave himself the pseudonym “Jan Komorowski,” wrote to Hutnik on two occasions, first in October 1982 (published in November) and again in January 1983. Like the hiding colleague, he underlined that he shared the struggle of the workers in the factories and emphasized his connection to them, for instance by referring to them as “Brother Miners” in his opening section.396 Overall, in comparison to the late 1970s, the great success of the Solidarność in 1980 managed to create an overarching workers’ identity whereas before, as has been mentioned, Polish society was rather atomized and lacked group identities exceeding one’s own family or the nation. Again, violence became a central topic and a central identifier of both political competence and morality. This is noticeable when “Komorowski” wrote about the “workers’ blood” that had been spilled.397 Out of the prison he expressed his “admiration for [their] endurance.”398 In his letter, the activist underlined the solidarity between workers, intellectuals, students, and peasants and claimed that Poles would never let a “violent policy” change their mind. Subtly, he created an opposition between Polishness and violence, by which he did not only embed his thoughts in the non-violent mindset of the Solidarność but also created a certain definition of Polishness which was a non-violent, morally good one. In this model, the government stopped being Polish due to its use of force. Denying others the right to be Polish oftentimes went hand in hand with a comparison of the current situation with historical phases of foreign rule, often in the Second World War. Here, the author compared the actions of the government with the “dark night of German occupation.”399 Barbara Tönquist-Plewa, who has  Idesbald Goddeeris, “Lobbying Allies? The NSZZ Solidarność Coordinating Office Abroad, 1982–1989,” Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (2011). On June 26, 1984, the ILO presented an official complaint against Poland, describing the banning of Solidarność as a “step of exceptional gravity” and contradicting the statements of the Polish government who claimed that Solidarność wanted to overthrow the system. International Labour Organisation, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry.”  Brier, Poland’s solidarity movement and the global politics of human rights, 207.  “Hutnik,” 33/1982 (7 November 1982).  “Jan Komorowski” (pseudonym), “List Przyjaciela z Więzienia,” Hutnik, November 7, 1982.  “Hutnik,” November 7, 1982.  “Hutnik,” November 7, 1982.

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studied the myths used for constructing a collective consciousness among Solidarność activists, showed how this antagonism was in line with a construction of national identity based on values and not on ethnicity: With the concept of nation based on spiritual heritage it was possible to exclude the authorities from the domain of the community, without denying them great emphasis on defying this spiritual heritage [. . .]. At the same time, it put this spiritual heritage in opposition to the ideological heritage represented by the authorities: the Communist tradition.400

Consequently, the author who named himself “Komorowski” described the politics of the government as “totalitarian” or rather a continuation of “totalitarianism.”401 In this setting, the political concept of totalitarianism is reduced to its violent character and functions as a mere antagonist of democracy and/ or freedom.402 The letter is characterized by both historical references and a moral argumentation. Repression is described as a lack of morality and as a well-known almost traditionally occurring problem. The same authorities who have broken their promises on the non-use of violence when solving social conflicts have started a battle against the working people who carry the weight of the crisis on their shoulders, a crisis that has been caused by [‘the authorities’] incompetence and doctrinal blindness. From the first days of martial law, the streets have been marked by workers’ blood. [. . .] It is hard to find a form of protest against this inhumanity. May the death of Bogdan W[. . .] unite us in proclaiming the truth. May this moral imperative accompany us wherever we are. [. . .] I am convinced, that the sacrifice of blood, which does not spare Polish workers these days, is paving the way towards real democratic and working-class governments in Poland.403

The juxtaposition of an immoral government and a moral population are explicit in this letter. By calling the state violence an “inhumanity,” the author depicted the governments’ deeds as inhumane that had to be answered by “proclaiming the truth.” It has been discussed in the previous chapter how traumatizing the shots against workers during the protests of 1970/71 had been to the Polish public and how important Gierek’s commitment to never shoot at workers again was. This is also true for the moral impact of him breaking this promise. It could be seen more than ten years later that the events from Gdańsk were still a salient topic for the Polish public and that violence functioned as a central vector for evaluating political actions. Lying and committing violence were equated while

 Barbara Törnquist Plewa, The wheel of Polish fortune: Myths in Polish collective consciousness during the first years of Solidarity (Lund: Lund University, 1992), 235.  “Hutnik,” November 7, 1982.  See also: Śpiewak, Anti-Totalitarismus. Eine polnische Debatte.  “Jan Komorowski” (pseudonym), “List Przyjaciela z Więzienia.”

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speaking the truth and non-violence were constructed as the main moral categories of the opposition.404 This is also one of the reasons why Kuroń’s suggestions on a “lesser evil” were discussed so passionately: use of physical violence harmed the basic moral convictions of many members of the movement. The end of the passage constitutes a teleological and messianic narrative of how sacrifice has to lead towards a better future which, in this case, would be a democratic state with “real working-class governments in Poland,” a subtle comment on the instrumentalization of the working-class by the state socialist governments in the past. In his second letter published on the pages of Hutnik in January 1983, “Komorowski” had different topics to share with his readers. Whereas in November he had called for staying strong and underlined the power of the movement, two months later he rather described the conditions in prison and how people were treated differently regarding whether they had submitted a petition for clemency or not. Those who had not submitted such a petition were denied the cultural program for the prisoners and banned from using the prison’s library. Moreover, he reported how conflicts emerged between the prison personnel and the inmates when they presented themselves as “political prisoners.”405 As the martial law was still binding, according to the personnel, the mere act of calling themselves “political prisoners” was a violation of the rules as it would constitute a form of political protest. Given the international awareness for “dissidents” in state socialism, especially with regard to the Soviet Union where some oppositionists gained an almost pop star-like status in the West, this formulation did entail a political provocation and a moral connotation simultaneously.

The “Book of Collaborators” As much as the workers’ press called for solidarity, it also denunciated collaborators. In line with their self-conception of being morally superior to the other side, for instance the government and its collaborators, the activists made sure that this denunciation was not perceived as mere sneaking but was made transparent as a mechanism of self-defense. The argument was that the work could continue only if spies and collaborators were identified and commonly known. When Bujak had called for “giving people instructions” when arguing about the right way to proceed with Kuroń in February 1982, these instructions followed  During the “hot summer” of 1980, the Solidarność press constructed a strong antagonism between “us” and “them,” i.e. the Solidarność and the authorities. See for instance: Törnquist Plewa, The wheel of Polish fortune, 235.  “Jan Komorowski,” “List z ZK Kłodzko,” Hutnik, January 30, 1983.

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quickly. Already in the next issue, published only two weeks later in early March 1982, a text resembling a code of conduct was published in Tygodnik Mazowsze. Here, “members of the union” were asked to start a chronicle of the events happening. The code of conduct was published in the form of a list of tasks that were to be followed. Among other things, people were asked to document proceedings of the strikes in December 1981, and were to list the names and addresses of those interned and arrested as well as write down the circumstances of arrest and interrogation, the charges of indictments, the names of judges and prosecutors, and also the “behavior of the witnesses.”406 Moreover, the list contained the appeal to name the people “dismissed for trade union and patriotic activities” by which the antiauthoritarian labor activism was transformed into a patriotic act. Two bullet points alone dealt with the documentation of spies and collaborators. In this context, names, addresses, methods, and circumstances of their detection and the repressions linked to their denunciation were to be written down, as well as the “forms of cooperation” in the case of “collaborators.” Not only were their actions as such to be included in the notes but also cases of “overzealousness in carrying out orders from the authorities, arranging private settlements on the occasion of martial law, appearing in the media, persecution of Solidarność activists.”407 Such a list suggested that the Solidarność leaders were preparing for a brighter future, that, in this process, seemed not so far away anymore and was an important counterweight to the more desperate articles that could neither estimate the duration nor the consequences of the current martial law status quo. This list was embedded in a moralizing text that started by envisioning a postmartial-law future, one that included a punishment of “the guilty.”408 This punishment was, however, to be carried out in a just way. One of the arguments for keeping such a list of events, people, and overall conditions was that the list would be used after martial law. One of the strategies to keep up the revolutionary spirit was therefore the envisioning of a better future, one in which the morally superior people in the country would be in power. This view is mirrored in the ostentatiously non-arbitrary, rational, and fair tone underlying the instructions. This morality was therefore closely connected to rule of law. Tired of political arbitrariness, the

 N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 4, 1982.  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 4, 1982.  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, March 4, 1982.

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Solidarność press subtly envisioned procedures of a democratic future.409 Referring to the late 1980s, Robert Brier has described how Solidarność activists were disillusioned by certain attitudes of their fellow countrymen. They hence considered democratization a twofold process, one that politically liberated a country from dictatorship but also as a “[. . .] collective psychotherapy of sorts in which, under the guidance of enlightened elites, Poland’s homines sovietici would shed the habits and states of mind Communist rule had ingrained in them.”410 Parts of this attitude can be seen already in the early 1980s, i.e. in the slightly paternalistic undertones of the underground press produced during martial law: people were advised to be careful not to accuse the wrong people of collaboration or spying “because it is possible to inadvertently inflict a great harm on someone” but also how they could ensure “full conspiracy” strategically, namely by keeping their maintaining of a chronicle secret. The list ended with a comment to the readers: As a society, we are now being tested on our solidarity, our social activism and the ability to organize ourselves. We do not demand heroism from every union member, but we demand engagement in the fight against evil from all Poles. Only those who contribute to victory through even the slightest actions will be able to enjoy a free Poland in good conscience.411

Like in Hutnik, where political activism was highly connoted as noble and ethical, this appeal exerted pressure on its readers, by also evoking a society’s maturity through political activity and an ethical behavior. The comment addressed the readers’ self-esteem and pride directly, especially through the clear appeal to everybody. The post-martial-law future that was envisioned here was also framed in moral terms. Only those who would have contributed to the “fight against evil” would be able to “enjoy” the future “in good conscience.”412 Considering the strong anchoring of the Solidarność ethics in Catholic faith, this comment cannot be detached from the Christian idea of an afterlife where humans are judged for their deeds committed during their lifetime. This motive, again, can be analyzed by integrating Koselleck’s conceptions of time and temporality, as he discussed the problem of eschatology in Christian faith, focusing on the functional dimen-

 Like in the case of the Spanish railway workers who longed for a democratic proceeding of the trade union organization elections, one could apply the Habermasian notion of a Verfahrensförmigkeit here – the idea of the regulated democratic process as a value as such. Cf.: Habermas, Between facts and norms.  Brier, Poland’s solidarity movement and the global politics of human rights, 226.  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego” (emphasis in original).  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego” (emphasis in original).

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sion of an afterworld. The Church had used the “imminent-but-future End of the World as a means of stabilization, finding an equilibrium between the thread of the End on the one hand and the hope of the Parousia on the other. [. . .] The End of the World is only an integrating factor so long as its politico-historical meaning remains indeterminate.”413 Like the Church that had for centuries integrated and organized their members by the means of apocalyptical and eschatological conceptions, the Solidarność press pressurized its readers not to act against it. Even if they would not be detected as spies, collaborators or as mere bystanders who had not contributed in the “fight against evil” were presented with a fictitious future situation in which everybody had to face their own “conscience.”414 The appeal to the citizens published on the pages of Tygodnik Mazowsze can moreover be regarded as a symptom of an overall dilemma that the Solidarność faced during martial law. On the one hand, they feared more bloodshed and wanted to avert physical harm but, on the other hand, they needed active members to keep up political engagement. Their way to cope with this situation was an ambivalent call for action that was moreover infused with moral rhetoric and the perspective of a future backwards-looking society judging the deeds of the past. The typographical emphasizing of the two words “free Poland” left no doubt about the historical relevance of the common undertaking. However, it is noticeable that the question of how to organize labor relations in the factories, shipyards, and mines was not a prominent one. Instead, due to the overall pressure of the martial law status, the debate shifted towards a more general tone on how to oppose the pressure from above and how to maintain a moral stand in this context. This is why a moral framing dominated the discourse by far, whereas rights were only occasionally mentioned. Instead, “conscience” was an important concept in the context of East-Central European dissidence and opposition but also beyond, considering prominent prisoners of conscience like Nelson Mandela.415 It constitutes almost a synonym to the term political prisoner but puts an emphasis on the non-violent character of the prisoner’s activities. The word is closely connected to the activities of Amnesty International since the 1960s. Or, as Robert Brier put it: “Abandoning notions of political solidarity with activists and their ideological aims it turned toward universal notions of compassion and empathy with a human being struggling to preserve their very humanity.”416 Belonging to the semantic field of morality, the

 Koselleck, Futures Past, 13.  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.”  See, for instance: Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of conscience: Moral vernaculars of political agency (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).  Brier, Poland’s solidarity movement and the global politics of human rights, 148.

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terminus became more and more important to social movements all over the world, pushed forward by the increasingly successful and prominent NGO.417 Another context of the concept of a “prisoner of conscience” was the Catholic faith that was an important vector for many actions of the Solidarność movement, as has been discussed by many scholars since the 1980s.418 In Catholic faith, as formulated for instance in the Catholic Catechism, i.e. principles and teachings of Catholic faith, conscience is what “enjoins [the person] at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil.”419 The concept was also the subject of different public sermons, for instance the sermon on the Solidarność sumień, the “Solidarity of consciences” held by Józef Tischner in the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow, one of Poland’s most important historical sites for many centuries. Tischner was a Catholic philosopher and priest and became the chaplain of the Solidarność in 1980 after he had sought close ties with the movement.420 His sermons were not only published in the liberal Catholic magazine Tygodnik Powszechny (“Catholic Weekly”) but were also ennobled to being the philosophical underpinning of the Solidarność in the form of a small anthology named “The ethics of Solidarność.”421 In Autumn 1980, in Cracow, fascinated by the successes of the previous months, he preached: We are living through extraordinary times. People discard their masks, come out of their hiding places, show their true faces. From dust and oblivion their consciences come to light. Today we are who we really are. [ . . . .] What we experience today is not only a social or economic event, but above all, an ethical one. The matter touches upon human dignity. Human dignity rests on one’s conscience. The deepest solidarity is a solidarity of conscience.422

This current of thought, expressed in late 1980, is mirrored in the discussed appeal warning readers of civil passivity and collaboration. Even though it is not possible to trace the exact diffusion of particular thoughts, this sermon can be  On the history of Amnesty International, see: Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame; on Amnesty International in Eastern Europe, see Christie Miedema’s study: Miedema, Not a Movement of Dissidents.  There is a plethora of publications on the matter. Jan Kubik’s contribution is one that I personally consider very insightful: Kubik, The power of symbols against the symbols of power.  Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in accordance with the official Latin text promulgated by Pope John Paul II (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994, 2000).  Tischner was a liberal representant of the Catholic Church – not only did he seek for commonalities between Marxism and Catholic faith, he also spoke out against anti-Semitism and chauvinism among the Polish clergy in democratic Poland. He died in 2000 in Cracow.  Józef Tischner, Etyka Solidarności oraz Homo Soveticus, Wyd. 2, rozszerzone (Kraków: Znak, 2005).  Józef Tischner, Etyka Solidarności oraz Homo Soveticus, Wyd. 2, rozszerzone (Kraków: Znak, 2005), 14.

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regarded as symptomatic for a certain mindset that shaped Polish discourses in the 1970s and 1980s, characterized by a rapprochement of a Catholic discourse on human dignity and a “socialist-revisionist understanding of workers’ rights.”423 The predominance of Catholic symbols and religious activities connected to the political protest led to an intertwinement of political demands and moral or religious conceptions of what is good and evil. This connection contributed not only to a morally framed perception of the political situation but also to a binary one, leaving not much space for grey zones, at least not in the workers’ press. The question of dignity and conscience could also be expressed in different semantics with less religious pathos, as the report of an anonymous female worker “of a big textile factory” shows.424 She also touched upon both conscience and dignity but talked about it differently than the other authors. The worker referred only to her own person and did not make any assessments about society as a whole. In a report in which she described a situation of being interrogated by the secret service, she also wrote about how she turned down a collaboration offer. The only thing she had left, the woman claimed to have responded, was her “face,” and she had to save it.425 In her report, she quoted herself stating that she did not care for whom she was working,426 that the only thing that counted for her was to be respected (żeby mnie szanowano), to be paid, and to see some order (porządek) around her. “This system is comfortable for you guys but not for me,” she remembered having responded to the interrogators.427 Without using highly loaded notions like conscience (sumienie) or dignity (godność) but also without referring to rights, she demanded a behavior and a treatment in everyday life that was based on similar values like those formulated by the Pope or authors writing for Solidarność underground press. The woman concluded her report with a short axiom justifying her political engagement. She mentioned how many people were tired of the political conflicts and that they argued the most important thing was to have “some bread and mortadella.” She, in turn, saw things differently: “I do not live so that I can eat. I eat so that I can live.”428 When dealing with collaborators and spies, the articles in the underground press oscillated between a reproachful tone with regard to those who had left the

 Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft, 46.  N.N., “Pani siedzi za Solidarność,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, January 31, 1983.  N.N., “Pani siedzi za Solidarność,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, January 31, 1983.  Comment: in this context, the woman used the German formulation ganz egal (English: “does not matter”) that became a popular formulation in Polish colloquial and/ or familiar language and was also transcribed according to the Polish phonetics into: ganc egal.  N.N., “Pani siedzi za Solidarność.”  N.N., “Pani siedzi za Solidarność.”

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moral common ground and a firm and empowering tone that was meant to encourage ordinary Solidarność members to keep up the oppositionist activity by assuring them that they were on the right side of history. This is for example true for Hutnik’s first issue that warned members of the factory management to stay at the workers’ side (like in August 1980) and to think of the future: “May you not be ashamed of yourselves one day.”429 Sometimes, collaboration was only laconically listed but, by publishing the respective names, a threatening atmosphere was created. This can be exemplified on a list of doctors and other people in the medical sector who denied first aid to injured protesters in May 1982.430 They were listed under the title “Collaborators,”431 just like medical personnel who helped the injured but later provided a list of names to the authorities.432 Also, people who showed any sympathy for the military government’s reactions to protest actions were prominently mentioned in the list, for instance a professor or employee of the department of Polish philology of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. When a group of people prepared a protest note against the internment of their dean, the linguist Jadwiga P., who had supported protesting students and was later interned for some days, is quoted as saying: “[. . .] if she allowed the strike [. . .], no wonder she was interned.”433 Similar to the names listed in the underground press, Hutnik also called for creating a “book of collaborators.”434 Not only active counteraction but also not taking part in protest actions could result in being mentioned in the so-called ksiega kolaborantów on the pages of Hutnik. When two colleagues did not participate in the mourning march for killed colleagues, Hutnik wrote about them in their twelfth issue by judging them severely: “During the funeral march, S[. . .] W[. . .] together with H[. . .] W[. . .] instead of walking with the miners, queued up in front of the Pewex435 to buy vodka.”436 After being confronted by their colleagues, the two had answered in an aggressive and vulgar language that Hutnik did not want to “quote at this point.”437 This denunciation had another educative

 “Hutnik,” 1/1982, 2.  On May 13, 1982, massive demonstrations were held as on that day martial law had lasted exactly six months.  “Tygodnik Mazowsze,” 15 (May 27, 1982), 4.  “Tygodnik Mazowsze,” 15 (May 27, 1982), 4.  “Tygodnik Mazowsze,” 15 (May 27, 1982), 4.  “Hutnik,” 4/1982 (April 28, 1982).  Pewex (abbreviation of Przedsiębiorstwo Eksportu Wewnętrznego) was the name of a chain of shops where one could buy otherwise unobtainable Western goods with Western currencies. Buying goods at Pewex was a sign of privilege as it was not possible for everyone to get hard currency.  “Hutnik,” 12/1982 (June 24, 1982).  “Hutnik,” 12/1982 (June 24, 1982).

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aim. The two deviant colleagues were presented in an overall amoral light; not only did they refrain from participating in a funeral march which would honor the killed colleague but instead they decided to consummate material goods as if in opposition to the idealistic funeral march. Moreover, their consumption entailed alcohol and was pursued in a shop that, like no other place, symbolized the downsides of a state socialist economy from a consumer’s perspective. They were not even proper communists but prone to the amenities of capitalism. The two were therefore presented as anti-social human beings, humans that joined the other side by not being honest, which at the same time created a certain group identity of people behaving morally. These appeals to behave morally in connection with a group-identity were sometimes explicitly formulated, for instance in February 1983 when such an appeal was titled “About us”:438 These extremely difficult times in which we live and work, cause endless stress and frustration. We are all nervous; more and more often sadness, bitterness, apathy, anger and even hatred appear on our faces. Many of us consider ourselves Catholics or humanists. However, so often is our daily conduct a denial of (those identities). We must free ourselves from this anger, numbness and hate. Despite all the sadness, humiliation and problems, we should demand more positive feelings from ourselves. On the basis of mutual respect and love we must build a desire to help others. We have great examples of this in the person of the Pope, or St. Maximilian, or perhaps also among our friends and acquaintances. Let us remember our children, wives, husbands, parents, but also our neighbors and co-workers. Let us help the suffering, the infirm, those in need of help. Let us turn to the human being standing next to us.439

This almost sermon-like text appealed to readers’ morality and ennobled the actual underground activism towards a “[. . .] struggle for honor, dignity, for truth – for our humanity. It is a struggle for those ideals that include the word ‘solidarity.’”440 In combination with the title “About us,” these ideals were converted into the main identity denominator for the activists. It is not clear whether the critique of people not behaving in solidarity or leaving the common value framework through another deviance addressed collaborative acts or mere interhuman rudeness and lack of support for each other. This might be a conscious vagueness: anybody could feel addressed by the critique, comparable to the severe words during a Catholic sermon when people are oftentimes warned of committing sins. The article, moreover, aimed at increasing a feeling of belonging or rather a group identity that was not only built upon shared abstract values but also ap-

 “Edmund Ząbala,” “O nas,” Hutnik, February 20, 1983.  “Edmund Ząbala,” “O nas,” Hutnik, February 20, 1983.  “Edmund Ząbala,” “O nas,” Hutnik, February 20, 1983.

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plied these values in everyday life. The critique can be therefore interpreted in two ways: first, as a real critique of aggressive behavior towards each other that would also harm the spirit of the movement, and second, as a symbolic act of further increasing one’s own sense of morale. The self-critique, in this context, becomes part of a humanist rhetoric that is different from the hypocritic propaganda of the government.

Uses of History The authors of the Solidarność embedded their own experience into a wider historical narrative. As has been mentioned earlier, the editors of Tygodnik Mazowsze proudly discussed the blossoming of the samizdat as something “never seen before in history.”441 The Solidarność activists collected documents and other artefacts already ready for filing. Their method differed from the one proposed in Bujak’s code of conduct: he envisioned a future legal post-processing of martial law,442 processes that would later be called “transitional justice” in political science.443 Yet the documentation described in the following source aimed at archives and history books, not trials: Since January ‘82, in each department of our factory, there lies a special book which is a specific history of the Solidarność during the period of war between the Crow and the Nation. All the actions carried out by our Union together with documentation such as posters, leaflets, underground publications and denunciations are written into it. [. . .]444

The structured documentation of their actions shows how Solidarność activists considered martial law as a particular phase of (Polish) history. As a side effect, their activism was uplifted towards a historically relevant process, one that deserves documentation. Solidarność activists rarely suggested historical comparisons subtly, but rather made explicit comparisons. Comparing the present to the German occupation during the Second World War was by far the most frequent historical reference, especially in the context of addressing violence: in November 1982, an eyewitness described the arrest of a medical doctor and wrote about it in Hutnik. He “congratulated” these “gentlemen” from the ZOMO for having “overtrumped  “Archiwista,” “Potrzeba Wolnego Słowa,” 1.  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.”  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego”; see for instance: Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ed., Transitional Justice Theories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).  “Hutnik” 28/1982 (October 10, 1982).

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your example, the gestapo.”445 The Gestapo, so the text claimed, had never arrested doctors during their duty.446 The National Socialist Gestapo had become a code for evil after the genocidal war and occupation in Poland and was therefore detached from its concrete historical context here. Like in many other situations, a comparison with National Socialism primarily served to construct an absolute evil on the other side. In August 1982, during a commemorative gathering honoring the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, Zbigniew Bujak connected the uprising against the German occupation with the strikes of 1980, which was covered by Tygodnik Mazowsze. In his speech, Bujak is quoted to have said: For Poles, August became a symbol of a fight for our rights. [. . .] The insurgents of the capital commenced a fight for freedom and independence of the Homeland. In the year [19]80, the workers of the Coast commenced a fight for social justice, [one] for rights of the world of labor.447

In such a setting, speaking to the “citizens of Warsaw,”448 the high-ranking Solidarność member did not only frame the Solidarność strikes in a language of rights; he even interpreted the Warsaw Uprising against the National Socialist German occupation as a “fight for our rights” in order to find a common frame for both historical events. The common denominator here was neither violence nor occupation but expressed positively in the form of a fight for rights, although the concrete historical contexts differed immensely. Not only the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 but also the 1943 Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was remembered on the pages of the Solidarność underground press. In May 1983, over the course of the official commemorative events, Tygodnik Mazowsze printed an article by Marek Edelman, a veteran and survivor of the Ghetto and the Uprising, alongside Czesław Miłosz’s poem “Campo di Fiori”449

 “Hutnik,” 36/1982 (November 27, 1982).  There are many examples of Gestapo members committing brutal violence against medical personal and patients during the German occupation of Poland. This is especially true for the killings of psychiatric patients and the “liquidations” of hospitals in Western Pomerania right after the attack on Poland in 1939 in the context of the Aktion Warthegau as well as for the “liquidation” of Jewish Ghettos in occupied Poland.  N.N., “W Rocznicę powstania,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, August 1, 1982.  N.N., “W Rocznicę powstania,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, August 1, 1982.  Czesław Miłosz’s work could not be published in Poland until 1980, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his poem “Campo di Fiori,” written in 1943, the poet juxtaposed the indifference of Warsaw’s non-Jewish citizens towards the Ghetto Uprising with the spectators of the public execution of Giordano Bruno on the Campo dei Fiori (a public square) in Rome in the year 1600.

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in which the Polish poet dealt with the historic event of the crushing of the Ghetto uprising.450 None of the horrible events, neither the Ghetto Uprising nor the Warsaw Uprising, were directly compared to the current situation by any of the authors. Yet they served as negative references in a common value framework. Marek Edelman explained on the pages of the Solidarność press why he did not participate in the official commemorative event: For I believe that people who use violence, people who want to gag the nation and bring it to their knees, do not have a moral right to honor the memory of those who gave their lives in defense of freedom, dignity and humanity.451

Hutnik also reprinted a declaration of “Dr. Edelman,”452 who was, among others, a Solidarność member. His declaration sounded a little different from the interview in Tygodnik Mazowsze, however, he also referred to “dignity.”453 Edelman explained that he had been proposed to an honorable position in the Committee for the festive commemoration of the Ghetto Uprising and why he denied this offer. He argued that “40 years ago, we did not only fight for our live[s], we fought for a life in dignity. [. . .].”454 To celebrate “our anniversary”455 while humiliation and slavery weighed down all public life and words were falsified equaled an “embezzlement of our fight” and a participation in something that was entirely contradictory to it.456 Although the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust was entirely different, both the Solidarność activist Bujak and the Holocaust survivor and hero of the Ghetto uprising referred to abstract notions like freedom or dignity. In so doing, they used a common language frame for the events during the Second World War, including the Holocaust, and the contemporary political con-

 “Tygodnik Mazowsze” (April 7, 1983), 3.  N.N., “Iść po słonecznej stronie: Z rozmowy z Markiem Edelmanem w 40-tą rocznicę wybuchu powstania w getcie,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, April 7, 1983.  Marek Edelman (1919–2009) had been already politically active before the war when he was a member in several Jewish Socialist organizations including Bund and Cukunft. He did not only have a leading role in the Ghetto Uprising 1943 but fought in the Warsaw Uprising (1944) as well. He was then a member of a Jewish branch of the Communist “People’s Army.” After the War, he studied medicine and became a cardiologist living in Łódź. In the 1970s, he was one of the signatories of an open letter protesting against changes in the Polish constitution and was associated with KOR. From 1980, he was a member of the Solidarność. See Witold Bereś and Krzysztof Burnetko, Marek Edelman: Życie; do końca (Warszawa: Agora, 2013).  Marek Edelman, “Oświadczenie Dr. Edelmana,” Hutnik, March 5, 1983.  Marek Edelman, “Oświadczenie Dr. Edelmana,” Hutnik, March 5, 1983.  Marek Edelman, “Oświadczenie Dr. Edelmana,” Hutnik, March 5, 1983.  Marek Edelman, “Oświadczenie Dr. Edelmana,” Hutnik, March 5, 1983.

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text. By arguing that the values of those who they fought were not compatible with the values of the historical heroes from the past, both inscribed the current situation into a long-durée-narrative of Polish history of upheavals against hostile (foreign) rule. In this context, it has to be acknowledged that a specific universalized Holocaust memory as described by Levy and Sznaider was strongly vernacularized in the Polish state socialist context of the 1980s.457 Consequently, the Jewish suffering was incorporated into a Polish national narrative that did not differentiate between the attempted extermination of the European Jewry and the mass atrocities against Catholic Polish citizens. Despite the salience of the German occupation in Polish (collective) memories, another frequent historical reference was the Confederation of Targowica that became a “Polish synonym or base treason [. . .]”458 and a “symbol of national disgrace.”459 This Confederation, declared by a group of Polish and Lithuanian aristocrats that had travelled to Sankt Petersburg to get support from Empress Catherine, was a direct product of the governmental quarrels accompanying the adoption of the Constitution on May 3, 1791 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This legal document did not only put an end to the liberum veto, one of the pillars of the ancient system, but it deprived the poorer members of the gentry of their privileges.460 The opponents of the Constitution interpreted these laws and traditions favoring the gentry as fundamental for the Polish nation, which is why they “equated the reforms with the “death of the nation.”461 Consequently, they hoped to reinstall the ancient regime with the help of the Russian crown, but in fact it led to the invasion of Poland by Russian troops and, in the mid-term, to the partitions of Poland. This ending of Polish statehood in combination with the role of the Russian empire became an allegedly well-suited object of comparison for many people, who equaled the Russian

 Cf. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 1 (2002).  Piotr S. Wandycz, The United States and Poland (Harvard University Press, 1980), 47.  Maciej Górny, “The Targowica Confederation,” in Late Enlightenment: Emergence of modern national ideas, vol. 4, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 282–285, 283.  Maciej Górny, “The Targowica Confederation,” in Late Enlightenment: Emergence of modern national ideas, vol. 4, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 282–285.  Maciej Górny, “The Targowica Confederation,” in Late Enlightenment: Emergence of modern national ideas, vol. 4, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 283.

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empire with the Soviet Union. “The motivations of the republicans were in retrospect labeled as perfidious and mean,” as Maciej Górny analyzed.462 This was especially true since the historical reference had already served as a highly normatively loaded realm of memory in the nineteenth century and could now be reactivated. In Hutnik’s ninth issue, an instruction from the regional executive Solidarność committee regarding the protest forms “against war” a few days later started as follows: On 13 June it will be six months since martial law was introduced –one of the darkest days in the history of Poland, for which the most accurate historical analogy is that of the Targowica Confederation. Then and today, all external and internal forces interested in maintaining the status quo united to try to stop the process of democratic changes initiated in August 1980 by terrorizing the whole society.463

Comparing the Polish lieu de mémoire of Targowica to the German Dolchstoßlegende (“Stab-in-the-Back-Myth”), Peter-Oliver Loew examined how the historical reference was reactivated in Polish romanticism. The romantic invention of the modern nation changed the perception of treason. From now on, it was a legally relevant treason again the state, religiously interpreted as a sin committed against the “life-giving homeland, the nation.”464 On July 22, 1983, martial law was officially abolished. Due to the changes in the Polish legislation and the constitution that had happened in the meantime, the legal status of the Solidarność was not improved nor was there any broader liberalization visible, which is why Tygodnik Mazowsze was unimpressed by the change. In an article titled “martial law in a replacement packaging,” an anonymous author explained why they considered the situation even worse than before: Our situation as citizens does not change much. In some cases, it is even worse: what at first seemed like temporary restrictions of our rights have now been sanctioned by changes to the Constitution and new legislation. Not only that some of the new legal regulations are an unprecedented increase in the repressive nature of the system, unseen during the entire period of the People’s Republic of Poland’s existence.465

 Maciej Górny, “The Targowica Confederation,” in Late Enlightenment: Emergence of modern national ideas, vol. 4, ed. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 284.  “Hutnik,” 9/1982 (June 2, 1982), 1.  Peter O. Loew, “Targowica und Dolchstoß: Verrat auf Vorrat,” in Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte: Band 3: Parallelen, ed. Hans H. Hahn and Robert Traba (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2011), 204–17, 205.  N.N., “Stan wojenny w opakowaniu zastępczym,” Tygodnik Mazowsze, July 28, 1983.

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This article aimed at summing up the previous months. Martial law appeared as a “temporary restriction of our rights” now that it was over. During martial law itself, the lawlessness was so obvious that the particular symptoms including concrete repression was documented, yet it was not constantly labeled as a rights violation. Hutnik was also motivated to publish a description of their own fight summing up their own history since August 1980, however, the reprinted text stemmed from the TKK and therefore from the leading figures of the Solidarność, i.e. Bujak, Hardek, and others. Referring to the twenty-one demands that had been postulated before the agreement with the authorities back in 1980, the article reminded its readers that those demands had not been met yet. The demands included “independent trade unions and the right to strike, freedom for the political prisoners, dignified conditions for living and working, freedom of speech (wolne słowo) and the shortening of police lawlessness (ukrócenie policyjnego bezprawia).”466 In Poland, the following years would be marked by ongoing strikes and political conflict. The round table in 1989 was a product of these quarrels but also the global environment had changed, first and foremost, with regard to the equilibrium of reformists and hardliners in the Soviet government. The Solidarność survived underground. In the factories, mines, and shipyards it would remain an “invisible reference point for individual positions, actions and non-actions.”467

Concluding Remarks: Negotiating Repression under Martial Law Focusing on the period of martial law in this chapter, I concentrated on two different yet intertwined aspects. I first examined how repression was discussed on the pages of underground print publication of the Solidarność movement, thereby focusing on debates on successful strategies. In this context, the role of rights was analyzed, too. When debating the use of physical violence, a strong normative selfconception already became noticeable when discussing strategies. This stand became even stronger in the second section of this chapter, where I showed how a morally infused rhetoric was used to construct a positively connotated collective identity. In other words: while the Solidarność activists first discussed what they

 Tymczasowa Komisja Koordynacyjna NSZZ „Solidarność“/ Zbigniew Bujak, Władysław Hardek, Tadeusz Jedynak, Bogdan Lis, Eugeniusz Szumiejko, “TKK o 31 Sierpnia ‘83,” Hutnik, August 3, 1983.  Borodziej, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert, 370.

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should do as a first reaction to the implementation of martial law, in a second step, they negotiated who they were or who they wanted to be. The source base of this chapter consists of two relevant publications. While Tygodnik Mazowsze was a Solidarność organ produced by the people around the TKK in Warsaw, Hutnik was produced by ordinary workers in the industrial town of Nowa Huta.468 With regard to strategy, different models of how to maintain the trade union structures were heavily discussed by the leaderboard of the Solidarność. Apart from the question of whether to organize the underground Solidarność in a centralized or decentralized manner, or whether to employ violence or not, other strategies remained uncontested. This was especially true for the maintenance of a functioning underground press system that was both a strategy itself and a tool to ensure further strategies, i.e., documentation of repression and sharing information and knowledge. Solidarność activists, moreover, presented a particular conception of rights under martial law. Their own historical example had shown them how trade unions actually secured civil rights and enabled freedom of speech – this equated to a reinvention of the traditional perspective on the historical, logical, and hierarchical interdependence of rights, as, for instance, expressed in the notion of different rights “generations.”469 The universality of human rights was understood in a particular way. Also here, one’s own very concrete historical experience gained momentum: the developments of the past months had developed a “need for free speech” – as if rights were a political expression of desires.470 Whereas before the success of the Solidarność democratic labor structures were presented as inevitable necessities liberated from a heavily loaded and potentially ideological language of rights, during martial law, the question of democratic labor structures was different. Nobody questioned their necessity, the debates circulated around the question of how they could be realized. This became visible through the example of the debate between Kuroń, Bujak, and Kulerski.

 The differences here are not so much defined by the social strata the authors belonged to but rather by their positioning within the Solidarność movement. It has to be taken into account that many academically educated people joined the leaderboard of the Solidarność. This is also important in the context of the findings of the previous chapter on Poland where I argued that (human) rights language was indeed used by Polish oppositionists but also by intellectuals when they addressed other intellectuals abroad. Similarly, the different aspects of what “audience” means have to be taken into account for the contextualization of this chapter’s findings. The same is true for the different genres of writing.  Cf.: Tomuschat, Human Rights, 25.  “Archiwista,” “Potrzeba Wolnego Słowa.”

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The second section showed, how, during martial law, Polish workers negotiated repression dominantly by drawing back on a morally, partly religiously infused language. Rights were less important in these discourses. The moral narrative was needed to uphold a positive moral self-image, which was at the same time an essential element of the rhetoric in both the factory magazine Hutnik and the Warsawbased Solidarność organ Tygodnik Mazowsze directed by higher-ranking members. The articles in the workers’ press highlighted the suffering of the activists, thereby drawing on a messianist conception of the victim that was converted into a sacrifice for others. These conceptions went hand in hand with a strong anchoring of the present situation in a historical, national narrative of oppression and foreign rule. In this context, negative realms of memory, such as the German occupation during the Second World War but also the partitions of Poland and Russian Imperialism, frequently served as references. In these comparisons, the Polish nation was equalled with their own movement, which, in turn, was equalled with the Polish nation pars pro toto. Consequently, the Polish government was excluded from the national narrative for acting immorally. Collaborators and spies, juxtaposed with morally acting members of their own movement, were equally excluded from their own group, which was defined by their moral superiority. Facing repression in a temporally limited phase, the activists regularly presented a particular of a post-martial-law situation. Given the Catholic connotation that entailed concrete normative imperatives known from the religious services, morality became a concrete concept for the Solidarność press. Connected to a religiously inspired concept of a brighter future that favored those who acted virtuously in the past, the Polish activists mirrored narratives of the Last Judgement. Answering the underlining question about the use of rights, the problem of audience becomes virulent again: rights were used as a rhetoric framework when summing up or explaining what their own movement, the Solidarność, was about and it served for generalizing speeches of higher-ranking members of the movement. Oftentimes, a language of rights was only used in the context of individual and civil rights but not when traditional labor rights, the central demands of the movement, were discussed. Moreover, just like in the late 1970s, rights in general remained a rhetorical instrument of the elites, in this case of the elites within the socially extremely heterogeneous workers’ movement. When present, a language of rights was directed at the general public, interested and potentially sympathizing with fellow citizens, while workers rather formulated moral appeals on the pages of their underground magazine Hutnik.

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3.3 Comparison: Crises as Waiting Rooms for Different Futures This book compares two different phases that were respectively crucial for the Spanish and Polish labor oppositions between 1960 and 1990. By taking an actorscentered approach, I identified phases of emergence and periods of ‘repressive backlashes’, i.e. periods of time during which the democratic oppositions faced particularly harsh reactions from the state. This chapter, hence, compares the findings connected to the periods of ‘repressive backlash.’471 The first parts of the respective chapters concentrated on oppositional practices in times of extraordinary political pressure. Spanish and Polish leaders of the democratic oppositions were imprisoned by the state in order to minimize and weaken the entire movement. The chapter on Spain concentrated on the months between the imprisonment of ten key figures of the Comisiones Obreras in June 1972 and the immersion of the CCOO in the Junta Democrática in July 1974.472 For the Polish opposition (and the entire population, too), the installation of martial law in December 1981, which was lifted again in July 1983, had a comparable effect. This is why this phase stood at the center of interest in the respective chapter on Poland. In both cases, states of emergency played a role. However, in Spain, the state of emergency had been introduced a little earlier already, in 1969, and was repealed before the detention of the “Ten.” The time of the process can be regarded as a de facto state of emergency for the Spanish labor opposition since its leaders were under arrest. With the imprisonment of both Marcelino Camacho and Nicolás Sartorius, the leading identification figure and the leading intellectual of the workers’ movement were under attack, just like the other activists. For the Polish case, the analysis concentrated on the months of the Polish state of emergency, or rather ‘state of war,’ as the period is literally called in Polish (stan wojenny). As has been shown in the first chapters, Spanish and Polish labor oppositions viewed the phases of emergence particularly positively in terms of political activism and potential gain of power. This perspective was in turn a motivation to become active. The phases of repressive backlashes were different. Although also being future-oriented, politically active citizens in Spain and in Poland regarded these periods as transitory, almost like waiting rooms for another period, be it democratic or not. But in contrast to the earlier phases, the practices discussed focused on how to cope with repression, not on questions of labor. These, how The idea of “different futures” used in the section heading was borrowed from: Aleida Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (München: Hanser, 2013), 9.  A group of oppositional forces that prepared the democratic transition.

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ever, would be tackled later. That the crisis was to be overcome was obvious in the publications of both the Spanish workers and communist activists and the Polish Solidarity members. Yet, the crises weakened the movements noticeably, a fact that was dealt with differently in the respective underground press. In the following, I first engage with the direct reactions to the crises situations after they occurred. Secondly, I compare the specific ways to address time and temporality while at the same time being forced to wait.

What to do after the Initial Shock? Outrage, Confusion, and Solidarity in Phases of Extreme State Repression Spanish and Polish democratic oppositions were shocked when learning about the imprisonment of the CCOO leaders in summer 1972 or about the installation of martial law in December 1981. In Poland, nevertheless, the installation of martial law followed a phase of immense success for the Solidarity movement in 1980, whereas the Spaniards had to look back to 1966 to find a positive realm of memory. This was the year when they had won the elections in the Spanish trade union organization to the surprise of many. In the meantime, the Spanish government had carried out several repressive measures already, of which the Proceso 1001 was the culmination point. Before 1972, the Francoist regime had frequently attempted to put an end to the now openly acting labor opposition: in November 1967, the government annulled collective bargaining. Between January and March of 1969, a state of emergency was installed, processes that were always accompanied by arrests of CCOO activists.473 “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.”474 However, just like the Polish, the Spaniards could be sure of massive support from the civil society. Xavier Domènech Sampere called this a “strong solidarity network that wove together the workers’ movement with other social movements and with an alternative society to the official one [. . .].”475 Although this strong network was still not as big as the massive support for the Solidarność that counted millions (!) of Polish citizens among its members, the fact that fourty-eight percent of Spaniards were industrial workers and protested strongly affected the oppositional dynamics.476    

Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 77. Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 77. Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 79. Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 70.

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In both movements, people loudly asked how to proceed facing the fact that they were under attack. The answers were quite different – while Poles openly articulated their insecurities on the pages of their underground press, the Spanish aggressively called for protesting and fighting. This was also grounded in the fact that Poles could not go on the streets anymore, as martial law massively limited their possibilities to articulate protest. Before analyzing the reactions to these harsh forms of state repression in comparative perspective, one important difference should be highlighted. This variance stems from the different relationships between ‘regime’ and ‘opposition’ in Spain and Poland, from the use of violence as a way of political articulation to the different ways the oppositions viewed the respective regimes. In 1984, Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis published a study on the Solidarność – abroad – that she titled “Poland’s self-limiting revolution.”477 It has already been mentioned how Kuroń and the others feared another military intervention after the experiences in 1956 and 1968 in other state socialist countries. Nevertheless, the Solidarność leaders grounded their actions in the deeply anchored conviction “[. . .] that the power vacuum (the ruling group’s inability to control the real processes in society and the economy) was synonymous with the ruling group’s inability to use repression.”478 Moreover, leaders of the Solidarity assumed that the government would employ legal methods and act “mildly” as they conceived the situation as a “stalemate.”479 The opposite was true for the Spanish opposition. Looking back on decades of severe repression of which workers and left-leaning Spaniards had been the main target, they did not expect any signs of mildness from the regime but called for open protest and fight. In 1972 Spain, the first reaction was outrage. The Spanish labor opposition repeatedly called for open protest against the imprisonment of the workers’ activists and the trial itself. In Mundo Obrero, the communist underground magazine, which at that time was also proliferated on the streets of Spanish cities, authors presented the entire process as a symptom of the lack of human rights in Spain and as a consequence of Spain’s unlawfulness. This was the case in Mundo Obrero, when an unknown author loudly wondered that the true, underlying reason for arresting them was “the absence of civil liberties, which turn into a crime what in any civilized country is [. . .] normal [. . .]” – even if there was a formal reason for the arrests of Marcelino Camacho and his colleagues.480

   

Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution. Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution, 326. Staniszkis, Poland’s self-limiting revolution, 326. N.N., “Marcelino Camacho nuevamente detenido.”

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The Polish Solidarność authors, in turn, did not criticize the imposition of martial law as unlawful, yet they connected the situation to rights in a positive way. Here, rights were not lacking or absent but they were communicated to people through the successful experience of the summer of 1980, when certain rights had been reinstalled. This can be exemplified in the article titled “The Need for Free Speech,” where an anonymous author argued that such a need could be developed in a society through positive experiences.481 What is more, Poles looked back on the already achieved success – they had managed to achieve certain rights while still being governed by this very regime. Nevertheless, they were only taken away after several months. These two examples stand for two different understandings of the universality of human rights and express an underlying teleological understanding of rights standing at the ending point of a successful historical evolution. The diverse variants of interpreting rights as universal can be explained against the backdrop of the different constellations of regime and opposition. The Spanish labor opposition had always acted against the regime, even if the CCOO had been able to combine legal and illegal activism and utilized the official channels of the Francoist state. Although some milieus had showed signs of political change, such as parts of the Catholic Church or the Falange, and despite calling for cooperation with almost any other political group in the country, the activists in the Comisiones Obreras and the PCE viewed the regime as being immune to truly democratic reforms. In addition, the regime never willingly employed reforms that were in the interest of workers but at the most responded with concessions to curb the massive social protests. Moreover, these reforms were partly deinstalled after some years, such as the Collective Agreement Act that was implemented in 1958 and later annulled in 1967.482 In such a setting, rights could only function outside the given framework. The authors writing in the Spanish underground press could not imagine an integration of rights into the Francoist structure. The absence of rights in the Spanish discourse was moreover reinforced through the underlining of their simultaneous presence in other places. In so doing, the authors of Mundo Obrero and, more carefully, also those writing for the Gaceta del Derecho Social compared Spain to other countries, where rights were binding, thereby presenting their own country as backward and less civilized. In the Polish sources however, although the Polish transforma-

 “Archiwista,” “Potrzeba Wolnego Słowa.”  Domènech Sampere, “The Workers’ Movement and Political Change in Spain, 1956–1977,” 77.

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tion process was oftentimes mentally mapped as a “return to Europe,” Western countries did not so much serve as a positive reference point.483 This is not to say that the Polish labor opposition viewed its government positively. On the contrary, the installation of martial law had been a negative shock to many. Yet, in contrast to the Spaniards, the Polish oppositionists did not expect such a degree of repression, despite the bad memories regarding the use of state socialist violence in 1956, 1968, 1970/71, and 1976. Moreover, they had experienced a revolutionary moment in 1980, an experience that showed how much was possible – even within the given boundaries. Hence, the Polish author “Archiwista” was able to speak about rights almost as if they were a tool to be picked up by people when in need. In both studied cases, authors wrote about the lack of rights by presenting a particular understanding of rights being universal. Spanish communist authors understood rights as absent, as concepts moving or rather migrating from country to country, depending on the civilization status of the given government. Polish Solidarność writers in turn depicted rights as something that needs to be activated, but is always present. This is also palpable in the idea of securing workers’ rights by carrying out respective activities, as was proposed by Zbigniew Bujak.484 Both movements launched solidarity campaigns that entailed writing letters to imprisoned activists and leaders of the movement. The international solidarity for the Polish Solidarność movement was massive; the US government sent approximately fifty million US dollars.485 Moreover, civil societies in Western Europe and elsewhere, oftentimes Catholic initiatives or conservative ones, supported the Polish population through importing food and other goods as the food supply was extremely limited during martial law. However, this international solidarity was not mentioned on the pages of the examined Solidarność press. In the Spanish underground press, in turn, authors listed every symbolic action abroad, including Australian or British solidary actions or the prominent Black movement activist and communist politician Angela Davis.486 In general, the solidarity campaigns differed strongly, which is also why I analyzed the Spanish one as a strategy and the Polish one by rather focusing on its rhetoric. Writing letters to Camacho and his colleagues was only one element of the Spanish solidarity campaign of which the more important aspect was the constant protesting on the streets and the strikes.

 See for instance, book titles such as: Alan Smith, The Return to Europe: The Reintegration of Eastern Europe into the European Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).  Bujak, “Walka Pozycyjna.”  Judt, Postwar, 587.  Davis, “Apoyar a los 10 de Carabanchel.”

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In the case of the imprisoned Solidarność activists, however, the letters were rather part of a moral support for the repressed, not so much a political tool. Again, the reason for these differences lies in the differences of the Spanish and Polish regimes and their positions within a global world order. While the Polish government and therefore also the Soviet Union were regarded as political opponents for Western democratic states, this was not the case in Francoist Spain. Too important was its geopolitical positioning in times of the Cold War, as were the possibilities for trade and economic investments for private companies from democratic countries. This is especially true for the European Economic Community. Daniel C. Thomas, among others, has extrapolated the ambivalences in how the (by then six) member states of the EEC and the widespread anti-Francoist opposition abroad dealt with Francoist Spain’s attempts to become an integrated member of the group. The political scientist even interpreted them as a reason to question the normative underpinnings of the European Community.487 Already in the 1960s for instance, Ludwig Erhard, Federal Minister of Economy and Vice-Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, supported Francoist Spain’s ambitions. Apart from the economic incentive, “[. . .] German support for Spain was also motivated by ‘political reasons,’ including a desire to anchor Spain within the Western bloc and for a ‘historical friendship’ between the two nations.”488 It already becomes palpable how different the need to raise awareness was, considering who supported the Polish workers and their allies and who openly spoke up for the imprisoned CCOO activists. Trade unions and individuals supported the Spanish labor opposition, while the Solidarność enjoyed support from the US government, the Vatican, and many Western governments. This is also why the Spaniards had to address the problem of their workers’ movements’ leaders in a language of human rights – they had to universalize the matter to make it resonant with a diverse audience. The same constellation that was problematic for the left-leaning intellectuals in Warsaw when asking left-leaning Westerners for support in 1976 was now helpful. While the Polish socialists had had to fear that leftminded or socialist citizens west of the Berlin Wall would not engage too much in activities against a state socialist government, some years later, the mass movement of the Solidarność benefitted from the mainstream anti-communism abroad.

 Daniel C. Thomas, “Constitutionalization through enlargement: the contested origins of the EU’s democratic identity,” Journal of European Public Policy 8 (2006).  Daniel C. Thomas, “Constitutionalization through enlargement: the contested origins of the EU’s democratic identity,” Journal of European Public Policy 8 (2006): 1196. See, also: Birgit Aschmann, “The Reliable Ally: Germany Supports Spain’s European Integration Efforts, 1957–67,” Journal of European Integration History 1 (2001).

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The Polish debates, hence, concentrated rather on the maintenance of the pre-martial-law-structures of the movement and questions of centralization versus decentralization. Moreover, Jacek Kuroń irritated many of the other Solidarność members when he stepped back from the strict non-violence ethos of the movement. As it was the style of the new movement, this issue was discussed at length on the pages of Solidarność underground press. The leaders of Solidarność movement used the time of martial law to elaborate upon different thinkable structures of Solidarność under state socialism. Thereby, they proposed different models, i.e. the “underground society” and the “underground state,” which shows how they prepared themselves for a longer period of illegality. Their protest practices, however, entered a new phase, one of an extremely minimized scope of actions. This becomes noticeable when fellow citizens were called to boycott state infrastructure, such as not using the public transport or not buying the daily newspaper. The Spaniards, in turn, did not prepare for another period of living underground. The physical condition of their dictator shaped their perception of the political situation massively. Indeed, while the Poles had to wait another six years after the ending of martial law until they would be able to vote in semi-free elections in June 1989, the Spaniards obtained democracy only several months after the investigated period of time. Starting with Franco’s death in November 1975, a gradual process would start that reached a culmination point with a nationwide referendum in 1976, when all adult citizens could decide upon a Reform Act that would install a parliamentary monarchy in Spain and put an end to Francoism. Only in 1977, however, were the Comisiones Obreras and all the other workers’ organizations partly legalized.489 While this section highlighted the practices or rather debates on strategies, the following concentrates on the question of how the movements viewed themselves and how they constructed a common identity on the pages of their press. These identity constructions were embedded in certain images of the past and the future, which is why ‘time’ played a particular yet different role for the repressed activists in the two countries.

 The workers’ press such as the Gaceta del Derecho Social was very critical about the proceedings of the so-called Transición, especially since not all rights were reinstalled immediately.

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Between Past and Future: Waiting for the Present to Pass The two investigated periods were especially challenging for most of the portrayed actors and anonymous authors. These particular phases did not only trigger certain strategic reactions or political conceptions but moreover animated people to position themselves in a normative framework. These frameworks, however, could look very different from each other, even though they evolved in a comparable setting of labor activism and moreover had similar anchoring points such as ‘democracy’ or ‘rights.’ The analyzed sources were written in times of extreme repression, not only compared to other countries but also in comparison to other periods of one’s own national history. While the sources sometimes reveal almost poetic displays of time conceptions, one has to bear in mind that they were produced under extremely difficult circumstances, sometimes by authors who were either themselves hiding from the authorities or were already imprisoned. In these contexts, almost en passant, one learns much about the collective identities of the authors. The time of the Proceso 1001 in Madrid and the critical physical condition of the dictator on the one hand and the months of martial law in Poland on the other constituted especially difficult phases. Nevertheless, they were also more tangible as they were concretely defined. Everybody knew that these phases could not last forever and were naturally limited. In Spain, people awaited Franco’s death, although with mixed feelings, especially after the assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco. Poles, in turn, knew that the implantation of martial law could not last forever. Under these circumstances, oppositionists wrote about the future. The envisioned and desired future could take manifold forms in the writings of the Spanish and Polish labor oppositions: it appeared either as a phase of post-Francoist national reconciliation in which democracy triumphed (Spain) or was subtly mentioned as an uncertain component in which one had nothing but one’s dignity (Poland). In 1966 and 1967, Spanish oppositional writers had already depicted Spain as particularly backward in comparison to other countries. In the early 1970s, when the CCOO leaders were imprisoned and Spanish workers went on strike or protested almost on a daily basis, this motive was even stronger. Europe became the ‘democratic Other’ in the projections of the Spanish oppositional authors, for instance when they wondered whether the European governments were aware of the disproportionately harsh trial while at the same time negotiated Spain’s integration to the EEC.490 Moreover, the authors of Mundo Obrero connected these

 M.A., “Consideraciones al Sumario 1001.”

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political differences with a temporal backwardness of Spain, when they loudly asked in which century they lived or sometimes wondered if the early and therefore more repressive period of Francoism had returned.491 Compared to Poland, these constructions of their own country’s backwardness based on the repressive political system were a mere Spanish phenomenon. Poles, as won’t surprise anyone who has dealt with Polish history and culture, also made historical references. However, they did so without depicting their own country as traditionally backward. Polish historical references were used to reinforce a positive self-image and to depict the Polish government as morally degenerated. The Polish government was rhetorically excluded from an imagined national community of Poles that was based on values.492 ‘violence’ was an important marker of difference. Polishness and violence were even juxtaposed and at the same time associated with Solidarność and the government respectively. The motive of Polishness was sometimes linked to specific forms of collective mourning: when workers had been killed by the police or the paramilitary forces ZOMO, their colleagues infused their mourning with religious elements. Whether it was “Poles” that were known for their “good hearts” or “brave people among us” that would keep the union alive, in the Solidarity’s underground writings, authors wrote about their own group in highly normative terms.493 This was especially true for victims of repression connected to them that were sometimes even described in a messianist manner, for instance, when Hutnik wrote that imprisoned colleagues “suffered for us” or when their death was called a “sacrifice.”494 The underground Solidarność press, hence, constructed a positive national identity based on the rejection of violence and a moral behavior. On the other hand, Solidarność activists rhetorically excluded aberrant colleagues from what they defined as ‘Polish’. Deviance could have different forms: hen fellow citizens or colleagues did not take part in collective actions or when they were caught spying and collaborating, they were excluded from the community, as was one’s own government. After centuries of foreign rule, this externalization was easy to embed in a Polish oppositional discourse. This religiously infused language of morality points at another aspect: the Solidarność press permanently negotiated ethical behavior and connected this with a vision of an unknown future. Here, a strong Christian influence becomes noticeable, as the post-martial-law future was almost portrayed as an afterlife that depended upon human deeds during martial law (read: on Earth). Only those who    

M.A., “Consideraciones al Sumario 1001”; N.N., “¿En qué país, en qué siglo vivimos?”. See for instance: “Jan Komorowski” (pseudonym), “List Przyjaciela z Więzienia.” “Hutnik,” 1/1982. “Hutnik,” September 26, 1982.

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had behaved morally would be able to enjoy this phase “in good conscience.”495 Here, a “free Poland” that was the ending point of all activism was elevated to a divine level.496 The underground Solidarność historicized their own present in the making. This historicization of their own present, for instance through writing a “book of collaborators” and the calls for an unofficial chronicle, was another symptom of the activists’ conviction to live in a transitory phase.497 In a comparative perspective, the similar perception of a temporally limited phase stands out. Spanish and Polish labor activists and their allies, many of whom were intellectuals, interpreted the phases of backlashes not only as repressive but also as transitory and evanescent, which was rooted in a linear conception of history as a steady flux of time following a modernizing, progressive path. This conviction was moreover nourished by historical experience on the one hand and by an outside world defined as democratic on the other one. The historical experiences that the Spanish labor activists referred to positively were the Spanish constitution of 1876 and the time of the Spanish Republic of the 1930s. Even though they had already achieved several civil and labor rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and had lost them again in the course of the Francoist dictatorship, Spanish authors pushed forward a highly teleologic vision of their own history, as if Francoism was a unique aberrance from a normally linear and steady path. Furthermore, the democratic outer world was not only an abstract idea, but, due to the emigration background of many of the authors, constituted a steady template for how democracy worked, especially in France. Rather than referring to their own republican past, Polish writers would compare the Polish government to previous occupying forces or to negatively connotated realms of Polish collective memory like the Targowica treaty that led to the partitions of Poland.498 In some cases, authors referred to the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War, sometimes even in order to portray the current power as worse. Referring to National Socialism was a commonality of Poles and Spaniards – and it points out at the globalized character of Holocaust memory, since the two countries and the two societies have a very different relationship with this historical complex. Spain was one of the few European countries

   

N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.” N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.” N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.” See also: Peter O. Loew, “Targowica und Dolchstoß,” in Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte.

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not involved in the war, neither as ally nor as victim of the German aggression.499 In contrast, Poland was not only the first country to be invaded in 1939. The Germans conducted a lethal War of Extermination against the civil population on Polish territories and established extermination camps on Polish soil where they murdered the majority of European Jews during the Holocaust. In a globalized memory culture, the atrocities of the National Socialists became a negative code for unspeakable evil. However, they were oftentimes detached from the concrete historical events and connected to more abstract notions like ‘values’ or ‘democracy’ beginning in the 1970s.500 In the context of this analysis, however, one cannot speak of a globalized detachment, since a veteran and survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, Marek Edelman, himself connected the past with the present. In a public declaration reprinted in the Solidarność magazine Hutnik, he declared he would not take part in official commemoration festivities on the fortieth anniversary of the Uprising, as this would be disrespectful to the values of those who fought.501 The Spanish labor activists saw their own history as a linear process that had come to a standstill with Francoism and was now to be awakened from a deep slumber. While the writings of the Polish underground Solidarność were infused with a religious language, the articles printed in the communist magazine Mundo Obrero revealed a Marxist understanding of history – however, in a vernacularized version. In Spain, this led to a depiction of history almost inevitably following a path of progress. At the same time, the oppositional authors had the impression that the flux of time was faster than normal – a phenomenon that has been analyzed in a prominent way by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck when he wrote about prerevolutionary times.502 This “acceleration of the rhythm of history”503 entailed an interpretation of the present phase as a preamble to a “democratic change,” which, in turn, was a “necessity.”504 This conscience of “transcendence” and the uncertainty of the future, is, according to Koselleck, even a necessary component of a revolution.505

 The complicated relationship between Francoist Spain and Nazi Germany was analyzed by Stanley G. Payne: Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).  Levy and Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter. See also: Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel, eds., Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008); Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound.”  Edelman, “Oświadczenie Dr. Edelmana.”  For instance: Koselleck, Sediments of time.  N.N., “La hora actual.”  N.N., “La hora actual.”  Koselleck, Futures Past, 50.

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While the Spaniards interpreted the months surrounding the process as more dynamic, the Poles expressed another feeling when writing underground: here, time seemed to be viscous and slow; in comparison with the aggressive activism of the Spaniards, the Solidarity members seemed tired and insecure. However, within this difference, one important commonality existed: both attributed political agency to their readers. The Spanish and Polish oppositional authors did not let readers escape their responsibilities, for instance, when the Spanish Communist Party published a pamphlet saying that no citizen could be a mere “spectator”506 of events or when Hutnik called for cooperating in form of denunciating spies and collaborators and “demand[ed] engagement in the fight against evil from all Poles.”507 The activity of the members of the movement was to be maintained, upheld. By no means was it to be terminated but rather adapted to the difficult circumstances. Another commonality links the question of national identities with the concept of violence: in both studied cases, people feared nothing more than a return of violence in any form. In Poland, the moral rejection of violence was elevated towards a precondition for being Polish. Poland’s history of statelessness that lasted over 120 years, while at the same time many European neighbors constituted themselves in form of a nation state, contributed to a traditional Polish narrative of state, government, and society.508 In this narrative, one’s own nation could be conjured without a real existing political structure or power; this is why this organic conception could be reactivated so easily during martial law. While it had been traditionally primordial categories of national identity such as ethnicity, religion, and language that served as a basis for a common Polish identity, in the writings of the Solidarność, these categories changed. They shifted towards a set of morally highly connoted values, among them solidarity and the rejection of violence.509 In Spain, however, the fear of a repetition of the Civil War was an important factor. Violence was depicted as a constant and even necessary element of the Francoist dictatorship, yet it was also presented as an element that belonged to the past, just like the Civil War. What the communists proposed in Mundo Obrero was not only a post-Francoist national reconciliation including a rejection of violence; it was also presented as the only civilized and thus the only

 N.N., “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.”  N.N., “Instrukcja ws. prowadzenia zakładowych kronik stanu wojennego.”  See also the discussion on the role of intellectuals in Poland as described in Chapter 2.2. See also: Sdvižkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz.  Törnquist Plewa, The wheel of Polish fortune.

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progressive way of proceeding. Having in mind the strong salience of a modernity discourse, where “time itself becomes the universal parameter of judgement,”510 this can be interpreted as a “conscientious positioning in the present, which turns into a modern, emphatic experience through permanently distancing itself from the past,” as Aleida Assmann has explained.511 Modernity is characterized, among other things, through defining itself as different from the past, through distancing, even detaching, the present from the past. What do these observations on modernity and violence finally reveal about the role of human rights in these phases of ‘illiberal backlashes’? In the first section of this comparison, I have argued that the authors writing for the oppositional magazines represented two different variants of understanding the universality of rights. In the sections that dealt with identities and time, rights were rather at the margin – or, to stay in the language of the modernization discourses, they stood at the end of the story, as they were part of the future-visions of the Spanish activists. For the Polish Solidarność under martial law, rights were used to remind one what one’s own movement was about. They were part of the rhetorical tool box of higher ranks when addressing a wider public. In both cases, workers’ rights and civil rights appeared and disappeared hand in hand. Moreover, they were presented as interdependent. Having in mind the success of 1980, when the workers’ movement achieved a broadening of freedom of speech and freedom of association while at the same time their own union was legalized, Solidarność activists in Poland interpreted labor rights as a tool to secure civil rights. This perception, however, equaled a turnover in their historical and legal order. The Spaniards, in turn, standing at the threshold of the exit door of Francoism and being very aware of its precarious state, conceived civil rights and workers’ rights as an inalienable element of being a citizen in a democratic state. Nevertheless, democracy, non-violence, and participation were equally central to almost all actors as human rights, be they civil or labor rights.

 Banerjee, Politics of time, 4.  Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen?, 24.

4 Conclusion – Working on Rights under Authoritarian Rule In 1969, Hannah Arendt published an essay titled “Reflections on Violence.”1 Arendt wrote about the contemporary phenomenon of the New Left in Western democracies and discussed the relationship between power and violence as well as their claim for participatory democracy – topics that were also central to the labor oppositions in Spain and Poland. Yet it is a privilege mostly enjoyed by Westerners to become featured examples in articles on political theory, since the West for the most part dominates the global public sphere.2 From time to time, others are invited to join as comparative guests. This is especially true for the massive contemporary and academic interest in dissident movements in EastCentral European state socialist societies.3 However, European semi-peripheries (especially Spain!) are rarely in the spotlight – neither of European nor global studies. With this book I have made an attempt, or perhaps even a beginning, to balance this asymmetry. Integrating Spanish and Polish experiences, I shed light on the margins of European postwar history. At the same time, I added those semi-peripheral European regions to a global perspective that are not included in the postcolonial discourses on ‘the West.’ Spanish and Polish labor oppositions shared the claim for participatory democracy with their Western counterparts, but they did so in a different environment. Being citizens of authoritarian states and lacking freedom of speech and trade union rights, the activists watered down the boundaries between announcing, demanding, and simply doing things.4 Even more so, they connected social and civil rights in their activism when they demanded these rights in one breath. Both groups strived at creating more space for participation in decision-making processes that affected their (work) lives on a daily basis. Like

 Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” Journal of International Affairs 1 (1969).  Cf. Steven L. B. Jensen, “Putting to Rest the Three Generations Theory of Human Rights.”  Being at the semi-periphery of Europe but not at the periphery of global discourses, the protagonists of this study are, again, in-between. Compared to the history of the West, they were at the margin of academic interest in the West, but compared to the history of the Global South they receive more (scholarly) attention. A good example in this context is the often mentioned monograph by Moyn, The last Utopia; cf.: Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.  Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” 9. Arendt criticized that these movements had never left the declamatory stage. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-004

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many currents in the Western New Left, Spanish and Polish activists renounced direct violence, while at the same time resorting to the means of strike action.5 By analyzing alternative press, I investigated how Spanish and Polish democratic labor oppositions dealt with the lack of free and independent trade unions and overall state repression. This book links the history of workers with human rights history, a field that is surprisingly elite centered so far. This bias is also mirrored in the focus on civil rights within human rights historiography. At the beginning, this study, too, was strongly influenced and inspired by the booming literature on the origins and peaks of human rights.6 Yet when diving further into the source material, it became increasingly clear that the question of if human rights were salient or not camouflages important key narratives of oppositional activism, since [. . .] the broader implications of the human rights moment of the 1970s for the history of human rights before or after this time are usually only stated in sweeping terms rather than demonstrated. [. . .] Having set out to overcome ahistorical origin stories, we have come dangerously close to writing one ourselves.7

One way to navigate safely around that danger was to analyze what people meant when they discussed “essentially contested concepts.”8 Consequently, this book stands in the tradition of vernacularization studies,9 that, in contrast to those research strands that look for diffusion processes, lends a historical agency to actors who shaped the notion of globally used concepts from below.10

Practices and Languages of Spanish and Polish labor Oppositions In 1976, the year of the creation of the Workers’ Defense Committee, Adam Michnik wrote about the policy of the Polish opposition:

 Cf. Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” 9. Strike action was partly contested as not bringing longterm results, see: Robotnik, January 4, 1979.  Especially by the debates around Moyn’s study: Moyn, The last Utopia.  Brier, Poland’s solidarity movement and the global politics of human rights, 4.  Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts.”  Peggy Levitt and Sally E. Merry, “Making Women’s Human Rights in the Vernacular,” in Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights.  Cf. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect.

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[. . .] one could say that the ideas of the Polish democratic opposition resemble the Spanish rather than the Portuguese model. This is based on gradual and piecemeal change, not violent upheaval and forceful destruction of the existing system.11

Even though only after Franco’s death, Polish intellectuals did notice what happened “at the other side of our continent.”12 For Michnik, the renunciation of violence was the central vector of comparison of the Polish and the two Southern European opposition movements, of which he chose Spain as the exemplary one.13 In contrast to Arendt’s analysis of the Western New Left, in Michnik’s analysis, the semi-peripheries of Europe are in focus. Analyzing and comparing global labor history and the history of human rights through the lens of the of two European semi-peripheries enabled me to de-parochialize axioms of a globally orientated historiography of both labor and rights that oftentimes analyzes contacts and intertwining between a global center (Western Europe and North America) and the peripheries (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) but tends to jump over the regions in-between. When Michnik envisioned the Spanish model of a “gradual and piecemeal change”14 the Polish oppositionist and philosopher touched on one of the structural qualities of the Polish and Spanish labor oppositions: anxious not to use violence or to trigger counter-violence, both movements combined legal and illegal forms of activism. The Comisiones Obreras participated in the election framework of the official trade union organization, the Organización Sindical Española, by which they hoped to be able to engage in democratic decision-making processes. It was part of the above-mentioned strategy of infiltrating the existing structures from below. Looking for successful examples in other dictatorial societies, Polish activists regarded the Spanish infiltrismo as a role model: in 1978, two years before the creation of the Solidarność and three years after Franco’s death, Robotnik published an article about the successful strategy of infiltrating Spanish factories from below.15 I consider this transfer process especially important, since it shows that two distant and distinct semi-peripheral societies that share their positioning towards Europe (although, as has been laid out, in different forms) were not only

 Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism 1976,” in Letters from prison and other essays, 143.  Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism 1976,” in Letters from prison and other essays, 143.  Cf. Arendt, “Reflections on Violence.”  Adam Michnik, “A New Evolutionism 1976,” in Letters from prison and other essays, 143.  Robotnik, January 1, 1978; while the article in Robotnik did not mention the communist background of a dominating part of the Spanish workers’ movement, the Comisiones Obreras, on the other hand, ignored the problems of Polish workers. Although the Spanish communists had proclaimed their commitment to democratic Eurocommunism, they could not bring themselves to write critically in their writings about the realities of life in state socialist societies.

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aware of each other but even tried to learn from the other’s experiences. While the West was an important reference point for self-positioning or in the context of international support, it did not serve as a suitable reference for oppositional strategies. Another important similarity between the two movements is the convergence between leftists and Catholics. I demonstrated the parallels of left-leaning and Catholic actors cooperating for the workers’ cause, regardless of the ruling ideology of the dictatorships they lived in. In public memory discourses, however, Lech Wałęsa’s ardent anticommunism and the Spanish church’s collaboration with the Francoist state have overshadowed the historical contribution of the leftleaning oppositionists in Poland and the role Spanish Catholic individuals played in the opposition movement.16 Taking into account the global sphere and keeping in mind the vernacularization of the Second Vatican Council in Latin America in the form of the liberation theology, this supposed historical coincidence becomes less odd. Even more so, the convergence of Spanish and Polish Catholics and leftists can be interpreted as variants of this global phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s, which, moreover, seems to have been especially strong when workers were politically and economically repressed. Filling the void that the lack of trade unions had created, Spanish and Polish workers’ magazines trained their readers to accept different opinions. I argue that this training for what you could call a “tolerance of ambiguity”17 prepared both movements for the democratic transitions that occurred several years later. Both cases were regarded as international role models for peaceful system transformations since the victims of the dictatorial oppression agreed to cooperate with the old elites on a pacted system transition. The Spanish transition to democracy after 1975 was executed within the Francoist legal framework as a cooperation of old elites and new politicians just like the Polish round table of 1989 (okrągły stół). How democratic labor oppositions addressed repression depended on the concrete context of repression. It is important to stress that repression occurred in manifold ways, starting from lighter forms such as being dismissed or sanctioned for taking part in strikes or protest actions. But it must not be forgotten that both Spanish and Polish authorities harmed and even killed protesting workers. This means that the possibility of getting shot again was one important vector for the rhetoric of the labor oppositions.  See, for instance: Gerhards, Breuer, and Delius, Kollektive Erinnerungen der europäischen Bürger im Kontext von Transnationalisierungsprozessen.  Cf. the origin of the terminus in psychological research: Frenkel-Brunswik, “Intolerance of ambiguity as an emotional and perceptual personality variable.”

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One of the key findings of this study is that the movements’ rhetoric depended on two important factors: the audience addressed and the respective stages of political activism. In the earlier, constitutive phases of their activism, activists called for structures of democratic participation.18 In this context, a necessity discourse emerged in both countries. I consider it especially important to understand why such a discourse emerged in the context of being repressed: given the continuous state propaganda disavowing oppositional actors as violent molesters of the public order and as enemies of the state, I argue that it was of the utmost importance for the movements to present their claims not as ideologically colored but as mere social necessities. The necessity discourse presented the demands for free and independent trade unions as a constitutive element of a functional, peaceful society in which workers were not forced to disturb the public order by protesting or striking. These claims, however, were oftentimes expressed without referring to a language of rights. They were hence directed at potential supporters, i.e. workers that so far had not been active in the opposition movement and who might be influenced by the anti-oppositional propaganda spread by state media. On this backdrop, the historiographical claim of human rights being the “last utopia” after the disillusions of the ideologies of the twentieth century comes to mind.19 Yet, as this book demonstrates, this assessment has to be taken more cautiously and within a broader scope: I agree that social movements had to find a language that bore an “apolitical”20 aura after they had lost their illusions about the promises of the West (see: Vietnam) and communist ones (see: Prague). But as I demonstrated with the example of Spanish and Polish workers, I disagree that human rights were always able to lend claims to this apolitical aura. The actors of this book lived in authoritarian dictatorships, not in Western democracies. State socialist governments instrumentalized human rights themselves, for instance to criticize the USA or the Federal Republic of Germany.21 What is more, while often cast and cultivated as apolitical, the rising intensity with which the West drew upon human rights in their critiques of socialist regimes invariably transformed them into a language that was provocatively political and candidly oppositional. Human rights were thus far from being apolitical. Necessities, in turn, could be presented as such. While trade unionism was proposed within the framework of a necessity discourse, the state repression in the form of attacks against workers was morally del-

 Cf.: the demands of the Western “New Left,” according to Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” 8.  Moyn, The last Utopia.  Dehm, “Highlighting inequalities in the histories of human rights: Contestations over justice, needs and rights in the 1970s,” 891.  Richardson-Little, The Human Rights Dictatorship.

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egitimized. Part of the normative toolbox was hence the renunciation of violence that in both countries was associated with the most negative realms of memory; the Spanish Civil War on the one hand and the Second World War and the German occupation on the other one. In both countries, morality was connected to concepts of the nation. Spanish and Polish labor oppositions excluded their regimes rhetorically from the national communities by depicting them as deviant. While the Spanish followed the dichotomic discourse of the Civil War, as they denied their government being part of the nation, the Polish could draw back on a long tradition of statelessness. The motive of being the victim of oppression and foreign rule was projected onto the state socialist government, especially since the Polish government indeed depended on the political decisions in Moscow, home to both the contemporary Soviet government and the Russian imperialism of the past centuries. What is more, Spanish and Polish intellectuals interpreted the lack of democratic workplace structures as a precondition that fostered immoral behavior, thereby acting against their own conscience. In his latest book snappily titled Not Enough, Moyn reshaped and reinforced his assessment of the 1970s as a “breakthrough” period for human rights by embedding the story of human rights into one of the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism.22 Taking a global historical perspective, he described how the “dream of a welfare world achieved its highest visibility” in the 1970s and how it was “shattered as a neoliberal turn began instead.”23 Individual entitlements had given way to an egalitarian welfarism or socialism, he claimed. Legal theory scholars like Julia Dehm have also shown how a “specific vision of apolitical individual political and civil rights” was prioritized and promoted as an alternative to the marginalized “structural” approaches.24 These assessments are true if one understands discourses as debates carried out in the conference rooms and corridors of the United Nations’ offices in Geneva and New York or in the national governments’ buildings of countries pertaining to the Global South, where this dichotomy was highly criticized. Nonetheless, when shifting the attention away from transnational elites and international relations and turning towards workers in Francoist Spain and in state socialist Poland in the 1960s until the 1980s, the question of which role social and civil rights played at that time has to be answered differently. In authoritarian, non-democratic countries like Francoist Spain and state socialist Poland, social and civil rights went hand in hand when labor opposition activists protested against repression.  Moyn, Not Enough.  Moyn, Not Enough, 120.  Dehm, “Highlighting inequalities in the histories of human rights: Contestations over justice, needs and rights in the 1970s,” 891.

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The Comisiones Obreras demanded democratic liberties and “syndical liberties” in the same breath. These liberties were also presented in detail: in different combinations and in varying orders, Spanish workers’ activists regularly demanded freedom of speech, freedom of association, and of assembly, which almost always immediately led to demands for the right to join and form independent trade unions and – very importantly – the right to strike.25 This set of demands barely changed during the years of investigation between 1966 and 1974. Collective and individual rights were demanded simultaneously. The backlash of the Proceso 1001 in 1972 provoked a shift of how different rights were emphasized. The imprisonment of the CCOO leaders triggered debates on the essentiality of the right to associate freely, even up to the articles written in the legally produced press, such as in the Gaceta del Derecho Social.26 The Spanish labor opposition presented two related understandings of rights: on the one hand, they were interpreted as entitlements and, on the other, as guarantees for a regulated proceeding resembling a Habermasian ideal type of democracy theory.27 Civil rights such as the freedom of association (and freedom of assembly) were understood as preconditions for the free exercise of social rights and therefore as indivisible.28 In addition, the Polish opposition called for an end of repression as a first reaction to state violence against workers in 1976. However, they combined their calls with positive demands, which they did not direct at their own government but at Western elites and fellow citizens. In the first issue of the workers’ magazine Robotnik, the editors explained that they “supported actions aiming at: the solidarity in defense of workers’ interests, the increase of workers’ participation in negotiations of wage” and other issues.29 As has been elaborated above, Polish activists presented them as simply necessary measures. Yet when addressing a Western audience, this aim was formulated in rights terms, even in labor rights terms.30 These, however, were not specified until the proliferation of the Charter of Workers’ Rights in autumn 1979. In this Charter, in line with its title, the signatories demanded a set of labor rights in combination with propositions of how they could be realized “already today.”31 Civil rights were not mentioned in the Charter. Not even one year later, when already being a massive movement orga-

 See, for instance: Carril, August/ September 1968.  García Valdes, “Asociación Ilícita Permanente.”  Cf.: Arendt’s assessment of violence always entailing an element of arbitrariness. Arendt, “Reflections on Violence.”  See also: United Nations/ General Assembly, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”  Robotnik, September 1977.  Barańczak et al., “List Trzynastu do Intelektualistów Zachodnich.”  Robotnik, September 17, 1979.

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nized in the unofficial trade union Solidarność, the Polish labor opposition presented concrete demands, very prominently in the form of a list of twenty-one demands in August 1980. The first demand addressed the “acceptance” of independent and free trade unions, the second one the right to strike, and the third demand freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.32 During martial law, the demands concentrated on civil rights predominantly, however, the relationship between civil and labor rights was constructed in a particular manner. Only free and independent trade unions were able to secure civil rights such as freedom of speech, as one could read in the magazine Hutnik.33 Indeed, Poles had such an experience when the success of the Solidarność, starting with protesting workers, had sparked the interest of other realms of society, or rather when a trade union movement became the carrier for overall democratic activism in Poland. Hence, what lawyers call different rights “generations” has to be re-assessed.34 Here, indeed, social rights were introduced before civil rights – which makes the Polish human rights history unique. In Francoist Spain and in state socialist Poland in the 1960s until the 1980s, vernacular human rights discourses did not play off against other civil rights and social rights but regarded them as closely interrelated and as interdependent – regardless of whether the people demanding these rights lived in a capitalist or state socialist economy. The fact that the two presented examples differ so much from more prominent cases around which much of the orthodox historiographical narrative has centered demonstrates the relevance of investigating when it made sense for the actors to employ a language of rights. Martha Nussbaum, when writing about rights as entitlements and as capabilities, underlined how a language of rights can camouflage important philosophical differences in their understanding: Rights have been understood in many different ways, and difficult theoretical questions are frequently obscured by the use of rights language, which can give the illusion of agreement where there is deep philosophical disagreement.35

Being aware of a simplifying and camouflaging effect that the simple use of a language of rights can have, I have highlighted these “agreements” and “disagreements” by contextualizing both discourses on repression that referred to notions other than the one of human rights and examples of a language of rights. Among

 Luszniewicz and Zawistowski, Sprawy gospodarcze w dokumentach pierwszej Solidarności, 67–70.  ‘Franciszek Barss’ (Pseudonym), “Co Robić?”.  Steven L. B. Jensen, “Putting to Rest the Three Generations Theory of Human Rights.”  Nussbaum, “Capabilities, Entitlements, Rights: Supplementation and Critique,” 24.

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other things, this enabled me to emphasize the moments when a language of rights was used. Hence, I argue, finally, that a language of rights was employed when translating a very concrete incident into a rights violation, so that others than those affected by it could relate and react. Human rights indeed served as a rhetoric framework when addressing a transnational audience or when global moral authorities, such as the ILO or the Vatican, were mentioned. When empowering victims of repression, however, human rights did not play such a central role but gave way to the promotion of participatory democracy and morality discourses. This was true regardless of the question of whether the individuals addressing them were themselves repressed workers or solidary intellectuals. Victims of repression that now would be motivated to defend themselves did not need a universalizing language in order to understand the wrongdoings against them. They rather needed arguments for activism. When and in what circumstances activists began utilizing human rights language was complex. It was not the result of a single transition, where an identity of struggle was simply replaced by a new lexicon. There was interaction and overlap, with the languages of the past commingled with the ascendant vocabulary for moral claims. The process of this partial migration from one language and a frame of protest to another reveals ellipses in the historiographic optic on human rights.

5 Sources and Bibliography I accessed different archives and institutions between 2016 and 2018 in Germany, Spain, and Poland: the library of the Berlin-based Iberoamerikanisches Institut (part of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation/ Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) houses the archives of several Spanish magazines and newspapers, including the above-mentioned Cuadernos para el Diálogo. In Madrid, archival material concerning the Comisiones Obreras is located in the archive of the Archivo Historia del Trabajo/ Fundación 1° de Mayo in Madrid (“Mayday Foundation”). Here, I could read documents published underground, such as leaflets, letters, and pamphlets. This archive moreover stores the railway workers’ magazine Carril (“The Track”) and another magazine titled Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral (“Information Bulletins for Labor Legislation”), which have both been digitalized and are accessible on the archive’s website.1 The weekly newspaper Gaceta del Derecho Social (“Social Rights Gazette”) was published from 1970 by secret communist lawyers sympathizing with the Comisiones Obreras and is also stored in the foundation. Documents concerning the Proceso 1001 and the Spanish Communist Party were accessed in the Archivo del Partido Comunista de España (“Archive of the Spanish Communist Party”) in Madrid. Apart from the sources surrounding the Process against communist lawyers in 1972/73 and communist magazines, the archive stores documents of the Spanish Communist Party’s underground activism. Some of them are accessible online. This is true, for instance, for the mouthpiece of the Spanish Communist Party, Mundo Obrero (“A Workers’ World”).2 For the analysis of the Polish source material, I examined documents stored in the archive Ośrodek KARTA (“KARTA Center”). This archive is dedicated to sources dealing with history from below and to marginalized histories including (Polish-) Jewish history. It contains a major collection of documents of the Polish democratic opposition. Here, the issues of Robotnik have been stored as well as letters written by KOR members and ordinary citizens alike. Furthermore, single personal folders are accessible there, for instance documents that are related to Jacek Kuroń. Jan Olaszek, a researcher affiliated with the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN (“Institute for National Remembrance”), put a massive amount of digitalized archival material at my disposal, predominantly from the abovementioned KARTA archive and the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow. Olaszek and some colleagues have moreover developed a database with digitalized workers’ magazines.3 The intellectual émigré magazine Kultura (“Culture”) is also accessible online.4

 Fundación 1° de Mayo, Archivo Histórico de Trabajo, “Prensa digitalizada,” https://1mayo.ccoo. es/Publicaciones/Biblioteca_Fundacion/Prensa_digitalizada, accessed April 8, 2023.  Archivo Histórico del Partido Comunista de España, “Publicaciones periódicas – hemeroteca,” https://www.archivohistoricopce.org/descripcion-de-fondos/publicaciones-periodicas-hemeroteca/, accessed April 8, 2023.  Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, “Encyklopedia Solidarności,” https://encysol.pl/, accessed April 7, 2023.  Stowarzyszenie Instytut Literacki Kultura, “Kultura: Szkice. Opowiadania. Sprawozdania,” https://kulturaparyska.com/pl/publication/3/year/1976, accessed April 8, 2023; Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, “Encyklopedia Solidarności.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-005

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Bibliography Primary Sources Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral Jiménez de Parga y Cabrera, José. “Editorial” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 1 (1966): 1. Martino de Jugo, José Luís, and Rosero Eduardo. “La RENFE: Ante las elecciones sindicales.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966): 12–14. N.N. “A Encuesta.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966): 8–9. N.N. “El Concilio Vaticano II y el mundo de trabajo.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966): 8–10. N.N. “Encuesta.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966): 8–9. N.N. “Participar resueltamente en las elecciones.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 5 (1966): 1–2. N.N. “Un grupo de obreros de I. Químicas, “Cartas de los lectores””. Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966): 6–7. Ruíz, S. “Hemos leído para usted . . .” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 2 (1966): 13–14. Sartorius, Nicolás. “La mesa electoral.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 6 (1966): 12. Usera, Gabriel. “Problemas de la nueva regulación de los Accidentes de Trabajo.” Boletín de Información de Legislación Laboral 4 (1966): 27–28.

Carril. Boletín de Apoyo a las Comisiones Obreras de Ferroviarios Carril, December 1965. Carril, January 1966. Carril, October 1966. Carril, October 1966. Carril, April/ May 1967. Carril, August/ September 1968.

Gaceta del Derecho Social “Juan de Nogales.” “Perspectiva Jurídica: Juicio 1001.” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973): 14–15. Burgos, Rafael. “El Movimiento Sindical en España: Derecho de Asociación.” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973): 5. García Valdes, Carlos. “Asociación Ilícita Permanente: Reformar los Delitos Políticos.” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973): 15. N.N. “El T.O.P. condena con 162 años de carcel a diez trabajadores: Juicio 1001.” Gaceta de Derecho Social 31 (1973): 12–13. N.N. “Kiosco Social.” Gaceta de Derecho Social 24 (1973): 2. N.N. “Sumario 1001.” Gaceta de Derecho Social (1973): 69–72.

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Mundo Obrero. Órgano del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España Azcárate, Manuel. “Intensa solidaridad de los trabajadores australianos.” Mundo Obrero, May 10, 1973. Camacho, Marcelino, and N.N. “Haremos el proceso del régimen.” Mundo Obrero, January 17, 1973. Camacho, Marcelino e. a. “El saludo de los presos comunistas de Carabanchel.” Mundo Obrero, July 3, 1974. Comité Central del Partido Comunista de España. “¡Boicot Rotundo! ¡Abstención! ¡Que nadie acuda a votar el 14 de diciembre!: El referendum de Franco es una burla al pueblo.” Mundo Obrero, November 15, 1966. Davis, Angela. “Apoyar a los 10 de Carabanchel: Reprint of Solidarity Declaration.” Mundo Obrero, May 23, 1973. Delegación del PCE en la Conferencia anual del Labour Party Young Socialist, “Inglaterra: La juventud socialista por la libertad de los ‘10 de Carabanchel’”. Mundo Obrero, May 23, 1973. “‘Los Diez’, “Desde Carabanchel, Carta a la O.I.T.” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972. M.A. “Consideraciones al Sumario 1001.” Mundo Obrero, December 7, 1972. “Mundo Obrero.” May 10, 1973. “Mundo Obrero.” May 23, 1973. N.N. “Por qué se debe votar: Las elecciones sindicales.” Mundo Obrero, 1966. N.N. “La libertad es indivisible!” Mundo Obrero, February 6, 1967. N.N. “Ante el Primero de Mayo. Llamamiento del Partido Comunista de España.” Mundo Obrero, May May 1967. N.N. “Representantes de las principales actividades profesionales reclaman los derechos cívicos.” Mundo Obrero, July 1967. N.N. “Marcelino Camacho nuevamente detenido.” Mundo Obrero, July 8, 1972. N.N. “Brutal Petición Fiscal contra Camacho y otros dirigentes obreros/ La Iglesia al Tribunal de Orden Público.” Mundo Obrero, November 22, 1972. N.N. “Ofensiva contra la Represión.” Mundo Obrero, November 22, 1972. N.N. “¿En qué país, en qué siglo vivimos?” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972. N.N. “La Iglesia se pronuncia por la Amnistia.” Mundo Obrero, December 18, 1972. N.N. “En defensa de los 10.” Mundo Obrero, April 26, 1973. N.N. “El proceso represivo contra la clase obrera.” Mundo Obrero, May 19, 1973. N.N. “Camacho Acusa.” Mundo Obrero, July 1, 1973. N.N. “En torno al problema femenino.” Mundo Obrero, September 17, 1973. N.N. “Los Sindicatos de G. Bretaña organizarán el Tribunal Internacional para juzgar al régimen de Franco.” Mundo Obrero, September 17, 1973. N.N. “El Juicio: Declaración de los Observadores Extranjeros.” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973. N.N. “El Partido Comunista de España a todos los Españoles: Ante la Crisis del Régimen.” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973. N.N. “Libertad para los diez del proceso 1001: Amnistía para todos los presos políticos y sociales.” Mundo Obrero, December 29, 1973. N.N. “Alternativa democrática.” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974. N.N. “Vivir mejor, vivir libres: Editorial.” Mundo Obrero, February 14, 1974. N.N. “¿Aquí no ha pasado nada?” Mundo Obrero, April 25, 1974. N.N. “La inevitable transformación de España en un país democrático.” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974. N.N. “Un saludo de Pham Van Dong, Primer Ministro de la R.D. de Vietnam.” Mundo Obrero, June 4, 1974.

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N.N. “Comisiones Obreras, UGT y USO incorporados al grupo de trabajadores de la O.I.T.” Mundo Obrero, June 19, 1974. N.N. “La hora actual.” Mundo Obrero, June 19, 1974. N.N. “Anunciada en España y en París la creación de la Junta Democrática de España!” Mundo Obrero, July 31, 1984.

Cuadernos para el Diálogo Ariza, Julián. “Encuesta sobre el Referendum, Respuestas.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966): 17. Corbella Madueño, José. “Quien y como se hara la ley.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 9. Martínez Conde, Victor. “Ley Sindical y Base Representativa.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 12–13. N.N. “Desmitificación.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966): 7. N.N. “Meditación para un voto: (Editorial).” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 39 (1966): 1–2. N.N. “Hacia una Nueva Ley Sindical (Editorial).” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 1–2. N.N. “La Representación Sindical en las Cortes.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 45 (1967): 5. N.N. “Veinte Años de Derechos Humanos.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 53 (1968): 9–12. Peces Barba, Gregorio. “La paz en la sociedad democrática.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 42 (1967): 22–23. Rubio, José L. “Ante una futura Ley Sindical.” Cuadernos para el Diálogo 55 (1968): 18–21.

Documents from the Archivo del Partido Comunista de España (“Archive of the Spanish Communist Party”) in Madrid A todos los Partidarios de la Convivencia Nacional! A los Democratas del Mundo Entero!, April 1968, Caja 87/ 2.6, Archivo PCE. Acosta, Francisco, Marcelino Camacho, Luis Castilla-Fernández, Francisco García Salve, Juan MuñizZapico, Pedro Santiesteban, Eduardo Saborido, Nicolás Sartorius, Fernando Soto, and Ángel Zamora. Carta a la New York Times, May 1973, Caja 87/ 2.6, Archivo PCE. Amnesty International. Situación actual en las cárceles españoles, 1973, Archivo PCE. Camacho, Marcelino. Carta a la O.I.T, November 22, 1972, Caja 87/ 2.6, Archivo PCE. Camacho, Marcelino, Eduardo Saborido, Fernando Soto, Pedro Santiesteban, Ángel Zamora, Luís Fernández, Nicolás Sartorius, and Francisco Acosta. A la opinión pública, December 1973, Archivo PCE. Comité d’Information et de Solidarité avec l’Espagne. Bulletin d’Information du C.I.S.E. / N° special, March 1973, 87/ 2.2, Archivo PCE. Delegación Exterior de CCOO/ Marcelino Camacho et. al. “A los Trabajadores y Democratas. A los Sindicalistas de los Pueblos del Estado Español y del Mundo Entero,” July 1972; Letter from Carabanchel Prison. Enlaces sindicales y vocales del Jurado de Perkins. Letter to League of Human Rights, September 2, 1967, Archivo PCE. Grupo de Juristas Democratas. Documentos ‘Proceso 1001ʹ visitado por un grupo de Juristas Democratas Españoles, December 1973, 87/ 2.3, Archivo PCE. Marcelino Camacho and others. A los Trabajadores, December 1973, Caja 87/ 2.3, Archivo PCE. N.N. Amnistia – Libertad, Caja 87/ 2.3, Archivo PCE.

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Index Ariza, Julián 24, 49, 69–70, 88, 103–107, 117 Berlinguer, Enrico 140 Blumsztajn, Seweryn 142 Böll, Heinrich 138 Borusewicz, Bogdan 265–266 Bujak, Zbigniew 274–276, 282–283, 285, 287, 290, 312, 316, 323 Camacho, Josefina 224 Camacho, Marcelino 49, 70–71, 88–89, 103, 106–107, 109, 117, 185, 190–191, 206, 212, 215–218, 223–224, 228, 230–231, 236, 244, 319, 321 Carillo, Santiago 49, 102, 257 Carrero Blanco, Luis 45, 206, 230, 250, 262, 326 Carter, Jimmy 234 Ciesielski, Jan 297 Davis, Angela 217, 225–226, 261, 323 de Borbón, Juan Carlos 210 Dodziuk, Anna 273 Edelman, Marek 312–313, 329 Fernández, Luis 206, 231 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel 63 Franco, Francisco 10, 18, 222, 248 Frasyniuk, Władysław 275 Gierek, Edward 1, 55 Gil-Robles, José María 103, 117 Hardek, Władysław 275, 290, 316 Ibárruri Gómez, Dolores 49

Lipski, Jan Józef 138, 141, 178, 191 Lis, Bogdan 275, 290, 316 Lityński, Jan 142, 168–169, 175, 190 Łuczywo, Helena 273–275 Łuczywo, Witold 142 Marchewczyk, Wojciech 271 Michnik, Adam 39, 130, 133–134, 138, 164, 169, 186, 261, 276, 288, 333–334 Milewski, Jerzy 300 Miller, Arthur 138 Muñiz Zapico, Juan 206 Naimski, Piotr 135, 184 Navarro, Arias 258, 260 Onyszkiewicz, Wojciech 142 Ostałowski, Jerzy 271 Pienkowska, Alina 266 Piłsudski, Józef 142, 147 Pope John Paul II 41, 180, 307 Pope John XXIII 113 Pope Paul VI 31, 66, 113–114 Ruiz Giménez, Joaquín 117 Saborido, Eduardo 206, 209, 231 Salazar, António 257 Santiesteban, Pedro 206, 231 Sartorius, Nicolás 70, 93, 183, 206, 208, 210–211, 218, 231, 319 Sartre, Jean-Paul 138 Solís Ruíz, Juan 48 Soto Martín, Fernando 206 Suárez Roldán, María Luisa 44, 70 Szczęsna, Joanna 142, 273–275

Jaruzelski, Wojciech 268 Jaworski, Zdzisław 271

Tischner, Józef 307

Kołakowski, Leszek 132–133, 164, 167 Krzywonos, Henryka 266 Kulerski, Wiktor 283, 285

Waldheim, Kurt 142, 191 Walentynowicz, Anna 176, 265–266 Wałęsa, Lech 176, 203, 266–267, 269, 335

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768916-006

374

Index

Wóycicka, Irena 149 Wujec, Henryk 142 Wyszyński, Stefan 180

Zamora Antón, Miguel Ángel 206 Zieja, Jan 138, 183