2025/05/01 by Michael Seidman · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Communism, Protests, Social Movements #Italian Fascism and Post-war Society #Spanish History and Politics
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609765
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The late twentieth-century collapse of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes brought in its political and historiographical wake a renewed emphasis on human rights. This humanitarian trend was accompanied by comparative and global approaches that entangled national histories. Such is the context of this new volume, which examines the rise of what the author calls the “democratic opposition” and its involvement in labor protest before the collapse of the Francoist regime in Spain and the communist regime in Poland. While workers—or, rather, workers’ organizations—spearheaded movements for change, progressive Catholic intellectuals played significant supportive roles in both countries. Workers and intellectuals united around the demand for human rights, including the ability to collectively organize wage earners and their right to strike. Both the Spanish and Polish oppositions protested when their respective authoritarian regimes repressed workers’ rights. The ability to organize and especially to strike—ultimately a refusal to work—represented perhaps the final stage of the abolitionist campaign to end forced labor and slavery. These social rights completed the civil rights specified in the eighteenth-century Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bill of Rights.A reflective comparatist, Delius is aware of the similarities and differences between the two countries and the protest movements they spawned. Underground publications were less important in late Francoist Spain because of its “defascistization” and relative liberalization during the late 1960s, which permitted some progressive Catholic publications such as Cuadernos para el Diálogo. This monthly’s openness to a human rights discourse narrowed the gap between Catholic intellectuals, some of whom were constitutional monarchists, and leftist worker militants, some of whose demands the Second Vatican Council supported. Likewise in Poland, the mass Solidarity movement—containing over 80 percent of working Poles in 1980—brought together workers and Catholics (not excluding Polish nationalists) and raised important issues of exclusionary nationalism versus a more inclusive patriotism. In the author’s broadly Lutheran concept, Catholic and universal norms were “vernacularized” from below during this period when the transition to democracy represented Spanish and Polish dissidents’ immediate goal. Ecumenical coalitions would make their nations’ subsequent democratic transitions relatively violence free.Although a valuable contribution to the literature on democratic transitions, human rights, and workers’ movements, this volume emerged from a recent German doctoral dissertation and needed further editing before publication. The English prose, while generally comprehensible, is not always correct or idiomatic. The text contains some relatively minor historical inaccuracies. For example, after World War II the French union federation, Confédération Générale du Travail, was not “anarchist” (71). Nonetheless, this impressive and thoughtful work ably blends the national with the transnational and the particular with the general. Few scholars have the linguistic skills to write a comparative history of workers’ movements based on underground primary sources in southern and eastern Europe. The author shows that although both productivist regimes—Polish Marxism and Spanish fascism shared this labor-centrism—attempted to ban strikes, the reigning Polish Communists practiced their work ideology more fully by employing in percentage terms nearly twice as many women than the Spanish franquistas did. This higher percentage of female workers reflected a Marxism that was not inflected by the more traditional Catholic sexism of Franco’s Spain. Unsurprisingly, despite official ideology and legality, neither state succeeded in preventing strikes, which were often provoked by sudden price increases.The author argues that workers were “rights activists and agents of democratic change” who pushed for the “democratization of both the workplaces and the entire society” (38, 7). This raises the problem of the limits of participatory democratization in the workplace. The answer can emerge only when history from below is taken to a new subterranean level to discover workers’ desires and, even more importantly, behaviors. This challenging task is complicated by the reality that the author’s sources are frequently underground publications that were produced by militants—whether workers or intellectuals—who followed their organization’s agenda. For example, even if the “workers themselves” wrote the Spanish railroad workers’ publication Carril, its editors were representatives of the Comisiones Obreras, which was tied to the Partido Comunista de España, a defender of the Soviet model and the popular democracies, including the Polish People’s Republic (67). The Polish Solidarity journal, Robotnik, demanded workers’ control from below, but its actual realization in the workplace was problematic, especially given that Robotnik criticized some strikes as “short-sighted,” thus indicating a certain distance between militants and “ordinary” workers (162). Rank-and-file wage earners should not be conflated with militants, who may have had quite different agendas than the people they claimed to represent.The ambiguities of the opposition’s appeals for “labor democracy” and “workers’ self-management” demonstrate the difficulty of interpreting work, whether forced or waged (17, 160). Like most, if not all, labor historians, the author emphasizes work as an activity involving collaboration and solidarity, but work has other aspects that can egotistically fulfill or alternatively estrange individuals, thus making workplace democracy problematic. More concretely, the right to organize and strike has sometimes endangered workers’ self-management and workers’ democracy, as occurred in both Russia and Republican Spain during their revolutions and ensuing civil wars. Workers’ rights can conflict with human rights, even if Delius does not explore this potential conflict.Thus, human rights are no panacea. They do not prevent and may indeed encourage all kinds of collectivities, including nations such as Spain and Poland, to portray themselves exclusively as victims. This tendency often has, as its corollary, a decontextualization and distortion of historical particularities. Therefore, the author shows that certain nationalist and leftist visions of Polish and Spanish suffering during World War II or the Spanish Civil War unhistorically equated themselves with the gold standard in such matters, the Holocaust.This far-ranging and stimulating book presents central issues of the late twentieth century by exploring human rights and worker responses in productivist societies on the supposed peripheries of Europe. The dilemma concerning individual and collective self-management in the workplace and society revisits the book’s epigraph, a quote from Ernst Bloch: “A map on which you cannot find the land Utopia is not worth a glance” (my translation).