Chapter 4 

The Drama of Spanish Socialism: 
Tragedy, Farce, or Conceptual Error? 

For Bill Shorr and Tania Mireles[1] 

“The Socialist Workers Party of Spain is the party of change. It is also the
party that must assure the tranquility of the Spanish people.   Therein lies 
the drama of Spanish socialism.”  --Felipe González

 

In Spain and in Latin America there have been many violent social conflicts, most of which the right wing has won.  Their history suggests that one need look no farther for an explanation of continued social inequality than to the ferocity of property owners and their military backers.   Here is a small example, recounted by George Collier, concerning a small village in Spain early in the 1936-39 civil war: 

In Barcelona and Madrid, people were being taken at night from their homes to the outskirts to be shot. Militants in Aracena had jailed a number of prominent landowners and clergy and threatened worse.  A rumor spread among the propertied families in Los Olivos that the militants had drawn up a list of rightists to eliminate.  Meanwhile, insurgent General Queipo de Llano, in a July 25 [1936] radio broadcast from Seville, threatened dire reprisals for any action against rightists: 

“In various villages of which I have heard, right-wing people are being held prisoner and threatened with barbarous fates.  I want to make known my system with regard to this.  For every person killed I shall kill ten and perhaps even exceed this proportion….  The leaders of these village movements may believe they can flee; they are wrong.  Even if they hide beneath the earth, I shall dig them out; even if they’re already dead I shall kill them again” (Collier 1987: 151).   

With a history of social violence to contemplate, it is easy to forget that the prosaic logic of economics also makes social democracy hard to achieve. The burden of this chapter will be to illustrate this less dramatic, but ultimately more important, obstacle. 

On October 28, 1982, the Socialist Workers Party of Spain won an overwhelming victory at the polls, electing an absolute majority of the members of the Spanish parliament, and winning 60 percent of the popular vote. The party’s First Secretary, Felipe González, became, at age 40, the youngest head of government in Europe.  The electoral triumph came 103 years, 5 months, and 26 days after the date when twenty-five young workers met in secret to found what was then a clandestine organization, the PSOE.  The socialists would win four successive elections and govern Spain for more than ten years. 

Between the death of the winner of the Civil War, the dictator Francisco Franco, in November 1975, and the elections of October 1982, two remarkable processes took place in Spain.  First, the authoritarian corporatist state established by Franco and intended by him to last forever, was dismantled and replaced by a constitutional monarchy.  Spanish voters approved a new Constitution in 1978.  Second, the centrist UCD party (Unión de Centro Democrático), which at first was dominant, fell apart and vanished, clearing the way for the left to win the elections of 1982.[2] 

On the surface the centrists cratered over social issues, specifically divorce. Spanish women first got the vote in 1933--twelve years earlier than French women.  When the Falange[3] won the Civil War, however, women lost virtually all rights.  Women living under the Franco dictatorship had no right to vote, to divorce, to abortion, to open bank accounts without the husband’s permission, to sign contracts without the husband’s permission, to travel, or even to be absent from the home more days than the husband allowed.[4]  The UCD was a loose coalition whose members ranged from social democrats to recent converts to democracy more or less nostalgic for Franco.  When the party leadership proposed to make up for lost time by modernizing Spain’s social legislation, it turned out that the members of the party could not agree on divorce.  In the ensuing chaos and stalemate, many MPs deserted, a few to the left, most to the right.   The UCD collapsed (Gilmour 1985: 263).[5]

Although divorce was the most salient public issue, both the left and the right were working deliberately to destroy the center.  The right did not want what appeared to be developing: a future in which Spanish voters would choose at intervals between center and left.  The socialist strategy was to eliminate the UCD in order to occupy the center itself.  At a multitudinous televised rally at Madrid’s main university campus on election eve, Felipe González offered the voters a government that would do what the UCD would not or could not do (Preston 1986: 211).

The more significant change leading up to October 28, 1982, was not, however, the dissolution of the center that allowed the socialists to win the election, but rather the dissolution of the dictatorship that allowed the election to be held.  Professor Josep Colomer (1995) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research in Barcelona has done a valuable study of how Spain was transformed from a dictatorship to a democracy in the years 1975-1981.  Understanding this transition to democracy is essential background for discussing what the socialists did during their ten year reign because democracy is still fragile in Spain and anything a government does there it necessarily does bearing in mind the permanent possibility of a military coup.  In discussing at some length Colomer’s study of the establishment of democracy in Spain, we want to comment particularly on his methodology. 

Colomer studies the demise of dictatorship and the birth of democracy with a method that combines social choice theory and game theory in what he calls a “rational choice approach.”  He describes it as follows: 

The advantage of the formal, deductive reasoning characteristic of the rational choice approach, is that it permits the identification of those elements which can explain real outcomes in a more accurate and precise manner than the conventional method of inductive generalization from empirical observations.   Once a set of alternatives, relevant actors, and preferences has been put forth and the deductive implications of the analysis have been formulated, the contrast between formal results and real outcomes can either confirm the validity of the explanation or suggest a modification or enlargement of the assumptions in order to produce a better fit between the model and reality.   In this way, it is possible to purify and refine the explanation, separate what is important from what is superfluous, and to produce real knowledge and understanding (Colomer 1995: 4-5).

The first and most important of the assumptions of the approach Colomer uses is  “that the decisions of actors can be explained as being derived from rational calculations”  (Colomer, op. cit.: 4).  This major assumption is surrounded by qualifications.  One of them, which bears on the payoffs (“the alternatives”) those rational actors are assumed to rationally choose is:  “A regime change is precisely a change of the rules of the game and, logically, the game for changing rules cannot entirely be shaped by the incentives structured by the rules being changed”  (Colomer, op. cit.: 6).  Colomer offers the following two examples:

Example 1.  The reformers (most famously Adolfo Suárez, head of the UCD) essentially double-crossed the army and the corporatist Council of State inherited from Franco, by breaking their promise that if democracy went forward the Communist Party would continue to be illegal.  Once democracy became the new norm, then it seemed rational to legalize all parties.  The decision was a rational and legitimate choice given the new rules (Ibid.: 68-77).[6]

Example 2.  For several hours during the night of February 23-24, 1981, it was not clear whether the rational alternatives--in terms of how what one does now is rewarded later--would be those of constitutional government or military dictatorship.  Colonel Tejero of the Civil Guard led 300 troops into a joint session of the Spanish parliament and held the entire government at gunpoint as part of a planned coup.  During those hours the decisions of a rational actor who calculated that democracy would continue would be different from those of one who calculated that the coup would succeed (Ibid.: 113-23). 

We propose to broaden Colomer’s rational choice approach by making six methodological comments before going on to apply the resulting modified approach  (which might be called a cultural construction approach) to shed light on constraints inherent in the logic of capitalism that made it very difficult, arguably impossible, for the socialists elected in 1982 to carry out their program.  

First, we would broaden the idea of “decisions” based on “rational calculations” and speak instead, following Aristotle, of “choices” following “deliberation.”   Thus the concept of “rational choices” becomes a subset of the wider category of symbolic processes guiding human action, or of discourses that guide practices. 

Second, Colomer, like many others, emphasizes that his model need not reflect the actual intellectual, emotional, and moral processes that move human action--as long as its assumptions lead to deductions that are verified by the data (1995: 4-5).[7]  We, also like many others, push instead in a realist direction.  We prefer the assumptions to reflect the actual processes that move human action.  Consider the following example: We count it as a point in favor of Marx’s M - C - M’ schema that it is realistic.  People really do think in terms of getting more money back when they invest money.  The general principles of accounting spell out in great detail how to count money with the intention of ending up with more than you started out with, and these principles are “the language of business.”  They are rules that actually guide life.

Third, Aristotle also observed that people make deliberate choices not on the basis of the facts, but rather on the basis of what they believe to be the facts.  In Spain, for example, the military conspirators who took Parliament prisoner on February 23, 1981, made rational calculations which led them to attempt a coup, based on the belief that King Juan Carlos II, who was crowned as king shortly after Franco’s death, would support them.  What they believed was not a fact.  The coup failed when Juan Carlos II spoke on the telephone to each of Spain’s eleven regional military commanders, asking them to be loyal to him and to the Constitution, and then shortly afterward sent them telexes with the same message.  We are among those who expand nearly to infinity Aristotle’s concept that it is beliefs, and not facts, that determine action.  The great majority, perhaps all, of the “facts” that guide human decisions are thoroughly embedded in systems of belief.  Humans are not animals endowed with direct contact with reality.  We live in dreams, and when we are lucky the relationship of our dreams to reality is not completely dysfunctional. We are scientific realists because we believe reality is there, and because we believe that the reason why scientific research has given humans immense power over nature during the past few centuries is that scientific methods succeed in finding out about reality.  Yet we are cultural idealists because we believe that we humans live in our imaginations.  In this sense we are all like Colonel Tejero when he marched at the head of his troops down the center aisle of the chambers of the Spanish Parliament, and up to the podium, shouting “In the name of the King!”[8] 

Fourth, Colomer and game theorists generally focus on “preferences.”  Colomer explains the motives of the 23 February 1981 conspirators by saying they misunderstood the preferences of the King.  Then he maps the preferences of Juan Carlos II, showing why his dominant preference was to be a constitutional monarch (1995: 116-21).  We have already implied that “preferences,” whatever they may be, are embedded in belief-systems.  Here we must add that decisions based on rational calculations are often not differentiated by preferences at all, but by beliefs about what the facts are, especially by beliefs about the causes that make the world the way it is.

Consider the following example.  The preferences of leftist Basque terrorists are similar to the preferences of Pablo Iglesias in that both prefer a classless society and the self-determination of peoples.[9]  For Iglesias causal power was to be found in organizing labor unions and political parties.  The combination of economic and political power would make a world where socialism could be achieved.  Many Spaniards, however, believe that such a causal analysis is incomplete.  They speak of the de facto powers (the “poderes facticos”) and often name them as the Army, the Banks, and the Church.  Terrorists take the de facto power thesis a step further by holding that it is productive to attack the de facto powers physically.  Thus there is a specious logic behind assassinating army officers, robbing banks, and burning churches.  It is a logic that differs from that of Iglesias, and from that of law-abiding citizens generally, not in its preferences, but in its causal analysis of how the world works.

Our fifth methodological comment on Colomer’s rational choice approach is that rational choice models have been accused of ethnocentrism.   They are said to promote the ideology of homo economicus to the status of scientific method (Plon 1976: 12-23, 69-100).  Colomer accommodates this criticism when he acknowledges that of course every rational choice has an institutional context.  No great harm is done if in his research he assumes that every decision maker is a rational calculator of alternative payoffs, if we bear in mind that rational choice models are only models, which can be expected to apply, more or less, whenever the institutional context of the research is a context where, in fact, homo economicus dwells.  Further, the great merit of model building is that by its clarity and specificity it permits tests which measure a model’s conformity, or lack of conformity, to reality.  If there are people somewhere and sometimes whose decisions cannot be understood with a rational choice approach, then the testing of models will discover their existence in due course.  Meanwhile, Colomer’s book does show that a rational choice approach does provide explanations of the decisions of political actors in the Spanish transition to democracy from 1975 to 1981. 

Fine, but if we want to say that Colomer’s book provides “explanations” of decisions as a result of quasi-economic payoff calculations, as distinct from saying that his approach “sheds light” on certain human decisions, then we must be content to use the word “explanations” in a weak sense.  There is certainly no Newtonian inevitability in the explanations Colomer’s book provides.  Quite the contrary.   Several times in the course of the book Colomer has occasion to confirm the words of the UCD leader Adolfo Suarez with which the book begins: 

 

An important lesson which I for one have learned from the Spanish democratic transition, in which I have decisively taken part, is that historical determinism does not exist.  In living and making this period of history, I have received the most important ratification of an essential idea: that the future, far from being decided, is always the realm of liberty, open and uncertain, although foreseeable by the analyses of the structural conditions and the operating forces of the society in which we live, the most essential of which is the free will of those men who shape history (Suarez quoted in Colomer, op. cit.: 1).

 

Now, instead of regarding the question as one concerning how to achieve knowledge in the social sciences, let us regard the question as one concerning how to achieve the ethical construction of social democracy.  We should be able to accept the observation that the rational choice approach bears a certain ideological affinity to capitalism.  However, it seems pointless to say that for the sake of improving society—and not just explaining it—we should advocate irrationality.  We should instead advocate deliberation and choice according to a better logic, a logic that embodies higher stages of moral development.  Making rational choices according to a better logic does not necessarily mean that the majority of the population has to achieve higher scores on the moral development tests that psychologists have devised.  It can mean, instead or in addition, that the normal conventions of society, the ones reflected by the “conventional stage” of the psychologists’ tests, evolve to reflect better conventional norms. 

Our sixth and final methodological comment is that it is thus advisable to broaden the rational choice approach in two directions: cultural and realist.  Culturally, it is wise to remember that rational choice methodology is so thoroughly embedded in historically constructed social institutions that its very terms carry the freight of modern western capitalist metaphysical commitments.  To say “preferences,”  “actor,” “decision,” “payoff, “rational calculation” is already to enter a discourse with a context.  It is not to mirror human nature as it is and always will be.  It is to choose a vocabulary.   Conversely, the enormous variety of the cultural structures studied by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists is only a foretaste of the even greater variety of cultural structures that are possible and might be invented.   We have more choices than we know we have. 

Realistically, there are physical facts that are not institutional facts.   One of them is that there could be enough for everybody.  With the knowledge that the physical and biological sciences have, or could acquire, all human needs could be met without ecological damage.  It is physically possible to implement population policies that would stabilize the earth’s population at whatever number is sustainable.  It is a physical fact that the long-awaited and often-frustrated civilization of agape, where everybody is included and nobody is rejected, is an ever-present possibility. 

Let us return now to a consideration of Marx’s schema M - C - M’.   In the second volume of Capital, which is devoted to the circulation of money and capital, Marx gives an expanded version of the M - C - M’ schema as follows: 

M - C - P - C’ - M’

 

In this diagram M stands for the money initially invested to buy commodities.  The commodities Marx particularly has in mind are the ingredients of production: labor-power, raw materials, and whatever else is needed for production.  P stands for production.  The key point in the diagram is P, because it is through production that C turns into C’.    C’ is commodities again, but this time it is commodities with greater value.  The increase in value is due to a remarkable quality Marx attributes to labor-power and to nothing else.  Labor-power is a commodity that produces value.  The value of the commodities the workers produce exceeds the cost of the labor-power that the capitalist purchases.  Voila tout.  The sale of C’ (the augmented commodity) yields M’, the augmented money, which is what the investor wanted in the first place, and which is the point and purpose of the exercise. 

By this elaboration Marx subtracts from rather than adds to the realism of the M - C - M’ schema.[10]   Making money is indeed a conscious intention of investors.  It is generally realistic to say that if they did not make money by hiring workers, and by using their labor power to produce more than it cost, then they would not hire them.  Marx, however, did not leave it at that.  He went on to explain a great mystery, namely, “How is profit possible?”  By advancing the plausible theory that it was possible because of the exploitation of labor he added to the scientific prestige of socialism.  As plausible as this explanation was, however, over the years it has not withstood scientific scrutiny (Robinson 1967).[11]

In any case, giving a scientific answer to the question “How is profit possible?” is not really the point.  To paraphrase Marx himself, the scientists have only explained the world in various ways.  The point, however, is to change it: to achieve, “production by society for itself.”  And quite apart from the merits (scientific and ethical) of Marx’s theory that profit comes from exploitation, his theory does not deny, and indeed it presupposes, that whatever goes on in the sphere of production, the purpose of the process is established by the requirements of circulation.  The desired conclusion is always the sale of the product: more money. 

Three examples may help to clarify what we mean by the subordination of production to circulation: 

Example 1.   A sea-going freighter has two sets of officers.  The deck officers are in charge of loading and unloading cargo and steering the ship.  The engine officers are in charge of keeping the ship going.  The captain of the ship is always a deck officer.  This is to be expected.  A commercial ship is a means for making money.   Money is made not inside the ship, but in the ship’s transactions with the outside world, as it takes on cargo and puts cargo off. 

Example 2.  The Chief Executive Officer of a large corporation normally comes from finance or from sales.  If, in an unusual case, a production manager advances to CEO, it is not because of his or her skill in producing goods or services, but because of skills more directly related to making the business profitable.  The accountants, not the engineers, write the bottom lines. 

Example 3.   When the striking workers took over Italian automobile factories in Turin in 1921, they found that “possessing the means of production” did not do them any good.   They could not buy the raw materials that went into production, and they could not sell the products that came out. 

The rule that circulation frames and directs production--represented in the schema M - C - M’ in both its short and expanded versions--is not a rule that regulates capitalism.  It constitutes capitalism.   It constitutes production for exchange, which is not production directly for use, but production for the sake of selling for money.   Even if one considers that a proper definition of capitalism must include other elements, the M - C - M’ relationship is still constitutive, not merely regulative.  It must be implicitly or explicitly part, even if not necessarily all, of a definition of capitalism.  It is not a mere rule of the game; rather, it is what creates the game. 

Production for exchange is a basic cultural structure.  It is “realistic” as an assumption in the social sciences because it is what people really do.  It describes a set of working norms that guide human action, rather than being a “factor” derived from the statistical analysis of data, like the “factors” that are said to make up intelligence.   But M - C - M’ is not “real” in the sense of “physically real independently of human practices.”   Societies in which the production of commodities for exchange prevails are indeed a minority among the societies known to anthropology and to history.   The schema M - C - M is a socially constructed reality, and it is neither the worst nor the best of the realities humans have constructed.  It can be deconstructed and reconstructed. 

Without being physically real, it is “basic” because it governs what Marx called the metabolism of society, the exchange of matter and energy with the environment, work.  When the prerequisites for cycle after cycle of M - C - M’   (i.e., “accumulation”) are not in place, then, physically, things stop.  Factories lie idle.  Bread lines form, as well as lines to buy toilet paper, matches, gasoline, diapers, and whatever else turns out to be scarce.  This basic cultural structure, situated strategically at the intersection of culture and nature, has ramifications for all aspects of life. 

In view of the basic constitutive rules of exchange, one must question whether the program of the PSOE was at all feasible.  Nothing jolts investor confidence, and therefore the M-C-M’ cycle and the tranquility of a nation, like a proposal to redistribute property, especially if the proposal appears to be accompanied by the power to implement it. 

When the PSOE won an absolute majority in Parliament in 1982 it no longer advocated the rapid socialization of the means of production called for by the program adopted in Barcelona in 1888.  Nevertheless, even the moderate program on which the party campaigned in 1982 proposed to shift economic power in favor of the organized workers and against owners.  The new program called for “socialization” in ways that did not necessarily mean expropriation, but did mean “social control,” or “limiting international dependence.”  They did mean, “penetration of the power of capital through augmenting the power of labor unions, small business supported by the state, cooperatives, and municipal governments” (quoted in Sarasqueta 1984: 130-34).  The 1982 PSOE platform called for “real equality” and proposed to remove the obstacles in civil society (in the schools, in labor relations, in consumption etc.) that impede this "real equality."[12]

Was this too much to ask? As ideology, it was just what candidate and future Prime Minister Felipe González said it was, “the deepening of democracy in every direction” (quoted in Share 1981: 139).  As economics, however, it was a formidable challenge.  The challenge was to reshape a society that was already shaped so as to require constant care and feeding to coax investors into initiating the processes that led to the good things everybody wanted: jobs, goods, services, tax revenues.  It is not easy to reshape society and maximize incentives for investors simultaneously.  The first task requires whittling away at the privileges of property.  The second requires catering to its every whim. 

Even before the PSOE won the 1982 elections, it had already made a series of compromises with the owners of the means of production by participating in “social pacts” sponsored by the UCD in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1981.   The pacts were comprehensive multi-issue agreements designed, among other things, to achieve labor peace by making limited concessions to workers in return for a no-strike pledge.  In the first series of pacts, known as “Moncloa Pacts” because the presidential Moncloa Palace was the place where representatives of the “social partners” sat down to negotiate them, the socialists joined in reassuring business interests that no nationalizations were planned.   “They can rest assured,” said González (1978: 263).[13]

The Moncloa Pacts and their successors prescribed an austerity program described as uniting the nation behind rational economic measures that would build a healthy economy for everyone’s benefit.  The prescribed measures succeeded in reducing inflation slightly, in bringing the Spanish balance of payments back into surplus, and in increasing exports.  While wages were kept in check, the increase in employment that was supposed to follow failed to materialize.  Instead, unemployment soared, leaving the Spanish working class to bear the brunt of the economic crisis (Pérez-Díaz 1993: 227; Share 1989: 50-51).[14] 

By the time the PSOE government took office it was not only the working class who found that the UCD’s social pacts were not working.  Spain’s Gross Domestic Product was growing at only 1.7 percent per year, which was unfavorably compared to 7.5 percent per year growth from 1960 to 1970 during the “Spanish economic miracle” under Franco (Harrison 1995: 13, 18; Pérez-Díaz 1993: 216).  One logical approach to the perceived failure of the social pacts was to say that although labor had made sacrifices to boost profitability and investor confidence, it had not made enough sacrifices.  The working classes would have to sacrifice still more to boost GDP growth to the desired levels in order indirectly and eventually to achieve its own goals of lower unemployment and higher wages. 

Left-wing elements within the PSOE called for another solution: they wished to use state investment to expand economic activity, modernize industry to make it more efficient by means of state-sponsored programs, and ban capital flight to prevent investors from seeking greener pastures elsewhere. 

Was there really a choice? Or was the “expansionary” solution advocated by the left-wing critics within the PSOE just a pipedream, which, if it had been tried, would have led to the same dismal results produced by such measures elsewhere?  Adam Przeworski (1986) has argued that in such situations social democrats do not have a real choice, but must bow to reality by doing whatever is necessary to increase the profitability of business: 

Once private property of the means of production was left intact, it became in the interest of wage-earners that capitalists appropriate profits.   Under capitalism the profits of today are the condition of investment and hence production, employment, and consumption in the future….  Social democracies protect profits from the demands of the masses because radical redistributive policies are not in the interest of wage-earners.   No one drew the blueprint and yet the capitalist system is designed in such a way that if profits are not sufficient, then eventually wage rates or employment must fail.   Crises of capitalism are in no one’s mutual interest; they are a threat to wage-earners since capitalism is a system in which economic crises must inevitably fall on their shoulders (Adam Przeworski, quoted in Share 1981: 3).[15]

We would revise Przeworski’s first sentence in the quoted paragraph to read:  “Once private property of the means of production was left intact, and as long as accumulation is the motor of production, it is in the interest of wage-earners that capitalists appropriate profits.” 

Felipe González and the PSOE did what modern European social democrats normally do, which is what they perceive they have to do: whatever is necessary to create the conditions under which the M - C - M’ cycles of accumulation can move forward.  It happened that the PSOE was voted into office at a time when capitalism worldwide found that the type of “regime of accumulation” it required was one that some scholars call “flexible accumulation,” i.e., breaking down the “rigidities” that hampered profit-seeking due to labor union power and government social policies during the heyday of the welfare state and Keynesian economics.[16] 

Thus the historical role of the PSOE in Spain was to break the social consensus negotiated under the UCD government by imposing policies akin to those of Ronald Reagan in the United States, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and Helmut Kohl in West Germany.  Such policies included limiting wages; reducing government expenditures; restructuring heavy industry to immediately lay off 65,000 workers and to lay off more in successive waves; devaluing the Spanish peseta; raising the prices of electricity, gasoline, and public transportation; cutting pensions; tightening requirements for pension recipients; capping payments to the sick, injured, and elderly; and increasing payroll deductions to fund social security (Pérez-Díaz 1993: 91; Share 1989: 71-79; Moxon-Browne 1989: 9).  Prime Minister González admitted on Spanish television: “It is true, as the unions contend, that workers’ salaries have risen more slowly than the owners’ income.  That is the way it is all over Europe, and that is the way it should be in the early stages of recovery.  Only this way can profits be invested in productive sectors of the economy” (González quoted in Share, op. cit.: 151). 

Consistent with its new-found faith in market-based solutions, and contrary to the platform it ran on in 1982, the PSOE took steps to diminish Spanish self-reliance, which had been carefully nurtured under Franco, and to integrate Spain into global markets.  Perhaps the crowning blow came when the French and German governments insisted that free trade in Europe be accompanied by a “social charter” guaranteeing certain basic social rights to workers.  The Spanish PSOE government, aware that Spain’s comparative advantage in Europe rested on cheap labor, watered down the social charter to make it a matter of national discretion. 

Perhaps the most severe challenge faced by the PSOE government, and by its successor, the center-right Partido Popular, has been the continual assassinations, robberies, and bombings, carried out by the Basque terrorists.  The King’s repeated pronouncements that it is illusory to think that a suspension of the Constitution would permit an effective crackdown on terrorists are hardly comforting--since they imply that there are army officers who need to hear the King’s message.   Like the British in Northern Ireland, and like the United States government trying to combat gangs and drugs in America’s inner cities, the Spanish government is engaged in trying to prove that crime does not pay, and that functioning normally as a law-abiding citizen does pay.    Again like the British, and like other democratic governments around the world trying to wean defiant ethnic minorities away from violence, the Spanish government finds that the structural limitations on its ability to deliver social justice frustrate its efforts to prove that democracy works while terrorism does not. 

We do not mean to imply that an appreciation of the constraints that the basic cultural structures of exchange impose on the achievement of social justice implies that the terrorists have correctly understood power and politics.  On the contrary.  Identifying the problem as cultural and structural strengthens the case for education, and weakens the case for violence. 

Nor do we mean to imply that when the socialists wrote their 1982 electoral platform they were lying to the dispossessed classes of Spain by promising them changes they knew they could not deliver.  Felipe González, Alfonso Guerra, and the majority faction of the PSOE, which turned out to be the staff of the political administration that brought neoliberalism to Spain, were quite aware in 1982 that “the deepening of democracy in every direction” was hard to achieve, but they specifically mentioned two good reasons for believing that although it was difficult it was not impossible (Calvo Hernando 1987: 239).   The good reasons they gave were the examples of Sweden and Austria.  Although the constitutive rules of capitalism, diagrammed by Marx as the M -C - M schema, and summarized by Przeworski’s statement of the need to protect profits from mass demands, might seem to imply that we cannot simultaneously administer capitalism and transform it, it seemed that there must be some flaw in any logic requiring that implication.  There had to be a flaw, for the Swedes and Austrians had in fact done it.  What exists must by definition be possible.  In the next chapter we turn to Sweden, one of the alleged living proofs that social democracy can be not just a dream, but a reality. 

Notes