Put away that working class cap! Watering down proletarian publishing in the Spanish Transition

Abstract

During the transitional period from dictatorship to democracy in Spain, the publications and publishers’ initiatives that sought to rebuild the class identity of the labour movement while also trying to create an alternative critical of Neo-liberal doctrines of the time, were subjected to a double process of appropriation and depersonalization. This article examines the importance that the proletarian discourse had in configuring the Spanish counter-culture and even in bringing about the very crisis of Franco’s regime during the late years of his government; and it describes the most important expressions of this in the publishing sector. The paper also analyses the key elements that allowed the ‘democratic reformists’ to absorb such discourse, and to reformulate it as a cultural product less ideologically charged, in order to better align with the attitude of western industrial societies.