Situating Solidarity in Spain

The term ‘solidarity’, broadly understood as the ‘unity resulting from common interests, feelings, or sympathies’, has indisputably left-wing connotations. Although appeals to solidarity have become increasingly common today, the term arguably still evokes trade union action and mobilisation of the working classes. In turn, this association harks back to Marx and Engels's concluding observation in the 1848 Communist Manifesto that ‘[t]he proletarians having nothing to lose but their chains’, and their consequent exhortation: ‘Working men [sic] of all countries, unite!’ (Engels and Marx, 1968: 62). Indeed, solidarity, in this sense the recognition that ‘we are all in the same boat’, can be thought to emerge most powerfully when the need to confront fear, oppression or injustice is identified.

In Spain under Franco's fascist dictatorship, oppositional solidarity was chiefly organised around the then clandestine Partido Comunista de España (PCE) (Morán, 1986).