Anarchist Prisoner Networks in Franco’s Spain and the Forging of the New Left in Europe

Abstract

This article explores the little-known but formative networks developing across the 1960s between anarchist political prisoners in Franco's Spain and emerging activists of the European New Left. As social change accelerated, these prisoners broke with the out-of-touch anarchist leadership-in-exile to connect with a new generation of activists inside and outside Spain. The article uses prisoner correspondence and prisoner-aid bulletins to reconstruct these informational networks, and argues they were an important element in the ‘global rupture of 1968’. It posits that anarchist prisoners’ input was a formative influence on how New Left activists came to see post-war Europe as a whole: both looked beneath Francoism's consumerist surface (habitually foregrounded in discussions of it as a Western client regime), to its reconfigured repressive core. The article discusses key discursive shifts by the anarchist prisoners as they sought international support in a new era of decolonization, ‘national liberation’ and the ramping up of the Cold War. In a landscape shaped by Castro's success in Cuba, war in Algeria and the birth of ETA inside Spain, anarchist prisoners and New Left activists alike defined Franco's political prisoners as victims not only of a national dictatorship but also of the Western Cold-War order.