50 years since the death of Spain's fascist tyrant Franco

The 20th November 2025 marked half a century since the death of Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco. 

 

Fifty years since the end of a regime built on blood, terror and class domination. Fifty years since the man responsible for crushing the Spanish Republic was lowered into the ground, yet his legacy, and the system he served, refuse to die on their own. History teaches us that fascism does not dissolve with the death of a dictator. It must be defeated, again and again, by the living struggle of the working class.

 

Franco’s rule was born in a military uprising against democracy, against workers’ power, against the revolutionary hopes of the people. Backed directly by Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s forces drowned the Spanish Republic in fire. The “White Terror” that followed the victory of fascism was not a tragic by-product, but a conscious class strategy: eliminate the militant workers, the Communists, the socialists, the anarchists, the peasants who seized land, the women who dared to demand equality, the nations of Spain that refused the chains of reaction. Hundreds of thousands were executed, disappeared or died of torture, imprisonment, hunger, and forced labour. The mass graves that still scar Spain’s soil are not an archaeological detail, they are the physical imprint of class murder.

Francoism was not merely political repression. It was the total subordination of society to a reactionary project of nationalism, clericalism and capitalist restoration. Trade unions were banned, strikes crushed, independent organizing outlawed. The Church controlled education and culture. Catalan, Basque, Galician identity and languages were persecuted. Women were reduced to legal minors. Workers were expected to obey, bosses to rule. This was not “order”; it was fascism in its purest form — the dictatorship of capital brutalized through militarism and fear.

Some proclaim today that “Spain moved on,” that Franco is a relic of the past. But fascism never retires quietly. The children of Franco did not disappear; they inherited positions of power in the state, the judiciary, the media, the military and big business. The 1978 transition did not uproot Francoism — it integrated it. The amnesty law protected torturers, not the victims. Monarchism — restored by Franco himself — still stands as a pillar of the Spanish establishment. And today, the far right marches again in the streets, in parliament, in the discourse of hatred against migrants, minority communities and the organized working class.

If memory becomes nostalgia, fascism wins. If memory becomes passive commemoration, fascism breathes. Only when memory becomes struggle — active, organized, political — can fascism be confronted. The honouring of the fallen of the Republic, of the International Brigades, of the workers and partisans who resisted, is not a ritual; it is a call to continue their unfinished task: the destruction of fascism at its root — the capitalist system that breeds it whenever its power is threatened.

Fifty years after Franco’s death, the duty remains the same: to build an uncompromising, disciplined and united anti-fascist movement. To expose the exploitation that nourishes far-right demagogy. To fight the rewriting of history that transforms murderers into “patriots.” To defend the rights of the working class not in words but in organized militant action. To transform remembrance into mobilization.

The Spanish Republic fell, but the cause for which it fought did not. The world today echoes the 1930s: crises, wars, inequality and desperation. In such conditions, fascism again seeks a path to power. The answer of the working class must be as clear as it was then: fascism is not debated — it is defeated.

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©