Conference 'Barcelona, from Textiles to Technology: The Development of a Great City IV'

Thursday 12 November 2015
Barcelona, from Textiles to Technology: The Development of a Great City IV
Speakers: Marc Andreu (Universitat de Barcelona) and Sebastian Balfour (LSE)
Screening of the documentary The Pegaso Generation (Generació Pegaso). Director: Isabel Andrés Portí.
Chair: Paul Preston
Time: 16.30 h.
Place: LSE, Portugal Street, Cowdray House, 1^st floor, Seminar Room 1.11
Poster
PowerPoint presentations by Marc Andreu and Sebastian Balfour

With the collaboration of:

This conference is the fourth of a series of events on the history of Barcelona from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Programme:

• 16.30 h. Welcome by Prof. Paul Preston
• 16.35 Dr. Marc Andreu (Universitat de Barcelona)
• 17.45 h. Screening of The Pegaso Generation (Generació Pegaso). Spain, 2012, 59 mins. In Catalan with English subtitles.
• 19 h. Prof. Sebastian Balfour (LSE) 

Abstracts:

• Barcelona (1968-1979): Civic Pressure and the Spanish Transition to Democracy, by Dr. Marc Andreu

The civic movement forged in neighbourhoods during the Franco dictatorship in Spain in the sixties was led by opposition militants (basically Communist and Christian Democrat). Its structure in Catalonia was a series of neighbourhood committees and associations. From 1972 onwards, it was organised in Barcelona around a legal federation (FAVB), which was largely middle class and initially linked to the local Francoist establishment. However, it was quickly taken over by the urban and Catalanist left, which enabled it to become a key part of the fight against Francoism and the struggle for democracy. This popular movement achieved numerous victories in Barcelona in terms of urban, social and cultural issues.

After the departure of the Francoist mayors Porcioles (1973), Masó (1975) and Viola (1976), this movement pushed for, and eventually achieved, an unparalleled political, social and cultural break in Barcelona. In the course of the process of political reform and transition to democracy, it had repercussions throughout Catalonia and the rest of Spain. It reached its apogee, in political, social and cultural terms, through its protest agenda during the two year term of the mayor Socías Humbert (1977-1979).

In 1979, with the introduction of a local democratic system, the demands for participation and grassroots democracy were met with resistance from the old economic elites and the new political power. The citizen movement suffered disappointment and a political crisis exacerbated by social demobilisation in the 1980s despite the efforts of some neighbourhood leaders. The role of the citizen movement in Barcelona was instrumental in the development of other social movements in Spain as well as in achieving concrete improvements in neighbourhoods and, ultimately, preparing the way for the eventual Barcelona model.

• The Pegaso Generation (Generació Pegaso). Directed by Isabel Andrés Portí

Paco, Andreu, Talo, Manolo and Pepito met in the late 1960s. They were in their twenties and worked in Barcelona at one of the most important state-owned factories of Franco’s dictatorship: the Pegaso automotive plant. United by their ideals, they organised divisions of the Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO, The Workers Commissions) and the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, The Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia), then clandestine organisations. They risked their lives, and the well-being of their families, in their fight to improve labour conditions, and in the struggle against Franco. Some suffered imprisonment, were forced into hiding, lost their jobs. Only the strong bonds of friendship enabled them to overcome the obstacles and make the Pegaso factory a pioneer in attaining workers’ rights during Spain’s transition to democracy. During that time they recorded some of those moments with a Super 8 camera. This unshown material, of great value, is filtered through the gaze of the daughter of one of the protagonists, the director of this project, to tell a story which is far more closely connected with the present than we might imagine.

• Barcelona during the desarrollo years, by Prof. Sebastian Balfour

This presentation focused on Barcelona during the desarrollo years after the project for the economic modernisation of Spain and its integration into the international economy of the Cold War became consolidated in the Stabilisation Plan of the Opus Dei government between 1957-59. From the pariah city of 1939, Barcelona became a showpiece for the regime by the mid-sixties, closely integrated into its authoritarian modernisation plans inspired by the end-of-ideology model of American Cold War sociologists. Barcelona also exemplified the contradictions of this model. Two salient and related cases were looked at: Porciolisme, on the one hand, or the politics of the Mayor Josep Maria Porcioles between 1957 and 1973, and on the other, the state-run SEAT factory in Barcelona, whose 600 model became a symbol for the Opus Dei technocrats of a new, consumerist, and ideologically anaesthetised Spain (‘La España del 600’). An Opus Dei collaborator, Porcioles succeeded in recruiting networks of managerial elites into a new social base for the regime, appealing at the same time to a new Catalanist regionalism. His urbanisation project, on the other hand, marked by infrastructural deficits, corruption, and nepotism, gave rise to widespread social protest. The SEAT factory, for its part, became the most militant workplace in the country, a model of anti-Francoist mobilisation. That is, both the urban and economic growth of Barcelona in the 1960s generated social and labour protest which, combined with other  causes and movements, deeply undermined the legitimacy of the Francoist regime.