A book a day: Carlos Barciela, ed.: Autarky and the black market

Original language: castellano

Year of publication: 2003

Valuation: Interesting with qualms

At the level of ordinary citizens, that is, myself, there is not much we really know about Franco’s regime. Yes, its coup origin, the repression and the absence of freedoms, its retrograde character, the filthy morality, the national Catholicism. But for example, in the field of the economy in a broad sense, perhaps we do not have much data at hand, at most it began with an autarkic stage inspired by related regimes, the stabilization and developmentalism of the 60s, emigration massive to the cities and abroad. So it is not bad to approach the economic management of the Franco regime based on the decisions of its successive governments, to observe in the most dispassionate way possible how these areas were managed.

This is what this book does, in which Carlos Barciela, professor of Economic History, brings together a series of works by various authors on different aspects of Franco’s economic policy in a very specific stage, from the end of the Civil War to the Plan of Stabilization of 1959, which meant a more or less decided or forced opening towards a comparable market economy and the entry of the so-called technocrats into relevant positions. These are rather academic texts on various aspects directly related to the economy: demography, human capital and educational policy, agricultural management, industrialization, fiscal and monetary policy, among others.

It must be said that we are not dealing with popular literature, they are not exhibitions intended for the general public but rather for the world of historians and researchers. Taking these into account, it must be said that reading is at times quite arduous, and in some cases it poses significant difficulties, although it depends largely on the focus of each article and the ability (or will) of each of the authors. . Tables and graphs, sometimes difficult to interpret for the layman, illustrate the theses presented, reinforcing the technical aspect of a good part of the presentations. So the reader is warned that it is a text for those very interested in the time and the subject.

From the modest point of view of the purely amateur reader, we can nevertheless draw some general conclusions. The main one is perhaps that this stage under analysis meant a delay of twenty years in the economic development of Spain, a burden that, despite the ardor of the 60s, had to be carried until the last decades of the century, when we began to converge in so many aspects with our neighbors. After the war, even before, economic management (like other areas of government) is absolutely dominated by the ideological component: at the hands of Falangists and the military (who occupy a good part of the ministries with no other qualification than their affection for the regime). ), and sometimes inflated by the following of Germans and Italians, they opt for an autarkic model, closed to the outside, deeply interventionist and with broad discretion, always in the hands of political officials. This generates effects such as product shortages, artificial price fixing, a fictitious and overvalued exchange rate and, as a consequence of all this, the birth of a powerful black market (the famous black market), which will multiply misery and logical difficulties. derived from the recent war.

All this, said badly and quickly, because there are many other aspects, almost always negative, derived from those directives that come directly from the highest levels of the Franco Government: the agrarian counter-reform that impoverished the crops and harmed the most modest producers, the inattention to primary education that would leave decades behind in the system, the irrational commitment to industrialization without a technological or logistical basis, the payment of war debts (that Italian and especially German aid was never free)… A whole repertoire of decisions almost always made by individuals whose merit did not go much further than genuflection before the rulers, and who generally had no basis other than ideological fanaticism. We had to wait until the end of the 1950s so that, in an already critical situation, with the arrival of North American financing, the Stabilization Plan and the arrival of the first technocrats, things took a somewhat more logical direction and began to approach which in the Western world was already a normalized market.

I already say that the book is not easy, that it explores, sometimes a lot and sometimes a little less, technical aspects that we may not be able to fully assimilate. But even so, reading will leave us with a wealth of information that I believe is sufficient and valuable to understand that the Franco regime was not only bad in its political and social aspects, that it not only attacked culture and freedoms or endeavored to build (successfully) fortunately only relative) a prudish, boring and backward society, but it also managed, and almost always managed poorly.

PS: Coincidentally, a few days ago I found out that Carlos Barciela has published another book ironically titled With Franco we lived better, in which it explains many of the aspects discussed in it, so it was discussed in a more didactic and accessible tone. It could be another option for those interested in the topic, which gives more than it seems.