Franco died in 1975. What followed was not revolution but constitutional design.
The 1978 Spanish Constitution, ratified in referendum, established a parliamentary monarchy and a system of autonomous communities: power devolved to seventeen regional governments, each with its own statute, parliament, and competencies. Catalonia got its 1979 Statute of Autonomy — education, language policy, health, urban planning, much of policing and cultural life. Spain became a quasi-federal state by another name.
This was the institutional opening. A city suppressed for forty years now had a regional government that could be its own argument with Madrid. The Catalan language returned to schools, signs, and television. The Generalitat — the historic Catalan government, dissolved by Franco in 1939 — was restored.
The transition wasn't perfect. It preserved much of the Franco-era state apparatus, kept the king the regime had positioned, gave amnesty to officials who had committed atrocities. Spanish democracy carries the compromise. But the autonomous community structure is real, and Barcelona's twenty-first-century coalitions could only happen in the space it opened.
This was also the moment of Negri and Deleuze-Guattari — the post-1968 left thinking past party politics toward distributed power, multitude, the political subject as a composition of singularities. The death of Franco landed in that moment. Spain wrote its new constitution into a theoretical environment already imagining new forms of political subjecthood.
In 1973, Ostrom and her husband Vincent founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. They called it a workshop because they wanted to emphasize political science as practice and build knowledge from real cases rather than from thought experiments and dogma. The cases accumulated across decades. Irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines. Mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan. Fisheries in Maine and Turkey and Indonesia. Groundwater basins in California. She interviewed lobstermen herself, quizzing them about the informal rules that governed their fishery — rules with no legal standing that every lobsterman understood and followed. She used satellite imagery to observe how different management regimes affected forests from above. She played irrigation allocation games with her students and found that when they were allowed to discuss strategy before playing, their collective outcomes more than doubled.
Walk back into the world with the names. What follows is what the commons looks like when the work has had time to set, and to bear weight, and to be inherited — eighty years of it in a mountain town in northern Spain, and more.
By February of 1941, much of this had been suppressed or scattered. Franco's regime had outlawed the Basque language in public life. Mondragón — Arrasate in Basque — had been on the Republican side in the Civil War, and the Basques had been a center of resistance: Guernica had been bombed in 1937, and the parish priest in Mondragón itself had been shot. The years that followed were called by the people who lived through them los años del hambre, the years of hunger. Spain's autarky kept imports out, the Basque industrial valleys ran below capacity, and the cooperative and self-help organizations that had long woven through Basque life had, in the words of one history, "died away after the war." What remained were the words: etxe, auzolan, lehen auzoa. And the practices the words named, dormant under suppression but not gone.
In 2024, the federation had 81 cooperatives employing 70,085 people, with €11.2 billion in annual sales. It is the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. The highest-paid worker earns at most six times what the lowest-paid worker earns. The wage ratio is set democratically by the worker-owners themselves and is voted on periodically.
The system is not utopian. Cooperatives have left the federation — Ampo and Irizar in 2008, ULMA and Orona in 2022, each over disputes about governance and autonomy. In 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos went bankrupt; 5,600 workers were at risk; roughly 95% of them were absorbed into other Mondragón cooperatives within weeks. No member-worker has been laid off in an economic downturn in sixty-nine years of operation. Pope Francis declared Arizmendi a "venerable servant of God" in 2015, one step from canonization. His town is still debating it.
At its peak, the anarchist collectives involved hundreds of thousands of people, managed major industries, demonstrated that complex economies could be coordinated without either capitalist markets or Stalinist central planning. For roughly a year, the most industrially advanced region of Spain operated as a functioning commons.