I
In a January 1971 editorial entitled "The Twilight of Francoism," Quatrième Internationale drew a balance sheet of the new rise of struggle of the Spanish laboring masses, from the Asturias strike of 1962 to the victorious struggle of December 1970 against the death sentences meted out to six Basques in the Burgos trial. This balance sheet described the factors impelling Spain toward socialist revolution:
"In spite of the accelerated economic growth of the 1960s, a by-product of the expansion of Western European imperialist economy, the Spanish bourgeoisie has been essentially unable to eliminate from Spanish society disequilibriums that produce the most explosive social contradictions in Europe: the proletariat's low standard of living, the permanent crisis of the poorest agricultural regions, Spanish industry's inability to compete in the international capitalist market, the crying underdevelopment of social services, etc.
"Objectively, the economic growth has served to postpone the social explosion, but at the same time has rejuvenated the proletariat, significantly expanded its numbers, and increased its capacity to overcome, little by little, the trauma of its defeat in the bloody civil war. This growth has also resulted in the development of valuable allies of the working class among the masses of students in ferment and among layers of technicians and intellectual workers, who are progressively radicalizing.
"The combination of the above two factors means that the Spanish bourgeoisie cannot afford the luxury of a democratic parliamentary—or even a Gaullist—regime. Any democratic rights won by the laboring masses would lead to struggles of explosive intensity and revolutionary breadth. Hence the basic failure of all attempts to gradually "liberalize" the Francoist regime, including under the form of a constitutional monarchy—an illusion that even the daily that by some mockery entitles itself Pravda [Truth] has just recently repeated for the n-th time.
"Under these conditions, the orientation of Spanish capitalism could have but one aim: fragmenting and channeling all workers' struggles toward purely economic and immediate goals. For a whole period, the traditional leaders of the Spanish proletariat, and above all the leaders of the Communist party, have objectively helped the bourgeoisie achieve this aim. The appearance of more resolute, politicized, and general forms of struggle, despite the intensified repression, marks the failure of this strategy. All the Spanish bourgeoisie's roads seem to lead to a ripening of the revolutionary upsurge."
The principal features of economic, social, and political development in Spain during the sixteen months since January 1971 completely confirm this analysis.
The year 1971 saw a pronounced slowdown of the Spanish economy. At the same time the rise in the cost of living shattered all previous records. Banking circles calculate that price increases in 1971 averaged more than 15 percent. The fact that a country like Spain experiences in its turn simultaneous stagnation and inflation says a lot about the weakness of its economic institutions.
Countries with a relatively marginal economy, like Spain, will be hit especially hard by the deterioration of the international capitalist economic situation. Spanish workers in West Germany and its smaller economic satellites are threatened with unemployment by the recession gripping those countries. Now, in Spain itself, unemployment is on the rise.
The third "development plan" (1972-1975) projects only a 1 percent annual increase in the number of jobs—less than the annual population growth and much less than the annual increase in the size of the work force, which is swelled not only by population increase, but also by the rural exodus, the ruin of the petty artisans, and the rationalization measures that are now beginning to spread throughout industry. It must also be stressed that in the area of new employment the objectives of the second "development plan" were not achieved. Even according to official statistics, the annual increase in the number employed reached only 0.9% during 1968-1971, as opposed to the projected 1.3%. Concretely, this means that in 1971 there were 150,000 fewer jobs than had been planned.
The agricultural crisis in poor regions, the crisis of the minifundia, continues unchecked, accentuating the concentration of landholdings, the proletarianization of small farmers, and the rural exodus. It is sufficient to point out that in 1970 the peasantry, which still constitutes 30% of the working population, accounted for only 14% of the national income. If one subtracts from this 14% the incomes of the large landed proprietors and the new kulaks, one gets an idea of the miserable incomes to which the mass of the small peasantry is condemned.
The absence of any political "liberalization" has become more and more obvious. Instead of "modest progress" toward a "European" regime, about which every Spanish reformist dreams, there has been a regression toward the most rigid dictatorship. This is especially marked by the adoption of the "public security" law, Franco's blunt rejection of establishing the right of political association, the intensification of censorship, and the extension of "exceptional laws." Juan Carlos has to guarantee the permanence of Francoism, but without Franco. Only the voluntarily blind can fail to see in the overtly fascist and integriste agitation of Blas Piñar's "Christ the King" groups the hardening of the regime itself. This is most clearly expressed by the standing order to shoot strikers. After the shooting in Granada, after the construction striker killed in Madrid, after the SEAT worker killed in Barcelona, it was two shipyard workers in El Ferrol who were shot down by the dictatorship.
This hardening of the repression comes in answer to mass struggle, and especially to workers' struggle. The most striking, most important element in the understanding of the basic tendencies of Spanish development is that the working class is no longer allowing itself to be intimidated by this intensified repression, and has not let itself be lulled by economic concessions or promises of "liberalization" as in the past. To the hardening of the repression the workers respond, and will respond more and more, with an increasing hardening, intensification, and politicization of their fight. In this way, the upsurge of objectively revolutionary struggles develops in Spain.
II
The major events that mark the rise of the mass movement in Spain between January 1971 and March 1972 are well known: the movement to boycott the union elections; the Madrid construction strike; the national strike of bank employees; the Asturias strike; the very bitter strikes in Pamplona and in Vittoria (Michelin), the latter lasting forty-two days; the strike and occupation of the SEAT factories in Barcelona and the solidarity strike of 100,000 Catalonian workers after a SEAT worker was murdered during the retaking of the factory; the national student actions centered around the medical students' strike which culminated in Madrid; the workers' movement around the renewal of many collective bargaining contracts during the first quarter of 1972; the explosive strike of the shipyard workers in El Ferrol, Galicia, which produced a real street battle between the workers and the repressive forces.
Simply listing these fights shows their tendency both to expand to a countrywide scale and to reach all sectors of the laboring masses. The participation of layers of the "new middle class," already discernable last year, was shown by the young doctors' activity in the student revolt against the "education law." On this same occasion, and especially on February 14, 1972—the day of national demonstrations against this law—high-school students, for the first time in Spain, took to the streets in massive numbers.
In the rest of imperialist Europe the capitalists have succeeded in uniting faster than the working class. But in Spain, the mass struggle more rapidly borrows from the advanced forms of struggle of other parts of Europe, while the bourgeoisie has not succeeded in borrowing the prevailing industrial technique and organization.
Aside from their politicization and their tendency to extend themselves, the 1971-1972 struggles of the Spanish workers had three basic characteristics that bring them still more into line with those of the European proletariat.
The goals and limits fixed not only by the Francoist regime but also by the whole employing class have been generally overturned wherever the workers opted for direct action instead of the "arbitration" of the state "unions."
Although the steelworkers of Altos Hornos in Bilbao had to settle for a nominal wage hike of 11 percent over three years while the Banco de Madrid published figures putting the rise in the cost of living at 35 percent just for the years 1970-1971, wherever the workers were able to bring to bear their growing combativity, the wage policies of the regime suffered partial setbacks.
The workers spontaneously opted for unitary demands that the revolutionary groups have vigorously projected: equal wage hikes for all; 450 pesetas [about US$7.00] a day minimum wage, etc. In the same spirit, the strengthening of class solidarity and the slogan of rehiring all fired workers played an increasingly important role in workers' actions.
Closely tied to this rise in the level of class consciousness was the adoption of more militant forms of action increasingly centered around workers' democracy. Strikes and actions were marked by the formation of workers' general assemblies; during the strikes the limited, permanent workers' commissions were replaced by larger committees responsible to the entire assembly.
Already there are examples in which the revolutionary Marxist demand for the formation of real strike committees responsible to, and therefore recallable by, the broader general assemblies have been put into practice by the workers. Furthermore, we must call attention to the emergence of mass pickets to extend the strikes—pickets that go to neighboring factories or other factories in the same branch of industry to generalize the struggle.
It was at El Ferrol that the hardening of workers' struggle reached a really qualitatively new level. Passive submission to the dictatorship's repression, which became more ferocious with the order to shoot demonstrators and strikers, had become increasingly unacceptable to the Spanish proletariat. Nevertheless, in 1971 it was only the revolutionary vanguard groups, and especially our comrades of the Revolutionary Communist League [Liga Comunista Revolucionaria—LCR], that raised the call for defense marshals and then began to apply this tactic, in a necessarily limited way, during the "lightning demonstrations."
When the Civil Guards retook the Barcelona SEAT factories, there were reflexes of self-defense, but the mass of workers hesitated to fight on the hardly favorable terrain of a single plant surrounded by the enemy.
On the other hand, when repressive violence was unleashed in the streets of El Ferrol against the striking shipyard workers, they not only responded, but passed to the counteroffensive and even managed to clear the repressive forces out of part of the city. Two workers were killed, but many cops were sent to the hospital. The strikers cut off the electricity, gas, and water, and the struggle took on the appearance of a citywide general strike.
The best past traditions of the Spanish working class, the most revolutionary in Europe, were suddenly thrust to the surface again, reinforced and enriched by the bitter lessons of past defeats—and above all marked by a profound mistrust of the bureaucratic apparatus and a stronger sense of class solidarity and independence.
III
A hardening of the dictatorship on the one hand, and a harder and harder response from the laboring masses on the other. The basic policy of the CP—seeking collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the monarchists, and even a fraction of the army so as to overturn the Francoist regime peacefully, without a revolution—has been robbed of all credibility by these lines of force in Spanish social and political development.
In an interview in the French CP magazine Nouvelle Critique, Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish CP, described his party's policy with a cynicism bordering on naïveté. The Spanish bourgeoisie, he says, no longer has any political force with which it could collaborate in the framework of a parliamentary regime. In the past, social democracy played this role; today, the CP offers itself as a replacement.
This whole orientation was founded on the hope of transforming the Francoist regime—without a revolution, solely through mass "pressure"—into a bourgeois parliamentary democracy by collaborating with the bourgeoisie, all the while solemnly promising to protect the latter's property and profits. The objective role of this policy, independent of the calculations and designs of the CP leaders, was to channel the new rise of workers' struggle toward goals compatible with the survival of the capitalist regime—most notably by choosing forms of action and organization that fostered the reformist and gradualist illusions propagated by a wing of the dictatorship.
The failure of this policy is demonstrated on two levels. The masses increasingly came to realize the illusory character of the notion that the Franco regime could be brought down without a revolution. In real life they unleashed harder and harder struggles with a clear anticapitalist dynamic. A vanguard began to emerge in the factories and in the universities which, having assimilated the essential lessons of the CP's neoreformism, succeeded in consciously drawing sectors of the mass movement toward demands and forms of action destined to set in motion a process of permanent revolution.
The most striking example of this change in the relationship of forces in the mass movement, of the CP's loss of the absolute hegemony it had wielded for fifteen years, was the remarkable success of the far left's campaign for a boycott of the state "trade-union" elections. The fact that in Catalonia and in the Basque country more than 50 percent of the workers followed the boycott slogan, and that even in the Madrid industrial complex—the bastion of the CP—substantial minorities of the working class boycotted the elections, reflected the maturation of class consciousness among a significant sector of the Spanish proletariat.
Since cases of the workers breaking with the CP's line on the factory level are spreading not only in the newly industrialized areas, but also in the old bastions, even in Madrid—at the Castellon factory—we are seeing for the first time a similar phenomenon.
The emergence of a broad vanguard independent of the traditional apparatuses and beginning to have a mass character and a mass influence is obviously not a development restricted to Spain. The same phenomenon has occurred, or is in the process of occurring, in three other important imperialist countries in Europe—France, Italy, and Great Britain.
For reasons peculiar to Spain, the relationship of forces between this vanguard and the CP is without doubt more favorable to the revolutionists in Spain than is the relationship between the revolutionists and the French or Italian CP, or, in the case of Great Britain, the relationship of forces between this vanguard and the Labour party. The more explosive character of the social contradictions, the much greater objective difficulty in limiting the mass movement or channeling it toward reformist goals will tend to accentuate still more this reversal in the relationship of forces.
The CP leadership thus finds itself confronted by a new task—that of maneuvering within the mass movement so as to limit its loss of influence and to hold back the crisis in its own ranks that could not help but be triggered by the successive breaks with its line by workers and students. The Santiago Carrillo team must also defend itself against the repeated attempts of the Soviet bureaucracy to replace it with one that would support Kremlin policies more unconditionally.
All these factors explain several things: the Carrillo team's greater flexibility toward other tendencies in the workers' movement, including the revolutionary groups; Carrillo's trip to Peking; the occasional united fronts the CP concludes with far-left groups, including, at the University of Madrid, our comrades of the LCR; and the CP's pronounced insistence on nonexclusive unity in action.
While attaining this unity in action in a favorable conjunction can lead local CP groups to shift their orientation to the left, that is, to adapt to the line of the revolutionists, it would be false to conclude that this is a possible line of development for the CP as a whole. On the contrary, the greater "liberalization" of this party and its evincing a clearer respect for workers' democracy fit in perfectly with its accentuated social-democratic evolution and its increasingly rightist political orientation.
Does this mean that a decline in the mass influence of the CP is in sight? We do not think so. Progressively, as wider and wider layers of the masses enter into action, as still newer layers of the proletariat and the youth begin to become politicized, the most likely variant is that the CP's influence within the vanguard will decline, but its influence among inexperienced and relatively less politicized masses freshly entering into action will expand.
Numerically, the total effect of these two tendencies will mean a strengthening rather than a weakening of the CP. This must be carefully taken into account by the revolutionists in formulating a correct tactical orientation toward building a revolutionary party within the mass movement.
IV
The historical perspective revolutionary Marxists in Spain defend is that of the permanent revolution. They reject both the possibility of liquidating the Francoist regime without a revolution and the notion that the mass movement can content itself with extracting democratic freedoms and thus peacefully institute a traditional bourgeois-democratic parliamentary regime. Franco and the Francoist regime (with or without Franco himself) can be overthrown only by a revolutionary mobilization of the masses that challenges the bourgeois state, dissolves and destroys its repressive apparatus, occupies the factories and the land, and threatens capitalist property. The revolutionary process leading to the overthrow of the dictatorship will immediately place on the agenda the victory of the socialist revolution without having to first go through an intermediate historical stage of bourgeois-parliamentary democracy.
But to speak of permanent revolution does not at all mean to defend the caricature of this concept that says a revolution will be immediately defeated if it does not result in the institution of the dictatorship of the proletariat after the first battle.
The Spanish bourgeoisie does not want to liquidate the dictatorship because it fears that granting democratic freedoms to the masses would accelerate anticapitalist struggles rather than allow them to be channeled toward reformist ends. But if the bourgeoisie is confronted by a revolutionary movement so tumultuous that it increasingly takes on insurrectionary forms, it would no longer have anything to lose, and would have precious time to gain, in throwing the workers the bone of democratic freedoms.
This is why the perspective of permanent revolution in Spain does not exclude, but on the contrary includes, the possibility of temporarily establishing democratic freedoms as a byproduct of a revolutionary proletarian upsurge. This process will begin by the laboring masses winning these freedoms.
During such a period, the bourgeoisie would be feverishly preparing the means to overturn the relationship of forces and crush the mass movement by force. The proletarian vanguard would utilize this breathing spell to perfect the organization of the masses into organs of dual power (workers' councils, workers' militia) and to strengthen its influence among the masses so as to enter the inevitable confrontation with maximum chance of victory, to accelerate the construction of the revolutionary party.
The difference between such a perspective and that of European-style "normalization"—a repetition of what happened at the end of the second world war in France and Italy as a result of the betrayals of the Communist and the Socialist parties in the context of an accelerated capitalist economic growth made possible by those very betrayals—is strikingly obvious.
To put this perspective into practice, Spanish revolutionary Marxists must from now on apply a revolutionary strategy that has as its essential goal preventing, or making more difficult, all maneuvers aimed at diverting the revolutionary energy of the masses toward purely reformist ends—maneuvers which, in the concrete conditions prevailing in Spain, would not lead to a more or less stable bourgeois-parliamentary democracy but to the crushing in blood of the new generations of Spanish workers and students.
The essential elements of such a strategy are as follows:
• Encourage all efforts to prevent struggles from being fragmented, scattered, or isolated, and try, on the contrary, to coordinate various struggles, not only by sector, but also on a local, regional, and national scale; and this not only for workers' struggles properly so called, but for all workers' struggles, as well as for struggles by students, high-school students, the laboring layers of the "new middle classes," and the poor peasants. Great attention must be paid to developing techniques for extending and generalizing strikes, as well as to the emergence and strengthening of organs for coordinating struggles, which prefigure the future soviets.
• Support all attempts to go beyond purely economic struggles and demands, to politicize strikes and workers' action campaigns. Democratic demands, including those relating to the national question, today play a key role in this process. The attempts of the regime and the employing class to restrict workers' struggles to the framework of simple wage negotiations that are thoroughly unfair—the workers do not even have legal trade unions on their side in such negotiations—are best thwarted by advancing systematically in the lists of demands the following: unconditional rehiring at full pay of all fired workers; immediate release of all political prisoners; expulsion of the private police and the public repressive forces from the factories, universities, and high schools; recognition of the right to strike; recognition of the right to form trade unions; recognition of freedom of association, of the press, of assembly, and of demonstrating.
• Push demands and forms of action that are clearly anticapitalist: no speedups; no firings; struggle for workers' control; occupation of factories, etc.
• Propagandize for and organize adequate and increasingly advanced forms of self-defense for strikes and demonstrations against the repressive violence of the dictatorship, its direct and indirect agents, the defenders of capitalist rule in Spain.
• Assure the greater and greater proliferation of united organs for preparing struggles—expanded and really united workers' commissions—and their replacement, during peaks of struggle, by representative organs democratically elected by the masses. That is, prepare for the emergence of real organs of dual power at the moment when the mass movement reaches its culminating point.
• Prepare for a revolutionary intervention among the agricultural workers and poor peasants.
This entire strategy can be summed up in a single slogan: Propagandize, prepare, and organize for the revolutionary general strike to overthrow the dictatorship, murderer of workers.
V
With the formation and strengthening of the LCR a first step has been taken on the road to constructing a revolutionary party of the Spanish proletariat, a party that can only be based on the program of revolutionary Marxism. Propagandizing for this program, the LCR is today the initial nucleus of such a party. But to achieve its construction it will not be sufficient merely to strengthen the LCR through intensive individual recruitment. Regroupments, fusions with other revolutionary currents, and recruitment of the best vanguard worker militants still remaining in the CP will be necessary.
The centralizing role the LCR played on a national scale during the struggle to boycott the CNS elections, its catalytic role in the immediate, national response to the SEAT events, its exemplary role during the student actions in Madrid made the organization known and respected among wide circles of the vanguard and made it a pole of attraction for revolutionary militants even in regions where the organization does not yet have any base.
The Fourth International is proud of the fact that militants of such temper and courage have on their own decided to join it. It sees in this a confirmation of the process the International is now experiencing: its transformation from limited numbers of small Trotskyist propaganda groups into a world revolutionary movement, already able to initiate actions that visibly alter the relationship of forces between the vanguard and the bureaucratic apparatuses within the mass movement, and at the same time able to begin to alter the evolutionist tendencies of the mass movement itself.
The immediate problem that must be dealt with is the new growth stage of the LCR. This problem involves both that of relations with centrist and ultraleftist groups within the vanguard and that of relations with the traditional organizations of the workers' movement, essentially the Communist party. Systematic programatic delineation, theoretical polemics, both political and propagandist, must be combined with the ability to propose and to conclude occasional agreements for united action around specific goals that correspond to the interests of all the laboring masses.
There is no contradiction between these two aspects of revolutionary politics and organization. On the contrary, they logically complement one another. Each attains its full value only through combination with the other.
The process of constructing a revolutionary party could also enter a new stage around the question of the workers' commissions. The CP's effort to transform these bodies into semilegal trade-unions under the control of its own apparatus has failed.
This failure comes as a result of the bankruptcy of the CP's whole gradualist and neoreformist orientation. The workers' commissions were compelled by the force of circumstance to expand their activities toward clearly political questions; and this made any semilegal existence incompatible with the very nature of the dictatorship. The failure equally resulted from the CP's loss of hegemony over the workers' vanguard, and from the process of growing political differentiation, which often even led to the commissions' fragmenting into grouplets. And finally, the CP's failure reflected the widening and hardening of struggle, which led to the emergence, on the eve of or during strikes, of much broader organs than the workers' commissions to prepare and conduct the workers' struggle.
From all this derives the impossibility of mechanically applying the traditional attitude of revolutionists toward trade-union work to the attitude Spanish revolutionists must take toward the workers' commissions. But this in no way means that we are dealing with an organizational form considered henceforth to be outmoded and for which the revolutionists must substitute a combination of factory political groups and strike committees (or committees to prepare for strikes) issuing from general assemblies.
The workers' commissions often represent the organizational form of permanent confrontation and collaboration of all the militant elements of a factory that is best adapted to conditions of clandestinity (that is, a situation in which it is impossible to organize mass trade unions) and of the increasingly turbulent upsurge of the mass movement (a situation in which the number of active militants in a factory may vary, even doubling or tripling during periods of action). The workers' commissions have the double advantage of being both unified and flexible, and this at the very moment when events and the relationship of forces permit the breaking of the CP's claim to political control or to exclusive representation within the commissions.
Spanish revolutionists must therefore make themselves the most confirmed advocates of this unified character of the workers' commissions, which implies the greatest respect for workers' democracy and for the right of representation and organization of all tendencies of the workers' movement within them, all the while taking account of the concrete reality, without making a fetish of any specific form of united action. The fight for this principle today corresponds to a real development of consciousness in the ranks of the CP itself. Far from opposing the task of constructing a new revolutionary leadership of the Spanish proletariat, it allows for the concretization of this task for the first time before such a broad workers' vanguard.
Francoist Spain is today the weakest link in the European imperialist chain. The outbreak of a revolutionary general strike, the outbreak of a new Spanish revolution, would have incalculable repercussions on the alignment of social and political forces on the entire continent. For this reason, revolutionary Marxists and the Fourth International have a special obligation to solidarize with the Spanish proletariat and with their comrades of the LCR.
The crucial place of the Spanish proletariat today in the context of European workers' struggle and the decisive importance the outbreak of the Spanish socialist revolution would have for the proletarian revolution in all capitalist Europe impose on the revolutionary Marxist organizations not only a special obligation to aid their comrades of the LCR, but also imply the necessity of understanding that in numerous European countries Spanish immigrant workers act today as an especially militant vanguard force. It is therefore urgent to develop systematic work in this area and to orient toward organizing Spanish groups abroad sympathizing with the LCR wherever that proves possible.
To aid the maturation of the revolutionary process in Spain; to aid in the construction of a new revolutionary leadership for the Spanish proletariat; to contribute to the strengthening of the LCR—these are the most direct means revolutionary Marxists command in accelerating the transformation of the new rise of European workers' struggle since May 1968 into a new revolutionary upsurge on a continental scale.