of this machine working class.
the Francoist order.
As long as the power of the Francoist machinery of repression remains in existence, the power of the right wing will be sufficient to prevent even the mildest of reforms.
This machinery cannot be "tamed' by Juan Carlos's gang of Francoist politicians. Nor will it be fought by the 'liberal" capitalists and the middle class opposition groups with which the Communist Party and Socialist Party are so busy flirting. Only one power in Spain today can break the back the organised might of the Spanish That is why the fight for democratic rights in Spain today can only be carried out by fighting for unity of the working class in an all-out fight to destroy every vestige of ARIAS NAVARRO-Franco's Premier continues
10 Spain alliances came into being, and their composition and programmes.
DEMOCRATIC JUNTA The Democratic Junta was set up as an attempt to rally all the opposition forces round the Communist Party during Franco's first major illness in July 1974. But Franco recovered, and the Junta failed to attract any dominant sections of the bourgeoisie into HIS TOIC In late 1974 the CP was very active in setting up branches of the Junta in all the major centres, and there was even talk of a national strike in October. But nothing came of it; and when the Basque Workers Commissions called a general strike for 11 December, the CP went so far as to distribute leaflets asking workers not to support it (with little resp 250,000 workers came out).
• Bloody clashes • This year has seen some of the most massive struggles since the Civil War. There have been huge strikes, demonstrations, bloody clashes with the police, mass arrests, and then the executions of five militants in September. In all this time the Democratic Junta has done nothing to mobilise action around concrete slogans for the overthrow of the dictatorship. It has merely contented itself with pious declarations, because these are the only basis for the CP's alliance with the other forces in the Junta.
The CP's allies in the Junta are, in fact, relatively few in number. One of the most significant is Rafael Calvo Serrer, a bourgcois opportunist who in his time has been a clerical-fascist, a Falangist, a member of Opus Dei (right-wing Catholic technocrats), a Francoist monarchist, and now claims to One of the most notable features of the present situation in Spain is the refusal of the reformist parties to launch an all-out struggle against the dictatorship. Instead they are up to their necks in class-collaborationist schemes of 'national reconciliation! These schemes presently find their expression in two cross-class alliances: the Democratic Junta, headed by the Communist Party: and the Platform of Democratic Convergence, headed by the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE). Below we look at how these be a liberal democrat after being exiled to Paris in 1971. His present prominence is entirely due to the CP, which has promoted him for all its worth as a sign of its good intentions towards the bourgeoisie as a whole.
Then there is the Popular Socialist Party, a group of university professors and lawyers which peddles a kind of legalist non-violent SANTIAGO CARRILLO socialist humanism. Its leader, Enrique Tierno Galvan, told Le Monde in 1969: 'The socialist parties, and the left in general, should understand that it is contrary to their interests to put forward a programme which incites citizens to struggle for power. What they should do is struggle so that the administration reflects more and more the interests of the community Also now in the Democratic Junta is the Spanish Labour Party (PTE), a group which split from the CP in 1967 on a pro-Chinese Red Weekly 18 December 1975 PSOE supporters demonstrate for release of political prisoners in Madrid basis but has now settled down as a more militant version of the CP without any real programmatic differences. It originally denounced the Junta as 'a platform for the salvation of the oligarchy', but has now decided that it provides a 'democratic alternative to fascism'. The PTE has a certain working class base, and was prominent in the construction workers' strikes in Madrid last week.
The programme of the Junta, as one might expect, is built around the theme of national reconciliation'. One of its declarations talks about 'the disappearance of the historical, ideological, economic and strategic factors on which Franco's exceptional power has been based, and the modern convergence of the moral and material aspirations of the working class, the big bourgeoisie. the professionals and the intellectuals.
Suddenly, almost overnight, the historic, economic and ideological factors which hurled one class against another in 1936 (at the cost of one million dead) have miraculously disappeared. In a country with the highest strike rate in Europe, both workers and capitalists now apparently have the same moral and economic aspirations!
• Peaceful points • We have dealt with the 12 points of the Junta's programme at some length in a previous issue (Red Weekly, 6 November). Here it is merely worth noting its 'amnesty for all the reactionaries and fascists; its attempts to play down the self-organisation of the working class through the Workers Commissions, by counterposing working class control of the vertical trade unions (CNS) inherited from Franco; its emphasis on peaceful action, relying on the political neutrality of the armed forces"; its failure to assert the right to self-determination of the national minorities in the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia; and its stress on the need for 'integration into the Common Market' (and also retention of the American bases).
Just as striking, however, is the total omission of any demands relating to the living standards of the working class. But then, as CP general secretary Santiago Carrillo recently declared: We believe that it is essential to keep Spain's economic apparatus as it is for the time being. A country which emerges from fascism needs a bourgeois-type democracy (Morning Star, 1 December). The message of the Democratic Junta is clear: the capintellectuals; the Christian Democratic Left, headed by ex-Falangist Ruiz Gimenez; the Christian Social Democracy, led by Gil Robbles (former leader of the clerical-fascist party CEDA, which paved the way for Franco); the bitterly anti-communist Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which represents very little since the rise of the ETA: and the Carlists, who tavour a different branch of the monarchy and were part of the Junta until the Platform offered itself as a preferable alternative.
• Judicious But through a judicious use of socialist phrase-mongering, the Platform has also attracted a couple of important revolutionary groups who see it as-a "left' alternative to the CP although one of these groups, the Revolutionary Workers Organisation (ORT), has since announced its departure. The other, however, the Communist Movement of Spain (MCE), is a Maoist splinter from ETA which has grown to be the largest grouping on the revolutionary left, and has played an important role in the strikes and mobilisations in the Basque country.
The programme of the Platform is nevertheless very similar to that of the Junta, despite the overlay of socialist rhetoric. It too calls for a democratic regime, although it