Polish Events Highlight
Confusion in Spanish Workers Movement
By Angel Munoz
The appeals of the Polish workers for the most part fell on deaf ears in the established mass workers organizations and revolutionary nationalist groups in
In fact, what the response to the Polish bureaucracy's declaration of war on the working class and people of Poland showed was a process that is endangering the process of recomposition of the Spanish workers movement.
A revival of Stalinist attitudes and a growth of sectarianism, on the one hand, is paralleled by the rise of a cynical "realism, " on the other.
One of the main reasons for this is that the workers and revolutionary nationalist movements are stagnant or in
They are suffering blows from the economic crisis and feel a growing threat of repression. They cannot offer any convincing perspective of a way
In this context, the opportunism of the CP and SP leaderships that began to flower with the passage of Francoism to semiparliamentary forms has continued to ripen until it has reached an extraordinary state of overripeness.
The reaction of many workers and rank-and-file CP members has been to become bitter and fall back to the old defensive reflexes, to the comforting hope that the Kremlin will be a big brother that will defend them. All this, after all, is largely what maintained the hold of Stalinism on Spanish workers for
Furthermore, because the dictatorship was able to isolate the Spanish workers for many decades, there is a lack of a tradition of concrete internationalism. This can be seen also in the case of solidarity with El Salvador. All the workers organizations and revolutionary nationalist organizations support the cause of the people of El Salvador. But the work on this issue has not gone beyond
There is also another feature of the Spanish working-class movement that makes it difficult for many workers in the Spanish state to understand clearly the nature of Solidarnosc. This is anti-
The Spanish church has been a major counterrevolutionary force and is deeply and justly hated. Furthermore, it has been particularly active in Spain in creating yellow unions.
It was in fact a government-subsidized union, the Union Sindical Obrera, that was the first organization to invite representatives of Solidarity to Spain. All this has come together to inspire a general feeling of suspicion of Solidarnosc, which in many cases has been transformed into hostility since the December 13
While supporting General Jaruzelski and the Kremlin seemed more militant and anticapitalist to some workers fed up with the parliamentary "democratic" opportunism of the SP and Eurocommunist CP leaderships, the Social Democrats did not find Poland a very useful issue.
After the inevitable statements condemning the East European regimes and protesting against the repression in the first moments of widespread shock and outrage after the crackdown, the Spanish Social Democrats of the PSOE decided to put the issue on the backburner.
The PSOE leader, Felipe Gonzalez, is striving to avoid absolutely anything hat could upset his systematic collabo ation with the Center Union government and in particular mass mobilizations. He is also trying to stay away from any questions that could open up internal debates that could weaken the already precarious homogeneity of the PSOE and the union confederation it controls, the UGT. Furthermore, the PSOE leadership probably thinks that it can benefit from the anti-Communist campaign launched by the right to make gains at the expense of the CP without having to participate
The so-called "socialist left" has in general followed the PSOE in its silence. Some of its members have participated in activity in the solidarity campaign. But certain of its leaders, such as the deputy Pablo Castellano, who is a great critic in public meetings of the laws he votes for in parliament, has not hidden his sympathy for General Jaruzelski.
At the other extreme of the pressure groups focused on the PSOE are the intellectuals who identify with Michel Rocard, the ideologist of the right wing of the
This group has an influence as well as Euskadiko Eskerra, one of the Basque radical nationalist parties. a fusion of a group originally influenced by the "Political-Military" faction of ETA and a faction expelled from the Basque section of the CP.
This Rocardien group began by expressing their moral solidarity with Solidar-
But unfortunately for them, morality rarely coincides with the hard realities of everyday life. They did not hesitate to say that it was Solidarnosc in fact that bore the responsibility for the military crackdown, because: "Instead of consolidating the important concessions it won from the government and on this basis open up a war of attrition against the government, it precipitated a confrontation with the Polish CP and forced General Jaruzelski to choose between his own tanks and those of the Soviets."
Nonetheless, the Polish workers should not despair because these strategists of modern times can offer them an excellent orientation for the present situation: only solution is to go underground." They advise avoiding any "resistance to the army" because "failure of the military junta to consolidate the dictatorship would lead immediately to Soviet intervention." (L. Paramio, in La Calle,
This aberrant "realism" is being presented in Spain as the latest thing in socialist thought, Marxism "of a new
The Eurocommunist leadership of the Spanish CP only deepened the ideological confusion of the party it heads by trying to take a greater distance from the totalitarian repression in Poland.
The CP hardly discussed that Polish process before the crackdown. It did not try to make any coherent balance of its previous positions. It supported successively Stanislaw Kania and General Jaruzelski, when he assumed the premiership. Finally, it went so far as to say about left sectors of Solidarnosc that "their extreme attitudes are a result of American pressure and infiltration." (Mundo Obrero, September 19, 198l.)
The center of discussion after the crackdown was how to characterize the East European regimes and their relationship with the USSR. The leadership wanted to come up with a position clearly demarcated both from the "renovacion" sectors, which favor dropping the vestiges of Leninism altogether, along with the connection to Moscow; and the "pro-Soviet" sectors. This attempt failed.
The resolution pays homage to the past role of the October revolution and the USSR but says: "However, under the leadership of Stalin, while it ceased to be a bourgeois state defending capitalist property, it did not become in Marxist terms what could be called a state in the hands of the workers organized as a ruling class, that is, a real workers democracy."
So, should the party "break" with this "system," and more concretely with the
This position was put forward in the Central Committee meeting by the right-wing leaders of the Catalan branch of the CP (the PSUC), Jordi Borja and
Jordi Sole-Ture, and by the "Renovacion" faction in general. (The position of Nicolas Sartorius, the crown prince of the party leader, Santiago Carrillo, was to say the least ambiguous. He did not take part in the debate but the supporters of a "break" seemed to regard him as one of their own.) Against this position, Santiago Carrillo launched the following warning: "There is a danger that this break will be a break with a very large part of our party."
Therefore, what the CC decided to do was only "break on the ideology level with a model of socialism" that is characterized as "outmoded."
That was the weak and contradictory response that the Central Committee offered to the crisis of identity of the CP, which was aggravated by the crackdown i in Poland. The party is continuing to unscrew the vice of Stalinism, but the result is that the vice is less and less firmly. anchored and the party is coming apart, being torn between the pressures of those ation in Eastern Europe. They can only raise awkward questions. For example, Marcelino Camacho, general secretary of the Workers Commissions, the CP-controlled union federation, asked during the Central Committee meeting: "How and why have parties and states that based themselves on the theory that we all consider an exact science degenerated? " Obviously he risks raising the question, Why have they degenerated and not we.
Furthermore, there was no explanation of how these "worn out models" could become "real workers democracies." - In this respect the CC report was a veritable chaos. Julian Ariza, one of the national leaders of the Workers Commissions, said, for example: "There is a real contradiction in these countries between the base and the superstructure that can generate revolutionary processes but not in the sense of moving forward...all this can even lead to disaster."
Among sections of the rank and file that want to fight back against the capipresent, only one defended the CC position. Among the remarks made by others were:
"Carrillo should not have agreed to talk about Poland on TV when they won't let him do that about El Salvador." "I ask those who say that there is no solution to Poland's problems without political pluralism, what solutions they are offering to the problems of the workers here in the sapitalist West where there is pluralism." I'm tired of Poland, let's stop talking about it and start talking about what's going on here."
Although the pro-Soviets can appeal to this sentiment, their approach is the opposite to offering an effective perspective for fighting in Spain.
On the defensive, such currents in the workers movement and among the revolutionary nationalists are tempted by substitutionism, looking to the power of the Soviet camp to compensate for their own inability to find a political way forward, to win greater support, to offer an effecwho want to get rid of the vice altogether talist offensive, this confusion and the and those who want to retighten it. The
"renewers" and the pro-Soviets have a certain coherence at least.
But the leadership's "Eurocommunism" is an ideological monstrosity that is inviable.
The Eurocommunists are incapable in particular of coming up with a materialist explanation of the process of degenerfailure of the party to struggle produces a reaction that often goes against the Polish workers. For example, in its February 5 issue, the CP weekly Mundo Obrero published the transcript of a discussion of the CC resolution in the CP cell at the Standart ITT engineering factory in Madrid. Of the seventy workers tive perspective for struggle.
So, the revolutionists in Spain for the moment will have to fight against the current. But this is a decisive struggle for the future of the workers movement and the liberation struggles in the Spanish state. The workers and the oppressed have a lot to learn from Solidarnos and a lot of Jaruzelskis to fight.