Crisis in Spain's United Left
* Spain
The United Left was supposed to gather Spain's anti-capitalist left under a common umbrella. Though the Communist Party was always the dominant force, a number of smaller republican and 'new left' groups, including most supporters of the Fourth International, have joined over the
The organisation has had great difficulty reacting to what Jaime Pastor calls "the new political cycle" in Spain The decline in the class struggle, after 13 years of Socialist Party government, has led trade union leaders to accept dramatic cuts in pension entitlement, and liberalisation of employment legislation, in a country with 20%
Last year's election of Spain's first conservative government since the end of the Franco dictatorship have led some in the United Left to argue for a closer relationship with the Socialist Party (PSOE). But the leadership of the United Left has preferred to increase the polarisation with the Socialists, expelling the most prominent supporters of a rapprochement.
The far left is divided in its analysis of these developments. Some argue that the expulsions have avoided an Italian style "big bang". , in which opportunist sections of the Communist Party and a corruption-racked Socialist Party collapsed into a centre-
Diosdado Toledano blames the crisis on media and establishment hostility to what is "one of Europe's most radical anti-capitalist parties with a mass base and parliamentary presence... The socialist, revolutionary left has the chance to participate in the reconstruction of a seriously anticapitalist left, pluralist in its respect for the currents, platforms and organisations which it encompasses."
Others, like Jaime Pastor, who recently resigned from the national leadership of the United Left, argue that the organisation has reacted in a centralised, sectarian way, taking it further from its initial project.
Given the importance of this debate, we invited both comrades to give their analysis of the causes of the current crisis, and the priorities facing the United Left at its 5th Congress Jean Dupont 12 International Viewpoint #295