SPANISH REVOLUTIOR
Resolution of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International ohha KEPTITIS OF THE The Francoist regime has entered its death agony. Its structures are cracking and breaking one after the other under the pressure of an ever more impetvous mass movement. While the owning classes are becoming increasingly divided and paralyzed in their attempts to decide on a response in face of the growing discontent and anger of all the toiling layers, the proletarian is making striking progress toward the generalization, unification, and politicization of its struggles and toward an ever more direct confrontation with the dictatorship and its repressive organs. The days of the Franco dictatorship are numbered; the hour of the new Spanish revolution draws near. A new and more advanced stage has been attained in the rise of the mass movement since November 1974. This rise has been accelerating since the outbreak of the powerful strikes and demonstrations 6 against the death penalty pronounced against the militants of the ETA by the war council of Burgos. In a series of impressive general strikes in solidarity with these militants, the proletariat living under the Spanish state has become conscious of its strength and has expressed a level of class consciousness higher than any seen since its defeat in the civil war, General strikes such as those in Pamplona, Tolosa, Asturia, and Galicia have developed in support of sectors of the working class hit hard by the repression of employers and Francoism, by sackings, layoffs, and arrests. But most impressive of all was incontestably the general strike in the Basque contry on December 11, 1974, in response to the appeal of the workers commissions, during which 25,000 workers mobilized for a platform of demands that included, in addition to immediate demands,
the demand for the release of political prisoners and the dissolution of the repressive corps. This general strike was preceded, on December 2 and 3, by the strike of 30,000 workers in the Basque province of Guipúzcon in solidarity with the hunger strike of political prisoners. These acts of political class solidarity, unprecedented in the recent history of workers struggles in Europe, clearly express the maturity that has been attained by the prerevolutionary situation in Spain. In all of these locally or regionally generalized struggles certain common features emerge. Forms of workers' self-organization (workers commissions, general assemblies, elected negotiating committees) are proliferating, and the highest form, that of elected strike committees, has begun to spreod in a significant number of struggles (Pamplona, SEAT/ Barcelona, Valladolid). Self-organization is giving an impetus to initiatives toward centralization. During the Pamplona. general strike a struggle committee was formed including both the elected committees of several factories and the workers commissions of others, with the presence of representafives of student and neighborhood organizations. In Barcelona a united coordinating body of the workers commissions is already functioning; in the Basque country this objective is on the way to realization. In Madrid, Galicia, and Asturias significant efforts at coordination are under way. In Valladolid a central strike committee in construction was set up during the April 1975 strike; efforts to coordinate with the strike of the workers at the FASA/Renault factory were sketched out. The unification of all the workers commissions of the Spanish state, going beyond the insufficient framework of the present national coordination only of the forces controlled by the CP faction, is becoming increasingly possible. If is broadly felt as an urgent necessity by the workers themselves. The workers struggles are largely going beyond the stage of a fight solely for immediate demands. Alongside entirely justified immediate economic demands such as equal wage ingreases for all, a minimum salary of 800 pesatas a day (about USSl6), a halt to layoffs, and the struggle against the high cost of living, transitional demands are being raised, such os the sliding scale of wages, opening of the bosses' books, and certain demands for workers control, as well as democratic demands: release of the political prisoners; the right to strike; trade-union freedoms; freedom of association, assembly, demonstration, and the press; dissolution of the repressive bodies of the dictatorship. Some of these democratic demands, above all that of the dissolution of the repressive bodies, acquire an objectively anticapitalist dynamic in the context of the Francoist dictatorship. And in their entirety, united with the other demands and forms of struggle that have emerged, they can only contribute to accelerating the challenging of the bourgeois regime, which needs the dictatorship to maintain its domination over the workers. In the course of the fight for the entirety of these demands striking workers learn the necessity of confronting the Francoist repressive forces and of taking the measures of self-defense that are indispensable to this aim. The defense of demonstrations and contingents; the protection of the commissions. against arrest; the attempts to rescue from their executioners comrades arrested during demonstrations; the preparation, tomorrow, for a general assault on the prisons at the first sign of the collapse of the dictatorship - a broad workers vanguard has become conscious of all these points and is beginning to act on the basis of this consciousness. This tumultuous extension of workers struggles is stimulating and accentuating the rise of struggles of a whole number of populor layers, struggles that tend to converge with those of the proletariat. Particularly noteworthy are the housewives boycott movement against the rise of prices that has just occurred in several areas of the Spanish state; the mobilizations of small shopkeepers and peasants; the strike of doctors and hospital employees; the general strike of teachers on January 20, 1975; the rise of the women's liberation movement and the new rise of the student movement. In these areas as well, a powerful pressure for unity is emerging. Spontaneously, the mass movement is making efforts to coordinate and centralize its batfles through united and representative organs, which at the neighborhood or local level, in the big industrial centers and even on the scale of whole regions, assemble all those mass energies released by the rise of the current movement. The task of revolutionary Marxists consists of supporting and strengthening all these efforts so as to stimulate the maturation of the broadest organs of mass selforganization, in order that the unification of alt these struggles may concentrate their energies on a central aim: the fall of the dictatorship, the shaking of the capitalist system, and the beginning of the Spanish revolution. THE DECAY OF THE DICTATORSHIP The Spanish owning classes are confronting the final phase of the death agony of Francoism in a state of the deepest division and disarray, which goes hand in hand with a growing paralysis. The Spanish bourgeoisie is virtually unanimous in its conviction that the maintenance of the dictatorship in its present form does a disservice to its closs interests and
SPAIN no longer has any effectiveness even from the pure standpoint of repression. But it is deeply divided on the methods and objectives of modifying or replacing the dictatorship. Under the impact of the post-wor "long boom" of the imperialist economy, cap nos under gone profound changes t render f coist dictatorship a totally inadequate syst rving the economic interest of Spanish big co i ta for assuring its class domindition in foce of th rise the moss movement. T le fascistic or fascist the only force interested if maintaining the sh ICtures of the dictatorship dfter the disappearance the dictator, has no social base of any solidity in any class or layer of Spanish fociety. It could almost be said that the only point of agreement among the Spanish bourgeoisie is that Francoism in its present form is no longer useful. International capital is in turn exerting Pressun in the same direction. The beginning of th Portuguese revolution accentuates the necessity for Sumerican imperialism to expand its bases in Spain or substitute Spanish bases for Portuguese NATO base The international economic recession, which threat ens to stifle the expansion of the Spanish economy, increases the entire European bourgeoisie's interest in integrating Spain into the Common Market, even though in the immediate sense the recession is increasing the economic obstacles to such an integration (1974 Spanish balance of payments deficit of more than $3, 000 million; growing difficulties in the export of agricultural products, uncompetitiveness of industrial products, etc.). But these political operations are difficult to carry to fulfillm as long as the Spanish government that would part in them retains the stigma of a dictatorshie that is universally hated for its acts of bloody repression and its denial of even the most elementary democratic rights to the toiling masses. Likewise, the experience of the Portuguese revolution teaches the Spanish bourgeoisie that to maintain a dictatorship beyond a certain point can only entail negative results for capital without offering any appreciable advantages. The Francoist dictatorship is no longer capable of atomizing the working class and the workers movement. The workers are organizing themselves into various groupings and institutions that tomorrow will come to the surface as powerful mass movements, and even as unifying bodies of the soviet type. But the survival of the senile dictatorship prevents the bourgeoisie from organizing in a similar way, retards the reconstitution of its political parties, and cuts it off from any possibility of acquiring a mass base, however unstable, as is the cose in Portugal today. But while the bourgeoisie is almost unanimous in
8 its desire to put an end to Francoism in its present form, it remains deeply divided over the question of what kind of political regime to substitute for the Francoist regime. The bourgeoisie is perfectly conscious of the explosive nature of the contradictions tearing the capiglist society of the Spanish state. The bourgeoisie nows that in spite of the progress of industrialization, social contradictions and regional differences are more pronounced than in any other imperialist country. According to official statistics, 1.22% panish households account for a greater share of the national income than 52.6% of households. Pericapita income among the five poorest provinces Orensey Almería, Granada, Cáceres, and Malaga) 15 barely % of per capita income in the richest i provinces The bourgeoisie knows the temper, class consciousness Ind combativity of the proletariat of філ. It cnows that the agrarian question is exploto the and the West. It is aware of the ess explosi character of the national question, pecially in Euzkodi. (the Basque country). It is tallowing with anxiety the relative decline of control by the traditional organizations, the CP and he PSOE, over the working class, which allows Frile credibility for the project of reestablishing a bourgesis democrady in which Me reformist and hereformist leaderships would be capable of chanhe ling the sto iggles of the masses info. paths compalible with the maintenance and consolidation of capital inf rule by means of their policy of class col laboration gha collaboration with the government. The c lusions that can be drawn from the Portumaalcan only conflem these fears. The guese projech of Ehending the Poetiquets, dictatorship "coldly" hes mani each failed And this projec had a much gregter dhance of sucdeeding than suci a projechwolie have insp in (because of the primacy of the questio ending the colonial war, in relation tobwhich the fall of the dictatorship was able to sarisfy Moe asse moreover the degree of combativity, conse gusness, experience, and politicization of the proletarian was from the outset lower in Portugalethan Un Spa f. After Barely six months of prepare se, the moss movement in Portugal has taken such a tumultious fun that it can be said that the Portugue revolution has begun. In the event of a chang of regime in Spain, it would not toke six months for spectacle even more disquiefing for the bourgeoisie than the one that is presently unfolding th Portugal to develop.
This is why, fear of the proletariat and its revolutionary potential, the Spanish bourgeoisie is not prepared to commit itself to the road of revolution from above" as the CP and its allies are begging it to do. All the guarantees that the reformists and the neoreformists are prepared to offer are in-
sufficient to alter this distrust, which is born of a sure class instinct. No "liberal" wing, however insubstantial, has come out of the Spanish bourgeoisie to collaborate with the CP and the SP before the fall of the dictatorship any more than it did in 1936. Like the popular front of that time, the Junta Democratica of today is reduced to seeking out the good graces of the shadow of the bourgeoisie, and not of any real part of it. Under these conditions, the various "liberalization" projects worked out within or on the fringes of the dictatorship are simply farces. While preserving the essential characteristics of the dictatorship, they in no way halt its decomposition. By manifesting the bourgeoisie's incapacity for self-reform, they spur on the rise of the revolutionary mass movement. In face of the extreme gravity of the present situation, the bourgeoisie has placed its hopes on a political solution whose function is to ward off the final assault of the mass movement by means of a "reform" of the dictatorship based on the accession of Juan Carlos to the post of chief of state, perhaps even before the death of the dictator. This political operation is condemned to failure from the outset. In fact, the minimal concessions to the mass movement that are an integral part of this project, far from slowing down the struggles, will give them an additional impetus that will definitively destroy any form of continuity of the regime. In this sense, it is especially significant that during the prologue to this operation, which is what we are now. witnessing, repression is being intensified, both by the police (the state of emergency in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya) and by the employers, who are systematically refusing to negotiate with the workers commissions and the bodies of self-representation of the masses and are attempting to impose the Francoist "vertical unions" as the only "valid interlocutors" during struggles. It is equally significant that this intensified repression is proving absolutely incapable of preventing the upsurge of strikes and their generalization and is even encouraging their radicalization and politicization. The Spanish bourgeoisie thus finds itself in a state of growing political paralysis of which the best symbolic expression is the Arias government, the weakest cabinet the dictatorship has had since its establishment. Locking any authority, deeply divided, subject to successive "ministerial" crises, it clearly has all the characteristics of a "fin de règne" if not a "fin de régime." In the recent period top circles in the ministries, the church, and the professional organizations - the traditional bases of support for the dictatorship — have all in their turn been affected by the tide of agitation and demands, and this is sharpening the aspects of the decay of the dictatorship. Under these conditions the army alone is the sole and last real base of the dictatorship. But at the same time it is the only solid instrument for the defense and maintenance of the capitalist system in Spain. Out of this fact flows yet another profound contradiction that is racking the Francoist dictatorship. The deep political divisions running through the Spanish bourgeoisie today and the profound class polarization that characterizes Spanish society cannot but have equally deep effects within the Spanish army itself. A clear differentiation is emerging between one wing that is linked to the far right and prepared to assume the political and repressive responsibilities necessary to maintain the dictatorship and a "professional" (technocratic) wing linked to the projects of "reforming Francoism," which does not desire to dirty its hands with lowly police business and is inclined to support both a change in the regime and, in general, the orientation that big capital would adopt in each case. This division penetrates the rank and file soldiers, intermingling with all the antidictatorial and anticapitalist sentiments that are spreading among the popular layers of the Spanish state. Because of this, using the army in a preventive coup" would threaten to blow up its unity. But this unity is the last trump card of a bourgeoisie that has its back to the wall politically. It is therefore less and less likely that there will be such a coup in an effort to halt the decomposition of the dictatorship. Rather, the continuation of this decomposition until a new outbreak of the political, social, and economic crisis occasions its collapse appears to be the most likely variant. REFORMIST OR REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY For twenty years now the Spanish CP and its various allies have obstinately pursued the strategy of putting pressure on the bourgeoisie (the "peaceful general strike") and of offering big capital ever more sweeping guarantees of class collaboration and respect for bourgeois order in an effort to win the replacement of the dictatorship by a bourgeois-democratic regime. The formation of the Junta Democratica is only the latest variant of a single and unchanging strategy: convincing the Spanish bourgeoisie that it can change its political system without its class power being seriously threatened.
9
SPAIN Since its inception, this strategy has lacked realism and credibility in the sense that in itself it has drawn no significant section of the bourgeoisie toward any serious action against the dictatorship. It fails to take account of the acute and explosive nature of the social contradictions in the country, the degree of combativity and class consciousness attained by the proletariat, or the fact that the bourgeoisie is very acutely aware of this basic feature of the situation. Although 20 years of incessant maneuvers by the CP and the reformists aimed at "convincing" the bourgeoisie to replace the dictatorship with a bourgeois-democratic parliamentary system have achieved only the most meager success, the CP's significant weight within the mass movement has undoubtedly enabled it to make the Junta Democratica appear in the eyes of significant sectors of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie as an alternative political solution to the crisis of the dictatorship. The balance-sheet on this policy is thus that it slows down, fragments, and disorients the workers struggles, leading them into an impasse. In this regard, the balance-sheet is most nefarious, as is testified to by the CP's refusal to add its call to that of the far left and the ETA-V for the general strike of December 11, 1974, in the Basque country, by its efforts to reduce the function of the workers commissions to simply lending support to the "legal" administration of the fascist trade-union, and by its bureaucratic maneuvers aimed af isolating those sectors of these commissions that oppose this orientation. The platform presented by the Junta Democratica is a recent demonstration of the degree to which the reformists and neoreformists are willing to make political concessions to the bourgeoisie in order to persuade them to have done with the dictatorship. This platform does not include demands for the dissolution of the Francoist repressive bodies, for the purge of the army, for the punishment of Francoist criminals and torturers, for the right of self-determination for the oppressed minorifies of the Spanish state, even though these demands have been advanced spontaneously by the masses in dozens upon dozens of struggles during the past months. The leadership of the CP and its allies want to assure the Spanish bourgeoisie that the regime can be changed under conditions that would leave intact not only its economic power and its private properly, but even its state and its instruments of repression against the workers; this is the real content of their treacherous policy. While the effects of this policy on the bourgeoisie remain weak today, this will not be the case immediately after the overthrow of the dictatorship.
At that point, an alliance with the Social Democratic reformists, neo-Social Democrats, or Stalin10 ists could appear to significant sectors of the bourgeoisie as a last resort in halting the revolutionary upsurge with d palliative that does not immediately threaten their class rule. But the ability of the reformists and Stalinists to carry out this counterrevolutionary work does not depend solely on their intentions and political orientation, but also and above all on the scope of the social crisis and the mass movement, as well as on the level of the class consciousness of the masses, the degree of self-organization and centralization they have attained, the relationship of forces between reformists and revolutionaries within the workers movement, and the progress made on the road to the construction of the revolutionary party. For years revolutionary Marxists have counterposed a consistent c loss strategy to the strategy of class collaboration put forward by the CP and its reformist and neoreformist allies. They consider that any idea of "peacefully" changing the dictatorship from above as a result of a section of the owning classes developing an awareness of the "advantages" of bourgeois democracy is unrealistic, diverts the masses from their class rood, and tends to hold back and fragment the masses. Only the development of a revolutionary general strike can overthrow the dictatorship. Once this is done, the process that will open in Spain will be one of proletarian revolution and not that of an experiment in the peaceful transfer of power from one team of bourgeois politicians to another. The systematic propaganda of the Trotskyists for a revolutionary general strike objectively corresponds to the aspirations and natural tendencies of the broadest vanguard of workers and youth in the Spanish state. It is beginning to be transformed into reality by layers of the working class that are not part of the revolutionary organizations, so much has it represented the logical outcome of all the class struggles now underway. The impetuous rise of the mass movement hos placed it on the agenda in a growing number of workers centers and industrial regions. The prospect of seeing it realized on a national scale has henceforth become an eventuality that the bourgeoisie itself must take account of. But precisely because the strategy of the revolutionaries is beginning to become a reality, it is important to detail its content and specific features. What revolutionary Marxists rule out in Spain is a "peaceful" change of regime, the abolition of the dictatorship through the decision of a "liberal" wing of the Spanish bourgeoisie. This eventuality is already so much excluded in real life that any new stage in the decomposition of the dictatorship can only accentuate even further the impetuous rise of the mass movement.
However, what cannot be affirmed is that the dictatorship could fall only under the blows of an insurrectional general strike throughout the whole of Spain. The events of the past months have shown that revolutionary general strikes on a local and regional scale, by proliferating and spreading, are accentuating the decomposition of the dictatorship to the point where a new outbreak of the crisis could precipitate the fall of the dictatorship even before the attack on it has reached the stage of a revolutionary strike occurring simultaneously in all the industrial pockets. The essential difference between the strategy of the revolutionaries and that of the reformists does not lie in the fact that for the revolutionaries a generalized and victorious confrontation with the repressive forces throughout the territory of the Spanish state is supposed to be an absolute prerequisite for the fall of the dictatorship. It lies in the fact that for revolutionaries there is no continuous solution to the development, broadening, and generalization of the struggles of the masses for their economic and democratic demands, the preparation for a general assault for the overthrow of the dictatorship through the mobilization of the masses, and the broadening of the mobilization toward anticapitalist objectives that place the creation of organs of dual power on the agenda both in the factories and on a territorial scale. The aim of revolufionaries is to make the present upsurge of struggles result in a revolutionary situation that will make the fall of the dictatorship coincide with the beginning of an attack on the capitalist system and the bourgeois state. The strategy of the revolutionary general strike has this precise function; it is not intended to enumerate a list of conditions without which the fall of the dictatorship would be impossible to realize. ACTION PROGRAM OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL IN SPAIN in accordance with this strategy, the action program of the Fourth International in Spain combines the economic, democratic, and transitional demands that have already been raised in the most advanced battles of the mass movement with all those demands that have as yet been adopted only by a sector of the broad vanguard but that must be introduced into the consciousness of the workers and tolling masses of the Spanish state so that the masses may find the revolutionary responses adequate to the central problems of the struggle against the Francoist dietatorship and capitalism. The function of our action program is to take roof and flourish in the struggles that are extending throughout the Spanish state. Beginning from the unevenness of development and the differences in level of organization and political consciousness that still mark these struggles, the action program must ossure that all efforts converge toward the road of victory: the unity and class independence of the mass movement and their organic articulation in the development, coordination, and centralization of organs of workers power. Here are the slogans with which the Trotskyists approach the emergence of the third Spanish revolu1. Against capitalist exploitation, for the demands of the workers. One of the basic gains of the struggle of these past years has been the generalization of egalitarian economic slogans expressing demands that all the workers are seeking to win from the employers today. Given the full-blown economic crisis, and the fact that "social pacts" for the "democratic" future are beginning to be sketched out in face of the ruin of Francoism, the current applicability of these demands is more clear than ever:
*Equal pay for equal work regardless of age, sex, or nationality.
*Equal pay for agricultural and industrial workers.
*Minimum wage of 800 pesetas a day (about
USS16).
*Immediate and equal wage increases for all of
7,000 pesetas a month added to base wages.
*Forty-hour workweek in all sectors with no reduction in pay and no increase in the work pace.
*No deductions from or taxes on wages.
*Compensation for illness, accident, and unemployment, and pensions equal to full wages. Nevertheless, no wage increase is capable of compensating in a lasting manner for the dizzying price Increases. In 1975, for the third consecutive year, the real cost of living index will increase by 2530%. Furthermore, thousands of workers are threatened by unemployment. The real number of unemployed is approaching half a million, and the situation will get worse in the immediate future with the return of 200,000 immigrant workers. The slogans of the sliding scale are already being raised in many struggles. Their extension is an urgent task:
*Sliding scale of wages: automatic monthly odjustments in wages and social benefits to compensate for all price increases according to an index drawn up by the workers organizations.
*Sliding scale of hours: division of working hours
SPAIN among all available workers at the factory, industrial branch, and regional levels with no reduction in wages, under the control of delegates elected by the workers. The capitalists are responding to the economic crisis with their "classical" weapons: fake bankruptcies, factory closings, massive layoffs, sharp increases in the pace of production. As for the workers movement, it also commands a classical weapon against capitalist pillage and deceit: workers control, the first experiments in which began to be made during the struggles at SEAT, Bianchi, etc.:
*Workers control of production: abolition of secret commerce; open the companies' account books.
*Workers control over forms of payment and the work pace.
*Workers veto over all layoffs and factory shutdowns. In relation to all these demands, as a point of departure from which to realize them and as a weapon against demagogy about the "insuperable" economic difficulties of the employers, the worker should advance the following demands:
*Nationalization without compensation of the private banks and financial corporations (with the exception of the deposits of small savers).
*Nationalization without compensation of all closed-down companies; restarting of production under workers control.
*Elimination of all Francoist labor legisiation - weapons for the superexploitation of the workers - and suppression of the fascist trade-union, the CNS, fundamental instrument of repression and control of the working class.
*One class union independent of the capitalists and their state, based on workers democracy, with the democratic election of delegates and leaders at all levels and with guarantees of the right of tendencies. 2. For the demands of all the exploited.
For a radical agrarian reform. The working class in Spain is not alone in its struggle. Students, professors, instructors, housewives, and small shopkeepers are also struggling for their own demands and in solidarity with the workers. The proliferation of local general strikes testifies to this. They presage the revolutionary alliance of the working class with the whole of the laboring people on a class line against any pact with the bourgeoisie. To advance along this line, the work12 ing class must adopt the basic demands that all these sectors advance in their struggle:
*Against capitalist profitization of education.
For free, secular, bilingual, rounded, compulsory education up to age eighteen.
* Immediate expropriation of all private educafion centers.
*Against class medicine. For social security financed by the state and the companies, under workers control; the whole population must be guaranteed quality medical care and medicine completely free of charge. Nationalization without compensation of all pharmaceutical trusts. Immediate expropriation of all pawnshops, insurance companies, and private clinics.
*No rent higher than 10 percent of base wages.
Immediate occupation of vacant housing by families without housing.
*Price-watch committees formed by delegates of workers, peasants, housewives, and small shopkeepers capable of combatting speculation, hoarding, gambling, and fraud in products of primary necessity.
*Long-term, interest-free credit for small shopkeepers. But the fundamental ally of the Spanish working class is in the countryside. Twenty-five percent of the active population are peasants. They suffer with growing intensity from the effects of the ruin of the structures of agricultural property, production, and distribution in Spain. In addition to the agricultural proletariat, which already has a great tradition of struggle, especially in southwest Andalusia, the peasants themselves have entered into struggle throughout the Spanish state. A rodical agrarian reform is thus on the agenda:
*Expropriation without compensation of the large landed estates and the big capitalists of agriculture. Abolition of any form of separation between property and cultivation. Land to those who till it!
*Nationalization of the marketing network for agricultural products and its administration by elected delegates of agricultural workers, members of agricultural cooperatives, and small peasants. 3. For the destruction of Francoism.
For democratic rights. For the right of self-determination of oppressed nationalities. Against any oppression and repression.
The overthrow of the dictatorship must be pressed to its ultimate conclusion. Nothing must survive of Francoism, not even a shadow. A single virus could infect the country once again. The mass movement understands very well this fundamental condition for its victory. The slogans of the destruction of Francoism must be engraved in letters of fire in the consciousness of the masses:
*Dissolution of all the special repressive bodies and all the Francoist courts.
*Accounts must be settled for all the crimes of the dictatorship. Vigilance and purge committees in every factory, neighborhood, and city in the country. People's tribunals will judge the torturers and murderers and all fascist vultures. The basic slogans of revolutionary antimi litarism will take on a burning applicability during the coming Spanish revolution. An army infected with fascists, Pinochet candidates, and military chieftains of the civil war will have to be purged. The copacity to offer the necessary response to any putschist undertaking will have to be organized both inside and outside the barracks:
*Purge the army of reactionary chiefs and officers. Dissolution of the mercenary and colonial corps.
*Democratic rights for soldiers. Creation and extension to all barracks of committees of soldiers and sailors, coordinated among themselves and with the workers organizations as well.
*Permanent self-defense detachments of the workers commissions and similar bodies capable of organizing the response to any form of repression against the mass movement and its vanguard, detachments that will be the embryos of the future workers militias. After forty years of dictatorship, an immense aspiration for the integral exercise of all rights and democratic freedoms is being manifested in all the struggles of the masses. This is true to such an extent that there have already emerged projects of "short-cut democracy, " such as that of the Junta Democratica, which seek to reduce these aspirations to the meager limits that would allegedly be tolerated by the Spanish bourgeoisie. The reformists seek in this way to once again place the hangman's knot of "democracy" around the neck of the Spanish working class. The Trotskyists will struggle energetically and with determined spirit for all democratic demands and against any form of repression and oppression, seeking to make sure that all limits imposed on the democratic rights of the masses are overstepped by the struggle of the masses themse Ives:
*Unlimited right to strike with no regulation whatever.
*Freedom to hold meetings, freedom of association and the press, freedom to demonstrate.
*Release of all political prisoners. Return of all exiles.
*Elections to constituent assemblies, with the right to vote at age sixteen for all men and women residing on the territory of the Spanish state. Right to vote in these elections for all
Spanish emigrant workers and the members of their families.
*Abolition of any form of censorship. Freedom of artistic creation.
*Full and complete sexual freedom. Right to sex information. Free distribution of means of contraception on demand. Free abortion on demand.
*Abolition of all discrimination against women economically, juridically, and socially.
*Complete separation of church and state.
*Immediate and unconditional return to Morocco of the Spanish colonial territories in North Africa.
*Immediate withdrawal of all Spanish troops from the Sahara. Unconditional independence for the
Sahara, so that the people of the Sahara may
Freely decide their fate. But there is one fundamental democratic right in Spain that is often forgotten or eliminated in the programs opposing Francoism: the right of self-determination for all nationalities oppressed by the Spanish state, A revolutionary program for Spain must accord a place of honor to this right, the place that it already occupies in the consciousness of the masses of these nationalities:
*Immediate election by universal suffrage exercised by all the inhabitants of the territory of each oppressed nationality of a national assembly of that nationality for the free exercise of the right of self-determination. 4. For the breakup of all pacts with imperialism. For the Socialist United
States of Europe. Spanish capitalism is fully integrated into the imperia list system. The opposition that certain European governments are expressing to the Francoist dictatorship's membership in NATO or the Common Market is only the reflection of these governments' deep fear of a reaction by the workers of their own countries against open collaboration with Francoism. But this involves no obstacle at all to other forms of military "mutual aid, " especially with the United States and Portugal, or secret police pacts, especially with France. For the Spanish
13
SPAIN bourgeoisie, respect for and broadening of these alliances is the best guarantee of its class rule, whatever the circumstances. For the Communist party, acting through the Junta Democratica, unconditional respect for the totality of these accords represents one of the key points of the "democratic alternative" to Francoism. For revolutionaries, the overthrow of the dictatorship is intimately linked to the breakup of all pacts with imperialism:
*Breakup of all pacts and all military alliances with imperialism. Breakup of the Hispano-American pact and of the Iberian Pact. Yankee military bases out of Spain!
*Breakup of all secret pacts of repressive and police collaboration with imperialist governments; immediate publication of the content of these pacts.
*Withdrawal of all British troops and military bases from Gibraltar. Immediate return of Gibraltor to the Spanish state. Spain's relations with the European Economic Community must be approached from a consistent internationalist standpoint opposed to any "tactical support" to the incorporation of a non-Francoist Spain into the EEC, support justified by the alleged "aid" that such incorporation would bring to the "democratization" of the country, which is linked to the promise of an alleged future "democratization" of the EEC itself. The struggle of the Spanish workers has received and will receive genuine aid and solidarity only from their class brothers. To the EEC and to any form of international political alliance with the bourgeoisie, the Spanish workers must counterpose the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe. Francoist Spain is a golden refuge for fascists the world over and is one of the centers of international Fascist terrorism. The overthrow of the dictatorship. must also mean that all this rabble, whose intimate financial, military, and political links with the dictatorship are well known, is brought before the revolutionary justice of the Spanish people. Spain must instead be transformed into a land of asylum for revolutionary fighters of the whole world, into a center of international solidarity with the strug gles of all the workers of the world. Solidarity must be organized especially with the Portuguese workers, on the road to a Federation of Socialist Iberian Republics against any project for turning Spain into a counterrevolutionary base against the Portuguese people. 14
5. For the unity of the proletarian front
For a workers government The basic strength of the present mass movement in Spain and the most solid basis for its future victory against the dictatorship and capitalism is its capacity for self-organization. The country has already witnessed thousands of distinct experiences on this field among the masses and the broad vanguard. For the moment, the sharpest evidence of the rise of self-organization of the mass movement is provided by the generalization of assemblies in the factories and by the expansion of their decision-making power. To struggle for the consolidation and extension of this process is an essential task of the Spanish revolution:
*For the generalization of workers assemblies in the factories as decision-making centers. For the election by these assemblies of committees recallable by the assemblies. For the coordina-
Tion and centralization of strike committees.
*For the strengthening, construction, and extension of the workers commissions and similar bodies. For their coordination and centralization at all levels and among all sectors in struggle. The political basis of the self-organization of the mass movement lies in its class independence from the bourgeoisie. An implacable struggle must be waged against the inclusion of the bourgeoisie or any of its political spokesmen in the organs of the mass movement and its vanguard. The representatives of the bourgeoisie must be expelled wherever they have been incorporated into such organs with the complicity of the reformists and other partisans of class collaboration.
*For the breakup of all pacts between workers political organizations and the bourgeoisie!
* The workers organizations must leave the Junta
Democratica and any other alliance with the bourgeoisie!
*For the workers united front against the dictatorship and capitalism! The sharper the ruin of Francoism becomes and the more its overthrow by the mass movement approaches, the more the reformists agitate for the slogan "government of broad coalition, " an instrument that would enable the bourgeoisie to tear victory from the hands of the Spanish workers and would assure the bourgeoisie the best possible conditions for reconstructing its state. The real authors of the fall of the Francoist regime - the working class and the toiling masses of the Spanish state - can expect nothing from such a government, except the denial of their essential demands once again. No conquest of struggle will be able to be lastingly guaranteed without the emergence of a workers
government based on the organs of mass self-organization that arise from the struggle for the overthrow and destruction of the dictatorship and responsible only to these organs. Only such a workers government will be able to move to the realization lISH SOLI UNITED FOl The fall of the Francoist dictatorship and the beginning of the third Spanish revolution of this century could change the objective situation in West Europe from top to bottom. Interacting with the revolutionary process developing in Portugal, it would powerfully stimulate an important new rise of workers struggles in France, Italy, and elsewhere. In a context of generalized economic recession and of prolonged social and political crisis, these struggles could in turn attain an objectively anticapitalist dynamic even sharper than in 1968 or 1969. But it would be irresponsible to sow illusions about a possible passivity of imperialism and the international bourgeoisie in face of a crisis of its system that threatens to be one of the deepest and broadest since 1917-19. If threats against the Portuguese proletariat are proliferating, even though in this country the bourgeoisie still commands so important an ultimate trump card as the MFA and even though the degree of politicization of the workers is lower than it is in Spain (even if it is now advancing rapidly), one can easily imagine the ferocious assault that would be directed against the beginning of proletarian revolution in Spain, which has one of the most combative and politicized proletariats in the entire world, and where it is highly possible that organs of dual power will cover the country from the very moment of the fall of the dictatorship.
of the revolutionary program that corresponds to the interests and demands of the masses, thus opening the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat: the coordination, centralization, and exercise of all power by workers councils. THE NEED TO PREPARE FOR URGENT TASKS OF INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY If is thus imperative for revolutionaries to immediately begin preparing themselves and the broadest vanguards of workers and youth to take up the many tasks of international solidority with the revolution and the proletariat of the Spanish state, tasks that could be posed more rapidly than might presently be thought. Today, more than after July 1936, active solidarity with the rising Spanish revolution must become the cause of all the workers in Europe and throughout the world. And, drawing the lessons of the experience of the Spanish civil war, this solidarity movement, while spurning no potential support, and while espousing the most flexible forms of the non-exclusive united front, must express itself on the basis of broad class independence so that it cannot be used as an instrument of braking and blackmail that would divert the Spanish revolution from the paths that it will trace out itself, which can happen against the intentions and will of the international proletariot itself. The best way to prepare to carry out the broader tasks of solidarity that will be posed tomorrow is to begin now to develop a vast international compaign of solidarity with the exemplary fight of the political prisoners in Spain for their immediate and unconditional release. The political prisoners who are rotting in Franco's jails have organized a battle whose dynamism, tenacity, unshakeable faith in the victory of the proletariat, and daily heroism are unprecedented in the history of the European workers movement, rich as this movement is in examples of indomitable fighters. The respect and admiration that this struggle imposes on everyone must be expressed in mobilizations throughout Europe, which will prepare for even more vast mobilizations when the death knell of the dictatorship sounds. The Fourth International calls upon its sections, sympathizers, and friends, the broadest possible workers and mass vanguard of Europe and the world, to throw themselves into these mobilizations. May 31, 1975
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