France, including the bourgeois press, recognized the political importance and success of the fäte rouge. The breadth of the response, the considerable organizational achievement, the combination of diversity and unity, and the richness and vitality of the debates and presentations make the launching of the daily Rouge a political event that is already going beyond the framework of the LCR itself and addresses itself to the masses of workers and youth of all categories in open struggle agairst capitalism.
The fatal illness of the dictator has provoked a new aggravation of the death agony of Francoism.
The isolation of the dictatorship from Spanish and international big capital, strikingly revealed af the time of the execution of the five Spanish and Basque militants on September 27, has been further accentuated. The desire for an "opening" through the "Juan Carlos succession operation" has sharply come to the fore. As soon as Franco's death agony became known for certain, the big bourgeoisie tried to force an immediate and definitive passage of power to Juan Carlos.
At the same time, the direct beneficiaries of the dictatorship confirmed, just as they did during the days before and ofter September 27, that they would act in an increasingly autonomous manner, independent of the overall class designs of the bourgeoisie. Their resistance to passing power to Juan
Carlos mounted, Some of them (there was talk of the chief of the Guardia Civil and of Franco's sonin-law) even tried to challenge the Juan Carlos succession. Under the pretext of insisting that it was necessary to wait for Franco to die before moving to implement the succession, they tried to prepare
These attempts scarcely had any chance of success. They ran up against the opposition of virtually the entire army, which wants to maintain both it own unity and the "constitutional legitimacy" of the political regime, two imperatives that would immediately be broken if the Juan Carlos succession were abandoned. But there was fear, that the dictatorship would break apart and that the masses themselves would suddenly bufst onto the political scene; there was hesitancy to directly confront the "hard-line" Francoists out of fear of weakening the repressive apparatus. And all this prevented the advocates of the "Juan Carlos opening" from acting with determination, which in turn created the incredible situation of a "strong" state with no chief of state for more than a week, a whole state hanging on the death rattles of the old executioner and recording the last tremors of his dying heart,
The major objective of the Juan Carlos operation, of the "reform of Francoism, " remains what it al-
Ways was: to avert the outbreak of a prerevolutionary crisis following a qualitative broadening of foster the rise of the political mass movement instead of slowing it down: such is the limit of the macated by the arrest of Socialist leaders ir Madrid at the very moment that Juan Carlos was trying to extend his consultations in the direction of Social Democratic milieus, limits this maneuvering room
Thus, the facis confirm the diagnosis made by revolutionaries: It is only when the masses defeat all the plans to maintain the regime while reforming it, when a prerevolutionary situation becomes o reality, that the big bourgeoisie will openly proclaim its break with "Francoism without Franco" and accept the legality of the workers movement and its organizations as the only available alternative to the possibility of a direct confrontation of the masses with the bourgeois state to destray that state.
tend to create political structures that would push the mass movement back into channels compatible with the maintenance of the bourgeois state and the capitalist economy. This is what Juan Carlos's plans for alternative bourgeois solutions to. "Francoism without Franco" are all about. But the mass movement and the dynamic of decomposition of the regime will go beyond these plans in spain, just
Editeur responiable: Rend Groslambert, 34 rue Nothomb. 1040 Bruxelles/Imprimarie specTale de Pediteur a different succession, to the grandson of the dictator.
incapable of formalizing his obvious ipability to govern.
All the plans of the "reformist opposition, as they brought down similar project in Portugal.
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