revolutionary marxists
SPAIN answer slanders On September 13 a bomb exploded during lunch hour in La Tropical bar in Madrid, near the headquarters of the National Security Police. At least a dozen people were killed in the blast; about seventy were wounded. The Francoist government has blamed the bombing on the Basque liberation movement and has used it as an excuse to intensify the repression, especially in Euzkadi (the Basque country). At the same fime, the Spanish bourgeois press has opened a slander campaign seeking to place responsibility for the bombing and for terrorism in general on the Fourth International and its supporters in Spain. The following statement answering this campaign was issued by the comrades of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria-Euzkadi ta Askatasuna VI (LCR-ETA(VI)--Revolutionary Communist League-Basque Nation and Freedom, Sixth Congress), a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International on the territory of the Spanish state. INPRECOR The attack of last September 13 in Correos de Madrid street has been the occasion for the development of a new propaganda and police campaign by the Francoist dictatorship, the sole and real incarnation of terrorism in this country for the past forty years. The objectives of this campaign are the following: 1. To attempt to justify the assassinations of Basque nationalist militants that the present "manhunt" -- which continues a long and bloody repressive tradition -- is resulting in. 2. To attempt to justify the savage prison sentences that the Public Order Tribunal and the military courts have imposed against revolutionary militants, the most recent examples being the 21- and 12-year terms handed down against Zabarte and Gazte lumendia by a War Council in Burgos. 3. To attempt to justify the legal and budgetary measures that are strengthening the police character of the Francoist state even more: permanent occupation of the popular neighborhoods and of entire villages, increase in the number of troops in the armed police, the civil guard, and the Brigade Politico-Sociale (Politico-Social Brigade, the secret police), judicial immunity for the police, immunity and encouragement for the fascist bands, etc. 4. To attempt to discredit all the revolutionary organizations, all those struggling for the overthrow of the dictatorship, comparing our methods and objectives to those that produced the attack on Correos street. But in particular, the campaign is an attempt to discredit the methods of direct mass action, the organization of revolutionary violence in face of the attacks of repression, precisely because the dictatorship knows very well that it is these methods - - which have nothing at all to do with the acts of September 13 -- that will permit the working class and the Spanish people to destroy the dictatorship forever. We think that any revolutionary position on the acts of which we are speaking must begin by denouncing this hypocritical campaign of a dictatorship built and maintained in power by a series of crimes. But we must also affirm that the attack of September 13 contributed to the unfolding of the campaign and constituted an absurd resort to violence, not only foreign to the struggles of the working class and people in our country but also in contradiction with them.
From a revolutionary point of view, there is not the slightest justification, whether direct or indirect, for the attack at Correos street. That is why we believe that no revolutionary organization is responsible for it. In the end, we consider this attack as an action contrary to the interests of the struggle against the dictatorship and capitalism. And, from the standpoint of this struggle, which is the standpoint of all who are exploited and oppressed by Francoism, we condemn it absolutely: In addition to what we have already mentioned, the events of September 13 have given a new impetus to a specific campaign against the Fourth International, a campaign that has been developed throughout the world by the political police for several months -- in collaboration with the most reactionary, if not openly fascist, sectors of the bourgeois press. This campaign aims at presenting the Fourth International, the world revolutionary organization founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, as a mélange of anarchist, Stalinist, Castroist, and nationalist organizations having only one thing in common: the fact that they call for "terrorism." In our country in the past few weeks, both the attempted kidnapping of the Count of Barcelona and the Correos street attack have been attributed to the Fourth International. This stupid and incredible list will certainly be continued. We are determined to denounce these base slanders. The Fourth International is a world organization of Trotskyist militants. Our common denominator is the program of proletarian revolution based on the principles of revolutionary Marxism elaborated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Our objective is the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of the world republic of workers councils on the road to communist society, which will realize all the dreams of freedom of the whole history of the human race. On the road to their economic and political liberation the workers and peoples of the world have always had to and will always have to confront the barbarous resistance of their exploiters. Those who may have forgotten this obvious lesson of history need only to look at Chile. The Fourth International
is fighting so that there will be no more Chiles, so that the masses will be armed with the desire to arm themselves and will thus resist and overthrow their class enemy. That is the communist conception of revolutionary violence around which the work of thousands of militants of dozens of organizations and sections of the Fourth International on all the five continents of the world is oriented. It is clear that the Fourth International has fundamental theoretical, programmatic, strategic, and tactical differences with organizations that are presented by the bourgeois campaign as belonging to it: in our country, for example, organizations like the MIL, GARI, FRAP, ETA(V)* and others. It is likewise clear that in spite of these differences, we have defended and we will continue unconditionally to defend these organizations, as well as all other revolutionary organizations, against the bourgeoisie, because we think that the actions of these * MIL: Movimiento Iberico de Liberación (Iberian Liberation Movement). GARI: Grupo Armado Revolucionario Iberico (Iberian Armed Revolutionary Group). FRAP: Frente Revolucionario Armado del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Front of the People). ETA(V): Euzkadi ta Askatasuna V (Basque Nation and Freedom-Fifth Congress). SPAIN on the call for a general strike The following article, which deals with the call issued by the Workers Commissions for a general strike in Spain this autumn, appeared in Combate, organ of the LCR-ETA(VI), a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in