[The United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued the following statement March 8.]
The Fourth International denounces the shipment of Polish coal to Spain in January and February 1970 during the courageous strike of the Asturian miners. In this way, the nationalistic and myopic Polish bureaucracy, with the complicity of the Kremlin, sabotaged the struggle of these workers.
While it is true that workers states living in a capitalist environment cannot avoid trading with states of a different social nature, it is no less true that such trade must be strictly subordinated, as was the case for the Soviet Union in Lenin and Trotsky's time, to the interests of the international class struggle and the world socialist revolution.
The fact that the governments currently in power in Warsaw and Moscow are expanding their trade with the capitalist countries, without regard for the disastrous effects this trade can have at specific times and in specific forms for the struggle of the workers in countries like Spain, reveals the full extent of the bureaucratic degeneration these countries have undergone.
This fact also undercuts the most elementary kind of trade-union solidarity. What sort of authority can Communist party members have for calling on miners and transport workers in the capitalist countries not to deliver coal to Spain, at the same time that a workers state is doing this?
While the Asturian miners' strike was going on, the Limbourg miners in Belgium were also on strike. Revolutionary activists alerted Belgian and German working-class public opinion against the danger of German coal coming into Belgium to break the strike. Among other things, the revolutionists got a majority of the Liège steelworkers to refuse to handle German coal.
Thus, while the Belgian miners were receiving demonstrations of international solidarity, the Spanish worker militants were thrown off balance by the arrival of coal from a country calling itself "socialist." They did not know how to react to this strikebreaking action.
The Fourth International calls on the Spanish Communist party activists, who condemned this shipment of Polish coal to Spain during the Asturias strike, to view this development in its full context. It appeals to them to make the connection between this strikebreaking action and the Kremlin's military intervention in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, as well as the policy followed by Stalin and the Spanish Communist party leadership during the civil war, when they strangled a promising socialist revolution for the sake of an agreement with segments of the bourgeoisie. All of these cases show the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism. In opposition to this, they will find their way back to Leninism.