[We have translated the following article from the October 19 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue
Communiste (Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International)].
"As for the parties that criticize us, we have the means to reduce them to the level of splinter groups." (Brezhnev. ) '
"I accuse Carrillo of conducting factional activities, factional activities begun years ago, which in the recent period have led to political and ideological division within the party, a division that today threatens to become an organizational division."
This is the charge Lister? wanted to hurl at the general secretary of the PCE (Partido Comunista de España— Communist party of Spain] at the expanded plenum of the Central Committee in September. He did not get the chance. The majority of the Central Committee rejected his proposed agenda; he left the hall, and found himself expelled from the party, just like Celestino Uriatrete, José Barzana, Luis Balaguer, and Jesús Saiz, who followed him.
This was only the most recent episode in the interbureaucratic struggle touched off by the intervention of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The leadership of the PCE firmly condemned the intervention, offering its support to Dubcek. On this
1. Quoted by Unir-Debat, No. 46, October 10, 1970. (This is the organ of the opposition faction in the French CP.]
2. Lister, a construction worker and union head, joined the PCE in 1930. He spent three years in the USSR, from 1932 to 1935, where he underwent intensive political and military training. He gained enormous military prestige for his exploits at the head of the Quinto Regimento (Fifth Regiment]. After the fall of Madrid, he returned to Moscow, where he was commissioned as a general in the Red Army fighting against the Hitlerite Germans. Since then he has lived in the USSR. 42
question, two members of the Executive Committee, Eduardo Garcia and Agustin Gómez, who had lined up behind the Soviet positions, have been bureaucratically expelled. This heavyhanded action revealed Carrillo's need to put an end to the factional campaign carried on by García and Gó- mez since 1968, which has been denounced repeatedly in the pages of Mundo Obrero, the organ of the PCE.
Today the confrontation between the pro-Soviet and Carrillo factions has broken out into the open, probably foreshadowing the breakup of the PCE itself.
The Garcia-Lister faction is launching an oppositionist Mundo Obrero, the first issue of which has just appeared. This grouping seeks to reappropriate the party central organ "usurped" by Carrillo, for use in a public factional war against him.
Carrillo has replied to Lister's violent accusations in an article entitled "The Lingering Odor of Beria," denouncing "slander of the party probably never equaled by Franco's propaganda."
It is true that Lister has always acted as a superloyal flunky of the Soviet bureaucracy and that he is still unequivocally on the side of the Red Army cliques. But in the interbureaucratic conflict within the PCE, it is not true that the Stalinists have chosen his camp.
It is nonetheless paradoxical to see Lister attacking the Carrillo group in these terms: "I accuse Carrillo of transforming the administrative apparatus into a party within the party." Still more: "For years great discontent has been accumulating in our party as a result of right and left opportunist deviations in the orientations and positions of Santiago Carrillo, and of a systematic violation of democratic centralism."
Tactical considerations alone cannot explain this denunciation of the bureaucratization of the party by a thoroughgoing Stalinist. Lister is, of course, seeking to draw behind him a section of the PCE apparatus and to win a minimum activist base in Spain itself. In his conflict with the Carri- Ilist bureaucracy, which has centrif-
Lister is fundamenugal tendencies, tally defending the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. But he is also expressing the resentment of PCE members, who since 1939 have taken refuge in the East European countries, especially the Soviet Union.
In opposition to this element, Carrillo has rebuilt the party apparatus and raised himself to the post of general secretary, where he has reigned like a Bonaparte since 1956.
Thus, Lister decided to expose Carrillo's rather uninspiring role in the 1950s and 1960s.
"I accuse Carrillo of forming a tribunal to interrogate and pass judgment on the comrades returning from the Nazi concentration camps in Germany. The fact that they were alive made each of them a suspected traitor. Carrillo maintained that all those who had escaped owed their success to holding the position of 'kapo,' or hangman of their comrades ...
"Carrillo in fact did not forgive these comrades for having escaped death. What Carrillo wanted was dead Communists whom he could use as a symbol. At the same time he wanted to get rid of as many as possible of those who might be able to testify to the baseness of the leaders of the party and the JSU [Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas - United Socialist Youth, the CP youth group], 3 who abandoned their comrades to their fate in 1939- 40, first in Spain and later in France."
Carrillo has not replied to these accusations. One faction is infected with the lingering odor of Beria, but his shadow falls on the other, too...
The present split in the PCE cannot be understood simply as the result of the crisis that has rocked the international Communist movement since the invasion of Czechoslovakia. This international crisis, in fact, combines with a crisis of the PCE in the Spanish context. The unprecedented upsurge of workers struggles over the last year has sounded the death knell if the PCE's policy of operating as a pressure group and making unprincipled alliances. This policy, represented as a strategy for overthrowing the Franco dictatorship and replacing it with a bourgeois-democratic regime supposed to be the first step toward socialism, is no longer tenable.
The allies that Carrillo sought in the "evolving" sectors of the bourgeoisie are in the government today. The workers' commissions have fallen into decay; their legalistic policy has been superseded by the present form of the struggles. The PCE is even finding its leadership challenged by Catholic trade-unionist currents. Moreover, the situation on the revolutionary far left is really beginning to be clarified.
The PCE has never been a mass party. But today it is losing even its basic organization in the workingclass centers. Its opportunism is being combined with an irresponsible and often criminal adventurism.
In view of the PCE's glaringly obvious incapacity for extending its hold over the Spanish working class, the Soviet bureaucracy has taken the of fensive on the basis of the following cold and cynical calculation: Since the PCE cannot serve as a serious card in the peaceful coexistence policy in Europe, it must be reduced to the role of a docile appendage. In this way, the Kremlin bureaucrats propose to put a halt to the notions the European CPs have today about freeing themselves from the domination of Moscow.
A complete split is very probable when the crisis reaches its peak, but all the cards have not been played yet. Carrillo still has a few aces, which he is capable of using skillfully. First of all, although he lacks a mass network, he does have an underground apparatus in Spain, and probably the critical support of the rank-and-tile activists, who have had little political indoctrination and are receptive to his "independent" positions. He apparently removed Eduardo Garcia from his post as organizational secretary of the jarty in time before García was able to build a solid faction inside Spain. This enables Carrillo now to bluff about the important recruitment the January 18, 1971
party is supposed to be experiencing at the present time.
Next, Carrillo proposes to play his international cards. At the conference of European CPs which was held last September 29 Carrillo was doubtlessly isolated on the Czechoslovak question. He can, however, boast of the support of the English CP, the only one that responded to the expulsion of Lister, which was reported in its organ the Morning Star. He can rely, to a certain extent, on the Italian CP. In recent issues of Mundo Obrero, Carrillo has played up his very fraternal conversations with Nicolas Ceaucescu, and his efforts to reestablish fraternal relations with the Chinese CP. In the latter respect, he anticipated the turn recently taken by the USSR and the European CPs.
Furthermore, Carrillo is still well regarded in Cuba, and he makes a point of this.
However, these arguments do not have decisive weight. Carrillo's best trump is doubtlessly the crisis which is now deepening in the European CPs and which the radical measures of the Soviet bureaucracy are more likely to aggravate than to quell.
A split in the PCE in the present situation would have a different order of importance from the one that occurred a year ago in the Finnish CP, or the expulsion of Ernst Fischer from the Austrian CP.
Carrillo has close relations with the Greek CP inside Greece. He recently had a meeting with Theodorakis in which he proposed coordinating the struggle against the dictatorships in power in both their respective countries. He does not conceal his sympathy for Garaudy; their standard themes at present converge, from the line of many models of socialism to the peaceful national strike, including the concept of a new historic bloc, or the alliance of labor and culture.
Along with this, there is the ardor of the Marchais team in its work of undermining the PCE. Since the realignment that followed the- verbaloutburst of condemning the intervention in Czechoslovakia, the PCF (Parti Communiste Français- French Communist party] has unquestionably become the Soviet bureaucracy's principal pawn on the European chessboard.
More monolithic than the Italian CP, the PCF proved itself in practice by damming up a revolutionary situation in May 1968. With Garaudy expelled and Marchais in power, this party is directly managing the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy. And it is doing this enthusiastically. It no doubt has turned its hand to the work of putting out the oppositionist Mundo Obrero. And it has presumed to organize PCE activists factionally in order to draw up a plan of campaign against Carriillo. (Cf. Unir-Débat, No. 46, October 10, 1970.)
But the PCF cannot long play the role of junior policeman without paying the price. It is well known that behind the artificially quiet facade, the cleavages are deepening.
Excluded from the Kremlin orbit, what trajectory will the PCE assume? A classical Social Democracy is even less conceivable in Spain than anywhere else. The Carrillist bureaucracy remains Stalinist. On the fringes of the pro-Moscow camp, the oscillations of its policy will probably increase dangerously.
From this standpoint, an International built on the Garaudy line is just as inconceivable. In the last analysis, it is the dialectical relationship between the international crisis of Stalinism and the building of the revolutionary International that will de termine the Spanish party's trajectory.
The emergence of a revolutionary Marxist organization in Spain will be the decisive factor.
Chicken with Arsenic Sauce
The United States Department of Agriculture found illegal concentrations of organic arsenic in 17 percent of the poultry it tested in 1969, according to an Associated Press dispatch published in the January 7 Washington Post. The previous year, 27.5 percent of the birds tested had too much arsenic. The department said it did not yet have figures for 1970.
The report attempted to reassure poultry eaters by pointing out that organic arsenic— also called arsenical - is not as poisonous as inorganic arsenic.
Arsenical is deliberately fed to poultry because it makes the birds grow faster.
'Full Employment
Nixon's economic advisers have invented a novel "cure" for unemployment. According to Edwin L. Dale Jr., writing in the November 8 New York Times, the administration now defines "full employment" as an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Notes
3. Carrillo was the general secretary of the JSU.