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Communist Parties of Europe could 'project a revolutionary orientation' and lead the overthrow of capitalism.

This view ran directly opposite tó the Trotskyist analysis that the CPs have been definitively and irreversibly transformed into instruments of the counterrevolutionary foreign policy of the parasitic Kremlin bureaucracy.

Though initially there was little opposition to this fundamentally false position-which effectively denied the need for the construction of Trotskyist parties-a fight against it eventually took place in 1953 and led to a split in the ranks of the Ancient history The followers. of Pablo, grouped around the International Secretariat, were politically rejoined in 1963 by the US Socialist Workers Party-though reactionary US legislation forbade its affiliation-and the so-called "United" Secretariat: (USFI) was formed, on the basis of letting bygones be by-gones.

When reminded of their Pabloite heritage nowadays, it is fashionable for members of USFI national sections-which include the British International Marxist Group-to brush the issue aside and regard it all as a matter of ancient history.

But now a "star" section of the USFI has given further clear proof that the revisionist conceptions of Pablo still live on happily within the topmost ranks of the USFI leadership.

In the last month the USFI's recognised section in Spain the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League) has shown the extremes of political compromise to which these Pabloite positions lead.

Persecution

The LCR was invited to attend the recent Ninth Congress of the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party, a party whose history involves participation in the persecution and murder of Trotskyists, centrists of the POUM, and anarchists during the Civil War and whose present role is characterised by its leaders' slavish support for the anti-working class francoist government of Adolfo Suerez.

Instead of sharply attacking and exposing the infamous counter-revolutionary past and present of the CP, the LCR chose to approach the CP as guests on their best and most respectful behaviour.

In its weekly newspaper Comin their words:

"We want to express our gratitude to the Spanish Communist Party for the attitude it has taken towards the LCR at this 9th Congress.

The national leadership of our party, the Madrid leadership and Combate (as well as Rouge the newspaper of the French LCR) have all been invited to the Moreover, we have been allowed to address all the delegates publicly, saying to them from the platform what we thought necessary.

And we must add that the warmth with which the delegates received our presence is a fine and emotive expression of the fratornal links which-in spite of the political differences-exist between both parties"

Discarded

There, in a few words, all the lessons of Trotsky's long struggle to rebuild the revolutionary party in bitter conflict with Stalinism -a conflict that cost Trotsky and countless more revolutionaries their lives at the hands of Stalin's murder squads-are discarded.

In its intervention in the Congress itself the LCR showed that it did not think that the CP was an obstacle on the road to the building of revolutionary leadership.

The party was asked for its collaboration in rehabilitating the Bolshevik: old guard-Trotsky, Bukharin and Zinoviev, along with the leader of the Spanish POUM Andres Nin in the USSR all eastern countries.

That request was made to a party which for all its conversion to "human rights" still has as one of its members (still in exile in the USSR) Trotsky's •assassin Ramon Mercader.

"Open debate"

The LCR's other theme was that the differences between its "Trotskyism" and the Spanish CP (which the LCR never describes as Stalinist) could be settled by "open debate"

"Between the PCE and the LCR there are deep political differences. To be honest, these are deeper than with other currents of the workers' movement I!! But they can be and should be openly discussed. So we have recently had debates in Barcelona and Madrid between your comrades Jordi Barja and Juan Francisco Pla and our comrade Ernest Mandel.

We want to pick up the proposal that you yourselves made on that occasion that these debates are taken into the factories, the universities, towns and villages where your comrades and ours come together in joint struggle against exploitation and oppression.

The public opening of debate for our next Congress and the publication of the resolutions of the 9th Congress of yours will serve to take forward the discussions which have already begun.

We are bitter enemies of sectarianism, we are defenders of rescuing the old and often abandoned proletarian tradition of debate in the workers' movement which is open and fraternal, however hard it may be politically.

No distinction was made in this intervention between the leadership of the CP and its mass base.

In fact, in an article on the Congress in Combate (May 14)

to be the mass base of the CP which poses problems for the LCR.

Contempt

Fernandez' "analysis" of the Spanish CP is worth quoting at some length since it expresses at the same time a contempt for the rank and file of the CP (who are blamed for the leadership's bureaucratic control) and an implicit expectation that if only there was more internal democracy the CP would return to the "revolutionary" fold.

Once again it is a position which throws out all the gains made and principles fought for in Trotsky's long struggle against Fernandez writes:

"The PCE is taking • major steps in the direction [of the social democratic parties].

The first is spontaneous: years and years of sacrificing the revolutionary • programme, including the distorted notion of it which the traditional communist parties have held, to the reformist political platform of the movement, on the basis of this or that "alliance'" or "tactical manoevre" • mean that the rank and file of the organisation gets filled with new members whose only political horizon is this reduced platform and not the permanentty postponed general The sacond is deliberate: Under the slogan of the mars party" the criteria for membership are reduced to nothing.

Joining is converted for many into the mere act of buying a party card. So the political level the level of discussion, the demand for training and information all fall.

So, joined to the old and new militant layers of the party appears a fundamentally now layer which becomes a dead weight for the internal life of the party and the development of a revolutionary policy.

This new, 'tremendously depoliticised base has a natural tendency towards moderation and voting with, the bureaucracy which converts it into a rubber mattress which allows them to cushion any radical impulse which might originate from the truly militant layer of the party, the layer most closely linked to the Salies masses and most sensitive to its needs.

Finally, internal democracy is also a question of the politicai education of the membership, especially of the cadres and in that respect the PCE leaves much tó be desired.

Its tradition is not exactly democratic but Stalinist and bureaucratic. Nor is its daily practice in the mass organisations which it dominates an example of democracy"

Now is certainly a decisive moment for Trotskyists in Spain to intervene politically with the mass rank and file of the CP's members.

The party shows itself in a major crisis at a time when the expectations and political involve ment of Spanish workers art growing fast.

But a Trotskyist intervention would be the reverse of that of the LCR.

Instead of beginning a search for a means of reforming the CP into a "revolutionary party" Trotskyists would start from the position that the CP was an incurably counter-revolutionary party, large sections of whose base nonetheless could and must be won to revolutionary politics.

Fernandez (apparently endorsed by the LCR) implies that if the CP threw out some of its politically weak members it would have more chance of adopting a revolutionary policy.

This can only mean tht the LCR sees Stalinism not as a conscious counter-revolutionary political force but as simply lacking formal internal democracy especially in view of the Stalinist ban on tendency rights within the It is, in other words, the same as the bourgeois liberal definition of Stalinism.

In spite of some remaining strictures on the CP's democracy, the LCR sees the debate before and during the Congress not as the signs of a crisis for the authority of the leadership but as an indication of change.

"Without any doubt" , begins the lead article in Combate, (27 April), "this Congress has been the most democratic of those which have happened in any CP since Stalin liquidated internat democracy"

The LCR, therefore, comes close to giving its "Trotskyist" seal of approval to the CP's own claim that 'We have overcome The LCR's position can lead nowhere except to political selfliquidation.

Its reaction to the CP's Congress shows it to be incapable of building on independent revolutionary leadership.

It has buried the political weapons with which Trotsky's struggle has provided the revolutionary movement, and it now has the capacity to be nothing more than a left pressure group on the Spanish CP.

The so-called "myth" of Pabloism has shown itself to be much more substantial than the self proclaimed "Trotskyism" of the LCR.

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bate, the LCR unctuously declares its "gratitude" to the CP