'trotskyists' Greet Spanish Stalinist

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Stalin reversed Bolshevik measures to legalise homosexuality Party and its Catalonian subsidiary the PSUC, attended a celebration of "Eurocommunism"

Apart from the leaders of the PSUC (including Gregorio Lopez Raimundo) the platform included enemy No. I of Leninism Santiago Carrillo, Dolores Ibarruri (President of the Spanish CP) and the General Secretary of the Italian CP Enrico Berlinguer.

Record It would be hard to find in half a dozen people such a concentrated record of counter-revolution and treachery towards the working class.

Lopez Raimundo, Ibarruri ("La Passionaria") and Carrillo were all leading members of the Spanish Communist Party when, in conjunction with the Soviet secret police, it waged .. a campaign of extermination against Trotskyists and against the POUM during the Spanish Civil War.

In recent years they have presided over the Spanish CP's policy of systematic class collaboration, at first with the bourgeois "opposition" to Franco and now with the Francoists of the Union of the Democratic Centre in their new "democratic" disguise.

Every time major that confrontations have developed between the militant Spanish working class and the forces of capitalism represented ' by the francoist state, these leaders and their associates have been in the vanguard of efforts to demobilise the struggle before there was any real danger of a threat to capitalist rule.

Faithful

The purpose of the Barcelona rally was a gathering of the "Eurocommunist" faithful at which Berlinguer, dolefully, and Carrillo, more aggressively than usual, could do their best to show that all their collaboration in the end was part of a strategy to build socialism.

Nothing they said was any surprise even if it is always a shock to hear such naked justifications of class treachery from those who profess to lead the working class.

Berlinguer lamented the death of Italian capitalist politician Moro and justified his party's support for Carrillo strong state measures against "terrorism" in Italy.

He expressed pride in having become part of the recognised parliamentary majority.

Supported And he made it clear that he supported Carrillo's concept of "Eurocommunism"

"Eurocommunism". , said Carrillo, was definitely not an attempt to form a new reject the description of the oppression of homosexuality in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union as 'sexual Before we can take up the fight against this oppression, we need to understand why it is imposed by the Stalinist bureaucracies in the deformed workers' states.

Abolished

In presenting the skeleton of such an analysis, we have to begin in December 1917, when the Bolsheviks abolished those sections of the Tsarist penal code dealing with homosexuality, along with all other legal restrictions on free and equal sexual relations.

But this advance was reversed, along with many other secondary gains of the October Revolution, as the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated its hold.

In March 1934, a new federal statute was introduced against homosexuality, now characterised as an aspect of the 'degeneracy of the fascist bourgeoisie' The penalities of this law were far more severe than those of the Tsarist legislation, and as a crime, homosexuality was now placed on a level previously reserved for major crimes against the state.

This attack, and the mass arrests of gays which Each Communist had to plough its own furrow.

Carrillo himself had just come from one of his most shameful efforts to date to cement his alliance with his "own" bourgeoisie.

The previous day he had participated in the annual homage to the flag (the Francoist monarchist flag) and the armed forces (the Francoist armed forces).

This he justified by saying that it was important that the people and the army should be as close as possible because the army are "our sons and our fathers"

Dead Tory Carrillo joined in the lamentation for dead Tory Aldo Moro and equated the Red Brigades with fascism.

He justified the Moncloa pact which, he said, would have solved the economic crisis if the agreements had been followed by the government and by the PSOE.

The only way out of unemployment was a policy of "consensus"

But the CP would not agree to extend the Moncloa agreements for a further year. What was needed was a serious, agreed, economic plan for three years.

And for that Spain required, said Carrillo, what. Catalonia already had in embryo, a government of "democratic concentration" which for him extends to the hard line Francoist Popular Alliance.

The enemies of' democracy' had been reduced to a tiny handful.

munist" rally of Barcelona therefore had an unambiguously and predictably reactionary objective.

Sister to IMG

That, however, was not the analysis of Spanish "Trotskyists" of • the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).

A sister party of the British International Marxist Group, the LCR is probably the largest national section of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International and certainly one of its two most important sections in Europe.

The LCR's attitude to the rally was a continuation of the slavish adaptation to Carrillo which it demonstrated in its message to and comments on the recent CP Congress (See Socialist Press 100).

These "Trotskyists" did not denounce the politically reactionary nature of the rally.

Message

They sent a message of support which was ironically announced by Gregorio Lopez Raimundo, an active member in the 1930s of the party which eagerly and bloodily persecuted those Trotskyists whom the LCR regards as its predecessors.

Such an action as the LCR's can do nothing but bring comfort to the Stalinist leaders.

From Enrique Alvares in Barcelona