Crisis Rocks Spain's Reformists

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The right-wing General Secretary of the party congress.

It was widely rumoured that, after he had made his dramatic and unexpected resignation speech, the first desperate plea for Gonzalez to change his mind came from the Francoist Premier Suarez.

Whether or not such a message was sent, the results of the PSOE Congress will produce nothing but alarm in Spain's capitalist class.

Open fight

They now see the prospects of an increasingly open fight between the socialist aspirations of large sections of the PSOE rank and file and the right-wing leaders for control of the temporarily headless party.

The occasion for Gonzalez's resignation was his humiliating defeat in a vote which, against his bitter opposition, reaffirmed the PSOE's paper committment to "Marxism" •But the dispute in the party in the six months before the emergency conference to elect a new general secretary is bound to rage not only around questions of words but also of policies and leadership.

Disappointed

The two years of the PSOE's now legal operation have deeply disappointed millions of Spanish workers who have voted for a class party in the hope of opening the way for the socialist policies of which Gonzalez demagogically spoke.

They have seen a Francoist dictatorship change its form but not its personnel or its anti-working class policies.

And it has been allowed this freedom to operate by the collaboration of reformist leaders like Gonzalez, along with his Stalinist counterpart, Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo.

Disillusion with the leadership appeared at the Gonzalez very start of the congress when the PSOE's parlia* mentary leader, Gregario Peces Barba, was rejected by the congress first as Chairman and then as Deputychairman, even though he was backed by the whole' Later, Gonzalez was only able to win the vote on his political report by making a demagogic self-criticism of the PSOE's support for the wage-cutting strike-breaking Moncloa Pact in 1977.

32% of the delegates to the PSOE congress voted against the main political One And in the vote on "Marxism" Gonzalez was reduced to a minority of only 31%.

These votes indicate a rough division of the delegates into three groups: one third open right wingers who lined up behind the main leadership on all questions; another third who wish to commit the PSOE formally to "Marxism" and "socialism" but who accepted the collaborationist policies of the leadership; and a final third who oppose both the policies of the leadership as well as its more symbolic efforts to point the party to the right.

This group includes "Trotskyists" and the Spanish equivalents of sections of the Tribune Group, as well as many independent militants.

Demands of masses

But there is no doubt that they reflect the demands of the mass of the working class for policies to beat the capitalist and Francoist offensives.

The extent of the opposition in the PSOE congress was certainly less than in the party as a whole.

Nonetheless it was a disagreeable surprise to the leadership who have spent the last year organising massive purges of socialists from the PSOE, especially in Euskadi and Andalucia.

The left forces at the congress remain, however, without any bold revolutionary leadership.

After Gonzalez' resignation none of them were ready to present themselves as an alternative leadership.

Exploited

This failure was swiftly exploited by the bureaucracy who managed to get agreement for a S-man committee of right wingers and the fakest of fake lefts elected to run the party until the special congress.

The militancy of the rank and file and the weakness of the bureaucracy, which the events of the PSOE congress have revealed, is a major new threat to the treacherous policy of consensus in postFranco Spain.

And it has exploded at the same time as new threats of right-wing military takeover as ETA steps up its successful Stalinist chief Carrillo terrorist campaign against army officers and the fascists organise with growing aggressiveness.

Destroy

Only the mobilisation of the working class around socialist policies can destroy these threats from the extreme right.

The crisis which has opened in the PSOE offers a new opportunity to Spanish revolutionaries in the fight to build a revolutionary The reactionary Giscard-Barre government last week expelled menster on the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, from France.

He was detained on arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport.

They • were applying ban originally imposed on Mandel by De Gaulle and Pompidou.

We condemn this flagrant violation of democratic rights and call on labour movement organisations in France and elsewhere to denounce and fight against the growing use by capitalist governments of reactionary bans of this kind.

¡ Mandel

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(PSOE), Felipe Gonzalez, was forced to resign at last week's

Fight ban on Mandel!