Spanish 'lefts' Collapse Paves Way for Gonzalez-and

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Last week, by an overwhelming margin (86% of the votes) Gonzalez was voted back into the General Secretaryship of Spain's Socialist Party (PSOE) from which he resigned six months ago.

It might have been different party from the one which voted six months ago, against Gonzalez' passionate opposition, that the PSOE should continue to define itself as a "Marxist, working class party"

The "Marxists" who carried the day in May were reduced to a mere 7% of the delegates.

Unscrupulous

This was the result of an unscrupulous campaign of constitution-rigging and witch-hunting carried out over the last six months by Gonzalez and his gang.

But the victory of the right cannot be put down to fraud.

It followed from the supine political weakness of the "lefts" of the PSOE. The opportunity opened up by Gonzalez' humiliation in May found the lefts' not leading any struggle for the "Marxism" they profess to believe in, but rather paralysed with fear of assuming any responsibility.

By a set of pathetic, yellow compromises they have collaborated in "the triumph of Felipe", which they now even shamelessly claim as a victory for themselves!

This laughable claim is based partly on the view that the need for the special congress shows that the party still dominates over any individual leaderalmost the reverse of the truth.

The lefts' also claim that, though the special congress voted a new definition of the party as a "mass, democratic and federal" party (ie. not Marxist) their views really prevailed in the resolution which defined the PSOE's relation to Marxism.

Tool

This said that the PSOE took Marxism:

"as a theoretical tool, critical but non-dos matic, for the analysis of social reality" and that the party incorporate:

"Marxists and non-Marxist elements which and the have contributed to making socialism the great emancipating alternative of our time...

While the 'lefts' rejoice about meaningless verbal formulae, Felipe Gonzalez and the right wing have taken an iron grip on the party and are preparing to lead it even further to the right-possibly even into a coalition government with the increasingly hard-pressed Francoists of the Democratic Centre Union (UCD).

An attempt to get the Congress to vote against coalition with the capitalist parties was angrily rejected by the leaders who were willing to be constrained only not to enter a coalition in a "subordinate" position.

The Gonzalez leadership and their opponents certainly lived up to the keynote slogan of the Congress-the "slow revolution" to socialism.

The slowest route to any stated destination is to go in the opposite direction.

students virtually took over city and impelled the downTwo agricultural workers in the Alentejo in Southern Portugal fell victim on 28 September to the counterBoth members of a Collective Production Brigade, they were shot dead, and several other workers wounded, by soldiers of the Republican National Guard (GNR).

The GNR unit was stationed in the Alentejo to protect the land seized from the workers over the last two years to be handed back to the former landowners.

The law which allows this counter-revolutionary attack on the gains made by Portuguese workers and peasants in 1974 and 1975 was passed under the aegis of the Socialist Party government of Mario Soares.

Its implementation was stepped up by the Mota Pinto government against growing peasant and worker resistance.

In the face of such resistance the caretaker government of Maria de Lurdes Pintassilgo (friend and admirer of former dictator Caetano) had announced a suspension of further restoration of land only a few weeks before this new unprovoked attack by the GNR.

The workers" deaths, the first of their kind in the Alentejo since the downfall of • Gonz the old dictatorship in April 1974, has already aroused massive anger from the working class, only two months from the parliamentary and municipal elections due to take place in December.

Numerous demonstrations of throughout the country. Party, protest took place last week The Communist Party, headed by Alvaro Cunhal, put itself at the head of many of these-but this was in order to control the spontaneous anger of its rank and file, not to direct the movement against the reactionary government.

Cunhal declared himself "very worried" by the murders, and rushed to discuss the matter with Pintassilgo who has promised a full enquiry into the incident.

The Socialist Party leadership, which fears the spontaneous mobilisation of the working class at least as much as the CP, has appealed for calm and against "extremist provocations"

But the workers of the Alentejo know very well who bears a large part of the responsibility for last week's armies-the Socialist Party which when a minority government in 1976 introduced a law which aliowed the restitution of land to the former exploiters.

New iffensivi against Po