[The decision on February 15th by Franco's Supreme…]

Scan page 2

The decision on February 15th by Franco's Supreme Court to reduce the savage jail sentences inflicted in 197 on the 'Carabanchel 10' - lead ers of the semi-legal 'Workers Commissions' - reflects the stick-and-carrot tactics now being forced on the fascist regime by the development of the Portuguese revolution. The simultaneous development of a 'hard' grouping among the top army leadership follows widespread strikes and demonstrations. All Madrid's theatres - for decades straightjacketted by censorship and poice surveillance - were closed in February by a protest strike of actors and producers.

Clearly worried by splits and indecisiveness among the ruling class General Campano, Command er of the Madrid military region, announced immediately after the Supreme Court had freed two of the Carabanchel militants that the army would oppose 'subversion' wherever it appeared, and that they were determined 'to guarantee some virtues which are not exclusively military' The fact that the worker's organisations of Lisbon and Oporto, and the land occupations in the South, are now thrusting beyond the 'democratic' limits of the Stalinist and Socialist Party leaders, has two important results. On the one hand it gives the lie to the Spanish Communist Party's polici ot a gradual, 'parliamentarv' road away from fascism. And on the other it drives key sections of the Spanish ruling class away from "liberal' solutions and towards plans, based on the army comman for a renewal of the most violent repression.

ITALY The Italian Communist coalition agreement with the Socialist Party and the main capitalist party, the Christian Democrats, took an important setback on February 12th.

The agreement reached last December in Venice for a municipal council supported by the votes of eighteen Stalinist councillors collapsed with the resignation of five representatives from the (openly anti-communist) Social Democratic Party and twenty-one Christian Democrats.

Vaunted in the Stalinist and reformist press for the last two months as a 'laboratory' for national politics, the Venice arrangement has disintegrated following strong pressure from Christian Democrat Party Secretary Amintore Fanfani, presently engaged in a labyrinthine faction fight within his own party over negotiations for a national deal for which the Stalinists are only too eager.

But the effect of the Venice collapse has been to push Comm unist Party policy, if anything, even further to the right. The Party press continues to publicise the twenty-five tiny municipilities in which some form of collaboration with the Christian Democrats continues. And in a Rome interview Stalinist party secretary Enrico Berlinguer stressed that even if the Socialist and Communist parties were to get a parliamentary majority they would not form a government without the Christian Dem ocrats.

----- pull-quotes -----

Party's plans for a 'historic compromise' - a national