Spain: Police Killings Spark

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With int F 1-blc The historic offensive of the panish working class is referid to by Spain's fascist gime as a 'Communist plot. i fact it is the very absence of national revolutionary dership which is placing this pidly growing movement in Til. bakers Comties havan reitemtist parties have consistently ed to limit its objectibes and to mpromise with the so-called berals' of the regime. ¡Last week the leading 'liberal' rist, Interior Minister Fraga, omised that there would be dom of assembly within two nths (not to include the Commist Party and separatist moveints).

SHOOTING In days of that LOUnC aga's police had jun ti oded shooting lemo strators in the streets. These events heradiation meangh what Fraga's means.

They have shown too, the fact that the workers are not prepared to compromise and that their offensive has now spread out from the major cities to become a nation-wide movement, sweeping across all areas of the country.

In Vitoria, in the north on the edge of the Euskadi (Basque) country, a series of strikes in support of wage claims has been going on since January.

GENERAL On March 3Id at least 30,000 workers (out of a population of 170,000) _joined a one-day general strike and 20,000 joined a demonstration.

Police losing control of the centre of the town, opened tire on the crowd, shooting low to cause maximum injury. They Killed three people and injured a further 100, some of whom remain on the danger list.

Since the deaths the whol city has been at a standstill as wo kers stay on strike and police patt . the city in groups of 30, armed with automatic weapons.

BARRICADES

Bilbao, main industrial city of the north, 17,000 workers and students demonstrated against the murders in Vitoria and were themselves dispersed with police brutality. The same happened in the city of Pampiona to the east of Vitoria and in many other cities throughout Spain.

A few days before the Vitoria murders, an office worker had been shot dead by police in a demonstration in the southern town of Elda near Alicante.

On February 29th a series of battles took place between police and demonstrators in the northeastern city of Vigo, during which workers builtit barricades in the streets as they did in Vitoria and have done in Barcelona on several occasions in the last few weeks.

In Barcelona itself, where the 'constitutes a sacred duty for all marxist-leninists?

A number of coincidences underlined the historic character of the 25th Congress. It ended on the exact anniversary of Stalin's death in 1953. And it opened almost twenty years to the day since Kruschev, then party secrealary. levered his famous 'secret speech' to the closed session of the 20th In this, session Kruschev confirmed officially the terrible catalogue of Stalin's crimes and the murder of thousands of communists, through which the Stalinist faction consolidated its political dictatorship.

While the momentous history of the CPSU and the Bolshevik Party may be politely ignored by today's Stalinists, it cannot be buried.

'DEMOCRACY'

Behind all the hypocritical talk of 'democracy' stood the fact that in the ten years • 1917 to 1927 (following the decision of the 1917 Petrograde Congress - the first on Russian soil) the Bolshevik Party held virtually one congress a year.

In the four decades since then the Stalinists have held - equally -just ten Congresses, every one of which has opened an ended in total unanimity among the delegates!

For forty years choruses of functionaries and bureaucrats have greeted the latest line of the Party chiefs and jumped to denounce those whose boots they were yesterday licking. There was obsequieous 'unity' throughout the Stalin era. There was unanimity when Kruschey exposed Stalin at the 20th Congress in 1956, the same when at the 21st Congress (1959) he denounced the so-called anti-party group of Molotov and Malenkov (removed in 1957).

PORTY Madrid Seville striking police and firemen are now drafted into the army, other strikes, notably those of 85,000 building workers and 25,000 teachers, continue. And in Asturias the coal miners strike has now lasted two months. Spain is reported to be making up the needed coal by imports from Poland.

In-addition, the whole of Spain has been partly paralysed by a national strike of lorry drivers which began three weeks ago in Madrid. In some areas the regime has tried to break the strike by using troops to move supplies and to protect blacklegs against pickets. In Seville eleven strikers were arrested for forming pickets.

By last week it was estimated that over 300,000 Spanish workers throughout the country were on strike; that is over 6% of the total labour force. In addition, demonstrations and clashes with the Likewise when Kruschev used the Albanian CP as whipping-boy And this time to denounce Kruschev (ousted in 1964) at the 1966 Congress!

One can understand, therefore, why Brezhnev felt it necessary to deliver a caution in his opening report against over-zealous praising of the Party leadership. In the Byzantine world the top echelons of Stalinism, superlatives are too often the prelude to a fall.

However, he might as well not have spoken. ( The hardened traditions of flattery brought speaker after speaker to the rostrum to support the 'general line'. Even the removal of Agriculture Minister Dmitri Polyansky from the Politbureau (undoubtedly as scapegoat for the poor grain harvest in 1975) was stage-managed to the hilt, being ushered in by attacks on the poor performance of his ministry - but not him in person.

After all, with good weather for a couple of years, he may still climb back to the top! Stifled with pomp, but without a shred of dignity, the public sessions of the Congress droned on for almost a fortnight.

Barcelona Elda police were a daily occurrence in several of the larger cities.

The reactions of the fascist regime, both the promise of reforms and the increasingly brutal repression, are unable to control the workers' offensive.

On the contrary they are giving it further fuel as all sections of the working class come to realise that Franco's death has changed nothing of the repression and hypocrisy of the regime.

All these events simply highlight the need for a revolutionary leadership within the workers' movement to direct against the main political obstacle to the overthrow of fascism - the continued grip of Stalinism and reformism.

The demands must be for a working class united front to prepare full general strike action, and for committees in each area to prepare armed defence squads against the attacks of the state.

rar left: Breznev ; left; Castro with Portuguese leader Cunhal.

Below: British Stalinist leader MacLennan.

But for Trotskyists this should not be allowed to mask the real developments which it signalled. The fragmentation of the world Stalinist movement stems from the material basis of the Stalinist bureaucracy - resting on the political usurpation and prostitution of the economic gains of proletarian revolution, but seeking to limit those gains and protect them only through compromise with imperialism.

The policy of 'socialism in one country' even reproduced through many states in Eastern Europe - necessarily gives rise to native bureaucracies with their own interests and privileges to preserve, and their own diplomatic, economic and even military policies towards imperialism. And the problems of doing this are being Sharpened by the economic crisis and the offensive of the working class in the capitalist world. So along with the public 'dissent by the Western European CPs, the Congress also witnessed even more camouflaged expressions of independence by • the Eastern European CP chiefs.

Causescu, of Rumania, flew home early after 'fraternal greetings' in which he outlined the intention of his party to "work for a new unity founded on respect for the right of each party freely to develop its political line, its revolutionary strategy and tactics."

For the Hungarian party Kadar (whose particular stripe of Popular Democracy' was installed Budapest by Kruscher's tanks in 1956) prudently expressed a more modest desire to adapt the historical experience of the USSR to 'Hungarian conditions'.

And in Poland the press tactfully censored these references - but also the statement by ultra-stalinist Bulgarian Zhivkov that "For a Bulgarian, the love of Bulgaria and of the USSR are the same thing"!

Like a scab upon the body of the European working class, Stalinism is gradually cracking as the tissue beneath it begins to move. But of course the final defeat of Stalinism will be in no way spontaneous: the political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracies just as the social revolution against capitalism can only be n completed under conscious Trotskyist leadership.

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