Mass Struggles Against New Regime

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since the amnesty proposal was announced,. there has been a noticeable increase in the number of political arrests. •* Trade union leaders in particular have suffered. The socialist party's trade union organisation the UGT, hitherto relatively unmolested, has had several militants arrested in the last few days and one of its members in Asturias shot dead in the street by the Civil Guard while putting up posters.

BOMBS

On the fortieth anniversary of Franco's rebellion a series of bombs exploded in important government buildings in Madrid and other cities. Responsibility has been claimed by an organisation calling itself the "Anti-Fascist Resistance Group" but it seems certain that the bombs were the work of right wing provocateurs.

The placing of the bombs make it fairly obvious that the bombers had the cooperation of the security services even if they were not the very same people.

The bombs were immediately used as the pretext for a new police round up of the left. And the amnesty, it it comes, will not, of course, involve any reduction in the mounting scale of poltical arrests.

The Suarez government, then, has found no better answer than its predecessor to the problems of the Spanish ruling class.

One of these problems is how to impose real wage cuts and higher unemployment, which Spanish capitalism so urgently 'needs on a working class which is every day more aggressive and impatient. Last week it was forced to concede the wage demands of the striking postal workers (which the Aras government had temporarily crushed a few months ago by calling up the postal workers into the army).

150,000 And the police did not dare to intervene against the march of 150,000 in Bilbao demanding work for the unemployed.

The regime's position could hardly be more contradictory. They are forced to put on their Workers demonstrate in Barcelona, They offer amnesty but at the same time step up political arrests. They promise elections contested by legalised parties - but none of these will be parties which have significant numbers of working class members and supporters.

"INDEPENDENT"

"Independent" trade unions are planned but they will not include any of the organisations which the working class has itself set up during the years of repression.

For this reason the recent general assembly of the workers Commissions in Barcelona was banned and had to be held . 'in secret" (though the UGT had been permitted to hold a congress two months: earlier).

The Workers' Commissions (local and factory based workers' organisations) first developed after the strikes in Asturias and other regions in the early 1960s. They developed so fast that the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) liquidated its own union organisation the OSO into the Commissions and has since then been the major, if not always the dominant, force inside them.

LARGEST

They were nearly destroyed by repression between 1969 and 1972 but vigourously came back to life after that to become the largest organisation of the Spanish workers' movement.

The PCE has made activity in the Commissions a central element of its strategy. It has consistentl tried to maintain the Commission as a very loosely federate "movement' and prevent them fror developing into a real trade unio federation.

A few months ago the PC leaders actually took a decision t liquidate the Commissions into th Francoist regime's official syndica organisation (in which elections ti local and factory posts had recent! been won almost entirely b Workers' Commission candidates!

This scandalous proposal wa resisted so strongly by the rank an file of the movement that the PCI leaders were forced to withdraw i almost immediately.

But they made sure that th recent general assembly should lea to no further challenge to it political line. The assembly was no prepared by a wide discussion i the Commissions and most of th delegates were not democraticall elected but bureaucratically hand picked.

Not surprisingly, therefore Marcelino Camacho, the PCE candidate, was elected to th leading position of the movemen nationally; the executive of 2' consisted almost entirely of PCI nominees; and the PCE's politica theses were passed by the assembl by a very large margin.

The main point of the these was that the Commissions shoul not attempt to build themselve into an independent trade unior structure unti • unity had beer achieved with thi Socialist-dominated UGT thi and ex-Christian USO.

COVER, This apparently worth commitment to trade union unit is in fact nothing more than a cove for a policy which holds back th development of the Spanis workers' movement.

But pressure against this line i mounting inside the Commission from the centrist organisations the PTE and the ORT, other lef and revolutionary groups and fron large sections of the rank and file The bureaucratic organisation o the general assembly is an exampl of how the PCE leadership is being forced into increasingly naker attacks on workers' democracy ir order to maintain its politica position.

This struggle within the maiz workers' organisation is a reflectior of the broader struggle between the Spanish working class and the mortally wounded fascist regime whose life is only prolonged by the policy of the Communist Party.