5pain: Traitors Fall Out

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Thieves, robbers and criminften fall out among them. And that is just what is eginning to happen among ae treacherous leaderships of be main Spanish working tass parties.

The broad class collaborationist Lance, the Democratic Coordinson, founded earlier this year, ed comprising Stalinist, reformist, intrist and bourgeois parties, is training at its seams.

This is not because any of its members are attempting to put irward a principled working class asition, but on the contrary, cause the main working class arties are squabbling over who bould be the ones chosen by the scist government as the policemer I the working class.

POSITION

¡ It has until recently been the josition of the Democratic Coordpation that the Spanish Communi Party should be legalised.

The Popular Socialist Party has ow explicitly and the socialist arty (PSOE) implicitly abandoned his position. The leader of the opular Socialists, Enrique Tierno alvan, is able to speak most freely ecause his party has virtually no hass working class membership.

In the last few months Tierno palvan has on many occasions ipenly mixed with members of the fascist government (and he has been einstated to the university profesorship from which he was dismisled in 1965).

Now he says that:

"The legalisation the munist Party is not an indispensable condition for the opposition negotiate with the government."

The obstacles in the way of such negotiation, he now says, have been exaggerated • The opposition, he states:

"has no interest because it lacks the means, in provoking a revolutionary situation which : might produce a counter coup from the right."

FOLLOWED

The leader of the Socialist Party has now followed Tierno Galvan into the fascists' den, Last week he met the Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez and reported afterwards that this was 'not an interview, just a dinner.' The result, he said, was:

"an identity of views, namely the installation of a truly democratic regime in Spain with the participation of all the political parties, Communists included.

Since the fascists in no way disguise ; their refusal to contemplate the legalisation of the Communist Party, this can only mean that the Socialist Party leadership is indulging in barefaced deceit order to justify its headlong rush to make a deal with the fascists before the working class offensive tramples them underfoot.

The regime has issued instructions that the exiled Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party who plan to return to Spain on September 1st should not be admitted to the country. But those leaders themselves are now begging the regime to accept their guarantees of "good behaviour" if their return is permitted. 960 popHi Tierno Galvan Santiago Carillo, General Secretary of the party, announced in Rome that his return and that of the party's President Dolores Ibarrun, would "relax the political atmosphere."

If allowed into the country, Carillo said they would be prepared to meet the King and the Prime Minister.

They have also said that the presence of American bases in Spain ought to be respected "as long as the Americans don't meddle in Spanish politics"

There is now, therefore, an open competition between the main workers' parties: the title they are competing for is that of "best collaborators with fascism'.

The reformist and Stalinist leaders all say that democracy is something that can be gained through negotiations with fascists.

MURDER

They are forced occasionally to utter reservations to this when faced with • such events as last week's murder of a member of the Socialist Party by the police for painting political slogans on walls, or the rearrest (five days after his release under the government's fraudulent "amnesty'), of a leader of the Basque Communist Party.

But such daily evidence of merciless repression by the lascist state in no way deters these leaders from their single-minded and increasingly desperate efforts to divert the massive and militant working class movement from the revolutionary diréction in which it is heading.

HELPED

The Stalinists and reformists are still being helped by the working class parties which claim to stand to their left and to oppose negotiations with the fascists (for example, the Workers Revolutionary Organisation, ORT, the Communist Movement, MCE, and the Spanish Labour Party, PTE).

Their left' statements mean nothing at all as long as they remain in the Democratic Coordination - an alliance with people who claim to be leaders of the working class but whose armaments are not pointing forward against the crumbling fascist dictatorship but are turned backwards against the mass of the working class itself.

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