The Communist Party falters Since the start of 1981, the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) has been in a chronic crisis. Splits, profound political shifts in the leadership, and various political turns have only made the situation worse. Repeated claims that the crisis has run its course have been immediately contradicted by the events. The slightest incident re-kindles factional warfare. There has been another example of this just recently. Felipe Gonzalez is negotiating with the various parliamentary groups a proposal for "consensus" on Spain's membership in NATO. The representative of the PCE in these negotiations should in principle have been its parliamentary spokesperson, Santiago Carrillo. But the party leadership decided to replace him with the general secretary, Gerardo Iglesias. Carrillo immediately launched a war of communiques in the press, claiming that Iglesias's behavior was "a matter for a psychiatrist."
In the midst of the battle, the deputy general secretary, Jaime Ballesteros, announced his resignation from the party, along with four other Central Committee members and, he claimed of "thousands of members." The reason for this action, he said, was that "in view of the process of liquidation and grave crisis that is afflicting Spanish Communism, we want to undertake a process of ideological clarification and unification of all Communists. " On December 17, these five members of the Central Committee and about a hundred party leaders at different levels announced that they had gone over to the pro-Soviet Communist Party (PC) led by Ignacio Gallego. (1)
slid to the right, leaving no space for us between it and the UCD." (2)
The balance sheet of the transition has been an inexhaustible source of polemics in the Spanish left. I can only go over this question very briefly here to point up the apologetic character of the "self-criticism" made by Carrillo and Iglesias. The notion of the "democratic break" in its time was an excellent formula that came to mean for the majority of the Spanish people the liquidation of Francoism. The PCE did in fact appear up to 1977 as the main force fighting for such a break. But at no time did it give this objective a precise programmatic content nor did it define the policy of alliances or the methods of struggle for achieving it. The « democratic break »
To the contrary, the PCE's strategy very closely resembled what actually happened - to organize a controlled mass pressure to induce decisive sections of the bourgeoisie to dump Francoism and put in its place a parliamentary regime based on national reconciliation, which meant fundamentally and explicitly respecting the military apparatus of the regime. It was not without reason that the PCE said in 1977 "de facto, the democratic break has occurred."
What happened was the contrary of a break. There was no break precisely where it was most necessary, that is in the Francoist apparatus of coercion. The result was an enormous political defeat for the workers and people's movement, whose deep-going effects were only understood later on.
The bourgeoisie was able to equip itself with a parliamentary system in its own time and to the extent that it wanted, one that amounted to an extremely reactionary version of the strong state, kept under constant surveillance and pressure by an army that was the backbone of the dictatorship.
What is more, the liquidation of Francoism by mass action (the "democratic break" in the best sense of the term) would have served a function of social hygiene, sweeping away all the filth represented by the ideas, the habits, and the institutions to which Francoism gave birth in the civil society. It did not happen like that, and so the society continued to be weighed down by considerable reactionary ballast.
The political force that lost the most in this process was the PCE. We can say that this was nothing more than historical justice, because the PCE also bore the main responsibility for the defeat. It is not 1. On the Gallego PC see International Viewpoint No. 45, January 30, 1984. 2. The Union of the Demoeratic Center (UCD), the now defunct bourgeois political formation that presided over the transition from Francoism. The main leader of the UC was Adolfo Suarez, who was premier from 1976 to 1981.
International Viewpoint 11 February 1985
Miguel ROMERO
The most important thing to be grasped, in order to understand the gravity of the crisis is that the basic differences between Iglesias and Carrillo are minimal. On the other hand, it cannot be said that Gallego's PC is making great progress and that it can serve as a clear alternative in practice to the PCE. A grave and chronic sickness has gone to the very marrow of the PCE and there is no hope in sight for a cure. The root of the crisis is not the specific line of Iglesias or of Carrillo. It is not what separates them that is the most important but what unites them, a sort of belated Eurocommunism that does not dare declare its name. The following article is an attempt to interpret th crisis, which has led the PCE from the position of unassailable dominance that it held in the anti-Franco struggle to marginalization in Spanish politics.
What detonated the crisis, it is worth remembering, was the rejection of the term "Eurocommunism" by the majority at the January 1981 congress of the United Socialist Party of Catalonia (the Catalan branch of the PCE). Today, no one uses this notion any more except in some isolated speeches or in special circumstances, such as funeral orations or the fight over the legacy of Berlinguer.
The reasons foe the crisis were obviously deeper going than a mere quarrel over terminologs, and the PCE leaders 4 come closer to the underlying problem when they try to explain the crisis. For example, in November 1982, immediately after being elected general secretary of the party, Gerardo Iglesias told the daily El Pais: "I think that the party's difficulties arise objectively from the form taken by the transition [from Francoism], that is, there was not a democratic break. We had a party, which was called the Party,' that had opted for a democratic break. But what we proposed could not be carried out because we did not have enough strength and because the other parties, in particular the PSOE, put their bets on reform. This was the key that put the transition in the hands of the civilized right, which seriously restricted the possibilities for the growth of the more progressive forces. To be sure, the party threw itself in behind the democratic process that opened up without any reservations, giving this a higher priority even than seeking its own political space in Spanish society."
Around the same time, Santiago Carrillo expressed complementary ideas in a still more outspoken way: "At the time [of the first general elections in 1977, which capped the period beginning with Franco's death in November 1975], we were faced with an immature and ultraleftist PSO, and we had to adopt an attitude of statesmanslike responsibility to get the country out of the rut it was in. Then, the PSOE
un debate comunista para la centencia para la d
3 acia
Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibarruri, 'La Pasionaria', in 1978, at the first legal congress of the
PCE for 46 years. (DR)
at all convincing to try to put the blame for this setback on the support that the PSOE did give, beginning in early 1911, to the plan of Adolto Suarez, leader of the UCD and premier. It is still less convincing to try to explain this by the low level of political awareness of the masses. It is true that this consciousness was a lot lower than we thought and that the project presented by Suarez and the king posed an awkward problem to handle. That is, it appeared to offer the establishment of a democratic system in a painless way, without great exertions or dangers. However, the PCE did not make the least effort to oppose this reformist scheme, which was called "the Reform" It did not attempt to explain to the workers that the "minimum program" arter its legalization was held under mantling of the Francoist apparatus. Nor did it do anything to sustain the mobilization and mass struggle necessary to achieve this objective. There is no reason to think that at the time this was an unattainable goal, and subsequent developments prove that it was necessary in any case to try to achieve it.
To the contrary, what the PCE did, especially after its legalization on the eve of the 1977 elections was to embrace the for a democratic break was the dis newly converted. This is the real source of the crisis of the PCE. To the astonishment of the left and especially of its own members, the PCE's first public activity after its legalization was held under the flag of the monarchy and marked by a declaration of loyalty to the king, all of which was justified as a token of gratitude to those "who legalized us." It is said that on that day many PCE members wept, perhaps for a lost identity. They did not yet know that it was lost forever.
The voters did not express any gratitude to Carrillo for his capitulation. In the June 1977 legislative elections, the PCE got under 10% of the vote. It tried to come up with complicated explanInternational Viewpoint 11 February 1985 ations for this, but it was above all the price it had to pay for its policy, for the defeat of the alternative of a democratic break and the victory of "consensus." Turn to the right
Carrillo's reaction to the party's electoral setback gave a new impetus to the crisis. What he called a statesmanlike sense of responsibility amounted in reality to a policy of helping to stabilize the system, trying to occupy the space traditionally filled by the Social Democracy, as Carrillo himself publicly acknowledged on a number of occasions.
It is significant in the quote that we gave from Carrillo that he said it was the PSOE's turn to the right that left the PCE without a political space! In reality, from the time of the Moncloa pacts [class collaborationist accords signed by the reformist union leaderships in October 1977] up till 1979, the PCE was generally to the right of the PSOE. And it led the Workers Commissions, the union confederation it dominated, on a course that lost them three fourths of their members. [See box.]
In that period, the PCE suffered a veritable programmatic liquidation. The identity of the party, which was built up in the anti-Franco struggle, was demolished, without Carrillo being able to offer anything substantial to replace it. The economic crisis came down on the workers, the pressure of reactionary threats grew day by day, and the PSOE and the UGT (the confederation led by the SP) increased their influence.
These disastrous results were identified in the minds of broad sections of the PCE membership with "Euro. communism," a term that a lot of them discovered precisely at the time the "democratic break" was dropped, and which served as ideological cover for every step the leadership took to the right. The explosion was already building up in 1980. The opposition to the leadership was orienting toward a "redemption of the PCE," presenting the history of the party under Francoism as a golden age.
This was a natural course for the development to take, since the revolutionary left was also going through a deep crisis at the time, which cannot be analyzed here, but prevented the far left from offering an alternative to the discontented ranks of the PCE.
In the attempt to recover an identity two aspects of rejecting Eurocommunism were to be combined. The first and fundamental one, as we have seen, was the experience of the party following 1977. The second was the reaffirmation of the "campist" (proUSSR) position traditional in the party's politics. This was favoured by the sharpening of international tensions and by Carrillo's own positions as regards international polities, since his criticisms of the USSR were more and more from a bourgeois democratic, if not outright pro- bourgeois democratic. if not outright pro-imperialist, standpoint.
More than an international position, pro-Sovietism seemed a way of recovering the Communist identity in conformity with the history of the PCE. It is probable that big maneuvers by the Soviet embassy or factions of the party following its orders also played a role. But the formation of a pro-Soviet current can be understood without resorting to any conspiratorial theory of history.
On February 23, 1981, when Lieutenant Colonel Tejero went into the Cortes [parliament] with his pistol drawn, only three deputies remained seated, rather than hiding under their chairs. Paradoxically, they were the three who lost the most because of this attempted coup d'etat - Adolfo Suarez, Gutierrez Mellado (the general who was responsible for reform of the army and police at the time), and Santiago Carrillo. The attempted coup reflected the failure of a political plan of which each of the three, each in his own way, had been a sponsor.
Carrillo had tried to justify his successive capitulations in the name of statesmanship and consolidating democracy. The result was evident. And this failure was compounded by the political consequences of the coup, It was not a mass movement but a pact between the king and the military hierarchy that blocked the operation led by Tejero and General Milans del Bosch.
The coup attempt inaugurated the "counter reform," a new turn to the right on both the political and social levels in the conditions of widespread fear of a new coup d'etat. The right was in an open crisis. The PSOE, which then adopted the line that it is carrying out today of modernizing Spanish capitalism and integrating the army into the political system, seemed to be the practical alternative, a force that would carry through some reforms that would be progressive but still moderate enough not to provoke any new putschist threats.
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In the aspirations for change that were expressed at the time, the PCE held a totally marginal position. The conditions were assembled so that the crisis in the party, which had already exploded in Catalonia, could extend in various forms to the organization as a whole. The first skirmish in the Central Committee took place in June 1982. Nicolas Sartorius, long considered the annointed successor of Carrillo, presented a critique concentrating on organizational questions. He called for "renewal of the leadership",
Carrillo responded by a feint. He presented his resignation. It was not accepted, as he expected that it would not be. But the traditional monolithism of the central leadership was shaken. The leadership crisis compounded a crisis of orientation that was to lead to the formulation of a literally absurd line. The PCE proposed to the PSOE forming a vague "democratic front," which it presented
(toward the Francoist period). No one, least of all the PSOE, took this proposal seriously. The PCE leaders could see the disaster of the 1982 elections coming [see box] but the actual results went beyond the most pessimistic predictions. A few days after the October 28, 1982 elections, Carrillo was obliged to turn in his resignation, and this time it was accepted.
Gerardo Iglesias, Carrillo's replacement as general secretary, was at first put forward as a stand-in. But the bureaucracy has its own laws. Iglesias set about immediately surrounding himself with people he could trust and removing the "Carrillistas." The origin of the factional war that opened up lay more in conflicts within the apparatus than in important political differences. The line applied by Iglesias can be summed up in six points: (1) an "open door" policy, making it easier for thousands of lost members to return to the party by regime; (2) reinvolvement of the party in social struggles, which means consolidating its working-class base; (3) strong involvement in the anti-NATO movement and relaunching the Com-munist Youth; (4) maintaining the traditional trade-union line of the Workers Commissions, that is, the policy of national solidarity in the face of the crisis; (5) the proposal for a "convergence of the left for a progressive alternative," designed to assemble an electoral front to the left of the PSOE for the elections scheduled for 1986; (6) defending the unity of the party around the majority line of the Eleventh Congress.
The line taken toward the Socialist Party government is not a model of clarity. In his report to the October 1984 Central Committee plenum, Iglesias said: "On the one hand, we have to support those measures of the government that have a progressive or left meaning. On the other, we cannot make general or sweepas the only alternative to "regression"
promising them a
TOL
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The Gallego PC ing judgements of the PSOE, inasmuch as, has about 10,000 members distributed very unevenly throughout the country. It is relatively strong in Catalonia, where it got slightly over 4% of the vote in the elections for the Catalan autonomous parliament in 1984. It is almost nonexistent in Euzkadi. It is rather large but in crisis in Asturias. It is influential in Madrid but not very stable. It has a biweekly paper, Nuevo Rumbo, which has a circulation on the order of that of the far left press. With the exception of Catalonia, its electoral scores are similar to those for the far-left currents, that is about 1%.
However, the creation of the Gallego CP is not the most dramatic expression of the centrifugal tendencies rending the PCE. In 1982, there was a split of the most Eurocommunist elements around such well-known leaders as Azcarate, Pilar Brabo, Alonso Zaldivar and 'some of the most popular intellectuals and artists in the party. The organization that they formed was called ARI (Association for the Renewal of the Left). It dissolved ingloriously a few months later. Some of its members went over to the PSOE. Others remained active as independents. " Some went back to the PCE.
As a result of Ballesteros and his supporters leaving for the Gallego CP [see article], another split is looming up in the PCE, which may be still more grave for the party than the preceeding ones. Romero, the general secretary of the Workers Commissions in Agriculture and the key leader of the PCE in Andaluzia (the PCE's other bastion, along (with Catalonia), has formed a new public faction that calls itself the "Leninist Front." They have not concealed any of their aims, which converge with those of the Gallego PC. But in the last months, they have been conducting a special policy of alliances, backing one and then another faction of the PCE. For example, they supported the Iglesias faction at the Congress of the Workers Commissions. It seems that a split is now imminent.
THE PE's ELECTORAL SCORES 1977 1979 1982 Number of votes 1,655,744 1,940,236 828,928
% 9.3 10.9 3.9
Deputies 20 23 4 The PSUC got 18.6% of the vote and 25 deputies in the 1980 Catalan elections. It got 5.8% and six deputies in the 1984 elections. In the same period, the Communist Party in Euzkadi went from 4.01 of the vote to 1.4% and from one deputy to none.
International Viewpoint 11 February 1985
The facts of the crisis In 1977, according to the official figures, the PCE had about 200,000 members. In the same period, the Workers Commissions claimed to have 1,100,000 workers affiliated. The PCE claims today to still have about 80,000 members. The real figures are on the order of 40,000 members. The Workers Commissions have less than 400,000 members. The PCE paper, Mundo Obrero, was a daily for a short period that ended in a financial catastrophe. At present it is a weekly with a press run of 35,000 copies. It has only 200 subscribers, one tenth the number that subscribe to Combate, the weekly paper of the LCR, the section of the Fourth International in the Spanish state.
The last congress of the PCE took place in December 1983, about a year after Carrillo's replacement by Iglesias as general secretary following the disaster of the October 28, 1982, elections. A few weeks before this congress, an internal crisis had broken out, dividing the party into two factions, the majority rallying around Iglesias, while the minority led by Carrillo acted as a public faction. The relationship of forces in the Central Committee was 44 to 32 in favor of Iglesias. Iglesias's position was consolidated relatively during the Eleventh Congress. In the new Central Committee, he had 71 against 38. But the report presented by Iglesias to the congress was approved by a majority of only ten out of 787 delegates to the congress.
At the Third Congress of the Workers Commissions in June 1984, the two factions ran separate slates for the Executive Committee. The Camacho slate (for the Iglesias line) got 53% of the vote, the Ariza slate (for the Carrillo line) got 28%.
The Carrillo faction has a public organ, the monthly magazine Ahora. It leads the party organizations in about a dozen regions and national areas, including the ones in Madrid and Euzkadi. In the Workers Commissions, it controls the Metalworkers Federation. In addition, Carrillo is the spokesman of the PCE's tiny parliamentary faction (four deputies).
The splits in the PCE began at the start of 1981 with the crisis in the PSUC (the CP in Catalonia), which culminated in the formation of the PCC (Party of Communists of Catalonia), described as pro-Soviet.
In January 1983, the Congress of Communist Unity was held. It founded the Communist Party, which wants to be called just that and nothing more. The general secretary of this party is Ignacio Gallego, who traditionally represented the most pro-Soviet positions in the PCE leadership. The slate that the CP presented to the Third Congress of the Workers Commissions got 15% of the vote. 6
as we have seen, currents are growing within the PSOE that challenge the governmental policy."
On the first and the last point, the failure of Iglesias' policy is evident. The PCE's "open door" is still being used more as an exit than an entrance. As for the unity of the party, it is more compromised than ever. As regards reinvolvement in social struggles, the most significant development is the party's involvément in the anti-NATO movement. But here the PCE had to pay the price for its delay, which was one of Carrillo's worst errors. On the other hand, given the characteristics of the anti-NATO movement in the Spanish state and the rel. ationship of forces within it, the PCE can hope to play an important role but by no means to control it or impose conformity on it.
The questions of trade-union orientation can be summed up as follows: The majority led by Camacho (a supporter of Iglesias) did not get the means at the Third Congress of the Workers Commissions last June to apply systematically the social-pact line that it would have liked. The Socialist Party government is offering them scarcely any room for negotiating, and the ranks of the union would not tolerate a social pact in line with the dismal tradition of recent years.
The "convergence of the left" is not in itself an absurd idea. It is true that the PSOE's ultraright-wing policy is opening up a broad space to its left in which the PCE could try to form a sort of electoral front with the support of independents prepared to associate themselves with the rather frayed image of the party. But Iglesias directed this proposal first of all to forces to the right of him, that is to sectors that while moderate are fed-up with the policy of the PSOE. Moreover, and most important, in the present situation, the PCE has a minimum credibility as a party and very little capacity to attract support for such a proposition.
One of the party's best known intellectuals, Manuel Vasquez Montalban, has written that such a proposal would only have meaning if it came from a reunified, stabilized, disciplined party, that is a party that before bringing about a convergence of the left first brought about a convergence of the Communists." Leaving aside the fact that for Vasquez Montalban the model for such a convergence is the Italian Communist Party or the PSUC of "the good old days," it is clear that the PCE would have to turn around its internal situation in order for such convergence to be a viable project.
However, the fundamental problem does not lie in the utopian character of such a convergence (which would involve the reintegration of the Gallego PC and respect for party discipline on the part of the Carrillo faction) but rather in its political content and the forces that are looked to for support. In fact, the social forces that are struggling against the PSOE government (which are called the International Viewpoint 11 February 1985
"social left" in Spain to distinguish them from the very weak "political left") are not going to identify themselves with the policy proposed and practiced by Iglesias. What he offers does not go beyond "opposition reformism," more or less tough in words but lacking the slightest firmness or decisiveness in deed, and maintenance of the particularly repulsive aspects of the PCE's traditional line - "anti-terrorism, striet respect for the army and for the king, etc. The PCE of Iglesias can improve its electoral scores, which are below the minimum, but it is in a poor state to fill the immense political vacuum that exists to the left of the PSOE.
The fundamental political difference the Carrillo faction holds with the Iglesias line is over what position to take toward the government. Carrillo says that the resurgence of the PCE can only come from systematic opposition to the government by the party in its own name. In particular, he opposes the party running in elections under any name but its own. As regards the need for systematically opposing the government, Carrillo has no lack of arguments. What he lacks is everything else.
To promote a recovery, you have to start on the movements that exist in fact and in some cases have a lot of strength, such as the anti-NATO movement, or the mobilizations against the industrial reconversions. You have to do real work in these movements to strengthen them and take advantage of opportunities to reach the level of generalization necessary to take on the government with a chance of winning.
The Carrillo faction is not doing any thing like that, in particular in the Workers Commissions, which are its fundamental social base. The Metalworkers Federation, led by this faction, retreated at the crucial moment in the Sagunto struggle (3), when it was possible and necessary to move toward a general strike. Instead of doing that, it signed a bad agreement and condemned the struggle to defeat. The same thing looks as if it may happen in the struggle today in the shipbuilding industry.
Worse still, workers mobilizations are being manipulated as a consequence of the battle between the two factions of the PCE. On November 30, the Workers Commissions in Asturias, which are led by people close to Camacho, issued a call to struggle in a sectarian and illprepared way for the sole purpose of giving a boost to Gerardo Iglesias. The mobilization was a failure. On December 14 in Madrid, the Metalworkers Federation tried a similar operation, but in that case it was to give a boost to a public activity by its 'chief,' Carrillo. It is not hard to imagine the sort of negative effects such maneuvers will have on the workers movement.
The fundamental problem, both for Carrillo and for Iglesias, is that there is in practice scarcely any space for a "left reformist" line. At the moment, Carrillo is projecting a more anti- imperialist language. He is making some positive references to the USSR. He is appealing to party patriotism against the "Liquidators." He has been making advances to the pro-Soviets, for the time being without getting any response. But there is nothing fundamental to distinguish the two of them from the program and strategy that provoked the crisis of the PCE. Therefore, the crisis will continue.
Who can gain from this crisis? In the long run, it may benefit Gallego's CP, but even that is not certain. In order precisely to try to win members from the PCE, since September the pro-Soviets have been conducting a very moderate policy, in particular in the workers movement, making as many compromises as possible with the sector led by Julian Ariza, who is linked to Iglesias, in the Workers Commissions.
Moreover, while there are undoubtedly very valuable activists among those joining Gallego, there are also "heads of clans" who have followed very tortuous political trajectories. And this is going to complicate the problems of political homogeneity that are already serious in this party.
In any case, the Gallego PC's electoral obsession, spurred by illusions about the possibility of repeating the Greek development (4), is a major obstacle to its evolving toward revolutionary positions. At the same time, all its emphasis on electoralism does not guarantee - quite to the contrary - that it will be able to gain entry into the exclusive club of the big parties.
When all is said and done, there is no use in speculating. The task for revolutionaries is first of all to understand the crisis of the PCE and to pursue the ideological battle against the demagogy that is flowing from its wounds, to take advantage of the new possibilities that have opened up for work in the mass movement, and to make specific alliances with this or that sector at the right moment. That is all.
The road to solving the grave problems of the left and the revolution in Spain does not lead through any of the wings of the feuding family of the PCE or a "convergence of Communists" without a communist policy. It leads through an extension of the anti-imperialist, antirepression, and anti-war mobilizations and struggles and through building solidarity among working people. What is necessary is a convergence of these movements in action. It is in that way that the political and social forces can be built up to fill the empty space to the left of the PSOE. 3. For the history of this exemplary struggle, see "The Fight of the Sagunto Workers Against Industrial Reconversion," by Miguel Romero in IV No. 55, June 18, 1984. 4. In 1968, the Communist Party of Greece split. One faction, called the "Interior" were premature Eurocommunists. The other faction was a pro-Soviet one called the "Exterior." In the political battle that ensued between these two factions, the "Exterior" largely won out.
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