Spanish miners.) And in oddition, the Carrillo leadership has been led to push its criticisms to what the Kremlin con-
24 sitionists who claim allegiance to Marx and Lenin! At a time when the international bourgeoisie wants to concentrate attention on The Gulag Archipelago in order to divert attention from its own crimes and to whip up hostility to communism, we must redouble our efforts to free Grigorenko, Yakhimovich, and their comrades from the torturers and to defend the rights not only of the Solzhenitsyns but also of the Marxist and Leninist oppositionists to freely speak, discuss, publish, and organize in the USSR!
- ERNEST MANDEL — siders an unacceptable point. So the Kremlin thought it could put some pressure on this party by instigating the formation of a faction led by Lister, a former military leader during the Spanish civil war. This operation failed miserably. The Carrillo leadership won an overwhelming majority of the party membership in Spain and among the countries of Western Europe, where there is a big Spanish emigration. It expelled Lister and his faction, which was composed solely of Pers living in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European workers states. One of the members of the Lister faction is Mercader, the murderer of Leon Trotsky. The Lister faction, which publishes an organ with the same name as the CP's, Mundo Obrero, achieved so little success that even the Marchais leadership of the French CP, which is determined not to run afoul of Moscow, can support Lister only backhandedly and has to publicly solidarize with Carrillo when it issues anti-Franco statements, as it did during the Burgos trials. But the Marchais-Carrillo polemic goes on nonetheless. Nuestra Bandera, the theoretical organ of the Spanish CP, published an article by Manuel Azcarate, a member of the party leadership, criticizing the policy of the Soviet CP. The latter responded with an article in the review Partingia Jizn, which was almost completely reproduced in l'Humanite (the French CP paper). l'Humanite did not bother to furnish its readers with the text of Azcarate's incriminating article, nor did it describe the situation that exists between the Spanish and Soviet CPs. Here is what 'Humanite (February 23, 1974) reproduced of the article that appeared in Partincia Jizn: •... Mr. Azcarate grossly distorts the essence of the foreign policy of the USSR and the other socialist countries as well as the international activity of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. He advances a False thesis on the contradiction that allegedly exists between the interests of the socialist countries and the interests of the revolutionary move".. Thus, whether he intends to or not, Mr. Azcarate in Fact counterposes the state interests of the socialist countries to the interests of the revolutionary movement and to the interests of certain fraternal parties. If is understood that this manner of posing the question is totally contrary to the principles of socialism and to the existing practice of revolufionary struggle..
"Distorting facts that are well-known public knowledge, Mr. Azcarate proclaims that in the wake of the policy of peaceful coexistence that is applied by the countries of the socialist community 'there has appeared the perspective of a sociopolitical status quo in the world.! "The falseness and absurdity of these declarations are obvious to every conscious participant in the workers movement. "The policy of peaceful coexistence has been approved many times in the documents of the international communist movement. "The international congress of Communist parties held in 1969 stressed that 'this policy means neither maintenance of the social and political status quo nor weakening of the ideological struggle. It aids the development of the class struggle against imperialism on the national and international scale.' "...The relations between the USSR and the United States have improved in recent times. ...Is that contrary to the interests of the revolutionary movement? Is it in the interests of revolutionaries to aspire to create international tension laden with the threat of a new world war? At the 1969 conference the Communist and workers parties of the world declared that 'the main link for united action of the antiimperialist forces remains today, as it was yesterday, the struggle for world peace against the threat of thermonuclear world war.. The Spanish Communist party has many times proclaimed its agreement with this position. It is clear that all the measures taken by the Soviet Union in regard to its relations with the United States are aimed precisely at attaining this objective..."As is shown by practice, which as Lenin said is the best test of the truth, the détente is creating a much more favorable situation for the struggle for democratic rights, for the reduction of military spending and the improvement of the material situation of the mosses, and for democratic and social changes. New conditions more favorable to the intensification of the struggle for the unity of all antimonopoly forces are surging forward. It is no accident, for example, that the governmental Common Program between the Socialist and Communist parties in France came along just as SovietFrench state relations were developing and peaceful coexistence was being strengthened. ".. _Mr. Azcarate particularly criticizes economic relations between the socialist countries and the countries of capital. In his view when the socialist countries speak of long-term cooperation with this or that country with an opposing system, it supposedly excludes in advance the possibility of any social change in that country... "It's one of two things. Either we start from the fact that communists favor settling the differences between the two systems in the world arena without world war, or else we are advocates of the perspective of "exporting the revolution," including with arms. If we uphold the first thesis, then we must base ourselves on the perspective of developing many peaceful ties among countries, economic ties especially. ... "It is also impossible to pass over in silence Me. Azcarate's attacka on the Soviet socialist regime. While Soviet democracy is expanding throughout the socialist society that hos developed in the USSR, and while the creative activity of the mosses is developing in all spheres of social life, Mr. Azcarate, at the instigation of declared opponents of the Soviet socialist regime, falls into articulating all sorts of fabrications about the absence of democrocy in the USSR. "It is also impossible to avoid noting that Mr. Azcarate launches crude attacks on the Soviet Union. He asserts that the CPSU 'is taking no step' "no attempt or initiative' to overcome the tension in the relations between the USSR and China. Instead of truthfully and objectively stating the position of the CPSU and the Soviet state on this question, Mr. Azcarate simply repeats Peking's lies about a supposed blockade and alleged military pressure by the USSR against China. "But the whole world knows that the CPSU insistently and constantly aspires to normalize relations between the USSR and China and that it has advanced and is still advancing constructive proposals that the Chinese leadership has rejected one after the other... "One of Manuel Azcarate's main objections to the possibility of holding a new international conference (of Communist parties) is that the conference could supposedly lead to a return to the practice (which he has invented himself -Partinaia Jizn) of unconditional subordination to the CPSU" and to the creation of a sort of single organizational center of the Communist movement. He even declares that some people would aspire to create such a center. "The CPSU has many times stressed that there does not exist and there cannot exist any single center of the international communist movement and that within the international communist movement there are no parties that lead as opposed to parties that follow. The CPSU starts from the idea that all the parties are independent and have equal rights, and it bases its policy on this idea... *The CPSU and the Communist party of Spain have always been linked by close and friendly relations, by the relations of their common struggle for the interests of the workers and against war and fascism. They are linked by the blood of their sons shed on the battlefields of the civil war in Spain and of the great national war. Today, as in the past, the CPSU holds firmly to the policy of support to the struggle of the Communists and of all the workers of Spain against the antipopular regime, for democracy, social justice, and peace. *The CPSU has always held and will always hold to the development and strengthening of its relations with the CP of Spain on the basis of the principled positions of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. This article is typical of the present-day Moscow bureaucrat. The crudest slanders and most ignoble accusations that in the old days would have been used against even a much less stinging critique of the Kremlin's policy are no longer resorted to. But not the slightest political argument is used to support the bureaucrat's case. It all consists of more or less peremptory affirmations: The Spanish leader "distorts" the facts and the essence of the USSR's policy; his statements are false and absurd; he makes things up, and so on. If one looks at the criticisms made by the Spanish journal ane immediately sees one accusation that all the leaderships of the Communist parties are very sensitive about: that Mos-
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cow would like to reestablish an international center, to become once again the "guiding party" - an accusation denied by Moscow, which while it might want to reestablish the Former state of affairs is no longer able to do so. There are other criticisms that are much more interesting. First of all, the Spanish CP criticizes the Kremlin for its policy toward China, or more exactly, for its economic and military pressures. Whatever criticisms Peking deserves on other aspects of its policy, there is no doubt that on the question of economic and military pressure it is Moscow that bears the heaviest responsibility. The Spanish CP also brings up the counterposition of the interests of Soviet diplomacy and the develapment of moss struggles. In reply Moscow marshalls nothing but wom-out stereotyped cliches claiming that the only alternative to "peaceful coexistence" is nuclear war and that "peaceful coexistence" is not an obstacle to the development of moss movements but rather creates the best conditions for them. The reference to the Common Program in France -- where the Union of the Left is an attempt to canalize and put the breaks on the revolutionary upsurge -- lends no credibility to these cliches. bolivia TOWARD AN