powderkeg
SPAIN the We are publishing below the editorial of the February 1, 1975, issue of Combate, central organ of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria/Euzkadi ta Askatasuna-VI (LCR/ETA-VI - Revolutionary Communist League/Basque Nation and Freedom-Sixth Congress), sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Spain. Since the general strike in Euzkadi (the Basque country) last December 11, the workers movement throughout the territory of the Spanish state has entered a decisive stage in its struggle against the dictatorship and its employers. Since that time, preparation of a general strike has become both the objective of all the struggles shaking the peninsula and the sole solution capable of advancing the whole movement toward the conquest of its just demands. Naturally, the dictatorship and the employers, conscious of the growing confidence of the working class in its own forces, are preparing to confront the offensive of current struggles through the only means they command: intensification of repression, occupation of factories, massive layoffs. The dictatorship is trying in this way to divide the movement, to exhaust it in partial struggles, and thus to make it bear the costs of the economic crisis by compelling it to negotiate within the framework set by the "legality" of the decrepit regime. What is shaping up, then, is a test of strength between the basic classes of Spanish society. The heroic general strike of Navarra constitutes the best demonstration of the will of the working class to confront this test of strength through its own methods: self-organization independent of any sort of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, conquest of the streets against police occupation, deepening among many militants of the consciousness of the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship. While the Navarra general strike in solidarity with the miners of Potasas and with the 1,500 laid-off workers represents the clearest example of the whole proletariat's will to combat, it is by no means an isolated example. The general strike in Tolosa and the struggles of the workers of several factories in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa also mark the progress of the workers movement in Euzkadi since December 11. But this time Euzkodi is not alone. In Barcelona the new attacks of the employers and the government against the workers of the SEAT automobile factories were not immediately answered with sufficient workers solidarity to prevent the occupation of the factory by the police and to force the reintegration of all the laid-off workers and the release of all those imprisoned. Nevertheless, the struggles of Hispano, Cumbre, Lavis, and Sanger, the solidarity work stoppages in various factories, branches, and regions, the assemblies in the popular suburbs, the urban demonstrations, and the support extended to the workers by the students and other sectors of the population all show very clearly that workers combativity is still on the rise and that the task of the hour is the organization of the general strike. The list of workers struggles is long: in Zaragoza the January 11 general strike by the metalworkers; in Galicia the struggle of the workers at Astano and the solidarity with Pillado and his comrades, who are facing trial on charges of belonging to the strike committee that organized the March 1972 struggle at Ferrol; in Asturias the struggle of the workers of Madrid the struggle of the workers of Citesa-ITT; in Lérida, Tarragona, Sevilla, Valencia, Cádiz, Valladolid. ... And in all these struggles there were protests agairst inflation and unemployment, through methods that involved greater numbers of workers each time: self-organization against the vertical "trade union"; organization (still very spontaneous) of pickets to do propaganda work and to protect demonstrations and oppose police occupation of the factories, suburbs, and cities. In all these respects, the necessity of going further is becoming ever more pressing in order to prevent the working class from giving ground in face of the attacks of the employers and the dictatorship. On January 20 the sinister and bloody Civil Guard added an entry to the already long list of crimes committed by the murderous dictatorship during the past few years: On the very day that the University of Madrid was holding assemblies to commemorate
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SPAIN the police murder in 1969 of Enrique Ruano, on the very day that a student of Valladolid that the police had tried to murder in December 1973 was brought to trial, another worker, Victor Manuel Elexpe, fell under the bullets of the Civil Guard as he was distributing leaflets in solidarity with the general strike of Pamplona. The working class will not forget this new crime! The general strike is possible Nevertheless, the unification of the present battles and their extension to the entire Spanish state is not a task that can be left to the simple spontaneity of the mass movement. That is why since last September the LCR/ETA-VI has been stressing the necessity of preparing the general strike, beginning with the unity in action of all the workers organizations, especially the Workers Commissions, and endowing them with objectives common to the whole working class and all the oppressed. The struggles that are developing today favor the work of these commissions, and especially of the Workers Commissions. In this sense we support the coordination initiatives of the Central Strike Committee recently Formed in Pamplona with the Workers Commissions of Catalonia, and we believe that the immediate task must be to extend the agreement to all the Workers Commissions in order to call the general strike throughout the Spanish state. Nevertheless, the responsibility of the entire workers vanguard is enormous at the present moment. In face of the intensification of the attacks of the dic4 tatorship and the employers, we must clearly define the objectives, forms of struggle, and organization required so that the workers movement may deal serious blows to its enemies. The Assemblies Against the High Cost of Living convoked for a one-week period, and the promise of a general strike at the beginning of February made by the National Workers Commission of Catalonia, do not satisfy the requirements of the necessary workers and people's offensive. That is why in face of the attempts to limit the objectives of the working class to a simple struggle (carried out through petitions) against the high cost of living, and in face of those who intend to prevent self-organization of the movement in order to subordinate it to the framework set down by the Junta Democrático, revolutionaries must counterpose objectives and methods that the mass movement itself is in process of raising to the order of the day. What are the objectives that the workers vanguard must popularize at the present time? No doubt, they are neither those that are limited to simple economic demands, nor demands in favor of democratic rights that do not at the same time imply the total liquidation of the dictatorship and challenge the rule of the big capitalists. As the Workers Commissions of Navarra clearly affirmed in their call for the January 15 general strike: "We address ourselves to the enemy clearly, to the rich people whose loot has been made from our money, our land, and our factories, and who are today dependent on and supporting a government of hardened fascist dictatorship, whose left hand is extended in greeting while its right hand grasps the revolver to drown in blood the people's thirst for liberty and happiness."
«the general strike must open the road to a...
frontal attack of the working class» The demands that are most clearly felt by the people today - reintegration of all laid-off workers and the release of all prisoners, democratic and trade-union rights, general wage increases tied to a sliding scale - cannot be divorced from those demands that are now beginning to be taken up by broad sectors in struggle, demands like the dissolution of the repressive corps and the special tribunals, the punishment of those responsible for Francoist crimes, the nationalization under workers control of factories that are in crisis. To move toward defining unifying platforms that unite the demands of the various popular sectors (workers, students, small merchants, peasants) is a weapon of primary importance in the baftle against the dictatorship and big capital, whose basic cohesion against the working class has been increasingly solidified by the present struggles. How to struggle, how to organize the offensive of the whole working class for the conquest of its demands? The Navarra general strike has offered the most advanced example of workers and people's solidarity through the strike, the assemblies, the strike committees, the formation of a general strike committee in which all the sectors in struggle are represented; these forms of organization have been revealed as those best able to support the fight, demonstrating that the general strike is the affair of all the workers. That is the road that all the localities and regions of the country must take, for it allows everyone to participate in the organization of the struggle, the demonstrations, and the solidarity, and in case of partial defeats it permits the movement to avert the demoralization of militants who have been the last to enter into the struggle. The fight for a victorious general strike against the dictatorship and the employers must not make us forget that we must immediately ameliorate the weaknesses of the movement, which, in the final analysis, constitute the essential strength of the decrepit regime. Without advancing toward the centralization and coordination of struggles on the scale of the entire Spanish state, without making progress on the road to action that is independent of any collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and without self-defense against the forces of repression, the mass movement can fall victim to the worst illusions sown by reformism and thus can suffer severely from the assaults of the dictatorial repression. The general strike must open the road to the preparation of a frontal attack of the working class that must culminate in the revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship and the open crisis of the bourgeois regime. In this process, all revolutionaries, all organizations that are struggling for the creation of a proletarian united front must play a leading role in preventing this battle from being diverted or channeled toward the simple installation of a caricature of bourgeois democracy. Now is the time. The Workers Commissions must take the lead in the general strike!
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OF The political situation in Mexico in 1975 will be marked by the battle over who will succeed President Luis Echeverria. The Mexican political system is not a totalitarian one, but it does have antidemocratic features that approach those of a totalitarian dictatorship. The "democratic-parliamentary" facade with its "four-sided" game of political parties conceals the reality of the one-party rule exercised by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI - Institutional Revolutionary party), which, in addition to being an apparatus for confrolling the laboring masses, acts as an electoral agency for the government both in the Congress and in official political life. Functioning as the sole effective force cementing national policy, the PRI contains within itself the divisions that crop up within the ruling sector, within the class in power. The struggle of the various groups within the PRI government that aspire to presidential succession begins during the fifth year of each presidential term (which lasts six years). The attitude of the groups in power looks quite natural when it is remembered that the candidate of the PRI is always the next president. (This has been true since 1920.) So the successor to Echeverria will be designated in reality in 1975, nearly two years before December 1976, when the actual succession takes place. In the present case, the peculiarities of this political mechanism - the product of the more than fiftyyear-long history of the rule of Mexican Bonapartism - coincides with the intensification of the world economic recession and its effects on the ever deepening political crisis of imperialist society. Thus, the weakening and decline of the Mexican Bonapartist system, which has been apparent for fifteen years and attained a critical point at the end of the 1960s, totally merged in 1974 with the 6
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