The validity and Current Relevance of the October Revolution of 1917 for the 21st century
Brussels, 4-6 May 2007
www.icsbrussels.org , ics[at]icsbrussels.org
Building the Party of a new Type in Spain
By Ra伃 Mart匤ez
Turrero
Partido comunista de los Pueblos de España
I.- The impulse of the October Revolution and the creation of the Communist Party of Spain. The triumph of 1917s October Revolution shook** Spanish labour movement. The enthusiasm generated by the country of the soviets and the creation of the III International in March 1919- , differencing itself from the II International, makes a part of the Socialist Youth create the Spanish Communist Party in 1920. At the same time, the Congress of the Socialist Party (PSOE) that took place in April 1921 rejects definitively to stick to the Komintern, thus provoking the splitting of a sector that will create the second communist detachment organised in Spain, the Spanish Communist Workers Party (PCOE). On November 14th 1921, the PCOE and the PCE decide to unite, creating the historical Communist Party of Spain (PCE).
The PCE fights actively against Primo de Riveras dictatorship, in a time of prosecution and secrecy characterised by the fall and imprisonment of tens of communist militants.
On April 14th 1931 the II Republic is proclaimed, the PCE prepares its 4th Congress (that took place in Seville in March 1932), where the sectarianism of the previous stage was corrected and Jos・D僘z is elected as Secretary General. Events develop very fast. In October 1934, Asturian labour movement transforms the general strike called all over Spain into a movement with insurrectional character that manages to take the political power. Under the slogan: Unite Proletarian Brothers! (UHP in Spanish), Labour Alliances write one of the more glorious pages of Spanish revolutionary movement and bring the first experience of popular antifascist unity. After the victory of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936, the reaction increasingly plots against the Republic. On July 18th 1936, fascism stirred up in arms against the II Spanish Republic. The popular response did not come late, from the very front to the rearguard, the peoples of Spain, with the working class and its party ahead, organised everywhere the National Revolutionary War against the pro-coup forces who where helped from abroad by the nazi-fascism.
Opposite to the Non intervention pact sealed by Europes bourgeois democracies, the Soviet Union and the Komintern bend over backwards for the Spanish working class. Enlisted in the International Brigades, tens of thousands of freedom volunteers, coming from many countries, took the arms together with Spanish workers in the biggest heroic internationalist deed known by humanity until now. Many members of the international brigades, together with the communists and other Spanish antifascists, put their experience at the service of the peoples of Europe in World War II until the definite crush of nazi-fascism in May 1945, when the victorious Red Army troops entered Berlin.
The fascist victory was followed by one of the cruelest pages in the history of Spain. More than one million people exiled, missing, executed…; concentration camps and forced work battalions, starvation and misery. But despite the difficult conditions in which the struggle was taking place, the Communist Party did not give up its will of defeating fascism. Guerrilla movement went on fighting although the regular war was considered to be over and, at the same time, and back again to clandestine conditions, the PCE worked to reorganize the mass struggle against franquism. Thousands of communist militants faced the dictatorship in every corner of Spain. Neither torture nor executions bent the revolutionary moral of Spanish proletariat and its Party.
But things started to change in the leadership of the PCE. The disappearance of the Komintern, thus finishing with the existence of a international coordination body between the communist parties, and making easier the progressive international reconnaissance of the franquism, and the crisis of the international communist movement, stated after the death of comrade Joseph Stalin and the celebration of the XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, together with the constant and arbitrary depurations and perversion of democratic centralism, were some of the factors that allowed PCEs leadership, headed by Santiago Carrillo, to prepare the conditions to move away of Marxism-Leninism and seal, when time came, an agreement with the dominant classes that guaranteed the recomposing of capitalist domination in Spain after Francos death.
II.- From Francos dictatorship to Borbonic monarchy, two historical forms of Capitals dictatorship. The struggle for the Party and the defence of Marxism-Leninism. The strategy to maintain the continuity of bourgeois domination in Spain at the end of Francos dictatorship was an elaborated operation that required the collaboration and submission of the historical forces of Spanish left and, in a special way, of its most significant organization, the Communist Party of Spain. The transition period ended with a generalized breakdown of the organizational and struggle capacities of the revolutionary left, and at the same time the democratic-bourgeois proposals were hegemonic even for the left-wing thought, unable to maintain its own discourse based on the categories of historic materialism and scientific socialism.
The written formulation of euro communism was the most explicit expression of PCEs desertion from revolutionary positions, and was the climax of a political and ideological drift that started with the assumption of the national reconciliation policy (at the end of the 50s), provoking then a widening gap between the militant basis, highly committed to the struggle against dictatorship, and the direction in exile.
The liquidation of the political structures and even the project of Spanish revolutionary left, eventually destroyed the trade union structures and, at the same time, a part of the progressive movements and social organisations. These fronts, orphan from the umbrella of the Party of the Revolution, drifted towards policies of integration and subordination to the hegemonic bourgeois project, either in its liberal or social-democrat version.
Francos dictatorship developed with the recomposing of the historic monarchist-bourgeois project based on violence, working class exploitation and oppression of the peoples of Spain. The same economic subjects, entrepreneurial and great owners kept their total control of the power mechanisms of the state. The national reconciliation policy, theorised by Carrillo, made easier the impunity of the people responsible of Francos dictatorship and the concealing and pretended oblivion of all the responsibilities in the crimes and brutal repression unleashed for forty years. The concealing of historic memory meant the miserable delivery and the treason to the political-ideological patrimony of those who gave their lives in defence of the Republic and the Revolution. Thus, nowadays, the victims contribution to the cause of democracy and socialism has not yet been recognized, not even collectively in the existing governmental and judicial files, thanks to the recent agreement between the Socialist Party (PSOE) and United Left (IU).
The renunciation to Marxism-Leninism, to proletarian internationalism, to the organizational principles of democratic centralism; to the strategy of the democratic break-up and, with it, to the peoples republican yearnings, opened a gap in the Spanish communist movement between those who remained faithful to the Leninist principles and those who chose to give in for an space in the narrow capitalist limits defined in the Monarchist Constitution of 1978.
In this transition period, the celebration on the basis of Marxism-Leninsm of the Communist Unity Congress (January 1984) in which the PCPE is born, breaks the process of defeats and abandons, and settles the basis for the construction of the Party of the Revolution in Spain.
III.- Developing, stimulating and building the PCPE as the vanguard of the class struggle in Spain. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of the counterrevolution in Eastern countries strengthened the liquidationist tendency started with the formulation of euro communism. The initial disorientation soon became a harmful subjectivity of defeat that deeply penetrated in the communist militants.
The resistance struggles against the policies of neo-liberal adjustment, along the 90s, and the ascertainment that the general crisis of imperialism gets more violent, more brutal forms of exploitation and oppression, brought to the class struggle a new generation that was unconnected to revisionist culture, unconnected to the defeat subjectivity and to political, ideological and organizational deviations that euro communist revisionism made hegemonic in the labour movement and the Spanish communism. At the same time we would like to highlight the loyalty to the Leninist principles and the trust in the working class and the peoples of the comrades that, despite the defeats suffered in the 70s and 80s, and in extremely difficult conditions, made it possible not to break the red thread of Marxism-Leninism in the historic continuity of the labour movement.
In this scene, the Unity Congress between the PCPE and the Spanish Communist Workers Party (PCOE) takes place in 2000, a thing that, together with the correction of the mistakes detected and overcame in the 7th Congress of the PCPE, allowed the regular exercise of the political direction by the Central Committee and the Executive Committee, the stimulation to the organized political intervention by the communist militants, the progressive framing of all the militants in cells and their regular work, the improvement in the distribution and regularity of the press organ of the Central Committee (Unidad y Lucha / Unity and Struggle), the progressive recuperation of our youth organisation, the Collectives of Young Communists (CJC), etc. These elements, together with the incorporation of different Leninist detachments to the PCPE in the last years, place our party in the offensive and before the challenge of advancing to a new development stage of the PCPE as the vanguard of the class struggle in Spain.
The 8th Congress of the PCPE, celebrated in Madrid in April 2006, showed the beginning of this new stage. Some of the central elements put by the whole of the delegates as a challenge for the new Central Committee are:
- Work for a Party of conscious militants whose organizational method is democratic centralism. A challenge that is posed in a real, non rhetoric way, to forge a militancy that bases its commitment to the Party in the conscious discipline; heirs of a militant culture and the best examples of Spanish communism, far from individualism and frivolity, proud of our communist militancy and able to carry out the entrusted tasks at every moment. A Party that, because of its way of organizing and the example of its militants, expresses now inside the values of the socialist society that we want to build, where there is no place for the stinginess of the bourgeois society; a space of organized struggle where the individual devotion of every comrade allows a superior collective addition of efforts to be done, which is the Party. To forge a radical militant commitment, unacceptable for the state and the dominant class, makes us face them and because of this commitment, at its moment, as did our comrades in October 1934 and in the National Revolutionary War, in the guerrilla and in the clandestine work, we will have to give even life if necessary.
- Work for a Leninist cadres policy. We work for a Party with a cadres policy that stimulates the formation of leaders characterised by their political and ideological capacity. We work for a Party that develops an intense work of ideological struggle inside the labour and popular movement, guaranteeing the primacy of the revolutionary positions. At this point, the regularity acquired in the work and the stimulation of political and ideological formation tasks is very important. Together with the Central Cadres School of the Party, we are now working to organize, in the period 2007-2010, four Intermediate Schools, with a territorial character (North, Centre, East and South) and an On-line Formation School, as a tool to give an answer to our militants needs of political and ideological formation. We give the same importance to the exchange of impressions and the collaboration in this subject with other sister parties. Coherently, we have proposed to several European Parties to celebrate a meeting of Formation Responsibles that starts and concretes the possibilities of a joint work.
- Work for a Leninist style of direction and leader. Our 8th Congress has defined a profile of PCPEs leader: that one to whom the militants give the responsibility of direction tasks and is committed to their fulfilment giving the best of him or herself. The communist leader must be linked to the popular struggle, be a part and have knowledge of the partys reality from the base his o her Cell-; know the Partys policy and be deeply identified with it, worried about theoretic learning and always ready to assume the critic and exercise self-criticism. They must be the mirror of the Party we want to build before our class and before the most advanced popular strata. All these parameters are the ones that must be taken into account at the moment of electing comrades for the different committees of the PCPE.
Together with the definition of a cadre of the PCPE, we have the development of the processes of account giving recently adopted in our practice- where the Leninist principles of criticism and self-criticism become a reality with the debate of an Account Giving Report where the work of every member of the Central Committee and every organization of the Party is analysed, so it can be debated later in every Cell and start the processes of Account Giving of the intermediate committees. This practice, extraneous till now to Spanish communist culture, is allowing our Party to deepen in the political and ideological unity and giving the militants a precise knowledge of the degree of the Partys development and the accomplishment of the work plans of each member and each Commission of the Central Committee, as a concrete expression of Leninist internal democracy and a factor that helps to build a new militant culture that, overcoming reformist vices in the organizational area, implements the combativeness and the discipline in the Party.
- Work for a deeply internationalist Party. As communists we fight against the principal enemy of the worlds working class, the imperialism. For the PCPE it is necessary to raise a World Anti-imperialist Front to break down the new wave of imperialist devastation; for the world peace and for the liberation of the oppressed peoples and the emancipation of the international working class. We understand that the stimulation, organization and development of this WAF is not extraneous to the development and strengthening of an international communist movement that has an active presence, that plays a decisive role in an open ideological struggle against social-democracy and reformism. We educate our militants and our class in the principles of proletarian internationalism, in the feeling of belonging to the same worlds working class, and that is why we aspire to advance from the present phase of exchange of analysis and putting in common our positions to a closer collaboration, respecting the sovereignty of each organization, with those Communist and Workers Parties that share the need of going on giving steps in the reconstruction of the international communist movement and, in a middle term, in the reconstruction of the Communist International.
We believe that in the European stage some steps must be taken also. For the PCPE, the creation of the European Left Party is a qualitative leap in the integration and submission of some parties to the imperialist structure of the European Union. For us it is necessary to increase the collaboration among the parties who, based on Marxism-Leninism, are ready to give the working class a strategy and a revolutionary and anti-imperialist project, without any sectarianisms but differencing the fields from those who have explicitly abandoned the objective of the Socialist Revolution to integrate themselves in reformism and social-democracy.
From the aforementioned conceptions, the PCPE understands that there is a dialectic relationship between its own strengthening and the reconstruction and strengthening of the international communist movement and that is why, with all the modesty and our short means, we are ready to give our best for the achievement of that goal.
The 90th anniversary of the October Revolution gives us an opportunity to reflect and exchange analysis about one of the central subjects defined one day by Lenin and the Bolsheviks: the construction of the party of a new type, the construction of the party of the revolution. For the PCPE, the Leninist party of a new type is still a need in the class struggle in the 21st century; to its creative construction are devoted the biggest efforts of our militants, convinced of the historical need for the working class to walk to the take of the political power and to the construction of socialism. As Lenin said, yesterday it was early and tomorrow will be too late. Time is short, because the choice was posed time ago: SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM.
Long live Marxism-Leninism!
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Long live worlds working class!
Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain
April 2007