Meanwhile, the Fourth Plenum of the party, in August 1970, had called for the formation of a United Antifascist and Antiimperialist Front (FRAP). Five months later, a Pro-FRAP Coordination Committee was established, “made up of the Party, various mass organizations, groups and republican and socialist personalities, among whom was Julio Alvarez del Vayo.” Under the auspices of the FRAP, the PCE-ML organized an illegal May Day demonstration in Madrid in 1973, which it claimed was attended by 15,000 people. According to the party, clashes with the police on this occasion resulted in the death of one policeman and the wounding of 25 others.[462]
In January 1974, the definitive establishment of the FRAP was announced, presided over by Julio Alvarez del Vayo.[463] Alvarez del Vayo had before the Civil War been a leader of the left faction of the Socialist Party, led by Francisco Largo Caballero. Then during the War, as Foreign Minister of Largo Caballero’s government, he had abandoned Largo Caballero, joining with the Communists to bring down his government. Subsequently, in Spanish exile circles, he had been for many a years a loyal collaborator with the PCE.
According to Leslie Robinson, the FRAP included not only the PCEML, but also the Unionized Workers Opposition, the Popular Peasant Union, and the Popular Federation of High School Students.[464]
On various occasions, H. Leslie Robinson reported that the PCE-ML was “recognized by the Chinese Communists.”[465] However, it is interesting that in its official description of itself, to which we have already alluded, and which was published in 1977, there is no reference to “Mao Tse-tung Thought” or anything else indicating allegiance to the Mao Tse-tung regime. It stated that “The ideology of the PCE (M-L) is Marxism-Leninism. It defends as basic principles of Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the armed struggle as the only way to come to power.”[466]
Nevertheless, the original Maoist orientation of the party, as well as its deviation from that orientation, may be seen in the fact that in 1978 the party sent a message of support to the Communist Party of New Zealand, a long-time Maoist group that had just denounced Mao’s three world thesis and had aligned itself with Albania, against the Chinese leadership.[467]
The Communist Party of Spain (International)
Four other Communist groups that originated in the 1960s and 1970s were clearly of Maoist orientation. One of these was the Communist Party of Spain (International) (Partido Comunista de Espana [International]) or PCE (I).
The PCE (I) was the second oldest Maoist-oriented party in Spain. An official statement by the group, published in 1977, said that “In the case of the PCE (I) it is not so much a matter of the foundation of the Party as of the rupture with the revisionist policy of what had been the Partido Comunista de Espana (PCE). The two fundamental factors in this rupture were: In the international field the struggle of the Communist Party of Spain against the revisionist policies of the Soviet gang and the revolutionary example of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In the national aspect, the active rebellion against the abandonment of the positions of the proletarian class by the ‘Communist’ party. This abandonment was concretized in the pacts which were attempted with sectors of the grand bourgeoisie and the evolutionists of the regime, as well as abandonment of the armed path.”
At the end of 1967 this split in the traditional Communist Party began in Barcelona, led by “Comrade Miguel,” then a member of the Central Committee of the Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalonia, the counterpart of the PCE in the Catalan region. According to the PCE (I) statement, “it was working class organizations which bore the brunt of the rupture, not university students.”
During its first decade, the PCE (I) underwent several splits, according to its own account. The first of these took place in 1968 when “a group of intellectuals and students” rebelled against “the iron and conscientious discipline and most rigorous democratic centralism which must characterize the activity of every Party of the proletariat.” These people objected to the party’s “defining itself with regard to the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.”[468]
A second schism occurred during the Third National Conference of the PCE (I). There a group from central Spain “opposed the political line of the proletarian revolution—presented by the Central Committee and defended by the majority of the delegates to the Conference,” arguing instead for a “struggle for national liberation of all classes oppressed by Yankee imperialism.” And an “alliance of the proletariat with the national Bourgeoisie.” The dissidents in this case joined the PCE (M-L).[469]
A third dissident group was alleged to have been “Trotskyite” in inspiration and to have sought its objectives through trying to get rid of the party leadership through a “liquidationist work which cost the Party a good number of detentions and made public the major secrets of our organizations.”[470] Finally, in July 1971, a fourth group, allegedly using “Nazi methods,” brought about the assassination of Juan Guerrero, a miner and one of the party’s principal leaders in the Asturias region. This group, the PCE (I) official report claimed, “began to say that the proletariat should lead the small and middle bourgeoisie towards the socialist revolution.”[471]
The statement of the PCE (I) proclaimed that the objective of the party was “the achievement of the direct democracy of the masses, that is to say, the Socialist Republic of Assemblies, under the political hegemony of the proletariat and of the masses of soldiers and democratic officers; the ultimate objective is the classless society, Communism.” The party, like most other extreme leftist groups at that time, put particular emphasis on the autonomy and self-determination of the various regions of Spain. Perhaps its most unique aspect was the emphasis it gave to support of the movement for independence of what had been the Spanish Sahara, led by the Polisario movement, and of the Canary Islands.[472]
The PCE (I) had a youth group, the Union of Marxist-Leninist Youth (Union de Juventudes Marxista Leninista). The party claimed that its members “come fundamentally from the working class, and in the second place from the petty bourgeoisie.” It claimed that 25 to 30 percent of its membership was female and that in its Central Committee and Political Secretariat, 60 percent of the members were women. The party published Linea Proletaria as the organ of its Central Committee and Tribuna del Partido, as a “bulletin published by the Central Committee for members and sympathizers.”[473]
The Revolutionary Organization of Workers (ORT)
The third avowedly Maoist group to be established in Spain was the Revolutionary Organization of Workers (Organization Revolucionaria de Trabaj adores—ORT). It had its origins in the formation in the early 1960s of groups of workers, brought together in Trade Union Action of Workers (Accion Sindical de Trabajadores—AST), which operated within the PCE-controlled underground trade union movement, the Workers Commissions (Comisiones Obreras—CCOO). It was not until 1969 that the AST was converted into a political party, the ORT.
465
H. Leslie Robinson, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1973, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 210.
467
H. Roth, in Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, 1979, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., page 278.