To all Spanish Internationalists and to all the proletariat

A MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN VITORIA

                            By: Los Incontrolados

                         HOW FRANCOISM BECAME DEMOCRATIC

“When legality is sufficient to save society then, by all means deploy legality; when it’s not enough then dictatorship”   

         (Donoso Cortes, in a speech, 4^th January 1849)

Comrades,

    Modern history has reminded the Spanish bourgeoisie of the alternative formulated over a century ago by Donoso Cortes (1): when dictatorship is not enough to guarantee its control over society, then democracy. From the moment when dictatorship no longer serves them, democracy must be revived to forestall revolution.

   The ever-deepening social crisis and the wildcat advance of a proletarian solution have displaced the real centre of gravity from those who would like to represent it. So much so, that in the circles of power everything is seen to be in disorder and each strata of the hierarchy has been left floating. In order to negotiate with the opposition bureaucrats, those in power have decided to contradict their own legality - a legacy of the times when they could dispense with such appearances - but which today they must organise as quickly as possible. The francoists, who for so long humiliated the proletariat by their triumph, are now forced to humiliate themselves in order that the proletariat doesn’t triumph. And the bureaucrats of the opposition, in order to create confidence in the new democracy, have also had to pursue their own legality, show their faces, ally themselves with the workers, humble themselves before them in order to be accepted, or at least not rejected outright. In the last year, during the course of the democratic stabilisation of Spanish capitalism, the party of order - whether francoist or opposition  - has seemed as incoherent as that order itself, founded as it is on a comic mixture of unreal laws and unlawful realities. But this has not stopped them from being profoundly united in practice, through a repressive division of labour - some within and others outside of the working class - against the growing autonomous movement.

         If we consider the recent past honestly we can quickly understand the immediate future, which faces us. Given the wave of strikes in the winter of 1976, the various factions of the disintegrating regime and the uniting opposition were hastily forced to jointly save the capitalist order whose future was in dispute. When the counter-revolutionary past collapses over everywhere where it had sealed its unity on the corpses of the revolutionaries of 1936 - there is where its putrefying evolution best demonstrates the truth of its being. Their real unity is split into its basic elements, each one getting a new face-lift and their apparent divisions are dissolved in their unity against the enemy. When francoism became democratic, everything paraded in front of the proletariat (unionism, anarchism, Stalinism, francoism) had to be simultaneously opposed. The quite evident unreality of this political democracy, senile from birth, when it tries to market the various varieties of government policy from which the citizen will have to choose, consists in the fact that the margin for social manoeuvring of those leaders and aspiring leaders is so small that enormous difficulties would rain down on them if it presented as plausible these half tones in a pseudo-election. Thus the francoists and opposition, wanting to be taken for great historic renovators, appear, without being able to disguise themselves, as a sordid collection of traders, thieves and shady dealers feverishly manoeuvring in an atmosphere of demagogy and wretchedness.

      What ten years ago would have been taken as a show of force by a section of the Spanish bourgeoisie, demonstrating that it was capable of destroying its terrorist past and ruling without a state of emergency, today merely demonstrates its weakness and fears, when it should be preparing its repressive future. “The great embrace of the great Spanish family” as Franco used to say, and “national reconciliation” as Carrillo (2) said, unite in their common counter-revolutionary truth; and as such embraces usually have pimps behind them one of them, Tierno Galvan (3) illustrates the meaning of this cordiality: “The government has presented an intelligent programme. A political agreement with the opposition could diminish the social and economic protests which run the risk of being transformed into a revolt against the institutional form of the State”, ending up with a call for a “united front of all democratic parties and the regime in order to save it.” (Declaration of 12^th August 1976.)

    It will not be the first time, nor the last, that the dominant power seeks its salvation by the organisation of elections to give itself the breathing space to come out of  “one of the greatest social and political crises of the 20th century”. If it is true that “crises are not resolved except by spectacular leaps forward”, this great leap forward in the spectacle could not be assured, by holding elections, without a profound general falsification of social relations. Aside from the under-development of the techniques of lying in information and culture, shortly to be remedied (witness the large number of jobs created in this sector), they also lack the very roots of social falsification, given the poor working class representation. The attempt to create unions has failed, not from a lack of interest by the government or the bosses, but because of the negative response of the workers. At the beginning of this year the sum total of those affiliated to the CC.OO, UGT, CNT, USO, STV (3) - in shreds after the proletarian offensive - was less than 200,000 from which a large number of students and cadres must be discounted. It is laughable that the ruined CNS was abandoned because it was no longer useful and what could have been of use - the opposition unions - were of no consequence because they had no support.

    Thus, comrades, a form of counter-revolution is dying of old age and is trying to rejuvenate itself by a late democratic renovation. It is, as old Hegel might have put it today, as if in the grey twilight of this reign of shadows the motley politician could do no more than paint grey on grey.  

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1.  Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-53), Carlist sympathiser who tried to make Carlism more sophisticated by  re-orientating it towards modern problems. (Translator's note.)

2. Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party  (PCE}.(TN)

3.Tierno Galvan, leader of the Popular Socialist Party, now fused with the PSOE, the Socialist Workers Party, the main second Internationalist party (TN).

4. See Glossary for organisational abbreviations at the very end of these documents on the assembly led strikes in Spain in the 1970s.

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Comrades,

   When the situation after the death of Franco cried out to the capitalists “make your play”, the workers answering with their strikes said “not any more”. By enthroning Juan Carlos, the neo-francoists still believed that they could at their bidding and under the conditions laid down by them accord a place in the democracy, to the bureaucrats of the opposition. From the beginning, however, they had to accept the help the opposition could not but otherwise proffer them, an  assistance which they provided effectively and which was the determinant cause in liquidating the most important strike movement since the civil war.

    Since the first Government of the Monarchy (1), some 100,000 workers, principally in Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country have been on strike. The movement spread and at the same time became more radical. With its practice of assemblies and the formation of flying pickets, it surpassed all organisations and endangered the legalism of the bureaucrats. By January, strikes were taking place all over Spain. But it was in Madrid where the autonomous movement of the workers fought its first great battle involving 320,000 workers, principally in the building and metal working industries. The minister for union affairs called for a cease-fire to which the USO, GG.OO and UGT agreed, saying, “it’s neither a question of retarding nor of radicalising the strikes but of finding a negotiable solution.” The principal liquidators of the strikes were to be the Stalinists who while unable to control them, could at least block them. They were the first to accept the promises of the bosses, the bosses the first to renege on them, and the Stalinists, in turn, the first to accept this reneging. Ariza (2) himself, dismissed from Perkins, (3) called on his work-mates to “continue working normally”, which illustrates in caricature the impotence of the CC.OO, and the consciousness of such impotency in utilising the strike as a support for Stalinist politics. In managing to smash the most important strike - Standard Electric (4) - with false information, cheating at the polls, underhand agreements and unrepresentative delegates and everything else that the Stalinists long experience in manipulation and the art of lying had taught them, they succeeded in breaking and demoralising the strike front. First came the big engineering firms, then the smaller ones, then all of the others on strike. The government militarised the post, Renfe (5) and the metro: dismissals, sanctions, arrests and threats did the rest.

    Following the principle, sustained with every trick in the book, of an “ordered retreat so as to regroup at a later date”, one by one the strikes collapsed in El Bajo Llobregat, in Malaga, in Valladolid, Barcelona, Tarragona, Elda, Allicante. . . the strikes that continued, like Laforsa in Bajo Llobregat, the three Michelin factories, Roca in Gava, Vers Hutchinson and Terpel in Madrid, remained isolated and doomed to collapse from exhaustion. And in Vitoria, where the strikers’ assembly movement had come to the point beyond which only revolution lies, where all recuperation was disarmed and bullets alone could stop it, the guns of the police spouted democracy’s last word while the moralising lamentations of the opposition provided harmony. All the defenders of the bourgeois order with their tear-soaked handkerchiefs had been saved for the day.

    The battle that started in Madrid and ended in Vitoria the first collision of the proletariat with an opposition henceforth in tow to francoism. The sharing out of repressive tasks was settled and the police completed what the lies and manoeuvres of the bureaucrats could not. Camacho speaking about “strike mania” opportunely recalls Jesus Hernandez (6) commenting on the “mania for seizing and collectivising”. In Madrid and in the rest of Spain the return to work was a very costly victory for the battered opposition, they paid dearly to keep their union dyke standing. As a result, the Stalinists had to abandon their project of taking over the CNS vertical union “with all the lifts in working order”, because it was really “out of order”, and a useless vehicle for all concerned. Having to resort to the base to recuperate the assemblies, the Stalinists had to renounce assuming from above the monopoly of workers representation. Forced to go along with the UGT and USO, whose liquidationist capacity was appreciably less, they joined in the negotiations with government and the bosses. Although they recuperated the parallel unionism of the committees formed in each company and the negotiating committees set up from above and outside of the assemblies, it didn’t help them. But this parallel unionism, obliged to go through the assemblies, could not last for very long when the latter ceased to function. And when the assemblies were in ascension the lies of parallel unionism had to triumph completely if it did not want to 1ose in one assembly everything achieved in the rest. The assemblies of strikers, however imperfect their control over the struggle, contain the possibility of total autonomy in making and carrying out decisions and have to suppress all external representation. In conclusion, the sad role that the politico-union opposition played throughout the present historical period was that of supporting the government no matter what, even to its own detriment, without ever being able to guarantee peace.

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1.  See Glossary

2.  Government of the Monarchy. See Glossary

3.  Perkins: diesel engine factory in Madrid.

4.  Standard Electric: multinational telephone company in Madrid.

5.  Renfe: Spanish state railway system.

6. Jesus Fernandez: Communist party member in the government of Largo Caballero, later wrote a book, which exposed the machinations of himself and the CP in   Spain during the Civil War . (TN)  

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Comrades,

    Going into action is to war what payment is to commerce. The battle of Vitoria on 3^rd March 1976 was that moment of truth when all protagonists of the social war had to appear as they really were. Without leaders, the workers threw themselves so courageously into the struggle that bosses and bureaucrats alike were dumbfounded by this unmentionable autonomy. Some of them hoped, without real conviction, that the movement would recognise the mediation of the vertical unions whose ‘representatives’ had been forced to resign by the workers. Without expecting that the intervention of their unionism would be of much use, they now limited themselves to preventing their stronghold - the Michelin factory (1) - from joining the strike. In two months of autonomous organisation of struggle (through daily factory assemblies, and twice-weekly joint assemblies which could not take decisions which had not been previously approved of in the factory assemblies) the workers had united the sufficient practical conditions of its conscious offensive. By adopting as fundamental principles, beyond any possible discussion, “All power to the assemblies of the working class” and “Everything within the assembly, nothing outside it”, they took the initiative that could lead to the revolution that must leave nothing exterior to it. But the workers saw the assemblies solely as a better means of defence, and did not recognise the extent of their challenge to the existing society and so dissimulated their self-organisation.

    Nevertheless what the workers ignored, the state already knew and even more so the union bureaucracy struggling to form itself. Within a movement which carries all the workers in a factory forward, un-masking those who speak in their name and stifling their manipulations, it is enough that they impose direct control in the general assembly. The workers then appropriate as a new need, the need for communication, and so “what in the beginning appeared as a means changes into an end in itself, direct communication which overcomes the defensive struggle against representations and abolishes the conditions of separation which had made representation necessary. Consequently, all responsible unionists could say that they agreed with the ends pursued but not with the means employed. In fact the requirements of the struggle led the workers irresistibly to cease making demands, to take what they needed. This process had to be interrupted at its most advanced point: Vitoria had become too exemplary in respect of what the proletariat could achieve without parties and unions at the moment in which the promise to give into their demands was seen as the answer to all their needs. On the 3^rd of March, the strike was general throughout the city, and the demonstrations in the capital saw barricades go up for the first time accompanied by the first violent confrontations in which the police used guns. The peaceful illusions of the originators disappeared. The police fell back awaiting reinforcements. Provisional masters of the streets, the workers contented themselves with reinforcing the system of barricades and what is worse were so naive as to meet, as if nothing had happened, at the pre-arranged assembly in the church of Saint Francis. Letting the police know about the meeting was like having the foresight to do their job for them. Anyone who doesn’t like to ideologically sanctify what was still the weakness of the autonomous movement must say that it was the unconsciousness of the workers, above all else, which delivered them into the hands of their enemy, in the worst possible conditions. They assembled in the church to listen yet again to the legalistic placebos of the choirmasters, who insisted that the police would not enter “because the authorities would not permit it”. The workers missed their chance of retreating voluntarily despite a valiant attempt at a diversion by those outside. The police were therefore able to regain the initiative, which the workers had granted them. Choosing to reach a verdict through a show of force, the state, wagering that the workers would not be able to organise their answer or their arms, took the risk of putting an end to the first spontaneous form of the proletarian offensive, of violently imposing the consciousness of what was at stake. Francoism took such a risk because it had calculated it hand in hand with the opposition: the union/ political bureaucracy which let the repression begin and end without calling a national strike, although for the first time in its life it risked being listened to and followed, if not actually preceded (as was the case with various local general strikes, as in Pamplona). The desperate violence after the shooting in Vitoria demonstrated that the workers’ determination, though unorganised and unaided, had not been annihilated. But the rage behind the destructive actions only expressed more clearly the rage at not having done it more effectively before. The only possible way of surpassing the struggle was by turning the riot into an insurrection, which meant calling for revolution throughout Spain (the state was perfectly conscious of this and hurriedly cut off all telephone communications with the outside); But the proletariat had not progressed as far as that. Not having envisaged the need for self-defence, all communication amongst themselves was completely disorganised by the repression. Guns had to speak before the assemblies would quieten down. Silence reigned in Vitoria. The workers’ committee from the Forjas Aiavesas factory wrote in its analysis of the struggle “There is no better way of resolving the conflict than by dismantling one of its parts. We have returned to work without achieving everything we wanted. Firstly we were bound to do so because of machine-gun fire. And secondly, if we consider the assembly as our most fundamental weapon, we have been disarmed.” (“Thoughts on the Forjas Alavesas strike”.) Each time the state takes the initiative with a frontal attack, it obliges the workers to transform their own particular method of waging war into that of the state’s. And in order to dominate this method before being dominated by it - as during the civil war- in order to use it without reproducing it, something, which the working class has to do, many more Vitorias are necessary.

 1. Michelin: tyre factory based in Vitoria. 

Comrades,

   The first government of the monarchy died in Vitoria. Its birth was not due to the general agreement amongst the pretenders to Franco’s reign but to the negotiation of the then president Arias(1) with the most astute first-comers and opportunistic impostors. Those francoists who were not included in the government and who were not prepared to accept it, formed their own separate parties, entrenching themselves in their division of power and its Institutions, following the share-out that took place after Franco’s death. If they could not direct the government from the separate party positions, they at least could contain it. To transform the francoist institutions smoothly, to successful1y modernise the state or reflate the economy, the government had to reorganise francoism as the government party by replacing its worn parts and gaining the collaboration of the opposition, ceding some responsibility to it without putting it back in the apparatus. It had to win new friends from outside as well as to prevent old enemies from retaliating from within.

    Fraga (2), seemingly the strongest man at the time, did what political dwarfs do on great occasions - he stumbled and fell. He fabricated by means of ministerial appointments the pretence of a persona) party wanting to impose his conditions on everyone by separate negotiations with each, But he lacked the strength to gain the time necessary to impose himself and the astuteness to utilise it. The strike movement had brought up all its subversive reality while the government vacillated from one day to the next. At the end of March 1976 the official organ of officious democracy, Cambio 16 wrote: “after Vitoria everything is possible”, earnestly hoping for a new government that could come to an agreement with the opposition in order to “obtain a truce in the streets and in the factories”. Fraga, on detaining Camacho and others, shamefully sought excuses instead of remedies, reproaching the opposition for not having managed to hold reality at bay, as if the latter hadn't had to pursue it, in order not to lose the possibility of controlling it. Trying to buy the opposition on credit it offered no room for manoeuvre, because he knew that they would work for free when everything hung in the balance due to the strike movement. And so he remained alone in his headquarters in between the francoists united against him to preserve their State and the opposition joined together in the democratic co-ordination prepared to negotiate this salvation with anyone who cared to listen to them and was prepared to occupy the ‘power vacuum’ that the imminent fall of the government would leave. The demobilisation of the Vitoria Solidarity movement and also of the first of May was the last unpaid job of the opposition, which allowed the Arias government to survive for a few more weeks. Similarly it was the final stab in the back to the strike movement that lost the final opportunity of re-uniting and returning to the attack. The initial failure of the government of Fraga and Arias marked the end of the authoritarian illusions of francoism. In future it would have to take democracy seriously. As the new president of the government, Suarez, (3) later declared: “On the one hand there is a very active, very intelligent opposition, which does not have experience of government, on the other hand there are government officials who do not have the least notion of what the function of the parties is all about. It’s a question of getting them working together-everything depends on that” (Cambio 16, 6^th –12^th September 1976).

     Because of the uncontrolled violence of the workers, democracy lost its first battle even before it came into existence. In future it would have to reform its rearguard forces, sacrificing all the dangerous and vulnerable positions that the former system of defence had bequeathed to it. Every battle lost is a weakening, disintegrating factor. The most urgent need was to collect its forces together in order to gather newfound strength and confidence. This could only come from amongst the forces least affected in the combat, from among the democratic organisations of the opposition that Spanish capital was learning to appreciate in some measure as its strategic reserve. But as Clausewitz had demonstrated, “Just as reserve tactics are recommendable so the idea of retaining as a reserve strategy, forces that are already prepared, is contrary to common sense. The reason is because battles decide the outlook of the war and so the employment of reserve tactics precedes any decision, whilst reserve strategies follow it.” And in fact this last card that capitalism wanted to keep up its sleeve had to be played at the opening of the game. Between the workers and the state (i.e. the police and military forces of law and order) there existed only a fragile buffer of politico-union bureaucracies to take the first shock of the workers’ offensive. So, in reality the politico-union bureaucracy, all its outposts exposed on open ground and to the repressive forces of the state, constituted rather the reserve tactics whose employment would decide the outcome of the battle. The police assassinations throughout the “bloody week” were carried out at the very time when the bureaucracy, extremely skilled after two months of manoeuvring and lying was going to be blasted itself. To get the workers to agree to the moderate positions of the opposition it was necessary to frighten them.

   On 13^th March 1976 that weekly magazine of unadulterated Stalinism Triunfo (4), wrote: “Undoubtedly the working class also pick up some lessons from these events. The first is that recourse to violence in addition to being ethically wrong is politically wrong also because it plays into the hands of reaction. All those that take upon themselves the possibility of influencing a working class, deprived of a party, deprived of unions, its complaints continually disregarded, must do so in the sense of recommending calm and quietness. If strikes, demonstrations or meetings turn into riots the working class has everything to lose by it”. Resorting to intimidation during the following week was one of the means used most by the bureaucrats to end the strikes. The bosses profited the most from the victory of the pseudo-clandestine unions over the strikes; firstly by standing firm over the dismissals and sanctions, then introducing specific legislation against strike pickets, and finally by later securing the suspension of article 35 of the labour Relations Law which allowed the bosses the right to sack workers without paying redundancy money. The unions allowed these three things to pass uncontested. Finally, the bosses abandoned the CNS doting on those unionists disposed to an early dialogue with the workers unions whose capacities for falsifying, dividing and ruling had to quickly reach its climax to confront the next inevitable movement of the masses. They needed leaders “that are as capable of calling a stoppage as of ordering a return to work” (Ribera Rovira, president of the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce), and there are special recommendations: if the Catalan boss Duran Farrell was a worker, according to him, “he would be in the Comisiones Obreras”. For their part, the unions would not have any difficulty in convincing the capitalists of their good intentions, although they would have a much tougher job in passing off their tricks on the working class. “For 25,000 pesetas inscription fees, heads of personnel and managers of more than 100 companies were able to see and hear in the flesh union leaders from the ‘illegal’ CC.OO, USO and UGT. They all insisted on a dialogue: “the workers do not go on strike for pleasure”; “the workers do not want companies to founder”; “class struggle does not exclude dialogue rather it presupposes it”. None of them wanted to frighten the managers off, one of whom present even exclaimed: “What a shame that the workers in the factories do not think in the same way as those in this room” (Cambio 16, 24^th to 30^th  May 1976). But wanting to be of help is not enough! To be of use it is necessary to close ranks and avoid surprises like Vitoria and the appearance on the scene of ‘unknown’ revolutionary formations swamping union bureaucracies. In the big cities co-ordinating bodies (like the COS in Madrid) were formed, ready to occupy the gap the CNS never filled, while the Stalinists gave up trying to transform the CNS into an inter-sindical such as the PC succeeded in doing in Portugal; the groupuscules of every shade entered en masse into the several central unions.

     The government and the opposition exchanged mutual bows and went off together to prepare the counter attack. The second neo-francoist government came to power on a programme of continuing this same democratic progression on a social terrain dangerously exposed to the view of the ascendant assembly movement, although it had only occupied the terrain partially, and now sought new means and allies. “The workers have taken the factory as the field of operations” - J. Garrigues Walker – (5) and it is from this exclusive concentration on their direct terrain of unification that people like Garrigues Walker shall have to divert them.

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1. Arias Navarra: President of the first government  after Franco's death. (TN)

2. Fraga Iribarne: leader of the extreme right wing  Popular Alliance, ex-Minister for Information and Tourism under Franco as well as Ambassador to Britain. Some members of FRAP (a Spanish Maoist party) attended a wining and dining given by Fraga in the Spanish Embassy in London when Franco died. They considered Fraga a representative of progressive forces in Spain. (TN)

3. Adolfo Suarez: leader of the UDC, the prime minister   after the 1976 elections and engineer of the unity of the centre parties. ( TN)  

4. Triunfo: glossy weekly with pronounced CP sympathies. To a degree that is absent in Cambio 16 it recalls the “past glories” of the workers’ movement Spain in practically every issue even going so far as to show some affection for its old enemy the re-awakened CNT whose repressive function vis-à-vis the autonomous movement Triunfo doubtless welcomed. Also hailed the return of Jose Pierats, the anarchist ideologist, (though every revolutionary is an ideologist at sometime or another), whose book Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution is nevertheless one of the most intelligent and readable of the 1936'39 uprising. (TN)

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Comrades,

    In Spain, we can say that, concentrated in time, all the present dilemmas of the possessing classes of the world are to be found. The property owning classes, discussing how to administer their failure and how best to make it profitable again by strengthening the state either cloaking it with “the energy crisis” or “the economic crisis” are neither able to save the economy nor be saved by it. Faced with the crisis of the economy, it is a matter here in Spain, as everywhere else, of persuading workers, through the intermediaries of unions and parties that the economy is a natural alienation that requires being administered in the best possible way, and not an historical alienation that must be overcome as soon as possible. But as the development of the crisis of the economy is accelerated at this moment in Spain by a particular economic crisis whose consequences are increased by an absence of union control, the difficulties in getting the masses to respond to the dramatised austerity, are considerably greater. Similarly the limited time in which to embark on “a new model of development”, basis of agreement of all moderates, is still more marked. Before all else, the Spanish economy requires a new “stabilisation plan”. Loans from international capital will be necessary, but more urgently, the search for the conditions of profitability amongst the proletariat. Each strike becomes more and more the state’s business the longer it is prolonged, obliging the state to intervene and so raising the question of self-defence. The opposition proposes political democracy as the remedy, which means allowing it to become part of the government, not only in respecting the economy as it has done up to now but to rescue it through a social contract. Consequently it desisted attacking the economy, provided it was given the opportunity to defend it. But such sophisms did not deceive the government who knew, watching the opposition do all it could against the mobilisation and radicalisation of workers, that if the opposition was unable to do more it was because it couldn’t. So the second government of the monarchy allowed the opposition to delude itself with the promise of some electoral crumbs, while it devoted itself to the controlled adaptation of the state institutions. And it is not because of some supposed betrayal by the opposition that neo-francoism has stabilised itself. Firstly, because the opposition was in no position to prevent it, and secondly because it did not want anything more than what it was finally given. However, it would have liked to have created the appearance of having won concessions after a great struggle, but had to give up this hope. It spoke about a republic, then of a more democratic king, then of a representative government of national unity, then of some ministry and finally settled for being allowed to stand at the elections. One cannot fail to see that because of the action taken by the Suarez government and the passivity of the opposition, the regime had affected an orderly retreat with the minimum of losses. And managing to keep control of the political situation, it has retained the possibility of returning to take over the entire social terrain. Cleverly combining tolerance in relation to details, and repression where essential, the government maintained contact with the proletariat that was pressuring it, thus preventing the proletarian movement from accelerating and returning to a lawless turmoil that would have forced the government to make some quite important sacrifices because of the consequent internal disintegration. Contrast the unexpected firmness of the Suarez-Guitierrez Mellado (l) government with the confused cowardice of the opposition, whose prudence was the best part of its courage and its obscure bargaining the clearest instance of its prudence. By political calculation, it was sufficient for the government to simply negotiate separately with its principal components for them to deflate the bluff of the ‘democratic co-ordination’. Each part feared losing or at least missing some minor advantage if it continued to associate with the others and the rivalry that resulted from this disparity inevitably divided them. But even without this, the democratic co-ordination had ceased in fact to exist from the moment when the government acknowledged the favours of the Stalinists who were endorsed with the opening of the dialogue with Suarez. The exclusion of all the superfluous parties - the Maoists, the small incidental groups like that of Treviziano and the Carlists (2) -cost nothing but was nevertheless a relief for them. The remodelled opposition therefore presented themselves in a more respected fashion with a new ‘negotiating committee’ which, along with the government, prepared the liquidation of the October strikes, and so dissipating their final dreams of glory, recalling, nostalgically, “how beautiful it all was to be a democrat under Franco”.  

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2. Carlists: their ideology was initially a crude amalgam of religious obscurantism and rural localism enshrined in the fueros (laws) of Navarra, the Basque country, inland Catalunya and lower Aragon. In 1937 Franco forcibly merged car ism with the Falange. From the mid 1960s on, the movement made a new appeal to frustrated youth and regionalists. It advocated 'popular monarchy' but was cut short by Franco's tutoring of Juan Carlos as the future King of Spain. (TN)  

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Comrades,

    The revolutionary proletariat exists and the long series of exemplary strikes in autumn 1976 in the Basque country, in Barcelona, in Sabadell, Tenerife, Valencia, Madrid, Leon, Gava etc proves it. The proletariat, neither resting nor allowing anyone else to rest caused the government to change its tactics, which now had to be less concerned about itself and more about the opposition. Although its own position was not strengthened it had to make sure the opposition was not weakened either, leaving the social terrain open to revolution. We may ask ourselves if the government, faced with violence in the streets and factories was pessimistic about its future, or had the impression of a diffuse pre-insurrectional chaos, or if it simply smelt something smouldering? What is certain is that be it one, the other, or all of them, the government acted rapidly, giving the go-ahead to the unions and the parties, organising its own party and setting a date for elections.

  The provocations of the extreme right provided the alibi, which justified making what previously was a tactical agreement into an official one. The final bloody events of February allowed the opposition to openly proclaim its support for the government and to secretly demand from it a promise not to abandon it, given the waves of anti-union strikes that would not be long in coming.

     Francoism definitely had now become completely democratic and the opposition completely francoist, with their democracy closing the door to the revolution. It’s up to the proletariat to wrench it open.  

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THE REVOLUTION DOES NOT DRAW ITS POETRY FROM THE PAST

“We knew that, henceforth the committees responsible to the CNT, could do nothing other than put obstacles in the way of the proletarian advance. We are the friends of Durutti, and strong enough to depose for reasons of incompetence and cowardice these individuals who have betrayed the working class. At the time when we had no enemies in front of us, they handed over power to Companys, the police, the reactionary governor of Valencia and secretary of defence, General Pozas. Betrayal is really something.”

(Manifesto of ‘Friends of Durutti’, 8^th  May 1937)

Comrades,

    The working class taking up the struggle, once again, was nothing like the same class that had impetuously hurled itself into the strikes of the previous year. The guns of the police and manoeuvres of the bureaucrats made them understand what the concessions obtained really meant. The greatest achievement of the assembly movement is the movement itself. The freedom taken by the workers in starting to unite and organise themselves without intermediaries, is the one thing that could neither be granted by the regime nor demanded by its leaders, because today traditional Spanish society is besieged and is falling apart. The assembly movement is the lived freedom of anti-hierarchical dialogue, the realisation of authentic democracy. It is where the revolution feels most at home and where its enemies feel like intruders, now not only denuded but denounced by their ideological jargon. Here, all practical problems take form and can be resolved. In the organisation of strike pickets it was a question of autonomy arming itself in dissolving the elected assembly committees where the manipulators wanted to place their representatives it was now a question of not supplying new weapons to the enemy. But the most threatening thing for the bureaucrats are not these initiatives but the fact that the workers, once they get together to take command of the movement, feel themselves naturally propelled to carry them out in practice and, later on, by experimentation and further practice to correct and supercede them.

    There is nothing that the bureaucrats undermine more, nothing that they persist in combating and destroying with such bloodthirstiness than direct communication. Despite all their praise as representatives, the bureaucrats could never hope to stabilise the situation while free discussion - that discussion which made dialecticians of the workers - existed.

    Frequently in history, especially at the beginning of a new epoch, the mass movement is judged by those who represent it, or at least pretend to have done so in the past. This generally is valid for the self-image that a nascent revolution has of its aims, its language, and its references to the past and to the imaginary genealogy in which it wants to guarantee its truth. The francoist counter-revolution, in prohibiting both access to the revolutionary past and its critical re-appropriation, has been the best ally of those bureaucrats who helped expropriate its memory in the authorised versions of those who make the myths. This is the reason why the anti-fascist falsehood, run mainly by the Stalinists, had been able to dominate the scene for such a long time. It is better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees and it is better still to survive in Prague or in Moscow making capital out of martyrs and carrying on the trade in corpses. Eventually - with the decomposition of anti-fascist ideology followed by an attitude of surprise - the enlightened technique of rewritten false histories had to redeem from the shadow, other more suitable ruins, which undoubtedly would excite admiration. One was anarchism, disinterred everywhere as an anti historical and tranquilising explanation of the modern contestation of the state, and reduced to the eternal belief in the return of revolt. It was the one which for obvious reasons was most suitable in Spain than anywhere else since it had once been a massive reality here, the local ideological form of the general alienation of the old workers’ movement that in other places originated from Marxism. The revolution draws its poetry from the future from where it has to learn to re-invent its justifications and impose them: its partisans have no need to defend anything of the illusory and boring paradise of petrified memories. Given that they are present, without any need of justification, they must choose to forget those obsessive references and, refresh the historical memory. Those starting to make history again have no reason to learn it and besides whom could they learn it from? They shall learn the truth of what happened in history only by struggling against what opposes them. In so doing all that was previously true shall return in a tangible form and capable of verification. The revolution then can serenely separate itself from the past.

   It is not a question of the revolutionary critique giving currency to a new version of the past, but of showing how the real movement extricates itself from the past; not only of explaining what leads up to the present revolutionary situation but of demonstrating what, in the present situation, explains the previous process giving it its revolutionary direction. Such a critique has to regard as an enemy everyone that positively evaluates “the constructive work” of the revolutionary anarchists of 1936. They cannot be considered constructors other than in the extent of their impotence and failure to destroy the criteria, which allows their achievements to be appreciated on the terrain of economic rationality, justifying self-management by counting the number of kilos of oranges and rice produced on the collectives. The “phantoms of 1937” return to besiege democracy 40 years after. But the leader’s nightmare should never become the dream of revolutionaries: if one dreams it is because one is asleep. Today’s proletarians will have to be much worse than the insurrectionaries of May 1937 who really knew how to act without their masters knowing how to retaliate. Modern subversion cannot begin until it has liquidated all the superstitions of the past.

Comrades,

   Within the Spanish economy in crisis, the only expanding sector (albeit chaotically), leading to a considerable increase in the number of jobs available, is that of the politico/union bureaucracy. And amidst this growing frenzy of basic training courses, provided to the new recruits, less representatives of the workers than travelling salesmen for their beloved union and democracy, it is necessary to comment on the resuscitated CNT, both because of its present misery and the greatness of the past that it tries to inherit. Without mentioning the genetic arguments in the manner of Santillan(1) (“In Spain there is a nearly racial tendency towards anarchism”), the importance of anarchism in the former Spanish workers’ movement has been either abusively attributed to anecdotes (for example because Fanelli, the first emissary of the International in Spain was a Bakunist) or interpreted tendentiously by a sub-Marxist sociology (the importance of the agrarian proletariat and industrial workers of recent peasant origin). A more historical analysis cannot forget that the revolutionary movement of the proletariat is determined by its origins in the socio-economic framework of each country, by whatever has been the formal mode of appearance of the bourgeoisie. It is both the organisational and programmatic legacy with which the proletariat begins to fight and the terrain, conditioning its struggle, on which it fights. Thus, the importance of politics in the organised workers’ movement of each country is exactly proportional to the degree to which the national bourgeoisie has appropriated the state and achieved political domination. Now no one should be surprised if in Spain the proletariat was not sidetracked by politics while the bourgeoisie came in the side door through their compromise with the landed aristocracy. The Marxist position, identifying the proletariat and the bourgeoisie from the point of view of the revolutionary seizure of power was not only a general strategic illusion in Spain, but a particular tactical error that totally failed to understand the meaning of the initial battles; an incomprehension that was later aggravated by the sordid necessities of the anti-Bakunin polemics. But what some understood was only ignored by others. If the scientific ideology based on the conception of a universally applicable linear scheme achieved its bureaucratic truth with the Stalinist ‘theory of stages’, the ideology of liberty had, for its part, to fully reveal its hidden authoritarianism, when all the questions, which it had inhibited, were formulated in practice by the revolution. So historical justice destined the question of organisational mediation that always was the rotten apple in the anarchist barrel, to represent its negative decomposition, a process of putrefaction that ended on 6^th November 1936 with the peremptory affirmation of Solidaridad Obrera: “As of yesterday the proletariat of the CNT is collaborating in the governing of Spain”. The revolutionary immediacy that anarchism had always guaranteed and promised encountered its unforeseen realisation in this sudden governmental metamorphosis of the proletariat. But if history, through what the anarchist masses attempted in spite of their leaders, has already criticised the worst side of anarchism, it is today necessary to criticise its better side - the same actions of the masses who, applying the anarchist programme (such as was formulated in the final Congress of Zaragossa (2) -the best representation of the separate coherence of ideology) showed its limitations and verified its insufficiencies. The collectivisation experiment intending to rid itself of a poor economy, as well as money, could only proceed slowly with its anti-economic programme in the agricultural sector and only as “Libertarian communism in one village”. In the factories the union bureaucracy far from taking control of the organisation of production, discovered through the ‘war effort’ the way forward to its integration into the state thus forestalling collectivisation. What contemporary self-management finds there in the way of precursor and innovator, on the same level as any Titoist self-management, is that it has no revolutionary future, and not even a counter-revolutionary one. What are judged past utopias, in keeping with the inevitable anarchistic nostalgia for the golden age - confusing the practical movement with its Kropotkinite ideologies, is on the contrary, the bearer of an authentic negative grandeur whose meaning one must know how to interpret. Anarchism wanted to suppress the economy but one cannot suppress the economy without realising it. The illusion of suppressing the economy that is not at the same time its realisation is not now supported by any movement that combats existing conditions, but is propagated solely in the form of an antiseptic, pedagogic moralising by an idiotic ecological reformism. And the CNT, resurrected alongside the present proletarian movement as the jack-of-all-trades unions for the lumpen-bourgeoisie in search of ideological certainties, is the historical dustbin, collecting naturally the ecologists and their problems of waste. Anarchism wanted to suppress the economy without realising it; Marxism wanted to realise the economy without suppressing it, to realise the proletariat as the greatest productive force, albeit economic. And of course, neither of these two unilateral positions could crown their enterprise with any success, although each at the moment of truth had to do the contrary of what it intended. In the anarchist collectives the monetary abstraction was formally combated while at the same time it was generalised everywhere as the concrete content of activity - so in this way life tended to be converted into an ‘economic problem’. At the same time the totalitarian identification of bureaucratic power with the proletariat, that is, the terrorist dictatorship of an ideology that wanted to rationalise the economy, abandoned all economic problems to the police, going as far as dementedly scorning the prime necessities of economic rationality. Today the modern revolution, through the struggles where the project begins to be unified, shows us that the suppression and the realisation of the economy are inseparable aspects of the same supercession of the economy.

   The assembly movement today, by overcoming its first spontaneous forms, is faced with the task that had arrested previous revolutionary attempts; the need not merely to occupy but also transform the social space in which separation reigns naturally over hierarchy and non-communication. If the revolution takes up from where it left off, it is not because of some mystic fatality. It is because the previous limitation that it had encountered now confronts it as an obstacle to the formulation and organisation of this same conscious project. Where previously it was its own incapacity, today it is the power of the enemy: one which has converted its territory, by a kind of inverted scorched earth policy, into something nearly impossible to re-appropriate. So then Bakunin’s famous formula “the desire for destruction is a creative passion” is no longer the expression of a subjective truth but the accurate formulation of an objective need to install over the ruins of passivity the only operational base from which the power of the assemblies can recognise itself and pass to the offensive. This need to construct the terrain of autonomy where the circulation of commodities ceases and mankind begins to encounter each other had begun to be gratified on the 3^rd of March in Vitoria with vandalism and barricades and was summarily expressed in the interruption of traffic on the Madrid/Irun motorway and in the main access routes to the city. In the social war the proletariat does not only have information problems respecting its enemy’s positions but also in regard to its own. As everything exists to prevent these problems from being resolved, it is necessary to destroy everything that exists. The present movement scorned politics but it had to learn to overcome politics. It was not enough to simply disregard it. Although the proletariat imagined it could ignore the state, it in turn, had not been ignored by the state. And although there hardly remained any illusions concerning the ‘democratic’ unionism being planned for it, the proletariat shall just have to take charge totally of autonomous relations if the walls of the factory are not to be the final ramparts of the old world. In the neighbourhood assemblies, which spread everywhere, the tendency to reject exploitation in the whole of everyday life advanced steadily, and from there developed the critique of wage labour. The assemblies, since then have become a channel for all Christian Stalinists fishing in the murky waters of sordid survival (neighbourhood associations) with the ridiculous slogan of ‘democratic Town Halls’. However, they have also generalised the thirst for dialogue and the experience of self-defence. At the same time as the form of the assembly was adopted, in all areas where it corresponded to a total necessity, it was recuperated as a caricature without content in all other areas where it was necessary to appear real i.e. in student and progressive substitute milieus or those of the politico/cultural spectacle, and were either very boring or very stupid. These shady ‘bazaars’ where cowardice and submission celebrated its redemption, with its liturgy and intecessors, were by no means the principal expression, nor even a weak echo, of real and free communication. This project of discussion, unlike those which the workers assemblies gave rise to, was content with a freedom of speech that accepted the fact that they were powerless to do anything or finally say anything. Here they wanted to discuss everything but ended up discussing nothing. If the workers assemblies only wanted to discuss what they were doing, and if eventually everything was discussed, that was because it was necessary to do everything possible, even if it only meant continuing to talk, to stop the bureaucratic monopoly of expression from being re-established. To combat this confusionist interference, the assembly movement only needs to draw its theory from its practise and forbid all else as a socially obnoxious noise. Forcing all its enemies to accept its existence and feign support for its terms was its first victory. The race to recuperate and the ‘scrum’ in which each managed to put the boot in, exhausted the assemblies enemies without any of them succeeding, as they say, to capitalise on the gold of autonomy: the latter changed into carbon when they attempted to mint it with their ideological money. In the usurious race for external representations inflation ate into everything that was a false autonomy. Ectoplasmic mini-bureaucracies sprang up and died during the course of a strike, acquiring their existence at the cost of their inconsistency, and then paying the price by disappearing. It even went so jar as the Stalinists of the CC.OO throwing a little councilism into their unionism and some assemblyism into their manoeuvrings. Throughout a busy year the Stalinists had composed a veritable encyclopaedia on the manipulative use of the proletariat, which cried out for a single practical conclusion. In order for their positions in the assemblies to win the revolutionary workers must not be paralysed by democratic formalism. By opposing the despicable behaviour of the Stalinists, their leftist rivals were able to obtain, in proportion to their denunciation, some ephemeral successes, but only so long as they contented themselves with that; their influence receded once they attempted to profit from it. Their tail-ending opportunism had wanted to create the impression of moving from victory to victory, but to be a Lenin it was not enough to shout “all power to the assemblies”, it is not enough to acknowledge a changing reality, one must in addition, in trying to control and direct it, be acknowledged by it. The final misadventures of decomposed Leninism were very well illustrated in the comical confusion of the only leftist group (Los Plataformas anti-capitalistas) that continued to keep afloat in the backwash of the movement in Vitoria.

     They had to support the dissolution of the representative Committees against the Stalinists to preserve their assembly image while at the same time hold onto the base of its mythical mass organisation (OCA) (3) which of all the representative committees in the congress of representatives would not relinquish taking power. Meanwhile when the beginning of generalised violence after 3^rd March had put an end to their margin of recuperating manoeuvre, these anti-capitalist had modestly attached themselves to the democratic version of the events and the most Christian pacifism: “There was not any confrontation in Vitoria between police and demonstrators. What actually happened was a brutal attack against the respect owed to a holy place and against the human person”. (Manifesto of the representative committee read by Naves 6^th March 1976).  

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2. 10^th May, 1936, CNT met in Zaragossa. Stressed collectivisation of industry, expropriation without indemnity of all landed property larger than 50 hectares, a restructuring of the country on the basis of a confedertion of autonomous communes. Largo Caballero described it as a 'transcendent event’! 884 delegates voted for a 'revolutionary alliance' with the UGT   - only 12 were opposed. (TN)

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Comrades,

   The revolution is not a matter of diverting the enemy but of destroying it. The proletariat do not require justifications because they do not have to convince anyone. They seek their own satisfaction and are not motivated to satisfy that of others. If the proletariat cannot assume its historical raison d’etre it cannot hope to win. Once more, the necessary and sufficient definition of the modern council is the realisation of its minimum tasks, which are neither more nor less than the practical and definitive liquidation of all the problems that class society is incapable of resolving. Anything else is the prattle of impotence or the diversions of manipulators. No juridical formalism can guarantee to the workers organised in councils the right to exercise total democracy. Only greatness will make them great while wretchedness will make them wretched. The practice of the assemblies makes everything possible but assures nothing. The only theory of the councils of ex-workers that it is necessary to develop is the theory of their war against all that does not belong to them and against everything inside the class that prevents them from being the unique power, beginning with what they have inherited from the past, thus limiting their appropriation. In this war everything is very simple but even the simplest thing becomes difficult. No one has the experience of the growing and practical problems and the time necessary to acquire it could suffice to lose everything. The proletariat arms itself by disarming the enemy and re-appropriating any backlash against it. But if it was merely a matter of a single spontaneous coup d’etat and if, in short, the enemy found itself, even before it had to fight, placed in conditions that rendered the task of combating the revolution a hopeless one, then it would be very easy to make history and revolution would be a kind of idyll, the limit of the spontaneous offensive of the workers is always the organised defence against the enemy which obliges them to organise in accordance with its means and capacities. The real way to wage the social war, i.e. freely adapting it to the specific needs by every means available, has for too long passed as a subject which doesn’t fit into this theory, and which only depends on its momentary spontaneous improvisation. For most of the time these problems just come up as something extra and as anonymous memories or accounts because the protagonists deceive themselves by mistaking reality as some ideal. We know that such illusions have reigned, to a large extent, amongst the anarchists, especially in its unionist form ideas purporting to resolve the problem of revolutionary re-appropriation and under the form of a militarised organisation external to the class - which intends to resolve it with a definitive putsch. The techniques of the social war include techniques obligatory in all wars but it is never reduced to the latter if the revolution, with the militarisation that it presupposes, does not reduce itself to a conventional war. As one militiaman said during the civil war: “We shall not win like this”. In conclusion Spain must remember that it is the classic country of the guerrilla and it will have to invent superior forms of guerrilla activity in accord with a modern revolution.

Comrades,

    What we have experienced has only been the mild beginning of something that will happen in the future and which will continue for some time. For the new revolutionary movement spontaneously springing up from the soil of a modernised Spanish society, it is above all a question of organising and coherently unifying the basis of the project of subverting class society. The critique that makes no concessions to the still-not-overcome deficiencies of the proletariat must accept its share in the present isolation of the workers. Linking its fortune to radical proletarian acts and to their future it must begin with the ideological illusions it has of itself, of its struggles, about those that speak in its name and of its predominantly defensive tactics, criticising without making any concessions, the present attempts at capitalist adaptation that will soon become widespread after the inevitable deception following the elections. At a time when all the traffickers (of dead ideas) ‘come out of hiding’, and rush to take a place in the political and cultural spectacle, this critique shall find its means of existence in the new clandestinity of real life where, without any official expression, new practices and gestures of rejection are traced out. In this way the ground is being prepared - far beyond any transitory illusions - upon which all those already feeling the need for truth and searching for the means to impose it are going to encounter each other. In the front ranks the language of critical autonomy will be found - without which the revolution cannot comprehend itself nor name its enemies without ideological mediation. “It is essential to finish with the anti-intellectualism and workerist tradition that has weighed down the Spanish revolutionary movement for so long. The rejection of theoretical activity, justified by the more or less concealed ideology of the absence of ideas - which today returns in the form of an unspecified unionism serving workerist intellectuals and intellectual workerists - is so much more criminal. What has to be done is to achieve the consciousness of what has to be done so that the weapons of criticism accompany the criticism of weapons.

    Even more immediately dangerous are the bureaucrats of the unions and the parties who have had to tolerate workers’ democracy in return for being tolerated by them without even building up their unionism. They know they will have to crush, under the penalty of being annihilated themselves, all autonomous forms. The counter attack against isolated revolutionaries has already commenced with calumnies, threats, accusations and isolated counter-revolutionary violence. Henceforth it is no longer a question of the bureaucrats abandoning radical workers to repression but of handing them over and reducing them to silence by whatever means available. Self-defence against all police and officers of law and order, whatever shade of colour they may profess is the order of the day. As the verdict of the barricades of May 1937 put it: “Up to now the revolution has not done anything more than transform Stalinism and its allies. Today it is a question of destroying them”.

Comrades,

   The weapons that serve as the defence of the workers in so far as they are wage labourers will be the last weapons in the defence of wage labour. The proletariat, separating from everything that is at one with the old world and passing to the offensive with its method of specific war, must manage its own autonomy: the fight for victory needs the weapons of victory.

20^th April 1977

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WHAT THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT “LOS INCONTROLADOS”

     After forty years of triumphant counter-revolution, the same fears find the same words. During the Civil War, the government coalition (composed of the bourgeoisie, republicans, socialists, Stalinists and CNTists) that destroyed the revolution to lose the war, used to call incontrolados all those proletarians who, fighting all internal and external enemies, would not obey anyone other than themselves right up to the end. And now when the revolution returns to be the order of the day, the same accusation is hurled by all the supporters of the old world against those whose excesses inconveniently jeopardise the peaceful reorganisation of their exploitation.

      Those who insult the proletariat like this show; rather, by the simple fact that they still have the opportunity and means to do so, how much moderation there still remains in the proletariat. The proletariat certainly has no reason to defend itself against such an accusation. It must recognise it as the enemy’s truth which is also its own, that is the truth of the social war in which the explosion of proletarian negativity is increasingly more uncontrollable and which will only end with the destruction of all external control and the abolition of “everything that exists independently of individuals” i.e. communism.

     As for us, additional incontrolados, we do not appear in front of the present movement saying: “Here’s the truth - on your knees” as do all the other authoritarian ideologists on the lookout for some reality to manipulate. We only show what the struggle is and why it must acquire a thoroughgoing consciousness of this struggle.  By doing this we do not belittle ourselves by concealing our project, which is no more than that of all the other incontrolados, who must possess it consciously in order to possess it in reality. The organisation of “the community of proletarian revolutionaries that places beneath its control all the conditions of its own existence” does not do so under the form of any kind of ‘workers control’ in which the most up-to-date state servants dream of interesting the workers, in the production of its own misery. It does so for the purposes of the insurrectionary realisation of communism, the abolition of commodities, of wage labour and of the state.

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FROM THE TIME WHEN REVOLUTIONARIES

      WERE CORRECT . . .

Workers for Proletarian Autonomy and Social Revolution  

REFLECTIONS ON AND LESSONS OF THE STRIKE IN THE SHOE INDUSTRY (22^nd AUGUST UNTIL 3^rd SEPTEMBER 1977) AND ON THE ASSEMBLY MOVEMENT IN THE PROVINCE OF ALICANTE

    The strike called by the assembly movement in the shoe industry, mainly in Alicante, was one of the most important struggles waged by the Spanish working class against capital after the strikes at Vitoria and at Roca in Gava.

   As negotiations for anew social contract between the bosses, the government and the unions proceeded, the shoe factory workers decided to take on all the defenders of bourgeois order, spoiling the best laid plans of the vote-peddlers of the region, the local bosses and their trade union stooges. As the expression has it, if the shoe fits wear it. The entire Spanish proletariat was depending on this strike, which was carried out only through the wishes of the workers meeting in permanent assemblies, without the tutelage of parties or unions. Economic solidarity came from everywhere.

A BRIEF HISTORY: HOW A SETBACK CAN BECOME A VICTORY WHEN THE WORKERS EXPECT NOTHING FROM THE PARTIES AND TAKE THEIR AFFAIRS INTO THEIR OWN HANDS

    The shoe-manufacturing industry and its service industries installed in the towns around the valley of Vinpolo was founded on the super-exploitation of its workers, many of them emigrants. Even today the exploitation of apprentice and female 1abour, cottage labour and other forms of lump-labour are frequent and regulate the level of employment whatever the state of the industry. But despite the great fortunes accumulated over long years of impunity and corrupt local bosses, a new proletariat has grown up, a high percentage of them energetic and combative youth who have neither been corrupted by misery nor apparent prosperity, who are difficult to delude and impossible to manage.

    After the big strike of February 1976 the workers knew exactly what they could expect from management, police and the parties. The result was one worker murdered and various wounded by the cops in Elda and Elche. A class, its consciousness awakened, learned in a brutal way that the gap between capital and labour was far too wide to hide the fact that a local strike, which was beginning to spread, could call the entire system of exploitation into question. Thousands of proletarians simultaneously discovered the intolerable nature of their social existence and the inevitability of a period of struggle.

    The then existing parties (the PCE and the tiny MCE -today in decline) in following the directions of their national chiefs to stay within a legal framework, found that their attempts to avoid the struggle and to negotiate until forced to act by the workers, put them into a position of total weakness, more interested in containing rather than pushing through the workers’ demands. The result was that the workers, disarmed and unorganised, took a fierce beating, after which the Comisiones Obreras (through a phantom ‘co-ordinating committee’ which no-one had elected) advised them to return to work. But in so doing, the parties and their trade-union equivalents lost face forever. The workers’ spontaneous will to fight was a thousand times greater than theirs and the consciousness which grew out of this struggle was neither political nor trade-unionist; it was a direct revolutionary consciousness. All that remained was to organise this spontaneity. The workers found their own solution to the problem of the organisation of the struggle; creating a movement of assemblies which was based on themselves and only on themselves. Hundreds of assemblies began to discuss and formulate all the demands which, over the years, they had been unable to make due to the fraud of the unions, and which had been left to rot until the time came to work out a set of demands for the negotiating of a collective wage agreement in September.

ALL POWER TO THE ASSEMBLIES

   The reaction to the political sell-out of the strike in February as well as the murder of Teofilo del Valle was tremendous. During this month the “United Workers Front” was born which, like all re-groupments led by independent trade unionists, would deny the real reason why it was created. In September it was to constitute itself as a “co-ordinating committee for trade union unity” along with the UGT, CC.OO and USO, thereby placing its opportunism on the other side. The UGT split from it in January upholding the boss’s proposal of state negotiation of the agreement with the result that the “co-ordinating committee” soon after dissolved. But the alliance between these professional independents of Elda, the CC.OO and the Christianity of the USO was to be maintained right up to the strike. It was partly due to this that these delegates, as also those of the CC.OO, came away less hated in Elda at the end of the strike than in other parts. These confused origins of the assembly movement gave it the image of being manipulated by the CC.OO - thus explaining the initial hostility of the local CNT group to the movement and to the strike - an image which dissipated when the movement expanded, making all the trade-marks, alliances and pretensions seem banal.

    In October 1976, the first assemblies took place in the factories of Elda, Petrel and Monovar and by January in all the remaining shoe-manufacturing towns. After these, factory representatives were elected and on 4^th May the first general assembly took place in Elda (3000 participants). The assembly movement was born here.

    The fact that the unions were absent from the struggles - the so-called “union vacuum” - helped the development of factory and regional assemblies, electing representatives, which were actively supported by thousands of companies. The assembly of representatives and the general assembly were the next step in the formation of the assembly movement and would make it a rough summer for all its enemies. What held the movement together without membership cards, rubber stamps, lawyers, bureaucrats, specialists in negotiation, professional leaders?  It was a pure and simple solidarity born in similar interests, similar aims and the same animosities. Even the regional magazine La Verdad (The Truth) repeated the same lies about the class struggle and could not but admit that “for the first time in recent decades a workers’ movement with a strong autonomous and independent character has grown up, able to overcome the dual circumstances of political transition and the trade union vacuum which exists all over the country. . .” the assembly movement is already historical because it has made history. It has conquered areas of freedom which very few could have imagined possible some months ago. Its force has been the number of workers who agree with the idea of a “pure workerism” without relying on political disguises or mortgaging trademarks. The most powerful bosses in the country are forced to recognise the assembly movement as the only valid spokesman to negotiate the shoe contract. The force of the street was able to do more than the glory (sic) of the banners…” (La Verdad, 25^th August 1977).

    And Cambio 16 (19^th –25^th September) was to dish up this local recipe to those in power: “Why has an assembly movement of this kind grown up?” they asked. “The weakness of the trade unions has been determinant in this process as well as a strong feeling of unity amongst the workers.”

THE TRADE UNION REACTION ACCOMODATES OR OPPOSES THE UNITY OF THE ASSEMBLIES ACCORDING TO THE POWER WHICH IT BELIEVES IT POSSESSES

    To the extent the assembly movement consolidated its position the unions began to organise against it. This soon became clear. In the eyes of unions, workers’ struggles are limited to being the tailend of a labour dispatch, the workers themselves only serving as consultants or fund-raisers. With such a view of things they only managed to recruit the scum of the factory. It was plain to see that they were full of those workers who were afraid, passive, ignorant, blacklegs and verticalists, white collar workers and bureaucrats.

    The assembly movement, by June, had definitely consolidated its position. By the end of July it was recognised by all the trade union federations which, as groups, had infiltrated it – with the exception of the UGT. After the elections which gave some sort of victory to the PSOE, the membership of the UGT had increased with the support and blessing of the bosses, and according to its own figures, could count on 10,000 members in its hide and shoe industries organisation , thus making it the largest and the most important when negotiations started. The CC. OO refused to accept the role of the UGT as sole negotiator but since it couldn’t break or overtake the assembly movement decided that all it could do was to go along with it and try to take it over from within. Thus the union federation which is historically least known for its love of assemblies became their full-blooded protagonists. The FICE (the bosses’ organisation within the shoe industry), refusing to recognise the negotiating committee of the assembly movement, supported the UGT. The workers rejected the proposals made by the UGT. The assembly movement, as well as the general assembly of 16^th of August, unanimously decided to go on strike, starting legally on the 24^th in Elda and on the 22^nd in Elche. The UGT condemned the movement and was in turn condemned. The base refused to obey the officials and it became so discredited that it had to shut up completely during the strike, only breaking silence to protest about its own marginalisation and in theircommuniqués and press to condemn the general assemblies and the pickets. In the end it proposed to the other union federations that it should negotiate alone. In recent struggles in the Basque country and Asturias the UGT has attempted a similar use of yellow unions and management tactics. It had never been so shameful to belong to a trade union as to belong to the UGT at this time. On 22^nd August, the day that the strike started in Elche after an assembly of 15,000 people, the management were begrudgingly forced to accept the assembly movement, with the UGT as onlookers. Along with the Elda delegates they worked out a contract in seven points - the so-called Madrid Compromise - in an attempt to isolate the Elche workers. But in Elche the police attacked the workers meeting in an assembly and a battle ensued in which fifteen workers were injured, one of them seriously, as well as three policemen. On the 24^th, the Elda assembly (12,000) and the Amansa assembly (more than 3000) overwhelmingly proclaimed their support for the strike. After them came Villena, Sax, Petrel, Manovar and Aspe. Pickets were sent to all the factories to ensure that the agreements of the assemblies were adhered to. From the first day, the workers - more than 70,000 - maintained a permanent assembly, morning and evening, meeting in football or sports arenas and this was decisive in keeping people informed, in maintaining direct discussion, morale and unity: It ridicu1ed a whole series of anti-proletarian activities whose wretched impotency was limited to the outer walls of the assemblies.