Madrid, as the politic centre of the Republic, was the strategic objective of the risen up and to its seizure they subordinated their operative plans from the very beginning of the war. In early November 1936, after having culminated the victorious advance of their troops in Extremadura, the basin of the river Tajo and Guipúzcoa, the fascist high command was confident regarding the immediate seizure of the capital. With that aim they concentrated their best and stronger troops: the Legion and the Moroccan colonial troops (the Tercio), the forces of general Mola and the biggest part of their artillery and air forces, mainly integrated at that moment by German, Italian and Portuguese flights.
In front of such powerful forces, neither the Government nor the career officers nor any party but the communists had any trust in the resistance of Madrid. However, Madrid resisted thanks to the fact that the Communist Party, with the help of the 5th Regiment, mobilized and organized all the people in its defence. The slogan No pasarán (They shall not pass) launched by the Party, became the banner of struggle of the people's movement.
General Rojo, by then Lieutenant-Colonel and chief of the Madrid Defence Head Quarter (quickly formed on November 6th, on the eve of the first attack), would say some years later: Madrid wanted to fight: it lacked weapons, organization, fortresses, bunkers, chiefs, technique; on the contrary, it counted with an abundant and excited moral, with little chiefs and with a citizen mass ready to fulfil its historic task at the cost of any sacrifice necessary [...] The change was tremendous: it seemed as if when the Government fled to Valencia taking with it the layer of pessimism and lack of confidence that covered everything, this had brought to light a truth till then asleep in the popular deep down, a spirit of struggle till then ignored, and this was the biggest force that we had in our hands because it represented the collective will of defence supported by a moral force that did not stop in front of sacrifice (133).
In the defence of Madrid also participated, apart from other anarchist and socialist forces, militia columns arrived from Catalonia, as the one commanded by the anarchist leader Durruti and the one organized by the PSUC, as well as the first units of the International Brigades.
In order to yield the resistance of its defenders, the fascist army, advised by German military experts, subjected the city to intense indiscriminate bombings which provoked innumerable victims among the population.
Although the combats for Madrid continued, the failure of this first attempt meant for the reactionary forces their first big military defeat after the one that the people's masses had inflicted them in the revolutionary journeys of July and it meant a great moral and politic victory for the Republic. For that reason, the defence of Madrid became the symbol of the people's resistance against fascism, even beyond our borders. Besides, if some lesson could be learnt from this heroic deed it was the great importance, as a decisive and determining factor, of the revolutionary and active support of the ample people's masses and their necessary contribution to the tasks of the war.
This great victory had also its politic consequences. On the one hand, it proved the workers and all the parties that it was possible to resist and defeat the fascist army and the international forces that supported it, it strengthened the combative unity of the people's forces and increased the prestige and influence of the Party among the masses; but, on the other hand, it unleashed the antagonism and hostility of the leaders of the democratico-bourgeois parties, of the socialdemocrats and of the FAI against the communists, fearing their growing influence and that they could impose their hegemony.
From February 1937 on, in view of the successive failures to seize Madrid, the fascist high command changed its tactics: it passed from frontal attacks to carrying out encircling offensive operations around river Jarama (at the beginning of that month) and around Guadalajara (in the second week of March).
Both were disrupted by the republican counteroffensives, supported by an important deployment of tanks and aircraft which was possible thanks to the arrival of Soviet equipment and military techniques. The most decisive counteroffensive was the one that gave name to the battle of Guadalajara where, for the first time, the republicans defeated in an open battlefield a big enemy force much more superior in number of men and weapons as the one of the Expeditionary Corps sent to Spain by Mussolini. For that reason this military, politic and moral republican victory, to which contributed two international brigades in which several hundreds of Italian antifascists were posted, had so much international resonance and repercussion.
But these counteroffensives and victories in which the progresses made by the people's forces in the dominion of the military art and technique were made evident, also revealed, at the same time, their weaknesses. Both in the battle of Jarama and in the one of Guadalajara, in spite of the heroism wasted, the republican army could not exploit in depth its offensive manoeuvres due to their deficient leadership, to the underestimation of the enemy forces, to the lack of experience, to the absence of reinforcements and to the tremendous losses suffered. But, above all, due to the numerical superiority of the enemy. For these reasons the republican forces, after their advance, were forced to withdraw later on to their initial positions and to adopt the defence of positions, since they were not able to contain the fascist counterattacks. This will be a constant during the whole development of the war.
After both battles that jointly form part of the campaign for the defence of Madrid, the fascists abandoned momentarily the plan of seizing directly the capital and orientated their main forces towards the conquest of the republican North strip, culminating it on 20th October 1937.
The loss of the North was a harsh politic, military, economic and moral blow for the Republic that made reaction and imperialism believe in an immediate victory. They will be soon surprised. By the end of the year the republican army started an audacious offensive in the Aragón front with the aim of preventing a possible enemy attack against Madrid and to seize Teruel. On 8th January 1938 the people's forces, after having besieged the city of Teruel, achieved the surrender of the troops that defended it.
From a military point of view, the operation was a success. If Madrid, in the context of the Spanish war, meant the defence of the Republic -general V. Rojo affirmed-, Teruel constitutes the first great offensive deed of its army where it becomes able to carry out a complete military manoeuvre, being enough seven days of attack to surrender a pocket of one thousand square kilometres, sixteen days to defeat in the heart of the city a resistance maintained fiercely and tenaciously by its defenders. And he adds: In Teruel it was not only proved that the war experience had been worthy but the healthy moral that the human factor had acquired in the course of the war became also evident (134).
In fact, those progresses were evident. From the heroic defence of Madrid to the battles of Jarama and Guadalajara, when the regular army began to be organized and to the operations of Brunete and Belchite, till culminating in the big offensive of Teruel, the people's armed forces maintained a line of advance and improvement in all fields. But as it will not take long to be proved by the later withdrawal from Teruel and later on by the rupture of the front of Aragón by the fascist divisions -during the defensive battle of Levante- and by the defeat of the republican offensive attempt in river Ebro and by the quick fascist advance over Catalonia, those progresses became annulled by the overwhelming military superiority of the enemy.
In this way, after the division of the republican territory in two as a consequence of the arrival of the fascist army to the coasts of Levante, the capitulationist tendencies started to strengthen within the People's Front and the Government. From democratico-bourgeois leaders as Azaña to prominent socialdemocrat leaders and military commanders without forgetting the members of the FAI, all of them exerted pressure to end with the war through a compromise with the so-called government of Burgos and got ready to form an opposition bloc against the communists, their main obstacle to carry out their capitulationist plans and manoeuvres.
Those manoeuvres, to which the English and French diplomacy were not alien, were unmasked and combated by the Party appealing and resorting to the masses. As José Díaz -who was each time more separated from the leadership tasks due to his illness- pointed out, such a compromise would be a surrender [...] it would mean the loss of the war (135). There cannot be peace -he added- till all the enemies and all who try to establish in Spain a fascist regime are crushed (136).
In Barcelona -seat of the government at that moment- the PCE and the PSUC, counting with the support of different non-communist politic and syndical sectors, convoked a big mass demonstration in support of the policy of resistance in order to press the government; to which the workers massively attended without any distinction of trends. At the same time they made a call to the army, in which most of its officers and combatants pronounced in a plebiscite in favour of continuing the struggle (137).
In view of this clear people's will and of the communist pressure, the capitulationists temporarily withdrew although they continued with their labour of sabotage.
However, with the unstoppable fascist advance over Catalonia and the hardening of the English and French positions against the Republic after the Munich pact, demoralization started to exert its influence on those who, like Negrín, had always supported, although with hesitations, the policy of resistance advocated by the communists. Negrín, instead of fighting the capitulationists and taking energetic measures against them, and specially against the high rank military officers, maintained a conciliatory attitude, paid attention to the English and French mediating proposals and yielded each time more and more to their pressures. This explains the fact that he presented to Parliament a programme like the one of the Three points of Figueras to end the war through a peace without reprisals (138), and that it received the support of Azaña and of those of his sort. But what was more threatening it was that such demoralization and lack of perspectives were also felt in the Leadership of the Party, to the point of giving its support to such a programme without doubts of any kind (139). A programme which, no matter how many slogans of resistance it launched, was nothing but a cover for capitulation.
In view of that capitulationist attitude and of clear submission of the Leadership of the Party to Negrín's Government, it is easy to understand that Casado and his fellow-traitors found a field favourable for the intensification of their manoeuvres aimed at ending the war in the shortest time possible. In order to achieve that, they needed to silence the communists, task on which they centred all their efforts in the middle of the offensive of the fascist troops against Catalonia, starting by forgetting the propaganda and the meetings of the Party under the pretext of the military censorship and by arresting in some provinces the communists who called upon the people to continue the struggle. At the same time, the supporters of Casado, who occupied the key posts in the republican army, sabotaged the military operations addressed at facing the enemy offensive.
However, on this occasion, the Leadership of the Party, instead of reacting, mobilizing the militants and denouncing the coup which was being arranged by the rest of the members of the People's Front, submitted almost completely to the Government. The mistake of the leadership of the Party -as it is admitted in a resolution of the PB posterior to the defeat- laid in the misunderstanding of the fact that even if it was just to help Negrín to overcome his hesitations, it should have made its action more independent, orientating itself decidedly towards the masses. This attitude was not modified, as the very resolution points out, not even in such serious moments as the ones which preceded the coup of Casado, when the factors of treason matured and were almost public knowledge; when even the majority of the ministers openly pronounced themselves in favour of ending the war and Negrín, involved in an atmosphere of treason and falseness, did not take any measure against the traitors and capitulationists. In spite of all, the leadership of the Party still hopes everything from the politic and organizational measures to oppose the imminence of the treason (140). On the contrary, all its attention -as Togliatti confirms in his reports to the CI trying to hide his own responsibility- was centred mainly on the absolutely necessary struggle for the conquest of the centres of leadership, above all in the army, more than on the labour of strengthening and systematically organizing the links of the Party with the masses (141).
In this way, since it did not act with decision and independence from the Government due to the fear of breaking the People's Front (142), when the capitulationists already had broken it, the Party isolated itself from the masses and left the bourgeoisie and its socialdemocrats and FAI allies an open field to enter into action.
On 3rd March 1939 the republican Fleet, centred in Cartagena, rebelled against the Government and tried to desert, being this impeded by the communist officers and sailors. The capitulationist elements of the units of the navy base took advantage of this situation to rise up and take control of the city. Afterwards, after raising the fascist flag and asking the enemy to send them reinforcements, ordered the fleet to leave the base and sail into the sea, what could not be avoided since all the militants of the Party in the fleet units were arrested by the supporters of desertion.
The Cartagena insurrection was crushed by the initiative of the leadership of the Party -only time in which it acted energetically and in an independent way- using a brigade formed by communists and mobilizing all the cadres and militants of Murcia and the nearer villages.
Both the rebellion of the Fleet and the pro-fascist uprising of Cartagena were part of Casado's plan which, in agreement with the Head Quarter of the enemy army, consisted on opening to the fascists the gates of Cartagena and Madrid at the same time (143). But the crushing of the insurrection changed partially the course of the events.
On the night of March 5th, Casado rebelled in Madrid against the Government, constituting a Junta or Defence Council headed by general Miaja, by himself and Julián Besteiro, a prominent socialdemocrat leader. In it there were represented all the parties which integrated the People's Front, except the communists.
The supporters of the coup immediately arrested in Madrid several communist military who occupied prominent posts in the army to hold them as hostages; at the same time the representatives of the Party were everywhere separated from the posts that they occupied in the State machine and expelled from the unitarian organs of the People's Front; the seats of the Party were stormed and hundreds of cadres were arrested to be later on handed out to the fascists.
In order to confound the masses and isolate the Party from them, the Junta covered up the military coup with the spreading of the news that the communists had risen up in Cartagena and that they pretended to carry out a coup d'état, at the same time that they launched on the radio constant proclaims in which they affirmed that they would not leave arms before having guaranteed a peace without crimes (144). And they said this while they were completing the surrender of the people to the fascist butchers and silencing with the military censorship the passing by the fascist Government of Burgos, on 13th February 1939, of the Law of political responsibilities with which it was established the prosecution of all those who from October 1934 had participated in the republican politic life or who from February 1936 had opposed to the National Movement through specific actions or serious passivity (145).
The Party was surprised by the coup of Casado and, apart from Madrid (where it had taken some measures to neutralize quickly a possible coup but which ,when the time came, they were not put into practice) it did not react to crush the Junta although -as José Díaz affirms- it counted with the necessary forces (146) nor did it mobilize the masses. The leadership of the Party, seeing that the Government did not fulfil its functions and was leaving the country, considered, in accordance with the governmental policy that it had been following, that there was nothing else to do and left its post in the moment in which it was more necessary, leaving Spain the majority of its members a few hours after the fleeing of Negrín. For that reason, it is not strange that some prominent leaders who left the country later on -as Checa, Jesús Hernández and others, like the advisor Togliatti- tried to make peace with the supporters of Casado and ordered the military forces of the Party, that were about to defeat them, to accept the truce asked by the Junta and to cease fire; what they did in fact (147). In this way Casado and those of his sort took advantage of the ceasefire to gain time, to receive reinforcements from the front commanded by socialdemocrat and anarchist officers and to attack and neutralize later on by surprise the communist unities that had confronted them, arresting and shooting some of their commanders while others were reserved to be handed out to Franco as a present.
A few days later, on March 28th, the fascist troops entered Madrid without shooting a single bullet; at the same time, the other fronts left arms thinking that the Junta had achieved some kind of compromise. The honourable peace and without crimes of Casado, Miaja, Besteiro, Wenceslao Carrillo and Cipriano Mera became in this way the biggest slaughter suffered by the people at the hands of reaction in the history of Spain.
Bearing in mind what we have exposed, it is evident that from the beginning of the war the Party made a series of mistakes both at the politic and military levels that led it to submit each time more to the republican Government; and those mistakes finally became central. In this way, what in the beginning was a just line became its contrary, provoking the debacle of the Party and impeding any organized armed struggle against fascism.
If so many mistakes had not been accumulated, a defeat -which was very probable from the beginning of the war due to the unfavourable correlation of forces and to the international situation, that already at that moment impeded the people to win the war- would not have impeded the continuation of the struggle.
One of those mistakes against which we have advised, that is undoubtedly the most serious one, since it impeded the Party to prepare itself to maintain the resistance under the new conditions, consisted -as it is pointed out in the Programme approved by the III Congress of the PCE(r)- on tending to abide to the republican Government instead of supporting unity from an independent politic and military position. This led it to neglect the ideological struggle within the People's Front and within the Party and not to pay attention to the politic labour among the peasantry. This policy of subordination and of concessions -it continues- although it pointed towards the consolidation of a bourgeois parliamentarian democracy instead of a republic of new type, in practice could only contribute under those circumstances to the victory of fascism (148).
Nothing else happened in the end. Due to that tendency towards subordination, the Party ended losing its politic independence, allowed the republican bourgeoisie to recover its hegemony in the democratic revolution and to stop its development and left in its hands the leadership of the struggle against reaction in front of which it tended to surrender due to its class position. For that same reason, that subordination also led the Party to isolate itself progressively from the masses -specially from the poor peasantry- and to underestimate the role that the latter could play in the development of the democratic revolution and in the struggle against fascism and imperialism.
Likewise, that lack of independence was also reflected in other collateral problems as the one of the colonial question and, more specifically, regarding Morocco. Although the Party defended in its programme the right of the Moroccan people to their self-determination and independence, from the beginning of the war the leadership forgot it completely and became, regarding this issue, an accomplice of the Government, to the point of adopting with regard to the colonial question the typical positions of socialdemocracy, as the one of pretending to spread democracy to the colonies (149).
However, the fact that in the course of the war a policy of subordination to the republican Government imposed each time more in the Party and first of all in its leadership, does not mean that all its cadres and militants shared it. As can be deduced from the conceptions that orientated its action and from its many times contradictory application, in the bosom of the Party was taking place an open struggle between two lines regarding all the problems of the revolution: a revolutionary line, of resistance and another reformist, of capitulation. Would it have been otherwise and the big majority of the Party would not have followed a revolutionary line, of resistance, there is no doubt that the opportunist tendencies that were flourishing in it would have prevailed before.
If this line of subordination and claudication finally imposed in its leadership, it was due to the fact that the supporters of the line of resistance were not capable nor could avoid it. To this incapability was not alien the influence gained in the Party by the leftist positions as a reaction against this opportunist tendency. Hence, in view of the sharpening of the capitulationist manoeuvres of the rest of the members of the People's Front and of their anticommunist positions, to which that line of concessions and subordination followed by the Leadership were giving free reins, many militants did not see any alternative but the seizure of power by the Party. The tendency against which I have had to pronounce myself many times -writes Togliatti in his report to the leadership of the CI dated on 21st-22nd April 1938- has been the one of believing that the solution to the problems will be possible if the Party takes in its hands all the organs of power and as soon as it does so. Some hesitation, quickly overcome, even in Pepe (José Díaz), in the form of tending towards a pure worker government (150).
Truly, considering the possibility that the Party seized power, no matter if it would be done under the formula of a worker government, was not a just position since there were no conditions for it and even less to be able to maintain it. However, neither was it just to continue submitting to the democratic bourgeoisie, as Togliatti proposed, basing himself on a false conception of the People's Front, that is to say, on unity without struggle. At that moment, it is true that it was necessary to spread the front of struggle against fascism and not to limit it or, as Mao said by that same time, it was necessary to put into practice a policy of open doors and not of closed ones. But, without ever renouncing to the politic independence of the Party nor to the ideological struggle since, if this happened, as experience will prove, not only will the People's Front be weakened but the activity of the capitulationists will be made easier. And this is, precisely, although in a mistaken way, what the supporters of the idea that the Party should seize power tried to prevent.
In this sense, it is doubly relevant that the Secretary General of the Party, José Díaz, showed himself hesitant, as Togliatti says, and that he shared in some way the position of the latter ones; this was a sign that he was seeing the blind alley to which the policy of subordination and concessions led without, on the other hand, having a clear idea of what path they should follow. Moreover, if it led to oppose to the advices of the leaders of the CI, whose politic and moral authority had a great weight and to break with this dependence when coming to elaborate and apply the politic line. This dependence -together with the fact that the position in favour of the seizure of power by the Party was not a just one- explains to a great extent that incapability of the PCE to adopt a line of its own and José Díaz' quick recovering from his hesitations.
It was neither casual that it was in Madrid where that leftist position was stronger, as it can be learnt from the references that Togliatti makes in his reports about the existence of much sectarianism, more specifically, in the rank-and-file organizations (151), since it was precisely in Madrid where the capitulationist and anticommunist activity could be better perceived. Neither was it casual that Mundo Obrero (Worker World, voice of the Party) became the spokesman of this tendency that was not sectarian at all, in which, together with mistaken ideas and banners like the one that the Party should seize power, other just ones were defended. Such as the one which called upon the people to base on their own forces and not to wait for the help of the democratic capitalist countries in which the majority of the leaders of the Party and the CI trusted, as it is proved by the fact that they tried to propitiate it making them one concession after another. Due to this we can affirm that, in spite of its mistakes, this tendency was the one which truly represented the line of resistance of the Party. Since those leftist mistakes could always be corrected. But, on the contrary, the rightist positions were hardly rectifiable -as experience will prove- since what prevailed in them was not in any way a spirit of struggle but of claudication and of surrender to fascism. And this radical difference between the line of resistance and the one of claudication became clearly visible in front of the coup of Casado: while most of the leaders of the Party and other cadres left the struggle or simply, as Carrillo and others after the fall of Catalonia, neglected their responsibilities staying in France, many cadres and local militants -headed by several members of the CC and of the Madrid local leadership- faced the supporters of Casado with the arms in their hands. Some of them even withdrew later on to the mountains to start the guerrilla warfare and continue the struggle.
Stalin himself insisted on its convenience and advised to create in the rearguard of the fascist armies groups of guerrilla fighters formed by peasants (153). Following these advices, this necessity was even posed by José Díaz in the Plenum of the CC in March 1937 (154).
There were favourable conditions to carry it out. On the one hand, in the fascist zone there was a numerous poor peasantry and a proletarian population each time more important, above all after the collapse of the northern front, which were submitted to a regime of terror and oppression. On the other hand, many antifascists had looked for shelter in the mountains escaping from repression and in some places they started to organize guerrilla detachments that carried out sabotages and punitive actions against falangists and other elements of the repressive forces. Some of these guerrilla groups, formed by combatants of the people's army who had moved to the mountains with their arms and equipment after the collapse of the Asturian front, had the fascists on the rack since they were not able to end completely with them thanks to the support of the population. This allowed many of these guerrilla groups to keep active till the middle of the 1940s.
The Party should have promoted the guerrilla warfare in view of the unfavourable course of the war, basing itself on an objective appreciation of the conditions under which it developed and of the confronted forces and having into account, as Mao pointed out, both the positive and the negative aspects for both sides, as well as their reciprocal actions (155). Moreover after the coup of Casado and the defeat.
Above all, the military superiority of the reactionary forces and the weakness of the people's forces could be modified, as Mao affirms, if a correct military and politic tactics during the war, without making mistakes of principle had been applied, and making all possible efforts. Only in this way -he adds- all the factors favourable for us and unfavourable for the enemy will be strengthened as the war becomes protracted, they will modify more and more the initial correlation of forces and will transform the superiority of the enemy over us into superiority of us over him (156).
That correct military tactics under the conditions of Spain at that moment was the guerrilla warfare within a protracted people's war strategy. The guerrilla warfare was what better corresponded to the popular character of the revolution and it counted with a great tradition in our country where during the Independence War against the Napoleonic occupation it played for the first time in world contemporary history a strategic role. And it could have played that same role in the struggle against fascism. The guerrilla action behind the enemy lines not only would have strengthened considerably the military powerfulness of the republican army and the possibilities of resistance, but, in front of the possible capitulation of some sectors of the People's Front or of a defeat, it would have established the foundations to go on with the struggle and would have allowed to win the mountains for thousands of communist cadres and militants and members of other antifascist organizations who, since they stayed in the cities, were captured and killed.
But the adoption of that strategy required from the Party, at the same time, to make a critical balance of the politic and military experience, of the mistakes and the failures, taking specially into account the disastrous consequences to which the policy of unity without struggle with the democratic bourgeoisie and with other anarchist or socialdemocrat worker organizations had led it; and, above all, to take into account the betrayal against the people that these organizations had just perpetrated unleashing the coup of Casado and surrendering to fascism.
On the other hand, in order to put into practice the guerrilla war, it was necessary to withdraw to secure and well-protected bases in the mountain zones which counted with appropriate conditions to accumulate, disperse or concentrate forces to attack or to defend themselves from the enemy and to spread the support bases and the guerrilla zones.
Throughout all this initial period the Party should do a clear approach about the role of the armed struggle in the development of the revolution, highlighting that war was the main form of struggle and that the guerrilla army became the main form of organization. The gravity centre of the action of the Party and of the armed forces under its command had, consequently, to be moved from the cities to the countryside and to the mountains in order to be able to carry out from there the siege of the cities before passing to their seizure. This does not mean that no more attention should be paid to the clandestine organization of the Party in the urban areas nor to other forms of struggle and organization of the workers, nor that it would not be necessary to pay attention to the development of the urban guerrilla warfare. But those forms or methods of struggle and organization, under those conditions, could not play but a secondary role.
At the same time, in view of the foreseeable situation of inter-imperialist confrontation that was going to take place in the international field, the people's forces should not dismiss the accumulated experiences about the attitude shown by the democratic powers towards fascism in general and towards Spanish reaction in particular. Anyway, independently of the possibility of using for its advantage the contradictions among the imperialists, the Party should lean on its own forces and not depend on the international support in order to secure the victory.
In the final stage of the people's war or even before, the small guerrilla units will be able to become gradually strong columns and regular units, with the objective of turning the guerrilla war into a war of movements, forcing the enemy to leave the defence of positions, in which the guerrilla always finds more obstacles to defeat a well-equipped enemy and to resort mainly to manoeuvres.
As Mao observes, that transformation does not have to entail the abandonment of the guerrilla activity, but the gradual formation, in the course of the ample development of the guerrilla war, of a main force able to carry out the war of movements; a force around which there will have to exist, as before, many guerrilla units to carry out ample guerrilla operations which, as he said, constituted powerful wings of the main force and served as an inexhaustible reserve for its continuous growth (157).
The changing of the guerrilla war into a war of movements would allow to strike the enemy harshly and to ultimate the conditions to pass to the offensive of the regular and guerrilla forces, combining it with the insurrection in the cities, with the objective of dispersing the enemy army and annihilating it everywhere. That moment could only take place in the final stage of World War II or immediately after its end, when the imperialist forces were not in conditions of coming to help reaction or, at least, they could not do it with the rapidness and the means that such a situation required.
In this way, since the PCE did not make a strategic reconsideration of the politic and military line followed during the war and it did not correct the politic, military and ideological mistakes to which we have referred above, the Party was not only impeded to confront the coup of Casado and to continue the armed resistance against fascism but it also unabled itself to lead the masses later on to the seizure of power. But more serious was the fact that the consequences of those mistakes were deeply felt in the Party later on, to the point of favouring the sabotage task of the carrillists and its posterior liquidation at their hands.
As we have already seen, the People's Front tactics, contrary to the tactics of worker and peasant government, adapted perfectly both to situations of ebb of the revolution and to situations of transition towards stages of revolutionary raise. Namely, through this tactics it was possible to accumulate forces and experiences in order to prepare the conditions for the seizure of power by the proletariat when there came a favourable change in the correlation of forces both at each country level and at the international one.
However, as a consequence of the tactical shifts (towards left and right or viceversa) of the previous period, it still persisted in the CI the confusion about different problems which impeded to apply the new tactics in a consequent way. In some cases, it found an obstacle in the leftist positions and in others in the rightist or reformist ones, being the latter each time more influent from the moment in which the ebb of the world revolution and the search for new formulas started. In this way, as the insurrectional tactics or that of the worker and peasant government, proper of a situation of raise, crashed with reality due to the lack of something new, it began to take place progressively the coming back to the old socialdemocrat tactics of participation in Parliament that was no longer just from some time before; this was accompanied by a neglect or a giving up of the underground and of the system of organization in cells and by a progressive influence of the reformist conceptions. In this way, taking advantage of the confusion about the formulas of the transition to socialism, the socialdemocrat conception about the democratico-bourgeois revolution and other opportunist tendencies against which Dimitrov alerted in the VII Congress of the CI entered it again.
It is not strange then that when the moment came to apply the People's Front tactics, within the PCE opened its way the tendency towards the neglect of the alliance with the peasantry and towards the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie; towards the giving up of the ideological struggle and towards the conciliation with socialdemocracy, what pointed out to the consolidation of a democratico-bourgeois process in the Spanish revolution. For that reason, such a misguided and ridiculous affirmation as the one made by Stalin in the sense that it was very possible that the parliamentarian via turned to be a procedure of revolutionary development more efficient in Spain than what had proved in Russia (158) could only encourage the reformist tendency, although this was not his intention and this statement had been made in a complex situation of fierce struggle against the German-Italian imperialism. It is enough to separate this affirmation from its context to take us by the hand of the revisionists to translate it into their well-known thesis of the peaceful, parliamentarian transition to socialism. To this aim were addressed the advices given to the Spanish communist leaders by Togliatti, main delegate of the CI in Spain from 1937 to the end of the war, as it is confirmed besides, by his posterior behaviour in Italy at the end of World War II at the head of the CP of that country.
It is not strange that the PCE conceived the unity without struggle in its relations with socialdemocracy and the democratic bourgeoisie and that it neglected the ideological struggle within the People's Front and within the Party since the leadership of the CI had advised the national sections to renounce to criticise the socialdemocrat leaders with the mere objective of putting into practice the united front tactics and since Stalin himself -as Mao pointed out- missed the connection existing between the struggle and the unity of contraries (159).
Something similar happened in the case of the military mistakes, although the question was more complex, given its relation with the backwardness of the military theory of the proletariat. Both the formation of a regular army (integrated by career officers and militia fighters, politic officers, etc.) and the strategy of conventional war were applied, to a great extent, under the advises of the Soviet military advisors who brought with them the experiences of the revolutionary civil war in Russia. Namely, the same that they did in China till Mao imposed his theses on New Democracy and the strategy of protracted people's war. The fact is that the defensive strategy, which was unavoidable at the beginning of a people's war, was forbidden by the Soviet military strategists since they considered it a synonym of defeat.
With such assumptions it is easy to understand that they were incapable of appreciating the strategic role of the guerrilla war. Something different is the reason why guerrilla warfare was not put into practice, at least as an auxiliary element of the conventional war. But in this case we had to look for its explanation more in politic reasons than in military ones, given the rejection shown to it by the republican and socialdemocrat leaders. Apart from, of course, the pressures exerted in the same direction by the imperialist governments; these pressures also explain other concessions like the withdrawal of the International Brigades or that of not dealing with questions such as the one of Morocco.
So, if we add to all these and other misguided advises the lack of independence of the PCE to develop and apply its politic line from the very beginning of the war, there is no doubt that the leadership of the CI had a great influence on the mistakes committed. However, since those mistakes were accepted and put into practice by the Spanish communists, they are the ones to be blamed for the main and latter responsibility.
Something quite different is the fact that, in the course of the war, they came to the point that the Party could not take any decision without its previous supervision and approval by the delegates of the leadership of the CI. Was not that the most evident proof that the centralism of the CI was hindering the development of the national sections and taking them many times through a wrong path? Where did the true fundamental problem reside?
Nowadays, in the light of historic experience, we can appreciate that from the moment in which the revolution in Europe did not take place, as the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular expected, the CI started to have no sense and that, as it had happened with its predecessors in situations of ebb of the revolution, that pretension of maintaining a leading centre of the world revolution would end by obstacling its development. On the other hand, the apparition of other fronts of struggle, as the national liberation movement of the colonies and semicolonies, made each time more difficult, not to say impossible, the organizational framing and the ideological uniformity of the world revolutionary movement. Under those conditions, taking into account the essential politic interests of the working-class movement as a whole, it would have been more advisable to dismantle it.
The experience of the previous international organizations of the proletariat also advised in that direction.
For instance, the League of the Communists was dismantled in 1852 at the requirement of Marx after the defeat of the 1848 revolution and in the middle of the ebb of the revolutionary wave in Europe, since it had become, according to Engels, a breeding ground of scandals and despicable acts (160). And the same happened in 1876, at the requirement of Marx and Engels, with the International Workers Association (IWA), also called I International, after having fulfilled completely its task of uniting the efforts of the working class of different European and American countries in the struggle for its emancipation. In this case also in a similar context to that of the dissolution of the League of the Communists, after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and using similar arguments: to avoid that opportunist groups as the bakuninists would grow within it and that the world reaction could unleash its hatred against its members. But, we may ask, was this only due to those reasons?
To this question answers F. Mehring, forestalling the ones who put forward the idea that, among the causes that advised the dissolution of the IWA, Marx had not taken into account the contradictions raised between the General Council, its maximum instance, and the national parties. The hypothesis has been adventured -Mehring writes- that Marx would have continued observing during much time this same withdrawal (Note of the writers: that is to say, that he would have refrained himself even much longer from raising the question of the dissolution) if the fall of the Commune of Paris on the one hand, and on the other the campaign of agitation of Bakunin had not compelled him to adopt a political position. It is possible and even believable that it was in this way [...] But this position does not take into account the fact that the problem posed to him could not be solved within the International, given the form in which it was organized, and that as the International concentrated and strengthened against its external enemies, it would internally dismantle. The very fact that the leading head of the General Council accused the worker Party which had most developed following its guidelines [...] of being a police troop showed clearly that the historic time of the International had come (161).
In fact, that very problem had been another of the reasons which led to the dissolution of the League of the Communists; it had been pointed out indirectly by Marx when he coined two concepts related to it that can help us to understand the contradiction appeared within the Communist International itself: the party, in the ephemeral sense as a specific organization, and the party [...] in its ample, historic sense (162). This idea will be later on retaken by Engels in 1882 to refer to the dissolution of the I International: the opposition between the International as a social or historic reality which continues existing by the very need of links among the revolutionary workers of all countries in spite of having been officially dissolved and the official International as a specific organization in which both identity and contradiction appear (163).
It may be argued against this position that the II International, which was not dismantled, is the exception that proofs the rule. But, even in this case, it is also confirmed showing the other side of the coin, since we see how it ended: in the hands of the opportunists, at the service of the German imperialist bourgeoisie before going bankrupt and breaking into a thousand pieces with the outbreak of World War I.
With regard to the CI, it is evident that its leaders were conscious of the problem, as it can be learnt from the Resolution of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the International that made public the reasons for its dissolution in May 1943. The whole course of the events during the last quarter of a century, as well as the experience accumulated by the Communist International -as it is stated in the aforementioned Resolution- proved convincingly that the form of organization to group the workers chosen by the first congress of the CI was a form that corresponded to the needs of the initial period of the renaissance of the working-class movement, and that this form was becoming out of date as this movement and the complexity of its tasks in the different countries developed, becoming even an obstacle for the later strengthening of the national worker parties (164).
If that was happening and much before the war it was each time more evident that as the situation of each country became more complex, both internal and internationally, the solution to the problems of the working-class movement of each country would find insurmountable difficulties (165), why was it not dissolved before? For instance, in 1934-35 coinciding with the calling and holding of the VII Congress of the CI, as it seems that it was thought at that moment. Or even much sooner. However, the official statements about the dissolution of the International do not tell anything about this. Why so much silence?
In our opinion, the reason for this is nothing else but the use and abuse that the USSR was making of the Communist International. Since it was not dissolved at its due time, in the moment in which the ebb of revolution in Europe became evident and the CI started to become an obstacle, it is easy to explain that the tendency towards using it as a tool of the exterior Soviet policy with the aim of breaking the isolation of the USSR prevailed. In this way it can be understood that in order to break the aforementioned isolation and not to provoke imperialism very much, it became advisable for State reasons a policy of contention of the contradictions, of electoral participation, of talking about insurrection not to prepare it, of flirtations with socialdemocracy, of tight control of the national sections in order to secure that their line of action did not interfere with those attempts of the Soviet diplomacy at defrosting the relations with the capitalist democracies, as it happened in the case of the CP of China or the PCE before, during and after the war. Or as it will happen later on with the Communist Party of Greece, first during the struggle against the nazi occupation and afterwards against the Greek monarchical-fascists and their Anglo-Yankee protectors. Everything, of course, except opening a new revolutionary via as Lenin had suggested and encouraging compromising experiences such as the Chinese one that made evident the existence of the struggle between two lines within the International.
It is true that this does not explain everything. The very maintenance of the CI was each time more a halter for the Soviet government, since hardly could it liberate from the accusation made by the Western governments of interfering with their inner affairs. For that reason, we can think that the responsibility for its dismantlement corresponded mainly to the Soviet and CI leaders.
However, the moment finally chosen for the dissolution of the CI was opportune since it made easier the formation of an international united front against fascism when not only the survival of the USSR was endangered but also the freedom and independence of many countries. For this we can say that this was the last and important contribution of the CI to the cause of socialism and to the struggle for the liberation of the peoples.
But, in the same way as we must criticise the mistakes of the CI and deepen in its causes to learn from them and not to repeat them, it is just to recognize the historic role of the Communist International and what its labour had of positive. A labour that consisted essentially on defending the doctrine of marxism against its attack and falsification by opportunism; on having contributed to group in several countries the vanguard of the advanced workers in communist parties; on helping them to mobilize the worker masses in the defence of their interests, to struggle against fascism and, specially, for the defence of the USSR. Without forgetting its initiative of organizing the International Brigades to combat fascism in our country and its campaigns of help and solidarity with the struggle of the proletariat and of the peoples of Spain.
And, above all, this is the memory of the CI that survives among millions of workers in the world and which lead some revolutionaries to think about its reconstruction. However, that internationalist feeling of the proletariat cannot make us forget that any attempt at trying to lead the revolution from an ephemeral centre or party, as Marx said, has proved inviable. Above all because the world revolution, contrary to what Marx, Engels or Lenin thought, and as it is proved by the historic experience, is not a result of a single qualitative act or step forwards, but of a series of acts, crisis and revolutions, of many quantitative changes and partial qualitative steps forwards which will lead, through a long and complex process, to the final qualitative change or step forwards; namely, to the world revolution. Only then will it be possible to put an end to the contradiction between the International as a social and historic reality and the official International as a specific organization.
With this statement, usurping the name of the PCE, the carrillists offered their services to the financial-landowning oligarchy and inaugurated the policy of National Reconciliation with which they culminated their labour of sabotage and liquidation of the Party. The transcendence of this fact was evident; thanks to revisionism the regime achieved its main objective after the crushing of the Republic: to behead the people's resistance movement. The fascists rounded off in this way their 1939 victory over the people's forces and received a boost to overcome the crisis unleashed by the resurgence of the struggle of the proletariat, the bankruptcy of the old fascist corporatism and the exhaustion of the autarchic economic policy.
Pressed by the situation, but favoured by the destruction of the Party, the financial groups and the hierarchy of the Church set off the process of opening and liberalization of the regime with the aim of adapting it to the new conditions created by the sharpening of the class struggle, the needs of the monopolist development and of its integration within international imperialism. The culmination of this process, which will allow the regime to keep afloat till nowadays combining the terror with the demagogy in the middle of a situation of permanent crisis, will be the democratic Reform undertaken after Franco's death, but which had already been designed by him, counting with the collaboration of the carrillist party and other reformist groups. This is the reason why 1956 meant a shift for the development of the working-class movement in our country and for the very evolution of the regime.
However, such shift could not be understood without taking into account the course followed by the events in the sixteen years that preceded it, in which the economic, social, politic and cultural transformations which will take place in Spain from the late 50s gestated. Hence we have to consider those sixteen years as a transition stage: a transition from a semifeudal society with a fundamentally agrarian economy to a capitalist one based on a growing industrialization and monopolization promoted by the State in favour of the financial capital; a transition from the old fascist corporatism to the organic democracy as a system more equivalent to the democratic regimes of the capitalist countries; a transition also, in view of the new situation created, in the forms and methods of the class struggle; a transition, in the end, from a Communist Party to a revisionist one.
Which was the attitude of the communists after the military, politic and moral defeat of the people's forces? Which was the role played by the guerrilla? Why did the revisionists succeed in destroying the Party? Was its liquidation unavoidable? These are, among others, some of the questions that perhaps many raise and which we will try to answer in this last chapter.
That resolution and determination had their more loyal expression in the communists and antifascists who before resigning themselves to die or to bow to the yoke of capital, moved to the mountains to continue the struggle by means of the guerrilla. Few or many, badly armed and worse fed, these groups of combatants -Dolores Ibarruri said some years later when she was already Secretary General after José Díaz' death in 1942- were the Republic, they were liberty. They were the ones who continued the heroic resolution of the thousands of combatants fallen in the battlefields (167). In this way this was understood by the thousands of workers and peasants, men and women, who -running the risk of losing their lives and overcoming their weakness- gave them their support. This was also understood by the regime since it mobilized all its forces to crush the guerrilla movement, to maintain the state of war in fact and to continue with the massive repression started in 1936, to the point that there was not any worker or peasant family that had not suffered the assassination or imprisonment of some of its members at the hands of the fascists.
The 270,719 political prisoners existing in 1940 -from them 30,000 women- or the 192,682 death penalties executed between April 1939 and June 1944 are a clear proof of it. And this, of course, without counting the thousands of assassinations perpetrated by the falangist and carlist gangs.
In a situation of generalized demoralization and of paralysing terror, difficult to imagine by those who had not lived it, the guerrilla was the only resort available to go on with the struggle, to face terror, to rise the moral of the masses and to prepare the conditions for the overthrowing of the regime. For that reason, the main role of the armed struggle at that time was not as much to annihilate the enemy forces as to end with the fear of the population, to make them see that it was possible to struggle and to win the battle through the guerrilla warfare (168).
But all this must not make us forget the apparently unexplainable fact that the official leadership of the Party, scattered at that time through different Latin American countries and the USSR, did not provide the guerrilla with any support, although it made references to it in its callings. Such lack of interest on the part of the Leadership was not alien to the state of neglect in which they had left the militants in Spain and France and there is no doubt that it responded to the same reasons that had led them to underestimate the guerrilla warfare in the previous period. Among those reasons we can highlight that some leaders, influenced by the bourgeois reformist and socialdemocrat conceptions, were confident that the Yankee and English imperialists, once they had won the war, would not tolerate the permanence in our country of a fascist regime ally of Hitler and Mussolini. The confusion, the disorganization and the political impotence to which the Party had been led by the serious mistakes committed, the lack of foreseeing and by the disordered withdrawal of the Leadership contributed powerfully to maintain this illusion. For that reason, in that situation the most important problem posed was to reconstruct the organization.
The only serious attempt and the more lasting one that, in fact, constituted the basis for a posterior and minimum reorganization of the Party, was carried out at the beginning of 1941 by the Moldovan internationalist known under the name of Heriberto Quiñones. For that he counted with the previous existence of a Reorganizer Central Commission formed by Calixto Pérez Doñoro and the Polish internationalist José Wajsblum. With the arrival of Quiñones, who counted with a large politic and organizational experience, the nucleus made important progresses. The first task that they undertook was to enter in touch with groups of militants scattered in different localities with the aim of creating a leading centre. Their banner we have to think by ourselves suited perfectly to the conditions and needs of that moment. In this way, it was possible to constitute a Politic Bureau of the Interior, to which Quiñones incorporated the most experienced and capable cadres that he found.
In July 1941 the arrest of a part of the organization of Madrid, provoked by a denunciation, alerted the police about this attempt of reorganization. Among the arrested was José Wajsblum. All of them were shot dead. However, the raid did not have bigger effects on Quiñones' plan of reorganization.
The labour developed in almost nine months was enormous. The clandestine organization extended quickly to many cities and towns, mainly thanks to the previous existence of organized nuclei and it was structured in three-member cells, a system of organization that had not been previously put into practice by the members of the Party. Even they managed to enter in touch with the delegation of the Central Committee settled in Mexico. In a letter addressed to it, Quiñones exposed in this way his plan of work and informed about the situation of the Party in Spain: Dear comrades: This our first communication will serve to enter in touch and to delimitate our respective actions and functions. Our wish was to enclose with this letter an ample and detailed report on the one hand about the economic, military and politic situation of our country, and on the other on the Party and its action. At the same time we would have wanted to send you the ‘Draft of Thesis’, what we consider that must be the politic line to be applied in Spain... We start from the basis that, due to the current and specific situation and conditions in Spain it is required a strong leadership that, in accordance with you and with the Communist International, could lead the struggle autonomously... (169).
The efforts displayed by Quiñones and other comrades were interpreted by the Delegation of Mexico as an attempt at constructing a new party.
In spite of the boycott and isolation to which Quiñones was submitted by the official leadership and confronting the harassment and the fierce police prosecution, he continued with his plans, putting special emphasis on the politic and ideological formation of the militants and on their preparation for the clandestine labour. They had also adopted measures to start to form guerrilla groups and to provide support to the already existing ones.
Quiñones' arrest took place in December 1941. His behaviour, similar to the one shown in the many arrests that he had suffered from his arrival to Spain in 1931, was exemplary. But this would not save him from being expelled from the Party as a traitor. Tied to a chair, in view of the impossibility of standing up since he had his back broken by the tortures, he was shot dead in October 1942 together with other members of the National Commission that he presided.
Other accusations which revealed more the true causes of the confrontation with the official leadership were also launched against Quiñones, as those of carrying out a coup d'état (170), pretending to constitute a new leadership and calling himself leader (171). It was clear that the opportunists tried to discredit Quiñones in order to cover their own responsibility for the disastrous situation to which they had led the Party and to calm the discontent among its members. This is the reason why they hastened to send to Spain from Latin America a group of outstanding members to take charge of the leadership. This initiative was used later on to blame Quiñones and to deviate the attention from the true problems. The presence in Spain of Diéguez and Larrañaga -as it is pointed out in Nuestra Bandera (Our Flag) in 1945- was the most categorical confirmation of the total dedication of all the efforts of the Politic Bureau to the struggle within our country and to the help to the Party within Spain. The confidence that this presence awakened in our Party towards the Central Committee and the Politic Bureau cut from its roots any possibility for Quiñones to continue sabotaging and discrediting the members of the Politic Bureau (172).
Apart from the use that they made of them, the cadres that they sent did not play other role, since they were arrested when they had just entered Portugal, handed out to the Spanish politic police and shot dead.
With regard to Quiñones, independently of the back problems that we are analysing and of the mistakes that he could make, in fact he did not do anything but to try to solve the most urging problem of that time: to reorganize the Party in the underground and to establish a leadership within the country. A task that, later on, Monzón and other cadres that were in France will try to accomplish.
About this very important question of the programme and of the tactics, from the beginning of this period started to appear in the bosom of the leadership two different and opposed positions, as it can be learnt from the analysis made by José Díaz immediately after the defeat of the Republic: The triumph of reaction in Spain -he declared- has not eliminated the causes that led our people to the struggle, but it has sharpened them. The working class, the peasants and the people's masses have seen better times. They have had the factories and the land in their hands, they have understood what freedom is and they have been the masters of their destiny. Our people have lived without landowners, without big capitalists and know the value of all this. For this reason, the struggle continues in a new form under the new situation, a struggle to widen these conquests till their full emancipation. For this struggle the masses count with the rich experiences of a war and a revolution that constitute an invaluable arsenal for the battles to come (173).
Such positions could not be accepted by the leaders who continued to be clung to their defeatist, dogmatic and opportunistic positions. Hence, they received as a present the so-called policy of National Union, advocated by the CI after the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 with the aim of establishing an alliance with the Anglo-American imperialists and avoiding that they could reach an agreement with Hitler. As it was proved in China, this policy, to which all the communist parties adhered, was completely just, provided that the politic and ideological independence of the proletariat within the united front would be preserved. The non-application of this principle led most of the communist parties to the compliancy with the big monopolist bourgeoisie, to reformism and to revisionism. And this not to refer to what it meant of sabotage and collaboration with imperialism with regard to the national liberation struggles in the colonies and semicolonies.
This opportunist application of the National Union policy cannot be separated on the other hand, from the lack of independence of the communist parties to elaborate and apply their own politic line nor from the use and abuse that the USSR was making of the International. In this sense, the diplomatic agreements of the USSR with the imperialist States of one or other sign, through which the Soviet leaders knew how to exploit the contradictions among them with great success and ability, did not entail to induce all the communist parties to make the same nor to force them to consider the monopolist bourgeoisies as something different from what they were in fact: imperialists that it was necessary to overthrow. Such compromises -Mao said in 1946 in relation to the ones that the USSR established with the USA, Great Britain and France- do not require that the peoples of the countries of the capitalist world make similar compromises in their respective countries (174). Besides, the development of the revolutionary movement both in each country and at the world level had to be taken into account. From there derived the important role that was assigned to the defence of the Soviet Union.
That policy could not be applied in Spain, where fascism had imposed through the arms after a bloody civil war and where the democratic bourgeoisie had gone massively over the field of counter-revolution. However, this was not taken into account by Dolores Ibarruri and other leaders who were in the USSR at that time. Incapable of adapting the revolutionary tactics to the new situation and submitted to the decisions of the CI, they did not hesitate to apply it to the letter even at the cost of falsifying the reality of the country. With this, the objective of ending with the regime and of reestablishing the People's Republic became reduced to removing Franco and the falangists and establishing a bourgeois parliamentarian republic. Hence, it was not a simple readjustment of the tactics of People's Front, justified by the consideration of Spain as a dependent or vassal country of Germany (175) -which was not true, no matter how much the foreign policy of the regime was by then conditioned by Berlin-, but a radical change of strategy that led to hand out the proletariat bound hand and foot to the big monopolist bourgeoisie. In this way we can affirm that it was from that moment on when the Party entered the game of the policy of the financial oligarchy and imperialism. To that led, precisely, the formation of a National Liberation Front against the German imperialists and their alleged Spanish puppets in which could enter from the big financiers and landowners -including the Bourbons, of course-, namely, the true responsible for the crushing of the People's Republic and for the massacre that their greyhounds were perpetrating.
As for the rest, the possibility of reestablishing the democracy under the form of a parliamentarian monarchy was something that even the oligarchy itself did not discard, above all, considering the evolution that the international situation could follow. This is the reason why Monzón and other leaders of the Party in France and Spain, following the policy of National Union, left themselves be dragged by that possibility and based themselves on the contacts maintained with some personages who supported the regime to constitute in Madrid, in 1943, a bogus National Union Supreme Junta accompanied by the attempt at creating local Juntas all over the country.
The opportunist illusion that the Anglo-American imperialists would help the Spanish republicans to re-establish the democracy, in which the Politic Bureau based its policy of National Union, was very spread within the Party. This explains the fact that the Delegation of the leadership in France centred all its efforts on the organization of the armed struggle against the nazi occupants instead of centring its efforts, means and energies on Spain. It also explains the fact that the aforementioned Delegation, in accordance with the diverse democratic parties and organizations of the exile and with the Delegation of the interior, headed by Monzón, started the so-called Reconquest of Spain operation (176) in which the same mistakes committed during the war are going to be repeated; but this time much more aggravated. Hence, it is convenient to stop and refer to it.
Such operation was carried out at the beginning of October 1944, immediately after the liberation of the French Midi to which so decisively the Spanish guerrillas contributed. Its central objective was to establish and maintain a liberated area or spearhead around Viella, the capital of the Arán Valley, which will force the democratic powers to intervene to help the forces of the Spanish resistance. The military campaign in itself, preceded by the infiltration, as a kind of diversion manoeuvre, of small unities throughout the Pyrenees, consisted on the penetration throughout the Valley of a main force of 3,000 men, provided with semi-heavy material, light vehicles, etc. as if it was a regular army. And it was conceived in this way, from its organization in brigades, battalions and companies to the minimum details: ranks, campaign orders, insignias... Namely, it was nothing else but a poor imitation of the republican army (177).
Both politic and military the adventure turned out to be a failure. And this was not because the forces which took part in it were defeated or suffered great losses, but because they did not manage to achieve any of the planned objectives. In view of the danger of being encircled and annihilated by the enemy and since they did not receive from the imperialists but warning orders of withdrawal, the generals who commanded them, backed by the politic guidelines transmitted by Carrillo at the instances of the Politic Bureau, gave them the order of returning to France. With this decision it was made evident that the aforementioned operation had not been conceived as a true military one, but rather as a propaganda action aimed at attracting the attention of the imperialists and proving -both them and the men of the centre and of the right (178) to which the Party and the other forces of the National Union referred in their callings- that they had nothing to fear from the republicans and communists if they got ready to dismiss Franco and Falange. In this way can be understood that the commanders and combatants received the order of respecting the falangists, civil guards, mayors and other representatives of the regime and that, instead of combating, they devoted themselves to hand out propaganda among the population and to offer masses and other acts of reconciliation in churches and town halls (179). However, not everybody agreed with those purposes and pantomimes: while the army of the Republic crossed again the border towards France, many communist combatants, against the instructions they had received, decided to enter Spain to carry out the guerrilla warfare. In this way the same history repeated twice. With the difference that what in 1939 had ended up in tragedy, in 1944 had turned into a comedy.
From that year on, the guerrilla action did not only spread to almost all the mountain areas of the country but also to the countryside, being an exception, although of great resonance, the actions carried out by guerrilla groups in some cities like Madrid. The guerrilla struggle -Dolores Ibarruri points out by that time, making a balance of it- has become more politic, more offensive; the targets are selected more carefully, the blows are directly addressed against the regime and its servants (181). The conspiracy of silence that till then the regime maintained around the guerrilla broke into pieces, what was reflected in its own propaganda since it abandoned the label of escaped by that of bandits to refer to the guerrilla fighters.
Some figures give us a clear idea of the backing of the masses and of the strength that the guerrilla organization and the revolutionary armed struggle reached. Only the active contingents of the guerrilla organized by the Party -without counting the supporters- which by the end of 1945 numbered 500, reached to exceed in their best moment the figure of 2,000 combatants. This figure could have been much higher if the leadership had acted consequently and had not hindered its development. From them, 85% had taken part in the republican army, being 75% journeymen or peasants and the rest, in their majority, workers (182). An approximate idea of the level of support with which the guerrilla fighters counted among the peasant population is given by the 20,000 collaborators arrested during the period 1943-1952, a figure that according to the calculations of the civil guard meant only a quarter of the real number of collaborators. As for the development of the guerrilla actions, if in 1945, according to official figures, 1,187 actions (executions, sabotages, expropriations, captures, ambushes, storming of quarters, etc.) were carried out, in 1947 they reached 1,462. They are also illustrative of the operative capacity and efficacy of the guerrilla the casualties inflicted to the military and repressive forces, that could be estimated during those three years -comparing several sources- in around 2,000, while the figures of proper guerrilla combatants dead or captured did not exceed 500 in those very years (183).
In order to confront the intensification of the guerrilla struggle from 1945 to 1948 the Government declared the state of war several times in many provinces and deployed a great part of its repressive forces and of the army, including the Legion and units of Moroccan regulares (colonial troops). Examples of the type of operations carried out were the ones launched in March and May 1948 against the Guerrilla Group of Levante and Aragón, the strongest one. In the last one, which was preceded by massive arrests of peasants and burning of mountain forests, 12,000 men were deployed under the command of general Monasterio, counting with all kinds of weapons, from light artillery to tanks (184).
During those years thousands of peasants were assassinated and many others were missing; entire families were massacred; inhabitants of villages and hamlets of many regions were deported; the imprisoned were counted by dozens of thousands. Torture, many times to death, was always a current practice in police stations and quarters. In that criminal labour outstood the contrapartidas (counter-guerrilla gangs) organized by the Information Service of the Civil Guard and frequently integrated by members of this corps and also by falangists and elements of the lumpen. Their main objective was to isolate the guerrilla from the peasant population and to end with the support that this one provided it. Disguised as guerrilla men they perpetrated all kind of crimes and atrocities: they robbed, raped, tortured and killed the peasants in an indiscriminate way with the aim of discrediting the guerrilla and spreading terror (185). This counter-insurgent tactics will be exported by the Spanish reaction to the entire world.
In spite of this intense and bloody repression, the guerrilla groups increased their combative and organizational capability, at the same time that the support and sympathy that they received from the peasant and worker masses grew.
The fact that the armed struggle revealed itself as the main method of struggle and the guerrilla military organization as the main form of organization that the Party should have adopted, is proved both by the failures of the successive attempts at maintaining a clandestine infrastructure, based exclusively in the cities and devoted to the tasks of propaganda, proselytism and solidarity with those who had suffered reprisals, and by the fact that for the development of these tasks they had to resort to the support of the guerrilla groups on many occasions. This is what they will do later on, from 1948 on, when they tried to transform the Head Quarters of the guerrilla Groups into regional Committees and the guerrilla combatants into agitators and propagandists (186). Nothing else came out of the vain attempts at reorganizing the old syndical organizations and from the inviability of their methods and forms of struggle. On the contrary, the guerrilla did not only allow the Party to rebirth from its ashes, to re-establish its links with the masses and to become the only real force of opposition to the regime but it also kept the flame of the people's resistance alive, counteracted the fascist terror and paved the way for the development of the mass struggle, being an example of this the first general strike, which took place in Vizcaya in 1947.
However, as it became evident with the development of the struggle and the organization of the guerrilla movement, the Party lacked a clear vision and a just politic and military line that could allow to strengthen and spread the armed struggle with the aim of the seizure of Power. This was the main cause for the failure of the guerrilla, which made possible that the fascist state could concentrate its forces against it to pass, finally, to annihilate it. Even so, this was not an easy task and it needed the collaboration of the opportunists for that.
The opportunists took advantage of the blind alley to which they had led the guerrilla and of the international situation, each time more favourable to the regime after the beginning of the cold war, in order to disband it. For that aim they also used, tergiversating them, the advices given by Stalin at the end of 1948 to a commission of leaders headed by Dolores Ibarruri and Carrillo about the convenience of adopting a defensive tactics -of withdrawal- aimed at strengthening the Party and at accumulating forces in the perspective of a protracted struggle. Such a tactics, according to Stalin, could be materialized on the one hand in using the guerrilla as a point of support for the clandestine machine and to organize politically the peasants; and on the other in taking advantage of the possibilities that the fascist organizations could offer to spread the links of the Party with the masses. With regard to this, he suggested them to take into account the Bolshevik experience during the tsarist epoch of labour within the reactionary trade unions. But independently of the fact that some suggestions, like this one, were influenced by his lack of knowledge of the Spanish reality, what Stalin never advised, as Lister confirms, was the plain and simple disbandment of the guerrilla (187). Even less that the Party devoted itself to conquer positions or to infiltrate (188) the fascist organizations and trade unions, to make proselytism among the falangist gunmen and to call the workers upon to integrate in them, that is, precisely, what the carrillists are going to do.
Only in this way, in view of the unwillingness to develop and organize the guerrilla war on the basis of a politico-military strategy addressed to the seizure of Power and in view of the evident fact that not even the communists that were ready to continue holding the arms had a clear idea about it, could it be advisable to disband the guerrilla groups and to carry out an ordinate withdrawal of its forces in order to avoid its annihilation by the repressive forces. But this was not due to the fact that in that moment, there were no conditions to develop the guerrilla struggle in the countryside nor to the fact that the international situation was more unfavourable than before but because, under those conditions and without the support of the Party, the disbandment of the guerrilla became a necessary and unavoidable measure.
Even in this case, in spite of the so surreptitious form under which the change of tactics was presented, it found a strong opposition, as it is made evident by the terrorist, police and provocateur methods used by the carrillists against the militants who opposed to their liquidation plans and, above all, against the guerrilla fighters. The disbandment of the guerrilla -as it is affirmed in an internal report- had its difficulties (189). And these had to be important when they did not dare to announce the disbandment publicly till mid 50s, as well as for the way in which they had to carry it out, in a hidden way, introducing in the detachments, the intrigue, the rivalries, and the provocations to find a justification for their liquidation, as Lister affirms. The discomposing of the guerrilla groups -he adds- was carried out from Paris, from where Carrillo sent members of his machine specialized in such labour [...] That line gave way to terrible things, to the loss of men who were honest and devoted to the cause of the Party and of the people, mainly in the years 1948-1949; the liquidations, above all in the Group of Levante-Aragón, were counted by dozens (190).
This is also confirmed by one of the maximum surviving leaders of the aforementioned Group in some statements made some years ago: I saw in the Group many men that suddenly disappeared. What information has been given about them? Here there are many hidden responsibilities that they have never wanted to come out. I think that this will never be done... (191).
And the same happened in other groups, as that of Asturias, where the majority of the guerrilla combatants showed their disagreement with putting an end to the armed struggle, and faced with shots the envoys of Carrillo who had planned to eliminate them on the occasion of their evacuation. But since they could not achieve it, they isolated these guerrilla fighters from the rank and file of the Party accusing them of being provocateurs, and , through denunciations, they made easier their liquidation at the hands of the civil guard (192).
These police and fascist methods applied by the carrillists, which corresponded to the liquidationist line that inspired them, were radically opposed to the ones advocated by the communists who were in the first line of struggle, in the guerrilla, in order to solve the contradictions appeared within the Party, guiding themselves by the principle of heeling the illness to save the patient. This was the principle that guided the leaders of the Guerrilla Group of Levante and Aragón when the advisors sent by Carrillo started to promote intrigue, rivalries and provocations: It seems that in some of our units there is a situation of terror [...] it is necessary not to confound the politic life, our vigilance must be healthy and not a police one. We must not throw on the ground he who makes a mistake, we have the obligation of helping him to rectify. If after having given him the politic orientation he continues repeating positions that show pessimism and discouragement it is then when we have to stop and observe (193).
They could not imagine at that moment that the carrillists were preparing the ground for their liquidation.
It was clear then, that the two lines that were shaping from the previous period in the bosom of the Party had already taken a definite character and that the revisionists were ready to resort to any method and to the help that the fascist State provided them so generously in order to impose themselves.
As it was foreseeable, fearing the raise of the revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries and of the national liberation struggles in the colonies and semicolonies, in 1947 imperialism started openly the cold war against the USSR and the people's democracies, at the same time that it unleashed the anti-communist hysteria and the prosecution of the democratic forces all over the world. The consequences of this new imperialist crusade were very important in Spain with regard to the regime, the Party and in general the so-called anti-Franco opposition.
The polarization of forces in the international field was reflected in the dissolution of the Alliance of Democratic Forces which the Party had joined in 1946. So, the Party, once more abandoned by its allies, stayed alone supporting the republican Government in exile. This rejection of the democratic bourgeoisie to any true democratic alliance with the working class and the fact that it could not count any more with the imperialist help to, at least, force a compromise with some sectors of the regime, left it no other way out but to abandon its republican flightiness and to submit definitely to the requirements of the financial-landowning oligarchy. The economic integration of the democratic bourgeoisie would not take long to come: this will take place gradually under its submission to the financial capital as the economic development advances.
Much more important was, however, the cover that that aggressive orientation of the international reaction meant for the regime in the politic, diplomatic and military fields as well as in the economic one, since the oligarchy found bigger facilities to obtain credits and loans in the international financial means and to accede to the markets of the imperialist countries. From that moment on, the Spanish big bourgeoisie started to integrate itself in the imperialist economy, politics and military strategy without being forced to renounce to the fascist forms of power. Moreover, given the historic conditions and the extreme polarization and sharpening of the class struggle reached in the country, the capitalist development could only be carried out through the imposition and maintenance of the regime.
In order to achieve it they also needed to undertake an intensive accumulation of capital which, in the situation of economic backwardness and of relative international isolation of Spain at that time, could only be carried out on the basis of what was known as the autarkic economic policy. And that accumulation of capital was being achieved through State terrorism and through the submission of the masses which was possible by the destruction of their organizations, the prohibition of any strike or protest under death penalty or imprisonment and the imposition of a regime of forced labour and wages of hunger to millions of workers. The peasants were not spared from this regime of terror and exhaustion; they were deprived of the freedom to sell their products, submitted to any kind of exactions, confiscations and abuses and advocated to ruin. The financial oligarchy used the State as an essential means of its economic policy to multiply its benefits and to reinforce its dominion on all sectors of the economy. With the objective of controlling and boosting the industrialization of the country, it established the National Institute of Industry (INI) in 1941 as well as the National Institute of Colonization (INC) destined to promote the capitalist transformation of the agriculture, under the pretext of settling thousands of journeymen and poor peasants as settlers in the wastelands which had been paid at a very good price to the landowners.
The capitalist transformation of the agriculture was an urgent need for the big bourgeoisie since without it it could not carry out its plans of industrialization. The monopoly on the property of the land exerted by the landowning aristocracy constituted mainly a serious obstacle for the capitalist development since it meant the hoarding of the whole rent of the land by the big large estate owners in detriment of the financial and industrial capital, a limitation to the free circulation of capitals and to the establishment of the average share of profit. Besides, such semifeudal monopoly on the land deprived the industry of the necessary capital for its growth and of the cheap work force that it required, impeding at the same time the widening of the inner market.
How to solve then this important problem without breaking the alliance with the landowning aristocracy? This was the challenge that the big financial bourgeoisie had to face in those years once the Republic had been defeated and the journeymen and peasants had been deprived of the lands which they had expropriated to the landowners. Once any kind of agrarian reform in the line of the American black sharing carried out in USA and France during the bourgeois revolution, or even a limited reform as the one that the democratic bourgeoisie pretended to undertake during the republican period had been discarded, it only remained an option: to carry out the capitalization of the countryside in the Prussian manner; namely, with the support of the State and without the big proprietors of lands losing their properties and being damaged by the fact of receiving the rent in equal conditions to the financial and industrial capital. With the policy of advantageous prices and cheap credits applied by the State, thanks to the indemnifications and improvements of any kind made in their states by the INC and other state organizations, the big large estate owners were more than rewarded by the diminishing of their incomes provoked by the emigration of the excess work force, the rise of the salaries and the low productivity from the moment in which the industrial boom started. The large estate owners will benefit doubly from the capitalization and modernization of their exploitations; with the investment on the industry of the accumulated agrarian capital they became big financiers and stockholders of the industrial societies, what in the case of some of them was already taking place from some time ago. This connection and integration of the agrarian capital with the financial and industrial one did not put an end to the struggle of interests between them, but from then on it will have a different character since it was motivated more each time by the capitalist competence.
The process of capitalization and modernization of the countryside, carried out mainly at the expense of the masses of poor peasants, will be a slow one due to its dependence on the industrial development and it will not be finished until mid 70s. The industrialization process, till that moment centred on the accumulation of capital, the rebuilding of the infrastructure and the industry and the recovering of the production rates previous to the period of the war, will also develop slowly till the end of the 50s. Hence, in those years its effects were hardly perceived. However, the beginning of both processes started in the 40s. Namely, already by that time it was evident that the via of monopolist development undertaken by the financial landowning oligarchy both in the industry and in the agriculture pointed to supersede definitively, at the economic level, the stage of the democratico-bourgeois revolution.
However, this question was not present in the struggle between the two lines within the Party from 1948 on, but rather the politic factors that made clearly evident the superseding of that stage: that is to say, the hegemony of the financial oligarchy in the reactionary alliance and the definite desertion of the democratic bourgeoisie from the republican field. This was, in fact, what -together with the international situation each time more favourable to the regime- compelled already to change the strategy and the tactics of the Party. Let's see which were the positions that confronted by that time in its bosom.
On the one hand, there were those who kept clung to the old tactic and strategic positions of the People's Front, more or less renewed by the policy of National Union. That was the line which predominated among the militants who combated in the guerrilla. On the other hand, there were those, as Dolores Ibarruri, Carrillo, Claudín and other fellow travellers, who basing themselves on a distorted appreciation of the international situation and of its effects, advocated for marching forwards; under this position they covered their purpose of abandoning the revolutionary methods of struggle and of surrendering to fascism as we have already seen. In order to achieve it, for them it was still valid the programme of the Party for the democratic revolution and the analysis on which it was based, that characterized Spain as a semifeudal and dependant country, but now, dependant on the Yankee imperialism. To sum up, basically a dogmatic, subjectivist conception and another rightist one confronted; the latter will be favoured by the revisionist trend that already by that time was opening its way within the international communist movement. Anyway, we have to take into account that, between these two positions, the most damaging one was the rightist. But this danger was not appreciated then by anyone, apart from Joan Comorera, although belatedly; he, although he shared the old positions, went further. Our problem -he pointed out, refuting the rightist positions- does not start nor end with the person of Franco, nor would we solve it throwing Franco away [...] We cannot let ourselves dazzle by the formal democracy, since in this dazzle lays the deep cause of the failures of the Spanish revolution (194). And he added: under a formally democratic regime, monopolist capitalism dictates the law [...] There is no possible pact nor deal with monopolist capitalism [...] It can neither be substituted by systems that had been definitively superseded. It can only be substituted by a higher socio-economic system (195).
It is not strange then that in view of these positions, Comorera became the main target of the calumnies, intrigues and provocations of the rightists, who did not only expel him from the Secretariat General of the PSUC and from the Politic Bureau of the PCE but, besides, tried to assassinate him; and since they were not able to do it, finally, denounced him to the police when he moved to Catalonia (196).
For Dolores Ibarruri, Carrillo and company the physical elimination of Comorera and other communists was a necessary condition without which they could not carry out their liquidationist plans.
A proof that those were their purposes and that already by then it was necessary to define the character of the pendant revolution as socialist and to adopt a new revolutionary tactics in accordance with it as Comorera pointed out, was the polemic maintained between Carrillo and Claudín at the beginning of the 60s in relation to the economic, politic and social changes that were taking place in Spain, which were more visible in that moment with the industrial explosion, and to the possible or not democratization of the regime. In the course of this polemic Carrillo will use the same trick to which he had resorted on other occasions: although he shares the same socialdemocrat positions as Claudín, he apparently will go to the side of the majority left trend which continued maintaining the old conceptions since otherwise, as he himself would admit in more than one occasion, he would have become a sniper and the situation would have escaped his control (197). On the contrary, Claudín, who was more impatient to carry out till its last consequences the National Reconciliation policy that both of them shared, tried to go faster. With it, naturally, he echoed the necessity of the regime to reform itself in order to maintain the submission of the working class and carry out its plans of over-exploitation.
Claudín started from the analysis of the economic transformations of monopolist type, highlighting that the fascist structures of power impeded and were in contradiction with the capitalist development, what according to him, made the regime tend necessarily to democratize itself and to resemble more each time to the democratic regimes of the neighbouring capitalist countries. Under that perspective -he affirmed- it was possible to establish an alliance with the liberalizing sectors of the regime to allow the peaceful transition to democracy and to make easier the accumulation of forces necessary for the seizure of power by the proletariat through the parliamentarian via (198).
Those positions were not openly defended at that moment by Carrillo, but from then on they will serve him as a politic and ideological platform in order to deepen the National Reconciliation policy, already advanced in 1948 under the pretext of the change of tactics, as well as to carry out the integration of the revisionist party within the regime. Although, covering always those purposes with the old official speeches about the anti-feudal, anti-monopolist and anti-imperialist revolution. This explains, to a great extent, that it was relatively easy for the revisionists to impose themselves and to accelerate their labour of liquidation, taking advantage of the narrow-mindedness of the opportunist and dogmatic conception and of the distortions of the Party life.
The gradual liquidation of the Party had also its effects at the organizational level. Since the attempts at creating a machine on the basis of the restructuring of the guerrilla became a failure and since the few clandestine committees which had managed to survive in the cities were dismantled by the police, the Party practically stopped counting with a clandestine organization within Spain. From then on, the instructors sent from France will impose methods of syndical and politic labour and forms of organization proper of the legality or semi-legality, in accordance with the revisionist and socialdemocrat line which inspired them.
Parallel to this, at different levels of the leadership, the replacement of the old leaders by the renewing youth, as Carrillo and his henchmen called themselves, started to take place. In 1954, as a result of the V Congress (*), which meant the assumption of the revisionist line disguised under the old tactic and strategic conceptions, the carrillists considerably increased their presence in the new Central Committee and in the Politic Bureau.
An idea about the influence that the revisionists had reached in 1955 in the leadership of the Party is given by the outcome of their confrontation with the old guard, headed by Dolores Ibarruri, on the issue of the admission of the Spanish State into the UN. While the members of the Politic Bureau who belonged to the previous generation -settled in Romania- adopted a resolution which condemned this entrance, since they considered that it legitimated the regime and meant a renounce to the democratic principles, those who resided in Paris, carrillists in their majority, approved it at the same time that they criticized in Nuestra Bandera (Our Flag) that position affirming that it responded to the idea that the solution to the problems of Spain had to come through an intervention of the big powers (201).
It was evident that Carrillo, Claudín and those of their sort, having their view on the new revisionist winds that blew on the USSR, went further: the approval of the entrance of Spain in the UN favoured their plans of liquidation of the Party and of integration into the regime. In this way it was explained by one of them: the problem was whether the basis of our policy was the maintenance of the republican legality and that kind of attitude; or if we were to look for the disappearance of franquism through the new contradictions that appeared in society. For that reason, I think that the nucleus of the problem that will raise later on with the policy of National Reconciliation was already present within this debate. I think that by that time, comrade Dolores played an important and positive role when she secured the predominance in the leadership of the Party of that attitude which was more opened to the future (202).
Due to all this we can say that already in 1955 all the fundamental premises were given for the definite liquidation of the Party by the revisionists. The only thing that they lacked was to seize the leadership completely. And they are going to achieve that very soon, immediately after the holding in February 1956 of the XX Congress of the SUCP, three years after Stalin's death.
In that Congress Khrushchev gave lecture to a secret report in which, under the pretext of correcting the mistakes of the previous period and criticising the cult to the personality of Stalin, the marxist-leninist politic line and the whole previous revolutionary deed was revoked. In the XX Congress the politic and ideological basis of modern revisionism were settled. Those were materialized in the theses on the peaceful transition to socialism, the State of all the people, etc. which were later on endorsed and developed by the XXII Congress. In this way the revisionists of all the countries could count with a platform and a backing.
It was clear that the coup d'état of Khrushchev and the revisionists in the Soviet Union and their attacks against Stalin and marxism-leninism were also the coup de grâce to the communist movement as it was conceived at that time. The revisionist cancer, widely spread, had already riddled many communist parties; among them, some of the most influent ones. In many others, under a marxist-leninist veneer, modern revisionism had conquered important positions and suffocated the revolutionary elements. In the very Soviet Union, the marxist-leninists and the Soviet proletariat, weakened by the war and disarmed by the serious politic and ideological mistakes which had been committed, were incapable of facing and avoiding the counter-revolutionary avalanche. Only the CP of China, headed by Mao, and some other communist parties kept high the banner of marxism-leninism, defended Stalin from the calumnies and attacks, opposed the efforts of Khrushchev to impose a capitulationist and reformist line to all the communist parties at the same time that they combated Thorez, Togliatti, Tito and other modern revisionists who, under the pretext of developing marxism in a creative way and of the appearance of new conditions, opposed to revolution and rejected its fundamental principles.
The XX Congress therefore served the revisionists of our country as an important backing. Four months later the carrillists presented in society, with a great fanfare, their policy of National Reconciliation, with which they culminated the process of liquidation of the Party, although it is true that maintaining its name and appealing at any moment to a legitimacy and to the traditions that they themselves were trampling.
Once more it became evident what Lenin had already pointed out in his combat against opportunism and liquidationism, two tendencies which, as he said, shared common links and between which there was nothing else but a small separation, sometimes imperceptible. However, it is convenient to highlight here the distinction that Lenin makes between ones and the others: Liquidationism -he states- is naturally bound through ideological links to the abjuration of the programme and the tactics, to opportunism. The opportunists lead the Party to a bourgeois, wrong way, to the path of the liberal worker policy, but they do not renounce to the very Party, they do not liquidate it. Liquidationism is an opportunism of such a kind that it even renounces to the Party. Liquidationism -he adds- does not only entail the liquidation (that is to say, the dismantling, the destruction) of the old Party of the working class; it also entails the destruction of the class independence of the proletariat, the corruption of its conscience by the bourgeois ideas (203).
According to Lenin, the deviations from the marxist tactics are not explained in a casual way or simply by the bad intention of isolated persons, but mainly by the historic situation of the revolutionary and working-class movement of each epoch, expressing themselves in different forms according to the more or less sharpening of the class struggle and to the peculiarities of each country. As he points out, in the time of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the situation of the revolutionary and worker movement provokes unavoidably, as a manifestation of the bourgeois influence on the proletariat, on the one hand, the negation of the Party as an illegal organization, the contempt for its role and importance, as well as the attempts at reducing the programmatic and tactical tasks and the revolutionary banners; and on the other hand, it also provokes the incapability to adapt the tactics to the changeable historic conditions and to the peculiarities of each moment. For that reason, Lenin insisted on the necessity of understanding the class origin of those unhealthy influences and of discovering the non-proletarian class interests that feed the darnel, given that the bourgeois (and petty bourgeois) ideology manifests under multiple forms according to the main revolutionary tasks of the working class and of its Party. The liquidationists are petty-bourgeois intellectuals sent by the bourgeoisie to introduce the liberal corruption in the worker circles; the liquidators are traitors to marxism and traitors to democracy. The slogan of ‘struggle for a legal party’ is for them [...] a way of covering their renounce to the past and their rupture with the working class (204).
Those same tendencies were growing and expressing themselves from some time ago within the PCE. On the one hand, the incapability to face the new revolutionary tasks and to elaborate a tactics adequate to the changeable conditions of the class struggle in Spain, the stagnation and dogmatism represented by the old guard of the Party; on the other hand, the aim at disarming it politic, organizational and ideologically according to the necessities and class interests of the big bourgeoisie which, since it had failed to destroy the Party through the most brutal and bloody repression, made use (and it still does) of its ideological influence in the ranks of the working class to achieve it. It became much more necessary to do this in the bosom of the Communist Party, since the petty-bourgeois influence exerted through the anarchist and socialdemocrat ideology had almost disappeared.
Hence the fact that the regime promoted with its opening demagogy the liquidationist and reconciliatory carrillist purposes, making easier their work within the Vertical Union (fascist corporative trade union) and other fascist organizations in the very moment in which the people's and worker movement started to recover from the defeat and the politic and economic crisis of the system became aggravated.
But besides, taking into account the sharpening of the class struggle in our country, opportunism and liquidationism had to adopt peculiar forms. That was the reason why the rightists and revisionists, the Claudín, Semprún, Carrillo, Azcárate,... did not show themselves as they in fact were, and speculated with the traditions, the name of the Party and the marxist-leninist principles in order to disguise better their anticommunist purposes and positions.
Regarding the old leading cadres of the Party: Dolores Ibarruri, Lister, Uribe... to them could be applied the characterization that Lenin made of the centrists as Kautsky after the first imperialist World War and the rise of the bourgeois counter-revolution in Europe, in a moment in which the transition from the pre-monopolist capitalism to the imperialist stage had already taken place and the epoch of the proletarian world revolution had started; and when it became necessary on the part of the working class and the communist parties to adopt a new via for the development of the revolution. Considered from a historic and economic point of view -he said-, they do not represent any specific social layer, they can be considered but as a phenomenon of transition, already superseded, of the worker movement. (205).
As the centrists to which Lenin refers, the same happened to many cadres and militants of the Party: clung to the old schemes -which were valid for a superseded stage of the class struggle- they were incapable of placing themselves at the height of the tasks and responsibilities required by the new period opened after the collapse of the Republic and the end of World War II. During the previous stage there is no doubt that they had played an outstanding role in the formation and development of the Party, in the spreading of the communist ideas among the proletariat in struggle against the anarchist and socialdemocrat ideology and had fought in the first line of battle at the head of the masses against fascism and imperialism; but under the such difficult conditions which the Party had to undergo after the defeat, neither were they prepared to face the complex revolutionary tasks that the situation required nor did they make any effort to get ready to do it. In many cases it became necessary to break with the old conceptions deep-rooted within the international communist movement and to deepen the development of the revolutionary theory and practice, taking very much into account the experiences acquired by the masses in the struggle against reaction and imperialism and the specific characteristics of the class struggle in Spain. Stagnated in their dogmatism and used to the protection of the CI and the SUCP, they did not take into account the principle that the past must serve the present nor the historic conditions nor the transformations which were taking place in our country. The revisionists took advantage of their weaknesses and distortions, even of their complicity, to lead the Party through the path of degeneration and liquidation.
Once the revolutionary line had been eliminated and, above all, once the leadership was under the control of the revisionists, the possibility that the PCE could adopt a just line or that it could be rebuilt from its inside, became void. Then it became necessary to reconstruct it, but already from outside it, on the basis of the new revolutionary forces that were emerging. That was the great task posed to the communists from 1956 on.
