Workers' Commissions in Asturias, the Basque | in universities does not involve an attempt I people's movement.
enough information to enable us to draw up a influence which the state of emergency may have on the creation of a revolutionary situanon.
The state of emergency is important, It is the most violent repressive measure taken opposition.
against the Spanish people since the end of the of the most conservative elements in the liberalization. show-piece a real piece On the other hand, the declaration of a state of emergency, one stage removed from an outbreak of war, shows that there are forces in Spain capable of drawing her towards a revolutionary crisis.
The immediate causes impelling the army to act centred on the troubles in the universities.
These troubles are no more serious than at any point in the past two years but last January the student Enrique Ruano Casanova. The Spanish Press lied or did not report fully this death, and the European Press ignored it. Ryandingasan the police, the only witness, Ruano committed suicide throwing himself out of a window of his flat.
by the police or threw himself out to avoid any further tortures. This "suicide" is explained when we know that, a few days earlier, Barcelona students threw a statue of General Franco out of a window of the rector's office.
The demonstrations organised after Ruano Casanova's death, carried out according to (without urban guerrilla tactics, exasperated the police. The official car of Vice-Admiral Gonzalez Aller, with the "big fish' inside, was surrounded by a commando of students in the Calle de la Princesa (in Madrid's University quarter). This cannot go on any longer, said the Admiral to Carrero Blanco, the Vice-President of the Government, also an Admiral. A few days later nagic words of Fascism were uttered again by Carrero Blanco's paternal mouth: *There shall be no sport played in the Temple, no science in the circus, no politics in the Universities... CHALLENGES Outside the universities, the government has been faced by a number of challenges.
Churches were occupied, with the priests' permission, by the wives and families of the a joke which was not published in the Spanish Press: "Spain 1969: Politics in the University Politics in the Church and Circus in Parliament'.
The Madrid College of Lawyers, traditionally fascist-inclined, passed a motion to modify the Penal Code on political matters.
1500 intellectuals demanded that the Government should accept its responsibility for the tortures suffered by members of the Folkestone, recently. Schools comrades were | Valencial and Joined up With "fellow travellers", anarchists, maoists, 'guevaraites' and such like.
It was not enough for Fascism to arrest and torture the members of the revolutionary Te revolutionary Left did not need a state emergency; and the same applied to the up with, state of emergency or not.
The complete censorship of the Press has directly affected those groups which have Left groups which go on publishing their clandestine leaflets with more virulence and justification than before the state of Good sources have it that he was either pushed deportations have for the time being silenced emergency. The prison Scutenees and the neo-capitalist liberal opposition. They are after all only a part of the system. On the contrary, the prison sentences and deportations I have pushed the Asturian mmers, me • Catalonian workers of the Basque Country to go on strike textile workers and the metal precedent in regime of total suppression and fear) and have caused partial strikes in the Madrid industries. Equally, the agitation in the Universities, which was meant to be wiped out, has been radicalized and has extended to new masses of students that see direct action as the only possibility to transtorm society Censorship and repression have fragmented n the so-called Spanish Parliament (Cortes), the the technocratic opposition and even some revisionist groups within the Workers' Commissions. However, the climate of repression has strengthened the revolutionary CLOUDS wno now ind their actions more justified than ever.
Today, it is possible to envisage in Spain a neo-capitalist and liberal successor taking over from Fascism. But large masses of workers and students would view with impatience such a succession - particularly those grouped in the leaders of the Workers' Commissions. There was revolutionary mixed Commissions of students ane workers The link between the students' and workers struggles has always been a basic aspect of the people's Spain against the Yankee-Francoite oligarchy. The first enemy was the fascist structure of the Unions, both for students and for workers. The struggle has brought more successes to the students than it has to the workers. To achieve partial reforms affect the labour field. The students have been able to smash the Fascist SEU (Union of Spanish Students) and to create a democratic one, illegal, but accepted "de facto' by the authorities.
The workers have not been able to destroy the vertical structure of the Spanish Trade Unions (backbone of the regime). However, they have set up workers Commissions, which are the ones who have the real power in political and economic talks with the bosses.
Neither workers nor students agree with the purely economic aim. The revolutionary goal is.
the most important aim of the Workers"
Commissions.
In 1962, the students mobilised in solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Asturian miners and, under the slogan The University with the demonstrated shouting Miners yes, Opus no", "Asturias yes, Franco no'. This 1962 strike saw birth the Workers' Commissions and these established links, even though weak ones, with the student movement.
reason, representatives Workers' Commissions attend the students assemblies regularly as observers. Leaders of the working class attended the Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Union of Students in Madrid and Barcelona. These unions are also the ones to launch the order of mobilisation every First of May, in which the students and the masses of the people demonstrate against the oligarchy.
The students take part in these in a massive way.
However, the link between workers and students has opened up new prospects with the setting up of new mass Comisiones Obreras Juveniles (COJ, Young Workers' Commissions) and Comisiones Obreras de barrio (COB, Area Workers' Commissions), which, in the big cities, have played and play a first-class revolutionary role during the state of emergency. With an efficient organisation and an iron discipline, the COJ and COB have played havoc with the whole of Madrid's police force. They have abandoned the idea of big peaceful demonstrations decorated with Press cameramen, TV, etc., as a product of the capitalist or consumer societyhat not only and have organised 'action commandos' demonstrate against Franco the man, or against action of the dictatorship, but against the whole system and all the elements which support it. These commandos have held up the Yankees and the oligarchy's Banks attacked the fascist newspapers, and distributed leaflets to everyone. They hold brief meetings in the streets, in the buses and even in the tube. They are also the catalysts of political agitation in every city area regarding local problems. The revisionists, which have a demobilising and counter-revolutionary character.
The COB and COJ are true mass organisations in which workers and students fight the common enemy: the Spanish oligarchy. They form in some towns and especially in Madrid, the base of the Spanish Alvar Gonzalez DWARF This letter was Dwarf by several comrades who prefer us not to print their names. They wish to avoid being connected with a resourceful individual who daubed an anti-exams slogan on a Cambridge pub and is now being sought by the City police.
Comrades So far the exams campaign in Cambridge has consisted of thousands of copies of six fairly lengthy leaflets, mass distribution of posters, slogan-painters, one mass meeting, meetings in several colleges and faculties, and the March of the Academic Cripples, complete with bandaged heads, burning gowns, street theatre, and a fire-hose employed by an unfriendly porter (which burst the ear-drum of one comrade). After two weeks, 250 attended the meeting, which, though fewer than expected, was not bad for an exam term, and we succeeded in putting over some fairly complex political arguments. A fair number of students have boycotted prelims and a smaller number Part I and Part Il of the Tripos, thus facing degree-less expulsion. This small boycott is not visualised as the end product, however, but as a means of propaganda towards a mass boycott (perhaps 1000 of 9000 students) next year or the year after, a boycott opposed to assessment and 1) They illustrate and propagate the evils of university education single, examinable 'disciplines", teaching The campaign was begun because we saw it as the most valid offensive political move we could make. Examinations and assessment are the key instruments of ruling class hegemony in the university: 1 They illustrate and propagate the evils of discipsines, teachin umversity single, teaching principally wnat is assessable, education ostensibly for a critical approach to individual life, in fact for capitalism, instead of education for a critical approach to social life education, and judge the correct status for the examinee with the attacking exams from within the university and from outside it, and above all it means breaking down the 3) They are a direct expression of class warfare keeping the buggers down' and ready for mastication in the jaws of the ruling class.
Hence a campaign against assessment is a political offensive on a revolutionary stand: a total negation of the authorities position rather than an opposition to its inconsistencies (the basis of the LSE struggle - clearly not to be denigrated). But such a campaign, whose strategic aim is to reveal that the strain of revision is class oppression at work, needs a great deal of time, propaganda attacking exams ffrom within the university and from outside it, and above all it means breaking down the mistrust of the left elite and of its often transparent (and hence incorrect) tactical manoevres, which is felt by the moderates, potential revolutionaries.
The possibilities of such a campaign, and the importance of the strategy outlined above is, we think, illustrated by last term's events in Manchester where, after a lot of publicity, a
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"The glass is now full", declared General balance sheet; to determine its importance and, Cano Iniesta, military Governor of Madrid. The what is more interesting, to estimate the opposition, so far liberal, had now hardened
The state of emergency was directed in fact Civil War. The fact that it has been possible to against all opposition, from the ultra-right wing
Falange, and that liberalization' is merely a of emergency. They have always lived under it. Runo Casanova was prior to the state of
occupation of churches, prison sentences, mass sackings or deportations that members of the Workers' Commissions have always had to put
witnessed the murder, in front of the police, of access to the Press at national level, such as the Opus Dei, Christian Democrats, monarchists. But it has hardly affected the revolutionary
COJ and COB maintain the revolutionary line against the civic commissions' launched by the