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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 50, 12 December 1949, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
PARIS – The Stalinists have finally been forced to give publicity to the crisis in the PSUC (Stalinist party of the Spanish province of Catalonia) and to the expulsion of its general secretary, Juan Comorera. After a prolonged silence on a fact which is now well known, their hand has undoubtedly been forced by the comments in the greater part of the Spanish émigré press.
Mundo Obrera, the organ of the CP of Spain, has at last published in its November 10 issue the resolution passed at a meeting held on September 2. For two long months the Stalinist leadership has been vainly looking for a way to prop up its collapsing structure by bureaucratic means.
The resolution is signed by the so-called secretariat of the PSUC – “signed,” not written, for the line is naturally that which has been handed down by the Cominform’s delegate, the “eye” which Moscow has in all of the Stalinist parties.
It fills an entire page of Mundo Obrera, as is customary in such cases – a page of massive, indigestible prose, more difficult to chew on than raw cotton. The first accusations against Comorera, constituting the preamble, so to speak, are the following: factional activity; attempting to oust all the members of the secretariat; eagerness to take over the party newspaper; retention of the funds of the party; finally, a desire to go directly to the party militants.
In a Stalinist party these incomprehensible proceedings are good coin, except the one about appealing directly to the party militants; for the CP leaders, this is really a crime to be condemned. For them, their rank and file play no part, not even in questions relating to their own party’s course. Theirs only to obey without murmuring or muttering, like soldiers in an army before the general staff. This is what so-called “democratic centralism” is reduced to after straining through the Stalinist sieve.
There is no point in making an extensive analysis of the long string of commonplace accusations which the CP bureaucracy always brings up when it wants to get rid of some of its elements, especially when it wants to shift the blame for a policy which is always foreign to the interests of the working class of its country. But some of the charges leveled against Comorera in this case are particularly absurd, even laughable.
For example: the CP resolution says that Comorera, who has been general secretary of the PSUC since its formation, “was never in agreement with its principles”; that he “impregnated all the party documents with ideological influences foreign to the working class”; that during the war he was in favor of the “annexation of Mallorca by Catalonia”; that he “pursued” a policy of looting the peasants,” wanted “to divide the People’s Army,” etc. He also criticized the expulsion of “Victor Colomor, Serra Pamie, Del Barrio, Ferré and other monstrosities from the lower depths of reaction.”
These confessions, which they present as if they were accusations, prove what we have said many times and which, we repeat: that the Stalinist PSUC is in no sense a working-class party. They now reveal, by implication, that the first central committee of the party, the one which functioned during the crucial period of the Spanish civil war, was made up of “monstrosities from the lower depths of reaction,” headed by a general secretary who was an “adventurer” and who aspired only to be “president of the corporation.”
The Stalinist bureaucracy would have overlooked much more than that if Comorera had not felt a desire to be independent of the tutelage of the Spanish CP – that is, of the apparatus composed of La Pasionaria and her gang. We do not know what motives or circumstances caused Comorera to go in this direction. But this is the fact. On another occasion we will write about the absorption of the Catalan PSUC by the Spanish Communist Party, with documented evidence to prove our assertions.
In the resolution before us, the objective which the Spanish CP proposes is clear. It reads: “When the conditions of the struggle demand it, neither earlier nor later, the PSUC will effect organic unity with the CP. It will recognize, organically and by statute, a condition of fact that in general has existed since 1936, from the point of view of collaboration and political unity.”
There it is. That the Catalan PSUC is no more than an appendage of the Spanish CP – just as the latter is merely an appendage of the Russian Cominform – is recognized by everyone; the resolution is a reply to the denials which have been made on this point by the PSUC.
What remains well established is the fact that this PSUC [United Socialist Party of Catalonia] is not a party, is not socialist, is not unified and has nothing to do with Catalans. The CP will absorb it, for better or worse, and thus put an end to the confusion which it aimed to sow in the field of Catalan politics.
We know that Comorera has prepared a long reply. It appears that he is not willing to be separated from his general-secretaryship so easily. While one can anticipate that another resolution will be thrown at his head one of these days, the current document is signed by Vidiella, Moix and other leading sheepherders of the present-day PSUC.
The struggle continues openly between the two factions, the one which is expelled and the other which continues to enjoy official favor. Whatever the outcome, the certainty is that the crisis in the PSUC will find no solution, as Stalinism in general has found none. The final hour of Stalinism has not yet struck, unfortunately for the working class, but the beginning of the end appears on all sides and in all countries.
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