Maoism in the Developed World

The PCE (I) was the second oldest Maoist-oriented party in Spain. An official statement by the group, published in 1977, said that “In the case of the PCE (I) it is not so much a matter of the foundation of the Party as of the rupture with the revisionist policy of what had been the Partido Comunista de Espana (PCE). The two fundamental factors in this rupture were: In the international field the struggle of the Communist Party of Spain against the revisionist policies of the Soviet gang and the revolutionary example of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In the national aspect, the active rebellion against the abandonment of the positions of the proletarian class by the ‘Communist’ party. This abandonment was concretized in the pacts which were attempted with sectors of the grand bourgeoisie and the evolutionists of the regime, as well as abandonment of the armed path.”

At the end of 1967 this split in the traditional Communist Party began in Barcelona, led by “Comrade Miguel,” then a member of the Central Committee of the Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalonia, the counterpart of the PCE in the Catalan region. According to the PCE (I) statement, “it was working class organizations which bore the brunt of the rupture, not university students.”

During its first decade, the PCE (I) underwent several splits, according to its own account. The first of these took place in 1968 when “a group of intellectuals and students” rebelled against “the iron and conscientious discipline and most rigorous democratic centralism which must characterize the activity of every Party of the proletariat.” These people objected to the party’s “defining itself with regard to the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.”[468]

A second schism occurred during the Third National Conference of the PCE (I). There a group from central Spain “opposed the political line of the proletarian revolution—presented by the Central Committee and defended by the majority of the delegates to the Conference,” arguing instead for a “struggle for national liberation of all classes oppressed by Yankee imperialism.” And an “alliance of the proletariat with the national Bourgeoisie.” The dissidents in this case joined the PCE (M-L).[469]

A third dissident group was alleged to have been “Trotskyite” in inspiration and to have sought its objectives through trying to get rid of the party leadership through a “liquidationist work which cost the Party a good number of detentions and made public the major secrets of our organizations.”[470] Finally, in July 1971, a fourth group, allegedly using “Nazi methods,” brought about the assassination of Juan Guerrero, a miner and one of the party’s principal leaders in the Asturias region. This group, the PCE (I) official report claimed, “began to say that the proletariat should lead the small and middle bourgeoisie towards the socialist revolution.”[471]

The statement of the PCE (I) proclaimed that the objective of the party was “the achievement of the direct democracy of the masses, that is to say, the Socialist Republic of Assemblies, under the political hegemony of the proletariat and of the masses of soldiers and democratic officers; the ultimate objective is the classless society, Communism.” The party, like most other extreme leftist groups at that time, put particular emphasis on the autonomy and self-determination of the various regions of Spain. Perhaps its most unique aspect was the emphasis it gave to support of the movement for independence of what had been the Spanish Sahara, led by the Polisario movement, and of the Canary Islands.[472]

The PCE (I) had a youth group, the Union of Marxist-Leninist Youth (Union de Juventudes Marxista Leninista). The party claimed that its members “come fundamentally from the working class, and in the second place from the petty bourgeoisie.” It claimed that 25 to 30 percent of its membership was female and that in its Central Committee and Political Secretariat, 60 percent of the members were women. The party published Linea Proletaria as the organ of its Central Committee and Tribuna del Partido, as a “bulletin published by the Central Committee for members and sympathizers.”[473]

The Revolutionary Organization Of Workers (Ort)

The third avowedly Maoist group to be established in Spain was the Revolutionary Organization of Workers (Organization Revolucionaria de Trabaj adores—ORT). It had its origins in the formation in the early 1960s of groups of workers, brought together in Trade Union Action of Workers (Accion Sindical de Trabajadores—AST), which operated within the PCE-controlled underground trade union movement, the Workers Commissions (Comisiones Obreras—CCOO). It was not until 1969 that the AST was converted into a political party, the ORT.