Last Stalinist : The Life of Santiago Carrillo by Preston Paul

Author:Preston, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

I now see Fernando in a new light, as a pessimistic sceptic, without beliefs, who doubts everything, who doubts the capacity for struggle of the working class, who doubts the political capacity of the party, who doubts Marxism-Leninism, who doubts his comrades in the struggle and in the leadership of the party, he treats them in a manner unbefitting a comrade … He is impressed only by the supposed power of the oligarchy, attributing to it the power, something Marxism rejects, to decide for itself the historical development of our country. His conclusions, more than those of a Marxist-Leninist, are those of a bourgeois sociologist or a Social Democrat … His analytical method is not that of a Marxist, but rather that of a petitbourgeois reformist who refuses to see reality because he is scared of the difficulties of the fight.

This supposed degeneration on the part of her one-time protégé she attributed to the attrition of age, exile and family commitments.

Resurrecting her characteristic oratorical power, she then stirred the emotions of the rest of the executive by skilful reference to the Civil War: ‘Did we really go through the war, fighting to stop the triumph of fascism, so that, after twenty-eight years of struggle against the oligarchies that brought Franco to power, we have reached the moment to renounce that struggle, to chant mea culpa and beg those oligarchies for a place in the sun?’ She then asked Claudín rhetorically if he would dare present his analysis to the workers of Asturias, the Basque Country, Madrid or Catalonia or to the peasants of Andalusia, Extremadura or Castile rather than in the safer environment of a closed meeting. Without the approval of the masses, his analyses were simply ‘the idle ravings of bird-brained intellectuals’. Rhetorically effective though it was, her speech was similarly manipulative. Where else could major adjustments of Party policy be discussed other than in such meetings? When a new line had been elaborated in tune with the changing reality in Spain, then it would be up to the Party to adjust its propaganda.

Carrillo spoke next. He began with a crude summary of Claudín’s position: ‘For Fernando, the issue is as follows: power will remain in the hands of the oligarchy. We are moving towards a more or less democratic change in power which will open a new and relatively long period of capitalist development in Spain. A long period of stability and development. Therefore, he concludes, we must adapt to this process and renounce until some distant date confronting the problems of the revolution in our country.’ He went on to condemn Claudín’s analysis as ‘bookish and abstract’, identical words to those used in Semprún’s letter to Pradera. Revealing the rigidity of his own thinking, he declared that Claudín’s analysis was not scientific, ‘in the sense in which we understand a scientific analysis, that is to say in the revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, class sense which our analyses have to have’. Recalling the accusation made at Arras that he was dogmatic, he repeated several times that it was Claudín who was rigid and dogmatic.

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