Spain's New Marxism

...This leaves the entire peonaje without a visible head...

...Father Gonzalez-Ruiz's works, in fact, contain the seeds of the great Synthesis which Spain may yet pioneer in the West: the reconciliation of the Christian ethic with the materialistic ethic...

...Sporadic labor protests were chastised as "Communist subversion" by the Church-State controlled newspapers, and striking workers were summarily fired, imprisoned, or both...

...one asks...

...Although the violence by no means reached the Barcelona level, the display of police force included foot patrolmen, land rovers, water tanks and two helicopters...

...The recent workers' demonstrations in Madrid followed hard on the heels of newly-announced government reforms...

...Observers estimate that between the Getafe-Villa-verde industrial belt and the outskirts of Madrid, there stretched a marching column eight to ten abreast and over a mile long...

...During the recent University disturbances, one of the leaflets circulated on the campus originated with a group of young, leftist Falangists who voiced their own protest against police intervention in student demonstrations...

...The two men were released...

...Smaller groups paraded to other points in the city...

...LABOR, THE UNIVERSITY AND THE CHURCH Spam s New Marxism By Carmen Irizarry Madrid Aldo Trippini, United Press International bureau chief here, was one of the foreign observers who ventured into the student-and-labor demonstrations in this Spanish capital last January 27...

...What happened to him is symbolic, though not typical, of the dangers inherent in all foreign reporting from Spain...

...They made it known that unless the government let the two go, Madrid would have a general strike on January 29...

...No," he replies solemnly...

...The wave of strikes, marches and other university demonstrations is simply the clamor of the high-spirited New Marxists...

...the anti-government reaction of a new generation whose political impotence is a constant goad to violence...

...Completely unorganized and moneyless??it shuns both institutionalism and finances??it consists of priests and laymen who are formulating a new, transcendent humanism for Spanish Christians...

...Isn't Opus using you...

...Varying in age, these men hold professions running from business to teaching to pastoral work...

...The present regime was born in 1939 as the third Fascist power on the European Continent...

...Like the now-mature laymen who instinctively mistrusted the clergy's fulminations against the "enemies of Spain," i.e., the Protestants, young Spaniards today are likely to sneer at the government's continued denunciations of "atheistic materialism...

...The religious and political persecutions of the past were indeed no less harsh, but they affected minorities: the handful of Protestants struggling for survival in an ambiance which found them, also, "Communist" and the few members of the intelligentsia or bourgeoisie who boldly challenged the policies of the absolute State...

...The word "bosses" is not a misnomer...

...The last two factors are peculiarly Spanish...

...Thirteen years ago this now gigantic, wealthy pressure group, the ascetic practices of whose members are central to its mission in the world, published a book warning that "Communism counts, first of all, on the appetites, on the lower instinct...

...To outside observers, the current conflict may appear to be a classical case of the Downtrodden versus the Oppressor or perhaps even Russian Communism having a field day with the unsuspecting Spanish masses...

...In fact, Spain in the '40s and '50s was such a vast labor camp that even the Grandees felt the pinch...

...Then there is the recent remarkable turn of Opus Dei, an "Association of Faithful" which heretofore worked with an elite drawn from the Establishment, but now has suddenly jumped into the political opposition, using its vast empire of papers and magazines to spread its new views...

...Inevitably, in the wake of the political and intellectual attrition of its own making, the only legal party in the land is undergoing an evolution...

...Word of their leaders' arrest was the last straw for the restless workers, and the rallying point to test their mettle...

...Three Catholic parishes have made their premises available for illegal workers' assemblies...

...But the Spanish orientation of the country's Marxism is much more significant and influential than any directive from Paris or Rome...

...Living on starvation wages in a destitute country, deprived of a voice in labor affairs and totally subject to the will of the Party (Movimiento Nacional), the Spanish worker was the low man on the totem pole of "verticality...

...Few ideological generalizations can be made about the country in 1967...

...As for the anti-Americanism, it is not Vietnam (much as the war is condemned) which stokes the fires of "anti-capitalism...

...Generally speaking, Spain's Marxism may be traced to three factors: the "opening to the Left" (la apertura a la izquierda) of intellectual and religious splinter groups in the Opposition...

...In fact, many young intellectuals here feel that "Manichean-minded Americans" (to use their term) believe Spanish Marxism is not only controlled by Communist parties in France and Italy, but ultimately by Moscow...

...Their cry...

...As in the case of the recent Religious Liberty Statute (putting Protestants under the control and vigilance of the Ministry of Justice), and the 1965 student regulations (placing a number of student affairs under the aegis of a government "Commissariat," the regime's new labor dispositions change very little the "vertical" system...

...Today it is courting the Marxist labor leaders to the extent of offering one of them space in Madrid, considered the best of opus Dei's two evening papers in the capital...

...The resemblance to the "Priests' Rebellion" in Barcelona in May 1966 was striking...

...confused and ineffectual as it might be...

...But no one who fails to appreciate what Madariaga calls the Spaniard's "instinct" to "side with the humanist universalisms which inspire the liberal approach to world affairs," and, the country's intellectual, moral and emotional ordeal in the past 25 years, can fully grasp the meaning of the present ferment in Spanish society...

...and the number of cama-radas in good standing who write rabidly anticlerical and anti-Monarchist tirades in the official paper Arriba is even higher...

...Most of the men's leaders are technicians," explains one spokesman for the laborers...

...It is rather an indigenous part of the social and political ferment in the country...

...Undoubtedly the outlawed and agitating Spanish Communist party is in touch with fellow units abroad...

...Like Frost's West-Running Brook ("see how the brook/ In that white wave runs counter to itself"), Spain can only be understood by "backward motion toward the source...

...When the workers reached Madrid proper, armed police jostled them out of formation and broke up the groups milling around...

...is "Freedom...

...Salvador de Madariaga, the exiled philosopher-diplomat in his Spain, A Modern History, uses it to describe the most ruthless of the government's initiatives: "The Falange syndicates are government organizations, and their bosses (one could hardly call them leaders) are nominated by the government...

...Trippini ended his sortie in the British-American Hospital with internal injuries inflicted by the clubs of the policia armada...

...The mitigating or positive achievements of capitalism in an open society are totally lost on the peasant who leaves the farm for the factory...

...The most distinguished member of the group is Jose Maria Gonzalez-Ruiz, a canon from Malaga who lent an inspirational hand to the famous Schema XIII, The Church in the Modern World, and who is one of the foremost voices in Europe's Catholic-Marxist dialogue...

...When they called the recent Madrid demonstration to protest, among other things, the closed labor law, the freeze on minimum wages during a period of steep price increases, and summary dismissals in factories across the land, the workers' response was overwhelming...

...he has simply traded Spanish for international bosses...

...Behind the students' rebellion are the frustrations of exuberant young people for whom the past is a riddle and the future, at best, a vacuum...

...Over the years, despite retaliations and arrests (several of its members are still in jail), the Commissions continued to grow...

...Moreover, the nation's new labor law is being drafted without the participation of the workers, whose only voice, the Commissions, shall remain illegal...

...Having overcome all democratic illusions," declared a Labor Law of December 6, 1940, "union organizations are established by those who voluntarily mobilize themselves in their service, to constitute them and command them...

...The new or home-grown ideology has very little, if anything, to do with the illegal party and its limited field of operations...

...From the beginning it pledged itself to an authoritarian, "vertical" form of government, implemented by bosses whose devotion to the Right had been forged in the crucible of the Civil War...

...The real hazards of venturing into the continuing Spanish fray promise to remain theoretical, with intellectual pummelings awaiting any Western journalist who tries to "understand" the Spanish situation simply by referring to his pocket dictionary of Fascist and Communist terms...

...Eighty thousand Spaniards assembled for what the French newspaper Le Monde called "Madrid's biggest day of labor demonstrations since the end of the Civil War...

...Thus, 27 years after the Civil War, it is labor that is inspiring and leading the protests which have given rise to an amorphous movement known simply as "The Opposition...

...It is the sizable sums of money which America continues to pour into an economy whose foundations lie in a closed system...

...Like the clerics, the workers decided on a "peaceful and silent march" from their factories to the city limits...

...A number of political currents are rushing to the showdown like the waters of a spirited stream??leaping to and over each other, clashing, joining forces, eddying and parting again...

...But moved with the restiveness of the post-Civil War generation, the students go their passive elders one better...

...Or in the Glor-ieta del Retiro," a popular spot in Madrid's municipal park where band concerts are held and strollers abound...

...The nearly 200 people arrested included several of the 700 students who had staged a sympathy strike on the University campus, and two of the most prominent labor leaders, Camacho and Ariza...

...They are the dispossessed, they are the ones who are handed the crumbs of an unjust socio-economic system, not only in money, but in culture, in responsibility, in participation...

...The Marxist leader took it with deep gratitude, since there is no forum for labor ideas in the country...

...Today the labor issue is at the heart of the Spanish crisis for the simple reason that no other problem affects such a vast number of people so directly...

...We would meet at the corner of a stadium during a football game," says one of its leaders...

...and a wave of anti-Americanism so powerful that the words "capitalist" and "American" have become synonymous in literary, student and labor circles...

...Especially significant in the present ferment is the rise of the Catholic Left...

...Carmen Irizarry is author of the recent book, The Thirty Thousand: Modern Spain and Protestantism...

...The paragraph on Organization sindical in the Workers' Bill of Rights, for example, has been amended to provide for three separate groups: managers, technicians and workers??a provision which has struck a blow to the clandestine Workers' Commissions...

...Neither his human condition nor that of his children is changed...

...This may be difficult to understand...

...Even more confusing to the outsider, perhaps, are the tactical twists and turns of organizations thought to be to the right of center??beginning with the present Falange??admittedly in decline but vociferous and angry...

...If hatred of Marxism is still virulent in the National Movement, hysterical aversion to capitalism (in the halcyon days the Movement thought of itself as the "Third Force") pushes it so far left that Arriba, from front page to last, employs the vocabulary of the most extreme Communists...

...The Commissions were organized in factories and workshops...

...In a socio-economic capitalist system," reads a booklet printed and distributed clandestinely by a Workers' Commission, "there is no possibility of harmonizing [the interests of] the two opposing factions . . . Workers must understand that they form part of a world which has been shunted aside by capitalist society...

...Before long he finds himself crushed between inflation and the vertical order...

...We're working together...

...The number of Marxist and Socialist leaders who are ex-Falangists is high...