Manifesto and Program
After many decades of repression and resistance, the continuation of the fascist regime in our country has cultivated deeply rooted feelings and bonds of solidarity, which have been expressed in the most diverse ways. Today we see that this torrent of antifascist solidarity still exists; what does not exist is an organization to strengthen it, consolidate it and pass it on. That is why it is necessary to rebuild the International Red Aid!
The International Red Aid has a legendary history. It was born in the nineteen-twenties at the initiative of the Third International to confront a fascism that was then only in its infancy. Its leadership included antifascist women as well known as the German Clara Zetkin, the Italian Tina Modotti and the Russian Elena Stasova. The International Red Aid is therefore directly linked to the history of the international communist and antifascist movement, soon reaching a great development throughout the world and standing out in the political, legal and economic support given to all victims of repression, without ideological or party distinctions.
In Spain it developed after the Asturias insurrection of 1934, in order to face the harsh repression unleashed by the reaction and to obtain the release of the great number of prisoners it caused.
After the war it was dissolved by fascism and its militants were persecuted.
In 1975, driven by the PCE(r), there was a first attempt to refound it clandestinely. It was born tied to the struggle for amnesty, so decisive in that period, as a prominent component of the struggle against the Francoist reform. The Red Aid published its own bulletin «Solidaridad» and counted among its collaborators actors, doctors and nurses, lawyers and many other intellectuals and artists, as well as the relatives and friends of the victims of repression. Its experience lasted until 1981, since the police came down hard on its members, who were persecuted, arrested and tortured, and its propaganda apparatus seized.
It is not a matter of merely looking at the past, but at crucial moments such as the present we must take into account the legacy that historical memory offers us.
Other kinds of organizations were created which have carried out meritorious work for the amnesty of political prisoners, against torture, in defense of freedom of expression, etc. Those small (but numerous) groups are made up of friends, neighbors and relatives of the victim of repression and are very much conditioned by the specific reason that leads them to be formed.
All of them, despite the extraordinary value of their work, have had obvious limitations, since they are organizations that are either local, or partial, or confined to the humanitarian sphere. They are a sign of the dispersion and extreme localism of the solidarity movement, which must be brought to an end so that solidarity can spread.
We want to create an organization that forms an integral part of the resistance against fascism, a political organization, not only of denunciation but of struggle. The International Red Aid aims to strengthen and consolidate the solidarity groups that already exist, but in an organized way that offers continuity and is able to pass on the breath of solidarity to all victims of repression.
That task is indispensable today. We cannot settle for the movement as we have known it in recent years. We have to take a step forward because the tasks ahead of us (the return of the crudest expressions of fascism and the imperialist war) impose it on us.
We need an International Red Aid closely tied to the anti-imperialist struggles of the whole world, to the revolutionary movement of the working class and to the defense and recovery of all democratic rights and freedoms.
We cannot limit ourselves to forming one more platform specialized in campaigns, in merely agitational work, in such a way that it makes us lose the nature of our objective: to develop solidarity with the resistance, to organize the anti-repressive struggle in its permanent denunciation of state terrorism and fascism. That is why we always understand it as a priority to weave organization, to consolidate a broad solidarity network capable of facing repression.
Campaigns are for us a tool, not an end in themselves. Campaigns must therefore help us to extend our project and consolidate our positions.
To be an integral part of the antifascist resistance, we must put an end to the humanitarian tendency into which all solidarity organizations usually fall and, therefore, we must explain the origin, cause and nature of the repression we suffer, which is none other than the fascist regime that has ruled in Spain since 1936, and how to fight that repression.
The anti-repressive struggle is framed within a context of struggle against fascism. It is among our tasks to place the struggle against repression in its proper and profound political content, which leads us to take on and support certain minimum democratic demands and to become aware that we are one and the same part of the revolutionary movement as a whole.
Precisely because of its prominent role in the struggle against State terrorism, the International Red Aid radically distances itself from every practice contaminated by reformism, expressed through spontaneist, disorganized attitudes, detached from concrete objectives, which render every denunciation of the regime useless and harmless. Reformist practices that we are obliged to unmask and to liquidate from within the movement.
In short, we are raising the inevitable political character of the anti-repressive struggle. Solidarity with the prisoners, the denunciation of the State, the struggle against fascist terror simply cannot be carried out from an «apolitical» viewpoint, apart from the commitment that obliges us to bind ourselves to the resistance itself, because we are part of that resistance. The anti-repressive movement must be taken on as one more front of struggle of the popular and revolutionary movement as a whole.
The International Red Aid has the task of organizing broad popular sectors in the denunciation of fascism, of the increasingly fascistized character of «democratic» states and of the («legal» and «illegal») judicial, police or legislative instruments (economic and social ones too…) that they use to impose their plans of exploitation and oppression and to eliminate every outbreak of dissidence or protest. The International Red Aid must be a channel through which awareness is awakened among ever broader sectors of the population that, in this context, no one is free from repression.
For that very reason, we must dare to define the International Red Aid as an instrument that must be taken as a unifying force for broad popular sectors. For only if the International Red Aid is a unifying force, the anti-repressive arm of the popular movement, which effectively organizes and channels solidarity with the resistance, only then will the International Red Aid be able to unleash its full potential as a weapon of political denunciation; only then will it make sense when we say that the anti-repressive struggle must be conceived in a unitary way, breaking with sterile and paralyzing sectarianism, clarifying positions and capable of acting internationally, in a coordinated way.
Political prisoners play a fundamental role in every solidarity movement. But we must not treat them with victimhood and lament their situation; they must not become objects of devotion that can be used but whose views are not taken into account. It is our duty to ensure that revolutionary prisoners have their own voice within the movement, in the street.
As subjects, the prisoners continue to carry out their militant task. Among our main tasks is to demand and obtain their freedom, to tear them out of the prisons, but it must be essential to facilitate to the maximum the contact between the street and the inside of the prisons. The prisoner must also take part, like anyone else, in political debate, and we must guarantee that participation.
We must bear in mind the condition of «political prisoners» of the imprisoned revolutionary militants, and the demand for the recognition of that condition is part of the political battle that we must wrest from the State.
When we speak of organization we are aware of the particular characteristics that a movement like ours must have, which must in no case be centralized or bureaucratic but, on the contrary, broad, open to all kinds of people who wish to express their contribution in the most varied ways. The International Red Aid has to bring together members of all ideologies, without any distinction, because the regime is attacking all kinds of political and social movements: pro-independence, libertarian, communist, autonomist, pacifist, etc. All of them must be supported and all of them must have a place here to defend themselves. It is obvious that there are differences of all kinds among them, but what unites us is much deeper: we are fighting against the same fascist State, which we want to put an end to.
All those movements (and ourselves) are part of one and the same struggle and, consequently, we must actively commit ourselves to their defense and bind ourselves closely to all their initiatives.
That said, the International Red Aid depends on no one but itself. An organization with our characteristics must be governed by internal democracy, and our decisions must be taken in the meetings and assemblies we agree upon. It is there that we must discuss and adopt decisions democratically, without accepting interference from anyone.
Our strength will be our independence, without forgetting that this independence must be especially with respect to the fascist State, and that we cannot become a fashionable NGO, one of those that claim to fight when in reality they live off the subsidies with which the fascist State itself manipulates and bribes them. To guarantee our independence we accept no subsidies of any kind.
But the broadest democracy is not at odds with the closest union and coordination among all local and regional organizations, so that we all march in the same direction and towards the same objectives, for which the formation of a committee that directs the work, develops the organization and ensures the distribution of our publications is indispensable.
We are not a humanitarian group but a militant one. Our solidarity is political because, in the last instance, we do not defend the victims of repression but their consistent struggle through them. Our relationship with the victims of repression is not personal, because we are friends, neighbors or workmates; rather we try to defend what they represent, their activity, their commitment and their fighting and committed practice.
Furthermore, we try to be a unitary organization. But it is not a matter of sheltering as many collectives and sectors as possible, but of conceiving the role of the anti-repressive struggle as a unitary framework in which all those popular and revolutionary sectors must meet shoulder to shoulder in an antifascist and anti-imperialist perspective.
In this direction we must take the initiative of opening a broad debate among those sectors that carry out anti-repressive work, putting to them our proposals to gather forces and strengthen solidarity.
The need for an organization such as the one we propose also comes from the warmongering race that the great powers have undertaken for a new division of the world. Not long ago, from every media front, we were made to believe that after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp the cold war had ended and triumphant capitalism was a paradise of progress and well-being, of unequalled freedom and democracy.
No more than twelve years have passed and the economic crisis is being brutally unloaded onto the shoulders of the workers: mass layoffs, casualization of employment, wage cuts, longer working hours… All the scourges of capitalism are being accentuated and they will be even worse as the bourgeoisie aggravates them to pay for arms spending and war.
That same warlike perspective is what leads them to savagely repress the slightest dissent from their militarist plans and to imprison antifascists, communists, anarchists, patriots and anti-imperialists, all those people, collectives, organizations and parties that do not submit to the dictates of capital, nor to the ever greater fascistization of their States; those who cannot bear the hunger, the misery, the repression and the death that their actions cause among the immense majority of humanity.
Imperialism cannot tolerate the slightest consistent dissidence and, while they fight over a new division of the world with which to stay afloat amid their endemic crisis, they increase their arsenal of political, police and ideological and psychological counter-information repressive measures, with which they try to neutralize and, if they do not succeed, to crush the workers' and popular movement and its most combative and vanguard organizations in whatever part of the world.
When repression and armed aggression cross borders and become the axis of the policies of all capitalist states, we antifascists, anti-imperialists, anarchists and communists too, and in general the conscious workers, students, intellectuals and artists of the whole world, need to organize internationally to confront it.
The International Red Aid is essentially internationalist, although for this internationalism to be firm and fruitful it must be rooted in and based on the work carried out in each country. That is why it is indispensable that in each country we undertake a broad work of organization and denunciation.
It is not enough to denounce repression and to criticize what we do not want: if we are really going to be a political movement we have to offer an alternative of what we intend to achieve, a Program that defends and contributes to recovering democratic rights and freedoms, and for which we await all kinds of contributions. Only in this way will we gather the solidarity that is so dispersed today.
Immediate halt to war preparations. Withdrawal from NATO and the other aggressive military blocs. Defense of peace, disarmament and friendship among all the peoples of the world. Solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggles and defense of those who are persecuted for that reason. Exemplary punishment of war criminals. Dissolution of Europol and abolition of the European police and judicial space.
Amnesty for all political prisoners and a broad pardon for prisoners held for social causes. Elimination of the FIES regime and of prison isolation. Repeal of the Citizen Security Law, the Video-surveillance Law and other special laws; dissolution of the Audiencia Nacional, of the military courts and of the repressive bodies, as well as the demand for accountability from torturers and from those involved in the dirty war. Prohibition of fascist and racist organizations and press.
Right to self-determination for all oppressed peoples and nations. Freedom of expression, assembly, association and demonstration without prior authorization. Right of asylum and refuge for all those persecuted for their struggle against imperialism and capitalism. Full citizenship rights for immigrant workers.
Eradication of unemployment, prohibition of precarious work and reduction of the working day. Equality for working women. Benefits for all the unemployed. Decent and affordable housing. Right to occupy abandoned housing and land. Free-of-charge premises for the youth. Free and democratic education for all and repeal of the LOU. Dissolution of private and church-run education. Separation of Church and State, prohibition of subsidizing any religious denomination. Freedom of conscience and of religious practice without discrimination.
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