- A
Wrong Method
- Restating
Our Case
- The
Bolivian Test
- The
Strategy of Armed Struggle Under the Torres Regime
- Comrade
Moreno, Advisor of the POR
- The
Alleged Political Mistakes of the Bolivian Section
- The
Test of Argentina
- Our
Differences With the PRT
- The
Forgotten Peruvian Example
- A
Second Forgotten Example; China 1925-27
- Third
Forgotten Example, or How Comrade Camejo Rewrites the
History of the Cuban Revolution
- The
Experience of the Struggle Against Fascism
1.
A Wrong Method
The key mistake committed by
Comrade Hansen in the field of the method used for defining
strategical and tactical tasks, and at the same time one of the
main origins of the differences which have developed between the
majority and the minority of the United Secretariat and the IEC
of the Fourth International, is illuminated by the
following extract from Comrade Hansen’s above-named discussion
article:
“Let me repeat: There are
three main positions in the ‘great ideological debate’ (in
Latin America): (1) Those like the Stalinists, who believe in
or argue for the feasibility of a ‘parliamentary road’ to
power (2) The Trotskyists, who have been defending the
Leninist concept of party building and who have been
struggling to apply it; an outstanding instance being Hugo
Blanco. (3) Those under the influence of the Cubans
particularly, who advance the ‘strategy’ of armed struggle
in opposition to both the protagonists of a ‘parliamentary
road’ and the partisans of the Leninist concept.” (International
Information Bulletin, No.3, April 1971, p.35.)
It is methodologically wrong
and misleading to use the concept of Leninist party building as an
alternative in debates about key tactical and strategical
problems, posed by the development of the class struggle itself.
Just to indicate how wrong this is, let us enumerate a series of
such debates initiated in the history of the international
labour movement of the 20th century.
Since 1905, the revolutionary
movement in the underdeveloped countries has been split between
protagonists of the theory of the permanent revolution and those
who defend the thesis of the revolution by stages, a
bourgeois-democratic one having to be first completed before the
proletarian-socialist one can start. Should we refuse to line up
with the first as against the second, under the pretext that
there is a “third strategy,” the “Leninist strategy of
party building”?
Since 1914, the international
labour movement has been deeply divided on the attitude one
should adopt towards an imperialist war. Leninists defend the
strategy (or should one say: the tactics?) of revolutionary
defeatism. Reformists and centrists of all types say that it is
possible for the workers to defend their own imperialist
fatherland, provided that it isn’t the aggressor, that it is
politically more “progressive” than its competitor, etc.,
etc. Should we counter-pose a “third alternative” to the two
sides in that debate, the “Leninist strategy of party
building”?
Since 1917, the international
labour movement has been debating whether it is necessary to
destroy the bourgeois state machine and to build a higher type
of democracy, called soviet democracy, as the precondition for
the proletariat conquering state power and for capitalism being
overthrown, or whether parliamentary bourgeois democracy and its
state machine creates the necessary institutional framework for
overthrowing capitalism. Should we refuse to line up with the
first as against the second, under the pretext that there is a
“third strategy,” the “Leninist strategy of party
building”?
Since 1930, the revolutionary
movement has been deeply divided on what attitude it should
adopt towards a rising threat of a fascist dictatorship. Some
defend the position that it is necessary to ally with all
proponents of bourgeois democracy (including the bourgeois
parties and state) against the fascists. Others say that we
should be neutral in the fight between fascism and bourgeois
democracy, even concentrating the main attacks on the
“social-fascists,” i.e., the reformist, labour fakers.
Others again say that only a united front of all working class
organizations could, by extra-parliamentary mass mobilization
and action, crush fascism. Should we refuse to line up with that
third position, and counterpose another orientation to the three
main lines defended in the debate, “the Leninist strategy of
party building”?
Comrade Hansen’s method of
approaching the problem of armed struggle thus is wrong
threefold. In the first place, it fails to understand that the
problem of armed struggle in Latin America – like the problem
of permanent revolution, or of soviet VS. parliamentary
democracy, or of the united front tactics against fascism – is
not some “false dilemma” arising out of the heads of
misguided individuals, but a problem arising out of the
development of the class struggle itself, which requires an
answer from all revolutionists. You can be for or against, but
you can’t evade the issue by talking about something else. To
answer this question correctly, is of course not sufficient
to assure the victory of the revolution. Trotsky could formulate
the correct strategic answer for the revolutions in
under-developed countries, without fully understanding the
Leninist strategy of party building. The same thing was true for
not a few supporters of revolutionary defeatism during the first
and the second world wars, and for not a few supporters of the
concept of soviet power after 1917 throughout the world. But a
correct answer to these key strategic or tactical questions is
an indispensable prerequisite for a victorious
revolution. While it isn’t sufficient simply to apply the
theory of permanent revolution in a semi-colonial country to
guarantee victory, you can be sure you will not lead your class
to victory if you evade an answer to that key issue.
In the second place, it is
impermissible to detach the “strategy of party building”
from correct strategic and tactical political options. There is
no such thing as a “Leninist concept of party building”
separate and apart from programme, correct strategic orientation
and correct tactics. Those of the alleged “supporters of the
Leninist concept of party building” who, in February-April
1917, were ready to ally themselves with the Mensheviks and
didn’t understand the need to fight for soviet power, would
have led the Russian revolution to certain defeat. That is why
the Leninist strategy of party building, far from being
counterposed to the orientation towards armed struggle under
specific conditions in Latin America today, implies the need to
adopt that orientation. Without such an orientation, your
“Leninist strategy of party building” is in danger of
becoming what it did become in the hands of Kamenev, Molotov and
Stalin before February and April 1917: an obstacle and not a
motor on the road towards revolutionary victory.
In the third place, by
counterposing the Leninist strategy of party building to the
burning needs of the objective revolutionary struggle one does a
serious disservice to Leninism. In presenting party-building as
something separate and apart from the needs of the living class
struggle, we are thereby helping all opponents of Leninism, all
spontaneists and the like, to increase anti-Leninist confusions
and prejudices. When the need for a strike picket arises in a
strike, and the strikers are torn in a big debate between
advocates and opponents of that method of struggle, to come
along and shout that there is a “third position,” the
“Leninist strategy of party building,” will certainly not
help clarify the debate among the strikers. Nor will it help
recruit the best strikers to the nucleus attempting to construct
the revolutionary party.
So we can only restate with
force the position adopted in our November 1970 document. The
need to take an unequivocal stand in favour of the “method”
of armed struggle, never mind whether it is a “strategy” or
“tactic,” or “orientation,” hi the present period and
under specific circumstances in Latin America, arises out of the
very needs of the class struggle and the experiences of the
toiling masses themselves. To evade the issue by taking up a
“third position” does a disservice to the task of building
Leninist combat parties, which Comrade Hansen correctly wants to
place hi the centre of attention of the Latin American vanguard.
There was a tune when Comrade
Hansen himself understood this perfectly. In his article: The
OLAS Conference-Tactics and Strategy of a Continental Revolution
(ISR, November-December 1967), he wrote:
“The question of armed
struggle was thus taken at the OLAS conference as a decisive
dividing line, separating the revolutionists from the
reformists on a continental scale. In this respect it echoed
the Bolshevik tradition.” (p.5)
And on March 1, 1963, the
Political Committee of the SWP issued a statement under the
title: For Early Reunification of the World Trotskyist
Movement, which contained the following passage:
“Along the road of a
revolution beginning with simple democratic demands and ending
hi the rapture of capitalist property relations, guerrilla
warfare conducted by landless peasant and
semi-proletarian forces, under a leadership that becomes
committed to carrying the revolution through to a conclusion, can
play a decisive role in undermining or precipitating the
downfall of a colonial or semi-colonial power. This is
one of the main lessons to be drawn from experience since the
second world war. It must be consciously incorporated into
the strategy of building revolutionary Marxist parties in
colonial countries.” (Fourth International,
No.17, October-December 1963, p.71.)
One wonders why what was true
in the spring of 1963 and the autumn of 1967 ceased to be true
in spring 1969, not to say in spring 1971, and why Comrade
Hansen failed to answer Comrades Germain and Knoeller: in the
great debate between advocates and opponents of the strategy (or
tactics) of armed struggle, at present raging hi Latin America,
we line up with the first as against the second. In that sense
the Latin American resolution of the 9th World Congress served a
useful purpose, and echoes the Bolshevik tradition. Of course,
this does not end the question. It remains to precise how this
strategy ties in with the strategy of the permanent revolution,
with the need of organising the masses, with the building of
Leninist vanguard parties, etc. But while the method of armed
struggle is no panacea, it nevertheless remains a key question
which has to be answered and not to be evaded. A debate along
these lines would not have led to deep divisions in the
International. Comrade Hansen’s way of approaching it in 1971
– opposed to his approach of 1967 – could only widen the
differences.
2.
Restating Our Case
All kinds of useless red
herrings have been inserted into the discussion. We shall not
waste too much tune hi eliminating them. Everybody knows that
there exist opponents of the Leninist theory of organisation
(not only among the advocates of armed struggle). Everybody also
knows that there are still some proponents of the “foquista”
theory around. But objectively, those positions are not defended
by anybody inside the Fourth International, included the
Argentine Section. So it is useless to drag the red herrings of
“foquismo,” “guevarism,” fetishisation of
“rural guerilla warfare,” not to speak of the “strategy of
terrorism” into the discussion, because nobody is defending
these propositions inside the world Trotskyist movement. Let us
briefly summarise what the 9th World Congress resolution was all
about, and what has been stressed quite clearly in various
discussion articles since 1969 by its proponents.
Under the given circumstances,
with the given social and economic instability in Latin America,
the profound influence of the Cuban revolution on the vanguard
of the mass movement, the decline of control of the traditional
working class leaderships on that same vanguard, the explosive
character of mass mobilisations which lead to rapid
confrontations with the army, the emergence of the army as the
mainstay of bourgeois power, not only materially but also
politically, and its relative strength as opposed to the extreme
fragility of all political formations of the ruling classes, a
long period of gradual rise of mass struggles under conditions
of relative (be it decaying) bourgeois democracy is extremely
unlikely (except, as we said, in the case of Chile). The most
likely variant is that a head-on collision between that mass
movement and the arm is unavoidable after a short period of
emergence of mass explosions, a collision which could lead to a
prolonged civil war, if the mass movement isn’t crushed by
capitulation or disastrous defeats. Even if the enemy succeeds
momentarily in establishing a military dictatorship, such a
civil war could go on, temporarily take the form of guerilla
warfare, and help to overcome the lull in the mass struggles
after the partial defeat Whatever may be the various
combinations of forms of struggle, it is necessary to tirelessly
prepare the masses for such armed confrontations, which are
unavoidable, so that the workers and poor peasants should not
face the army without arms and without preparation.
There is nothing of a
generalised panacea in this analysis which is above all a
prognosis and a perspective. It does not apply to all countries,
regardless of time and space. It is not the final assessment of
a historic period. As long as there is no tumultuous rise of the
mass movement, obviously civil war is not on the agenda. As long
as our nuclei are so weak that they can’t exercise any
political weight inside the mass movement let alone help the
masses to arm themselves, it would be lunacy to start
“preparing for armed struggle.” Where the traditional
reformist petty-bourgeois or bourgeois leaderships still control
the mass movement, as in many semi-colonial countries, these
conclusions are also uncalled for. Where the decaying
bourgeoisie still rules essentially through bourgeois democratic
forms the analysis doesn’t apply either. It is specific to a
given phase in a given context, in Latin America and in the
present it only has practical applications in a few countries
for our movement. If and when this context changes, we shall
have to analyse this change and say so openly. For the time
being, there is no indication that it has.
Comrades of the minority hotly
deny that this was what the 9th World Congress resolution on
Latin America had in mind. They interpret that resolution as a
universal call to “rural guerilla warfare,” later partially
corrected into a call for “urban guerilla warfare.” Careful
study of the resolution itself does not support this contention
of the minority. There is no reason to deny that the 9th World
Congress resolution on Latin America contains several elliptical
and synthetic formulas on rural guerilla warfare and continental
civil war open to various interpretations, which try to
encompass too many different variants and successive stages of
struggle into a single sentence or a couple of sentences. That
resolution reflected an initial, and therefore insufficient
level of consciousness and of experience with a new problem with
which our movement was confronted on the field of practical
intervention. It would be surprising that this could have been
accomplished without over-simplications, exaggerations and
partial mistakes.
Under these conditions, there
is no purpose in pursuing the debate on “focism” and
“guevarism” which nobody defends inside the Fourth
International, instead of discussing the ideas of the majority
as they are expressed by the comrades speaking for the majority
itself. Wouldn’t it be more intelligent for the minority to
claim that it succeeded in having the majority change its
initial positions – which we would deny; for we don’t share
the minority’s interpretation of what the 9th World Congress
Latin American document was all about – and then comedown to
the task of debating the expressed and not the alleged positions
of the majority?
In order to go away from
sterile accusations and counter-accusations of an abstract
nature, it is necessary to analyse concretely the developments
in Argentina and Bolivia since the last world congress – the
only countries where the sections of the F. I. decided
themselves to apply the orientation of armed struggle before the
9th World Congress took its well-known stand – and determine
whether the evolution of the objective situation justified this
orientation or has shown it to be wrong. Although none of the
comrades who polemicise against the position adopted by the 9th
World Congress openly tried to refute this overall assessment,
we have, however, come across an attempt to question it in a
covert and indirect way.
Dealing with the analysis of
the economic developments in Latin America by Comrade Mandel,
Comrade Anibal Lorenzo of the La Verdad
(Moreno) group in Argentina, writes:
“These lost [two] years [in
Bolivia] are sufficient, I hope, to dispel the schemas
floating around about ‘growing repression,’ the
‘impossibility of using legal methods,’ Or the formula
that the Trotskyist theoretician Ernest Mandel, who commits
the same error, put forward in the February 1971 issue of Cuarta
International:
“‘But we must avoid any
illusion about a return to constitutional systems of classical
bourgeois parliamentary democracy, about any return to a
climate in which the mass movement could organise and broaden,
gradually, progressively and legally. This does not correspond
to the intentions or possibilities of the military reformist
regimes, or to the interests of the “new oligarchy” that
supports them.’
“For two years the
revolutionists fell into the opposite error to the one Mandel
warns against. The fact is that events more closely resembled
the classical model of Russia (!) than the guerrillista
scheme, with the decisive difference that there was no
Bolshevik party to offer a perspective for insurrection.”
(Anibal Lorenzo: The Lessons of Bolivia, International
Information Bulletin, No.3, July 1972, p.13.)
The “errors” allegedly
committed by our Bolivian comrades we shall deal with below. The
attempt, however, to equate the Russian revolutionary experience
with that of a “constitutional system of classical bourgeois
democracy” is certainly a novelty in Trotskyist literature.
The equation of two (!) years of legality in Bolivia – in
reality only a few months! – with such a period is a slight
exaggeration to say the least. But Comrade Lorenzo comes close
to falsifying Comrade Mandel’s article, largely because of his
inability to understand what we are discussing. For immediately
before the paragraph of Mandel’s article which he quotes
and immediately after that paragraph, the context in
which Mandel makes that point is specified, and this leads to a
quite different interpretation than that of Comrade Lorenzo.
Here is the text of these three paragraphs:
“No more does this mean
that the toiling masses and the revolutionary organisations
should be indifferent as to the precise forms taken by the
exploitation and the oppression they suffer. Every legal or
semi-legal possibility to do propaganda, agitation or to
organise the vanguard should be vigorously exploited, every
new reduction of democratic freedoms of the working class
organisations should be considered as an attack against the
whole movement, and vigorously fought against.
“But we must avoid any
illusion about a return to constitutional systems of classical
bourgeois parliamentary democracy, about any return to a
climate in which the mass movement could organise and broaden
gradually, progressively and legally. This does not correspond
to the intentions or possibilities of the military reformist
regimes, nor to the interests of the ‘new oligarchy’ that
supports them.
“... The perspective which
results from this analysis is that of a succession of
pre-revolutionary and revolutionary convulsions, cut by
temporary defeats and attempts by the Latin American
bourgeoisie to try to apply solutions of the ‘military
reformism’ type, but which after a certain time lead again
to new convulsions and new tests of strength. The building of
an adequate revolutionary leadership of the proletariat and
semi-proletariat of city and countryside is the only way out
of the impasse. More than ever this remains the central task.
The strategy of armed struggle, in close association with the
mass movement into which a growing rooting has to be achieved,
is the only way to build such a revolutionary party in the
present historical context of the majority of the countries of
Latin America.” (pp.40-41 in Cuarta International,
No.3.)
So the opposition between
Comrade Mandel’s analysis and Comrade Lorenzo’s does not
consist in Mandel’s alleged inability to understand the need
of exploiting legal opportunities, nor in his alleged inability
to link such opportunities with the rise of the mass movement at
a given stage, nor \ with his lack of concern for building the
party. The opposition hinges on Comrade Lorenzo’s lack of
understanding of the difference between a short legal
interlude of a year or two, between periods of rising or
declining military dictatorships, and a whole period of
“constitutional systems of classical bourgeois parliamentary
democracy” hi which the working class movement can organise
and grow gradually, progressively and legally. They hinge, in
short, on Comrade Lorenzo’s inability to understand the
qualitative difference between a bourgeois democracy – be it a
degenerate and decaying one – and a military dictatorship
(albeit a temporarily weakened one).
We know that in any country in
the world, bourgeois democracy today is constantly undermined by
repressive tendencies toward a “strong state.” We know that
the army and the police – civil war apparatus against the
workers – are constantly strengthened. We have no illusions in
a “peaceful” road to socialism anywhere, even under
conditions of the strongest bourgeois democratic traditions. But
it is one thing to say that there is only a relative and not an
absolute difference between decaying bourgeois democracy and a
weakened military dictatorship, and something different again to
deny that there is any significant difference between them
altogether.
The most astonishing statement
in this respect comes from Comrade Peter Camejo. In an article
sent to the discussion bulletin of our sympathising section in
Mexico, he wrote:
“It is one thing for us to
note and expose the brutal repression exercised by the
military dictatorship against the workers movement, its
attempts (!) to intervene in the trade union, its occasional
(!) direct intervention in a vanguard trade union. It is
something else again to lose sight of reality, of the fact
that it is easier to do revolution (!) work within the trade
unions of Argentina than hi most countries hi Latin America,
or Europe for that matter.” (p.7, Comments on Comrade
R’s Document, by Peter Camejo.)
Now if we understand this to
mean anything, Comrade Camejo has arrived at the point where he
seriously tries to defend the position that it is “easier”
to do “revolutionary” work hi the trade unions in a country
where there is a military dictatorship, where all the political
organisations of the left and the extreme-left including the
pro-Moscow CP (and the only exception of the Socialist Parties),
are illegal: where the army often intervenes in trade
unions whenever they elect a leadership considered as
revolutionary, to depose the elected leadership; where factories
like the FIAT factories hi Cordoba can be occupied by the army;
where elected trade union leaders can be put and held in jail
without trial for months if not years (as happened to Tosco);
where revolutionary trade union militants can be kidnapped hi
broad daylight, tortured and killed, as happened hi dozens of
cases denounced by the press of La Verdad group
itself. Obviously these things didn’t happen in Western Europe
in the last twenty years, except in countries like Spain,
Portugal or Greece. Comrade Hansen, who set out on a worthy
crusade against “ultra-leftism,” should seriously ponder how
that disease now suddenly springs up among his closest allies,
in the form of the thesis that it is “easier” to do
revolutionary work in the trade unions under a military
dictatorship than under conditions of bourgeois democracy. As we
obviously desire to do our revolutionary work in the unions
under the “easiest” possible conditions, shouldn’t we then
actually welcome the establishment of military dictatorships of
the Lanusse type, according to this typically ultraleft logic?
3.
The Bolivian Test
The Bolivian case is the
clearest confirmation of our thesis that under present
conditions in Latin America, no protracted period of bourgeois
democracy is possible. Whenever an impetuous rise of the mass
movement occurs, and the vital question for this movement is to
prepare for armed struggle against the inevitable and short-term
attempt of the army to crush it.
When General Torres took power
under conditions of rapid development of mass mobilisations and
activity, this expressed undoubtedly a temporary retreat of the
right-wing forces in the army who had tried to take power under
General Miranda. The rise of the mass movement had divided the
army. The main task for the ruling class was now to gain some
time in order to reunify the army. During this “democratic
interlude,” the mass movement was to be held in check by some
concessions. Torres was to fulfill that function, till the army
was ready to strike its blow.
The Bolivian section of the Fourth
International, which had begun to prepare its cadres for
armed struggle during the period of the Barrientos dictatorship,
and had centered its orientation towards guerilla warfare under
that dictatorship, understood the necessity of making a turn as
soon as the Ovando dictatorship allowed a semi-legal margin for
working class activities. It started to publish a semi-legal
paper, repenetrated the unions, and raised a whole series of
appropriate demands like: release of the political prisoners,
re-establishment of full trade-union freedom, recuperation of
all houses and properties of the COB, re-establishment of the
miners’ wages of 1965 (which had been severely cut by the
Barrientos dictatorship), creation of a representative organ of
all the working class organisations. The party was however still
illegalised by the regime, some of its main leaders in prison
(they were to be released only in October 1970, when the masses
stormed the prisons), some of them, together with
representatives of other working class tendencies even being
submitted to torture.
When Torres took over from
Ovando in October 1970, the Bolivian section became legal.
During the 10 months of the Torres regime – the only period of
fully legal working class upsurge since the Pas Estenssoro
repression of 1964 – the FOR explained that the army was only
tolerating large-scale working class activities temporarily, and
that a military coup to crush the mass movement was being
feverishly prepared:
“While the army, confronted
with the mobilisation of the workers, authorised General
Torres to organise the government in October (1970), with the
task of putting a brake upon the masses and disarming them
politically, this mission has now failed, and therefore the
armed forces have decided to change Torres and to return to a
policy of the strong hand. The situation of the Torres
government is very precarious. It does not enjoy the support
of the army neither can it count upon the support of the
masses which have been defrauded ...
“For that reason we declare
that the revolutionary process in Bolivia is confronted with
two dangers. On the one hand there is the threat of a fascist coup,
nourished by the yankee embassy and by the Argentine and
Brasilian dictatorships, a coup which is being
prepared by the divisions of the Bolivian army. On the other
hand there is military and civilian reformism, which tries to
lull the masses to sleep, and which has transformed itself
into an obstacle to the triumph of the revolution.” (Appeal
of the FOR on May Day 1971 – Combate new
series, No.5, first fortnight of May 1971.)
This was the constant theme of
all the FOR interventions from then on till the August coup;
to warn the workers that the coup was impending, was
inevitable, and that the workers had to organise immediately
against that danger.
The political line of the FOR,
while encompassing a whole series of immediate and transitional
demands (including a whole programme for agrarian revolution),
was centred around three key demands:
- Transformation of the
Popular Assembly into a real power organ of the workers and
toiling people, through the establishment of local
assemblies (i.e., Soviets), which would elect the delegates
to the national assembly and could recall them.
- Immediate arming of the
workers and the peasants.
- Extension of the
revolutionary process of the countryside
The cohesion of this line was
convincing, and confirmed by events. Cut off from rank-and-file
assemblies in the towns, neighborhoods, factories and mines, the
Popular Assembly remained a purely consultative assembly, as
Torres visualised it, without real power and without expression
of the revolutionary will of the masses. Without the arming of
the masses, it could be swept away by the coup which
was being prepared by reaction. And without the extension of the
revolutionary process to the countryside, the revolutionary
proletariat of the mining areas and of La Paz was in danger of
remaining isolated and being defeated in the armed confrontation
with reaction, which was visible on the horizon.
What was the alternative to
this correct orientation of our Bolivian section? It was the
orientation followed by the reformists and centrists of the
pro-Moscow CP, or Lora and of Lechin, who concentrated entirely
upon endless debates on statutes, regulations and paper
resolutions, including the composition of the management bodies
of the nationalised tin mines of COMIBOL – whether the workers
should be represented with 50 or 51% of members on that body –
but completely neglected the question of arming the proletariat
and the poor peasants. Another characteristic of this reformist,
spontaneistic and syndicalist approach to the question of power
was a total neglect of the agrarian revolution.
It is true that the Popular
Assembly voted a resolution about a clandestine
“preparation” of workers’ militias; but this was a paper
resolution pure and simple, without a single step taken towards
its implementation.
What was the political kernel
of such criminal passivity, in the light of the open
preparations for a reactionary coup by forces of the
army? Lora’s main lieutenant, Escobar, more honest and more
cynical than his leader, has expressed it clearly in the first
issue of the Lora paper Masas which appeared
after the defeat in Santiago de Chile:
“In October 1970, the
working class occupied the political scene without arms, as a
simple mass. From that moment on, it was clearly understood
that in order to be able to win against the gorillas
[the putchist generals] it was necessary to put a gun in the
hands of the politicised workers. And from then on it was
commonly assumed – including by us Marxists (!) –
that the ruling military team would distribute the arms,
given the fact that it could at least neutralise the right
wing gorillas by basing itself on the masses and
giving to them an adequate firing capacity.” (La
Contrarrevolucion de Agosto de 1971, p.8 in Masas,
No.400, September 1971 issue.)
Escobar’s “honesty” does
not go far enough, of course, to admit that the POR
(Combate) did not share these illusions of so-called
“Marxists,” and constantly had called the masses to
immediately arm themselves, warning them not to expect any arms
from the Torres government.
What was the position adopted
at that time by the comrades who today so severely criticise the
policy of our Bolivian section? One can read La Verdad;
one will note that the necessity to arm the Bolivian workers and
peasants immediately in order to oppose the impending
counterrevolutionary coup was hardly mentioned, if it was
mentioned at all. Great importance was attached to the internal
debates of the Popular Assembly, great stress laid on this, the
“first soviet of Latin America,” in the Lora-Lambertist
style of declamation, without taking into consideration the fact
that an unarmed consultative and powerless
“assembly” without any representative rank and file bodies
capable of mobilising the masses, instantaneously and
transferring the masses’ revolutionary energy to it, facted
with in addition an imminent reaction coup, could hardly be
called a “soviet,” and that the question of immediately
getting arms for the workers was the key question of overriding
importance, much more important than the establishment of
Assembly statutes, or the proposals for the composition of the
Comibol management board.
In an attempt to evade this key
issue, Comrade Lorenzo, writing for the La Verdad
group immediately after the August 1971 coup goes into the
lengthy development about the work inside the army. He agrees,
he says, with our rejection of the Lora-type “spontaneous
insurrection perspectives.” But he then counterposes to that
“spontaneistic insurrection perspective” of Lora the
perspective of insurrection based essentially on work inside the
army. Here is the relevant part of his thesis:
“On the other hand, the
October insurrection planned and led by Lenin and Trotsky
ended by installing the first socialist government. In order
to achieve this, the Bolshevik party did not limit itself to
propaganda on the need for an armed insurrection but
formulated a programme and a policy of carrying out the
uprising based on the mass organisations. In this programme
and policy, work in the army was decisive ...
“This activity which,
strictly speaking, is the conscious preparation for arming the
people and for the uprising, was completely ignored by the
propagandists of insurrection. Unfortunately, it was also
neglected by the guer-illists, who saw working in the army
only as another stage and another front in their ‘prolonged
war’.” (The Lessons of Bolivia, by Anibal Lorenzo
– International Information Bulletin, July
1972, p.13.)
The truth of the matter is that
armed workers militias – Red Guards – emerged from the
February revolution, essentially organised by Bolshevik vanguard
workers, long before there was any talk about “armed
insurrection.” It was these Red Guards who, together with the
direct election of the Soviets by the workers, soldiers and
peasants, gave the Soviets the fundamental nature of real dual power
organs. The disintegration of the Tsarist army was in the first
place the result of the imperialist war and not of the Bolshevik
propaganda in the army; this propaganda played an important role
only in the final stage previous to the October insurrection. To
believe that without Soviets, without already decisive weight of
revolutionists inside them; and without the existence of armed
workers and poor peasants militias, “propaganda inside the
army” – always necessary of course – is the key next step
forward, or even the decisive factor to prepare armed
insurrection, is really to put priorities upside down.
Trotsky had something very
precise to say about people who hide behind the need to develop
revolutionary propaganda inside the army in order to deny in
practice the necessity of immediately starting to arm the
workers, in order to postpone the setting up of workers
militias till a later stage:
“It would be puerile,
however, to believe that by propaganda alone the whole army
can be won over to the side of the proletariat and thus in
general make revolution unnecessary. The army is heterogeneous
and its heterogeneous elements are chained by the iron hoops
of discipline. Propaganda can create revolutionary cells in
the army and prepare a sympathetic attitude among the most
progressive soldiers. More than this propaganda and agitation
cannot do. To depend upon the army defending the workers’
organisations from fascism by its own initiative and even
guaranteeing the transfer of power into the hands of the
proletariat is to substitute sugary illusions for the harsh
lessons of history. The army in its decisive section can
go over to the side of the proletariat in the epoch of
revolution only in the event that the proletariat itself will
have revealed to the army in action a readiness and ability to
fight for power to the last drop of blood. Such struggle
necessarily presupposes the arming of the proletariat.”
(War and the Fourth International, p.323 in
Leon Trotsky’s Writings 1933-34 –
Our stress.)
We see that Trotsky reverses
the priorities as developed by Comrade Lorenzo. The arming of
the workers and the poor peasants, far from being “prepared”
by “propaganda inside the army,” creates the necessary
preconditions for such successful propaganda, at least on a mass
scale. Indeed, if there are no armed militias of the toilers,
the first symptoms of independent soldiers’ committees
appearing in the army might very well become the immediate
signal for the counter-revolutionary coup, as the enemy
understands perfectly that the army is his last-ditch defence
line before a victorious revolution. This is precisely what
happened in Bolivia, as it happened hi Brazil before.
Trotsky draws a very clear
conclusion from this reasoning:
“A revolutionary party must
take upon itself the initiative in arming fighting workers’
detachments. And for this it must first of all cleanse itself
of all sorts of skepticism, indecision and pacifist reasoning
in the question of arming the workers.” (Ibid.,
p.323.)
4.
The Strategy of Armed Struggle Under the Torres Regime
Comrade Lorenzo’s article,
which also completely underestimates the need for the immediate
arming of the workers and poor peasants during the Torres Interregnum,
and substitutes for it propaganda in the army, presents the
policy of the POR-Combate as if it continued to prepare
guerilla warfare in isolation and thereby “lost two valuable
years.” This is a complete travesty of the truth. During the
Torres interval our Bolivian section did not call for
“rural guerilla warfare.” They called for the immediate
arming of the masses. The already cited May-Day Appeal of the POR
(Combate) new series No.5) says in that respect:
“Let us not fool ourselves.
The innumerable massacres have taught us a lesson. On the
basis of that experience, the POR calls upon all the
workers, on this first day of May, to organise their armed
pickets, their proletarian and peasant regiments. In each
factory, in every mine, in every peasant community, in the
Universities, it is necessary to organise armed detachments,
which will be the embryos of the Revolutionary People’s
Army. Only in this way shall we definitively crush the
fascists in the crisis which they prepare, while at the same
time we shall assault the positions of the capitalist regime.
Only in that way will the revolution triumph, opening the road
to the building of socialism.”
The same issue of Combate,
the organ of our Bolivian section, carries a special article on
the organisation of armed detachments at trade union level
against the fascist threat. These were no isolated incidents.
The whole agitation of the POR in the months prior to
the Banzer coup were centred around these slogans.
Nor did the Bolivian section
limit itself to literary propaganda and agitation on this field.
It started to take initiatives in order to implement that
line. In the Food Workers Union of La Paz, where our
comrades had important influence, an armed youth guard was set
up. Comrade Tomas Chambi, member of the Central Committee of the
POR, was elected responsible for setting up an armed
guard by the Peasant Federation of Pacajos and accomplished this
task (this was the only armed peasant detachment which would
come to La Paz and fight alongside the workers on August 21,
1971). Another member of the Central Committee of the POR,
was put in charge of organising an armed militia by the miners
union of Huanuni. In the province of Santa Cruz our comrades
participated with other left-wing forces in the armed occupation
of land carried out by several thousand peasants. In the La Paz
province, attempts of a similar type began to be undertaken.
Comrade Lorenzo’s above
quoted article was written immediately after the Banzer coup. It
appeared first in the magazine of the La Verdad
group, Revista de America (July, October 1971
issue). It seems he has had second thoughts, for a year later,
as author of the draft of the part on Bolivia of the minority
document Argentina and Bolivia – The Balance
Sheet submitted to the December 1972 IEC, he puts in a lot
of words about the need of setting up armed militias. It is of
course always pleasing to see a comrade, albeit belatedly,
becoming converted to correct ideas. What is lacking however in
this part of the Lessons of Bolivia is an essential
element of the truth: to wit that the POR (Combate) not
only had defended that same line 18 months earlier (when it was
necessary to defend it) but had also started to apply it in
practise.
Instead of that simple fact, we
are served with the following piece of suppression of evidence
and distortion:
“In spite of the course of
the class struggle in Bolivia, the POR (Gonzales)
held stubbornly to its position that a socialist revolution
would occur only via rural guerilla warfare. Disregarding all
the evidence before their eyes, our Bolivian comrades remained
steadfast supporters of the line adopted at the Ninth World
Congress a line that had ruled out almost everything happening
around them (an urban insurrection, a reformist regime, open
trade union work, the possibility of legal preparations,
etc.).
“... As they visualised the
coming sequence, Torres would fall and then would come the
real struggle for power, that is, rural guerilla warfare on a
new and higher plane, since the successor to Torres would be
the most brutal dictator yet seen in the country. This was
their real perspective. That was why they were so preoccupied
with building some kind of military apparatus separate and
apart from the mass organizations.” (International
Internal Discussion Bulletin, January 1973, p.21.)
In the light of the above
quotations and facts, comrades can judge for themselves what a
caricature these paragraphs present of the real position adopted
by our Bolivian section. It is simple nonsense to say that
during the Torres regime they were preparing “rural guerilla
warfare”; they were preparing and had started to organise
workers and peasants’ militias. They were doing open trade
union work and had conquered in a few months time important
positions in this field. They were publishing legal newspapers,
legal leaflets, organising legal meetings of the party.
Especially they were warning the masses day after day that
Torres would be overthrown by the right-wing, if the workers did
not follow the party’s call to arm themselves. What remains of
this whole misrepresentation by Comrade Lorenzo is the fact that
the comrades of the POR (Combate) were indeed
“preoccupied with building some kind of military apparatus.”
This “military apparatus” of the POR, small as it
was was one of the few existing in La Paz when the
right-wing struck. To it was confided the guard of the COB
headquarters on the night of August 20, 1971. It was this
apparatus which led the masses to storm the arsenal, to get
whatever arms were ready. People who still believe that you can
“improvise” military combat in a spontaneistic way can crack
cheap jokes about a “military apparatus.” The workers of La
Paz rather appreciated its existence on August 20 and 21, 1971.
They could only regret that it was not bigger and that they had
not understood the importance of such preparations earlier. They
seem to have learned their lesson since. Only Comrade Lorenzo
hasn’t learned that lesson yet.
Comrade Gonzales, drawing the
conclusions from the failure of the reformists and the centrists
to arm the workers and from the weakness of our party which
couldn’t all by itself compensate the failures of most of the
other working class parties, indeed predicted that under these
conditions Torres’ defeat was the more likely variant. Events
have proved him to be right, alas. In case of that defeat,
Comrade Gonzales was sure that the Bolivian working class would
not be crushed, that the struggle would continue, and that the
lessons would be drawn to step up military preparations. In this
too, events proved him to be rather right. But it is completely
misleading to present things as if the POR (Combate)
refused to conceive the possibility of a struggle for power
under the more favourable conditions of the Torres regime, i.e.,
“preferred” in a certain sense the dictatorship which would
open up the road for “extended guerilla warfare.” This type
of slander of Stalinist origin should not be developed in the
Fourth International discussion documents, whatever may be the
heat of the debate. The POR (Combate) did everything it
could to prepare the workers for the fight against the impending
coup. To blame Banzer’s victory and our comrades alleged
orientation towards “rural guerilla warfare” and to affirm
that their policy led to a “disaster” completely distorts
the historical record based on the POR’s writings and
actions between October 1970 and August 1971.
Comrade Lorenzo tries to
involve us too in the presumed “mistaken political analysis”
of the Torres period. He quotes a sentence of the article which
we wrote together with Comrade Martine Knoeller in November
1970, and in which we warn the Bolivian workers that in spite of
the fact that General Torres came to power “with the support
of the left,” the army would try to crush the masses as soon
as it had re-established its unity. We warned the workers not to
expect a protracted period of bourgeois democracy, but to
prepare themselves for an immediate armed confrontation with the
enemy. Nine months later this confrontation actually occurred.
The fact that the army was united not by General Torres but by
General Banzer is of absolutely secondary importance. What we
understood was that there was only a short time left to prepare
for armed confrontation, and that the workers should have
prepared for this. We didn’t write a word about “rural
guerilla warfare,” but about the need to prepare the masses
for this confrontation. The POR (Combate) didn’t say
a word about “rural guerilla warfare,” but likewise called
upon the masses to arm themselves against the incoming
semi-fascist onslaught. In that sense, we were armed, and the
Bolivian POR was armed, by the 9th World Congress
resolution on Latin America, – which is the best proof of the
fact that this resolution far from projecting a universal line
of “rural guerilla warfare,” prepared all those willing to
listen to the key importance of taking initiatives in the
direction of armed struggle in all those forms made necessary
and possible by the development of the class struggle itself.
5.
Comrade Moreno, Advisor of the POR
Comrade Lorenzo and the other
authors of the minority document submitted to the December 1972
IEC heap heavy irony and scorn on the “rural guerilla
warfare” and the “civil war on a continental scale” line
of the ELN and allegedly of the POR (Combat) too. They
make the “orientation towards rural guerilla warfare”
responsible for the (undemonstrated) political mistakes of the POR
(Combat) during the Ovando and Torres regimes, and even for
the defeat which the revolution suffered in August 1971. The
application of the guerilla warfare line was undertaken by the POR
during the Barrientos dictatorship. In the final year of that
dictatorship, in 1968, Comrade Moreno had the following to say
about the “strategy of armed struggle in Bolivia” (yes,
Comrade Hansen: Moreno wrote about the strategy and not
the tactics of armed struggle):
“In the past, we had posed
the question of power in Bolivia insisting on the need that
the trade unions, the COB and the workers and peasant militias
take power defeating the national army or preventing its
rearmament. Today this isn’t possible anymore. Even if it
took a much paler aspect, the same was applied in all the
other [Latin American] countries. The way in which we posed
the question of power in countries like Chile, Argentina,
Brazil or Uruguay was through the demand that the trade union
organisations or the working class parties should organize the
armament of the proletariat and the conquest of power. This
was a tactical variant of the well-known strategy of the
workers and peasants government. It was a nationally
institutionalised way of posing the question of power, through
the great recognised organisations of the mass movement: the
trade unions.
“The deterioration of the
economic situation, and the generalised impossibility – with
some exceptions – of defending or conquering the most
minimal economic demands, leads or is leading the traditional
trade union organisations to become more and more discredited.
On the other hand, yankee imperialism, united with the
strongest sectors of the bourgeoisie, creates bonapartist
governments, supporting themselves upon the national armies
and repressive forces, in order to prevent anything of this
type from happening. Among these repressive forces are to be
included the whole weight of the repressive apa-ratus of
yankee imperialism itself, ready to intervene directly when
these repressive forces are insufficient, as in the case of
Santo Domingo. In front of this situation, the problem of
power as well as the problem of the development of organs of
dual power and of the conquest of power, has to be posed in
different terms.
“With the Cuban revolution,
and more precisely with changed policy of yankee imperialism
(escalation in Vietnam), a new phase of the class struggle has
opened in our continent: there are no more possibilities of
the conquest of power on a national scale. There are at the
present moment no more possibilities for a socialist
Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala or Mexico. This
does not mean that the case of Santo Domingo, with a popular
and working class insurrection taking power and defeating a
national army, cannot repeat itself. Such a possibility
remains open. What is impossible during this stage, in which
yankee imperialism will intervene with all its might to crush
that variant, is the defence of power in the urban centers. It
flows from there that the organisation and development of
workers power transforms itself, through whatever variant, in
the problem of armed struggle, of winning the population,
especially the peasants and the workers, for armed struggle.
“By its very nature, such
an armed struggle will be unable to respect frontiers and will
tend to transform itself in a front of continental civil war.
If in the past the trade-union was our organisational vehicle
for posing the question of power, today OLAS, with its
national combat organisations for armed struggle, is the only
organisational vehicle for power. We state this, because the
democratic or transitional slogans for the struggle for power:
Constituent Assembly, workers and peasant government, workers
federation with Cuba, transform themselves into
petty-bourgeois declamatory demands, if they are not
accompanied by a concrete dynamic of revolutionary struggle in
order that specific class organs might take power.”
“In the simplest way we
would say that the transitional demands for power of
revolutionary Marxism are always combined with a way of posing
dual power, of supporting and developing organs of workers
power, for the destruction of organs of bourgeois power. Lenin
said: ‘Constituent Assembly,’ and together with this
‘All power to the Soviets.’ We have said: ‘All power to
the CGT’ together with ‘Constituent Assembly.’ In
Bolivia we said: ‘All power to the COB.’ When the slogans
of power become separated from this way of conceiving dual
power, they transform themselves into reformist slogans, and,
in the best of cases, into super-propagandist slogans.
“Which revolutionary class
organs do we propose today to take power, to combine them with
‘Constituent Assembly, Down with the reactionary
governments, Federation with Cuba, etc.?’ The
trade-union organisations as in the past? We think
categorically no! The organisational class dynamics for
power concretises itself in: All power to the ELN in
Bolivia, to the FALN in Venezuela, and so on in the same
way. As long as there is no armed struggle in a given Latin
American country, the organisational power dynamics can be
formulated in a propagandistic way on the basis of the same
themes: a continental civil war, let us prepare the armed
struggle; long live OLAS and its armed struggle, etc.,
combined with the other power demands.” (La Revolucion
Latin Americana, Argentina y nuestras Tareas; 1) La Situacion
Mundial p.12 – Our stress.)
If the 9th World Congress
document really had the perspective of generalised “rural
guerilla warfare” and of “civil war on a continental
scale” in 1969, the least one can say is that Comrade
Moreno’s 1968 document was its great predecessor. As always
when he makes a turn, Comrade Moreno makes it all the way. One
will look in vain, even in the most “ultraleft” documents of
the international majority, not to speak of the Bolivian
comrades, for such extreme formulas as the one which makes even
the most “minimal” economic concessions of the bourgeoisie
impossible (our Bolivian comrades, under Ovando, were calling
for the re-establishment of the 1965 wage for the miners, and
after the October 1970 mobilisation this was actually achieved).
One will look in vain for even the most diabolic
“guerillists” in the ranks of the Fourth International
repeating in 1968 Comrade Moreno’s wisdom that the unions were
in a process of becoming “discredited.” Our Bolivian
comrades were calling for the re-establishment of free trade
unions and the recuperation of their buildings and property at
the same time Comrade Moreno proclaimed unions to be going out
of business.
Indeed one might ask oneself
whether the lengthy and impassioned polemics which the minority
document Argentina and Bolivia - The Balance Sheet,
submitted to the December 1972 IEC, unfolds against the
partisans of “universal rural guerilla warfare” as the
“only road to socialist revolution,” is directed at all
against the Bolivian and the Argentine sections of the FI, not
to say the international majority and the 9th World Congress
Latin American document – which of course never defended such
absurd positions – or whether this polemic is not in fact the
way in which the authors of the first draft of that document,
Comrades Moreno and Lorenzo, choose to atone for their own past
deadly sins, and present to the startled world Trotskyist
movement a thorough self-criticism – without unfortunately
mentioning the real culprits of the wrong positions they
demolish.
But there is more to come. In
his 1968 article La Revolution Latinoamericana, Argentina Y
Nuestras Tareas (The Latin American Revolution,
Argentina and Our Tasks), Comrade Moreno furthermore
develops the following detailed analysis of the prime importance
of rural guerilla warfare in Bolivia, not only for the Bolivian
but even for the Argentine revolution:
“The historical importance
of the beginning of armed struggle in Bolivia demands from us
a careful analysis and redoubled activity under this
perspective. We should default as Marxists if we would not
start from a concrete analysis of the present reality. The
death of Che has been a grave blow for the armed struggle, but
it hasn’t crushed it, and it has no more suppressed the
group which started it. Inti Peredo and his heroic
comrades survive and continue to fight: they are already in
fact the new leadership and power organisation of the Bolivian
proletariat and masses. On all the walls of Bolivia you
can read the following slogan: Inti will no die. This
concrete, decisive, fundamental fact is the first one which we
have to take into consideration when examining the Bolivia
situation. Any theoretical-political document which doesn’t
put this fact first, and doesn’t consider it fundamental is
a real disaster.... It would be intellectual and sectarian
pedantry elevated to its extreme degree. Inti and his group
survive, like Fidel and his group survived at that moment
[after the Granma landing], and no Marxist analysis of the
reality of the southern part of our continent, of our country
and of Bolivia is possible, if it doesn’t start from this
decisive, categorical, concrete and immediate fact, known by
all ...
“It follows that the first
task of all Latin American revolutionists in this moment, the
first task of OLAS as the only organization capable of
conducting armed struggle, of our party as part of OLAS in a
country bordering on Bolivia, is to first save and then
consolidate the ELN and Inti as its undisputed leader. There
is no more urgent task than this.
“To save Inti is our
principal tactical task; to develop the armed struggle in
Bolivia is our principal strategic task as Trotskyists. We
must demand that our International, and especially the whole
Trotskyist movement of Latin America concentrates itself on
Bolivia. All conditions work in favour of this continuation of
the Bolivian armed struggle: a crisis of the economy without
any way out; the crisis of the bourgeoisie; radicalisation of
the urban petty-bourgeoisie and growing discontent of the
peasantry as a result of the new taxes imposed by the
Barrientos government; revolutionary disposition of struggle
by the mining and factory proletariat. Subjective conditions
conspire against this: the parties which adhere to OLAS
continue to be weak and disorganised; there is no programme
for struggle which reflects the needs of the masses. All this
is important, but in this given moment, it is abstract. What
is urgent and fundamental is the need to save Inti and his
group, the ELN, beginning to create a movement rooted in the
mass movement which saves him and allows the ELN to develop.
“...Our responsibility is
of the first magnitude. Without the direct intervention of
ourselves and our international we shall not be able to play a
role of prime magnitude, to save Inti and develop the ELN. A
single young comrade of ours, very young and without
experience, has played and is still playing a role of prime
magnitude. Several much more capable comrades could do a lot!
With that goal, the party must intervene with everything:
money, middle cadres, logistic support from the limiting
provinces for the Bolivian armed struggle. Enough talk! Let
us intervene urgently in the armed struggle in Bolivia, key of
our own revolution.” (Le Revolution Latinamericana,
Argentina y Nuestras Tareas, Capitulo Quinto: Nuestras
Tareas, pp.1-2) (our stress.)
It is not necessary to continue
these quotes. They prove beyond any doubt that under the
Barrientos dictatorship in 1968, Comrade Moreno gave our
Bolivian section the advice to put itself completely under the
command of the ELN and its “undisputed leader,” who were
conducting a typical foquista form of rural guerilla
warfare. He saw this foco as a decisive factor not only
for the Bolivian but even for the Argentine and the whole Latin
American revolution. He wanted to subordinate everything to
develop the ELN struggle in Bolivia.
Three years later in 1972,
Comrades Lorenzo/Moreno, discovering the urban mass upsurge of
the Bolivian proletariat, gave our Bolivian section the opposite
advice to launch itself immediately into an urban struggle for
power:
“On May 1 a Popular
Assembly in which the working class movement has a majority
representation was inaugurated in Bolivia. This fact has an
enormous importance. It is the expression of the dual power
which prevails in Bolivia. On the one side there is the
government of Torres and on the other side there is the
working class. For that reason we find it strange that the
ELN, which has not started to organise urban actions, is of
the opinion that the ‘workers parliament,’ desired by the
trade unionists and the left parties, ‘only serves to
contain or deviate the revolutionary process’.” (La
Opinion, 8/5/71, p.31)
This shows no understanding of
the contradictory nature of the phenomenon. It is not exagerated
to compare the appearance of the Popular Assembly with that of
the Soviets which emerged during the Russian Revolution. These
Soviets were, like the Popular Assembly in Bolivia, products of
the revolutionary upsurge. That is the decisive fact. Torres had
to “impose” this resolution upon himself, independently of
the fact that the hegemony which the most bureaucratized or
reformist elements exercise (over the Assembly) allow him to
continue his bonapart-ist game. The present situation in Bolivia
is very similar to that of Russia, when the Bolsheviks were in a
minority in the Soviets and the Mensheviks and
Social-Revolutionaries capitulated shamelessly before the
Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie first, or Kerensky
afterwards.
“Nobody would dare to say
today that the Soviets of that period ‘only served to
contain or deviate the revolutionary process.’ Their
capacity to precise this phenomenon allowed Lenin and Trotsky
to acquire a policy for the conquest of power. It is clear
that neither Lechin nor Lora are the Lenin and Trotsky of the
Bolivian revolution. And if things would depend upon them, all
power would never pass into the hands of the workers. But it
is important to see how the Popular Assembly could become a
useful medium through which the real revolutionaries could
give impetus to the process towards this fundamental goal.
“It is evident that the
existence of the Popular Assembly alone does not guarantee the
fulfillment of this task. The absence of a real revolutionary
party, like the Russian Communist Party, is a powerful
obstacle in favour of Torres and Co. Historical experience
shows how highly explosive processes can become deviated or
frustrated....
“...This danger likewise
exists in Bolivia, for sure. But it would be criminal if,
while being conscious of this aspect, we should refuse to
recognise that the present legalisation of the Popular
Assembly represents an extraordinary triumph of the toiling
masses which has to be deepened till all power is conquered.
The general situation in Latin America contributes to this
perspective, independent of the efforts of Lechin and Co. for
maintaining the process within the limits accepted by the
Torres government. It is in this way that revolutionists
should see the Bolivian panorama. Using sectarian blinkers can
only help the opportunists.” (La Verdad,
May 12, 1971)
There is indeed a 180 degree
turnabout. No more all power to the ELN, but to the Popular
Assembly. No more were the trade unions discredited; they had
become the main motors of the revolutionary process. But the May
1971 analysis doesn’t seem more adequate than the 1968 one.
The absence of Soviets, the absence of arms, the preparation for
a counter-revolutionary coup, the need to warn the workers about
that rather than to issue empty proclamations about the
“conquest of power,” the urgency of beginning without delay
the arming of the workers and the peasants: all these aspects of
the situation of which the Bolivian section was fully conscious
somehow escape our advisor’s eagle eyes.
In spite of these dizzy ups and
downs of advice, the Bolivian section kept its head, understood
the need to prepare for guerilla struggle under Barrientos, but
refused to dissolve itself in the ELN, refused to give in to the
foco conceptions, maintained the necessity of close
links with the miners, the urban workers and the poor peasants,
and therefore was able to make the necessary turn towards the
arming of the proletariat immediately after the new upsurge of
the mass movement, meanwhile constantly maintaining the
independence of the party, of its programme and of its political
orientation. Yet the authors of the remarkable advice of 1968
and 1971, which have so well stood the test of history, have the
cheek to accuse the Bolivian section in 1972 of having “missed
the boat” and to be even co-responsible for the defeat of the
revolution, because they were allegedly sticking constantly to
“rural guerilla warfare.” A bit thick, isn’t it?
6.
The Alleged Political Mistakes of the Bolivian Section
In an indictment of the
political mistakes supposedly committed by our Bolivian section,
the authors of Argentina and Bolivia – The Balance Sheet
advance seven accusations against the comrades of the POR
(Combate):
- They failed to understand
the differences between the Barrientos and Torres regimes,
between Kerensky and Kornilov.
- They failed to participate
in the “Political Command,” a united front set up by the
mass organisations of the Bolivian working class.
- They failed at each step to
work out a correct political line for the unfolding mass
movement.
- They were late and hesitant
in understanding the importance of the Popular Assembly.
- They failed to launch the
slogan “All Power to the Popular Assembly,” without
which “all talk of armed struggle amounted to nothing but
phrase-mongering or ultra-left adventurism.”
- As a result of their
previous orientation toward “rural guerilla warfare,”
they were isolated from the mass movement.
- After the defeat, they
joined an unprincipled united front with the betrayers of
the Bolivian revolution, the FRA (Anti-Imperialist
Revolutionary Front), thereby contributing to cover up
for the crimes and betrayals of the bankrupt leaders of the
mass movement of 1970-71. This front, in addition, has a
bourgeois programme.
The indictment seems
formidable. But after careful examination, one has to conclude
that not a single one of these accusations holds water.
Did the Bolivian section fail
to make the distinction between Kornilov and Kerensky, between
Torres and Barrientos or Banzer? If such a “failure” would
have any meaning, it could only mean one of two things: either
that our comrades remained neutral when Banzer rose against
Torres, refusing to fight against Banzer alongside with the
Torres supporters, be it independently from them, like the
Bolsheviks fought alongside Kerensky but independently from him
against Kornilov; or that the POR (Combate) followed
essentially the same line under Barrientos and Banzer as under
Torres. Both implications are completely unfounded. The record
shows that the POR (Combate) fought alongside the
Torres supporters against Banzer, and played even a partially
leading role in this struggle. The record also shows that the POR
(Combate) was legal, and followed a line of mass arming of
the workers and peasants under Torres, whereas it acted
illegally under Barrientos and Banzer, following an orientation
of preparing armed struggle by smaller contingents. The first
accusation thereby falls.
It is true that the POR
(Combate) failed to participate in the “Political
Command” of 1970. But was this a mistake? Unfortunately for
the authors of the minority document, the “political
Command” was not a working class united front, but a typical
coalition between working class and bourgeois parties. One of
its main participants was the largest bourgeois party in
Bolivia, the MNR, whose top leaders have been responsible for
the terrible massacres of the miners in 1964. One of its first
acts was to demand ministerial posts in the Torres cabinet.
Should the POR have joined these gentlemen in a common
“political command?” We don’t think so. The second
accusation thus also falls.
Is it true that the POR
(Combate) “failed at each step to work out a correct line
for the unfolding mass struggles?” We have already analysed
two of these lines projected at one year’s interval. In the
middle of 1970, under the Ovando regime, they called for
complete restoration of trade union freedom, liberation of all
political prisoners, restoration of the miners’ wages of 1965,
and the setting up of an elected representative body of all
working class organisations. Was this a wrong line for the
“unfolding mass struggle?” It was so “wrong” that a year
later, the masses had realised every single one of these
demands! In the beginning of 1971, the POR centred its political
line on the three demands quoted above: democratic elections of
local and rank-and-file assemblies of the toiling masses so as
to transform the Popular Assembly into a real soviet, immediate
arming of the workers and poor peasants; extension of the
revolution to the countryside through the implementation of a
concrete and detailed programme, published by the Party. It
seems to us that these two series of demands, in 1970 and in the
beginning of 1971, were fundamentally correct and corresponded
to the needs of the unfolding mass struggle. The third
accusation thereby falls.
Was the POR “late and
hesitant” in understanding the importance of the Popular
Assembly? Members of the POR participated in it since its first
session. The POR as a party requested to be represented at this
first session, on May 1, 1971. This request, blocked by Lora,
was then transferred to a commission dominated by the pro-Moscow
CP, which after much bickerings granted it during the second
session of the Assembly, in July, which lasted five days (three
days plenary sessions, five days commissions). The POR was to be
invited as a party for the third session, called for September.
This session was never convened, because of the Banzer coup.
There is consequently no sign of any “hesitation” on behalf
of the POR (Combat), as it attempted to gain
representation in the Assembly from the first day of its
convening. The fourth accusation thus falls.
Was the slogan, “All Power to
the Popular Assembly” the key slogan for the period May-August
1971? The case of the minority comrades is not very convincing.
There were no Soviets. The peasants – three-quarters of the
population of Bolivia – didn’t yet identify with the
Assembly. Neither did the soldiers. Furthermore there was not
even a beginning of the process of arming the masses. Under
these conditions, the slogan “All power to the Popular
Assembly” seems premature, to say the least. We believe that POR
(Combate) was substantially correct in giving priority to
its three main demands, enumerated above.
But even if the minority were
more correct on this question of the slogan, it is obvious that
the mere ‘launching’ of the slogan, would not have changed
anything concerning the outcome of the struggle. The military coup
was imminent. The decisive question was to prepare the workers
and peasants against the coup by arming them. It is not true
that a successful reply to a reactionary coup is impossible
without a central governmental slogan. There was no central
governmental slogan in Spain in July 1936; nor was there one
during the days of struggle against Kornilov either. In fact the
Bolsheviks had temporarily abandoned the slogan, “All
Power to the Soviets” after the July days, and took it up
again only after Kornilov’s defeat (see Trotsky’s History
of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2, Chapter entitled The
Bolsheviks and the Soviets). So the fifth accusation also
substantially falls.
Is it true that in 1970-71, the
POR (Combate) was “isolated from the mass
movement,” as a result of its previous involvement with
“rural guerrilla warfare” (pressed upon it, as we noted, by
Comrade Moreno himself as late as 1968)? This is absolutely
untrue. To show the shallowness of this particular accusation,
it is sufficient to indicate that out of the 180 members of the
Popular Assembly representing workers and peasants unions, the POR
(Combate) had no less than 12 (as compared to Lora’s 6):
3 representatives of the Food Workers Union; 2 of the
Departmental Trade Union Federation of La Paz; 2 of the Teachers
Union and 5 representing different peasants federations. Even in
comrade Moreno’s own publications, which partially ignore the
facts because they failed to consult the Bolivian section, the POR
(Combate) is credited with a substantial representation in
the Popular Assembly (equal to that of Lora, according to these
publications). The least one can say is that if today a similar
popular assembly were assembled in Argentina, the Verdad
group despite many years of “exemplary mass work” and other
“successes” of which the authors of minority document are
very proud, would hardly win 6.5% of the mandates, which was the
proportion received by the Bolivian section, allegedly
“isolated” from the masses. So the sixth accusation also
falls.
Finally, is it true that the
FRA (Anti-Imperialist Revolutionary Front) has a “common
bourgeois programme” and serves only as a cover for hiding the
bankruptcy of the reformist and centrist leaders of the 1970-71
period? It is true that the FRA launched a public appeal –
which was adopted against the vote and in opposition to a draft
presented by the Bolivian section – which was essentially
class-collaborationist in character. The Bolivian section made a
mistake in signing that appeal. The United Secretariat has
stated this publicly and we stick to that today. But the
following facts should be noted:
(a) That the FRA, contrary to
the “Political Command,” is not a coalition with
the bourgeoisie, as not a single bourgeois party participates in
it. Even the “revolutionary armed forces” under Major
Sanchez state that they are in favour of a socialist revolution
and adhere to Marxism-Leninism.
(b) That the programme
of the FRA is explicitly socialist in character and purpose as
appears clearly from the first three points of its fundamental
Charter:
“1. The FRA is organised
for the conquest of power. The Bolivian people have already
reached a high level of revolutionary consciousness which has
prepared them for the struggle for socialism as their
political aim. On the basis of this popular political
development, we begin the organisation of a political,
trade-union and military mechanism which leads to the
insurrectional struggle.
“2. Given the fact that the
present government is an un-disputably dictatorial and fascist
regime, an agent of yankee imperialism, and unable to fool any
sector of the people in relation to its real character; given
the fact that the Bolivian masses have an advanced political
consciousness, what is necessary is to organise the action and
the struggle in all its forms. With that goal it is vital to
organise immediately a Vanguard Political Command with the
participation of all the revolutionary sectors which unite
themselves under the banner of the fight against fascism, for
national liberation and the building of socialism.
“3. Our alliance has a
durable and organic character and not a superficial and
transitory one, because it is the indispensable instrument for
the people’s victory. The struggle for national liberation
and socialism is, in and by itself, indissolubly political and
military, at one and the same time. For this reason, our
alliance and conjunction of forces realizes itself
simultaneously on the political, trade-union and military
field. Our patriotic position, publicly open to an alliance
with progressive sectors, does not imply any hedging over our
class position, as the alliance which we establish and which
will be in the forefront of the struggle for national
liberation and socialism, expresses the ideology of the
working class.
We state our conviction that
the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship alone will not
constitute a revolutionary order. Like all the other Latin
American countries submitted to the regime of neo-colonial
exploitation, Bolivia will have to reach the culmination of
its historical process of liberation and of the building of
socialism, within the framework of a revolutionary development
on a Latin American scale.”
It is impossible to call this a
“bourgeois” programme. Although as Trotskyists we would have
formulated some parts of it differently, it cannot be denied
that the line of this Charter is substantially that of the
theory of Permanent Revolution. It should be noted that even the
public appeal of the FRA, which we strongly criticised, stated
that the leadership of the Bolivian struggle should be in the
hands of the proletariat.
(c) It is not true that, as a
result of entering the FRA, the POR (Combate) has been
forced to end all criticisms of the reformists and the centrists
in relation to the August 1971 defeat. The publications of the
section which appeared since the establishment of the FRA
testify to the exact opposite. They contain numerous and severe
criticisms of the reformists and centrists bankruptcy during the
1970-71 period.
What is true, on the contrary,
is that the setting up of FRA has strengthened the Bolivian
section’s political case against the pro-Moscow CP, Lora and
the followers of Lechin. For by joining FRA these parties and
currents implicitly or explicitly admit the correctness of the
Bolivian section’s orientation prior to August 1971. This can
be seen clearly from the following excerpt of the first issue of
Lora’s paper in exile, Masas:
“The whole people, the
left, were fully aware of the imminence of the coup and that
this coup would transform itself into a civil war. October
1970 and January 1971 were warnings about the designs of the
right. The left answered simply with speculations and not with
a military people’s strategy. Nobody took the arming of the
proletariat seriously. The nuclei of the left launched
themselves into a search for arms within their own
organisational limits. This proved to be a drop in the sea at
the decisive moment. The trade-union organisations, which had
the major possibilities for organising their own militias,
limited themselves to keeping the old arms taken from the
‘mines police’ during the October 1970 crisis (240 Mauser
guns and 11,000 pieces of ammunition). There was no other plan
... This is proven by the fact that the left-wing parties
didn’t take any measure of arming and organising militias in
every single mining centre, in every single factory, as active
part of their work.” (Causes de la Derrota, p.4 in Masas,
September 1971.)
One should compare this quote
with the one from the May 1971 issue of Combate
which we have already quoted, to see how brilliantly the
political position of the POR (Combate) becomes
vindicated as a result of the turn made by other working class
parties in joining the FRA. Our Bolivian section alone, through
an understanding of the role of armed struggle reflected in the
9th World Congress resolution on Latin America, can face the
Bolivian masses without shame with a balance-sheet of its
activity in the 1970-71 period.
Under these circumstances, the
POR leadership thought it wise to join the FRA in order to
advance both objectively and subjectively the revolutionary
consciousness of the Bolivian proletariat and the level of its
revolutionary combat preparations. It was convinced that the
incorrigible reformists would not stay long on the FRA line,
would wriggle and squirm in the face of organising the real
struggle, that the FRA itself would divide between a reformist
right and a revolutionary left wing, that the reformists and
centrists would once again base their hopes on “divisions”
within the army and the dictatorship coalition, and try to
substitute manoeuvres with these forces instead of preparing the
masses for an armed overthrow of the dictatorship. This new
experience, collectively assimilated by the Bolivian
proletariat, would strongly reduce the political influence of
the reformists and centrists and utterly expose them. So they
hoped.
One can have differences of
opinion on the estimates of the impact of the FRA on the
Bolivian working class, and, in that light, differ on the
sagacity of this particular tactical move. But there is nothing
wrong, in principle, in entering such a united front with
working class organisations on a clear socialist orientation,
under the hegemony of the working class. So the last accusation
of the minority against the Bolivian section also falls.
It is necessary once and for
all to end the ridiculous misrepresentation of our Bolivian
section’s political and practical orientation which implies
that the POR (Combate) withdrew its essential forces
“to the hills.” This has never been the case in the entire
existence of the POR. Even when the POR had as its main
orientation the preparation of guerilla warfare, this was always
conceived as being based on the mining, the urban and the rural
areas together, always conceived in close links with the mass
movement. That is why the POR (Combate) did NOT follow
Comrade Moreno’s 1968 advice to dissolve itself into the ELN
and to put itself under the command of OLAS unconditionally. Nearly
all the comrades of POR killed in combat or by the dictatorship
since 1964 were killed in their capacity as mass leaders, trade
union leaders, or in struggles of a mass character. The
real debate is centred on the need or the impossibility of the
Bolivian section to take initiatives for organising armed
struggle in the light of a concrete perspective for mass
insurrection, not a withdrawal to “rural guerilla warfare”
or to “small bands in the hills.”
Does this mean that the
Bolivian section is faultless, that its leadership didn’t make
mistakes, that it has done everything which could be done to
help advance the Bolivian revolution during recent years? We
would give nobody such a blank cheque of approval including
ourself or the entire international leadership together. We are
sure that the leadership of the Bolivian section holds the same
views. The POR (Combate) suffered and continues to
suffer from many weaknesses. The main one being an insufficient
strengthening of the party, an insufficient capitalisation of
its broader mass influence in the form of winning additional
members and cadres. Then there is the weakness of the cadre,
imposing too many responsibilities on too narrow a leadership
which is responsible for the insufficient practical
implementation of many correct decisions of the party, including
those in the field of armed struggle. The irregularity of the
publication of the party paper is part of the same weakness. It
is in this sense, with constructive criticism contributing to
overcoming these shortcomings that the POR has to be helped. But
strengthening the organisation, cadre building, etc., will
certainly not be achieved with a wrong political line, or by
eliminating what is the main political conquest of the POR
during recent years in the eyes of the masses: its deep
understanding of the need for workers to prepare themselves for
armed confrontation with the enemy from the very beginning of
every new stage of mass mobilisations. This theoretical and
practical conquest far from being an obstacle to cadre building
has shown itself and will show itself to be one of the main
preconditions for strengthening the party.
7.
The Test of Argentina
In the debate prior to the
Fourth Congress of the PRT (in the spring of 1968), i.e., prior
to the split between the Combatiente majority
and the Verdad group, two different analyses of
the dynamics of the class struggle were presented. Comrade
Moreno characterised the objective situation in Argentina as one
of political stability, with a united bourgeoisie and a profound
decline of the mass movement, which was at its lowest level
since 25 years. (La Revolucion Latin-Americana y Nuestras
Tereas, pp.15, 17.) He drew the conclusion that the
orientation of the PRT should be toward defensive struggles of
the working class, combined with help to the Bolivian guerillas.
The PRT majority, regardless of wrong theoretical positio |
