- 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 positions
which we shall discuss further on, analysed that, on the
contrary, the situation was one of profound instability in which
the rising discontent of the working class and the impoverished
petty bourgeoisie would inevitably lead to mass explosions.
Less than a year after this
debate, the first Cordobazo erupted. In fact, at the 9th World
Congress, a month before the first Cordobazo, Comrade Moreno
still clung to his wrong estimate of 1968. Today, after the
events, as author of the Lesson of Argentina (the
section on Argentina in the minority text submitted to the
December 1972 IEC) he has, of course, no trouble in recognising
the “turn of the tide” of May 1969, and the
pre-revolutionary situation which resulted from that turn. The
art of revolutionary politics, however, is to foresee such
turns, not to be taken by surprise when they take place. It
consists in not speaking of “great stability” and of
“biggest decline since 25 years” of a mass movement on the
verge of erupting in its most violent convulsions of the last
decade.
The impressionistic and
static-descriptive character of Comrade Moreno’s political
method is clearly revealed in his subsequent analyses of both
Argentina and Bolivia.
There is, it is true, a limit
to the mass upsurge, which the minority document correctly
notes, and which throws some light on the origins of the
differences inside the Argentinian Trotskyist movement itself.
It is true that all the six semi-insurrections which have
occurred since May 1969 erupted in provincial towns and that the
greater Buenos Aires region has not yet witnessed similar
explosions. It is certainly no accident that at the time of the
split, the bulk of the forces which aligned with the majority (El
Combatiente) faction inside the PRT came from Cordoba,
Rosario and Tucuman, where the first semi-insurrections
occurred, while the bulk of the forces aligning with the
minority (La Verdad) faction came from greater
Buenos Aires, where such a semi-insurrection has not yet taken
place.
All of these semi-insurrections
witnessed mass confrontations with the army, the gendarmerie and
the police in various degrees. Likewise, violent interventions
of the army, gendarmerie and police in unions, in factories,
against revolutionary groups and individuals (arbitrary arrests,
kidnappings, torture, murder) have occurred without interruption
during this whole period. In that sense, in Argentina too,
albeit from different circumstances than in Bolivia, the
question of armed struggle became posed before a broad vanguard
of the working class, not as the result of “ultraleft”
speculations or “foquista” adventures, but as an
outcome of the development of the class struggle itself.
Surely, a revolutionary party
worthy of the name would see it as one of its main tasks to
prepare the masses for new and bigger clashes, to organise and
train armed self-defence detachments of the workers, to project
and prepare – within the limitations of its own relatively
weak forces – the transition from spontaneous, fragmented and
locally isolated semi-insurrections into a nationally
coordinated, prepared and generalised uprising. The very absence
of semi-insurrections in the greater Buenos Aires region, which
has been till now the main weakness of the upsurge of the
Argentinian working class during the last years, is, at least,
partially explained by the greater weight in the capital both of
the repressive apparatus of the state and the apparatus of the
Peronist trade union bureaucracy. But the appearance of
simultaneous uprisings in several parts of the country would
stretch to breaking point the repressive apparatus’ capacity
to intervene effectively everywhere At the same tune it would
lessen the weight of repression on the Buenos Aires proletariat
and thus facilitate its participation in the upsurge
The capitalist class
understands this danger perfectly. Since the second uprising in
Cordoba armoured cars are usually stationed in central points of
the big cities, prepared for every eventuality. When the Mendoza
uprising occurred on April 5-7, 1972, against the doubling of
electricity rates, the army intelligence transmitted threats of
similar mass eruptions in Tucuman, Rosario and Cordoba and also
certain areas of Buenos Aires. Immediately on April 8, 1972,
General Lanusse withdrew the decree doubling the electricity
rates. The army was not ready to face simultaneous risings in
several key cities of the country.
The complex political manoeuvre
which the Argentinian bourgeoisie has undertaken since then has
to be understood in the light of the dangerous situation for
capitalism which has resulted from the May ’69 Cordobazo, and
from the emergence of armed struggle groups. The Argentine
working class is one of the most militant in the world. It has a
tradition of innumerable general strikes – the 1964 one taking
place with simultaneous occupation of numerous factories. In the
past, this tremendous militancy has been thwarted by the class
collaborationist outlook of Peron and the union bureaucracy,
which moulded to a large extent the consciousness of the mass of
the working class. But since the late Sixties, two additional
factors have made the situation more dangerous for Argentine
capitalism and truly pre-revolutionary. The workers
spontaneously begin to take the road of semi-insurrectional mass
actions, bypassing the syndicalism which characterised so many
of their past actions and looking for a political solution in
the form of a workers and popular government. The Peronist union
leadership begins to lose control over a new vanguard, both
working class and youth, which gropes towards a revolutionary
road and expresses on the subjective level the spontaneous
radicalisation of broader working class layers.
It is in these circumstances
that the Lanusse regime projected a “great national
agreement” with the political parties and Peron, to
re-establish a semblance of parliamentary democracy through the
organisation of general elections. The purpose of the manoeuvre
is crystal-clear: to try and put a brake on the development of
extra-parliamentary mass action growing towards an
insurrectional political general strike; to channel the
tremendous militancy of the workers back to reformist, class
collaborationist channels, to isolate and break the armed
struggle groups.
The difficulties and dangers
surrounding this manoeuvre from the point of view of capitalism
are numerous. A real solution to the explosive discontent of the
masses is impossible under the given circumstances. The economic
situation does not allow the bourgeoisie to grant the kind of
material concessions to the masses which could tranquilise them
for a period. On the contrary, in order to find a more durable
solution for its economic difficulties, Argentine capitalism
would have to crush the mass movement Brazilian style and still
further lower the standard of living of the workers,
streamlining and “rationalising” the economy at the workers
expense to get a new nook on the world market (“common
market” of the Andes, increased meat export to W. Europe,
etc.,). Under the present social relationship of forces this is
unrealisable before a severe defeat of the working class.
On the other hand, Peron and
the Peronista leadership cannot simply capitulate before the
regime and agree on a military candidate for the Presidency (or
another bourgeois figure identified with the bosses in the eyes
of the workers), without risking loss of control over larger and
larger sectors of the mass movement, which, in turn, would
stimulate rather than reduce the risk of mass insurrections for
the bourgeoisie.
Finally a transfer of power to
Peron himself – the most “radical” solution possible from
a bourgeois point of view – would combine both dangers. The
workers would consider it as a victory and their militancy would
result in even stronger upsurges than in 1969. They would occupy
the factories, take to the streets, present their bill of
unfulfilled promises and demands of the last 15 years. The
repression of this movement would be much more difficult (in the
beginning near-impossible). In addition, being unwilling and
unable to apply radical solutions either in a bourgeois sense
(crushing the labour movement) or in a proletarian sense
(expropriating the capitalists), Peron’s return to power would
lead to a rapid discrediting of the old fox himself in the eyes
of the working class, to an accelerated differentiation within
the Peronist unions and youth organisations and to the rapid
emergence of a much broader revolutionary vanguard than the one
which exists today.
Much of this analysis can be
found, too, in the minority document’s section on Argentina,
as in the analysis of the La Verdad group. If
before 1970, there was a striking difference in analysis between
the Combatiente and La Verdad
factions, today many factors of the analysis are held in common
by both groups. The working class upsurge and the
pre-revolutionary character of the present situation in
Argentina are too obvious to be ignored by anybody.
What remains is probably a
difference in the appreciation of the possibilities of a success
of the Great National Agreement manoeuvre. We believe that the
possibility of actually calming down the workers impatience and
militancy through elections and partial political concessions to
the Peronists is rather limited and will not last long. Comrade
Moreno seems to believe that the manoeuvre can have more
success. However the most important difference concerns the
conclusions drawn from this analysis in relation to the basic
orientation of revolutionaries. Comrade Moreno has projected a
“workers and socialist pole” in the coming elections as the
major intervention of his group. We believe that the main
orientation should be propaganda, agitation and practical
preparation for an insurrectional general strike to overthrow
the dictatorship, coupled with propaganda for a workers and
popular government.
The contradiction between the Verdad
tendency’s own characterisation of the objective condition in
Argentina as pre-revolutionary, and the central orientation
towards parliamentary elections (held under the auspices of a
military dictatorship) is too obvious to need much comment. The
comrades of the Moreno group speak to the Argentine workers as
if they were in a situation similar to pre-1914 Britain or the
United States in 1938 or 1946, i.e. relatively stable capitalist
countries, with a working class which is highly militant from
the trade-union point of view, but which has not yet attained a
political class consciousness. But in a pre-revolutionary
situation, a revolutionary Marxist does not tell the workers
that to have workers candidates in general elections is a step
forward.
He should tell them to
following:
“If the dictatorship is
retreating, it is as a result of your powerful
extra-parliamentary struggles, as a result of six Cordobazos
and of the appearance of groups committed to armed struggle.
Continue along this road. Build up local factory and
neighbourhood committees to organise in a permanent way for
your mobilisations. Start to draw together all radicalised
unionists, students, women and militants who are ready to join
in these preparations. Coordinate nationally the class
struggle factions in the unions and tie them in with the
vanguard committees. Start to arm yourself. Beware of a
continuation or a quick return to sharp repression and
confrontation. Don’t give in to parliamentary illusions.
Argentine capitalism cannot grant you a significant increase
in your standard of living. That’s why the class struggle is
sharpening every day. That’s why you have to continue on the
road of the Cordobazos. Whatever retreat the army will
undertake today will only be temporary. Large-scale clashes
with the army are unavoidable. Don’t go towards it
spontaneously and in an unorganised way. Prepare and organise
yourselves for it. Prepare an insurrectional general
strike.”
While the Verdad
group does not develop in the pre-revolutionary situation
prevailing today in Argentina, a political orientation which
conforms Leninism, it must unfortunately be said that the PRT
(Combatiente) likewise is guilty of serious deviations. In
fact, it is tragic to have to underline that, while in Argentina
there is today a pre-revolutionary situation in which more
people are claiming to be Trotskyists than in any other country
in the world today with the exception of France, Britain and the
USA, the number of comrades who apply a real revolutionary
marxist orientation is extremely limited.
In order to criticise in a
constructive way the orientation of the Argentianian section of
the Fourth International, it is, however, necessary to clear up
a whole series of distortions and misrepresentations of the
PRT’s activities presented in the minority document Argentina
and Bolivia – The Balance Sheet. These misrepresentations
are as much a caricature as the way in which the document
presented the activities of the Bolivian section in the 1970-71
period.
To state that the PRT is only
conducting armed actions and has turned its back on the real
class struggle is completely untrue. It publishes several
special factory and union caucus papers – a reason,
incidentally, why the “statistics” in the minority document
counting the number of articles devoted to strikes in Combatiente
alone is extremely misleading. It is engaged in united front
class struggle union caucuses and has played a leading role in
several important strikes during the 1969-72 period.
The way in which the
minority’s “balance-sheet” tells the story of the
SITRAM-SITRAC national class struggle caucus meetings is most
revealing of the half-truths and distortions of the minority
document. The document fails to point out that, contrary to the Verdad
group, the PRT was represented in the leadership of
SITRAM-SITRAC, the most progressive union development known till
today in Argentina. It fails to point out that at the plenary
sessions, the members of the PRT present were at least as
numerous as those of the Verdad group. It fails
to point out that whereas the members of the Verdad
group present
could only act as
trade-unionists, because the credit of the Verdad
group as a political group was extremely low among the assembled
militants, a woman comrade, strike leader of the current strike
who publicly spoke for the PRT was given a standing ovation and
immediately taken to the presidium of the conference.
To say that the military
actions of the PRT and of the ERP have “isolated” these
comrades from the masses, or that they have been reduced to
“Robin Hood” actions plus “terrorism” is likewise
ludicrous. The most important military activities of the PRT and
ERP took place in close connection with the class struggle. The
ERP detachments penetrated into some 30 factories where special
conditions of repression existed, and where armed factory guards
of the bosses and the army terrorised the workers. They disarmed
the guards, convened all the workers into general assemblies and
held long discussions with them on the present and next stage of
the class struggle in Argentina. Each of these actions was an
important success.
During the second Cordobazo,
the armed detachments of the ERP actually fused with the masses
and led many mass actions. The banner of the ERP flew on most of
the barricades put up by the fighting masses. Thousands of
people followed the coffin of a youth killed during the actions
and covered this coffin with the ERP banner. So “isolated”
are these comrades from the masses that the top leader of the
Peronist party, Campora, chosen as Presidential candidate by
Peron, was unable to get a hearing in Peronista mass assemblies
after the Trelew massacre if he made any criticism of the armed
struggle groups and was forced to shout “Long live the armed
struggle.” So “isolated” are they that after the Trelew
massacre, the Cordoba CGT proclaimed a 24 hour general strike in
protest against the killing, and in several towns thousands of
workers gathered behind the coffins of our murdered comrades.
So “isolated” are the PRT
and ERP from the masses that the dictatorship had to organise a
mass campaign of denunciations against them, covering the walls
of numerous cities denouncing the “terrorist bandits.” So
“isolated” are they that the question of amnesty for
political prisoners of the armed groups, and suppression of the
repressive laws enacted against them, has become one of the main
bones of contention between the army and Peron, with the army
stubbornly refusing any concessions in this sphere. One wonders
why the bourgeoisie goes to all this trouble against isolated,
inefficient, and influenceless nuclei of “ultraleft
adventurists” who don’t make any impact on the course of
events in any case.
According to the information
available, the contention of the minority document that the PRT
is today much weaker than the Verdad group in
militants is subject to some doubt too. In any case, the figure
of “affiliates” to the PST creates confusion, as it concerns
people who only signed an election slate, not militants in the
Leninist sense of the word.
Finally to identify the actions
of the PRT and ERP as “terrorist,” putting them on a par
with the actions of the Russian populist/terrorists, is to
misunderstand completely the situation in Argentina. The
comrades of the minority who use this parallel, should ponder
the following words of Lenin:
“Allow us a small
digression on the guerrilla actions of the combat detachments.
We think it would be false to identify them with the terror of
the old type. That terror was vengeance against individual
persons. That terror was a conspiracy by groups of
intellectuals. That terror was absolutely unrelated to the
mood of the masses. That terror did not form military leaders
of the masses. That terror ... was the result ... of lack of
faith in the insurrection ...
“Guerrilla actions are not
acts of vengeance, but military operations. They are as little
comparable to adventures as reconnaissance actions of mobile
units behind the rear of the enemy army during a lull in the
war on the main theatre can be compared to the assassination
of duellists or conspirators. The guerrilla actions of the
fighting detachments which have been formed since a long time
by both factions of social democracy in all the major centres,
and are mainly composed of workers, are undoubtedly linked in
the most evident way to the moods of the masses. The guerrilla
actions of the fighting detachments directly educate military
leaders of the masses.” (Lenin, The Present Situation in
Russia and the Tactics of the Workers Party, pp.106-7 of
the German edition of the Works, vol. X
pp.106-7, retranslated from the German, our emphasis)
It is in that spirit that our
Bolivian comrades have acted, with a real, if modest success
before and during the August 1971 days. It is in the same spirit
that the Argentine section tried to act, at any rate till the
second Cordobazo and during the insurrection. That alone should
be sufficient to discuss the views of these comrades seriously
and thoroughly and not through the caricatures which the
minority presents in its document. That also in our opinion
reconfirms that the position of the 9th World Congress as being
in the real tradition of Leninism.
8.
Our Differences With the PRT
Nevertheless it must be said
that the United Secretariat has made a serious mistake in not
opening up a frank discussion with the comrades of the Argentine
section much earlier than on the eve of the last IEC. This
discussion has now started with the letter signed by some
members of the United Secretariat and sent to the leadership of
the PRT before the last IEC. But this is much too late. Taking
into consideration the heroic struggle in which the Argentine
section was engaged and the fierce repression to which it was
submitted, we thought it wise first to establish an atmosphere
of fraternal solidarity and collaboration with these comrades
before beginning a political debate. This was a mistaken
tactical delay. In the meantime the danger became precisely that
the Argentine section would increase its mistakes and seriously
damage its own potential growth and influence – which had
increased remarkably as a result of these mistakes.
Our differences with the PRT
comrades fall into two categories: the general ideological
evolution of the PRT and the concept of the revolutionary army,
as developed especially since the second Cordobazo.
Ideologically, the PRT has been
from its inception and before the split, a combination
of Trotskyism and populist-semi-castroist currents. The populist
semi-castroist current has several wrong concepts in relation to
the existing global realities and the tasks of Revolutionary
marxists in this regard. It has not fully assimilated the
Trotskyist theory of the bureaucracy in relation to the Soviet
and Chinese bureaucracies, although it is closer to that theory
than to Castro’s ideas on the Soviet Union. It adopts a
concept of “the two world camps” which fails to draw the
dividing line between unconditional defense of the USSR and all
workers’ states or any genuine revolution against imperialism
and defense of the bureaucracies privileges and power and the
policies arising from the latter against the toiling masses.
This led these comrades to
adopt a wrong position on the invasion of Czechoslovakia; to
seriously underestimate the counter-revolutionary impact of the
CP’s policies in France and Italy on potentially revolutionary
mass movements in those countries in 1968 and 1969; to
completely fail to understand the counter-revolutionary
implications of Nixon’s visits to Peking and Moscow with
regard to the Vietnamese revolution.
The eclectic combination of the
theory of permanent revolution, with which the leadership of the
PRT agrees, and some of the concepts of Maoism, has led these
comrades to a false “two-possible-roads theory” in relation
to the conquest of power by the proletariat which they pose
thus: the road of the October revolution or the Vietnamese road.
It is one thing to understand the great variety of forms the
revolutionary struggle has taken and will take in the future. It
is a completely different matter altogether to confuse different
forms of struggle with different programmatic goals. There is no
other road to the direct rule of the workers and poor peasants
than the establishment of Soviet power, of power based on
elected committees of workers and poor peasants. The fact that
capitalism was overthrown in China through a revolution led by
Mao means that from its very inception, the revolution was
bureaucratically deformed in that country, that the working
class has never directly exercized power there. Surely no
revolutionary marxist striving to lead his own class to power
can adopt such a “model” as a possible alternative to
Lenin’s and Trotsky’s.
The comrades of the PRT
correctly understand that the Fourth International today is only
the initial nucleus of the future revolutionary mass
international. On the road to that mass International, our
movement will have to fuse with many revolutionary mass
currents. But for us this fusion has to occur on the basis of
our programme and our principles, which represent a synthesis of
the experience of 150 years of revolutionary class struggle. For
the PRT leadership, this fusion is envisaged with all those
forces engaged in objectively revolutionary struggles throughout
the world, regardless of basic programmatic differences or grave
programmatic confusion.
On all these questions, it is
necessary to conduct an extensive discussion with the Argentine
section in a fraternal, but frank way. We cannot predict the
outcome of this discussion. But it is clear to us that the
problem of assimilating the PRT thoroughly to the FI has to be
tackled POLITICALLY. There is no other way to increase the
weight of Trotskyism.
While the ideological questions
which we just enumerated might seem unrelated to the present
revolutionary struggle in Argentina – which of course they are
not – and while the PRT might seem to be in the process of
correcting some of its theoretical mistakes (the adaptation to
Maoism is retreating under the pressure of events), the concept
of the revolutionary army as developed by the PRT leadership
since the second Cordobazo has obviously grave implications for
the current activities of the Argentine section. The leadership
of the section has developed the concept of the gradual
strengthening of the revolutionary peoples army, of which the
ERP is the main vehicle, as the key factor in the struggle for
power in Argentina. This concept disorients the Argentine
revolutionists and risks turning them away from some of their
key tasks at the present stage.
Under conditions of upsurge of
a mass movement of predominantly proletarian composition, which
spontaneously takes a semi-insurrectional form, the main ask of
the armed detachments of the party consist, as Lenin specified
them, in training and preparing the military cadres of the
masses themselves. Closely related to this task is the task of
relating to the successive waves of mass struggles and
confrontation of the masses with the enemy. The revolutionary
party tries to arm the masses with the desire of arming
themselves. The armed detachments show in practice that this can
be done and what difference it makes to the unfolding
confrontations. The central objective to be obtained is the
creation of armed militias in the factories and neighborhoods,
with which the masses identify and which function openly as
organs of the appropriate mass organisations (either left-wing
unions, or committees of a soviet character, or combined organs
of whatever form evolves out of the struggle itself). An
insurrectional general strike to overthrow the dictatorship
would culminate in the spread of such armed detachments, closely
integrated with the mass movement.
Only in the case of this
insurrection being defeated in the towns if the mass struggle
and upsurge temporarily decline under the blows of repression
and if the dictatorship would harden as a result, but if the
party at the same time would have qualitatively changed its
strength and its relationship to the masses because of the role
it played in the preparation and the course of the insurrection,
only then could the autonomous development of the revolutionary
army be considered as the main vehicle of struggle for the next
stage, as happened after 1945-46 in Vietnam. In that case the
function of the army would be to harass and weaken the enemy,
allow the masses to regain confidence and to restart the
struggle under more favourable conditions with regard to the
power of the repressive apparatus. This would eventually lead to
a new mass upsurge, in the course of which the revolutionary
army would again have to fuse with the arming of the toiling
masses.
But to base oneself at the
present stage on the inevitability of defeat of the mass upsurge
in an industrialised country like Argentina, and to act as if
this defeat was already around the corner, is to seriously
misestimate the tasks of a revolutionary vanguard. The examples
of the factory occupation realised by the ERP and of the second
Cordobazo indicate that a growing awareness by the vanguard of
the masses of the need to consciously prepare themselves for
insurrection, can lead at one and the same time to the
strengthening of the party, to the strengthening of its ties
with the masses, to a strengthening of the armed detachments,
and to a growing transformation of these armed detachments into
armed militias of the mass movement. This should have been the
orientation of the PRT after the second Cordobazo.
The concept of building the
revolutionary army as the main vehicle in the struggle for
power, in an autonomous way from the mass movement, involves
several serious dangers. In the first place it leads to
militarist deviations, which systematically give preference to
military operations independent from the needs of the mass
movement and from the moods of the masses, thereby actually
weakening the political effects which armed detachments could
exercize if and when they are more closely linked to the mass
struggle. Military operations then run the danger of becoming
goals in themselves, instead of means for helping the working
class to raise its consciousness and the forms of its struggle
to the levels required by the objective situation.
Such a militarist deviation
tends to underestimate the importance of closely relating the
armed actions with party building based on a clear political
programme. Party building could become reduced to attracting
people by the prestige of the armed actions on their own and the
political physiognomy of the party then risks being considerably
weakened. A sharp turn in the mood of the masses, temporarily
taken in by some enemy manoeuvre, would then leave the party
unprepared to provide adequate political answers and would
create the danger of opportunist adaptation.
In the second place, the
concept of building the revolutionary army as the autonomous
vehicle in the struggle for power could lead to a
substitutionist deviation in which the party seriously
overestimates its own possibilities and undertakes tasks which
it is not strong enough to tackle. The preparation of armed
detachments, the training of dozens or even hundreds of cadres
in armed struggle, can produce wonders in an insurrectional mass
movement, when these cadres become the natural leaders of tens
of thousands of workers fighting the army and the police. But
for small detachments to take on all by themselves, in single
combat so to speak, a powerful army and state apparatus based on
tens of thousands of armed individuals, is to run the risk of
heavy and unnecessary losses. The function of armed detachments
is “to help prepare the arming of the masses so that they can
participate in the solving of their own tasks which only they
can solve.
In the third place, the concept
of building the revolutionary army as an autonomous vehicle for
seizing power leads to a gross oversimplification of the tasks
of the revolutionary vanguard, i.e., to a gross
over-simplification of the prerequisites for a victorious
socialist revolution in Argentina. It is true that the militancy
of the masses in that country has reached an exceptionally high
level, and that only the power of the army stands in the way of
the pre-revolutionary situation transforming itself into a
revolutionary one. But a revolutionary situation by no means
guarantees a revolutionary victory. What will be decisive will
be the level of consciousness reached by the masses and the
political and organisational strength of the vanguard party. To
educate the masses in the need to build their own organs of
power, to distrust all kinds of parliamentary combinations, to
reject class-collaborationism and conciliationism in all its
forms, to distrust reformism, Stalinism and peronism: this is as
important as arming the masses. The current activity of a
revolutionary vanguard in the given pre-revolutionary situation
in Argentina must attach at least as much importance to these
tasks of education, propaganda, mass organisation and politically
arming the masses as it does to the task of strengthening the
armed detachments of the party. To conceive of these armed
detachments as a revolutionary army, which will in the long run
lead the masses to power, turns attention away from these
burning tasks.
It is because we highly
appreciate the contribution which the comrades of the PRT have
made to the development of the Argentine Revolution and to the
influence of the Fourth International in Argentina and in Latin
America, because we have the highest admiration for their
single-minded devotion to the socialist revolution and for their
exemplary courage and heroism, that we feel the urgent need to
come to grips with the serious political weaknesses they have
displayed in applying the strategy of armed struggle in
Argentina during the latest phase of their activity. If they do
not correct these mistakes, much of their heroism will have been
in vain and will not contribute decisively to leading the
Argentinian proletariat to the conquest of power. If they
correct their mistakes and thoroughly assimilate the lessons of
history thus grasping the obstacles which have up till now
impeded impetuous proletarian mass movements from actually
overthrowing the bourgeois state in Argentina, they could write
a decisive chapter in the history of the Argentinian revolution
and in the history of the Fourth International.
9.
The Forgotten Peruvian Example
It is our contention that the
way in which comrade Hansen has opposed the building of a
Leninist vanguard party to the orientation of armed struggle
makes a clarification of the tasks of Latin American Trotskyists
impossible. The analysis of the Bolivian and Argentinian class
struggle since the 9th World Congress has convincingly shown
that the problems of educating and preparing the masses for
armed struggle were key problems of the class struggle itself.
Initiatives correctly taken in that sense by Trotskyists, far
from implementing any “underestimation” of the problem of
party building, represent an indispensable prerequisite for
building a revolutionary vanguard party in pre-revolutionary or
revolutionary conditions.
The analysis made by comrade
Hugo Blanco of the peasant struggle in the Convencion valley in
Peru is another confirmation of our position. In his book Land
or Death, comrade Blanco insists on the fact that the
main cause which made it impossible to extend the peasant
uprising beyond a certain point was the weakness, nay, the
near-absence of a revolutionary vanguard organisation. That
organisation, the FIR, was weaker and much less influential on a
national scale than the Bolivian or Argentinian sections of the
Fourth International. Of course we fully agree with him. We have
never defended the idea that “armed struggle” is a
substitute for party building, or that you could have a
victorious socialist revolution merely thanks to some weapons
and without a revolutionary organisation rooted in the masses.
But there is another side to
Hugo Blanco’s story, which the comrades of the minority are
much too eager to overlook. Although the upsurge of the peasant
movement in the valley of La Convencion was still regionally
limited; although the overall situation in Peru was far from
equalling the type of pre-revolutionary situation characteristic
of Bolivia or Argentinian; although there was no question yet of
a generalised mass upsurge of the working class in the country, armed
confrontation and armed struggle inevitably grew out of this
even limited example of upsurge of the peasant movement.
Can one find a better confirmation of the key thesis we have
constantly and consistently defended since the 9th World
Congress?
On page 39 of Land or
Death, comrade Hugo Blanco dealing with the initial
strengthening of the FIR when three Argentinian Trotskyists came
to help it, states:
“In addition, it gave
serious impetus to the preparation for armed struggle.
Although preparation had begun earlier, it was clearly
becoming urgent to step it up in view of the advanced
level of the class struggle in the countryside.” (my
emphasis – E.G.)
In chapter 5 dealing with the
dual power situation which arose, Hugo Blanco correctly stresses
that such a situation cannot last for long and that inescapable
conclusions flow from that understanding, from the point of view
of the class struggle:
“Many of our hastily
arrived at positions regarding La Convencion and Cuzco, taken
without adequate preparation, had their origin precisely in
our completely clear understanding that ‘this state of
affairs cannot last.’ The bank expropriations were not
designed to ‘stabilise’ the situation, but to buy arms for
the revolution. In July or August of 1962, I wrote to the
comrades, showing them that this situation would not last more
than six months. Why did we turn to guerrilla warfare without
sufficient preparation? Precisely for that reason! Because we
knew that the moment had arrived in which, if we did not make
a decisive move, they would fall upon Chaupimayo and crush
us.” (pp.56-57)
Describing the final stage of
the struggle, Hugo Blanco writes:
“We had to choose between
dying of malaria and going down fighting. We chose the latter,
not through romanticism, but for a political reason. We
considered it necessary to educate the masses, to show them
how the peasantry must fight the armed force of the enemy to
the last; to show them that although the peasant fell under
bullets, the enemy could meet the same fate; to show them that
the military uniform is largely a fetish, that it is not an
impenetrable armor, as the people tend subconsciously to
believe.” (p.68)
Isn’t that exactly the same
spirit in which the Bolivian and Argentinian comrades developed
their turn towards the armed struggle? One could think that this
is a pure description of what Hugo Blanco actually did and
thought in 1962; that since, familiarising himself with the
writings of comrades Hansen and Moreno in the present debate, he
has developed doubts about his past activities and their
correctness and is wondering whether or not he was an
“ultraleft and terrorist.” But comrade Blanco, drawing the
balance-sheet of this past experience, comes TODAY to the
following conclusion:
“Nevertheless, I still
think it was correct to choose the armed confrontation, even
if all the guerrillas had been massacred and the repression
against the peasants had been even more severe. The error was
not in turning to guerrillla warfare. It was in having
neglected from the start to build the party, which would have
organised, extended and centralised all aspects of the
struggle (armed struggle among them) in all their
variations.” (p.60)
If it hadn’t been an error to
turn to armed confrontation growing out of a regionally limited
mass movement as was that of the La Convencion valley in Peru,
how can one argue that it was an error to turn to armed confrontation
growing out of the mass struggles in Argentina and Bolivia which
were much wider and more generalised than those of the 1962
peasant movement in which comrade Blanco was involved?
Thinking over the more general
problem of the orientation towards armed struggle, comrade
Blanco writes:
“Nevertheless, in both
instances (Russian and Cuba) it (the armed struggle) developed
after the masses had come to see that armed struggle
was the only solution. I emphasize the role of the masses
because that is the part which the ultralefts do not
understand; they believe that what is necessary for us,
the revolutionaries, is to understand that the revolution will
have to employ violence.
“In Cuba, it was Batista
who convinced the masses with his brutal tyranny that no legal
recourse remained open to them. When the guerrilla foco
arose, the people understood that it was the only road to
their liberation.” (pp.62-63)
The method of approach seems to
us substantially correct. The key criteria is whether the masses
understand the need for armed struggle. This was the
yardstick applied by Lenin in 1906. Comrade Martine Knoeller and
myself used the same method in our contribution to the
discussion entitled, The Strategic Orientation of
Revolutionists in Latin America. The question thus becomes
concrete: Did the” brutal tyranny of Barrientos convince large
sectors of the Bolivian masses that armed struggle against the
armed violence of the enemy was necessary? Did the brutal
Ongania dictatorship convince the Argentinian masses likewise?
Was the turn of the Bolivian and Argentinian comrades therefore
timely or not, according to that criterion? Didn’t the
behaviour of the masses who themselves started to participate in
semi-insurrectional upsurges provide a confirmation of the
correctness of our comrades’ assumptions? Isn’t that exactly
the line of the 9th World Congress on Latin America? Isn’t it
significant that when thousands of miners came to La Paz in
January ‘71, they caused a panic among Torres supporters and
their shame-faced reformist and centrist allies, because they
demonstrated under the banner and slogans, “Let Us Struggle
for Socialism” and “Revolutionary War,” and their main
immediate demand was for arms? Can one deny under these
circumstances that our comrades’ orientation toward armed
struggle corresponded to the understanding of the masses,
namely, that armed struggle was necessary?
10.
A Second Forgotten Example; China 1925-27
In reality, the
inter-relationship between an orientation towards armed struggle
and the building of the revolutionary party – instead of the
mechanistic opposition of one to another – is nothing new in
the history of revolutionary Marxism. It was already posed
albeit in a limited way, during the final stage of the Russian
Revolution in 1905. It was explicitly enunciated by Trotsky in
his critique of the Stalin-Bukharin line pursued during the
Chinese Revolution of 1925-27.
Trotskyist cadres have been
educated in the essential lessons of the experience. By
abandoning the independent political organisation of the Chinese
Communist Party and submitting to the bourgeois Kuomintang; by
refusing to fight for proletarian hegemony and proletarian
leadership over the toiling masses of city and countryside,
thereby taking the lead in the struggle for the most burning
tasks of the unfulfilled bourgeois-democratic revolution (the
anti-imperialist task of national independence and unification
and the tasks of the agrarian revolution, of the emancipation of
the peasantry); by following the Menshevik theory of stages,
Stalin-Bukharin imposed on the Chinese Communist Party a course
which led to the victorious counter-revolutionary coup of April
1927 in Shanghai, ending the second Chinese Revolution in bloody
defeat.
The world Trotskyist movement
has paid less attention, in the last few decades, to the more
detailed analysis of Trotsky’s evaluation of the motive forces
of the second Chinese Revolution, their interrelationship and
the revolutionary tasks which flowed from them. Especially in
the debates with the Maoists, but also for the correct education
of our own cadres in semi-colonial countries, this analysis is
of the utmost importance.
Nowhere did Trotsky
advocate a line of the conquest of power by the Shanghai
proletariat separate and apart from peasant uprisings. Such
a proposition, which would have opposed the relatively small
vanguard of the Chinese proletariat to a powerful army, even
bigger than it in numbers, would have been pure suicide. It
conforms to the Stalinist legend of Trotsky’s alleged
“underestimation of the peasantry,” and is unfortunately
repeated – in a “positive” sense! – by some sectarians
who claim to be the “followers” of Trotsky, in spite of all
historical and documentary evidence.
In fact, as far as organising
the Shanghai proletariat, of doing “mass work,” of
organising unions and strikes was concerned, the leadership of
the CCP following the Stalin/Bukharin line were not so much at
fault. They certainly didn’t lack success in that field during
the months leading up to the successful workers insurrection
which opened the gates of Shanghai to Chiang Kai Shek’s army.
Even on the question of arming the Shanghai workers, the then
leadership of the CCP showed itself much more advanced and much
nearer to Bolshevism than the Moreno group in Argentina today,
although later on the terrible mistake was made of surrendering
part of the arms to Chiang’s henchmen, for the sake of
“keeping the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal united front”
(another example of dual power being based on armed workers
from the start and losing its character of dual power when the
arms disappeared).
What then was the most fatal
consequence of the Menshevik line of “revolution by stages”
applied by the Chinese CP in 1925-27 in relation to the basic
revolutionary social forces at work in China hi that period? It
was the refusal of the Chinese CP to stimulate, organise,
coordinate and arm the peasant uprisings, and tie them together
with the communist-led urban working class to create a powerful
alliance against which the Chiang army would have beaten itself
to death, nay, which would have started to disintegrate
Chiang’s army. This is no new variant of “Pabloite
revisionism” or “ultraleft Guevarism.” It is the opinion
of Comrade Trotsky himself. Here is what he had to say on that
crucial experience:
“Had the Comintern pursued
any sort of correct policy, the outcome of the struggle of the
communist party for the masses would have been predetermined
– the Chinese proletariat would have supported the
Communists, while the peasant war would have supported the
revolutionary proletariat
“If, at the beginning of
the Northern expedition, we had begun to organise Soviets in
the ‘liberated’ districts (and the masses were
instinctively aspiring for that with all their might and
main), we would have secured the necessary basis and a
revolutionary running start, we would have rallied around us
the agrarian uprisings, we would have built our own army, we
would have disintegrated the enemy armies; and despite the
youthfulness of the Communist Party of China, the latter would
have been able, thanks to proper guidance from the Comintern,
to mature in these exceptional years and to assume power, if
not in the whole of China at once, then at least in a
considerable part of China. And, above all, we would have had
a Party.” (Leon Trotsky, The Third International
After Lenin, pp.185-86.)
One should know that Trotsky
was speaking of a party of only 10-15,000 members in a country
of then some 450 million inhabitants. More than half, if not
two-thirds, of these party members were in the big cities. He
was, thereby, regretting that a few thousand communists, no
more, didn’t start to organise a communist-led peasant army
behind the rear of Chiang’s troops. He stated clearly that, in
his opinion, the disintegration of Chiang’s forces, i.e., the
possible victory of the Shanghai workers in an open
confrontation with them, was dependent on the prior organisation
of that army. And he even went so far as to clearly state that
the building of a really revolutionary party was
conditioned upon its capacity to lead, organise, arm and steel
the peasants uprising into a real army of the toilers. Comrade
Hansen’s simple rule of counterposing “Leninist party
building” to the preparation of armed struggle is completely
overturned. Trotsky answers Hansen: under specific circumstances
you have to organise a revolutionary army before you even have
the right to believe that you have got a revolutionary party.
Why this surprising though
utterly correct analysis? Because Trotsky, as every
revolutionary Marxist should, always starts from the objective
dynamics of the class struggle, from the objective dialectics of
the social relationship of forces, and from the political,
tactical and strategical needs which flow from that analysis.
Any other method is subjective, idealistic, and doomed to
failure. It is impossible to subordinate huge social forces to
some alleged “intrinsic” needs of “party building,”
divorced from the needs of the live vanguard of the workers and
poor peasants. If class collision has matured to the point where
these forces are taking up arms, it is impossible for
revolutionists to say “Stop immediately, because we are not
yet ready and strong enough; go back to more ‘patient’ forms
of struggle till the moment when we are strong enough to guide
you towards victory.”
Trotsky’s analysis of the
dynamics of the 1925-27 revolution could only be proven wrong if
one could demonstrate that these peasant uprisings were much too
scattered and isolated to create the basis for a real
revolutionary peasant army; if one could demonstrate that some
other political force outside of the Communist Party had such
overwhelming support among the toiling peasants that they would
never have followed the leadership of the CCP; and that,
therefore, for objective reasons independent of the will of the
CCP, an alliance between the proletariat and the poor peasantry
was still premature (as it proved to be in Russia in 1905) and
for the same reason the defeat of the revolution inevitable. But
given that this demonstration has never been made, the strategic
line as summarised by Trotsky in the above quotation, and which
turns on the building of a revolutionary army, was the only
possible way to victory in the second Chinese revolution.
Likewise, any attempt to
contradict the strategic line we project for the Bolivian and
Argentina revolution will have to indicate either that there is
much more objective scope for “appeasing” the Argentine (not
to speak of the Bolivian!) workers through economic reforms than
we believe, or much more possibility for the spontaneous
collapse of the bourgeois army under the pressure of
“peaceful” mass mobilisations. If this cannot be
demonstrated then the conclusion which flows from our analysis
of the basic correlation of class forces for Bolivia 1970-71 and
for Argentina today implies in the short term the inevitability
of an armed showdown between the army and a rising mass movement
and hence the uttermost importance of preparing, organising and
arming the workers for such a showdown.
11.
Third Forgotten Example, or How Comrade Camejo Rewrites the
History of the Cuban Revolution
Another very telling precedent
of the key role played by the armed struggle, under specific
circumstances, in a genuinely revolutionary mass process, is of
course the example of the Cuban revolution. In the ISR
of November 1972 Comrade Peter Camejo treats us to a rather
original interpretation of that experience. “It is
important to briefly review what actually happened in Cuba and
why it was possible for the Cuban revolution to triumph,”
he writes. We can summarise Comrade Camejo’s opinion of
“what really happened in Cuba” in his own words:
“Let us summarise the
factors that made possible the triumph of the Cuban
revolution: 1) Mass support to the July 26th Movement’s
central demand, DOWN WITH BATISTA; 2) a substantial apparatus
throughout Cuba, and in the colonies of Cuban exiles, capable
of raising large sums of money and providing supplies to the
guerillas; 3) demoralisation of the army ranks and lower
ranking officers in response to popular hostility to the
regime, resulting in a hesitancy to enter combat; 4)
semi-neutrality of US imperialism and a divided national
bourgeoisie; 5) the development of support among the peasantry
of the Sierra Maestra and general peasant sympathy based on
the demand for land reform; 6) the complete dismantling of the
army and the police after the triumph of the guerilla army; 7)
the use of governmental power after January 1, 1959, to
mobilise, organise and arm the masses, above all the urban
proletariat; and 8) the existence of other workers states.”
(ISR, November 1972, p.13.)
The inadequacies of this
“summary of what actually happened in Cuba” are manifold and
striking. The formula “semi-neutrality of US imperialism” is
simply grotesque. Washington was arming and financing Batista
till the very eve of his downfall. In exchange “liberal”
imperialist journalists like those of the New York Times
and the television networks wrote and spoke nicely about the
“bearded revolutionists.” If this is “semi-neutrality,”
one might as well argue that British imperialism had been
“semi neutral” in the Vietnam war.
Mass mobilisations did not
start only after the “workers and peasants” government was
formed. Nor is it correct to say that “mass participation was
organised after the seizure of governmental power.” In the
first place, the government formed after January 1, 1959, was
itself a coalition government and mass mobilisations only
occurred on the call made by part of that government. But what
this analysis leaves out was the successful general strike of
January 1-3, 1959, which started before Fidel’s
revolutionary army reached Havana, and which played a decisive
role in preventing the Cuban bourgeoisie from setting up an
alternative bourgeois regime, an alternative military power and
an alternative army leadership after Batista’s downfall.
Comrade Camejo also fails to point out that the mass
mobilisations which continued in January and February had
largely a spontaneous character, and were by no means made
possible by the “use of governmental power.”
We cannot, go on mentioning
many other inaccuracies hi this “summary.” Its main weakness
does not lie in these factual inaccuracies, but in the near
complete absence of social forces and of political strategy from
this analysis. Everything seems to be a function of clever
manouvres on the side of Castro’s apparatus and stupid
mistakes on the side of his opponents.
There are at least half a dozen
ways to untangle this mystified version of what “really
happened in Cuba.” Castro won “general peasant sympathy”
on the basis of his demand for land reform, writes Comrade
Camejo. Why then was this support denied to the Cuban CP, which
certainly didn’t fail to call for land reform as well? The
masses were mobilised for democratic demands: that’s where
Comrade Camejo sees the main lesson of the Cuban revolution, the
only one which can be repeated elsewhere too! But did the Cuban
CP fail to fight for the “restoration of bourgeois
democracy”? Camejo makes a lot about Castro’s bloc with the
national bourgeoisie. But didn’t the Cuban CP strive with all
its might for such a bloc too? Indeed, if one follows Comrade
Camejo’s analysis, one is left with an insoluble mystery: why
didn’t the Cuban CP, which at the outset had a much bigger
mass influence and a much bigger apparatus than Fidel’s July
26th Movement, lead a successful revolution in Cuba? Perhaps
because it didn’t court enough support and
“semi-neutrality” on behalf of American imperialism, or
could it be that it wasn’t opportunist enough?
The mystery is cleared when one
passes from the mystified to the real history of the Cuban
revolution. Castro’s growing popularity and support among the
Cuban masses was not based on the “use of democratic
slogans,” but on his actual armed struggle against the
dictatorship, as compared to the cowardly manoeuvres,
shameful capitulations and impotent declamations of the
Stalinists, reformists and other fake “oppositionists.” His
growing support among the peasantry was not based on any vague
“demand” for land reform but on the actual implementation
of land reform in the areas liberated or protected by the rebel
army in the Sierra Maestra. Fidel and Che’s main contribution
to the unfolding gigantic mass mobilisations which determined
the course of the Cuban revolution – and which Camejo has the
effrontery to call “limited” (ISR, Nov.
1972, p.14) was not the manipulation of the government apparatus
– that was the way American bourgeois journalists sneered at
Fidel’s “television democracy” – but the destruction
through armed struggle of the huge repressive apparatus, which
enabled the tempestuous rise of the mass movement. And the
demoralisation and subsequent disintegration of the bourgeois
army was not a result of “popular hostility” (one wonders
why the Brazilian army is still intact. It certainly is as
unpopular as the Batista army ever was!), but by the very real
material blows delivered to it by the rebel army, with the help
of a growing sector of the masses.
In other words: the Cuban
revolution – like the Chinese revolution of 1925-27
(potentially and to a certain point actually) – which contrary
to the Russian revolution of 1917, did not coincide with the
breakdown of the ruling army through defeats in an international
war, saw a typical inter-action between the unfolding of
armed struggle and of mass mobilisations, each feeding and
strengthening the other. The weakening of the repressive
apparatus through the blows of the revolutionary army, the rise
of the mass movement, the collapse of the enemy army’s central
apparatus, the political general strike, the disintegration of
the bourgeois state apparatus, the rise of centres of workers
power: like cogs in a cog wheel these elements integrate with
each other to explain what happened in Cuba between 1957 and the
spring of 1959.
Is this a “model” which can
be repeated? In some parts it can, in others it probably
won’t. Instead of speaking about imperialism’s
“semi-neutrality” during the civil war, it would be more
correct to speak about imperialism’s hesitations after
Fidel’s military victory. This is certainly unlikely to repeat
itself. Rapid if not instantaneous intervention by US
imperialism or its continental relays, is the more likely
variant now, as the case of Santo Domingo indicated, as would
have happened if the workers and poor peasants had won the
confrontation in August ‘71 in Bolivia (the Brazilian army was
ready to intervene any minute in that case). That is precisely
why it is correct to raise the perspective of “prolonged civil
war,” with a possible retreat from the cities where the
revolution has already triumphed, if one understands what such
an imperialist intervention could mean.
On the other hand, the absence
of a revolutionary party based on a revolutionary Marxist
programme and tradition hi Cuba was the main factor why direct
power organs of the toiling masses – Soviets – did not
develop in January-March 1959 in town and countryside, as they
most probably will wherever Trotskyists play an important role
in the phase during which the repressive apparatus of the
dictatorship is overthrown.
But the specific
interrelationship between the mass movement and armed struggle
which characterised the Cuban revolution (not necessarily in the
form of rural guerilla warfare, or rural guerilla warfare only;
different combinations will be possible under different social
and geographic conditions in different countries) is likely to
occur again wherever the basic starting points of the Cuban
revolution are repeated, in other words wherever a repressive
dictatorship suddenly stopping the rise of the mass movement in
its tracks, will be challenged by a determined revolutionary
vanguard, progressively gaming mass support and helping to
relaunch mass mobilisations till the point of a successful
overthrow of the dictatorship.
12.
The Experience of the Struggle Against Fascism
Comrade Hansen has some doubt
about the use of armed struggle in the struggle against fascism
too:
“Note, for instance, how
the example they cited of ‘exemplary actions by autonomous
armed detachments’ suggest an approach to the struggle
against fascism that differs from Trotsky’s, as presented in
the Transitional Program. Trotsky emphasized
the mobilization of the masses by the tens of millions,
starting in the plants with the formation of picket and ending
in the streets with massive confrontations – all under the
slogan of self-defence.” (In Defence of the Leninist
Strategy of Party Building, p.52.)
This is a slight
over-simplification of Trotsky’s position on how to fight
fascism. Trotsky raised the question of mobilising “tens of
millions” against triumphant German fascism, which had already
seized state power in the major industrial country of Europe. He
never said that before Hitler came to power, it was necessary to
mobilise first “tens of millions” before risking a
confrontation with the Nazis. And he certainly never said that
you had first to organize pickets in plants before you could
challenge the fascists in the streets. Here is what he
concretely and specifically said on that issue:
“The slogans of the party
must be placed in quarters where we have sympathizers and
workers who will defend us. But a party cannot create an
independent defence organization. The task is to create such a
body in the trade unions. We must have these groups of
comrades with very good discipline, with good cautious leaders
not easily provoked because such groups can be provoked
easily. The main task for the next year would be to avoid
conflicts and bloody clashes. We must reduce them to a minimum
with a minority organisation during strikes, during peaceful
times. In order to prevent fascist meetings it is a question
of the relationship of forces. We alone are not strong, but we
propose a united front.
“Hitler explains his
success in his book. The social-democracy was extremely
powerful. To a meeting of the social-democracy he sent a band
with Rudolf Hess. He says that at the end of the meeting his
thirty boys evicted all the workers and they were incapable of
opposing them. Then he knew he would be victorious. The
workers were only organised to pay dues. No preparation at
all for other tasks. Now we must do what Hitler did
except in reverse. Send forty to fifty men to dissolve the
meeting. This has tremendous importance. The workers
become steeled, fighting elements. They become trumpets. The
petty-bourgeoisie think these are serious people. Such a
success! This has tremendous importance, as so much of the
populace is blind, backward, oppressed, they can be
aroused only by success. We can only arouse the vanguard but
this vanguard must then arouse the others.” (Discussion
with Crux (Trotsky)on The Death Agony of Capitalism,
May 1938, pp.14-15. Our stress.)
“Forty to fifty people.”
“We can only arouse the vanguard, but this vanguard must
then arouse the others”: this is quite different language
from Comrade Hansen’s. It comes from that notorious defender
of “rural guerilla warfare” and “vanguardism,” Leon
Trotsky. And it happens to embody the whole historical
experience of the fight against fascism in Europe.
Revolutionists will never stop
the rising tide of fascism, when conditions are ripe for it, if
they limit themselves to writing articles, resolutions and
speeches calling upon mass organisations to mobilise against the
fascists. The more the working class organisations – included
their vanguard groups, which it would be entirely correct to
call for that reason “so-called groups” – are
content with using only words and empty threats to the material
and violent successes of the fascists, the readiness of the
working class to act against the fascists, not to say its
capacity of drawing petty-bourgeois masses away from the
fascists, will decline, and the more conditions for a fascist
victory will become riper and riper.
Only by successfully
breaking the fascists’ terror first in a few meetings and
neighbourhoods, then in key towns and provinces, and finally in
the whole country, are the preconditions created for “mobilising
tens of millions.” This Trotsky understood perfectly –
thereby also understanding the key role of the vanguard. To fail
to do this under the pretext that the “vanguard cannot
substitute itself for the masses,” is to make the victory
of fascism certain.
When the Spanish fascists rose
on July 17, 1936, the first blow against them was not made by “tens
of millions” but by a few thousand vanguard fighters, who
had arms, had learned how to use arms during the previous year,
and were ready to act immediately, instead of waiting for mass
assemblies to vote on this or that resolution. Their armed
response took the fascists completely by surprise and changed
the situation by one stroke. Thanks to this unforeseen fact,
broad masses were rallied to the struggle, hundreds of thousands
rose, and the fascists were beaten in a few days in practically
all the industrial towns of the country. But without that
instantaneous armed answer of a limited vanguard, the danger of
a fascist walk-over victory, following the Italian and German
pattern, or the pattern of the Greek coup of 1967, was
very real.
The minority document submitted
to the December 1972 IEC session takes the weekly of our Belgian
section, La Gauche, to task, because that paper
wrote:
“The possessing classes
must be made to know that after the experience of the
barbarous Nazi atrocities, the young vanguard throughout the
world will never again tolerate the most abject form of civil
war: that in which one camp is armed to the teeth, and
murders, tortures and oppresses without mercy, while the other
camp is physically, psychologically and politically disarmed,
and resigns itself passively to the role of victim. The
example of Argentina demonstrates that this vanguard is
already sufficiently strong and resolute so that such an
ignominy will not be repeated again.”
The minority comrades add to
this the following comment:
“We pause to wonder before
the ramifications of what this suggests. Guerrilla war can
stop fascism? Then what about the course Trotsky
advocated in battling against the rise of Hitler? Why didn’t
he advocate guerrilla war in the style of the PRT
(Combatiente) or the Tupamaros? Did he, after
all, miss the key to the German situation in the early
thirties.
“... What does this alleged
lesson of ‘universal importance,’ discovered by the editor
of La Gauche, suggest to the young comrades
of our movement, not only in Argentina, but throughout the
world, including Europe? “The answer is that they begin to
think, quite logically, that armed actions of an autonomous
and clandestine type, such as those being carried out in
Argentina, are applicable in other parts of the world. In
Europe, for instance, it is quite clear that Greece, Portugal
and Spain have dictatorial regimes that are worse than the one
in Argentina. Moreover, the bourgeoisie are quite capable of
setting up similar regimes in rather advanced countries, as is
shown by the current trend towards the establishment of
‘strong’ states.” (International Internal
Discussion Bulletin, January 1973, pp.48-49)
Let’s not dwell on the
confusion between fascism and the “strong state,” between
the struggle against a “rise” of fascism and the struggle
against a fascism which has already conquered power. What is
saddening is the minority’s distortion of what is said and
intended by La Gauche, in the most classical
Trotskyist tradition. Nowhere does La Gauche
speak about “guerrilla warfare” against a fascist
take-over. Nowhere is there any mention of “clandestine
armed actions.” What we mean is something quite
different, but perhaps equally “terrifying” for the comrades
of the minority. It is the capacity of our comrades, wherever
they have reached a minimum strength, to take the initiatives of
open confrontation with the fascists, which the mass
organisations still fail to take. It is the action by the Communist
League against the fascists of Ordre Nouveau
holding their mass meeting at the Paris Palais des Sports.
It is the action of the comrades of the Communist League
against the terror of the fascists in the Rennes Citroen plant,
preventing the distribution of leaflets there even by the trade
union. There is nothing “clandestine” in this. It has
nothing to do with “guerrilla action,” but has something to
do with taking appropriate initiatives in action
against the fascists.
The minority document submitted
to the December 1972 IEC tries to exploit a couple of lines from
an article submitted to the Internal Bulletin
of the Communist League of June 1972 by comrades
Anthony, Arthur, Jebrac and Stephane, to suggest that these
comrades “apparently” project a guerrilla war orientation
for France too. This is not a serious method of discussion.
Abstraction made even of the fact that these comrades disavowed
that passage nearly immediately after it had been written;
abstraction made of the fact that comrade Jebrac has voted at
the IEC for the European thesis which clearly states that
isolated defense against state repression in Western Europe
would be suicidal and that our European sections should follow a
line of creating the broadest possible united front against such
repression, involving the whole labor movement, how can one
judge the policies of the Communist League and of other
FI sections in Western Europe on the basis of a paragraph in a
discussion bulletin, and not on the basis of their actual
day-to-day activity since 1969? We are waiting for the proof the
minority has apparently assembled that the Communist League
is actually preparing guerrilla warfare in France. If that proof
does not exist because the allegation is of course totally
unfounded, as the minority comrades themselves know, what’s
the use of this type of misleading polemics?
We repeat: what we threaten the
fascists with is not “guerrilla war,” but civil war of the
Spanish type, which, let us repeat again, was started by
relatively limited vanguard forces. What we demonstrate to the
fascists is that the vanguard is strong enough; that ignominious
capitulation without struggle by the large bureaucratic
apparatus will not be identical to capitulation without struggle
by the whole class. “January 30, 1933 will not repeat itself;
in the best of cases, what you could expect is July 1936 in
Spain.” That is our “message” to the fascists.
We will spare no effort to
educate the new generation of European revolutionists in the
lessons of the terrible experience which cost mankind 60 million
dead. It will be the pride of the Fourth International, that
such a turn of events will not repeat itself wherever we have
sufficiently strong sections. We cannot assure victory; that
depends on the relationship of forces. But we can assure that
there will be no ignominious capitulation before fascist
murderers, following the pattern of German social-democracy and
German Stalinism. Comrade Hansen might interpret this as a
result of our adaptation to “guerrillaism” and
“guevarism.” We see it rather as a fulfillment of
Trotsky’s heritage. For it was in answer to the Comintern’s
capitulation without a struggle before Hitler that Trotsky
raised the cry: “The Third International is dead; we must
start to build the Fourth International.”
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