From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broué-Bolivia, 9 April 1952: A Forgotten ‘February Revolution’?

Workers Vanguard No. 868	14 April 2006

Bolivia-Trotskyism vs. Bourgeois Nationalism

 

The election of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia in December was hailed by a range of liberal “anti-globalization” activists and social democrats internationally as a blow to U.S. imperialism, largely based on Morales’ pledge to nationalize oil and gas reserves. Heading the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS—Movement Toward Socialism), Morales won an outright majority of the vote in the biggest landslide victory since the end of military rule in 1982. Much of Morales’ support stemmed from the fact that he is an Aymara Indian, the son of a shepherd, in a country marked by deep anti-Indian racism. Reporting on Morales’ inauguration, the New York Times (22 January) commented that his election may represent “the hardest turn yet in South America’s persistent left-leaning tilt, with the potential for big reverberations far beyond the borders of this landlocked Andean nation.”

The Bush administration, which has chastised Morales for his base among Bolivia’s coca farmers, has responded cautiously to his election. The Washington Post (21 February) remarked in an article titled “U.S. Officials Soften Stance Toward Bolivia’s New Leftist President” that “for now, at least, the Bush administration is hoping that Evo Morales, who once threatened to become ‘America’s worst nightmare,’ is a man with whom it can do business.” The imperialists are also aware that Bolivia is a very poor country and that Morales has fewer resources at his disposal than Hugo Chávez in oil-rich Venezuela.

A bourgeois nationalist, Morales is committed to “Andean capitalism” and “free trade.” Immediately after his election, he traveled to Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia, a center of the country’s business elite, where he expressed sympathy for their demand for autonomy from the impoverished western region. He also agreed to privatize El Mutún, one of the biggest iron mines in the world, and has sought to cement the bourgeoisie’s allegiance by appointing to his cabinet a veritable rogues’ gallery of shady businessmen and supporters of his “neoliberal” predecessors. Thus Morales handed the Ministry of Mines to one Walter Villarroel, who in a previous stint in the government played a pivotal role in dismantling the state-owned Bolivian Mining Corporation (COMIBOL) and privatizing mining operations. Just last month, workers at Lloyd Aereo Boliviano, the country’s main airline, who were on strike demanding that the company be nationalized, clashed with police after Morales ordered military and police forces to seize control of the country’s airports in order to break the strike.

In calling to “nationalize” Bolivia’s natural resources, Morales echoes a longstanding program in Latin America. The main demand of the protesters in Bolivia last year for nationalization of oil and gas is supportable as a measure of national self-defense by a semicolonial country against the imperialists, albeit hardly socialist in character. In regard to the expropriation of the oil industry by the bourgeois-nationalist Cárdenas regime in Mexico in 1938, revolutionary Marxist leader Leon Trotsky wrote:

“Semicolonial Mexico is fighting for its national independence, political and economic. This is the basic meaning of the Mexican revolution at this stage. The oil magnates are not rank-and-file capitalists, not ordinary bourgeoisie. Having seized the richest natural resources of a foreign country, standing on their billions and supported by the military and diplomatic forces of their metropolis, they strive to establish in the subjugated country a regime of imperialistic feudalism, subordinating to themselves legislation, jurisprudence, and administration....

“The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense.”

—“Mexico and British Imperialism,” 5 June 1938

Bolivia is itself no stranger to nationalizations, including in the petroleum industry. The military government of David Toro (1936-37) nationalized Standard Oil Company of Bolivia without compensation, setting up a state oil company. This company took over Gulf Oil Company of Bolivia in 1969. Only in 1996 were significant portions of the oil and natural gas operations privatized. Today the Brazilian company Petrobras controls some 51 percent of Bolivia’s extensive natural gas reserves and 95 percent of its refining capacity. However, most of the natural gas reserves are not being exploited. The Association of Organizations of Ecological Producers of Bolivia noted in a 2005 report that “Bolivia has eight sectors that generate more employment than gas” and that “the entire petroleum sector gives work to some 600 people, most of them foreigners.”

Morales’ call for “nationalizations” today most likely connotes merely increased taxation. He told the social-democratic In These Times (January 2006): “We want to tax the transnationals in a fair way, and redistribute the money to the small- and medium-size enterprises.” In the December presidential election, not only Morales but every candidate raised some form of the call to nationalize the natural gas industry. A savvy politician, Morales sought to sound more militant than his competitors, while simultaneously seeking not to irreparably alienate either the Bolivian bourgeoisie or the imperialists.

The Bolivian “Revolution” of 2005

The immediate precursor to Morales’ election was a series of popular upheavals last May through June. Demonstrators protested against “neoliberalism”: the widespread privatizations of state-owned facilities and IMF-dictated austerity measures. Made possible by the defeat of a 1985 general strike, those measures resulted in the privatization of Bolivian mines and other natural resources, as well as telecommunications and transport. Laid-off miners and peasants were forced to eke out a living in small family businesses or other forms of self-employment. Many of these moved to El Alto, originally a suburb of the capital city of La Paz, but now an independent entity comprising some 800,000 people.

The 2005 upheaval was the latest in a series of desperate struggles by Bolivia’s impoverished masses. In 2000, large plebeian protests broke out in Bolivia’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, after the Hugo Banzer government acceded to World Bank demands and sold off the city’s water system to Bechtel and other corporations from imperialist countries, leading to water-rate increases of at least 200 percent. This “water war” led to Bechtel abandoning its stake and subsequently suing Bolivia for lost revenue in U.S. courts. Another revolt broke out in September 2003 upon the announcement that recently discovered natural gas reserves would be piped through Chile, a historic target of Bolivian nationalism since Chile’s victory in the 1879-83 “War of the Pacific,” which resulted in Bolivia losing its coastline. The 2003 “gas war” came to an end with the installation of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s vice president, Carlos Mesa, as president—a move that Morales was instrumental in bringing about.

The May-June 2005 protests and strikes erupted in El Alto after Congress passed a hydrocarbon bill proposed by Mesa that would favor the imperialists. Protesters raised numerous demands, including to nationalize gas and other resources, to oppose the autonomy of the wealthier Santa Cruz province, and to put Sánchez de Lozada on trial for killing protesters in the “gas war.” Mesa resigned on June 6, and elections were called for December.

The El Alto protests reflected the determination of the downtrodden masses to resist imperialist exploitation. However, to smash the chains of imperialist oppression requires a proletarian revolution led by a programmatically sufficient, i.e., a Leninist-Trotskyist, party to smash capitalist rule and establish a workers state. Such a revolution must have the perspective of spreading elsewhere in Latin America and, crucially, to the advanced capitalist countries, particularly the United States. But what has been missing since the inception of the protests in Bolivia has been participation by an organized proletariat. This in turn reflects not only the petty-bourgeois nationalist outlook of the protest leaders but the material devastation and atomization of the working class itself since the 1980s. Indeed, one of the bourgeoisie’s reasons for shutting down the state tin mines was to get rid of thousands of the miners, who had been some of the most class-conscious workers in Latin America.

The changed social composition of the recent protests has been noted by numerous individuals, including some who hail Bolivia’s “social movements.” Thus, in an article posted on the reformist Left Turn organization’s Web site, “El Alto: Epicenter of the New Bolivian Resistance” (19 January 2005), Jim Straub wrote:

“The IMF and World Bank’s economic ‘reforms’ wiped out entire sectors of the Bolivian economy—mining, manufacturing, and the public sector—that employed mass numbers of organized revolutionaries....

“Denied a livelihood in sectors like mining or public service, unemployed Bolivians gravitated to the few industries where there was any economic opportunity, the informal sector—which basically means the massive black market and street-level retail that dominates Latin America now—and coca growing....

“Whereas once armed miners and factory workers brought down governments, this past year it was indigenous associations of informal market workers and militant coca growers who forced corrupt President Sanchez Lozada to resign and flee the country.”

Permanent Revolution and Bolivia

In countries of combined and uneven development, the national bourgeoisie’s weakness and dependence on imperialism makes it incapable of achieving the gains realized by the French Revolution and other classic bourgeois revolutions, which laid the basis for economic modernization and the creation of an industrial society. As Trotsky wrote in The Permanent Revolution (1931):

“With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.”

In explaining the perspective of permanent revolution, Trotsky stressed that “the conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale.” The 1917 Russian Revolution broke imperialism at its “weakest link,” a backward, mainly peasant country. Generalizing from this experience, Trotsky insisted that a socialist order, which would provide material abundance for all, could not be constructed within the confines of one state. Ultimately the capitalist system had to be destroyed at its strongest points, the advanced industrial states. The proletarians of the more backward countries had to be linked to its class brothers and sisters in the West through an international revolutionary party.

The struggle of the working masses in Bolivia has been a negative confirmation of the perspective of permanent revolution. In 1952, in 1970-71 and again in 1985 the proletariat, with the tin miners in the lead, engaged in powerful actions, up to and including outright insurrection. But these struggles were betrayed by the workers’ misleaders, who tied the proletariat to the class enemy by preaching the need to ally with a supposedly “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie. The coalition governments (popular fronts) that the workers’ misleaders entered into with the bourgeois nationalists strengthened the forces of capitalist reaction, leading time and again to military coups and bonapartist rule.

While past struggles were defeated by the betrayals of the workers’ leadership, the material devastation of Bolivia—in particular the shutting down of the tin mines and much of industry—raises another issue. The proletarian instrumentality for overturning capitalism has been qualitatively diminished. If one looks at only the relationship of forces within Bolivia itself, this period does not augur well for the struggle against imperialism and its domestic bourgeois agents. As Trotsky stressed in The Permanent Revolution:

“Under the conditions of the imperialist epoch the national democratic revolution can be carried through to a victorious end only when the social and political relationships of the country are mature for putting the proletariat in power as the leader of the masses of the people. And if this is not yet the case? Then the struggle for national liberation will produce only very partial results, results directed entirely against the working masses.”

Militants radicalized by the depredations of imperialism and capitalism in Bolivia must grasp the necessity of linking the struggles of the Bolivian masses to those in adjoining countries such as Brazil, Chile and Argentina, where there are more viable concentrations of the proletariat, as well as to the struggles of the North American working class. This proletarian-internationalist perspective is sorely lacking among the pseudo-Marxists who have enthused over the recent protests and their petty-bourgeois and bourgeois-nationalist leadership.

A case in point in the U.S. is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which cheered Mesa’s resignation with a Socialist Worker (17 June 2005) article, headlined “Victory in Bolivia!” that exclaimed: “Although the fight for nationalization of gas and oil is not yet resolved, the social movements have delivered a stunning blow to the Bolivian oligarchy and U.S. imperialism.”

Also fatuously enthusing over the 2005 upheaval is the Internationalist Group (IG), whose founding members found their way out of the International Communist League in the mid 1990s due to their irrepressible appetites to cheer for forces remote from the working class. The IG turned an accusing finger on us in their Internationalist (December 2005). They pontificate:

“For its part, the now centrist Spartacist tendency has reached a new low as its Mexican comrades now denounce us for calling for soviets in the May-June Bolivian events, claiming this is impossible since according to them there is ‘no working class in Bolivia today’ (never mind the thousands of factories in the city of El Alto alone). In other words, these fake-Trotskyists believe socialist revolution is impossible in Bolivia.”

Although the IG evokes “thousands of factories in the city of El Alto alone,” these are, for the most part, not “factories” in the usual meaning of the word but small, often family-run and -owned textile shops and sweatshops. As Straub puts it, they are “people without regular work, union representation, or even the proverbial Boss to struggle against.” This is on top of the extensive unemployment in El Alto.

Writing in CounterPunch (14 October 2005), Raúl Zibechi notes:

“With regard to jobs, El Alto is characterized by self-employment. Seventy percent of the employed population works in family-run businesses (50%), or semi-business sectors (20%). These jobs are mostly in sales and the restaurant business (95% of the employed population), followed by construction and manufacturing.”

What often pass as “trade unions” are in fact groupings of artisans and the self-employed. A case in point is the Regional Workers Center (COR), which was a leading component of the El Alto protests. Noting the emergence in the 1970s of labor federations for merchants and artisans with “a strong territorial worker identity,” Zibechi wrote: “Thus emerged trade unions and organizations of artisans and vendors, bakers and butchers, who in 1988 created the COR, now joined by local bars, guesthouses, and municipal employees. These groups are mostly made up of small businesses owners and self-employed workers, a social sector that in other countries is not usually organized.”

Reading the IG’s breathless accounts of Bolivian events (gathered on its Web site under the grandiloquent title of “Bolivia: Class Battles in the Andes”), one would never know that anything had changed in the world over the past 20 years, whether in Bolivia or elsewhere. The IG denies the magnitude of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and the retrogression of proletarian consciousness worldwide accompanying this defeat. The purpose of this is to prettify existing reality in the hope of passing off as “revolutionary” the alien class forces they accommodate—whether it be burnt-out Stalinist sellouts from the DDR East German deformed workers state, trade-union opportunists in Brazil, or the like (see “Norden’s ‘Group’: Shamefaced Defectors from Trotskyism,” International Bulletin No. 38, June 1996, which can be ordered from the Spartacist Publishing Company).

The IG is a past master at denying reality. It can conjure up a fraternal section in Ukraine made up of total counterfeits (see “IG’s Potemkin Village Idiocy Ad Absurdum,” WV No. 828, 11 June 2004). The IG can conjure up a proletariat where it barely, if at all, exists, while it ignores powerful concentrations of the working class. Thus it’s notable that while the IG has written scads of articles on Bolivia (literally seven in the Summer 2005 issue of their press alone), it has mainly ignored East Asia—China, Japan and Korea—which has become an industrial heartland of the world.

The 1952 Revolution

In 1952 the Bolivian working class, led by tin miners organized in the FSTMB miners union, spearheaded a promising opportunity for workers revolution. In April of that year an attempted coup sparked an insurrection in which armed workers defeated the army. A powerful labor federation, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), was formed and became the primary authority not only for organized labor but for much of the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie. As miners demanded workers control of the newly nationalized tin mines and peasants anticipated the promised land reform by seizing some large estates, COB top Juan Lechín joined the bourgeois government of Víctor Paz Estenssoro’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR). Thus Lechín and other “workers ministers” became the bourgeoisie’s instrument to subordinate the aroused masses to the capitalist regime.

At the time, the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party), an ostensibly Trotskyist organization, enjoyed real influence in the COB executive. The POR was led by Guillermo Lora, who became known for his national Menshevism and contempt for anything outside the borders of Bolivia, boasting that “Bolivia is the richest experience of world Trotskyism.” Lora demonstrated his disdain for the lessons of the Russian Revolution, not least the need for the political independence of the working class. The POR supported Lechín’s entry into the bourgeois government, asserting that it “supports the left wing faction of the new cabinet,” and called on Paz Estenssoro to “realize the hopes of the workers by organizing a cabinet composed exclusively of men of the left of his [bourgeois!] party.” In counterposition, the Bolsheviks in 1917 refused any support to the bourgeois Kerensky government, exposed the reformist Menshevik and Social Revolutionary class traitors who joined the government, and led the working masses to shatter bourgeois rule through proletarian revolution (see “Revolution and Counterrevolution in Bolivia,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 40, Summer 1987).

The nationalization of the tin mines as well as a modest agrarian reform were among the concessions granted by the Bolivian bourgeoisie in 1952 as a means of staving off revolution. However, as subsequent events proved, such reforms are eminently reversible. Indeed, as the threat of social revolution receded, the capitalists began to move against the workers. The army was rebuilt with U.S. dollars and advisers, on the basis of a decree cosigned by Lechín. This army became notorious for its bloody massacres of the combative miners. By 1957 the MNR felt sufficiently secure to invite the U.S. to take over the Bolivian economy under the “Triangular Plan” of austerity and union-busting.

When the IG today gushes over the FSTMB miners’ participation in protests, it is trying to dupe the uninformed reader into believing the FSTMB is still the spearhead of the militant proletariat. This is sheer chicanery. Between 1985 and 1987 the state tin mining company reduced its workforce from 30,000 to 7,000; subsequently the operations were privatized. The Library of Congress, in its country study on Bolivia, notes, “The restructuring of the nationalized mining sector, especially the mass layoffs, had decimated the FSTMB.” The bulk of the people working in the industry today are in fact engaged, along with their families, in sifting through the remains of closed mines or straining minerals out of rivers, selling what they find on the black market or on the street. Their atomized position makes them more akin to petty-bourgeois prospectors rather than proletarians.

The COB, the historic union federation of 1952, has also changed radically. As Herbert S. Klein notes in A Concise History of Bolivia (2003): “The base of the radical left has been transformed with the decline of the old labor central, the COB, and the miner’s FSTMB and the rise of new peasant organizations.… Soon the CSUTCB [peasant confederation] held a major stake in the COB and would eventually take over its leadership and reorient its demands toward these new themes.”

It is a logical consequence of the recent protests that Bolivia’s new leader is a farmer. His crop, and that of his social base, is coca, which after the collapse of the tin market became a key export. In fact, the coca farmers “union” has supplanted the FSTMB as the strongest component of the COB!

U.S.-imposed drug eradication programs—carried out under both Democratic and Republican administrations—brought financial ruin to Bolivia’s coca farmers. Morales seeks to cooperate with the U.S. in eradicating cocaine production while hoping that Washington will allow him to “depenalize” the coca leaf. Coca has many traditional uses. Many chew it to alleviate hunger pains—a powerful inducement in the second-poorest country of the Western Hemisphere. The Bush administration, however, is predictably hostile to anything having to do with coca. This puts Morales in a tight spot between his social base and the imperialists he is seeking to placate. As Marxists, we oppose the U.S. rulers’ “war on drugs” and call for decriminalizing drug use.

For Socialist Revolution Throughout the Americas!

Numerous commentators have predicted that if Morales doesn’t carry out his campaign pledges, he will fall as did the previous two presidents. This may be true. Then again, Bolivia has had almost 200 governments since gaining independence from Spain in 1825, and each has administered economic exploitation and misery. It points to the weakness of Bolivia’s bourgeoisie that a president can be toppled largely through activities as simple as blocking its main roads. In the context of tremendous backwardness, Bolivia’s instability recalls what Trotsky, addressing Spain’s chronic turmoil, called “the chronic convulsions expressing the intractable disease of a nation thrown backward” (“The Revolution in Spain,” 24 January 1931).

Confined to the borders of Bolivia and with the proletariat absent as an organized force, the social upheavals that grow out of the country’s instability can only result in some variant of capitalist rule. What is crucially necessary is to build an international revolutionary workers party that can link the struggles of Bolivia’s impoverished masses—particularly of those proletarians that exist—to the powerful working class that exists in other Latin American countries, the U.S. and elsewhere. Such a party will be built in Latin America in sharp opposition to bourgeois nationalists and reformist politicians of all stripes.

It will also be built in opposition to the national chauvinism that has long characterized even “leftist” politics in Bolivia. Guillermo Lora’s POR largely focused its opposition to the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in the 1970s on accusations that the latter had sold out the “fatherland” to Chile and Peru. The POR also accused Banzer of betraying the “great national task” of regaining access to the sea—an implicit call for war to reverse Bolivia’s defeat by Chile in the late 19th century. The last time landlocked Bolivia attempted to win a “road to the sea,” the result was the bloody Chaco War of 1932-35, in which Bolivia battled Paraguay over the potentially oil-rich Chaco region and access to the Paraguay River outlet to the Atlantic. With Standard Oil backing Bolivia and Shell Oil on Paraguay’s side, the war ended in defeat for Bolivia and intensified Bolivian nationalism. How deep this nationalist sentiment runs was shown in the recent “gas wars” protests, when chauvinist denunciations of Chile for “stealing” Bolivia’s natural gas were rampant.

The task of tearing South and Central America out of backwardness and subjugation to imperialism falls to the proletariat of the region. As Trotsky stressed in “Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution” (May 1940):

“The slogan in the struggle against violence and intrigues of world imperialism and against the bloody work of native comprador cliques is therefore: the Soviet United States of South and Central America....

“Only under its own revolutionary direction is the proletariat of the colonies and the semicolonies capable of achieving invincible collaboration with the proletariat of the metropolitan centers, and with the world working class as a whole. Only this collaboration can lead the oppressed peoples to complete and final emancipation, through the overthrow of imperialism the world over.” 

 

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 
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Pierre Broué-Bolivia, 9 April 1952: A Forgotten ‘February Revolution’?

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Written: 1992
Source: Revolutionary History magazine [London], Volume 4, No. 3, Summer 1992
Transcription: Martin Fahlgren
Markup: David Walters, 2009, for the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line
Public Domain: This work is in the under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Trotskism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

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This short introduction to the theoretical problems of the Bolivian Revolution was translated by John Archer from Tribune Internationale-La Verité, no 13, April 1983, and appears here by kind permission of both author and translator.

More general introductions to the history of Bolivia up to and including this time can be consulted with profit. An interesting snapshot of the country occurs in Peter Fryer’s Crocodiles in the Streets, London, 1987, pp42-51. James Malloy’s Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970, includes sections on Marof and Gainsborg and the origins of the POR (pp95-7), the POR in the Second World War (pp144-5), the Theses of Pulacayo (pp146-7), the influence of the POR amongst the peasantry of Cochabamba during the 1940s (pp200-1, 207) and the COB Manifesto (pp224-5).
A more detailed account, The Beginnings of Bolivian Trotskyism’ and Trotskyism and the Bolivian National Revolution’, occupies Chapters Six and Seven (pp111-56) of Robert J Alexander’s Trotskyism in Latin America, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, California, 1973. Alexander was at one point an advisor to President Kennedy (cf Joseph Hansen, Trotskyism in Latin America’, InterContinental Press, Volume 5, no 32, 5 September 1971), and has also written a book devoted to the Bolivian events, The Bolivian National Revolution, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1958.
Indispensable for the study of the whole topic is James Dunkerleys’s Rebellion in the Veins, London, 1984, the second chapter of which, The National Revolution’, should be subjected to close scrutiny, together with his ‘Notes on a Trip to Bolivia, July-October 1981’, which exists only in manuscript form donated to the Socialist Platform archives by Mike Jones, along with Dunkerley’s more detailed account, written jointly with Rolando Morales, ‘The Crisis in Bolivia’, New, Left Review, no 155, January-February 1986, pp86-106.
The main political problems receive particular attention in ‘The POR and the Bolivian Miners’, Trotskyist International, no 1, Summer 1988, pp32-43, which includes the Theses of Pulacayo, and ‘Bolivia 1952: Revolutionary Nationalism and Proletarian Revolution’, Permanent Revolution, no 2, Summer 1984, pp27-38, comprising Roberto Gramar’s ‘In Defence of the POR’ (translated by Mike Jones) and Stuart King’s ‘A Reply to Gramar’.

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Mid-twentieth century Bolivia was an archaic country of appalling poverty, one of those countries where figures and percentages speak for themselves, and simply to list them is to compile a terrible indictment.
Four-fifths of the Indians spoke no other language than their vernacular, whilst 90 per cent of them were illiterate. Two hundred thousand miners worked in rags deep underground, at levels where the humidity was 95 per cent, producing 90 per cent of the national income. Half were infected with syphilis, and 60 per cent with tuberculosis. In 1950 the eight per cent of the landowners with estates of more than 500 hectares and often of thousands of hectares, possessed 95 per cent of the cultivable soil.[1]
The ‘gamonal’ , the great landowner, enjoyed the labour of the ‘colono’[2] for several days a week without pay, and also whenever he thought necessary for works which he regarded as being in the general interest. Two million Bolivian peasants lived ‘outside the money economy’ , to use a mild, value-free expression.
From first going underground, the miner could expect just 10 years of life in front of him. Not only did he earn barely enough to feed his family, but he also had to buy alcohol and the drug—coca—which enabled him to continue in these terrible conditions. These he bought in the company store, up on the plateau where he was going to die of tuberculosis, silicosis, or exhaustion—or of an overdose. So he paid with his blood and sweat the dividends of the shareholders in the firms of Hochschild, Aramayo or Patiño.[3]
Antenor Patiño, whose shares yielded 47 per cent of their face value, was the true ruler, both of Bolivia and, on behalf of imperialism, of tin. He was said to have offered Princess Margaret a fur coat worth $50 000. These men, capitalists and owners of great estates, enslavers of the Indians, were known as the Rosca, and they used the inexhaustible reservoir of labour formed by the masses of impoverished peasants on the margin of subsistence and society. For a long time they had controlled without difficulty a petit-bourgeoisie which they needed as much for its role in production as to maintain order. All in all about 150 000 people formed the body of electors, the ‘political class’ , to use this dubious term in a real sense.

The Revolution of 9 April

General Antonio Seleme, the chief of police, and General Humberto Torres Ortiz, the chief of staff of the army, decided to seize the capital on 8 April 1952. Their excuse was that an insurrection ‘from the left’ was being prepared. They believed that they were merely carrying out a police operation, which might indeed be necessary but would be a routine affair, a small ‘pronunciamento’ in the South American tradition. They were mistaken, for their initiative sparked off a revolution. The workers’ demonstrations on 8 April had an unexpected outcome. The hasty alliance between the rebels and the so-called ‘loyal’ military units was too late. The workers obtained arms, and on 9 April they launched attacks on the police and army posts. The army units collapsed in the face of the tide of humanity which took over the streets. Workers’ barricades were erected all across La Paz.
On 9 April the leaders of the MNR were quick to announce that a new government was being formed under the leadership of the exiled Paz Estenssoro.[4] The armed workers came to demand that the new ministers make room for three representatives whom the workers had already chosen. Very clearly something had changed in the tin kingdom. What had happened was a revolution, that was from then on known as the Revolution of 9 April.
In his analysis of the revolution which he made in 1963, Guillermo Lora, a leader of the POR at the time, said:
9 April can be regarded as the Bolivian “February Revolution”, if we take into account the differences due to the circumstances. The most remarkable similarity lies in that the workers made the revolution and that it was the political party of another class which took power. To a certain extent the Bolivian petit-bourgeoisie played the role of the liberal bourgeoisie in Russia. Our “October Revolution” has been too slow in arriving. That is the difference which strikes the eye. The ebb of the revolutionary movement, which we said was only temporary, has lasted too long.’
Catherine and Francois Chesnais write in their introduction to the French translation of Lora’ s book:
`The April revolution was a genuine revolution. The masses surged forward to the front of the stage with extraordinary determination and the desire to bring down for good the rule of the Rosca. It carried on the activity appropriate to the masses. Through the destruction of “gamonalism” in the countryside, as well as the new political experience which it meant for the proletariat and its vanguard, the revolution represented a profound break from the palt. A new stage in the history of the class struggle in Bolivia opened in April 1952. In this respect April 1952 really was like February 1917, including the delay until October in the evolution of the situation.’
On the thirty-first anniversary of the revolution of April 1952, and just after the publication of an article in Informations Ouvrières entitled ‘The Paradox of February [19171’ , it is interesting to attempt to explain why this ‘February Revolution’ surged up, and why the ‘OctoberRevolution’ , which it foreshadowed, has been so long delayed.
The economic, social and political situation described above had deteriorated continuously since the 1920s. The price of tin fell, agriculture stagnated, and the petit-bourgeoisie saw the possibilities of upward social movement closed off. One part of the petit-bourgeoisie was to serve the Rosca to the end, but the youth, and especially the students, looked for a solution through nationalism, or even Marxism, and a workers’ movement that was taking its first steps.
The Second World War and the political developments which accompanied it were to speed up a political differentiation, which led ultimately to an explosion and the eruption of the masses onto the scene.

The Forces Which Confronted Each Other

The Stalinists appeared openly in 1926 with a trade union federation, the CSTB, which was linked with the confederation led by the Mexican agent of Stalin, Lombardo Toledano,[5] and then, in 1940, with a party, the Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionario (PIR). From 1941 onwards the PIR supported the concept of ‘patriotic unity’ , that is it defended the interests of the ‘allies’ of the Soviet bureaucracy. It sent its representatives into reactionary governments, just as its brother party in Cuba did for the government of Batista. This collaboration with what appeared to be the main enemy alienated the PIR from many of its supporters, to the benefit of the nationalist movement.
The MNR was founded in 1941. It proclaimed itself to be an patriotic, Socialist-inclined movement for the independence of Bolivia. The MNR entered the government for the first time after the military coup d’ état which brought Colonel Villarroel to power, with the aim of winning a programme of limited reforms, and particularly of using the state to create peasant unions and the new trade union organisation of the FSTMB, which was to have considerable resources with which to organise the workers.
The MNR benefitted on this level from the response of the masses which turned towards it in disgust at the classic Stalinist policy of the PIR, which supported the Rosca against the nationalists, whom it treated as ‘pro-Nazis’ .
However, one sector escaped from the control of the MNR unions, and this was the tin miners. During the 1940s a workers’ group formed by militants of the POR, which had been founded in exile under the influence of the Trotskyists in Chile and Argentina in order to build the Fourth International in Bolivia, had, little by little, built a base amongst the miners.
It was they who in November 1946 won over the Miners’ Federation to adopt the well-known Theses of Pulacayo with a programme for the nationalisation of the mines, agrarian reform and universal suffrage, which the MNR found itself obliged to support.
Already in 1947 the Miners’ Parliamentary Bloc was strong enough to get four deputies elected,6 one of whom was Lora, and two senators, one of whom was Lechin, who over a period used the political authority of the POR to become the leading trade union leader and the indispensable agent of the MNR at the head of the Bolivian Workers Central Organisation (COB).
The Bolivian trade union centre, the COB, was founded just 11 days after the victory in the streets of the Revolution of 9 April. It was founded through the initiative of a POR militant, Miguel Alandia Pantoja. At that time it was not only the largest mass organisation in the country, but was a genuine constituent of dual power, with strongly marked characteristics of Soviet-type power.
The PIR was discredited, the MNR was overtaken and forced to adopt the slogans of the POR in order to control the movement, and the influence of the POR was growing. These were the political elements which explain why the generals’ actions on 8 April produced the breach through which poured the tidal wave of the masses, and which resulted in the outbreak of the revolution. In such conditions, at the point when the POR’ s programme opened a perspective for struggle, there was no counter-revolutionary apparatus able to act decisively as a brake.
Paz Estenssoro received a rapturous welcome from the crowds when he returned from exile. They demanded the nationalisation of the mines and the expropriation of the landlords. He gave way—and prepared to counter-attack.

The MNR’ s Counter-Attack

There is a law of revolutions which applies generally, and especially in revolutions like that of February 1917. In their first phase, the masses tum towards the organisations which they have raised to power, which seem to them to be the party of the victorious revolution, which are in government, and which have the greatest mass influence.
Despite the tremendous qualities of the POR, and despite its influence in the mining regions, the fact is that at the beginning of April 1952 it was only a very small party, and above all it lacked material resources. The MNR, on the other hand, was a genuine mass party. It enjoyed the support of all the leading layers of society, who saw it as their ultimate defender, and had everything it needed to enjoy a favourable image and to give the masses the illusion of being their party—apart from a real implantation in the working class.
As for the POR, it did not clearly understood the situation. Even in its leadership, there were some who had illusions in the left wing’ of the MNR, such as Lechin, whom the bourgeoisie had placed there for that very purpose. The POR did not propose the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ . It limped behind Lechín, who talked about ‘controlling’ the government, at the moment when the government was systematically excluding the COB from positions of power, and encouraging the dual process of both integrating it into the governmental apparatus and bureaucratising it.
Soon a revisionist wing in the leadership of the POR was supporting the idea that the Bolivian masses would take power within the frame-work of their existing organisations—which, in real terms, meant under the leadership of the left wing’ of the MNR.
This crisis in the POR opened the door to the politics of stabilisation and the MNR’ s counter-attack. In October the nationalisation of the tin mines, at the moment when the rural masses were starting to move, served as a sharp check. This was nationalisation with compensation, which left open the possibility of a return to private ownership, while the creation of the mixed managing concern for the mines, the Comibol, laid the material basis for the large-scale corruption of the trade union leaderships, which were being integrated into the state on the pretext of sharing control.
The ebb of the revolution, which was in general inevitable, could only be accelerated in the course of the following years, after the proletariat had been disoriented by the consequences of its victory. The peasant movement in turn moved towards the bourgeois form of agricultural smallholdings.
Thirty-one years after the Revolution of 9 April there has been no ‘Bolivian October’ . That cannot be disputed. Nonetheless, the revolution of 9 April has lived on within the consciousness of the masses in Bolivia and in South America. We can be convinced of this by the international campaign against the ‘Trotskyists’ in Bolivia in the 1960s—read the book by Regis Debray[7]—by the continuation of attempts to destroy the POR and the struggles of the workers and peasants, and by the struggle for the Constituent Assembly in 1971—a struggle which has not yet ended, as has been shown recently by the ignominious collapse of the government of the drug trafficking generals, and by the coming to power of Siles Zuazo, the left arm of Paz Estenssoro.
Let us state clearly: behind the defeats which have followed the Bolivian ‘February’ , in 1971 as in 1952, can be traced the crisis of the Fourth International.[8] To be sure, it is not only in Bolivia that the revolutionary International is necessary for the victorious transition from February to October. But it is because Bolivia reached its ‘February’ in 1952 that the question of the International appeared there in such a striking way.

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Notes

1. The distribution of land in Bolivia was very unequal. In 1950 615 landowners with holdings of 10 000 or more hectares held 49.6 per cent of the cultivatable land in Bolivia, whilst a total of 51 198 landowners with holdings of less than 0.5 hectares held 0.23 per cent of the cultivatable land. The land was underexploited, with an overall average of 1.9 per cent of cultivatable land being used. Those owning over 10 000 hectares used a mere 0.5 per cent of their holdings, the figure for those owning under 0.5 hectares was 54.2 per cent (HS Klein, Prelude to the Revolution’ , in JM Malloy and RS Thorn (eds), Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia Since 1952, Pittsburgh, 1971, p42).

2. Gamonal: from gamonito, a parasitic plant which digs into roots of trees and lives off their sap. In Bolivia it refers to those who live off the unpaid labour of peasants, in other words wealthy parasites, idlers. Colono: a landless peasant who provides free agricultural labour on big estates in exchange for the right to grow crops on some of the land.

3. The tin content of the ore extracted in the Catavi mine declined steadily from 6.65 per cent in 1925 to 1.28 per cent in 1950, and continued to decline thereafter. Despite the increasing work necessary to extract the same amount of tin, in the period 1950-52 the amount spent per annum on importing mining machinery into Bolivia was in real terms a mere 3.3 per cent higher than in 1925-29 (RS Thorn, ‘The Economic Transformation’ , in Malloy and Thorn, op cit, pp170-1).

4. Siles Zuazo led the MNR government until Paz Estenssoro returned from Argentina, he then became Vice-President.

5. Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894-1968) was a prominent Mexican Stalinist and trade union leader who played a leading role in the slander campaign against Trotsky.

6. Lora states that the miners’ bloc won seven seats in the chamber of deputies and two in the senate (G Lora, A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement 1848-1971, Cambridge, 1977, p253).

7. A reference to Regis Debray’ s Revolution in the Revolution?, Harmondsworth, 1968.

8. In October 1970 Alfredo Ovando Candia’ s government was overthrown by a military coup, and the new government, headed by Generals Albarracín, Guachalla and Sattori was immediately challenged by more radical bourgeois/military elements around Juan Jose Torres. A huge general strike brought down the generals’ government, but the nationalists and Stalinists in the new unified working class body, the Comando Político, gave their support to Torres, and would have accepted posts in his government had he not withdrawn his offer. A right wing challenge to Torres in January 1971 was met with a mass working class upsurge, but on 19 August 1971 General Hugo Banzer Suarez staged a successful military coup, defeating the heroic resistance of the workers and students of La Paz. The POR did not effectively challenge the illusions of the nationalists and Stalinists in Torres.