From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Liborio Justo-Bolivia: The Revolution Defeated
Origins, Development and Postmortem of the First Proletarian Revolution of Latin America.
Workers Vanguard No. 868
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14 April 2006
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Bolivia-Trotskyism vs. Bourgeois Nationalism
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.”
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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Liborio Justo-Bolivia: The Revolution Defeated
Origins, Development and Postmortem of the First Proletarian Revolution of Latin America.
The piece below is translated from Chapter 14 (pp17990) and the beginning of Chapter 18 (pp2356) of Liborio Justo’s Bolivia: La Revolución Derrotada, first published in Cochabamba in 1967 and reprinted in Buenos Aires in 1971. Its author, Liborio Justo (Quebracho) was born in 1902, the son of Augustin Justo, who was later to become president of Argentina, and played a most important part in the history of Trotskyism both in Argentina and in Latin America as a whole. His work has already been made familiar to the readers of this magazine by the account of Argentine Trotskyism by Osvaldo Coggiola and the review of two of his books by John Sullivan in Volume 2, no 2, Summer 1989 (pp232). His Leon Trotsky y Wall Street , Buenos Aires, 1959, is much appreciated by enemies of the Trotskyist movement, who consider it as his major work. A project for the publication of an English version was being discussed a year ago, but as far as we are aware has yet to get off the ground. In addition to the books mentioned in our previous review, he is also the author of Prontuario: Una Autobiografia , second edition, Buenos Aires, 1956.
Despite the questionable nature of some of his works, the book from which these extracts are taken is regarded within the revolutionary movement in Latin America as one of the major assessments of the Bolivian crisis of 1952. Its critical view of the behaviour of the POR in those events is shared by two other main contributions, those of Sam Ryan, part of which appeared in ‘Revolution Betrayed: Bolivia 1953 ’in the Revolutionary Communist League’s International Bulletin , No 3, Spring 1971, pp924; Documents of the VernRyan Tendency , 19501953, Communard Publishers, nd; and the whole in Bolivia: the Revolution the ‘Fourth international ’Betrayed (still obtainable from the League for the Revolutionary Party, PO Box 3573, New York, NY 100083573, USA) and by Juan Robles/Rey published in Labor Action between 3 January 1949 and 22 November 1954.Shorter critiques that are largely dependent on these analyses include ‘Revolution and CounterRevolution in Bolivia’, Spartacist , no 18, Winter 1987, pp2938; John Newsinger, ‘Revolution in Bolivia’, International Socialism , no 18, Winter 1983, pp6086; Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism , New York, 1990, pp32777; The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today , Workers Power/Irish Workers Group, London, 1983, pp379; and Christopher Hobson and Ronald Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism , Westport, 1988, pp45563.
Our thanks for the translation that follows go to John Sullivan, and hopefully it will whet the appetite of readers who feel confident enough in Spanish to get hold of the full text.
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In April 1952 the Bolivian proletariat, having seized power in an armed insurrection, handed it over to the MNR instead of retaining it. The Bolivian Workers ’Union (COB), formed at the same time, was the real force, so there was a situation of dual power. If there had been a revolutionary party to provide leadership, workers ’power could have been established. As that was not so, dual power began to dissipate, thus allowing the MNR to consolidate its position in government and to begin the counterrevolution.
‘An event without precedent in the American world, more influential in its effects on the history and geography of the new world than even the war of independence. We refer to the historical significance of the Bolivian revolution.’
So claimed Carlos Montenegro, an MNR leader, who saw the importance of the 9 April 1952 insurrection, although he lacked the social or economic understanding to appreciate the reasons for that importance and to interpret it.[1]Its importance, let us insist, lay in the fact that the proletariat of the Altiplano, led by the miners, the ‘remnants ’of the Inca Empire, serfs of the colonies, the beasts of burden of the republic, had taken power in Bolivia for the first time in the history of our continent, thereby placing itself in the vanguard of the proletariat not only of Latin America but of the entire world!
Yes! It was the most profound social revolution in the history of the three Americas!
However, instead of holding onto power and continuing the proletarian revolution, as the Theses of Pulacayo had advocated, the Bolivian working class handed over that power to the leaders of the MNR, the petitbourgeois party which had initiated the rising. The MNR leaders had wanted merely to form a government which could fulfil their limited aspirations through a palace coup, but the rising provoked unforeseen and unwelcome aspects. That party found itself at the head of a popular revolution, such as its leaders had never dreamed of, and which greatly exceeded their demands. As Lora put it:
‘When the MNR leaders came to write about the April events, they were forced to recognise that it was the miners who had destroyed the oligarchy’s army, and that the factory workers of La Paz made the victory complete, the occupants of the Burnt Palace now shudder when they recall these facts. In April, when the proletariat led the revolutionary movement, the class struggle was symbolised by Siglo XX, Catavi, and Villa Victoria. The victorious proletariat handed power to the petitbourgeois leaders of the MNR, a political leadership that was not its own.’[2]
Meanwhile, on 17 April 1952, only days after the rising of the 9th, that same armed working class created its own organ of power by forming the Bolivian Workers ’Organisation (COB). Effective trade union democracy ensured that all revolutionary organisations were represented, as were the peasants. The miners ’leader, Juan Lechín Oquendo, was appointed as Secretary. The COB was, from its foundation, the real and effective power in Bolivia; the other authority, in the Burnt Palace, was a shadow which existed only because the COB allowed it to exist under its own control. ‘ We have maintained that at that time’, writes Lora, ‘Paz was nothing more than a prisoner of the COB.’The demands of the COB members, to which its leaders had to listen, were conclusive and consistent with the workers revolution, as set out in the Theses of Pulacayo:
Immediate nationalisation of the mines, without compensation and under workers ’control; also of the railways under the same conditions; workers ’occupation of the factories; nationalisation of the large estates, so that they could be handed over to the peasants to bc worked collectively.’
Those demands were based on the following concepts:
‘The Bolivian proletariat is the youngest in Latin America, but it is also the most militant and politically advanced. Its high level of class consciousness has gone beyond struggles which are merely economic, reformist and conciliatory. Its objective is the complete transformation of society under its own revolutionary leadership. The bourgeoisie’s historical tasks will be accomplished by the proletariat. The knell of private property is the reveille of the proletarian revolution. That is to say, workers ’power will not stop at democraticbourgeois measures, but will progressively restrict the rights of private property, and carry out Socialist demands, thus making the revolution permanent. The anticapitalist and antiimperialist struggle, which began as trade unionism, has deepened into a national and then an international one, thereby becoming permanent in both senses. The slogan of the United Socialist States of Latin America is valid, and its achievement will prevent the Bolivian Revolution being smothered by imperialist economic power.’
Beautiful ideas, even if they were not absolutely theoretically correct, but they were destined to remain fine phrases! Sadly, all of the political parties which claimed to be revolutionary, including the Trotskyists, who had voiced these words and who claimed to be the most advanced, ignored the most basic aspect of dual power which had been established on 9 April. Instead of demanding that that duality be resolved by the working class taking power, they were content that the COB name its bureaucrats as ‘workers ’ministers ’of Paz Estenssoro, establishing what they called a ‘joint government’.What would have been the correct revolutionary demand at that historic moment, when the Bolivian proletariat headed the struggle of the entire Latin American working class? What would a genuine MarxistLeninist leadership have demanded? This: ‘"Workers ’ministers” out of the government! All power to the COB! Implement the Theses of Pulacayo !’
However, at that critical point in Bolivian history, these demands were not made. The ‘prisoner in the Burnt Palace[3] was allowed to consolidate his position, with the invaluable support of Juan Lechín. The whole emphasis was to pressurise the MNR government to do what the masses demanded — from that viewpoint the more ‘workers ’ministers ’the better. Many even began to argue that, now that the MNR was about to carry out the proletarian revolution, revolutionary workers ’parties were no longer necessary. Had not the ‘Comrade President ’declared that he was ‘President of a government of workers, peasants and the middle class ’in a Labour Day speech in 1953? All the Bolivian political parties, even the extreme left ones, capitulated to that demagogy, encouraging the proletariat to believe that, in spite of a 15 year long struggle whose heroism had few parallels, Paz Estenssoro’s government was ‘its ’government, and that it should be content merely to put pressure upon it.
Yet, the Theses of Pulacayo established that even in Bolivia the working class played the leading rôle in the struggle for national and social liberation. That was also the contention of the first four congresses of the Third International, where Lenin and Trotsky had shown the revolutionary strategy for the colonial and semi- colonial countries. Take Trotsky’s words in his classic of MarxistLeninist thought, The Permanent Revolution .
‘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.’[4]
Can anyone imagine a process which fitted the classic MarxistLeninist framework more than did the Bolivian one? Dual power existed to an extent seldom seen anywhere in the world! However, the Trotskyists, who laid claim to these ideas, did not understand them, and let the opportunity slip away. Afterwards, they bitterly regretted it, but by then it was unfortunately too late. Let us quote again from Lora:
‘From 9 April the trade unions in the key districts simply took control of all important issues. The authorities either submitted to their decisions or were removed. The trade unions acted as organs of workers ’power, and posed the question of dual power both locally and nationally. As organisers of the daily life of the masses they had legal and administrative powers (and the forces to ensure that their decisions were obeyed), and they even administered justice. The trade union assembly became the supreme authority. That was almost always so in the mines, and less commonly so in the factories. Unfortunately, the situation was not fully understood by the workers ’vanguard, so the opportunity to occupy the mines and resolve the question of dual power in the workers ’favour was lost. Initially, the assemblies and the trade union leadership acted as instruments of workers ’power.’
Stalinism, by its inveterate pusillanimity, and Trotskyism, by its inveterate centrism, put the Bolivian proletariat at the service of the MNR’s ‘National Revolution’, instead of leading independent action for workers ’power, and thereby set it on the road to defeat. That policy was worse than the one for which Trotsky had so bitterly criticised Stalin in 1927, when he forced the Chinese Communist Party to submit to Chiang Kai Shek.Meanwhile the ‘Comrade President’, who had declared 1952 ‘The Year of the National Revolution’, declaimed demagogically from the balcony of the Burnt Palace:
We are in power to defend the interests of the people. That is the only reason we are here… To achieve the National Revolution is a gigantic task which will take many years… We cannot carry out the revolution without telling the truth to the people… The people support the revolution because it is theirs, because it is the way to salvation, the road to a better future… There have been many deaths and sacrifices by the entire Bolivian people on the long road to liberation… We have never betrayed the people. We represent no economic interest other than that of the great majority whose interests we serve…
‘Our government’s actions are in accord with the historic stage which the Bolivian people are in, and precisely because of this we cannot yet carry out a social revolution. Consequently, those who raise extremist demands are sabotaging the Revolution.[5]
From that moment on, it was necessary to build up a body of doctrine, elaborating on those words, to provide a theoretical justification for the socalled National Revolution. That task was given to some fugitives from Trotskyism, who, going further than the official position of the POR, joined the MNR and became its spokesmen. As one of them put it:
‘The political formula of the “National Revolution” does not appear specifically in the Programme and Principles of the MNR of 1942. Neither is it there in the first period of the VillarroelPaz Estenssoro government. After the eclipse of that regime, Senor Walter Guevara Arze tried to give it some theoretical content in his pamphlet Theory, Ends and Means of the National Revolution . Now it has become the basic theory of the MNR in power.’
He goes on to give it some content:
‘In our countries, which have not yet resolved the national problem, the different social forces are so weak because of their “uneven” development that they cannot express themselves through separate political parties, but only through national fronts of distinct classes whose interests coincide at the time of decisive insurrections. Therefore it is a question of a struggle between the nation on the road to power and the declining antinational and colonial oligarchy. The struggle between the forces supporting the oligarchy and the oppressed popular classes, with parties being pushed aside. As we know such interclassism has produced the “National Liberation Front” in Guatemala, “Peronism” in Argentina, and the “Revolutionary Nationalist Movement” in Bolivia.’[6]
As we have already remarked, it is in the nature of such movements to install popular governments representing all the social forces within the national revolutionary front. Consequently, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat ’is neither necessary nor inevitable in order to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. On the contrary, if we take into account that in the countries which have not resolved the problems of the national revolution, there is a variety of local circumstances on which the class strategy must be based, we must also consider that as the working class is not a homogeneous mass and that it will react differently to distinct circumstances, we must conclude that a mechanical application of that strategy will lead to directly counterrevolutionary conclusions.That point of view which, in practice, coincided with that held by all the parties of the left, barred the way to proletarian revolution, and tied them to the National Revolution, while the demagogic displays of ‘Comrade President ’were indispensable in preparing the counterrevolution. As one North American author referred to Bolivia:
‘The revolution went much further than the coup d’état, palace revolutions and military risings which degrade the word “revolution” in Latin America, but it also shows that even an authentic revolution could be guided, and to some extent braked, in order to be beneficial while avoiding a cataclysm.’[7]
That ‘cataclysm ’was, of course, the proletarian revolution.The Bolivian Workers ’Organisation (COB) was formed on 17 April 1952 on the initiative of a POR member, Miguel Alandia Pantoja, who wrote its first proclamations and edited the first three numbers of its journal Rebelión . Effectively, the MNR had no strength apart from a few bureaucrats. Real power was in the hands of the workers, who flocked into the trade unions. Lora writes:
Immediately after 9 April 1952, the MNR was a powerless minority within the trade unions. The official line was helpless, because of the mass radicalisation.’
However, a few weeks after 9 April, the ‘prisoner in the Burnt Palace ’was able to announce the postponement of the peoples ’main demand, the nationalisation of the mines, using the excuse that a commission would be established to study the question. Lechín’s bureaucracy aided this attempt to apply a brake to the revolution, slow down the rhythm of mass enthusiasm, and allow the MNR leaders to begin the process of counterrevolution. Their measures were from the beginning aimed at destroying trade union democracy, and bureaucratising the COB. To do so they relied on the active support of Stalinism. Lora writes:
The first step on the road to the COB’s destruction consisted of the silencing of the Trotskyist opposition through a plebiscite, stage managed by dispensing money and all kinds of privileges. Stalinism was delighted to play the government’s game… Faithful to its tradition, it used every method to combat the revolutionary movement. It assisted or initiated the purging of POR members from the leadership… The MNR’s plan required the destruction of all traces of trade union democracy as a step towards bringing the workers ’organisations under state control. The regular election of COB delegates and leaders was replaced by the decrees of the President and of the “workers ’ministers”. The Trotskyists began to be bitterly persecuted…
‘The COB was transformed from an organisation so strongly influenced by the Trotskyists that it never acted without consulting them, into an instrument of the government that would smash the POR and destroy its trade union base. The manoeuvre, blatantly aimed at the main left tendency, was successful because of the momentary retreat of the workers ’movement and of the help of Stalinism… The Siglo XX district was the scene of monstrous falsifications by the MNR leaders about POR members, with the intention of imprisoning them… We were caught at our lowest point, and ran the risk of being totally isolated and being physically removed from the unions… All opposition tendencies were eliminated from the leadership through violence and corruption, and were replaced by servile bureaucrats… The government exercised a bureaucratic control over the unions, sufficient for its cowardly purpose.’
The second step was the dissolution of the COB militia, which was replaced by the socalled militias of the MNR, who were paid and recruited from criminal elements and the unemployed.
‘During the first months of the revolution, the COB alone had an armed force consisting of the workers ’and peasants ’militias. The workers ’forces originated as trade union militias, when the MNR was in no position to form its own forces. Meetings witnessed the presence of strong detachments of armed workers and peasants. The workers announced that the factories and mines would become fortresses of the revolution; their heroic struggle had taught them that the army and police were repressive instruments of the “Rosca”, and that their own militias should be the only armed force. The post of militia secretary, which the COB had created in its early meetings, and became an accepted part of the union structure, now assumed a merely decorative function. Unlike the Executive Committee, both the general assembly and the base organisations of the COB took on the task of strengthening the militias, improving their armament, training and discipline and the creation of a single command, very seriously. Paz Estenssoro and Lechín told their followers to hinder the efforts to strengthen the armed workers ’groups, as they represented the greatest danger to the government. MNR militias, separate from the trade unions, were formed which were made responsible for security in the main districts. MNR leaders, working closely with the Stalinists, were given instructions to sabotage the development of the workers ’militias.’
A third, very important, measure to derail and even suffocate the progress of the revolutionary proletariat was the decree of 21 July 1952, which implemented universal suffrage, thus ending the restricted franchise which deprived illiterates of the vote. In other circumstances, the concession of universal suffrage would have been a highly progressive measure, but at that moment, when a united will expressed itself more effectively through armed and trade union action, which made the discrimination against illiterates ineffective, a call to vote was a distraction for the people, making them believe that through it they could win what had already achieved by arms. The electoral road threatened to drown the proletariat in the peasant mass. Lora writes:It is claimed that the MNR electoral reforms constituted a bold revolutionary advance which only reactionaries could oppose… Giving the peasant masses the vote is progressive, using that mass to strangle the workers is not.’
The fourth aspect of the plot to destroy the revolutionary advances consisted of the bureaucratisation of workers ’control and abolishing the right of veto in the mines. That control, derived from the Theses of Pulacayo , had a profoundly revolutionary content. Lora writes:
‘Mie must not forget that the Theses originated when the workers were moving towards the occupation of the mines, which were then controlled by the great mine owners. In those circumstances, workers ’control meant the administration of the mines by the working class through organisations representing the collective will.’
At the beginning of the revolution of April 1952 it functioned as the natural expression of the miner’s collective will. Lora continues:During the revolution’s first stage it was imposed by the masses, and functioned as a genuine expression of workers ’power. This control acted as the workers ’voice, and it was opposed to both the MNR government and to the abuses of the mine administration.’
But once the MNR, taking advantage of a momentary decline in the revolutionary struggle, produced by the postponement of the nationalisation of the mines, started its attack on the revolution, workers ’control became bureaucratised and divorced from the rank and file. Bureaucratisation produced corruption, and ‘in the hands of that petitbourgeois party [the MNR], that control became an insignificant “workers” ’decoration on the old managerial system’.
However, the most important counterrevolutionary measure taken by the MNR government was the reorganisation of the army, which had been destroyed and disarmed by the people, and the reopening of the Military Academy. The pretext for doing so was to create an army steeped in the spirit of the National Revolution, which would be open to workers. In spite of the decided hostility of the proletariat to such a measure, demonstrated by frequent decisions, the COB leadership, especially Lechín, gave it their backing. To quote Lora:
‘The worst aspect of the situation was that the COB Secretary, who knew perfectly well what the masses felt, should have played Paz’s game. Violating the statements he had previously made, and the union’s resolutions declaring the necessity of destroying the repressive army at its roots, señor Lechín cooperated in the opening of the Military Academy, and was an accomplice in the plot to reorganise the army.’
And as all the means which could have been used to channel the revolutionary impulse of the armed masses were being blocked, there was an attempt to neutralise such impulses and divert them towards the false goal of ‘joint government ’with the MNR. The evolution of the COB showed that very clearly.According to the Theory, Programme and Constitution of the COB adopted by the Workers National Conference on 31 October 1954:
‘The great movement of national and social liberation of 9 April 1952 began simply as a coup, but quickly became a victorious insurrection because of the revolutionary presence of social forces… especially the working class, which by force of arms put the candidates who had won the May 1951 election into government, with three workers ’representatives in the first revolutionary cabinet… The triumph of the April revolution and the participation of the working class in government has substantially modified, not only the country’s economic structure, but also the balance of class forces and the attitude of the workers to political power…
‘The increasing mass participation gives our revolution a popular character, which transcends its original purely bourgeoisdemocratic objectives. The increased number of “worker ministers” [increased to five — L.J], the implementation of workers ’control, the joint legislative and executive work of the COB and of the trade union conferences, show that ours is a popular revolution rather than bourgeoisdemocratic or proletarian… Our revolution is national and popular. The transformation of the struggle for the national liberation of the Bolivian people into one of social liberation depends on the revolutionary capacity of the working class in close alliance with the poor peasants and the exploited sectors of the urban middle class…
‘The working class, operating from the centre of power, is achieving gains which benefit wide layers of the people, rather than merely either itself or the bourgeoisie. For the workers to abandon power [this refers to the joint government with Paz Estenssoro — LJ] would mean, not only a weakening in that “power” which we wish to strengthen, but would play into the hands of our class enemies. While the working classes use power to push the revolution forward, while the Workers ’Congresses remain as Popular Parliaments in the true sense of the word, participation in power is not “class collaboration”…
‘In addition to the measures already announced, we ought to welcome the destruction of the old army of the “Rosca” which confronted us… as a repressive instrument of the dominant caste, and its replacement by a popular army which will be combined with a militia of the armed people… If the structure and the objectives of a Revolutionary Army are different from those of an oligarchic one, so too is the basis of its discipline. Class consciousness and political ability are the basis of discipline in the new army… The young officers must be ideologically and organisationally assimilated to the National Revolution.’
Lastly, it stated:
‘Some have tried to find a weakness — even an opportunist getout — in the fact that the COB has not raised the “question of power”. To evaluate that accusation it is necessary to look at the character of the trade unions, the relationship between the workers and the present government, and the situation of the working class and the possibility of it taking “power”… It would seem absurd to raise the question of the “seizure of power” by a trade union organisation, which, however well it represents the economic interests of the worker, the peasant, or the salaried employee, cannot express a united political view on how to take power and for what purpose.’[8]
Such was the ideological foundation of the bureaucracy leading the COB, headed by the FSTMB leader Juan Lechín Oquendo.Who was Lechín, and what was his importance in the Bolivian Revolution? On just one occasion among many others he said conclusively:
‘I am not a Communist, and I do not accept Communism. I will tell you clearly… There can be no Communists in Bolivia.’[9]
That did not prevent Juan Lechín from making terribly red statements during his trade union career, which were designed to harmonise with the aspirations of the working masses. But more than that, we know that these speeches were directly written by the POR, and contained all the slogans of the Fourth International, with the result that Lechín was sometimes considered as a Trotskyist. However, the COB General Secretary was demagogically playing a part, just like Paz Estenssoro at the head of the government, when such methods were necessary to hold back the revolutionary workers ’movement, and limit its perspectives to those of an elegant petitbourgeois. To quote Lora:
‘A student of the Bolivian workers ’movement will begin by being astonished that the name of Lechín appears so unexpectedly in the leadership of the recently formed Bolivian Mineworkers Union… The Villarroel government, and specifically its MNR component, anxious to organise and control the workers in order to ensure its own stability, plucked him from obscurity and made him leader. The spurious origin of his leadership, and his lack of involvement in the workers ’movement… made it clear, even during the six year dictatorship, that he lacked the qualities needed to be a revolutionary leader, in spite of having become the workers ’leader:.. The past 10 years of proletarian struggles, crammed full of momentous events, have given him an undeserved prominence… After the coup… of 21 July 1946, because of the temporary absence of the MNR from the political scene, Lechín sought a close relationship with the POR, and secretly became a member… He already showed the predominant traits which were evident in his trade union and political career when he came to be boss of the COB: crookedness in his dealings with both parties and people. Simultaneous flirtations with the left and right were presented by him as political astuteness, which laid the basis for the politics of deceit. Later, as if he had discovered a new principle, he declared that he was proud of being an opportunist. On that basis, he left the POR and returned to the MNR to fight against the POR.
‘Having started as the petitbourgeois representative of the workers, he immediately freed himself from the direct influence of the rank and file activists, and started to control the proletariat on behalf of another social class. This privileged position enabled him to rally the left wing of the MNR around him in one of the main factions of the governmental party. However, above all, he never ceased to be part of the MNR, reflecting its ideology and its class nature… From the moment he surrendered his body and soul to the MNR and acted as a fifth columnist of that party within the workers ’movement, he became one of the greatest obstacles to the liberation of the exploited masses. The party of the working class was built up in the struggle against …Lechínism.’
Elsewhere he states:
‘Lechínism… has been the MNR’s link with the trade unions: through this channel the immoral and corrupt activities of the government party has affected many trade union leaders. The greatest sin of the Lechín clique has been the corruption of a multitude of good leaders. When corruption failed, they jailed those who dared to resist them.’
An impartial observer recently gave an accurate description of this clique:
‘The trade unions did not seize the historic opportunity… except to create a venal and inept trade union bureaucracy, theoretically Trotskyist, but conservative in practice.’[10]
The Bolivian Revolution was essentially proletarian, the first in Latin America, and its failure was due to the absence of a revolutionary MarxistLeninist party which could have guided and directed it. Neither Stalinism nor Trotskyism responded in the way that was necessary as events unfolded. Consequently, nearly 30 years of heroic struggles produced a terrible defeat. Such heroism deserved better.We are now worse off than when the ‘Rosca ’was in power. This dreadful admission sums up the worst tragedy in Bolivia’s history. The greatest and most profound event in the history of Latin America until now could have been the beginning of its liberation. The protagonists were those who appeared the most backward and submissive. The movement failed because the masses found no one who could show them the way to direct their desperate attempt to free themselves, at whatever cost, so that their heroism could be victorious.
For that reason, because the events were so important, we must draw up a balance sheet, so that the disaster may not have been in vain, and that the defeat should serve as a lesson to the masses of Latin America in their struggle for the liberation, which they will surely win.
We ought then to ask: why did the Bolivian Revolution fail? To that question there can be only one answer: because it produced, not the proletarian revolution, but the socalled national revolution.
As we have already stated, the only way that the revolution of 9 April 1952 could have succeeded would have been if the proletariat had taken power directly and established its own dictatorship, displacing the MNR, which took power only because the working class permitted it to do so, although it had no ambitions either to make a revolution or to make structural changes. It wanted to be in government merely to fulfil its limited petitbourgeois ambitions. The revolutionary party, the POR, acting through the COB, should have fought for control in achieving the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution, in other words, the struggle against imperialism and the remnants of feudalism in the countryside, and going on to carry out Socialist measures. That is the classic MarxistLeninist road followed by the leaders of the October Revolution in Russia, in a country with a larger population, but which was as backward as Bolivia. Besides, it was not a new idea in Bolivia. In 1946, six years previously, the Theses of Pulacayo had established this aim.
As Lenin had pointed out:
The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is far greater than the proportion it represents of the total population. That is because the proletariat economically dominates the centre and nerve of the entire economic system of capitalism, and also because the proletariat expresses economically and politically the real interests of the overwhelming majority of the working people under capitalism.’[11]
Notes
1. C Montenegro, Documentas , La Paz, 1954, p60. Carlos Montenegro (19031953) organised a left wing faction in the Partido Nacionalista which split to become the Partido Socialista Boliviana in October 1935, in which he played a major part in opposing the Marxist left, before helping form the MNR.
2. The extracts by Guillermo Lora are taken from his La revolucién Boliviana and Sindicatos y revolucién . An abridged English language account of this period can be found in his A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement 18481971, Cambridge, 1977, pp241301. The Burnt Palace was the Presidential Palace, in which the MNR leaders had installed themselves.
3. Paz Estenssoro.
4. LD Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution , New York, 1969, p276.
5. The Revolutionary Thinking of Paz Estenssoro , pp34, 40.
6. Ernesto Ayala Mercado, ¿Que es la revoluciano Boliviana?, La Paz, 1956, p20. Ayala Mercado was a leading member of the Federación Universitaria Boliviana in the late 1930s, and a member of the POR. In the 1950s he moved to the left wing of the MNR. Walter Guevara Arze (1911 ) was a founder member of the MNR, stood on the right wing of the party, was the Foreign Minister in the MNR government after the 1952 revolution, and represented Bolivia at the Organisation of American States. In 1964 he split to form the MNR Auténtico, and supported the military coup against the MNR.
7. Richard W Patch, Bolivia: Diez añå on de revolucion national , Cuadernos, Paris, September 1962.
8. Programa Ideolégico y Estatutos de la Central Obrera Boliviana , La Paz, 1954.
9. R Aldunate Philips, Tras la cortina de estaño , Santiago de Chue, 1955, pp28, 33.
10. Antonio Garda, ‘Reforma agraria y desarrollo de Bolivia’, El trimestre economico , Mexico, JulySeptember 1964.
11. VI Lenin, ‘The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, Collected Works , Volume 30, Moscow, 1977, p274.
Updated by ETOL: 12 February 2009
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