Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The 1952 Revolution
How the 4th International and the POR betrayed the revolution which could have carried Trotskyism to power.
by José Villa
Part 1
Introduction
When the February revolution occurred in 1917, the Bolsheviks had been in existence for fifteen years. When the revolution of April 1952 happened the POR had been in existence for seventeen years. Both movements operated in countries with a peasant and petty bourgeois majority but with a modern, geographically concentrated, proletariat. Both parties had the benefit of working with the introducers of ‘Marxism’ into their respective countries (Plekhanov and Marof) and their cadres had taken part in forming the first working class organisations. While Bolshevism had been formed by its confrontation with other Marxist currents (economists, Mensheviks, etc.), petty bourgeois socialists (SRs) and bourgeois democrats (Cadets), the POR had had to fight against the ‘Marxists’ of Marof and Stalinism, the different wings of the MNR and ‘socialism’ of both bourgeois and military varieties.
Bolshevism was tempered during the working class upsurge which culminated in the 1905 revolution, in the reactionary phase which followed it, in the new wave of strikes and the struggle against World War 1. The POR was born in the fight against the Chaco War and was forged during two great mass insurgencies, which brought down the governments in 1936 and 1946, in great strikes and massacres, in constant changes of government, coups and a short civil war. While the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was smashed, both of the two rehearsals of revolutionary crises experienced by the POR ended with toppling the governments. Bolivian ‘Trotskyism’ had its programme endorsed by the university students and the miners and could pride itself on having had within its ranks the main leaders of the FSTMB and the CON. (1)
The role of the POR in the April events was such that even one of the founders of the Stalinist party recognised that of the five main leaders of the insurrection, one was of the MNR right, another was of the pro-POR wing of the MNR, and three were POR:
“This armed uprising was led and guided to victory by the leading personnel of the MNR, Hernán Siles Zuazo, Juan Lechín Oquendo, Edwin Moller, Alandia Pantojas, Villegas and others”. (2) (Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986 p.188).
In Lucha Obrera, the POR boasted that
“when top MNR leaders thought about flight, it was our comrades who lead the people and proletariat of Oruro to victory (...) our militants were the real leaders in the defence of Villa Pavon and Miraflores that in practice saved the difficult situation for the revolutionaries when the enemy already appeared to be triumphant within the city”. (3) (LO 12.6.52, p.3).
Within the COB, the dominant power in the country, the POR was the most important and influential party. The historian Alexander states that: “The POR which had in large part been able to determine the ideological orientation and dynamism of the Workers Center”, “For the first six months the COB was practically in the hands of the Trotskyists”. (4)
Lora admits that
“Immediately after the 9th April 1952, the MNR operated as a inactive minority within the trade union organisations. It had little success because mass radicalisation had reached its highest point.” (5)(Sindicatos y revolución, G. Lora, La Paz 1960, p.31).
“The whole of the opening struggle for the formation of the Trade Union Centre was in the hands of POR militants and a large part of the full-time Staff and the whole orientation of the brand new COB was Trotskyist. Lechín did no more than operate under the powerful pressure of the masses and the POR. In the speeches of the workers’ leaders of this period and in the plans presented to the Paz Estenssoro Cabinet can be found the imprint of the POR”.(6) (La Revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, Guillermo Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254).
While the MNR was weak for several months after the uprising of April, the POR CC continued boasting to itself about its majority in the COB. “Our unchallenged present majority is a clear proof of our slow but solid and sure work, undertaken by the party in this sense”. (7) (Boletin Interno, no 13, POR, 1953, p.11).
The COB was born brandishing the Theses of Pulacayo, and with a POR programme and orientation. When it was founded the POR displayed its total identification with its conduct. “The COB was born then with a clear conception of its independent class position, faithfully interpreting in its transitional programme the broad mass movement” (8) (LO, 18.4.52., p.2).
The historian Dunkerley maintains that “much of the preparatory work (of founding the COB) was undertaken by the POR representatives, Edwin Moller, Miguel Alandia and José Zegada”. (9) (Rebelión en las venas, James Dunkerley, Ed Quipus, 1982, La Paz, p.50, Verso edition p.45). “The POR allegedly controlled at least half the COB’s 13 man central committee”. (10) (ibid., p.67, Verso Edition, p.64. The editor of the English text omitted ‘allegedly’ before ‘controlled’).
In October 1952 a journalist, claiming to be a Trotskyist critical of the POR, admitted that within the COB “the largest fraction is that of the POR; next comes the group of Lechín and Torres, that is the nationalist wing of the unions while the Stalinists are in third place with scarcely five votes”. (11)
It took the Russian Bolsheviks from February to October to obtain a majority in the Soviets and when they had got it they moved to insurrection. The POR however controlled the COB from its first moments. While the Bolsheviks were a minority within the Russian working class for these eight months the POR led the COB for the first crucial six months after the insurrection which dispersed the bourgeois army. The programme, the leadership and the press of the COB were the work of the POR. The main leader of the COB functioned by reading out speeches written by the POR.
However, there was a huge difference between the POR and Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks demanded of the Soviets that they should give no class support to the bourgeois-democratic, reformist coalition government and that instead they should break with the bourgeoisie and take all power in their own hands. The POR, in contrast, gave ‘critical support’ to the bourgeois government and asked to be given ministerial posts. While the Bolsheviks attacked the Mensheviks and the SRs without pity, seeking to remove them from leadership positions, the POR identified itself with the labour bureaucracy (for whom they drafted speeches and ministerial plans) and sought to transform the bourgeois party and its government. The Bolshevik strategy was to make a new revolution while that of the POR was to reform the MNR and its government. In short, while Bolshevism was Leninist, the POR was Lechínist.
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The Menshevik Positions Of The POR And Of Lora In April
Trying to explain the behaviour of the POR as objectively as possible, Dunkerley maintains that those from the section of the 4th International “were from an early stage highly critical of the MNR regime, they made no call for an immediate workers government, demanding instead a radicalisation of proposed reforms, the defence of the regime against imperialism and the revolutionary education of the masses”. (12) (Rebelión en las venas, p.52 – Verso Edition, p.46).
Just before the April events the POR had published “an open letter to the government, demanding that power be handed over to the Nationalist MNR without a new election”. (13) The strategy of the POR was limited to pressurising the government periodically so as to change the leadership of the bourgeois state with the aim of allowing the MNR to take over the presidency by constitutional means. In that way, a legitimate government could be restored, which, through pressure, would be forced to adopt radical measures and would also have to appoint worker ministers.
During the April events Lora had been in France where he gave statements to La Verité which The Militant then reproduced. They were the main weeklies of the 4th International. In his history of the POR, Lora says that “Up to now not enough importance has been given to the call for the Trotskyist programme made by Lora in Paris a few days after the arrival of the MNR in power”. With great cynicism he states that there he said that the working class “in order to triumph had no other way than by going over the political corpse of the MNR and also over that of Lechínism”. (14) (Contribución ..., G. Lora, Vol.2, pp.237-238). As far as we are concerned, we do not want to give ‘enough importance’ to such statements. Exactly the opposite was said. Let us see:
“The central slogans put forward by our party were:
1) Restore the constitution of the country through the formation of an MNR government which obtained a majority in the 1951 election.
2) The struggle for the improvement of wages and working conditions
3) Struggle for democratic rights
4) Mobilisation of the masses against imperialism, for the nationalisation of the mines, and for the abrogation of the UN agreement”. (15) (The Militant 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP, New York.)
Of all these demands only the last one is really radical and even that did not go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy, or what the anti-communist Paz would do a few months later. The first seeks a constitutional bourgeois state with a populist government. Instead of seeking to differentiate itself from the latter by raising anti-capitalist and class-based slogans, the whole of the POR platform was exactly the same as that raised by the bourgeois MNR. Lora did not put forward as his dominant idea any proletarian slogan (expropriation without compensation of the bourgeoisie, workers control, disarming the bourgeois armed forces and their replacement by worker and peasant militias, occupation mines, factories and land, etc.). Instead of wanting to make the COB into a soviet, break with the bourgeoisie and take all power, Lora called for the MNR bourgeois government to change direction and limited himself to asking for some reforms which did not go beyond the framework of the capitalist state.
“The subversive movement of the ninth of April was no surprise for our party and occurred as we had foreseen in our theoretical analysis”. (16)
If a party was aware that it was approaching the main revolution of its history it ought to have done all it could to have kept its most important individual in the country, or at least, not far away. However, Lora stayed in Paris for more than half a year after the end of the 3rd World Congress of the 4th International which was why he was in Europe. By boasting that his party had predicted what was going to happen and with his view that he should stay outside in the imperialist world, Lora was either blustering, or worse, he did not place much importance on his own endeavours to get rid of the MNR but instead agreed with trying to put pressure on it.
“The struggle which immediately began is a struggle of the masses to impose their demands on the April 9th government”. (17)
If the POR was in the forefront of the struggle its objective should have been to put itself forward as an alternative leadership which called on the COB to kick out Paz. However, Lora called for support of the bourgeois government and its ‘left-wing’ ministers. Instead of opposing the trap of inviting labour ministers into the capitalist cabinet, so attempting to improve the regime’s disguise preparatory to disarming and then counter-attacking the workers, Lora identified himself with the tactic. “The textile workers decided to impose their conditions on the right wing of the MNR, they obliged it to accept the working class elements in the new cabinet who constitute its left faction”. (18) (The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora Interview Part 1).
“In this connection, the essential mission of the POR is to assume the role of the vigilant guide to prevent the aspirations of the workers from being diluted by vague promises or by manoeuvres of right wing elements”. (19)
For the POR, the enemy was not the bourgeois government but only the ministers who were to the right of the anti-communist Paz. As far as Paz was concerned, ‘the government was to be defended to the utmost’.
Lora wanted to uphold this reformist position by characterising the regime as petty bourgeois. The petty bourgeoisie is incapable of installing its own mode of production and regime. Small property engenders large property. A society of small owners is impossible and cannot avoid competition so forcing some to enrich themselves to accumulate while others become poor and are turned into proletarians. When the petty bourgeoisie is not allied to the proletariat it is marching behind the bourgeoisie aiming to reform its state.
A government that is not subordinate to the Soviets and workers militias is one that is against the proletariat. A petty bourgeois government which oscillates between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie cannot exist. By upholding such a possibility, Lora put forward the view that these ‘petty bourgeois’ governments, should have pressure put on them to try to fill them with extra labour ministers, with the aim of gradually achieving a workers and peasants government. This is a gradualist and reformist conception that led the POR to prop up the military socialist dictatorship, and it would later lead them to ask for ministers in the cabinet of General Torres. Whenever you try to put ‘red’ ministers in the populist governments of the bourgeoisie and sow further illusions, the more the ruling class is helped make use of these demagogues so as to confuse and disorientate the masses and to prepare a reactionary coup.
Neither the MNR government nor the party were petty bourgeois. The MNR, like every party with popular support, reflects the composition of the society in which it operates. A populist party, even though it has a majority of members from the most oppressed strata, just as elsewhere within capitalism, is run from the top down. Almost all the top leadership of the MNR were people who came from the oligarchic families, who had collaborated with German imperialism, propped up the bloody nationalist dictatorship of Villarroel and who were socially, ideologically and organically, an expression of a sector of the national bourgeoisie. The MNR, like Bolivian society, might have a majority of members and voters in the petty bourgeoisie, but it was led by politicians of and for the bourgeoisie.
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International Repercussions Of The Interview With Lora
These scandalous declarations were published in the mouth-piece of those who called themselves bastions of ‘anti-pabloism’: the SWP (USA) and PCI (France). From ‘Pabloists’ to ‘anti-Pabloists’ all fully supported these positions. In all of the factional struggles which were to split the 4th International in 1953, nobody ever objected to this criminal Menshevik policy which betrayed the Bolivian Revolution.
The only discordant voice known within the 4th International at that time was that of a small tendency in California, headed by Vern and Ryan. This had the great merit of severely questioning the Menshevik declarations of Lora.
“The POR has been presented the opportunity of leading a revolution and thereby rendering a great service to our international movement.”
“The MNR is a bourgeois party, which politically exploits the masses.”
“... it is incontestable that the present Bolivian government is a bourgeois government, whose task and aim is to defend by all means available to it the interests of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism (...) This government is therefore the deadly enemy of the workers and peasants, and especially of the Marxist party.”
“A united front with a bourgeois party with the aim of establishing a bourgeois constitution and placing the bourgeois party in power is not a united front but a people’s front.
“The united front that the Marxists advocate aims to unite the workers and peasants on a minimum programme embodying a stage of the revolutionary transitional program. This united front, in a revolutionary situation, turns into workers’ and peasants’ soviets. And even in the soviets the struggle goes on. Far from accepting the conciliationist programme which may be imposed on the soviets, the Marxists advocate their own programme, calling on the soviets to break with the bourgeoisie, their parties and their government, and take the complete power, establishing a workers’ and peasants’ government.
“But comrade Lora does not raise the question of a break with the bourgeois government. The workers’ and peasants’ government he advocates appears as some ultimate conclusion to a gradual reshuffling of the personnel of the bourgeois government, whereby the right wingers will be forced out and the cabinet take on a more and more left tinge”. (20)
The Vern-Ryan tendency received no reply to its criticism against the Menshevik line in Bolivia. From then until today, all the currents which derive from the ‘anti-Pabloist’ International Committee continue to ignore these questionings of a policy which they, opportunistically, totally endorsed.
In spite of the progressive nature of its criticism this tendency soon dissolved itself. Its positions, although on the left of the deformed 4th International, contained a series of ambiguities. The most important of them was its conception that a government directed by a Stalinist military apparatus would be enough (regardless of whether capitalist social relations had been expropriated or not) to recognise the creation of a new deformed workers state.
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Rebelión Against The Permanent Revolution
The POR was proud that it edited the mouthpiece of the COB bureaucracy.
“Our points of view were imposed by a crushing majority and the newspaper Rebelión of the COB presented our own political position in the workers camp”. (21) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, undated, p.10)
“The three first issues of Rebelión, the last of which was published on the occasion of the First Congress of the COB (31st October 1954), appeared under the direction of M. Alandia and wholly expressed the programme of the Centre at that time. The first issue contained a hearty greeting to the General Secretary of the POR”. (22) (La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, G. Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254).
But what did this mouthpiece have to say? Did it put forward a revolutionary policy whose basic principles could only be a demand for the COB to break with Paz and call for the occupation of the mines, factories and the land, and to take power? On the contrary, Rebelión identified itself with the bourgeois regime. It stated that the MNR government was its own and that it had to be propped up. In its first issue under POR direction it said:
“The defeat of the oligarchy and the birth of the MNR government is the work of the working masses; it is our creation (...) in order to survive the present government requires from the workers that the workers supporting it, being vigilant will be able to attain great achievements”. (23) (Rebelión, 1.5.52, pp.8-9)
They not only mortgaged themselves to the MNR but paid homage to the memory of a military man, Gualberto Villarroel, who was involved in the Catavi massacre of 1942, and who was a pro-imperialist dictator overthrown by a popular uprising. (24) “Our proletarian homage to the memory of the martyr president” (ibid., p.9).
How could that be the position of a revolutionary? This was an orientation which could only help to disarm and demobilise the COB, asking it, in spite of having the real power, to continue helping a bourgeois government that was destined to line up behind imperialism and massacre the workers.
In June, Lucha Obrera maintained that the MNR should thank the POR for helping it achieve power and for its support. Its task would now be to put pressure on the MNR to carry out reforms which would benefit the working and middle classes.
“If the MNR has to give thanks to anyone, and greatly for our help, it is without doubt, to the POR (...) The POR will continue in carrying out its task of guiding the proletariat and of ensuring that the actions which deposed one government and raised up another, which enjoys the support of all the people, are carried out in a way beneficial to the proletariat and the oppressed sectors of the middle class”. (25) (LO, 12.6.52, p.3).
“Never before had a party like the MNR, that can count on uniform backing from an armed people and proletariat, achieved power; and never, therefore, did anyone have the opportunity of adopting measures with a real revolutionary content. The government has closed its eyes, or has not wanted to see the magnificent opportunity, and has preferred to deceive the proletariat which supported it unconditionally”. (26) (LO, 29.6.52, p.4)
Never before had the party had such an opportunity to make a social revolution, but the MNR hesitated. The POR opposed the view that the deficiency was because of the bourgeois class character of the MNR, but said it was due to its lack of tactical ability. The task was to open its eyes and make it see the magnificent opportunity. The whole policy of the POR was completely Menshevik. Instead of calling on the workers to reject the MNR and to struggle to put the COB into power, the POR boasted of having served the MNR and of wanting it to mull over things and see reality – an orientation that was simply limited to seeking to serve as an adviser to the MNR in order to reform it.
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The POR Supports The Bourgeois Government
Nine days after the uprising of 9th April, the mouthpiece of the POR declared that
“to the extent that it carries out the promised programme, it supports the Government which arose out of the popular insurrection of 9th April, (...) It had two worker ministers in the petty bourgeois cabinet, but was entirely controlled and tied to the decisions of the COB”. (27) (LO, 18.4.52, p.2).
Under no circumstances can the proletariat support the government of a section of its exploiters. On the contrary, the aim of a Marxist party should be to undermine it and to struggle for its revolutionary overthrow. Supporters of it would be compromised with a policy of maintaining backward and semi-colonial capitalism. In the case of an attempt at a reactionary coup the Trotskyists should have followed the same policy as Russian Bolshevism in the face of the Kornilov revolt. Without giving an ounce of support to the Kerensky government the Leninists joined its supporters in the streets to fight with arms in order to crush ultra-reaction. At all times they called on the workers to have no confidence in, or to give support to, the government, and to prepare to depose it in a revolutionary way, once the monarchist coup attempt had been crushed.
However, in Bolivia at the time imperialism had no intention of carrying out a coup. It much preferred to help Paz and Siles, who knew how to use demagogy together with reformists like Lechín and their agents in the POR, in order to exhaust the masses, so that they could free themselves from working class pressure and succeed in rebuilding the bourgeois armed forces and so maintaining semi-colonial capitalism. The rightist coups (such as the adventure of the MNR right-wing in January 1953) could not count on the patronage of the USA. The Yanks had no wish to provoke a popular counter-reaction. They knew that the MNR was led by bourgeois and they knew how to use such people against the workers.
The USA never armed a counter-revolutionary guerrilla force as it did later in Nicaragua, Angola or Afghanistan. Nor did it encourage bellicose sentiments among the reactionary governments of the region for an invasion. The imperialist trump card was Paz. They knew that the latter would be made to nationalise the larger mines and to carry out some social reforms. But they also knew that he did it under pressure of the armed masses and that he would try to moderate those reforms when he could. As soon as populist demagogy had helped the rebuilding of the repressive bourgeois military machine and the workers activity had ebbed, that would be the time for a policy of destabilisation. The Eder and Triangular plans applied later by Paz, Siles or Lechín would seek to follow the designs of imperialism against the exploited of Bolivia.
To believe that ministers in a cabinet could have a policy contrary to that of the government was shown to be a reactionary illusion. Rather, those ‘red’ ministers were obliged to implement the decisions of an anti-working class government. It was not the COB that controlled its ministers, but it was the government, through its trade unionist ministers, which controlled the COB.
During the April events, the “Central Committee issued a resolution in the form of adhering to the revolution, advancing a programme of immediate demands. The fundamental points demanded a struggle for (...) A Bolivian government that would obey the will of the Bolivians”. (28) (Boletin Interno, No.13, 1953, p.7). In May, Lucha Obrera called for a struggle to change the direction of the Victor Paz government. It demanded “A Bolivian government which will obey the will of the Bolivians and not of the Yanks”. “The petty bourgeois government, owing to the force of political circumstances, has the possibility of being transformed and changed into a phase of the Workers and Peasants government”. (29) (LO, 25.5.52, p.3).
The Bolivians living in that country are from every class. A government ‘of the Bolivians’ can only be that of the ruling class of the said republic. The POR, instead of struggling to overthrow the bourgeois government in order to create one of the workers and peasants, suggested that the MNR should rather take up the aim of developing a sovereign national bourgeoisie and that it should stop conciliating the USA to such an extent. If it did the latter it would be able to turn itself into a workers’ and peasants’ government.
For Marxism, the proletariat can come into power only on the basis of the destruction of the existing state machinery and the removal of the bourgeoisie from power. For the POR, the workers could attain power by Bolivianising and improving the regime of the bourgeois MNR. The POR faithfully followed the teachings of Aguirre and Marof, of trying to serve nationalist governments with the aim of changing their direction.
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Co-Government
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After the success of the April revolution a quarrel began between the different wings of the MNR about sharing out the quotas of power. When Lechín withdrew, protesting at the few posts given to him for his followers, the leader of the right-wing gave way. According to Lechín’s story, Siles followed him as far as the palace staircase: ‘Juan, come back and we will talk. Put your points of view, and so that they can be carried out, name four ministers’. Lechín went back, named four minsters almost at random, and thus co-government was born”. (30) (ibid. p.301).
“The top layer of the left-wing supported by some union leaders, were content to impose two worker ministers and three centrists in the cabinet and to challenging the right to posts and positions in the administrative bureaucracy”. (31) (Boletin Interno, No 13, of the POR, undated, p.8.) As far as the POR was concerned Lechín should have fought for more portfolios and perhaps some for the POR.
Supported by all the POR votes the newly born COB resolved “To grant comrades Juan Lechín and Germán Butrón the absolute confidence of the working class and to reaffirm its solidarity and support in the ministerial posts they hold at present”. (32) (Movimiento obrero y procesos politicos en Bolivia: Historia de la COB 1952-1987, Jorge Lazarte, EDOBOL, La Paz 1989, p.280).
The POR, after identifying itself with the Lechínist ministers, did ask them to resign in protest about the delay in nationalising the mines. But, on other occasions, later, the POR was once more to demand the capture of ministries on behalf of Lechínism.
In July, the POR said: “When the COB was organised the situation of the worker ministers in the cabinet was defined as spokesmen of the working class in the government and agents of the government in the workers’ camp. The action of the workers ministers, as a minority, is difficult. Faced with that fact, there was undoubtedly no other alternative but to resign”. (33) (LO, 15.7.52, p.1).
In November, the POR issued a ‘self-criticism’: “In spite of all their bold statements, these workers representatives, instead of proletarianising the cabinet as had been proposed, only succeeded in ministerialising the Central Obrera Boliviana”. (34) (LO, 29.11.52, p.2)
Towards the end of 1953, the POR leadership presented a Report in which it stated that: “The new upsurge comes from the demand to Lechín to leave the cabinet put forward by the mining unions, backed by the COB and curbed by Lechín. Our union fraction then took up a neutral and vacillating position”. “We have no doubt that this new period of upsurge will culminate with the adoption of our political theses”. (35) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, p.11).
The POR admitted that its trade unionists adapted to the pressures from Lechín. The policy of demanding the resignation of the labour ministers was an opportunist manoeuvre. It did not accompany the call for the COB to take power. Some weeks later, during the key events which frustrated the rightist January coup, the POR was to demand that ‘the comrade President’ Bolivianise his government and allow them to join it. For those reasons, the ‘new period of upsurge’ did not end with the victory of the POR theses but in the victory of the MNR, which was to succeed by absorbing most of the membership and periphery of the POR.
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The POR Seeks To Enter The Bourgeois Government
During the 1952 revolution it was vitally important that any party, in the slightest way Marxist, had to have a policy of total independence from and opposition to the new bourgeois government of the MNR. The POR not only did the opposite, supported this new regime and identified itself fully with its ‘Leftist’ ministers, but even tried to enter it. At its 3rd World Congress in 1951, the 4th International, unanimously adopted a line favouring the POR joining a future MNR government, and the POR had already previously joined the military ‘socialist’ government.
A journalist, claiming to be Trotskyist, related how “One of the old militants of the POR told us likewise with pride, that the MNR offered two ministries to the POR.” (36)
“The Executive Power invited the revolutionary painter Alandia to take up the post of Minister of Culture (...) The POR authorised its member to accept the invitation”. (37) (LO, 1.6.52, p.2).
Alandia, who until the end of his life was a well known leader of Lora’s POR, succeeded in being the Editor of the trade union organ of the MNR bureaucracy, and he joined the government in the capacity of Minister of Culture.
The Californian Trotskyist Ryan sent a letter to the leadership of the SWP and the 4th International, demanding that it give an answer with information on the details of POR participation in the government. Up until now we are not aware of any explanation or denial of such facts, just as we are unaware of any source which can ascertain their reliability or otherwise. “According to these reports received from non-Trotskyist sources, the POR is accepting posts in the government machinery: Guillermo Lora, former secretary of the party, has been appointed [to] the Stabilization office; Comrade Moller, present Secretary of the POR, is director of the Workers Savings Bank, which is controlled by Juan Lechín, a member of the Cabinet; Ayala Mercado, another POR leader, is a member of the Agrarian Commission.” (38)
Bolshevism emerged in the struggle against ministerialism. The followers of Lenin were opposed to socialists entering bourgeois-democratic governments in western Europe and equally that of Kerensky in the Russia of 1917. The only governments in which the Bolsheviks would have participated critically, would be those based on workers militias and councils which could attack and disarm the capitalist class. The 4th International was founded in the struggle against the POUM of Nin which joined the anti-fascist bourgeois government of Barcelona in 1937. Taking part in a non-working class government only serves the enemies of the proletariat by confusing it and preparing the conditions for a later offensive against it.
In 1952, the POR had a ministerialist attitude. If it did not succeed in getting portfolios in the government but only managed secretarial posts in ministries or departments, it is because the MNR did not consider it to have any weight independent of the Lechínist faction, and it could point to its presence as a way of calming the masses. It preferred to keep the POR outside the cabinet but subordinate to it through the union bureaucracy.
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The Collaborationist Programme Of The POR
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In every issue of Lucha Obrera after April 1952, a new version of The Programme of the Exploited, was reproduced, which we reprint in its entirety:
“1. To prevent the revolution that begun on 9th April being strangled within the bourgeois and democratic framework.
2. The Strengthening of the working class, and consolidating the COB.
3. The mobilisation of the peasants behind the slogan of nationalisation of land and expropriation of the large estates without compensation, in order to allow the revolutionary process to end in victory.
4. The gaining of democratic guarantees for the exploited. The development of union democracy within the unions. Freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties. The cancelling of all privileges for the rosca (39) counter-revolution.
5. Armed workers militias as a substitute for the regular army.
6. Better conditions of living and work. A basic living wage and sliding scale of wages. Collective contracts.
7. Nationalisation of mines and railways without compensation and under workers control.
8. The expulsion of imperialism. The cancelling of the international treaties which bind the country to imperialism. The rejection of the agreement on technical aid with the UN”. (40) (LO, 25.5.52).
We are not questioning those slogans, but the absence of key and essential slogans. That programme is limited and is adapted to the tastes of the Lechín wing of the MNR. The union bureaucracy could accommodate itself to all these slogans.
The central demands which were completely ignored in the POR press during those months were those of the occupation of the Mines, factories and large estates; no support for the new bourgeois government nor for the Lechín union bureaucracy; no to Co-government; that workers ministers should resign from the capitalist cabinet; All Power to the COB.
The POR talked about “preventing the revolution being strangled” when they themselves were strangling it with ‘critical’ support to the capitalist government. They demanded the “consolidation of the COB” but they opposed struggling for the most elementary tasks of achieving such an aim: an open struggle against the bureaucracy of Lechín and the MNR for the election and recall of all leaders by rank-and-file mass meetings and for an immediate conference of the COB in order to equip it with a soviet-type structure and for it to take complete power. The POR did not struggle to transform the COB into a Supreme Soviet in order to seize power, but wanted to put pressure on its summit so that it would recite its speeches and improve governmental decrees.
It called for the nationalisation of the land, mines and railways but did not demand its imposition by the workers and peasants with their own hands through occupations. Its position was limited to requesting and putting pressure on the government to carry out such measures, which created dangerous illusions in the masses, helping to demobilise them and keeping them in a state of dependency (instead of calling on them to do things themselves). At no time did it call for the bourgeoisie to be expropriated. Workers’ control was only demanded for state enterprises. The factories (Said, Soligno, etc.), shopping chains (Casa Grace, etc.) and other private companies continued operating as before. There was no demand for their nationalisation (not even with compensation), for workers, control, or the payment of higher taxes.
They wanted “freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties”. By this the POR acknowledged that, apart from itself, other ‘revolutionaries’ existed, among them the MNR and Stalinism. What was correct was to call for the broadest democratic liberties. At the same time there had to be a struggle for the expropriation of the mass media and its handing over to organisations of workers and ordinary people. “The cancellation of all privileges of the rosca counter- revolution” was demanded. But what does the cancellation of privileges mean? What was needed was the demand for its total expropriation along with the creation of people’s courts to try the executioners and butchers of the oligarchic regime.
The slogan about expelling imperialism was very vague. It was not tied to demands to expropriate all its enterprises or to repudiate the foreign debt. Anyway, the POR itself said repeatedly that, if it got into power, it would try to force the USA to recognise it and establish diplomatic relations.
Neither did the POR raise the main slogan for a thorough-going bourgeois democracy: the sovereign Constituent Assembly, where all those over the age of 18 (or 16) would have the right to vote and to be elected. New elections on as democratic and as broad a basis as possible, and the creation of a new Constituent Assembly where the main national problems could be debated, would have let the revolutionary party more easily unmask the nature of the MNR and of parliamentarianism. The POR envisaged something else which flung dust in the workers’ eyes: to restore the reactionary constitution which put Paz into the Presidential Palace.
This programme lacked the slightest internationalist slogans. It did not call for solidarity with the other workers of the world and with anti-imperialist struggles, the defence of the workers’ states against imperialism, support for revolutions against the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracies, the internationalisation of the revolution; and for the building of the United Socialist States of Latin America and of the world, not to mention the struggle for the worker-peasant government or for the socialist republic. The POR merely wanted to pressurise the bourgeois government behind whose ‘left’ wing it was always searching for a compromise to carry out the programme further.
The POR action programme was that of a party which had repudiated the strategy of permanent revolution and which only wanted a bourgeois-democratic transformation within the segregated framework of one, isolated, landlocked and backward country.
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The POR Did Not Struggle For The Occupation Of The Enterprises
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After the April events, the bourgeois armed forces were virtually destroyed. All power was in the hands of the peoples’ and workers’ militias and the COB. In those circumstances the next step on the agenda was to call on the COB to cease to support a non-working class government and to take all power in its own hands.
According to Lora: “From the 9th of April on, the unions of the most important districts simply took over the solution of the vital problems, and the authorities, thus replaced, had no other course than to accept their decisions. It was these unions which operated as organs of workers power and raised the issue of the duality of local and national authority. Controlling the daily life of the masses, they took on legislative and executive attributes (they had the power of compulsion to execute their decisions), and even succeeded in administrating justice. The union assembly was turned into the ultimate arbiter and the supreme authority. This phenomenon was almost general in the mines and, on occasion, could be seen in the factories.
Unfortunately, this reality was not fully understood by the vanguard of the proletariat and a favourable moment for carrying out the demand for the immediate occupation of the mines, which would have made the proletariat fight a battle to determine the question of dual power in its favour, was thrown away. In this first period the union leadership and assembly operated as organs of workers’ power”. (41) (ibid., p.277).
“One of the POR slogans which most gripped the workers was that of the occupation of the mines (...) Why was this demand not carried through by workers action, at the time of their greatest mobilisation and radicalisation? If the mines had been occupied, and it was possible that this could have occurred, it is clear that the course of the revolution would have undergone a radical change (..) The occupation of the mines would have raised, sooner or later, the question of power, and created the basis for the rapid supersession of the nationalist positions adopted by the working class; at the same time, the POR would have been able, quite quickly, to recover its control”. (42) (Contribución ..., G. Lora, Vol 2, p.231-232).
If the issues of Lucha Obrera and the POR programme for 1952 are examined, the slogan of immediate occupation of the mines, factories and land will be found. The only time an enterprise is was taken over was to prevent the closure of the Corocoro mine.
The reason the POR did not raise that slogan is connected to its refusal to call for workers’ control for the private businesses, to nationalise the factories and to formulate anti-capitalist demands. The POR was tailing Lechín and pressuring the Paz government.
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All Power To The COB!
“Through the COB, the working class left-wing was a government within the government and, in a certain sense, more powerful than the government itself. The COB had a basis of support greater than that of the party of which it officially formed a part. It proposed that the MNR assume the power and responsibility of government and of governing the state officially, but the COB set itself up as a centre without rival capable of initiative and veto in relation to the central power. That is to say it had the power of government but not the responsibility”. (43) (Bolivia: la revolución inconclusa, James M. Malloy, Ceres, La Paz 1989, p.243).
“In reality, the COB was the real government of the Bolivian workers and, hence, of the national economy. In fact, it possessed the symbolic and functional characteristics of a sovereign entity, including executive, deliberative and judicial organs, a defined area of authority, electors and, what is more important, armed forces”. (44) (ibid, p.243-244).
“The COB was the master of the country, and indeed for a certain period it was the only centre of power worthy of the name”. (45) (A History ..., Lora, p.281). “For the majority of the masses, the COB was their only leader and their only government.” (46) (ibid., p.284).
The situation in Bolivia after 9-11th April 1952, was similar to that in Russia after the February 1917 revolution. Two powers existed in the country, but the strongest, the one with mass character, was that of the peoples’ and workers’ organisations, which, owing to their conciliatory leaderships, handed over power to a weak bourgeois government. The governments of Kerensky and Paz had to flirt with the upsurge and demands of the masses at the same time as they tried to spin out time to exhaust them, and then, by rebuilding the armed forces and their authority, to open the way to a situation of bourgeois stabilisation.
In order to face up to such a situation, the Bolsheviks demanded that the Soviets break with the leftist provisional government of the bourgeoisie and take all power themselves. In the Bolivian case, the demand should have been to struggle for all power to the COB. The COB, just as with the Russian Soviets, had the arms and the power but, because of its conciliatory leadership, gave away the latter to the bourgeoisie. The seizure of power by the Soviets and the COB could have been done peacefully. The old military apparatus had already collapsed through a violent revolution. The road was open for workers power, which had its own arms and the people behind it, and could have had total power. The only obstacle to the COB and the Russian Soviets carrying out that task was that their leadership was so insistent on rescuing the bourgeoisie.
In spite of the COB being the real power in the country and the POR being its main directing force, the section of the 4th International opposed the slogan of All Power to the COB. On the contrary, it called on the COB to join the bourgeois government, thus weakening its alternative power and so becoming a body more and more subordinate to the bourgeois government. The slogan of the POR was that of shifting the Paz administration leftwards via ministerial changes. With that treacherous line it helped Paz and Lechín to dilute the power of the COB and go on to reconstitute the bourgeois state and the army.
In his ‘self-criticism’ Lora recognised that: “The POR brigade used these events to launch the slogan of ‘total control of the cabinet by the left’ (...) The slogan, however, contained the signs of an enormous ideological error: to believe that the workers could attain power via Lechín – behind the slogan of ‘All Power to the COB’”. (47) (La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, Lora, La Paz 1963, p.267).
“The watch-word of ‘All Power to the COB’ could have lead to the victory of the workers on two exceptionally favourable occasions. The first was when the agitation around the immediate nationalisation of the mines without compensation and under workers’ control reached its high point (first half of 1952). The second arose with the defeat of the coup d’etat on 6th January 1953. Not taking due advantage of these opportunities and adapting to marching behind and mouthing the slogans of the MNR left, were the greatest errors of the POR”. (48) (ibid., p.270).
As we have seen, on the first occasion the POR did not call for the seizure of the enterprises but for support to the MNR government. On the second occasion, the POR insisted on the treacherous line of support for, and pushing for a change of policy by, Paz.
“On the morning of the 6th January 1953, the Minister of Peasant Affairs was kidnapped, as a preliminary to a coup d’etat (...) But towards evening the failure of the coup attempt was already evident (...) The COB called the workers and peasants militias to a mass mobilisation on a national scale. On the morning of 7th January, a massive demonstration, sponsored by the COB, took place. The demonstrators demanded immediate and unrestricted agrarian reform (..) Paz took measures against the rightists but in a moderate way (...) The government dissolved the Grupos de Honor and demoted and exiled many of the key conspirators. There was no bloodletting (...) Among the measures included were wage increases, vouchers, protection against dismissal, rent control, price control, subsidies to food stores and a series of measures on social security and other aspects of ‘consumption’ (...) sacked workers were re-employed”. (49) (ibid., p.298-299).
In the massive demonstration of 7th January, Edwin Moller, secretary of the POR at the time, spoke for the COB in the Plaza San Francisco. In his speech, instead of calling on the workers to have no confidence in the bourgeois government of Paz and to make its own Trade Union Centre take power, he ended his intervention saying “We want, comrade Paz Estenssoro, a government of Bolivians for the Bolivians”. (50) (LO, 23.1.53).
On that occasion, when Lora himself recognised that it would have been enough to have agitated around the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’, in order to have gained victory for the proletarian revolution, the POR put forward exactly the opposite. The POR called upon its ‘comrade’ president to set up a bourgeois nationalist government. In the crucial moments of the revolution, the POR showed that its strategy was limited to correcting the bourgeois government and not to overthrow it with a workers uprising.
“The counter-revolutionary forced obliged the MNR to base itself more and more firmly upon the left. In an attempt literally to frighten the opposition in order to obtain its agreement, the centrist tendency of the MNR and the leftist axis of the COB called demonstration after demonstration of their armed might. Militias of miners and peasants were brought permanently to the city in lorries and marched there in front of the population, crazily discharging their rifles”.
In spite of those extraordinary conditions, the POR delayed almost a year before launching the slogan for a COB government. In March 1953, Lucha Obrera argued: “That the culmination of the Altiplano Revolution cannot be anything else or occur in any other way than by a government formed by the COB embodied as the organ of power”. (51) (LO, March 1953, p.1).
However, it must be said that there are distinct ways and methods of launching such a slogan. The position of ‘All Power to the COB’, which was launched too late by the POR, was a variant of its idea of ‘all power to the left of the MNR’. For the POR, the launching of that slogan was not in order to unmask the Lechín leadership, but was more bothered to govern jointly with it. Instead of trying to oppose the COB to the MNR government, the position of the POR consisted in continually replacing the Paz cabinet with ministers from the COB until finally there would be a government of the COB bureaucracy of the MNR. The slogan of ‘All Power to the COB’ should have gone hand in hand with the raising of anti-capitalist slogans with an impeccable denunciation of the ‘left’ of the MNR.
Lechín has often said that his great mistake was not taking power in April 1952. (52) (see interview in Facetas, 5.7.87.) If Lechín had been anointed president based on the COB, it would not have created a revolutionary workers’ government. Villarroel’s ex-prefect would have done everything possible to maintain capitalism and to co-exist with the national and world bourgeoisie. A revolutionary party would only have been able to participate critically in that government if it had broken with the bourgeois MNR, based itself directly on the working class organisations and their militias and attacked and disarmed the bourgeoisie. Such an eventuality was highly unlikely. A Lechín government would have been a government of the Kerensky type or a bourgeois labour government. In the exceptional circumstances of the revolutionaries participating in a COB government as a minority, it would necessarily have required conditions of a considerable differentiation with Lechínism and the unmasking its counter-revolutionary character. They would have had to have persisted in brandishing the Trotskyist programme in opposition to its waverings and would have to seek to displace it from power so that it could give way to a Trotskyist dictatorship. (53)
(Nahuel Moreno always claimed that he called for ‘All Power to the COB’, as opposed to the POR policy of adaptation to the MNR left-wing. But Moreno’s slogan was only a variant of the popular-frontist resolutions of the 3rd congress of the 4th International and the ‘government of the MNR left-wing’ position. In May, his paper put forward the “Demand that the worker ministers elected and controlled by the Miners Federation and the new Workers Centre are taken into the Paz Estenssoro government”. (Frente Proletario, 29.5.52. Quoted in Prensa Obrera 131, 3.5.86 – presumably PO Argentine – eds.).
Moreno’s position was akin to Lora’s. In reality, co-government was a cabinet of all the wings of the MNR. The worker ministers constantly reported back in detail to the COB, but that, instead of modifying the government and changing it into a proletarian one (an impossibility) simply confused the class. Moreno’s paper said that “the two wings which now exist within the MNR express the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie”. (ibid.). Presumably Lechín represented the proletariat. But a sector that stays within a bourgeois party cannot represent the interests of the proletariat. By 1953 Moreno was proposing the “development, support and strengthening of a left wing inside the MNR”. (Estrategia, April 1966, quoted in ibid.). One proposed a government of Lechín’s faction of the MNR, while the other preferred a government of Lechín’s bureaucracy of the COB – the same jam but in different jars. Anyway the slogan ‘All Power to the COB is invalid once a dual power situation no longer exists (that is since 1952.) It only generates illusions in its bureaucracy.)
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Turn The COB Into A Soviet!
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For Lenin and Trotsky, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat could be based only on bodies like the Russian Soviets of 1917. In every revolution it is vital to struggle to give Soviet features to the mass organs and organs of power created by the exploited. A Soviet is an organ of struggle of the proletariat whose delegates are directly elected and revocable in rank-and-file assemblies, which include all workers, small- holders, peasants, soldiers, housewives, unemployed and other oppressed sectors of the area. While the unions are bodies which unite workers in an enterprise or branch of production, Soviets are territorial organisms which encompass the broadest masses, both non-unionised and unionised.
In the eyes of the POR, the COB, like a mass meeting or an open town council meeting, was a Soviet. Not every Soviet has dual or alternative power, Not every dual power is a Soviet. A parallel power could be a parliament, an army or another institution which possesses an armed force and governmental authority over a significant part of a country.
The COB, although it had Soviet tendencies, was an organism with trade union, vertical and bureaucratic features. “One of the gravest errors in the organisation of the COB consisted in its originating from the top summit leaders, who would soon end up completely tied to the petty bourgeois government, and it crystallised through the middle layers of leadership (...) The correct thing would have been to proceed in the opposite way, that is to say, from the bottom up. The workers adhered to the COB through their trade union leaders (...) The founders of the COB called upon the old leaders and not on the democratically elected rank-and-file delegates. This organisational defect already contained the cause of its infirmity, which eased its bureaucratisation, its isolation from the masses and the skilful control of it by the government”. (54) (La Revolución Boliviana, G. Lora, p.262-263).
The COB delegates were neither elected nor controlled and subject to recall through rank-and-file mass meetings. The first congress of the COB took place two and a half years after its foundation. The bureaucracy did everything possible to run the union with boss’ type bureaucratic criteria. A revolutionary party should have struggled for the immediate organisation of a congress a few days or weeks after it was founded. Only in this way could the COB have been democratised and have acquired soviet-type features. However, the POR was in the top leadership of the COB and did not object to a bureaucratic structure which allowed it to get along better with Lechín, in order accommodate to him.
The COB was founded at a meeting called by the Miners’ Federation on 17th April 1952. The leaderships of the confederations of factory workers, railway workers and peasants, the federation of bank employees and allied branches, commercial and industrial employees, and graphical, construction, bricklayers and bakers unions took part in that assembly. (55) (Movimento obrero y processos politícos en Bolivia, Jorge Lazarte, p.6). Note that fact that the squatters, the unemployed and rank-and-file soldiers were not organised within it. The COB aimed to be a union centre based on leaderships elected at labour congresses every ‘X’ years. A Soviet should be based on all the oppressed sectors and directly elected at rank and file assemblies. In this way, the organisation can grow and be de-bureaucratised. This meeting elected an executive committee which held office until the congress in October 1954. It was headed by Lechín (Executive Secretary), Germán Butrón (General secretary) and Mario Torres (Secretary of Relations). As the two key figures in the COB had to be ministers, the job of day-to-day leadership at the centre fell on PORists like Edwin Moller (Organisation Secretary), José Zegada (Minuting Secretary) or Miguel Alandia Pantoja (Director of the Press). “This first Management Committee was declared provisional until the election of a proper committee by a national congress which would meet shortly.” (56) (ibid., p.7). However, that congress took place with extreme delay, after the COB had ceased to be an alternative dual power and had surrendered to the official bourgeois power.
The COB developed in the same way like all organs of ‘popular power’ that bourgeois nationalists governments create. The ‘Committees in Defence of the Revolution’ in Nicaragua, the ‘Shoras’ in Iran or the ‘Popular Assemblies’ in various nationalist processes are organisations which unite union leaders and those of mass bodies, to ensure that they support nationalist regimes or projects. Instead of structuring themselves as alternative workers’ power which fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to consolidate all power, these organisms are committed to building a popular basis for nationalism. They use ‘anti-imperialism’ in order to discipline the masses and to maintain themselves against their enemies.
Dual power cannot last for long. One power must rule over the other. If a workers’ power does not crush that of the bourgeoisie then the latter will be imposed (whether via bloody liquidation or by regimentation and domestication). (57)
(As Stuart King so rightly says:
“Is not Workers Power absolutely right when it describes the COB as an ‘embryo’ or ‘proto-Soviet’ which could have developed into a full Soviet only through political struggle against the bonapartist project of the MNR? This would have involved concentrating on building Soviets both in and outside La Paz, drawing in and organising peasant syndicates in the localities, calling for the construction of rank and file soldiers committees in the army, drawing their delegates into the Soviets, strengthening and placing under Soviet discipline the militias, and ensuring that all delegates were elected by rank and file factory and workplace committees subject to immediate recall”. Permanent Revolution, No.2, p.36).
The POR did not fight to make the COB soviet. To do so required a constant daily battle against the MNR and the Lechínist bureaucracy. On the contrary, the POR, was one of the main causes of the COB being limited, bureaucratised and tied to officialdom.
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The MNR-POR Government
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At its 1952 congress, the 4th International, with no votes against, adopted the slogan of an MNR-POR government. After April 1952, the POR tried to apply this recipe with a small difference. It demanded the removal of the MNR right wing.
“The worker-peasant government is not the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is in transition toward it, an inevitable period in the sense that, as a political party of the working class, we do not yet constitute a majority of it (...) The Worker-Peasant government will surely emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat in Bolivia, on the fundamental basis of two important political forces: the POR and the MNR left-wing, to which we should try to give the essential organisational consciousness, security and firmness, so that the way to political power is opened to us, which the militant working masses will offer us in the future”. (58) (Boletin Interno, No.13, POR, p.12).
This worker-peasant government notion is more like that of Stalinism than of Leninist Trotskyism. In its earlier period, Stalinism also spoke of the worker-peasant government, but in a stageist sense. It proposed a dictatorship together with class collaboration in which the proletariat had to give up its own objectives and subordinate itself to the bourgeois-democratic programme of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie. For that same reason, Trotsky objected to using the slogan for a time, and only did so after explaining that his strategy was that of a government of workers and poor peasants led by the proletariat and aiming to apply a socialist programme.
The idea of the centrist 4th International and the POR was that of a joint government where the so-called workers party was led by a party of another class. But the MNR did not represent the peasantry (and even less the poor or landless sectors), and neither did the MNR bother to organise this class or to place in its top leadership some leader from the national majority. The MNR was an unmistakably bourgeois party. Its members came from various capitalist and cacique parties that had presided over anti-working class government. Paz had been the governor of the Central Bank and Finance Minister in two bosses governments. The MNR had sympathised with the German Führer who massacred the biggest labour movement of the world. When they were in the government they repressed the left and put in power a pro-imperialist dictatorship which was thrown out by a popular insurrection.
“For the solution of the basic national tasks, not only the big bourgeoisie but also the petty bourgeoisie was incapable of producing a political force, a party, or a faction, in conjunction with which the party of the proletariat might be able to solve the tasks of the democratic bourgeois revolution”. (59) The Third International After Lenin, Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.181. Stalin, el gran organizador de derrotas, La III Internacional despues de Lenin, Trotski, El Yunque, Bs As. 1974, p.241).
The proletariat should not dilute its programme and accept the democratic one of the bourgeoisie, whether petty, medium or big. Under this programme it is impossible to break with imperialism and backwardness. The only manner of resolving the outstanding bourgeois democratic tasks is through a Socialist revolution which, in passing, completes the unfinished democratic tasks within a framework of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, of a socialised and planned economy established by popular and workers councils, and by the internationalisation of the revolution.
In its more than 55 years of existence the POR has never put forward the strategy of the internationalist socialist revolution. It was born calling for an anti-imperialist and agrarian revolution in order to establish a multi-class and capitalist government which could be achieved by a military coup or the metamorphosis of a bourgeois government. Later, in the Theses of Pulacayo, it put forward the idea of a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the proletariat. That position held similarities with that of Parvus, which meant, according to Trotsky’s argument “the conquest of power by the proletariat was seen as the path towards democracy and not to socialism”. (60) Through the strategy of opposing a socialist revolution in order to limit itself to a bourgeois-democratic and national one, the POR was subservient to strategic blocks with and behind Lechínism, and then with the whole MNR and Stalinism.
An MNR-POR government would be a bourgeois one with ‘Trotskyist’ ministers, good at helping Paz and Lechín to confuse the workers and at compromising themselves by defending the capitalist regime.
In the 4th Congress of the Communist International Lenin and Trotsky clearly differentiated five types of workers’ government. Liberal and Social Democratic workers governments can never be supported by communist ministers. In certain circumstances a workers’ government or worker-peasant government could emerge in which the communists would be able to join the cabinet as a minority.
“The two types (of workers government) in which the communists may take part, do not represent the dictatorship of the proletariat, they are not even a historically inevitable transition stage towards the dictatorship. But where they are formed they may become an important starting point for the fight for the dictatorship. The complete dictatorship is represented only by the real workers’ government which consists of communists”. (61) (The Communist International 1919-43: Documents, Ed. Jane Degras, Vol.1, Cass, 1971, p.427.)
The author is wrong, Zinoviev drafted the theses which represented a compromise between the lefts and the right. In Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler (Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, Deutscher, Verso, 1985) the latter says “Radek was accused by Moscow of being the author of my definition of the five forms of workers government. In reality he tried to prevent this definition from being adopted; not because he thought it incorrect but, as I learned years later, because it irritated Zinoviev, and Radek found this inconvenient for his factional struggle in Moscow.” pp.158-159. Brandler advanced it at the 8th Congress of the KPD in January 1923 just after the 4th Congress of the Communist International in Nov-Dec 1922.) See Revolutionary History Vol.2 no.3 pp.1-20.)
The conditions advanced by the CI were very clear. “The overriding tasks of the workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat, to disarm bourgeois and counter-revolutionary organisations, to introduce the control of production, to transfer the main burden of taxation to the rich, and to break the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie”. (62) (ibid., p.426).
“In certain circumstances communists must declare themselves ready to form a workers’ government with non-communist workers’ parties and workers organisations. But they can do so only if there are guarantees that the workers government will really conduct a struggle against the bourgeoisie in the sense mentioned above”. (63) (ibid., p.426).
However, whichever wing of the MNR was in government it would not have fulfilled these conditions. The MNR was a party representing an emerging bourgeoisie. Far from wishing to disarm and expropriate itself, that is to say, to commit suicide as a class, the MNR bourgeoisie aspired to strengthen the state through reforms which would extend the internal market. A government of one or more wings of the MNR would have been a government for the defence of the bourgeois state.
To sum up: an MNR-POR government of whatever variant would have been the opposite of a worker-peasant government. It would have been a bourgeois government with a decoration of workers.
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All Power To The MNR Left Wing!
“When the struggle within the cabinet between the right and left tendencies of the MNR broke out (within the latter tendency were numbered the “worker” ministers who were the base of Lechínism), the POR launched the slogan of more workers’ ministers and, thereby, the expulsion from the government of the right, a demand which turned out to be far too ambitious for Lechín and Co.”. (64)
(Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.253).
At its 9th national conference, the POR ratified the line of identifying with the national-reformist wing of Lechín and Ñuflo Chavez. “The national political report fixed the position of the POR before the government in the following points: 1) Support to the government in face of the attacks by imperialism and the rosca, (2) Support for all the progressive measures it enacts, always indicating their scope and limitations (...) 3) In the struggle of the MNR wings, the POR supports the left (...) The POR will support the MNR left in its struggle against the right of the party, in all its activity that tends to destroy the structures on which the feudal bourgeoisie and imperialist exploitation rest, every attempt to deepen the revolution and to carry out the workers programme, such as the complete control of the government so replacing the right wing”. (65) (LO, 11.11.52, p.3).
In that same newspaper it also says: “The working class must actively intervene in the formation of the new Cabinet. It is the workers who must run the state with a revolutionary programme that will start to destroy the capitalist structure. The COB, representing the worker-peasant forces, must join in the new cabinet with a majority of ministers who come from it, representing the different sectors of workers”. (66) (LO, 11.11.52, p.2).
The MNR is clearly a bourgeois party. Within every populist bourgeois party which tries to discipline the unions there is always a labourist wing that tries to mediate between the pressures of the workers and the needs of following a bourgeois policy. A party of various classes cannot be. The one which commands is the one that owns the capital. A horse and its rider are not in an equal alliance. One rides the other. The union bureaucracy and the reformist wings are like a saddle. They lie on the proletariat to relieve the weight and rule of the capitalist boss in order to help him to continue giving orders.
The ‘left’ wing of the MNR is not a proletarian or revolutionary wing. The fact is that it claims the bourgeois programme as its own and its insertion in such a conglomerate of capital makes it a counter-revolutionary sector. It is always possible that youth and worker sections in the nationalist movement will shift to the left towards centrism, and, if so, everything possibly must be done to conquer their prejudices and win them to Trotskyist politics. However, known bureaucrats, with a long career of betrayals, who have served a dictatorship such as Villarroel’s and have brought forth an anti-communist party that did not at first disguise its flirtation with racism and nazi-fascism, cannot evolve in a revolutionary direction.
The Lechín and Chavez ‘left’ wing defended capitalism and so only wanted to reform it. The MNR needed them in order to be able to control the masses. With the right hand it initiated the reorganisation of the armed forces, set up the para-military commandoes and the secret-police (the ‘Commando Politico’), stirred up anti-communist hysteria to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian ‘excesses’ and pressed for approaches to imperialism. With its left hand it tried to flirt with working class radicalism while aiming to tame it. MNR trade unionists, while they uttered the most incendiary speeches, did everything possible to use that authority hold back the COB’s mobilisation and demands, tried to empty it of its dual power content and turn it into a force that would be subordinated to, and would collaborate with, the bourgeois regime.
Faced with a struggle between two wings of a bourgeois party, the proletariat should try to assert its own class independence and its opposition to both wings. Of course we must undertake very limited practical actions of a mass direct action character with the MNR ‘left’ when it undertakes the defence of popular and working class demands. But preferably, we should take the initiative and try to unmask those ‘leftists’ with a policy that constantly asks them to fight and break with the bourgeois party.
However, the POR did more than serve Lechínism. They edited its union paper, they wrote its speeches and totally supported it. While Paz wanted to line up behind imperialism, Lechín lined up behind Paz and the POR behind Lechín.
From the first weeks of the 1952 revolution until at least the end of 1953, the POR “works so that the masses and the left-wing sector of the governing party will proceed to their logical conclusion, that is to say, evolve towards a worker-peasant government”. “The evolution towards the left of the government and its consequent transformation will be determined by the exploited. Owing to the pressure to political circumstances, the petty bourgeois government may possibly be superseded and be turned into a stage of worker-peasant government. It is the most probable tendency of that unstable moment and only in this sense do we speak of the only outcome. The aforementioned involves the political defeat of the right and the active participation in the state of the proletariat and the peasants”. (67) (LO, 25.5.52, p.3).
According to the POR, a month after the creation of the COB, it was probable that the exploited would put pressure on the MNR to the point that it had to shift leftwards and be transformed into a worker-peasant government. Paz and the MNR were not ‘neutral’ forces or ‘wild-cards’ flitting between the various classes. The MNR was an unswervingly bourgeois force and incapable of changing its class content. However much a monkey wants to learn to fly it is impossible. Paz’s MNR had absolutely no possibility of evolving into a worker-peasant government. The only ones who could evolve were the PORists ... but towards a greater conciliation with the bourgeois MNR. Revolutionaries do not call upon the workers to have a more ‘active participation’ within the state but to overturn it.
In the second half of 1953, they still persisted. The 10th POR conference stated that: “The total predominance of this sector (MNR ‘left’) would profoundly modify the nature of the MNR and would enable it to come significantly closer to the POR (...) Only in such conditions could one speak of a possible coalition government of the POR and the MNR, which would be a form of creating the formula of the ‘worker-peasant government’, which, in its turn, would constitute the transitory stage towards the dictatorship of the proletariat”. The Political Bureau of the POR, on 23rd of June, 1953, raised the call, “The whole of this struggle must revolve around the slogan: Total Control of the State by the Left Wing of the MNR.”
Liborio Justo correctly made the following observation: “The POR would support the left in its struggle against the right, it would help it to position itself ideologically, it would push it forward towards the most advanced positions and simultaneously it would mobilise the MNR rank-and-file so that it called on the leftist leadership to adopt the programme of proletarian revolution. That is to say, that the revolution would be carried out by the MNR left wing, which the POR ‘instructed’ to cease being petty bourgeois and an agent of the reaction and this would help its rank-and-file push it to adopt the programme of the proletarian revolution’”. (68) (Bolivia: la revolución derrotada, Liborio Justo, Cochabamba 1967, p.224). This was just a utopia to disarm the class.
In August, after a ministerial crisis had occurred, Lucha Obrera opined: “The only political outcome of the present situation: the displacement of the MNR right-wing from power by the left-wing.
“All power to the left”! is a suitable slogan in the case of a cabinet crisis. Such a new kind of MNR government would carry out the new tasks of the revolution. Total control of the state by the left (...) the POR will help the left in this job, it will guide it politically and support it critically”. (69) (LO 2.8.53, p.1)
Instead of fighting to unmask and politically destroy the ‘left-wing’, the POR offered itself as a prop and adviser to the left of the official bourgeois party. Instead of struggling for a worker-peasant government it asked for a ‘new kind of MNR government’. Instead of wanting to overthrow a social class, the POR was limited to asking for a new cabinet to which it would lend itself and offer its services. Instead of calling for the overthrow of the bourgeois state, the POR called for its regeneration under the control of the left of bourgeois officialdom.
Even though the ‘left’ wing of the MNR would have had the majority and even every ministry, the state that they would have controlled and defended would been bourgeois.
When the Bolsheviks agitated for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ they knew that the government could end up falling into the hands of the reformists. Lenin thought that a collaborationist government without capitalist ministers was preferable. But he always said that even if an entirely Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary government emerged, the Bolsheviks would not support or enter it. The only compromise that he would adopt was that of struggling together with them against any reactionary coup and of renouncing any attempt to take power as they had not won a majority among the workers and in the soviets.
The MNR ‘left’ wing was in no way a reformist workers party (as was Menshevism) with a certain degree of independence with respect to other capitalist paries. It was part of the same bourgeois MNR party. While Lechín did break with the MNR some 11 or 12 years after 1952 (and with quite a pro-United States orientation) other ‘leftists’ carried on working with the MNR longer.
When an independent and mass organisation of workers exists, it is feasible for Communists to call for a critical vote for it or to help it get into power “as a noose supports a hanging man” said Lenin, with the aim of better unmasking its leaders. However that policy cannot be applied to a section of a party that includes a sector of the bourgeoisie from which it has not broken, that does not represent a step towards class independence, even in embryonic form. Stalinism, ignoring Leninism, always put forward the line of tailing this or that “progressive “ sector of the bourgeoisie. To follow the MNR ‘left’, or that of APRA or Peronism, is only helping to reinforce bourgeois nationalism and prevents the workers from breaking with it.
Calling on the labour leaders to break with the bourgeoisie and to struggle for an independent workers’ party is a very different tactic. In this case it encourages the class struggle and helps to unmask collaborators. Choosing which of the bosses executioners it is better or worse to follow, is an old Stalinist strategy that has always meant the disarmament of the exploited to benefit reaction. In any case it is a vicious circle that cannot be broken. Within the left there will always be another left, and within the latter yet another one. At the end of the this pursuit of left wings of the bourgeois parties the route to the proletarian revolution is lost and we are changed into vulgar followers of the bourgeois nationalists.
Not one leader of the MNR ‘left’ wing evolved towards forming a reformist workers party or even centrism let alone Marxism. In 1963 when Lechín split the MNR in order to form his own ‘leftist‘ party, the POR characterised it as reactionary and anti-working class. If the POR made a grave error in capitulating to Lechín in 1952, it adopted a sectarian policy when Lechín split from the MNR in 1963. It had then been necessary to attack Lechín implacably for having been Paz’s Vice-President and for having gone to China to abase himself before the Guomindang but at the same time, by putting forward the demand an independent working class candidate, the tactic of the workers United Front should have been used.
Ryan was correct when he maintained that “The POR occupies, on all the major questions, the positions occupied by Menshevism in the Russian Revolution, and by Stalinism in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27.” (71) In China Stalinism would first support the Guomindang and then its ‘left-wing’. Both ended up using the Chinese Communists to get more power and once they felt secure the Communists were massacred. It is worth pointing out that the Guomindang was, both in its origins and programme, more radical than the MNR. So while the MNR was born with a declaration of principles influenced by racism and Nazi ideas the Guomindang was at first a sympathising section of the Communist International.
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The POR Adapts Itself To The MNR Left
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The least that a party which called itself revolutionary should have done was to have constantly denounced the counter revolutionary and turncoat role of Lechín, the dictatorship’s ex-prefect and now the appointed union leader. But the POR went on tail-ending the corrupt old bureaucrat.
“There can be no doubt that with the creation of a political organisation of a left-wing, independent of the right that controls the MNR and government, the imminent split will ensure the vanquishing of all vacillating and centrist positions, ensuring that, faced with this situation, all the leftists in the MNR will turn to the Party initially with no other aim than to win positions from the right and so deepen the revolutionary process. (72)
According to the POR Lechín had to be helped to create an independent faction and this would guarantee the defeat of the “vacillators and centrists” and would “deepen the revolutionary process”. The POR believed that the revolutionary party would be Lechín’s with which it could then unite.
“A group of intellectuals within the leading layer of the POR had got the COB started with the full agreement of the Executive Secretary of the FSTMB with whom they were old friends through bonds forged in old struggles going back to the Theses of Pulacayo. The relationship was so close that they believed that they could control the Labour movement through him while he used them for his own aims.
“The POR could not hide its servile attitude to the Executive Secretary on every question which came up in the COB. For example all the members of the POR voted with the majority to reject the credentials of the delegates of the university students; but when their leader asked them to reconsider the matter they all changed their minds without hesitation.
“Many cases could be cited but the most serious, which is almost a betrayal of the proletariat, was to give way to the requests of the top leaders about the launching of a manifesto to nationalise the mines. On this the workers demanded workers control because they thought workers point of view to be absolutely revolutionary. But when the Executive Secretary intervened asking for the amendment to be withdrawn in accordance with government policy only one POR member stood firm and supported the workers, the rest softened their position and, docilely attacked the government directive, and in order to disguise things asked for the amendment to be sent to the government in a separate note.
“So on a number of occasions, the POR’s slavish attitude to the main COB leader, led it to making concessions prejudicial to the real revolutionary mood of the working class”. (73) (Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986, pp.283-84.)
According to Catoira, when Lechín was “put in charge of the COB by the government, as soon as he became Minister of HydroCarbons and Mining, he shed the Trotskyist clothing in which the POR had clad him and put himself forward as simply a loyal MNR supporter.” (74) (El Sindicalismo Boliviano, Ricardo Catoira Marín, La Paz, p.43.) Whereas according to Lora, “Lechín who went back to Trotskyist posturing immediately after 9th April could be found at Paz’s side, but not in advance of him and thus accommodated himself to the radicalisation of the masses. He surrounded himself with POR members and, where he could, recited speeches written by the latter. (75)(Contribución ..., Vol 2 Lora, La Paz 1978, p.228)
Notice that Lora recognises that the COB’s great traitor had the same ideology in 1952. Some people thought Lechín had evolved from the MNR to the POR in 1952 whereas others thought the opposite. What is certain is that nobody knew for whom that crafty individual was working. Lechín made use of everyone. The MNR let him have a certain independence and verbal radicalism so that he could consolidate his position in the labour movement and tame it. The POR thought that by writing his theses, speeches and programmes it was using him to reach out to the class. But it was the clever bureaucrat who used the POR to gain authority over the most militant workers and thus negotiate for a share of power within his party and his government. In exchange for mouthing the POR’s incendiary slogans Lechín got mild criticism and even support from the POR.
During the revolutionary euphoria of the 1950’s Lechín lived in the Hotel Crillon, the most luxurious hotel in La Paz. In contrast the workers who had made him their irreplaceable leader have always lived in the most degraded conditions of squalor, a situation which remains the same today”. (76) (El Sindicalismo Boliviano ..., p.48.) This was never denounced by his POR hacks who made such efforts serving as his secretaries.
The POR went as far as to claim the line of the Lechínist newspaper Vanguardia as its own: “Its orientation is defined and determined by the route that the proletariat boldly opened up during the April events (...) Take care! The people are not the servants of the government. The government are the servants of the people’. A revolutionary fluency can be seen incarnated in its editors, interpreters of the majority views of the rank and file of its party formed by proletarians, peasants and office workers (...) if Vanguardia maintains its line, the path on which it is set will bring these bold lads the object of their desires when the working masses judge that feudal exploitation in the countryside must be liquidated. With them we will be firm in principles and consistent in revolutionary practice”. (77) (LO. 3.5.52, p.3.)
The POR identified itself with the Lechínist slogan of making the government the servant of the people. Within the capitalist state it is impossible to imagine that any government can defend the proletariat’s aims. The POR bet on the MNR left being able to enlighten the popular and working class majority in the MNR so as to reorient it and enable it to put the MNR government “at the service of the people”. (78) (LO. 25.5.52, p.1.)
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The POR Believed That Paz Would Be Able To Create an Anti-Capitalist Government
The nationalisation of the mines was the main demand which the working class talked about. Paz did everything possible to delay and moderate the measure but finally he carried it out in August 1952. When the government delayed carrying out the measure the POR said, “We cannot understand how a government that has the proletariat on a war-footing and prepared to defend it against any counter-revolutionary, retreats after taking a step forward. (79) (LO, 12.6.52, p.1)
A marxist on the other hand could clearly explain why the government oscillated. It was a bourgeois government under pressure from the masses trying to do everything possible to hold back the latter and, though making concessions, at the same sought time to maintain semi-colonial capitalism. The POR could not explain the tremendous shifts of the regime because of the tremendous illusions that it had.
Like gullible petit-bourgeois the POR believed that the government was a product of the ‘revolutionary will of the masses’ and therefore they should be subordinated to it. “With arms in hand, the working class will know how to consolidate and carry forward any step in this sense made by the present government thrown up by the revolutionary will of the masses.” (80) (LO, 12.6.52, p.2.) Instead of seeing the MNR government as its own, which only needed a push, the party of the proletariat should have denounced it as a usurper which had to be deposed.
The illusions of the POR went to the extreme of believing that Paz himself could initiate a turn to revolution. “It is possible that the President could have made some good proposals for achieving a real economic transformation of the country. But the reactionary element in the cabinet and its brigade of technicians are all openly right wing and therefore make it impossible to improve conditions for the proletariat (..) The left wing will not be able to stand up to the crushing majority which constitutes the MNR right wing unless it is based on the mobilisation of the masses. Meanwhile the present President of the Republic has his hands tied in front of his party comrades and, faced with creating of government of the people or staying President, seems to have chosen the latter”. (81) (LO 12.6.52, p.3.)
The job of a revolutionary party should have been to do everything possible to make the workers distrust Paz and to propose his removal by a new insurrection. For the POR on the other hand he had to be convinced to create a ‘government for the people’. In order to help the President ‘achieve a true economic transformation’ his most right wing ministers had to be removed.
While the POR’s aim was attempting to build up and influence the left of the bourgeois MNR, the latter in its turn was to influence the President to shift his position. The POR abandoned the promotion of class struggle. It replaced it by class persuasion. All revolutionary politics were replaced by a series of pressures on the leadership with the aim of reforming the official bourgeois bureaucracy and thus the President himself.
Every time that President started a speech to ingratiate himself with the radicalised masses, a Marxist should have denounced it as a trick to disorient the masses and an attempt to dress the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“The bourgeoisie will make you any promises you want! It will even send its delegates to Moscow, enter the Peasants’ International, adhere as a ‘sympathising’ party to the Comintern, peek into the Red International of Red Trade Unions. In short, it will promise anything that will give it the opportunity (with our assistance) to dupe the workers and peasants, more efficiently, more easily, and the more completely to throw sand in their eyes – until the first opportunity, such as was offered in Shanghai”(82) (The Third International after Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, p.169-170.)
However the POR always ended up saluting every demagogic outburst by Paz. “His speech of the 21st July (1952) is quite clear. He not only offered to ‘nationalise the mines and carry the revolution to the countryside regardless of the consequences’ but promised ‘to arm the miners and factory workers’ so that they could defend the revolution in their own way.” (83) (LO, 3.8.52, p.3.)
This policy of sowing illusions in the revolutionary and even anti-bourgeois potential of Paz was to continue until after the first year of the revolution: “The President, revising the whole of his past political attitude, points to anti-capitalist and not merely anti-imperialist and anti-feudal aims for the revolution. This speech can very easily be regarded as Trotskyist (...) With these words Victor Paz has gone further than all his leftist collaborators who are so determined to hold back and obstruct the liquidation of the latifundia (...) in order that the left turns its victory into effective governmental influence (...) its only solution to the situation created was for the left to impose the total domination of the left in the cabinet”. (84) (LO, 5.8.53, p.1.)
Its complete adaptation to Paz was such that it believed that he was capable of breaking with and expropriating his own social class!
The origins of this individual whom the POR believed would open the road to an anti-capitalist government must be remembered. Víctor Paz came from a family of aristocrats and generals from Tarija. He had been a lawyer for the Patiño concern. He made his debut in politics supporting the bonapartist dictatorships which tried to imitate certain features of fascism (Toro, Busch and Villarroel). He was the President of the Central Bank and Finance Minister in the anti-working class governments of Peñaranda and Villarroel. He founded the MNR with a clearly anti-semitic, racist, ferociously anti-communist platform inspired by nazism and sympathetic to the imperialist axis of Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado. When his party was in power from 1943 to 1946 it did not touch even one big mining concern or ranch.
On the contrary the MNR aimed its repression at union leaders and at peasants who occupied land. Its symbol was a dictator who was lynched,(85) it massacred the oppressed and took part in the butchery at Catavi. In 1947 it supported Hertzog for the Presidency. Then it spent the whole six years of reactionary rule conspiring with whatever butcher and rosca minister it could. In power it became the best weapon that imperialism had for holding back and reversing the revolution. Once he reorganised and revived the bourgeois state and armed forces Paz accentuated the turn to the right. Víctor Paz was directly responsible for the carnage at Sora-Sora (1964) as well as the atrocities during the period of Banzer’s dictatorship. When he returned to the government in 1985 he was the author of the worst attack on the social gains of the Bolivian workers in history. In just one month he raised prices by fifteen times and then sacked three-quarters of the mining proletariat.
It was a serious crime for a party claiming to be working class to disseminate even the faintest illusion that it was possible that such a reactionary could have ever installed an anti- capitalist government. All wings and sections of the post-Trotsky 4th International are besmirched with that significant historical betrayal since they always supported this policy and never questioned it.
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The Nationalisation Of The Mines
In order to make sure that the President carried out the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, a cabinet of the union bureaucracy had to be imposed. In a manifesto aimed at the February 1953 Convention of the MNR, the POR suggested to Paz that he alter his cabinet to achieve “the overcoming of the present bonapartist government by another anti-imperialist and anti-feudal one which would be sustained by a front of revolutionaries and workers” (86) (LO. 6.2.53, p.1.)
While Paz, supported by Lechín, did everything possible to ensure that the workers did not occupy the mines and instead waited for a solution from above, the POR, far from denouncing these manoeuvres, took pains to idealise Lechín:
“The Minister of Mines and Petroleum, supported by those round him, quite clearly advocated expropriation without compensation”. (87)(LO, 29.6.52, p.4.).
A revolutionary party should have done the opposite. It should have drawn attention to the fact that while Lechín spouted radical phrases he was, as events showed, preparing nationalisation with compensation for enterprises in a poor state. “ We agree with comrade Lechín when he states that the decree nationalising the mines is just the start of the economic and social transformation of the country.” (88) (LO, 11.11.52, p.1.)
Just prior to the nationalisation of the mines the POR said: “The balance of forces favours the interests of the workers, who, with certainty and firmness, have been winning ground inch by inch in spite of the vacillations of the MNR left-wing which has yet to put itself at the head of events (...) the nationalisation of the mines which will be announced shortly will be the starting point that will make the continuation of the capitalist system on the basis of the classical forms of exploitation impossible.” (89) (Boletin Interno, No.13. POR, p.9.)
Nationalisation is not an anti-capitalist measure in itself. It can just as well be a mechanism used by the bourgeoisie to help its development. The nationalisation of large scale mining allowed the state to obtain more resources to invest within the country, the small and medium mining sectors of the bourgeoisie could grow without having to face the competition of the big private monopolies while the other bourgeois sectors could develop by commerce and the production of goods, tied to, or derived from, large scale mining.
The nationalisation of large scale mining was not the start of the open destruction of capitalism, it strengthened it. The POR helped that process by limiting itself to raising the bourgeois democratic programme and by tailing the MNR and its ‘left’.
The MNR adopted the demand for nationalisation without compensation under workers control. However it ended by paying up so as to keep in with imperialism. ‘Workers Control’ was applied in the following way: the directorate of the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL) was run by Carbajal (the first General Secretary of the FSTMB) and two of its seven directors were nominated by the FSTMB. The latter were not elected with a mandate and they were not recallable by rank and file assemblies. In actual fact this sort of ‘workers control’ was getting the participation of the workers in the business in order to stop them striking and so get them to break their backs for ‘their’ company. Workers control means the workers supervising the administration of the business with the aim of creating a dual power there that will gradually be extended. Of necessity it should culminate in workers control of every enterprise with a national committee of workers control and a struggle for power.
But when exercised by bureaucrats, with no control by the rank and file, it turns into the integration of a layer of workers, who had sold out, into the directorate of the business. “The worker leader Torres admitted that he earned 90,000 bolivianos per month for running COMIBOL (...) when a skilled worker earned 4,000 bs per month.” (90) (Revolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, Pierre Scali, La Verité, sup.333, 22.4.54, p.20.)
The POR limited itself to asking for workers control only in state enterprises while it did not question the prevailing regime in the private sector. It adapted to the bureaucracy controlling COMIBOL. Later on it raised the reformist alternative of getting a majority on the COMIBOL board. Faced with this position it should have tried to ask for the opening of the accounts of all enterprises and of the government so that they could be controlled and inspected by the workers through rank and file meetings and by delegates supervised by them with the aim eventually the forming soviets and struggling to seize power.
At the international level the POR said: “We demand a free market for tin”. (91) (LO, May 1953, p.2). What was really required was a producers’ cartel instead.
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The Disintegration And Reorganisation Of The Armed Forces
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After the April events in the armed forces “All the units had to face a serious problem: the troops recruited a few weeks previously had very little combat training and instruction. A large part of their working hours in the previous weeks had been used for practice drills for the military parade planned to coincide with the repatriation of the remains of Eduardo Avaroa. The soldiers were able to parade very well but they did not know how to fight”. (92) (Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, General Gary Prado Salmón, Cochabamba 1984, p.33.)
“In the first months of the revolution, only the COB possessed an armed force, the armed worker and peasant militias. The arming of the workers began with union militias when conditions did not exist for the formation of a similar force linked to the MNR. The meetings were impressive parades of armed workers and peasants (...) The COB assembly and the rank and file organisations, unlike the Executive Committee, were serious about the task of consolidating these militias, improving their armament, disciplining them and creating a unified command. Paz Estenssoro and Lechín instructed their followers to obstruct the efforts being made to strengthen the armed workers nuclei as they represented the greatest threat to the government. Taking advantage of the resources available because of their monopoly of power they began to organise militias in the zonal commands of the MNR, independent of the trade union militias and gave them the job of overseeing the main centres; the moviemento leaders, closely helped by Stalinism were given the means to sabotage the consolidation of the COB militias.” (93) (La revolución boliviana, G. Lora, p.271.)
A key problem in every revolution is the armed forces. A revolutionary party should have opposed the reorganisation of the bourgeois army in any form and put forward the demand to replace it by the armed people organised in militias. As the revolution deepens the repulse of any external or internal aggression should be based on the latter so as to move towards an internationalist and proletarian Red Army.
But this was not the policy of Lechín and his followers in the POR. While the MNR did everything possible to reorganise the traditional armed forces, Lechín tricked the workers with the fable that he only wanted a peaceful, technical and construction brigade type of bourgeois army. An armed force like that does not stop being guard dogs of capital, and its benign postures tend to give it popular support in order to justify its armed defence of the capitalist state. Costa Rica does not possess an army but a national guard that serves capital very well in terms of making the exploited work. Yankee imperialism has now sought to dismantle the Panamanian army in order to replace it by Civil Guards.
In July the POR identified with Lechín: “The position of the miners’ leader is well known as it has been put forward many times on workers demonstrations locally and elsewhere: he opposes the army which existed before the insurrection of the 9th April and favours instead the creation of a new technical army with industrial and farming functions.” (94) (LO, 15.7.52, p.1.)
Immediately after the April insurrection, the Bolivian armed forces were disintegrating. The well-known anti-communist general Gary Prado tells us what it was like at that time:
“In the barracks the situation was tense as the officers were split between those who supported and those who condemned the revolution. Nobody did anything except stand guard so that as much military equipment was preserved from the revolutionary host. A sense of defeat however was made worse when we learned the details of what had occurred in the three days of fighting confirming that the army had been beaten on every hand. The flight of the High Command made the officers feel even more abandoned. A number, fearing repression, deserted their units without delay and sought asylum in foreign embassies or voluntarily went into exile. Others, forgetting their duty, went home to await developments. A few stayed in the barracks trying to regroup their units, control the soldiers and keep an appearance of order and discipline.” (95) (Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, p.40.)
While this was happening (the 17th June 1952) the COB adopted (...) the draft presented by the mining representatives that said:
“The National Corps of Armed Militias of the Central Obrera de Bolivia will be organised in the following way 1. The National Command 2. Departmental and Special Commands. The National Command will consist (of) the National Leader, Comrade Víctor Paz Estenssoro. Commander-in-Chief, Comrade Juan Lechín Oquendo (...) The commanders of the cells will be elected by the departmental militiamen, by the Departmental Centres and the National Command of the COB.”
Gary Prado continues with his analysis.
“The analysis of the military commands is different. They thought that resolution was an attack on the institution of the Armed Forces and furthermore it was humiliating. However, faced with the impossibility of putting forward arguments at the time good enough to prevent the formation of militias in the prevailing political situation and by the precarious balance occurring then and in order to enable the army to survive it was decided to try to maintain some degree of control over the militias in some way.”
“With that aim by means of deceit, the Chief of the General Staff Germán Armando Fortún, offered to supply the COB with all the advice needed to improve the organisation of the Armed Militias such as the appointment of enough instructors to instil into the militiamen disciplined attitudes, basic military training and responsibility on the understanding that the militias will be, in the final analysis, the reserve of the Armed Forces of the Nation”.
“The General Staff offer was warmly accepted by the COB (...) In this way it succeeded to a certain extent in dealing with the problem of the militias, at least inasmuch as it prevented them from becoming a structure that would turn them into a parallel army. The National Command of the militias never functioned properly”. (96) Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, pp.52-54.)
Instead of struggling to make the workers militias independent and opposed to the previous bourgeois armed forces which carried out the massacres of Uncia, Catavi, Villa Victoria and others, the COB leadership of Lechín and the POR “warmly accepted” the proposal of the high command of the defeated genocidal army which had as its aim the castration of the militias to make sure that they did not transcend the boundaries of the bourgeois state and to subordinate them to the control of the armed spinal column of the class dictatorship of capital. They also accepted, as the national leader of the militias, a class enemy, Víctor Paz.
Lechín tried to avoid the construction of an independent force of armed workers the whole time. He wanted to transform them into the MNR’s armed guards or the militia reserves of the regular bourgeois army.
In his memoirs Lechín always boasts of having defended the ‘fatherland’ and ‘army’ in the slaughter of the Chaco War. He also boasts that in April 1952 he handed over to the police the arms thrown down by the soldiers. “I calculate that there were about 3,000 deaths. In Corioco Street many women and children and men died. Eventually we were able to take the Caiconi arsenal and all the arms captured we handed over to the Carabineros.” (97) (Historia de una leyenda: Vida y palabra de Juan Lechín Oquendo, Lupe Cajias, La Paz 1989, p.148.) However Lechín does not want to say that he was one of the authors of the military reorganisation and that he failed to establish people’s courts to punish the perpetrators of the massacres.
In mid-1952 there was a drunken brawl between militiamen and soldiers. This was used as a pretext for weakening the militias and encouraging the further re-establishment of the armed forces. The POR dealt with Lechín in a very fawning manner,
“The immediate re-organisation and ‘goose-stepping’ of the army that the said gentlemen tried to carry out, taking advantage of a bloody incident between drunks in the ‘Ciros’ night-club, instigated by falangists in the pay of the rosca, was soon stopped with singular energy by Minister Lechín. The above mentioned incident led to a triumph of the MNR left wing over the rightist, conciliatory and opportunist bureaucracy.
“We revolutionary workers see this with sympathy and, relying on our own forces, we fraternally salute all the triumphs of the MNR left-wing, represented by Lechín and the newspaper Vanguardia.” (98) (LO, 3.8.52, p.3.)
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The Desire To Transform The MNR
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The huge adaptation of the POR to the MNR is seen not only in its attempts to shift the cabinet leftwards but in wanting to transform the bourgeois MNR so that it would be turned into an anti-capitalist revolutionary party. The POR went so far as to write an open letter to the MNR convention where it put forward the position that, if the MNR moved leftward, it could absorb the POR.
“The convention should be worker-peasant and not bureaucratic (...) The left wing should impose revolutionary demands without fear of reaction and imperialism”. (99) (LO, supplement, 3.2.53, p.4.)
The POR held the suicidal belief that Lechínism could declare and impose a revolutionary programme to turn the MNR in a revolutionary direction.
“The MNR is certainly a party in transition from traditional or reformist politics to the new politics of the revolutionary transformation of the proletariat as the leader of the whole oppressed society.” (100) (LO 11.11.52, p.3.)
“The main essential doctrinal foundation required to play a decisive role in the present period can only be obtained by modifying, in its turn, the social composition of the party. Its uniform social nature could be achieved around the main social force of anti-imperialist struggle. The most powerful and decisive social force is made up of exploited workers and peasants. It is around these social forces that the unity of the party must be attained.”
According to the POR a struggle had to continue so that “the workers and peasants of the MNR impose a programme that reflects their own interests, and likewise impose a leadership that reflects the interests of the exploited. The present task is to ensure that the MNR must be controlled by the exploited masses”. The exploited will never be able to control a party created by and for the bourgeoisie.
“Only on condition that it takes the consistent progressive step of adopting a programme of principles in accord with the upsurge of the masses then carrying it out, will the MNR be able to play the role imposed on it by circumstances.”
“Solid worker cadres in the MNR, elimination of counter-revolutionary tendencies, a political programme which represents the interests of the exploited classes, in brief the absolute pre-eminence of the working class within the MNR ranks is the only thing that can give the MNR an important role in the revolutionary course towards the Worker-Peasant government.” (101) (LO, 11.11.52, p.3.)
The POR distinguishes counter revolutionary wings from another, or others, supposedly revolutionary ones. The one certain thing is that all wings of the MNR were and are counter-revolutionary.
“If the MNR wants to maintain its status as a mass party it will have to be more sensitive to their aspirations; it will have to integrate the demands for which they fought and which they will never renounce, into its programme. That will not be done unless the representatives of caciquism and imperialism are expelled from the party (...) This is the only possibility of survival remaining open to the MNR: to stop keeping the workers and peasants out of its ranks but, on the contrary, to give them the greatest influence over the party leadership.” (102) (LO, 29.11.52, p.2.)
“If the MNR does not organically change itself, expelling the rightists, freemasons, adventurers, businessmen and carpetbaggers from its ranks, it will become the gravedigger of the revolution (...) If the left wing succeeds in taking charge and having a working class face, the POR is ready to work with it and even to fuse with it. This new party form ought to be reflected in the forms of government which can only be a worker- peasant government.” (103)(LO, Supplement, 3.2.53, p.3.)
No matter how many workers a bourgeois party has it does not change its class character. While the POR struggled to get more workers into the MNR Trotskyists should have struggled for more workers to leave it. The POR’s line had been much more serious than simply seeking to reform the government and so advance towards a worker-peasant government. The POR based its whole strategy on trying to reform the solidly bourgeois MNR. This demanded greater participation of the labour bureaucrats in the leadership, greater ‘sensitivity’ from the top chiefs and more verbiage. All the problems of Bolivia could have been dealt with if more workers had been in the MNR and they had strengthened the left wing which would have been the most demagogic of them.
It proposed that the same party which only four years before it had labelled ‘nazi-fascist’ should now turn itself in the party of the social revolution. Furthermore if the rightist elements had been purged and the Chávez and Lechín left wing had taken charge the POR would have agreed to fuse with the MNR. A revolutionary party can never fuse with a counter-revolutionary one, even less so when it is leading the class enemy.
The positions of the POR were worse than those of Stalinism when it betrayed the Chinese revolution in 1927. In the latter, thanks to the policy of the Chinese CP which wanted to support and transform the Guomindang, bourgeois nationalism, once it had used the Communists to gain power, massacred them in the slaughter of Shanghai. Trotsky attacked the Stalinist Comintern for “consider(ing) the Kuomintang not as a bourgeois party, but as a neutral area of struggle for the masses (...) to assist the (summit) to convert ever broader masses into ‘cattle’, and under conditions most favourable to it to prepare the Shanghai coup d’etat (...) they imagined that by means of ordinary elections at Kuomintang Congresses power would pass from the hands of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat.” (104) (The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.218.)
The left wing was no more than a demagogic tribune used by that bourgeois party in order to distract the masses and to get them to accept a solution of complete capitulation to imperialism. Chávez ended up as vice president to the leader of the MNR right-wing. Lechín ended up supporting all the imperialists’ plans totally, such as the triangular one and by visiting Nationalist China with the object of getting US endorsement for his management of their semi-colony.
As a consequence of that line, in 1954, the whole of the POR old guard (Warqui, Ayala etc) all the POR leaders of the COB, (Moller, Zegada) and the great majority of Lora’s Leninist Workers Faction dissolved themselves and went into the MNR.
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The Peasant Uprising
The insurrections of 1936, 1946 and 1952 as well as the civil war and the great struggles undertaken between the end of the Chaco War and 1952, had the cities and mines of Bolivia as their arena. At that time at least 70% of the population lived in the country. The peasants lived on the margins of the national economy, did not vote and had little direct part in politics.
The peasant masses spoke Amerindian languages and the great majority were illiterate. Their main relations of production were still based on serfdom. The Indians had to pay the cacique in labour, products or money.
Villarroel had been demagogic in his calling of the congress of the indigenous peoples. The peasant masses were gradually awakening. When the army of the rosca collapsed the Indian tenants organised themselves and a few months after April 1952, a strong movement of land occupations broke out – mainly in the valleys of Cochabamba and Titicaca which had trading links with the cities. These movements were not guided by Marxist ideology. The MNR immediately took them over.
“The only substantial incident of ‘communist’ influence involved the POR, which under the direction of its erstwhile leader Warqui had established something of a presence among the peasants of Ucureña. This was soon to prove ephemeral and had only been made possible by supporting a faction in conflict with the leader of the regional confederation over financial questions.” (106) (Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, pp.70-71.)
Once the peasant mobilisations for land began to get under way the POR succeeded in attaining great influence in the convulsed valley of Cochabamba. In 1953 it correctly launched the slogan of occupation of the land and expropriation of the latifundiae. However its agrarian programme did not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois democratic revolution.
When a peasant receivers a plot of land he becomes a petit- bourgeois. Competition and the operation of the market results in some small proprietors becoming rich and turning into bourgeois farmers, buying lorries or tractors, acquiring new land and hiring labourers while others lose their plots and sink into the proletariat. Land does not deal with all the peasantry’s problems and neither dos it mean that there will be a great increase in the supply of farming produce to the country. There must be electricity, mechanisation and modernisation of the agricultural sector as well as an improvement in communications and means of exchange.
In order to achieve the latter industry and the banks must be expropriated and placed under the control of the workers and small peasants. Thereby the peasants can more easily get credit and urban products. The expropriation of the rich and the nationalisation of large scale transport will mean investment in agriculture, lower transport costs and lower prices for goods traded between town and country. By eliminating the private distributors and middlemen and being in direct contact with their markets, the peasants will get better terms for their trade. The state monopoly of foreign trade will allow the agricultural sector to be protected and provided with goods at subsidised prices.
In order to do this it is vital that the revolution spreads internationally and it must try to control the main cities, banks and factories in the region. A workers state should try to encourage the peasants to develop associated forms of large scale production voluntarily. But such collective farms will inevitably fail if the revolution remains isolated in one country and a backward one at that.
Three more important problems for the peasant are education, culture and political democracy. Plans for literacy campaigns and education could only be carried out on the basis of substantial sums obtained by confiscation from the rich and by a general mobilisation of educational volunteers (something that the MNR did not want to do.)
Even now in Bolivia the majority of the population not only still live in the countryside but still speak Quechua, Aymara and other Amerindian languages. In order to try to integrate them into modern society and the struggle for socialism, the proletariat must unconditionally defend the right to national self-determination for these nationalities before the bourgeoisie. That should entail a struggle for the official recognition of the Amerindian languages so that the great majority of Bolivians can develop their own culture or be educated or examined in their own mother tongue. If a strong feeling for autonomy or separation emerges, the proletariat should struggle for the right of these nationalities to opt for that course but also to persuade them that the best course is that of a soviet region or republic in the framework of a socialist federation. The POR did not raise any slogan favouring self-determination of the Indian nationalities. When, decades later, it did so, it clothed itself in populism and idealised the obscurantist pre-Columbian religion.
The MNR introduced adult suffrage. The illiterate Bolivian peasants were able to vote for the first time. The POR did not make either that demand or the one for an Constituent Assembly. Later it demanded that illiterates be eligible for election and that the proletariat have a preferential vote.
The POR did not demand the expropriation of industry and credit in order to put them under workers control. It programme was limited to a bourgeois and national framework. The way to realise it was to put pressure on the ‘comrade President’, Paz.
“While we all waited for the government to make its position clear on the problem of the latifundia while taking up the hopes of the exploited masses, President Paz Estenssoro answered our worries with the needs of the Indian, of labour and sacrifices.” (107) (LO, 29.6.52, p.4.)
Once more the POR pinned its hopes on Paz. What was needed was to alert the masses constantly that the entire MNR was not interested in carrying out an agrarian revolution.
One of the personalities most supported by the POR was Ñuflo Chavez, one of the leaders of the MNR left wing, who had worked very closely with the POR and, in spite of being a rancher’s son, had been put in charge of peasant matters by the COB and was peasant’ minister. “The Minister of Peasant Affairs has forbidden the Federation to collect dues. Is this the way to encourage organisation in the countryside?” (108) (LO, 6.2.53, p.1) Once more the POR was surprised that its friend was inconsistent and pleaded with him to be consistent. The minister should have been denounced for wanting to disorganise the peasantry in order to moderate and regiment it.
Eventually the MNR adopted an agrarian reform that failed to pull the agricultural sector out of its backwardness. “between 1954 and 1968 only about eight million of some 36 million hectares of cultivated land changed hands. After two years 51% of the latifundia in La Paz, 49% in Chuquisaca and 76% in Oruro had been affected, but in Tarija the figure was 33% in Santa Cruz 36% and in Cochabamba only 16%, the national total being 28.5%.” (109) (Dunkerley, Verso, p.73.)
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The Opportunist International Orientation Of The POR
The Bolivian revolution could never have overcome its impoverished capitalist semi-colonial condition by remaining isolated in a backward and landlocked country. The internationalisation of the revolution was vital in order to ward off counter-revolution and to establish the material basis for socialist construction.
The MNR did everything possible to isolate the revolution within its own boundaries. It did not even dare to organise or encourage insurgent movements in other countries of the continent however moderate the programmes of these insurgents were. Víctor Paz took great pains to be imperialism’s trump card. Lechín and his POR scribes took great pains to promote him.
If the POR press and its programme of action is examined no serious fight for the international expansion of the revolution will be found. It did not even call for a struggle for the Socialist United States of Latin America. Even the most pro-nationalist wing of the Latin American ‘Trotskyist movement’, the Ramos current criticised the section of the 4th International for its provincialism. “the POR, far from basing its policy on the development of the struggle in Latin America, limits itself only to Bolivia. This is a suicidal but neither a working class nor revolutionary policy (...) A Workers Government is only conceivable on the plane of a revolutionary struggle in all Latin America, not in one of its isolated ‘provinces’.” (110) (Trotsky ante la revolución Latinoamericana, Juan Ramon Peñaloza, Bs As 1953, pp.152-154)
The POR has never been renowned for regarding international politics as important. However in the few articles written by the POR about other countries a line of colossal capitulation to counter-revolution can be seen.
A report from the POR CC said: “First Peron and Vargas in Argentina and Brazil, then Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia and later Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador and finally Ibañez in Chile, unifying the revolutionary and anti-imperialist aspirations of their own peoples, express in their broad electoral victories, not only the discontent of the working masses for the system of capitalist exploitation, but the fundamental defeat of imperialism’s subjection of our semi-colonial countries through the traditional methods of economic slavery. Such mass movements fully identify themselves with the revolutionary actions that are liberating China, Korea, Indonesia and Indo-China and which enable these markets to escape the influence and exploitation of imperialism (...)” (111)(Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.3)
The POR maintained that the bourgeois governments of Peron Vargas, Paz and Ibañez had defeated imperialism and “fully identified themselves” with the revolutions that were overthrowing the bourgeoisie in Asia. In Indonesia the bourgeoisie was never deposed and, furthermore, thanks to the popular frontist policy of the CP, it demobilised the workers and paved the way for a coup that would assassinate a million opponents. The nationalist Latin American governments did not question the backward capitalist semi-colonial nature of the countries that they ran. They simply sought to generate better conditions for the development of a national bourgeoisie. The aim of their social reforms was to widen the internal market and control the organisations of labour. All these regimes were anti-communist and ended up supporting imperialism and repressing the workers.
The POR openly showed its sympathy for the PSP of Chile. Instead of denouncing its reformist politics of entering a capitalist government, the POR promoted it and presented it as an anti- Stalinist party derived from Trotskyism and with a semi- trotskyist orientation.
“The Partido Socialista Popular is a centrist party which recently shifted to the left and, for some time, gave the Ibañez government a socialist tinge. As to be expected, the policy of the PSP could not be achieved by the cabinet and its leadership, energetically pressured by its rank and file, had no other remedy than of giving expression to the popular discontent by the ministerial crisis (...) it should be noted that the PSP is anti-Stalinist and it is derived from the Left Opposition.” (112) (LO, 27.9.53, p.4.)
The POR’s most scandalous position was its open support for Zionism. In an article called Israel Gives A Lesson To Imperialism the POR called for support to the main bastion of imperialism in the Middle East against Jordan. It is the duty of any Marxist to defend any Arab semi-colony (no matter how reactionary it regime) in face of the racist aircraft-carrier of imperialism.
“The tiny republic of Israel, also apparently received ‘free aid from the USA’. The conflict with Jordan had the virtue of showing the game played by imperialism. The yankee chancellery told Israel to stop engineering works on the river Jordan under threat of a suspension of US aid to this tiny state. The reply of this young country with a population of less than two million was a hard lesson for yankee imperialism. The Israeli Chancellor Moshe Sherrett declared that ‘Israel does not sell its sovereignty or independence for any type of help.’
“This lesson of not compromising national sovereignty to imperialism for a few tons of food should be learnt by every ruler.’” (113)(LO, 3.11.53, p.1.)
By that time Israel had destroyed the Palestinian state and had expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from its territory. The USA did not want its ‘guard-dog’ to continue carrying our further ‘excesses’. The POR saw in this even more reactionary attitude of Israel a dignified gesture for the MNR government to imitate. It is as if anyone today could be proud of a South African government which defied the USA by refusing to repeal racist laws.
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The Leadership Of the 4th International Identifies Itself With This Menshevik Policy
The whole of the treacherous policy of the POR was given total support by the 4th International. Furthermore the latter admitted to being its guide.
The resolution adopted by the IEC of the 4th International at its 12th Plenum (November 1952) said:
“The way in which the POR has operated so far is, in general correct, and corresponds both to the objective reality and to the real strength of the party.
“Ideologically preparing since before the events of 9th April, the POR was not surprised by them and, above, all it did not fail to correctly interpret them and to adequately adjust its policy (...) This double support was concretised in the critical support given to the MNR government” (114) (Contribución ..., p.241)
Early in 1953 the journal Fourth International asserted: “The POR began by justifying granting critical support to the MNR government (...) it gave the government critical support against attacks of imperialism and reaction and it supported all progressive measures.” (115)(Fourth International, January- February 1953, p.16.)
“Ideologically prepared in advance for the events of April 9, the POR was not surprised by them and above all did not fail to interpret them correctly and to adequately adjust its own policy.” (116) (International Information Bulletin, January 1953, SWP, New York, p.24.)
In 1953 the factional break-up of the 4th International began between the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Posadas and the International Committee of the SWP (USA), the French PCI of Bleibtreu-Favre and Lambert and the groups of Gerry Healy and Nahuel Moreno. The split was the result of the latter grouping’s rejection of the tactic of deep entrism within Stalinism. Nevertheless the IC carried out, or would later, deep entrism into social democracy or bourgeois nationalism.
During the split the Bolivian revolution was not discussed. All had supported the POR line. The split was not between ‘orthodox’ and revisionist’ forces but between two wings which had already supported the centrist orientation of seeking to reform dissident Stalinists (such as Tito) or nationalists (such as the MNR).
Much later in the search to find arguments for their factional battles, the anti-pabloists discovered the betrayal of 1952 which they had endorsed at the time.
The International Committee of Healy published a vast collection of seven books entitled Trotskyism versus Revisionism which contained hundreds of letters and documents which were supposed to show its struggle against revisionism. However in none of those volumes is the 1952 revolution mentioned. The extensive first volume is dedicated to the split with Pabloism. More than fifty texts of that polemic are reproduced. Nevertheless in all those documents Bolivia is only mentioned in two brief and passing references of a purely administrative nature. The Vern and Ryan texts are totally ignored. All this merely confirms that the ‘anti-Pabloists’ never questioned the Menshevik strategy at all which was unanimously adopted by the 4th International and that the latter had already shifted towards centrism between 1948 and 1951.
At the beginning of the 70s the Healy current was to develop a particular interest in Bolivia arising from its wish to engage in a factional manoeuvre against the PCI of Lambert, at that time linked to Lora and because it had begun to form its first very active South American section in Peru. In 1971-72 it launched a massive political offensive against the POR, accusing it, correctly, of having conciliated the nationalist Torres government. But these criticisms were made from a sectarian angle as it denounced Lora for having dared to engage in joint anti- gorilla actions with Torres and for not having dared to agitate for the slogan ‘Down With Torres!’ which would have been a blunder at the time as only reaction would have replaced him. Later the journal Clave, in its first number, published an analysis of the crisis of the Trotskyist movement in which many of the criticisms made at the time by the anti-defencists Shachtman and Robles were repeated.
However all these criticism were made under pressure. Healyism supported the pro-nationalist line of the POR in 1952. Its sectarian orientation in the Andes ran counter to its total capitulation to the bourgeois movements of Khomeini, Arafat, Qaddafi and Ortega at the same time. Healyism went so far as to justify the massacres by the theocratic dictatorship of Iran of the Kurds, women refusing to wear the oppressive veil and ‘Trotskyists’.
In 1980 the currents of Moreno and Lambert fused to give birth to the Parity Committee and then the 4th International – International Committee. In the programme that it adopted it said:
“The synthesis of Pabloist betrayal occurred in Bolivia. In this country the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), Bolivian section of the international, led by the hand of Pablo, committed one of the greatest betrayals against the revolution so far this century, equal to, or greater than, that of the Mensheviks during the Russian revolution, than that of the social democrats during and after the First World War, than that of the Stalinists in China, in Germany, in Spain etc. In Bolivia the working class, educated by Trotskyism, carried out – at the start of 1952 – one of the most perfect working class revolutions known: it destroyed the bourgeois army, built up workers and peasants militias as the only real power in the country, and organised the Central Obrera Boliviana in order to centralise the workers movement and the militias. The bureaucracy that led the COB handed over power – which it had in its hands – to the bourgeois nationalist party the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario). Bolivian Trotskyism was a power, it had great influence in the labour and mass movement, it had participated as co-leadership of the working class and popular insurrection that destroyed the army. The International Secretariat (IS), led by Pablo, laid down the treacherous and reformist line of critically supporting the bourgeois government. The present crisis of Bolivian Trotskyism, the present crisis of the whole of the 4th International, the strengthening of Stalinism in Bolivia and of all the petty bourgeois nationalist movements in Latin America, derives from that criminal policy of class collaboration which Pablo obliged the whole of the International to carry out in Bolivia. The Pabloite revisionist principle was always the same; the MNR pressured by the mass movement would see itself obliged to make a socialist revolution”. (117) (Actualización del programa de transición, Nahuel Moreno, Caracteres Ed, Bogota, 1990, pp.40-41.)
What this demonstrated was the greatest cynicism. Lambertism had worked very closely with Lora before subscribing to that position. It was the international current that showed the greatest eagerness to demonstrate that Lora’s POR had always advanced a revolutionary orientation. Pierre Broué, its great historian, wrote a small book in which he defended the official line of the POR in 1952.
The Moreno current never questioned the right-centrist policy of the POR in 1952. In fact it made it its own. While the POR capitulated to the MNR, Moreno was engaged in total adaptation to Peronism. For a decade he was to be dissolved inside it giving allegiance to the leadership and economic programme of the bourgeois Peron. When the POR began to break up in the mid-1950s, the SLATO (American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism), headed by Moreno and Vitale, had a greater affinity with the majority of the Fracción Obrera Leninista of Moller which was dissolved into the MNR. In his major work Moreno admits that Vitale took great pains to win the Moller group to SLATO. Those who went over to the MNR did so under the powerful influence of the pro-Peronist PSRN, within which Moreno, Ramos and pro-Peronist social democrats worked together.
Another current that has just ‘discovered’ that Lora committed serious errors in 1952, is the Partido Obrero of Argentina. This current was one which had unconditionally defended the whole pro-nationalist line of the POR. Its historian Coggiola based the whole of his analysis of the history of Trotskyism in his country and continent, on the basis of total adherence to the conceptions and actions of the POR-MASAS. In its daily practice it has struggled to impose worker ministers onto Peronism and for a front with bourgeois sectors behind a bourgeois democratic programme and a joint presidential candidate. Now it has decided to break with Lora because he supported a dissident faction. Without drawing up any balance sheet of its co-habitation with Lora, Pablo Rieznik published a brief and deficient article in which he belatedly initiates an attack on Lora in 1952.
All the currents that claim to come from the 4th International since 1951-52 are compromised with the historic betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. The lack of a radical balance sheet of the lessons of that crime has meant that all those currents continue to practice different varieties of adaptation to forces foreign to the proletarian revolution. The heirs of Pablo’s IS capitulated before the FLN in Algeria, to Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinism, to Sandinism, to Khomeini, to Euro-Communism and bourgeois pacifism and ecology. The Latin American Bureau would end up following Posadas until its transformation into a puppet of the conservative Stalinists. The different variants of the IC would capitulate to the MNA in Algeria, Peronism & Belaundism in the 50s, where its sections ensconced themselves) Social Democracy and Sandinism. Healy would die converted into an emulator of Arafat, Gaddafi, Khomeini and Gorbachev. The SWP(USA) has ended up openly reneging on Trotskyism and unconditionally hailing Castro, the FSLN and the FMLN. Lambertism survives wishing to form a new international and reformist parties like that of Lula in Brazil and based on the strategy of forming bourgeois democratic governments. Morenoism was always characterised by its embrace of whatever was in fashion among left currents (at different times it was Peronist, Castroist, Maoist, standard bearers of the formation of sections of the Social-Democrat Socialist International, apologists of Walesa’s ‘Solidarity’ and for the immediate capitalist unification of Germany.)
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References
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1. The CON was the predecessor of the COB.
2. Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz 1986, p.188.
3. Lucha Obrera, 12.6.52, p.3.
4. Trotskyism in Latin America, Robert J. Alexander, Hoover Institution Press, California 1973, p.134.
5. Sindicatos y revolución, G. Lora, La Paz 1960.
6. La Revolución Boliviana: Análisis crítico, Guillermo Lora, La Paz 1963, p.254.
7. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, 1953, p.11.
8. Lucha Obrera, 18.4.52, p.2.
9. Rebelión en las venas, James Dunkerley, Ed Quipus, 1982, La Paz, p.50 – Verso edition p.45.
10. Rebellion in the Veins, Verso, London 1984, p.64. (The editor of the English text omitted ‘allegedly’ before ‘controlled’. Note by Eds of RH)
11. Labor Action, 27.10.52. Shachtman’s paper.
12. Rebelión en las venas, p.52, Verso Edition, p.46.
13. Labor Action, 7.4.52.
14. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, G. Lora, Vol.2, pp.237-238.
15. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP New York.
16. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP New York.
17. The Militant, 19.5.52, Lora interview Part 2, SWP, New York.
18. The Militant, 12.5.52, Lora interview Part 1, SWP, New York.
19. The Militant, 19.5.52, Lora interview Part 2, SWP, New York.
20. “A Letter on the Bolivian Revolution”, S Ryan, 1.6.52, SWP Internal Bulletin.
21. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, undated, p.10.
22. La revolución boliviana: Análisis crítico, G. Lora, La Paz, 1963, p.254.
23. Rebelión, 1.5.52, p.8-9.
24. “Gualberty Villarroel (...) Our proletarian homage to the memory of the martyr president”, ibid., p.9.
25. Lucha Obrera, 12.6.52, p.3.
26. Lucha Obrera, 29.6.52, p.4.
27. Lucha Obrera, 18.4.52, p.2.
28. Boletin Interno, no.13, 1953, p.7.
29. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52, p.3.
30. ibid., p.301.
31. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, undated, p.8.
32. Movimiento obrero y procesos politicos en Bolivia: Historia de la COB 1952-1957, Jorge Lazarte, EDOBOL, La Paz 1989, p.280.
33. Lucha Obrera, 15.7.52, p.1.
34. Lucha Obrera, 29.1.52, p.2.
35. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.11.
36. Trotskyism in Latin America, Robert J. Alexander, p.125.
37. Lucha Obrera, 1.6.52, p.2.
38. Internal Bulletin, no.17, August 1953, SWP, New York, p.40. The second Ryan letter, dated 4.8.53.
39. ROSCA was the mining oligarchy – Eds note.
40. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52.
41. ibid., p.277.
42. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, G. Lora, Vol 2, p.231-232.
43. Bolivia: la revolución inconclusa, James M. Malloy, Ceres, La Paz 1989, p.243.
44. ibid., p.243-244.
45. A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement, Lora, Cambridge, p.281.
46. ibid., p.284.
47. La revolución Boliviana: Análisis crítico, Lora, La Paz, 1963, p.267.
48. ibid., p.270.
49. ibid., p.298-299.
50. Lucha Obrera, 23.1.53.
51. Lucha Obrera, March 1953, p.1.
52. See interview in Facetas, 5.7.87.
53. Nahuel Moreno always claimed ... in its bureaucracy.
54. La Revolución Boliviana, G. Lora, p.262-263.
55. Movimento obrero y processos politícos en Bolivia, Jorge Lazarte, p.6.
56. ibid., p.7.
57. As Stuart King so .... Permanent Revolution, no.2, p.36.
58. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.12.
59. The Third International after Lenin, Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York 1970, p.181. Stalin, el gran organizador de derrotas. La III Internacional despues de Lenin, Trotski, El Yunque, Bs As 1974, p.241.
60. The author may be incorrect in assuming that.
61. The Communist International 1919-1943: Documents, ed. Jane Degras, Vol.1, Cass, 1971, p.427. (The author is wrong. Zinoviev drafted the theses which represented a compromise between the lefts and right. In Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler (Marxism, Wars and Revolutions, Deutscher, Verso, 1984) the latter says: “Radek was accused by Moscow of being the author of my definition of the five forms of workers’ government. In reality, he tried to prevent this definition from being adopted; not because he thought it incorrect but, as I learned years later, because it irritated Zinoviev, and Radek found this inconvenient for his factional struggle in Moscow.” pp.158-159. Brandler advanced it at the 8th Congress of the KPD in January 1923, just after the 4th Congress of the Communist International which took place in Nov-Dec 1922. See Revolutionary History Vol.2 no.3, pp.1-20. Eds note)
62. ibid., p.426.
63. ibid., p.426.
64. Contribución a la historia politica de Boliviana, Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.253.
65. Lucha Obrera, 11.11.52, p.3.
66. Lucha Obrera, 11.11.52, p.2.
67. Lucha Obrera, 25.5.52, p.3.
68. Bolivia: la revolución derrotada, Liborio Justo, Cochabamba 1967, p.224.
69. Lucha Obrera, 2.8.53, p.1.
70. This reference is missing in the text available to me – ETOL
71. Internal Bulletin, no 17, August 1953, SWP New York, p.50.
72. ibid., p.10.
73. Memorias del primer ministro obrero, Waldo Alvarez, La Paz, 1986, pp.283-84.
74. El Sindicalismo Boliviano, Ricardo Catoira Marín, La Paz, 1987, p.43.
75. Contribución ..., Vol.2, Lora, La Paz 1978, p.228.
76. El Sindicalismo Boliviano ..., p.48.
77. LO, 3.5.52, p.3.
78. LO, 25.5.52. p.1.
79. LO, 12.6.52, p.1.
80. LO, 12.6.52, p.2.
81. LO 12.6.52, p.3.
82. The Third International After Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, pp.169-170.
83. LO, 3.8.52, p.3.
84. LO, 5.8.53, p.1.
85. Villarroel was lynched in 1946. Eds note.
86. LO, 6.2.53, p.1.
87. LO, 29.6.52.p.4.
88. LO, 11.11.52, p.1.
89. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.9.
90. Revolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, Pierre Scali, La Verité, supp. no.333, 22.4.54, p.20.
91. LO, May 1953, p.2.
92. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, General Gary Prado Salmón, Cochabamba 1984, p.33.
93. La revolución boliviana, G. Lora, p.271.
94. LO, 15.7.52, p.1.
95. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, p.40.
96. Poder y Fuerzas Armadas 1949-1982, pp.52-54.
97. Historia de una leyenda: Vida y palabra de Juan Lechín Oquendo, Lupe Cajias, La Paz 1989, p.148.
98. LO, 3.8.52, p.3.
99. LO, Supplement 3.2.53, p.4.
100. LO, 11.11.52, p.3.
101. LO, 11.11.52, p.3.
102. LO, 29.11.52, p.2.
103. LO, Supplement 3.2.53, p.3.
104. The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder, New York, 1970, p.218.
105. This note seems to be missing.
106. Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, pp.70-71.
107. LO, 29.6.52, p.4.
108. LO, 6.2.53, p.1.
109. Rebellion in the Veins, Dunkerley, Verso, p.73.
110. Trotsky ante la revolución nacional latinoamericana, Juan Ramon Peñaloza, Bs. As., 1953, pp.152-154.
111. Boletin Interno, no.13, POR, p.3.
112. LO, 27.9.53, p.4.
113. LO, 3.11.53, p.1.
114. Contribución a la historia política de Bolivia, G. Lora, Vol.2, La Paz 1978, p.241.
115. Fourth International, January-February 1953, p.16.
116. International Information Bulletin, January 1953, SWP New York, p.24.
117. Actualización del programa de transición, Nahuel Moreno, Caracteres Ed, Bogota 1990, pp.40-41.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Bolivia: The birth of the POR-9th April 1952: A situation of Dual Power.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following passage is taken from the introduction (pp.LX-LXXV) by F. and C. Chesnais to the French edition of G. Lora’s Bolivie: de la Naissance du Parti Ouvrier Revolutionnaire ál’Assemblée Populaire. It has been translated by Ted Crawford, and was prepared for Revolutionary History Vol.4, No.3 – Bolivia: The Revolution Derailed?. It was not included there because of pressure on the available space. That volume did however include a review by Jean Lieven of Lora’s book, which takes issue with positions put forward here by Chesnais (and by Lora).
The notes, which ran from 52-67 in the original, have been renumbered.
We have tried to check all spellings of proper nouns in this article as carefully as possible, but as with all the material we post which contains non-English words, we will be grateful if you point out to us any corrections that are needed.
Bolivia: The birth of the POR-9th April 1952: A situation of Dual Power.
On the morning of the 9th April armed bands from the MNR, together with a section of the police, started an insurrection in La Paz. At the start it seemed to be a conspiracy that involved few people. As in many previous coups, in spite of the initial successes of the rebels the army had the situation pretty well in hand. At the end of the day the rising seemed almost smashed.
But next day the movement took on proportions which went far beyond the MNR. Throughout the country there were very serious clashes between the army and the masses: at Cochabamba, at Oruro, at Potosi and elsewhere, the workers armed themselves and marched on La Paz. The ‘fabriles’ (workshop workers) from the Viacha industrial zone swept towards the capital, and the miners from Milluni occupied the railway station at La Paz and seized a train carrying munitions, all of which shifted the situation in favour of the insurrection. In addition armed miners from the Catavi region surrounded the town of Oruro, thus removing any possibility of the government sending reinforcements to the capital.
On the 11th April the Ballivián military junta fell. The MNR took power. Armed bodies of workers converged on La Paz.
After the fall of the junta the army evaporated in a few days. Armed groups of civilians took over the barracks and the police stations and occupied local government buildings. In the mining districts and towns the movements became organised and rapidly created workers militias. Five days after the end of the fighting in La Paz a network of workers’ militias covered the country.
The Trade Unions played an essential rôle in the organisation of the movement during the first few days. They were the ones who organised the militias, they were the ones who filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of the authorities and they took on administrative and judicial rôles. It must be said that in the mines things went more slowly than in the towns. For example the mining unions did not occupy the mines and did not immediately impose workers control of the mines [1] through mass meetings of the workforce. This delay was to prove useful to the government. The power of the Trade Unions was to be decisive in the country with the creation, eleven days after the insurrection, at the initiative of Alandia Pantoja [2] of the Central Obrera Boliviano (COB) which grouped together the various unions, corporations and workers’ parties. Born as the expression of the mass movement which had struck an sudden blow at the bourgeois state, the COB appeared to be an organisation with immense power, capable of giving a national lead to the masses in the fight for the fulfilment of their hopes. Its birth in a situation of revolutionary upheaval, from the beginning gave it a true soviet character. Thus some of the characteristics of a dual power situation existed in April 1952, a paradoxical situation reminiscent of February 1917. In fact a revolutionary movement of the masses put a government in power which claimed that from its coming to power it drew its only legitimacy from the 1951 elections which had been annulled by the ‘mamertazo’ and Ballivián’s coup d’état. At the same time the workers regarded this government as quite different from any other. On his return from exile on the 17th April Paz Estenssoro was greeted by an enormous crowd to shouts of ‘Long Live the MNR!’, ‘Long Live Victor Paz!’, ‘Nationalisation!’ and ‘Land Reform!’. In welcoming Paz the workers were acclaiming someone, who in their opinion, was going to give a mortal blow to landowners, capitalists and imperialism. But the MNR had not the slightest intention of attacking private property because that would call in question the interests of the class that it represented and thus, at the same time, its own power. The mobilisation of the masses and their organisations to demand both nationalisation without compensation under workers’ control and land reform, carried within it the struggle for the working class’s own power. Correctly, all the COB’s proclamations which the activists of the POR had been able to initiate in this period, were focused on the need to establish a real workers’ and peasants’ government. [3] In addition the MNR had to find a way to defuse the revolutionary push of the masses without delay. It was around the COB that the issue of the revolution would be decided.
The raising of the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’
The Trade Union organisations and the COB were thought by the workers to be their exclusive leadership. Its very existence made the COB an organ of workers’ power – whether its leaders knew it or not – and posed all the elements of a situation of dual power In fact the COB very quickly became a very important stake in the class struggle. For, during this period, it was the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ that encapsulated the deep convulsion and permanent mass mobilisation that made the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government real.
The MNR government was aware that therein lay the real danger to itself. So it asked the COB to nominate three of its members to the Cabinet. The three ‘worker Ministers’ were J. Lechín, Minister of Mines & Petroleum, German Butrón, Minister of Labour and Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs. It was by means of this expedient, which provided a way to the integrate the top echelons of the COB into both the state and the MNR’s apparatus, that Paz Estenssoro opened his counter-attack to aid the defence of the threatened bourgeois order.
In the person of J. Lechín, the COB General Secretary, the MNR had a choice instrument to carry out its policy of controlling the workers movement. He was known to exhibit a reputation for independence as far as his own party was concerned (cf. the ‘Bloque Minero’ in 1947). He represented the ‘Left’ of the party and had been the target of violent attacks by its right wing. Thus the masses pinned their hopes on him transmitting their policies into the government. It was Lechín who was given the job of sowing illusions among the workers that their organisation ran Paz Estenssoro’s government through this expedient of ‘co-government’.
Thus Lechín was the indispensable screen between the masses and their own power, the road to which had been opened by the existence of the COB and by the mobilisation of the masses themselves for their own aims.
Guillermo Lora discussing how the ‘Co-government’ had been imposed, explained it thus:–
“The creation of the theory of ‘Co-government’ was nothing else but the Bolivian version of collusion between the upper reaches of the trade union leadership and a petit bourgeois government. In spite of a strong group of PORists this aim was achieved because the MNR captured the predominant mood among the majority of the middle classes and the workers which was one of enthusiastic support for the government of Paz Estenssoro. In the first stage of the revolution this feeling tended to grow (a phenomenon which explains the strengthening of the MNR ‘Centre’ in relation to its left wing) above all because of the errors committed by the leadership of the POR, a large part of whom were entrists and Pabloists, and who refused to point out the limitations of the MNR and encouraged the growth of popular illusions in the revolutionary potential of Lechínism.” [4]
In fact this is to connect the crisis in the POR, which is analysed later on, with the COB which, from April onwards, could be seen to be muzzled by ‘Co-Government’ without the vanguard waging the slightest struggle to expose this governmental manoeuvre, but, on the contrary, by putting forward the call ‘Complete Control of the Cabinet by the Left’, it nourished illusions.
Guillermo Lora goes on:–
“This slogan could, strictly speaking, be justified as a pedagogic measure meant to show the masses, who were blinded by their love of the MNR, that the MNR Left was quite incapable of taking power against imperialism. However in reality this call revealed an enormous error of principle which was to believe that the working class could take power through Lechínism. It would have been more correct to direct the mobilisation of the masses through the slogan ‘All Power to the COB!’” [5]
It is not only that it would have been ‘more correct’ to direct the mobilisation of the masses through this slogan. The slogan ‘All power to the COB’ was the only one that would allow the Lechínist leadership to be exposed whilst keeping a united front against the bourgeoisie at the same time. Only in this way could the COB assume the full character of a soviet linked to the living mobilisation of the working class involving the broadest working class democracy. It was this slogan that could unite and mobilise the masses through directly elected representatives from the rank and file and the old Trade Union leadership. And it was only thus, as G. Lora shows, that the isolation could be overcome:
“Perhaps one of the worst mistakes in the organisation of the COB was that it was created from the top by the trade union leaderships who were rapidly subjected to the petit-bourgeois government and that this orientation formed its middle layer cadre politically. The masses were mobilised around the slogan of powerful centralised Trade Union but this mobilisation did not find a proper organisational expression. It would have correct to start the other way round – that is to say from the bottom to the top. The workers joined the COB through the intermediary of their trade union leaderships, which, apart from their differing politics, had very different organisational forms. The founders of the COB made their appeal to the old leaders and not the shop-stewards elected by the membership. This organisational failure brought with it elements of weakness which made its bureaucratisation easy helping to isolate it from the masses and putting it under the artificial control of the government.” [6]
In reality it was not just a simple organisational problem but a highly political one. The COB, composed as it was of leaderships which were acknowledged by the masses, gave a huge boost to the movement because it enabled it to become centralised. But at the same time this centralisation became a trap if the actual slogan that was put forward did not enable the workers to make the seizure of power a COB demand. The struggle for workers’ democracy was inseparable from the struggle which had to be waged around the slogan ‘All Power to the COB.’ In a period of revolutionary convulsion workers democracy could not feel that it was outside the political struggle to accentuate the soviet type characteristics of the Trade Union Congress. It was here and nowhere else that the lack of experience and lack of homogeneity of the COB could be measured.
For want of this the workers were left completely defenceless in the presence of their treacherous leaderships and a gap opened up between the mobilisation of the masses and the body that could centralise their struggles because that body was tied to the government, so that it became an instrument directed against the masses. The Trade Union militants of the COB organised great demonstrations demanding nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control but had to explain that there was really no need to occupy the mines properly and have mass meetings which could impose workers’ control, since, given their weight in the government, they could be confident that the COB would achieve these demands.
This left the way open for the COB to be transformed into a bureaucratic body, closely controlled by the government, in which the militants of the MNR, PIR and the newly created PCB (Bolivian Communist Party) gave themselves a slice from the juicier parts and, little by little, pushed out the POR militants who refused to unite with this bureaucracy.
On the basis of this first retreat of the masses, whose complicated mechanism we have examined, the government was able to impose a solution to the problem of nationalisation, that is to say a solution that harmed the interests of imperialism and private property as little as possible.
The Bourgeois Nationalisation of the Mines
On the 13th May 1952 the government announced the creation of a committee to carry out a four month enquiry into the problems of mine nationalisation. This was, very simply, a way of saying what guarantees would be offered to imperialism and was a severe blow to the working class movement. The announcement even seemed a kind of provocation. Had not Lechín called for immediate nationalisation in the COB’s paper?
Greeted by the MNR as the ‘day of economic emancipation’, the nationalisation of the big mining companies with moderate compensation was decreed on the 31st October 1952. Under these circumstances, the nationalisation carried out by the MNR appeared to the large tin concerns as an unexpected escape. At the end of 1952 it was no mystery to anybody that the three large companies, looking simply at their tin mine investments, were on the edge of bankruptcy. The ownership of the nationalised mines on the other hand, was handed over to a mixed company – COMIBOL – whose capital was part state owned and part private, and to which American capital was immediately subscribed so that American interests even profited from the event by increasing their share in comparison with what had been the case with the ‘Three Great’ companies. The capitalist management was not disturbed. A simple reorganisation inside COMIBOL would be enough for a total return to finance capital.
Anyway, from now on Trade Union corruption on the one hand, and the exploitation of the workers on the other, bound together those in charge of production through the creation of a so-called system of ‘workers control’ under trade union management.
A word must said about this institution for it is this that best expressed the way in which the government, seizing on a demand of the workers, cleverly turned it against them. In the nationalisation decree it clearly says that the administration of the nationalised mines, that is to say COMIBOL, is based on individual workers’ control which occurs through their membership of the COB, which in turn selects some of its members to manage the mines. Here was created a whole layer of worker managers who were easily corrupted by the government since the salaries given to the worker managers were astronomical, about 100,000 Bolivian pesos a year when an unskilled worker got 4,000!
As was emphasised by G. Lora in his pamphlet El stalinismo en los sindicatos [7] COMIBOL acted as a ‘bank account for trade union bureaucrats’ which enabled the government to increase the COB’s bureaucratisation.
By the nationalisation of Oct 1952 the working class had been dispossessed of what it had struggled for in April 1952. From this moment on a very sharp retreat of the working class could be observed.
However, the bureaucratisation of the COB, even if it was a factor in the retreat of the masses, could not in any sense be the whole story. In fact the control of the masses by the government, which operated through the bureaucracy, was extremely fragile. This was demonstrated in January 1953 by the way that, once more, the masses mobilised behind the COB against an attempt at a coup d’état by the right wing of the MNR. This started a phase where the government had to move its politics to the left and where the rediscovered power of the COB gave meaning to the slogan, ‘All Power to the COB!’ for several days.
Once more the incompetence of the POR, which arose from its lack of experience and from the pressures within its ranks calling for this slogan, resulted in a weakening of the push leftwards by the urban masses at the moment when an explosive situation was developing in the countryside.
The Revolutionary Movement in the Countryside
It was only at this moment, when the workers’ movement started to enter its phase of retreat, that the peasantry, which had slowly started to organise during the year of 1952, actively intervened. In the course of the last few months of 1952 and the first few of 1952 the peasant movement developed and took on extraordinary strength.
As we have seen the Bolivian peasantry had a long tradition of struggle. Peasant wars had played an important rôle in Bolivian social history. In addition it was worked on, above all in some regions, in particular the region of Cochabamba and Potosi, by the political currents which came from the working class. So it was that the miners, who had fled the ‘white’ massacre in Potosi, settled in these regions and a good number being supporters of the POR or MNR, played an important rôle in radicalising the peasantry.
On the other hand from 1945 onwards that peasantry had started to organise with the setting up, under the auspices of the MNR, of the ‘Federacion de Campesinos’. It was in 1952 however that the organised movement took on any sort of size when Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs in the MNR government, adorned with the prestige of a leader of the COB, took part himself in a massive campaign for the creation of peasant unions. Naturally the aim of this operation was to control the peasantry through the COB, for the MNR who had written land reform into their programme, with some reason feared that, in the name of land reform, the peasantry would go beyond the limits of private property. [8]
Now to the extent that the unions developed, the peasants started to put into practice what they thought was the dominant content of the reform. They surrounded the haciendas and forced the owners to flee and even did the same with the local authorities who were the object of the same hatred as the owners. It was then that the peasant unions came to control the entire life of the countryside, above all in the case of Ucurena, in the Cochabamba valley, where the union took charge of distribution, administration and, through its use of the militia, policing. For a period, Lora thought that the peasant unions had clearly reached even more of a soviet stage than the workers’ unions.
It was at this point that a civil war of extreme violence developed in the countryside. The landowners organised to resist the occupation of their lands; in the small towns the townspeople, together with the MNR, organised military expeditions against the surrounding peasantry. The government sent the police against the peasants. In the opposite camp the POR, whose influence in the countryside has been mentioned, developed an agitation around calls for the creation of a single Peasant Federation, an alliance with the working class and the holding of a peasant conference while the peasants were mobilised to form a front against the intrigues of the landowners.
Under the pressure of events, the government, on the 20th January 1953, set up a commission of enquiry into agrarian reform and on the 2nd August 1953 Paz Estenssoro went to Ucurena to announce the reform and to sign the decree in front of an immense crowd of peasants.
The repression by the police, the MNR militias and the landowners’ armed bands went on throughout the year. The Commission of Enquiry, headed by a well-known member of the PIR, Arturo Urquidi Morales, sought to limit to the utmost the extent of the transformation of the countryside and to channel it into the consolidation of bourgeois order and of the MNR regime itself.
This aim was achieved as land reform led to widespread tiny plots of land, defusing the appeal of the call of land to the peasants and creating, it is true within narrow limits, an internal market for local manufacturing production.
Semi-serfdom (the pongueaje) was abolished for ever, the peasants became free men and the power of the great landowners was broken and never rebuilt, even under Barrientos. All that was grasped by the peasantry, in a few areas, was the direct purchase of the land – a formula which, to the peasants, appeared to have the advantage of more firmly guaranteeing the ownership of the land than the land reform decree, whose application was extremely slow and chaotic and which, in the years after 1953, kept a climate of uncertainty in existence in the countryside.
These gains, in particular the abolition of semi-serfdom, were not negligible. But they were little in comparison with the size and violence of the peasant and the explosive revolutionary potential which would have been possible if the alliance had been made with the working class. For want of the working class which could, through its revolutionary party, go onwards at the head of the peasant masses and focus this force to establish a workers’ and peasants’ government, the great upheavals of 1953, important as they were, did not deliver the Bolivian countryside from its misery.
For that, the triumph of the working class was needed and that, in its turn, meant that the revolutionary party would know what it was about and play its full part.
The Two Successive Crises of the POR
It was inevitable that the first phase of the radicalisation of the masses occurred in conditions which meant the temporary control of the movement by the MNR and the Lechí nist Trade Union bureaucracy. This is one of the laws of the revolutionary process: generally after the first phase it by-passes the party or the revolutionary nucleus.
Already it was almost inevitable, if entirely understandable, that the POR, the first Trotskyist Party (with the sole exception perhaps of the Indo-Chinese Party immediately before the Second World War) should have to face a situation that called for the formulation of totally practical demands which reflected the level of the working classes struggle for power, and should have let slip its first opportunity to put forward the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’.
The essential thing was that the party succeeded, on the basis of understanding what was going on, in keeping in good order; that it resisted the pressure of alien forces in its ranks and, in good order, grappled with the second phase of the revolutionary process which would start when the masses in movement broke with the parties to which they had at first given their confidence.
But the revolutionary party is a gamble in the class war. On the one hand, even if some people wish to forget it, it is an organism built by men who are socially determined, whose activity takes place within classes and layers – the working class the peasantry, the radicalised petit bourgeoisie – which are themselves the constituent parts of a society in torment. It is inevitable that the hopes and the illusions, or their opposite, the deception and the discouragements come to be refracted in the ranks of the party. The marxist revolutionary party, of which the Bolshevik Party is the only successful one, is distinguished by its ability to resist these pressures, to weaken them and to neutralise them.
The POR as well as all the elements that Lora listed in La Revolución Boliviana [9], showed it had not reached such a level of development. It had tackled April 1952 when it was not only quite weak from a numerical point of view but above all not very politically homogenous. As a body it lacked the strength to resist the pressure of class enemy forces. The refraction of the illusions of the petty-bourgeois and even of the working class within its ranks, rapidly turned into a mass exodus of important militants who went over to the MNR and all too often occupied the highest positions in the apparatus of the COB and of the state. [10]
This was the first phase of the crisis of the POR. The second, which occurred eighteen months later, was in its essence different though superficially it had analogies with the first. As a direct consequence of Pablo’s victory over the Lambert-Bleibtreu tendency and the bureaucratic expulsion of the majority of the French section of the 4th International [11], this crisis was of a quite different order from the previous one. The departure of the ‘entrists’ was a serious blow to the Party and the attack of the directing centre of the 4th International, which had become liquidationist, all but completely destroyed it.
These attacks took place after the 10th Congress of the POR – whose resolutions are contained in this book – which marked a very serious attempt on the part of the Party leadership to rearm themselves after the last crisis and to give their members an analysis and activity which would help them to deal with the difficult situation. The resolutions of the 10th Congress included a precise analysis of the character of the Paz government and a balance sheet of its political record from April onwards. They included a long discussion on the meaning of the slogan for a workers’ and peasants’ government, which made a real effort to explain the very important indications given by Trotsky in the section of that name in the Transitional Programme. Then they linked up in paragraph five of the middle section on the central problem: how to position oneself in a period where simultaneously the masses were in retreat but the full experience of this government was yet to come.
The main thrust of the resolutions of the 1953 Congress can be summed up in the following way: Before winning power, the POR must win over the masses. It must succeed in educating them in the course of their daily struggles. The time to cry, ‘Down with the Government’ has not yet come, but rather the demand must be that the government must carry out the tasks of the revolution. It is only then that the masses will understand from their daily experience the need to replace the present government which is incapable of carrying out the tasks of the revolution with a workers’ and peasants’ government. Indeed the most combative and politicised sectors and the best elements of the Bolivian working class and peasantry have already turned towards the POR and see it as their leadership. But the majority of the workers are still grouped around the MNR. That is why the POR must carry on its strategy ‘To power through winning over the masses!’ [12]
It was this position to which Pablo was so bitterly opposed at the end of 1953. To understand both the factional game which occurred from that time on until the split of 1956 and the rôle played by the International Secretariat it is important to give this passage from an internal document, dated October 1954, where Lora made the point about the situation at a time when irreconcilable positions had hardened:
“The factional dispute started over the character of the Bolivian revolution, the development of mass consciousness and the attitude to take to the MNR, the only mass party in the country. On the basis of differences around these very important issues of revolutionary politics, two positions hardened about the way a party could be built. In the heat of a savage struggle it became clear that the so-called Internationalist Proletarian faction – who had adopted this title to underline their unconditional submission to the orders of the International Secretariat – had come to adopt a Stalinist conception of the party (it had supported a democratic centralism that had rather more centralism and rather less democracy so that the second element was completely subordinated to the first) and in the course of the factional dispute had recourse to bureaucratic methods. The Leninist Workers’ faction (they took the term Leninist to distinguish themselves from the Stalinist deviations of those who, to start with, were in the majority) defended Lenin’s concept of the party and became the standard bearer of the Trotskyist traditions of the POR. The political positions of the two factions could be summed up thus:
a) The Leninist Worker faction started to build around the defence of the political resolution approved by the 10th Congress which took place in La Paz in June 1953. After instructions from the Latin American Bureau of the International Secretariat this document began to be attacked. As is known the document of the 10th Congress states that the revolution was underdoing a temporary retreat whose consequences were the bureaucratisation of the trades union movement, the weakening of its fighting spirit, the organisational retreat of the party and the accentuation of the government’s lean to the right. The immediate task was not to take power but to win over the majority of the working class and peasantry to the POR positions. We said again and again that there was no other way to get a worker-peasant government.
b) The Internationalist Proletarian faction tried to undertake a revision of the political positions adopted by the 10th Congress, which it regarded as pessimistic and capitulationist. Its position was as follows: ‘It is wrong to talk of a retreat of the revolutionary movement; on the contrary the masses have kept their spirit and are marching rapidly towards power. As a result the demand for a workers’ and peasants’ government can be transformed into an agitational demand, for it can be achieved before too long.’ It added that the MNR was no longer the party of the masses because the latter were rapidly leaving this petty bourgeois leadership.
c) Party Building. The Leninist Workers’ faction thought that the strengthening of the party, as much organisationally as ideologically, was indispensable. The time was coming when the POR would be able to transform itself in the party of the masses which was indispensable if the exploited were to seize power. The key problem which they had, was to tear the masses from the control of the MNR. The response they had to this problem was the tactic of the Anti-Imperialist Front oriented to the Left of the MNR and other Trade Union sectors. They tried to use this approach in certain areas, for example Sucre. They took account of the variations which this Front could assume, first it could be formed as a result of a vigorous push from the MNR rank and file and second it could serve merely as a propaganda slogan which would accelerate the split of the MNR rank and file activists from their leadership.
On the other hand the Internationalist Proletarian faction felt that by virtue of the rapidity with which the masses were moving to power, it was impossible, (for reasons of time) to make the POR the party of the masses, and that the latter would achieve power, undoubtedly under the command of Lechín, without the need for its own vanguard. It did not deny the usefulness of the Anti-Imperialist Front tactic but only questioned its correct timing, and, since the left of the movement was not well organised, the party’s most important job would be to help it achieve its aim.
These differences over the problem of Bolivian policy were connected to the differences in the heart of the 4th International which led to one of the sharpest crises in its history. The split of the North American section from the International Secretariat led to the formation of two ‘4th Internationals’. The repercussions of these events became known to the activists, not directly, but through the clumsy and disastrous behaviour of the Pabloite body called the Latin-American Bureau. Faced with the crisis in the 4th International the Internationalist Proletarian faction had no other position but to follow the orders of the International Secretariat. Its votes and its decisions were adopted as instructions and not because they had any knowledge of the problems. Faced with Stalinist and Pabloite deviations, the Leninist faction put the necessity for preserving the unity of the International and its Bolshevik structure above every other consideration.” [13]
The line advocated by the Internationalist Proletarian faction consisted of a permanent and total capitulation to the Trade Union bureaucracy at every turn of the class struggle, recourse to the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ at a time when retreat of the masses turned this into a simple formula for a policy of unconditional support for Lechín, and eventually a very clear turn towards ‘entrism’.
This conformed in every respect to the orientation ‘to penetrate and to act in the real movement of the masses in as fully and deeply as possible ’ as defined by Pablo in the preparatory document for the Fourth World Congress [14] after the expulsion of the PCI and the creation of the International Committee. This line is one of capitulating to difficulties, including the building of parties and the International, and, to achieve these tasks, implies a search for substitutes whose the precise forms and nature evidently vary in the particular circumstances of different countries and time periods. The task of building organisations is reduced to playing the rôle of a pressure group at best and eventually the whole historical necessity for them is removed.
At the time of the Third World Congress in 1951 Lora was in prison [15] and was not able to help in the battle that the PCI had opened up against the propositions put forward by Pablo in Where Are We Going? It is more than likely that he heard only a faint distorted echo of this. In July 1952 at the end of the 8th Congress of the PCI, which saw the defeat of Pablo’s supporters, there was, by means of a bureaucratic diktat of the International Secretariat, the expulsion of the French section. The POR delegation at the 4th World Congress included a representative from each of the two tendencies of whom Lora was from the Leninist Worker faction. In the internal bulletin which he wrote after his return, Lora made clear that he had voted against the main document put forward by Pablo and that he had defended these positions during the meetings of the Latin-American Commission which met after the Congress. [16]
In this article Lora went further than before in his characterisation of the positions of Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso. He wrote:
“The position of the liquidators was that, without the leadership of the POR, the masses would come to power through their own methods and guided by their present organisations, that is to say through the Left of the MNR. The strategic consequence was defined in that the leading rôle of the POR was not to be asserted until after the seizure of power by the masses. To the extent that it is held that the victory of the masses is possible without the leadership of their vanguard, the revision of Marxism is total. The main aim is defined as helping the building of Lechínism since it is stated categorically that the workers’ and peasants’ government will be a government of the MNR Left stiffened by the POR militants. Implicitly the necessity for the POR is denied and its tasks are attributed to a sector of the MNR.” [17]
The extreme gravity with which this crisis of the 4th International was attended arose from the fact that positions such as these were developed at the very top of the International. The thesis of Gonzalez was in perfect accord with the preparatory documents of the 4th Congress. They only had a particular application in Bolivian conditions. By definition they benefited from the total support of Pablo and his lieutenants in the International Secretariat, Frank, Mandel and the others.
It was this that gave them their absolutely devastating character. Even where, as in Bolivia, a faction with the necessary strength to fight them was developed, the difficulties of this fight were multiplied tenfold by the fact that it was against the leadership of the International itself – fortified with all its prestige – that this faction had to measure itself.
Lora’s deep hatred of Pablo and his lieutenants, and also his distrust for the whole international organisation, comes out clearly in this reading from La Revolución Boliviana:
“We understand that the POR could only struggle and overcome its whole heritage of past errors through a broad internal discussion. The assimilation of international experience can be done in no other way. Pabloism and the Latin-American Bureau enjoined us to follow a very particular form of party organisation. According to them we would have the duty of limiting ourselves to servilely obeying the orders of the International Secretariat and Michael Pablo and to vowing fealty to Michael Pablo, who had been declared the official heir of Trotsky’s ability. We have never abandoned a critical attitude towards the marxist classics and Trotsky – we would find it difficult to worship a puppet. According to the curious theory of the bureaucrats of the Latin American Bureau – incompetent bureaucrats into the bargain – the only job of the POR was to circulate documents written in Buenos Aires and, so that we could do such an ‘important’ job properly, we were told not to form factions or tendencies. Thus the ‘Heirs’ of Trotsky showed how they had adopted the worst vices of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a normal way of working.”
Pabloism – the tendency which had revised Trotskyism in the most serious way – believed that its illegitimate interests would only be satisfied when it had succeeded in smashing the Revolutionary Workers Party. This disastrous enterprise was so conscientiously carried out that the party almost disappeared. The bureaucracy which obeyed the International Executive Committee of the 4th International, used every means, from illegal expulsions to the bribing of oppositionists (reminiscent of Stalinist methods), to divide the party and to make sure of a section that was totally submissive to its decisions.
In 1956, after a battle that left the Party drained of life, the two factions finally split. On the 3rd May 1956 at the Congress of Oruro, with a tiny band of militants grouped round the paper Masas, Lora undertook to rebuild the party, all the while under heavy fire from the MNR which thought that it had finished with the POR.
Footnotes
1. Mine occupations and the debates on workers control in the mines are frequent according to the Pulacayo Theses which put forward these demands. G. Lora in La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit p.330, writes ‘The lack of a workers party was one of the reasons why the masses, who were formed and trained in the mine occupations, did not put this into practice (in 1952). If occupation had taken place the life of the MNR government would have been considerably shortened.’
[Note by JJP – An English translation of the Pulacayo Theses can be found in Permanent Revolution No.2, Summer 1984 (Published by Workers Power)]
2. It was a militant of the POR, Alandia Pantoja, who had actually started the organisation of the COB, and this had put such pressure on Lechín that he had called the first mass meeting. For this he was praised in the first issue of Rebelión, the paper of the COB. Equally it was for that he had a seat in the Popular Assembly in 1971 and, in as much as he represented the COB, he had the heavy responsibility of organising the armed militias on behalf of the COB and the Popular Assembly.
3. cf. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, University of Pittsburg, 1970, op. cit., pp.224-5 quoting the first numbers of Rebelión.
4. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.263.
5. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviano, op. cit., p.267.
6. G. Lora La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.262.
7. On p.13 G. Lora explains how the two leaders of the PCB, Ireneo Pimental and Fedérico Escobar Zapata, apart from the money that they got from COMIBOL, allowed themselves to handle money belonging to the Siglo XX Trade Union. This came out as a result of a Trade Union enquiry.
8. J.-M. Malloy, op.cit., Chapter 10, as well as P. Scali, La Révolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, in La Verité, 22 April 1954 p.28 and seq. can be consulted on this.
9. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, Chapter 9, The Building of the Revolutionary Party on all these issues.
10. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op.cit., p.330 explains that ‘entrism’ started from 1952 giving rise to a new crisis in the Party and not only in 1954. Lora writes ‘A group of Trotskyist militants, some of them being very able and having great influence in the Unions, went into the MNR under the pretext of carrying out revolutionary work inside the mass party’.
11. On the crisis of 1951-52 and the expulsion of the Parti Communist Internationaliste (PCI), cf. J-J.Marie, Le Trotskysme, Paris, Editions Flammarion, in the ‘Questions d’histoire’ series, pp.78 et seq., as well as Quelques enseignnements de notre histoire, p.75 et seq.
12. Pierre Scali, op. cit., p.36.
13. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.16-17.
14. Notre intégration dans la réel movement des masses: notre expérience et ses perspectives, Quatriéme Internationale, January-February 1954, no.1-2.
15. ‘The Third Congress took place under the honourary presidency of the revolutionary militants who were victims of imperialist or Stalinist repression: the Bolivian, Vietnamese and Greek comrades, in particular the imprisoned comrade Guillermo Lora’, Quatriéme Internationale, vol.9 No.8-10, August-October 1951, p.1.
16. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.17-18.
17. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, p.18. We are rightly astonished to learn when reading a recent pamphlet of the Ligue Communiste, La Revolution Permanente en Amerique Latine, p.42 that the POR was straightened out in 1954-55 by Gonzalez Moscoso in relation to its ‘opportunist deviations’ at the 10th Congress.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The following passage is taken from the introduction (pp.LX-LXXV) by F. and C. Chesnais to the French edition of G. Lora’s Bolivie: de la Naissance du Parti Ouvrier Revolutionnaire ál’Assemblée Populaire. It has been translated by Ted Crawford, and was prepared for Revolutionary History Vol.4, No.3 – Bolivia: The Revolution Derailed?. It was not included there because of pressure on the available space. That volume did however include a review by Jean Lieven of Lora’s book, which takes issue with positions put forward here by Chesnais (and by Lora).
The notes, which ran from 52-67 in the original, have been renumbered.
We have tried to check all spellings of proper nouns in this article as carefully as possible, but as with all the material we post which contains non-English words, we will be grateful if you point out to us any corrections that are needed.
Bolivia: The birth of the POR-9th April 1952: A situation of Dual Power.
On the morning of the 9th April armed bands from the MNR, together with a section of the police, started an insurrection in La Paz. At the start it seemed to be a conspiracy that involved few people. As in many previous coups, in spite of the initial successes of the rebels the army had the situation pretty well in hand. At the end of the day the rising seemed almost smashed.
But next day the movement took on proportions which went far beyond the MNR. Throughout the country there were very serious clashes between the army and the masses: at Cochabamba, at Oruro, at Potosi and elsewhere, the workers armed themselves and marched on La Paz. The ‘fabriles’ (workshop workers) from the Viacha industrial zone swept towards the capital, and the miners from Milluni occupied the railway station at La Paz and seized a train carrying munitions, all of which shifted the situation in favour of the insurrection. In addition armed miners from the Catavi region surrounded the town of Oruro, thus removing any possibility of the government sending reinforcements to the capital.
On the 11th April the Ballivián military junta fell. The MNR took power. Armed bodies of workers converged on La Paz.
After the fall of the junta the army evaporated in a few days. Armed groups of civilians took over the barracks and the police stations and occupied local government buildings. In the mining districts and towns the movements became organised and rapidly created workers militias. Five days after the end of the fighting in La Paz a network of workers’ militias covered the country.
The Trade Unions played an essential rôle in the organisation of the movement during the first few days. They were the ones who organised the militias, they were the ones who filled the vacuum left by the disappearance of the authorities and they took on administrative and judicial rôles. It must be said that in the mines things went more slowly than in the towns. For example the mining unions did not occupy the mines and did not immediately impose workers control of the mines [1] through mass meetings of the workforce. This delay was to prove useful to the government. The power of the Trade Unions was to be decisive in the country with the creation, eleven days after the insurrection, at the initiative of Alandia Pantoja [2] of the Central Obrera Boliviano (COB) which grouped together the various unions, corporations and workers’ parties. Born as the expression of the mass movement which had struck an sudden blow at the bourgeois state, the COB appeared to be an organisation with immense power, capable of giving a national lead to the masses in the fight for the fulfilment of their hopes. Its birth in a situation of revolutionary upheaval, from the beginning gave it a true soviet character. Thus some of the characteristics of a dual power situation existed in April 1952, a paradoxical situation reminiscent of February 1917. In fact a revolutionary movement of the masses put a government in power which claimed that from its coming to power it drew its only legitimacy from the 1951 elections which had been annulled by the ‘mamertazo’ and Ballivián’s coup d’état. At the same time the workers regarded this government as quite different from any other. On his return from exile on the 17th April Paz Estenssoro was greeted by an enormous crowd to shouts of ‘Long Live the MNR!’, ‘Long Live Victor Paz!’, ‘Nationalisation!’ and ‘Land Reform!’. In welcoming Paz the workers were acclaiming someone, who in their opinion, was going to give a mortal blow to landowners, capitalists and imperialism. But the MNR had not the slightest intention of attacking private property because that would call in question the interests of the class that it represented and thus, at the same time, its own power. The mobilisation of the masses and their organisations to demand both nationalisation without compensation under workers’ control and land reform, carried within it the struggle for the working class’s own power. Correctly, all the COB’s proclamations which the activists of the POR had been able to initiate in this period, were focused on the need to establish a real workers’ and peasants’ government. [3] In addition the MNR had to find a way to defuse the revolutionary push of the masses without delay. It was around the COB that the issue of the revolution would be decided.
The raising of the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’
The Trade Union organisations and the COB were thought by the workers to be their exclusive leadership. Its very existence made the COB an organ of workers’ power – whether its leaders knew it or not – and posed all the elements of a situation of dual power In fact the COB very quickly became a very important stake in the class struggle. For, during this period, it was the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ that encapsulated the deep convulsion and permanent mass mobilisation that made the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government real.
The MNR government was aware that therein lay the real danger to itself. So it asked the COB to nominate three of its members to the Cabinet. The three ‘worker Ministers’ were J. Lechín, Minister of Mines & Petroleum, German Butrón, Minister of Labour and Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs. It was by means of this expedient, which provided a way to the integrate the top echelons of the COB into both the state and the MNR’s apparatus, that Paz Estenssoro opened his counter-attack to aid the defence of the threatened bourgeois order.
In the person of J. Lechín, the COB General Secretary, the MNR had a choice instrument to carry out its policy of controlling the workers movement. He was known to exhibit a reputation for independence as far as his own party was concerned (cf. the ‘Bloque Minero’ in 1947). He represented the ‘Left’ of the party and had been the target of violent attacks by its right wing. Thus the masses pinned their hopes on him transmitting their policies into the government. It was Lechín who was given the job of sowing illusions among the workers that their organisation ran Paz Estenssoro’s government through this expedient of ‘co-government’.
Thus Lechín was the indispensable screen between the masses and their own power, the road to which had been opened by the existence of the COB and by the mobilisation of the masses themselves for their own aims.
Guillermo Lora discussing how the ‘Co-government’ had been imposed, explained it thus:–
“The creation of the theory of ‘Co-government’ was nothing else but the Bolivian version of collusion between the upper reaches of the trade union leadership and a petit bourgeois government. In spite of a strong group of PORists this aim was achieved because the MNR captured the predominant mood among the majority of the middle classes and the workers which was one of enthusiastic support for the government of Paz Estenssoro. In the first stage of the revolution this feeling tended to grow (a phenomenon which explains the strengthening of the MNR ‘Centre’ in relation to its left wing) above all because of the errors committed by the leadership of the POR, a large part of whom were entrists and Pabloists, and who refused to point out the limitations of the MNR and encouraged the growth of popular illusions in the revolutionary potential of Lechínism.” [4]
In fact this is to connect the crisis in the POR, which is analysed later on, with the COB which, from April onwards, could be seen to be muzzled by ‘Co-Government’ without the vanguard waging the slightest struggle to expose this governmental manoeuvre, but, on the contrary, by putting forward the call ‘Complete Control of the Cabinet by the Left’, it nourished illusions.
Guillermo Lora goes on:–
“This slogan could, strictly speaking, be justified as a pedagogic measure meant to show the masses, who were blinded by their love of the MNR, that the MNR Left was quite incapable of taking power against imperialism. However in reality this call revealed an enormous error of principle which was to believe that the working class could take power through Lechínism. It would have been more correct to direct the mobilisation of the masses through the slogan ‘All Power to the COB!’” [5]
It is not only that it would have been ‘more correct’ to direct the mobilisation of the masses through this slogan. The slogan ‘All power to the COB’ was the only one that would allow the Lechínist leadership to be exposed whilst keeping a united front against the bourgeoisie at the same time. Only in this way could the COB assume the full character of a soviet linked to the living mobilisation of the working class involving the broadest working class democracy. It was this slogan that could unite and mobilise the masses through directly elected representatives from the rank and file and the old Trade Union leadership. And it was only thus, as G. Lora shows, that the isolation could be overcome:
“Perhaps one of the worst mistakes in the organisation of the COB was that it was created from the top by the trade union leaderships who were rapidly subjected to the petit-bourgeois government and that this orientation formed its middle layer cadre politically. The masses were mobilised around the slogan of powerful centralised Trade Union but this mobilisation did not find a proper organisational expression. It would have correct to start the other way round – that is to say from the bottom to the top. The workers joined the COB through the intermediary of their trade union leaderships, which, apart from their differing politics, had very different organisational forms. The founders of the COB made their appeal to the old leaders and not the shop-stewards elected by the membership. This organisational failure brought with it elements of weakness which made its bureaucratisation easy helping to isolate it from the masses and putting it under the artificial control of the government.” [6]
In reality it was not just a simple organisational problem but a highly political one. The COB, composed as it was of leaderships which were acknowledged by the masses, gave a huge boost to the movement because it enabled it to become centralised. But at the same time this centralisation became a trap if the actual slogan that was put forward did not enable the workers to make the seizure of power a COB demand. The struggle for workers’ democracy was inseparable from the struggle which had to be waged around the slogan ‘All Power to the COB.’ In a period of revolutionary convulsion workers democracy could not feel that it was outside the political struggle to accentuate the soviet type characteristics of the Trade Union Congress. It was here and nowhere else that the lack of experience and lack of homogeneity of the COB could be measured.
For want of this the workers were left completely defenceless in the presence of their treacherous leaderships and a gap opened up between the mobilisation of the masses and the body that could centralise their struggles because that body was tied to the government, so that it became an instrument directed against the masses. The Trade Union militants of the COB organised great demonstrations demanding nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control but had to explain that there was really no need to occupy the mines properly and have mass meetings which could impose workers’ control, since, given their weight in the government, they could be confident that the COB would achieve these demands.
This left the way open for the COB to be transformed into a bureaucratic body, closely controlled by the government, in which the militants of the MNR, PIR and the newly created PCB (Bolivian Communist Party) gave themselves a slice from the juicier parts and, little by little, pushed out the POR militants who refused to unite with this bureaucracy.
On the basis of this first retreat of the masses, whose complicated mechanism we have examined, the government was able to impose a solution to the problem of nationalisation, that is to say a solution that harmed the interests of imperialism and private property as little as possible.
The Bourgeois Nationalisation of the Mines
On the 13th May 1952 the government announced the creation of a committee to carry out a four month enquiry into the problems of mine nationalisation. This was, very simply, a way of saying what guarantees would be offered to imperialism and was a severe blow to the working class movement. The announcement even seemed a kind of provocation. Had not Lechín called for immediate nationalisation in the COB’s paper?
Greeted by the MNR as the ‘day of economic emancipation’, the nationalisation of the big mining companies with moderate compensation was decreed on the 31st October 1952. Under these circumstances, the nationalisation carried out by the MNR appeared to the large tin concerns as an unexpected escape. At the end of 1952 it was no mystery to anybody that the three large companies, looking simply at their tin mine investments, were on the edge of bankruptcy. The ownership of the nationalised mines on the other hand, was handed over to a mixed company – COMIBOL – whose capital was part state owned and part private, and to which American capital was immediately subscribed so that American interests even profited from the event by increasing their share in comparison with what had been the case with the ‘Three Great’ companies. The capitalist management was not disturbed. A simple reorganisation inside COMIBOL would be enough for a total return to finance capital.
Anyway, from now on Trade Union corruption on the one hand, and the exploitation of the workers on the other, bound together those in charge of production through the creation of a so-called system of ‘workers control’ under trade union management.
A word must said about this institution for it is this that best expressed the way in which the government, seizing on a demand of the workers, cleverly turned it against them. In the nationalisation decree it clearly says that the administration of the nationalised mines, that is to say COMIBOL, is based on individual workers’ control which occurs through their membership of the COB, which in turn selects some of its members to manage the mines. Here was created a whole layer of worker managers who were easily corrupted by the government since the salaries given to the worker managers were astronomical, about 100,000 Bolivian pesos a year when an unskilled worker got 4,000!
As was emphasised by G. Lora in his pamphlet El stalinismo en los sindicatos [7] COMIBOL acted as a ‘bank account for trade union bureaucrats’ which enabled the government to increase the COB’s bureaucratisation.
By the nationalisation of Oct 1952 the working class had been dispossessed of what it had struggled for in April 1952. From this moment on a very sharp retreat of the working class could be observed.
However, the bureaucratisation of the COB, even if it was a factor in the retreat of the masses, could not in any sense be the whole story. In fact the control of the masses by the government, which operated through the bureaucracy, was extremely fragile. This was demonstrated in January 1953 by the way that, once more, the masses mobilised behind the COB against an attempt at a coup d’état by the right wing of the MNR. This started a phase where the government had to move its politics to the left and where the rediscovered power of the COB gave meaning to the slogan, ‘All Power to the COB!’ for several days.
Once more the incompetence of the POR, which arose from its lack of experience and from the pressures within its ranks calling for this slogan, resulted in a weakening of the push leftwards by the urban masses at the moment when an explosive situation was developing in the countryside.
The Revolutionary Movement in the Countryside
It was only at this moment, when the workers’ movement started to enter its phase of retreat, that the peasantry, which had slowly started to organise during the year of 1952, actively intervened. In the course of the last few months of 1952 and the first few of 1952 the peasant movement developed and took on extraordinary strength.
As we have seen the Bolivian peasantry had a long tradition of struggle. Peasant wars had played an important rôle in Bolivian social history. In addition it was worked on, above all in some regions, in particular the region of Cochabamba and Potosi, by the political currents which came from the working class. So it was that the miners, who had fled the ‘white’ massacre in Potosi, settled in these regions and a good number being supporters of the POR or MNR, played an important rôle in radicalising the peasantry.
On the other hand from 1945 onwards that peasantry had started to organise with the setting up, under the auspices of the MNR, of the ‘Federacion de Campesinos’. It was in 1952 however that the organised movement took on any sort of size when Nuflo Chavez Ortiz, Minister of Peasant Affairs in the MNR government, adorned with the prestige of a leader of the COB, took part himself in a massive campaign for the creation of peasant unions. Naturally the aim of this operation was to control the peasantry through the COB, for the MNR who had written land reform into their programme, with some reason feared that, in the name of land reform, the peasantry would go beyond the limits of private property. [8]
Now to the extent that the unions developed, the peasants started to put into practice what they thought was the dominant content of the reform. They surrounded the haciendas and forced the owners to flee and even did the same with the local authorities who were the object of the same hatred as the owners. It was then that the peasant unions came to control the entire life of the countryside, above all in the case of Ucurena, in the Cochabamba valley, where the union took charge of distribution, administration and, through its use of the militia, policing. For a period, Lora thought that the peasant unions had clearly reached even more of a soviet stage than the workers’ unions.
It was at this point that a civil war of extreme violence developed in the countryside. The landowners organised to resist the occupation of their lands; in the small towns the townspeople, together with the MNR, organised military expeditions against the surrounding peasantry. The government sent the police against the peasants. In the opposite camp the POR, whose influence in the countryside has been mentioned, developed an agitation around calls for the creation of a single Peasant Federation, an alliance with the working class and the holding of a peasant conference while the peasants were mobilised to form a front against the intrigues of the landowners.
Under the pressure of events, the government, on the 20th January 1953, set up a commission of enquiry into agrarian reform and on the 2nd August 1953 Paz Estenssoro went to Ucurena to announce the reform and to sign the decree in front of an immense crowd of peasants.
The repression by the police, the MNR militias and the landowners’ armed bands went on throughout the year. The Commission of Enquiry, headed by a well-known member of the PIR, Arturo Urquidi Morales, sought to limit to the utmost the extent of the transformation of the countryside and to channel it into the consolidation of bourgeois order and of the MNR regime itself.
This aim was achieved as land reform led to widespread tiny plots of land, defusing the appeal of the call of land to the peasants and creating, it is true within narrow limits, an internal market for local manufacturing production.
Semi-serfdom (the pongueaje) was abolished for ever, the peasants became free men and the power of the great landowners was broken and never rebuilt, even under Barrientos. All that was grasped by the peasantry, in a few areas, was the direct purchase of the land – a formula which, to the peasants, appeared to have the advantage of more firmly guaranteeing the ownership of the land than the land reform decree, whose application was extremely slow and chaotic and which, in the years after 1953, kept a climate of uncertainty in existence in the countryside.
These gains, in particular the abolition of semi-serfdom, were not negligible. But they were little in comparison with the size and violence of the peasant and the explosive revolutionary potential which would have been possible if the alliance had been made with the working class. For want of the working class which could, through its revolutionary party, go onwards at the head of the peasant masses and focus this force to establish a workers’ and peasants’ government, the great upheavals of 1953, important as they were, did not deliver the Bolivian countryside from its misery.
For that, the triumph of the working class was needed and that, in its turn, meant that the revolutionary party would know what it was about and play its full part.
The Two Successive Crises of the POR
It was inevitable that the first phase of the radicalisation of the masses occurred in conditions which meant the temporary control of the movement by the MNR and the Lechí nist Trade Union bureaucracy. This is one of the laws of the revolutionary process: generally after the first phase it by-passes the party or the revolutionary nucleus.
Already it was almost inevitable, if entirely understandable, that the POR, the first Trotskyist Party (with the sole exception perhaps of the Indo-Chinese Party immediately before the Second World War) should have to face a situation that called for the formulation of totally practical demands which reflected the level of the working classes struggle for power, and should have let slip its first opportunity to put forward the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’.
The essential thing was that the party succeeded, on the basis of understanding what was going on, in keeping in good order; that it resisted the pressure of alien forces in its ranks and, in good order, grappled with the second phase of the revolutionary process which would start when the masses in movement broke with the parties to which they had at first given their confidence.
But the revolutionary party is a gamble in the class war. On the one hand, even if some people wish to forget it, it is an organism built by men who are socially determined, whose activity takes place within classes and layers – the working class the peasantry, the radicalised petit bourgeoisie – which are themselves the constituent parts of a society in torment. It is inevitable that the hopes and the illusions, or their opposite, the deception and the discouragements come to be refracted in the ranks of the party. The marxist revolutionary party, of which the Bolshevik Party is the only successful one, is distinguished by its ability to resist these pressures, to weaken them and to neutralise them.
The POR as well as all the elements that Lora listed in La Revolución Boliviana [9], showed it had not reached such a level of development. It had tackled April 1952 when it was not only quite weak from a numerical point of view but above all not very politically homogenous. As a body it lacked the strength to resist the pressure of class enemy forces. The refraction of the illusions of the petty-bourgeois and even of the working class within its ranks, rapidly turned into a mass exodus of important militants who went over to the MNR and all too often occupied the highest positions in the apparatus of the COB and of the state. [10]
This was the first phase of the crisis of the POR. The second, which occurred eighteen months later, was in its essence different though superficially it had analogies with the first. As a direct consequence of Pablo’s victory over the Lambert-Bleibtreu tendency and the bureaucratic expulsion of the majority of the French section of the 4th International [11], this crisis was of a quite different order from the previous one. The departure of the ‘entrists’ was a serious blow to the Party and the attack of the directing centre of the 4th International, which had become liquidationist, all but completely destroyed it.
These attacks took place after the 10th Congress of the POR – whose resolutions are contained in this book – which marked a very serious attempt on the part of the Party leadership to rearm themselves after the last crisis and to give their members an analysis and activity which would help them to deal with the difficult situation. The resolutions of the 10th Congress included a precise analysis of the character of the Paz government and a balance sheet of its political record from April onwards. They included a long discussion on the meaning of the slogan for a workers’ and peasants’ government, which made a real effort to explain the very important indications given by Trotsky in the section of that name in the Transitional Programme. Then they linked up in paragraph five of the middle section on the central problem: how to position oneself in a period where simultaneously the masses were in retreat but the full experience of this government was yet to come.
The main thrust of the resolutions of the 1953 Congress can be summed up in the following way: Before winning power, the POR must win over the masses. It must succeed in educating them in the course of their daily struggles. The time to cry, ‘Down with the Government’ has not yet come, but rather the demand must be that the government must carry out the tasks of the revolution. It is only then that the masses will understand from their daily experience the need to replace the present government which is incapable of carrying out the tasks of the revolution with a workers’ and peasants’ government. Indeed the most combative and politicised sectors and the best elements of the Bolivian working class and peasantry have already turned towards the POR and see it as their leadership. But the majority of the workers are still grouped around the MNR. That is why the POR must carry on its strategy ‘To power through winning over the masses!’ [12]
It was this position to which Pablo was so bitterly opposed at the end of 1953. To understand both the factional game which occurred from that time on until the split of 1956 and the rôle played by the International Secretariat it is important to give this passage from an internal document, dated October 1954, where Lora made the point about the situation at a time when irreconcilable positions had hardened:
“The factional dispute started over the character of the Bolivian revolution, the development of mass consciousness and the attitude to take to the MNR, the only mass party in the country. On the basis of differences around these very important issues of revolutionary politics, two positions hardened about the way a party could be built. In the heat of a savage struggle it became clear that the so-called Internationalist Proletarian faction – who had adopted this title to underline their unconditional submission to the orders of the International Secretariat – had come to adopt a Stalinist conception of the party (it had supported a democratic centralism that had rather more centralism and rather less democracy so that the second element was completely subordinated to the first) and in the course of the factional dispute had recourse to bureaucratic methods. The Leninist Workers’ faction (they took the term Leninist to distinguish themselves from the Stalinist deviations of those who, to start with, were in the majority) defended Lenin’s concept of the party and became the standard bearer of the Trotskyist traditions of the POR. The political positions of the two factions could be summed up thus:
a) The Leninist Worker faction started to build around the defence of the political resolution approved by the 10th Congress which took place in La Paz in June 1953. After instructions from the Latin American Bureau of the International Secretariat this document began to be attacked. As is known the document of the 10th Congress states that the revolution was underdoing a temporary retreat whose consequences were the bureaucratisation of the trades union movement, the weakening of its fighting spirit, the organisational retreat of the party and the accentuation of the government’s lean to the right. The immediate task was not to take power but to win over the majority of the working class and peasantry to the POR positions. We said again and again that there was no other way to get a worker-peasant government.
b) The Internationalist Proletarian faction tried to undertake a revision of the political positions adopted by the 10th Congress, which it regarded as pessimistic and capitulationist. Its position was as follows: ‘It is wrong to talk of a retreat of the revolutionary movement; on the contrary the masses have kept their spirit and are marching rapidly towards power. As a result the demand for a workers’ and peasants’ government can be transformed into an agitational demand, for it can be achieved before too long.’ It added that the MNR was no longer the party of the masses because the latter were rapidly leaving this petty bourgeois leadership.
c) Party Building. The Leninist Workers’ faction thought that the strengthening of the party, as much organisationally as ideologically, was indispensable. The time was coming when the POR would be able to transform itself in the party of the masses which was indispensable if the exploited were to seize power. The key problem which they had, was to tear the masses from the control of the MNR. The response they had to this problem was the tactic of the Anti-Imperialist Front oriented to the Left of the MNR and other Trade Union sectors. They tried to use this approach in certain areas, for example Sucre. They took account of the variations which this Front could assume, first it could be formed as a result of a vigorous push from the MNR rank and file and second it could serve merely as a propaganda slogan which would accelerate the split of the MNR rank and file activists from their leadership.
On the other hand the Internationalist Proletarian faction felt that by virtue of the rapidity with which the masses were moving to power, it was impossible, (for reasons of time) to make the POR the party of the masses, and that the latter would achieve power, undoubtedly under the command of Lechín, without the need for its own vanguard. It did not deny the usefulness of the Anti-Imperialist Front tactic but only questioned its correct timing, and, since the left of the movement was not well organised, the party’s most important job would be to help it achieve its aim.
These differences over the problem of Bolivian policy were connected to the differences in the heart of the 4th International which led to one of the sharpest crises in its history. The split of the North American section from the International Secretariat led to the formation of two ‘4th Internationals’. The repercussions of these events became known to the activists, not directly, but through the clumsy and disastrous behaviour of the Pabloite body called the Latin-American Bureau. Faced with the crisis in the 4th International the Internationalist Proletarian faction had no other position but to follow the orders of the International Secretariat. Its votes and its decisions were adopted as instructions and not because they had any knowledge of the problems. Faced with Stalinist and Pabloite deviations, the Leninist faction put the necessity for preserving the unity of the International and its Bolshevik structure above every other consideration.” [13]
The line advocated by the Internationalist Proletarian faction consisted of a permanent and total capitulation to the Trade Union bureaucracy at every turn of the class struggle, recourse to the slogan ‘All Power to the COB’ at a time when retreat of the masses turned this into a simple formula for a policy of unconditional support for Lechín, and eventually a very clear turn towards ‘entrism’.
This conformed in every respect to the orientation ‘to penetrate and to act in the real movement of the masses in as fully and deeply as possible ’ as defined by Pablo in the preparatory document for the Fourth World Congress [14] after the expulsion of the PCI and the creation of the International Committee. This line is one of capitulating to difficulties, including the building of parties and the International, and, to achieve these tasks, implies a search for substitutes whose the precise forms and nature evidently vary in the particular circumstances of different countries and time periods. The task of building organisations is reduced to playing the rôle of a pressure group at best and eventually the whole historical necessity for them is removed.
At the time of the Third World Congress in 1951 Lora was in prison [15] and was not able to help in the battle that the PCI had opened up against the propositions put forward by Pablo in Where Are We Going? It is more than likely that he heard only a faint distorted echo of this. In July 1952 at the end of the 8th Congress of the PCI, which saw the defeat of Pablo’s supporters, there was, by means of a bureaucratic diktat of the International Secretariat, the expulsion of the French section. The POR delegation at the 4th World Congress included a representative from each of the two tendencies of whom Lora was from the Leninist Worker faction. In the internal bulletin which he wrote after his return, Lora made clear that he had voted against the main document put forward by Pablo and that he had defended these positions during the meetings of the Latin-American Commission which met after the Congress. [16]
In this article Lora went further than before in his characterisation of the positions of Hugo Gonzalez Moscoso. He wrote:
“The position of the liquidators was that, without the leadership of the POR, the masses would come to power through their own methods and guided by their present organisations, that is to say through the Left of the MNR. The strategic consequence was defined in that the leading rôle of the POR was not to be asserted until after the seizure of power by the masses. To the extent that it is held that the victory of the masses is possible without the leadership of their vanguard, the revision of Marxism is total. The main aim is defined as helping the building of Lechínism since it is stated categorically that the workers’ and peasants’ government will be a government of the MNR Left stiffened by the POR militants. Implicitly the necessity for the POR is denied and its tasks are attributed to a sector of the MNR.” [17]
The extreme gravity with which this crisis of the 4th International was attended arose from the fact that positions such as these were developed at the very top of the International. The thesis of Gonzalez was in perfect accord with the preparatory documents of the 4th Congress. They only had a particular application in Bolivian conditions. By definition they benefited from the total support of Pablo and his lieutenants in the International Secretariat, Frank, Mandel and the others.
It was this that gave them their absolutely devastating character. Even where, as in Bolivia, a faction with the necessary strength to fight them was developed, the difficulties of this fight were multiplied tenfold by the fact that it was against the leadership of the International itself – fortified with all its prestige – that this faction had to measure itself.
Lora’s deep hatred of Pablo and his lieutenants, and also his distrust for the whole international organisation, comes out clearly in this reading from La Revolución Boliviana:
“We understand that the POR could only struggle and overcome its whole heritage of past errors through a broad internal discussion. The assimilation of international experience can be done in no other way. Pabloism and the Latin-American Bureau enjoined us to follow a very particular form of party organisation. According to them we would have the duty of limiting ourselves to servilely obeying the orders of the International Secretariat and Michael Pablo and to vowing fealty to Michael Pablo, who had been declared the official heir of Trotsky’s ability. We have never abandoned a critical attitude towards the marxist classics and Trotsky – we would find it difficult to worship a puppet. According to the curious theory of the bureaucrats of the Latin American Bureau – incompetent bureaucrats into the bargain – the only job of the POR was to circulate documents written in Buenos Aires and, so that we could do such an ‘important’ job properly, we were told not to form factions or tendencies. Thus the ‘Heirs’ of Trotsky showed how they had adopted the worst vices of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a normal way of working.”
Pabloism – the tendency which had revised Trotskyism in the most serious way – believed that its illegitimate interests would only be satisfied when it had succeeded in smashing the Revolutionary Workers Party. This disastrous enterprise was so conscientiously carried out that the party almost disappeared. The bureaucracy which obeyed the International Executive Committee of the 4th International, used every means, from illegal expulsions to the bribing of oppositionists (reminiscent of Stalinist methods), to divide the party and to make sure of a section that was totally submissive to its decisions.
In 1956, after a battle that left the Party drained of life, the two factions finally split. On the 3rd May 1956 at the Congress of Oruro, with a tiny band of militants grouped round the paper Masas, Lora undertook to rebuild the party, all the while under heavy fire from the MNR which thought that it had finished with the POR.
Footnotes
1. Mine occupations and the debates on workers control in the mines are frequent according to the Pulacayo Theses which put forward these demands. G. Lora in La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit p.330, writes ‘The lack of a workers party was one of the reasons why the masses, who were formed and trained in the mine occupations, did not put this into practice (in 1952). If occupation had taken place the life of the MNR government would have been considerably shortened.’
[Note by JJP – An English translation of the Pulacayo Theses can be found in Permanent Revolution No.2, Summer 1984 (Published by Workers Power)]
2. It was a militant of the POR, Alandia Pantoja, who had actually started the organisation of the COB, and this had put such pressure on Lechín that he had called the first mass meeting. For this he was praised in the first issue of Rebelión, the paper of the COB. Equally it was for that he had a seat in the Popular Assembly in 1971 and, in as much as he represented the COB, he had the heavy responsibility of organising the armed militias on behalf of the COB and the Popular Assembly.
3. cf. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, University of Pittsburg, 1970, op. cit., pp.224-5 quoting the first numbers of Rebelión.
4. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.263.
5. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviano, op. cit., p.267.
6. G. Lora La Revolución Boliviana, op. cit., p.262.
7. On p.13 G. Lora explains how the two leaders of the PCB, Ireneo Pimental and Fedérico Escobar Zapata, apart from the money that they got from COMIBOL, allowed themselves to handle money belonging to the Siglo XX Trade Union. This came out as a result of a Trade Union enquiry.
8. J.-M. Malloy, op.cit., Chapter 10, as well as P. Scali, La Révolution Bolivienne 1952-1954, in La Verité, 22 April 1954 p.28 and seq. can be consulted on this.
9. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, Chapter 9, The Building of the Revolutionary Party on all these issues.
10. G. Lora, La Revolución Boliviana, op.cit., p.330 explains that ‘entrism’ started from 1952 giving rise to a new crisis in the Party and not only in 1954. Lora writes ‘A group of Trotskyist militants, some of them being very able and having great influence in the Unions, went into the MNR under the pretext of carrying out revolutionary work inside the mass party’.
11. On the crisis of 1951-52 and the expulsion of the Parti Communist Internationaliste (PCI), cf. J-J.Marie, Le Trotskysme, Paris, Editions Flammarion, in the ‘Questions d’histoire’ series, pp.78 et seq., as well as Quelques enseignnements de notre histoire, p.75 et seq.
12. Pierre Scali, op. cit., p.36.
13. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.16-17.
14. Notre intégration dans la réel movement des masses: notre expérience et ses perspectives, Quatriéme Internationale, January-February 1954, no.1-2.
15. ‘The Third Congress took place under the honourary presidency of the revolutionary militants who were victims of imperialist or Stalinist repression: the Bolivian, Vietnamese and Greek comrades, in particular the imprisoned comrade Guillermo Lora’, Quatriéme Internationale, vol.9 No.8-10, August-October 1951, p.1.
16. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, pp.17-18.
17. G. Lora, En defensa del POR, p.18. We are rightly astonished to learn when reading a recent pamphlet of the Ligue Communiste, La Revolution Permanente en Amerique Latine, p.42 that the POR was straightened out in 1954-55 by Gonzalez Moscoso in relation to its ‘opportunist deviations’ at the 10th Congress.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-The Birth of Bolshevism in Greece-by Loukas Karliaftis
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following article was prepared for inclusion in the Revolutionary History special issue on Greece, Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991. Because of pressure on space we were not able to include all the documents that we would have liked in that issue. Several other interesting documents by Karliaftis were published, and interested readers are recommended to look there for biographical notes about him and other heroic figures in the Greek movement.
The articles in that issue, which is now out of print, is available on the web. In the longer term, we hope it will be possible to scan and web-publish other material which was given a very limited circulation in English by the Greek ‘Workers Vanguard’ group, of which Karliaftis was the long time leader.
It would be surprising if we were able to prepare this document without making errors in the spellings of proper names. We will be grateful if you point any out to us.
The Birth of Bolshevism in Greece-by Loukas Karliaftis
THE ROLE OF THE LEADERSHIP OF THE BALKAN FEDERATION IN GREECE
To understand the influence which the Balkan federation had on the Greek movement, we must learn about the different tendencies inside the Balkan federation.
The Bulgarian ‘Narrow’ marxists played a very important role in the Balkan Federation. They were the first to join the Bolsheviks. Without any doubt Dimitrov was a heroic militant as his struggle against Nazism and his testimony at the Leipzig trial proves. But it was Stalin’s politics that he put forward at Leipzig, policies which contributed to Hitler’s rise to power.
A lack of initiative did not help Dimitrov. The date of the split between the ‘Broads’ and the ‘Narrows’ was in 1903. Dimitrov was the leader of the Trade Union side of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He pushed the struggle between the ‘Narrows’ and the ‘Broads’ to the point of a Trade Union split. Already, outside the Second International and before its decline, Trotsky was sent in 1909 and Rakovsky in 1908 to resolve the Bulgarian question and to repair the strategy which the Dimitrov’s split had caused in the Trade Unions. What is more this strategy helped the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, Savazov and others, to divide the masses. At last in 1914 Dimitrov accepted Trade Union unity.
During the war of 1914, the Bulgarian leadership of the Balkan Federation, Dimitrov and Kolarov, cordially stood together with the other representatives. It seems that Dimitrov and Kolarov were not aware that Sideris was a representative of the Federation, that is to say a supporter of gradualist Socialism, in other words a ‘Broad’ like Rakazov.
During this period of unity there was an Anti-Militarist Manifesto of the Balkan Federation which had a rather superficial view of the situation and even a certain pacifism.
In 1918 the uprising at Klantomir and Kintala broke out and Dimitrov said later that both the Party and he himself made grave errors during the uprising, which was drowned in blood. This revolt was a spontaneous movement of soldiers, Dimitrov even said that they were not close enough to the Bolsheviks. This declaration necessitated his self-criticism.
At their conference in February 1922 the PSO continued its policy of betraying the masses. What is more this policy was not just because of Dimitrov and Kolarov but was also that of the Balkan Federation.
The Stalinists have said nothing about this betrayal. Benaroyas has revealed an extraordinary and important thing in telling us what the political prisoners in prison stressed on the subject of this betrayal. Benaroyas tells us that the Conference had thought that the social patriotic and opportunist policy was alright in the Greek situation, while the Bulgarian representatives declared that they wished to set an example to the other Balkan parties.
That was an inevitable proof of their incapacity, unlike Lenin and Trotsky with the Comintern, to perceive the revolutionary nature of the epoch.
After the Conference of October 1922 the representative of the Balkan Federation who had come to Greece with leanings towards the supporters of the 1922 February Conference of a common agreement between the extremist Papanastassis and the reformist Sideris, said that a Central Committee must be created including Sargologos and the partisans of the February 1922 Conference. During this period the Federation representative, with the complicity of Georgiadis and Sideris, had created another Central Committee but the Central Committee of Sargologos sabotaged this Committee.
The Bulgarian representative had dared to support Georgiadis, Sideris and Petsopoulas. Sargologos made friendly contacts with him of a kind that gave a false impression of his plans to the Bulgarian representative. The Bulgarian representative had also met Tzoulatis of whose role and prestige he was well aware. There was no possibility of doing anything without Tzoulatis. He tried to convince the latter to join them. But from the end of 1921 onwards Tzoulatis did not believe in a regroupment of the PSO. So he formed a new movement. Without doubt he counted on the support of Balkan Federation but even more he counted on that of the Communist International. The Balkan Federation representative ignored article 7 of the 21 Principles which demanded a break in relations with reformists and centre politicians. He made an agreement with Tzoulatis on the basis of Article 2 of the 21 Principles which demanded that two-thirds of the Central Committee could only consist of Socialists who had pronounced in favour of the Third International before the Congress.
Thus he aligned with the right wing of the February Conference.
Dimitrov had made other errors and had accused the tendency opposed to the Fascist coup d’‚tat of Tsagov of reformism. From that moment Dimitrov, on his own responsibility, adopted a policy by the Bulgarian Communist Party of neutrality between the governments of Stabolinsky and Tsagov. He did not take sufficient notice of the position taken by the Bolsheviks towards Kornilov. Tsagov started by murdering Stabolinsky. He then killed thousands of Communists, workers and intellectuals. He ruled for twenty years as a dictator.
The hatred of Fascism and the spontaneous rising of the masses against Tsagov brought about a change of heart in the Bulgarian Communist Party. They then formed a joint front with Agrarian Union of Stabolinsky, the Social-Democratic Party (the so-called Social Fascists of 1931) and even radical bourgeois.
These opportunist deviations of Kolarov and Dimitrov were unknown to Trotsky and Lenin. But they showed the reason for the conflicts going on between Trotsky and Rakovsky on the one hand and on the other Dimitrov and Kolarov. It was never possible to open a debate within the Third International on the problems of Greek and Bulgarian Communism.
GREEK CAPITALISM ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS
When Greek capitalism reeled in Asia Minor and rotted in Greece, the militarist adventure paralysed activity. A state of emergency was declared. Then in the summer of 1922 the Gounaris government imprisoned members of the Communist union of the P.S.O., the editor of Rizopastis and Rizos, with the accusation of high treason and sedition. At the same time Metaxas, for demagogic reasons, declared that the direct intervention in Asia Minor was done by mercenaries and that Kabanis, Kraniakis and Kotsies openly sabotaged it without anyone bothering them.
The prisons filled with members of the P.S.O until the organisation collapsed.
At this point the retreat started. The defeat was almost total. There was panic among Constantine’s supporters. Kordatos made public a decision of the military government of Athens that wanted to execute all the Communist prisoners believing that there would be a mass outcry to punish the Communist treason.
The blow failed. In fact Balidis, the prison governor, demanded a written order as a telephoned command was not enough.
The bourgeois class looked with favour on the defeat at the front and saw a Greek version of the Commune.
Then Metaxas was summoned to take power. It was he who was given the responsibility of involving the communists in the government.
Metaxas sent his aide Evelpidis to visit the prisons and then went there himself with two vacant ministerial posts to offer. One of these was the Ministry of the Interior for he said “The more you can pin the responsibility on Plastiras the more they will have to suffer the reprisals of the Venezelists.” It was certainly an odd proposition from someone who had previously hanged Communists for treason.
“General you do me too much honour” replied Kordatos. “I know that the present time is critical for our country but I believe that the role for us in the P.S.O.P. is not save the throne of the bourgeois state. We cannot take part in your government for our principles forbid it.” After that Metaxas formed a government on his own.
THE DEFEAT ON THE FRONT IN ASIA MINOR
The collapse of the front in Asia Minor in August 1922 marked the end of the Greco-Turkish war which the Venezelists had started and the royalists had continued. This defeat was the result of the profound weakness of Greek capitalism and the feelings of the soldiers against the massacre lasted for eight months.
In that year discipline in the army was destroyed. A whole unit mutinied rather than go to the front. The soldiers would no longer sacrifice themselves for Greek capitalism. The articles in Rizos, For Communism and Workers’ Fight were inspired by Lenin’s Socialists and the War which set the tinder alight. The exiles had difficulty in recovering from this defeat. But there were other disturbances in the very heart of society. At Radesto there were numerous disturbances. There were mass meetings of thousands of soldiers. In these mass meetings they spoke of peace and socialism. The state seemed to breaking up. At Adrianople a group of Communists, which included Vlachos, had organised an action committee. There were other such centres of organised nuclei in other places but their impact was not very great. In reality, since the PSO had been dissolved at Athens, the little groups could not co-ordinate their activities. Papadatos and Kianoulotos maintained that they had reunited the Committee but the Soviets did not get the same effects as in Russia.
Certain units of the army succeeded in both keeping their arms and escaping from the control of Plastiras. The Trotskyist Giannis with some other socialists says that they were able to get almost to Pireaeus before they were disarmed. The worker Kokkinogiannis almost got to Salonika. The defeat at the front could have transformed itself into a revolution but there was no party to give things direction and to focus the revolutionary tendencies of peasants, workers and soldiers.
THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM BETRAYED
When the decisions of the February Conference were known the word treason sprang to the lips of the rank and file. Everyone attacked the opportunist tendencies.
The rank and file were encouraged in their struggle by the German crisis of 1923. The British, Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian and Chinese revolutionary events encouraged them too. But they were also influenced by the (dis)association of the Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky.
The upheaval started with the Tzoulatis-Sarandidis group but the Papanastassakis tendency followed. In time the movement spread as far as Pireaus and Salonika reaching into the prisons and the soldiers at the front.
Benaroyas was sincere in his recognition of this movement of militants in spite of which he declared “Some agitated with ulterior motives, other through weakness, thought that the February Conference had betrayed the principles of the Party.” Saragogolos and Stavridis did agitate with ulterior motives and voted for the decisions of the February meeting.
Then Benaroyas tells us “Around Papanastassios a group of militants was built against the Conference decision. The prisoners were also against such Social-Democratic decisions. Petsopoulas and Kordatos also declared themselves opposed to these decisions. And the leadership of the Party became engaged in a great movement against these opportunist tendencies.” Then the Petsopoulas tendency cancelled the February conference decisions even though it was in favour of them. At the time the revisionism of the February conference had only partially marked certain events of the twenties, Petsopoulas and Kordatos were definitely influenced.
THE SPECIAL CONGRESS OF SEPTEMBER 1922
The October 1922 Conference was called to resolve the crisis of the P.S.O. but in fact it made it worse.
Athens was represented by Ikonmou, Papanikolaou, Maggo and Strago, and Pireaus by Agelis, Kourtidis and Aligizakis, while Saragogolos, Chatzistavros and Ventura came from Salonika. The Federation of Tobacco workers and Electrical workers union were present. Sideris and Georgiadis decided to break if they were not in the majority. But the right wing did not have the majority.
That, said the secretary Kordatos, is united on the only small possibility of organising. What is more that underlined the crisis among the parties and unions.
Then Sideris and Georgiades proposed the expulsion of Petsopoulos. After the treachery of the leading workers here and internationally, the Special Congress was torn to pieces by endless personal rivalries.
Members with ossified ideas were attacked as intellectuals. That only made the crisis worse. Thus the bourgeoisie could rule over a divided working class. Petsiopoulos was expelled by a committee made up of Saragogolos and Stavridis who by the end had shown themselves to be traitors to the working class.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following article was prepared for inclusion in the Revolutionary History special issue on Greece, Vol.3 No.3, Spring 1991. Because of pressure on space we were not able to include all the documents that we would have liked in that issue. Several other interesting documents by Karliaftis were published, and interested readers are recommended to look there for biographical notes about him and other heroic figures in the Greek movement.
The articles in that issue, which is now out of print, is available on the web. In the longer term, we hope it will be possible to scan and web-publish other material which was given a very limited circulation in English by the Greek ‘Workers Vanguard’ group, of which Karliaftis was the long time leader.
It would be surprising if we were able to prepare this document without making errors in the spellings of proper names. We will be grateful if you point any out to us.
The Birth of Bolshevism in Greece-by Loukas Karliaftis
THE ROLE OF THE LEADERSHIP OF THE BALKAN FEDERATION IN GREECE
To understand the influence which the Balkan federation had on the Greek movement, we must learn about the different tendencies inside the Balkan federation.
The Bulgarian ‘Narrow’ marxists played a very important role in the Balkan Federation. They were the first to join the Bolsheviks. Without any doubt Dimitrov was a heroic militant as his struggle against Nazism and his testimony at the Leipzig trial proves. But it was Stalin’s politics that he put forward at Leipzig, policies which contributed to Hitler’s rise to power.
A lack of initiative did not help Dimitrov. The date of the split between the ‘Broads’ and the ‘Narrows’ was in 1903. Dimitrov was the leader of the Trade Union side of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He pushed the struggle between the ‘Narrows’ and the ‘Broads’ to the point of a Trade Union split. Already, outside the Second International and before its decline, Trotsky was sent in 1909 and Rakovsky in 1908 to resolve the Bulgarian question and to repair the strategy which the Dimitrov’s split had caused in the Trade Unions. What is more this strategy helped the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, Savazov and others, to divide the masses. At last in 1914 Dimitrov accepted Trade Union unity.
During the war of 1914, the Bulgarian leadership of the Balkan Federation, Dimitrov and Kolarov, cordially stood together with the other representatives. It seems that Dimitrov and Kolarov were not aware that Sideris was a representative of the Federation, that is to say a supporter of gradualist Socialism, in other words a ‘Broad’ like Rakazov.
During this period of unity there was an Anti-Militarist Manifesto of the Balkan Federation which had a rather superficial view of the situation and even a certain pacifism.
In 1918 the uprising at Klantomir and Kintala broke out and Dimitrov said later that both the Party and he himself made grave errors during the uprising, which was drowned in blood. This revolt was a spontaneous movement of soldiers, Dimitrov even said that they were not close enough to the Bolsheviks. This declaration necessitated his self-criticism.
At their conference in February 1922 the PSO continued its policy of betraying the masses. What is more this policy was not just because of Dimitrov and Kolarov but was also that of the Balkan Federation.
The Stalinists have said nothing about this betrayal. Benaroyas has revealed an extraordinary and important thing in telling us what the political prisoners in prison stressed on the subject of this betrayal. Benaroyas tells us that the Conference had thought that the social patriotic and opportunist policy was alright in the Greek situation, while the Bulgarian representatives declared that they wished to set an example to the other Balkan parties.
That was an inevitable proof of their incapacity, unlike Lenin and Trotsky with the Comintern, to perceive the revolutionary nature of the epoch.
After the Conference of October 1922 the representative of the Balkan Federation who had come to Greece with leanings towards the supporters of the 1922 February Conference of a common agreement between the extremist Papanastassis and the reformist Sideris, said that a Central Committee must be created including Sargologos and the partisans of the February 1922 Conference. During this period the Federation representative, with the complicity of Georgiadis and Sideris, had created another Central Committee but the Central Committee of Sargologos sabotaged this Committee.
The Bulgarian representative had dared to support Georgiadis, Sideris and Petsopoulas. Sargologos made friendly contacts with him of a kind that gave a false impression of his plans to the Bulgarian representative. The Bulgarian representative had also met Tzoulatis of whose role and prestige he was well aware. There was no possibility of doing anything without Tzoulatis. He tried to convince the latter to join them. But from the end of 1921 onwards Tzoulatis did not believe in a regroupment of the PSO. So he formed a new movement. Without doubt he counted on the support of Balkan Federation but even more he counted on that of the Communist International. The Balkan Federation representative ignored article 7 of the 21 Principles which demanded a break in relations with reformists and centre politicians. He made an agreement with Tzoulatis on the basis of Article 2 of the 21 Principles which demanded that two-thirds of the Central Committee could only consist of Socialists who had pronounced in favour of the Third International before the Congress.
Thus he aligned with the right wing of the February Conference.
Dimitrov had made other errors and had accused the tendency opposed to the Fascist coup d’‚tat of Tsagov of reformism. From that moment Dimitrov, on his own responsibility, adopted a policy by the Bulgarian Communist Party of neutrality between the governments of Stabolinsky and Tsagov. He did not take sufficient notice of the position taken by the Bolsheviks towards Kornilov. Tsagov started by murdering Stabolinsky. He then killed thousands of Communists, workers and intellectuals. He ruled for twenty years as a dictator.
The hatred of Fascism and the spontaneous rising of the masses against Tsagov brought about a change of heart in the Bulgarian Communist Party. They then formed a joint front with Agrarian Union of Stabolinsky, the Social-Democratic Party (the so-called Social Fascists of 1931) and even radical bourgeois.
These opportunist deviations of Kolarov and Dimitrov were unknown to Trotsky and Lenin. But they showed the reason for the conflicts going on between Trotsky and Rakovsky on the one hand and on the other Dimitrov and Kolarov. It was never possible to open a debate within the Third International on the problems of Greek and Bulgarian Communism.
GREEK CAPITALISM ON THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS
When Greek capitalism reeled in Asia Minor and rotted in Greece, the militarist adventure paralysed activity. A state of emergency was declared. Then in the summer of 1922 the Gounaris government imprisoned members of the Communist union of the P.S.O., the editor of Rizopastis and Rizos, with the accusation of high treason and sedition. At the same time Metaxas, for demagogic reasons, declared that the direct intervention in Asia Minor was done by mercenaries and that Kabanis, Kraniakis and Kotsies openly sabotaged it without anyone bothering them.
The prisons filled with members of the P.S.O until the organisation collapsed.
At this point the retreat started. The defeat was almost total. There was panic among Constantine’s supporters. Kordatos made public a decision of the military government of Athens that wanted to execute all the Communist prisoners believing that there would be a mass outcry to punish the Communist treason.
The blow failed. In fact Balidis, the prison governor, demanded a written order as a telephoned command was not enough.
The bourgeois class looked with favour on the defeat at the front and saw a Greek version of the Commune.
Then Metaxas was summoned to take power. It was he who was given the responsibility of involving the communists in the government.
Metaxas sent his aide Evelpidis to visit the prisons and then went there himself with two vacant ministerial posts to offer. One of these was the Ministry of the Interior for he said “The more you can pin the responsibility on Plastiras the more they will have to suffer the reprisals of the Venezelists.” It was certainly an odd proposition from someone who had previously hanged Communists for treason.
“General you do me too much honour” replied Kordatos. “I know that the present time is critical for our country but I believe that the role for us in the P.S.O.P. is not save the throne of the bourgeois state. We cannot take part in your government for our principles forbid it.” After that Metaxas formed a government on his own.
THE DEFEAT ON THE FRONT IN ASIA MINOR
The collapse of the front in Asia Minor in August 1922 marked the end of the Greco-Turkish war which the Venezelists had started and the royalists had continued. This defeat was the result of the profound weakness of Greek capitalism and the feelings of the soldiers against the massacre lasted for eight months.
In that year discipline in the army was destroyed. A whole unit mutinied rather than go to the front. The soldiers would no longer sacrifice themselves for Greek capitalism. The articles in Rizos, For Communism and Workers’ Fight were inspired by Lenin’s Socialists and the War which set the tinder alight. The exiles had difficulty in recovering from this defeat. But there were other disturbances in the very heart of society. At Radesto there were numerous disturbances. There were mass meetings of thousands of soldiers. In these mass meetings they spoke of peace and socialism. The state seemed to breaking up. At Adrianople a group of Communists, which included Vlachos, had organised an action committee. There were other such centres of organised nuclei in other places but their impact was not very great. In reality, since the PSO had been dissolved at Athens, the little groups could not co-ordinate their activities. Papadatos and Kianoulotos maintained that they had reunited the Committee but the Soviets did not get the same effects as in Russia.
Certain units of the army succeeded in both keeping their arms and escaping from the control of Plastiras. The Trotskyist Giannis with some other socialists says that they were able to get almost to Pireaeus before they were disarmed. The worker Kokkinogiannis almost got to Salonika. The defeat at the front could have transformed itself into a revolution but there was no party to give things direction and to focus the revolutionary tendencies of peasants, workers and soldiers.
THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM BETRAYED
When the decisions of the February Conference were known the word treason sprang to the lips of the rank and file. Everyone attacked the opportunist tendencies.
The rank and file were encouraged in their struggle by the German crisis of 1923. The British, Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian and Chinese revolutionary events encouraged them too. But they were also influenced by the (dis)association of the Comintern of Lenin and Trotsky.
The upheaval started with the Tzoulatis-Sarandidis group but the Papanastassakis tendency followed. In time the movement spread as far as Pireaus and Salonika reaching into the prisons and the soldiers at the front.
Benaroyas was sincere in his recognition of this movement of militants in spite of which he declared “Some agitated with ulterior motives, other through weakness, thought that the February Conference had betrayed the principles of the Party.” Saragogolos and Stavridis did agitate with ulterior motives and voted for the decisions of the February meeting.
Then Benaroyas tells us “Around Papanastassios a group of militants was built against the Conference decision. The prisoners were also against such Social-Democratic decisions. Petsopoulas and Kordatos also declared themselves opposed to these decisions. And the leadership of the Party became engaged in a great movement against these opportunist tendencies.” Then the Petsopoulas tendency cancelled the February conference decisions even though it was in favour of them. At the time the revisionism of the February conference had only partially marked certain events of the twenties, Petsopoulas and Kordatos were definitely influenced.
THE SPECIAL CONGRESS OF SEPTEMBER 1922
The October 1922 Conference was called to resolve the crisis of the P.S.O. but in fact it made it worse.
Athens was represented by Ikonmou, Papanikolaou, Maggo and Strago, and Pireaus by Agelis, Kourtidis and Aligizakis, while Saragogolos, Chatzistavros and Ventura came from Salonika. The Federation of Tobacco workers and Electrical workers union were present. Sideris and Georgiadis decided to break if they were not in the majority. But the right wing did not have the majority.
That, said the secretary Kordatos, is united on the only small possibility of organising. What is more that underlined the crisis among the parties and unions.
Then Sideris and Georgiades proposed the expulsion of Petsopoulos. After the treachery of the leading workers here and internationally, the Special Congress was torn to pieces by endless personal rivalries.
Members with ossified ideas were attacked as intellectuals. That only made the crisis worse. Thus the bourgeoisie could rule over a divided working class. Petsiopoulos was expelled by a committee made up of Saragogolos and Stavridis who by the end had shown themselves to be traitors to the working class.
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Unpublished Articles Of Interest-Leaving Leninism-Paul Levi
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following piece was translated by Mike Jones from the weekly published by Paul Levi, Sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft, of 8 July 1927, republished in Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie, a collection of articles, speeches and letters by Paul Levi, edited by Charlotte Beradt, published by EVA, Frankfurt a.M. 1969, pp.148-150.
Leaving Leninism-Paul Levi
“The present oppressive bureaucratic regime in the party reflects the pressure of the other classes against the proletariat.”
Trotsky said these words – unfortunately not until May 1927. It was already time to speak out during 1921: perhaps the cannons in Kronstadt during the March of 1921 had already thundered the same language which Stalin now speaks and the language-teacher had indeed been Trotsky. But today it is not at all a question of how far the Russian Opposition helped create the erroneous policy of the party, which was the issue which caused it to go into opposition, how much it had itself created the preconditions for what is occurring today and under which it is suffering today. One must be content with determining the nature of the tragedy now unfolding in Russia and what it signifies.
We have already often pointed this out: the interests of the proletariat and the land-owning peasantry are opposed to each other. The Bolsheviks made two errors. The first: with their peasant policy of 1918 whereby the land-hungry peasants and agricultural labourers were elevated into land-owning peasants they have created the causes for the sharpening of the contradictions so manifest today in Russia. It is very probable that in 1918 the Bolsheviks had no other choice but to give the peasants the land. If they had not accommodated them it is likely that the movement would have removed them: the least that would have occurred would be that the peasants would have taken the land anyway. But if giving away the land was an error – in any case from a theoretical point of view – from the standpoint of Socialism, a second error was added to it, a greater one. If the giving away of the land was theoretically a mistake, although unavoidable in practise, then the party should recognise it when setting out its aims. Instead of doing that they made a theory from their errors: the theory of a solidarity of interest between the workers and the peasants. That was already the case under Lenin. But his descendants made a canonical law out of the theory.
Yet it was nevertheless obvious, both for Marxists as well as for the historically aware, what this solidarity was worth. If there had been any solidarity of interests between landed peasants and propertyless industrial workers then the European history of the last three centuries would be incomprehensible. The Bolsheviks believed themselves capable of skipping over this disharmony between the both classes, to be able to master it, because they brought the both of them, so to speak, into one retort. These retorts were called the soviets: within which the opponents were united, just as for the believing catholic the spirit and the body are united in the host he has swallowed. Now these errors are totally incomprehensible for politicians educated in the school of Karl Marx: there are absolutely no state forms which can cancel out the existing class contradictions; since the form of the state is indeed the expression and the result of the class contradictions and not their cause. If there were state forms which could prove the cancelling out of those class contradictions: if there were, then it would be incomprehensible why one could not also accomplish such witchcraft with a coalition government. Yes, we confess: the pretence of a class solidarity where class contradictions exist – historically seen – then this delusion is much more acceptable in the form of the coalition government than in the form of the soviet government in the Russian model. When the illusion of class solidarity is destroyed in the coalition government and the contradictions become apparent again, then the coalition separates out into its constituent parts, and the parties which were previously paralysed in the coalition once again take up their natural functions. But in the soviet form in the Russian model, we see happening – precisely what we now see in Russia. Previously the contradictions had no form: they seek the form in the one existing party, separate the party into factions and then into fragments, result in those previously called friend and leader being called traitor and finally put the comrades under the gun of the comrades of yesterday. In the countries in which that error occurs in the form of the coalition government, its disintegration is already the solution of the crisis and the start of convalescence; in the regime of the soviets, the grave crisis is only beginning, in which although the illusions are destroyed, the independent functional forms of the different classes are still not found. That is the status in Russia. Since the worker is ground down by the peasant, so must Stalin and Bukharin grind down the Opposition.
While for the deeper observer the function of the party leadership and the opposition in Russia is in any case clear, for the Russian masses everything is still concealed events, perhaps mostly incomprehensibly in the discussion over China, for where that is concerned, and – we have to say this – the Russian opposition is not clear itself about the starting point of its opposition. Either not at all clear or it will not express it. Yet the root of the problem can be found in the above explanation. That ‘solidarity’ between worker and peasant is the real kernel of so-called Leninism; it is that which Leninism believed that it had developed beyond Marxism. In reality one can only grant Lenin one thing – which is indeed no small thing and which made him a great man: that he recognised the particular conditions of the seizure of power in Russia, that he indicated the creation of new forms of a state and raised the concept “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, for once and if only for a short time, above and beyond a phrase, into reality. But the generalisation of all this beyond Russia and into a Leninism, the canonisation of tactical strokes in particular situations is just as much an error as the canonisation of tactical or strategical moves of a military commander. With the canonisation of the Schlieffen Strategy the Germans came unstuck in 1914, just as the Bolsheviks now with Lenin’s tactic from 1917. No: we speak out quite frankly: Lenin remains, but Leninism is the past. Where he believed he had developed Marx he has failed. We have to say: nowhere has the correctness of Marxism been more alarmingly proved than in the end Leninism is undergoing.
Erich Hausen (5.2.1900-19.12.73) Murkau/Oberlausitz (Silesia). Electrical Fitter. Called up WW1. War resister. Return January 1919 to Weisswasser/Lausitz. Joined USPD. Became USPD chairman then Secretary of USPD In the area. 1920 joined KPD with USPD-left. 1921 local editor of the KPD paper in Cottbus. Elected to party council at Jena Congress 1921. Member of Lausitz District Committee, from end of 1922 its secretary. Delegate to 8th Congress KPD in 1923, re-elected to party council. 7.12/23 imprisoned and sentenced to 3 years gaol for “preparation of high treason” (during the period of KPD illegality). 26.8.25 released and returned to Weisswasser. Unemployed a while, then secretary for Red Aid in Thuringia. 1926 secretary for KPD in Silesia. At the 1927 Essen Congress, as CC candidate, together with Heinrich Galm and Albert Bassüner, advanced the position of the Brandler group. On account of his protests over the Hamburg corruption (Wittorf case) removed from his functions in Silesia (Hausen demanded an open enquiry over the Wittorf Affair, and Thälmann’s role in it, before the working class, and advanced far-reaching demands for the reintroduction of the accountability of KPD functionaries: “election and recall by the rank-and-file”, “no removal without election”, etc.). Nov-Dec 1928, together with Galm, called to ECCI in Moscow, to enquire into their oppositional attitude. Both refused to capitulate (Hausen tells an interesting anecdote about attempts by various ECCI figures to persuade him to capitulate, or at least appear to do so, and Bela Kun told him that the CI leadership knew that Thälmann was a “dummkopf” and Neumann a “schweinhund”, but one had to close ranks in the CI, as the SU was passing through difficult times). Expelled KPD December 1928. Founded Gegen den Strom, 17.11.28. Leading KPO functionary and DMV activist. Led illegal KPO in Berlin for a while after Nazi take-over. Arrested but deported to France after 6 months because of his French passport. During the 1938-39 internal differences in the KPO he sided with the minority and broke with it. Interned in many camps until 1941 when he succeeded in entering USA. Lived in Swarthmore Pennsylvania as an electrical fitter till his death.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
The following piece was translated by Mike Jones from the weekly published by Paul Levi, Sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft, of 8 July 1927, republished in Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie, a collection of articles, speeches and letters by Paul Levi, edited by Charlotte Beradt, published by EVA, Frankfurt a.M. 1969, pp.148-150.
Leaving Leninism-Paul Levi
“The present oppressive bureaucratic regime in the party reflects the pressure of the other classes against the proletariat.”
Trotsky said these words – unfortunately not until May 1927. It was already time to speak out during 1921: perhaps the cannons in Kronstadt during the March of 1921 had already thundered the same language which Stalin now speaks and the language-teacher had indeed been Trotsky. But today it is not at all a question of how far the Russian Opposition helped create the erroneous policy of the party, which was the issue which caused it to go into opposition, how much it had itself created the preconditions for what is occurring today and under which it is suffering today. One must be content with determining the nature of the tragedy now unfolding in Russia and what it signifies.
We have already often pointed this out: the interests of the proletariat and the land-owning peasantry are opposed to each other. The Bolsheviks made two errors. The first: with their peasant policy of 1918 whereby the land-hungry peasants and agricultural labourers were elevated into land-owning peasants they have created the causes for the sharpening of the contradictions so manifest today in Russia. It is very probable that in 1918 the Bolsheviks had no other choice but to give the peasants the land. If they had not accommodated them it is likely that the movement would have removed them: the least that would have occurred would be that the peasants would have taken the land anyway. But if giving away the land was an error – in any case from a theoretical point of view – from the standpoint of Socialism, a second error was added to it, a greater one. If the giving away of the land was theoretically a mistake, although unavoidable in practise, then the party should recognise it when setting out its aims. Instead of doing that they made a theory from their errors: the theory of a solidarity of interest between the workers and the peasants. That was already the case under Lenin. But his descendants made a canonical law out of the theory.
Yet it was nevertheless obvious, both for Marxists as well as for the historically aware, what this solidarity was worth. If there had been any solidarity of interests between landed peasants and propertyless industrial workers then the European history of the last three centuries would be incomprehensible. The Bolsheviks believed themselves capable of skipping over this disharmony between the both classes, to be able to master it, because they brought the both of them, so to speak, into one retort. These retorts were called the soviets: within which the opponents were united, just as for the believing catholic the spirit and the body are united in the host he has swallowed. Now these errors are totally incomprehensible for politicians educated in the school of Karl Marx: there are absolutely no state forms which can cancel out the existing class contradictions; since the form of the state is indeed the expression and the result of the class contradictions and not their cause. If there were state forms which could prove the cancelling out of those class contradictions: if there were, then it would be incomprehensible why one could not also accomplish such witchcraft with a coalition government. Yes, we confess: the pretence of a class solidarity where class contradictions exist – historically seen – then this delusion is much more acceptable in the form of the coalition government than in the form of the soviet government in the Russian model. When the illusion of class solidarity is destroyed in the coalition government and the contradictions become apparent again, then the coalition separates out into its constituent parts, and the parties which were previously paralysed in the coalition once again take up their natural functions. But in the soviet form in the Russian model, we see happening – precisely what we now see in Russia. Previously the contradictions had no form: they seek the form in the one existing party, separate the party into factions and then into fragments, result in those previously called friend and leader being called traitor and finally put the comrades under the gun of the comrades of yesterday. In the countries in which that error occurs in the form of the coalition government, its disintegration is already the solution of the crisis and the start of convalescence; in the regime of the soviets, the grave crisis is only beginning, in which although the illusions are destroyed, the independent functional forms of the different classes are still not found. That is the status in Russia. Since the worker is ground down by the peasant, so must Stalin and Bukharin grind down the Opposition.
While for the deeper observer the function of the party leadership and the opposition in Russia is in any case clear, for the Russian masses everything is still concealed events, perhaps mostly incomprehensibly in the discussion over China, for where that is concerned, and – we have to say this – the Russian opposition is not clear itself about the starting point of its opposition. Either not at all clear or it will not express it. Yet the root of the problem can be found in the above explanation. That ‘solidarity’ between worker and peasant is the real kernel of so-called Leninism; it is that which Leninism believed that it had developed beyond Marxism. In reality one can only grant Lenin one thing – which is indeed no small thing and which made him a great man: that he recognised the particular conditions of the seizure of power in Russia, that he indicated the creation of new forms of a state and raised the concept “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, for once and if only for a short time, above and beyond a phrase, into reality. But the generalisation of all this beyond Russia and into a Leninism, the canonisation of tactical strokes in particular situations is just as much an error as the canonisation of tactical or strategical moves of a military commander. With the canonisation of the Schlieffen Strategy the Germans came unstuck in 1914, just as the Bolsheviks now with Lenin’s tactic from 1917. No: we speak out quite frankly: Lenin remains, but Leninism is the past. Where he believed he had developed Marx he has failed. We have to say: nowhere has the correctness of Marxism been more alarmingly proved than in the end Leninism is undergoing.
Erich Hausen (5.2.1900-19.12.73) Murkau/Oberlausitz (Silesia). Electrical Fitter. Called up WW1. War resister. Return January 1919 to Weisswasser/Lausitz. Joined USPD. Became USPD chairman then Secretary of USPD In the area. 1920 joined KPD with USPD-left. 1921 local editor of the KPD paper in Cottbus. Elected to party council at Jena Congress 1921. Member of Lausitz District Committee, from end of 1922 its secretary. Delegate to 8th Congress KPD in 1923, re-elected to party council. 7.12/23 imprisoned and sentenced to 3 years gaol for “preparation of high treason” (during the period of KPD illegality). 26.8.25 released and returned to Weisswasser. Unemployed a while, then secretary for Red Aid in Thuringia. 1926 secretary for KPD in Silesia. At the 1927 Essen Congress, as CC candidate, together with Heinrich Galm and Albert Bassüner, advanced the position of the Brandler group. On account of his protests over the Hamburg corruption (Wittorf case) removed from his functions in Silesia (Hausen demanded an open enquiry over the Wittorf Affair, and Thälmann’s role in it, before the working class, and advanced far-reaching demands for the reintroduction of the accountability of KPD functionaries: “election and recall by the rank-and-file”, “no removal without election”, etc.). Nov-Dec 1928, together with Galm, called to ECCI in Moscow, to enquire into their oppositional attitude. Both refused to capitulate (Hausen tells an interesting anecdote about attempts by various ECCI figures to persuade him to capitulate, or at least appear to do so, and Bela Kun told him that the CI leadership knew that Thälmann was a “dummkopf” and Neumann a “schweinhund”, but one had to close ranks in the CI, as the SU was passing through difficult times). Expelled KPD December 1928. Founded Gegen den Strom, 17.11.28. Leading KPO functionary and DMV activist. Led illegal KPO in Berlin for a while after Nazi take-over. Arrested but deported to France after 6 months because of his French passport. During the 1938-39 internal differences in the KPO he sided with the minority and broke with it. Interned in many camps until 1941 when he succeeded in entering USA. Lived in Swarthmore Pennsylvania as an electrical fitter till his death.
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