Jump to: Introduction · In defence of the POR, by Roberto Gramar · A reply to Gramar, by Stuart King
The first article in this exchange was written in reply to an article which appeared in the March 1983 issue of Workers Power newspaper (No. 40), entitled ‘Bolivia 1970/71: A revolution disarmed‘. It was written by Roberto Gramar, a European representative of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency, of which the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) is a part. Gramar is a member of the Argentine group Política Obrera. The second article, by Stuart King of Workers Power, was written in response to Gramar.
Although the original newspaper article concentrated largely on 1970/71, the exchange which followed focussed on the Bolivian revolution of 1952. For reasons of space, and to make the articles more accessible for the reader, we have edited both articles, taking out sections which referred to internal discussions between the organisations involved, and part of the material which dealt again with 1970/71. We have also included a separate introduction which gives some background to the Bolivian political situation in the early 1950s.
The questions raised in the 1952 revolution and the role of the POR have lost none of their burning relevance. Indeed, in Bolivia today many of the figures who participated in the 1952 events continue to play significant roles in the present crisis in that country, and to peddle the same bankrupt strategies in the working class. Revolutionaries must learn from past errors in order to lay the basis for future victories.
Introduction
Bolivia is a land-locked country of no more than six million people, with the majority of its population, about 60%, still working on the land as peasant farmers. Historically it has been one of the countries most exploited by imperialism. Its economy was massively dependent on the export of tin to the imperialist powers—most importantly to the USA. Exports of tin amounted to 75% of all exports by the 1920s, and still amount to over 50% today. Tin production by the turn of the century had come to be dominated by three massive family firms—Aramayo, Hochschild and Patiño—which controlled 80% of the industry and dominated the government. This oligarchy, known as the ‘Rosca’, came to be based outside of Bolivia, firmly integrated into the business communities of the imperialist heartlands.
The enormous superprofits extracted by imperialism from Bolivia and the resistance to paying taxes of the expatriate ‘Rosca’ kept the Bolivian state chronically impoverished. It was completely at the beck and call of imperialism, and cruelly subject to the vagaries of the world tin market. The 1920s and 30s saw Bolivia racked by economic crises as the world slump produced a dramatic fall in prices. The failure of Bolivian capitalism produced a number of movements, often based in the army and drawing support from the financially squeezed urban petit-bourgeoisie, which attempted to challenge the grip of the ‘Rosca’, and negotiate a better deal with imperialism. The MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario), founded in the 1940s, was the most influential nationalist party during this period, and became the leading force in the 1952 revolution.
The revolution of April 1952 started as a traditional military-political coup d’état, in which the MNR, in collusion with a member of the governing junta—General Antonio Seleme—attempted to seize power. Seleme was to have become President, and an MNR/military cabinet would have been constructed.
The coup failed because the majority of the army remained loyal. Having been deserted by Seleme, the MNR was forced to turn to the Miners’ Union, the FSTMB, led by Juan Lechín. It was the miners and the working class of La Paz which broke the resistance of the army, and delivered power into the hands of the MNR.
The army, defeated in open battle and heavily purged by the MNR government, was forced to retreat to the sidelines. The miners in the battle had supplemented their ‘normal’ weapons (the dynamite stick) with captured army weapons. Workers, and in some areas peasants, spontaneously formed themselves into militias.
Thus the April 1952 revolution opened up a period of dual power in Bolivia. The bourgeoisie no longer had a strong and reliable repressive apparatus to defend its interests, while the workers and peasants remained mobilised and armed.
Despite the revolutionary situation created by these developments, it rapidly became apparent that the Bolivian workers and peasants lacked a revolutionary leadership which could resolve the duality of power in their favour. Leadership remained firmly in the hands of the MNR, whose influence within the most advanced sections of the Bolivian proletariat—the tin miners—was guaranteed through leaders such as Lechín. Lechín, a member of the MNR, had enormous sway over the miners, and was seen as the major initiator of the mass insurrection against the army. The workers and peasants viewed the MNR, both its ‘left’ wing (Lechín) and its centre (the President, Paz Estenssoro)—with its radical anti-imperialist verbiage—as representing their interests against the ‘Rosca’, the landowners and the imperialists.
After the insurrection, Juan Lechín representing the miners, Germán Butrón representing the factory workers and Ángel Cromez, the transport workers, entered the government as ‘worker ministers’, peddling the idea of ‘co-government’ between the workers and the nationalist bourgeoisie. It was from this position that the call was issued for the convening of the inaugural session of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB)—the Bolivian Workers’ Centre.
The key question for Bolivian revolutionaries was how to relate to the MNR government in a way that enabled them to break the illusions of the masses in the MNR, and win them to a revolutionary party and perspective. It is around this question—the communist use of the anti-imperialist united front tactic—that the following polemic revolves.
In defence of the POR
by Roberto Gramar
Here we cannot make a concentrated study of the Bolivian revolution of 1952 and the intervention of the POR.1 The situation is summed up by Lora himself: ‘The internal crisis which shook it (the POR) during the greater part of the sexenio (1946–52) had weakened it enormously: all the political developments led the masses to move themselves around the MNR and not the POR. These circumstances prevented the POR being physically present in the events of April 1952’.2
A central feature of the Bolivian mining proletariat is that it built its class activity around a revolutionary programme, the Theses of Pulacayo, adopted in 1946. This is a result of POR activity. The revolutionary party confronted the difficulty that its political influence in the workers’ movement did not mechanically translate itself into its organisational development, a difficulty which was seriously aggravated in the retrogression subsequent to 1946. A sector of the organisation, even at the level of leading cadres, adapted to the pressure of nationalism. In the situation of the reactionary sexenio, the masses confused the nationalism of the MNR with the programme they had adopted in Pulacayo.
This fact is not the fatal result of a ‘chronic political weakness’. It is a concrete difficulty faced by the Trotskyists of a backward country confronted by nationalism, particularly in its period of ascent, when it recites anti-imperialist demands and appears in opposition to the regime of the old ruling classes and persecuted by the reactionary governments.
Moreover, the POR had to confront the negative weight of the intervention of the leadership of the Fourth International, which placed itself in the vanguard of the formulation of the positions of capitulation to nationalism. ‘Strange that until now the erroneous policy of Pabloism in Bolivia should not have been connected with the period of crisis of the International (1950–53), over the revisionist theses of the international leadership of that moment’.3 This question doesn’t even figure in the analysis of Stuart King, which strikes us as strange for a non-romantic revolutionary internationalist. If the POR was ‘a united party’ in April 1952, as claimed by Workers Power (WP), it is worth while remembering that it was already undermined by serious internal differences, which would result in the split two years later.
The POR was not physically present in the insurrection as a party, its own political physiognomy before the masses was diluted, and the workers and peasants identified the MNR with the satisfaction of their demands. This is the effective reality of the class struggle, which naturally does not fit into the schema of pedants. In these conditions, the task of the revolutionary faction of the POR, led by Lora, was double: to re-arm the party on the basis of the strictest differentiation with nationalism, including its left wing, and to win the masses to the revolutionary programme, detaching them from the political dominance of the MNR. The POR was the only organisation of the Bolivian left which kept itself independent in the face of the MNR government, denouncing its inevitable capitulation to imperialism. It criticised the nationalisation of the mines and the agrarian reform from a class viewpoint. It opposed to the MNR government the slogan of the workers’ and peasants’ government. The fact that it had not called for the insurrection, in agreement with the concrete analysis it made of the concrete situation of the class struggle and its development, is something else.
The re-arming of the party was carried out in its Ninth and Tenth Congresses, September 1952 and June 1953, mainly in the second. The Ninth Congress characterised ‘co-government’ as a ‘formula devised by Lechinism in order to divert the proletariat from the objective of seizing power’.4 The Tenth Congress made a much more precise analysis of the government, of the situation of the mass movement, and of the ‘left wing of the MNR’. It is worth the trouble to make some extensive quotes from its political resolution:5
‘The necessity in which the Paz Estenssoro regime finds itself of keeping itself in power either utilising the pressure of imperialism against the masses, imparts to it its bonapartist sui generis character, just as Trotsky indicated when he analysed the nature of the Cárdenas government in Mexico. The extreme weakness of the bourgeoisie and national capital do not permit the petty-bourgeois government the development of an independent policy in the face of imperialism, and oblige it to continually capitulate.
‘History previous to 9 April had contributed to the attention of the exploited being polarised around the MNR. In spite of these conditions, right from the start, the proletariat showed no confidence in the petty-bourgeois leadership, and imposed its own elected representatives in the cabinet, launched its own slogans and created the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana). In this way the experience of the masses, acquired in a bloody struggle, materialised itself. Now, a year after the revolution, one can note that the magnificent point of departure of the masses could not be politically capitalised in a satisfactory manner, mainly owing to the weakness which the vanguard of the proletariat, the POR, showed in the first stage’.
‘For the POR, before the immediate seizure of power, is the task of winning the masses, of educating them in the daily struggles, and of teaching them to have complete confidence in the leadership of the vanguard of the proletariat…The POR says to the exploited that the “workers and peasants government” slogan is not the product of a simple intellectual speculation. The organisations of the masses themselves, increasingly accentuating their struggle for central demands and confronting themselves constantly to the present power, will come to understand the necessity of demanding for themselves the total control of the state. (…) The subsequent evolution that we indicate for the COB, where the creation of new rank-and-file organs, parallel to it or even independent, under the pressure of the masses in struggle, constantly broadening their field of intervention to all domains of the life of the exploited, will lead us to the workers and peasants government. In the culminating point of that process, it will be necessary to launch the slogan of “All power to the workers’ organisations”‘.
The view of the masses
We could take up whole pages with such quotes, but it is best if every interested militant reads the original texts. In every way, that portion transcribed above is enough to verify in which way the POR ‘supported’ the MNR government, according to the peculiar and slanderous statement of WP, and how it ‘refused’ to pose the necessity of a workers’ and peasants’ government, as opposed to that of Paz Estenssoro, according to the same statements. The detail, which was crucial in Bolivia in 1952, is that ‘capitalist’ government was not seen by the masses as identical to that of the ‘Rosca’, for the simple reason that it originated in a different movement of the class struggle. As a capitalist government, it had its specificity and posed a series of totally new problems. Pabloism and Stalinism characterised it as revolutionary and supported it; the POR characterised it as bonapartist, denounced its capitulations before imperialism, placed itself in the opposed trench, and called upon the masses and their organisations to prepare its revolutionary overthrow.
This was the basic line of the intervention of the POR in the revolution of 1952. Now we can confront the accusation that it supported the participation of ‘worker ministers’.
We say right now that the POR was opposed to ‘co-government’ in 1952, and to the Comando Político naming ‘worker ministers’ for the Torres government in 1970. WP lies shamelessly about these two episodes. From then on, the tactical problem which the POR faced was of launching a series of demands which would allow the masses to become conscious of the character of that participation, as contrary to their class interests, and their revolutionary demands. To use an analogy which we suppose WP will not reproach us for, the conduct of the POR followed the same orientation as that of the Bolshevik Party after the formation of the first coalition, and especially during the June demonstrations.
Not a ‘normal’ government
Why was the question of ‘worker ministers’ and ‘co-government’ posed in Bolivia? It is obvious that it isn’t a case of a ‘normal’ capitalist government. On behalf of the bourgeoisie, or of its petty-bourgeois representatives, the incorporation of that type of minister starts from the need to liquidate a situation of dual power, more or less developed, through the identification of the working class with the government and with the apparatus of the bourgeois state in general. It is a ‘peaceful’ way of stopping the development of the masses towards their own power, which will prepare a much more violent bourgeois offensive; it is an instrument in order to disorganise the masses in a revolutionary situation, when a frontal attack is not yet a possibility.
In their turn the capitulationist tendencies of the leaderships of the workers’ movement use the ‘co-government’ formula in order to brake, from the breast of the mass organisations themselves, their revolutionary progression, subordinating them to the bourgeois government. For that, it is necessary that the participation of the ‘worker ministers’ verifies itself in very precise conditions, as a simple annexe of the government, as a guarantee of its acts and decisions. The algebraic aspect resides in the political attitude of the mass movement, which can oscillate between support to the presence of those ministers, understanding it as a form of representation of their class interests, and the repudiation of all collaboration with the government, once the differentiation with the petty-bourgeois representatives of the bourgeoisie has occurred. The task of the revolutionary party is to impel and precipitate the said differentiation, in order to transform it into a rupture, supporting itself on the progressive tendencies of the mass movement.
In 1952, ‘right from the start the proletariat showed no confidence in the petty-bourgeois leadership and imposed its own elected representatives in the cabinet’ (Theses from the Tenth Congress of the POR, quoted above). The left wing of the MNR, with Lechín at the head, launched the formula of ‘co-government’ in order to institutionalise the collaboration with Paz Estenssoro, subject the COB to the government, and castrate its soviet-type development. The POR systematically criticised the ‘co-government’, and the tactical objective which imposed itself was that of denouncing the betrayal of Lechín. The fundamental scenario of this battle was the COB. ‘The policy of the POR in the breast of the COB consisted in struggling for the effectivisation of the independence of the working class (also before the government), and in accentuating the duality of power. Due to a PORist initiative, it was decided that the decisions of the COB were an imperative mandate on the “worker ministers”. When the struggle within the cabinet between the right and left movimientista tendencies (the worker ministers who constituted Lechínism were among the latter) broke out, the POR launched the slogan of more worker ministers, and, therefore, the expulsion from the government of the right, a demand which remained beyond Lechín and company. This slogan, as many others, had a pedagogical character, it sought to demonstrate to the workers the non-revolutionary character of the MNR government, and, also, the connections and bonds which united the movimientista left with reaction’.6
Struggle against ‘co-government’
These are the facts and the intervention of the POR in 1952. The struggle against ‘co-government’ was waged starting from the aspirations and mobilisations of the masses themselves. The content which the masses gave to the presence of the ‘worker minister’ was in contradiction with the political objective of the MNR, and of Lechín, and it was this contradiction which had to break out, making both elements clash. WP imagines that it can be achieved thanks to a literary denunciation; in reality, the only thing gained via such methods is assistance to the manoeuvres of the conciliators and the government, because a denunciation as such cannot impel and organise the effective intervention of the masses, and is in fact a sectarian obstacle.
We will draw attention, in order to jog the memory of some people, to the intervention of the Bolsheviks: ‘On the placards which had been prepared by the Bolsheviks for the cancelled demonstration of June 10, and which were afterward carried by the demonstrators of June 18, a central place was occupied by the slogan: “Down with the ten minister-capitalists!”…In the government besides the “ten minister-capitalists” there were also six minister-compromisers. The Bolshevik placards had nothing to say of them. On the contrary, according to the sense of the slogan, the minister-capitalists were to be replaced by minister-socialists, representatives of the Soviet majority. It was exactly the sense of the Bolshevik placards that I expressed before the Soviet Congress: break your bloc with the liberals, remove the bourgeois ministers and replace them with your Peshekhonovs. In proposing to the Soviet majority to take power, the Bolsheviks did not, of course, bind themselves in the least as to their attitude to these Peshekhonovs…’7
Concerning support and fronts
Comrade Lora, who like every revolutionary is implacable with his own history and that of his party, totally clarified the legend of ‘critical support’. The formula was used by the XII plenum of the IEC of the IV International, November 1952, in its resolution on Bolivia, when it stated that the position of the POR ‘concretised itself in critical support given to the MNR government, accompanied by a revolutionary activity directly among the masses, in order that the latter exercise and reinforce their pressure, and develop their autonomous organisation in the unions and in the militias’. But the reality of the positions of the POR in the 1952 revolution is something different: ‘The ideological confusionism conquered the ranks of the POR itself. “Critical support” for the MNR government was frequently mentioned, as if it was a part of its traditional programme. But it happens that as a party line there was no “critical support” or lack of criticism of the MNR, but the most bitter criticism of its most important measures, of precisely those which Stalinists and nationalists referred to in their frustrated attempt to demonstrate its “anti-imperialist” and “revolutionary” character. The policy of the POR was orientated to breaking the masses from nationalist control, and not to proclaiming the revolutionary praiseworthiness of nationalism’.8 If the philistines can be scandalised by the ‘ideological confusionism’ of a revolutionary party, we remind them in passing of the similar situation the Bolshevik Party underwent after the February revolution.
The issue of ‘critical support’ was one of the most important questions which precipitated the confrontation between the POR and the Pabloite leadership, which criticised the Bolivian leadership to support the MNR government.
Using political fraud once again, WP quotes a paragraph from the Theses of the Tenth Congress as a proof of the sin. It concerns a political fraud because that section of the Theses refers to the position of the POR in the face of the threat of an imperialist coup: ‘At the present time, our tactic consists in grouping our forces, in uniting the proletariat and the peasants in one bloc in order to defend a government which isn’t ours, and to which we apply an implacable critique, before the imminent threat of the latifundist and imperialist reaction’.9 In January 1953 a reactionary coup attempt had already occurred, and imperialism combined negotiations with the government alongside preparations for a new attempt. The fall of the government in favour of an ‘oligarchic restoration’ was a burning political question, and it is in the above quoted terms, of defence of the government in the face of a coup, of a circumstantial agreement without renouncing the strictest differentiation and the most intransigent criticism, that the POR established its tactical orientation in those months. Only sectarians can mistake this position with that of ‘support’ to the nationalist government.
Soviets: myth and reality
WP has the quite strange virtue, in addition to those already indicated, of not discovering soviets where they actually exist, in order to later invent their necessity. At no moment in their ‘analysis’ of the 1952 revolution is it agreed that the COB took on a soviet character. The Popular Assembly only reached the level of a ‘proto-soviet’ (sic), and WP gives us the recipe whereby it could have been transformed into a real soviet.10
We will put the recipes aside, because they only serve for the self-proclamation as revolutionaries of those who give obvious advice from far away and much later, and we will examine the development of the class struggle. The COB developed its soviet character in a very advanced form, bearing in mind that the army had been destroyed and workers’ militias built, and that the masses engaged in direct action. In this same way, the POR posed in its time the slogan of ‘All power to the COB’. The situation of the Popular Assembly was simultaneously more advanced and more backward, and we cannot but lament the fact if reality doesn’t correspond to the schemas. More advanced from the point of view of the leading role of the revolutionary party; more backward if we examine the revolutionary mobilisation of the masses.
According to the analysis of the POR: ‘The soviets are such by their organisational amplitude and by the functions which they assume: the indisputable authority of the masses, which for the latter are the expression of its power and of its tendency to govern the country, and not by its radicalism…The common error of the leftist critics of the Assembly consists in their confusing soviets with extremism or with insurrection. The grandiose channel of mobilisation of the masses was called upon to convert itself into the leading head of the insurrection. At the opportune moment, that is to say, when the masses had materially placed themselves to fight the military government for the rule of the state, it would have launched the slogan of “All power to the Popular Assembly”‘.11
The comparison with February 1917 must be formulated in different terms to those WP enumerates. The effective power resided in the soviets, as a material force, and it is the conciliatory leadership which transfers it to the bourgeoisie. The ‘April Theses’ take this point of departure in order to raise the slogan of ‘All power to the soviets’. This wasn’t the situation of the Popular Assembly. It had to precisely develop its material force, and as the means to develop it the POR posed the vital questions of its organisation and extension, of armaments, of the majority worker leadership of the mines and education. The only thing WP can oppose to this is…one had to organise soviets. The political mechanism, the intervention of the mass movement, are a mystery for these critics who think that it is enough for someone to raise an idea, because it isn’t even a matter of a slogan, in order for the masses to follow it.
The Founding Documents of the Popular Assembly established that its objective was the installation of the workers’ government and socialism, they define it as an ‘organ of the power of the masses’, and declare that with its existence the process of dual power is initiated. To accelerate this process wasn’t a question of virulent words and expressions, but of the material development of the mass movement. The slogan ‘All power to the Popular Assembly’ was inscribed perfectly in its development and in the orientation of the POR. Its concrete posing, as an insurrectional slogan and not as a propagandist expression, required precise conditions, without which it was a simple expression of wishes, or a calamitous adventure.
Notes
- One of the virtues of the POR, and of comrade Lora, is that they have published an extensive amount of books on the class struggle in Bolivia, in particular on the 1952 revolution, and on the workers’ movement and its vanguard. They have the excellent habit of expounding their political trajectory and positions in print. In 1978, Guillermo Lora published Contribución a la historia política de Bolivia, in two volumes of 384 and 522 pages. ↩︎
- Contribución…, Vol. 2, p. 232. ↩︎
- Contribución…, Vol. 2, p. 242. ↩︎
- Contribución…, Vol. 2, p. 255. We do not have at our disposal any direct version of the Theses of the Ninth Congress and therefore quote from Contribución. ↩︎
- These quotes are taken from an anthology in French of the works of comrade Lora, entitled Bolivie: de la naissance du P.O.R. à l’assemblée populaire (EDI, Paris, 1972). They were re-translated by us into Spanish and therefore, of course, do not coincide with the original in literal terms. ↩︎
- Contribución…, Vol. 2, pp. 252–3. On the next line Lora explains in what conditions the POR launched the slogan ‘All power to the COB’. ↩︎
- Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Appendix III to the chapter ‘The Soviet Congress and the June Demonstration’, p. 488. ↩︎
- Contribución…, Vol. 2, p. 240. ↩︎
- The quote used by WP from the Theses of the Tenth Congress comes immediately after the paragraph quoted by us. ↩︎
- The Popular Assembly came into existence in 1971 after a right-wing coup attempt against the ‘left’ nationalist government of General Torres. Workers’ and peasants’ organisations were represented within it, alongside political parties and representatives of the teachers and students. For a fuller account, see Workers Power newspaper No. 40, ‘Bolivia 1970/71: A revolution disarmed’. ↩︎
- Quoted by Lora in his work De la Asamblea Popular al golpe fascista, published in the compendium Estudios histórico-políticos sobre Bolivia, 1978, p. 189. Previous editions are in existence. ↩︎
