FROM THE PRESENT CRISIS
TO THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS' GOVERNMENT
56
I. THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND REVOLUTION
'he latest events have opened a new stage in the revoluonary process in Bolivia: a stage of clear definition o the opposing camps, of regroupment of the revolutionary forces of the masses, a stage that will lead to a decisive trial of strength. These were the first serious combats in he second Bolivian Revolution, of the death-struggle between the capitalist power - in crisis, yet able to last through the First Revolution - and the workers' and peasants' power, whose first elements also emerged from the April Revolution, and which, in order to hold out, are forced to extend themselves. THE MASSES STRENGTH DEFEATS SILES'S COUP • Driven by the needs of imperialism and by the general needs or destate montia the government launched an attack factory-workers' organizations, to disregard their main conquests, and to break the action of the workers' parties. The quick answer of the La Paz factory-workers, the depth and strength of the mine soc, which threatened in a few days the collapse of that the rapid break-up at the base of the "reconstruction whole bureaucratic apparatus, demonstrated the revolutionary strength of the masses, and their ability to organize and extend the struggle from below. It demonstrated that the workers in struggle are able in a few days to bring about the revolutionary regroupment of the broad masses, throwing the whole work of years by the leadership of the MNR and the bureaucracy of the COB. The anticommunist plot of the end of January, the sharpening of the clashes produced by the announcement of Paz Estenssoro's return and Siles's resignation, demonstrate the deep contradictions and internal splits within the ruling capitalist sectors. Siles' resignation in particular laid bare the extreme division into tendencies in both the government camp and the "rosca" opposition. The crisis found a temporary solution only through the active intervention of North American imperialism, by an agreement to strike a blow against the workers organizations — both political and trade-union - which was centred the resistance against government policy. The "hard line" of Cuadros Quiroga carried the day, momentarily silencing internal contradictions. But the vigorous reply of the factory-workers and miners, and the solidarity which this struggle encountered among the rest of the labor movement, blocked these plans. Within two weeks the "strong men" who arose at the beginning of the coup either fell or were about to fall. Those who announced that the recommendations of the Ford Bacon and Davis Report would be applied, those who announced at beginning of the coup that the "marginal" mines would be shut down and personnel reduced in the others, those who 1 For updating news on Bolivia, see p 64.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL considered that workers' control was finished, entirely or retreated back to where they had started from. The government began the coup by promising a reorganization of the trade-union movement the mill and of the country, and it ended it by a ministerial crisis, a crisis in the management of the Comibol, and a crisis in its "reconstruction bloc." As the culmination of this defeat, it had to accept the reintegration of the labor directors of the Comibol, as previously in the CNSS. The Siles government underwent its greatest political defeat at the hands of the workers' movement. Previously it had succeeded in neutralizing the COB, in getting rid of its "co-government," in organizing a bloc of trade-union bureaucrats who aided its plans for the destruction of the workers' conquests by means of a terrorist trade-union dictatorship. Lechin capitulated in all these cases with the explanation that "the workers do not want to fight." But when Siles and imperialism set out to smash the workers' organizations, to break their vanguard unions by means of repression and from below a resistance and a counter-offensive which succeeded in disorganizing, at least for the moment, the forces of reaction. THE STRUGGLE WAS ORGANIZED FROM BELOW Lechín and Torres, in a defeatist spirit, limited themselves to calling for a staggered strike. Some leaders of their tendency, such as Lima and Saavedra, under the attacks of the Silists, chose to resign from their posts. It was from the factories (Said, Forno, Breweries, and many others), directly from the working-class bases, that there arose the struggle against the Silist coup de main, to the point of inflicting a complete defeat on the "reconstructors," forcing them to correct themselves. Among the miners, it was the workers and their trade-unions themselves who gave struggle their own organization, their own methods, and their own goals. The unlimited strike and the hunger strike went beyond the Lechinist directives. The miners' radios smashed the lying official propaganda. The miner's and peasants' militias that concentrated in San José checked the military provocation against the strike. The ten-mine Strike Committee that was formed in Oruro represented an enormous stride forward in the miners' tendency to provide themselves with their own leadership, combative and capable of centralizing and organizing the struggle. The hunger strike, the inclusion of women in the struggle, the support of the population of the mining districts, made the most recalcitrant sectors of the government retreat, as occurred with Minister Cuadros Quiroga himself in Potosí. In this whole struggle, one of the aspects that forced government to give way most rapidly was the great power of attraction the masses had on the organizations controlled by Silism. In the mines that have been under the dictatorship of the comandos, such as Huanuni, Colquiri, Milluni, a genuine uprising of the workers so as the strike threatened their rule. The workers of Pulacayo,
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL of San José, and of Potosí accomplished in one day what Lechinism had not been able to do in many years: to break the bureaucratic control of Sanjinés of the railwaymen, and to win their solidarity, as also that of the building-workers and factory-workers, and, as in the case of those of Araca, of the peasants. By opening up a channel after a long time the workers showed not only their will to fight, their great combativity, but also their maturity, their initiative, their natural tendency to organize the struggle, to provide it with a leadership arising from their own ranks, to unite and centralize themselves from below, and to give fresh life to their militias to back up their demands. The masses not only keep the April conquests alive but also raise them to the level of the new needs of their struggles. IT WAS NOT AN ISOLATED BATTLE, BUT THE BEGINNING OF A WAR This attempt at a frontal blow against the workers' organizations was not the result of a casual predominance of a "hard" tendency in the government. When the Siles government set out to beat down the organizations that had founded the Bolivian labor movement, the main forces that made the. April Revolution - miners and factory-workers - and the political vanguard, it was not because it had the strength to decide in its own favor the war that it was declaring. It was because the capitalist leadership had reached the limit of its possibilities. The economic, social, and political crisis had reached a limit in which the capitalist power cannot coexist with the conquests and organisms of the masses. Furthermore, the maintenance of the conquests and organs created by the masses during and since the April Revolution cannot be kept up under a capitalist leadership.
II. THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE CAPITALIST ADMINISTRATION THE CRISIS IN TIN AND OTHER METALS Capitalism has no possibility of lessening the economic contradictions from which the Bolivian economy is suffering. The economy, is suffering from the tremendous blow of the fall of prices of tin, lead, copper, zinc, wolfram, and other metals, in the international market dominated by imperialism. It is simultaneously suffering from the brutal restriction of its tin quota imposed by the International Council with its seat in London. Bolivia, according to the terms of a North American law, cannot trade in "strategic" materials with the Soviet Union, China, and the "people's democracies." But neither can it sell all its minerals in the imperialist market : it has to undergo the restrictions imposed thereby on the volume of purchases and on prices. The recession in the United States has lately aggravated this situation even further, and threatens to worsen it by new customs duties which that country is planning to set up against lead and zinc imports. In the United States and in the world market, it is the big mining companies expelled from Bolivia by the April Revolution which dominate the market, the International Tin Council, and the Buffer Stock, It is they who, through these organisms, continue to rule Bolivian mining, imposing on it their conditions, quotas, and prices. It is they who buy, smelt, and trade in Bolivia's tin and other metals. The policy of these big companies, government plays and aids, is that of bringing nationalized mining to bankruptcy. They are trying to strangle the Comibol in its own contradictions, those of the international market and its internal ones arising from the failure of its administration, the exhaustion of veins and of mines. Through the Ford Bacon and Davis Plan, trusts want to impose their administration and criteria on nationalized mining. Despite Bolivia's enormous wealth of minerals, new mines are not opened, and on the other hand the richest national mines, held in reserve, are "rented out"
57 to big imperialist companies, as in the case of the "Matilda" mine. Imperialism, in close alliance. with the Siles government, is trying to "liberate" mining from workers' control, from the miners' unions and Federation, and from the armed militias. THE OIL WAR IN BOLIVIA The great oil wealth of the Bolivian subsoil has made the country a new battlefield in the world oil war. The big trusts expelled from the mines come back with oil concessions, as if into a colony. Imperialism, in alliance with the petty-bourgeois government of the MR — then led by Paz
• succeeded in obtaining, as an offset to the nationalization of the mines, a colonialist Oil Code. At the same time the big companies have imposed their typical pirate methods in order to force concessions under the most advantageous conditions. They have imposed on the YPFB a financial, technical, and transport boycott, to bring pressure for the turning over of the richest areas assigned to this nationalized company, as in the case of Madrejones. The agreements with Brazil, with the "recuperation" of a large part of the area assigned by the treaties of 1938, were
"nationalist" campaign whose spokesmen were the imperialist press agencies, and were then presented as a triumph of the diplomacy of the Siles government. This area has begun to be assigned, the day after the signing of the treaties, to North American companies. It was indeed a triumph of diplomacy...... but for Standard Oil. At the same time that the big imperialist firms are obtaining these concessions, the real production of oil continues in the hands of the YPFB. The government's propaganda to justify its policies, to the effect that these oil give-aways diversify the economy, is refuted by the facts themselves. The big oil like the tin companies in another period, require "guarantees" in order to begin production. that "trade-union power" be overthrown, made to uncontrolled hiring-and-firing. They require a dictatorship against the masses that reëstablishes the free functioning of capitalism. THE FAILURE OF THE STABILIZATION PLAN A little over a year since it was applied, the Eder Stabilization Plan has failed. Far from stabilizing and raising the economy, it has gone on sharpening the crisis. This fact was recognized by the decrees at the beginning of this year, when the government purposed to freeze salaries for one more Year "cold" liquidation of the CNSS. Capitalist stabilization to proceed to disguised free hiring-and-firing, and is incompatible with the conquests of the masses, with their living standards, and hence with their organizations. At the same time, the graft in the administration, the shady deals that become known day after day, demonstrate that administration's demoralization and internal decomposition. "American aid" can succeed only in prolonging the life. of this administration without solving any of its problems. Its use as blackmail has forced the most reserved sectors of the MNR leadership to follow the political instructions of the State Department, but it has increased the disequilibrium and "aid government. North American imperialism is to urge drastic measures on the Bolivian: In sum, nationalization of the mines, agrarian reform, full employment, increased wages, social security, and the organisms of control and power with which the workers and peasants guarantee their conquests — militias, workers' control, trade-union organizations — do not fit into the capitalist
Therefore the capitalist stabilization of Bolivia requires destroying the masses' conquests and organizations, restoring the coercive power of and the carabineros, imposing an imperialistcapitalist dictatorship. On the other hand, as the mine strike masses prevent capitalism from going further. But in turn, in order to maintain their conquests and
58 to protect themselves from the consequences of the collapse of the capitalist economy which fall primary on them, masses' struggle must be transformed from a defensive into an offensive one, into a struggle for a profound economic transformation, and into a struggle for the destruction of the forces that are attacking them. THE SOVIET AND RUMANIAN OFFERS Within this capitalist crisis, the offers made by the Soviet Union and Rumania, of loans and investments, at very low interest and for long terms, of smelting plants for all the ores that Bolivia produces, of oil equipment, of the purchase of unlimited quantities of lead and copper, of the installation of factories for the treatment of raw materials, only accentuate capitalist contradictions. It is not capitalism that can envisage this development in Bolivia. The perspectives opened up by these offers would still further strengthen the workers' conquests and much more greatly undermine capitalism. This regime cannot profit by these offers without deepening its own disintegration, that is why Siles rejects them with the arguments of the
III. THE MASSES REJECT THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CRISIS The latest clashes are the end-product of a process growing disagreement and opposition which is reaching and stirring up all the masses — workers, peasants, and urban petty-bourgeoisie. WORKERS' OPPOSITION Not only have the aggregate meetings of the miners Potosí and Oruro demonstrated the break of the ore workers with the capitalist government of the MNR. A still stronger process is taking form in this last period in the mines, where the workers, faced by the threat of shut-downs, administration's arbitrary behavior, have been occupying the installations, expelling the authorities, and taking charge of the management of the mines. At the same time they appealed to the FSTMB to back up their action. The miners rejected the Stabilization Plan, and the demand for higher wages has been a central point in their resolutions. But one of the most explosive problems in the mines is that of the shutting down of marginal mines, and mass firings in the others. The last strike showed this. It was those mines most directly threatened by shut-downs and unemployment which went the furthest in the struggle, as in the case of San José, Pulacayo, Kami, Unificada, and others. It was not only the imprisonment of Cabrera that mobilized the workers, but also the direct threat the government measures brought against their jobs and living standards, and against their organizations. The raising of the level of understanding about the real meaning of this struggle was shown, in resolutions like that taken in January by the meeting at Catavi, refusing to recognize the government's measures about free hiring-andfiring and wage-freezing, declaring that such decrees null-and-void in Catavi, mobilizing the militias, and calling on other trade unions to unify their action. How enormous was the worry of the government and of imperialism about this resolution was expressed by the fact that Catavi was the centre of their provocation aiming at unleashing repression. Among the factory-workers, the opposition to the Decrees" was equally vigorous. Here the danger of unemployment is as real as in the mines. The shutting down of factories, the stopping of wage payments, and threats to social gains, were answered by the workers, as in the case of the Glass Works and the Manaco shoe-factory in Cochabamba, with determined actions that made the bosses and the government beat a retreat. The latest factory-workers' aggregate meeting in La Paz, and the quick reply and defeat imposed on the Silists in their attempt to break up organization, indicate that the masses
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL not disposed to give in to the capitalist attacks. Similarly the factory-workers' conference in Tarija broke through the wage-freeze, in spite of the efforts of the government and the "reconstructionists." The bulk of the "reconstructed" unions sometimes showed even greater opposition to the government's policy. The La Paz building-workers broke publicly with the government. They, more than any other sector, are suffering from enforced idleness. The railwayman have openly broken — first by the Uyuni strike at the beginning of January, and then by their solidarity in Uyuni, Oruro, and Potosi — not only with the government, but also with the directives of Sanjinés & Co. The Conference of the La Paz Railway Federation, a base of support for the bureaucracy, was also a defeat for the government, when it solidarized itself with the miners and asked for them 100% payment of wages for the days The La Paz printers, the Oruro factory-workers, the Potosí building-workers, also showed their opposition to the government's policy and their spirit of struggle. There may be added practical insurrection which threaténed the mining bases of Huanuni, Colquiri and Milluni, shattering the whole Silist apparatus in the irade-union movement, not only the enormous weakness of the government, but also the possibilities of joint mobilization and unification in action of the working masses of the entire country. THE PEASANT INSURRECTION IS STILL ALIVE The Stabilization Plan, imperialism, the rosca, and the government have a clear programme for the rural regions: hold back the agrarian reform. Eder said so, and Siles repeated it: in order to increase agrarian production, it is necessary to pledge assurances to the "men of enterprise" that their properties will not be seized. In other words, the increase in agricultural production is not to be tackled as a problem of technical advance, of the social, economic, and cultural raising up of the peasant, but, just as in the cities, as a matter of giving guarantees to capitalist functioning, to "investors," to the latufundists who have succeeded in retaining their properties. The strategy of imperialism and the government is simple. They are trying to separate the peasants from the workers, to neutralize the peasants while they try to break the workers' movement, and then to attack the peasants' gains. When the rosca attacks the peasants and universal suffrage, it does not conceal the hatred and thirst for revenge it feels against those who have deprived it of its lands and its feudal the rural areas. Apparently the peasants did not intervene in the latest struggles. Save for the support of the peasants' militias of Araca who came to defend San José, there were no mass interventions by the peasants. Nevertheless, the peasants view with deep alarm the social and political crisis, in which they feel that all their gains are threatened. This alarm has been for some time now turned against the functionaries of the agrarian reform and of the Ministry of Rural Affairs, who for them constitute the immediate expression of the obstacles and hindrances that are trying to be set up against the agrarian reform. In spite of the Barrientos Mamamis and the bureaucrats of the entire country, the crisis continues to deepen between the peasants' movement and the government. The current clashes all over the country between rival federations, for or against the Ministry of Rural Affairs, are the deformed expression of the struggle that is going on down below. Up till now, the peasants' organizations, on a national and even on a regional scale, have been led by elements of the urban petty-bourgeoisie, lawyers and functionaries, ministry staff. The tendency of the peasants is to oppose the government, to resist the Silist agents. But they lack a centre. The COB leadership of Nuflo Chávez surrendered its positions without a fight. The peasants are seeking a centre in this tendency, but they do not find one. By their pressure they have pushed
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL things to a differentiation within Silism itself. The La Paz Peasants' Conference, at the same time that it renewed its support to Siles, resolved to raise an army to defend the agrarian reform in danger, each peasant family having to choose one of its members on a permanent basis for this desertion of the Lechinist leadership keeps the crisis in a certain confusion. There is no channel leading out of it. A centre is lacking. In Choroma, where the armed Peasants' Union Centre has kept up the war against towns like San Pedro de Buena Vista, the refuge of the peasants' despoilers, the peasants' insurrection has remained very much thousand peasants, despite the assassination of their leader Narciso Torrico, are keeping alive the agrarian revolution, forcing the bureaucrats in Ucureña and elsewhere to keep up and extend their solidarity, because of the pressure of the peasant mass. The isolated uprisings on estates of the Altiplano, of Chuquisaca, and of Cochabamba, are expressions of the peasants' spirit of struggle which burst out into broader fights like those now drawing near. The workers' struggles, such as the recent one of the miners, will offer' the centre of regroupment, the channel of development, for the agrarian revolution that is now dammed and isolated. There will be needed a conscious action by the workers' organizations, by the workers' centres that are being formed in the struggle, like those carried out by the Viloco miners toward the Araca peasants, to liberate and channel the peasants' enormous revolutionary forces, restrained by the bureaucracy and by their own isolation, and separated from the workers' struggles in this latest period by the paralysis and capitulation of the Lechín-Nuflo leadership. In that way the workers will replace the peasants' petty-bourgeois leadermade up of the leaders of the COB and approved THE CRISIS OF THE PETTY-BOURGEOISIE The urban petty-bourgeoisie is also being stirred by the profound contradictions that are shaking the whole regime. It was the basis of support for the Stabilization Plan. It was mobilized by the government so as to hold back the workers' mobilization in June and July of last year. Nevertheless, within its ranks also the consequences of this plan are having their repercussions. Its material situation not only has not improved, but has worsened. During the entire last period strikes in petty-bourgeois sectors have occurred much more than among workers. Functionaries of the Interamerican Services, bank clerks and municipal employees at various points throughout the country, schoolteachers, have repeatedly gone on or stood ready for
These are the very sectors who apparently supported Siles, who had "sworn" — at least the leaders had - on the sixth of March: "No more strikes." The mobilizations of support for Siles, just as formerly the votes for the Falange, are rather the result of the lack of a lead from and action by the workers which would objectively open up for the petty-bourgeoisie a road of struggle in order to improve its situation. Objectively, broad sectors of the petty-bourgeoisie are opposed to government policy, are disposed to carry on a struggle, and objectively the way is open for their supporting the proletariat in its fight. The process of searching and uneasiness that has been produced for some time now in intellectual circles, especially university ones, concerning problems such as oil, logging concessions, economic problems, free hiring-and-firing, and the growing critical position, not particularly in favor of the rosca, that can be noted in these milieux, is the product of this effervescence, and uneasiness of the urban pettybourgeoisie in general.
IV. THE CRISIS OF THE POLITICAL FORCES The policy of the Siles government, of the MR leadership, of imperialism, of the rosca and its parties, and of the high command of the armed forces and the carabineros, is centred on one goal : to strangle the revolution, whether quietly or violently, to free capitalism from all the limits and controls that were imposed by the April revolution. But they have advanced to a certain point beyond which they cannot go the beginning of the Stabilization Plan, and more especially since the Second Congress of the COB, the Siles government has kept the initiative basing itself the political failure and the of the COB leadership, on the open capitulation part of it, and on the backing given it by and by the urban petty-bourgeoisie, irritated and without perspectives. But in the process of the revolution none of these forces or of these capitulations changed the relationship of forces. During this whole period the urban petty-bourgeoisie could brought to engage in an open clash in a violent form with the proletariat and the peasants. When Siles unable to go any further along the . path, the coalition with the rosca was broken. Tendencies toward coups de force began to blossom out again, finding support even within the government itself. The January plot was the manifest beginning of this new stage. Under the guarantee of imperialism and the weakness of the government, the rosca has recommenced a more aggressive political activity, through the Falange and through the PURS. In the heat of the effervescence of the petty-bourgeoisie, and the lack of a channel leading to the reëstablishment of its alliance with the proletariat, a whole series of parties killed by the April revolution are reviving again, and seeking to profit by this process to bring water to the rosca's mill. THE MNR IS BROKEN UP This whole process has served to make completely clear the total break-up of the MNR. Up till now, up till the Oruro aggregate meeting, Lechin was trying to keep up the fiction of the unity of the MNR. He thus kept the workers' movement a vassal of the political leadership of the government which was showering blows upon it. The return of Paz Estenssoro was presented - and in many cases hoped for — as the solution of the economic crisis, and as the reunification of the MNR. But it only accentuated the crisis in the MNR. Just the announcement of his arrival caused all the pent-up forces to explode. And Paz Estenssoro did not succeed. The crisis of Bolivia is the product, not of the Siles government, but of capitalism. Paz Estenssoro represents no other policy than that of the Siles government. It is just another phase, under more stable economic conditions, of the same capitalist government, of the same attempt to stabilize capitalism on a mass revolution. And so,
"miracle-worker" Eder had no solution for the Bolivian crisis, neither does "miracle-worker" Paz. The Siles wing itself, seeing the base it had acquired in June of last year break up as a result of the Stabilization Plan's being shown up before the very eyes of the petty. bourgeoisie, has split into various sectors, among which two main ones are the "hard" group of Cuadros Quiroga and Ocampo, and the other that connected with the Ministry of Rural Affairs which holds back from bridges" between itself and its mass base, which today serves as a certain basis of manœuvre to enable it not to become a political prisoner of the rosca. The Paz Estenssoro sector continues to be lost in present political developments. It has no base of its own for action and orientation within the political process. Behind all these sectors stands imperialism, trying to unify them, to form capitalist political force with some vigor to it. But its intèrventionism, combined with its incapacity to impose a rapid solution, simply accentuates the contradictions. fronts are formed to carry out coups, like that in January or that formed on emergence from the crisis of Siles's resignation of March 6th, but the resistance of the masses checks them, and throws them back again into their internal contradictions.
60 The army itself and the carabineros are part of this process. Crises follow one after another, and the officers' corps splits up at every crisis. The rank-and-file troops feel no hostility against the workers' and peasants movement from which they themselves come, and capitalism cannot count on their willingness to fight. The tradition of April 9th is still too strong in this sector, and the government is not strong enough to infuse a certain cohesion and conviction into the masses of the army. The MNR militias, recruited from among the unemployed, are not tar trom being just a way to earn a living. In a real battle, the workers' movement would have a real power of attraction for them. THE LECHINIST LEFT HAS BEEN SHOWN UP What has most felt the effects of this frontal clash between the workers movement and the MNR government 1s the so-called Left, in all its sectors except the POR. The polarization of the two camps and their open controntation have knocked all its predictions and political orientation galleywest, and exposed its impotence. Faced with the crisis of Siles's resignation, whelmed by panic. Enormously important political changes were taking place, which required a definite stand. But the attitude of Lechin, when Siles's resignation was being discussed in the factories and mines, was to call for non-intervention, for "not accepting provocation." It was the same attitude that had led him to go on abandoning positions, even to the point of accepting the neutralization of the COB. In the solution of the crisis opened up by Siles's resignation, there were interventions by imperialism, by the Falange, by Acción de Defensa, by the high commands of the army and the carabineros, by the chiefs of the MNK, by the "recontructionist" bureaucrats ; but any intervention by the workers' movement was checked. The result was that, under the shadow of this "peace" offered by Lechín, reaction was able temporarily to overcome its contradictions and reach. an agreement about repression, so that the movement had to intervene tardily in defense of its gains, already under fire from a unified enemy. Lechinism, "intransigence," and all the other left currents in the MNR failed in their perspectives. Their ideological submission to the MNR, to Paz Estenssoro, keeps them politically immobilized in the midst of the most dynamic process that the masses have ever experienced. The political camps become well-defined, the trade unions fight against the MNR government, its comandos attack the trade unions, and the unity with the government that Lechin wants to preserve, the unity of the MNR, finds no objective grounds for existence. THE COMMUNIST PARTY Faced by Siles's resignation, the leadership of the Communist Party proposed a front to support Siles against a coup d'état. Among the 1 first victims of this error of not accepting the fact that Siles himself constituted a coup d'état, The convery leaders of that party, arrested and exiled. ciliatory policy of the CP has been disproved by events. The break of the rank and file with the directives of the "Reconstruction Bloc," the action of the railway. workers of Uyuni, Oruro, and Potosí, and of the factory-workers of La Paz, carried the militants of the CP far beyond the orientation and directives they had received from their party. THE OBJECTIVE NEED FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY This crisis in the MR and in the forces of the left, which has already had the greatest influence on the leadership of the workers' movement, is constantly rendered more by the workers' and peasants decision to fight, and by the continued advance in the methods of combat. Revolutionary struggles, far from quieting down, are growing deeper. The previous political structure has broken down, and there is developing more every day an objective political need. The road is opening up for the development of the revolutionary
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL Marxist party capable of orienting and organizing this new stage of the Bolivian revolution. It is a political struggle that is beginning, and political needs that are developing. Like the other tendencies, the POR also has put its orientation to the test, and it has emerged confirmed and developed by events.
THE STAGE OF DECISION Both camps are growing clearly defined, both forces are becoming polarized, and they tend to drive each other out. The government and imperialism do not have the strength to force a decision in their favor. The masses do not have the unity of purpose and clarity of direction to do so. But the crisis does not allow time for a peaceful political evolution, so that the forces may get ready. Even without preparation, both forces will find themselves drawn into clashes and fights such as have been occurring in the last period. THE PROSPECTS OF CIVIL WAR The contradictions are developing without there being a simultaneous development of a force capable of dominating the process. The deterioration in the situation drove the government and imperialism to hurl themselves into struggle that they do not have the strength to win. military chiefs and the Falange, led by the same reasoning, can at any moment try a coup that may be able to win out over the weak Siles government, but that will encounter the savage resistance of the masses, who will defend their gains. Sectors of the rosca and local Silist comandos, faced by the development of workers' struggles, and driven by desperation impotence of the petty-bourgeois or rosca sectors, may hurl themselves into attempted coups and provocations that lead to armed struggles, like that of San Pedro de Buena Vista, that of Uncía, or the events of Santa Cruz. But the masses are reacting and will continue to react vigorously, including by armed action, against attacks on their provocations, coups d'état, etc. The answer of the Catavi and Siglo XX workers to the Uncía provocation, and the concentration of militias at San José in face of the provocation and attack of the regiment and the comando, indications of this tendency. There exist elements of civil war that may burst out at any clash. It could have burst out in the recent mine strike if the government had not retreated in time about the march of the Huanuni comando against Catavi, or the military attack on San José. There is a danger in this situation. For lack of a centralized leadership and objective, this civil war may explode in the of dispersed guerillas. Every forward step that the workers' movement takes toward centralizing the purposes of the masses' struggle, and toward turning the action of the most determined sectors of the proletariat into developing the overall action of the masses into a central struggle for power, will be an advance on the road to raise the war of guerillas to a higher level and rapidly centralize it. THE GENERAL STRIKE AND PARTIAL STRIKES Another variant in the situation lies in the fact that new attacks and provocations by the government, or a military coup that threatens the masses' overall gains, or other equivalent events, may, in the present explosive situation, bring a general strike on the order of the day. Partial strikes with a tendency to become general are not excluded either. It is in these actions, to which the objective situation may drive the masses, that there must be raised the objective of a central and offensive struggle against imperialist and capitalist domination and in favor of the toiling solution of the question of power. The revolutionary strength of the masses is expressed not only in their ability to carry struggles but also in knowing how to give these in bringing their own solutions actions their own outcomes Otherwise, country's crisis. their forces will be exhausted and dispersed, throwing the field open to capitalism to impose its outcome.
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ELEMENTS OF WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' POWER A military coup, or new dictatorial attempts by Siles, will be objectively - just as the last strike was — elements which will aid the tendency of the masses to strengthen their organs of power, their trade unions and militias, to tend to centralize these organs from below. The development of dual power has again been put on the order of the day for this new stage in the revolutionary. struggle of the masses. THE ELECTIONS Defeated in its trial of strength, the government finds itself forced once more to face an election campaign which is not at all to its liking, and which it will try to Imperialism is seeking to bring about the return of the political forces of the rosca into the arena, as a form of broadening its base, and working up other alternatives. This stage will help to push the trade unions to an open break with the MNR, and to develop these unions as the channel for the masses' revolutionary aspirations. But at the same time, as the process develops, the efforts of the reaction will grow more desperate, and the culmination of this mobilization through the trade unions will be, not the bourgeois parliament, but the Workers' and Peasants' Congress.
VI. FOR A SPECIAL CONGRESS OF THE GOB, TO DECIDE ON THE FORMATION OF
THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' GOVERNMENT To hold back the reactionary coup, the masses have not yet brought into play more than a very small part of capacity for revolutionary action. As we have seen, the masses' struggle runs up against an obstacle to the full expansion of its strength and its canalization into struggles such as can decide the situation. That is the lack of central objectives that determine the intervention of the masses as a whole and raise their capacity for struggle. The government temporarily has on its side the advantage of confusion among broad sectors. Defensive struggle and the lack of a centre will not develop all the revolutionary energies of the masses. The economic and political crisis cannot go on indefinitely. There has to be an outcome, either the capitalist or the workers' one. masses cannot keep up definite struggle against firings in an economy in bankruptcy. They cannot raise, or even maintain, their standard of living
The mining crisis, the agrarian crisis, and the industrial crisis require solutions. Capitalism is unable to provide them. Its solution is poverty and unemployment
They are the ones who must find They cannot raise, or even maintain, their standard of living the capitalist regime solve things. Capitalism's solutions mean only blood for the masses. The toilers of city and country need their own economic solutions and their own political solutions. They need to overthrow the capitalist government and set up their own government, chosen by and responsible to their own organisms, which express and carry out the will of the toilers: trade unions, federations, the COB, workers' militias and peasants' armies. Reaction wants by means of. dictatorship to dislodge the workers and peasants from their conquests, to eliminate their capacity to take decisions and carry them out, to intervene in all problems that concern them. On the contrary, it is necessary to open the way so that it is the masses that bring Spen enges a worke is i hergan die or an ine through which the will of the that the masses have already created and that they must keep control of, that they will discuss and proportionately choose their delegates, by meetings of the unions, of the mines, of the factories, of the estates, etc. New forms of
61 organization, like committees and others, will arise out of the struggle itself, and will also represent the opinion of the masses. THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' GOVERNMENT It is this Special Congress, as the highest expression of the of city and country, that will adopt resolutions on all the economic and political problems, beginning with the central one. To give the Bolivian Revolution the regime that will guarantee its conquests and that will extend them, that will definitively liquidate the enemy forces of the rosca and socia developdent lop lolivia. This eith be tale Workers and
Peasants' Government. This government will not be a different form of the present in accordance with the needs of the masses and of the real possibilities of the economiy. Its formation and maintenance will originate in a mobilization of the masses capable of checking and destroying enemy resistance, and will attract the sympathy and support of the Latin American masses, for whom it will constitute a centre for the struggle against imperialism and capitalism that they are currently carrying on. The Workers' and Peasants' Government will emerge from the election of the Special Congress of the COB, and it will be composed of those who have won the confidence of the masses, who have been at the head of their struggles. It will not be a government with a majority of the POR, or of any other party, to the extent that these parties have not won the trust of the majority of the masses. To carry forward their struggle, the channel for the masses will be the trade unions, the COB, the Committees that are created in the process, and it is from there that the government will arise. CENTRALIZED MOBILIZATION OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE REVOLUTION Under present conditions, the government, imperialism, and the rosca will exhaust all provocations and measures of force to prevent a congress in which the masses may solve the future of the revolution. To open the possibility of taking decisions, free of the pressure of terrorism, to be able to develop its mobilization over the whole extent of the country, it is necessary to accompany its preparation by the mobilization and centralization of the workers' and peasants' militias, as, on a limited scale, the Oruro Strike Committee did in the recent mobilization. The armed threat of the army and the comandos must be faced by the armed force of the as was done in San José and Uncía, and as the peasants' unions are constantly doing. In case of the outburst of struggles of a guerilla nature, the task of revolutionary Marxists must be to guide, to take the lead of this struggle, to develop the formation of a Single Command, calling on all the masses, whether they have risen in arms or not, to mobilize around it, for the holding of the Special Congress.
EMERGENCY COMMITTEE TO DIRECT THE STRUGGLES, CENTRALIZE THE MILITIAS, AND SUMMON THE CONGRESS The COB, in the hands of the "reconstructionists," is paralyzed. The confederations also, in the hands of this bureaucracy, are transformed into obstacles and enemies to any mobilization of the masses. The last mine strike, on the other hand, showed that the workers' tendency is to form their own organisms, beyond those of the Lechins and Torreses. These organisms must become permanent ones, forming an Emergency Committee which, at the same time that it takes the leadership of the struggle and centralizes the militias, also summons and organizes the Special Congress. The tendency of the workers organized in the "reconstructed" union sectors is to join the struggles, as has been demonstrated. Such sectors and federations must be organized in the Emergency Committee. There where the bureaucracy in various ways maintains its control, there must be formed Special Congress Committees which duplicate these leader-
62 ships and which, if necessary, at a certain stage in the mobilization, take over the leadership and representation of these sectors. THE CONGRESS, CULMINATION OF THE MOBILIZATION OF THE MASSES The Special Congress to decide on the formation of the Workers' and Peasants' Government must be the culmination of the mobilization of the masses. As we have analyzed it, the process will. build up. The present struggles will be followed by broader and more decisive struggles. Armed clashes, civil war, the general strike, are possible alternatives within a process of growing mobilization, which will incorporate ever broader sectors of workers and peasants. In order to avoid the dispersal of this process, the exhaustion of the revolutionary forces in partial battles, it is necessary to centralize perspectives. The struggle for the Special Congress will serve as the lever to mobilize the more hesitant or confused sectors. It will aid in avoiding strikes and partial actions that may help the plans of capitalism and turn these forces so as to give an impulse to the massses as a whole. This will not be a congress of bureaucrats, like previous ones. The bureaucrats, as the railwaymen's experience demonstrating, are not in a position to face congresses, not even those who, on paper, "control" them. Under conditions of struggle and mobilization, the congress strike the masses rather as the most direct road to liquidating the control of the bureaucracies and the ministries over their central organizations, as the most direct road to rescue the COB from them. Strikes, militias, guerrillas, the general strike — these will be fields in which the idea of the congress, launched now with great vigor, can spread and attract the support of the broad masses. The miners' radios have been developed throughout this process as a very important arm: an arm to counter enemy propaganda and to make known the workers' and peasants' objectives. From now on the struggle for the Special Congress, for the organization of the militias, for aid in the dispersing of enemy forces, including the army, must count on this basic instrument. Whereas the Second Congress of the COB was strangled by official propagandá, this Special Congress will be built on this new conquest of the masses. THE BASES OF THE ECONOMIC PLAN FOR THE WORKERS' AND PEASANTS' GOVERNMENT The Special Congress of the COB and the government that it forms, will have to take the political and economic measures for destroying the power of the capitalists and for organizing the economy on the basis of the interests of the workers. The paralysis in mining, factories, and agricultural production, the workers' extremely low standard of living, the scarcity of food — all these must be faced up to by means of The first step must be the expropriation of the banks, of the properties of the rosca and of the capitalists, of those firms that can be run without immediate need of imperialist investments. Concerning others, such as oil properit will be necessary to revise the give-away contracts, and to impose workers' control. The agrarian reform must be completed, legalizing the occupation of lands, distributing those that remain, and working up a plan for the mechanization of agriculture, with a rational use of those tractors and machines already existing in the country, and the obtention of others on a broader scale from the USSR and other countries that may be disposed to provide them under favorable conditions. The Soviet and Rumanian offers of smelters, oil equipment, factories, technicians, and trade, will be an important basis for the development of the economy, to which the new Workers' and Peasants' Government must have recourse. The alliance of the Bolivian revolution with the workers'
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL states will open up for Bolivia the advantages of modern technics and science, now closed to it by imperialism. Together with this collaboration, the resources obtained by the expropriations will be the basis for a planification of the development of the economy. There must also be immediately carried out a statistical survey of food stocks and an organization of their equitable distribution. And there must simultaneously be planned an immediate development of the production of foods and consumer goods to raise the living standards of the masses. VII. THE IMMEDIATE TACTIC TO DEVELOP
AND CENTRALIZE THE FORCES OF THE REVOLUTION As we said above, the open break between the workers' movement and the government creates a new dynamics, and develops to the maximum the political needs of the mass movement. All currents — Lechinists, "intransigents," Stalinists, and those around Masas — are entering a crisis, or sinking deeper into the crisis in which they were already living. The POR has verified its political line. It possesses the objective conditions for transforming itself into the centre that animates and gives impulse to the struggle; but it must develop its forces very much, at the same time that the forces of the revolution are developing, to be at the high level of the needs of the situation. TO DEVELOP A CENTRE FOR THE MASS STRUGGLE The whole immediate effort must be to produce a centre to give guidance and drive to the mass struggle. The present situation, in view of the impotence of the trade-union leadership, contains the danger that it will be frittered away in outbursts and partial actions to whose consequences we have already referred. It is necessary that the whole strength of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard be turned to avoiding such a dispersal, which would only partially bring into action the revolutionary potential of the masses and would prolong the possibilities of the capitalists. A revolutionary centre is necesto concentrate the forces of the masses and to turn then toward a struggle to bring about within a short time the summoning of the Special Congress and the forming of a Workers' and Peasants' Government. As we already saw, right in the course of the last strike, the mining masses tended to torm such a centre, and took steps toward it. Directives were sought much more from the Oruro Strike Committee and the San José Radio than from
'La Paz "leaders." Mine militias and peasant unions concentrated under their leadership. In turning the whole effort toward a Special Congress of the workers to decide on the formation of a Workers' and Peasants Government, possibilities for organizing and holding this congress, necessary to develop those elements of a new leadership which have already appeared in the struggle. It will certainly not be the Lechin leadership that will try to resist the attempts of every sort made by the reaction to prevent the congress. It is a centre organized from below which will, as it did in Oruro, counter provocations, stimulate confidence, broaden the perspectives of the workers and peasants. There must be set up one centre at Catavi and one at San José, the first connected with Siglo XX, the second organizing all the surrounding mines of the last strike. To this centre we must connect up Pulacayo, with the mines of the South Central Council, and Potosí. This centre can develop rapidly, continuing the line of the January Catavi resolution and the experience of Oruro and Pulacayo in the recent strike. That is to say, to develop the elements of dual power, as resolved by Catavi, on the basis of the organisms developed in Oruro. Let these organizations extend and consolidate their power, back it up by a solid military organization, in alliance with the main centres of the peasants and urban workers, and concentrate perspectives on the organization of a Special Congress of the COB to resolve on the formation of a Workers' and Peasants' Government. In case of the outbreak
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL of armed struggles, let it be this centre that takes over their leadership and organization. These unions, which must consolidate their action by meeting to set up a committee to carry these tasks forward, must send commissions and appeals to the factory-workers of La Paz and other cities, to the railwaymen of the various centres, to the building-workers and flour-mill workers, to the peasants of Ucureña, Chuquisaca, and the Altiplano, to the Coroma peasants in revolt, for the formation of an Emer-
Committee to centralize the workers' and peasants' forces and organize the congress. The immediate step. is to group together the mining and factory centres most disposed for the struggle. This action must be accompanied by a systematic campaign by the radio, by publications, by tours, meetings, and assemblies, carried out by this same centre, making clear the failure of the capitalist leadership, workers' solution for the economic and political crisis. those unions that have made the greatest advances in the struggle that must take. the initiative. The other main centre is La Paz, the political centre where in the final analysis all large-scale actions come to a head. The La Paz fadtory workers, in Siles's own pressure-centre, inflicted a far-reaching defeat on him action in the mines had won out. An action centre formed in La Paz, based on the main factories, will give the mine action an enormous scope, a repercussion in all strata of the THE UNITED FRONT The open struggle that has begun, and the polarization of forces, at the same time that they destroy the perspective of the old left, free forces that are open to revolutionary development under the impulse and pressure of the masses. The revolutionary Marxists, whose strength is small compared to the needs of the situation, must turn their action during the very course of events in such a way as to aid the development of these forces, to impel them to put themselves at the head of the revolutionary struggle, and to help them to mature through their experience. The action that we have previously developed will be the centre on which these forces will converge and where they will develop. It will be that struggle which will make these sectors break with the traditions of conciliation and manœuvres in which the majority of them have been educated. Leaders of the factory-workers, of the miners of San José, Siglo XX, Unificada, Pulacayo, and dozens of other mines, have shown that they can go forward under the pressure of events. Pacts and agreements with these leaders peasant leaders are possible and necessary for giving a centre and a certain cohesion of objectives and actions to these sectors who, at the very moment that they saw the failure of their orientation and that of their leaders, found themselves launched into more intense action than ever. Agreements and pacts for central objectives and for some partial objectives — while taking care not to waste or wear out their forces — will aid their experience and stimulate their conscious audacity. Of course this is a stage of rapid experiences, and the revolutionary Marxist vanguard must keep its full freedom of action, and make clear its independent existence, without getting tangled up with vacillating sectors. The bankruptcy of the "reconstructors," the bankruptcy of the political perspective given by the leadership of the CP, open possibilities for the development of the healthy sectors of that party, those most involved in the class struggle. The experiences of Uyuni, Siglo XX, and Potosí among others demonstrate this. The La Paz factory-workers also constitute a field for the development of sectors connected party. A united front action which raises the objectives of that party and those sectors to the level of the masses' central tasks as they development of revolutionary sectors important for future The Masas group has also been shaken up, where it was closely tied up with the workers' movement, as in Potosí and Siglo XX, out of its world of abstractions, and the struggle for the Special Congress may lead these sectors to join in the action of the revolutionary Marxist vanguard. The basis for the development of all these tendencies and of many others that are emerging from the crisis among the "intransigents" and the Lechinists in the workers' peasants' movement, is the development of a revolutionary centre within the mass movement itself, the development of a concrete alternative. All these tendencies will be much more moved by the political deeds of which the revolutionary Marxist vanguard is capable under the present enormously favorable conditions, than to political reasonings. of political line will be in action, and action will gain more members and allies than even the best explanations. The latest struggles have once more recorded a fact which has a deep-going tradition in the Bolivian revolution: working-women's joining in the struggles, in the first ranks of action and decision. The social - and racial — submission of working-women has built up here also an explosive material comparable only to that constituted by the peasants. Yet in the workers' movement women still do not have a place of struggle and leadership in accordance with their participation and combativity. In the building of the revolutionary forces, the conscious development of the enormous force represented by workingwomen in Bolivia plays a fundamental part. The Marxist vanguard must bring up this problem throughout the entire workers' and peasants' movement for a conscious solution, which will enormously raise the revolutionary potential and the consciousness of social problems of the revolutionary
VIII. THE PARTIDO OBRERO REVOLUCIONARIO In a situation which is so fruitful yet which contains so many which tend to disperse it, the action of the revolutionary Marxist party is decisive. There exist various possibilities, various alternatives, in the development of the situation. But it is necessary to concentrate and raise the objectives to the maximum degree. The party brings out the most possible and correct perspective, and intervenes in the entire process in order to lead it toward that outcome. Guerrillas, strikes, the general strike — these will represent the tendencies of the masses to struggle; but those masses will not alone settle on the objective that centralizes these struggles into the struggle for power. The highest combative level does not of itself solve this problem. Only the revolutionary party solves it. In this stage of the Bolivian revolution, it is the POR that solves it. The prognoses, the orientation of the process that the POR predicted, have been confirmed. The POR has emerged strengthened from the same test that burned up currents. But the stage now opened in the Bolivian revolution requires something more than clear understanding. It requires vigorous action, concentrated and determined, constantly multiplying itself till it reaches the level of the revolutionary dynamics of the situation. The way lies open for the revolution, for the Second Bolivian Revolution. This revolution is not isolated. It has the support of the growing revolutionary forces of Latin America. Siles himself said to the delegates of the Railwaymen's Conference at La Paz: "If the extremists take power in Bolivia, there will be started a fire in Latin America worse than that in Asia, that nobody will be able to stop." This explains the fierceness with which imperialism is trying to smash the Bolivian Revolution. And this explains the immense revolutionary optimism with which we face our revolution's tasks.
Xth CONFERENCE OF THE PARTIDO OBRERO REVOLUCIONARIO 11 April 1958
Neros of the World Workers'
Movement and of the International