(The following article appeared in the first issue, dated October-December 1977, of Coyoacán, a quarterly published in Mexico City. The translation and accompanying editorial note are taken from the November 10 issue of Inprecor, a fortnightly news bulletin published by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.]
We are publishing below the lead editorial of a new Mexican magazine called Coyoacán, the editorial board of which includes Comrade Adolfo Gilly, as well as various revolutionary intellectuals, both members and non-members of the Fourth International. The editorial presents a point of view on a subject which is being widely discussed in the Latin American vanguard today.
We do not necessarily agree with all the positions upheld in this editorial. In particular, we would stress two differences. First, we do not believe that a process of construction of socialism is under way in Cuba; this country remains fixed at an initial stage of transition between capitalism and socialism. Second, we do not believe that the Latin American working class as a whole has only a "nationalist" level of political "consciousness" (bourgeois or petty bourgeois). One of the major characteristics of the past decade has been precisely the fact that significant sectors of the Latin American proletariatparticularly in Chile and, to a different and in a different form, in extent Argentina-has begun to go beyond this level of consciousness.
The military coup in Argentina closed a cycle of capitalist economic development in Latin America during which the political regime of the bourgeois state sustained itself socially through an alliance of the leading sector of the national bourgeoisie with the proletariat and other exploited sectors of the population. This does not mean that this cycle had not been closed earlier in other countries of the continent, nor that it did not continue in more limited forms in some other countries. But it does mean that in the most developed capitalist country in Latin America, the one with the best organized and most socially powerful proletariat, the possibilities for survival of this alliance of classes under bourgeois hegemony were exhausted, although the influence of national bourgeois ideology on the consciousness of the working class did continue, taking the political form of Peronism. As this occurred in the most mature country, the possibilities for a new surge or recovery of bourgeois nationalism in Latin America as a whole were closed— which does not mean that bourgeois nationalist tendencies disappeared from the political scene, nor that they can no longer intervene in the event of fresh crises, in the absence of a workers leadership.
The decline and fall of the bourgeois nationalist regimes enjoying mass support, whose paradigm was Argentine Peronism, were ultimately rooted in the insoluble contradiction between the limits of the economic possibilities of these regimes in the current international situa tion and the impossibility of continuing to use their usual policies and methods of holding the working class down. Only a new cycle of capitalist economic recovery, the preconditions for which do not exist and are not on the agenda, and an excessive extension of the delay in the formation of a workers leadership would be able to create the possibility of a future rise of bourgeois nationalism. But this variant appears more remote and improbable today.
The maintenance of the rate of capitalist accumulation is caught between two antagonistic forces: the fall of the rate of growth of the dependent economies of the Latin American bourgeoisies and the re sistance of the proletariat and the masses (who use the organizations created under the nationalist regimes, on which these regimes in turn relied in mounting relative resistance to imperialism) to the loss of their gains and fall of their living standards which would be required to preserve this rate of accumulation.
Behind these antagonistic forces lie a series of factors which require a change in the forms and methods of organization of capitalist accumulation and preservation of the political and social structures of the capitalist system in Latin America.
Among these factors are:
a) The world crisis of capitalism, the end of the long postwar boom (which coincided with the rise of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in Latin America and made their alliance with the masses possible), and the beginning, as of 1968-70, of a new long wave of recession of the world capitalist economy; b) The economic growth of the camp of the workers states (despite internal crises and persistent economic imbalances), whose overall rate was greater than that of the capitalist camp as a whole, in spite of the latter's continued advantage in the most advanced economic sectors and in technology; ge The demies found it i Amit, an baterc) The dependent Latin American bourimpossible, to absorb and incorporate the conquests of the technological revolution and to prevent an accelerated widening of the technological gap between themselves and imperialism, especially the U.S. metropolis (the effects of this were particularly devastating precisely in those Latin American countries with the greatest capitalist development and the strongest proletariat); d) The general reorganization of impe rialist strategy after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973-75 centered on reinforcing the central ramparts of capitalism-the United States, West Europe, Japan-and the consequent attempt to consolidate the economic, political, and especially military submission of the Latin American zone of imperialist security in accordance with the objectives of the overall strategy against the workers states and the European proletariat; e) The organizational and programmatic advances of the working class-despite its obvious unevenness and interruptions in various countries-which was linked on the one hand to its numerical increase and social insertion into the process of industrialization in Latin America and on the other hand to the objective (and also subjective) influence of the development of the workers states, the worldwide advance of revolution (Vietnam in particular), and the struggles of the European proletariat (especially Italy, Spain, France), all of which shaped a process of general rise in the specific weight and consciousness of the proletariat.
These five factors, which were fundamental but not exhaustive, caused a shift in the relationship of forces between the national bourgeoisie and the working class in Latin America. This took different forms in the various countries, depending on the previous level of organization and consciousness of the contending classes.
In general, however, the decisive factor in the outbreak of the social crises which brought the police-military dictatorships to power in the southern part of the continent was not the emergence of a "new model of capitalist accumulation" resulting from the combination of the economic development already in progress with the capitalist crisis and technological revolution, as some economistic interpretations of Marxism claim. The decisive factor was the resistance of the working class to the reorganization of the Latin American capitalist economy at the expense of the workers' conquests and social positions. Without this resistance, without this "inelastic" element, the reorganization could hee be carment peacetalist meetin
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lation through unemployment, wage cuts, and a general reduction in mass consumption.
End of Bourgeois Nationalist Course
The explanation for the sharpening of the social crisis and for its violent outcome must be sought not in the economy, but in the class struggle, although its ultimate roots obviously do lie in the economy. But this is not the immediate explanation for the terrorist dictatorships; rather, it is the inability of the regimes of the national bourgeoisie to make greater concessions to the masses or to overpower and defeat their resistance in the absence of concessions.
The situation is not the same in coun tries in which the level of organization or specific weight of the working class in society did not allow it to mount the same resistance to the new plans of capitalist accumulation or to raise the class struggle to a level intense enough to threaten the stability of the state. This explains, among other things, the specificity of the Central American countries as well as the "exceptional" course of the Mexican regime. But the same basic tendencies operate in these societies. For this reason, although new national reformist regimes are not excluded, they will absolutely not enjoy the economic and historical conditions (and the consequent maneuvering room) that previously existed in Argentina, Bolivia, or Chile. The splendors of the sunset can sometimes resemble those of the sunrise, but they are at the opposite side of the horizon.
Under the new international, national, and Latin American conditions, this resistance of the proletariat posed the question of whether the pace of capitalist accumulation would continue. In the last instance, it posed the question of the functioning of the system. But in the absence of a revolutionary class political leadership, neither the state nor power of the bourgeoisie was placed in question.
The military dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina did not take power blood. lessly, but after great general strikes-in 1973 in Uruguay and 1975 in Argentinawhich objectively posed the question of power in both countries, although the working class lacked the party and leader ship that could have offered a class response. The organizational strength of the proletariat posed the question of power; its lack of a revolutionary leadership prevented it from becoming conscious of this question and resolving it. In Chile and Bolivia the rise of the proletariat within the nationalist and reformist course of the Latin American revolution placed the problem of power on the agenda in other ways, but no one could offer a workingclass response. In all four cases it was this sharpened challenging of the bourgeois regimes and the latter's inability to find a way out while still maintaining the "demo cratic"
structures of the state which resulted in the resort to the army and a military-police dictatorship as an ultimate solution. It was the same response, albeit with differences in time and place, as that of the Italian bourgeoisie when it opted for the fascist coup in face of the general strike and factory occupations of 1920, when the workers severely threatened but did not destroy the bourgeois state.
In both cases the crisis marked the exhaustion of the bourgeois nationalist course and the end of its policy of social reforms from the top down.
The precocity of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which took power in 1964, resulted among other things from the fact that Goulart's bourgeois nationalist course had begun to open the way not to the seizure of power by the working classwhose level of consciousness and organization in Brazil was far from adequate for this-but to an agrarian reform and a latent or overt peasant war, which under Brazilian conditions would have triggered a revolutionary dynamic that would have finally overturned the entire stability of the capitalist system. Both imperialism and the Brazilian army had studied the logic of the Cuban example sufficiently to realize that they could not afford what would have amounted (in Brazil, no less) to a peasant mobilization from below for the expropriation of the latifundistas and an agrarian reform. Hence the "modernizing" character of the Brazilian military regime, bankrupt as it is, of course. Moving to the other extreme, the Peruvian officers attempted to respond to a similar problem through a reformist road: modernize the social structures of the country from above, without the intervention of the masses, at the cost of partially sacrificing the interests of the landholding oligarchy and compelling it to "recycle" its capital, investing in industry.
In spite of their apparently contradictory features and very different political methods, which depend on the situation in each country, the military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and even Ecuador do have a common denominator: They aim at maintaining the continuity of the bourgeois state against the masses, at containing, substituting for, or violently repressing the revolutionary mobilization of the working class, and at overcoming the threat of violation of the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole, even at the cost of sacrificing some immediate interests of specific sectors. For this reason, imperialism, in the course of the complexity of its relations with the military regimes, offered them greater or lesser support (or in some cases went so far as to withdraw support, as happened by stages in Peru and Ecuador), but did not promote or encourage any real mobilization against them, not even by significant sectors of the "civilian" bourgeoisie and its parties. The most it did was stimulate "minor skirmishes," but not violent coups like the ones against Allende or Goulart.
But the persistence of these military regimes without any civilian alternative in sight indicates the depth of the crisis of the bourgeois system in Latin America, and not its strength. It is an expression of the fact that the bourgeoisie in these countries lacks the traditional political vehicles, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties. The army has to fulfill the function of guaranteeing the continuity of the state (and acts which takes power in as an arbiter emergency situations and later restores it to "civilians"). The army is transformed into the direct executor of bourgeois policy against the masses.
State, government, and army form three distinct categories which are interlinked and complement each other. They do not function under the rules of a bourgeois republic. Because of the sharpening of the crisis of the entire system, the three are compelled to fuse into one-in the form of a military-police dictatorship. This leaves the bourgeoisie without political alternatives. Under such conditions, to overturn the government would amount to destroying the army, which forms a single entity with the dictatorial regime, and that would mean destroying the state. This would create a "Cuban" or "Vietnamese" situation of the type that existed under Batista or Thieu.
The bourgeoisie has no alternative to this sort of situation, unless it manages to endow itself with a reformist workers leadership whose political convictions lead it to try to guarantee the continuity of the bourgeois state. In the last instance, this is the common logic of the policies of the Argentine and Chilean Communist parties, which, under different conditions, oriented toward solutions that did not lead to posing the question of workers power, that did not open a process toward workers power, which they see as a "blind alley" (and according to their conception of revolution by stages, the same held by the Cuban Communist Party in 1959, there is indeed no "way out" of this problem). In this sense, these Communist parties-and this is not the exception, but the ruleshare the rightist logic of "Eurocommunism," although they do not make even the most minimal of Eurocommunism's "leftist" criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy, but continue to be the most loyal defenders of Moscow orthodoxy. (This is enough, it may be said in passing, to belie the sincerity of the supposedly "Leninist" criticisms the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party has made of the reformism of the "Eurocommunists," since Moscow's most faithful followers in Latin America practice a reformism of the most nefarious sort without receiving the slightest criticism from Moscow.)
Under these conditions, the dictatorial road did not open a new cycle of capitalist accumulation. But no return to the nationalist and reformist road was possible, not only because the economic premises for it were lacking, but also because the level of mass mobilization that would have been necessary to overturn the military dictatorships could not have been contained within the framework of the capitalist system. This represented one of the greatest difficulties in developing a bourgeois alternative to these regimes, a Frei or a Balbin, or some equivalent.
Nevertheless, in its turn the working class did not have its own alternative either. Now it must be constructed under more difficult conditions. The workers are defending their standard of livng. Under especially adverse conditions they are maintaining their organizational tradition, relying on it to carry out the minor or medium economic struggles that are possible. The class has suffered severe defeats, but has not been atomized or disintegrated. It enjoys a world situation favorable to the maintenance of its cohesion.
But it does not have its own program: its level of consciousness is still nationalist (that is, subordinated to the hegemony of bourgeois ideology, although its level of organization is proletarian (that is, separate from and opposed to the bourgeoisie, through trade-union organizational forms). Because the working class has not put forward a proletarian program in response to the situation, it has been unable to attract the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie to its banner. It could do so in action, but the possibilities for action are quite limited and, since they are not linked to a working-class political program, time and time again they end within the limits of the programs of the bourgeoisie.
This explains the programmatic limits even of the most heroic actions of the vanguard. They have not succeeded in building a bridge between the needs and elementary democratic demands around which the united front against the dictatorship is organized and the subsequent development of a democratic, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist process as an alternative to these militarypolice dictatorships and their states.
The difficulty in organizing this transition does not lie solely in the reality of the terror of the dictatorships, great as it is, but also in the concrete level of consciousness and organization of the proletariat and the masses. It is here that the vanguard must root the development of a class alternative to the bourgeois state, the break of the consciousness of the class as a whole (and not only a limited vanguard) with the ideology of the bourgeoisie and its state, the development of socialist consciousness. This is something we did not do, not even in Chile. To organize this programmatic and organizational alternative in the consciousness and life of the working class means in practice to organize the mass revolutionary Marxist party, the absence of which, for reasons of specific historical circumstances, was a decisive element in the defeats of the previous stage, in the failure of the mass movement to make the transition from the nationalist phase to the socialist one.
The persistence of the struggle of the working class under these conditions, albeit on the trade-union and factory level, has not only practical consequences, but also theoretical repercussions (as is shown by Argentina and Bolivia, and, to a lesser extent, by Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil). This cannot be directly expressed by the class, which lacks a party and is subjected to cruel persecution. But it is manifested in a visible programmatic maturation among sectors of the revolutionary vanguard, in the overcoming of the "guerrillaist" ideologies which substitute the "heroic presence" of the vanguard for the organized action of the class, and in the concern for Marxist theory and for the necessity of a party of the working class.
The programmatic maturation has been made difficult in many countries because of repression and the exile of militants. In other countries the masses lack any party organs. Above all, it is expressed only by an intellectual vanguard. But it arises not from revolutionary intellectuals, but from the struggle of the proletariat and the masses under the dictatorial or authoritarian governments or under the conditions of limited and precarious democracy that prevail in other Latin American countries.
This advance of the Marxist program is decisive for the foundation of the alternative to the bourgeois state. Before it can take form among the masses, it must be organized in theory. Hence the decisive importance of the discussion of the program of the Latin American revolution for the task of building mass workers parties in these countries.
This discussion has gone beyond, or is in the process of going beyond, one of the most sterile polemics: that of the "armed road" versus the "democratic road." This polemic identified the armed struggle with the revolutionary road, ignoring the fact that it is perfectly possible to wage an armed struggle for completely reformist and democratic objectives (as the recent history of various Latin American countries has confirmed), struggles that in no way attack the essence of the bourgeois state. This polemic raises to the level of strategic and principled problems what are in fact only alternative tactics. It thus avoids the essential problem of the socialist revolution itself: the question of the state.
The organization of the revolutionary Marxist party is precisely the response to this problem. The character of the party is defined by its program, which consists not merely of the enunciation of a series of particulars, but above all involves the methods, conceptions, and objectives around which the party organizes the masses on the basis of the given levels of organization and consciousness they have attained. The revolutionary party does not commit the infantile mistake of rejecting as a matter of principle the conquests of bourgeois democracy and legality; by definition, these are always concessions wrenched from the bourgeois state by the organized strength of the proletariat. On the other hand, the existence and functioning of the party must not depend on whether or not the bourgeoisie respects these conquests.
The essential characteristic of the Leninist party is not its organizational schema, but the fact that the party's existence, functioning, and thought in no way depend on its relations with the bourgeois state, the party's seats in parliament, or its freedom of the press and association. By the same token, the absence of these freedoms is not a precondition for the maintenance of revolutionary principles. The party expresses the complete independence of thought and decision-making of the working class with respect to the state of the bourgeoisie, whether "democratic" or dictatorial. In this sense, it may be said that the party is the counter-state and that the seeds of State and Revolution are already contained in What Is to Be Done.
This independence does not result from a simple material break with the state provoked by the repression of a dictatorial government. It arises from a programmatic break; it is founded on the program of the party in the construction of a new state, the state of the working class, whose foundations begin to arise through the conquest of the organizational independence of the working class in the factories and work places, even when the government and state of the bourgeoisie still exist.
It is this programmatic and organizational independence of the proletariat which makes its alliance with the peasan try possible, winning the latter away from the influence of the ideology of the bourgeoisie and its state or party organs. And the worker and peasant alliance continues to be, under very different conditions in the various countries of Latin America, the indispensable condition for the victory of the proletariat and wage earners over the state, army, and government of the bourgeoisie and over its foreign supporter, imperialism.
Since the new course opened in Latin America with the closure of the cycle of the bourgeois nationalist movements at its highest point, in Argentina, the working class and its actual or potential allies have found themselves in a new situation. A new power bloc-composed of the agrarian bourgeoisie oriented toward exports, national banking and finance capital, and the foreign multinationals—controls the governments or is preparing to impose complete control. The bourgeois state is strong in that its character is dictatorial and authoritarian, but it is weaker than ever in terms of its consent from the masses. Most of the national-bourgeois movements are exhausted or in decline because they lack the national or international economic conditions for offering the masses a "new alliance" and for recovering the former support of the masses for the state. The new power bloc is closely linked to imperialism and directly depends on its support. The old alliance of the national-bourgeois movements with the masses, under the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie, cannot contend for power. But at the same time, the working class does not command the instruments with which to organize and put forward its own alternative, primarily its own party. Nor has it completely broken with its dependency on national-bourgeois ideology. Its organization in the unions and the factories is class organization, as we said above, but its ideology is nationalist, not socialist.
The central task of the Marxist vanguard is to organize-in practice, not in documents-the transition from this nationalist and anti-imperialist consciousness to anti-imperialist and socialist consciousness.
There is a decisive element in this transition: the anti-imperialist struggle. With the decline of the hegemony of the national bourgeoisie and of its possibilities for recovery; with the indispensable role of imperialist support in maintaining the power bloc that props up the military dictatorships or aspires to impose them in the rest of Latin America; with the new global strategy of imperialism, which regards all of Latin America as falling within its economic-military security zone and maintains its technological and financial grip on the reorganization of capitalist accumulation in the region; with all these conditions, the leadership and major responsibility for the struggle against imperialism once again objectively falls on the shoulders of the working class.
But precisely because of this interlacing of the military and economic interests of imperialism on the one hand and the new bourgeois power bloc on the other (even though the political frictions which normally exist in an association of this kind continue to persist in this bloc), the struggle against imperialism acquires something like an anticapitalist character. Although it is not directly anticapitalist, but rather national and anti-imperialist (and this results in large part from the insufficient maturity of the consciousness of its protagonists), the defeat and expulsion of imperialism is interlinked, in an uninterrupted and uninterruptable process, with the expropriation of capitalism, which would be deprived of its major military and economic support if imperialism were expelled.
To maintain its positions and respond to the exigencies of its own nationalist and anti-imperialist consciousness, the working class is led to occupy the position that the national bourgeoisie, previously the bearer of this consciousness, has abandoned: the resistance to imperialism. It is thus led to take the leadership of the struggle against the penetration and domination of foreign imperialism, to take the lead in the national struggle. But this struggle, abandoned by bourgeois nationalism, can be successful only if it goes beyond the limits of this nationalism, which has led it to the present defeats and retreats. The proletariat is now facing the necessity of moving from anti-imperialist nationalism to socialist anti-imperialism. It has begun to use its proletarian class struggle and forms of class organization (factory councils, trade unions, parties) as a lever for the organization of the struggle of the nation against imperialism, relegating to second position the purely "national" considerations which blur the class line dividing the workers from the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.
This means completely altering the content of anti-imperialism and changing the force that holds hegemony within it. The transition from anti-imperialist nationalism to socialist anti-imperialism retains a common link with antiimperialism, but its class character changes. It means shifting from antiimperialism as a (nationalist or pettybourgeois) national-bourgeois ideology to proletarian anti-imperialism. The program must include the expropriation of all imperialist enterprises, the expulsion of imperialism from the country, the agrarian revolution and the distribution of all land to the peasants, and the full conquest of democracy. It also includes the social organization of the entire proletariat, peasantry, and poor petty-bourgeoisie, the trade-union organization on a workshop basis of all the wage earners of the city and the countryside, and consequently the affirmation of their democratic decisionmaking power over all the forms of organization of social production. In Latin America the complete and radical expulsion of imperialism means the foundation of a new state that holds a monopoly of foreign trade and plans production and builds socialism; its social base is the organic alliance of the workers and peasants, and it must resolve the land question in an equally radical manner. This makes the revolution, and with it democracy, indestructible. It is the logical consequence of the process of permanent revolution, which begins from the present level of consciousness and organization of the working class and the masses and leads from the anti-imperialist struggle to the socialist revolution. This is precisely the lesson of the Cuban revolution, which, even twenty years later, must be studied in depth in order to generalize its fundamental theoretical and programmatic lessons.
The struggle for this course of the revolution is national, but also continental, in scope. The new power bloc, interlinked with imperialism in each country, is only formally national, unlike the industrial bourgeoisie linked primarily to the domestic market, which was previously dominant in some of these countries. Consequently, its extranational interests, which are determined by its association with imperialism, lead these regimes to a continental policy whose common basis, in spite of the persistence of competitive interests among them, is provided by the senior partner, the United States, and is determined by the collective necessity to confront the workers movement and the masses socially and militarily.
This accentuates the continental character of the struggle and of the objectives of the Latin American workers movement. Obviously, there are specific features in each country. Only an abstract and sectarian conception of the struggle for socialism would ignore these. Conditions in Mexico and Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, are not identical, nor are the forms of bourgeois domination or the organizations and traditions of the proletariat, peasantry, and the masses. It would be absurd to place all of them under a common denominator, just as it is absurd and at bottom reactionary to ignore or efface the economic, political, and historical specificities of the various countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, lumping them all in a single category labeled Third World.
But even though the revolution begins from specific traditions, forms of organization, and roads in each of the Latin American countries, the form of imperialist domination accentuates the continental character of the revolutionary struggle more than in the past. In turn, this will be further accentuated as the objective content of the struggle passes from the antiimperialist nationalist phase to the socialist program, internationalist by definition and in its essence. Thus, it is necessary to grasp both the national peculiarities and the general Latin American articulation, which is not subsumed by the mere coordination of the struggle of each coun try, but is based above all on the programmatic features common to all of them: antiimperialism and socialism.
The forms of maturation and levels of organization and consciousness are different in the various countries. But the Latin American and worldwide process tends to sectors. The class consciousness of the Latin American proletariat lies in its vanguard, which through the many and violent forms of its struggles is advancing toward socialist consciousness and toward recognition of the necessity for a mass revolutionary Marxist vanguard party. This advance is not linear; it is a transition laden with obstacles and difficulties, permanent transition in which one contry, Cuba, is already building socialism.