"A Bolshevik line is characterized not only by its revolutionary sweep but by its political realism. These two aspects of Bolshevism are inseparable. The most important task is to be able to recognize a revolutionary situation at a given time and to exploit it to the fullest. But it is no less important to be able to understand when this situation has become exhausted and been transformed, from a political point of view, into its antithesis.... You should turn your back contemptuously on anyone who tells you that this is pessimism and lack of faith. Closing your eyes to the facts is the most wretched form of lack of faith."-Leon Trotsky
Two years may be no more than an episode in the history of the social struggles of a people, but it is more than enough time for revolutionists to draw the essential conclusions about a defeat. However, this has not been done.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the establishment of the most barbarous military dictatorship in the history of Argentina, illusions are still being encouraged that bourgeois-democratic institutions in this country are going to resume functioning. Illusions are being fostered about a counteroffensive by the workers that will shortly overthrow the dictatorship, as well as about the capacity of the structures that existed before the coup to organize and lead such a counteroffensive.
In my opinion, such predictions repres ent a grave error in analyzing the series of social developments we have seen in the Southern Cone of Latin America and in assessing their scope.
In order to characterize the situation prevailing in Argentina two years after the establishment of the military dictatorship, it is necessary to clarify the reasons why this dictatorship was established and how it was possible to impose it.
A Counterrevolutionary Trend
In my opinion, the establishment of the military dictatorship on March 24, 1976, represented the consolidation of a counterrevolutionary trend that began in this region with the triumph of the counterrevolution in Chile on September 11, 1973, the ouster of the Cámpora government that occurred about the same time in Argentina, and the defeat of the general strike and the annihilation of the people's and revolutionary organizations in Uruguay.
This turn was foreshadowed by the toppling of the Torres government and the dissolution of the People's Assembly in Bolivia. It culminated in the coup in Argentina.
It is necessary to charaterize the objective conditions in which a coup such as the one in Argentina could take place. There are some who contend that this operation was the only way out, the regime's last resort in defending itself against a mass upsurge that could no longer be contained. That is, they argue that it was the only way the regime could stop a prerevolutionary situation from developing into a revolutionary one. In my opinion, this is an incorrect assessment.
The coup in Argentina was a simple exercise of setting up a military junta to fill the power vacuum left by the crisis and disintegration of the final expression of Peronist Bonapartism. This crisis and collapse were not the result of the emergence of a revolutionary class-struggle tendency within the Peronist mass movement that could have challenged the Peronists' operation. It was the result of the exhaustion of the material basis for the Peronist mass movement and the absence of any alternative leadership with a mass following, authority, and a national organization capable of coordinating struggles and offering a socialist solution.
In Chile, the military junta led by Pinochet had to confront and slaughter a vanguard that was on the advance, which was developing embryonic organs of dual power that were undermining the structure and stability of the bourgeois state. But in Argentina, the counterrevolutionary coup came as the result of the exhaustion of a prerevolutionary situation, in the absence of any revolutionary solution. This is the general framework in which the process has developed.
The process clearly sharpened with the beginning of the end of Peronist Bonapartism, which was marked by the ouster of Cámpora in 1973 and the establishment of a bourgeois coalition allied with imperialism against the autonomous mass movement.
This turn was consummated by the return of Perón and the installation of the third Perón government. Its effects were shown in the bureaucracy's losing its authority and control over important sectors of the workers movement, in particular in the north (the sugar workers), in
Córdoba, as well as in the steel industry and important sections of the automotive and other growth industries in Greater Buenos Aires. Likewise, it led to the appearance of embryonic forms of workers self-organization, such as the Coordinating Committees.
The union bureaucracy and Peronist government's loss of authority over the workers vanguard was shown by the fact that the Peronists could no longer offer a program of national liberation to contain and canalize the masses but rather had to resort to the terrorism of gangs of armed thugs, which were maintained by the union bureaucracy and worked in conjunction with the police and army intelligence services.
A dress rehearsal for the counterrevolutionary terror campaign of the military junta was staged with the help of the big
Miguel, bureaucrats such as Lorenzo l Smith, and others under the third Perón government. As has always happened historically in such cases, by discouraging independent mass action and keeping it disorganized in order to defend its special interests, the bureaucracy dug its own grave. When the workers movement was thoroughly disoriented, the military junta put the bureaucrats in jail. Like the Social Democratic ministers without portfolio, the Peronist ministers without portfolio got their reward. But the masses paid the price.
Decline of Peronism
This contradictory process of different class tendencies emerging within the Peronist mass movement could not fail to occur, and will inevitably continue. When I spoke of the exhaustion of the Peronist mass movement, I was referring to the elimination of the material bases that made it possible for a mass movement of historic dimensions to continue within the framework of the capitalist system and under bourgeois ideological domination. I was not speaking of the exhaustion of this political and organizational experience for the workers. I did want to emphasize that such a movement could not be maintained unless it made the dialectical leap to becoming an independent class-struggle movement.
This did not occur, for both objective and subjective reasons. In the process of the decline of Peronism, we cannot fail to take into account the role played by the bureaucracies of the workers states, by the
Communist Party, or by the fact that worldwide imperialism has become more experienced in dealing with such phenomena. In other words, the crisis of leadership in the workers movement has been demonstrated most dramatically in the wearing out of the Peronist mass movement.
This is why I said that the consolidation of the counterrevolutionary course in Argentina, with the military coup of March 24, 1976, was not the result of a counterrevolution staged to prevent a revolutionary leap but rather of a prerevolutionary situation becoming exhausted in the absence of a revolutionary solution. This was the difference with respect to Chile.
In an article of this scope, I cannot place the exhaustion, crisis, and breakup of Peronism in its broader and more complex context. But this fate was not peculiar to the Peronist mass movement. In the worldwide economic crisis of capitalism, the margins for maneuver have narrowed in the so-called third world. And this affects the general range of nationalist populist movements that arose in the postwar period.
Moreover, the role of the traditional bourgeois parties has been undermined by the new forms of imperialist penetration, the restructuring of the ruling class, and the association of the old sectors of the classical "native bourgeoisie" with the classic "landowning oligarchy of growers and ranchers." This process produced a profound crisis in these parties. Thus, along with the Peronist bosses, the traditional bourgeois parties gave up their place in running the crisis-wracked state in a gentlemanly manner to the military junta. While carrying it on their shoulders, they avoid the blame for its "excesses" in violating democratic rights.
Scope of Defeat
The organized workers movement in Argentina has suffered the most extensive defeat in its history. Making such a statement has nothing to do with saying that there has been a historic defeat. No one can say whether or not there will be a historic defeat. But if there is, this will occur not in the Argentine context but on a world scale. And we have no basis for making such a prediction, although we continue to maintain that the alternative is between "socialism or barbarism," and it is still to be determined which way the world will go.
When I said that this has been the most extensive defeat, I meant from the standpoint of the scope of the mass movement that ended in failure, and which failed not because of the force of the repression but because of its own intrinsic weakness.
From the time of the coup to the present, more than 10,000 persons have been killed. According to the government's own figures, more than 7,000 persons have been imprisoned. More than 22,000 persons have been kidnapped and have subsequently disappeared. More than 300,000 persons have been forced into exile. We might say that an entire revolutionary generation has been shattered. The figures are eloquent. The entire politically organized vanguard in Argentina could not have been much larger than the total number of those imprisoned, killed, kidnapped, and forced into exile.
However, it is not the numbers of the dead, the imprisoned, and the exiled that determine the extent of the defeat. Victory might have been even more costly. It was more costly for the Vietnamese people, for instance, and for the Algerian revolution.
Nor is the extent of the defeat determined by the mere loss of all the gains the workers had achieved, by the imposition of military tutelage on the trade-union organ. izations, the banning of all political organizations, the trampling on the most elementary democratic rights, and the fact that completely uncontrolled secret bodies have been given the power of life and death over every citizen.
In a civil war no one demands or gets democratic rights. But in Argentina all this is taking place without a civil war. That is where the tragedy lies.
The extent of the defeat is shown by the absence of any political perspective for organizing the masses on the national level, by the absence of any credible political perspective, by the absence of a vanguard with any confidence in itself or with any authority for the working class, and by the absence of any authority by the working class itself for the rest of the exploited population.
The political vacuum left by the breakup of the Peronist mass movement has not been filled, and there is no workers organization in the country capable of advancing any slogan or political perspective other than fighting for elementary economic gains.
The entire workers and revolutionary movement has been encouraged by the emergence of two factors: (1) The military junta's plans have failed, and unmistakable signs have appeared of internal disputes and contradictions in the regime. (2) Along with this, large-scale strikes have developed.
What the Wave of Strikes Showed
It is claimed that the power of the workers remains intact, that there has not yet been a general test of strength, and that the resistance by the workers is growing and spreading throughout the country.
Argentina has undergone modern capitalist development; 82% of its working population consists of wage workers; it has a stable national industry. So, the working class cannot be destroyed; it can only be suppressed. The strikes show the power of a working class driven to desperate measures in order to survive. Its wages today are half what they were in 1960, lower than they have been at any time in the last thirty-five years. Inflation is expected to run at about 400% this year, the highest rate in the world. Unemployment is estimated at 20%, which is one of the highest rates in the world.
I am not trying to minimize the importance of the strikes but rather to place them in their concrete context so that we can utilize the existing possibilities to the fullest. If we confuse the struggle for survival by superexploited workers with a stage in which the workers movement is regrouping its forces for a prerevolutionary advance, such as that exemplified by the Córdoba uprising in 1969, we are going to assume that what we have to do today has already been done.
Moreover, as important as they have been, the strikes have not succeeded even in making up for the lost buying power of wages. And in a series of cases, while such actions have won certain material gains, these have gone hand in hand with layoffs, sometimes massive in scope, and with the decapitating of factory organizations, jailings, kidnappings, and executions.
The most important thing about the recent strikes is that they show that the workers' standard of living has been reduced to an intolerable level and that the regime has been unable to destroy the factory organizations of the old Peronist mass movement. Some of these organizations, as well as some cadres of the workers movement, have survived the repressive offensive of the military junta. The problem has been posed of what road revolutionists should follow in responding to these developments and how they can pull together these elements.
I do not discount the fact that a section of the ruling class, especially the middle or small industrialists dependent on the internal market, dream of an alliance with sections of the displaced bureaucracy in order to press for a redistribution of profits, which today are monopolized by the big companies linked to the multinationals.
I do not deny that some imperialist forces cherish the notion that they can compete for the raw materials and cheap labor offered by the Latin American market by promoting antifascist democratic fronts headed by Frei in Chile, Lanusse or someone else in Argentina, General Seregny or some other bourgeois "progressive" in Uruguay, and the old leaders of the MNR [Movimento Nacionalista Revolucionario-Revolutionary Nationalist Movement] in Bolivia. They have in fact raised such a perspective. The Social Democrats have spoken quite explicitly about it. The time is favorable for trying to organize Social Democratic parties, since the vanguard of an entire generation has been physically and politically liquidated.
What Kind of Alliances?
To seek an alliance with those bourgeois and imperialist forces interested in such fronts, to promote the idea of such an alliance in the name of fighting for the democratic rights of the masses, when the masses have no organization, policy, or program of their own, means helping to tie the masses to the chariot of these "democratic" bourgeois elements. It means "forgetting" once again the principle of the united front: "strike together but march separately."
In the conditions created by the defeat of the workers movement, the centrists and former bureaucrats can be a useful and easily manipulated tool. So, in Argentina, for example, why not promote a labor party headed by the bureaucrats who prepared the way for the defeat, who murdered the vanguard, and today are being kept in comfortable conditions in the military junta's prisons as extra pawns in case they might be needed?
As Marxists we cannot fail to recognize that one step forward by the class as a whole is more important than ten or a hundred taken by its vanguard. But as Marxists we can also distinguish the first tentative attempts of the workers to organize themselves from the bourgeoisie's plans to take advantage of the defeat they have suffered and prolong its own existence. I think that if such plans materialize, we Marxists will have to develop a line and tactics to deal with them. But I maintain that we cannot adopt an orientation today toward such a labor party.
History never repeats itself exactly. And it is unlikely that we will see a reedition of the kind of mass movement that dominated the past thirty years of political history in this country. There is no material basis for it.
Effect of World Economic Slump
The deepgoing economic and social crisis in Argentina is the result of the impact of the worldwide crisis of capitalism on a country dominated by imperialism and subjected to the new forms of imperialist domination and penetration. We have no basis whatever to say that the capitalist system will find the means for overcoming its crisis and still less to say that an economically dependent country such as Argentina will find the means for maintaining the rate of profit and exploitation of surplus value while at the same time carrying out a redistribution of income.
In the best days of the Peronist mass movement, wages accounted for 50% of the national income (and some statistics put this at 52%). Today they represent 31%. In some industries, such as textiles, wages now amount to no more than 13.7% of cost price and in cement 10.7% of cost price, while the cost of capital in these industries amounts to 25% and 30% respectively (Prensa Económica, October 1977). Even so it has not been possible to moderate the crisis of the system.
I do not discount the possibility that there may be attempts, even by sections of the army itself, to reconstruct a bureaucratic layer that could serve as a mediator in regulating national wage levels, based on a new equilibrium in the internal market. This cannot be excluded in view of the failure of the junta's economic plansand let's make it clear once again, these are not the plans of the junta as such but of the Argentine bourgeoisie-and of the deteriorating role of an army occupying its own country.
However, I do maintain that, if it occurs, any such reconstruction of a bureaucratic layer will be designed to hitch the proletariat to the cart of imperialism and to block the possibility of the workers organizing independently.
In the objective conditions in which the restructuring of the organized workers movement in Argentina will have to take place, the experience of the Spanish Workers Commissions, which were built in a long underground struggle against the Franco regime, has inestimable value. I am not talking about any mechanical transposing of this, but about a dialectical assimilation of a very rich social experience.
Restructuring the politically organized workers movement in Argentina with a perspective of establishing its class independence must be the central concern of the revolutionary-Marxist vanguard. Since the consolidation of the counterrevolutionary trend, objective conditions have changed. But our line has not. It continues to be for organizing the workers on the basis of class independence and revolutionary principles.
To illustrate this, let me give an example. The Second World War confronted us with the need to conduct our unconditional defense of the USSR in a different context, but it did not oblige us to change our line toward the Soviet bureaucracy. The establishment of the military dictatorship makes it necessary to fight for democratic rights, but we do not change our line on the role of bourgeois tendencies, or on the character of the bourgeois democratic institutions or bourgeois parliamentarianism.
The fact that the unions have been put under military trusteeship means that freeing them from this control becomes a primary task. But we do not change our characterization of the Peronist tradeunion bureaucrats, who are no less betrayers because they are being held in reserve in the prisons of the military or because some of them have paid for their treachery with their lives.
All sorts of tactics are theoretically possible, and none can be ruled out in advance. However, it must be understood that what sort of tactics you use and what kind of alliances you seek is conditioned by whether or not a politically organized workers movement exists.
The Fourth International was planned and founded in the context of one of the most extensive defeats in the history of the workers movement. It is possible to build revolutionary organizations in periods of defeat, but these can be no more than the bases for building mass parties when the masses erupt onto the political scene. It is impossible to try to build a mass workers party in the context of defeat, unless what you have in mind is something other than the conscious and organized expression of at least a section of the working class.
In taking up the task of restructuring the workers movement and its vanguard, we face modern, sophisticated methods of counterrevolutionary terror. We face not simply a military junta in one country, but a repressive policy coordinated and applied by imperialist centers. In the Southern Cone of Latin America, the military juntas are trying out policies that were tested in Algeria and Vietnam and then updated and perfected.
It would be incorrect, in view of their social base and character, to define these military juntas as fascist regimes. But it has to be understood that the repressive methods they are using have been taken from the fascist arsenal and applied in a modernized and improved form. The Nazi regime had its laws, its courts, and its offical hangmen. These military dictatorships have perfected the system.
In such a situation, it is hard to conceive of any other form of struggle but underground, conspiratorial organization. It is for this reason that the experience of the Workers Commissions in Spain is so important. The Argentine working class is going through a tragic experience but a rich and profound one as well. Underground forms of struggle are becoming part of everyday experience. The battles for day-to-day economic demands and to parry the repressive measures are giving form to underground political organizations.
The workers know how to utilize every legal chink that may appear in the repressive apparatus. But they do not rely on such openings, and are spontaneously organizing themselves in clandestine or semiclandestine forms. Alongside every union organ, every plant committee, every body of shop delegates, and every union, where these exist, the new vanguard is spontaneously turning to clandestine ways of operating.
Now that the military junta has been in existence for two years, there can be no illusions that the failure of its economic plans, or the interbourgeois or interimperialist conflicts in the country are inevitably going to clear the way for a rapid return to the normalcy of bourgeois parliamentarianism.
Although in carrying out the tasks of restructuring the working class, all such conflicts must be taken advantage of, the struggle is still going to be a long and hard one. The alternative we face is not "fascism or democracy" but "socialism or barbarism." For the vanguard, this alternative poses the need for building a solid nationwide network of clandestine organizations. This must be done within the perspective of struggling for power and for socialism, based on economic planning and the running of society by the workers.
In view of the wearing out of the dictatorships, we cannot rule out the possibility that attempts will be made to replace them by less bloody civilian governments.
However, if we start out from an understanding of the fact that these regimes are the result of a general crisis of the system in the backward areas dominated by imperialism, if we realize that they are necessary to prolong the death agony of this system, then it is wildly speculative to advance the perspective of these dietatorships being defeated in a peaceful political process.
To the contrary, it may be foreseen that the organization and growth of resistance by the working class will give rise to very violent social struggles, with all their implications.
The revolutionary teams that developed in the final stage of Peronist populism are going through a very deep crisis. The Social Democrats and Stalinists are trying to take advantage of the disarray of these groups for their own ends. By formulating a program for the resistance, a program for this stage, and by working to restructure the workers movement, revolutionary Marxists will play a very great role in recoalescing these teams around the task of making the socialist revolution.
It is difficult to conceive of a task of such scope being achieved in the framework of one country. The Latin American revolutionary movement as a whole faces a new and difficult historic challenge. It is more than ever necessary to pool our experience and coordinate our forces on a continentwide basis. The resistance faces not only the down-at-the-heel Argentine bourgeoisie but the might of the world imperialist system, whose trump cards include the compliant attitude of the bureaucracy in the workers states.
International solidarity, proletarian internationalism, and the revolutionary upsurge in Europe will be of vital importance for the organization of the continent-wide resistance of the Latin American workers and for reducing the pains of a difficult birth.
Nationwide Strike Supports Political Prisoners
High-School Students Challenge Somoza
Time
SOMOZA
President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua announced April 28 that he was granting the demands raised by a nationwide strike of high-school students that had lasted more than three weeks.
The strike began April 5 at the Masaya National Institute where students de manded the resignation of teachers supporting the government. The movement spread quickly and by April 11 dozens of schools had been occupied throughout the country. Soon 50,000 students were on strike and had shut down 80 percent of Nicaragua's public and private schools.
The student movement was accompanied by street demonstrations and other protests against Somoza's dictatorial rule. This latest wave of actions began April 10 when memorial masses were held in many churches to mark the third month since the assassination of publisher and opposition leader Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. The ceremonies were followed by demonstrations by thousands of students and occupations of schools and churches.
Protesters clashed with National Guard troops in several cities on April 10. One woman was killed in Diriamba and six youths were wounded in Managua, Granada, and Jinotepe.
Developments such as these continued throughout the month. In an April 24 dispatch from Managua, New York Times correspondent Alan Riding said that "clashes between demonstrators and National Guardsmen take place almost daily in cities throughout the country. So far this month, at least five protesters... have been killed."
Riding quoted one opposition leader as saying "the country is in an insurrectional mood. I would never have believed the could become politicized so masses quickly."
In addition to the student strike and other actions, a hunger strike was initiated March 30 by Albertina Serrano de Jaén, mother of imprisoned Sandinista guerrilla Marcio Jaén. She was demanding that her son and Sandinista leader Tomás Borge be removed from solitary confinement in Tipitapa prison.
The hunger strike gained wide support, and by April 13 more than 100 persons were participating in churches and seminaries and at the Red Cross hospital in Managua where Mrs. Jaén was staying. The high-school students added the hunger strikers' demands to their own.
Somoza at first attempted to break the students' movement. On April 14, when forty-eight churches and more than fifty schools had been occupied by students and other protesters, Somoza told the occupiers they would have seventy-two hours before the National Guard dislodged them. But only one such effort came, on April 20, when soldiers shooting into the air and firing tear-gas grenades removed forty students from the Masaya National Institute. Thousands of persons came into the streets to protest the attack and were dispersed with tear gas.
The strike continued. The regime's Ministry of Education decreed that all high schools would be closed for the rest of the term and that all students would lose a year of studies. Somoza withdrew this decree April 25, and three days later announced that he was giving in to the demands of the high-school students.
Banzer Claims Divine Assistance
"God is a nationalist," Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer told an election campaign rally April 21. "He has helped me in carrying out my policies, which benefit the country through order, peace, and labor; and in throwing out the foreign and destructive interests."
Bolivia's military regime is backing Gen. Juan Pereda in the presidential elections it has set for July 9. Banzer told those attending the rally in Cliza that they should vote for Pereda because "he will perfect my policies and correct the errors I have committed involuntarily."
Part of demonstration of 6,000 at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons
Mary Imo/Militant
Facility in Colorado April 29.