EXCEPTION? .
By Emmanuel Aguinaldo
MEXICO, D.F. =-- The September election in Chile will be the | most important political event in Hispanic America and perhaps in the world this year, The Communist party of Chile, together with other parties of the left, is running the socialist Salvador Allende as.candidate for the presidency. In all their political analyses they consider it certain that the FRAP [Frente Revolucionario de | Accién Popular] will triumph and that this will therefore signify a triumph for the Stalinist-Khrushchevist thesis of the possibility of. social revolution. through peaceful means, Consequently all the progressive circles in the Americas are watching the southern republic, There, in September, the prestige of the last stronghold of the Latin-American Communist parties is at stake. The triumph or defeat of Allende will accelerate or retard the development of the revolution in all the other countries of the continent.
No one has discounted the possibility that imperialism, in collaboration with the oligarchy and its "gorilas" ["gorillast “~ reactionary military figures] will again utilize its many skills and vast. experience in resorting to force, Likewise no one doubts that in destroying "democracies" in the name of democracy they are really invinoible, A long history-of gorilazos [seizure of power by the “gorillas"] -- mounting in recent years -- demonstrates this, After the Cuban Revolution, under pretext of containing “international Communism" (meaning poor, hungry peasants and workers), military coups d!état have become the order of the day. Those carried out in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Brazil have shown that imperialism and the officer caste seize power whenever and wherever they feel like it, with utmost ease, Apparently they have become invincible.
In reality they are not so invincible as they appear at first sight, as the Cuban Revolution itself demonstrates, What happened is that the manifest vulnerability, the opportunism and low mili-tancy of the leaderships of the Communist parties of Hispanic Amerioa, gave them invincibility. To all this should be added their lack of organization, their sectarianism, and their provincialism which does not permit them to conceive the socialist revolution on a world scale. Besides this the political ignorance of many of their leading oadres. The evidence of this is mountainous.
To list a few cases, above all of sectarianism, let us begin with Codovilla accusing the MNR [Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario] of being Nazi; Blas Roca, major Communist leader of Cuba, refusing to oollaborate with the July 26 Movement until just before Fidel Castro took power, holding that it was a putschist movement; the Peruvian Communists avoiding giving any aid to the peasant militia of Hugo Blanco because Blanco was Trotskyist and consequently, to
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them, a revisionist and provocateur, We also have in Brazil Luis Carlos Prestes, thé ex-knight of hope, making out that the revolution can be oarried out with hugs and kisses; and the Eouadorian Communist leaders waiting for Moscow to give the green light, not to begin the armed struggle, but to support the lesser evil bourgeois candidate.
They argue that so long as the governments of the "representative democracies" permit a little play for democracy it is necessary to take advantage of democratic freedoms to struggle at all levels, mainly the parliamentary one. It is necessary to exhaust all peace-~ ful means ~~ they say, not very ingenuously -- and they dedicate themselves to writing apologetic novels on the misery of the Indian and pseudorevolutionary poetry. They convert themselves into monopo~ lists of the national culture and into receivers of world cultural currents, They know all about the influence of Kafka, of Thomas Mann or of Wasserman on this or that writer but they don't know anything about what Marx or Lenin or Trotsky said with regard to the world revolution,
Doubtlessly they do struggle in reality at all levels, with the exception, it is certain, of the most important: the underground, Even worse, not only do-they fail in this but they lie to the sadres and rank: and file members, telling them that they're ready for the underground and even have a military apparatus, as was the case in Eouador before. the coup d'état of duly ll, 1963.
In this way, when the primates of the State Department and their congeners, the national gorilas, decide that enough rope has been given the Stalinists they do not run into the least problem..or . the least resistance in changing the order of things. Bruskly, the small gains acquired by the Stalinist Communists in their struggle. “at all levels," are undone. The most revolutionary cadres, who are generally not in the leadership, are sent into exile or placed in prison when they are not murdered in the most brutal and inhuman way.
Torture, whether of Communists or non-Communists, since they torture everyone who is not in agreement with the military caste, becomes more and more common, In short, all the "subjective conditions" (in quotation marks) are destroyed, After this, many Communists continue desperate attempts to appear as martyrs and therefore . genuine revolutionary Marxists, citing as proof of this the number | of cases of imprisonment and torture, Against this pedestrian argument we hold that if the revolutionary character of an organization or of a seotor of the population is to be measured by the number of victims it should be measured by their fewness, since this would be concrete proof of the efficiency of the revolutionary organization, Contrariwise we would have to admit that the five million Jews who perished under the Nazi regime constituted the most revolutionary sector of the European population; and that the hundreds of members of the Nicaraguan Conservative party who fell in the slaughters organized by the Somozas were also the most revolutionary elements
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of this Central American country,
. As for the provincial outlook of the members of the Communist parties of Latin America, this is a weight. that pulls the revolutionary movement away from the international level, since, despite calling themselves Marxist-Leninists, they hold the same nationalist prejudices as the rest of the population. Like any other citizen, they never forget for one moment the grudges created by the bourgeois governments in the history.of these countries, like the border conflicts between Eouador-Peru, Peru~Bolivia, Bolivia-Chile, Chile- Argentina, eto. Many of them,. out of -antipathies like these, get so that they don!t want to know anything about the comrades of another country. And since in many places, these parties are completely "electoral" and not revolutionary, it is natural that like the bour~ geois parties, demands related to these grudges serve them as slogans in their electoral propaganda, |
Naturally this electoral propaganda is never aimed at winning the presidency for one of their own members, as would at least be logical; it is always done in backing a member of the ruling bourgeoisie, For example, Lombardo Toledano and his party supported the president just elected in Mexico, Diaz Ordaz. The Eouadorian Communists supported Velasco Ibarra in 1944 and Carlos Julio Arosmena in 1961. The Chilean Communists displayed unconditional servility with regard to Gonzflez Videla in 1948,
; In the three latter instances, persecution was not long in coming from the man they had helped lift into power, No one will forget the unconditional support which Carlos Prestes gave Vargas in 1945 after being held nine years in prison by the dictator,
In the light of all this, is it possible to believe that the Chilean Communist party has learned the lesson? Are they prepared for the coup d'état which the reaction will attempt? Or, on the contrary, are they hoodwinking the working class, leading it to believe that they are ready for the underground and for the armed struggle, the way the opportunist leaders of the Ecuadorian CP did? And if they gain power by means of the ballot box,- are they ready to. carry out the socio-economic and political reforms they have pledged although the country may be plunged into a civil war, or are they confining themselves to bourgeois reformist measures in order not to arouse the ire of the State Department? These questions will be answered in a short time.
The Chilean Communist party is the only one in Latin America that proved capable of gaining big influence among the masses. Its commitment before the working class and the peasantry is much greater than that of the CPts in other countries of the continent. Its suocess or failure will accelerate or set back the social revolution in the rest of the Hispanic American countries as we said at the begin-~ning of this article, What is really a fact is that its failure, if
this occurs, will be the last failure. of the Communist parties of . Latin Amorica, and we say that it will be the last because its disappearance as a party seeking the adherence of the proletariat will be definitive, In the September election it faces a decisive test,