FIRST WORK BY RECABARREN APPEARS IN CHILE
The first volume of the Obras Escogidas [selected works] of Luis Emilio Recabarren, founder of the Federacién Obrera de Chile - [Chilean Workers Federation] and the Partido Socialista Obrero ©... «. Socialist Workers party], was recently issued in Santiago de Chile.
As the main figure in the successful work of establishing a section of the Third International in Chile, the Chilean Communist: ::party still hails Recabarren as of historical importance; however, the Chilean CP has never published his works. The reason is that Recabarren, like Marigtegui and Ponce, helped establish Latin-American Marxism. His words therefore sound like a condemnation of the present-day policies of the Communist party. oo
In one of Recabarren'ts pamphlets, included in the first volume of Obras Escogidas, the following appears: "The (Russian) Communist party did not believe that it could win power by electoral means, by legal means as the Social Democratic parties, the parties of socalled order, continually urge us, since by means of the legal use of the vote, the election of parliamentarians, the working class will never succeed in taking power and abolishing the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression."
Another source of embarrassment to the present-day leaders of the Chilean CP is Recabarren's attitude toward certain leaders of the Russian Revolution. After founding the Chilean CP in 1922, Recabarren visited Russia the following year. Upon his return, he published a small book of 96 pages entitled Workers -and--Peasants Russia -which has — been included in the present collection. He failed to mention Stalin
once. On the other hand, he had some glowing things to say about» Leon Trotsky, and cited long extracts from Trotsky's report to. the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Recabarren described the organization of the Red Army and the outstanding role Trotsky played together with Lenin. ~
The editors of the collection are Jorge Barrfa, Julio C. Jobet and Luis Vitale. In presenting the first volume, Luis Vitale observes:
"An abyss of almost three decades separates the previous revolutionary generation from the new one, a long period of political | retrogression in which the original thought of the genuine socialist fighters was systematically buried. The linking up of the previous...” generation -- which responded with exhiliration to the appearance of the first socialist revolution in Russia -- with the new generation that arose after the Cuban Revolution, was a prolonged and often cruél period for the handful of fighters who sought to maintain the genuine Marxist tradition in face of the brutal ideological terrorism of contemporary history. But the laws of history once again proved to be stronger than all the power of the bureaucratic machines; and today we are witnessing the restoration of the truth, promoted by the new generation which is seeking its natural connection with the heritage of its ideological forefathers. To the rediscovery and publication of the works of Ponce and Maridtegui, we now wish to add the theoretical legacy of a Chilean thinker: Luis E. Recabarren, whose selected works we present for the first time after the laborious work of bringing together his pamphlets, many of them mutilated, deliberately hidden, or mysteriously removed from the big libraries. Recabarren was not only the founder of the Chilean workers movement and of the CP but was Chile's first revolutionary Marxist thinker and one of the outstanding social thinkers of Latin America, a precursor of Ponce and Maridtegui."
THE THESES OF THE WFTU CONGRESS
By Livio Maitan
The "