STRUGGLE OVER PROGRAM IN DOMINICAN JUNE 14 MOVEMENT
By Antonio Valdés
The June 14 Movement of the Dominican Republic [1J4 -- pronounced one-jay-—four, from the emblem used by the movement in its literature] has recently taken an interesting turn in a development that sheds light on the course of the Dominican revolution in general. A dispute has been going on in the 1J4 for some time (a process we will detail below). The issue is a curious one: whether the movement could or should "transform itself" into a proletarian party advocating socialist revolution.
One section of the leadership, influenced by the dogmatically Maoist Movimiento Popular Dominicano [MPD], held that the 1J4 could not and should not take this turn. The other section, independent-minded revolutionists, said that the party could and should -- and they have gone ahead and done it.
The Dominican political scene today is characterized by two contradictory trends. On the one hand, there is a rightward drift on the part of the U.S.-backed Balaguer regime, most sharply expressed in the continuing terrorist campaign by police and militarists against former rebel fighters. On the other hand, there is an increasing radicalization among the masses. This can be seen in a recent rash of strikes and a leftward turn in the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano [PRD], till recently headed by Juan Bosch. Bosch himself has left the scene, and PRD "moderates" have been resigning under pressure from the rank and file who favor a militant policy. What has happened in the June 14 Movement was the result of a similar, though more radical, process.
The recent report from Santo Domingo by the journalist Norman Gall (World Outlook, Vol. 4, No. 39] is worth recalling in regard to the mood of the masses: "The slum dwellers of Santo Domingo, who defeated crack tank and infantry units during the revolt, still have thousands of arms hidden. Many are frightened and angry about the beatings, deaths, and disappearances in recent months of members of the rebel forces..." Gall quoted a PRD slum dweller who fought in the April 1965 uprising: "The people want to fight again because they don't want to be killed this way."
A more detailed look at the June 14 Movement's evolution is valuable for two reasons. First, it indicates a development similar to that undergone by the Guatemalan guerrillas and, for that matter, by the Cuban leaders after they came to power -toward the view that the Latin-American revolution must be socialist. Second, it reveals once again the sectarian and nonrevolutionary role played by those who follow the theories of that “inspired genius" -~ Mao Tse-tung.
The June 14 Movement was named after an attempted uprising against Trujillo on that date in 1959. It began as a radical nationalist, antidictator party, much like the July 26 Movement of Fidel Castro; and it was composed, like the July 26, primarily of student youth. After Trujillo's death in May 1961 it became a focal point for the increasingly radical activists who militantly opposed the leftovers of Trujilloisn. After the overthrow of Bosch in 1963, Manolo Tavares Justo, the 1J4 leader at that time, led an abortive guerrilla fight, but when he surrendered, he was brutally slaughtered together with about a dozen comrades. In the constitutionalist uprising of 1965, 1J4 militants participated actively in defense of the rebel zone. Following that uprising, in the fire of events the intense debate over the possibility of the 1J4 transforming itself began.
Up to the June 1966 elections the debate was kept within the limits of the leading bodies of -the party, without being put up for discussion in the cells. However, a number of cells independently raised the question. The discussion began to spread to all the cells. of the party, and after the elections it became the issue of the day.
Within the top leadership the majority maintained that transformation was impossible or undesirable. But a sizable minority in the leadership favored "transformisn." They pointed to the increasing influx of workers into the 1J4, which had developed a reputation for militant struggle. The "transformists" argued that the growing working-class element in the 1J4 would eventually demand radical changes in the program and perspectives of the party.
_ In the midst of this discussion, elements of the Maoist MPD, who favored the "nontransformist" position, entered the 1J4. Making a bloc with the nontransformist majority in the leadership -- who were on a lower political level -- these Maoists soon achieved control of the leading organs of the party. Once in controlling positions, they began a campaign against the "harmful and anti-Marxist. thesis" of transformisn.
(A word is in order on what we mean by "Maoism" in this article. Both transformists and nontransformists admire Mao. But the MPD follows the Chinese line faithfully -- including the two-stage theory of revolution, advocating a national democratic revolution to be followed later by a socialist revolution. They hew blindly to a factional and sectarian attitude toward the pro-Moscow Communists. In these ways the MPD leaders show themselves true Maoists. The 1J4 transformists, while they are attracted by Peking's more militant verbal stand in the Sino-Soviet dispute, have not been trained in the Stalinist school of blind obedience. They reject both sectarianism and revisionism. Though influenced by Maoism, they are not, strictly speaking, Maoists.)
The entry of the MPD into the June 14 Movement produced splits within the Maoists’ own ranks. A group of MPD'ers who held their own variant of "nontransformism" broke away and formed their own party, the Partido Communista de la Republica Dominicana [PCRD]. Secondary splits occurred, all on the question of the class nature of the 1J4. Now there are five MPD factions -- the various positions of which are not at all’ clear. The confusion created by the splintering process in the Dominican left can be seen in the party labels. The new Maoist PCRD is distinct from the PCD [Partido Communista Dominicana], which is the current name of the traditional pro-Moscow tendency. Before 1965 the old-line Communists used the same name as those in prerevolutionary Cuba -- Partido Socialista Popular [PSP].
A congress of the 1J4 was held in November. Presumably it would resolve the "transformist" dispute. Those MPD'ers who still remained in the movement successfully dominated the congress, although which splinter they represented was hard to tell. Their political line was carried at the congress, namely that Santo Domingo is a "semifeudal and semicolonial country," that the task at the present stage is the restoration of the constitutionalist government (i.e., the bourgeois democratic revolution), the same stand substantially as that of the class-collaborationist PCD. This similarity of political line did not prevent the Maoist elements from pushing through the congress a whole series of slanderous and sectarian denunciations of the pro-Moscow Communists.
Finally, these "leaders" declared, as though inspired by divine revelation, that the 1J4 "has been, is, and will be a petty-bourgeois party."
’ Others in the 1J4 did not fully absorb these dialectics according to Mao, but began a stubborn fight for the transformation of the party. With two factions formally established after the congress, the transformists rapidly increased in number and influence among the cadres and cells of the party. Before long the nontransformists were reduced to a small group of MPD'ers and sympathizers, mostly at the top.
Things came to a head when the party committees in the eastern provinces, representing cells with a heavy workers' composition, sent in a resolution demanding the expulsion of the nontransformists. Faced with this situation, the nontransformists left the party without being formally expelled and entered one of the factions of the MPD.
Although they took some prominent individuals with them and much of the party's material resources, they did not take the name of the 1d4 or the bulk of the militants. Seven of the former Central Committee of twelve left, among them two outstanding fighters with honorable records of struggle: "Fafa" Tavares, who had run for Congress on the 1J4 ticket in the June elections and who had been a close collaborator of Manolo Tavares Justo; and Guido Gil, also a former collaborator of Manolo and author of two books on Dominican history. Strong in revolutionary spirit, these men lacked political understanding. As one Dominican revolutionary put it, "The problem is they're true revolutionaries, but they're not Marxists."
A closer look.at the conflicting political positions shows a deformed, scholastic Marxism on one side and a healthy instinct for the revolutionary essence of Marxism on the other.
The nontransformists (Maoists) used two basic arguments: (1) that the petty bourgeoisie has the predominant role to play in the current stage of the Dominican struggle; and (2) that the class nature of a party is determined solely by its social composition. . :
"In our country the petty bourgeoisie constitutes 80 percent of the total population," argued the MPD. "Without the incorporation, active participation, and support of these masses, ‘the proletariat cannot carry on the antifeudal and-antiimperialist revolution corresponding to this stage." They maintained that the pettybourgeois masses had to have a party that would mobilize and represent them and that ‘this party would play the decisive role at this stage. And they nominated the 1J4 to be that party, whether it wanted to or not.
The transformists replied that the petty-bourgeois and peasant masses must be organized and led not by a petty-bourgeois but by a proletarian party. And they pointed to nothing less than the experience of the Chinese revolution as a model, where a Communist party organized and led the peasants. The Leninist concept of the workerpeasant alliance, the transformists reminded their opponents, assigns the leading role to the workers' party.
To the nontransformist assertion that the 1J4 was petty bourgeois in social composition and therefore must eternally remain so, the transformists replied that the character of a party is basically defined by its ideological position. If a party has a proletarian ideology and form of organization, it is no longer petty bourgeois, they argued. And they reminded the learned "Marxists" of the MPD what Marx and Engels had said of the petty bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto: "If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat. They thus defend not their present, but their future interests. They desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat."
In essence, the Maoists did not want to see a tendency emerge that would call for a workers and peasants government and the immediate struggle for proletarian revolution. If they could convince the 1J4 militants that they were eternally decreed to be "petty bourgeois," then they would stick to the program of national democratic revolution. It is important to note that of all the left tendencies in Santo Domingo only the 1J4 transformists oppose the concept of "alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie. The transformists hold the position: "War to the death against liberalism!" (Trotsky long ago defined the attitude toward liberalism as the dividing line between Bolshevism and class-collaborationist Menshevisn. )
The impossible involutions of the Maoist theory were brought out when the transformists asked: If the 1J4 is inevitably a petty-bourgeois party, then why is the proletarian MPD in it? To preserve the working-class elements within it from corruption by the petty-bourgeois tendency, came the ineluctable reply. Why a "working class" tendency was fighting to dissuade a group from advocating a proletarian revolutionary program was a more subtle problen.
The militants of the 1J4 broke through this murky theorizing and transformed their party. The Dominican ruling class and its imperialist masters were not slow to recognize the danger to their interests in this development. They have unleashed sharp repressions against these courageous youths who have "placed themselves at the stand~ point of the proletariat."
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