ATTACKS REVOLUTIONARY LINE OF OLAS CONFERENCE
(The following article appeared in the August 4 issue of 1'Humanité. It is of special importance due to its sponsorship by the daily newspaper of the ossified French Communist party which is particularly close to the top layers of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Worker, which reflects the views of the American Communist party, gave the article very favorable attention (August 20).
{The puerile arguments advanced by 1'Humanité were answered at the OLAS conference. For instance, Castro responded to the contention that it is quite normal for “socialist countries" to trade with any kind of capitalist countries by stating that what the revolutionaries object to is not trade but the extension of financial and technical aid to the counterrevolutionary regimes participating in the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
{The question of a united front between Moscow and Peking to better help the Vietnamese people is beside the point in this context, since the Cubans were
among the first to urge its necessity. As
for the authority cited by 1'Humanité,
Iuis Carlos Prestes -- with his line of
an electoral road to power and reliance
on the national bourgeoisie -- he is among
those bearing the heaviest responsibility
for the defeat in Brazil.
(Granma, the official organ of the
Central Committee of the Communist party
of Cuba, apparently considered the article
so self-refuting that it ran the full text
(August 23) without bothering to comment
on it.]
* * *
The Wednesday evening plenary ses-
sion of the conference of the Organiza-
tion of Latin-American Solidarity was par-
ticularly marked by violent anti-Communist
and anti-Soviet diatribes from represen-
tatives of “ultrarevolutionary" group-
lets.
Francisco Prada, "political secre-
tary of the unified command of the Na-
tional Liberation Front and the National
Liberation Army" (Venezuela), declared that by "renouncing the armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, the Venezuelan Communist party had betrayed the Latin- American revolution." "These revisionists (of the VCP) seek to sabotage the revolution," he added. Later he attacked the USSR without naming it, stating: "We see Vietnam tragically alone."
Gerardo S&nchez, representative of a leftist group in the Dominican Republic, violently attacked the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries for the trade they carry on "with dictatorships like the one in Brazil." The same accusation was launched by the Brazilian José Anselmo, who said in addition:
"In face of imperialism only two positions are possible: the one taken by Cuba and Vietnam and, on the other side, the one taken by the oppressors, its allies and accomplices."
It is easy to recognize in these words the language used for some years in Peking. This calls for some observations.
(1) The trade which the socialist countries carry on with different political systems and social regimes does not at all imply approval of these systems. It occurs within the framework of peaceful coexistence and in addition permits countries that are under dictatorial regimes not to depend exclusively on imperialism, and in particular American inperialism. The delegates at the OLAS conference, ready to eulogize the Peking thesis, should be aware of the fact that the People's Republic of China also trades -- increasingly all the time -with capitalist countries, no matter what their nature.
(2) To accuse the USSR of abandoning to their fate the Vietnamese people, victims of aggression by the United States, is a flagrant untruth to which the South Vietnamese FNL and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam have already given a fitting reply. The same applauders of the Peking thesis would do better to ask themselves how to explain the refusal of the present Chinese leaders to set up a common anti-imperialist front in order to bring aid to the Vietnamese people.
(3) At the time of their underground session last April (see "l'Humanité" of 5/20), the Central Committee of the Venezuelan Communist party drew up a balance sheet on five years of armed struggle, observing that the forces of the left had been severely beaten. The result was a decline for the antiimperialist and freedom cause, entailing as a consequence for the revolutionary vanguard the risk of being cut off from the Venezuelan masses, if a guerrilla war, hopeless in the immediate future, were continued. It was because of this that the VCP, courageously drawing the lesson of this failure, decided to modify its tactics, while still maintaining the. strategy elaborated in 1961 at the time of the beginning of the armed struggle.
The lesson is analogous to the one drawn by Iwis Carlos Prestes, general secretary of the Brazilian Communist party, on the blow dealt to the antiimperialist movement in Brazil at the time of the military coup d'état in 1964. Speaking of the struggle under way (interview in "l'Humanité" 1/16/67), he declared that "to be victorious, what is required at the head of the masses of the Communist parties is experienced and responsible men, enemies of adventures and effectively guiding the majority of the working class in an alliance with the broad peasant masses."
Recalling that Lenin declared: "A revolution is not stimulated, it cannot be made to order," Prestes added: "Under present conditions nothing is worse than pseudorevolutionary phraseology which contributes to isolating the Communists from the broad masses of workers."
This is the angle from which the leaders of the ultraleftist Latin- American grouplets, inspired by the Peking thesis, could advantageously study the fearful slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Communists which followed the events of September-October 1965 in Indonesia, a consequence of the adventurist line preached in Peking.
Does this mean that the Latin- American Communist parties and workers renounce armed struggle and guerrilla war? Not at all. They refuse only to convert them into a universal panacea and they take into account the conditions applying in each country.
The OLAS conference likewise heard Isais Pardo, representing the Colombian Communist party and its armed forces, who declared: "The Colombian Communists do not abandon an atom of legal action, while at the same time their armed forces continue fighting in the mountains."
Rodney Arismendi, general secretary of the Uruguayan Communist party, declared in substance for his part: "Armed struggle is a higher form of the struggle for freedom, but there exist other forms for the legal parties."
The delegate from Panama, in addition, denounced the transformation of his country by the United States into a military base and a center for the training of "antiguerrillas" in the service of Washington's satellite governments in Latin America.