In the Americas there is only one market, one imperialist power; all of the economies are geared to the needs of the USNA imperialist class. This is the material base for the developing hemispheric revolution which will overthrow our common oppressor. Thus our crucial task becomes to win the peasant masses of South America as the reserves of the Anglo-American proletariat. Unlike the CPUSA we know that all radical phrasemongering about national liberation in general is chauvinist demagogy without a determined struggle in support of the liberation struggles of the colonies of Puerto Rico and the Negro Nation for their independence from U.S. Imperialism.
Puerto Rico is and has been a direct colony of USNA imperialism since l898. It has suffered imperialist oppression during that whole period and has fought back valiantly. The Puerto Rican national liberation movement strikes at the one same enemy which also opposes proletarian revolution in Anglo-America, USNA imperialism. Puerto Rico as a colony of USNA imperialism serves imperialism but we must change this situation and Puerto Rico must become a reserve of the Anglo-American proletarian revolution, for without it we cannot succeed here. The dialectics of the situation demand also that we become the reliable support of the Puerto Rican national liberation movement. Only by marching together in one unbroken line can the Puerto Rican proletariat and peasantry and the Anglo-American proletariat advance towards socialism.
The 40’s represented the departure point for the reorganization of Puerto Rican social forces. The crisis of the 30’s in the U.S. had its effects on the colony which Puerto Rico was and continues to be and on the independence struggle being waged. Puerto Rico suffered the devastating effects of this crisis. The broad, impoverished masses in Puerto Rico, cornered by the crisis and lacking a real revolutionary Communist Party began to rally around the Nationalist Party, whose highest leader was Pedro Albizu Campos. This was the time in which the Nationalist Party had an extraordinary upsurge among wide sectors of the people, which in its turn served as a basis for the many protests which took place in the factories, schools, communities and towns of the island during that time. The inability of the Nationalist Party to put into effect a mass policy which would set forth an effective solution for the working masses, permitted imperialism to channel its politics of aggression through the creation of the Popular Democratic Party, the PPD, The PPD whose highest leader was Luis Munoz Marin, the son of Luis Munoz Rivera, was the imperialist instrument through which a pale reformism not only succeeded in momentarily quieting down the Puerto Rican anti-imperialist movement but also served for 30 years, a and still serves, to put imperialist politics in Puerto Rico into effect. Imperialism promoted the creation of the PPD not to represent the interests of the toiling masse but to quiet down their cries of protest. In this sense we could not have expected anything different. As early as the colonial elections of 1944, in which the PPD was overwhelmingly victorious, that party began to fully expose itself as an instrument of imperialism. When they realized what this situation was, those elements of the Puerto Rican national bourgeoisie who had closed ranks within the PPD formed their own political party to continue the struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico. In this way, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) arose. The Nationalist Party, which represented the most radical section of the national bourgeoisie, had been crushed by imperialism toward the end of the 30’s and its leadership assassinated, or jailed together with its leading figure, Pedro Albizu Campos, The new bourgeois leadership which went on to lead the independence movement did not have the strength nor the radical, anti-imperialist character of the Nationalist Party. This is a result of the new attack which imperialism unleashed against our country.
During the first decades of the century North American capital spilled onto the agricultural base of the country and proletarianized the countryside, and then, after the Second World War, launched its attack by exporting industrial capital. In Puerto Rico, the industrialization process is the process by which imperialism definitively smashes the Puerto Rican national bourgeoisie converting it In fields in which it is still allowed to: operate, into a junior partner in the exploitation of the broad working masses. So, imperialism forms, through this avalanche of financial and industrial capital, a Puerto Rico with a numerous working class and a Puerto Rico with eminently capitalist relations of production.
The uprising of the 30th of October, 1950, promoted by the Nationalist Party, was the last armed attempt to take power made by the remnants of the national bourgeoisie. This uprising was a desperate but useless attempt with no possibility of success but it marked the first attempt against North American imperialism in the history of Puerto Rico. Many patriotic elements died in the attempt and some together with those who carried out the attack on the US Congress which was also promoted by the Nationalist Party, are still today in prison in the USNA.
The struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico was broken down in the 50’s by these events. It was for Puerto Rico a period of reorganization of social forces, given the avalanche of Yankee financial and industrial capital. Toward the end of the 50’s specifically in 1959, the Pro-Independence Movement (M.P.I.) was founded. There then arose a phenomenon new to the independence struggle: the petty-bourgeoisie arrived on the political stage to lead the independence of the international struggle of the Algerian Revolution and, the one that affected it core, the Cuban Revolution. This new situation has been called The New Independence Struggle.
The organization of the Puerto Rican workers during the whole period of the 50’s fell into the claws of North American unions which are nothing but imperialist instruments. It is important to point out that during the 50’s more than half a million Puerto Ricans driven by hunger and poverty, migrated to the US, principally New York.
It was then, that the M.P.I, took the reins to lead the independence struggle. In essence, the struggle came to be led by the petty bourgeoisie. This process took, place together with a new economic development on a world-wide scale, the crisis of capitalism, and the war in Vietnam. The broad Puerto Rican laboring masses began to feel the weight of the economic crisis and the class struggle began to sharpen.
The cadre within the MPI who realized the petty bourgeois direction of its policies, and other Communist cadre, began to propose the creation and construction of a Party of the working class as the immediate task of the Puerto Rican revolutionary forces.
The PIP, which suffered an electoral disaster, reorganized itself on a new basis, a petty bourgeois basis. The petty bourgeoisie, organized around these two parties–the PSP-MFI and the PIP, also felt the weight of the economic crisis and answered by putting on socialist clothing, but which, at heart, was and is revisionism and petty bourgeois ideology, in order to win the broad working masses to their side.
The economic crisis which is hitting Puerto Rico through imperialism has little by little enthroned a fascist type of government which has fought against independence, workers’ and student movements in various ways. The repression unleashed against organizations such as “Proletarian Cause” which was broken up by it, and the “Socialist Revolutionary Party ML”, are the most recent examples of this situation as also are the repression against workers on strike, like the General Electric strike, the El Mundo newspaper strike and the telephone strike. The situation of repression is one of the most important aspects of Puerto Rico today. But the most important aspect, around which the broad working masses unite, is the high cost of living. The rise in the cost of living is an imperialist form of making the costs of its aggressive wars, like the Vietnam War, and its arms race, fall on the shoulders of the working people.
The wage-freeze, together with the rise in prices, it in fact an underhanded way of reducing workers’ wages and of increasing the capitalists’ surplus value and margin of exploitation.
The petroleum superport which they are trying to build in Puerto Rico to solve the US Petroleum crisis is a form to try to increase the degree of imperialist domination over our country even more. We also struggle against such plans.
The independence struggle in Puerto Rico is today headed on a firmer path. The principal task of the creation and construction of a Party of the working class based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought has been begun by the Socialist Revolutionary Party-Marxist-Leninist. The great working masses begin to get out of the sphere of Yankee syndicalism where they have been imprisoned for more than 40 years. The struggle against the state of repression unleashed by imperialism is beginning to bear fruit. The struggle against petty bourgeois ideology and contemporary revisionism represented in Puerto Rico by the PSP(MPI) is being carried out by the most conscious Communist elements.
The struggle for independence and socialism in Puerto Rico, the struggle against imperialism both in Puerto Rico and in the USNA, is and will be arduous. New struggles await both working classes against their common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and therefore, the closest union between both, based on that proletarian internationalism which has led the international proletariat to great victories, is required.
The above report was presented to the Conference by the Socialist Revolutionary Party(ML) of Puerto Rico and was unanimously accepted. In addition an introduction was added to demonstrate the need for the Anglo-American working class to militantly show their support by demanding concretely INDEPENDENCE FOR PUERTO RICO.
During the workshop, two main deviations were also discussed on the question of Puerto Rico, which will be summarized here.
The primary deviation on the Puerto Rican national colonial question is white chauvinism and the secondary is bourgeois nationalism. This white chauvinism is expressed towards Puerto Ricans by Anglo-American so-called revolutionaries is the line that the main profits of the USNA imperialists are made here, off of the Anglo American working class and not off the colonies. This white chauvinist lie, put forth mainly by the CPUSA and their conciliators denigrates the importance of the national question and breaks the links between the working class and the oppressed peoples. Thus it is a major task for Anglo-American revolutionaries to explain to their own working class that it cannot be free without independence for Puerto Rico, a task that the CPUSA and their conciliators have never done.
The CPUSA claims to support the liberation of Puerto Rico but in fact it dealt it a severe blow in 1949 when it liquidated all communist work in Puerto Rico along with that in the Negro Nation. Today the CPUSA supports the revisionist PSP and its tiny partner-in-crime, the CP of Puerto Rico.
The CPUSA also pushes the syndicalist line that national minorities are not part of the Anglo-American working class and their liberation struggles are separate from the proletarian revolution. This is the theoretical justification for the CPUSA’s fight to divide the working class, to render it unable to perform its historical mission, the liberation of all humanity.
The other secondary deviation is that of bourgeois nationalism. The main advocate of which is the PSP (Puerto Rican Socialist Party) formerly MPI. Their bourgeois nationalism, disguised as Marxism-Leninism is qualitatively different from the militant nationalism of the Nationalist Party of Albizu Campos, The PSP’s position is basically reformism and reduces itself to two main theses: the “divided nation” and the “two-stage” theory.
The “divided nation” theory says that the Puerto Rican nation exists both in the island and in the locations in the Anglo-American nation in which live the large concentrations of Puerto Ricans, particularly in the ghettos of New York, Chicago, & Boston. To deny that a nation rests in a common territory is to deny the nation itself and to fall into the “national cultural autonomy” of Springer and Bauer.
The “two-stage” theory calls for a period of an independent bourgeois republic. While New Democracy is essential in semi-feudal countries, Puerto Rico is overwhelmingly industrial and even the vast majority of the rural toilers are proletarians. This position of ”no socialism now” represents the attempt by the petty-bourgeois revolutionaries to use the working class to defeat the imperialists and then deny the proletariat state power and maintain capitalism with the petty bourgeois in control. This can only lead to the continued hegemony of the USNA imperialists.
The Anglo-American proletariat must fight for Independence for Puerto Rico and Full Equality for the National Minorities, as the only way to unite the working class and turn the reserves of the bourgeoisie into reserves of the, proletariat.