Bolivian Trotskyists Cuddle Up Closer to Peronist Groups

Juan Rey

Labor Action, 7th April, 1952

Santiago, March l8. – Our last article reported the initiative taken by the Central Committee of the Trotskyist POR [affiliated with the Fourth International] in publishing an open letter to the government demanding that power be handed over to the nationalist MNR without a new election. The grounds for this were the 195O elections, when the nationalists, who were supported by the POR, won a majority of the vote.

Now the “dynamic” General Secretary of the POR has published a new open letter in which he again demands support for the MNR and for the “United Front Against Imperialism”. By this move the “strategists” of the POR are backing the Peronist Congress of Workers’ Unions. This outfit was organised by Peron’s agents in Asuncion, Paraguay, with the aim of winning the support of Latin American workers to Peron, not only against “Yanqui Imperialism”, but also against his own Argentine opposition, that is, the workers’ opposition in Argentina.

The Bolivian “official Trotskyists” uncritically support this move by the Peronistas and greet it as the “process of the unification of the Latin American workers”; they assert that it is breaking out of the “narrow aims of the Peronist bureaucrats”, and that it is basically an “anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist movement”. It is very difficult to think of a clearer case of political blindness. Therefore it is that in Bolivia one hears the opprobrious term “Nazi-Trotskyism”, and the student press calls the POR the “left hand of the MNR”.

For Coalition

It is a fact that the POR has consistently backed all the Nationalists’ adventures, such as its “coup d’etat”, has helped to organise the miners to support the MNR, and supported the Nationalists in the 195O elections. This policy was confirmed by the last congress of the Fourth International and its “Latin American Bureau”.

In the Internal Bulletin of the Fourth International Secretariat we read a proud confirmation of the Bolivian POR’s policy of supporting the Nationalists and Peronism. One of the old militants of the POR told us, likewise with pride, that the MNR has offered two ministries to the POR. The Internal Bulletin stated that the POR will proclaim the “creation of the workers’ and peasants’ government formed by the two parties [the MNR and the POR] based upon the aforesaid programme [of the POR] and supported by the workers’ committees, peasants’ committees and the revolutionary elements of the petty bourgeoisie of the cities” [October 1951 Bulletin, Montevideo].

This pro-Nationalist reformism is served up to the Bolivian workers as a revolutionary Marxist programme. This is the “revolutionary policy” of the Bolivian Section of the Fourth International: coalition government with the MNR, which was formed in the Nazi school and with Nazi officers.

Hungry for Power

Behind this theory is its corresponding “theory”: “The programme of the revolutionary party”, the Internal Bulletin says, “must be built by a combination of the anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, and democratic and nationalist spokesmen”, and “this broad conception of the programme must be manifested practically by participation and activity, without any sectarianism, in all organizations and in all movements of the masses which can express, even if indirectly, the aspirations and feelings of the masses, including, for example, the Peronist workers’ unions, the MNR in Bolivia, the Peruvian APRA, Vargas’ labourite movement in Brazil, or Democratic Action in Venezuela” [Bulletin, page 9].

For these people there is no important distinction between the Peron, Vargas and Bolivian MNR movements on the one hand and on the other the APRA in Peru or Democratic Action in Venezuela. But everybody knows that Peron, Vargas and the MNR are totalitarian, while APRA and Democratic Action are petty bourgeois radical organizations of a reformist character.

On the theoretical plane, in our view, the mistakes of the Latin American official Trotskyists are based upon the mistaken concept of the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution in Latin America. But this day is past in the whole world, and today only the working class can carry through such a revolution, which would be a proletarian Socialist revolution, with bourgeois-democratic tasks in some countries.

But outside of theoretical errors and a lack of Marxist culture, the “Fourthist” radicals have a great hunger for power and, filled with pride by the MNR’s offers, are anxious to make all haste towards a coalition government with the totalitarians.

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