The 1952 Revolution

by José Villa

Part 15

The POR Believed That Paz Would Be Able To Create an Anti-Capitalist Government

The nationalisation of the mines was the main demand which the working class talked about. Paz did everything possible to delay and moderate the measure but finally he carried it out in August 1952. When the government delayed carrying out the measure the POR said, “We cannot understand how a government that has the proletariat on a war-footing and prepared to defend it against any counter-revolutionary, retreats after taking a step forward. (79) (LO, 12.6.52, p.1)

A marxist on the other hand could clearly explain why the government oscillated. It was a bourgeois government under pressure from the masses trying to do everything possible to hold back the latter and, though making concessions, at the same sought time to maintain semi-colonial capitalism. The POR could not explain the tremendous shifts of the regime because of the tremendous illusions that it had.

Like gullible petit-bourgeois the POR believed that the government was a product of the ‘revolutionary will of the masses’ and therefore they should be subordinated to it. “With arms in hand, the working class will know how to consolidate and carry forward any step in this sense made by the present government thrown up by the revolutionary will of the masses.” (80) (LO, 12.6.52, p.2.) Instead of seeing the MNR government as its own, which only needed a push, the party of the proletariat should have denounced it as a usurper which had to be deposed.

The illusions of the POR went to the extreme of believing that Paz himself could initiate a turn to revolution. “It is possible that the President could have made some good proposals for achieving a real economic transformation of the country. But the reactionary element in the cabinet and its brigade of technicians are all openly right wing and therefore make it impossible to improve conditions for the proletariat (..) The left wing will not be able to stand up to the crushing majority which constitutes the MNR right wing unless it is based on the mobilisation of the masses. Meanwhile the present President of the Republic has his hands tied in front of his party comrades and, faced with creating of government of the people or staying President, seems to have chosen the latter”. (81) (LO 12.6.52, p.3.)

The job of a revolutionary party should have been to do everything possible to make the workers distrust Paz and to propose his removal by a new insurrection. For the POR on the other hand he had to be convinced to create a ‘government for the people’. In order to help the President ‘achieve a true economic transformation’ his most right wing ministers had to be removed.

While the POR’s aim was attempting to build up and influence the left of the bourgeois MNR, the latter in its turn was to influence the President to shift his position. The POR abandoned the promotion of class struggle. It replaced it by class persuasion. All revolutionary politics were replaced by a series of pressures on the leadership with the aim of reforming the official bourgeois bureaucracy and thus the President himself.

Every time that President started a speech to ingratiate himself with the radicalised masses, a Marxist should have denounced it as a trick to disorient the masses and an attempt to dress the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

“The bourgeoisie will make you any promises you want! It will even send its delegates to Moscow, enter the Peasants’ International, adhere as a ‘sympathising’ party to the Comintern, peek into the Red International of Red Trade Unions. In short, it will promise anything that will give it the opportunity (with our assistance) to dupe the workers and peasants, more efficiently, more easily, and the more completely to throw sand in their eyes – until the first opportunity, such as was offered in Shanghai”(82) (The Third International after Lenin, L.D. Trotsky, Pathfinder, New York, p.169-170.)

However the POR always ended up saluting every demagogic outburst by Paz. “His speech of the 21st July (1952) is quite clear. He not only offered to ‘nationalise the mines and carry the revolution to the countryside regardless of the consequences’ but promised ‘to arm the miners and factory workers’ so that they could defend the revolution in their own way.” (83) (LO, 3.8.52, p.3.)

This policy of sowing illusions in the revolutionary and even anti-bourgeois potential of Paz was to continue until after the first year of the revolution: “The President, revising the whole of his past political attitude, points to anti-capitalist and not merely anti-imperialist and anti-feudal aims for the revolution. This speech can very easily be regarded as Trotskyist (...) With these words Victor Paz has gone further than all his leftist collaborators who are so determined to hold back and obstruct the liquidation of the latifundia (...) in order that the left turns its victory into effective governmental influence (...) its only solution to the situation created was for the left to impose the total domination of the left in the cabinet”. (84) (LO, 5.8.53, p.1.)

Its complete adaptation to Paz was such that it believed that he was capable of breaking with and expropriating his own social class!

The origins of this individual whom the POR believed would open the road to an anti-capitalist government must be remembered. Víctor Paz came from a family of aristocrats and generals from Tarija. He had been a lawyer for the Patiño concern. He made his debut in politics supporting the bonapartist dictatorships which tried to imitate certain features of fascism (Toro, Busch and Villarroel). He was the President of the Central Bank and Finance Minister in the anti-working class governments of Peñaranda and Villarroel. He founded the MNR with a clearly anti-semitic, racist, ferociously anti-communist platform inspired by nazism and sympathetic to the imperialist axis of Hitler, Mussolini and the Mikado. When his party was in power from 1943 to 1946 it did not touch even one big mining concern or ranch.

On the contrary the MNR aimed its repression at union leaders and at peasants who occupied land. Its symbol was a dictator who was lynched,(85) it massacred the oppressed and took part in the butchery at Catavi. In 1947 it supported Hertzog for the Presidency. Then it spent the whole six years of reactionary rule conspiring with whatever butcher and rosca minister it could. In power it became the best weapon that imperialism had for holding back and reversing the revolution. Once he reorganised and revived the bourgeois state and armed forces Paz accentuated the turn to the right. Víctor Paz was directly responsible for the carnage at Sora-Sora (1964) as well as the atrocities during the period of Banzer’s dictatorship. When he returned to the government in 1985 he was the author of the worst attack on the social gains of the Bolivian workers in history. In just one month he raised prices by fifteen times and then sacked three-quarters of the mining proletariat.

It was a serious crime for a party claiming to be working class to disseminate even the faintest illusion that it was possible that such a reactionary could have ever installed an anti- capitalist government. All wings and sections of the post-Trotsky 4th International are besmirched with that significant historical betrayal since they always supported this policy and never questioned it.

Previous Chapter: The POR Adapts Itself To The MNR Left
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