The 1952 Revolution

by José Villa

Part 21

The Leadership Of the 4th International Identifies Itself With This Menshevik Policy

The whole of the treacherous policy of the POR was given total support by the 4th International. Furthermore the latter admitted to being its guide.

The resolution adopted by the IEC of the 4th International at its 12th Plenum (November 1952) said:

“The way in which the POR has operated so far is, in general correct, and corresponds both to the objective reality and to the real strength of the party.

“Ideologically preparing since before the events of 9th April, the POR was not surprised by them and, above, all it did not fail to correctly interpret them and to adequately adjust its policy (...) This double support was concretised in the critical support given to the MNR government” (114) (Contribución ..., p.241)

Early in 1953 the journal Fourth International asserted: “The POR began by justifying granting critical support to the MNR government (...) it gave the government critical support against attacks of imperialism and reaction and it supported all progressive measures.” (115)(Fourth International, January- February 1953, p.16.)

“Ideologically prepared in advance for the events of April 9, the POR was not surprised by them and above all did not fail to interpret them correctly and to adequately adjust its own policy.” (116) (International Information Bulletin, January 1953, SWP, New York, p.24.)

In 1953 the factional break-up of the 4th International began between the International Secretariat of Michel Pablo, Ernest Mandel and Posadas and the International Committee of the SWP (USA), the French PCI of Bleibtreu-Favre and Lambert and the groups of Gerry Healy and Nahuel Moreno. The split was the result of the latter grouping’s rejection of the tactic of deep entrism within Stalinism. Nevertheless the IC carried out, or would later, deep entrism into social democracy or bourgeois nationalism.

During the split the Bolivian revolution was not discussed. All had supported the POR line. The split was not between ‘orthodox’ and revisionist’ forces but between two wings which had already supported the centrist orientation of seeking to reform dissident Stalinists (such as Tito) or nationalists (such as the MNR).

Much later in the search to find arguments for their factional battles, the anti-pabloists discovered the betrayal of 1952 which they had endorsed at the time.

The International Committee of Healy published a vast collection of seven books entitled Trotskyism versus Revisionism which contained hundreds of letters and documents which were supposed to show its struggle against revisionism. However in none of those volumes is the 1952 revolution mentioned. The extensive first volume is dedicated to the split with Pabloism. More than fifty texts of that polemic are reproduced. Nevertheless in all those documents Bolivia is only mentioned in two brief and passing references of a purely administrative nature. The Vern and Ryan texts are totally ignored. All this merely confirms that the ‘anti-Pabloists’ never questioned the Menshevik strategy at all which was unanimously adopted by the 4th International and that the latter had already shifted towards centrism between 1948 and 1951.

At the beginning of the 70s the Healy current was to develop a particular interest in Bolivia arising from its wish to engage in a factional manoeuvre against the PCI of Lambert, at that time linked to Lora and because it had begun to form its first very active South American section in Peru. In 1971-72 it launched a massive political offensive against the POR, accusing it, correctly, of having conciliated the nationalist Torres government. But these criticisms were made from a sectarian angle as it denounced Lora for having dared to engage in joint anti- gorilla actions with Torres and for not having dared to agitate for the slogan ‘Down With Torres!’ which would have been a blunder at the time as only reaction would have replaced him. Later the journal Clave, in its first number, published an analysis of the crisis of the Trotskyist movement in which many of the criticisms made at the time by the anti-defencists Shachtman and Robles were repeated.

However all these criticism were made under pressure. Healyism supported the pro-nationalist line of the POR in 1952. Its sectarian orientation in the Andes ran counter to its total capitulation to the bourgeois movements of Khomeini, Arafat, Qaddafi and Ortega at the same time. Healyism went so far as to justify the massacres by the theocratic dictatorship of Iran of the Kurds, women refusing to wear the oppressive veil and ‘Trotskyists’.

In 1980 the currents of Moreno and Lambert fused to give birth to the Parity Committee and then the 4th International – International Committee. In the programme that it adopted it said:

“The synthesis of Pabloist betrayal occurred in Bolivia. In this country the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), Bolivian section of the international, led by the hand of Pablo, committed one of the greatest betrayals against the revolution so far this century, equal to, or greater than, that of the Mensheviks during the Russian revolution, than that of the social democrats during and after the First World War, than that of the Stalinists in China, in Germany, in Spain etc. In Bolivia the working class, educated by Trotskyism, carried out – at the start of 1952 – one of the most perfect working class revolutions known: it destroyed the bourgeois army, built up workers and peasants militias as the only real power in the country, and organised the Central Obrera Boliviana in order to centralise the workers movement and the militias. The bureaucracy that led the COB handed over power – which it had in its hands – to the bourgeois nationalist party the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario). Bolivian Trotskyism was a power, it had great influence in the labour and mass movement, it had participated as co-leadership of the working class and popular insurrection that destroyed the army. The International Secretariat (IS), led by Pablo, laid down the treacherous and reformist line of critically supporting the bourgeois government. The present crisis of Bolivian Trotskyism, the present crisis of the whole of the 4th International, the strengthening of Stalinism in Bolivia and of all the petty bourgeois nationalist movements in Latin America, derives from that criminal policy of class collaboration which Pablo obliged the whole of the International to carry out in Bolivia. The Pabloite revisionist principle was always the same; the MNR pressured by the mass movement would see itself obliged to make a socialist revolution”. (117) (Actualización del programa de transición, Nahuel Moreno, Caracteres Ed, Bogota, 1990, pp.40-41.)

What this demonstrated was the greatest cynicism. Lambertism had worked very closely with Lora before subscribing to that position. It was the international current that showed the greatest eagerness to demonstrate that Lora’s POR had always advanced a revolutionary orientation. Pierre Broué, its great historian, wrote a small book in which he defended the official line of the POR in 1952.

The Moreno current never questioned the right-centrist policy of the POR in 1952. In fact it made it its own. While the POR capitulated to the MNR, Moreno was engaged in total adaptation to Peronism. For a decade he was to be dissolved inside it giving allegiance to the leadership and economic programme of the bourgeois Peron. When the POR began to break up in the mid-1950s, the SLATO (American Secretariat of Orthodox Trotskyism), headed by Moreno and Vitale, had a greater affinity with the majority of the Fracción Obrera Leninista of Moller which was dissolved into the MNR. In his major work Moreno admits that Vitale took great pains to win the Moller group to SLATO. Those who went over to the MNR did so under the powerful influence of the pro-Peronist PSRN, within which Moreno, Ramos and pro-Peronist social democrats worked together.

Another current that has just ‘discovered’ that Lora committed serious errors in 1952, is the Partido Obrero of Argentina. This current was one which had unconditionally defended the whole pro-nationalist line of the POR. Its historian Coggiola based the whole of his analysis of the history of Trotskyism in his country and continent, on the basis of total adherence to the conceptions and actions of the POR-MASAS. In its daily practice it has struggled to impose worker ministers onto Peronism and for a front with bourgeois sectors behind a bourgeois democratic programme and a joint presidential candidate. Now it has decided to break with Lora because he supported a dissident faction. Without drawing up any balance sheet of its co-habitation with Lora, Pablo Rieznik published a brief and deficient article in which he belatedly initiates an attack on Lora in 1952.

All the currents that claim to come from the 4th International since 1951-52 are compromised with the historic betrayal of the Bolivian revolution. The lack of a radical balance sheet of the lessons of that crime has meant that all those currents continue to practice different varieties of adaptation to forces foreign to the proletarian revolution. The heirs of Pablo’s IS capitulated before the FLN in Algeria, to Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh’s Stalinism, to Sandinism, to Khomeini, to Euro-Communism and bourgeois pacifism and ecology. The Latin American Bureau would end up following Posadas until its transformation into a puppet of the conservative Stalinists. The different variants of the IC would capitulate to the MNA in Algeria, Peronism & Belaundism in the 50s, where its sections ensconced themselves) Social Democracy and Sandinism. Healy would die converted into an emulator of Arafat, Gaddafi, Khomeini and Gorbachev. The SWP(USA) has ended up openly reneging on Trotskyism and unconditionally hailing Castro, the FSLN and the FMLN. Lambertism survives wishing to form a new international and reformist parties like that of Lula in Brazil and based on the strategy of forming bourgeois democratic governments. Morenoism was always characterised by its embrace of whatever was in fashion among left currents (at different times it was Peronist, Castroist, Maoist, standard bearers of the formation of sections of the Social-Democrat Socialist International, apologists of Walesa’s ‘Solidarity’ and for the immediate capitalist unification of Germany.)

Previous Chapter: The Opportunist International Orientation Of The POR
Next Chapter: References