Workers Vanguard and the Bolivian Revolution

[p009] WORKERS VANGUARD AND THE BOLIVIAN REVOLUTION With its document ‘The Bolivian Revolution and the Deviations of the POR’ (published _ in Workers Press from June 29 to July 5, 1972) the ‘Workers’ Vanguard’ of Greece wanted to present to the ICFI its positions on the latest events in Bolivia and on_ their reflection within the Fourth International. We must, however, see clearly that this document is something more than a simple presentation of the Bolivian problem or a simple political placement in regard to it: it is at the same time the partial result and manifestation of a whole approach, of a certain Workers Vanguard and Bolivia political methodology, not at all new, as much within the Greek as in the world workers’ movement. Marxist criticism must not confine itself to a criticism of conclusions, but advance to an understanding of the way in which these conclusions were reached, to sharpen the method of its criticism by making a criticism of the method which was followed. Deviations of the POR The ‘Workers’ Vanguard’ criticism of the POR does not seem to have set out from this point. In the introduction to the document, we find, as a methodological ‘explanation’ of the deviations of the POR, its abandoning ‘... of the struggle for an understanding of dialec- tical materialism as a theory of knowledge’, ‘...its prag- matist adaptation to circum- stances and its negligence and disdain of Marxist theory’. This is all the document has to say. Afterwards it returns to the empirical events. Does the ‘Workers’ Van- guard’ believe that with the ceremonial recitation of a credo on the basic principle of the ICFI on revolutionary theory, the whole subject of the POR’s abandonment of dialectical materialism is exhausted? Without showing the principal cause of this anti- theoretical stand? Or, to look at the question from its other side, does the ‘Workers’ Van- guard’ believe that an essen- tial theoretical development of the POR would have been pos- sible, had it taken up the struggle for theory, but carried it out within the stifling 7 cc

[p010] localized framework where Lora’s leadership had confined (and still does) the Bolivian Trotskyist movement? The abstract truth of the necessity for the struggle for dialectical materialism is trans- formed into its opposite when it remains cut off from the concrete material reality which it reflects. For us, an enmity towards theory is inseparable from a rejection of internationalism. The disdain of the POR leadership towards the struggle for theory is inseparably tied to the disinterest it has always shown towards the building of the Fourth International, its persistent refusal to base revo- lutionary work in Bolivia on the foundations of inter- national revolutionary perspec- tives. The struggle for the develop- ment of the science and philo- sophy of revolutionary Marx- ism cannot be undertaken fruitfully in a vacuum, nor in the solitary studies of isolated learned scholars, nor in the local office of some national party suffering from the characteristic political myopia of the leading group gathered around Lora, as far as inter- national political developments and internationalist responsi- bilities are concerned. Marxism is always developed only through permanent struggle against its opposite, the rejection of Marxism — every kind of revisionism — a struggle which does not unfold in the field of academic sword- play, but on the battleground of class conflicts, for the build- ing of revolutionary parties which will lead the working class to power and mankind to the first truly human civiliza- tion. And all those who take their weapons for present-day con- flicts from the arsenal of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, are well aware that ‘in the present epoch, an international epoch, a national revolutionary party can be built only as a part of an international party’. (L. D. Trotsky, ‘Centrism and the Fourth International’.) Only by starting from an international strategy and an international programme, which are organizationally expressed within the inter- national form of a world party of socialist revolution, can revolutionaries in each country see in a_scientific light their national peculiarities and con- cretize, under local conditions, the tactics and strategy of the smashing of the bourgeois state. Marxist theory was developed within this inter- nationalist framework, within the struggle for the world party, the International, against every liquidationist — trend, against every attack of bour- geois ideology from without or from within Between the struggle of Marx and Engels against the Bukunin anarchists at the time of the First International; and through the fight of Lenin and Trotsky against the social- traitor reformists of the Second International and against petty-bourgeois leftism for the building of the Com- munist International; between the struggle of the Inter- national Left Opposition and Trotsky against degeneration into a Stalinist bureaucracy for the building of the Fourth International and through the struggle of the International Committee against the liquida- tionist attempts of Pabloite revisionism, the same red thread runs without a break. The worldwide struggle of the proletariat does not tolerate breaks. Often, in times of retreats and defeats, the Marxist van- guard remains concentrated in small minority groups. But it swims against the current, waiting for the next revolu- tionary wave which will bring it to the head of the masses, guarding all the theoretical and practical experience of the workers’ movement which is found embodied in Marxism. This does not at all mean that the Marxist is transformed into a museum guard. To the contrary, the Fourth International and the Inter- national Committee were able to surpass the imperialist storms and Stalinist brutalities, to defeat all the revisionist attempts at adapting the Inter- national to counter-revolu- tionary defeatism and to arrive armed on the threshold of this new revolutionary epoch, because for three decades, on all fronts of the class war, they defended Marxism in the only genuine way: by developing it further. What role did Lora and the leading group of the POR play in this whole process of the defence and development of Marxism, within the struggle for overcoming the world crisis of revolutionary leadership and the building of the Inter- national? Only within this concrete framework can the question of the abandonment of the struggle for theory by the leaders of the POR be posed. About these internationalist responsibilities not taken up by the POR, about the nega- tive international role which it played, the ‘Workers’ Van- guard’ (WY) says nothing in its document. And as we shall see, this is not an accidental omission. Lora’s leadership, at the time of the big split in the Fourth. International in 1953, maintained a completely Pab- loite stand with regard to the nationalist MNR government which finally prostituted the Bolivian revolution of 1952. On the Latin American level, he put most of his weight behind revisionist _ policies, against the ICFI, and bears full responsibility for the liquida- tion and disfiguration suffered by the Latin American Trot- skyist movement at the hands of Pablo, Posadas, Mandel and Maitan. He came into conflict with the Pabloite Secretariat, pro- ceeding clearly from local criteria and aspirations, while on the other hand he refused repeatedly to take up the struggle of the ICFI for Trot- skyism in Latin America. When he reapproached the ICFI he again took as his starting point the problems which the Pabloite faction of Gonzalez Moscoso created for him. He always was and is in opposition to any attempt whatsoever to base revolu- tionary activity on internation- alist foundations. This shortsighted localized view and anti-internationalism are at the root of the oppor- tunist adaptation of the POR to bourgeois nationalism, the horizon of consciousness of the local national bourgeoisie. So we see that in the final analysis, without revolutionary theory (and development of theory) not only can there be no revolutionary _ practice, there can only be practice (or inaction) adapted to the limits of bourgeois society. The POR did not act as a revolutionary leadership in the latest revolutionary situation in Bolivia because it lacked the theoretical weapons which are acquired only within the theo- retical and practical struggle of Fourth International Winter 1972/73

[p011] the International, only in tie arena where the working class, as an international entity, struggles against the world- wide system of oppression. This connection between the anti-theoretical and anti- internationalist stand of Lora’s group, between the struggle for theory on a national and inter- national level and the revolu- tionary practice of the Inter- national and its sections, does not seem to have been noticed by the WV. The crisis of capitalism This weakness in grasping the dialectic between the inter- national and the national is also evident in the main docu- ment, which lacks the first distinctive characteristic of a Marxist document: the correct historical dimension. In the lengthy diatribe on the counter - revolutionary bourgeois nature of the Torres dictatorship, this regime is nowhere placed as it should be within its international framework. There is only a reference to the fact that this was a coup d’état that took place within this world crisis of capitalism, which the WV characterizes as ‘cyclic’. This assessment by the WV certainly does not surprise us. In 1966, at the 3rd Conference of the ICFI, when this group was still a minority within the EDE, it agreed with Robert- son that we were at least 10 years away from a crisis of capitalism, So from that time, the posi- tion of the WV concerning the world economic situation was diametrically opposed to the ICFI’s analysis. In one of the group’s docu- ments again, after April 21, they talk about a crisis which, when at some time it acquires social depth, the dictatorship in Greece will fall... But in the latest document which we are now studying, we see again that they con- front the present-day crisis of capitalism as though it were one of the periodic crises which the process of the accumulation of capital has experienced up to now, and which have always been fol- lowed, as Marx's analysis points out, by periods of rela- tive stabilization until the next crisis, and so on, Such a characterization of Workers Vanguard and Bolivia the present-day world econo- mic crisis, which in the final analysis foresees that sooner or later the crisis will be sur- passed and replaced by a new boom, would not find a Mandel, for example, in dis- agreement. International strategy ————— Se The ICFI, on the contrary, has based its international strategy on an_ entirely different assessment. Today’s crisis, the collapse of the world monetary system and of all the economic and political relations based on the decisions at Bretton Woods, are more widespread and deep than any that capitalism, in its whole history, has known before now. We are on the threshold of the greatest revo- lutionary earthquakes that class society has ever known. It is certainly not enough for a Marxist to acknowledge the crisis that imperialism is undergoin throughout the world and from there to con- clude mechanically that for this reason ‘therefore the Torres coup took place’, for this reason ‘therefore a revolu- tionary situation was created in Bolivia’ etc. The most essential point of a Marxist analysis is the one where it is shown how in every concrete situation and under particular conditions _ the general trend of the epoch manifests itself. That is, how the need that imperialism feels on a worldwide scale to come into total conflict so as to smash the militant decisiveness of the oppressed masses, in order to survive, in the one case passes through con- spiracies for Common Markets, in another wears the mask of the populist demagogy of the Velasco junta in Peru, or of the popular front in Chile and in yet another passes from the Torres regime to Banzer’s coup. The truth is always con- crete, Lenin said. This presentation of the concrete, the highest point of a Marxist analysis, is not the empirical conception of the raw fact (something Marx called ‘the imaginary con- crete’). The scientificness of Marxist thought consists of conceiving the concrete as ‘the combina- tion of many determinations, as the process of a composi- tion’. (Marx, ‘Grundrisse’.) aime emma et Revolutionary action needs as its guide concrete theoretical analyses using Marxist method and not formalistic abstrac- tions and schematic generaliza- tions. In the WV analysis we see Torres and his regime placed not within the material con- ditions of our revolutionary epoch, but a statue hovering in some timeless, unhistorical circle of Dante’s Hell, keeping company with Chiang Kai- shek, Castro, Ben Bella, Boumedienne, Nasser, Gaddafi, Bandaranaike, Aref, Papan- dreou, Suharto, Makarios, Sadat, Hussein, even Thiers. Let us look at the critique proper which the WV makes of the POR’s poli- cles. It is impressive that the critics themselves are not abso- lutely sure about their critique. If this impression is wrong, then how can we explain how on the one hand the document condemns the POR for not having advanced the slogan ‘Down with Torres’ and for having waited for the military government to arm the work- ers, while on the other hand it comes to the defence of the POR against ‘Pabloite slanders’ on the same subject by saying: ‘The POR did not support Torres . . . the POR line is crystal clear.’ We would find it rather unclear. The policies of the POR and the Popular Assembly always stood in support of the bour- geois nationalist government, And they never denied this, much less now that all the organizations of the Popular Assembly together with Torres, his military clique and one sec- tion of the MNR (the other section is in power together with the Banzer and the Falange fascists) are together in a common front, the infamous FRA (Anti-imperial- ist Revolutionary Front). The WV wants to reconcile the irreconcilable, How can it on the one hand accuse the POR of ‘trying... to avoid the necessity of an uncompromising struggle for the overthrow of Torres,’ and on the other hand rebel against the exclusively (it would have us believe) Pabloite accusa- tions about the POR’s support or Torres... .

[p012] At another point the WV accepts that: “The Trotskyists of the POR. did make a dis- tinction of the class antithesis to Torres. ‘They announced that: “The Torres government is not a workers’ government”, but in saying this they should have characterized it categorically as capitalist, dictatorial and counter-revolutionary.’ Lora did not seem willing however to follow this advice. Continuing along his ‘crys- tal clear’ line, he went on categorically characterizing the Torres government as a ‘mili- tary nationalist government with bourgeois content, that is with an anti-imperialist orien- tation.’ (Document presented by the POR at the Latin American conference in April 1972, ‘La Verité’, No 557). Lora’s group wants to ‘jus- tify theoretically’ even this wretched capitulation to the national bourgeoisie with vari- ous tricks by legerdemain. One of the most seemingly serious is the one that seeks to justify the popular front with the bourgeoisie with references to the positions of the Third Congress of the Comintern which concern the united anti- imperialist front in the colonial countries, That united front would have permitted combined action of the proletariat and the peasants with sections of the national bourgeoisie for joint defence in a war against imperialism. The Third Congress of the Comintern defined quite clearly the boundaries of this tactic: ‘The working class movement in the colonial and semi- colonial countries must first of all win for itself the position of’ an independent revolu- tionary factor within the anti- imperialist front as a whole. ‘Only when its importance as an independent factor is recognized and its political independence secured, then provisional treaties with bour- geois democracy are permitted and necessary .-.’ (‘The Com- munist International 1919- 1943, Documents, Vol I, Oxford University Press)- Lenin and Trotsky particu- larly emphasized the point that - Lora prefers to forget: no amalgam, Srreconcilable pre- servation of the independence of the proletarian movement, even if it is in an embryonic stage’. 10 The WV however ignore all these attempts to present the capitulation as logical. "The POR did not support Torres.” His deviation lay in the fact that he formed a popular front with the Stalinists who supported Torres. . . - And what was the danger according to the WV, carried by this united front POR-CPB? They had nothing to say but that ‘the Stalinists would have done everything in their power to drag the “united anti-imperial- ist front” towards guerrilla warfare in the mountains or the cities and to turn the movement into a petty-bour- geois one, leaning © on the peasantry and pushing the pro- letariat aside...’ To whomever has the slight- est knowledge of reality and knows the relative positions of the Kremlin, the rabid polemic carried out by all the Stalin- ist agencies, all the CPs, parti- cularly in Latin America ani even more in Bolivia, against guerrilla warfare in the name of the ‘peaceful road to social- jsm’, arriving at conscious sabotage and open betrayal, the views of the WV on the fervent passion of the Bolivian CP for a guerrilla war seem ridiculous to say the least. But we, the Greek Trotsky- ists, cannot laugh, as perhaps the situation merits, when we hear this sui generis ‘Trotsky- ist’ group from Greece uttering such insane apophthegms. And this is because we know quite well what their aim is. By denouncing the guerrilla adventures in Latin America with the ridiculous accusation that they are inspired by Mus- covite Stalinism, they are not aiming at the adventurist views of an arch-Pabloite like Livio Maitan which led so many innocent fighters up 4 blind alley, but they do it from a desire to justify the well- known stand they took at another time, during the guer- rilla movement of ELAS in occupied Greece: because the guerrilla army had the Stalinist CPG in its leadership, the present leaders of the WV characterized the whole move- ment as being ‘of a reactionary nature’. This sectarian and reaction- stand of theirs played a terrible suspensory role in the development of the Trotskyist movement in Greece. For this reason, we Greek Trotskyists of the EDE can only feel anger about the opportunistic basis upon which they uphold their criticism of guerrilla warfare ‘generally’. They have raised their views about the communist guerrillas under the treacherous Stalinist leadership in a Europe occu- pied by the Nazis to a super- historical metaphysical schema, into which they try to fit the most different things: the ELAS guerrillas, the Vietcong, the Bengalese Mukti Bahini, the Chinese _ partisans, together with the Tupamaros, the Pab- loite ERP in Argentina or the various radicalized petty bour- geois of the Latin American Castroite Focos. A second circle of Hell in this Divine Comedy of the wv! We know from other cases (as for example, that of Shacht- man and the ‘state capitalists’) that usually a hysterical Stal- inophobia is the camouflage for an adaptation to the pressure of the bureaucracy, the refusal to come into conflict with Stalinism within the masses, for the raising of the con- sciousness of the masses. In the same indictment served by the WV against the ‘United Front of the Stalinists and the Lora tendency’, the support of the Torres govern- ment by the Bolivian CP is characterized as ‘Menshevik’. Lora himself would not dis- agree at all with this charac- terization! On the contrary, he always wanted to justify his whole opportunist alliance with the CPB with the ‘theory’ that Bolivian Stalinism is ‘simply Menshevik’, eccentric and radi- cal and is forced to succumb to the pressure of Trotskyism. The counter-revolutionary character of the ‘left’ zig-zags of the Stalinist CP is hidden under the screen of the revis- jonist conception of the ‘Men- shevik’ character of Stalinism. From the time of Marx and Lenin we know that an impre- cise, unscientific characteriza- tion comes, most of the time, to cover political opportunisms and capitulations. Let us now come to the point to which the critique attaches most ss ro cance: ‘. . . the leaders o the POR and of “Informations Ouvritres’-OCI claim the dis- covery of a new kind of organ for the conquest of power, the “Popular Assembly of a soviet type”. Fourth International Winter 1972/73

[p013] “Why this distortion of the Soviet theory? Why were they drawn to the Pparliament- assembly? Why, instead of building soviets, did they try to frame a constitution, with which “the Popular Assembly would deepen its roots in the Committees”? “Why the attempt to create a new, Bolivian-type of revo- lution, in place of the proven October?’ The WV bases its fundamen- tal attack against the POR on a monumental confusion. Nowhere does it appear to have a clear idea about what this Popular Assembly is and where exactly the opportunism lay in Lora’s line. So does the deviation of the POR lie in the fact that“. . perhaps without realizing it (our emphasis) in fighting for the Sovietization of the Pop- ular Assembly , , .’ they‘... omitted their basic duty, to put forward the slogan for Soviets . . .’? Let us try to dissolve the confusion of such statements. Confusion at times tragi- comic, especially when we see the Popular Assembly of La Paz called in one case ‘bour- geois parliament’, in another ‘Constituent Assembly’, and another time compared to the ‘Small Parliament’ of Papado- Poulos... . This final insane compari- son shows clearly that the WV not only has no idea about the Popular Assembly in Boli- via, but furthermore is drift- ing on a sea of confusion as far as the situation in Greece itself is concerned, Harmless body The unbelievable extract from the document reads: . ‘Similarly in Greece, Papa- dopoulos created the “small parliament”, a harmless advi- sory body where 3,000 appointed people vote on be- half of 9,000,000—a corporate body cast in the mould of the fascist state of Mussolini or Franco.’ (Our emphasis), Let us leave for another time the spectacle of a Greece where, according to the wy, corporate and long-lived struc- tural institutions of ‘fascism’ are operating, and let us return to the ‘appointed body’ in far- away La Paz. The Popular Assembly was born in January 1971, out of Workers Vanguard and Bolivia the mobilization of broad layers of oppressed which fol- lowed the seizure of power by the Bonaparte Torres, This body consisted of 240 members, of whom 60 per cent had been nominated by the trade unions and the other 40 per cent by left organizations. Most of the 240 representatives had been nom- inated by conferences or assemblies, of the rank and file in the places of work, they were obliged to have a man- date from their electors and they could be recalled at any moment, if they lost the trust of the rank and file. As we see, we are miles away from the ‘small parliament’ of Papado- poulos, Most of the disputes on whether the Popular Assembly has a Soviet character or not are carried out, or continue to be carried out, by various trends for the sole reason of defending the policies of each trend and of avoiding discus- sion on the essence of the matter. The Pabloites of Moscow denied the Soviet character of the Assembly in an attempt to dissolve the movement into the remains of Guevarism. Lora and other opportunists defended (and defend) the ‘first Soviet of Latin America’ by cultivating the illusion of a ‘dual power’ which would lead gradually, through the struggle against the fascist ‘Gorilismo’ and with the conditional sup- port of Torres, to socialism. IHlusion reigned This illusion finally reigned within the Bolivian proletariat, even in its most avante-garde sections, with the result that on August 21, 1971, it stood face to face with Banzer’s fas- cists, unarmed, counterposing only its unrivalled heroism and its high revolutionary morale. The Popular Assembly was a pole with continually increas- ing influence on the political and social life of the People. Torres, as much as the CIA thugs, did not hide his hatred towards the Assembly, which however was impotent against the imperialist designs, not having any legislative power, tied ideologically and practi- cally to the chariot of bour- geois nationalism. The Assembly always stood on rotten ideological founda- tions. The programmatical theses accepted by it were those which had been voted in 1970 in the COB, on the basis of a capitulation of the POR to the Stalinist CP. The stand defined by the Position of the COB towards the Ovando regime was con- served within the conditional Support of the Torres regime, The POR wanted to com. pare this support with the sup- Port given by the Bolsheviks to Kerensky against Korniloy. It wants however to forget the letter from Lenin to the Central Committee in Septem- ber 1917, of which Trotsky so Correctly reminds us: ‘Even now, we do not have an obligation to support the Kerensky government, That would be unprincipled. The question is: then are we not for the struggle against Korni- lov? Naturally we are. But this is not one and the same thing. ‘There is a limit to this: it has been surpassed by many Bolsheviks who-~ fel] into “reconciliationism” and let themselves be carried away by the flow of events, ‘We will fight, we will Struggle against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky, we uncover his weaknesses. The distinction is much more fine, but very important and it must not be forgotten, ‘Wherein lies the change in our tactics after the Korniloy uprising? ‘In this, in that we vary the forms of the struggle against Kerensky.’ (L. D. Trotsky, ‘Germany 1931-1932’,) The Popular Assembly and the POR gave their trust and Support to Kerensky-Torres, just as the ‘old Bolsheviks’ and Stalin had done. They were waiting for one part of the counter-revolution to arm the Bolivian revolution. And Kor- nilov-Banzer came in. WHAT does ‘Workers’ Vanguard’ (WV) think the POR should have done that it did not? +. . the comrades of the POR omitted their basic duty, to put forward the slogan of soviets, to work for the country-wide extension of the committees, which to their credit only they had built in the mines and to crown this embryonic soviet organization with a congress of the com- "1 sss

[p014] mittees on a national scale and finally, to work out a soviet constitution.’ As far as. the peasants are concerned, what, according to the WV, should the POR have done? ‘The poor peasants . . . in their struggle against the landlords, needed peasants’ soviets.’ Thus what conclusion must we draw from the Bolivian Revolution, according again to the WV? ‘In conclusion, in Bolivia, as elsewhere, we must struggle for soviets [WV’s emphasis], in which the masses would recognize the organ of leadership [our emphasis] which strikes decisively for power and for a real workers’ and peasants’ government.’ So the panacea has been dis- covered. Anyway we prefer to agree with Trotsky and see these ‘phraseological genuflec- tions before the soviets’ as ‘a misunderstanding of _ their historical function’ (L._ D. Trotsky, ‘Germany 1931-1932’). Let us see better how the inspirer of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905 answered the fellow- thinkers of the WV of 1932 in Germany : ‘The soviet per se is not the possessor of miraculous powers. It is the class repre- sentation of the proletariat, with all the strong and weak points of the latter.’ (Trotsky, op. cit.). When Urbans of the centrist Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany cried that the leader- ship of the struggle belongs to the soviets elected by the masses without any involve- ment of any party, Trotsky answered: ‘But to declare that the soviets “by themselves” are capable of leading the struggle of the proletariat for power— is a. demonstration of vulgar fetishism for the soviets. Every- thing depends on the Party which leads the _ soviets’. (Trotsky, op. cit.) The WV presents us with its soviet panacea, completely ignoring the dialectic between the soviet and the Party, between the masses and the revolutionary vanguard. The POR as wel) did exactly that. It refused to give the masses revolutionary leadership, it refused to build the revolu- tionary party whose absence was catastrophic during the Bolivian revolution. It was impossible to build this party without a struggle to win over, to the cause of 12 the proletariat, the broad masses of the peasants, The POR did not do any work with the peasants, it has © programme for them. From January 1971 until August, in its organ ‘Masas’, the peasants were referred to only once very briefly. To say that the Bolivian peasants needed soviets is to confuse one means with the end. The peasants would have answered quite materialisti- cally that what they need is land, an agrarian reform. The WV, with its drivel about the leading role of the soviets, retrogresses not only to the positions of the centrist SWP of Germany, but even further to the German KAPD and anarchosyndicalism. Lenin in ‘Left-Wing Com- munism’ and the Communist International at its first Con- gresses, and with the words of Trotsky, struck out implacably at the middle class and sec- tarian movement of so-called ‘Communism of councils’. This movement not only ignored the dialectic between Marxist con- sciousness and the spontaneous movement of the masses, but also turned its back on the bloody experience of the Euro- pean revolutions. Do we perhaps need to remind the WV about the German revolution of 1918- 1919, when the soviets of workers and soldiers filled all of Germany, and yet, because their overwhelming majority followed the Social Democratic Party, not only did they not lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, but were slaught- ered and smashed? Or must we recall the revo- lutionary events in Italy dur- ing the same period, when the factories were occupied by the workers’ councils who took down the signs of the indus- trialists and raised placards with the names of Lenin and Trotsky. Must we recall how the whole of that terrible movement was defeated because the leading party of the working class was the Socialist Party, which turned back thé masses and gave the country to the fascists? Contrary to the WV, the inspirer of the workers’ coun- cils of Turin, Antonio Gramsci, came to the opposite conclu- sions and fought to build the party, leaving us some of the most important analyses of this grave task of the proletarian struggle. Soviet fetishism and a rever- ent attachment to the spon- taneous organizations of the masses are transformed, when the situation calls for it, into their opposite. The same people who preach the leading role of the workers’ councils, are dominated by a fear of the masses, This hap- pened with the KAPD. This happened with the whole move- ment of ‘Communism of coun- cils’. Their rejection of the dia- lectic leads them not only to see the role of the party, but also not to see the role of the masses within the fiuctuations of the movement, They see their relationship to the masses as a relationship of indoctrination, of propa- ganda. Their organizations are propagandist circles, where, as Trotsky observed, in the name of a demogogy about the lead- ing role of the masses, the leaders begin to play a dis- proportionate role... The sectarian stand of the WV towards the masses appears at another point, and concretely with regard to the French proletariat. It criticizes the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) because in May 1968 it did not advance the correct (according to the WV) slogans: ‘Down with de Gaulle! Long live the workers’ and peas- ants’ government!’ On the contrary, the IC of the Fourth International, not ignoring the fact that the largest and most dynamic sec- tion of the French proletariat follows the French CP and the Stalinist CGT, criticized the OCI with the greatest severity for not having advanced the only concrete slogans, the slogans that would have un- covered the counter-revolu- tionary Stalinists and led the masses to their ideological emancipation from their treach- erous leadership: ‘Down with de Gaulle: CPF-CGT govern- ment’, The WV’s criticism of the OCI (and the POR) was not placed on this Bolshevik basis. The fact that it does not grasp the whole essence of the dispute that brought the OCI into an alliance with the cen- trists and into irreconcilable opposition to the IC does not surprise us. Out of the whole split, it retains only the events in Boli- Fourth International Winter 1972/73

[p015] via. The Bolivian events and the POR’s treachery, which found enthusiastic support from the OCI, are only the consequences of a whole trend and method, the fruits of a whole system of centrist poli- tics, From the bitter lessons of Bolivia, Marxists are called on now, in the presence of today’s huge conflicts, to draw the scientific conclusions in rela- tion to a whole political methodology, as has happened with the lessons of Algeria, Cuba and Ceylon. The WV does not concern itself with these problems, This is because, for it, they do not exist as problems, but as theses of its own centrist policies. To Greek Trotskyists it has been well known for a Jong time that, both as far as the transformation of the ‘United Front’ from a tactic of a revo- lutionary party into a strategy (liquidation of the party) is concerned, as well as more generally in their anarcho- syndicalist adaptation to spon- taneity, the positions of the WV were and are always iden- tified with those of the OCI and its centrist friends. ARCHEIOMARXISM AND TROTSKYISM All the elements which we have seen in the Workers Vanguard’s ana- lysis—confusion, formal- ism, sectarianism, anar- cho-syndicalist ideas, are expressions of the same idealistic method, which is not unfamiliar, as we said at the beginning, to the Greek as well as to the international workers’ movement. Contrary to the Pabloite ideologists of the Novak school, in order to examine a method of thought, we do not make an abstraction of the historical horizon within which it comes into being and functions. We cannot speak abstractly about empiricism, without seeing its historical develop- ment through the process of the English Revolution; nor can we talk about pragmatism, while ignoring the conditions of development of bourgeois ideology in America; nor Workers Vanguard and Bolivia about rationalism, independ- ent of the class struggle that first formed it in France. The WV’s formalist method of thought, as well, has a historical origin. It is the method of a quite peculiar centrist sect, the Archeio- Marxist one, which developed before, parallel to and against the Greek Section of the 3rd International, the CPG, against the Greek Left Opposition and against the founder and guide of Greek Trotskyism Pantelis Pouliopoulos. This great communist leader and fighter of the 4th Inter- national had correctly charac- terized this current as ‘a peculiar substitute for social democracy within primitive Greek communism’. The line of the Archeio was: ‘Education first and then action,’ ‘not just a passive but also a hostile stand against every political and trade union action of the workers’ (Circu- lar of the Archeio 1928), ‘a systematic cultivation of hatred for every revolutionary organization, a blow and a split by terrorist means of the revolutionary wing in the trade union movement, the armed liquidation of the lat- ter’s conferences, a Masonic, despotic type of organization.’ (Pouliopoulos ‘Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece?’) Through the adventurist Molinier they came _ into temporary contact with the International Left Opposition, they hid behind the books of Lenin and Trotsky until they withdrew and began their fierce anti-Trotskyist efforts against the Greek section of the 4th International, and against the International it- self, approaching the tempor- ary international focus of centrism, the London Bureau, in company with the English ILP, the SAP, the POUM etc. Blessings of revisionism After the war, some of its vestiges took part in the re- grouping of the Greek section of the 4th International in 1947, with the blessings of rising Pabloite revisionism. Greek Trotskyism joined with just what it had been fighting throughout its whole history up to that time... Stalinism always wanted to make an amalgamation of Archeio-Marxism and Trotsky- ism in order to annihilate its opponents. Until now the CPG tries to slander Greek Trotskyism for the criminal policies of the Archeio. And at the time of the Albanian revolution, the arch-Stalinist Enver Hodja used amalgama- tion, slander and assassination to identify Archeio-Marxism with Trotskyism and to be better able to drown in blood the strong influence of Trotskyist ideas in the Albanian proletariat. When the EDE took up in Greece the historic continua- tion of the heroic Greek Trot- skyist movement against Pabloite liquidation, in its ranks were Archeio-Marxist elements which crystallized into a minority. Within the rapidly-develop- ing crisis of Greek and world capitalism, before the impera- tive tasks of a new revolu- tionary period when the Inter- national is called upon to play the role defined by its found- ing Conference in 1938 and by the Transitional Programme, no co-existence with centrism was possible, even less with an Archeio-Marxist type. In 1967 the minority was expelled from the EDE and from that time called itself Workers Vanguard. Some people will say that these are old stories, that the WV cut its ties with Archeio- Marxism and its method. We believe that not only does the WV always follow its method, but also that it _ consciously Sees itself as its continuation. An apparently ‘innocent’ phrase in their document about the POR suffices to show us this. They write: ‘From the time of Warski’s support for Pilsudski in Poland, in whom he saw the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants”, and of the support for the dictator Pangalos in Greece on whom the Greek CP called to “do as you boast, my general’ in 1925, the continuity of support for Bonapartist regimes in the colonial and semi-colonial countries is a result of the fellow travelling of the Stalinists with the ‘“demo- cratic” bourgeoisie (as in China, Spain, Indonesia, etc.)’. In 1925, the general secre- tary of the CPG was Pantelis Pouliopoulos who was con- demned by Pangalos’ court martial together with other 13 LS SS

[p016] communists, exiled to Fole- gandro from where he re- turned after the fall of the Pangalos dictatorship and fought in the Conference of Cadres of 1926 his first great battle against the ideological and organizational degenera- tion of the CP by the Stalin- ists. In relation to the WV’s be- liefs, Pouliopoulos writes the following in ‘Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece?’: ‘The political immaturity of all the Party cadres the first time, and their uncritical faith in the correctness of the strategic orientation of the 7th Balkan Conference and of the 5th World Congress (“for an immediate workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Bul- garia”), had initially led the Party to the mistaken idea that it could easily win over many “left-ized” democratic officers, if it simply unmasked the original demagogic pseudo- radicalism of Pangalos before the masses as well as the democratic officers, proposing really radical demands—arm- ing of the workers, alliance with the USSR, taxation, liber- ties to the proletariat, etc. From here, we have said, came the articles of the “red major”, the “down with the masks, do as you boast” etc. (That the Party with these policies sup- posedly called on Pangalos to overthrow the bourgeoisie at the head of the workers, this is an idiotic slander of the Stalinists, which even small children can understand. No Stalinist believes this. That this is an impudent lie, that it ,is a disgraceful political slander, can be seen quite clearly also from the fact that it has been happening since 1926, for eight whole years, a very fierce. struggle of fac- tions within the party, where all sorts of trivialities and dirt were called up against the Marxist opposition—but even so about such a great crime the Stalinists speak for the first time today in 1934! They had... forgotten about it be- 14 fore! And this now—just in passing. They think: let us go ahead and say it, and what- ever sticks in the minds of the new members who know nothing about history, well and good. Calomniez, calom- niez, il en restera toujours.) ‘If however—we stressed at the conference—the Party, from the very first days of the Pangalos dictatorship, had found the correct orientation and come in at the head of a truly heroic fight against it, (for example, the great anti- Pangalos meeting of refugees in Piraeus, disbanded by guns soon after the proclamation of dictatorship, new persecutions, trials of “autonomists” etc.) on the contrary the “Lenin- ists” further deepened the mistakes... Political immaturity ‘The fighters of the later opposition, then as yet un- formed, by reminding the 1926 conference of all this, were saying that the political immaturity of the new Party cadres certainly explained the mistakes of 1924 and 1925 (later it was revealed that a mature leadership of a fully developed CP, like that of the Stalinist Varsky in the Polish Party, when in May 1926 General Pilsudsky carried out his coup, called on the peas- ants to support him—some- thing which never happened in the CPG, in spite of the rela- tive Archeio-Marxist slander which, out of factional blind- ness, some of our more sense- less Stalinists brought to the light again).’ We see again, after almost 50 years, the ancient anti- communist slander of the Archeio, used with such en- thusiasm by Koutvis-Zacharia- dis (later to become the butcher of the Greek revolu- tion of 1943-1949) against Pouliopoulos and the Left Opposition of the CPG, served up again in the document of the WV, disguised as an anti- Stalinist attack! The ‘political ichthyosauri’ (to use an exX- pression of Trotsky) of the Archeio are repeating past history for the second time, inevitably in the form of a farce this time. A full discussion In relation to Lora, the statement of the IC of the 4th International on October 24, 1971, said that: ‘When he appeared in Europe in 1970, the SLL made it clear from the beginning that it would not support his engagement in the IC without a full discussion on his whole history and an understanding reached on this basis. We do not have one policy towards the LSSP and the Pabloites and another for Lora.’ The EDE again had told its former minority — now the WV, that any work whatso- ever within a common frame- work would presuppose 4a critical re-examination of its whole history up to now, and a documentated rejection of the centrist policies of this Archeio-Marxist group, par- ticularly with regard to the time of the Occupation and the Civil War. Greek Trotskyism will fight implacably any capitulation to centrism in any form, Pablo- ite, Archeio-Marxist or other. Now more than ever, in the presence of the mass struggles which have already begun in dictatorially-ruled Greece, any retreat whatsoever before centrism, any carelessness in the struggle against centrism will have catastrophic results. The centrist policies of the POR again taught the Trotsky- ist movement bitter lessons. We cannot have one policy to- wards Lora and another for Archeio-Marxism. S. Michael, member of the editorial board of the ‘Ora tis Allagis’, organ of the Central Committee of the Workers Inter- nationalist League (EDE), Greek Section of the In- ternational Committee of the 4th International. Fourth International Winter 1972/73