In December, the first assault by the masses fails
Of course, as soon as he was elected, Paz shelved his promises to the realm of booby-traps and began to implement the policies required by the bourgeoisie. By a decree dated 17 December, comprising no fewer than 120 articles, he abolished State subsidies for fuel, leading to a doubling of petrol prices overnight and a knock-on rise in the prices of all essential goods; he imposed tax on self-employed workers in the informal sector, street vendors, etc., whilst cancelling or reducing taxes on capital and large fortunes; he threw open the granting of mining licences to domestic and foreign capitalists, with disregard for indigenous peoples and the environment, etc.
For the masses, who were already suffering from high inflation, this is unbearable. Led by transport workers, who had been deprived of their livelihoods, the resistance quickly spread. On 18 December, the CSUTCB called on farmers to demonstrate, the FSTMB called on miners, and the CTEUB called on teachers. They were joined by workers from other industrial sectors and indigenous organisations. On the 19th, faced with the determination and scale of the demonstrations, the COB trade union confederation was forced to call for an indefinite strike, which it immediately set about undermining. In reality, there was no general strike; only the transport sector was affected. But the struggle continued, notably with roadblocks in the major cities.
The COB is led by bureaucrats, accustomed to co-managing the bourgeois State alongside the Morales regime, who manoeuvre to ward off any political threat to the government. Instead of calling for a general strike, the occupation of workplaces and government offices, self-defence and the overthrow of the government, the COB’s National Executive Committee (CEN) is negotiating with the government and recognising its legitimacy. But the protests were intensifying. On 5 January, 500,000 workers and peasants marched together in La Paz, demanding President Paz’s resignation. The COB leadership was forced to withdraw from the negotiations. And a massive demonstration was being organised for 12 January.
On 11 January, the government reached an agreement with the COB leadership at the expense of the masses. Fuel prices will be set by the market, in return for a meagre 20% pay rise and a minimal increase in pensions. The other measures in the decree remain unchanged. In return, the COB management is calling for a return to work and for the blockades to be lifted. However, on 12 January, despite the rotten agreement, the farming communities were still maintaining 52 roadblocks, but the government took advantage of their isolation to step up its crackdown. With the decisive help of the COB leaders, the anger of the masses was channelled, and an initial opportunity was missed.
In April, the working class, poor farmers and ethnic minorities resume their struggle
Within the space of a few weeks, inflation had wiped out the meagre pay rises. The Paz government, emboldened by the complacency of the trade union bureaucracy, has resumed its attacks on labour protections, with a view to privatising strategic mining and energy companies and further eroding public education and healthcare. On 10 April, the government issued a decree aimed at ending the protection of small farmers’ and indigenous communities’ land from seizure, so that it can be consolidated for the benefit of agro-industrial groups, not to mention the deforestation.
Mass mobilisation is gaining momentum once again. From 8 April onwards, dozens of indigenous organisations from the Amazonian region of Pando set off on a march towards La Paz. This ‘radial’ march, echoing the historic Marches for Territory and Dignity, served as a catalyst. Along the way, students, municipal staff, teachers and pensioners joined them. Meanwhile, the health workers’ union called for a 24-hour day of action. On 31 March, thousands of workers surrounded the government building. On 1 May, an open meeting was called by the COB in the working-class town of El Alto. The pressure from the rank and file was such that the leaders could no longer shirk their responsibilities. In front of tens of thousands of people, the COB leadership announced an indefinite general strike to begin the following day, 2 May.
The movement is spreading: roadblocks are paralysing access routes to La Paz, and public transport workers are bringing bus services to a standstill. However, the leaders of the COB and the trade union federations are opposing the general strike, which is straining relations between the rank and file and the leadership. Workers are demanding that the leaderships of their organisations do not conduct separate negotiations with the government.
However, there is no properly organised general strike, no national central strike committee to lead the struggle, no self-defence organisations to protect the roadblocks and demonstrations, and no workers’, peasants’ and students’ councils representing all the masses in struggle to bypass the bureaucratic apparatuses, take the lead in the struggle and put themselves forward for power.
The government is taking advantage of the situation to step up its crackdown. On 26 May, parliament authorised the government to declare a state of emergency. The police and the army have been cracking down on demonstrations and roadblocks; hundreds of protesters have been arrested, including trade union leaders, and there have already been seven deaths. At the same time, he called on the COB leadership to enter into negotiations, but they were unable to take that step, despite their best intentions. On 2 June, the workers attending the mass open meeting in El Alto unanimously rejected the negotiations initiated by the government and insisted that the COB leadership should not take part in them.
Dangerous illusions about trade union bureaucracy
The Morenoite current (LORCI of the CRP-QI, MST of the LIS…), whilst speaking of an ‘organic crisis’ (PTS) or a ‘revolution’ (MST), is incapable of dealing with the situation.
For coordinating committees for the general strike, until the government falls and a provisional government is established by the workers’, peasants’, indigenous and grass-root organisations in struggle! (CRP-CI, International Declaration, 6 June)
Why a ‘provisional’ government of workers’ and peasants’ organisations? Why ‘coordinating committees for the general strike’, rather than, quite simply, the general strike itself, along with elected and recallable strike committees, centralising to demand power?
When a general strike brings the country’s production, transport, administration and economic system to a standstill, it inevitably raises the question: who should run society? The bourgeoisie or the workers? That is why it requires elected bodies to lead it, self-defence structures to protect it, and a national centralisation capable of replacing the bourgeois State.
Without elected and recallable strike committees, without national coordination, and without workers’ and peasants’ militias, the general strike risks remaining an impressive show of strength but one that is politically incomplete. Conversely, when workers themselves take the lead in the struggle, a general strike can serve as a bridge between mass mobilisation and a successful uprising.
It is precisely for this reason that the struggle against the trade union bureaucracy is not a secondary organisational issue. It stems directly from the need to transform the general strike into a conscious struggle for power.
While it prevents a general strike and protects the bourgeois State, the centrists spread illusions about the trade union bureaucracy.
The COB ceased to be a mere trade union and became a body of dual power… It is the duty of the current leadership to lead dual power to victory. (LIS, Interview with Juan José Villa, leader of the MST in Bolivia, 20 May)
At present, whilst doing nothing to ensure the general strike is effective, the COB leadership appears to be playing a game of attrition. (Matías Maiello & Josefina L. Martínez, Rebellion in Bolivia: forceful solutions and trends towards organisational crises in Latin America, 9 June)
The COB is not a central soviet, if only because 79% of urban workers are in the informal sector. The trade union bureaucracy has not adopted a ‘strategy of attrition’ against the government: the agent of the bourgeoisie is sabotaging the general strike to protect Bolivian capitalism.
We can never rely on the top-down, corrupt trade union bureaucracy (the official salary of union leaders ranges from 15,000 to 20,000 bolivianos, whilst the minimum wage in the formal sector is 2,500). To transform the COB into a soviet, we must impose workers’ democracy on it and confront its bureaucracy. However, there is no more of a class-struggle tendency of the LOR and the MST in the Bolivian trade unions than there is of the FIT in the Argentine trade unions, nor is there a revolutionary faction of LO, RP, the NPA, the POI, etc., in the French trade unions.
By spreading illusions about the corrupt leadership of the COB, which they claim is pursuing a ‘strategy of attrition’, and by portraying the ‘current leaders’ as the embodiment of ‘dual power’, the LOR-CI and the MST even more, are replacing the conscious struggle against the treacherous bureaucracy with opportunistic accommodation. The result is a shift typical of centrism: instead of fighting for democratic councils and against the apparatus that has sold out to the bourgeoisie, the existing, current leadership is declared to be the bearer of revolutionary perspectives. The central strategic issue — the struggle for the political independence of the working class in the face of all petty-bourgeois reformist and bourgeois nationalist leaderships — is thus obscured. It is precisely because there is no self-organisation or self-defence that the central task today is to establish them. Building a revolutionary proletarian party thus becomes superfluous: it would be enough simply to rally behind the traditional leaderships and steer them in the right direction.
This illusion, which had poisoned the Pablo-Mandel-Frank leadership of the Fourth International in Europe from 1948 onwards, leading to the revision of the programme in 1951 (the reform of Stalinism, the anti-imperialist united front), destroyed the International and resulted in unbridled opportunism, both in Argentina — in the form of Posadism (which vanished without a trace) and Morenism (the forerunner of the PTS, the MST, the IS, the NMAS, etc.) — and in Bolivia. The POR, led by Lora, failed in 1952 by kowtowing to the bourgeois nationalist MNR party and the COB bureaucracy (José Villa, La Revolucion boliviana, Poder Obrero Bolivia, 1992) and in 1970–1971 by aligning itself with the nationalist wing of the army and the reformist majority in the People’s Assembly, including the COB leadership (Tim Wohlforth, Bolivia: Bitter Lessons of Defeat, Workers League USA, 1971). It is this counterfeit version of the Fourth International that the LIS and the CRP-QI, as well as the MST and the Morenoite LOR-CI in Bolivia, claim to represent.
The situation raises the pressing question of self-defence
On 14 June, the COB leaders called an enlarged CEN meeting, which was cancelled due to the presence of fascist groups. On 16 June, fascists from the UJC attacked the picket lines in San Juan.
Meanwhile, the pompous ‘theorists’ of the Argentine PTS invoked Gramsci to justify their claim that the current situation is… ‘dangerous’.
Gramsci said that: At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties; in other words. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class or fraction of a class. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes precarious and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions… (Matías Maiello & Josefina L. Martínez, Rebelión en Bolivia, ‘Rebellion in Bolivia: forceful solutions and trends towards organisational crises in Latin America’, 9 June)
Gramsci had the excuse of writing this whilst in prison, under the watchful eye of censors from the Italian fascist regime, which is not the case for the leaders of Argentina’s PTS. Like the MST, the PTS is a member of the FIT electoral coalition in Argentina, which talks at length about a constituent assembly but never calls for self-defence or a workers’ militia.
The situation is becoming ‘dangerous’ for the masses because the ruling class relies on the State’s repressive apparatus or fascist gangs. From this point of view, the leaders of the MST and the LOR-CI are of no use whatsoever.
Anyone who fails to prepare for the armed uprising must be ruthlessly dismissed from the ranks of revolution’s supporters, sent packing to its enemies, to the traitors or cowards. (Lenin, The lessons of the Moscow Uprising, 1906)
The urban proletariat, working peasants, Indian minorities and students who stand with the people must defend themselves and, building on the trade unions and mass organisations, form a workers’ and peasants’ militia to prepare for the insurrection and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Conscripts must be organised to refuse to repress the people and to turn their weapons against any officers who attempt to do so.
As long as capitalism exists, violent repression of the labour movement is always a danger… To repel the goonsquads and strike-breakers, let us set up properly armed workers’ picket lines… The key is to teach rank-and-file workers that they must arm themselves against the bourgeoisie, which is armed to the teeth. (Pulacayo Theses, 8 November 1946)
The situation is untenable, as the working-class and grassroots population of El Alto are falling victim to the roadblocks. The government and the bourgeois State must be overthrown. Undeniably, forms of self-organisation amongst the masses — in open assemblies, neighbourhood committees and so on — are emerging in the course of this mobilisation, but they are not yet generalised or coordinated, just as the general strike has not yet been organised. Together, the workers’ and peasants’ councils, headed by a national central council, could form a dual power against the government of the bourgeoisie.
What is lacking today is a revolutionary, united and democratic workers’ organisation, which resolutely sets the struggle the objective of overthrowing the government, arming the people, and establishing a workers’ and peasants’ government that will destroy the bourgeois State, expropriate foreign and domestic capital, and open up the prospect of a socialist federation of South America, and the Socialist United States of the whole of the Americas.