20.06.1996

General strike and the left

Workers Power in Bolivia (Poder Obrero) and the Socialist Labour Party in Paraguay report on countries rocked by general strike and the tasks of revolutionaries

On April 21 an indefinite general strike, launched by the COB (Bolivian Trade Union Council) five weeks earlier, ended. This was the third general strike in two years - each lasted around one month.

In Bolivia the living cost for a family is at least L300 but the official minimum wage is only L30. The government only offered a wage increase of 8% - lower than the 12.5% inflation. The COB demanded an increase of at least 200%.

Denationalisation of the railways (ENFE) and the Bolivian airlines (LAB) has caused more hardship. Now, President Sanchez de Lozada is trying to privatise the biggest company in Bolivia, YPFB, the gas and oil monopoly. The great majority of the population is against privatisation because they are afraid that oil prices will increase and that only the multinationals will benefit.

Between 1982 and 1986 Bolivia was in a revolutionary period. Its high point was a general strike in which the new MNR (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) government managed to divide the wage workers from the smallholders and imposed the beginning of their neo-liberal political model. In August 1986 a general strike was defeated by the army. A new period of a reactionary democratic-liberal offensive began.

The MNR was the party that led the 1952 revolution and was forced to concede land reform, nationalisation of the mines and universal suffrage. In 1985 they returned to power and, like all bourgeois nationalists, became a direct agent of Thatcherite policies. In 1989 the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a Castroite guerrilla-based party founded in 1971, took power in alliance with the ADN of general Banzer (a Bolivian Pinochet). The MIR-ADN continued all the neo-liberal policies.

In 1993 the MNR retook power in alliance with the Indian nationalists (MRTKL) and the MBL (the Bolivian section of the Castro-Lula-Aristides Sao Paulo Forum’s international). The new MNR president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, is the man who destroyed the biggest state company (COMIBOL) that controlled the majority of the big tin mines. Sanchez’s company (COMSUR) bought many former COMIBOL pits and now is the biggest tin mining company.

Sanchez’s programme is based around three ‘terrible laws’: ‘capitalisation’ of all the state companies (the selling of the majority of the shares to foreign capital); educational counter-reform (to destroy the powerful teachers’ union and the universities’ economic autonomy, to promote private education and to hand over all the schools to poor city councils); and ‘popular participation’ (giving money for public works to the peasant communities and popular districts with the aim of destroying the unions and using them against the teachers and public workers).

Over five weeks in March and April this year Bolivia was shaken by the biggest demonstrations in years. Every day La Paz and other cities were paralysed. The people were not afraid of the police and constantly fought back, using dynamite and slings. On March 26 one person was killed. On March 28 tens of thousands organised a 12-kilometre march to La Paz. On April 2 private transport was completely stopped and demonstrators destroyed several cars and wagons of the newly privatised railway company.

Nevertheless, the general strike could not defeat the government. In the end Sanchez de Lozada only increased the wage offer of 8% by one point. The government said that it would liberate all union prisoners except the COB’s number three, Lucio Gonzales, who has been in prison since early 1996 under the false accusation of kidnapping a businessman. The ‘capitalisation’ of YPFB was postponed to July.

The strike did not win. Nevertheless, this is not a very serious defeat. The workers developed more radical methods of fighting and the government is weaker.

Why did the strike not win?

The government has made it clear that the ‘capitalisation’ of YPFB was the “mother of battles”. If the COB wanted to stop that privatisation it was indispensable to prepare seriously for the battle.

But the COB bureaucracy began the “mother of battles” with a national hunger strike of more than 200 union leaders on March 12. This is a defensive tactic that could be used when you or your relatives are in jail. When you are trying to defeat the government’s biggest plan and to increase all wages this measure is completely destructive. The majority of the Bolivians live on permanent hunger strike with very low wages and poor food.

Instead of putting hundreds of thousand of militants in isolated rooms without food, the leaders should have organised street meetings, blockades and pickets, and pressed all unions to join in the strike. One week later the COB did launch a general strike.

A total general strike would have meant that transport, the banks, telecommunication, the post office and all production stopped completely. The COB only managed to close the schools, the state universities, the health sector, the state mines and a few companies. It was an indefinite general strike, but mainly of the service sector. The street sellers and the pensioners played a significant role in the daily demonstrations.

On some days several cities were completely paralysed because the transport and the civic committees decided to launch regional stoppages. In Beni, on April 24, the streets were empty and students organised their own “civic police”.

Oil workers form a privileged workers’ aristocracy that has constantly broken past general strikes. Nevertheless, this year they started to fight. But the army took over the oil fields and the production of gas was not stopped, which could have had a big impact, damaging the economy.

The peasants in 1979 were able to blockade the cities and to stop the movement of rural produce. In this strike the peasant unions carried out several blockades (especially around Cochabamba, the biggest peasant area, in which the peasants are fighting for the legalisation of coca production). Nevertheless, the majority of the peasants did not participate in the strike.

The trade unions, instead of organising a general stoppage with factory occupations, only called for their leaders to go on hunger strike and workers to organise blockades in their lunch hours.

Many groups, especially teachers and students, set up self-defence pickets that fought effectively. What was needed was the central organisation of such bodies. The COB did not do that. The COB should have launched people’s councils and assemblies to organise the strike, with elected delegates, recallable by rank and file assemblies. The same principle needed to be applied to a national strike committee to lead the strike under rank and file control. Without it the bureaucracy was able to authorise unions to deal separately with the government and in the end they betrayed the strike.

The left

The Bolivian left is in serious crisis. Its strategy is to try to create a popular front behind the neo-liberal bourgeoisie. Dr Morales Davila, leader of the radical left group around Workers Tribune was jailed because he accused Sanchez of ‘betraying the fatherland’. He leads the National Committee for the Defence of our Natural Resources and National Sovereignty in alliance with Banzer’s ADN, the MIR and the bourgeois populist CONDEPA. They are also trying to influence the army, which is not happy with the privatisation of the railways to the ‘Chileans’. This is a popular front in which the left takes up a programme of defence of the capitalist system - but with less privatised companies.

The majority of the left is capitulating to anti-Chilean slogans. Some demonstrations burnt Chilean flags. We are against every private company, but we defend the Chilean workers and condemn all chauvinism. We are demanding an end to this anti-Chilean campaign and for the COB and the Chilean trade union centre to unite against private companies in both countries. Just as the left is using anti-Chilean slogans, the government is constantly denouncing the presence of Peruvian ‘subversives’ as instigators of several radical demonstrations.

The COB had several leaders that are members of the government coalition. The left outside the government is trying to rebuild a popular front with sectors of bourgeois nationalism to try to reform the system.

Lora’s POR led the La Paz teachers’ unions and they became the most important left opposition to the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, they have a Healyist style of adventurism. They say that Bolivia has been in a revolutionary pre-insurrectionary situation for the last 15 years, despite the fact that the majority of industrial workers did not strike and there is no dual power. They said that the democratic-liberal government that has only 40 political prisoners (less than Britain) is a fascist dictatorship.

They reject the strategy of a workers’ council insurrection, led by a mass Bolshevik party. For them a spontaneous insurrection has to be led by a party of less than 100 militants in alliance with ‘Bolivianist’ officers. The POR is trying to recruit generals and colonels to a programme that proposes to build a ‘Bolivianised’ army with better weapons and wages to defend the fatherland against foreigners and ‘gringos’.

Instead of denouncing the demobilising character of the hunger strikes, the POR itself tried to organise them. It tried to replace mass action with the hero action of supermen.

In this strike Poder Obrero intervened and developed as an organisation. Now we are trying to organise all our supporters in the task of building the nucleus of a revolutionary party.

Poder Obrero