25.07.1996

Strategic defeat for Bolivian workers?

J Villa of Poder Obrero in Bolivia replies to Workers Power on the working class movement in that country

In March the COB (Bolivian Trade Union Congress) launched its third month-long general strike in two years. This unique experience in a country with strong Trotskyist traditions obliged revolutionaries worldwide to break the imperialist media silence and to discuss its lessons.

The League for a Revolutionary Communist International certainly felt this was important. It is one of the few European Trotskyist currents that had comrades in Bolivia. Poder Obrero members were the only people that entered the LRCI with experience in leading thousands of proletarians in strikes. One year ago, when Bolivia had its previous general strike, around 200 people participated in a picket of the Bolivian embassy in London. This was followed by a rally addressed by Tony Benn. The initiative for this was taken by rank and file LRCI members, while the leadership had initially a passive attitude. This was the biggest rally held by the LRCI in its short history. A representative of that campaign was the first LRCI supporter to speak from the main platform of the May Day demonstration in London.

This year the LRCI was completely silent about what happened in the much longer general strike in Bolivia. In October 1995 the Bolivian section and all the Latin American members were excluded from the LRCI.

Only 40 days after the strike was finished, Workers Power (June 1996) published an article on Bolivia. Instead of reprinting the different documents that Poder Obrero produced during the strike, Keith Harvey, the main LRCI leader, wrote an article that reproduced some of our demands and tactics without acknowledging our existence. It was mainly based on a pedantic report by somebody who showed complete ignorance of what happened. In a short space it is impossible to deal with all the factual inaccuracies. We will concentrate on some of the main ones.

For Harvey, “After the struggles of 1985-86 the Bolivian working class suffered a strategic defeat when its then political and industrial vanguard - the tin miners - was shattered by mass sackings and closures”. Nevertheless, “since coming to power four years ago Sanchez de Losada [sic]” suffered a series of defensive struggles which “have delayed or modified government plans”.

In Bolivia constitutional presidents can only be in power for four years. At the time of the 1996 strikes Sanchez de Lozada had been in power for two and a half years.

The mass actions that delayed or modified neo-liberal plans did not begin only four years ago. In 1987 the central police station in Potosi was burned down. Massive strike action took place when the pope visited Bolivia. Since 1986 the COB has called at least one general strike each year. A state of siege was declared in 1989, when a general strike confronted Paz Zamora.

Between 1986 and 1995 the different neo-liberal presidents never succeeded in carrying through their privatisation agendas, because strikes “delayed and modified government plans”. In actual fact since Sanchez took power in August 1994 many of the strategic aims of neo-liberalism have been achieved (eg, privatisation of education and nearly all public companies).

There was a revolutionary period of struggles between 1982 and 1986. It ended after the defeat of the 150-mile mass miners’ march in August 1986. Since that time Bolivia has lived under a period of democratic-liberal reactionary offensive. The regime did not carry out any massacres or suppress the unions or left parties. It was, like in the rest of Latin America, a democratic parliamentary counterrevolution.

The closures of the tin mines did not come as a result of the defeat of the August 1986 march, but as a consequence of the 50% decline in world tin prices. The extraction of tin became uneconomic. The collapse of raw material prices is a worldwide phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of workers were sacked. Nevertheless, the LRCI, instead of characterising the situation around the world as based on a “strategic defeat”, is saying that we are now seven years into a worldwide revolutionary period. A few weeks before the 1994 general strike the LRCI leadership wrote that the “strategic defeat” in Bolivia was comparable with the bloody shattering of the first proletarian dictatorship (the Paris Commune).

To say that Bolivia suffered a “strategic defeat” is a point of honour for the LRCI leaders. They line up against its entire Bolivian section through trying to impose their capricious characterisation. Today the LRCI is trying to fuse with the Argentinean PTS (Workers Party for Socialism) which not only is against the characterisation of “strategic defeat”, but also thinks that Latin America and the world are in a “pre-revolutionary situation”. Only an opportunist diplomatic solution can conciliate these different methods.

In Bolivia (its own area of influence) the LRCI maintains this pessimistic view but in Argentina (the PTS area of influence) the LRCI followed the PTS line. In the last Trotskyist International the LRCI said, “There has been no strategic defeat” in Argentina. In spite of the fact that 30,000 union and left militants were killed and that “privatisation and rationalisations have left millions of workers outside the unions”. Supposedly only two and a half years ago there was “the beginning of a potentially pre-revolutionary situation”. The Bolivian workers suffered a lesser defeat than the Argentinean workers and their degree of militancy is higher.

Nowhere in the article is there any mention of the indefinite general strike that lasted from March 18 and April 21. For Harvey the movement was only a mass action around the teachers’ strike that lasted “two months. Health workers and miners joined the strikes.”

The teachers’ strike did not happen at the beginning of March as a separate action, as Harvey suggested, but as part of the COB’s national general strike. The health workers and miners did not join the strikes “by April 13”. They were in the general strike since its beginning on March 18. The small factories in La Paz did not take indefinite action at all. The factory unions decided that jobs should not be put at risk. Their leaders went on hunger strike and instructed the factory workers to make blockades in their lunch hour.

For Harvey the demonstrations were “mainly led by students and teachers”. At least as important as the students was the participation of other sectors in the March-April mass demonstrations (the health workers, peasants, street sellers, retired, urban poor - particularly in El Alto, La Paz, etc). Harvey ignored the fact that most cities from La Paz to Camiri and from Beni to Sucre saw strikes in which everything was completely paralysed for one or more days. Harvey suggested that the oilworkers did not play any important role and they failed “to paralyse the very industry that was under threat of privatisation”. This is false. The oilworkers, for the first time in years, participated in a COB general strike, but their pro-government leaders managed to sabotage it.

The general strike was preceded by railway and oil strikes, a 24-hour strike on March 5 and a massive hunger strike that started on March 11. All of these were completely ignored by the article. The hunger strikes played a very important role in the movement. The bureaucracy and Lora’s POR, instead of instructing the activists to prepare for the general strike through mass actions such as pickets, demanded hundreds of them enter isolated rooms to fast. The hunger strike is a very defensive method that should only be used when it is not possible to take to the streets. In the context of a general class versus class confrontation which aimed to destroy the privatisation plans and increase national wages, this was a distracting and demobilising action.

Harvey wrongly said that “since the 1952 revolution” the Bolivian workers were tied to bourgeois parties and that now “the top leaders of the COB are members or supporters of these parties.” The bourgeois MNR created the miners’ union (the COB’s predecessor) in 1944 and controlled the COB until 1964 when its leader (Lechín) broke with it and created a nationalist labour party (the PRIN). After 1986 the Communist Party took over the COB’s leadership. Salas (not Sales, as the article calls him) is the leader of the rightwing Stalinist ASD. The most important unions are led by non-bourgeois left parties. Harvey has said on another occasion that the labour movement in Bolivia is less class conscious than the British, despite its militancy, because they do not have a Labour Party.

He simply does not understand what is happening. At no time did Harvey criticise Lora’s POR which played an important role leading the La Paz teachers’ union. The POR wanted to overthrow the bourgeoisie by extending hunger strikes.

Since the LRCI leaders excluded us nine months ago, they have never made any criticism of this traditional opponent. On the contrary, Lora, the Bolivian Healy, was sent a copy of an LRCI document, in which there was internal information about our comrades that put their security in serious danger during the strike.

Despite our differences, we will always help all our former LRCI comrades in any serious fight against repression.

Harvey’s article shows a very bad method - one that we had to deal with when we were in the same International. A clique of English academics always wanted to impose their criteria, elaborated in closed rooms, without knowing what was happening in the Andes. They called this colonialist bureaucratic practice “internationalism” and any time we demanded that they investigate and try to establish a collective international line with us, we were called federalists, factionalists, etc.