April 23, 2019
A contribution of the revolutionary socialists of Bolivia to the brave workers of the NUMSA of South Africa:
THE "THESES OF PULACAYO"
of the TRADE UNION FEDERATION OF MINING WORKERS OF BOLIVIA (1946)
An experience that should be known as a valid instrument to conquer a revolutionary leadership
in the unions and open the way to set up a true revolutionary party
It has been a short time since the SRWP launching conference in South Africa ended. Regrettably, in it, a leadership that claims to belong in the World Social Forum at an international level and enthusiastic follower of the so-called "Bolivarian Revolution", has impregnated the SRWP of a course that is, in our view, a reformist and class collaborationist one, so wasting the enormous effort of militant workers who seek a path to socialist revolution. That is our opinion. This is what we have said publicly from the FLTI, international current which we are part of.
However, life and the common struggle will give their verdict on this experience that the workers of South Africa have initiated.
But what we are sure of, is that the well-known "Bolivarian Revolution" in Latin America has been a real scam to the struggle of the working class, not only in Latin America, but also in the US, after the pact that Fidel Castro signed with Obama in 2008, at a time when the crash of Wall Street was busting... As if that "black president" were a representative of the workers of the US and not the counterrevolutionary leader of the US imperialist pirates.
We will not insist on what we propose in the article detailing our balance of the SRWP congress and our vision of what has happened with Cuba's surrender to imperialism and the imposition of capitalist restoration. We have already developed our position on the servility of the native bourgeoisies that, faced with the imperialist attack, as in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia or Argentina, have knelt before the US imperialist master and not touched even one of their interests, in spite of the latter having looted all the nations that are in what it regards as its "backyard." Quite the opposite: the Maduros, the Kirchners, the Lulas, etc., have been the biggest re-payers of the fraudulent external debts with which the global financial oligarchy plunders Latin America, Africa and the whole semicolonial world.
In this opportunity, we want to contribute to the workers of the NUMSA, and also of the SAFTU, a revolutionary experience of the Latin American working class and of our country Bolivia in particular. This goes at an angle of 180 ° with the policy that Castro-Chavezismo has applied in recent years in Latin America, with which they have gone on diverting and expropriating massive revolutionary processes that emerged in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela itself and throughout Latin America.
We want to send you the program proposed by the revolutionary socialists, the Trotskyist militants, in the last century, voted in 1946 in a meeting by the Trade Union Federation of Mining Workers of Bolivia, which took place in Pulacayo. Hence they are known as "THE THESES OF PULACAYO" (you can see them at http://www.democraciaobrera.org/suple/Suple_bolivia_07-10/tesis_pulacayo.html ). This program is praised and taken as a reference point, until today, by broad sectors of the Bolivian working class, which does not give up before the boss’ state and government.
The "Pulacayo Theses" were the program of the Bolivian working class in the Bolivian revolution of 1952. This program was also adopted in the same year by the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). During the revolutionary process opened in '52, the working masses and even the poor peasants were organized inside the COB, giving a content of real worker and peasant power to this central union. Destroying the army, the miners and the entire working class armed themselves and had in their hands the possibility of taking power. As it happened in so many revolutions, the reformist leaders refused to take power and returned it to the bourgeoisie.
Beyond that tragic experience, a revolutionary program remained that was followed by millions of workers in the world, and of course in Bolivia, as their program of struggle, as we said. We are convinced that this is a contribution to the labor base of NUMSA for their current struggle.
We advance some questions of that revolutionary program, as an exchange between workers who fight for socialist revolution and practice proletarian internationalism.
These theses that you will be able to read now as an advance, raise in their point "III - Fight against class collaborationism":
1) The class struggle is, in the last analysis, the struggle for the appropriation of surplus value. The proletarians who sell their labor force struggle to do it in better conditions and the owners of the means of production (capitalists) struggle to continue usurping the product of unpaid labor, both pursuing contrary objectives, resulting in irreconcilable interests. We cannot close our eyes to the evidence that the struggle against the bosses is a fight to the death, because in that struggle the fate of private property is at stake. We do not recognize, contrary to our enemies, a truce in the class struggle. The present historical stage, which is a stage of shame for humanity, can only be overcome when social classes disappear, when there are no longer exploited and exploiters. Stupid stupidity of the collaborators who argue that you should not go to the destruction of the rich, but to convert the poor into rich. Our objective is the expropriation of the expropriators.
2) Any attempt to collaborate with our executioners, any attempt to concede to the enemy in our struggle, is nothing less than a surrender of the workers to the bourgeoisie. Class collaboration means giving up our goals. All workers' conquests, even the smallest, have been achieved after a bloody struggle against the capitalist system. We cannot think of an understanding with the subjugation because we subordinate the problem of transitory demands to the proletarian revolution.
We are not reformers, although we give the workers the most advanced platform of demands, we are, above all, revolutionaries, because we are going to transform the very structure of society.
3) We reject the petty-bourgeois illusion of solving the workers' problem by leaving it in the hands of the State or of other Institutions that have the hope of passing as equidistant organisms among the social classes in struggle. Such a solution, as taught by the history of the national and international labor movement, has always meant a solution according to the interests of capitalism and at the expense of hunger and the oppression of the proletariat. The compulsory arbitration and the regulation of the means of struggle of the workers is, in most cases, the beginning of the defeat.
Where possible, we work to destroy compulsory arbitration. Let social conflicts be resolved under the direction of the workers and by themselves!
4) The realization of our program of transitory demands, which should lead us to the proletarian revolution, is always subordinated to the class struggle. We are proud to be the most intransigent when talking about commitments with employers. This is why it is a central task to fight and destroy the reformists who preach class collaboration, who advise us to “tighten our belts” for the sake of the so-called national salvation. When there is hunger and oppression of the workers, there can be no national greatness; that is called national misery and decrepitude. We will abolish capitalist exploitation. War to death against capitalism! War to death against reformist collaborationism! On the path of class struggle towards the destruction of capitalist society!
Among other programmatic points, this revolutionary workers' program of the COB of '52 advances in giving a response to the brutal plundering of the minerals that Bolivia has suffered all along and continues to suffer at the hands of transnational corporations, as is also the case in South Africa:
"Worker control over the mines. The Trade Union Federation of Mining Workers of Bolivia supports all measures taken by the unions in the sense of carrying out an effective control of the workers in all aspects of the operation of the mines.
We have to break the secrets of exploitation, accounting, technique, transformation of minerals, etc., to establish the direct intervention of workers as such in these 'secrets'. Since our objective is the occupation of the mines, we have to be interested in bringing the secrets of the bosses to light.
Workers must control the technical direction of exploitation, accounting, intervening in the designation of category (professionals, NT) employees and, above all, should be interested in publishing the benefits received by large mining enterprises and the frauds they make when it comes to paying taxes to the State and to contribute to the Worker's Insurance and Savings Fund. "
The workers of South Africa have felt in their own flesh the brutal fascist repression of Apartheid and the counterrevolutionary bands of the ANC and their murderous police, which killed 34 Marikana miners, as an example of the harsh punishments of the ruling classes against the workers in fight. Therefore, as stated in the "Pulacayo Theses":
"Armament of the workers. We have said that as long as capitalism exists, the violent repression of the workers' movement is a latent danger. (...) we have to arm the workers. To reject the fascist gangs and the strikebreakers, let’s forge workers’ pickets properly armed. "
Before the intervention in the elections, which is a challenge before which the SRWP is today, the Bolivian trade union center, advanced the following considerations:
"- We claim the place of preeminence that corresponds, among the methods of proletarian struggle, to the direct action of the masses. We know very well that our liberation will be the work of ourselves and that to achieve this goal we cannot expect collaboration from forces other than ours. For this reason, in this stage of the rise of the workers' movement, our preferred method of struggle is the direct mass action and within this the strike and the occupation of mines. (...)
- The parliamentary struggle is important, but in the stages of the rise of the revolutionary movement it acquires a secondary character."
This revolutionary program ends up fixing a clear position in the sense that the established combat is class versus class:
"- With the bourgeoisie we do not have to make any block, no commitment.
- With the petty bourgeoisie as a class and not with its political parties, we can forge blocks and sign commitments. The left front, the Central Obrera, are examples of such blocks, but being careful to fight for the proletariat to be the leader of the block. If we want to go to the petty bourgeoisie, we must reject and break the blocks. "
These are some points of the program of a revolutionary trade union center that puts the workers' organizations at the service of the revolution. This was the program of the COB for the revolution to be opened in Bolivia in the early ‘50s. As you can see, for the socialists, when a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary process starts, the central task is to fight for building up the dual power organs of the masses and the self-defense committees. Those are equivalent to 1917 Russia worker and peasant soviets. That worker and peasant power cannot be replaced by any party. The revolutionary parties are for the emergence of these organisms of self-determination of the workers, poor peasants and all the exploited masses to arm themselves and seize power. Only thus, we are deservedly called revolutionaries and socialists.
For that reason we send you this program, of which we are reproducing only some excerpts. This program was taken by the Trotskyists of the Fourth International to the Bolivian mining proletariat in 1946 and as a proposal to their organizations of mass struggle. And it was this program, the "Theses of Pulacayo", a combat tool not only against foreign imperialism and the Bolivian bourgeoisie, but also against the Stalinist gang that with its pseudo-theory of "revolution by stages" prostrated the workers of the semi-colonies tying their lot to the interests of the native bourgeoisies or of the "democratic" imperialisms, as they called them. There is the Obama-Castro pact of capitalist restoration in Cuba, which brought to the island the establishment of the right to inheritance, the return of private property, the installation of maquiladoras (sweat-shops) to exploit slave workers and which also meant the selling out of the Colombian resistance. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan “Bolivarian bourgeoisie”, with Maduro at the helm, have more than 300,000 million dollars in their private accounts in Miami. How will the interests of imperialism touch then, if they are its smaller partners?
Che Guevara, who died in our country, murdered by the lackeys of imperialism, had a policy opposed to these native bourgeoisies who are on their knees. He was a true militant internationalist who had shouted "Socialist revolution or caricature of revolution!" The time has come to return to that path: that of the socialist revolution. A few years ago, Fidel Castro said that "socialism does not go further, even in Cuba." That was a very hard blow against the workers of the whole world because, precisely, we are experiencing the greatest crisis and decadence of the world capitalist imperialist system and the socialist revolution is the only way out for the exploited.
From Latin America and other countries of the world, we are learning and following your experience closely. We have raised frankly the points in which we have agreement and those in what we differ, both before, during and after your congress. Here we bring you this collaboration, in the form of a program that workers raised in a process of open revolution against local capitalists and imperialism.
We know we have differences. We will continue discussing them. But we will do it while fighting in common, from all parts of the world, against the imperialist transnationals and the bourgeoisie, against all their governments and regimes. But also against all those who in the name of "socialism" disorganize at every step the struggles of the working class and their desire for revolutionary change against this rotten capitalist system.
Julian Juarez