Here is the report by our comrade Alejandro Bodart on International Panorama, the program of the International Socialist League, on the Bolivian Revolution of 1952.
As we have explained on several occasions, at the end of the Second World War and without Trotsky, who had been assassinated in 1940, the Fourth International was left in the hands of a petty bourgeois leadership, without any experience, without tradition or training regarding the class struggle.
This unproven leadership, through revisionist deviations and blunders, ended up dispersing the forces of Trotskyism in multiple organizations.
Today we are going to elaborate on the greatest opportunity Trotskyism had in its history and which was wasted by that leadership: the Bolivian revolution of 1952.
That year, the working class in Bolivia carried out one of the most perfect revolutions in history, comparable to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Unlike all other postwar revolutions, this one clearly had the working class leading it and a Trotskyist party with mass influence in a position to contest and seize power.
The 1952 revolution succeeded in destroying the bourgeois army; workers’ and peasants’ militias were set up and took over all the weapons.
An organization arose and became the only real power in the country, the COB, the Central Obrera Boliviana, where the entire working class, the peasantry and the militias were referred to and centralized, and where Trotskyism managed to have a decisive weight.
But the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, the Bolivian section of the Fourth International, squandered the historic opportunity that was presented to it.
Bolivia was governed by the regime of the mining and landlord oligarchy known as La Rosca. It entered into an acute crisis after being defeated in the Chaco War against Paraguay.
The army was divided and a nationalist sector emerged, which took power in 1936 and nationalized part of the oil industry, in the heat of a rise in the workers’ and popular struggle.
Linked to this self-styled “military socialism,” the MNR, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, a middle-class party with a reformist program, emerged.
It had a faction, that of Paz Estenssoro, that would be linked to the mining unionism, supporting in 1944 the foundation of the Bolivian Mining Workers’ Union Federation.
But the mining workers were in a process of politicization and radicalization that went beyond the nationalism of the MNR.
In 1946, the Miners’ Federation adopted the Pulacayo program, drafted by the Trotskyist POR, which included a revolutionary, political and socialist transition program, inspired by the Transitional Program written by Leon Trotsky.
From that moment on, Trotskyism would not stop growing and would reach a mass weight among the workers.
The same year, the Rosca recovered the government with a right-wing coup that had the support of the Communist Party, then aligned with the United States, and accusing the nationalist side of being Nazis.
The new government tried to defeat the miners but lost all social support after perpetrating the well-known white massacre in the Siglo XXI mine and had to call for elections in 1951.
The MNR won the elections, but the military struck again to prevent it from taking over the government.
On April 9, 1952 the MNR with the police and a sector of the army attempted a counter-coup, which failed, but an impressive workers’ and popular insurrection broke out.
Thus began this extraordinary revolution.
The police, defeated, handed over some weapons to the workers in the capital of La Paz.
Meanwhile, the miners of Oruro defeated the army, seized the regiments, armed themselves and began to march towards La Paz.
The workers in the capital liquidated the seven regiments that made up the base of the Bolivian army, and also appropriated all the weapons.
After two days of fighting, the military coup had fallen and the workers’ and peasants’ militias were the only armed forces left in the country, most of them led by Trotskyism. The MNR took over the government, but the real power was in the hands of the masses in arms, who organized all the unions and the militias by creating the Central Obrera Boliviana on April 17.
Under pressure from the masses in revolution, the government nationalized the mines and integrated the unions into the leadership of the state enterprise with veto power. The unions and the workers’ and peasants’ organizations acquired legislative, executive and judicial powers and began to organize all the activities in the country. A situation of dual power develops, similar to that of Russia after the February revolution in 1917, with a powerless bourgeois government and real power in the hands of the organized working class.
The COB had the possibility of seizing power entirely, burying the bourgeois state, establishing a workers’ and peasants’ government supported by the workers’ militias, and carrying out the revolutionary program of Pulacayo.
But the reformist sectors of the COB, with Juán Lechín, of the left wing of the MNR itself at the head, defended the government of Paz Estenssoro and occupied two ministries in his government.
Tragically, the POR, which had 6 of the 13 members of the Central Committee of the COB and a decisive weight among the miners and the militias, instead of fighting for a revolutionary policy, which passed by lifting all power to the COB, also supported (critically) the government of the MNR.
The Fourth International led at that time by Pablo and Mandel had adopted the policy of sui generis entryism.
It characterized the coming of a Third World War against the USSR, which would force the Stalinist Communist Parties to become revolutionaries, and which the Trotskyists then had to join and support.
That line was imposed on a world scale. Where there were no strong Stalinist parties, they replaced them with reformist socialists or bourgeois nationalists.
In Bolivia that meant giving their critical support to the bourgeois government of the MNR instead of fighting for the COB to take power.
This capitulation to bourgeois nationalism was hidden behind a false objectivism. They argued that the pressure of the mass movement was so strong that it would force the MNR to make a socialist revolution.
They proposed for Bolivia, and unfortunately the POR carried it out, a policy opposed to that raised by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, where in the face of the bourgeois government of Kerensky they opposed all power to the Soviets.
The current from which we came, which had joined the Fourth International a few years earlier, developed an implacable struggle against the betrayal of the Bolivian POR, warning that it would lead to the defeat of the revolution and the crisis of Bolivian Trotskyism, insisting that the only revolutionary policy at that time was to lift “all power to the COB.
All the conditions were in place for that to happen. The POR had enough weight in the COB and the militias to fight for that bottom line, which was also the only one that could lead the revolution to victory.
Tragically, the central thesis of the theory of permanent revolution, that everything that does not advance ends up going backwards, would be confirmed once again by the refusal.
The oxygen granted to him by Lechín and the POR allowed Paz Estenssoro to demobilize the revolution with some democratic concessions, such as universal suffrage and a limited agrarian reform, and then to begin to dismantle its conquests.
In 1953 the government began to rebuild the regular army and disarm the militias with the help of the United States and the IMF.
But it would take a long time to achieve this to the point that in many celebrations the army had to borrow the weapons from the COB to march and then return them.
The POR would then denounce the government’s right turn, but instead of breaking, it demanded the left of the MNR to take power.
However, in the first COB congress, which took place in 1954, the COB ended up approving the reconstruction of the army with aid from the US.
It was not until 1956, when the revolutionary wave had subsided and the MNR had stabilized in power and the army had been restructured, that the POR ended up raising the slogan, already propagandistic, of “all power to the COB”.
As in every revolution that does not go all the way, the reaction cost the Bolivian people greatly. Decades of neo-liberalism, plundering and new dictatorships.
In the first decade of this century, the Bolivian masses, again with the miners at the front, took on another bourgeois government.
Unfortunately, a new reformist leadership, this time the MAS of Evo Morales, stopped the process, reconciled itself with the oligarchy and ended up disillusioning the masses and then falling.
But few working peoples have the persistence of the Bolivian, which is again in movement against an exhausted regime.
We revolutionaries must draw conclusions from past experiences so that the next revolutionary opportunity, which will come sooner rather than later, will not be wasted.
At the end of last year the workers rose again, and on two occasions power was once again being disputed.
Evo Morales fell because of the generalized rebellion of the workers and important sectors of the peasantry.
The leadership of the COB, headed by the bureaucracy, refused to intervene in the political crisis. Nor is there a revolutionary party with the weight of the masses to place the need for the workers and the people to govern through their own organizations back in the center of the debate.
That absence and the collaboration of Morales’ MAS from the chamber of deputies and senators in which they maintain majorities allowed the third in the line of succession, the right-wing Añez, who has already said that it will not run in the next elections, because it has no social base, to come to power.
The most urgent task in Bolivia is to unite revolutionaries and build a party that, in view of the coming crisis, will raise correct politics and strengthen the perspective of a government of the workers and the people.
The ISL is devoted to that task.