Bellow is the complete interview of Hernan Camarero, Argentine historian, director of the magazine Archivos and the Center of Historical Studies of the Working Class and the Left, that Alejandro Bodart conducted for the final edition of 2020 of International Panorama.
Alejandro Bodart: Hernán, you are an expert on the history of the labor movement in our country. Can you tell us what were the main political tendencies in the rise of the Argentine working class?
Hernan Camarero: In the history of the formation of the working class in Argentina and after the constitution of the labor movement, since it is important to differentiate these two levels, one can recognize four great traditions, identities and political cultures. That is precisely what is interesting when one elaborates on the history of the working class and the labor movement in Argentina, which is its richness, its density, its complexity and its diversity. That places it, without a doubt, as the labor movement that brought together, in the whole of Latin American history, a greater capital of experiences and teachings, which were very useful for the times that followed, even today when we examine them.
Throughout the first stage… We are going to identify the first stage as the cycle that opens from the process of formation from the 1870s to the 1880s, look at how early we are talking about. One could identify two great tendencies, two great currents, one was that of the militants who were grouping themselves around the Marxist program. The role of some immigrants was fundamental. Initially, immigrants who came from what had been the repression of the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 and later, in the 1980s, a series of German immigrants who escaped Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. I mention these two experiences, which also occurred in other places, a group of militants from Italian immigration and some cadres who already had experience in the Spanish workers’ movement. I mention this aspect, which now seems overdimensioned, but which is very important, the role of immigrants, the role of cadres trained in previous experiences, who played a really exemplary role in the process of forming the workers’ movement as a collective subject.
I was saying then that initially, mainly as a result of the dissemination of Marx’s work in the Rio de la Plata, a socialist-Marxist current was forged, which after various steps ended up coagulating in the 1880s the experience of a first newspaper, which played a very important role.
At that time the press and the newspapers played a role of forger of groups, forger of movements and parties. That first great newspaper was El Obrero, which came out in 1890. And many people therefore believe that that date, in 1890, marks a germinal moment in the history of the workers’ movement, that the years and decades before that are in some way a kind of proto-development or pre-history of the workers’ movement. And that with the founding of the newspaper El Obrero, in 1890, and also towards the end of that year and the beginning of 1891 of the first federation or attempt to forge a federation of workers, the labor movement in Argentina arose as a subject. I wouldn’t say it was strong yet, but it was making its mark in the social and political context.
Remember that we are talking about the period where Argentina had a strong economic development with the agro-export model, with an oligarchic-conservative regime that, incidentally, did not leave many gaps for the development of the labor movement, that is, this had to be a process against the tide. The foundation of the newspaper I mentioned, of the first federation and also the commemoration for the first May Day as an international day of the workers, all of this makes the year ’90, ’91, a fundamental year for us.
That first current later took steps towards the foundation of what was considered as something imperious and very necessary, which was the foundation of a workers’ party. This generated very interesting discussions, discussions that were later reissued in the history of the left-wing workers’ movement. The big discussion at that time was whether to found a party, a party that would fight for the political independence of the working class, or whether to insist on the creation of a federation of unions, that is, to prioritize the union struggle to galvanize the class more and then launch it into a party form. This debate about a party or trade union organization was something that had a great impact on the socialist movement of those years.
Finally, the group that prevailed was the one that put forward the idea of founding a party. There was a process that lasted between 1892 and 1896, in the middle of which another important step was taken which was, in April 1894, the founding of the newspaper La Vanguardia and finally in 1896 the founding of what was to become the International Socialist Workers’ Party, which later took the name of the Argentine Socialist Workers’ Party. Finally it is known as the Socialist Party.
This Socialist Party, in which initially the person who was going to be its future leader, Juan B. Justo, did not play such a central role, but rather he won it at the second and third congresses and imposed his positions and reformatted that Socialist Party into a program and a strategy. The characteristics of Argentina were turning the PS into a strong party, and I would say successful as a political enterprise, but very weak as a leadership of the workers’ movement, it did so under a strongly reformist program. That is, a program of reforms, a program that renounced a revolutionary strategy and above all that renounced the dimension of the class struggle understood as direct action practices.
Juan B. Justo spoke of the need for class struggle, but he kind of understood it as a public debate, a debate in which he forced the bourgeoisie to also structure itself as a party, that finally in Argentina there should be parties around ideas and programs. He said that this was the party of the working class with its program, but it was rather a minimal program. There was a maximum program that had been voted on in the 1896 congress, but it was a program that was mainly stated for the first of May or for the days of commemoration, but in practice the party behaved according to a minimum program.
Well, there it was, our party and our program, and it set the way for the challenge that the bourgeoisie should also forge its parties. In some way in the debate and confrontation of ideas of the programs and above all in parliament, progress was being made towards the extension and deepening of a political democracy or a social democracy. That is to say, it is very clear that the Socialist Party ended up being one of the first parties in Argentina, that it had its influence on the workers’ movement, that it helped to establish the labor movement and the trade union movement, but it was guiding workers towards a clearly reformist, parliamentary alternative, quite integrated into the system. To a large extent, it was even a party that had a certain liberal democratic drift or imprint in its program. It combined very characteristic features of the tradition of Marxist socialism, but it was an incomplete party as a Marxist party. Justo himself denied his status as a Marxist in orthodox terms.
Although Justo had an insertion in the international socialist movement, he was a figure of the second international, perhaps its most prominent figure in Latin America for a few years, he was a rather heterodox Marxist, very unclassical. In that sense, you could say he was very creative.
We have this first great current, which is the Socialist Party. I already marked something that is very important, it was strong as a party. A party that began to win many votes in the 20th century and began to win parliamentarians, deputies and then senators. After the opening of the Saenz Peña Law in 1912, it began to have representation in the Senate.
It was strong in the electoral instance, in the legislative action, in the cultural action and in the cooperative movement. It was a very important experience, especially Justo himself pointed out that the workers were trained in the management of social issues through cooperative work, as a prefiguration of the society to come, socialism gave a lot of strength to the cooperative. But it was very weak, I repeat, as the leadership of the workers’ movement.
To put it very succinctly, it was in that sense, a party, perhaps as reformist or in the reformist vein of German social democracy at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Except the German Social Democratic Party led the workers’ movement, while the Argentine Socialist Party failed to lead or organize the workers’ movement.
If not socialism, who did it? It was the second current that began to form in the 80s and especially in the 90s, which was anarchism.
Anarchism was very important for the history of the workers’ movement in Argentina. Above all, since 1897/98, the current of the so-called Organizing Anarchists was strengthened, those who founded the newspaper La Protesta Humana, those who put forward an anarchism that rejected the anti-organizing approach and that struggled, obviously, for an anarchist approach against the State, against the bourgeoisie, against all forms of oppression and domination. But that also gave rise to the union struggle, that was the great merit of the anarchist organizers, they launched themselves into the workers’ movement. And that is why it is not by chance that, in 1901, in a scenario in which socialism left an empty space for representation and organization, it was the anarchists who ended up founding the first big organization of the workers’ movement, which was the FOA, Federación Obrera Argentina, in 1901. This later became the famous FORA, Federación Obrera de la Región Argentina.
In those years, anarchism became a great leadership, it turned the FORA into an entity of struggle, which led to grouping, mobilizing between 15,000 and 20,000 workers, and launched them in great struggles against the state and against the bosses, and several general strikes. Even with that which was so characteristic of anarchism, not only did they wage union struggle, but also another type of struggle. For example, they organized the Tenants’ Strike in 1907; they organized women, they were very important in the struggle for the emancipation of women. One could place anarchism as being halfway between a workers’ struggle and a broader popular struggle.
The truth is that anarchists and socialists were the first mass expression of the workers’ movement. A third current was added to them, already at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was revolutionary trade unionism. It was a very strong current in Europe, above all in France and Italy where they led the workers’ movement, with the proposals of Labriola, Sorell and others. They reached the lands of the Río de La Plata with great force, managed to win a sector of the Socialist Party, and in 1904/1905 they broke with the PS and were founded as an autonomous current.
What did revolutionary trade unionism propose? Initially it was a current to the left of the PS. They questioned the parliamentary, reformist horizon of the PS. It stated that the country had abandoned the class struggle and it was necessary to organize the workers in their daily struggles and in their especially revolutionary struggles, for that reason the name Revolutionary Unionism.
Then they ended up forming their own current, they became strong in the workers’ movement, they displaced socialism and then went for the leadership of the workers’ movement. In 1915 they succeeded when they achieved the leadership of the FORA in the famous Ninth Congress, in 1915. That’s why that FORA was called the FORA Ninth Congress, that is, the FORA directed by trade unionism.
The interesting thing is that trade unionism began as a revolutionary current, but later it was moderated in its program and in its strategy, it was more and more adapted to the regime, above all under the Radical governments. And it began to become a grouping, a current above all in negotiation, more pragmatic, even with more and more bureaucratic tendencies. Let us say that it was defined by a strongly economistic orientation, which renounced political combat.
The unionist current was a serious problem for the workers’ movement, because it blocked and blocked the possibility of the working class in Argentina to fight for its own political party which would adopt a program with revolutionary characteristics. The unionists initially said that the only revolutionary thing was the union, not the party. There cannot be a workers’ party, every party is bourgeois, every party means playing in the field of the bourgeoisie. They renounced the political struggle, the party form and finally ended up as all trade unionism ends, adapted. I always say a somewhat provocative phrase, “There are no happy endings in revolutionary trade unionism.” Antonio Gramsci used to say, “Revolutionary unionism is a contradiction in terms”, because unionism can never be revolutionary. Because what the union struggle is about is improving the conditions for the sale of the labor force. For it to be revolutionary, it has to take a political program.
Let us remember that the history of revolutionary unionism in Argentina was after being a very left-wing current which questioned the reformism of the PS, it ended up negotiating with the radicals, ended up adapting to the regime in the 1930s and finally dissolved in the ranks of Labor and Peronism.
There was a fourth current which was the Communist Party, which was also very early. It was the first Communist Party in Latin America, together with the Mexican one. It arose formally under the name of the Communist Party, Argentine Section of the International, at the end of 1920, when it adopted Zinoviev’s conditions of the International and was founded as a section of the Comintern. But in reality it had already emerged before, in January 1918, under the name of the International Socialist Party.
What had the International Socialist Party been? It had been a break from the left, again a break from the left of the PS. Questioning things similar to that of the Revolutionary Trade Unionism of a decade before; the reformist horizon of the party, which turned its back on the class struggle, which denied the union struggle, which forgot the struggle for elements of the maximum program, internationalism, anti-militarism, etc.
It emerged as an internal current of the PS, from 1911-1912, with a strong figure, which was Jose Fernando Penelón. It gave the battle within the party, it fought for the Socialist Party to have an internationalist conduct during the First World War, they were against the PS deputies voting or being willing to vote for the rupture of relations with Germany, violating what was the tradition and the position of the International. They were finally kicked out and founded this small PSI, which in 1920 took the name of the Communist Party.
In the first years the CP was a rather weak party in the workers’ movement, it had workers’ cadres, but it was not the defining current. My position is that the Communist Party began to become strong in the workers’ movement from the second half of the 1920’s, when they adopted the cellular structure. They broke with the tradition of organization of the old PS and took the form of organization of cells; factory cells, company cells. That is, they grouped the workers of the same company under a clandestine militancy, that the bosses couldn’t recognize, and from the bottom, they forged organisms of control or workers’ power.
With the organization of the cells, the CP began to penetrate strongly into the working class and above all into the most exploited and least organized faction of the working class, which was the industrial working class.
Let us remember that at the end of the 1920s, throughout the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s, Argentina experienced what became known as import substitution industrialization. Industry grew a lot, the number of workers in industry, meat, metallurgy, textiles, and construction multiplied. And that was a poorly organized sector.
The socialists did not pay attention to it, the trade unionists were very comfortable in the unions they ran: the maritime ones, the railway ones. The railway workers were the great workers’ organization in Argentina. The anarchists were there among the most exploited workers, but they were already very weak, they had been defeated. In other words, anarchism suffered a heavy defeat with the Centennial strikes in 1910 and there began a decline.
Then there was an empty space, the CP occupied that space. It launched itself, as I say in one of my books, into the conquest of the industrial working class and began to organize these poorly paid workers, who lacked labor legislation, at the base. Where it was very difficult to organize the union struggle, because the boss fired you as soon as he realized that you were won over by an anti-capitalist consciousness. So the CP, with that clandestine struggle, armed, with a lot of revolutionary disposition. And this must be recognized, even though the CP was already adapting to the process of Stalinization of the Comintern, we must not lose sight of this. We already know that in the middle and end of the 1920’s the Argentine CP was adapting to the bureaucratic and Stalinist drift of the Comintern. However, in spite of this historical orientation, the practical militancy of the communists in the factories and in the workshops opened up a space for their insertion.
And the CP in the 1930s was very well established in the industrial working class. So it was the fourth current to arrive, but when it arrived, it arrived with great force. And at the beginning of the 1940’s, there I state a sort of counterfactual, well, I am not the only one, if the coup of 1943 had not taken place, which made Perón appear, it is very probable that the dynamic would have been that the Communist Party not only finished conquering its total influence over the industrial proletariat, but also lead it. Look, I give you a fact that is impressive. By 1943, the 6 secretaries of the biggest industrial unions in the country, metallurgical, meat, construction, wood, textile and clothing, were members of the Central Committee of the CP. That is to say, how long will it take a party of the left to have in its leadership, in its Central Committee, 6 secretaries of the strongest industrial unions? That was the Communist Party. That is, its influence among the industrial proletariat was very strong.
It is probable that, after a few years, it could even conquer the whole leadership of the CGT, which had been founded in the 1930’s, in which the socialists and trade unionists still had influence. But the CP was the party that advanced most rapidly.
With this I close this description. It is not by chance then that one of the elements of the coup of 1943, by Colonel Perón, is precisely an anti-communist strategy. That is to say, to avoid the working class being completely in the hands of the CP and for that reason his anti-communist action, on the one hand, of persecuting and pursuing the communists very hard in 1943 and 44, filling prisons with union cadres from the CP. But at the same time, on the other hand, he tried out measures to attend to the demands of the workers; he increased wages, bonuses, collective bargaining agreements. And there a new political phenomenon arose, the appearance of Peronism was the phenomenon that cut off a development of 50, 60 or 70 years.
Peronism always says, “we founded the workers’ movement. Every so often it says “we founded the CGT,” as if it had been founded in 1945, in reality it was founded in 1930 by socialist and trade union leaders, where there were also communists. Peronism tends to say that they are the source of constitution of the workers’ movement in Argentina, that is false.
The movement in Argentina had several decades of development in different variants, reformist, revolutionary, of rejection of the State, of combat against the State, of integration, of insertion in the industrial workers, among the railway workers. With very rich experiences, impressive programmatic debates about which much has to be learned, we have to return to these debates; of programs, of tactics, of maximum program, of what are minimum vindictive struggles, of how to take legislative action, what is the place of cooperative work. The cultural struggle is very important. It is very important the experience of the workers’ culture, parties and currents that had libraries, which gave rise to the struggle for the emancipation of women.
In short, it is an experience that I think we can learn a lot from and that in 1945 has a break, but it gives rise to other experiences that I can later reincorporate, in which, for example, Trotskyism appears. Logically, in this first period it will appear in the year ’29, ’30, but as an undoubtedly very marginal current, very small.
AB: In one of your books you describe the impact that the Russian Revolution had in these lands. Can you tell us a bit about this?
HC: Well the Russian Revolution was a process that had great influence on the working class in Argentina and in all Latin America, even beyond the ranks of the world of the workers.
Initially the Russian Revolution had of course in its chapter of February an almost universal nature, that is to say, when someone studies how the February Revolution was read, since its news arrived in March. Initially, everyone was in favor of the Russian Revolution, meaning, not only the side of the left. They did not only greet the overthrow of Tsarism, known as the Tsarist regime in the world as the representation of despotism, the most despotic autocracy.
Then the entire world greeted the fall of the Tsar and the establishment of a republic, where quickly that new word called soviet became known, which was a body, a council of delegates, representatives, soldiers, workers and later also farmers.
Then the idea of a republic, of a republic with an assembly or popular council. That portrays the idea of a deep revolution, a mass revolution. It had achieved what it seemed unthinkable, overturning one of the most despotic and strongest regimes, ancient in the heart of Europe.
Initially, the entire world supported it: anarchists, who will become the international socialists that will later fund the PC, the revolutionary unionists. But outside the left, everybody supported it, even for example, the newspaper La Nación. I write a book about this called Tiempos Rojos and in it I comment how the newspaper La Nación, the newpaper La Prensa greeted and said “Liberals and republicans greet the events of Petrograd, because now Russia will come closer to Western Europe, the values of the republic, of the division of powers” and then there is great consensus.
However, when the process went further, I even want to say that it won the headlines of the newspapers, the topic of the Russian Revolution reached headlines. All the headlines of the newspapers narrated the events. But as months went by and the internal dissidences, as they were called, became known, in the heart of the post-Tsarist field, a field that had opened the February Revolution. I speak as if I was an accordion that fully opens from February to March, everybody in favor, but then that accordion kind of closes. It starts to close. But why? Because there are opinions increasingly more condemning, opinions of a trend that is not at first clearly acknowledged, which is the trend of maximalists.
They start talking about a Lenin who, returned from exile, had disrupted his origin in the ranks of social democracy to adopt the Bakuninist program. It is very curious. They said that what Lenin was proposing was a Bakuninist strategy. That is to say, the immediate establishment of the project of a revolutionary commune, even on the ranks of the vanguard one read that Lenin had been left out of the ranks of the International, like he had turned to another proposal. Besides there was the suspicion that he was a German agent, in other words, a paid agent for German imperialism. For what? To overthrow the provisional government, over which the figure of Kerensky stands out. Then the fall and eventual overturthrowing of the government of Kerensky and getting Russia out of the war, which was the proposal of the Bolshevists. It was going to be a victory at the level of the German Empire, thus, he was a German agent.
These things were reproduced with a lot of clarity. When someone reads the newspapers of July or August of 1917 and they reproduced them in Argentina, I mean in Buenos Aires and they are reproduced in La Vanguardia.
The truth is that we now the outcome. Finally, the outcome is the October insurrection; the conquest of the Bolshevists by the majority of the soviets, the establishment of a soviet government and the beginning of the great transformations.
When that happened, an impressive polarization was generated. Not only the traditional right, the liberal right, the conservative right, the Church of course, which had a huge influence in that time, for example, one of the great newspapers was called El Pueblo and was of Catholic orientation. Some can see La Nación, La Prensa, La Razón, but also La Vanguardia of the socialists, condemning what was defined as the coup d’etat of the maximalists.
A coup d’etat against the republic, a coup against the rest of the left, even against the Mensheviks. A coup that served German imperialism, as it immediately pulled Russia out of the war and allowed Germany to clear its eastern front and focus on the western front. Those were the diatribes that took place towards late 1917 and early 1918.
Where did the support to the October Revolution last? Among the ranks of the workers’ movement, there in the emerging International Socialist Party. The Socialist Party was left very confused. Officially, the leadership of the Socialist Party, Juan B. Justo, Antonio de Tomasso, Reppetto, condemned the coup of Lenin and condemned the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat. They said, “Socialists do not support any dictatorship and in addition it is going to be a dictatorship over the proletariat.”
From then on, the Socialist Party formed its reformist program and said that what they were doing was insane. But what happened? At the heart of the SP, there were many sectors that spoke in favor of the revolution. Among them, for example, a historical figure, Senator Enrique del Valle Iberlucea. He had been in positions always discussing with Justo, but he was not precisely a referent of the left wing. However, Senator del Valle Iberlucea began to support many of the transformations and spoke in favor of the Russian Revolution. And him, being a Senator, saw the reactionary atmosphere and to what extent can the bourgeoisie hold the flag of the republic, that in the Senate a judge started a trial for his positions in favor of the revolution and the debate was started for impeachment. He was impeached, in other words, he was expelled from the parliament, only for expressing his standing in support of the Russian Revolution.
Just like del Valle Iberlucea, there were other figures. An intellectual linked to the party like José Ingenieros, was also initially in favor. In other words, the ranks of socialism were shaken. Even some time later, a current was formed, which was called Tercerista. It was a very important current, juvenile above all, that directly proposed that the Socialist Party support the revolution and affiliate to the Third International, something that Juan B. Justo utterly rejected. But they were expelled. That third party current entered and strengthened the Communist Party since 1921.
In the ranks of anarchism, the situation was complex. The anarchists initially supported, even the phenomenon of October, the idea of overturning the government of the bourgeoisie and establish a government of the soviets. But quickly, they began to propose that that was not a government of the soviets, but a government of one party. Then, newspapers like La Protesta and later La Antorcha quickly retracted.
But there was an anarchist current, known as Anarco bolchevique, which kept its support to the revolution. They proposed that the Bolshevists were not the core element. The core element was the process of the objective revolution that was taking place and that it was a process that had to be supported. The newspaper Bandera Roja expressed that position of the libertarian field, which kept the position in favor of the revolution, at least till the year 1921. After Kronstadt, obviously, other events made them retract.
In the ranks of the revolutionary unionism, there was also another current. They called themselves red unionist. They had their own newspaper, La Batalla Sindicalista. They said, “We are unionist but we acknowledge that Bolshevists have been the protagonists like no one else.” They acknowledge that their program was disrupted. Unions had not taken power, soviets had, led by a party. They said that the revolution had to be supported, trusting that later they are going to get rid of the party.
I show the diversity of positions of that time. Logically the news that came from Petrograd and Moscow were quite moving. It was the revolution that allowed things like the distribution of land, the workers’ control over the production, the measures for the emancipation of women; against the slavery of housework, divorce and abortion; the complete transformation of art, culture and the esthetical vanguard. Those things during 1918, 19 and 20 had the workers’ movement of the left on the edge. I would say that the majority, an overwhelming majority, supported the revolution.
And among the ranks of the enemy, the bourgeoisie, the big papers and the Church, there was obviously persecution, a battle of ideas of the revolution. What I see is that, if during the first 3 or 4 years many support the Russian Revolution from different perspectives, I would say that towards mid 1920’s, the support of the Russian Revolution is more identified with the current that explicitly references itself in the soviet regime, in the party and in the Comintern. That was the Communist Party.
I am not sure if you understand. Initially the support was very broad, very diverse, but towards the mid 20’s that support was more referenced in a CP, which somehow takes on the role of ambassador of the process of the Russian Revolution.
The Russian Revolution kept having its impact after the 20’s, logically, and in the 30’s, but everything was more covered by the media with the local reference, which were the communist parties. What I mean is that the support surpassed the field of the ranks of the workers. For example, its impact in the world of culture and intellectuals was huge. Dozens of writers, artists and painters, the most advanced of the vanguard, supported the revolution.
When anyone sees the world of the writers of Buenos Aires of the 1920’s, the group of Boedo, the group of Florida, in both most of the writers supported the revolution. All of them, including a young man, who later you would not believe it, Jorge Luis Borges. He was a fanatic, advocate and admirer of the Russian Revolution, in the years 1917, 1921 and 1922. He declared it, he affirmed it on his letters and wrote poems called Guardia Roja, and I cannot remember other titles. He was going to project a book, which he was going to publish under the title of Los Salmos Rojos, where he paid homage to the revolution. But after 1921 and 1922, Borges showed his disappointment with the course of the revolution and turned to other positions. He later abandoned and tried to hide that juvenile period, which did not support Bolshevism, but did support the cause of the revolution from a libertarian communist perspective. That was the road many followed.
The concept of libertarian communism is, in other words, people that came from a libertarian and acrata tradition and came together with the revolution. Let’s think that that was a path that many walked. An example, in Argentina, is the group of the magazine Insurrexit of Mika Feldman, Hipólito Etchebehere, etc. I comment this because later they were some of the first Trotskyists in Argentina. That was the generation of libertarians that supported the revolution and took their support further, entering the ranks of the Communist Party.
Then, as I say, the influence of the Russian Revolution was felt in different fields of the workers. Well, also in the students’ world. I did not mention something as obvious as the University Reform of 1918 in Córdoba, but which later was spread everywhere, even in Latin America.
The movement of the reform of 1918 obviously was a movement but it also was referenced in the Russian Revolution. Why? Because the Russian Revolution was seen as a revolution made above all by a new generation. It was seen as a revolution made, where the role of intellectual students, merged with the workers, who in turn lead a mass farmers’ movement, was seen as a very effective equation. Then the place of the youth, of the students, was boosted by the revolution. Then the whole ideal of the reform of 1918 was also inspired by the Russian Revolution. As we can see, there are lot of events of the class struggle, the union struggle, the student and cultural struggle that had the Russian Revolution as a very deep source of inspiration. It lasted throughout the first decade. Later, sadly, the process of degeneration and bureaucratization of the regime of the revolution, of the Thermidorian reactionary process, that Stalin will end up leading, made that the support to the revolution took another nature and significantly changed.
AB: Hernan, you recently published a work on the rise of the Left Opposition in the Third International in the region and our country. Can you explain this a bit?
HC: If I started to study, I had analyzed it some time ago. But now I returned again on the basis of new sources, which had not been so examined, which are the papers that Trotsky himself had deposited after his exile in Mexico, he had deposited at Harvard University. They were the papers of the left-wing opposition.
In recent years it has been possible to learn more about these materials, and they are very rich for understanding the process of germination and first development of the Left Opposition and later of the Fourth International.
I have been studying this phenomenon. The Left Opposition emerged in Latin America, I would say in 3 or 4 main countries. I am speaking of very small focuses, that is, of a very limited group of militants, and now I am going to analyze the context a little.
There was a small group in Mexico. Of course, it was going to develop in the 1930s and it was going to be very important to give Trotsky support when he arrived in Mexico, as a place of exile.
There is another important focus in Brazil. I would say that this was quite interesting. Fortunately, many works are now being done on that first Left Opposition and on that first Brazilian Trotskyism. I emphasize it a lot and in the article I use it to compare it with the Argentine case, and thus understand the Argentine case, when comparing it with the Brazilian case.
The Brazilian case had the particularity that an opposition current emerged within the PCB, formed by important workers’ cadres and very important intellectual cadres. Among them, the figure of Mário Pedrosa stood out.
Mário Pedrosa was a great art critic and philosopher. A guy who was a reference in the intellectual field of Brazil, beyond and much more important than his identification with Trotskyism. Let’s remember that Mário Pedrosa was the only Latin American who attended the congress for the foundation of the Fourth International, in 1938.
He was a very important guy for the position in Trotskyism in the 1930s. In his exile in Germany, he was to become acquainted with Trotsky’s positions and the opposition, and to link up with opposition cadres in Brazil. Some workers’ cadres, intellectuals, Rodolfo Coutinho, Mário Xavier and others. And they were going to form a group, not that they were so numerous, they were not more numerous than the one that existed in Argentina in the early 1930s, but they did have a very relevant structural location. They had workers from more or less important unions and intellectuals with a lot of projection. They formed a tendency of opposition, which was quickly expelled from the Brazilian CP and formed the first group called the Lenin Communist Group, which later took on the name of the Communist League.
Sometime later, after the 1930’s, they will take on the name of the Leninist Workers Party and will become a section of the Fourth with some weight.
The interesting thing is that the group of Pedrosa, Coutinho, Arístides Lobo and others, could eventually become an alternative to the leadership of the PCB in the hands of Octávio Brandão and Astrojildo Pereira, because they were a weak leadership. That is to say, hypothetically one can think that the leftist opposition could have disputed the leadership of the Brazilian party. And then Brazil is a relevant case.
In comparison, Argentina’s was weaker. Perhaps technically it is the first group. Also the Argentines can claim there that Argentine obsession of being the first. The first big socialist party in Latin America, the first Communist Party, and some say it is the first group of the Left Opposition in South America. Already by mid and late 1929 what will be the first outbreak of the Left Opposition in the country was founded, which was called the Communist Committee of Opposition.
What happens is that this Communist Committee of Opposition is a very small and very weak group. What is more, it does not even emerge within the Argentinean CP.
What had happened was that the Argentine CP had had a very important place in the group of Latin American CPs, South America, above all, because it had been the most reliable section for Moscow. The Argentine CP was a relatively large CP by the mid-1920s, with a certain growing insertion in the workers’ movement. But also, due to the characteristics of the Argentine working class and the CP itself, where all kinds of languages were spoken, we are talking about a multinational and multilingual working class. And by the very characteristics of Argentina, which was a country more likely to be known or understood from Europe, than the countries that appeared with a more full Latin American identity.
I don’t know if you understand. Argentina appeared with a very strong urban structure, a very strong working class, with certain parameters that Europeans could understand a little more. Because of different characteristics and because the CP itself was more or less strong, Buenos Aires became in some way the capital of the Comintern and here the South American Secretariat of the Comintern was forged. It initially had its leader in Penelón.
Then, Buenos Aires operated as the Comintern capital. And the leaders of the Argentine CP were becoming, with the passage of time, leaders, some of them, Latin American “appartchik”. Guys who went to the CPs almost as interveners.
The case of Victorio Codovilla is the best known. The great Moscow apparatus, Stalinist, not only of Argentina, but of Latin America, even beyond, because we all remember the role he played in Spain. Codovilla’s role in Spain was very important, he was in Cuba, he was in Chile, he was in Brazil. That is to say, the Argentinean CP appeared as a party that, in some way, some tend to compare with what the German Social Democracy was for the Second International, that is to say, a pole of reference.
With such a strong PC, with a leadership that is beginning to be so strong, that of Codivilla and Rodolfo Ghioldi, it was much more difficult for the left opposition. That is, the leadership of the Brazilian CP was comparatively weaker. The Argentine CP had at its head a leadership with many links to Moscow.
So it was a difficult opposition that, even if it did not come from the bosom of the CP, emerged from the bosom of a dissident CP. The Argentine CP had several dissidents, several ruptures in those years.
In 1922 a current called the Front had emerged, which was a current, one can say on the right. It put forward the idea of the Frente Único, in which there was agreement, the Frente Único propitiated by Lenin in 1921. But it wanted to carry the agreement with the Socialist Party almost permanently. That is, almost liquidating the autonomy of the CP in the agreement with socialism.
It was expelled and created a small group that later. I mention this because some cadres who later became part of the left opposition and Trotskyism, for example, had been militant in the frontism. One of them was Pedro Milesi, who was an important union cadre, who had had a frontist experience.
The other rupture was in ’25, that of the “Chispista” Workers’ Communist Party, which brought out the workers’ newspaper “La Chispa”. This was a break from the left, a left wing of the CP that questioned the leadership of Codovilla, Ghioldi and Penelón, putting forward the struggle for the maximum program. They were thrown out and known as “los chispitas”. There were several cadres there who later became Trotskyists. The Chispista Worker’s Party was not officially Trotskyist, on the contrary, it claimed to be against Trotsky, but many of its cadres later became Trotskyists, among them Héctor Raurich or, as he mentioned, Hippolyte Etchebéhère, Mika Feldman and others.
On the 27th the last break took place, which is that of Penelón. There was a rupture in which the troika leader of the CP, where Penelón was expelled and set up his own party in ’27 and ’28. Here I return to the story of the Left Opposition. The first group of the Left Opposition did not emerge in the Codovilla-Ghioldi CP, the official CP, as we might say, which Moscow recognized, nor in the “Chispista” CP, but in the Penelón CP. So, what I see and a little bit put forward, I don’t know if you remember Alejandro, in my article I use the concept of the communist camp. That is, what is happening in the 1920s, especially in the second half of the 1920s, is that there are several CPs. There is the Codovilla-Ghioldi CP, the official CP; the Penelón CP; the Chispista CP and the old Frentista Trend. It is a divided party, where there are also passages between one and the other.
So the Left Opposition formally emerges from the CP of Penelón, but it begins to attract some militants who are in the official CP, where the passage between militants is quite important, and where furthermore the Left Opposition is not proposing the idea of creating another Communist Party. Which is the flag that the Left Opposition points to? This is very interesting. It puts forward very strongly the idea of the United Front. It puts forward the idea that they do not want to create another Communist Party, but what they want is to regenerate the Communist Parties and the Communist International from their Stalinist degradation and their centrist drift. They say that what we are witnessing is a coagulation of a bureaucracy, in the hands of Stalin, Bukharin and others, where the struggle of the first four congresses of the International is abandoned. And this centrist orientation of the International is committing all kinds of disasters, like for example the disaster in China, where they made an agreement with Chiang Kai-shek.
But, besides, now from the ‘28 on, what new disaster was the Comintern adding? The famous line of class against class, the famous line of the third period, was from the ’28 to the ’35. A delirious line, a sectarian, far-left line, in which the CP began to state that the world had become polarized between only two alternatives: fascism and communism. In the middle there was nothing left, that is, what was authentically revolutionary was going to go to communism and what was left in the middle, for example, Social Democracy, was going to end up playing in favor of fascism. That’s where the theory of social fascism came from.
Obviously, with this line, what Stalin and his current were doing was to pulverize the United Front, there was no possibility of agreement between the communist parties and the workers’ bases of the social-democratic, reformist currents. The United Front was impossible, so much so that the communist parties threw themselves into forming red unions, breaking up the unions. This can be seen in Argentina. For example, the CGT is founded and the CP does not enter the CGT, because it says that the CGT is a rotten, yellow, bureaucratic organization and we don’t enter. Because the only unionism is a red, classist, separate unionism. So the PC remains outside the CGT until 1935. The Left Opposition fights this line, saying that it is a sectarian line, which is denied by the United Front, of right-wing policies. For example, the Argentine CP adopted a program, such as the program it began to take on the 28-29, which is an stagist program. Thus the Argentine CP begins to have a model of revolution by stages. It begins saying: first will come the stage of democratic, agrarian and anti-imperialist revolution, in which the working class can play with the national bourgeoisie and then the Socialist Revolution will come for another stage. This is a very important definition that the CP took up in its congress in the 28 and in the 29 it held a conference of Latin American communist parties and ended up imposing it in Buenos Aires. The Peruvian Mariateguista delegation even came and Codovilla crushed the Mariateguista theses and imposed the lines of the revolution by stages.
See how paradoxical it is to propose a revolution by stages, which gives it a place in a class alliance with the national bourgeoisie, but combined with a sectarian and far-left line.
With this drift the CP makes quite important disasters. For example, it does not speak out against the coup of the 1930s; it has no line to confront the 1930s coup. It remains outside the CGT and the existing union bodies. It fights the Socialist Party as if it were a fascist party; it refuses any kind of agreement with the workers’ base of the Socialist Party.
The Left Opposition, this is very interesting, in spite of the fact that it was a very small group, gave a lecture in this sense. Against adventurism, against sectarianism, it put forward the line of the Frente Único, raising the idea of intervening in the unions and in the real and existing organizations. And above all, a very internal proposal that this small Opposition of the Left proposed: a totally bureaucratic spirit reigns, which suffocates all types of debate, which expels, the party and the International is becoming an apparatus where there is no possibility of any type of dissidence, so it proposed the reincorporation of those expelled.
But look how interesting, I propose it in my article. The leader of that small group, Roberto Guinney, who was an English immigrant, like so many militants of the left in those years. In the group they were practically all foreigners: Guinney was of English origin, Camilo López was a Spanish immigrant, and Guinney’s son, Manuel.
Guinney put forward the idea, today one sees those first pronouncements of the Communist Committee of Opposition and sees them as quite naive. They said, “If freedom of criticism, freedom of tendencies, the reincorporation of Trotsky and self-criticism of the expulsions are restored, we have no problem in reinserting ourselves in that party. We are not fighting for another party; we are fighting for the regeneration of the communist parties. That was the first line.
How long will that line last? Until 1933, when Trotsky begins to state that the line of regeneration, that there is no longer any margin for struggle within the Comintern, and above all the responsibility that Stalin’s Comintern leadership has in the catastrophe in Germany. That is, when the delirious line of the third period leads to Hitler’s victory in Germany, that is, because the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, refuses any form of a United Front with a social democratic workers’ base. Let us remember what the KPD said: “The main enemy is social democracy, because it is a hindrance to the shift of communism. Social democracy is more dangerous than Hitler.” So that is when Trotsky says, this is a historical betrayal, this is an irretrievable crime, the KPD will never recover. Perhaps the main section of the Comintern, outside the Russian one, is going to recover from this tragedy and therefore the German CP is irretrievable, and then the whole Comintern also begins to be irretrievable.
There the line begins to take shape in the various sections of the opposition, then it begins to be stated that it is no longer possible to fight for the regeneration of the communist parties, it is necessary to set up our own organizations.
Until 1933, as I mentioned in my article, groups had emerged that were considered precarious, waiting for reinsertion. Objectively they could not be, but in the public presentation, you saw that I put it forward as a difficult identity situation, because they did not define themselves as Trotskyists.
The term Trotskyist in 1929 and 1930 was a pejorative term, the Stalinists used it as a way of discrediting them. They did not call themselves Trotskyists, although obviously their reference was Trotsky, they called themselves the Left Opposition. We are the workers’, internationalist, the revolutionary wing of opposition to the degeneration and bureaucratization of the party. But we are a genuine current, the continuity of Bolshevism-Leninism. That is how they called themselves, Bolshevik-Leninists.
The term Trotskyist will be more fully accepted when these organizations form totally autonomous entities, and this is what emerged after 1933. The first group, I said, was the Communist Committee of Opposition, which later took on the name of ICA in 1930, the Argentine Communist Left. They managed to put out the first newspaper, which was called La Verdad. Well, the references are always the most traditional. La Verdad was obviously chosen because of Soviet Pravda, and because La Verdad was beginning to be the title of the first big Trotskyist newspaper in France, La Vérité. So they put out La Verdad, but it comes out in two issues, it’s very precarious, we’re talking about a small group, the group of Guinney and Lopez.
Then they add an interesting sector that they won for the ideas of the Left Opposition in Spain, Héctor Raurich and Antonio Gallo. In Spain a fairly strong section of the opposition had been formed, which was going to be the Spanish Communist Left, and there Gallo and Raurich were won. They returned to Buenos Aires between 1930 and 1931.
There is a problem there that is interesting to explore. Whoever reads this article will be faced with important questions, which are, for example: when Gallo and Raurich come, they do not manage to join the ICA. There are 6 or 7 on one side and they are another 5 or 6, but they don’t manage to create a common party, even though the indication of the Spaniards is to enter Guinney’s group. However, they do not enter and form another group called the Communist League and then for two years there are two groups, they are 6 or 7 on one side and 7 or 8 on the other and they do not manage to join and there are processes of discussion.
It’s interesting because from Paris and from Berlin, where the leadership of the opposition is, the letters are, we don’t see differences in principles. Okay, there are discussions about the character of the program, but make a common experience, and then we see if in the common struggle an experience of shaping a direction and a program can emerge. I put it in my article, there is a very clear definition, however, it was not possible and the two groups were separated.
Then came other stages, a figure who was important broke into the ranks of the opposition, which was Pedro Milesi. He was a prominent figure who was a member of the municipal union. He took over the direction of ICA and developed it in the following years. He transformed it after 1933 into the Internationalist Communist League, which was the name adopted by the opposition sections. Gallo and Raurich’s group also continued to operate.
And well, I would say that Trotskyism began to have greater vigor, a greater number of adherents towards the end of the 1930s and beginning of the 1940s. But at the time when it managed to merge almost all its forces into a single party, which was the PORS, the Workers’ Party of the Socialist Revolution. That PORS lasted a very short time. From the implosion of the PORS, from the destructuring of the PORS, the new groups that are going to begin to mark the history of Trotskyism in the following decade emerged in the years ’43 and ’44.
This is interesting. Practically all the militants of the Left Opposition in Argentina and of the first Trotskyism, from ’29 to ’43, the majority of the leading cadres did not continue in the ranks of Trotskyism afterwards. They left Trotskyism or the revolutionary movement.
Guinney died, his son Manuel abandoned the struggle, as did Camilo López. Raurich and Gallo joined the Socialist Party sometime later. Milesi also abandoned the movement. So that’s why one finds a turning point, for the 44, when Peronism emerges, which poses the challenge of interpreting that new thing that is emerging, it already found a Trotskyist movement with new actors, where they change the surnames. It is already Trotskyism without Milesi, without Gallo, without Raurich. Without Liborio Justo, a key figure who enters the ’35, who occupies the whole scene, who founds his own current, which is going to be the LOR. In which a young student named Hugo Bressano is active for some time, very quickly. He is going to take on the name, driven by Liborio Justo de Nahuel Moreno himself.
Now that cycle is closing and what opens from the ’44 and the ’45 is another stage of Trotskyism. If one can look at it in perspective, one can find very clearly the cut. That is, from 1944 and 1945 onwards, the perspective of Trotskyism is referred to in two or three new groups. The group that Nahuel Moreno was going to promote, the group of Posadas and a very small group, that history swallowed, the UOR, the Revolutionary Workers Union of Posse. And well, I would say the group that later disbanded into the national left, Abelardo Ramos and some others.
It’s a different stage in the history of Trotskyism. The previous one is marked by this boost of the opposition and of a Trotskyism that I would say, with this I close this part, that Trotskyism of the second half of the 1930’s had a great programmatic debate. The debate was about how to confront the situation of the so-called national question.
That is, those who argued within Trotskyism that the programmatic struggle had to incorporate the struggle for national liberation. The anti-imperialist struggle and the program of national liberation articulated as part of the program of the socialist revolution, was strongly oriented towards Liborio Justo. And the group of Gallo and Raurich, who rather tended to deny or underestimate the flag of national liberation, proposing that Argentina was a full capitalist country and the struggle should be for the program of the Socialist Revolution, that is, a rather false alternative between national liberation or socialist revolution.
This was a debate that was very significant for the first development of Trotskyism, and in my article, if you look at it in some detail, you can see that elements were already appearing at the beginning of the 1930s. Because before Antonio Gallo put forward this idea of denying national liberation, a young Rosario student of the FJC, who was expelled from the party, called David Siburu, had begun to put forward these ideas.
He had questioned the idea that the national bourgeoisie could play a role in the flag of national liberation, which was a relatively false flag, by questioning the stagism of the CP. Then one finds that, in those ideas of Siburu, which later join those of Gallo and express a whole current of early Trotskyism,which he confronted with the interpretation of Liborio Justo.
I believe that what is coming after 1944-45 is a Trotskyism that has settled that debate. The struggle against imperialism, the struggle for national liberation, is a struggle that the working class must wage. But it must wage it, not in alliance with some progressive fraction of the bourgeoisie, it must wage it as leader of the exploited masses and it must wage it under the program of the Permanent Revolution. These are the questions that are posed there.
AB: I have two questions. I´m not sure which goes first, I´ll leave that to you. One is, how do you evaluate the second Troskyism and how does Trotskyism evolve from then? It gets mixed up with Peronism and the left´s politics toward Peronism, that is why I´n not sure what comes first.
HC: They are very related, we can talk about a general position of the left within Peronism and then we get a bit into Trotskyism.
The emergence of Peronism was a huge challenge for the left, obviously. It was a very complex challenge. We have to keep in mind that in one way or another the Left was coming in its different variants, more reformist, more revolutionary, more anarchist, less anarchist, articulating party and class, not articulating it, separating the union struggle, the political struggle. In other words, the Left came from a very dense, very rich experience over 60, 70 years and Peronism in a sense meant a new stage.
It was very complex to take up a position in the face of the new phenomenon. We have several elements: it is very clear that the way in which the Socialist Party and the Communist Party positioned themselves in the face of the emergence of Peronism was very clumsy, very stupid. That is to say, to a large extent denying a fact of reality, the most serious thing that can happen when one does politics is to deny reality and confuse it. Perón’s move was very complex to interpret and to take a position, in the move of a military elite that, from the State at the same time that it repressed the Left, filled the jails with Communist and Socialist union leaders and persecuted independent unionism, etc., at the same time, it made possible the “aguinaldo” yearly bonus, salary increases, conventions, important gains for which the labor movement had always fought. Obviously Perón wanted to do this with a strategy of integration and co-option and was also anti-communist, as he said so many times. Perón’s famous speech at the stock exchange in ’44 when he brought together all the employers’ chambers: he said “please don’t criticize me, don’t attack me, what I want to do is save Argentine capitalism”, that is, It is convenient to give some improvements to prevent the working class from taking the position of the class struggle.
At that time it was very complex also due to Perón’s own trajectory, a guy linked to the worst of politics, a sympathizer of the Axis, a person who in his resume did not have positions in favor of the defense of the working class. He had participated in the repression of the “Semana Trágica” of 1919, he had participated in the coup of 1930, he had been a delegate of the German embassy in Italy, had known the experience of Mussolini and had sympathized with the idea of European social fascism. That is to say that he was not the type of person a working-class cadre would defend, they saw Perón in ’43 and per-se did not feel any attraction for his past. However, Perón appeared as redeeming himself from that past and present, because initially the repression of Communism and the Left was very strong, but it was covered with very clear concessions, so he was forging an unthinkable or perhaps not so unthinkable alliance, because the idea of establishing a link to the labor movement from the State was not new, Irigoyen had done it, the “radicales” had done it and they had found sections in the labor movement who would accept that invitation. It was revolutionary syndicalism, which held large unions such as the maritime or the railroad unions, they had come to an agreement with Irigoyen.
In other words, Perón was not the first to attempt, from the State, to interact and build a link with sectors of the union apparatus. Perón accomplished it, he approached a whole sector that in general was outside the Communist Party and outside the dynamics of the Socialist Party, many were union members affiliated with the SP, but in practice they did not give much relevance to the directives of the party. I always say that the tragedy of the Socialist Party in Argentina, I mentioned it before, is that it had separated the union struggle from the political struggle and in practice it had privileged the political struggle, which it understood as a parliamentary struggle, and had abandoned the union struggle. So what did the union cadres of the SP have? They had a party that served them at the time of parliamentary action, but then the party abandoned them in the union struggle, they behaved as independent union members, that is to say in practice the union members of the SP remained pure trade-unionists.
Logically when Perón called the labor movement they went, they accepted, because they began to gain very clear advantages, so an alliance was forged in which those union cadres, as a sociologist and historian Juan Carlos Torres says “the old union guard”, realized that they made gains from that link with the colonel who was in charge of the Secretary of Labor and Social Security and we already know what happened next. Perón was expelled from the government in ’45, defenestrated, and, unexpectedly for everyone, that old guard, those union cadres with such different traditions that had obtained concrete gains from their agreement with Perón, launched the October 17 call to action and staged a very impressive labor mobilization that shifted the political reality. It allowed them to rescue Perón from ostracism and catapult him onto the political scene and launch him into the electoral campaign of 45-46, in which it was initially thought that Perón could not win because he had no political apparatus.
Because, what were the parties up to? And that’s where the Left comes in, the stupidity and clumsiness of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party was interpreting Perón as a military demagogue, a fascist, who wanted to co-opt and buy the union cadres and therefore had to be completely confronted by aligning in a broad democratic agreement, a Popular Front. The CP had been raising the line of the Popular Front, a democratic anti-fascist front that is going to find an enemy in Perón and is going to find an ally in the Radical Civic Union (UCR), in the conservative liberal right and in the US embassy itself, which joined the line of the democratic front with embassador Braden.
For example, in December 45, the Argentine Communist Party held a huge rally in the Luna Park stadium celebrating the end of its ban and it did so under the banners of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. That was the Argentine CP, its popular front line, in agreement with the democratic, liberal, republican wings of the bourgeoisie, they trusted that they would win, that Perón was an accident in history, a military demagogue, authoritarian, fascistic that he had tried a low maneuver, to buy off the union cadres, but was not going to be successful. For example, they said that October 17 was not a relevant labor mobilization, but rather a group of workers that had been bought off or lumpen proletariat and Perón was going to be defeated in the February 46 election.
The gravest thing, one can be wrong in a characterization, but what is more serious is the program, the strategy, the line that the socialists and communists had, of uniting with a fraction of the bourgeoisie. That is the tragedy of the Left in Argentina, wasting years and years of party building, that is the tragedy. Worker cadres who suffered torture, persecution, who had been tortured several times. The case of José Peter, who was an extraordinary worker, a meat worker leader, had been tortured to exhaustion several times, a member of the Central Committee of the CP, a leader of the meatpacking workers who, for example, ended up arguing in the assemblies for the end of the strike in the meatpacking industry, because of the need to supply the Soviet Union, a line of militant union leader but behind a popular front political line. So the CP squandered all those advances, the Socialist Party did the same, it had already become a center-left party, with a very moderate line, which could not interact with the demands of the workers and the behavior of this Left was very complex, they bet on the triumph of the Democratic Union but the Democratic Union was defeated.
When Perón took office in June of ’46 another stage began, another stage in which we already know how one and the other moved. The Socialist Party to a large extent never recovered from this, it lost its entire working-class base, it became a middle-class party with very little presence in the working class. The Communist Party lost a large part of the working-class base, but it kept its workers’ militants and then it continued to be an important current, of course in absolute minority, the working class became mainly Peronists, we already know that. But one can say that perhaps the second identity within the working class that one could find was the communist, the CP held positions.
In this terrain, one begins to consider, to watch what the Trotskyist current was. New actors appear there. The founding stage had closed, that decade, decade and a half of the Raurichs, the Gallo, the Milesi. New actors began to appear. It was very complex due to an element on which, for example, Nahuel Moreno reflected a lot, which was the development in which it was made, which, he said, was a “barbarian Trotskyism”, largely because the disengagement with the Fourth International was very important. The IV had been founded in ’38, it had had its congress, it will have another congress in ’48 which Moreno will try to attend like Posadas, and the truth was that it had developed as groups, that not only were fragmented, divided, but did not have solid support or a point of reference in the Fourth International. They found themselves really, not disoriented, but rather devoid of a theoretical and political arsenal. Above all, it was very complex to characterize a phenomenon as difficult to characterize as was, for example, Peronism. Peronism and the nationalist, national popular, bourgeois nationalist mass anti-imperialist movements that existed in Latin America, which began to appear more and more in the 1930s and 1940s.
I would say that the group that Moreno founded initially in ’43 with the name Grupo Obrero Marxista, the GOM, which a few years later identifies with the name POR, Partido Obrero Revolucionario, is going to have there, I think, two strong points, that seem important to me.
The first is Moreno’s characterization distinguishing that this first stage, that first decade of the left opposition, of Trotskyism, had been a heroic stage, of great heroism, but it had had a fundamental flaw, it had faced their debates, their discussions, their conformations as groups, subordinating the insertion and the struggle in the working class. It was a characterization, today one could say: well perhaps too much emphasis has been placed on this definition, which was later said to be a “coffee-house” Trotskyism, that is to say, Trotskyism that had its debates at the “Café Tortoni”. Some of this indeed existed, these Trotskyist currents had an important petty-bourgeois character and some of those debates explain that. They also had some valuable working class cadres, among them I did not mention them yet, was Mateo Fossa for example, who had been a cadre of the PC, a guy who had been in the “La Chispa” (The Spark) current, then in the CP, was kicked out, had done entryism into the SP, a great leader of the lumber industry workers. In the early years of the Left Opposition there were several working class cadres, but it is true that the weight of the intellectual sector was too important and therefore the proposal that Moreno is going to put forward in the document “The Party” of 1943, that has so many quotes from Hegel and it still has a very philosophical, somewhat abstract approach, however it marks a line which is that the way in which Argentine Trotskyism could be saved is if it became part of the working class, of the struggles of the working class. Therefore the process of becoming structured into the working class became fundamental, in other words, it was necessary to proletarianize Argentine Trotskyism.
I think that was a fundamental strategic line, and I think it is one of the strongest elements that marked the group and the current, the idea of interacting, of getting involved in the workers’ struggle. Going to the factory, listening to the demands of the workers and building the political organization without deviating one millimeter from the general needs of the working class, I think that is a central point. The other element was that the group, the GOM-POR, had a different characterization of Peronism from that of the CP and the SP. Of course they repudiated the formation of the Democratic Union, it was a small group, they did not call to vote for the Democratic Union, they considered that it was a catastrophic line of submission to US imperialism, to the liberal bourgeoisie. They opposed the Popular Front line, they argued that it was necessary to interpret this new movement that emerged from Peronism through the lens inherited from the IV International itself, the theory of the permanent revolution and interpreting the local reality with those elements, but initially they made an analysis that I think was meritorious, very meritorious in a sense, although a bit sectarian towards Peronism.
The analysis elaborated by Moreno, together with a militant who joined the ranks of the GOM in ’46 along with a large group of students called Milcíades Peña who was going to become a close collaborator of Moreno in the early years, the characterization that they put forward is that Perón was at the head of a bourgeois nationalist movement that resisted the penetration of US imperialism but did so leaning on the more traditional structure of the country and especially British imperialism. From there came a definition of Perón as a British agent. Of course, there were elements of Perón’s own actions in the early years, for example the entire line of nationalization of the railways and companies, which were presented by Peronism as great anti-imperialist epics, we know, and in that some texts and characterizations of Moreno and Peña are impressive for their clarity, showing that this was not any type of expropriation or any type of anti-imperialist combat, on the contrary, they were rather ways of agreeing to negotiations with British interests, getting rid of old scrap metal, of companies which contracts were already about to expire and they were actually very convenient deals for British capital, for British imperialism.
So I think there was a series of characterizations that were very lucid in their analysis of the economic and social structure of the country, incredibly lucid. I wrote an article in the magazine “Archivos” about this, on the figure of Milcíades Peña, arguing against certain visions that make Peña a kind of “critical intellectual” as if he had been a lucid mind that went further, breaking the constriction of the party and especially of Moreno and that the most brilliant Peña is the Peña that breaks with Moreno and Trotskyism, I argue that in reality the most valuable part of Peña’s interpretation is forged in the heat of the debates and his militancy in the GOM and the POR. So one sees that Peña’s first writings are very powerful, he works with Moreno, for example, interpreting the socio-economic structure of the country, the very sophisticated idea they have of the bourgeoisie. Against the national populism of the Left and against what was said by the the CP and others, most of the left, Peña and Moreno said: there are no opposing interests between the industrial bourgeoisie and the agrarian bourgeoisie, in reality it is almost the same class with diversified interests, so let’s not look for an ally in the industrial bourgeoisie, as Abelardo Ramos and others did, let us not look for an ally in the national industrial bourgeoisie because in reality it is a class that is directly linked to agrarian interests.
So, for example, that study that Peña and Moreno did to prove that the large bourgeois consortiums, the Tornquist family and others, has interests in agriculture, industry, finance, commerce, they are the same class, so it is not with them, there is no possibility of a revolution in stages, which clarified that any program of transformation, democratization, national liberation, agrarian reform of any progressive line that modifies the economic and social structure of the country, has to have the working class as the leadership of the exploited masses, and no confidence in the bourgeoisie. These proposals were very important, but in the early years there was a behavior that I think was quite sectarian with respect to Peronism, the interpretation of Peronism that, above all, I think was modified in the 1950s and a different line will emerge from that modification. That different line has a very strong point, I think, and here we get into an issue that is enormously controversial and interesting to analyze, a very clear line that places the POR very correctly in the coup of ’55, against the coup.
That moment of the POR denouncing the character of the coup of ’55. An anti worker, clerical, imperialist coup and it was necessary to fight against the coup. I think it is a fundamental strategic success.
From this came another step that the current is going to take, obviously, about which so much has been discussed and continues to be discussed, which is the line of entryism. That is to say, Perón was overthrown and the process of Peronist resistance started, in which the working class becomes Peronist as never before, against the wishes of the “Libertadora” and the “gorillas” [right wing anti-peronists. T.N], that is, not only does it not become less Peronist, rather, it becomes more Peronist. The almost only way to intervene in the working class was to formally adopt the Peronist identity, in order to establish some form of dialogue with the workers in their struggles. Hence the idea of adopting entryism, organic entryism in the ranks of Peronism.
On this issue there have been many years of discussion, of debates. I have a very nuanced balance sheet. I think that this experience of entryism had some strengths, especially because it transformed that current, which by then was already taking up the name of Palabra Obrera from its newspaper. It turned it into a vanguard reference for those sectors of combative workers who fought against the “Libertadora”, against Frondizism, against the bosses, against the bureaucracy. It allowed the current to have this insertion, but it had important concessions, that is, the adoption of the Peronist identity had important concessions from a programmatic, even practical point of view. It turned out to be a trade-off, even appearing in a very brutal way, a political trade-off, a trade-off in the sense of calculations. In any way, what was sought was to strengthen a revolutionary organization.
In the end the result was rather poor, because Palabra Obrera was able to influence the plenary sessions of the 62 Organizations, the union structure, but it did not manage to capitalize on it politically. So it came out of the experience of the resistance politically very weak. Even in a period, in the year ’63 for example, where Palabra Obrera was almost dissolved into the Peronist Youth. Entryism was finally ended in ’64, what remained by ’64, after almost 10 years of entryism, of rapprochement, of militancy within the Peronist working class was little. And then came the line of merger with the Santucho group, to give birth to what would become the PRT.
The balance sheet of entryism, I think it has to be a balance sheet that demonstrates these contrasts, these strong points and these weak points. Which included some concessions that today, seen from a distance… Well, I never give that any place of relevance, issues of identification. For example, the subtitle that Palabra Obrera had, in a period initially in ’55 and going forward, of: “Under the superior command of the Peronist council”. Issues that, said in 2020, seeing where Peronism ended, one can say that they were unacceptable concessions, they seem unacceptable, but in the historical context they had a different character.
So, this subject of entryism is very interesting, it has to do with what position to take, I say this again, with the Peronism of that time. That is a thing that historians have a bit, that we always look for debates, analysis and their historical contexts, that is, we historize processes. A discussion of something that happened in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s is not the same with today’s categories. You have to make an effort to contextualize historically, see what alternatives existed at that time, that is, try to rebuild and that is a historical exercise. It cannot be done by floating a slogan, saying that a current did this, a current did that. Well, the historicity of the processes must be restored, that is why I believe that it is an important contribution history has in the struggle for the formation of parties and currents. History, and I am not trying to make an appraisal of my profession, but it seems to me that it provides elements that are quite useful for the political struggle.
AB: You already touched on some aspects of Morenism. Can you tell me your global opinion on Morenism as a current?
HC: And well, that balance of the tendency founded by Moreno back in the 1940s. I believe that – a bit as I pointed out before – it has to be meticulously reconstructed in its different historical contexts. It ended up being a current, which in turn later became fragmented. Today it is a tree with branches, from which many streams have come off. Very extensive, given that almost 80 years have passed. So the effort to historicize each stage seems to me to be very important. The role it played in each historical period is different.
I pointed out before that there are aspects of that tradition that were fundamental, which I think are the ones that definitively structured Trotskyism in Argentina. That is to say, if we globally analyze Trotskyism, we are talking about a current that is already close to 90 years old. I have no doubts about it. If you ask me quickly, without repeating and without blowing, what was the most relevant historical picture of Trotskyism in Argentina. I do not doubt that it was Nahuel Moreno. That is undoubted, undoubted.
Despite the fact that he came to the movement almost 15 years, ten, fifteen years later. It does not stand out in its first moments, Moreno is the comrade that manages to root Trotskyism in the Argentine reality. Yes, it embeds it in the working class, there are decisions that are very strong. The idea of going to live in Avellaneda, of installing a small group in Villa pobladora, inserting it in the meat packing plant, in the struggle of factories, that was a strategic decision and that continues as time passes by; one sees that consistency. The idea that the building of a revolutionary party of the working class, which does not get into the working class… that cannot be.
Then I believe there is a certain characterization, a vocation that I believe was more or less coherent, but which had different modulations of studying reality, studying it, analyzing changes in the economic and social structure, changes that took place in the working class or within the left, or in the class enemy itself, the State. An idea of studying reality that was embodied in a series of works that today one can, a long time later, read and understand that there was an effort to never stop doing what is most basic for a political current that is to understand where it is standing.
I mean, beyond trying to apply a historical program. The first challenge, in addition to rescuing that historical program and doing all the re-elaborations of that program that must be done, that needs to be done at the same time, with a study of reality and the modifications of reality. I think that was like the ABC of Moreno’s construction method, which I think is very important. There is also the idea regarding the type of party: like there are so many (perhaps different ones) throughout history. I can recognize different party models in Moreno; but there is always an obsession -it seems to me quite important- with that phenomenon of understanding reality, and what reality can offer, a search for points of agreement with groups that are emerging, that are appearing in the class struggle.
That bet is a very risky bet. It was quite risky in fact. We can see that there were different processes of confluence, some were very good, they were permanent, others were very bad. One could say that the agreement with Santucho in ’65 was a very risky agreement, I think it was made on a slightly weak programmatic basis and that is what explains the outbreak of that party, three years later. An outbreak that was quite destructive for the organization, because it is very clear that when one sees the reasons that led to the moment before the confluence and what came of it, finally, Santucho managed to win, even a sector that came from the Morenista tradition led him into the disastrous positions of the Combatant.
But once again the historian says, you have to look at the historical context. And the historical context marks us very important pressures that we should see, how to resist at that moment, at that moment in history, the pressures were tremendous. In other words, the current promoted by Moreno had to, in the first place, subsist, it could have disappeared. With the Peronist wave, Trotskyism could have disappeared, let’s say it. The working class became rabidly Peronist. And the other alternative was to become reactionary. It was necessary to resist and interpret what Peronism was, the tide, the Peronist wave and the Peronization of the working class.
The other was, of course, the challenge posed by the Cuban Revolution, towards which process was also very complex to position. With what the Cuban Revolution brought, especially with the enormous prestige that the Castro and Guevarist leadership had. And well, again, the only alternative that Moreno’s current had was either to reject it as a phenomenon that did not conform to the programmatic proposals of the Fourth, or to understand its more progressive dynamics and be able to influence so that the movement advanced in the most correct line.
I believe that the balance is also a balance of chiaroscuro, there was a position of Moreno’s proposals that are very interesting, but today -read from a distance- there are some documents that may seem very impressionistic. That is to say, very tied to the moment of the conjuncture. Characterizations of Castro, for example, or regarding what the strategy of the armed struggle could be. But hey, once again you have to look at the historical context, what the phenomenon of armed struggle in those years and especially the early 1960s implied, the pressure exerted on the vanguard sector. That is, how to have an experience with the avant-garde, which will overcome the danger of the guerrilla temptation, which was a significant pressure and which led the organization’s line to destroy it or threaten to destroy it several times.
Let us remember that the experience with Vasco Bengochea developed tremendously in the sense of Vasco. Probably in one of the most important management leaders that Morenism had. It was part of that historic leadership of the Word Worker.
And the facts of the blowing up of the Posada department was the blowing up of a good part of the best leadership that Moreno had formed. This is so. And then also the intervention in Peru, in ’62. And then the agreement with Santucho and the discussion regarding a definition about the armed struggle, which at times seemed not to make such a clear and strategic difference with the proposals that would later lead to the Santuchista disaster.
So, well, it’s a very long balance, it’s a current that had a very rich history. In the first place, it was a current that gained authority not only for having existed, but also for having raised the flag to the permanent revolution, the Trotskyist program and the militancy in the working class and in the places of struggle. But that also had sectarian drifts and programmatic clumsiness at times.
But today the problem of the drift of entryism appears “well, the experience of entryism… if one does not see it in global terms and it is finally a very limited period of development, if it had been a strategic line, well, it would have meant the dissolution of the party in the Peronist movement. And of course it was a tactic, in my view, excessively long, which at times seemed to mean a strategy. But hey, it is finally a chapter in a long history that shows the will to build a revolutionary party.
So that’s how you have to read the experience of entryism. Because we are talking about a current that continued to exist, even recovering from the drift of entryism and trying other alternatives.
I believe that, as in so many things, Trotskyism in Argentina would require a good story. From history built with a lot of patience, with a lot of time doing a work that should be collective and should be non-sectarian and should be balanced. We have experiences that are no good. We already know, in that sense, balances, which are totally unbalanced, they are useless. You have to build a balance that takes into account all these situations, the contexts, this is fundamental.
It doesn’t make sense to finger and say “well but look at what he said, look at what he wrote, look at what he did” without seeing the context. And, above all, it should be a story that at the same time is not concessive, it has to be a story that has a critical perspective, I mean a critical perspective implies the revaluations that must be made and at the same time being able to mark the elements that one from a distance still sees as problematic. That is, things that could be of help in order to avoid repeating mistakes.
So, it seems to me that this is a strategic task. It is very difficult for parties to do this task. Of course the so called “party patriotism” exists, it is logical. And it seems to me that it should be a task in which colleagues who are part of these same convictions, who have not resigned, because there has been a process of dissolution of many intellectuals who are part of the revolutionary ranks, who have behaved as renegades or changed their identity. But I think there are possibilities, because Trotskyism, among other things, is a very rich movement in Argentina.
To try a process of historical balance that is not sectarian, that is deep, that is not consoling or destructive. Inside and outside Trotskyism, one has to settle, in the intellectual, academic, cultural world, there is balance that state that the Trotskyism struggle was useless, that there is nothing to rescue from that experience.
I consider myself in a position of confrontation with those statements, and I believe that it is a contribution to the coming struggle. May it always be the same, the idea of a revolutionary movement that with programmatic clarity drives the struggle, drives and directs the struggle of the working class and the exploited sectors in a clear direction.
The struggle of the exploited alone out of sheer spontaneity, is not going anywhere. That was always clear to me and I still have it clear. If there is no articulation in that struggle of the exploited at whatever level, trade union, territorial struggle, etc., in articulation, in a political movement. Which in turn there have to be instances of centralization and recognition of what they are, what the idea of the vanguard is, a concept too important to underestimate.
All the currents of the autonomist, anti-political type, well, let’s not talk about the best known that usually occur, the unionists, the purely unionist exits, they do not have. They have no perspective.
AB: Lastly, can you tell us about the CEHTI, the Center of Historical Studies of the Working Class and the Left, and the Archivos Magazine?
HC: The experience of CEHTI and Archivo magazine has existed for a few years. Archives magazine was founded in 2011, 2012. It is a thought magazine, it is an academic magazine, made by intellectuals who have, let’s say, insertion in the academic world. We are mainly professors in the University of Buenos Aires or CONICET researchers, etc. Our goal is to contribute to a reconstruction of the history of the working class, the labor movement and the Left.
Not in a purely national context, but in this continental and global context. That is, to make an international history, precisely for these actors who were always so.
And also to contribute to a social, political, cultural history of the working class and the Left. In a plural way, this is something that I am very proud to have built around the magazine. First the Archives magazine, whose first issue was published in 2012. Then we gave life to a second project that was a collection of in-depth research books on different problems in the history of the working class, the Left or Marxist theory, of social theory.
We have already published 12 volumes, 12 books. And in 2016 we took another step, which was to found a Center. A study center, a research center called CEHTI (Center for Historical Studies of Workers and the Left), which we turned into a place for discussions, debates. Well, this year, obviously due to the issue of the pandemic and the lockdown, activities, in person meetings, had to be suspended, but until last year, since the Foundation in 2016, we managed to do about 50 activities, conferences, talks, discussion round tables, book launches. Where these questions of history, of the Left, of Anarchism, Socialism and Communism, Trotskyism, guerrillas, Feminism are debated. In the heat of the publications of the magazine or books, or of other colleagues who do presentations.
We do it with a very open, very plural spirit. An element that I always like to point out is that people who come to CEHTI for the first time say “what a good atmosphere there is here, what a good climate for debate.” Because it is not concessive, it goes to the knot, to the bone of the discussions, but there is a very fraternal atmosphere, and that is something that I want to highlight a lot. It is the climate that is present in the CEHTI.
I believe that it is the best of the Socialist culture, which is the fraternal environment, where one may have differences or maybe they are differences that after a discussion, an investigation, the other side convinces you to change a position. And also with colleagues who come from, well, my story is quite well known and I am never proud of that story, no, there is nothing to hide, I am a guy who studied all my life, who dedicated myself to the history of the working class, the labor movement, the Left, for 30 years.
I have a place in the field of historiography as a tenured professor of Argentine history, I know all the challenges that this implies, being responsible for the chair that trains future historians in the field of Argentine History and I am a CONICET researcher.
I did that academic career as, well a good part of my life was a militant life, everyone knows that and I have no problem raising it. I was a militant for about 20 years, so it was decisive for my training as an intellectual. My training as an intellectual and as a social and political historian of the Left would be inconceivable without that militancy. And my consubstantiation with the tradition of Trotskyism. That’s how it is. My impulse, my system, my vision of the world is permeated by that tradition, which connects with the tradition of Marxism or with the tradition of the workers’ movement.
And well, somehow, after so many years of activism and study and publications, I felt that I had to take that step, that it was a contribution, that it could be a modest, very modest contribution to the formation of some knowledge.
I am very happy that, in CEHTI, for example, hundreds and hundreds have come to our activities. Many students, many intellectuals, and many former and current militants. And militants from different organizations, who, again, feel very comfortable listening and intervening. In some cases, intervening on their own as well. We very clearly try in our activities, not to identify ourselves, in addition we do not have that identity, we do not do it with any specific organization, precisely we stand in a different place, not higher or better, different. That is, we intervene in the intellectual and cultural field. And we contribute from that place, building the best knowledge that we can or know how to. That is, research articles, with a solid empirical evidence. Our statements are based on very meticulous studies that we capture in the magazine, in books, in the activities we carry out, we do workshops, we do study groups. We try to innovate in new themes.
Last year we did a really beautiful course on social reproduction theory and we debated the most recent advances on feminist struggles and the articulation between the class struggle and the gender struggle. Of course, there will be topics in which we are perhaps further behind, but as a whole we try to keep up with the progress that social theory and Marxist theory are having and we also do the “Jornadas”, which is a great event.
The “Jornadas” which are now an international event on the history of the Left movement. On the last day there were hundreds of participants. The next one we are going to do next year too. We already have 29 round tables set up, there are going to be about 350, 400 presentations. It is a very relevant event. And well, that’s the weird, particular positioning that this space has. We also cultivate the way we work a lot. The way of working, which is open, which is very careful and tries to be very respectful of different points of view, but at the same time has a clear horizon, which is immovable. Immovable in the sense that there are things that we do not question. This, the idea of the inevitability of the class struggle, that we defend our interests of the working class, of the exploited, that socialism is the horizon, that capitalism is irreformable. Today we would also say that the struggle for the emancipation of women is inseparable from the fight for socialism, well, they are general convictions.
Well, that’s where we’re at. It is a process, it is a project that demands from us a lot, because it is also self-sustained. That is, we limit the funding of some university or the state or a party, a church or whatever. So it is a self financed project and we are proud. Each thing is sustained by its own inertia, by its own conquest.
The magazine, for example, we put it out on paper and from the first issue we self-financed it by its own sale, a material that was obviously relevant to those who wanted to buy it. And the same with books and then also the CEHTI. And we have a modest office in the Center and it is supported in that way, with voluntary contributions. We were setting up a library that is open to public consultation, all with donations and that is how we are supporting ourselves. As a space designed for the long term. It is not a conjuncture, it is a long, long-term perspective. That´s it.