Aotearoa: Spilt coming in Maori Party?

At the rank and file level within the Maori Party, there has been disquiet and concern expressed at some of the actions of its co-leader Tariana Turia. In March, she accepted an invitation to the ACT Party’s annual conference in Wellington. The only dissent among the 4 Maori Party MP’s against her going to the conference came from Tai Tokerau member, Hone Harawira. This was consistent with his rejection of support for a parliamentary review of the 90-Day probation period bill for workers introduced by National’s Wayne Mapp. On that occasion yet again, Harawira went against the decision of his other 3 colleagues to support the parliamentary right wing. Does this signal an impending split in the Maori Party?
 
The Maori Party’s rightward shift away from its natural political ally the Labour Party, is a reactionary move in response to Labour’s anger at losing a significant part of its past support base. For a Party consisting of disillusioned castaways from the political mainstream, it’s only a matter of time before there is a clash between its pragmatic leadership and the more principled working class rank and file. The kaupapa (basic platform) that the Party and its constitution rests on, is being exposed as a weak excuse to accommodate political rivals.

The question being considered by members in many of the local branches is; are these early signs of an inevitable future split within the Maori Party centred on a breakaway led by Hone Harawira? From his earliest days in Nga Tamatoa, He Taua, Patu Squad, Kawariki and so on, Harawira has demonstrated an independent sense of leadership that has been at odds with many of his Maori political contemporaries. More importantly, he has an urban background that has not been entirely tainted by the backward politics of rural isolation.

His reluctant decision to enter Parliament shows a suspicion for an institution he regards as representing only one side of the Treaty deal. His passion is still the establishment of an independent Maori Parliament. In his time as an MP, Harawira has clearly identified with the grassroots rank and file by holding regular dialogue and consultation that has kept him away from much of the superficial parliamentary activity except crucial voting.

As his Party’s spokesperson for employment, discussions with workers and union leaders in the North have clearly put him on a path that focuses on the practical issues facing an area with the highest number of unemployed in the country. Central to that dialogue, has been his regular contact with workers at JNL Tri-Board in Kaitaia where he lives. In 1997, JNL workers were involved in one of the most significant strike actions that challenged both the ECA and the companies draconian work proposals for a new contract.

Maori Party support for striking meat workers at Ngaraunga Gorge in February this year bore more the hallmarks of Harawira’s genuine concern for people as workers rather than constituents. Regular contact with workers has forced him to face up to the limitations of the nationalist rhetoric of his youth. He increasingly has come to recognise that internationalising indigenous struggles as workers’ struggles, has more to offer in terms of strength and unity than the empty promises of misleaders governed by bourgeois nationalist class interest.

Politically, it is too early to see if he has matured to the point that he is able to make a clean break from the more limiting aspects of his past. His entry into a Parliamentary institution that he openly describes as cynical and representative of the ‘Settlers’, falls short of what could be described as the higher level of serious politics, that is ‘revolutionary’. To that end, he must engage with struggles where consciously, the break with ‘Indigenousness’ has had to be made by indigenous people. Without sacrificing their unique regional identities, they have come to realise that their battles cannot be fought alone.

In Latin America, struggles are being waged and led by native peoples who are at the head of the most politically advanced workers in the world. Their organisations are built on the ‘rank and file.’ For example in Bolivia landless indigenous peasants have united with workers to fight for the nationalization of gas against Evo Morales whose ‘Indigenous’ government is trying to do a deal with the oil companies. These struggles are in a frontline face-off against the most murderous anti-indigenous/anti-worker force ever assembled; ‘The Imperialist capitalist USA.’

In Aotearoa, the Maori fight for independence has tended to identify with a romanticised version of the past replicated in modern times by reactionaries such as George Speight in Fiji. By supporting Speight, some Maori nationalists such as Tame Iti, put themselves in opposition to Fijian workers because their ‘Indigenous’ perspective disorientated them from recognising the greater class struggle.

When Hone Harawira entered Parliament in 2005, he was in many ways going to be a cat loose among the pigeons even in his own Party. His belief in the power of the Maori Party branches to formulate policy has put him at odds with the non-parliamentary Party hierarchy. To stretch his workload even more, he has become the proxy-member for Tainui, a seat narrowly lost by left-leaning Maori Party co-candidate and Mana Maori (temporarily in recess) leader Angelline Greensill, daughter of legendary activist Eva Rickard. As a reluctant candidate herself, Greensill was perhaps going to be Harawira’s most valuable ally.

In many ways, Greensill and Mana Maori, reflect a cautionary cynicism that is aimed at the Maori Party as much as Parliament; a view not too dissimilar to that of Hone Harawira. At a meeting in Pukekohe, South Auckland before Christmas 2005, Harawira was challenged by a local worker as to the Maori Party’s industrial policy, to which he replied, “That matter is in your hands as rank and file members.” That challenge probably more than any at this stage, is going to be a sign of his future trajectory in the Maori Party.

Te Taua Karuwhero 



From Class Struggle 66 April/May 2006

Bolivia: Long live the revoltionary program of the the workers, peasants, miners and students of El Alto!

For the Nationalisations of the Hydrocarbons!

Out with Mesa! Dissolve the Parliament!

For Workers' Militias and a Workers' and Peasants' Government!

The masses of Bolivian workers and peasants have begun a new revolutionary fight. This uprising has not come out of the blue. It takes place just weeks after the Ecuadorian workers and students, rising up as an independent mass, demolished the pro-imperialist government of Gutiérrez, shouting “Que se vayan todos” [“all go away" the cry of the Argentinazo of 2001] not only against the bourgeois institutions, the bosses’ parliament and the politicians, but also against the Stalinist, Maoist and Castroist leaders that helped to elect Gutiérrez as President and that, along with World Social Forum, continued to defend him.

US imperialism has imposed a severe defeat on the nation of Iraq, crushed the Palestinian workers and people, and because of the treacherous betrayals of the leaders, contained the masses in Latin America, strangling the revolutionary struggle in Argentina and holding it back in Bolivia. Now it has relaunched an offensive in its back yard to impose new colonial laws like the FTAs [Free Trade Agreements] and the FTAA [Free Trade Agreement of the Americas] to guarantee access to the natural resources and payment of the external debts of all the nations of the continent.

The renewed revolutionary uprising of the masses of Ecuador and now in Bolivia, the struggle of the workers and students in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, the revolt of the students in Chile, the build up of workers and students struggles in Argentina, are the anti-imperialist response of the Latin American masses to the intensified attacks by imperialism. The revolutionary uprisings in Bolivia and Ecuador in Latin American; Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in Eurasia; the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses and the resurgence of anti-imperialist struggles in Afghanistan in the hearts of these Yankee protectorates, pose a challenge to the fragile stability created by imperialism with its victorious counter-revolutions.

These events in Bolivia accelerate from day to day. The government of Mesa did not oppose the hydrocarbon law passed by parliament. It will become law automatically. Obviously, fearing a new revolutionary uprising the bourgeoisie has made some small concessions to keep negotiations open. This is the position of Evo Morales: to negotiate with the bourgeoisie over the percentage of the gas royalties, where the national bourgeoisie acting as the junior partner of imperialism in the exploitation of the natural resources of Bolivia, asks for the scraps, while imperialism takes the lion’s share of the huge wealth made from plundering the gas and oil.

The workers and peasants, with the miners in the front line, once more rise up with the central objective: “Nationalization of the gas without compensation, out with Mesa, close down Parliament”

But the passing of the law far from calming the situation has stirred it up. From Monday May 16, the revolutionary masses have taken to the streets, with pickets, roadblocks, general strikes like that of the teachers, and barricades, raising the slogan of the moment: ¡nationalization without compensation of the gas and oil, down with Mesa and the parliament that serves the oil companies!

Since Monday the 16 there has been no halt to the demonstrations in La Paz, with thousands of workers and peasants, now headed by the miners, surrounding the parliament and carrying out pitched battles with the police, responding with "puppies" of dynamite to grapeshot and tear gas. The Congress of the Federation of mining workers that was being held in Huanuni suspended its sessions, and the miners are already in La Paz at the head of the fight. The urban and rural teachers have declared an indefinite strike.

On the 20 of May, El Alto stopped for 24 hours, blocking the Freeway, and once more tens of thousands led by the miners were mobilized in La Paz, and the bourgeoisie, terrified, evacuated parliament. A indefinite general strike was planned to begin on Monday 23 of May by the ‘extended’ emergency meeting [delegates of all organizations in struggle] of the COR [Regional Workers Centre] of El Alto, which included the miners, the COB [Bolivian Workers’ Centre, affiliates of the national organization of Bolivian workers] the Fejuve, [Federación de Juntas Vecinales, or federation of community groups] the students, the teachers and other sectors in struggle.

In February 2003, the cry was “Fusil, metralla, Bolivia no se calla”, ["Guns, shrapnel, Bolivia will not be quiet”], in October 2003 the cry was “El gas y el petróleo para los bolivianos” ["gas and oil for the Bolivians"]. With the repeated uprisings of the masses they have learned from experience, even without the presence of a Marxist party, that the bourgeoisie uses different manoeuvres to counter the revolutionary situation.

With this experience, the masses have not only confronted the government of Mesa, but their own treacherous leaders in the COB and the peasant organizations. In February 2003 and October 2003, the revolutionary masses rose up, despite these leaders, and brought down the murderous government of Goni [Lozada]. But the leaders of the COB and the peasants then took back control over the workers uprising, giving the power to Mesa [Goni’s deputy who continued his policies] who formed a new government of the Rosca [mine owners] and oil companies.

For one and a half years, the treacherous leaders made truces and pacts with the new government. The national bourgeoisie, with Evo Morales at its head, used the enormous mobilization of masses to increase its share of the gas royalties. Today, with this third revolutionary uprising, the workers and farmers are trying to break out of the containment pacts made between their leaders and the different bourgeois groups, and to free the masses to directly confront the capitalists in Bolivia and in all of Latin America.

Therefore, on one side of the barricades are the mine owners and its puppet government; the Castroite leadership of the COB (Solares) and Evo Morales, who represents the national bourgeoisie in negotiating an increased share of the oil wealth at the expense of the Bolivian masses. On the other side of the barricades are the revolutionary masses of workers and farmers who raise the demands “Out with Mesa, down with parliament and nationalize the gas and oil without compensation".

In the same way, on the bosses’ side of the barricades are the members of the World Social Forum, supporting Mesa in the same way they supported Gutiérrez – the servant of the IMF in Ecuador. On the other side of the barricades alongside the masses of workers and farmers in the struggle, are the internationalist Trotskyists, the Latin American revolutionaries. These barricades separate the classes in struggle in Bolivia and the whole continent.

The bourgeoisie is divided on how to defeat the masses that once more rise up to complete the revolution. Again the treacherous leaders of the masses are called upon to betray the masses’ struggle.

Facing the new revolutionary offensive of the masses the bourgeoisie is divided. One fraction, the bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz, Tarija and the Medialuna, where most of the oil and gas reserves are found, are campaigning, with the support of the oil companies, for much greater regional autonomy. On the other hand, there are two other fractions advancing different policies to try to prevent that the masses from throwing out Mesa and destroying the mine owners’ regime.

One fraction of the bourgeoisie, with Mesa and Evo Morales at its head, tries to contain the masses within a ‘democratic reactionary’ solution. It proposes new elections for a Constituent Assembly, elections of prefects, and a referendum on regional autonomy. This is designed to stabilize the regime and allow time for the different bourgeois fractions to negotiate their shares of the oil wealth and the surplus value of the working class. Thus Evo Morales opposed Mesa’s resignation and advised him to send troops to the oil wells to prevent mass occupations. He constantly acts as a ‘safety valve’ turning the revolutionary struggles of the workers and farmers towards parliamentary elections and referendums, rescuing the government of Mesa, the reactionary regime of the mine owners, and the Bolivian state from collapse.

Another fraction of the bourgeoisie tries to abort the revolutionary uprising of the masses by promoting a nationalistic way out. Mesa would be replaced by a ‘patriotic’ military regime that would contain the anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle of the masses like Chavez has done in Venezuela. Solares and the Castroist leadership of the COB are working to implement this bourgeois solution under pressure of the masses to call for the resignation of Mesa and the closing of parliament.

That’s why Solares has said: "If there were an honest military man like Hugo Chávez, I would support him" (Clarin, 20/05/05). But the lesson of Venezuela clearly demonstrates to the workers and farmers of Latin America that, because of Chávez, Venezuelan oil fuels Bush’s military machine in Iraq while Repsol makes superprofits. In the same way, any general or colonel of the Bolivian army, even though Solares dresses him up him as "patriotic", will give the gas to the Yankees and not the workers and farmers. Meanwhile, POR [Revolutionary Workers’ Party] of Bolivia – that has already openly renounced the program of Trotskyism – calls for the convening of a Popular Assembly like that of 1971. That is to say, to repeat what General Torres, that supposedly ‘patriotic’ military man, did in 1971. POR therefore provides a programmatic left cover to the policy of class collaboration of Solares and the Castroite leadership of the COB.

The main objective of i.e. Castroite leadership of the COB and of Evo Morales is to prevent the masses from throwing out Mesa, destroying the mine owners regime, winning the rank and file soldiers in the army, and creating dual power organs capable of making an insurrection. For that reason, all their forces are used to prevent the miners, workers, farmers and students who have been struggling for ten days against the police and army, from taking the Plaza Murillo in La Paz, the seat of Parliament.

The treacherous leaders fear like death that the workers and peasants will take the same road as that of the workers and oppressed people of Ecuador. They know that if the workers and farmers take the plaza and occupy parliament, the mining bosses’ regime and the Bolivian semi-colonial state would be split wide open, and a period of dual power would be opened where the masses would counterpose to the weakened bourgeois state their own power based on their organs of struggle, direct democracy and self-defense.

For that reason, in the different regions and departments the bureaucracy has decided against a massive march to La Paz, but only to send delegations of the COD's [Departmental sections of COB] and COR's [Regional sections of COB] and the Civic Committees [FUJEVE] headed by bureaucratic leaders whose task is to restrain the masses and to withdraw them from the Plaza Murillo. All the bureaucrats of the COB, COD, COR's and FUJEVE that converge on La Paz, although throwing some dynamite "puppies", have only one objective which is to stop the masses from taking the Plaza Murillo and the Parliament. For that reason, Evo Morales called for the roadblocks to be lifted and a truce until Monday 30 of May.

That fraction of the bourgeoisie that is trying to revive the puppet parliament – to meet in session while surrounded by the miners, workers and peasants who have returned to occupy La Paz and face the police defending the Plaza Murrillo and the seat of Parliament – seeks to divert the masses by calling for new presidential elections, referendums or for a Constituent Assembly, to prevent that the masses from carrying through their demands to bring down Mesa and parliament and open up a revolutionary crisis in the regime.

Meanwhile, the officers of the armed forces are on alert over the "danger of the disintegration" of the regime. What deceit: the real disintegration of the Bolivian nation has been caused by the capitalist gangs –the oil companies and the national bourgeoisie. It has been caused by the national bourgeoisies of Latin America that, hanging on the apron strings of the oil companies like Repsol, Petrobras, British Petroleum, and Totalfina, try to profit from the plunder of the natural wealth of Bolivia that passes through Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Social disintegration is the political program of the bourgeoisies of Santa Cruz, Tarija and the Medialuna, that want to keep most of the reserves of the gas and oil for themselves, while 80% of the population of Bolivia must use firewood, charcoal etc for cooking and heating.

It is the insatiable drive for superprofits by the imperialistic monopolies and the native bourgeoisie that continues to oppress the Bolivian nation. The only class that can unite the nation and end the oppression and “disintegration” is the working class, leading the poor peasantry, and creating its own government, with its own militias, reviving the best traditions of the heroic revolution of 1952.

The Armed Forces, at the moment, remain on alert to defend the bourgeois state and safeguard its security, prepared if necessary to drown the revolution in blood if they cannot otherwise contain or divert the revolutionary advance of the masses. But the bourgeoisie will only resort to open repression if all else fails, because it is aware that to do could lead to another massacre like that which led to the downfall of Goni, and run the risk of splitting the army so that the conscripts would mutiny against the officers. This is the greatest danger posed by the revolutionary uprising of the masses because, since, in the last instance, whoever controls the army rank and file, wins. If the bourgeoisie retains control, it will suppress the workers and peasants uprising with blood and fire. If the workers and poor farmers win control, the workers militias will be reinforced by soldiers committees.

Long live the revolutionary program of the democratic base of the COR of El Alto and of the miners: down with Mesa! Workers must dissolve the puppet parliament, build worker militias and form a provisional workers’ and peasants’ government to nationalize the gas and oil, and carry out the program of the working class and the Bolivian people!

The strong revolutionary upsurge that has erupted in Bolivia must prevail. Only a provisional government of revolutionary workers and peasants supported by the organs of direct democracy of the masses, workers militias and soldiers committees, will succeed in winning the most elementary national demands of the Bolivian workers and oppressed people, on the ruins of the regime of the mine owners and their imperialist partners, who are the real expropriators of the natural resources of the millions of Bolivians and Latin Americans.

The masses, betrayed by the truces and pacts which their leaders used to prop up Mesa and his crony oil bosses, have begun a new revolutionary uprising. Against the containment policy of Morales and Solares, the exploited workers of El Alto have marked out the revolutionary road to the masses’ victory. On May 17 the COR of El Alto meet with the miners, the teachers, the neighborhood committees, the students, and voted for a program of struggle to bring down Mesa, for workers to dissolve the puppet parliament, for workers’ militias and Workers’ and Farmers’ provisional government to nationalize the gas and oil, and to carry out all the demands of the Bolivian workers and oppressed people. This program was re-affirmed on May 25. Long live the revolutionary program lives of El Alto, that marks a clear course of action for the preparation of a decisive revolutionary struggle that does not leave a stone standing of the government of Mesa and the mine owners regime!

This resolution and this program voted by the COR of El Alto is a slap in the face of the liquidators of Trotskyism and the reformist left of Latin America and the world. It says that the problem is not that the working class does not suffer from a "crisis of the subjectivity" "or underdeveloped consciousness” but rather too many treacherous leaders. The demand of February 2003 "Gun, shrapnel, Bolivia will not shut up"; of October 2003, "Go away Goni, the gas is for the Bolivians", and now the program of the COR of El Alto demanding the "nationalization of the gas and resources, a workers and peasants government and workers’ militias", proves that the Bolivian working class has raised the flag of socialism for the workers of the world.

Some months ago, during the March events, the bourgeoisie claimed that there were ‘soviets’ in El Alto. They were not mistaken. The COR of El Alto, coordinating and representing workers, miners, students, teachers, unionists, drivers and all of the masses in struggle in that revolutionary city, acting independently, called for an indefinite general strike, for armed pickets and militias –a call that was taken up by the COD in Oruro and other cities – creating the most advanced and authoritative organs of the masses in struggle. It is without a doubt the highest point reached in the creation of workers organs of dual power that is now being strengthened and extended. There is no more urgent task than to develop, extend and centralize the organs of self-determination and self-defense of the militant masse in preparation for the insurrectionary seizure of power.

The COD, the peasants’ organizations marching from Caracollo towards the La Paz, , and all workers, peasants and students organizations that are engaged in struggle, must elect and sent delegates of the rank and file, mandated and recallable, to the COR of El Alto!

In the dynamite charge of the miner, in the stones of the picketers, there are already the embryos of the workers’ militias called for by the resolution of El Alto. It is necessary build them urgently because the army generals have warned that the revolution means ‘the disintegration of Bolivia’; that is, threatens the profits of the oil companies and the big capitalists. They are preparing another blood bath against the workers and farmers. Nor will they hesitate, as they did in October 2003, to shoot the troops – the children of the workers and farmers – that refuse to repress their class brothers and sisters. It is necessary for the people to surround the barracks to win over the rank and rile soldiers, the children of workers and farmers! It is necessary to call on them to form committees of armed soldiers, and to send their delegates to the COR of El Alto! For the dismissal of the officers of the Armed Forces, killers of the people! The committees of soldiers will elect their own leaders!

With thousand of delegates of the rank and file workers and peasants meeting in El Alto, it is necessary to build a ‘soviet-type’ organ that represents the legitimate and democratic expression of the will of the vast majority of the Bolivian people. That organ would be the only one with the authority to create a provisional revolutionary government of workers and peasants supported by the organs of direct democracy of the masses, workers militias and soldiers committees. The government would nationalize without compensation the gas, oil and mines, and place them under workers control; break with the IMF; distribute the best land to the poor peasants; nationalize the banks without compensation and under workers’ control; create a single state bank that grants cheap loans to the small peasants; make a general wage rise and a sliding scale of wages and working hours; and provide free public quality health and education for the workers and the people.

This revolutionary workers’ and farmers’ government is the only one that can guarantee the unity of the Bolivian nation. It is the only one that can realize the most advanced form of bourgeois democracy, such as a truly free and sovereign Constituent Assembly. And it will enable the peasants to learn from their own experience that the most democratic of the bourgeois republics it nothing but a cover for the ruthless dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and that the Workers’ Republic, born out of the self-organization and the arming of the workers and peasants in struggle, is the only way to realize their demands for land and to break with imperialism.

Build centralized and armed organs of dual power, in which the revolutionary party can fight for the program that is necessary for the victorious revolution!

The crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat is acute facing the new uprising of the Bolivian masses. The collaboration with the counter-revolutionary leadership of the renegade Trotskyists reveals in its true light their total bankruptcy. POR Lora, in 1952 supported the “progressive" bourgeois Paz Estenssoro and the MNR (Military Revolutionary National) government, breaking all connection with the program and strategy of Trotskyism. In 1971 POR Lora supported General Torres and the class collaborationist front (FRA). Today it is in the counter-revolutionary camp in the third Bolivian revolution.

We are on the threshold of decisive battles. The revolutionary uprising of the masses begins to break the strangle hold of the treacherous leaders. The counterrevolution forces are preparing to abort or smash it. It is a race against time to build the internationalist revolutionary party that can lead this uprising to the victory of the workers and farmers.

In order to close overcome this crisis and build a true proletarian revolutionary party, the key is to extend the program of the El Alto workers and peasants so that organs of direct democracy and of dual power (councils or soviets) extend across the whole country. In those class struggle organs, the programs of all those who claim to represent the working class and its interests can be put to the test of experience of the workers and farmers who can then get rid of their treacherous leaders. In those organs the alliance of the working class with the poor farmers can can develop a unified command and break all subordination to the different bourgeois fractions. Inside these organs a small nucleus of revolutionaries, fighting uncompromisingly against the treacherous leaders, explaining at each point who are the workers’ allies and enemies, convincing workers of the correct program through their own experience, can create the revolutionary leadership needed to win.

The forces necessary to create a revolutionary party already exist. They are the miners, the poor workers, farmers and revolutionary students of El Alto who have voted for a revolutionary program. They are the miners, the workers and the farmers who, in Oruro, Cochabamba, in every city, every land occupation, every mine, agree with the El Alto program and try to unite and centralize all their struggles. The place of the revolutionary internationalists is with them, to unite with these advanced forces and fight for international Trotskyism in Bolivia; a fight that is inseparable from the struggle to regroup internationally all the healthy forces of Trotskyism, confronting all over the world the treacherous leaders of the liquidators of the IV International.

We call for a united struggle of the whole Latin American working class: Not a cubic centimeter of gas or oil must leave Bolivia unless authorized by a provisional government of revolutionary workers and farmers!

The pro-imperialist bourgeoisies of Argentina, Brazil and Chile say that because of the fight of the Bolivian masses, they will increase the price of gas. This is a lie, as the capitalist governments of Latin America raise the prices of the gas to rob their own nations in complicity with the imperialist monopolies!

Not a cubic of Bolivian gas or oil must leave that country, if is it not authorized by a provisional revolutionary government of workers and peasants! This must be the common cry of the workers of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and the whole continent!

The struggle of our Bolivian brothers and sisters is a slap in the face to Chavez, who has decided that Venezuelan oil’s not for the Venezuelans, but for Bush to enable him to fuel the military machine to kill in Iraq and the Middle East, and for the profits of Repsol or Corona of Spain.

The Castro bureaucracy – which has opened up the first Latin American workers’ state to imperialist companies – is on the same side of the barricade as Chávez, Repsol, Kirchner, Lula and Tabaré Vázquez, against the Bolivian revolution. It did the same in 1973, preaching the "peaceful road to socialism" in Chile, and in the '80s it betrayed the heroic Nicaraguan, Salvadoran and Central American revolution with the pacts of Esquipulas and Contadora. These "peace accords" brought about the submission of Central America to the US imperialism and to their recolonization today by means of NAFTA, the FTAs and the FTAA. Meanwhile the old “commanders" of the Sandinista’s and the FMLN have turned into "yuppies" and agents of the IMF plans, or become officers in the bourgeois armies, as is the case in both Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The revolutionary uprising of the masses in Bolivia, after the exemplary action of the Ecuadorian masses, means that it is now necessary for the workers and exploited people of Latin America to unite behind the demands of the Bolivian workers and peasants against imperialist plunder, oppression and wage slavery. The fight to stop any gas from leaving Bolivia for the oil monopolies, and for its nationalization without compensation and under workers’ control, now leads the fight of all the oppressed nations of Latin America to reclaim their natural wealth exploited by imperialism.

To achieve this, the most important task of workers and exploited people in Latin America, is to oppose and defeat all the regimes and governments that support Mesa and are subservient the imperialistic policy of the IMF and the multinationals in Latin America, such as that of Lula, Kirchner, Tabaré Vázquez, Toledo and Lagos. It is necessary to take the road opened up by our class brothers and sisters in Ecuador.

What the exploited people of Bolivia and Ecuador, and of all Latin America, need, is that the continental working class settles accounts with all the sell out collaborationist bureaucrats of the workers and mass organizations, to be able to create a coordinated and centralized movement of workers and peasants able to defeat imperialism and its regimes client states.

Against the revolutionary uprising in Bolivia, signified by the workers and peasants of El Alto calling for the formation of workers militias, the officers of the Bolivian army are preparing for repression. All the client states in Latin America are ready, if called by their Yankee master and the gang of thieves of the OAS, to sent their armies against the workers and peasants to "defend the constitutional order" in Bolivia. The US military bases in Latin America at Chapere in Bolivia, Manta in Ecuador, in Colombia, etc. have been put on alert.

As revolutionary internationalists we alert the workers of Latin America to this threat. We call for the expulsion of all imperialists military bases such as Chapare, Manta, the Malvinas! Immediate recall of the Chilean, Brazilian and Argentine mercenaries in the service of US imperialism in Haiti! We call on the workers and anti-imperialist organizations of Venezuela to put the 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles bought by Chávez into the service of workers’ militias that the COR and workers and peasants organizations in El Alto have called for in Bolivia! Left in the hands of the Chavista national bourgeoisie those guns will be used to prevent the victory of the Bolivian revolution, and to repress the anti-imperialist masses of Venezuela and Latin America.

It is necessary that the Chilean working class - whose bourgeoisie profits from the oil pipeline from Bolivia across Chile to the sea - takes in its hands the fight for the territorial rights of Bolivia. A workers’ and peasants’ government arising from the defeat of the civic-military regime of Lagos could establish fraternal and cooperative relations with a workers’ and peasants’ government of Bolivia to determine the future of the disputed territory.

The organizations who have signed this declaration declare that it is our duty as to devote 100% of our forces to the revolutionary struggle for victory of the workers and farmers of Bolivia, and to take to the workers and mass organizations in the countries in which we are based, the resolution that “not a cubic centimeter of gas or oil leaves Bolivia for the imperialist monopolies”, and to adopt as our own the revolutionary program of the workers and farmers of El Alto who are in the vanguard of this heroic struggle.

Long live the uprisings of the masses in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstán and Uzbekistán! Long live the heroic Iraqi resistance and awakening of the North American working class! Long live the revolutionary uprising of the masses of Ecuador! For the victory of the revolution in Bolivia, Ecuador and in all Latin America! For a Federation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Republics of South and Central America!

The revolutionary uprising of the Bolivian masses is not alone. Their allies are the workers and students of Ecuador who, like Bucaram and Mahuad yesterday, threw the US lackey and poster boy of the WSF Gutiérrez, into the waste-basked of history; they are the workers and peasants who threaten another uprising in Ilave, Peru; they are the rebellious workers and students of Nicaragua and Chile; they are the militant vanguard of the labor movement in the US, the Million Worker March Movement that stands against the killer Bush’s war.

They are the Afghan anti-imperialist fighters that are resisting the humiliations they have suffered under Bush’s occupying troops, and the anti-imperialist fighters of the Middle East who are imprisoned in Guantánamo. They are the Iraqi masses that continue a strong and heroic resistance against the imperialistic occupation and its colonial puppet government.

The allies of the proletariat and exploited people of Bolivia are the rebellious workers and farmers in Kyrgyzstán and Uzbekistán - nations of the former USSR where capitalism has been restored by the stalinist bureaucracy who became a new bourgeoisie as junior partners with imperialism. The workers and oppressed people rose up against dictatorial regimes and ‘pinochet’ governments, headed, as in the case of Uzbekistán, by the head of the KGB in the former stalinist bureaucracy, who ordered the army to repress the uprising, massacring more than 700 workers and farmers. In all the former workers’ states it is necessary to build revolutionary parties with transitional programs that can lead the fight for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The workers and oppressed people of Latin America, the United States, of the Middle East and Central Asia; these are the allies of the Bolivian workers and peasants who march on the revolutionary road of October!

The renewal of the revolutionary uprising of the masses in Ecuador and Bolivia demonstrates the urgency of a continent-wide struggle of Latin American workers and peasants. These two great struggles prove that the only solution to imperialist plunder, starvation and slavery is the victory of a Federation of Workers and Peasants Republics of South and Central America. The North American and EU proletariat have a key role to play in defending the revolutionary victories of their class brothers and sisters of Latin America. They must strike at the heart of their own imperialistic bourgeoisies, expropriating the monopolies –British Petroleum, Exxon, Totalfina, Repsol, and other oil monopolies – the IMF, the World Bank and international financial capital that plunder and oppress the workers and people of Bolivia and Latin America.

Build the World Wide Party of Socialist Revolution, to provide the working class of Bolivia, Ecuador, of Latin America and the world, with the revolutionary leadership it deserves.

To make revolutions in Ecuador and Bolivia that can spread like wildfire, the masses need world revolutionary party. Today, all the liquidators of Trotskyism and the Fourth International have become the disciples of Chávez, Fidel Castro and the World Social Forum, and act as leftwing public relations agencies of the pro-IMF regimes and governments such as Lula, Kirchner, Lagos, Toledo, and Tabaré Vázquez.

The liquidation of the Fourth International into Stalinism began in 1948 with the adaptation of pabloism to Tito who was called an "unconscious Trotskyist", and with the entry of the pabloites into the communist parties. Today, the liquidators of Trotskyism have been subordinated to the Castro bureaucracy under the ideological authority of a leader of the Cuban PC Celia Hart Santamaría. She, with the collaboration and support of the renegade currents of Trotskyism, appeals to the legacy of Leon Trotsky, falsifying it in order to conceal the continental policy of class collaboration of Castroism and the completion of the process of the restoration of capitalism in Cuba.

The liquidators of the Fourth International have abandoned the struggle for socialist revolution. Some openly like the United Secretariat in Brazil, that has a minister for land reform in the Lula pro-IMF government that represses and continues to kill the landless farmers. Others, of many stripes and colors, proclaim the socialist revolution on holidays, but during workdays betray it day after day.

Today, the revolutionary program of the COR of El Alto is a new test that serves to separate the reformists, liquidators of Fourth International from the revolutionaries. On one side of the barricade of El Alto, are those fighting to implement their revolutionary resolutions in action, to defeat the government and create a regime like that of 1952 based on the dual power of the armed masses that is capable of taking state power. On the other side of the barricade are those on their knees before the "patriotic" generals, or before those who seek to defend the bourgeois parliament and constituent Assemblies in order to salvage the collapsing regime of the mine owners.

The theory and the program of Trotskyism have passed the test of history. The opportunist liquidators of the Fourth International have gone over to the camp of the World Social Forum.

The healthy forces of Trotskyism and revolutionary workers organizations, have begun to rally our forces and to regroup in the Liaison Committee for an International Conference. The objective must be rebuild the World Party of Socialist Revolution on the base of the program foundations of the Fourth International from 1938-40, to equip the Bolivian, Ecuadorian working class, of Latin America and the world, with the revolutionary leadership that they deserve, with true insurrectionary parties of struggle that give programmatic expression to the historical objective of the proletariat and lead if to victory.

Ecuador and Bolivia are the current life and death tests of the revolutionary program. The masses in struggle demonstrate their heroism, and they are already distinguishing, more and more clearly, their enemy. The revolutionary program and will to fight brought to the Ecuadorian and Bolivian revolutions, are and will be the rallying points to regroup the internationalist Trotskyists.

The revolutionary organizations who have signed this declaration call on all the healthy forces of Trotskyism to commit 100% of our forces to the victory of the Bolivian revolution and to combine to make an International Conference, on the base of revolutionary history and a correct program founds a transitional international center of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers organizations with the objective to found the World Party of Socialist Revolution as a centralized force to confront the counter-revolutionary leaders of the liquidators of the Fourth International.

•   Long live revolutionary struggle of the workers and exploited people of Ecuador and Bolivia!

•  Long Live the uprisings of the masses in Afghanistan, Kyrkystán and Uzbekistán!

•  Long live the Iraq heroic resistance '! 
  

• The revolution lives in the workers and peasants of El Alto!

•  Down with Mesa and his puppet parliament!

• For a National congress of the COB and the farmers organizations; for workers’ militias and soldiers’ committees!

• For a Revolutionary Provisional Government of workers and farmers to nationalize the gas and petroleum, and to impose all the demands of the working class and the Bolivian people!

• Down the truces, pacts and class collaboration with the bourgeois governments of Lula, Kirchner, Lagos, Tabaré Vázquez, Toledo! All of them must be watched in the mirror of Gutiérrez: all of them must fall at hands of the proletarian revolution!

• Not a cubic centimeter of Bolivian gas or petrol for Repsol, Petrobras, Totalfina, or British Petroleum, or for their small partners, the national bourgeoisies of Latin America!

• Down with the TLCs, NAFTA, FTAA and Mercosur of the exploiters! 

• For a Federation of Workers’ and Farmers’ Republics of South and Central America!

• Long live the anti-imperialist fight against Bush’s war by the dock workers of Oakland in the United States, because in the awakening of the North American working class the lives the possibility of the final triumph of the revolution in South and Central America! 
  

• Against Stalinism, social democracy, all reformists and liquidators of Trotskyism! 

• For an International Conference of the healthy forces of Trotskyism and or revolutionary workers organizations! 

From Class Struggle 61 May-June 2005
 

Bolivia: The Revolution Re-opens

Events have again taken a turn towards mass insurrection in Bolivia. The Bolivian workers uprising of October 2003 that caused President Losada (Goni) to flee to the US, was halted by the union leaders who did a deal with Vice-President Carlos Mesa. But Mesa did not carry out his side of the agreement. Once more the masses are on the move blocking roads and striking against Mesa’s proposal to sell the gas to multinationals. The path ahead must be the call for the downfall of Mesa and for a National Congress of the delegates of the COB (national union) and peasant organisations, backed by the formation of workers militias and soldiers committees, to nationalise the gas without compensation and under workers’ control, and to expropriate the imperialist corporations and put in place a workers’ and poor farmers government. Here we summarise the Theses on Bolivia of the International Trotskyist Fraction (Fraccion Trotskista Internationalista – FTI).

Bolivia is a hinge of the world revolution and counter-revolution

The events in Bolivia are critical to the whole balance of class forces internationally. US imperialism has gone on the offensive in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, and has contained the revolutionary upsurges in Argentina, Equador and Peru. A new worker and peasant uprising in Bolivia may tip the balance once more in favour of the masses and begin a new offensive against capital lthat is already signalled in the awakening of the US working class, the French mobiilsation against its government attacks on the pension. Thus much rests on the success of the Bolivian masses in breaking out of the containment imposed on them by the bureaucracy and the left reformists and fake Trotskyists who have come together in the World Social Forum.

The crisis of Bolivia’s semi-colonial economy shape the events today. First, the question of who will benefit from the gas resources, the imperialists or the poor people of Bolivia, makes this fight a fight to the death. Second, Bolivia’s national debt is not 80% of GDP and this dictates that the state must pay the debt by attacking the masses. The uprisings of February and October 2003 and December 2004 were all caused by increasing prices and taxes on poor workers and farmers. Third, the Bolivian bourgeoisie are weak and divided about how to solve the crisis. This thrusts the union and peasant leaders to the fore as the managers of the crisis. Each time the masses rise up the bureaucracy rescues the situation by doing a deal with Mesa. But this time the mass pressure from below forced the bureacuracy to call a 24 hour general strike on January 10. This coincided with an indefinite strike in El Alto (working class suburb above La Paz) to expel the French multinational Illimani which now owns the water supply. But the leaders of the unions and peasant organisations managed to prevent these strikes from turning into an offensive against Mesa.

March events

By early March 2005 the economic crisis was now expressed as a national political crisis. The mobilisations, strikes, pickets etc threatened to paralyse the country. The indefinite general strike of March 2 in El Alto was joined by a blockade of the refinery of Senkata on March 7 by 40,000 workers. In the rest of the country the occupation of oil fields and the cutting of roads in seven of the nine departments of the country continued. Again, the workers demanded that the leadership of the COB call a 48 hour national strike from March 15. Once again there was the possibility of a new revolutionary uprising of the masses. Mesa reacted by offering his resignation on March 6. This was an ultimatum to the ruling class to back him with new powers as a ‘referee’ to bring the different fractions from the bourgeoisie into line, to appeal to the reactionary petty bourgeoisie for support, and to try to go on offensive against the workers and farmers. Thus Mesa would impose social order and guarantee both the plunder of the gas by the US monopolies and payment of the external debt to the IMF.

The COB and peasant leaders stepped into solve the crisis again. They wanted to avoid an uprising such as October 2003. Evo Morales, the main peasant leader, and Solares of the COB signed a unity pact, proposing that the government impose a 50% royalty payment on the gas, and called for a Constituent Assembly. Against this pact with the national bourgeoisie against the workers, revolutionaries could have broken this pact with a program of transitional demands: "Neither 18% nor 50% royallties but nationalization without compensation and under workers control of the gas, petroleum, water and mines! Expropriation without compensation and nationalization of the banks under control of the workers, to reduce the debt of the small farmers and to give them cheap loans ". A call for a political general strike in the middle of the political crisis would have thrust the proletariat immediately to the head of the struggle and demonstrated to the rest of the exploited classes that only it can resolve the crisis of the oppressed and exploited nation by leading the fight against imperialism. The united intervention of the working class, led by the miners vanguard, would quickly have solved the situation in favor of the exploited, and would have sealed the fate Mesa, the puppet parliament and the mine owners state!

The result was that Mesa was re-confirmed as President by the unanimous vote of all the Deputies including the MAS (Morales) and MIP (Quispe). With this move the government bought some time. Yet it could not overcome the deepening division in the ruling class between those openly serving imperialism, and those acting for the reactionary national bourgeoisie. Mesa risked an open controntation between the army and the masses that could have seen a section of the military split in support of the insurrection. While Mesa still had the upper hand there was the potential for the masses to stage another insurrection. For that reason the oil monopolies held Mesa back. Instead they proposed new elections to win electoral legitimacy. But Parliament refused and voted to impose royalties of 18% and taxes of 32% on the monopolies. Mesa threatened to veto this law if the Senate did not reduce the royalties and taxes. Morales, who demanded 50% royalties, then claimed that the new law would provide another $600-$750 million dollars for distribution to the people and so called off the strikes and blockades.

At present there is an impasse. The ruling class is agreed on Mesa remaining in power and a pact of national unity to contain the masses. Imperialism is only interested in political stability to allow it to super-exploit the oil and gas. They do not yet have the power to defeat the masses outright in an armed showdown, and have to rely on the leaders of the peasants and workers to hold them back. They know this situation is unstable as the masses have the potential to break through this strangle hold.

Background to the current crisis

The events of March means that the truce made between the regime and the leaders of the workers and peasant organisations in October 2003 has come to an end. Already the existing regime based on a longstanding peasant/military pact had come under attack in February 2003. The October truce followed an uprising that included a split in the army forcing the resignation of President Lozada (Goni).

The truce with Mesa depended on the key role of Morales, Quispe etc who promised real gains for the masses to prevent them taking the insurrection on to the seizure of power. But this truce gave Mesa the time to rebuild his regime. He could not rely on the army because of the risk of further splits. Behind the cover of the truce he tested the masses resolve to fight with selected attacks on the most militant sectors, but met with strong opposition like the rebellion at Ayo Ayo and the student occupation at Ururo.

Mesa also tried to bolster his regime with the referendum on oil royalties and the local body elections of December of 2004. The result was the March crisis and Mesa’ re-confirmation under a new truce more favourable to the bosses. Mesa’s has been strengthened elevated as a Bonaparte balancing between imperialism and the national bourgeosie on the one side, and the masses on the other. Nevertheless, he is not strong enough to dispense with the treacherous petty bourgeois role of Morales, Solares and Quispe, still tying the masses to the bourgeois camp.

The present situation is therefore the direct result of the treacherous role of the misleaders of the workers and peasants organisations. Twice, between January and March this year they have held back workers from embarking on new revolutionary attacks on the regime. Instead they harness the pressure from below to bargain for more oil rent for the masses.

The Revolution is in Danger

The revolution that initiated the heroic workers and Bolivian farmers in February 2003 and was interrupted twice by truces is in danger. If the bourgeois fractions manages to use its unity pact with the labour and peasant misleaders (apopular front) to contain the masses, the revolution will come to a haltand counter-revolution will gain the upper hand. If the masses break this new truce, then Mesa may fall and the revolution will once more re-open. The crucial factor that will decide which way Bolivia goes is the independent organisation of the workers and peasants breaking with their treacherous leaders and freeing themselves to complete their insurrection against the hated bosses’ regime.

In colonies and semicolonies the dominant bourgeois fraction always serves imperialism. The national bourgeoisie may squabble over its share of the rent with imperialism on one side and the masses on the other, but ultimately its class interests are aligned with imperialism against the masses.

Opposing it is the working class leading the small farmers and all oppressed people. This can only mean victory or defeat for one class or the other. Either imperialism imposes its repressive regime of super-exploitation, or imperialism is overthrown and a workers’ and small farmers’ state is established.

This means that Morales and the petty bourgeois leaders of the farmers and workers must objectively act for the national bourgeoisie and ultimately imperialism. Their program is no more than to negotiate and haggle over the rent. They will not fight to overthrow the bosses regime because that would elimitate their role as negotiators of class truces. Even if Bolivia won a larger share of the rent, say 50% royalties on oil, this money would go to pay off the national debt and not go to the workers or small farmers. That is why Morales and Co voted for Mesa to stay in power while at the same time calling for a Constituent Assembly as a talkshop for the bourgeois fractions to debate who gets what share from the oil rent

Will the masses, or will the imperialists, pay for their crisis?

The exploited masses of Bolivia rose up in October 2003 against the imperialist plunder othe hydrocarbons (oil and gas) “Out Gringos, the gas is not for sale!". Today their misleaders tell them that the problem has been solved by increasing the royalties to 18% so that $750 millions are prevented from leaving the country. But increasing the share of the oil rent cannot solve the problems facing the workers and poor farmers.

At every meeting of the COB (Confederation of Workers), and at every meeting of the striking people of Al Alto (working class city above La Paz), the demands were:

· Down with the pact of nation unity between Mesa, Morales, Solares etc that allows the monopolies to rob the gas and petroleum and the national bourgeoisie to haggle over its share!

· Neither 18% nor 50% royalties! Oil and Gas for the Bolivians! Nationalization without payment and under workers control of the gas, petroleum, the water, the mines!

· Expropriation without payment of the banks under control of the workers, to reduce the debts of the small farmers and to give them cheap credit!

· Expropriation without payment of the great landowners and distribution of land to the farmers;

· Break with the IMF!

· A sliding scale of wages and working hours, as raised in the Theses of Pulacayo (the program of the COB in 1946 modelled on the Trotskyist Transitional Program) to end super-exploitation, poverty and unemployment; an emergency plan of public works and economic plan to make the bourgeoisie, the imperialists and the IMF to pay for the crisis.



For a national Congress of workers and small farmers delegates!

Workers are openly questioning the betrayals of their misleaders. Every meeting over the last few weeks of miners, teachers, regional and local COB branches, etc is demanding that Solares consult the rank and file before making agreements. There is no support for increasing royalties only nationalisations. In El Alto, the rank and file said that if Morales and Quispe betrayed again, they would apply popular justice like the mayor of Ayo Ayo (he was lynched).

After February 2003, to overthrow Goni and begin the revolution, the workers had to replace the old bureaucratic leadership of the COB. Today they have to break from their new leaders.

Against Class Collaboration! Against the leaders of the COB who want to trap workers in national pacts!

A National Congress of workers and farmers delegates, representing democratically the exploited millions of Bolivia would immediately have a million times more authority than Mesa, or the puppet parliament and that the handful of representatives of the imperialist monopolies and employer's associations that conspire against the people in back rooms.

It could immediately make a revolutionary decree calling for the nationalisation without compensation and under working control of all the natural resources, and for the immediate release of the jailed leaders of Ayo Ayo, the landless farmers and other political prisoners.

Mesa has once already called on the reactionary petty bourgeoisie to attack the workers and farmers in the streets. No doubt a National Congress would be met with a similar call for armed reaction to smash the Congress and its program. He will also call out the armed forces when he needs them to massacre the people. To defend themselves from armed attack, the Congress must immediately create workers and farmers militias and send out a call to the rank and file soldiers - the children of the workers and farmers under arms – to mutiny, to form committees of soldiers, and to send its delegates to the workers and farmers Congress.

This Congress would replace the collaborationist leadership of the COB with a General Staff of revolutionary workers and small farmers leaders, who would prepare and organise an armed showdown of the workers and farmers militias alongside the soldiers committee, to bring down the government of the mine-owners and the imperialists so that the Congress can take the power into its own hands.

For a class alliance of workers and small farmers led by the workers

The misleaders of the COB, while subordinating the workers to the capitalists, also breaks the workers’ alliance with the small farmers, beraying the farmers, also throwing thenm into the arms of the bosses. Only the workers can meet the demands and needs of the small farmers, because of the decisive role they play in production. They extract the oil, the gas, the minerals; they work them, they refine them, they transport them. Workers run the banks and telecoms. Workers can meet the interests of small farmers by taking over the refineries, banks, mines and gasfields, and distributing land, cancelling debts, and giving cheap credit, and providing access to water, machinery, technical advice etc.

But to lead the small farmers in a class alliance the workers must retain their armed independence of the capitalists. A national Congress of workers and small farmers deputies must have an independent program backed by workers militias and soldiers committees proving to the small farmers that they will fight to the end to over throw the regime. This would quickly teach the small farmers to abandon their petty bourgeois misleaders and their polices of truces with the national bourgeoisie.

Workers’ power lives in the strikes, blockades and occupations!

Solares and co have tried to smash the independent power of the workers organisations. But they have not succeeded, The flame of ‘dual power’ (workers’ power opposed to bourgeois state power) is alive in the workers city of El Alto which maintained a strike for 8 days. And when Morales and Solares called off the strikes and blockades in favour of negotiating 50% royalties, the popular meetings resolved: "Mesa, his ministers and all MPs out!"; and to continue to fightor the nationalization of the hydrocarbons for which more than 60 died and 400 were injured during during the street battles of October 2003. It is no accident that the bourgeois newspaper La Razon of Bolivia, has stated with alarm that today in El Alto "a soviet has been formed"!

In the same way, the flame of the dual power is alive in those militant organisations that made armed pickets and blocades of 72 highways, bringing transport and commerce to a halt and creating an embryonic dual power. These organisations already have the authority to convene a National Congress of workers and farmers delegates, to create workers militias and soldiers committees, capable of organising a decisive showdown with the government to dissolve the puppet parliament and take power in its hands by constituting a workers and farmers government!

The Bolivian masses are the best allies of the Iraqi resistance and militant US workers

The politics of class collaboration of the reformist misleaders is not ‘national’. It is the politics of the reformists of the World Social Forum of Lula, Chávez, the restorationist Castro bureaucracy, the union bureaucracies of every colour. At this year’s WSF at Porto Alegre, these people conspired to defeat the Bolivian revolution in the same way they did with the Argentine revolution. The treacherous Morales, Quispe and Solares want to make the workers and farmers of Bolivia believe that by electing them to parliament they can make solve all o their problems by making the national bourgeoisie extract higher royalties and taxes from the oil monopolies.

They point to Chavez to make their case. The same Chavez who sells oil to the US to use in killing Iraqis, and who agrees to a joint fight with Uribe of Colombia against ‘terrorism’. Solares hold up Castro as the model for socialism in Venezuela. The same Castro who backs Kirchner in Argentina and restores capitalism in Cuba. They praise Lula who attacks the landless farmers occupations, and allowed the recent massacre of 60 by landowners; or Kirchner who imprisons scores of political opponents; or Tabaré Vázquez, who rules Uruguay in the interests of imperialism.

It is not the national bourgeoisie who are the allies of the Bolivian workers and farmers! They are their enemies! Their allies are the heroic Iraqi resistance!+ They are the Brazilian workers who have formed CONLUTAS to fight Lula and the union bureaucrats of the CUT; they are the workers of the Subte, telephone, schools etc of Argentina, who struggle against the government of Kirchner and the rotten union bureaucracy of the CGT and the CTA.

But the main ally of the Bolivian masses is the North American proletariat, in particular the oppressed black and Latino workers who are treated as pariahs by the bosses and the union bureaucrats of the Afl-cio. They are the black workers of Local 10 of the ILWU (harbour workers) of Oakland, who stopped work on March 19, to mark two years of the US occupation of Iraq, and who sparked the militant workers who formed the Million Worker March Movement. These are the true allies of the workers and small farmers of Bolivia and Latin America!

The crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class must be overcome

The re-opening of the Bolivian revolution reveals once more the absence of a revolutionary party. Without that party the revolution will not be finished and suffer again counter-revolutionary defeats.

Once more the events of the 2005 expose the treacherous politics of Stalinism and Castroism. For the second time in less than two years, Castroism has stopped the workers revolution from taking power. This new betrayal is of the same order of those of Chile in 1973 and of Nicaragua in the 1980s. But the Castoites need the fake Trotskyistst to cover their left flank. This is the role of the POR Lora (Revolutionary Workers Party of Guilliemo Lora). POR talks of “insurrection” but without building workers’ militias or arming the masses. Like the Castroites its program is subordinated to a popular “anti-imperialist” front with the national bourgeoisie like 1971. This will defeat the 23rd Bolivian revolution as it defeated the 2nd in 1971.

Others, like the LOR-CI - the satellite group of the PTS of Argentina exhibits a enthusiams for parliamentary and trade union cretinism, calling on the COB to liquidate itself into a reformist workers’ party! The COB which keeps alive the embryo organs of dual power will become another parliamentary talking shop. The 3rd Bolivian revolution reveals the total bankruptcy of those who have broken with Trotskyism.

We are in a race against time to build a revolutionary party to lead the revolution before the forces of the counter-revolution prevail. Only the workers’ vanguard breaking with the bureaucracy can rescue the revolution by fighting for a national congress of the COB and farmers organisations, and to transform these into soviets, workers’ and farmers’ militias and soldiers committees capable of taking power.

In those organs, a small nucleus of revolutionaries can openly fight to win the masses, convincing them of the justice and correctness of our revolutionary program. For this it is necessary that that nucleus of revolutionaries is part of the struggle to regroup internationally all the healthy forces of the Trotskyism against the all the treacherous liquidaors of the 4th International.

The student-worker group Internationalist Red October (a member of the FTI-CI, born in the heat of the rebellion of the students of the UTO of Oruro, has made this fight as its own. In support of IRO we must mobilise all the forces of healthy Trotskyism for the socialist revolution. A start is the Call for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutonary International Workers Organisations made be the Liaison Committee (see Class Struggle 59, January-February 2005).

The full text in Spanish is on our website http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/boliviatheses.html Any errors in translation and condensing are the editors.

From Class Struggle 60 March-April 2005

Bolivia: Long live the revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle of the workers and peasants

The recent uprising in Bolivia in the last months has taken the world’s centre stage. The workers and peasants rose up in their tens of thousands and forced the hated President ‘Goni’ to flee to Miami. But the revolution was stopped halfway by the leaders of the peasants’ and workers organizations’ who made deals with Goni’s replacement, another US stooge, Mesa. The leaflet below was a joint statement published during the recent uprising in Bolivia before the resignation of Goni in October? It raises the central question of the necessity for a nationwide workers’ congress to prepare for a Workers’ and Peasant’s Government. These demands were reprinted in the paper of our fraternal group Poder Obrero of Bolivia at the height of the struggle in September.

Long live the heroic revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle of the Bolivian workers and peasants!

Long live the general strike with road blockages across all the nation!

For a workers’ and peasants’ government of the United National Leadership, the COB and of all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations that take part in it, based on the workers’ and peasants’ militia and on the self-organization of the workers and the people!

Out with imperialism and its blood sucking monopolies from Bolivia and the whole Latin America!

On Saturday 20th of September, the land of Bolivia was once again stained with workers’ and peasants’ blood. The army and police assassins, sent by the US lackey Sánchez de Lozada, irrupted with blood and fire in the localities of Warisata and Sorata, where workers and peasants were maintaining a total blockade of roads against the selling of the natural gas resources to the US, for the right to produce coca and for land for the peasants. Six more workers and peasants martyrs fell murdered, among them, a woman and her eight year old daughter; dozens were wounded, imprisoned or missing.

This new massacre of Sánchez de Lozada’s -"Goni" - government and the military-backeed regime, under a new agreement with Yankee imperialism, the gas and oil barons and the officer caste of the army, was perpetrated the day after tens of thousands of workers and peasants went into the streets of La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro and the main cities of the country, extending the peasants’ road blocks against the extraordinary plundering of Bolivian gas proposed by imperialism, the oil monopolies and the government. Once more the Bolivian workers and people rose up shouting the slogans "the gas is ours and not of the foreigners"; "With the gas and the coca, the future of our sons". “Out with the gringos!"

But the massacre of Warisata did not demoralise the heroic Bolivian workers and peasants. On the contrary, while taking care of their martyrs, they prepared for battle again. In Warisata, they organized a workers’ and peasants’ militia to defend their lives from the assassin army. In Sorata, the people rose up, set fire to the prefecture, the hotels, the police stations, and the city is in the hands of the insurgent workers and peasants, who have declared themselves in a "state of civil war". Thousands of workers and peasants in the province of Omasuyos - where Warisata and Sorata are - met on September 22 in a general assembly, raising the demands "Death to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada", "Civil war, civil war", and "the gas is not for sale", and demanding the head of the ministers of Government and of Defense and that of Goni himself.

The indefinite road blocks are now all over the country, leaving La Paz surrounded and forcing the closure of the markets in the capital city. The CSUTCB (Peasants’ Central trade-union) declared a national mourning for 30 days with road blockages and peasants’ strike, along with a peasants’ ‘state of siege’ -which means that the soldiers and the police officers cannot safely patrol the peasants’ communities. At the same time, it has called on the workers and peasants "to occupy the sub-prefectures, municipal offices, and military posts, so that the Wipala (the flag of the indigenous people) is the only national flag raised".

Today, the workers and the peasants of Bolivia have forced their leaderships - the COB, Quispe, Morales - to set up a United National Leadership of Mobilisations, and to call for a general road blockage and for the indefinite general strike from September 29th, in the defense of the gas, for their particular demands which includes the resignation of the murderous government of Goni and his military regime.

So, the workers and the peasants have risen up again, breaking the truce made last February with the government by the leadership of the COB, Quispe and Evo Morales - members of the World Social Forum -, a truce that aborted the revolutionary uprising when the workers and peasants were mobilising against Goni’s government and his military forces, faced the army in the streets, threatening to divide it and causing divisions among the officers, and beginning the Fourth Bolivian revolution, under the battle cry "Rifles, shrapnel, Bolivia will not be silenced".

Down with Sánchez de Lozada! Throw the imperialist pirates out of Bolivia!

Long live the heroic struggle and the general strike of our Bolivian brothers and sisters, who show the way for all the Latin American workers and exploited people, breaking the truces and the pacts imposed by the reformist leaderships grouped in the World Social Forum, and confronting the imperialist plunderers and their lackey governments and regimes!

Long live "the war for the gas" of Bolivian workers and peasants!

Fight Yankee imperialism, the imperialist oil monopolies, and the servile government that wants to steal the gas resources!

After having plundered the mineral riches of Bolivia for decades, after having taken the oil, after having left the country exhausted and in ruins, and the workers and peasants in misery, this gang of robbers who are the imperialist oil monopolies, Sánchez de Lozada and the Bolivian bourgeoisie, are ready to perpetrate a new extraordinary robbery against the people. The prize is very valuable: Bolivia has enormous gas reserves, valued at US$80 billion (when the GDP of this country is only US$8 billion), while the vast majority of the population has to use firewood to cook, and suffers cold without heating. The government has decreed the selling of the natural gas to an imperialist consortium (Pacific LNG, a consortium of YPF Repsol, British Gas and British Petroleum), which will build a gas pipeline to the Chilean port of Patillos and from there ship the gas to the United States. This business would make US$1.3 billion dollars of profit per year for 20 years (i.e., US$26 billion dollars!) for this monopoly and Bolivia will get only US$70 million dollars per year in royalties (i.e., US$1.4 billion in 20 years!

The same Yankee butchers and their greedy corporations that invaded and occupied Iraq to get its oil, today want to steal the Bolivian workers’ and peasants’ gas! How true was the cry of our Bolivian class brothers and sisters when, during the mobilizations against the war of Iraq, they shouted: "To Iraq for its oil, to Kollasuyu (indigenous name for Bolivia) for its gas; Gringos out of Iraq!”

Today, before such blatant robbery, the exemplary struggle of the workers and the peasants of Bolivia shows once more that they are not willing to be plundered. They had already shown this in 2000 in Cochabamba when they rose up against the imperialist monopolies that wanted to steal their water, and against the government of Banzer; and by opposing with a civil war the imperialist policy of eradication of the coca; and then last February again rising up against Goni’s generalised attack on wages ordered by the IMF, almost overthrowing the regime and forcing it to retreat. It proves once more that the working class - with its allies the poor peasants - is the only class that does not have any interest in serving imperialism, and for that reason, it is the only class capable of carrying the struggle against imperialism to the end, liberating the oppressed nation from its yoke.

Down with Sánchez de Lozada and the military-backed regime!

Throw imperialism and its plundering monopolies out of Bolivia!

For a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the United National Leadership, the COB and all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations that are part of it, based on workers’ and peasants’ militia and on the independent organizations of the workers and the poor people!

This gang of thieves and assassins, massacrers of the people and plunderers of the nation which is imperialism, its insatiable monopolies, the lackey bourgeoisie and the government of Goni, wants to steal the wealth of the people by means of blood and fire, to continue to condemn the people to hunger and misery and reduce Bolivia to a slave colony.

The only way to prevent this happening, to stop the plundering of gas and the natural resources of the country, and to win bread, work, land, living wages, and the right to cultivate coca, is to open up a victorious revolution with the general strike and road blockages, taking control of the factories, the banks, the transport, extending and centralizing the workers’ and peasants’ armed militias, destroying the West Point caste of army officers, overthrowing the murderous lackey government of Goni, smashing every pillar of the regime and expelling imperialism and its monopolies. And then imposing, on these ruins, a government of the United National Leadership, the COB and all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations comprising it, based on workers’ and peasants’ militia and on the independent organizations of the workers and the poor people.

To carry this decisive combat forward, the United National Leadership, the COB and all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations that take part in it must fight for the dissolution and disarmament of the police and the army and the construction and centralization of workers’ and peasants’ armed militia. This is the only way to destroy the army – a key pillar of the military-backed regime and of the state –at the same time calling upon the rank and file soldiers and the subordinate officers of the army –sons of workers and peasants –to rebel against the West Point caste of sepoy officers, to disarm and destroy it, and to organize themselves in committees of armed soldiers, to coordinate with the workers’ and peasants’ organizations and to join the general strike, putting their weapons in the service of the workers’ and peasants’ militia.

By overthrowing Goni and the military-backed regime and imposing a workers’ and peasants’ government, that breaks with imperialism and expropriates the expropriators; by re-nationalizing without payment and under workers’ control the gas, the oil, the mines, and all the privatized enterprises; by expropriating imperialism in general and breaking with the IMF, the World Bank and the IDB (International Development Bank); by imposing the free production and marketing of the coca, the provision of agricultural machinery, the canceling of the debts and the granting of cheap credit to the ruined small producers of the country, through expropriating and nationalising the banks under workers’ control and the creation of a single official bank; by nationalizing foreign trade; and by taking every measure to guarantee work, decent wages, health and education for the people; only in this way will the Bolivian working class and the peasants be able to finish with the catastrophe, the plundering and the colonial oppression caused by imperialism, the national bourgeoisie and the lackey government.

No new truce or pact with Goni and the gang of plunderers of the people!

For a Workers’ and Peasants’ National Congress of rank and file mandated delegates, democratically elected, to organize the decisive combat and to prepare the insurrection to defeat Goni and the military regime!

After the massacre in Warisata, and facing the indefinite general strike, the government of Sánchez de Lozada once more is trying to negotiate sector by sector, trying "to dialogue" with those organizations that have particular demands, such as the peasants led by Quispe, and ignoring others such as the COB who demand his resignation. For his part, Evo Morales declared that the coca producers of Chapare would not join the road blockages before October 10th because "the executive secretary of the COB was premature in calling for a national mobilization", and he criticised Quispe for demanding that the representatives of the government go to Warisata to negotiate, saying that Quispe and the government "are gambling with the situation of the country".

No new truce or pact with the murderous government of Goni and the gang of plunderers of the people!

It is necessary to stop the unity created in the struggle of the workers and the peasants from being broken by the reformist leaderships, and from allowing the energy, the struggle and the blood of the workers and the peasants to be abused by these leaders to establish new truces and pacts with the bosses, and, in this way, to save the government and its military backers. The only way forward for the masses is to create the widest direct democracy, with a workers’ and peasants’ national Congress of rank and file delegates who are democratically elected, mandated and recallable, in the COB and all the workers’ and peasants organizations that are part of the United National Leadership.

At the same time, in every village, every city, in every region, it is necessary to set up strike committees with elected delegates of all the organizations in struggle which become a true workers’ and peasants’ power. This National Congress, a true workers’ and peasants’ parliament - opposed to the power of the exploiters - would become an organization respected by all the masses in struggle, and with an enormous authority to guarantee the construction of workers’ and peasants’ militias, to advance workers’ and peasants’ control over production and distribution, to carry out the expropriation and the nationalisation of the banks under workers’ control, and the formation of a single official bank which releases small ruined producers from debt and provides cheap credit, as well as the nationalization of the foreign trade, and to fulfill these tasks by organising a triumphant insurrection to overthrow Goni and the military-backed regime and then to put in place a workers’ and peasants’ government that the bureaucratic leaderships of the trade unions, Stalinism and social democracy cannot do themselves.

The Bolivian workers and peasants show the way forward for the exploited of the whole Continent to break the collaborators truces and agreements and to confront imperialism and its client regimes!

The fight of the workers and peasants of Bolivia today is the undisputed advance guard of the struggle of the Latin American working class and exploited people to break the truces and pacts that the reformist leaders have imposed on them, tying their hands in the face of imperialism, the employers and the exploiting and repressive client regimes.

This is the road confronting the Bolivian masses today, the one that Fidel Castro imposes, along with the union bureaucracies of the continent, the leaders of the organizations the peasant’ unions, and all the reformist leaders of the World Social Forum. One of deals and class collaboration with pro-imperialistic popular fronts like that of Lula in Brazil, of colonel Gutiérrez in Ecuador, and President Lagos in Chile; or with the supposed "anti-neoliberal" governments like the one of Kirchner in Argentina, all servile lackeys of Bush and the IMF; or with the bourgeois nationalist governments, like the one of Chávez in Venezuela, which use the masses’ fight to blackmail concessions from imperialism, only to turn on the workers as soon as they threaten to erupt into revolution.

The road opened up by the Bolivian workers and peasants, is that of a fight to the end to bring down the government of Goni (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada) and the military-backed regime – unlike that of FARC in Colombia, which refuses to expropriate a single factory or patch of earth in the territories it controls, and is today preparing to sign a new pact with the murderous government of Uribe and with the blessing of Lula, with the blood of thousand of farmers and city workers killed by the "death squads".

For that reason, this fight of the workers and peasants must open the way to the ‘fourth’ Bolivian revolution, defeating the reformist leaders, overthrowing the government and destroying every pillar of the military-backed regime, including the officer corps, trained in assassination at West Point, and put in place a workers’ and farmers’ government based on the independent, armed organisations of the masses. This fight is inseparable from the struggle of the Ecuadorian workers and peasants to break the truce and the policy of class collaboration of their leaders and regain the revolution that they began in 1997. It is inseparable from the fight of the Argentine revolution, today retreating under the treachery of the union and piquetero bureaucracy and the reformist leaders, to raise once more its head; from that of the Peruvian workers to throw out the truces and agreements which the CGTP and the stalinists have made with Toledo; with that of Brazilian workers and farmers to break the links of the (PT) Workers Party with the popular front government of Lula and Alencar –which imposes the plans of the IMF, beating workers and massacreing farmers –and with the leaders of the CUT (Central Workers Union) and the MST (landless peasants’ movement), and to begin a political fight of masses against the government of Lula, the lackey of Bush.

Therefore, the insurgency in Bolivia today shows that the exploited people of Latin America face a life and death choice: either the victorious workers’ and peasants’ socialist revolution; or new and terrible defeats as the nations of the continent are turned into colonies and protectorates facing unlimited plunder and destruction. For that reason, the workers and peasants uprising in Bolivia depends on the successful struggles of workers for socialist revolution in each country of the continent, overthrowing the bourgeoisie, destroying its armed forces, and imposing workers and peasants governments based on the independent, armed organisations of the workers and the peasants that put an end to the imperialistic yoke and capitalist exploitation, and go on to form a Federation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Republics of Latin America.

But this historical task will only be advanced if the Latin American proletariat unites with its important ally, the North American working class, and in particular with its most exploited and oppressed fractions, the millions of black and latino workers, exploited and treated like outcasts by the imperialistic bourgeoisie, discriminated against by the US labour aristocracy and the union bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, who therefore suffer the worst working conditions, unemployment, poverty, as well as persecution and harassment by the police. By uniting with the North American workers of Latino origin, the working class of Central America and South America can build unity with the North American working class to weaken imperialism, to advance the revolution in the United States and assure the victory of the continental and world-wide proletariat in the struggle for socialism. But this will only be possible if the working class and the exploited of all the Americas, the United States but also of Latin America, overcome the dominance of the North American labour aristocracy and defeat the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy, the labour lieutenants of Bush and the Yankee imperialist bourgeoisie.

All out support and solidarity with the heroic fight of our class brothers and sisters of Bolivia!

The Bolivian workers and farmers are the leading edge of the fight against imperialism and its client governments in Latin America. They show how all the workers and exploited people of the continent can break the truces and agreements that the reformist leaders have made that tie the hands of the workers before imperialism, the capitalists and their lackey regimes and repressive austerity governments, allowing these regimes to remain and go on the offensive like today in Bolivia. We cannot allow the masses to continue being massacred by the servant Goni and his killer army! Their fight is our fight! Today we must all be Bolivian!

We call on all the workers, student organizations and parties that claim to be for the workers and against imperialism, to immediately act to win support for and solidarity with our class brothers and sisters of Bolivia, with mobilizations in the streets, picketing of Bolivian embassies, and the widest unity in action.

End the massacre and repression!

Long live the struggle of the Bolivian workers and peasants!

Down with the government of Sanchez de Lozada, assassin and exploiter of the Bolivian people!

Fight imperialism in Latin America!

The international Trotskyists that signed this declaration and who fight for the revolutionary program raised here are committed to initiate actions and to participate in united actions in all every way possible to build support for and solidarity with the heroic fight of our Bolivian brothers and sisters.

At the same time, we call on the workers and peasants of the continent, to demand that the leadership of all the political organizations in Latin America who speak in name of the working class and the poor peasants, and of the unions (like the CTA and the organizations of unemployed people of Argentina; the CUT and the MST of Brazil; the CUT of Chile; the CGTP of Peru; the CONAIE and the unions of Ecuador; the PIT-CNT of Uruguay, etc) that they immediately break all agreements with the client governments, and that they break all ties that subordinate these organizations to the employer's associations. We call on the labour movement to immediately create a continental workers’ and peasants’ movement in support and solidarity with the heroic revolutionary and anti-imperialist fight of the Bolivian workers and peasants, against the imperialism that destroys the people of Latin America and against the governments that are their servants.

We must build a Trotskyist and internationalist revolutionary party, to equip the heroic Bolivian proletariat with the leadership it needs and deserves, and this is the task of the healthy forces of Trotskyist internationalists!

The Bolivian workers and peasants have given us great examples of heroism, of readiness to fight, and of revolutionary will. If they have yet not managed to open the way to the Fourth Bolivian Revolution, it is because of the leaders that they have in front of them, try at each step to prevent it. This life and death situation makes it more urgent and necessary than ever to provide the Bolivian proletariat with a new leadership –a revolutionary, Trotskyist and internationalist party, able to prevent them from sacrificing their forces and having their struggle expropriated once more by the truces, pacts, and class collaborationist alliances with "progressive patrons" and "the patriotic military".

The program of Trotskyism, of Permanent Revolution - defended in the 1940s by the POR (Revolutionary Workers Party) the Bolivian section of the IV International, became flesh and blood when the Theses of Pulacayo were adopted by the Bolivian working class in 1946 as its revolutionary action program - is now more correct than ever and has passed the test of the class struggle. Unfortunately, Pabloism and the revisionism of the IV International became a political influence on the POR and its leadership, preventing it from playing a revolutionary role in the revolution of 1952 and in the revolutionary events of the Bolivian masses in the second half of 20th century.

Therefore, though Trotskyism has passed the test, the currents that call themselves Trotskyist have not. In the three previous incomplete revolutions – in 1952, in 1971 and 1985 – these currents demonstrated all their impotence, renouncing the Theses of Pulacayo, that is to say, the fight for the armament of the masses and the strategy of building Soviets (or independent armed workers and peasants organisations), and instead subordinated themselves to the bureaucracy of the COB, if not directly to bourgeois nationalistic currents like the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) or to allies in "the patriotic military". These are the Pabloite currents that have deprived the Bolivian working class of the revolutionary leadership that it deserved: a revolutionary internationalist Trotskyist party.

Today, at the threshold of a new revolution, the forces that will bring that party into existence are being formed: they are the advanced workers who denounce the leaders who betrayed the Theses of Pulacayo, and who have taken on the task of rebuilding the COB, so that it becomes a proletarian organisation that can lead the peasants and all the exploited people towards a victorious insurrection overthrowing the government and its military backers. They are those workers, the exploited peasants and the heroic women workers who are the driving force of the workers and peasants militias, the assemblies, the strike committees, and the blockades. These, along with the honest Trotskyist militants who oppose the capitulations and betrayals of the General Staffs of the renegade currents of Trotskyism, and who seek a revolutionary way out, are the emerging forces that will create the revolutionary party.

But this party will only be able to make and complete the Bolivian revolution if it joins in the struggle to regroup the forces of a healthy internationalist and principled Trotskyism, if it learns the lessons forged by the acute events of revolution and counterrevolution world-wide, if it adopts the Theses of Pulacayo as a revolutionary internationalist program that sees Bolivia as a link in the Latin American and world-wide revolution, and if it fights against the reformist leaders in Bolivia - the union bureaucracy of the COB, Quispe,, Morales –as an indissoluble part of the wider fight against that new counter-revolutionary international the World Social Forum, and against the renegade Trotskyists that support the WSF.

Only in this way, mounting an internationalist struggle on the ruins of the revisionist and liquidationist currents that usurp the flags of Trotskyism in Bolivia, can the revolutionary internationalist Trotskyist party that the Bolivian working class needs and deserves be built as a section of the world-wide party of the socialist revolution. It is the task of the revolutionary internationalists, on the threshold of the Fourth Bolivian Revolution, to urgently collaborate to regroup our forces by campaigning for an International Conference of principled Trotskyists and internationalist revolutionary workers organizations.

October 12 of 2003. –
Lucha Marxista (Peru)
Groupe Bolchevik (France)
Communist Workers’ Group (New Zealand)
Grupo Obrero Internacionalista-CI (Chile)
Liga Obrera Internacialista-CI (Argentina)

From Class Struggle 53 November 93-January 04