Fifth Congress of the
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores
The Class Struggle Inside the Party
The following analysis of the class struggle inside the party utilizes by way of reference a draft resolution, presented by the Central Committee as a self criticism in convoking the Fifth Congress. It was presented by Candela, Polo, Bernardo, Alonso and Matias last April. This document was one of the first official expositions of the centrists. In spite of its basis character—its misrepresentations and grave violations of underground security is worth replying to inasmuch as it voices some of the main arguments used by the centrists in the internal struggle.
Because of its centrist structure, which does not consist of an objective analysis, a revolutionary critique, a contribution to the party’s line, the document constitutes a factional indictment with a class content directed against the party’s morale. Its intention is to confuse the weakest sectors through misrepresentations, exaggerations, and lies. The first step in a critique of this document is necessarily an analysis of the class struggle inside the party, a recapitulation of the party’s internal situation, the context of the social forces represented by the contending groups in which the document was written. Naturally, the centrist theoreticians, owing to their new critical preoccupation, are not at all interested in delving into this vital question. We, however, with a greater interest in making a revolutionary proletarian party out of our organization, have been doing this since the time of Morenoism and we insist on it once again, conscious that the fundamental importance of this fight rests in the party being able to emerge from it immunized against the Morenoist virus, the main form through which the petty bourgeoisie has entered our party in order to act negatively within it as an agent of the classes hostile to the socialist revolution.
The Marxist theory of the revolutionary party teaches that such an organization is at all times exposed to manifestations of the class struggle within it. This is inevitable in its first stage, the period of the organization’s birth; it is very probable in the period of formation and growth; it is even possible for this struggle to reappear in a fully developed revolutionary party. As long as capitalism continues to exist in the world, as long as the class struggle goes on in society, every revolutionary party will have to endure the influence of pressures from the classes in combat. This can remain latent, hidden, developing in a subterranean way, finding partial solutions through the exercise of criticism and self criticism; or it can explode, becoming manifest with the emergence of tendencies as happened in our party.
The class struggle inside the party corresponds to the class struggle in society at large. The exacerbation of class antagonisms, the ripening of the situation, sharpen the class struggle inside the party. Distinct tendencies become clear and the denouement is prepared which — if it results in victory for the proletarian wing—will accelerate the full development of the revolutionary proletarian party, placing it in position to play its leading and creative role.
The class struggle within the party is of fundamental importance because the victory of the proletariat in this internal fight points toward resolving one of the fundamental problems of every revolution: (a) The creation by the proletariat and revolutionary intelligentsia of the revolutionary party, the main and decisive tool that can make possible the future triumph of the revolution. (b) The adoption of a correct line for a specific period of time.
The manifestations of the class struggle cause grave disturbances in the party and are usually extremely sharp and intense. We all recall Lenin’s historic battles within the Russian Social Democracy. The Chinese Communist Party also underwent fierce fights and important breakups. In the case of these two parties there were many irreversible divisions and splits. The Vietnamese Communist Party, on the other hand, wound up its internal struggles by unifying the bulk of the three preexisting parties, thanks to the political authority of Ho Chi Minh and the proletarian standards of the vast majority of the leading Vietnamese cadres. The agency transmitting bourgeois and petty bourgeois concepts and methods into revolutionary organizations is principally the revolutionary intelligentsia, composed of elements coming from these classes. The proletarian foundation of a revolutionary party consists of its worker cadres and militants. As Lenin explained, both of these elements are indispensable to the party since it represents the fusion of the worker vanguard with revolutionary theory. Until it attains full theoretical ability in the course of revolutionary struggle, the worker vanguard needs the bourgeois and petty bourgeois revolutionary intelligentsia. But this fusion, this uniting of workers and intellectuals, must be realized as a reciprocal heightening of levels within the party—the vanguard workers raising their understanding of theory, and the revolutionary intellectuals raising their level by adopting the proletarian point of view, characteristics, and methods.
Those intellectuals who do not exercise self criticism to correct and improve themselves retain their class limitations. They become a petty bourgeois or bourgeois virus, go on to form tendencies when the class struggle sharpens, turning into agents of the class enemy within the revolutionary party.
The same thing happens with those workers who adopt petty bourgeois and bourgeois characteristics, methods, and points of view, or who become bureaucratized.
Every unproletarianized revolutionary intellectual, every petty bourgeoisified or bureaucratized revolutionary worker, can correctly orient himself in the course of the internal struggle, can understand and correct his mistakes through exercising criticism and self criticism. This has occurred in history, particularly the cases of Leon Trotsky, Lunacharsky, and other Russian revolutionists. Their extreme individualistic tendencies, intellectual pedantry, and other petty bourgeois limitations kept them outside the proletarian current for years. But their revolutionary consistency, their contact with the worker masses, brought them back into the proletarian wing at a later stage. Once they understood their past mistakes and the causes of them and had sincerely criticized themselves, they could be readmitted into the party, being counted from then on among the staunchest of revolutionaries.
Having made these points, which, even though they are far from having exhausted the subject of class struggle inside the party, will help us orient ourselves and understand our party’s prehistory and the stage it is now going through, we can proceed to recapitulate our party’s past.
For twenty years a sect vegetated in the workers movement. It appeared under various names that can be summed up in “Morenoism,” after its leader, N. Moreno. It emerged from bourgeois intellectual groups that claimed to be Trotskyist (Quebracho, Justo, and Company). At its birth it was characterized by the correct approach of going to the masses as the first step in building a revolutionary party. Because of the extreme youthfulness of its cadres, their distance from Leninist theory and method (which were difficult to come by in that period and appeared unattractive because of Stalinist propaganda), and the natural egocentricity to be found in all youthful forces, the Moreno group succumbed from the beginning to the enormous pressure of the massive movement for union organization that swept the country at the time (1944 45), giving it the spontanéist, syndicalist stamp it has never lost. This, its most outstanding characteristic, led it to develop on the basis of concepts and methods alien and hostile to Marxism Leninism that even to this day exercise a harmful influence on the vanguard and in our party up to this Fifth Congress.
According to the Morenoist strategy, the revolutionary process will begin with a triumphant strike, or a series of triumphant strikes (an upsurge), which, followed by a general strike, will end with a mass insurrection, the victory of which at the least possible cost and with the guarantee of a profound revolution requires the leadership of a revolutionary proletarian party. It assumes that the masses will spontaneously orient toward the program of the party and accept its leadership. Also, that the bourgeoisie’s armed forces will be shattered at the first onslaught of the masses and that the process leading to the victory of the revolution will be rapid and bloodless. It dreams of an “antiseptic” revolution, without this horrible ingredient of dead and wounded, triumphing because of political skill. For this strategy, the Russian revolution (October) was the example to be followed, but with fewer deaths and without the civil war that followed it. The Chinese revolution, along with its leadership, was condemned because of its high cost in human lives. This ingenuous and aristocratic pretension fogged the party’s vision for years. It is the cause of the total lack of fighting spirit, of the allergic reaction to the most minimum risks, characteristic of the majority of leaders who came out of Morenoism. In like manner, according to this strategy, the unions in Argentina are the most important instruments for gathering together and leading the masses (like the Russian soviets). It holds that a handful of large factories could play the fundamental role of motor force and leadership of the revolution, thereby making it possible for a tiny party to climb to the top of this proletariat, and, via the mass union organizations (CGT), exercise its leadership throughout the country. On the basis of this strategy came the tactic of concentrating forces in the union organizations, especially in the large factories, where the party had to stay, burying itself, in expectation of the coming upsurges of the general strike and victorious insurrection. From this it followed that the main obligation of the leadership was to maintain the party, “preserve” it, without understanding that to detain it, to preserve it, means death. This explains the reason for the enormous baneful conservatism that spread like a poison gas or soporific through the party, destroying its initiativeness, reducing its goals to ridiculous dimensions, transforming its activity into insignificant peddling, replacing the lion’s roar of revolutionists with timid, sporadic cat meows. The Morenoist strategy gave rise to the timid mentality that sees great risks in everything, retreats before dangers, views the smallest positive step forward as an adventure, and, magnifying the blows received, does not seek to fight back and is overwhelmed by them. As we know, this mentality is characteristic of the majority of the leaders with a Morenoist background. The entire, party must write in letters of fire the revolutionary principle that capitalism cannot be destroyed without “audacity and more audacity,” that one of the most essential characteristics of a revolutionist is his decisiveness, that a revolutionist is a man of action.
The fetishism about the comisiones internas and euerpos de delegados [steering committees and delegate committees in the plants] as a natural working class vanguard also derives from the Morenoist syndicalist concept, the concept that the main party activity should be in the struggle for immediate demands in the factory, and that leading the proletariat means holding a majority in thecomisiones internas and euerpos de delegados and from there orienting the “concrete” or “structural class struggle,” that is, union struggles for wages and conditions. In order to achieve this, the activists necessarily had to hide the fact that they were revolutionists. In accordance with Morenoist criteria, union activity would have the effect of making the activists the tacticians, the “officers” of the class struggle.
Every union conflict became the axis of work for the whole party and its success was a matter of honor. On the other hand, revolutionary propaganda and agitation were called “propagandism”. This term was coined by Morenoism to place the label of “erroneous” on all political activity not connected with “concrete” syndicalism.
To try to bring Marxist concepts, socialism, to the masses was considered to be superstructural activity and therefore of secondary importance when it was not considered a “provocation.” Clearly this tactic could have no other effect than to keep Morenoism at the tail (sometimes the arm) of the union bureaucracy. And the only way they differentiated themselves (by demanding a higher wage increase) was by marching behind the bureaucrats, protesting and shaking their fists. It is also clear that by abstaining from the independent activity required of a party, the axis of which is agitation among the masses, Morenoism cut off any quantitative or qualitative growth.
This strategy and tactics, and the methods flowing from them, instead of linking up Morenoism with the masses (an objective that was sincerely sought) paradoxically took the group further away. Its composition became more and more petty bourgeois up to the period just before the unification of FRIP [Frente Revolucionario Indoamericano Popular Indian American Revolutionary Popular Front and Palabra Obrera when it became almost totally petty bourgeois. This was bound to happen because syndicalism and spontanéism correspond to that social class’s point of view when, influenced by the working class struggle, and/or attracted to Marxism, it takes up an elementary workerist outlook, idolizing the most visible aspects of the class struggle. This same isolation from the working class resulted in the indiscriminate and formal proletarianization that we all know about. Parallel with its petty bourgeoisification, the Morenoist sect, now lacking vitality, underwent a process of bureaucratization (about the time of the split with Bengochea) with the rise to leadership positions of men without training or hardening who had the typical characteristics of functionaries on the make.
We believe we have said enough to remind the party of the fundamental aspects and social character of Morenoism. Let us now turn to the history of the party to locate the initial point of the organization’s transformation, the origins of the Leninist and proletarian wing which by penetrating the petty bourgeois and already senile body of Morenoism, began by revitalizing it so as to immediately initiate a transformation to overcome it through a dialectical process whose motor force was the internal class struggle as expressed in the antagonistic[1] petty bourgeois—proletarian contradiction. The result of this process was to provide the Argentine socialist revolution with a new Leninist and proletarian victory and thereby a substantial, possibly definitive, step toward transforming the PRT into the proletarian Marxist Leninist organization that will lead the revolutionary struggle in our country.
In the winter of 1963 a united front agreement was signed by Palabra Obrera (represented by N. Moreno) and the FRIP (represented by five of its members). The ideological basis of this agreement was acceptance of Marxism; its political base was the perspective of building a revolutionary working class party. The agreement was facilitated by the fact that both groups had a similar point of view concerning armed struggle —considered to be the only road to taking power —namely, that it was first necessary to build a small revolutionary party. This agreement corresponded to the situation that existed at the time when the vanguard was debating how to begin the armed struggle, and putschist currents abounded. Palabra Obrera had recently suffered a split in this direction (the Bengochea group).
However, two large differences remained, which it was agreed would be settled in the following months: (a) Relations with Peronism. Palabra Obrera took a Peronist position in accordance with the tactic of entryism while the FRTP considered this to be incorrect. This difference was immediately resolved with the abandonment of entryism. (b) Relations with the Fourth International and Trotskyism. Palabra Obrera claimed to be Trotskyist and belonged to the Fourth International, while the FRIP was not in agreement with this. The difference was resolved more than a year later by a majority vote at a plenum of the Central Committee for full incorporation in the International.
The FRIP we have been talking about was a small petty bourgeois group with a populist ideology formed in 1961. Thanks to the mass work it had undertaken in Santiago and Tucumán among the sugar and lumber workers and in the slum areas, it had been progressively assimilating the method and concepts of Marxism.
At the time of the united front with Palabra Obrera it continued to be a petty bourgeois current whose basic merit lay in its orientation toward mass work.
A short time after signing the agreement and in complianee with one of its elauses, the FRIP Palabra Obrera front began joint work in Tueumdn based on the previous work of both groups. This activity centered around an orientation toward the sugar workers and constituted the beginnings of the party’s Leninist and proletarian wing. Since 1961 the sugar workers had in fact been going through a stage of great mobilizations and energetic struggles provoked by the profound crisis in the sugar industry. This struggle transformed them into the vanguard beyond question of the Argentine working class. And thanks to our party’s strength, this vanguard began among other things to transcend the trade union level and move into the political arena. It was in this period that a group of workers entered the party who, at the same time ’they were being formed into Marxist revolutionists, brought into the organization a working class point of view, proletarian methods and characteristics (hardness, decisiveness, energy, elose ties with the masses). They had a decisive influence on the revolutionary intellectuals who were undergoing training with them; and their class influence predominated in the party’s Tucumán section, converting it into a proletarian sector. This process, decisive for the party’s future, carried with it the seeds of the internal class battle. As long as the bourgeoisie maintained its domination through a parliamentary bourgeois democratic regime, this contradiction remained incipient,[2] breaking out with all its intensity when the bourgeoisie had to resort to the Ongania military dictatorship and use open violence against the masses as the chief method of continuing its anti-working class and anti-popular offensive. Thus, it was within the framework of developing a party line to meet the new stage initiated by the June 1966 coup that the class struggle had to become manifest in an open form inside the PRT itself.[3]
Toward the end of 1966 the working class ranks of the Tucumán section began to raise the need to take up armed struggle. The compañeros who made this proposal had gone through several years of peaceful struggle, principally of a trade union nature. They had led important working class mobilizations, finally suffering a brutal setback in this field despite having begun to use increasingly violent methods.
Thus the proposal for armed struggle was not brought into the PRT by revolutionary students and intellectuals influenced by the revolutionary experience of other countries. It arose from the direct experience of the Argentine working masses and was brought into the party by their vanguard, which had already traveled the road of peaceful struggle that began with ordinary strikes, participation in elections, proceeded to factory occupations with the taking of hostages, then turned to violent street demonstrations, until—when Ongania took power—all possibility for legal work was ended and this vanguard oriented correctly toward revolutionary war’[4]
Many recollections of these struggles come to mind at present and we decided to mention an anecdote by way of example: January 12, 1967. As a part of the National Sugar workers Struggle Plan, the FOTIA [Federaci6n Obrera Tucumána de la Industria Azuearera] ealled four meetings in some small cities in the province’s interior. Bella Vista was one of them. The workers in San Pedro, San José, Amelia, Bella Vista and Santa Lucia were supposed to gather there. At that time our party led the San José union and in this way took part in the meetings. The government had already amply demonstrated its new methods and it banned the meetings. The San Jose workers rode forty five kilometers to Bella Vista via side roads they had previously reconnoitered. Groups from Santa Lucia walked the twenty kilometers to the meeting site. This had to be done because the police patrolled the roads to block the workers. By 1 p. m. there were about 200 workers in Bella Vista. The majority were from San Jose and Santa Lucia and they waited near the union headquarters for the meeting scheduled for 5 p.m. Some forty police, members of the Provincial Infantry Guard, who came from San Miguel de Tucumán, were quartered in the police station four blocks away. An incident . [line missing] holding a leader from San Jose in order to provoke the workers. Within a few moments the battle began. Led by some 100 activists from San José, the workers used slingshots and three or four of the twenty Molotov cocktails they had on hand. The police began with tear gas, aiming it against the union headquarters. Later, forcefully driven away, they used 45 caliber pistols. The confrontation lasted half an hour and resulted in the retreat of the soldiers, who abandoned the area and took refuge in the police station, leaving the town in the hands of the workers. (At 5 p.m. the meeting took place with about 1,000 workers present and the only worker that had been arrested was set free immediately’) Among the workers, one was killed and three wounded. Hilda Guerrero de Molina, the heroic and valiant fighter from Tucumán, became a symbol and an example. Two of the wounded had been shot and one beaten with a club. Eight police were wounded by sticks and stones, three being hospitalized. The following day at the San Jose sugar mill, the atmosphere among the workers was one of satisfaction with the energetic attitude that had been displayed, and they repeatedly proposed to the party activists the necessity of taking up arms, getting maehine guns, and beginning a fight to the death against the dietatorship.[5]
It was at this time, in January 1967, that the leadership of the Tucumán section orally presented a formal proposal to the national leadership to adopt a policy of armed struggle centered around a rural guerrilla front in Tucumán. The majority of the leaders of the Center and the Right, who were more papist than the Pope, at first opposed this line. But since Moreno accepted it, even taking on the job of preparing the first document concerning it, the others also agreed to adopt it. Moreno did not reject the guerrilla line in theory, but instead of conceiving it as the beginning of a prolonged revolutionary guerrilla war, he considered it to be a form of pressure within the framework of the spontanéist strategic conception we have already spoken about. And above all, he was not disposed to champion the guerrilla line.
Throughout 1967, while the Leninist current was gradually adopting a correct view of the revolutionary war, the class struggle began to manifest itself inside the party. The sharpening of the social contradictions in the country had a positive effect on the party, helping the proletarian pressure emanating from the Tucumán. section, with its class outlook, to be felt throughout the party as a whole. Party members and workers cadres in different regions took more activist positions. And some of the revolutionary intellectuals, especially the young members and cadres, led what was called “the ideological revolution in the party,” which was nothing other than the ideological side of the party’s proletarianization.
With accurate insight, Moreno realized that an irreversible process was beginning, one leading directly away from Morenoism. But, blinded by worry and fear, he forced a split, engaging in all kinds of maneuvers —one of the results of which was that many politically and ideologically Morenoist elements joined the Leninist and proletarian sector for the time being.
This first stage of the class struggle inside the party ended with Moreno and his group splitting away. Disavowing the party’s official bodies, they broke with the party, usurped its name, and returned to their petty bourgeois syndicalism.
This victory freed the party from its heavy Morenoist ballast and brought it solidly together under the banner of revolutionary war. In the resulting enthusiasm the party was able to immediately embark on the first practical steps toward preparing for war, and for a short time the class struggle inside the party was covered over. In a brief period, two or three months after the Fourth Congress, the struggle broke out again, manifesting itself in the persistence of Morenoism in the party leadership which began to be a problem in the provincial regions and zones (mainly Córdoba and Chaco). This struggle developed in a subterranean way in the months that followed, being confined to confrontations among top level leaders without the knowledge or participation of the party rank and file. The record of these events is contained in various letters and documents elaborated in the course of the internal struggle which we do not consider it necessary to reproduce here.
But it is necessary to quote a self criticism made by Compañero Carlos to the Congress. He said: “Many compañeros have criticized me for not having gone to the rank and file at the first signs of the internal struggle in the top leadership. At first, I thought this criticism was unjustified, inasmuch as a struggle against Morenoism as a political current had continued to be carried on,
one of the expressions of it being the Central Committee’s March resolutions. And I thought it was correct not to react to the different signs of resistance to the party line inasmueh as they were formulated very unclearly and that it would not be proper to launch such an important discussion in the party without clear evidence But later, analyzing the situation better at the insistence of the Compañeros, I realized that there had been several occasions when Morenoism could and should have been denounced before the rank and file. I also understood that on these occasions I had acted under the influence of the cliquist spirit in which we had become accustomed to working instead of immediately going before the party and calling upon it to exercise revolutionary vigilance over the leadership and to participate fully in the internal struggle from the moment it first appeared. This disarmed the ranks and the cadres and made possible the temporary predominance of Morenoism (December to February) which lasted until Mariano’s letter, the first reaction of the Leninist wing. While taking into account that responsibility has to be fixed, we also point out that the ranks and the cadres have their responsibilities. For even though they reacted to some of the signs (for example, the article on the CGT of the Argentines, revolutionary groupings, etc.), they did not do so energetically enough to develop the contradictions. It should be made clear that the ranks reacted to the degree made possible by the method the leadership was using.”
The class struggle in the party surfaced abruptly with the repression in Tucumán during the months of October and November 1969. The nucleus of this struggle was the antagonistic petty bourgeois proletarian contradiction and the struggle to consolidate the party as a revolutionary proletarian organization that had definitively overcome its petty bourgeois past. The repression cost the party the life of one militant, the arrest of seven activists, one contact and four nonparty elements, the capture of some arms, and raids on several houses. “Morenoism” considered these events the “Tucumán disaster” and they provided the pretext for attempting to turn the party away from revolutionary war.
Once the political struggle began, the Right, the Center and the Left took form. Initially, right and center Morenoism remained united in the shape of a right wing and they pressed their offensive for abandonment of the line of the Fourth Congress and burial of the proletarian wing, which they thought would be easily accomplished. They did not expect the reaction from the party, which forced them to clearly define themselves inside the grouping and to take on a battle that had not entered into their calculations.
The Right preferred to unmask itself frankly and return completely to Morenoism. For all practical purposes they abandoned the party. The Center, on the other hand, after a period of vacillation, accepted struggling within the framework of a strategical concept of revolutionary war. The obvious political weakness of this position led them to base their arguments on misrepresentations and lies. They adopted the petty bourgeois attitude of sowing confusion, provoking doubt, obstructing daily activities under pretext of the need to “study.”
This is the context in which the document of sell criticism we have mentioned was presented. We are now in position to proceed to an analysis of it.
Criticism of the Fourth Congress
The draft resolution begins by pointing out: “That the depth of this party crisis had its historic origin in the opportunistic character of our party from 1955 to 1968, since during this entire period it failed to make an analysis of our country’s structure and of the character of our revolution, of a strategy for power, of a program, of organizational methodology and tactics, and of a correct military policy’ During this entire period the party used the positivist method of bourgeois social science, beginning with the empirical recognition of the dominant political forces and the establishment of an opportunist policy of bowing before this force without a program, strategy, and tactics of its own’ As a consequence it followed an opportunist policy in relation to Peronism from 1955 to 1964, the period of “entryism” in the Peronist movement; in relation to Castroism in 1960 and 1962, the period of the Castroist united front; in relation to the union organizations and the most backward masses from 1963 to 1968, the syndicalist period,”[6]
We can already begin to see how these compañeros have not yet understood the path traveled by our organization, although the party’s irreversible reawakening forces them to look back to the Morenoist period, whose bad habits we are now finally overcoming’ Both the Center and the Right have systematically refused to accept the critical characterization of Morenoism as a clearly distinct type of petty bourgeois and bureaucratic current’ If this critical and concise characterization came to be included in some documents, such as “El Unico Camino” [The Only Road][7] and the March 1969 Central Committee resolutions, it was only because of the strong determination of the proletarian wing which put these characteristics down in writing and forced their inclusion’ But for the Morenoists of the Center and the Right this was a dead letter, just a formal concession to “militarism.”
Nevertheless, they never agreed with these characterizations and therefore never sought to give up Morenoist conceptions and methods.
Furthermore, when the proletarian wing, from the rank and file to the leadership, insisted on a struggle against these hangovers, the Right and the Center indignantly opposed them.
If the leadership attacked Morenoism it was considered “ideological terrorism”’ if dmuments in the same vein came in from the ranks a furious counterattack was mounted, as happened with a memorandum prepared by the Córdoba section at the beginning of 1969’ (This memorandum was rejected as being disrespectful, was not answered, and the request by Córdoba that it be published internally was denied.) Now, when there is no other recourse left but to look back to the past, they acknowledge some of the main characteristics of Morenoism, but earefully avoid mentioning it by name. They do not point out its social character and they try to reduce it to a simple “opportunist character” produced by the lack of a correct line. An exemplary analysis of thirteen years of the party’s life!
After washing their hands of the party’s history with this critieal paragraph and acknowledging that the Fourth Congress was a great step forward in the life of our party,8 far from analyzing the class forces that gave rise to this transformation and the class resistance that had to be overcome, which would be in keeping with the Marxist method, they utilize the scientific, idealist methodology belonging to bourgeois sociology and Morenoism. They seek for the cause of the leadership crisis we went through in theoretical mistakes and later claim that a foquista tendency appeared, which insofar as it can be made out in the tangled skein of misrepresentations and lies is represented by someone like Carlos, the source of all evils and errors, who gradually imposed his foquista concept by taking advantage of political and military level and the absence of half of the executive committee.[8] The author of this draft resolution is mistaken. He should have written an analysis of the real political facts. Instead he let his imagination run away with him and, in spite of his fancy terminology, it is not hard to see in this draft resolution a mediocre adventure story with its heroes and villains.
As we said, the author of the draft points out the obvious: the Fourth Congress was no more than the beginning and only a beginning. Many problems remained to be solved on the road that had been opened up to transforming the PRT. We do not have at hand resolutions specifying and putting them in order, but it seems to us that the draft does not do so either. It includes points that have been satisfactorily treated, such as: No. 3 (”Character of our revolution, based on an analysis of the unequal and combined development of capitalism in the country and in each region’);[9] No. 5, (fundamental characteristics of the current stage of our revolution and the stage of building the party and its military force);[10] and the first part of No. 7, (”Policy for the working class and its different sectors”)[10] But it leaves out what appears to be essential the struggle against Morenoist bad habits and the continued existence of Morenoism, above all, in the party leadership.
In the absence of any constructive, revolutionary, critical objective, the draft’s succeeding observations are tendentious, unsubstantiated, fallacious allegations that only need to be refuted by us.
The draft says: (1) In the resolution on the national situation the second resolution says: “Armed struggle must be initiated immediately in the form of self defense of the working class movement throughout the entire country, taking on the self defense of militants and activists as well as reprisals against agents of the employers, the bureaucracy and the government. So the Fourth Congress underestimated independent military activity in the cities and condemned armed struggle to the mere role of self defense of a basically sindicalist character.”[10] A truly infantile misrepresentation. In the first place because it is clear that the same written text calls for self defense throughout the country. It is incomprehensible how the author is able to draw the conclusion from a quotation that calls for self defense throughout the country that it reduces armed struggle in the cities to the mere role of union self defense. In the second place, because the Fourth Congress document clearly proposed independent military activity in all the cities. One quotation is sufficient to demonstrate this: “For all these reasons, for a period of several years our strategy for creating a revolutionary army in the countryside and to form hundreds of armed detachments of the workers and people to operate in the cities, (a) to support mass mobilizations, and (b) to carry out independent military actions. This is our basic tactic which must be subordinated to that strategy.”[11] In the third place, because the tactical plans from the beginning proposed the preparation of independent military units to function in the cities, laying out their size, objectives, etc. This was done to such a degree that the first military units set up by the party were urban units. In the same way, plans for training and shaping the leaders took urban as well as rural needs into account.
It is possible that the Fourth Congress documents did not use the term “urban guerrilla war.” Similarly we do not find this term in the writings of Che, Giap, or Mao, simply because the classics never differentiated between urban and rural guerrilla groups, and in speaking of guerrillas it was understood to mean rural groups. In Cuba, the urban fighters were called the “underground”; in Venezuela, “tactical combat units” and in Vietnam there are similar names (see Burchett). The activity of Black revolutionists in the United States and of the Tupamaros in Uruguay gave rise to the term we now use regularly and with a precise meaning. In addition, the entire party recognizes the clear distinction made between urban guerrillas and self defense of the masses, aware that the guerrilla units in the cities were following a tactic relatively independent of the daily shifts in the class struggle. That is, they work out tactical plans independent of the immediate struggle of the masses. These consist of actions aimed at obtaining arms, publicizing the name and the line of our military forces, and harrying the enemy. In contrast to this, self defense was a question for the party as a whole, for its unspecialized cells, and it consisted of all kinds of violent actions directly linked to the daily struggle of the masses.
The draft continues: (2) In the same resolution in point No. 3, it says: “Within a short time we must prepare a guerrilla group in the North for the next, inevitable period, provoked by the repression in the cities, by the situation as a whole in the North, and the strategic need to build the embryo of the revolutionary army.” “So the Congress committed a voluntarist deviation by deciding on a ‘short time,’ without bearing in mind the Marxist principle that armed struggle is not a matter of setting dates but of the political development of the class struggle and of the party’s forces.”[12] This appears to be a joke. Nobody denies that the question of armed struggle is not one of setting dates, and neither does the resolution that is quoted. The entire party knows that the decision to prepare for a guerrilla struggle in the North resulted from a profound political analysis of the country that was adopted precisely by the Fourth Congress. But it is also the job of every Leninist party, disposed not only to prescribe solutions but also to carry them out in practice, to decide on the timing and pacing of the line it adopts. We can mention more than one historic episode concerning “voluntarists,” or someone who did not “take into account the Marxist principle that armed struggle is not a matter of setting dates.” In September and October of 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in repeated letters to the party leadership and later in person insistently raised the immediate need to organize the armed insurrection; he pointed out that even a few days delay could prove fatal and give the bourgeoisie a chance to reestablish itself. The same happened in our case. We broke with Moreno because he stood in the way of immediate application of the line of revolutionary war; and we were conscious of the fact that if we permitted the bourgeoisie to experiment indefinitely with the desperate solution represented by the Ongania takeover, which gave us the opportunity to initiate armed resistance under very favorable conditions, the enemy could ultimately find another way out and make the possibility of revolution in our country more difficult for years to come.
The draft continues: (3) Point No. 4 says: “In the North our politics must still be subordinated to our military strategy, and in the rest of the country our military activity must be subordinated to the party’s political penetration of the mass movement in the form of self defense.” “With this resolution the Congress committed a militarist error in the North by not taking into account the Marxist principle repeatedly expressed by Giap, according to which at the beginning of armed struggle military activity is always and everywhere subordinated to the political penetration of the party in the mass movement. And it committed a rightist, conservative error by repeating that military activity in the cities must be reduced to self defense, opposing independent military activity.”[13] In contrast to the previous observations this one contains a grain of truth. In an erroneous formulation is to be found a correct thought. What this paragraph sought to say, as can be gathered from the Fourth Congress document as a whole, is that since the first stage in the North, the axis of the party’s political approach to the masses has been the war and that other aspects of revolutionary activity (economic and political demands, propaganda and agitation, etc.) had to be subordinated to and brought into conjunction with its needs and objectives. Whereas in the rest of the country violent and peaceful mobilizations for economic and political demands would be primary in our political approach to the masses, military activity constituting a complementary and secondary aspect. This formulation corresponded to a realistic Marxist analysis of the unequal development of Argentina’s pre-revolutionary situation in which revolutionary war is an immediate problem, a necessity and a justified preoccupation for the impoverished masses in the North, while in the rest of the country, principally in Greater Buenos Aires and other areas, relatively stable economically and not so hard hit by the crisis, revolutionary war was considered an immediate way out only by the working class vanguard and the revolutionary intelligentsia. The masses as a whole in these areas tended toward resistance and other similar forms of opposition and struggle, although incorporating increasingly violent methods with these forms. Anyone who honestly reads the document understands this. The authors of the draft self criticism seized on this gem in their polemical zeal and deliberately misrepresented it in order to “demonstrate” the origins of “militarism” to the party.
Self Criticism, Military Conception, Etc.
The “draft self criticism” then goes on to raise self criticisms. Let's see what it says: “The first self criticism to be made before the party is by the Central Committee for having had a superficial and irresponsible attitude in not calling the attention of the entire party to the omissions and mistakes of the Fourth Congress. It also criticizes itself for not having seriously faced up to developing the policies necessary to overcome these mistakes and omissions and for having spread its irresponsible political attitude throughout the whole party, claiming that the Fourth Congress had solved all the problems.”[14] The leaders of the Center have a very poor memory. They forget that in March 1969, the Central Committee adopted a set of resolutions on tactics and organization with an introduction stating: “An essential part of the preparation for the war is to shape the party organizationally to take on the new tasks, sinking roots into the mass movement, training the party's cadres, increasing efficiency in all tasks. For various reasons, the most important being the reformist syndicalist, petty bourgeois heritage of Morenoism, our party was fated to suffer from some very weighty limitations in the field of organization and tactics. It is necessary to overcome these limitations in order to achieve satisfactory results for the objectives we have singled out. This task, this necessary surmounting, can be defined generally as abandonment of the syndicalist methodology of the past and the impregnation of the party as a whole with Leninist tactics and organizational methods.
”Our party is a robust child reaching the age of puberty. It has put aside the reformist syndicalist game and is moving, even though timidly, toward a totally new experience revolutionary fusion with the masses in the only way possible the initiation and development of revolutionary war. But it so happens that this boy, which is our party today, was reared like an adult, a child prodigy who knows and has experienced everything. And today it must throw itself into the torrent of life and the torrent of revolution in order to grow up there and become a man. Today when its body, its arms, legs, and heart are ready to plunge into the torrent, they are held back, misdirected, and restricted by its head which has not yet fully worked out its orientation, which continues to believe in the seriousness of its games, is not resigned to giving them up and accepting the new reality, the necessity of self reform, of avidly learning everything that is new, so that it can move and direct its whole body with sureness to master the torrent and the new situation.
“We must be conscious of the reality of our party, of its lack of maturity and its youthfulness conscious of the considerable defects and limitations that we have to overcome. With regard to the latter, we consider it very useful to record some of the most notorious of these defects and limitations.
“Let's begin with self sufficiency, an unjustified self sufficiency, an absolute lack of any notion whatsoever of our own smallness, a ridiculous overestimation of ourselves and of the leader. There were compañeros in the party (and not a few of them) who thought Moreno was a greater genius than Lenin, not to mention the empiricists, Mao, Ho and Fidel. And all this without the least justification—unless we consider it a defect of childhood—since Moreno was always the same as he is today, the same charlatan, the same faker, and a living example of political and personal nothingness.” “We shall attempt to define the methodology of the past. This is necessary so that all the compañeros will recall it, compare the advances that have been made, and become increasingly more thoroughly conscious of the limitations we must make efforts to overcome.
“Work was classified as structural and superstructural. The first was considered basic; in reality it consisted of a narrow syndicalism to which all the tasks that a revolutionary party must really carry out were subordinated.
“The mass work of a team unless it was student work—consisted of the following: visiting all the factories in the area, ‘combing’ them in search of some way of making contacts along trade union lines. They talked with the workers about the most inconsequential problems, seeking to encourage, develop, or create a union struggle. It was the tactic of ‘fighting with your gloves on.’ Not a word about the government, a few attacks against the union bureaucracy, taking special care that the workers did not suspect us of Marxism, Communism, ‘those weird things.’ When a delegate or member of a comisión interna was won over or when an important conflict was ‘hooked,’ we took the great leap: ‘The struggle against the employers and the bureaucracy.’ Not a word about the government, less about the capitalist system and, of course, less than nothing about socialism.
“This was 90 to 99 percent of a team’s activity and this crude syndicalism, denominated ‘structural work’ (?), was considered to be the only truly revolutionary work. To talk about socialism and to paint slogans on walls, was considered ‘propaganda’ work. Public meetings or any other independent party activity? It was not even dreamed of.
“Today, when the party is rapidly approaching a new stage, we must definitively do away with these restrictions. This is the objective outlined by the present resolutions on tactics and organization. We must not forget, however, that in order to apply them the way they should be applied, we need increasingly capable and trained Leninist cadres and leaders.”
It is natural that the Morenoists would forget these resolutions as easily as they concealed them. It is natural that they would likewise endeavor to make out that the real problem of the party was not the errors and omissions of the Fourth Congress but something prior to it the existence of petty bourgeois, bureaucratic Morenoism. The proletarian wing always fought openly against it and efficiently enough so that the party was able to smother with relative ease the present attempt to resurrect Morenoism.
The Morenoists of the Center and Right should criticize themselves for having formally approved and blindly resisted the efforts of the proletarian wing in this and in other areas. It is not by accident that even now they are trying to liquidate Leninist conquests like these resolutions by means of a false and diversionist sell criticism.
To know a plant a bud is enough. It would the and distract the comrades too much to continue with a detailed criticism of the centrist argumentation. The greater part of the following paragraphs dealing with the life of the party from the Fourth Congress until now were answered in advance in the letter of February 24, which the centrists pretend to be unaware of. Other aspects can easily be refuted by the cadres and militants who actively participated in this period of party life. Nevertheless, it is in our interest to single out from the draft the following items for critical attention. (1) Point 9 on page 5 says: “In the terrain of internal theoretical struggle, so necessary to purge the party, this Central Committee permitted one section of the opportunist Right to present a document in October attacking all the fundamental positions of the party, which was not submitted to the ranks nor answered as it should have been.”
Further on: “This confused, contradictory, opportunist document was not answered by the Central Committee because of their natural foquista underestimation of the theoretical struggle and because foquistas and opportunists of the Right held in common their irresponsible adventurism, since the document of the Right proposed with great acclaim that preparations be speeded up in the countryside.”[15] B., P., and A. are deliberately lying. They were present at the Executive Committee meeting held at the beginning of November 1969 (the Central Committee knew about the document at the end of October), when members of the Leninist wing declared that the document of the Right should be used to open the discussion, and that it would be answered in the debate, and, at their request, it was decided to send it to the ranks with some secondary changes that I. asked be incorporated.
In addition, the said document was mentioned in M.’s letter of February 24 and it was proposed that the whole party ask for copies.
If it was not rejected in the Central Committee it was because the Right, under the influence of strong criticism they received in previous conversations, did not advance it. If it did not reach the ranks it was exclusively the fault of B., P., and A. who constituted the Secretariat at that time and did not carry out the Executive Committee’s resolution.
(2) The draft self criticism demonstrates the idealist, bureaucratic, paternalistic, and sell sufficient view of the centrist leaders to confine the internal struggle to the leadership level. For them the ranks played no role, did not participate in this struggle. Thus, they closed theft eyes to the very evident, palpable reality explicitly pointed out by us in the March 1969 Central Committee meeting, that the party’s rank and file was and is the main agent for transforming our party into a proletarian and Leninist organization. And not only that. The sole references to the party’s activists and cadres contained in the draft reveal the deep petty bourgeois contempt, the intellectualoid hostility of these gentlemen toward the rank and file and for the party. They say: “When that Central Committee met there were approximately X militants in the North, the majority of them workers, whose characteristics and method of work have been shown since October. X in Córdoba, of whom X are workers. (the listing goes on). “Let us see what kind of party it was that the Central Committee decided to send into revolutionary war within five months. Altogether we have far fewer than X members, including all those who could be considered as such, and out of them not even half come close to what a professional revolutionary activist should be. Except for the North, the different zones have almost no workers.”[16] (3) The draft contains serious violations of underground norms, almost bordering on informing. What does this mean? What reason is there to reveal military operational plans that should be guard ed with the utmost secrecy? The time has come for them to end their unsubstantial and irresponsible chatter, to weigh their words and absolutely desist from continuing to reveal secret organizational matters. (4) The “military” arguments of the draft deserve special mention as the height of elementary ignorance, intellectualism, and shame less charlatanism disguised as erudition. Here is a quotation: “According to the Chinese and Vietnamese conception, guerrilla warfare emerges from a process of organizing the rural proletariat and poor peasantry into hundreds of self defense groups that function under the strictest clandestinity, moving among the masses ‘like fish in water.’ The party can go on to the second stage consisting of ‘regular guerrilla warfare,’ that is, the creation of mobile detachments outside the process of production, only when it has developed among the masses, is in command of self defense groups linked to the population and battle hardened in hundreds of actions, when the repression already forces it to go over to higher forms of action, and it can do so because it has the support of the masses and the necessary experience and fire power. Foquismo, on the other hand, does not carry out this preliminary groundwork of a political nature, or the organization of armed nuclei. And it claims to be able to create everything ‘from the top down’ with a foco of X-men, exactly as this Central Committee tried to. The X man unit approved by the Central Committee in October constituted another mistake of a specifically military nature. In face of the modern counter-guerrilla techniques being used by the Latin American armies, able to move around with many powerfully armed units, the smallest being a platoon, a guerrilla unit of X men would be permanently condemned to hiding out and in practice would not be able to carry out annihilating actions, except in rare instances. Only larger units that can count on organized popular support for logistics, that can mobilize numerous self defense groups as a supporting force and that have as much fire power as a powerfully armed column, can carry out annihilating military actions.
“Because they lacked these conditions, Che’s guerrilla group, the Guatemalan group of Cesar Montes, the Peruvian MIR and the ELN, etc., were wiped out. The Venezuelan and Colombian groups managed to survive by dissolving entire fronts and regrouping their forces into what they called ‘strategic columns.’ That is the military reason why, at the time of this self criticism, the only remaining foquistas in Latin America are the members of this Central Committee.”[17] Almost as many mistakes as paragraphs. It is not true that the Chinese and Vietnamese conception is that the guerrilla struggle comes out of hundreds of self-defense groups moving among the masses. For them as for us, the guerrilla struggle flows from the struggle of the masses when they have exhausted other less effective forms of struggle and decide to take up armed struggle. It is precisely the guerrilla who moves among the masses like a fish in water. It is pure intellectualism to claim that self defense groups must be trained in hundreds of actions as a preliminary step to becoming guerrilla groups. Except for Colombia, in no country in the world, in any revolutionary war in history, have guerrilla groups begun in this way.
Giap had no combat experience before he became head of the Armed Propaganda Detachment of thirty three men that started the revolutionary war in Vietnam. Fidel and his men (some of them) only had the Moncada experience behind them, and as a whole, they had never belonged to anything resembling a self defense group. Yon Sosa was a military career man and not one of his men came out of self defense groups, or anything of the kind. Nothing similar to this occurred in China, or in Korea, or in Cyprus, or in Yugoslavia, or in South Vietnam, or in Venezuela either. It was only in Colombia that the Communist Party managed for a time to evade the necessity of founding guerrilla groups and held arming of the peasants within the limits of self defense, with lamentable results. What cannot be substituted for in initiating a rural guerrilla struggle is a revolutionary party with sufficient roots among the masses of the region to supply men, assure information, part of the provisions, to do political work among the masses, as well as provide operational support. The centrists, with their unshakeable love for small business operations, have divided the first of the three famous stages of revolutionary war (1) guerrilla war or strategic defense, (2) balance of forces, (3) strategic offensive (with conventional warfare predominant in the last two stages), into two ministages: (1) self defense, (2) regular guerrilla war. It is frankly ridiculous to think that Foquismo is based on the size of the unit that begins the fight. The question of Foquismo or revolutionary war is a problem of policy, not of the number of combatants. If there is an attempt to begin the struggle only on the basis of geography, avoiding contact with the population and trying to confront the enemy with solely the military force available to the group; if the need for a revolutionary party is ignored then a foquista deviation is involved. If on the other hand, it is clearly understood that the fundamental strength of the guerrillas lies in the population’s support, geography being only auxiliary; if the strongest possible links with the masses are maintained; if a correct political approach to the masses is adhered to; if military activity is oriented with the masses kept in mind; if it is understood that the main thing is the party—guaranteeing its leadership of the guerrillas and determinedly working to build it and develop it—then we have a Leninist line for revolutionary war. The question of numbers depends on the concrete situation, on the characteristics of the zone, on the immediate political reality, the party’s forces, the disposition of the enemy forces, and tactical considerations of a military nature. The next paragraph in the quotation refers precisely to questions of military tactics. Frankly, we still do not know what to think of the author of those paragraphs. Have you forgotten, compañero, that the main weapon of the guerilla group is its mobility, its logistic independence? That what characterizes guerrillas militarily, offering it the possibility of triumphing, is to “hit and run,” to strike and disappear? To the modern tactics of counter-guerrilla fighting we must respond with the old guerrilla weapons: mobility, support of the population, technical efficiency and high morale. We are not going to be drawn into a debate about numbers because that means meeting you at your level, where the norm is irresponsible divulging of figures and practical plans, which we have already criticized. We definitely will touch upon your historical examples, which even the greatest charlatan of the “leftists”[19] would hesitate to use with such unscrupulousness. First, the most well known, Che’s guerrilla front. Che, with thirty five men to start with, won more than ten battles, seized 200 enemy weapons, successfully moved around a totally unknown area for nine months with a handful of combatants without the least support from the population and pursued by more than 3,000 men. Although he was overcome, it was not at all because of any military error. On the contrary, militarily it was a veritable epic. As we all know, his defeat was due to the hostility of the population which wound up informing on his movements and positions to the bourgeois army. Concerning Guatemala, we do not have inside information about the liquidation of Montes. We do know that this front suffered severe problems of leadership and line. On the other hand, we must remind you that Yon Sosa’s guerrillas controlled a peasant zone without any of the military conditions you have listed. The MIR guerrillas do not serve as an example either. Divided into three fronts, they went under because of the fatal military mistake of accepting a positional war against an immensely superior army. That is to say, their military mistake was to forget that mobility is the essential guerrilla weapon. As for the Peruvian ELN, we do not have enough information about this experience, but we believe their case was similar to that of the MIR, inasmuch as they stationed themselves in a very small zone and were surrounded. Colombia and Venezuela are a different matter. The strategic columns were a result of the struggle’s development. It is clear that when a guerrilla group succeeds in obtaining a firm foothold in the population, creating effective support bases, it should immediately go on to the formation of columns, companies, battalions with heavy weapons, so it can effectively carry on the war. This is also the experience of the ELN in Columbia, which has successfully fought until recently with forty or fifty men. Stop inventing Foquismo, gentlemen! Stop attempting to theoretically justify your growing distance from the line of the Fourth Congress. If you are not prepared to share with the party the risks of its line, say so frankly—don’t invent “military” excuses.
Strength and Social Composition of the Current Tendencies
For six months before the party crisis erupted, the party had been taking positions. We are in position to offer an approximate statistical[19] report of the strength and social composition of the different tendencies, zone by zone, section by section. In the total we will also include the corresponding figures for the Central Committee. For security reasons we will use the following percentage method: In each zone or section which we number 1 through 11, percentages are worked out based on the number of worker and non-worker members respectively. Totals include percentages of the entire party membership. (See table.)
This is the statistical reflection of the strength and social composition of the three tendencies. In it we can very clearly see the class character of each. In the same manner the figures show that the present crisis is a crisis of leadership since the greatest equilibrium and tension between forces is found in the Central Committee. The predominantly bureaucratic character of the Right (half of its members are members of the Central Committee) shows up unmistakenly. The predominantly petty bourgeois character of the Center which is shown by the fact that its ranks include only 0.31% of the workers in the party, while the Leninist tendency, including 76% of the party has 97% of its workers—that is to say, nearly the entire worker membership.
We have purposefully left aside one important question concerning the class struggle in a revolutionary party in order to touch upon it now. It concerns the criterion of truth which a Marxist must use to objectively orient himself in this struggle. The centrist theoreticians claim to be Marxists and they make much of the need for a scientific analysis of all questions. They go on and on about this need. The party crisis is the immediate field in which they should put into practice this preoccupation with science. We have already seen how they have neglected Marxism and class analysis in their studies of internal tendencies, party history and the present crisis. We shall now see how they go on to ignore another principled question in determining the truth or the falsity of the present party positions: the criterion of truth in the Marxist theory of knowledge. We have already given our scientific interpretation of the internal class struggle;
now we shall put forward our scientific evaluation of the truth or falsity of the internal positions, using the clear practical criterion of truth. Instead of abstract chatter and constant doubts, the centrist theoreticians ought to counterpoise other clear, straightforward and convincing criteria to ours. Since they do not have and will not be able to find these criteria, they continue to threaten a “Marxist analysis” while formally applying scientific and subjectivist methodology, opposed to dialectical materialism, in all the questions before us. As we know, “In practice man must prove the truth, i. e., the reality and power, the ‘this sidedness’ of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or non reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”[20]
Marx was saying here that the truth or falsity of all thought is tested in confrontation with practice. This Marxist principle is completely valid and applicable in the instance of a party’s internal struggle. Any theoretician or militant of a revolutionary party can be mistaken, can be victim of a subjectivist outlook that brings him in all honesty to make mistakes that limit his understanding of the situation. If the theoretician or militant is a Marxist, he will hasten to use a practical test of the truth to confirm the correctness of his point of view, with the intention of exercising self criticism if he is mistaken. The practical test of truth in determining the proletarian correction and content of a line inside a revolutionary party, especially when the class struggle in it has openly surfaced, is the orientation of the worker ranks in this struggle. This is what Lenin taught in “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.” This is what Trotsky taught in his analysis of the struggle in the Socialist Workers Party (see In Defense of Marxism). This is what Mao taught in his works on the Cultural Revolution. Instead of continuing in an error, deepening it, accentuating its petty-bourgeois aspects, and taking refuge in pedantry and self importance, these people should force themselves to look objectively at the real situation, adopt a healthy proletarian standard, give up their negative characteristics, and be ready to listen to and observe the party’s working class militants in a self critical spirit. If they are capable of sincerely undertaking this task, they will save our organization from splits, they will prove to be useful in the future, occupy a place in the vanguard of our proletarian party, center their personal contribution on preparing for war, and they will rise notably as revolutionists.
If, on the other hand, they persist in their errors, accentuating their petty bourgeois characteristics, refusing to listen to the working class militants, they will without fail end by breaking with the party.