RE: [Marxism] Trecherous and bourgeois Bolivian regime...

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wayne Rossi writes: "Joaquin has presented an analysis that holds that
the confrontation with imperialism - as expressed in a nascent
anti-imperialist bloc - is the main class force in Latin America, and as
such that the primary problem is the solution of the national questions
in the individual nations and the building of this bloc.  Counterposed
to this is an analysis that holds that the national questions are
inextricably interpenetrated with the class questions, and that what in
fact is happening in the Latin American nations is the beginning of a
revolutionary process.  (To be painfully clear, the class questions in
this analysis are connected intimately with the imperialist questions;
that is not at issue.)"

Frankly, Joaquín has a hard time discerning his position in Wayne's
description. 

The issue is this: HOW are "the class questions connected intimately
with the imperialist questions." 

My position is, quite simply, that "the class question" tends to find
expression in and through the national (anti-imperialist) movement for a
very simple reason, the rulers of these countries are the imperialists
and therefore at the heart of the class political struggle is the
struggle to "nationalize the government." 

This is the battle Evo and his friends have undertaken, and judging by
this first week, much more aggressively than certainly I expected in
terms of cabinet appointments and the shake-up of the military high
command. 

So convincing have Evo and his friends been that the Spanish imperialist
petroleum firm REPSOL, which calls itself "Repsol-YPF" because the Menem
government sold the Argentine state oil company YPF to Repsol, felt it
could not continue with the fraud of listing Bolivia's gas as part of
its own reserves, writing down its reserves and taking a big hit on the
stock market as a result.

The position of Wayne and others who think like him is that the "class
struggle" supersedes the national movement. He himself describes it in
these terms in his complaint against Nestor's very effective lampooning
of their position: "Denouncing those holding to the class-primary (as
opposed to the anti-imperialist-primary) analysis by posting items
tangential to the debate by posting hyperbole is attacking a weird
strawman, as you seem intent on doing."

This "class primary" idea that counterposes "class struggle" to the
national movement against imperialism is fundamentally wrong.

A month ago I posted to this list a detailed exposition of these ideas,
from which the following is drawn:

*  *  *

I want to second what has already been said, that all national
struggles, indeed all major social struggles, are class struggles.
That's the Marxist understanding of history, not that class struggle is
our preferred variety of social conflict, but rather, that it is at the
root of all social conflict.

To that, I would add the following: National struggles arise from and
are expressions of the class struggle. But you can't run the clock of
history and social development backwards, unwind the national forms,
strip them out, and say "let's do these social conflicts in purely class
forms," workers against bosses, peasants against landlords, etc. 

Historical development has already given rise to national forms and the
"national struggle" -- above all the "national struggle" of the
imperialist bourgeoisies to dominate, subjugate and superexploit the
Third World. This national oppression is what evokes against it national
liberation movements.

The national forms are *inescapable* because exploitation and oppression
are already "racialized" and "nationalized," i.e., come structured and
packaged along those lines, and because class struggles are political
struggles, struggles over political power. What oppressed nations like
Bolivia need to "nationalize" most of all is not one or another
industry, but their state power, first and foremost.

These national movements of oppressed nations, precisely because they
are national, are by their very nature multiclass movements. That is
inherent in the national form of the struggle, that is what nations are,
multi-class socio-economic formations. This does not make the national
struggles any less expressions of the class struggle, but it is one of
the things that makes impossible any attempt to substitute the struggle
of workers *as such* against capitalists or toilers generally against
exploiters generally for the national liberation struggle.

*  *  *

That full post is here:
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w52/msg00078.htm.

In that post I also quote directly and extensively from Trotsky's
presentation in the Transitional Program on the revolution in colonial
and semicolonial countries and his description there of Permanent
Revolution to show that these ideas are *not at all* a deviation from
the strategic approach that Trotsky took, despite the ultraleft
interpretations that seek to turn "permanent revolution" into a
"program" counterposed to the national-revolutionary program that have
been so common if not completely dominant in the Trotskyist movement for
several decades. 

The reason people like myself and others find we have little to say on
the list on these issues now is simply that the ultraleft comrades have
not been able to articulate a systematic presentation of their position;
or it they have, I must have missed it, whereas those of us on the other
side of these discussions have done so not once but a number of times
over the past several years, going all the way back to the late Jim
Blaut's posts on the national question in the first year or two of the
list.

That pretty much leaves the only other question for discussion to be an
evaluation of Morales and his friends. 

And I think --frankly-- this is where a lot of the ultraleftism comes
from, an attempt to find reasons why what Morales said or did or is
planning to do is wrong, insufficient, inadequate or could not possibly
be right; just as at an earlier stage we had quite a few exchanges on
Hugo Chavez around the same issues. 

And that I think comes from the (residual, in some cases, full-blown in
others) Leninist religion that a true-blue one and only Truly
Revolutionary Party (tm) is required before you're allowed to have a
revolution, that only a revolution that proclaims itself from the outset
as socialist is permitted (i.e., that you're not allowed to have
national revolutions which "grow over" into socialist revolutions); that
a revolutionary process or an important part of it can't really be
carried out through, or set off by, or advanced within,
bourgeois-democratic elections, and so on.

Arguably, however, a revolutionary process has been developing in
Bolivia starting with the "water wars"; the election of this government
represents and important stage and advance in the struggle for a
government truly independent of imperialism; and its early days yet,
both in terms of this government and in terms of the very long road the
Bolivian and Latin American revolutions have ahead of them.

The heart of the matter is what is the nature of this process or if you
prefer movement *today,* what are its immediate tasks, which isn't a
question of defining "immediate" in terms of time but of trying to
understand what issues are posed and how these present to the masses. My
contention is that this is essentially a national-democratic [note: NOT
"bourgeois democratic"] anti-imperialist process at this stage. Which
doesn't mean or exclude that there will be all sorts of bread-and-butter
"class" issues and fight also.

Wayne Rossi's "class primary" position means --if it means anything--
that what is posed now in Bolivia is a proletarian revolution as such
(in alliance with the peasantry and so on); that the government that
*ought* to have arisen is not a cabinet to organize the fight for the
"nationalization of the Bolivian government," which it seems to me is
what we've got (although, again, it is early days, we're a long way
aways, so I can only say that tentatively), and instead what's needed
and wanted RIGHT NOW is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This goes back to a question I've asked repeatedly on this list of those
I consider ultraleft on this issue, which is, if some Bolshevik
committee had somehow wound up in charge after the February revolution,
would that have transformed the February Revolution into the October
Revolution? Was the Kerensky period a historical accident, or was it a
*necessary* part of the process (albeit not necessarily in that *form*)?


Similarly, was the Jan-July 1959 period of the Cuban revolution, or the
Jan. 1959-Oct. 1960 period, mostly a mistake due to the lack of
consciousness of the leadership (the lack of a more developed Truly
Revolutionary Party with its one-and-only Truly Revolutionary Program),
as the U.S. SWP majority's analysis from the early 1960's maintained, or
was that "national democratic" --and not yet socialist-- stage, Cuba's
"Kerensky Period" an unavoidable part of the process, of getting TO the
expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class?

I know comrades are immediately going to think, "but the Batista army
and police were smashed" and so on, but I don't believe that's the heart
of the question. The heart of the question is for the class struggle
that takes place within the national movement to play out, for the
masses to learn through their own experiences who is who and what
additional measures are necessary *beyond* those immediately posed and
carried out as part of the national and anti-imperialist revolution.

Joaquín


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