The 1952 Revolution

by José Villa


Part 1

The Collaborationist Programme Of The POR


In every issue of Lucha Obrera after April 1952, a new version of The Programme of the Exploited, was reproduced, which we reprint in its entirety:

“1. To prevent the revolution that begun on 9th April being strangled within the bourgeois and democratic framework.
2. The Strengthening of the working class, and consolidating the COB.
3. The mobilisation of the peasants behind the slogan of nationalisation of land and expropriation of the large estates without compensation, in order to allow the revolutionary process to end in victory.
4. The gaining of democratic guarantees for the exploited. The development of union democracy within the unions. Freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties. The cancelling of all privileges for the rosca (39) counter-revolution.
5. Armed workers militias as a substitute for the regular army.
6. Better conditions of living and work. A basic living wage and sliding scale of wages. Collective contracts.
7. Nationalisation of mines and railways without compensation and under workers control.
8. The expulsion of imperialism. The cancelling of the international treaties which bind the country to imperialism. The rejection of the agreement on technical aid with the UN”. (40) (LO, 25.5.52).

We are not questioning those slogans, but the absence of key and essential slogans. That programme is limited and is adapted to the tastes of the Lechín wing of the MNR. The union bureaucracy could accommodate itself to all these slogans.

The central demands which were completely ignored in the POR press during those months were those of the occupation of the Mines, factories and large estates; no support for the new bourgeois government nor for the Lechín union bureaucracy; no to Co-government; that workers ministers should resign from the capitalist cabinet; All Power to the COB.

The POR talked about “preventing the revolution being strangled” when they themselves were strangling it with ‘critical’ support to the capitalist government. They demanded the “consolidation of the COB” but they opposed struggling for the most elementary tasks of achieving such an aim: an open struggle against the bureaucracy of Lechín and the MNR for the election and recall of all leaders by rank-and-file mass meetings and for an immediate conference of the COB in order to equip it with a soviet-type structure and for it to take complete power. The POR did not struggle to transform the COB into a Supreme Soviet in order to seize power, but wanted to put pressure on its summit so that it would recite its speeches and improve governmental decrees.

It called for the nationalisation of the land, mines and railways but did not demand its imposition by the workers and peasants with their own hands through occupations. Its position was limited to requesting and putting pressure on the government to carry out such measures, which created dangerous illusions in the masses, helping to demobilise them and keeping them in a state of dependency (instead of calling on them to do things themselves). At no time did it call for the bourgeoisie to be expropriated. Workers’ control was only demanded for state enterprises. The factories (Said, Soligno, etc.), shopping chains (Casa Grace, etc.) and other private companies continued operating as before. There was no demand for their nationalisation (not even with compensation), for workers, control, or the payment of higher taxes.

They wanted “freedom of propaganda for revolutionary parties”. By this the POR acknowledged that, apart from itself, other ‘revolutionaries’ existed, among them the MNR and Stalinism. What was correct was to call for the broadest democratic liberties. At the same time there had to be a struggle for the expropriation of the mass media and its handing over to organisations of workers and ordinary people. “The cancellation of all privileges of the rosca counter- revolution” was demanded. But what does the cancellation of privileges mean? What was needed was the demand for its total expropriation along with the creation of people’s courts to try the executioners and butchers of the oligarchic regime.

The slogan about expelling imperialism was very vague. It was not tied to demands to expropriate all its enterprises or to repudiate the foreign debt. Anyway, the POR itself said repeatedly that, if it got into power, it would try to force the USA to recognise it and establish diplomatic relations.

Neither did the POR raise the main slogan for a thorough-going bourgeois democracy: the sovereign Constituent Assembly, where all those over the age of 18 (or 16) would have the right to vote and to be elected. New elections on as democratic and as broad a basis as possible, and the creation of a new Constituent Assembly where the main national problems could be debated, would have let the revolutionary party more easily unmask the nature of the MNR and of parliamentarianism. The POR envisaged something else which flung dust in the workers’ eyes: to restore the reactionary constitution which put Paz into the Presidential Palace.

This programme lacked the slightest internationalist slogans. It did not call for solidarity with the other workers of the world and with anti-imperialist struggles, the defence of the workers’ states against imperialism, support for revolutions against the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracies, the internationalisation of the revolution; and for the building of the United Socialist States of Latin America and of the world, not to mention the struggle for the worker-peasant government or for the socialist republic. The POR merely wanted to pressurise the bourgeois government behind whose ‘left’ wing it was always searching for a compromise to carry out the programme further.

The POR action programme was that of a party which had repudiated the strategy of permanent revolution and which only wanted a bourgeois-democratic transformation within the segregated framework of one, isolated, landlocked and backward country.


Previous Chapter: The POR Seeks To Enter The Bourgeois Government
Next Chapter: The POR Did Not Struggle For The Occupation Of The Enterprises


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Updated by ETOL: 26.10.2003