The dictatorships in Latin America suddenly [illegible] vulnerable against popular mobilisations in defence of democratic rights. Adolfo Gilly argues that the central task for the Latin American working class is the conquest of political independence from the bourgeoisie.
During the last fifteen years, the economy, society and state of the Latin American countries have undergone profound transformations. These changes took place in large part under the influence of the increasing internationalisation of capital and of the work process. They have opened up — or are opening up — the way for a change in the mode of domination of the bourgeoisie and the bloc of bourgeois fractions in power. Industry, agro-business and wage labour have spread further, while pre-capitalist relations of domination and exploitation have been reduced in importance — although not eliminated.
These countries have modernised and the class struggle likewise [illegible]. The new dominant bourgeois bloc, associated with imperialism through the multinationals and finance, has managed, albeit with some conflict, to keep the initiative throughout these changes. The working class and the wage earners as a whole have had to endure these changes with only defensive battles. These occasionally enabled the workers to defend some of their positions and at other times led to disasters such as that in Argentina in 1976.
The victory of the Nicaraguan insurrection of July 1979 may signal a change of this trend — one foreshadowed by the earlier strike movements, and general strikes, in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and even Argentina. However the new trend is not yet marked and generalised on the political level.
It is precisely on this level that the Latin American working class must come to grips with the foremost task which has not yet been achieved in most countries: the conquest of political independence from the bourgeoisie and its state ie the organisation of a mass workers party. This is the long-standing task which Engels had described in an 1892 letter to Kautsky: 'In our tactic, one thing is definitively established for all countries and the contemporary epoch: to bring the workers to form their own independent party, in opposition to all bourgeois parties'. Except in Cuba and Chile (or the particular cases of Nicaragua and El Salvador) this goal has not been achieved. This is true in particular for the countries which have the largest population and which are the most industrialised such as Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.
In most Latin American countries, the working class is organised in trade unions, but remains under the ideological domination of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaderships. The leaderships of the trade unions and workers' confederations are the main transmission belts for this influence. The Argentine case, with its Peronist leadership, is the most graphic example of the phenomenon. But the Bolivian, Brazilian, Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan cases are not qualitatively different.
The working class in Latin America thus combines a relatively high level of trade union organisation, rooted in old traditions of struggle (the typical case being Bolivia) with a relatively low level of independent political organisation. The combination of these two factors indicates the level of consciousness reached by the working class (which is not the same as its level of militancy) and therefore represents a concrete starting point for the definition of its political tasks.
In the past some of the socialist, communist and revolutionary leftist currents and parties in Latin America have tended to view the unions merely as instruments of their leadership. They ignored their function as mass organs of the working class which concentrate its organised experience of struggle. Because these currents confuse the unions with the leadership they have drawn the conclusion that they must advance the workers' class consciousness through other paths. These forces set up 'independent', but minority and isolated, trade unions, carried out 'focoist' guerrilla experiments, and practised various types of revolutionary propagandism, in particular among students during the 1960s and 1970s.
These experiences and failures led much of the Latin American Left to change its position and reaffirm the importance of the mass trade unions as historic steps forward by the proletariat. However this originally healthy reaction has led in many cases to the opposite extreme: idealising their leaderships, making concessions to the methods they use in the unions, believing that their periodical verbal radicalisation, which is not a political radicalisation, corresponds to the needs of the wage earners — rather than to the bureaucracies' need to readjust their role as intermediaries for bourgeois domination.
An excellent example of this was the prelude to one of the Latin American proletariat's greatest catastrophes, the Argentinian military coup of March 1976. This witnesses a 'turn to left by the CGT which, a few months earlier, had threatened general strikes against the preparations for the coup. The Peronist bureaucracy called for a large number of nationalisations and, demanded other gains. At the same time, however, they accepted the political leadership of Isabel Peron who was protecting the paramilitary gangs of the Anti-Communist Alliance and acted as godmother for the chaos which led to the coup d'état.
There was in fact a very specific reason for this verbal left turn of the Peronist trade union leadership. There was a genuine radicalisation of the Argentine workers following the momentous general strike against the austerity plan of Isabela Peron, and her minister Rodrigo, in mid-1975. This radicalisation was led by coordinating bodies which emerged from the internal commissions of the large factories of Cordoba, Buenos Aires, Rosario and other regions. This began in the workplaces without breaking with the national trade unions, and built an alternative leadership which, in the concrete circumstances existing at that time, was able to counteract the sabotaging action of the upper bureaucracy allied to Isabela.
But this movement did not develop its own political expression. The workers remained Peronist for historical reasons which we cannot discuss in this article. Paradoxically though, the very strength demonstrated by the proletariat in the general strike accelerated the process to a coup d'état, as an emergency measure designed to lock the process of autonomous radicalisation and destroy workers' organisation at the point of production: ie the internal commissions, the factory delegates, the coordinating commissions and with them, the trade unions. These were the real targets of the methodical and scientific massacre launched and continued to this day by the Argentine military in power. It consciously sees its regime as a system of government and a means of reorganising capitalism.
This specific case of Argentina shows simultaneously both the paths through which the politically bourgeois workers' leaderships can actually be bypassed and the potential of independent politicisation of the working class through their trade union organisations. The coordinating commissions counterposed in a centralised manner the politics of the factory internal commissions, of the workers' organs at the workplace (for a general strike is always a political decision) to the politics of the upper trade union bureaucracy. The internal commissions were actual organs of the trade unions and not alien, counterposed, or alternative to the trade unions.
Similar processes developed, with different national characteristics, in the Bolivian workers' movement. Here they were centred in particular around the decisions adopted by the miners' union — whose supreme organ in each pit is the general assembly of all workers. The movements and organisations of the Brazilian proletariat followed a similar path from 1977 until the big strike of the metalworkers and autoworkers in April-May 1980. In this the factory commissions, elected delegates and general assemblies of the workers acted collectively as the prime movers.
The factory organisations (commissions, committees, councils, etc) formed by delegates of work units or departments, elected and subject to recall, and regular general assembly functioning as a collective decision-making body, are the common features that emerged in the high points of these broad trade union movements in Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina.
The repressive measures used against the Brazilian metalworkers' strike also demonstrate, as the repression of the Argentine dictatorship had earlier shown in a more terrifying way, that the state and the bourgeois bloc at its helm cannot tolerate the development of such forms of proletarian organisation which grow centralised beyond certain limits. The traditional trade union bureaucracy also dislikes these forms of organisation insofar as they call into question its role as a mediator between the bosses and the state and expose it to the deadly threat of democratic control by rank and file organs.
The state, the bourgeoisie and the trade union bureaucracy can coexist with this type of organisation only as long as the expansion of capitalist economies allowed them to make concessions to the workers' movement and thus to maintain the influence of bourgeois ideology on the workers and the control of the trade union leaderships over the factory organisations. This became less and less possible in the late 1970s as capitalism in Latin America entered a new state of crisis.
The reason for the conflict was fairly simple: while the trade unions tends to emphasise the struggle for better wages (a struggle which the bourgeoisie fully accepts in the framework of the market), the factory organs elected by the workers tend to emphasise the struggle over the organisation of the work process within the factory (a struggle which capital cannot accept in the realm of production because it challenges a kernel of its power, the right to decide how and where to use the labour power it has purchased through wages),
The factory committees or internal commissions and the workshop delegates, are the workers' instruments to protest and struggle against the deteriorating working conditions imposed by capital: speedup, increase of workloads, health hazards, cancellation of work breaks, lack of safety and protective measures, police control by bosses, and all the countless other aspects of the despotic and dictatorial regime imposed on the workers during their workday (ie during the greater part of their conscious life).
In the new conditions of the Latin American economies, determined by the internationalisation of the labour and production process, industrial growth (and therefore the growth of the proletariat) and the world crisis, we can foresee that the focus of class conflict will be located precisely in this area and it will therefore become the central point for the trade union and political reorganisations of the working class.
In recent years capital succeeded in Latin America in imposing through various means a lowering of real wages (devalorisation of labour power) in most of all countries. It now tends, especially in the most industrialised countries of the region, to emphasise the need to rationalise and intensify the exploitation of the labour force. This means a many-sided increase in the workload of each wage earner. All this is justified in the name of productivity.
This capitalist drive clashes head on with the existence and strengthening of workers' organisation in the factory. Capital must therefore secure the political and juridical conditions which will enable it to prevent this organisation or destroy it, where it already exists: the right to fire according to the needs of the firm, no job security, a high rate of 'turnover', a selective system of bonuses for production which substantially complement the wage, political control and repression within the factory, and refusal to accept factory commissions as bargaining partners. Moreover on this last point, the bosses' interests coincide with those of the traditional trade union leaderships who negotiate wages without any concern for the other problems we mentioned.
One of the features of what is called the 'modernisation' of the class struggle is that the modernisation of the economy, and the new priority requirements of capital, force the workers to seek, create or reconstitute forms of factory organisation. These are a [illegible] both capital and the trade union bureaucracy. This does not mean it will be possible to sweep away both in one blow. But it does mean that the unchallenged basis for their domination in the factories, and in the consciousness of the workers, will be undermined little by little in a cumulative process. The result of the 1980 Brazilian workers strike also represents an important experience in this regard.
Among the reasons that ultimately prevented a victory stood difficulties in extending the strike to other sectors of production and the impossibility of giving it a political expression. The state, an essentially political organ of the ruling class, committed all its strength to supporting the bosses intransigence because the workers' central demands — recognition of the delegates and trade union organisation within the factory, recognition of job security etc — had a political content even though they were put forward officially on a strictly trade union level. It is also precisely this political characteristic which explains the particular attitude of the Brazilian Church — which sided with the strikers against the state.
How can the working class overcome the contradiction which exists and achieve independent political organisation and expression? The experiences accumulated in various stages by the Bolivian, Argentine, Brazilian, Colombian workers and those of other Latin American countries confirm that the working class can only do so by going through its own experience. This means following a road which is not on a straight line, but in which the conquests accumulated by collective consciousness and experience are not lost although material gains may be cancelled or reduced for whole periods.
The working class is going through this experience today precisely within the trade unions. But the unions and trade union organisation involve different levels and realities: they are in every sense an arena for the class struggle. On this terrain, the key is that the working class moves forward from the standpoint of its self-confidence and independence by undergoing political experiences and adopting organisational forms which enhance and strengthen its internal democratic life, its spirit of initiative, and its capacity to elaborate a collective thought and its ability to make decisions autonomously. This is workers' self-organisation.
Confronted with the new demands of capital and the terrain of which it forces the wage earners to fight, self-organisation becomes the main dimension and condition for a response to the challenge of the bourgeoisie. The methods and forms of self-organisation have the following common features. They challenge capital in the very core of its domination in the factory. They challenge the traditional bureaucratic methods and decisions through which the bourgeoisie ideologically dominates the working class organised in the trade unions.
Does this mean that self-organisation automatically creates political class consciousness and independent political organisation of the proletariat? No, such a leap, such a spontaneous development is not possible. But self organisation can create more favourable conditions for the development of political consciousness and organisation.
Consequently the working class self-organisation process developing from struggles taking place in Latin America today must be combined with a defense of the socialist programme and Marxist theory by tendencies and parties which subscribe to them. These parties' tactics will be correct if they lead the workers to form their own independent parties opposed to all bourgeois parties — the necessary condition for the struggle for socialism. Every workers' party which exists in Latin America proclaims itself to be the party of the working class. But the working class will only recognise it as such if it can translate the experience undergone in struggle into class consciousness. In other words if it succeeds in giving a conscious anti-capitalist and socialist content to the spontaneous and natural struggle against capital which is taking place. Of course this cannot be accomplished by mere propaganda for socialist ideas: it can only be accomplished by the organisation of the experience of the proletariat. The large mass workers' parties of Europe were born from such an accumulation of experiences, which explains their lasting roots and survival despite their reformist policy and the defeats they suffered.
Latin America today is not Europe but neither is it Latin America fifteen years ago. The struggle for the independent organisation of the proletariat, for its class party must undoubtedly be based on the principles of Marxism. But in each country, that organisation is linked to the history and traditions of national and Latin American organisations: the Mexican revolution, the Bolivian revolution, the Cuban socialist revolution, the mass Peronist movement in Argentina, the Chilean Popular Unity, the Guatemalan revolution, the Peruvian peasants and miners [illegible].
However neither principles nor traditions will bring about [illegible] the working class if they are not translated into policies and tactics suited to the confrontation with capital. They must do this now in the current struggles which are determined by the dynamics of international capital, the acute forms of its crisis and the new [illegible] which the national Latin American states have adopted.
ADOLFO GILLY is author of The Mexican Revolution, shortly to be published by New Left Books, and a lifelong revolutionary militant.