El Salvador left draws

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The struggle of the workers and peasants of El Salvador against the bloody dictatorship of monopoly capital is by no means new30,000 lives were lost in the 1932 insurrection alone.

But in the last year imperialism, wounded by major setbacks in Afghanistan, Iran and Nicaragua, has escalated its offensive to such a pitch that, it the Salvadorean capitalist state is not destroyed through a decisive military confrontation, the workers movement • stanas to suffer a defeat on a scale comparable to those in Spain in 1939 and Chile in 1973.

• El Salvador is only a small state of some 4.5 million people.

Its productive capacity is of marginal importance to the massive transnational corporations.

Its tiny, hidebound and vicious ruling oligarchy is of relativel y little value to the barons of the international banks.

But Salvador now holds the key to Central America; and Central America has become a region of absolutely critical importance in the struggle between international capital and labour.

However, a proletarian revolutionary victory in this struggle is dependent not only upon crushing the forces of capitalism but also upon removing the radical petty bourgeois leadership of the mass movement.

Without this the Salvadorean masses will not simply be subjected to betrayals after the defeat of the regime but they also stand in grave danger of losing even the war to oust the oligarchy.

The history of the Salvadorean left, its political development, social composition and the conditions of its struggle against imperialism are in many respects distinct from those of the Nicaraguan FSLN.

Moreover, despite its close links with the Sandinistas, it is still possible that under pressure from the masses the left in Salvador will be forced to recognise some of the "negative' as well as the "positive lessons of the Nicaraguan revolution.

However, the great weight of evidence points in the opposite direction, showing the leadership to be fully committed to the politics of petty bourgeois nationalism, actively pursuing 247 class collaborationist strategy of the popular front. Early days of the Salvador junta: Andano, While vehemently anti-imperialist and anti-dictatorial, it consistently refuses to call for the political independence of the working class and fight for the destruction of the capitalist system as a whole rather than simply rid it of its 'degenerate' elements and realign the relationship between sections of capital (as well as between capital and labour) through reform.

Every permutation of radical rhetoric-much of it far in advance of that produced by the FSLN-is to be found, but on these central questions (questions that in the last instance distinguish the politics of social revolution from those of political reform) there is silence.

The key text in this regard is the programme of the Coordinadora Revolucionaria de Masas (CRM) of 28 February 1980.

The section entitled "The Revolutionary Democratic Government. Its Composition and its Platiorm of Political Structural and Social Changes" states:

"This government will be Gutierrez, Ungo, Majano based on a broad social and political foundation formed in the first place by the working class, the peasants and the advanced middle classes. Intimately united with them will be the social classes prepared to carry forward this platform, managers of small-and medium-sized industries, artisans and agricultural businessmen, (small and medium coffee growers and other branches of agriculture and cattle raising).

It will also include honest professionals, the progressive clergy, democratic parties such as the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), the advanced sectors of Christian Democracy, worthy and honest army officers, who are willing to serve the interests of the people and all other sectors, groups, persons or segments which are in favour of broad democracy for the popular masses, independent development and popular freedom"

The programme goes on to call for the nationalisation of foreign trade, electricity, oil and banks, but:

"all without affecting the small and medium companies, Which will be given stimulus and support in every way..."

(Tasks and Objectives, subsection e).

It calls for the destruction of the repressive bodies ORDEN, the Guardia Nacional, and the Policia de Hacienda but not the army.

A new army will be created:

"constructed during the course of the revolutionary proccss, into which will be incorporated those healthy and worthy members of the present army.

(ibid., subsection paragraph confirms that includes officers).

Foreign policy will be directed on the basis of independence: "peaceful coexistence, equal rights and mutual respect between states."

Education, health, tax, credit, urban and agrarian reforms are all outlined alongside the introduction of a sliding scale of wages, a literacy campaign and general 'cultural transformation', , all of which are treated as ends in themselves rather than as transitional demands.

The success of this programmatic outline as a platform for a popular front was proved with remarkable rapidity.

The CRM itself already represents, as we shall see, an alliance of forces which, although-long calling for 'unity of the left' , had been in sharp political conflict for •over a decade.

Its largest components, the Bloque Popular Revolucionario (BPR) and the Frente de Accion Popular Unificada (FAPU), and the smaller Ligas Populares-28 de Febrero (LP-28) had substantial differences over tactics.

But they had been united in opposition to the strategy of the Communist Party, the electoral front of which-the UDN-was the fourth signatory of the nlatform They attacked the CP as reformist' and revisionist long before the UDN actually joined the government set up by the military junta in October 1979.

Nevertheless, these groups share a formal. adherence to "marxism' and 'socialism'. • and possess a sufficiently large membership within the working class and peasantry to be considered workers' mass, parties, albeit with petty bourgeois politics and leaderships.

Their alliance on the basis of the programme of 28 February was in many respects a coherent move and consistent with the example of the FSLN in Nicaragua-in terms of the strategy of "prolonged peoples' war' and the 'policy of broad alliances' with capitalist organisations. the 'established Consequently having united successfully appealed for the support of the Frente Democratico Salvadoreno (FDS).

The FDS, formed a week after the announcement of the programme, consists of the small social democratic MR, the tiny Social Christian party, leading Christian Democratic politicians who had resigned from the government over the previous months in protest at its repressive policies, independent protessional assocations, and trade unions which had hitherto resisted affiliating to the left parties.

On 18 April the CRM and the FDS combined to form the Frente Democratico Revolucionario (FDR), the secretary general of which is Enrique Alvarez, previously minister of agriculture for the junta.

Since April the FDR has been engaged in the task of emulating the 'successes' of the FSLN last year in drumming up aid for its cause amongst 'social democratic' regimes.

The leading political figures of the October-January junta have toured the chancelleries of the world in search of backing for their newfound democratic locomotive.

These are the Robelos and Chamorros of El Salvador: Hector Dada (ex-Foreign Minister); Ruben Zamora (ex-Minister of Presidency)-who only in February of this year was attacked for being 'in close alliance with the US State Department by Salvador Cayetano Carpio of the BPR-FPL but is now a leading architect of the FDR; Roman Mayorga (ex-junta member) and Guillermo Ungo (leader of the MNR and exjunta member) to whom the FAPU referred in January as "petty bourgeois reformists fülly entwined in the cobweb of the oligarchy". (Pueblo, Boletin Internacional, Jan. 1980 pp. 29-30).

In sum, the FDR fosters the political enterprise of bourgeois figures and parties which, while they may be distinguished from the central oligarchic bloc, actively participated in a regime that killed hundreds of workers and peasants in the service of imperialism and with the full knowledge that the junta was totally mortgaged to the US State Department.

In this they differ from their Nicaraguan confreres who were faced with the monolithic Somocista bloc with which they could, despite frenzied efforts, achieve no institutional settlement.

Moreover, in Nicaragua there was no scope for a separate arrangement with the military since the Guardia Nacional owed its existence and very survival to the Somoza dynasty which guaranteed it a share of the family's booty, and actually used it against other sectors of capital.

To be sure, some of the Salvadorean dissident bourgeois politicians may have been personally outraged by the methods employed by their military allies.

But their principal reason for quitting the ship of state was the fact that this repression actively encouraged resistance and the growth of revolutionary consciousness amongst the masses.

By transferring their allegiances they have certainly polished up their 'democratic' credentials; but they have also moved to safeguard the norms of property ('small- and medium -sized').

In this they have been more perspicacious than the high marshals of imperialism-a contradiction that relates to the different interests of the specific and the general.

The danger to the workers' movement, however, remains just as great.

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Wednesday September 3, 1980