Salvador Groups Cling to Stalinist Strategy

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TP*28 The Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS) clings on to a perspective of a longterm alliance with supposedly 'progressive' sections of capitalists.

This, the policy of the 'popinant line of the lett in Ed satvador.

In seeking to break from this position and to find a more radical line of policy, the leadership of the Popular Revolutionary Block (BPR) initially went far beyond merely criticising the CP's lack of any perspective of armed struggle.

While they did of course attack this position, the BPR went on to reject outright what it described as the PCS's consistent efforts to:

"orientate the masses towards bourgeois objectives such as "constitutionality (which legalises the capitalist system of ox la democratic thermaling, govellecue (of a bourgeois character, headed not by workers and peasants but by the opposition bourgeoisie"

(Combate, 3/7/77)

Moreover the BPR correctly showed that these positions flow from the PCS's:

"belief in the possibility of the growth of a "national independent bourgeoisie; a position that for many years has lost its objective basis and possibilities, to the degree that international monopoly capital has been penetrating our economy"

(The People's Alternative, 11 July 1976.)

From this starting point the BPR assailed the PCS as "refoImist", "revisionist"; "moving to the right", , and even aiding the counter-revolution and imperialism" through its capitulationist policies (BPR Boletin Internacional, San Francisco, Dec.

1979).

Bureaucratisation

The BPR had also earlier attacked the United Popular Action Front (FAPU) on a similar basis - criticising its purely anti-fascist strategy.

And the BPR's critique features an assessment of the bureaucratisation of trade union leaderships which appear to echo many Trotskyist formulations.

Both the BPR and the Popular Liberation Front (FPL)

have explicitly declared themselves to be "forces of revolutionary socialism."

They have stated that the only fundamental classes are those of capital and labour, and that thescience of"marxism -leninism" provides the central means of understanding and overthrowing capitalism.

The revolutionary mobilisation will not cease until this is achieved, they argue Boletin Internacional, June 1979).

But against the PCS's search for an alliance with a "progressive" wing of the capitalist class, the BPR counterposes the call for a "Revolutionary Front"

which, they say, must:

"(a) be led and orientated in its struggle by the proletariat and its revolutionary principles, the indispensible condition of the Popular Revolution towards socialism.

(b) have as its fundamental driving force the worker-peasant alliance, based on the revolutiionary alliances of the people.

The worker-peasant alliance will Victims of right wing violence is of right wing violence / have to draw around itself the advanced members of the petty bourgeoisie and of the middle strata...

(The People's Alternative)

Quotes from Mao and Vietnamese leader Giap are used to support these positions, and there is more than a hint of Maoism in the BPR's emphasis on returning to the popular masses".

It is this «return" which is used to argue for the turn away from the industrial proletariat and towards the peasantry. It is among the peasants that the BPR found the principal source of its strength in its early years.

The attraction of Maoism for the BPR leaders in their break from the pacifism of the Communist Party is that it offers a military strategy while remaining within the confines of the Stalinist view of "Marxism-leninism", The crude popular frontism of the PCS is replaced not by a fight for the mobilisation of the proletariat, but by a concentration on the peasantry under the guise of a strategy for "all revolutionary classes"

It is telling that when the BPR referes to these classes it effectively suppresses the leading role of the proletariat.

These revolutionary classes' are described as:

"the workers of the countryside and the city, the poor and middle peasants, the most exploited sectors of the petty bourgeoisie (small producers, small proprietors, traders, etc and the most oppressed sectors of the middle strata (teacheis, students, intellectuals, etc) who are the agents of the revolutionary, process, and nobody can replace them in this historic mission."

(The People's Alternative)

There is a political link between these lines written in July 1976 and the programme of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR), written in February 1980.

Rhetoric Despite its fighting rhetoric and critique of PCS pacifism, the BPR could not attain a genuine alternative to the politics of the PCS without embracing Trotskyism, which alone comprehends the necessary leading role of the working class, as expressed in the theory of Permanent Revo'above and right) lution.

This has left the BPR with only a road back towards a 'left' form of class alliance and popular frontism.

However the principal external influence upon this political development is not Peking or Hanoi (although it is interesting to note that FAPU manifests keen interest in Hanoi, with the entire June issue of its magazine Polemica Internacional devoted to a discussion, of the strategy of the NLF in Vietnam), but Stuffing The Nicaraguan revolution has put the stuffing into the "policy of alliances' with remarkable speed.

Indeed the impact of the defeat of Somoza can be seen in the turnaround by BPR leader Cayetano.

In February of this year he denounced the connections between Ruben Zamora and the US State Department, and stated that the proposed Popular Revolutionary Government of El Salvador would be constituted "from all social sectors, excluding the 14 families, imperialism, and its allies"

(Barricada, 25 Feb)

Yet a mere two months later Cayetano was well ensconced alongside Zamora in the FDR, fighting now for a government which in Cayetano's words:

"Will not be socialist but, rather, a government that, with the efforts of the entire people, will build an economy on the basis of independence and sovereign development."

This orientation has been defended and pursued even more consistently by FAPU, which is also politically descended from the PCS. Its guerrilla arm, the FARN, grew out of the ERP, which was the guerrillaist (Castroite) breakaway from the CP in the 1960s.

The ERP was headed by the celebrated poet Roque Dalton who had been a leading Stalinist for over a decade; but he quickly appreciated the errors of guerrillaism and was killed in a sordid internal struggle when he set up FARN.

In 1974 FAPU was established from a grouping of radical trade union caucuses. But while it achieved a substantial base among the industrial working class, it still held on to a broad anti-fascist programme, and failed to undertake any serious work amongst the rural proletariat and the peasantry which led to the formation of the BPR the following year.

The BPR attacked the FAPU as:

"a vacillating petty bourgeois current, the political strategy of which has led it to attach itself to the designs of the revisionists."

(Combate 3/7/77)

Left voice Yet FAPU itself has a highly adroit left voice. It argues, like the BPR, that "marxism leninism is the only science capable of guiding the people towards socialism and communism" (Polemica Internacional, June 1980). It argues that:

"the fundamental social classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and that the struggle between these two classes consential nucle soy class struggle in El Salvador."

(Polemica Internacional, February 1980).

It argues that the fate of Latin American military dictatorships is inextricably linked to the crisis in world capitalism and goes on to warn that while CP leader Shafik fears • the plans of the ultra right, the danger comes equally, if not even more so from another quarter:

the "Great Right", , the not-so-extreme-right, but in the end still the right, which accounts for a good part of the middle class and bourgeoisie... which is against a military counter-coup because it understands that in the long term El Salvador National Guard the costs of military dictatorship are too great.

Equally, despite the fact that it did not immediately call for the overthrow of the October junta, FAPU identified it as:

"an alliance between the army(as the principal bastion, within which agreement was reached between the pro-imperialist sector and the young officer sector on the basis of the partial displacement of the fascist sector), the "aperturist' sector of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeois reformist political parties, and intellectual sectors linked to the Catholic Church."

Yet, like the BPR, FAPU has eagerly grasped the. "lessons of Nicaragua":

*the second lesson which the Sandinista Revolution has taught us is the necessity of establishing the broadest alliances with democratic forces...

(Pueblo, 10 March 1980)

"Mature forces"

Pueblo, FAPU give prominence In the March issue of an interview with FSLN 'Comandante' Humberto Ortega in which he emphasises the importance of 'flexible, mature policies of alliances':

"Mature forces? ... I refer to those bourgeois forces which continue to mature and do not indulge in adventuristic acts like those of the CIA and the most reactionary and retrograde sectors. There are mature forces in the world which while they understand the nature, the strength of a revolutionary movement, and are at the same time in partial contradiction with it, can come to respect it.

One can reach determinate alliances at determinate political points which draw together a correlation of forces necessary to make a definitive breakthensinh It was important to gain the support of every- InTOug! • • • te was body, not just the left...

(Pueblo, 10 March 1980)

Thus the new authority of the FSLN in post-revolutionary Nicaragua is being thrown unambiguously into international alliances that submerge completely the leading role of the working class, and reduce the question of socialist revolution to one of "stages" in the classic Stalinist pattern - first "democratic" capitalism, then, al some point in the future. socialismi The third major "politicomilitary' organisation is the LP28/ERP, which joined the FDR-DRU alliance later than the others principally because the ERP has maintained a more adventurist and Guevarist strategy than the other groups.

This tendency has certainly been somewhat tamed in recent months, in part by the necessity of coordinating actions as the tempo rises, and in part by the very cost sustained during the attempted full-scale insurrection called by the ERP in October after the overthrow of General Romero.

Adventurism

All the same, the ERP's adventurism is still evident and remarked upon by its peers.

The LP-28 has demonstrated similar tendencies in the political field, and this can be explained to some degree by the fact that a large part of its membership is drawn from the slums of San Salvador, and that it lacks an appreciable base in the industrial working class or the peasantry.

Comparatively undeveloped programmatically, largely staffed by student radicals and the recently-mobilised, lumpenproletariat, the LP-28 remains the most 'insurrectionist ?, immediately populist current.

Nevertheless, it has shown itself to be increasingly influenced by the political progr ammes of the BPR and FAPU and its military capacity has grown considerably over recent months, with the army now admitting that the ERP controls large parts of the north-eastern province of Morazan.

Concluded

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age LIST PRESS, Wednesday