First Published: Workers Vanguard, #19, April 27, 1973.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) held the first congress of its “U.S. zone” in New York City early last month. The closing session was attended by approximately 1,500 people, in spite of inclement weather, indicating the rapid growth of the PSP in the last year. The congress approved the Political Declaration of the U.S. zone and a number of resolutions, notably on unity of Puerto Rican independence forces and relations with the U.S. left.
The congress also marked the consolidation of the PSP as the major leftist force in the Puerto Rican communities of the U.S. and a step on the road to becoming a mass reformist social democratic party.
In the public sessions PSP spokesmen concentrated on elaborating their view that Puerto Ricans in the U.S. are not a national minority but an integral part of the Puerto Rican nation itself. As a consequence they should be organized not as members of a single vanguard party in the U.S., but rather as part of the PSP.
The Political Declaration approved at the congress was based on the conception that Puerto Ricans everywhere are part of a single nation:
The General Declaration of our party begins with the affirmation that ’Puerto Rico is a Latin American nation with four and one-half million citizens, 2,700,000 of whom live on the island and the rest (more than a third) are concentrated in New York and other places in the U.S.
Thus we begin with a basic conclusion: We Puerto Ricans, whether living here or there, constitute a single nation.
In his speech at the closing session on 8 April, Juan Mari Bras, general secretary of the PSP, maintained that the “single Puerto Rican nation” is marked by “a cohesive identification of our national being” defined in part by linguistic and cultural characteristics. The tremendous immigration to the U.S. was part of a plan of “national genocide” characteristic of the 75 years of Yankee colonialism. As a consequence, “The conquest of independence for the fatherland has priority, in order to safeguard the nation.”
Mari Bras argued that achievement of Puerto Rican independence would be a blow to U.S. imperialism, which has made the island into a major military outpost in the Caribbean, a “super coaling station” for U.S. efforts to suppress the struggles of Latin American peoples for national liberation. In his presentation of the Political Declaration, Ram6n Arbona, first secretary of the U.S. zone, declared that there will be no revolution in the U.S. without previous independence in the colony.
Asking militants to read, discuss and dispute the program of the PSP, Arbona declared that:
... all Puerto Ricans suffering from imperialism are part of the nation.... vVe are not a national minority with ties to the nation, but part of the nation itself.... To talk about Puerto Ricans in the U.S. as a national minority in the U.S. forgets that in that sense Puerto Rico itself would simply be a national minority.
He called for “unleashing the national liberation struggle in the U.S. cities,” Arbona did, however, add that “we must participate in the revolutionary process in the U.S.”:
We cannot have real independence in Puerto Rico until after eliminating the social oppression and exploitation of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. But this is not possible without socialism in the U.S.
The U.S. must be restructured to safeguard the rights of national minorities, he continued. The Puerto Ricans must link up with other sectors of the population who are equally oppressed.
In his speech at the opening of the congress on 30 March, Mari Bras linked this view of a “single Puerto Rican nation” to the PSP’s “original contribution to Marxist-Leninist science,” namely, the creation of a semi-autonomous section of their party in the U.S.
One of the important decisions of the congress was an attempt to formalize the PSP’s relations with the U.S. left. In the past the PSP has had loose links with the International Socialists and the National Caucus of Labor Committees. At this congress, a representative of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party sat at the presiding table, as well as representatives of the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (Young Lords), the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), El Comite, the Black Workers Congress, the Guardian, the Revolutionary Union and Workers World Party.
The PSP reaffirmed its traditional position of calling for a “patriotic front” of all Puerto Rican independence forces, including in this the bourgeois PIP. A resolution called for concrete depression is undermined by the adverse balance of payments and the highly unstable world monetary system. In such a situation we can expect to face increasingly sharp recessions which will have a radicalizing influence on the working class internationally and will thus open opportunities for rapid growth of socialist organizations.
In this situation the main danger is not capitalist reactionaries on the order of Nixon-Agnew, but the trade-union leadership and aspiring reform bureaucrats who will be in a key position to sidetrack the coming struggles, unless they are defeated politically by an alternative, revolutionary leadership.
But in any case there is no final crisis of capitalism from which the capitalists cannot recover if the workers do not themselves directly challenge the exploiters for state power. Even though corrupt and bankrupt, the capitalist system will not fall of its own weight. What is required to bring down the bourgeoisie is the intervention of the conscious vanguard struggling for the class independence of the proletariat. With their predictions of imminent depression/fascism the various fake left groups (CP, NCLC, WL) are looking only for a cover which will excuse their capitulations before the bourgeoisie, the labor bureaucracy and the existing backward consciousness of the workers. Super-radicalism in words, opportunism in deeds.