The “Nationalist” Revolution in Bolivia

A Special Correspondent

Labor Action, 28th April, 1952

Promises

[...] In his first official declaration, the no.2 man of the MNR, Hernan Siles Zuazo [the top leader is Paz Estenssoro, who has been in exile in Buenos Aires] promised the workers that “our government will not only be one of reform, but it will be a government of political, social and economic transformation”. He promised a change in the colonial economic structure and a transformation of the one-product economy [tin and other materials] towards a diversification of industry and agriculture. He also promised Agrarian reform and the integration of the Indians into national life. The secretary of the miners’ union, Juan Lechin, promised nationalization of the mines.

This is indeed the key to the situation, the reason for the heroic fight of the workers and also the tragedy of the Nationalists in power. The workers were and are fighting only for power and for a “transformation”, that is, for “social revolution” and the MNR is fighting only for power and for a patchwork reform of Bolivian capitalism. The MNR government will be only a patchwork government because the MNR is only a petty bourgeois party and not a revolutionary workers’ party.

The Bolivian workers want a revolution but are quite confused about its content, for the MNR talks about the “national revolution” and the Stalinists [PIR] and Trotskyists [POR] talk about the “democratic revolution”. But this is precisely the basic error of the Stalinists and backward Fourth Internationalists; in our time what is possible is only a revolution carried through and led by the workers – that is, only the social revolution, which will solve the national and democratic problems of backwardness in passing. The social revolution of our time is the Socialist revolution and its leader is the proletariat, not the petty bourgeoisie or the Stalinist bureaucrats.

The Bolivian POR [Trotskyists] supported the MNR; the militants of the POR fought under the leadership of the Nationalists in Lechin’s groups on the streets, as this writer was able to see personally. They fought in the hope that the MNR would start the democratic revolution in Bolivia and that “then we [the POR] will come”. But in Bolivia there is no revolutionary bourgeoisie; there is only the nationalist petty bourgeoisie, which is oriented towards Peronism, and the Stalinist “intelligentsia”, which would introduce state capitalism [...]

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