The MNR, POR, and the Bolivian Revolution of 1952
To prove that I haven’t been slacking off entirely, I decided to post my latest history paper, titled The MNR, POR, and the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Although I’m pretty sure this paper will have a niche audience, it brings to mind some pretty uniform lessons of Latin American politics and their shortcomings to date. Also, as this website also acts as an online portfolio of sorts: it may get me hired by the Bolivian government.
I have been additionally blogging over at the PSEN blog (Penn State Entrepreneurs Network), where I provide musings on entrepreneurship. I assume that this blog will continue to promote whatever ideas spring into my mind in the long-form style that I’ve posted with so far. Hang in there.
—–
The MNR, POR, and the Bolivian Revolution of 1952
Had Engels and Marx designed the state themselves, it is unlikely that they could have created a more archetypal case study for the prerequisites for a socialist revolution than Bolivia in the 40’s and 50’s. Originally a Spanish colony, Bolivia suffered from political and economic instability for more than 100 years, since its independence in 1842. As a result of its instability, Bolivia was an agrarian society, with 72% of its population working as “campesinos,” or farming peasants. The campesinos were subjected to severely inadequate land distribution, low wages, and unfair treatment, working within the Bolivian “hacienda” system, resembling feudal systems of the Middle Ages. The deplorable condition of the hacienda system met the qualifications for Marxist “super-exploitation,” meaning that the campesinos were paid less than the value of their own subsistence. The peasantry was caught in a state of perpetual oppression, as landowners had no incentive to modernize their means of production due to the abundance of cheap labor available to them.
Despite the predominance of Bolivian agriculture proportionally, profits from the sector only made up 1/3 of the country’s total GDP. The other 2/3 was almost entirely due to tin exports, employing a sizable proletariat class of miners. The interests of the mines were in the hands of the few: a rosca, or oligarchy, was responsible for reaping the profits of the miner’s efforts. Tin, Bolivia’s sole source of export production, was innately tied to the international economy. As such, following the market crashes of the 1930’s, Tin prices fell exponentially, never again reaching their 1929-level prices. The proletarian miners found their wages decreasing more and more each year, as global market demand for the low-quality tin decreased.
The Bolivian population was subject to the ills of capitalism and the class struggle, two of socialism’s most notorious enemies. Leftist political parties began to spring up during the early periods of military rule. These parties quickly grew in popularity, providing an alternative to the bourgeois Conservative and Liberal parties that dominated Bolivian politics in prior periods of democracy. These new parties espoused the virtues of socialism, focusing on the literature of the great communist minds, namely Trotsky, Lenin, Marx, and Engels.
Of the left-leaning political parties, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) assumed the role of vanguard revolutionary power in Bolivia. Starting in September 1949, the MNR, echoing the need for Marx and Engels’ “smashing” of the state, organized and armed the civilian population, forming urban and rural militias. After initially attempting to seek power through democratic means and being discredited, the MNR soon realized that an armed revolution was the singular solution.
The Bolivian Revolution of 1952, despite containing the requisites of a socialist revolution, was a failure from its inception, ultimately straying significantly from a socialist revolution. The nationalist MNR party found itself falling into the traps implicitly forewarned by the forefathers of the socialist movement in their most infamous texts. By acquiescing to every demand of the proletariat and peasant classes following its rise to power, the MNR and its allies assumed the role of “yes-man,” creating a society strife with bureaucracy, greed, and economic ineptitude, while the ideologically-slanted Revolutionary Worker’s Party (POR) stood idly by; “a revolution betrayed.”
One of the most significant shortcomings of the Bolivian revolution can be directly ascribed to the role of the POR. The POR was initially founded in the mid-30’s, ascertaining to follow a hard-line “Trotsky-ist” stance. During most of the early 40’s, the POR maintained a strong support base among Bolivia’s mining community, proving instrumental in the formation of the Miner’s Federation, henceforth referred to as the FSTMB. As the FSTMB grew steadily in numbers, so did their influence in Bolivian politics. In response to the short-lived military coup of Gualberto Villarroel, the FSTMB met collectively in the city of Puyacayo, establishing the “Thesis of Puyacayo.” The thesis was an overtly Trotsky-ist document, calling for a “worker’s revolution,” no doubt a result of the heavy influence of the POR party within the union ranks. However, as the elections of 1951 approached, the POR-dominated FSTMB and the POR itself took a backseat to the MNR, rallying instead around their candidate for President and writing his speeches. This paradigm continued through the Revolution of 1952, when armed miners marched on Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, overtaking the “mestizo” rosca and bringing the MNR to power.
Following the Trotsky-ist agenda laid out in Results & Prospects, the MNR began its tenure as the vanguard party of the revolution by taking up the struggle for “bourgeois issues,” such as campesino rights, and the nationalization of the mines. These “bread and butter issues” were a direct result of the demands of their proletariat and peasant constituency, building off the POR-penned Thesis of Puyacayo written more than 10 years prior. Its first official action as ruling party was an edict of universal suffrage, abolishing the previous literacy requirement which prevented most campesinos from voting, expanding the voting base from 200,000 to 1,000,000 and guaranteeing themselves a support base for future elections. The MNR proceeded to gut the army, yet never disbanding it entirely. Again, this paralleled the POR’s Trotsky-ist vision of revolution, clearly outlined in Trotsky’s Results and Prospects: “[the revolution's] first task will have to be the dismissal from the army and administration of all those who are stained with the blood of the people, and the cashiering or disbandment of the regiments which have most sullied themselves with crimes against the people.” [5] However, the overt Trotsky-ist agenda that characterized the MNR’s initial actions in power quickly disappeared, as months passed without any action.
Since its inception, the MNR had been a strictly nationalist party, with nationalist issues at the forefront of their agenda. The MNR carried with it no ideological or independent vision of political and economic development. As such, the POR always acted as the ideological backbone of the party, writing the MNR’s campaign speeches and forming its platforms. The bourgeois leadership of the MNR juggled the popular sentiment of two primary, yet separate, constituent groups – the proletariat class and the peasant class. As Arganaras aptly puts it in his paper Bolivia’s Transformist Revolution, “the revolutionary alliance was led by two forces endowed with divergent state wills.” [3] Before long, this led to fractioned fighting within the party itself, swaying left and right with each gust of revolutionary demand.
One of the MNR’s first decisions as acting party was to consolidate the labor unions of Bolivia into a singular entity, known as the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB.) The FSTMB took up a large portion of the newly formed union, bringing along the POR’s Trotsky-ist influence, carrying with it FSTMB’s figurehead, Juan Lechín. Per José Villa: “the POR was the most important and influential party within the COB, which was itself the dominant power in the country.” [1] The POR saw the election of the MNR as a “transition” step; they were in a perfect position to create significant progress towards an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Villa explains: “…the POR considered that the left wing elements of the governing party would ‘proceed to their logical conclusion, that is to say, evolve towards forming a workers and peasants government’.” [1] The logical transition, according to Villa, would be the transformation of the COB into a soviet, a relatively simple task relative to the POR’s influence within the Union. Despite this “opportunity,” the POR and its leader, Guillermo Lora, listlessly obliged with the MNR, continuing their unbridled support of the MNR leadership with the utopian assumption that the revolution would run its natural course. By postponing their agenda for the future, the POR blatantly failed to heed the warnings of Lenin in The State and Revolution, in which he describes the “transition” step as “a surrender to opportunism; for at present the opportunists ask nothing better than to “safely leave to the future” all fundamental questions of the tasks of the proletarian revolution.” [2]
As the months progressed, the miners grew increasingly inpatient. They and their COB coalition pressed the MNR to follow through with one of its primary platforms: the nationalization of Bolivia’s primary export factor, tin. The MNR, caving to COB pressure, established the Comibol in August 31st, 1952 as the nationalized mining corporation of Bolivia. The formation of the Comibol brought 2/3 of Bolivia’s mines under national control, leaving 1/3 of the remaining mines in private hands. Coincidentally, the remaining private mines all had a similar quality: they were foreign owned, primarily direct trusts of the United States. This represents an obvious fractioning within the MNR party: while leftists of the party clearly opposed the decision and sought out more government control over the economy, the right wing of the MNR hoped to solve the nation’s problems with aid from the United States. The POR offered little resistance to these measures, clearly enacted far from Lenin’s presumed role of government (“…watching over the true interests of society.”) [2] Villa explains “The POR called for the nationalization of the land, mines, and railways, but did not call upon the workers and peasants to carry it out themselves, merely requesting and pressuring the government to do it.” [1] The MNR chose to appease its western partners in capitalism over its proletariat base. To mollify this obvious encroachment of trust between the bourgeois MNR and proletariat COB, the MNR government granted members of the COB elite directorship positions within the Comibol, dubbing the arrangement “co-government.”
The MNR continued to utilize the power and wealth associated with the bureaucratization of government to its advantage, creating and maintaining a cabinet as a reward-based function. Juan Lechín, leader of both the Comibol and COB, was awarded the position of Minister of Mining and Petroleum. Lechín profited immensely from his new-founded arrangement, taking up residence at the Hotel Crillon, the most luxurious hotel in La Paz. As Villa ironically points out: “the workers who had made him their irreplaceable leader lived in the most degraded conditions of squalor” [1] Rather than balk at the incessant bureaucracy of the MNR, the POR readily joined in, reaping the benefits of the newly-actualized MNR, a bureaucratic machine. According to Villa: “the POR is accepting posts in the government machinery,” and continues on to rattle off the names of the POR’s elite, assuming prominent (and no doubt, highly rewarding) positions within the MNR regime. Contrary to Leninist philosophy (“that public functions will lose their political character and be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society”), [2] public functions took on an increased political character, becoming a vital aspect of MNR political strategy.
By the early part of 1953, the MNR government had yet to act on the promises it had made to its peasant constituency. Across the Bolivian countryside, the peasantry had begun to act out against the feudal hacienda institution, attacking the landlords of the estates, in addition to the land itself. In an obvious show of desperation, the MNR, appearing powerless in lieu of the violence, enacted the Agrarian Reforms of 1953. The reforms contained a redistribution of the haciendas to peasant communities (dubbed “syndicatos.”) The alliance of the peasants, relying so heavily on nationalist sentiment, fell back into historic ethnic feuds of the Quechua and Aymara indigenous peoples. The peasants, who had lived for hundreds of years within a feudal system of poverty and indentured servitude, suddenly received the right to their own land. The newly founded syndicatos became a “conservative force” within the MNR, seeking the bourgeois reforms of capitalist governments. By caving in to the unlawfulness of the peasant class, the MNR created a brand new social class resembling the petit bourgeois of Russia! This outcome directly parallels Trotsky’s historical and notorious distrust of the peasantry, degrading their role in the revolutionary movement throughout Results and Prospects.
Following the Agrarian Reforms of 1953 and the subsequent actions taken on by the syndicatos, a nationalist alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry in Bolivia was no longer a foregone conclusion. The Bolivian economy, with dramatic tremors to its centuries-old institutions, soon fell into chaos. In addition, Comibol management, no doubt spurred by the actions of Lechín and the Comibol leadership, increased the now-guaranteed salaries of the work force by nearly 50 percent, abetting the dismal situation further. The Bolivian Peso fell into a state of hyperinflation, causing the national currency to become devalued by nearly 900%. The right wing of the MNR, with its continued drive for US aid, won out in the ongoing conflict within the MNR. As the decade ended, US aid took on an increasingly prominent role within the Bolivia political and economic framework, an acknowledgment of the failure of the MNR-led government and their once-socialist platform.
Trotsky clearly describes the role of socialist revolutions in relation to the Permanent Revolution in his concise account, What is the Permanent Revolution? He states: “the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completely, only in the final victory of the new society of our entire planet.” [4] However, by ceding to the bourgeois traps of bureaucracy and capitalism, the Bolivian Revolution never reached a Trotsky-ist state of permanent revolution. Instead, it became nothing more than a failed attempt, seemingly content to contain itself within “unthinkable” national limits. [4] Had the POR stepped in to provide the ideological framework necessary for the perpetuation of the socialist revolution, and not merely rode the coattails of the success and popularity of the MNR, the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 may have resulted in a dramatically different conclusion. Instead, the “divergent state wills” [3] of the proletariat and peasantry were unsuccessfully managed by the MNR leadership, eventually crumbling into a state beyond repair. As Villa describes with clear disgust, the co-government of the revolution became nothing more than “a bourgeois government with a decoration of ‘Trotskyist’ ministers,” [1]
–
[1] Villa. A Revolution Betrayed
[2] Lenin. State and Revolution
[3] Arganaras, Fernando Garcia. “Bolivia’s Transformist Revolution.” Latin American Perspectives 19.2 (1992): 44-71. Print.
[4] Trotsky. “What is the Permanent Revolution?”
[5] Trotsky. “Results and Prospects”
leave a comment