I. Economic Tendencies and Increased Imperialist Exploitation
(1) Above and beyond the national and regional peculiarities and conjunctural ups and downs, the economic tendencies operating at present in Latin America remain pretty much the same as in the past, the most negative features tending generally to become worse. The situation can be summarized as follows: In no country has there been an economic expansion which would meet the needs of real development and counterbalance the rate of population increase. Industrialization, even when it extends into new sectors, remains limited and partial. Investment is inadequate and in no case offers a basis for more balanced development and absorption of the unemployed and underemployed. The national debt is still a source of financial crises and budgetary difficulties. The draining off of profits from the Latin-American economy (by American, but also, in part, European and Japanese imperialism) is continuing and increasing, as is the general unfavorable evolution in terms of trade. Agricultural production is deteriorating and proving in any case more and more inadequate with respect to the needs of consumption, which is growing, if only as a result of the increased population. The weight in the economy of low-profit or unprofitable sectors, far from decreasing, has risen still more. In most of these countries inflation remains a chronic or very frequent phenomenon.
(2) A relatively new tendency which has increased in recent years is a movement of foreign investment into modern, dynamic industrial sectors not directly linked to the processing of raw materials. This has resulted in two things. First of all, it has created economic sectors exclusively controlled from the start by imperialist corporations in lines traditionally reserved to the so-called national bourgeoisie. Secondly, it has produced a grave and imminent threat to national industries which though relatively developed cannot meet the competition of a much more dynamic technology and far more efficient organizational and managerial techniques, and which moreover need capital not available locally. This means that while continuing to bear the crushing burden of all the traditional forms of economic domination and exploitation, Latin America now finds even its most modern sectors facing the same sort of threat the European countries face (absorption, elimination owing to American competition, etc.). The consequence can only be new economic distortions and greater imperialist exploitation. This means that an economic development in any way capable of solving this continent's tragic social problems is totally ruled out. This is all the more true because the Latin-American bourgeoisies have proved incapable, in general, of carrying out even very modest attempts to develop regional "common markets," and at a time when it is becoming more and more clear that the dimensions of the present national states are too narrow to permit a real takeoff for modern industry.
II. Dynamics and Role of the Social Classes
(3) The economic and social processes, more especially in the past fifteen years, have culminated in important changes in the relative composition of the ruling classes. The most striking element has been the decline in the economic and political weight of the traditional layers of the big landlords, especially those less directly linked with the commercial and financial bourgeois layers. The more specifically urban ruling strata, linked to the new industrial sectors, to big business and to financial capital, have increasingly played the fundamental role, seeking to translate this economic and social reality into new formulas of political rule (for example, the Frei experiment in Chile, to a lesser extent that of Belaúnde in Peru).
However, the relative reenforcement of the industrial bourgeoisie in nowise means that a vigorous social class has developed able to play an effective leading role and to act independently. The economic consolidation of this class, its existence, is tightly bound up with the operations and interests of Yankee imperialism; or, in far fewer cases, of European imperialism. In the best of cases, it is more precisely joint ventures of foreign and native capital that is involved in which the native capitalists most often play a completely subordinate role and have no possibility of acting on their own. Thus, it would be absolutely incorrect to project the perspective of an increased role for the national bourgeoisie as a historical class capable of any kind of consistent struggle to free itself from imperialist tutelage (the bankruptcy of the Belaúnde experiment is significant in this regard, since Peru is one of the countries where there has unquestionably been a certain amount of industrial development).
(4) As a result of the well-known phenomena of the last fifteen to twenty years, and especially with the growing urbanization, the new petty-bourgeois strata—white collar workers in various government bureaus, trade, and the services, the liberal professions, etc.—have gained strength. These are the strata where the ideological influence of imperialism is the strongest (relative success of propaganda for the model of the consumer society, for the American Way of Life, etc.), where it is most difficult to mobilize against imperialism, and where the government parties recruit their electoral clientele (for example, part of Frei's support in Chile, of Leoni's in Venezuela, of the old coalition parties in Peru). However, the position of these strata is quite precarious, either because they live off risky enterprises or get their incomes (at least in part) more from assorted expedients skirting the law than from the "normal" functioning of the economic machine. They are at the mercy of this or that clique or group in power, being the first in any case to pay the price for recessions, attacks of inflation, and changes in the ruling cliques. They have no perspective for any real security or substantial social advancement for their children (who swell the ranks of the students engaging in "confrontations"). This new petty bourgeoisie, then, can temporarily aid the political operations of the ruling classes and imperialism; but, in the last analysis, it is no social cement for the system; and, in critical situations, it can be swept by sudden flames of revolt. In certain countries, moreover, layers of employees of the state and of different administrations have already played an important role in some of the broad and militant trade-union mobilizations.
(5) The peasantry represents a decreasing percentage of the total population and its specific economic weight is declining more markedly and more rapidly than its quantitative weight. In certain countries particularly, the tendency toward expansion of the agricultural proletariat is increasing. Nevertheless, in absolute terms it still constitutes the majority and often the overwhelming majority of the population. It is still the social class which suffers the worst exploitation and oppression and which, in the existing economic and social context, has the least perspective.
The causes of the peasants' discontent and anger are manifold—the traditional land hunger, the choking off of subsistence agriculture, conflict with the state administration which extorts taxes and appears most often as an instrument of repression in the service of the exploiters, disillusionment arising from the fraudulent nature of the official "agrarian reforms," fear of a comeback by the landlords in the countries where they have had to renounce certain privileges, difficulties arising from price and market problems especially for small independent farmers, unfavorable repercussions from prices on the world market, etc. In countries like Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia, etc., the social oppression is also expressed in terms of national oppression, hitting a high percentage of the population. The outcome is always the same. Far from improving, the lot of the peasants remains tragic and is even getting worse. Hence the persistent impetus to struggle and revolt. This is all the more true because the peasants are less and less isolated from the international political and ideological currents; have largely assimilated the lesson of the Cuban revolution; have learned a great deal from the guerrilla experiences and are not cut off from the student revolutionary movements, whose influence reaches them through a thousand different channels.
(6) The working class has not undergone any quantitative growth, despite the development of industrial production in certain countries. This is due to the fact that certain industrial advances have gone hand in hand with a crisis in the traditional sectors and have been based on technological innovations and rationalizations which involve a contraction rather than an expansion in manpower employed. Aside from completely exceptional cases, the tendency is by no means for the standard of living to rise but rather to stagnate and most often decline (in some cases, for example, Uruguay, to a dramatic degree). For both objective reasons (unemployment, underemployment, etc.) and subjective reasons (their subordination to the government, their bureaucratization, the control of pro-Soviet Communist parties, etc.), the trade-union organizations are increasingly incapable of meeting this situation, even of exercising effective pressure within the framework of the system. Most often it is primarily the mechanism of inflation that depresses the workers' standard of living, cancelling out the wage gains that are occasionally made. Furthermore, from the social standpoint, the workers are usually the ones who often suffer the effects of the rural exodus, inasmuch as their very modest wages must provide the subsistence for groups of relatives and friends swollen by newcomers from the countryside (in exceptional cases, as for example in Bolivia during the crisis in the mines, the inverse phenomenon develops, namely, a partial return of workers to their villages of origin). Finally, the proletarian populace has not experienced any improvement in housing, living conditions, medical care, transportation, etc., or the possibility to assure a normal education for their children.
For all these reasons, the working class is absolutely not, and has no consciousness of being, even a relatively privileged layer-as superficial theoreticians claim. Exploited and oppressed in manifold forms by the capitalist and imperialist system, they have not ceased in reality to be an explosive force, a motor force of the revolution. Powerful strikes in defiance of military dictatorships (for example, in Brazil), mobilizations accompanied by clashes with the repressive forces (Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, etc.), linkups between nuclei of workers and the student movement (Mexico, Brazil) constitute, moreover, significant symptoms of a proletarian resurgence at the present time. If the broadest layers of the working class are still immobilized or neutralized and if the workers have not been able to play a substantial role in the revolutionary actions of recent years in certain countries, this is by no means a result of any degeneration or intrinsic weakness of the proletariat as a revolutionary force. It is the result of well-defined concrete factors, such as the momentary prostration resulting from severe defeats and repressions; the pernicious role of the trade-union bureaucracies which are more and more integrated into the government structure, especially in certain important countries, the no less negative role of opportunist political leaderships enjoying prestige sometimes rubbed off from an international Communist tradition, the weight of unemployment which has continued to increase in recent years, and the danger of reprisals in the event of struggles or strikes—which is a danger the workers are ready to face only if they see a real perspective for political change.
(7) As a result of the persistence, or even accentuation of the rural exodus, the concentrations of plebian masses on the periphery of the big cities are still growing. These masses can find no real openings in the basic economic structure and remain condemned to a poverty-stricken and precarious existence (sometimes a meager wage must suffice for a whole group, sometimes they live literally from hand to mouth, most often they apply their "initiative" in the most diverse ways, from peddling and occasional services to theft and prostitution). The assignment of a part of this disinherited population to the service sector is an outright statistical obfuscation. Far from being a symptom of progress and modernization, the expansion of the "services" is only an additional expression of the economic and social decay, involving the extension of nonproductive activities and of strata with the most precarious and pathetic kind of income. For this reason the masses grouped around the big cities still represent an explosive potential which could be fully tapped in critical situations by the revolutionary forces. This potential, moreover, has already partially expressed itself several times in the course of the last ten years and in abrupt and violent mobilizations (for example, in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile). More particularly, because of its essentially peasant origin and proletarian composition, this plebian element offers precious opportunities for concrete linkups between the working class and the peasantry and for the circulation of revolutionary ideas.
(8) The revolutionary student movement shook several Latin-American countries simultaneously with the student upsurge sweeping Western Europe and the United States. Common objective causes and subjective factors are unquestionably at the root of this upsurge which fits into the more general framework of the international revolt of the young generation. The common feature uniting all these struggles is the irresistible impulse generated by the ever deeper and more dramatic crisis shaking imperialism as a world system (which is concretized most specifically in Latin America in the influence of the Cuban revolution). It would be an error, however, to make too close an identification or analogy, forgetting in particular that:
(a) Students in the colonial and semicolonial countries have traditionally played a progressive and even revolutionary role since the beginning of the anti-imperialist struggles and they also played this role in powerful mobilizations for university reform in the twenties.
(b) The phenomenon of the population explosion in the universities and schools which is at the base of the crisis in the European countries has not assumed the same proportions.
This does not imply any underestimation of the revolutionary role the student strata can play on a continental scale in Latin America. In any case the role of the students will be much more substantial than in the past and must no longer be conceived as simply a supporting force or source of cadres for the revolutionary organizations. The student movement must be understood as a political and social force capable of stimulating or deepening revolutionary crises by its intervention. This is true for the following reasons:
(a) The dynamics of the student mass movement is assuming an entirely different character than in the past because it no longer expresses the demands of strata of the national bourgeoisie for independence and autonomy. The student movement, whatever its point of departure, is becoming a consistently anti-imperialist and anticapitalist movement (reflecting, among other things, a change in the social composition of the student population with the access to education of broad petty-bourgeois and even popular strata).
(b) The international and continental context has radically altered, opening new perspectives with regard to the radicalization and mobilization of petty-bourgeois forces.
(c) The cadres and activists of the student movement have not suffered all the demoralization from the bad experiences of the old organizations and their leaderships and are not tied by any umbilical cord to the traditions of the workers movement or the traditional national-revolutionary movement.
III. Political Situation and Perspectives
(9) The essential features of the political development can be summed up schematically as follows:
(a) Bankruptcy or profound crisis of the regimes which were presented as pilot models of the "democratic reformism" boosted with the propaganda send-off of the so-called Alliance for Progress (the fall of the Belaúnde regime in Peru following the bankruptcy of the most "progressive" wing of the national bourgeoisie, crisis of the Frei regime in Chile, deep erosion of the Venezuelan regime, which is incapable even of performing its repressive functions effectively).
(b) The collapse of the political equilibrium in those countries which for both historical and conjunctural reasons have known rather long periods of relative stability, and which represent exceptions with regard to the conditions prevailing on the continent as a whole ( Uruguay and Mexico).
(c) A universal tendency toward the establishment of open or hypocritically camouflaged military regimes. (d) A crisis of the military regimes themselves which are proving incapable of offering any solutions of the least durability to the crucial problems and as a result can maintain themselves only by the harshest repression (Bolivia, Brazil, etc.).
These conditions and tendencies as a whole, which in the last analysis reflect the economic and social tendencies mentioned above, create not only a continentwide structural instability but more precisely a prerevolutionary situation which is taking the form of both a more or less rapid ripening of profound social and political explosions (Brazil, Mexico, Chile), the outbreak of real revolutionary crises (Uruguay), and the emergence of a state of civil war in certain countries (Guatemala and partially Bolivia). The year 1968, in particular, was marked by a new revolutionary upsurge expressed in the mass mobilizations in Mexico and Brazil, the July-August crisis in Uruguay, the breakup of the regime and renewal of struggle in Bolivia a few months after the grave defeat of the guerrilla group led by Che, and the first symptoms of a revival of working class nuclei in countries which have undergone years of stagnation (for example, Argentina).
(10) In view also of the international context (involving primarily the Cuban revolution's continuing to play its historic role*), the general perspective must be one of increasing and mounting social and political tensions tending toward the outbreak of revolutionary situations.
In the economic sphere, a major improvement and hence a reversal of the trend would only be possible, for example, under the following conditions: a substantial rise in agricultural production, industrial development capable of absorbing large masses of the unemployed or underemployed population; the creation of new jobs for the youths leaving the universities and schools generally; a favorable trend in the prices of certain products on the world market; the defense and expansion of outlets compromised or threatened, among other things, by the Common Market and the arrangements between the Common Market and certain African countries; and the development, if only very incompletely, of Latin-American common markets. These are clearly unrealizable conditions in the present context, and thus the situation is hopeless for any economic solution, with all the inevitable implications this entails in the political field. In this context, then, the ruling classes will have no chance of forming coalitions or blocs on any even relatively stable base. In particular, this is so because none of the strata of these classes—including the "new" national bourgeoisie-can get any real popular support either in the cities or in the countryside; because, as difficulties mount, internecine struggles within these classes will inevitably multiply; and because American imperialism's margin for maneuver—most of all in the economic sphere but also in the political—is tending to shrink constantly.
This does not exclude possible oscillations in the most disparate directions, including new ephemeral pseudo reformist attempts, political gambles, and even variants within the framework of military regimes (groups of officers are continually playing at "Nasserism" in several countries and the immediate import of military coups is not always the same in every given situation). But this will change nothing in the general, deep-seated tendency: in a situation of chronic crisis and prerevolutionary tensions, the ruling classes will inevitably be impelled to adopt brutal repressive measures and utilize despotic and terrorist political regimes. Since these classes often are not very solid as social forces and cannot realistically contemplate solving their problems with popularly based reactionary regimes on the fascist model, military regimes remain the most likely recourse.
This is all the more so because the military strives to constitute a relatively coherent force united by common caste interests and characterized by a discipline absent from other social formations, thus able to function effectively as an instrument of leadership and political organization and even to outline an ideology of its own (which does not exclude the existence of perceptibly different currents among the military, reflecting in the last analysis different places in the hierarchy and different shares in the booty).
To the extent that the native conservative forces reveal their inherent impotence more directly and prove incapable of preventing the collapse of the system, American imperialism will finally be compelled to intervene militarily, either in direct form or in the guise of one of its "national" allies.
Thus not only in a historical sense but in a more direct and immediate one, Latin America has entered a period of revolutionary explosions and conflicts, of armed struggle on different levels against the native ruling classes and imperialism, and of prolonged civil war on a continental scale.
It goes without saying that this conclusion by no means implies the simplistic interpretation of an inevitable collapse of the system. If the objective possibilities are not exploited in time by the revolutionists, imperialism and indigenous capitalism will reorganize, if only precariously, alternating between "new" and traditional solutions.
IV. Criteria and Lines of a Revolutionary Strategy
(11) The fundamental dynamics of the Latin-American revolution is the dynamics of permanent revolution, in the sense that the revolution is developing into a socialist revolution without intermediary stages or dividing lines. This does not mean that the revolution could not begin as a democratic anti-imperialist revolution in regard to its objectives and the consciousness of the masses participating in it. But such a possibility does not affect the inherent logic of the process with all its inevitable implications for the lineup and role of the social classes. Because a workers state already exists in Latin America, in an eminently revolutionary world context; because the broadest masses are constantly impelled by powerful objective factors to struggle against the capitalist system as such and have made great advances in their social and political consciousness; and because the imperialists, after the Cuban experience, have clearly recognized the dynamics of the confrontation that is developing, the perspective of the permanent revolution is no longer only a historical tendency but a reality in this stage of the class struggle. The age of permanent revolution, in a direct and immediate sense, has already begun in Latin America. The fact that this conclusion is shared by the leadership of the first Latin-American socialist revolution is a historic step forward. This leadership by its attitudes, its actions and generalizations has contributed in a decisive way to the maturing of a new vanguard.
(12) The first conclusion that follows from this analysis is that any perspective of collaborating with the "national" bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected. Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as "national democracy,""people's democracy,"" anti-imperialist revolution," or "bloc of four classes," which have been irretrievably refuted both positively and negatively by vital revolutionary experiences, must be rejected. In this area, too, what was true in general in the past is assuming a more concrete and immediate importance when, faced with the Cuban workers state, the bourgeoisie cannot help but align itself on the side of imperialism (leaving aside possible temporary diplomatic maneuvers) and is proving itself absolutely incapable of achieving a program of even the most modest democratic reforms. New or relatively new tendencies in industrial development (see points 2 and 3) do not justify any change in the basic evaluation. The national bourgeois strata linked to modern industry arise or develop by intertwining themselves completely within the imperialist structures and in strictest dependence on them. They are intrinsically incapable of the least independent action in either the economic or political fields.
(13) In a revolution proceeding according to the logic of the permanent revolution and in a worldwide and Latin-American context, which necessarily forces a split between the fundamental classes from the outset, the leading role in achieving revolutionary democratic objectives belongs to the working class, which, by its place in the process of production, is the basic force antagonistic not only to imperialism but to native capital. This does not imply any underestimation of the role of the peasantry, especially of the poorest peasant strata and radicalized petty-bourgeois layers. In fact, in most of the countries the most probable variant is that for a rather long period the peasants will have to bear the main weight of the struggle and the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie in considerable measure will provide the cadres of the movement. This means that the leading role of the proletariat can be exercised under diverse forms: either directly by the wage workers (industrial workers, miners or agricultural workers) participating at the head of revolutionary struggles, which will doubtless be the case in only a minority of Latin-American countries; or indirectly, the leadership of these struggles being in the hands of organizations, tendencies, or cadres issuing from the workers movement; or in the historic sense of the term, by means of the program and theories issuing from Marxism. The completion of the revolution into a socialist revolution is in any case inconceivable without the mobilization and very broad participation of the proletariat. The problem now posed in Latin America is not that of determining in general terms the driving forces of the revolution, a problem which for revolutionary Marxists has been resolved at the theoretical level. The working class, still representing a small percentage of The population in most of these countries, obviously cannot play its role without the fundamental and irreplaceable support of the peasantry. The events of 1968, moreover, have further clarified the role which radicalized petty—bourgeois strata and the masses of student youth can play (among other things, they can serve as a medium for concrete interaction between the cities and the countryside, between the urban vanguard and the vanguard forming in the villages). Gigantic forces composed of millions of men and women in fact exist and can be mobilized in revolutionary struggle now or in the next stage. The real problem is to determine and to apply a strategy based on premises of general scope while being at the same time adjusted to specific and conjunctural needs, which could take advantage of all the existing potential, coordinate the different sectors, and strike the adversary effectively without running the danger of the movement being crushed. In the immediate future, the revolutionary vanguard must be aware of the grave danger inherent in the present situation, characterized, particularly in several countries, by a crying contradiction between the objective potential and the subjective will to struggle of broad strata on the one hand and on the other by the persistent weakness of the organized vanguard, even sectors which have played an effective role in major episodes of the most recent years. The danger lies more precisely in the possibility either of spontaneous explosions without a leadership and without clear perspectives, or premature and adventurist moves by nuclei of courageous militants. In both cases, the result would be a quick and murderous repression which would decimate the vanguard and throw the movement back.
(15) The rich experiences in guerrilla warfare—with its successes, its vital role in upsetting the political equilibrium, and even its grave defeats—as well as the experiences with great mass movements, especially in 1968, which have revalidated urban struggles, against the generalizations of superficial theoreticians, but which have at the same time confirmed their limitations and their blind alleys, make it possible now to delineate more clearly an overall strategy, avoiding the sterile antithesis between conceptions based on the absolute primacy of mass work, which consider guerrilla warfare to be only a completely secondary point of support, and simplistic conceptions, according to which guerrilla warfare alone can unfailingly unleash a revolutionary process and assure its victorious development.
There is no universally valid formula which can be applied to surmount difficulties and contradictions which have real objective roots; even the adoption of correct basic guidelines offers no automatic guarantee against making mistakes in applying them. In other words, no generalization is sufficient to resolve the problems facing the revolutionary movement unless it is constantly tested and enriched by concrete analyses. The failure of certain guerrilla experiments (in Peru, for example) came about, in large measure, more from errors in assessing the situation, the trends, and the relationship of forces among the masses than from errors in conception.
In Latin America, the polemic between the advocates of the "democratic" and "peaceful" road and the advocates of the revolutionary road has been entirely outmoded; the first hypothesis does not have the least objective justification and can be defended only by naive and unrepentant utopians or by ossified bureaucrats who have lost all revolutionary perspective and inspiration and whose sole concern is to cover up their conservative, routinist practices with theoretical obfuscation. The problem which is posed is that of the concrete forms of the revolutionary road; it is necessary to guard against simplistic schemas on the one hand, but on the other, no concession whatever must be made to ideas according to which armed confrontation, conceived as the culmination of a progressive rise and broadening of the mass movement, can in principle be reduced to a minimum.
The fundamental perspective, the only realistic perspective for Latin America is that of an armed struggle which may last for long years. This is why the technical preparation cannot be conceived merely as one of the aspects of the revolutionary work, but as the fundamental aspect on a continental scale, and one of the fundamental aspects in countries where the minimum conditions have not yet been met. It must not be forgotten, however, that the armed struggle itself cannot succeed, in the last analysis, except on the basis of a correct political line, and that the application of such a revolutionary strategy requires first assembling a minimum of organized and politically homogeneous forces.
(16) The great mass mobilizations of 1968 were extraordinarily important because they expressed the depth and explosive nature of the contradictions of Latin-American society and its structures; because they swept away with one blow all the "theorizing" on the inherent corruption of the urban milieu and a fortiori all the lucubrations on the incapacity of the worker masses and the urban masses in general to play a dynamic revolutionary role; because they gave a powerful stimulus to the maturing of thousands of new cadres who will be instrumental in the victory of the revolutionary struggles which are being prepared. Nonetheless, revolutionary Marxists cannot conclude from this that the "classical" variant calling for a progressive rise and broadening of the mass movement and its structuring and reenforcement through traditional organizational forms before it reaches the armed struggle has been revalidated. In the international context, after all the experiences of the last decade and in face of an increasingly brutal repression by the native ruling classes and imperialism, such a variant is not the most probable. In reality, the adversary is in nowise ready to allow a mass revolutionary movement to organize more or less legally or normally, not only because in the given economic and social conditions a general mobilization even for economic goals would threaten disastrous consequences for the system, but also and above all because the men in power no longer underestimate the dynamics of mass movements, even when they start off with limited objectives. The experience of Bolivia, where all forms of normal organizational activity are continually stamped out, as well as the experience of Peru, where the repression has not let up since 1962, especially in the countryside, are absolutely clear. The same holds for Mexico where the ruling class, reverting to its most barbaric traditions, did not hesitate to stage a full-fledged massacre of the students (the Brazilian regime's official and "semiofficial" counterattack followed the same logic).
The exceptional variant of an explosive crisis involving the breaking up or paralysis of the state apparatus and a mass mobilization so impetuous that it could prevent or neutralize recourse to repression as a decisive measure, cannot be categorically excluded, but a strategy on a continental scale cannot be based on exceptional phenomena, and in such a case imperialism would very likely intervene militarily (as happened already in the case of Santo Domingo).
(17) Even in the case of countries where large mobilizations and class conflicts in the cities may occur first, civil war will take manifold forms of armed struggle, in which the principal axis for a whole period will be rural guerrilla warfare, the term having primarily a geographical-military meaning and not necessarily implying an exclusively peasant composition of the fighting detachments (or even necessarily preponderantly peasant composition). In this sense, armed struggle in Latin America means fundamentally guerrilla warfare.
The strict selection of this central axis must be complemented by a very precise understanding that there will inevitably be a whole gamut of variants and that the different factors at work will combine in different forms according to the different countries and conjunctural situations. The two extreme possibilities can be indicated almost symbolically by taking on the one hand the case of a country like Uruguay where the armed struggle will be essentially urban and where the regime could have already been overthrown on the basis of a powerful urban mass movement if it had been technically and politically armed with such a perspective, and on the other hand by taking the case of a country of overwhelmingly peasant composition, without large urban concentrations, where the guerrilla war will be almost exclusively rural and peasant until the very eve of the enemy's final defeat. A variant that merits particular study is that of very large countries where armed struggle could result in the occupation of whole regions, geographically and socially favorable to this, for a prolonged period without bringing on the disintegration of the central power. In such cases the conception of mobile columns would not necessarily be contradictory to that of liberated zones.
(18) Under the perspective of a prolonged civil war with rural guerrilla warfare as its principal axis, even in the most difficult phases of severe repression and temporary prostration, the problem of liaison between the guerrillas and the masses will be a vital one.
In a situation of prerevolutionary crisis such as Latin America is now experiencing on a continental scale, guerrilla warfare can in fact stimulate a revolutionary dynamic, even if at the start the attempt may seem to have come from abroad or to be unilateral (which was the case with Che's Bolivian guerrilla movement). But in any case it must be realized that without the active sympathy, the protection, and the solidarity of certain sectors of the masses, the chance for consolidating and strengthening the guerrilla nuclei diminish to the extreme and the political repercussions which the armed action is striving to provoke dwindle. Secondly a major problem which no clearsighted revolutionary leadership can sidestep is how to utilize all the explosive social potential (which for structural reasons cannot be channeled into the framework of the actions and initiatives proper to revolutionary minorities) during the whole struggle and not just at the culminating moment of the overthrow of the system.
Hence the necessity to:
(a) Take advantage of every opportunity not only to increase the number of rural guerrilla nuclei but also to promote forms of armed struggle specially adapted to certain zones (for example, the mining zones in Bolivia) and to undertake actions in the big cities aimed both at striking the nerve centers (key points in the economy and transport, etc.) and at punishing the hangmen of the regime as well as achieving propagandistic and psychological successes (the experience of the European resistance to Nazism would be helpful in this regard).
(b) Advance a program not just of immediate economic and political demands but also transitional demands able to mobilize and raise the political consciousness of the worker, petty-bourgeois, and plebian masses as well as the student masses and thus create growing tensions threatening the system (this would also make it more difficult for the governments to concentrate their repressive forces exclusively in the zones of armed struggle). An orientation and mobilization based on a transitional program conceived in accordance with the logic of an anticapitalist struggle would, moreover, help certain revolutionary organizations to overcome the difficulties arising from the fact that while having been formed for revolutionary combat and armed struggle, these organizations have been unable for conjunctural reasons to put their ideas into practice. They thus run the risk in practice of combining abstract revolutionary propaganda with mobilizations for immediate goals which do not involve a revolutionary dynamic, even if pursued by extraparliamentary and extralegal means. The determination of the themes of a transitional program for each given stage is clearly the task of revolutionists in the various countries.
(19) Such a conception of the revolutionary strategy of armed struggle and guerrilla war refutes not only the simplistic "guerrillist" idealizations (which reflect a lack of patience with regard to organized action and a hope of substituting improvisations for the whole, often onerous, labor of preparation and organization), but also the spontaneist theses which challenge the role of the party (most often on the basis of an arbitrary interprepation of and generalization on the Cuban revolution). Spontaneism, substituting abstract notions for concrete historical analysis, draws the conclusion, from the absolutely necessary critique of specific parties which bear a heavy responsibility for the manifold failures and prolonged prostration of the workers movement, that parties in general must be rejected as instruments of revolutionary struggle. From their very nature, such conceptions are incapable of providing an answer to the essential problem of the liaisons between the guerrillas, the armed struggle and the mass movement and the political development of the latter. Unfortunate experiences have been, in the last analysis, brought about or facilitated either by false or illusory solutions to this problem or a mystical confidence in the automatic nature of certain processes.
While it is necessary to reject the schematic and paralyzing conception according to which everything hinges on the preliminary existence of a genuine party with all its traditional structures (and the Cuban experience has unquestionably shown that under certain conditions it is possible for the political organization to develop and reenforce itself as the armed struggle unfolds), the two following fundamental facts must, however, never be lost sight of:
(a) The existence and functioning of a revolutionary party, far from being an outworn schema of outmoded Marxists, corresponds to the concrete and ineluctable needs of the development of the armed struggle itself (this, among other things, is the lesson of Hugo Blanco's experience in Peru).
(b) The revolutionists must struggle for the most favorable variant: acting in such a way that when the armed struggle begins, if there is not already a genuine party, completely structured, with a large mass influence (a very unrealistic perspective in almost all of the Latin-American countries) in existence, there is at least solid nuclei of a political organization, coordinated on a national scale. This means more particularly in the countries where the armed struggle is not on the agenda at present, not to choose the road of spontaneist or putschist temptations inexorably doomed to failure, but to take advantage of the breathing space.
V. Situation of the Revolutionary Workers Movement and the General Lines of Orientation
(20) The Cuban revolution, the conflicts in the international Communist movement, particularly the Chinese polemics, and the experiences of the struggle in recent years have produced profound upsets, new relationships of forces, splits, and multiple realignments in the Latin-American revolutionary workers movement. The overall picture can be outlined as follows:
(a) The Cuban revolution continues to represent the fundamental pole of attraction, and on the level of ideological and political influence the Castroist current remains by far the strongest. However, this tendency has not developed any important degree of organization and in fact the OLAS likewise has not succeeded either in finding a solution to the problem of crystallizing and consolidating organized new vanguards.
(b) The traditional workers organizations have been undergoing an irreversible erosion and are being ceaselessly shaken by grave crises. In certain socialist parties (Chile, Uruguay), the Castroist influence is very strong. And this is true also for most of the Communist parties, especially those which have not yet suffered left splits and are compelled to engage in centrist maneuvers in order to capitalize, if only partially, on the prestige of the Cuban revolution (e.g., the attitude of the current represented by Arismendi and certain attitudes even of the Chilian CP).
(c) The revolutionary nationalist movements which played a key role for a whole period have definitively exhausted themselves; and where they retain a measure of influence (APRA in Peru, AD in Venezuela), this goes hand in hand with an outright reactionary policy. This does not exclude the possibility that tendencies or groups issuing from these movements can survive and still play a certain role, on condition, however, that they break completely with the old organizational structures and integrate themselves into the revolutionary left on the basis primarily of defense of the Cuban revolution (this possibility exists, for example, for left Peronist nuclei, Brazilian left nationalist currents, and groups in the PRIN and even in the left MNR in Bolivia). The problem of relations of the revolutionary organizations with such groups, moreover, is an aspect of the more general problem of the relations between the revolutionary vanguards and petty-bourgeois sectors capable of being drawn into the struggle against imperialism and national capitalism. (d) The revolt of the Catholic vanguard has now assumed considerable scope (Camillo Torres has become the symbol of a continentwide current) and will increase still more in the coming stages of the struggle. The importance of this rests fundamentally in the fact that it is an additional expression of the way the social and political crisis is tearing the ideological fabric of the system, driving toward the revolutionary pole plebeian and petty-bourgeois strata who have been tied essentially by ideological bonds.
(e) The revolutionary left is going through a feverish phase of splits and restructuration with a whole gamut of results, going from the important advances in vanguard regroupment in Brazil (especially the formation of the POC) to the still very difficult situation of the Peruvian revolutionary organizations (where the Vanguardia Revolucionaria gained strength relatively for a certain time owing to the fact that it was hit much less hard by the repression than the FIR, the MIR, and the ELN), from new experiments on a centrist or left centrist basis (for example, the Argentinian student organization which came out of a split from the CP) to other experiences following a much more revolutionary direction (the Chilean MIR in particular). The birth and development of revolutionary groups and organizations have been stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, the continentwide prerevolutionary situation, the anti-imperialist struggle in Asia and more particularly Vietnam, and, recently, by the repercussions of the international wave of student revolt. The temporary difficulties, the lack of experience, the inevitable failures, and the contradictory impulses coming from the international workers movement are causing a fragmentation which reflects in part the historic divisions in the working-class movement and results in new variants and combinations which in certain cases represent a new level in the reorganization of the revolutionary movement (for example, the experiences of the POC and PCR in Brazil, the Castroist and pro-Chinese movements in Santo Domingo, the united Guatemalan guerrilla front).
While the revolutionary left starts off from a common acceptance of the general conception of armed struggle, a basic division repeatedly recurs over the characterization of the Latin-American revolution, with certain tendencies still questioning its outright anticapitalist character, advancing the old formulas of anti-imperialist, antifeudal, people's revolution, etc., and thus leaving open the perspective of collaboration with layers of the "national" bourgeoisie (see in this regard particularly the theses of the orthodox pro-Chinese organizations). A second cleavage emerges around conceptions advanced under the opposing form of a people's war (most often based on the Asian experiences). Finally, differences arise continually over the analysis and assessment of gains and setbacks as well as over determining the tempos and forms of actions in preparation.
In conclusion, the problems of regrouping the revolutionary forces and giving structure to the new vanguards is far from resolved despite powerful objective stimuli, enormous advances in subjective revolutionary development, and the massive irruption onto the scene of the young generation. The necessary solutions can be envisaged, in the last analysis, only on a continental scale, but without leaving aside the manifold particularities and without any consoling illusions such as the automatic nature of the processes or the possibility that audacious subjective actions are sufficient by themselves (repeated experiences have shown that even the formation of a guerrilla nucleus is not automatically a positive solution; moreover the painful ups and downs of the Venezuelan guerrilla movement prove how many difficulties arise in the course of the armed struggle).
(21) Revolutionary Marxists, in the work of regrouping and organizing the vanguard, must bear in mind the following very general criteria:
(a) Integration into the historic revolutionary current represented by the Cuban revolution and the OLAS, which involves, regardless of the forms, integration into the continental revolutionary front which the OLAS constitutes.
(b) Rejection of any a priori exclusionary attitude toward any revolutionary tendency, which, while not excluding criticism and polemics, implies the possibility of common revolutionary fronts making it possible to regroup froces and to collaborate in both the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggle and the struggle against the conservative and bureaucratic tendencies of the workers and peasants movement.
(c) Elaboration of a revolutionary strategy, based on the continental experience and the general principles outlined elsewhere in this document, corresponding to the concrete needs and potential of each country or group of countries at a given stage. This also implies the need for a political program under which broad social layers can be mobilized with the aim of continually deepening the contradictions of the existing regimes at all levels; in other words, a program which, without ignoring immediate economic and political demands (the importance of which was confirmed, for example, by the events of the summer of 1968 in Mexico), would stress objectives and slogans of a transitional nature, able to mobilize the masses at their present level of consciousness in a struggle, the dynamics of which would necessarily collide with the system as a whole.
It is the job of the various national revolutionary Marxist organizations to translate this general orientation into concrete formulas and guidelines. They must, in any case, understand that they cannot measure up to the height of their tasks in the dramatic stage which is opening, if they prove incapable of building more solid organizational structures on the basis of substantial political homogeneity, of adopting methods of work corresponding to the necessities of a struggle conducted under conditions of repression and strict clandestinity, of combining detailed empirical analyses and tactical flexibility with firmness in criteria and general conceptions (the prerequisite for avoiding any impressionism and hasty generalizations), of assuring much more than in past years international and continental coordination by more genuine integration in the International, including the level of its centers of leadership and theoretical work.
* It is not the purpose of this document to analyze the inner development of the Cuban revolution. However, it is obvious that the survival of the Cuban revolution and its maintaining its present role are dependent in the long run on an extension of the revolution in Latin America. The threat of imperialist military action against Cuba still exists and the crushing of the revolutionary regime would have very grave repercussions throughout Latin America. The danger of bureaucratization is not excluded. Objective factors favor such a development despite the conscious antibureaucratic campaign by a leadership which over a decade has given many proofs of its capacity.