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Title: Platformism in Latin America Author: Nick Heath Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: platformism, Latin America, Federación Anarquista Uruguaya, Organise!, book review Source: Retrieved on 10th December 2021 from https://libcom.org/history/platformism-latin-america-uruguayan-example Notes: A review of a pamphlet on the Uruguyuan anarchist movement that appeared in the magazine of the Anarchist Federation, Organise! No. 80, 2013.
The Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU): crisis, armed struggle and
dictatorship, 1967–1985. Texts by Juan Carlos Mechoso, Jaime Prieto,
Hugo Cores and others translated and edited by Paul Sharkey. 50 pages.
Kate Sharpley Library. £3.00
The longest existing and perhaps strongest Platformist organisation in
Latin America is the Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU) of Uruguay.
This pamphlet describes a key period in its existence, one that was
marked by the death of a large number of its militants shot down or
tortured to death by the dictatorship that had emerged in Uruguay. Just
as important, it sketches out the direction that the FAU took in its
accommodation to Stalinism, towards the politics of a broad front and
indeed to the development of a political party.
The forerunner to the Anarchist Federation — The Libertarian Communist
Discussion Group-was founded in 1985–6 in an attempt to renew the short
lived tradition of Platformism that had developed in Britain in the
early 1970s — the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists succeeded by
the Anarchist Workers Association and then the Libertarian Communist
Group and the Anarchist Communist Association. The evolution of the LCDG
into the Anarchist Communist Federation which then became today’s
Anarchist Federation involved a critique of Platformism. The current of
Platformism within international anarchism is based on The
Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists , the 1926 text
drafted by Russian and Ukrainian and Polish anarchists in 1926 in an
attempt to understand why the Russian and Ukrainian anarchist movements
met with failure in the Russian Revolution of 1917. For us three main
theses developed in the Platform and supported by Platformism remain
relevant for the Anarchist Federation of today. They can be summed up as
Federalism, Collective Responsibility, and Tactical and Theoretical
Unity, which should be seen as the building blocks of a specific
anarchist communist organisation, something else that was insisted upon
by the Platform. However the Anarchist Federation was clear that its
political positions could not be solely based on insights gained in the
1920s, and in tandem with this was aware of the need to incorporate
other theoretical gains and innovations developed in the decades since
1926. In addition the AF was critical of the practice and theoretical
evolution of at least some of the groups and organisations that were or
are part of the actually existing Platformist current.
The Uruguayan experience documented in this pamphlet illustrates the
trajectory that one such Platformist group took.
Unlike other countries in South America, Uruguay was known as a
stronghold of bourgeois democracy and social reform. Under its President
Battle y Ordonez, a whole raft of legislation was introduced in the mid
1910s. He separated Church from State, banned crucifixes in hospitals,
removed references to God and the Bible from public oaths, gave
widespread rights to unions and political parties and organisations,
brought in the eight hour day and universal suffrage, introduced
unemployment benefits, legalised divorce, created more high schools,
promised and practised no residency laws against exiled anarchists and
other radicals, opened universities to women, and led a campaign to take
away the control of industry and land from foreign capitalists ( the
British capitalists had huge influence in Uruguay) and nationalised
private monopolies. This disoriented some elements within the fairly
strong anarchist movement in Uruguay.
Between 1948 and 1954 the working class in Uruguay was comparatively
well off, with good conditions and pay, in a country presided over by a
ruling class with a liberal outlook. This all changed between 1955 and
1959 with an increasing cost of living. Inflation began to rise sharply
and strike waves broke out. A wage freeze was introduced, The Army broke
strikes b and emergency laws were introduced. The excuse for this was
the supposed threat from the leftist guerillas of the Tupamaros, but in
reality to repress the agitation in the workplaces.
Bordaberry came to power in 1971 and gave increasing powers to the Army
in the fight against the Tupamaros. In 1973 political parties were
banned, congress was closed down, public meetings were banned and
constitutional rights were suspended. The employers dropped their
liberal outlook and banned the National Workers’ Convention (CNT) which
federated many unions, when it called a general strike. Wages were
driven down by 35% and inflation rose by 80%.The FAU was set up in 1956.
Militants within it like Juan Carlos Mechoso began to agitate for the
creation of a specific anarchist organization as opposed to the
anarcho-syndicalists who thought that work in the unions was enough to
bring out radical social change. At first the FAU had been an alliance
of different anarchist currents, from the anarcho-syndicalists on one
hand, through those who believed in setting up anarchist communities in
the here and now, traditional anarchist communists on to the group
around Mechoso, Gerardo Gatti and Leon Duarte.
Controversy had already arisen in the international movement over the
increasingly reformist ideas of Rudolf Rocker. One of the pioneers of
anarcho-syndicalism, he had taken a principled stand against the First
World War and was interned in England as a result. However by 1945,
after his support for the Allies in WW2, Rocker began to reject
class-based notions of anarchism, moving in an increasingly liberal
direction. In this he had the support of other German anarchists like
Augustin Souchy, and elements within the Spanish CNT in exile like Abad
de Santillan. Nevertheless, it was people like Souchy who adopted a
critical approach to the Cuban Revolution, along with the Cuban
anarchists themselves, who directly experienced repression from the
Castro regime. Within the FAU itself there was intense debate over the
Castro regime between 1961 and 1965 with Mechoso, Gatti and co.
supporting the Cuban regime. This led to a split in the FAU in late 1963
with the Gatti/Duarte/Mechoso faction retaining the FAU name and
symbols, affirming the class struggle nature of anarchism, but also
giving critical support to Cuba. The FAU now began to incorporate
elements from different currents of Marxism, calling for a synthesis
between Marxism and anarchism, whilst referring to Poulantzas and
Althusser, and later Gramsci. It increasingly broke with the
anarcho-syndicalists by moving from the need for a specific anarchist
organization to talk of a Party. It set up the Student-Worker Resistance
(ROE), which was meant to be a broad class struggle front, and began to
seek out alliances with the Tupamaros and other leftists. As a result
many students influenced by ‘revolutionary Marxism’ began to join the
ROE, accelerating the move away from anarchism. The writings of Che
Guevara became popular and influential within this broad movement. The
FAU established its own armed wing, OPR-33, in the late 1960s.
There was an increasing spiral of repression and counter-attack by the
FAU/OPR-33, and many militants lost their lives in gun battles. By 1974
the US security forces launched Operation Condor in collaboration with
the dictatorships now reigning in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and
Paraguay. Uruguayan and Argentinian security forces worked in tandem to
kidnap FAU militants and many were imprisoned in a torture camp, where
after many months of terrible agonies, they were murdered Gatti, Duarte
and Alberto Mechoso (Juan Carlos’s brother) were among those murdered.
OPR-33 was seen as to be firmly under the control of the FAU and was
meant to relate its actions to the workers movement in Uruguay itself.
However, in the final analysis its actions had the same effect as those
armed groups influenced by Castroism. FAU/OPR-33 lost a large number of
militants. At the same time Gatti had pioneered the setting up of the
People’s Victory Party (PVP) whilst in exile in Buenos Aires in 1975,
along with Ruben Prieto, Pablo Anzalone and others. The PVP was a a
heterodox mixture of anarchism and Castroism/Guevarism.
The deaths of Gatti and co accelerated the move of the PVP away from
anarchism. It participated in the creation of the Broad Font-Frente
Amplio- a coalition of over a dozen political groupings as well as
unions and community groups and in 1980 began to take part in its
electoral activities and today is just another leftist parliamentarian
party.
What was left of the FAU re-established its structures in 1986 after the
fall of the dictatorship. It remains active in work in the unions and
the neighbourhoods. As one French observer noted: “The FAU, like a
number of other organisations, fell headlong into the political cracks
opened up by the Cuban revolution and backed it for years, even if it
had become plain that that revolution was turning into a bureaucratic
dictatorship and even after Cuban anarchists had been rounded up and
executed…The FAU eventually distanced itself from that betrayed
revolution and withdrew its support from it, though it does not appeatr
to mean that it is prepared to risk blunt criticism of the current Cuban
regime”. This observer notes a sympathy from the leftist FARC guerillas
in Colombia and the Guevarist MRTA in Peru, putting the anti-imperialism
of the FAU down as underpinning this sympathy “which is very probably
bound up with a lack of critical information about such authoritarian
movements”.
The pamphlet raises a number of key questions
anarcho-syndicalist movement in the post-World War Two situation?
(uncritical support for Castroism, evolving into silence on the Cuban
situation and unwillingness to openly attack the regime there, support
for fronts with leftists like the ROE)
of political parties and towards electoralism? (The PVP in Uruguay, the
electoral adventure of the Federation Communiste Libertaire of France in
1956 etc)
These questions need to be looked at, examined, considered and debated
in the present period. We need to learn from our mistakes, learn from
them in a coherent way, and incorporate them into a theory and practice
that is informed by an analysis strengthened by a satisfactory answer to
these questions. We need to strive for unity of all the libertarian
forces, recognising our similarities and fighting for collective and
unitary practice at both an international and regional level. At the
same time we have to recognise our differences, and encourage a debate
that can overcome these differences if possible