Various Authors

El Salvador and Poland: Two Paths to Revolution

August/September 1981

Strike! August/September 1981, page 11

We must choose between two paths: the road of El Salvador, of a lethal sidetrack into capitalist politics which is actually a prelude to world war, or the road of Poland, of mass and autonomous confrontation against the capitalist state.

For the past several months since the proclamation of the Left’s “final offensive”, we have witnessed a further scourge of capitalist brutality in El Salvador. Within the countryside the guerrillas are completely on the defensive, having been sacrificed for “reasons of (capitalist) state” as the modern-day La Passionaria, Ana Guadalupe Martinez, will argue. The F.D.R. now cynically admits that its meager military offensive was nothing but a bargaining ploy against the Duarte Junta, with the corpses of Salvadoran youth used as their ante.

Always ready to mediate between bourgeois factions, the Catholic Church has moved away from its previous blanket support of the Left to the more familiar position of moderate governmental “reform, re: statified capitalism. And this stance is amiable with the Stalinist F.M.L.N. & the Sandinistas as well.

The Reagan Administration wasted no time in putting its house in order in El Salvador. A large propaganda effort to document alleged “Soviet intervention” began in February; $10 million in new military hardware was rushed in bringing the total current commitment to $35 million. The equipment included helicopters, trucks, jeeps, surveillance gear, heavy machine-guns, M-16 rifles, & M-79 grenade launchers; 56 military trainers, among them green berets, have also been ordered in. With the incontrovertible logic of an MX missile, the right-wing portion of the U.S. imperialist ruling-class has convinced its brethren of the left, & their counterparts abroad, of the present dead-cold “correctness” (as Haig might utter it) of the over-kill formula.

Economic aid to the Duarte regime, desperately needed to finance the state-supervised collectivization of the big agricultural estates, has been upped to $100 million. Government officials, temporarily outflanking the Left, are touring the countryside, led by the demagogue Morales Ehrlich, extolling this “land reform” program; for the rural proletariat, the State is the new patron. National elections have been promised in ’82. Meanwhile, in San Salvador the terror of the rightist death squads, abetted by the government, goes on and on.

Here in North America, the Leftist politicos have also been enjoying an ideological field day of their own. The liberals, Social Democrats & Stalinists, true to form, have revived the old Viet Nam popular-front-for-world capitalism atmosphere. Under the tight, bureaucratic auspices of the “Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador” (C.I.S.P. E.S.), various “legal and peaceful” (what else?) marches and vigils have been staged. Liberal politicians are basking in the popular spectacle; Kennedy, odds-on favorite for the “progressive” U.S. bourgeoisie in 1984, has introduced legislation to suspend military aid and recall the military advisers in El Salvador. Not one to miss a good show, the Church has gotten into the act, too.

The sole organizing platform of C.I.S.P.E.S. is “self-determination” by which they simply mean the Left to state power. Anyone who foolishly attempts to raise even a semblance of proletarian class positions (“But how dare you?!”) like the Trotskyists or the anarchists has been threatened and/or excluded from their mendicant activities. The repressive antics of the C.I.S.P.E.S. gang are merely a mild harbinger of what the F.D.R. would do with a fury to the Salvadoran proletariat if it ever obtained a monopoly of state violence.

Another facet of the liberal/left hysteria over El Salvador is the so-called “Argentina connection” — an ominous, rightist conspiracy to bolster the draconian regimes in Honduras and Guatemala by a massive infusion of military goods from South America. The specter of the Right, along with the hoopla about the paramilitary units of Nicaraguan and Cuban exiles in Florida, is part and parcel of a developing leftist campaign at anti-fascist mystification precisely at a time when the class struggle in North America against the Reagan austerity is about to commence. All of these leftist machinations are just so much ideological junk to be thrown away by the awakening proletariat.

We must all choose between these two paths: the road of El Salvador, of a lethal sidetrack onto capitalist politics, which is actually a prelude to world war, as was Spain in the late 1930’s; or the road of Poland, of mass and autonomous confrontation against the capitalist state. For the revolutionaries the choice is clear. The tasks at hand now are not to immerse oneself into any popular leftist sewer, but to diligently and confidently work for: 1. political and organizational regroupment on a global scale, and 2. interventions with a genuine revolutionary, international perspective in the real class battles going on here in North America & around the planet, all of which are surely about to intensify.