Читать онлайн "International Maoism in the Developing World" - Alexander Robert Jackson - RuLit

In 1974, the MPD was accused of moving to the right by leaders of the Red Line and Red Flag splinters of the 14th of June Movement. They said that “the right-wing shift we are talking about here can be found in the policy pursued by the MPD, although at the same time we believe that the MPD is a democratic and revolutionary organization and we are sure that it will straighten itself out again.”[335]

By 1976, the MPD continued to control the FOUPSACESISTRADO trade union group. It also was reported as having some influence in another central labor group, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT).

By that time, the MPD was trying to become more “responsible.” In an interview in February 1976, some of the party’s leaders conceded that the party had made “grave errors,” but that it was “frankly on the road to their rectification.” At about the same time, a faction dubbing itself the “MPD Legalists” accused the leadership of both forming alliances with elements of the “proimperialist oligarchy in the opposition and having mistakenly gotten involved in guerrilla activities. The group called for the party to intensify its study of Marxism.[336]

At the time of the 1978 election, which was won by the Dominican Revolutionary Party, the MPD formed a coalition with several other far Left groups. However, just before the balloting, the MPD called upon its followers to abstain.[337] By 1980, the MPD was described as being divided into minifactions.[338]

The Pacoredo

The Communist Party of the Dominican Republic (PACOREDO or PCRD) had its principal strength among university students. It formed its own youth group, the Communist Youth (JC). Seven leaders of the JC were expelled from the Santo Domingo University Council in May 1967 for “organizing violence during the student elections of 23 May and refusing to obey a University Council resolution banning the raising of ‘any foreign flag’ above the National Flag on the university building.”[339]

However, in 1969, the JC somewhat increased its voting strength in elections for the Federation of Students at the University. It received 385 votes, compared with the 134 it had gotten the year before.[340]

The PCRD also had a smattering of support in the organized labor movement. In 1970 a list of candidates in which the party participated, along with the MPD and the Dominican Revolutionary Party, won elections in the Port Workers Union in Santo Domingo.[341]

The PCRD strongly attacked the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, saying that the conflict there was “a row between revisionist birds of prey who lead Soviet satellite countries through the path of peaceful evolution to capitalism,” and urged that the Czechoslovakian workers “organize the ranks of the real Communist Party and… pardon each other so that it may be ready to take over the government for the restoration of the proletarian dictatorship through violent revolution.”

The party endorsed the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pin Montas, the party’s Secretary-General, proclaimed it “the greatest anti-imperialist movement of our epoch, without precedence in the history of humanity.” He also stated, “The theoretical base of our party is the thought of Mao Tse-tung.”[342]

The PCRD differentiated itself strongly from the Cubans. Thus, in 1969, it argued that the Cuban regime was not a proletarian dictatorship but a bourgeois state. Instead of looking to Cuba, the workers and peasants of the Dominican Republic should take “the road of Mao Tse-tung’s ideology.”

As we have noted, the PACOREDO centered much of its attention on attacking other far Left groups, particularly the MPD. Often these attacks were physical as well as verbal. However, in 1970 the party expressed its opposition to terrorism and to “opportunistic groups under the guise of fighting reaction and Yankee opportunism.” It proclaimed that “individual terrorism is wrong and could “only be used to justify future repressive acts against the people” by the government.[343]

The party strongly condemned the MPD’s kidnapping of a U.S. military attach in 1970. It claimed that such actions rejected the “popular masses as the moving force” in the revolution and, furthermore, were “completely ineffective in achieving the liberation of the people in general and political freedom in particular.” In that same year, it denounced the government of Bolivian General Juan José Torres, which had the support of the pro-Moscow Communists and some Trotskyists, as being “reactionary, bourgeois and landholding.”[344]

In 1971, when clashes between MPD and PACOREDO members were at their height, the PCRD called for a “policy of nonaggression and mutual respect” between the two parties. It urged talks be held to that end.[345]

The PACOREDO continued to be active, particularly among the students, through the mid-1970s. In spite of its supposed allegiance to Maoism, it was not reported to have sent any message to the Chinese at the time of the death of Mao Tse-tung, although several other Dominican groups did.[346]

The PCRD took no part in the 1978 election, and was reported one leader of the Dominican Revolutionary Party to have “virtually disappeared.”[347]

The 14th of June Movement and Its Offshoots

The 14th of June Movement got its name from the date, June 14, 1959, of an invasion of the Dominican Republic by a group of young exiles coming from Cuba. Soon after the defeat of the invasion, the survivors organized as a political party, and after the assassination of Trujillo, the exiles returned and for a while their party was one of the three most important ones of the post-Trujillo period.

In the beginning, the 14th of June undoubtedly had people of quite varied ideological allegiances. At least some of its leaders thought of it as a party comparable with the Aprista Party of Peru and Venezuelan Acción Democrática. Soon after Trujillo’s death, twenty-six members of the party were sent to the Institute of Political Studies in Costa Rica, a school for the training of secondary leaders of Apra, AD, and similar parties.[348]

After the overthrow of Juan Bosch in 1963, the 14th of June mounted a guerrilla effort to overthrow the successor regime. It was disastrous, and a large part of the original leadership of the party, including its founder, Manuel Tavares Justo, were killed. this precipitated a series of splits within the party. The first struggle was between a group of “nationalists” led by Luis Gómez Espaillat and elements that considered themselves Marxist-Leninists. In mid-1966 the “nationalist” group was eliminated from the party. Later in the year, another group, led by the party’s Secretary-General, Rafael Tavares, withdrew and joined the MPD, saying that it was “the nucleus around which the Dominican proletarian party was developed.”[349]

However, the ideological position of the 14th of June remained unclear. Carol Stokes wrote in 1968, “In international affairs, the MR-14J has revealed certain ‘opportunist’ tendencies, vacillating between Castroist and Chinese positions.” However, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution the party attacked the “Soviet revisionist clique,” and charged that it was restoring capitalism in the USSR, “in league with U.S. imperialism.”[350]