Issuing body: Delegation of the POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario, Argentina) (Original note: Bulletin intérieur du SI, édition espagnole, octobre 1951, traduit par Cécilia Garmendia — i.e. originally published in Spanish in the SI's Internal Bulletin, October 1951, and translated into French for that Bulletin by Cécilia Garmendia.)
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Declaration of the Argentine POR to the Latin American Commission
The two POR delegates approve, in their general line, the theses on the situation in Latin America and the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat; they make a self-criticism on the following points:
a) The leadership of our party was against the slogan of the anti-imperialist united front, while having produced no document on the subject.
b) Against this slogan, it counterposed that of partial agreements with petty-bourgeois and bourgeois parties, for concrete anti-imperialist tasks.
c) We did not understand the importance of the AUF [Anti-Imperialist United Front] in the dynamic of anti-imperialist struggle in the underdeveloped countries, for unmasking, through common action, the petty-bourgeois leaderships of the proletariat.
d) Our ignorance of the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International was one of the reasons for our position.
e) A careful study of that congress's resolution on the East has confirmed the error of our position.
Convinced that any change of position must be accompanied by self-criticism, and finding in the SI's document this single point of opposition to the positions upheld by our party, we make this self-criticism.
This same error, committed by our leadership with regard to the anti-imperialist united front, occurred also with regard to the proletarian united front. Although we are the only Argentine organization that has posed the problem in terms of an immediate task and that has made serious and fruitful efforts to carry it out, our programme for the proletarian united front took into account the most general — and therefore most abstract — needs of the Argentine proletariat at this stage of the class struggle: the independence of the unions from the state, and their democratization. That is to say, we did not proceed, as we should have, from the more concrete, immediate needs (such as the struggle against the rise in the cost of living) toward more general needs — and this not through an abstract process, but through the struggle and experience of the proletariat itself.
On the basis of the discussions we have had with the SI in the Latin American Commission, we have arrived at the conclusion regarding the dynamic character of the united-front programme, whether anti-imperialist or workers': this programme must proceed from what is more concrete and immediate toward more general terms, pushing the workers to go beyond each stage or each slogan in order to take up another, more general and more important one.
Bulletin intérieur du SI, Spanish edition, October 1951, translated [into French] by Cécilia Garmendia.