Nahuel Moreno: speech at the memorial meeting, 2 February 1987
Socialist Viewpoint1980sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
This is the full text of a speech made by Alan Thornett on Monday February 2 in London at the memorial meeting for Comrade Nahuel Moreno of the MAS of Argentine and the International Workers League who tragically died the previous week. The meeting was organised by the WRP and there were speakers from the SLG, Socialist Organiser, Lutte Ouvriere and others.
Due to time constraints a few of the points at the end of this text were not fully made in the meeting.
WE come together on this platform tonight to pay tribute to comrade Nahuel Moreno, a major world figure of the Trotskyist movement who fought to maintain the Trotskyist movement through its most difficult years.
My first contact with the PST of Argentina (as the MAS was then) was in the early summer of 1976 soon after the military seized power in Argentina from the Peronists. We were a part of the old Workers Socialist League which we formed soon after being expelled from the WRP in 1974. The WSL received an urgent request from PST to hold a public meeting in Britain in solidarity with PST comrades, and others on the left, who had disappeared and were being persecuted under the military crackdown of the Videla Junta.
It was to some extent a surprising request since the PST, as a USEC section, was asking us to do something which would naturally be the job of the IMG — the USEC section in Britain. We approached the IMG and they had a speaker on the platform and we had a successful meeting.
All we knew about the Argentine PST at that time was that they were an important movement in Argentina and had been a part of the Leninist-Trotskyist faction of the USFI along with the US SWP since 1969.
After the public meeting we were approached by PST representatives and had several meetings with them.
We took those meetings very seriously for the same reason that we take tonight's meeting very seriously. We recognised that the validity of Nahuel Moreno was not first and foremost what he had to say but what he had built in Argentina. It did not take much to see that the construction of the Argentine PST was a major contribution to world Trotskyism; that it was a Trotskyist movement rooted in the Argentine working class and that it had an experienced leadership serious about addressing the central political problems of the world movement.
In November 1976 the PST published the "Declaration of the Bolshevik Tendency" (later to be the Bolshevik Faction) — the call to form a tendency which was effectively a challenge for the leadership of the USFI at the upcoming 11th World Congress and a response to the proposed dissolution of the factions inside the USEC.
Much of what the "Declaration" said we agreed with. It pointed to the disastrous and ultra-left guerrillaist orientation of the 9th USEC World Congress and the student vanguard deviation of the late 1960s. It pointed to the reflection of this in the "new left vanguard" conceptions for Europe developed at the 10th World Congress and to the positions being developed by Jack Barnes that a fourth international could be built in which the Trotskyists were a minority. We agreed with the declaration when it criticised both the US SWP and the USEC majority for capitulating to the Portuguese armed forces movement and tail-ending the Stalinists.
We had our problems with the "declaration" as well. We could not agree with its position on Angola, its call for a "Black Afro-American Revolution", or its lack of accounting of the PST's long relationship with the SWP. Nor was there any accounting of the fact that Moreno himself had been a strong supporter of the guerrilla turn from November 1967 until May 1968, arguing that the USFI should join OLAS.
We also, naturally, had historicl disagreements with the PST and comrade Moreno. In particular over the nature of the 1963 reunification in which he was involved, which formed the USEC, and its central idea that the Castro leadership in Cuba were "natural Marxists" and had a progressive role to play in the building of a Trotskyist world movement.
Despite these disagreements we saw the formation of the Bolshevik Tendency as an important step to take. We didn't expect to agree on everything anyway and we saw the areas of agreement as very important.
Moreno came to Britain to discuss the Bolshevik Tendency with us. He argued that we should join the IMG and fight with him where we had agreement inside the USFI.
We did not feel that joining the IMG was an option for us at that time, but we did continue to take what Moreno and the PST had to say seriously. We had discussions with local representatives and in the summer of 1978 we sent a comrade as an observer to the conference of the Bolshevik Tendency in Bogota and we tried to make an assessment of the work of the PST in Argentina itself.
We did this with some humility, conscious that we were people from an imperialist country trying to look at the work of other comrades of the Trotskyist movement in a country oppressed by imperialism — with all the differences in politics, organisation and tradition which that implies.
Some things we could not accept, however: in particular the relationship between the PST (and its predecessors) and the Peronist movement. At the same time we could not fail to be impressed with the PST, their implantation in the working class, the role they had been able to play in the class struggle in Argentina, and the work they were able to carry out even under conditions of the military rule which existed again at that time.
We found ourselves in further agreement with the Bolshevik Faction with the upsurge of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, although we did not agree with everything the comrades said — in particular the position that Nicaragua was the new "epicentre of world politics" but we did strongly agree with what the BF were saying in general about the Nicaraguan revolution, and we agreed with the idea of the Simon Bolivar Brigade. At the same time we were strongly opposed to the developing line of the USEC majority and its logical outcome — the instruction to its Nicaraguan section to dissolve into the FSLN.
Our relationship with comrade Moreno's movement reached a crucial point with the call put out by the Bolshevik Faction for a "World Conference of Trotskyists". Comrade Moreno sent a representative to Britain to discuss this proposal. We strongly favoured a world conference and were keen to participate.
Unfortunately, however, we were never to get to such a Conference since it was quickly overtaken by the formation of the Parity Commission between the LTT, the OCRFI and the Bolshevik Faction — which we felt avoided carrying the fight through inside the USEC.
We were excluded from the Conference by conditions laid down in advance. The only unconditional invitation now was extended to the USEC, which turned it down. Anyone else who wanted to attend had to make a statement in advance that the groups comprising the Parity Commission represented "the historic continuity of the Fourth International".
That development effectively ended our relationship with the current led by Comrade Moreno. The Parity Committee lasted 10 months and since then the PST comrades have been building their own international movement.
Now we have again the call for an international conference of Trotskyists from the Comrades of the WRP and the comrades of the International Workers League and again we have exlcusion clauses before the discussion has even begun. We think it is a very negative development. We have to recognise that there is a range of opinions within the world movement and that people's ideas change. For example there are periods in the past where the criteria for this conferene would have excluded Comrade Moreno's movement from it!
We believe that we have to get away from these kind of attitudes if we are going seriously to tackle the problems of the movement. We have to get away from self-proclamation and denouncing others in the Trotskyist movement for original sin before the discussion has even started.
We need to see the contradictions in the contribution of cormade Moreno. We need to see both the great strength and the great contribution he made and also see that he was a part of the same crisis of the movement of which we are a part. He did not have the whole answer and none of us have the whole answer. If we are going to tackle these problems we need to draw on the strengths of the whole movement. It cannot be done with two or three sections of the movement getting together to the exclusion of the others.
I make these points frankly but I make them in the context of paying a very sincere tribute to the contribution which comrade Moreno has made. We need to draw on the strengths of that contribution and at the same time to recognise that the Trotskyist movement is very much the poorer for his passing.