Dominican workers protest IMF austerity

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Socialist Action June 1984 5 The following is a slightly abridged version of an article which appeared in the May 21 International Viewpoint, a news magazine of the Fourth International.

The Dominican Republic police and army killed more than 200 men, women, and young people in attacks on the crowds demonstrating April 23-25 against brutal austerity measures. That was the way the government run by the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), a member of the Social Democratic Second International, proved its reliability to the International Monetary Fund and the imperialist banks.

For months, the PRD government had been negotiating a new agreement with the IMF. On April 19, the Dominican president, Jorge Blanco, announced that the government had accepted the IMF's conditions. In fact, this regimewhich trims its sails to suit the demands of imperialist finance capital, the multinationals, and the small layer of Dominican rich-simply capitulated.

The president hoped to be able to take advantage of the Easter holiday to avoid a mass reaction and defuse the discontent. But he lost his bet. On April 23, the People's Struggle Coordinating Committees in two neighborhoods issued a call for a demonstration.

The response was immediate and vast. In the capital, as well as in the cities of San Cristobal, San Francisco de Marcoris, and Barahona, tens of thousands of working people came into the streets. They demanded breaking off the negotiations with the IMF, freezing the prices of necessities, and establishing a minimum wage of 250 pesos with automatic cost-of-living increases.

This outburst of desperation by impoverished and hungry people struggling to survive was seen by the Social Democratic government as a "provocation. So it ordered its repressive forces to open fire.

The world capitalist economic crisis hit the Dominican Republic rather late. But when it struck, the impact was brutal. Today, it is estimated that the real unemployment rate is around 32 percent. About 58 percent of the economically active population is considered to be suffering from both unemployment and underemployment. Thus, out of a total population of 6 million, less than a million have a real job.

In 1980, it was estimated that a family of five needed 500 pesos a month to live on. But the minimum wage is only 125 pesos. Moreover, for the last four years real wages have steadily melted away under the impact of growing inflation.

...China visit (continued from page joyfully reported these statistics as "proof" that capitalist incentives are superior to a socialist economy in terms of efficiency of production.

However, the cost to the society as a whole is becoming painfully evident, and there are indications that longer-term projections are very bleak. These new policies have already meant worse working conditions for millions of Chinese workers, along with steady attacks on all the gains of the revolution. Letting the capitalist fox, even though leashed, into the socialist chickenhouse may have temporary stimulating effects but abdication of longer-term planning and cooperative sharing of wealth produced from the land and the factory can be disastrous.

Unemployment and crime

The evidence for this social deterioration can be seen in the increasing reports Now, in the spring of 1984, the IMF is going to impose measures that will have the following results for the masses of working people: a wage freeze, going hand in hand with a drastic increase in the prices of necessities; slashing of the already meager social spending; increased unemployment provoked by the reduction of state investment; a new wave of bankruptcies by small and medium enterprises in industry and agriculture; and the elimination of a lot of subsidies designed to cushion the effect of rising food prices.

The IMF imposed these measures as April 23 protest in Santo Domingo raises the condition for making new loans that would enable the Dominican Republic to repay the imperialist banks, which in past years have provided credit at nearly usurious rates.

But that is not all. U.S. budget deficits are skyrocketing because of the high levels of arms spending, among other things. The result is an upward thrust of interest rates in the United States driving up the value of the dollar. And the higher the dollar goes, the deeper into the quicksand this pushes the countries that owe debts in dollars.

And now the IMF, which is controlled by the United States, is demanding that dominated countries-such as the Dominican Republic-tighten their belts until they choke in order to balance their budgets! That's the real provocation.

By demanding that the negotiations with the IMF be broken off, the Dominican workers and peasants directly challenged this shameless imperialist exploitation and the complicity with it of the Dominican ruling party.

Since March, a mass movement had been taking form in the Dominican Republic. Hunger marches multiplied, for example, in the capital, which as the result of the rural exodus, has swollen from the Chinese government itself of unemployment (up to 12 percent in some cities), profiteering on the black market, tax cheating, increased crime, large scale smuggling, and illicit foreign exchange. In the previously quoted article, Orville Schell graphically describes peasants standing guard at night over their land during harvest to prevent theft, chopping down roadside trees for firewood, and stealing concrete blocks from canals to build houses. In fact the decollectivization of land has obviated the use of modern farm machinery, which is only efficient on larger farms.

If, in fact, the increase of agricultural productivity is due to short term profit incentives, but is accompanied by a rapid deterioration of the infrastructure, there could be real trouble for the fragile existence of 800 million peasants. The communes that previously built and maintained irrigation and hydroelectric projects, maintained the roads and the health, welfare, and educational services are apparently being disbanded. Factories building more sophisticated into a concentration of 1.4 million inhabitants.

In March 1984, the five labor confederations, including the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), which is the backbone of the labor movement and the class-struggle wing of it, called for a "great national day of protest against hunger" on April 7.

The first congress of the Independent Peasant Movement (MCI), held March 22-25, reflected big steps forward in organizing the poor peasant masses independently of the various bourgeois parties and state institutions. The fight the specter of the 1965 revolution against the measures dictated by the IMF and cooperation with the CGT were central themes of the congress.

So, the protest movement and the mass rebellion that occurred in late April were based on a buildup of forces that had been going on for a whole period. It was thus not by chance that immediately following the first clashes on April 23, the five labor confederations, including those linked to the rul ing party, called for a general strike. On May 1, despite the imposition of martial-law measures, they managed to hold a successful day of protest. The breadth of the movement is shown also by the lining up of peasant, student, and peasant women's coordinating committees behind the trade-union organizations.

The April 23 and 24 events opened a new stage in the class struggle in the Dominican Republic. The repression was savage, the worst seen since the April 1965 war, when the island was occupied by 42,000 U.S. troops, and 5000 Dominicans were killed. This time, the masses showed that they are not ready to bow to the dictates of the IMF and the threats of the army and police farm equipment are becoming unprofitable and are stopping production as the bigger communes are broken up. If these processes continue, irrigation and conservation practices will steadily deteriorate until the dust bowl conditions of the 1930s and 1940s reappear with each peasant family trying to scratch out a living with hand tools.

Need for political revolution The recent events in China are a result of the economic and political dead-end into which the entrenched Chinese bureacracy has led the workers' state. Since the 1949 revolution the Chinese rulers have sought to maintain their privileges and monopoly of power by punishing political dissent and by cooperating with powerful capitalist states.

Today, the Chinese bureaucracy is clearly intensifying its role as the transmission belt for capitalist restoration. But for capitalism to be restored in China, it would require a qualitative defeat of the Chinese working class in a process of counterrevolution. This has force controlled by the United States.

In the wake of the first clashes, the mass organizations began to collaborate more closely. The MCI and the peasant women's organizations joined the Coordinating Committee of Peasant Unions. And this time, unlike in the past, the Dominican Left Front (FID-Frente de Izquierda Dominicana) was able to provide the initial, decisive elements of a leadership for the struggle. This is a key factor that will certainly be a major obstacle to any attempts by the populist sectors of the PRD, such as the wing led Second International, or by the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) of Juan Bosch.

Jorge Blanco's government is on the defensive politically. That is why it resorted to machine guns and open repression. The crisis of this regime will continue to deepen. However, precisely as a result of this, the government is stepping up the repression. Thus, on May 7, the security services, which work hand-in-glove with the CIA, arrested about a hundred trade-union and left political leaders, including Rafael Taveras, a leader of the Bloque Socialista and the FID.

In order to understand the full importance of the struggles of the Dominican masses and the late April massacre, these events have to be put in their wider context. A gigantic confrontation is developing throughout the Central American and Caribbean region, which is close to the heart of American imperialism, as well as close to Cuba.

Support for the Domin people, for the political fo the FID, must become an of the broad movement with the Central American Distributors of Socialist Action in Canada:

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not occurred yet.

As in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Chinese bureaucracy deeply fears any kind of mass action as a threat to its control. A massive opposition movement known as the "Peking Spring" movement developed from November 1978 to March 1980, when it was brutally repressed. With over 30 underground publications, many of them calling for "socialism with proletarian democracy" and solidarizing with the struggle of the Polish workers, this movement objectively posed the need to renew with the traditions of the Russian revolution under Lenin and Trotsky.

The Chinese working class has risen up against bureaucratic mismanagement and control in the past. Today it is resisting the escalated attacks on the gains of the revolution. It is only a matter of time before this mighty force of hundreds of millions will find its path toward the political revolution that will remove the parasitic bureaucratic caste, defeat the threat of capitalist restoration, and place the workers and peasants in control of society through their organs of workers' democracy. ican working rces united in integral part of solidarity revolution. E