To take up arms against the enemy, to bomb or to perform terrorist attacks is not synonymous of being revolutionary, very revolutionary, or more revolutionary than the rest. These actions are presented as politically radical, but they are not necessarily so; specially when they are performed by initiative of small groups, not acknowledging the organization and mobilization power of the workers, peasants, students and social movements in general.
By: Cote.
Such was the idea that the FARC sold the youth and workers for several decades. This guerrilla movement has never aimed to end capitalism as a political goal with its actions, or to impose a workers’ government, to establish socialism, or to try to expand the revolutionary movement to the rest of world. Its goals have always moved within the limits of capitalism and aiming to improve it. For fifty years, they were an armed reformism, and now, during peace negotiations, they decided to demobilize as a guerrilla and become a political reformist movement, although disarmed.
Reformism is a type of social, political or military movement that generally aims to make gradual changes to improve a system, project or society. Those changes are usually related to certain aspects of the society or the regime and not to the system as a whole. Reformism seeks to obtain things like social justice, both social and economic progress, the deepening of the bourgeois democracy through the practices of consensus, social dialogue and mixed economy.
The program of the FARC
The first program of the FARC was approved in July 1964, and it posed, among other goals, the struggle for a democratic government of national liberation; a democratic agrarian reform respecting “the private property of rich peasants who personally work the land”; protection of indigenous communities; basic prices and support for agricultural products; extended credit with payment facilities. Thirty years later, on April 3rd, 1993, the Bolivarian Platform for the new Colombia was approved. In this text, they call to conform a national, patriotic, democratic and Bolivarian government to socialism, to commit to a program that, in its essence, is still democratic and against neoliberalism. In their program, the FARC do not make any reference to the proletariat, to a workers’ and popular government, or to the workers’ demands. Now they are about to sign peace with the government and the imperialism, they have been careful to wash its program once again and locate with no hesitation within the boundaries of capitalism.
A Broad Front for Peace
Mr. Timoshenko, in an extensive interview with Semana magazine, stated what will be the frame of his political action, and called reformists of all species to join together into a holy alliance.
Two meetings took place, one in Bogota and the other one in Havana, counting with all reformist tendencies, to begin discussing the entry of the FARC to politics. What at least some sectors of the Communist Party and other close sectors have posed is the need for a Broad Front for Peace, with a common program for the left and the democratic sectors. It is not clear how far they have gone with it, but what is clear is that the leadership of the FARC, together with the CP, the Patriotic Union and the Patriotic March, pretend to reorganize the actions of the so-called (reformist) left.
The program proposed will attempt to make “final touches” to the neoliberal model and to the Bonapartist and anti-democratic political regime, and to seek space within the Parliament. This is what emerges from the interview given by Mr. Timoshenko to Semana:
“We will do politics without weapons. We have the Bolivarian Platform for the New Colombia, and we have some spines there, confronting the imaginary of what Colombia should be. But one thing is what it should be, and a different thing is what could be. And we have to be realistic about it...”.
“Everything is comprehensive: agricultural issues, political participation, special justice, abandonment of arms, the link to the civil, economic and political life of the FARC“.
“We never said we are against private property. What we are against of is the over-exploitation of the people, we are against inequity in the distribution of wealth in Colombia, (…) we can build a kinder Colombia together“.
“…This is not a process faced against the entrepreneurship. This is not a process aimed to overthrow the Colombian State; this process is trying to create the conditions for transformations in Colombia, to stop killing each other over ideas each of us defend“.
“…What we want is a developing Colombia; to develop the productive forces. We need to rescue the national industry, to rescue the wealth…”
“…We have to find the widest number of alliances as possible, to accumulate and gather up to make the implementation of the agreements an actual reality…”.
To sum up, the FARC do not question the private property, they seek to improve the capitalism model of neoliberal development, they do not care about the working class being not just exploited but “over-exploited”; they only seek to defend human rights within the regime, to ensure their own electoral and parliamentary space, etc., and in order to achieve these goals they are willing to conform the widest political alliances possible. They are ingloriously turning the armed reformism with no arms.
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Originally published in The Socialist N.° 700, April 2016.-
Translation: Vale Santamaría.
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