The Bolivian Crisis: Hemispheric Order Confronts Proletarian Self-Defense
**The Riga Resolution on Defensive Proletarian Solidarity (Extraordinary Session of the Council of Revolutionary States, December 12th, 1931)
Preamble**
The revolutionary states, constituted by the self-activity of workers, peasants, and soldiers, affirm that the era of strangling popular sovereignty through blockade, covert war, and tutelary “protections” must be brought to an end. The Council recognizes that the capitalist powers increasingly seek to substitute economic siege and maritime policing for open intervention, thereby making hunger and isolation instruments of policy.
I. Principle
1. Proletarian Self-Defense is the right and duty of the socialist republics, and of organized proletarian society, to provide defensive, material support to any workers’ and peasants’ government which has successfully seized and consolidated public authority and is under attack by blockade, invasion, counterrevolutionary armies, or foreign coercion. For the purposes of this doctrine, blockade includes the organized denial of insurance, credit, transit, and neutral carriage when undertaken to collapse a recognized popular government.
2. The Council affirms that hunger is violence. A blockade aimed at collapsing a proletarian government by deprivation is an act of aggression even when it hides behind commercial forms.
3. This doctrine is defensive in purpose. It is not a banner for adventurism. It is a shield against the organized return of the old world.
II. Conditions for Assistance
4. Assistance under Proletarian Self-Defense shall be extended only where the following conditions are met:
a) A workers’ and peasants’ government has assumed the functions of state authority in a defined territory—maintaining public order, provisioning, and administration—and is not merely a faction, committee, or insurgent band.
b) That government has been affirmed by representative organs of proletarian and popular power(workers’ councils, peasant assemblies, soldiers’ committees, or equivalent institutions rooted in the laboring population).
c) The government is under material attack: blockade, external military threat, organized counterrevolution, or coercive measures designed to produce collapse.
d) A request for assistance has been made by the constituted organs of that government, or the necessity of humanitarian relief is evident beyond dispute.
III. On the Character of Aid
5. Assistance shall be defensive and sustaining in character: food, medicine, engineering support, communications, transport, credit, and means necessary to resist blockade and coercion.
6.The Council affirms the legitimacy of international volunteer formations provided they are placed under the authority of the recognized organs of popular power and adhere to discipline prohibiting reprisals and coercive requisitions.
7. The Council establishes a Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit , tasked with coordinating shipping routes, procurement, medical detachments, and the protection of neutral carriers from harassment. The Council further instructs that the existence of relief and transit measures shall not be concealed as if it were a crime; secrecy will be reserved for routes and names, not for the principle
IV. On Non-Substitution and Self-Determination
8. The Council rejects any doctrine by which revolutionary states may substitute themselves for the initiative of the people concerned. Assistance is not tutelage.
9. The Council affirms that the form of the revolutionary order—its constitutional arrangements, party composition, and local institutions—shall be determined by the people themselves, subject only to the universal prohibitions against racial persecution and the restoration of landlord rule.
V. On Provocation and Discipline
10. The Council makes no decree commanding parties to initiate insurrection. Revolution cannot be administered by timetable.
VI. Representation and Colonial Voice
11. For the duration of this emergency session and for all agenda items concerning colonial liberation and hemispheric coercion, the Council grants expanded representation to the recognized Colonial Councils and to anti-colonial parties operating under repression.
12. The South American Anti-Colonial Council is seated as a bloc with full deliberative rights on the matters above.
VII. Declaration
13. The Council declares that the attempt to starve a proletarian republic back into submission is an attack upon the dignity of labor everywhere. If such a method succeeds once, it will be repeated—against the next revolution, and then against the next concession, and then against any people who demand to live as more than an extractive resource.
14. Let those who govern by blockade understand: the world has changed. The proletariat is no longer a population to be managed by scarcity. It is a historical actor capable of coordination, action, and resolve.
15. We do not promise ease. We promise this: no revolution will stand alone.
Address by President Herbert Hoover
Delivered from the White House, Washington, D.C., December 14th, 1931
(Following the announcement of the “Riga Resolution on Defensive Proletarian Solidarity”)
My fellow Americans,
Tonight I speak to you not to inflame passion, but to steady it; not to summon hatred, but to clarify what is at stake.
In recent days, a body convened in Riga under the direction of the revolutionary governments now ruling much of Europe has issued what it calls a Resolution on Defensive Proletarian Solidarity. Stripped of its theatrical phrases and humanitarian varnish, this resolution declares an intention to intervene - materially, organizationally, and by mobilization of men - in the domestic affairs of other nations, wherever a faction declares itself a “workers’ republic” and claims the sanction of “proletarian legitimacy.”
The authors of this declaration ask the world to believe they are merely defending the oppressed. But the world has heard such claims before: when armies crossed borders “to protect” this or that people; when states demanded bases “for security”; when ideologues announced that history itself had granted them license.
Let us be plain.
The United States recognizes and will always recognize the right of every nation in the Americas to govern itself without foreign coercion, whether that coercion comes from old empires, new empires, or any international apparatus that pretends it has outgrown the need for consent. We will not accept the doctrine - whether voiced in Berlin, Moscow, or anywhere else - that sovereignty is conditional upon the approval of a committee abroad.
This is not, as some would have it, a quarrel over economic theory. Americans may disagree fiercely about tariffs, currency, labor law, or the proper scope of government. Those debates are the lifeblood of a free people. This is something else. This is a question of whether force and clandestine subversion may be dignified as “solidarity,” and whether distant powers may declare, in effect, that the Western Hemisphere is open to their experiments.
That proposition collides head-on with the oldest and clearest principle of American foreign policy: that the nations of this hemisphere shall not be made the chessboard of external powers.
We do not seek conflict with any nation. The American people know the costs of war. They have buried sons. They have endured the long aftermath of emergency measures that always arrive as “temporary” and linger as habit. I do not romanticize force. I do not propose crusades. And I say to you with all the gravity this office requires: we will exhaust every instrument of law and diplomacy before we consider anything else.
But peace is not preserved by closing one’s eyes. Peace is preserved when the terms of peace are understood and defended.
The Riga resolution attempts to create a new kind of international practice: a chain of “volunteer” formations, “technical missions,” clandestine shipments, and political direction—meant to be deniable in form, yet undeniable in effect. Its authors propose to maintain the outward posture of nonintervention while undertaking the substance of intervention. That is not moral progress. That is merely the old art of conflict by other means.
Now, Americans are hearing much discussion of Bolivia. They are hearing claims and counterclaims, stories of “people’s committees,” reports of coercion and disorder, and disputes about foreign influence, both real and alleged. Bolivia is a sovereign nation. The United States does not claim to govern Bolivia or choose its leaders. But we do insist on a basic order of relations between states: that political change in the Americas must not be forcibly engineered or sustained by extra-hemispheric powers who regard our hemisphere as an arena for war.
To the delegates gathered in Riga, I say this: the United States does not presume to lecture Europe about the internal arrangements of Europe. We have watched the upheavals there with concern. We have heard rhetoric of emancipation and witnessed acts of repression and the growth of vast apparatuses of control. We do not seek to export our system by force. We ask only to be left free to live under our own laws, and to allow the nations of the Americas to do the same.
To our neighbors in the Americas, I say this: our purpose is not domination. The United States has made mistakes in the past. We are not blind to them. But we are committed to a Pan-American principle that is deeper than any one administration: that the peace of this hemisphere is a common good, and that foreign intervention - whether by gunboat or by “international volunteer” - has now become a common danger.
I have directed the appropriate departments to undertake the following:
1. A full investigation into foreign-directed organizations operating within the United States that may be serving as conduits for illegal material support to armed factions abroad, regardless of the political label those factions claim.
2. The strengthening of coastal and customs enforcement to ensure that our ports are not used—by any party—as a staging ground for covert international conflict.
3. A review of hemispheric defense preparedness, so that no foreign power may miscalculate American resolve. Preparedness is not aggression. It is insurance against the gambler’s logic that invites catastrophe.
I must now ask for three things from the American people:
First, calm: the calm of a nation that does not startle at shadows, but also does not deny realities.
Second, unity: not a false unity that smothers legitimate debate, but a unity in defense of our sovereignty and the sovereignty of our neighbors.
Third, confidence: confidence not in the infallibility of any administration, but in the strength of our institutions and the good sense of a free people.
We will answer ideology with law. We will answer clandestine interference with transparency. We will answer provocation with firmness. And we will answer the old dream of foreign dominion—whether in the name of empire, or in the name of “solidarity”—with the simple American truth that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Thank you, and good night.
The Bolivian Revolution: An International Proletarian History: Chapter 4, November 1931-August 1932 (1978)
From December 7th through the 16th, an emergency meeting of IntRevMar’s Council of Revolutionary States was convened in Riga. This was not merely an intervention in the Bolivian crisis, but part of the ongoing struggle for control of the Third Internationale between Moderates and Internationalists. Bolivia had become a lightning rod, but also a shared object of political and revolutionary fervor. Germans, Italians, French, and Russians could not always agree with one another—or with themselves—about the direction of socialism, either internationally or domestically. But all could agree to condemn capitalist barbarism and to furnish the means of resistance.
The document that emerged met the demands of the new anti-imperialist public: it created institutions to coordinate relief and made the defense of the Bolivian revolution a matter of official policy. It also, for a time, suspended the rift between moderates and internationalists. The internationalists secured a general promise: that proletarian revolutions with genuine popular organs would receive IntRevMar support. The moderates secured guardrails and a new point of leverage, both moral and diplomatic, against the capitalist bloc.
Anti-colonial cadres from South America were seated as a full body, a victory for both the internationalists and the insurgent colonial parties. In truth, the extraordinary activity of proletarian society had already ensured a settlement favorable to the internationalists: the Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit was exactly the kind of institution they had advocated, a committee with real fiscal and diplomatic power speaking in the name of the international proletariat. On its authority it could charter ships, issue cover papers, coordinate procurement, and compel cooperation from fleets.
It would take more than a month to fold existing German–Russian efforts into this new body and make it a reasonably integrated device. But the effects of the resolution were immediate. In America, where paranoia and panic were slowly rising to a boil among political and business elites, the demand for escalation was swift. Hoover himself tried to guide it into “productive,” rather than—as he wrote in his journal—“nihilistic” channels. By this point, however, matters were escaping his control. Such a blatant challenge to the Monroe Doctrine could not go unanswered. Extraordinary but covert pressures were placed on Britain to move its fleet to wartime readiness to defend the Atlantic Approaches, and much of the United States Atlantic Squadron was sent south to begin “inspections” of goods bound for Argentine ports. Congress passed a bill formalizing measures already in place and declared a formal embargo against Bolivia. Now fully in the public eye, the “Bolivian question” became a subject of national debate just as a presidential campaign was about to begin.
Fearful of the awakened American colossus and aware that the socialist powers had no real capacity to project force into the Atlantic, the caudillo governments began searching for a way out. They did not want domestic audiences to see them surrender to Washington, and they hoped to use the existence of, and their limited influence over, a hostile Bolivian government as leverage. But they also understood, quite rightly, that the embargo might soon be extended to them. Judging by past precedent, such an embargo could quickly become a blockade in all but name. On January 3rd, to the surprise and delight of the Americans, they jointly announced that they would crack down on illicit weapons shipments.
In more respects than one, this was a ploy for time. Both nations had labor movements sympathetic to Bolivia which were already involved in illegal smuggling; neither government wished to antagonize them. Nor was it particularly decisive for La Paz whether rifles arrived through official channels or were hauled through mountains and jungle on the old paths of smuggling. Sooner or later, the Americans would realize what was happening.
In fact, the Bolivian government was increasingly consolidating control over the countryside, and its army shrank over the first months of 1932 as soldiers shifted from pitched battles and anti-guerrilla sweeps to the mundane work of checkpoints, patrols, requisition audits, and surveillance. It was therefore not a lack of guns that most threatened the new state at this point, but a lack of flour, fuel, and machine parts. Scarcity did not merely weaken the republic; it forced it to decide whose survival counted first. The need to ration between indigenous communities (seed and subsistence), miners’ councils (tools and calories), state bureaus (payroll and provisioning), and the revolutionary army (transport, uniforms, ammunition) inflamed pre-existing tensions and compelled tortuous coalitional choices. The Bolivian crisis ceased to simply be an international contest of shipping and embargoes; inside Bolivia itself, it became a daily argument over justice and rationing.
Ironically, by depriving the new state of an immediate enemy, victory over the American puppet government exposed the seams within the ruling coalition. Toro, convinced the situation remained fragile, argued that an All-Bolivian Congress must wait until the blockade had been broken; Busch and Marof insisted that prolonged emergency rule would corrode legitimacy faster than it preserved security. Yet the latter two also divided over strategy. Busch believed survival required exporting the revolution into Chile and Peru before the cordon tightened further. Marof warned against premature adventurism, especially with a Chilean government whose cooperation remained indispensable to the transit of raw materials and foodstuffs, and whose hostility would hand Washington a cleaner justification for escalation.
In the immediate future, matters only worsened for the new Bolivian Republic. By March, the American blockade, staffed with more ships than ever before, had tightened. Debates over rationing turned rancorous and bitter and the mood in Europe turned sour. But then the Americans made a mistake. Hoover, under attack from the right wing of the Republican Party, finally agreed to extend the embargo to the “rogue dictatorships” in Chile and Argentina. But so far from bringing the two caudillo regimes to their knees, this measure catalyzed, to the surprise of some of their leaders, a resurgence of popular patriotism among Argentines and Chileans. The backs of the military leaders thereby stiffened, and with no exit that did not look like diplomatic humiliation, both states committed themselves to the survival of the Bolivian government. Renewed shipments of Argentine grain were extended on socialist credit, to be repaid in full once the crisis ended and regular shipping could resume. Appreciative voices in Europe spoke of the “progressive, anti-imperialist bourgeoisie of South America,” who had resisted the temptation to become compradors of the imperialist jackboot.
Slowly, more gaps began to appear in the blockade. The American Navy could not plug the entire Atlantic. As Washington bolstered the cordon with cruisers, expanded inspections, multiplied paperwork, and increased pressure on ports, the Commission, armed with extraordinary financial and diplomatic means, responded in kind: ships disguised as passenger traffic, flags of convenience, byzantine transshipment chains, false routes, and night landings.
American admirals argued that the only answer was another round of escalation: transfer Pacific assets to the Atlantic to tighten the cordon, while the resistance inside Bolivia was revitalized with American arms routed through intermediaries in the eastern borderlands. But to strip the Pacific was to accept risk, and only assurances from Japan could reduce it. As the crisis deepened, Japan became the hinge of the world-system: its peculiar position allowed it to extract privileges from Washington without undertaking extensive commitments of its own. Diplomats were dispatched, assurances floated, and arrangements made for a summit, should it be required.
The world watched, and clandestine sheets - mimeographed in basements, smuggled in mailbags, read aloud in workshops and barracks - circulated from Moscow to Mumbai, from Berlin to Beijing, denouncing the naked attempt to starve a free people. The Americans retorted with images of a metastasizing socialist contagion, a plague that would consume the world and dissolve the old bonds of family, nation, and faith. It was not yet a true quasi-war, but it had already become a propaganda war,and here the socialists possessed a weapon the State Department could not easily name “subversion.”
There was one man they could call upon who claimed neither commissariat nor party discipline, and whose authority carried a warrant older than any republic on earth. Embarking from Rome, he would brave the Atlantic and climb into La Paz. And America would have to decide what, exactly, it does with a Pope traveling through a blockade. Would they arrest him?
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