The Proletarian Redeemer Arrives

The Proletarian Redeemer Arrives ​

Communiqué of the Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit
(Issued from Riga, April 8, 1933. Printed on broadside and posted in ports, councils, cooperative halls, community centers, and camera del lavoro; broadcast across socialist radio networks.)

The Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit, constituted by the Council of Revolutionary States for the organization of relief, carriage, and defensive provisioning under bourgeois coercion, addresses this communiqué to the peoples of the socialist republics and to the world’s colonized proletarian and peasant laborers.

1. The Blockade Has Been Shattered

Bolivia has endured. Not as a cautionary tale or a rotting corpse behind a suffocating quarantine, but as a living republic of workers and peasants which held its ground against the attempt to starve it into submission by the international bourgeoisie.

The blockade was drawn and it has been answered.

2. Blockade Is Aggression, Even When It Wears a Clean Shirt

The capitalist states have tried to govern by euphemism but in the end were forced to resort to force. Their clean phrases mask hollow lies. The Global Proletariat will no longer listen to them.

3. Europe Has Not Forgotten 1919

For years, the enemies of the revolution have repeated a lie: that the revolutionary era ended; that the socialist republics were domesticated by fatigue; that the workers of Europe were content to become clerks of their own welfare and spectators to the world’s misery.

This lie has been answered and the record set straight.

Across our republics the working class has moved in concert. Dock councils and cooperative fleets did not ask permission to become an instrument of defense - they assumed the responsibility. Workshops did not require lectures to understand hunger - they remembered it in their bodies. Women’s cooperatives did not debate whether bread is political - they treated it as such and sent it.

The European worker has been told that he must remain silent as his brothers abroad starve, and the European worker has refused.

Europe has been forced by history to become the furnace of world-politics, first under bourgeois domination and now under the rule of labor. The revolutionary heartland has learned what the old world never wished the oppressed to learn: that it is only universal proletarian solidarity which can liberate the oppressed.

4. From Sympathy to Capacity: The School of Organization

Our victory is not only moral but organizational. 1919 was no fluke: it has been proved time and again that proletarian society can cooperate on a global scale.

It is said that the peoples of the periphery are brave but disorganized, rich in suffering but poor in method. The old empires exploited this, and then mocked the disorder they themselves produced. Even today they bewitch the plantation worker and miner with empty talk of “development,” as if history were a gift delivered by foreign administrators and political adulthood were a certificate issued by bankers.

We answer with what the European proletariat has learned: to organize. Where the old world exported creditors and slave-drivers we will export discipline, technicians, and bread.

The Commission records, with pride, what has been accomplished under conditions of harassment, surveillance, blacklists, and coercion:

• Routes were improvised, then regularized;

• Charter chains were rotated;

• Cover papers and substitute manifests were issued;

• Procurement quotas were met;

• Specialists and volunteers were transported and assigned;

• Relief was made to arrive even when the sea was treated as a weapon.

And we declare openly: this capacity will not be dismantled but retained as a standing reserve of proletarian power.

5. The New Duty of the Socialist Republics

The socialist republics did not emerge in order to live comfortably behind their own borders while the global proletariat is crushed. A workers’ state that refuses to answer siege elsewhere is merely a national administration donned in red cloth.

We therefore reaffirm the doctrine of Proletarian Self-Defense:

Where a workers’ and peasants’ government has assumed public authority, has been affirmed by organs rooted in the laboring population, and is attacked by blockade, invasion, counterrevolutionary armies, or foreign coercion, organized proletarian society has the right and duty to provide support which will prevent them being coerced into obedience.

6. On Historical Responsibility and the Repayment of Plunder

Let it be stated clearly: the industrial capacity of Europe was not created simply with the labor of the European proletariat. It was built on Bolivian tin, Congolese rubber, Indian cotton, and Caribbean sugar.

The European bourgeoisie plundered and then blamed the plundered for their poverty. They called it “backwardness” and offered “development” as a gift, always with conditions, always with interest, always with the understanding that the “backward” must accept tutelage from the “advanced.”

The European proletariat rejects this lie. We do not offer tutelage but restitution. This restitution cannot take the form of returning what was stolen. This wealth has been consumed, transformed into factories and railways and technical knowledge. Restitution can only take the form of sharing what that theft produced : organizational capacity, industrial expertise, the discipline of coordinated labor. This is not charity or benevolence but the repayment of a historical debt , paid not in gold, but in the only currency the working class possesses: solidarity, expertise, and the capacity to organize. Where the old empires exported masters, we shall export comrades. Where they exported capital, we shall export capacity. Where they demanded obedience, we shall offer partnership.

The Bolivian miner and the German machinist stand on the same ground: both are workers, co-creators of history, subjects of their own liberation. That the tools differ, that the methods vary, that experience has taught different lessons - these are merely so many accidents of history, not judgments of nature. What colonialism stole, proletarian solidarity will restore. Not as a gift from superior to inferior, but as the mutual recognition of equals who share what each possesses.

7. To the Oppressed Nations

To those in Asia, Africa, and the Americas who have been taught that Europe is only an oppressor and never an ally, we answer with Bolivia: judge us by what we do.

For too long, the old powers treated the oppressed nations as raw material, useful for tin, rubber, grain, and hands, but not acknowledged as equals. This is what they mistook for “civilization.” When the oppressed refused to kneel, they were considered childish and disordered.

Bolivia has shown another route: not the tutelage of bankers but the discipline of labor. A people once spoken of as an object has spoken as a subject, and the world has been forced to listen.

8. Declaration: The World Has Been Instructed

The capitalist press sneers that Europe presumes to speak for the world. We answer: the world has been speaking through Europe for centuries, through its empires, its banks, its navies, its doctrines. The only question is whether it will continue to speak in the language of domination and trusteeship, or in the language of labor, organization, and liberation.

The attempt to starve a proletarian republic into submission has failed. Let those who govern by blockade understand what follows from this failure:

If the method is attempted again, it will be answered again - faster, more systematically, and with fewer illusions. The oppressed nations have seen that the ocean is not owned. The old powers have seen that the advance of the global proletariat cannot be constrained by cordon and blockade.

We do not promise ease. We promise this: no revolution will stand alone.

Adopted in Riga, April 8 1933,
in the name of the Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit.
(Seal appended.)

From the private journal of M.N. Roy Berlin, April 15, 1933

The Riga communiqué has been posted everywhere. I’ve read it five times now, once in Riga, once while transiting to Berlin, twice on the city streets, and then again in private. Each time I try to feel and to think as my German comrades do, with the clarifying pride and sense of historical duty being fulfilled. But I cannot summon up the same emotions. The blockade has been broken and Bolivia endures. This is not nothing. Why, then, this nagging sense of dread?

What I am going to write next is ungenerous, perhaps it is even wrong. It feels dangerous to write even in a private journal, but this thought is foolish.

The communique claims that it is not offering “tutelage but restitution”. This phrase has haunted me for the past two days. The Europeans say that they are exporting their methods, sharing expertise, teaching - well, this word is never used, but how else to understand what is happening when one party is disciplined and well-organized and the other pictured as a passive recipient?

The British taught me English, and through this language I came to Marx. Was this a gift or some manner of tutelage? Perhaps both and neither. I had no choice but to join the conversation if I was to be heard.

When I write of the Indian peasant, I do so today in German, using an apparatus developed in Europe for an audience in Berlin. It is they who judge whether I’ve understood my own country correctly. And I fear that Bolivia will too not be understood unless it is first explained by the Europeans.

I am being resentful. The aid to Bolivia was real, and so is their commitment to India. German workers voted to reduce their own rations, and Russian volunteers risked their lives. The organizational capacity that Europe possesses is a consequence of combined and uneven capitalist development. Today, at the present, there is no way that this can be changed. Not without the work of labor and the labor of time.And who will direct that work, and who will decide when enough time has passed?

Excerpt from The Constitution of the European Proletariat: Collective Action and Political Subjectivity in the Bolivia Crisis , 1997, Charles Mills and William Sewell

…The news reached Hamburg’s docks at 4:17 on the afternoon of August 8th, 1933. A radio operator at the Port Council headquarters received confirmation: the Americans had all-but-recognized the independence of the new Bolivian republic. The blockade, maintained for over a year through a combination of naval coercion and diplomatic pressure, would be withdrawn. Bolivia’s workers’ and peasants’ government would survive.

Within twenty minutes, work had stopped across the harbor. Within an hour, thousands of workers had gathered in the square outside the Council building. By evening, similar scenes were unfolding in Bremen, Moscow, Marseille, Genoa, and Petrograd. The celebrations continued for three days.

Although they began spontaneously, they quickly took on ritualistic characteristics. In Hamburg, workers carried hastily made banners reading “BOLIVIA ENDURES” and “THE REVOLUTION VICTORIOUS.” In Petrograd, the entire fleet sounded its horns in unison at sunset. In Marseille, women’s councils organized distributions of bread in public squares, each loaf marked with a small Bolivian flag, a gesture that simultaneously recalled the relief shipments and sacralized the act of sharing. These were not planned demonstrations but eruptions of collective emotion that generated their own symbolic vocabulary.

The intensity of these gatherings surprised the bureaucrats who had organized the relief efforts. A member of the Commission for Anti-Blockade Relief and Transit, observing the Hamburg gathering, wrote in his diary: “I expected satisfaction, perhaps some pride. What I witnessed was something closer to ecstasy. Workers were embracing strangers, weeping openly, chanting slogans that no one had written. It was as if something had been proven that we had not quite believed ourselves.”

What happened in those three days was not simply an outpouring of relief or solidarity, though it was certainly both of these. This was the completion of a process that had begun in 1919 and resumed in 1932 with the birth of a mass anti-imperialist public. The “European Proletariat”, which had existed before August 1933 as an analytical category and a rhetorical figure, emerged from the Bolivia celebrations as a lived collective identity with a mission and a sense of historical responsibility that would fundamentally reshape the socialist republics’ relationship to the world beyond their borders.

In nearly every recorded speech, chant, and resolution, the subject of the action was “we.” Not “our governments,” not “the Commission,” not “the socialist republics,” but we workers. “We broke the blockade.” “We saved Bolivia.” “We have shown the world.” This was not rhetorical: the relief effort had indeed been organized through workers’ councils, cooperative networks, and voluntary associations. The ships that ran the blockade were crewed by volunteers and the grain that fed La Paz had been collected through workplace contributions. The agency claimed was, in a meaningful sense, real.

But the “we” that emerged in these narrations was not simply the sum of individual actors. It was a unified collective subject that transcended national boundaries, sectoral divisions, and local particularities. A docker in Hamburg and a railway worker in Milan, who had never met and who belonged to different national republics, were narrated as part of the same “we”—the European Proletariat, acting in concert, expressing a unified will. This unity had first become thinkable in 1919, but the division of the European working-class into separate national republics and the institutionalization of revolutionary energy had temporarily made it recede from view. With Bolivia, workers once again seized revolutionary agency; in the colonial periphery, they witnessed an opportunity to once again become subjects of history. Their victory confirmed that collective agency had been real rather than illusory.

The implications of these events were profound. The viewpoint that emerged from the celebrations - the European Proletariat as world-historical liberator, as bearer of organizational capacity, as repayer of colonial debts - would become formalized in the Riga Communiqué of August 1933 and would inflect the shape of socialist internationalism for years to come. But this subject-position, forged in a moment of genuine solidarity and effective collective action, carried within it structural features that would prove deeply problematic: a persistent asymmetry between European “capacity” and peripheral “need,” a relationship of pedagogical transmission disguised as partnership, and a form of internationalism that, despite its revolutionary intentions, reproduced certain patterns characteristic of the imperial order it sought to transcend.