AS this magazine was preparing to go to press, we heard of the unexpected death in Argentina of life-long revolutionary Nahuel Moreno.
Moreno has been one of the few post-war Trotskyist leaders to succeed in developing both a sizeable organisation — the Argentine PST (Socialist Workers Party) and more recently the Movement for Socialism (MAS) — and a substantial implantation in the working class. Immediately before he was taken ill, Moreno had attended a MAS rally of as many as 40,000 supporters in Buenos Aires, and the organisation has grown rapidly in the fertile conditions in Argentina since the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship.
The basis for this mushrooming growth had in part been laid by the ability of the PST to survive and function clandestinely under the repression of the dictatorship from 1976.
It was during this period that a number of us in Britain first met supporters of Moreno when they came seeking support for a campaign on release of political prisoners. We were impressed at that time by the PST — at that time affiliated to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International — and also in much agreement with political criticisms which Moreno levelled against both wings of the divided leadership of the USFI on their lines for the Portuguese revolution. It was on these points that Moreno formed first the Bolshevik Tendency and later the Bolshevik Faction, comprising much of the USFI's Latin American membership.
Occasional written contacts and meetings took place until 1979, when Moreno himself came to Britain to urge support for the newly-constituted Simon Bolivar Brigade, which the Bolshevik Faction was assembling to give military aid to the Sandinista struggle in Nicaragua. In the run up to the XIth Congress of the USFI, that year, some of us urged Moreno not to drop the polemic on Portugal, and to force a real debate over the differences he had raised.
In the event, USFI support for the Sandinistas' swift expulsion of the Brigade from Nicaragua in the summer of 1979 precipitated a rapid split by the Bolshevik Faction from the USFI — without discussion and prior to the world congress.
Events moved rapidly, and within a few months Moreno had entered a "Parity Committee" with French OCI leader Pierre Lambert — whom Moreno had branded a "hopeless sectarian" only a few years previously. Though some of us were at first invited to participate in the Parity Committee, this invitation was soon altered to a requirement that we first endorse a detailed resolution.
Since the split with Lambert, Moreno's International Workers League has taken on a more sectarian, strident tone of self-proclamation as "The world Trotskyist movement". Interestingly, however, it is the only major international grouping to attempt to systematise its politics into an up-to-date programmatic document building upon the Transitional Programme.
Supporters of Socialist Viewpoint will find numerous points of political disagreement with Moreno and his current — not least with the programmatic texts, which are eclectic and empirical. But the political evolution of Moreno, and his ability to build substantial support for Trotskyist politics, further underline the scope of the political changes that can be brought about through a combination of experience, circumstances and political struggle.
Moreno, interviewed last year, freely admitted to "an infinite number of errors", which he clearly felt he had managed to detect and correct. But every current and individual continues to make errors.
The vital issue for the Trotskyist movement is to break from the entrenched habit of writing off opposing currents on the basis of their errors, and to fight instead to establish a serious political basis for development.
Moreno stopped short on this task, and failed to learn the lessons of his own political evolution. It would be a tragedy if those who most respect his achievements were to show it by echoing his sectarian weaknesses.