Puerto Rico: The working class and the 2024 elections

On 5 November, general elections will be held in Puerto Rico. As happens every four years, people will vote to elect officials to administer the government. But, unlike previous elections, these offer us a historic opportunity. 

[Originally published in Spanish at rumboalterno.net]

For the first time in more than 50 years, the traditional capitalist-colonial bipartisanship that has dominated the political landscape in our country is on the brink of collapse. What position should we take in this situation? What position should the working class assume to best advance its class interests?

The labour movement in Puerto Rico

In Puerto Rico, the workers' political struggle was born at practically the same time as trade unionism. Less than a year after the US invasion, on 18 June 1899, a group of workers organised the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers) with the aim of fighting to improve their wages and working conditions.

At the same meeting, the workers also agreed to organise the Socialist Workers' Party with the aim of conquering political power. From then on, and for more than 50 years, trade union and political struggles developed as two aspects of the same workers' struggle. By 1915, the working class organised the Socialist Party.

In this brief space we cannot evaluate the successes and errors of the struggle of the FLT and the Socialist Party. However, it is important to point out that the socialist delegates at the 1952 Constitutional Convention managed to include in Puerto Rico’s Constitution important workers' rights such as the right to organise unions, the right to strike, and collective bargaining. 

They also achieved the approval of the famous Section 20, which recognised important human rights for our people, such as the right of every person to receive free primary and secondary education, the right to work, to enjoy an adequate standard of living ensuring health and well-being with access to food, housing, medical care, and necessary social services, as well as the right to protection in the event of unemployment, illness, old age, or physical disability. In an exercise of its imperialist power, the US government vetoed this section of the Constitution.

Shortly after winning the elections in 1944, the PPD stopped preaching social justice and openly embraced colonial capitalism / Image: vxla, Wikimedia Commons

On the other hand, and as part of the so-called ‘Latin American Democratic Left’, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) was born in 1938 as a social-democratic party raising the flag of social justice and a programme of broad demands for the benefit of the working class and farm workers. However, shortly after winning the elections in 1944, the PPD stopped preaching social justice and openly embraced colonial capitalism. It oversaw the Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap) programme of industrialisation, the destruction of the General Confederation of Workers, and the imprisonment of communist and nationalist pro-independence leaders.

In 1968, the PPD lost the elections for the first time since 1944. Since then, it has alternated in power with another capitalist party, the New Progressive Party (PNP). While in other countries the bipartisan alternation generally occurs between the right (which nakedly defends capitalism) and the social-democratic left (which defends capitalism ‘with a human face’), in Puerto Rico the PPD-PNP two-party system has consistently manifested itself as a struggle between two factions of the local bourgeoisie, both staunch defenders of colonial capitalism.

During the period of PPD-PNP domination, any semblance of independent political workers’ struggle disappeared. The working class was divided in the eternal search for a ‘lesser evil’, which inevitably ended in the election of an equal evil. Thus, when the PNP repressed the people or adopted anti-worker legislation, the PPD became the electoral ‘alternative’ and vice versa. 

Although there were efforts to rescue independent workers’ politics by the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) in the 1976 and 1980 elections, and by the Working People's Party (PPT) in the 2012 and 2016 elections, they failed to attract large sections of the working class. 

The flag of social democracy was picked up by the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), and in the 2020 elections it was also taken up by the Citizens' Victory Movement (MVC).

The erosion of the two-party system

Over the past few years, we have seen a progressive erosion of the PPD-PNP two-party system. Since the exhaustion of the economic model based on the importation of foreign factories, the government’s economic and fiscal crisis, and the massive demonstrations in the summer of 2019 that led to the governor's resignation, the conviction has grown in broad swathes of the population, including the youth and the working class, that the political situation has to change. 

To illustrate this fact, it is worth mentioning that in 2008, the PNP won the elections with almost 53 percent of the vote. By the last elections in 2020, this percentage had dropped to only 33 percent. For its part, the PPD obtained 41 percent of the votes in 2008, and by the 2020 elections it barely obtained 32 percent.

While the traditional parties of colonial capitalism showed their decline, other electoral alternatives emerged. In the 2008 elections, the Puerto Ricans for Puerto Rico Party (PPR) obtained 2.8 percent of the votes, while the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) obtained 2 percent. In the 2020 elections, the PIP vote increased to 13.7 percent while the newly founded MVC reached 14.2 percent. Between both parties, they accounted for 28 percent of the votes cast.

Without a doubt, the PNP-PPD bipartisanship is politically worn out and is entering these elections widely discredited by corruption. On the other hand, the PIP and the MVC have managed to coordinate their efforts in an electoral alliance called the Alianza de País that, according to the polls, would minimally beat the PPD, placing the historic party in a pitiful third position.

The current situation

In these elections, the working class, for the first time in more than 50 years, doesn’t have to be satisfied with voting for the ‘lesser evil’. Alianza de País offers a programme of broad social and economic demands while promoting democratic demands aimed at the decolonisation of our island.

The PNP has organised an anti-communist campaign of fearmongering against Alianza / Image: fair use

The two-party system has reacted hysterically to the emergence of Alianza de País. The PPD has not missed the opportunity to decry it as “Independence Victory” [a play on the names of the two constituent parties aimed at fear mongering that the Alliance stands for separation from the United States].

It has presented itself as the ‘centrist’ alternative between the right wing PNP and the leftist Alianza de País. For its part, the PNP has waged a virulent, anti-communist campaign against Alianza, denouncing its alleged ties to the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Contrary to what the PNP claims, Alianza de País is not anti-capitalist and does not promote the struggle for socialism or communism. We can point out that, without a doubt, the political programme that Alianza de País promotes will not eradicate capitalism or eliminate the exploitation of the working class. However, it represents a real option for change that will break the two-party system while defending a series of democratic demands which – if implemented – would provoke a clash against the narrow limits of colonial capitalism.

In addition to this, the newly created Trade Union Coalition, made up of more than 25 unions in our country, has presented a political programme entitled, “Proposals for the Country We Deserve”. The elaboration of this programme and its campaign, No te vistas que no vas, undoubtedly constitutes a turning point in the development of the class struggle in Puerto Rico.

An important section of the working class, organised in unions, is publicly promoting a programme of demands for political change. As if this were not enough, both leaders and rank-and-file workers of the Trade Union Coalition have expressed their enthusiastic support for the Alianza de País – both publicly and in private.

The fact that layers of the working class, organised in unions, have developed a programme of political demands at this electoral juncture represents a leap in workers’ consciousness in our country. For far too long, what we have known as ‘workers' struggle’ has generally been narrowly limited to economic, trade union struggle. For this reason, advancing political demands – in a collective and coordinated manner – is an important step in the right direction.

The way forward

As Marx and Engles stated in The Communist Manifesto, “The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”

For communists, the class struggle between the exploited working class and the exploiting capitalists is manifested not only in the economic struggle, but also in the political and ideological struggle. In order to win the workers’ demands and to ensure they are not sabotaged, it is essential that we – as a class – have our own political party.

Communists in Puerto Rico welcome and support the political initiative of the Trade Union Coalition / Image: fair use

As our working class predecessors correctly stated in 1899, it is not enough to have unions to fight for better wages and working conditions, it is also necessary for workers to have their own party fighting to win political power. The working class in power will be the only guarantee that we can win – and defend – the demands of our class.

Communists in Puerto Rico welcome and support the political initiative of the Trade Union Coalition, although we recognise the limitations of the political programme they have presented. We also offer our critical support to Alianza de País, since it entails a break with the two-party system that has shackled the working class and strangled our country. We support Alianza critically: we recognise that the break with the two party system that it offers us is important and necessary. But it is not enough. We must go further.

To end the exploitation of the working class in Puerto Rico – and internationally – it is not enough to have ‘good governance’ or to ‘fight corruption’; we have to end capitalism, which is the source of all exploitation and oppression. And to succeed in this anti-capitalist struggle, as the working class, we need to have our own organisation: we need our own political instrument.

For this reason we must lay the foundations to build our own revolutionary workers' party. That is our objective now, and it will be our objective after the elections. Only in this way will we be able to build a better world, free of exploitation and all forms of oppression, because a better world is possible, but only if it is socialist. We invite you to join this effort.