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Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 06:41:32 -0000
Subject: [Arg_Solid] CPGB: Argentina in Revolt
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Weekly Worker 414
In this week's Weekly Worker, paper of the Communist Party of Great
Britain;
Argentina in Revolt
Argentina today is in a simmering pre-revolutionary situation. The
established capitalist parties - Radicals and Peronists - are unable
to rule in the old way: the mass of the population is also unwilling
to allow itself to be so ruled.
The resultant rapid alternation of presidents and governments, with
two substantial pretenders to 'national leadership' driven from
presidential office in a fortnight, and a revolving alternation of
cabinets, unable to implement the austerity plans demanded by the
parasitic financial institutions of 'globalised' capitalism in the
face of massive popular resistance, points to a major opportunity
for the working class. Now the Peronist Duhalde has been put into
power as 'interim' president to carry out a controlled devaluation
of the peso, while maintaining many of the hated austerity measures
that provoked the masses to drive out his predecessors.
The working class has shown great combativity, although the
leadership of the main trade union organisation, the CGT, with its
links to the Peronists, has had to be pushed from below into calling
a series of actions, which it has so far limited to one day general
strikes. The conservative nature of the old, Peronist - influenced
union leadership has led to the masses flowing outside the unions,
and the subsequent movement has had the character of a spontaneous
plebeian revolt, with large elements of what many consider the 'new'
middle class also involved heavily in militant mass actions.
There have been mass 'sackings' of supermarkets by the hungry, and
militant confrontations with armed police outside the parliament and
government buildings - actions whose evident mass support was enough
to bring down both the Radical De La Rua and his Peronist successor,
Rodriguez Saa, and hated subordinates such as the finance minister
Domingo Cavallo, stooges of the international bankers who want to
starve the Argentine masses to pay the debts run up by previous
gangster-capitalist regimes.
In particular, the years-long recession that has blighted the lives
of the majority of the population - resulting from the irrational
experiment of making the Argentine peso convertible one-to-one with
the US dollar - has produced a sense of mass outrage among the
population. 'Why should we be expected to starve because of the
collapse of this nonsense?' the masses are justly shouting at the
bankers and their political front men. And indeed, such was the
irrationality of this scam that its effects have not only devastated
the working class, the unemployed and the poor, but have been
directly ruinous to the middle classes - the upshot of a devaluation
of the peso to its real value against the dollar would be the
depreciation in savings of 40-50%. The debts of many of the same
people (particularly those who have mortgages or loans from banks or
similar institutions) will still be payable in dollars, and thus may
be nearly doubled in real terms at the stroke of devaluation.
Capitalist enterprises facing a similar problem are able, unlike the
petty bourgeoisie, to pass the costs onto the working class, through
mass sackings and attacks on benefits.
Conversely, a refusal to devalue would mean an enormous austerity
programme together with massive interest rates to artificially push
up the value of the peso to dollar parity - which itself will
inevitably lead to economic collapse through the procong of
Argentine exports out of foreign markets - plus the draconian
freezing of the bank accounts of workers and the middle class
designed to shore up the banking sector at their expense. The chaos
is in some ways redolent of the 'Black Wednesday' currency crisis
that crippled the major government in Britain in 1992, when an
artificially overvalued currency in the European Monetary System,
the precursor to the euro, brought about a threatening economic
crisis and the crippling of exports. But the current situation,
beacuse of the major disparity between the economies of the United
States and Argentina, is infinitely worse.
Such is the power of this mass rising that it has the potential to
effect a major shift in the balance of class forces - and not in
just Argentina, but in the wider world context. One only has to
recall the role of the upheaval in France in May 1968 in not only
radicalising a whole generation of student youth, but also creating
a major opening for the development of socialist politics and
organisations in the working class internationally. The Zeitgeist of
the past decade or so since the collapse of the Stalinist regimes,
the reactionary period whose backwash robbed the robbed the working
class of its sense of being a class and its belief in its
independent politics and historical mission, would at first appear
to militate against that. The current internation situation in the
aftermath of September 11, with the US-led reactionary war against
equally reactionary islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan and
elsewhere, might also appear to make such a potentially
earthshaking, progressive event less likely.
But this is a powerful upheaval, which has the potential to resonate
around the world and act as a counterweight to these reactionary
circumstances. It is without a doubt the most deep-going class
conflict, not based on a militant sectional group, but rather a
broad mobilisation of the masses in explicitly political conflict
with the established parties in a strategic country on the South
American continent, since the pre-revolutionary situation that
brought to power the popular front regime of Salvador Allende in
neighbouring Chile at the beginning of the 1970s.
This comparison also points to dangers in the situation. While the
Argentinian army is at this point a deeply discredited force, as a
result of the 'dirty war' of mass-murder and torture directed
against the left in the 1970s, followed by the losing, diversionary
military adventure in the Falklands/Malvinas islands in 1982 (whose
purpose was in fact to head off a rising wave of militant protest
from the masses then also), nevertheless there are conceivable
circumstances where, in the absence of a viable political direction
arising from the current upheaval, a political vacuum could arise
which a military strongman could see an opportunity to fill.
The key to ensuring this does not take place is independent working
class politics. The Argentine left faces an historic opportunity -
yet what Argentina lacks at the moment is an authoritative, broadly
based revolutionary party with roots in the masses that can unite
the class-conscious elements of the working class in a struggle for
power.
Socialists and communists in Argentina need above all to create such
a centre, capable of unifying the various fragmented left groups, at
present competing with each other for the loyalties of sections of
the masses, into a single fist. Such a party needs to be equipped
with an action programme for the current situation: a programme that
must include as a matter of urgency a concentrated mass agitation
for the formation of generalised councils of recallable delegates
from the mass workers' and popular organisations as have sprung up
in the current upheaval.
These bodies, which would have the potential to act as an alternative
source of power to the ramshackle capitalist government, must be
formed alongside and in conjunction with an independent armed
organisation of the insurgent masses. Indeed, in the event that the
army or other reactionary armed formations do attempt to crush the
mass movementm such independent organs with an armed capacity would
be crucial in ensuring that the masses are not left powerless or,
worse, crushed and obliterated, as in Chile.
The left in Argentina, as is the case throughout the world, is
presently divided into competing organisations whose fundamental
raison d'etre is their confessional nature - their attachment to
some particular competing brand of Trotskyism or other amorphous
form of subjective revolutionism. There are no doubt many political
differences between the various Argentine left currents that are of
importance to the working class. We, as people not intimately
familiar with every aspect of the history and development of the
Argentine left, do not claim any expertise on them beyond the most
general insights that can be discernib;e at a distance.
One things we would note, however is that the Argentine left has in
the past allowed itself to be disarmed by 'anti-imperialist'
nationalism - as evidenced by the support of many of the Trotskyist
groups in Argentina for Galtieri's Falklands/Malvinas adventure in
the name of some kind of 'anti-imperialist' united front - despite
its obviously being a device to head off an incipient revolution.
These are the kind of matters that must be thrashed out publicly
among the revolutionary cadres within a single revolutionary party -
a party that through its unified nature the masses can come to see
as the authoritative voice of the working class. Indeed, the working
class must be an active participant in thrashing out such matters,
and must be drawn into such discussions as much is practicable. This
is desirable not only from a standpoint of simply maximising
democratic participation of the masses in what they must come to see
as their party, but from a programmatic standpoint also.
In such a potentially revolutionary situation as the current one, the
most far sighted elements of the left, those whose leadership
qualities are most essential for the successful outcome of the
crisis, will inevitably find their authority strengthened both
within the party and among the revolutionary masses, by the
programmatic impulses that come from the masses themselves acting on
such a genuine, Bolshevik-style organisation. This will be crucial
in blowing away the political cobwebs that have accumulated among
the ossified and divided revolutionary socialist currents that have
clung on druing the years of reaction that preceded this upheaval.
A socialist upheaval in Argentina could not be confined to one
country. Indeed, the attempt to build some kind of isolated
Argentine form of socialism, even on the social basis of the strong,
if historically nationalist-influenced, worker's movement in that
country, would be to rob the the proletariat of its potential role
as regional trail-blazer, as well as to risk a repetition of some of
the more tragic consequences that have resulted from attempts to
build 'socialism' in some kind of national isolation during the 20th
century.
Socialism must be international, or it will not be socialism. A
revolution in Argentina must spread to Brazil and Chile, in order to
bring into play the decisive proletarian forces on the South
American continent, as a stepping stone to world revolution.
The upheaval in Argentina is a key event that has the potential to
qualitatively deepen the existing amorphous, youth-centred 'anti-
capitalist' movement that has grown up in the last few years, and
ignite a real new left movement internationally based on the
revolutionary power of the working class. It portends not only the
series of limited victories that the power of the masses has won
against the bourgeoisie in Argentina, but something much more
lasting - a reborn communist movement that can win decisive
victories against the rule of capital internationally.
Ian Donovan