On 19/20 December last year Argentina erupted after two years of economic, social and political crisis. Deepening recession after 1998 saw the country gradually engulfed by road blockades by the unemployed (piqueteros), eight general strikes, local uprisings, plus significant gains for the left in the November elections.
When the IMF refused President De La Rua’s requests for more loans De La Rua decided to freeze withdrawals of bank savings. The middle classes and better off workers were furious. Their anger spilled onto the streets.
A 36-hour general strike closed down the country for two days, December 13-14. The poor of the barrios, the unemployed, often led by women with their children, organised the distribution of food and began emptying the supermarkets and hypermarkets. The demonstrators rapidly raised the call with regard to the ruling elite that, “they ALL had to go”.
De La Rua attempted to form a national unity government with the Peronists, but was repulsed and gambled with a state of siege.
Without support from the army on the streets this simply ignited the “revolutionary days” of massive militant street demonstrations in which 31 people were killed. De La Rua was obliged to flee the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, in a helicopter after the police were unable to win the battle of the Plaza de Mayo.
This was a tremendous victory of the people which forced the resignation of the government by revolutionary means. As the demonstrations continued the Peronists tried to find a president – Ramon Puerto and Rodriguez Saá came and went. The question of power was posed.
But the masses on the streets were unable to discover or create a positive alternative to the old gang. Presidents and governments were overthrown, but no organs of nation-wide alternative power were established. This reflected the political weakness of the working class, the lack of an organised expression of its own independent political class interests on a national level.
Generally speaking, the working class joined in the actions of 19 and 20 December mainly as individuals, or specific workplaces but not as an organised force. The working class did not enter the stage as a leading force, because of its own misleaders – the leaders of the union federations, two CGTs and the CTA, and the leadership of the piqueteros too.
It was the political responsibility of the TU leaderships and the leaderships of the piqueteros that no general strike took place. They actually called off a general strike and aided the ruling class in the moment of its most severe crisis.
The conservative and corrupt bureaucrats of the official CGT were of one mind with the more militant and even radical leaders of the CGT Dissidente (Moyano) and the CTA (Genaro), the CCC and the national Piqueteros’ leadership: demobilise the working class, and cancel the general strike.
This treachery allowed the ruling class a breathing space and in early January the bourgeois parties united behind a new president – the Peronist Duhalde. His government – unlike De la Rua’s and Saá’s – was backed by all sectors of the ruling class. Furthermore, it had the support of the trade union leaders.
Duhalde’s government represents the attempt to derail and defeat the revolution, by incorporating the labour aristocracy (via the trade union bureaucrats), and the Peronist worker and popular base in the suburbs of the large cities via the party apparatus.
As the Economist said last month: “Its grip on the lower orders of the Buenos Aires rustbelt has helped to ensure social peace.”
Breaking the political influence of the union bureaucracy and of Peronism in the working class and creating a revolutionary workers’ party remain the crucial strategic problems of the Argentine revolution.