Dave Stockton
After a lull in the second half of 2024, caused partly by the initial (temporary) success of Milei’s deflationary measures in “solving” the runaway price rises but also by the trade union bureaucracies’ paralysing of their members’ activity, resistance is rising once more on the streets of Argentina.
On March 12, the pensioners’ demonstration, supported by fans of the two rival football teams, Boca Junior and River Plate, was brutally attacked by police with mass arrests. Since then, a new wave of demonstrations has rocked the country culminating on March 24 — the Day of Memory, Truth and Justice. This is when Argentina’s human rights organisations, including the internationally famous Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, march to the Plaza to commemorate the 30,000 victims of the military dictatorship of the 1970s and ‘80s and to condemn the impunity granted to the perpetrators. This time, there was a united march by all these organisations, providing an opportunity for revolutionaries to mobilise in solidarity.
The massive mobilisation called for a 36 hour general strike. It starts today, April 9, with a march in support of retirees and then continues on April 10 as a total stoppage. This could be a tremendous start for a new and decisive confrontation with Milei. But for that, a 36 hour strike must only be a start. The call must go out to the union leaders, the unemployed organisations, women’s and human rights groups to form local and city-wide councils of resistance with delegates from all sorts of workplaces, factories, schools, hospitals, plus the unions, piqueteros, etc. Such bodies can debate and set the goals and demands of an all-out and indefinite general strike, including creating picket defence squads to protect it against police and illegalisation by the courts.
If the Argentine workers and popular masses can bring down Milei this will be of continental, indeed worldwide, significance in turning the tide against the growing number of savage Bonapartist regimes attempting to demolish the economic and political gains of the workers’ and socially oppressed.
Here, the crisis of working class leadership is posed, involving the trade union bureaucracies but also the continued influence, through them, of the bourgeois parties, notably the Peronists (PJ) that, like the US Democrats, have blocked the political class independence of the country’s workers for generations.
However, it must be remembered that, faced with an acute social crisis, Argentina’s workers and unemployed, plus active women’s and youth mobilisations, have many times erupted on a massive scale, famously in 2001-2. Then, strikes, factory occupations and street fighting took place, raising the slogan against the entire political caste; Que se vayan todos (All of them must go!), which forced out the president, Fernando de la Rua and four succeeding presidents in twelve months.
Today, at a grassroots level, it might seem that Argentina is closer to creating a revolutionary socialist force capable of challenging the bureaucrats and PJ politicians for leadership during a high point of struggle. Parties with a Trotskyist background make up the Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores – Unidad (FIT-U) an electoral bloc founded in 2011 which, in 2023, won five seats in the 257 member Chamber of Deputies, receiving 798,000 out of 25.5 million valid votes. It is made up of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS/FT), the Partido Obero (PO), Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST) and the Izquierda Socialista (IS/UIT).
These parties have built up a force of thousands which, if it went beyond electoral propagandism and agreed a revolutionary action programme to bring down Milei and fight for a revolutionary workers’ government, could change the situation. Apart from the MST, with whom the League has established important areas of agreement and with whom it is in regroupment discussions, however, the others tend to adopt a sectarian stance towards the necessary united fronts with the mass organisations. For example, they did not mobilise their forces for the Plaza de Mayo demonstration, preferring to organise separately. Indeed, they seem to be afraid of putting their organisations and their programmes to the test of turning the FIT-U into a party and opening it to the hundreds of thousands of voters and supporters.
Argentina could well be entering into a pre-revolutionary situation and the actions of the left there need and deserve the close attention of revolutionaries world-wide, both to offer solidarity and for the lessons they can teach us.