Ten months after its “revolutionary days” Argentina is still in a grave economic crisis. The political establishment remains discredited and divided. Nevertheless, the opposition to President Eduardo Duhalde on the streets has lost its mass character. Why?
• There is a certain bottoming out of the economic crisis, including an imminent deal with the IMF. This may restore a degree of unity within the ruling class.
• Duhalde’s decision to bring forward presidential elections to March next year, has turned the thoughts of the urban middle class and the trade union bureaucracy towards an electoral way out of the crisis.
• The split between the militant vanguard and the mass of the employed working class remains the most important subjective weakness in the opposition movement.
These factors have slowed the tempo of the mass movement. But they have not resolved the political and economic crisis in Argentina. Sudden turns in events can quickly recreate the conditions for mass struggle. The crisis is reduced to the crisis of working class leadership. The objective prerequisites are still in existence for a rapid revolutionary development of the crisis.
The economic crisis
Businesses have folded, unemployment has rocketed to more than 25 per cent. Real wages have fallen by 25 per cent. A staggering 50 per cent of the population has fallen below the poverty line. Crime has doubled compared to years ago, kidnapping is rife as people are plunged into poverty and seek to get their hands on the $20 billion in cash (about the same as all bank deposits!) said to be stored in homes.
The IMF aims to restore the banking system, preserve its assets and create a climate for profitable foreign investment again in Argentina. It needs a different president from Duhalde to impose structural reform.
But it recognises that Duhalde is a lesser evil compared to the overthrow of the regime from below. So the IMF has shored up the regime with minimal subsidies. while keeping it politically weak.
The IMF has a minimum and maximum programme: first, “a relatively short-term” agreement. But the maximum programme is a government capable of imposing price rises and restarting foreign debt payments.
The government
The crisis of the Argentine ruling class is reflected in the structural crisis of the Peronist party (PJ). The PJ is divided into factions. There are those who accept the transformed role of the Argentine bourgeoisie as totally subservient to imperialism (particularly the USA). The main representative of this wing is Fernando de la Sota who is also supported by the most conservative and corrupt sector of the Argentine trade union federations, the CGT Daer.
There is another wing representing the weaker sectors of the bourgeoisie who need state support and protection against the pressure of the IMF and multinational corporations. They play with old-style
Peronist populism and promise not to follow IMF dictates. This wing is represented by the one-week-president of last December, Rodriguez Saa. He has successfully built an alliance with the previously more combative union, the CGT Moyano (as well as with a semi-fascist former paratrooper and coup maker, Ricco!) and has made overtures to sections of the piqueteros movement.
Duhalde’s survival is also thanks to support from the CGT trade union bureaucracies that have refused to organise a general strike against his government.
From spring onwards the radical mass movements – the unemployed piqueteros and the more middle class cacerolazos – came up against limits of their spontaneous development and a certain bureaucratisation of them has taken place.
The left-wing of the piqueteros movement, led by the far left and populist forces, has suffered repression from the state.
The bourgeois opposition
Elisa Carrio’s Alternativa por una Republica de Iguales (ARI) is the only “regime” oppositional party with any credibility (it has 17 deputies).
Formed on an anti-corruption platform, support in the polls for the ARI has increased markedly since June. Carrio was a key sponsor (together with the CTA union federation chairperson De Gennaro) of the Citizens’ Forum from July to September. It seeks to exercise leadership over the “get rid of them all” movement and dilute that sentiment into electoralism.
Instead of focusing that sentiment on the slogan for a Constituent Assembly (and hence an end to Congress, Supreme Court and Presidency) Carrió has now agreed to put herself forward as a presidential candidate in the March elections. Carrio is an important political force for reconciling the urban middle class to the regime and the existing constitution.
The Piqueteros
The piqueteros, the vanguard of the unemployed movement, have been responsible for some of the most militant actions during the last ten months and for this very reason have been subject to the harshest repression.
More recently, the movement has been derailed politically by the municipalities’ use of workfare schemes, which tie the piqueteros materially to state governors and others in local administration. The United Left tries to bureaucratise the movement. The combined sectarianism and opportunism of the Partido Obrero (via the Polo Obrero) means that it remains a difficult struggle to unite the movement with the employed workers around necessary campaigns for job sharing without loss of pay or even systematically linking up with the factory occupations (the exception being Zanon).
Popular Assemblies
The popular assemblies came into existence as a result of the mobilisations of the unemployed, the middle class-dominated cacerolazos and of the workers from enterprises faced with closure. But they were and remain not delegate councils in which workers predominate but local meetings and in the best cases, city-wide meetings of their representatives.
While more than 300 popular assemblies remain active, the numbers attending have dwindled and most are concentrated in Gran Buenos Aires. More importantly they lost the capacity to call the massive “cacerolazos” that were common earlier this year. Only in Neuquen has there been close collaboration with the factory occupations for which the Trotskyist PTS must take much of the credit.
More dangerous still, the regime has tried to co-opt them in Buenos Aires by seeking to put them under control of the municipality. Politically, they are derailed by the election preparation and by the fact that they have no strategy for realising their demand for nationalisation of the banks in order to release their frozen savings accounts.
Occupied factories
The factory occupations – such as Zanon in Neuquen or Brukman in Buenos Aires – represent a real challenge to Argentina’s bosses. They do not just demand more jobs or more food or the return of savings, but challenge capitalist private property itself. They show practically that workers do not need bosses to run production.
For this reason the occupations are under attack. Regular attempts are made to have them declared illegal and increasing attempts are made to oust them physically. In addition they are under attack politically by reformist currents that seek to derail their revolutionary potential.
The leaders of the National Movement of Reclaimed Companies and the CTA are trying hard to get workers to negotiate and cave in the face of the state. This would entail them being turned into tame workers’ co-operatives. The revolutionary response to this has to be to use the occupied factories to act as a vanguard force in the fight to move beyond workers’ control in the factory to workers’ control in society.
The occupied factories are proving a “school for socialism”. But to achieve this goal they must become a revolutionary weapon to smash the apparatus of the state. They cannot remain tiny isolated islands of socialism in a sea of capitalist ownership and competition. Without control over the mainstays of the capitalist economy – the banks, the major multinationals – the occupied factories will be smothered or at best survive on the basis of self-exploitation and profit sharing.
The Unions
Back in December, the trade union bureaucracies derailed the full potential of the December revolutionary days by withdrawing the great mass of the employed working class from the struggle. They then threw their weight behind Duhalde.
Today, the trade union bureaucracy of the two CGT federations provide the main basis of social and political support for Duhalde. They have refused to organise national strikes against his government despite the rise in unemployment and collapse of real wages. Worse, they have colluded in or orchestrated attempts to end the occupation of Zanon factory and actively seek to undermine certain popular assemblies. They now collude with the PJ in seeking to ensure a Peronist successor to Duhalde; Daer and Barrionuevo back De la Sota while Moyano has endorsed Rodríguez Saa
The question is how to remove the obstacle that these corrupt and pro-bourgeois bureaucracies represent to any revolutionary development. There is only one answer – the tactic of the united front. This must combine outright exposure and denunciation of their treacherous actions with fomenting demands from their rank and file to break with Peronism (in the case of the two CGTs) and with bourgeois populism (Elisa Carrio) on the part of the CTA/CCC.
Wherever possible workers must seek to replace local officials with newly elected representatives of the rank and file who want to fight. They must demand regional and national leaders organise national general strikes to get rid of Duhalde. As the culmination of these demands we call for them all to break with the bosses’ parties and form a workers’ party that could rally the workers to an independent strategy, a revolutionary strategy for the destruction of capitalism and its replacement by a revolutionary workers’ state based on the democratic organisations – councils and a militia – of the working class itself.