On 17 October 1945, hundreds of thousands of workers from the districts of Buenos Aires came together in the Plaza de Mayo to demand the release of General Juan Peron. That night, Peron was released from confinement and addressed a crowd of more than 300,000 people.
He declared that Argentina was set for a new course that would deliver social justice and give a voice to working people. In 1946, with the support of the labour movement, he was elected president. During his 10 years in power – before he was overthrown by a coup and forced to flee to Spain in 1955 – he transformed the nation and the workers’ movement and left behind a legacy that overshadows the labour movement even now.
So how did an army colonel from a modest, lower middle class background, win the political support of the workers of Argentina and found a political movement named after him?
Some commentators suggest that it was Peron’s charisma, his ability to relate to the concerns of the workers, to speak the language of the descamisados (the shirtless ones) that ensured his popularity.
Others emphasise the role of his wife Eva ‘Evita’ Peron, whose own working class background was despised by the gente bien (social elite) but endeared her to the hearts of the poor and played a key role in the ensuring the popularity of Peron’s regime.
While Marxists never deny the role that individuals play in history, these observations fail to put Peron in the economic and political context of the times.
Since 1930, Argentina had been ruled by repressive military governments, desperate to keep control over a crisis-ridden system. Industrialisation had accelerated during the 1930s in response to the depression and the need to produce locally manufactured goods that had previously been imported from the imperialist nations. There was a massive expansion of industry in textiles, metal goods, meat packing plants and transport.
Yet while the industrial economy expanded, real wages declined. The 1930’s brought intense hardship and state repression for the workers and poor. The new layer of workers drawn from the country’s interior to the cities of Buenos Aires and Cordoba was weak in union membership and divided politically between communist, socialist and syndicalist fractions within the trade union movement. Worse, the Argentine workers had no independent political party of their own to express and fight for their interests.
In 1935, however, Socialist Party figures gained influence within the CGT (Conferacion General de Trabajo). These union leaders increasingly saw the potential in fighting for political representation and not just “bread and butter” economic demands. The development of this labourist current was influenced by what the socialist movement had achieved in Britain with the setting up of the Labour Party.
During the early 1930s the Communist Party also began to win support among the workers as they led and won strikes of meat packers, tram workers and telephone workers. From 1935, the Communist Party oriented to the socialist-dominated CGT and rapidly became a growing force – leading unions in construction, meat packing, textiles and metallurgy.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 had a significant impact on the Argentine bourgeoisie. It had hoped the war would open up markets for its grain and beef in the USA. However, the US kept its markets firmly closed to Argentinean exports, which provoked increasing anti-US sentiment amongst the bourgeoisie.
After a coup in 1943, led by General Ramirez, the Argentine government refused to support the Allied side and was heavily influenced by the nationalist force within the army – the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (Group of United Officers). Peron was a prominent member of this group.
The war also had a profound impact on the fate of the socialist and communist movement in Argentina. After the Soviet Union entered the war against Germany in 1941 on the side of Britain, Communist Parties called for support for the Allies. In Argentina this led to the disastrous policy of arguing that workers should not strike in British-owned factories and instead make “sacrifices” for the war effort.
In a country dominated by an imperialism, this policy was despised by the workers and isolated the CP from the working class and gave the opportunity for nationalists such as Peron to pose as the anti-imperialists who refused to support the Allies in the war.
This was the political context in which Peron entered the government in 1943. The military government’s first task was to rapidly disarm a workers’ movement that, despite brutal repression, continued to fight back.
Peron recognised one important fact: that the only way to head off the threat of revolution was to meet the demands of the workers for substantial reforms. He began to make contact with key workers’ leaders. The war department became the centre of a delicate operation to woo the union leaders and convince them that Peron was committed to social justice and political reforms that would give the workers union and workplace rights.
Peron made headway in the railway engineers’ union, convincing its leaders that their demands would be met if they supported his broad populist Justicalismo movement – an ideology that preached close collaboration between the unions and the state to place the control of industry in the hands of the Argentine nation.
On the surface Peronism used the rhetoric of citizenship, social justice and nationhood to argue that the interests of the workers and the nation were connected: “International capital is an instrument of exploitation, but national capital is an instrument of welfare.”
But beneath the rhetoric was a political strategy engineered to put the brake on a militant workers’ movement. His labour strategy was clear when he explained to nervous employers in 1944: “Do not be afraid of my trade unionism…I want to organise workers through the state… to neutralise ideological and revolutionary currents in its midst which might place our capitalist society in danger”.
A turning point was the role Peron played in the meat packers strike of August 1943 in which he secured the release of their arrested leader. His aim was to win prestige among the workers and at the same time disarm the communist leadership of a key union: “When I speak with these communists, they shall cease being that or be replaced”.
Peron, in fact, helped the meat packers gain concessions but at the same time got their CP leader replaced.
Peron approved the first rural legislation, the Esatuto del Peon (Statute of the Rural worker), that fixed minimum wages, paid holidays and free medical services.
In 1944 he set up the Tribunales de Trabajo (Labour tribunals) and the National Labour Office, of which Peron was minister, instigated a series of state interventions in collective bargaining and labour disputes.
By 1945, however, the major employers’ associations, and the Argentine military were becoming increasingly restless and concerned about the direction of Peron’s reforms. The army demanded that Peron be removed from all his government posts. On 9 October, Peron resigned.
The trade union response was immediate. The CGT leaders perceived the attack on Peron as an attack on their new found rights and called a general strike to demand Peron’s reinstatement. The fact is Peron’s project coincided with the reformist aspirations of the trade union leaders.
The Partido Labourista (Labour Party) was formed shortly after 17 October, and the PL threw its weight behind Peron’s candidacy. Peron’s involvement ensured that pro-Peronist candidates such as Mercante were imposed on the Partido Labourista. But as events after 17 October revealed this was to be a tragic relationship. It marked the definitive alliance of the workers’ movement to a corporatist project, led by a nationalist sector of the armed forces.
The Communist Party’s response to the mass mobilisations in support of Peron was to further alienate them from the workers’ movement by characterising Peron and the mass movement that had supported him as analogous with the fascist movements of Italy and Germany.
Peron was not a fascist. His aim was not to mobilise a mass movement to smash the working class but to incorporate the trade unions into the state-sponsored national industrialisation of the Argentine economy and in this way de-mobilise the revolutionary aspirations of the workers.
After being elected with more than 50 per cent of the vote his first act was to disband the Partido Labourista. Having dissolved the Labour Party, Peron carried out a similar operation in the CGT, by replacing the leadership with his supporters. Opposition unions dominated by the Socialist and Communist parties were not legally recognised and were often put under the control of government appointees.
At the same time, Peron instigated the mass expansion of the trade unions: membership grew from 877, 000 in 1946 to 1.5 million in 1948 and nearly two million by 1948. Real wages increased by 53 per cent between 1946 and 1949.
After 1944, in the large factories, cuerpo de delegado’s (shop steward’s plenaris) were formed which, in turn, elected a commision interna (factory committee) that played a major role in asserting workers’ control at a factory level. However, this local control was countered by a centralised trade union movement that fell under state control.
Peron delivered reforms for the workers’ movement and altered the balance of power in favour of the trade unions during his first term. However, as the economic crisis of the 1950s began to have its impact, the level of income distribution that had been achieved, thanks to substantial reserves that had been accumulated during the Second World War, came to an end. The working class bore the brunt of the crisis as inflation soared and wages declined.
In 1955 the ruling class decided to strikeback. They were no longer prepared to tolerate reforms favouring the workers’ movement. In 1955, Peron fled without a fight, despite the fact that the CGT had offered workers as volunteer reserves to help defend him.
So what was Peron’s legacy? In Argentine labour history the Peronist regime is still referred to as the “golden age of labour” – a brief period when the oligarchy were on the defensive and the workers began to experience a degree of political freedom and room for manoeuvre that had been so brutally denied under the conservative military dictatorships that had preceded Peron.
But the workers’ movement paid a heavy price. Not only were the revolutionary opportunities of the 1940s thwarted by the role of Peronism, but the revolutionary movements of the cordobaza in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s were deeply imbued with a bourgeois nationalist consciousness that could never provide the answers to the economic and political crises that continued to rock Argentina throughout the 20th Century.
The Argentine masses have demonstrated countless times, and most recently in the revolutionary December days, that they have the boldness and determination to resist the dictates of capital that have only brought misery and hunger to Argentina.
The key to the success of the next phase of the Argentine revolution is for the working class to build its own independent revolutionary political party that must break with the ruling class in all its forms and complete the task of “getting rid of them all”.