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Introduction
In the previous issues of Estrategia Internacional we pointed
out that the situation in Argentina was characterized by
a crisis of bourgeois hegemony, with the political institutions
of the regime questioned by the mass movement and the ruling
class was mired by internecine disputes.
In this historical crisis, however, none of the classes
or class factions in conflict were capable of imposing a
complete victory upon their enemy. The general picture is
somehow a "strategic tie", in which all contestants
are bleeding out, the crisis of power remains unresolved
and the ongoing revolutionary process is drawn out in time,
with its ebbs and tides. The old parties of the regime are
in crisis and deeply split.
In the meantime, new political phenomena have emerged; we
speak of them as "parties" to mean rival class
factions. First, we have the "party" of finance,
the big private banks and the privatized utilities, which
has been on the defensive after the fall of De la Rúa
and the ensuing devaluation --Menem and López Murphy
are both the main representatives, coming from two fractions
of the traditional parties on the run. Menemism particularly
seeks to recreate the no-longer existent conditions of 1990s
capitalism. This faction has become weakened, because it
is no longer reliable for the native oligarchy or the US
State Department due to the rejection they arise in the
society. However, this party should not be underestimated,
because it is preparing, in the middle-term, to become a
Bonapartist bulwark relying on a defeat of the mass movement.
They also place their bets on a new upturn of the world
economy that may bring about a new wave of direct investment,
privatization and greater integration to the world economy
via entry in the AFTA. By resorting to the demagogy of the
1990s "stability", Menem has been able to reap
some support among the poor strata of the population and
within Peronism itself. Furthermore, his faction still has
leverage both in institutions of the regime like the Supreme
Court and the Congress. Last but not least, this quarter
can be used by the US administration and the sharks of local
finance as an instrument to blackmail and exert pressure
against rival factions of the bosses that were benefited
by the devaluation and the new capitalist cycle inaugurated
by it. However, the overall balance of social and political
forces is against them, and this section stands for now
as a minority opposition.
The second "party" represents those who promoted
the devaluation of the peso, and reaped juicy benefits from
the "pesification" of their debt --i.e., the conversion
of dollar-pegged loans into pesos. Here we find the exporters
and a certain group of bosses oriented to the domestic market.
In spite of the strong disputes opposing this heterogeneous
group with the first quarter, both have a strategic agreement
on two points: the wages eaten away by inflation should
remain low, and all corporate debts with foreign creditors,
worth more than 60 billion dollars, should be converted
into pesos and therefore dramatically reduced. The state-sponsored
bail-out of corporate debts and the cut on the value of
labor provoked by the inflation are two basic foundations
to boost profits and begin a new expansion cycle. However,
the rifts have appeared in full light. This faction is made
up of a pro-Duhalde faction of Peronism, today in government,
the remnants of the Radical Party, the Peronist union bureaucracy
(both Daer and Moyano) who hailed the current devaluation,
the political strand of Peronism around the populist governor,
Rodríguez Sáa and those economists who devised
the so-called 'Plan Phoenix'. This motley crew shares a
view of a neo-developmental agenda driven by exports, devaluation
and the protectionist barrier provided by a devaluated peso.
The victory of Lula in Brazil is an incentive to relaunch
the Mercosur, to widen the markets for exports and negotiate
with the IMF from a stronger position. It is not true that
multilateral agencias such as the IMF are opposed to this
agenda. Quite otherwise, the IMF itself had insisted with
devaluation, because the demise of convertibility has paved
the way to boost exports, which in turn brought about a
trade surplus and fresh cash into the state coffers. This
resembles the agenda of the 1980s, and has been devised
to allow to continuation of the payments of the foreign
debt and enable US corporations to buy today's under-valued
assets at knock-down prices. By raising the banners of "production
and work", the stronger faction in government today
has nourished expectations on an economic recovery, keeping
the dollar and inflation at bay by means of the manipulation
of the currency. In this way, the tailspin of the economy
has been stopped -defusing one of the factors behind the
December uprising-, creating for now an unstable and jerry-built
balance, just by putting off the main problems (foreign
debt, bank restructuring, etc.). Thus, new actions of the
mass movement have been written off, for the time being
at least. The main drawback bearing down on this quarter
in its attempt at launching a new accumulation cycle is
the balance of forces with the mass movement, which is reflected
in the wear-out of the whole political regime and the disputes
within the ruling class, all against the background of a
world recession. Yet, the "devaluators" will not
be able to overcome the narrow foundations of capital accumulation
in this country -they will rather reproduce those shortcomings
that historically hampered it. This time, it will proceed
against a bakground of mass unemployment, wages well below
their value and a two-tier Argentina. The rhetoric of the
"left wing" of this sector, those who devised
the Plan Phoenix, who have postulated the need for a "fairer
distribution of wealth" and a stronger domestic market,
dream of returning to the Argentina of 30 or 50 years ago
-an unlikely return if the current capitalist regime remains
in place. The center-left ARI shares this perspective. We
could say that the ARI is half-way between this group and
strand of neo-reformism embodied in the 'opposition' trade
union federation, the CTA.
Indeed, to the left of the "devaluation party"
stands the CTA, closely related to the ARI within the Frenapo
(National Front Against Poverty). This third project for
a reformist party is based on the same tenets than those
of the "devaluators"; they have just raised criticisms
as to the abrupt way in which devaluation was implemented,
but they have never rejected it for what it is: a confiscation
imposed on the people. Their coincidences with the Plan
Phoenix come as no surprise, then, since they have agreed,
right from from the start, that the Mercosur, the domestic
market and the exports should all be rejuvenated to negotiate
with the IMF. Little wonder, then, that Lula hailed the
last CTA congress held in Mar del Plata, expressing his
desire and conviction that "Argentine workers"
will fight to boost and build the Mercosur. The CTA leadership
has a rather peculiar view of what they call "crisis
of hegemony ": according to it, the working class should
build a new "bloc of power" with sections of the
ruling class, just what Lula has done with the Brazilian
bosses. The social base for such agenda are the state workers
and the teachers -the bulwark of the CTA unions. However,
the CTA's scarce implantation among wage earners of the
private sector is a big hindrance: no new "bloc of
power" can be built without them. Notwithstanding this,
the CTA is a rival to be reckoned with, mainly due to the
appaling discredit of the old-seasoned Peronist union bureaucracy
and the crisis cutting across the Peronist party. They are
not so much discredited as a union federation in the eyes
of the mass movement, and their demand for a fairer distribution
of the national rent along with their opposition to "neoliberalism"
are naturally regarded by wide layers of the population
with sympathy. Last but not least, they count on the political
support coming from the Brazilian PT. Their neo-reformist
and neo-developmental agenda has even enticed the Maoists
of the Revolutionary Comunist Party (leaders of the CCC)
and those political currents intervening in the new vanguard
and social movements strategically leaning toward them:
an increasingly neo-Keynesian CP, the Patria Libre or the
countless self-proclaimed groups of "revolutionary
nationalism". All of them stand for class collaboration,
regarding "national liberation" as an independent
stage of the socialist revolution. All of them have been
co-chairing the CTA for a long time now.
However, the reformist politics of the CTA have been questioned
and rejected by a wide fringe of left-minded activists.
It is made up of thousands of militants coming from various
social movements, groupings of unemployed workers who have
refused to be part of state-sponsored 'advisory councils',
new anti-bureaucratic activists in a number of unions, the
occupied factories challenging the pro-government policies
of the MNER (National Movement of Reclaimed Companies),
the Popular Assemblies who refused to take part of the CGPs
(Centers of Administration and Participation) of the Buenos
Aires county hall, human rights activists, artists, students'
unions, etc. They have all been key actors of a whole series
of struggles and movements that sprung up last year, which
came all together in Plaza de Mayo to celebrate the first
anniversary of December 2001 uprising. As the struggles
of the mass movement ebbed, the neo-reformist tendencies
grew stronger. But the continued existence of this major
section of militants has forced the CTA to take them into
account, and fight with them for the political representation
of the new social developments and the widespread discontent
of the population with both the government and the current
regime.
This wide fringe made up of the new militant forces that
emerged in Argentina, in which all the strands of the left
-i.e., the populists, the autonomists, the various movements
of jobless, etc.- participate is the fourth 'party' -a heterogeneous
lot as well. It is a social, rather than political expression
of the December uprising, one that speaks for the new working
class militants and militant unemployed workers, the impoverished
middle classes and various urban strata.
The four sectors that we have charted are essentially transitory
ones, just like the entire national situation, cut across
by a number of political fault lines and struggles, showing
that no combination of factions and parties has managed
to prevail over the rest and portray their interests as
the general interest of the society as a whole. Right in
the heart of the militant vanguard of today there is an
ongoing strategic dispute as to the combination of classes,
parties and programs that will represent the historical
interests of the working class movement and the popular
sectors.
Which social force will gain hegemony over the oppressed
layers? What kind of party should be built? A unified course
of struggle and the democratic organization of the vanguard
movement are two basic things if the latter is to grow stronger
and become an alternative for the mass movement. The programs
and strategies of the various parties should be put to the
scrutiny of the vanguard, but this is just the beginning,
it is not political unity in itself. The political and ideological
atomization prevail at the onset of the process, when the
mass movement has not yet fought decisive battles. But in
the heart of what we call the "fourth party" for
the sake of description, the coexistence of heterogeneous
political and ideological views is compounded by the lack
of a radicalized and independent mass movement, which makes
the vanguard more volatile. Thus, its potential political
representation lacks a social base to use as a springboard
for a struggle for power, and the perspective of a socialist
revolution and building a revolutionary working class party
are completely alien to it as well. But there can be no
revolutionary party without a real revolutionary mass movement.
This rather obvious conclusion has been, nevertheless, a
rather controversial topic within the left.
It is unquestionable that Argentina has been a true laboratory
where different theories, programs and strategies forged
in the previous stage have been put to the test of the class
struggle in this new period. Although the developments in
Argentina are still unfolding in front of our eyes, a year
has passed from the popular uprising and it is necessary
to draw a thorough-going balance sheet, both on the dynamics
of the process and the programs and strategies raised toward
it. The mass movement has not yet come back into action,
but it will presumably do so in the next period ahead. The
future of the revolutionary process will largely depend
on the ability of the vanguard to draw upon revolutionary
conclusions, and thus be able to to influence the mass movement
with them.
The common sense of the new social movements
The rather heterogeneous views and postulates of the so-called
'autonomism' have gained momentum among the political militancy,
which mushroomed with the emergence of new militant and
political strata last year. This phenomenon is not only
a local ocurrence, but reflects an international development,
in which the ideas postulated by Toni Negri, Paolo Virno
and John Holloway have gained widespread acceptance, mainly
within the anti-capitalist movement.
The most variegated currents have espoused those views:
strands of the jobless (MTDs) in the Greater Buenos Aires
area, independent students' groupings, the political movement
headed by Luis Zamora, and hundreds of Popular Assembly
activists and diverse social movements. Although they might
not claim a conscious allegiance to autonomism, or might
not even have heard of autonomist intellectuals, their theoretical
and political postulates have provided, de facto, an action
guide for them. The spontaneous nature of the movement originated
in the wake of the December 2001 uprising, plus a movement
of popular assemblies reliant on wide gatherings and 'citizens',
the exercise of direct democracy by wide layers of the population
and their self-organization have all reinforced the common
sense of thousands of activists, to the effect that the
new processes described by the autonomist currents, their
political strategies and the means they pursue, provide
a more far-sighted and accurate response to the historical
course of the Argentine developments. This perception has
also been reinforced by the take-over of public spaces and
democratic decision-making, on one hand, and a deep-going
sociological development: most traditional unions and the
organizations of the unemployed where by and large absent
in the December shake-up, whereas the middle classes were
at their core, prevailing over the millions of wage-earners
in the months that followed.
State and revolution
The notion of 'counter-power' is a key concept of autonomism,
a power that is exerted not in opposition to the powers-that-be,
but as an alternative to them. This counter-power does not
seek to smash the bourgeois state and seize power, a strategy
put forward by 'the old traditional left-wing organizations',
but to emancipate society by means of very same resources
on which that counter-power is built upon. Beyond their
nomeclature and categories, all these theories share the
view those powers that are opposed to the powers-that-be,
should not become 'institutionalized' or crystallized into
a new power in any way. The minute they do so, they lose
their autonomy and emancipating power, becoming a new ruling
and oppressive power. For the autonomists the problem is
not that of the withering away of the state, which becomes
the expression of new globalized world relationships through
the works of the Empire. The main issue at stake is the
process by which the multitude's power, or that of counter-power
build upon a here-and-now communism, here and now, through
the immanent works of the 'multitude'.
In this regard, Argentina has been a proving ground, in
terms of knowing if those views can respond to actual crises
that bring the mass movement onto the scene. It was precisely
in light of the Argentine process that autonomism postulated
the power of the multitude and the new forms of 'subjectivity'.
The refusal to seize state power flowed from this as well.
Argentina is a country where all the juridico-political
relationships have been altered, with the bourgeois factions
fighting tooth and nail over the spoils, with a widening
abyss between the expropriated middle class and the urban
poor on one hand and the political institutions of régime
on the other. It is a deeply polarized society with totally
discredited social regime, in which the problem of political
power becomes top priority. And this is not because the
working class is about to conquer it, but because of the
massive erosion of bourgeois power, which confronts the
whole classes in society with the question of who has the
power and who should have it. To be opposed, in these circumstances,
to set out the fundamentals that shoould hasten the advent
of workers' power is tantamount to helping the regime's
survival and reinforcing capitalist domination in the last
analysis.
The autonomist strategy has resulted in an intrinsical inability,
of anti-political nature, to respond to the maneuvers orchestrated
by the régime. Because in the realm of the day-to-day
class struggle, the powers-that-be fight back by any means
necessary. So, the dynamics of the real process that started
with the December uprising has given the lie to the autonomists'
denial of politics. Although for the time being a serious
systemic crisis remains in place, the government has managed,
by means of demagoguery and relief schemes, to stave off
new uprisings of the starving urban poor, isolating the
picketers' vanguard from the millions of unemployed workers.
Furthermore, it has succeeded in preventing the debacle
of the economy, which was the driving force behind the December
uprising, downloading the burden of the crisis onto the
shoulders of the wage-earners and the urban poor by means
of the devaluation of the currency. It has also bailed out
debt-ridden capitalists, preventing a widespread crack of
banks and held on to the reins of power through a critical,
convulsive and uncertain transition, shoring up the beleaguered
political institutions of the old regime against the wishes
of majority ('all of them out'). The totally discredited
union leaderships have also retained power and held down
the working class movement by playing up on the 'unemployment
scare'. On the other hand, the new militant developments
of the last few months have not only been unable to expand,
but they have become more isolated as well. This is the
case of the people's assemblies. In the meantime, the picketers'
movement has been more and more subordinated to the tutelage
of the state.
How are we to understand this dialectical evolution unless
we resort to the Marxist formula stating that the ruling
class should be displaced from state power, or else sooner
or later it will strike back imposing new defeats against
the mass movement? For the time being, the ruling class
has been forced to resort to deception and maneuvers, but
sooner or later they will try and impose lasting defeats.
The watershed is still ahead of us, though, and the ruling
class remains crisis-ridden and deeply divided. The mass
movement has not yet fought decisive battles and the classes
are mired in a catastrophic stalemate. By the same token,
the tempo of the Argentine process will be longer than that
of other revolutions, which gives the working class movement
extra time to rejuvenate its forces, allowing for the ripening
of a militant revolutionary vanguard as well. But this can
only grow wiser by drawing the proper conclusions from its
experience in the class struggle.
Although autonomists accuse both reformists and revolutionaries
of 'worshipping the state', the truth is that the autonomist
movement coincides with reformism or 'the progressive strand
of politics' on many questions. Their most important common
ground, of course, lies in their mutual rejection of socialist
revolution and workers' power altogether.
The reformists, the current CTA leaders among them, also
seek 'to politicize society and socialize politics'; they
also preach on the 'transformation of society' and 'social
change', but they reject the revolutionary overthrow of
the capitalist class. Some may seek to enforce it via participation
in the state, whereas others might set up self-managed undertakings
within 'civil society '; they both share a fundamental coincidence,
mainly in our country, where the issue of political power
is not just a theoretical truism.
At the other end of the political spectrum, we see the Movimiento
Socialista de Trabajadores (MST) and the Communist Party,
who have been the champions of the 'constituted power',
either by putting forward a Constituent Assembly of constitutional
nature, supposedly 'imposed from below' but actually convened
'from above', without a revolutionary overthrow of the regime,
or else out of outright electoral opportunism. The MST proposed,
for instance, the MP Zamora to form a joint electoral front,
right from the first semester of this year, when millions
were chanting on the streets 'all of them out' and the likelihood
existed that Duhalde's government could be ousted. At the
same time, new reactionary solutions were being cooked up,
and all this happened against the background of what the
MST itself considered an ongoing 'democratic revolution'.
This move showed the constitutional illusions and the feverish
electoral opportunism of this current, which placed all
its bets to the 'momentuous chance' of getting a big 'red
caucus' in parliament rather than the revolutionary potential
flowing from the situation itself.
The State and direct democracy
Consistent with our characterization of the current period
as one of a crisis of bourgeois power, we along with those
who claim allegiance to the legacy of revolutionary Marxism
have encouraged the development of bodies of direct democracy
of workers as a sort of embryonic dual power, i.e., the
anticipation of a new power, that of the workers and the
people. Such organs of workers' democracy should operate
on the basis of a direct democracy of citizens, relying
on whole chunks of the population, both in the countryside
and the cities. The perspective of an alliance between the
workers and the people, throught bodies rallying both producers
and consumers and diverse layers of the exploited , is a
prerrequisite for the victory of revolution. But a direct
democracy of a popular nature will not mean the proletariat
is set to loose its central role by fading into a 'multitude
of citizens'. Quite on the contrary, it will allow the latter
to become part of a proletarian revolution -a process that
will not be free of contradictions.
The huge civic explosion that followed the break of the
middle class layers with the Alliance government, and the
events of December themselves, are both a clear indication
that their social, economic and cultural influence, pushes
these heterogeneous social layers in the direction of participation
in revolutionary developments. Furthermore, they are set
to nurture -and the popular assemblies are a living proof
of this- urban and regional bodies with a key role. It is
very likely that as a militant working class movement gains
momemtum in an unfolding revolutionary process, bodies of
direct democracy based on production units will spring up,
standing alongside communal-styled bodies. The different
combinations and specific bodies that might develop will
all be shaped by the process. The emergence and growth of
the people's assemblies, regardless of their ups and downs,
relies on a revolutionary foundation, i.e. the shift of
the middle classes to the opposition of the régime,
in a move that paves the way for the workers and people's
alliance. This alliance has been hindered ever since the
last revolutionary upheaval in Argentina -the so-called
'Cordobazo'; the different classes rallied behind those
parties historically speaking for them, the Radical and
Peronist parties. The drives toward a democratic organization
along territorial lines, the outright rejection of state
cooptation and the active participation in public politics
are all expressions of a break with the old ruling political
institutions. But this break has been much more violent
and conscious among the middle class than in the working
class movement. The latter remained out of the streets in
the momemtuous events of December has lagged behind in the
following period, fuelling the illusion that out of the
heart of the popular assemblies, based on direct democracy,
and whatever the class nature of a new power in Argentina,
a new power was in the making. A powe that was independent
both from the capitalist class and the working class movement.
The time had come for the power of a Rousseaunian-styled
direct democracy wrapped up in autonomist robes, one speaking
for civil society, the citizens and an spontaneous, fragmented
multitude.
This ideology pervaded as well the unemployed workers movement,
given their non-structural and territorial organization.
The slogan of the "picketers and pot-bangers"
together not only expressed the alliance between the two
most active and militant sectors in these days, but also
had an autonomist twist in that the unemployed workers movement
was regarded as a sui generis "citizens' movement",
which organized their own life and subjectivity, an expression
of both counter-power and the overcoming of waged labor
and the law of value.
But within a 'society of work', a democracy reliant on the
assemblies, bearing no control of the means of production,
no matter how 'direct' it is, cannot be other than a formal
ruse. The purpose of a masses' democracy is to establish
- by taking control of all the productive forces and the
media- the power of decision, planning, control, verification
and correction of the reproduction of social life as a whole
for their own benefit. The scattered strata of the population
at large -the petty bourgeoisie among them- do not have
access to the main means of production so as to introduce
that kind of democracy. Only by expropriating a capitalist
power flowing from the relations of production will the
toilers -the associated producers envisaged by Marx-, exert
their full capacity to decide on a production for their
own lives -the power to exert that kind of control lie within
the capitalist production in the factories, the service
companies, the offices. Every major strike, especially those
in the main branches of the economy, is a direct challenge
against capital. Whenever a section of the working class
movement, not to speak of a movement encompassing industry
as a whole, gets organized in their workplaces, coordinating
on a local and national level in order to wage a serious
struggle against capital, bodies of self-determination of
labor emerge. Factory councils, committees, coordinating
bodies, up to their most developed expression, Russian-styled
Soviets, all pose a fundamental challenge as to who controls
the levers of the economy, political power and the state.
Such a drive was by and large absent in the revolutionary
days of December and later on, except for small expressions
and vanguard groupings like the Alto Valle coordination
body, sponsored by the ceramic workers at Neuquén.
This was the Achilles' heel of the revolutionary upheaval
back then, and this shortcoming led us to regard it not
as an insurrection or a 'revolution', as other currents
did. We believed it was unlikely that a new and deeper revolutionary
crisis could immediately throw bourgeois power into disarray.
However, the lack of a centralized proletarian intervention
at the onset of the process provides a countervailing example:
a true counter-power set to nurture a new emancipated society
can only be based, especially in an urban and industrial
country such as Argentina, in the millions of workers that
make up society. Autonomism does not stand for a proletarian,
sovietic, revolutionary strategy to win over those millions
of wage-earners, and cannot therefore point to an anti-capitalist
solution for the Argentine crisis.
Views on the State and direct democracy among the
socialist left
Whereas the autonomists have extolled the virtues of direct
democracy and self-management, regarding them from a purely
'citizen' standpoint, the political currents such as the
MST and the Partido Obrero have turned their backs on this
enormously progressive process.
The PO has posed the question of political power, but in
opposition to the autonomists, their emphasis was on reaching
political agreements between tendencies, rather promoting
and encouraging the self-organization and direct democracy
of the working class, as a way of proclaiming themselves
the political leadership 'of the mass movement'.
It is most surprising that these currents, which have churned
out red-hot revolutionary prognoses, never fight to encourage
the creation of such bodies. If the question of political
power remains a key and yet unresolved issue, what kind
of power should the masses establish then? It has been insisted
that soviets cannot be built artificially, beyond and above
the will and initiative of the mass movement. Of course,
we are not out to invent them. Our duty is to spot the embryonic
forms of these in the natural tendencies at work within
the masses and their more militant sections, which should
allow us to bring together more and more layers coming out
on struggle for their demands. The various sectors on struggle
have once and again demanded a united front of the workers
and the jobless, trying to win the solidarity of the middle
classes and assemblies for the occupied factories. In them
lay the embryos with a potential for building coordination
bodies, of a democratic and representative nature, on a
local and regional level, to make the class struggle more
effective. The Coordination Body in Neuquén has shown
this potential is for real, a means for enhancing the authority
and the prestige of the most militant sections in the eyes
of the masses still passive. All this is just the ABC of
a genuine Leninist perspective. However, it has been totally
abandoned by those currents claiming allegiance to a working-class
and sosialist tradition. The PO has not yet been able to
respond to this elementary but decisive issue.
The last congress of the PO made hardly any mention of the
kinds of organs to be built, the ways to help them develop,
etc. Perhaps the party or a front of parties is regarded
as the spokesperson for workers' power; maybe the party
is considered, like the old MAS believed, to have the ability
of encompassing mass organizations within it. All these
postulates entail a deliberate mix-up between potential
mass organs that may lay the foundations of a new state,
on one hand, and the party as the political vanguard of
the masses, on the other. And this mix-up pervades the currents
of the picketers' movement, which have not been organized
on a regional and national level with freedom of tendencies
within them, so that the vanguard can choose from the programs
and political strategies raised by the diverse currents.
Instead, a 'mass' organization is set up by seeking reliance
on state relief, and it toes the line of the political party
that is standing behind it.
The PO has walked out of the only serious attempt made to
establish a united front, the Alto Valle Coordination Board,
sponsored by ceramic workers of Neuquén, just because
the latter did not toe the line of the National Assembly
of Workers. The NAW could have been a starting point to
set up more organizations like that of Neuquén, but
the PO just hampered this perspective. As a result, the
NAW rallies only a minority of the vanguard, with some influence
among sections of unemployed workers but a negligible one
among labor. On the other hand, its delegates are not voted
in a democratic fashion; they are just hand-picked among
the various tendencies operating insided it -workers' democracy
has been by and large absent. They even denied the delegates
representing Brukman and Zanon the right to speak on the
basis that 'you are not active members', in a move that
shows that the NAW is more a political bloc than a true
Coordination body, let alone a 'Soviet'. It is evident that
the agreement between picketers' tendencies has obliterated
the task of building democratic organs of the masses.
However, from a socialist point of view, political power
cannot be separated from organs of direct democracy and
dual power. 'The history of the workers' revolutions has
shown, once and again, that the basis of a new political
power are laid from below, with the latter becoming more
centralized and relying on local grassroots bodies, which
in turn become a lever to rally the mass movement. This
was the case, among other examples, of the Soviets in the
Russian revolution, of the German, Hungarian and Italian
workers' councils; the committees of revolutionary Spain.'
The struggle for a new state entails a tendency to do away
with the social division of labor, relying on the active
participation of millions in the administration of the State
and raising the cultural level of the masses of the population.
Only by proceeding along these lines will the proletariat
become a ruling class, i.e., as a conscious subject aware
of its own destiny. But those remarkable premises are not
created overnight, they must be set out on the eve of the
revolution, and blossom through experience, having been
fertilized by the practical and political education provided
by the revolutionary organizations in previous stages. Above
all, they must pass the crucial tests of political power
before the revolution unfolds, during the phase of dual
power, by taking over the factories, organizing food distribution,
organizing self-defense. In this process, workers will opt
for a program and a strategy they regard as the most accurate
ones for the development of the revolutionary perspective.
Without this previous experience, a workers' government
might as well become a wretched caricature that might succumb
to the rule of a bureaucracy standing well above the interests
of labor. The experience of the Stalinist bureaucracies,
i.e., the police-styled control of power by a parasitic
layer stuffed with social and political privileges speaking
in the name of 'the party of the working class', which went
over to restoring capitalism, is a lesson we should never
forget. Specially those currents claiming allegiance to
Trotskyism, which strongly denounced the bureaucratic deformations
and the prosecutions mounted by the Stalinists, should put
forward a perspective based on a conscious self-activity
of the masses, seeking to develop a direct democracy of
producers, to help workers become the main actors and empower
them to stand as the leaders of all the exploited layers
of society. The substitution of mass organs by the party
is the clearest sign of a centrist and bureaucratic deviation,
which brings about practical political consequences immediately,
the first and most immediate one being an adaptatioin to
the bourgeois regime.
When you are out to build the party over and above the needs
and the advance of the class struggle, of class consciousness,
you might as well end up destroying or boycotting any organization
not controlled by your own party (for example, the PO and
the CP regarding the Meeting of Occupied Factories called
by Brukman and Zanon). On top of that, artificial organizations
toeing party lines are created, even if they stand at odds
with organized but 'rebel' strands of the vanguard (the
non-existent 'meeting of occupied factories' organized by
the PO at Grissinopoli plant, in which the hosting factory
alone participated). Furthermore, this leads to a peaceful
coexistance with the state, to strengthen the organization
abandoning radical methods and programme, which are just
resorted to for the sake of propaganda (welfare payment
and food provision were transformed in ultimate goals of
the unemployed workers´ movement) . Therefore, a working
class policy is turned into cheap bourgeois dealings and
wheelings to gain sets in the parliament, the unions and
the students' federation, as a goal in themselves but not
as a revolutionary platform (the strategic alliance of the
MST and the CP in United Left with the only purpose of gaining
legislators, which goes hand in hand with opportunistic
agreements in unions and within the students' movement).
Last Christmas, we saw the FUBA (Buenos Aires University
Students' Union) convene a congress in which not a single
student participated, devoid of any political discussion
and relying on the support of the bourgois Franja Morada
to retain the leadership.
The consequence of this is the prevailance of one's own
apparatus, the lack of ideas, pragmatism and not very clean
bargainings with the institutions of the bourgeois regime.
The MAS, for its part, has accused all those who do not
share their complete revision of the analyses, characterizations
and programme put forward by Trotsky against the Stalinist
bureaucracy in the 1930s, as incapable of standing by a
policy of workers' democracy and a democratic socialism.
Curiously, they have not put forward any soviet-styled strategy
whatsoever, without which workers' democracy is turned into
cheap bourgeois democratism. Little wonder,then, that the
MAS has just written off the perspective of the dictatorship
of the proletairat. What kind of democracy, what kind of
self-government can be established without an effective
control of power by the working class based on soviet-type
organs?
For different reasons, both autonomist currents as well
as those claiming allegiance to workers' and socialist perspective,
have failed to hammer out a programme and a theoretical
framework to endow the movement with hard-rock democratic
organizations for struggle, embryos of workers and peoples'
power that are indispensable if the masses are to wrestle
power away from the hands of the bourgeoisie. There can
be no revolution without a party, but there can be no revolution
without organizations of dual power.
The struggle against unemployment and the transitional
programme
In a country with more than three million unemployed workers
and many more under precarious labor conditions, the issue
of unemployment is a central aspect of any revolutionary
programme. In the past months this issue has also been a
test for the different strategies and programmes being raised.
The financial collapse and the ensuing devaluation, after
four years of recession, have dealt a death blow to the
informal economy. In this situation of unheard-of polarization
and social decline, never seen in this country, wide sections
of the urban poor have been push to rely on precarious subsistence
economies, mostly the jobless, who have started their own
production in their neighborhoods.
The pundits of autonomism have rushed to describe such practice
as a growing movement of liberation from waged exploitation
altogether. These self-managed activities were labeled as
'an alternative to capitalist exploitation' and spaces for
the reproduction of social life beyond capital, producing
a new 'non-alienated subjectivity'.
To think that the idle strands of the working class can
reproduce themselves via subsistence undertakings of the
small unemployed workers' movement that have gone for self-management,
on the fringes of capital, is tantamount to retreat even
from Proudhon's views, relapsing into the utopias of the
agrarian communist sects of the sixteenth century. To put
it straight, the fundamental means of production in this
country -energy, oil, big food makers, the metal works,
the banks- are all in the hands of capital. How can we take
the people out of misery without taking over those huge
resources? How to take them back unless we wage a relentless
class struggle, one with the workers of that same industry
and companies as its main actor? How are we to take them
back unless we defeat the state protecting them?
A few months ago we insisted in that 'it is impossible to
even think of putting an end to the present state of affairs
and meet the needs of the mass movement without challenging
the forces of the bourgeois state, seizing power and expropriating
the massive social wealth accumulated in the hands of a
bunch of parasites, which thanks to the anarchy of capitalist
production, block progress and bring in increased starvation,
poverty and degradation for most of the population'.
This is undoubtedly the only realistic perspective. The
MTDs (Movement of unemployed workers) in the Greater Buenos
Aires area have just found out that waged labor can be superseded,
not by destroying capitalism, but standing on the fringe
of it, putting an end to starvation not with the techniques
and the science of the twenty-first century, but rather
with the introduction of pre-capitalist domestic economies.
And this in the century of 'immaterial work' and 'cognitive
capital'! Finding a solution to chronic employment entails
trascending the restricted and dependant character of capital
accumulation in this country, i.e., a rational and democratic
planning of the productive forces, which entails overcoming
dependence and capitalist anarchy altogether. The logical
conclusion of this is the expropriation of the expropriators.
Workers are relentlessly driven out of production because
of such a pattern of accumulation, which provokes both an
increasing destruction of productive forces and a heightened
social polarization. To transform that anomaly into a foundation
for freedom and the undoing of alienation amounts to a rather
obscene celebration of the capitalist offensive of the past
25 years. The individual worker does not 'free' himself
from capitalist exploitation when expelled from the capitalist
process of value creation, nor is it a prerequisite for
its advent. It is just capital doing its work, gaining extra
value in this way, thus reinforces its control over the
whole capitalist process.
To oppose to the reduction of working hours and a share-out
of them, and stand for a state-sponsored 'citizen's allowance'
(welfare payment) is completely in line with the type of
restricted and dependant capitalist accumulation so common
in peripheral countries, and totally in accordance with
the reactionary policies of governments today. We communists
do not worship work just as it is, neither do we celebrate
the 'dignity of work' along the lines of the Peronist and
syndicalist tradition. But it is evident that the opposition
to waged labor should start from demanding cuts into capitalist
profits, a growing control of production processes and a
steady decrease of working hours as new technology is introduced.
The conquest of leisure means to conquest abundance, rather
than mass unemployment, destitution, poverty and wretched
living conditions. In this reactionary philosophy of the
autonomists lies their organic inability to set out a programme
and a strategy to unite the unemployed with the workers.
The first condition to conquer free time is, paradoxically,
putting the bulk of workers to work by sharing out working
hours with an average wage worth the cost of reproduction
of the labor force. Under the current conditions, this entails
cutting drastically into capitalist profits, fighting directly
against capital and its state. It is a fundamental premise
for the socialization of the means of production, being
the only safeguard of the physical and moral preservation
of the producers of all existent social wealth, to preserve
the potential of the working class to overcome the capitalist
mode of production.
The illusions of the autonomists bear dramatic consequences,
because in a country with more than three million unemployed
workers, communal undertakings to grow vegetables and make
bricks can only be considered as minor trenches of a more
far-reaching class war for the control of the productive
forces as a whole. This requires a programme to bring together
the working class as a whole, to weld the common interests
of the workers and the jobless by raising an anti-capitalist
programme. However, the organizations rallying the unemployed
workers -not only those autonomist-minded ones-, which have
been part of a wide vanguard of struggle, have for their
part failed to raise a strategy to come together with millions
of wage-earners. The programme raised at the uprising of
Cutral Có -'work for all'- has been dropped in favor
of immediate demands for welfare and food provisions, which
in turn have been used to mount productive undertakings,
the quintessential tenet of 'non-alienated' work.
In turn, the unemployed workers movements oriented by the
left have not been able to offer an alternative in this
regard. It can hardly be said they have been even one step
ahead. Many times it seems otherwise, as long as their strategy
seems more and more subordinate to getting whatever is possible
within the limits set by the government by means of the
welfare plans, food provision, lunchrooms and community
dining rooms. The transitional program has been replaced
by a minimum program, just when we are witnessing the worst
capitalist crisis ever in national history. Those movements
not affiliated to any political current, many of them in
the interior and sometimes of a more spontaneous nature
than their counterparts in Buenos Aires, like those in Mosconi
or Neuquén, have raised the demand for genuine work
much more consistenly. For all their rhetoric against the
government and the state, the truth is that those movements
of unemployed workers to the left of the picketers' bureaucracy
led by Messrs, D'Elia and Alderete (which have build up
their muscle in the demonstrations), have nevertheless been
progressively tamed through a public agenda of state relief.
The PO has raised hue and cry over this characterization
of the PTS, accusing us of regarding the unemployed workers
as 'classless and marginal', 'outcasts', of setting the
jobless against the workers, of 'standing by a political
strategy that disregards the jobless', and of wanting to
separate Brukman and Zanon workers from the 'declassé'
. It goes without a saying that resorting to slanders will
not bring us any closer to solving this issue. The whole
question remains, since most picketers' movements, included
the one led by the PO, have dropped the demands for genuine
work and a share-out of all working hours altogether. Out
went the demand for a plan of public works controlled by
the workers to meet social needs as well -as everyone knows,
these demands have remained a dead letter, because they
have never been fought for in the real struggles. Thus,
the only program that can bridge the gap separating the
workers from their brothers and sisters that are out of
work, and bring them into collision course with the state
and the capitalists has been unceremoniously thrown out
of the window. The actual practice of the movement has been
guided by a minimum program, thus writing off the demands
it raised when it was born. In doing so, the PO and other
unemployed movements turn unemployment into a fait accompli
--i.e., a tacit acceptance of the capitalist relationships
of production in their current historical circumstances--
and the unemployed are given the role of asking workfare
schemes from the state, not even a payment equivalent to
the shopping basket (which has also been dropped). The PO
has gone as far as proclaiming that the demand for 'welfare
payment and food provisions', when 'addressed to the state
means a combat against the powers-that-be on a national,
provincial and municipal level' . If a minimum demand for
state relief challenges per secapitalist political power,
we could then say that the transitional program is now outlived.
But this is not true. The past few months have clearly shown
that a widespread minimum state assistance is compatible
with the bourgeois state itself, and it was also used by
the government presiding over such state to stave off new
uprisings and even to regain some social support though
the manipulation of a clientele. The World Bank itself recommends
handing over such relief schemes to policymakers in semicolonial
countries. As a matter of fact, this is what Lula has just
announced in Brazil, although the PO was not there 'to wrestle
them from him' and prove that Lula is at odds with capitalism.
If the PO means what they say on this issue, they should
seriously reconsider their characterization of the CTA-sponsored
plan as neo-keynesian.
Handing over relief is not incompatible with capitalism.
Still more, it can be used to coopt the most combative movements,
to wipe out the methods of direct action as blocking the
circulation of goods through road blockades (a measure frequently
resorted to in the beginning), and prevent millions of unemployed
workers from demanding what truly attacks the heart of capitalism,
the share-out of working hours. And this can only be achieved
by means of programmatic, political and organizational unity
among the workers and the unemployed workers. The PO believes
it has done its share already, gaining a pardon for its
sins in passing, because they 'work closely connected with
the working class movement, as shown in the defense of the
occupied factories (Brukman, Lavalan)'. But this speaks
rather unfavourably of them, because to reduce the strategy
of uniting workers and the jobless to a solidarity action,
means to acknowledge the lack of a proletarian perspective.
The PO sees a pipedream scenario when they claim that 'the
Picketers in Argentina have broken the capitalist attempt
at playing workers against each other through competition'.
This competition is alive and kicking: the government has
put thousands of jobless on workfare schemes to work in
positions in local county halls and the private sector -an
inevitable drift in a country with millions of unemployed
workers with a tendency to push the cost of the labor force
even lower. This has been pushed through regardless of the
picketers' movements' rejection of attempts at torpedoing
bargainings and their defense of wages.
This division of the working class movement accounts for
many of the hardships suffered by labor today, which might
be overcome striving to achieve working class unity and
a trascending of the capitalist state. The starting point
should be, then, to make the working class come together
on a programmatic, political and organizational basis, bridging
the divisions nourished by capitalism: that close alliance
can be seen at work at Zanón, whose workers have
come together with the MTD of Neuquén. Alas! the
PO is lagging far behind them.
As long as the program of the first unemployed workers'
uprisings of 1996-97 is not taken up and codified along
revolutionary lines; as long as no close organic unity with
all swathes of the working class, particularly its more
combative sections, is built, the movements of the unemployed
run the risk of being institutionalized as corporative-styled
organizations, thus losing their early revolutionary edge
of seven years ago. Last but not least, we should point
out that this bizarre idea of the picketers being a new
distinct social subject has been espoused both by the autonomists
and the PO. We have already taken issue with with this idea
somewhere else. Here, we want to add that the perspective
of a general strike as a working class method has been written
off altogether as well. However, for more than two months
the PO announced a new 'Argentinazo' for December 20th,
on the day of the first anniversary. They believed that
peaceful protests, without the millions of workers bursting
onto the scene with their own methods, with an insurrectional
general strike, could bring down Duhalde and re-enact the
revolt that ousted De la Rúa, this time on a superior
level.
Factory occupations and workers' control
The process of factory occupations and workers administration
are without doubt two developments with the biggest revolutionary
potential ever since last December. This trend challenges
capitalist property directly, putting the right to work
well above property rights, eroding by its natuere the free
will of capital and the bourgeois legal order. As in all
the advanced developments of the class struggle, a difference
arouse between a drive to institutionalize the process and
those pursuing an independent agenda in these factories.
The first strand is that led by a lawyer, Mr. Caro, and
his National Movement of Reclaimed Companies (MNER), closely
bound to the Church and Peronism, who has encouraged expropriation
acts favorable to the bankrupt bosses, with compensation
payments, a rent of the premises of the plant, an expropriation
limited in time, etc. The other tendency was represented
by the Brukman and Zanon workers, who stick to workers'
control and demand a nationalization without compensation.
Regardless of these differences, the new development of
factories occupied by their workers has boosted the view,
already present within the unemployed movement, of going
for a self-management of production. Autonomism considers
this movement to be part of a new subject, one beyond post-Fordism,
just like the picketers, casual workers and the ruined small-sized
producers. And just like the productive undertaking mounted
by the MTD, these sectors deemed bound to produce their
own lives, their own subjectivity. In this way, this small
sector of labor, which has taken over small and medium-sized
companies driven against the wall by the slump, are torn
apart from the rest of the 'Fordist' wage-earners.
In this case, the illusions of self-management on the fringes
of the market are more harmful than those nourished by subsistence
undertakings. In factories like Zanón, it is not
self-consumption that dictates the tempo of production,
but the demand of the market, production costs, the renewal
of machinery, the price of raw materials, i.e., the capitalist
market. And this means that, although to a certain extent
there is greater freedom, self-awareness and non-alienation
in these exemplary struggles, they depend entirely on developments
well outside the factory itself. This contradiction can
only be worked out successfully by in two ways. The first
means accomodation to the capitalist market, the law governing
trade, bringing in the self-exploitation of workers in their
strive to achieve competitiveness and hiring new workers
for a wage, in the medium term, to gain a greater share
of the market and lower costs --the agenda for capitalist
adaptation raised by Dr. Caro. The second way is to spread
the process toward big industry and the service companies,
seeking reliance on the further development of the class
struggle. Although autonomism rejects, as a rule, the institutionalization
(instituted power) of the reclaimed factories into cooperatives,
their own logic pushes them in that direction nevertheless,
because they refuse to fight for nationalization, economic
planning and the centralization of the means of production,
finally rejecting a new workers' and popular power. For
a company to remain in business along the lines of 'self-management',
it must enter the arena of the market and join the dog-eat-dog
war out there. The postulate of a small-scale socialism
of proprietors is not new, besides. The French anarchist
Proudhon codified it as a program for the working class
more than 150 years ago. This petty bourgeois socialism
devised by Proudhon undestood that property in itself was
mere robbery. However, it could cease to be so on condition
that certain social reforms were introduced, such as work
coupons. In Marx's words, these ideas codify 'a pious wish
to do away with money by means of money, of exchange value
by means of exchange value, of merchandise by means of the
merchandise and the bourgeois form of production'.
Self-management, just like the autonomists understand it,
can only push the occupied factories down the road of cooperativism
and their accomodation to the capitalist market, this time
like proprietors with almost full rights. It pushes the
workers in the occupied factories away from the rest of
the class, transforming the wage-earners into 'partners'
--the ideal goal for every single autonomist bent on 'abolishing'
waged labor within capitalism.
Those capitalist methods of labor management can only be
confronted with socialist ones, which rely on the class
struggle and a conscious preparation, by spreading workers'
control and other forms of dual power up to a fight for
power.
Self-management and the cooperatives can be introduced -with
mixed results - in small companies with a medium or low
technological level and capital investment. It is reasonable
to think that the owners of big factories will resist any
attempt at expropriation, up to include a civil war. Workers
should also borrow huge amounts of capital to put constant
capital to work. The issue of who possesses the big banks,
the energy suppliers, etc., would arise immediately. At
the same time, as we have said, we seek to overcome capitalist
anarchy and take over the main levers of production to snap
the country out of its ruin. In fact, the factories that
today are occupied by their workers are an extraordinary
lever, not just to 'self-manage' themselves along autonomist
lines, i.e., in a capitalist way, but as a step forward
to encourage workers' control and challenge private property
in big industries, the privatized utilities and the banks.
At the end of the day, the task is to go for class-minded,
anti-bureaucratic leaderships and develop the embryos of
a new revolutionary labor movement. Workers control or direct
labor administration in nationalized companies will thus
be a school for socialist control and administration, educating
workers in those issues hitherto in the hands of the bosses,
creating in these same factories organs of dual power in
the process. The growth of this development relies entirely
on the class struggle and the balance of forces at large,
not on legal technicalities and property forms.
Different variations of this model have been devised, more
realistic ones, because they think not in terms of a single
factory but in networks of companies, in those tiers with
medium to low levels of technology. A move that means some
sort of primitive socialist accumulation within the capitalist
market. Yet, to think that a subsystem of medium technology
can resist the pressure of big business is just a pipedream.
What is interesting about this idea is that the working
class movement appears as capable of confronting big business
in its own terrain, on the grounds of the law of value rather
than in a revolutionary class struggle. A lot has been said
about the distance separating the original accumulation
originated of a rising propertied class like the bourgeoisie,
which prepared its own political revolution, and the kind
of accumulation the working class is forced to do, since
it owns nothing except for its own labor force. Such accumulation
is of a very different nature, being mostly political and
ideological.
The truth is that the occupied factories are an unstable
phenomenon, and they have survived due to an unremitting
economic and political crisis on one hand, and the militancy
and the social, material and political support they received
from the population at large, on the other. However, we
must bring clarification on a strategy to avoid defeat or
their accomodation to the capitalist market, and how are
we to make such movement spread to the most important branches
of production and the services. The left-wing currents have
also failed to provide an alternative to the reformist cooperatives
or to the 'self-management'-prone autonomists in this regard.
By and large, the left has remained on the sidelines of
this process, and where they managed to get some influence,
such as the MST in the Junin Clinic in Cordoba, they have
essentialy put forward the same programme of cooperatives.
Indeed, the MST has even advocated cooperatives in those
cases where a bogus 'expropriation' amounted to a bail-out
of the bosses and a heavy load for workers (Ghelco and others).
Apart from that, there have consistently failed to come
up with any serious reflection on this.
The PO has made a turn-about between the months of June
and July, but as usual, they have not made it openly. So
far, the PO had stood by the nationalization of all the
companies that shut down and laid off their workers, which
subsequently started production under workers' control.
The perspective of nationalization was an extension of the
program raised for the big privatized companies, the energy
and oil suppliers and the banks. But from then onwards,
they have figured out that anyone who stands by the nationalization
of the occupied factories is guilty of 'bourgeois étatisme',
a criticism curiously in tune with those raised by the autonomists
that led them to flirtation with the cooperatives and to
formulating a common proposal on the Grissinopoli food-making
plant with the Peronist and center-left legislators . The
agenda for the nationalization of the banks and key corporations
arises out of the need to concentrate the productive resources
and put them to work, not for the sake of private profit,
but to meet social needs. Of course, the state-owned enterprises
of the past were instrumental to capitalist accumulation
-they were means for a redistribution of the agrarian rent
towards local capitalists. But the slogan of the nationalization
of those enterprises does not seek a return to the old state
of affairs. Instead, it postulates that the workers and
the consumers should take over them, and is connected to
a string of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist demands
-i.e. a program that only a workers' government could make
good of. So, this is a demand for nationalization of a capitalist
non-state on the grounds of a revolutionary mass struggle.
There is not much to say about this, it all boils down to
the historical agenda of Marxists, this time adapted to
the deep crisis afflicting our country. And it remains valid
not only for those big economic branches, but also for those
companies that the bosses have led to bankruptcy through
fraudulent proceedings, because it is just all about preserving
the forces of the working class as such, preventing shut-downs
and their exploitation -this time not at the hands of an
individual capitalist but by the capitalists as a class
though competition in the market in the shape of a cooperative.
When the Partido Obrero reproaches the Zanón workers
that they want a 'new boss: the state', they just forget
the fact that the proletariat does not reclaim the property
of any given capitalist owner; it does not strive to become
'their own bosses' along the lines of a cooperative; it
just reclaims ownership of the whole means of production
-i.e., state power. Insofar as that perspective is not a
short-term possibility, the generalization of that experience
can only proceed though the spread of workers' control to
all the branches of production; it cannot be a piecemeal
evolution growing over from one factory to the next. The
program raised by the ceramic workers, demanding workers'
control, a public works' scheme to create new jobs for the
unemployed and integrate the productive process between
construction workers, the schools, the hospitals, etc, pursues
a generalized participation of labor and the masses in the
immediate task of finding a solution for unemployment and
also in economic planning at large, over and against capitalist
profit. Furthermore, a string of nationalized enterprises
under workers' control might be able to become integrated
to various production branches as state suppliers, beyond
the turnover of such undertakings. What people fail to see
is that the independence from the capitalist state does
not flow from the certificate of property (state-owned,
private). Instead, it flows from an independent political
organization of labor, which much be underpinned by workers'
control. However, workers' control might be of use, on some
occasion, for those individual capitalist being controlled,
as long as workers as forced to look for scarce raw materials,
find new customers, etc, in a drive that might turn workers'
control into participation in private profits. Be it state-owned,
private or else transitorily self-managed, a factory under
workers' control can be an effective lever only if it orients
itself to spreading the movement and challenges capitalist
power altogether.
Outright rejection of nationalization, whatever form it
takes, poses the following question: what shall we do with
economic surpluses? The ceramic workers are striving to
put their factory to work in line with social needs, which
requires that those surpluses should be earmarked for expanding
production, building houses and hospitals, etc, regardless
of the profits yielded by the factory itself. And this,
in turn, requires support coming from the state on the basis
of taxation of the rich and other cuts into profits. But
as an independent enterprise, a self-managed one, although
the state might purchase all its production, that surplus
should be earmarked for muscling out rival enterprises,
which means throwing more workers out of production, if
the former wants to avert extinction.
It is most curious, then, that the PO, which has taken reliance
on the state for granted, in the sphere of relief for the
unemployed at least, which has become their key demand,
should now reject out of hand the demand of nationalization
of all occupied factories under workers' control. And the
whole thing grows into a flagrant paradox when we consider
that they are demanding the nationalization of the banks
and the privatized utilities. The semi-autonomist stance
adopted by the PO, therefore, transforms the workers into
investors, even illegal investors if they are out of the
cooperative bankroll. But if all this can be staved off
by means of imposing conditions on the state (purchase,
supplies, credit, etc) then it all boils down to the balance
of forces on the field on one hand, and the political orientation
being pursued, on the other, which leaves out the 'inexorable
bourgeois étatisme' that Altamira has just found
out in the last six months, after his 35 year-long political
career.
The party, the vanguard and the masses
After decades in which Peronism reigned supreme among the
ranks of the working class, preventing it from building
its own revolutionary party, the December uprisings, combined
with the decline and discredit of the traditional parties
have ushered in an entirely new historical outlook. However,
this does not mean that labor has broken away with its party
already, but Peronism is a far cry from what it used to
be and its influence has decreased sharply. The emergence
of a new vanguard made up of thousands of activists objectively
poses the need to build a revolutionary vanguard party rallying
the thousands of militants rooted in those key levers of
the economy, in the unemployed workers' movement, in the
universities and the schools. This party should also get
ready, on a programmatic, strategic and organizational level,
to recruit hundreds of thousands and influence millions
in the coming revolutionary upheavals. The fate of the revolutionary
developments in Argentina will by and large be hinged upon
our ability to build such tool.
The autonomist movement eschews party building by its own
nature. Those populist and nationalistic- minded currents,
the CP among them, seek to tie workers up to the chariot
of class conciliation, i.e., democratic or liberation fronts
with different strands of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, they
reject class independence, revolutionary party building
and a transitional program out of principle.
Our party has issued a call to all those currents who claim
allegiance to socialist and working class principles -the
MAS, the PO and the MST (so far as it breaks its strategic
bloc with local Stalinism)- and a wide layer of activists
to openly discuss our coincidences and the existing differences
in the eyes of the vanguard to try and build such a party.
In our statement, we claim that 'The time has come for us
to finish off the 'quangos' and reassess the old differences
in the light of the new developments. The time has come
for us to show who wants to really build a party, and who
wants to build just a sect. Gramsci stated that within a
sect (and also the maffia), association becomes an end in
itself, and familiar or particular interest is postulated
as a universal principle. The party, on the contrary, as
a vanguard or else 'collective intellectual' should be regarded
just as a means, an indispensable tool, but one whose interest
should tend to speak for a socialist interest at large,
a socialist revolution to finish off the exploitation of
men (which is the ultimate reason for the existence of the
current political parties). We shall cast aside any sectarian
'particular interest' and do our best so that all those
parties claiming allegiance to Marxism and revolution should
be able to discuss with all revolutionary workers and students
on a program and the methods to build a party of socialist
and workers' revolution in Argentina. That is our current
responsibility, and history will condemn us if we fail in
this undertaking.'
The MAS has posed, for the immediate period ahead, the building
of a 'political/social movement of workers', whereas building
a revolutionary party in which various strands should get
together is a long-term goal.
In a document submitted to their VIII Congress, they say
that 'In the first place, we shall propose the creation
of a social/political movement of the left to raise a minimum
revolutionary program. This program could be drawn upon
the people's assemblies, the picketers' programs or else
those of the class-minded developments.'
We do not agree with the program being raised here, rather
than the tempo, because the program is said to draw upon
the experiences of the last few months. However, a program
drawing upon token experiences will only fail to generalize
the historical experiences of the working class in its revolutionary
struggle. Furthermore, it will not be able to postulate
and enduring solution to the crisis afflicting our country
today. We would thus be condemned, at best, to agree upon
minimum program that would be outdone at the first onslaught
by the masses. The worst scenario is to make a hotchpotch
of demands and views that might eventually distort the revolutionary
program or else render it useless.
The PO, in turn, remains in a self-proclamatory attitude,
regarding their own political organization as the ready-made
party of the working class. However, none of these left-wing
political organizations rallies more than one thousand militants
each. No sensible party can claim, then, to be the political
leadership of those millions that still have not broken
away with Peronism. Still more, the influence of the left
in the unions is negligible. To regard oneself a mass political
leadership one needs to have earned the recognition of the
working class and have implantation and roots at least in
key sectors of it -but all these are still positions to
conquest.
Sectarian self-proclamation always ends up backfiring against
those advocating it, because it nurtures an illusion and
a mirage that sooner or later is smashed by reality. Besides,
it prevents parties from correctly grasping the tasks of
the moment. The demand of political power, as we said, will
remain a hollow shell unless we conquer the masses. This
is the key task of today. And this requires a revolutionary
policy within the mass organizations, the unions first and
foremost, to challenge the sway of the union bureaucracy
there. It is all too evident that a revolutionary vanguard
party emerging from an eventual coming together of all those
of us claiming allegiance to revolutionary socialism, one
gathering thousands or tens of thousands of militants will
no doubt boost its influence among the working class. For
that, we need to win the new emerging layer of social militancy
over to a program of socialist revolution. And this task
would also be immensely benefited from the creation of a
common party.
A party with those characteristics should be able to boldly
go for a unified and democratic congress of assemblies,
the picketers and the occupied factories. It should also
be able to boldly set up coordinating bodies on a regional
and provincial level, rallying all those quarters on struggle,
which would thus become a platform to address millions in
wait for a solution to hunger and unemployment, gaining
influence on the unionized workers in the process.
The question of building a revolutionary party, then, rallying
the vanguard and addressing to millions of workers and the
people at large are key tasks still to be tackled -burning
tasks of the period ahead.
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