https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/argentina
Argentina is facing a devastating economic crisis that is rapidly destroying the living standards of most layers of the population. With hyperinflation rampant (reaching an annual rate of 287 percent in March) and the economy in ruins, the right-wing government of Javier Milei elected last November promised neoliberal “shock therapy,” explicitly modeling itself on the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher. It has aligned itself fully behind U.S. foreign policy and is unreservedly committed to repaying billions of dollars of debt to the IMF and other imperialist creditors. To satisfy these vultures, Milei is imposing drastic austerity: slashing funding for the provinces, education, retirement and social services; eliminating subsidies; enforcing massive layoffs and threatening to sell large swaths of the country’s resources and services to foreign corporations.
On the other side of this class war is the powerful working class. To open the country fully to imperialist plunder, the Argentinian bourgeoisie needs to break the workers’ resistance. Since Milei’s election, there have been a number of large demonstrations, partial strikes and two one-day general strikes called by the CGT and CTA union federations. These have shown that there is a will to fight. However, they have not succeeded in stemming Milei’s attacks and no sustained struggle is being organized. Milei has succeeded in getting his reactionary Ley Bases (Basic Law) through Congress, winning approval from his imperialist masters. This law includes measures to privatize state-owned enterprises, restrict the right to strike, dismantle permanent contracts in favor of temp and precarious work and slash unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, repression is intensifying, with attacks on both trade unions and left organizations and new laws to prevent blocking the streets.
Why have the partial struggles of the last months been ineffective? The bulk of the Argentinian working class is under the leadership of the bourgeois-nationalist Peronistas, who have clearly shown that they have no intention of seriously fighting against the government and are openly betraying workers’ interests. While opposing the worst of Milei’s attacks, the union bureaucracy preaches “social dialogue” with the government and respect for the parliamentary process. As they start from the premise that power must remain in the capitalists’ hands and that imperialist demands must be satisfied, what they seek to negotiate is just how much the workers will have to give up. They mobilize behind the slogan “La Patria no se vende” (“The Country Is Not for Sale”), which expresses legitimate anger over the imperialist debt and the sale of Argentina’s national resources and industries to foreign companies. Yet the Peronistas have no program to combat imperialism, as they have shown each time they are in government (see leaflet).
Solving Argentina’s economic problems will require attacking both private property and the interests of the imperialists, which would directly threaten the Argentinian bourgeoisie’s own interests. The Peronistas uphold those interests and will therefore oppose any strategy, any method of class struggle capable of defeating the bourgeoisie, and instead seek an illusory compromise between labor and capital. It is because of this program that the CGT has organized strikes in a way that causes minimal disruption (weeks or months apart, often for only a few hours at a time) and not to provoke a major crisis that forces the government to back down. Its whole perspective is to wait for the next election in the hope of getting a new Peronista government. This would simply perpetuate the cycle of Peronista and neoliberal governments administering the imperialist plunder of the country, which led to Milei’s victory in the first place.
To the left of the Peronistas, we find the largest movement of ostensible Trotskyists in the world. Most are organized in the FIT-U (Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores Unidad, or Workers and Left Front-Unity), an electoral alliance of four organizations which have tens of thousands of supporters: Partido Obrero (PO), Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST), Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) and Izquierda Socialista. There are also dozens of smaller Trotskyist groups, plus assorted Maoists. As the MST noted at their recent conference:
“Argentina is often seen from the outside…as a place where there is a very large concentration of revolutionaries, there are cadres formed in decades of struggle, there is a working class that has not been defeated, and from this working class revolutionary socialist activists have emerged in a quantity and quality that from the outside often gives the impression that we are on the verge of resolving [the country’s] problems…. But we have to discuss why, with this concentration, with such an important tool [the FIT-U], we still have not managed to convince significant layers of the working class to see us as an alternative.”
—“El Congreso del MST y las propuestas al Frente de Izquierda Unidad,” mst.org.ar, 10 April
This is a very good question.
A Rising Tide of Struggle?
The answer starts with the way in which the left views the current state of the struggle against Milei. For months after his election, they painted a rosy picture of a government on the ropes—paralyzed by internal squabbles and incapable of getting its first Omnibus Bill through Congress—while playing up the size of the mobilizations against him. Some of the FIT-U parties have dampened their optimism since the Ley Bases was voted, but their method is still to portray the situation as a rising tide of struggle. According to this logic, Milei’s attacks will automatically impel ever greater layers to take up the fight, and struggle will increase incrementally thanks to a tradition of democratic grassroots organization. With no decisive role to play today, the task for Trotskyists becomes simply to support existing struggles, put pressure on the current leaderships to step them up, call for assemblies and wait for the tide to rise.
However, reality shows that the struggle is in a state of dangerous stagnation. It is clear that the strategy of calling a one-day general strike every three months poses no real threat to the government. Smaller, isolated strikes are often called off with no decent offer on the table. On 23 April, a million people took to the streets to protest drastic cuts that threaten the closure of universities. The left hailed this as a great movement. But the next day, everyone was back in school. The protest did not give rise to a student movement against Milei and no national mobilizations have been called to follow it up. Teachers waged a two-day strike in June, but since the government released limited funds to keep the universities ticking for a few more months, no further action is being organized. The attacks on universities have not been defeated and the left has no proposal for what to do next beyond vague calls for assemblies and plans of struggle. With every passing day, the government consolidates itself further. If there is not a clear path forward, the risk is that apathy and demoralization will take over and the working class will face a historic defeat.
The urgent task for Trotskyists in Argentina is to break workers from the Peronistas. If this is not achieved, there will be no victory against Milei, much less a socialist revolution. Recent struggles have shown that the working class still overwhelmingly follows the current leadership of the union federations. When the union bureaucracy calls a general strike, it is widely observed and effectively shuts down the country. On the other hand, when unions refuse to call for protest, such as when the Ley Bases was being debated in the Senate, protests are limited to the left, with no significant participation by the organized working class.
To break the influence of the Peronistas, the left must provide a genuine alternative to the unrestrained national subordination offered by Milei, a path that fuses the just desire for national liberation from imperialist oppression with the fight for social liberation. What is posed point blank is the need to repudiate the betrayals of the union leadership and unify all sectors of the oppressed behind the power of the industrial working class, under a leadership prepared to confront both the domestic rulers and the imperialists who stand behind them.
While the parties in the FIT-U are quite capable of denouncing the bureaucracy’s betrayals, their main critique is simply that union leaders are not sufficiently combative. For example, at the lone protest organized by PO and Izquierda Socialista in Buenos Aires for the 9 May national strike, both organizations proposed pursuing the struggle not by counterposing a revolutionary strategy to the CGT’s prostration before the government, not with a plan to fight imperialist oppression, but with a call on the CGT to make the next strike (at some unspecified date) 36 hours instead of 24 and to organize a demonstration that day. They concluded with an appeal for this union leadership, which has no intention of struggling, to come up with a…“plan of struggle.” This amounted to pressuring the bureaucracy to be a little more radical on the basis of its existing, thoroughly defeatist program—a sure road to ruin.
Against Sectarian Boycott of the Unions
At the same time, the left seizes on the very real betrayals of the bureaucracy to put forward a sectarian perspective, calling for organizing “independently,” i.e., separately from the bulk of the working class. To the Peronista-led unions, they counterpose struggle through alternative organizations that are supposedly independent and more militant: neighborhood assemblies, piqueteros (unemployed and semi-employed picketers), combative or “anti-bureaucratic” unions (usually a reference to those led by Trotskyists), autoconvocados (self-organized groups), action committees, retirees, social movements, etc. Obviously, it is important to organize those sectors. But by counterposing them to the CGT and CTA unions, the left is dodging the fundamental obstacle of the union bureaucracies instead of fighting at the base of the unions to replace them with a revolutionary leadership. This means accepting that it’s impossible to win the working class away from the Peronistas.
This betrayal was expressed very starkly on May Day. While the unions called a demonstration attended by more than 300,000 workers, the majority of the left either boycotted it outright (PTS, MST, the Maoists and many smaller Trotskyist groups) or organized “independent columns” on the margins of the demo that did not mingle with the CGT-organized workers (PO, Izquierda Socialista).
The PTS dismissed the CGT mobilization as a “symbolic act” (laizquierdadiario.com, 1 May), while the MST went as far as calling it a “reactionary march” (mst.org.ar, 2 May). Other groups argued that the CGT was totally discredited and there were no illusions in it, that workers who attended were complicit in their leaders’ betrayals, that going to this union demonstration was a capitulation to the bureaucracy, or even that no workers would come to it. Instead, on the grounds that the leadership of the trade unions is selling workers out to the government—which is true—they each organized their own, separate activities. This meant dividing the working class and abandoning the fight for leadership of the unions, leaving workers who came out to protest Milei’s attacks in the hands of the Peronistas.
The ICL intervened both in the CGT-organized demonstration and at a number of the separate Trotskyist activities. At events organized by the FIT-U parties, their Congressional deputies gave fiery speeches opposing imperialism, defending Palestine and calling for socialist revolution. But all this rhetoric is meaningless if it is not directed toward breaking the working class from its current leaders. Workers won’t be convinced to do this by socialists going to a separate location and proclaiming the need for revolution while refusing to fight in the unions against a bureaucracy that is utterly opposed to such a perspective. It is necessary to intervene in the CGT and CTA unions themselves and take part in the fight at individual workplaces, putting forward at each step what needs to be done and linking day-to-day struggles to a strategy to fight the imperialist plunder of the country. That would allow workers to test their leaders in action, and show concretely that they refuse to do what is necessary to win.
The FIT-U parties call for a plan of struggle…up to and including a general strike. Of course, this is sorely needed. But to state the obvious, it cannot happen without the active participation of the bulk of the industrial working class. Calls for a general strike are empty without a strategy to replace the current leadership of the trade unions with one based on a fundamentally different program.
Argentinian Trotskyists must urgently change course and break with their sectarianism. Milei’s attacks threaten to destroy many of the very gains that form the basis of the Peronistas’ support among the oppressed (nationalizations, subsidies, social programs, etc.). The workers movement, including those who still support the Peronistas, has an objective interest in defeating these attacks. The situation is ripe for Trotskyists to aggressively appeal to the trade unions for united-front action to defend workers’ basic living conditions. This would both advance the struggle and help expose their current leadership. As Trotsky motivated:
“The Communist Party proves to the masses and their organizations its readiness in action to wage battle in common with them for aims, no matter how modest, so long as they lie on the road of the historical development of the proletariat; the Communist Party in this struggle takes into account the actual condition of the class at each given moment; it turns not only to the masses, but also to those organizations whose leadership is recognized by the masses; it confronts the reformist organizations before the eyes of the masses with the real problems of the class struggle. The policy of the united front hastens the revolutionary development of the class by revealing in the open that the common struggle is undermined not by the disruptive acts of the Communist Party but by the conscious sabotage of the leaders of the Social Democracy.”
—“What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat” (January 1932)
For a FIT-U/CGT/CTA Government!
One of the reasons there aren’t more sustained mobilizations is that while workers support demands for canceling the debt, wage increases linked to inflation and opposition to privatizations, they do not see who is going to accomplish this. As the MST noted at their conference, “Many workers tell us this can’t go on. But they also tell us, but if Milei goes, then what? The old leaders from the past will come back.” This is true: One of the reasons for Milei’s popularity is that the previous Peronista government was rightly hated for leading the country into hyperinflation and economic chaos. The MST argues that the FIT-U has to counterpose an alternative to the Peronistas. Yes, it does. But its solution is to call for a congress with the aim of opening the FIT-U to “combative sectors” and social movements, once again leaving the leadership of the unions unchallenged.
Most of the left readily agrees that we should call for repudiating the foreign debt, expropriating the banks and nationalizing industry. Indeed, they call for these things themselves. But to actually carry this out and provide an alternative to the dead ends of a neoliberal government or a return to the hated Peronistas, it is necessary to have a perspective of political struggle for workers power. This is exactly what both the union bureaucracy and the Trotskyists don’t have. The ICL’s 7 May leaflet on Argentina argues for a concrete plan of struggle that addresses the main problems the population is currently facing and links this to the perspective of a FIT-U/CGT/CTA workers government.
But all the FIT-U parties object to this. Why? Because it includes the unions, and those are led by traitors. These objections miss the crucial point: For the unions to fight for a workers government, the Peronista leadership needs to be removed and replaced with genuine revolutionaries. If anything, what the FIT-U’s objections reveal is that they simply cannot comprehend that the task of communists is to lead the unions in place of the Peronistas—not least by aiming for a government of trade unions and revolutionary parties, i.e., a workers government.
Many of the smaller Trotskyist groups outside the FIT-U object to including the FIT-U parties in our call for a workers government because the FIT-U is focused overwhelmingly on electoralism and breeds illusions that Milei can be defeated through parliament. While this criticism of the FIT-U parties is correct, they nonetheless represent the political vanguard of the working class in Argentina and the principal obstacle to building a revolutionary opposition to the Peronistas inside the unions. The FIT-U cannot simply be dismissed.
The most serious argument against our call is raised by groups arguing that now is not the time to raise the slogan for an alternative government: The working class is not ready for taking power, the period is not revolutionary, it’s necessary to wait until there is more sustained action around economic demands before putting forward a perspective of political struggle against the government. Obviously, the working class is not ready to launch a direct struggle for power. But it is only by organizing today toward this goal that we can advance the workers’ cause. To convince workers to make the sacrifices necessary to wage effective struggle, particularly with massive unemployment and skyrocketing inflation, they need to know not only what they are fighting against but also what they are fighting for.
In his writings on France, Trotsky wrote an entire polemic against the Communist Party which, at a time of dire crisis, sought to limit the struggle to economic demands and refused to pose the question of which class should rule. He wrote:
“The outline of the immediate demands is given in vague general terms: against wage cuts, for increased social insurance, for collective bargaining, ‘against inflation’, etc. Nothing is said about the character that the struggle for these demands can and must have under the conditions of the present crisis. However, every worker knows that with two million partially or wholly unemployed, the ordinary trade union struggle for collective bargaining is utopian. Under present conditions, in order to force the capitalists to make important concessions, we must break their wills; this can be done only by a revolutionary offensive. But a revolutionary offensive, which opposes one class to another, cannot be developed solely under slogans of partial economic demands….
“The masses understand or feel that, under the conditions of the crisis and of unemployment, partial economic conflicts require unheard-of sacrifices which will never be justified in any case by the results obtained. The masses wait for and demand other and more efficacious methods. Messrs. Strategists, learn from the masses: they are guided by a sure revolutionary instinct.”
—“Once Again, Whither France?” (March 1935)
The course of the Argentinian left is pointing toward disaster. The only way out of Argentina’s crisis is to unite all the oppressed behind the power of the organized working class. Socialists must forge militant caucuses in the unions and seek to organize united-front actions in order to combat the bureaucrats and replace them with a leadership that will fight to win the class struggle and stop the imperialist plunder of the country. That is, a leadership that will organize the coming battles based on the understanding that the oppressed class must topple the oppressor and prepare to confront the U.S. imperialists. Such a perspective would have wide appeal throughout Latin America and in all the other countries the imperialists are squeezing as they seek to shore up their increasingly unstable order.
