A month ago, Argentina was a symbol of the disaster of the free market. But Argentina today is the symbol of something else: the hope of a better future. In mid-December, ordinary Argentinians said "no" to the misery of a system run by bankers and bosses. By December 20, every city and town in Argentina, including Buenos Aires, was paralysed by mass demonstrations.
JAMES PETRAS has worked for the past two years with the unemployed movement in Argentina. Petras is the author of numerous books on Latin America, the most recent, co-authored with Henry Veltmeyer, is Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century. He talked to ALAN MAASS about the uprising.
Where did the spark for the December uprising come from? The driving force for these massive mobilisations has its roots in the large-scale, sustained activities of the unemployment movement. The unemployed workers' movement has been gaining strength for the last five years. But in the last year, it's spread throughout the country and has played a major role in securing subsistence programs from the government and public works for at least a sector of the unemployed.
The ranks of the unemployed movement include a preponderance of women especially women heads of households, whose numbers have grown with unemployment.
In some areas, unemployment is probably 60%. So many of the piqueteros (picketers) are factory workers with trade union experience. Many are also young people who've never had a job.
Its tactics are to paralyse the circulation of commodities and transportation. So the piqueteros block major highways in order to make their demands. Traffic piles up, trucks can't move, factories can't get supplies.
The government send the police, in which case there's a confrontation. People have been killed, five or six recently in the north of Argentina.
But the fear for the government is that if the confrontations continue, the crowds come in from the huge slums and it could turn into a mini-civil war. So the government usually — after threats and mobilisations of police — negotiates an agreement.
These agreements are discussed by the participants. They don't delegate leaders to go downtown. They make the government come to the highways, and the people there discuss what they should demand and what they should accept.
The piqueteros' experience with past delegated leaderships is that leaders get some payoffs, even the militant leaders. Or they get drawn into tripartite agreements, and the rank and file is sold out.
These demonstrations have been enormously successful within the limited areas in which they operate. But what they taught the population as a whole was that you can't rely on the politicians. You have to take action for yourself and from below.
Recently, as early as September, there were two national meetings to try to coordinate the committees from all the different cities, the regions and the suburbs of Buenos Aries. They created a kind of coordinating committee.
How did the piqueteros' struggles set the stage for the December demonstrations?
That spirit began to manifest itself, even in downtown Buenos Aires, shortly before the uprising. There were several cases in which grievances emerged and shopkeepers and others decided to close off downtown streets.
There was a huge debate within the movement, because the so-called progressive trade union leadership thought it could win over the middle class by blocking main streets but allowing alternative streets to function. This was opposed by the more militant unemployed movements, which said you either close the streets, or you don't.
This spirit captured the imagination of not only employed workers and young people, but also the impoverished lower middle class, and even sectors of more affluent petty bourgeois, including shopkeepers, small businesspeople and others who had accounts in the banks.
When the government finally confiscated the savings — billions of dollars in savings — of the middle class, these layers also became involved in street demonstrations. This is an impoverished, radicalised middle class.
It's a mistake to think of it as simply the middle class. These are people who've lost all their savings. They don't have money to pay their grocery bills or their rent.
Following the example of the unemployed workers, you had a coming together of various strands of the population. You had the great mass of unemployed who were involved in some kind of informal economy. You had employed workers who hadn't been paid because the accounts of their employers are frozen. And you have a great mass of public employees and shopkeepers and others forming a very broad front against the bankers.
The bankers have been able to get their money out. By using the purchase of Argentine stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, they have no problem getting their money out of the country.
So this is very much a class phenomenon, in which the unemployed workers formed one pole, drawing the workers, the petty bourgeoisie and sectors of the middle class to the politics of extra-parliamentary struggle, the rejection of the major bourgeois parties.
Whether this middle class will be a strategic ally — whether they'll get a deal which allows them to take their money out of the banks — is an open question.
The most important factor is that mass action, more than all the ritual strikes of the trade union bureaucracy, led to the ouster of the main leaders of neo-liberalism and the main spokespeople for US banks and US imperialism in the government.
Nothing in the bourgeois press captures the degree of tension and polarisation that exists in Argentina today. On the spot, activists and revolutionaries describe it as a pre-revolutionary situation. And certainly the degree of hostility to all the bourgeois parties and the degree of militancy of great mass of people would describe a pre-revolutionary situation.
There isn't at this time an organised revolutionary party with roots and support. There are thousands of local activists and militants who engage in these activities, and there is a broad radicalisation of consciousness among hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Argentinians today — unprecedented in recent times in Latin America.
But the little left parties — all the Trotskyist and Marxist parties — spent most of their resources recently in electing officials to an impotent parliament. Nowhere have these parties — or the centre left — exercised any kind of leadership. They've been out of sight. In none of these growing mass confrontations — that are reaching proportions of hundreds of thousands in different cities — has there been any organised vanguard.
There are militants from the unemployed movement, who have some street-fighting experience and preparation. Programmatically, they're clear as far as their immediate demands — which are massive employment projects, a living wage, unemployment benefits, and of course, no payment of the debt. And some sectors are calling for the re-nationalisation of the strategic sectors of the economy.
What will Eduardo Duhalde's new government be like? The government of President Duhalde is a provocation. He's a man of the right. He has organised in the past a political apparatus of thugs.
Despite what the press says, he is capable of mobilising right-wing street fighters — fascist-like groups that can draw on lumpens and some disoriented unemployed to challenge for hegemony in the streets and take pressure off the police. There already has been one major confrontation with, of course, the police taking the side of Duhalde's Peronist thugs.
We're dealing with a country that has a long tradition of trade union action. General strikes are more common in Argentina than in any country in the world. This is the country that has the biggest concentration of unemployed industrial workers in the world today. And the largest number of unemployed workers organised and engaged in direct action.
What is missing is a recognised political leadership that can carry this dynamic process forward to the creation of a workers' government. I think the ensuing struggle is going to raise that question very acutely.
We should keep in mind that Washington will not rest until it buries that movement. And I think what you might see is the maintenance of the civilian political facade and the return of the military as a determining factor in politics.
As we saw with the dictatorship of 1976, it took 30,000 dead and disappeared to bury the mass movement. This time, there are many, many more activists and militants than there were at the height of the mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s.
You talked about the conservatism of labour leaders and the unions' "ritual" general strikes. Haven't the unions played a role in the resistance? You can't just speak of a general strike in Argentina. There are general strikes, and there are general strikes. Everybody knows that in Argentina. You can talk to a cab driver, who, when you ask, "What do you think of this general strike?", will tell you that the bureaucrats are using it to blow off steam.
They're one-day affairs with no active mobilisations or factory occupations. They do little in the way of activating the class and creating class consciousness. They're decided from above, and they're shut off from above. The employers and the government know that if they sit on their hands for one day, everything goes back to normal.
There are three trade union confederations in Argentina. The official trade union is the CGT, which has allied itself with every government since the end of the dictatorship — and even had arrangements with the dictatorship.
There's the CGT-Moyano — the dissident CGT led by Hugo Moyano, which has been critical of the official CGT for being so closely tied to the government. But in turn, this federation is run by another set of bureaucrats who pressure the government to make concessions to their followers while maintaining a distance from any structural challenges.
The third major union is the progressive CTA, which emerged as a rejection of the CGT and has many of the public sector workers — workers who have suffered from the shutting down and cutting off of services. Hundreds of thousands have been fired.
The CGT-Moyano trade union bureaucracy has been more eager to engage in general strikes and to mobilise around specific issues. They use a great deal of populist rhetoric, but later negotiate on more narrow sectoral issues behind the backs of the workers.
That's why the CGT-Moyano is distrusted by many sectors of the working class. But it is also capable of bringing them out of the streets.
The CTA has been the most active and radical of the trade unions, led by the ATE, the public employees union. They have been involved with the piqueteros and the unemployed.
They have raised very important structural issues. However, they have not at any point called into question the capitalist system. Moreover, they have a tendency to engage in militant actions and then step back and negotiate. They have been conscious of their position as state employees — and therefore very much engaged in negotiating with the state and paying lip service to the rest of the working class.
There are powerful sectors of the public employees' unions and the teachers' union that have engaged in mass struggle and confrontations — and have suffered some injuries and deaths even in these great mobilisations.
One has to distinguish between the national leadership — particularly of the CTA and to a lesser degree the Moyano group — and the rank and file. This is especially true in the provinces, where you find very radical, very militant trade unionists, local leaders even, as well as the rank and file.
Where do industrial workers fit into this picture of the labour movement? The bulk of industrial workers are unemployed. They used to be 40% of the labour force. They're under 20% today. We have to think of the unemployed not as some kind of poor, urban street vendors. We're talking about people who have worked in auto plants, were steelworkers, were metallurgy and mechanical workers.
One of the things I've noted is the militancy and high levels of participation of wives of industrial workers — wives who've taken on even more family responsibilities because their husbands have become disoriented, in part because of long-term unemployment.
The women are the ones to call them out on the picket line, to be active in order to get a job. Because if you're not on the road blockade, you're not there to get a job when the assembly meets.
The mass action and mass confrontations did more to change the political agenda and the physiognomy of the government than all the general strikes and symbolic protests of the trade unions in the last five or 10 years. The general strikes are important when they have a social content — when the workers occupy the factories and come out and face the government.
That's what I think these movements of the unemployed have. These are desperate people today. These are not employed workers fighting against a particular cutback. They've lost all their savings. They've been out of work for a long time. Many of them haven't seen meat for months. This is a whole desperate mass of people that cuts across class lines — but in which class demands are articulated.
What are the prospects for the development of an organisation or party that can take up the big political questions ahead? The organising principle of the struggle has been hunger. That's what started the sacking of supermarkets in December, and the organisation of these road blockades before that. You had what we might call survival demands for jobs — even low-paying public works jobs at $200 a month — and for food.
Out of that struggle and organisation, some of the more advanced workers in the movement — with trade union experience and some political experience — began to raise other issues, structural issues like repudiating the debt, large-scale public investments and the re-nationalisation of strategic industries.
There are Marxists and socialists who are involved in some of these organisations. But they are there as militants within these movements. They are not, certainly, the dominant force. And they certainly don't have the following in these movements to give leadership and direction — at least at this time.
I think what you have is three levels. One is the grass roots, which is suffering horrendous deprivation. Here's a country that is one of the leading meat and grain producers in the world, and the workers are hungry. They don't have beef, they don't have pasta, they can't feed their kids — and they watch the trains taking tens of thousands of tonnes of meat to Buenos Aires to be shipped to Europe.
The second level is the emerging leadership, which has a conception of structural changes that we might call anti-capitalist and populist.
And then we have a third level, in which the issues of socialism and of revolution come into play.
While the government continues to avoid the measures to ameliorate the problems, increasingly the power within these mobilisations is moving toward the left. A month ago, the issue of foreign debt repudiation was a left-wing issue. Today, it's the mainstream. The issue of massive public works was a left-wing issue. Today, it's moved into the mainstream.
The re-nationalisation of basic strategic industries had a very small group of supporters. Today, it's gaining tens of thousands of adherents. Intervention in the banks was an issue for the minority. Today, it's become a major issue.
So the whole political debate has moved to the left, as left ideas begin to gain hegemony.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 16, 2002.
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