"On Monday, the quarantine is lifted," they said. Then they said no. Now they say they will lift it "little by little" and "gradually" ...How cynical of them! They are hiding that they will "gradually" incorporate workers into production under different figures such as "essential products" or "rotating shifts of no more than 50 workers" and increasing the transportation figures, with more trains and buses... From factories and establishments, capitalists will recruit their slaves to produce under conditions of pandemic, famine and slavery.
The bourgeoisie and the rich middle classes will stay at home and in their closed neighborhoods.
For broad sectors of the working class, quarantine never existed. More than 10,000 steelworkers have continued to work at the Techint Group mills. Thousands of workers did it in the meat processing plants to slaughter animals and process beef, poultry, pork, etc., only for export. This, in addition to the food industry workers who, like those at Felfort, continued to produce chocolate bars, not at all essential in the midst of this pandemic.
On the shoulders of the health, service, and transportation workers, the country remained doing business as always all these days.
And while this was happening, another dozens of thousands of workers saw their jobs lost, both on and off the book ones, as happened in Garbarino, and also UOCRA affiliates (such as those at Techint) or at McDonald's shops, where they have even reduced the workers’ wages by 50%.
Now the government says that they are "prepared" to face the "spike of contagion." For the elderly, they already have some isolated "inmate wards" in churches, schools and clubs. In this way they all get together and do not go out on the streets to protest with their children and grandchildren because their shacks explode, they are hungry or lack water. They will have them controlled to prevent hundreds of thousands of them from crowding, hungry, to collect their pensions at the doors of the banks
Tens of thousands of exploited will be quarantined by creating ghettos in their neighborhoods, surrounded by the gendarmerie and the police, since if they do not hold up in a 2mx2m house, they will infect each other in the neighborhoods but do not go out to protest.
No doubt, new sectors of the working class will have to go to the machines and shops to produce, surrounded by coronaviruses.
The offices of managers, directors and bosses will be empty.
There will only be the whip of the foremen that will receive double salary.
Those who are off the book will have to go out to the street to earn some coins for the sandwich and the milk for the kid ...
Most of those that have a temporary contract will be fired, and they will have also to go to ANSES (Work, Pensions and Social Benefits State Office,NT) to collect the miserable 10,000 pesos the government gives for those fired during the pandemic (around half of the minimum monthly wage, NT)...
The workers under collective agreement are forced to listen to the hollow talk of the traitors of the union bureaucracy trying to justify why they agreed to shave 25% off the monthly wage while the permanent staff workers should now additionally do the work of the "termporary" workers who have been fired.
Already at SMATA (autoworkers union), that sinister union bureaucracy have agreed to reduce wages by 60%. The same is predisposed to do the directive of the UOM and the entire bureaucracy.
Of course, all the rounds of the collective bargains that were pending, to recover the salary that was stolen from us in 2018, 2019 and so far in 2020, have already been suspended. The bosses have already made us pay for this crisis by brutally stealing our wages.
Meanwhile, the prices of the essential goods are and will be increasingly cruel. The capitalists are eagerly recovering their “fallen profits”.
This is the pandemic managed by the ruling elites. "We flatten the curve," they say. "We are already prepared to face the peak of contagion." What they already have are coffins and refrigerated containers and body preservers in all hospitals, such as those that were brought to Ecuador to lift thousands of bodies or also in New York ... Not that they will have to bury us in public parks!
The truth must be told: even if they are now trying to soften or relativize it in their statements, they are actually going to send millions of workers, forced by hunger, to risk their lives, to die.
The bourgeoisie and its government are measuring the relationship of forces. The days of Easter will be used to probe how far the masses will bear this scourge. The bourgeisie will continue to be quarantined. They only fear enormous action from the hungry exploited. They know that they are preparing a "massacre operation", but directed precisely at the working class and the exploited masses. They are taking the coronavirus there to save themselves.
As with a mortar, they are adjusting the parallax with test shots to see what the "coordinates" at which they shoot really are...
The army has already put the sabers under the kitchens with a pair of lentils stew pots.
We are facing a brutal state of militarization of the country.
The intelligence services are tracking social networks, as recognized by the same Fernández's Minister of Security, Bullrich's heiress. In this way they are registering the entire combative wing of the working class and the left, listing their phones, addresses, etc.
It is a state of siege to now strangle the masses so that they lay the dead and the bosses continue reaping their profits and prepare to arrest thousands of workers and left fighters in the face of a mass rise.
The sector of the bourgeoisie in the government is calling the other ones for the unity of all their gangs to strike as a single fist against the workers.
They are asking them for some tactical gestures of their own: "among those of us who win the most, let's put each a little and reunite a small fund to make believe we are contributing to the generalized sacrifice", they say,
"this way we will make those from below put the most part".
They, the ones above, privilege their health, their profits and maintaining their power.
They have never cared about our lives... In these weeks of the lockdown they were only organizing and fine-tuning their states, their governments and institutions to send disciplined slaves to produce.
All that the bourgeoisie and its supporters do is for those from above to be saved and those from below to die for the sake of their thirst for profit.
Despicable rascals!
If the ruling classes put their mark on the pandemic, they will throw away over the workers the entire social and economic crisis that they themselves caused.
The capitalist world is bankrupt. Broke!
The imperialist pirates and their local partners have spent benefits on account of the next 10 years.
188 trillion dollars is the states' and private debt throughout the planet ...
The world is marching to a global default of the capitalists that the masses will pay for...
A heart attack from a rotten system that is sinking into the mud and dragged off the cliff.
Reformists have hung themselves at its feet. They have left the lives of the workers in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the big capitalists and imperialism. In this way they are condemning us to hunger, misery and death.
In the USA, the richest capitalist country on the planet, 43 million people live on social assistance. And while Wall Street's financial oligarchy has hoarded most of the world's wealth, there is no gauze, chinstrap, or alcohol in hospitals, and a coronavirus test comes out at $ 3,000.
In England, Spain and Italy the bourgeoisie has left the workers producing in the factories in full expansion of the pandemic. Thousands of them are already infected or dead. It was the working class that rose up and stopped production. It was not the capitalists.
In China, where they celebrate "having stopped the pandemic," tens and tens of thousands of those infected by this fascist regime of the "red businessmen" of Beijing were murdered, as has already been demonstrated. Thus they "flattened the curve" of the coronavirus.
In Argentina the bourgeoisie prepared themselves. While cheating with the numbers, they delayed the advance of the pandemic, shielded their state, threw the crisis at the masses and now they are ready to go for them.
In the rest of Latin America, the tragedy of the exploited is one unheard of. The pandemic and the social crisis of the masses with famine and chronic unemployment have created already a massacre and threatens to lead the peoples of the subcontinent to a holocaust. In Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil the bourgeoisie have left the exploited to their fate or subjected them to the fiercest repression.
The pandemic makes us fall sick ... but it is capitalism that kills!
The resolution of the crisis must be taken by those from below
We cannot allow one more life of the workers and the poor people to be jeopardized in favor of the capitalists.
Starting on Monday, wherever it is necessary to maintain or start production, in the first place it must be done by guaranteeing tests to each worker who enters work as well as to those who are already working because the criminal employer has them producing.
Production must immediately be stopped in factories that produce goods not essential for the population, at the cost of the profits that the capitalists have accumulated over the years.
The bourgeoisie don't give a damn about our health. According to official records, in Argentina 0.2 coronavirus tests are carried out for every 1,000 people, the lowest rate among all the countries where the virus has penetrated.
Prestigious medical centers at the international level and in Argentina already argue that it is incongruous, due to the few tests carried out, the low number of infected people that the government gives ... It is clear that they lie in the figures so that their slaves are entrusted to work. The data coming out of the secret meetings of the government, the capitalists and businessmen and the traitors of the union bureaucracy are not to be believed!
Likewise, the working class cannot accept any dismissal. We must fight for the nationalization and state-ization without compensation and under workers control of any factory that closes, suspends or dismisses workers, and for the registering of all workers that are currently off the book, paying them according to the wage and benefits stated in the collective agreement.
The task of the entire labor movement, together with the unemployed workers' committees, which are forced every day by the bourgeoisie to break the quarantine and expose themselves to look for a plate of food, is to conquer a vital and mobile minimum wage of 62,000 for everyone. .
We must impose a working class and popular solution to this social and health crisis. The banks must be nationalized without payment and put at the service of the poor people. In order for the people to eat, the lands of the oligarchy must be seized and workers' control of the entire food production branch must be imposed, breaking trade secrets to demonstrate to the people's eyes the super profits of the capitalists.
Asking the capitalists to control their prices is like asking the fox to take care of the chicken coop. This can only be done by workers' organizations and consumer committees, which would be in charge of expropriating all food so that it is at the service of the people.
A worker and popular Public Health Committee must be set up, together with health workers, the INTI (Industry and Technology R&D and Standards), the Conicet (National Science R&D) the Universities of Medicine and Pharmacy, the unions and the student centers, which really prioritizes the care of the health of the workers and not the profits of those above, nationalizing all laboratories and private clinics without compensation because what is at stake is the life of the majority of the people.
For this reason, one of the priority measures is to expel the country's "owners", that is, the IMF's watchdogs in Argentina, from the Central Bank.
They come for everything that is ours. We must regroup our forces to go after them
Next Monday, April 13th, when the quarantine is "partially" lifted, the government will do it sneakily, giving instructions factory by factory and establishment by establishment so that people go to produce. That's the truth. They want to send us to a slaughterhouse but without being noticed.
The working class has many accounts to settle, starting with the traitors of the union bureaucracy who have just handed over the jobs, wages and lives of the workers. The union bureaucrats are the ones who really support this infamous government and regime that have militarized and armored their state.
The bosses' politicians, taking all the precautions, have been meeting to conspire against the people and defend the pockets of the capitalists. They can even join with Moyano (Teamsters Union head), Daer (Health workers Union head and CGT co-Secretary General), Acuña (Fuel station workers Union and CGT co-Secretary General) and other sellouts of the union bureaucracy. But when workers demand due payment of wages of doctors and nurses, health union leaders are injured and arrested by the police, as was the case in Chubut.
As we have already said, we are facing a state of siege that has guaranteed that all organizations of the labor movement are dissolved. The entire country is under the command of this ferocious dictatorship of capital, which today has been exposed after breaking free from its sweet envelope, which are the parliamentary forms created to cover up the institutions of the bourgeoisie's rule.
Settled in governors, a president with kingly powers and repressive forces on the streets, the bourgeoisie is destroying even the smallest of democratic freedoms to prevent the political expression of all workers' organizations.
The forces of repression that are in the streets will go against the workers. Thousands have already been arrested, processed and criminally accused in Argentina. To be sure, they will direct this against the workers who rise up, refusing to die like guinea pigs in the factories.
We must fight to immediately lift this state of siege, dissolve the repressive forces and end with the militarization of the country and the monarch powers that the arch-reactionary Constitution of 1853/1994 grants to the president. The setting up of workers and popular vigilance committees is the task of the moment.
The bourgeoisie is a social force that refuses to perish.
The working class will do everything possible to untie their hands so as not to fall together with the bourgeoisie into the void... It only needs one gram of force: a revolutionary leadership so that the executioners fall and civilization survives. Helping the working class stand up is the task of the moment.
Failure to do so, the two classes in conflict risk sinking into history.
The most immediate task is none other than a socialist revolution, to attack the citadel of power, destroying its machinery of domination and exploitation.
The working class have the strength to do it ... they must be ready for decisive battles, where life and death are at stake.
What workers don't have is the leadership they deserve.
The thread that sustains this rotten capitalist system is that of reformism that disorganizes the masses and betrays each one of their struggles. This time, at every step, the nurses of capitalism will be in dire straits to save their bosses. The proletariat must be given the leadership it deserves. That is what the fight to re-found the Fourth International is about, whose program and theory are as up-to-date and valid today as when they were formulated in the 20th century.
For the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world to live, imperialism must die!
Socialism or barbarism.
Socialist revolution or fascism.
Liga Obrera Internacionalista (LOI-CI) / Democracia Obrera, adhered to FLTI