Notes for a debate
The bankruptcy of the New Left
Altamira's new skid
A united and military front with the genocidal armed forces against the coronavirus?
We have read a note by comrade Jorge Terracota, a columnist for "The International Workers Organizer", entitled "Altamira's Monism and the anti-labor Army". That note is a devastating criticism of Altamira and the leaders of the Tendency of the Workers Party's open and full revisionism and rupture with Marxism. Terracotta quotes Altamira in his anti-revolutionary nonsense, where he affirms that to the bourgeois state and the armed forces: "We must demand, not that they cancel state coercion, but that they apply it consistently."("A great political misunderstanding", by Executive Board of the PO (T), 04/03/2020)
Actually, Altamira is proposing a united and military front with the Videlista armed forces. He calls for them to exercise coercion consistently! We vehemently oppose this, since we affirm that if the Armed Forces were to apply coercion consistently again, this time the missing would not be 30,000 but 60,000. Just look at what happened in China, where this army policy that was dedicated to killing every civilian with fever was applied to "flatten the curve" and imposed quarantine at gunpoint, as we will develop later... What a model the one of Altamira! Argentine workers must know where this controversy leads, about which rivers of ink are written.
Using the same reasoning, and going even further, in the same statement, Altamira asks, "Or should American workers request the expulsion of a hospital ship that docked in New York?" (idem). This is nonsense. It is a life and death task to move that military ship from the US Navy off the coast of New York. That ship is there, in any case, to save the big bourgeoisie in Wall Street's 8 blocks, and not to save the lives of the tens of thousands of black and Latino workers who die like flies, including having to bury the corpses themselves of their families in mass graves. None of them was taken to Altamira mentioned ship.
That ship is there to treat the exploited in the US as the US Navy treats the peoples it oppresses and exploits on the 5 continents: to bombings. At this point, the leadership of the Workers' Party Tendency falls off the cliff. "Standing with the Marines to save the working class and the poor people of the United States from the coronavirus" is the greatest reactionary stupidity anyone has ever said trying to defend revolutionary Marxism. We call the American workers, those who surrounded Wall Street some time ago, those who are fighting for Black Lives Matter, and for a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour, to know that the medical facilities of that ship are not and will never be for them, the same as US medicine is not at their service, where getting a coronavirus test costs US $ 3,000.
Altamira considers himself omnipotent, as if to say anything in the name of Marxism while being unimpeachable.
His left-wing FIT colleagues write rivers of ink against Altamira's policy in Argentina. But they hide that Altamira's program for Argentina is the same one they all apply in Syria... where they suspend the class struggle and support the genocidal armed forces of al-Assad and Putin to massacre the rebellious people, for the sake of an "anti-jihadist fight”, which has already claimed 600,000 deaths, and “exerted a coercion” that this reformist left-wing crowd applauds, leaving 15 million refugees. There they have applied the theory of "two demons" to support the "less evil".
Thus, revisionism of Marxism in life plays the role of executioner of the proletarian revolution.
The official PO and Christian Castillo of the PTS have participated in this discussion. They wrote their brainy notes, "in defense of Marxism", from the headquarters of al-Assad's fascist forces, with whom they have been for 9 years now on a common front fighting jihadism and calling for "a strong coercion” against it.
In Syria, to support this policy, they use the same argument as Altamira in Argentina: “We must deal with the phenomenon of the need for coercion on the one hand, and the class character of the institutions responsible for applying them on the other, including their arrogant methods and their arbitrary arrests. ” (idem)
But that's what the Argentine army's coercion is all about ... not to mention al-Assad! They all splash around in the same muddy bloody swamp from the Middle East.
Jorge Terracota has titled his post “Altamira's Monism and the anti-labor Army”, and we could title this note as:
"The reformist left on the planet of the apes"
"The reformism in the nude".
Actually, Altamira is calling for, in fact, a "united front" between the workers' organizations and the Armed Forces to combat the coronavirus. To do this, he calls for the setting up of workers' committees, in the neighborhoods, etc. to prevent the "excesses" that the Armed Forces may have in their "valuable" apostolate of "exercising coercion" to "save civilization from death". This is what Altamira says in his previously cited note, dated 3/4.
The virus has made FIT and its allies as the New MAS sick. These have become a kind of "ladies from Mendoza province" (the ones who collected jewelry for the Army of fore-father San Martín), since they now call for collecting and gathering food for the hungry. They, in a flyer published at the end of March, call for a “solidarity campaign to confront the pandemic” and give an account of the donations collected and delivered to neighborhoods in the Southern Zone (April 20) or soup kitchen areas in Neuquen (April 24 / 4). To make believe that with donations and collections the hunger is solved is a position of bourgeois philanthropists and not one worthy of a socialist. They are like a NGO or a “socialist Caritas”, which calls for the people to put what the bourgeoisie steals. They have dedicated themselves to this charity office after they asked Fernández "to control prices" ... which is to say that the fox takes care of the chickens. This left, worshippers of Sanders and "anti-capitalist" friends of Podemos and Lula no longer have limits in their nonsense.
The FIT-U, whose deputies pray that "the parliament meets”, has been doing nothing different as a whole. What do they seek? If everything has been already resolved! The president assumed, by decree, all the power of the state institutions. And not only did the parliament stop working, and even the same bourgeois justice that came to the background. The president has dissolved the unions and co-opted the union bureaucracy to a ministry together with the business chambers, where all the workers' conquests are being destroyed and liquidated by secret decrees and pacts. It is a state of siege in fact ... and in law.
Here the only thing that has to come together and get going, to stop this brutal attack by the capitalists, are the unions, the workers' organizations, the assemblies, the internal commissions, the piquetero movement. In the same way that those from above meet and organize, with social distancing and a lot of gel alcohol. Or as 30% of workers do, who risk their lives every day in factories and hospitals, while the bourgeoisie conspires against the people to take all the conquests from the exploited.
Pitrola and Del Caño cry out for "Parliament to meet..." But the time of parliamentarism is coming to an end. Now they are going to make a teleconference for them to approve what the government has already resolved with the 24 governors, supported by a police regime.
The FIT-U deputies stun proposing to the government to take 20 measures to stop the crisis and the pandemic. Far from making these proposals to the masses so that they take them into their hands, they demand them from the government and the parliament so that they can vote and carry them out. The Argentine left has entered a totally reformist alley. It has called for suspending the class struggle so that it is the government, parliament or justice that command the fight against the social crisis and the humanitarian catastrophe.
The crisis of capitalism inevitably leads to the crisis of parliamentarism. The left wants to revive it so to be able to continue living. But the fate of reformism is also cast. Under the present conditions, the bourgeoisie no longer needs intermediaries from the parliamentary left.
Altamira, for the sake of his unity with the bourgeois Armed Forces to impose quarantine and to "save our lives", also calls to suspend the class struggle and to sustain the coercion of the bourgeois army.
For Altamira the State, which is ultimately reduced to a gang of armed men, has a neutral content... sometimes worker, sometimes bourgeois. That is the theoretical premise of Altamira. He is a Social Democrat to the end. We are facing a Stalinist and Social Democratic pseudo-theory. It is the same premise as that of its partners on the left, but in the Altamira version, the Kautskist theory of "neutral state" focuses on the active role that the armed forces must play today.
Already in 2002/2003 Altamira went to the Blumberg marches to "change their content" and calling for a strong hand against organized crime... it is as if today he defended Bullrich's "Chocobar Doctrine" (the former Security Minister held that in case of doubt, the police is always right, even if they shoot to the back or to unarmed people, NT). 4,000 kids fell for the "easy trigger", while the criminals were in the government house.
It seems that for Altamira the coronavirus has an enormous virtue: it makes irreconcilable classes stop fighting and unite to fight the pandemic. Does the bourgeoisie give up on crushing the hungry?
If they leave their homes, desperate for hunger, as already happens in dozens of countries in the world, including breaking the quarantine, the Armed Forces would shoot them to death... And Altamira tells the military to "execute the coercion" and "defend the quarantine"!
The workers revolted in northern Italy because the bosses were taking them to work… What would the Altamira Armed Forces do about it? Would they picket and support the workers against the employers that expose them to the pandemic? Really?
In the time that the pandemic is lasting, there are already millions of laid-off workers... As it is necessary to guarantee quarantine, they are sent home to eat noodles or to the soup kitchen of the leading political boss in the neighborhood.
The unions have been dissolved. In the factories or shops where you are still working you cannot hold assemblies. Delegates' plenaries cannot be held, not even maintaining social distance. Nothing! Fernandez's dictatorial decree prohibits meetings and his subjects, the Armed Forces and the police are to execute it.
How to shut up and silence -as the entire reformist left does- not only that there is already a state of siege, but that by decree all union activities in the country have been suspended?
Altamira proposes more military coercion when what the working class needs most is to defeat the dictatorial policy of the government, democratic rights to organize and fight, recover their organizations and unions. The piquetero movement, given over to the begging from the powerful, has to take saving their lives in their own hands. Coercion must be exercised by the working class and the health workers, who are the ones who run the hospitals and continue to produce the food, which is increasingly scarce and the capitalists turn more expensive every day.
But don't worry! The Armed Forces are neutral and can be used not only by the bourgeoisie to repress the people, but also by Altamira and their people to save our lives in the face of the coronavirus (¿!! ???)
Marxist politics is the other way around. It affirms that the later the working class takes the solution of the social and health catastrophe in its hands, with the method of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution, the more the masses will pay in a cruel and bloody way for the crisis that is in course. The bourgeoisie, on the brink of the precipice, does not save the slave, but on the contrary, makes him fall to save themselves.
In Penta, whose workers and delegates are fighting for the reinstatement of the dismissed, the police "exercised coercion." The police went and broke their heads, for "breaking the quarantine" in an assembly at the door of the factory. Then Berni (provincial Security Minister, NT) went to clarify that they are repressors, but not savages. He was with Don Jorge's program to condemn "arrogant methods and arbitrary arrests". But we all know that Berni was there as the "good police" after the "bad police" had broken the workers' heads and evicted them from the factory, and now they are all fired.
Today the Penta workers are blocking the streets of Avellaneda and the Pueyrredón Bridge (the latter unites Avellaneda city in Buenos Aires Province with Buenos Aires city, Argentina's capital, and is a popular place to stage workers' protests and roadblocks). Have the deputies of the FIT-U participated? Why weren't there the unions led by the FIT-U, using union permits, maintaining social distance, sitting with a seat in between in the transport, as the workers do to go to work?
Argentina has been inundated with partial factory-to-factory struggles, while the bureaucracy fled to quarantine in the Olivos estate with Fernández to hand over all the workers' conquests. The workers are defending themselves against the bosses' arrogance that wants to send them to work risking their lives, reducing their wages or laying them off en masse. A wave of resistance struggles is running through the country's factories and hospitals, where doctors and nurses are the first to fall, against the brutal coercion of the bourgeoisie and its repressive police forces, who send health workers dressed with big garbage bags as PPE to care for coronavirus patients. Whatis Altamira talkingabout?
We are faced with a pseudo-theory taken from Kautsky that affirms that the institutions of the bourgeois state are, ultimately, neutral and their content can be changed. Deputy Bregman released an astonished, exultant public post, vindicating a judge who had guaranteed a ruling that from now on it was mandatory to give healthy food to the boys who continue to go to school to get their plate of food.
Really, we are facing an abject left. Justice is only there to defend the rights of capitalists. Ultimately, with that ruling, the judge washed his face. The kids had been getting an apple and a stale ham and cheese sandwich 3 days old. After the dictum of the justice, they removed the apple. Bourgeois justice is not there to guarantee a decent and healthy meal on the plate of the workers' children. That has to be conquered, as it has always been conquered, by means of fighting, in hard combats and on blood of the exploited.
Seeing the members of the FIT-U criticize Jorge Altamira by seeing the straw in the other's eye without seeing the beam in their own does nothing but worry every serious worker who manages to understand the heart of the discussion that is underway, where the alleged opponents are not such, but a parody of reformers looking for which institution of the bourgeois state each of them serve and subject the workers to.
In this controversy, which already carries tons of letters and rivers of ink, Altamira affirms that it is legal for the army to intervene and exercise coercion to save the life of the population, because "A proletarian regime would also resort to coercion in a similar situation, of course with its democratic militias and revocable commanders, or with the workers army, if that were the case. ” (idem). Again it speaks of a neutral state and institutions. What does the red army of the workers' state, the iron fist of the soviets, which would exert coercion against the bourgeoisie and even against decomposed sectors of the working class itself (such as informants, strikebreakers, etc.), have to do with the army of a bourgeois state, which is only to kill and repress workers?
As the Marxist dialectic says, both armies are armed forces, but of totally opposite essence and qualities, irreconcilable, a question that Jorge Terracota develops in his excellent note annihilating Altamirista bungling.
Kautskyism was which came to deny that the State is a by-product of irreconcilable class contradictions. In a capitalist country, the state is bourgeois and defends the bourgeoisie every day, every hour, minute and second of its existence. It uses and sets up different institutions of domination, whichever it needs at all times to survive and maintain oppression over the exploiting class. It uses monarchies, parliaments, military governments and "workers" governments of reformist parties to run their businesses to deceive the people. It also uses justice, parliaments... and also bungling leftists and reformers, who are co-opted by the states to defend the business and power of the bourgeoisie.
But, as Engels would say, the State, once stripped of all its masks and shells that cover it, boils down to its band of armed men, and from them, to the officer caste, which is what appears at a time when the bourgeoisie is about to lose its power to defend the joint interests of the possessing classes. Altamira has mounted a Kautskyist bulldozer to demolish revolutionary theory in the 21st century.
Social democracy had the same logic as Altamira, but in relation to bourgeois parliamentarism. It proposed winning the elections, obtaining the parliamentary majority and then changing the class content of the capitalist state. If the bourgeois parliament had a social democratic majority, they could take power, make socialism... This is how they lied to the masses.
This is the foundation of the "peaceful path to socialism" policy. But every time the masses were dragged after this policy, the generals came and passed the insurrectional peoples to slaughter. And Altamira is of the opinion -and wants to make the workers believe- that thanks to the heart of the bourgeois state, which is its caste of officers, the people will be able to take care of the pandemic!
Altamira, the old leader of the PO and today of PO (T), has the conception that, while the pandemic and quarantine lasts, the working class has to be just an auxiliary wheel of the bourgeoisie and its institutions, according to him became in "Progressive". This is posed precisely at a time when the bourgeoisie has to play its sharpest counter-revolutionary instincts to make the masses pay for the pandemic and, taking advantage of it, for the economic crash that the capitalists themselves and imperialism have caused.
Already the insightful workers have realized that they have never lost so many conquests as with this quarantine: their unions, their work, their collective bargaining, their wages... and their lives! Altamira has skidded badly.
For him, ultimately, the fight against unemployment, etc. while the pandemic lasts, has become a “secondary contradiction”. But it has become clear that if the bourgeoisie controls the nation to stop the coronavirus and has to settle the Armed Forces in the streets, the working class will be subjected to brutal defeat for the time Altamira breathes relief and leaves from his quarantine.
"The main thing now is to defeat the coronavirus," says Altamira. But the pandemic and hunger are not defeated if the bourgeoisie and its state are not defeated. Or if they are, it will be at the expense of the masses. The coronavirus puts to the order of the day which class has the power. The one that has it will make the other pay for the pandemic.
As we see, the bourgeoisie is making them pay for the coronavirus worldwide, handing over their slaves to death. In China, the army "went overboard" with its "coercion" and killed tens and tens of thousands of sick people who could spread it. They jailed and killed all the doctors who reported the infection, coming either out of a hot meat market or out of a NASA-funded laboratory in Wuhan province.
In Ecuador, the bourgeoisie fled Guayaquil and its cowardly officer caste fled and is already reaching Central America, while the poor and hungry people die in the streets.
It was with the method of class struggle, unemployment and strike, how the workers in Spain and Italy imposed the quarantine.
In the United States, the National Guard puts a gun to the black and Latino workers' heads so that it is them who bury the infected, so that those who get infected and die are the exploited in the Bronx.
The fact is there is no virus, no god, no demon able to suspend class struggle or the irreconcilable character between them.
Referring to Kautsky, when he spoke of "democracy", Lenin replied "Democracy? For what class?”,“State? Armed forces? Of what class?". Altamira has gone to look in the bourgeois state, that is, in the fierce dictatorship of capital, an ally to defend him against the catastrophe of nature ... Howwretched!
Altamira puts on the old conscripted soldier's cap and runs to sweep the barracks. His former partner Lora already did it in 1971 together with the PO in Bolivia. It was the program that Altamira defended tooth and nail, i.eg. the Unified Anti-imperialist Front. They ended up together with Lora in a front with General Torres, strangling the dual power of the Popular Assembly.
That front with the military in Bolivia was based on a Stalinist argument of the "Bolivian national particularity." This affirms that the officer caste, since it was of Quechua and Aymara ethnicity, could give life to a “red” and “socialist” fraction of the Bolivian Armed Forces. From this pseudo-theory of lackeys of the Bolivian Armed Forces of the old members of Altamira, comes the POR of today that supports the coup and fascist generals who massacred in Senkata.
Now in Argentina, Altamira argues that the Videlista officer caste, due to a virus, has become "progressive" and necessary to be able to cope with the pandemic. Undoubtedly, like Fernández, Altamira has "turned the page". But he did not notice the "cunning" of the Videlista generals and their boss Fernández: Under the pretext of sewing masks, the soldiers have returned to ESMA, one of the main clandestine centers of detention, torture and disappearance during the Videla dictatorship. This Altamira policy would also undoubtedly apply to a military dictatorship whose country is plagued by the pandemic, that is, it would also support the army to "save the people", exercising "more coercion" in the face of the coronavirus. This man has gone too far.
Ultimately, it repeats what the old CP of Vittorio Codovilla said, which stated that with "progressive" sectors of the bourgeoisie and "patriotic military" steps forward could be taken to improve the conditions of the masses in Argentina. They went to the end in this policy and ended up in a front with Rojas and Aramburu, "exercising coercion" against Peronism and killing thousands of workers. Not to mention when the CP traveled the world to suspend the fight against the Videla dictatorship because it sold wheat to the USSR. And Altamira does it because he has been dazzled by two military kitchen cars delivering a lentil stew in a neighborhood for television cameras.
One of the symptoms of the coronavirus is that people loses taste and smell. But those of us vaccinated against the virus of reformism can feel that here it smells like a Stalinist whiff.
This time the nonsense has gone a long way. Companions of the PO leadership like Altamira lived the '70s and fought, along with the best of the vanguard of the Argentine working class. Altamira cannot ignore that at the end of 1974, General Peron sent the Armed Forces along with the Peronist Youth to make ditches and sewers, to demonstrate national unity and to regain prestige for the army after the murderous role it had played in the "Liberator Revolution" (the 1955 toppling of Person that brought tough persecution of unions and workers) and with (1966) General Onganía's coup. The montoneros and the Peronist Youth of those 1970s years applied Don Jorge's policy. The military ended up digging trenches... to bury 30,000 of our own.
We are in a semi-colonial country. Although Altamira denies it, there is no Argentine army. It is a colony with militias under the command of the Pentagon in the UN missions, as Jorge (this time Terracotta), correctly points out in his controversy with Jorge (Altamira). The breed of officers educated in the Pentagon is in charge of always defending the interests of imperialism.
Calling to "apply coercion" to quarantine millions of hungry people, without solving the social crisis, is already a rude attack on the working class. It ought to be said.
Or is there any chance that the most exploited layers of the masses and the poor people could face the pandemic, with quarantine in 2mx2m houses where 10 people are crowded, with more than 5 million laid off workers, with supermarket shelves dynamited by the prices put by the capitalists?
The masses do not need coercion to take care of their health. It is food, decent housing, health for all and fundamentally recovering their unions, setting up assemblies, internal commissions and a coordinator of all sectors of the working class who are the only ones who can guarantee quarantine, risking their lives in hospitals, food factories, supermarkets and meat processing/refrigerator plants.
This would be achieved by expropriating the capitalists and resolved by destroying the repressive forces and the murderous army officer class. That is the shock that is in the making and is being prepared.
What the masses need to make a healthy quarantine are the houses of the closed rich neighborhoods, the luxury houses of the bourgeoisie, the idle apartments of the urban landowners. What the masses need is to expropriate and control the food marketing network, from the lands of the oligarchy to supermarkets and banks, where retired workers are martyred.
The Armed Forces, with the gendarmerie and the police, are already applying coercion to impose quarantine. A coercion under bourgeois command. They have surrounded all the working class and popular neighborhoods. People in them have been surrounded by repressive forces. The government knows that in 2mx2m shacks there is no human being, even Altamira, to endure quarantine. The bourgeoisie knows that when contagion begins there, it will be unstoppable. They surround the neighborhoods so that the workers can be infected and killed. The Armed Forces will be there to shoot those who want to get out of those ghettos.
At this point in the game one wonders: how could this man go so far in his nonsense? Like their FIT-U partners, they are all drunk with years of being the parliamentary left, left squires of the putrid Argentine semi-colonial bourgeois regime.
We are facing exponents of a new wave of reformism, just out of the oven of the 21st century, cooked with the same ingredients of the social democratic and Stalinist reformism of the 20th century. Mr. Altamira has fallen a while ago to the precipice.
Altamira overreached in his telltale, being on a superhuman stage. And now he looks for any argument to defend the anti-Marxist stupidity he said. His FIT-U allies and former party colleagues came out to tell him that some things are done, but not told openly, because there may be Trotskyists in his party who realize that this is a candid confession of an open break with Trotskyism. His "left" allies call him to order, so that he at least appears to behave.
Altamira takes the gauntlet of the Kautskyist thesis of a "neutral state" and openly attacks Marxism. For this thesis, it is not necessary to destroy, demolish or disgregate the state machine in order for the working class to liberate itself. Therefore it does not leave stone on stone of the Marxist theory of the revolution, from the rebellion of the weavers of Lyon to the Paris Commune to the October Revolution to all the post-war revolutions ...
In a simple discussion about a virus, Altamira destroys Marxism. He lives horrified, at every turn, by his PTS partners for their Gramscian revisionism against Trotskyism. But Mr. Altamira proves to be the most faithful disciple of the Stalinist on Sardinia island.
Capitalism survives in the midst of a true world crash, which threatens all civilization with barbarism and new wars; with inter-imperialist clashes and brutal attacks on the masses, who will be made to pay for not only a couple of months of quarantine, but the entire deep crisis of the capitalist system, based on the super-profit of gangs of parasites that have destroyed the planet and led the working class to the worst martyrdoms.
Although Mr. Altamira is scared by the horseshoe bat virus, the greatest pandemic on the planet is hunger. 265 million starving people are dying. Even the UN itself recognizes it.
Under these conditions, quarantine is a luxury that the workers will conquer with the revolution, although Mr. Altamira does not like that word. The time has come. The huge class conflagrations are already underway.
There is an international speed race and this is about how much the bourgeoisie takes advantage of the health crisis and the pandemic to throw its entire crisis on the masses and defeat them before they return to the productive process. Because if they return without being previously defeated, demoralized and with their ranks divided, what lies ahead for the bourgeoisie -and they know it- will be the cry for justice of the exploited, who will make it count with the fire of the revolution.
That is the caution about the exit of the quarantine: that millions will remain unemployed, the workers will have lost all their conquests and the governments will be there to make them pay for the losses of the productive paralysis. No brainer not even delusional people believe that the huge issuance of coins, quasi-currencies or titles to subsidize capitalists in crisis will be paid by the latter.
Mr. Altamira? Well… Hanging on the coattails of the Argentine army... You cannot come back unscathed from there.
Paula Medrano and JulianJuarez
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