Why do the deputies of the FIT-U ask only for the expropriation without compensation of Vicentin and not of the entire branch of production of cereal companies and agribusiness?
Socialists do not fight only for the expropriation without compensation of broke companies or those that furlough and lay off workers. In that case, we support their passing into the hands of the workers, even in the form of a direct workers administration.
But this is not the case of Vicentin, which organized a scam on a large scale, appropriating state funds to prepare the liquidation of the company at a low price to end up merging with some of the large international cereal companies.
The world market has shrunk and, just as in the automotive industry regarding Nissan and Renault merging, the large grain cartels are preparing large mergers, plundering the states and thus obtaining enormous benefits. Their bankruptcies are a scam.
The fight then is not only for the nationalization of Vicentin, but the fight must be for the expropriation without compensation and under workers' control of Cargill, Bunge and Born, Monsanto and the entire oligarchy that starves the people. They are the ones who take more than 50% of the Argentine agricultural income, as true parasites, intermediaries between the country's agro-industrial production and the world market.
Workers do not want only companies that show losses or bankruptcies. In most cases, we insist, bankruptcies are nothing more than open scams that cover mergers while distributing dividends among shareholders, as is the case with Vicentin.
It is about the people and the workers taking in their hands the large transnational corporations that make profit and who take more than 25 billion dollars without producing absolutely anything, just by placing the grains on the world market where, on the other hand, they already have fixed buyers. They are the same ones who sell their food at dollar value in the Argentine domestic market, when there is a totally devalued currency. They are the exporters who take the country's dollars. A club of parasites, with which the rest of the bourgeois fractions, such as banks, the UIA and the Chamber of Commerce, have juicy common businesses.
Socialist deputies could make one more effort, perhaps spending a few more hours of work, to bring out a bill that strikes at the heart of the capitalists' super profits, using parliamentary benches to revolt the workers and the people against such looting of the nation.
You have to open the accounting books and end the trade secret, through which the big transnational companies hide their super profits and only show losses.
Workers' control must be over the entire industry, including the wretched oligarchy and agrarian bourgeoisie.
And it is also time, then, for a brave voice to be raised to propose the nationalization without compensation of large agricultural property, ports and the entire business of agribusiness.
Grabois, the Vatican spokesman and creator of a "secular Caritas", has timidly stated that some small plots would have to be taken from the oligarchy, either as a loan or with some form of cooperative, to put them to work. These people want the workers and the people to exploit themselves for a crumb. It is a proposal to feed the reserve industrial army with alms and have slave labor, as does that piqueteros bureaucracy that distributes misery to contain the unemployed workers and millions of exploited people who no longer dream of getting a decent job. And they call that "popular economy": pauper workers cleaning streets or self-exploiting themselves in cooperatives, for $ 10,000 or 15,000 (u$ 83 or 125) a month and a couple of paltry food bags. That is the "social justice" of pope Francis, the same one who blessed Videla's sabers.
The workers must fight for the nationalization and expropriation without compensation of the entire Wet Pampa and of every establishment of more than 200 hectares.
More than 1 million workers are enslaved in "rural Argentina" ... Literally enslaved, in the hands of a handful of oligarchs and imperialist magnates who take over the nation's water reserves.
Thousands of ruined small producers are taken a large part of the agricultural rent by this oligarchy and the big bourgeoisie of agribusiness, by buying the former their production at a cheap price and selling it at a dollar price in the internal and international market.
The land in the hands of the oligarchy, imperialism and the big agrarian bourgeoisie has been valued with the effort of the workers and the taxes paid by all the people.
The ports, the power plants, the electricity, the energy and the roads have been built by dozens of generations of workers and exploited of this nation! On top of that, the exploiters dissolved the Argentine merchant fleet, which the Peronist government of Menem surrendered selling it for coins in the 1990s, and gave Cargill and Monsanto the shipping routes.
A miserable concentration of imperialist financial capital, along with the oligarchy, appropriated the land at gunpoint and valued it with the effort of the entire Argentine people. This oligarchy and the agrarian bourgeoisie, imbricated with international financial capital, with the Chicago Stock Exchange and food cartels, defended their lands also at gunpoint, massacring workers as in the Tragic Week (1918-19), the Rebellious Patagonia (1921), and along Videla's fascist coup and dictatorship (1976-83). It was in the dictatorship when they handed over the ports, the railways and the maritime routes, which are property of the people, focused on the Cordón de San Lorenzo (SL belt), where the wealth of the nation is bleeding to death, while more than 60% of the Argentine population are starving and plunged into poverty.
Later, Menem and the cowardly Peronist bourgeoisie handed over the former Somisa (State Steelworks) to the Techint group with the privatizations of the 1990s, while the production of steel for the development of agribusiness in Villa Constitución was reoriented.
We insist, the wealth of the Argentine countryside and the valorization of its production has been thanks to millions of workers, not to that handful of parasitic shareholders of the large cereal companies, who only cut coupons, in Frankfurt, Wall Street or the city of London. And much less was it for that anti-labor oligarchy, which leases its lands to a fierce and slaver agrarian bourgeoisie. Martínez de Hoz, the minister of Economy of the last dictatorship was its spokesman, its representative and the organizer of this genocide against the working class and theft against the nation.
All of them, together with the Chamber of Commerce, the Stock Exchange and the great industrial bourgeoisie, have fled more than 350 billion dollars abroad and have charged the people with an unpayable external debt, which tortures the workers and exploited.
The National Congress, as well as the murderous justice and police, are mere appendages of domination and looting of the nation by these gangs of slavers and swindlers of the nation.
The “rescue”, as Fernández cowardly calls Vicentin's bailout is a perfidious policy of a fraction of the bourgeoisie, which today manages the entire business of the capitalists from the government.
The big industrial bourgeoisie, tied to the production of the transnational companies, need cheap labor. They have imposed labor flexibility and the destruction of the collective agreements, which were given in by the union bureaucracy. They have sank wages and are supporting 9 million workers, as noted in the pandemic, with $ 10,000 (u$ 83) in 3 months. They have devalued the peso and dynamited the supermarket shelves... That is, the Argentine bourgeoisie and imperialism, under the command of the Fernandezes, have managed to do -for now- what even Macri dreamed of and couldn't achieve: having a slave working class to put to work for a misery as soon as the capitalists are able to launch the start of this or that sector of production.
Argentina's maquiladora plan is already underway. In the midst of the pandemic this is expressed through hunger, misery, a state of siege and death for the workers and exploited, and the rescue of all the capitalist gangs, which are subsidized by the state with money from the people and from ANSES (retirements' common fund) for a partial payment of wages.
Why so much Fernandez's interest in Vicentin? He does not have it either as a “patriot” or as an “anti-imperialist” leader, since he guarantees the big grain, mining, oil companies and other transnational corporations, all their businesses and now with a thousand times more enslaved labor force.
The government's policy is to achieve a “national unity” agreement that also contemplates the reduction of food prices in the internal market. With dynamited supermarket shelves at dollarized prices, he cannot fine tune the plan to maintain a labor force valued at a paltry $ 100 or $ 200, without the risk of revolutionary outbursts or uprisings by the exploited. This gang of slavers, who today manages the businesses of the entire bourgeoisie, seeks to establish the devaluation of the workforce, guaranteeing food that is 10 or 15% cheaper, so that the working class can reproduce without threatening bourgeois power with new outbreaks, revolts or rebellions against hunger. They fear that. That's what they mean when they say "we have to do politics" and they look terrified at the uprising of the black people and the workers in the US, Paris, London, Chile, Ecuador ... or as years past, in December 2017, it happened in Argentina, whit the workers throwing more than 3 tons of stones against Congress, where the representatives of the capitalist gangs “parley”.
The Fernandezes dream of a Vicentin rescued from their bankruptcy, which allows them to keep the "prices cared for" (a list of basics allegedly kept at reasonable prices), which are still unaffordable for the majority of the population.
We must then unmask the "little help" that the Fernandezes government gives to the Vicentin directory, which the state continues to have as a privileged client; now it is the same state that will pay all the holding's debts, starting with the creditors who are already threatening with laying off the workers throughout the San Lorenzo industrial belt. Fernandez's “little help” is to clean up the company and be able to influence the distribution of the “cake”, that is, of the surplus value taken from the working class and of national incomes such as agrarian, mining or oil rents, on the basis to guarantee the reproduction of a labor that is paid very low wages if expressed in dollars.
All along the term Vicentin's intervention lasts, accepted by everybody, we insist, the state will take care of the company's debts and will even be in charge of organizing any merger process with the transnational grain companies, but as long as there is a succulent commission, such as it has always been, in the bribery box of the bosses' politicians.
We already know the "bravery" of Fernandez and his gang: on their knees before the IMF, and looting the pocket of the working class to sit down on that to negotiate the distribution of the super profits with the entire Argentine bourgeoisie. Those are his intentions, but nowhere it is written that he will succeed.
The Kirchners and A. Fernandez were courageous to privatize and loot all state companies in the 1990s together with their boss Menem. And now they are looking for thousands of excuses to look good with their "bailout" of Vicentin. Not to doubt, if there any “expropriation”, it would be at a low price. Cristina Kirchner is a specialist in that. Repsol still applauds her for the 5,000 million dollars they received for their “expropriation” in Argentina and the emergence of the new YPF, where through thousands of agreements, transnational corporations keep on collecting the oil rent as happens in Vaca Muerta.
What a paradox is that of YPF ... The Fernandezes' Peronist bourgeoisie were at either side of the counter: when YPF was privatized in the 1990s and when it became nationalized, paying Repsol a fortune as compensation.
It is this Argentina of the capitalists which smells bad and makes life unbearable for the workers and the poor people. This capitalist Argentina, submitted to imperialism as a semi-colony, is "irredeemable". It deserves to be destroyed so that the Argentina of the majority, of the workers and the people, a socialist Argentina, emerges from its bowels.
Expropriating the expropriators of the people is a task that will be conquered with a victorious Argentinazo; it will be solved by a revolutionary workers and popular government, supported in the combat of the exploited of the country and all Americas, from north to south.
It is time for the deputies of the FIT-U to break their policy of assimilation and organic functioning with the bourgeois Parliament. The most that it can be is a tribune at the service of organizing the mass revolutionary combat... That is why there is something that clashes a lot with the parliamentary left, apart from their political outrages: in each of their speeches in Parliament, constantly the deputies of the FIT-U refer to the head of the Chamber of Deputies, as "Mr. President". How do you recognize that filth from the Argentine oligarchy that presides over Parliament, as the "president of the socialists"? The forms and the good treatment make the content. Aim up. It's time.
Ivan Leon
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