In the Argentina of the Fernandezes and the capitalists, the only ones paying for the crisis are the workers
Argentina has been in recession for almost three years. It is a nation strangled by imperialism. 50% of industry is at a standstill.
Those who have been paying the full cost of the crisis are the workers, with 300,000 layoffs, factory closures, devaluation and inflation, misery and hunger. And as if this were not enough, the arrival of the coronavirus threatens to become a catastrophe for the exploited.
The workers did everything to avoid this situation. Since December 2017, with a mass fight in front of the parliament and huge struggles throughout 2018, we put Macri against the ropes. But we were betrayed by the union and piquetera (unemployed workers, NT) bureaucracy, who led our class into the electoral trap, behind the same PJ (Justicialista Party, NT) who collaborated with and supported Macri from the parliament and the governorships.
Today Fernández appears asking for "solidarity" and that "everyone do their part to move Argentina forward”. But he is nothing more than a "sweetened" Macri, a government of false promises and empty hands, a defender of the businesses of the "Club of Six": the imperialist banks, the oligarchy, the UIA (Argentine Industrial Union, NT), the stock market and the chambers of construction and commerce.
The social pact of the Fernandezes means hunger and misery for the workers
The government with its "solidarity" discourse makes the workers "put even more". In the mouths of the capitalists this means that they 'give up their wages or they will be fired'. That is the blackmail they impose on us with their social pact!
After Fernandez devalued our wages by 30% with a dollar at $80, the union bureaucracy sold out the labor collective negociations. The Kirchnerista bureaucracy of the UOM (steelworkers, NT) and CTERA (teachers, NT) signed an 11 and 13% of salary increase. Kirchnerista Pignanelli of SMATA (autoworkers, NT) agreed with General Motors to extend the suspensions with salary reduction for 10 more months, saying that "recovery is delayed”. Traitors!
Fernandez's solidarity actually means to take from the poor to give to the poorest; he takes from the workers' salary to throw coins at the retirees and hungry unemployed. Now he is launching a public works plan where he will use the unemployed, cooperative members, etc. who are paid a social plan (even lower than the miserable minimum wage, NT) as cheap labor without rights.
But the "Club of Six" doesn't put anything! The banks, oil and mining companies have had their taxes reduced. To the energy companies, the new administration recognized the 2000% and 3000% higher fees approved by Macri. The oligarchy, which has dollarized the prices of their foodstuffs with the octopuses of the agro-industry and is ramping them up, has been applied a minimal increase in export taxes with a compensation, and on top of that, they have given the government the advice not to touch a single peso more (see box).
Today, faced with the threat of the coronavirus, the government, the parliamentary bosses' parties, the judges, all together agree on that the workers should go to work to guarantee profits for the bosses.
The Economic and Social Council, the official board of the Social Pact has been set up, with the bureaucracy playing the role of internal police of the workers' movement more than ever.
The social pact among the government, the bosses and the trade union and picket line bureaucracy -with which they seek to guarantee super-slavery and the repayment of the debt to the IMF and Wall Street - deepens to an extreme degree both the control of the bourgeois state over the workers' organizations and the liquidation of any hint of workers' democracy.
The life of the workers is decided in extra-parliamentary agreements between the government, the companies and the bureaucracy, where the latter has to play more than ever its role of internal police of the workers' movement, which it will seek to discipline with the terror of the crash, the threat of unemployment and, if necessary, armed strikebreakers.
The piquetera bureaucracy met with the leaders of the Naval Prefecture, Police and Gendarmerie that murdered Santiago (Maldonado, NdT), Rafa (Rafael Nahuel, NdT) and dozens of martyrs of the unemployed movement, not to have a snapshot taken but to discuss how to keep the unemployed under control.
The Economic and Social Council is the institutionalization of this social pact, a center of conspiracy of the oligarchy, the UIA, the transnationals, the bankers and the union bureaucracy against the working class. 30 gentlemen who nobody voted for decide for millions of workers and their families!
Parliament will give this Council the force of law. This means that every workers' strike against the Council's resolutions will be declared illegal and repressed, just as Perón did in the 1970s.
We can already see today how the government unloads the repression on those who do not abide by the discipline of the social pact, such as the teachers from Tucumán, the laid off workers from Cresta Roja, the workers of Molinos Minetti or the drivers of Number 60 Bus line, who are persecuted by the judges and their police. This is the "democracy" that the capitalists give to the workers!
Fernandez wants to make up the hated repressive institutions to use them against the workers
To armor the Social Pact, Fernandez wants to relegitimize the bourgeois state's institutions of repression, hated and discredited in the eyes of the masses. He saw what happened in December 2017 in front of the parliament. He knows that in order to impose his plans of hunger, false pretences are not enough and that sooner or later he will need the stick and bullets.
The Judicial Reform seeks to re legitimize the justice system by appointing many "impartial" judges. It is a phenomenal deception.
The Kirchners and Macri filled the courts with cases against the workers for fighting (we have 7500 defendants), truncated trials, life sentences for the oil workers of Las Heras, prisoners like the ex-drivers of the East bus line.
With the new federal judges the government wants to put in place, there will be thousands more persecuted and imprisoned.
Fernández says that he is going "to investigate the AFI (Federeal Intelligence Agency, NdT)"; though, since 1983 all the employers' parties have run its predecessor the SIDE (State Intelligence Department, NdT), which they inherited and afterwards protected when the military dictatorship came to an end. And this promise comes from those same who excelled in spying on the workers' organizations with the Gendarmerie's "Project X"!
About the Armed Forces, Fernandez celebrates they have "generals trained in democracy," so that the government can reconcile the people with those generals, servant of the Pentagon, who were trained with the US imperialists when invading Iraq in 1993 and occupying Haiti with the UN to kill hungry workers. That is why Fernandez called for "turning the page" on the eve of a new March 24.
We socialists know that the PJ does not tremble when it comes to killing workers. Fernandez was in the Menem government when it murdered the unemployed and starving people who rose up in Cutral-Có. The same happened in Mosconi, in Jujuy, on the Pueyrredón Bridge, in the Indoamericano Park, etc. The Argentinean bourgeois has a Master degree in killing unemployed workers who rise up.
That's the truth. Fernandez comes to wash the bloody hands of the damn bourgeois state and all its institutions.
To get wages and decent work, we must defeat the IMF and Wall Street and the social pact of the Fernandezes, the bosses and the union and piquetera bureaucracy
The IMF and Wall Street are the ones who strangle the nation and lead the class war against the workers not only in Argentina but in all Latin America.
Hand in hand with Trump, U.S. imperialism is coming to re-colonize Latin America and take over oil, minerals, farm income, and the repayment of foreign debts. And to achieve this, it does not hesitate to promote fascist coups, as in Bolivia.
Here, more than US$ 150 billion have been stolen, in partnership with the oligarchy and the big bosses, and now they are trying to collect the foreign debt, take over the ports and double the slavery of the workers.
The Fernandezes have come to guarantee this with the social pact.
That is why there can never be decent wages, work, health and housing without defeating the IMF and the imperialist transnationals, and the social pact on which all their plans for plundering are based.
There can never be bread without expropriating the land and all the goods from the landowning oligarchy and the imperialist grain companies.
These two great pending democratic tasks -the break with imperialism and the expropriation of the oligarchy- are set for the immediate future and the bread and lives of the workers depend on them.
The working class must return to the path of December 17 and 18, 2017, and of the Cordobazo. Only the workers, leading the ruined middle classes, can fully guarantee the break with imperialism and solve the problem of land and hunger with the method of socialist revolution.
The FIT (Left and Workers Front, NdT) and the rest of parliamentarianist left have broken with this programme and strategy. In the middle of the world capitalist economy crash, they tell the working class that a whole stage of struggle for "more democracy" and reforms in parliament is ahead, just when the Fernandezes are trying to armor the Social Pact against the workers to finish taking away the conquests they still have!
The workers need to set up a new regroupment. The Argentine working class needs a revolutionary and internationalist leadership to win! The party of Mateo Fossa and Leon Trotsky must stand on its feet, as part of the struggle to refound the Fourth International of 1938.
Organize yourself with the Trotskyists of DEMOCRACIA OBRERA to wage this fight!
ARGENTINA WILL BE SOCIALIST
OR A WALL STREET COLONY
DEMOCRACIA OBRERA (Workers' Democracy)
Editorial Board
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Meeting of the Economic and Social Council
March 20th, 2020
Argentina
Argentina, Northern Salta - March 20th, 2020
Relative of Raul Zigaran, leader of the unemployed movement in Pocitos
She speaks from the Salta hospital and tells the health conditions in which Raul is.
“I am at the hospital. I was taken out of the room because they tell us we can only be there in visiting hours. They told us it was a security issue because of the coronavirus. Yesterday, it seemed that a case (of coronavirus) arrived to the hospital. I hope it is not.
I was taken out of the hospital and I left with the wife of the patient next to him. I am staying in her place, because I have nowhere to go and I don’t have resources to go back to Pocitos.
It feels bad to see him. His hands seems like a dough. This morning, I was bathing him and when I removed the bandage a piece of flesh came out. I feel so bad that it brings me down.”
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Polemic - March 16th, 2020
Del Caño and Del Plá gave the government the quorum it needed to approve the anti-worker judicial reform
A few days ago, the issue of the FIT-U giving quorum to the government in parliament for voting the judicial reform bill, once again showed how far the leaders of the PTS, PO, IS have gone in their policy of class collaboration.
With the fairy tale of “ending privileged retirements”, Fernández wanted to introduce a judicial reform to re legitimize the discredited anti-worker judges caste, filling it with allegedly “impartial and democratic judges”, and thus be able to repress and persecute the workers harder.
The FIT-U gave quorum to the government party a therefore facilitated the approval of this anti-worker reform. Del Caño and Del Plá were far from getting up denouncing the true reactionary objective of that reform and calling on the workers to fight it in the streets, with the methods of the working class.
The FIT-U caucus eventually abstained to vote and kept the merely formal traits of "political independence." But that abstention matters little. The only thing that Fernández needed from the FIT was that it accorded "to debate" and so legitimize the approval of his Bonapartist reform.
The PTS leadership tried to justify this capitulation in an article by Guillermo Pistonesi published in La Izquierda Diario on 02/29/2020 ("Altamira in the field of the judicial right"), where he states "Who would have celebrated if on Thursday the session had had to be lifted for lack of quorum? In the first place the entire judicial caste”.
That is to say, with their abstention, from an "independent tribune", "from the left" and, under the pretext of not sticking to the "right", the FIT-U allowed the approval of the government project, placing itself in the field of government against the camp of “the caste of judges and the right”.
Del Caño and Del Plá has already came to support Macri-Fernández's "Food Emergency" hunger law last year saying that it “was a palliative” for the hungry. Pistonesi was in charge of clarifying that a left deputy must support any measure that means an improvement for the masses (that is, "progressive"), even if it is a measure of the bourgeoisie.
This is a true confession: the FIT-U supports the "progressive bourgeois camp" "from the outside", "critically". It is the old policy of "bourgeois camps" of Stalinism and the Mensheviks, who supported the "progressive" measures of the "liberal bourgeoisie" and criticized the "negative" ones.
The FIT-U tells the workers that there is a "progressive" bourgeoisie that can be pressured to take out laws favorable to the workers, that is, that they can fight for "small reforms", as much as possible, in parliament hand in hand with the bourgeoisie.
If so, why make the socialist revolution? If the Fernándezes can promote measures favorable to the exploited, why were they (the FTI-U) not consistent in October and called to vote for them?
The honest militants of the FIT-U who went to those parties to fight for the cause of the workers must not allow one more minute to continue submitting the workers' vanguard to the criminals of Kirchnerismo and the PJ!
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March 16th, 2020
A slight rise in export taxes with a compensation... a “strike” of the landowners that does not stop the grain and cattle trade...
Blank bullets between the government and the agrarian oligarchy
A few days ago, the organizations of the landowning oligarchy and the big agrarian bourgeoisie carried out an alleged stop of loading grains and meat to export for four days (a lock-out), in response to the 3% rise to taxes on soybean export.
But what really pushed the oligarchy to this action was not the money (the rise was almost nothing), but the political decision of the oligarchy to put limits on the government. Let's see
Since Fernandez took office, they have tried to close a social pact with all the fractions of the bourgeoisie and the union and piquetera bureaucracy, to become a government of bourgeois unity to attack hard on the workers’ movement. That is Peronism’s plan to kneel down the working class and guarantee the debt payment to Wall Street and the IMF.
They want to show a social pact where “everybody gives” to better deceive the workers and continue squeezing them so that they continue giving “everything”... since it is already clear that the working class is the only one that really “gives”, throughout the wage devaluation, paying dollarized prices and with a rich soil under the workers’ feet that leaves them nothing.
From this point of view, the 3% increase in export taxes is a political measure to prop up this deception. Its fiscal impact is almost nothing. They are only an additional US $ 500 million, of which US $ 350 million would be compensated by different mechanisms to producers of less than 1000 tons per year of the humid pampas and sectors of the regional economies. In other words, they would only raise US $ 150 million. It is derisory.
The government gave them a very high dollar and knows that in 2019/202 it is expected the second largest production in Argentina’s history. That is why Massa asked them for “an effort, to help and to understand that at this stage Argentina needs them."
However, the big agrarian bourgeoisie stands firm and sets limits to government. It doesn't want to give the government another extra dollar.
It is a powerful bourgeois fraction with great economic and social significance in Argentina. It is directly tied to the world market and the Chicago Board of Trade. It sits on billions of dollars of farming income. With Macri, they were in the government and have a social base in the wealthy middle classes of the country that are not in the capital city.
As junior partner of Cargill, Bayer-Monsanto, Dupont, Dreyfus, etc., this bourgeois fraction is part of the soybean complex, the largest exporter in Argentina, with more than 25% of the total Argentinean exports. In 2019, the soy complex alone recorded US $ 15.7 billion revenues.
That is why they responded to the government with a political lock-out, reminding it that Argentina is the land of Trump and American imperialism and that there is no place for populist flirting, not even for the empty-handed one, like the chatterbox of Fernandez.
The working class must break all submission to the government, the new fundraisers of the IMF, and set up a revolutionary program to solve the land problem and the imperialist plunder of the nation, which ultimately is the basis for the hunger and misery of the people.
With the expropriation of the families of the agrarian oligarchy and the grain and agricultural monopolies, state farms could be established, under the control of their workers, which would put the high technification and productivity of the humid pampa at the service of ending hunger not only in Argentina but in the entire Latin America.
The nationalization of foreign trade would make it possible to put Argentina's enormous agrarian income at the service of the poor people.
But these tasks are closely linked to the break with the IMF and the parasites of Wall Street and the Chicago Board of Trade.
Only the workers, leading the ruined middle classes by the method of the socialist revolution, can carry the fight against imperialism to the end and solve the land question.
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