Argentina - November 19th, 2021

 The electoral trap was consummated under the command of Biden and the IMF
The capitalists and imperialism enlist the bosses' parties to deepen the attack on the working class

A new electoral trap was consummated. The bosses' parties, enemies of the people, representatives of the IMF, Wall Street and the big local capitalists, have been re-legitimized with 21 million votes to deepen the attack on the workers and the exploited masses. That's why all of them celebrate.
However, we workers have nothing to celebrate. We do not have a decent job or salary. We do not have fair pensions. This "democracy for the rich" has only given us more misery, unemployment and high cost of living.
Still, millions of workers, betrayed by the union bureaucracy, have been led to vote for those parties, executioners of the working class. That is the tragedy of our class.

Fernández celebrates having reduced the margin of his defeat in the province of Buenos Aires with respect to the PASO (the primaries), but this cannot hide the historical defeat that Peronism suffered at the national level, where it obtained 33% (7,800,000) votes whereas Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change) got 42% (9,800,000). So much so that the PJ lost its own quorum in the Senate for the first time since 1983.
Together for Change, which has won over the middle classes in the streets since the beginning of the lockdown, has succeeded overwhelmingly in the central and southern provinces of Argentina.

The Fernandezes are doing to the working class what the Macri government of the CEOs could not, as the working class put a limit to it with the December 2017 fighting in front of the parliament.
This government, with the billionaire union bureaucracy supporting it in a pact with the UIA (manufacturing employers' chamber, NT) and big capital, drowned out every claim and is advancing in the labor reform company by company.  Fernandez “celebrates” the agreements with the IMF while bleeding to death by losing huge swaths of voters in the working class and the exploited masses.

Small surprise. Imperialism is carrying out a fierce offensive to recolonize and plunder Latin America. In Argentina, it will use all the agents it has at hand to impose it.
The Peronist government, a direct agent of American imperialism, supported by the union and piquetera bureaucracy, tries to generalize the advance of the transformation of Argentina Into a big "maquila" (sweatshop), with the help of gunmen of the unions and the bullets of the police.
The PJ guarantees Wall Street the control and extreme subjugation of the working class through the bureaucracy of the state-ized unions, a true “police” at the service of the capitalists within the working class ranks.  For this reason, despite having lost now more than 5 million votes at the national level compared to 2019, Fernández can celebrate as a "victory" not having lost the key control over the hungry people of the Conurbano (the 24 Buenos Aires province's municipalities thigtly urbanized around Buenos Aires City, home to 38% of the Argentinean population, NT) where he won and maintains an iron control via the neighborhood "punteros" (political "caciques", NT) and the Vatican-led picket bureaucracy. But above all he celebrates that he has enlisted the gunmen of the unions against the working class and that he will have the support of Together for Change in the Congress to pass the plans of the IMF and imperialism.

The government brandishes the union apparatuses in rallies and marches in its support, after having removed the working class from the scene with harsh defeats and setbacks to all struggles since the start of the quarantine in 2020.
The current reunification of the CGT reinforces the social pact and the iron control of the workers' organizations by the State, to continue passing the labor flexibility in agreements by factory and by sector as in Toyota, and with the liquidation of social welfare plans and the entry of the unemployed to work for $ 30 or $ 40 thousand (USD 150-200) a month.

Together for Change, the party of the antiworker rual landowners, the oligarchy and the banking system, has recovered its weight in these elections thanks to the support of the reactionary middle classes and a sector of workers who voted against Fernandez. Their role is to ensure that the government attacks the working class more and more. This is what the electoral trap is all about. Imperialism tightens the noose around Fernandez's neck and squeezes him like a lemon until it gets his last drop of servility for Wall Street and the IMF.
When he no longer has a drop left, they will not hesitate to mercilessly discard him. Meanwhile, the rabid anti-worker Together for Change opposition will monitor and support from Congress all the Fernandez's measures against workers for the repayment of the fraudulent debt to the IMF... as long as it strictly complies with the orders of the US embassy and the United States Chamber of Commerce in Argentina.
It is that, as we anticipated above, Argentina is under the conditions of the offensive of North American imperialism on Latin America. Biden wants to impose a regime of super-exploitation of workers at the level of the maquiladoras in northern Mexico, from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego.

Wall Street needs to turn bankrupt and looted Argentina into a colony of the likes of Colombia, Chile or Ecuador.  For this reason, since April, Washington was closely following the march of the electoral trap, which came to crown, in the first place, an enormous victory of the social pact regime and the strengthening of all its institutions of domination with which the worst ignominies will be imposed on the working class, together with the looting of the nation.
Ahead, there is not a path of parliamentary reforms but a resurgence of the class war. Imperialism knows that the transformation of Argentina into a "maquila" will not be peaceful.
Following orders from the US embassy and the bosses' parties, the judges have just sentenced César Arakaki and Daniel Ruiz for facing Macri's attack on pensions in 2017. Sebastián Romero, a former GM delegate, is in prison for the same cause. We are before a government that does not hesitate to savagely repress the workers. In 2012, the judges of the (Cristina) Kirchner goverment and the oil companies tortured and sentenced the oil workers of Las Heras to life.
The enormous electoral growth of (right wing economists-politicians, NT) Milei and Espert, at the head of a proto-fascist movement nurtured by big capital and the US embassy, ​​is a proof that imperialism is exploring the conditions for fascism in the middle classes, which they are filling with hatred against the workers in order to throw them tomorrow into clashes in the streets against the working class, if they consider it necessary.
Milei's act in Luna Park was guarded by "black shirts" who publicly displayed their weapons, in an episode framed up to legitimize their revolvers, with the full endorsement of the judges and the police.

The FIT-U already has the votes and the MP’s... now we must set up the Front of Struggle to unite the workers' ranks in the streets against the attack from those from above

The working class was subjected to the electoral trap in the midst of a fierce international economic crisis. The betrayals of the union bureaucracy prevented the working class from giving a forceful response to the economic and social catastrophe and challenging the leadership of the ruined middle classes to the Together for Change right wing anti-worker opposition. Millions of exploited have been left in marginality, chronic unemployment and despair. Many of them, sunk in disappointment and despair, have voted Together for Change against the Fernandez government.
This fact, without a doubt, makes the election of the FIT-U pale, as it has obtained 1,400,000 votes and got 4 seats in the Lower Chamber.
But hundreds of thousands of workers voted for it because they are not resigned to accepting misery and hunger and they want the FIT-U to do what it says: break with the IMF, share the working hours (among all working hands, NT) to end with unemployment, earning a wage at the level of the family basket. (FIT-U candidate) Vilca's formidable election in the province of Jujuy shows that FIT-U is already the leading force in the labor movement in that province, in the factories, the sugar mills, the public employees and the unemployed movement.

Unfortunately, the FIT-U says that this would be achieved in the Congress and (consequently) has not put its forces at the service of organizing the forces to carry out this program in the streets. In the midst of the crash and under the boot of the IMF, fighting for reforms through the Congress is a utopia. The capitalists will only give up something if they are threatened by the danger of losing everything.
There will be no decent wage or work without a struggle to expropriate the oligarchy and the transnationals without compensation. You cannot break with the IMF unless you wage a revolutionary struggle in the streets like in the 1969 Cordobazo or in the December 2001 revolution.
To do this, it is necessary to break with the bosses' parties and the social pact of the union bureaucracy, which ties the working class to the PJ and the State.

The FIT-U has already got the votes and the deputies.  Now we must regroup the workers' ranks, calling urgently to set up a great Front of Struggle of the self-convened health workers, the dock workers in Terminal 5, the workers of the Río Santiago Shipyard, together with the militant unions and piqueteros movements, to prepare a great fight against the government, the UIA, the oligarchy and the union bureaucracy.
Jujuy must become a stronghold of the Argentine working class against the offensive of imperialism and the government.  The one and a half million votes of the FIT-U, its weight in the SUTNA (tire workers union), the railroad workers of UF-Haedo, ATEN Capital (Neuquén province teachers union), SUTEBA-Matanza (Buenos Aires province militant teachers union) and all the Multicolor ticket-led sections (of the same union), and in the combative piqueteros movements at the service of this fight.  We must defeat the union bureaucracy and reopen the way to the General Strike. Out with the scabs and the traitors of the working class!
A Front of Struggle with direct democracy that calls for the establishment or development of the workers self-determination bodies and the establishment of the workers' self-defense committees against the repression of the State and the gunmen of the union bureaucracy. This is the only way to prepare an exemplary punishment to Milei's infamous fascist groupings.

It is about returning to the cry of "everybody out". An Argentinazo must be prepared so that this anti-worker government is forced to take off by helicopter and we conquer, on the ruins of this infamous regime, a workers' and popular government of the self-organized and armed masses. Only that government, in unity with the working class of the entire continent, can guarantee decent wages and work for all workers, breaking the submission to imperialism and expropriating the oligarchy, without which there will never be bread or national liberation.

The world working class is waging huge battles. Their leaderships, sold to capital and its regimes, keep them isolated country by country. In Korea, workers launched a fierce general strike against government plans and to regain the freedom of their imprisoned leaders. In the Spanish State, the metalworkers of Cadiz have gone on strike and are fighting against labor flexibility. Different sectors of the American working class have been fighting against Biden and the imperialist butchers. Months ago, the Colombian workers and the working class youth rose up in a revolutionary fight against Duque and the plans of the IMF.
Those are the natural allies of the Argentine working class.
The tragedy is, as we have said, that their leaderships prevent their unification in a single international struggle. But the last word has yet to be said. From the Rio Santiago Shipyard, sectors of workers are sending their solidarity with the strike of the metalworkers of Cádiz, calling to fight together across borders.
This real motion puts on the order of the day the need to unite the working class at the international level, marking a 180° angle with respect to the leaderships, which are submitting the workers to their own bourgeoisie and its regimes, sowing illusions in the capitalists' Parliament and class collaboration.
Far from this, the strength of the workers rests in the world working class. It becomes urgent to resume the task of setting up a revolutionary and internationalist leadership of the working class, which unifies the struggles of the workers throughout the Americas against the attacks of imperialism. That is the task of the revolutionaries, of the Trotskyists who fight under the banners of the Fourth International of 1938.