Argentina - November 4th, 2021

Statement by LOI-CI / Democracia Obrera
on to the general elections of November 14

√ With millions of unemployed workers, or working unregistered, outsourced, with junk jobs and wages, in precarious conditions...
 √ With an unbearable and skyrocketing price increases, especially in basic goods...
 √ With an anti-worker government supported by the big bosses and imperialism, and by their partners from Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change) in the Parliament ...l
 √ With an infamous social pact with the millionaire union bureaucrats who have resigned the workers' conquests...
 √ With a country looted by the IMF and Wall Street bankers...

An infamous electoral trap is underway: a “front of all” the bosses' parties and the IMF against the workers

The parties of the big bosses, the oligarchy and the IMF took our salary, work and life from us. The Fernández government, supported by the UIA (Manufacturing bosses chamber) and the large transnational companies, have come to continue the work of the Macri government and other ultra-reactionary bosses of the Rural Society. This PJ government has been paying with the hunger of the people more than 4,000 million U$D to the IMF and an equal sum to the Wall Street bankers of a fraudulent foreign debt.  This government of FdeT (Front of All, the present coalition government) is an administrator of the business of all the bosses and imperialism as a whole.

The high cost of life cannot be endured anymore. Workers' wages are under attack. And in a pact with the traitors of the union bureaucracy, the only commodity that doesn’t increase in value is labor power, while the prices of food and the expenses of the poor people are fully dollarized, with a devaluation that escalates week to week and day to day.

Those at the top, amassing enormous fortunes with looting, the high cost of living and the exploitation of workers, have taken all our conquests from us. The fight cannot be other than going for all of them to recover what they stole from us workers and the people.

In Parliament, which is a true Wall Street clerk, the PJ and Together for Change, after the coming middle term elections will formalize with the force of law the agreement with the IMF that they are already de facto applying, while the Minister of Economy of the “popular” government walks through the palaces of the imperialist bankers on his all fours. This is summed up by the cowardice of the national bourgeoisies, which are "brave" to repress the workers and the people with truncheons and rubber bullets when they rise up, but are subservient and lackeys to their major bosses, big imperialist capital.

This is how the bourgeoisie and its politicians conspire against the working class!  The electoral process that is underway is nothing more than a smokescreen that hides this brutal attack on workers like a sinister death trap.

Democracy for the rich: a fierce dictatorship of capital

With the bourgeois elections, the ruling classes only try to sweeten the fiercest dictatorship of capital to sustain this democracy for the rich that sits on the shoulders, sacrifices and blood of millions of exploited.

It’s enough to raise, even just a little the curtain of this infamous regime, to see the clubs and the ferocious repressive forces that attack landless and homeless people, workers who defend their workforce, who fight against layoffs, who demand a miserable social plan. They are the murderous repressive forces that killed Facundo Castro, Santiago Maldonado, Maxi Kosteki, Darío Santillán and other martyrs of the Argentine working class, while in their barracks a caste of officers is sheltered who came from the guts of the genocidal military (that ruled with their 1970s dictatorship over the corpses of 30.000 disappeared they tortured and massacred, NT)

Their millionaire judges and prosecutors are only there to condemn the workers and the people. There they are, comrades Romero, Arakaki, Ruiz and the oil workers from Las Heras being persecuted, prosecuted or imprisoned, while millions of thieves, political criminals and swindlers -who flew more than 400,000 million U$D of national wealth- are at large, walking freely, entering and leaving the country unmolested, and meanwhile they are deputies or senators and govern the nation. This is the Argentina of those above.

Capitalism cannot be fought without fighting for the victory
of the socialist revolution

The working class, its conscientious workers and the currents that claim to vindicate themselves from the left, have the obligation to confront the bosses' politicians in this electoral process and unmask this trap for what it is: a dictatorship of capital that uses makeup to prepare the best conditions to impose a decisive attack on the working class under the command of imperialism.

The workers need a leadership that will collaborate with them to respond to the war waged by those above. The bankruptcy of the world capitalist system has already been demonstrated with two huge crises, in 2008 and 2019-2020.  The division of labor has blown up worldwide and the imperialist powers have thrown their crisis to the workers and oppressed peoples of the world in a fierce trade war. All this shows that this rotten system no longer leaves loopholes for the masses to improve or regain their standard of living without the victory of the socialist revolution.

With this question, which is life and death for the working class, you cannot play hide and seek. The FIT-U, Argentina's reformist parliamentary left, has issued a proclamation on November 2, calling on workers to disseminate "10 reasons to vote for the left."  In this appeal they set out the axes of their electoral policy, as stated in their presentation. A kind of "10 commandments" for which to vote for the FIT-U, which are the points that they developed throughout their electoral campaign.

In this article, they remain silent and hide that, without defeating the capitalist system with a socialist revolution, it is unthinkable to break with imperialism, expropriate the capitalists, their banks and their transnationals without compensation, conquer the land and even impose the sliding scale of wages and working hours.
In an open break with revolutionary Marxism, the FIT-U proposes that by pressuring this bourgeois Parliament it is possible to expropriate and attack the property of the capitalists and recover all the conquests of the working class.

The parliamentary left has joined the organic work within Congress

Unfortunately, the FIT-U has joined the organic work within Parliament where they have voted or proposed, together with the capitalist parties, hundreds of bills that they consider "progressive for the people". Thus, breaking with every policy of class independence that it proclaims in their electoral campaigns, the FIT-U ends up supporting, like any historically reformist current, the measures that they call "progressive" of the bourgeoisie and criticizing those that they consider "negative."

We ask ourselves: what bill/Act has improved the wages, work or housing of workers, or has attacked the property of the transnationals, the oligarchy and the capitalists?

This policy of the FIT-U has only served to create illusions in the masses that allied with the "progressive" bourgeoisie and in that den of bandits in Parliament, they can solve their unprecedented sufferings. The reformist left has abandoned in Congress the apothegm that the fight is class against class.

The socialist militants that make up the ranks of the FIT-U cannot allow their parties and leaders to make political agreements, even if they are partial, with the bourgeoisie and the bosses' politicians in Parliament. That would mean to abandon any combat to put their seats at the service of the extra-parliamentary mass struggle.

We are facing a totally "democratizing" policy, of integration into the regime. Because, where and when has there been a bourgeois Parliament that simultaneously satisfies the interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the working class?  To this and every one of the institutions of the bourgeois state, we only address ourselves to demand the rights of the workers to continually unmask that den of bandits in Congress and to demonstrate that this is nothing more than a machinery that serves the bourgeoisie to appropriate the sweat and blood of the workers and the poor people.
Workers cannot be fooled by talking about "class independence" and then fraternizing with the bourgeoisie in Parliament.

In that 10-point article to vote for the FIT-U, what is hidden is the fight for socialism. It is the great absentee. It is not socialist to hide the fight for socialism before the great masses and in the daily agitation during the electoral campaign. The one who hides the fight for the socialist revolution, stops being a socialist.

Let them all go, not one of them must be allowed to remain!
 The road is a victorious Argentinazo

The union and piquetera (unemployed organizations) bureaucracy are part of the government and the attack from those above...

Some of them distribute and administer, as leaders of the PJ, the hunger and misery of the workers, separating the struggle of millions of hungry for decent work, from the fight for wages and against the high cost of living, which the traitors of the union bureaucracy (today true "ministers without portfolio" in the Fernández government) strangle and give in.

They have divided the ranks of the workers. It is not possible to fight or take any decisive step to achieve the minimum, vital and mobile salary according to the family basket of 120,000 pesos, the reduction of the working day, decent work so that all hands enter to produce; conquer decent housing and much less break with imperialism and the IMF, as minimal and immediate demands, without starting by uniting the workers' ranks and defeating the traitors of the union bureaucracy.

We can no longer fight divided!  We have to set up a:

Front of Struggle of combative trade unionism, the piquetero movement, the self-organized workers and the landless masses that seek to conquer decent housing

A unitary Struggle Front that retakes the path of the unity of employed and unemployed workers that was conquered in the streets in 2001, fighting against the Menemato and the ultra-reactionary government of the Alliance, under the same conditions that the masses suffer today.

The union bureaucracy is in a true social pact with the government. Its hired thugs are already swelling their ranks. They act as a true internal police in the unions and workers' organizations. And they are the true support and Praetorian Guard of the bosses.
We must end the business boss union bureaucrats and the infamous social pact that they have set up with the UIA, the Rural Society and the imperialist bankers.

It is necessary to generalize the set up of self-organized and self-convened workers' committees to all factories and establishments, with the method of workers 'democracy.

We must unite those who fight to open the way to the General Strike to confront the war of the capitalists with the fierce struggle of the Argentine working class.

 Out with the traitors of the CGT and the CTA!
Enough of reformist leaderships leading the massive and self-sacrificing movements of the unemployed!

 The fight is for decent work; not for paltry handouts for the working class!

We Socialists intervene in elections to confront the regime, the capitalist state and its institutions of domination, and to organize and prepare the extra-parliamentary mass struggle.

That is what the immediate fight is about: to convene without delay a Meeting and Congress of the organizations of struggle of the masses. Unfortunately, the FIT-U, desperate to be a “third force” in the bourgeois Parliament, refuses to set up a first force in the working class to expel the union bureaucracy and prepare the fights that are already here and those that are to come.

Murderous state!  Free Sebastián Romero!
 Trial and punishment for the murderers of the people!

The fight for the freedom of Sebastián Romero and the dropping of charges already placed on all the persecuted fighters, turns to a question of life and death to face the fierce repression that the bourgeois state has unleashed against any serious fight and attack on the property of the capitalists and their businesses the workers do. The Fernández police have violently repressed dockers, Guernica dwellers, Penta and Arre Beef Meat Processing workers, etc., while the thugs of the union bureaucracy and their hooligans intimidate the struggling workers.

The bourgeoisie and Big Capital have already brought to the streets proto-fascist movements like that of Milei, supported by the desperate middle classes, whom today they fill with hatred against the working class and will throw them out afterwards with forms of civil war against the workers and the masses in struggle. The bourgeoisie prepares for the class war all their counterrevolutionary devices of repression.  They accuse those who claim land in the south as "terrorists". No doubt, anyone who fights will be considered a "terrorist", subject to state repression.

In December 2017, supported by the PJ, Together for Change robbed workers' pensions at gunpoint. The workers and pensioners exercised the legitimate right to self-defense and defeated the police.

We make the proclamation of Romero (one of the workers jailed for fighting them) and his party our own: we accuse you, capitalists, Judiciary, bosses' politicians, the repressive forces, the treacherous leaderships, of starving and repressing the people and of surrendering the nation to imperialism.

Dissolution of the repressive forces!  Workers self-defense committees!  Decent work for all!  This is the only way to achieve tranquility and security for working families.

No vote for the IMF, the oligarchy,
the bankers and the capitalists' parties

We workers do not vote for our executioners!

From the Liga Obrera Internacionalista (LOI-CI) / Democracia Obrera (Internationalist Workers League (LOI-CI) / Workers' Democracy), we call on the workers to break all political support for the parties of the bourgeoisie. They are a "front of all" against the working class: the PJ, Together for Change, Milei and other representatives of the capitalists. The bourgeois regime needs all of them to deceive and repress the people and keep its profits.

The working class has been led into this electoral trap amid a fierce economic crisis caused by the capitalists both internationally and in our country, which has been brutally thrown on the shoulders of the workers, after a pandemic where the bourgeoisie saved their businesses and the exploited were driven to the greatest despair.

The betrayals of the union bureaucracy prevented the working class from giving a forceful response to the catastrophe that those from above threw at the poor people.

Millions of our people, of the exploited, have been left on the margins, in chronic unemployment, in despair.

The vote even for Together for Change by sectors of the workers and the ruined masses is the expression of this disappointment and despair with the Fernández government.

The working class, with its hands tied to the PJ and the state, has not managed to intervene with all its weight in national political life. When hope and revolutionary struggle seize the great mass of the proletariat, it inevitably drags behind it all the oppressed layers of the population and the ruined middle classes. When it doesn't, its forces are divided. The betrayals of their directions settle down. Such is the present moment.

The masses were taken off the streets when in December 2017 they had the possibility of taking Macri out of the Casa Rosada by helicopter. In the midst of a fierce economic crisis, the exploited were taken to a “democratic” replacement of government, which threw the whole crash on their backs.
Under these conditions, the petty-bourgeoisie did not turn in the direction of the working class, but, in desperation, turned towards the most extreme imperialist reaction.

We must tell the truth to the masses, no matter how cruel it may be: the FIT-U has nothing to celebrate, although its ultra-minority vote is a reflection of the hope that nests in sectors of the working class to fight. But undoubtedly, in the face of these objective factors of millions of exploited trapped in the electoral trap and immobilized by the traitors of the union bureaucracy, the FIT-U sectarian self-proclamation is more about a campaign to gather votes than an intention to prepare the proletariat for the hard battles that will ensue. A true preparation would consist of a clear showing the masses how the battlefield is. If their current policy is maintained, the FIT-U will be one more stumbling block in the way to free the working class from the chains that today prevent it from fighting. Their persistence in refusing to set up a great Front of Struggle of employed and unemployed workers, to propagandize and organize it, is an obstacle that the vanguard and its militants must overcome.

The socialist and left-wing workers cannot allow this policy and this totally electoral program to take hold, which weakens the left wing of the working class, at a decisive moment of sharpening of the class war. There is no time to lose.

We fight under the banners of the Fourth International, for proletarian internationalism and the socialist revolution

The workers need a new regrouping of their ranks under a revolutionary program. We Trotskyists fight under the banners of the Fourth International. Fighting every day for the socialist revolution, we do not hesitate to snatch this or that partial conquest from the exploiters. But we know and we tell the workers that, without fighting for everything, without putting our feet on the bourgeoisie's chest, we cannot wrest even the slightest of our conquests and that if we achieve them and don’t seize power or advance towards this, all will be lost. There are as a proof the salary increases that are celebrated by sectors of the militant left as a "victory" in the unions they lead, which in weeks or days are lost with the increase in inflation.

The struggle for workers' control, for the opening of the accounting books of the companies to demonstrate the super-profits that the capitalists make behind the backs of the people, for expropriating the bankers and the transnationals without compensation, is impossible to conquer without developing the armed dual power of the masses, without setting up the revolutionary factory committees. These tasks involve and will develop in an acute process of mass revolutionary struggle, with the working class on the offensive with its self-determination bodies, which will open a dual power regime within each establishment and throughout the country.

As we have already said, the FIT-U proclaims from the rooftops that this “anti-capitalist program” can be conquered in the bourgeois Parliament, which is not only a reactionary utopia, but, at the same time, closes the way for the masses and its vanguard to understand that only with a revolutionary government of the working class and the poor people can these transitional measures to the socialist revolution be imposed.

In the 10 points or "commandments" with which the FIT-U calls to vote for its tickets, it proclaims "to nationalize the banks" and "expropriate the large landowners", but omits that this must be done without compensation, as proposed by the Marxist program. If not, they are talking about bourgeois expropriations with compensation, which is what the capitalists use to save their companies or businesses in bankruptcy, as they did with the Wall Street banks: they nationalized it to cover their debts and then they re privatized it in a healthy condition. This cannot be a fleeting forgetfulness, an oversight or a drafting flaw: it is the true program of the FIT-U so as not to scare the bourgeoisie and so that the oligarchy doesn’t get angry.

The Trotskyist Transitional Program repudiates the "the muddleheaded reformist slogan of nationalization", since "we reject indemnification" and “we warn the masses against demagogues of the People’s Front who, giving lip service to nationalization, remain in reality agents of capital." “We call upon the masses to rely only upon their own revolutionary strength" and, what is more important, "we link up the question of expropriation with that of seizure of power by the workers and farmers”.

For some time now, the so-called "New anti-capitalist Left" has broken all ties with the program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International in order not to bother the bourgeoisie with which it has integrated into the bourgeois Parliament.
We are facing a reformism without reforms in a bankrupt capitalism. We revolutionary socialists of Workers' Democracy affirm that it is unthinkable to break with the IMF, expropriate the oligarchy, transnational corporations and banks without compensation, recover the land and nationalize the chain of commercialization of food to eat, if the working class does not break with the regime and the bourgeois parties, and unless it joins in a single fight against imperialism together with the workers and peasants of Latin America, with those who fight in Colombia and Ecuador, as yesterday in Chile, and with the millions of migrants who seek to enter to the US, where a fierce working class takes up the path of combat that in 2020 will demonstrate all the power of the workers who surrounded Wall Street.

Far are the workers from achieving or maintaining the smallest immediate conquests, from breaking with imperialism, from conquering the land and bread, without uniting their struggles with the international working class.

The capitalists and the treacherous leaderships, under the command of imperialism, centralize their forces to beat the exploited all over the world. The reformist leaderships have them fighting country by country. The working class was strong and why not, invincible, when it managed to unite its forces in the same international combat. Thus the 8 hours and so many minimum demands of the workers were achieved at the beginning of the 20th century. The victory of the October Revolution in the USSR and the threat of its spread throughout Europe and internationally, shook the world capitalist system.

Only by resuming that path will we once again recover the lost conquests and end the catastrophe, labor flexibility and wage slavery that continue to worsen. 250 million migrant workers are looking for a country to live and work in. Ahead, in this dark 21st century, if the socialist revolution does not triumph, only barbarism, war and fascism are on the horizon. Reformism proclaims a program for social peace, when what is intensifying is the fiercest class war.

We affirm that what yesterday was called the “Bolivarian revolution” has been unmasked for a long time now, a caricature of the revolution of the native bourgeoisie who in Latin America expropriated the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of our continent. There is Venezuela a thousand times looted, with millions of starving workers seeking asylum and a place to live and eat. There is Castroism becoming a new ruling class, handing Cuba over to imperialism and the capitalist system. There are the "socialists" saving capitalism in its phase of open decay and putrefaction.

The conditions for the proletarian revolution are already more than ripe. The current crisis of the working class and of human civilization is ultimately reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the world proletariat.  These premises of the Marxist movement for the struggle are reaffirmed more and more.

We call on the workers and the rebellious youth to organize together with us under this program of workers', socialist and internationalist struggle of us that fight under the banners of Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

In these elections in Argentina, we call to vote for Romero and Ruiz who go on the FIT-U lists and all the parties that claim to be the working class indiscriminately throughout the country

We call not to vote for the bourgeois parties and to quickly take decisive steps to fight in each factory and establishment to unite the ranks of the working class in a Front of Struggle to confront the war that the capitalists have declared on us.

We call to vote for the parties that claim to be from the working class: the FIT-U, the NMAS and Politica Obrera indistinctly, wherever they present lists. For a class vote against the bosses' politicians and imperialism.

We call on the militants of the Argentine left who claim socialism and the working class, not to allow the votes that goes to their parties to be transformed into parliamentary agreements with the bourgeoisie, and to put together all our forces to unite everyone who are fighting.

 It is about organizing and preparing the great battles against the traitors of the union bureaucracy, against the “front of all” the capitalist parties, their government and their state, to reopen the way to the General Strike so that the working class weighs again in the national political life and for Argentine workers to be part of the anti-imperialist revolutionary torrent of the workers and peasants of Latin America and of the North American working class.

In that struggle we will be fighting side by side with all the working class fighters. The only right we claim is to fight for our ideas and for our program, which is none other than the fight for the socialist revolution.