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Argentina will be socialist or Wall Street colony
Editorial
Argentina under Trump and Wall Street’s claws
A semicolonial capitalism in ruins
The masses are paying the looting of the nation and capitalists’ super-profits with starvation and misery
US imperialism with Trump has been carrying out a fierce offensive trying to reestablish full control of the planet, after the 2008 crash that hit Wall Street. The clashes with the Franco-German axis of the imperialist Maastricht have already started, even disputing spheres of influence. The US under Obama’s command tried to negotiate with Europe while it proposed to advance in semicolonizing China and Russia; under Trump’s administration the ruling power elbows its way into the planet, like an erupting volcano, seeking to once again control the world market and in a particularly taking these new markets and all its business directly.
World capitalist system is sustained in a parasitic alchemy of the global financial super-oligarchy. With this parasitism, it has temporarily left its crisis behind, by throwing it to the whole of the working class and the oppressed peoples. Large investments are going to the development of war goods and technology. The US spends 250 billion dollars on it. Namely, on the one hand, the creation of destructive forces has multiplied. On the other hand, fictitious values are being created: the so-called "derivative values", which are not backed by goods, such as the future prices of commodities; the insurances that secure them; or the value of the stocks that systematically explode Wall Street; the accumulation of uncollectible debts of banks -as of bankrupt states- at nominal values. That is to say, capitalist system in its imperialist phase survives, as it cannot be otherwise, with wars and parasitism, recreating values that do not represent goods made by human labour yet. This pushes imperialist powers more and more to double their plunder and capitalists to double the attack against the world working class.
Today we see the US closing its domestic market, while seeking to lift customs barriers of the Europe of Maastricht and particularly, China. The USA, as the main power of the Pacific, desperately seeks to colonize China completely. Its current actions have caused an open deceleration of its economy. US imperialism is forcing China to spend its huge reserves. On the one hand, to buy bonds of the US treasure, that is to say, to cover its “enemy’s” deficit. But on the other hand, China is being forced to compensate, with subsidies, what Chinese companies and the same transnationals lose by exporting to the US with the current levels of tariffs that Trump has raised, from 10% to 25%. It is also clear that the US transnationals win on both sides: they are subsidized in China and protected in the US. Thus, Trump’s head of advisers stated, a few days ago, that they are winning the current commercial, calming their cartels and trusts.
The Yankees, in their new irruption to the world after the 2008 crash, want to ensure their sources of oil. While they sell fracking as cutting-edge technology, their business is to extract cheap oil, located close to the ground. The US wants oil from Iran and Venezuela, which is at a few kilometers from its shores. That is why it has blocked and surrounded those countries, to colonize them openly, as it did with Iraq.
That is why in Middle East there are oil wars and counterrevolutionary massacres, through their agents, as in Syria with Al Assad, in Egypt with Al Sisi and in Sudan, Algeria, etc. with the puppet regimes now hacked by the masses. They have already used the Ayatollahs in the Middle East and Maduro in Latin America as squeezed lemons to divert or crush the revolutionary processes and anti-imperialist struggles of the masses, as in the case of Iran in Syria. This proves the servile role of the native bourgeoisies, who here and there use the masses to bargain their share in business with the imperialist masters, but who always end up being against the working class, which ultimately threaten the interests of all the exploiters.
In the midst of the morass of the world crash, not only there is no place for new imperialist powers, but there are too many. Some of them are being vassals in Europe, like Greece, or suffocated, losing their weight in the different branches of production and spheres of influence. That is what the new "wild right" governments express, like in Italy (threatening to leave the euro zone), or the enormous crisis in England with the Brexit, torn between the Franco-German axis in Europe and the businesses that it has there on the one hand, and on the other by the USA, with which it shares common business in the world market from the City of London.
If this is what the US "offers" to Europe, China and the Pacific, in Latin America, its backyard, the Yankees are coming for everything. They not only want Venezuelan oil, but also to settle the restoration of capitalism in Cuba completely. Trump has set up the “Lima Group”, a group of sepoy governments -such Brazil’s, Peru’s, Chile’s or Argentina’s- that have opened their doors to the looting of their commodities, minerals, etc. as well as to the mass privatizations of pension funds and state companies, as in Brazil. The "Bolivarian" Evo Morales does not have much to envy, surrendering of Bolivia's hydrocarbons.
Latin America begins to be occupied with US military bases, not only in Colombia. The US seeks to apply the Monroe’s doctrine: "America for the Americans".
In this new US offensive in his backyard, Argentina has suffered an enormous looting of all its wealth through an atrocious financial parasitism of Wall Street and its representatives at the head of the Macri’s government, supported all these years by parliamentary collaboration of the PJ and the Ks. Pichetto, Macri’s vice president candidate, is just a sample what we are saying.
The outcome of this real theft is an enormous external debt, refinanced in 2005 by the Kirchners with usurious interests after the 2001 debacle. This time, the debt is directly with the IMF, which, with its loans, acted as guarantor of the payment of huge super profits from the investment funds, mainly Wall Street, which entered the country investing in state bonds and letters with 70% of gross profit.
These super-profits left the country with a flight of foreign currency of over 125 billion dollars in the last few years. Those are the agrarian rent, the reserves of the central bank, the payments of royalties, patents, dividend of the transnational companies and also the 50 billion dollars of the new indebtedness with the IMF.
Along with this, huge masses of capital left the production process. On the one hand, the crisis of Mercosur -hit by the global crash-, and on the other hand, the enormous profits offered by the Argentine treasury, led to enormous masses of capitals moving to the financial gamble, leaving Argentina in a deep recessive process.
The capitalists who cry about miseries only shed crocodile tears. Many of those who closed their factories of consumer goods became importers. Others changed business to the stock market or the financial gamble with the treasury bonds. The agrarian oligarchy continued getting enormous rents, while the energy companies take the country’s dollars abroad. They cannot cry their "miseries." Here workers are the only ones who suffer.
The profits taken by international banks from Argentina, the big bourgeoisie and the oligarchy are undoubtedly not backed by the creation of actual goods or in the expansion of productive capacity, but on the contrary. The Argentine productive apparatus is idle and paralyzed by 42%; the car industry goes over 60%. What we are witnessing is a theft of the nation's wealth and a debt with the IMF to finance it and pay it in full.
Recession is here and, added to the flight of currencies in dollars, left the Argentine peso without goods backing it, totally devalued, and 70% bank interest rate to try to anchor the dollar. This drove a phenomenal inflation with which capitalists also guaranteed their profits and passed on to the dollar value all what the labour force consumes, namely the family basket. Thus, the ongoing process strangles the working class and all the oppressed sectors of the nation with a deep recession and an already unbearable high cost of living. Argentina has entered into a spiral of stagflation, that is, stagnation and inflation plus recession. This is, in short, due to the parasitic plundering of imperialism and the capitalists and their super-profits.
Argentina went bankrupt, suffering a new round of imperialist looting, with a sector of its bourgeoisie avid for business which came to power with Macri in 2015, after being partly left out during Kirchner’s government. These direct agents from Wall Street created this panacea of super-profits for the big capitals and for them, as commission agents and new contractor and financial homeland.
In the second part of the kirchnerato, the foundations for this perverse mechanism of looting were laid. The Kirchners paid the debt to the IMF with hunger, sacrifice and workers' super-exploitation. They gambled with the value of dollars in the future, which guaranteed foreign capital to enter, stay for a period of time, exchange dollars for pesos, put it in financial profits and then return to acquire dollars with super profits as we have seen, with an insured value of beforehand. The Kirchners created this fabulous business; Macri and his friends developed it; and Wall Street pocketed it.
As business was very profitable, the PJ and the Macrism voted "money laundering", where the thieves of the nation brought the stolen loot, exchanged it to pesos, staid 6-7 months, profited between 40% and 70%, and took it back in dollars.
Along with this, the former bosses of the Kirchner's contracting homeland today are being trialed, while friends of the government are resuming their business. It is nothing but a fight of gangs and pirates who dispose at their will the theft of the goods of the nation paid by the workers and the people.
This government and its democracy for the rich are based on a puppet parliament and a justice of deep videlist roots that runs the secret intelligence services of the nation. These are commanded by the US embassy, the IMF and the "group of 6". They are the ones, in the past with the Kirchners and today with Macri, performing the most fabulous business. This group is made up with the agrarian oligarchy with the SRA, the UIA, the stock exchange, the chamber of commerce, the association of private and foreign banks and the construction chamber. That is the group of the 6 largest bourgeois gangs in Argentina, front men of imperialism's big business. They organized this new round of looting of super-profits of imperialism and those that are defining, even in terms of their most particular interests, the presidential formulas that are touring around the television channels.
Now those on top want those on the bottom to pay for their “party”, with hunger and slavery. With the beginning of the flight of currency since 2016-17 and the agreement with the IMF, the government has launched a brutal attack of deepening price hikes, theft on wages, dollarization of consumer goods and an attempt to appropriate the values of the pension funds, taking the bill to reform the pension system to Congress. Labour flexibilization was the next immediate goal. The union bureaucracy sold out the collective bargains one by one with increases below the inflation rate.
A great response from the masses, which all the charlatans who present themselves to the elections of the bosses' politicians want to forget, took place on December 14, 18 and 19, 2017. There was no tile of the congress square or kerb from the sidewalk which was not thrown to the police. The clash of the masses with the police caused them a heavy defeat. Workers actually imposed an active general strike of 36 hours. The middle classes took to the streets with their pots at night. The ghost of 2001 aroused.
Those days of combat were so big, that even the left deputies shouted from the parliament "stop this session, do not vote the laws; let's make a popular consultation, because the country is in flames." When the combat was on the streets and deserved to develop and deepen, the reformist left wanted to hold elections earlier. Well, now they have them, once the masses were taken out of the revolutionary political struggle by the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy and the parliamentary left that covered their left flank.
The bourgeoisie had already noticed this blow of the masses and responded to it supported by recession and inflation, blackmailing them with the economic crisis that is underway. They declared the Argentine productive apparatus in a generalized state of insolvency, which gave bosses' green light to dismiss and suspend immediately, throwing the crisis provoked by capitalists to the workers.
The traitors of the union bureaucracy played a key role by leaving hundreds of factories and conflicts isolated, without coordinating or centralizing those struggles against the government. Thus, these bureaucrats left the working class politically disarmed and with their forces exhausted by the crash and capitalists’ brutal blackmail and economic terrorism. Every life-and-death struggle against closure and dismissals found workers divided and the government and state forces concentrated in those battles to defeat them.
The working class fought back a thousand times: Shipyards, Fanazul, Rio Turbio, Villa Maria, Adidas, Canale, Puma, Loma Negra, Eitar, Gaelle, Electrolux, Teachers, etc. etc. But the goal was defeating the plan of the capitalists and the attack of the government as a whole. The bureaucracy betrayed. The left parties kept playing in the parliaments of this rotten democracy for the rich and refused to regroup workers' ranks, unify conflicts and centralize the struggle against the bureaucracy. They even made one of their most prominent workers leaders apologize to Macri for calling workers to overthrow him. This is the parliamentary left, which fought hard to be in the elections where the masses defeat Macri. And now they lament their electoral bankruptcy.
The reformist left disorganized the left wing of the working class, leaving dozens and dozens of partial defeats that demoralized workers’ bravest battalions. The more that process developed, the closer their electoral debacle approached. They were the first ones who launched the electoral campaign (April 2018!), by carrying out electioneering rallies, refusing to unify the struggles and coordinate them, ultimately digging their own grave. In the elections, the instrument that workers see to defeat Macri is the PJ and Cristina; such conclusion means a true political fraud. Those parties have voted every bill for Macri or gave quorum so that he did. The parliamentary left of the "anti-Macri front," which did nothing to defeat it in the streets, thus approached its own electoral bankruptcy.
But masses are paying for this tragedy. The electoral process is anesthesia to deepen the attack. It is not that it will come later, as they want to make us believe. More and more votes are counted, more and more the high cost of life advances, the dismissals and bitter partial defeats of isolated struggles.
Meanwhile, the crack breaks down workers' ranks, with the terror of layoffs, unemployment, outsourced labour and the high cost of living and inflation that make masses’ lives unbearable. The votes are already counted and day by day the capital offensive continues. The economic crisis, under these conditions of crisis of leadership, tends to disorganize workers’ ranks, in a reversed sense to December 2017, when the masses in a huge political struggle, gave a hard political blow to the government and, in alliance with the middle classes, threatened to start the path to force Macri to escape in a helicopter.
We are facing a death trap, because the bourgeoisie is already deceiving and convincing workers, with the siren songs, that a "social pact" between workers and employers would solve the crisis. This is a vile infamy and lie. The interests of both are irreconcilable and capitalists prove it every day. They are telling workers that they have to give up everything they have already lost and even more to prevent from falling over the cliff.
The attack is already here. What comes after October is capitalists consolidating and institutionalizing the victory they conquer in their attack on the workers. The working class is in a speed race to unite its ranks and to centralize its combats, while its enemies are already aligned and grouped to defeat it.
They are preparing and already applying a social pact, which is a gun pointing to the masses’ heads to surrender. As the Kirchner would say, proposing herself to impose this social pact, controlling a large sector of union bureaucracy, "we must apply a pact like Perón’s, in '73".
As we see in another article, the social pact of that year was a Bonapartist extra-parliamentary agreement where Peron’s government and the big employers organized in the General Economic Confederation (CGE), together with the traitors of the Peronist trade union bureaucracy, they tried to impose a brutal loss of salary and the suspension on the masses, so that "the country can grow again". What Kirchner does not say is that this social pact was imposed with guns, sticks and with the nationalized trade union bureaucracy playing a counterrevolutionary role; with Perón and López Rega organizing the AAA that devastated the workers vanguard those years murdering hundreds.
This is what all the Peronist presidential formulas will do, which take the union bureaucracy as a doormat to announce that they have the agents to control the working class, to deepen that infamous pact that the Macri’s government has already started.
Carlos Munzer
