The mounting escalation of global debt and stagnation of value creation gives no way out for capital other than attacking workers with extreme shock treatment - a forced depression in which jobs and living standards are destroyed along with the destruction of nonprofitable industry and business. History has thrown up Milei as the executioner of the workers, and there is no way out but the fight to destroy capitalism before it destroys us. The alternative is either socialism or fascism. For workers to live, capitalism must die!
Milei can’t solve the bosses’ crisis
The terminal crisis has thrown up Milei in a desperate attempt to make the working masses pay for the bosses’ crisis. Climate change is unforgiving especially to capital intensive, mono-cropping agricultural models which leave entire regions vulnerable as production for the world market replaces production for local consumption. Over-extended in debt to the IMF, the finance fraction of Argentina's ruling class has made a jump from the popular front to outright reactionary proto fascist solutions. This bloc of Argentina’s ruling class with its US masters can no longer depend on the Peronists to contain the masses and have opted for Melei to impose massive cutbacks in jobs and social spending to make the workers pay for the national debt. These conditions have been met by an upsurge in working class anger.
The US is pushing for a Bonaparte who can lead from above to impose austerity but maintain a balance of class forces. So far Trump and Bolsonaro have proven to be lumpen Bonapartes who cannot fulfill that task. Milei is already the most lumpen of all. Such is the terminal crisis he cannot even maintain a balance between the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. So far his edicts have blown up in his face. His anti-communism, dollarisation and rejection of deals with China are facing resistance from the Peronist fraction which can offer de-dollarisation deals from China and the BRICS+ and to bring agribusiness and the union bureaucracy into a new popular front with China.
What about the Workers
On January 24th the masses showed they are willing and able to fight! The leadership of the workers movement however, while quick to unfurl their red flags, initiated the Day of Action as a “pressure relief valve” more than a workers uprising. The FITU and its 5 constituent self- identified Trotskyist parties, act to divert the mass upsurge in defense of workers’ rights rights into their electoral project, a throwback to Bernstein and Kautsky opposed to the revolutionary method of Luxemburg and Trotsky. They have squandered 10 years of Argentina’s workers’ fight to build mass organs of extra-parliamentary power. Today workers’ councils, modeled on soviets as the basis for dual power, are at the top of the agenda!
The vanguard workers supporting FITU and other left organizations must break the stranglehold of decomposing currents of Morenoism and Altamarism. The main strains of left reformism (PO, PST and the LIT-CI etc.) who still lay claim to the legacy of Trotskyism, have long sold out to capitalist rule. Altamira in 2017 cast the PST as “Podemos in diapers' which in turn called the PO propagandists. This rare moment of theoretical clarity did not alter the fact that both currents are drowning the masses in the Kautskyan marsh.
The nature of the FITU ‘united front’ is an unprincipled agreement, burying its differences and betraying internationalism on every burning acid test! The FITU has no agreed position on the Russo-Ukrainian proxy war between the Western and Eastern imperialist blocs! Since the outbreak of war we have called for a NEW ZIMMERWALD drawing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht to fight against the inter-imperialist proxy war and for workers’ revolutions to end and prevent war.
Despite the infighting in FITU none of its adherents nor its electoral strategy remotely qualify as the United Front strategy of the 1923 congress of the Third International, or the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International! Commanding tens of thousands of votes and a few parliamentarians, their Leninist pretentions are exposed as propping up electoral gains in a bourgeois parliament. Again electoral, national pacifist Kautskyism!
A new party and a new revolutionary workers’ international to end the crisis of revolutionary leadership is the order of the day! That party has to be rooted historically in the Argentine experience with a fully developed revolutionary program integrated into an international transitional program. Only such a program can turn bankrupt reformist electoralism into the revolutionary rostrum of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. Those who know this on the factory floor should begin organizing to take back your unions today! From that vantage you can see your revolutionary road to socialism and take it!
Enter China
The international crisis of capitalism, its terminal crisis, requires the balancing of the IMF debt and trade imbalances on the backs of the workers across the Global South. Loans and currency swaps from China were used to pay back IMF debt in Yuan and IMF loans have been used to repay China! Workers carry the gold of one imperialist master to the banks of the other and back again while they rape our soil and enslave us with debt! For the working class to eat we must defeat not just the Austerity but its root cause imperialism. China is making its play to use finance capital and trade deals to counter the IMF and the Dollar debt draining wealth to Wall Street banks.
China may win the ‘left’ wing of the Peronists and layers of the Trade union leadership and left organizations to its “progressive” pose as the fair players on the international economic stage. We say China is not an oppressed semi-colony. Rather it has emerged as a great imperialist power in a bipolar world challenging for supremacy in surplus value extraction from the Global South - Argentina included. Don't fall for it!
Enough pressure relief “Days of Action” intended to pressure the left faction of the bourgeoisie against the right and ultra right! The bosses’ governments come and go, but all agree on one thing - make the workers and poor farmers pay for the crisis. We say vanguard workers must build our class’s revolutionary party armed with a transitional program. With these tools workers can create their own future based on a centrally planned economy, under workers self management which exposes the bosses as obsolete and makes them pay!
The Transitional Program
To win, Argentine workers, landless farmers and ranch hands, must build mass assemblies of the rank and file (base), form workers councils in every agricultural town, industrial center and working class neighborhood. Build workers' self-defense guards to fight the fascists and defend the mass movement to expropriate foreign and national capitals; cancel the foreign debt and reorganize the economy under workers control! Build socialism by igniting regional revolution that unites the industrial, mineral and agricultural might of all of Latin America! Prepare the indefinite general strike which poses the question of which class rules creating the conditions for for a workers’ government to expropriate the expropriators. To win, it is necessary to build a revolutionary party and program able to guide workers in the struggle to seize state power!
Jobs for all and a living wage now!
For the Sliding Scale of Wages and Hours enforced by price and neighborhood committees committed to survival of our class, something the Federations present leaders never have done!
For class struggle caucuses to carry out the renovation of our unions with ever more militant class struggle leaderships and immediate recall of class betrayers.
Down with Milei and all the bourgeois politicians. They must all go, and not one remain!
For the Indefinite General Strike! Form strike committees in every factory town and workers neighborhood!
Build workers self defense squads, from armed pickets to increasingly coordinated workers militias against the fascists and the capitalist and state thugs.
Convene a national congress of the workers base to set up workers councils across the country!
For a workers’ government based on workers’ councils and workers’ power!
Abolish the Debt!
Expropriate Big Capital, Capitalist Firms national and international and run them under workers control!
Smash the Capitalist State, servant of the stock markets and imperialist powers!
For a socialist federation of South America!
For a new revolutionary workers party in Argentina integrated in a workers’ international - the united world party of revolution based on the method and program of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program.
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