We need a workers’ way out of the crisis

After the results of the Argentinean Primary Elections (PASO) were known, the economy deepened its crisis with a 30% devaluation of the local currency, a consequential fall of real wages and a greater cost of life. In the meantime, the presidential candidates of the IMF point their fingers at each other to find out who is to blame for a new and recurring crisis. The workers and the poor people are the ones who pay the consequences.

As Marxists we know that bourgeois democracy grants the workers an apparent political control over the leaders through elections. That appearance is what we saw in the past Primaries, in which a great majority expressed itself against Macri and supported the “F-F” formula (Alberto Fernández-Cristina Fernández de Kirchner). On the contrary, this bourgeois democracy never allows the slightest control over the economic administration, which is the basis of the exploitation it exercises, and that ends up in anarchy, bankruptcy and misery for the great masses.

Some trade union sectors are already advancing the urgent need to reopen collective wage bargaining, in face of the brutal impact of the post-PASO devaluation. The COR encourages this debate in all the workers’ sectors, by advancing the concrete motion to demand the immediate activation of the trigger clause, to compensate for devaluation. 

This is an emergency measure. But the worsening of the ongoing economic crisis demands the workers to intervene by attacking the bourgeoisie in its foundations, that means, in production. To the economic disorder, we must impose workers’ control of production, banks and trade. With that control we will be able to develop the sliding scale of working hours and wages, creating the conditions to raise the general standard of living of the working population before the debacle to which the IMF, Macri, F-F and Lavagna are leading us. To do that we must develop a great deliberation within our class, in order to confront our enemies in our own ranks, those are the union bureaucrats, by imposing a general strike to express our force in this crisis. We must regroup the workers’ vanguard behind an action program in order to act independently from the bourgeois and petty bourgeois variants and prepare the conditions for the struggle for power.

We must organize caucus meetings or assemblies in our work places to vote for shop stewards and impose a Congress of rank-and-file shop stewards with mandates, to vote for a battle plan to achieve our demands.

It is imperative that we intervene in this crisis; being conscious that this struggle is part of an international struggle, since this imperialist attack is also being suffered by the proletariat of all Latin America. We must make an appeal for the active solidarity of the American and European proletariat to defeat the imperialist policies.

Down with Macri!

For a workers’ government.