Displaying items by tag: workers' government

First published in Spanish, Sunday, 24th July 2022 Por un gobierno obrero. Abajo el gobierno de Alberto y Cristina - Corriente Obrera Revolucionaria (cor-digital.org)

Argentina continues in free fall and every week is experienced as the road to a new catastrophe, with a deterioration of wages due to devaluation and price increases, a debacle in our living conditions, higher unemployment and an attack on pensions, increases in public transport, electricity and gas services fares.

In this scene, the government of Alberto and Cristina fulfill the demands, not of the workers and the poor people, but of businessmen and big capitalists. They are coherent, since as a bourgeois government they are the state administrators of their businesses.

Many of these businessmen and economic groups ask for devaluation and, if they do not get the government to do it, they achieve it through market mechanisms, such as the run of these days. The increase in prices is an expression of a devaluation that has already been imposed. Then the government only has to legalize it by splitting the exchange rates, one dollar for the agribusiness, one for imports, another for tourism and so on ad infinitum, while for those of us who live in pesos, "better luck next time".

The A&C government must guarantee the agreement with the IMF and the plan imposed by this organization to pay the debt. All the measures taken by the current Minister of Economy, Silvina Batakis, go in that direction. If there are some differences within the ruling coalition, these are not on breaking the agreement, but on how it should be paid.

But these elements that we have listed so far are part of a characterization with which perhaps a large part of the Left and sectors of activism agree, however what we try to outline in an approximate way in this article is what should be the way out of this crisis.

The first point we want to raise is that, unlike what is proposed by the great majority of the Left nucleated in the FIT-U [front of Argentinean Left Parties PO, PTS, IS, MST] and its satellites, the solution for Argentina is international. Any program that proposes a national solution to the crisis, no matter how left-wing it may seem, is false and tends to confuse the workers and the vanguard.

We raise this because the program of revolutionaries starts from the analysis of the capitalist system at world scale and how its particularities are expressed in each country. If we take the particularities as the norm, we will surely end up putting forward a program that responds to the conjuncture without unity with the internationalist tasks posed by the situation.

In the case of Argentina, it is clear that we must raise "Down with the government of Alberto and Cristina and their pact with the IMF. For a workers' government". This statement gives the idea that it is the working class who should rule in the scenario of economic chaos and pauperization of our conditions. Now, how do we prepare this scenario so that it becomes a revolutionary situation, in which the leadership of this process is a fourth-internationalist revolutionary party? For some members of the FITU, like PTS and PO, it is by the magic word "socialism". PTS says "for a socialism from below" and PO, "for a popular movement with socialist banners". Here they are already beginning to confuse the vanguard and to programmatically overlook the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat and its different stages.

Socialism is a social regime; in order to develop its program, which is a transitional stage, a workers' revolution must first take place. To propose a program of socialist reforms without first destroying the bourgeois State is nonsense and makes the program unfeasible. That is why to promote, as PTS does, “the state monopoly of foreign trade to avoid the flight of capital and to be able to choose what we buy and what we sell abroad”, or “the nationalization of the banks so that we can give another destination to credits and deposits” of course! “under workers' management” is to destroy the program for which we revolutionaries are fighting to turn it into an accumulation of slogans that will end up in a bill to be voted in Congress. This way of seeing the program starts from a fundamental error, which is ignoring that capital cannot be separated from the capitalists and that is why a revolution must take place to modify this relation of force in production. By omitting the struggle for power, it becomes a redistributionist and statist program. The Russian revolutionaries raised the monopoly of foreign trade after having made the revolution to fight against the law of value that rules at world level. This has nothing to do with the national and redistributionist approach.

Revolutionaries fight for the destruction of the State, which is why our transitional program seeks to bring the bourgeois State to its agony before we seize power. These statist measures advanced by Centrists only strengthen in the eyes of the workers the institutions that we must destroy. To raise "management" and not "workers control" is another programmatic nonsense. Workers’ control means dual power in production, management is convergence with capital, they are opposite lines.

Revolutionaries uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat as a State-form which, in its stages, aims to disorganize the bourgeoisie, organize the working class and develop the international dictatorship of the proletariat, as a transitional form throughout the stages from socialism to communism.

In the program of Centrism, the dictatorship of the proletariat has been erased. Today, in a devalued form, we see it raising "workers’ government" as a possible transition, that is to say, a stage different to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat and not as the popularization of it, as it is raised in the Transitional Program. This slogan would rather be used to seek more deputies with an idea of a "parliamentary minority government". And guided by this theory they seek their allies in political formations, which do not have workers in their ranks or, failing that, they try to dialogue with social movements seeking some organizational tactic detached from production.

These are some elements to discuss in face of the workers, militant leaderships and activists in order to find a way out of the crisis. To confront this government and union’s bureaucracy, we must begin by kicking out the delegates and leaders who respond to them, and thus prepare and go forward in the task of recovering the unions. We stand for a general strike and a plan of struggle, tactical measures that must be carried out to develop a vanguard that expresses the program of the revolutionaries.

If we fight to bring down the government of the day it is not so that another bourgeois variant takes power, we already have nearby examples such as Chile. And if we propose a workers' government it is to show the superiority of the State-form of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the development of productive forces and the necessity of the United States of Latin America for the economic unity of our region in the need for a world revolution.

Opening a debate within our class is fundamental in the face of the crisis scenario in the midst of a pandemic and the war in Ukraine. We call on the currents that still vindicate the dictatorship of the proletariat and propose the reconstruction of the IV International to give us a deep programmatic debate to set up a revolutionary leadership. In this sense we call for an international conference of the Trotskyist currents to discuss the tasks before the war in Ukraine and the world crisis.