Displaying items by tag: workers' methods

As the government prepares to extend the quarantine, we want to make some considerations about the situation and how, in our view, we revolutionaries should intervene.

Alberto Fernandez with his group of notables, that is Paolo Rocca (CEO of metal holding Techint, TN), Acevedo, from the UIA (Argentine Industrial Union, leading industrial employer syndicate in the country, TN), and the greatest of businessmen, define the destinies of workers in the name of the health of their businesses. Alberto is carrying out the motto of one of his teachers, Néstor Kirchner, who said "don't give importance to what I say, but to what I do". He calls the businessmen "miserable" , but endorses dismissals in Techint; he says price control, but endorses overpricing in food purchases and he says with actions: between the banks and the  pensioners, I choose... the banks.

It is striking that much of the left is calling for the quarantine to continue and trying to change the content of this state measure. We must be clear, the quarantine is a measure recommended by the World Health Organization, an institution created in the post-war period as part of the new world order after the Second World War. It is clear that any policy that comes from such an imperialist organization, which is responsible for the destruction of health and therefore responsible for the impoverishment of our living conditions, will not be to the benefit of our class.

Therefore, if our conditions of exploitation are at stake, our exploiters will not offer us a favorable outcome. It is with the workers' methods, which are part of our history, such as stoppages, sit-down strikes, strikes, in other words, paralyzing production by imposing a program that confronts the State, that we the workers will be able to face this crisis.

Quarantine is the method that the bourgeoisie has, not to stop the virus, but to guarantee its form of domination in the face of the crisis and to prevent its systems, centrally that of healthcare,  from collapse. The workers' methods, as part of transitional measures are interventions of the proletarian state-power that consciously limit the right of capitalists to dispose of their assets and their desire for profit.

We could say that the quarantine is a preventive state policy, to protect big capitalists and their class, that disorganizes our class with the collusion of union’s bureaucracy, to preserve a semi-state in decomposition, strengthening the military bureaucratic apparatus to discipline the masses. To impose this policy, it uses the monopoly of state forces, with the police, the gendarmerie, even cyber-spying and the army to guarantee this line. If we were the ones to paralyze everything, we would not only be facing the virus, but we would be organized to face the attacks.

We must open a central debate within our class, mainly in the industrial workers' movement,  against official propaganda about the importance of the State in this crisis, its social and control functions. It is imperative to clarify the class content of the concept of State. The class nature of the State is bourgeois, it defends a class that is antagonistic to our own, so we must prepare the material conditions for its destruction.

To allow the government to continue imposing a reactionary centrality with the quarantine, which means a brutal attack on the workers, with suspensions, salary reductions, layoffs and removal of conquests, is - at the very least - to give ourselves up without a fight.

We workers can organize the tasks to face the consequences of the pandemic, stop the attacks and disrupt the bourgeoisie in its base of support, production. By imposing workers' control of the most important industries of the economy, the sliding scale of working hours and wages, the expropriation of private banks, the opening of the ledgers of big companies, are some programmatic points that can show the masses as a whole the domination of the workers in the administration of things. To intervene independently and with our methods in this crisis is the task before us. There are many examples in the world of how to face this crisis, accelerated by the coronavirus. Sectors of workers went on strike against the attacks. Perhaps the most important case is the general strike in Italy, where workers stopped against the government's quarantine decree. In the U.S., the main imperialist power, workers are also striking at their workplaces.

Trusting our own strength is the only way out for us workers.

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First published in Spanish 4/9/2020 at www.cor-digital.org