Volume 3, No. 3-4, March-April 2002

Mired in debt Argentina was not able to meet the steep interest payments demanded by its creditors. The flow-on effect has yet to be determined but it will inevitably cause ripples which could send other Latin American countries over the brink. It is reminiscent of the collapse of the Mexican currency in 1995 which threatened to drag all of the NAFTA countries down and was only prevented by further US credits and a credit guarantee worth $US20 billion.

Fundamentally Argentina’s crisis is an outcome of its semi-colonial status - a country at the mercy of the parasitism of the finance capitalists who demand great rentier profits from loans. The IMF head, Mr Koehler, at a meeting of bankers in Switzerland declared ‘... without pain, it [Argentina] won’t get out of this crisis, and the crisis - at its root - is home-made’. (BBC 7 January 2002). The people of Argentina do not need more pain, but that is all they will get under capitalism.

In December there were signs a revolutionary situation was developing in Argentina. As Lenin noted:

‘For a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph.’ (Left-Wing Communism avid Infantile Disorder). It does not automatically follow that a revolutionary situation leads to a revolution. The opportunity can be lost if there is not a party capable of leading the revolution.

Throughout Argentina in December the masses were rebelling, staging strikes, barricading streets, blockading major roads, calling for the government to be toppled and declaring they had no faith in any of the bourgeois politicians. Popular Assemblies in many parts of the country have sprung up. These are militant organisations which unite neighbors, students, workers and homeless.

The ruling class has not been able to rule in the old way, that was clear when president after president came and went within days.

But these political storms had been preceded by a long build up of class struggle. From the time President de Ia Rua took up office in 1999 until his fall in 2001 there had been half a dozen general strikes.

In fact, throughout the l990s the working classes organised against the vicious anti-worker policies of the Menem government which was selling-off state assets, cutting back social security meanwhile giving tax cuts to the rich. Menem religiously followed the IMF recipe of squeezing the workers and poor farmers until the last drop of blood was extracted. The harder be squeezed the more rebellion grew.

Some of the struggles were quite successful in their demands. Workers at one shipyard succeeded in preventing privatisation of their workplace in 1993. State sector workers also conducted anti-privatisation protests in many provinces. Workers from Aluar (alummium monopoly of Argentina) confronted and blocked the attempts of employers to push down wages. The workers of Terrabusi-Nabisco (a big imperialist food enterprise) stopped work dismissals. Petrol workers, fruit workers and metal workers frustrated the employers’ attempts to enforce casualisation of the workforce. The workers of Rio Turbio occupied the coal mine and led a major struggle to prevent its closure.

Farmers joined the battle against Menem’s policies. Fruit farmers confronted government repression by blocking the roads. A national agricultural strike shook the country for ten days in 1994.

In 1995 the Women in Struggle Movement arose, organising peasant women village by village. There were land occupations by poor Peasants in many provinces too. That same year pensioners began demonstrating every Wednesday in front of the National Congress building and other government offices, and developed their own fighing organisations. Secondary and university students waged major struggles in 1994 and 1995 against reactionary educational reforms, and out of these struggles arose the Secondary Students’ Unity Movement and the Anti-Imperialist Popular Students’ Current which is playing a progressive role in the student movement.

Each year there is a National Women’s Meeting which has been growing in size and fighting spirit In June 1996 they rallied 12,000 women from all over the country who then marched in opposition to the government’s policies. They forced reforms to family legislation to establish the equality of children in the eyes of the law, binding divorce, shared guardianship of children, the right to pension for defacto relationships, improved protection against domestic violence and also were successful in their demand for a law to set quotas for elective positions. In subsequent years they have carried on the struggle for sexual and reproductive rights.

In 1994 and 1995 there were two general strikes which for the first time were carried outside of the structure of the main union body the Workers’ General Trade Union (WGTU). The collaborationist WGTU leadership were compelled, under pressure from the workers, to call another general strike in September 1995.

In 1996 the struggles intensified and in the south of Argentina more than 36,000 people set up barricades and road blocks challenging the power of the provincial government This shook the establishment So too did a mass demonstation in the capital Buenos Aires on July 26. This was soon followed by a wave of militant strikes in August and September that year with the industrial workers playing the central role.

In December 2000 in the north of the country, in the province of Salta, the working masses staged long-running protests blockading streets. Farmers joined in. Throughout Salta towns becarne barricaded by the masses of protesters. The movement spread throughout the country and led to a huge protest in Buenos Aires in June 2001.

The growing hardship and further pay and pension cuts demanded by the IMF reduced the spending power of the masses and sharpened the economic crisis. They also made the people more impatient for change.

The latest president, Eduardo Duhalde, will not be able to fix the mess that Argentina is in. His solutions and those of the other bourgeois politicians - revolve around adjusting the currency, trying to stop a run on the banks and freezing loan repayments. But the problems are deep at the heart of the semi-colonial system in Argentina. Dictated to by the imperialist institutions such as the IMF the country has only been nominally independent. With an enormous debt burden there is no chance Argentina can recover, it can only sink deeper.

The danger lies in the real possibility of a fascist coup (backed by the US) as the way out for the old ruling class. No longer able to rule using the facade of parliamentary democracy they may decide to give up all pretences and go over to open dictatorship. From 1976 to 1983 a fascist military dictatorship ruled with extreme brutality. Estimates of the number of people ‘disappeared’ (tortured and murdered by the military then dumped in concealed graves) ranges from 10,000 to 40,000. Communists and leftists of all shades were targeted by death squads.

The present crisis has brought into stark relief the need for a revolution. The particular form that revolution takes is a matter for revolutionaries in Argentina to resolve, but there can be no doubt that the present system is rotten through and through.

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