ARGENTINA - March 20th, 2019

With the smokescreen and trap of the elections, and supported by PJ from the Parliament

Imperialism, the government and capitalists are coming for everything

With the blackmail of unemployment, dismissals and betrayal of the trade union bureaucracy, they want to impose labour flexibility

The Argentinean working class is being the target of a historical offensive of the capitalists. They want to do away with the gains of 80 years of struggle, to take the workers to slavery conditions as in the beginning of the 20th century.
This is the brutal economic blow that the government and the transnational companies are unleashing on the working masses, nothing more and nothing less. The liquidation of collective agreements, layoffs, massive suspensions, factory shutdowns, wage loss as a result of inflation, devaluation and hikes in utility fees seek to take the workers to minimum levels of subsistence, with wild exploitation rates. The labour flexibility that all the factions of the bourgeoisie claim for is being imposed with misery, repression, dead –as Santiago and Rafa- and prisoners such as Daniel Ruiz and the anarchist youth.
The bankrupt capitalist system imposes hell on the workers. Imperialism doubles the plundering of the nation.
The workers are not the ones paralyzing the production, facing the industrial crash. Capitalists and their rotten system of exploitation paralyze the machines in Argentina. Around 50% of the national industrial capacity is paralyzed, without producing. Thousands of workers are expelled from the productive process. The capitals run away from production and go to finance speculation and bank accounts abroad. While the working class and the people plunge in misery, thousands of millions of men-hours are lost in order to defend the profits and the property of the means of production of a bunch of parasites.

The decline of this rotten system is in the base of the war that the IMF and the “Club of the 6” (the stock market, the Rural Society, the Foreign Banks, the Argentinean Industrial Union, the Traders and Construction bourgeoisies), which is the true government behind Macri, declared on the exploited as part of the offensive of US imperialism to impose a full domination on Latin America.
The workers are paying an expensive price for the betrayal of the trade union bureaucracy, which saved the government in the moment of its worst crisis during the whole 2018.
We cornered the Congress on December 18th and 19th 2017. We made general strikes, fighting in the streets, local revolts. There were months of tough political fight against the government and the IMF, which the bureaucracy strangled in October-November last year, when they guaranteed social peace for G20 summit.
Today, the government is no longer cornered. The bureaucracy saved it. The PJ, Kirchnerism and FR guaranteed governance to the government from the Congress and the governors of the provinces. Now, all of them will hold their elections, being loyal to the IMF and the “Club of the 6” to deceive the workers with ballots and votes, while the capitalists wage a brutal war unleashing the industrial crash and the crisis over the people.

What about the FIT (Left Workers Front)? It does not confront the attack or the electoral trap, because it tied its fate to the elections and the parliament. It made 3 electoral rallies and is already in the campaign...
The workers vanguard, the tyre workers, the ARS (Shipyard), the oil workers, the teachers, the movement of exploited women, etc. They must regroup their ranks. To stop the onslaught of the capitalists and defend the historic gains, we must defeat the union bureaucracy and respond with strikes, pickets and the general strike in the class war that has begun.
We must stop this offensive of the exploiters in one point and concentrate all the forces there. As yesterday it was the ARS and the military companies of the state. Today it is Fate and the whole tyre and automobile industry, where the entire crisis and the attack of the capitalists are concentrated.
Until yesterday, the Kirchnerist trade union bureaucracy said that we should not make strikes against the government, but that it had to be defeated in the elections of 2019. This is precisely what the triumvirate of the traitors of the CGT bureaucracy does, that is, to give the capitalists time to deal a heavy blow to the working class before October.
The war is here. The layoffs are now. Inflation and the high cost of living can no longer be bared. The elections? They are just a smokescreen for the government and the bosses to attack without mercy. We have to stop them now. afterwards will be late.

 

The electoral trap: the legitimization of the loss of conquests and a smokescreen to the war of the capitalists

The government and the “opposition” bosses have furiously thrown themselves into the elections to cover with “democratic” verse their war against the people. They want the workers to kneel and wait until October while the government and the capitalists are dismissing freely and taking away our historic conquests.
They have already voted to implement the IMF plan - Trump’s spearhead - and to bust the workers. The IMF not only openly directs the economic policy of the government but also all the employers’ parties, whose candidates and politicians -Lavagna, Kicillof, Urtubey, etc.- came to supervise in February. Even the scabs of the CGT met with the IMF! In the elections in Neuquen (southern province of Argentine), it was clear: all the bosses candidates swore to respect the contracts with the oil companies in Vaca Muerta, starting with the Kirchnerist Rioseco.
The October elections will legitimize the loss of conquests, the hundreds of thousands of dismissals, the closing of factories, the pulverization of wages, imposed with dozens of partial defeats of the working class. In addition, in October, a strengthened government will emerge to impose labour reform as a law voted in Congress.
The working class cannot wait until October and let layoffs and defeats pass without fighting. We cannot allow the imposition of the electoral trap. We must respond up to the class war, here and now.

 

The fraud of the “bosses’ opposition” and the “defense of the national industry”

The PJ, the Kirchnerists and the FR speak of “defending the national industry”. They lie shamelessly. It is precisely the UIA that is stopping the machines, closing the factories and destroying the industry with more than 400 “crisis preventatives”, which conceal a generalized lockout of the capitalists. Madanes, a multimillionaire owner of Fate and Aluar and former star entrepreneur of the Kirchners, declared the “crisis preventative” to lay off 500 workers. The car industry is suspending thousands of workers, and are operating at 15% of their installed capacity, not because they go bankrupted, but because they have enough stock to cover not less than half of the projected sales for 2019. Others, such as the textile bosses or the assemblers of Tierra del Fuego, become importers directly.
Those are the laws of capitalism. The bourgeois go where they have higher profits. Here, they are stopping the machines and going to the financial gambling, with treasury bills and the Central Bank that yield a 60% annual interest. Their vaunted “crisis” is nothing more than the way to maintain their profits increasing the unemployment and misery of the working class and impoverishing the nation. Galloping inflation is the warranty of their profits, which has already made the lives of the ones below unbearable.
In order to produce, these parasites of the UIA want the labour reform, slave workers, without conquests, like the Rural Society, the banks or the trade employers. There is no fraction of the bourgeoisie that does not want to enslave our class. With 60 or 70% profit in the interest rate or in the dollar, capital does not return to production, if this is not the same profit that they are going to get from the working class. Their war cry is “labour flexibilization now. Let’s end the Christmas bonuses and vacations. Workers, to work by piecework. Full time available to companies. Liquidation of the collective contracts”... Namely, transform Argentina into a new Bangladesh. Either labour flexibilization or recession and starvation. That is what the war of the capitalists is about.
In Congress, the bosses’ politicians of the “national industry” voted for Macri all the laws of selling out the nation to imperialism, such as the 2019 budget dictated by the IMF, in the provinces they rule, like Santa Cruz or Tierra del Fuego, they apply huge cuts against the workers, imposed by bullets.
That is why the shout that goes with “Andate Macri” (“Walk away, Macri”) in the combats of December 18 and 19, 2017 was so accurate: “Everybody out.” That is what the labour movement must raise again.

 

To confront Macri and the IMF seriously, the union bureaucracy must be defeated
We must separate the bourgeoisie disguised as “opposition”,
from the workers’ organizations and their struggles
The working class must put its weigh in national political life

In 2018, the working class waged very fierce battles, after the revolutionary days of December 2017, in the struggle against the Parliament. From that moment, the bureaucracy put all its forces to discoordinate and desynchronize the workers’ offensive that was beginning to unfold. The tendency to the worker and popular unity with the lower middle classes that faced the hikes in fees, opened in 2018. The union bureaucracy was obfuscated. It held a festive march on February 21, 2018. It threatened with the “mother of all battles” and until September left hundreds of struggles by factories or region uncoordinated and decentralized. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy signed collective wage agreements where they sold out between 30% and 40% of the worker’s wage.
They dispersed the struggles of the workers. The working class suffered heavy partial defeats such as the closure of Fanazul, which began to spread to other branches of production such as textiles, food and footwear. There were more than 200,000 dismissals, for the decentralization that the traitors of the bureaucracy imposed on the struggle. Then, to completely decompress the fight, they made a passive and festive 36-hours-strike, to then close the curtain and, from the Ministry of Labour, sell out all the workers’ conquests. 
For its part, the Kirchnerist bureaucracy imposed “social peace” surrounding each struggle with multi-sector structures made of bosses’ politicians, priests and trader chambers, as the CTA did in the ARS or in Rio Turbio.
The movement of the unemployed, the dispossessed and the hungry, to which pompously priests, various Stalinists and servants of the bourgeoisie of all types, call “workers of the popular economy”, were separated from the employed workers and their fight against dismissals and were taken to marches of pressure... as beggars, to ask for alms in the Ministry of Social Development by those leaderships.
So, the government and the capitalists threw the whole crisis onto the working class. The recession and the dismissals were followed by new rates, a high cost of unbearable living and devaluations. A brutal war against the exploited.
The result of all this: the soup kitchens tripled where the hungry of the “popular economy” eat. The workers see the supermarkets from afar. The hikes in utility fees do not stop and the cost of living keeps rising. The collective bargains are not reopened, although some exceptions in which the bosses say they have no money this year for wage increases. The latest fad of the dominant elites in Argentina is to declare themselves in “crisis preventative”.

The bureaucracy is preparing itself to sell out the wages in the collective bargains. And not only that: today it promises the government to yield key points of the collective agreements and workers’ conquests in those meetings. The workers know very well what a “light flexibility” means, as the press already announces, is what the bureaucracy is willing to sign for Macri: suspensions with reduced wages, layoffs of workers in the factories with twice as much work for those who remain producing and exchanging agreements and conquests for work. With the gun of the dismissals pointing at workers’ heads the head of the workers and the betrayal of the union bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie is advancing against the workers’ conquests and it is doing so today. Then, after the elections, the Parliament of the employers’ politicians will come to transform into law what the capitalists conquer with their current attack.

We have to regroup workers’ ranks! The worker and popular counter-offensive must be prepared!
Those who really are in “crisis preventative” are the workers
May the bankers and the bosses pay for the crisis!

The bosses have launched a brutal blackmail against the working people: either they give away wages and collective agreements, or the dismissals will increase. This is a gun to the head of the workers. It is an armed robbery. To remind that to everyone, they have Daniel Ruiz in custody, Sebastian Romero with an arrest warrant and thousands of fellow workers prosecuted.
With mass dismissals, workers who are still producing do so at a fierce pace of work, even producing what the thousands of dismissed workers were doing before.
The infernal production paces have already taken lives. This rotten capitalist system assassinated the railway worker comrade Sebastian Carranza and the oil workers comrades Ariel Sajama and Hugo Rojas. They are the dead of this class war declared by the capitalists and their government.

The truth must be told: there are forces of the masses to wage battle, but they are dispersed. Those from below have not surrendered. However, their leaders have: the union bureaucrats and the left, tied to the apron strings of the bourgeois Parliament.
Therefore, workers must break the force vest imposed by the union bureaucracy to wage decisive struggles.
In Salta the teachers broke the trap of the limited struggle plan controlled by the union bureaucracy of the CTA and CTERA.
There, disregarding the miserable 23% wage increase agreement in 6 payments that had been signed by the bureaucracies of ATE, UPCN, SADOP, UDA, etc., based on the grassroots assemblies, with the self-appointed teachers, thousands of them took to the streets. Thus they got 38% incease in 7 payments, with a bonus of $ 5,000, with a quarterly salary adjustment clause. A true combat at a 180° angle with the union bureaucracies. The path was that of self-organization and direct democracy. That is the way!To achieve the most minimum conquest, the union bureaucracy must be removed.

The teachers opposition and ‘multicolour’ groups have two possible ways forward: either to continue tied to the apron strings of Baradel and the bureaucracy of the CTA, or to regroup the forces at the national level with the teachers from Salta to fight together for the same demands. The teachers’ union was sold out all these years a thousand times by the CTERAist bureaucracy. Salta shows the way forward!

Likewise, there was no dismissal or attack by factory that workers who did not respond. Even today, in Fate, Siam, Coca-Cola or the same ARS, workers seek to stop this attack under harsh conditions of struggle. They are isolated battles, left to their fate by the traitors of the union bureaucracy.
ofalready announced a “restructure” to dismiss workers. Quickly the workers’ assembly stopped the plant and imposed the obligatory conciliation. But they, in their struggle, are isolated from Acindar and the contractors, and surrounded by the traitors of the UOM bureaucracy.
In Fate, unfortunately, all the forces of the workers in struggle of the country against the dismissals have not yet been concentrated, when there are conditions for it.

Dozens of unions and shop steward commissions have been uprooted from the union bureaucracy as in oil companies, SUTNA, railway section, potters, teachers, etc. Today, unfortunately, they are being divided by the petty and cretinically electoralist politics of the parliamentary left.

A powerful movement of working women has entered the fight, as it was seen on March 8 on the International Working Women`s Day. They have taken to the streets and they will not leave them... But their enemies, the bourgeoisie and the reformists, with a new bill, are trying once again to take that fight and those energies to the same Parliament that they pressed for months to get the legal safe free abortion. There they will place the interests of the working woman at the feet of the employers’ parties, including with the politicians of the same government party that has started this brutal war against the workers of the country. We are facing a new infamous trap: separating the working woman from her class to take her asleep at the foot of the Parliament of her executioners.

Together with the working woman, there is the unemployed movement who can no longer bear the inflation. The lack of food hits more than 30% of the working class and the dispossessed. The bourgeoisie and its servants know very well that this movement organized as a piquetero movement, with unemployed workers fighting for decent work for all, as in 2001, would be a huge force to come together with the workers who defend their jobs and fight for their wage.

The working class needs regrouping its ranks immediately. We must unite those who fight! We have to prepare a worker and popular counter-offensive!

We cannot continue fighting divided.
From the assemblies and the current fights, we need to set up a National Struggle Coordination Body

As we see, the energies of the working class are not exhausted. Huge sectors are in struggle, but divided and disperse. If only they unite their demands in a big national struggle organization, the path of overpassing the limits imposed by the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy would be opened quickly.
From the factories that were paralyzed by the capitalists, from the struggle against dismissals and suspensions, from the unions that are fighting for better wages, from the militant syndicalism, from the working women movement and the unemployed movement, it is time to set up a powerful organization that can open the way for a resolute action of the mass movement to wage a decisive battle against the government, in one point, and to prepare a great counter-offensive.
Those who are in struggle know each other and recognize each other in the struggles across the country.
We need to put all the struggling forces in one point. Fate, where the bosses decreed a “crisis preventation” and threatens to dismiss hundreds of workers, can be a grouping point of all the sectors in struggle. ARS can also be that point, where the bureaucracy imposed a deceitful “social peace” that leaves Vidal hands free to attack and dismiss again.
In there, in those key sectors, the government prepares decisive defeats to chastise all the workers of the country! We cannot let that happen!
In those hot spots of fighting, we need to put all the forces of struggling workers… those of the unemployed and piqueteros as it happened in 2001; those of the unions in struggle such as the teachers, those of the powerful working women movement. At some point the working class has to stand and wage a decisive unitary battle, uniting all the demands, as we did on December 18th and 19th 2017, to stop this brutal attack of the capitalists and their government.

Unfortunately, FIT has started its election campaign long time ago. Their political rallies left out the struggle to coordinate hundreds of thousands of those that enter to the fight. They have promoted small rallies of their union collateral organizations, in the best case, if not openly electoralists. The members of FIT talk about making a “single party”. They wrote rivers of ink with it, but they just divide all those in struggle.
What the parliamentary left does, far from uniting the workers, is to negotiate their places in the parliament, when a true war was unleashed on the working class, as if this war could be stopped with the ballots and the electoral rooms of the executioners of the people.
The struggles led by FIT are permanently taken to the Labour Secretary. The mandatory conciliations are nothing but an oxygen tube before the bosses dismiss and finish defeating the struggles. In there, all the energies of the workers are wasted and fake illusions and expectations are created. We need to tell workers the truth, the dismissals and closures of hundreds of companies in Argentina were done with the signature of the Labour Secretary, who is nothing more than the human resources department boss of all the capitalists.
FIT has subordinated the struggle to the parliamentary seats and they were unable of putting their seats to the service of conquering the unity of the mass struggles against the attack of the capitalists and the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy. So left reformism has become an additional obstacle to unite and coordinate those in struggle.

However, this unity is the one desired and needed by all the attacked sectors of the working class. In every partial struggle, in the middle of the ongoing economic crash, the whole attack of the capitalists and the weakness of the working class when it fights isolated under the threat of layoffs and suspensions are concentrated.
There are enough conditions and forces to make a call, from the workers in struggle and the workers movement rank and file, to set up a big national Workers Congress of employed and unemployed workers, of the working women and the militant unionism.
We need to prepare a counteroffensive now. There is no time to lose. The offensive of the capitalists can be stopped by strikes, picket lines and the general strike, so they pay for the crisis they caused.

 

No more fighting divided! For a single demand of the entire workers movement!

The road for unity is no other than starting to get a single claim of all the sectors of the workers and the people that are attacked by the government and the capitalists to unite their struggles- the unemployed, the working women, those who fight in defence of their jobs and the ones that are preparing to break out in a struggle against the increase in the cost of living and for wage increase.
The bosses with the government said that the workers should not even dream about recovering the wage stolen in 2018 in the current collective bargains, as Buenos Aires Governor Vidal said to the teachers.

The traitors of the bureaucracy of the CGT and CTA plot so that these claims are not unified and the working class does not coordinate their struggles and give a hard blow to the government. The war of those of above can only be answered with a mass political and revolutionary struggle that puts a massive foot on their chest and makes them retreat. A general revolutionary political strike is what must be prepared and organized.
The need for a single and united claim of all the exploited is at top of the agenda:
Against the collective bargaining agreements of hunger and surrender negotiated by the traitors of the union bureaucracy, we must conquer a National Single collective Bargaining to impose No more dismissals! Reduction of the length of the working day! 6 hours of work for everybody with a wage equal to the family basket, indexed month by month with a trigger clause according to the increase in the cost of living! Unconditional defense of agreements reached in the collective bargaining! Nationalization without compensation and under workers control of every factory that closes, suspends or lays off!
Let all the demands of working women become effective! Legal, safe, free and available abortion, beginning by recognizing it right now by the health care of all the unions!

Out with the IMF!
Immediate elimination of VAT! Down with the “salary tax”! Progressive taxes to bankers, capitalists and great fortunes!
Expropriation without compensation and under workers control of all the service companies (transportation, power, gas, water) to end the skyrocketing of fares and service prices! By the “law of extinction of domain” of these companies to recover the super profits obtained with a brutal sacking of the people!

Immediate freedom for political prisoners and end the prosecution of all persecuted fighters!
Every minimally serious struggle of the workers has been brutally attacked by the police and the repressive forces. Hundreds of fighters have been through the prisons of this bourgeois regime. We must stop the repression of those who fight! The immediate task of setting up strike pickets and self-defence committees becomes decisive. The pacifism with which the workers are imbued in their struggles only strengthens and emboldens the capitalists and their shock forces that will multiply their attack and repression at every step.

The task of the moment then, is none other than to unite the workers in struggle against the lay-offs and suspensions with the piquetero and the unemployed movements for genuine work. Before it is too late, we must unify the claim for a decent wage according to inflation with the fight against the fares and the price of electricity, gas and tap water, which drags more and more sectors of the ruined middle classes to the streets. We must channel the enormous energies of the working woman not to submit them to the bourgeois Parliament and its enemies, but as an advance in the struggle of the workers to overthrow the traitors of the trade union bureaucracy, the guarantors not only of the exploitation and surrender of all the workers’ struggles, but also, and in the first place, of the triple exploitation of working women.

Down with the union bureaucracy!
For direct democracy and the self-organization
of the working class!
We must coordinate those who fight!

Macri, go away! General strike until everyone of the bosses and their politicians leaves and there is not a single one of them left!

National Committee of the LOI-CI /
Democracia Obrera (Workers Democracy)

Argentina: For a worker way out to the crisis The path to a breakthrough for the exploited is to go back to the path of December 18 and 19, 2017. In the face of such crisis and attack by the capitalists, none of the sectors that come out to demand believe that in an isolated way any economic conquest can be achieved, let alone stop the war of those at the top against workers and poor people. The economic blow threatens to leave the working class helpless. We cannot wait another day. The deep tendencies of the class war pose the need for us to give a hard political blow to the government and the capitalists in the streets. In the middle of the economic morass, handcuffed by the union bureaucracy and the electoral trap, the working class is being impeded to weigh in national political life, though it is the only class capable of running the machines that the capitalists have paralyzed and of preventing imperialism and capitalist parasites from taking all the wealth of the country abroad. The road to any serious struggle cannot be other than attacking the profits of those who send heaps of foreign currency to off-shore tax havens and make fortunes with the hunger of the people and the crisis of the nation. An emergency worker plan to exit the crisis is set at the top of the agenda. The expropriation without compensation and under workers control of the oil and gas companies, mining companies that steal our wealth, is a decisive step to end the looting of the worker’s pocket. In Argentina, the alleged “breadbasket of the world”, meat, milk and bread are increasingly out of reach for the homes of the workers and the poor people. Meanwhile, the great grain producers and the agrarian oligarchy take away more than 40 billion dollars of wealth from the entire nation. The price of food will fall quickly, if the oligarchy is expropriated without compensation, if the people ends with the entire chain of intermediaries in the marketing of food consumed by workers and the people ends, and if the nationalization of foreign trade is imposed to prevent the flight of foreign currency from the great cereal traders. Along with this, the denunciation of all agreements and treaties of repayment and/or renegotiation of the fraudulent foreign debt of Argentina signed by its ruling elites, is the basis of any plan to end the hunger of the people and the plundering of the nation. Expropriating the bankers and that den of bandits of the Stock Exchange and the Rural Society without compensation, must be the starting point of any worker exit to the crisis. There is no more immediate claim than these basic measures to get out of the catastrophe that is already here. And this will not be conquered in the elections or in the labour ministries. The working class must set up a workers’ plan to emerge from the crisis and conquer it in the struggle. The bourgeoisie has its program, its plan: to finish delivering the country to imperialism so that it can recolonize it, advance in looting all its wealth and make all of Argentina into a maquila. The workers must have their way out plan to the crisis and impose it decisively with the fight in the streets. A revolutionary provisional government of the workers and the poor people is the only one that will be able to take these exit measures to the crisis until the end. We, the Socialists, affirm that to stop this attack of imperialism on the nation and against workers, the labour movemen will have to travel the path of the Cordobazo, the fight against the 1976-83 dictatorship and the  2001 revolution, so that nothing of this government or of this remains above deserve is an Argentinazo so that they all leave us alone and not a single one of them remains... We have to try again or there will be nothing left of the conquests and the lives of us from below. It is  them or us! Those from above have come for everything, let’s go for all of them! Argentina will be socialist and revolutionary or it will be a colony of Wall Street!