ARGENTINA - March 20th, 2019

The international conditions that push the government and capitalists in Argentina to an onslaught against the masses

A new imperialist offensive besieges Venezuela and sieges Latin America

Latin America is shaken by the Wall Street war against the exploited. US imperialism has launched a new recolonizing offensive over its “backyard”, seconded by the sepoys of the “Grupo de Lima”, which today is besieging Venezuela. There is no place even for the cowardly Bolivarian bourgeoisies, who have long surrendered and sold out the anti-imperialist struggle of the masses of Latin America.
This is the true strength behind the brutal offensive of the capitalists and the hated government of Macri.
In the trade war between great imperialist powers over the control of the world market and the spheres of influence, Trump comes by all the businesses and wealth of Latin America.
The US has closed the customs borders to Germany, while it wants to impose England to break with Maastricht.

It is preparing and launching higher offensives and for this the Yankee “backyard” is its living space. The head of this attack is the blockade, besiege and siege over Venezuela, where Chavism, on their knees, prepare their surrender.
Currently, the US is in an open commercial rupture with China. It seeks to encircle it and force it to surrender, to give Wall Street all its fundamental businesses, from telecommunications to profitable state companies. As Republican Senator Marco Rubio said, “any agreement with China should leave the US at the upper end of the value chain and China should limit itself to supply lower value inputs.”

Imperialist powers cannot allow China to control leading branches of production in the world economy, as it threats doing so with Huawei in smartphones and telecommunications... and let alone copying patents of imperialism, achieved after hefty investments in the military industrial apparatus. The plan that is under way, and what imperialism needs to survive from its crisis, is semi-colonizing China and Russia. Clearly there is no room for new imperialist powers, actually there are too many.
All imperialist powers need to fence China, not only the US. They also need a new twist to the looting of the entire semi-colonial world.
If this is what Yankee imperialism is preparing for China and the entire Pacific, what would not US imperialism and its trading partners do in their “backyard”? They must leave their crisis behind and throw it to the world.

 

In the imperialist countries, the attack on the working class is brutal, seeking to take away all their conquests. In 2008, Obama, disguised as a nice guy, with the excuse of the crash of Wall Street took all the conquests to the American workers: he stole the pensions and unemployment insurance and imposed massive suspensions, while subsidizing Wall Street financial oligarchy to return later their large healthy banks.

The French working class lost the 35-hour week and labor flexibilization was imposed by decree, which has turned out to be a recipe organized and centralized by the G20 against the entire world working class.

As part of this offensive in its “backyard”, the US seek to transform Latin America into a territory of maquilas such as Eastern Europe, China and other Asian countries.

In Argentina labour flexibilization that the capitalists could not be voted byvthe Parliament in 2017 (for the formidable battle of the working class against the robbery of pensions), today they try to impose it with a brutal blackmail of thousands of dismissals, throwing the whole crisis to the workers. An economic blow to disorganize their ranks; a true “trade war” but against the exploited. The bosses “adjust their production to the market”. Where producing is not longer profitable, they become importers or take their capitals to the Stock Exchange, to treasury bonds or abroad. They never lose.

Capitalists and their government come for everything, supported by this US imperialist offensive over the world and, particularly, over Latin America.

But the Yankees have been able to advance because all these years Castroism and the Bolivarian bourgeoisie had strangled the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggle of the exploited of the continent. The greatest expression of this is the infamous Obama-Castro pact, with which capitalism was restored in Cuba under the slogan of “socialism does not work anymore” and with which the Colombian workers and peasants resistance was handed over. They were real stabs in the back, which ultimately created the conditions for this new imperialist offensive.

The Bolivarian bourgeoisies have surrendered completely. Maduro does not show resistance and for some time he has been in charge, like a squeezed lemon, of starving and shooting the Venezuelan masses and guaranteeing the payment of the fraudulent foreign debt to the IMF. He does not lay a finger on Guaido.
Lula surrendered to Judge Moro and Bolsonaro, while Kirchner paraded around the courts and declared before Judge Bonadío. They showed that they prefer to kneel before imperialism rather than to call the exploited masses to expropriate the US banks and transnationals, of which they are junior partners, because they fear more the workers and peasants in arms than the Pentagon troops.

What has prevented Trump from invading Venezuela directly is the chill that a scenario like Iraq or Vietnam still causes the US establishment and the Latin American bourgeoisie. Trump still has no social base in the US for new military offensives. The white supremacist movement -that he tried to encourage in the first part of his presidency as a social base for its counterrevolutionary world policies- was defeated and taken out from the streets, even physically, by the black movement, the rebel youth and the US workers, with the Hispanics at the head of that struggle. It was not the scoundrels and figureheads of the Wall Street Democratic Party, their “female candidates” or the anti-socialist charlatans like Sanders, who have prevented superior offensives from the Yankees on the planet. It has been the workers and the American people, whom Trump wants to separate from the workers of the south of the continent with a wall in the Rio Grande so that new migrant Latin American masses do not enter that country. Over 30 million workers of Latin origin live and fight inside the US against the imperialist beast. Immigrants are persecuted with their children inside the US and when they seek to cross the border.

US policy against the countries that it wants to colonize in the immediate but that cannot invade militarily is the one already applied by itself together with Al Assad, Erdogan and Putin in Syria. There, as they could not enter the rebellious cities, they surrounded them by hunger and besieged them militarily, being then sold out from within by the cowardly Sunni bourgeoisie. That is precisely what the Yankees are doing in Iran to conquer the Middle East oil routes fully, knowing that the ayatollahs are on their knees before Wall Street and even before the German Bundesbank.

That is the large-scale plan of encirclement and commercial war to colonize China. And it is the one implemented in Venezuela with a cowardly bourgeoisie that has not touched a dollar or a millimeter of property neither to the bankers, nor to the IMF, nor to the oligarchy, which have been stolen the assets of the Venezuelan nation abroad. While Guaidó enters and leaves through the customs of Caracas, Venezuela is surrounded by hunger and militarily from Colombia and Brazil, including US troops. It is besieged, with its supplies cut, while Maduro on his knees pleads for a negotiation.

The re-colonizing offensive of the imperialist powers throughout the semicolonial world is brutal and disembodied. The partition of Syria copies the model of the partition of Libya, after the revolutionary process that defeated Qadafy was aborted, with a qadafist bourgeoisie taking control of Tripoli and with a violent military coup of Heftar occupying Benghazi, where the rebellious masses had “passed away” to the Yankee ambassador.
Siege, blockade, surround -like the one we see in Venezuela or Iran-, open counterrevolutionary military wars and direct attacks on the world working class... this is the “commercial war” opened up between the imperialist pirates to dispute the world market.

The “Lima Group” -with Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, etc- is the club of sepoys of the Latin American bourgeoisies under Trump’s direct command. It supports Macri’s government to launch this brutal war against the working class of Argentina.
The immediate objective is to transform Latin America -and Argentina particularly- into a large maquila. It is blackmail all along the line, via a fierce economic blow. They want to give the Argentine working class a strategic defeat, like in the ‘90s, when Menem’s regime imposed the plan of privatizations and hundreds of thousands of layoffs. And as in the ‘90s, today the union bureaucracy ties the hands of the working class so that capitalists and the regime can launch their attack.

But the last word has not been said yet. Trump’s offensive has not have, as we had said, base or mass support in the US for attacks of a higher magnitude yet, which is what he needs. Bush’s plan to impose the FTAA in 2000 is the one that Trump seeks to apply with the “Grupo de Lima”. In the midst of the war for the opening of customs barriers around the world, Wall Street wants a free zone with full economic opening for all its businesses.
This cannot be done in a single blow nor it is guaranteed in advance that it will be achieved. Workers and peasants of the continent have not surrendered. Imperialism wants to transform Latin America into a big maquiladora, like China. But the Latin American maquiladoras have already revolted. In Matamoros, Mexico, on the border with the US, tens of thousands of workers in the maquilas rose shouting “Down with the traitors of the union bureaucracy” and, as in Bangladesh and India, they have entered the fight. There transnationals have begun receiving what they deserve.

 

In the US, the working class fights against Trump’s imperialist offensive. They are Latin American workers’ greatest allies.
The revolt of the insurgent Mexico is the example for the workers of Argentina and all of Latin America: to get rid of the glass ceiling of the union bureaucracy, a true internal police of the workers movement, in order to be able to deploy all its fight against imperialism.

MATAMOROS SHOWS THE WAY FORWARD FOR THE ENTIRE WORKING CLASS OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT TODAY.
WE HAVE TO FIGHT LIKE IN HAITI, WITH INSURRECTIONS AND POLITICAL COMBATS IN THE STREETS AGAINST THE LACKEY GOVERNMENTS OF IMPERIALISM THAT STARVE THE PEOPLE!

So, this imperialist offensive is being contained by the US working class with its struggles; it begins to be confronted by the Mexican working class; the revolutionary masses of Haiti are struggling with revolts and a true semi-insurrection that puts the defeat of imperialism on the top of the agenda. The port workers from Valparaíso, Chile, breaking with the union bureaucracy and imposing unity with the grassroots assemblies, showed how to face labour flexibilization. Only the exploited masses of the continent can defeat imperialism!
All the reformists, Stalinists and renegades of Trotskyism are enemies of any revolutionary struggle to defeat the onslaught of Trump and the “Lima Group”. They push the path of submission and class conciliation, of electoral traps of the puppet parliaments of Latin America. The Trotskyists bind our fate to the combat of the exploited, so that the socialist revolution can rise from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

Editorial Board
of Democracia Obrera