THE ARGENTINE ELECTIONS: HOW REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS PARTICIPATE
Inter-imperialist conflict in Argentina ignored by FIT (Left and Workers Front)
Argentine workers, like most in the Global South, are trapped between the vise of the western imperialist bloc and the hammer of the rising Chinese/Russian imperialist bloc. Decades of enslavement to the IMF enforced by CIA incursions, dictatorships, threats of the return of military rule, and Peronist/ bonapartism have disappeared, murdered, attacked, beaten, harassed militant workers and have infiltrated and weakened the workers movement in general and the revolutionary left in particular. The working class struggles to find its independent pole and its workers’ government but is held back by the Peronist Popular front and the reformist parliamentarians of the left who sell their wares in the shadow of the popular front.
Standing in the November election, the Frente Izquierda de los Trabajadores (FIT) is an electoral bloc composed of four self identified Trotskyist (PST, PO, IS, MST) groups each with significant memberships and leadership roles in the trade unions. Each organization has its program and in the struggle they are divided because of “program”, but in elections there is no discussion about it. The particularity of FIT is that they are all “Trotskyists”. Certainly each party has a reformist program and as such their programmatic differences do not pose a problem for them in forming a front in the election. In the actual class struggle, in the unions and on the streets, unity is not possible because they are different. But in the elections, their parliamentary cretinism brings them together in a rotten bloc that holds the masses back from the Marxist analysis of the world situation and the revolutionary program.
The program of the FIT unites the workers movement around a mono-polar world view of US imperialist hegemony ignoring the relative decline of the western bloc and the rising inter-imperialist competition from the China/Russia bloc. This silence on the class nature of China/Russia ignores the actual role these Great Powers play in Latin America and the developing inter-imperialist conflict. The program claims to protect the fisheries, yet not a word about the ongoing incursion into Argentine fisheries by the Chinese which resulted in the sinking of a Chinese vessel by the Argentine navy after which the poachers have adapted by ‘going dark’ and continuing to exploit the fisheries. In the sphere of energy, oil contract deals favorable to China have been cut by the Argentine bourgeoisie with nary a word from the FIT about the exploitation. Indeed the Argentine oil mogul Eurnekians recently bought Argentina’s oil fields back from the Sinopac. And the Belt and Road initiative competes in Argentina for major projects which threaten the environment such as the Santa Cruz River, the Nestor Kirchner-Jorge Cepernic Hydroelectric Power Plant.
By not identifying the actual imperialist players the FIT mobilizes the workers against the deadly yet declining threats of Western imperialism while ignoring the deals cut between the Argentine bourgeoisie and Chinese imperialism competing for a slice of the workers’ flesh.
Parliamentary Cretinism
The ILTT finds the FIT electoral bloc to be a unity of political varieties of national Trotskyism, united especially for reformist perspectives on the parliamentary terrain and in agreement not to acknowledge the immense operations of Chinese imperialism in the Argentine economy, even extending into the military and aerospace spheres. Further, this is not a united front, whatever the pretensions of the common program, as any mass labor struggle is likely to separate the front into conflicting programmatic groupings. Nowhere does this program call for a workers’ international, in effect abandoning questions of international strategy to popular front politics with Chinese “socialism”, and in Latin America, with Bolivarianism.
The program of the FIT raises with much gusto and vigor many of the needs of the working class, but stops short of developing a revolutionary transitional program to form a workers state that can build socialism. The militant worker reading the program would walk away thinking that Eduard Bernstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Lula/Dilma and Bernie Sanders are right! All the workers have to do is win 51% of the electorate and the victory is at hand.
For revolutionary Marxists the capitalist’s elections in particular and bourgeois democracy in general are nothing but the dictatorship of the capitalist class and its sideshow of democratic forms. For over a century revolutionary Marxism has advocated participation in elections. Not to take control of the capitalist state apparatus but to use the opening afforded by the window of “electoral democracy” to mobilize the workers for the struggle for power by the methods of the working class – mass assemblies, national delegated workers congresses, preparations for and the actual indefinite general strike, mine, farm and factory occupations and the smashing of the capitalist state. As the Paris Commune proved, the state cannot be smashed without the formation of organized, disciplined, armed and coordinated worker’s defense guards mustered by every union and workers organization. The FIT program makes a mockery of the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International, which all bloc members claim as their own. They have individually and collectively removed the spring from the clock, rendering their program a path toward defeat, not victory.
Among the many omissions from the program of the FIT are:
- The section on jobs for all does not call to shorten the work week but only to share the work
- There is no direct call to establish price and wage committees based on the unions and workers organizations
- Opposition to the pro-Zionist definition of anti-semitism which was a capitulation to bourgeois ideological terminology and an embarassment for the militants who elected representatives who claim to fight for Palstinian self determination.
- Capitulating to social backwardness the FIT abandons women’s health. The call for No Restrictions and Free Abortion on Demand is unstated, while the FIT celebrates the recent “green tide” abortion reform with 14 weeks limits allowing the capitalist state restrictions to remain unchallenged.
- A call for a national assembly of the workers representatives of the base (rank and file) to prepare the indefinite general strike to establish a workers government.
- The call for the workers’ government does not explain to the workers how such a government can be established only by the workers’ own assemblies from factory and neighborhood committees to national councils of workers deputies and how its decisions must be defended by the armed masses.
- The workers governments mission is to expropriate the national bourgeoisie, big capital monopolies, banks, finance capital and imperialist properties and carry out the socialist tasks to build a centrally-planned socialist economy based on workers’ democracy and workers’ self management.
How does revolutionary Marxism advocate critical support in elections as a tactic?
We give critical support only when workers have illusions that the reformist or centrist bloc has a program that will deliver social revolution. The masses to varying degrees trust or have faith that the bloc, in this case the FIT, has the ability to deliver if only it is elected. We don’t share these illusions at all and we say so! Our critical support is not to be mistaken for political support. Our critical support is like the rope supporting the hanged man, with the object of exploding such illusions and the reformist and centrist leaderships that foster them.
The tactic of critical support was developed by Lenin in “Left Wing Communism” for communist parties not strong enough to run their own candidates to intersect with workers voting for the Social Democrats, the bourgeois workers parties and even the Socialist Party USA which under Debs had not navigated its way to the 3rd International.
“If the Hendersons and the Snowdens reject a bloc with the Communists, the latter will immediately gain by winning the sympathy of the masses and discrediting the Hendersons and Snowdens; if, as a result, we do lose a few parliamentary seats, it is a matter of no significance to us. We would put up our candidates in a very few but absolutely safe constituencies, namely, constituencies where our candidatures would not give any seats to the Liberals at the expense of the Labour candidates. We would take part in the election campaign, distribute leaflets agitating for communism, and, in all constituencies where we have no candidates, we would urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate and against the bourgeois candidate. Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and Gallacher are mistaken in thinking that this is a betrayal of communism, or a renunciation of the struggle against the social-traitors. On the contrary, the cause of communist revolution would undoubtedly gain thereby.
At present, British Communists very often find it hard even to approach the masses, and even to get a hearing from them. If I come out as a Communist and call upon them to vote for Henderson and against Lloyd George, they will certainly give me a hearing. And I shall be able to explain in a popular manner, not only why the Soviets are better than a parliament and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (disguised with the signboard of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that, with my vote, I want to support Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man (ed. emphasis added)—that the impending establishment of a government of the Hendersons will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will hasten the political death of the Hendersons and the Snowdens just as was the case with their kindred spirits in Russia and Germany.”
We apply the same method to the FIT in Argentina today. We support the workers in their struggle for class independence and admonish the fake Trotskyists whose Kautskyian method has so watered down Trotsky’s Transitional Program that it is unrecognizable except as a replica of the Minimum/Maximum program, that leaves out the transitional bridge; the min/max program explicitly forbidden by the founding document of the Fourth International.
We have seen the tactic of critical support degraded into a reformist strategy across the world to the point that the “revolutionary Marxists” forget about the rope! They grab the hanged man by the feet and try to hold him up! Sometimes even sticking their own necks in the noose. Our intention is not to elevate the FIT but to help the masses, who want socialism, navigate their way past all rotten political blocs, bourgeois workers parties, reformist and Stanlinist usurpers and find their own revolutionary workers party and revolutionary international that fights for socialism with proletarian methods, not parliamentary pipedreams.
To Conclude: Support FITU like a rope supports a hanged man!
The ILTT applies the tactic of a critical vote for the FIT candidates. The reason is to break the workers who have illusions in reformism from their leaderships. We advocate workers challenge the FIT mono-polar world view and build an anti-imperialist program that identifies the inter-imperialist conflict that exists today between the US led bloc and the China/Russia bloc (including rejecting their Bolivarian popular front partners who retail “21st Century Socialism.”) We reject the Stalinist/Castroist fictions that hide the capitalist restoration in Cuba. We take our stand on a revolutionary transitional program that distinguishes itself from the minimum/maximum FIT program. The ILTT calls on vanguard and revolutionary workers to break from the PST, PO, IS, MST reformism and form a revolutionary workers party that shuns parliamentary cretinism and leads the fight for power by proletarian means based on the methods advanced in the Transitional Program.
