Argentina - December 20th, 2021

Preview of the book Argentina 2001: The Outburst of a Revolution

Presentation of Part I

In the first part of this book we are presenting below a document entitled "Argentina: the genesis and the moments prior to the revolutionary outbreak of December 2001".
This material was written in April 2001, and based on the international conditions that shaped Argentina, it anticipated the convulsive events that were to take place months later with the outbreak of the revolution, in December of the same year.

In our country an objectively revolutionary situation was already developing in the year 2000. That situation had begun with a brutal economic crash,  the default to the foreign debt, while imperialism did not cease its offensive on Latin America to make it pay for imperialism's own crisis, and at that same time a phenomenal mass struggle was shaking not only Argentina, but also Latin America as a whole, as we will show.

Well into 2001 Argentina together with Turkey were two acute centers of crisis, as had been Indonesia before. They concentrated the world economic crash that had outburst in 1997 within U.S. imperialism.

Likewise, in order to understand these historical events, this material gives an account of the two cycles of accumulation of semi-colonial capitalism that had developed in Argentina up to the date of the outbreak of the revolution. On the one hand, the cycle of substitution of imports that developed in the post-war period and was closed by the military coup of 1976 and then, it was followed by the cycle based on the nation indebtedness to imperialism, which extracted its wealth to the maximum, throwing it further and further into backwardness and barbarism. This is the cycle that blew-up in 2001.

Later on in 2008, with the revolutionary process already deviated and the slaveholders and their infamous regime having regained control of their slaves and subjected the country once again to imperialism, (then president Nestor) Kirchner boasted with his government of having taken the bourgeoisie and the exploiters out of the "hell" of 2001. But in that hell, as can be seen today, 20 years after the beginning of the Argentine revolution, the masses are still sunken, suffering the same or worse conditions than in 2001.

The revolutionary uprising of the working class and the impoverished popular masses had opened the road to the victory of a revolution that, by imposing a government of the exploited in struggle, would have broken all submission to imperialism and all exploitation of the workers. This would have strengthened by a thousand the revolutionary uprisings that shook Latin America and even the USA in the first decades of the 21st century.
As we also developed in this work, the exploiters and imperialism called back Stalinism which, together with the native bourgeoisies disguised as "Bolivarian", were the channel that diverted the revolutionary tide and allowed the ruling classes to regain control of the exploited.

In Argentina, the cycle of indebtedness and plundering of the nation that was interrupted by the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 2001, was continued later with the reconstitution of the regime of the bosses' parties like the PJ and the UCR, the latter concealed under the skirts of the PRO, while a docile reformist left was the left flank of the bourgeois regime.

"Everybody out, let nobody remain" was the battle cry of the masses in 2001 after years of enduring the worst inequities and unheard of sufferings imposed by this regime of bourgeois parties, lackeys of the US imperialism Embassy and representatives of the worst of the oligarchy and the slave-owning bosses. The outbreak of 2001 was, ultimately, the by-product of an enormous learning of the masses from the struggles they had waged in the resistance against the Menemato, and the offensive against the PJ and the government of De la Rúa, which attacked on behalf and order of the IMF each and every one of the conquests of the exploited, even robbing the middle classes of their savings.

To study carefully the events that preceded the outbreak of December becomes a key for the understanding of the same and of the revolutionary situation that those revolutionary days at the end of 2001 opened in Argentina that made all the ruling classes tremble.
It is crucial to analyze in depth the conditions that opened the crisis and the outbreak of 2001, since they can be a guide to understand the current moments of the struggle of the masses in Latin America and in Argentina in particular, where the bourgeoisie has taken pains to draw lessons from the events of 20 years ago, when together its power, its control over the exploited and its property were at risk.

The main debates and discussions of the Argentine bourgeoisie and imperialism on Latin America are about how to avoid a "new 2001". The ruling classes know that "new 2001s" have developed in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru in recent years.
Those at the top are engaged in a discussion -just as they did in the years prior to the uprising of 2001-, on what is the best way to contain and make the masses pay for the crisis: whether conceding partial concessions and co-opting the treacherous leaderships or by going directly for the heart of the conquests of the exploited. These two bourgeois variants are indispensable for those at the top. One needs the other. The second uses the first as a "squeezed lemon", Peronism, to even attack its own social base, while the PJ had already supported Macri so that he could apply the plan against the working class.
These bourgeois differences are about how best to defeat the working class, not about how to improve their conditions of existence. To confront them all again so that not a single one will be allowed to remain and a new Argentinazo is opened, is the task in these preparatory moments.

For revolutionary Marxists it is a matter of understanding from an international point of view, the current conditions of capitalist crisis and crash that are shaping Argentina and threaten it at every step to become again a link that breaks the chain of imperialist domination in the region and opens the conditions for a new revolutionary irruption of the masses.
The crashes of 2008 and 2019-2020, which are the expression of an open bankruptcy of the world capitalist system, put at the order of the day the prognosis that huge class clashes are simmering. The current offensive of imperialism on the semicolonial world is fierce. The wars of occupation as in the Middle East, the establishment of Bonapartist or semi-fascist regimes as in Russia and China, the selective assassination of the vanguard and the black movement in the US, the thousands of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, the prisoners, wounded and murdered of the Latin American uprisings, are a sample of where Argentina is going today.

Drawing the lessons of this heroic struggle of 2001, as well as those of the Cordobazo, the Rosariazo, the Peronist resistance of the 1950's, among so many historical struggles waged by the Argentine proletariat, is the task of the moment.
This is not a discussion of bourgeois historians who write about the workers' movement from their comfortable university chairs or in their doctorate courses. It is about the working class learning from the struggles that have taken place in order to set up the combat organizations and the revolutionary party that it needs at its head to take power this time. It is that so much heroism and so much blood shed by the indomitable working class of Argentina deserve the victory, an Argentinazo that will be impossible to conquer if it is not part of the revolutionary struggle of the masses of the American continent.

Twenty years ago our current was born fighting, as we continue to do today, under the banners of the Fourth International and the socialist revolution. It has been a long time since the liquidators of Trotskyism stopped fighting under its legacy.
We know that remaining firm in the strategy and principles of Marxism is the key to learn from the deviant and defeated revolutions, to prepare ourselves to try again to arrive on time and provide the masses with the revolutionary leadership they deserve to succeed.