Argentina - December 20th, 2021

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

Presentatio of Part II

The work "The ten days that shook Argentina" - "The outburst of the revolution"is the first one of Part II of this book. It was written by the protagonists of this combat, grouped around the banner of the struggle for the re-foundation of the Fourth International, with the aim of setting up an insurrectionary revolutionary party at the level of the fight for the socialist revolution. This question was not posed as an immediate task by any of the former Trotskyist parties, whereas the beginning of the revolution was taking place. All the years that passed after that day show that these ex-Trotskyist currents are already fully integrated to the post-revolutionary regime, that of the reconstitution of the bourgeois parties of democracy for the rich under the most reactionary Bonapartist forms of the 1853 Constitution.

According to Trotsky, at the beginning of every prerevolutionary or revolutionary situation, the entire Marxist program must be articulated around setting up the armed dual power organizations of the masses, since a phase of rupture of social peace between the classes opens, which Marxism calls the phase of civil war, where the masses deploy all their methods of struggle in combat. This is important, since when a revolution begins, the central task of any current that claims to be revolutionary is to prepare an insurrection that will lead it to victory.
Days ago, Nicolás Del Caño, MP for the PTS / FIT-U, in a speech in the Argentine bourgeois Parliament paid tribute for the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Argentine revolution. In front of the bosses' parties, such as Peronism and the UCR together with the Macrism, which in 2001 had imposed a state of siege and assassinated more than 40 martyrs during the uprising, Del Caño had the nerve to affirm that he was paying homage to a "great democratic demonstration" carried out on December 19, 2001 at night. Del Caño silenced the dozens of revolutionary days of struggle that, as we show here, took place in 2001, which hit and shook the Argentina of the powerful, the capitalists, imperialism and the oligarchy. After 20 years, what we are witnessing is the complete submission to the bourgeois regime of a reformist left that in 2001 showed all its impotence for being currents that were already in an open break with Trotskyism.
Del Caño was paying tribute to the fight of 2001 and was silent about the fact that those who were in that Parliament were the murderers of those who fell on those days. To denounce that might have meant that they want to take away "the questions of privilege" or ask for his expulsion from the Chamber... but the only privilege for a revolutionary in the bourgeois Parliament should be to defend the interests of the proletariat and not of its executioners.
In the following pages the reader will be able to follow in detail how the outburst of the revolution was; how the development of the political General Strikes was; the fighting with picket lines and roadblocks interrupting the transport of goods; the factory seizures and the attack on the property of the capitalists.In addition with these, there’s also the mass action of December 19. The axis of this was not only the cry "everybody out", but it was also a milestone in the fight against the union bureaucracy and the threat of burning the bourgeois Parliament (it ended up being fenced with its doors set on fire), where today the reformist left rejoices.
Of course, this revolutionary action was democratic, but it was democracy for the workers, for the hungry, for the ruined middle classes, just as democratic as the fighting in Congress Square against Macri and his theft of pensions in December 2017, when tons of stones fell over that den of bandits which the Parliament is. They were as democratic as the uprising of the working class and the people of Chubut today, who have not left an institution of power without burning in the capital of the province.

December 20 was the decisive combat that forced De la Rúa to flee by helicopter due to the revolutionary events, as defined in the article "The Battle of Buenos Aires" that we include in this Part.
The work "Maturity and immaturity of the revolution that has begun" accompanies these first writings on the revolutionary outburst in Argentina, defining centrism and the opportunism of the currents that usurped the Fourth International as a factor of immaturity of the revolution. They led the thousand and one attempts of the vanguard of the world working class (and of Argentina in particular) to set up a revolutionary party to impotence.
This issue includes the milestones of the revolutionary program that the masses conquered in their combat, which were expressed not only in the struggle for "Everybody out" but also in the revolutionary program of the picketers from the north of Salta, called the "21 points", with which they organized their entire struggle around conquering decent work and not to be transformed into beggars, as a picketer bureaucracy would later do by managing hunger and miserable alms to millions of exploited. There is also the struggle to unite the employed and unemployed workers,which was expressed in the call for a National Congress of employed and unemployed workers in Mosconi Square when roadblocks and bullets from the Gendarmerie were raging.
We also publish the resolutions of the National Inter-neighborhood Assembly of Popular Assemblies of March-April 2002, which voted a program to attack all state institutions, proposing a government of workers and popular assemblies, which stated that not only the ruined middle classes were organized there, but also broad sectors of the working class, pensioners, etc., who were in the struggle.

In this Part II, the reader will also find the program and course of action posed by revolutionary Marxists as these acute events unfolded. It was about having a policy to deepen the revolution that had begun and that it didn’t stop, setting up the dual power organizations of the masses, with the working class leading the exploited sectors of society and with a list of demands starting from the most immediate needs to rise to the fight against the capitalists and their regime, opening the way to the victory of the revolution that had begun.
If Marx wrote a great work against vulgar materialism entitled "The Poverty of Philosophy", then this book could be called the "the poverty of reformism and its program at the beginning of a revolution."

Likewise, in this second part, we include a document entitled "Whither Argentina?", written one year after the beginning of the revolution, which reviews the revolutionary events and defines the key categories of the situation opened in 2001 and the theoretical lessons and strategies of those combats.
In this work the three key moments that had elapsed in the first year since the beginning of the revolution are developed.
The first of them refers to the revolutionary days of struggleof December 2001, that is, that of the independent mass actions.
The second moment is the closure of the revolutionary crisis on the topand the rise of the government of Duhalde, due to a crisis of leadership and collaboration of the treacherous leaderships, which is the first bourgeois attempt to reestablish all the battered institutions of domination in Argentina, after 5 presidents passed through Casa Rosada in a week.
Finally, it couldn’t be otherwise, the third moment dealson the selective counterrevolutionary blows to the left wing of the working class and the masses. The Avellaneda massacre in June 2002(the assassination of Darío Santillán and Maximiliano Kosteki) together with the betrayal of the leaderships of the working classwas a key factor for the bourgeoisie to stabilize the murderous government of Duhalde, Aníbal Fernández and Felipe Solá. This was the PJ government that had already proven itself by setting up Triple A in 1975 and with Menem assassinating on the roads the best of the picketer movement that rebelled in the 1990s, such as Teresa Rodríguez, Aníbal Verón and the martyrs of Mosconi. This time, the founders of Kirchnerism led the way by assassinating the best of the workers' vanguard.
It was with betrayals, deceit and harsh repression to the left wing of the rebellious masses that the regime managed to impose the relative reconstitution of social peace in Argentina.

This second Part of this book culminates in the denunciation of the key role played by Fidel Castro at the time of the worst crisis of domination and of the bourgeois parties since 1982. In May 2003,Fidel Castro arrived in Argentina, supported by all the representatives of that farce of the "Bolivarian Revolution", to be present at the swearing-in of Néstor Kirchner as president. The next day, in a memorable speech before tens of thousands of people on the steps of the Law School, Castro stated that “we had to support Kirchner” (“my friend”, he said) who was supposedly going to “distribute the wealth, But to do this, you had to work and sacrifice yourself first”… What Kirchner really came to do, relying on the brutal devaluation of Duhalde and the robbery of the middle classes, is to put the workers to work as slaves with poverty wages, while he renegotiated and paid all the foreign debt to the private bankers and the IMF up to date.
In his speech in Argentina, Castro denounced as a utopian dream the victory of a socialist revolution in Argentina as it had happened in Cuba and openly proclaimed that the key was the "equitable distribution of wealth"... Thus Castro became a decisive factor to support the Kirchner government on the left, in the midst of the marasmus of this democracy for the rich and of all the institutions of dominance of the 1853 Constitution.
He did nothing new. Before, Fidel Castro had traveled to Chile in the 1970s to proclaim the "peaceful path to socialism," which ended in a brutal tragedy and bloodbath of the masses in that country, at the hands of Pinochet's military coup.
The Cuban CP, far from transforming the island into a stronghold of the socialist revolution in Latin America, transformed it into a great obstacle for it to advance and take steps forward.
The coming of Castro to Argentina inaugurated the focus of all the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisies in the so-called "Counter-Summit" against the FTAA. Lula, Morales, Chávez, Correa, etc. put all their forces to support the Kirchner government, opening illusions in the revolutionary masses of Argentina that in alliance with the native bourgeoisies, imperialism could be defeated. This is a true political swindle and a key and decisive factor in the deviation and strangulation of the Argentine revolution, as we will see later.

This policy gave the bourgeoisie time to rebuild all its institutions that had been dislocated and the political parties that had been hit hard by the outburst of the revolution. The cry "Everybody out" expressed this enormous crisis that the parties of the regime had and, in turn, demonstrated the acute split of the working class with Peronism, which it had repudiated during Menemato in the '90s.
Far from expressing impotence (as the left of the regime affirms), this slogan of "Everybody out" is a milestone of the revolutionary program and class independence. Precisely, "Everybody out" is the precondition for the victory of a socialist revolution, a question from which all the parties that claimed to be revolutionaries in Argentina disowned.