July 21st, 2016

On the struggle against the rates hikes…

On FIT and its bills in the capitalists’ parliament

ONCE AGAIN APOSTATING THE STRUGGLE AGAINST CHEVRON AND THE IMPERIALIST TRANSNATIONAL COMPANIES THAT PLUNDER THE RESOURCES OF THE NATION

Macri’s government and his cabinet of TNC’s CEOs continue with his plan of attack on the people and plundering the pockets of the workers. The utility bills hikes are huge. This not only undermines the already low wages of the workers, which were left behind by the big inflation when the trade union bureaucracy signed the hunger collective agreements. There is not a single worker family that can manage to pay all the increases.
The president’s cynicism and that of his henchmen has no limits. They say that the poorest sector is not affected by the hikes because they use gas cylinders. The facts speak for themselves. Even the prices of these gas cylinders were increased due to the speculation of the distributors and the political ward bosses in the workers neighbourhoods.
Truth is that the sky-rocketing hikes in the rates affect all the subjugated sectors of the nation, even the biggest sectors of the middle classes that are seeing how their wages and savings are increasingly weakened, little by little, but each time in a faster way.
The anger and rage in every sector of the society start to be noticeable. The bourgeoisie tries to contain it with judicial rulings and appeals. Even the left, like FIT, promotes these appeals and judicial resources as well as denounces in the “regulating agencies” in order to stop the hikes. In this situation, they show once again their true face as a regime left.

Nobody (not even the left) speaks anymore about the theft on the workers wage imposed in the fake collective bargain, which meant that the workers wage was expropriated in more than 60%, only so far in 2016, without counting what happened last year with the maximum limit of wage increase imposed by Kristina-Kicillof. This was a robbery bigger than the rates hikes, silenced by all the bosses who claim to “confront the hikes” today. They don’t argue about stealing from the people. They just discuss how to do it, according to which business deals they have.
The governors and mayors of the parties of Kirchner, Massa and the rest of the bourgeois political parties speak against the hikes but were the first ones that imposed the hunger collective bargaining, removed the gains of the state employees and hiked up the municipal and state taxes. The cases of Tierra del Fuego and Santa Cruz with a Kirchnerist local government are two examples of this.

On TV and political press, the FIT politicians and their deputies limit themselves to demand public audit of the TNCs that provide services to research what they did with the funds under the shape of “subsidy” during all these years. Every worker knows the answer: They have stolen it! Can anybody tell FIT deputes that we are living in the capitalism? The FIT leaders and  deputes became so servant of the institutions of the Argentinean bourgeois regime that one of his deputy Bregman is asking the opening of the Congress -that is actually closed due to holidays- to discuss the hike prices topic.
His most “radical” elements announce the need of the national mobilization and demand the central unions they call on a national strike.

To fight to reject the miserable collective bargaining and for an increase in salary according to the hike rates and high cost of living and in that way to confront the massive increase of fees and basic service prices? This is not in the FIT agenda.
To fight for the expropriation without payment and under workers’ control and customers’ service control of the transnational companies that steal the basic resources from the nation and have destroyed the infrastructure without investing any cent and have plundered everything? It is in neither the FIT deputes speech not even in a rhetoric way nor in their bills they present in the Parliament. FIT has defined that the road to finish with the hike fees is the road within the bourgeois institution without attacking the private property of the capitalists doing business with the basic resources of the nation and they have chosen the current “opponent” boss politicians as allies.
Nothing more far away from the workers`needs who are the ones suffering the capitalist attack. When more and more the union bureaucracy, FIT and the systemic right-wing politicians tie the workers `interests to the bourgeois regime and the alliances with the boss political parties, more and more the capitalist attack on our gains get increased. 

The FIT deputes lied to workers.  Their promises in the electoral campaign went with the wind. During the whole electoral campaign, the FIT candidates called on workers to vote for them to confront the attack that would be applied by the three horsemen of the austerity. It was a double lie. They asked the vote of workers to confront the austerity measures that were going to come when at that moment Cristina Kirchner was who led the attack and imposed on workers the “roof” on wage in the collective bargaining negotiations.

 

And after the elections? Neither they confronted the austerity meassures. First, since they haven`t prepared workers taking profit, for example, of the electoral tribune to organize the struggle and resistance by unifying the working class and his vanguard in the fighting organs. And when workers said “here we are”, neither did so. They dissolved the meeting of fighting unions as a possibility to organize the different sectors in struggle facing the layoffs and for salary beginning with the workers in the province of Tierra del Fuego that at that moment were carrying out a heroic fight that lasted more than five months.

In those scattered fights against the layoffs and starving collective bargaining imposed by bureaucracy is where the fight against the hike fees and basic service prices could have been defined. The road of FIT was not the struggle in the streets by the methods of the working class. The FIT’s road was the hall of the Parliament and the offices of the boss politicians with whom they sought to agree a consensus to present a law against the layoffs that Macri had already announced beforehand that he would prohibited.   A fake where the FIT deputes took part.

FIT turned the back on workers from Tierra del Fuego and on the task to set up the organs of self-determination for workers to fight. Thus, thousands of layoffs were imposed on workers and in Tierra del Fuego they could not reach victory; Macri and his CEO`s cabinet had the free hands to impose the skyrocketing increase in fees. Workers from Tierra del Fuego and the whole workers in La Patagonia in struggle like the oil workers from Chubut had the key to defeat the TNCs  that steal our resources and take such resources, put them under their control to impose their demands and have free resources at disposal of the whole exploited. Here we pose the facts. Once again, who pays the consequences of the politics applied by the left politicians are the workers and masses.

 

We say to the leaders and deputies of FIT that the boss politicians are not who will stop the hike fees or save workers from the catastrophe this rotten system imposes. The workers themselves will do so by trusting their own forces and setting up their own fighting organs. This will be achieve by conquering the road towards a great fight against the government and transnational companies on the part of the oppressed sectors of nation and the working class leading it since they deal with the production of the nation.
This is the road of the factory workers in Bolivia who are confronting Evo Morales government and the COB union bureaucracy. They show us how to confront the Bolivarian governments, those servants of the imperialism.

 

The banging on pots and pans has started in the streets of different parts of the country. It is necessary that the war cry of 2001 can be heard again: “Picket, pots, it is a single one struggle”. This chant unified the employed and unemployed workers who blockaded the routes together with the ruined middle class that were victims of the pillage of bankers and TNCs. It was such struggle that stopped the tax on basic services at that moment. That is, the struggle of “everybody out, nobody left”, the fight in the popular assemblies, in the occupation of factories that closed or dismissed that surrounded the same banks and TNCs that today are applying the hike fees. The frozen of the taxes at that moment was the product of the mass revolutionary struggle in 2001. It was not done by the welfare program of the Kirchners. Nobody speaks on this, not even the FIT politicians. 

As every gain, if the working class don`t advance towards the taking of power, this gain in the hands of the bourgeoisie was transformed into a brutal negotiation for the subsidies among the TNCs, contractors and the government.  

Thus, the working class today must follow the 2001 road. Workers have to organize again the forces to non-recognize the collective bargaining and impose a salary equal to the familiar basket indexed to the inflation. If the taxes increase 400 % so we want 400% increase in salaries. The only Congress workers need is a Congress of employed and unemployed workers with rank and file delegates from the entire worker movement to discuss, legislate, and execute a fighting plan to stop the attack on the part of the government, his CEOs cabinet and boss politicians.
Re-nationalization without payment and under worker control of YPF! Out PAE, Chevron, TOTAL and all the oil companies that plunder the country!

IT IS ABOUT TO ORGANIZE A STRUGGLE IN THE WHOLE COUNTRY AGAINST THE OIL COMPANIES, IMF, THE VOLTURES FUNDS, TNCs, BANKS AND CORRUPTED POLITICIANS THAT SELL OUT OUR NATION TO THE IMPERIALIST PILLAGE. DOWN WITH THE HIKE FEES! ALL THE IMPERIALIST OIL COMPANIES: GO HOME! FOR A SINGLE STATE COMPANY, FOR THE RE-NATIONALIZATION OF YPF UNDER WORKERS`CONTROL with which all the worker families will have electricity and gas!

 

Liga Obrera Internacionalista – Cuarta Internacional (LOI-CI)- Argentina