Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 11:04:14 +0000 (GMT)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Argentina: Diary of a Revolution


 

Nate and a couple of others have presented 'exercising
power' as an alternative to workers taking power in a
revolution. But how is it possible to exercise power
without having power? What 'power' do the Argentineans
have to 'exercise' when their kids are going hungry
and their country is being bled dry by imperialist
capital and IMF programmes? And how, presuming that we
are not believers in the parliamentary road to
socialism, is it possible to have power without first
seizing power? 

In order simply to feed their families, the
Argentinean workers need to take over the economy and
establish a democratic workers' plan in place of the
chaos of the market. Instead of exporting profits,
servicing huge debts and tolerating a huge reserve
army of labour they need to work and produce for
themselves. How is such a programme 'useless', or
doomed to bureaucratic degeneration, or
indistinguishable from 'left reformism'? 

I have already argued these points in detail but, to
recapitulate: because of a) the complex nature of the
economy of a modern society and b) the inevitably
short life ofa situation of dual power and
revolutionary possiblity post-capitalism cannot be
created on a piecemeal basis, in isolated factories. 

Nor can a left reformist government act as a
substitute for revolution: any government which does
not abolish the market and socialise property will
remain in hock to imperialism. The idea that a strong
national bourgeoisie and an independent 'national
capitalism' can be established in Argentina and
provide a material basis for left-wing reforms is
utterly utopian, as the postwar history of the country
shows. 

The second national congress of employed and
unemployed workers showed an appreciation of all these
facts. It broke with Peronism, the political
expression of the drive to establish national
capitalism in Argentina. It fused demands for
immediate reforms with the call for workers' power,
thus affirming the necessity of going all the way to
socialism to get real reforms. After the bitter
experience of the 'left-wing' de la Rua administration
it recognised the futility of social democracy in a
semi-colony. 

Surely, if the autonomist Marxist tradition Nate
invokes has value, then it has value as an argument
for looking at what workers are actually doing as a
model for what is possible and desirable, rather than
referring to some abstract schema or slogan. Perhaps
this is what Nate and Harald mean when they talk about
'the concrete experiences' of Argentina. Why, then,
not look at what the mass organisations of Argentinean
workers have been saying now for more than six months?
Why not read the declaration of the second congress,
or the numerous statements of the militant unions, or
the speeches given on the anniversary of the
Argentinazo?

It is clear to anyone who studies these documents that
the arguments within the workers' movement concern not
the possibility let alone necessity of revolution but
the *best strategy for achieving revolution*. The CWG
and Workers Democracy articles do not even consider
explicit arguments for left reformism and against
workers' power, because these arguments are irrelevant
in Argentina at present. All the effort of the
negative parts of the CWG and WD pieces goes into
arguing that various strategies which pretend to be
revolutionary, and indeed are probably sincerely
designed to create revolution (ie are subjectively
revolutionary) will in fact stymie revolution (ie be
objectively counter-revolutionary if put into place).
If we want to have a relevant discussion about
Argentina, then we should discuss the best strategy
for revolution, not the possibility of revolution. I'm
not setting these rules in cyberspace: the Argentinean
workers' movement is setting them. 

A word about vanguardism and revolutionary situations:
the CWG/Workers Democracy articles I have posted do
not
argue that a revolutionary situation must have as a
prerequisite the existence of a mass revolutionary
organisation. This definiton of a revolutionary
situation is sometimes attributed to Lenin, but in
fact Lenin never advanced it - to believe that he did
is to fundamentally misunderstand him. Lenin argued
that revolutionary situations required revolutionary
vanguard organisations to be resolved in the favour of
workers, ie to turn into socialist revolutions.

So what is a vanguard? There are many answers to this
question, but neither the CWG nor WD sees a vanguard
as a substitute for the organisations that comprised
the second congress of employed and unemployed
workers. These organisations do not have to be
displaced by some massive vanguard party for
revolution to occur. The CWG and WD argue that the
vanguard will be comprised of members of these
workers' organisations who propagandise for a correct
revolutionary strategy inside them.

A correct revolutionary strategy is not set in stone:
it may change over a short space of time, it may at
one time be possessed by one group and another time
possessed by another. Neither the CWG nor WD insists
that only Trotskyists can have the correct
revolutionary line. (As a matter of fact, the
international tendency that WD is trying to form does
not require that groups that sign up to it identify as
Trotskyists. How many anarchist groups or tendencies
can claim to be so non-dogmatic?)

At the moment in Argentina the various left parties
and organisations (including the anarchists) are all
putting their strategies forward, and having them
tested in practice. These parties and organisations
are not bunches of intellectuals outside the class,
but groups of workers in the organisations that
attended the second congress. 

Thus WD has a section in Brukman, the occupied factory
in Buenos Aires, which argued with the section of the
Socialist Workers Party (and presumably other major
parties) about the correct strategy to advance on the
anniversary of the Argentinazo. Eventually, the WD won
their co-workers, or a majority of their co-workers,
over to the line of the Class Struggle Pole United
Front, which wanted the anniversary to be made into a
call for a third national congress to coincide with an
indefinite general strike protected by workers'
militias (ie an attempt at revolution). The Brukman
workers, including of course the Socialist Workers
Party members, therefore ended up marching behind the
banners of the Class Struggle Pole (a collection of
several small parties and several militant unions). So
why has the most famous factory occupation in
Argentina endorsed the programme of the Class Struggle
Pole - the programme the CWG argues for in its article
- as the authentic strategy for revolution in
Argentina? Surely this is a question worth discussing.


Cheers
Scott  
 











===="Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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