Jonathan Frühling and Martin Suchanek
Argentina is being wracked by a severe economic crisis. In the first quarter of 2024, GDP shrank by 5%; in the summer inflation hit 271%. 60% of the population live below the poverty line, 15% do not have money to buy enough food—and the trend is rising.
Since December 2023 the ruling class has had a loyal servant in self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’ president, Javier Milei, who carried a chainsaw to rallies to symbolise what he would do to government social spending. His aim is to throw the full burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class—laying off government employees, slashing subsidies on transport and energy and reducing fiscal transfers to deprived regions. With the election of Donald Trump, he now has a strong supporter in the White House and the dominant international financial institutions like the IMF located in Washington.
Though his party, La Libertad Avanza, holds only 38 out of 257 seats in the congress, seven of the upper house’s 72 seats, and none of the regional governors, the bourgeois parties have, in general, been willing to support all his anti-working class measures. His first major blow was the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), the so-called Omnibus Law, which included privatisation of state-owned assets, and restrictions on workers’ rights, including the right to protest. Though his government has come into conflict with sections of the ruling class and the traditional political elites in congress, the passage of the so-called ‘Basic Law’ in June represents an important, if partial, victory for Milei over his opponents.
His government is concerned with nothing less than a fundamental neoliberal reordering of the country by destroying all the essential achievements of workers, the unemployed, and the various social movements. It is not just about extreme cuts in spending and the deterioration of services under the impact by inflation and unemployment, but about inflicting a strategic defeat on the working class.
As a country with powerful social movements, this would have reverberations across the entire region. Milei’s policies—and any resistance, or lack of it, they provoke, will be closely observed well beyond Latin America. The working class and the socially oppressed urgently need to unite all their forces in the fight against Milei. Everything is at stake.
The electoral alliance FIT-U
Milei’s programme has been dealt with in detail in our press, which can be found on our website. In this article, we turn our attention to the response of Argentina’s well organised far left. Over the past decade, Argentina has witnessed the growth of a variety of groups emerging from a Trotskyist tradition. The largest of these have been grouped together in the Left and Workers’ Front—Unity (FIT-U), with five deputies in parliament.
The FIT-U was founded in 2011 by the Partido Obrero (PO), the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) and the Izquierda del Trabajadores por el Socialismo (IS). In 2019, the Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST) joined. The FIT-U’s stated goal was to ‘prepare workers for the task of fighting for their own government’. In 2011, the FIT-U won 590,000 votes, though it failed to enter parliament. In 2013, it sent two deputies to Congress, where it has maintained a small presence since. In 2021, the coalition received just under 1.3 million votes and five MPs. Initially, four deputies were from the PTS and one from the PO. When half the seats in congress were elected in 2023, this fell to just under 800,000, demonstrating that the FIT-U’s vote is highly elastic; despite the economic crisis and the political crisis of Peronism, the bloc cannot take a consolidated increase in support at the polls for granted.
Historically, the Argentine workers’ movement has been dominated by Peronism, a bourgeois populism which exerted a powerful influence in sections of the trade unions. The Peronist Justice Party oscillated between right-wing and repressive governments, and reforming trends associated with European-style social democracy which ensured Peronism maintained its hold on the main trade union federation, the CGT, and a large part of the working class electorate.
Fluctuations in numbers notwithstanding, the FIT-U banner has been able to attract the support of a section of the workers’ vanguard and most politically progressive parts of the social movements during election periods. This represents the embryo, or the possibility, of a turn towards class independence for Argentine workers. Therefore, the question posed to the FIT-U almost from inception, has been—how can it go beyond an electoral bloc, to becoming a force that organises the vanguard of the working class, and those breaking from Peronism, into a powerful force challenging for leadership in the class struggle beyond the ballot box?
The 2011 programme
The original 2011 programme of the FIT-U was expanded in 2019 and constitutes its fundamental basis to this day. It contains a number of immediate and transitional demands, including the expropriation of the banks and large companies under workers’ control, and culminates in the demand for a ‘government of workers and the people, achieved through the mobilisation of the exploited and oppressed’.
It remains unclear, however, how this government is to be created. Is it through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus—or by ‘mobilising massive pressure’ on the existing political system? Neither workers’ councils nor militias make an appearance. Their absence robs the programme of any indication of how a revolutionary break with the bourgeois system and its state can come about. The compromised product of an electoral bloc founded on the basis of a limited consensus, we characterised the programme as centrist at the time, and it remains so today.
As a totality, the programme represents a compromise whose common positions only accentuate the the programmatic differences between the component organisations on the trade unions, Peronism, and tactics in the unemployed movement, to take just a few notable examples. As in the domestic arena, so in the international sphere, the FIT-U organisations have taken different—or even diametrically opposed—positions on central questions. In preserving the consensus basis of the bloc, the groups have so far failed to open up these questions to discussion and clarification amongst the bloc’s supporters, instead preserving their organisational freedom of manoeuvre and polemic.
An electoral alliance
Thus the FIT-U is, in reality, an electoral alliance, and at that, one that does not carry out joint activity or campaigns. At large demonstrations, such as the two 24 hour general strikes against Milei’s ‘reforms’ in January and May 2024, the groups agree only on who will march or where their stands will be set up. There is no common activity outside of elections, which take place every two years.
This leaves the FIT-U perceptible to the masses only as a logo appended to the materials of the component organisations, and, principally, through the parliamentary work of its deputies, who have, nevertheless, achieved a high profile.
Accordingly, there is no collective and permanent political leadership. There is, equally, no means by which FIT-U voters can become active within it outside of electoral work, unless they join one of the four organisations. Inevitably, the precondition of joining one of the propaganda groups poses an insurmountable obstacle to the FIT-U fusing itself with, and drawing in, wider layers of its working class support into organised political activity, discussion and decision making—assuming an element of collective ownership over the bloc’s programme, perspectives and strategy.
This self-imposed cordon sanitaire between the political organisations and their periphery is without doubt one of the reasons why the bloc is stagnating and unable to capitalise on its support by drawing more people into activity. In the present situation of ruling class offensive, however, it is essential to develop, within the class struggle, a political party that can develop a perspective to defeat Milei and thus act as a rallying point for the millions of workers and youth seeking just such a programme.
But, unfortunately, recent years have demonstrated that the FIT-U’s has responded to this objectively posed necessity by congealing as an electoral bloc. And yet it is precisely this on this electoral terrain—the least important arena—that there is stagnation.
The 2023 programme
It flows from this that there should be a lack of progress on the programmatic level. Indeed, the 2023 election programme, “10 Points of the Left Front”, represents a political retreat from the founding programme. The ten points do address the central needs of the masses and raise demands that include an important part of an immediate programme for the working class, as well as demands directed against the exploitation of natural resources by agribusiness, oil and mining companies and the IMF.
But, unlike the founding programme, there is not a word (in a general election programme) about the all-important question of government. There is no demand for the constitution of workers’ and popular councils, let alone the organisation of self-defence against attacks by the police, or overcoming the power of the state and the establishment of a workers’ socialist republic. Even at the level of the immediate class struggle, one finds no mention of the need to form a workers’ united front against the attacks of the Milei government, let alone any demands which could be the basis for one.
Quite rightly, the four groups in the FIT-U did not limit their own electoral propaganda to the common platform, but also raised their own demands that go beyond this. All of them repeatedly advocated the perspective of a workers’ government (or a workers’ and people’s government); all propagated the necessity of large-scale mass struggles, up to and including a general strike. But—unlike in 2011—none of this was reflected in the FIT-U programme.
At the same time, the FIT-U is touted as a ‘revolutionary front’ in the election campaigns, even though it plainly does not itself advocate or embody a revolutionary programme of its own, and knows no common activity other than running for election. In our opinion, there is a deep contradiction here. On the one hand, the FIT-U attracts hundreds of thousands of workers and youth who are looking for an answer to the deep crisis in Argentina and an alternative to Peronism. But it does not offer these people a political leadership beyond the election. Nothing remains of its promise at its founding to ‘prepare workers for the task of fighting for their own government’. The four member organisations (and other competing groups) are left to do this themselves.
This means that the FIT-U falls short both of its potential and of the current tasks of the class struggle. In Argentina today we are witnessing a class confrontation that can only end in a fundamental alteration in the balance of forces, either with a deep, counter-revolutionary defeat or with a revolutionary victory. Although this struggle may be drawn out, it will not last indefinitely and, in particular, the corrosive forces of inflation and impoverishment threaten to wear down the masses sooner rather than later, even if the government is slow to implement reactionary legislation.
At this point, we must acknowledge the concrete difficulties that exist. The fact that the FIT-U still exists only as an electoral alliance is of course not simply due to the fact that everyone benefits financially from the electoral successes, but also to deep differences between the four groups. Equally, if the four organisations merely effected an organisational merger and united only as permanent factions, as the French NPA became, this would not solve those differences and transform the FIT-U into a fighting party with an operative strategy.
Nevertheless, the intensification of the class struggle demands that the forces within the FIT-U should develop a plan for taking forward the development of a revolutionary party capable of acting as the leadership of millions. The individual groups of the FIT-U, large as they are in comparison to those in similar countries, can hardly do this individually nor by a simple aggregation of their forces.
What is the means by which the FIT-U, or parts of it, can become the motive force in the development of such a party? The precondition to answering this question is to pose it in the first place; to understand that the task of creating a revolutionary leadership—a party—is a task flowing from out of today’s struggles, not tomorrow’s.
The organisations of the FIT-U
Let us now look at the three largest organisations in the FIT-U, which have roughly equal weight in the Argentine left. We will see that they differ considerably in their assessment of the situation in Argentina, their development tactics and in their policies within the FIT-U.
Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas – PTS
The PTS is probably the third largest organisation of the FIT-U in terms of numbers. It was formed in 1988 as a split from the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) founded by Nahuel Moreno (1924–1987). It is the Argentine section of the Fracción Trotskista (FT) and is also by far its largest individual section. We previously analysed its theoretical basis in 2016.
The PTS sees its policy as a break from Morenoism and a restoration of a revolutionary Trotskyist tradition. In fact, this year it has developed an action programme which sets out ten demands for Argentina. First of all, it is very commendable that, in contrast to many who consider themselves Trotskyists, it has published an up-to-date programmatic document, and this goes far beyond the election programme of the FIT-U. However, it must still be described as a centrist, not a revolutionary, programme, although it does make this claim for itself. It calls for the nationalisation of industry under workers‘ control, a monopoly of foreign trade, and a series of important democratic and social measures. But, on the question of government, it remains vague. At the end, it says:
In the face of the pacts behind the backs of the people and against the IMF regime, we defend the struggle for a free and sovereign Constituent Assembly as a democratic body to challenge all the institutions that have governed us. A more generous democracy would facilitate the struggle for a government of workers based on their own democratic organisations within the framework of the international struggle for socialism from below.
In our opinion, the slogan of the Constituent Assembly is not a central slogan for Argentina today , and certainly not one to prepare the struggle for a workers’ government through its ‘broader democracy’. On the contrary. Even though we support demands for democratic rights and, for example, the abolition of the bicameral parliament, Argentina has been an established bourgeois democracy for decades. The slogan of the Constituent Assembly does not have any decisive political power here, and we consider it to be more of a distraction from the essentials in view of the tasks ahead. Why?
Like the PTS and all other groups of the FIT-U, we consider an indefinite general strike to be essential to stop Milei’s attacks. However, unlike temporary, one-day ‘demonstration strikes’, such a strike inevitably poses the question of power. Milei’s government will try to break it, the union leaderships will try to choke it off, if they can’t prevent it. Therefore, mass assemblies, the election of strike committees, a nationwide leadership and coordination of the movement, as well as self-defence organs against police or military repression are needed, plus agitation among the soldiers for them to refuse to participate in the repression of the movement, indeed, to go over to the side of the workers.
Councils of workers’ delegates can emerge from action and strike committees, and workers’ militias from the self-defence organisations, creating a dual power situation that can that can only be resolved progressively by installing a revolutionary workers’ government; i.e. the rule of the working class. However, the necessity of the smashing of the bourgeois state, the building of workers’ or soldiers’ councils or the establishment of self-defence committees do not appear in the PTS’s ‘transitional programme’.
Another problem concerns the assessment of the situation by their last congress and the perspectives derived from it. The PTS understands the current situation as a defensive situation, in which there are favourable conditions in the coming months to strengthen itself by participating in struggles in the factories, at the universities and in the neighbourhood committees. While they are aware that the government’s attacks will continue, they do not expect there to be a decisive defeat for the working class in the near future. However, it also does not assume that it is possible to build a party that can organise the vanguard of the class and fight for leadership of it. The level of class struggle, they say is too low for that.
We consider this assessment to be wrong in two respects. On the one hand, the capitalist side is waging the struggle with extreme intensity. On the other, broadening, and intensifying even defensive struggles will tend to transform the issues into ones which pose the question of power.
The level of class struggle is actually extremely high—but nevertheless the camp of the workers and oppressed still remains far behind the requirements of the hour, for which Peronism and the trade union leaderships in particular bear political responsibility.
In this situation, in our opinion, a revolutionary force, for all the importance of partial struggles for propaganda and agitation, must stand for a generalisation of class resistance. At the individual company or sectoral level, the balance of power is more unfavourable than at the level of society as a whole, especially in a deep economic crisis, and central problems of the class such as inflation cannot be solved purely on a sectoral basis.
In accordance with its party building concept and its analysis of the situation in Argentina, the PTS sees no need to turn the FIT-U into a political regroupment project. The FIT-U hardly appears in its publications overall. If it is mentioned, it is only as an electoral front and with the aim of broadening the visibility and acceptance of general left-wing politics. This is probably also due to the fact that the PTS currently has four members of parliament and thus has great weight within the FIT-U. Opening up the FIT-U to the unorganised could jeopardise its position of power, and a concretisation of its programme could scare off parts of the more moderate voter base. This, in turn, could jeopardise the further successful development of the PTS, which is why it prefers to leave everything as it is.
Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores – MST
The largest force within the FIT-U, together with the PO, is the MST. It was formed in 1992 as a split from the Morenoite MAS. The international organisation associated with it is the Liga Internacional Socialista (LIS) / International Socialist League (ISL)
The MST is particularly strong in the private health sector and in the unemployed movement or piqueteros. A peculiarity of Argentina is that unemployed people, if they want to receive their state support, have to go to unemployed organisations and as such also participate in demonstrations. This is intended to give weight to the social movements in Argentina, also because many people are unemployed. The MST has its own unemployed organisation, Unidad Piquetera, which allows it to mobilise many thousands of people for its demonstrations. The aim is to be able to carry out agitation among the unemployed through these organisations and thus to gain contact with the most precarious strata of the working class. It also tries to intervene with these organisations in the neighbourhood committees that have formed since the crisis in Buenos Aires, often grouped around public kitchens.
The MST sees the present situation as very critical. According to it, the attacks of the Milei government are aimed at fundamentally transforming the country. This leads to polarisation within the population. Therefore, it recognises that the social forces fighting against Milei in recent months can grow into even greater confrontations with his government. In addition, the MST recognises the social movements have the potential not just to fight the government but to overthrow it.
Such an upheaval was seen In 2001–2. Under the Radical Party president Fernando de la Rúa, a mass movement of demonstrations broke out, including cacerolazos (pot banging), general strikes, factory occupations , including the imposition of workers’ control, plus unemployed workers’ road blockades. In a short period five presidents came and went, yet the absence of a workers’ political alternative enabled the Peronists to return to power and do deals with the IMF, first under Eduardo Duhalde and then Nestor Kirchner and later Christina Kirchner-Fernandez.
The MST is well aware that its own weight is not enough to lead the decisive battles. For this reason it seeks to transform the FIT-U from a purely electoral front into a collective organisation of all the fighting sectors. The MST sees the need for these activists to go beyond their separate struggles and organise politically. Peronist administrations held office for a long periods and ultimately brought corruption, inflation and cooperation with the IMF, thus preparing the ground for Milei’s election. That is why large parts of the masses are deeply disillusioned with this leadership and want to reorient themselves. Due to the already existing popularity of the FIT-U, it can thus become a rallying point for leftists and give rise to a new and united movement. In an open letter to the other organisations of the FIT-U the MST writes:
The country is facing a new stage, a stage with more social confrontations and more political disputes. The FIT-U must face this situation, not only alongside the daily struggles and in direct opposition to the government, the state governors and employers‘ associations, but also as a political alternative. More rebellious, more democratic, and more open to those who share our ideas of change to work together toward workers’ government and socialism.
To achieve this, the MST advocates that there should be an open congress of the FIT-U in which all activists from the universities, the district committees, environmental activists, women’s rights activists, left-wing intellectuals and trade unionists can participate. At such an open congress, in which thousands of people would participate, it would like to discuss democratically the future form of the FIT-U. It would like to argue at such a congress that the FIT-U opens up to a membership of individual activists, that it creates local groups and a democratically elected leadership. In this way, it is to become more rebellious and democratic and transform itself into a party in which the individual organisations are organised as currents. It proposes that the different currents agree on a draft programme and, where they cannot reach agreement, table it for debate and voting among a wider membership. We consider this approach to be sensible in principle—but it remains to be seen precisely what programme the MST itself would propose.
But in addition to the ‘left’ or the ‘revolutionaries’, we believe that a proposal must also be aimed at the various trade union federations, especially the 7 million strong Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), as well as to the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA), and the smaller federations to break all their links with the bourgeois parties, particularly the historic ties to the Peronists (PJ) and begin the formation of an Argentine workers’ party around an action programme for defeating and bringing down Milei. Linked to this must be support for a movement of rank and file members within the big federations’ to break the stranglehold of the corrupt and dictatorial union bureaucracy.
Partido Obrero – PO
The Partido Obrero is the the only one of the four groups of the FIT-U not to result from a split in from Nahuel Moreno’s MAS. It was founded in 1964, around the Journal Politica Obrera and its historic leader Jorge Altamira, though in 2019 it split with him. It assesses the situation in Argentina in such a way that the current government will either end in a decisive defeat for the working class or it will manage to overthrow the government and open a path to solving the crisis in their interest.
Like the MST, the PO also has a piquetero organisation under its leadership. It bears the name Polo Obrero. It believes that the piqueteros, which emerged from the popular uprisings of 2001, have played a pioneering role in the struggles of this millennium. Polo Obrero is one of the largest piquetero organisations in Argentina and is therefore also affected by strong repression by the government, which the PO describes as the most violent attack against its party in its history. This refers to over 120 state raids on soup kitchens across the country and the political persecution of piquetero activists.
Programmatically, the PO outlines some demands in its political declaration, which it published on 3 July 2024. Among other things, it calls for a halt to cooperation with the IMF and debt payments. The banking system and foreign trade should be nationalised and the entire economy be placed under the control of the workers. This is to be accompanied by an increase in wages and pensions and their indexation to inflation. The establishment of a workers’ government and the expropriation of factories without compensation are also mentioned. To achieve this, a general strike needs to be organised.
However, the programmatic part of the text is extremely short and does not mention the same crucial questions that we have already mentioned above with regard to the PTS. In its action programme of 23 July 2023, it briefly formulated its understanding of a workers’ state. It is to be a state of a new type and consist of representatives of the class who can be elected and recalled, who form the government. In the new state, the bourgeois organs of repression are to be replaced by workers’ militias. Judges and public prosecutors are also to be elected. These are all important points, but they are more of a maximum demand than a battle plan for how to become active for such a government in the here and now.
In order to organise a general strike, the various organisations of the PO, and the PO itself, should regroup activists, agitate among them and fight with them for the most important demands of the day. The aim is to show the workers the treacherous role of Peronism. Local meetings of trade union activists, neighbourhood assemblies and youth meetings are intended to help recruit new activists for the party and increase its influence in these sectors.
However, there is no call in the recent PO congress documents to join forces with the other organisations within the FIT-U for these demands. It is striking that the FIT-U is actually not even mentioned in the Declaration, nor in its action programme or its ‘Tasks and Conclusions of the 29th Congress of the PO’. Nor is there any mention of the united front tactics to be directed against the bureaucracies of the CGT and the CTA. The PO therefore has no tactics at all for breaking the working class away from Peronism and uniting it. But this would be absolutely essential if the PO really wants to overthrow the government within Milei’s term of office, unless it thinks it can do so entirely on its own.
Perspectives for the struggle
Like the MST, we believe that the FIT-U should be opened up to membership by class-struggle trade unionists, social activists and anti-capitalist youth. Local groups and a permanent leadership must be formed to plan and execute the activities of FIT-U. In addition, the debate on a new programme should be started immediately. A large public congress, as demanded by the MST, can be the start of such a development. In this way, the FIT-U can transform itself from a pure electoral front into a new workers’ party that can actually offer a perspective to the impoverished masses. Such a political force could also actually challenge the Peronist trade union leaders and force them into a united front by appealing to their membership. Only in this way can the entire class be drawn into the struggle and left forces become the leadership of the working class.
The economic crisis and coming attacks will certainly set even more people in motion in the coming months. So the possibility for such a development is currently there. But, if the defeats become too heavy, then the hope and thus the fighting power of the working class will be broken. So there is no time to lose.
All leftists and revolutionaries must be aware that it is not enough to keep fending off Milei’s individual attacks. His government is waging an undisguised class war from above. If he can continue to implement his programme, his model threatens to destroy not only the lives of the Argentine working class, but also those in other countries. That’s why it must be the task not only to fend off the attacks, but to get themselves out of a defensive posture. In other words, the demands for the nationalisation of certain sectors under workers‘ control, as well as the expropriation without compensation of companies that are closed or are planning mass redundancies, which the FIT-U is raising, are correct. However, they can only be successfully implemented if the groups involved decide to launch joint campaigns with the aim of getting the unions moving and ultimately overthrowing the Milei government.
Ultimately, only an all out and indefinite general strike can stop the government’s attacks. At the same time, however, that would pose the question of power in society as a whole—whether a bourgeois government should continue to exercise power or a workers’ government based on the fighting organs of the general strike, arming the workers and smashing the repressive apparatus, relying in the army on soldiers’ councils that oppose the officer corps. Such a workers’ government would not only have to revoke Milei’s bills, but also implement an emergency programme against inflation, poverty and to reorganise the economy in the interests of the masses.
But a socialist revolution also needs a revolutionary workers‘ party. The FIT-U faces the challenge of laying the foundations of one in the here and now, otherwise the victory of an extreme counter-revolution threatens. But this also means that it must cease to exist as a mere electoral front. Rather, it must become a party based on a revolutionary programme of action, in which all trade unionists, piqueteros, and all other activists of social movements who want to fight for such a programme can become members.
Endnotes
(1) https://www.ft-ci.org/Programmatic-declaration-of-the-Workers-Left-Front
(2) Ibid
(3) Christian Gebhardt, Argentina: What’s Next for the Radical Left?
https://arbeitermacht.de/infomail/711/argentinien.htm
(4) https://www.frentedeizquierda.org.ar/landing/programa.html
(5) Christian Gebhardt, Orthodox Trotskyism or Workerist Maximalism? https://arbeiterinnenmacht.de/2018/04/03/orthodoxer-trotzkismus-oder-workeristischer-maximalismus/
(6) 10 points to unite working people, youth and women against militude and plundering of economic power
https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/spip.php?page=gacetilla-articulo&id_article=252046
(7) https://lis-isl.org/en/2023/12/14/argentina-desafios-de-la-izquierda-ante-una-nueva-etapa-politica/
(7) https://po.org.ar/declaraciones/a-los-trabajadores-y-al-pueblo/
(8) https://prensaobrera.com/politicas/las-tareas-y-conclusiones-del-xxix-congreso-del-partido-obrero
