>
> Johannes Schneider asked me:
>
> "- What is in general the relationship of the piqueteros to the workers'
> movement as a whole? To see them being courted by both the ultra-leftists
> and the Blairite unions seems to be contradictory to me."
>
> To begin with, please don´t take my shorthand definitions to the letter.
> The workers movement in Argentina, today, is a complex thing, which in
fact
> simply reflects the exasperation of divisions within the working class as
a
> result of 25 years of reaction.
>
> The main rift that has been introduced here is the rift between basically
> petty bourgeois unions (teachers, state employees, journalists, and so on)
> and more working class unions (automotive, metallurgy, transportation).
> This rift is important in the sense that it is reflecting a POLITICAL
> division, which is the result of a setback for the wage earning petty
> bourgeoisie (a very specific trait in the Argentinean social formation) in
> their consciousness of the world and their feeling that they belong to a
> bloc that can only be unified by the working class in the most strict
sense
> of producers of value through material transformation of raw matter. This
> crack is a consequence of the ideological and political setback that came
> after the destruction of the working class such as it had existed between
> 1945 and, say, 1985, through a series of blows the first of which had been
> the 1976 coup.
>
> The Argentinean petty bourgeoisie responded to all this by partially
> relapsing into its old prejudices against the darker skinned, less
European
> so to say, working class. These prejudices came to the fore in the form of
> a deep distrust of union leaders (even their own union leaders) and
> individualism. Thus, the petty bourgeois unions of teachers and state
> employees broke the unity of the CGT to constitute the CTA, in a painful
> and somehow sad process. Of course, not few of the criticisms that the
wage
> earning petty bourgeoisie makes against the "traditional" union leaders
are
> reasonable, but the step to break the unity of the working class was a bad
> step. The consequences have been a continuous social-democratization of
the
> CTA, which even tends to depend from foreign subsidies for some
> developments, and has even been on the line with the Alianza government
> through a mild support of Alvarez.
>
> In this sense, they look for the piqueteros as an ALTERNATIVE form of
> organization that may help substitute the "classical" working class.
>
> The ultra left formations, on their own side, just reproduce those petty
> bourgeois positions and, once elliminated the thin veil that covers them,
> show anti-working class positions much on the line of the 1945 Unión
> Democrática. In the end, these people believe that Peronism has been a
> great mistake, and will always work in order to send this experience of
our
> masses into oblivion. Thus, whenever they see a "new" form of working
class
> organization that DOES NOT depend on the mobilisations by the union
> leaders, they immediately jump to them as if they were the final solution
> to the curse of Peronism.
>
> What is the relationship of the piqueteros to the working class? Well,
most
> of them are fractions of the working class that have been left jobless.
> Many of them are children of working class families such as the one
> depicted in "Mundo Grúa", with no future but to die of hunger, become
> thieves or beggars. Others are workers who have been recently left jobless
> by the privatization of our national oilfields (Tartagal and Cutral Có /
> Plaza Huincul, two of the main centers for piquetero action, were former
> oil cities, where the influence of the national oil company gave good
> levels of living to the residents), and whose anger is best expressed
> through road blocks.
>
> But their positions cannot organize the whole class towards power, in the
> same way that a series of general strikes does not substitute proletarian
> consciousness and hegemony building. In a sense, the road blocks are just
> the only strikes available in a country where production is dying away and
> you have only circulation as the main economic activity. Blocking a road
is
> more or less the same thing as putting a branch of production to a halt.
>
> You can get some advantage (generally under the shape of State subsidies),
> but you will not go to revolution by merely blocking roads. This is the
> basic issue.
>
> Néstor M. Gorojovsky
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