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I recently participated in a thread, with friends whose names is not necessary to disclose, on Kirchner. It made me pour out a number of things which I think are useful. I have other comments on Gorojovsky’s turgid lies and cavillations, but I don’t have time to put them up now. But, just to counter the “now is not the time to talk about Kirchner’s “mistakes””, I wanted to post this. There was also another Argentine friend who was in the discussion, who I call ‘G’. LK: The question is, where did that change come from? Kirchner's personal qualities? Or the masses of people who came out in 2001 to put a stop to the counterrevolution of the 80's and 90's -as a reaction to the world revolutionary wave from the late 60's to the mid 70's? And in that case, where did those masses come from but, just as in Venezuela and other countries in Latin America, from their social being as members of the excess layers of population (relative surplus population, to use Marx's term) expulsed during these decades by capital itself? And since then, what has the Kirchner couple, who worked with the ex-president Carlos Menem -one of the prime agents of said counterrevolution- represented? A continuation of this process, or rather, something more like its Peronist containment, a perpetuation of the form of accumulation in Argentina and other countries which condemns the masses to toil and suffering for a lost cause, i.e. developmentalism, while particularly imposing on the workers the same kind of labor flexibilization which expresses how this form of accumulation preconditions the trend for the working class to consistently sell its labor-power below its value? Which, as a corollary, means a continuation of the Peronist, under its various strands, union busting and repression of workers struggles as it was clearly manifested when the workers of the Kraft company were confronted with bullets by gendarmes. The way I see it what the Kirchners represent is a recuperation on very feeble bases, such as the sporadic rise in soy prices, and now that Kirchner is dead there will be an intense internal struggle, particularly involving the union bureaucracy which the Kirchners have had to ally with very strongly, which will determine whether this containment will take a more repressive form. This week also had the death of a 23 year-old militant of the Partido Obrero, Mariano Ferreyra, at the hands of the railroad union hooligans. With the conditions set by the world crisis, which the government connivingly claims it has “superseded”, this will be hardly a hopeful prospect…in that case, the Kirchners’ torch will have been nothing but a prelude to a vicious attack of the ruling classes. G: I completely agree with Leonardo. Just a week ago, a young, 23-year-old Trotskyist, Mariano Ferreyra was murdered by a squad of the railway union bureaucracy and the Peronist Party. This bureaucracy is beyond any doubt fostered by the Kirchners (especially by the late Néstor). Scores of Kirchnerites slandered and viciously attacked the memory of Mariano, a revolutionary student who was fighting against labor casualisation in the railways. What a difference with Néstor Kirchner, someone who had made a fortune out of swindling poor people as a lawyer with the aid of the Military during the last dictatorship, and someone that secured bourgeois rule after the crisis of 2001. Néstor Kirchner's talk on "human rights" was a sham, as it was shown by the way his government did all in its power to secure impunity for those who kidnapped Julio López, a witness against the military butchers. I could go on and on telling more about him like this, but all I want to say is that Mariano Ferreyra is one of our martyrs; while we should definitely count Néstor Kirchner as someone from the ruling class. With respect, greetings from Argentina G: When the Kirchners supposedly took an anti-IMF stance, they didn't repudiate and cancel paying the foreign debt. Quite the contrary, they paid it off in full to different international financial institutions! They said that in this way they would avoid any further conditioning by these institutions... However, Argentina is indeed heavily burdened -more than before the Kirchners, not less- since their motto is "a sovereign return to the international capital markets". As a result, by now while soy prices are still soaring, as Leonardo says, they don't need to resort to structural adjustment plans as would be needed by such payoffs [my add: but Cristina has been looking for loans desperately, as her invitation of and meeting with Hillary Clinton shows]. What they do instead is keeping a strongly devalued currency (unlike the 1990s, when the Argentinean peso was pegged to the US dollar) to boost exports, while keeping the price of the labor force cheap, by the same levels of the neoliberal 1990s. So that's why they need labor casualisation, and a rotten trade union bureaucracy to secure it, like the one that murdered a young Trotskyist on the 20th of October. My last point: the Argentinean working class suffered defeat after defeat from 1976 to 2001, as a price for the hegemony of Peronism, but particularly due to the perfidious role of the Peronist Left in the revolutionary rehearsal of 1969-1976. The upheaval of December 2001 changed the relation of forces in favor of the masses, but at that point, there couldn't have been a revolutionary alternative. Since 2001 favorable conditions have developed to build a strong revolutionary left inside the labor movement, as one can see in many factories like Zanon Ceramics, Kraft Foods and many others where comrades of mine play a vital role, in what is called "rank-and-file trade unionism", still a small and somewhat heterogeneous trend but a very dynamic one, much feared by the trade union bosses that Néstor used to cherish so much. The change in the relations of force seriously damaged normal bourgeois rule. The role of the Kirchners so far has been to try to close that crisis of bourgeois legitimacy to prevent the emergence of a new revolutionary crisis. The bourgeoisie was indeed lacking of cadres with such skills in 2001-2003, there were no serious options. The Kirchners tried to fill that vacuum, strongly aided by the great economic recovery starting in 2004 and now seriously challenged by the international crisis. So that's why we shouldn't praise such qualities. LK: Juan Kornblihtt from the group RazonyRevolucion (Andrew Kliman participated in debates organized by them just last year) dealing with some of the false appearances originated in the fight over the foreign debt repayment within the main bourgeois factions, the usual oligarchic-agrarian groups vs the pseudo-populist fake industrialist ones. I translated that here http://www.ceics.org.ar/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=142%3Athe-debt-is-not-the-problem&catid=65%3Aargentine-economy&Itemid=78 As soon as default was declared with respect to the IMF debt, which did not mean that the government stopped paying it, but that it ‘momentarily’ broke relations with it through an exchange in the rates of the debt due to the devaluation of the peso, (a significant part of which was facilitated by funds coming from Venezuela), repayment plans were reorganized and stepped up with the Paris Club and the World Bank. However, this also had to do with restructuring going on inside the IMF itself, which once stabilized marked the rapprochement with the government, whereupon Boudou –the new minister of economy- had a number of “friendly” meetings with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Concomitantly operations with vulture funds rose up. At any rate, the question here is much larger, the question as pointed out by G is the expansion of the debt since 2001, and I dare say, the origins of Argentine capitalism itself. For proof of this I refer to the work of Juan Iñigo Carrera in a book where he traces the movement of this debt since the 1800s. To make a long story short, foreign debt has always been a source of compensation for the lack of productivity of Argentine ‘scrap’ industrial capitals, and in fact, through the past 4 or 5 decades it has represented a net inflow of social wealth -calculated by Iñigo- of about 20 billion dollars. This is the expression of the role of the Argentine state as the main mechanism of transfer of subsidies to these industrial capitals which do not have the capacity to compete in the world market, subsidies which are necessary due to the form of accumulation itself, an accumulation whose base is pinned to the circulation of differential ground rent from agricultural production. The other leg for this compensation has been increasingly, as I mentioned above, the paying of labor-power below its value, allowing only a decreasing minority of the labor force to reproduce normally. All of this is explained in more detail in Iñigo’s essay which came out a couple of years ago in Historical Materialism and can be seen here http://www.cicpint.org/jinigo/articulos/argentina/articulo%20HM.pdf I’d like to quote the conclusion, though, “Kirchner has been the Peronist governor of Santa Cruz Province since 1991. What form of capital accumulation does he represent? After the acute contraction of the national process of capital accumulation in 2002, the new phase of expansion without the possibility of receiving fresh funds from foreign creditors is taking a renewed populist shape: the assertion of national sovereignty, a discount on the defaulted foreign debt, import substitution, widespread support for the indigent unemployed, and the like. Of course, the real basis for this lies, firstly, in the further fall of wages below the value of labour-power and, secondly, in a fortunate rise of agricultural and oil ground rent. The Argentine economy has surged forwards on this renewed basis, growing almost 9% in physical terms both in 2003 and 2004. In so doing, GDP has returned to the level it was in 1999, which was by no means a glorious year but the starting point of the previous contraction and crisis. Yet, Kirchner enjoys high rates of popularity after a year and a half in office. Now, Kirchner HAS ASKED THE PERONIST UNIONS TO TAKE TO THE STREETS IN ORDER TO STOP THE MORE COMBATIVE PIQUETEROS. … The mutilation suffered by the historical powers of the Argentine working class is immediately reflected in the leading role played by the unions within its political organisation. The fulfilment by the working class of its generic powers would have demanded independent political action. That is to say, an action able to impose itself over and above the conditions corresponding to the immediate reproduction of labour-power and, hence, over and above trade-union action. Conversely, the sterilisation of those generic powers has taken concrete shape through the subordination of the independent political action of the working class to its immediate reproduction under the specific form of the national process of capital accumulation. In other words, it has subordinated working class political action to trade-union action. Nevertheless, the historical powers of capital accumulation provide the Argentine working class with a specific POSSIBILITY TO REVERSE THE PRESENT STATE of affairs, thereby halting its accelerated transition into the labouring surplus population. It is a question of the Argentine working class consciously regaining its generic historical powers by personifying the development of the material productive forces of society. This is not an abstract potentiality, let alone one that arises from the abstract consciousness of the working class. On the contrary, it arises from the consciousness of the Argentine working class being determined as an attribute of capital. Concretely, it is about overcoming the strength that Argentine capital accumulation obtains from freeing itself of its historical role in the development of society’s productive forces. It is to be achieved by imposing upon it the overwhelming strength that capital accumulation gains from accomplishing its historical role. A strength that, in the Argentine case, becomes specifically stressed by the magnitude of the extraordinary influx of surplus-value through differential agricultural and energy-sources’ ground rent. The transformation of ground rent into capital able to actively participate in the development of productive forces by acting as a normal productive capital located in Argentina, requires its CONCENTRATION ON A SCALE NECESSARY in order to compete on the world market. In turn, achieving this scale demands nothing less than the CENTRALISATION OF CAPITAL AS A DIRECT SOCIAL PROPERTY WITHIN ARGENTINA. Therefore, the transformation in question could only take the concrete political form of the abolition of the capitalist and landowner classes within the country. In other words, it could only be performed through a SOCIAL REVOLUTION in which the working class, whose surplus labour would feed the concentrated capital, transforms itself into the collective owner of this capital under the political form of state capital. By reproducing its specific form, the national process of capital accumulation reproduces only a diminishing part of the Argentine working class as an actively employed working class that is able to reproduce its labour-power. Nowadays, the transformation of ground rent into concentrated capital has become AN IMMEDIATE CONDITION FOR REGAINING THE NORMAL REPRODUCTION OF THE ARGENTINE WORKING CLASS. Thus, its INDEPENDENT POLITICAL ACTION HAS DEVELOPED A NEW BASIS TO IMPOSE ITSELF ON UNION ACTION. If even the thus-concentrated capital were unable to reach the scale needed to compete on the world market, only one further alternative would remain for the Argentine working class to take part actively in the development of the material productive forces of society. Namely, to integrate its immediate political action with that of the working classes of neighbouring countries in order to form an expanded domestic space for capital accumulation within which the centralisation in question could fit. Only when the Argentine working class starts to move in these directions will it be truly possible to claim that everything has changed in Argentina” LK: Politics isn’t made by Menem, or Kirchner, nor Videla, it is made by capital.I don’t think the moral qualities, or in some cases, deformations, of these figures, are the relevant question here. And I would even go further, from my more personal perspective, the Argentine bourgeoisie have expressed the ideological personification as functionaries of capital rather crudely throughout history. Populism is not based on the capacities of a certain figure to concentrate the will of the Argentine people; for that matter, Menem began in a far more popular position than Kirchner, and Peron outdid any of them by a long shot. But Peron created the Triple A, because when the conditions of his popularity stumbled, which was but the outward expression of the needs of accumulation, the class struggle came to the fore, and it was this (and still is) that Peron, as any other bourgeois representative, react against. Cristina Kirchner is not the reincarnation of Isabel Peron, but she is not her reincarnation because the actual conditions are not a reincarnation of the 70s conditions. That, however, doesn’t preclude the Kirchners from expressing the need for Peronism to use the same methods of those times when necessary. For instance, by having to closely ally with Hugo Moyano, the secretary general of the CGT, who was in those times a secretary of the Mar del Plata section and a member of the Juventud Sindical Peronista, which they have recently relaunched, which in those times was one of the many arms of the repressive apparatus, helping the dictatorship to identify and “neutralize” combative workers and revolutionaries. The IMF’s (and other groups and banks like Barclays) claws are still clutching the economy and the debt is still growing, and, rather perversely, the better the state can hoard reserves from differential ground rent and other sources such as the pension funds –while denying retired people, a large majority of whom live below poverty levels, any redress-, the more it has to give them away to international finance. There is a chart in Iñigo’s book which shows how, in almost unbelievable fashion, the state paid the most debt and nationalized the most capitals in times when it appropriated (through different forms of collection, retentions and currency exchange rate devaluations being the preponderant ones) this ground rent the most, having its all time high during the rise of Peron. This means, in other words, that these fiery “independentist” figures rose as a need for national industrial capitals, and foreign capitals installed in Argentina, which operated on a scale limited by the domestic market, to act as instruments for the recuperation of the ground rent by the countries where it came from, the countries where industrial production is geared toward active participation in the world market. In short, these political characters, have acted as mechanisms of transfer of social wealth which did not significantly change between protectionist vs neoliberal phases, the essential form of accumulation remained the same. As Juan Kornblihtt’s note says “Although she (Cristina Kirchner) replaced every vestige of Keynesianism with the most long-established elements of neoliberal orthodoxy (Minister [Amado] Boudou comes out of the bowels of CEMA [University], while the now-repudiated Martín Redrado and his successor, Mario Blejer, have an even worse lineage), this was not sufficient to induce the international banks, which are not satisfied with mere symbolism, to lend money. Despite all the gestures (or self-abasements, to be more precise), the primary problem with Cristina’s plan to become Menem is that it ran into the financial crisis and the credit crunch.” So, once more, the temporary break with the IMF might have been an important institutional change (I think, however, that this had a lot to do with changes within world finance itself, but I’m hardly an expert) but not a real change for people. And I’m not saying this out of an ultra-leftist desire to criticize abstractly. As Iñigo says, quoting Marx himself, the consciousness and will of workers are ruled as attributes of capital, the axis of conscious political action (as embodied in the critique of political economy) lies in the potentiality inherent in the specific historical conditions established by capital to give rise to a scientific consciousness which advances in its freedom by recognizing itself as alienated in capital. Concretely, it is about acting within capital as representatives of its own inherent revolutionary tendencies, vis a vis, its own supersession, which lies most concretely in “the mutation of the productive attributes of the collective labourer according to a determinate tendency: the individual organs of the latter eventually become *universal productive subjects*. This is the inner material determination underlying the political revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat”, [‘The system of machinery and the social and material determinations of revolutionary subjectivity in the Grundrisse and Capital’, Guido Starosta.] In this regard, the conscious and patient work of the revolutionary left in Argentina is steadily advancing. Unfortunately, that implies the reaction by the ruling classes, at this juncture, in a more decrepit and decaying Peronism. LK: I have also translated a few relevant pieces here http://www.ceics.org.ar/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=34&Itemid=78 There’s the article of Iñigo which I mentioned above but also this other important essay by Iñigo which appeared in International Working Group on Value Theory (IWGVT). www.iwgvt.org/files/03Inigo.doc There’s more material from Iñigo in www.cicpint.org , but only in Spanish I’m afraid, and I think you’d be really interested in the piece by Starosta which appears here http://www.cicpint.org/cicp/congreso%20marx%20int/cmiv.html Other than that, unfortunately, I don’t think I have more relevant material in English…from a Marxist perspective :-) I do not think Peronism is in the ascendant, but that it’s rather going in the direction of a turgid death, a whimperish bang, if you will. There is a crisis of hegemony for Peronism because the fuel that made it run, ground rent, can cover up the holes no longer, at the same time this makes the class struggle more crystalline, mainly within the workers movement, between those sectors who are sustained by the crumbling CGT structure and the other large majority of workers who are left out in miserable “informal” conditions. But to get the political meaning of these battles, one must look at a larger picture than that offered by the workers movement itself. One must look at the ‘piquetero’ (unemployed) movement, at the layers of population who have been expelled by the Argentine “chatarra” (junk) industry through the 80’s and 90’s but even before that. And, in this respect, this is a common thread throughout Latin America. In other words, what is called neoliberalism, represented the necessary movement that ensues from the break-up in the division of labor by increasingly polarizing fractions of the world working class between those whose scientific capacities have become a prerequisite for concentrated, intensive, capital accumulation and those who have been forsaken as mere appendices of machinery, their human potentialities thus being scraped and mutilated. And what this begot was the crisis in the means of institutionalization of the working class by capital, and I think this is what the world crisis, particularly in Argentina, will bring sharply to the fore. The crisis will preclude any means of co-optation of the combative sectors of society, the “large” working class so to speak, which is reflected for example by the regime of labor flexibilization which has only worsened in the Kirchner period. As we all know, the greatest revolution of all time did not emerge out of an ordered and powerfully organized workers movement, i.e. the German SPD, but from an initially fragmentary organization which was able to add other layers of de-instititutionalized masses, the Bolsheviks. The group Razon y Revolucion has been studying these conditions intensively, particularly the work of Marina Kabat is excellent, you can see articles in Spanish here http://www.razonyrevolucion.org/ryr/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=104&Itemid=99&limitstart=31 , I translated an essay by Marina which is a sort of synthesis of these elements here http://www.ceics.org.ar/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149%3Athe-relative-overpopulation-the-least-known-aspect-of-the-marxist-conception-of-the-working-class&catid=65%3Aargentine-economy&Itemid=78 So will Moyano be able to “transcend” these determinations?, certainly not, but will he represent the forces of reaction, i.e. the bourgeois infiltration in the workers movement, certainly yes. I’m not afraid of Moyano, perhaps I phrased some of my comments with exaggeration which gave this impression; what I meant is that the fact that Moyano has become the right arm of the Kirchners implies the intensification of the contradictions in this crisis of hegemony. And, for me, the death of Mariano Ferreyra, who was a leading militant in student organizations and grassroots union struggles, and already at 14 years of age participated in what’s called the Argentinazo, the battles of 2001, and was even present in the same location where two young lads were murdered, Kosteki and Santillan, who the piquetero movement took as their martyrs, represents, in this respect, a landmark of the struggle of the Argentine working class. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
