CEHuS Centro de Estudios Humanos y Sociales Nahuel Moreno Argentina, a country in crisis Nahuel Moreno Argentina, a country in crisis 1964 Taken from Editorial Estrategia, Palabra Obrera, April 1964 English translation: Patricia Parola, Daniel Iglesias Editor notes: Daniel Iglesias Cover and interior design: Daniel Iglesias www.nahuelmoreno.org www.uit-ci.org www.izquierdasocialista.org.ar Copyright by CEHuS , Centro de Estudios Humanos y Sociales Buenos Aires, 2020 [email protected] CEHuS Centro de Estudios Humanos y Sociales Contents Foreword ..................................................................................................... 1 Palabra Obrera and the entryism to Peronism ............................................................................2 Argentina, a country in crisis Introduction ................................................................................................ 6 First section The crisis after the 7 July elections I. Result of the elections ............................................................................................................8 II. UCRP perspective on government ..........................................................................................8 III. The country’s perspectives .................................................................................................10 IV. Perspectives of the Peronist movement...............................................................................10 V. Perspectives of the workers’ movement ...............................................................................10 Second section Only the single party of the Argentinian revolution will overcome the crisis Introduction .............................................................................................. 11 Chapter 1 Decline and crisis of the country .................... 13 The economic crisis ................................................................................................................15 Neither the government nor the bosses can solve the crisis in favour of the workers ................16 The political crisis of the exploiters ..........................................................................................18 The bourgeois opposition to the government ..........................................................................19 Editorial CEHuS Page 1 Chapter 2 The crisis of the workers’ and popular movement ........................................................ 21 The first crisis and overcoming it .............................................................................................22 The second crisis leads to a new stage .....................................................................................23 The third crisis and its overcoming ..........................................................................................24 In the fourth stage, a new leadership saves the previous achievements ....................................26 Perspectives of the current crisis .............................................................................................27 Chapter 3 Immediate tasks of the activists ..................... 29 Not to lose one more conflict ..................................................................................................29 Let’s fight for the internal commissions and delegates commitees and not for union leadership .. 31 The fight for the collective agreements ...................................................................................34 Let us support the CGT’s plan of struggle by demanding a Grassroots National Congress ..........34 The armed struggle and the working-class struggle .................................................................35 Bourgeois Democracy and Workers’ Democracy .......................................................................36 Let us demand a Constituent Assembly from the government ..................................................36 Solidarity with the Cuban and Latin American Revolution ........................................................37 Chapter 4 Towards the Single Party of the Argentinian Revolution ........................................................ 38 The union bureaucracy and the Peronist movement leaders.....................................................38 The Argentinian Communist Party ...........................................................................................39 The Peronist left .....................................................................................................................39 The sects ................................................................................................................................40 Palabra Obrera ........................................................................................................................42 The Revolutionary United Front ...............................................................................................43 The United Front and the workers’ vanguard ...........................................................................43 The students’ movement .........................................................................................................44 Use of the elections ................................................................................................................45 From the United Front to the United Revolutionary Party .........................................................45 Page II www.nahuelmoreno.org Third section Editorials from Palabra Obrera The CGT struggle plan, the trigger for a new social crisis ......................... 47 The mechanism of a bomb ......................................................................................................47 Picturesque explanations ........................................................................................................48 Substantive reasons ................................................................................................................48 The plan of struggle ................................................................................................................49 The shambles begin ................................................................................................................49 The new social crisis ...............................................................................................................49 The end of picturesque explanations .......................................................................................49 The authentic workers’ leaders ................................................................................................50 Let’s use the truce, to prepare for the fight .............................................. 50 The deferral serves us well ......................................................................................................51 The politics of “good” Illia .......................................................................................................51 Integration disintegrates .........................................................................................................52 The heroes of the industrial recovery.......................................................................................52 The theoreticians of terror .......................................................................................................53 From the small to the big struggle ...........................................................................................53 Editorial CEHuS Page III Foreword Mercedes Petit 1 In July 1963 the People’s Radical Civic Union (UCRP) won the election with 25 per cent of the votes. At the end of that month, Doctor Arturo U. Illia took up office. Peronism had achieved electoral status with a new party, Union Popular (People’s Union – UP). Some political sectors considered it was time to open channels to legalise the followers of the “fugitive tyrant” as the gorillas called the defeated former president Peron, exiled in Madrid. A front was being formed UP, Frondizi’s Intransigent Radical Civic Union (UCRI), Christian Democracy, and Popular Conservative and others. In February of that year, the Catholic Church had publicly lifted the ex-communication to former president Juan Domingo Peron. In May, the ticket Vicente Solano Lima (Popular Conservative) – Sylvestre Begnis (UCRI) was proclaimed. A few days before the election, Solano Lima’s candidacy was vetoed, as he looked like a possible winner. Hours before the opening of the polls, the Front called for a blank vote. At the time, Nahuel Moreno headed the Trotskyist organisation Palabra Obrera (Workers’ Word), which had rejected the negotiations between Peron (exiled in Madrid) and Frondizi (confined to Bariloche) that led to the frustrated Solano Lima’s candidacy and campaigned for a blank vote. A few days after that Sunday 7 July, Moreno wrote a short text on the new situation. In November, he presented an extensive oral report at a national plenum. In it, he analysed the crisis of the country, the different stages of struggle of the workers’ movement, the central characteristics of the new government of the UCRP, also the proposals to respond to the incipient recovery of the workers after the defeat of 1959 and to advance towards a revolutionary and socialist solution. 1 Mercedes Petit is a Trotskyist militant, a journalist, and a researcher. In the 1960s, she joined the current headed by Nahuel Moreno