The Paris Commune lives - in Argentina!
Olivier Besancenot and François Ollivier reported from Buenos Aires for Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International, in early February.
Every day Argentina slides further into crisis. Industrial production fell by 20% in December. Tens of thousands of people are falling into poverty every day: official bodies believe that more than 15 million can now be classified as poor, five million of them in extreme poverty.
Layoffs multiply across the industrial sector. Economic paralysis is spreading little by little across a country that seems to be disintegrating.
On Monday and Tuesday February 4-5, the banks were closed again. The closure was the direct consequence of a new phase of the political crisis in the country: on Friday February 1, the Supreme Court of Justice had declared the ‘corralito’ plan1 unconstitutional.
The court is made up of corrupt judges and politicians linked to the ultra neoliberal faction of Carlos Menem2.Threatened with dissolution by the government, it sought thus to revive the political crisis. These divisions at the highest level of the state summit are one of the manifestations of the acute crisis Argentina is experiencing.
The institutions have not collapsed, the state is still there and if the army cannot intervene at this stage it remains intact. However, the dominant classes are worried. The gangrene of corruption is such that after the fall of two governments and prior to a probable dissolution of the Supreme Court of Justice, the whole edifice seems rotten through and through.
Their worries are reinforced by the combined crisis of the two big traditional parties (the Peronist Justicialist party and the Radical Party) and by the emergence of a vast movement of mass self-organization throughout society against politicians, government and state.
The emergence of popular assemblies in the capital, Buenos Aires, and now across the whole county is the major phenomenon of recent weeks. This process is only at its beginning, but since the insurrectional days of December 19-20, the social mobilization has broadened incessantly.
The entire society is on the move, all social and political questions have become questions of everyday life. The process of the setting up of popular assemblies in the neighborhoods spreads and generalises: today, there are more than a hundred across the country.
What is at stake is opposing the generalized corruption of the state institutions and the trade union bureaucracy with another legitimacy: a democratic legitimacy through which the citizens recover their rights and their votes that have been confiscated by the corrupt politicians and trades unionists.
In these assemblies people refer to themselves as vecinos, ‘neighbours’. Some sociologists and observers point out the similarities with the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871.
Very quickly, urgent questions are posed: how to help the hardest hit, the children, the unemployed the poorest? How to settle the emergency food problems? How to oblige the pharmaceutical firms to provide medicines to the hospitals?
One of the weaknesses of this movement resides in the fact that it is not yet present in the workplaces: the Argentine working class – once one of the most powerful in Latin America – has crumbled under the blows of neoliberalism (more than 30% unemployment).
Still, a number of workers (employed or not) participate in the assemblies as vecinos besides middle class sectors. Already contacts are being built with the trade unions in the front line against layoffs (notably in the rail sector), and with the piqueteros..
The coordination of these structures of self-organization will be decisive. The movement is spreading already to the most popular neighborhoods of greater Buenos Aires and to the provinces.
The assemblies consist of about 100-200 people per neighborhood; in the best-mobilized areas, they break up into smaller groups when they reach several hundred. Beyond the vital questions, they structure themselves in groups or commissions (organization, relations with the media, preparation of the next caceroleos ..
An ‘assembly of assemblies’ coordinates the assemblies of Buenos Aires every Sunday at the Centenario park: nearly 4,000 people attended the coordination of Sunday February 3. A veritable social vanguard of several tens of thousands of people is coming into being, involving new generations but also the remobilization of thousands of revolutionary militants or ex-militants.
This socio-political vanguard is also beginning more generalized discussions on emergency measures to meet the crisis: nationalization of the banks, reintegration of the privatized enterprises in the public sector, cancellation of the debt, payment of wages and pensions and so on. Finally, these assemblies have often demonstrated their support for the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre.
1. This plan imposes a limit on bank withdrawals. 2. Former Argentine president (Peronist).