En relaci�n a [PEN-L:1549] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen,
el 10 Sep 00, a las 3:37, Rob Schaap dijo:
> Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence,
> largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's
> government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve
> as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests.
This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed.
Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country
and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely
known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a
Fascist South American overgrowth that remained alive for a decade
after Nazism was swept away from Europe was in fact a domestic
version of a Labour government in Australia. In fact, one of the
parties on which Per�n built his initial electoral victory in 1946
was the Argentinian Labour party, a party based on the workers of the
La Plata city foreign owned meat packing and slaughterhouse
industries.
Failure, however, must not put us in a sobering mood as to the
achievements of Peronism (re. Jim Devine's ideas that both Peronists
and antiPeronists were bad for Argentina). Peronists achieved great
things, for example (and missing lots):
*an impressive redistribution of wealth that, from the point of view
of the bourgeoisie, sought to create a domestic market; from that of
the workers, however it gave the Argentinian worker a level of living
that was the envy of their Latin American counterparts (thus boosting
by the way a wave of Latin American migration into Argentina that
partly mitigated the alienating consequences of the European inflow
of previous decades), and opened up the road to higher education to
the children of the working class
*a huge wave of nationalizations cut short the multiple sources of
capital outflow through the financial, commercial and industrial
foreign control of pre-Peronist Argentina. It is interesting in this
sense to note that the Spanish word "extranjerizaci�n", or
"extranjer�a", has no English equivalent. A whole set of political
and economical experiences is condensed in this assimetry.
*the State took it as a task of its own to develop industrial
concerns not only in a simple "import substitution" schema, as it had
been the case after the 1930 crisis, but also as a conscioulsy
directed policy of independent and self-centered economic growth; the
plants of this new and vast system were, on the other hands, located
outside Buenos Aires, thus injecting new life to the up to then
decaying cities of the Inland country
And lots more (nationalization of insurance, banking, generation of
the conditions for domestic technological advance, social
democratization of access to University, creation of a trading fleet
in a country that depended basically on foreign trade, management of
the nationalized railroads to boost entire regions, massive housing
plans, and so on).
But Peronism was limited by its attempt to develop Argentina _as just
another capitalist country_, an attempt tragically put to light by
Per�n in his later government (1973-74) when he said that he sought
to turn Argentina into a "World Power, an Argentina Potencia". The
bourgeois programme proved fatal, in the end, because our ruling
oligarchy wasn't a feudal class, but a dependent _capitalist_ ruling
class. So that Peronism never attacked its ECONOMIC positions (you
begin by expropriation of large estates, where do you end?).
But this harshly abstract comment -on which antiPeronist Leftists
build their whole nutty edifice that sets workers abstractly apart
from national revolution, a building that unfortunately for these
Leftists has never been inhabited by the Argentinian working class-
must be made more concrete, because the actual going of history is -
in a semicolony- full of unexpected events.
It was history, not an economic predestination which made that the
movement be in a sense doomed, because in fact it could have
generated its own, massive and powerful, Left wing, and at the first
moments Per�n himself tried to do it.. In fact, the ultimate reason
for this attempt to have failed is, again, partly because of the
stupidity of local bourgeoisie, partly because of the constraints of
a national-bourgeois programme with overwhelming proletarian support
under the increasing pressure of imperialism in Latin America, and
partly because of the tragic limitations of our anti-Peronist
(abstractly "anti capitalist" thus, when the moment of trial came
objectivelly -and sometimes subjectivelly- proimperialist) domestic
"Left".
In 1945, and not because he actually needed them, but in order to
generate a front as broad as possible to oppose the antinational bloc
that had gathered around the unbelievable American Ambassador
Spruille Braden, Per�n offered the Communists and the Left wing of
the petty bourgeois Radical party (led by Amadeo Sabattini, much
influenced by the Communists through his wife) to share ballots. Both
rejected the offer, and thus set themselves to the sidelines of
history for ever. It should be noted here that the Argentinian
Communist Party has never had a strong working class constituency,
but another one, of a basically petty bourgeois and even bourgeois
character! This is true to the point that, as it has been recently
disclosed, the Foreign Relations bureaucracy of the Soviet Union
understood Peronism much better than the most abjectly pro-Soviet
Union Communist party in this part of the world.By the way, it was
Peronism that established relations between Argentina and the USSR...
The weakness of the Argentinian bourgeoisie (Per�n used to make the
bitter joke that Argentina was the only country in the world where
the bourgeois were Communists, and not bourgeois, in mind) thus
displayed itself in the bitter fact that Per�n could generate a
regime where a State Bonapartist government was substituted for a
rich, variegated and politically advanced National Front.
Though this was in a sense functional to the limitations of the
movement (Bonapartism did not allow workers to wage their own
struggle with ideological independence: most unions that grew under
Peronism had gorgeous buildings and excellent organizers, but lacked
libraries), it was at the same time self defeating. When in 1955 the
moment for politics came, it was too late. The National Movement
discovered itself lacking a coherent consciousness of the situation,
and even though Per�n was, from a strictly military point of view,
overwhelmingly strong in 1955, he refused to wage battle. In the end,
the programme was already dead by that date. But the conditions of
resistance against the oligarchic governments made it impossible to
give the necessary step ahead towards socialist revolution.
It is interesting to point out in this sense that the best heads of
democratic nationalism in the Argentina of Peron were not given the
place they had deserved, were in fact set aside by Peronism, and only
came back to the political fore after the 1955 coup. In fact, the
most clever defender of the national revolution, Arturo Jauretche, a
man who prided in declaring himself "a bourgeois", was already in the
mid 60s envisioning a socialist future for the revolution. He
delivered a famous speech by those years where he declared the
Peronist experience "a last off-stage rehearsal of the new, bolder
and deeper, revolution to come".
The "bourgeois" Jauretche -whose writings on sociology and economics
are of course not paid a dram of attention in today's Argentina- thus
set himself far nearer to socialism than any of his "socialist"
critics of the mainstream Left.
Ah, yes, history and economy are a strange thing here in the basement
of the world system...
N�stor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
