When I interviewed Naomi Klein, who spent most of the past year in Argentina, she said that there were so many sectarian Trot parties trying to tell the spontaneous mass assemblies what to do that they turned lots of people off from politics. Instead of following the vanguard into revolution, the masses went home.
Yeah, but Naomi Klein has little to offer Argentina herself. In a Nation Magazine article, she criticizes sectarian Trotskyist formations but she also says that autonomism is a problem as well:
>>Rather than challenge sectarian efforts at co-optation head-on, many of the assemblies and unemployed unions turned inward and declared themselves "autonomous." While the parties' plans verged on scripture, some autonomists turned not having a plan into its own religion: So wary were they of co-optation any proposal to move from protest to policy was immediately suspect.<<
full: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030526&s=klein
I think that Argentina does need a socialist revolution. It is too bad that this is not part of her vocabulary. In the final analysis, the "global justice" movement not only does not address the question of state power in a particular country, it is ideologically hostile to that sort of project.
I would recommend the astute James Petras for a balance sheet on Argentina:
While the unemployed workers movement initially proved promising in pressuring for jobs and funding for local projects, it soon confronted a series of serious problems. First the movement appealed to only a fraction of the unemployed workers – less than 10% of the 4 million. Secondly while the MTD’s were quite militant, their demands continued to focus on the 150 peso a month public works contracts – there was little political depth or political-class consciousness beyond the leaders and their immediate followers. The assumption of many of the leftist-anarchist and Marxists was that the crises itself would “radicalize” the workers, or that the radical tactics of street blockages would automatically create a radical outlook. Particularly harmful in this regard were a small group of university students who propagated theories of “spontaneous” transformations based on not seeking political or state power but retaining local allegiances around small scale projects. Their guru, a British professor devoid of any experience with Argentine popular movements, provided an intellectual gloss to the practices of his local student followers. In practice, the deep structural problems persisted – and the new Duhalde government soon initiated a major effort to pacify the rebellious townships of unemployed workers, providing over 2½ million job contracts for 6 months, distributed by his loyal ‘point men and women’ in the barrios. This move undercut the drawing power of the radical leaders of the MTD to extend their organizations and provided the Peronist party the organizational links to the poor and unemployed for future elections, particularly since the movement leaders rejected electoral politics and neglected any sort of political education. Over time most of the initial followers of the ‘anarchist’, spontaneist and ‘no-power’ grouplets abandoned them for the Peronist-controlled unemployment committees.
full: http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/030604petras.pdf
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