(The following editorial has been translated from EL COMBATIENTE, the official organ of the Argentinian Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores. The subheadings appear in the original.)
From May 15 to May 30, the country experienced the most gigantic spontaneous popular explosion in its history. Never before has there been such intense mobilisation in the provincial capitals and many other cities, from Salta to Rio Negro and from Corrientes to Cordoba, embracing the entire territory of Argentina. Never before have all the popular strata risen to their feet united by one common feeling of repudiation for a government. Never before has the conjunction of all these forces and regions produced such a high level of combativity and resistance with such depth and scope.
No party, no ideology, no programme, no nationally or regionally centralised leadership today can claim responsibility for such an explosion. Its spontaneity has exceeded every anticipation. It left some people behind and taught others a lesson - especially those bourgeois oppositionists who, in their desire to save the regime from any real popular interference in politics, might try electoralist or putchist manoeuvres to give the government a preventive face lifting.
The denunciation of subversive planning guided by extremists of the left is no more than a crude trick by the dictatorship, something like an attempt at subtlety by Ongania and his troglodyte prosecutors. It draws smiles even from the politicians of the regime.
What really produced the explosion was a slow, continuous accumulation of acts, crimes, sellouts to imperialism, attacks, deceptions and spoliations by which the dictatorship robbed the workers of their bread, their work and their rights; robbed the students of their universities; and robbed the middle class of their standard of living, together with their democratic rights and freedoms. This culminated recently in a decree raising the price of petrol and transportation, which immediately affected the cost of consumer goods. In this accumulating resentment, the last straw was the murder of a student demonstrator in Corrientes*, but it could have been anything.
The fact is that in the prevailing conditions the mere existence of the dictatorship of the monopolies generated a dynamic of popular resistance, which resulted finally in a feeling of unanimous determination on the part of the majority of the Argentinian people to get rid of this dictatorship once and for all.
This determination, and it alone, has been the cohesive element uniting the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who have poured on to the streets, torn up paving stones and built barricades, routed the police and confronted the army, defying its military edicts and its weapons of war. From bent nails and stones, the demonstrators escalated to slings, pistols and .22 calibre rifles with which they finally dominated the neighbourhoods of Cordoba.
THE MAY DAYS AND REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY
This spontaneous popular explosion assumed a defensive character from the strategic point of view, although employing offensive tactical means. It revealed an uneven development among the various regions of the country. It made methods of active resistance and armed struggle definitely a part of the political conflict. It lacked a well-defined, centralised leadership, a programme, and the aim of taking power. It was based essentially on working-class motives and democratic aspirations in combined form.
This popular explosion had been brewing from the very moment the dictatorship took over the Government. It is defensive - in the strategic sense - because it occurred as a specific response to the political, social and economic aggression of the regime and as a product of accumulated discontent. The combined democratic and class motivations extended from problems like unemployment, the cost of living, the wage freeze, and generally worsening economic conditions for the majority of the population to the total denial of democratic rights and guarantees.
The uneven character of this upsurge has been revealed in the backwardness of the masses in the coastal areas, especially greater Buenos Aires, relative to those in the urban centres of the interior, Cordoba especially, with its modern, combative industrial proletariat has provided the backbone of the mobilisations and the active urban centres of the interior have played [illegible] has been marked by the highest level of popular participation, political consciousness, and the use of violent methods of struggle going so far as incipient forms of open armed struggle.
The movement developed without a well-defined and centralised leadership. However, as it has proceeded, the CGT of Paseo Colon** and the main student leaderships especially have increased their role as mass political leaderships and made possible the emergence in local and embryonic form of new organisational instruments in the heat of the struggle, like the Juntas Coordinadoras (Coordinating Councils) in Tucuman and La Plata or the CGT Unificada (United CGT) in Rosario and Cordoba.
Understanding this characterisation requires in fact not only understanding the more important lessons of the May days it also requires realising their limitations and arming ourselves theoretically against any illusions regarding the much discussed themes of spontaneous insurrection as a possible road to power. And it requires arming ourselves theoretically against the grandiloquent escapism which, under the pretext of pure armed struggle, ignores and underestimates mass mobilisations or considers them as a separate and walled-off aspect of the process of creating a revolutionary army.
Obviously, even if the May explosion had had a conscious insurrectional character and resulted in a conscious attempt to seize power, its real possibilities would have inevitably been limited by the lack of a party - a leadership, organization and programme. Its possibilities would have been limited by the lack also of a revolutionary army capable of militarily defeating the capitalist army, the last resort of the system, in an all-out confrontation.
It is such a revolutionary army that will make possible a seizure of power and which unfortunately did not exist in Cordoba. We must not wait to build this army, as the promoters of spontaneism claim, until the masses go onto the street in an upsurge producing new insurrectional explosions. This army must be constructed on a steady day-to-day basis, even during periods when the class struggle is quiet. This task does not permit improvisations. Through this army, and with it, the inspiration of the barricades could support popular organisations emerging from the insurrectional process to challenge capitalist power.
But it would be criminal to wait for such an army to be "constructed" to promote the development of popular mobilisations and to intervene in them. On the contrary, it is necessary to accompany and orient the masses in their living, real and concrete experience.
One mobilisation is more educational than a hundred programmes and, in the last analysis, to be built and to be really the army of the people, the revolutionary army must emerge from the people's struggles and nourish itself from them - even though a revolutionary army has its own organisational and technical operational forms which are distinct from those which the people spontaneously adopt.
Revolutionists must, then, patiently explain this conception of the seizure of power to the new vanguard of the whole people which participated in the resistance in the May days and even took up arms. This vanguard will understand this concept better than anyone, because it is easier to arrive at an understanding of the necessity of a party and a revolutionary army starting from the level reached in a mobilisation and from the technique learned in an armed detachment than from revolutionary periodicals or propaganda leaflets, no matter how clear or well-written they may be.
A NEW STAGE OPENED IN MAY
Once the strategic perspective for the seizure of power is clarified, which the May days proved correct, it is important to stress the fact that these days opened a new stage. They opened a new stage in the relationship among the classes and in their relationship to the dictatorship which imposes new tasks, new organisational forms, and new methods.
This change has been produced by the incorporation of the people en masse into the militant opposition to the dictatorship. This popular opposition was unshakably consolidated with the general strike of Friday, May 30, which was carried out unanimously by the workers, the students, and the most diverse layers of the middle class.
This new stage has in turn sealed a definitive breakdown of the unity of the regime, bringing its social, economic, and political contradictions to their climax. The whole political and administrative apparatus of the state has fallen prey to crisis and attrition. No recourse can close the fissures that have opened between the dictatorship and the exploiting sectors today without provoking new fissures and splits. No measure can satisfy one sector without [illegible] another. And in turn no exploiter is in a position to achieve his own "solution" at the expense of all the others.
The paradoxical base of support for the dictatorship is the incapacity of the capitalist system to replace it, since the system has been definitively discredited. In fact, the sectors of the oligarchy that are infuriated by the government's incompetence now have no other recourse but to tolerate it for the time being. They have to tolerate it in view of a greater danger threatening the system - the danger of a violent irruption of the masses into the political arena.
It is possible, therefore, that the solution of a coup d'etat, never as "justifiable" as it is now, is considered a suicidal tactic even by its prospective leaders. In fact, only a military adventurist would risk bringing tanks into the streets now when they might be commandeered by unsuspected demonstrators for their own use.
This is what the vaunted stability of the regime has been reduced to. This is why we say that with the entry of the popular masses into the struggle, the stage that opened in the May days was the stage of preparation for a revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship.
It is not important that this stage still lacks a programme and that the masses in their thinking still lack the clear aim of taking power. The dynamic of its spontaneity has not yet created this product of revolutionary consciousness which will go hand in hand inseparably with the understanding of the necessity for a revolutionary army. And, therefore, it is an inescapable task to raise the banner of a revolutionary workers' and people's government as the only possible solution for preventing the fall of the dictatorship from opening the way for a flouting of the interests of the workers' class interests and the rights, guarantees, and liberties of the population.
But we cannot attain this revolutionary government and avoid the electoral or coupist traps of the bourgeois opposition by any other road than the active and militant mobilisation of the workers with their own forms of organisation arising out of and forged in direct confrontation, and with the methods and techniques which the resistance in Cordoba has put on the order of the day. The character of any governmental shift to meet the situation that has appeared: a coup, electoral farce, or change in ministers, will be determined by how this mobilisation matures and develops, or, to the contrary, by the extent that it gives ground and leaves the initiative to the bourgeois leaderships in the government, who want to capitalise on the popular discontent to make alterations only in the facade of the regime.
Directing our fire on the dictatorship today as the main and immediate enemy does not mean that we must hitch the forces of the workers and the popular masses to the electoral or coupist cart of the oppositionists. However, in Argentina - [illegible] some [illegible] and concrete episodes in the confrontation with the dictatorship, we may find ourselves fighting together with the Radicales del Pueblo (People's Radicals - petit-bourgeois [illegible]) or the opportunists of the Communist Party. The essential thing today is not differentiating ourselves verbally from these forces, indulging in abstract declarations of principle on different objectives of class struggle. What is essential is to demonstrate these differences in acts, in methods of struggle, in forms of organisation, and in different political and governmental solutions which the masses are in a position to demand as the result of their mobilisation. There is no other road for preventing the overthrow of the dictatorship from being accomplished "in bourgeois "style."
This is why we said that the present stage is one of preparation for the fall of the dictatorship while we at the same time call for mobilisation and active and armed resistance by the people.
PREPARE THE WAY FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY DEFEAT OF THE DICTATORSHIP
It is typical of sectarians and opportunists to look at the great political battles waged by the masses primarily from the strategic viewpoint of how to strengthen their own organisations. Since they take this as their essential objective, it is logical that they make all activity subordinate to "differentiating" themselves from other currents.
The sects try to keep the disturbing elements of obstinate and generally impure reality from infiltrating into their ranks. The opportunists in turn, resorting to grandiloquent purism and organisational exclusivism, try to conceal all their political incongruities and theoretical weaknesses which are submitted to the test of fire in the class struggle.
It is urgent - because the class struggle in our country demands it - that such erroneous conceptions not frustrate the chances that the existing organisations and mass leaderships, both in the workers movement and the student movement, have for participating in the revolutionary process at this time.
The CGT de los Argentinos (the "Rebel" CGT), although it cannot claim to be the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat, has contributed to this process by consistently applying its May programme. As a result of this application and the impetus this section of the CGT has given to the popular mobilisations, the workers movement has achieved "unity in struggle" at the regional level in several places in the interior. This has represented an example and an objective advance whose importance the government has not failed to recognise. The regime has been alert to this development above all because this unity has been achieved in the struggle against the dictatorship and for the purpose of carrying this struggle forward.
In the student movement, on the other hand, organisations like the FUA (Federacion Universitaria Argentina - Argentine Student Federation), which claim the main leadership of the most consistent anti-imperialist struggle, have not yet shown any sign of this "unity in struggle". It is as if the exclusivism of its leadership - which moreover is threatened with progressive isolation - exempted it from other currents and leaderships fighting against the dictatorship. However, FEN (Frente Estudiantil Nacional - the National Student front of Peronist colouration), Humanismo (Humanism), and other groupings in the student movement, if not for their programme, at least for their influence and leading role among sectors of the student population, constitute an active and significant factor in the struggle.
This was shown on the occasion when the mass of students, gathered in an assembly in the School of Philosophy and Letters, saw how the major student leaderships transformed what should have been a massive principled expression of a united front against imperialism and the dictatorship into a fight for dominance. The fight had nothing to do with any strategy of impelling and advancing the class struggle through the mobilisations of the student movement. The result was demoralisation.
Revolutionists who mire themselves in such wrangling today renounce in practice and in principle their orienting and leading role in the struggles which the workers and the popular masses began in Cordoba.
We are neither sectarians nor opportunists but consistent revolutionists. We will not hide our views. We will differentiate ourselves from both sectarians and opportunists by the Leninist and Trotskyist methods of common work for common objectives against a common enemy with the aim of advancing the mass mobilisations and transforming "theory" into authentic revolutionary practice.
Therefore, in the work of preparing the way for eliminating the capitalist system, we appeal for active resistance to the dictatorship by all the mass organisations of the students and workers movement - the CGT de los Argentinos, the CGT "Participacionista", FUA, FEN, Humanismo - and all other movements which claim to play a vanguard role. We propose:
(1) Regional or national coordination by the workers and student federations in developing and deepening active resistance by the workers, students and other popular sectors.
(2) The organisation of resistance commando groups, self-defence groups, and armed detachments of activists to protect popular mobilisations from the repressive violence of the regime, organised violence of the people in opposition to the government's violence, and beginning to lay the basis of the future revolutionary army.
(3) A propaganda campaign aimed at the ranks and non-commissioned officers of the regime's repressive bodies, the police and the military forces, calling on them to fraternise with the people and not to fire on them.
* The medical student Juan Jose Cabral was shot to death by police in Mid-May in the cafeteria of the Corrientes University during a demonstration against higher prices for meals.
** The Argentinian CGT (Confederacion General del Trabajo - General Confederation of Labour) is split into two competing organisations. The more independent faction, usually referred to as the CGT "Rebelde" (the "Rebel" CGT), is led by Raimundo Ongaro. It is also called the CGT de los Argentinos (the CGT of the Argentinians) or the CGT of the Paseo Colon for the street where its offices are located. The other faction is usually referred to as the CGT "Participacionista" (the participationist CGT), its main leader was assassinated just prior to Rockefeller's visit to the country.