It is impossible to talk about the current situation without getting upset. Massa, now Super Minister of Economy, Production and Agriculture, does not represent the change that working people need. His first announcements have anticipated an “audit” (cut) of social assistance to the poor, a raise in tariffs for the working majority and middle sectors, the negotiation with the landowners’ Liaison Committee and agribusiness, and the confirmation of austerity policies to comply with the IMF, since this government has decided to accept its conditions and pay for the scam with which Macri indebted us.
The new names in the cabinet and the government’s announcements are far from the changes that many young and working class Kirchnerist activists and activists of other social organizations, with their best intentions, still expected. Not surprising. Massa has always been on the right. He is a liberal that emerged from 1990’s liber party UCedé and more recently supported Macri’s laws with his Renovating Front. He is an eternal doormat for the Yankees and big capital. Unfortunately, he now rises with the full endorsement of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, as part of a shift to the right of the entire government.
The IMF is happy with these decisions, the price makers raise prices blatently, the financial power and the corporations continue taking millions of dollars offshore and the government, instead of touching the profits of agribusiness, offers them a special dollar rate so that they can make even more profits. After all this, they whimper to their rank and file that “there is no relation of forces” to do something else? It’s not that it’s not possible: the truth is that they do not want to touch the interests of the rich.
They told us that if we did not agree with the IMF there would be economic chaos. Yet what is generating instability and more inequality is the official course of austerity and delivery to the IMF, not the social organizations and the left that mobilizes to defend basic rights. How are Macrists and Milei not going to be emboldened if the government applies their agenda? There is no political sovereignty, economic independence or social justice this way. And don’t be fooled: you can’t change from the inside something that can’t be fixed and shifts to the right.
Given this situation, the union leaders disgust. The CGT bureaucracy supports Massa and lets the austerity pass, and the CTA, which once claimed to be different, now plays the same bureaucratic role. That is why we have to organize the struggle from below and support the struggles of the working people and the youth that are on the rise.
Capitalism is hunger, inequality and dependency. You suffer it in your pocket. It is time for all those who have already governed us and are responsible for this disaster to step aside. We must make way for a root change in the economic plan and political project. No more two or three deciding everything without consulting anyone: let us fight for elections to a free and sovereign Constituent Assembly, where the people can democratically decide everything.
Comrades: it’s time to transform your disappointment into the will to start on a new path. You don’t have to accept the unacceptable. To confront the entire right, come with the left, with the MST. A left with a firmly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and socialist program and project, but united and open to converging with thousands. A left that goes beyond an electoral agreement, that can become a great unitary political movement, with freedom of tendencies or internal currents, and advance as an alternative government. We invite you to join this left wing project to bring together all who trusted this government and now feel frustrated and angry, but continue to yearn for a just and egalitarian society.
It’s time for root changes. There will only be a full refrigerator if we affect the pockets of the rich, as the FITU’s program proposes, if we break with the IMF, break with agribusiness and the financial power, if we nationalize banking and foreign trade, if we declare the large means of production to be social property and democratically plan the economy according to people’s needs, and fight for a government of the workers and the people together with the left, that can open the path to socialism. To take on this struggle together, we invite you to join the MST in the Left Front Unity.
Cele Fierro and Alejandro Bodart for the