Sergio García prepared the report on the first topic and, Marian Rosa, the report on the second. They are both comrades of the national leadership of the MST. Here are the main points of the debate.
The international and continental framework, beyond the paces of the country, marks a dynamic of more class struggles and abrupt changes. The economic forecasts of the bourgeoisie itself are very complex to the dragging deterioration and the stoppage of the pandemic. During the campaign, the government promised a full refrigerator and a return to barbecues, but meat consumption fell to the level of the 2001-2002 crisis. Inflation is 3 or 4% per month and it is estimated that during the year it will reach 40 or 50%. There are almost 20 million poor people. Unemployment is at 11 or 12%, with sectors that do not even go out to look for work anymore. Even the most optimistic bourgeois analysts foresee at least three years to return to the level of the beginning of 2020, when Alberto took office. Due to the crisis, the government needs to collect more and spend less. That is why in its 2021 Budget it eliminated the IFE and reduced the allocations for health, education and social welfare. The axis of its economic plan is to encourage agribusiness and extractivism to collect dollars to pay the foreign debt. The country is over indebted and Guzman keeps traveling abroad to see if, on the basis of recognizing all the debt, which is a fraud, the IMF and other creditors will stretch a little the terms of payment. In May 2,400 million dollars are due with the Paris Club and in August-September another 3,000 million dollars with the IMF, plus everything for next year. In other words, more austerity, more conditions and more dependence. With Macri the IMF returned and with the Frente de Todos it did not and will not leave. In this context of hardships, the government still has pending the fundamental task that the Macrismo came to do and could not: “normalize” the country, provide capitalist stability and apply strong austerity measures. That is why it is promoting the Economic and Social Council with the union bureaucracy and the Church, seeking to talk with all the bourgeois sectors, which still do not have confidence in it. To this must be added the government’s internal affairs and the electoral struggle, which explains some of Cristina’s shots at the justice system and the “unpayable” debt. As the government does not manage to impose the austerity measures it needs, it allows the right wing to regain ground. On top of that, it yields to it, as in the case of the retreat on the expropriation of Vicentín or the opening of the economy due to business pressure, apart from scandals such as that of the VIP vaccination center. At the same time, the big media feed the “crack” between only two political spaces.
The social and political perspective
In 2020, with the quarantine, there were few conflicts due to uncertainty and fear. But this gradually loosened and since August there have been different claims. The year 2021 also started with struggles and since the end of February there has been a leap. In terms of gender, together with the triumph of the abortion law last year, there was the 8th of March and every femicide generates mobilization. In the socio-environmental field, the struggles in Chubut stopped the mining law, there were claims in the coast against the Hidrovía and now Andalgalá exploded. And in the face of the growing poverty, the unemployed movements are strongly reactivated. In all these processes Kirchnerism seeks to demobilize, as was also seen on March 24. In the labor movement some conflicts have been going on since last year, but they are increasing. At the forefront is the nursing sector and the whole health sector, the most exposed in the front line: there were important processes in CABA and the suburbs, Rosario, Córdoba and other places, and now a big struggle in Neuquén: it is a nationwide rise. With the increase of infections in schools, the teachers’ demand for salaries and for safe conditions or temporary suspension of classes is spreading. There are also hard struggles in factories against layoffs and for wages in steelworkers, drivers, railroad workers and other sectors. It is not yet a matter of a general outbreak, because of the pandemic and above all because of the restraining role of the entire union bureaucracy, the CGT and the CTA, tied to the government and the bosses. The tremendous anger at the treacherous leaderships leads to the fact that in a large part of the struggles there are overflows, self-convocations, radicalized activism and tendencies towards coordination. This conflict tends to increase and, beyond the electoral situation, the crisis opens the possibility of abrupt changes in the situation. At the political level, the absence or insufficiency of government responses, which increasingly contrasts with its double discourse, opens more space for the left. The Frente de Todos won based on the popular expectation to remove Macri and change, but soon the reality appears: austerity, adaptation to the IMF and a soft hand with the rich. Facts such as the cuts to the pensioners, Vicentín, the repression in Guernica with Berni at the head or the VIP vaccines feed the disappointment and dissatisfaction in sectors of their own bases.
A positive assessment and the challenges of the MST in the FIT Unidad
In the two years since the previous party congress, we have made progress. In 2019, an election year, we achieved a seat as MST in Córdoba, good results in Santa Fe and other provinces and, after years of refusal, the Frente de Izquierda accepted our entry. Thus, having formed together the FIT Unidad was an achievement of our policy. The year 2020 started with the pandemic, before which we were giving fundamental political answers that proved to be necessary: massive testing, quarantine with social aid, a single and state health system and the release of patents to be able to produce vaccines and apply them massively. And we made emergency and fundamental economic proposals, for wage increases, against the debt and the IMF, for a real tax on the rich and other anti-capitalist proposals. As the most positive aspects of our assessment of these two years is the contribution of the MST to the development of the ISL and its campaigns, and the intervention in the feminist wave that allowed us to organically add many new militants and cuadros to the party. In the social struggles, the MST said and says present. Our most outstanding intervention is in public and private health, through our militancy in the ALE (Buenos Aires nursing), the CICOP (Buenos Aires health), the AGHIM (Moyano Hospital), the Association of Professionals of Garrahan, the Body of Delegates of the Italian Hospital, the UTS (Córdoba) and other unions. We are also active in several other unions, depending on the municipality or province. In the next period we propose to move forward in our role as a union and political leadership where we already are and in new sectors of the working class. The Movimiento Sin Trabajo “Teresa Vive” actively participates in every struggle of the unemployed, and our national groupings Juntas y a la Izquierda, Libre Diversidad and the Red Ecosocialista are among the main references in the feminist, LGBTI+ and socio-environmental movements. CADHU is active in the Encuentro Memoria, Verdad y Justicia and the human rights movement. And while the student movement was further behind as there were no classes, our Socialist Youth grew by inter coming in the green tide and environmental claims. The new website Periodismo de Izquierda and the work in the networks are at the service of spreading our socialist ideas and proposals. In the FIT-U we gave and continue giving debate in favor of strongly postulating the left as a third alternative in the face of the “crack” between the two bourgeois variants. The FITU has missed opportunities and should go far beyond an electoral front, acting in common in the class and political struggle to advance as an option for power. Our proposal for a party of tendencies is framed in that strategy. As for the next electoral challenge, the lists should reflect the real relationship of forces within the FITU, either through an agreement, the PASO or other democratic mechanism.