I. Historical Crisis of the System
1. Argentina has been convulsed by an economic, social, and political crisis that throughout numerous conjunctural ups and downs goes back two decades and, in certain respects, dates as far back as the 1930s.
In the framework of a capitalist system where, because of the imperialist grip, there was only distorted and unreliable growth, Peronism represented the most suitable political formula for the industrial bourgeoisie. In fact, General Peron's regime did help to an important degree to bolster the position of native capital visa-vis both the traditional conservative classes and foreign capital. By using a highly developed Bonapartist technique, Peron succeeded in establishing a relative equilibrium between the bourgeoisie and the exploited classes, a balance that, while guaranteeing in the last analysis the optimum functioning of the system in the given situation, assured real gains for the working class and other popular strata. By basing himself on mass support, Peron was able to bring about the social and political restructuring that made it possible to take advantage of the exceptional opportunities offered by the international situation at the time. But to win this support, he had to make some concessions to the mobilized working class, which won the greatest victories in its history (universal unionization, the development of the Comisiones Internas [Plant Committees], on-the-job rights, social-welfare laws, a marked rise in the standard of living, and so forth).
It is precisely because of this situation that Peronism still appears to be a viable short-term solution to some layers of the bourgeoisie and a hope for radical social and political change to very broad sectors of the popular masses.
The success of the Peronist formula was to a large extent due to the situation that existed during the second world war; the urgent economic needs of the European capitalist countries in the immediate postwar period of reconstruction; and to a lesser extent, the economic boom resulting from the Korean war. As soon as this situation changed and as soon as the world market was no longer starved for certain agricultural products and capitalist competition was once again unleashed, Argentina's socioeconomic balance was upset and a serious crisis loomed. From the beginning of the 1950s, Peron had to set his course toward "rationalization" and a quest for sources of imperialist capital. It was this sort of policy that provoked serious tensions between his regime and sectors of the working class.
2. Peron's downfall, resulting from numerous and contradictory factors, opened a period of prolonged instability. The objective bases on which the Bonapartist regime rested, which guaranteed popular support for the policy of the industrial capitalists, no longer existed, and the ruling classes were not able to come up with any formula that would offer the slightest stability. The industrial bourgeoisie was deeply shaken by the crisis and was unable to project any solutions; moreover, it had to face a pitched battle with the working class, which although it was on the defensive, was still able in the five years that followed Peron's overthrow to put up a very vigorous struggle. The army began to emerge as the guarantor assuring the maintenance and functioning of the system. But it itself came under the influence of different social and political pressures and failed to advance a common strategy. It hesitated to take direct charge of running the government, dividing into opposing tendencies.
Frondizi's regime, when all was said and done, was an ephemeral attempt to reestablish the dominance of the industrial bourgeoisie, based on the radicalized petty bourgeoisie and layers of the proletariat that remained faithful to the slogans of Peronism. The Frondizi regime failed because, on the one hand, it quickly came into open conflict with the masses, and on the other hand, it could not provide a solution for the economic impasse and it thus promoted a comeback by the most conservative sectors of the ruling classes.
The industrial bourgeoisie demonstrated its intrinsic social and political weakness and had to rely on certain sectors of the army until the installation of the Ilia regime— as transitory as Frondizi's — which more directly represented the interests of the rural bourgeoisie and layers of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie. The only success scored by the ruling class was that, starting in 1959-1960, the working class, hard hit by unemployment and a declining standard of living, began progressively to lose its dynamism and fighting spirit and entered into a stage of relative stagnation and demoralization — able only to wage sporadic and essentially defensive battles.
The Ongania regime, which came to power in 1966, brought the army to the forefront in the context of a situation relatively more favorable for stabilizing the country. The main goal of the new Bonapartist regime was to rationalize and modernize the economy, a policy that suited primarily the interest of the most "modern" capitalist sectors more or less directly tied to imperialism. Furthermore, the job of the new government was made considerably easier by the relative passivity of the broad masses, the neutrality or even the favorable inclination of the majority of the union bureaucracy, and the attitude of the Peronist movement— which was, to say the least, equivocal for an entire period. A clear indication of the dictatorship's policy and the source of the social and political conflicts at the time were the measures restricting sugar production in the northern mills, the attempts to reorganize the railroads and the ports, and more rigorous control over the universities.
Ongania's Bonapartism, which operated in a completely different context from that of the Peronist variety, could promote the interests only of a very narrow minority. If Ongania was able to partially reactivate the economy and appreciably reduce the level of inflation, it was only by increasing the impoverishment of the proletariat as well as broad sectors of the petty bourgeoisie.
3. May 1969 marked a radical turning point. In Rosario, Cordoba and Tucuman the masses mobilized in the most gigantic movements Argentina had ever experienced. The Cordobazo was a major test of strength between workers and students and the military dictatorship. It was the outbreak of a new stage of impetuous upsurge that created a prerevolutionary situation by shattering the balances established in 1966. This rise took the form notably of repeated explosive mobilizations both in the traditional epicenters of the workers movement and in the less radicalized cities, of hard-fought battles in vanguard workers sectors as well as general strikes that involved greater numbers than ever before in Argentina and in Latin America (November 1970 and September 1971). In this context the class struggle began to give rise to armed struggle, and urban guerrilla warfare spread to all of the country's important centers. The bourgeoisie thus found itself faced with the need to reexamine its whole orientation. The question for the working class was how to take advantage of the new prerevolutionary crisis and the new explosive imbalances of the system in the context of a comprehensive anti-imperialist and anticapitalist strategy.
4. The ruling class, embroiled in the contradictions of neo-Peronism, had to confront the powerful upsurge of the mass movement and the audacious initiatives of the armed-struggle organizations without a political leadership that was the least bit firm or homogeneous in the midst of an economic situation that combined a conjunctural downturn with the reappearance of a high rate of inflation. Called on to improvise, it alternated between the most brutal repression and attempts to seduce the masses through populist and liberalizing demagogy. But it did not succeed in blocking the periodic mobilizations of the masses, the radicalization of wide layers of the petty bourgeoisie, or the revival of the student movement, nor did it succeed in smashing the armed-struggle organizations.
In this context, Lanusse adopted the policy of the GAN (Great National Agreement), which brought about the elections of March 1973. There were, in fact, very great risks involved in any solution involving an increase in repression, such as the adoption of a reactionary Brazilian-type solution. In a situation of successive and powerful mass mobilizations and the existence of armed organizations already endowed with a wealth of experiences, a gorilla coup could have had a boomerang effect, precipitating a civil war of uncertain outcome.
By accepting a reestablishment of official political activity, the GAN was intended to institute an agreement between Peronism and other traditional political currents (primarily the Radicals), to introduce a constitutional framework based on compromise and close collaboration with the trade-union bureaucracy, and to guarantee controlling positions to the military. Through this operation, it was hoped that it would be possible to isolate and crush the vanguards, especially the armed vanguards.
### II. The Working Class: Driving Force of the Revolution
5. The working class, the fundamental driving force of the revolution, has accumulated a great wealth of experience over the last thirty years. It has been the protagonist of an extraordinarily wide gamut of economic struggles extending from normal trade-union conflicts to factory occupations and seizures of hostages; of political general strikes; of vast mobilizations and abrupt semi-insurrectionary explosions; of hard-fought defensive battles; and of embryonic armed-struggle initiatives going from the most elementary kinds of sabotage to the boldest forms of urban guerrilla warfare. It has built powerful trade unions, which despite their origins and the ideology they adopted have been seen by the broadest masses as suitable instruments of class struggle and which in certain periods have accomplished the task of defending the immediate interests and elementary rights of the workers. The Argentine working class represents a relatively homogeneous social force with a tremendous specific weight in the political life of the country. When it mobilizes together with the wage workers in transport and in service industries, it is capable on its own of paralyzing all activity, as has been shown on several occasions by the most significant general strikes.
The contradiction of the Argentine workers movement lies in the fact that the proletariat has reached a high level of organization and carried out its most decisive political mobilizations under the hegemony of the Peronists, whose leadership reflected the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of the 1960s, important changes started to occur. From a structural point of view, the working class in the big cities in the interior, which was integrated into the modern industrial sectors, was acquiring an ever increasing specific weight. From the political standpoint, the mobilizations had their epicenter first in the Tucuman region. A very hard-fought battle was waged there, but since it was a defensive one in the strategic sense, it was condemned to run out of steam. Next the epicenter shifted to Cordoba, which unquestionably became the nerve center of social and political confrontation.
This development went hand in hand with the emergence of young strata of the working class that had not suffered the negative effects of stagnation and de moralization. A broad vanguard matured politically under the influence of the Cuban revolution and the armed struggles inspired in many countries by the Castroists. The crisis of the international Communist movement and the Sino-Soviet conflict also had repercussions in CP circles. Thus, in the 1969 mobilizations in Cordoba and Rosario an important role fell to very militant workers who were not organized in the traditional workers movement. So, too, an ever clearer differentiation showed up in the unions, which was marked by phenomena of varying importance but all pointing in the same direction— increased radicalization of the regional leaderships, formation of the CGTA [the Confederacion General del Trabajo de los Argentinos- a left trade-union formation led by Raimundo Ongaro], the development of antibureaucratic tendencies and of plant unions reflecting pressure from below. Moreover, the emergence of these plant unions also reflected the revolutionary aspirations of the politically advanced layers of the working class that decided to break with routinist practices and respond to the violence of the repressive apparatus by posing the problems of armed struggle in a short-term perspective and beginning to operate on this level. The example of the Tupamaros in Uruguay was an additional stimulus.
It would be incorrect to conclude that Peronism's political and ideological influence is only a throwback to the past. But the links between Peronism and broad working-class layers have become much less solid than in the past, and their adherence to Justicialism has become much more critical. There are important layers that have broken with Peronism, especially in the decisive epicenters like the huge plants in Cordoba, where the Peronist bureaucrats have even lost hegemony in the trade-union arena. All this boils down to the fact that Peronism no longer controls the workers vanguard.
The Argentine working class therefore has been and remains the backbone of the revolutionary mobilizations, and its role will be decisive in the coming battles. Its weakness still lies fundamentally in the fact that there is no nationwide organization that presents a political line that is independent of every bourgeois or petty-bourgeois leadership or tendency, that there is no revolutionary leadership capable of mapping out and implementing the strategic outlines of a struggle for overthrowing the government. But forces have matured that understand the need for struggling simultaneously against imperialism and capitalism, as well as the need for an overall strategy of armed struggle for seizing power.
6. The peasantry does not represent a major force, and its social and economic weight is tending to diminish even further. Moreover, the Argentine revolutionists have not developed a general analysis of agrarian structures in recent years, a failure that has not been without its consequences in formulating political positions. It is unquestionable in any case that the poor peasants, especially in certain regions in the north where they are closely linked to the workers, must be regarded as allies of the proletariat. Mobilizing these strata both in political battles and in the armed struggle is an imperative need that revolutionists cannot underestimate on the pretext of the specific social composition of the country and the overwhelming weight of the wage workers integrated into the urban economy.
A considerable role will be played by the petty bourgeoisie. In the 1940s, this social stratum was to a large extent the base of the anti-Peronist movements and organizations that stood objectively on conservative, if not outright reactionary, ground. The petty bourgeoisie also have been affected by the economic downturn, against which it is often less able to de fend itself than is the working class, as well as by the growing strength of the monopolistic sectors, the progressive elimination of all freedoms and democratic rights by the military dictatorship, the repercussions of the Cuban revolution, and the situation of other countries on the continent. The result has been a growing radicalization of the petty bourgeoisie, along with the radicalization of the so-called marginal layers which fit into a category between the poorest workers and the most impoverished petty-bourgeoisie. It is these phenomena that explain the role played by petty-bourgeois elements in the struggles of recent years and in the armed-struggle organizations, as well as the influence Peronism has gained in these social strata.
The student movement itself- which cannot as such be characterized as petty bourgeois —has reflected, and in large measure given expression to, this radicalization. The significance of such an alliance between the working class and the radicalized petty-bourgeoisie and students was shown especially by the participation of petty-bourgeois layers in the great mobilizations of 1970-72, as well as the links established between the workers and students at the time of the revolutionary explosions in 1969. It is evident, moreover, that the favorable attitude on the part of the petty bourgeoisie greatly facilitated the development of guerrilla warfare in the big urban concentrations.
### III. Permanent Revolution, Armed Struggle, and the Mass Movement
7. In a situation marked by a structural crisis and revolutionary tensions such as exists in Argentina, the question of power, of overthrowing the capitalist system and establishing a workers state is objectively posed. But no positive solution of this problem is possible without a strategy for taking power that includes an orientation of armed struggle and without a revolutionary party intervening to apply this strategy.
The basic orientation of the struggle flows first of all from the nature of the Argentine revolution.
Revolutionary
Marxists more than ever reject every conception based on the assumption of a democratic stage preparing the way for a socialist one. They reaffirm the concept of a permanent revolution, that is, that the unfolding of the revolutionary process has an anticapitalist and socialist dynamic. All the experiences of the last thirty years-in Argentina as well as in other Latin American countries-show that a revolution that stops on a "democratic," "antioligarchic," and "anti-imperialist" plateau and does not attack the capitalist system as such inevitably reaches an impasse, is thrown back, and ends in defeat. In those countries where democratic tasks remain to be accomplished— and there are less of these in Argentina than in almost any other country on the continent— these tasks can only be achieved in the framework of a dynamic of permanent revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat.
It follows from this that we must reject any perspective of an alliance with the so-called national bourgeoisie or with any of its so-called progressive sectors. The workers and revolutionary movement must not, of course, fail to exploit the tactical advantages offered by the enemy's contradictions. In the case of a reactionary dictatorship, for example, it cannot exclude the possibility that bourgeois organizations or movements may take part in the opposition struggle.
But this by no means implies that bourgeois layers or political formations can be considered allies from a revolutionary standpoint. Any hesitation or doubt in this matter would come down, in the last analysis, to questioning the concept of permanent revolution. Since the revolutionary dynamic tends to shatter not only the framework of the capitalist system as such, a confrontation with the bourgeoisie is inevitable and it is necessary to prepare for such an eventuality. The revolutionists' criticisms of the Chilean Unidad Popular and the Uruguayan Frente Amplio do not concern simply the method of the "democratic road." They are aimed also and above all at the nature of a political strategy that involves maintaining the essential political and economic mechanisms of the system, and, on this basis, an alliance or compromise with the bourgeoisie or important sectors of it. 8. In Argentina, the orientation of armed struggle, which the Ninth Congress could only outline in a very general way, fitted into a context where a prerevolutionary situation was developing, the class struggle was reaching the stage of armed confrontations, and embryonic forms of civil war were taking form. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie had not exhausted all its margin for maneuver. The imperialists and the bourgeoisies of other countries on the continent were ready to intervene politically and, in the last analysis, even militarily to prevent the birth of a second workers state in Latin America. No revolutionary party existed with a decisive influence over the masses that could in the short run take advantage of the social explosions that were occurring and building up in the direction of a struggle for power. It was in this context that the revolutionary Marxists said that unleashing armed struggle is a task belonging specifically to the vanguard. It must take the initiative, while putting the emphasis from the start on those forms of armed struggle that make it possible to establish or strengthen ties with major strata of the masses. At the same time, they outlined a perspective of armed struggle developing through ups and downs and multiple variants for a prolonged period.
It was imperative, particularly after the 1969 turn, to prepare for armed struggle in the short run, and the revolutionary Marxists emphasized this quite clearly, reaffirming the necessity of avoiding the isolation of the armed-struggle organizations from the masses, as well as avoiding all foquista or spontaneist, insurrectionalist deviations.
At the same time, it was necessary to intervene in the mass movement to exploit every legal or semilegal opportunity, and to use every instrument the masses have traditionally considered worthwhile, as well as those that naturally appear in the course of mobilizations at different stages of an acute social conflict and in prerevolutionary situations. More concretely, this involved activity in the trade unions, a persistent struggle against the decaying bureaucracy, and initiatives to stimulate the polarization and the maturation of vanguard layers of the working class around a platform that effectively corresponds to the needs of the struggles and their generalization within the framework of a political struggle against the dictatorship. It also involves systematic activity to support and encourage the formation of democratic rank-and-file bodies that are the product of the need, felt particularly strongly by the most dynamic layers of the working class, to keep from being cooped-up in routine functioning of the bureaucratized structures, to express their aspirations in a more immediate and effective way, to make their wishes felt more strongly, and to provide a broader united base for struggle.
### IV. Peronism's Return to Government
9. Despite the fraudulent nature of the March 1973 elections, the results ex pressed a massive rejection of the military dictatorship. For lack of a revolutionary alternative, the masses used the elections to express themselves and their support for Peronism, whose political formulas appeared the most credible. Thus the elections also showed the mass support that Peronism continues to have, strengthened by the support of sectors of the radicalized youth who set the tone for the Peronist election campaign. The inauguration of Campora as president on May 25 was marked by dramatic events that revealed the depth of the political crisis. Under the pressure of the masses, who mobilized in large numbers, with the active participation of the armed organizations, the most representative leaders of the dictatorship left the stage, unable to camouflage the partial defeat that their return to the barracks represented. All the political prisoners were immediately released, without exception. Allende and Dorticos were hailed, while Rogers was obliged to remain on the side lines.
The change in leadership carried out by the bourgeoisie through the installment of a new Peronist regime and a return to parliamentary democracy promised from the beginning to be full of dangers. 10. Once he had abandoned the demagogic phrases used during the preelectoral period, Peron's plan became clear. This was to unite the main sectors of the ruling classes in order to find a way out of the country's economic crisis and the crisis of the instruments of bourgeois political domination, after so many years of failures at alternating between "democratic" and dictatorial regimes.
On the economic plane, Peron is trying to renegotiate the dependent relationship with imperialism, by seeking a base in other, non-American, imperialist capital and increasing state intervention in the field of economic planning. He is trying to limit inflation and to encourage a new phase of economic expansion. This presupposes a far-reaching modernization and rationalization of the productive apparatus.
The economic situation is characterized by: a. the small growth in the gross national product in the framework of a general stabilization, achieved at the cost of a slowdown in the growth of production; b. a foreign debt of US$7 billion; c. a big deficit in the state budget, which, insofar as it restricts public expenditure, conflicts with a policy of economic stimulation; d. a sizable currency reserve (US$1,300 million) and an expected surplus in the balance of payments; e. serious problems in traditional grain exports in the coming year; f. good prospects for the export of manufactured goods to Cuba, Chile, and Rumania; g. the need to modify the system of price controls by allowing some increases; h. the need to hold the line on wages; i. a million and a half unemployed; j. the fact that proposed foreign capital investments have not yet materialized. Although the bourgeoisie's economic plan provides for a progressive redistribution of income, this presupposes a preliminary revival of economic expansion, which has not yet occurred. Thus the results of the first eight months of the Peronist government have yielded only several hasty measures with respect to the economic situation of the masses. Once again the bourgeoisie has asked the working class to make sacrifices for the "national reconstruction" of Argentine capitalism.
The "Social Pact" signed by the businessmen of the CGE (General Confederation of Company Managers), the heads of the government's economic planning departments, and the bureaucrats of the CGT (General Confederation of Labor), set the tone for Peronism's social policy. The miserable wage increase of about 200 pesos scarcely compensated for the deterioration of buying power produced by the escalation of prices during the last months of the dictatorship. The Party Commissions were suspended for two more years (this had already been done by the dictatorship), and wages were frozen. Like the Rural Pact and the Three- Year Plan, the Social Pact shows that Peron's economic policy is not encroaching upon the fundamental interests of any of the most important sections of the ruling classes. As for his attitude toward imperialism: he has taken no radical measures such as nationalizations or refusal to repay the foreign debt, but on the contrary has promised new guarantees for foreign investments, accommodating to the demands of international financial bodies. This is because to rationalize the productive apparatus and expand ex ports, he must depend on the monopolistic firms (for example, the agreement with the automobile companies), not to speak of the necessity to attract new imperialist capital. The same thing applies to the big bourgeoisie, which after all these years must again look to Peron as the sole way out of the crisis. The "agrarian" bourgeoisie has obtained the govern ment's unreserved respect for private ownership of land, postponement of the vote on taxing potential land profits, and guarantees of price supports to counter accidental fluctuations in production— measures that compensate for state intervention in the marketing of export grain. Although their role as minor partners has been recognized, the petty bourgeoisie and small-business men have suffered most in the short run from the partial stabilization.
The precondition for a more enduring stabilization and a new period of expansion is an intensification in the rate of exploitation, which will hurt the working class and layers of the petty bourgeoisie. That is, the precondition for the success of the economic plans is an essentially political one: success in imposing these plans on the masses.
11. There are a series of contradictions involved in trying to carry out a political "institutionalization," that is, in overcoming and resolving the political chaos— a reflection of the crisis of the system - that has shaken Argentina for the last twenty years. The principal contradiction is that the Peronist movement's arrival in power accentuated all its internal tensions, giving rise to a period of overt crisis. The heterogeneous and antagonistic interests that coexist within Peronism have begun an open struggle to impose their positions on the government. The months following May 25, 1973, were characterized by the confrontations within the Peronist movement. The struggle counterposed mainly the trade-union and political bureaucracy to the young and militant sectors of the movement. Their irreconcilable antagonism was marked by the blood of the Ezeiza massacre on June 20, 1973, the day of Pe ron's return, when the armed right-wing gangs set into motion one of the most dramatic events in Argentine history. That was the beginning of a conscious offensive by the Peronist right wing as it prepared to win full control over the direction of the process. The July 13, 1973, coup, with the resignation of Campora and the restoration of power to Peron, came about in the same way. Lastiri's interregnum as president absolved Peron from carrying out the "dirty work," the "ideological housecleaning" of the Peronist movement, the McCarthyism, the return to censorship and obscurantism in cultural life, and above all, the escalation of assassinations and the attacks by the armed gangs of the Peronist right wing.
This very explosion of the internal conflicts within Peronism quickly revealed the unstable character of the new period of bourgeois democracy. But, going beyond the internal struggle within the Peronist movement, the escalation of the number of gangs of special police and the bureaucracy is aimed at dealing selective but effective blows at sections of the social vanguard that refuse to accept the imperatives of capitalist "national reconstruction." The assassinations of militants, the kidnappings, and the right-wing attacks of various kinds followed in rapid succession at a rate never before seen, even under the military dictatorship. A "democracy" whose highest governmental agencies are encouraging the white terror is a strange democracy indeed!
The selective repression, under the cover of the activity of the special gangs, was to be complemented by new repressive legislation on various levels-from the new Law on Professional Associations, which consolidates the power of the trade-union bureaucracy, giving it the responsibility to control and repress the labor movement; to the reform of the Criminal Code, which reintroduces new concepts of political "delinquency"; and including the "Prescindibilidad" law (the "Availability" law) for civil servants, which deprives them of job security and provides for the purging of "undesirable" elements and the "rationalizing" of the state apparatus. When veiled repression proves insufficient against the mass movement, the new Peronist government does not shrink from using the traditional repressive forces— the police and riot police— as when it crushed the San Francisco uprising (with a resulting death), or when it repressed workers' strikes in various regions of the country. A "people's government" that sends its police forces against its own voters is a strange one indeed!
The approach taken toward the mass movement will provoke the first disagree ments among the various bourgeois sectors who support Peron's plan. It will also produce tensions within the armed forces, which are maintained as a reserve military party of the ruling classes, keeping control of the whole process.
The sectors of the petty bourgeoisie who believed in the anti-imperialist inclinations of Peronism are now seeing in place of their aspirations, a reactionary offensive against the university system, the develop ment of McCarthyism, and the spread of right-wing terrorism. Peron's big plans for an independent foreign policy and support for the liberation of Latin America are being translated into aid to the Chilean military junta and a scandalous attitude toward the refugees, into the reception accorded to the hangman Ban-zer, and into the visits of the puppet Bordaberry and of Stroessner. In addition to the failure of Peron's diplomatic projects, Argentina is encountering great difficulties in its attempts to compete with Brazil in the Latin American market. 12. The majority of the working class voted for Peronism. During the dictatorship's last months, they demonstrated their hopes for the period after the elections. But these aspirations were linked with the desire that concrete demands long rebuffed would at last be satisfied. After the Mendozazo in March 1972, there was a sharp decline in workers struggles throughout the country. The bureaucracy held back the struggles; only Cordoba continued to experience militant actions. After May 25, there was a change. The workers interpreted the election results and Campora's coming to power as their own victory. The lessening of the repression and the return of democratic rights that had been suppressed for years were to increase the relative weakness of the trade-union bureaucracy, which had no impact in the election campaign and up to the time when the government changed, because of its inability to mobilize the workers and its rejection by the rank and file. These developments were to give a new impetus to struggles, their revival indicating a new rise of the working class.
The most important characteristic of this new period of growing struggles is the integration into the struggle of the workers of greater Buenos Aires — almost 70 percent of the working class. It is they who were in the forefront of the majority of struggles in the first months of the Peronist government. The importance of this development is obvious in view of the fact that workers struggles since 1969 had been limited to cities in the interior of the country, where the proletarian concentration is smaller than in Buenos Aires. Most of the struggles mobilize the industrial proletariat in confrontations with the bosses in the private sector, and not against the state. In general, the struggles are short and isolated, lacking unifying slogans that can extend them to the national scale. Most of the generalized struggles have been spearheaded by the workers in the state apparatus, who have been confronting a common boss — the state.
But in the context of the rise of struggles since May 25, there has been an increase in factory occupations, showing that important layers of the working class have assimilated the most militant methods of struggle that were developed during the dictatorship. In general, the struggles have developed around immediate demands such as defense of jobs, the re-hiring of workers fired for political or trade-union activity, payment of salary arrears, and so on. But a characteristic feature of many of these struggles is that they become politicized in confronting the bureaucracy. A large number of the most militant confrontations, moreover, have been directed exclusively against the bureaucracy. The confrontations between the bureaucracy and the ranks have almost always been violent, with armed confrontations resulting in dead and wounded. Finally, there is a reappearance of those explosive struggles with broad popular support that began to occur during the military dictatorship but that the repression and the hostility of the bureaucracy had increasingly isolated and hampered. The most significant was the popular mobilization in San Francisco, in Cordoba province, but similar events have already occurred in other places, as well as in entire regions of the province of Tucuman (Villa Carmela, Villa Quinteres, etc.).
Although the majority of mobilizations had a defensive character at the begin ning, the context of the Social Pact and the attitude of the union bureaucracy enhanced their significance. These struggles show on the one hand the resistance of the working class to accepting new sacrifices, despite repeated appeals from Peron himself; on the other hand, they demonstrate the extreme situation the Argentine bourgeoisie has been placed in as a result of having continually stalled on meeting even the most elementary needs of the workers. But because of the lack of a nationally recognized class-struggle leadership and generalized slogans, the workers are still unable to understand that in reality it is the state they are confronting as their enemy; they have only come to understand the need to confront these measures on the local level. Nevertheless, even these limited struggles have an explosive dynamic that is intolerable for the state and the trade-union bureaucracy. They have sufficed to prevent the necessary political stabilization of the country, which is an indispensable precondition for the success of the government's plans. That is why the full fury of the armed gangs of the special police and the bureaucracy has been unleashed against the best-known worker-activists and the most militant sectors. They are attempting to behead the working class of its new broad vanguard that has come to the fore in recent years.
13. It must be concluded that the installation of a "constitutional" regime will be but a brief interlude that the ruling class will be quick to put in question. The opening of a whole stage of bourgeois democracy— where the parties and unions would enjoy effective rights and autonomy and could gradually become stronger — re mains a completely unlikely variant. Such a stage of bourgeois democracy would presuppose a defeat of the working class, concretized either through the physical destruction of its vanguard, or through the political acceptance of the plans of the bourgeoisie. It is unlikely that the latter possibility will be realized, and the bourgeoisie itself is aware that it cannot "alleviate" the situation by means of ideological maneuvers, even with Peron's help.
In this context, the main danger for the working class and the revolutionary movement is that the dynamism and combativity of the masses will be expressed only in sectoral, uncoordinated struggles that are likely to exhaust themselves or to result in very limited gains, or that these struggles will give rise to spontaneous explosions that can be isolated and repressed and that in any event have no real impact.
The confrontation between the workers movement and the ruling classes that is developing under the new Peronist regime will determine the evolution of the relationship of forces in the southern part of the continent. In fact, after the defeat in Chile, the epicenter of the class struggle in Latin America has been shifted to Argentina.
### V. Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership, the New Broad Vanguard, and the Building of the Revolutionary Party
14. The new political conjuncture that opened with Peronism's return to power has once again revealed the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the Argentine workers movement. While the Argentine bourgeoisie is increasing its efforts to find a stable form of political rule that can provide it with guarantees of sustained capital accumulation, the majority of Argentine workers continue to have illusions in Peronism.
The absence of a revolutionary leadership in the Argentine working class, which has allowed bourgeois nationalism to develop in the ranks of the workers move ment, is the historic responsibility of Stalinism. Before the second world war, the Argentine CP had succeeded in winning the most significant part of the workers vanguard, embodying in the eyes of the class the traditions, prestige, and influence of the Russian revolution. During the war, the CP followed the twists and turns of Stalinist policy, breaking totally with the dynamic of workers struggles and openly practicing class collaborationism reflecting the USSR's alliance with the "democratic" imperialist countries. This opportunist and treacherous policy on the part of the main workers party explains why the Bonapartist operation of Peron was so successful during his first government. He succeeded in winning the main workers leaders and the big majority of the workers vanguard that had emerged in the mass mobilizations of the day to the new bourgeois nationalist party created under his influence.
The first Peronist government was able to grant important concessions to the extremely militant workers movement, thanks to the margin of maneuver the Argentine bourgeoisie had gained from the loosening of its links with imperialism and the conditions favoring the country's traditional trade patterns as a result of the world war and the changes it had brought about in the international conjuncture. At the same time, General Peron's movement initiated a profound transformation in the structure of the organized workers move ment, creating the conditions for the rise of a new union bureaucracy directly linked to the bourgeois state apparatus. This bureaucracy became the main vehicle for class-collaborationist politics among the workers.
Contrary to what happened to the leaders of the MNR in Bolivia, Peron fell be fore the masses had broken from his movement. His successors sought to deprive the working class of the conquests of the Justicialist era and to suppress those organizations that the workers regarded more than ever as their front line of defense. A long period of eighteen years of proscription and persecution of its most militant members opened up for Peronism. For years these factors delayed the development of an open crisis within the workers movement.
15. The Cuban revolution had a determining role in the appearance of new vanguard sectors and organizations throughout Latin America. At the continental level, it was both the main motive force and the product of the crisis of Stalinism. It was to rupture the hegemony of bourgeois nationalism on the mass movement. It polarized the field of class struggle through the presence of the first Latin American workers state.
The Cuban revolution thereby led to an increasing radicalization of struggles, which was reflected in Argentina in Peronism, Stalinism, and Social Democracy, as well as to some degree in some sectors of the Trotskyist movement. This is how some initial elements of the present Argentine vanguard appeared, developing mainly from the ranks of Peronism and Stalinism.
But a new broad vanguard was to appear in Argentina, not only under the impact of the Cuban revolution, but above all out of the mass struggles that spread and developed around the confrontation with the military dictatorship, between 1966 and 1973.
16. That is why it is correct to consider the explosion of the Cordobazo as a key date for understanding the present situation of the vanguard in Argentina. Because it was in the Cordobazo that the appearance of a new social vanguard or broad vanguard was to be expressed for the first time on a massive scale.
What we call the broad vanguard is the totality of radicalized sectors of the mass movement who play an active role in the struggles and who, to a more or less large degree, tend to escape the control of the traditional nationalist or reformist leadership as they go into action. This mass vanguard encompasses more than the number of militants who are organized in clearly structured groups or parties. What the Cordobazo and the later struggles show is that this broad vanguard in Argentina is not limited to radicalized sectors of the student movement or the petty bourgeoisie; it is also composed of elements located in important sectors of the working class. In the latter case, this workers radicalization reflects the social weight of the Argentine proletariat and its active role in the mass struggles throughout the last thirty years. Among the harbingers of this radicalization were the workers' participation in the Peronist resistance, the general strike and factory occupations of 1964, the experiments incorporated in the programs of La Falda and Huerta Grande, as well as in the struggles of the longshoremen and sugarcane workers during the first years of the Ongania dictatorship and the splitoff of the CGT de los Argentinos [a distinct labor federation headed by the "left" bureaucrat Ongaro]. This new broad vanguard developed through these successive mass struggles against the military dictatorship, accumulating experiences and beginning to challenge the bureaucratic leaderships. Now it is not only peripheral edges of the traditional organizations who are swelling the ranks of the vanguard but, above all, sectors that are radicalizing and appearing even in the midst of mass struggles, including student as well as worker struggles.
17. The real political importance and meaning of the armed struggle in Argentina depends on the degree to which it fuses with the traditions of the use of revolutionary violence in the working class — as in the Peronist resistance— and with the growth of the mass movement in the context of a prerevolutionary situation. The guerrilla organizations were to have political repercussions among the masses and reciprocally, to find the development of the mass movement determining their own orientation. The growing worker and student movements confronted the repressive apparatus of the military dictatorship on several occasions, objectively posing the necessity to organize revolutionary violence. Only then could it be understood to what degree sectors of the masses and especially this broad vanguard that had emerged from the struggles themselves had identified with the guerrilla struggle as an extension of their own struggle against the dictatorship.
That is how an identification with armed struggle and, more concretely, support of the guerrilla organizations became one of the main points of reference for the majority of the new broad vanguard. 18. But armed struggle is not a sufficient pole of clarification to assure the homogeneity and cohesion of this new broad vanguard. As soon as the electoral maneuver prepared by General Lanusse became clear, the political contradictions that would break up the initial framework of unity of action in the struggle against the dictatorship were to appear clearly.
This is where the absence of a revolutionary Marxist pole in the Argentine vanguard became obvious. This role was not filled by the PRT, an organization that had some real possibilities of winning a hegemonic position within this new broad vanguard. The centrist orientation of its leadership made it incapable not only of benefiting from the prestige it had won through the actions of the ERP, but also of acting as a force that could provide political clarification in the struggle against Peronism and reformism.
Thus the natural heterogeneity and political confusion of this new vanguard, the historical product of Stalinism's domination of the international workers move ment and of the weakness of revolutionary Marxism down through the years, was to continue and to crystallize into different political currents.
Today it is impossible to analyze the characteristics of this broad vanguard without analyzing the principal political currents that it includes.
The partial setback of the military dictatorship and the return to a regime of bourgeois democracy, with a certain lessening of the repression and the reestablishment of democratic rights, even though precarious, will enable broader sectors of this social vanguard to express themselves in new mobilizations and mass struggles, and thus to gauge the limits of this situation.
Even if the situation of the vanguard in Argentina continues to be characterized by a profound atomization, the new conjuncture, which is more demanding of political responses than was the previous period of the military dictatorship, has be gun to produce a certain polarization. Thus organizations and currents that are more important and defined are appearing, accompanied by a process of fusions, splits, crises, and clarification.
Numerous groups and organizations continue to exist, however, around these sectors, the most important poles of the broad vanguard. We must take these groups and organizations into account when we attempt a more precise definition of united-front tactics and political intervention in the different mass fronts. 19. The vast majority of this new broad vanguard was to identify with revolutionary Peronism, and with radicalized Peronism.
Insofar as the radicalized sectors of the Peronist youth groups had identified with the Peronist armed organizations, these sectors were able to channel and win the support of a major part of this new broad vanguard of student and worker origin. The development of various workers currents opposed to the bureaucracy and identified with radicalized or revolutionary Peronism reflected the difficulty some sections of the working class were having in breaking with bourgeois-nationalist ideology after thirty years of the workers' consciousness being formed in the Peronist mold, and in the absence of a "classist" (class-struggle) mass alternative. This had already been experienced previously, for example, in the formation of the CGT de los Argentinos.
The radicalization of sectors of the petty-bourgeoisie and the student movement was followed by its "Peronization."
This phenomenon reflected, in a distorted way, the weight of the labor movement in the social struggles. It was an opportunist attempt to link up with the working class, through adapting to its present level of consciousness.
The new conjuncture, characterized by the presence of bourgeois and bureaucratic Peronism in government, under the leadership of General Peron himself, tends to increasingly sharpen the political contradictions in the radical wing of the Peronist movement. There is a gap that grows wider and wider between the aspirations of the militant sectors and the harsh reality of the bourgeois project of rebuilding a national capitalism under the sponsorship of Peron. There is an insurmountable contradiction between the needs of liberation and the "socialist fatherland" that arose in the struggle against the dictatorship and, on the other hand, Peron's maintenance of a negotiated dependence on imperialism. The demands that were rejected for so many years, and that are today advanced by the workers ranks, collide with the requirements of the "Social Pact" signed between the bosses and the union bureaucracy with Peron's full support.
The whole struggle against the military dictatorship is being betrayed by virtue of the fact that the assassins and torturers guilty of bloodbaths against the people go unpunished, and are even vindicated by the new wave of repression being under-taken by the special gangs of the police and the Peronist right wing.
In these conditions, two distinct attitudes have already appeared clearly within the "radical wing" of the Peronist movement. One is held by the leadership of the Peronist youth, the Peronist worker youth, the Peronist university youth, and the FAR and Montonero organizations.
They are vainly trying to preserve the precarious political breathing space won within the Peronist movement, at the cost of continual twists and turns, in order to absolve Peron himself from responsibility for the government's policy.
They continue to hold to the logic of Peron's plan for "national reconstruction," putting forward a stages concept of revolution in which an alliance with the national bourgeoisie would have its place. This leads them into increasingly opportunist attitudes, such as collaborating with the army in the case of "Operation Dorrego"; negotiating worker and student struggles; adopting a conciliatory attitude toward the most reactionary sectors of the Peronist movement, whose role of open betrayal of the labor movement they themselves had denounced; subordinating themselves to the "tactical" interests of these sectors; and supporting the bureaucracy's "Law of Professional Associations." This attitude will lead to a growing separation of the leading circles of the radical wing of the Peronist movement from their base among the militants, especially those militants of working-class origin. The outlines of the other attitude, still a minority one, are to be found among the more consistent sectors of the revolutionary wing of Peronism —the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP), the Rank-and-File Peronists, the October 17 Revolutionary Move ment, and the Peronist Revolutionary Front.
These sectors have shown they are more in tune with the militant and revolutionary aspirations of their ranks, and are beginning to pose the necessity of an independent alternative for the working class, in a process that can lead to a split with bourgeois and bureaucratic Peronism and with Peron himself.
Thus new conjunctural conditions are appearing that favor a break by wider sectors of the social vanguard with the ideology of bourgeois nationalism, to the extent that a revolutionary Marxist pole exists capable of winning it and offering it new perspectives.
Thus a new and decisive stage is appearing in the open crisis of Peronism as a bourgeois-nationalist current in the process of losing control of fundamental sectors of the workers movement and the mass movement in general.
20. Stalinist reformism has won new forces, especially among the student movement and among sectors of the new vanguard.
This rise of the CP is a phenomenon that is not limited to Argentina, but which has occurred also in other countries of Latin America. It shows the CP's capacity to recover from its own serious crises and its own links with the international Stalinist movement. In the last analysis, this rise reflects the weight of the USSR in the international relationship of forces and the fact that the crisis of Stalinism does not automatically mean the disappearance of this reformist current.
In a more precise and conjunctural way, this rise indicates a certain recovery of re formism vis-a-vis the crisis of the Castroist current which, at the Latin American level, developed under the impact of the Cuban revolution as both a product and a motive force of the crisis of Stalinism. This recovery of Stalinism is also based on the dependence of the Cuban workers state on the USSR: the present policy of the Cuban leadership is not weakening Stalinism as was the case in preceding years. The experience with the Popular Unity in Chile has also contributed to the resurgence of reformist illusions.
This conjunctural growth of the CP poses once again the problem of the validity of the overall political and ideological struggle against Stalinism in the Argentina of today.
The CP's policy has been revealed as absolutely tail-endist in relation to Peronism, in the framework of a traditional orientation of revolution by stages and class collaboration with sectors of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, its present growth will deepen its contradictions and its crisis, to the extent that the failure of its present bourgeois project and the precariousness of bourgeois parliamentary democracy become obvious, as they did in Chile.
21. The Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) represents the most important centrist force in the revolutionary left. Precisely because it opts for the armed struggle as a central core of its political theses— and armed struggle constitutes one of the main political reference points of the new broad vanguard — it tends to polarize around itself military sectors lacking important perspectives of their own in the present conjuncture.
In spite of the growing rightward evolution of its leadership (see the section "A First Self-Critical Balance Sheet of Argentine Trotskyism" in this resolution), the PRT has won great prestige as a result of the ERP's struggle against the military dictatorship. Despite many inadequacies from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism, it has shown that it is capable of important political initiatives in the new conjuncture, such as the workers assembly of Cordoba, various military actions, its participation in the mass mobilizations for Trelew and Chile, and the creation of the Front Against Imperialism and for Socialism.
In the short run, the major source of the PRT's contradictions is its inability to define and develop an overall correct tactic that can respond to the needs of the conjuncture. Thus the gap between propaganda initiatives, which remain relatively abstract, and a policy in the mass movement that is insufficient or tail-endist in relationship to the reformists, continues to widen. But it must be emphasized that as long as there is no clear revolutionary Marxist alternative that is also a political force capable of attracting significant sectors of the broad vanguard by its presence in the struggles, the PRT will continue to appear as the most advanced and most credible existing option in the revolutionary left. 22. The other important organized sectors that are influential in the new broad vanguard, whose main characteristic is their centrism on the question of armed struggle, have radicalized in opposition not only to the radical wing of Peronism and Stalinist reformism, but also to the PRT and other armed organizations. This means that they have developed their consistency and their main points of reference in reaction against the principal deficiencies of these currents, giving rise to a broad overall political and ideological definition, as well as to a perspective of doing "serious" work in the mass movement.
Reacting against Peronist populism, reformism, and ideological eclecticism, organizations like the PCR and the VC seek a consistent line in Maoism, while the PO, the PST, and others seek it in Trotskyism.
Although in their strategic perspectives they can hold various positions, ranging from "people's war" to insurrectionalist positions, and from the revolution by stages to the permanent revolution, their activity with respect to armed struggle is the same. They have not understood the necessity of armed struggle initiated by detachments of the vanguard in the period of the dictatorship. They do not understand the necessity of responding with mass self-defense to the current attacks of the special gangs of the police and the trade-union bureaucracy. This policy disarms and disorients their own militants and sectors of the broad vanguard influenced by them in the worker and student movements. This is expressed by a complete absence of responses to the key questions of the present period or, in the best of cases, by an improvised tail-endism with respect to more consistent revolutionary sectors.
23. The crisis of revolutionary leadership that the Argentine workers movement has been experiencing does not signify only that the majority of workers have illusions about bourgeois nationalism. It also means that none of the existing political forces today appears as the embryo of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to the seizure of power and the building of socialism, thus putting an end to the capitalist system of dependence and exploitation. Even the most advanced forces have profound deformations that prevent them from becoming a real revolutionary leadership of the masses.
To employ such a characterization is to emphasize the central task facing revolutionary Marxists at the present stage: building a revolutionary party capable of overcoming the crisis of leadership of the proletariat and leading it to the definitive victory over imperialism and the bourgeoisie. The entire activity of revolutionary Marxists must be focused on building the party. Revolutionary Marxists insist on the full actuality of the Leninist theory of organization. This means posing the problem of building a party in accord with the principles of democratic centralism, composed of members tested through their experience in the class struggle, and providing for the fusion of revolutionary Marxism with the workers vanguard.
24. A hard political struggle is required to build a revolutionary party in Argentina. It means contending against bourgeois nationalism for the support of the masses. It also means debating sectors that have already escaped the control of the traditional bureaucratic leaderships, that is, the new broad vanguard, in contest with the radical wing of the Peronist movement, with reformism, and with the various centrist currents. The party will be built in conditions where there already exist relatively crystallized poles at the level of the vanguard-or at least poles having a significant political attraction. These conditions require that the task of political clarification and education of the broad vanguard be made a fundamental aspect of party building, given the fact that this vanguard constitutes the essential basis on which the revolutionary Marxists must accumulate their forces. The political education of this new broad vanguard in the present circumstances of Argentina can only occur on the basis of the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. Only revolutionary Marxism offers a solid critical basis and a coherent political alternative to bourgeois nationalism, Stalinist reformism, and centrism. In Argentina today, there is no more room for new centrist options, if the crisis of revolutionary leadership is going to be effectively overcome. Only a revolutionary Marxist party will be able to lead the Argentine proletariat to workers power and socialism.
25. The explosive dynamic of class struggles in a country like Argentina determines how the political accumulation of forces involved in building a revolutionary Marxist party will take place. Even an organization that is of modest size, but which is struggling to become the vanguard, quickly confronts imposing responsibilities. Moreover, the existence of more than one vanguard pole already commanding significant political strength and capacity for initiatives requires that revolutionary
Marxists who claim to be contending for leadership of sectors of the broad vanguard build a real and concrete alternative, and not present themselves simply as a "theoretical" alternative.
These two factors put a question mark on the possibility of building the revolutionary Marxist party through an accumulation of forces by "stages," including a first stage of propaganda and pure and simple education.
Political education and accumulation of forces within the broad vanguard is a function not only of the ability to conduct a necessary political struggle around revolutionary Marxist positions, but also of the ability to transform them into initiatives in action that concretize the revolutionary Marxist orientation in the eyes of sectors of the masses and the broad vanguard by demonstrating its quality and its superiority and the capacity of the organization to carry out such initiatives successfully. Initiatives in action must be part of an overall tactic that is suited to the conjuncture. Only if we are able in practice to carry off such a tactic and obtain results from it, even the most modest results, within sectors of the masses, can we go forward in building the revolutionary party. In that sense, the revolutionary Marxists must be able to assume tasks and responsibilities that correspond to the vanguard of the class struggle in Argentina in the present period. They must build their organization as a combat organization composed of members completely committed to the revolutionary cause and determined to take on all the tasks of the period. There is no room for dilettantes or propagandist organizations in Argentina today.
### VI. The Tasks of Revolutionary Marxists in the Present Period
26. In the stage that opened with the installation of the new Peronist government, the central task of revolutionary Marxists is to win a mass base, even if only in several epicenters of the class struggle. This objective can only be achieved if the revolutionary Marxists succeed in creating an alternative pole to Peronism, reformism, and centrism, a pole that can win to the revolutionary organization or its influence some cadres of this new broad vanguard that played a leading role in the struggles beginning with the Cordobazo in May 1969. Any success revolutionary Marxists achieve in this area will help strengthen the mass movement as a whole, thereby deepening the crisis of the system, stimulating the political maturing of broad layers of workers and employees, and helping to emancipate them from the influence the bourgeoisie continues to exert through the medium of Peronist ideology.
The main efforts of revolutionary Marxists in winning a mass base should be oriented toward inserting themselves in the workers movement. That involves a centralized and planned intervention of the developing revolutionary Marxist party aimed at winning to its ranks the best cadres of the new workers vanguard. This intervention will be focused on those sectors of the working class where it is possible to accumulate forces, combining an intervention in the most concentrated and advanced of the key sectors with an intervention in less advanced sectors that have nevertheless experienced an important radicalization and important struggles. The first concern of revolutionary Marxists in the workers movement will be to encourage struggles and to support them. The natural point of departure of these struggles is the legitimate desire to recover conquests of the workers that have been trampled underfoot by the bourgeoisie and the dictatorships for the last twenty years, as the first step toward winning new conquests. It is essential that the recovery of previous conquests and the winning of new ones be the product of the struggle, because whether the labor movement increases its subordination to the bourgeoisie or increases its confidence in its own forces and methods of class struggle will depend on this. In addition, the struggle against high living costs and for regaining the previous standard of living involves a refusal to subject the labor movement to the requirements of the bourgeoisie's economic policy, and breaking with the Social Pact, which was signed by the bosses and the Peronist trade-union bureaucracy, against the people's interests. From this standpoint, such struggles have a major political significance beyond their intrinsic objectives and lead to confrontation with the Peronist government and its plans.
Revolutionary Marxists must emphasize transitional demands that stimulate an anticapitalist dynamic in the struggles. In the context of prerevolutionary crisis, such demands go beyond the level of propaganda and become the subject matter of political agitation campaigns.
The problems of modern industry and the experiences of the struggle of recent years indicate that these transitional slogans will tend to be centered on the theme of workers control. This concept can be developed around several themes: rehiring of workers who are laid off, with the right to veto layoffs, to open the books, and to abolish business and banking secrets; struggle for wage increases and against the high cost of living, with the sliding scale of wages controlled by the workers, permanent parity commissions under the control of workers assemblies, neighborhood price-control commissions, workers control of production as a means to control costs and prices. A struggle for working conditions and job security, with production norms and the pace of work determined by the workers themselves, workers control over conditions of job safety and hygiene, the elimination of security guards and their integration into useful employment, etc., etc. An anti-imperialist struggle with nationalizations and state ownership under workers control. All opportunities, all incidents, and all conflicts should be used to put forward these slogans and others that express the concept of workers control in concrete terms. The struggle for transitional demands must be accompanied by the struggle for the independence of the workers movement in relation to the bourgeoisie and its state. Thus, at the same time, revolutionary Marxists advocate the creation of democratic rank-and-file bodies as the primary instruments of revolutionary mobilization, capable of growing over into an embryo of alternative workers power. We must take advantage of all struggles to fight for the independent organization of the proletariat, beginning with its most elementary forms such as democratically elected strike committees, struggle committees, and so on.
Revolutionary Marxists will have to take advantage of high points in their struggles to wrest the unions from the hands of the bureaucracy and make them instruments of defense of the workers' interests. The integration of the bureaucratic leaderships into the state apparatus and their transformation into civil servants sharing re sponsibility for the management and functioning of the capitalist system indicate the importance and the implications of the struggle against the bureaucracy. A major proportion of the present workers struggles will inevitably develop an antibureaucratic dimension and thereby go beyond their initial economic framework to become transformed into political struggles that are decisive for the labor movement. If it is true that the bureaucracy is nothing other than the representative of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement, and that behind it lies the fundamental class enemy, the present mode of domination of the bourgeoisie over the masses gives the bureaucracy a decisive role. Hence the explosive character of the antibureaucratic struggle, its dynamic of violent confrontations with the armed gangs of the bureaucrats. and its collisions with the bourgeois state itself when the union bureaucracy cannot contain the mass movement.
Revolutionary Marxists will organize the struggle against the union bureaucracy at the rank-and-file level, encouraging, supporting, and participating in the formation of regroupments, slates, fronts, and mobilization committees against the bureaucracy, while avoiding any identification with oppositionist tendencies that are also bureaucratic. To help break the bureaucracy's restraining hold, revolutionary Marxists will do what they can to organize the generalization, solidarity, and centralization of struggles, breaking through their isolation and thereby holding out new perspectives and new possibilities.
The very dynamic of the class struggle and the character of the class confrontation taking place in Argentina today pose revolutionary Marxists with the necessity of assuming as a central task the responsibility to advocate and organize mass self-defense. Every struggle of a certain scope must pose armed self-defense against the attacks of the gangs of the bureaucracy and capital, against police and special military repression. Armed self-defense should be accompanied by demands pointing to a renewal of the traditions of militant forms of struggle that challenge bourgeois legality: ranging from factory occupations, seizures of management personnel, and strike pickets, up to the formation of combat detachments and workers commandos that undertake offensive actions. For revolutionary Marxists, self-defense is preparatory to the arming of the masses in the perspective of the armed struggle for the seizure of power. The decisive character of self-defense and its relevance today mean that revolutionary Marxists cannot limit themselves to propaganda for it, nor wait like spontaneists for "the masses" or "the mobilization" to defend itself in the natural course of things. On the contrary, they must take concrete and definite initiatives in this direction, in order to gradually draw more and more sectors of the masses into the tasks of armed self-defense. 27. In the present stage, major efforts will have to be devoted to a centralized and planned intervention in the student movement. For revolutionary Marxists, the student movement, besides being an invaluable source for rapidly accumulating cadres, permits the organization to engage in political initiatives with a significant mass impact within a relatively short space of time.
Revolutionary Marxists will propel forward the struggle against the plans of the bourgeoisie, which are aimed at transforming the students into factors in the rationalization of the dependent capitalist system. Through mobilizing and organizing the student movement, they will try to maintain the role it has had in recent years as a politicizing factor and auxiliary of the workers movement in the struggle. They will struggle to convert the university that serves the capitalist system and a negotiated dependence with imperialism into an instrument serving the workers and people's struggles. They will struggle against the plans of both imperialism and the national bourgeoisie. Within the framework of their critique of the content of education and their challenge to imperialist domination, they will struggle to introduce Marxism into the university as a fundamental political and ideological weapon against bourgeois ideology. Participation in legal, representative student bodies, when guaranteed free speech, will be used to encourage mobilizations and struggles, based on the forms of democratic organization of the ranks of the student movement that have been developed during the re cent years of struggle against the military dictatorship. In addition to fighting against all forms of obscurantism, revolutionary Marxists will denounce the plans and agents of imperialism and the bourgeoisie. They will mobilize and organize the armed self-defense of the students against the armed gangs of reaction. 28. The value and relevance of the armed struggle are indicated by the very characteristics of the period, by the explosive character of the class struggle, and by the responsibilities for the vanguard that flow from it.
The first duty facing revolutionary Marxists at this level is to assure the armed self-defense of the mass movement and of its own activity as a vanguard. Those who would be incapable of assuming such a role cannot claim to play an effective vanguard role.
The revolutionary organization must combine the various necessary levels of armed struggle with its own political intervention, which involves developing revolutionary fighters, as well as agitators, propagandists, and organizers. From this standpoint, in Argentina today we should not sacrifice the clandestine character of the organization— especially of its leadership, apparatus, and infrastructure-in order to take advantage of possibilities for legal or semilegal work.
Besides self-defense of the mass movement and its own activities as a vanguard, the revolutionary organization will undertake a series of armed initiatives in action, the necessity of which will flow from the characteristics of the period and the conditions in which the party is being built. The fundamental purpose of these actions is to carry out armed agitation and propaganda to publicize the positions of the revolutionary Marxists. These actions may be centered in milieus where we are developing our political intervention, or they can be of greater scope with a more general character. In all cases, such initiatives must not be meant to replace the activity and struggles of the masses, but precisely to stimulate them. Their fundamental character will therefore be to carry out political denunciations and to contribute to the maturing of the broad vanguard, thereby helping build the party. The political themes of such actions must be evaluated tactically in each case in terms of the conjuncture and the situation of the revolutionary Marxists.
29. The needs of the political and ideological struggle against Peronism, reformism, and centrism, as well as of the active intervention of revolutionary Marxists in the class struggle, require intensive propaganda work. Even the most minimal possibilities of using legal and semilegal openings must be exploited along this path. Besides the special efforts that are necessary to guarantee the quality, the regularity, and the broadest circulation of the central organ, revolutionary Marxists will increase the means of propagandizing their positions. This propaganda will be focused on several fundamental axes: a. A consistent struggle to demystify Peronism and the nature of the regime that resulted from the 1973 elections, which at the same time involves a definition of the prerevolutionary character of the period, the nature of the revolutionary process in Argentina, and the aim of the struggle for workers power. Peronism will have to be demystified not only through general explanations of the first Peron governments, between 1945 and 1955, but also and basically by citing the concrete experience that the masses are going through right now. It must be emphasized that any eventual adaptation to the level of consciousness of the masses would only appear to resolve the problem of establishing links with the masses without actually doing so. Inevitably, this would lead to a tail-endist attitude, devoid of a revolutionary orientation and method. b. A demystification of all parliamentary illusions. The precariousness of the "democratic" interlude and the inevitability of armed confrontations must be continually emphasized. We must show concretely the continuity of the class character of the state and its role as a repressive instrument of domination serving imperialism and the bourgeoisie. We must denounce the fact that repressive elements who carried out torture and assassinations under the military dictatorship go free and are even used in new ways for the same ends. We must point to the fact that the armed forces re main as the reserve military party of the ruling classes, ready to actively intervene again as a decisive guarantee of the continuity of the system. c. A propaganda campaign with the slogan of a revolutionary workers and people's government. The social content of this formula is a government from which the representatives of the ruling classes would be excluded, and which would be composed of representatives of the proletariat, the poor peasant layers, and the radicalized petty bourgeoisie, the only allies the working class can count on. The formula of a revolutionary workers and people's government will be explicitly counterposed to any formula that deliberately blurs the precise class content and implies an alliance between bourgeoisie and the exploited classes. Propaganda for this formula must be accompanied by propaganda on the structures of workers power, from neighborhood councils and factory committees to a People's Assembly whose legitimate expression must be the workers and people's government. At the same time, we must explain that such bodies can only arise from the mobilization itself, from the revolutionary struggle of the working class and its allies, and that it requires the arming of the masses. In this sense, a real workers and people's government can only arise from and be based on a people whose ranks are armed and organized. d. Propaganda on the forms and content of the socialism we are fighting for. The power of the democratically organized and centralized workers councils must be counterposed to the farce of "national socialism" of bourgeois and bureaucratic Peronism; to the ambiguities of the "socialist fatherland" of the radical wing of the Peronist movement; and to the bureaucratic model of socialism presented by the international Stalinist movement, a caricature that has done so much to discredit socialism and prejudice the workers movement against it. e. A consistent struggle around the full program of revolutionary Marxism. More precisely, a struggle for proletarian internationalism and solidarity with struggles in the other countries dominated by imperialism, in the advanced capitalist countries, and in the bureaucratized workers states. This involves an active defense of the relevance of the building of a mass revolutionary international and of the role played by the Fourth International at this level. 30. The present relationship of forces between revolutionary Marxists on the one hand, and the Peronists, reformists, and centrists on the other, means that we cannot continually apply the united-front tactic without falling into tail-endist positions. In these circumstances, we must adopt a more flexible tactic of unity-outflanking at different levels. We must dynamically promote a correct dialectic that combines unity in action on precise points of an action program with independent initiatives. To subordinate a revolutionary approach to the interests of achieving unity in all situations leads to tail-endism in relation to the dominant political currents. An exclusively independent activity leads to sectarianism, isolation, and ineffectiveness in the political and even ideological struggle. Unity in action on precise points and independent initiatives outflanking the dominant political currents must be combined so as to support the mobilization, organization, and political clarification of sectors of the masses in which we are intervening. We refer to unity of action-outflanking at different levels because it is a question of benefiting from similar trends and contradictions among the different political forces that make up the spectrum of the broad vanguard.
The dispersion of the revolutionary Marxist forces, their limited influence in the mass movement, and the significance of the present political situation mean it is extremely important for these sectors to gradually come together and unify if they are to succeed in forming a pole capable of influencing the broad vanguard. Such a process must occur on solid political foundations that include a definition of the tasks of the period as outlined in this resolution. 31. Building the revolutionary Marxist party and intervening in the class struggle with the ability to carry out initiatives requires a special effort to assure the political education of the cadres and members of the broad vanguard who are won to the organization. In addition to an effort to raise their theoretical level and their political capacities, this also involves their achieving a more profound understanding through debating and assimilating the experience of the struggles of recent years, one of the richest experiences in the history of the country and of the whole of Latin America. In this framework, we must begin defining a strategy for power as a task of major importance.
### VII. A First Self-Critical Balance Sheet
32. There is a great tradition of Trotskyist organizations in Argentina. Several of them already have a long history, more or less linked with the Fourth International.
However, neither
Posadasism (which broke with the Fourth International in 1962) nor the tendency that resulted in today's PST [Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores —Socialist Workers party, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International], have succeeded in forging a continuity of revolutionary Marxist politics.
The Fourth International has experienced an important defeat with the split of the Revolutionary Workers party [PRT— Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores], together with the majority of its members, from the International. This occurs at a time when the Argentine political situation is heading toward a class confrontation whose outcome, after the coups in Bolivia, Uruguay, and Chile, will be reflected in the relationship of forces throughout Latin America. This political context, and the circumstances and forms of the PRT's split, indicate the importance of the defeat.
This development must be analyzed self-critically by the Fourth International as a whole, and by its leadership in particular. Within the framework of this resolution it is appropriate to make a first self-critical balance sheet.
33. The PRT was recognized unanimously by the Ninth World Congress as the Argentine section of the Fourth International because the congress considered that this organization represented the continuity of the section, its national congress having been called by a majority of the Central Committee of the united section, while the minority of the Central Committee, which constituted the group La Verdad, had re fused to recognize the authority of that congress. At that time, the leadership of the PRT already held a series of positions, many of them inherited from the leadership of the united section, that were in contradiction with the essential concepts and analyses of the Fourth International — an erroneous appreciation of Maoism, especially of the theoretical implications of Mao's concept of people's war; an apologetic appreciation of Castroism; a centrist and eclectic conception of building the International; an opportunist conception of the struggle against the bureaucracy of the degenerated workers states, typified by the support they gave to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Kremlin armies, etc. Although these positions were partly known, neither the Ninth World Congress nor the leadership of the Fourth International spelled out a political critique of the PRT.
The PRT could therefore have already been characterized as a centrist party, but with a centrism different from the Castroist current in general. This centrism has many roots: the impact of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions; the international influence of Maoism, reinvigorated by the cultural revolution and the Sino-Soviet conflict; the influence of Peronism in Argentina, which encouraged the development of the revolutionary populism that figured in the ideology of the PRT.
But its links with the Trotskyist movement meant that the PRT had maintained a definition of the party and an under standing of the need for one, in contrast to the lack of precision of the conceptions held by the MIR and the Tupamaros, not to speak of the Castroist current in general. From this viewpoint, the PRT objectively posed the necessity of the Leninist party at the level of the new vanguard, which in Latin America had begun the armed struggle after the Cuban revolution — a new vanguard that is characterized in general by its lack of understanding of the necessity of the party. Even in the confused formulas of the Fifth Congress, in 1970, where it included the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cubans, and the Albanians in "its" proposed international, the PRT kept a vision of the International and its necessity that went beyond the horizon of OLAS. Finally, the PRT assimilated (although in a confused and insufficient way) the conception of the permanent revolution, which leads it today to retain a class-struggle approach to Peronism. Moreover, the PRT has shown that it is capable of actually initiating armed struggle, despite the political errors we will analyze, which have been paid for at the cost of losses and splits. This aspect of its political intervention corresponds to a profound necessity of the period; otherwise, it would be impossible to understand the origin of the influence and prestige that the PRT presently enjoys despite its errors. Thus the PRT has been able to win a body of representative militants among the best elements of the new vanguard that has arisen during the recent years of struggle in Argentina. For all these reasons, the recognition of the PRT as a section of the Fourth International was justified. In the framework of the transformation of the Fourth International from a propaganda organization to a combat organization capable of actively intervening in the class struggle and able to take initiatives in action, including armed struggle in Latin America, the integration and political education within the Fourth International of representative sectors of the new vanguard, such as the PRT, that state their programmatic agreement with the Fourth International are correct. But immediately after the Ninth World Congress there should have been a frank discussion with the Argentine comrades on all the theoretical and political differences, instead of limiting ourselves to publicizing the courageous actions of the ERP without at the same time posing the political problems that existed. A correct characterization of the PRT as a centrist party implied the need to understand that a veritable political battle had to be waged to clarify positions and definitions, even if this led to a break with an important sector of its leadership and its members. The conditions for this struggle for political clarification were incomparably more favorable at the time of the Ninth World Congress than during the recent past, because at that time the centrist positions and the definition of the PRT's orientation were less crystallized. At that time, too, there were more elements likely to join a tendency supporting the Fourth International, given the framework of a battle for political clarification.
The attitude of the Fourth International toward the PRT must be characterized as opportunist. The lack of necessary debate with the Argentine comrades is still more serious when one takes into account the fact that in addition to the positions of the PRT Fourth Congress, which were already partly known at the time of the Ninth World Congress, there were other facts that should have alerted us further to the dangers in the PRT's orientation. Before and after the Ninth World Congress, the PRT had experienced serious crises involving important splits and reflecting the difficulties it had encountered, first when it defined its strategy and then in the practical application of that strategy. The most important warning signal was the preliminary debates and resolutions of the PRT's Fifth Congress, held in July 1970, which were accompanied by the split of important sectors, including the majority of members of the Central Committee elected in 1968. No balance sheet of this congress was made on the International level, although it is true that the International center suffered from a serious delay in the receipt of information about it. The sectors that had split off were overlooked, in an administrative way, and the majority was recognized as the legitimate successor, without the least analysis of the political significance of what had happened.
Nevertheless, the criticism that certain members of the Communist Tendency were making at the time had a number of valuable points —for example, the characterization of the period, the role of armed struggle in the building of the party — that anticipated to some degree some of the characterizations that we are able to make today. Despite the eclectic nature of the Communist Tendency (which resulted in the dispersal and inconsistency of the majority of its members, with a few exceptions), it would have been important to have an analysis of the positions that were debated at that time. Nor did trips and contacts between the leaders of the Fourth International and the PRT have any effect on the way the debate was conducted. When the first elements for a discussion were produced, it was already too late for this to have any significant repercussions in the PRT.
The relations between the PRT and the Fourth International highlighted the fact that there was no leadership acting as the collective center. Nevertheless, the objectives of the Ninth World Congress required a profound transformation in the International center and its methods of operation. Only a real day-to-day leadership, with new resources in personnel and finances would have enabled it to respond effectively to the new needs arising from the evolution of both the objective situation and our orientation. In this situation, the work of the center with respect to Argentina was rarely discussed collectively, and what discussion did take place was sporadic and much less than what was required. But it was a political weakness as much as an organizational weakness on the part of the International leadership, as was shown in the administrative attitude taken toward the building of the Argentine section. We were prevented from defining what was involved in the objectives adopted by the Ninth World Congress by the lack of understanding of the role the leadership had to play in the transformation of the International; by the maintenance of primitive and routine methods of work; and by the absence of a clear political characterization of the PRT, which led some to hope that it could be progressively and spontaneously assimilated to revolutionary Marxism. In addition, there was the underestimation of the major inadequacies of the Ninth World Congress in the definition of the orientation for Latin America and the dangers involved in the application of the armed-struggle orientation, which was a new experience for the International as a whole. For all these reasons, the Fourth International must self-critically take responsibility for the circumstances in which the split in the Argentine section took place. From the viewpoint of the centrist leadership of the PRT, its break from the Fourth International is at once a consequence and a necessary step in a growing evolution to the right. The pressures from the Cuban leadership played an important role in influencing this leadership in its break with the Fourth International.
34. Shortly after the Fifth Congress, in July 1970, the PRT began to carry out its actions through the intermediary of the ERP. Having succeeded in educating its militants in a fighting spirit, it was in a position to launch a systematic and effective struggle of considerable scope. In the space of a few months, the ERP emerged as the most dynamic of the armed-struggle organizations, winning broad support from proletarian and popular layers and becoming a real factor in the political struggle of the country.
The major initiatives of the PRT-ERP occurred in the context of urban guerrilla struggle against the military dictatorship, the broad lines of which were developed in forms that corresponded in actual fact to the tasks of the vanguard in that period: a. actions aimed at accumulating financial resources; b. actions aimed at acquiring arms, medicine, medical equipment, etc.; c. actions linked to mass mobilizations; d. actions to punish hangmen of the dictatorship, known and hated for their crimes.
Some actions especially tended to integrate the armed struggle into the concrete dynamic of the mass struggle. Some significant episodes, especially during the 1971 mobilizations at Cordoba, were, moreover, a refutation of the opportunists' arguments that armed actions of the kind the ERP engaged in are not understood or approved by the working class and provoke the isolation of the vanguards. On the contrary, in an upsurge and a prerevolutionary crisis the existence and intervention of armed detachments of the vanguard reinforce the masses' mobilizations, increasing their combativity.
The PRT-ERP also carried out expropriations of food and clothing, distributing them in the poor neighborhoods and slums. These actions were aimed at winning the sympathy of the poorest layers of the population and creating a social base of support for the guerrillas. The priority given to orienting toward the most backward sectors of the mass movement to the detriment of advanced sectors of the workers movement is itself debatable. The attempt to base its urban support on a social layer likewise corresponds to an incorrect characterization of the period. Militarist deviations in the armed activity of the ERP were manifested through empiricism or improvisation. Several far-reaching actions were compromised be cause of their voluntarism or an overly ambitious choice of projects. The situation of the organization was not always taken account of in deciding on some actions, which led to the loss of comrades. The system of organization adopted from 1971 on, with the formation of "squads," increased the distortion between the efforts devoted to military action and those aimed at insertion in the mass movement, producing deviations in party building. The balance sheet of the period of armed struggle from 1969 to 1973 indicates that the organizations that successfully engaged in this struggle won a response from the masses, which, among other things, enabled them to play an important role in the mobilizations of May 1973 and during the first months of the Peronist government. Even more important, if the mass mobilizations beginning with the first Cordobazo were the decisive element in the defeat of the military dictatorship, the guerrilla struggle helped to deepen the crisis of the regime. At the same time, it acted as a factor increasing the political maturity of the broad worker and student vanguard.
35. Despite the favorable objective conditions and the prestige gained by the audacious actions of the ERP, the PRT did not succeed in establishing solid links with important sectors of the masses. In other words, the PRT was not able to plumb the potential offered by the period in the framework of the given relationship of forces, in order to build a revolutionary Marxist party with mass influence. That is the consequence of the erroneous strategic orientations and overall conceptions of the leadership team represented by comrade Santucho.
Already, before the split of 1968, the party had drawn the apparently unanimous conclusion that the problem of armed struggle should be put on the agenda. The analysis of the situation at the time — a relative stagnation of the workers movement, sharp social conflicts in the Tucuman area, the existence of a guerrilla nucleus in Bolivia, in the context of a situation defined as prerevolutionary in Argentina — had suggested the perspective of armed action in the form of guerrilla struggle based for a period in the North. The Fourth Congress, which occurred before the Ninth World Congress, saw the development of a harsh polemic on the necessity of concretizing the orientation for armed struggle (the minority represented by Moreno had meanwhile left the organization), while affirming a concept that tried to avoid the twin pitfalls of focoist adventurism and insurrectionalist spontaneism. Based on social and political — and not just technical — considerations (having in fact a relatively static view of the tendencies that were maturing in the country and a lack of understanding of the social formation of the country and the fundamental role of the urban working class), it placed its priority on rural guerrilla warfare. It was the adherence to this perspective, even after the Cordobazo, that was at the origin of the new crisis that shook the party in the first part of 1970. The Fifth Congress marked a decisive stage through the establishment of the ERP.
These corrections, carried out empirically, proved insufficient and did not prevent a number of serious errors and de formations.
First of all, the development of the revolutionary struggle was conceived in accordance with an analogy with the experiences of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. This implied an ignorance or minimization of essential differences: the social composition of these countries, the existence before the outbreak of revolutionary war of a party with broad mass influence, the paralysis of the ruling classes resulting from international as well as domestic causes, and so on. Moreover, a schematic analysis continually blurred the necessary distinction between a prerevolutionary situation and the first stage of armed confrontation on the one hand, and revolutionary war, in the real sense of the term, on the other.
Hence the illusions about the possibility for a rapid and sustained growth of the ERP as the armed organization of the masses. By avoiding the necessity of defining a tactic for building the party, a conception arose of the PRT as the self-proclaimed vanguard.
The basic conception was that the ERP would be built as a result of the initiatives that it took itself through the action of its members, and consequently military strategy was outlined without a strict relationship with the organization's political evolution. This led to a dynamic of the ERP substituting for the party. It was not understood that the integration of sectors of the masses into the armed struggle takes place essentially through their own experience with the sharpening of the class struggle. Nor was there an understanding of the essential role of insurrections and semi-insurrections in the accumulation of experiences by the masses, or of the practical application of the vanguard character of the revolutionary organization as a step toward generalizing the armed struggle.
Another consequence was that the party came to understand the turn in the situation only with considerable delay; above all, it was unable to determine the new priorities in its orientation with the necessary speed and agility. In fact, in the second part of 1971 and in 1972, it went through a militarist deviation, failing to understand the need for forms of armed struggle increasingly linked with the mass movement, such as self-defense teams, which were, however, objectively possible (this was expressed, among other things, through its complete deficiency with respect to the tactical problems posed by the elections last March).
In its political conceptions, the PRT took erroneous or at least equivocal positions on some important problems. It used frankly opportunist formulations when, in a resolution of its executive committee, it characterized the ENA (including the PCA), some petty-bourgeois formations, and even some bourgeois sectors, as strategic allies.
It thus revealed its insufficient assimilation of the theory of permanent revolution and its centrist approach to Stalinism, seeking agreements with the latter on conciliationist bases.
The PRT verged on a rightist orientation when it expressed its preference last July (1973) toward an electoral bloc between the labor leader Tosco and the "progressive" bourgeois Alfonsin. It revealed its theoretical faults when it expressed agreement with the electoral policy of the Tupamaros, who supported the bloc of the CP and SP with the bourgeois parties under the leadership of General Seregni.
It mobilized support for the Front
Against Imperialism and for Socialism on the basis of a minimalist program and at the cost of conciliation with bourgeois Peronism, without defining clearly the nature of the Peron government, while at the same time failing to offer its own members channels for democratic discussion among the rank and file.
In its documents and publications, as in its practice, the PRT has likewise demonstrated that it has not assimilated the methodology of transitional demands. That is why it combines (as it did in the past) positions that are correct in principle but that are expressed in a basically propagandist form (for example, demands directed at the Peronist regime), with a minimalist platform for the working class and the other layers of the population. This is a particularly serious error in a prerevolutionary situation and one, moreover, that prevents an adequate understanding of the real meaning of the potential elements of dual power. All this has alternated with sectarian attitudes (for example, the pretense of imposing the PRT's own conception of revolutionary war on trade-union platforms) and with a bureaucratic practice in its activities in the mass movement.
Finally, if for a certain period underground conditions could explain some restrictions in the full application of the norms of internal democracy, it is nonetheless true that the PRT leadership used clandestinity as a pretext to limit the circulation of political ideas, above all when it was a matter of critical positions. It adopted increasingly bureaucratic methods effectively guaranteeing itself exorbitant powers and introducing norms that are foreign to a Leninist organization. To make things more difficult for oppositionists, it developed an almost caricaturized form of the theory of the class struggle within the party. Even though it had itself announced the opening of the precongress discussion period, as soon as important sectors of the party began to ask questions about the line, the methods, or relations with the International, it quickly ended the debate by administrative measures that brought about splits. It postponed the congress indefinitely, far longer than the statutes allowed. What is even more significant, the Santucho leadership prevented members from learning about critical documents sent by members of the International's leadership, and once the polemic began to touch on issues more directly related to the situation in Argentina, it bureaucratically decided to break with the International, confronting not only the next congress but also the Central Committee with an accomplished fact. Thus the sum total of the errors and deviations flowing from its centrist orientation prevented the PRT from winning a hegemonic position in the new broad vanguard that had arisen in the struggles of recent years. Despite its importance and prestige, it was not able to build a real alternative to Peronism, reformism, and various centrist factions.
36. Point 36 of this resolution is published internally in an Internal Bulletin of the Fourth International.
37. Argentina is the country in Latin America that during the last twenty years has experienced the broadest mobilizations of the working class; where vanguards have matured as a result of many experiences, both national and international; and where there are many militants who consider themselves to be revolutionary Marxists. The creation of a revolutionary party with a mass base is inscribed on the order of the day, and the Fourth International will have to consider as one of its priorities the building of a section which, breaking with the deformations and weaknesses of the Trotskyist movement in the past, will rigorously defend all the conceptions of revolutionary Marxism and draw the political and organizational conclusions that correspond to the urgent needs of the period.
This means that the International must provide sufficient material and political means to aid the construction of its Argentine section. The political means involve mainly the strengthening of the international leadership, the opening of a debate on the strategy for power in the countries of Latin America, and a profound balance sheet on the PRT experience. If its lessons are drawn and assimilated, that experience can become one of the fundamental conquests for the Fourth International in Latin America, because politically it is the richest experience of armed struggle on the continent since the Cuban revolution.