Editorial

Argentina - A Revolution Without Leadership

The events of the past few weeks in Argentina underline, once again, the crucial role of revolutionary leadership in the outcome of the struggles of the peoples for emancipation and social justice.

For the past decade, Argentina has served as the model for neo-liberal "development". All the main policies of neo-liberalism - foreign direct investment, privatization and dollarization - were advanced further in that country than in any other. Those policies led to a direct clash between the people of Argentina and their government, which was little more than a puppet of the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The outcome of the clash was the defeat of the government and the victory of the Argentinian people. In the space of two weeks, four presidents were brought down by the people's movement.

However, what has been the outcome of that victory? Has it solved any of the problems of the Argentinian economy and society? Has it at least opened a path for the solution to those problems by putting political initiative in the hands of the people? No, it has done none of those things. The Argentinian ruling class, which brought this disaster to the people, may have been shaken, but is still firmly in power. The current president, Eduardo Duhalde, has promised to abandon the neo-liberal policies that destroyed the Argentinian economy, but few observers expect him to do more than buy time for the Americans to consolidate their control again. Although payment on the foreign debt has been suspended, Duhalde has not pledged to repudiate that debt, which has been repaid many time over. The main measure taken to date, the floating of the Argentine peso which had previously been pegged to the U.S. dollar, has actually exacerbated the problems of the people by cutting the value of their wages and savings by 40 percent overnight. Despite promises to lift the freeze on personal bank accounts, they remain frozen with strict limits on withdrawals.

How can such a situation develop in which the people have (and use) the power to overthrow their oppressors, but are incapable of consolidating their victory and taking political power into their own hands? The answer lies in the absence of a revolutionary organization capable of providing the people with the leadership needed to advance their struggles from one step to the next.

During the past two decades, many such revolutions have been waged with similar results. The overthrow of the pseudo-socialist regimes in Eastern Europe was one example. Lacking a revolutionary organization capable of leading them step by step to emancipation, the peoples of those countries succeeded only in replacing one set of oppressors with another.

The growing anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement must pay attention to the experience in Argentina and elsewhere. It is not enough for the people to merely take "direct action" against their oppressors. They must also build those organizations and institutions capable of challenging the state and the underlying system itself, and of becoming their own instruments of power. Only then will the overthrow of an existing government become a revolution in the true sense of the word.