Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle

Strategies, Tactics, Objectives

Robert Ovetz, Robert Ovetz

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Arbeitsmarktforschung

Rumours of the death of the global labour movement have been greatly exaggerated. Rising from the ashes of the old trade union movement, workers' struggle is being reborn from below.

By engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organisational forms and objectives. These workers' inquiries, from call centre workers to teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energising unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organisations.

In one of the first major studies to critically assess this new cycle of global working class struggle, Robert Ovetz collects together case studies from over a dozen contributors, looking at workers' movements in China, Mexico, the US, South Africa, Turkey, Argentina, Italy, India and the UK. The book reveals how these new forms of struggle are no longer limited to single sectors of the economy or contained by state borders, but are circulating internationally and disrupting the global capitalist system as they do.

Part I

Transport and Logistics

1

Camioneros: The Argentine Truckers’ Union that Can Paralyze the Country

Dario Bursztyn

The integration of the Argentinian economy into world capitalism as a supplier of raw materials to the world’s largest economies— Great Britain in the nineteenth century, the US in the twentieth, and China and Brazil in the twenty-first—is critical for understanding the emergence of the Camioneros’ struggle for social justice. To do so we must trace the history of Argentina’s insertion into the global model of accumulation as well as the changing technical composition of capital. We will see that the agro-livestock exporting latifundio, the railroads system, the dependence on British capital, and the transport of cargo by truck are stages along a continuum in time to the present. Over the past several decades, and particularly the last one, partial or total strikes by the Camioneros have left the country paralyzed. The central role of trucking in moving cargo to global markets has provided the Argentinian working class with strategic leverage. This chapter offers an historical analysis of how the changing technical composition of Argentinian capital has affected the composition of the working class and the consequences for class struggle.

HISTORY OF A LONG DEPENDENCE

The Argentine Republic was initially inserted into the world capitalist economy as a satellite of the British Empire. This relationship dates back to the period prior to the development of capitalism in its mature stage. Already at the beginning of the eighteenth century the privileged commercial sectors of the Viceroyalty (Virreinato) of the Ríio de la Plata were trading fluidly with London. They dodged the regulations set by the Spanish Crown—the owner of those territories—that demanded exclusivity of trade with Cadiz and Seville from the Customs of Buenos Aires. Through smuggling they provided the English with salted dried meat—food for the slaves of the colonies in the Caribbean—and tallow and cowhides, in exchange for yarn, slaves, and other goods entering South America (Villalobos 1977: 82–5). It was this genetic and pivotal point in the history of the region that kept the economy of the philo-Europeanizing Ríio de la Plata tied to London. This relationship did not diminish with time but increased to constitute Argentina as a semi-colony. The history of colonialism and dependency helps us understand the changing composition of capital and the resulting class struggles.

In the early nineteenth century, two English military invasions of Buenos Aires were attempted, to turn the lands of the Spanish Viceroyalty into a British colony. However, both were resisted and the British were expelled by a local population that already had an elementary awareness of the French Revolution, the events in Spain, the Enlightenment, and the expansion in South America of libertarian and republican lodges modelled on those in Europe. On May 25, 1810, a revolutionary movement that united some Spaniards with native creoles and some other popular sectors became the only independence (and later republican) movement to triumph and be sustained throughout Latin America.

Following the revolution, the links between the privileged sectors of Buenos Aires and the British—owners of the seas and commerce— expanded. London banks funded abusive British investments in lands and undertakings such as the extraction of wood, tañino, and minerals for the war, and the setting up of settlements to breed ovine herds to obtain wool, which were a constant feature during the nineteenth century. It is in this context that we can understand the 1833 British invasion and possession of the Malvinas Islands, in the extreme South Atlantic, a territory that continues to be under British colonial rule. This brief introduction provides a glimpse into the role of the Río de la Plata economy as a supplier of raw materials to the heart of world capitalism for more than a century and a half. In fact, Argentina was constituted as the result of a bifrontal struggle, one that was not resolved even after the formal declaration of independence in 1816. On one front, it was a struggle against foreign invaders (i.e. Spaniards), but on the other it was also a struggle against the pro-British landowners and commercial powers of Buenos Aires, who under no circumstances wanted to lose the innumerable privileges they held. Thus, the Customs Port of Buenos Aires was the entry and exit point for everything. The city, which at the turn of the nineteenth century had been no more than a village far from the heart of Spain’s interests (centered on Lima, Upper Peru, and Mexico), became a center of power from east to west, from the sea to the Andes mountain range. But the growth of Buenos Aires was due not to the connection with the old metropolis, Spain, but to its link with British imperialism.

In the provinces, the caudillos ruled (except in Patagonia, which was in the hands of the native peoples, and whose incorporation into the agro-livestock production system was achieved decades later by blood and fire from Buenos Aires with British collaboration). Caudillos were figures with territorial and military power, landlords owning small or large portions of land, at a time before it was divided into plots, or latifundios. The caudillos, men and some women, built the respect of the local population with their personal charisma, but they were targeted for elimination by the great merchants, exporters and landowners of Buenos Aires in order to implement the bourgeois nation state with all its legal and administrative apparatus. In that process, a crack between “the interior” and Buenos Aires emerged that was to be permanent. Buenos Aires was perceived as the internal invader, and as the partner of “Europe.” In the center-west, north-west and north-east interior all kinds of small artisans and local production processes were gradually destroyed or reduced to a barely residual value, making way for the country’s growing dependence on goods imported from England.

However, we cannot say that the caudillos were a group homogeneous in their ideals and attitudes, let alone a class. The reason for this is that they had followers in the provinces among both the land-owning elites—some of them heirs of wealthy families—and the poor and the gauchos. The caudillos represented another type of territorial power, independent of the aristocracy of the port (e.g. Buenos Aires), hence earning the latter the nickname of porteños. At the time, what is now Uruguay was part of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata; its main leader was José Artigas, who as early as 1815 carried out the first known agrarian reform, which earned him intense and persistent persecution (Bruschera 1969).

These elements of the history of Argentina are relevant to the analysis of social and labor struggles because they are constitutive: although on the periphery, Argentina always formed part of the development of capitalism and imperialism. The productive forces that developed in their bosom moved rhythmically and in parallel. Since then, “caudillismo” has maintained a permanent place in Argentine politics, expressed and crystallized in the leaders of the great mass political movements, the strong presidential and non-parliamentary model, and in the traits of union leaders. At the same time, and still resonating even in the current social and political situation in Argentina, the notion of the “invader” has been an element perceived among the most humble, applied not only to the Spanish or British foreigners, but also to the rich porteños who were always their partners. The mixtures of ethnicities during colonization, mainly of Spanish and later Italian immigrants with indigenous and former black slaves, produced a “mestizo” population. The majority were workers in the plantation fields, in local industries in the provinces, and housekeepers—the so-called “darkies.” When, many years later, the “darkies” of the provinces came together in the port cities to join the industrial proletariat, the privileged sectors described them as “blacks” or “indians” or “little black heads” that had invaded civilization. It was Eva Peron, Evita, who said “mis queridos cabecitas negras” (“my beloved black haired”), in an attempt to give these masses of workers a positive identity.

Understanding the germinal struggles of the masses in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries means going back to the men and women who were dedicated to various rural labor tasks, the artisans, and the railway workers. Their struggles bring us back to the issue of the expansion of the nascent bourgeoisie and the local oligarchy in partnership with foreign capital. While productive enclaves in other territories of the Southern Hemisphere were French, Dutch, or German, in Argentina they were British. American capital only appeared in the industrial sector in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. British capital invested in the creation and expansion of the railroad, which was constructed radially on the basis of where the areas to be exploited were located. The rails naturally converged (and still do) towards Buenos Aires and the grain export ports (Rosario, Bahía Blanca, and Quequén). They also extended to the quebrachales (north of the province of Santa Fe), the cotton plantations (Chaco), and then to the sugar plantations or the sheep production estancias in Patagonia. The subject of the railroad and its vast network is one to which we will later return.

The historiography of capital in Argentina provides an abundance of material relating to the expansion of the railroad, foreign bank loans, the arrival of immigrants, the distribution of land, and the struggles of workers. One chronicler to these developments, Germán Avé Lallemant, served a double mission. He was born in Lübeck, Germany, and in 1868 settled in Argentina to develop his work as a geographer, geologist, and surveyor. He also occupied the rectorate of the National College in San Luis, a province in the center-west that was at the time a “territory” without its own legal demarcation. What interests us about Lallemant, beyond his scientific work, is that, in addition to founding the Argentine press organization Federación Obrera (Workers’ Federation), he was a correspondent for Die Neue Zeit, the newspaper of the international labor movement, edited by the German socialist Karl Kautsky from 1894 and 1909. Unfortunately, Avé Lallemant’s contributions to the Die Neue Zeit were not translated until the 1970s.

Lallemant warned that “without political conquests, without ships or cannons, English capitalism extracts from Argentina 17 times in relative value what it extracts from its subjects in India ... and worse, five or six London bankers—the Rothschilds, Baring, Morgan and Greenwood—give orders to the Argentine ambassador and the government of Buenos Aires” (Paso 1974: 37). It is clear that Argentina’s situation was that of a permanent semi-colony.

Incipient organizations of workers began to operate in the nineteenth century, and were greatly enhanced by the arrival of workers from Europe in successive waves subsequent to the revolutionary attempts of 1848, 1871, and others. Tens of thousands of Italian and Spanish peasants arrived during the time of agricultural harvests, meeting the need for an agricultural labor force in a country that was first and foremost dominated by ranching. Many returned home, but many others stayed. Hence, the early entry of the internationalist ideas of anarchists, socialists, and communists in Argentina, embodied in the struggles that were already taking place. Among these were struggles for the land, or against the abusive taxes set by Buenos Aires, against internal customs duties, and against the massive conscription of the “gauchos” to the armies fighting against the Indians. The historian Leonardo Paso points out that

The new social ideas of that time looked like anticipations of those that would last, a fact that is not causal if the conditions of the socio-economic development of Argentina are taken into account. Augusto Kühn, one of the founders of the German club Vorwärts in 1882 (he would later also be a founder of the Communist Party), confirms that that was the starting point of the socialist work in the country, never interrupted afterwards. From that point to the constitution of the organizing Committee of May 1, 1890 ... and the appearance on December 12, 1890 of the newspaper El Obrero, a period elapsed whose brevity interweaves with the rapidity of the events ... [together with] the constitution of the Workers’ Federation, [these] are three manifestations of the organized presence of the Marxist current in Argentina ... that in the meeting of Paris of 1889 was represented by order of the club Vorwärts of Buenos Aires by Wilhelm Liebknecht ... All authors agree that in Argentina and Chile the reception of Marxism preceded the rest of the countries of Latin America. And this is linked to the characteristics of its development, not to the circumstantial presence of any man. (Paso 1974: 8–14)

The enormous expansion of land for livestock and agriculture during the so-called “Conquest of the Desert” in the 1870s—that is, the genocide of the indigenous peoples who lived in the regions south of the province of Buenos Aires to the extreme of Patagonia in Tierra del Fuego—put the local and foreign landowner oligarchy in a position of incomparable advantage that seemed to have no end. That “golden” period sealed the conflict in the hegemonic bloc over what kind of insertion Argentina should have in the world market. The question was whether agriculture and ranching would supply raw materials or if progress was to be made through an expanded industrialization. In the 1910s, 1930s, 1980s, and from 2015 to the present, it has been insisted that Argentina’s role is to be a “granary” or “supermarket of the world.” To some extent, the brief years before Peronism and the period of Peronist government were the watershed, giving rise to an effective and powerful policy of industrialization and import s...