“Trotskyist” repeaters of Bullrich and Milei’s slanders against the Argentina Polo Obrero

“Trotskyist” repeaters of Bullrich and Milei’s slanders against the Polo Obrero
The reactionary position of the FSP must be condemned.

Guillermo Kane

It is well known that there is a great fragmentation in the international left, including the currents that identify themselves with Trotskyism. Each political event generates multiple realignments and divergences. To the Partido Obrero, this fragmentation responds to a great extent to an immense pressure of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois positions on the ranks of the left. It can be seen in the international alignment of many tendencies with the governments of the bourgeoisie, its political forces or even its military enterprises. The legal persecution of the ultra-right government of Milei against the militants of the Polo Obrero in Argentina has had, in general, the opposite effect. The campaign in their defense against attempts by state prosecutors to portray an organization with a two and a half decade history of organizing and direct action against all governments as an “criminal enterpise” with completely fabricated charges has had, on the contrary, a unifying effect. Trends that do not agree on absolutely anything have united among the more than 400 signatures from 30 countries that have called for the dismissal of their cases. In Argentina, the defense of the comrades and the rejection of the 120 police raids against homes and soup kitchens of the piquetero movement have been supported by a very wide range of organizations that not only covers the entire left and the piqueteros, but also a large part of trade union and human rights leaders. The lies of the prosecutors put together through police pressure and “anonymous” accusations have been destroyed by the defense lawyers, as has been made public by our organization.

But a contrary example has appeared, and the positions that this group has held must be pointed out and refuted.

While comrades in many countries organized protest actions in front of Argentine embassies and at other points, in solidarity with the appeal against the prosecution of the Polo Obrero, the US “Trotskyist” organization Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) stated to organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a public debate, through its leader Bob Price, that they would not participate in the demonstration organized in the area because the Polo Obrero had committed “acts of corruption with funds given by the Peronist government for workers” and that “everyone in Argentina knew about this”.

These statements, which shocked the different organizations that are engaged in solidarity work with the struggles in Argentina, are not an isolated fact. A pamphlet called “The Crisis of World Trotskyism” has recently been published, in which this group wants to reference itself as a candidate to lead a new Fourth International. The FSP, which for many years was an observer section of the Unified Secretariat, accuses the parties of the Left and Workers-Unity Front (FITU) of being an apparatus that mobilizes people for “ wages”, of “clientelism” and even of “ buying votes”. Reactionary slander, which attempts to sustain itself on the anarchist and infantile idea that receiving parliamentary or electoral funds would be equivalent to integrating into the State, regardless of the policy pursued. Delirious McCarthyism of those who cannot imagine how it can be possible for mass organizations of workers to form conscientiously and prefer to believe the lies of the bourgeoisie. We tell them: piquetero organization did not arise from handouts from bourgeois governments administered by Trotskyists, but from the militant organization of the unemployed who organize against the State and for the unity of the occupied and unemployed working class.

To wrap up the campaign against the piquetero organizers, a phantom “Party of Socialism and Liberation of Argentina” set up by the FSP launched a communiqué on the Internet saying that since the comrades of the Polo “are not accused of cutting streets or defending themselves from repression with stones and sticks” but of “corruption”, the “easy” way out of defending them against Milei’s government is not appropriate, but rather to join in the accusations, which they are not certain of, but just in case, calling for the formation of a “workers’ tribunal” to judge them.

As the authors of the communiqué do not know the Argentine reality, or pretend not to know it, we will inform them. The case originates as a result of confronting the militarization of the city and organizing the first march against Milei days after he took office on December 20th, 2023, not because of allegations of “corruption”. The case was announced by the Minister of Security on television, and then she got prosecutors to invent the accusations.

This repetition of the ultra-right government’s slanders does not provide any new data or evidence. In Argentina the only ones who repeat them are the journalists in the pay of Milei’s government. The PO is not considered “corrupt” by any current of the labor movement, it is defended as a victim of political persecution for giving a heroic struggle against a repressive government. What “everybody knows” in Argentina is that the aim is to smite the vanguard that is struggling with these lawsuits. Far from co-opting to the State, it is the piquetero movement’s confrontation with it with methods of direct action that is openly debated in the mass media.

The piqueteros that these petty bourgeois talk about from the comfort of their homes in the first world could have given them classes on revolutionary class organization, on the revolutionary use of elections and parliament, on fortitude and accountability in democratic organizations, if they had asked nicely.

The method of slander is not compatible with revolutionaries. In the face of attacks by the State against revolutionary militants, it is appropriate to defend even those with whom we have profound disagreements. To rejoice when there is an offensive of the bourgeoisie against the organizations of struggle of a country to try to set up a competing group is a miserable vulture reflex. The removal of solidarity because the charges of a far-right government are qualified in terms of “suspicion” depicts a group that has nothing to contribute to the workers in Argentina, in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Versión en español aquí.