Interview with Guillermo Kane of Argentina's Partido Obrero 3/7/25

Interview with Guillermo Kane
3/7/2025


EG: It's Friday, March the 7th, and I'm here with Guillermo Kane in the headquarters of P. O. Partido Obrero, which translates as the Workers' Party, here in Argentina and I'm so happy to be here. I wonder, Guillermo, first, if it would be useful to just sort of frame this moment in Argentina What's happened in the last year, year and a half here?

GK: Okay, good afternoon, Eric, and glad to be able to have this talk with you. And this last year and some months since Javier Milei came to power in December 2023 has been a shock attack against the working class in general, the oppressed people in Argentina. So it's an interesting moment right now because Milei is starting to have his first big political crisis because he's been identified as the organizer of a scam and fraud on an international level with the Libra cryptocurrency. The economic prospects have many contradictions, which may quickly make this situation even worse than it is, where the government is saying it is happy that it has stabilized the economy because inflation is not rising as high as it was during the previous government and the first months of the Milei government, where he did a vicious 100% devaluation. But the IMF, whom the government is discussing an agreement with, and they just passed yesterday by decree the agreement with the IMF, it is demanding a new devaluation. So we'll see how that fares out. So we've had a year, just to try to sum up, of a lot of repression, a lot of attacks on rights and gains that the working class in Argentina has won over a long time. We've had a lot of struggle, even very important mass struggle, like demonstrations with a million people on the streets on some days. We've had some very important strikes in different provinces and workplaces.

EG: I'll bet people in the U. S. would be really interested in hearing about what I saw yesterday, the occupation of a printing company in, I think I'm going to pronounce it right, “Avellaneda”. Yeah, So what is that?

GK: Well, what's going on there is that this is the first occupation of a factory under the Milei government, which is very important because in general the trade union bureaucracy has been letting mass layoffs and shutdowns of different companies just go by without really any organized And what's happened in the Morbillo factory in the district of Avelleneda, which is immediately to the south of the city of Buenos Aires, a very working class district, is that the workers have decided to occupy the factory against the announced closing down. It's a factory of 200 workers, and last week they got a message where they weren't even laid off by the company, nor was the company actually pronounced initially bankrupt. I mean, they were still making money, but they decided to close down. So the workers reject this, and they've taken it into their own hands to keep the factory occupied while they're on a political campaign, a union campaign, in defense of their places of work, of their workstations. So this is very important because it's a great example for an industry in Argentina that has fallen over 25% in production in the last year and a half, and which may fall even further with the economic climate and with the measures taken by the Milei government.

EG: And I understand that there's a history of this. This is another thing that hasn’t happened in the U. S. for quite a few decades, but I understand that in recent years, there's been a history of workers occupying their places of work and holding them for periods of time.

GK: Yeah, of course, there's a long history in Argentina of using occupation of factories as part of strikes and direct action in struggles with both the individual bosses and governments. But also, in 2001, there was not only a popular rebellion, but a huge economic crisis and a cease of payment of the foreign debt in Argentina by the government at that time. And many companies just closed down, their many bosses just fled with the money they had in their pockets and decided to not operate those factories anymore. And there was a long line of occupation, hundreds of factories, where there were attempts, more or less successful attempts, to put those factories to work under control of the working class, which was a very interesting movement. Some of those factories still exist as cooperatives. Of course, cooperatives under the capitalist system, which are not sustained by the state, financed by the state, end up having a very tough time competing with the big capitalist monopolies. But that being the case, which economically makes those companies today very, in many cases, under very difficult conditions and pressure from the state to pay taxes and services and so on, but it's been an important movement. And I definitely say that the occupation of factories is part of the repertoire of actions of the Argentine working class.

EG: So, I'm aware that you, until very recently, actually held a seat of elected public office. Here, in Argentina, in a provincial government. The equivalent of that in the U. S. would be something like a state legislature for Buenos Aires province, which I believe is the most populous province in the country by quite a bit. And so, I wonder, maybe the people in the U. S. would be really interested in hearing about the electoral front that P.O. was a part of with other parties.

GK: Yes. In 2011, we formed the Left Workers' Front, which then, between three left parties, a fourth one joined several years later, and we became the Left Workers' Unity Front. It's F- I- T- U, FITU, by its slogan, is its acronym in Spanish. So, I think that the FITU is an important experience because while much of the left internationally seems to have sort of diffused into either broad parties or fronts with the left wing of bourgeois parties or so- called progressives. The FITU is very much a front based on political independence from bourgeois parties and movements, on organizations which are rooted in the class struggle, and our common program is for workers' government. We all consider ourselves to be revolutionary organizations. So, it is not an electoral presentation to try to camouflage the action of the revolutionary left, but a block to try to concentrate the energy of those parties that consider themselves to be of the revolutionary left to contest against the bourgeois parties and not amongst themselves. And even with limits that could be discussed, this has had some success because over the last decade, the revolutionary left in Argentina has held seats in the National Congress, in the provincial level, like you said, in the legislatures, and at the city level as well, in many places and moreover, the problem of the parliamentary benches or positions in themselves, I think what you have to understand is that the FITU places itself as one of the political forces of the country. So, the left in Argentina is mostly considered to be Trotskyist, independent from Peronist nationalism, linked to the struggles of the working class, of the unemployed workers, of the piqueteros, of the student movement, so very much linked to that. From the P.O., we consider that this experience nonetheless has its limits. The FITU has not been able to work as a front within the class struggle, organizing independent people who want to participate in the front as such, so it is basically a block of each individual party has its separate organizations and so on, and it hasn't been able to actually make a space, which we think could be very important if the front called for meetings, congresses at the level of the different cities and neighborhoods of the country. We think this could open up an important channel. The FITU has at different times gotten almost a million and a half votes for example. So, it's definitely a recognized political force. Its leaders are well- known in the media, in Congress, and respected by the working class and all those in struggles where they go every day to participate in those conflicts.

EG: I know that could be a very, very complicated conversation, and we probably shouldn't go there too deeply because you've made clear that your time is short. But, I certainly hope for you, I see at least the hope of possibly a merger and becoming a mass party. I'll hope for that. I'm sure that that's enormously complicated.

GK: Yeah, there are programmatic differences. I mean, on an international level, for example, let's take the Ukraine war, which is a point that's strategically causing much debate on the international level. For the Partido Obrero, for our party, an internationalist position means rejecting NATO intervention in Eastern Europe, as well as Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And though this could be seen by some, or some prefer to discuss this as an individual case, we really don't think it is. Because the way that leftist organizations in Argentina and internationally react to different conflicts and events has to do with the fallowing: Is it true that there is a sector of imperialism that is more democratic? that is promoting democracy? Or do we have to see it first as imperialism? So for us, this is a central debate. And we have differences in this sense with, for example, organizations of the FITO, who have demanded that power be given to the right- wing candidate in the Venezuelan elections, like MST or Izquierda Socialista. Which we think is, even though we are completely critical of Maduro, who is repressing his country, we think that the right- wing opposition, which has called for U.S. intervention in Venezuela, cannot be supported under any means. So to try to sum it up, because Ukraine is one example, Venezuela is another, but for us, the problem of rebuilding an internationalist unity, this is why the P.O. is working for an internationalist conference, which is going to be held 14th and 15th of June in Naples, Italy, to try to regroup organizations that come from very different traditions, but which have a common internationalist point of view on the main problem of war and the trend towards international war. So, we have just to try to underline, that's one aspect, but programmatic differences, frankly, and things are not looking like they're working towards a merger today. But that being said, we think these differences should not be used as a reason to split a front which, in the class struggle and political struggle in Argentina, even with its differences, has maintained a space of political independence from the bourgeois parties and is referenced by thousands of workers all over the country. So in that sense, we think it should be defended. It's a very different role from the P.S.O.L. of Brazil, which is inside the popular front with Lula, from experiences like the MPA in France, which has collapsed into the popular front with Mélenchon. So, I think that the FITU in Argentina is a strong contrast, a contradictory example to a trend to class collaboration in many of the broad left structures internationally.

EG: Okay, that seems like a really good place to ask a very specific question about that. And we could talk for hours about what Peronism is. It's very complicated and we really don't have anything like Peronism in the U.S. at least not as a political party. But my understanding is probably most of the Argentine working class, at least passively, supports them. There are many different currents. There's quite a significant left wing. I wonder if there's any perspective for pulling many people out of Peronism into this broad left front or maybe even into your party specifically.

GK: Well, that's the only way you could build a mass working class party in Argentina, so yeah that's a struggle. But I mean, it's complicated. Let's say this: We built, for example, a mass movement of unemployed workers, which organizes thousands of workers. The majority of them come from some level of relation to Peronism.

EG: Some people in the U.S. would have heard of them I think their called “piqueteros”.

GK: Piqueteros, exactly. That's the name of it. Our organization within that is Polo Obrero. It's one of the larger organizations. But the piquetero movement has existed for about 30 years. It's a structural particularity, I think you could say, of Argentina that in the face of mass unemployment, which other countries have had as well in the last few years. We formed a mass unemployed workers organization, which is like permanent and struggles against the state and where the left has important organizations. So, for example, but also in the working class, you were yesterday at the factory that the comrades occupied. Of course, many of those workers come from an experience with Peronism. That being said, Peronism today is not the mass movement among workers that it was decades ago, a measure of which is that it lost most of the provinces of the country. So even if it's to vote the right- wing Milei, it's clear that over the years, Peronism has lost a lot of its past authority on workers. Milei got the majority of the votes in the run- up. Peronists only have governors of five or six of the 24 provinces. But they have a minority, even if they still lead the province of Buenos Aires, which is the largest, by far. So they are at an all- time low. They still lead the unions They have very important positions in the leadership of the mass organizations. But I think the reason they receive support, and this, though it's a very different sort of organization you could possibly compare to the Democrats, in the sense that there's a big part of the masses that sometimes votes for them or supports them as a lesser evil or seeing them as within the bourgeois options, one that seems to be less vicious, even though the reality is when that leads to huge frustrations, it has been the plank on which the right and even the far right has grown. So there's that sort of lesser evil at play, which I don't think equates to people being willing to fight for Peronism, per se, as maybe when Peron was ousted from power in 55 and there was something called the Peronist Resistance, which had general strikes and mass movements and sabotage. And the vanguard of the working class was willing to fight for Peron. Whether we agree with that or not, I don't think that's the case today. So I think it's definitely gone back allot. That being said, we agree. I mean, the way the left has to grow is winning those workers over to a new political movement away from Peronism. It's a strategic critique of the fact that bourgeois nationalism, which has governed for decades in Argentina. I mean, just in these past few years, Kirchnerismo was in government from 2003 to 2015 and a Peronist coalition they were a part of with Alberto Fernandez from 2019 to 2023. So they've governed most of the time and 10 years with Menem in Peronism in the 90s before that. So they've governed most of the time after the dictatorship. Most of the last few decades have been under Peronist rule. And not only do we not have an autonomous, independent, industrialized country, it's less independent and less industrialized than it used to be. And the conditions of the working class are much less. So I think the conclusion that Peronism in particular and the traditional parties of Argentina more in general have led the country to a disaster is widespread. The problem is, at this point, that's been capitalized by the far right. Now, to overcome Milei, we need to show a working class alternative to the bourgeois disaster and not to make a block with Peronism against the far right, which is a pressure that sectors of the left get, you know.

EG: It's seductive.

GK: Yeah, get seduced.

EG: Yeah. Yeah. And just again, this could be for several hours, but there's quite an awful history of repression in this country. Going around every place I've ever been. You see, they're called houses of memory, “casas de memoria” in Spanish. And there are pictures, literally, of the people that were murdered under military dictatorship. And so just a little bit about, obviously, the dictatorship ended a few decades ago, but there's this fight to kind of keep that memory alive because the right wants to bury the history, and with the new government, you've explained to me, as have others, that there's sort of a slow, creeping return to repression. And just as an example, I'm in this beautiful old building that is the P.O. headquarters, and you've largely had to turn it into just a public space. You've had to take your computers out because you were raided recently. The police raided your headquarters. This is a legal political party. If you want to say a little bit more about that.

GK: Yeah, several things at the same time, but let's go for it. First of all, yes, the last military dictatorship in Argentina, which was, of course, from 1976 to 1983, started by the Junta headed by Videla in 1976, backed by the U.S. strongly anti- communist, murdered over 30,000 people. And, of course, they did it under clandestine means. Even though they were the state themselves, they disappeared people. There was no transparency. There were no trials. They were just held and, in many cases, murdered. Their children stolen, given to military families to raise. Their property stolen, tortured. Everything has been denounced for years. The struggle for justice continues to this day. Some of those military officers who carried this out have done jail time or are doing jail time, and some have never been tried because the movements for impunity and cover- ups and partial justice have been a day- by- day fight in these decades. What's going on now is that the Milei government has, as part of its members, people who have actively fought to defend these genocidal military officers all these years. In particular, the Vice President, Victoria Villarruel, is the daughter of a military officer active in the groups that are looking for jailed torturers to be set free. And she has been close to Videla, Astiz, and all of the worst tortures and murders of the military dictatorship. So it's very much a part of that. So in the public speech, in the way this has to be taught in schools, and how it's talked about in media, there's an open fight going on where they want to erase the reality of the genocide that was carried out by the military dictatorship.
Now, of course, this relates to the fact that mass struggle against state repression, both from the days of the military dictatorship and also under so- called democratic governments, has been an important limit to the levels of repression and state control that governments have been able to carry out. It has often happened that when governments go too far in repression and there have been deaths, people have been assassinated in demonstrations. I mean, even governments have fallen. The De La Rua government in 2001, the Duhalde government in 2002, left office after trying to counter a popular rebellion and popular struggle, a class struggle, with state repression. So this is part of our recent history, very much. So the Milei government is in a tactic of upping the levels of repression. They've said that they forbid public demonstrations. So what we've had for the last year and a half is demonstrations every day, clashing with repression, with police repression, with open police repression, with arrests, with legal cases against militants and So that's the situation we're dealing with.
The raid on our P.O. headquarters has been part of different attempts to criminalize, particularly the piquetero movement, because our party is very linked to one of the piquetero organizations. And they've raided over 200 soup kitchens in the neighborhoods of the different piquetero movements. So these are very humble people who get a saucepan, some oven, or something to be able to make fire with, to organize the people of the neighborhood, to put together a self- organized soup kitchen with the neighbors. And these are under direct raids. While the justice system is not investigating what happened with the president, his sister, and their close associates, what's being discussed in the international press, the corruption that they're—

EG: The cryptocurrency rip off.

GK: Oh yeah, but they were asking bribes to arrange meetings with the president, millions of dollars stolen from people. So this is not even investigated. And they're trying to frame social organizing as if it was the mafia. They're saying it's a criminal organization. They're laundering money, all sorts of things to this event. So there is, for example, a criminal case with these accusations, which is probably going to go to trial in the next few months, against at least 15 comrades of the Polo Obrero, which include Eduardo Chiquito de Livoni, who is a very well- known public figure of the piquetero movement and of our party. So, the police raid on our headquarters was part of all that, and we think that that case in particular is what we call a caso testigo, how can you say this, there's a case that's a leading case, that if Milei is going to be able to go as far as he wants with political persecution, to try to get people off the streets, in terms of being able to protest against him.

EG: Well, castigo is a punishment, so it's something like a punishment?

GK: No, no, testigo is witness, but what it means is, you know like a leading case, like what happens with this will show everybody if it can be done or not.

EG: Like a precedent, a legal precedent.

GK: Yeah, a legal precedent, to make an example, he wants to make an example out of us, because he's a very well- known, very large, national level organization, a very well- known leader of unemployed workers who's on TV every day, and he wants to put him in jail, make an example out of him, so people don't organize and go up against the government. So this is the situation, and we're very, how do you say this? we're very thankful for the level of solidarity, a lot of organizations and individuals have been sending in signatures to the courthouse and so on, but we definitely think in the next months we're going to need a very strong level of demonstration and solidarity campaigns.
One more thing I want to tell you about, April 26th, we're going to be co- organizing with organizations from many different countries, an international forum against repression and political persecution. So these cases that the Milei government in Argentina is carrying out, we don't think they're that different from many things Trump and previous presidents in the U.S. are already doing against workers in the U. S. against cases that, you know, from Russia, to Isreal, to Ukraine, to Europe, to different Latin American countries, to Turkey, we're in touch with many organizations whose comrades have been persecuted or who are linked to the victims of political persecution, and as well as asking for solidarity with the comrades here in Argentina being persecuted, we also want to open up this forum to be able to work together against persecution and repression internationally.

EG: Okay, so I believe you told me before, I mean, obviously you and I are in touch, as you are with a number of individuals, but there's no organization you have any kind of formal link to in the U.S. so I wonder if you'd like to invite listeners in the U.S. how they can reach you and offer different kinds of support, how do they get a hold of Partido Obrero?

GK: Okay, we're online on all social media, as Partido Obrero, our publication is called Prensa Obrera, Workers Press, so PrensaObrera.com is updated daily, some of the articles are translated into English, though of course nowadays Google Translate and everything makes things much easier, and yeah, so we're open there, I'm Guillermo Kane, I'm on all social media as well, so, you know, whoever wants to get in touch, we're open to dialogue and to debate.

EG: Okay, it's been great, Thank you for your time.

GK: Okay. Good talking to you.