A-Infos (en) Argentina, FORA, Organizacion-Obrera #101: Content + EDITORIAL[NECESSITY AND URGENCY] (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

EDITORIAL - NECESSITY AND URGENCY
Public Media Workers on alert - GREMIALES
Precarious spaces and the possibility of survival in times of dystopia - 
ANALYSIS
The main labor reforms of Milei's mega dnu - LABOR LEGISLATION
The Milei catastrophe - ANALYSIS
The reforms of the omnibus bill on labor and pension matters - LABOR 
LEGISLATION
It seems that we were the privileged ones - ANALYSIS
Palestine: That distant melody of freedom - INTERNATIONAL
A not very well-known page from the first years of the labor movement - 
HISTORY

EDITORIAL - NECESSITY AND URGENCY
If there is anything worse than a representative system, it is a bad 
representative system. And if there is something worse than a bad 
representative system, it is tyranny. Two weeks after taking office, the 
president of the country confuses himself with Rosas and asks parliament 
for the addition of public power to foreignize the economy, deregulate 
all markets and destroy the public sector. Menem, in his champagne hell, 
must feel deep envy.

For arbitrariness in government, Milei has the help of the law. In 2006, 
parliament voted to regulate the parliamentary process of decrees of 
necessity and urgency, a law that had been pending since the 
constitutional reform of 1994.

The history of decrees is simple: all governments use and have used 
them, but with varying intensity. Between 1853 and 1983, 25 DNUs were 
sanctioned. Menem signed 545 in 10 years. Until now he was only 
surpassed by Néstor Kirchner who brought the average to more than sixty 
per year, signing 270.

The problem with the Milei decree is not the decree itself, but the fact 
that it modifies a tremendous number of issues of which none justify the 
need or urgency in the terms established by the constitution, and which 
in fact function in together as a general reform of the State.

Faced with this situation, the court judges go on vacation waiting for 
other players to play: first instance judges and chambermaids, but 
mainly deputies and senators. What is expected, rather than resolving 
the legitimacy of the decree, is to politically negotiate the reform of 
the State. It seems that the need and urgency of the decree have not 
affected the judiciary.

Our democratic and republican institutions do not seem to have efficient 
mechanisms to stop in time the arbitrariness of a president who assumes 
legislative powers and launches a profound transformation of national 
legislation by decree and whim.

This not only reflects the weakness of our blessed republican 
institutions, but also reaffirms that the fundamental issues of social 
conflict are not resolved through the law. If Milei does what he does it 
is because he can. And if he can it is because no one stops him.

The workers' struggle is called struggle and workers. This is because 
society is divided into classes with antagonistic interests that are not 
resolved amicably or with parliamentary debates. Fantasy law works more 
or less well when the secondary benefits of negotiation outweigh the 
risk and effort of maintaining a permanent confrontation, especially if 
neither party has achieved victory. But as long as the contradiction 
persists, this situation is temporary, and since the contradiction is 
typical of the economic system, what is achieved by law will always be 
subordinated to the strength that the working class has to keep at bay 
the constant attempts of the class that owns fatten the income with the 
thinness of the salary.

Workers must come to terms with the fact that we cannot rely on labor 
legislation to bring anything resembling justice, nor anything 
resembling peace of mind. When things seem to find a path (good or bad 
but none) the waters shake again. Faced with the crisis, we go out into 
the streets, we make contact with organizations and we activate, 
outraged by the injustice and the audacity of the representatives, 
hoping that things will settle down again, in some way, dreaming of a 
world that works as they say it works. , in which the institutions look 
after us and we can live a little more peacefully. But that doesn't 
work. An unjust system will always bring the conflict that determines 
it. No. You can stick your head in a hole and hide from reality.

When working class organizations are politicized and established as 
permanent institutions intended for the negotiation of working 
conditions, they become an instrument of government and end up 
functioning as departments of State. The concept of the working class is 
confused with a national identity, recognized and administered by the 
State, and constitutive, therefore, of the social order.  The struggle 
becomes a negotiation delegated to an accommodating leadership and a 
monthly subscription to union services. That is what is called class 
conciliation.

In other words, the idea of fundamentally resolving the conflicts that 
reappear again and again is abandoned, showing the injustice of the 
social system whose inequality is seen in the material and symbolic 
contradiction between owners and the dispossessed.

What we are experiencing now is the consequence of having given up on 
the workers' struggle in favor of political organizations that 
vindicated the workers to negotiate the conditions of their plundering. 
The result is sadly noticeable: today the union leaders, far from 
considering the abolition of capitalism, negotiate the implementation of 
a deregulation of the markets and the consequent concentration of wealth 
in exchange for preserving some of their own privilege.

This surrender has been notorious in recent years as it has been in the 
90s. The scrapping of railways and the handover of public companies, 
with tens of thousands of layoffs nationwide, was accompanied in those 
years by a complicit silence of unionism. who accompanied Menem's 
Peronist government in the deregulation and foreignization of the local 
economy. In recent years, the union leadership has also accompanied the 
fall in wages and the disorder of public accounts of crazy magnitudes. 
Today they speculate in tune with parliament while Milei advances in the 
same direction as Menem, but at a frenetic speed and with the ambition 
to go much further.

Menem took office with the promise of high salaries and a productive 
revolution. They were very hard times in which the economy of the 
Alfonsín government had collapsed, multiplying poverty exponentially in 
its last months, hand in hand with hyperinflation. Milei's case is 
unique because he took office in a critical situation but not so 
critical, much less serious and urgent than that one, but he managed to 
establish such a catastrophic perspective that he achieved popular 
acceptance for a savage adjustment. Milei anticipated the adjustment and 
not the high salary, he announced a nightmare and promised a fantasy 
world for which we must wait 40 years.

Milei clearly said that he was going to destroy the currency until it 
disappeared, that he was going to privatize everything that is public, 
that he was going to deregulate the markets, take away compensation and 
other labor rights (less and less massive, by the way) and finance the 
reactivation with the competitiveness of the economy, that is, with the 
fall in wages, the precariousness of work and an increase in 
productivity from which the owning class would benefit. For the first 
time in history, a crowd in the plaza, on the day of his inauguration, 
sang in favor of adjustment and police authority, chanting "there is no 
money," "chainsaw," and "police."

Such a proposal would have been rejected outright at any other time in 
our history.

There is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in all this. Milei 
pushed inflation from 12% monthly to 30% in one month. If everything 
goes well and there is no hyperinflationary escalation, the following 
months will have a similar inflation pushed by the increase in rates and 
services. In this scheme, the only force capable of slowing inflation is 
the cooling of the economy, that is, recession. All the signs converge 
in a serious increase in poverty and in the generation of a truly 
critical situation for workers.

If the Milei project advances, what awaits us is worse than what we 
experienced in the 90s. The destruction of the productive apparatus and 
the dogmatic deregulation of the economy will have a very severe impact 
on the economic capacity of the working class and on our conditions. of 
life. If Milei achieves dollarization (and there are those who say that 
he has already started it) he will create a general conditioning of the 
economy from which it will be very difficult and traumatic to escape. In 
such a context we cannot trust the union leadership and the 
representatives of the people. It is necessary to create and promote 
labor organization outside the orbit of political parties and corporate 
leaders.

It is necessary to join forces in the creation of a labor movement 
capable of facing the economic and social devastation that is coming. It 
is the imperative need to build truly working-class organizations in 
which workers can take the reins of our own destiny. It is a historical 
necessity that is imposed on us today as an emergency. Today the need 
has become urgency.

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2024/01/08/necesidad-y-urgencia/
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