[Published in Spanish here – August 7, 2023]
Simultaneous and Mandatory Open Primary Elections in Argentina 2023 –
Socialists Without Borders
Next Sunday, August 13, primary elections will be held in Argentina, in which candidates for president, vice president, 43 representatives of Parlasur, 130 deputies and 24 senators will be elected. Candidates who win the primary elections will contest in the general elections of October 22, but in order to be able to contest in the national elections, the various political fronts, including those of the left, must obtain, by law, a minimum of 1.5% of the valid votes.
The open primaries are an electoral mechanism instituted in 2009 mainly to facilitate the selection of candidates from the different emerging fronts of the big bourgeois parties and to smooth the fluidity of the electoral process of the ruling class.
Argentina’s working-class and socialist left is divided in these elections. Our organization, SOCIALISTS WITHOUT BORDERS, maintains the position that the Argentinean left should not turn to the PASO elections to determine its candidates for the general elections, but should have previously organized their own internal elections, involving all left-wing parties through democratic and transparent mechanisms. With this mechanism the left could have presented itself in every contest with a unitary program that would provide a much greater political authority to present its program before the candidates of the bourgeoisie.
That is why we call for a critical vote for the left in general and not for any particular front or party.
These elections are carried out in the context of a fundamental crisis of Argentine capitalism and the depletion of global options of social and environmentally capitalist sustainability.
In 2001 the Argentine economy sank to unimaginable limits at that time, where we witnessed the corralito, the popular bonfires and pots in the corners of the city of Buenos Aires, and in working class neighborhoods where industry was destroyed by the previous neoliberal decade, among other things.
After the great mobilizations of 2001 that led to the fall of 7 presidents in a week, the establishment of Kirchnerism in power, the institutionalization of the piqueteros together with minimum social subsistence plans for enormous impoverished masses would allow a period of limited stability, which within the deep fissures of Argentine capitalism, would only enter a tunnel without a certain future.
These two decades of “stability and recovery,” are marked by the enormous overexploitation of the soil with the production of soybeans for export, the destruction of glaciers and the sale of water, and the irresponsible extraction of gas and hydrocarbons, as well as the entry of Brazilian and now Chinese capital, to advance a looting imperialist production.
In these two decades of “stability and recovery,” we saw the already deteriorated infrastructure of the country, falling apart without limits because of the abandonment and state negligence, from schools with fallen roofs and without heating or air conditioning for extreme summer and winter temperatures, to the total lack of medical supplies in the clinics and hospitals that serve the large majority of the Argentinian people; the same happen with the railways that were left to decay without maintenance and lack of resources for universities, the central library and other cultural institutions of high social value, etc.
In these two decades of “stability and recovery,” there was no improvement in employment or social security. Precarious labor relations continued with the same model set during the previous Menemist decade, devaluation of wages, increase in the number of workers in the underground economy [trabajo en negro], reduction of medical and social benefits, and establishment of permanent levels of poverty with blatantly insufficient funding for safety net plans and regularizing domestic employment, among other very minimal policies. And of course, Kirchnerims dressed themselves up as progressive, with the adoption of measures of social advancement related to equal marriage, recognition of gender diversity and the adoption of purely decorative inclusion measures, and, of course, including the legalization of abortion, forced by the monumental protracted struggle of Argentine women.
And now we are reaching the end of the tunnel, at the end of this cycle of the capitalist economy, one which has exhausted all possibilities of “stability and recovery” and is currently facing ballooning levels of inflation, to say the least, and a middle class going crazy about the possibility of social explosions, searching a solution to their problems by turning to the heavy handed repression of the mano dura promoted by the far-right candidates.
And at the end of this tunnel, we are before five possibilities in the replacement of command, 1) continue with Kirchnerism, the architects of the policy of pyrrhic “stability and recovery,” now at a dead end; 2) support again the wealthy and privileged agricultural bourgeoisie, which had their interests at the helm with Macri and his Propuesta Republicana [PRO]; 3) plunge into the bottomless spiral of hyper reactionary petty bourgeoisie hate against immigrants, the poor, the beneficiaries of social plans, the slum dwellers, who demand an iron fist against crime and who follow the libertarian demagogue Milei; 4) the socialist, anti-capitalist, workers’ options, at the moment divided, into two main currents, the one led by the PO-MST, and the other by the PTS-IS; and, finally, 5) the abstention and the blank vote proposed by some left-wing groups, like the New PST, and OIR.
Are elections the defining means of solving the problems of Argentines, or of workers anywhere else in the world? Absolutely NO. The resolution to the fundamental and surface problems of all workers lies in their organization and revolutionary mobilization against the causes of these problems, the bourgeoisie and imperialism. The resolution lies in the workers’ decision to take power and rein their destinies and to end the rule of our exploiters once and for all, in order to build an egalitarian and just society that can provide everyone with what is necessary for a dignified life, and be able to face the ravages of an ongoing environmental crisis.
However, the elections, yes… the bourgeois, are a fact of reality. One more front for the struggle. The workers must fight in any front of struggle in which we can not only extract solutions to immediate problems, but, more importantly, where we can amplify our voice and give the ideological and political dispute against the different sectors of the bourgeoisie. Use the elections to call on workers to organize, to break with the bourgeoisie’s political options, to support options that are demanded of workers, or to build their own options.
In these elections, many workers will be misled, blackmailed or forced to vote for one of the three bourgeois options, one bad, another worse and the other super worst, in the desperation to leave this dead-end tunnel that will irretrievably lead to the advent of a new economic and social crisis of enormous magnitudes, even worse than the one seen in 2001.
Our organization, SOCIALISTS WITHOUT BORDERS, considers that abstention or a null vote do not help in the struggle for workers’ consciences in search of a socialist and internationalist workers’ solution. We call on the two main contending organizations of the left, PO-MST and PTS-IS to decline in favor of the other, the PO-MST in favor of the PTS-IS, or the PTS-IS in favor of the PO-MST, and thus not present a socialist alternative divided in these elections. We know how difficult it would be for either organization to accept this. This approach should be considered in the future before the PASO elections if they really believe that the interests of the workers and the dispossessed throughout the country must be put before any political differences.
Meanwhile, we call in this election to vote critically for one of the left-wing parties that are running in the contest. And we call on all socialist and revolutionary organizations, as well as the workers, the dispossessed and all marginalized groups, to continue to work on the options of struggle necessary to end capitalist exploitation and build an egalitarian and just society in solidarity with the workers of the world and in defense of the planet.
SOCIALISTS WITHOUT BORDERS