Re: AUT: Argentina: Diary of a Revolution

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

John Jordan wrote:

>The futile dream of taking
power and running governments has been abandoned, and
>politics has returned to the physical processes of
>everyday life, to the necessities of the immediate
moment.

In an article that talks a lot about hope this seems a
very hopeless statement. Jordan's seems to be just
another article which tries to present the situation
in Argentina as an end in itself, but surely as
revolutionaries with a bit of understanding of history
and of the nature of capitalism we can see that the
situation in Argentina is only temporary - that it has
to go either to victory, ie taking power, or to
defeat, ie being killed, imprisoned or at the best
politically muzzled by counter-revolution.

Even if we ignore this stark fact, we can still ask
what is so great about what the Argentineans have now?
They are suffering terribly. According to what I read
500 kids are dying daily from the effects of
malnutrition. Surely, with what we know about
capitalism and about socialism, we can conclude that
it will be impossible for this suffering to be
resolved until the economy is brought under the
control of the workers, and the rule of the market is
replaced with a democratically-decided workers' plan
for production, distribution and consumption. Even
then, revolution will have to spread fairly soon to
other countries. Growing vegies on the margins of the
market won't cut it. Jordan actually runs a danger of
valourising the attempts by Duhalde to recuperate the
workers' movement by creating 'microentrepeneurs' in
its midst. (See the CWG article I posted recently, or
think about the piquiteros in terms of early Methodism
in the UK, and you'll see where I'm coming from.
Working class self-help can easily turn into a prop
for the system. Of course workers should
self-organise, they have to organise to take power,
not eke out a living in the gaps left by capital.)

Jordan seems to assume that any attempt to seize power
and put a workers' plan into effect would only create
a corrupt or authoritarian government. He seems to
have the view that any organisation on a large scale
will inevitably become bureaucratised. But why is
socialism on one commune a viable prospect, when
socialism in one country was such a flop?








=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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