The General Strike in Argentina and a Name to Watch for the Future
1.
My tldr on yesterday’s general strike in Argentina: a score draw between the unions and the government. The former, all things considered, got a reasonable number of people on the street, shut down the national airline for the day and disrupted public transport in Buenos Aires. The latter managed to prevent the building workers union from joining the main protest by blocking off one of the main entrances to the city and kept Avenida 9 de Julio, a critical transport artery, open. And in most of Greater Buenos Aires (about 13-15 m people, depending on where you stop counting) work seems to have continued more or less as normal, considering the disruption to public transport. A further plus for the government were the idiotic remarks of Pablo Moyano, the leader of the truck drivers union, who threatened to throw Finance Minister Caputo into the Riachuelo (a river), a threat with stomach-churning echoes of the 1976-83 dictatorship and the fate of many of the disappeared.
And what about the rest of Argentina? There were marches and protests of various dimensions but the cockpit of power in Argentina is Buenos Aires, governments live and die by what happens there, not in Mendoza, Tucuman, Santa Fe or anywhere else in the country. It's still January though, the new government is less than two months in office and this was just the first game in what will be a long season.
2.
Many readers probably think of trade unions as fighters against the power, of hard-working organizers taking huge personal risks to persuade workers to unionise, something like the efforts being made in various places to unionise Amazon and Starbucks today. There’s plenty of that in the history of the Argentine trade union movement but not much in recent decades. The trade unions don’t fight the power, they are a key pillar of it.
The origins of the CGT, the trade union confederation that organised yesterday’s strike, precede the rise of to power of Juan Domingo Perón but when he became President of Argentina in 1946 it was rapidly subsumed into his movement. These days peronismo is pretty much devoid of ideological content but in its heyday it was a mix of Catholic social teaching and corporativism; everyone in their place and a place for everyone, no class struggle rather the trade unions playing their legitimate part in the organised national community. Not every trade unionist was happy with this and there have often been tensions between militant grassroots elements and the so-called “gordos” (fatsos), the conservative leaders of the CGT unions. Sometimes this has led to violence.
Under the government of Carlos Menem the CGT cooperated in the privatisation of many state industries and the consequent redundancies. It also cooperated with the 1966-1970 Onganía military dictatorship and accepted the self-amnesty the leaders of the genocidal 1976-83 dictatorship granted themselves before leaving power. Just like peronismo more broadly, the unions are not attached to any ideological scheme and when you read in some august anglophone media outlet that peronismo and the CGT unions in Argentina are “left-leaning” or social democratic you should allow yourself a faint smile.
3.
There were two elements driving yesterday’s protests and strikes. One was a justifiable rejection of the new government's curtailment of workers’ rights. The other was a rejection of the legitimacy of the new government. The unions, and peronistas in general see, any non-peronista government as an aberration, a phenomenon both anti-natural and anti-Argentine, one which must be brought down by any means necessary.
Yesterday was also the performance of a liturgy; chanting, dancing masses, the thump of bass drums and the smell of choripanes, ”the people” taking to the streets in the name of the deep and true identity of both the nation and the working class to reject a false and foreignising government,
That liturgy could once mobilise millions of Argentines, today its clergy are happy with several tens of thousands. The magic just doesn’t work as well anymore. The resemblances between the trajectory of the Catholic Church and the peronista trade unions in recent years are notable
Under the catastrophic mandate of the outgoing peronista government, inflation rose to 200% annually and poverty to more than 40% but this didn’t produce even a flicker of protest from the unions. Why make things difficult for fellow peronistas? As General Perón said, “For a peronista there’s nothing better than another peronista.”
4.
Facundo Moyano is one of the bosses of the toll booth operators union, a former Congress Deputy, the brother of the above-mentioned Pablo and the son of Hugo Moyano, another CGT leader. Yesterday he did something that Argentine union leaders aren’t famous for; engaging in scorching self-criticism. He said that the strike should have been held two years ago and that the management of the economy by the previous government was “a disaster”. He also says the unions have for too long ignored the situation of the informally employed (half the workforce in Argentina).
And in an interview elsewhere yesterday he blamed Milei’s victory on the previous government, its…
… institutional mess, the economic disaster, the quarrels of ego, of vanities, of political leaders, including myself. Because even though I resigned (as a Deputy), I am still a political leader of Peronism. And I resigned, do you know why? To be free to criticise. We have to face up to society and say, yes, we are responsible for it. We dishonoured the history of peronismo, because peronismo is jobs, peronismo is upward social mobility, peronismo is education.
Facundo is someone to keep an eye on for the future of trade unionism and politics in Argentina; rich, good-looking and ambitious, and not afraid to tell people on his own side what they don’t want to hear.