The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

Tom Sullivan

Jasmine Duff

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

The Argentine working class is not backing down from its struggle against conservative President Javier Milei. A general strike called by the major union confederations on 9 May, the second since Milei came to office in December, paralysed the economy and major cities. Urban transportation came to a standstill, nearly 300 flights were cancelled, banks and shops were closed, and government operations were massively reduced. One study found that the lost economic activity was equal to 1.1 percent of annual GDP.
The second general strike took on Milei’s new austerity package, which has just been passed by the Senate and will now return to the lower house. After he withdrew his first one (known as the Omnibus Bill)—which aimed to slash public spending, privatise state-owned firms and pass anti-labour legislation—he introduced a new, watered-down, version, colloquially referred to as the “Omnibus Bill XS”. Despite only containing around a third of the provisions of the original bill, the new one still includes significant anti-labour legislation and privatisations.
Milei has faced significant difficulty in passing any of this through Congress because he lacks even a sizeable minority parliamentary bloc—his party was founded only in 2021. Unlike other far-right figures, like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, Milei does not have a cohered and loyal base. He was backed by the Argentine ruling class in the second round of the election and won 56 percent of the vote. However, this was considered to be a vote against the incumbents—it’s unclear how loyal this base will remain.
“The government is very determined to move forward, but this also generates significant resistance”, Cesar Latorre, a union delegate at a major hospital in Buenos Aires and member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), said to Red Flag. “The government has not given up and, where another government might have backed down, it tries to keep pushing forward.”
 This was clear when a journalist recently said to Milei, “The people can’t make ends meet, Mr President”, to which he responded, “If people couldn’t make ends meet, they’d already be dead”.
Milei’s intransigence reflects that, despite decades of economic turbulence, Argentina’s rulers have not succeeded in smashing the organised working class and the welfare state as fully as elsewhere in Latin America. Large sections of the economy are nationalised, and the unionisation rate remains around 40 percent. Milei’s whole political project is about fighting on behalf of the bosses. His labour measures would weaken workers’ ability to fight for better wages, his budget cuts would remove subsidies to households, his privatisations would hand public companies to private bosses, and his tax proposal would make workers’ pay a greater share of the state’s finances. 
But after Milei faced stiff opposition in parliament for the last six months, it now looks like some of his opponents are willing to negotiate and approve sections of his agenda. This includes the main parliamentary opposition, the Peronists, a number of whom voted in favour of the second Omnibus Bill. 
Peronism is a political current unique to Argentina. It has a strong base in the unions. Its origins lie in a coup led by Colonel Juan Perón in 1943. Perón sought a base in the organised workers’ movement but was no working-class hero; he worked to control and restrain the rising working-class militancy of the time. Perón severely attacked the left, jailing and murdering hundreds of leftists and unionists. More recently, the Peronists were the first to try to implement neoliberalism in the 1990s and, while in power for the four years prior to Milei, oversaw the deaths of more than 100,000 people during the pandemic. Outside of the various periods of military rule, the Peronists have governed Argentina most of the time since the 1940s.
The union bureaucracy consistently subordinates the interests of the workers it’s supposed to represent to the electoral interests of Peronism. Currently, while the Peronists are out of power and there’s a significant attack on the unions themselves, the unions have been pressured to organise protests and strikes. 
 “Peronism has a division of labour. On one hand, they make speeches in parliament, complain and denounce the law”, says Latorre, referring to the austerity package. “On the other hand, they discuss with La Libertad Avanza [Milei’s party], as is the case with the CGT [General Confederation of Workers], which is trying not to mobilise seriously to avoid destabilising the parliamentary session.” 
The union bureaucracy and Peronists have negotiated with Milei to protect, among other things, union funding sources, such as automatic union membership at workplaces. Whilst it is right to defend this measure, the bureaucracy has been far more interested in negotiating with the government over it than sustaining protests and strikes to defeat the brutal attacks on workers. 
The Peronist parliamentary leaders want to wait out Milei’s four-year term in a way that causes minimal disruption to Argentinian capitalism, whilst contrasting themselves as the steady hand against Milei’s chaos. 
The second general strike was not due to any enthusiasm from the bureaucracy and Peronist leaders for a prolonged battle against Milei. Rather, it was called in response to pressure they are under from their own members and seen as a bargaining chip in negotiations to protect the unions’ structures. 
Nonetheless, the strike was an opportunity to reunite the full force of the working class after many unions had ceased their industrial action while they returned to negotiations following the first general strike. However, its impact was contradictory. Whilst it had very strong participation, its political impact was not fully realised because the union leaders refused to call a centralised protest.
Despite the lacklustre efforts of the CGT leadership, Milei has so far failed to make workers pay for the crisis. Instead, resistance remains strong. Since the second general strike, teachers have held a national strike, healthcare workers have taken industrial action, train drivers organised a 24-hour national strike just a week after a national transport strike, and even judges struck for 24 hours. And on the day the second austerity package was being voted on in the Senate, public sector workers held a national 24-hour strike, the university sector began a 48-hour strike, and other unionists struck and joined protests outside the Congress.
On 24 May, a textile company fired hundreds of workers in two of its factories. When it attempted to remove the machinery, workers occupied both factories, one of which continued functioning for more than a fortnight.
Students have also joined the fight. On 24 April, around 1 million people marched across the country to defend higher education from Milei’s cuts. A few days later, he caved and increased the budget. 
The rising social tensions reached even greater heights in the province of Misiones, an underdeveloped region in the north-east with a small but important agricultural sector. There, teachers, healthcare and other workers have been protesting and striking for months. In recent weeks, the protests have become more aggressive, marching on the provincial congress and clashing with security forces. Students and workers have blockaded roads across the province. Even the local police went on strike for a pay increase and set up an encampment outside their headquarters. The federal government, for the thirteen days of the police strike, had to call in other state security forces.
The police temporarily breaking ranks and joining the protests is a clear sign of how deep the crisis is. Combined with the increased levels of industrial action, it shows that Milei’s approach is a risky one. Previous conservative presidents have failed in similar attempts to implement austerity. For example, during Mauricio Macri’s term from 2015 to 2019, the unions thwarted his anti-worker changes with five general strikes. The other risk for Milei is that the Argentinian ruling class grows tired of the social conflict and returns to the Peronists. After all, they can offer something Milei cannot: social peace. A recent opinion piece in the Argentinian paper La Nación expressed this sentiment:
“The growing labour unrest, combined with social organisations joining the protests, threatens to reach record levels during Milei’s short presidency ... Curiously, many of the unions that today have adopted a belligerent stance ... remained silent during the last four years [when the Peronists were in government].”
The situation in Argentina is unstable. Even if Milei passes his watered-down austerity package, the mass mobilisations will likely continue. Union leaders are under serious pressure to continue mobilising, Peronism is highly discredited, and workers are eager to fight. 
If Milei wins, his victory may embolden other far-right leaders. But if Argentine workers manage to defeat him, they will send an important message to workers facing similar attacks in Europe and elsewhere: that it is still possible to defeat a ruling-class offensive with a mobilised and combative workers’ movement.

Another general strike in Argentina challenges Milei

The struggle of the Argentine working class against ultra-conservative President Javier Milei continues to evolve. Public sector workers are one of the key groups leading the resistance. Through strikes, protests and occupations of government buildings, state workers have pushed back against Milei’s plan to sack up to 70,000 people.
Milei took office in December and went straight on the offensive against the working class, moving to cut government spending, limit the right to strike and privatise state-owned industry. He also enacted draconian anti-protest laws that deemed any gathering of more than three people an illegal protest.
“They seek to destroy the public sector”, Leonardo Rando, a delegate in the State Workers’ Association (ATE) and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), told Red Flag. “They are not interested in continuing any public policy that improves the quality of life of the people.”
In many cases, management did not even tell workers they were sacked. Instead, they found out only when their access cards did not work one morning.
Fortunately, working-class resistance has thwarted major aspects of Milei’s plans. Argentina’s working class is strong, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent in the formal economy and a large left. The resistance began almost immediately, with huge protests and strikes kicking off across the country. This culminated in a general strike on 24 January, in which half a million people joined the accompanying protest in the capital Buenos Aires.
Shortly after, Milei withdrew his proposal from congress when it became clear it did not have the votes to pass. The huge protests over the last five months have defied the anti-protest laws and rendered certain aspects of them a dead letter.
With his initial attempt to unleash a major attack on the entire working class defeated, Milei has changed tack. He is now targeting specific sections of workers, such as the public sector, while trying to pass a watered-down version of his original bill. 
The Argentine public sector has a proud history of resistance and remains well unionised. Over recent years it has won progressive reforms, such as minimum employment quotas for women and transgender and disabled people.
In response to the attacks, some public sector unions have gone on strike and taken direct action. During a national day of protest on 3 April, ATE workers pushed through police lines and occupied several government buildings in various cities, where they held open assemblies. Two days later, ATE followed up with a nationwide strike and a march on the Ministry of Economy.
State workers from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) have held large assemblies and protests for several months. Argentine cinema is world famous and plays an important cultural role in the country. Employing around 700,000 people, INCAA has long been in the firing line of conservatives for economic and ideological reasons.
“There is a tradition of independent cinema in our country that is also recognised and valued globally, which allows for storytelling from a diversity of perspectives, including critiques of the current political power”, wrote a group of INCAA delegates in a recent press release. “All of this is what they want to destroy in order to reduce Argentina to a cheap location for Hollywood productions.”
Inside the union movement, the socialist left has built itself into a considerable force. For instance, in Córdoba, the second most populous province, the left ran together in union elections last August and won the capital city section of the Union of Educators of the province, defeating two other campaigns. This section of the union has 16,000 members, and the whole union has 43,000 members out of around 80,000 teachers in the region.
But despite some victories for the left, the union movement is overwhelmingly dominated by Peronism, the political movement that occupies the space from centre left to centre right and has governed the country most of the time since the 1980s.
Socialist organisations, including the MST, are attempting to organise the unions’ rank-and-file members and encourage a more combative approach. Since Milei’s election, they have called public meetings, participated in large assemblies of workers and marched as a strong column independent of the union bureaucracy at the general strike in January.
“We believe that it is necessary to go to a large assembly of all state workers to define the necessary plan of action. There should be a new strike of 48 or 72 hours in the coming weeks. No action should be ruled out; we must continue to grow and think about the radicalisation of the struggle”, said Rando.
Public sector workers are not up against just Milei’s government. They face significant obstacles in the union bureaucracy, which is intimately tied to the Peronists. It has refused to call strikes in certain workplaces and industries, and even when it has called them, has not seriously organised and prepared workers. Instead, it routinely tries to channel workers’ anger and frustration into electoral campaigns for the Peronists, much as the Australian union movement does for the Labor Party.
The bureaucracy also overrides decisions made by the rank and file. For example, in the week prior to Milei taking office, delegates from ATE Capital (the Buenos Aires section) voted for a protest. But three days before it was to begin, the union’s general secretary announced that it would be replaced by a press conference in which union leaders simply requested a meeting with Milei.
 Despite this approach from the bureaucracy, the unrelenting attacks on key sections of workers have compelled it to call a second general strike for 9 May.
The political situation in Argentina remains open. Milei is determined to attack workers, the union bureaucracy refuses to organise a prolonged strike campaign, and the misery of mass poverty is a heavy burden on workers’ shoulders. But two general strikes in Milei’s first five months signal the willingness of the working class to resist his agenda.

Argentine public sector workers take on Milei

Amid extreme social and economic crisis and a brutal austerity package proposed by far-right President Javier Milei, the Argentine working class won an important victory last month: the government withdrew a bill that proposed sweeping privatisations of state-owned firms, budget cuts and attacks on labour rights, among other things. 
On the day of the vote in the lower chamber of the Congress, there were tense scenes in Buenos Aires. Thousands of protesters in front of the building, led by the left, resisted pepper spray and batons from police. Inside, Milei’s party, Liberty Advances (LLA), and its congressional allies, who lack a majority, tried to convince a centrist bloc to support the bill. Initially they were successful, with the bill passing “in general”. But when it came to a vote on each chapter, resulting in successive defeats, LLA withdrew the bill.
The bill was the centrepiece of Milei’s austerity package, which makes its defeat a significant setback. Further, to get the bill passed “in general”, he had to water it down and remove more than half of the articles in the original version.
But despite the government’s defeat, which was propelled by a huge general strike followed by mass protests around the country, Milei’s far-right agenda is by no means buried.
Annual inflation is running at nearly 250 percent, and the poverty rate has increased from 45 percent in December to 57 percent. Almost every day, there is a new attack on workers’ living standards. After the legislative setback, Milei announced cuts to public transport subsidies, which will result in bus and subway fares rising by more that 360 percent in coming months. He has also announced cuts to pensions. The most reactionary LLA legislators also introduced a bill to criminalise abortion. While Milei distanced himself from this, it gives an indication of the type of social policies his party wants to impose on Argentina.
The government retains the backing of a considerable section of the Argentine capitalist class and has strong support from the international capitalist class. For example, the International Monetary Fund has released billions of dollars in emergency loans and has praised Milei. Further, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was titled “America needs a Javier Milei”, while other articles talk of global investors’ enthusiasm at the prospects of getting their hands on Argentine public assets.
This is why they support Milei’s no-holds-barred austerity drive. But he faces obstacles. First, several of his proposed laws or aspects of them have been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. Second, his lack of a congressional majority means he has to rely on a centrist bloc to pass legislation. This bloc has proved difficult to win over. Even members of the coalition allied to Milei voted against the bill. However, they largely criticise the means rather than the ends, seeing his approach as authoritarian by trying to assume legislative powers and govern under a state of emergency.
The biggest obstacle for Milei, however, is arguably the working class. But it is far from a unified opposition. Large sections of workers voted for Milei and accept the idea that he should be allowed to implement his proposals. Milei has made direct appeals to this group by claiming that a monthly inflation rate under 25 percent should be a cause for celebration and proof his plan is working. In January, this was achieved with monthly inflation at 20.6 percent.
However, there is a sizeable minority of the working class, not uncommonly under the influence of the socialist left, that views Milei’s plans for what they are—an attempt to make the working class pay for the crisis of Argentine capitalism and give public assets to international capitalists. A key group within this minority are cultural sector workers, who have held large, open assemblies in which debates are held about how to organise resistance to the government’s attacks. Similar processes are playing out among other groups of workers.
But the working class also faces obstacles—principally the trade union bureaucracy, which has so far refused to call a second general strike. Despite the left being strong enough independently to move into action a minority of the most combative workers, a full-scale general strike still requires a call from the major union confederations. Consequently, the slogans of the left continue to be demands on the bureaucracy (“General strike and plan of action”) and against Milei (“Until Milei’s defeat”).
Ultimately, the struggle to defeat Milei and his far-right agenda will not be won easily or quickly, nor through the withdrawal of any particular bill. It will be a drawn-out process involving partial victories and defeats, and lasting throughout his presidency.

The fight continues in Argentina

The turbulent political winds of Latin America blew to the far right in Argentina’s November presidential election. Javier Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, won 56 percent of the vote, while his opponent Sergio Massa, economy minister in the Peronist centre-left ruling coalition, secured only 44 percent. 
Milei is the latest example of Trump-style far-right populism on the continent. A former TV personality who rose to prominence online, he supports a range of socially reactionary policies, including opposing trans rights and sex education, and extreme libertarian views: for instance, he only recently dropped a policy to legalise the sale of human organs. Former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro congratulated Milei on his victory, and Trump has announced he will soon travel to Brazil so the two can meet.
The current Peronist president, Alberto Fernández, did not run for re-election due to his unpopularity, but the party stood arguably its next least popular figure. Massa has overseen a failing economy: the inflation rate is 143 percent, and large sections of the population are impoverished.
The election process was anything but predictable. The primary election took place in August (when candidates must first qualify for the general election), and Milei, a relative newcomer to Argentinian politics, won a surprising 30 percent of the vote. Massa finished third on 28 percent, behind the traditional centre-right coalition. 
However, the Peronist machine mobilised its substantial apparatus of bureaucrats and officials to run an anti-Milei scare campaign in the first round of the general election in October. They flipped the scoreboard: Massa won 37 percent and Milei trailed behind on 30 percent.
There was a widespread feeling of relief from people who feared Milei’s social conservatism, threats to massively slash social security and denial of the former dictatorship’s genocidal acts, and his plan to abolish the central bank and replace the peso with the US dollar.
To shore up support between the first and second round, Massa eliminated income tax for almost the entire formal workforce and offered welfare payouts to informal workers that would be funded by taxes on banks and other major companies.
Consequently, it seemed likely that an Argentinian-style Bolsonaro would be blocked from the presidency. It came as a big surprise on election night when the polls showed the exact opposite.
Milei was backed by the Argentinian elite, who might be concerned about his maverick persona and pledge to dollarise the economy but prefer him to the Peronists, who retain links to the trade union movement. The traditional right also supported Milei when it became a two-horse race between him and Massa—he was endorsed by the right’s presidential candidate as well as Mauricio Macri, their most recent president.
His main appeal to Argentinian and international capitalists is his promise to implement the scale of austerity the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has demanded of Argentina for decades, as well as sweeping privatisation of state-owned industries. Both the Peronists and the centre-right have taken on huge IMF debts in exchange for austerity; Milei claims he will cut even harder (he famously wielded a chainsaw during the campaign as a sign of the cuts he would make). Upon victory, he said, “There is no place for gradualism, there is no place for tepidness, there is no place for half measures”. 
In the lead-up to the election, the Peronists warned of imminent economic collapse if Milei won the presidency. Yet the stock market rallied in the days following his victory. And despite his anti-establishment rhetoric, he has met with Macri to discuss a governing coalition and indicated he will nominate establishment figures to key ministries. This seems to have calmed the elites’ nerves. 
But Milei will find it difficult to implement much of his agenda. His party, formed only in 2021, controls just seven seats out of 72 in the Senate and 38 out of 257 in the lower Chamber of Deputies. The Peronists will remain the largest minority bloc in both chambers. And despite Milei’s support for IMF austerity, Argentina is largely blocked from borrowing on international capital markets and is already running low on foreign currency reserves to repay its debts.
It’s likely that there will be serious confrontations between the new president and Argentinian capital on one side, and the workers’ movement and the left on the other. In recent years, Argentina has witnessed immense social and economic struggles, including the successful fight for abortion rights and numerous strikes. Argentina remains one of the few countries where the working class was not defeated by the neoliberal onslaught; it is still strongly unionised and home to a large and militant left.
Fortunately, the socialist left made gains in the election. The Workers’ Left Front-Unity, an electoral coalition of four revolutionary Trotskyist parties, secured a fifth congressional seat. The coalition won 4 percent of the national vote, which rose to 5-8 percent in the capital city of Buenos Aires and in provinces like Jujuy and Chubut that have been the site of major popular struggles. 
Cele Fierro, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement within the coalition who will soon assume a seat in the Buenos Aires Congress, told Red Flag: “The triumph of Milei is the result of the disaster of the Peronist government, which co-governed with the IMF ... and that gave all benefits to the corporations. This situation led to great discontent and caused a section of the population to vote for a force of the far right”. 
Fierro says it’s unclear just how far Milei is willing to go with his far-right platform, given that he has already started to moderate some of his attacks on public health and education. However, she said, “It’s clear he has an orientation that the ruling class needs, which is to put an end to gradualist policies and implement structural changes that include a blow to the working class”.
“All of our followers have to be ready with greater organisation and struggle to confront these policies”, said Fierro. “We need to be building a political alternative on the left. The debate cannot always be whether to support the ‘lesser evil’.” 
It’s unclear how these different tensions will play out, but there is no doubt that Milei will try make workers and the poor pay for the crisis of Argentinian capitalism. His ability to do so will ultimately depend on the strength of the workers’ movement and its leadership.

Far-right victory in Argentina

1973 in Chile was a year of hope and tragedy. Hope because one of the world’s best organised and most militant working classes was engaged in a fierce class war, and tragedy because it lost. Fifty years have now passed since the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, which established a seventeen-year military dictatorship. The lessons of the period remain important.
In the 1960s, Chile was industrialising, and there was an increasingly militant and radical movement of industrial workers, urban students and rural peasants. Factory occupations and seizures of land were not uncommon, while student protests began to grow as the universities opened to young people from outside the upper classes. 
The 1964 election was an important moment. The main leftist coalition, headed by the leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, won 39 percent of the vote but lost to Eduardo Frei of the conservative Christian Democrats. Fears that Popular Unity (UP), as the left-wing coalition later became known, would win government with its radical yet reformist program had motivated the CIA to fund Frei’s campaign to the tune of US$3 million—more than US President Lyndon B. Johnson spent on his presidential campaign the same year.
In government, Frei attempted to dampen the growing movement by offering limited agrarian reform and housing and educational programs. But the limited nature of the reforms meant that the strategy failed, and the government often resorted to violence, as when it killed five workers during a 1967 general strike. 
By the 1970 election, society was continuing to shift to the left, and it was clear that only the UP had any chance of taming the radicalisation and taking control of the movements that were now beginning to threaten the stability of Chilean capitalism.
The UP platform of 1970 reflected the militancy and class consciousness of its base, directing blame at all sections of the ruling class. “The only alternative ... is to bring to an end the rule of the imperialists, the monopolists, and the landed oligarchy and to initiate the construction of socialism in Chile”, it read. And it called for the “mobilisation of the Chilean people toward the conquest of power” by the establishment of “Popular Unity Committees in every factory, farm, poor neighbourhood, office or school”. 
The platform went on: “Popular Unity Committees will not only constitute electoral organisations. They will interpret and fight for the immediate claims of the masses and above all they will learn to exercise power”. It also demanded the nationalisation of industry, land redistribution and expansion of welfare.
So it was understandable that, when the UP won the 1970 election, a huge section of the working class looked to Allende with the hope and expectation that he would begin a revolutionary reconstitution of society in their favour.
In the first year of the UP government, there were significant improvements to living standards for broad sections of the population and a limited implementation of some key aspects of the UP platform. Chile’s largely foreign-owned copper mines were nationalised, agrarian reform was intensified, unemployment fell, average wages rose by around 50 percent, and inflation was significantly reduced through price controls. Support for the government grew, and the UP won an absolute majority in municipal elections six months later.
Among the growing aspirations and confidence of the labouring classes, a popular, left-wing artistic movement also arose. Famous protest songs such as “Venceremos” and “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido” made clear calls to action:
Arise, sing 
We are going to win. 
Flags of unity are now advancing. 
And you will come, marching together with me, 
And so you'll see your song and your flag blossom. 
The light of a red dawn already announces the life to come.
But despite the popularity of Allende, and the willingness of the people to defend the UP program and even push it further, the government faced material constraints and political resistance from the middle and ruling classes. Towards the end of 1971, the strong growth of the economy and increased consumption of the working class were beginning to be felt in food shortages. The political right seized on this as its first opportunity, after being on the back foot for over a year, to lead anti-government marches of the middle classes through the streets of Santiago. 
As tensions rose, Allende and his reformist government did everything in their power to avoid open class conflict. Increasingly, they denounced striking workers and peasants who seized land, and violently used the forces of the state to stop them. In doing so, Allende found a willing partner in the Chilean Communist Party, which, given its significant base in major unions, had a strong influence over important sections of workers.
At this point, a key contradiction of the UP program was exposed. Allende had never seriously attempted to combat the institutions of the state. While his government reformed some areas, others were left largely untouched. Even the 1970 platform maintained the military, police and capitalist judicial system. Further, despite Allende’s radical rhetoric of workers exercising revolutionary power, he constantly stressed the importance of achieving change within the limits of the existing capitalist system.
What Allende and the UP leaders offered was a strategy of compromise with the ruling class. But any compromise inevitably meant workers and other oppressed layers accepting their own subordination to and exploitation by the Chilean capitalists. Despite Allende maintaining huge levels of support across the country, by early 1972, key sections of the working class were no longer willing to accept the strategy. Neither were some in the ruling class. 
One of the first major ruling-class attacks was a bosses’ strike in the trucking industry in early October 1972, almost immediately causing the movement of food and basic goods to grind to a halt. A few days later, other major industrial associations joined the offensive, along with doctors, engineers and other sections of the middle classes.
The different responses on the left showed the growing division between the moderate leaders, Allende and the Communist Party, and the rank and file workers, who were demanding a more combative strategy. Instead, Allende called for “good sense” and “reflection”, while asking workers to avoid any type of “sporadic or spontaneous actions”. 
To the left of the UP, calling for a more militant response, were groups such as the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Founded in 1965, the MIR was a unification of several revolutionary parties. Originally formed with a focus on the poorer sections of the working class, by 1972 it was slowly beginning to orient more to the better organised sections of industrial workers. In contrast to Allende, the MIR called for the establishment of “communal coordinating committees”, “to put into action the masses and develop their political initiative, under the direction of the working class and the revolutionaries”.
With no real leadership coming from UP officials, and shortages beginning to bite, the rank and file began to move independently. At this moment, the cordones industriales rose to become the leading organ of resistance to the bosses’ strike. Established a few months earlier in Santiago, the cordones were coordinating centres that grouped together factories and other workplaces in a certain area to organise the struggle against the bosses locally. Now, in the face of economic sabotage, the cordones began to control production and distribution all over the country. 
Neftalí Zúñiga, a worker Communist Party member in the Pollak cordón, related her experience:
“We had six people absent, no one else, everyone came to work. From Renca, Puento Alto, San Bernardo they arrived at work, did their day and went home. We made sure to supply them with food, so they were able to walk from five in the morning to arrive at eight”.
Another militant spoke of the ingenuity of the workers in alliance with students:
“It was a marvellous thing, almost all the factories of Santiago operating without bosses! The workers were producing the most sophisticated things, designing shoes, and we sold them at the market. My role was to move the products, see how many workers there were in the factories and go find them ... We went with the garbage workers to look for petrol in Maipú and we brought it back to all of Santiago. The students were looking for vegetables and were distributing them to the neighbourhoods, in the neighbourhoods there was everything.”
There were even cases of factory workers threatening the technical staff, who had largely deserted, to ensure they stayed to help with production. In other areas, workers’ brigades were formed, albeit very poorly armed, to defend against any potential attacks from the military or police.
During October, the cordones also established an independent press. Newspapers served as organs for the left parties to debate immediate tasks and strategies. Union militants of the Socialist Party in one cordón released a manifesto called “To advance, bourgeois power must be destroyed”. 
In many workplaces and cordones, childcare centres were established and cultural events were held. Elsewhere, a system of direct sales was established that basically wiped out the black market.
The organisation of the working class through the cordones defeated the bosses’ strike by the end of October. When the strike officially ended, there were huge victory marches all over the country. In the wake of victory, an additional 65 factories were nationalised, of which only nine were part of the government’s original plan.
The devotion, enthusiasm and success of the Chilean working class in October 1972 give a glimpse of the collective power that workers have to run society in their own interests. In the most embryonic form, the cordones were a first step towards building the type of organisation the working class needs to rid itself of its oppressors and exploiters.
But the organisation and leadership of the rank-and-file contrasted to the leadership of Allende. The cordones represented an alternative base of power belonging exclusively to the working class, and for that reason Allende and the reformists in power feared them. At every step, they tried to restrain the cordones and maintain any resistance within constitutional bounds.
While the strike was defeated by the cordones, it officially ended through an agreement between Allende’s government and the opposition parties, representing the major business associations. Shamefully, the agreement established a new cabinet that included three senior members of the military.
After such an outstanding working-class victory, Allende wanted to take back control of the movement, which he had temporarily lost. A few months later, in early January, the government proposed a law to return nationalised factories to their owners, which became known as the “Prats-Millas plan”, after its inventors, the Communist Party Minister of Economy Orlando Millas and the general-turned-cabinet-member Carlos Prats.
Immediately, workers all over the country recognised the plan for what it was and prepared for another battle. The Cerrillos-Maipú cordón declared that the plan “was a transaction between the government and bourgeoisie with which only the bosses win, and they win to continue with their permanent activity to definitively defeat the working class”.
Once again, the cordones went into action, accompanied by large protests and street blockades of the Presidential Palace in Santiago. Even mid-level members of Allende’s Socialist Party were beginning openly to criticise and oppose the law. In late February, the government withdrew the plan.
Thus, from October 1972, after the defeat of the bosses’ strike, into the early months of 1973 with the defeat of the Prats-Millas plan, the Chilean working class had achieved two great victories against the military, the industrialists and the UP government itself. Consequently, the ruling class now rejected any parliamentary manoeuvres and began preparing the ground for a military coup, seeing no alternative but to crush the UP government, along with the union movement and revolutionary left.
The military leaders resigned from the cabinet after the defeat of the Prats-Millas plan, and the right-wing press was rabid in support of a coup. Allende, however, continued to seek appeasement. Nor did the Communist Party provide any lead when it launched its slogan, “Collect signatures against civil war”.
 Over the coming months, large protests were held in Santiago and other cities to defend democracy. There were even signs of rank-and-file mutinies within the army and navy. But by early September, with Allende having assured the military leaders he would offer no serious support to the resistance movement, they felt confident enough to make their move. On the morning of 11 September, the army moved into the Presidential Palace.
In the lead-up to the coup, the appetite for serious resistance from the cordones and the working class was unquestionable. Only six days prior, the provincial coordinator of the cordones industriales sent a letter to Allende, in which it outlined with great accuracy what was to come and what needed to be done.
It opened with the workers’ alarm over the “unleashing of a series of events that we believe will lead us not only to the liquidation of the revolutionary process in the short term, but, in the long term, to a fascist regime of the most criminal and implacable kind”.
With great clarity, it condemned Allende for not taking the opportunity on several occasions to defeat their enemies:
“When the generals and seditious officials ... placed themselves above the law, they could have been beheaded and ... the process could have been carried to triumph, having moved onto the offensive.
“What was lacking in all these occasions was decision, revolutionary decision, what was lacking was confidence in the masses, what was lacking was knowledge of its organisation and strength, what was lacking was a determined and hegemonic vanguard.”
The cordones now clearly expressed an understanding of the failures of reformist strategy and the necessity of revolutionary action:
“We, the workers, agree with Mr Frei on one point, that there are only two alternatives: dictatorship of the proletariat or military dictatorship. We are absolutely convinced that historically reformism that seeks dialogue with those who have betrayed [us] over and again, is the quickest path to fascism.”
The letter ended with a warning to Allende that if he continued with his strategy, he would “be responsible for bringing the country not to a civil war, which is already in development, but to the cold, planned massacre of the most organised and conscious working class in Latin America”.
Despite the heroic resistance that was put up by workers in certain areas, a reign of terror was unleashed that resulted in the torture and murder of tens of thousands of working-class militants, giving birth to seventeen years of a brutal military dictatorship.
The lessons of the defeat were immediately clear. Allende, to his dying day, remained steadfastly committed to the parliamentary road to socialism. But this road was blocked by every institution of the ruling class—the police, military, judiciary, business associations—backed by US imperialism. The UP leaders were bound by a commitment to constitutionality, for which their enemies showed no regard.
Further, the defeat shows that the state cannot simply be captured by a reformist government and converted into a tool for the exercise of working-class power. It must be smashed and a new, workers’ state established on its ashes.

What happened in Chile?

As millions of Spaniards went to the polls on 24 July during a blistering European heatwave, many breathed a cool sigh of relief as the results came in. The widely expected parliamentary majority of the centre right People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox party did not eventuate. In fact, Vox’s vote went down markedly from the last election in 2019, as it lost 19 of its 52 seats.
Many were concerned that the far right was going to enter government for the first time since the overthrow of Spain’s fascist dictatorship in 1975. But the final outcome remains unclear. The governing Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE, improved its vote but still fell short of a majority in its own right. It will likely need the support of several separatist parties in both Catalonia and the Basque Country to form government.
The election was called in response to a significant rejection of the PSOE in municipal elections across the country in May. Vox achieved strong results in those elections, which gave it momentum going into the federal election. But despite its poor result at the national level, the party has risen quickly since its formation in 2013 and is seeking to emulate the rise of other far-right parties across Europe in recent years. Forging links with these parties, they invited Italian fascist leader Giorgia Meloni to speak, via video link, at one of their campaign rallies.
Vox made a name for itself when the Catalan independence movement was at its height in 2017. Its platform is fiercely against all separatist movements in Spain and seeks to consolidate power in Madrid. On top of this, the party’s policies are in line with other far-right parties in Europe in calling for immigration cuts, with particular vitriol aimed at African refugees and migrants, attacking LGBTI rights and opposing laws against sexual violence.
But despite Vox’s poor result, the election was no glowing endorsement of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his government. Since his election in 2019, Sánchez has ramped up military spending, unleashed the security forces on refugees and repressed progressive protests. He also mishandled the pandemic disastrously.
The PSOE was accompanied in these efforts by the Podemos party. Born out of a wave of anti-austerity protests in 2013, Podemos catapulted into the Spanish electoral arena winning 8 percent of the vote only four months later in the European Union elections. The party was a popular expression of the mass discontent in Spanish society and a rejection of the political class following the global economic crisis. It gained popularity through its unorthodox party organisation, which includes online voting, a youthful leadership that rejects the suit-and-tie appearance of establishment politicians, and a platform that includes higher taxes on corporations and an expansion of welfare. 
Podemos quickly replaced the United Left coalition, which includes the Communist Party, as the main left-wing force in the country. But the Podemos leadership rapidly moved to the right and has continued to do so. Early in the formation of the party, the leadership around academic Pablo Iglesias quickly isolated the leftist elements in the party and gained control.
After the 2019 election, Podemos joined a PSOE coalition to install Sánchez as prime minister. As a deputy prime minister, Iglesias has provided left cover for a government that has made deals with the International Monetary Fund to implement austerity and has continually opposed Catalonian independence.
On this issue, Podemos’s lurch to the right is particularly clear. When the regional government of Catalonia declared independence in 2017, Iglesias called it “illegal”, instead calling for “dialogue” and “breathing room”. In government with the PSOE, Podemos has helped Sánchez to quell the independence movement by bringing important separatist parties into government.
In 2021, Iglesias resigned as deputy prime minister. This was not because of any major political disagreement with the PSOE government. It was so that he could run in the Madrid regional elections, where the party’s declining support risked it becoming irrelevant in the most important part of the country.
In the 2023 elections, Podemos ran as part of the recently formed Sumar coalition, led by the Communist Party labour minister in the current government. Compared to the similar left coalition in 2019, Sumar lost seven seats, while Podemos lost nine seats.
The rejection of both Sumar and Podemos is a result of their complicity in a PSOE government that has implemented conservative, anti-worker policies. Barely a decade ago, Podemos was an encouraging step forward for the Spanish left, but its leadership has watered down its platform and demobilised its members and wider social movements in order to earn a place in government. The recent electoral result will raise questions about the future of the party.
It is unclear whether Sánchez will be able to gain the support of separatist parties and pull together a coalition government. A return to the polls remains a possibility. Whoever ends up governing Spain, they face a number of challenges. 
While the separatist movement in Catalonia may have fallen from the heights it achieved in 2017, the issue has not gone away and the potential for another wave of struggle always exists. At the same time, the Spanish economy continues to stagnate and the PSOE has no answer to the rise of the far right—except to embrace its hardline position on refugees and other issues. A second Sánchez government with the support of Podemos and Sumar would be no step forward for the millions of Spaniards looking for an alternative to the political establishment.

Far right loses in Spain’s hung parliament

The process of creating a more progressive Chilean constitution took another decisive step on 9 May. Unfortunately, it was a step further away from the demands of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6931">the 2019 rebellion</a>, which pushed the conservative government to the brink of collapse and forced it to initiate the constituent process as a way out of the political crisis.
In elections to the Constitutional Council, a new body tasked with drafting a second constitutional text after the first was defeated in a referendum last year, the big winners were the far right. The list of José Antonio Kast, runner-up in the 2021 presidential election, gained the most votes. With 23 out of 51 seats, his bloc fell just short of a majority. Combined with the traditional conservative bloc, which won eleven seats, the right holds more than two-thirds of the Council seats.
The result was another major blow to the government of leftist former student leader Gabriel Boric, who was elected promising to enshrine the demands of the rebellion in a new constitution. This second constituent process was born of an agreement between Boric and right-wing congressional parties. Unlike in the first constituent process, when a convention was elected to write the text, this time the elected members will not be drafting a new constitution but rather approving, rejecting or amending a draft already written by an “Expert Committee” consisting of 21 legal professionals, a journalist, an economist and a sociologist.
The Committee, appointed by Congress, is to write the new text within the framework of twelve “constitutional bases”, a set of guiding principles agreed by legislators. They include amendments stating that Chile is “one and indivisible”—a clear rejection of the demand for a plurinational state in which indigenous communities have more autonomy. And where the first revised constitution abolished the highly undemocratic Senate and replaced it with a Chamber of Regions to decentralise power, one of the guiding principles enshrines the Senate.
So even before the draft text is handed to the Constitutional Council, which itself has minimal control over it, severe limitations have been imposed.
Only a few years ago, the working class was on the offensive, acting collectively through millions-strong protests and a general strike that paralysed the country and nearly toppled a billionaire president. The leaders of that movement rode a wave of discontent into the presidency and government. Now the movement itself is at its weakest point.
In the original constitutional convention, the right was unable to win even one-third of the seats. Now, it has a dominating majority of more than two-thirds. To make matters worse, the traditional conservative block since 2019 has been completely overtaken by a far-right bloc that embraces a far more anti-working-class and anti-immigrant platform.
How did Chile arrive at such a dire situation so quickly after one of the most inspiring mass movements in recent memory?
In part because the working class is led by the reformist leaders of the Broad Front and Communist Party, in alliance with the trade union bureaucracy. In every decisive moment, this leadership has sought compromise with the right and demobilised the street movement. Boric himself was a key player in the creation of the Agreement for Peace and a New Constitution, the original congressional agreement that saved the right-wing government in 2019 and offered it an institutional exit to the rebellion.
The latest agreement to draft a second text is a continuation of this failed strategy. 
The 2019 rebellion showed workers and oppressed people that through collective action and struggle they could push back against the neoliberal offensive of the last 40 years, and their expectations of what would come out of that struggle were justifiably raised. But now, for millions of Chileans, the consciousness-raising experience of participation in a mass movement has been replaced by demoralisation and disillusionment as it becomes clearer that the political leaders of the movement are committed not to advancing it but to holding it back.
Even in government, Boric has shown no desire to meet the demands of the movement. He has replaced his more leftist ministers with conservative ones, and on key issues he offers nothing of any genuine progressive content. Take, for example, the nationalisation of the mining sector, a key demand of the movement. His proposal for nationalising Chile’s lithium industry has been extremely conservative, stipulating that no nationalisation will occur until all current contracts expire, which for the two major producers is in 2030 and 2043 respectively. One of the companies responded to the nationalisation plan by saying it would have “no material impact on our business”. 
Boric upholds the right’s law and order agenda, refuses to free all political prisoners from 2019, and offers no real solutions to the millions of Chileans struggling to make ends meet in the cost-of-living crisis. This is a key reason why there was such a high amount of null and blank votes and abstentions in the election—around one-third in total.
The rightward trajectory of Boric will probably continue. At the same time, the political situation increasingly plays into the hands of the right, which, after the defeat of the first referendum, has positioned itself as more in touch with the people than this supposedly radical left government of former student leaders.
With the streets empty of protesters, Boric and the ruling class feel no pressure to meet any of the progressive demands of recent years. Meanwhile, the far right continues to grow. If current trends continue, it will be in a strong position for the 2025 presidential election. The reformist leaders would prefer this scenario to a return to mass struggle, which they and the union bureaucracy will continue to hold back. 
The only real solution for the Chilean working class is to re-ignite the movement of 2019 and retake the offensive.

Another win for the right in Chile

After seventeen months in office, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was this month deposed by a right-wing parliamentary coup hidden behind the facade of an official and legal impeachment process. The impeachment vote came just hours after Castillo announced that he planned to dissolve Congress, hold new elections, redraft the constitution and place Peru under a state of emergency. His vice-president, Dina Boluarte, has assumed the presidency while Castillo is held by police on charges of “rebellion” and has been ordered to remain in prison for the next eighteen months.
Castillo’s removal is the culmination of a highly organised campaign by the parliamentary right, the business sector and the media to undermine and attack the self-described socialist, the impeachment being the third such vote of his short presidency. The campaign began as soon as the school teacher and union leader won the presidency, defeating the daughter of jailed Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori by just 44,000 votes. 
Having never held political office prior to being president, Castillo rose to prominence in 2017 as a key leader of a national teachers’ strike that lasted more than two months. He ran on an openly left-wing platform, promising to nationalise key sectors of the economy and call a constituent assembly to redraft the 1993 constitution, which was approved under the Fujimori dictatorship. He positioned himself on the side of the poor and oppressed against the Peruvian elites, often repeating the phrase, “There should be no poor people in a rich country”. But lacking a congressional majority, his major reforms were blocked. Furthermore, his presidency was undermined by constant ministerial changes, averaging roughly one per week.
The media, both in Peru and internationally, have been quick to create a narrative legitimising the coup and the rule of Castillo’s successor, even using it as an opportunity to “restore faith” in Peru’s institutions. An article in El Comercio, a major Peruvian newspaper, noted: “Just as the strength of the economic model has managed to resist the anarchy of the last few years and the destructive action of the Castillo government, the institutions have managed to contain the authoritarian onslaught”. 
The New Yorker called Castillo’s administration the “world’s shortest-lived dictatorship” while declaring that “the rule of law ... was strong enough to stop a single desperate man”. The US ambassador was also quick to support the coup, tweeting, “The United States categorically rejects any extra-constitutional act by President Castillo to prevent Congress from fulfilling its mandate”.
But the Peruvian masses have rejected such propaganda and see the coup for what it is. After an initial muted reaction, protests have spread across the country and are continuing to grow. Rural areas with large indigenous populations were the quickest to respond to the coup, organising road blockades, burning down government buildings and occupying airports. In other cities and towns, protesters took police officers hostage and negotiated exchanges to free arrested protesters.
In several regions, leading indigenous and social organisations have declared a state of “popular insurgency” and indefinite strike. In response, the new president placed the most active regions under a state of emergency that was later extended to the entire country for 30 days.
Peru’s main union confederation, the CGTP, responding to extreme pressure from below, called an indefinite strike beginning on 13 December, with 15 December promoted as the main day of mass mobilisation. Unfortunately, due to Peru’s relatively small industrial working class, the CGTP lacks the ability to paralyse the country economically. So while most unions affiliated to the CGTP participated, the general strike of 15 December was closer to a national day of protest. 
Despite this, the union leaders have so far played a positive role, by adding industrial weight to the main demands of the movement, which have crystallised around the release of Castillo, the closure of Congress and new elections, and the establishment of a constituent assembly. 
The national strikes were the first expression of mass, organised resistance of the working class. But the success of the anti-coup movement relies on these strikes bringing broader layers of workers, particularly in the main cities, into the movement. Currently, Peru’s rural, indigenous populations have been at the forefront of the movement. This is understandable: Castillo is seen by many as a symbol of the poor, rural people of Peru. He won several rural provinces with more than 90 percent of the vote. 
The people of these areas have already demonstrated their militancy and willingness to defend democracy, but it remains crucial that the indigenous movement is united with the most powerful sections of the working class. 
With Peru being the world’s second largest copper producer, it was inspiring when videos emerged on social media of miners in the Arequipa region downing their tools and beginning to march towards the capital, Lima.
Students have also joined the movement. At one of the main universities in Lima, students occupied the campus and declared their solidarity with, and participation in, the national strikes.
Early acts of resistance have already shown success. Boluarte has announced that she will ask Congress to call early elections in 2023, after initially refusing to do so, saying that she would finish the rest of Castillo’s term, which ends in 2026. The new president has tried to play the role of peacemaker by recognising the legitimacy of the protesters’ demands yet calling for a “truce” at the same time. 
Unfortunately, Castillo and Peru Libre, his party until he resigned from it in June, have given no indication they will lead the type of movement necessary to defeat the coup. Six of Peru Libre’s twelve congressional representatives voted to impeach Castillo (three abstained and three voted against). The party has largely limited itself to vague statements about the right to protest being respected and calling for government restraint. Castillo, for his part, has been able to release a few short statements from prison through intermediaries, none of which call for an escalation of the protests fighting for his release.
Ultimately, Castillo’s downfall is an example of the futility of trying to create fundamental social change through the capitalist state apparatus. He was hamstrung from the beginning by the lack of a congressional majority to pass the reforms on which he campaigned. In response, he watered down the proposed reforms in the hope that the right-wing majority in Congress would pass them, which it did not. After every setback, he made further concessions to the ruling class by removing more progressive and left-wing ministers and replacing them with technocrats from the business sector. 
At the same time, he toned down the anti-rich, pro-poor rhetoric that had defined his campaign, and made overtures to the international and domestic business community that he would welcome foreign investment. Despite all this, the ruling class, acting through Congress and the media, was unrelenting in its attacks against him. So isolated and incapable had he become by the end that he made a final appeal to the most reactionary sections of the state to save him, including the armed forces, the police and the Organization of American States (the main arm of US imperialism in Latin America). When these groups predictably rejected him, he made a last-ditch effort to dissolve Congress and hold new elections. But Congress beat him to the punch when it moved swiftly to impeach.
This institutional strategy went hand-in-hand with the biggest pitfall in the reformist project that Castillo exemplifies: subordination of the class struggle. At no point in his presidency did he try to mobilise the indigenous and working-class populations to defend his government. This was despite a clear desire and readiness among them to do precisely that, demonstrated by several marches in various parts of the country only two weeks ago, calling for the defence of democracy against any impeachment attempt.
By rejecting the mobilisation of his supporters, Castillo weakened his government and the ability of the masses to resist the coup. It was a clear signal to the ruling class that it could remove the president without the risk of him leading a strong protest or strike movement in response.
In Castillo’s case—as is the case anytime a reformist leader manages to take the presidency—everything was stacked against him. The entire state apparatus—the courts, the bureaucracy, the armed forces and police, the Congress—was working to undermine him from the beginning. On top of this, the entire business sector, both domestic and international, along with the media, organised a ceaseless campaign against Castillo. As for the one section of organised power that he could have had fighting for him—the working class organised through the unions—he refused to mobilise it. 
Events in Peru have proven yet again the limitations of parliament. The working class must now look towards its own power, through protests and strikes, to go beyond parliamentarism and start to build resistance to the inevitable right-wing attacks that are coming.

Peru ignites to defend democracy against right-wing coup

More than 150 million Brazilians went to the polls to elect a president and members of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies on 2 October. The election was a showdown between the two heavyweights of Brazilian politics, pitting former president and leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against the far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. 
Polling companies and large sections of the media had all but written off Bolsonaro’s chances of re-election, many confidently calling a win for Lula, as he is commonly known, in the first round. However, the results showed a surprisingly strong outcome for Bolsonaro, who received 43 percent of the vote against Lula’s 48 percent, meaning the outcome will be decided in the second round on 30 October. 
Despite Lula winning the first round by more than 6 million votes, the fact that Bolsonaro did much better than expected and will have a second chance is a huge disappointment to the millions of Brazilians who looked to the PT to defeat the far-right movement that has grown around Bolsonaro over the last four years. Now, instead of his presidency ending in the first round with a crushing defeat, the door has been left open for Bolsonaro. 
The election was not just a shot in the arm for Bolsonaro. His vice-president and several former ministers won congressional seats. Among them are his former health minister, who oversaw the deaths of more than 700,000 Brazilians during the pandemic, his environmental minister, responsible for the mass deforestation of the Amazon, and his minister for women, a transphobe who opposes sex education. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party and Bolsonaro-supporting candidates were also the biggest victors in the Senate, winning a majority of the 27 contested seats. They now form the biggest bloc in the Chamber of Deputies.
The congressional weight of this bloc will embolden all the reactionary forces in society. Whatever happens in the second round, Bolsonarismo has consolidated as the dominant right-wing force in Brazilian politics.
The PT maintained and improved its vote in its traditional stronghold of the north-east, where most of the poor Afro-Brazilian population resides. For example, in the state of Piauí, the PT’s first-round vote increased to 74 percent, up from 63 percent in 2018. In key urban areas, the picture was slightly different. The working-class peripheries of Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo, have traditionally been PT strongholds. However, in 2018 they swung sharply to Bolsonaro. Four years later, these areas have returned to the PT, with some of them swinging from votes in the low 20s to the high 40s or above 50 percent. 
Worryingly, however, in the working-class parts of other major cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, where the PT has always been weaker than in São Paulo, Bolsonaro maintained strong support, winning in some places by more than 20 percentage points.
Overall, the PT’s first-round vote increased substantially, from 29 percent in 2018 to 49 percent this year. A large part of this jump has to do with Lula himself. Imprisoned for 580 days during the 2018 election (on corruption charges that were later dropped), Lula was barred from competing in the election. The PT’s little-known candidate, Fernando Haddad, was never able to match the popularity of the man who had led the party since its founding in 1980. 
Lula and the PT of today have gone through a series of transformations since the early days. The party <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6602">originated</a> in the São Paulo metalworkers union and was committed to socialism. It was at the forefront of workers’ struggle and supported indigenous and peasant movements. Lula was briefly a metalworker before entering the union bureaucracy. Formed as a mass party under the military dictatorship, the PT played a key role in Brazil’s transition to democracy. 
The founding of the party, which included several revolutionary socialist and Trotskyist organisations, was a decisive step forward for the Brazilian working class, particularly when it nearly captured the presidency in 1989 with Lula as the candidate. But after successive defeats in the 1990s, the leadership decided that the organisation needed to be palatable to the ruling and middle classes; they adopted a pro-business platform and tamed the radicals.
When it eventually won the presidency in 2002, it did so with a multimillionaire businessman as vice-president. In government, a commodities boom allowed the PT to oversee modest wealth redistribution towards the working class through popular welfare programs, helping to lift millions out of poverty. At the same time, Lula maintained the support of key sections of the ruling class by offering large government contracts, holding back resistance from below and implementing austerity. 
Improvements to the living conditions of a significant section of the working class earned the PT huge popularity, carrying it to victory in the next three elections. However, when the commodities boom came to an end around 2012, the formula proved harder to maintain. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, who won the 2010 and 2014 elections, was impeached and ousted in a parliamentary coup in 2016, which was consolidated with Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 while Lula was in prison. 
While the impeachment of Rousseff was largely orchestrated by the Brazilian ruling class and prosecuted through the media, there was also a genuine and understandable turn against the party from the working class. After thirteen years in government, the PT had serious corruption issues and was rightly seen by many as a party that cut social services and welfare. That anti-PT sentiment was compounded by the fact that Rousseff spent billions of dollars hosting the World Cup and the Olympics. 
The explosion of anti-austerity and anti-PT protests in 2015 and 2016 greatly helped the media and business sector to construct a successful narrative of corruption around Rousseff that would eventually lead to her impeachment.
Lula’s approach to the 2022 election was a continuation of the institutionalisation and conservatisation of the PT that the party leaders began in the 1990s. As running mate, Lula chose a former governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party. Alckmin, who competed against Lula in the 2006 election, is a pro-business figure who, as governor, led a wave of privatisations and budget cutting. Furthermore, instead of the PT putting forward a strong platform of wealth redistribution, it cast the election as a life-or-death choice on the future of Brazilian democracy, with Lula playing the role of saviour. 
The lack of a strong progressive platform was also partly a result of the relatively uncritical support that some important sections of the Brazilian left offered the PT. Despite a period of significant internal debate and opposition, the PT’s main left-wing opposition, the Party for Freedom and Socialism (PSOL), chose for the first time in its history not to run its own presidential candidate. PSOL was formed as a breakaway of the PT left factions in 2004 specifically because Lula’s party was moving too far to the right. But now it’s tailing the PT, refusing to oppose it or provide a clear alternative to it—when the PT has shifted even further to the right.
As a result, the left appears even less equipped to combat the far-right movement that Bolsonaro leads. Bolsonaro’s 2018 victory was not due to some mass embrace of far-right politics among the Brazilian population. The anger of large sections of the working and middle classes at the PT, an anaemic recovery from one of the country’s worst economic crises and the general weakness of the left were key factors in Bolsonaro’s rise. 
But Bolsonaro has now established a solid base of the electorate around his far-right politics. His 2018 first-round vote of 51 million (46 percent), largely held up in 2022, only falling slightly to 49 million (43 percent). This is despite his four years in the presidency having been marred by the massive deforestation of the Amazon, one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls in the world and the extreme militarisation of poor neighbourhoods. 
Bolsonaro’s electoral coalition brings together a diverse range of groups, including evangelicals, agribusiness and other large capitalists, middle-class groups, the far right and, to some extent, sections of the working class and petty criminals. How this coalition will hold up in the second round or in the future is unclear. 
Lula and the PT are more than capable of winning over large business interests through “fiscal discipline” and attacks on working-class living standards, and the small capitalists through direct cash transfers. The party does have some support among poor evangelicals as well.
Bolsonaro is not, however, driven purely by ideology. Several times during the pandemic, he rejected the advice of his economic minister and made direct cash payments to the poor. He repeated this just weeks before the election to try to buy more votes in PT strongholds. He has, however, proved that his coalition is here to stay and has replaced the traditional centre-right coalition as the country’s major right-wing force. 
Ultimately, a second-round victory for Lula and the PT would be welcome only insofar as it prevents a second Bolsonaro term. The PT represents no path forward for the Brazilian working class. Given the current economic conditions under which it would govern, it is likely that Lula would once again implement austerity. The PT long ago abandoned the class struggle, which is the key reason that Bolsonaro was able to win in 2018. 
But regardless of who wins in the second round, the left needs its own political organisations outside of both the PT and the PSOL. The trade union bureaucracy has equally shown itself to be full of conservative, establishment PT leaders with no interest in challenging the system—much less so with Lula as president. No real gains for the working class will come through a Lula presidency. If he does win, progress will come through resistance, not collaboration.

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