Pedantry has good news from Argentina
The Argentine economy has been devastated, but the real sign that capitalism can sometimes be the most completely insane system of economic governance imaginable is that Argentina has ample available labour, amply fertile land and plenty of productive factories, but the masses are unemployed, the farmers can’t afford to bring food to market and the factories are closed. Argentina’s real capital – its factories, its infrastructure and its labour – have not been harmed. No war has devasted their land. Everything that supported them before is still there now. Only then they were rich and now they’re poor.
That such a situation could arise in the first place is lunatic, yet there it is. Well, it seems the ridiculousness of it has not been lost on the people of Argentina, where the workers are taking control of the factories and operating them themselves, meeting community needs and paying wages.
Naturally, the authorities are taking a dim view of this development. Wherever workers manage to demonstrate that they don’t need the bosses, sooner or later somebody calls in the police. The owners would, as usual, prefer the people starve rather than question the nature of the system.
If all that sounds rather like orthodox Marxism, so be it. It’s certainly more orthodox class revolution than my usual fare but this is about as traditional a class struggle as you can get. When there are actual proletarians – none of this ambiguity about labour classes and the service industries – struggling to take control of the means of production from repressive owners, that’s a good day for Marxism. It’s enough to make me want to sing L’Internationale. Debout les damn?s de la terre, debout les for?ats de la faim…