WORLD WORLDWIDE ARGENTINA News Journal Update - (en) Argentina, ICL-CIT: Organizacion-Obrera #97 - MAKE WAY (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The dates, the marks in time, can serve to call our attention to a global

perspective that overcomes the tyranny of daily demands. Go from hour to day and
from day to year. This allows us to recalculate and rethink our own journey and
the path that will continue. ---- When we look back at that May 1, 1886, we are
faced with the current precariousness not only of quality of life, but also of
organizational capacity and attitude towards social issues. ---- Many things have
changed, undoubtedly. Very little remains the same. However, that little bit of
continuity is fatally important: society continues to be split in two because of
the productive system, and misery, which in many sectors is less cruel than in
the 19th century, in many others is even worse.

In those years the working class recognized and thought of itself in the
immediacy of a material confrontation in self-defense. The workers' organizations
were consolidated as the natural way for the class to confront the structural
injustice of industrial capitalism. Issues as basic as the defense of wages,
health, housing or working hours were defended by the workers of that time
organizing among themselves. All of this has clearly changed.

The international situation of the working class is not homogeneous, nor are our
organizations and our ideas. They never were. But currently the economic, social
and cultural conditions have opened gaps between the different sectors of the
working class that at times seem to be insurmountable. This distance between one
another results in a lack of recognition. The working class no longer recognizes
itself as such.

Other identification vectors generally operate today. Moral evaluations, gender
identities, national or religious identifications, preferences related to
"lifestyle", etc., serve as identification above participation in the productive
system and, therefore, above class condition. This sadly impacts the degree of
solidarity that could be expected and the organizational perspective that we need
to have.

The organizations that currently exist may be necessary, but they are
insufficient. Syndicalism as it currently functions is no longer a tool of
struggle but an institution of the representative system for the government of
the working class, a containment bellows that absorbs the conflict between
classes and assimilates it in defense of the status quo.

This situation leaves us at the mercy of a political dynamic that from the
heights of the desks defines the living conditions of the working class.

Faced with such a situation, the need to create organizations whose perspective
is something more than negotiating the conditions of our resignation returns time
and time again. In times when things are once again changing rapidly, with the
impact that new technologies have on the productive system, it is urgent to
devise other forms of social organization that come hand in hand with new worker
organizations. There can be no other horizon than that the inequality inherent in
class society disappears.

We workers have to give ourselves our own tools to overcome the current situation
through solidarity and commitment and, at the same time, enable a future.
Identifying ourselves with the resistance is a historical error. We workers must
organize ourselves for the initiative, appropriate the product and the means of
production, and socialize the economy sectorally in conjunction with the
inescapable resistance and pressure on the bosses until they are overcome.

It is necessary to articulate consumption with the remote production of the
political organizations that obtain from the State the wealth that they cannot
produce by themselves. If we do not put production ahead, we will continue to be
subordinated to political processes that have, at most, the pretense of forcing
the government to take this or that measure circumstantially. In other words,
unionism that does not incorporate the creation of production and consumption
units will not be able to avoid political leadership. It will be completely
subservient to the management of the State as it is at present, and it will not
be able to go much further from where it is.

In this aspect, the capture of the community capacity of the sectors expelled
from the formal economy in the rhetorical figure of the popular economy, is a
more advanced strategy in relation to the understanding of the new social
conditions than the one that has been expressed up to now by trade unionism.
contemporary. In the context of a decline in the classical model of capitalist
employment, a fabulous concentration of wealth, and an equally phenomenal growth
in productivity, structural exclusion is also becoming permanent.

Since the 1990s, unemployment ceased to be a circumstantial variable associated
with productive crises to become a stable and permanent dimension of society. The
current models of capitalist development no longer aim at full employment, but at
equilibrium points in which some more or less extensive segments of society are
left out of production. It is in this context that the figure of the popular
economy has come to stay.

The very concept of popular economy implies that there is no longer a marginality
but two different territories. The people will have an economy and the others
will have another. Who are those others? What is the dividing line between the
economy of the people and the economy of others? That dividing line is a
crossroads between formal employment, purchasing power, and territory. The
popular economy is circumscribed to a social sphere that is assumed to be
structurally differentiated from the formal economy. It is the conversion of
informality into a parallel formality.

Having nothing to lose, having been left out, is an incomparable opportunity to
create a different world. Not out of romanticism or some kind of virtue in
misery, but out of necessity. If it weren't for that capture, the inside half
would have to face off more radically against the outside half. And that half of
the outside could perhaps make its way to other forms of sociability and
confrontation. Or not.

The truth is that there are not two economies but one. Without a link between the
formal economy, with the power of industrial productivity and the sophistication
of applied information technologies, the popular economy could not survive
without taking by storm the capital necessary for its own subsistence. That link
is the state. Today through plans, who knows tomorrow through universal income.
But the role of the state as a link between the formal world and the formally
informal, "popular" world is also here to stay. They are two faces of the same
coin. That is why the economy is one. While the popular economies keep the beast
in the corral, the State is the run-and-see of the business community bringing
subsidies, repressive forces and clandestine businesses.

This scheme is unapproachable by a trade unionism that does not contemplate the
properly economic dimension of class solidarity. It is necessary to think of a
trade unionism that, unlike representing workers before employers or the State,
consolidates itself as a workers' organization to directly attend to the
vicissitudes of economic life. I am referring to the need to subvert the
political order of poverty management and to dismantle the rupture that is
created within the working class with the cut border between the formal economy
and the popular economy.

This informality, on the other hand, advances the porosity of a formal economy
that will not be able to resist the disarticulation of its regular order for much
longer. The flexibilization of work contracts and the setback in the social
coverage of labor legislation are processes that will come sooner rather than
later because without them the crisis of the capitalist system could become too
deep, unless we have the capacity and the enough organization to bring that
crisis to the level of rupture. That doesn't seem to be the case.

For all this, a reformulation of the workers' organizations is imposed. It is
necessary to shuffle and give again, to resume the principles that order the
conception of the working class and that explain the urgent and imperious need to
organize ourselves. It is not about a more or less direct confrontation with the
bosses, much less about routine political adventures, but about a real survival
strategy in an unequal world and the importance of eliminating the conditions of
that inequality.

The current motor is to make way, to open a new path in the same direction.
Changes in the productive system impose new conditions for the organization.
Direct action is, now more than ever, an economic action aimed at covering the
material needs of workers in all spaces and in all dimensions of economic
relations. And these needs are not restricted to consumption, but also imply the
appropriation of production processes to finally socialize economic activity and
the profit produced.

The workers' organization should ever be the economic organization of society,
the organization of productive activity by the producers and for the common
benefit. If unionism has been the historical expression of the workers' struggle
against exploitation, currently it has been confused with the containment of the
labor conflict so that this exploitation is manageable. It is time to start over,
to rethink the organizations that exist and those that should exist, taking the
initiative in a world in rapid transformation. It is time to organize ourselves
to make our way.

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2023/05/01/hacer-camino/
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