WORLD WORLDWIDE ARGENTINA News Journal Update - (en) Argentina, FORA, Organizacion Obrera #99: - September / October 2023 Content + EDITORIAL (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 EDITORIAL - LAW

Some reflections after the PASO in the face of a new government and a
regressive labor reform
LABOR LEGISLATION
More than one justice.
OPINION
Interests and rights
OPINION
Right to burst
OPINION
Who are you voting for?
OPINION
Good luck and bad luck
ACTIVITIES
The new business traps after the labor reform

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RIGHT
During election times, public communication is filled with careerists
who shout the word right from the rooftops to get voters to lean towards
them. It is properly an advertising campaign in which the trade of
membership is proposed in exchange for illusions that end soon. When the
illusion ends, the disillusioned scream and demand the promised rights.
The sacred books of the Nation claim to guarantee rights. Right to work,
right to housing, right to a healthy environment.... What do they mean?
What do we say when we talk about rights?

In Argentina for the last 40 years, voting is a mandatory right. Voting
means maintaining that network where "the people do not deliberate or
govern except through their representatives." We have ample evidence of
what this means: from the fierce repression that persists in the
provinces of Salta and Jujuy, to the advance of the extractivist model
without social license; from the dismissals or intimidation of workers
who seek to organize, to the silencing of technical reports on
agrochemicals by official organizations; from the 11,465,599 people
below the poverty line to a dystopian future for the working class that
includes labor and pension reforms that are unavoidable for the health
of an infamous capitalism.

In such a context, and especially in the course of a 2023 election,
there is a term that plays like a drum: rights rights rights. The
cynicism of the political class can no longer be hidden. In their
electoral speeches, when they do not repeat like a mantra the need to
defend, recover, maintain, expand the "conquered rights," they claim
class privileges as if they were civil rights.

Where there is a need, a right is born, it is repeated from above. We
workers know well that there is a chasm between the standard on paper
and its daily application. In fact, the demand for rights usually turns
out to be a trap.

So what is law? Is it a trap or a tool at the service of workers? What
is the distance between the letter and its application? Can we think of
an existence without rights? Does their existence safeguard the future
of the class or are they corsets that guarantee voluntary servitude?
What do we do when we claim or when we demand rights?

Undoubtedly, law has some relationship with justice and the law, but it
is also well known that laws are usually unjust. Is claiming a right the
same as demanding a law? Outside of any situation, it is necessary for
workers to assume that rights do not emanate from the State, with its
parliament and its judicial system, but from justice in social life and
this, as historical and current experience clearly indicates, exceeds
completely the virtues of the State. The laws of the State only serve to
establish and preserve a state of things, a material and symbolic form
for social life, but never to change it. What defenders of the State
confuse with the expansion of rights is nothing more than the normative
establishment of social pressure for the creation of an order in common
life.

So the right, sanctioned from above, is the endorsement of the
privileges present in society and the provision of the "public force" in
its defense.

If we trace the etymology of the word right we find that it derives from
the Latin derectus and has to do with the powers or privileges due to
law, tradition, nature as well as the precepts that govern human
relations in the community1. Powers or privileges of the given social
order. Without a doubt, the sanction of the law is quite far from the
exercise of a right, if perhaps the right has that relationship with
justice.

Regarding the labor issue, the rights that we know today have come from
historical demands of the working class. This means that these rights
were prior to the legal signature, and in fact explain that signature as
the insufficient effect of those struggles. And this insufficiency is
seen in the difficulty that exists in enforcing the laws in labor
relations. The law is only fulfilled when there is the force to enforce it.

The above examples are glimpses of profound phenomena. In them, an
imbalance is observed between the sanction of a law, its material
reality and the results with respect to the rights in question. There is
no doubt that the massive nature of certain demands, combined with
electoral advantage, has resulted in the incorporation of laws that seek
to guarantee certain rights, but as everything that is written with the
hand is later erased with the elbow, the struggle of workers in the
defense of these rights has become a permanent, exhausting and
continuous job. It is necessary to note that the word is tinged with
diverse and distant meanings depending on who enunciates it: for some,
law is state regulation of entire life, for others, law is a guarantee
of preservation of acquired privileges.

If law has any relation to justice it must have some relation to
equality. Claiming a right, in this sense, can be a way to point out an
injustice and raise your voice against it. This is something very
different from demanding legal protection from the State that guarantees
us "powers or privileges." Equality is characteristic of social
relations. It is not administrable nor can it be granted with the
charity of the institutions. The only way to give meaning to the law is
to link it to the transformation of injustices by virtue of the
principle of equality. This permanent tension between the current state
of society and its transformation in the name of justice can only be
carried forward through organizations that materially intervene in the
transformation of social relations and not by subordinating themselves
to state regulations or deferring to the illusions of political
representation.

The 99th edition of Organization Obrera seeks to problematize those
naturalized discourses, transcending semantics to turn words into action
with the objective of identifying the path we need to begin to walk so
that a better life does not dissolve in empty categories, opportunistic
discourses and unkept promises. To do this it will be necessary to
overcome apathy, share organizational experiences; reviewing those
experiences that have changed our class condition to reconfigure them in
light of an increasingly complex present for workers.

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/
https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2023/09/04/derecho/
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A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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