What are the concerns of Washington and the imperialist governments of Europe? That Argentina "fulfill its international obligations"--that is, resume payments on the $132 billion debt owed to imperialist banks and super-wealthy bondholders as quickly as possible. Paris put it bluntly: "Do everything in your power to look after our companies!"

With the governmental shuffle in Buenos Aires in the face of mass protests that forced former president Fernando de la Rúa from office, Washington hopes the worst is behind it, and that the new coalition regime can carry through the peso devaluation, stem street actions by working people, and start the debt payments going again.

The catastrophe in Argentina is not the result of "mistaken policies" by the capitalist rulers of the South American country, as spokespeople for Washington, Madrid, and Paris try to tell the world. In subordinating the country to the needs of imperialism, the Argentine rulers have brought on an economic nightmare for workers, farmers, and layers of the middle class. But the debt crisis is the natural consequence of how capitalism works in the imperialist epoch.

The foreign debt is not a relationship between equals. Through their control of capital, world markets, and technology, as well as their military superiority, Washington and a handful of other imperialist powers set the rules and impose their exploitative terms on a large majority of oppressed semicolonial countries. Unequal terms of trade mean that prices for agricultural goods and natural resources--the main sources of revenue for Third World nations--tend to decline relative to the prices for the industrial equipment they purchase, forcing them deeper into debt.

Argentina, like nations throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa, is being bled dry by massive payments to the banks and bondholders in the United States and other imperialist countries. Working people there have been forced to pay tens of billions in interest payments, yet the foreign debt continues to grow. The foreign debt setup is simply a form of pillage through which the capitalist families in the imperialist countries suck massive amounts of wealth out of the semicolonial world and into their own pockets.

As Spanish bankers cry "plunder" over some tentative measures floated by the Duhalde government in order to hold off protests, the real plunder of Argentina by the imperialists has been going on for decades.

The change in the presidency and the continuation of a coalition government of the bourgeois parties in Buenos Aires demonstrate the pressing need for the construction of a revolutionary leadership of the working class in Argentina. Workers and farmers can resolve the deepening crisis in their favor only by revolutionary means. Until a communist party is built that educates and organizes workers and our allies to not just get rid of a string of presidents, but to lead the struggle to overthrow the capitalist government and replace it with one of our own, the capitalists and their parties will continually come out on top.

Such a revolutionary outcome is indeed the nightmare U.S. imperialism works overtime to keep at bay. This is why Washington remains implacably hostile to the Cuban Revolution, which has set an example for all working people in the Americas--from Canada, to Argentina, to Chile--for more than four decades. Cuba's example points to the only road open to workers and farmers in face of the growing economic catastrophe, wars, oppression, racism, and brutality offered by capitalism.

Millions of toilers who are following the social crisis and explosion of street actions in Argentina can more clearly see what capitalism has to offer working people the world over and the capacities of the toilers to fight back. These developments help open many people up to learning the truth about Cuba and to searching for revolutionary books such as those published by Pathfinder Press, along with the series of New Internationals and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

The capitalist rulers of Argentina are no match for the militancy, combativity, and power of the Argentine working class if it is organized and led in a fight for power.

The most important solidarity that working people in the United States can offer is to join with fellow fighters internationally to demand the unconditional cancellation of Argentina's foreign debt, and the entire Third World debt. Such a fight can strengthen the possibilities for collaboration by workers across national borders on related fronts, from the fight to demand jobs for all, to the defense of immigrant workers.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers in Argentina protest peso devaluation
Unemployed workers describe resistance to crisis in Argentina
Peronist party in Argentina has weaker political hold on working people today
Interest in Pathfinder, socialist press by workers in Argentina
 
 
 
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