"I'm still a Peronist," Riveros added, "but now I've started to agree with my kids. All these parties in the government today are rotten, and we have to do something to change things."

Such remarks are not uncommon today among many working people in Argentina. They are even more prevalent among workers involved in union and other social struggles, such as Rivero, a painter, who together with 150 other workers is occupying the EMFER plant here to oppose the company's mass layoffs and threat of closing the facility.

Riveros's comments are a sign of a change that has been taking place in this South American nation, especially over the past decade--the weakening political hold of the Peronist party on workers. This change is a result of the part the Peronists have played in carrying out the employers' brutal offensive against the social gains and living standards of working people, and of the working-class resistance to those assaults.  
 
Peron's rise to power
For several decades since World War II, when Juan Domingo Perón rose to power, the political party that he founded, the Justicialist Party, has enjoyed the allegiance of the big majority of working people in Argentina. A capitalist party that uses nationalist rhetoric and that historically has presented itself as a champion of the workers and the downtrodden, the Peronist party has been the main obstacle to workers and farmers charting a political course independent from the Argentine employer class.

During World War II the ruling class of Argentina, a semicolonial country, was able to take advantage of the conflict between the rival imperialist powers to gain economic and political advantages. It sold meat--the country's main export product--on the world market and brought in high profits, giving the Argentine rulers considerable margin to make concessions to workers.

The Argentine capitalist class was divided over whether to enter the war on the side of Washington and its allies or whether to remain neutral. The crisis was resolved by a military coup d'etat led by some colonels, including Juan Domingo Perón. Appointed Minister of Labor, Perón came down hard against the unions dominated by the Communist Party--which backed entry in the war on the side of Washington--and in favor of unions that supported neutrality in the war. The trade union bureaucracy became subordinated to Perón and the CP lost most of its previous weight in the trade union movement. Meanwhile, the working class took advantage of the openings to fight for its demands.

At the end of the imperialist war, sections in the ruling class decided to remove Perón, a bad miscalculation. On Oct. 17, 1945, the union officialdom called a mass demonstration. The huge mobilization ended only when Perón was brought to the balcony and the military promised elections, which Perón's party won by an overwhelming margin.

Perón portrayed himself, together with his wife Eva Perón, as champions of the descamisados (shirtless), the workers. At the same time he claimed to speak for the "Argentine nation"--workers and bosses alike--seeking to subordinate working people to the domestic capitalists. Perón used nationalist rhetoric and sometimes found himself in conflict with U.S. imperialism, which was seeking to displace British imperialism as the dominant oppressor power in that country. When Washington found itself at odds with Perón, its spokespeople labeled him a dictator or a "fascist"--not because they were concerned about democratic rights but because they were worried about the heightened expectations of working people.  
 
Nationalizations
Perón's government nationalized the railroads, oil industry, and other industries and services. During his presidency, the working class pressed for and made substantial gains in wages and social conquests. Women won the right to vote. And workers organized on a massive scale--90 percent of the workforce became unionized. Argentina became the most industrially developed country in South America with a large middle class.

While these developments marked the rise of one of the most powerfully organized working-class structures in the world, a conservative bureaucracy, linked to the state under Perón became deeply entrenched. The contradiction between the militancy of the rank-and-file and a labor bureaucracy serving as an agency of the ruling class has been a central feature of the Argentine labor movement ever since. Deep illusions were instilled among the working masses with regard to the capacity of the bourgeois nationalist regime to meet their needs.

In 1955, with the exhaustion of the economic expansion, Perón's usefulness to the bourgeoisie ended and he was overthrown in a military coup. The dictatorship, however was not able to crush the working class, which continued its resistance. And the Peronists carried out an intense guerrilla war against the regime.

In the late 1960s, a working-class upsurge began, leading to a prerevolutionary situation in Argentina for several years--coinciding with mass upsurges in other South American countries. A high point was the 1969 working-class uprising in Córdoba, which became known as the cordobazo. Vanguard layers of the working class began to break through illusions in Perón as they gained experience in struggle. Several political currents launched guerrilla organizations, including groups rooted in Peronism such as the Montoneros.

In response to this upsurge, the Argentine rulers decided to call elections for 1973 and brought Perón back from exile as their best hope to demobilize working people. Perón's hand-picked candidate, Héctor Cámpora, was elected president in March of that year. Cámpora stepped down in July, paving the way for new elections in which Perón became president until his death in 1974, when his wife, Isabel Perón, took his place.

In the 1970s, however, the Peronist government could not give the kind of concessions workers had wrested during the postwar boom. Instead, the regime sought to chip away at the gains of working people, and used selective repression to go after the labor movement. When this government proved unable to push back the working-class upsurge, the ruling class, backed by Washington, launched a military coup in 1976 that unleashed a brutal reign of terror for six years.

The next Peronist government was the one led in the 1990s by Saúl Menem. His government sought close ties to U.S. imperialism and carried out sharp attacks on workers' jobs, social gains, and union rights. The sell-off of virtually all state-owned property led to layoffs of hundreds of thousands of oil, railroad, telephone, and other workers. The government pushed through a "labor reform" law that gave bosses more power to lengthen work hours, extend probation, fire workers, and other attacks on the unions. This decade of brutal attacks on the living standards and rights of working people have led to growing hatred for Peronist politicians as well as the Radicals, the other major capitalist party.

Duhalde built up a political apparatus when he was governor of Buenos Aires province, giving out jobs, food, and other social welfare programs to impoverished neighborhoods through his local political bosses in exchange for political support. But under his administration, workers were ravaged by the capitalist economic crisis, with unprecedented unemployment levels in working-class neighborhoods, which has tarnished his image among many working people.
 
 
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