Argentina: the struggle of pensioners is our struggle

On Wednesday, 12 March, the bourgeois press reported that: “The pensioners’ protest in front of Congress ended once again with the Federal Police firing tear gas and beating people with batons. It was the third consecutive crackdown: it has become a habit for the security forces. Despite the oppressive heat and chaos caused by power cuts in the city of Buenos Aires, hundreds of protesters responded to the call issued every Wednesday by groups such as Jubilados Insurgentes, the Union of Retired Workers in Struggle (UTJEL) and the Plenary of Retired Workers. This time they were joined by left-wing parties, the Association of State Workers (ATE) and even ‘self-organised fans’ of ‘Chacarita Juniors’” [1]

Economic crisis, austerity measures and the conditions of pensioners

The ICC maintains, unlike the left wing of capital and its far left hangers on, that the causes of austerity measures, wage cuts and attacks on the living conditions of workers (and former workers) are not the fault of this or that left-wing or right-wing government, but are due to the global economic crisis, accelerated by the decomposition of capitalism, which causes states, regardless of their ruling clique, to unleash cuts and austerity programmes that are applied like a club on the backs of the working class in order to protect the profit rate of their respective bourgeoisies. As we already stated in 2022:

“This crisis is shaping up to be a longer and deeper crisis than that of 1929. This is because the irruption of the effects of decomposition on the economy tends to cause havoc with the functioning of production, creating constant bottlenecks and blockages in a situation of growing unemployment - combined, paradoxically, with labour shortages in some areas. Above all, it is expressed in the outbreak of inflation, following various successive rescue plans hastily deployed by states in the face of the pandemic and the war, and thus caused and fuelled by a headlong rush into debt” [2]

When Javier Milei took office on 10 December 2023, he arrived at the Casa Rosada saying: “There is no alternative to austerity and there is no alternative to electro-shock.”

This brutal austerity plan is leaving thousands of families without food and thousands of workers unemployed. It will also plunge a large mass of pensioners into poverty. The Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), among its most important points, establishes deregulation of trade, industry and services throughout the country.

This involves:

•  deregulating prices such as those for private security firms, which have risen by 100%, and eliminating transport subsidies, causing price increases of between 65% and 150% for users. In addition, it led to a 270% increase in electricity rates.
• The reduction in the size of the state, the closure of government offices and ministries, which has resulted in layoffs in the public sector with more than 75,000 jobs eliminated and more expected.
• The brutal reduction in public works, causing the collapse of the construction industry and leading to more layoffs in this sector.
• The devaluation of the peso by more than 50%, causing prices of goods and services to skyrocket by more than 100%, devastating the purchasing power of wage earners and even more so among the majority of pensioners. The minimum wage barely covers a third of the basket of basic consumer goods. In Argentina, a traditional livestock economy, the proletariat can no longer afford to eat red meat, which has been replaced by chicken or noodles.

All of this has caused poverty to soar, although it was already on the rise under the Kirchner and Peronist governments, rising from 49.5% in December 2023 to 57.4% in January 2024.

“There is a huge mountain of poor or near-poor people, a tiny middle class and a privileged few. This is the new income configuration in Argentina, which was not caused by Javier Milei's government, but which has accelerated in Milei's year in office.” (Statements to the EFE news agency by economist Alfredo Serrano Mantilla, Executive Director of the Latin American Strategic Centre for Geopolitics (CELAG).

These brutal blows to the backs of workers, the unemployed and the non-exploiting population have terrible consequences for Argentine retirees and pensioners. The austerity measures have meant a cut of more than 38% in the budget for the unemployed, a measure justified under the pretext of ‘raising cash’ to pay... 14 billion dollars in debt adjustment!

There are around 7.5 million former wage earners in Argentina. Sixty-three per cent receive a pittance of approximately 280,000 pesos (approximately 340 dollars) in retirement benefits. The rest live on less than 400,000 pesos, when the basic basket of goods costs over 1.2 million pesos. Many elderly people wander desperately around the nearly 230 soup kitchens in Greater Buenos Aires. However, the bourgeois state's welfare system is unable to cope. In addition, three of the 7.5 million pensioners have been left out of the free medicine programme, which is serious considering that medicine prices rose by 119% in 2024. All this has led former workers, fed up with the attacks, to say ‘Enough of starving us!’ and to unite to fight in the streets.

Struggle and repression by the populist government

It was in this context of attacks on the living conditions of this sector of the working class that the violent repression of 12 March took place. On that day, as on every Wednesday, pensioners gathered to protest in front of Congress. On the same date, the CGT, forced by events, had called a march of ‘solidarity’ with the pensioners, which was joined by other organisations of the left of capital (Trotskyists of all stripes such as PTS-Frente de Izquierda, Polo Obrero. There were also collectives and citizen organisations) and, above all, the ‘barras bravas’ (football hooligans) of Argentina's main teams, such as Boca, River and Rosario Central, because a few days earlier a pensioner wearing a Chacarita team shirt had been beaten up by the police and they were there to ‘collect the debt’ and confront the cops

The interior minister in charge of repression, Patricia Bullrich, had already warned against the ‘disorder and violence of piqueteros and barras bravas’ and had sworn not to let them pass. Police contingents armed to the teeth and using quasi-military tactics unleashed a fierce repression as soon as the march towards Congress began. The football supporters in particular responded to the beatings, rubber bullets and tear gas with stones and the burning of police vehicles and rubbish bins. The worst of the repression was suffered by a pensioner who ended up with a broken skull after being pushed and beaten by a police officer, and a cameraman who was hit directly in the face by a bomb. In total, the day left 50 injured and more than 100 detained.

Assessment of the pensioners' struggle

The policy of austerity, wage and pension cuts, and cuts to health and services by Milei and his government, are part of the bourgeoisie's offensive to keep the rotten capitalist order standing. At the root of this is the global economic crisis, accelerated by decomposition, which leads any clique that comes to power to implement measures that attack the living conditions of the working class. The workers are being made to pay for the crisis to defend the interests of the national capital.

The struggle of pensioners and their demands are class-based, as they are a form of resistance to the measures imposed on the working class by the bourgeoisie and its state. Therefore, the struggle of pensioners in Argentina is also our struggle. It is a struggle of retired workers to resist the permanent attacks on their living conditions unleashed by the bourgeois state in the context of the global economic crisis and austerity policies. And they have not been alone. They have marched accompanied by some young workers, adults, even children (some of them children and grandchildren of these former workers) who have taken to the streets to fight side by side with them. Throughout the mobilisation, the pensioners called on other young workers to join the mobilisation with banners and slogans, such as one that read: “One day you will be old and you will also go out and fight like us today”. Therefore, the struggle of the pensioners and unemployed in Argentina is also that of the working class as a whole.

Despite this combativity, the movement has shown serious weaknesses. For example, the retired workers find it difficult to recognise themselves as exploited, as part of the same class, and in this sense to unite their struggles with other sectors of the working class who are also suffering brutal attacks from the populist government. We have already outlined in a previous article the wave of strikes that since 2022-24 have made this territory the one with the most struggles in all of Latin America last year[3]. We have already spoken of the harsh blows that workers and pensioners have been receiving from the Milei government, but which had already begun with the Peronist-Kirchnerist left-wing governments. However, the pensioners' movement has not attempted to connect with the active workers who are fighting (teachers, customs workers and railway workers, who were preparing strikes at the time but which have been carefully isolated, each in their own corner), and most of the union leader have instead fuelled the illusion that the union is the only possible ‘fighting’ organisation for workers. In this regard, it is illustrative that a leader of the left wing of capital (Myriam Bregman, a well-known Trotskyist of the PTS organisation and a former MP representing the United Left Front) claimed that pensioners were complaining because the CGT had not come to support them and were demanding that it call a national strike.

The football fans who went to the pensioners' demonstration expressed themselves as fans and not as workers, not as a class but as part of another institution of bourgeois society: the football team, like the ‘hooligans’ and ‘ultras’ of European teams whose aim is to demonstrate their unconditional support for a particular team. The methods used by the latter are not those of the proletarian tradition of struggle, but rather a lumpen practice which is totally alien to the working class, demanding revenge and unleashing blind, nihilistic violence of revenge and blind violence, such as burning cars and smashing windows and shopfronts, a situation reminiscent of the vandalism of the piqueteros in the ‘corralito’ riots at the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires and other cities. All of these are merely desperate expressions of the ‘no future’ typical of the petty bourgeoisie and not of the working class[4].

That is why, in the midst of the demonstration, slogans such as “Milei, you are the dictatorship”, “the fatherland is not for sale”, or the already hackneyed “que se vayan todos” (‘they must all go’) and similar slogans could be heard; slogans which, instead of calling for all workers to mobilise in defence of their living conditions against the attacks of capitalism, divert their anger onto a bourgeois terrain, trapping them in the struggle to defend democracy against dictatorship or autocracy, and in the dead-end of nationalism. All of this is an obstacle to the development of class consciousness.  

The trade unions and organisations of the left wing of capital, from the Peronist CGT to the Trotskyist and citizens’ organisations, played their dirty role of dividing the workers in order to weaken their struggle. Reluctantly, and to ‘look good,’ they called a march supposedly in solidarity with pensioners and then a 36-hour national strike on 9 April, but in reality they were only seeking to recuperate the anger and exasperation that is so widespread within the working class, shared by all sectors – pensioners, unemployed and those still in work. The unions and the left are trying to take advantage of the confusions in the movement and to build a false inter-classist unity based on a common denominator: opposition to Milei and his government or around openly bourgeois demands. Peronists, unions, left parties and far-left organisations are all working hand in hand to keep the workers divided, each in their own sector or sociological category, each with their own demands: unemployed on the one hand, those in work on the other, pensioners somewhere else. The other ‘citizens’ organisations’, from feminists and defenders of this or that minority like LGTB+ to the ‘radical’ football supporters, have all played their part in sabotaging the self-organisation of the workers and the extension of struggles, appealing to the ‘people’ or the ‘citizens’ to take revenge on Milei at the next elections; or, for the more ’radical’, calling for ‘political abstentionism’ on this occasion, in order to prevent the development of consciousness about the need for workers to fight together on their own class terrain against the attacks of this dying capitalist system which has nothing to offer the exploited except more exploitation and poverty.

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[1] https://www.pagina12.com.ar/808576-un-clasico-de-los-miercoles-palos-y-gases-para-los-jubilados [1]. This is a Spanish language press agency specialising in economic information for companies.