Reports from Argentina by Dzhon Rid

Adiós

Posted: Mar. 12 2003, 14:30

There was so much stuff I didn't even mention (five Telefonica buildings were occupied last week; rioting broke out during the elections in the province of Catamarca; the supreme court finally ruled that Duhalde's decision to freeze the savings of small depositors was unconstitutional, and the government scrambled to make sure no one got their money back; there have been endless fights to re-nationalize the railways including a strike by the train workers, even some of the Peronists have begun to support some form of re-nationalization; the Rivadavia popular assembly was evicted by police; just recently police evicted a hundred families from an occupied building and the kids from ¡NO PASARÁN! went out to defend them, there was pretty severe repression but all the activists found sanctuary in the university, which the police are not allowed to enter for some reason; etc. etc. etc.). These reports tell about only a part of my experiences in Argentina. And besides that I needed to write part four of my election round-up covering the extreme left, plus a history of Zanon.

I feel certain I'll keep adding to these reports well into 2005.

So let me thank all the people who told me coming to Argentina was a bad idea – without your opposition I never would have found the stubbornness to do this.

This was all such a great experience. I am a better revolutionary and a much better Marxist. Now I have seen what a revolutionary situation looks like, the responsibilities that we will have when revolutions break out in Europe. Being a Marxist isn't just reading, debating, getting yelled at by the Spartacists – in key historical moments it means directing the revolutionary energy of the masses. The comrades from the PTS spent a decade theorizing and polemicizing in a fairly isolated left, but then the revolutionary upsurge of 2001 came and that theory transformed itself into the Zanon and Brukman occupations.

I'll get into "what I learned from my trip to Argentina" mode later, now I need to run or I'll miss my flight!

See you in old Europe!

– Dzhon Rid

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