[The following are major parts of a speech by Juan Carlos Coral to the August 18 meeting of the Workers Front. They were published in the August 22-29 issue of Avanzada Socialista, weekly organ of the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST - Socialist Workers party). The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Compañeros: As we reach the end of this gathering, we could say that there are two sentiments that we all share: disappointment at the stubborn refusal of Compañero Tosco to assume the position in the struggle that class-struggle and revolutionary sectors throughout the entire country have called upon him to fill; yet also a feeling of legitimate and militant pride because the vitality that has been achieved by the Socialist Workers party and the Workers Front, and that is expressed in this gathering, shows us that we have reached a point where we can make any decision we want without being dependent on the individual will of anybody.
We have come out of an election campaign in which we took part, with our class-struggle and revolutionary approach, in order to speed up the process of building the party and organizing the working class. We saw to the silent but daily task of educating our cadres, carrying out propaganda among those we influence, and agitating everywhere to move the working class forward. But the weakness of ing class forward. But the weakness or 1022
the bourgeois regime is so great that today we find ourselves faced with a new electoral challenge. And our response has not been to sit it out until things clear up, because for us much was cleared up prior to March 11 [date of the last election].
We know how many votes we are going to get, but this is of no importance to us, for proletarian victories have never been measured - nor will they ever be-by election totals, but in the day-to-day struggle. Paez and I are not afraid that we will suffer a letdown over the number of votes we get. Even if we were to receive only two votes-his and mine— we would still run in the elections in order to use them to get out revolutionary propaganda. For there is a worse way of being let down than getting a small number of votes, and that is to live on the hope that the ideal conditions will come along.
We thought it very important - and we continue to think so -that Tosco head up the ticket; and, as was voted on here, we will exhaust all possibilities to persuade him to. This is why we withdrew our candidacy; for Tosco symbolizes this completely new stage in Argentine workers struggles that opened up in 1969. These struggles show - even in the theoretical discussion on the tactics and roads toward taking power-the historical effectiveness of workers mobilizations. All by themselves they were able to kick out the powerful dictatorship of the commanders in chief.
The class-struggle and revolutionment was a very positive phenomenon, but that if no socialist political content is given to these classstruggle forces their struggle will be deprived of a revolutionary dimension For it is with the union that we sion. For it is with the union that we go after the economic positions of the bosses, but in the field of politics it is with the party that we go after the positions of power that they hold and from which they must be removed if we are to build the socialist republic to which we aspire.
Perón, Balbin, and General Carcagno have put together the broadest alliance of classes that the country has known. Facing them is this joint, valiant attempt of the Socialist Workers party and the Workers Front to expend every effort to bring together sectors that want to struggle all against the bosses and the bourgeois state. We don't want to grind any special sectarian axes; we don't want a little party that functions as a kind of machine for promoting its own leaders. We want an instrument that can be effectively used in building a socialist Argentina.
Propaganda Effort
In still another triumph of Western civilization, U.S. psychological warfare experts have prepared a recruiting poster for the Cambodian puppet army.
The posters, which are on display in the streets of Pnompenh, show a young man in civilian clothes being refused by a prostitute, who tells him: "You don't appeal to me. I only make love with soldiers."
Presumably the next propaganda defense of the American Way in Pnompenh will show a heroin dealer refusing to sell to a civilian addict and saving his wares for soldiers.