(The following article appeared in the November 28, 1974, issue of Avanzada Socialista, weekly newspaper of the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers party, a sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Argentina). The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
As is common knowledge, our party has held several meetings with the UCRI and asked it to go on record on various questions, among others the attacks and persecution we have suffered. During the largely stalled meetings of the "Nine,"2 we have repeatedly requested that all participants — but especially the UCR- support our proposal, on which the Communist party concurs, for holding a mass public rally in defense of democratic rights.
We have found a sense of political responsibility in the UCR and so we feel obliged to make a criticism of this group. This is all the more necessary since, in our opinion, their vacillations are favoring the growth of the far right, which hopes to wipe out the institutionalization process and democratic freedoms with one blow. Up to now such vacillations are what have prevented the "Nine" from developing into a nucleus that could coordinate mobilizations in defense of democratie rights. It is this sort of thing that has kept the nine party group from being more than a discussion circle that is totally inadequate for defending civil liberties.
In our opinion, the arguments offered by the Radical leadership and many of the party's youth for not having come out in support of mobilizations are secondary and formal. They refer to the characteristics of the UCR and the psychology of the UCR
member who is not very inclined to attend meetings or mobilizations. These considerations, although they may have some basis in fact, are not decisive. In the first place, a big mobilization built by the UCR and other parties would reach and bring out a broad ideological spectrum, including Peronists. In the second place, the UCR's difficulties in calling mass meetings have not prevented them from organizing such affairs during election campaigns and under circumstances less dramatic than the present conjuncture.
Thus, if the UCR continues vacillating, it must be for deeper reasons.
The Radicals' Method
As opposed to our method of mobilizing to defend democratic rights, the UCR offers the alternative of ne gotiations, meetings, declarationsin short, deals or pronouncements at the superstructural level. Its ideal, its strategy, is "summit" meetings. If they are private, so much the better, like the ones Balbin had with Perón.3 The supreme example of this was the Hora del Pueblo. 4
By this method they try to eliminate any participation by the masses. There is a profound logic in this. It is the classical political method of the bourgeois forces that was brought into the workers movement by the bureaucratized currents.
We are not so naive as to hope to convince the Radicals to change their political methods. That would be as ridiculous as trying to get them to change their character sociologically and stop being the party of the agrarian bourgeoisie with support among the middle classes in the city and countryside.
But we do want to show that they have fallen into the grip of a contradiction, the same one that brought down the Radical government in 1966 and that cost the country and the workers so dearly. That contradiction arises between the political objectives of the UCR itself and the vacillating, superstructural method by which they try to advance these objectives.
The UCR's Political Strategy
Though using its own forms, the UCR's political strategy is similar to the one inspired by the Armed Forces and General Perón in the period of the Hora del Pueblo and the GAN. 5 These groupings and strategies, and the commitments that flowed from them, aimed at a common goal: to try to channel the semi-insurrectional process unleashed by the masses starting with the Cordobazo6 into the framework of formal parliamentary democracy. We can say that from the Cordobazo up to the time the Cámpora government was allowed to take office, there was an impetuous advance of democratic freedoms. The strategy and promises of the Hora del Pueblo consisted precisely in freezing, braking, and containing that advance within the parliamentary and representative forms that the UCR- and the bourgeois democratic currents in general- consider best.
The "right turn" of the Peronist government— begun with the removal of Cámpora-was an efficient delivery, in the style of the governing party, on deals made in the Hora del Pueblo and the GAN. That is why the UCR has made only partial criticisms of that "turn," and has injected an almost unheard-of element in Latin American politics — a "constructive opposition." So the UCR has endorsed, provided a quorum for passing, and even directly supported the fundamental measures of that turn -from the security law and the university law to the state of siege and general legislation, and, it goes without saying, the economic policy.
Only when-in the opinion of the UCR - the government has departed from agreed-on commitments, when it has strayed from the prearranged path or committed serious "excesses," has the Radical chief resorted to summit talks as a corrective measure in a process whose essence he wholeheartedly favors.
With this policy, which the UCR has held to as a matter of principle, this neia to as a maner or principie, mis party has become one of the firmest guarantors of the political plan that was adopted at the proper time bv the bulk of the Argentine bourby the bulk of the Argentine bourgeoisie in order to counteract the threat from insurgent masses. Thus, through agreements and the natural course of events, the UCR expects that the Peronists themselves, by harnessing the masses, will smooth the road for the Radicals to take office in 1977.
The Current Situation
But the situation has diverged from what was envisioned in the original schemas of the Hora del Pueblo. From out of the ruling party and the frantic petty bourgeoisie, currents are arising that, in their desperate frenzy to smash the guerrillas, hope to liquidate the parliamentary regime from the right. Such currents have been allowed to grow more freely since the death of Perón, and the UR's superstructural demands do no more than irritate them.
When our party, which consistently denounced the GAN and the Hora del Pueblo, raised the alarm about the fascist danger foreshadowed by the Navarrazo, 8 it took the initiative in promoting agreements for the defense of democratic rights and in meeting with the "Nine" for the purpose of safeguarding the freedoms that threatened to be swept away. That was when we began insistently calling on the reformist currents to join in broad, united mobilizations.
The contradiction the UCR finds itself caught in today is something of a repetition of the 1966 events. Only by setting aside the method of superstructural negotiations that characterizes it can the party hold to its strategy of maintaining and defending parliamentary democracy. If it persists in its traditional method, it could find itself faced with a liquidation of civil liberties and the return of the worst forms of dictatorial rule on the national scale, as it already has in the universities and in some provinces.
What is needed is very simple. The Radicals must not let themselves become accomplices of an ultrareactionary solution through passivity. They must defend what democracy exists by helping to bring the masses onto the streets. For our part, although we have different political objectives - i.e., to deepen the democratic process in the workers and socialist sense of the term — we call on the UCR and other bourgeois currents to join with us in a limited temporary agreement to fight against a coup or an ultrareactionary solution.
Notes
1. Union Civica Radical-Radical Civic Union, the main bourgeois opposition party.
2. The legal political parties.
3. Ricardo Balbin, head of the UCR, and Juan Peron, former president of Argentina.
4. The People's Hour-the Peronist-led plan to form a broad class-collaborationist bloc against the Lanusse dictatorship.
5. Gran Acuerdo Nacional-Great National Agreement, a class-collaborationist plan developed by the dictatorship to return Argentina to constitutional rule.
6. The 1969 semi-insurrection.
7. Hector Campora served as Peron's stand-in in the March 1973 elections and as president briefly in 1973.
8. The February 1974 coup that ousted the elected Cordoba provincial governor. 128