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From International Socialism (1st series), No.88, May 1976, pp.30-31.
Peron first came to prominence in Argentina after a military coup in 1943. He started to build up support among the rapidly expanding working class from his position as Secretary of Labour. He gave many benefits to the workers – he forced employers to negotiate over wages with unions, instituted sick pay and accident benefit etc. He rapidly undercut the influence of the Communist Party who had been the chief influence in the working, class in the 30’s, but who had abandoned class struggle for a ‘democratic front against fascism’ during the Second World War. In the 1946 elections for President the Communist Party and all the traditional parties of the left supported an arch conservative landowner standing on a ‘democratic’ ticket against Peron. Peron based himself on the support he had built up in the working class in the previous two years and won the elections with a majority of working class votes. The Communist Party called him a fascist and described his working class supporters as backward, lumpen elements. In fact, this was untrue. Most workers had made a choice between a conservative landowner backed by the US and Britain and someone who in the previous two years had given them concrete help.
Peron was re-elected in 1952 with even greater working class support. His basic programme was a nationalist development one – using the state to encourage the growth of light consumer goods industry and shifting the balance of economic power away from the traditional dominant landowning class. His policy to the working class was a fairly straightforward reformism with a strong nationalist rhetoric. It was based on the big jump in real wages that occurred in the 1946-50 period, made possible by Argentina’s good economic position after the war, and by a continued number of social gains. Under Peron there was an enormous expansion in the unionisation of workers – the state gave official encouragement to this union drive and by 1950 there were about 3 million unionised workers compared with 400,000 in 1944. The Peronist state used these newly unionised workers as the basis of popular support and a very close relationship grew up between the State and the unions. In fact the unions were almost a state within a state under Peron – though he always made sure that they were ultimately dependent on him. Thus Peronism was contradictory. Its ideology was fundamentally reformist, emphasising harmony of interests between classes and the role of the state as the neutral mediator between capital and labour for the greater glory of the Argentine nation, but it also did undertake the first mass organisation of the working class and gave big social and economic advances to the working class.
With the overthrow of Peron by the armed forces in 1955, and the attacks that were launched on the working class’s standard of life in the next 18 years, most workers came to look back on the Peronist government as a sort of golden age. After a brief attempt to smash them the unions were left in Peronist hands and in fact the Peronist union bureaucracy played a vital role in the plans of Argentine big capitalism. In particular, they prevented the social conflict caused by the economic programmes of the last 20 years from getting out of control. The Peronist union bureaucracy developed in this period into a sort of mafia not unlike some US unions – with close relations with the state and army. They sometimes used straightforward victimisation of militants, sometimes they would mobilise the workers to pressure the government and head off any independent rank and file action. But above all they were able to perform their task because of their position as the chief embodiment of Peronism with the official party outlawed and Peron himself in exile. The continuing hold of Peronist ideology over the working class enabled capitalism, through the union bureaucracy, to absorb and defuse the spontaneous defensive actions of the working class. The Argentine workers had a sort of split consciousness. While they were capable of launching massive defensive outbursts, these were always channelled towards reformist political goals. For example at the height of the struggles against the military government in the early 1970s, most Argentine workers looked towards the return of Peron at elections as the answer, and with him, the return to a sort of benificent state capitalism. This meant that the bureaucracy were always able to keep things under control. Of course it wasn’t easy and it was becoming more and more risky to achieve – which is the basic reason the military called Peron back in 1973.
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