Argentina: imperialist strategy and the may crisis

Abstract

Argentina is probably the most industrialized major country in the so-called Third World. Well over 60 per cent of its population live in towns, a proportion higher than that in many European countries. The urban and rural proletariat, organized in solidly developed trade unions, comprises two-thirds of its total work-force. This singular configuration for a peripheral capitalist country has created forms of political struggle not to be found elsewhere in the underdeveloped world. Argentina is the one country in the continent which last year, on the contrary, witnessed a mass urban insurrection of a classical type, led by the industrial working-class. The background to the great explosion of May 1969 in Córdoba and Rosario must be sought in the complex history of Argentina since the eviction of Peron, and the modifications of its economy and society that were ushered in by it. This history has many lessons for Marxists everywhere, since the imperialist strategy operative in Argentina in the last decade represents a pilot experience for many other non-metropolitan countries, and has important implications for our understanding of the global pattern of capitalism in the present epoch.