Eric Toussaint y la deuda: don't cry over spilled milk

lis-isl.org

The Belgian historian and political scientist Éric Toussaint is one of the most recognized figures of the Unified Secretariat (Fourth International ), that brings together a sector of Trotskyism. For a couple of days he has been complaining about the political use by the Argentine government of a statement on foreign debt... which he signed because both he and his organization agree.

ByAlejandro Bodart Y Pablo Vasco

“I see in 15 Argentine media that my signature is instrumentalized in favor of the government: it's serious. I didn't imagine this was possible. It's a scandal. “It is totally unacceptable.”, Toussaint complained on his social networks.

He was referring to the foreseeable political use that officials of Alberto Fernández's government made of a text on the external debts of Latin American countries entitledThe priority debt is with the health of the people, which Toussaint signed. Although it raises“the immediate suspension of payment of principal and interest on all sovereign debts”, the text proposes“legitimize postponements of deadlines and essential reductions in public debts before multilateral organizations and private creditors”.

However; term Yremove on debts is exactly the roadmap that not only sectors of the establishment such as Pope Francis and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have been proposing. (IACHR), but also even the IMF itself, which recognizes that there are some “unsustainable” debts.

Have they suddenly become good? At all. The thing is that capitalists know well that creditors can squeeze hard but not suffocate the debtor to death., since it is obvious that if he dies he does not pay. And that's whyterm Yremove It is the combo of Alberto Fernández and his Minister of Economy to negotiate with the bondholders, that is, with vulture funds, to pay them in a couple of years and with some removal of bonds that are already depreciated in the market.

When something has four legs...

…a queue, barks and looks like a dog, it's a dog! If the statement that Toussaint signed presents the essential line of the Argentine government, If it was drafted and promoted by the official representative and economist Fernanda Vallejos, president of the finance commission in the National Congress, if, in turn, the initiative arises “coincidentally” in the midst of the government's negotiation with the bondholders, and if he 99% of the signatories is from the government or related to it, What pro-government “instrumentalization” is Toussaint amazed and complaining about??

In a very long subsequent writing seeking to justify his signature, Toussaint claims that they have used it because he and other signatories considered the aforementioned suspension of payment as“a precondition, “a question prior to any negotiation”. And then he recognizes that the AF government has not done so. The problem is that although Toussaint interprets such a hypothetical suspension as “a precondition”, the text doesn't say anything about that. And the main thing: Toussaint signed the text that we criticize hereafter that the new government had already made at least two multimillion-dollar foreign debt payments.

Inclusive, at the slightest doubt, Toussaint could have consulted one of the leaders of Argentine Trotskyism for an opinion., that as a whole we have insertion and evident weight in this country, about the opportunity, the risks or political convenience of signing said statement. A shame that he did not take this into account and preferred to surround himself with leaders of the traditional Argentine bourgeois party that governs the country today..

That the Argentine capitalist government seeks to give a leftist veneer to its capitulatory policy of paying, It doesn't surprise us at all.: It's part of his permanent doublespeak. The unfortunate thing is that figures and organizations that claim to be Trotskyist, like Toussaint and the Fourth (ITS), and who also have decades of experience regarding what to sign or not., end up falling into errors that confuse and are functional to those bourgeois policies.

A wrong direction

The error of Toussaint, that instead of recognizing he tries to justify with a text four times longer than the one he signed, It is not individual but organic because it comes from the global political scaffolding of the Unified Secretariat of the IV, the current in which he militates. For several years now, its political documents have characterized that there is a “change of era” in an essentially regressive sense., of strengthening capitalism and moving away from the socialist revolution.

This unilateral and wrong vision that alreadywe have previously criticized has made them abandon the construction of revolutionary parties and assume as a strategy the formation of broad parties with reformists. In addition to deepening a camp drift that ends up bringing them closer to bourgeois political spaces supposedly different from “neoliberal capitalism.”. For example, Toussaint himself in his latest text defines President Alberto Fernández as “anti-neoliberal”. It is the old argument that fuels the fable of the “lesser evil.”, typical of reformism.

The same thing expresses therecent international statement from the SU Bureau of IV about the pandemic, whose proposal on external debts is limited to raising“suspension of payment, with audit with citizen participation, in the perspective of repudiation/abolition of the illegitimate part”. Although some of these points can eventually be raised as a tactical slogan to occasionally facilitate some mobilization in unity of action against capitalist governments., The axis of the proposal and strategy of the revolutionary socialist currents must be the non-payment of foreign debts.

This new international declaration, with a strong humanist and non-classist tone, beyond some loose phrase about“attack the entire capitalist structure”, reemphasizes a general framing against theneoliberalism, without warning against supposedly non-neoliberal governments that apply adjustment plans, privatizations and extractivism equal or almost equal to those of neoliberalism. That is why they propose replacing their centrist slogan-axisAnother world is possible…for another equally centrist: Another world is necessary and urgent. Let's disagree. The only “other world”possible, necessary Yurgent against capitalism, whether it is neoliberal or not, It has its own name and that's how it has to be said out loud.: socialism!