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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Festivals

Buenos Aires 4th International Festival of Independent Cinema—Part 4

Discussions on the Argentine crisis

By David Walsh
22 May 2002

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This is the fourth and final part in a series on the recent Buenos Aires independent film festival (April 18-28).

We post below portions of discussions held with a number of individuals, filmmakers, activists and students in Buenos Aires on the present social and cultural situation. At the center of each discussion was the question of political perspective.

If skepticism about the possibility of social transformation was a recurring theme, this is the result more than anything else of a failure to view contemporary events and difficulties in an international and historical context. The dominance of the “national milieu” is felt strongly in a number of the conversations.

The consequences of the bloody defeats suffered by the working class in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s can still be felt, particularly insofar they are not worked through consciously. Thousands died tragically in Argentina under the military dictators, and the balance-sheet that Marxists have made of the failed politics of Castroism, guerrillaism and petty bourgeois nationalism needs to be studied.

The artist is by nature a sensitive creature. However, even the most sensitive artist can mistakenly point his or her antennae toward social layers and social impulses that are exhausted, or worse. There is a considerable portion of the middle class intelligentsia in Latin America and elsewhere that has simply thrown in the towel, made peace with the status quo and transformed cynicism and renunciation of principles into a way of life. Woe to the artist who takes the musings of such squeezed lemons for “popular opinion.”

The healthiest instincts are to be found among the young. However, the younger generation needs to be educated. Much of the skepticism or impressionism results from an ignorance of history and historical law. Only on the basis of a thorough knowledge and scientific grasp of the great events of the twentieth century—in particular the rise, decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the nature of Stalinism, fascism and imperialism and the historic role of nationalism, as well as the critical strategic experiences of the international working class and socialist movements—is it possible to resist the pressures of one’s own immediate surroundings, which inevitably reinforce the notion that the existing social order is “natural” and “unchangeable.”

Notwithstanding the difficulties, a process of political and intellectual clarification has begun in Argentina, which needs to be deepened and extended. The conversations bore witness to the willingness of serious artists and young people to examine critical questions.

I interviewed Ana and Santiago, on the political and moral crisis in Argentina; Julio, on the popular assemblies and the activities of the “left” parties; Gustavo Noriega on the state of mind of the intellectuals; Rubén Delgado and Nicolás Batlle on social conditions; and Valeria, on the Argentine crisis and the role of the WSWS.

Ana and Santiago, filmmakers

David Walsh: Were you surprised by the events in December?

Ana: It was the first time in my life that the party I voted for won the elections. I thought Fernando De la Rua was incompetent, but other people of the party [Alianza] inspired me with confidence. My first disappointment was discovering that the people I had trusted turned out to be just like [Carlos] Menem [president of Argentina 1989-99]. Today, when I read statements from the individuals who were members of the Alianza, I realize that they are all the same, they are a fraud.

I had mixed emotions in December: feelings of surprise, and also of terror, because the specter of the military government is always present. However, I think there’s no reason at the moment for a coup d’état. The military doesn’t want that, and neither does the US. But I couldn’t help remembering the old times. I felt some hope when I looked at people reacting and rebelling against the atrocities of the government.

I thought “Well, people can react at last,” and at the same time I had doubts about many things. I don’t know; it’s complex. First, we had the phenomenon of “cacerolazos [pots and pans protest],” where you see workers assembling with people who really want a political change, and also upper and middle class people who cannot withdraw money from their bank accounts (these are the same people who voted for Menem). The most important thing in this movement was the appearance of popular assemblies, where you can see people trying to create something on their own for the first time. I believe that these popular assemblies are more important than the “cacerolazos.” If the banks opened up the accounts, the protest of middle class people would stop, because they are only motivated by economic concerns.

DW: What is your impression of the changes in the city and changes in social conditions of the people?

Ana: Every day I feel that degradation in the city is developing in a dizzying way. I moved to this neighborhood nine months ago. This is an upper middle class neighborhood and, at first, I was astonished by the variety of shops and commercial areas. I thought I was living in Europe. But now I walk the streets and it looks like Once [one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires]. Sometimes it looks like a postwar city. You see many shops that had to shut down, people looking into the garbage. Every night, in front of my apartment, I see a parade of people who open up the garbage bags, taking out scraps of food.

You see increasing numbers of people begging, sleeping on the streets, selling stuff on the train. I’m struck by a new phenomenon: people who do have a job and prefer not to travel back home to the suburbs, so that they can save the money they’d spend on transportation. They prefer to sleep on the streets in the capital during the week and save that money for their family.

DW: When you wrote me, in January or February, what was your state of mind?

Ana: It’s difficult to remember what I wrote. I was sad. I can tell you an anecdote that expresses what I feel. This is an area of the city where former military officers live. I was having a coffee with a friend at a bar that’s not far from here. I saw this very old man coming into the bar. He had trouble walking and I felt really sorry for him. Suddenly I found myself thinking “Maybe he belonged to the military government.” We have this contradictory feeling every day. My view is very pessimistic. How can we pretend to fight for progress when we live surrounded by assassins, thieves, people from the mafia?

It’s a fact: people supported Menem’s government for ten years. It’s hard for me to understand why they did it: dreams, convenience, the wish of living in the “First World”? I refuse to believe that these people “suddenly” realize that they were wrong in supporting that system. I think Menem finished shaping Argentineans’ minds with this idea: there are no human values, there’s no memory. So people didn’t react against anything until their bank accounts were threatened. The Argentinean mentality has ended up being very superficial.

DW: I think it’s a historical and political problem, it’s not a problem of the Argentinean people as such. It’s a problem in every country, involved with the political history of the last thirty or forty years, or more. Let me explain to you one thing: in this country there were left-wing organizations, “Trotskyist” organizations who supported Peron. There was the [Nahuel] Moreno group which became MAS [Movimiento Al Socialismo]. They used to have Castro and Peron on the front of their newspaper. You wonder why there is this confusion.

The confusion is not a problem of the Argentine soul, it’s a problem of Argentine history and politics, and world politics. There’s conformity and superficiality everywhere. I come from a country that in many ways at present is far more conformist and superficial than Argentina. It’s not the fault of the people, it’s the fault of political organizations and political tendencies that betrayed.

Ana: Now you can see that many leaders of these so-called left-wing parties have become important businessmen or politicians. [Rodolfo] Galimberti, for example. In the ’70s he was the leader of Montoneros, a revolutionary organization, and in the ’90s he became the associate of [Jorge] Born, a businessman Galimberti had kidnapped a few decades before.

DW: This happened everywhere in Latin America. In Venezuela, one of the former guerrilla leaders [Teodoro Petkoff] became the minister of Planning. This is a social reality. Think of the generation of 1968. These sections of the middle class moved to the right. It’s not some moral abstract problem. These are political and social realities and we have to make an assessment of all this, make a balance sheet.

Ana: Before De la Rua’s fall, I was buying some things in this pharmacy when suddenly the owner said to her clients: “I want the military to come back.” So I asked her, “Did you say that you want the military back in the government?” “Yes.” “Do you want us to have concentration camps again?” “Oh, no, please, that’s awful,” she said. She thanked me because I had made her realize how wrong she was. Anyway, I saw that this woman could never be really conscious of the situation.

We come to the point where we disagree. I know that, for instance, the US had the power to make decisions about our situation in the past, but that doesn’t mean that people cannot be conscious. People in Uruguay, in Cuba, have more consciousness than we have.

DW: I understand. People are responsible. But people are also the product of certain social circumstances. They are not free individuals floating in the air. They are produced by social and historical circumstances, and they are limited by them. Can people go beyond those circumstances? Yes, of course, but they are produced by bourgeois society, educated in certain schools, by the media, by political organizations. And the political and historical difficulties and disappointments also have an impact. They think about the Soviet Union, about Cuba, and say, “We don’t want that.”

Ana: But there are different people.

DW: More conscious people and less conscious people. As a Marxist, I believe that there needs to be a minority that is more conscious, that explains to working class people the problems, the alternatives, the solutions. If people see no solutions, they will do terrible things. We have the experience of the twentieth century, fascism, etc. I don’t believe in collective guilt. It’s not my theory. You can say, “People are bad, people are rotten,” but that’s a religious attitude, not a social analysis.

Ana: I told you in one of my letters that, when I was an adolescent, I used to pass by the door of a police station on my way to school. A teacher of mine was missing and I knew that there were concentration camps. Every day I told myself, “Now I’m going to stand in front of the station and tell them everything I think.” But I was afraid of getting killed, and at the same time I thought: what if everyone does the same thing? I never participated in any demonstrations in Plaza de Mayo. I was always a spectator, so I’m not saying that I’m a good person and the others are bad.

DW: In my opinion, we require a perspective, a program, a revolutionary leadership. The atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s was very different from the atmosphere today. That also can change, and will change. The most volatile element in the universe is human thinking.

Santiago: Even though the events [in December] surprised me, I had foreseen them. I felt they were the expression of all the things I had been discussing with my friends, or with an occasional taxi driver. What seemed to be a general Argentine complaint had finally found a shape in the protest of those days.

I was raised by a conservative family during the dictatorship, so I had to make an extra effort to understand what was going on around me. When I entered university, I was attracted to postmodernism and I was taught that you cannot change history. Although I wasn’t convinced, I believed that we were not supposed to make history.

In December I noticed the desperate level of people’s humiliation. One could see starving people struggling for food as if they were worms. And then I remembered September 11 because, in a way, I thought that these two events were related. I felt a direct responsibility for the devastating world that I was living in. Both events, both images, represented cracks in a system that can no longer exist. I was confronted by a terrible level of degradation of humankind.

I think that we lived through a cultural vacuum during the ’90s. People of my generation, born in the early ’70s, can’t be entirely conscious. I feel responsible to a certain point. There has been an ideological vacuum and it’s not only an Argentine problem, but a global one. We were supposed to believe that we were a part of the “First World” and that there was nothing left to do.

Julio, political activist

David Walsh: I want to ask you about the popular assemblies. How were they formed?

Julio: The starting point of the popular assemblies was the events in December. People started to meet and join together in different “cacerolazos” and then decided to organize themselves in a better way.

DW: Was it the first time these popular assemblies arose or they had developed before?

Julio: No, it’s the first time we have seen this sort of phenomenon.

DW: How many people would assemble?

Julio: The number of persons has decreased in the last weeks. In January and February you could find about 400 people in the assembly of Caballito, which was one the most numerous in the capitol. But there are assemblies of 40 people, of 100 people. It depends on the population in each neighborhood.

DW: Were there political tendencies or political organizations?

Julio: Yes, but the problem is that at the moment people don’t believe in politics anymore. You see militants from political organizations who don’t admit in public where they come from. They present themselves as simple residents, even those who belong to left parties that are not supposed to be blamed for the crisis. They don’t say that they represent the left parties, but when they speak you know they are introducing their political ideas.

DW: It’s a universal phenomenon. Do you agree with that tendency?

Julio: No, I don’t agree, because it’s a unique historical opportunity to separate bourgeois parties from other parties. So if you belong to a party, this is the right time to say, for instance, “We are from the Partido Obrero [Workers Party] and we have nothing to do with Peronism or the UCR [Unión Cívica Radical]. We have a different method and a different program.”

DW: It’s peculiar. If there’s a political crisis, and you belong to a political party, I presume you believe your party has a solution to the crisis.

Julio: The problem is that this crisis of trust in politics has also reached the left-wing parties. The other parties have been rotten for a long time now.

DW: What political issues do you discuss in these assemblies?

Julio: You meet people from the middle classes who tell you that in 1995 they voted for Menem or Frepaso [one of the bourgeois opposition parties], and then they voted for Alianza. So many of them were disappointed and the assembly was a way of releasing their outrage. It was the first time that they had a place to express the anger. We discussed different issues: not paying the external debt anymore, re-nationalizing the privatized industries, nationalizing the banks and the international trade.

These measures, which are rather sweeping, established our basic positions. But after that the discussion was directed at issues that concerned the neighborhood. The work was divided into different commissions which took care of specific problems: a commission on unemployment, another one for health, etc.

DW: So, there was a program of social reform in the neighborhood?

Julio: Yes. These commissions dealt with specific problems which were discussed in the general assembly later. It depends on the dynamic of each assembly. The unemployment commission in Caballito proposed to use some land that belonged to the railways to cultivate gardens to grow vegetables and so on. The health commission works with the doctors in the hospital, trying to solve problems. It’s a way of doing different things within this system.

DW: Did anyone raise the need for these assemblies to become the basis for a new government?

Julio: We are experiencing a huge crisis of the representative system. People don’t need to delegate things to a politician, because they have the power to change things. People proved that when they brought down the president in December. One of the chants in the demonstrations is: “Get Duhalde out, let the assemblies rule the country.”

This idea doesn’t correspond to the proposal of the left parties, who want to create a constitutional assembly. But that would take us back in time and we would have to delegate things to a representative group again. If you call for a constitutional assembly, all the parties of the present system would participate, so it’s crazy to think that a left party could direct the assembly to make a revolution.

DW: You already described the situation in which people are disgusted with all the parties. I’m asking if someone said, “I’m a socialist, I’m a member of such and such party, and I think the popular assemblies should assemble and create a new government.”

Julio: Well, if you go to the general assembly in Parque Centenario, where all the assemblies get together every Sunday, you’ll find the tables and flags of the different parties, but when a militant speaks in public he won’t identify himself.

DW: It’s called opportunism. I see the same thing everywhere. It was the same in France in 1995.

Gustavo Noriega, co-editor of the film magazine El Amante

David Walsh: Did the December events come as a surprise to filmmakers, artists and intellectuals in Buenos Aires?

Gustavo Noriega: The economic crisis was not a surprise. Everybody knew that there was going to be a disaster at some point. In September and October I could foresee that it was going to be impossible to keep editing the magazine month after month. What really was a complete shock was people’s reaction, with the “cacerolazos.” On December 19 people were looting markets in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. It was a very difficult day. I was depressed and anguished, because I realized that there was no future for me, for my magazine, for anything.

That day President De la Rua made a public announcement that was totally absurd, autistic, irrelevant. He was denying reality, in a way. I was watching the television and we thought that De la Rua might have a mental disease or something because he showed no reaction. Ten minutes later I began to hear a noise and it was something magical. Everybody was beating pots, the whole city was making noise. It was a total surprise. I didn’t expect that. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I went out to the balcony of my apartment and everybody was making noise. Then we went to the Plaza de Mayo where the government buildings are. We were gassed by the police and everything, but the reaction was a surprise.

DW: Why was that such a surprise?

GN: Because there was a general feeling of resignation. The middle class had resigned itself. The idea was, “OK, this is outrageous, everybody knows it is. But you know, Argentina is a bad country, and the only way out is taking a plane and going to Europe or somewhere else.” What happened in the end was that the poor classes, the unemployed, tried to steal food in despair. That was the ultimate in terms of political action that we could expect. I never expected that the middle classes would have a significant reaction.

DW: Do you think your feeling of surprise was a general feeling?

GN: Yes, it was unanimous. Nobody could have predicted that there was going to be a massive demonstration against the government. I’m totally sure about that. That feeling of protest lasted for several weeks, and then the idea of the middle classes was, “Oh, maybe we went too far, maybe we should probably wait for the IMF’s money.”

DW: What was the impact on the festival itself?

GN: I know that they had enormous difficulties because of the devaluation. On the surface the festival is not very different from last year’s. I think that’s a great achievement. Many people are working for free. You can do it one year or two, but no more. You can’t work that way.

DW: How have the conditions of life changed in the last months?

GN: Poverty is spreading through the whole city. You can see people looking for food in the garbage. You can feel the sadness. People have no hope, no future, no dreams. Young people are trying to get away. We were visiting some apartments for sale. Many owners that we met wanted to sell the apartment so that they could travel to Spain. Young people are trying to escape as if they were animals. The idea is depressing. Nobody has a plan, nobody can think in terms of more than one week. It’s sad. You can live thinking that they are going to take your money, or that you will lose your job. It’s an insane way of living.

Rubén Delgado and Nicolás Batlle, co-directors of Matanza

Matanza is a documentary made by the Grupo Documental 1° de Mayo (1st of May Documentary Group), a collective of left-wing documentary filmmakers. The film follows the protests carried out by the impoverished residents of Matanza, an industrial suburb of Buenos Aires between 1998 and 2000. This densely populated area is blighted by unemployment, poverty, wretched housing and malnutrition. The filmmakers have documented discussions with residents, protests (including the blocking of roads) and encounters between local people and local politicians.

The people in Matanza have the most elementary needs: electricity, decent sanitation, health care, education. One protest demands sheet metal and mattresses from the local government supply because the houses have no roofs. “They are the crooks, not us,” says one. “We’re not violent. We went through all the legal channels. We have no choice.”

The film is useful because it gives a voice to people who are not otherwise heard. The political perspective of the leaders of the protests is another matter. The latter apparently belong to the CCC [Corriente Clasista y Combativa], which, according to the filmmakers, is a collection of “different groups. There are Peronists, UCR [Unión Cívica Radical, a bourgeois party], Maoists.” This is an extremely unappetizing mixture, and the protests, of a severely limited political character, reveal that. They seem designed to let off steam more than anything else.

The filmmakers, graduates of ENERC, the Argentine National Film School, seem sincere. One hopes they will find their way to genuinely socialist and internationalist politics.

I spoke to two members of the group, Rubén Delgado and Nicolás Batlle.

David Walsh: Can you describe the social conditions in the area where the film was made?

Rubén Delgado: Matanza is one of the poorest areas in Gran Buenos Aires [the districts that surround the capital city]. In terms of population, it’s as big as an Argentine province. There are about 1,500,000 people. A lot of social research is done in Matanza, because it gives a picture of the social conditions of the whole country. It’s also very important in terms of elections, because this district defines which candidate is going to be the governor of the province of Buenos Aires.

DW: What is the unemployment rate in Matanza?

RD: It’s about 25 percent. And in terms of young people, it’s 40 percent.

DW: What is the attitude of people? What do they see as the source of their problem? The corruption of the local government? The corruption of the Argentina government? The IMF? Global capitalism?

RD: All of that is included in the protest. But when you talk to them, they mention Menem’s politics. The leaders of these groups of unemployed people say that this economic crisis began in 1976, with the military government.

DW: What is the political perspective of the people who are leading this movement?

RD: They intend to unite all the groups and parties that are against this regime to create a government of popular unity, in order to guarantee the basic needs for everybody: housing, food, health, jobs, education.

DW: How is that going to be achieved? In the film there’s discussion of many issues, but is there political discussion of anything besides the most immediate issues? Is there discussion of world events, or about the need to unify the working class internationally?

RD: Yes, they participate in some international meetings, but first they want to solve the local problems. But they’ve gone to Brazil to a conference with landless people, to Paraguay, to Colombia, to Ecuador. This last experience was very important because some people from Ecuador came to the neighborhood.

DW: You say they want to solve their local problems, but what is the source of those problems? It’s world capitalism.

RD: That’s true, but the CCC [Corriente Clasista y Combativa] is a united front of different groups. There are Peronists, UCR, Maoists. So it’s difficult to coordinate the programs and the number of militants is increasing. It’s a complex issue. The leaders of CCC come from that neighborhood, they were not prepared to lead a party. So they have to learn how to direct the movement. The movement in Matanza began 20 years ago. It took time to move forward and to understand the national problems. It has had ups and downs.

DW: Did anyone raise the question of socialism?

RD: Yes, of course. People talk about the possibility of socialism, in different ways. Some sectors ask, “Why aren’t the left-wing parties governing the country at the moment?” But they are not discussing specifically socialist theory. The most urgent problem is looking for a way out, an exit.

DW: Do you think filmmakers or artists have a responsibility to address social questions today?

RD: Yes, but the problem is that we are behind the situation, and we become aware of it when it’s too late. There are young filmmakers who are showing these social subjects in their films. There’s a small boom, especially after the events in December. Many young people are videotaping what is going on and have visited the popular assemblies to report on their discussions. It’s positive, but it’s also complex because many of us don’t agree about the way these issues should be reflected.

Nicolás Batlle: It’s clear that we are responsible for what we do. We make documentaries, and we love to make them. We have an ideological responsibility for our material, at least for what we videotape. We think over many times about what we show in our films. We have an ideological structure that becomes clear. Our group is similar to the “piqueteros” [those blocking the roads], because we discuss everything and afterwards we take decisions.

It’s a very democratic group, and we use the same tools as the movement we are showing in the picture. We feel very comfortable working together, even though we had no financial support. We made the film with our own money; families and friends helped us. It was very important for us to finish the film and show it in La Matanza and here.

RD: I want to say that I never thought of becoming a filmmaker. I come from a working class family and it’s difficult for a person like myself to get to shoot a film. The making of Matanza was a great achievement for me. I intend to keep on making films and being a professional filmmaker, but I don’t want to lose the point of view of the working class. I wanted to show in my films this idea of a united front. We, the four filmmakers who made the film, come from different social classes and we were able to achieve our objective. That’s also very important.

Valeria, student at the Universidad de Buenos Aires

David Walsh: Tell me about your family situation.

Valeria: My father lost his job last February. He started working in that factory in 1974. The factory specialized in the making and development of products for measuring electricity. A couple of years ago the factory started to lose many of its clients and have money problems. All the employees only worked half the time they used to, so there was a severe drop in the salaries.

The owner got into a situation where he owed them a lot in wages. Suddenly, one morning, all the employees found themselves literally on the street. The owner had locked the factory and fled. They went looking for him at his house, but he had just disappeared. He had apparently left the country and gone to Spain. The workers would never get paid, not even indemnified. You can’t imagine the moral damage it did to my father. He was in charge of supervising the production and he even took responsibility for the firm whenever the boss was away. He still cannot believe how this man could betray them all like that. He’s still in shock.

DW: What was the psychological impact?

Valeria: He tried to be optimistic. We are six in the family, and my father had always been the breadwinner. My mother works as a teacher but her wage is very low, only 300 pesos [$US100] a month. I really don’t know what we are going to do if the crisis keeps deepening. I’m scared, we are all scared. I have to say my father was pretty lucky, given the situation, because he found some work by producing small toy cars, a business that he had been developing over the last decade. Anyway, he’s working all day long and makes very little money. It’s a very difficult situation. My parents are lost, with no perspective, they weren’t prepared for a crisis like this. They are more disconcerted than me and my sisters.

I know that I got lucky, in a way, because I have a job, I was able to finish college and start working as a journalist. But I feel worried when I look at my sisters who are very young. I don’t see a future for them or for me.

It’s hard for person of my generation because we see no future. I look for answers every day, but all I get is anger. I know that this system is finished, because it’s irrational and it’s killing people. But where or how do we start building something different? We are looking for a change, but the general idea is that we are becoming one of the poorest countries in Latin America. That’s why everybody wants to get out of here. Some people may go away, but there are many who can’t. But you don’t see people saying, “Let’s stay and build something new here.” When I try to start a political discussion with some people, you feel this skeptical atmosphere. The general response is, “I don’t know what will happen here, I’m just trying to survive,” “Nothing is going to change in this country.” So one feels alone.

DW: You told me about the incident with the cows. It sounded like something that might have happened before the French Revolution.

Valeria: Near the city of Rosario (Santa Fe), one the most important cities in Argentina, there was an incident that was really terrible. A truck that was carrying cows had a mechanical problem in the middle of the road, so it had to stop. People from a poor village suddenly came running and surrounded the truck. Men, women, young children started to kill and cut the cows, to take a piece of meat. They were desperate. They fought for the pieces of meat. I saw a kid carrying the head of a cow on his shoulder. I felt that we had returned to a primitive state of life.

DW: What do you think of the WSWS?

Valeria: I first went to the World Socialist Web Site thanks to a link that was posted on El Amante’s site. I started reading (with anxiety) the film reviews in the arts section. I realized that I’d never read that kind of film criticism before. Information, honesty and a profound understanding of the more complex problems of our society.

Then I found out that the site belonged to the Fourth International. And then I read the name of Trotsky. I knew who that was, but it sounded obsolete at first. I thought: “I can’t believe that there are people in the world who are still dreaming of a socialist revolution.” I was cynical and narrow-minded at that time, I admit that now. Then I remembered some of Marx’s writings that I studied in college and realized that no other man in history had been so determined about this: the respect for human dignity.

The WSWS, for me, is the place where I can hear “the other bell.” It makes me see that I have to take everyday events as a result of history, because they are not isolated facts. Most of all, it makes me see that there is a possible alternative. It’s great to hear a voice fighting against the USA’s devastating imperialism with such courage. The article you posted after the September 11 attacks was one of the bravest pieces of journalism I’ve ever read. It helps me to see that we, people from the working class, don’t have to take oppression for granted, because we are capable of struggling against it. But it has to be an international movement, that’s the only way to win the control of economy.

The problem for a person of my age is patience. I know that there’s no way for mankind to survive the capitalist system. But I’m anxious, I don’t seem to find the tools to start spreading the word of socialism. I know that we can’t go on living in this insane situation, but at the same time I believe that the possibility of a change is so far away. The simple mention of a “working class” sounds absurd to so many people.

I think it’s great that you can have a web site with different languages, because it shows that Trotsky’s objective was forming an international political party as the only way to defeat capitalism. It’s also interesting to find articles about art, politics, history, philosophy ... it’s a proof of your respect for knowledge. Knowledge, the only weapon that could lead us all to a way out. I’d like to read more articles about economy and the problems of poor countries in confronting the IMF’s pressures. It’s good to read an analysis of the global development of economy in the last decades, but it’s hard to think about how to fight capitalism when it has so much power over dependent regions, such as Latin America.

Concluded

See Also:
Buenos Aires 4th International Festival of Independent Cinema—Part 1
Changed conditions and some of the same problems
[15 May 2002]
Buenos Aires 4th International Festival of Independent Cinema—Part 2
Films of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and a number of documentaries
[17 May 2002]
Buenos Aires 4th International Festival of Independent Cinema—Part 3
Drama, ideas and life
[20 May 2002]
Argentina
[WSWS Full Coverage]