Political acts and their symbols are liturgies that seek to keep an identity alive. They are rituals that appeal to the past with the aim of making it present. A representation of what we were, trying to illuminate what we are.
There is nothing to look for in October 17 of this year other than a failed attempt to invoke a common past, casting shadows on the shared present. Dissimilar acts, heterogeneous messages and few shared beliefs are symptomatic features of the present of the Frente de Todos. Syndicalism, the backbone of classic Peronism, seems to be, once again, close to dividing. It is not surprising. It is increasingly difficult for trade unionism to represent the contemporary working world of Argentine society. The world of work is no longer, if it ever was, that of wage labor. In 1954, Argentina had more than 6.5 million workers.
Organized around the figure of the registered employee, covered by collective agreements. The CGT represented at least 5 million of those workers. That was a much more homogeneous workforce than today. The backbone of Argentina. This process was part of a project to harmonize the growth and tension of a country through the meeting between the State, the businessmen and the workers, represented through the unions. That is why union membership skyrocketed between 1945 and 1954, going from 400,000 members to nearly 2.5 million.
Today the salary society is on the way to disappear. Trade unionism is not weaker because of its low public image, but because its political subject is becoming smaller and more distant from its representatives. Any attempt to regain its public image will succumb to the slow erosion of these structural factors. Trade unionism lives prisoner of an outgoing environment. It is the atmosphere that is created between us when we sit around a dying fire.
*Augusto Reina, political scientist and president of Doserre
by Augusto Reina
