The FORA, the genuine defender of the workers, is celebrating another year today. On May 25, 1901, taking advantage of the holidays for the bourgeois celebration of the "May Revolution", workers organizations from different cities in the Argentina regions met to fulfill their aspirations of creating an organization which would synthesize all its human aspirations of solidarity and liberty.
From here, the Argentine Workers' Federation was formed - since 1904 called the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation, which immediately started to grow and promote the organization in all unions and workplaces, identifying the workers with their principles and methods of struggle.
We can say without a doubt that while the workers' movement was guided by the ideas of FORA, there was healthy trade union activity in the country, and through the Federation the workers brought their claims beyond mere economic or labor conquests, dedicating all their forces to the revolutionary struggle to end the current state of affairs.
We know of the heroic deeds of the proletariat of the Argentine region which showed its capacity for action and combativity against the capitalists and its guardian - the State. For this, the FORA was always persecuted in whatever form the capitalists imposes: in dictatorship and in democracy, with its members deported, jailed or asassainated, its offices closed or blown up, its press prohibited and attacked, under the Federation was almost completely destroyed.
With time, the State came to concilliation with the workers' movement, with a paternalistic attitude, reducing it to a mere instrument, useful and manageable for its ends. The experiences of the syndicalism which managed to win with the protection of the State and its partons, while FORA was repressed and prohibited, show us that legality, representation, negotiations with the Ministry of Labour as mediator, centralismo, and other characteristics of this traitor and concillitory tendency, are disastrous for workers and lead to ruin.
Today, the same as these workers who met on May 25, 1901, we continue maintaining free association, the resolution of our problems without intermediaries or representatives, solidarity between the exploited and the struggle for the integral emancipation of all human beings. These postulates, far from having expire, acquire a vital importance in these moments when persecution rules, there is a union dictatorship, state repression, the loss of workers' conquests which were gained by the dedication of comrades from past eras.
Therefore it is more necessary than ever to return to solidary practices and to build bonds between equals, with hierarchies. Only that way we can start to change the course of this reality which day by day overwhelms and distress us more and more.
We invite you to participate actively in FORA, to recouperate the decision making power in our lives and to build on our own, without delegating away our responsibilities, on the road towards the total transformation of the inhuman society which reduces us to goods.
Solidarity and Direct Action against the State and Capital!
For Anarcho-Communism
Argentine Regional Workers' Federation
International Workers' Association