Tango by Mike Gonzalez Page B

century. There were 100 engineering factories employing around 15,000 workers but over 2000 plants of every kind, two-thirds of them owned by foreign entrepreneurs. And this industrial growth was helped by a level of external capital that made Argentina the recipient of thelargest volume of external investment in the world in the years to 1913.
    If the immigrant populations were occupying an increasingly central role in modern Argentina, this working-class majority remained marginalized, both socially and physically, and exploited. But the social relations of production were changing. The rent strikes were signs of a new sense of the collective, of burgeoning forms of organization. A new generation of trade unions was emerging informed by the ideas of anarchism and socialism that the European migrants had brought with them. The new unions were general unions organizing the unskilled – the new sector of the working class that was denied access to the tighter and more exclusive guild organizations of an earlier generation. And with them came a growing confidence in the right of immigrant workers to play their role in the new Argentine nation, a nation reforming in a cosmopolitan, modernizing image. The Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 was a recognition of the expanding nation and the demands of its new citizens to participate fully in it.
    After 1900, a militant Anarchist movement established a large following among the immigrant workers in Buenos Aires. There was a series of violent general strikes, which triggered a spate of repressive measures by the government. Strikes were broken by force and legislation was passed by congress allowing the government to deport or imprison working class leaders. 1
    In 1902, the Congress passed the Law of Residence, which allowed rights of residence to be withdrawn in the case of ‘undesirables’. In 1910, this was reinforced by the more openly repressive Law of Social Defence. Social conflict was clearly intensifying, and the influence of anarchism, with its disregard for the struggle to win control of the state and its emphasis on direct collective action, connected with the experience of immigrant workers andtheir families. The rent strike of 1907 was a clear expression of a political philosophy that linked social and trade union struggles. And it was not surprising that anarchist ideas should take hold in an environment in which political control remained in the hands of the old landowning oligarchy, while the economic and social transformation of the country was occurring in the cities.
    While the working class was developing forms of collective organization to fight back against its marginalization and exclusion, the middle class was also growing increasingly restive with a political system still dominated by the old elite. They were enjoying economic prosperity and profiting from growth, yet they remained marginal to the political process. Their frustration was expressed by the Radical Party.
    Radical doctrine and ideology . . . were little more than an eclectic and moralistic attack on the oligarchy, to which was appended the demand for the introduction of representative government. 2
    The Radicals had to achieve a delicate balancing act between the oligarchy on the one hand and an increasingly angry and militant working class on the other.
    Sáenz Peña’s Law of 1912, passed just two years after the promulgation of the Law of Social Defence, had a clear objective: to channel political dissent towards parliamentary democracy and away from the violent revolutionary rhetoric which was becoming increasingly strident as the first decade of the century ended. The Radical Party itself had often employed a vague revolutionary language in its early years. Yet it was equally ill at ease with the multilingual voices of protest growing louder in the barrios of Buenos Aires. Sáenz Peña’s commitment was to offer the Radical Party a stake in the existing, but reformed