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The ultra-left sects of various descriptions have - quite predictably! - supported Argentina on the grounds that it is a colonial country faced with imperialist aggression. That is nonsense, and shows a completely undialectical approach. Argentina is one of the most highly developed countries in Latin America. Her landowners are not feudal but bourgeois landowners comparable to the capitalist landowners in Britain. Eighty-six percent of the population live in the towns, and the country has a reasonably developed industry. Finance capital, both foreign and local, is intertwined with the bourgeois landowners and the capitalists in the cities. Whoever heard of a colonial country with a stock exchange! The Argentine has a similar basis to that of the United States. The settlers exterminated the local Indian population, and started out with bourgeois relations, rather than those of feudalism, although Argentina, of course, is not as highly developed as the United States. The regime's motives are not at all those of defending the rights of the workers and farmers, or rather, agricultural proletariat, but of defending the interests of Argentine big business and the country's highly developed finance capital.

On the Falkland Islands themselves, the Argentine presence consisted of one Argentine married to a Falkland Islander who fled from the Islands when he saw the possibility of war. Had there been a colony of, say, 100,000 Argentines, a case for colonial oppression could have been made out. But the Islands have been in British possession for 150 years. There was a fleeting Argentine garrison for only a few months before that, which was expelled by the British. The population of the Islands is English-speaking and of British descent.

Although there are only 1,800 Falkland Islanders, Marxists nevertheless have to take into consideration their rights and interests. The Junta's claim to the Falklands is purely an imperialist claim for loot in the shape of resources which can be developed, although even this is secondary to their aim of heading off revolution by diverting workers along nationalist lines. ... [T]he hot breath of revolution forced the Junta to act prematurely. The decisive factor was their fear of revolution. And yet, the ultra-left sects are completely unaware of this fact.

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