Argentinians hold a banner that reads "The debt is with the people, not with the IMF," a recurrent slogan in protests in Argentina, referring to the country's external debt and the IMF's neoliberal austerity. File photo.
By Aram Aharonian – Jun 17, 2024
When neo-fascism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, racism return in the region, hand in hand with ultra-right governments, the popular forces (progressive? leftist?) debate on critical thinking and the end of the left-right dichotomy. They appeal to an immobilizing and uncritical nostalgia, showing a lack of unity or any cohesive plans.
The expletives and sayings of Javier Milei, a rare mixture of rockstar, TV panelist and anarcho-capitalist messiah, no longer attract attention. In his presentation at Stanford University, he was told that people “cannot make ends meet” and he replied that “if they could not make ends meet they would have died already… There will come a time when people will starve to death. Somehow they will decide something so as not to die. I don’t need to intervene. Someone will figure it out.”
The demonstrations and marches against his policies show an archipelago of organizations without leadership, without a leader to unify them in the struggle beyond the denunciation of the government’s policies and the increasingly harsh repression with gas, sticks and gunshots. Any dissent is being used by Milei to speak of a coup attempt and blame the repression on the repressed. It is a reversal of the burden of guilt.
Milei has adopted—without pretense or dissimulation—the role offered by the alternative right, and will try to carry out the plan of the owners of the technology companies to the last degree, placing Argentina as a link in the global chain, a source of energy supply for Artificial Intelligence through gas, oil, and lithium and food for the workforce.
The Economist points out that he wants to “transform Argentina into the Texas of the South,” converting the country into “the fourth pole of Artificial Intelligence worldwide,” which means development in energy and technology sectors without social inclusion as part of a national project for 10 million people (while 36 million will be left out).
According to Argentinian psychoanalyst Jorge Alemán, “A government that does not govern, a group of inconsistent and cruel officials, a group of bizarre politicians who seem to testify of an anthropological mutation in the center of neoliberalism provoke a crucial question: why is this experiment with such a large cost of pain for the Argentinian society not only bearable but seemingly supported by an unshakable faith?”
Woe is the left
The problem of the Argentinian left is not the lack of financing but the lack of ideas. What is needed is a roadmap to get rid of the philosophy of whining and complaints. If one has a political position, the least one can do is to have proposals. But it seems that there is a shortage of ideas and proposals, and in this situation, one is always complaining and whining.
Milei’s identification with the capitalist order and his vocation to make a system in evident crisis work—not only in his territory but in the whole world—is clear. That is what he said at the Davos Economic Forum and at the conservative summit (CPAC) in the United States.
His international policy alignment is with the US and Israel, without fissures, in a discourse against any alternative to capitalism, be it socialism, populism (in which he only includes the left), feminism, environmentalism, or any demand that restricts the dynamics of the exploitation of the labor force and the plundering of the common goods.
The path is made by walking?
It is no longer a question of being a revolutionary. In contemporary capitalism it is enough to sustain a sensitivity for social justice against all the hostility and aggressiveness of the ultra-right, its media, its bots and trolls to be brought into play with a planned attack and with all the trickery of fakes and lawfare. The algorithm of capital does not include democracy.
Today, the first duty of (let’s say) progressivism would be to make a concrete analysis not only of its painful realities but also of the advances—which did not bear fruit in the construction of solid alternatives, where they are still enthusiastic about being mouse heads (each one on his own side) and not being in the lion’s tail, which would allow them to face the hyper-organized right wing financed by the US agencies and the international ultra-right of the Atlas Network.
The progressive-left opposition at present has no strategy for the construction of people’s power or government. Without unified people’s organization, without their own project, without participation of the people, defeats will continue. There is no debate of ideas, only opinions and diatribes in X and other social networks. Complaining does not bring about anything, power is not achieved with Whatsapp or Facebook.
We are talking about progressivism and leftism. Without delving too deeply, in Argentina, although there are too many politicians who want to shelter behind the umbrella of progressivism, today it is centered around Kirchnerism. After the traumatic episodes of the 70s, the crushing of the revolutionary experiences and the establishment of a bloody civil-military dictatorship which left 30,000 people disappeared and a dramatic social situation, as well as after the disasters of the 90’s, which left widespread unemployment, unprecedented levels of poverty and dismantling of the State and ended with the social explosion of 2001 and the flight of President Fernando de La Rúa.
Many times this “progressivism” is presented as a sort of eradicating the divide between left and right in order to improve the social conditions of the population. Is progressivism leftist? Apart from this Argentina-style progressivism, there are the Trostskyist groups, very militant, with representatives in Congress and a strong presence in the streets and among the workers.
Revolutionary organizations have long since disappeared… along with revolutionary thought. A man of left-wing Peronism, John William Cooke, accurately pointed out, “This government is a mixture of the worst of each system: from liberalism it applies free exchange and free enterprise; from fascism and various feudal variants, authoritarianism, hierarchies considered to be of divine order; from Christianity, ultra-moralism, clericalism, the reactionary use of religious sentiments to sustain all that is established order.”
Cooke, an internationalist who fought in Playa Giron against the US invasion of Cuba and died on September 9, 1968, was obviously referring to previous Argentinian governments, which were similar in their background and tasks to that of the “libertarian” Javier Milei.
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Resistance and/or organization
In Latin America we have been in resistance for 532 years. We have resisted everything; we have become accustomed to its logic and, when we had progressive governments, we did not change the agenda and we forgot about construction. Without paying attention to the construction of new critical thinking, new political, economic and administrative cadres, the construction of a new popular communication, we remained anchored in the past, in the mere immobilizing resistance. And today we are paying for it.
And we in the “popular camp” have confused resistance with complaining and whining. We continue trying to convince the convinced: it is much more comfortable, they all agree with us. Today (almost) nothing is done to confront the hegemony. There is a basic problem of the left and progressivism in Argentina: it does not know how to sell hope. It always talks about what it has done and how bad the opponent has done. Some speak of a battle of ideas, but there can be no battle if there are no ideas.
When we say complaining, we refer to the tendency to focus on complaining about problems or injustices without proposing concrete solutions. Complaining alone does not generate significant change or offer constructive alternatives. Instead of simply pointing out what is wrong, people in political positions are also expected to come up with ideas and proposals to address the problems.
Whining relates to constantly complaining or whining without taking effective action. In the political context, this means that the left is trapped in a cycle of complaining and criticizing without moving toward real solutions. Complaining and whining are obstacles to political progress. We need to offer concrete proposals and be proactive rather than simply criticizing problems.
Six months into the Milei administration, the libertarian test tube in Argentina has changed the doses so that the laboratory does not end up blowing up. Campaign speeches are one thing, but administering a State is another. Diatribes against the “caste” are not enough: the anti-political discourse seduces society and allows the government to retain acceptable levels of image in the midst of an unprecedented economic adjustment, but it also has its limits. Milei, between trips and selfies for the social network X, should dedicate time to govern.
The vertigo imposed by the libertarian administration prevents, at times, the ability to draw conclusions, because something new is always happening: diplomatic conflicts, layoffs, lack of gas, food for soup kitchens not delivered, more layoffs, more hunger, more poverty. Unemployment is growing throughout the country at the pace of a recession that has reached pandemic levels in some sectors.
The scandal of the food not being distributed to the soup kitchens and the corruption that is rampant in the so-called Ministry of Human Capital opened a crisis within the power structure: it was fully understood that the government included the decision of not distributing food and leaving both the soup kitchens and the victims of natural disasters out in the open as part of its program of planned misery.
Every morning, impoverished workers, overburdened women, retired men and women arrive at the soup kitchens that dozens of social organizations support all over the country. For a large part of society and the politicians of the Milei regime, these poor people are considered “lazy.”
Fighting wars that do not exist
None of the progressive governments that have passed before did anything to change the structures. Today we do not have social movements, we do not have the streets, we do not trust the people. That is why it is important to stop the machine and to start thinking. Sometimes it gives the impression that we are fighting wars that do not exist anymore, wars that are a thing of the past. The enemy keeps us busy fighting those wars, while they do other things to the detriment of the majorities.
It is much more difficult to build than to resist: we have to get together, stand shoulder to shoulder, build walls brick by brick (sometimes they fall down and have to be picked up again). And, of course, the construction is done from below, because the only thing that can be constructed from above is a well.
To the perplexity of the so-called experts, there are still no signs that the bulk of the population has begun to feel tempted to end the libertarian government, although the International Monetary Fund continues to speak of a possible explosion if there is no correction in official policies.
And here comes the big question: what happens if Milei’s government falls, by implosion or by social explosion? There are several people waiting for the fall: Vice President Victoria Villarruel, supported by sectors of the armed forces; Martín Menem, president of the Chamber of Deputies… and the neoliberal former President Mauricio Macri, sitting in the stalls.
Today, a little more than six months after Milei’s ascension to power, the real opposition against the libertarian administration is in the streets, where students, teachers, workers, unemployed people, peasants, relatives of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship are saying clearly, in spite of the harsh repression, “Never again” and “Argentina is not for sale.” That is why even the International Monetary Fund is warning about a social explosion, as in 2001. And what will happen if that comes to pass?
(NODAL)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
Aram Aharonian
Uruguayan journalist and communicologist. Master in Integration. Founder of Telesur. He presides over the Foundation for Latin American Integration (FILA) and directs the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis (CLAE, www.estrategia.la).
