A-Infos (en) Argentina, FORA, Organizacion-Obrera #101: ANALYSIS, THE MILEI CATASTROPHE - The same but faster - HERNÁN MANCUSO (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

1 ---- Milei's government aims to organize the Argentine macroeconomy 
based on a fairly clear ideological model. This model can be synthesized 
with its main idea, which is that the free market is the natural order 
of society, and any attempt to alter the free forces of the market will 
end up generating catastrophic damage. After all, a catastrophe is an 
event of involuntary cause that is usually the effect of human action 
contrary to natural laws. ---- From the perspective of Milei's 
ultracapitalism, social relations are the sum of interpersonal relations 
in the context of the market. Furthermore: the market is the area in 
which the interpersonal relationships that make up the social fact 
occur. According to this perspective, every social fact can be 
understood as specific interactions in specific markets, and they are 
always unique ways of combining the laws of exchange. In other words, 
there is always a market for every interaction.

Federico Sturzenegger, a key member of the government's political 
framework, illustrated this issue indirectly by referring to marriage 
[1]. His "nominal" goal was to exemplify the inappropriateness of state 
regulation of economic activity, and he did so by choosing marriage as 
an example. What would explain this choice is that in marriage there is 
a contract. A free contract is the regulation of an interaction 
established by common agreement between the parties, without the 
intervention of third parties. In the ideological framework of 
ultracapitalism, if there is interaction there is exchange, and if there 
is exchange there is a market. That is why for Sturzenegger the marriage 
contract is equivalent to the contract between an agricultural company 
and a risk insurer, or between a tourist and an agency that sells 
excursions with mountain guides.

The first consequence of this, and perhaps the most important at a 
general level, is that the public is nothing more than an effect of the 
private. Private activity is what determines all the conditions of 
social life.

The difference between public and private is not a minor matter. Since 
modesty has existed, that border has existed. But, at this point, the 
question goes much further. The public and the private are two spheres 
of life in common, two areas or environments of society. Without the 
social fact this distinction has no meaning. But without that 
distinction neither would society.

Our existence is not homogeneous. Not all aspects of our existence work 
in the same way, nor with the same logic. Society is a symbolic 
institution that expresses the ability, or even the need, to link 
individuals in more or less extensive, more or less voluntary, more or 
less egalitarian or unjust communities.

That is why linear interpretations of the issue do nothing but spoil 
understanding and ruin the few possibilities of conscious transformation 
of common life. When you try to capture a link in an imaginary chain and 
follow from there, step by step, the consequences of a single thought, 
sooner or later you arrive at a dogmatic vision that collides with the 
materiality of the social fact. The postmodern attempt to abolish all 
universal affirmation incurs, precisely and paradoxically, this error.

Liberalism thinks of society as an effect of individual relationships, 
and fights against a communism imagined as the opposite thesis, that is, 
as an ontological anteriority of society with respect to the individual. 
Statism does the same, but in reverse. And, in both cases, a thousand 
arguments are deployed aimed at objectively demonstrating the wrong 
consequences of the counterpart. Ultracapitalism and statism, brothers 
and enemies, converge in this and also in another crucial aspect: there 
is no difference between the political, the social and the economic. 
They take a link (economic ultra-capitalism, political statism) and pull 
it to explain and intervene in any aspect of common life.

Note that I am not opposing liberalism against communism, but against 
statism. And I do this by getting to the strong point of what I am 
trying to say, which is that the common (and consequently the public) is 
not identical to the State. A communism that, as the word indicates, 
places emphasis on the common, cannot claim a political and symbolic 
centralism like the State without ruining itself in a fatal 
contradiction. This is one of the ideological problems of Marxism but 
also of social democracy, that Aristotelian-inspired happy medium 
between liberalism and statism.

This linear polarization between liberalism and statism explains the 
disconcerting statements of ultracapitalists when they accuse anything 
that moves, or does not move, of being socialist, collectivist or 
communist as deranged. In this they bring down the military paranoia of 
the 70s, when they accused long-haired bearded men of being communists, 
for example. Such delirium has its reason for being: the dogmatic 
radicality of the ideological merengue of the ultra-capitalists means 
that wherever there is a drop of State yolk, their preparation is ruined.

Once again in this they are identical to the statists. It is enough to 
read the Soviet Dictionary of Philosophy [2]to see a button as an 
example. What happens is that statist dogmatism already had its fifteen 
minutes of glory in other times (not so distant) and currently they are 
quite in decline, somewhat more deconstructed. In the case of 
ultracapitalists, they are currently on the rise. They haven't reached 
the zenith yet.

2

To understand what awaits us and what we are already experiencing under 
Milei's regime, we must contemplate his dogmatic faith. His assertions 
are cast as dogmas that, in his eyes, can only be questioned by the 
pernicious forces of perverse interests. In the latter, it is not very 
different from the paranoid statism of Kicillof, for example, who cannot 
see antagonisms that are not based on interests directly oriented 
towards carrying out evil. They embody precisely that: the fight of good 
against evil. There are no nuances.

But in the case of Milei, paranoid delirium is combined with a messianic 
vision that in the most rational sectors of his environment seems not to 
be taken into account. This aggravates the situation because when the 
causes are transcendent, the damage is always collateral. There is 
always a cause of force majeure.

In this context, Milei's government actions are dizzying. The idea of 
shock is not only a matter of political tactics, of delivering a blow so 
brutal that it paralyzes the opponent, but also a technical tool in line 
with his ultra-capitalist dogmatism. Milei seeks with shock to get 
favorable responses from the market itself by kicking the board while 
waiting for the pieces to fall into place and fall on top of each other.

In the strictly economic aspect, the brutal devaluation of close to 120 
percent, accompanied by the deregulation of all markets, is a shock that 
has two main effects: liquefying public spending and enabling the 
rearrangement of relative prices. From the point of view of the 
capitalist economy, and in the current state of the situation, both 
things are necessary. However, that does not explain the decision to do 
so, much less that it is fair or even desirable. Nor is the main 
argument of all this explained, which is the naturalness, virtue or 
inevitability of capitalism, but on that, once again, everyone agrees.

If in the coming months inflation completely recovers the ground lost by 
the economy's prices after the devaluation, the maneuver will have been 
useless. Milei's operation depends on prices not being able to fully 
recover, and that is why it devalued to 800 and not 650, as 
pre-announced. What it tries to do is for prices to adjust to a ceiling 
below 800 and, eventually, to readjust with a second devaluation in 
April or May, of a lower magnitude.

The key to the strategy is the fall in wages. The only thing that can 
put a stop to the inflationary process is the cooling of the economy 
generated by the drop in consumption. In other words, Milei's entire 
stabilization plan boils down to destroying salaries to the point at 
which inflation subsides in a recessionary context and a new investment 
process is opened, encouraged by large profit margins and capable of 
reactivating the economy by absorbing the central bank's liabilities, 
recovering reserves and beginning an expansionary cycle with controlled 
fiscal spending. Without a political agreement to freeze prices and 
wages, this freeze ends up being produced by the market itself, cutting 
the thread at its thinnest. In this the confluence of the State and 
capitalism is clearly seen, which reveals the trap of anarcho-capitalism.

This is a perverse crossroads. If Milei's plan works, workers will have 
financed the concentration of wealth by transferring even more wealth 
from wages to income. If, on the other hand, we manage to prevent this 
looting, the plan will fail, and in its failure we will end up stumbling 
upon the economy with the deepening of the crisis.

In this context, it is imperative to prevent Milei from continuing to 
advance its plan and contain the damage caused so far, before it worsens 
even more with the labor and tax reforms that also push progressively 
towards dollarization.

Milei's equation does not include the severe damage that is generated in 
the population nor the tremendous injustice implied by the enormous 
drain on salaries. Nor the impact at a structural level that such a 
shock will have on the economy and the country's productive infrastructure.

There is not even the slightest intention to think outside the box. 
Nothing of the order of an economic thought capable of moving away from 
the naturalization of capitalism has the slightest chance of being 
incorporated into the issue, and in that Milei is not different from 
other sectors with some social support and public projection.

The liquefaction of public spending and the "alignment" of relative 
prices through a devaluation was what Massa planned to do. Surely the 
project was to do it gradually, in the tone of what they call 
"gradualism", maintaining its alliance with the provincial governments, 
the CGT and some sectors of agriculture and industry through some kind 
of agreement to freeze prices and salaries. tacit or explicit. That is, 
something more similar to what Macri had done but slower, trying to 
avoid his own clumsiness. Massa was betting that the collection and 
trade balance of 2024 (his green shoots of the second semester) would 
allow him to continue kicking and then fully stabilize the economy or, 
to put it in terms more typical of his doctrine, continue surfing the 
milonga .

Milei, on the other hand, beyond his liberal dogmatism and his trust in 
the forces of heaven, knows of his own political weakness. Everything 
comes together in the shock strategy and the difficulty of carrying it out.

This strategy generates, at least, three important problems. The first 
and most urgent is the immediate impact that the inflationary shock and 
the liquefaction of wages generates in the dramatic deepening of 
poverty. The second, the impact this has on the income of the middle 
sectors, seriously increasing the concentration of wealth, social 
inequality and the paralysis of economic activity. The third is the 
structural transformation of the economic and social fabric generating 
effects whose reversal would take decades, if it ever occurred. This is 
what happened in the 1990s, with a process much less intense than the 
current one and which installed, structurally and permanently, the 
levels of poverty to which we have incredibly become accustomed.

Milei's naturalistic view of the economy leads him to think of his 
adjustment plan as leveling the water once the levees are released. 
Hunger and misery are simply more water under the bridge.

What Milei is looking for with decree 70/2023 and the omnibus law are 
three things:

On the one hand, advance its intention to deregulate all markets and 
thus transfer a large part of the wealth from salaries to income.
On the other hand, provide yourself with political support, either 
through new alliances or a communication campaign that reinforces you as 
a popular leader against the sectoral interests of the status quo, and 
that accompanies the international support that you aspire to receive.
Finally, multiplying other people's contradictions in a myriad of 
conflicts of various kinds, all launched with the same level of 
priority, which opens an infinite series of negotiations that expand 
their own margin for negotiation, practically non-existent until now.
This last aspect is in some way the most important, because it is the 
real chance that Milei has to advance with its government plans even if 
it is somewhat limited in this first stage. Each item of the omnibus law 
will be negotiated in such a way that something will always be achieved 
and, at the same time, contributes to deactivating, or at least 
reducing, the formation of an opposition bloc that stops all government 
initiatives. In this movement Milei manages to reconfigure political 
alliances.

The same happens with the DNU. It is impossible for there to be general 
agreement about its content. Having been questioned at the same time 
with the DNU and the omnibus law, parliament needs to negotiate the 
contents of the law but also needs to negotiate majorities in both 
chambers to stop the decree [3]. Without the omnibus law, this 
negotiation would be much easier.

3

The advances on labor law written in the bill and in the DNU are 
directly aimed at depressing wages, dismantling the corporate structure 
of unions and configuring a new context of economic exploitation in 
which the privileges of income over wages deepen dramatically.

In a certain aspect, no resistance specifically launched against the 
Milei government will be enough to prevent the transfer of wealth from 
workers to the most concentrated sectors of the economy. This is a 
process that began a long time ago and is advancing steadily in the 
context of the transformation of the productive system at a global 
level. The only way for contemporary capitalism to overcome this new 
productivity crisis involves concentrating social wealth. However, there 
are two strategies to guarantee that purpose.

The statist sectors more or less linked to the global policy of the 
Vatican, seek a reconfiguration of the alliance of the State with the 
business community encrypted in the canon of the universal salary [4]. 
It is possibly the most feasible in the long term. In the case of 
ultracapitalism, this reconfiguration amounts to an absolute capture of 
the State by the most concentrated sectors of the international business 
community.

It is essential to note that Milei's ultra-capitalism is not strictly 
anti-state, even though he himself claims it or even believes it. This 
is a specific orientation of the State that seeks to prevent popular 
rebellion from ruining the interests of the property-owning class and 
administering competitive relations in the manner of a court at the 
service of the free market.

What we are experiencing is an opposition between two factions of 
capitalism that oppose two configurations of the relationship between 
the company and the State and, consequently, two different strategies to 
guarantee social peace, that is, the peaceful resignation of the people 
in the face of plunder. capitalist.

In this context, the resistance against Milei can be metabolized within 
the tactics of internal recomposition of a statism that tries to recover 
the government. Depending on the circumstances, this could occur as a 
consequence of a fall of Milei's government or as an electoral recovery 
for 2027. In both cases it would be necessary for Milei to fail to 
accumulate political power, stabilize the economy and recover activity 
after a brutal recession. . This largely explains the initial passivity 
with which the leadership of unionism and Peronism in general faced the 
situation, and which was interrupted by social demand in the face of the 
government's excessiveness, along with a resistance to the government's 
negotiation that pushed to the CGT to show its turkey tail on TV.

Statism needs Milei to make the adjustment so as not to have to pay the 
cost of doing so. In that sense, having lost the runoff was not so bad 
for them. The challenge is to prevent Milei from retaining some popular 
hope after the adjustment.

The CGT's call for a general strike on January 24 is the result of 
social pressure on the leadership and the urgency of the leadership to 
obtain a space for negotiation with the government. The CGT does not 
express any worker resistance to the colossal advance of income over 
wages. What the CGT does is negotiate with the rentiers to preserve 
their political and economic power. The CGT will not hesitate to betray 
the workers' cause as it always did, and especially during the 4 years 
of the Fernández government. The Cegetista leadership is not sensitive 
to the popular clamor but to the pressure that increases from below and 
from the sides.

Below that leadership are the workers. Without pressure from the bases, 
the leadership negotiates without conflict. But when the bases are bases 
of high corporate politics, that pressure ends up being used as a 
bargaining chip at a fraudulent negotiating table. The verticality in 
the leadership of labor organizations is the theory of spillover itself: 
we workers are left with crumbs from the banquet of others.

Faced with such a panorama, what remains for us is to create our own 
organizations, without the leadership of representatives, and committed 
to understanding the place that capitalist society reserves for the 
working class. Meanwhile, and at the same time, the pressure will have 
to be maintained so that the leaders know that they cannot take a nap.

On the sides of the Cegetista leadership are the other sectors of 
statism that seek to build a political space with a view to the future. 
In this universe, a Grabois stands out who knows that he has the chance 
to eat from Milei's hand as the anti-caste opponent. Grabois pretends to 
be the real Milei, the one who is capable of doing what Milei said he 
would do, not in the economic field, but in the political field.

With all this, Milei's failure is not necessarily a victory for the 
working class. We have already known similar processes in 1989 and 2001. 
They are not identical processes, but they have similar aspects. The 
current situation is pressing and forces us to double resistance. It is 
essential to stop the advance of ultra-capitalism, and it is also 
necessary that this does not result in a recovery of a foolish 
interventionism that claims to defend the public when what it defends is 
state centralism, to the point of repressing economic activity and 
squandering reserves in the attempt to cover a volcanic eruption with a 
cork, in the midst of perks and negotiations contrary to the needs of 
the working class. And the decline in wages and the concentration of 
wealth did not begin on December 10.

4

The current catastrophe is not an action against nature, but an 
accumulation of social damage as an effect of the antagonism of two 
sectors of capitalism that fight each other to see who takes control of 
the processes designed to reconfigure the relationship between the State 
and the Company. This reconfiguration is strictly intended to save 
capitalism from its self-destructive productivity. There is no nature 
operating, but rather ideas and interests linked together with regard to 
the administration of public affairs.

The economic devastation is overwhelming. The Peronist government did 
nothing more than sweep it under the rug and subordinate the common 
interests to its own political pettiness. Everything that was opened in 
2001 was metabolized by capitalist and representative conservatism 
thanks to the efforts of Peronism and some sectors of nationalist 
progressivism led by the Kirchners. The economic, social and political 
failure of the process of the first quarter of the century is 
unforgivable, and without it it is impossible to understand the rise of 
Milei.

They have brought us here. Now the urgency is clear. But the need to 
break once and for all the premises of political representation and 
classical activism is also clear. The problem of ultra-capitalism led by 
Milei is not the absence of the State but the absence of the public and 
the use it makes of the resources conferred by the State itself to 
privatize social life.

They have brought us here, but we have come. Milei won the election with 
genuine support, or at least as genuine as anyone else in electoral 
terms. Support, yes, much less than what she pretends to have. But this 
is a representative democracy, that is, a system in which the delegation 
of politics and public administration go hand in hand. A delegation that 
operates with mechanisms that enable a relatively small flow of votes to 
grant a very important concentration of power. These mechanisms in turn 
allow the candidates to be defined behind the popular decision and, once 
consecrated, to receive the total delegation of the collective decision. 
Ultimately, the most democratic of all has been Milei until the day he 
took office. From there the cuddly kitten showed its claws and pounced 
on the institutions and on representation itself with a nerve typical of 
the audacious and perverse.

Hard times are coming. We will have to resist and then, after the storm, 
try to open a new horizon, something we have not been able to achieve in 
the last 25 years. If it weren't for the catastrophe, perhaps we 
wouldn't be discussing these things. Maybe, who knows, there is no evil 
that does not come with good.

[1]  Diario Perfil, consulted on January 1, 2024. 
https://www.perfil.com/noticias/politica/sturzenegger-defendio-las-desregulaciones-al-turismo-y-comparo-el-riesgo-de-vida 
-with-marriage.phtml
[2] https://www.filosofia.org/enc/ros/index.htm
[3] This thanks to law 26,122 promoted by Cristina Kirchner and which 
established a mechanism for parliamentary acceptance of decrees that 
facilitates the concentration of power in the hands of the executive in 
2006, when her husband governed.
[4] Universal basic income, capitalist resignation in Workers' 
Organization No. 93, September 2022

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2024/01/08/la-catastrofe-de-milei/
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