From Lobo Suelto! (09/12/2024)
For many months we had the opportunity to investigate the reasons that made Javier Milei’s government possible: the subjective effects of the pandemic and the acceleration of remote communication technologies; the transformations in the structure of employment and the difficulty of providing quality universal public services; the failure of the right-wing gamble with Mauricio Macri (and the criminal indebtedness to the IMF) and the failure of the government of the Fernández-Fernández formula to reverse processes of social inequality. We have simultaneously observed the aggressive day-to-day treatment by the new government of a population that has no effective instruments to limit the destruction. One year into Milei’s government, it is time to consider some key points for reflection in terms of political antagonism:
1. The exceptional character of Milei’s personality confirms the role of contingency in shaping structural phenomena. The value of novelty is measured in his ability to apply a huge adjustment without losing political centrality. The ruin of Argentine neoliberalism was “saved” by the appearance of a personage with extraordinary features, suitable for expressing at once the affections of network communication, social humiliation and the uninhibited liberation of a capitalist unconscious that even the circles of owners did not dare to confess. This is the secret of his “authenticity”. There is no way to oppose Milei by imitating him. The only authenticity that could contradict him would have to arise from the constitution of an exception capable of turning the structure in the opposite direction.
2. Communication becomes political when it intensifies enmity. Stripped of drama, the voice of opponents and political organisers is a depoliticised spectacle. Milei’s effectiveness lies in the intensities he captures and diffuses with his gestures. As Sergio Massa’s campaign team – advised by professionals with a perfect knowledge of Bolsonarism’s communication – found out, the extreme right is reduced to the use of propaganda “techniques” that can be reproduced by anyone. The effectiveness of Milei’s communication is political effectiveness. He translated a collection of heterogeneous discomfort into votes. The politics of Mileism consists in the aggressive administration of social inequality. In order to confront an intense political phenomenon, it is necessary to mobilise equally powerful affects but with effectively opposite contents and contrary directions.
3. Mileism was underestimated. The certainties that acted in this underestimation – the notable impression of mediocrity and implausibility of its protagonists; a mystified evaluation of the reaction capacity of popular forces disarmed from above – oblige us to adjust arrogant attitudes and inoperative knowledge. The predictions of explosion, explosion or collapse of the government have – so far – been wrong, and for good reasons: they were right in reading the systemic instability and governmental inconsistencies, but they did not take sufficient note of the disorientation imposed by political disarmament and the consequent inability of society to react to the violence of the adjustment, nor did they focus on the capacity for improvisation that capitalist governmentality has for the moment to deal with a scenario of instability and crisis.
4. The discourse of “cultural war”, the organisational axis of the discourse of the extreme right inside and outside the country, consists of imposing the terms of enmity and forging subjectivities willing to assist and repair the broken machine of capital’s political command. It is not a mere diversionary phenomenon, but an attempt to re-launch political command relations and social productivity in a Western world perceived as geopolitically decadent by its own elites. To understand its effectiveness, it is less a matter of listening to what its publicists say about a supposed Gramscian “hegemony” and more a matter of paying attention to Schmittian “decisionism” in the service of increasing political power day by day in the face of total institutional weakness.
5. The anti-feminism of Mileism is organically constitutive of the neo-extractive economy. It is not only a cultural revenge against the green wave: it is also a political economy. The patriarchal logic that draws political hierarchies between genders intervenes in nature and in social cooperation to appropriate collective wealth through unspeakable cruelty. The biologistic theology of neo-fascism complements the dreary neo-liberal competition with a fanatical system of refuting any trace of egalitarianism. If the “battle” is “cultural”, it is above all by the way in which culture, conceived as the sphere from which to organise the conditions of command of the extra-economic processes of capital accumulation, is obscured.
6. The extreme right does not hate the state, but just enough to gain access to it and occupy it. Once in power it does not destroy it, it tries to reconfigure it. Milei, Trump or Bolsonaro aim to destroy public regulations that deal with social reproduction and favour private regulation of the requirements of capital accumulation. State action is not dissolved but reoriented to constitute a new, ultra-punitive power of command capable of assisting the order required by the markets.
7. The alignment with the US and Israel seeks to cling – in the absence of an undisputed international hegemony, and in the midst of a growing trade war – to the power of a military force capable of sustaining a space of control within which to ensure certain “democratic” axioms for the accumulation of capital. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is reborn in Trump’s mouth when he speaks of the imminent deportation of millions of Mexican migrants. The “democratic” axiom combines with the policy of war against the population that Patricia Bullrich assimilates and promotes without errors of comprehension.
8. The current neo-fascism in which we live is part of a decaying neo-liberalism. Neo-fascist is the organisation that profits from the obscuring of collective perceptions, that designs and exploits the brutalisation of social cooperation that has emerged after five decades of neo-liberal competition. The differences with 20th century fascism are ostensible: any comparison with it should serve to clarify them, avoiding mistakes in political action.
9. Neoliberalism in crisis offers neither welfare nor explanations. Without a “social” pact between classes, there is no “democratic” pact either. The legitimising mechanisms of yesteryear have been replaced by acceleration and contempt. The negationist futurism of capital no longer imagines the repair of the earth, but the colonisation of nearby planets. The attack on life inherent in accumulation by dispossession functions ideologically on the basis of a delusional belief in a flight forward.
10. Milei’s government benefits from the polarisation of the remnants of the pre-2023 political system. The projection of the current political system, without the eruption of novelties from below, is tantamount to the eternalisation of collective impotence.
11. The current neo-fascism takes into its hands the critique of bourgeois reason (which the left did not carry out). Its attack on universities, cultural or trade union institutions does not seek to reform but to destroy. The recourse to “auditing” is the weapon of choice to advance the demolition. The offensive against public mediations aims ultimately to neutralise language itself: to codify it as much as possible and inhibit it in its power of discernment and expression, which is tantamount to annihilating the capacity to constitute common power in the order of bodies. A famous 11th thesis [Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach] offers the formula of the antagonistic demand: up to now we have tried to interpret Milei by describing him from every possible point of view. What we would now like to do is to conquer a point of effectiveness that at least helps to open up the possibilities of transforming reality.
From Freedom News (17/12/2024).
Argentina: Anarchists call for direct action to oppose Milei’s brutal policies
Organisations’ joint declaration calls for “robust resistance” to build “a popular, collective alternative” and oppose the government from below
Sonia Muñoz-Llort
A year after the election of Javier Milei, four of Argentina’s anarchist organisations have released an analysis of his government’s “turbo-capitalist” program to “profoundly change the social, economic and political relations” in the country. The joint statement from Santa Cruz Anarchist Organization (OASC), Rosario Anarchist Federation (FAR), Anarchist Organization of Tucumán (OAT) and Anarchist Organization of Córdoba (OAC) also highlighted the “repression and criminalisation of popular resistance” accompanying the extreme-right economic program.
To impose the labour reforms privatising different strategic areas of production and services, the government has been engaging a systematic plan to repress protests. “In alliance with the judiciary”, said the statement, “Milei’s government opened cases and arrested activists and union leaders, threatened workers who participated in strikes with dismissal, [and] organised media operations against workers in conflict”.
The groups describe the impacts of Milei’s policies as a social catastrophe, which has worsened due to the rise in the price of basic necessities. The official unemployed population has reached more than 1.7 million, and over half the population is beneath the poverty line. 44.000 state workers have been dismissed and essential services in the health, education and retirement sectors are being de-funded.
Another worrying concern is that parts of the social support system are increasingly being transferred to evangelical churches. This alliance between conservative and far-right sectors is destroying decades of efforts by the women’s and dissident movements. Not only are programs for the prevention and attention to sexist violence being dismantled, but a new anti-feminist crusade led by the government is promoting the public emergence of neo-fascist discourse.
While the parliamentary opposition places all its hopes on the next election, the anarchists are calling for “a robust resistance” that takes the new context into account. By building bridges between those union groups and social organisations willing to turn to direct action as a strategy, and intensifying the mobilisations and strikes that have been ongoing since Milei’s takeover, they aim “to build a popular, collective alternative, for a better life for those at the bottom”.
Diego Sztulwark: One year of Milei’s government
From Lobo Suelto! (09/12/2024)
For many months we had the opportunity to investigate the reasons that made Javier Milei’s government possible: the subjective effects of the pandemic and the acceleration of remote communication technologies; the transformations in the structure of employment and the difficulty of providing quality universal public services; the failure of the right-wing gamble with Mauricio Macri (and the criminal indebtedness to the IMF) and the failure of the government of the Fernández-Fernández formula to reverse processes of social inequality. We have simultaneously observed the aggressive day-to-day treatment by the new government of a population that has no effective instruments to limit the destruction. One year into Milei’s government, it is time to consider some key points for reflection in terms of political antagonism:
1. The exceptional character of Milei’s personality confirms the role of contingency in shaping structural phenomena. The value of novelty is measured in his ability to apply a huge adjustment without losing political centrality. The ruin of Argentine neoliberalism was “saved” by the appearance of a personage with extraordinary features, suitable for expressing at once the affections of network communication, social humiliation and the uninhibited liberation of a capitalist unconscious that even the circles of owners did not dare to confess. This is the secret of his “authenticity”. There is no way to oppose Milei by imitating him. The only authenticity that could contradict him would have to arise from the constitution of an exception capable of turning the structure in the opposite direction.
2. Communication becomes political when it intensifies enmity. Stripped of drama, the voice of opponents and political organisers is a depoliticised spectacle. Milei’s effectiveness lies in the intensities he captures and diffuses with his gestures. As Sergio Massa’s campaign team – advised by professionals with a perfect knowledge of Bolsonarism’s communication – found out, the extreme right is reduced to the use of propaganda “techniques” that can be reproduced by anyone. The effectiveness of Milei’s communication is political effectiveness. He translated a collection of heterogeneous discomfort into votes. The politics of Mileism consists in the aggressive administration of social inequality. In order to confront an intense political phenomenon, it is necessary to mobilise equally powerful affects but with effectively opposite contents and contrary directions.
3. Mileism was underestimated. The certainties that acted in this underestimation – the notable impression of mediocrity and implausibility of its protagonists; a mystified evaluation of the reaction capacity of popular forces disarmed from above – oblige us to adjust arrogant attitudes and inoperative knowledge. The predictions of explosion, explosion or collapse of the government have – so far – been wrong, and for good reasons: they were right in reading the systemic instability and governmental inconsistencies, but they did not take sufficient note of the disorientation imposed by political disarmament and the consequent inability of society to react to the violence of the adjustment, nor did they focus on the capacity for improvisation that capitalist governmentality has for the moment to deal with a scenario of instability and crisis.
4. The discourse of “cultural war”, the organisational axis of the discourse of the extreme right inside and outside the country, consists of imposing the terms of enmity and forging subjectivities willing to assist and repair the broken machine of capital’s political command. It is not a mere diversionary phenomenon, but an attempt to re-launch political command relations and social productivity in a Western world perceived as geopolitically decadent by its own elites. To understand its effectiveness, it is less a matter of listening to what its publicists say about a supposed Gramscian “hegemony” and more a matter of paying attention to Schmittian “decisionism” in the service of increasing political power day by day in the face of total institutional weakness.
5. The anti-feminism of Mileism is organically constitutive of the neo-extractive economy. It is not only a cultural revenge against the green wave: it is also a political economy. The patriarchal logic that draws political hierarchies between genders intervenes in nature and in social cooperation to appropriate collective wealth through unspeakable cruelty. The biologistic theology of neo-fascism complements the dreary neo-liberal competition with a fanatical system of refuting any trace of egalitarianism. If the “battle” is “cultural”, it is above all by the way in which culture, conceived as the sphere from which to organise the conditions of command of the extra-economic processes of capital accumulation, is obscured.
6. The extreme right does not hate the state, but just enough to gain access to it and occupy it. Once in power it does not destroy it, it tries to reconfigure it. Milei, Trump or Bolsonaro aim to destroy public regulations that deal with social reproduction and favour private regulation of the requirements of capital accumulation. State action is not dissolved but reoriented to constitute a new, ultra-punitive power of command capable of assisting the order required by the markets.
7. The alignment with the US and Israel seeks to cling – in the absence of an undisputed international hegemony, and in the midst of a growing trade war – to the power of a military force capable of sustaining a space of control within which to ensure certain “democratic” axioms for the accumulation of capital. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is reborn in Trump’s mouth when he speaks of the imminent deportation of millions of Mexican migrants. The “democratic” axiom combines with the policy of war against the population that Patricia Bullrich assimilates and promotes without errors of comprehension.
8. The current neo-fascism in which we live is part of a decaying neo-liberalism. Neo-fascist is the organisation that profits from the obscuring of collective perceptions, that designs and exploits the brutalisation of social cooperation that has emerged after five decades of neo-liberal competition. The differences with 20th century fascism are ostensible: any comparison with it should serve to clarify them, avoiding mistakes in political action.
9. Neoliberalism in crisis offers neither welfare nor explanations. Without a “social” pact between classes, there is no “democratic” pact either. The legitimising mechanisms of yesteryear have been replaced by acceleration and contempt. The negationist futurism of capital no longer imagines the repair of the earth, but the colonisation of nearby planets. The attack on life inherent in accumulation by dispossession functions ideologically on the basis of a delusional belief in a flight forward.
10. Milei’s government benefits from the polarisation of the remnants of the pre-2023 political system. The projection of the current political system, without the eruption of novelties from below, is tantamount to the eternalisation of collective impotence.
11. The current neo-fascism takes into its hands the critique of bourgeois reason (which the left did not carry out). Its attack on universities, cultural or trade union institutions does not seek to reform but to destroy. The recourse to “auditing” is the weapon of choice to advance the demolition. The offensive against public mediations aims ultimately to neutralise language itself: to codify it as much as possible and inhibit it in its power of discernment and expression, which is tantamount to annihilating the capacity to constitute common power in the order of bodies. A famous 11th thesis [Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach] offers the formula of the antagonistic demand: up to now we have tried to interpret Milei by describing him from every possible point of view. What we would now like to do is to conquer a point of effectiveness that at least helps to open up the possibilities of transforming reality.
From Freedom News (17/12/2024).
Argentina: Anarchists call for direct action to oppose Milei’s brutal policies
Organisations’ joint declaration calls for “robust resistance” to build “a popular, collective alternative” and oppose the government from below
Sonia Muñoz-Llort
A year after the election of Javier Milei, four of Argentina’s anarchist organisations have released an analysis of his government’s “turbo-capitalist” program to “profoundly change the social, economic and political relations” in the country. The joint statement from Santa Cruz Anarchist Organization (OASC), Rosario Anarchist Federation (FAR), Anarchist Organization of Tucumán (OAT) and Anarchist Organization of Córdoba (OAC) also highlighted the “repression and criminalisation of popular resistance” accompanying the extreme-right economic program.
To impose the labour reforms privatising different strategic areas of production and services, the government has been engaging a systematic plan to repress protests. “In alliance with the judiciary”, said the statement, “Milei’s government opened cases and arrested activists and union leaders, threatened workers who participated in strikes with dismissal, [and] organised media operations against workers in conflict”.
The groups describe the impacts of Milei’s policies as a social catastrophe, which has worsened due to the rise in the price of basic necessities. The official unemployed population has reached more than 1.7 million, and over half the population is beneath the poverty line. 44.000 state workers have been dismissed and essential services in the health, education and retirement sectors are being de-funded.
Another worrying concern is that parts of the social support system are increasingly being transferred to evangelical churches. This alliance between conservative and far-right sectors is destroying decades of efforts by the women’s and dissident movements. Not only are programs for the prevention and attention to sexist violence being dismantled, but a new anti-feminist crusade led by the government is promoting the public emergence of neo-fascist discourse.
While the parliamentary opposition places all its hopes on the next election, the anarchists are calling for “a robust resistance” that takes the new context into account. By building bridges between those union groups and social organisations willing to turn to direct action as a strategy, and intensifying the mobilisations and strikes that have been ongoing since Milei’s takeover, they aim “to build a popular, collective alternative, for a better life for those at the bottom”.