President Javier Milei responds to a specific class fraction: the financial caste. Four and a half months after coming to power, he has put Argentina in front of a new challenge against debt and the financial colonization of everyday life. We use the term caste in a very precise sense: in counterpoint to the way Milei and his libertarian political force popularized it to postulate himself as an “outsider” of institutional politics. His organic relationship with the financial corporate powers forces to bring back the term caste to signal the fraction to which he responds. The feminist struggles of which we are a part allow us to identify this antagonism and to sort out the characteristics of this process and the political work to come.
To govern is to exercise cruelty, destruction and chaos
The novelty of the neoliberal shock we are experiencing has two key characteristics: the speed and intensity of the violence it assumes as a mode of government. This is because Milei extracts its power directly from the most concentrated capital corporations, at a time of accelerated reconfiguration of capitalism towards an extractive and war model. Our hypothesis is that this mode of government is affirmed by articulating three vectors: capacity for destruction, generation of chaos and deployment of cruelty.
Cruelty is a category that has been driven by the feminist debate and has crossed borders to the point of becoming a key to characterize this era. It is a concept that anthropologist Rita Segato has worked on and that served to understand gender violence crimes and macho aggressions as a form of a masculinity pact, and that became known at the beginning of the Ni Una Menos [Not One Less] movement, back in 2015.
Today, that term exceeds the vocabulary of feminisms and names the type of verbal, economic, political and symbolic violence practiced by this government and which is trained daily on social networks.
At the same time, cruelty names a pedagogical project that despises life and has as its political objective to make us insensitive to the pain of others. This is a crucial supplement to the extreme concentration of wealth, in the form of “dueñidad” [“ownership”] (the power of the owners, again, to quote Segato) or, in Javier Milei's version, of “heroic businesspersons”. At the Llao Llao hotel, the photo of the President with the “financial caste” was just that: his celebration of their flight of dollars (something they already do, only now with the explicit agreement of the State), but under the rubric of their heroism as a misogynist institutional pact.
It is, in fact, the only scene that satisfies and sustains Milei: praising businessmen and taking refuge in the confirmation of obedience. The same scene he staged a week before in Texas, where in front of magnate Elon Musk the gestures of obsequious flattery were the only political message. We mean: it is not about excesses, imperfections or improvisations, but about the necessary mode of government for this moment of crisis and war where the logic of destruction -and not that of governability- imposes itself.
Financial, territorial and military recolonization
As we have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism in our region is immediately violent, from its origins. Authoritarianism is not an a posteriori deviation. In the same way, the original violence of neoliberalism in Argentina is constitutively linked to processes of recolonization of the continent. Today we are witnessing a new phase that articulates financial and military colonization. At a time when national dissolution is being discussed in order to segment the territory into “sacrifice zones” (radicalizing something that already exists: a neo-extractivist distribution of territories), opposing a vocabulary and practices that resume the discussion for a decolonization becomes a central element against violence towards certain bodies and territories.
The argumentative pendulum about whether Milei is the local effect of a global phenomenon or an extreme national singularity that is misunderstood if it is diluted in the global conjuncture does not make much sense. It is necessary to get out of this binary scheme to think in what sense the global aspect of his bet is novel and in what sense the local aspect of his roots is not limited to national specificities, much less to personal eccentricities.
Milei also exceeds a Bolsonaro because the situation of the genocide in Gaza and his alignment with the United States and Israel allow him another scenario. But also because Milei does not play nationalism, as a Trump does. Here emerges the directly colonial dimension of his subjugation, his power and his effectiveness. Rather: his position is that of an extreme internal colonialism, where it becomes necessary to deploy an “internal war” to assert the positions of colonial subordination.
To this we owe, for example, the official vindication of the Campaña al Desierto [Campaign to the Desert] as a campaign of extermination of the indigenous populations, the affirmation of the plundering of lands to which today is added the financial swindle as an internal economic war against the population.
The neo-extractive dimension of this phase of capital, and to which Milei is trying to attach us without mediation, is becoming clearer and clearer. In his last message in national TV channel he appealed almost as a last lifejacket to the entry of dollars coming from sectors such as mining and the countryside, at the same time that he promised them a tax cut. In the same message he boasted of reaching a fiscal surplus built on the basis of an atrocious adjustment that liquefies pensions, social programs and salaries, and cuts in education, health and public works.
The model of the “heroic businessman” that he promises to achieve in his meetings is composed of three aspects: 1) liquefaction of income (salaries, pensions and social programs) and budget cuts, 2) increase of extractivism with a free hand to corporations and 3) the transformation of Argentina into a tax haven thanks to tax reductions.
The flight of foreign currency becomes a campaign of liberation from “the clutches of the oppressive state” (the same state that provided its services for the indigenous genocide and executed state terrorism and to which the right wing and ultra-right wing appeal to convey their plans in spite of appearing under an “anti-state” discourse). The flight personifies the utopia of capital to move without regulations in a world adapted to the sacrifice zones. A mobility that leaves in its wake, devastated territories. However, nothing of what Milei does is stateless: he extracts his power from corporations to produce, once again, a statehood at his service, devoted to the reproduction of capital and reduced in its functions as guarantor of social reproduction.
This process of financial, territorial and military recolonization puts us as a feminist movement in front of a profound debate of the State form, on which we will not only have to debate its ineffectiveness (a point on which the ultra-right has mounted to express dissatisfaction) and simultaneously defend public policies that the government does not stop destroying, but imagine new institutional forms that can articulate with the strength of the constructions from below against this financial capital that does not stop extracting wealth, destroying and fleeing.
Economic war and unpaid financial management work
The category of war, already used by feminisms to account for new coordinates of violence, becomes more strategic than ever. The war against the conditions of reproduction of the population and the war against the conditions of reproduction of struggles are articulated with war as the global stage, to which the ultra-right can appeal to polarize local scenarios when social protest is on the rise. Militarization is the highest stage of financial warfare. It is happening in Ecuador, in Haiti and it happened in Africa in the 1980s.
As militants, we are obliged to rethink the categories of violence. In fact, we have been speaking since the feminist struggles that it is incomprehensible macho and patriarchal violence without its meshing with an “economic violence” that has intensified as “financial violence”, and that conforms to a pretension of capitalism to become “absolute”, to quote the formula of Étienne Balibar.
A few weeks after the Ni Una Menos [Not one less] mobilization of June 3, we want to propose that we are facing a threshold passage of economic-financial violence that combines intensification and acceleration to reconfigure the possibilities of survival of the majorities.
In this context, we need to analyze the recent resolution of the national government to make it possible to charge via the Mercado Pago [Market Payment] platform (of the businessman Marcos Galperín, a favorite of the Llao Llao photo, also known for his verbal violence in the X network) the beneficiaries of the Universal Child Allowance, Family Allowance and Pregnancy Allowance, and other programs. The female workers of the popular economy, attacked in particular by the government's refusal to deliver food to canteens and merenderos [lunchrooms] but also by the indiscriminate cuts in the Potenciar Trabajo [Enhance Work] program, are at the same time put at the center of the financial business. By delivering those amounts of public money to Mercado Pago, the government not only gives a captive booty of resources for financial speculation, but also opens more possibilities of indebtedness through the virtual wallet.
Taking debt or making small “investments” in the platform are not benefits accessed by the goodness of Mercado Pago, but an obligatory and compulsory financial “solution” in the face of impoverishment and inflation. In such a way that the government offers Galperín to profit not only with the public money that corresponds to the most impoverished sectors, but also to turn their poverty into a financial business.
The acceleration of economic violence through what we have called “financial extractivism” (and which has a key tool in the DNU 70/2023) finds in the platforms its favorite means. Since the pandemic, the so-called FinTech (financial technology) companies have consolidated and expanded as means of payment and, above all, as sources of indebtedness.
In a context of falling incomes and where many popular economy enterprises are managed through platforms, this measure multiplies the possibility of taking on debts, at more usurious rates than those of banks (now also deregulated) and with greater vulnerability to scams given the lesser regulation that exists on them.
Getting into debt in order to live, to solve daily needs and to spend part of the day in a permanent debt management has become a widespread condition in our country. In addition to the multiple working days that women, lesbians, transvestites and trans, ranging from salaried jobs (many intermittent), changas [temporary occupations], community work, and care is added a work of unpaid financial management: it consists of managing the few and devalued income and debts through platforms, take advantage of small “speculative” possibilities to lose a little less, move money from one virtual wallet to another to take advantage of benefits, etc.
Let's put it more directly: Mercado Pago lives on unpaid work. Among them, the unpaid financial work that consists of surviving income poverty through a minimal scale financial bicycle, which consumes time and, above all, mental health.
Overflow of the streets and organization
Today Argentina is a laboratory in several senses. On the one hand, we have an extreme right wing with messianic and geopolitical delusions that has abandoned all pretensions of sovereignty without abandoning state power.
On the other hand, a social, trade union, popular, feminist mobilization that since December 20 has not stopped producing protests, street occupations, assemblies, strikes and mobilizations. And which, in addition, has a plan of struggle for the near future. This is where the possibility of fighting this new synthesis of the colonial project is being gestated.
In a recent International Feminist Meeting at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA [Buenos Aires’ University], the dimension of punishment and global exemplification that Milei wants to exert on a people that has shown the world great movements of transformation, such as the feminist movement, was emphasized.
This ultra-right seeks to channel a neoliberalism in crisis from the relaunching of a warlike extractivist insertion in the global market. At the same time, for the time being, it is betting on not exchanging concessions in the face of an increasing social conflict.
To affirm that Milei's regime has fascist elements is not to affirm that the majority of his voters are fascists, as we have already debated even at the electoral moment. In fact, a large part of his support is explained from everyday economics. It is a field that seems to be despised time and again in its inexorable materiality and, therefore, in its political rationality. From the feminist movement we have placed it as a fundamental perspective to understand the economic violence suffered daily by those who sustain their domestic economies. Going into debt in order to live, calculating all the time the rise of the dollar, rates and rents, produces an experience of speculation immanent to survival.
The question of the mutations of subjectivity becomes strategic not only as a theoretical debate, but also as the gateway to a political conversation that transcends those who oppose Milei. These questions appear trying to understand the “patience” of those in adjustment, the momentary effectiveness on popular subjectivity of phrases such as “there is no money” or “we must sacrifice”.
And here is our greatest challenge as militants: how do we make politics when the language of austerity becomes a popular language?
The government answers with memes to a conflict and discontent that do not stop expanding and that has a sequence that includes the December pots and pans strikes, it is agglutinated in the national strike of January 24, continues with the feminist March 8 and March 24, and has a forceful episode in the federal march for public education on April 23.
It is evident that Milei's fascism -unlike other historical fascisms- does not have the capacity to win the street; its bet is on seeking massiveness in the networks and addicted media (a characteristic already pointed out by Enzo Traverso to think about the virtual masses of contemporary fascism).
We want to end by saying that the march for public education marks a turning point in the formation of a movement and a new majority against the policies of adjustment and cruelty. It is so because it has been a profoundly transversal, multisectoral and intergenerational demonstration and because the youth has entered the scene. That same youth, to a large extent blamed for their passivity after the pandemic.
Faced with the market totalitarianism of this government, which installs armies of trolls in what used to be the Women's Room in the Casa Rosada [The House of Government] (an image of its occupation of power), which wants to play war and ideological crusade in the face of an ongoing genocide, every demonstration counts. And what counts above all are the processes of preparation of these massive scenes, which require enormous efforts and hours of political work, discussion and patient and artisanal articulation. This preparation of the collective (in assemblies, public classes, meetings and plenary sessions) produces a political school for unity. A dynamic, vital unity, which actualizes a community of senses and affections that sooner or later will be an alternative. The end is open.
* Verónica Gago (Chivilcoy, Argentina; 1976) is an Argentine philosopher, political scientist, researcher and feminist activist. She studied Political Science and received her PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, where she currently teaches. She also teaches at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and is a CONICET researcher. She is the author of “La razón neoliberal. Economías barrocas y pragmática popular” [Neoliberal reason. Baroque economies and popular pragmatics] and ”La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo" [Feminist Power. Or the desire to change everything], among other texts. Her work articulates the world of research, academia and feminist activism. She is a member of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos.
* Luci Cavallero is a sociologist and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. Master in Interdisciplinary Studies of Subjectivity (UBA). She teaches in the Master's Degree in Gender at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero. Co-author of the book Una lectura feminista de la deuda [A feminist reading of debt] (Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo, 2019). Member of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos.
[1] This article was first published in Revista Anfibia (in Spanish) link
[2] Translated from the Spanish by Andrea Balart.
Original photographies © Celeste Laila D'Aleo.
Image postproduction: Andrea Balart.
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