By Atilio Baron on November 9, 2024
Milei, photo: AFP
There are many reasons why the Argentine president will enter history through the service door, if he is lucky. Contrary to his delusions of grandeur, to his self-proclaimed mission of being the “redeemer” of a West won by the seven-headed hydra of collectivism, Javier Milei will be remembered instead as the ruler whose administration provided a new, more resounding and definitive ratification of the veracity contained in Karl Marx’s theory of capitalist economy. As a “proven and confessed” Marxist, I can only thank him, because I will fight the battle of ideas better equipped than before.
The author of Capital said that the capitalist mode of production rests on an irresolvable contradiction between owners and non-owners of the means of production. In other words, it is a society in which a brutal distributive struggle is waged between rich and poor; a “zero-sum” game in which what some gain, the others lose. And in capitalism, through surplus value and other tricks, the former “legally” rob the workers of their incomes and modest fortunes, thanks to which the capitalists grow richer every day. As reported by the U.S. Federal Reserve (the ideal society according to Milei) at the end of 2021, “the richest one percent of U.S. households owned 30.9 percent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 50 percent owned 2.6 percent”. And worldwide, Oxfam reported, according to a note published in Página/12 on October 2 of this year, that “one percent of billionaires accumulate more wealth than 95 percent of the world’s population”. This is the “good society” that the prophet of the Casa Rosada promises us to achieve in 30 or 40 years of enormous sacrifices. Data which, on the other hand, irrefutably confirm that Marx is right and that Milei’s mentors -the Austrian School, the anarcho-capitalists, etc.- are only a group of cunning liars at the service of big capital.
From the above it follows that your government, President, is not only bad, irrational, inefficient because it promotes neither economic growth nor income distribution. It is also immoral. Nothing else can be said of someone who, despite his litanies to the contrary, in fact only governs for the rich. Your arts of governing are reduced, as you yourself said, to “enlarging the pockets of the rich” and organizing the large-scale dispossession of the poorest, sustaining this nefarious project with the help of the media scoundrels, the local oligarchy and its foreign allies and “the embassy”. They also collaborate with parliamentarians who shamelessly sell their vote and a Judicial Power that does not have the slightest curiosity to know where the three shipments of gold bars taken abroad ended up and the reasons for such a radical measure.
That is why his government offers all kinds of concessions and privileges to the big landowners while it denies them a paltry -incredibly paltry!- raise to retirees and pensioners, reduces workers’ real wages, causes unemployment, melts down small and medium-sized enterprises, concentrates wealth, financially stifles public universities, scientific research, national cinema and advances, like a crazed mole, in the destruction of the national state and all the social protection devices that characterize a civilized society. His ideological prejudices have surely led him to ignore the fact that public spending as a proportion of GDP in advanced capitalist countries is very large, and has nothing to do with his nonsense in this regard.
It reaches 57.0 percent in France, 48.40 percent in Germany, 44.17 percent in the United Kingdom, and 37.84 percent in Argentina, almost the same as in the United States. Of course, you will say that these are countries avidly governed by communists, but such nonsense only provokes laughter or smirks among your friends of developed capitalism. Your project to reduce public spending, if successful, will turn our country into the South American replica of nations like Afghanistan, with a public spending of 16.89 percent, or Cameroon, with 17.08, or that of most of the poorest countries in the world, with 80/90 percent of their populations living in poverty. But Milei’s friends and the beneficiaries of his policies, that is, the power behind the throne, will be satisfied because they will enter the list of the greatest fortunes compiled by Forbes. And extreme poverty will be installed in Argentina until it reaches apocalyptic proportions. That is until the people decide to put an end to this evil economic experiment that is causing so much pain and suffering to our people. There are faint but real signs that the people have begun to realize that their project is a scam for the people and will only worsen their economic situation. And sooner rather than later there could be surprises.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano