Traditional politics versus Milei: fighting the right by becoming right-wing. Editorial from “El Círculo Rojo”, a program on La Izquierda Diario that is broadcast every Thursday from 10 pm to 12 am on Radio Con Vos 89.9.

  • “There is no alternative” was the famous slogan popularized by Margaret Thatcher and the flag with which she reset Britain in the 1980s. She imposed this slogan, literally, with “blood and fire” in battles that were more than cultural. Two stood out in her repertoire: the one she waged against the miners (the backbone of the British labor movement) with a one-year strike between 1984 and 1985, and the Falklands War against our country. It could be said that the “cultural” triumph was a derivative of these battles won by Thatcher and lost by the workers and popular sectors, not only in Great Britain, but in the world.

  • Why do I bring up this “there is no alternative” thing? Well, first of all, because re-editing a kind of “Thatcherism” in our own way is one of the wet dreams of Javier Milei and his gang. But that is not the most important thing because the president sees himself as many things: Terminator, the State mole, Menem, Thatcher and so many other things.
  • The remarkable thing is that a large part of the universe of traditional politics or politicized sectors that have influence in shaping public opinion have been acting with the idea (more veiled or more open) that “there is no alternative.”
  • Is there no alternative government or is there no electoral alternative? I am not necessarily referring to that, but to the idea that there is “no alternative” conceptually. From this perspective, Milei would be a kind of historical fatality, a genuine and inexorable expression of the times. While this has some truth (Milei ended up expressing some political representation of popular feelings), it also has a lot of ideological falsehood.
  • I’ll try to explain myself better: since Milei’s government experience began, many in the political or media opposition (most of them linked to Peronism, which is in “balance mode”) began to affirm that, in reality, “the adjustment should have been made earlier, so it would have been done in a more orderly manner, because the adjustment had to be done in any case.” Some even affirmed it with brutal sincerity: “Anyone who had arrived would have had to have done in one way or another what Milei did,” they said. This idea presupposes that Milei was voted for and supported to make the adjustment and not, as I believe, because a part of society was fed up with the consequences of the adjustment made by those who said they were against the adjustment (remember the fall in real wages, to take just one index, during the Government of Alberto Fernández).
  • Others began to say that “we should have valued meritocratic or individualistic ideology more,” well, because it was an expression of the time. As if that ideology that can be summed up as “everyone saves himself” were a “natural” common sense that inhabits many sectors and not a historical product for which those leaders of collective organizations (such as unions) are responsible, who left a large part of the working class out in the cold, ending up falling into informality or outside of any social protection. Or of a State that told you that it “will save you,” while leaving you to save yourself.
  • Because, look, it is absolutely true that there was an abysmal gap between the narrative of “the State saves you” or “the Fatherland is the other” and the reality of an immense number of people abandoned to their fate; now, that does not transform the contrary statement into truth. It remains a truth that “no one saves themselves alone.” The defeat of a perspective that perceived itself as “collectivist” (in the sense of vindication of the collective or the common) does not transform into a certainty the opposite orientation also synthesized by Thatcher: “There is no society, there are only individuals.” Well, no, there is nothing outside of social work, of social cooperation, of work in common. The problem lies in the increasingly private appropriation of a work that is increasingly social.
  • There were some rather bizarre expressions of this question of seeking “appropriate” manifestations of Milei’s narrative. For example, after the imposing and somewhat exuberant military parade led by Milei and Victoria Villarruel on top of a war tank, I read people saying “Why did we abandon military parades?”
  • Well, the most blatant expression of this adventure of “let’s build our own Milei” is Guillermo Moreno, and more than Moreno, all those who support him, which are few. The one who claims that he would have voted against abortion, who chooses Bolsonaro over Lula for certain reasons; who lets slip an anti-Semitic tone, who copies the forms and who has quite a few media sponsors who want to install him.
  • But there are also more subtle manifestations. We once highlighted in this space that, after Milei’s victory, Cristina Kirchner began to talk about “good privatizations” or “necessary labor reforms,” ​​etc. In the last interview with Pedro Rosemblat, in a section that was not given the attention it deserved, he said that one problem that the Peronists had (a kind of self-criticism), was not having given the importance due to that truth of the “20 truths” that says that “work is a right, and it is a duty, because it is fair that each one produces at least what he consumes.” And he highlighted, linked to this, the issue of productivity.
  • This can trigger a lot of discussions. There is a socialist principle (a “socialist truth” if you like) that says “from each according to his ability and from each according to his need.” Precisely because humanity’s production capacity has reached such a high level that it would allow everyone to be freed from the compulsory obligation of work. Precisely to get closer to the point where everyone contributes what they can contribute (because we are all different and have different abilities) and takes what they need, for the same reason.
  • But beyond the doctrinal discussion, to raise the issue in this way at a time when Milei’s government is attacking members of unemployed organizations because it wants to give the idea that they are “unproductive” (because they would not “produce” what they consume), and state workers because they are “dummies”, that is, because they are “unproductive”; is clearly a conceptual capitulation disguised as an attempt at “dialogue” with those reactionary ideas that Milei wants to establish.
  • Because the Argentine problem does not lie in the fact that workers (formal, informal, from “social organizations”, state or unemployed) are “unproductive” in the sense that they “do not work” or do not produce what they consume. In Argentina, people work like crazy, and even more so lately (this is measured: the increase in productivity, especially in the post-pandemic period). The Argentine (and global) problem is that the fruit of all that effort is what is left for precisely those who live off the work of others.
  • On this core of ideas (who pays for the adjustment, what is collective and what is individual, work and its appropriation) we must wage a battle that is more political than cultural. In order not to fight the right by appropriating its main motives, but by giving it a different tone. And, ultimately, to build another alternative.

    • Margaret Thatcher / Carlos Menem / Fernando Rosso / Meritocracy / Javier Milei

    Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com



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