Everything indicates that there is little time. If we are guided by the statements of the elected president, his future officials and by journalistic reports, This Sunday, upon taking office, Javier Milei will announce a war plan in his speech against the great majorities.
New devaluations, tariff increases, layoffs and budget cuts are coming in different areas. Also projects in the National Congress to debate privatizations and reforms. But the battle already began before the new president took office.
Javier Milei is following the advice Mauricio Macri gave him. The former president of the PRO says that he still regrets not having used the first days of his Government in 2015 to denounce the inheritance received that Cristina Kirchner’s Government left him and thus justify a strong adjustment plan. He dedicated himself, instead, to talking about the “revolution of joy” with promises for everyone that he neither wanted nor could keep.
The elected president of Freedom Advances -advised by Macri- is on a different tune. He wants to use the enormous social fatigue that exists with very long years of economic crisis to hit the table and justify shock measures. It is highly probable that this Sunday we will hear him speak with a very harsh diagnosis about the situation in the country. The goal is to make the tremendously unpopular measures that are coming seem inevitable.
The current situation is very hard. That goes without saying. According to a report from the Argentine Catholic University (UCA) released this week, The Government of Unión por la Patria (or Frente de Todos) is leaving poverty rates of 44.7%being even more serious among children and adolescents (62%).
Javier Milei offers a diagnosis at your convenience as to why this happens. The blame would be the excess of public spending, the “caste” that defends its privileges, the monetary issue or the limitations that are placed on the market with regulations, among other reasons. From that cultural battle they will justify what is coming: the diagnosis of the inheritance received will be instrumentalized to ask the population to endure hard months of even higher inflation and economic stagnation (stagflation) and to sell the recipe (devaluation, adjustment, layoffs, privatizations, tariffs) with the illusion that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Comparisons are never perfect, but there is a reason there is so much talk these days about menemism . Even Martín Menem is the man proposed by Javier Milei to preside over the Chamber of Deputies. In the early ’90s – and after hyperinflation – Carlos Menem “took advantage” of the fatigue with a great crisis to shape public opinion in favor of implementing his neoliberal plan of privatizations, adjustments, structural reforms and indiscriminate opening to stabilize the economy. situation. On the balance of what he left that decade, Javier Milei considers that it was the best government in Argentine history. The great masses, on the other hand, remember it as a plan that ended in hunger and unemployment.
Today the anger that exists with a situation of very high poverty and inflation wants to be used by Freedom Advances to go in a similar direction to that of Menem, although in another context.
A battle is imposed for the diagnosis and the program. With his far-right demagoguery that seeks to connect with the feeling that something radically different must be done because the current situation is very bad, Javier Milei goes from saying that the fault lies with the “caste” to pointing his guns at everything that depends of the State. Seek to generate consensus to fire state workers. To devalue, cut and apply tariffs saying that first it will be hard but only then will inflation go down. To give the market freedom to mark up prices without control or exploit and fire workers as they want. So that even more private companies control strategic levers of the economy. Logically, it has a great support point: the “present state” discourse with which Peronism actually applied the IMF’s major adjustment plans, and the passivity with which the union bureaucracies remained silent in these years, gave great support to the discourse of the right to discredit everything collective, solidarity and make way for the ideas of free markets and individualism. The liberal combo is completed with a patriarchal and anti-rights discourse. Even Mauricio Macri had the luxury this week of saying that the CGT did nothing against the adjustment all these years, taking advantage of the fact that Alberto Fernández’s Government was the first in decades to end without a general strike.
One last thought before finishing. Carlos Menem not only imposed his plan on the basis of being fed up with the crisis and riding the wave of the neoliberal consensus that he prevailed in the world at that time. Before, he had to overcome enormous workers’ struggles against privatization. Because Between speeches and reality, the proof of class struggle is always involved. This will also be the case in the new stage that is opening in Argentina.
Today the organization is already beginning to redouble for what is to come. There are thousands of workers state that they have already held assemblies to stand up against the attacks that will come to them in a few days. Are the women and sexual diversity the first to take to the streets on November 25 to say “Not one more adjustment, not one less right.” They are also workers in the industry like at Mondelez or in the tire industry who are with their guard up against the businessmen who want to embolden themselves.
These are just the first steps of resistance against what is coming. But we cannot fight these battles separately. On the one hand it is about coordinating, yes. If they touch one, they touch all, because in each fight that succeeds or is defeated, a new relationship of forces is built in the face of the stage that opens.. We must support each fight and establish instances of coordination of the sectors in struggle and the left, like a great Meeting. But it is also necessary to redouble the efforts of political agitation and cultural battle against their consensus.. One of the most important tasks of the moment is to dispute opinion, expose the demagogic political discourse of the extreme right and highlight that everything Milei’s diagnosis is false, which is a construction to support brutal adjustment plans and protect the interests of economic power. Yes, Milei is a cuddly kitten of economic power. The relationship of forces for each fight, and to confront the overall plan, is also played out in the fight for the conscience of mass sectors.. We must oppose right-wing populism that points blame where there is none, a story in favor of a solution favorable to the great majorities. Reality, which much sooner rather than later will collide the expectations and reality of even a part of Milei voters who hope to improve their living conditions, will help by doing its part.
This Thursday we invite you to a small battle in that sense, which will be one of the many that will come in a convulsive period where a new political project from the right aims to redesign the country. From 6 p.m. we called for a tweet with the hashtag #PlataHay. We want to be thousands so that our cry becomes massive to denounce that Milei’s recipes are not the only way, but that it is either them or us. Either it is adjusted to the workers, tariffs are applied, the country is fired and handed over, or the interests of the powerful are affected. We must pass the chainsaw to them: to the IMF, to the banks, to the speculators, to the privatized companies, to the large exporters and owners of fields. If we install these ideas with great political agitation, the struggles that are to come will also take place under better conditions. The battle for opinion is a key fight for the preparation of the class struggle. As Leon Trotsky once said, it is about rebelling against the public opinion of the ruling classes and establishing a “revolutionary public opinion” that allows the working class to “trample the orders of the bourgeoisie and achieve the freely chosen revolutionary goal, which constitutes at the same time a historical necessity”.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
