By VALERIO ARCARY*
If Javier Milei were to win, his government would be incompatible with the democratic freedoms dramatically won after the fall of the last military dictatorship.
“Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary to be able to have dreams” (Fernando Pessoa).
“Nothing is easier than deceiving yourself, because every man believes that what he desires is also true” (Demosthenes).
“We build statues of snow and cry when they melt” (Walter Scott).
A political volcano has erupted in Argentina. The media presents Javier Milei's speech, with cheerful irresponsible indulgence, as an anarcho-capitalist, but it is a neo-fascist candidacy. If Javier Milei were to win, his government would be incompatible with the democratic freedoms dramatically won after the fall of the last military dictatorship. Such a brutal anti-people shock policy is not possible without breaking the backbone of the continent's strongest trade union and people's movement. It cannot be imposed without violence, and therefore without a regime change.
The recent result of the PASO seems to have been totally unexpected. In Brazil, it was an abrupt surprise. There are those who reduce the meaning to a “scolding” vote. There must be a “grain” of truth in this protest idea, but it seems to be much more serious. No one foresaw that such a profound movement of social “tectonic plates” was imminent, and could qualitatively subvert political power relations. Unfortunately, once again, a naive underestimation of the extreme right prevailed, as had already happened with Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Which should, honestly, disturb us, and lead us to ask: why?
As far as we are concerned, it was complicated and controversial. It was very difficult to admit that, after thirteen years of governments led by the PT, but permanent concertation with fractions of the ruling class, the country was fractured by the turn of the “bourgeoisie mass” towards the opposition and the coup d’état, the displacement of the majority of social strata. mediums, exhausted by social resentment, towards anti-PTism, and the division of the working class in the face of the Lava Jato operation offensive criminalizing the left as corrupt. Illusions blind when reality is too cruel.
With regard to the phenomenon Javier Milei and his party La Libertad advances, the best internationalist criterion is to wait for the answers that will come from the Argentine left. After all, one has never seen such frontal antisocial bestiality. A ferocious ultraliberal program, Thatcherism with “44 degrees of fever”, which advocates the privatization of education and public health, the suspension of all social assistance programs, a devastating attack on labor rights and pensions, the defense of unlimited privatizations , free access to widespread weapons and unrestricted support for police violence, revocation of the right to abortion, elimination of the ministries of education, public health, culture, environment, science and technology, dollarization and the end of the Central Bank. Horrible.
The buffoon Javier Milei with his calculatedly disheveled hair, his rehearsed pop histrionics, an exalted rhetoric against everything and everyone, a lot of extremist demagoguery and crazy proposals attracted the votes of millions. Far beyond appearances, disguises, dissimulations, the vote revealed a deep social fracture that must be analyzed and explained.
Even though the first round will only take place at the end of October, and an electoral struggle is yet to be fought, one cannot fail to take seriously the “real and immediate” danger that a fascist will be in the second round. And it would be an unforgivable levity to rule out the possibility that Javier Milei could win the elections. One cannot fight all enemies at the same time with the same intensity. The terrain of tactics is one where a choice has to be made. Nothing is more important than fighting to stop the fascist from winning.
This new reality lights up a red alert for the Argentine and South American left, for two reasons. In the first place, because the possibility of Javier Milei's victory signals the precipitation of an apocalyptic counterrevolutionary offensive against the workers and the people whose outcome is unpredictable and, perhaps, the danger of a historic defeat.
Secondly, because it shows that the fascist threat is still present, even after electoral victories such as those of Gabriel Boric in Chile, Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Lula in Brazil. If the Frente Ampla government led by the PT fails, the danger that the extreme right political and social movement, even without Jair Bolsonaro as a candidate, could dispute power in 2026 is real.
In Argentina, the defeat of Mauricio Macri's government did not bury the right wing. On the contrary, the erosion of the Peronist government headed by Alberto Fernández, in the face of the decay of the social crisis, did not favor the anti-capitalist left. It leveraged the vertiginous conquest of mass audience by the extreme right. Why? Surely, there are “Argentine” national factors that explain why the “pendulum” of the political relationship of forces swung towards neo-fascism, and not towards the left. Nothing fairer than taking stock, identifying responsibilities, and drawing lessons, without dissolving in circular discussions – “they won because we lost” – the assessment of what happened.
But the reality is that the advance of neo-fascism is one of the fundamental features of the international situation ten years ago. Something has changed, and profoundly so. Everything suggests that the stage opened with the capitalist restoration, between 1989/91, which we can call globalization, ended. The world has become more dangerous.
The latest crises confirm that the historical limits of capitalism are narrower. The historical “use by” period of capitalism has shortened. The dangers of long-term economic stagnation, impoverishment, refugee displacement and catastrophic social crisis, global warming, jockeying for world political supremacy, and the rise of fascism mount.
But they are not equivalent, and they do not have the same urgency. In the class struggle, the rhythm of the processes is central, because that is how the practical experience of millions is developed, and the dispute of consciences is made. The fight against the emergence of a fascist party that could come to power is an unavoidable priority. Trump, Marine Le Pen, the growth of AfD in Germany, neither can they be underestimated.
Some “certainties” of the Marxists of the XNUMXth century finally collapsed along the way: today we know more, and we know that it is more difficult. One of the central problems is the degenerate forms of the modern counterrevolution. For Marx and his contemporaries, barbarism was one of the possibilities for the evolution of capitalism, if the socialist revolution did not triumph: but a degraded process such as Nazi-fascism, the imperialist counter-revolution with methods of genocide, was unthinkable.
Unforgettable, for those who have read them, whether they are socialists or not, are the pages in which he explains n'The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with horror, the monstrosities of the regime of the Bonapartist counter-revolution in France, after the defeat of 1848. But the Bonapartism of the XNUMXth century cannot be remotely compared to the horror of the counter-revolution in the XNUMXth century. The same, possibly, can be said even for Lenin who, however, came from a country where pogroms were frequent. If he was not surprised by the declaration of the First World War by modern imperialisms, and its ten million dead, neither did he know the grotesque Nazi-fascist parades and marches, or the horror of the holocaust extermination camps as a method and State policy.
The defeat of Nazi-fascism was among the most extraordinary victories of the workers' and peoples' struggle in the XNUMXth century. World War II was the most important and extraordinary revolutionary war in history. Its outcome defined the second half of the century. From a Marxist point of view, it cannot be reduced to an inter-imperialist struggle for hegemony in the world or for control of the world market. An essentially economistic approach to explaining it, simplifies the differences between the blocs in struggle and ignores the place of Nazi-fascism.
Not only due to the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, and the threat of capitalist restoration and colonization that it prepared, which in itself would qualitatively differentiate it from the First World War, due to the genocide of Jewish ethnic cleansing. For the first time in history, there was an implacable fight between imperialist powers over two political regimes. On the one hand, the most advanced regime conquered by civilization, with the exception of the October regime in its beginnings, bourgeois republican democracy, and on the other hand, the most degenerate, fascism.
The most aberrant and regressive, because its political project went far beyond the crushing of the workers' revolution in Germany: the new Reich demanded the enslavement of entire peoples, such as the Slavs, and the genocide of others, such as the Jews and the gypsies, in addition to the repugnant homophobia turned into a policy of state repression.
Javier Milei has to be defeated.
*Valério Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo) (https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc).
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