What does it mean that daily debt is the most widespread reality of the Argentine population? Debts to buy food and medicine. Debts to pay rent. Debts to pay pre-existing debts. Debts to finance any emergency of daily life. Only by fully understanding the training in precariousness that accustoms us to prolonged inflation and the war against the income of those who live from their work, will it be possible to understand the construction of intimacy with the financial company through debt. Debt, infiltrated into life as a survival tool, explains the resonance capacity of financial blackmail as a political mechanism experimented in recent weeks.
The fetish notion of “financial freedom,” as the promise of future business for an over-indebted population, has become a keystone of the far-right in the Argentine government, capable of synthesizing new financial technologies such as virtual wallets, dailydollarization (as a safeguard against inflation) and the end of all exchange regulation through a new cycle of debt, first with the IMF and now directly with the US Treasury. “Financial freedom,” despite its name, is organized into a continuous with the conservative restoration: it is accompanied by a state anti-feminism, which allows authoritarian neoliberalism to be exacerbated according to fascist methods, as a war declared and supported with public resources against gender, which ranges from the cancellation of almost all policies for the prevention of gender violence to the president’s verbal and digital violence against journalists and politicians. It is through state anti-feminism, which allows violence against women, lesbians and trans people, that the government intensifies the neoliberal authoritarian project to the point of organizing it according to the fascist logic of the impoverishment and criminalization of certain populations (pensioners, people with disabilities and migrants are the latest sources of attack).
Milei’s victory in the mid-term elections in October has relaunched his profile as the favorite politician of the American advance in Latin America. This was the plan. Trump was the one who won the election by offering 20 billion dollars. His intervention was not only financial, but political. A sentence of his published the day after the victory in all the Argentine newspapers served as a summary: “The United States earned a lot of money from the elections.” The elections as a business summarize a previous political-financial operation: the promise of an outlay by the US Treasury as a “rescue operation” of the Argentine economy from a new inflationary crisis.
Trump’s message was spread in the media and on social networks that if the government had not won there would be no bailout. Why did it work? Because this financial blackmail was exercised as a threat to a precarious and over-indebted stability. Is greater chaos possible than already exists, in which prices vary every week, income devaluation is greater every month and illegal work is an everyday reality? Yes, everything can always get worse if inflation and the dollar get out of control. Financial extortion has been fundamental and for this reason we must underline the strategic impact that finance implies in daily life. This political path ended in November with the signing of an agreement between the United States and Argentina, which provides benefits for the installation of data centers, which require enormous quantities of water and cold.
Household debt is a record (one third of the population already owes more than they earn in three months), which is why the “financial stress” that 7 out of 10 Argentines say they experience is part of the language of the media. Added to this is the brutal deregulation of the economy: the prices of rent, medicines and basic services increase month after month. This economic fragility is existential fragility. The anarcho-libertarian project is an authoritarian capitalism because it forces us to compete permanently in the race against impoverishment and, in this task, the formulas for the annihilation of some populations become a lubricant for “economies of hate”. The ways in which precariousness is managed are a field of open dispute: they can be a key subject on which the authoritarianism of competitiveness grows or a terrain of political organization to insist on forms of solidarity, cooperatives, unions.
The “libertarian fantasies” of the Milei government bet on the idea that it is possible to live alone without depending on anyone (protecting your home, your family and your water from scarcity as a way to process the catastrophic future). Milei’s offer and gamble cannot be understood without a third term: scam. This is what Milei did from his official account to promote and ask for investments in a meme-coin called Libra: that is, a cryptocurrency inspired by a meme. The scam boils down to pursuing an abstract idea of freedom called “financial freedom”. It is based on the way in which financial instruments have spread as an aid against precariousness and the devaluation of incomes, following the IMF adjustment program since 2018. It adheres to a subjectivity that must make do as a permanent “entrepreneur” to the point of consecrating itself as a “speculator of its own survival”.
Meanwhile, the government takes its time and gives stability to financial companies without managing to stabilize the crisis. This instability functions as a discourse of legitimacy to accelerate reforms (labor, pension and tax), decrees (for example, for compulsory debt collection via electronic wallets) and the handing over of territories to foreign companies (in favor of lithium mining and extractivism).
In global terms, the “financial freedom” strategy is linked to propaganda to obtain income in the face of devaluing wages and, in particular, pensions. That is to say: when faced with an uncertain future in old age, protection becomes financial freedom. But in Argentina that uncertainty is now. For this reason, individual responsibility, translated as freedom and independence, finds in the tools of finance the language to displace issues such as impoverishment, inequality and, above all, uncertainty. This increases where the devaluation of income is organized as a real war against the population, to which the logic of cruelty is articulated. Organizing the challenge to the cruelty that uses finance as a weapon of mass colonization is a difficult but inevitable task to prove liberation in a capitalism that only bets on war.
