The Brooklyn Rail

In the days leading up to the Argentinian elections of October 26, Prime Minister Javier Milei’s fate seemed sealed. “Milei’s dream … is in tatters,” wrote an analyst of the radical left just twenty-four hours before the elections. There were reasons for that statement. Among them were the economy’s stagnation in the last two quarters; the government’s defeats in Parliament; complaints about corruption; the link with drug trafficking; (earlier) the $LIBRA scam;¹ and the growing social discontent due to the fall in workers’ incomes and pensions.

To these issues was added a persistent and increasingly broad demand for dollars. The government first resorted to laundering dollars (producing a festival for the laundering of dirty money); then it used the 20 billion dollars extracted from the IMF, followed by the advance settlement of exports with the reduction of withholdings until mid-year. But the outflow of foreign currency continued, with a central bank with negative reserves. Treasury sales of 2.2 billion dollars were then added; issuance of dollar-linked securities for 5.3 billion dollars; futures sales for 6.7 billion dollars. Everything was devoured by demand, nothing seemed to be enough. It was at this point that Trump and the US Treasury came to Milei’s aid.

Now the sale of US Treasury bills came into play. It is estimated that these interventions amounted to about 400 million dollars a day, totaling approximately 2 billion dollars. They were accompanied by the injection of 7 billion dollars, but demand quickly ate up those dollars as well. However, the intervention of the United States ended up slowing down the run on the peso. The government thus arrived at the elections on US life support.

It is in this framework that Trump’s warnings to Argentines should be considered: “If you don’t vote the right way, we will not give you money.” This matched Milei’s message “If you don’t vote for the LLA [his La Libertad Avanza party], there will be chaos.” This in a country with a long saga of exchange-rate and financial crises, deep recessions, massive asset devaluations, chronic inflation, and episodes of hyperinflation (since the end of the 1960s the Argentine currency lost thirteen zeros). At the same time the working masses progressively lost their traditional ideological and political reference, Peronism. Significantly, the Peronist party Fuerza Patria did not present any alternative to Trump’s blackmail.

The result was success for Milei’s party, with more than 9 million votes, or nearly 40 percent of the total. LLA has increased its base, its territorial organization, and its political weight. He won by one point in the province of Buenos Aires, where fifty days earlier he had lost by fourteen points. He triumphed in Córdoba and Santa Fe, with votes that exceeded 40 percent of the votes. He won with a big advantage in the city of Buenos Aires. And he won in Mendoza, Entre Ríos, Misiones, Chaco, Salta, Jujuy, San Luis, Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, and Tierra del Fuego. LLA obtained 64 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 13 in the Senate.

In second place, Peronism with Fuerza Patria and allied lists prevailed in Catamarca, La Rioja, Formosa, La Pampa, San Juan, Santa Cruz, and Tucumán: in total, 30 percent. Outside of LLA and Fuerza Patria were, with almost 25 percent of the votes at the national level, the Provincias Unidas group, the FIT-U (almost 900,000 votes), and provincial parties.

The other noteworthy fact is that 11.47 million people did not go to vote, almost 36 percent of eligible voters. In addition, 5.3 percent of voters cast blank ballots or annulled their votes. But, overall, Milei’s electoral triumph means that his government is now the bet of businessmen, the mainstream media, the IMF, international banks (JPMorgan), and the US government. Everything indicates that a scenario of greater unity is opening up in the capitalist class and its parties, with support, for now, from Trump. Specifically, Milei is expected to be a unifying factor, to sustain the fiscal adjustment and the “pending” reforms—first of all, of labor relations.  

Trump’s blackmail is a particular expression of the pressure put on dependent and backward countries by both globalized and national capital, by international organizations, and by the most powerful states. In other words, it is not peculiar to Trump and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (even if they are despicable people), but expresses the nature of capitalist exploitation. Capital is, essentially, the power of the owner over those who possess only labor power. Transferred to the level of relations between countries, internationalized capital is power over backward and dependent states. Decades ago, in Argentina, the threat was, “If you don’t vote properly, the military will come and democracy will end,” and, “If you vote to the left, there will be civil war and chaos.” Now the message is, “If you don’t vote well, the country’s economy will explode and we will have hyperinflation,” etc.

The government and the press have announced that one of the first reforms to be undertaken by the government is the labor reform. Among the measures being considered: reduction of compensation; its payment in installments of up to twelve months; facilitating hiring and firing; limits on the right to strike (with the excuse of “essential services”); extension of the working day; the possibility that employers fragment the vacation period; the possibility of company-established contracts; wage increases conditional on increased productivity.

These proposals are being developed by government teams in collaboration with law firms, some linked to large economic groups and business associations. All indications are that there is substantial class agreement and unity around these objectives, and not only from large companies. Broad sectors of the medium and small business community agree. The conflict is a class one.

 

Workers’ struggles

In the months leading up to the elections, various left-wing publications argued that the government was battered and even cornered by mass mobilizations, such as those to defend the public university; in solidarity with the Garrahan Hospital workers; against cuts in disability funding; supporting the teachers’ strikes; retirees’ demonstrations; against the Palestinian genocide; in defense of industrial jobs and against layoffs. However, the overall picture suggests a more moderate characterization. Notably, according to the Ministry of Human Capital’s Secretariat for Labor, Employment, and Social Security:

The level of labor conflict in the private sector during the second half of 2024 has been the lowest in the last nineteen years. There were fourteen conflicts over unemployment on average per month during the second half of 2024, the lowest number since 2006. Compared to the peak of forty-seven conflicts in 2014, this represents a decrease of 71%.

Likewise, the monthly average number of striking workers has been 15,155, which represents the minimum verified during the same period and a drastic decrease compared to 2008, when the number amounted to more than 100,000. In 2024, 42,575 individual days not worked due to unemployment were also recorded, one of the lowest figures in the historical series in contrast to the 180,000 days in 2009.

In July 2025, the same Ministry reported that, “there was a reduction of 10 percent compared to the same month of the previous year and a drop of 22 percent compared to May 2025.” Regarding the number of striking workers, there was a decrease of 34 percent year-on-year and 61 percent in relation to May 2025. As for individual days not worked, they registered a drop of 28% compared to June 2024 and 57 percent compared to May 2025, totaling 338,721.

The private sector saw a decrease in all three indicators:

Strikers fell by 94%, days not worked decreased by 73%, and conflicts over unemployment fell by 44%, which expanded the state’s share of total conflicts from 67% in June 2024 to 78% in June 2025. In contrast, in the public sphere there was a 1% decrease in the number of strikers and a 15% drop in the number of days not worked.

On the other hand, and very clearly in recent months, the mobilizations of the unemployed and social movements have decreased in number and massiveness. This situation cannot be explained alone, or even mainly, by the “betrayal” of the union leaders.

 

Peronism’s loss of power

The vote obtained by the Peronists cannot be described as a “disaster.” More than seven million votes is not a negligible figure, but it is a point on a slow downward slope. After all, Peronism had almost 2 million fewer votes than in 2023. And in some places of traditional influence, the performance was decisively bad. In Salta, Jujuy, and Misiones, Fuerza Patria came third, with less than 20% of the votes. There is therefore a process of unraveling militancy and support. In addition, we are faced with a conspicuous absence of any program and strategy that can attract and convince the masses of workers.

How are we to explain why—in the face of the impasse to which Peronism has led the working masses—they have turned to the right, or consented by not voting, to the advance of the ultra-right and of the employers’ parties that are carrying out an offensive on wages, pensions, labor regimes, education, and health? Now millions of workers have voted for LLA and for parties and candidates who are sympathetic to LLA’s ideas, or willing to collaborate with it. Millions did not go to vote because they see no way out, they are discouraged and disappointed. And why is the left not capitalizing on the political and ideological crisis?

Part of the explanation is that in the eyes of the working masses, in Argentina as elsewhere in the world, there is no apparent alternative to the capitalist system. In particular, the fall of the USSR and the rest of the “actually-existing socialisms,” and the turn of China and Vietnam to capitalism, have played a crucial role in producing this idea. This was aggravated by the disaster to which Chavismo has led Venezuela. Almost eight million Venezuelan emigrants have “certified” that socialism is a catastrophe. To which we may add the failure of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, the restoration of a dictatorship in Nicaragua, and the crisis and stagnation of the Cuban economy, to cite some of the most relevant cases.

Many comrades on the left, however, think that it is enough to call for struggle, shout a few slogans (such as “Do not pay the IMF!”), and present themselves as consistent nationalists, to reverse the situation. But this is not the case. In periods of confusion, of retreat from socialist ideals, even of discouragement, it is necessary to accompany social and political struggles with criticism that goes to the bone, to the essential questions.

One of the most widespread ideas among Argentinian leftists these days, for instance, is that with Trump’s bailout of Milei’s government, Argentina has become a colony of the United States. There are facts that seem to support this characterization. To begin with, as we saw, the US Treasury is now openly intervening in Argentina, in the foreign exchange market and in monetary policy. It is assumed that many economic and political conditions will accompany Milei’s bailout, such as advantages for US investors in mining, gas, and oil. Another demand is that Argentine laboratories pay for the patents of US laboratories. Washington and the IMF demand a political agreement to advance labor and tax reforms and strengthen bourgeois governance. More strategically, in the geopolitical field, the US is asking Argentina to reduce its ties with China. That is why the Financial Times speaks of President Donald Trump’s “desire to push China out of Latin America, an area he regards as the US’s legitimate sphere of influence. China has indeed expanded trade and investment in Washington’s ‘back yard’ hugely over the past two decades, as successive US administrations looked the other way.” All this is topped by Trump’s intention to dictate to Argentines which candidates they should vote for from now on, under the threat of cutting off “generous aid” from the United States.

Yet a distinction must be made between a colony and a dependent country. The former is the domination of backward countries by powerful ones, through violence and the occupation of territory. It means that repression is exercised on the native population as a whole, to the point of genocide (as is happening now in Palestine). Consequently, a relationship of exploitation is structured around looting, pillage, and extra-economic coercion of the dominated country.

Trump’s intervention in Argentina, in contrast, follows the pattern of dependency of a backward but politically independent country. It was the Argentine government itself that requested the intervention of the United States, with the support, or the consent, of a good part of the Creole ruling class. Conditions are imposed via swaps and credits, a reflection of US economic power; military means are not imposed. Exploitation occurs through the employment of wage-labor by capital.

Another example is provided by the loan made by the United States to Mexico in 1995 (responding to the “Tequila crisis” triggered by a massive outflow of liquid capital). The US Treasury contributed US $20 billion, along with disbursements from the IMF and other organizations. In return, Mexico had to adopt “orthodox” economic policies: the VAT increased from 10 to 15%; exchange rate policy became more flexible; the Mexican government gave as collateral for the loans the income of Pemex (the state oil company); and bank debts were nationalized. At the same time, thousands of companies went bankrupt, and wages fell. But all this happened without Mexico ceasing to be a formally sovereign country; it did not become a colony of the United States.

We emphasize that national liberation—a break with the colonial relationship and the right to form one’s own government—does not, in principle, question the capitalist mode of production. Latin America gained independence from Spain and Portugal within the framework of incipient capitalism. African and Asian nations became independent in the twentieth century, in most cases, without affecting capitalist relations (the most important exception was China, between 1948 and the early 1980s). In Europe, too, there were countries that achieved national self-determination without going through socialist or proletarian revolutions. Norway, for example, seceded from Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century. That is why the struggle for national liberation tends to bring together all the social sectors of the oppressed country (except the agents and collaborators of the occupying power). That is why it does not eliminate the pressure and de facto interference of internationalized capital on the dependent nation.

We should not lose sight of the fact that, while acting as a subordinate partner, the capitalist class of a dependent and backward country like Argentina is not a puppet of Washington, or of the IMF. It is not a mere intermediary, collecting commissions and bribes, of foreign or globalized capital. Its bargaining power is based on the exploitation of “its” working class. It tries to act according to its own interests. For example, Argentine soybean and corn producers are not going to stop doing business with China because of what Trump and the Republicans in the US say. And the decision to continue the outflow of capital from Argentina in the days following the announcement of the swap, contrary to what Bessent expected, cannot be explained by the notion that “they are puppets of imperialism.” Even the balance of power between China and the US opens up spaces for bargaining and negotiation between the factions of the more nationally-centered bourgeoisie.

 

Limits of national sovereignty

Given the internationalization of capitalist economies, it is less and less possible for a backward country to develop “behind closed doors.” In the 1920s, the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin speculated that Russia could develop without the world market. Leon Trotsky rightly told him that this was like wanting to have a Moscow winter without the cold. Already a hundred years ago it was impossible to develop “socialism in one country” within Russia. Today there is even less chance of developing capitalism (or socialism) in a single autarkic country. For this reason, the demand to break with the interference of internationalized capital is the same as demanding the abolition of capitalism.

Ending dependency means establishing internationalist socialism. It is not conceivable as a national task. This is the ultimate reason why bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalism cannot present a fundamental alternative, in Argentina as in other backward and dependent countries. Recent examples from Latin America include the failures of nationalism in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as well as the impasse into which the Cuban bureaucratic state led its country. None of these regimes has been able to escape from the world market. Even the millions of Venezuelan, Cuban, and Nicaraguan emigrants are an expression of the international character that the struggle for liberation from exploitation and oppression must assume. In the purely economic sphere, this dependence shows in the importance of remittances from emigrants to their countries of origin (in some Central American countries they represent more than 25 percent of GDP).

Nor was Argentina under the governments of Néstor Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Alberto Fernández able to advance on the so-often proclaimed path of national liberation. An economy with rising current-account deficits, with demand sustained by a fiscal deficit that was increasingly difficult to finance, with uncontrolled inflation, with weak investment in technology and infrastructure, ended up in stagnation, a currency crisis, and renewed capital flight. This is how the stage was set for the imposition of the programs of the ultra-right, the economic and media establishment, and international organizations. As post-Keynesians have pointed out, the policies of bastard Keynesianism—invariably presented as progressive—lead to crises that legitimize the discourses of the right and the ultra-right in the eyes of the masses.

But we should not forget the concessions that, time and again, bourgeois nationalism makes to the logic of globalized capital. After all, in Argentina the most widespread program of privatizations and market advancement was carried out in the 1990s by the National Justicialist Movement, with the support of a good number of the old “national-liberation militants” of the 1970s (including the Kirchners). Governments that claim to be nationalist have issued debt subject to the courts of New York and London, they have granted concessions to US oil companies with clauses that were not made public, and their politicians and leaders have intertwined with the circuits of international finance capital to launder money from the looting of public coffers. To which we can add the governors and legislators, also from the “nationalist field,” who in the last two years facilitated or supported Milei’s measures in Parliament. The hard truth is that ending the dependence and domination of globalized capital is only possible by ending capitalism.