It’s Class, Stupid!
Argentine police repressing retirees in Buenos Aires, Sept. 2024. X/ @AnibalGarzon
By: Atilio Boron
September 13, 2024 Hour: 9:47 am
In Argentina, the “caste” is actually the set of officials of capital perched in the structure of the state.
In Argentina, “the caste” has become the interpretative key to which both politicians and commentators of the turbulent juncture through which national life is going through appeal. The electoral victory of a neo-fascist coalition presided over by Javier Milei, a laboratory product manufactured to capture the prevailing social anger, installed “the caste” as the synthesis of all the ills afflicting the country.
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History, however, demonstrated the little usefulness of that category because whoever, like the President, made use and abuse of it to fulminate with the fury of a prophet the political class and its uses and customs soon became one more member of the much hated ”caste.”
He learned, or was taught, in a short period of time all its tricks and adopted its worst methods, which he now practices with undisguised fruition. Blackmail, corruption, the blatant buying and selling of wills and favors of governors, legislators and pseudo journalists are now commonplace as well as the most brutal repression when the victims of his lethal economic experiment have the audacity to publicly and peacefully manifest their discontent.
But let us go a little further. The “caste” is actually the set of officials of capital perched in the structure of the state, in its three branches: the president and his cabinet and high public administrators in the Executive; legislators, deputies and senators in the Legislative, and judges and prosecutors in the Judiciary.
All of them conveniently leveraged from the outside by the mass media of “confusion and disinformation” (Noam Chomsky dixit) concentrated in a handful of anti-democratic oligopolies, necessary accomplices of the misdeeds and crimes of “the caste”. Of course there are some exceptions within each of these categories, but they are a minority.
Therefore, “the caste” is the convenient abbreviation of the group of employees of the ruling class, that is to say, of big capital, national and foreign. The ruinous policy of President Milei has nothing to do with his alleged dispute with “the caste” but is the natural outcome of his extensive career as an employee or consultant of some of the largest foreign companies, such as HSBC bank; or national ones, as Corporación América presided by the local tycoon Eduardo Eurnekián. His decisions as a chief of state obey linearly to the structural interests of the dominant bloc of Argentine capitalism, strongly intertwined with the largest transnationals of the world economy, behind which is the US imperialism.
That is why Milei has shown an irresistible vocation to become the empire’s biggest lackey in the region, antagonizing presidents of sister countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Mexico and actively militating against Latin American integration, not to mention the insults he has reserved for the government of the People’s Republic of China. None of this is accidental: weakening Argentina’s ties with Brazil and China is one of Washington’s strategic objectives in the region, and Milei is a faithful executor of this unpatriotic design.
Furthermore, he has involved our country in the war in Ukraine and invited none other than the hypercorrupt Volodimir Zelenski to his presidential inauguration ceremony. Not only that: with its unworthy colonial submission, Milei validates NATO’s presence in the Malvinas Islands; sets aside the claim for our sovereignty over that part of the national territory; buys F-16 planes discarded by NATO and pays an exorbitant price for them; keeps silent, like Washington, before the genocide of the Zionist regime in Gaza and moves the headquarters of the Argentine embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, where only the United States, Papua New Guinea and Guatemala have their embassies.
Given all the above, what “caste” are we talking about? It is the class, not “the caste”! What we have in Argentina is a “colonial-fascist” government, rabidly classist, oligarchic, at the service of the most concentrated fractions of national and international capital, period! Its mandate is to enrich the richest (“I am coming to enlarge your pockets”, said Milei with total brazenness at a recent meeting with major industrialists); to increase business concentration by liquidating the SMEs; to enforce labor and social reforms through the super-exploitation of the popular classes increasingly impoverished during his government and to practice a slow and ferocious genocide -without bloodshed but equally deadly- against the elderly, depriving them of their medicines, medical care and access to the minimum supplies for a miserable life.
Does this not constitute the legal form of a crime: “abandonment of persons”, foreseen in article 106 of the Penal Code, as was recalled by Congresswoman Gisela Marziotta during the last session of the lower chamber? That and no other is the project of the libertarians (a true “elite of outlaws”, as Harold Laski called the leading ranks of fascism) who have taken over Argentina.
That is why they are singing victory, while Milei continue to lie as no other president -I repeat: none- has ever done in Argentine history. The “outlaws” are celebrating and aggrandized. For the time being.
Autor: Atilio Boron
Fuente: Pagina 12
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