Jose Antonio Kast, a far-right figure, won Chile’s recent presidential elections in December. His victory in the second round with 58.2 percent of the vote against his opponent from the Communist Party, Jeanette Jara, consolidates the shift on the Chilean right from mainstream conservatism to a new brand of Trump-inspired politics.
Jara served as minister for work and social provision in the current government of Gabriel Boric of the Frente Amplio (FA, or Broad Front). In this role, she implemented mild pro-labour reforms such as the 40-hour week and wage and pension increases, which helped her become the centre-left Unity for Chile coalition’s candidate.
Boric’s presidency is the backdrop to the election. A left-wing former student leader, he came to office in 2021 in the wake of a mass social rebellion, which occurred two years earlier. That movement culminated in the then-president, a conservative billionaire, agreeing to redraft the constitution, which was a relic of the Pinochet dictatorship. 
Boric and other leaders in his coalition, which included the Communist Party, played a crucial role in demobilising the movement and channelling its aspirations into their electoral campaign. Two years later, on a platform of higher taxes on the rich and greater social spending, he won the presidency.
How Chile went from such a moment in 2019 to a victory for the far-right can only be explained by the failure of Boric and the FA to implement the demands of the rebellion. 
By the time a constitutional convention put a new document to a vote in late 2022, there was a chasm between the demands that millions had fought for in the streets and what was actually in the draft. Some of those demands included the nationalisation of key resource industries, land rights for indigenous groups, an overhaul of the loathed private pension system, increased education spending and a range of other socially progressive measures. But even the FA had voted against some of these measures being constitutionally enshrined. As such, 62 percent of the population voted to reject the draft. 
A second draft, which further rejected key demands of the movement, was again rejected by 56 percent of the population. Boric’s response was to abandon any further constitutional process and make further concessions to the right. This political trajectory was entirely predictable. As I wrote in Red Flag after his election in 2021:
“While the victory of Boric is welcome in so far as it represents a rejection of the legacy of the dictatorship and a repudiation of the attempt to elevate a Trumpian, Bolsonarist figure, it is clear that the president-elect is both unable and unwilling to fulfil the demands of the October 2019 movement ... “[W]avering and concessions on the part of Boric will likely cede more political ground to the right, which, despite losing the elections, has a newfound sense of confidence.”
This outcome was the logical conclusion of a political project that rejects mobilising the working class, instead channelling popular sentiment into an electoral campaign. Boric and the FA sought only minor reforms to capitalism and thoroughly rejected the self-activity of the working class. 
Once in government, they faced the pressures that come with running capitalism. They were now responsible for overseeing a system in which a tiny minority rules over the vast majority. This meant ensuring a stable environment for profitable investment, cordial relations with the US and attacking anyone who challenged this state of affairs. 
All of this runs totally counter to the vision that millions of Chileans fought for in 2019 and then elected Boric to implement. Is it any wonder then, that after such betrayal and demoralisation, the ground would become fertile for the far right? 
A similar story has been playing out across Latin America over recent years. Parties with the same program and politics as Boric have been tossed out by the electorate and replaced with a more radical and right-wing replacement. 
In Argentina, a self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, is implementing one of the most vicious austerity programs in recent memory. In El Salvador, the authoritarian Nayib Bukele has turned his country into a gulag. President Daniel Noboa is following suit in Ecuador and wants to base US troops in the country. And former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving 27 years in prison for attempting his own 6 January-style “insurrection” to maintain power, which had support in the top echelons of the military.
Several governments are now some of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, lauding the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Trump, for his part, is more than willing to support them, such as when he offered a US$20 billion lifeline to Milei’s government shortly before the mid-term elections to help stabilise the economy and improve his electoral prospects. Given recent events in Venezuela and El Salvador, it’s not hard to imagine a return to the strong-man military regimes that ruled the region in the 1960s and 1970s.
Over recent decades, Latin America has given rise to many Borics—left-wing reformists who ride the tide of class struggle to power. But the region is now turning to the far right in large part because of the failure of these governments to improve people’s lives. 
With Trump open about his intentions to shore up US domination over the Western hemisphere and the far right on the march, the need for an anti-capitalist political alternative to reformism has never been greater.
Tom Sullivan will present the session <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/program/franco-and-pinochet-military-fascism">Franco and Pinochet: military fascism?</a> at the Marxism conference in Melbourne, 2-5 April.

Tom Sullivan

Another Latin American country turns to the far right

President Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is just the latest move in a long and bloody history of US imperialism in Latin America. As US leaders prepare to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary this year, there is little to celebrate for the region south of its border, which Yale University academic Greg Grandin has aptly labelled the “workshop” of the US empire. 
When the thirteen former British colonies on the North American east coast formed the United States in the late eighteenth century, the dominant power on the American continent was the Spanish empire. But it was an empire in decay and, by the early 1820s, a series of independence wars ended over three centuries of Spanish rule in most of Latin America (as well as Portuguese rule in Brazil). The defeat of the Spanish, however, only intensified imperialist competition in the region as other European powers saw opportunities on the resource-rich continent. The US entered the contest with its Monroe Doctrine: a declaration of US hegemony in the region, ruling it off limits to the European powers. Through a series of treaties it was fairly successful in stopping any direct recolonisation of the area.
The threat of European imperialism was one of the main factors guiding US actions in the region in the early nineteenth century. The other was slavery. From the time of independence, the US southern states had maintained slavery in the face of a northern abolitionist movement by incorporating new slave states into the union. This gave rise to a strong movement in the South pushing for expansion into Mexico and Central America. The strategy bore fruit with the Mexican–American war of the late 1840s, US victory ending with the incorporation of the land roughly from Texas to California—more than half of Mexico’s territory. The US emerged from the war as a true continental power, its borders now stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
After the defeat of the southern confederacy in the 1860s, US imperialism in Latin America took on a different form. Territorial expansion was no longer its primary objective. With slave labour abolished, the forces of industrial capitalism were unleashed. Vast plains to the west, enthusiastic investors, and millions of former slaves and impoverished white workers provided the three essential ingredients for capitalist development: land, labour, and capital. The result was that the US in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced rapid capitalist development. Within a few decades, it became the world’s largest industrial and agricultural producer.
But underneath the growth hid a dangerous contradiction. The productive capacity of the US economy grew so large that by the end of the century the domestic market could no longer absorb its output. Rapid growth, consequently, was accompanied by a series of deep recessions due to severe falls in prices as supply so quickly outpaced demand. The expansion of the post-civil war period, therefore, was also a period of extreme crisis for the US ruling class. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge, in an 1898 speech, acknowledged the problem: 
“American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours ... Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? ... The power that rules the Pacific ... is the power that rules the world. And, with the Philippines, that power is and will forever be the American Republic.”
This is the background to the Spanish–American war of the late 1890s. The US could never reach its true imperial potential while the European powers denied it access to certain markets and held colonies. The defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire, which still held important Caribbean islands such as Cuba and Pacific islands like the Philippines, was the pre-condition for the US entering a new period of imperialism in the early twentieth century. As one lawyer, Brooks Adams, wrote: “This war is the first gun in the battle for the ownership of the world”.
Victory in the war in 1898 established Cuba as nominally independent but an effective US colony. The only reason it did not become the 51st state was because the US sugar industry opposed the additional competition that would have come from Cuban sugar being sold tariff-free in the US market. The Philippines, however, was the real prize. The US occupied the country until the end of the second world war, crushing several independence movements.
With dominance secured in both the Atlantic and Pacific, a central priority became the construction of a canal linking the two oceans, allowing US firms privileged access to a key global trade route. The only problem was that the proposed site lay in Panama, which at the time was a province of Colombia rather than an independent state. When Colombia rejected a proposal to lease the territory, the US threatened military action and backed a separatist movement. A treaty was then swiftly concluded with a small group of Panamanian elites, granting US control over the canal in exchange for diplomatic recognition. This period, beginning with the Spanish–American war, opened a period of even more aggressive US imperialism. The supposedly peace-loving liberal President Woodrow Wilson expressed the sentiment in 1907: 
“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.” 
Wilson’s words quickly became true. As Sydney Lens writes in his book The Forging of the American Empire: 
“By 1913 ... the United States had gained control of the tin industry in Bolivia, copper in Chile and Peru, and meat packing in Argentina and Paraguay. Its economic role was still distinctly secondary to Britain in that part of the world, but the American star was rising. J.P. Morgan and W.R. Grace operated the Chilean-Andean railroad, and American firms were making inroads into river transportation in Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. John Bull [England] was already outpaced for the trade of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, and being pressed in Peru and Ecuador ... By making the Caribbean an “American lake” the United States guaranteed its dominance over the banana industry of Panama and Guatemala, the coffee industry of Haiti and El Salvador, the sugar industry of the Dominican Republic.”
And when economic means failed, military force was always available. In 1915, the US invaded Haiti because it would not cede control of its customs houses, resulting in a nineteen-year occupation. A year later, it invaded the Dominican Republic. A 1922 report from the US Congress, while the occupation was ongoing, admitted that “homes were burned; natives were killed; tortures and cruelties committed; and ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s horrible concentration camps were established”.
But for the US rulers, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of the country’s rise. In the twenty years after the Spanish–American war, US manufacturing output increased six-fold. The two world wars further accelerated this trajectory. As the Cold War began and the European powers lost the last remnants of their empires, US control over Latin America was stronger than it had ever been.
Despite US hegemony, however, Latin America was one of the regions in which Soviet influence reached furthest. Through local communist parties, Russia established itself in some countries within the working class and the left. In other cases, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, pro-Moscow groups took state power. In the post-war period, therefore, the battle to maintain Latin America under US domination against Soviet influence became the lens through which foreign policy planners viewed the region. As US diplomat and the great theoriser of Soviet containment, George Kennan, said in 1948: “We have half the world’s wealth, but only 6 percent of its population. Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.
That “pattern of relationships” in Latin America took the form of direct US military interventions (including biological and chemical weapons attacks, and forced starvation through the poisoning of crops), backing military coups, sponsoring right-wing death squads, and plunging entire countries into years-long civil wars. 
In 1944, a popular revolution in Guatemala overthrew a dictatorship and led to the election of a reformist government. But after ten years and subsequent democratic elections in which Jacobo Arbenz was elected, the US had had enough. This was particularly the case when the interests of the US United Fruit Company were threatened. Arbenz initiated a mild agrarian reform program, expropriated only unused land and offering compensation to the owners. The land reform program, consequently, had virtually zero impact on the United Fruit Company. Nonetheless, in 1954, the US orchestrated a coup to overthrow Arbenz. The military and paramilitary units unleashed horrendous violence upon the civilian population, murdering, raping and torturing thousands.
The Arbenz government was what US scholar Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: any government or movement that, even in modest fashion, tries to improve the lives of ordinary people, is a threat to US interests because it offers the example of an alternative. This idea took on increased importance for the US after the Cuban revolution in 1959. When the forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew a US-backed dictator 90 miles from Florida, it set off major alarm bells for US foreign policy planners. Two years later, when those same rebels declared themselves to be communists and allied themselves with the Soviet Union, the US decided to make an example of Cuba. A strict trade embargo was placed on the island and, in 1961, the CIA trained a group of right-wing mercenaries to invade and overthrow the government. Although it failed, a clear message had been sent to the entire continent: this was the price of defiance.
The problem for the US, however, was that the Cuban revolution inspired the Latin American left. In nearly every country, guerilla groups formed with the goal of repeating some variation of the Cuban revolution. This combined with the radical period of the 1960s and 1970s, in which a series of urban mass movements developed across the continent. In some cases, the movements toppled governments, both democratic and dictatorship. In response, the US unleashed its infamous death squads in Central America and backed military regimes in South America, such as Chile.
Nicaragua was a prime example. Its case goes back to the early 1930s, when President Roosevelt, under the “good neighbour” policy, supported a military coup that brought Anastasio Somoza to power. He and his two sons established a family dynasty that ruled for 43 years. Nicaragua suffered a particularly violent fate because it was the only other country after Cuba in which a left-wing guerilla group actually won state power. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, financially and politically backed by Castro, won mass support among the peasantry and working class and played the leading role in the revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. 
When the Sandinistas took power, they gave land to the peasantry, expanded healthcare and education, and lifted a big group of the population out of poverty. As a result, Washington decided that Nicaraguans had to be punished. It was another case of the “threat of a good example”. When President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the US became uncompromisingly committed to the violent overthrow of the Sandinista government. The CIA trained opposition paramilitaries and by early 1982 had launched airstrikes in the country. Despite the Sandinistas holding and winning elections in 1984, they lost in 1990. After a decade of civil war and more than 30,000 lives lost, they voluntarily gave up power to a US-backed candidate.
The early decades of the 21st century in Latin America gave rise to the so-called pink tide. Across the continent, left-wing, reforming leaders won elections on the promise of wealth redistribution to the poor and the working class. Many governments achieved significant improvements in quality of life for millions of people, largely thanks to China’s vast demand for Latin America’s resources. But the economics of this model were undercut around 2011 as China’s growth began to slow, leading many left governments, like the Workers’ Party in Brazil, to implement austerity. While some were prepared to challenge US economic control in the region, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who partially nationalised the oil industry, they were all bound to the logic of capitalism and the necessary alliances with imperial powers that stems from it. As such, the independence from the US that some of them won was replaced by reliance on China.
Remembering the bloody history of the United States in Latin America is essential in light of Washington’s latest criminality in Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves. With China rapidly catching the US economically and militarily, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza having laid bare the sham of international law, there is little need for Trump to cloak US imperialism in the language of “democracy” and “liberty”. The might makes right imperialism of the early twentieth century is returning.

The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America

The US has launched airstrikes against Venezuela, kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro, and is attempting a regime change—although at this point the government still stands. The order for this naked display of gangster imperialism came from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club for the one percent, where just days earlier he auctioned a portrait of Jesus for US$2.75 million and said his new year’s resolution was “peace on Earth”. 
There can be no peace with the Washington regime enforcing order. On every continent, military bases, CIA stations and multinational companies are engaged in a global war to continue or expand US domination. Extortion and terrorism are the norm for this rogue state. But this latest act is so brazen, so arrogant, that it beggars belief. This is the lawlessness of a criminal syndicate; the act of a mob-boss state.
Regime change in Venezuela has been a long-held goal of US foreign policy planners since the left-wing Hugo Chavez won the presidency in 1999 and initiated a program of wealth redistribution towards the poor and the working class. The country’s oil wealth underpinned the new president’s program. With the world’s largest known reserves, Chavez partially nationalised the sector. He and his successor Maduro increasingly turned to China as Washington turned the screws, including signing deals to sell oil at below world market prices.
Trump’s actions must be understood in the context of intensifying imperialist tensions between the United States and China. For Washington, the world’s largest oil reserves in a region it considers its “backyard” being sold at cut-price rates to its principal geopolitical rival was scandalous. This was part of the motivation for the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, when Chavez was detained for two days but ultimately failed. It also inspired the first Trump administration’s recognition of little-known politician Juan Guaido as the country’s “true” president. Guaido unsuccessfully called for the military to oust Maduro in a coup and publicly supported a US invasion.
While oil is important in US calculations, Maduro’s ouster is part of a broader attempt to shore up the Western hemisphere under US domination. Many governments have been overthrown in this region purely for not toeing the US line and displaying some concern for their own citizens’ wellbeing. Also, the region is home to crucial natural resources and has gradually been slipping out of US control. Such a brazen move to oust the leader of a country that has forged closer ties to China and Russia sends a clear message about what the US is prepared to do to maintain its hegemony.
Why now? Regional dynamics are important. The first decade and a half of the 21st century was dubbed the “pink tide”, as left-wing or left-leaning governments came to power across the continent. These leaders often used Chinese demand for their natural resources to lift millions of people out of poverty. But this model began to break down around 2011 when Chinese economic growth began to slow. Many of pink tide leaders turned to austerity and authoritarianism. 
Over the last decade, the political pendulum in the region has tipped back to the right. But it was not the same right as before the pink tide. Today, it is a hardened and radicalised right, inspired by Trump. Such governments are in power in Argentina, El Salvador, Bolivia and just won elections in Chile. 
Crucially, there is also a government-in-waiting in Venezuela. Since Chavez’s first election victory, Venezuela’s far right have openly supported US intervention. Now, they have finally got their wish. At the time of writing, it’s unclear how much, if any, of the US’s actions were coordinated with Venezuela’s far-right leaders and dissident military officers. 
Should they end up in power, however, the plan is clear. Their most prominent leader, Maria Corina Machado, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, recently summed it up: “We will bring rule of law. We will open markets. We will have security for foreign investment and a transparent massive privatisation program that is waiting for you.”
That’s the “peace on Earth” that Trump, and apparently the Nobel committee, desire: a fire sale of public assets to predatory US companies, and a government pliant to Western corporate and geopolitical interests.
Many questions remain unanswered. The role of the Venezuelan military looms large. Its top echelons are deeply integrated into the Venezuelan capitalist class, running important sections of the economy. Along with Venezuela’s large military budget, this has underpinned their loyalty to the government for many years. It is unclear how the leading generals will respond to Maduro’s ouster, but voluntarily handing over their control of the world’s largest oil reserves seems unlikely.
There are more questions. Will the opposition unite around a clear program and person? It’s impossible to know, but the more moderate sections are not unanimous in supporting US intervention. How much of this is driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose political career has been animated by an almost manic desire for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba? 
What political impact will this have domestically in the US and on Trump’s MAGA movement? The legacies of Iraq and Afghanistan left a section of Trump’s base strongly opposed to regime change operations. It is notable that the few statements by Trump and Rubio have framed the actions as a “law enforcement” operation to bring a “criminal” drug trafficker to justice. 
Most important of all, how does the Venezuelan population respond? Having turned the country into a corrupt, authoritarian state stalked by poverty weakened the strong support Chavez enjoyed, but the Venezuelan population also has a long history of opposing US imperialism. Many understand that Washington’s crippling sanctions regime has been a key source of economic misery in the country. They know that Washington will only plunder them further.
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the ouster of Maduro marks a step towards greater, and more naked, imperialist aggression. After Israel’s genocide in Gaza, there now appears little need for even the pretence of international law. Might makes right is the guiding ethos of US imperialism. There will be no peace until the empire falls.

US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president

Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, suffered a setback in the elections of the province of Buenos Aires on 7 September. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) won in just two of the eight electoral areas in Argentina’s most populous province, home to more than 17 million people or 40 percent of the entire Argentine electorate. With the national mid-term elections due to be held in late October, this was an important test for the government.
Milei came to power in 2023, and immediately implemented a series of draconian anti-protest and anti-strike laws, combined with mass cuts to public spending, large public sector lay-offs and privatisations. During the Buenos Aires provincial election campaign, he promised his supporters, “We’re going to put the final nail in their coffin”, referring to the centrist Peronist opposition. But even Milei could not spin the result into something positive. On election night he struck a very different chord, saying “Without a doubt, on the political front, today we have suffered a clear defeat”.
The major beneficiaries of this defeat are the Peronists, a coalition of various parties from the centre left to centre right. Closely linked to the union bureaucracy, the Peronists have governed Argentina for the majority of the years since its return to democracy in the 1980s, introducing a range of neoliberal measures during that time. The Peronists won 47.3 percent of the vote in Buenos Aires, claiming victory in 100 of the 130 municipalities. LLA, by contrast, won just 33.7 percent. In the two most populous and working-class electoral areas, the Peronists beat Milei’s coalition by 25 and 10 percentage points respectively. 
The strong Peronist vote much more reflects a rejection of Milei’s program than enthusiastic support for the Peronists. In just two years, Milei’s austerity has savaged the living standards of the working class. Last year, the poverty rate reached a record high 54.8 percent. A full 70 percent of people run out of money for monthly expenses by the 20th of the month, according to economist Guillermo Oliveto. Milei dismissed this statistic, saying, “If it were true, you would have to walk down the street and it would be full of corpses”. 
On top of his clear indifference to mass poverty, Milei’s administration has been mired in corruption scandals, which have likely had an impact on some voters who bought into his self-described “anti-elitistism”.
The other encouraging outcome of the election was the strong vote for the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U), a coalition of far-left socialist parties. Across the province, the FIT-U won 4.3 percent of the total, or 350,000 votes. Electorally, the province is divided into eight areas. In the third and eighth areas, which have respective populations of more than 5 million and 600,000, the FIT-U consolidated itself as the third political force, winning just over 5.5 percent in each. 
In La Matanza, the largest municipality in the country with nearly 2 million people, the FIT-U won 7.5 percent. In other areas, its vote reached between 6 and 8 percent. The strong result means the FIT-U will hold on to its two lower house MPs. The party’s program includes massive expansions of public health and education, nationalisation of key sectors of the economy, putting politicians on a teachers’ wage, cutting regressive taxes and establishing a national jobs program. Its success shows that even a relatively small party, when it puts forward a decent left-wing program, can win a section of workers and students.
Ana Paredes Landman, a teacher, will hold one of the seats for the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), one of the four parties that make up the FIT-U. In a statement she pointed to the resistance, led by the left, to Milei’s program as responsible for his defeat:
“There were the workers of the Garrahan (hospital), the disability movements, retirees and so many popular sectors who, with the support of the Left Front, kept the resistance alive while other spaces linked to the union bureaucracy and Peronism chose passivity. The good electoral result of the Left Front marks a recognition of those of us who uphold a consistent proposal, who do not turn our backs and who always defend the rights of workers and youth in the legislatures and in the councils.”
Another important part of the FIT-U’s approach is that it doesn’t just offer an electoral alternative but also actively builds resistance in the streets, university campuses and workplaces. The MST have been leading some of the most high-profile resistance to Milei’s austerity. One example is the Garrahan paediatrics hospital in Buenos Aires. Milei’s attacks on the free and public hospital, which treats 40 percent of Argentina’s paediatric cancer cases, have turned it into a symbol of resistance. The MST is the dominant political force in the Garrahan union. It has led a series of strikes at the hospital and marches on congress—one of which ended with healthcare workers surrounding the congress building. The union general secretary, Norma Lezana, an MST member, has tried to link the Garrahan struggle to the broader struggles of all workers, saying that while their action “is centred on the Garrahan, it includes all the demands of the population ... if the Garrahan wins, and we manage to keep it from closing, that will also be a victory for the entire population”.
Ultimately, the election is an important setback for Milei and his ultra-conservative agenda. While two general strikes and other major industry strikes in the first year of his term stymied some of the most extreme elements of his program, the resistance has become more isolated since then. Only the best organised sections of the working class, often where the socialist left is strong, have kept up the pressure with consistent strikes and protests. 
Nonetheless, the Buenos Aires election shows that the far right’s advance can be checked, and that the centre can make gains electorally against it. While the Peronists and their partners in the union bureaucracy have largely given up the fight against Milei in the streets and workplaces, the presence of a sizeable far left with some weight in key sections of the working class has been crucial in building resistance. 
Unfortunately, the far left is still too small to challenge seriously the influence of the Peronist movement. But for a growing section of workers, it does provide a political alternative capable of leading at least some of them in action. Continuing to build and strengthen a genuinely anti-capitalist movement that reaches further into the working class is the key to challenging seriously both Milei and Peronism.

Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina

You push a button on your phone and, minutes later, an Uber appears. Hidden behind this seemingly simple action is the labour of millions of people: cobalt miners in Congo, assembly line workers in Shenzhen, software engineers in Silicon Valley and the driver in your city. These workers will never meet one another, speak different languages and work in vastly different conditions. Yet, through a vast web of global market relations, what appears as disconnected labour is unified into a single product.
This is the dynamism of capitalism, one of its defining features that even its earliest critics recognised. In The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that the capitalist class, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”. The statement is even more accurate today. Modern capitalism can produce enough food to feed the entire global population twice over. It has the technology to draw energy from the sun and transfer it to every household on the planet. Medical advancements have eradicated diseases that used to claim millions of lives. 
Why is it, then, that so many people go hungry every day, live with little or no access to electricity and die from totally preventable diseases?
The answer lies in the very functioning of capitalism. A small minority of individuals control what is produced, how it is produced and who gets access to it. Behind every decision they make lies a single motivation: profit. This is the condition every product must meet before it will be produced. If it fails this condition, it isn’t produced. Or if, after production, the product becomes unprofitable, then it likely is destroyed rather than distributed: Why pay to put it on the shelf? Human need is not only not a second thought, it is not even a thought.
Such a system, in which all production is subordinated to profit, leads to irrationality, absurdity and outright barbarity. 
A good harvest can become a bad thing because it creates an oversupply that pushes down prices. In some cases, it makes more sense, from the capitalist’s perspective, to destroy some of the crop than to send it to be consumed. This happened on a mass scale during the COVID pandemic. In the US, demand from restaurants and other hospitality businesses plummeted almost overnight as people stopped eating out. In response, farms all around the country began destroying food that was no longer profitable to sell. At one point, farmers were tipping around 5 percent of the country’s milk supply down the drain, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. This was at the same time that millions of people were losing their jobs and facing food insecurity.
Just as depraved is the way that corporations use patents to block cheaper versions of medicines, as happened in South Africa with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1997, some of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government to stop it from producing a generic (and cheaper) version of a drug that could combat the epidemic. To the corporations, the protection of their intellectual property was a far greater concern than alleviating the suffering of the millions of people with the virus/disease. While the court case was pending, estimates suggest that up to 20,000 people per month were dying. 
For years, the corporations fought tooth and nail, claiming that allowing generic versions of their drugs would threaten all medical innovation by destroying the patent system. It was only in 2001, under extreme international pressure, that they dropped the lawsuit. Hundreds of thousands of people died who could have survived had they had access to the medicine. An industry representative later made light of the lawsuit, saying, “People ask me how we could have been so stupid as to sue Nelson Mandela. I tell them: We had to. Mother Theresa was already dead”.
Finally, consider the absurdity of planned obsolescence, in which companies design products to break down after a few years to force you to buy a new one. The classic case is the light globe. Since at least the late nineteenth century, the technology has existed to produce globes that last tens of thousands of hours. In fact, the famous centennial light globe in California has been running continuously since 1901. But products that last a long time, meaning you don’t have to buy as many, do not fit the logic of capitalism. This was the story behind the infamous Phoebus Cartel in 1925, which included General Electric and Phillips. The cartel agreed to produce light globes with a one-thousand-hour lifespan, forcing customers to purchase extra globes. Two years later, an executive bragged that sales had increased five-fold. 
Ironically, it required significant engineering innovation to design a light globe that would break after 1,000 hours. To do it, the Phoebus companies shared technology and know-how. But when one company thought it could break the agreement, the head of Phillips sent a dire warning: “After the very strenuous efforts we made to emerge from a period of long-life lamps, it is of the greatest importance that we do not sink back into the same mire by ... supplying lamps that will have a very prolonged life”.
Today, there are countless examples of this practice. Major phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung have paid millions in fines for all sorts of things that force you to replace your iPhone or Galaxy: apps that don’t work on older models, software updates becoming unavailable after a few years, batteries that make the phone eventually unusable but are not replaceable with a generic battery, new charging cables that make older chargers redundant, monopolistic control over parts; the list goes on.
All of these examples are part of the perverse logic at the heart of capitalism: people go hungry because there is too much food, are homeless because there are too many homes, are sick because their treatment isn’t profitable and are forced to repeatedly buy the same product because it is designed to stop working.
Capitalism, in this sense, is different from every human society that came before it. In all pre-capitalist societies, production was for people’s use. The feudal landlord took what his peasants produced and ate it. Where there was hunger and starvation, it was because there was not enough food. It is only under capitalism that people lack something because there is too much of it.
Modern capitalism is the first system in history with the technical capabilities to overcome the misery that has plagued humanity for millennia. Yet, at the same time, it has produced one of the most unequal societies history has ever known. This is not an aberration or capitalism gone wrong. It is the system working perfectly in the interests of its rulers.

The irrationality of capitalism

If more evidence were needed that workers’ losses are capitalists’ gains, then look no further than the latest Australian Council of Superannuation Investors report on CEO salaries. It finds that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies last year “earned”, on average, 55 times the average salary of an Australian worker. That’s up from 50 times the year before. 
At the top is the CEO of News Corp, who received $42 million for managing Rupert Murdoch’s far-right propaganda machine—Sky News Australia, the
Australian and dozens of other rags masquerading as journalism. Not far behind are the bosses of Macquarie and Commonwealth banks, who earned a combined $38.7 million for squeezing billions of dollars out of working-class families. Rounding out the list are the bosses of two of the planet’s most destructive corporations—Rio Tinto and BHP. They pocketed a cool $19 million each.
Such eye-watering salaries at the top end of town might have you thinking that at least some of the wealth would trickle down. You would be wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. The cost-of-living crisis has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Analysis by the Australia Institute in November last year found that a full-time worker is, on average, $8,000 worse off compared to just three years ago. A big part of the decline is due to housing. Whether someone is a mortgage holder or a renter, a bigger chunk of their pay packet is going to either the bank or the landlord.
The situation is particularly bad for workers on the bottom end of the wage scale. Just over 900,000 low-income workers on award wages have seen their real wages fall by 14.4 percent over the last four years. These workers are disproportionately young and in less stable forms of employment, like casual work.
And yet, the lobbyists of Australian businesses vehemently oppose any notion that wages should rise by even the slightest amount above inflation. The Australian Industry Group considered the Fair Work Commission’s recent 3.5 percent increase in award wages “higher than necessary” and “well beyond what current economic conditions can safely sustain”.
The growing gap between rich and poor is not an unfortunate accident; it’s capitalism working as intended. CEOs live lives of luxury while workers must be grateful for their crumbs. Only a serious fightback of the working class can start to change this.

Keeping up with the CEOs: capitalism’s reality show

When Jordan van den Lamb, using his online pseudonym “purple pingers”, launched a website for renters to review their rental properties and real estate agents anonymously, he had no idea it would turn him into the “bane of all landlords”. Hating landlords is a big part of his life, however, so it’s a title he wears as an honour. Now, van den Lamb is taking his pro-renter, pro-worker platform to new heights by running for the Australian Senate with the Victorian Socialists in the upcoming federal election.
Shitrentals.org has become a database for renters to get information about potential rental properties that landlords don’t want prospective tenants to know about. Maybe it’s an ad that boasts a carpet floor but fails to mention that it squelches when you walk on it. Or it could be that you can’t bring your pet because a possum is living in the extraction fan. Perhaps you don’t need to bring your plants either, because there’s already one growing out of the kitchen floor. Some reviews have been so damning that landlords have offered him money to take them down—which he always refuses.
Van den Lamb started shitrentals.org for a few simple reasons. First, “the material conditions of the average renter are pretty shit, so you can just point at that and say, ‘That’s bad’”, he says. Second, “there’s really nothing in common between a renter and a member of the ruling class, so renters’ rights are something we can link to a broader struggle against the system”. 
If elected, he plans to be quite the rabble-rouser. “I would shout at so many people; I’d be really excited about that”, he says. “I’d use question time to point the finger at people ... maybe a bit of swearing. I kind of want to see what the cafeteria is like, maybe throw some food at someone. And normal politics stuff, like trying to introduce bills or whatever.” Such a lack of respect for capitalist institutions is refreshing and appeals to many people.
Van den Lamb wants to use the Senate to challenge the anti-worker politics of the mainstream parties while building a movement of renters, students and workers outside of parliament. It’s an openly socialist approach to politics, which acknowledges that real change comes, not through respecting the institutions of capitalism, but by challenging them in all spheres. “If we got a socialist elected to parliament, we could shake some stuff up”, he says.
The campaign has already begun shaking up stuff. In early December, van den Lamb and the Victorian Socialists launched the “Empty Homes Crime Scene” campaign. The campaign involves placing bright yellow stickers on empty homes, exposing them as crime scenes for sitting empty during a housing crisis. 
It got the attention of the landlords, too. The president of the Real Estate Buyers Agent Association of Australia “slammed” it as “quite extremist”. Van den Lamb is also part of the Renters and Housing Union (RAHU), where he has helped to organise empty home occupations. 
They recently occupied three Brunswick homes that had been empty for almost 25 years cumulatively. Also in December, he was on the picket line with striking Woolworths warehouse workers. These are the sorts of actions that van den Lamb would use his Senate position to make even bigger.
“Victorian Socialists isn’t like the other parties, where they ask you to vote once every few years”, he explains. “Politics is something we want you to do every day—at home, on campus, in the workplace, wherever. Get involved.”
The Pingers4Parliament campaign is travelling all across Victoria. After a large forum in Bendigo in January with socialist councillor Owen Cosgriff, the campaign is going to Geelong, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Shepparton and beyond. Van den Lamb wants to bring his left-wing platform to the entire state.
<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/node/364">That platform</a> includes establishing a public builder to construct 1 million new homes, a five-year rent freeze and scrapping negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. Other policies include putting politicians on a worker’s wage, reversing privatisation, fighting for climate justice and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Achieving such a vision will not come simply through getting a socialist into parliament—something van den Lamb regularly emphasises. But a socialist in parliament could be a voice for the struggles of ordinary people both inside and outside of parliament. Yelling at Liberals in the Senate in the morning, speaking at a rally in the afternoon, going to an organising meeting in the evening—all in a day’s work for a socialist parliamentarian. 
These are the steps that van den Lamb and the Victorian Socialists are taking to rebuild the socialist movement in Australia.

Pingers4Parliament: the campaign to get a socialist into the Senate

For most of the time since the 2022 federal election, the Labor Party has held office in almost every state and territory. Such a strong political position could have been used to introduce reforms that would help ordinary people. Instead, the party has ruled for the rich, while overseeing the most significant attack on working-class living standards in generations. By nearly every measure, workers, renters, pensioners and students have gone backwards under Labor, while the billionaires’ wealth has increased.
The private rental market has been one of the greatest sources of insecurity and poverty for the one-third of the population that rent, while being a boon to the roughly 8 percent of the population who are property investors. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems proud to be part of that elite 8 percent, having recently bought his second investment property for a cool $4.3 million (and listing it at $1,500 per week). 
As a property investor, he also enjoys a share of more than $20 billion in annual tax concessions. So while he and his cabinet of landlords (together, they own 57 properties) continue to rig the market in their own favour, rental prices have hit record highs under the current government. The median rental price in Australia now sits at $640 per week, up $43 per week in a year.
Of the one-third of the population with a mortgage, most are from the middle classes. But thirteen consecutive interest rate rises have been a colossal hit for working-class households that owe the banks. Since just before the pandemic, the average monthly repayment has increased by $2,100, according to Mozo, a financial comparison site. According to Roy Morgan, around 27 percent of owner-occupiers are living in mortgage stress. Meanwhile, the banks are recording record profits. The Commonwealth Bank, for example, which holds a quarter of all Australian mortgages, just announced a half-yearly after-tax profit of more than $5 billion.
Pensioners are another group that has faced the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. Around 2.6 million people are on the age pension, and millions of others are dependent on other forms of pension payments. Most pensioners own their own homes, which will not be true, if current trends continue, when today’s young people retire. Twelve percent of pensioners rent—and most live in poverty. It’s particularly bad for pensioners who rent in the private market: two-thirds live in poverty. 
This is the grim reality for the working class under Labor. Even when the government has offered crumbs as “cost-of-living relief”, it has served corporate interests. For example, the much-touted energy bill rebates do nothing to put downward pressure on energy prices. Instead, the energy companies continue charging exorbitant prices, but taxpayers subsidise them.
The cost-of-living crisis, however, has not been a crisis for all. The billionaires of Australia—there are nearly 50 of them—have used their political and economic control to turn the misery of millions into new yachts and mansions. The government helps to facilitate this system through a network of tax breaks available only to the rich and major corporations. 
Tax office data show that, in the 2022-23 financial year, nearly one-third of big companies paid no tax. The top ten of those companies by total income—including household names like Qantas, Virgin, NewsCorp, Netflix and Mastercard—had a combined $56 billion in income yet did not pay a cent in tax.
This system has caused the wealth disparity in Australia to reach eye-watering levels. According to a recent Monash University report, the top 1 percent of the population now own 24 percent of all wealth, and the top 10 percent own 57 percent.
As rage-inducing as the current state of affairs is, there is nothing natural about it. The rich and powerful consciously work to ensure that society’s wealth flows to them while denying it to the workers who produce it. 
They do so because they can. The only way to begin challenging their power is by building a political force that looks to a different power—the working class. When workers go on strike, they show that, without their labour, the whole system comes grinding to a halt. This is the power that can seriously challenge the system. Building this type of political force is today’s most important task for anyone who wants to challenge the rule of the rich and build a better society.

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

Jasmine Duff

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

The Argentine working class is not backing down from its struggle against conservative President Javier Milei. A general strike called by the major union confederations on 9 May, the second since Milei came to office in December, paralysed the economy and major cities. Urban transportation came to a standstill, nearly 300 flights were cancelled, banks and shops were closed, and government operations were massively reduced. One study found that the lost economic activity was equal to 1.1 percent of annual GDP.
The second general strike took on Milei’s new austerity package, which has just been passed by the Senate and will now return to the lower house. After he withdrew his first one (known as the Omnibus Bill)—which aimed to slash public spending, privatise state-owned firms and pass anti-labour legislation—he introduced a new, watered-down, version, colloquially referred to as the “Omnibus Bill XS”. Despite only containing around a third of the provisions of the original bill, the new one still includes significant anti-labour legislation and privatisations.
Milei has faced significant difficulty in passing any of this through Congress because he lacks even a sizeable minority parliamentary bloc—his party was founded only in 2021. Unlike other far-right figures, like former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, Milei does not have a cohered and loyal base. He was backed by the Argentine ruling class in the second round of the election and won 56 percent of the vote. However, this was considered to be a vote against the incumbents—it’s unclear how loyal this base will remain.
“The government is very determined to move forward, but this also generates significant resistance”, Cesar Latorre, a union delegate at a major hospital in Buenos Aires and member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (MST), said to Red Flag. “The government has not given up and, where another government might have backed down, it tries to keep pushing forward.”
 This was clear when a journalist recently said to Milei, “The people can’t make ends meet, Mr President”, to which he responded, “If people couldn’t make ends meet, they’d already be dead”.
Milei’s intransigence reflects that, despite decades of economic turbulence, Argentina’s rulers have not succeeded in smashing the organised working class and the welfare state as fully as elsewhere in Latin America. Large sections of the economy are nationalised, and the unionisation rate remains around 40 percent. Milei’s whole political project is about fighting on behalf of the bosses. His labour measures would weaken workers’ ability to fight for better wages, his budget cuts would remove subsidies to households, his privatisations would hand public companies to private bosses, and his tax proposal would make workers’ pay a greater share of the state’s finances. 
But after Milei faced stiff opposition in parliament for the last six months, it now looks like some of his opponents are willing to negotiate and approve sections of his agenda. This includes the main parliamentary opposition, the Peronists, a number of whom voted in favour of the second Omnibus Bill. 
Peronism is a political current unique to Argentina. It has a strong base in the unions. Its origins lie in a coup led by Colonel Juan Perón in 1943. Perón sought a base in the organised workers’ movement but was no working-class hero; he worked to control and restrain the rising working-class militancy of the time. Perón severely attacked the left, jailing and murdering hundreds of leftists and unionists. More recently, the Peronists were the first to try to implement neoliberalism in the 1990s and, while in power for the four years prior to Milei, oversaw the deaths of more than 100,000 people during the pandemic. Outside of the various periods of military rule, the Peronists have governed Argentina most of the time since the 1940s.
The union bureaucracy consistently subordinates the interests of the workers it’s supposed to represent to the electoral interests of Peronism. Currently, while the Peronists are out of power and there’s a significant attack on the unions themselves, the unions have been pressured to organise protests and strikes. 
 “Peronism has a division of labour. On one hand, they make speeches in parliament, complain and denounce the law”, says Latorre, referring to the austerity package. “On the other hand, they discuss with La Libertad Avanza [Milei’s party], as is the case with the CGT [General Confederation of Workers], which is trying not to mobilise seriously to avoid destabilising the parliamentary session.” 
The union bureaucracy and Peronists have negotiated with Milei to protect, among other things, union funding sources, such as automatic union membership at workplaces. Whilst it is right to defend this measure, the bureaucracy has been far more interested in negotiating with the government over it than sustaining protests and strikes to defeat the brutal attacks on workers. 
The Peronist parliamentary leaders want to wait out Milei’s four-year term in a way that causes minimal disruption to Argentinian capitalism, whilst contrasting themselves as the steady hand against Milei’s chaos. 
The second general strike was not due to any enthusiasm from the bureaucracy and Peronist leaders for a prolonged battle against Milei. Rather, it was called in response to pressure they are under from their own members and seen as a bargaining chip in negotiations to protect the unions’ structures. 
Nonetheless, the strike was an opportunity to reunite the full force of the working class after many unions had ceased their industrial action while they returned to negotiations following the first general strike. However, its impact was contradictory. Whilst it had very strong participation, its political impact was not fully realised because the union leaders refused to call a centralised protest.
Despite the lacklustre efforts of the CGT leadership, Milei has so far failed to make workers pay for the crisis. Instead, resistance remains strong. Since the second general strike, teachers have held a national strike, healthcare workers have taken industrial action, train drivers organised a 24-hour national strike just a week after a national transport strike, and even judges struck for 24 hours. And on the day the second austerity package was being voted on in the Senate, public sector workers held a national 24-hour strike, the university sector began a 48-hour strike, and other unionists struck and joined protests outside the Congress.
On 24 May, a textile company fired hundreds of workers in two of its factories. When it attempted to remove the machinery, workers occupied both factories, one of which continued functioning for more than a fortnight.
Students have also joined the fight. On 24 April, around 1 million people marched across the country to defend higher education from Milei’s cuts. A few days later, he caved and increased the budget. 
The rising social tensions reached even greater heights in the province of Misiones, an underdeveloped region in the north-east with a small but important agricultural sector. There, teachers, healthcare and other workers have been protesting and striking for months. In recent weeks, the protests have become more aggressive, marching on the provincial congress and clashing with security forces. Students and workers have blockaded roads across the province. Even the local police went on strike for a pay increase and set up an encampment outside their headquarters. The federal government, for the thirteen days of the police strike, had to call in other state security forces.
The police temporarily breaking ranks and joining the protests is a clear sign of how deep the crisis is. Combined with the increased levels of industrial action, it shows that Milei’s approach is a risky one. Previous conservative presidents have failed in similar attempts to implement austerity. For example, during Mauricio Macri’s term from 2015 to 2019, the unions thwarted his anti-worker changes with five general strikes. The other risk for Milei is that the Argentinian ruling class grows tired of the social conflict and returns to the Peronists. After all, they can offer something Milei cannot: social peace. A recent opinion piece in the Argentinian paper La Nación expressed this sentiment:
“The growing labour unrest, combined with social organisations joining the protests, threatens to reach record levels during Milei’s short presidency ... Curiously, many of the unions that today have adopted a belligerent stance ... remained silent during the last four years [when the Peronists were in government].”
The situation in Argentina is unstable. Even if Milei passes his watered-down austerity package, the mass mobilisations will likely continue. Union leaders are under serious pressure to continue mobilising, Peronism is highly discredited, and workers are eager to fight. 
If Milei wins, his victory may embolden other far-right leaders. But if Argentine workers manage to defeat him, they will send an important message to workers facing similar attacks in Europe and elsewhere: that it is still possible to defeat a ruling-class offensive with a mobilised and combative workers’ movement.

Another Latin American country turns to the far right

The long and bloody legacy of the US in Latin America

US gangster regime kidnaps Venezuelan president

Setback for far-right Milei and advance for left in Argentina

The irrationality of capitalism

Keeping up with the CEOs: capitalism’s reality show

Pingers4Parliament: the campaign to get a socialist into the Senate

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

Another general strike in Argentina challenges Milei

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