The unprecedented dimensions of the economic and social tragedy that Argentina is experiencing under the semi-dictatorship of Javier Milei and his cronies -servants of both domestic and foreign big capital- prompted me to revisit a magnificent 1963 Italian film: “The Companions” (I Compagni), directed by Mario Moniccelli and enlivened by the superb performances of Marcello Mastronianni, Renato Salvatori, Folco Lulli and Annie Girardot. The story is set in Turin at the end of the 19th century and portrays with vivid realism the heartless working conditions in a textile factory in that city and the struggle of its workers to reduce the working day from 14 to 13 hours a day. I was lucky enough to be able to see this film as soon as it was released -with great success- in Argentina. At that time I was only twenty years old and had already passed a few courses in Sociology, and one of the most  moving passages in the film was indelibly engraved in my memory. When I observe with sadness and anger what is happening in Milei’s Argentina, that memory, now sixty years old, reappears with the force of a whirlwind. What scene am I talking about?

In the middle of a scuffle between the factory workers, who are unable to work out a common strategy to fight against their bosses, the camera focuses on the tracks of a railroad shunting yard and a freight train that is slowly about to stop. Stones continue to be thrown between the two sides and one of them hits a door of the caboose that closes the formation. A few seconds after, someone who was inside tries to open it, very carefully, and the one who finally peeks out is nothing less than Mastroianni, impersonating a socialist militant, who, intrigued by the stones and not knowing where the train had stopped, asks very politely: “Scusi, che paese è questo? (“Paese”, in Italian, can refer both to a country and to a small town). The reply of one of the workers, enraged by the quarrel between fellow workers, was of crushing eloquence: “un paese di merda!” (“shit-hole country”) Obvious: proletarians living on the edge of subsistence and in overcrowded homes, frozen by the winter cold of Torino, poorly fed, and with a 14-hour working day, and to top it all, disorganized and fighting among themselves, could hardly offer a more delicate answer than the one they spat at the socialist professor.

But I deciphered that image, and that answer: “paese di merda” from another interpretative key because I have never accepted nor will I ever accept the colonial self-denigration of the Argentine right wing and its spokesmen who insist time and again on qualifying this noble country in such obscene way. But what we do have in Argentina is a “shitty government” and a “shitty leadership” (unfortunately not only among the big business but in many other walks of life as well) that pulls the strings of the grotesque buffoon that governs us to consummate its plan to plunder and pillage our common goods, our natural wealth and the incomes of ninety percent of the population. The assault on social security pensions perpetrated by Milei’s regime is unprecedented in this country, in spite of the fact that the mythomaniac of the Pink House says that they exceed the inflationary hemorrhage, a criminal lie. The truth is that the retirement assets cover not even half of the basic food and medicine basket of retirees and old people in general. The same happens with the income of workers, both registered and informalized, because in the Argentina of the anarcho-capitalist dystopia, having a job does not guarantee earn a salary above the poverty line. Furthermore, the policies of the Milei “regime” led to the generalized destruction of small and medium size enterprises and the collapse of mass consumption. According to UNICEF, one million Argentine children go to sleep every night without having dinner; 55 percent of the population is immersed in poverty -which could reach 75 percent if those who are only a few pesos above the poverty line are added- and there are also 20.3 percent of people considered as indigent. Another “great achievement” of this outrageous right wing bootlicker of imperialism is that average meat consumption has fallen to 44.8 kg per capita, the lowest figure in a century. and roughly the same can be said of milk and dairy products. To all this, add the vicious  hostility addressed against public universities -with a fiercest attack centered not by chance in the National University of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, as befits these new “offspring of the last genocidal dictatorship of 1976-1983”- and also against science and scientific research, in line with the intellectual coarseness of the current ruling group that feels a visceral rejection for culture, science and education and that is why it freezes the salaries of university professors in an inflationary context and paralyzes innumerable research projects inside and outside the CONICET, the national scientific research state agency. A government that plunders and expropriates the income of the national majorities and that accelerates vertiginously the concentration of wealth while, at the same time, it gives birth to new forms of state terrorism, brutally repressing retired people who demonstrate peacefully and characterizing as terrorists those who exercise their right of assembly and of petition the authorities.  

Let us say it unequivocally: under Milei and his bosses Argentina is no longer a democracy. Today this country is a semi-dictatorship that sweeps away the division of powers, tramples on constitutional guarantees, reaches a deal with the corrupt judiciary, turns the National Congress into a sordid market place where votes are bought and sold with total brazenness, just as it does with the provincial governors, all conveniently disguised by the hegemonic mass media so that only a few realize the farce. Having destroyed certain agencies and fundamental instruments of state regulation and control, this government was able to send overseas three shipments of gold bars without anybody knowing the exact amount that was transferred, its final destination and the reasons for such an unusual measure. Not even Al Capone -remember, one of Milei’s heroes because of his rejection of state involvement in liquor business – would have handled a huge sum of money with such lightness and impunity. To top it all, there is a suspicion that these gold bars might have been shipped to London, capital of a country with which Argentina has a serious dispute over the Malvinas Islands. Or perhaps the gold bars ended up in one of the many money laundering caves frequented by members of Milei’s economic team, who knows.

This painful involution has the support of big business, both domestic and foreign, and counts with the protection of the judiciary and of a small entourage of pseudo-journalists who reproduce the president’s nonsense without daring to ask a cross-examination that would prove that Milei is a consummate fable maker, and that his statistics are nonsensical inventions that never find an empirical reference to validate them. These are the reasons why Milei would not stand even five minutes with a real journalist, such is his unbearable and toxic levity of his discourse. This was demonstrated in the interview granted to a young BBC journalist in May, who slammed this self-proclaimed genius of Economics (aspiring to the Nobel Prize in that discipline) who did not even know how much a liter of milk cost in this country. Such is the degree of his ignorance and wickedness. That is why, remembering the film in question and its endearing characters, I came to the conclusion that instead of talking about “paese di merda”, a new category should be added in political theory to account for the novelty brought by the current experience in Milei’s Argentina. To the classic categories coined by Plato twenty-five centuries ago: aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny we must add a sixth one: “governos di merda” or, to be more delicate, “shitty governments”.

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