Javier Milei’s faux anarchism and blaring support for Israel
Photo by Alisdare Hickson, taken on July 13, 2018, in London.
Showing how Javier Milei’s employment of the term Anarchism is nonsensical doesn’t take much effort, but nonsense is highly electable in our era. For an anarchist to run for president, he would be seeking a position he doesn’t believe should exist, and would be ideologically committed to not doing the job. As Milei campaigns and wins his bid in Argentina, he is, however, committed to doing a job as head of state, despite calling himself an anarchist. The commitment is to instate the freest of capitalist markets and keep the government as small as possible – without his own job seizing to exist. This means, out with regulations and ministries, in with USD stocks and security forces – to protect private assets. How can an ironclad relationship with the USA and Israel, which are his first confirmed international trips since the election, help him achieve that?
Milei’s strategy to create wealth and curb inflation is to privatize everything, and that has already shaken up stocks in the US. According to Reuters, his plan to sell YPF, the national oil company, has already led its stocks to go up 40% since his win. “YPF is Argentina's largest oil firm and oversees development of Vaca Muerta, the world's second-largest shale gas reserve and fourth-largest shale oil reserve.” Dollarizing Argentina will make these types of sales all the more convenient for foreigners. At the same time, selling these public assets will make dollarizing more stable.
This, at least, is what Milei is betting on, and he needs it to work for several reasons. One of them being that the YPF is under judicial scrutiny for how it was nationalized in the first place. A 16 billion judgment by a US court is hovering over its head due to the “seizure” of company shares from minority investors in 2012.
Another reason Milei needs this plan to work is that Argentina is the country which owes the most amount of money to the IMF in the world. If investment from the IMF, whose purpose is to assist “low income countries” to remain significant players in the global capitalist market, failed, would a dollarized and privatized free-dive into the market work as a solution?
When it comes to conflict in West Asia, the discussion of oil is a tired cliché. But if it quacks like a duck, we have to at least consider the possibility it is one. The escalation of the attacks on Palestine has raised concerns about oil prices and global supply. If Iran, “OPEC’s fourth-largest oil supplier”, gets involved (further) in this conflict, and, let’s say, the US is encouraged to enact sanctions, it would be pertinent to start devising a plan for handling the decrease in volume of what’s been circulating. Time Magazine published an article in late October arguing that sanctions on Iranian oil is the key to “peace” in the “Middle East”, estimating that oil sales constitute 70% of Iran’s government revenue.
Meanwhile, Israel has been grappling with the potential for the extraction of significant amounts of oil shale for some time, since it’s believed 15% of Israeli territory is on oil shale beds. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Argentina’s new president wants to strengthen its relationship with Israel as it tries to offload YPF, which was described once as “the most attractive shale play outside the US”.
The political and economic relationship between Argentina and Israel has not started with Milei. Perón had already tried to win the US over by making accords with Israel. In doing so, he believed to “remove the stigma” around Argentina becoming a safe haven for Nazis after WWII, as it’s also home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America. Since then, Israel provided military equipment to Argentina before and during the Falklands War against Britain, which’s been argued to be due to Menachem Begin’s enduring animosity toward the British mandate of Palestine.
Today, Milei is eager to support Israel’s invasion of Gaza and to follow Trump’s footsteps in moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But even before his win, Israel’s national water company Mekorot had already been given “significant influence” over how water resources are allocated in several provinces in Argentina. After seeing how this company has addressed water supply to Palestine, plenty of Argentinians are outraged not just by its presence in their own country, but also by what it has been doing overseas.
In Brazil, when Bolsonaro waved an Israeli flag at a protest, representatives of the Jewish Confederation of Brazil were quick to reject it as representative of the political stance of the whole Jewish diaspora in the country. It’s unclear if the same can be said about the Argentinian Jewish population. But one thing is clear, Milei’s fanaticism with Israel has nothing to do with anarchism, and everything to do with his unrelenting love for a US American brand of capitalism. It seems to me that he weaponizes religion to achieve economic goals, and this will most likely be at the expense of Argentinians of all faiths, as he waves his chainsaw of austerity.
Anarchist and libertarian ideologies do envision less government control over society, but anarchism has never meant for this control to fall in the hands of an even more pervasive institution – the global stock market. This is why, historically, anarchism was born in response to the unsustainable direction capitalist industrialization was taking back in the 1800s (towards widespread poverty). By drawing inspiration from the fact that various indigenous civilizations thrived without both capitalism and the State, it has been clear to anarchists another world is possible. Racing in the direction of regulation-less industrial capitalism is quite contrary to the principles of anarchism, because it only exacerbates the issue of economic inequality.
Undeniably, Argentina is in a financial pickle, and its new president plans to solve it with a more extreme version of the financial system that has not exactly panned out so far. As a television personality with explosive economic ideas, he won the hearts of an electorate that is eager to hold on to the capitalist status quo. Perhaps these ideas are not as explosive or innovative as he makes them seem, they are just a desperate attempt to protect a long-standing system that has shown no signs of working.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
Mirna is a Brazilian writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation, Pretend This Is a Cellphone, and producer of several other non-fiction titles under the P9 press.