“Long Live Freedom, Dammit!” Neoliberal Reason Returns with a Vengeance

• In Event: Democracy in Peril?

Abstract

On the night of December 20, 2023, ten days after taking office, Argentina’s new President Javier Milei announced a mega emergency decree abolishing over 300 laws. Together with a bill sent to Congress, these measures intend to start the “reconstruction” of a “free” Argentina. The decree seeks to introduce “the widest deregulation” of the economy to end market "distortions" of “private initiative” and the “spontaneous play of supply and demand.” Meanwhile, taxes were raised, rents and prices deregulated, salaries frozen (despite the 25 percent inflation in December alone), thousands of public servants fired, and decades-old labor and social security protections abolished by decree.
Never before in Argentine history did a president attempt such a radical takeover, not even under military dictatorships. In a matter of months, Milei intends to achieve what it took 45 years to UK Conservatives, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian. Perhaps more. And while citizens did not wait for the end of the televised presidential announcements to go into the streets banging pots and pans, the government is severely limiting demonstrations–both by making protests into felonies and charging protesters the cost of policing them.
For a democratically elected president who reveres freedom, the scenario seems difficult to characterize. Is this an expression of right-wing populism, sheer rising authoritarianism, or a new form of a coup d’état? Acknowledging the validity of these frameworks, my paper revisits Milei’s political experiment as rooted in, and an intensified expression of, neoliberal raison d’état.
Neoliberalism, which in her book Undoing the Demos Wendy Brown defines as a “form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms,” gained room in academic circles in the early 20th century. After some policy applications in Post-WWII Germany, neoliberal principles reached full display in Chile under the military dictatorship following the 1973 coup. It was then, under the auspices of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, that the Pinochet dictatorship imposed a novel radical experiment in deregulated capitalism and shock therapy.
As in Chile, no matter the decades of North Atlantic liberal democratic normalizing, neoliberalism can turn full-fledged authoritarian in a snap. Surely the privileging of markets at the expense of people or abandoning the state's responsibility in social reproduction do not sit well with rights and democracy. In Argentina, against the expansive recognition of rights in four decades of democracy, Milei’s project lies his explicit attack on the principle “where there is a need, there is a right,” which he describes as an “atrocity.” The notion that anything other than the right to own property is an illegitimate entitlement undermining liberty has a long pedigree, for sure. Both Von Hayek and Von Mises would agree.
Thus in 2024, Latin America is once again serving as the laboratory for extreme neoliberal experiments. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal mantra of deregulations and privatizations made possible unprecedented fossil fuel, biomass, and mineral extraction–doubling and even quadrupling in a few years. This “Great Acceleration,” as John Bellamy Foster puts it, brought us speeding global warming, and levels of deforestation, disasters, and environmental destruction that threaten life on Earth. Just as these dystopian realities reach the daily news, these are conditions that Milei and his global network of right-wing libertarian and billionaire supporters can only attempt to deny or monetize. Thus, through a new radical experiment in Argentina, neoliberal reason presides over the ultimate unleashing of capital, as the world’s last frontiers are opened to exploitation in conditions of global precarity.
To better understand what is disputably the most radical neoliberal experiment so far, its distinctiveness and continuities, and the test that it presents to the people, this paper reconstructs the basis of this experiment by engaging in a dialogue with seminal works on neoliberalism by Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, or Johanna Oksala, as with leading voices in the critique of capitalism including John Bellamy Foster and Jason Moore.

Author

• Guillermina Seri, Union College