Cristina Kirchner’s speech on Wednesday at the meeting of parliamentarians from Latin America and Europe raised the dilemma “State Laws or Market Laws”, which destroys the supposedly institutionalist or republican mirage of neoliberalism. The most radical expression of that ideology, represented in the libertarians, makes a fanatical speech for the freedoms of corporations that actually implies the slavery of the majority of people.
The proposal of the vice president was that there is no political democracy if there is no economic democracy. It is the updating of the old controversy between market liberals who, at the time of the independence struggles, were only interested in opening the market to Great Britain, as opposed to anti-absolutist liberals who struggled to create democratic and independent governments.
The vice president gave a twist to that image of the beginnings of Argentina, describing that when these democratic forms were created – the republics with their three powers – they had not taken the dimension that factual powers such as monopolies have now, international financial organizations and large media corporations.
They are factual powers that interfere with the full validity of democratic forms. There is no democracy in the structure or in the decisions of the corporations, which move according to particular interests and, nevertheless, sometimes have more capacity than the governments elected by the sovereign vote of the citizens to interfere in the institutional activity with economic pressures or parliamentary lobbies or through the cooptation of judicial officials.
It is not an image that distorts reality, but it is the description of institutional processes that have led to a world panorama in which, despite great progress in other aspects, societies have increasingly greater inequality. From the decade of the 50s of the 20th century, which marked the lowest point in inequality on the planet, it has reached the present with the most shameful levels between the accumulation of infinite fortunes and large sectors of humanity submerged in poverty.
Another concept raised by the vice president was that of “dissatisfaction with democracy” as a product of this reality. Democracy is assigned the responsibility for the consecration of injustice. This dissatisfaction was quickly captured by neoliberalism that used its cultural media device to install a discourse that visualizes the State as the main culprit.
With its “unnatural” interventions in the economy -according to the neoliberal manual-, the State would prevent corporations from creating wealth whose spillover would resolve inequality. In this way, he created a common sense contrary to reality so that society appropriates a discourse that only favors particular corporate interests and not those of the whole.
The most radical expression of this thought even leads to emphasizing a discourse of freedoms in opposition to the State, excluding any mention of social issues. They make this exclusion because they consider that any reference to the social is ultimately part of a statist discourse. And they are right to fear that link between the idea of the State and social issues because there is currently no other institutional tool to regulate such uneven mechanisms of accumulation and impoverishment that have led to a world with such inequality.
Neoliberal common sense speaks of poverty and not of inequality, because this term includes the forms of wealth accumulation that are what generate poverty. It concludes definitively that it has been the intervention of the State in the economy that has generated so much poverty. Actually it is the other way around, the decade where the lowest levels of inequality were verified, following the Second World War, was characterized by the validity of what was called the Welfare State, with a strong presence of the State in wealth distribution policies .
The current institutional forms were created when there were no cell phones, cars or electricity – Cristina Kirchner recalled – and they remained the same while the world was drastically transformed with the emergence of de facto powers that weakened the ability of States to define policies that benefit the whole of society.
This weakness of the States to counteract the interference of factual powers generated the “dissatisfaction of democracy”. And this phenomenon drifts towards authoritarian forms such as that represented by libertarians in countries of the South, like ours, or the ultra-conservative xenophobic forms that are verified in the countries of the North, such as Trump or Le Pen, or intermediate forms that respond to the same causality.
The speech of the Argentine vice president was highly criticized by the Spanish Popular Party, the party where the peninsular Franco supporters take part. With almost the same words, the radical Alfredo Cornejo agreed with these criticisms despite the anti-Franco historical tradition of his party. They are the logical coincidences to which this thought leads.
Contrary to the libertarian claim, the vice president did not propose shrinking the State as a response to this “dissatisfaction”, but rather the search for new institutional aspects that update the republican forms of democracy and block corporate and media interference.
Throughout the speech there were very few direct references to the internal debate that stirs the Frente de Todos and that has her and President Alberto Fernández as central protagonists. The phrase regarding the sash and the cane given to presidents was highlighted and that this did not mean having power. But that phrase was more related to her experience as president. The most direct was when she said “especially when you don’t do what you have to do”, which was added almost in passing.
Although there were very few direct references to the internal, the entire speech was referred to that controversy. The development that Cristina Kirchner made in the meeting of parliamentarians on Wednesday at the CCK was the presentation of her thought, the basis on which she supports the critical vision that has been raised, especially in relation to the agreement with the Fund and the demand for measures more intense social
In that speech, the most direct references to the internal are the least and the least important and in general they were included only as some irony. The background of this debate was exposed throughout the exhibition and especially in the first question when it was raised whether the world in which we want to live is the one governed by the laws of the State or by the laws of the market. That question divides the waters when it turns to concrete politics. They are very clear and different fields, although of course there are intermediate nuances. But It is clear that the laws of the State involve all people equally, while the laws of the market always favor the richest and strongest.
