Except for its first three years, from 1974 to today the World Economic Forum has been held in Davos, Switzerland. In a world with increasing wars and conflicts…this year’s theme was Rebuilding Trust. At the forum, top businessmen, spokespersons of multilateral organizations and some presidents spoke of “avoiding a further deterioration of the situation and looking to the future”. The new Argentine president, Javier Milei, also made his debut there. With the pretensions of a messiah, he praised capitalists, angered several people present and made a fool of himself by calling almost all the imperialist governments and leaders “collectivists”.
By Martín Carcione and Nicolás Zuttión
A special Forum, in a convulsive world. The main capitalists of the planet sought to forge a sort of balance in Switzerland, in the midst of constant friction between powers and several war scenarios. This panorama is complemented with a growing and unprecedented social inequality on an international scale, a product of the economic 2008 crisis, enhanced by the pandemic. In contrast to the luxuries of Davos, the majority of humanity, as confirmed by Oxfam[1], is mired in poverty. Inequality has grown to such an extent that, according to the Committee, if this situation of inequality continues, poverty could only be eradicated in 229 years.
These reasons are considered by part of the world bourgeoisie to be the ones that gave free reign in Davos to the speech of a dangerous libertarian like Milei. He warned about the socialism and collectivism agenda that would influence those present and about the danger in which the West finds itself. Beyond the ghost that runs through his head and his delirious features, it is important to differentiate between meaningless speeches and a spokesman of an increasingly radical sector of the bourgeoisie that proposes to leave behind the “traditional” scheme of capitalist democracy and go to a new one governed only by the laws of the market. That is, the pure state of the will of the capitalists and, at most, their disputes over profits. Let us examine his ideas in more detail.
Capitalism: a (toxic) love story
The data that Milei shared in Davos, even if accurate in many cases, is useless to demonstrate the economic, social and moral hypothesis he claims.
Indeed, the conquest of America, which we can add to the colonization of Africa and Asia by the imperialist powers, represents an unprecedented leap in global economic growth and the basis for subsequent capitalist development since the industrial revolution of the mid-19th century. We do not know if Milei is aware that it was precisely Marx, the original demon of his story, who made the most profound inquiries into this aspect. In Das Kapital, Marx, in analyzing the process of original accumulation, argues that “capital comes into the world dripping blood and mud from every pore”. He thus refers to the bloody conquest, the annihilation or reduction to servitude of millions of human beings, at the service of accumulating resources that allowed those powers to become what they are today, “advanced” countries.
At the same time, what Milei’s data on GDP growth hides is its unequal appropriation: more and more wealth is accumulated by the big imperialist businessmen and more and more misery in the pole of the popular majorities.
Comparing the growth of world GDP with the concentration of wealth, a simple exercise for anyone with access to the Internet, shows how wrong their theoretical framework is. According to Oxfam, while five tycoons have increased their wealth at a rate of $14 million per hour from 2020 to today[2], 5 billion people have fallen into poverty in the same period.
But capitalism has not only developed by crushing the working majorities, but also sectors of capitalists themselves. Their lie about market regulation deliberately conceals the fact that the harmonious development of competition does not exist, but that it is this which leads to the economic – and consequently political – monopoly of an ever smaller handful of imperialists who build immense transnational trusts or holdings which control all commercial exchange.
Thus, there is hardly a single economy in the world today that escapes the brutal logic of capitalism, nor one that even comes close to something resembling socialism or even collectivism, which Milei repeatedly mentions without further explaining what he is referring to. After centuries of capitalist development, the planet is plunged into wars, recurrent economic crises, famines, massive exiles and an environmental crisis of civilizational proportions, due to the incessant pressure of this insatiable system in a planet with limited resources. And the main leaders of the world, about whom Milei complains, are capitalists as well and are responsible for this disaster regardless of their political wings.
As for the moral aspect of capitalism, it is enough to see the genocide carried out by the Zionist and Nazi State of Israel in Palestine, with piles of bodies of children murdered with white phosphorus, to understand the moral disposition of the capitalist “democrats” of the main powers and also of this herbivorous lion called Milei who exalts them as moral beacons of society as a whole.
The State, a tool of class domination
The character of the State and its supposed link to collectivism that Milei criticizes is, without a doubt, one of the central knots to be dismantled in his discourse. Contrary to what he exposed in Davos, the State has been up to now the main tool of power to enforce their dictatorship over the popular majorities. This was also pointed out by Marx and the Marxist current. In the Communist Manifesto, he defines the State as a tool of domination of a minority class over the others, and the government of that State as “a board that administers the common business of the bourgeois class”.
This definition is not unknown to the powerful, but is shared by them. The political caste is nothing more than the army of administrators and repressors at the service of that domination and, in the modern State, those who translate the conquests of the bourgeoisie into laws, institutions, ideologies and repression. They present this bureaucratic conglomerate as a force above society, disguising the class struggle. As a result of great struggles the masses were able to incorporate rights, which today are being increasingly curtailed.
There should be no confusion regarding his speech. Milei does not propose the disappearance of the State, but to curtail any expression of any right, even minimal, for those of us who live from our work. That is why, while criticizing the general notion of the State, he encourages and strengthens its repressive institutions, in charge of answering with bullets and imprisonment when the ruling class requires it. And it is, at the same time, the guarantor of the functioning of the market “rules” that Milei defends so much, those “agreement between equals” that he mentioned. This formal truth of those who make an agreement is preceded by a material reality, which demonstrates the inequality of the former. While the employer class wants to use labor with fewer rights and lower wages, workers are only “free” to choose between selling their work under those conditions or starving to death. The State, and its repressive function, appears when there is a dispute between the “capitalist benefactors” that Milei defends and the rest of humanity.
Those of us who advocate for socialism do not defend the present State, but the workers’, social and democratic conquests that still persist in it. We fight to destroy it and build a new, truly free and democratic State at the service of the majorities. A tool capable of guiding a transition towards the absolute disappearance of capitalism and of the State itself, to give place to a freely organized society. Regulations are not the core of socialism’s approach, as Milei misrepresents, alluding to the Stalinist disaster of the last century. On the contrary: we propose a State capable of expressing the creative energy of the permanently postponed workers and we are not afraid to give that institutionality a transitory character, necessary to confront the owners of everything, their austerity, their moral and social decadence, their weapons and armies.
The present State deserves to be demolished, not to make way for the “free will” of millionaires to subjugate humanity but at the service of a workers’ State with the task of equalizing conditions, ending the domination of a minority class and that the whole of society advances towards a new order with equality and fraternity among peoples. A State that is also a tool to build a new relationship of humanity with nature, which is not aggressive or predatory but rational, metabolic.
That is why we are the main opponents to Milei’s ultra-right project and also to the other variants that propose some cosmetic reforms or administer the bourgeois State in a more “rational” way. All those sectors that Milei accuses of collectivist variants are in reality agents of different bourgeois sectors.
The dilemma of the times: socialism or barbarism
Milei’s speech was the subject of debates, analysis and mockery in the media. A good part of the international press rejected his speech. The Spanish newspaper El País headlined: “Milei scolds leaders in Davos: ‘The world is in danger, they have opened the doors to socialism’. The rest, with greater or lesser adherence to what Milei expressed, highlighted his denunciation of the danger that the West heads towards socialism and any other idea that he also deems as collectivist. And as the article in El País said: “He was received with enthusiasm in the heart of capitalism, the Davos forum, as a great defender of the market, a sacred word for the executives who filled the main hall to overflowing, something very unusual when a politician speaks, but the faces quickly began to change as soon as Javier Milei began to speak”.
For many masters of the world present in Davos, it must have sounded disrespectful that in their own house someone wanted to lecture them on how to govern and how to defend their social system. Milei does not express any delirium, but an experiment that combines extreme market capitalism and a brutal attack on democratic freedoms to avoid mobilization against his plans. At the same time, ideologically, he represents a regression in scientific terms, since he denies the existence of gender inequality and the climate crisis and even the shape of the earth. If its program is imposed, we would be facing a new political regime much more authoritarian than bourgeois democracy.
The libertarian liberal, beyond their differences, echoed authoritarian variants such as Bolsonaro, Trump and Vox. There is no absolute similarity, but there are points of agreement and above all in liquidating democratic rights. A very reactionary program similar to Milei’s plan has already been applied by Viktor Orban in Hungary, although not by shock but through governing for several years.
The greetings to Milei from the likes of Elon Musk and others are not innocent: they are politically charged. They represent a bourgeois variant that is beginning to draw conclusions that in order to recompose its rate of profit they need to defeat the working people, for which they need more extreme and repressive political forces. Capitalism opens up these tendencies. That is why the only way out is a different social system, socialism, with a planned economy based on the needs of the majorities and in metabolic balance with the environment we inhabit. That is to say, a way out that works as a handbrake against the barbarism that capitalism is approaching.
Of course, those who in the name of socialism adjust and repress their peoples, like Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, or reformism, the center-left and the so-called new left like Podemos or Syriza, managers and guarantors of the interests of capital, do a disservice to the extreme right. Confronting these bureaucratic or possibilist variants is also key to overcoming the crisis of political alternatives in favor of the majorities.
Davos evidences the crisis of the global political order, instability, disagreement between the different wings of the bourgeoisie. The trial that Milei means is part of that panorama, with many of them looking at whether or not he will be able to impose his plan. In any case, all those present in the Swiss Alps are united by the unrestricted defense of capitalism.
Our task is to expose their lies and false ideologies, denounce their austerity and repression plans, strengthen workers and popular struggles against them and their governments, and demystify capitalism as the only possible system. We revolutionaries have to organize at the international level to fight against this globalized capitalism. To give material anchorage to the ideological battle with a militant organization, which also acts in each country where it is present. Against reactionary utopias, we continue to raise the banners of internationalism and socialism. To this strategy we contribute from the IS.
[1] Oxford Committee of Aid Against Hunger.
[2] Elon Musk (Tesla, X Corp, Starlink, etc.), Bernard Arnault (LVMH luxury goods), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Ellison (Oracle Corp.) and Warren Buffet (investor).