By
Alexis Dritsos and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli
Photos by Lucas Chillemi
Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at
Soka University of America, California, USA. He is an associate producer of
ITVS and POV, from the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. He is
on the editorial board of the journal Latin American Perspectives (LAP),
of which he is co-editor of the film section. He is co-editor of Film and
Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) and El documental
político en Argentina, Chile, y Uruguay (LOM Ediciones, 2015). He also
co-edited two special issues for LAP: Political Documentary Film and Video
in the Southern Cone: 1950s-2000s (2013), and Media, Politics and
Democratization in Latin America (2018). He is currently co-director of the documentary
film journal Revista Cine Documental.
Address: Soka
University of America, 1 University Avenue, Aliso Viejo, California 92656
Alexis Dritsos is a member of the National Economic Commission of the
Socialist Party and was a candidate for National Deputy for the Socialist and
Popular Front, in 2017. He currently works for the National Treasury Department Council of
the Judiciary of the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. He publishes weekly
articles on politics and economics and appears regularly on radio and TV as a
pundit.
Address: Calle 13b, Nro. 556, City Bell, Provincia de Buenos Aires, CP
1896. Argentina alexis.dritsos@gmail.com
Lucas Chillemi is a
professional photographer living in Buenos Aires. He works as an agricultural
administrator in Tres Arroyos. He is a member of the Association of Graphic
Reporters of Argentina (A.R. G. R.A). He works as a freelance photographer and
is the art director of Espacio Makarius.
Address: Avenida Corrientes 1584, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires,
C1042AAO Lucas.chillemi@hotmail.com
Abstract
Argentine
President Mauricio Macri’s price hike policies have deeply hurt the Argentine household
economies. This essay seeks to understand the rationale behind the policies and
to analyze the rhetoric that Macri has deployed to justify it. Macri and
members of his government have made bold pronouncements in the press
articulating an elitist, discriminatory view of social advancement. Faced with
popular resistance from social movements, opposing political parties, and
citizens, price hikes have solidified Macri’s neoliberal approach and are an
indispensable component of his austerity plan. In this essay, we consider ways
in which price hikes have become a bold instrument of social control and
political indoctrination. In particular, we are interested in Macri’s
deployment of price hikes and austerity measures as a counter-offensive to
successful grassroots movements that emphasize economic and environmental
sustainability as a principle of effective social organization.
La vida es un vaso de gaseosa aguada,
como una secuencia de bromas pesadas.
Disfruta este trago porque al terminar
habrá que pagar y quizá pagarlo de más;
habrá que insistir como lo hicimos tantas veces...
Life is a glass of watery soda
like a sequence of heavy jokes.
Enjoy your drink because when finished
we will have to pay
and maybe pay more;
we will have to insist
as we have done so many times (Babasónicos)
We began writing this essay in February 2019. Argentina was
suffering once again under the calamitous policies of a neoliberal government
and the draconic mandates of the IMF. The road to development, according to
this ideological framework, is labor flexibilization and austerity. News
programs and newscasters were assessing the political fortitude of Mauricio
Macri’s administration. Will Macri and his party win reelection in October 2019?
Or will rising utility costs, inflation, interest rates, unemployment, be
enough to sway the electorate to vote for a political party of the opposition?
In 2015, right-wing candidate Macri won the presidential
election by a narrow margin, aligning the country once again with the
transnational neoliberal block. During the
campaign, Macri promised a set of policies that would correct the problems
inherited from the previous administration- la
pesada herencia- without violating acquired rights. As expected by Macri’s critics on the left, the new president
rolled out a series of fiscal measures that did away with utility subsidies; chipping
away at the purchasing power and well-being of middle and low-income
households. Soon after, inconsistencies became visible, contrary to the
optimistic forecasts promoted by the government.
The policies of seduction, with respect to foreign capital,
involved several measures that went against the interests of the majority of
the population. The discourse of pragmatism, as Max Horkheimer argued in the Eclipse of Reason (1947) in the aftermath of the World War II,
degrades all complexities to a simple “rational” plan: “In our day, the hectic
desire that people have to adapt themselves to something that has the power to
be, whether it is called a fact or an ens
rationale, has led to a state of irrational rationality” (90). In many
aspects, Macri’s economic plan is structured on “planned obsolescence” (Foster
and Clark, 2012: 9). The casting aside of sectors of production and its
workforce mirrors the strategy imposed by the Dictatorship in the 1970s and by
two democratically elected governments of early and late 1990s (Menem and De la
Rúa) all of which led up to a tragic social genocide in the wake of the 2001
economic crisis.[i]
Since 2015 Argentina’s economy has displayed the all too
familiar signs of neoliberal malaise: inflation has risen to around 50% a year,
the peso was devalued by 400%, interest rates have ballooned to 65% making it harder for small businesses (PYMES) to
borrow money, and poverty has risen to 32%. Even more alarming is the loss of purchasing
power, as salaries depreciated between 15% and 20% (Katz, 2019). As if this were
not enough, Macri’s government has borrowed 57 billion dollars from the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), and has opened the economy up to imports,
wrecking industries. Luciana Zorzoli (2019) writing for Jacobin puts it this way: “Reestablishing
ties with the IMF allows Macri to both reconnect with ruling economic hubs and
introduce a powerful external actor that can help discipline political and
popular demands in the country (by loading the country up with debt) and push
through his neoliberal program” (2). In addition, Zorzoli explains to readers
that this rescue package from the IMF is the most generous package in the
institution’s history. When looking at
perfect storms like this, Claudio Katz
reminds us in La economía marxista hoy:
seis debates teóricos (2010) that these economic conditions are fertile
ground for speculators and vulture funds (72).
Historian and political commentator Araceli Bellota, described
the effects of this disciplinary regime of impoverishment as gaslighting [te están haciendo ‘Luz de Gas’] in
reference to the 1944 film Gaslight (Una
nueva aventura, 2019). In the film, Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) rummages around
at night in the attic, unbeknownst to Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman), his new wife.
From the garret, Anton flickers the gaslight, heightening the terror that
slowly drives Paula mad. Anton’s ultimate goal is to discover the hidden jewels
of Paula’s murdered aunt, a former opera-star. As in the case of Paula in Gaslight, day after day, month after month, Argentines are slowly “gaslighted”
by Macri’s price hikes, and left to wonder how their own family economies are being
ransacked.
Central to Macri’s shock doctrine, perhaps its cornerstone, has
been the rise of utility prices. Since the president took office, electricity
has increased by 3,624%, natural gas 2,401%, water 1,025% and transportation an
average of 500%. In 2015, utility costs comprised
of an average minimum salary. Today, the percentage is much higher: 23.5% (UNDAV, 2018: 3). The
impact on most citizens has been so dramatic that agencies have recently
reported a 45% increase in personal loans to pay for utility services (Terrile,
2019).
The streets, once again, have become a critical space in which
to mobilize bodies and summon up solidarity among workers, students, and activists
(especially feminists). Protests against price hikes began in 2018 in Buenos
Aires and by the beginning of 2019 have spread all over the country. Popular
culture has given several names for these demonstrations: marchas de las antorchas [torch marches] marchas contra el tarifazo [protests against price hikes] or ruidazos [banging of pots and pans]. A
woman, protesting in the streets of Buenos Aires in early January, said to the
daily Página 12: “If a man hits a
woman they put him in prison. This man hits us all. No one realizes that?” [Si un hombre golpea a una mujer lo meten
preso. Este hombre nos golpea a todos. ¿Nadie se da cuenta?] (“Un ruidazo
que se amplía: 2019).
This report has three central objectives: to develop a
theoretical analysis of the political and economic consequences of Macri’s
shock doctrine economic policies, to demonstrate how prices hikes are an
intrinsic part of these doctrines, and to show how prices hikes constitute a counteroffensive
to a grass roots discourse of sustainability. The following are some of the
questions we will attempt to answer: Are these economic policies designed to
persuade the Argentine people that price hikes are the only option to join the
developed world? How are these prices hikes reasonable, or good economic
policy? Or simply put, why is Macri’s government doing this to the Argentine
people, a question often raised by bewildered TV panelists?
We will explore the following central questions: Is Macri
attempting to redistribute capital from the working class to the corporate
oligarchy? Is he trying to discipline
workers (by spreading a fear of unemployment, distrust in unions, and divisions
among people) in order to lower wages and make Argentina “more competitive” than
other developing nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, or El Salvador)? Is he trying to
develop a new culture of exploitation, or as Immanuel Wallerstein put it, “an
ideological cover” to vindicate the natural rights of an oligarchy? (2000: 268)
Or is Macri’s approach a combination of all of the above? We will consider how
Argentinians are opposing these tarifazos.
Although this is not a central objective of this paper, in the conclusion we
will explore a few compelling arguments to strengthen a discursive crusade to
socialize public services and support a discourse of sustainability.
In “La pregunta” [‘The Question,’ composed in 2018], Adrían
Dárgelos of Babasónicos sings: “Life is a glass of watered down soda, like a
sequence of heavy jokes...” In many ways, Macri’s policies have engendered an
economy that is like “a glass of watered down soda” but for most Argentines the
heavy jokes are not funny but ruinous. This neoliberalism, pumped with testosterone,
is as reckless and violent as older incarnations (Harvey: 2005, 7-9).
Macri’s party Cambiemos
[Let’s Change] contends that progress in society should be based on a system of
natural competition, in which winners are sifted away from the losers. The
State, a propaganda machine with paid collaborators in media outlets and an
army of trolls, broadcasts a mixture of proto-fascist slogans and platitudes. Novelist
Martín Kohan recently ridiculed Macri’s oratory skills at the Conference of
Spanish Language. Kohan attempted to delineate the president’s rhetorical juggernaut:
“…where the form, under the inspiration of advisors or Jaime Durán Barba’s
slogans, that is, phrases made of two, three or four words, rather
sweet-sounding but hollow, the type of empty, tantric, phraseology of New Age
let’s say, which effectively leads language to a precarious state, and also
leads thinking to a precarious state” (“Un cúmulo de dificultades
incalculable”: 2019).
Thinking is indeed in a precarious state. One-time middle-class
truisms like “the value of education,” is dismissed by Cambiemos, whose supporters encourage the population to carve out
their careers and not to count on public schools or universities for
professional training and social mobility. Recent cuts to the education budget
have magnified infrastructure emergencies in the Province of Buenos Aires. In
August 2018, a gas explosion in a school in Moreno, La Plata, killed vice
Principal Sandra Calamano and Rubén Rodriguez, a guard. School authorities had
been complaining of a gas leak to public officials for years (Hayon, 2019).
Macri, who expressed sadness for the avoidable deaths, had previously affirmed
in March of 2017, after grim results were revealed of inequities between
students in public vs. private schools, said that he felt pity for those that
“had to fall into the public education system” […aquel que tiene que caer en la educación pública] (“ ‘Caer’ en la
educación pública,” 2017). Drawing from the work of Karl Polanyi, David Harvey
(2005) conjures the neoliberal model of social organization in which rights are
dispensed “…to those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing” (38).
As Kohan described so shrewdly, language leads thinking to a precarious state,
as in the case of the deaths of a disfranchised school teacher and janitor.
After three years in power, it is clear that Cambiemos would much rather use the authority of the State to
impoverish large sections of the population by undermining decency and
democratic participation: “The Macri government has also signaled that its
stance towards contentious demonstrations of collective action and basic human
dignity is distinct from previous governments. It has spoken, for example,
about the need for unions to choose between salaries and jobs”(Casullo, 2016:
365). Jean-Luc Nancy in Hegel: The
Restlessness Of The Negative expresses this pathetic condition of
self-awareness brought about by despotism: “I recognize myself separated and
finite, shut-in, reduced or reducible to the very point of my pain”(2002: 41).
The recognition of displacement was expertly articulated by Cambiemos, to cite one example, by the
designation of Juan José Aranguren as Macri’s first Minister of Energy.
Aranguren, is a former CEO of Shell, who was caught in a scandal when the press
revealed that he had refused to sell his holdings after taking the oath as a
public servant (echoing Trump’s Secretary of State appointee, Rex Tillerson ).
He also refused to bring his deposits in fiscal paradises back to Argentina.[iii]
Aranguren launched the price hikes assault on the population, issuing forth the
cornerstone of Macri’s economic policy: the notion that the consumption of
utilities is a luxury-- i.e. Argentinians had been living well beyond their
means, enjoying a life-style only reserved for the wealthy and successful.
Macri himself stated the same idea not one but three times in the same speech:
“We must mature as a society and not live above our means” [Debemos
madurar como sociedad y no vivir por encima de nuestras posibilidades] (Zapata
& Ricardo: 2019). As the opposition
press accused Aranguren of corruption, Macri’s Minister of the Interior
Affairs, Rogelio Frigerio, vehemently verbalized his classism by contending
that in Patagonia--one of the coldest regions in Argentina--“people were
walking around in t-shirts because the heating was practically free” (“La gente
andaba en remera,” 2019). Shortly after this statement, Frigerio earned harsh
criticism when utility bills in the southern region rose up by 2700%. Economist
Javier González Fraga, a Macri supporter, added another hateful ingredient to the
Cambiemos rhetoric, and thus steered
thinking further into a “precarious state” when he proclaimed during a radio
interview: “Overconsumption was encouraged, the utility rates and the monetary
exchange rate were delayed...They made an average employee believe that their
salary could be used to buy a cell phone, a plasma TV, cars, motorcycles and
travel abroad (“Le hicieron creer…,” 2019).
It is clear that this CEOcracia [CEO-cracy] (Rincón, 2018: 139) that has run Argentina for the last
three years has greatly punished the middle and lower class and increased the
wealth of financial speculators by settling an outstanding debt with vulture
funds, borrowing billions of dollars from the IMF, and issuing bonds at
ruinously high-interest rates, one of the largest transfers of capital from
middle sectors to a political oligarchy in recent decades. Economist Michael
Hudson, in an interview with Sharmini Peries, puts it this way: “Like all IMF
loans, the purpose is to subsidize capital flight out of Argentina before this
austerity occurs, so that wealthy Argentinians can take their money and run
before the currency collapses” (2018). One of Macri’s campaign slogans was volveremos al mundo [we will return to
the developing world], a rallying cry which had a twofold function: to save
Argentina from populism or worse, “populist left” (Ellner, 2019: 4) and to depict
the Kirchner administration as reckless for giving working people the illusion
they could afford a life of dignity: “Their return to power promised to signal
the restoration of the old order in which business groups, traditional
political parties, the church hierarchy, and media owners would regain their
position of hegemony. There was also considerable evidence that if the old
elites regained their power they would deliver heavy blows to pink-tide
leftists as well as to the social movements that supported them” (Ellner, 2019:
5). Some politicians from the opposition have argued that Macri’s overall goal
is to turn Argentina once again “en un
país agroexportador” [into an agro-exporting country], and to forge a
segregated society- on one side the holders of capital (corporate monopolies,
landowners, offshore account holders) and on the other, impoverished laborers
with no savings, no property, no access to health care or education.
Let’s consider a few
more economic figures to understand why price hikes are an intrinsic part of
Macri’s austerity package. In the last twelve months (until October of 2018)
the Cambiemos government has devalued
the peso by 258% making it the worst-performing currency in the world. In the
last six months, the Central Bank has raised interest rates to around 60%
making it one of the highest in the world. Most importantly, salaries have gone
down from around u$ 600 to u$ 250 dollars and the poverty rate has increased to
33. 6%.
Macri’s price hike policies are a bold instrument of social
control and indoctrination. Price hikes intervene on the social consciousness
by attempting to persuade the population of two basic notions: 1) the price of
utilities must not be determined by the value of commodities in the domestic
economy but by that of a transnational one, and 2) utilities should not be
regarded as natural resources but as consumer goods (luxury ones we may add). The
dollarization of prices of fuels, gas and electricity, among other consumer
goods, generated great benefit for
energy companies while producing a huge burden on the productive sector,
commerce and families. In order to reduce the fiscal deficit, Macri’s
administration began a sudden reduction of subsidies to regulated pricing in
general; including the cost of transport and the price of water. The immediate
effect of these measures was the acceleration of inflation motivated by the
disproportionate growth of costs, thus damaging the overall performance of the
country's economy. This is very important to note, because as the price of
utilities rise, small businesses have a harder time generating profit. As a
result of this dynamic, hundreds of businesses have closed their doors in the
last three years. Camilo Kahale, president of the Federación Económica de la
Provincia de Buenos Aires (FEBA) [Economic Federation of the Province of Buenos
Aires] reported in the financial daily, Ámbito
Financiero, that between 2016 and August 2018, 9,500 PYMES closed their
doors: “Business owner no longer think of expansion, the goal is to avoid
bankruptcy because they know that a business which closes means a new family
near the poverty line” (“Cada comercio que cierra…,” 2019). Unemployment rates have also risen dramatically in
different sectors of the economy condemning workers to search for jobs in the
informal economy. The consequences are profound; the loss of purchasing power
of consumers affects aggregate demand and subjects companies to a large drop in
sales. Argentina, because of the current economic policy, has consolidated a
situation of chronic stagflation while the government pursues a relentless
austerity agenda and promises economic recovery.
Macri’s economic policy of austerity measures and price
increases generates a “perfect storm,” a term the president himself likes to
use. Every budgetary item upon which a family depends for their economic
well-being has gone up: food (an increase of about 100%), transportation,
utilities, health care costs, education, credit card interest rates, and household
appliances. The president utilizes terms used frequently by emissaries of
neoliberalism: efficiency, personal responsibility, self-monitoring: “We must
mature as a society and not live beyond our means” (Zapata and Ricardo, 2018).
In the last couple of years, politicians have used the analogy of a household
budget to justify the slashing of subsidies to utilities. Although this
strategy has been used by other governments, it has played a critical role in
the deployment of Macri’s rhetoric of “living within our means.” The correlation between federal budget
allocations and household budgeting violently kicks down the safety door that
used to offer families the conviction
that they were capable of administering their incomes. As Michael Edelstein argues,
drawing from research about communities affected by contamination, “No longer
is one’s health assumed. The ability to make decisions for one’s self and
family its thrown into doubt…Both home and environment are now feared” (in
Willow, 2015: 771).
In April 2018, Macri sent to El
Litoral, a newspaper of the Santa Fe province, a document entitled
“Cuidemos el consumo de energía” in which he stated:
Each light that we
turn off, each tap and each stove that we shut off, each water heater that we
regulate so that we do not have to cool off the hot water, every time that
instead of turning on the heater, we wrap ourselves up. All these small steps add
up to energy savings and paying less. These habits are also part of the
cultural change that we are achieving, an authentic and lasting transformation
that is brought about little by little, putting one foot in front of the other.
I know that for many of you it is very difficult to cope with a cost update. I
know what is hard on your pocket. And I want to tell you, once again, that, if
there had been an alternative to avoid this, I would have been the first to implement
it.
For the average citizen, it is crucial to know that their
efforts to save in utilities constitute small but significant transfers of capital
to the State. This revenue could be used to finance other public services,
public education to name one. Another obvious option would be to invest these
savings in energy consumption to build renewable energy infrastructure. According
to Robert Soutar (2015), “Oil and natural gas alone are currently responsible
for well over 80% of Argentina’s total primary energy supply. The Latin
American regional average is around 60%” (2). This is not the goal of Cambiemos. In Argentina today, every
month the price of utilities increase, inflation increases (currently about 4%
percent a month) and salaries depreciate. This unsolvable contradiction
supports a business and political oligarchy which undermines a discourse of
sustainability. As grassroots movement leaders have been arguing frequently
over the last two years, it continues to be difficult to press for a
sustainable model of development when most households are struggling to make
ends meet.
Why would any president do this to their population? Macri’s political
approach is part of a global effort to reorganize economies in the interest of
international capital, and at the expense of working bodies. If one wants to
understand the consequences of economic policies in Argentina, start with the
pain inflicted and walk your way back to the source. As John Bellamy Foster and
Brett Clarke (2012) have argued about the cost of capitalism: “workers
themselves become ‘negative externalities’ ”(14). With this new deployment of
power, utilities are commodities to be purchased by those that can afford them,
use them and trade them. We believe this is the main reason why Macri has so
adamantly defended his policy to roll back subsidies for public utility
services. In the rhetoric of Cambiemos,
energy subsidies are handouts not part
of an economic plan to strengthen national industries and safeguard employment.
One of the biggest problems for Macri’s government is that it is
difficult to find new ways to hide the suffering it inflicts on the population.
As Max Pensky (1993) suggests in his reading of Walter Benjamin, if you take
away from people the possibility of consumption, the enchantment of the system
disappears (184). The many marches against price hikes make clear the obvious, that politics, as former
Uruguayan president José Mujica said, cannot abandon a discussion of the most
elemental problems, and cannot be an appendix of econometrics (“Latinoamérica
piensa,” 2018). As many times before, sectors of the Argentine population have
come out into the streets to express their frustration and discontent. This
might be the only way to shake off the fear that takes over when all one can
think about is being able to pay bills at the end of the month.
The policy of disproportionate rate
increases that the Macri government has implemented since the beginning of its
mandate has generated various types of reactions among citizens, political
parties, as well as different social actors. In the case of families, the
significant fall in purchasing power resulting from the dollarization of
tariffs and the removal of subsidies has generated a constant movement of
claims and protests throughout the country. Consumer rights associations have
developed claim actions on all possible fronts, including court filings, which
in some cases has managed to delay increases for a short period. Small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the commerce sector have permanently positioned
themselves (through various associations that represent them) against a policy
that increases their costs in a manner incompatible with the economic
sustainability of the activity they perform. In the political sphere, except
for the ruling party, all the main opposition forces have repudiated the tariff
increases and contemplate a substantial modification of the one used so far. Besides
public demonstrations, some Argentine provinces- La Pampa, Chubut, Misiones,
and cities- Bariloche- have presented recursos
de amparo or appeals for legal protection (“Freno al tarifazo del gas…,”
2016).
WHAT THE FUTURE MIGHT BRING:
AN INCONCLUSIVE CONCLUSION
Is Argentina heading for a deep recession and potentially
another default of its debt? Will Macri lose the support of sectors of the
population that gave him their vote and legitimacy? There is a strong possibility.
As we finish writing this essay, these are important questions that remain
unanswered. Is Macri’s economic plan wretchedly ineffective or the culmination
of a Machiavellian policy to lower salaries, disempower working people, and
spur inequality? At the national level, grassroots organizations that advocate
for a sustainable model of development, greatly rooted in the strategy of
empowering citizens, must make wise political choices when electing public
officials. Christian Fuchs (2017) reminds us of the deathly consequences of
enabling a CEO-cracy to take control of the country’s resources: “Unsustainability
arises in modern society to the extent that the class interests of elites
become the governing principles of social systems and society’s subsystems”
(456). The version of democracy endorsed in this paper is that of a
governmental system that satisfies the basic necessities of its citizens. They
must remain cognizant of the connections between politics, sustainability, and
collectivity. We seem to be learning this lesson the world over. Middle and low
income families will distrust public projects sponsored by public officials who
raise utility prices, keep their savings in fiscal paradises and make their
lives a living hell. To urge people to conserve and invest in more sustainable
practices, governments need to be role models, not corporate plunderers. These
seem like obvious points, but developed countries that carry the weight of
being the biggest polluters should support grassroots organizations, not
corporations, in their efforts to spread sustainable practices in the
developing world. Instead, the U.S. government has supported smear campaigns
against governments that subsidized public utilities (tarifa social or social prices) and continues to support neoliberal
projects whose main political objectives often center around lowering wages to
sentence the working class to a life of poverty. As Babasónicos puts it so
plainly in their song “The Question,” “we will have to pay/ and maybe pay
more/we will have to insist/as we did so many times.”
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[i]
Documentary filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas uses the term social genocide in Memoria del saqueo (2003), which traces
the history of inequality and the transfer of resources from the Argentine
people to political elites. For a comparative analysis of this film and Solanas’ celebrated La hora de los hornos (1966-68) [The
Hour of the Furnaces] see Guillermo Olivera’s “Dependency Theory and the
Aesthetics of Contrast in Fernando Solana’s La
hora de los hornos and Memoria del
saqueo”.
[ii] Sol
Sánchez Maroto (2019) uses the expression “the ideology of the devil” to
describe how politicians made room to “experts” in order to give their
controversial decisions an aura of expediency and objectivity.
[iii] Aranguren is currently under investigation for taking part in a
scheme in which the government raised the price of gas benefitting the very
company of which he was a shareholder.
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