Milei and Mayol and the need to be cool
Pelao Carvallo*
Alberto Mayol, a Chilean sociologist based in Spain, is promoting his book with widespread acclaim. The Milei phenomenon which bears the subtitle The challenge of the first anarcho-capitalist government in history[1]A catchy title and subtitle, with punch. Nothing surprising from an author with experience and a fast-paced writing style. Nor is the book's success surprising, given the current trend on the subject and the author's established press presence. Incidentally, it's always good to buy and read printed books.
I just want to make a couple of points, not about the text itself, but about the statements the author (Mayol) has made in the many interviews he's given during the book's promotion. Chilean, Argentinian, and Spanish media outlets have interviewed him, and in those interviews, he has established or reaffirmed certain points that can be discussed to some extent, contributing to a better understanding of the topics he addresses.[2]And to begin with, it is appreciated that both the interviews and the text are not conformist.
A first point of reference is the anarchist perspective in the definition of anarcho-capitalism and in Milei's own work, as Mayol has been doing. Since this is not a formal academic response, I want to make it clear that my sources are implicit and generally drawn from classic anarchist thinkers, including Tomás Ibáñez, Laura Fernández Cordero, Agustín García Calvo (RIP), and Gaya Makaran, to name a few contemporary voices.[3]The anarchism and anarchy that Mayol describes is quite flexible, lax, which coincides with the descriptions he makes of anarchism as a constantly updating thought that fights against its own demons and traditions, which are often the same thing.[4]However, Mayol uses this flexibility with excessive enthusiasm, so much so that he tears down, destroys, and breaks the reeds that form the flexible structure of anarchism. In his propaganda dialogues, he has enthusiastically mentioned the existence of anarchist governments—many of them, all short-lived—and this (the existence of anarchist governments) is not recorded in anarchist history written by either anarchists or non-anarchists (even anti-anarchists).[5]So much so that even regarding the revolutionary situation in Spain in July 1936, it is not known how anarchist that government was, of which he was a part in the republican sector, participating with ministers and all.[6]There are a few more discussions of the same nature, and that would be all. There is no section in the historiography of the history of world anarchism entitled "anarchist governments" because there haven't been any. Even in the statist drift of anarchism in Spain in 1936, that drift didn't reach the point where one can say with certainty that there was an anarchist government; however, it can be said that at that time there were anarchists in the government. Mayol, in his search for coherence in his hypothesis, makes assertions inconsistent with the data of actually existing anarchism.
Regarding Milei, he says that he is an anarchist and that, as such, his behavior in his current position as president of Argentina (and this is not his first elected office) is anarchic. His description of anarchy is likened to an aspiring pilot who, in an interview, declares that he hates airplanes, hates flying, hates pilots, hates airports, hates everything related to flying airplanes, and that he will act accordingly. In other words, he says that anarchic behavior in the office of president of the republic is and will be destructive. However, the historiography of anarchism offers no examples, recent or distant, of anarchist presidents of any republic. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude that an anarchist presidency can be described in this way, as it seems more a product of prejudice than anything else. There are, however, examples of anarchist participation in a government (that of Republican Spain in 1936), and there is a consensus that this participation was primarily constructive and focused on defending the existence of the republic. In fact, militant anarchism has criticized this governmental participation both at the time and subsequently, with several conclusions that denounced that these ministers were, at that time, better ministers than anarchists, which, on the other hand, reflects the anarchist work ethic and anarchist ethics in general.[7]This topic, that of anarchist ethics, fundamental to understanding anarchist political practice, eludes Mayol, and that is why he goes off the rails, consciously and unconsciously, when he tries to label Milei the destroyer as an anarchist.
The reeds of anarchism find their flexibility in firm roots and canes that clearly understand that no government can be destroyed or deconstructed from within, especially not if doing so requires an electoral and/or parliamentary career, as Milei has done. This does not, however, preclude anarchist artivism from engaging in such activities.[8] The electoral performance has been revisited several times, but that's from a performance perspective. There are other socialist currents, from authoritarian socialism onward, that have preached and practiced "entryism," but with a different orientation: not to enter a government and destroy the state from the presidency, but to guide what they've "entered" in a revolutionary direction. Furthermore, anarchism has never been naive about the state and knows that simply creating chaos in the presidency wouldn't be enough to bring down the state... at best, it would only bring down that same government.
Mayol's portrayal of Milei's anarchism is a useful descriptive exaggeration for disseminating his text, but useless for understanding anarchism itself. Milei is not an anarchist, even though he has at times called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a concept that is nothing more than another semantic misunderstanding requiring separate clarification.[9]He is not so clearly an anarchist that he describes himself as such less and less, although, being a self-promoter, if the sale of Mayol's book convinces him, he will have no problem describing himself as such again.
Milei is a specimen of that long drift of liberalism (and conservatism) that led them from their sharp differentiation in the 18th and 19th centuries to their increasing amalgamation in the 20th century, driven by the possibility of becoming irrelevant in the face of the rise of socialism and progressivism worldwide. In fact, the anti-statist wing of 20th-century liberal conservatism is anti-statist due to a rejection of the growing and successful presence of progressive and socialist statism during that same century. This liberal-conservative amalgamation resulted in a generic program that was economically liberal and morally conservative, as it associated progressive statism with rights for women and young people—two of the most frequently used sources of unpaid (care work) and/or cheap (entry-level jobs) labor in the industrial and service economies.
Liberal conservatism[10] This is nothing new; it has a global history with local particularities, ranging from the creation of the National Party in Chile to the liberal-conservative shift of the US Republican Party in the face of the Democratic Party's progressive turn, just as in the UK, faced with the Labour advance, the Conservative Party became a refuge of classical liberalism. In Argentina, while Peronism, from the early 2000s onward, definitively leaned toward progressivism, the liberal-conservative fusion has been testing various formulas and managed to bring Macri to power. Reagan, Thatcher, and even Pinochet (the militaristic version) were channels for broadening the ideological horizon of this cultural and political amalgam to the point where there is now ideological space for its most extremist wing, represented by Milei, to come into play as a radical experiment, much like Pinochet's Chile was in the 1970s and 80s.
Milei, then, is just a radical liberal-conservative with a great capacity for publicity who reflects an Argentine and global situation in which (as I have already said elsewhere) progressive movements, by managing the present so much, have lost –and feared– the future, leaving the field open for liberal conservatism to establish the past as the future to be built, a certain ideology of nostalgia, an ideological steampunk of what never existed as a desirable future.[11]Milei, as an extremist liberal-conservative, hates the state, young people, and women, and he is consistent with this. For these same reasons, no description of him as an anarchist accurately reflects his views, because he is neither an anarchist nor does he want to be. Milei might be shaping his liberal-conservatism into a kind of "Mileism" that allows him to continue capitalizing, economically and politically, on the fame he has gained from his experience in government. This can be interpreted as a not-so-subtle appropriation of Peronist mythology, which also emerged as an "ism" from a governing experience.[12].
Mayol, with his characteristic enthusiasm, has constructed a fictitious description of a Milei that does not exist: the anarchist Milei, since fundamentally there is no such thing as an anarcho-capitalist Milei, as anarcho-capitalism exists only as an advertising name for an extremist, misogynistic, and racist liberal-conservatism that good liberal-conservatives would never have embraced and which they are now testing in a country increasingly distant from the center of the world and, due to Milei's own management, increasingly distant from the center of Latin America and South America.
[1] https://www.infobae.com/opinion/2024/07/06/milei-fase-2/
[2] Check out the video interviews on YouTube channels https://www.youtube.com/@AlbertoMayolMiranda y https://www.youtube.com/@PodcastLaCosaNostra
[3] That is without counting the vast anarchist production in self-managed and autonomous media, mostly of short duration.
[4] An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmSiRDqrT2c&t=43s
[5] This survey on the current state of anarchist studies, available at https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/handle/11336/167016 The topic is not mentioned by any of the specialists, not even marginally.
- [6] “With the return to government, the CNT sealed its commitment to the policy of resistance. The secretary of the CN/CNT culminated the collaborationist and Popular Front line of anarcho-syndicalism with the adoption of the Thirteen Points. On June 24, 1938, he delivered a speech as the CNT representative in the Popular Front, in which he endorsed the foundations of the ministerial declaration of May 1st: he indicated trade union unity and support for the Government as the basis for unity in the rearguard.” – MARTÍN NIETO, Isaac. ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM, RESISTANCE AND AFFINITY GROUPS. THE CONFEDERAL AND ANARCHIST PROPAGANDA COMMISSION (1937-1939) El Future of the Past, electronic history journal. The Future of the Past, no. 1, 2010, pp. 597-611
[7] “In short, anarchist militants—at all levels—were expected to maintain impeccable conduct in both the public and private spheres. This was considered one of the defining characteristics of the movement, a practice always opposed to the corruption and authoritarianism of official politics.” Navarro, Javier. The 'moral profile' of the militant in Spanish anarchism (1936-1939) in “Spagna contemporanea”, 2004, no. 25, pp. 39-67-
[8] “Militant art or “artivism” refers to collectives that use tools from the art world for their political action. Many of these groups draw inspiration, in their aesthetics, discourse, and organization, from the libertarian movement.” Tarín Sanz, Adrián. LIBERTARIAN ARTIVISM IN RUSSIA: THE VOINÁ GROUP BEYOND THE MEDIA in IC – Scientific Journal of Information and Communication 2016, 13, pp. 195 – 212
[9] Murray Newton Rothbard invented the concept of anarcho-capitalism as a radical differentiator of his anti-statism within the internal disputes of liberal conservatism in academia (economics) in the United States during the second half of the 20th century.
[10] See for example file:///C:/Users/usuario/Downloads/Dialnet-ElLiberalismoConservadorEnLaEuropaContinental18301-27519.pdf
[11] Carvallo, P. (2024, July 21, 2024). The nostalgia and destruction industry. ABC Color Newspaper, Cultural Supplement, p. 1. Also available in the digital edition.
[12] Ver https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/bitstream/handle/11336/30939/CONICET_Digital_Nro.a2951706-db76-4bc8-858a-e3dfb7bc3c8f_A.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
