Milei and Mayol and the need to be cool
Pelao Carvallo*
The Chilean sociologist based in Spain, Alberto Mayol, is generating considerable buzz for his book, *The Milei Phenomenon *, subtitled *The Challenge of the First Anarcho-Capitalist Government in History * [1] . A catchy title and subtitle, with real punch. Nothing surprising from an author with experience and a prolific writing style. Nor is the book's success surprising, given the current buzz surrounding the topic and the author's established press presence. Of course, 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 has given during the book's promotion. Chilean, Argentinian, and Spanish media outlets have interviewed him, and in these interviews he has established, or reaffirmed, certain points that can be discussed with some benefit to understanding the issues he addresses [2] . And to begin with, it is commendable that both the interviews and the text are not complacent.
A first point of reference is the anarchism in the definition of anarcho-capitalism and of Milei himself, as Mayol has been doing. Since this is not a formal academic response, I should mention that my sources are implicit and are generally the classics of anarchism, including Tomás Ibáñez, Laura Fernández Cordero, Agustín García Calvo (RIP), and Gaya Makaran, to mention some contemporary voices as well [3] . The anarchism and anarchy that Mayol describes is quite flexible, lax, which coincides with descriptions of anarchism as a constantly evolving thought that struggles against its own demons and traditions, which are often one and the same [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 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 unclear how anarchist the government he was part of, in the Republican sector, actually was, even serving as a minister [6] . There are a few more discussions of the same nature, and that's about it. 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, this drift did not 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. In his search for coherence in his hypothesis, Mayol makes statements that are 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 denouncing that these ministers were, at that moment, better ministers than anarchists, which, moreover, reflects the anarchist work ethic and anarchist ethics in general [7] . This issue, that of anarchist ethics, fundamental to understanding anarchist political practice, eludes Mayol, and that is why he goes astray, consciously and unconsciously, by trying 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 by pursuing an electoral and/or parliamentary career, as Milei has done. This doesn't preclude the fact that, from the perspective of anarchist artivism [8] , electoral performance has been revisited several times, but only from a performance standpoint. Other socialist currents, from authoritarian socialism, 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 has been "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, regarding Milei's anarchism, makes a descriptive exaggeration useful for disseminating his text but useless for understanding anarchism. Milei is not an anarchist, although at some point he has called himself an anarcho-capitalist, a concept that is nothing more than another semantic misunderstanding that requires separate clarification [9] . He is not an anarchist so clearly that he describes himself as such less and less, although, being the self-promoter that he is, if the sales of Mayol's book convince him, he will have no problem describing himself that way 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] is not a recent phenomenon and 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 United Kingdom, 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 succeeded in bringing 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 variant, 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 advertising who accounts for an Argentine and world situation in which (I have already said it elsewhere) the progressives, by managing the present so much, have lost – and feared – the future, leaving the field free for liberal conservatism to install 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, youth, and women, and he is consistent with this. For these same reasons, no description of him as an anarchist accurately describes him because he is not one, nor does he want to be. Milei may be shaping his liberal-conservatism into a kind of “Mileism” that allows him to continue capitalizing, economically and politically, on the fame that his experience in government gives him, in something that can be interpreted as a not-so-subtle expropriation of the Peronist mythology that also emerged as an “ism” from a government 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] Consult audiovisual interviews on the YouTube channels https://www.youtube.com/@AlbertoMayolMiranda and 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] In 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 militancy—at its various levels—had to maintain impeccable behavior in both the public and private spheres. This was conceived as 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,” that is, collectives that use tools from the art world for their political action. Many of these are inspired, in their aesthetics, discourse, and organization, by 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 twentieth 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] See https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/bitstream/handle/11336/30939/CONICET_Digital_Nro.a2951706-db76-4bc8-858a-e3dfb7bc3c8f_A.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
