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The Chainsaw International Regardless of whether the sacrifices to be made are named or not, they have long been on the agenda due to drastic cuts and high tariffs. The crucial question is how governments justify and enforce these sacrifices. In this respect, Javier Milei can be seen as a right-wing extremist pioneer of authoritarian experiments. From the war against "gender ideology" to the cuts in higher education funding, from the glorification of Israeli destruction in Gaza to the rejection of an independent judiciary, new authoritarian regimes demonstrate how fascism can be advanced particularly quickly and purposefully today. In this context, the chainsaw is more than a metaphor. It represents the logic of a new wave of anarcho-authoritarian neoliberalism spreading across Latin America, North America, and Europe. As if under the spell of a viral meme, even politicians on the center-left spectrum seem to be following this trend. Just last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer floated the idea of a "Project Chainsaw," modeled on Milei's far-right attack on the public sector, but seeking, according to Starmer, to realize "radical goals of the moderate left." The more the chainsaw logic spreads, the more a politics of patriarchal domination, racist exclusion, plunder, and violence is strengthened, whose actors are increasingly internationally networked. The New Right International In 2024, the center of gravity of world politics shifted not only further to the right, but, with Milei, also further to the Global South. On the first anniversary of his inauguration and immediately after Trump's re-election victory, the leadership of the far right gathered in Buenos Aires in December 2024 for the first Argentine CPAC . "We could call ourselves a right-wing international," Milei declared in his opening speech . "With Trump, Bukele, and us here in Argentina, we have a historic opportunity to bring a breath of freedom to the world." Nayib Bukele, the incumbent president of El Salvador, had recently signed an agreement with the Trump administration to house deportees from the United States in the maximum-security CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo; English: Center for the Containment of Terrorism), a notorious facility with a capacity of 40,000 inmates. Newly appointed members of the so-called "right-wing international" who spoke at CPAC included Santiago Abascal, chairman of the Spanish Vox party; Brazilian congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro from São Paulo (a son of Jair Bolsonaro); Chilean congressman Fernando Sánchez Ossa; Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee; and Arizona politician Kari Lake. The lineup was rounded out by online opinion leaders such as Agustín Laje and Ben Shapiro. Steve Bannon and Jair Bolsonaro [1] spoke via video. Their speeches included every inflammatory term from the far right's arsenal: gender ideology, LGBTQ+ lobby, cultural Marxism, "woke" extremism, migrant invasions, globalist machinations, and the decline of civilization. Meanwhile, the collective in the conference hall danced to Trump's ironic campaign anthem , "YMCA." Even in his time as a hot-headed television commentator with a penchant for rants, Javier Milei was a fervent admirer of Donald Trump. And now his admiration is being reciprocated. Trump's "favorite president," as he called Milei, was the first foreign head of state to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after the US elections. "You've accomplished a great deal in a very short time," Trump praised him in his first speech after the election. Milei, for his part, boasted : "I am one of the two most important politicians in the world today. One is Trump, the other is me." This mutual admiration has repeatedly translated into concrete political measures. Most recently, Trump's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, banned the former Argentine president and Milei's declared rival, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, from entering the US due to corruption allegations. Milei won the elections during a period of explosive post-pandemic inflation, in which many Argentine workers needed multiple jobs to make ends meet. His agenda included drastic cuts in government spending, the elimination of public subsidies, lower corporate taxes, and the deregulation of markets. While he has not yet fulfilled his campaign promise to abolish the central bank, he is instead artificially supporting the dollar exchange rate by drawing on its reserves , which are currently at their lowest level since he took office. As a result of his reforms, a growing number of Argentines are having to finance all their expenses, from food to rent, with loans. Those affected by this precarious situation are virtually forced to participate in speculative practices. The rigid austerity measures have massively increased poverty and private debt. This was due in particular to the lifting of price caps (for example, on public transport, telephone and internet charges), as well as the liberalization of credit card interest rates (which allows banks to charge higher fees for late payments). Under Milei's government, the poverty rate rose by 10 percentage points to at least 53 percent of the population. Although the government claims that this figure has now fallen to 38 percent, the fact remains that large sections of the population are increasingly running out of money, inflation is particularly noticeable in basic areas such as public services and food , and 93 percent of households are now in some form of debt. The Argentine government is currently seeking a new $20 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, thus linking another cycle of public debt to the country's growing private debt, all of which is taking place on the basis of a progressive financialization of social life. Public debt repayment must be made in US dollars, which in turn will be generated in highly deregulated sectors such as mining (including lithium production), agriculture, and the energy industry. In a recent move, Milei's government allowed young people aged 13 and over to open bank accounts denominated in US dollars: a tempting but largely symbolic offer, since, according to UNICEF , the majority of children and young people in Argentina live below the poverty line. Similar to the situation in the US, the project is particularly popular among boys and young men and is contributing to the consolidation of a new toxic form of politicized masculinity. On an individual level, Milei defines his model, which is particularly expressed in his openness to cryptocurrencies, under the slogan of "financial freedom." Younger leaders of the Latin American "New Right" understand their ongoing project as a "culture war," drawing on the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci's concept of "war of position." While Gramsci used this term to describe resistance to the cultural hegemony of the capitalist class, this culture war is directed against the perceived hegemony of progressive and left-wing forces—against "progres" and "zurdos," as Milei prefers to call them—and attacks feminist, queer, indigenous, and human rights movements, as well as the entire civil service. Entire government agencies—the Ministry of National Security (under Patricia Bullrich), the Ministry of Human Capital (under Sandra Pettovello), and the Ministry for Deregulation and Transformation of the State (under Federico Sturzenegger)—are now dedicated to fighting "internal enemies," criminalizing protests, and cutting funding for science, public education, human rights programs, initiatives against gender-based violence, and soup kitchens. Milei’s libertarian “ revolution ” undermines the state from within, in favor of capital. By immediately ruling radically by decree, Milei not only tested the limits of the executive branch. A veritable torrent of regulations immediately after taking office – a foretaste of Trump's approach, which Steve Bannon called "flooding the zone" – paved the way for a massive legislative success: the "Ley Bases" (Bases Law), which was passed by Congress about six months later. One element of this legislative package is the new regulations and incentives for large-scale investments (Régimen de Incentivo a las Grandes Inversiones, or RIGI for short), which provide extensive legal guarantees as well as tax, customs, and exchange rate advantages for large-scale investments in forestry, tourism, infrastructure, mining, the tech sector, and the steel industry. The chainsaw strikes at any regulation that could restrict the influence of capital or the exploitation of natural resources. In January 2025, Milei completed his first privatization. This involved IMPSA, a national company operating in the energy, technology, and metal processing sectors. After the company's share price collapsed as a result of Milei's reforms, he sold it to the US-based Industrial Acquisitions Fund for a knockdown price of $27 million—an apparent nod to Donald Trump. In addition, Milei announced plans to build new nuclear power plants to support AI development and, in parallel, accelerated the development of the nation's uranium reserves for domestic use and export. At the same time, the government is working to transform Argentina's economy into a platform economy, in close collaboration with Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago, two companies owned by Marcos Galperin, the Argentinian Elon Musk. The plan is to create a comprehensive platform for income, payments, loans, pensions, and social benefits that will operate independently of traditional banks. As luck would have it, this vision corresponds exactly to that pursued by Elon Musk with his platform X, which recently entered into a partnership with Visa to process financial transactions. At the same time, the very regulatory authority responsible for regulating X's new financial services has come under the scrutiny of Musk's DOGE authority. But, similar to the Tesla case, the future prospects of X as an "everything app" also appear increasingly questionable. Like Milei, Trump has committed himself to fighting within and against the state. In doing so, he is politically inverting a strategy that theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas once described from a socialist perspective . Although Trump's "Project 2025" plan largely anticipated this instrumentalization of the administrative apparatus—not to destroy it, but to remodel it in the spirit of "arch-conservative rule," as James Goodwin argued —Milei was both a role model and an ally in this process. Russell Vought, director of the influential White House Office of Management and Budget and co-author of Project 2025, openly declared that the measure was intended to " traumatize " public sector workers. White House budget documents indicate government plans to cut funding to some agencies and departments by as much as 60 percent . The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently withdrew a plan to lay off 65 percent of its staff; the Department of Education announced plans to cut nearly half its staff ; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is eliminating at least 25 percent of the positions at the Department of Health and Human Services. " While land, resources, and entire population groups are supposedly "sacrificed," that is, left open to the grasp of international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general principle of life. " Milei is a good example of how far-right politicians gain support through promises of national greatness that presuppose a willingness to make sacrifices. While they circumvent democratic procedures, they tap into a dissatisfaction with purely formal democracy that is fed by the everyday experiences of the majority of the population and channel it into the mill of anti-democratic radicalism. Milei's campaign slogan, "There is no money," should therefore not be understood merely as an argument for fiscal discipline or the fight against inflation, those "achievements" that the Western media celebrate at the expense of a suffering population. Rather, this phrase serves primarily to justify sacrifice. Because Milei is transforming the entire country into a “sacrifice zone” – to borrow a term from extractivism research – by leaving land and resources to large corporations for further plunder and ecological destruction . In this sense, individual sacrifices and national sacrifice zones are two sides of the same coin. The rhetoric of sacrifice demands consent to one's own dispossession. "You are neither being exploited nor taken from you," it is claimed, but rather that you are part of a larger project for whose success sacrifices must be made. Your suffering is necessary and will ultimately benefit you. While land, resources, and entire populations are supposedly "sacrificed," that is, exposed to the grasp of international capital, the ethos of speculative competition is imposed on individuals as a general principle of life, which deforms subjectivities and undermines the foundations of social reproduction. Milei's gift to Musk not only referred to a specific package of measures. The chainsaw also represented a strategy to maintain political legitimacy. The staged photo opportunity with Musk came at a tactically opportune moment: Just a few days earlier, Milei had promoted the memecoin $Libra on X. The cryptocurrency, modeled after the $Trump memecoin, initially experienced a rapid price increase, but collapsed dramatically a few hours later, causing a national scandal. More than 40,000 people were affected by the price crash, the estimated loss was over $4 billion , and Argentina's most important stock index fell by 5.6 percent. The Argentine president was soon dubbed "Milei Estafador": Milei the Fraudster. But whenever his legitimacy at home falters, Milei courts favor abroad—and usually with great success. Only recently, leading liberal media outlets like The Economist and the Financial Times labeled him right-wing extremist and a threat to democracy; now they praise his policies as a cure for other crisis-ridden countries, even as a possible solution to Europe's economic stagnation. Heads of state like Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz have also welcomed Milei into the leading circles of a Western order that now appears severely damaged. By further normalizing the far-right fringe, they are shifting the boundaries of what can be said within democratic societies, which in turn benefits far-right forces at home in Europe. The mutual admiration expressed on social media serves similar purposes. Milei, Musk, and Bukele maintain an authoritarian love triangle—a "Pan-American Trumpism," as historian Greg Grandin has put it . What began as a virtual acquaintance between Milei and Musk on X shifted into the physical world during a series of meetings that resembled bilateral trade negotiations between heads of state. Their shared agenda includes the massive expansion of lithium mining for Tesla's battery production and the increasing use of Musk's Starlink satellites for Argentina's internet coverage. In addition, Milei has also visited other US tech giants to win them over as strategic partners for Argentina. Contrary to all the austerity rhetoric, government spending on personal travel abroad rose to a record high. His focus is clearly on alliances with the US financial, technology, and commodity sectors. His tour of Silicon Valley included conversations with Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Tim Cook (Apple), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), as well as several meetings with Musk. Thumbs-up selfies were a must. Last year, on his way back from a visit to Silicon Valley, Milei stopped off in El Salvador to attend Nayib Bukele's second inauguration, which was only possible because the Supreme Court reinterpreted the constitutional ban on consecutive terms. (Donald Trump also recently stated that his consideration of a third term was " no joke .") Bukele, who calls himself the "coolest dictator in the world," received Milei along with Donald Trump Jr., the King of Spain, and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa. Like Bukele and Milei, Noboa deliberately uses violent social media displays to legitimize his authoritarian rule. Noboa is currently negotiating a deal with Erik Prince, founder of the private military company Blackwater, to militarize the "war on crime" along US lines. Shortly before the runoff election on April 13, Noboa visited Trump in Florida to discuss a bilateral trade agreement—apparently hoping to boost his chances of re-election. The authoritarian triangle of Trump, Milei, and Bukele is thus beginning to expand into a quadrilateral. Trump's team has also been innovative in terms of authoritarian media strategies. After a deportation agreement with Bukele was announced, the official White House X account published a video touted as "ASMR," meaning it was intended to provide viewers with a pleasant sensory experience. It showed men in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane—cruelty staged as a relaxation aid. Shortly after, Bukele released an elaborately produced video , filmed with drones and accompanied by dramatic music, showing suspected Venezuelan gang members being transferred from the plane to Bukele's prison complex. (Family members and lawyers for several of these men vehemently deny the allegations.) The White House subsequently posted a similar clip—it showed a handcuffed Venezuelan accompanied by the pop song "Closing Time." The video was later deleted. Trump cited the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as the legal basis for these prisoner transfers to El Salvador. Although federal courts banned the deportation flights, the immigration authorities (ICE) continued to carry them out anyway. Bukele commented on X with "Oopsie... Too late" – and was promptly retweeted by Senator Marco Rubio. A few days later, Bukele claimed : "The US is experiencing a judicial coup," to which Elon Musk responded with "1000%." This digital banter reveals the new authoritarianism in its purest form: culture war as shitposting spectacle, constitutional crisis as viral entertainment. This is the accompaniment to systematic attacks on the judiciary, the repression of protests, and the imprisonment of citizens and non-citizens alike. In 2021, Bukele's party dismissed five constitutional judges in El Salvador and replaced them with loyal followers. In February 2025, Milei also appointed two new Supreme Court justices by decree while parliament was on summer recess. And after Trump publicly called for the impeachment of opposition judges in the US, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson floated the idea of completely abolishing recalcitrant federal courts . At the same time, Bukele and Noboa are pushing forward an authoritarian law-and-order policy through mass incarceration, while Milei is responding to ongoing social protests in Argentina with police violence, and Trump is unleashing the ICE immigration agency on migrants and foreign students. From the USA to Argentina, from El Salvador to Ecuador, the resurgent right is betting that spectacles of retaliation—trolling the "zurdos," bashing the liberals—can conceal or even compensate for real dispossession. As soon as the population begins to question the sacrifices demanded, these governments respond with diversionary tactics, further cuts, and calls for preemptive obedience. How long the rewards of cruelty can outweigh cruel wages remains to be seen. But as long as the calculation works, popular resistance will be necessary to challenge the chainsaw regime. https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/kettenaegen-internationale/? Back |
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