Debt as a Tool of Domination: The IMF's New Loan and Argentina's Subordination to Global Capital

 

David Barkin and Juan E. Santarcángelo

As we reported in our 2024 Monthly Review article on the International Monetary Fund’s history in Latin America, countries receiving financial support from the IMF have been systematically transformed into dependent subjects of international capital markets.1 In practice, this has meant that they have been obliged to reorganise their institutional structures and to unravel or dilute whatever protections were in place for workers in the industrial and service sectors, the informal sector, and farmers. It also led to the undermining of the quality and availability of medical services and the weakening of pension systems. Educational institutions are also early targets of these financial agreements. In Latin America, this is frequently accompanied by a systematic intensification of discrimination against Indigenous peoples and the outright theft of their territories.

In contrast to Mexico, where an attractive progressive candidate mobilised substantial popular support for a dramatic turn in national politics in the 2018 presidential election, a cumulative disenchantment with the ability of progressive political coalitions to respond effectively to the profound inherited economic problems facing Argentina created the conditions for an overtly liberal (in the nineteenth-century meaning of the concept) candidate to win the presidential election in 2023. Javier Milei has become the “wunderkind” of international liberal sectors and much of the transnational capitalist community, who laud his rapid promulgation of institutional and economic reforms that promise a rapid restoration of the financial prospects of the wealthiest sectors of society.


For a full review of this essay, click here or on the picture to download the pdf file.