I don’t usually comment on economics, because it’s not something I studied and I didn’t even have much to do with managing my private economy throughout my life. If they had named me on the board of a company or a bank, I would have bankrupted them. I have only analyzed economic topics when they were related to what interests me: the analysis of politics and communication.
If someone asks me about buying dollars or staying in pesos or buying Turkish pounds, they make a mistake. I am not an economist. It is better that you go to Florida street and ask a little tree. If you plan to run for office, I can be helpful: nine out of ten candidates who use our analytics win elections. I am a political analyst.
Currently, our country is governed by a triumvirate of lawyers who manage the economy. The result is in sight: we suffer from the highest inflation in the world, the dollar touched 500 pesos, nobody knows how the economy will be in a few weeks and worse after the PASO in August.
There is no doubt that, if we want Argentina to get ahead, it is necessary for it to put its economy in order, but human beings are not computers that can be programmed without protest. For people to be happy, it is not enough that they balance the figures in the Excel sheets of the officials. If someone removes multiple columns from a chart, no computer will be outraged, stage a protest, and kick the programmer out of the office.
Politics has always been moved by the feelings of passionate and sensitive human beings, now empowered by the Internet, which demolished the old paradigm of governability.
When Macron tries to raise the retirement age by two years in France, the country catches fire. The rational arguments of the actuarial calculation are worth little. There is a wave of uncontrollable indignation, the streets are paralyzed, the police join the protest, groups of uniformed men rob banks. What relationship do these assaults have with retirees? None. But this is the dynamic of the self-convened mobilizations of today’s society, violent riots mobilized at the same time for everything and for nothing.
The protest by Chilean students over the price of the subway ticket in Santiago ended up being turned into a demand to change the country’s constitution. Boric, who won the elections expressing the anarchic protest of the youth, dedicated himself to writing constitutions. He has already had the first version of him rejected and works to get the second text rejected from him, closed in on himself, without communicating with ordinary people.
There is a clash between two actors who decide the future of politics. On the one hand, there are ordinary citizens, with a vision of the world built from their daily lives; and on the other, self-speaking elites, a dense minority that is generally unsympathetic. There are also objective problems, which sometimes make it necessary to take unpopular measures, difficult to impose in a society in which sacrifice is in disuse. In these weeks I studied in depth the text by Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, Managing Political Emotions, which talks about the subject, sharing theses unanimously accepted in the world‘s serious academy, but ignored by 90% of parish politicians.
Humans are sentient beings. Voters do not vote for the most prepared, but for the candidate they like. They support the one who shares their feelings, not the one who writes programs that put the little tastes of their life at risk. When a high-class sage tells them that he has a plan, it causes a panic. They are not there to sacrifice themselves for the calculations of a rich man, they prefer to have fun with the sentimental expressions of someone more human, even if they are wrong.
When the majority say that their main problem is the economy, they are referring to the anguish caused by the grocer moving prices, to the fact that they cannot buy their son an ice cream when they go to the park or organize the barbecue on the weekend. The country for them is their square meter, here and now, not the future of humanity, which is just an imaginary line that vanishes when someone approaches them.
Serious militants do not give importance to such superficial issues. What significance can your child’s candy have if with those pesos you can buy paint to paint a poster that makes imperialism or Castro’s communism tremble. There are clueless politicians of two types. Some believe that people want inflation to drop, for the State to reach a zero deficit, for the government to get support from the International Monetary Fund. The others believe that the people do not want the external debt to be paid, that the young people of the cities want to become peasants, they ask the Minister of Economy to travel to Cuba to obtain dollar loans that are not imperialist, but revolutionary. Both are wrong; The problem of people is to treat themselves.
I was born in Ecuador, a country that kept the same currency for decades, without major changes until the inflation that led to dollarization in January 2000. When I came to study in Argentina in 1973, the peso was still used as the national currency, later replaced by the legal weight, the Argentine peso, the austral, the current peso. In each denomination change, three zeros were removed from the banknotes, making a total of twelve. It is something difficult to conceive of for the citizens of most countries, who have never changed their currency.
The financial crisis unleashed in Ecuador at the end of the 20th century ended when the government accepted the opposition’s demand to dollarize the country, ten days before suffering a military coup. Dollarization was not a popular demand, but a political decision, but it produced beneficial effects for broad sectors, especially the poor. Some would have wanted to repeal it, but none would have won the election by offering to do so. It has the enthusiastic support of more than 90% of Ecuadorians.
The challenge of governing is complex. In Argentina the triumvirate led us to collapse. Enrique Szewach recently said that Massa’s measures to control prices do not make sense. It is useless to pressure businessmen to work at a loss. It would be better to stimulate production. The most prominent economists are not policemen or racketeers from political and union groups, who mobilize to threaten businessmen.
It is dangerous to trust that, given the failure of the government, the people will vote for whoever orders the economy, giving them a parliamentary majority to enact a package of laws that raise rates, make the labor market more flexible, declare the peso immutable, and magically lead us to development, even if it bans Lunfardo and imposes Swedish as the language.
You cannot destroy the enthusiasm for spending that exists. Statistics show that there is a general increase in consumption, especially of goods that have to do with fun, pleasure. There is no vocation for saving, but playful enthusiasm.
Kirchnerism is obsolete. People don’t believe the revolutionary tales of ladies who advertise Louis Vuitton handbags. Its liturgy is outdated: the old mobilizations, organized by parties, unions and other organizations of the poverty business cartel, no longer work.
The leaders of the past said that they were fighting for principles, they invoked ideologies, theses, programs. Although it was not known if they wanted to fight the capital of the businessmen or that of Marx; fighting it was part of the musical epic.
The mobilizations were planned, the leaders handled them, they called them, they could dissolve them. The masses did what the bosses ordered, with whom governments and politicians negotiated.
With the network everything changed. People communicate directly, create their own utopias that do not respect the business of their employers.
When some provincial slave catchers try to force unionize courier workers, the workers fight back and win. They want to live in peace, without bosses who take part of their income and force them to go to demonstrations.
The situation is very dangerous. People are distraught. He will not obey messianic leaders of any sign. The world is plagued with spontaneous insurrections, which are not brought about by the provocations of politicians or foreign countries. Nor by the action of “infiltrators” as archaic politicians love to say.
They are conflicts that are started by issues related to daily life, they increase with people who mobilize through the network who come adding their demands. It goes from focused conflicts to broad mobilizations that destabilize governments.
Its protagonists are generally middle-class people who feel far from the political and intellectual elites. They are not proletarian mobilizations or provoked by marginals.
When they break out, they fold groups that question society from any angle. Also violent groups, which are not “infiltrators”, but what is called in the academic field “black rocks”, which loot and destroy public and private assets.
They are generally groups made up of outsiders who conspire and take advantage of the chaos. Sometimes they call themselves anarchists. They carry out group attacks during demonstrations, rob shops, and normally look for those that sell the finest products. They have good taste.
Sometimes they act individually, as in December 2018, when some anarchists, who lived on State subsidies, planted a bomb at the tomb of Colonel Ramón Lorenzo Falcón, in the Recoleta cemetery. One of them, Anahí Esperanza Salcedo, was injured because she wanted to take a selfie at the time of the bomb explosion.
The same phenomenon occurred when some street vendors of drinks made an attempt on the life of Cristina Fernández, in such a crude event that not even the vice president herself was aware of what was happening.
* Professor of the GWU. Member of the Argentine Political Club.
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