In one of his videos you can see Javier Milei, the ultraliberal who has just won the primary elections in Argentina, symbolically “thinning” the state administration; The names of the ministries he proposes to disappear are peeling off from a panel that outlines the government structure: “Get out!” he shouts with his furious way of communicating while tearing off the label that reads “Ministry of Public Works,” the corresponding to the “Ministry of Health” or to the “Ministry of Education” which he accuses of being useful for socialist indoctrination. When finished, only a few ministries remain, including Justice, Security and Defense. Visually, a light State can be observed as a result, “thin” as some analysts call it, a State that is the dream not only of Milei but of the libertarians of the world.
For some decades, if not more, there has been a contrast between those political forces that tend towards the construction of a strong, heavy State, with a great institutional framework that is in charge of many functions such as providing public health , education and other varied services to the population with the objective of creating a more or less centralized “welfare state”, these functions can be exercised by the collection and administration of taxes; This state model has, in theory, a great interference in the dynamics of the market. As an example, we can talk about the post-revolutionary Mexican State that managed, in addition to basic services, state telephone companies, the railway system or even an aviation company, among many others. By contrast, the political forces that defend just the opposite are opposed, the neoliberals fight for a thinned State, a light State that intervenes little in the economy and that leaves many of the services for the population to the private sector; In this spirit, neoliberal governments cede many of their functions to private initiative. Everything is a matter of degrees, a continuum that goes from a state that is responsible for and manages a large number of services and has as much influence as possible on economic affairs to a state at the opposite end that, as Milei dreams, is only in charge of administer justice and create the conditions that protect private property at all costs. In this last extreme is that the so-called libertarians or anarcho-capitalists are found, a term that, as I will explain later, is an oxymoron, a contradiction between its compounds. The heavy state is generally identified with the left and the light state with the right, although there are interesting contradictions all the time.
The theoretical opposition between a heavy State and a thin State is just that, a theoretical opposition. I maintain that both models, although in different ways, are very heavy states. When the State loosens its interference in economic affairs and lightens its institutional framework, it becomes heavier in terms of its repressive apparatus for the defense of private property and the interests of companies. A neoliberal State is anything but a light State; the indigenous peoples who have defended the natural assets of their territories are very clear about this. No matter how neoliberal the Mexican State has been in the last decades of the 20th century, its heavy legal scaffolding has been needed to grant communication concessions to private companies; it is the legal framework of the State that is needed to grant mining concessions , to negotiate the terms of free trade agreements and it is the State that represses when it is necessary to defend the privatization of common goods. When, in the first decade of the 21st century, the Zapotec community of Magdalena Teitipac in Oaxaca decided to expel the mining company that was contaminating their water sources, it was the police, military, and other state agents who tried to suppress the uprising by favoring the mining company. , it was the state apparatus that criminalized the leadership of the movement; The same thing happened when the Nahua peoples of Puebla took over the facilities of the Bonafont water bottling company from the Danone corporate in 2021. This company was leaving nearby communities without access to water, appropriating a common good (nobody manufactures water) to generate profits. private, it was the National Guard and the state police who evicted the communities in resistance to return the facilities to the company. The neoliberal State only seems light to the insignificant part of the population that makes up the business elite, for the rest, especially for the peoples in resistance, it is a tremendously heavy state that crushes social movements in favor of the market.
Capitalism needs the State to protect the theft of common goods such as water, capitalism needs liberal democracies that romanticize and make the oppression of the capitalist market more bearable. This is very clear to us when problems arise and the state has to go out to rescue banks and companies with taxes from the population. The state is necessary for the privatization of the profits and the socialization of the losses of the capitalist market, the nation-state model has been a very functional sociopolitical structure to capitalism, it is for all this that “anarcho-capitalism” is a contradiction in the terms.
Like most libertarians, Javier Milei actually loves the State and its heavy repressive force to impose the dictatorship of the market, he loves the borders of the State to expel migrants he considers undesirable, Milei loves the Argentine State to which he claims not to disappear in a capitalist internationalism but rather to strengthen it turning it into a world power, Milei and others like him dream of conquering the power of the state, seizing its symbols, wrapping their claims with nationalist discourses, that apparent ultra-light State that they want to build it is actually an ultra-heavy state that crushes the common good.
Fortunately, between the public sphere of the State and market capitalism there is a common, the commons of the world that constitute a third way proven by many peoples who have resisted, despite everything, centuries of colonialism and dispossession; Between the public and the private, the common appears as a different option. Given the catastrophe that heralds the climate emergency, it is worth exploring.
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