Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

Reflections on Authoritarian Times

What is new about the authoritarianism that we are currently witnessing? It is useful to situate this authoritarianism within, and to see it as an organic part of, a counterrevolution: that is, the new authoritarianism operates against the backdrop of the transfeminist, Indigenous, migrant, and antiracist struggles that have modified our understanding and collective experience of the connection between patriarchal, racist, and capitalist forms of violence and have simultaneously produced a set of demands and altered desires and sensibilities. We can interpret these variegated movements as new struggles for liberation. They have generated forms of collective self-esteem, of common sensibility and shared trust, of political astuteness, and of inventiveness in language and intelligence in action.

Carrying out a real-time diagnosis of authoritarianism across several geographies simultaneously can make intelligible what we are seeing and experiencing. Such a diagnosis enables us to connect facts that appear as isolated symptoms or the eccentricities of individual leaders in order to construct a sequence and a shared comprehension of our historical situation—which is precisely one of the things they want to deny us.

I write from Argentina in an effort to contribute to the creation of a roadmap that (1) seeks an operational definition of authoritarianism linked to the specific invocation of “freedom” in contemporary fascism, a definition that can serve as for imagining and practicing anti-fascism; (2) while situated in national experiences, can account for a web of transnational interconnections; and (3) provides an analysis both from a structural point of view (at the level of power concentration) and from a micropolitical perspective (at the level of mobilized political subjectivities).

To destroy the vitality of these struggles, authoritarianism is required. I’m thinking of ten years of feminist strikes and mobilizations at a global level and their impact, for example, on Indigenous and working-class strikes in Ecuador (2019 and 2022); on the national strike and uprising in Colombia (2019–2021); on the feminist demonstrations after Marielle Franco’s murder and against Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil (2018); and on the sequence of protests that runs from the feminist student movement (2018) to the social uprising in Chile (2020), to name a few of the most striking examples. But I am also thinking of the transnational green tide for abortion rights from Argentina to Mexico. This interweaving, which brings several genealogies together, implies a deepening and organic connection with popular, anti-racist, and anti-extractivist forms of protest.

Their vitality produces concrete infrastructures for living and resisting and is deployed in specific bodies and territories as part of an expansive wave that has taken form in different rhythms and intensities across regions, as they build upon one another dynamically. Authoritarianism now recognizes those modifications that have already taken place and seeks to twist and reverse them in an anti-gender, racist, and predatory manner. And in so doing, contemporary authoritarianism seeks to undermine, if not destroy, their vitality. The fact that these expansive struggles for social, ecological, and transfeminist justice are a common point of reference for contemporary authoritarianism—in its natalist, biologist, and expansionist forms—means that their demands should not to be understood as merely symbolic, discursive, or decorative. The attack against these struggles is, rather, a strategic point of entry for the counterrevolution because they mark the places where disobedience has expanded, intervened in, and reconfigured other struggles (struggles over labor, public services, housing, popular movements) and where, especially since the pandemic period, tensions connected to freedom and care—reinventing one meaning of liberation—have emerged. The counterintuitive question for understanding the logic of authoritarianism is: what are its ways, its practices, of destroying the radical persistence of the living?

In other words, fascism does not arise merely to prevent alternative political formations to come; it responds, rather, to a revolution that is already underway, though hardly perceived by the left and other progressive forces precisely because it is transfeminist and antiracist. Within this framework, I want to highlight three elements that can help us understand the novelty of the new authoritarian modality.  

1. The war on “gender” is a central, exemplary, and strategic element through which authoritarian neoliberalism is radicalized toward a colonial form of fascism.

In Argentina, the fantasy of an absolute power that proliferates at the level of everyday life is actualized in the increasing number of femicides, travesticides, transfeminicides, and lesbicides, after a decade of Ni Una Menos struggles against machista violence. These struggles have shown how machista violence is a structural feature of capitalist violence, and they have modified common sense and challenged the perception that such violence is a matter of “crimes of passion” or interpersonal violence. The effective powers provided by a range of everyday forms of sexist and racist violence are a key element of the authoritarianism currently becoming radicalized. It is not necessary to have “institutional power” or to be a “great man” to wield that power. For this reason, on the one hand, this form of sexist and racist power is available to anyone. On the other hand, it is sustained at the institutional level by the concentration of corporate power. It is on this level that the owners of technology companies amplify their political power and position, that hyper-innovation converges with the traditionalist defense of gender roles.   

Consider the access to government—to the highest reaches of democratic institutional power—enjoyed by a person such as Javier Milei, who menacingly wields cruelty, targeting “those who do not have power” (those who are not part of the political caste) at the same time as he “liberates” an exercise of power that permits and approves  state-sponsored “hate speech,”  including his own repeated references to rape and pedophilia.

We need to review a whole psycho-political arsenal to understand these times of capitalism and schizophrenia in a new fascist era, in which the affective dimension—which we have so often defended—has become a core political resource for finance exploitation in everyday life. Milei relies upon and exploits this ressentiment, that is, the individual capital from which to position oneself as dispossessed, to mark one’s difference, and to denounce the other. Better to hate than be a victim of hatred; better to feel pleasure in destroying than to suffer being destroyed. Hateful difference is active in such political modes of reasoning. Confronting patriarchal and racist forms of violence, as the cycle of transfeminist struggles during the last decade have done, also challenges the practice of reactionary power that intensifies the everyday dispossession and humiliation of the labor market, in the face of illness and uncertainty, and transmutes them into microfascist pleasure, into “fascist passions” as Judith Butler puts it, understood as exercises of spectacularized violence wrought from the cruelty already at hand.

In short, it is through state anti-feminism and racism that the most avowedly extreme form of libertarianism, an “anarcho-capitalist” government, intensifies the authoritarian neoliberal project to the point of organizing it according to a fascist logic aimed at annihilating certain populations. The war on gender relies on a strategic and expansive logic: the subjects who are the targets of cruelty are also migrants, racialized and unhoused people, and those receiving public assistance. All are seen as expendable because they are all classified as degenerate and unproductive, while those in power peddle the lie that being a “victim” is profitable.    

2.  Finance functions alongside precarity to train subjects to experience authoritarianism as freedom, synthesized in the formula: “financial freedom.”

In the case of Argentina, authoritarianism is deployed in relation to the libertarian intensification of austerity as a sacrifice here and now. This authoritarianism excites and accelerates the capacity to act against impoverishment and that takes the name of “financial freedom.” Financial freedom is an attempted appropriation of speculation for survival.  A fetish term championed by the Argentine president under the sign of advancing freedom (the name of Milei’s party: La Libertad Avanza) and an  “economic freedom” measured—and enjoyed—by the Heritage Foundation, financial freedom implies that the masculinization of financial risk is on offer. It thus seeks to lure and capture young men with the promise of quick monetary success in the place of the declining and victimized figure of the male breadwinner who can no longer earn that bread.

Financial freedom—presented as the inverse of what women, lesbians, travestis and trans people do when they go into debt to sustain social reproduction—radicalizes an authoritarianism that invites people to transition away from the status of entrepreneurs to become speculators. It also holds out a promise: that the current sacrifice will transmute into investment in the future. This financial offer “responds” to the destabilization caused by labor precarity, itself the result of decades of neoliberalism, and it points to an underlying connection between economics and gender. Offers of financial “agency” proliferate, opening a new field of small-time scams and speculation. Above all, they provide the elements for assembling masculinities that seek to ward off fragility by converting it into triumph. The devaluation of the ethos of the collective as unproductive reduces a range of possible masculinities to a single, desperate individualism.

3. The countries of the South function as laboratories for authoritarian experiments. These instigate and rationalize a form of acceleration that at once contradicts and works to counter the “backwardness” of peripheries while fortifying the center. In other words, these “backward” countries in fact anticipate developments elsewhere.

Authoritarianism also captures the majoritarian critique of formal democracy. It exploits the non-universal experience of social rights and recodifies it into an anti-democratic radicalism. In that sense, Milei is proposing an idealized future of prosperity through both entrepreneurialism and financial freedom, rather than a return to a past universal welfare state that never existed. The “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous,” constitutive of the state of colonized countries, gives rise to as a set of overlapping temporalities in which the genocide that gives birth to the nation-state coexists with military dictatorships and (local and transnational) rentier capitalism relying on recursive extractivist practices. This non-progressive experiment becomes the vanguard again, as it was in Chile in 1973 for neoliberalism, as it is in Argentina today for fascism in a colonial form.

These three dynamics also oppose the realm of social reproduction and the interdependence of collective life, which they recast as a strategic, everyday terrain for the deployment of violence in its most recent phase of cruelty. Perhaps these three novel elements can help us understand how today authoritarianism acquires new features and reshapes fascism.