On March 13th, The Guardian published a report on an article titled “Photographer in Coma After Argentina Police Hit Pensioner Protest Hard.” The article covers how Argentinian police officers used teargas, rubber bullets, and water cannons, among other weapons, to break up the protests. This violent clash illustrates the heightened tension between the Argentinian society and the regime as initial measures based on dialogue, management of the situation, and institutional attempts have failed. The current Argentinian experience has been dominated by neoliberalism as privatization, deregulation, market politics, and competition to maximize profit. This report deals with this problem, and its central purpose is to construct a unified understanding of the situation and to suggest potential developments in the political economy of human existence during the 21st century.
One of the most dominant features of the current neoliberal era is the increasing tendency to address political problems—issues needing general political visions—through market mechanisms. This transformation deforms the role of politics in a world previously anchored on political pillars. More disturbing, however, is that when market solutions fail to solve such problems, they lead to the dissemination of violence and the breakdown of dialogue and peaceful transfers in trying to resolve such issues. This is one of the core problems treated by Noëlle McAfee in her book Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, where she states, “Just as neoliberalism is antipolitical in calling for market solutions to political problems, the advocates of ‘demands’ are antipolitical in ignoring the need to actually engage and encounter alternative perspectives and concerns—as well as the need to woo the consent of others.”
The consequence of this neoliberal market-oriented reaction has been the depoliticization of the popular callings—namely, those against neoliberalism and its impact in the contemporary era. Argentina’s newly inaugurated president, Javier Milei, came into power in late 2023 facing a rooted multi-dimensional crisis. According to a Reuters report published on March 19th, 2025, while the Milei administration has managed to stabilize things to some degree, the country still sees its ups and downs. For instance, in 2024, Milei imposed very strict austerity, which led to poor economic conditions. But subsequently, the administration managed to turn around the economy. By March 2025, Argentina had again seen a confrontation in the style of the June 2024 protests, which demonstrated the incompetence of neoliberal solutions to problems that need political solutions. A more effective solution would include the necessity to change the position of the political elite within society and to deal with the dangers of the formation of oligarchic elites that exploit society, monopolize wealth, and reinforce inequality.
The violent repression of retirees, the most unequal victim of the “structural adjustment policies,” is unmitigated proof of the damage. The retirees have become one of the most vulnerable groups of the population because of these policies. It is reported by a study conducted by the International Federation for Human Rights, entitled “The Brutal Repression of Retirees’ Protest in Argentina,” that several persons were injured, and around a hundred persons were detained, children among them. This Argentina experience, both economic and political, underscores the need to address political problems through political solutions. This also underscores the importance of examining political solutions to economic problems, particularly those that arise from excessive reliance on neoliberal policies such as deregulation and privatization.
In short, what is required in Argentina is a critical rethinking of the neoliberal approach to political and economic crises. It needs solutions rooted in political engagement and the social and human condition, rather than purely depending on neoliberal methods of tackling societal challenges.