In his end-of-year message, the president of Argentina Javier Milei once again insisted on his speech about turning Argentina into a new Ireland―within 45 years. Like everything, Irish reality does not correspond to Milei’s imagination: free public services, from transport to health and education, all as a member of a regional community…

But let’s look at Ireland’s history before it understood that being a colony is not part of any development plan, according to which Argentina would need 150 years before changing course―I will summarize here a more extensive explanation of the book Moscas en la telaraña.

For the Industrial Revolution to occur, the colonies were forced to export basic foodstuffs to Europe, which assured their proletarian class a subsistence that European fields could not provide. The Indo-Bengali industrial development process was interrupted by English protectionist laws, economic sanctions, and for the powerful reason of the imperial cannon, that is, what would later be called freedom and free markets.

Once Ireland adopted the new rules imposed and became a competition for England, London resorted to the old resource of contradicting its sermon to impose restrictions preventing any independence of its first colony. The Irish had to sell themselves as indentured slaves in the North American colonies—today’s illegal immigrants.

England not only imposed its enclosure (privatization by enclosure) on Ireland and North America but also on India and Bengal, with the same result: while the minorities became richer, the peoples who lost their communal lands, and their way of life, suffered. famines with tens of millions of deaths.

This novel idea of private property according to market exchange value and its right to expropriation spread rapidly. 29 years after the creation of the transnational East India Company in 1599 (whose flag had thirteen red and white stripes), the Puritan son of English landowners and first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, summed it up this way: “God has given the men a natural right and a civil right. The first right was natural when men owned the land in common… Then, as the men and their livestock increased, they appropriated certain parcels by enclosure and were granted a civil right… Native Americans do not enclose any land … If we leave them enough to use, we can legitimately take the rest.”

Although there is neither private property nor the free market as the social order in the Bible, according to Milei “the State is the Evil One (Satan) and the free market is God’s system.” The repeated reference to him, Moses, was the State, an undisputed dictator, and the Promised Land was collective property, taken from other peoples by force, not by the laws of the market.

Milei’s superstitions arose in 17th-century England, when the richest enclosed common lands, parliaments legalized dispossession, and power intellectuals (John Locke and other liberals) legitimized it for posterity. Some farmers had to compete for the lease. The rest sank into misery or emigrated to the cities where, later, they would become the proletariat.

The market (now trapped in the stock markets) became the supreme dictator. Social differences in each country and national differences globally increased. By 1800, the differences between countries reached an imbalance of three to one. In the second half of the century, the disproportion was 35 to one. This translated into hundreds of millions of deaths due to the new capitalist system and the never achieved (rather destroyed) “freedom of the market.”

Ireland was the first banana republic—not Honduras. By 1840, it had a population of eight million. In 2023, it barely reaches seven. Modern mythology attributes this phenomenon to The Potato Plague, but the cause of almost two million Irish deaths and millions of other emigrants was not a fungus, but capitalism. The plague originated in Mexico and spread from the United States to Europe. Neither these countries nor continental Europe suffered famines because they had more diversified agriculture.

Ireland was England’s first imperialist laboratory, just as the banana republics were the United States’ first laboratory. As Western empires promoted monoculture in their colonies (gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, cotton, bananas, coffee, copper, meat, immigrants, tourists), Ireland became a European colony with the Peruvian potato as a monoculture and main source of calories of its population. Before the plague, various observers had denounced the poor living conditions of Irish peasants. The peasants’ profits were used to pay rents, defined in London by the sacred Law of supply and demand.

When the famine broke out, London claimed that the problem would be solved by the magic of the free market, while landowners exported other products from Ireland, such as meat and milk, to meet market needs in England. William Smith O’Brien of Limerick, in 1846, observed: “what is most outrageous is that people are starving amid plenty.” A history well known to other colonies, such as India or Bangladesh.

Not coincidentally, the person in charge of the Irish crisis, Sir Charles Trevelyan, was a returnee from the brutal administration of India and, not coincidentally, he initiated anti-Irish racism, which would cross the Atlantic after his victims. Trevelyan was a fervent defender of the free market and laissez-faire, a superstition convenient for a few. Like almost all free-market zealots, he turned to God to explain the mysterious failures: he blamed the victims: “God sent this calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” he declared. If China lost three percent of its population in the 1958-62 famine, Ireland alone lost 12 percent a century earlier.

In much less than the 45 years promised by Milei, China went from being (economically speaking) Mongolia to being Japan. The radical change did not occur in a country of ten or fifty million inhabitants but in one with one thousand two hundred million and, although a large part of its economy is a capitalism different from Anglo-Saxon war capitalism, it was carried out by a communist government. I understand that China’s secret was that it could not be fragmented and indebted (neocolonized) in time, as in the Opium War, as in any other case of independence threat.

No, I do not propose China as a model of anything, but as a refutation. The point is, why not let Argentina be Argentina, with all its possible variations? Isn’t that the true principle of prosperity, well-being, and dignity of any country that prides itself on not being a damn colony? Come on, Javier, reflect; Reliable sources have told me that you read this back cover.

jorge majfud, 2023

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