On 27 February 2026 the labour reform was definitively adopted by the Senate. It had already been approved by the Argentine Congress a week earlier, by a vote of 135 to 115. This reform, supported by a broad parliamentary coalition ranging from the centre-left to the far-right, was notably backed by the libertarian president Javier Milei, elected in November 2023. The stated objective was to definitively break with the Peronist legacy of labour relations, characterised by the significant influence of corporatist and collaborationist unions and the centralisation of collective bargaining under the auspices of the state, by massively deregulating and making labour law more flexible.⁽¹⁾ This law, in reality, is part of a long series of anti-worker attacks by a government that proudly proclaims itself "anarcho-capitalist".

Legalising Wage Slavery for the Sole Benefit of the Bourgeoisie

This labour reform could be considered one of the main exhibits in capitalism's museum of horrors. A few examples suffice to illustrate this. The maximum permitted working hours are increased from 8 to 12 hours (!) per day.⁽²⁾ This increase in daily working hours can be decided unilaterally by the company, and there is no statutory overtime pay. Sacking workers has also become easier, severance pay has been drastically reduced, and holiday times can be staggered to allow employers greater flexibility. Wages can now be partially paid in kind, one of the most archaic forms of capitalist exploitation. Finally, the right to strike has been severely restricted, making it almost impossible in most sectors in the name of the sacrosanct "minimum service," as is the right to unionise, with collective bargaining regulated by sector. Collective agreements, which must guarantee a minimum level of social protection for workers, are now renegotiated annually instead of being automatically renewed. Furthermore, company agreements now take precedence over the law, even if they are less binding.⁽³⁾

At the same time, the corporate tax rate has been reduced from 35% to 31.5%, and employer contributions cut. However, wages are subject to a new 3% levy, intended to finance the equivalent reduction in employer contributions to the pension system. Workplace occupations are now prohibited, and freedom of association and assembly severely restricted, as any meeting in the workplace must be approved in advance by the employer.⁽⁴⁾ It's like a return to 19th century Manchester capitalism, when capital was completely unregulated in the name of "freedom of enterprise" and other bourgeois nonsense. This, once again, gives "freedom to the fox in the henhouse," to borrow the expression of the French socialist Jean Jaurès. It means allowing capital to exploit the proletariat to the bone, without any constraints, in order to amass ever greater profits.

This reform comes as no surprise to anyone. It is part of a continuation of the class war already well underway, waged by the libertarian president against the proletariat since he came to power: massive cuts in social spending (health, education, pensions), layoffs of public employees, deregulation of prices for essential services (transportation, housing, gas, electricity, water), and drastic wage cuts in both the public and private sectors, among other measures. These measures have led to unprecedented enrichment for capitalists, while conversely causing an equally significant increase in inequality, poverty, and job insecurity.⁽⁵⁾

The Bankruptcy of the Anarcho-Capitalist “Model”

After its victory in the October 2025 midterm elections, aimed at renewing part of the Senate (24 out of 72 seats) and the Chamber of Deputies (127 out of 257 seats), where Milei’s party came out on top with 40% of the vote, the bourgeois media once again sought to explain this success by its supposed macroeconomic and social “achievements.” And this, just a few weeks after the Argentine government begged the United States for $40 billion in aid to stabilise the economy in the face of investor fears linked to a sharply devalued peso and a lack of dollar reserves… Quite a fragile economic “miracle”!⁽⁶⁾

This electoral success is largely explained by the lack of political alternatives, since previous governments, both left and right, are accused of being responsible for the current economic slump and of being corrupt, as well as by the decrease in inflation, which had been severely impacting the population, particularly informal workers. However, the economic and social situation is far from ideal. It is claimed that Milei "saved" Argentina from chaos and hyperinflation by restoring the country's credibility in the financial markets and reducing the scope of state intervention. Admittedly, this has had the effect of bringing inflation down from 25% per month in December 2023 to around 3% today.⁽⁷⁾ At the same time, country risk has decreased, foreign investment has increased, and the public and trade deficits have been significantly reduced.⁽⁸⁾ However, not all that glitters is gold. First, the methodology adopted by INDEC to calculate inflation and the poverty rate is completely outdated.⁽⁹⁾ It is based on the cost of living in 2004, and the government refuses to update it to reflect the current cost of living. If this database were updated, not only would inflation be significantly higher than official estimates, but the poverty rate would be equally high, at the same level as when Javier Milei came to power, or even higher according to some estimates!⁽¹⁰⁾ A striking example of this impoverishment is the increase in the number of homeless people and the number of working poor.⁽¹¹⁾

On the other hand, the K-shaped recovery reveals the structural weaknesses of the Argentine economic model⁽¹²⁾: the increase in growth to 4.4% in 2025, lower than the estimates of the IMF and the World Bank (after a recession of 1.8% in 2024), is driven exclusively by the mining and agricultural sectors, that is, the primary sector, while the sector that has felt the effects of the crisis the hardest is the industrial sector. Some newspapers even speak of "industrialicide" to describe this phenomenon of massive de-industrialisation, causing a wave of lay-offs.⁽¹³⁾

The opening up to foreign capital and exports has disrupted the local productive fabric, particularly in the textile sector, which employs a significant portion of the population. In total, nearly 300,000 jobs have been lost in two years, in both the public and private sectors, leading to a sharp increase in unemployment and social unrest in response to wage cuts, lay-offs, and company closures.⁽¹⁴⁾ Faced with this sharp contraction in formal employment, the last resort for workers is informal work, which is far more precarious. Informality and undeclared work have therefore increased significantly since the beginning of Milei’s term, reaching over 40% of the active population.⁽¹⁵⁾ Thus, the libertarian president is proposing a continuation of this increased precarity, without a stable productive structure. However, this model has obvious limitations. Not only is the strong growth in 2025 explained by the rebound from the 2024 recession and the positive figures in December, but there were also five months during the year in which the country posted negative growth compared to the previous month. Moreover, several experts are warning of a drop in consumption, which risks further weakening the growth model in the coming years.⁽¹⁶⁾

Following his victory in the parliamentary elections, Javier Milei announced that he would further intensify the series of neo-liberal reforms already implemented. This includes not only the aforementioned labour reform and increased cuts to social spending, the likely increase in the retirement age to 70 (!), but also the return of the spectre of dollarisation of the economy. A spectre that has haunted Argentina since December 2001, when the convertibility model implemented by Carlos Menem's economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, collapsed on its own.

Dollarisation consists of rigidly pegging the national currency (in this case, the peso) to the US dollar and using the dollar as the primary currency for transactions and deposits. In Argentina, the convertibility policy of the 1990s fixed the peso to the equivalent of one dollar, which helped control inflation. However, this rigidity reduced the country's ability to adjust its monetary policy in response to external economic shocks, making exports less competitive and the economy vulnerable to capital flight. When confidence fell in the early 2000s, with savings withdrawals and capital transfers abroad, the inability to devalue the peso exacerbated the crisis, causing a liquidity crisis and the freezing of bank accounts, contributing to the economic collapse of 2001, marked by a default on sovereign debt, a deep recession, shortages and riots.⁽¹⁷⁾

Milei and his clique have clearly learned nothing from the crisis. The Argentine economy remains largely dependent on foreign capital, and dollarisation would only exacerbate this dependence, risking a new economic shock in the future, the effects of which would be severely felt by the proletariat.

The Resumption of Class Struggle as the Only Horizon Against Capitalist Barbarity

Today's Argentina shows the path that all national bourgeoisies will follow tomorrow. Faced with the historic crisis of capitalism, which has failed to generate new cycles of growth for over 50 years, the bourgeoisie cannot be satisfied with the corporatist compromise model between capital and labour, in this case between employers and collaborationist Peronist unions. On the contrary, it must opt for a shock strategy aimed at ensuring maximum profitability at the expense of the workers, in order to revive — only temporarily — the rate of profit.

In recent decades, rolling back all the concessions made by the bourgeoisie to the proletariat is not unique to the far-right Argentine government. In France and Northern Europe, for example, the welfare state is constantly under attack by successive governments, both right and left, which are raising the retirement age, creating more precarious employment, and reducing social spending and protections. In the United States, in several states, child labour has been legalised again, representing a huge step backward in terms of labour legislation. The goal is no longer to buy social peace, but to increase the rate of profit by any means at the bourgeoisie's disposal, including the proliferation of anti-worker attacks.

This reform has provoked calls for a 24-hour general strike launched by the CGT (General Confederation of Labour), which was particularly well-supported, and numerous demonstrations — sometimes massive — near the Congress building, marked by violent clashes with law enforcement. The other, supposedly more militant unions, such as the CTA, as well as the grassroots unions and piquetero organisations (unemployed workers' organisations), followed the CGT's decisions without a murmur. This is hardly surprising. All these unions are now fully aligned with Peronism, whose record is nonetheless dismal for the Argentine working class, which suffered from a particularly harsh policy of austerity and wage suppression under the Kirchner presidency and the duo of Alberto Fernández and Sergio Massa. It should also be noted that most piquetero organisations officially support the Peronist coalition, notably the Parti Piquetero, which identifies as Trotskyist and is a member of the left-wing coalition Fuerza Patria. The CGT has achieved the feat of doing even worse than other organisations, having already collaborated with various military dictatorships throughout the 20th century, as well as with President Carlos Menem, one of the main figures responsible for the historic economic crisis of 1999-2003. The CGT consistently sought to negotiate and engage in dialogue with the libertarian government and opposition parties to obtain a labour reform deemed more "acceptable" in its eyes as a watchdog for the bourgeoisie. And, so as not to jeopardise these discussions, it only proposed a few days of demonstrations or brief general strikes. Unsurprisingly, this was a resounding failure, but the objective had never been to overthrow this reform, and the government along with it.

In the ruins of Peronism, a new "hero" of the Argentine left is emerging: the governor of Buenos Aires province, Axel Kicillof. A former economy minister under President Cristina Kirchner, he is seen as the only possible challenger to Milei, supported by a broad coalition ranging from the right to the Stalinist-Maoist far-left. His programme, firmly rooted in Peronism, is nonetheless remarkably bland: implementation of a protectionist policy aimed at promoting an import substitution industrialisation (ISI) model, state intervention to regulate private capital, slight increases in taxes and social spending, and so on. In short, all the methods that have already largely failed to address the crisis of capitalism and have only prolonged the suffering of the proletariat. Several Peronist governors and parliamentarians have even reached an agreement with the government to support the labour law, on the condition that some of the most brutal measures be removed from the text! Let them savour their “victory” today: they have allowed one of the most regressive reforms of recent decades to pass on a global scale.

Far from representing an alternative, Trotskyist groups are once again acting as a crutch for Peronism and the right wing. For example, they supported the CGT's national strikes, while simultaneously calling for the union to defend workers more concretely (!), and called for “pressure” on the Congress to reject the law (!!). What cruel irony…

Faced with these true enemies and false friends, the working class must act autonomously and independently tomorrow, as a class for itself, and therefore organized as a Party, to confront capital and all its allies, right and left, far-right and far-left. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels already explained in their time, “against the collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes … this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to insure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end -- the abolition of classes”.⁽¹⁸⁾ This is the task at hand for all revolutionary minorities, faced with the chaos and the life-and-death struggle that the bourgeoisie promises us.

Notes:

Image: commons.wikimedia.org

(1) Peronism, or Justicialism, corresponds to the ideology defended by Juan Perón, the nationalist leader in power between 1946 and 1955 and between 1973 and 1974. He advocated a so-called "third way" between liberal capitalism and communism, and relied on propaganda focused on social justice, an interventionist state, national sovereignty and the political support of the popular classes and trade unions.

(2) In France for example you would need to go back to 1848 to find a working day of such long hours!

(3) lesechos.fr; courrierinternational.com and bfmtv.com

(4) basta.media

(5) enfoquesindical.org

(6) elpais.com ; elpais.com and bbc.com The BBC report also notes that Trump made the bailout of Argentina’s currency dependent on a Milei victory.

(7) elpais.com

(8) courrierinternational.com

(9) courrierinternational.com

(10) perfil.com ; letrap.com.ar ; pagina12.com.ar and pagina12.com.ar

(11) elpais.com and reuters.com

(12) The K-shaped recovery describes "an economic recovery where different groups or sectors experience very contrasting results: some prosper and grow, while others struggle or decline."Cf usbank.com

(13) reuters.com and courrierinternational.com

(14) conclusion.com.ar

(15) lesechos.fr

(16) elperiodico.com

(17) cepal.org

(18) marxists.org