ARGENTINA’S midterm elections have left the institutional political system in shock — not because Javier Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), performed well, but because of who didn’t show up.

More than 13 million Argentines abstained, cast blank ballots, or submitted null votes — a larger share than those who voted for the ruling party itself.

Only 67.8 per cent of those eligible voted, the lowest turnout since the end of the military dictatorship in 1983.

That figure speaks louder than any campaign slogan. It marks the exhaustion of a political order incapable of representing the people it claims to govern.

Abstention in Argentina today is not apathy; it is a quiet, collective withdrawal — a form of passive rebellion against a democracy that long ago stopped delivering.

Latin America’s capitalism no longer needs tanks or torturers to enforce obedience.

It does so with spreadsheets, interest rates, and deficit ceilings.

Violence has become bureaucratised cruelty — hunger, debt, and precarity administered from behind a laptop.

The ruling class knows exactly what it’s doing. The tragedy is that we no longer call it by its name. We speak of “neoliberalism,” as if it were just a policy school. In truth, it’s class warfare — refined, calculated, relentless.

And while the bourgeoisie wages it with surgical precision, too many in the workers’ camp have traded antagonism for consensus.

Liberal progressivism has spent decades mistaking impotence for virtue. Its faith in the “sensible centre” — in compromise, technocracy, and managerial civility — has turned into the cemetery of class consciousness.

Moderates keep insisting that edging rightward is tactical. It isn’t. It’s capitulation.

The world is polarising, contradictions are sharpening, and yet our internal (Latin American) neoliberals still dream of a “broad avenue of the middle” — a road that no longer exists.

There is no centre, only a balance of class forces in motion and today the proletariat exerts almost no counterforce.

Alienation and atomisation are powerful; the union federations are paralysed. Where struggle should exist, we find resignation. And without struggle, there is no class conflict — only domination disguised as consensus.

Argentina’s current model mirrors the Carlos Menem era of the 1990s — but in a more degenerate form, where the decomposition of savage capitalism is faster, crueller, and soaked in open class hatred.

The “cheap dollar” — the artificially low exchange rate of the peso to the US dollar — is sustained by criminal indebtedness and US, and Treasury swaps that keep the rate flat while vulture funds liquidate their holdings.

When that mechanism collapses, the bill will be paid in uranium, lithium, water, land and geopolitical obedience.

Inflation seems to be easing, but only because recession has crushed consumption and wages alike. This is not stability — it’s a controlled demolition disguised as order.

Milei’s temporary success rests on two pillars: a cheap dollar and low inflation achieved through mass impoverishment.

For years, progressives have quoted Napoleon’s line: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” But that motto has become a justification for paralysis — the excuse of those who’ve lost faith in confrontation.

Milei’s “mistakes” are, in fact, the deliberate expression of the colonial project he serves and while his forces advanced, the opposition stood still.

Within Frente Patria (Homeland Front), the implicit campaign line was precisely that: “Let him make mistakes.” In fact there was no campaign at all — and the outcome speaks for itself.

History doesn’t reward spectatorship - the enemy doesn’t fall on its own. Capitalism never collapses by accident; it endures until someone shakes the ladder.

The task of the left is not to wait for contradictions to ripen — it’s to turn them into movement.

Peronism has long claimed that the labour movement is its backbone. But a backbone without a head is just a body that cannot move.

As long as political leadership remains in the hands of bureaucrats who’ve never worked — of former IMF and World Bank officials wearing progressive masks — the working class will remain muscle without thought.

Labour must stop being decorative and become the conscious brain of the popular movement.

What happened in Argentina will not stop at the border. Across it in Chile, the tremor is already felt.

Next week, on November 16, the right, emboldened by regional momentum, will claim legitimacy in the presidential election.

Meanwhile, an institutional left — captured by technocrats who fear radicalisation more than defeat — continues to seek validation from its adversaries. History does not reward the cautious.

The only way forward is to repoliticise society, rebuild moral coherence and construct a project that speaks from conviction, not from marketing.

Materialism does not deny values — it materialises them. Politics is not only about wages or institutions; it’s about moral hegemony — about who defines what is just, possible, and human.

Against neoliberalism’s moral decay — its glorification of cruelty, greed, and inequality — the task ahead is to reinstall the ethics of working-class humanism: solidarity, community, tenderness as revolutionary principles.

Beneath the layers of alienation, that moral reserve still beats. It only needs to be unearthed.

Milei’s victory is not an ending. It’s a storm warning — a sign of what’s coming if we keep mistaking patience for strategy.

Either we build a class-based project with consciousness and courage, or the 21st century will be a long neoliberal night with a libertarian mask.

No “centre” will save us. Only organisation, conflict, and ideological clarity.

Leonel Poblete Codutti is a trade unionist based in Chile.