Interview
Against the Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom: Debt, gender and Argentina
The daily habit of finding solutions to one’s own economic situation is fundamental for understanding why the far-right’s appeal to freedom is proving to be effective.
For Veronica Gago and Luci Cavallero, feminist sociologists, debt is a way to understand contemporary Argentina. Due to the continuous economic crises hitting the country, it has become habitual to go into debt and resort to digital financial instruments to supplement meager incomes.
In a context marked by extremely precarious living conditions, “financial freedom” emerges. According to the authors, this recognizes the individual’s capacity to act, stimulating and activating their propensity for action, but at the same time it trains them in precariousness and pushes them to internalize it. Since it leads to closing oneself off in individualism, it weakens collective organization and social conflict.
In Against the Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom (“Contra el autoritarismo de la libertad financiera,” ed. Tinta Limón), Gago and Cavallero add a further step to the analysis: the daily habit of finding solutions to one’s own economic situation is fundamental for understanding why the far-right’s appeal to freedom is proving to be effective.
The stabilization of widespread forms of entrepreneurship and multiple employment shapes a new subjectivity that moves away from victimhood to insert itself into what the authors define as “neoliberalism from below.” Thus, austerity policies fall upon individuals who translate them into an incentive for their own productivity, perceiving that as a duty.
Against the Authoritarianism of Financial Freedom continues the research of the previous A Feminist Reading of Debt (“Una lectura feminista de la deuda”) and The Home as a Workshop (“La casa como laboratorio”), essays in which you deepened the study of debt using a gender perspective. What is “financial freedom” and what relationship does it have with debt?
Gago: Financial freedom constructs new imaginaries: it makes you believe that you are not becoming poorer – on the contrary, you have the potential to act as a creditor-entrepreneur. You don’t see yourself as someone who is going into debt because wages are lowering or because you are suffering the effects of inflation. Access to microloans via virtual wallets transforms daily impoverishment into an opportunity to “put your capabilities into play.” It is a seductive freedom precisely because it recognizes the autonomy and productivity of indebted subjects who stop perceiving themselves as victims.
Cavallero: There is a flip side: a moralizing aspect. Everything that is communal is seen as unproductive and a negative value. In the book, we underline a further aspect: the “masculinization” of financial risk. For young men, financial freedom is a tool to exorcise existential uncertainty in a context where masculinity is destabilized and is no longer the “provider,” having been put in crisis by feminist movements.
Has this new subjectivity been a favorable terrain for the extreme right of President Javier Milei?
Gago: Discourses linked to entrepreneurship appear after the economic crisis of 2001 in the face of strong collective experiences of self-management. Neoliberalism tries to capture that vital energy dedicated to solving the problems of daily life, attaching an individualist component to it. But the process jams because in Argentina a modern and bourgeois subjectivity, in the classical sense of the term, was never fully constituted. The subjectivity of the individual has always been a “failed” and anomalous one, deformed by the superimposition of dynamics of political subjectivation that are lateral or oblique with respect to capitalist modernity. This reproduces itself continuously in the ways the discourse on individual economic initiative connects with dynamics of self-management and experiences of collective entrepreneurship. The Argentine extreme right has exploited this situation with great skill: it has managed to insert itself into the rhetoric of the “self-made” and of individualism, exploiting contexts that deviate from “textbook” neoliberal competitiveness.
Cavallero: One can study the triumph of the extreme right in Argentina through the lens of debt, which has become a form of solution for daily life for some time now. Especially for those working in informal sectors, the use of financial instruments to obtain other income is becoming a settled practice: one manages one’s small and devalued earnings through virtual wallets, exploits small speculative possibilities to lose a little less, moves money from one digital platform to another to gain benefits. Precariousness is normalized. It is here that Milei’s discourse takes root: the dollar and debt, even towards the International Monetary Fund, are a relief in the face of daily anxiety about inflation. Furthermore, managing this daily precariousness configures subjectivities that feel protected from the image of the “parasite” applied to beneficiaries of public state programs. This intertwines with the construction of the “decent Argentines,” the moralizing narrative par excellence of the La Libertad Avanza party.
You define debt as a form of “colonialist extractivism.” In what way?
Gago: Mechanisms of indebtedness are ways of conditioning projects of political liberation that go in a different direction from freedom in itself. The former are trials, open experiments: freeing oneself from debts, from economic dependence, from gender constraints. They are political practices, living processes. Financial freedom tries to close them in and capture them, colonizing what has been called into question by social movements and feminism, which have organized other types of economies, new forms of education, care and organization. It is against these modalities of politicizing social reproduction that the extreme right is raging, trying to conquer anew the spaces that have been fundamental for contesting neoliberal hegemony.
Cavallero: We also point to the International Monetary Fund. The various governments that have struck agreements with the IMF have accepted handing over territories and resources of the country, rendering it a testing bed, a sacrifice zone. Debt functions as an accelerator of the extractivist nature of capitalism.
Does debt reinforce gender divisions?
Gago: It is not the same thing to ask for a loan if you are a female worker in the popular economy without a regular job, depending on sales in a market, or if you are a female worker with stable employment, or a migrant woman who must send remittances back to her country. While presenting itself as an effective solution for precarious lives and jobs, debt exploits this heterogeneity of situations. Furthermore, it has to do with care work in families. Many of the people we interviewed told us they went into debt to buy work equipment for their children, pay for the repair of their husband’s taxi, maintain a community activity in the neighborhood. Especially in the case of women, debt is always linked to maintaining a network. It has a double dimension: it individualizes, but women go into debt to maintain a set of relationships.
Cavallero: The feminist perspective is fundamental. Women contract debts to survive, especially for expenses linked to maintaining the domestic economy. We are also witnessing the emergence of micro-speculation, which is a strategy to integrate increasingly devalued incomes.
A part of your latest work is dedicated to the impact the current government has had on gender policies. You speak of “anti-feminism.” What are its features?
Gago: Milei has translated anti-feminism into state policy. He has attacked from above the programs destined to prevent and contain gender-based violence. In some cases, he has criminalized notable figures in the fields of politics, journalism, art and feminist organizations, particularly those dedicated to the popular economy. This is a counter-offensive, a strategy to discipline the Argentine transfeminist movement which has had resonance and effects at the global level.
Cavallero: Anti-feminism is the vector of a “school of cruelty”: it goes beyond the personal opinions of the president and further than the so-called culture wars, because it is an attack that integrates organically with austerity policies in which the subjects to be “sacrificed” are women, lesbians, transgender people, the elderly. All are presented as enemies. Contempt toward workers’ movements, toward feminisms and toward any mobilization or form of organization is the basis for the repression conducted by the government, the budget cuts and the cancellation of public policies, especially when they are aimed at eliminating inequalities.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/argentina-tra-debito-e-vite-in-svendita on 2025-12-11