Is the state obsolete, or is it our last hope? Between the Argentina’s 2001 crisis and Silicon Valley’s AI, it’s worth asking whether the public sector should (and can) slow down the pace of capitalism. Is it a nostalgic myth or an epic struggle against collapse?
I studied Political Science in the first decade of the century. The crisis of 2001 was still looming over us: in fact, I had enrolled in that program after participating in a popular assembly in my neighborhood's square. Back in 2005, just a few years after the collapse and while I was already walking the halls of the Social Sciences department, the revaluation of the public sector was part of the zeitgeist: the State was the engine of development and the tool to carry out a new model for the country. The motto was to conquer it, and then strengthen an emancipatory project. The song “Lost Toys” played a lot in the background, along with many flags in your heart.
Now, fast forward to 2020. In October of that year, a national government official sent me a message on my cell phone: he wanted me to join the team that was going to create the Economic and Social Council (CES), a forum to think about long-term policies in Argentina. I was studying such experiences as part of my doctoral research. They needed, he said, a specialist to draft the project for establishing the Council. It would involve business unions (mainly the Argentine Industrial Union - UIA, but also the Rural Society and other chambers) and workers (led by the CGT), as well as national universities and research centers. The goal of then-president Alberto Fernández (or at least, what he publicly stated) was to build a broad national agreement to design state policies.
No need for a spoiler alert. The Economic and Social Council was created by decree in February 2021, more than a dozen meetings were held, and by the end of 2022, it was dismantled: nothing came of it. The major employer organizations boycotted it, the unions distanced themselves, and the government never pushed for substantial debates. The proposals regarding artificial intelligence were just for show, pure smoke. There was no political will, corporate support, or imagination to dig deeper.
Both experiences (and many others) shaped my understanding of the public sector: there is a gap between the State that should serve social transformation and the concrete policies being carried out in its name. It’s the distance between the ought to be and the is. Between the possibilities of something and its material conditions. Between the idealistic view and the realistic one. It’s the software and the hardware, the beating heart and the muscle that acts. We can distinguish it according to whatever theoretical framework we choose. But the first dimension speaks to the role the State should have; and the second, to the tools, to what the public apparatus is capable of doing in (and with) this complex reality we live in.
There is a gap between the State that should serve social transformation and the concrete policies being carried out in its name. It’s the distance between the ought to be and the is. Between the possibilities of something and its material conditions.
I warn you: I’m not going to provide any answers; so, if you're expecting that, you can leave now. I just want to throw out some prompts to hopefully start imagining what kind of State we want and what we can actually have.
But first, a preliminary question.
I’m not naive. I know that the contemporary State is going through a crisis of both political capacity and legitimacy. It’s like the phrase from The Simpsons: “from whom no one expected anything, nothing is being done.” Or, in truth, the State does act, but less and less and in worse ways.
It’s not all its fault; it navigates a complicated context: the rollback of welfare policies since the eighties, the gradual deterioration of political participation in Western democracies, the crisis of representation. And, of course, an increasingly globalized world that makes it very difficult to make sovereign decisions within borders riddled by global capital flows. How can we define a policy for the Argentine labor market if the technologies that will most impact it are being developed, let’s say, in Silicon Valley, thousands of kilometers away? How can we decide about the Internet if the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) dominate the market on a global scale?
The territorial paradox (the territorialized trying to legislate over the deterritorialized) is compounded by the disproportionate power of capital. How can we stand up to, say, Elon Musk, if his wealth, estimated at $782 billion, is greater than what an entire country of 48 million people produces annually (the Argentine GDP was $638 billion in 2024)? In plain terms: the fish, now more than ever, is not cut in the Rivadavia chair.
That’s why it’s not surprising that people are looking for new political alternatives when they go to vote. The crisis of the Nation State is also the crisis of Western representative democracy. The State and democracy are thrown into the same bag that La Libertad Avanza, Vox, AfD, and other global rights kick around. But the anti-statist rhetoric is not exclusive to neoconservative populisms. The accelerationism (in its landian variant), that philosophy adopted by the CEOs of Big Tech (our real-life Lex Luthors), is perhaps the ideology that best synthesizes the current times, both for its definitions and its bizarre memetic antics. They tell us: capitalism is an inexorable, runaway productive force that neither the state apparatus nor anyone else can stop anymore. We need to let go of the wheel, shift into fifth gear, and let ourselves be dragged at full speed towards collapse.
Let’s go to the common place: it’s easier to imagine the end of the world and such. Because it’s true: we are increasingly convinced that an apocalyptic fate awaits us, and not too far off either. The hyperstitions and sci-fi fantasies have taken hold, and of course, the distressing reality of day-to-day life has contributed as well. There are futures on demand, but all of them are sinister. We could end up in one of tech feudal lords, owners of city-states (the Tokyo of Akira or that of Ghost in the Shell); another where machines defeat humanity (like in Terminator or Matrix); one where all-powerful companies tell us what to do (Weyland-Yutani in Alien or Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner); a space technofascism like in Warhammer 40,000; or, why not, a (somewhat more fun) Mad Max-style future, like in Fallout.
It might be that a cyberpunk scenario is the most likely. But it’s not inevitable; it doesn’t have to be. I believe there is agency in the face of acceleration; I don’t buy into fatalism when we talk about social relations.
Footnote: the rhetoric of apocalypse is not new. In the 16th century, Hobbes was the number one doomsayer of the end times. In fact, if we read the original texts of Leviathan, there are a thousand biblical quotes talking about the apocalypse. And for that reason, the philosopher deduced, given such chaos, a powerful tyrant was necessary for England.
Many, here and now, and from civil society, are carrying out acts of rebellion to dispute our cognitive sovereignty and limit the consequences of the attention economy. Downloading Tor to ensure our anonymity, hosting a home cloud to strengthen our autonomy, and many other actions by cyber-surgeons and hacktivists that have been described in 421. A society that opposes the “data oligarchs” is more than necessary; however, is it enough for a group of users to limit information for commercial or intelligence use? These are invaluable proposals. It’s much more than I ever did. But I worry that these individual resistances are just tears in the rain if there isn’t a grand emancipatory narrative that groups them together and gives them meaning.
That’s where the State comes into play.
But a messed-up State. We agree on that with the right-wing.
Well, with one caveat. Because, even if it’s messed up, I believe the State and its tools are still useful. There is legislation that organizes wills (like, for example, the regulations that limited algorithmic pricing and the surveillance of civil society), there are public policies that work, that change people's lives. There is a budget, there is money to put on the street. Moreover, the Argentine State may not be perfect, but it’s not that bad either. It developed nuclear energy before most countries, sent satellites into space. How many have been able to do that?
Of course, the State is not just the power of its tools; it’s also, and above all, an irreplaceable platform for building cultural values, a shared worldview, even new hegemonies (hello, Gramsci). It’s a social relationship that puts issues on the agenda, that induces debates, that strengthens discourses. Let’s think about the trials against the military, the abortion law, and all the policies led by the State, regardless of the social support they had beforehand.
The State is not just the power of its iron; it is also, and above all, an irreplaceable platform for building cultural values and a shared worldview.
If all those flags are not raised by the State, then who? The Parties, the Family? The Church and its encyclicals (well analyzed here and here)? Some social movement that we still don't know about? What other narrative, what other institution has the strength to stand (even if it stumbles) against the rapid advance of the market?
Perhaps, and I say this with some doubt, only the State. Not just any State (because there is also a State now, one that often legislates in favor of big capital), but a certain type of State: one that puts the market at the service of the people, one that distributes, one that leads development. Let's call it whatever we want. Perhaps, such a State is the only truly collective fiction, the last Great Narrative of the 20th century that can prevail in our times. Of course, there's no point in getting nostalgic: we can't go back to the benefactor and industrialist policies of our grandparents. That's in the past. But knowing this, are we going to abandon the discussion about what kind of State we want?
Javier Pallero
The right-wing accelerationism, in its chaos, has some ideas about the State that it prefers. Bureaucracy, they tell us, is a brake on the inexorable advance of capital and technological progress. The current State should not be more efficient; it should be replaced by corporate-government structures. And the attack on the State is an attack on representative democracy. Because many of the proposals imply replacing popular sovereignty with an institutional architecture centered, basically, on wealth. It's Curtis Yarvin's neocameralism, the Technological Republic of Alex Karp, the leadership of a post-humanist elite in Nick Land.
In practice, of course, Big Techs do not want the State to disappear. It is the major investor, for example, in AI: over 50% of Palantir's revenue comes from public contracts, and the company was practically incubated during its critical years by the U.S. government. Almost all the technology in an iPhone (GPS, touchscreen, Internet) was born from state funding. The myth of the "garage entrepreneur" versus the "elephant State" does not exist. As Italian Mariana Mazzucato points out, the State is, rather, the protagonist of technological vanguard. Major innovations do not emerge from private companies; basic and high-risk research is often funded with public money. With ours.
Big Techs are very clear about this; they propose a State that watches and wars, and does so with the tools they provide: AI, drones, biometric analysis.
They want that State. And us, what do we want? Do we even know?
It's the discussion about the ought to be. What State, for what purpose, to carry out what policies, to pursue what ultimate goals. It's the universe of imagination, of heroic creativity. It's the software we want to run on the state machine.
I play with the what if. What would our proposals be if we could whisper in the ear of a minister willing to listen and act on our advice? Would we have any to offer?
There is a crisis of imagination, that is clear. But is it just about forcing us to imagine and that's it? Partly, yes. But imagination is not just about thinking long-term policies, but about ideas that invite and move us. Because it's not that no one is thinking of ways to alleviate current problems: the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, for example, offer a future horizon. But this type of narrative does not resonate; no one is going to passionately campaign for composting on their terrace, it's boring to separate plastic bottles from banana peels. And they are just patches, which is why they don't excite anyone. Even more so when, on the side of the accelerationists, they tell us: “we're going to transcend in machines and be immortal,” “we're going to travel to Mars,” “you'll be able to implant a super robotic arm.” Which bus would you get on? How do you compete with that vision of the future?
That's why it's about building new myths. Great Narratives. Great Epics, so that our present is not hacked by hyperstitions or by the prophecies of those who get excited about the apocalypse. It involves thinking about other futures, different ways to organize our lives, other modes of production, perhaps even another State. That is epic. And it requires a deeper humanistic discussion about what it means to be fully human. “The liberation of man by man.” "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." “Where there is a need, a right is born.” That kind of myth.
But again, it's not about going back; we can't be lazy. It's not worth it to cover past hits. We need more mushrooms, more psychedelia, as Mark Fisher said, more drugs from the sixties. Things that help us understand that reality is malleable, flexible, and not something already petrified. A lot of creative impulse to build narratives for our time and our issues. Stories that can be implemented, if necessary, by the State. Because if the State and its cultural institutions (in Althusserian terms) do not question the narrative of the AI (for example), the market will do it under the logic of extractive efficiency. Following Morozov, we run the risk of falling into “technological solutionism”, where political, social, and fundamentally human problems are treated as mere technical "puzzles" that only Silicon Valley can fix, through an algorithm. In other words, the same old technocratic discourse, where the debates and disagreements of democratic politics are heard as unpleasant noise. A simplistic reading of Asimov's psychohistory, the return of Cybersyn from the seventies.
Emilio Méndez
But it’s not just about imagination.
Muscle is also important, realpolitik, knowing the limits imposed by the times. It’s not all about political voluntarism. Strength is needed to put ideas into practice. Hard power. The state hardware in good condition. What Peter Evans calls “rooted autonomy” and Guillermo O’Donnell refers to as “stateness.” That is, the State’s ability to be effective, to permeate society and territory with its policies: that the SUBE is used throughout the transportation system, that running water reaches all neighborhoods.
I know the public sector; I spent almost fifteen years there. I know what it’s like to work with an Internet connection that drops for hours, asbestos columns, and bathrooms without toilet paper. Any coworking space in Palermo is Google compared to a Social Development office. I’m not trying to contribute to the popular imagination about the public sector. Nor to reduce everything to aesthetics (even though the State is also made up of mundane things, as Latour says). I loved working in the public sector for a long time. But a State like that can do little against an unbridled late capitalism.
Muscle is also important, realpolitik, knowing the limits imposed by the times. It’s not all about political voluntarism. Strength is needed to put ideas into practice.
I already mentioned accelerated globalization, the crisis of representation, and the territorial paradox. But these global obstacles are compounded by specific ones in the Latin American region. Starting with our capitalism, our material conditions. The region's economies are characterized, according to scientific literature, as peripheral (i.e., far from global productive epicenters), dependent (needing imported machinery/industrial goods and external capital for development), and extractivist (dominated by highly concentrated sectors specializing in the extraction of raw materials without added value, be it lithium, soy, or oil).
Furthermore, within the variety of existing capitalisms worldwide, the Latin American economy is classified as a hierarchical market economy. The hierarchical element relates to the predominance of large family-controlled companies in the economy (think of the Bulgheroni, Cabrales, Macri, Rocca families, and so on) and also of subsidiaries of multinational companies (Fiat, Accenture, Google, whichever). This hierarchy of companies not only concentrates national wealth but also controls innovation and investment in cutting-edge technology. They coordinate with each other when it comes to pressuring the State for specific policies that benefit them or to boycott those that harm them.
Let’s take an example: in 2021, major oil companies bypassed the Economic and Social Council and negotiated their sector's policy directly with Alberto Fernández and his ministers. A small group of national family conglomerates (Pluspetrol, Pan American Energy, Vista), multinationals (the German Wintershall Dea, the French Total Austral, and to a lesser extent, the Brazilian Petrobras), and of course, YPF, pressured for a bill aimed at increasing the price of the barrel in the primary market and thus boosting profit margins for crude oil exports. This is what we mean when we talk about an extractivist, peripheral, and hierarchical economy.
Moreover, the project was negotiated in a closed-door office, and this last detail is crucial. Because the dependent and hierarchical structure in Latin America combines with what O’Donnell calls “the other institutionalization.” In more colloquial terms, the backroom deals between government and businessmen. It’s Peter Thiel meeting with Caputo for hours, with no one knowing what the hell they talked about. That’s “the other institutionalization,” a black box. In short, formal rules do not predict the behavior of actors. When companies, in our example, saw that “nothing was happening” in an institution like the CES, they sought the usual informal channels: a WhatsApp message to the minister, and on to the next thing.
Now, this doesn’t mean that other countries don’t have institutional informality or dubious agreements between family conglomerates. But, following Ben Schneider, in Latin American economies, it’s more widespread. And these are not the only obstacles to state capacity in our region. The importation of foreign institutions (the cheap copy and paste of “best international practices”) or rapid institutional design in contexts of extreme uncertainty are other factors that explain the deficits. In Argentina, the alternation of radically opposed government programs (CFK-Macri-Alberto-Milei) has led to the constant activation/deactivation of certain institutions (think of the Minimum Wage Council, now almost dead).
The list of problems goes on; I’m not exhaustive. We surf these waves. They are our conditions, the limits of the current Argentine State. It’s the starting point for any other possibility.
But never the limit.
The Argentine CES wasn’t a bad idea, at least on paper. It brought together the government, businesses, and the labor movement at the same table. It pushed them to discuss and think about country projects, urging them to commit to strategic policies. No, it wasn’t a bad idea. These forums have been successful in the Nordic countries of Europe, where they co-governed alongside parliament. Many Latin American States have used them as tools to coordinate industrialization strategies, as in the Brazilian case.
And it was also implemented in our country: from 1946 to 1955, the CES was a tool for Perón to legitimize his internal market and industrial planning. Closer to our times, in February 2002, in the midst of a phenomenal mess, President Duhalde also wanted to call a CES. Cristina Kirchner, in 2008, called on all sectors for a Bicentennial Pact. Even the IMF asked Javier Milei to create the Council of May, composed of governors, union leaders, and businessmen, to give greater viability to his austerity policies.
With this, I don’t want to push a line on this type of institution. In fact, what I’m narrating is the chronicle of a failure: the CES didn’t serve to imagine anything, nor to give more muscle to the State. There was no will from the government nor commitment from the organizations to institutionalize it.
But I do believe that forums like the CES can serve as a springboard to reclaim the State as a meeting place, a bit in the Nordic style. A space to gather and create new futures. In our case, the Argentine one, to discuss what matters today: the environmental crisis, the protection and use of our natural resources, the attention economy, artificial intelligence, the labor market in Argentina, mental health, access to housing, etc., etc., etc. And thus design disruptive, long-term policies on these issues. The State we want, the policies we want. That is, the software.
And, moreover, these forums generally host people who possess both power and imagination. They are places where the soft and hard converge, where the ought to be meets the is. It’s not just about imagining; it’s also about strengthening state capacities in service of a project that includes the majority of Argentinians.
Juan Ruocco 🧙♂️
One last digression. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas (who, as a fun fact, supervised the doctoral thesis of Alex Karp at the University of Frankfurt) inspired many of these institutions with his idea of deliberative procedural democracy. According to Habermas, it is necessary for the state to strengthen a public sphere where free agents deliberate until they reach agreements based on the exchange of arguments. These spaces are valuable because they allow for the convergence of two types of discourse: the “pragmatic” discourse, which expresses the interests of specific groups (who gains what, who loses what, and how much); and the “ethical-political” discourse, which expresses general themes about ends and values.
Despite the criticisms of the Habermasian paradigm (mainly regarding the feasibility of reaching a consensus that transcends sectoral interests), the truth is that this approach can serve as a theoretical foundation for recreating institutions where we can envision futures. And why not, where particular discourses (like those of the cyber-surgeons or the cognitive sovereignty, let’s dream) transform into general discourses. In other words, turning the counter-hegemonic into hegemonic, so that they cease to be guerrilla actions and become collective and viable alternatives. In this sense, we can also think of these forums as resonance boxes that amplify currently subaltern narratives.
Obviously, all discussions should be led by the state. Because otherwise, it’s just a Swedish jeep ride, a student assembly at Puán, a mental exercise. Voices never carry the same weight: Pérez Companc is not the same as a Wichi leader. The state must mediate, balance, equalize.
These types of forums are just examples; there are other institutions and other forms of intervention we could imagine. Because it’s all about that, about proposals for the future, about the great myths we can create. I remain convinced, as I was when I was twenty and studying in Social Sciences, that the state, with its capacities and resources, and also with its deficiencies, continues to be a valuable tool that we want on our side and at the service of our new epics. And even more so, to steer away from the futures proposed by Big Tech and accelerationists.
Because if we democratically conquer the state, then what are we going to do with it?
