The Discreet Charm of the IMF: Considerations of Class Power in Argentina
NOVEMBER 06, 2019 BY JASON HIRTHLER
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a masterpiece of surrealist fiction, but also a powerful political indictment of the middle class and the ruling elite, if one chooses to look at it through a class lens, which Buñuel seemed intent on exposing. A raft of well-to-do couples attempt to come together for a dinner party but fail, their efforts continuously thwarted by seemingly random events. The dinner party, of course, is the staple of bourgeois life, in which the well-off congregate to celebrate their lives of comparative comfort and often debate the failings of the working class and impoverished.
What Buñuel does, however, is stifle the ability of the rich to stage their ritual by interjecting one social problem after another into their midst: corruption, drug trafficking, wasteful militarism, religious hypocrisy. It is as if Buñuel were wishing that the bourgeoisie might never slip back into their simple purblind pleasures until they address the crises of the majority, which they are immunized from, ignorant of, indifferent to, or have rationalized out of view.
In the global north, many bourgeoisie know Argentina in snippets and glimpses, most of them second hand. Through the very bourgeois rituals Buñuel mocked. Through an award-laden Argentine film that passes swiftly through town on a Latin film junket. Through the dark fruits of a celebrated malbec imported from the limestone soils in high Mendoza. Through an evening in a lavish Churrascaria, gorging on the boneless skirt steaks popularized by gaucho communities. Through hearsay and rumor, such as the idea that Buenos Aires is the, “Paris of South America,” with its wide boulevards and Haussmann-esque public works, and that local porteños are fiercely proud of their European heritage.
Despite the distance and lack of regular contact, it is striking how relevant what happens there is to what happens in the United States, in Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, and nearly every other terreno through which neoliberal capitalism has threaded its suction-cup tentacles. If there was ever an argument for global class solidarity, neoliberalism is it. After all, the neoliberal project, as David Harvey has argued, is a “project to achieve the restoration of class power,” the class being the one percent and the power being chiefly political and economic, with military hegemony the unspoken enforcer of last resort.
More:
https://ahtribune.com/world/americas/3631-class-power-in-argentina.html