Argentina - February 18, 2025

Argentina: the president caught red-handed

Milei's “crypto scam”: the modus operandi of imperialism
and the rotting capitalist system

On February 14, Milei had his “black Friday”. He appeared from his X account sponsoring the $Libra cryptocurrency. He encouraged people to invest in it. Quickly came the first flood of investments and its price went up. Within hours, when the coin was at its highest value, Milei's friends pulled out, pocketed $90 million and caused the price of $Libra to plummet..

Is this a scam? Is this a casino roulette? The workers and exploited with their shattered pensions, with frozen labor negociations, with the education and health budget destroyed, with thousands of lay-offs in the state jobs, full of hungry unemployed, are asking in perplexity, “what is a cryptocurrency?”.
TV shows are full of journalists trying to explain it. Thoughtful economists of the bourgeoisie try to unveil the “digital mystery”, unattainable for every worker who with his miserable salary does not even get to live the first week of the month.

That is what the task of revolutionary Marxism is about: to unveil the secrets of business and the super-profits of the capitalists. Step by step, capitalists manifest that they are in crisis, furlough and fire workers and tear away their conquests, when what really happens is that businessmen are diverting enormous masses of capital to speculation, where the rate of profit far exceeds what they would obtain in the productive process.

Cryptocurrencies are digital fictitious currencies that are accessed by putting funds through virtual wallets. Their value is given by the amount of funds that each cryptocurrency collects. Thus it increases its value and distributes profits. It is like “money producing money through the internet”... That is why we affirm that they are fictitious: they do not express any goods produced by human labor.
In the middle of their pumps and dumps, there is no production of goods, no investment in machines or raw materials, no products sold in the market, no human labor incorporated to produce...

These currencies increase in value as funds come in. Their mentors are real scammers. They promise very high profits. As investments come in, with that money they pay the profits to those who entered first. That is to say, they distribute as profits the new funds they receive... until the new funds are no longer enough to cover everyone's profits and earnings. Then the value of the cryptocurrency plummets. A few pocket millions and most of the investors lose.

These investors sometimes earn money in other businesses where capital is increasingly moving away from the productive process and insatiably seeking profits. They create and recreate even fictitious currencies with no backing in goods or any support in production.
This is done by large companies and banks as a branch of their business and investment of their profits.

These investments in cryptocurrencies appear on the balance sheets of companies listed on stock exchanges, which increases the value of their shares and the distribution of profits to their shareholders.
Financial capital produces and reproduces parasitism: businesses without productive investment, from which they obtain their huge super-profits.

There you have the Chicago exchange, where the price of grains is fixed. Wheat, soybeans, etc. are bought at a future price. For example, what it would be worth in 10 years. Thus, prices increase. They are overvalued. They give interest for grains that are not even close to being produced yet. The same thing happens with oil, which they also buy at future price.
These forward values are backed by insurance companies that are far from having the safeguard funds in case these goods do not end up having the value established for their purchase in the future.
It is a 10-year business dealing with securities, titles, etc., that the only thing they do is to increase the price of cereals and oil today, which do not have the value with which they reach consumers and even the production process. The prices of raw materials become more expensive in order to maintain the superprofits of a handful of parasites who invest in the future prices of raw materials. They put these totally overvalued bonds on their balance sheets, receive profits and the masses pay for it with overpriced food and energy.

All these worthless bonds and securities, which are on the balance sheets of the big banks and transnational corporations, are outside the productive process. Parasitism is such because for every dollar that is invested in production, there are 20 dollars in bonds, securities and investments in what are called “derivative securities”, that is, which have no backing in goods.

These huge masses of capital seek to reproduce themselves in sectors that give them 2 or 3 times more profit than in the process of production of goods. Cryptocurrencies are nothing more than another way to reproduce fictitious values and cover themselves from their pumps and dumps.

This is what imperialism is all about, parasitism and as we will see later, hunger, looting, squandering of wealth and wars.

The “$Libra scam” is nothing more than a refraction of the modus operandi of the imperialist capitalist system in its phase of absolute decomposition. It is a business of Milei and his gang of “law firms” of Puerto Madero (one of the top ultra-modern luxury neighboorhods in Buenos Aires, NT). It is an intermediary bourgeoisie, completely sold to foreign corporations and direct employees of BlackRock and the hedge funds of  Wall Street. It is made up of a handful of “law firms”, of accountants and fraudulent economists, who are the ones who wrote Milei’s Basic Law with which the working class and the common people and all their conquests and democratic rights are brutally attacked.

At the same time, these “law firms” manage enormous businesses with the entry of large investments of companies that come to plunder lithium, minerals and oil without paying taxes, as established by the RIGI, the system of free entry of capital into Argentina to plunder its wealth, voted by all the bosses' politicians in Congress. These “law firms” (under the orders of Milei and the big bosses of AEA, the Association of Big Business listed on the New York Stock Exchange and of the US transnationals based in Argentina) charge 5% to the companies arriving in the country for the daily political contacts with the government to coordinate the plundering of the nation, “set up companies” in Argentina and establish the way for them to take funds abroad.
This is giving rise to a new bourgeois gang that is the heart of the Milei government, intimately linked to imperialist capital. It is them who brought the $Libra “scam”, one more of the dozens and dozens of businesses they began to pocket up out of the hunger of the people and the plunder and recolonization of the nation....

$Libra is one more of the businesses of the capitalists in the country.

Madoff and Ponzi: Milei's teachers in the "school of econo-thieves"
of imperialist lackeys

When the real estate bubble crisis in the US blew up in 2008, it became clear how the founding father of these fake investment groups acted. One of the yuppy and most important man on Wall Street was called Madoff. He managed a large investment fund. He promised profit rates of 40 or 50% annual interest in dollars. Thus, he got a huge amount of capital. To be more precise: 4 billion dollars. Madoff bought four mansions, some yachts... He became the most popular and revered star millionaire in the financial city not only on Wall Street, but also in London, imperialist Europe, etc.
This faithful representative of capitalist parasitism never invested a single dollar. He only distributed some profits to the first investors and then declared bankruptcy.
“Swindler! Swindler!” shouted the gentlemen of Wall Street after their idol fell apart. They did not “beat around the bush”… They gave him life imprisonment for being a “swindler” to save everyone else, who did the same as him and worse.

Another millionaire named Ponzi was the master of the “great Milei”: he created an investment fund, promising super-profits and even informing how it was going to be done. There was an enormous mass of capital there. Ponzi paid high profits to the first investors with the money of those who came in later on, as we have already seen. A kind of “financial carousel”, also called by the gentlemen of Wall Street, “pyramid scam”. When new funds stopped going in, there was no money left to pay interests. The smarter investors withdrew their profits of billions of dollars, while thousands of investors (who are not poor retirees or unregistered workers earning miserable 500 dollars a month) lost part of their profits.

“A vile hoax!”, scream the capitalists, their judges and some of their politicians hypocritically, getting rid of their dirtiest and most exposed men to wash their dirty clothes…

That’s a lie: this is how the capitalist system works, based on the incessant thirst for profit, in its current state of putrefaction and decomposition in a world economy controlled by monopolies and large international financial capital. They are 1% of parasites who live without working, from “cutting coupons” of their shares in companies and banks. The capitalists and financial capital have already spent and distributed profits that human work has not yet produced.

Cryptocurrencies are nothing but “one of the baskets where they put some eggs they have.” As the saying goes, “capitalists never put all their eggs in the same basket.”

We insist, the world economy, with its different branches of production, banks, etc., is organized by monopolies and international financial capital. Large trusts control the financial system, trade and world production. These parasites set up cartels that even set prices on the world market. We are talking about a financial super-oligarchy like the one of Wall Street, the City of London, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Maastricht of the imperialist powers of Europe… It is them which organize the plundering of the colonial and semi-colonial world with lackey governments, and counter-revolutionary wars like in the Middle East, to grab cheap raw materials, as is also seen in Ukraine. Russia provided cheap gas that was the oxygen with which imperialist Europe worked.

The imperialist pirates even make children work as slaves in Africa to extract cobalt, coltan, uranium, cocoa… They carry out enormous genocides like in Syria or Palestine… Who can be shocked when they racket with Milei and his gang what they consider a “pocket money”?

Imperialist parasites control trade routes and sources of raw materials with their gunboats and their military bases in the colonies and semi-colonies they oppress.

They are large monopolies that are above the states and control their treasuries… Such is capitalism…

As revolutionary Marxism states, in this era of crisis, wars and revolutions, that is, of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system in its imperialist phase: “… only the values that have been created by human labour are at the disposal of society, and prices cannot break through this limitation, including even the monopoly prices fixed by trusts; where labour has created no new value, there even Rockefeller can get nothing.” (Leon Trotsky, Marxism and Our Times, 1939, our bolds)

Is it a scam? Is it a “casino economy”? Both things, but the fundamental is the rotten capitalist system that is collapsing and leading the entire civilization to barbarism with wars of occupation and plunder, which prepare new and greater military conflagrations. The world market has shrunk. There are too many imperialist powers. , Trump’s trade war today against his competitors, will be the inter-imperialist wars next, unless the proletariat prevents it.

The fact is that war is the most profitable and beneficial enterprise since it produces for destruction. Missiles, tanks, airplanes, etc., have an unlimited market.

We must overthrow Milei, as we did in 2001 with the murderer De la Rúa!
To ​​overthrow the government of AEA and the IMF, we must fight against capitalism and imperialist plunder!

The working class and the masses must defeat capitalism, along with all its institutions of oppression, domination and repression of the bourgeois state, such as its justice for the rich, its Parliament, which is a notary of Wall Street, and its puppet government that deserves to go away by means of street battles, like De la Rua in 2001.

They proclaim that there is no money. They fire public servants massively. They terrorize millions of workers with furloughs and dismissals. In the industrial unions, they have liquidated the collective bargaining agreements. The union bureaucracy has done it.

Without treacherous Peronist-Mileísta bureaucrats and without boss politicians, the working class must weigh in on national political life, unite and coordinate demands, to expel the IMF and free Argentina from any imperialist oppression.

Milei and the Argentine bourgeoisie have great allies like the IMF and the imperialist parasites.

The Argentine working class also has great allies, such as the US and European workers who fight within the metropolises, and the working and peasant masses of Latin America who rose up against imperialist plundering, as in Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia…

Recovering proletarian internationalism is the only way for the Argentine working class to wage a decisive anti-imperialist battle.

To end with the dying capitalist system and its rotten institutions of domination, the only way: REVOLUTION!

Reformism has long been avoiding and refusing to fight for revolution, making the masses believe that they can improve their living and living standards within the framework of this bankrupt capitalist system.
They speak of “socialism of the future,” while the capitalist system is collapsing on the shoulders of the exploited today.

Editorial Board of “The International Workers Organizer”