The word “reform” always sounds good. It evokes progress, modernization and efficiency, with the promise of a more agile and functional State. In the collective imagination, reform means improving, correcting what is outdated and adjusting what doesn’t work. However, when inserted into the vocabulary of ultraliberalism, the expression “state reform” often becomes an elegant euphemism for the calculated dismantling of public structures.
The method has been repeated for over 40 years. First, the narrative of inefficiency is constructed, in which the State is “fat”, “ineffective” and “an obstacle to freedom”. This rhetoric undermines public trust and gives rise to the idea that only the market can solve the problem. Margaret Thatcher did it in the 80s, when she reduced the British welfare state to an obstacle and Ronald Reagan summarized it in a lapidary phrase that “the State is not the solution, it is the problem”.
Then, cut. Not surgically, but I do. Organizations are extinguished, public services are privatized and universal rights are transformed into merchandise. What is presented as “efficiency” is in practice exclusion, in which health and education become consumer goods and the poorest are left unprotected.
In Pinochet’s Chile, the “Chicago Boys’” reforms privatized pensions, weakened public schools and converted healthcare into business, anticipating by almost a decade measures that would only later be adopted by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. It was a laboratory of ultraliberalism whose perverse effects are still felt today.
The dependence phase follows. By destroying the capacity for public investment, the country needs external capital to finance even basic needs. The State ceases to be sovereign and becomes a client. The IMF was an expert at this game in the 80s and 90s. It imposed “structural reforms” in exchange for loans, plunging entire economies into austerity and prolonged subjugation. The promise of growth ended in decades of stagnation and debt.
Finally, the cycle ends with economic chaos, including unemployment, inflation and inequality, ending up serving as an argument for new “reforms”. The spiral feeds on itself, as what began as a promise of freedom ends in financial imprisonment. First, the State is destroyed, life is made more expensive and sovereignty is surrendered. Then external “aid” appears, at a bargain price and with conditions that dictate future policies.
This is where the true character of ultraliberalism is revealed, as it is not just an economic doctrine, it is a method of power. “Reform” means preparing the capture of public services by private companies, the handing over of strategic resources to foreign powers and the submission of national sovereignty to creditors.
Examples abound. In Russia in the 90s, the so-called “shock therapy” destroyed the productive fabric and handed over strategic sectors to oligarchs and multinationals. In post-2008 Greece, the reforms imposed by the troika mortgaged the future in the name of “fiscal responsibility”. Today, in Argentina, Javier Milei follows the same script of dismantling the State, worsening the social crisis and preparing the ground for “help” from Washington which, far from salvation, ends up tying the country to the interests of others.
Hence it is essential to ask: Reform for what and for whom? To modernize and improve the lives of citizens or to open markets to external investors? To make the State more agile or just weaker? To free the individual or leave him alone in the face of unequal forces?
Ultraliberalism dresses up as freedom, but delivers submission. The homeland, reduced to an asset in liquidation, ceases to belong to everyone and becomes the property of those who can buy it. And the State, supposedly reformed, finally reveals itself to be dismantled, vulnerable and captured.
E-governance specialist