A Post-Neoliberal Era in Latin America?

Revisiting cultural paradigms

Nehring, Daniel, Gómez Michel, Gerardo, Daniel Nehring, Gerardo Gómez Michel, Magdalena López

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781529200997
• eBook ISBN: 9781529201321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Ongoing conflicts between neoliberal and post-neoliberal politics have resulted in growing social instability in Latin America. This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America as a complex set of interrelated cultural forms, examining the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed public discourses of self and social relationships, popular cultures and modes of everyday experience.

Contributors from an international range of different disciplinary perspectives look at how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives in order to analyse the discourses and cultural practices through which a societal consensus for the pursuit of neoliberal politics may be established, defended and contested.

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Introduction: Everyday Life in (Post-)Neoliberal Latin America

Daniel Nehring, Gerardo Gómez Michel and Magdalena López

This book explores the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and anti-neoliberal resistance in Latin America. While Latin American neoliberalisms and the region’s transition—perhaps temporary—to post-neoliberalism have been extensively debated (Dávila, 2012; Flores-Macias, 2012; Goodale and Postero, 2013), extant research has largely focused on relevant political and socioeconomic processes. The cultural dynamics of neoliberalism, anti-neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism, in terms of the discursive construction of neoliberal common sense and the organization of everyday beliefs, norms, values, and systems of meaning, have received far less attention.

Together, the studies in this volume seek to address this gap. They pursue three objectives. First, they seek to explore how neoliberal narratives of self and social relationships have transformed everyday life in contemporary Latin America. Second, they examine how these narratives are being contested and supplanted by a diversity of alternative modes of experience and practices in a diversity of settings, in the context of anti-neoliberal and post-neoliberal sociopolitical programs. In this context, the studies in this book examine to what extent contemporary Latin America might in fact be described as post-neoliberal, given the crisis of political challenges to neoliberalism in societies such as Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. Third, the following chapters interrogate the discourses and cultural practices through which a societal consensus for the pursuit of neoliberal politics may be established, defended and contested.

Neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism in Latin America

At the beginning of the 21th century, nations such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela have attracted international attention for their forceful critique of neoliberalism and their pursuit of alternative developmental models. Until the turn of the century, neoliberal theories had dominated political and economic life at the global level (Harvey, 2005; Davies, 2014). The end of the neoliberal cycle of the 1990s in much of the Latin American region has led to what John Beverley (2011) called a post-neoliberal moment. However, these post-neoliberal political programs have recently entered a period of crisis. The beginning of this crisis was marked by the early death of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (2013), and it has continued with the electoral defeat of Argentina’s left-wing government in 2015, the escalating economic and political crisis in Venezuela, and the removal from office of Dilma Roussef in Brazil in mid-2016. The current social, economic and political unrest has been heavily intensified by the worldwide financial crisis that began in 2007–08 and its lasting repercussions. Even though Bolivia and Ecuador are politically relatively stable now, there are clear signs of public disillusionment with both country’s governments and the political and ideological models they represent. The failures of these programs and ongoing conflicts among neoliberal and anti-neoliberal elites and social movements have by the mid-2010s resulted in growing social instability. This book examines cultural responses to this instability. It looks at a wide range of cultural forms, such as literature, underground cinema, street fairs and self-help books to explore how Latin Americans construct subjectivities, build communities and make meaning in their everyday lives during a profound crisis of the social. In this context, it is important to emphasize the role that neoliberal and post-neoliberal narratives of self and social relationships may come to play in popular culture and everyday lived experience in Latin America today.

David Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as:

in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The global hegemony of neoliberalism has turned out to be extraordinarily durable even throughout the contemporary period of profound socioeconomic crisis brought about by a far-reaching deregulation of financial markets (Mirowski, 2013). At the same time, it is essential to acknowledge that the global dominance of neoliberal theoretical dogma has resulted in a diversity of sometimes only loosely connected policy programs, forms of political practice, institutional dynamics, and cultural narratives. In Latin America, obvious examples of this diversity are the infamous experiments with neoliberal economic policy during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the far-reaching privatization of public services in Mexico that took place from the 1990s onwards under conditions of formal democracy (Harvey, 2005). Roy et al (2007) accordingly describe neoliberalism as a shared mental model with potentially heterogeneous institutional consequences:

Neoliberalism as a shared mental model refers to the spread of market-oriented ideas across the globe that has been occurring over the past three decades. … while these ideas have had an important effect in shaping global economic reform, this importance has varied greatly across countries and regions. Additionally, in cases where neoliberal ideas have been influential, they have not always been successful.

This diverse account of neoliberalism marks a central point. How have neoliberal narratives of self and social relationships transformed everyday life in contemporary Latin America?

How are these narratives being contested and supplanted by alternative modes of experience and practice in a diversity of sites and cultural fields? To what extent can contemporary Latin America be described as post-neoliberal? We intend to raise these questions through the case studies presented in this book.

In the field of Latin American studies, neoliberal hegemony was contested by decolonial theory in the late 20th century. Departing from what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (1992) called the “coloniality of power” in the early 1990s, this line of research has explored how modernity’s matrix of global power manifested itself throughout the Latin American social fabric and formulated cognitive alternatives. Some of the merits of decolonial theory lay in its concrete referentiality, and in its appreciation of forms of coexistence and indigenous organization, as reflected by the studies of Walsh (2013), Escobar (2008), Coronil (1997), Mignolo (2005), and Castro Gómez (2009). However, alternative forms of knowledge and constructions of local power could not be applied to larger cultural contexts within the region, and they had little applicability to the political changes of the 21st century, when the interests of leftist governments began to distance themselves from the subaltern demands that initially fed them. The end of the neoliberal cycle in much of the region has led to the present time being identified as post-neoliberal.

However, contrary to what one might expect, secular power asymmetries remain alive. If there was and still is a critical, anti-neoliberal consensus, disagreements regarding possible alternatives have worsened as the left became increasingly hegemonic. Laclau’s theory of populism (2005) came to displace decolonial theory in much of the academic debate over the past decade. Laclau provided a conceptual basis for sympathizers of pink tide governments who needed to escape from the negative stigma of the liberal tradition about populism. From this perspective, populism provides a discursive tool to think about changes in hegemony. However, to the extent that the pink tide did not entirely meet the social, political, economic and cultural expectations of countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua, debates about whether it is even desirable to capture the state have emerged. As Jon Beasley-Murray argued, Laclau “took the state for granted, and never questioned its power” (2010, p.69). In recent years we have witnessed the restoration of new exclusions to sustain the hegemony of the pink tide, while the definition of the “people” is becoming more restrictive.

What are alternatives are there, then, for thinking about Latin American communities that are emancipatory? To exit the dichotomous choice between hegemony and counter-hegemony, and recognizing similar practices of power between the right and the left, scholars like George Yúdice (2004), Alberto Moreiras (2013) and Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) prefer to blur the boundaries of hegemony or dispense with concept of ideology at all. While Moreiras (2013) calls for an “infrapolitics” which is situated at the very edge of the political, prior to any subjectivity, Beasley-Murray (2010) argues that politics is not moved by ideology, but by habits and affects. Neither the people nor the subaltern, both Moreiras and Beasley-Murray propose the concept of “multitude” to talk about a collective that would function as a kind of autarchic social power. However, these latest proposals are not exempt from questioning either. There is a difficulty in linking post-hegemony and concepts like “multitude” and “infrapolitics” with concrete practices in Latin America. The contribution of these theories will be tested in the next decade.

Neoliberalism, politics and culture

Recent events raise important questions about the dynamics of neoliberal and post-neoliberal politics in Latin America today, and about the future viability of political programs that seek to occupy post-neoliberal discursive spaces (Gago, 2017). In the most basic terms, these questions result from the current and ongoing crisis of post-neoliberal parties and political movements and the re-emergence of governments led by political parties and sectors of Latin America’s elites that have been closely associated with neoliberal political projects. Important crisis moments include (but are not limited to): the escalation of social, economic and political conflict in Venezuela, following the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013; Mauricio Macri’s rise to the presidency in Argentina in 2015; the electoral defeat of Kirchnerism; and the decline of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) in Brazil, manifest in acrimonious public debates about corruption and the impeachment of Dilma Roussef in 2016. At the same time, political programs that can be described as both anti- and post-neoliberal continue to exert a strong influence in Latin America, particularly through the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Lenín Moreno in Ecuador.

The complexity of questions about post-neoliberalism’s presents and futures is thus visible across Latin America. In Venezuela, a nation that attempted perhaps Latin America’s most radical program of societal reorganization, scholars have called into question the future of progressive societal development, given the recent and ongoing retrenchment of Chavism. Thus, in a recent analysis, Spanakos and Pantoulas argue:

The concern about survivals of neoliberalism among political activists within Bolivarianism has been accentuated since the death of Chávez. Many activists at the base level fear that the post-Chávez PSUV and government leadership are moving toward greater centralization and institutionalization—that they are returning politics to the technically trained bureaucrats and elected officials. This means a decided movement against the creative and more free-flowing politics of the street (post-neoliberalism as ontological project), and this has important implications for the legitimacy that key support groups accord the government. (Spanakos and Pantoulas 2017, p.49)

Spanakos and Pantoulas here draw attention to shifts in the relationship between government and political grassroots, and between state and citizen, that have recently emerged in Venezuela, and they suggest that Chavism’s continued political legitimacy will reside in its ability to retain its links to the “free-flowing politics of the street.” At the same time, Spanakos and Pantoulas also highlight a lack of clarity with regards to a long-term political vision, beyond anti-neoliberal resistance:

The legacy of one of Latin America’s most strident anti-neoliberals, Hugo Chávez, provides a valuable opportunity to do that. Analyzing post-neoliberalism during and following the presidencies of Hugo Chávez confirms what careful observers have noted: that anti-neoliberal movements are clearer about what they oppose than about what they propose …. (Spanakos and Pantoulas, 2017, p.49)

Spanakos and Pantoulas’s concerns are echoed in Elbert’s equally recent analysis of post-neoliberal politics in Argentina. Drawing on empirical research on unionization and political solidarities in two factories in Greater Buenos Aires, Elbert finds:

There has been a growing debate about the characterization of political regimes that emerged in Latin America after the crisis of neoliberalism …. In Argentina, unemployment was drastically reduced, and the government allowed the comeback of national level collective bargaining. However, the Argentine state tolerated labor informality in order to foster capital investments. In this context, the present study provided evidence of union solidarity strategies toward informal workers. In a broader sense, it showed that workers were not passive victims of labor fragmentation policies but did have agency and were fundamental in developing strategies of resistance to the persistent inequality of capitalism in Argentina. (Elbert, 2017, p.141f)

Elbert’s analysis again conceptualizes the viability of post-neoliberal political programs in terms of the relationship between government and political grassroots, and between state and citizen. Taking this argument further, Errejón and Guijarro emphasize the need for post-neoliberal movements to achieve a coherent sociopolitical vision, and to give this vision roots in a coherent social base. In this context, they highlight the achievements and limitations of post-neoliberal government in Bolivia and Ecuador:

In this sense, the MAS’s hegemony seems more comprehensive, capable of dismantling opponents and mediated by organized social sectors—largely campesinos, but also popular-urban and near-middle-class ones on which they rely and by which they expand. The hegemony of the PAIS movement seems subject to greater challenges. Although Correa’s leadership remains uncontested in the electoral domain, it has not formed a social bloc around itself, and it is more dependent on the charismatic game that confronts, in addition, the traditional powers that came out of the regime crisis less weakened than in Bolivia and therefore retain a greater ability to resist. The flexibility to incorporate formerly alien issues and demands into its discourse thus seems to be a core feature of hegemony. It is this tension between openness-inclusion/closedness-exclusion that will mark the future directions of political processes in Bolivia and in Ecuador. (Errejón and Guijarro, 2016, p.50)

Errejón and Guijarro add to the conceptualization of post-neoliberalism in terms of the relationships between government and political grassroots and between state and citizen in so far as they draw attention to the long-term viability of relatively new and fiercely contested political movements. While MAS and PAIS have fared well and managed to retain power at the national level, recent developments in Argentina and Brazil have been more complicated. Thus, Grigera ties the past successes and subsequent decline of Lulism and Kircherism to short-term commodity booms, in line with older, historical populist movements in Latin America:

We have thus explained the emergence of Kirchnerism and Lulism as responses to the crisis of neoliberalism. We have opted to use the term ‘Pink Tide neopopulism’ to distinguish them from classical post-war populism, and ‘neopopulism’ from neoliberal populism. The differences between both were traced in the nature of the mobilized subject, the enabling condition, and the depth and type of the crisis. (Grigera, 2017, p.452)

Finally, explaining the dynamics of post-neoliberal politics in Latin America, it is important to account for the ability of neoliberal political programs and the constituencies that support them to creatively reconstitute themselves. Weinberg is mindful of this when she writes of the “thousand faces of neoliberalism” and Mauricio Macri’s ascent to the presidency in Argentina:

In the new scenario under Macri, we will have to observe the impact of this change on negotiations with the new government and on the ways in which possible new policies and strategies are developed for this sector. One of the main problems we have observed in these years has been the negative impact of institutional fragility on the development of medium- and long-term policy, with the constant creation and disappearance of state structures that we are witnessing nowadays. While remaining hopeful and supporting political activism, we might keep in mind the thousands of faces of neoliberalism. It seems that we are witnessing new arrangements and combinations of old structures. (Weinberg, 2017, p.165)

The permutations of neoliberalism at the level of national political and economic programs and its diffusion into everyday social relationships are further rendered visible by recent research in Mexico. Here, a range of studies has emphasized developmental trajectories and sociopolitical continuity between the stringent implementation of neoliberal structural adjustment programs from the 1980s onwards, the radical privatization of public goods that began in the 1990s, and the escalation of violence initiated in the mid-2000s through the disintegration of everyday social relationships and the growing power struggle between a weakened state and drug cartels seeking territorial and political control (Gaytán and Bowen, 2015; Laurell, 2015; Martin, 2005; Paley, 2015).

How, then, can we make sense of post-neoliberalism presents and futures across the region? A useful point of departure in answering this question lies in Verónica Gago’s observations as to the limits of progressive government in Latin America and the persistence of neoliberalism in new permutations:

The progressive governments’ perspective, which attempts to neutralize the practices from below while the governments present themselves as overcoming an era of popular resistance, closes of a more complex and realistic image of neoliberalism. … The progressive governments, despite their rhetoric, do not signal the end of neoliberalism. Further, they severely complicate the characterization of what is understood as postneoliberalism …. My thesis is that neoliberalism survives as a set of conditions that are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Everyday Life in (Post-)Neoliberal Latin America
• 2 Imaginaries, Sociability and Cultural Patterns in the Post-Neoliberal Era: A Glance at the Argentinean, Paraguayan, and Venezuelan Experiences
• 3 Making Neoliberal Selves: Popular Psychology i Contemporary Mexico
• 4 From Uribe’s “Democratic Security” to Santo’s Peace Accords with the FARC: Hate, Fear, Hope and other Emotions in Contemporary Colombian Politics
• 5 Cine Bajo Tierra: Ecuador’s Booming Underground Cinema in the Aftermath of the Neoliberal Era
• 6 Neoliberalising Humanity: Culture and Popular Participation in the Case of the Street Market of Caruaru, Brazil
• 7 The Contribution of the Catholic Magazine Espacio Laical and the Constitution to the Cuban Public Sphere
• 8 Argentina: The Philosophical Resistance to the Conquest of the Soul
• 9 Fleeing (Post-)Chávez Memories: The 1990s and the Black Friday Generation
• 10 Re-imagined Community: The Mapuche Nation in Neoliberal Chile
• 11 Neoliberalism and the Negotiation of the American Dream in Contemporary Latina Narratives
• 12 Bare Life in Contemporary Mexico: Everyday Violence and Folk Saints