Neoliberalism and Reactions to It

Neoliberalism swept through Latin America just as countries there made transitions to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, and it shaped the policies that newly democratic governments chose. The works under review assess that trend, highlighting its detrimental effects on the economies and societies where neoliberal practices were adopted without proper critical analysis or the adaptations necessary for their application in diverse and complex contexts. Importantly, the books also show that social movements have arisen as a simultaneous expression of dissent, rebellion, and, above all, reaction to the negative economic and social effects of these often undifferentiated and uncontextualized neoliberal practices.

The authors of the books under review are unanimous in stressing that neo-liberal practices have been harshly criticized by Latin American societies. Publics have faced the tough challenge of resisting and responding to the results of the neoliberal economic modus operandi, which caused severe social problems at the micro and macro levels, affecting not only communities and workers but also businesspeople and entrepreneurs. The critical tone of these volumes stands in stark contrast to earlier economic literature that promoted neoliberal policies as a kind of cure-all for the region’s economic woes. These new works stress instead that national economies and their constituent sectors are embedded in a political and economic environment of interdependence and thus are to one degree or another subject to external occurrences that influence behaviors, decision making, and the economy as a whole. The volumes under review suggest that the adoption of neoliberal policies, even at different times and in varied economic, political, and social structures, has accentuated the ripple effects of external problems in domestic environments.

The present essay is structured around themes that emerge in two recent single- author studies (Sebastián Etchemendy’s Models of Economic Liberalization and Donna L. Chollett’s Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements) and three edited volumes (Neoliberalism, Interrupted, edited by Mark Goodale and Nancy Postero; Latin American Responses to Neoliberalism, edited by Vibeke Andersson and Steen Fryba Christensen; and Neoliberalism and Commodity Production in Mexico, edited by Thomas Weaver, James B. Greenberg, William L. Alexander, and Anne Browning-Aiken). This review first highlights the methodological proposal latent in three of the five books, and the theoretical conceptualization and derivative characterization of neoliberalism that is similar across all of the works. Second, it deals with the economic and social consequences of the adoption of neoliberal practices. The essay closes with consideration of the movements that arose in response to neoliberalism. The shared understanding in these books is that neoliberal practices are detrimental to national economies and citizens, and their results are rightly perceived as derisory when evaluated against their initial proposals and targets.

Illustrative cases must suffice in this review as it will not be possible to cover in detail the many cases introduced by these authors. Neoliberal policies were not adopted at the same historical moment among all of the countries treated, but some proximity between them can be observed. It should also be stressed here that neoliberal globalization is ongoing and increasingly is shifting from the productive to the financial sphere, where the cycle of detrimental social, political, and economic...