Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies by Verónica Gago (review)

The rise of leftists, nationalist, and populist regimes in Latin America, starting with Hugo Chávez in 1998 and culminating, perhaps, with Evo Morales in 2006, suggested that neoliberalism had run its course in the region. The rise of both right- and left-wing populism in the United States and Europe more recently has thrown into doubt the strength of the support for Neoliberal policies in the Northern Hemisphere as well, as the left retreated in Latin America. Verónica Gago’s stimulating book suggests that neoliberalism is alive and kicking, and that it has survived disguised in many practices that she refers to as “neoliberalism from below.”

The main argument of the book is that many of the practices associated with increasing the inclusiveness of financial services have in fact perpetuated neoliberal results that lead to the exploitation of the dispossessed. In that sense, the peculiar network between the formal and informal economies that developed with the collapse of the neoliberal model of the 1990s, with its very heterogeneous productive structure (referred to as “baroque economies” by the author), is seen as a pragmatic solution for the crisis, but one that strengthens in many ways the exploitation of women, migrants, and the working class in general. The suggestion is that the progressive governments in South America incorporated what the author refers to as “rentier-financial mediation” in a context of, and in support of, “the plebeian revolt” (27).

In many ways, the book reflects closely the Argentinean experience and tries to extrapolate it for the region as a whole. Yet the generalization is not always correct, and some nuances of the specific conditions in each country might be lost in the process. For example, the idea that neoliberalism as an institutional framework resulted from “Latin American dictatorships . . . that reoriented the region from diverse attempts at import-substitution industrialization toward a pattern of extractive and financial economies” (27) does not fit the Brazilian experience. In Brazil, the last dictatorship (1964–85) was clearly developmentalist, and, in the 1970s when the Southern Cone was moving in the direction suggested by the author, it was promoting a national development plan to deepen the industrialization process, which eventually was brought to a halt by the debt crisis in 1982. Neoliberalism is a 1990s phenomenon in Brazil. Even though there was the experience during the Fernando Collor de Mello (1990–92) presidency, it was only with the nominally leftist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president from 1995 to 2003, that neoliberalism took hold.

The same could be said about Mexico. Dominated for a very long time by the undemocratic and somewhat authoritarian regime led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico implemented Neoliberal policies only in the aftermath of the debt crisis, during the Miguel de la Madrid presidency. Note that Brazil and Mexico are the two largest countries in the region, and a generalization that does not encompass their experiences is bound to be problematic. In that sense, one wonders if the persistence of Neoliberal practices in both countries also differs from the Argentinean experience analyzed in the book.

The discussion of the concrete experience of Neoliberalism from below is fundamentally associated with the analysis of the La Salada market in the periphery of Buenos Aires. The concept of “communitarian capital” becomes relevant in this context (35), in the discussion of the textile production networks of (mostly Bolivian) immigrants and their ability to create forms of accumulation, referred to as “fractal accumulation” (46). The use of the term seems to indicate a close relation with the more popular concept of social capital. This is particularly problematic because the term ‘capital,’ referring not only to the physical machines, but also to the social relations of production, has a very clear meaning in economics. The idea of community capital conflates economy and society and hinders the analysis of Neoliberal practices.

The concept of community capital meshes traditional categories like...