Financialization of Popular Life and the Extractive Operations of Capital: A Perspective from Argentina

GAGO, VERÓNICA

South Atlantic Quaterly

Duke University Press

Lugar: Carolina del Norte; Año: 2015 vol. 114 p. 11 - 28

0038-2876

(Indexada en Academic Abstracts FullTEXT Elite, Academic Abstracts FullTEXT Ultra, Academic Research Library, Academic Search Elite, Academic Search Premier, America: History and Life, Art Index Retrospective, 1929?1984, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Corporate ResourceNet, Current Abstracts, Current Contents/Arts and Humanities, Discovery, Expanded Academic ASAP, Historical Abstracts, Humanities Abstracts, Humanities and Social Sciences Index Retrospective, 1907?1984, Humanities Full Text, Humanities Index, Humanities Index Retrospective, 1907?1984, Humanities International Complet). This article proposes expanding the concept of extractivism beyond the critique of the reprimarization of Latin American economies and their dependency on commodities. Thus, we will focus on the modes of financial penetration of Argentina´s popular sectors during the last decade linked to a structural increase in consumption. First, we develop the notion of ?neoliberalism from below? to understand the concrete forms of neoliberalism´s persistence in a neo-developmentalist context. Then, we conceptualize apparatuses of consumption and debt as drivers of new forms of value creation in the urban peripheries through a variety of informal economies, with blurred boundaries between the legal and the illegal, which can be read as a prototype of financialization´s arrival in these territories. It is there, we hypothesize, where capital extends its frontiers and where the necessity of a specific logistics connecting high finances with low finances can be seen.