Neo-developmentalism: Beyond Neoliberalism? Capitalist Crisis and Argentina’s Development Since the 90s

FÉLIZ, MARIANO

Londres, Inglaterra

Conferencia; Historical Materialism Sixth Annual Conference; 2009

SOAS/University of London

Argentina´s economy went from its mid-nineties boom to its late nineties bust (1998-2001), and then from a deep recession in 2002 to a renewed expansion. The neoliberal process of the nineties and its continuation in today´s neo-developmentalist strategy are but different forms of processing capitalist contradictions in Argentina´s peripheral form of capitalist valorisation. From the historical background of neoliberalism, the post-nineties phase of expansion gets its thrust in the consolidation of a new capitalist hegemony based on an export-led growth pattern, super-exploitation of the labour force and plundering of natural goods by tras-national capital. This pattern of capitalist valorization remains subject to the international cycle of capital and thus its still fragile in the context of the current international crisis. This article will show that Argentina´s boom-bust-boom process since the nineties expresses the traditional stop-and-go process of development in peripheral economies. However, the originality of our approach is that we´ll centre the analysis on the articulation between capital´s valorisation, changes in labour´s political composition and changing State´s strategies of socio-economic intervention. We show the necessary linkages between “political” crisis (crisis of public policies) and “economic” crisis to capital´s successful valorisation. We propose that the crisis of the nineties in Argentina´s growth (valorisation) process was the result of capital´s success in building a new social hegemony -after 30 years of unsuccessful attempts- through restructuration of capital and labour´s composition. This implies the apparent paradox of explaining Argentina´s development through crisis. We will explain how growing exploitation and successful valorisation met -as a necessity- with crisis tendencies and the collapse of the exchange rate regime in late 2001. Our conceptualization of the historical process under study proposes -contrary to many recent studies- that there exists a necessary relationship between capital´s success (not its failure) and the character of recent capitalist crises in Argentina. This reading takes into account the contradiction between capital´s imposition of its will for expansion and labour´s will for self-development.