Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Neocolonial Subordination: Beyond the National Question (Argentina, 2015-2019)

Abstract

This text seeks to present some elements for the analysis of new forms of neoliberalism, paying particular attention to the internal complexities of neoliberal ideology in Latin America’s “peripheral” countries. I begin from the premise that we need to tear away the aura of impenetrability from the supposed mystery of a form of neoliberalism that is at once deregulating, disciplinarian, and punitive. Such an effort is necessary, I claim, if we are to move beyond the plane of neoliberal ideology’s own self-representations and instead develop a critique of the authoritarian social sensibilities that, in Argentina, the government of Mauricio Macri both expressed and fomented between 2015 and 2019. In order to understand the specificity of this authoritarian form of neoliberalism, however, we have to attend to the dialectic of aggression and submission that unfolded at the level of rhetoric. Unlike both recent nationalist configurations of neoliberalism in countries like Brazil and earlier forms of neoliberalism that prevailed in Argentina, Macrism in the latter country combined xenophobic gestures, a series of dehistoricizing strategies, and a demand that the population meekly assume the subordinate role historically assigned to Argentina in the global order.