The Neo-Developmentalist Alternative: Capitalist Crisis, Popular Movements, and Economic Development in Argentina since the 1990s

Abstract

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, falling again into crisis in 2008. 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, with the particularities implied by Argentina's semi-industrial capitalism based on the superexploitation labor (concept developed by Ruy Mauro Marini) and the generalized overexploitation of natural resources (as pointed out by David Harvey, Rhina Roux, and Francois Chesnais, amongst others). The originality of our approach is that we´ll center the analysis of the cycle of crises on the articulation between capital´s valorization, changes in labor´s political composition and changing State´s strategies of socio-economic intervention. We?ll show for the case of Argentina since the nineties the necessary linkages of political crisis (crisis of public policies) and economic crisis to capital´s successful valorization, mediated by class struggles over the form and content of development. 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 failure) and recent capitalist crises in Argentina. This implies that the foundation of crisis should be found in capital's contradictions in its conflictive development as a social relation of struggle. In particular, we hold that the 1998-2001 crisis and the post-2001 process of capitalist development in Argentina are the result of capital's successful restructuration during the nineties. Our reading takes into account the contradiction between capital´s imposition of its will for expansion and labor´s will for self-development. In this line of thought we will present the development of crisis and public policies against it as the result of social class subjects struggle to impose in theory as well as in practice- their own views of development and values. That is, they imply the opposition of the political economy of capital (expressed in neoclassical economics) and the political economy of the laboring people (of which Marxism has provided some insights but whose fundamentals must be searched in popular struggles against the imposition of capital's rule). In particular, we'll analyze this process of struggle of values and views in regards to big capital's organizations (such as the AEA, Asociación Empresaria Argentina, representative of Argentina's biggest capitals) and popular social organizations (such as the Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos CTA- and the Frente Popular Darío Santillán).