Neodevelopmentalism and Dependency in Twenty-first-Century Argentina: Insights from the Work of Ruy Mauro Marini

Abstract

For Ruy Mauro Marini, writing in the mid-1990s, neodevelopmentalism in Latin America ended with the moratoria on debt repayment in Mexico and Brazil in the early 1980s, which ushered in an era of International Monetary Fund control. For him this demonstrated the inability of the Latin American bourgeoisie to achieve autonomy at the international level. Neodevelopmentalism returned in early-twenty-first-century Argentina in the local context of a new class politics and a wider context marked by the emergence of China in the world economy and the influence of Chavismo. It consisted of an economic policy that consolidated the new hegemonic groups led by transnational capital through the superexploitation of labor and nature and the revival of the myth of development expressed by the notion of “growth with social inclusion.” For a time the project was characterized by high rates of profit and high levels of (albeit precarious) employment, but, as the global crisis of 2008 revealed its limitations and the “fine-tuning” of economic policy produced a decline of real incomes and consumption, it led to fragmentation of the political spectrum and a realignment of its principal actors. Mauricio Macri’s election to the presidency in 2015 represented a counterrevolution that, as Marini predicted decades ago, would involve more violent superexploitation and stronger imperialist influence.

Para Ruy Mauro Marini, escribiendo a mediados de la década de 1990, el neodesarrollismo en América Latina terminó con la moratoria sobre el pago de la deuda en México y Brasil a principios de la década de 1980, lo que marcó el comienzo de una era de control del Fondo Monetario Internacional. Para él, esto demostró la incapacidad de la burguesía latinoamericana para lograr la autonomía a nivel internacional. El neodesarrollismo regresó en la Argentina de principios del siglo XXI en el contexto local de una nueva política de clase y un contexto más amplio marcado por el surgimiento de China en la economía mundial y la influencia del chavismo. Consistió en una política económica que consolidó los nuevos grupos hegemónicos liderados por el capital transnacional a través de la superexplotación del trabajo y la naturaleza y el renacimiento del mito del desarrollo expresado por la noción de “crecimiento con inclusión social.” Durante un tiempo el proyecto fue caracterizado por altas tasas de ganancia y altos niveles de empleo (aunque precario), pero, como la crisis global de 2008 reveló sus limitaciones y el “ajuste” de la política económica produjo una disminución de los ingresos reales y el consumo, condujo a la fragmentación del espectro político y una realineación de sus principales actores. La elección de Mauricio Macri a la presidencia en 2015 representó una contrarrevolución que, como predijo Marini décadas atrás, implicaría una superexplotación más violenta y una influencia imperialista más fuerte.

Keywords

Neodevelopmentalism Neoliberalism State Argentina Marini

The ideas of Ruy Mauro Marini provide insights for an understanding of the limitations of neodevelopmentalism resulting from the articulation between the transformations of global capitalism and the nature of its reproduction in Argentina. Marini’s work is one of the high points in Latin American critical thought, and his studies of capitalism, dependency, and revolution have inspired a generation of critical intellectuals. His “Dialectic of Dependency” (1973a) marked a turning point in interpretations of peripheral capitalism and the transnationalization of capital facilitated by neoliberalism. His integrated understanding of dependent capitalism is the starting point for my analysis.

Marini’s contributions were part of a theoretical and political debate with those who saw the possibility of autonomous capitalist development in the periphery, in particular the so-called Latin American structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) as represented by Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, and Aníbal Pinto. Their claim, challenged by Marini (1994), was that the industrial bourgeoisie in association with the state could become a modernizing force that would promote development on a par with that of the core countries. Marini (2008 [1978]) criticized neodevelopmentalists and dependency theorists such as José Serra and Fernando Henrique Cardoso for their failure to take imperialism into account, their reformism, and their “sociological” focus. He had a more fruitful exchange with other currents of dependency theory, including that associated with André Gunder Frank, with whom he shared (Marini, 2008 [1966]) a critical view of the developmentalist theses of structural dualism that to this day make a fundamental distinction between the development of the primary sector and that of industrial capitalism. Instead of structural dualism Marini (1966: 85) and Frank proposed an organic complementarity between export agriculture and industrial development. Marini (1973a: 111) also agreed with Frank on the development of underdevelopment—the idea that underdevelopment is a specific form of capitalist development in the periphery—and its antireformist political consequences.

Marini’s positions in various debates contribute to an understanding of the transformation of capitalism in Argentina as a result of neoliberal policies and the neodevelopmentalist project associated with Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. This project is both a historical stage and a societal project of the dominant classes. Emerging from the crisis of neoliberalism from 1998 to 2001 (Féliz, 2011a; 2014b), it displaced neoliberalism but displayed structural continuities with it—maintaining its contradictions but processing them in different forms. The dominant classes sought to make productive use of the social, political, and economic assets derived from the neoliberal era with a strategy of social reproduction in an age of transnationalized capitalism involving a new political structure and a new kind of state. Neodevelopmentalism is the social and political articulation of the demands of different social sectors within the framework of the interests of large-scale transnational capital.

Neodevelopmentalism in twenty-first-century Argentina reaffirmed the idea of state intervention as a way to promote economic growth and social inclusion through improved wages and social policies. However, its reformist rather than anticapitalist character led it down the road of dependent capitalism and was subject to its limitations. Those limitations were revealed by the global crisis of 2008, which required a deepening of strategy on the part of the political forces defending it. Their failure to accomplish this weakened the political and social bases of the hegemonic project (especially among the subaltern sectors) and brought on a crisis that persists today.

Examining the structural bases of neodevelopmentalism and the changes in state policies that it involved, I will analyze the articulations between the structure and the political composition of classes (Cleaver, 1992) in Argentina and the contradictions that produced the crisis of the hegemonic project. Drawing on Marini’s work, I will try to determine the extent to which neodevelopmentalism can guarantee continuing capitalist development in the periphery and satisfy the needs of the popular classes.

The New Hegemonic Project in the Era of Transnational Capitalism

The crisis of neoliberalism in Argentina was an organic crisis—social, political, and economic (Gramsci, 2004)—and opened up the possibility of a new stage calling for the construction of new relations of production, appropriation, and distribution of monetary and mercantile wealth that would facilitate a new process of capital accumulation and economic growth (Féliz, 2015). New dominant actors took advantage of the crisis-spawned reorientation of Argentina’s economy to develop a project that would allow them to benefit from the structural adjustments of the neoliberal era. This project led to a half-decade of growth and unequal recovery, with real gross domestic product (GDP) increasing by 8.8 percent annually between 2003 and 2007 and real wages in the private sector by 35.7 percent. It had two central components. The first, created in the 2002 transition under the Eduardo Duhalde administration, involved a severe devaluation of the local currency, the imposition of an export tax, the reduction of public debt service, intervention in the financial system, and the freezing of utility rates and public employees’ wages (Féliz and López, 2012: 35–64). The second stemmed from tendencies associated with neoliberalism: extensive precarization and superexploitation of labor and reliance upon resource extraction to produce extraordinary income and foreign exchange. The latter component relied on the transnationalization of capital and integration into Brazilian and Chinese subimperialism.

Peripheral Capitalism in the Era of the Transnationalization of Capital

The neoliberal era was brought on by a shift in the correlation of forces in favor of transnational capital (Harvey, 2007). As Marini (2008 [1997]: 250) noted, “the ascent of neoliberalism is not an accident, but the tool par excellence used by the great capitalist centers to break down national borders in order to clear the way for the circulation of their commodities and capitals.” Neoliberalism is not just a set of policies but a historical process of structural transformation. In Argentina this process had different modalities under the military dictatorship (1976–1983), the era of democratic reconstruction and heterodox structural adjustment under Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989), the orthodox structural adjustment of Carlos Menem (1989–1999), and finally the crisis under Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001). It was characterized by the transformation of class structures to the detriment of the working class through the deregulation and “financialization” of the economy, labor flexibilization, transnational integration, and the transformation of the state.

Capitalist transnationalization replaced “multinationalism.” For Marini (2008 [1997]: 243) the globalized economy corresponded to a new phase in the development of capitalism based upon an international division of labor that tended to reestablish, at a higher level, forms of dependency that were widely thought to have disappeared. For Argentina this meant a modification of its place in the world economy between the imperial powers and the new subimperial forces that had achieved preeminence regionally (Brazil) or throughout the Global South (China). Marini (2008 [1966]: 94–95) saw this subimperial tendency as “the rush to compensate for the inability to achieve the growth of the internal market with the conquest of existing markets. . . . This form of imperialism . . . cannot convert dispossession [that is, plundering and exploitation] carried out abroad into higher domestic living standards that might alleviate the class struggle.” Brazil and China are currently peripheral centers of accumulation with an active capacity for neo- or subimperialism, seeking to displace their internal contradictions to other countries (Harvey, 2005). This general tendency goes beyond the recent conjunctural economic crises in each country. Argentina’s place is as a supplier of primary products (from agriculture, mining, and potentially hydrocarbons) and their manufactured derivatives (Arceo, 2010). This has been an asymmetrical relationship, since Argentine exports to Brazil, China, and India rose from 24.9 percent of total exports in 2002 to 31.6 percent in 2010 while imports from those three countries rose from 32.7 percent to 45.8 percent of total imports during the same period.

While this situation appears typical of dependent incorporation into the world economy, the transnationalization of capital alters its characteristics. I agree with Marini that the division of labor operates not only as a result of the unequal trade relations but also through the global integration of local production. The division of labor at the global level is through the labor force itself rather than through national economies. Workers in each country participate in a veritable global industrial army undergoing constant creation and consolidation (Marini, 2008 [1997]: 242–242). China’s rapid development has accelerated this tendency. Foreign trade is increasingly an internal transaction within transnational corporations, accounting for 35.9 percent of all trade in 2007 (De Cicco, 2010).

The Superexploitation of Labor and of Nature

These processes put the superexploitation of the workforce and nature at the center of the process of economic growth (Féliz, 2014a; Jaccoud et al., 2015).

Marini (2008 [1997]; 2008 [1973a]: 143–144) proposed that the superexploitation of labor was no longer simply a mechanism for the survival of national capital in a competitive market but a way for capital to recoup its losses. In 2010, 35.2 percent of waged workers and more than 50 percent of waged private-sector workers were employed under precarious conditions (Féliz, 2015: 83). In 2009 42.3 percent of workers received wages below the legal minimum (up from 32 percent in 2003), and today superexploitation is a precondition for the use of local labor by transnational capital. The expansion toward the external market is not just the export of raw materials and their derivatives but also the export of manufactured goods. As Marini (1981) argued, “although export expansion based on industrial products is not easy in that as it faces a market already dominated by the main capitalist countries, [the dependent country] offers those countries the possibility of achieving high rates of return by exploiting cheap labor . . . , to obtain higher profits than they would obtain elsewhere with the same industrial base, in exchange for a higher participation in the world market.”

The superexploitation of nature is just a new chapter of its constant pillaging (Constantino, 2014). In Argentina in the era of transnational capital, this pillaging goes beyond traditional practices to include massive expansion of soya cultivation beyond the traditional areas (Constantino, 2013) and large-scale mining and hydrocarbons extraction (Colectivo Voces de Alerta, 2011). Income extraction from the land has multiplied not through the talents of producers but through exceptionally low-cost production to satisfy demand (Féliz, 2014d: 10–11). Rural income has increased as more land has been brought under cultivation (Arceo and Rodríguez, 2006), from 25 million hectares in soya, wheat, and corn in 1995–2004 to 34.5 million in 2010–2011, while production increased from 65 to 104 million tons (López and Oliverio, 2012). At the same time, new mining projects have increased from 18 in 2002 to 614 in 2011 and investment in mining from US$541 million to US$11 billion (Colectivo Voces de Alerta, 2011).

During the pre-neoliberal developmentalist phase, income from these activities went mainly to national producers who were not well integrated into the local productive cycle. Historically, the dispute over its appropriation was at the heart of intense conflict. Now that large-scale local capital tends to become an integral part of a global production chain, income from the land “disappears,” since the owner of the land may be the same corporation that processes and/or exports the resource. Greater integration between primary product (commodity) producers and manufacturing capital has led to greater agreement among fractions of the dominant class about the overall development project (Féliz, 2014c).

The superexploitation associated with transnational capitalism is a process of appropriation of income oriented to the global market. The production of primary products promotes export-led accumulation, and the pressure for the superexploitation of labor causes demand for popular consumption goods to decline. Between 2002 and 2010, extraordinary profits from the superexploitation of labor and nature represented 24 percent of GDP, compared with 17.6 percent between 1991 and 2001 (Jaccoud et al., 2015). According to Marini (2008 [1973a]: 249), “the internationalization of productive processes and the constant diffusion of industry to other nations is not simply to exploit the advantages created by protectionism, as in the past, but above all to confront the sharpening of competition at a global level. In this movement a key role, although not an exclusive one, is played by the superexploitation of labor.” To this we can now add the plundering of nature and the appropriation of the income derived from extractive activities.

The new hegemonic project was nurtured by these tendencies. After the collapse of the Convertibility Plan (1991–2001), the Peronist party regained control of the Argentine government. First, under the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde in 2002–2003, a political process was initiated to spur economic growth through the above-mentioned policies. This occurred gradually with changes in social, economic, and labor policies and a strategy for consolidating political power that, through a delicate equilibrium between consensus and coercion, sought to channel conflict through state institutions. The Duhalde government (2003–2008) opened the path to consolidation of a fully neodevelopmentalist project. The initial phase represented by Duhalde was essential to the construction of the project (Grigera and Eskenazi, 2013: 168) and cannot be separated analytically, historically, or politically from the consolidation (2003–2008) and then stagnation and crisis (2008–2015) of the administrations of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

The Political Economy of Neodevelopmentalist Reformism

The hegemonic project needed to articulate the productive capacity of capital with the dynamic of the social struggle that expressed the changes in the political composition of Argentina’s social classes. Overcoming the crisis required recovering capitalist profitability while partially satisfying the demands of the subaltern classes. The large transnational corporations sought to impose policies that would consolidate their dominant position while incorporating (in a subordinate way) a significant number of medium-sized and large local firms. Meanwhile, the popular forces sought to bring about transformations that would improve their living conditions. During the phase led by the Kirchners, the neodevelopmentalist state showed a weakness that differed from what Marini envisioned.

The dominant classes pressured the government to implement a high and stable real exchange rate to permit a higher rate of profit. Simply put, the “expensive” dollar reduced the real value of wages and increased the profitability of commodity production, favoring exports while keeping popular consumption depressed. It was designed to protect local industry and create the basis for “growth with social inclusion” (Arroyo, 2004) through employment, combining growth with the need to reduce social tensions (Frenkel, 2005). This policy was presented by the Kirchnerist current of Peronism as the viable development model for the periphery (Curia, 2007) that would contribute to the establishment of a new social pact.

A second dominant-class formulation was a monetary and fiscal policy that would permit wealth to be appropriated by productive capital rather than finance capital. This was done by limiting both public and private debt, guaranteeing eventual repayment without threatening economic growth (Féliz, 2015). Fiscal surpluses were generated through renegotiation of the debt, freezes on public sector salaries, and the imposition of an export tax (the proceeds of which subsidized industry). Monetary policy maintained low rates of interest to favor borrowing (based on cheap credit) by industrial capital in order to invest in machinery (Bresser-Pereira, 2010). Until mid-2008 this approach contributed to economic growth (Féliz, 2015). Strengthening the hegemonic coalition required addressing to a certain extent the interests of the popular sectors that had the capacity to generate instability. Economic and job growth made this possible, but the increased political influence of the popular classes demanded the creation of new institutions to reduce social conflict through the partial satisfaction of those demands (Dinerstein, Deledicque, and Contartese, 2008).

The new political composition of the working class had two parts. One was born of the piquetero movement of unemployed workers, whose demands and protest methods had become a major challenge to the government (Stratta and Barrera, 2009). Containing the movement was a priority and was partly achieved through a combination of repression (with a high point in June 2002) and reforms resulting in a precarious integration of the movement’s main organizations. This was seen by Kirchner as evidence of the feasibility of building a “serious capitalism” that guaranteed social inclusion through job creation (Presidencia de la Nación, 2011a). The other dissident social force was the broader workers’ movement. In the face of increased questioning of union leadership, the government sought to channel worker demands through existing institutions and legislation (Schneider, 2013). Higher growth rates and lower unemployment permitted unions to recover the traditional instrument of collective bargaining to pursue their demands. Employers sought to diffuse worker demands that they considered excessive institutionally through, for instance, general increases in the minimum wage decreed by the executive power (Schneider, 2013: 108). Kirchner came to the presidency in 2003 with limited legitimacy—he actually finished second in the first round of voting, with only 22 percent, and reached the presidency only because his opponent, Carlos Menem, quit the race—and these early steps served to consolidate his regime. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Labor, Employment, and Social Security carried out a policy of low-level repression of the most disruptive labor conflicts, led by unions that were ideologically distant from the government’s Peronist (national-popular) traditions (109).

A Developmentalism Sui Generis

Marini believed that the “developmentalist dream” had been buried by neoliberalism. He argued that in Latin America neoliberalism represented the imposition of imperial interests in the context of the structural adjustment generated by changes in the world economy. But he also noted that the Latin American bourgeoisie, especially in the countries where it was most developed, had its own interests and would try to defend them even as it submitted to imperialism (Marini, 1993). While Marini did not predict the nature of the temporary resolution of the neoliberal crisis, his analytical framework permitted him to envision the possibility of new forms of reproduction of local bourgeois interests. Neodevelopmentalism may be seen as one of these new forms.

The five years after the collapse of neoliberalism in 2001 saw the consolidation of a capitalist development project in Argentina that, having emerged in the era of transnationalized capitalism, was sui generis. Following Marini (1993), the project may be seen as a convergence of developmentalism (classical structuralism) and endogenism (which sees Latin American capitalism as a social form to be analyzed separately from global capitalism [Sotelo Valencia, 1990]) in a synthesis that suggested a critical modification of neoliberal patterns (Sztulwark, 2005: 137). For Marini, the neodevelopmentalists were open to a social-democratic notion of capitalist development: to consolidate its hegemony, the bourgeoisie accepted consideration of redistribution of income in the light of popular demands for a greater share of it (Marini, 1992: 897). Neodevelopmentalism emerged from the fall of neoliberalism in the region as a new phase in this process. Its developmentalist roots are evident in several ways. Discursively we see the emphasis on reindustrialization led by the national bourgeoisie as proposed decades earlier by the ECLAC. Marini (1993) said that the ECLAC viewed industrialization as the lever for social transformation, a deus ex machina “sufficient in itself to guarantee the correction of social disequilibria and inequalities.” In policy terms, state interventionism served to promote accumulation both macroeconomically and more directly through subsidies and infrastructure spending. This is the canonical model of neodevelopmentalism (Curia, 2007): fiscal surplus, trade surplus, and an expensive dollar.

The neodevelopmentalist framework has both innovations and limitations. On the one hand, it is based not on classical structuralism but on a neostructuralist version that can be summed up as “productive transformation with equity” (Grigera, 2014). Neodevelopmentalism asserts the centrality of industrialization as the driving instrument and the need to overcome the historical opposition between primary and industrial production (Féliz, 2014c). The advocates of neodevelopmentalism, while acknowledging that Argentina has an unbalanced productive structure, argue that this can and must be overcome through policies that promote competitiveness and strengthen productive integration in order to move from development for the domestic market (desarrollo hacia adentro) in accordance with import-substitution industrialization to a development from within (desarrollo desde dentro) that industrializes Argentina’s abundant natural resources for export. Along Southeast Asian lines, import-substitution industrialization with the objective of satisfying local consumption is replaced by a strategy of export of raw materials and industrial products of low-to-medium complexity (Féliz, 2014d: 9–10).

Neodevelopmentalists see the state not as the principal agent of development (e.g., undertaking infrastructure investments through state-owned enterprises) but as creating the conditions for global competitiveness and joining with large-scale capital for strategic undertakings (Grigera, 2014; Sunkel, 1991) Besides discursively exalting the national bourgeoisie, the state promotes the internationalization of capital as it accepts a regionally and globally subordinate position. Innovations in labor and social policy, according to Marini (1993), are “one of the specificities of neodevelopmentalism when compared to developmentalism: for the latter, the distributive question always appears as a question of secondary importance.” During the classical developmentalist phase, a peripheral welfare state was consolidated that privileged widespread access to social and labor rights. This was a manifestation of the importance of building the internal market and of a correlation of forces that was relatively favorable to the popular classes. Today the situation is very different, with transnational capital imposing the superexploitation of labor and of nature. In this sense the political reconstitution inherited from the fight against neoliberalism forced the Kirchner regimes to incorporate some popular demands into the new makeup of the state.

State, Class Struggle, and Neodevelopmentalism

This way of understanding neodevelopmentalism goes beyond the neostructuralist understanding of society, in which the state is the integrator of antagonistic class demands (Grigera, 2014). On this point, Marini (1993) had this to say about the so-called progressive forces:

We are witnessing . . . a tendency toward traditional national-developmentalism and to certain dependency theses, which—in the absence of a dynamic theoretical basis—tend to represent a simple return to the past. . . . Despite the apparent vitality of Peronism . . . [and] the youthful forces that have emerged, such as the Workers’ Party in Brazil, this tendency has not shown itself capable of revolutionizing the ideological-political composition of the region. The basis of this phenomenon is bourgeois hegemony over the multiclass blocks that have been formed in the majority of countries in the region.

The phrase “growth with inclusion” accurately synthesizes this position formulated by Marini a generation ago. The political economy of Kirchnerism was based on the idea of increasing employment through state support for economic infrastructure and material incentives, creating the basis for accumulation and promoting demand through public spending.

For Kirchnerism the state acts above society (Acuña, 2011) in a politics-driven interpretation of social change that grants the governing political forces the capacity to articulate a societal project. Kirchnerism sees what is done or not done as the political will of the people in power, but when it comes to outcomes it invokes “the lack of objective [and subjective] conditions.” Thus it appropriates progressive “successes” while postponing consideration of their limitations and shortcomings to the indefinite future. More radical demands are placed in eternal limbo through the demand for “moderation” (Presidencia de la Nación, 2011b). I consider it more productive to analyze the state as an arena in which class struggle is expressed (Holloway, 1992; Poulantzas, 1979). The state tends to reproduce social contradictions and both channel and integrate them. During the 1990s the correlation of forces favored the restructuring promoted by transnational capital, which sought to impose the Washington Consensus (Féliz, 2005). Somewhat polemically, Marini argued (Cueva et al.,1975: 34) that the state becomes strong when the class it represents becomes weak and that in a democratic-representative context this weakness permitted (or required) the state to become more autonomous. During the 1990s the state imposed discipline on all classes by fulfilling the project of the new hegemonic group—convertibility, unilateral trade liberalization, and central bank independence (Bonnet and Piva, 2013)—and employing open repression against social protest. The popular classes were politically weak and limited in their ability to get their demands translated into policy.

The neoliberal crisis weakened the state (Bonnet and Piva, 2013) at the same time that popular organizations were displaying greater strength (although not to the point of achieving hegemony). The brief Duhalde regime expressed the limits of the neoliberal state’s repressive possibilities. The street demonstrations against repression on June 26, 2002, when the police killed two protesters, forced the state to adopt a more moderate approach. While Marini (1977) argued that the state’s relative autonomy in the immediate aftermath of such crises represented a moment of strength (including in its relationship to capital), the state in these situations is not necessarily strengthened. This juncture was characterized by a “return of the state” (compared with its apparent absence under neoliberalism) at a moment when it was required to respond to diverse social sectors that, because of the crisis of capitalism, had escaped the restrictions usually imposed by state institutions and capital itself.

In this case, the state was able to recover legitimacy under the Kirchner regimes by reconstructing the myth of growth with inclusion. It became more permeable to popular demands, channeling them without undermining the new conditions for growth. The government’s reforms were a response to the new political potential of the popular classes and the potentially destabilizing political impact of the prevailing economic precariousness. The neodevelopmentalist state was weak because it made significant concessions to the people even if they did not threaten capitalist domination. One of these concessions was the creation of new models of social security, and another was labor policy. The former was based on “basic of household universalism” (guaranteed minimum income) (Molina, 2006), and it began with the Unemployed Household Heads program in 2002 and reached its high point with the Universal Child Subsidy in 2008 and the social security moratorium of 2014, which permitted workers to join the pension system without the minimum number of years of contributions. The principal innovations in labor policy were the Productive Reconversion Program and the previously mentioned initiative to increase the minimum wage. Along with support for collective bargaining, these measures were designed to achieve a less conflictive environment with regard to wage demands (Schneider, 2013).

Reform or Revolution? Overcoming the Limitations of Peripheral and Dependent Capitalism

The distinct fractions of capital, always seeking ways to neutralize popular pressures for a greater share of national income, proposed “wage moderation” through the imposition of ceilings on wage increases (Schneider, 2013) and employer-led price fixing that devalued workers’ wages through inflation. These policies were in conflict with Kirchner’s early attempts at maintaining an expensive dollar. The maintenance of low interest rates and the promotion of consumer credit (and to a lesser extent credit for producers) had as their principal goal the recovery of fixed capital investment in order to increase labor productivity in industry. Growth during the early period (2003–2007) was largely based on installed capacity and previously unemployed workers (Féliz, 2015: 83). The development of primary-sector, rent-accruing activities promoted capital accumulation later in the decade. This was accompanied by the increasing role of finance capital in the productive process, notably via investment in agricultural production and real estate. Consumer credit partially countered the impact of superexploitation, permitting the popular classes to consume beyond what their wages would allow. Additionally, Argentina’s dependent position limited the reinvestment of profits, since transnational capitalism concentrated its investments in core areas within their global networks of commodity production. Indeed, the profits of transnational capital in Argentina have increased by 40 percent since the 1990s, but their rate of local investment has fallen (Féliz and López, 2012: 46; Manzanelli, 2011). In addition, the high profitability of agriculture is undoubtedly the result of exceptional external conditions, while the rate of reinvestment is quite low.

During the second phase of neodevelopmentalism beginning in about 2008, the government encountered growing fiscal obstacles and difficulties. The restructuring of the public debt privileged foreign capital’s access to public funds, while the revaluation of the peso placed local capital (especially in manufacturing) at a disadvantage and increased the need for public subsidies to rescue it. Subsidies to transportation and energy were increased to keep the prices of those basic services under control and thus limit wage demands (Bona, 2012). Meanwhile, the persistence of underemployment required the government to continue broadening the social safety net as part of its political legitimation, and this increased fiscal pressures.

From the Global Crisis to Fine-Tuning

The post-2008 global crisis would define the next phase as the decline in global demand (and prices) reduced local production and proceeds from the land (Féliz, 2011b) while transnational capital increased its profit taking. Average growth in GDP fell to 4.7 percent between 2008 and 2013, including two years of growth less than 1 percent. With increased uncertainty, the dominant sectors reduced their expectations for future profitability and limited their investments. They also intensified their use of existing labor rather than increasing employment or wages. The productivity of labor increased by an average of 3.8 percent annually between 2003 and 2007 but by 6.1 percent annually between 2008 and 2012. Faced with these tensions, the hegemonic bloc saw an increased commitment to neodevelopmentalism as the best guarantee of its continuing hegemony at the same time that the government opted for “capitalist intensification” in order to further increase labor productivity.

The Kirchner government deployed various strategies to forestall a crisis and guarantee future election victories. It increased tax collection to include more workers without changing the tax structure and deprivatized the social security system to achieve universal coverage, which also increased public revenue. In addition, it increased its fiscal and monetary flexibility by creating a special fund in 2009 to facilitate the repayment of the foreign debt and by reforming the central bank’s charter in 2012 to permit additional intragovernmental borrowing. It also increased foreign exchange controls to achieve a devaluation of the peso. These changes, along with countercyclical policies, maintained “growth with social inclusion” in an adverse context. They also led to an increase in government spending of 124 percent in real terms between 2007 and 2011, compared with 81 percent between 2003 and 2007 (Féliz, 2015: 78). The government called this stage “fine-tuning” of the model and hoped that it could be financed out of increased economic activity and a combination of currency issues and intragovernmental borrowing.

The increasing external disequilibrium also required a government response. The increase in imports, the complicated renegotiation of the foreign debt, and the decline in external demand threatened the continuity of economic growth. Rising imports reflected the significant foreign component in nominally local production, as well as the consumption habits of the dominant classes (Furtado, 1974) as concentration of income remained high. Also, while the renegotiation of the debt required foreign currency apportionments (including a US$9 billion payment to the International Monetary Fund in 2006 [Gambina and Ghio, 2015]), it also restricted the country’s access to international credit. Lastly, the government adopted an energy strategy that resulted in increased imports.

The Crisis of Neodevelopmentalism

The tendencies of neodevelopmentalism were exacerbated by the global crisis. Despite the government’s efforts, disequilibria placed limits on the hege-monic project. The reindustrializing agenda, announced as an alternative to “deindustrializing neoliberalism,” was reversed as industry declined from 21.1 percent of GDP during the 2002–2007 period to 18.9 percent from 2008 to 2012. Argentina’s place in global capitalism prevented sustained investment. This was a new phase of the “dependency spiral” noted decades ago by Marini (2008 [1973b]: 132): “Latin American industrialization corresponds to a new international division of labor, within which the inferior dimensions of industrial production are transferred to dependent countries . . . , reserving to the imperialist center the more advanced steps . . . and the monopoly on technology.” In Marini’s view, manufacturing could not be an articulator of development in the sense proposed by the ECLAC. Socioeconomic inclusion through manufacturing employment was restricted as average annual job creation went from 451,000 per year between 2002 and 2007 (two and a half times the increase in the economically active population) to 128,000 between 2008 and 2012, and during the latter period real wages stagnated (Féliz, 2015: 81). In historical terms Argentina’s “recovery” was very limited, with labor’s share of national income reaching only 37.8 percent in 2010 compared with 49.7 percent in 1974, while poverty (measured by income) was 25 percent in 2010 compared with less than 9 percent in 1974 (ATE-INDEC, 2012).

Moreover, the creation of a national bourgeoisie was thwarted by the consolidation of transnational capital as the active agent. The local bourgeoisie, unable to compete with imperial and subimperial powers, joined them. Marini (2008 [1973a]: 242) observed that the transfer of less knowledge-intensive industries to the periphery prevented the development of nationally integrated economies there. Even when the policy of integration with imperialism (including subimperialism) increased the productive capacity and technological modernization of local industry, the disequilibrium between industrial growth and employment creation was reinforced (Marini, 2008 [1966]: 93). While at first the Kirchner regime had entertained the dream of a national bourgeoisie, once this was recognized as an illusion it proposed to use global capitalism itself as the instrument for overcoming these disequilibria. Global capitalism was called upon to contribute to the development of the extractive sector (including the associated manufacturing), the country’s energy and technological infrastructures, and even access to credit through greater integration with the local financial system. This scheme was expressed by institutional instruments such as the Plan Estratégico Industrial 2020, the Plan Agroalimentario y Agroindustrial 2020, the 2014 agreement between the state oil company YPF and Chevron to develop fracking, and the 2015 agreement with China. We are witnessing the deepening of a tendency highlighted by Marini (2008 [1973b]: 135–136) as Argentina—unable to achieve subimperial status—reaches a new rung in the spiral of dependency.

Preliminary Conclusions

For Marini, writing in the mid-1990s, neodevelopmentalism in Latin America ended with the moratoria on debt repayment by Mexico and Brazil in the early 1980s, which ushered in a neoliberal era of International Monetary Fund control. For Marini (1993) this development represented “an irrefutable demonstration that the Latin American bourgeoisie was unable to achieve real autonomy at the international level, leaving neodevelopmentalism to depart the scene in silence.” While he believed that neodevelopmentalism was finished, we have seen its return as the revalidation of capitalist development after the collapse of neoliberalism. In Argentina after 2001 it developed in the local context of a new class politics and the wider context marked by China’s emergence in the world economy and Chavism’s influence on Latin American politics; later it was defined by the crisis of neoliberalism in the core countries in 2008. This article has examined these transformations.

The neodevelopmentalist project had two key aspects. The first was the formulation of an economic policy that would consolidate the new hegemonic groups led by transnational capital, which required the superexploitation of labor and the environment in order to grow. The second was the revival of the myth of development through the notion of “growth with social inclusion.” During the first phase the project was consolidated because of high rates of profit and high levels of (albeit precarious) employment. Starting in 2008, however, its contradictions intensified, and in 2014 the “fine-tuning” of interest and exchange rates led to a decline in real incomes and consumption for the first time in a decade. The fine-tuning turned into a transitional crisis, with capitalist intensification and alienation of neodevelopmentalism’s nonprivileged junior partners. The result was the fragmentation of the political spectrum and the realignment of its principal actors. In this kind of context, according to Marini (1981), reformist solutions cannot open up new paths of development; instead they lead society to a crisis in which the choice is not reform or revolution but revolution or counterrevolution. In Argentina the counterrevolution was expressed by the triumph of Mauricio Macri in the presidential elections of late 2015. Macri’s platform had been predicted by Marini decades earlier: “much more violent superexploitation” that would “set the country much more firmly in the area of imperialist influence” (Marini, 1981). In the aftermath of the profound crisis of the project of transnationalized capital, the transition to socialism will require the development of a social-political force with the hegemonic ability to overcome that crisis and transcend the limitations of peripheral capitalism. The struggle of the popular classes is essential to the achievement of this goal.

Supplemental Material

DS_10.1177_0094582X18806588 – Supplemental material for Neodevelopmentalism and Dependency in Twenty-first-Century Argentina: Insights from the Work of Ruy Mauro Marini

Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0094582X18806588 for Neodevelopmentalism and Dependency in Twenty-first-Century Argentina: Insights from the Work of Ruy Mauro Marini by Mariano Féliz in Latin American Perspectives

Footnotes

Mariano Féliz is a professor of economics at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata and a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Richard Stoller is coordinator of selection and international programs for Schreyer Honors College, Pennsylvania State University.

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