Abstract
This forum examines a range of grounded struggles over efforts to materialize elements of a ‘postneoliberal’ agenda by social and political movements of the 2000s. Drawing from their research in Latin America and South Africa, the contributors ask when, where and why these experiments in realizing postneoliberalisms have prompted durable transformations in neoliberal political economic structures and social rationalities (or not). Theorizing from diverse postneoliberalisms, they interrogate what these material and ideological projects reveal about space, power, contestation, and possibilities of reconstituting deeply unequal worlds.
I Introduction
In a 2012 essay, ‘Learning from Latin America’, Doreen Massey argued for careful attention to creative re-workings of state, economy, and civil society that emerged in response to economic crises and social movement actions of the 2000s and that were dubbed ‘postneoliberalism’ by some scholars. This period saw a range of such developments – not just in Latin America – and generated debate about whether they indeed signaled a challenge to decades of neoliberalization in political economies and social life (Brand and Sekler, 2009; Peck et al., 2010; Yates and Bakker, 2014; Rustin, 2016). In some countries, the election of left-leaning governments was followed by restructurings of state-civil society relations, purportedly toward new forms of pluralism and political recognition (Postero, 2007; Sader, 2009). In some places we have seen state-led redistributive projects and national state refusals to cooperate with ‘development’, financialization, and austerity imperatives of multinational institutions dominated by rich and powerful countries (Macdonald and Ruckert, 2009; Goodale and Postero, 2013). Movements such as Occupy, Indignados, Movimiento 15-M, and Aganaktismenoi have resisted austerity policies, politicized unprecedented levels of inequality, and catalyzed insurgent actions such as debt strikes and occupied land or foreclosed homes (Ceceña, 2009; Massey and Rustin, 2013; Errejon and Mouffe, 2016). Ever-focused on a scholarly and activist politics of possibility, Massey (2012) insisted our focus should be not on debating ‘postneoliberalism’ as a frame or whether these developments constitute an end of days moment for neoliberalism, but on interrogating what these grounded material and ideological projects reveal about space, power, contestation, and possibilities of reconstituting deeply unequal worlds. Going to press shortly after her passing in March 2016, this forum is prompted by that charge.
Contributors Patrick Bond, Carmen Martínez Novo, and Sarah Radcliffe explore a range of material and ideological challenges to the political economic structures and social rationalities of neoliberalism, asking when, where and why these experiments have prompted durable transformations (or a doubling-down on business as usual). They explore what differently grounded postneoliberalisms teach us about workings and potential un-workings of broader structures of inequality, including contemporary global capitalism; colonially rooted imaginaries of race, place, and modernity; and political institutions calibrated to reproduce privilege and hierarchy. Across the places they examine – South Africa and Latin America – experiments in postneoliberalisms have largely unfolded as processes of state (re)formation. From assertions of greater national autonomy and self-determination in global political economies and in relation to their dominant actors; to expanded social welfare provisions and regulation of capital and labor; to open data initiatives aimed at altering transparency and participation in governance, the national state has played a key role. The contributors conceptualize these postneoliberal interventions as fundamentally socio-spatial processes, reading re-territorializations of state, economy, or structures of citizen formation/participation as intertwined with processes of social and political subject formation and the signification of places and social groups as the bearers (or not) of knowledge, modernity, and legitimate claims on the state. Finally, the authors theorize the possibilities and limits of these postneoliberalisms by situating them within geohistories of power and domination, framing postneoliberalism as a complex set of often-contradictory interventions that articulate not just with structures and rationales of neoliberalism, but also with durable vestiges of liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
Patrick Bond invites us to learn from the foreclosure of postneoliberal social, economic and environmental politics, as well as from surprising victories. He shows how South Africa’s seemingly potent conditions for postneoliberalism – robust social movements, high levels of poverty and inequality, left-leaning leadership – have instead led to two decades of ‘neoliberal nationalism’ and ‘sub-imperialism’. Even in times and places where postneoliberal politics seem an inevitable outcome, he argues, they cannot emerge when states remain locked in adverse positions vis-à-vis global capital and its multilateral governance apparatus, underscoring the urgent need for transnational solidarities to confront them. Despite this persistent ‘national neoliberalism’, Bond also points to other surprising successes in South Africa where resistance movements have forced myriad expansions in state-led social welfare provisions in recent years. These successes show us, he argues, that the basis of a more durable postneoliberal politics also lies in the coalescing of diverse local movements around de-stratification of access to fundamentals of human wellbeing: food, water, work, health, personal safety, and education.
Carmen Martínez Novo traces political economic and socio-cultural ambiguities of ‘bring back the state’ approaches for advancing postneoliberal priorities. Using examples from Ecuador, she shows that though the national state took a strong position of non-cooperation with transnational capital and finance, launched policies and regulations aimed at national level redistribution, and initiated all-inclusive social welfare programs, these inroads were limited by a commodity-based extraction economy dependent on global prices and ongoing land dispossession. She traces the contradictions that have arisen as the state claimed legitimacy on the basis of political pluralism and expanded forms of participation, but has dismantled longstanding structures of indigenous participation and political formation, pursuing authoritarian strategies for ‘managing’ diversity in the face of persistent social movement pressures. Martínez Novo argues that these are not the inevitable outcomes of a ‘bring back the state’ approach to countering neoliberalism, but rather result from the particular way that these state-led strategies have intertwined with existing social and political hierarchies and alliances.
Sarah Radcliffe examines reworked state spatialities, modes of governmentality, and social/economic rationalities that have been part of many efforts to reposition political economies and citizenship away from neoliberalism. She argues that in several Latin American countries, postneoliberalism has taken shape as a ‘neo-developmentalist’ project that both re-inscribes and undoes elements of the centralized, modernist, rationalist institutional and epistemological bases of power and authority under prior developmentalist state formations. In particular, she unpacks how the politics of geographical knowledge making are implicated in these efforts, becoming a site of struggle for postneoliberal futures as some Latin American countries produce, use, and share geographic information and technologies in ways that run distinctly against the grain of their colonial-modern origins. Geographers, geographical knowledge and geographical modes of knowledge making, she argues, have played an ambivalent role in efforts to materialize postneoliberalisms, in ways that demand our ongoing critical engagement.
On one level, these contributions collectively burst the bubble on hopes that the variously timed and located crises in the contemporary political economic order in recent years might be harbingers of a sustained and unambiguous anti-neoliberal confrontation. They underscore the adaptive and reincorporating capacities of the political economic and social rationalities we have named neoliberalism (see also Peck, 2010). Yet, on another level, the contributors’ deeper readings of how space, power, knowledge and contestation are being made and remade through efforts to materialize postneoliberal ideologies open new possibilities for theory and action. They remind us that post-colonial scholars’ attention to tracing the shifting geohistorical relations between place, knowledge and power is utterly essential to theorizing postneoliberalisms and their effects. By theorizing postneoliberalism in relation to a long historical arc of related material-ideological projects of domination, all three authors illuminate forms of power and processes of domination and differentiation that have been reproduced across these varied regimes: racialization, territorialization, technoscientific rationalities, political economic and socio-cultural processes of class formation, to name a few. In doing so, they underscore the need for continued explanation of how these mechanisms operate in grounded struggles for postneoliberal futures.
Further, this collection challenges us to pose questions from one place to another, theorizing from these grounded experiments in postneoliberalisms to ask what they reveal that has not been considered in other places or has been obscured in dominant theory and explanation. For instance, the moves toward data/technology sovereignty and epistemological pluralism that Radcliffe finds in postneoliberal state (re)formations in Latin America challenge theorizations that frame techno-scientific and private sector hegemony of spatial data and technologies as universal and inevitable. Such theoretical un-boundings open the possibility that we might find similar moves by marginalized people and places in rich countries and prompt ways of theorizing them as related expressions of broadly public digital justice struggles (Slager, 2015). Such transnational theorizing from postneoliberalisms allows us to identify and theorize as connected seemingly very different instantiations of struggle over (post)neoliberal futures. For instance, are the ‘open data’ projects growing like wildfire in Minority world places and the renewed expansion of ‘poverty mapping’ programs in Majority world countries (Atia, 2014) in fact similar impulses to foreclose some of these openings in epistemological politics and governance that have accompanied post-neoliberal struggles? Beyond this particular example, the broader point, following from our contributors here (see also Yates and Bakker, 2014; Parnell and Robinson, 2012; Roy, 2016, and others), is that significant new insights flow from a strategy of transnational theorizing from grounded experiments in postneoliberalism.
Finally, this collection suggests we need to know more about the making, breaking and grounded politics of alliance. Alliance lies at the heart of the successes and subjugations charted in the essays that follow, as in Martínez Novo’s account of ‘diversity management’ and racialized splitting of resistance movements, or Bond’s tracing of alliances across political and class difference arising in the face of state violence and his call for assembly of micro-level contestations into coalitional challenges of macro-level structures and institutions. Echoing Wainwright and Kim (2008), these accounts suggest that alliance is not a normative feature of anti-neoliberal contestations so much as a politics whose workings we must continue to theorize, particularly to understand alliance across social difference, across place and scale, and across the different-felt consequences of poverty, exploitation, and unprecedented inequalities worldwide.
Sarah Elwood
University of Washington, USA
II Neoliberal nationalism and postneoliberal possibilities
Postneoliberal social, economic and environmental politics should long ago have emerged much more decisively in South Africa, a country ruled by a ‘disciplined force of the left, a mass movement, an internationalist movement with an anti-imperialist outlook’ (Zuma, 2010). This force, the African National Congress (ANC), was led by anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela. Mandela, who praised Marxism in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1995), and was a leading communist in the 1960s (South African Communist Party, 2013), was elected president in the country’s first-ever democratic vote in 1994 – a rise to power that should have ushered in robust national-level challenges to globally ascendant neoliberal economic imperatives of the time. Yet quite the opposite has occurred over the last two decades. We find a counter-intuitive rise of a neoliberal nationalism in South Africa, an ideology that has blunted what seemed to be a powerful alignment of postneoliberal potentials. This said, resistance movements in South African have also registered exceptional victories against neoliberalism, which hold lessons for efforts to ground a more robust postneoliberal politics worldwide.
1 The nationalists’ neoliberal turn
Mandela came to power when US imperialism and its neoliberal policy agenda reigned supreme. He retired just as social movement challenges to neoliberalism were becoming systematically expressed, as in South Africa’s social movement campaigns for decommodified medicines, water and electricity; worldwide protests against the ‘1%’; and the rise of left-leaning governments in some Latin America countries. During the 1990s, Mandela faced terribly adverse power imbalances, in part because of the demise of the East Bloc and the traditional social democracy that sustained the ANC early on. By 1992, he announced he was persuaded of the merits of market logic at a World Economic Forum summit and in subsequent years he authorized major compromises with capital, repaying $25 billion in apartheid-era foreign loans, borrowing $850 million from the IMF and joining what became the World Trade Organization on adverse terms. He ended the main exchange controls and raised interest rates to unprecedented levels, adopting a homegrown structural adjustment policy and permitting South Africa’s biggest companies to move their financial headquarters and primary stock market listings abroad.
None of these deals with capital bore the promised fruit, and nationalist neoliberalism has had catastrophic results. ANC leaders’ many compromises left South Africa with world-leading inequality (a 0.77 income Gini Coefficient), a 2015 poverty rate estimated at 63%, and official unemployment that increased from 16% to 26% (Bond, 2015a; Budlender et al., 2015; IMF, 2013). Although a consumption-based mini-boom occurred in the early 2000s, soaring interest rates soon made consumer-debt repayment obligations impossible for many (Bond, 2015b; African News Agency, 2015). Financialization has become one of South Africa’s key maladies. Medium-term interest rates were set by the Reserve Bank at the fourth-highest level in the world by 2015 and the availability of easy housing finance generated the fastest-rising speculative real estate bubble on earth (The Economist, 2009, 2015). Late last year, the market value of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange was 320% higher than GDP, the highest ‘Buffett Indicator’ of any major country’s modern stock exchange (National Inflation Association, 2015). Approximately $50 billion in corporate cash was idle in bank deposit accounts, a full seventh the size of the country’s GDP (Khanyile, 2015). The real economy stagnated and financial froth, speculative-based accumulation and idle capital continued. Large corporations relocated their financial headquarters to London, creating a persistent balance of payments deficit, including $21 billion in annual illicit financial flows over the past decade (Kar and Spanjers, 2015). In 2011, the International Monetary Fund (2013) had rated returns to capital in South Africa amongst the highest in the world. But when the commodity price bubble burst in 2011–15, several mining houses and steel smelters active in South Africa lost more than 90% of their (London) share values, leading to job loss for tens of thousands of underpaid mineworkers.
Amongst extreme cases of neoliberal economic restructuring, tendencies to capitalist crisis and social depravity worldwide, South Africa ranks at the fore. Nonetheless, robust class struggle continues to challenge these expressions of a neoliberal agenda. The World Economic Forum’s (2015) Global Competitiveness Report ranked South African labor as the least cooperative among 140 countries for the fourth straight year. But trade union mobilizations have made few gains, prompting the question of why such broad anti-neoliberal resistance has been unable to gain traction. A critical missing factor in Pretoria is the absence of ‘national state refusals to cooperate with … imperatives of multinational institutions dominated by rich and powerful countries’ (Elwood, this issue). South Africa has undergone an elite transition from racial to class apartheid. This transition was mediated by the institutions of imperialism and their elegant local collaborators who regularly occupied economic ministries and endorsed the Washington Consensus, giving it local, continental and global legitimacy (Bond, 2005, 2006, 2014b).
Notwithstanding the heady atmosphere of anti-capitalist, anti-racist rhetoric and the revolutionary conditions that had occasionally appeared within South Africa, the subsequent balance of forces during the 1990s was adverse. Co-optation of leading forces within the ANC was decisive, and it took more than five years before the movements for justice could regroup. The 2000s witnessed more protest, but when the opportunity arose to question broader capitalist dynamics and neoliberal policy as the world financial system melted down in 2008, progressive forces were distracted by an intra-ANC power struggle.
2 A postneoliberal break-point papered over
Under the stress of boiling social anger and rapid capital flight, the ANC’s sophisticated neoliberal nationalism has prevailed throughout the post-apartheid era, replete with ‘talk-left-walk-right’ populist tendencies that Fanon (1963) would easily recognize. Potential break-points abounded, yet remain unrealized. The most encouraging for some postneoliberals was the (false) dawn of 2008 when President Thabo Mbeki (an ex-communist turned neoliberal) was overthrown by Jacob Zuma. Yet while Zuma promised ‘radical economic transformation’, neoliberalism has continued apace and appears certain to intensify following a 2016 ‘junk’-level investment rating.
That these apparent break-points in neoliberal political and economic arrangements were quickly foreclosed is not limited to South Africa. As Mbeki was falling in Pretoria, Lehman Brothers crashed in New York City. The accumulation cycle peaked and global commodity prices, international trade, production levels and employment suddenly collapsed. Capital’s resuscitation included immediate bank bailouts and money-printing (‘quantitative easing’) by the US Federal Reserve and parallel entities in London, Brussels and Tokyo. World debt continued to rise, but with a notable shift from private to public liabilities and emergence of new bouts of austerity. Representing a ‘temporal fix’ to the crisis that came of postponing the devaluation of over-accumulated capital (Harvey, 1982), the world’s state debt rose by 9.3% annually and corporate debt by 5.9% (Dobbs et al., 2015). A $57 trillion increase in aggregate global borrowing raised debt as a share of global GDP from 269% to 286%. Stock markets soared to unprecedented heights before $8 trillion in share value evaporated in early 2016 during one of many mini-panics.
In this context, resistance to neoliberalism rose unevenly, fitfully and momentarily. The World Social Forum’s soaring hopes of 2001 had dissipated energy by the early 2010s when they were most needed. Other hopes were placed in the unexpected 2011 democratic revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East and in the Occupy wave – both rapidly defeated. European anti-austerity protests were unsuccessful in fending off German bankers and the IMF. Other spectacular occupations of major urban spaces, including Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Istanbul’s Gezi Park, cross-class protests in Brazilian cities prior to the World Cup, and the temporarily victorious Hong Kong democrats of late 2014, were short-lived. More recently, the Latin American Pink Tide has faded, on the heels of Hugo Chavez’s death in Venezuela and turns to ‘extractivist’ accumulation in Ecuador and Bolivia for the sake of redistribution. Greece’s anti-austerity party Syriza made a bizarre U-turn that Portugal’s Left Bloc may yet follow. At the time of writing, a similar rise and fall seems likely for social democrats Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin, as they try to challenge the corporate-dominated US Democratic and British Labour Parties. Other major world movements have made heroic recent efforts to liberate information about imperialism, including WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, the Anonymous hackers, whistle-blowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and The Intercept team. These efforts too have been foreclosed, hitting the ceilings of state repression, data overload, individualism, and difficulties in politicizing information. 1
These spaces – from the urban to cyber – are the graveyards of many of my own fantasies for a ‘genuine postneoliberalism: defending against financial degradation; restoring national power without the distraction of global governance; and re-establishing anti-imperialism so as to take advantage of unprecedented United States weakness’ (Bond, 2009: 203). Though these objectives look naïve in retrospect, their motivating forces remain relevant. In countless of the cases above, these broad objectives of a robust postneoliberal politics failed to take root. In South Africa, instead of a genuine anti-imperialism, we have seen the rise of a sub-imperialism that legitimates global neoliberalism, confirms regional territorial hegemony for accumulation, and establishes alliance with Brazil, Russia, China and India that allow a ‘seat at the table’ on multilateral matters such as climate policy and financial reform (Bond and Garcia, 2015). But are postneoliberal politics necessarily doomed in future? In South Africa, in spite of many false-flag postneoliberal projects, there have also been a few important wins in the fight against neoliberalism. They reveal a postneoliberal political strategy that makes most sense when we pay more attention to scale politics and coalition politics.
3 Grounding a sturdier postneoliberal political architecture
In South Africa, there have been occasional genuine victories against neoliberalism, and these are deeply instructive as to the core elements of a more robust and enduring postneoliberal politics. These include a Free Basic Services policy providing at least tokenistic supplies of water and electricity (at least 25 liters/person/day and 50 kWh/ household/month), a small monthly welfare grant to 17 million people (nearly a third of the population), and the commoning of HIV/AIDS medicines (Bond, 2014a). South Africa’s successful campaign for HIV/AIDS medicines reflect four features that any postneoliberal project should embrace: decommodification (of drugs costing over $15,000/year that are now free); destratification of access (now numbering over three million South Africans); deglobalization of capital (generic medicine production facilities now exist in many African cities); and global solidarities against powerful multinational forces. Jumping scale, South Africa’s ‘Treatment Action Campaign’ (TAC) confronted global Big Pharma, the South African and US governments, and the World Trade Organization. In 2004 prior to medicines access, life expectancy was 52 years, and a decade later it rose to 62: an extraordinary postneoliberal victory.
The future of a South African postneoliberalism depends upon whether resistance politics continue to focus upon these four themes, and whether the activists collectivize their experiences, moving from local to national terrains of struggle. Ongoing mass campaigns in water, electricity and university education face a fiscally conservative finance minister, former Marxist guerrilla Pravin Gordhan. He recently rejected student demands for $2 billion in additional annual spending to make higher tertiary education free. In October 2015, a few thousand students won stunning short-term victories after national protests on consecutive days at parliament in Cape Town, the ANC’s national headquarters in Johannesburg and the president’s Pretoria office. In addition to a (real) 5% fee cut, nearly all universities also agreed to ‘in-sourcing’ of low-paid university workers. Like the fight for a policy ensuring free basic supplies of water and electricity, these campaigns teach the importance of scale-jumping, in a myriad of physical micro-space contestations, because they were only successful by moving from micro-sites to generate a sense of national purpose. Yet there are evident limits to the thousands of township-based ‘service delivery protests’ that occur each year. In part due to localism, community activists often do not identify the source of harm (e.g. in the national treasury) beyond the immediate geographical settings of the slums.
Two more caveats are in order, regarding the possibility of a national power shift, without which the activists are likely to remain within their issue-specific silos. First, residents’ grievances against immigrants have sparked tragic conflict. The xenophobic attacks that became national news in 2008, 2010 and 2015 were just one of the dangers of turning inward against the Other close at hand. This violence targeted immigrant workers as well as shop-keepers from Somalia, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, whose economies of scale had swamped the market and threatened local residents’ much smaller ‘spaza shops’ (Bond, 2014b). Second, an epidemic of domestic, gendered violence among a patriarchal South African working class is another self-destructive way that the scale politics of social grievances have telescoped backwards, in this case into the home (Bollen et al., 1999).
From this terrain, political forces representing two distinct ideologies are emerging to fight neoliberalism in the period ahead. First, the fight-back against white South Africans’ resurgent and often virulent racism returned popularity to the Black Consciousness philosophy of Steve Biko. This form of identity politics began re-ascending in 2015 with a famous #RhodesMustFall student campaign on Cape Town’s Table Mountain that toppled the Cecil Rhodes statue at Africa’s leading university. Second, there is a resurgent class-community fusion (perhaps with environmental justice opportunities) emerging initially in response to state violence against labor, such as the massacre of 34 platinum mineworkers at Marikana on behalf of the Lonmin mining house in 2012. One result was a labor movement split between renewed socialist sensibilities of the country’s largest union, National Union of Metalworkers, and the residual nationalist loyalties of the Congress of SA Trade Unions. The fusion of metalworker socialism, anti-neoliberal social movement traditions and community radicalism may continue under the rubric of the name ‘United Front’ and connect a multitude of left-leaning civil society groups, or may more forcefully jump political scale to become a party contesting elections in 2019. While promising, these resistance politics have thus far been small-scale and momentary, just as the 2008–15 anti-neoliberal upsurges around the world. Amidst this turmoil, the multi-faceted South African left has embarked on an unprecedented round of radical electoral politics, inspired partly by the support of more than a million voters for the Economic Freedom Fighters and its leader, former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, in the 2014 elections. Part of Malema’s fame and that of other EFF Members of Parliament results from their willingness to launch ferocious attacks on ANC personalities, on neoliberalism and on ingrained corruption. In terms of his party’s popularity and impact, Malema may have found the route to a national postneoliberal political presence.
In a country facing such intense geographical, social and sectoral segregation as South Africa, unifying local grievances and the forces they have birthed into a national ideology of postneoliberalism remains a pressing challenge. That ideology in this part of the world takes the name, first and foremost, of socialism. But the class struggle cannot stop there, obviously, and must now also firmly grapple with full human liberation on grounds of race, gender, sexual preference, different-abledness and socio-ecological relations. If anywhere on earth the conditions are ripe and contradictions reaching break-point, it is South Africa.
Patrick Bond
University of the Witwatersrand and
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
III Authoritarian attempts to overcome neoliberalism
The literature on postneoliberalism has focused on both the anti-neoliberal political turn in Latin America that led to the election of left of center governments in the 2000s, and the 2008 global economic crisis of neo-liberalization that gave rise to novel forms of social and political resistance (Peck et al., 2010). The crisis of neoliberalism arrived earlier in Latin America, as populations protested the discontinuation of social welfare benefits, as well as poverty, inequality, and stagnant economic growth. Social movements questioned racial and ethnic discrimination, aiming to overcome the legacies of neoliberalism and colonialism (Escobar, 2010). Here, I use the case of Ecuador’s Correa regime, brought to power in the heady period of postneoliberal political movements, to consider how and with what effects national states have sought to push back key elements of neoliberalization in the ensuing years. As I will show here, a central tenet of postneoliberalism in Ecuador has been ‘bringing back the state’ – a stronger state more present in all aspects of social, political, and economic life. Bringing back the state has been fraught with paradoxes. A stronger postneoliberal state has meant reasonable regulation, more social services, and greater redistribution, but also an excess of control over territory and society. Further, the regime’s authoritarian means of securing its power in the face of social movement resistance has produced ambiguities that systematically truncate its transformative potential.
1 Political economies of postneoliberalism
In its early days, the Correa regime tried to build a postneoliberal state, strengthening public participation in strategic sectors of the economy, particularly oil, mining, and public services. The state renegotiated contracts with transnational companies, raised income and indirect taxes, and increased its efficiency in collecting them. It regulated the financial sector, asking banks to repatriate capital held abroad and strengthening public and cooperative banks. Development planning prioritized internal development and selective import substitution industrialization over an export orientation. The regime protected national industry with tariffs on imports and a publicity campaign called ‘Ecuador First’ encouraging consumption of Ecuadorian products. It sought to increase national sovereignty, ending an agreement that permitted a US military base in Ecuador, and diversified its international relations, strengthening links with China, other Latin American countries and the Middle East.
Correa’s regime sought to push back neoliberalization through labor policies and redistribution. Forms of precarious labor were forbidden, and all workers were expected to enjoy full-time, indefinite contracts and to be registered with social security. State-led redistribution took several forms. The executive increased the minimum wage and assisted its poorest citizens through policies such as the Bonus for Human Development (a conditional cash transfer), the Bonus for Housing, and the Dignity Electricity Tariff, and established additional subsidies and controlled prices for basic products (Ramírez, 2010).
Despite these efforts, the Correa regime has not significantly diversified the economy, continuing to depend on oil, raw materials, and agro-exports. Private investment has been limited by greater regulation and relatively high wages for the region. In Ecuador’s rentier economy, diversification of private investment is unlikely, given that abundant public rents from oil can be easily captured with less risk (Coronil, 1997). The economy has relied on publicly funded projects, particularly in strategic sectors and infrastructure. The expansion of extractive activities has worsened environmental damage and exacerbated opposition by indigenous peoples and others living in extraction frontiers, as well as environmentalists, key participants in the Correa government in the early years.
Building a more inclusive postneoliberal society has also been constrained by middle and upper class control of key government positions. Structural reforms to redistribute non-oil wealth and the means of production, such as a comprehensive agrarian reform, have not been undertaken (Radcliffe, 2012). Redistributing some oil rents to the poor has proved easier than tackling complex social, political, and structural change. Elites have profited from public investment through contracts with the state and subsidies of production, with the 100 biggest banks, construction, commercial, industry and agro-businesses growing 50% more from 2007–11 than they had in the previous years (Acosta, 2013: 16). Elites resisted higher wages and state regulations, yet benefited greatly from public investment, growth of internal markets, and political stability. Further, a professional middle class captured state rents through high-paid consultancies, jobs in the public sector, and scholarships.
This process of state formation could only continue while oil and commodities prices skyrocketed from rising Asian demand for energy and raw materials. With oil prices decreasing since 2014, the Ecuadorian state has continued relying on China as an investor and lender, but could not negotiate from a position of strength. Loans and concessions came at high interests, with disadvantageous terms. As oil prices continued plunging, Ecuador was not able to keep borrowing with its devalued hydrocarbon resources as collateral. With few resources to distribute, the political legitimacy of the regime rapidly eroded, state growth slowed, and privatization of state enterprises and layoffs of public employees ensued (Acosta, 2016; Petrich, 2016). Dwindling state rents were accompanied by a resurgence of some neoliberal strategies. Desperate for private investment, the Correa government announced a Proposal of Law to bring back ‘flexible’ labor arrangements (La República, 6 February 2016). As state redistribution stalled, social control and repression increased. The state sought greater control over territory and society, through expansion of the extractive frontier, infrastructure projects, and community- and neighborhood-level social programs.
2 The postneoliberal state and social movements
Correa’s relationship with social movements is ambiguous, characterized by contradictory dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Some scholars interpret the tensions and contradictions as stemming from progressive legislation and plans that have been insufficiently implemented or that have not gone far enough (Radcliffe, 2012; Walsh, 2015). Taking a different angle, I argue that these contradictions were present from the beginning, produced by contradictions inherent in the political process. In supposedly postneoliberal Ecuador, there is a tension between the state’s lip service to indigenous autonomy and its concentration of power in the executive; and contradictions between the discourse of interculturalism and a mestizo-centric understanding of the nation that undergirded the regime’s early legislation.
For example, the Constitution declared Ecuador plurinational, but gave the state absolute control over the territory and resources. It declared Spanish the only official language while native languages were classified as lower status ‘languages of intercultural communication’. It required state consultation with indigenous communities when their territories or interests were affected, but consultation was neither clearly regulated nor binding. The Constitution enacted indigenous territorial circumscriptions, but made them difficult to create, requiring an absolute majority in a referendum in one of the existing divisions of the state. These divisions are colonial in origin and based on the distribution of the mestizo population, not the indigenous population (Martínez Novo, 2014a). A cornerstone of state formation under Correa has been tight control of civil society, such as Executive Decree 16 that requires all civil organizations, from non-governmental organizations to indigenous communes, to register with the state and report their membership, funding, and activities. Decree 16 allows the executive to dissolve organizations involved in politics or seen by the executive as a threat to national security. Such moves suggest the problem is not one of benign but imperfectly implemented intentions but, rather, centralized state control over territory, resources, and organized society, while pretending to grant autonomy and rights.
This will to control is also evident in everyday relations between the state and indigenous populations. The regime has practiced simultaneous strategies of co-optation, fragmentation of social movements, and repression. Selective redistribution of resources and public works co-opted some groups, while non-cooperative groups were threatened with withdrawal. Privileging smaller organizations and co-opting some branches of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE, the largest and most active indigenous organization) fragmented indigenous alliances. The government fragmented civil society by playing minorities against each other, minimizing indigenous numbers in official statistics while promoting the visibility of minorities friendlier to the regime, such as Afro-Ecuadorians and montubios, mestizo peasants (Martínez Novo, 2014b). The president’s anti-Indian outbursts have re-legitimized open racism in the public sphere. Protest and activism have been criminalized, and the regime has used broad counterterrorism legislation to prosecute indigenous leaders.
Are these tensions inherent to postneoliberal state formation in contexts where the state advances reforms through exercises of national authority? Not necessarily. The tensions originate in a specific balance of forces. In Ecuador, the state came to be controlled by a technocratic middle class and economic groups trying to stay in power in the face of political instability. Staying in power has meant controlling the very movements that brought them to power. More importantly, the state depends on oil and mining revenues, an economic strategy opposed by indigenous movements, yet supported by other minorities. Whereas Afro-Ecuadorians are 69% urban, indigenous people are 82% rural, many living in the extractive frontiers. Scholars have identified similar tensions between centralization of state power and the inclusion and exclusion of social movements in anti-neoliberal politics in Venezuela and Bolivia (Angosto, 2008; Postero, 2013), countries that share with Ecuador a dependency on natural resources.
3 Postneoliberal state management of diversity
Struggles for political power in the postneoliberal state have also played out in the state’s authoritarian management of diversity. Specifically, the state has transformed an intercultural education system that was the backbone of indigenous political power and anti-capitalist resistance. Previously, indigenous organizations managed administrative appointments, hiring of teachers and curriculum, a form of grassroots management unique in Latin America. A 2009 executive decree abolished the autonomy of intercultural bilingual education (following indigenous protest against a law expanding large-scale mining) and returned these powers to the Ministry of Education. The Ministry replaced CONAIE’s historic leaders with mestizos or younger indigenous professionals closer to the regime, a critical blow to indigenous organizations’ ability to provide jobs in a context with few opportunities for indigenous professionals. The curriculum was overhauled. Interculturalism has not been implemented in Hispanic schools, yet in the system serving indigenous children, standardized educational materials in Spanish replaced texts in indigenous languages. The history of indigenous struggles was erased, on the logic that educating children in these struggles was an inappropriate form of politics (Martínez Novo, 2014a). Ironically, as indigenous peoples lost their autonomy, this restructured education system was referred to as ‘intercultural’.
The most dramatic aspect of the transformation of ‘intercultural’ education has been the closure of community schools. The Ministry of Education reduced the number of schools fourfold during a territorial reorganization of public education, closing all schools with one teacher or less than 25 students per teacher – nearly all located in rural areas and indigenous communities (Mena and Terán, 2014). These community schools were the backbone of intercultural bilingual education and efforts to decolonize education. They allowed indigenous children to study closer to home instead of traveling to mestizo towns where they experienced discrimination. These schools were central catalysts for indigenous politics, mobilizing indigenous teachers to become local political leaders; connecting education with indigenous institutions, language and culture; and involving community authorities and parents in school maintenance and governance.
The systematic closure of indigenous community schools is nothing short of catastrophic for the very survival of indigenous communities in Ecuador and for robust challenges to capitalist accumulation. Indigenous community schools, now largely replaced by ‘axis’ schools, have long formed the backbone of indigenous political organizations, which in Ecuador were at one time able to mount significant challenges to the implementation of neoliberal political economies. Closure of the schools and lack of public transportation to reach axis schools has led many families to migrate to provincial capitals or to Quito (Manangón, 2015). This accelerated migration together with violent dispossession have left land open for extractive and agro-industrial activities, as when Chinese company ECSA demolished Amazonian community Tundayme’s school while displacing the population to facilitate mining (Sacher et al., 2015).
The axis school system that carries out the state’s vision of a supposedly ‘intercultural’ education secures the exclusion and subordination of indigenous people in many ways. The state has invested in infrastructure and technology as ways of signaling modernity (even while technology often goes unused; see Torres, 2013), while relegating indigenous forms to the subordinate realm of folklore. In my field research, a regional Ministry of Education official explained the Ministry’s interest in capturing the ‘spirit of the community’. When asked how this could be achieved while closing community schools, he explained that axis schools would imitate community architecture and paint farm animals on the walls. Indigenous teachers have been expected to transfer to axis schools. They must take standardized government qualification tests rooted in urban culture and taken on a computer, an exam many are not able to pass (Mena and Terán, 2014). Meanwhile, the state removed the accreditation of indigenous institutions of higher education where native teachers formerly trained. All educators must now study at the National University of Education, which has yet to develop an intercultural curriculum, in spite of national rhetoric that the education system is ‘intercultural’.
4 Conclusion
Brought to power by anti-neoliberal political movements, the Correa regime redistributed some oil rents to the poor, but has not transformed the socio-economic structures that produce poverty and inequality. It has used oil rents to finance a process of state formation that has furthered authoritarian control over territory and society. This process has been controlled by middle and upper class groups that have pushed away more radical allies. Building its own power and authority amidst high political instability, the state has co-opted, regulated and repressed civil society, destroying the autonomous forms of participation that were an important tenet of earlier postneoliberal struggles. The regime forcibly relocated populations in its effort to expand the extractive frontier, using oil rents in violent pursuit of still more oil. Sharp decreases in prices have halted this vicious cycle, preventing the state from buying political stability and state growth through such strategies. Nonetheless, the failure of state hegemony has led to ever more open and crude repression.
The Correa regime has not decolonized society. Despite enacting a plurinational state and anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws, mestizos continue leading the nation and feeling that they represent it, while indigenous peoples and other minorities have lost autonomy and agency. Important gains of the earlier period such as intercultural bilingual education have been reversed, and the education system has been re-centralized and mainstreamed. As technocratic mestizos have enacted their own understanding of modernity, indigenous culture has been further delegitimized. The destruction of intercultural education has been not just a blow against cultural diversity but also against the very core of indigenous political power and anti-neoliberal resistance, at a time of struggle over collective rights versus the desire to expand extraction. The state has been more open to individual rights, but this process has been limited by the weakening of social movements.
What does the case of Ecuador illuminate with respect to the relationship of postneoliberal regimes to broader structures producing the inequalities they supposedly came to power to address? It suggests that the return of the state may or may not be a progressive occurrence. The state may return with reasonable regulations and social services, but it may also come back with authoritarian control and repression that exacerbates existing asymmetries in social and political power. The case of Ecuador underscores the importance of theorizing who leads the state and how, demonstrating that these have implications for a postneoliberal state’s transformative potential (or lack thereof). A technocratic, middle-class, mestizo-centric state dependent on oil has not been able to overcome the twin legacies of colonialism and dependence.
Carmen Martínez Novo
University of Kentucky, USA
IV Postneoliberalism as statecraft: Power and space 2
Geographers seek to understand neoliberal crisis ‘as both spatially and temporally particular [and multidimensional with] … diverse geographical practices and connections that have shaped … projects and the dynamics of contestation and alternatives’ (Featherstone et al., 2015: 2, 4). Latin America’s postneoliberal experiments of reorienting political economies and citizenship away from neoliberalism can be framed in the same ways. Here I take postneoliberalism to refer to a broad political challenge to state, citizenship and political economy, a challenge organized around a discursive and institutional binary between neoliberalism on the one hand, and a set of material, ideological, and socio-political alternatives. Postneoliberalism is increasingly analyzed as comprising path-dependent, contingent and complex, interwoven processes of postneoliberalization that may reproduce and/or be operating alongside neoliberalization (Yates and Bakker, 2014). Postneoliberalism hence is intrinsically a politically contentious and unsettled project. While seemingly established in some countries’ electoral politics (Ecuador, Bolivia), other countries have voted for liberal politics (as in the 2015 Argentine and Venezuelan elections). As an ongoing open-ended project of state formation, postneoliberalization encompasses a range of governmental and discursive re-positioning processes to which the specter of neoliberalism provides a foil (cf. Ettlinger and Hartmann, 2015). Neoliberalism’s fluid capacity to re-integrate social development and poverty-alleviation into policy has increasingly come to light; so too a diverse array of postneoliberal policy alternatives have come into focus, highlighting how in practice the boundary between neoliberalism and its ‘post’ is blurred and contested.
Postneoliberalism in Latin America has become associated in several countries with a neo-developmentalist project in which the state plays a key managerial role, although the macro-economy remains firmly capitalist (Radcliffe, 2012; Cunha Filho and Santaella, 2010). As postneoliberalism moves from being a series of slogans to statecraft’s guiding principle, so research has increasingly revealed the institutionality, rationality and forms of governmentality used to ground something different to neoliberalism. The state comes to play an increased role in macroeconomic management, reflected in the expansion of the state’s workforce and institutional reach and the ambition of social, infrastructure and development agendas. In this context, several commentators have drawn parallels with James Scott’s (1998) modernist all-seeing state, as postneoliberal countries do endorse vast schemes for improvement and seize the reins of macroeconomic planning. However, questions need to be asked about Scott’s sharp distinctions between state and society, and unidirectional flows of expert knowledge (Li, 2005). Moreover, comparisons between Latin America’s postneoliberal nation-state policies and various dimensions of the developmental state remain to be drawn (Woo-Cumings, 1999). I explore one facet of these issues by focusing on the geographies of postneoliberalism, namely the spatialities of socio-political change, and postneoliberalizing forms of geographical knowledge production. Postneoliberalism has illuminated the continued fault-lines of postcolonial societies especially but not exclusively in relation to the politics of knowledge production (and its related public policy outcomes), although these are not straightforwardly fault-lines between state and (civil) society, nor between expert and popular knowledges. 3
It has been suggested that postneoliberalization means rescaling and strengthening local institutions to counteract neoliberal legacies (Massey, 2011; Yates and Bakker, 2014: 71). While postneoliberalization has undoubtedly utilized decentralization as a means to re-found the state as more participatory, it is also clear that rescaling and re-spatialization occurs by means of territorialization and sovereignty premised on robust visions of national sovereign space. According to one commentator, postneoliberal government discourse affirms ‘a statist concept of territory converging in the idea of “productive territory” with a classical developmentalist narrative’ (Svampa, 2015: 76). A central nation-state acting as a macro-economic powerhouse, modernizer and integrative planner in the name of the nation rightly suggests parallels with Scott’s high modernist state. In other words, space as an expression of power as well as a resource for change remains key, requiring a more nuanced account of state-centered ‘modernist’ transformations. For instance, the technocratic turn whereby Buen Vivir’s epistemological diversity was quickly associated with quantitative indicators founded on western liberal concepts of the human subject and her freedom (Waldmüller, 2014). Nevertheless, even here civil society demands for developmental interventions, a shared will to ensure ‘living well’ (known as Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien in postneoliberal Andean states) for all citizens, and the innovative bricolage of diverse epistemologies means that ‘seeing [merely] like a state’ is not a foregone conclusion (neither indeed is ‘seeing like an indigenous state’; see Zimmerer, 2015; Radcliffe, 2012). Moreover, these ‘developmental states’ have been open to varying degrees to agendas unforeseen in 1950s modernism such as Bolivia’s Ministry of Decolonization, and Ecuador’s Secretariat of Peoples, Social Movements and Citizen Participation. In another example of how postneoliberalism breaks from modernizing/neoliberal temporalities, Bolivia’s flagship law on decentralization, the Law of Popular Participation (LPP), reflected political imperatives, not World Bank checklists, and became socio-spatially embedded in ways that facilitated diverse experiments in participatory decision-making that later underpinned postneoliberalism’s electoral success (Centellas, 2015), although the LPP spaces remain disputed. Postneoliberalization also engages international and regional rescaling around geopolitical alliances including ALBA and diplomatic ties with non-metropolitan and emerging powers (e.g. China), although neither occur to the exclusion of established trade block negotiations.
In this sense, the ‘geo-institutionally differentiated structures of neoliberalism are challenged’ by postneoliberalism (Yates and Bakker, 2014: 69), yet what goes unremarked is that Latin American postneoliberalization mobilizes geographical knowledges, methods and information within and outwith the state. Geographical imaginations, data and analysis is deployed against neoliberalism to, in some cases, create alternative spaces and forms of politics. The systematic use of GIS and geo-referenced data on the depth, extent and distribution of inequalities has been a recent finding in postneoliberal states. In Ecuador, various ministries and secretariats charged with overcoming poverty and inequality turned avidly to systematizing data sources to pinpoint where public action is required urgently (Camacho, 2010). Rather than having geographical and spatial information generated through the neoliberal proliferation of private, subcontracted and privatized public services (cf. Radcliffe, 2009, on Ecuador; Lerch, 2013, on Bolivia), postneoliberal states of Latin America are experimenting with public geographical information and public dissemination of spatial information. These technologies are assembled into inclusive governmentality, providing geolocalization information to facilitate new social programs such as Renta Dignidad (Lerch, 2013: 99). In Bolivia, GIS was taken away from international financial and development agency interventions to become the core of a project for an effective state and open democracy where information is gathered, standardized and disseminated for the public good. Overseen by the country’s vice-presidency, the GeoBolivia project epitomizes ‘the development of a GIS in public service and democratic access [….] in the re-foundation of the country on the basis of a paradigm to facilitate the democratic circulation of information and the pluralist construction of the state’ (Lerch, 2007: 4, 2013). Geographical data gathering and storage are envisioned as integral to state formation with new citizenship and state-citizens relations, an assemblage for a postneoliberal inventory and ‘a cartographic vision of the ensemble of resources, infrastructure, [delimitations] and projects … developing in the territory’ (Lerch, 2013: 99). In Ecuador, the online National Buen Vivir Plan 2013 includes numerous maps with indicators at the parish level, signaling an interleaved multiscalar territorial vision for the country and decentralized participatory planning (SENPLADES, 2013a). A widely disseminated Atlas of Inequalities provided a tool for optimal resource distribution and a potent symbol of progress made (SENPLADES, 2013b). Cadastral and land surveys have continued and even grown in importance as tools through which the national territory can be known and allocated a function in postneoliberal planning (Radcliffe, 2009; Lerch, 2014). Nevertheless, despite projects for spatial visibilization, ‘blind spots’ remain, not least with respect to agricultural development and agrarian reform (pace Tecchio et al., 2015, on Brazil’s Rural Identity Territories program).
Postneoliberal state formation occurs too in relation to coloniality’s geographies and their ongoing legacies in citizenship, state formation and political voice, which make current knowledge production processes highly diverse and subject to highly variable authority within the re-oriented processes of state and policy production (Rankin, 2010; Ettlinger and Hartmann, 2015; Radcliffe, 2015b). The modernizing neo-developmentalist political authority at the center of postneoliberalism contains within it colonial modern forms of power, spatiality and exclusion, which cause frictions out of the distinctive epistemological positions present within the state itself, and within heterogeneous societies. Hence, although the constitutional objective in Ecuador and Bolivia is to re-found the state as plurinational and thereby establish parity between diverse pre-existing expressions of political geographies (an historic demand of indigenous groups), an ongoing struggle exists over how to ground this state formation and what this might mean for state territorial sovereignty and citizenship. With different epistemological starting-points disputing the basis on which state formation is to occur, the plurinational state has yet to be finally defined. Moreover, existing power favors political-economic elites often stubbornly resistant to policy edicts, however well intentioned. Governmentality in the meantime reflects complex and irregular concatenations of neoliberal and colonial-modern dynamics, however many constitutional rights and public services exist. Decolonizing substantive citizenship hence remains a major challenge (Scott, 1996; Radcliffe, 2015b).
Postneoliberal institutionalization and policy geographies suggest the need to unpack the dynamics between state-led ‘modernization’ and diverse knowledge production. Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous social movements have long advocated distinctive ways of knowing space and re-working socio-political formations bound up in particular spaces. These alternative patterns of knowledge production gained some leverage in postneoliberal commitment to a plurinational state. Yet it becomes clear that what the state treats as state-led decentralization comes into messy, negotiated encounters with heterogeneous indigenous spatialities. State territorialization remains robustly postcolonial and sovereignty-based, while indigenous and non-dominant lived geographies struggle to receive substantive recognition and inclusion. In Ecuador, the Indigenous Territorial Circumscriptions (CTIs) remain subordinate to a state-wide agenda of reforming political administrative scales of governance through from regions to provinces (SENPLADES, 2013a; Gonzalez, 2015). These state-indigenous engagements, informed by distinctive epistemologies, are further heightened when macroeconomic policy seeks to reorganize state territory. In Bolivia, the competing logics of neo-developmentalism, environmental protection, and indigenous spatialities were visible in the TIPNIS case (Laing, 2015; Zimmerer, 2015). Where rights to indigenous territorial autonomy have been established, as in Bolivia under the AOIC law and in Venezuela, their spatial reach and boundaries are largely within pre-existing colonial modern politico-administrative units. Bolivia’s reassertion of control over the country’s land survey after 2006 effectively restored sovereignty over socio-territorial regulation (Lerch, 2014), an impulse at odds with social movement epistemologies.
Postneoliberal experiments in Latin America also draw on geographical knowledge production, inviting critical and Marxist geographers to advise and undertake research related to public policy and debate. Doreen Massey argued that postneoliberal countries in the region often implicitly if not explicitly recognize the connection between space and power, and hence attempt to imagine – and, in some cases, create – ‘socio-political spaces that are more democratic and more egalitarian’ (Massey, 2012: 136), as in the complex mosaic of international cooperation of ALBA, UNASUR and other organizations. Massey’s ‘power geometry’ concept informed Venezuela’s policy to decenter power through bottom-up communities in communal councils (consejos comunales) (Massey, 2011). Marxist geographer David Harvey until recently held a visiting professorship at the Institute of Advanced National Studies (IAEN) in Quito, in a research unit exploring dimensions of accumulation by dispossession, and Ecuador’s multiscalar positioning in global political economies. The CENEDET ‘National Center of Strategies for the Right to Territory’ unit researched the politics of space across thematic and regional geographies in the country. Projects included unequal rights to water, the city and housing under capital accumulation and new modalities of decision-making. Interventions by Anglophone geographers represent an unprecedented shift in regional geographical knowledge production, and accordingly are often controversial. Adding to existing geographical knowledge production (often theoretically and politically critical) in civil society, public institutions, and private universities (Radcliffe, 2009), fierce debates rage about Harvey’s positionality, the possibility of decolonizing accumulation by dispossession frameworks, and the extent to which radical geographies have been co-opted by state extractive projects (Gudynas, 2015; Martínez et al., 2015).
Whereas, a decade ago, postneoliberalism looked like a radical, emergent, underprepared proposal from disaffected electorates in countries that had borne the brunt of harsh restructuring (Peck et al., 2010), the picture today suggests a different analysis. Postneoliberalization is in several key respects a process of state formation and of substantive and formal citizenship. As such it invites critical comparison with developmentalist and modernizing states as well as careful examination of the forms of governmentality by which state re-foundation becomes entangled with colonial exclusions, global political economies of resource extraction and dispossession, and exclusionary political cultures of voice and authority. Geography as a technique of governance and as a critical positionality is also part of these processes, offering ambivalent tools for the materialization of postneoliberal agendas.
Sarah Radcliffe
University of Cambridge, UK