Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies

Radical Américas

by Verónica Gago, Liz Mason-Deese (Translator)

In Neoliberalism from Below—first published in Argentina in 2014—Verónica Gago examines how Latin American neoliberalism is propelled not just from above by international finance, corporations, and government, but also by the activities of migrant workers, vendors, sweatshop workers, and other marginalized groups. Using the massive illegal market La Salada in Buenos Aires as a point of departure, Gago shows how alternative economic practices, such as the sale of counterfeit goods produced in illegal textile factories, resist neoliberalism while simultaneously succumbing to its models of exploitative labor and production. Gago demonstrates how La Salada's economic dynamics mirror those found throughout urban Latin America. In so doing, she provides a new theory of neoliberalism and a nuanced view of the tense mix of calculation and freedom, obedience and resistance, individualism and community, and legality and illegality that fuels the increasingly powerful popular economies of the global South's large cities.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Verónica Gago is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Her work is deeply influenced by active participation in the experience of Colectivo Situaciones.

Reviews

[Athena]

I only read about 25 percent of this book, including the introduction, conclusion, and first and last chapter. It's provocative because Gago takes the very popular Foucauldian idea of neoliberalism, which is based in governmentality, and asks: What if the spaces and practices that we have been understanding as responses to neoliberalism, as ways of managing and resisting governmentality, are actually ways of generating neoliberalism "from below"? Gago looks at concrete ways of being and doing around La Salada market on the periphery of Buenos Aires to think through how informal practices might be considered as preceding and giving rise to new formal structures, rather than as ways of making do in the absence of state care. She frames this in terms of Spinoza's conatus, as a vitalist striving for self-maintenance. I got lost here since I haven't read Spinoza, and it isn't clear from the sections that I read how this vitalism is ultimately vital -- as in life enhancing.

There are also some arguments about the neodevelopmentalism and extractivism of the supposedly anti-neoliberal, anti-extractive administrations in South America from 2000 onward. I'll probably return to this book because it seems to add an important dimension to neoliberal vs. anti-neoliberal takes on Latin American politics and resistance in 2019.

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

"From below, neoliberalism is the proliferation of forms of life that reorganize notions of freedom, calculation, and obedience, projecting a new collective affectivity and rationality." (p 6)

The theory is as expected, the data is rich, the story is well told.

[Kyle Keckler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Understand neoliberalism and you understand the root of everything which happens today.