Rejecting the Neoliberal Consensus: Latin America Goes Bottom Up
Weekend Edition March 20-22, 2015
Rejecting the Neoliberal Consensus
Latin America Goes Bottom Up
by ADAM FISHWICK
Latin American development has, over the last decades, been defined by its experimentation. Innovative development strategies — both progressive and regressive — have seen the introduction of untested new policy measures, bringing dramatic transformations to countries throughout the region.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, state-led populist development strategies produced massive industrial transformation, rising wages, welfare state provision and dramatically expanded institutional representation for labour. From the mid-1970s, the neoliberal counter-revolution reversed many of these changes, bringing political repression alongside wage depression and a process of de-industrialisation that reconfigured economic relations within Latin American countries and between these countries and the rest of the world. And in the last decade, the so-called Pink Tide has seen left and centre-left governments consolidate power in countries as diverse as Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Nicaragua.
Whilst each of these countries adopts distinctive positions on developmental issues, at the core is an explicit rejection of the neoliberal consensus that has dominated since the 1980s. Development strategies across the Pink Tide countries involve a return to many of the earlier state-led, populist measures that preceded the decades of neoliberalism. The state once again plays a leading role in supporting economic growth, developing new leading sectors in these economies and, to a varied extent, supporting the rights of labour.
However, each of these experiments has been seen as a top-down experience, with the state, or leading firms within the economy, enforcing changes from above. Such a focus on these actors and their activities conceals important, and potentially even more radical, social and political experiments that can, and oftentimes have, provided a genuine bottom-up alternative for development. Age-old tensions between peasants and landowners in Brazil and Mexico, conflict between international producers and non-unionised workers in Chile, unemployed movements in Argentina, and community-led organisations and mobilisations in Bolivia and Venezuela have all played, and continue to play, an integral role in their respective societies.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/20/latin-america-goes-bottom-up/