Neoliberalism in Crisis

Abstract

This review article examines two recent books, Verónica Gago’s La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Buenos Aires, Tinta Limón, 2019) and Diego Sztulwark’s La ofensiva sensible: Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político (Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2019). Both works approach the crisis of neoliberal governance in Argentina, and the new forms of collectivity that it has produced, as a heuristic lens for understanding the dynamics of contemporary political economy. In doing so, both authors also make important claims on their own mode of inquiry, which, derived from their earlier work as members of the Colectivo Situaciones, aims to decipher, rather than prescribe, forms of practical knowledge operating in the political situations they study. The present essay explores the way each book formulates the specificity of this knowledge and the language of its transmission.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• militant research
• crisis
• conjuncture
• Néstor Kirchner
• Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
• Diego Sztulwark
• Verónica Gago
• Colectivo Situaciones
• neo-extractivism
• populism
• social reproduction

Diego Sztulwark’s La ofensiva sensible: Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo político (The Offensive of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Populism, and the Underside of the Political, 2019) and Verónica Gago’s La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Feminist Potential or the Desire to Change Everything, 2019) interrogate the subject of neoliberalism from radically different perspectives.¹ Both books share an expansive understanding of neoliberalism, which they view not only as a set of economic policies or a theory of the relationship between politics and the administration of social life, but also, and more radically, as a historical pattern of capitalist accumulation and as an apparatus for producing the most expedient forms of life for that process. Both books consider this phenomenon within the specific conjuncture of the election of Mauricio Macri in 2015, the first conservative president to be elected since Hipólito Yrigoyen almost a century earlier, following twelve years of the centre-left administrations of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Rather than privilege Macri’s policies or their effects as objects of criticism, Gago and Sztulwark view the present as a continuation and intensification of the mechanisms of expropriation and social control practised under the Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner governments, despite the latter’s inclusive rhetoric and redistributive policies. By reconstructing and theorising the Buenos Aires women’s strike of 2017, La potencia feminista poses an explicit and implicit question about how to define what is specifically feminine about this power or potential and the knowledge it produces about the present. La ofensiva sensible, by contrast, makes an argument for the political power or potential of what its author describes as the plebeian sensibility incubated in the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis.

La potencia feminista presents a social ontology of feminised work and adopts the women’s strike as a heuristic lens allowing us to see the implication among the phenomena of femicide, the frailty of conventional forms of masculine authority, and the exacerbated precarity of an already uneven regime of salaried labour. In the author’s view, the strike bears witness to the ways in which contemporary capitalism expropriates specifically feminine forms of knowledge and interrelation and, in so doing, transforms the masculine, urban, industrial, and European face of the working class. La potencia feminista also outlines the possible ways in which the strike thinks the exploitation of feminine labour in the context of a socioeconomic formation defined by the transposition of different modes of production. Simultaneously, the book considers its own analysis, together with the practices and discourses of the women’s strike, as “situated” forms of knowledge inextricable from the empirical facts and bodily experiences that they contemplate.

Sztulwark’s inquiry into the historical subject of the present takes a somewhat more circuitous path. Sztulwark argues that neoliberalism, whether in its social democratic or technical fascist varieties, functions at once as an economic order and as what the author terms a “severe pedagogy,” or ethics based on the celebration of possessive individualism (Sztulwark 2019, 47). According to the author, the book’s title aims to capture the “ambivalent expression” of the affective and ethical plane of neoliberalism’s productive rationale and its potential subversion (180). Like La potencia feminista, La ofensiva sensible contemplates the extent to which its own analytical perspective is implicated in the psychic and political conditions of neoliberalism, which it defines in terms of the normalisation of the political and ethical “forms of life” that had emerged as a response to the financial crisis of 2001. In the introduction to La ofensiva sensible, Sztulwark thus notes that “2001 possesses, above all, a cognitive value” (14). It is in this sense that the book calls for “a politics of the symptom” that “adopts the perspective of the crisis” (48). In contrast to Gago’s account of the women’s strike, however, Sztulwark diagnoses the present as a moment in which “the revolution is not under way, though there are revolutionary becomings” (48). One could argue that Sztulwark’s principal objective in La ofensiva sensible is to assign a name and a series of predicates to a form of life and potential political power ignored, misrecognised, or negated by other recent accounts of Kirchernismo and theories of populism.

Rather than prescribe a better strategy for the Left, both Gago and Sztulwark inquire into the conditions and methods of intellection necessary in order to appreciate the collective forms of material, ethical, and political life already at work at the local, grassroots level. Key to their approach is the notion, borrowed from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser via José Aricó and René Zavaleta Mercado, of the crisis or historical-political conjuncture as providing a privileged epistemological perspective. Not coincidentally, Gago and Sztulwark were founding members of the Colectivo Situaciones (Situations Collective), a group of intellectuals and activists that grew out of a previous collective formed at the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s. With the term “militant research,” Colectivo Situaciones inscribed its approach in the tradition of Italian Workerist journals such as the Cuaderni Rossi and their short-lived influence over the Argentinean journal Pasado y Presente. In a 2003 text, Colectivo Situaciones defined militant research as a kind of counter-methodology or willingness neither to know nor to affect a given political situation, but rather to register the kinds of practical knowledge that emerge from it (Colectivo Situaciones 2003, np; Sztulwark 2019, 111). Drawing upon their own earlier individual and collective work, both Gago and Sztulwark claim to engage in a form of militant research (Sztulwark and Benasayag 2000, 26).² In this sense, they understand their objects of study not primarily as the practices of the strike or the ambivalent attitude of precarious workers towards the interpellations of the state but rather the embodied “vision from the perspective of the crisis” that each provides (Sztulwark 2019, 137).

Both books alternately reflect on and perform the difficulties and limitations of capturing this experiential knowledge in writing. Though the effort is more pronounced in La ofensiva sensible, both books also attempt to name and describe the attributes of a collective way of life that has been overlooked or negated by existing theoretical frameworks. Simultaneously, however, both books also code the situation in a specific theoretical language, oftentimes borrowed from Félix Guattari’s schizo-analysis and Antonio Negri’s recently compiled texts on Foucault. Gago’s and Sztulwark’s propensity for a certain register of philosophy poses its own methodological question about how to formalise or conceptualise the knowledge produced by the symptom, to paraphrase Sztulwark, or embedded within the experience of a given situation, as Gago suggests. The question of transmission also bears on an even more profound problem regarding the legitimacy of such knowledge, or, in other words, the institutional conditions under which the knowledge of the unconscious or of the situation becomes intelligible as such beyond the university discourse of the social sciences.

La potencia feminista presents a combination of participative ethnography, conjunctural analysis, and theorical reflection. Its eight chapters move between the analysis of gender violence and the exploitation of feminine and feminised labour, and the anecdotal and theoretical account of the organisational forms and problems raised by the strike. The chapters perform the cognitive radiation of the strike outwards from its immediate demands and practices towards the contemplation and transformation of other immediate political concerns, for example, regarding gender violence or abortion; earlier theories of the general strike; the dynamics of neo-extractivism in the former colonial world; Marxist debates about the subordination of feminine labour under capital; the assembly as an organisational form; the territorial or localised nature of the internationalism of grassroots women’s movements throughout Latin America and Spain in recent years; and the ideological, economic, and military counter-offensive against gender emancipation conducted by the Catholic Church and its real and ideological influence over the state. The chapters also advance recursively. Whether through the illustration of the assembly culture of the women’s strike in Buenos Aires, feminist debates over social reproduction, or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of the reproduction of capital, Gago’s text returns to two fundamental questions: what is new about the women’s strike and how does it help to illuminate the dynamics of capitalist accumulation before and beyond the wage?

Take, for example, the following lines:

In this way, we are not only interested in the extension of an analytic of labor attempting to cast the tasks of care, affect, and social reproduction as labor, but rather in how the perspective that they produce might help to reclassify the very notion of work more generally (…). Concretely, the gratuitous, unrecognized, subordinate, intermittent and, at the same time, permanent dimension of reproductive work functions contemporarily in order to allow us to see the precarity of work as a transversal process. The intensive exploitation of affective infrastructures and, simultaneously, the extension of the working day within the home allow us to grasp new forms immigrant labor and new hierarchies in the service industry; the overlapping of tasks and availability as a primary subjective resource demanded by the work child-rearing similarly reveal the basic requirements of work in the service industry. (202)

In this passage, in particular, Gago aims to create a certain genealogy of the general strike and its theorisation. She cites the general strike of black slaves in DuBois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), the rural strikes the Spanish and Chilean peons massacred in the events of the “Patagonia Rebelde” in the early 1920s, and the 1907 rent strikes of tenants in Buenos Aires’s tenements or conventillos. In doing so, Gago also attempts to inscribe the equally disparate organisations and claims of the 2017 – and 2018 – women’s strike throughout the Spanish-speaking world within this lineage.

The passage also speaks to the book’s much larger ambition. La potencia feminista is not content to position itself within a certain canon of Third World or postcolonial Marxism. Rather, it presents the women’s strike as the weakest link in and analytical key to reframing long-standing debates in Marxist theory and Marxist feminism, in particular, about the exploitation of feminine labour and the subordination of non-capitalist forms of property, work, and socialisation under capital. Gago displaces the issue of whether reproductive labour is directly productive for capital or, inversely, if the Fordist political economy of Western Europe effectively socialised labour beyond the walls of the factory, drawing our attention instead to the ways that capital incorporates earlier modes of production and informal networks of economic support (Gago 2019, 95).

La potencia feminista stops short of exploring on a problematic level what might be specifically feminine about the mode of being and knowing purportedly incarnated in the organization of feminised labour or in the practical-conceptual production of the strike. Gago articulates the social and political registers of the women’s strike through recourse to a certain neo-Spinozist notion of the body as both the object of the expropriation of wealth and the genesis of a desiring force or conatus capable of resisting this same operation. The author’s militant investigation insists on the relevance of accumulation to the ontology of politics, and yet, as it concerns the women’s strike, it does so by obviating or taking for granted a descriptive understanding of femininity as it concerns the expropriation of labour power in the expanded sense that the author intends.

As a whole, La potencia feminista does not so much provide a theory of mass politics in the era of expansive extractivism as it does perform the kind of analytical disposition in support of the symptom called for by Sztulwark. La potencia feminista thus offers neither an empirical account of the women’s strike nor a theory of its political forms or of the political economy of feminised labour per se. Rather, the movement of the book’s prose among these three approaches suggests that it wishes to underscore the fact of the strike’s situated, territorialised, and visceral thinking as such. One could thus argue that La potencia feminista is as much a theoretical account of the events of March 2017 as it is a demonstration of how to “do theory” in a way informed by these same events.

In contrast to La potencia feminista, La ofensiva sensible predicates the necessity of its inquiry on the failure or missed opportunity for sustaining the novel forms of social and political organisation developed in response to the 2001 economic crisis. Sztulwark borrows from Foucault’s late seminars the idea that neoliberalism extends and combines the modern state’s biopolitical function, or power over life, with the exercise of state power over the soul. Key for Sztulwark is the extent to which neoliberal governance articulates the command of capital through the financialisation of politics, or the intertwined economic and ideological mechanisms of self-entrepreneurship, instrumental calculation, and the mediatisation of politics. Sztulwark explains the recent turn to neofascist electoral politics as the product, in Argentina, in particular, of two models of neoliberalism combined and embodied in Macri’s presidential campaign: that of the consumer-citizen initiated with the return to democracy in 1983, and of the rhetoric of a desired return to normalcy following the 2001 crisis.

Sztulwark analyses the Kirchners’ political and economic policies, for example, incentivising internal consumption, generating revenue for the state based on the extraction and exporting of commodities, extending private consumer credit, broadening social programmes, and reclaiming the militancy of the 1970s, at once as a reaction to the contingency of the 2008 grain and cattle breeders’ strike, which represents a continuation of the consumer-citizen model of political subjectivity advanced by the neoliberal governments of the 1980s and 90s, and as a lost opportunity to channel the political force of the new forms of collective organisation produced in response to the 2001 crisis. Sztulwark thus explores what he refers to as the “the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion” practised by the Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner governments and assumed by contemporary theorists of populism and of the Pink Wave of the early 2000s. Whether through the interpellation of individuals as bearers of rights and consumer credit or the “precarious mediation” of social organisations by the state, Sztulwark asks whether we might not seize upon moments of increased popular consumption of the kind fomented by the Kirchner and Fernández de Kirchner policies of political and economic inclusion in order to identify potentially new dynamics of collectivity, to extend productive structures, and to invent new modes of consumption and even happiness (Sztulwark 2019, 101). In doing so, however, Sztulwark does not propose a uchronic vision of the past. Rather, his view of Kirchnerismo aims to underline the shortcomings of other recent critical approaches to the popular subject responsible for Macri’s 2015 election. In this sense, Sztulwark does not propose an alternative analysis to recent accounts of Kirchernismo, such as Javier Trímboli’s, or theories of populism like Damián Selci’s, both of which he cites. Rather, he attempts to trace an alternative framework or point of view that might allow us to capture the vicissitudes of the people in a single frame and as a possible source of productive resistance to the same economic and ideological structures that constitute them.

La ofensiva sensible attempts to name and describe the collective subject of popular sovereignty under the conditions of politicised finance specific to neoliberal governance. Sztulwark proposes “the plebeian” (lo plebeyo) as a way of naming a political ethos born of neoliberal governance and its successive crises. He presents plebeianism alternately as a line of flight from the present sociopolitical order that cannot yet be named and as a concrete and highly localised ethos, as testified by the other vernacular terms with which other authors have tried to name the same subject. Sztulwark cites a 1980 class by Deleuze as the inspiration for his choice of “plebeian.” With the resignification of the word “plebeian” Sztulwark creates the possibility of registering a sensibility that has been ignored or negated by political theorists and observers. As he explains in the book’s concluding pages, the “sensible” refers to the micropolitical plane of both popular sovereignty and the social factory of postfordist capitalism.

A second-hand reference to political essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada bookends La ofensiva sensible and aptly describes its analytical operation. According to Sztulwark, Martínez Estrada’s “methodical bitterness,” a phrase proposed by critic Christian Ferrer, consists of thinking the present without assigning it any value or making any evolutive or utopian wager on the future, even at the risk of “remaining without the desire to believe” (Sztulwark 2019, 29). As if summarising the aims of La ofensiva sensible, its author writes, “The affects that bitterness is willing to traverse seek neither nirvana nor happiness, but rather an orientation towards that which Spinoza called ‘adequate ideas’, by which he refers to those ideas that express the greatest causality and thus liberate the greatest potential to exist.” He then adds, “Adequate ideas also possess the added value of removing from circulation other ideas that no longer work” (30). Sztulwark’s calls for a politics of the symptom belie the optimistic rationalism of Spinoza’s theory of knowledge. Or, perhaps better said, for Sztulwark, attending to the singularities of the symptom serves as only the first step in grasping an ontology of politics that might, in turn, allow us to view in a new light the specificity of the conjuncture. Much as one finds in La potencia feminista, La ofensiva sensible does not distil the popular knowledge or desire embedded within the apparent ambivalence and spontaneity of this plebeian ethos, but rather undertakes the preparatory work of attributing to it a plausible relation to the conditions of neoliberal governance in Argentina.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Benezra

Karen Benezra works on twentieth-century visual art and critical social and psychoanalytic theory. She is the author of Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America (University of California Press 2020), and has recently finished editing Accumulation and Subjectivity in Latin America, a collection of scholarly essays addressing debates about the historical logic of capitalism in social theory and contemporary culture. Karen has been an editor of the journal ARTMargins (MIT Press) since 2012.

Notes

1 An English translation of La potencia feminista has been published under the title Feminist International: How to Change Everything. 2020. Translated by Liz Mason-Deese. London: Verso.

2 In Política y situación: de la ofensiva al contrapoder (Politics and Situation: From Offense to Counterpower, 2000), Sztulwark and his co-author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Miguel Benasayag, expound on the subjective figures of a slightly early moment of the neoliberalism’s crisis of legitimacy. Just as one finds in Sztulwark’s latest book, the link between militancy and knowledge passes through the ability of the researcher to apprehend the present in the absence of judgements of value or evolutive schemes (26).