Neoliberalism as Political Technology: Expertise, Energy and Democracy in Chile (original) (raw)
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Neoliberalism as a capitalist revolution in Chile: Antecedents and irreversibility
Paolo Sylos Labini. Quarterly Review, 2019
This essay offers a historical perspective on the economic reforms carried out by the Chilean civic-military dictatorship that governed the country between 1973 and 1990. The regime applied some of the earliest and most extensive neoliberal reforms in Latin America, which included labor flexibilization, the end to agrarian reform, capitalization of the countryside, and privatization of public enterprises in almost all sectors, including pension funds, healthcare and education. Unlike the rest of Latin America, after the mid-1980s these reforms produced high growth, although they generated economic inequality and the concentration of wealth.
Relying on a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), this paper shows how the past four decades of Chilean history can best be understood by examining the interaction between the material and semiotic dimensions. Analyzing the shifting and mutually-constitutive interaction between material (structural) and semiotic (meaning-making) practices is crucial for assessing (1) continuities and ruptures enacted by center-left Concertación (1990-2009) and the Nueva Mayoría administrations (2014-2018); (2) debates about how Chile's "progressive" public policies shift the boundaries between the commodified and non-commodified realms of social life; and (3) possible outcomes to the crises of legitimacy and representation currently afflicting Chile's political and economic institutions. Using a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), I examine the major transformations experienced by Chilean society over the past four decades and draw implications for contemporary struggles to reform economic, social and political structures. The analysis presented here suggests the urgency of developing a more comprehensive definition of "neoliberalism," one more attentive to the articulations among the accumulation of capital, hegemonic practices and the production of subjectivity.
THE BOTTLENECK OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHILEAN REVOLUTION
THE BOTTLENECK OF NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHILEAN REVOLUTION, 2019
A blog article published by the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education of the University of Bristol Website https://cire-bristol.com/2019/11/20/the-bottleneck-of-neoliberalism-and-the-chilean-revolution/ During the last three weeks, Chilean unrests show to the world the social crisis of neoliberalism as a structure of state formation. The international media has broken the communicational censorship imposed by the Chilean government, showing violations of Human Right (see the links The Guardian, The Washington Post). The Chilean political situation has been savage; 5.629 people have been arrested, 2.009 people injured, 197 people have lost one or both eyes. Last weekend a 21-years-old undergraduate student was blinded by rubber bullets in his both eyes. Also, there are 283 cases of police sexual abuse (you can see the violent action of Chilean police here -sensitive content-, and a New York Times report here). I share my experience in the Chilean unrests while I was running my fieldwork.
Neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile: common antecedents, divergent paths
This paper contrasts the experiences of neoliberalism in Argentina and Chile, exploring why two countries that implemented apparently similar market reforms came to different stances on marketization: a post-neoliberal politics in Argentina, and a tempered neoliberalism in Chile that has only recently come under scrutiny. The paper traces the common antecedents that inspired these reforms and the different outcomes and reactions that they produced. In contrast to recent literature, which emphasizes one or another explanatory factor, this article offers a synthetic comparison of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors in play, helping to understand how capitalists achieved a hegemonic class position in Chile and not in Argentina.
Chilean Neoliberalism under Scrutiny: Class, Power, and Conflict Are Back in Town
Latin American Research Review, 2017
The major topics of interest for those studying Chile in the 1990s and 2000s—democratization and consolidation, growth, equity, regulation, governance—have lost their centrality among Chilean social scientists, who are now calling for a critical reexamination of the political and economic arrangements that have prevailed in the country since the end of its military dictatorship in 1989. Old topics such as class, power, and conflict have made a comeback. The five books discussed in this review essay are good examples of this renewed interest in a critical reexamination of the origins and trajectory of contemporary Chile. A close reading of these works reveals similar starting points, a number of analogies and broad complementarities among them, but also important limitations