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Argentina as an experimental field for a new wave of looting

Mariano Féliz, July 2024

Dependency,

“green” capitalism, and struggles for the commons

new green rhetoric

extractivist agenda

For the last decade, Argentina’s governments put forth new green rhetoric within a neo-developmentalist framework to push forward with its extractivist agenda. Presenting itself as an alternative to “green capitalism”, this is an attempt to promote a project of neo-dependency. This discourse -closely reminiscent of Green New Deal proposals-, simultaneously worships imperialist investments in “green ventures” while attacking ecofeminist resistance to further plundering of nature and bodies.

projects on infrastructure and nature’s super-exploitation

The green developmentalist speech fosters projects on infrastructure and nature’s super-exploitation as a solution to the restrictions posed by the ‘external constraint’. This constraint expresses the need to finance capital flight, a huge, illegal and illegitimate (thus, odious) foreign debt and the conspicuous consumption of the dominant classes.

fostering the imperial mode of living in our territories

pillage of nature and labour

According to the new developmentalism these demands must be met through the pillage of nature and labour (both productive and care&reproductive labour, paid and unpaid). Thus, the so-called green investments are no more than new forms of fostering the imperial mode of living in our territories, stepping over communities that mostly reject the advancement of projects that destroy their way of life and pollute their environments.

Authoritarianism

devalorization of the livelihoods

The discourse of development hides the reproduction of forms of authoritarianism under the brand of “green sustainability”. The devalorization of the livelihoods of entire communities comes to the fore as the negation of alternative ways of living. Surprisingly, or not, imperialistic developmental practices assume the right to destroy everything and everyone in the path of dependent capitalism. Sustainability of capital’s conditions for expanded reproduction become the conditions for life’s unsustainability.

Limits to GND Transitional Strategy: Dependency, imperialism, and the State

• Ignore the role of structural dependency, which means that the North gets greener at the cost of increasing super exploitation, plundering and pollution in the South
• Racialization within capitalism remains at the core of hegemonic transitional green projects: poor, women, migrants are still taken as inferior (remember Larry Summers Memo from 1991): “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages” and “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”.
• Mercantilization of nature (pollution markets, green taxes) only feeds capitalist relations of production, the actual cause of climate crisis
• False technological solutions appear to be key, but the issue is socio-political. Green technologies are destroying territories and communities in the South, and in the peripheries within the South
• The capitalist State remains at the center of the transition. No room for actual transformative practices from below

• In the 60s, a new wave of struggles put into crisis Latinamerican version of modernization, UN’s ECLAC developmentalism/structuralism (industrialization, import subsititution).
• Cuban revolution, crisis within real socialism, new wave of struggles for independence.
• Struggles create the possibility of new theoretical beginnings: marxist dependency theory (MDT).

Marxism and Latin American Marxian Dependency Theory

critical thinking from struggles

Raúl Prebisch

Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro

Cordobazo against dictatorship (Argentina, 1969)

Vania Bambirra

Teotonio Dos Santos

Ruy Mauro Marini

Protest agains Vietnam War (US, 1967)

dialectics of dependency

Marxian Dependency Theory

• Super-exploitation of labour (not just exploitation, or low wages), key to dependency
• Caused by unequal (value) exchange between core (imperialist) and peripheral (dependent) territories
• Local markets fractured (inequality): popular against conspicuous consumption. Dependent consumption of domestic dominant classes
• Pressure to export commodities at higher rate (falling terms of trade)

Super-exploitation

… of labour and nature in Argentina

• Since mid-1990s, expansion of frontiers of capital
• New forms of super-exploitation of labour + new frontiers for appropriation of nature (“accumulation by appropriation” and “dispossession”?)
• Super-exploitation of ‘productive’ labour (i.e., male, adult, white) increases the S-E of ‘reproductive and care’ labour in the “popular economy” (i.e., female, young, migrant)
• Super-exploitation of nature (plundering, ‘saqueo’)
• State policies + transnational capital; subsidies, regulations
• Foreign debt: cause and excuse. IMF SAP's and growing indebtedness
• The ‘external constraint’: foreign currency supply is not enough to sustain growth and pay debt

• Dependency is unequal exchange of value
• … and unequal exchange of common goods (minerals, water,…)
• Super-exploitation of labour is concomitant with super-exploitation of nature (one and the same?)
• Extractivism accrues ground-rent thus pressures on industrial activities, price of land, food, …
• Plundering of common goods: turning them into ‘resources’ (expanding the commodity frontier), and transforming social relations (new forms of exploitation of paid and unpaid labour)
• Life at center of capitalist reproduction
• New forms of violence (symbolic, material)
• New geopolitics: from food to minerals & energy + GMO (varieties that stand heat/drought)

Value, nature and labour

Argentina and core countries’ energy transition

Green developmental strategy

• New ‘green’ developmentalism? Gas, lithium, H2… to help core countries become ‘greener’ (limits to IML?)
• From industrializing (old developmentalism) to exporting commodities
• From local markets to foreign markets (wages don’t matter as demand, just a cost)
• New imperialisms: US, Europe (Germany), China
• Devaluing alternatives to THIS development: prosecution, repression, media ‘crucifixion’. Epistemic battle (capitalist science against life)

A little help from old and new imperial powers

neo-imperialism at its best

The new ways of developmentalism come along with the aid of old and new imperial powers. Thus, the US’s Chevron enters shale oil&gas Vaca Muerta geological formation, together with China’s Powerchina and Shanghai Electric Power Construction. At the same time, with the financial leverage from competing hegemonic powers, new lithium extraction, soya production and mining projects attempt to leap forward; neo-imperialism at its best.

Into the paleo-libertarian experiment

Milei’s government as a cross-roads

• Exhaustion of “statist” discourse: limits of developmentalism. The State as problem, rather than solution
• Process of individualization, decolectivisation, solitude and estrangement, self-made man attitude, new technologies (i.e., apps, IA, platform economy)
• Ten-year long class war of attrition
• Milei as radicalization of looting and repression
• example: RIGI (large investment incentive scheme)

resistance from ecological, feminist and indigenous population

need for radical transformation

While resistance from ecological, feminist and indigenous population organizations abound, so does State judicial and police repression and persecution. It’s high time to go beyond green capitalism and State sponsored green new deals, or marketed anarcho-capitalist false solution, and into a radical socio-political transformation based on grassroots political practices and horizons (e.g., popular economy).

• Movements of unemployed (piquetero moments), precarious workers (popular economy).
• Homeless people (MTST in Brazil).
• Peasants, rural and indigenous workers (MST/Landless in Brazil, Zapatistas).
• Feminist and women movements and struggles.
• Eco-territorial movements.
• Unions

new cycle of struggles, new debates: new theory?

We’ll keep on fighting, until we are all free

Thank you

Water is life

La tierra es para quienes la trabajas

Trabajo, dignidad y cambio social

Para todos, todo (Queremos todo)

If our life doesn’t have value, work without us. International Women’s Strike

Luchar, crear, poder popular

Caminamos al paso del más lento