The missing link in Latin American postneoliberalism: situating capital and labor in current development debates

• In Event: Work in XXI Century Latin America: Options, Challenges and Promises I

Abstract

After the crisis of neoliberal reforms, several Latin American countries have explored “post-neoliberal” development strategies. Students of these strategies have stressed their positive effects on growth, the weakening of the subordination of the countries' economies to global finance, and the role of the state in sustaining growth and distributing wealth. Much less has been said about their class dimension. This paper will review recent arguments and debates about the so-called postneoliberal development strategies and policies in Latin America, assuming that postneoliberalism has involved reconfigurations in the balances between and within classes and new forms of class rule. It will discuss the scope, limitations and contradictions of these development strategies from the point of view of the relation between capital and labour, taking into account the structural conditions in which this relation is shaped and reshaped and the political dimensions of such relation.

Author

• Ruth S Felder, SUNY Albany