Hegemonic neoliberalism? Notes on the State, the power block and the political economy in recent Argentina (2016-2018)

Abstract

After 12 years of Kirchners’ governments (2003-2015) in Argentina, the executive power passed into the hands of the Cambiemos alliance. It was the first political change by a democratic election in the South American region, after the cycle of progressive/leftist governments started in 1998. This essay aims to review the conditions that allowed the advent of the arrival of Cambiemos to the national executive power and propose some notes to characterize the way in which the accumulation regime seeks to unfold, and its complex network of linked social relations. For this, we use the categories of hegemony (Antonio Gramsci) and power block (Nicos Poulantzas), as well as some elements that provide State theory, drawing an analysis of political economy. The main results indicate that: 1) the current neoliberal project expresses a different power block from the one operating under Kirchnerism, with the conduction of financial and foreign capital, 2) it proposes to organize a new distributive framework related to these groups, 3) in order to do so, it implemented two strategies of distributive shock and one of graduation in the adjustment on the popular sectors and 4) social resistance, as well as the divergences within the dominant sectors, have put in tension its development since the crisis of 2018.