“Post-Neoliberalism” and the Reconfiguration of Capitalism in Latin America

Abstract

Today it is perplexing that the right wing has won support among popular and middle class sectors in Latin America, even in countries where left and center-left governments had improved their income and living conditions. But the advance of conservative social ideas and practices are not so recent nor have they arisen by spontaneous generation. 10 years ago I made the warning - as can be seen in this paper that is now published in Portuguese - that the strategy of the dominant, deployed since the 1990s to stabilize capitalist restructuring, was showing success in building a new bourgeois hegemony. The dominant strategy gained legitimacy because it was presented as “anti-neoliberal” or “post-neoliberal”, after having imposed a falsified notion about “neoliberalism”, and after appropriating the lexicon of so-called critical thinking. The stabilizing strategy had as one of its axes a profound reconfiguration of society, presenting as “progressive” ideas and policies elaborated by neo-conservatism since the 1980s. That “post-neoliberalism” elaborated from the system influenced left governments to different degrees , but it became the “mainstream” in the social sciences in Latin America.