From neoliberalism to neodesarrollismo and back?

Reading Karl Polanyi in Latin America

Christian Berndt (University of Zurich)

Victor Ramiro Fernández (CONICET/ Universidad Nacional del Litoral)
Marion Werner (SUNY Buffalo)

- DRAFT VERSION -

Abstract: This paper adapts Polanyi’s core concepts of the Great Transformation in order
to understand recent Latin American experiences of neoliberalism and “postneoliberal-
ism”. We argue that the tensions between market-led regulation and reactions spurred by
the resulting social fallout must be refracted through the region’s peripheral position
within global production networks and transnational hegemonic structures. By incorpo-
rating a Gramscian perspective that situates the state as a terrain of struggle over accumu-
lation and regulation, we expand upon Polanyian insights to analyze de/marketization in
Argentina through the lens of the soy boom. We show that the double-movement impetus
to address the social fallout of neoliberal reforms was mediated by an enabling-disabling
contradiction within the state. The country’s increased dependency on soy production,
exacerbated by cyclical boom, currency effects, and financialization, and limited by a
fragmented state without the conditions to discipline transnational capital, effectively
deepened the country’s subordinate pattern of accumulation as a condition for selective
redistribution. When commodity prices started to fall again, Argentina’s delicate
de/marketization arrangement fell apart, giving way to a return to a market-radical ne-
oliberal order.
1. Introduction
Latin American’s recent history can be read as a succession of (counter)movements: from
the dismantling of the developmental state via neoliberal reforms, to a popular reaction
heralding a neodevelopmentalist and redistributive long decade. As the “postneoliberal”
turn in the region began its second decade, however, and a second generation of leaders
was tasked with turning “easy” redistribution under conditions of commodity price
booms into “deep” transformation in times of commodity price lows, the weaknesses of
these varied projects were threatening past gains and future prospects. Events of the past
three years point to a re-capture of the state by neoliberal champions in Brazil and Argen-
tina, resulting in the resurrection of radical market policies, while Ecuador, Venezuela
and Bolivia face emboldened oppositions and significant political and economic limits to
their redistributive projects.
In this paper, we reinterpret these trajectories of de/marketization by reconstructing Po-
lanyian insights around the double movement and fictitious commodities in the Latin
American context. We build on Burawoy’s observation that waves of marketization tar-
geted variously at the fictitious commodities of land, labor and money “differentially [af-
fect] countries according to their history and placement in the world economy” (2013:
41). The dialectical tension between market-led regulation and reactions spurred by the
resulting social fallout must be refracted through the region’s peripheral position in the
world-system, and, in particular, how states, firms, and workers are situated within global
production networks and transnational political forces. By placing double movement-type
regulatory shifts in a global structural context, however, we do not intend to revert to a
kind of functionalism. Instead, we incorporate a Gramscian perspective that situates the
state as a terrain of struggle over accumulation and regulation, channeling differentiated
internal and external interests. Our goal then is to develop a situated understanding of the
relationship between the state, de/marketization movements, and global economic and
political forces, revealing the constraints and possibilities for deeper reforms that would
alter accumulation and regulatory patterns in Latin America.

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In what follows, we draw on Polanyi’s conceptions of the double movement and fictitious
commodities in the Great Transformation (2001[1944]).1 These concepts serve as useful
starting points for considering regulatory shifts in Latin America and their relationship to
broader trends. Our purpose is not to identify the blind spots or inconsistencies of these
terms or their varied uses over time and across disciplines. Our aim, rather, is to draw on
Polanyi’s generative concepts in order to develop our understanding of how
de/marketization is conditioned by regional positionality in the global economy.
In the Great Transformation, Polanyi outlined the institutional transformations that un-
derpin industrialization. At pains to counter the naturalistic pretense of the classical polit-
ical economists and their inheritors, Polanyi detailed the “highly artificial stimulants ad-
ministered to the body social” (2001: 60) in order for market society to come into being.
Shifts in technology, commercial norms and state regulations instituted the commodifica-
tion of land, labor and money, his famous “fictitious commodities”; their circulation via
market mechanisms became the sine qua non of industrial capitalism of the nineteenth
century. “[T]he elements of industry,” Polanyi wrote, “had to be on sale” (ibid: 78). Here,
in this process of commodification, Polanyi located the primary contradiction at the heart
of capitalist industrialization. The making of land, labor and money into commodities –
or more precisely, their regulation via the market mechanism – provoked varied forms of
social reaction since the extension of the market undermined the very existence of labor,
nature and businesses as “elements of industry” and of society itself. “[N]o society could
stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time,”
Polanyi argued, “unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organiza-
tion was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill” (ibid: 77). The double move-
ment describes the resulting impetus to social protection, but as many have noted, the
concept was politically underspecified. Indeed, for reasons that were particular to the de-
bates of his time, Polanyi was more at pains to emphasize the spontaneous character of
social protection – in contrast to the artificial and planned nature of market regulation –
than to presume its content. If the double movement, or the dialectic of de/marketization,

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We do not pretend to offer a comprehensive analysis of these terms based on Polanyi’s entire oeuvre as
that is not the purpose of this paper. Rather, given the popularity of the Great Transformation, and the rela-
tively common use of these two concepts from that text to evaluate neoliberalism/postneoliberalism, we
restrict our discussion here to that text.

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denoted an abstract tendency, its concrete manifestations were entirely dependent upon
the historical conditions of a given polity. The double movement could be socialist or
fascist, egalitarian and expansive or regressive and exclusionary. As Burawoy cautioned,
“depending on historical context, market expansion can be followed by reaction or with-
drawal, by a great transformation or a great involution” (2003: 244). In his re-reading of
Polanyi, Burawoy argued that the task of what he called sociological Marxism is to de-
termine under what conditions states expand or retrench market mechanisms, and how
those actions are spurred and conditioned by civil society.
The capacity of states to facilitate and to limit marketization processes strongly depends
on national political trajectories and positioning in the global economy. Polanyi was cer-
tainly attuned to the way that both of these dimensions shaped the character and magni-
tude of movements for social protection in Europe. In his brief comparative discussion of
proletarianization, for example, Polanyi argued that by the time peasants were pushed
into industry on the European continent, forms of social protection were already in place.
The neophyte proletarians of France, unlike those of England, were already incorporated
into the nation as political subjects when they became industrial wage laborers. The tran-
sition to wage labor in continental Western Europe was thus experienced as a form of
improvement in stark contrast to the epochal social trauma suffered by England’s new
wage workers fifty years earlier (2001: 173-177).
With respect to non-European societies, and again, restricting our analysis to the Great
Transformation, Polanyi’s discussions were in one of two modes, neither capable of fully
considering the role and form of peripheral states. In his engagements with anthropologi-
cal texts, Polanyi drew on non-European societies as non-coeval subjects who afforded
the West a reflexive view of the socially disintegrating forces of capitalism (e.g., chapter
4). But Polanyi also drew on the “non-West” in more abstract terms to make his point
about the impact of marketization as an external force wielded by colonial powers to rup-
ture inherited customs and institutions. He argued that European colonialism primarily
acted as a force of primitive accumulation, dissolving forms of social solidarity in order
to compel colonial subjects to sell their produce or their labor to the market. “Ironically,”
Polanyi wrote, “the white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s world mainly con-
sisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger” (ibid: 172). In order for

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hunger, or “nature’s penalty” as he called it, to compel the commodification of labor and
nature, colonial forces first had to dismantle the social structures that protected against it.
Thus, in an occidentalist mode (Coronil 1996), the forces of colonial capitalism imposed
the commodification of land, labor and money from the outside. One consequence of this
emphasis on external force was that the degree of commodification both of labor and land
in (semi)peripheral regions could easily be overstated (Burawoy 2013).
We propose adaptations to Polanyi’s concepts of fictitious commodities and the double
movement in order to mobilize his perspective towards constructing a more robust under-
standing of contemporary dynamics in Latin America. In order to so, we proceed in four
steps. First, we draw on world-systems discussions of commodification and uneven de-
velopment in order to develop a relational (i.e., taking the core-periphery dynamic as cen-
tral) understanding of the double movement beyond Europe (section 2). Second, we en-
gage with neodevelopmentalism as the ideological underpinning of a rearticulated role of
the state in Latin America, taking Burawoy’s synthesis of Gramscian and Polanyian per-
spectives as our starting point (section 3). This is followed, third, by a stylized case study
of Argentina’s soy boom in order to elucidate and explain why and how the movements
for demarketization and social protection were limited by continuous marketization under
the Kirchner administration (section 4). In a fourth step we tease out the limits of the
“postneoliberal” development consensus in Argentina, connecting with Polany’s ficti-
tious commodities.

2. Double movements and the spectrum of commodification in the world sys-

tem
What are the implications of thinking about the double movement in countries that occu-
py a peripheral position in the global economy? On the one hand, Polanyi offers insight
into this question. Social protection can exhibit patterns of “combined and uneven devel-
opment” in the classic sense. “Late” developers – in his brief example, Germany and
France – benefit from a trajectory of social reaction to strong marketization starkly dif-
ferent from their “early” counterpart, England. The political outcomes are highly distinct:
a trade union movement that articulates a party posterior to its creation (i.e., England), on
the one hand, and labor parties that spawn and associate trade unions (e.g., France), on

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the other. But of course, these examples are drawn from core capital: a position that bene-
fits from relative ease to accumulate wealth guaranteed by political power that secures
the conditions of that accumulation. In the orthodox, world-systems and dependency
sense of the term, the core benefits from surplus transfers from the (semi)periphery.
While this notion of surplus transfer has important limitations, the world-systems discus-
sions of the effects of that surplus, together with the theory’s insights into uneven returns
mediated by complex geographies of commodification at the global scale, can shed light
on how the dialectic of de/marketization is shaped by uneven development.
Hopkins and Wallerstein (1977) introduced the commodity chain concept in the late
1970s to shift development debates from a focus on the national development trajectories
touted by modernization theorists to the linked processes that connected actors and activi-
ties across space. The commodity chain concept functioned as a heuristic device to make
sense of the "new international division of labor". World-systems scholars were precisely
interested in how commodity chains articulated a variety of forms of labor control. Simi-
lar to the notion of coloniality advanced by their long-time interlocutor, Anibal Quijano
(e.g., 2000), they argued that capital accumulation at the global scale stemmed not simply
from the different distribution of activities across the world, but also from the trade and
exchange amongst producers that operated under substantially different institutional
forms. In short, they emphasized that commodification was not simply a social process
that expressed a given state of play of social forces in a particular polity; rather its degree
and form were spatially, indeed transnationally, mediated. For world-systems scholars,
“the world class system may be understood as a continuum from protected labor through
wage labor to coerced labor which roughly corresponds to the core/periphery hierarchy”
at a variety of scales (Chase-Dunn 1998: 39-40, emphasis in the original). The expansion
and deepening of commodification not only provoked double movement reactions for
social protection in one locale, but also shaped the highly uneven, integrated and dynamic
pattern of commodification worldwide as capital shifted not only in terms of location, but
also in terms of organizational form (i.e., subcontracting) in reaction to de/marketization
forces. Indeed, today’s global production networks, when studied through the lens of un-
even development, reveal precisely the dynamic sociospatial integration of different labor
regimes and forms of labor control.

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As feminist and critical race scholars have long argued, the high degree of social protec-
tion that benefited a subset of workers in the welfare states of the post-WWII period in
the global North was achieved in the context of a stifling national morality (family, sexu-
ality, discipline etc.) and at the cost of excluding key section of the population – includ-
ing housewives, as unpaid labor, and mostly immigrant women and women of color, who
worked in occupations that were excluded from welfare state protections (Collins and
Mayer 2010, Haug 1998). But from a world-systems perspective, these social protections
were also inseparable from the position of core capital itself. World-systems scholars ar-
gued that the surplus generated through the core-periphery hierarchy effectively subsi-
dized those social protections without a substantial erosion in profits (e.g., Chase-Dunn
1998). Here, they found common ground with the position of Raul Prebisch and Latin
American structuralism, which argued that the high wages and benefits enjoyed by work-
ers in the capitalist core were maintained by high prices for industrial goods imported by
the periphery, rather than the low prices that should have followed from increases in
productivity (Prebisch 1959). In effect, if the economic significance of core-periphery
hierarchy rested upon accumulation by “extra-economic means” (i.e., primitive accumu-
lation), the political significance of regular, expanded accumulation in this hierarchical
arrangement lay in the use of unevenly distributed returns to attenuate class conflict in
core regions by sharing a portion of the system’s rewards with white, male workers in
core countries.
There are at least three related limitations to world-systems understandings of commodi-
fication as a product of internationally linked activities. First, whether intended or not by
world-systems scholars, regulation theorists and others criticized this approach for a nar-
row functionalism. While the core-periphery structure may well serve to regulate, or sta-
bilize, “the global regime of accumulation” (Lipietz 1986: 22), we certainly cannot
“read” the mode of regulation off of a country’s position in the hierarchical structure of
global capitalism (ibid). Second, world-systems scholars betrayed a tendency to presume
that marketization forces were external to the Third World and applied in a largely unidi-
rectional fashion (Coronil 1996). Third, similar to Polanyi’s discussion of “nature’s pen-
alty,” the world-systems perspective tended to overstate the degree of commodification of
land and labor in the global South. Indeed, as numerous scholars of the “new internation-

6
al division of labor” have long argued, the low wages of neophyte factory workers in the
periphery are often subsidized by a host of non-market material and cultural mechanisms,
from rural-to-urban food transfers from agrarian smallholders to the construction of fem-
inized labor as temporary and subsidiary to household income (e.g, REFs Ong 1991,
Wolf etc). Indeed, these three limitations are part and parcel of the same problem. For
our analysis to be robust, precisely the degree of importance of external forces in shap-
ing the social (class) compromise on commodification of the fictitious commodities in the
periphery, reflected in the extent of that commodification, must be at the center of our
inquiry.2
If our discussion up to this point has largely considered the dialectic of de/marketization
for labor in the (semi)periphery, what of land and money? While space limitations pre-
clude a comprehensive discussion, we signal two key intersections that connect land and
money and the history of Latin American political economy germane to our later discus-
sion of postneoliberal developments in Argentina. From the structuralist theory of the UN
Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to dependent de-
velopment of Cardoso and Faletto, Latin American political economy historically focused
on the position of peripheral nations as exporters of raw materials to core capitalist coun-
tries and importers of their industrial goods. When it came to agriculture, structuralism
identified two problems for Latin America: the rigidity of agricultural supply and over-
supply of agricultural labor. These constraints were mainly seen as resulting from the
prevailing land tenure system, given that both the latifundia system and small landholders
were unproductive – the former because of its rent-seeking rationale, the latter because
campesinos lacked the means for technological progress (i.e. land and capital). The obvi-
ous solution was classical agrarian change as documented by Karl Polanyi: increase agri-
cultural output by increasing agricultural productivity and/or developing new farmland
areas, and the absorption of excess labor in industry (Figueroa 1993: 287-289). But the
limitations to this strategy were set by the core-periphery relation: an autonomous, dy-
namic industrial sector largely failed to materialize; the region generally remained subor-

2
In answering this question, we may also understand the iterative production of core/periphery relations,
not as a structural certainty but rather an overdetermined arrangement whose apparent stability is produced
contingently rather than fixed transhistorically.

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dinately incorporated into global production networks controlled by MNCs; and speciali-
zation in agricultural and extractive commodities only deepened. As Fernando Coronil,
drawing on Lefebvre, evocatively argued “the international division of nature provides
the material foundation for the international division of labor: they form two dimensions
in a unitary process”(1997: 29; see also Hornborg 1998).
In terms of nature’s commodification, as a process constituted through struggles and
forces at a variety of scales (local, national, and international), the post-WWII period has
largely exhibited a continuous trend directed alternatively by multinational capital or the
national state. Indeed, the largely uninterrupted marketization of nature despite “double
movement” type reactions to neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrates one
way in which crises of commodification emerging from land, labor or money interact. As
we will discuss below, Pink Tide governments of the long first decade of the 21st century
extended the marketization of nature through their dependence on raw material exports
with the intention to ameliorate the crisis of marketization of labor. In short, social pro-
tection for labor was to be achieved through the deepening marketization of nature.
Finally, while the market regulation of currency subjects all nation-states to the errant
whip of finance capital, it does not do so with equal force or frequency. The particular
position of (semi)peripheral countries creates more crippling constraints on the possibility
to introduce social protections via currency regulation in the post-Bretton Woods period.
In Latin America during periods of high commodity prices, creeping overvaluation is at-
tributed to two structural factors: the generally high profit and interest rates prevailing in
developing countries, and the so-called “Dutch disease”. The latter originates from Ri-
cardian rents within the primary commodity sector and is particularly problematic for re-
source dependent countries that lack diversification. While the more competitive primary
activities are better able to cope with these distortions, appreciation of the real effective
exchange rate has dire consequences on non-tradable sectors and manufacturing sectors,
creating structural disincentives for industrial development. Indeed, these structural
tendencies towards currency appreciation were identified in the germinal study of Latin
American development in the 1940s, the so-called “bible” of Latin American structural-
ism (Prebisch 1949), even if they circulate today under the sign of “Dutch disease,”
stemming from observations of the North Sea gas boom in the 1970s. The less diversified

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and highly import-dependent economies of the periphery especially experience the cur-
rency effects of resource booms more acutely, reinforcing their position in the interna-
tional division of nature in periods of high resource prices. If the regulation of currency
through floating rates creates this impediment during periods of high resource prices,
countercyclical moves are impeded by the debt regime in periods of resource price de-
cline. Across Latin America under structural adjustment, the IMF imposed currency de-
valuations in order for so-called non-traditional exports to replace resource exports as
earners of foreign exchange and thus payments for the servicing of restructured loans.
These policies unleashed competitive devaluations across the region as countries compet-
ed for international investment in assembly manufacturing and other labor-intensive sec-
tors (Ould-Mey 2003), reinforcing the region’s position in the subordinate nodes of glob-
al production networks.
In short, the dialectic of de/marketization requires a situated, historical analysis that re-
mains attuned to the structures of uneven development in the global economy without
falling into tautological arguments that equate a state’s regulatory arrangement with its
structural position. In order to understand how national regulation emerges through its
interaction with uneven development, we argue here that the double movement can pro-
ductively be analyzed through a Gramscian lens. If “society” in Polanyi is a spontaneous
social category, Gramsci offers us an understanding of civil society and political society
(i.e., the state bureaucracy) as a terrain of cultural struggle over the souls of the people,
with the state acting as the guarantor for the kind of moral discipline needed for industrial
capitalism to be successful. Combining Polanyi’s “active” with Gramsci’s “civil society”,
allows us to better integrate the state into our analysis and to discern the continuities and
discontinuities between the different moments of de/marketization as situated tactics
within a protracted war of position (Burawoy 2003: 198; Haug 1998)

3. Postneoliberal development and the state in Latin America

In his argument for a sociological Marxism, Michael Burawoy offers a useful synthesis of
Gramscian and Polanyian perspectives. He notes that Polanyi distanced himself from the
category of class, associating it with the economistic fallacy and emphasizing the sponta-
neity of social protection instead (2001: Chapter 13). Thus, Burawoy contends, in Po-

9
lanyi, society often appears to “[have] a reality of its own, acting on its own behalf,
whereas Gramsci understands civil society as a terrain of struggle” (2003: 198). He draws
upon Gramsci to operationalize how “double movement” dynamics operate on and
through social alliances and struggles (2003). Polanyi’s “active society,” as Burawoy
calls it, occupies an institutional space oriented towards (and often against) the market,
while Gramscian civil society interpenetrates the state (ibid), and, we want to emphasize,
its formal apparatus, political society (Gramsci 1977). “If Gramsci starts out from the
way civil society, through its connection to the state, organizes consent and constricts
class struggle,” Burawoy argues, “Polanyi starts out from the way active society counter-
acts the dehumanizing effects of the market economy” (2003: 199). Analysis of post-
neoliberal developments in Latin America drawing on one or both perspectives are very
common (e.g. Brand and Sekler 2009). Indeed, scholars have even drawn upon the theo-
retical distinction between the two perspectives to parse differences among countries, for
example, suggesting postneoliberal Argentina as more Polanyian compared to a more
Gramscian Venezuela (see Yates and Bakker 2014). We do not categorize national cases
along these lines, but rather develop a combined approach in order to understand the
changing role of the state in the “second” or “postneoliberal” movement, keeping the in-
ter- and transnational framework of uneven development in mind (Fernandez 2016; Levy
2008).3 We then draw on this approach to offer an historically grounded analysis of the
role of the state in the dialectic of de/marketization in postneoliberal Argentina.
In an extensive discussion of the “postneoliberal” turn in Latin America, Fernán-
dez argues that any analysis must maintain a focus on the region’s peripheral position not
only within global production networks, but also transnational hegemonic networks

3
Just as its apparent other neoliberalism, “postneoliberalism” has been treated in a wide array of ways in
the literature. We do not follow those who seem to imply a clear historical break with a seemingly coherent
neoliberal era. Our starting point is a nuanced understanding of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is neither a
“big Leviathan” against which everything else is measured and which appears to be the ultimate cause for
all sorts of processes (Collier 2012, 186), nor is it an amorphous chameleon capable of assuming almost
any form. Rather, we conceptualize neoliberalism as a specified set of elements that are always entangled
with other rationalities and logics that are not reducible to neoliberalism (see Ferguson 2010; Peck 2010;
Sheppard and Leitner 2010). Understood in this way it is less interesting whether we see a rearticulation
encompassing enough to justify the label postneoliberalism or whether the crisis of a particular market-
radical variant gave way to a different form of neoliberalism. What we are interested in this paper is how
representations of postneoliberal rupture mask what may more adequately conceptualized as ambivalent
dis/continuities in the neoliberal project, in América Latina and elsewhere.

10
(2016; see also Arrighi 1994, Levy 2008). Concretely, these structures received inordi-
nate attention in the literature on the Washington Consensus (e.g. REFs). This work
showed that neoliberalism was not simply imposed from the outside; rather from los Chi-
cago Boys in 1970s Chile to World Bank-funded titling programs in the 1990s, there was
no mistaking the entanglement of transnational proponents of neoliberal policies and state
institutions. Moreover, as Ferguson (REF) and Gupta (REF) note for countries in Africa,
the neoliberal period also saw a significant transnationalization of the state is another
sense: non-state actors, including NGOs of wide provenance, as well as contractors, took
over hitherto state functions of social protection as governments were submitted to strict
zero-deficit budgeting and debt repayment schedules. The analysis of the institutionaliza-
tion of neoliberalism through state agencies and non-state actors was particularly poign-
ant since political parties elected to power on anti-austerity platforms over the course of
almost two decades repeatedly submitted to the neoliberal debt regime, severely eroding
democratic institutions in many countries that were emerging from colonial rule (West
Indies) or dictatorship (South America).
In general, state institutions as a key terrain of social and ideological struggles have re-
ceived less attention (at least in the English language) in literature on postneoliberalism.
In a Polanyian vein, focus has been more on social movement reactions to neoliberalism
that led eventually to the election of governments who were finally obliged to push back
against neoliberal dictates (but see Brenner et al. 2010: 109). Perhaps as a consequence of
this focus on “active society” – the reaction against the market – scholars have tended to
focus on the forms of redistribution and new forms of recognition, specifically for indig-
enous peoples, enacted by neodevelopmentalist states (see the debate on “postneoliberal”
state-led social assistance; e.g. Escobar 2010; Ettlinger/Hartmann 2015: 40; Gago 2015,
Harris/Scully 2015). Scholars have arrived later to the question of why and how these
projects of redistribution and recognition saw a deepening of the marketization of nature
and, in short, why postneoliberal states have been largely constrained in their attempts to
transform their countries’ position in the international division of nature and labor. In-
deed, from the perspective of the dialectic of de/marketization, there is far more continui-
ty between the “first” and “second” movement than is often considered and to understand

11
this continuity we must shift our analytical perspective from “active society” to civil and
indeed, political society: that is, the terrain of state institutions themselves.
The social fallout from “roll back” neoliberal reforms gave way to a double effect at the
level of the state, what Fernández conceptualizes as a Gramscian enabling-disabling pro-
cess. In the abstract, state programs were targeted at re-enrolling subjects who had suf-
fered marginalization and immiseration through neoliberal reforms. This process took
place through both universal mechanisms and well-worn corporatist paths of selective
redistribution. In Argentina, for example, the state restored universal child benefit and
old-age pensions, de-privatizing the latter. On the other hand, a multiplicity of programs
directed at particular constituencies with direct links to the state proliferated, taking the
form of state support to cooperatives, small enterprise, targeted food subsidies, and oth-
ers. These forms of selective redistribution exhibited continuities with long-standing cor-
poratist practices deeply rooted in forms of populism. This “enabling” process of redistri-
bution, principally expanding consumption, was coupled with the inability of the state to
deepen demarketization and extend universal forms of redistribution (decommodifica-
tion), or to discipline the institutional actors that govern global production networks and
transnational hegemonic structures (Fernández 2016: 31-32). If the first process limited
state action to advancing fragmented forms of social cooperation and inclusion, the se-
cond impeded the possibility for the state to exert significant control over the process of
accumulation, thus allowing for the iterative reproduction of the region’s peripheral posi-
tion. From a Gramscian perspective, Fernández argues that despite key differences and
variegation across national contexts, those institutions and actors that govern global pro-
duction networks, together with allied political forces operating at transnational and na-
tional scales, largely preserved and even extended their control in the region. These forc-
es successfully guaranteed that nationalization of key industries and de-privatization of
social benefits and services undertaken by the neodevelopmental state, as well as selec-
tive redistribution, did not fundamentally undermine the forms of marketization that re-
produced the region’s peripheral position (ibid). This enabling-disabling process in effect
linked and conditioned redistribution to subordinate accumulation.
The ideological vehicle for this enabling-disabling process was Latin American neostruc-
turalism and neodevelopmentalism. Neostructuralism is a body of thought that emerged

12
in the late 1980s from the UN ECLAC (or CEPAL in Spanish) (i.e. ECLAC 1990; Sunkel
1993; ECLAC 2010, 2012, 2014; Bárcena and Prado 2016). A key defining feature is its
dismissal of one-sided market-driven policies modeled after the Washington Consensus
(WC) of the 1990s, criticizing these measures as "[failing] to provide full employment
and decent jobs, produce unsustainable levels of income and wealth inequality, and ex-
pose national economies to increasing financial instability” (Pérez Caldentey 2016: 3).
Neodesarrollismo shares with neoestructuralismo a common antagonist in the Washing-
ton Consensus. The former is primarily associated with the Brazilian economist Luiz Car-
los Bresser-Pareira, who coined the term as a name for a Latin American development
alternative to neoliberal radical market policies (Bresser-Pereira 2011: 7). “As an alterna-
tive based on Latin-American structuralism and on the successful experience of fast
growing Asian countries,” Bresser-Pereira writes, neodevelopmentalism promotes “a
strategic role for the state, fiscal responsibility, exchange rate responsibility, growth with
domestic savings, and active social policy (Bresser-Pereira and Gala 2010: 663).
A key commonality between these two related schools – what we might term the post-
neoliberal development consensus – is a more active role for the national state and a fo-
cus on social inclusion. Government policies are not regarded as antithetical, but “indis-
solubly linked to the emergence and consolidation of market economies” (Pérez Calden-
tey 2016: 68). It is with the active use of monetary policies and the management of the
exchange rate, the selective renationalization of vital activities (e.g. resources, energy,
infrastructure) and the use of subsidies and tariffs that the state is considered to be able to
provide the conditions conducive for a thriving globally competitive export sector and to
overcome its “dualist” production structure. Together with redistributive and expansive
social interventions this should pave the way towards the “socially inclusive develop-
ment” envisaged by proponents from these two schools (Fernández 2016: 23; Pérez
Caldentey, 2016: 69). It should be added, however, that this does not mean a return to the
interventionist state of “old” developmentalism. Sunkel and Ramos (1993: 7) warn
against “excessive reliance on idealized state interventionism.” Bresser-Pareira (2011:
13) refers to a more indirect, “enabling and encouraging” state role that resonates with
the post-Washington Consensus zeitgeist. In its new “complementary”, enabling role the
state is called upon to create an institutional framework that “brings out the creativity and

13
dynamism of productive agents (entrepreneurs and workers) and induces their coopera-
tion and coordination” (Sunkel and Ramos 1993: 13). Purportedly flat network forms of
social coordination and reciprocity are promoted, providing the type of institutional envi-
ronment that facilitates state orchestrated redistribution of the fruits of global market in-
tegration.
Represented by proponents such as José Antonio Ocampo (2016: 96) as “the end of the
era of orthodox, export-led growth policies” that mainly center on primary commodities,
the seemingly new “postneoliberal development consensus” reemphasizes the need for an
active industrial policy and demands investments into the industrial base of the countries
in the region. But at the same time it is not a return to the import substitution paradigm of
the past. The aim instead is the development of globally competitive, high value manu-
facturing and service activities that are capable of taking the “opportunities offered by the
global economy” (Ocampo 2016: 98). This goal is to be achieved by a dual policy ap-
proach that combines more traditional demand- with supply-side measures. On the one
hand, there is a strong focus on policies that seek to close knowledge and productivity
gaps in export-oriented sectors and promote “high-tech” economic activities. These are
the sectors with highest productivity growth potential and highest knowledge intensity
that should lead the innovation process. On the other hand, the state promotes activities
that remain more strongly orientated towards domestic markets and should be enabled to
profit from more competitive, export sectors whose dynamism is “radiating out to other
sectors” (ECLAC 2012: 16). With this dual strategy, the structural heterogeneity of these
economies should be overcome, a classical problem identified by structuralist thinking
(ECLAC 2012: 110; Infante 2013: 15). The buzzword in the ECLAC documents is “tech-
nological progress”: the state is expected to do everything needed to create strong nation-
al innovation systems (Ocampo 2016: 98). Incorporation into global production networks
and a focus on “upgrading” – or improving position and thus returns within – those net-
works includes the primary commodity sector, and in Argentina, agriculture in particu-
lar.4 Another important role for the state concerns a “light-touch” regulation of exchange
rate policies in order to address “Dutch disease”-type effects (see discussion below).

4
The argument here is, not unfoundedly, that it is wrong to one-sidedly represent the production of soft and
hard commodities as activities that only involve negligible amounts of R&D and technology (Sunkel 1993).

14
4. Sojización: the enabling-disabling process in Argentina
“Popular nationalist” Argentina can in many ways be regarded as an exemplary case of
how “new center left countries” have adapted these ideas. After the crisis of 1998-2002
and Néstor Kirchner’s election, the country implemented proactive policies that aimed at
“economic growth with social inclusion” (Axel Kiciloff in Steinslager 2014) and regard-
ed insertion into global commodity markets as a means towards national development
(Porta 2016: 408). An active state embarked on a project of reindustrialization and redis-
tribution, using export earnings to improve the country’s production and technology base
and to reduce income inequality. In line with the neostructuralist/neodevelopmentalist
script, the Kirchner administrations also developed an optimistic, modernist vision of Ar-
gentinian agriculture (e.g. see MAGyP 2011). Rather than the expression of a proactive
strategic plan, however, the celebration of a new era for the country’s industrial agricul-
ture reads more like a retrospective discursive attempt to legitimize deeply contradictory
marketization policies that almost exclusively center around a single export commodity:
the soybean.
After experiencing a continuous increase since the 1960s, the production of soybeans in
Argentina took off in the mid-1990s culminating in a veritable boom during the 2000s as
global market prices rose sharply while Argentina found itself locked out of international
financial markets. So dominant has the soybean become that observers in the public me-
dia and the academy alike routinely refer to the “sojización” of the country. The facts
speak for themselves: enormous productivity increases have seen to it that that the
amount of harvested soy per hectare has tripled since 1960. Geographically, sojización
has long left behind the pampa humeda, the agrarian heartland, and has expanded into
areas that were hitherto only integrated into export-oriented agriculture to a limited ex-
tent. This holds above all for relatively arid and marginal areas in the north, the NOA
(Noroeste Argentino, mainly the provinces Salta, Santiago del Estero and Tucumán) and
the NEA regions (Noreste Argentino, above all the province Chaco) as they are referred
to in the official regionalization language. In the wake of this development, Argentina has

This position is also shared by critics such as Argentinian economist Claudio Katz who puts the old dualist
opposition between the agricultural sector and industry in question (2016: 234-235).

15
turned into a key player in the global soy market: the country currently ranks third
amongst soy exporting countries globally. In the case of higher value derivatives such as
soy meal or soy oil, Argentina is the world’s market leader. It is hardly surprising there-
fore that the commodity became of paramount importance for Argentina’s balance of
trade. Agricultural commodities and meat regularly account for more than 50 per cent of
the country’s exports, with soy alone being responsible for roughly half of this. In 2016,
for instance, the soy complex (beans, meal and oil) had a 30% share of the country’s ex-
ports. This export performance has turned soy into Argentina's most important source of
foreign exchange (source: INDEC 2016).
As the key crop driving 21st century agriculture in Argentina, the soybean has had an
enormous impact, restructuring production technologically and organizationally with
enormous social and geographical consequences. Technologically, it is the application of
a “nuevo paquete tecnológico” (Arceo et al. 2011: 8) that has turned into the symbol for a
modernizing sector that stands every comparison with its counterparts in countries such
as the US. The key to this is Monsanto’s GM soy, legalized by Carlos Menem in 1996
and having converted the country into a playground for the biotech industry, a veritable
“laboratorio a cielo abierto” (= open air laboratory) (Gras and Hernández 2013: 27). Or-
ganizationally, soy is a good example of how the “revolutionary” changes that have trans-
formed production in core manufacturing sectors have diffused into high volume, high
value agriculture. The buzzwords are “encadenamiento” (linkage), “producción en redes”
(network production) and “agricultura sin agricultores” (farming without farmers). In-
spired by the cascading waves of outsourcing that have given rise to fragmented value
and supply chains in almost every economic sector, protagonists of sojización in Argenti-
na emulated these developments. Companies such as Los Grobo achieved dominance and
notoriety for contracting out in the value chain, above all upstream. Production inputs
such as land, machinery, seeds and all the necessary technology are leased or bought
from partners in the network. Represented as an “asset-light” flexible model, the net-
works of the various actors involved are rhetorically held together in a discourse of part-
nership and collaborative learning, a narrative that advances network embeddedness as an
antidote against unfettered market competition pitting individual actors against each oth-
er. In such a value chain setting, the traditional sectoral opposition between agriculture

16
and industry is considered a thing of the past, industry no longer being agriculture’s ene-
my, but rather profiting from a dynamic sector: “Industry no longer is agriculture's foe
and needs a dynamic campo” as the former minister of economy Axel Kiciloff put it
(Pagina12 2015). The soy value chain is thus touted by neostructuralist proponents as
playing a key role in overcoming the structural dualism of Argentina’s economy, not-
withstanding that soy-based accumulation had already driven the economy in the 1990s
(Roitter et al. 2013: 126).
Consistent with neostructuralist nostrums, the state played a key facilitating role in both
these areas. In terms of technology, the Kirchners continued the commitment of previous
governments to research and development in the sector. A key role is being played in this
context by the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Founded in 1956
in the years following the so-called “Revolución Libertadora” (the military coup against
Juan Perón), INTA has driven the industrialization of Argentina’s agriculture throughout
the following decades, in close co-operation with the private sector and largely independ-
ent from the particular political orientation of the governments in question. Throughout
the decades INTA’s interventions have been inspired both by a quest for productivity in-
creases and by attempts to push the technological frontier forward to permit farmland ex-
pansion - the classical modernist rationale underpinning agrarian change.
Important steps into this direction have been the Red de Agricultura de Precisión set up
by INTA in the late 1990s and the national program Cambio Rural, also implemented by
this public institution and directed at small and medium-sized producers (La Voz del In-
terior 2008). While Cambio Rural started in 1993 during the Menem years, a successor
was implemented by the administration of Cristina Kirchner under the name of Cambio
Rural II in 2014. Another, recent example for the state’s involvement with the transfor-
mation of the sector into a high-tech endeavor is INVAP, a state-owned company linked
to aerospace and defense activities that has created a joint venture with Los Grobo with
the aim to develop solutions for the application of satellite technology in agriculture. Fur-
ther actors cooperating with INTA in the technological transformation and liberalization
of the agriculatural sector include the CREA movement (Consorcio Regional de Experi-
mentación Agrícola similarly originating from the 1950s and organized in the Asociación
Argentina de Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola - AACREA), the Aso-

17
ciación Argentina de Productores en Siembra Directa (Aapresid), founded in 1989, and
Argentina’s oldest agricultural association - the Sociedad Rural Argentina (SRA) (Bisang
2007: 193; Palmisano 2014, 126; Roitter et al. 2013: 176).
State institutions such as INTA have also been connected to the organizational changes in
the soy production complex. In the 1990s in particular, a complex network of public,
semi-public and private organization emerged that in addition to INTA include various
value chain oriented associations clustered around key export commodities. These “en-
cadenamiento” policies are aimed at capturing the high road of the new global economic
order, linking large corporate players with smaller ones, farmers with service-providers,
primary producers with processing companies, producers with exporters and traders, and
public and private organizations involved in R&D (Leiva 2008: 222). It has been the soy
association, ACSOJA, that has been particularly visible in this context (Gras and Hernán-
dez 2013: 43). Often not sitting easily with more traditional organizations that represent
actors “horizontally” (e.g. Federación Agraria Argentina as the voice of traditional cha-
carero farmers), the “vertical” value chain orientation of the interventions fits well with
the construction of the postneoliberal (and indeed post-Washington Consensus) state as a
market facilitator.
It is important to add, that the entanglement between state institutions and private agricul-
tural capital is not confined to the national level. The technological and organizational
changes giving form to the highly competitive soy complex have a lot to do with the in-
volvement of the global biotech industry. “Network production” and “technological
package” crucially depend on the corporate strategies of transnational companies such as
Monsanto, Nidera or Syngenta (see Fig. 1). This provides evidence for the entanglement
of the interests of global players with the Argentinian state institutions and the extent to
which there is a division amongst national actors (agricultural associations, government
ministries etc.) between those who profit from export-oriented industrial agriculture and
those that do not.

18
Figure 1: Technological evolution in Argentina’s agroindustrial sector

Source: Bisang 2007: 202

These examples are illustrative of the continuities between ostensibly neoliberal and
“postneoliberal” governments when looking at the country’s agricultural complex. But
there are also important differences. The Menem administration had deregularized the
sector, liberalizing agricultural trade, abolishing the Junta Nacional de Granos (JNG)
which had controlled the export of grains and oilseeds centrally, and doing away with
export taxes (retenciones). Retenciones (and conflicts around the instrument) have a long
history in Argentina, having been a regular feature of all historical epochs, both more
market-liberal ones such as the “Revolución Libertatora” and the Frondizi government of
the 1950s or the military regime of the 1970s as well as more protectionist ones such as
under Perón (Bolsa de Comercio de Rosario n.y.; Rapoport 2008). In a clear break with
the Menem era, Nestor Kirchner reintroduced the instrument to absorb some of agricul-
tural profits in order to finance redistributive social programs and the strengthening of the
industrial base. As the key export commodity, soy was taxed most strongly.
Rather than outright marketization or demarketization, then, we witness the ambivalent
rearticulation of the relation between state and market in the realm of agricultural policy
in non-antagonistic terms. This blurring of the state-market divide, however, came at a

19
cost, alienating, as is it did, large parts of Argentinian society that would normally form
the basis for a progressive political project. Dissenting voices included representatives of
traditional chacarero agriculture such as the Federación Agraria Argentina (e.g. Buzzi
2014), who criticized the bias towards large national and transnational capital, protestors
alarmed by the social and environmental costs of sojización and other monocultures, and
indigenous groups resisting violent dispossession. Such criticism was regularly dismissed
as backward-looking opposition to progress and as obstructing Argentina’s way towards
a model for 21st century agriculture, or as the political economist Miguel Teubal (2006:
71) commented critically: “Those who are against transgenic plants are against progress”.
Because this “progress” was the material basis for the redistribution programs that low-
ered Argentina’s poverty rate under the two Kirchner administrations, opponents of the
soy model were also regularly accused of effectively depriving the poor of much-needed
support. Opposition from quite different backgrounds were marginalized in the popular,
national developmentalist discourse that emerged around sojización.

5. The limits of the postneoliberal development consensus in the world-system

While the construct of a postneoliberal containment of unfettered marketization processes
may have been able to conceal the deep-seated contradictions during the long 2000s,
more recent transformations quickly exposed the fragility of the new developmentalist
model. These external forces revealed the limitations of the enabling-disabling dynamic
that had stabilized accumulation over the long decade. When the wider global economic
environment deteriorated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, these contradictions
broke open, undermining the fragile national consensus and proving that the neostructur-
alist promise of economic development with social equity and democracy in the country
was a short-term bargain rather than a long-term achievement.
We highlight here three main limitations that illustrate the particular challenges faced by
states of the periphery to effectively demarketize fictitious commodities. First, we focus
on the efforts of the Argentine state to manage the country’s exchange rate and to create
“smart” market borders between domestic agricultural crops and its export specialization
in soy. Both these policies represented attempts to create conditions for Argentina to only
selectively be governed by world-market prices with the aim of preserving domestic pur-

20
chasing power, especially for basic foodstuffs. Second, we discuss the role of financiali-
zation in the process of sojización, which ultimately exacerbated the already unequal ef-
fects of the commodity boom and undermined development in other sectors. And third,
we briefly turn to labor and the paradoxical observation that the Argentinian state sought
to finance the social protection of labor by rents from a commodity complex that has
been involved in the wide-scale displacement of agrarian labor. We argue that the neode-
velopmentalist logic is almost turned on its head: rather than financing the protection and
social inclusion of labor with soy profits, the soy production model is effectively stabi-
lized by state-delivered social programs for the victims of extractive commodity produc-
tion.

a. Exchange rates and “smart” market borders

When Néstor Kirchner came to power following Argentina’s default and the subsequent
economic crisis, it was the strategic aim of the government’s agricultural policy to stimu-
late upgrading processes in soft commodity production more generally and across the
whole soy value chain in particular. Although the almost explosive increase of soy pro-
duction and the soy export boom had a lot to do with productivity gains, there are of
course important additional factors. This concerns above all the largest devaluation in
Argentina’s history after the convertibility era (parity between both currencies; currency
board) ended in 2002. In the subsequent regimen of posconvertibilidad, a flexible ex-
change regime that de facto had narrow floating bands, government policy oriented itself
on what is termed “stable and competitive real exchange rate” (SCRER) (Basualdo 2006:
166; Frenkel and Rapetti 2008: 216; Rivera-Quiñones 2014: 69). With its coupling with
strict money supply targets and the priority of the fight against inflation over wage in-
creases this is another example for policy continuity with the neoliberal Menem era
(Frenkel and Rapetti 2008: 220; Wylde 2011: 443).
The sudden peso devaluation of about 300% was a catalyst for Argentinian exports, soy
and soy derivatives in particular becoming highly competitive in the general context of
high commodity prices during the 2000s. But this is only one part of the story. Under-
neath this impressive performance of the soy commodity sector lurked a familiar problem
of primary resource dependent economies: the negative effect of commodity exports on
the industrial base of the countries in question often labeled as “Dutch disease”. In the

21
original narrow meaning this refers to an appreciation of the real exchange rate resulting
from a boom in commodity exports. Such a widening gap between real effective ex-
change rate and the official exchange rate can also be observed in Argentina in the post-
convertability era. This leads to a structural imbalance that undermines the competitive-
ness of domestic vis-a-vis foreign capital, a pressure that the commodity sector is better
able cope with than the industrial one, providing further momentum to an ongoing dein-
dustrialization process (Palma 2008: 6-7). As in other Latin American countries, this
phenomenon has also been described in Argentina as the reprimarization of economy
(Arceo and Basualdo 2006: 23; Azpiazu et al. 2011: 40; Ocampo 2016: 95; Slutzky 2012:
74). The new developmentalist medicine against the “Dutch disease” is a floating ex-
change rate that is managed in a way that the effect is neutralized, the exchange rate
thereby becoming competitive (i.e. not harmful for weaker sectors of the economy
(Bresser-Pereira 2011: 12, 21).
Just as for other countries in the region, neostructuralist “encadenamiento” policies in
Argentina were severely complicated by these external constraints. On the one hand the
Kirchner governments had little choice but to place all hope in primary activities as the
only reliable source of the export earnings needed for its ambitious development pro-
gram. On the other hand, there was an urgent need to secure the access of the (urban)
population to food at affordable prices and to keep inflation at bay. It was a key aim do-
mestically to keep domestic prices for key agricultural products such as wheat or beef
well below their export market equivalents and to disarticulate internal from external
price dynamics as far as possible.
In such a situation, and certainly helped by rising demand and prices globally, soy was
almost without alternative as a source of foreign exchange (Poth 2010: 276). What the
Argentinian state did therefore was to implement a complicated agricultural trade regime
that involved a skillful construction of “smart” market borders, discriminating both be-
tween commodities and within specific commodity chains. This was to be achieved with
a mix of regulatory devices, ranging from export taxes, export quotas and import re-
strictions to price controls or compensations for negatively affected industrial producers
(Regúnaga and Tejeda Rodriguez 2015: viii). Key industrial activities were protected
with a 35% import tax for foreign competitors, while the main agricultural commodities

22
were burdened with the retenciones. In addition to generating much needed Dollar in-
come, retenciones were also legitimized as an instrument capable of neutralizing Dutch
disease given that they are expected to have a dampening effect on commodity exports.
In line with the discriminatory treatment of key agricultural commodities, only soy en-
joyed unhindered access to world markets, while wheat, maize and beef were subject to
more stringent export controls. In so doing, clear incentives were given to farmers to pro-
duce soy (at the expense of more traditional commodities). A look at the historical devel-
opment of export numbers illustrates that this selective market regime was “successful”:
the gap between soy and its key derivatives (soy cake and oil) on the one hand and other
commodities opening in the mid-1990s and widening enormously during the 2000s. After
having constructed a market regime that appeared to leave farmers little choice than
planting soy, the Kirchner government established its selective export tax regime, that
levied higher rates on soy (35%) than wheat (23%), maize (20%) or beef (15%). In an
attempt to stimulate the export of processed rather than raw product, derivative products
enjoyed lower retenciones in those commodity chains (see Regúnaga and Tejeda Rodri-
guez 2015). The latter measure also appeared to have the desired effect. In the soy com-
modity chain, for instance, unprocessed soybeans currently account only for one fifth of
all soy-related commodity exports, the share hovering around one third in the early 1990s
and around 80% in the early 1980s (data source: FAOSTAT, own calculations).
In the end, however, the peculiar mix of export incentives and protectionist measures im-
plemented by the Kirchner governments turned out to be too contradictory to be sustaina-
ble. There were two interrelated reasons for this. The first is external and concerns the
dependence of the redistributive policy on global commodity prices. When soy prices
started to fall from 2013 onwards, the limits of this particular application of the neostruc-
turalist policy script became obvious. Second, this meant that underlying internal tensions
were ever more difficult to contain. Conflicts around the retenciones pitted the govern-
ment against small and medium-sized producers. Export tax rates did not discriminate
according to farm size or economic situation, with the effect that smaller, economically
weaker farms were burdened relatively strongly while larger players were better able to
cope with the extra costs. Tensions came to the fore when the former forced Cristina
Kirchner to revoke a controversial increase of soy retenciones in 2008. At the end of the

23
day the struggle around retenciones has given further impetus to the ongoing concentra-
tion process in the Argentinian countryside (Fernández 2013, 86) and demonstrated the
extent to which the Argentinian state has only limited room to maneuver politically (Bas-
ualdo and Arceo 2010: 248), a problem that became even more visible after the price
boom had ended.

b. Soy financialization
The particular renegotiation of domestic/global market border underwriting the govern-
ment’s development ambitions is complicated further by the ongoing financialization of
primary commodity production and trade. In a nutshell, there are four ways in which
global financial market rationalities connect with the soy commodity chain, considerably
constraining the political room for maneuver. The first concerns the increasing role of
grain futures markets. The soybean is amongst those commodities for which prices are
determined to a large extent on futures markets, mainly performed at commodity ex-
changes. It is also amongst the few commodities globally for which there is evidence of a
subordinate role of spot prices, that is, changes in futures prices leading more often to
changes in spot prices than the reverse (UNCTAD 2011: 7). What this implies is that de-
cisions by the various actors in the commodity chain are increasingly influenced by the
workings of futures markets, starting with the Chicago Board of Trade and ending with
ROFEX (Rosario Futures Exchange) and MATba (Mercado a Término de Buenos Aires).
The second aspect connects with the increasing importance in commodity markets of
“non-traditional” players. This refers to a number of financial players that have increas-
ingly redirected their speculative gaze towards agricultural commodities in recent years.
Driven more strongly by “speculative” motifs these actors have (1) forced more tradition-
al commodity brokers into the same direction; and (2) have contributed to increasing
price volatility. Third, there is the (gradual) transformation of agri-food companies and
the globally dominant commodity traders (e.g. ABCD) in the commodity chain into fi-
nancial institutions with growing internal investment divisions. The role of these actors is
one of framing the soy complex as a valuable investment. This involves the application of
various technologies and devices. This is done in a discourse that emanates from an array
of market reports, statements, blogs, press releases and other media activities that are
mainly directed at clients and prospective clients, but additionally serve as a means to

24
give commodity brokers and traders visibility in a competitive struggle for public atten-
tion.
The fourth way in which financial market rationalities trickle down the soy commodity
chain is an Argentinian particularity and concerns the emergence of the so-called “pooles
de siembra,” particularly important to the expansion of the soy commodity frontier into
the northwest and northeast. The “pools” made a sudden appearance in the years follow-
ing the 2002 crisis. The banking system had collapsed, limiting access to traditional cred-
it finance and preventing agricultural elites from taking advantage of rising prices and the
peso devaluation. As a response, creative agricultural producers pioneered a new model,
adapting the institutional figure of the fideicomiso (= trust fund) to the needs of industrial
agriculture: the pooling of financial capital and/or means of production. A funds structure
was established and the collected money was used to finance the production of soy. At
first it was often family members and close friends who contributed, but soon the profit
margins attracted all sorts of investors who had little to do with agriculture: from urban
professionals to companies from non-agricultural sectors, all searching for a way to in-
vest their money profitably. The “sowing pools,” quickly gave rise to a whole infrastruc-
ture of consulting and legal service organizations (Fernández 2012; Pertierra Canepa
2014).5
The financialization of Argentinian agriculture had direct repercussions for the rural land
market. The new “asset light” organizational production model led the main players –
large firms such as Los Grobo as well as the pools de siembra – to prioritize the short-
term leasing of land over direct acquisition. Some companies, for instance, Adecoagro
largely owned by foreign investors, additionally started to create value with land, buying
land cheaply and reselling it after increasing its productive potential (Adecoagro 2014:
68-70). As a consequence of this, land prizes and lease costs have risen dramatically with
distinct geographical effects. In the agrarian heartland, the pampa humeda, the turn to-
wards soy, incentivized by state trade policies (retenciones), led to a growing demand for

5
The pooles de siembra are also a good example of the need to be cautious when talking about financializa-
tion. The increasing presence of non-agricultural actors who regard soft commodity production predomi-
nantly as a yet another asset to invest in is mitigated by the strong role of commodity chain insiders and the
presence of other key driving forces such as the technological and organizational innovations discussed
above. It would be wrong therefore to infer a linear transformation of agricultural production by financial
rationalities (see Williams 2014 for a similar argument).

25
agricultural land and increasing prices, costs that producers in the region only had a
chance to recoup when planting soy. This generated a kind of vicious circle, crowding out
more traditional commodities such as maize or meat, rearticulating traditional social rela-
tions and accelerating the already mentioned concentration process further (source: Már-
genes Agropecuarios various issues). The soy frontier regions, on the other hand wit-
nessed the violent dispossession of land. This holds above all for areas in the northwest
such as the Chaco salteño. Here land has been traditionally used communally by
indígenas and criollo families for extensive livestock breeding in the monte ecosystem. In
other words, this is land that had not been fully integrated into capitalist agricultural pro-
duction before (Gordillo 2013, 2014). These violent processes therefore also provide
support for our earlier cautionary reminder to be open for contemporary processes of
primitive accumulation when applying Polanyian thinking in the Global South. This spa-
tial expansion has largely been driven by the “pools de siembra” that remain largely in-
visible to the local population because of their opaque ownership structures (Grosso et al.
2010, 126). Tomás Palmisano aptly refers to a “new latifundismo” in this context
(Palmisano 2014, 46). This combination of financialization and land marketization is an
important driver of the soy boom, playing an important role in the reprimarization pro-
cess and further limiting the room for maneuver for neostructural redistributive policies.

c. When the state enables and disables at the same time: The dis/articulation of agrarian
labor
It is the great irony of the translation of neodesarrollismo in Argentina and related con-
texts that there was little alternative to realizing the vision of socially inclusive growth
with the promotion of the soft commodity that is perhaps the most hostile towards labor.
In other words, in Argentina and elsewhere in “soylandia”6 we are confronted with the
impossible situation of seeking to achieve redistribution and social protection of labor by
pushing for a brutal marketization of nature that played a crucial role in displacing labor
in the first place.

6
This phrase was coined by Syngenta, represented in media advertisements with a map covering the soy
regions in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

26
When looking at waged labor, what we are confronted with in the pampa humeda has
been an ongoing process of “deproletarianization”. Because of the increasing capital in-
tensity of soy production there is hardly any need for manual labor, leading to an almost
negligible employment effect and a massive expulsion of agrarian labor (Lattuada and
Neiman 2005, 10). What is left is a diminishing amount of seasonal labor hired mainly by
the growing number of contratistas, service providers that enjoyed an enormous boom in
the “asset-light” network production system pioneered by the soy complex. These work-
ers are subject to increasing exploitation rates, their hourly wages belonging to the lowest
nationally – in a sector that counts amongst the most productive in the Argentinian econ-
omy (Villulla 2015: 125). It is this process that prompted Verónica Gago (2015) to ob-
serve how the new developmentalist logic has turned around: Rather than providing the
redistributive means for social inclusion, the largely consumerist progressive social poli-
cies of the Kirchner era stabilized the extractive soy model. While this conclusion may be
one-sided, it is not far-fetched to conclude that the waged labor and “non-labor” dis-
placed by the soy boom in the pampa humeda and the Argentinian chaco may have
turned into the urban recipients of the various programs of social assistance that have
rightly been lauded as the progressive heart of kirchnerismo.
In a parallel process the agrarian heartland in particular saw an unprecedented process of
professionalization and managerialization in the wake of the technological and organiza-
tional changes described above (Gras and Hernández 2013: 42). A new “technocratic”
class comprised of agrarian engineers and agrarian economists emerged that is not em-
bedded locally and forms its identity in relation to the command of the “latest” scientific
knowledge. Both anti-kirchnerist sources and those close to the Kirchner administrations
celebrated the new figure of the entrepreneurial Argentinian producer. The Plan Estraté-
gico Agroalimentario y Agroindustrial presented by the government of Cristina Kirchner
in 2011, for instance, represented the “nuevo productor rural del siglo XXI” as an entre-
preneurial subject with a “clearly positive attitude” towards the implementation of state
of the art technology, always eager – having internalized a “spirit of productivity” – to
maximize profits without asking for subsidies, always ready to take risks against all odds
(instead of asking for protection by the state), equipped with formal education titles in
agrarian science, business management and organization studies (MAGyP 2011: 44).

27
In the wake of these changes, the traditional social relations defining the rural chacarero
culture are broken up, new social inequalities inscribed into existing ones. Traditional
family farmers in the heartland have a difficult choice to make: either adapt to the new
times by taking risks and expanding operations or give up and lease land to the pools de
siembra or companies such as Los Grobo. The latter then either take on new roles in the
production system (e.g. as service providers – contratistas) or lead a life as rentiers, liv-
ing of the money generated by the leasing of their land (Gras 2012: 17, Slutzky 2010:
166; Grosso et al. 2010). This is not to say that traditional power hierarchies are eliminat-
ed. What we are witnessing is increasing social complexity, a rearticulation of insiders
and outsiders, that does neither fully away with the semifeudal class of landowners nor
with the extreme inequality between enormous wealth and desperate poverty that Ernesto
Laclau had already observed in the mid-1970s (Laclau 1979).

6. Conclusion [still to be written]

28
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