ABSTRACT
The current phase of neoliberal ascendancy is rooted in changes in the correlation of class forces within the state, society, and workplace. The eclipse of trade unions and left-wing parties, in part the result of repression beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing to the mid-1970s (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Uruguay, and so on), the co-optation of trade union bureaucrats (in Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere), the conversion of Social Democratic parties to liberalism (Chile and Bolivia, for example), and the right turn of intellectuals allowed for high rates of accumulation by depressing labor costs and thus encouraging greater flows of capital and goods across national boundaries. In the 1980s, with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the ex-Soviet Union into mafia-run ministates and bankrupt economies, the incorporation of China into the world economy, and the retreat of Third World revolutionary movements from the anti-imperialist struggle, the external opportunities for Latin American countries seeking alternative trading and investment partners dried up. In the new international context, even the language of politics changed: Imperialism became "globalization," and Latin American dependence on creditors was called "interdependency." Investments in cheap labor undermined the trade union's role as a countervailing force. The fragmentation of the trade unions and divisions in the labor movements encouraged local and overseas investors to intensify exploitation and accumulate capital. State intervention directed at controlling and defining the sociopolitical activities of popular sectors in civil society and establishing narrow parameters for political and economic debate increased. Big business may be oriented toward the "world market," but neoliberal statism has become the practice: State subsidies to exporters and government bailouts of private bank losses have been accompanied by massive state-directed redistribution of income upward and outward, justified on the basis of "international competitiveness."
