Postneoliberalism as institutional recalibration: Reading Polanyi through Argentina’s soy boom

Abstract

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the “fictitious commodities” of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a “farming without farmers” model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and “overflow” that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.

Rethinking Polanyi's double movement through participatory justice: Land use planning in Puerto Rico

“…While perhaps initially perplexing from a double-movement perspective, these cases demonstrate several important caveats. First, that the double movement cannot be read as a simplistic pendulum motion between markets and state-society; that instead the “key question is how land, labor and money continue to be de/marketized in a geographically variegated mix of diverse institutional forms that determine their de/commodification in given contexts” (Berndt, Werner and Fernández, 2020: 220). Actually-existing markets are always in the process of becoming, articulated through a variety of economic and socio-natural logics that include the capital-M Market among others (Berndt, Rantisi and Peck, 2020).…”

Geographies of production II: Thinking through the state

“…The government reinstated retenciones (or export taxes) on soy exports, among other agricultural commodities, but tied tax rates to processing, charging lower taxes on derivative products in order to incentivize functional upgrading. The rural reaction to retenciones unified a cross-class agrarian opposition to the progressive government, cascading in events that led to its downfall and the return of a revanchist neoliberal administration (Lapegna, 2017; Berndt et al, 2020).…”

The Glyphosate Assemblage: Herbicides, Uneven Development, and Chemical Geographies of Ubiquity

“…Debates over neoliberal natures and the problematic of the human-planetary interface signaled by various "-cene" concepts (Anthropocene, Plantationocene, etc.) draw attention to the "chemicalization of life" or life understood "as the emergent property of complex flows of chemicals with great temporal and spatial complexity" (Romero et al 2017, 167; see also Heynen et al 2007;Bigger et al 2018). That is, the ubiquity of chemicals combined with newfound anxiety about them demands new ways of thinking about humannature assemblages and their boundaries.…”

“…That is, the chemical ubiquity that characterizes the glyphosate assemblage is also a geography of uneven development comprising shifting firm networks, state policies, and changing trade relations. Our approach highlights marketization and commodification of glyphosate as a contradictory and always incomplete process driven by exclusions, devaluations, and more-than-economic logics that remake geographies of uneven development (see Werner 2016;Berndt, Peck, and Rantisi 2020;Berndt, Werner, and Fern andez 2020).…”