Social Classes and Capital Accumulation in Recent Argentina: The 2008 Agrarian Conflict

Abstract

In March 2008, the passage of a law to amend grain export taxes in Argentina led to a clash between rural organizations and the national administration. Given its characteristics and political consequences, this clash was one of the most significant events of the Kirchnerist administrations and one of the most outstanding agrarian conflicts in Argentine history. An analysis of it in the context of Argentina’s specific pattern of capital accumulation, in which land appropriation by the industrial sector is significant in explaining valorization capacity, shows how economic determinations affected the political actions of the pertinent social subjects and how the conflict was resolved in favor of the rural bloc. En marzo de 2008, la aprobación de una ley para modificar los impuestos a la exportación de granos en Argentina condujo a un enfrentamiento entre las organizaciones rurales y la administración nacional. Dadas sus características y consecuencias políticas, este choque fue uno de los más significativos durante las administraciones kirchneristas y uno de los conflictos agrarios más destacados de la historia argentina. Un análisis del mismo en el contexto del patrón específico de acumulación de capital en la Argentina, en el que la apropiación de la renta de la tierra por parte del sector industrial ayuda a explicar la capacidad de valorización, da cuenta de cómo los factores económicos afectaron las acciones políticas de sujetos sociales pertinentes y cómo fue que se resolvió el conflicto a favor del bloque rural.

Institutionalizing Populist Power Coalitions in Latin America: Argentina’s Economic and Social Council and Brazil’s Council for Economic and Social Development

“…In 2003 President Da Silva created the Conselho de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social to discuss a new social contract among socioeconomic organizations (Pereira, 2020) and ensure governability in a difficult context (Fleury, 2005). The goal was to create a broad coalition made up of the Paulist industrial business class (Patschiki, 2016) and the unions around the development model proposed by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party--PT), which the business owners distrusted.…”

“…To attract them, President Da Silva agreed to corporate overrepresentation on the council, and this was sustained by successive administrations. From 2003 to 2019, the employers' organizations held an average of 50 percent of the seats, as opposed to 14 percent for the union sector and 18 percent for social organizations (Pereira, 2020).…”

“…The Paulista industrial business class was hegemonic during the Da Silva phase, in line with its neodevelopmentalist hallmark. The industrialists saw the institution as suitable for preserving the decisive quotas of influence on the economic policy of a proworker government (Patschiki, 2016), although their support was always ambiguous and distrustful (Pereira, 2020). In 2016, Temer reinforced the probusiness slant of the council, although incorporating mostly multinationals linked to the services and finance sector (García, 2019).…”

“…Although the so-called strategic-directions documents were extremely general (Santos and Gugliano, 2015), they served to create agreement on common positions among the political and economic elites around the promotion of industrial policy (Fleury, 2005) and, subsequently, broader topics such as inequality, labor informality, education, and environmental sustainability. The council headed by Da Silva also crafted policy proposals (e.g., the creation of a National Fund for Regional Development) and supported draft legislation such as the Micro and Small Business Law (Pereira, 2020) before sending it on to the Congress (Santos and Gugliano, 2015), Furthermore, it issued anticrisis recommendations in the 2008-2009 period that expanded unemployment assistance and averted layoffs through training.…”

The Politics of Fiscal Legitimacy in Developmental States: Emergency Taxes in Argentina Under Kirchnerism

“…25 However, while the government managed to contain large-scale nation-wide mobilisations by the sector, favoured by the recovery and rise of international prices (which in the case of soy peaked at 684 US$/Ton in August 2012), it could not control the spill out of contention to the partisan and electoral arena. 26 The increase in political polarisation that followed the rural conflict meant that export taxes were no longer a mere distributive discussion about who and in which proportion should appropriate extraordinary incomes, but became part of a broader clash between antagonistic visions of the state: between a progressive national-popular front represented by Kirchnerism, advancing state autonomy and post-neoliberal development, and those that denounce it as a rentier, populist, and authoritarian project, seeking to extend the state's control over the economy while concentrating the government's control over the state (Mazzuca 2013, Pérez Trento 2021). An ex-government minister summarised this, indicating that '[…] for many the Kirchners are associated with retenciones, Kirchnerismo was born during the tax revolt' (Anonymised interview C, Buenos Aires, 26/04/2019).…”