Reproduction and class struggle. Outline of an Althusserian reading of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Based on a brief review of three important perspectives for a critical approach to so-called "neo-liberalism”, the study identifies a common vacancy in its characterization as a post-hegemonic capitalism; as a specific rationality; or as an hegemonic articulation. Despite their differences, these analyses are based on the detection of a single feature of the neoliberal social formation - the logic of Capital; Power or political articulations – and find extremely difficult to conceptualize Its inscription in the overdetermined complexity of the historical totality. Based on this reading, a revision of the Theory of Social Reproduction formulated by Louis Althusser towards the end of the 1960s is proposed, focusing on the question of the complex of relationships, tendencies and tensions that confer its contradictory consistency and heterogeneous historicity to a social formation. This allows the intellection of long-lasting structural processes, but through the essential detours of the concrete aspects in which these tendencies exist and without which their economic determinations become abstract: on the one hand, the ideological situation, understood as the complex of devices, discursive formations, practices and interpellation forms that give concrete existence and at the same time modulate the duration/transformation of a given order of relations; on the other hand, the processes of political subjectivation of its contradictions, in its overdetermined contingency. This approach allows us to characterize neo-liberalism as a conjunctural process, unstable but determined, and –finally- to sketch out some general conjectures in order to understand in a complex way the concrete circumstances of the Argentinean neoliberal situation in recent years.