From Neoliberalism to Social Liberalism Situating the National Solidarity Program Within Mexico’S Passive Revolutions by Susanne Soederberg
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LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Soederberg / FROM NEOLIBERALISM TO SOCIAL LIBERALISM From Neoliberalism to Social Liberalism Situating the National Solidarity Program Within Mexico’s Passive Revolutions by Susanne Soederberg Launched by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988, Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (National Solidarity Program— PRONASOL) has become the organizational center of an ever-changing, complex web of education, health, productive, and infrastructural projects aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor (PRONASOL, 1991). This de facto welfare program, which embodies Salinas’s “third-way” doc- trine of social liberalism, basically claims to be more humane and democratic than unfettered free-market capitalism and heavy-handed state intervention- ism. The objective of this article is not to supply another policy assessment of PRONASOL but to address a gap in the literature by providing a historical materialist account of its emergence. Seen through the lens of historical mate- rialism, PRONASOL is neither an attempt to alleviate the poverty afflicting well over half the population of Mexico nor a move toward constructing a stronger civil society in a top-down fashion (cf. Salinas de Gortari, 1990). Instead it is a reflection of new forms of ideological and political domination targeted at preserving the hegemony of the ruling classes while excluding the majority of Mexicans from participating in the formulation of state pol- icy. In the face of the increasing poverty brought on by “modernization,” PRONASOL aims to weaken counterhegemonic movements in civil society as Mexico further deepens its dependent relations with the United States. Antonio Gramsci once referred to these expressions of political and ideologi- cal retrenchment in the relations between state and civil society as a “passive revolution” (1992). This article will suggest that there have been two passive revolutions in Mexico. It can be argued that the first of these passive revolu- tions, neoliberalism, emerged after the 1982 debt crisis whereas the second, social liberalism, took place during the late 1980s. The argument presented here will proceed as follows: First, it will explore the political and ideological implications of the relative autonomy of the state Susanne Soederberg is an assistant professor of international political economy in the Depart- ment of Political Science at the University of Alberta. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 118, Vol. 28 No. 3, May 2001 104-123 © 2001 Latin American Perspectives 104 Soederberg / FROM NEOLIBERALISM TO SOCIAL LIBERALISM 105 in an effort to clarify my understanding of the Gramscian notion of the pas- sive revolution of the “extended state.” Second, it will briefly discuss the political and ideological contours of the neoliberal passive revolution and its eventual deterioration. Third, it will examine the ideological and political meaning of PRONASOL within the reinvented form of neoliberalism, social liberalism. While the ideological component of this new configuration of the extended state is based on social liberalism, its political facet is based on con- tinental rationalization. Here the argument is that PRONASOL is an integral political facet of an economic restructuring strategy aimed at deeper eco- nomic integration with the United States. The final section draws conclusions and discusses some of the argument’s political implications. THEORIZATIONS OF A PASSIVE REVOLUTION WITHIN THE EXTENDED STATE The analytical departure point of my argument is that PRONASOL, like most policy formulations in Mexico after the 1982 debt crisis, is a reflection of a passive revolution—a change in forms of political and ideological domi- nation by the ruling classes that is rooted in the wider restructuring of the social relations of capitalist production, or civil society. This position hinges on Gramsci’s (1992) notion of the extended state, a state made up of both political and civil society. Whereas Gramsci places more emphasis on the state (or superstructure) as the active and positive factor in the historical development of capitalism, I accord equal weight to civil society; assigning the state a greater role in the perpetuation of class dominance inevitably leads to political determinism and thus to a distortion of state power. Since the notion of the extended state rests upon the wider concept of the relative autonomy of the state and civil society, it is useful to provide an explanation of this complex relationship. To start with, to observe that the bourgeois state is a moment of the capital relation is not to say that it is either an instrument of capitalists or capital factions or an autonomous actor. In con- trast, the state is made up of various ideological and coercive apparatuses that constitute a specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes within civil society (Poulantzas, 1978). Because of the inherent con- tradictions of the capital relation and the inability of capitalists to resolve struggles with labor on their own, there is a need for a mediating force. The capitalist state plays this role by assuming the appearance of a separate insti- tutionalized entity (or relative autonomy) vis-à-vis civil society. It is Janus-faced in that it is at once real and illusory. 106 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Inasmuch as the state is an integral moment of the capital relation, its par- ticularized appearance is fictitious. Because the state reflects power relations that are inherently contradictory and dynamic, public policy will take on these qualities as well (Poulantzas, 1978). Thus capitalist restructuring requires a constant renewal of political and ideological schemes to facilitate the implementation of policies aimed at overcoming the barriers to capital valorization. As the state attempts to intervene in civil society, it internalizes these conflicts and is in turn restructured. The relations between the state and civil society are dialectic rather than deterministic. At the same time, the state’s particularized position is real, for in guaran- teeing the reproduction of capital accumulation through various forms of intervention the state does not directly participate in the larger processes of the valorization of capital—production and exchange. From this point of view, the bourgeois state assumes the necessary appearance of class neutral- ity free of force. Nevertheless, this force can and must be overtly used if at any time the basis of the reproduction and self-expansion of capital and of exploi- tation is threatened by, for instance, a counterhegemonic movement (Hirsch, 1978). Following Gramsci, coercion itself is not enough to guarantee class rule and thus the continuation of capitalism. Therefore the consent that pro- duction enjoys among the subordinated classes is to be located in the power of consciousness and ideology. Class domination seeks to preserve domina- tion over the masses by gaining active consent through their self-organiza- tion, starting within civil society and resonating in all ideological apparatuses (such as schools, universities, state-owned media, etc.) up to the workplace and the family (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980). Consequently, state policy con- sists of politics backed by coercion and ideology. The other component of the extended state is civil society. Civil society is not a neutral, private, classless (i.e., free from class conflicts) space sus- pended between the market and the state. Rather, it is situated within the larger social relations of capitalist production. Its constituting human ele- ments are two opposing classes: capitalists and labor. It is the realm where the valorization of capital occurs and is thus marked by economic relations of exploitation. Because it is part of the extended state, it is not free of political forms of class domination. In contrast, it is interlaced with economic and political power and the dependency structures inherent in the capital relation. Consequently, it is the space in which, through public discussion and debate, the dominance of the state is legitimized and hegemony (consent) is pro- duced; yet, at the same time, it is also the object of state intervention (coercive force) (Gramsci, 1992; Hirsch, 1999). Civil society is not simply an instru- ment of class rule. Instead, it is a politico-ideological battlefield upon which alternative hegemonic concepts of societal order and development are con- Soederberg / FROM NEOLIBERALISM TO SOCIAL LIBERALISM 107 tinually being established, and this is particularly true during times of crisis and socioeconomic upheaval. Taken together, state and civil society form an intricate complex through which coercion and consent congeal in a “hege- monic bloc.” For Gramsci, hegemony is the ideological predominance of bourgeois values and norms over these of the subordinate classes. Through this hegemonic bloc one version of reality—for example, the mystification of one class, one society is diffused throughout the extended state in all its insti- tutional and private expressions. Because of the contradictory nature of the capital relation, crises are inevi- table, albeit unpredictable. In terms of the extended state, crisis implies not only economic restructuring but also political and ideological retrenchment in the relations between state and civil society. The crisis of capital over- accumulation that manifested itself in Mexico in the mid-1970s was marked by currency devaluations, heightened class struggle, high levels of unem- ployment,