Everything changes, nothing does. The new Argentine "hegemonic tie" in the Latin American labyrinth

Abstract

In the context of the virulent moment Latin America is living, the recent Argentine crisis shows the renewal of the "hegemonic tie" as a specific form of the impossibility of stable domination and of a society-state relationship where popular protagonism continually defies state projects, causing the breakout of cyclical political crisis. At the dialectical junction between a Latin American "world logic" in which the crisis of the peripheral neoliberal state persists and the "logic of the place" of the hegemonic tie, the crisis that opened in 2017 revives the catastrophic collapse of 2001 and the relations of force that it has produced, contained, but not resolved, during the Kirchner decade. The new neoliberal attempt to discipline the masses and to break the hegemonic tie led by the Macri government, similar to that of the "Menemist decade" of 1990, end up having the same frustrated result due to popular opposition to FMI-backed “structural adjustments” and the chronic limitations of the Argentine economy, which have reappeared in the form of foreign debt and capital flight. The consequent return to power of Peronism occurs in the context of a dramatic economic, social and health crisis, aggravated by the coronavirus COVID-19, a scenario that, if on the one hand compromises the achievement of a "social pact" apt to contain popular demands, on the other enables profound transformations of society on the back of the establishment of an "emergency welfare state".