Monetary stabilisation policies and militarisation : The effects on social and class structure in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (1950-1985)

This paper analyses the origins of neoliberalism in the Southern Cone; a process that has its origin in the period 1955-65 with the implementation of monetary stabilization policies, followed later by the structural adjustment programs. Both the monetary stabilization and the structural adjustment policies were global macroeconomic mechanisms to restructure the dynamic of capital accumulation and economic power relations. By promoting a freer flow of capital, the economic stabilisation policies facilitated the entry of foreign capital into the economies of the Southern Cone, predisposing the economies of the Southern Cone to the process of internationalisation of production and financial capital, which began to take shape after World War II more rigorously.This process can be understood within a double transformation of capital as 1) the destruction of the domestic bourgeoisie; a process of relative concentration of capital; and 2) the internationalization of finance capital; a process of absolute concentration or centralization of capital. Military rule was a necessary conditions for the project and process of ‘peripheral privatization’ through which capital was accumulated, but not mainly through the productive circuit of capital (M-C-M+). This process thus took place within a global transformation in the process of concentration of capital characterised by a shift in the domain that provided the productive sphere towards the financial and commercial spheres as mean to secure the valorization of capital, requiring the liberalization of international credits and financial markets, thus setting the bases for the expansion of neoliberalism as an accumulation regime, globally and within Latin America. Therefore neoliberalism and globalization found their grounds in Latin America’s ephemeral ‘national developmentalism’ promoted by ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean)