Verónica Gago's book provides a fascinating and original account of the production of neoliberalism from the perspective of popular economic practices in Argentina. Thinking of neoliberalism as an ‘art of government’, Gago explores the heterogeneous material and embodied practices, strategies and subjectivities that organise everyday life and articulate the city and the market, producing the territory from below.

Situated in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the departure point for this study is the crisis in Latin America (2001 Argentina, 2003 Bolivia and 1999 Ecuador): a moment when the institutional political order collapsed, and illegal popular markets with street vendors – such as ‘La Salada’ – clandestine workshops and villas (i.e. shantytowns) started to emerge and expand in the city. But rather than reading this as a vestige of barbaric, pre-political, pre-modern society, Gago sees in the informal economies and in the migrant worker a sector that politicises social life through the organisation and self-management of workshops, illegal markets and villas.

With the slow recovery from the economic crisis, these popular initiatives, rather than disappear and re-engage through formal economic circuits, settled and expanded. During this period, clandestine workshops multiplied and the popular market of La Salada diversified – selling everything from branded clothing to DVDs, shoes and computers, and later moving to online platforms. At the same time the villa population in the city of Buenos Aires grew by 52 per cent between 2001 and 2010. Tracing the transformation of the city and popular practices, Gago explores how, beyond the ‘return of the state’, popular and informal economies articulate another form of progress, one that escapes the logic of the neoliberal subject – a construction imagined as a universal (white male) individual guided by profit and calculation, and economic reason – which collectively develops by capitalising an economy of exclusion. This means that the proliferation of precarious forms of labour relations, the establishment of irregular commercial circuits and the clandestine workshops became integral to the global economy.

Contesting the notion that – with the advent of the so-called ‘pink tide’ period in Latin America and the return to a state discourse – neoliberalism in Latin America was in retreat, Gago skilfully demonstrates neoliberal persistence: from above, it is entangled with an extractive neodevelopmentalist model; from below, it is ‘anchored in territories, strengthened in popular subjectivities, and, in organisational terms, expanding and proliferating within popular economies’ (p. 11).

These alternative economic initiatives, nevertheless, rather than being a revolutionary force against capitalism, expand the notion of neoliberalism: a ‘rationality that negotiates profits in this context of dispossession, in a contractual dynamic that mixes forms of servitude and conflict’ (p. 5). Using an ethnographic analysis to explore the persistence of neoliberalism in Argentina – and extensible to the whole region – the book explores the ‘new neoliberal landscape’ by presenting a detailed material, affective and performative account of the interwoven topology of La Salada, the clandestine workshop and the villas in a post-Fordist context.

Each chapter explores the paradoxical position of popular economic rationality in the context of the market, the workshop and the villa. Gago traces the constant tension, ambivalence and oscillation between obedience and resistance, legal and illegal, original and copy, and inclusion and exclusion. Following a feminist and postcolonial critique, the author develops the key concepts of motley city and baroque economies to show how these binary oppositions enter into crisis through communitarian practices. With these strategic notions in place, Gago manages to theorise these new labour forms, their multiplying forms of accumulation and the production of a heterogeneous city, disrupting the divide between modern and non-modern that simultaneously enables the production of other forms and logics.

With this permanent tension in place, Chapter 1 starts by locating La Salada – the biggest illegal market in South America – as a border space at the centre of a transnational market economy. Gago describes it as a borderland, in an epistemological, material and analytical sense. Rather than existing as an exception to the city composition and modern forms of social reproduction, La Salada is considered as a privileged place to explore modernity in crisis. As such, the pre-eminence of informal economies articulates a central feature of the assemblage of the global economy in the global south. In Chapter 2, Gago explains the recomposition of labour emerging from the economic crisis through the feminisation of popular economies. This is expressed by the increasing presence of women in public spaces and the shift of the affective economy of the household to the production cycle. In domestic–communitarian popular economies, production and reproduction become indistinct. People in the workshop (and the villa) work, sleep, cook and become the node of social support. The ‘feminisation of space’ (p. 83) by popular communitarian economies, Gago proposes, renders multilayered forms of value visible while also challenging the categories of class and labour.

Chapters 3 and 5 explore the spatial and subjective formation of the ‘Motley City’ by looking at the assemblage between the clandestine condition of the textile workshops, the villa and the market. Gago compares the most visible and idealised form of self-management that took place in Argentina after 2001 – which focused on the recovery of factories (wonderfully documented by the work of Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis in the documentary ‘The Take’ (2004, Montréal, Québec, Alliance Atlantis)) – with the hidden side embodied in the clandestine workshop. The textile workshop appears as a secluded, exploitative space, lacking any form of political agency. Treated as a place of ‘cultural difference’ (by state agencies, NGOs and media), racial arguments either justify, moralise or victimise the brutal forms of subordination taking place in this business model, while also capitalising on its clandestine condition as another form of dispossession. While it is often treated as an exception, Gago reminds the reader that the economy of migration and its repertoire of practices is actually becoming the norm and moulding the city. Chapters 4 and 6 tackle the theoretical underpinning of Neoliberalism from Below. Gago conceptualises a communal logic of calculation, distinct from the ‘homo economicus’, as a vital strategy of progress. On a macro-level, she reconsiders the meaning of extractivism beyond the extraction of natural resources – connecting situated economies with global financial logistics – as a mode of value extraction ‘as it configures the relationship between territory and the global market’ (p. 171).

This skilful translation into English by Liz Mason-Deese of Gago's book La razón neoliberal (Tinta Limón, 2014) – a compendium of the author's doctoral thesis, articles and collective collaborations – is a major theoretical contribution that sheds light on other rationalities which are permeating neoliberalism in Latin America. The philosophical debate that emerges from social practice feeds into the wider contribution of this book: exploring how neoliberal reason and communal self-organisation is articulated and contested. It is in the production of the city that the intricate connections between colonial forms of power are exposed in the vertical expansions of the villas and exploited in the multiplication of micro-economies and precarious labour relations that are generated by urban migrant communities. Gago's challenging approach is an ambitious theoretical reformulation of neoliberalism that should be read and debated among students and scholars interested in the socio-economic, political and urban transformation of contemporary Latin America.