Verónica Gago’s book is a tour de force through more than a century of economic and political thought—as well as Buenos Aires’s La Salada market, clandestine textile workshops, and migrant labor networks. It should be on the reading list of any scholar working with themes of informality, neoliberalism, or developmentalism.
Gago challenges the prevailing notion of neoliberalism as a package of reforms imposed from above by large, powerful actors, such as the national government, international banks, and international organizations. She argues that scholars should pay attention to individual and collective strategies of resistance and calculation that undermine and question neoliberal regulations. Further, she argues that scholars should think about how neoliberalism persists through the actions of regular people, who respond to economic crises and subsequent reforms with self-employment, migration, and informal business. She terms this dynamic “neoliberalism from below” and argues that the concept is “a set of conditions materialized beyond the will of a government” (6). Gago points out that millions of people weather crises with these survival strategies and, in the process, fill in the gap left by the state’s retreat from healthcare, education, and other services. These strategies embody and perpetuate the neoliberal logic of individual responsibility and a thin state—even as administrations across the region roll back unpopular reforms.
To demonstrate how people come to embody neoliberal logic, Gago analyzes the strategies, relationships of production, and migrant networks that constitute La Salada market. Bolivian and Argentine microentrepreneurs founded La Salada in the 1990s, and the market ballooned as a center of attainable, popular consumption during the 2001 economic crisis. The market continues to grow—and with it, the webs of clandestine textile workshops, migrant workers, festivals, and autoconstructed neighborhoods reproduce themselves. Gago traces the perpetuation of neoliberal logic through the market itself and individuals’ strategies in chapter 1, the textile workshops and Bolivian labor networks that staff them in chapters 2 and 3, and the neighborhoods that house workers and workshops in chapters 4 and 5. The progression explores the evolution and redeployment of neoliberal strategies at the individual, firm, and community levels. Gago supports her analysis with reports, news articles, and secondary sources on La Salada and its networks, supplemented by interviews.
Gago’s monograph challenges the prevailing narrative on neoliberalism in Latin America. Scholars, commentators, and politicians typically view neoliberal policies as imposed on states in crisis by international financial actors, reducing the role of the state and hurting many citizens, and finally resulting in a backlash across the continent. Gago posits that many people not only reacted to neoliberalism, they saw opportunities in crisis and upheaval and founded markets and neighborhoods, started businesses, and moved to new countries to develop those opportunities. These hundreds of thousands of people contest the citizen-as-victim narrative in critiques of neoliberalism.
Gago further argues that the strategies that people use to seize opportunities enable them to survive economic crisis but also reproduce exploitation. When people become self-employed, they shift employment, healthcare, childcare, training, social security, taxes, and other responsibilities from large employers and the state onto themselves, again perpetuating neoliberal conceptions of responsibility and citizenship. When successful microentrepreneurs hire others, they reinvent labor relations and often reproduce highly exploitative labor conditions. Gago uses the example of Bolivian employees in clandestine textile workshops to make her case. Employees work double shifts for well below minimum wage, with few benefits. They work for successful migrants in the hope of one day opening their own workshops. The process reproduces migrant success and exploitation, as well as neoliberal ethics: employers often report workers as self-employed and deduct all expenses from rock-bottom salaries, shifting all responsibility to the worker.
To construct the analysis, Gago engages deeply with political and economic theory, applying concepts from Foucault, Spinoza, Brown, and many others to the contradictory reality of La Salada. Neoliberalism from Below engages in close dialogue with Bolivian scholarship as well, bringing Cusicanqui’s concept of ch’ixi, Tapia’s savage politics, and Zavaleta’s motley city to the terrain of La Salada.
Surprisingly, Gago makes sparing use of scholarship on informal work. Neoliberalism from Below is an explicit study in contrasts: the frequently applied concepts of ch’ixi and the motley are concepts of contrast, and Gago reveals many contradictions in La Salada and the strategies that people use to navigate it. The literature on informality makes ample use of the same contradictions that Gago points out. Much of the touchstone research on informal work centers on the contradictions and strategic logic in this type of labor. Keith Hart’s 1973 study “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana” (Journal of Modern African Studies 11, 1), which coined the term informal economy, centers on how the unemployed in Ghana cobble together innovative strategies and income streams to survive. John C. Cross’s 1998 ethnography Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City (Stanford University Press) examines how street vendors in Mexico City created livelihoods, interest groups, and pockets of popular contestation out of crisis and authoritarian cleavages. Temporally and geographically closer to La Salada, Nico Tassi et al.’s 2014 study “Hacer plata sin plata”: el desborde de los comerciantes populares en Bolivia (Fundación PIEB) casts Bolivia’s popular markets as both modern and individualistic, as well as traditional and communitarian. Likewise, Rosana Pinheiro Machado’s 2011 ethnography of the Triple Frontier’s informal supply chains, Made in China: (in)formalidade, pirataria e redes sociais na rota China-Paraguai-Brasil (Hucitec), highlights how informal markets enable widespread popular consumption while brutally exploiting the labor in popular sectors.
Despite Gago’s thorough treatment of La Salada and the world of relationships that produces it, the state receives a thinner analysis. Gago carefully traces neoliberal reproduction and reimagination through La Salada and individual entrepreneurs, then through textile firms and workers, and then through popular neighborhoods. The state makes frequent appearances: as a passive entity to which associations make claims, as an active judiciary that decides labor cases, as individual politicians and patrons of La Salada and autoconstructed neighborhoods. But the state does not benefit from the same systematic analysis that individuals, firms, and communities receive, though this is perhaps because the state has been at the center of so many existing studies of neoliberalism.
Gago convincingly uses everyday practices in and around La Salada to argue that popular markets, firms, and the workers who sustain them perpetuate neoliberalism through rational survival strategies. In this way, neoliberalism persists and evolves “from below,” even as national governments repeal unpopular policies and reforms from above. Neoliberalism from Below is an important contribution to social scientific theory on Latin America and a necessary read for critics and students of neoliberalism.
