The AMLO Project
An interesting view of the AMLO project as the presidency of Lopez Obrador is winding down, offered by Edwin Ackerman in Sidecar. The overview of the article is as follows: "We can therefore assess AMLO’s administration based on three fundamental criteria: the reinstatement of class cleavage as a primary organizer of the political field; the effort to reconcentrate the power of a state apparatus hollowed out by decades of neoliberal governance; and the break with an economic paradigm based on institutionalized corruption. Let’s consider each of these in turn."
These are the things that any progressive government would need to do in the context of Mexico’s rather deep submersion into neoliberalism. With respect to class politics, Ackerman points to the redistributive politics of the AMLO administration in terms of cash transfers to various categories of persons in need (students, seniors, etc) and increased tax enforcement, which extracted higher tax revenues from upper classes and multinationals doing business in Mexico. Similarly, AMLO has enforced state sanctioned profit sharing agreements between businesses and workers, which the former circumvented through extensive subcontracting. In terms of specifically working class politics - as opposed to state spending as a terrain of class conflict - AMLO has raised the minimum wage, eased requirements for labor union formation, and supported increased labor union militancy, with Susan Terrazas, a working class leader from Tamaulipas, and now a representative in the Mexican house of deputies, representing Morena. This is interesting because it suggests a linkage between Morena and social movements that, in other contexts in Mexico, have been quite strikingly absent. In this capacity, at any rate, Terrazas has been advocating for constitutional expansions of the workers rights in terms of hours per work per week - diminishing them from 48 to 40. Another dimension of AMLO’s class politics has been his demotion of the credentialed elites as a core constituency of the left - the phenomena that Ackerman refers to as the “Brahmin left”. Some of this has assumed the form of AMLO attacks on Mexico’s various independent institutes, particularly the National Electoral Institute and also his derision of feminists and their protests against femicides in Mexico. These attacks have registered in terms of declining support for AMLO among college educated voters, a pattern particularly pronounced in the 2021 midterm elections. See, in particular, Mexico City, where AMLO lost in the more affluent regions of the city.
Ackerman’s second criteria is reversing the hollowing out of the state. Here AMLO has opted to cancel private infrastructure projects while advancing public projects, such the Tren Maya, the trans-isthmus corridor, the nationalization of the electrical companies, and the nationalization of Mexico’s lithium reserves. Interestingly, given the state’s hollowed out administrative capabilities, the AMLO has turned to the military to oversee many of his public works projects (Tren Maya) and has relied on Banca Azteca to distribute his cash transfers. Another major project in terms of reversing the hollowing out of the state has been the creation of a national guard, which would help to maintain public order and bring down high levels of criminal violence in Mexico. Instead, AMLO has consented to U.S. insistence, backed by threats of trade sanctions, to interdict migrants crossing Mexico to claim asylum at the U.S. border. This has detracted from the capacity of the GN to play an effective role in law enforcement. Moreover, as the recent explosion of cartel violence in the state of Chiapas shows, the security forces show little inclination to protect Mexicans when they are under siege from organized crime. The inability to improve public security in Mexico is a massive failure to reverse the hollowing out of the Mexican state, much less to re-legitimize it as an actor that is advancing a progressive project on the part of the people.
Finally, Ackerman considers AMLO’s republican austerity as an effort to reverse neoliberalism, which AMLO regards as corruption, meaning the instrumentalization of the state in the service of the market. Of course, if you're a neoliberal, nothing could be more progressive. But what that meant in the context of Mexico was capitalists being able, through various means, to extract wealth from the state. Ackerman describes this process in the following terms:
This process has transformed Mexico into a sort of reverse rentier economy, in which a network of private businesses siphoned money from public coffers through a series of legal and illegal mechanisms: privatization, outsourcing, the sale of overpriced services and the creation of ghost companies designed to take advantage of state contracts and tax evasion opportunities.
The notion of neoliberalism as a political economy of corruption has informed AMLO’s public spending objectives. The flagship concept of his government is a counterintuitive one: austeridad republicana, or ‘republican austerity’. In practice, this means the ongoing reorganization and recentralization of public spending with the aim of ‘cutting from the top’. Since Mexican neoliberalism forged extensive links between the state and private enterprise, austerity is seen as a means of breaking such connections – casting off parasitic companies whose profits rely on government largesse.
This suggests a broader understanding of republican austerity than I previously had. This was tied to shifting the beneficiaries of the state spending, which could be one without deficit spending or without great levels of taxation. More broadly, what Lopez Obrador has sought to do is to reverse the bourgeois colonization of the state in Mexico - a process, of course, that unfolds in other places too, the state being a site where capitalists can temporarily resolve the ongoing crisis of accumulation.
In sum, it is easy to dismiss the achievements of the Fourth Transformation. There is an important class basis for what AMLO and Morena have attempted to achieve in Mexico. Ackerman labels this has a form of neo-developmentalism, an important counter current to neoliberalism and one that, unlike the pink tide in Latin America, was not driven by the economic windfall of higher commodity prices associated with the burgeoning growth of the Chinese economy. On the other hand, it is rather easy to suggest that the Mexican state is not fundamentally different under AMLO, particularly in terms of public security, penetration by organized crime, and continued domination by transnational and national capitalists. Nor is Morena a transformative political party generating new linkages between social movements and the political class.
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