Financialization of Popular Life and the Extractive Operations of Capital: A Perspective from Argentina

This article proposes expanding the concept of extractivism beyond the critique of the reprimarization of Latin American economies and their dependency on commodities. Thus it focuses on the modes of financial penetration of Argentina’s popular sectors during the past decade linked to a structural increase in consumption. First, the notion of “neoliberalism from below” is developed to understand the concrete forms of neoliberalism’s persistence in a neodevelopmentalist context. Then apparatuses of consumption and debt are conceptualized as drivers of new forms of value creation in the urban peripheries through a variety of informal economies, with blurred boundaries between the legal and the illegal, which can be read as a prototype of financialization’s arrival in these territories. It is there, the article hypothesizes, where capital extends its frontiers and where the necessity of a specific logistics connecting high finances with low finances can be seen.