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A CLASS IN POLITICS  
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Edwin F. Ackerman
December 29, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ How AMLO turned an anti-corruption campaign into an opportunity for
economic redistribution. _

Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador whose
policies during his tenure created measurable advances for workers.,
(ProtoplasmaKid / WikiCommons)

 

The presidential elections that took place in Mexico on June 2
delivered the reigning Morena party and its candidate, Claudia
Sheinbaum, a decisive victory. Founded in 2014 by Andrés Manuel
López Obrador, or AMLO, Morena won 60 percent of the vote in a
three-way race and a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Sheinbaum
took office in October with an indisputable mandate. She campaigned on
a promise to continue the policies that AMLO implemented during his
tenure as president, which witnessed measurable advances for workers.

Official figures show that real wages surged by approximately
30 percent, labor’s share of income increased by 8 percent, and
the earnings of the bottom 10 percent grew by 98.8 percent.
Additionally, the country’s Gini coefficient, a measure of
inequality, improved, and overall poverty dropped by 8.5 percent,
with over nine million people lifted out of poverty — the largest
reduction in twenty-two years. Unemployment rates are now the lowest
in the region, coupled with a slight decrease in informal labor.

Left-Wing Anti-Corruption Politics

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AMLO retained extraordinarily high approval
numbers throughout his tenure, averaging in the mid-60s and hitting
closer to 80 percent toward the end of his term. Certainly,
progressives of different stripes have taken issue with the
seventy-one-year-old leader. During his tenure, critics claim, AMLO
did not make a full break with neoliberalism, did not heed the demands
of feminists or environmentalists, and strengthened the militarization
of public affairs — many big infrastructure projects in Mexico
continue to be built and managed by the military. These criticisms are
not without merit.

What is incontrovertible, however, is the progress that Morena has
made on behalf of the working class, confirmed at the polls in early
June. Rightly, this has elicited a renewed interest in the
English-speaking world, which for decades has puzzled over the issue
of how to revitalize a left centered around the popular classes.

If there was a distinguishing feature of AMLO’s political style, it
was his ability to treat neoliberalism as synonymous with corruption.
Historically, anti-corruption politics has been the mainstay of the
neoliberal right seeking to privatize graft-ridden state industries.
In Latin America, at least, the middle and upper classes have been the
most reliable constituency for this brand of politics. But AMLO
adroitly repurposed anti-corruption politics to garner mass appeal
without embracing neoliberal anti-statism or a technocratic
anti-politics that empowers unelected officials.

“It sounds harsh, but privatization in Mexico has been synonymous
with corruption,” AMLO said in his inaugural speech in December
2018. “Unfortunately, this malady has almost always existed in our
country, but what happened during the neoliberal period is
unprecedented in modern times — the system as a whole has operated
for corruption,” he added. “Political power and economic power
have mutually fed and nurtured each other, and the theft of the
people’s goods and the nation’s wealth has been established as the
modus operandi.”

The key features of the Mexican neoliberal state were an increase in
outsourcing of services to private companies, subsidies to a private
sector encouraged to compete with state-owned companies (electricity
is one of the most egregious examples), mechanisms for ceding control
of public monies through privately
administered _fideicomisos_ (trusts), and sanctioned and
unsanctioned forms of tax evasion. At the heart of AMLO’s diagnosis
of his country’s malaise lay a fundamental redefinition of
neoliberalism. Contrary to the common belief, neoliberalism was not
about the contraction of the state. For AMLO, it represented the
instrumentalization of the state to serve the rich.

Republican Austerity

AMLO’s reinterpretation of neoliberalism has lent a sophistication
to discussions of the economy that remains alien to much of the
anglophone world. Thanks to Morena, the debate in Mexico is not, as in
the United States, about small government versus big
government — Mexico operated under “big government” during
neoliberalism, but it consistently served the upper class through both
legal and illegal means. Recognition of this fact provided the basis
for a class politics of anti-corruption.

This understanding helps explain the flagship concept of AMLO’s
government, which is perhaps counterintuitive: republican austerity.
The term refers to the ongoing reorganization and recentralization of
public spending with the aim of cutting from the top. Neoliberalism in
Mexico, as Morena understands it, does not mean the general
contraction of the state but its decentralization and
instrumentalization — austerity of a specific type could thus be a
tool for combating neoliberalism.

Here the connection to AMLO’s broader diagnosis of corruption is
key. Republican austerity looks to fight against corruption through
the elimination of intermediaries of all sorts betweenthe state and
the citizenry in the distribution of public resources. The vision of
AMLO’s government was that these intermediary networks — parts
of the private sector, clientelist brokers, NGOs that received
government funds, _fideicomisos_, or simply private companies hired
by the state to carry out specific services — facilitated
budgetary capture. A push to recentralize government functions that
had been outsourced to private or semiprivate entities has therefore
been central to Morena’s politics.

In a press conference in May 2021, AMLO tied his political project to
a distinctive view of Mexican history:

In our country, capital accumulation did not necessarily occur through
the exploitation of the bourgeois or the employer over the worker;
capital accumulation in Mexico occurred through corruption. This is
not new; it increased in the last stage, in the neoliberal
period. . . .  This is not to sideline Marxism, it is not [that
discussions] about class struggle, or surplus value are invalid, but
rather that the case of Mexico is something special.

There are, of course, many objections one might make to AMLO’s
arguments, especially his claim that this form of upward
redistribution is a unique feature of Mexican politics. This
narrative, however, goes a long way toward explaining the outlook and
aims of Morena. More than a series of individual crimes or isolated
scandals, for AMLO, corruption is a consequence of a reordering in the
state-economy relationship. Neoliberalism was characterized not by the
contraction of the government but by its conversion into a
reverse-rentier state in which capital drained public money through a
series of mechanisms. These ranged from the outsourcing of government
functions and overpriced contracting to tax loopholes, creating an
unofficial alliance between politicians, businessmen, and expert
service providers.

This nexus represents a class faction that is, if not specific to
Mexican neoliberalism, especially prominent within it. Its defining
feature is that it generates surplus value not from the production and
sale of goods in the free market but from the extraction of public
resources.

The phenomena that AMLO observed in Mexico have analogues across the
globe. The historian Robert Brenner has long argued that the
neoliberal period is characterized by upward redistribution through
political means. Tax cuts, privatization of public assets at bargain
prices, and the socialization of massive private losses, such as the
bailout programs after the financial crisis of 2008, are all examples
of how the state has intervened in the economy to alter the balance of
class power in favor of the rich.

In wealthy countries, much like in the Global South, the state did not
simply contract. The economist Thomas Piketty has found that tax
revenues in rich countries as a percentage of national income never
dropped during the neoliberal period. Neoliberalism was in fact a
retooling of the state to more closely reproduce the interests of
capital. This fusion of political, administrative, and economic power
has undoubtedly made neoliberalism difficult to dislodge. But it has
also exposed elites to the kind of moral and political critique
advanced most forcefully by AMLO.

This brand of left-wing anti-corruption politics has not only managed
to legitimize redistribution but has brought the working class back
into the fold of left-wing parties, reversing the trend of dealignment
prevalent across much of the rich world.

_Edwin F. Ackerman is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse
University and the author of Origins of the Mass Party: Dispossession
and the Party- Form in Mexico and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective._

* AMLO
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* Mexico
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* workers
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* wealth redistribution
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