Brazil And Argentina: Hegemonic Crises, Wasted Decade And Challenges Of Latin American Post-Neoliberalism In The Capitalism Of Knowledge

This article exposes the main arguments about the explanation of persistent economic backwardness and a decade wasted in Latin America, through the study of two national experiences, namely: Brazil and Argentina. In this sense, it is pointed out that due to the failure of the Import Substitution model and the global institutional change that led to the liberalization of national economies, in Latin American countries a series of politico-economic reforms called neoliberals are applied in the decade of 1980, but this economic model generated a regression in the main economic and social indicators of the region. The so-called neo-development arises, as a political-economic movement that sought to establish an alternative to the neoliberal model. The previous process was promoted by Lula da Silva in Brazil and Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández in Argentina. But, the neo-development failed as a hegemonic project, generating a return to governments attached to the more conservative bourgeois factions (exporting landowners and agro-miners), exemplified in the coup d'état against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and the triumph of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, situations that highlighted the unresolved hegemonic crisis within the historical blocs of the countries. In this context, within the framework of a new Development Phase or Knowledge Capitalism, this possibility of an economic – structural transformation of the Latin American economies has been held back (Ramírez and Sztulwark, 2018), thus constituting a wasted decade for development in our region. The main objective is to show the validity and explanatory capacity of the theoretical contribution of Antonio Gramsci, to unravel the challenges and opportunities of the world historical change in Brazil and Argentina, through a long-term historical analysis of both Nations. The investigation is presented in the following logical sequence. In sub-section 1, the main conceptual elements developed by Antonio Gramsci, interpretative axes of the historical process of social development. Next, in subsection 2 the historical and empirical analysis of the Brazilian economy will be developed, and in the subsection 3 the study of the Argentine economy will be studied.