Closures and Openings in the Impasse

Abstract

What lies beyond neoliberalism? This essay proposes to examine this question within the effects of those struggles that, through the creation of collective spaces, significantly contributed to delegitimizing neoliberalism and breaking its hegemony. In Argentina, ten years after the original crisis of neoliberal order, this discussion remains at a boiling point. Does neoliberalism live on in new forms? Can those same people who put its legitimacy into question propose a different order? What can we call this current phase, which, since 2003 has been filled with fluctuations between “closures” and “openings” and is now characterized by a government that aims to merely administer over the situation that has resulted from the crisis of neoliberalism? Here, Colectivo Situaciones does not attempt to answer these questions (which still remain open) but rather proposes to read the last decade of events in Argentina and Latin America from the perspective of the effects of the movement on the current situation. As this essay attempts to show, this moment is marked by an ambivalent dynamic in which novelties and archaisms stand juxtaposed in a situation best characterized as an “impasse.” This process seems to close and reopen in each new phase, requiring a continuous new art of questioning that will subtly construct a path to take us deeper into the limitations and potentialities of this situation.