Contradicciones y tensiones en las políticas de desmercantilización de la Revolución Ciudadana en Ecuador

Abstract

The article analyzes the extent to which economic and social policies implemented between 2007 and 2015 by the Government of the Citizen Revolution in Ecuador can be considered as a process of de-commodification work, money and land, as fictitious commodities, in Karl Polanyi terms, in a country with informal employment, officially dollarized and dependent on oil. To do this, the main labor and financial policies, as well as the management of oil revenues, are described. Furthermore, the lack of coherence and the limits that the institutions of global capitalism impose on the sovereignty of the economic policies will be discussed. The main hypothesis of this work is that the Good Living, which originally appeared in the margins of the State and political power, was instrumented by the Citizen Revolution (CR) to articulate a political project of de-commodification of labor, money and natural resources. However, this project, embraced by Ecuadorian society, showed limited autonomy and coherency -and this is the subordinate hypothesis- because it heavily depended on the upward trend of oil prices, as the return to the neoliberal program -that never lost its hegemony at global level­- demonstrated, when oil price fell. One of the conclusions is that the Government of the CR can be considered as a post-neoliberal one.