Illiberal economies: ambivalence and critique in an alternative investment scheme

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines practices of critique and ambivalence among participants in a controversial Latin American investment scheme called the telares de la abundancia (‘looms of abundance’). While the dominant discourses about the telares construe them as predatory, participants understand themselves as knowing subjects who reject a worldview based on economic rationality and utility in favour of one based on emotional connectedness. While this emphasis on emotional connection is not unique to the telares, what is remarkable is the central role that doubt plays: the tejedoras (weavers), as they call themselves, assert themselves quite explicitly not only as critical and knowing subjects, but also as profoundly ambivalent subjects who insist upon the incommensurability of emotional connection and financial gain even as they simultaneously pursue both. This article explores how tejedoras confront and deal with their doubts by cultivating practices of ambivalence. In so doing, it foregrounds the multiplicity of people's allegiances and intuitions in contexts marked by competing epistemologies, as is the case not only in Latin America but also in much of the world where illiberalism has become a central concern. Towards that end, the article develops the concept of ‘illiberal economies’ – spaces in which participants simultaneously pursue contradictory and mutually exclusive forms of value – as a way of shedding light on broader political and economic dynamics that can seem simultaneously (and paradoxically) nonsensical and irrational, on the one hand, and manipulative and instrumental, on the other. In so doing, the article foregrounds the ambivalent dynamics that are at the heart of illiberal economies in order to open up analytic possibilities for grappling with illiberalism more broadly.