The Normalization of Economic Life: Representations of the Economy in Golden-Age Buenos Aires, 1890-1913

Abstract

This essay examines the cultural impact of the market transition in Buenos Aires during the so-called golden age (ca. 1890–1913), when Argentina experienced a process of export-led growth, centered on agriculture and livestock. The international mobility of labor and capital resources, in a context of an expanding frontier, facilitated rapid and important gains in productivity. By the turn of the century, a model of accumulation based on mass immigration, foreign capital, and the redistribution and use of land taken from indigenous peoples was firmly established. Important changes in technology (breed selection and threshing machines) and social relations (tenancy and sharecropping) modified the landscape of the pampas. The city experienced more directly the turmoil of “progress,” receiving massive inflows of immigrants from Europe and rapidly absorbing modern means of transportation and distribution. Soon, a large consumer market developed, underscoring the modernity of the city’s economy.Some scholars view this period as a turning point in the history of Argentina. Social and urban historians have noted two fundamental changes: the revolution of wheat that transformed the social landscape of the pampas; and the modernization of the city that ultimately allowed some improvement in the living conditions of immigrant workers. Labor historians found in this period a deepening of class confrontations: the transition from artisan-based and ethnically divided working-class communities to a politically active and organized working-class movement under socialist and anarchist leadership. The very success of capital accumulation made the disparities in the distribution of income and wealth all the more evident, facilitating the diffusion of radical ideologies. Anarchist-dominated labor unions, mutual-aid societies, socialist cultural centers, and renewed activism within the workshops signaled the emergence of class politics.Economic historians have emphasized the success of a model of growth based upon the export of primary commodities produced with the help of international capital and European immigrants. However, it is important to remark that this was also a period of monetary and financial normalization. The renegotiation of the foreign debt, the stabilization of the currency, and the greater overseeing of banks and speculative investments produced a certain degree of stability in the economy. Monetary stability was crucial to the expansion of exports that followed. The transition from a financially and monetarily unstable economy (1885–92) to one governed by stable prices and a strong currency (1893–1913) left indelible marks on the memory of contemporaries. The golden age was as much a story of monetary stabilization as one centered in the rapid incorporation of European immigrants, capital, and technology.My interest lies in the examination of the critical reception of these economic changes by workers’ advocates, experts, publicists, and the public.1 In other words, instead of focusing on the actual evolution of production, prices, investment, consumption, or distribution, I analyze the economy as a cultural process. This perspective necessarily finds its object of investigation in the terrain of discourse, communicative interactions, and representations.2 Public reactions to economic policies or to the general evolution of the economy can be found in novels and memoirs about economic life, in social practices and prejudices built around money and merchants, in everyday conversation about economic topics, in the rhetoric and tone of social protests, and in publicists’ representations of policymakers.3Texts and images indicate the structure of feelings associated with a given market transition and the extent and intensity of public reactions to new economic policies. This experience cannot be reduced to any single set of sensations, practices, or forms, because it involves different social actors, all endowed with capacities to represent and attribute meaning to their own activities. A market society produces an abundance of representations about what people do in the marketplace. The multiplicity and diversity of these representations present important problems to the researcher, but this does not make the enterprise of reading the cultural impact of a market transition totally unassailable; there are a limited number of interpretive communities and the representations of market life tend to converge around certain powerful signifiers.4Market transitions bring about a series of transformations to everyday life that leave indelible marks in popular culture. Certain transitions have been dubbed market revolutions because they involve comprehensive changes in “beliefs, behaviors, emotions, and interpersonal relations.”5 These revolutionary changes are often associated with the transition from a subsistence to a commercial economy. In the antebellum United States, for example, the transition involved at least five major transformations: the conversion of quasi self-sufficient farmers into producers of cash crops for distant markets; the improvements in transportation (canals, roads, and railroads) that opened new market opportunities for farming and manufacturing; the erosion of the handicraft system as a result of the competition of cheaper manufactured goods; the decline in home manufacturing; and the rise of a new working class.6 The cultural impact of such vast and diverse transformations was overwhelming— the sense of vulnerability and class alienation felt by immigrant workers, the discredit of republican values and promises, middle-class fears about the moral degradation of cities, the emerging cult of domesticity, and the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening.At the other end of the spectrum are social and cultural adaptations that produce some criticism of new market ways and policies, without revolutionizing ways of life, self-perceptions, emotions, or beliefs. These non-revolutionary market transitions reinterpret “the economy” in ways that are neither catastrophic nor apocalyptic. They do not produce the intense class anxieties or nostalgia for a past golden age, usually generated by major economic transitions (for example, the industrial revolution). The process I describe in this essay, namely, the normalization of economic life, is one such non-revolutionary transformation in market culture. Despite the dissemination of radical discourses about capitalist accumulation and politics, Buenos Aires did not witness any religious awakening or messianic restoration between 1890 and 1913. Similarly, the changes in the functioning of markets and in economic policy were not so radical as to produce intense moral reactions from society. Instead, the export economy and the gold standard generated a multiplicity of representations about “the market” that implied a certain degree of accommodation or acceptance of the principles of a capitalist economy.The critical reception of economic changes can be called “revolutionary” if people’s collective experience with market mechanisms, institutions, and principles leave more than normal impressions, or if participants are conscious of living in a period of rupture, a time of different intensity, a memorable epoch. By contrast, any economic transition in which people accept the evolution of the economy as a normal process can be called “non-revolutionary.” In such a situation, criticism would focus on the inequality of outcomes rather than on the basic commodification of social relations. Of course, each economic transition produces a reworking of the moral or ethical boundaries of the market. Different imaginaries about the market translate distinct intensities of moral indignation about a given process of economic growth.Three important premises guide my investigation: (1) the constellation of images and texts generated by a given economic transition belongs to a different plane than the economic process itself because they constitute an entirely different and separable subject matter; (2) the multiplicity of representations of market culture, though apparently chaotic and radically different, can be summarized and reduced to a few leading principles; and (3) the importance of a market transition should be measured in relation to its resonance in “culture” rather than by a set of structural changes in society and the economy. My focus on representations about markets entails no presupposition about the veracity of economic discourses. My goal is not to describe how a society with markets transformed itself into a market society, which, by necessity, is a long-term process that certainly did not start in 1890. Rather, my aim is to present a preliminary assessment of the critical reception of the economic changes during this period, by examining a limited group of representations about market activity, policymaking, and economic development.7 The existence of a moral economy during the Age of Progress is hinted at but not fully explored in this essay. My argument is organized as follows: First, I provide a plan or strategy for studying the cultural reception of economic change; second, I offer a hypothesis about the existence of a major conceptual change in the interpretation of the economy in golden-age Buenos Aires; and finally, I show how diverse producers of discourses, namely, socialists, anarchists, middle-class reformers, and representatives of the middling sectors, contributed to a reflection about the nature of economic change during this period.An analysis of the market transition as a constellation of cultural processes entails reviewing changes in at least five areas: (1) the rearrangement of the boundaries separating public and private, market and non-market, family and work; (2) the nature of economic reforms; (3) the popular resistance to these reforms; (4) the ways in which various producers of discourse portrayed the economic situation; and (5) the changes in the practices of economic agents (powerful and subaltern) in response to economic reforms.8The penetration of the market into areas traditionally dominated by other principles (art, love, workmanship, scientific curiosity, tradition, patriotism) tends to produce reactions saturated with a sense of moral transgression or outrage. Voices that transmit these reactions highlight the existence of cultural boundaries delimiting the space of legitimate market activity.9 The spread of market relations threatens the stability and the meaning of central organizing polarities of social life (art/commodity, love/prostitution, work/crime, mercenary/patriot), provoking either negative reactions or rearticulations compatible with market modernity. The confusion, travesty, and degradation brought about by the commodification of social relations in these particular areas demand our special attention. In particular, moral panics—reactions that present the penetration of market relations into bordering areas as dangerous and morally pernicious—may signal the presence of intense cultural cleavage. Anxieties about the excess and the intrusion of market forces in other preserves tend to appear when the very success of economic change manages to affect consumption patterns, lifestyles, and morals.The construction of the new dangers facing nation and culture are often the product of the rise to prominence of reformist communities. Their discourses rearrange the boundaries and the categories that organize the social world. Paradoxically, these discourses, while aiming at a clear demarcation of legitimate sphere of market activity in relation to other areas, such as public health, prison rehabilitation, education, housing and sanitation, and urban planning, tend to use market metaphors to convey their message. Hygienists, pedagogical experts, prison reformers, educators, and urban planners often resort to ideas of competition, productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness to understand the society they try to reform. Reprocessing classical and modern motifs about individuals, society, and culture, these reforming communities draw new dividing lines within the social world and construct “normal” and “dangerous” social categories.A given economic transition (an acceleration of economic growth, the integration of a region into the world market, or a severe and protracted depression) always involves change in the policies that orient or sustain economic decision-making. These reforms could be more or less revolutionary, depending on whether or not they modify structural components of the economic and social system. Evaluated in terms of its critical reception by non-expert interpretive communities, economic reforms are considered revolutionary when they affect fundamental changes in cultural structures and modes of experience. By this I mean the cognitive polarities, the imaginaries, the myths, and the narrative motifs that help people make sense of an economic transition. Important variables to consider in this regard are (1) the degree to which an economic transition is associated with a particular authority or policymaker; (2) the consistency between economic reforms and the expectations and values formed by economic and social agents, (3) the effect a particular investment profile can have on reshaping the sociophysical landscape in which most people live, and (4) the extent to which reforms redefine the spheres of private enterprise and government.Events of social protest are exercises in communication between a given constituency and government. Through them, a perceptive reader can detect the sources of conflict, the tone and intensity of demands, the peculiarities of the language used by protesters, as well as the constellations of feelings and sensations awakened by certain economic reforms or, more generally, by the experience of a market transformation.10 The voices raised in the public sphere against certain economic policies or in favor of government protection (against the effects of market forces) are generally diverse and not easily reducible to common basic demands. Finding common elements of discourse in the diverse universe of social protest is sometimes difficult. The existence of a common popular indictment against economic policies or of a shared perception about the economic and social situation is rare. But, when this happens, it indicates the presence of major transformations in the region’s economic life. The language of open social protest is, of course, permeated by competing political discourses that translate for “the people” the messages of policymakers, journalists, and experts about the economy. These ideological undertones can create the appearance of the existence of common perception of the economy, but this impression is deceptive. Each event of protest displays a situational logic and a criticism that underscores conditions and grievances pertaining to a particular group at a given moment. Only contemplating the diversity of subject positions and claims, analyzing their evolution over time, and evaluating the influence of politico-ideological currents, we can get a comprehensive reading of what social protesters are saying about “the economy.”People tend to associate economic realities with certain administrations. Similarly, the memory of the economic past can be associated with certain motifs, events, and cultural artifacts that represent a particular period. When people need to evoke or reenact the experience of a given economic period, they resort to these motifs, events, and cultural artifacts as reservoirs of meaning and as synecdoche for a world of unrecoverable experiences. The recollections thus formed reflect not so much concrete individual experience with markets as the imaginaries construed around a given economic reality.11 The messages disseminated by producers of public discourse (the press, for example) are important in this creation of public imaginaries about the economy. That a past period is later recalled as an era of the speculative fever or the age of sweet money, or the time of the merger mania depends substantially on the work of literati, journalists, and politicians in disseminating a given sense of the economic and social situation of the period. Public imaginaries (another way of examining the critical reception of market revolutions) tend to shift along an economic transition, stressing the importance of that transition.How does an economic transition affect the opportunities and practices of subaltern subjects in the marketplace? To what extent does the involvement of the popular sectors with market practices and principles increase as a result of economic reforms? Most people relate to markets in cultural terms. Not only as readers and interpreters of economic information (market signals) but also as actors in concrete processes of selling and buying, saving and investing, looking for jobs, or consuming. The actions of some actors (corporations, government) modify the structure of opportunities open to others (consumers, workers) and this translates also into changes at the level of practice. New conditions of employment, income, goods available, and the general competitiveness and transparency of the economy tend to affect the way people perceive their own participation in the marketplace. The experience of markets, thus, has to do with the life of marketplaces, with the discoveries people make while looking for jobs, with the segmentation of consumption patterns, with the popular attitudes towards wealth and luxury, and with the formation or erosion of a given work/production ethic.Delimiting the territory of legitimate private market activity is often a complex cultural process. In the period under consideration, a series of campaigns and denunciations marked the moral limits of the market. Discussions about gambling, crime, and prostitution served to identify frontier areas of market activity in need of containment and control. These areas—considered as perversions of legitimate business activity—set moral limits to the expansion of market forces. The gambler, the delinquent, and the prostitute were emblematic of perverse market paths, of entrepreneurial energy allocated to immoral purposes.One of the concerns shared by publicists, social reformers, religious leaders, and state officials was the rapid erosion of the distinction between work and play. The diffusion of gambling in Buenos Aires looked to contemporaries as the greatest calamity, one that eroded the habits of work and the faith in the virtues of labor.12 Critics agreed that gambling was everywhere—in casas de juego, garitos, agencias de lotería, riñas, toros, carreras, ruletas, tómbolas—growing under the protection or inaction of government.13 “Estamos en Monte-Carlo,” protested El Nacional in 1899. Gambling was viewed as a disease that obfuscated the minds of the lower classes, one that had its origins in a particular market, namely, the stock exchange. The speculative fever of 1890 appeared to have trickled down to the popular classes disseminating the belief that riches could be attained without work. Entrusting their future on gambling, the unemployed ceased searching for work, causing great losses to themselves and their families. Ultimately, gamblers turned into drunkards, abandoning altogether the world of labor.14The criticism against gambling, though primarily directed against working-class culture, also entailed a warning against laissez-faire policies.15 The market by itself was unable to reproduce the conditions (cultural and social) that made immigrant workers remain in the labor market. The government needed to regulate gambling if the economy was to function with honest workers and entrepreneurs. To socialists, gambling was an immoral economic activity that was promoted by the elites and disseminated among the working classes. Ignorance and poverty were the two necessary conditions for its existence. Socialists criticized with the same duress the Mar del Plata Casino—a place of sociability for the elites—and the official lottery, massively demanded by workers and the middling sectors.16 Like alcoholism, gambling had a degrading effect on working-class morale, generating dependency and alienation. The lottery, in particular, was viewed as a tax on imbecility, a revenue collected through deception from the poor that went to enrich the coffers of the church (part of the revenue of the lottery was devoted to Catholic charities).17For similar reasons, the erosion of the boundary separating work from crime also emerged as a threatening development. Concerns about the rise of urban crime turned into a moral panic between 1890 and the first decade of the century.18 Criminologists, prison and police reformers, and publicists joined to denounce the ease with which workers and youngsters were leaving the “world of labor” and entering the “world of crime.” The instability of the labor market coupled with the attraction exerted by delinquents’ peculiar subculture (la mala vida) made the fall from one world into the other quite probable.19 Working-class women were considered in danger of falling into prostitution. From Manuel Galvez’s preoccupations about the professionalization of ruffians to Vacarezza’s theatrical anthem to stolen money, the fear of a life without labor served to energize the writings of Porteño intellectuals.20The narrowing of the distance between the two worlds presented severe implications for the normal functioning of market society. Not only were immigrants loosing their love of work but the very concept of labor was being reshaped. Delinquents had appropriated the language of work to refer to their own activities.21 From the standpoint of a criminal, work was only a cover to gather information, to make contacts, to prepare the stage for a job (criminal activity). Rather than acting as the essential creator of value, work had turned into simulation and deceit.The expansion of capitalist markets also found its moral limit in alcoholism. The cheapening of alcoholic beverages—itself the result of the success of capitalist enterprise—brought about dangerous consequences for the working classes. Socialists such as Augusto Bunge saw in alcoholism workers’ worst enemy. Alcoholism degenerated the race and made impossible the progress of working-class families.22 Considered by workers as a palliative against exhaustion, alcohol ended up weakening workers’ bodies. Their sons and daughters carried the effects of this social disease. More importantly, alcoholism prevented workers from attaining the level of consciousness required for understanding their condition under capitalism. Because of this, socialists declared a war on alcoholism and demanded from the state a severe regulation of the production, commerce, and consumption of alcoholic beverages.23According to socialists, there were too many taverns in modern Buenos Aires, far more in comparison than in Paris, London, or New York. This was a segment of the economy that was considered to be immoral for its effects on working-class communities. Furthermore, the medical community organized around the Social Hygiene project to present alcoholic beverages as a negative consumption. In the early years of the century, leading hygienists, such as Cabred, Bunge, and Coni, launched a national campaign against alcohol consumption (the Argentine League against Alcoholism was formed in 1903). In public conferences, mostly addressed to working-class audiences, reformers presented the dangers of a life under the vice.24 While unable to force Congress to enact a prohibition bill, the various reformist communities (socialists, hygienists, and criminologists) managed to demonize alcoholism.Another important boundary crossed was paid sex. Criticism of prostitution as a growing business mounted during these years. The police, Jewish associations, protestant groups, and physicians climbed on the bandwagon to disseminate the idea that Buenos Aires had become the main destination point of an international traffic of prostitutes. The story was that Jewish girls from Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were seduced by unscrupulous intermediaries and dispatched to bordellos in Buenos Aires—the city of sin—where their services were highly valued. Neither proved nor disproved, this story continued to feed state policies destined to control and regulate prostitution.25 In the first years of the century, the question of prostitution became a fashionable topic among journalists. The alarming reports of the newspaper El Tiempo made inseparable the relationship between mass immigration and the market for sexual services. One was the cause of the other. Brothels were just an expression of an expanding consumer power that, if let free, could have terrible consequences for society.26The demand for state intervention came from different angles of the socio political spectrum. Many who attacked the white slave trade did it from a moral standpoint: they felt that sex (or love) should not become a commodity. The complaint that this mercantilist era had transformed love into a business was a common rhetorical strategy to relocate prostitution within the moral debate. Jewish organizations were interested in containing a possible backlash of anti-Semitism (if Jewishness became associated with an international business in prostitution). Socialists criticized sexual commerce as another aspect of the bourgeois way of life. European prostitutes were luxury items, as reproachable as the carriages, the clothes, and the palaces of the rich.27 For anarchists, prostitution was just a moment of the falsity and hypocrisy of bourgeois sexuality and the institution of marriage.28According to Dora Barrancos, the socialists of the Sociedad Luz tried to reform working-class attitudes toward sex, enabling men to see women workers as their friends rather than as sexual objects. Prostitution was immoral because it implied an unfair treatment of wives and because it reduced male workers’ capacity for true love.29 In this regard, the socialist condemnation of sexual commerce came close to the Catholic familist agenda: friendship among the sexes, rather than sexual pleasure, was the true basis of happiness. In addition, socialists believed that sexual exchange with prostitutes was a wasteful expenditure of workers’ energies away from social struggles. Endowed with limited resources (life energy), workers could better invest these energies in more productive social channels.Costumbrista literature added a new dimension to the critique of market society: it presented Buenos Aires as a space contaminated with fraud, falsification, and deceit. Fraud was present in the products offered on the market, in the promises made to incoming workers and investors, and in the “arrangements” of the voting system. It was intrinsic to the process of social mobility that corresponded to this period of export-led growth.30 The competition for social positions was based on pretension, opportunism, and social travestism. According to Fray Mocho, Argentina was a country of pretension, where the rich disguised themselves as poor people and the middle classes tried to appear as rich. In this context, immigrants were ridiculed for trying to make fortunes through work and thrift. Creoles, on the other hand, sought rents by trading favors with the political class. They obtained pensions as veterans of wars they never fought, sold their votes to local caudillos, embezzled state property and cheated immigrants of their savings, with incredible stories (cuentos del tío). Falsification and fraud was their business.31The upper classes tried to emulate the styles of the rich in Europe (the dress codes, the clubs, the sports, the balls, the interiors, the art), but did it with exaggeration and excess. In the competition for social distinction, the stakes got higher and higher, as opportunist newcomers managed to disguise themselves as gentlemen and ladies from “good families.” As the market for status-providing goods was growing, so was the number of status simulators. In the July 1897 issue of La Montaña, Leopoldo Lugones criticized the Argentine elite’s new taste for falsified art.32 According to him, the nouveau rich, ignorant of “culture” and insecure of his own good taste, emulated the interiors of the established elite, purchasing copies of well-known paintings. Thus, a new market had developed for fraudulent reproductions of European art.33 To Lugones, the commercialization of reproductions entailed a major crossing of boundaries (“an absolutely imbecile democratization of the most noble creations of the spirit”), one that eroded the distinction between true and fake art, between cultural competence and the mere possession of wealth.In what sense did these forces (gambling, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, fraud) contribute to delimit the legitimate space of market activity? They underscored the dangers of excesses and established new demands for the expansion of the regulatory power of the state. Gambling, for example, was considered to be a perversion of business activity and a derailment of the work ethic. Delinquency, in turn, entailed a misuse of good market skills. Like entrepreneurs and workers, thieves and embezzlers were calculating, rational agents whose activities were not directed towards the creation of social wealth. Prostitution, an activity organized by entrepreneurs in pursuit of profit, was viewed as the negation of domestic life and normal sexuality. Gambling, prostitution, and crime pointed to social pathologies that undermined institutions and cultural traits essential for the functioning of market society, namely, work ethic, family, and private property.The fears of an elite overwhelmed by the immigration wave—the concerns about the erosion of honest labor, respectability, and domesticit