Through the looking glass, darkly: the Neoliberal Hegemonic project viewed from the perspective of pluralist labour relations in the Southern Cone

Abstract

This paper argues that the authoritarian experiments of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s dramatically lowered the material and ideological thresholds of subordinate group consent to present-day dominant class hegemonic projects. By using severe economic and physical oppression to reduce the material and political expectations of lower and working class groups, the departed authoritarian regimes not only promoted subordinate group disarticulation and atomisation: they essentially swept the economic and political landscape clean of militantly counter-hegemonic subordinate group strategies while simultaneously reforging coalitions of new entrepreneurial elites dedicated to fundamentally reordering the composition and character of their national economies.1