Changes and Continuities in Argentina since the 2001 Political and Economic Crisis

What is it about?

The spectre of crisis haunts the capitalist world. Indeed, crisis was an all too familiar phenomenon throughout the second half of the twentieth century, especially in Latin America during the 1980s debt crisis. Its usage passed the Rubicon in the post-Lehman Brothers world and entered the everyday lexicon of advanced capitalist societies in a way not seen since the since the Great Depression. This chapter analyzes the nature and effects of crisis in Argentina, setting the scene for the discussion of the legacies of crisis that will be discussed in this panel.. First, it seeks to reject false dichotomies of 'old' and 'new'; instead synthesising them in order to incorporate both elements of continuity and elements of change into analysis. We assert that responses to crisis do not only involve the merging of old and new, but that they are also, concurrently, responses to both old and new problems – many of which were evident in the 1990s and before. Second, it recognises that crisis manifests itself in a number of realms – political, economic, social – and that heuristic devices employed to investigate them must subsequently also be drawn from a number of academic disciplines. This second point is in recognition of the fact that models of political economy, by their very nature and definition, come to encompass all aspects of social life and social reproduction.

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