Reflections on “Globalization Theory” and the Crisis in Argentina

Neil Larsen

University of California, Davis

During the final months of 2001, when I first conceived the idea for this essay, Argentina had become the sudden focus of world attention. The International Monetary Fund, in what seemed at the time an unprecedented move, had refused to continue loaning money to the De la Rúa government, and, in the course of the following weeks, and the effective economic collapse of the country, a quasi-revolutionary situation appeared to prevail. On December 20, 2001 there occurred the now near-legendary uprising of the people of Buenos Aires that succeeded in forcing the resignation of De la Rúa. Though upwards of forty people were killed by police in the course of the uprising, the Argentine armed forces refused De la Rúa’s plea for intervention, thus marking what seemed, indeed, a revolutionary new phase in Argentine political and social history.

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First installment: Votive Offerings

Neil Larsen nalarsen@ucdavis.edu

With the bloody debacle in Iraq driving the Bush regime to levels of imperial ruthlessness and corruption worthy of the emperor Nero, the combined sense of outrage, despair, and unreality evoked by political life in the US seems to have reached its limit. But now California takes us well past even this point by electing Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. The political post-mortems –assuming, that is, we aren’t all already dead or have had our bodies snatched by some cyber-pod electro-genetically hatched in Hollywood or Silicon Valley–continue to toll forth, but this much is known: ‘Arnold’ vanquished his nearest competitor by more than a million votes, and the vote to recall standing governor Gray Davis triumphed by a margin of 10.6%. Voter turnout was high. This means that registered Democrats (a sizeable majority in the state), as well as a traditionally pro-Democratic voting block comprised by women and gays and lesbians, as well as Blacks and Latinos, ‘crossed over’ to vote for Schwarzenegger in huge numbers. Even unionized labor, probably the most organized, traditionally Democratic voting bloc in the state, spurned the instructions of its union bosses and offered up 51% of its votes to Republican gubernatiorial candidates Schwarzenegger and McClintock, who made no secret of their anti-union views.

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