Argentina: The Philosophical Resistance to the Conquest of the Soul1
Authors: Del Percio Enrique 
Published: September 2019

In 1976, a terrible dictatorship was established in Argentina, even before Foucault claimed with crystal clarity that the fundamental difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism was the substitution of the homo economicus −related to the exchange− by the homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself (lecture delivered on 14 March 1979); and also before Margaret Thatcher (in Ronald Butt’s interview, Sunday Times, 3 May 1981) confirmed Foucault´s analysis stating that: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”. In the same year, Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in Economics. The explicit purpose of the Military Junta was to promote a profound cultural transformation, based on the premise that the causes of the alleged “underdevelopment” were not so much economical but cultural and political. Nevertheless, as García Delgado and Molina (2006) pointed out, the problem is not related to a sort of inevitable structural poverty, due to the culture of our people. It is a matter of a decline in society, produced by the policy orientation of the dictatorship. Until then, the income distribution was similar to that of the countries from the Southern Europe with an almost frictional unemployment. Until the coup d’état, Argentina had a poverty rate of 8% and the best distributive structure of income in Latin America. However, 1976 was a turning point; the surge of the neoliberal model promoted a process of over-indebtedness, wealth concentration, unrestricted opening of markets with an unfavourable exchange rate for national industry, labour flexibilization, with the insertion in a competitive globalization of “savage capitalism” that “strengthened the asymmetries and transfers of resources from the periphery to the centre. This concept differs from thinking about inequality as a problem related to culture, corruption and poor institutional quality” (García Delgado, 2006).Despite the overwhelming adverse evidence, it is still a commonplace to blame all the ills of our society on that culture, the maximum expression of which would be Peronism. In fact, the great majority of disappeared people during the dictatorship were Peronist political, trade union and social leaders. The motto of the Ministry of Economics during the dictatorship was “towards a change of mentality”. The current Argentine situation, in terms of advances of neoliberalism as well as resistances to it, cannot be understood without referring to the dictatorship. In Poratti words, “the coup d’état of 1976 does not only put an end to a government, a political system and project, but also to a 'world' in which Argentinians were living at least from the independence project of 1810. In those days, there was not an abrupt differentiation between generations and, in many aspects, people could identify themselves, diachronically, with a historical line beyond the particular generational characteristics” (Various Authors, 2009).These aspects go along with others that appeared in other areas, such as the implementation of new computer and communication technologies and, as a consequence, individual and social fragmentation. The impact of these technologies on daily life was decisive to the emergence of what some authors, like Sloterdijk (2002), called “mass individualism.” No doubt, this is a necessary aspect to explain the rise of the neoliberal subjectivity in developed countries. Yet, in Argentina, the existence of political, social, trade-union and ecclesiastical movements based on popular roots, with solidarity as a fundamental value, hampered the conquest of the “heart and soul” in 1976; and they are still now an obstacle to be overcome by sectors interested in imposing a neoliberal model. It is impossible to explain any isolated phenomenon of popular resistance to the hegemonic attempts from neoliberalism without analysing the common conceptions and understandings found in Argentina. Indeed, the popular culture substrate in Argentina is made up, mainly, by the confluence of different cultures: Andean, Guaraní Indians, Afro and Criollo (native). All of them are characterized by their relational and solidarity conceptions, intrinsically opposed to a subjectivity that conceives the individual as an entrepreneur of himself/herself.