Verónica Gago

As a feminist activist and academic, Verónica Gago has led the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina - an alliance of feminist forces that call for economic and social justice globally. She has been a professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and at the National University of General San Martín, as well as a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council.

She is the author of the book Neoliberalism from below (2017), which offers a holistic analysis of the neoliberal system in Latin America, looking at both global dynamics determined by international finance, corporations, and governments, and local activities lead by marginalized groups of society. The book considers forms of resistance and revolts against neoliberalism as key elements that have led to a crisis of political legitimacy. At the same time, it examines how this system persists beyond its crisis and establishes its roots in popular subjectivities. According to the writer, neoliberalism as a paradigm survives through new financialized forms of extraction and dispossession and ‘strategic rationality’ that popular classes have developed in this context of deprivation - negotiating profits in a dynamic of “servitude and conflict” (Gago, 2017).

Studying the illegal market of La Salada in Buenos Aires, Gago shows how informal practices of production and labor resist neoliberalism, while at the same time falling into its exploitative logic. The author reminds us that neoliberalism does not come only from above by the hand of major actors (pro-market and antistate) but comes also from below through new forms of affectivity and rationality. In this way, the populist rhetoric whereby a return to the state would determine an end to the neoliberal logic is dismantled. Gago’s analysis of baroque economies overcomes moralization, whereby these are often victimized or criminalized. It focuses instead on vital strategies within these economies that challenge the idealized neoliberal concepts of progress, calculation, and freedom, through self-management, autonomy, and transversality (Gago, 2017).

Her recent publication, A Feminist Reading of Debt: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory (2020), explores debt’s impact on women and the LGBTQ+ community in Argentina and Brazil. In particular, it examines the connection between macrostructures of external public debt and domestic debt within the household, exploring how this is closely linked with gendered violence and patriarchal structures. In this regard, the feminist movements through their action and ways of organizing offer a new language that allows one to see these processes and investigate ways of resisting them. The book analyses how forms of financial violence, which is considered the most abstract form of exploitation, fuels precarious work, impoverishment, and extreme levels of debt, making up incomes and subsidies that are never adequate. In this sense, Gago and Cavallero (2020) describe the real-life impact of the financialization of life by sharing stories of women’s resistance.

Similarly, the book Feminist International: How to Change Everything (2020) documents political processes within the Ni Una Menos movement, which, according to the author, has invented a new form of collective action: the feminist strike. The movement is inspired by the concept of feminist potencia, meaning a counter-power against forms of exploitation and domination. In Gago’s words, feminist potencia implies the affirmation of “common invention against expropriation, collective enjoyment against privatization, and the expansion of what we desire as possible in the here and now.” Throughout the book, the author describes the themes discussed within the movement through the lens of the feminist strike. In this way, she sheds light on hidden forms of work and value production, as well as documents a new powerful form of struggle that is anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal. Further, a focus on the ‘feminist strike’ allows one to reinvent the concept of class, historically narrowly interpreted as homogeneous. Indeed, feminisms advocate for a redefinition of the very notion of labor, and as a consequence of the working class.

In Silvia Federici’s view, this contribution “brilliantly captures the revolutionary potential of contemporary feminism - its theories, its organizational forms, its struggles - all examined through the lenses of one of the most radical feminist movements on the American continent.” Overall, Gago’s refreshing contributions to feminist economic theory show how an understanding of the feminist strike at the grass-roots level provides the lens through which one can critically analyse the neoliberal system and the process of financialization, leading to true social change.

References and Readings

Gago, V., (2017). Neoliberalism from below: Popular pragmatics and baroque economies. Duke University Press.
Gago, V., (2020). Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Verso Books.
Gago, V., & Cavallero, L. (2020) A Feminist Reading of Debt: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory. Pluto Press
Gago, V., & Cavallero, L. (2021). Argentina’s Life or Death Women’s Movement. Retrieved 29 March 2021, from Jacobin
Social Reproduction, Financial Exclusion, and Alternatives - webinar co-organized by SOAS Economics, SOAS Development Studies, and the Global Feminist Political Economy Group