The Rhetoric of the Financialization for the Reduction of "Poverty" The “Neoliberal” Social Policy in Mexico, 2012-2018

Abstract

This article critiques the dominant thought conceptions expressed on capitalist “neoliberal” social policies, that both normalize inequality and legitimize “poverty”. The perspective of the Coloniality of Power explains that, since the 16th century until today, a power structure (domination, exploitation and conflict) has been created on a global level, associated with capitalism, that in the labor sphere appears in the historic-structural heterogeneity, as a result of the hierarchical distribution of population based on the idea of a “race” (linked to sex, gender and class) in roles and places, in both symbolic and material ways, in the relations of power. This work analyzes the social structure process that started in the 1960s, along with the capital-labor dispute, in order to explain the emergence of social marginality, that in the “neoliberal” phase of global capitalism is expressed in two processes: 1) the increase of structural unemployment, the marginal pole and “poverty”, due to the predominance of financial capital in the global economy and, 2) the reassignment of the marginal pole activities through a separation of the economic production and the social reproduction spheres, which states the division between economic policy and social policy, according to capital interests. This is the context of Mexico’s social policy in the last decade, oriented towards holding back poverty from incrementing based on a rhetoric that recreates the discursive illusion of productive, labor and financial inclusion, as well as the establishment of financialization mechanisms that both naturalize and reproduce social inequality, legitimize domination and exploitation of sectors culturally conceived as inferiors, backwards and pre-modern, through a colonial way of exercising power that reinforces the social marginality, represented on the “poverty” increase.