Resources for Reform

Oil and Neoliberalism in ArgentinaBy Elana Shever

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7840-4

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................ixAcknowledgments................................................................xiIntroduction: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina...............................11 Affective Reform.............................................................332 Creating a Privatized Public.................................................753 Fueling Consumer Citizenship.................................................1174 Creating Bonds...............................................................155Conclusion: The Neoliberal Family and the Corporate Effect.....................187Notes..........................................................................203References.....................................................................213Index..........................................................................225

Chapter One

Affective reform

DIEGO PARMADO WAS DEVASTATED. He had been born and raised in a Patagonian oil town and followed his father and uncles into YPF Estatal at the age of fourteen, expecting to retire from the company as they had. He had worked in the Neuquén oilfields for almost thirty years when he was dismissed during the privatization of YPF Estatal. He was thus younger than fifty years old at the time he left the company and, like most state oil workers, was too young to receive a retirement pension but too old to be hired by another oil company or to retrain for another career. He was overwhelmed because leaving YPF represented more than the loss of a job. In the early 1990s when the company was being restructured, Diego was one of fifty-one thousand workers who called themselves YPFianos after the state entity for which they labored. This self-designation begins to illustrate how attached the workers were to the state oil company. Not only Diego's work life, but also his sense of himself and his family life revolved around YPF.

As the state oil company was converted into a privately owned corporation, Diego and the workers in his division were dismissed from their jobs. They were not, however, entirely pushed out of the oil industry. They were told to re-form their production units into worker-owned microenterprises that would offer subcontracting services to the newly formed private company, YPF SA. The YPFianos' change from public servants to independent business owners occurred so rapidly, Diego explained, that "you went to sleep at night with a baby bottle and the next day you got up with a tie and briefcase." With his Kafkae sque vision of metamorphosis, Diego captured an understanding, shared by his fellow YPFianos, that the formal conversion of state workers into small businessmen happened overnight. However, he later told me how their substantive transformation was a far more arduous and extended process. Bodies toughened by years of labor in the harsh Patagonian oilfields did not easily fit into business suits meant for deskwork, yet Diego learned to wear a businessman's clothing with poise.

The vast majority of state oil workers across Argentina lost their jobs during the privatization process, and many of these men, and a few women, became worker-owners in subcontracting microenterprises like Diego did. These subcontracting companies were known as emprendimientos, a word that could be rendered in English as "startups" if their owners were much younger, wealthier, and more formally educated. The YPF emprendimientos were special oil service microenterprises collectively owned, managed, and staffed by former state workers. While many YPFianos joined these emprendimientos in the early 1990s, only a small percentage of them remained employed in the oil industry a decade later. The second half of this chapter examines how the remarkable ones who managed to stay in the industry were able to remake themselves into business owners and maintain their microenterprises for a dozen or more years against seemingly impossible odds. I was surprised to find that kinship was the key to comprehending their metamorphosis.

The conversion of YPF Estatal into a privately owned transnational oil corporation, first called YPF SA and later restructured as YPF-Repsol, was one of the most prominent pieces of the sweeping state and economic restructuring carried out by the Menem administration in the decade between 1989 and 1999. YPF's privatization thus belongs to the ideas and actions that became "married" to form the global neoliberal "family" discussed in the Introduction. The midwives of this process stressed that the privatization of state enterprises and services was the panacea for multiple ills, including state debt, bureaucratic corruption, market inefficiency, and the failures of state development and welfare. President Menem in particular promised that privatizing state companies and services would allow Argentines to finally "join the First World," as they had been striving to do since the early twentieth century.

The architects of Argentina's privatizations assumed that the legal and administrative changes that were reorganizing the state and the national economy would inevitably lead to modifications in people's dispositions and relationships. In particular, the privatization of state companies such as YPF was supposed to remake public servants into "entrepreneurs," the quintessential neoliberal actors. That is, privatization was supposed to turn people who work for others into people who work for themselves, people who take orders into people who take risks, people who depend on the state into people who depend on themselves. This represents a significant change from the seventy years during which oil workers were supposed to be quintessential national actors, and thus public servants rather than entrepreneurs. The microenterprises were intended as a short-term tool to ease this transformation for the YPFianos, but there was no long-term plan for them. They were expected to become entrepreneurs on their own or to quietly disappear as they were replaced by young people with college degrees, computer skills, and an intuition for business. But the YPFianos did not quietly disappear.

Argentina's privatization process would not only alter how commodities and services are produced, distributed, and consumed, but would also transform the people who produce, distribute, and consume these products. However, it is wrong to assume that state projects or their representatives could determine these changes in subjectivity. This chapter elaborates my assertion that neoliberalismo is not a set of principles, a series of policies, or an ideology that is producing a new type of person: the autonomous, competitive, and calculative entrepreneur. Instead, neoliberalismo is a family of both novel and existing concepts, techniques, and discourses that is shaping personhood in unexpected ways. One of the unanticipated ways that the privatization of the Argentine oil industry has reshaped the YPFianos is by strengthening their longstanding kin relationships rather than replacing them with the short-term contractual agreements that neoliberal policies mandate.

The relationship between changes in state and economic institutions, on the one hand, and the transformation of social life and personhood, on the other hand, is never straightforward. There is no direct or predictable effect of the...