Enrique Dussel argues that a political interpretation of nature happens all the time and is informed by contrasts such as those between the periphery and the centre of capitalism, the different social classes, the various political systems, and how a particular mode of production treats and interacts with nature (Dussel 2011). The capitalist system has transformed nature and its systems so deeply that collapse has become a daily phenomenon. However, this collapse is not uniform. Since the periphery of the system is more affected as sacrifice zones and through patterns of ecological imperialism, to understand the relationship between capital and nature in the Global South requires a particular political interpretation of nature itself. If impacts are unequal and the economic rationale is also based on an 'international division of natural exploitation', we must also examine how authoritarian practices that involve environmental destruction and attacks on communities and their territories at the periphery of capitalism differ from what happens at the core. Whereas the capitalist system causes a metabolic rift with nature on a global scale, the ways in which it operates in the Global South favour a normalization of authoritarian practices and regimes in order to secure the stream of profits that flows from the margins to the centre.

# **The Global South's Metabolic Rift**

It is important to note that to speak of how capitalism severs the link between humans and nature is to speak of social metabolism and the metabolic rift caused by capitalist production (Foster and Holleman 2014). The sociometabolic perspective entails the understanding of human society as part of and dependent on nature—possibly interdependent too when we consider human creation and regeneration, such as through Indigenous co-creation of the Amazon rainforest over thousands of years. We can speak of humans *and* nature and humans *in* nature, while combatting the capitalist hierarchy that forces humans *out of* nature in a pattern of total crisis.1

István Mészáros spoke of sociometabolism directly when referring to the material conditions of production and reproduction. In his book *Beyond Capital*, he argued the following about capitalism's relationship to nature:

It is in the nature of capital that it cannot recognize any measure by which it could be restrained, no matter how weighty the encountered obstacles might be in their material implications, and no matter how urgent—even to the point of extreme emergency—with regard to their time scale. For the very notion of 'restraint' is synonymous with *crisis*in the conceptual framework of the capital system. Neither the degradation of nature nor the pain of social devastation carries any meaning at all for its system of social metabolic control when set against the absolute imperative of self-reproduction on an ever-extended scale. This is why in the course of historical development capital not simply *happened* to fatefully overreach itself on every plane—even in its relationship to the basic conditions of social metabolic reproduction—but sooner or later was *bound* to do so. (Mészáros 1995, 173)

More specifically, the discussion and concept of the metabolic rift is important for the context of authoritarianism against nature because it is often the sociometabolism of sacrifice zones that is interrupted with the help of authoritarian forces. These sacrifice zones exist everywhere, as one can see from the state violence perpetrated against the Wet'suwet'en nation that resists the laying of

1 For a defence of the metabolic rift theory and how the language of humans and nature does not make it necessarily dualistic, please see Malm 2018.

a pipeline in their territory in British Columbia (Dhillon and Parrish 2019). The colonial nature of the Canadian state affects marginalized peoples domestically, who are supposed to bear the damage done in their territory for the sake of fossil capital, while it also supports the advancement of Canadian multinationals so involved in extractivism in Latin America that in almost every place there is a potential sacrifice zone. Todd Gordon and Jeffrey Webber show that "in Latin America and the Caribbean, Canada was the largest investor nation in the [mining] sector, and four countries—Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States—accounted for 74 percent of mergers and acquisitions from 2000 to 2015" (Gordon and Webber 2019, 8). The pattern of unequal ecological exchange does not prevent the creation of sacrifice zones in the North, but surely contributes to their normalization and ubiquity in the South.

The theory of the metabolic rift proposes that a system powered by constant accumulation, namely the capitalist system today, leads to an irreparable rift between humans and nature due to the pressure placed on nature's metabolism by society's demands. Resources are extracted without care for the integrity of nature's metabolism and, as a consequence, human society is impacted too. A metabolic rift may occur in the transfer of nutrients from one area to another, as in Karl Marx's original analysis in Volume III of *Capital*, or it can amount to a global phenomenon that, under the tools of ecological imperialism, involves "environmental degradation and ecologically unequal exchange" (Clark and Foster 2009, 317). When taking international trade into account, the unequal ecological exchange becomes visible alongside negative trade balances, with countries at the periphery unable to really afford imports even after many years of excess exports (Hornborg and Martinez-Alier 2016, 331). When Brazil and Argentina rely heavily on the export of primary goods, they reinforce the unequal movement of such goods from the periphery to core countries (Dorninger and Eisenmenger 2016).

Unequal ecological exchange takes place via the exploitation of materials and destruction of biomes in one place for the benefit of another place, usually better positioned in regard to both capitalist and geopolitical power. Globally, this is extended through ecological imperialism, as a subset of imperial power that includes but is not limited to:

the pillage of the resources of some countries by others and the transformation of whole ecosystems upon which states and nations depend; massive movements of population and labour that are interconnected with the extraction and transfer of resources; the exploitation of ecological vulnerabilities of societies to promote imperialist control; the dumping of ecological wastes in ways that widen the chasm between centre and periphery; and overall, the creation of a global 'metabolic rift' that characterizes the relation of capitalism to the environment, and at the same time limits capitalist development. (Foster and Clark 2004, 187)

Where the metabolic rift is an integral part of the local economy and deeply embedded in trade patterns that match economic and unequal ecological exchange, a set of vulnerabilities to authoritarianism develops. Much can be justified, legalized, or hidden when a country's fate and development is said to depend on it. In addition, the structure of dependent capitalism in the Global South means that national elites organize themselves in autocratic ways that already disregard principles of liberal democracy in order to reproduce the economic conditions that favour this class (F. Fernandes 2019), primarily by keeping labour cheap and nature cheaper or free. As such, a place need not be governed by extreme forms of authoritarianism to lead to constant environmental degradation and the destruction of lifesustaining systems that are also interconnected with race, class, gender, and other structures of oppression. Rather, a degree of authoritarianism is enmeshed in daily life, benefitting the continuation of the system of exploitation. In the early 2000s, this meant the heavy repression of demonstrators against the privatization of water in Bolivia, whereas in Brazil, the advancement of agribusiness has come at the expense of campesino, Quilombola, and Indigenous communities. In fact, although this text analyses right-wing authoritarianism, it is worth highlighting that the economic structure in the Global South also means that even progressive governments tend to engage with authoritarian practices in order to secure extractive and development projects with their partners (Svampa 2019, 1).

#### **Latin America's Authoritarian Rifts**

Under capitalism, Florestan Fernandes explains, the "authoritarian element is intrinsically a structural and dynamic component of preservation, strengthening and expansion of the 'capitalist democratic system'" (F. Fernandes 2019, 45). The system needs authoritarian practices in order to maximize profits and production, allowing for the super-exploitation of labour, repression against opponents and unwanted groups, and the continuous robbery of nature. Thus, it is a matter of whether this authoritarianism is practiced in particular spheres, local, and/or global, or becomes the dominant expression of the regime. Since countries in the Global South are subject to dynamics of colonialism and capitalist dependence that maintain levels of instability and underdevelopment, authoritarianism not only functions as a more common expression of everyday politics, but is also entrenched in imperialist relations and interventions that range from coups that establish dictatorships to dealings in favour of the extractive industries that risk the survival of entire communities.

These relations show that authoritarianism is established from both the inside of a nation and also from the outside. The United States has been involved in a series of war incursions and special forces interventions abroad connected to fossil fuels, including in Latin America. Scholars offer many examples of this, such as how, throughout the years, the CIA helped to train paramilitary forces involved in territorial conflict in Colombia, oil companies lobbied for further US military presence in the region (Scott 2004, 100), and "special warfare manuals" even advocated for the "harsh treatment of civilians" (Stokes 2005, 60). Doug Stokes argues that authoritarian states were seen as partners that could further US interests in Latin America, adding to a broader scenario that Michael Watts refers to as petroimperialism (Stokes 2005, 58; Watts 1999, 7). Ecological imperialism has a natural affinity with authoritarianism because it speeds up processes of resource extraction while "hindrances" such as community resistance and territorial protections can be easily suppressed.

The mainstream discussions about authoritarianism often frame it as deviations from liberal democracy (F. Fernandes 2019). This perspective tends to equate fascism and communism, while it holds liberal democracy as the highest standard, hiding its limitations, like the defence of capitalism and the necessary domination it exercises to exploit peoples and nature. In practice, liberal democracy leaves the door open for fascism according to convenience, especially when there is a crisis. For Stuart Hall, this means a swing to the Right as a way to respond to the crisis, while social democracy renders the Left too disorganized to respond (Hall 1979, 16). In the case of Brazil, liberal parties and groups chose to support Jair Bolsonaro's campaign, aware of the threat of authoritarianism, in opposition to the return of the Workers' Party (PT) and its attempts to couple progressive social policies with actions that favour the Brazilian capitalist class. The parliamentarian coup against the Dilma Rousseff government is a good example of how it is possible to defend liberal democracy and use its devices to oust a legitimate president legally, but with false charges, in order to replace her with a more authoritarian leader with a clear project of austerity.

Since different regimes and different governments may produce different combinations and layers of authoritarianism, three elements must be highlighted: (1) under authoritarianism, power is exercised through coercion, or the threat of coercion, and consent is used to legitimize and maintain coercion; (2) capitalism is prone to authoritarian tools and actions, but authoritarianism is the entrenchment of these tools as a way of governing; (3) this power is exercised to maintain hierarchies and exclude the oppressed from the possibility of popular power.

Authoritarianism against nature acts against peoples and the environment, maintaining the metabolic rift in particular territories for the sake of resource extraction, land grabbing, and territorial control, and to be able to negatively impact ecosystems without much external pressure and regulation. Thus, it entails very racist, gendered, and xenophobic authoritarian acts of expulsion of peoples and repression of dissenting groups. Since authoritarianism against nature ensures patterns of unequal economic and ecological exchange for the benefit of capital circulation, it goes hand in hand with imperialist interests and tends to strengthen nationalism and borders in some places while it weakens self-determination claims and sovereignty in others.

The dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the appropriation of their territories comprise one of the clearest examples of authoritarianism against nature, including both environmental destruction and violence against human communities, that continues to take place in liberal democracies and is normalized because of capitalist appetite for land and raw materials. Colonization entails violence against Indigenous communities in order to access territory but also to sever the link between community and territory that historically conditions a more balanced relationship with the natural environment (Crook, Short, and South 2018). Land grabbing and forced urbanization also aid capital by adding to the labour force and its reserve army. Genocide against Indigenous and traditional communities goes hand in hand with ecocide. Alongside patriarchy, racism, and ethnic violence, these tactics fit into a particular perspective of development concerned with economic growth (Malheiro, Porto-Gonçalves, and Michelotti 2021).

Because of this, the task of understanding authoritarianism against nature must consider at least three political regimes: (1) authoritarian far-right expressions, mainly in fascism and its ecofascist correlative, (2) authoritarian practices under liberal democratic regimes that involve both right-wing and progressive/moderate left-wing governments, and (3) socialist Left engagement with authoritarianism—both historical and by governments that propose a socialist transition today.

This paper is concerned with the right-wing expressions under (1) and (2), and it must be stressed that a direct interest in the upkeep and deepening of the capitalist system and repression of anticapitalist ideas and practices falls within the political spectrum of the Right. This spectrum ranges from a moderate Right that generally accepts liberal democracy and its negotiation with capital to overt farright authoritarianism that combines attacks on people's rights with a strong capitalist orientation. Centre-left and progressive groups under (2) help to maintain capitalism as well and may oppose direct anticapitalist action, but in this case, are not about the furthering of capitalism, but rather projects of conciliation and/or reformism that restrain the search for alternatives within the system. This perspective of conciliation is connected to the centre-left's general acceptance of the terms of liberal democracy—primarily the legitimacy of private property and the capitalist market—and its maintenance of capitalist infrastructures. It shows, for example, the limits of moderate Left experiences in Latin America under the pink tide governments, when the advancement of social rights was negotiated alongside capitalist growth and the strengthening of particular sections of each country's elites (Webber and Carr 2013; S. Fernandes 2019).

For the Right, these conciliations imply profit reduction, regulation, and other concessions that stand in the way of the type of free-rein capitalist system it envisions.Thus, centre-right governments seek to legitimize their authoritarian actions through liberal institutions—the legal system and mass incarceration—or by treating them as exceptional cases—imperialist war abroad or torture in the name of fighting terrorism. Far-right expressions, such as fascism, have a strong capitalist component, even if some of them may challenge free-market policies in favour of protectionist nationalist approaches (Konder 2009). They still assert private property, while having strong ethnonationalist—often white supremacist—and authoritarian values that tend to be mobilized in an "us versus them" framework (Forchtner 2019). Far-right forces end up incorporating authoritarianism in the very core of their project, as is the case of overt repression under the military dictatorship that governed Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s, or the defence of white nationalism and strong borders that unites fascists in the United States and Europe.

In the economic relations between central and peripheral countries in the capitalist system, the periphery is a major source of natural resources and, therefore, the negatively impacted party in the system of unequal ecological and economic exchange. The Global South, as the sum of peoples and territories at the margins of the system, has to bear the brunt of authoritarian practices by its own elites and the elites in the Global North. Whether there is a leftist or a right-wing government, the paradigm of development in Latin America is still embedded in a logic of dependence. Even when strategies geared towards import substitution industrialization were implemented to boost domestic industry, they failed to overcome a general state of underdevelopment due to both internal and external factors (Hira 2007; Love 1990) and still contributed to environmental pressures.

This dynamic has long been explored in Marxist dependency theory (MDT) and studies on development and underdevelopment. Latin American industrialization was done in such a way that the strong concentration of land in the hands of a few permitted labour to be overexploited in both rural and urban areas (Marini 2013, 67). The tenets of industrialization were set according to the demands of foreign capital, so that the local capitalist class was devoid of a national project of capitalist development. The rule of thumb was—and still is—to maximize profits through very cheap labour and access to raw materials and rights to exploitation that could be purchased at a very low cost or even taken. Because of this, underdevelopment is not simply a status or innate characteristic of countries under dependent capitalism but the result of ongoing economic and political relations.

Although traditionally MDT does not provide an analysis embedded in ecological considerations, a critique of extractivism in Latin America expands its potentiality and helps to identify patterns of underdevelopment connected to the reduction of nature to a free gift. Thea Riofrancos explains that MDT led to a struggle between "nationalist-developmentalist versus revolutionary paths to development" (Riofrancos 2020, 235). Whereas the latter acknowledges that the national elites will not bring about development, a critical position on extractivism builds on a critique of imperialism and expands the conversation by troubling assumptions over extractivism and industrialization that have constrained the Left to a monolithic approach to development (Riofrancos 2020, 15).

Understanding the context of dependence is essential for avoiding the mistake of treating environmental destruction in the Global South as a simple issue created by poor environmental consciousness, lax regulations, or irresponsible leaders. Dependence influences and moulds how authoritarianism against nature operates at the margins of capitalism, where sacrifice zones and ecocide are the norm rather than the exception. Fostering environmental degradation in one place while national parks are valued and protected elsewhere is part of the global capitalist project. A marked characteristic of ecological imperialism today is that it not only exploits nature heavily in the Global South but also creates, as Camila Moreno suggests, mechanisms for existing alongside growing environmental concerns through negotiations and compensations that are seen as assets in projects of "New Development", as suggested by Camila Moreno (2012, 57). Carbon credit schemes are only one of the ways through which false compensation for ecocide is sold—as if that were even possible—in dollars or the creation of protected units around the world. This also impacts marginalized communities in the Global North whose habitat is invaded by mining initiatives geared towards traditions of green technology while the same companies or even the state contributes to a green fund for protecting a limited piece of tropical forest somewhere else (S. Fernandes et al. 2021). This further normalizes authoritarian practices of dispossession and violence in sacrifice zones through eco-extractivism and a model that proposes remedying the ecological crisis without fixing the metabolic rift and regulating with nature; that is, without challenging the capitalist system.

The link between ecological imperialism and extractivism makes it acceptable for Canadian mining companies to destroy biomes and encroach on Indigenous territories in Brazil, Bolivia, and at home, while governments justify these actions through a need for resources for development and growth and offer limited conservation initiatives that function as olive branches (Gilchrist-Blackwood 2020). Contradictions like this become even more apparent when dealing with far-right governments.

Canada's Belo Sun Mining Corp has long planned to open an open-pit gold mine in the Brazilian Amazon, but the project only became viable under Jair Bolsonaro's presidency, when entities responsible for Indigenous protection actually liaised with miners and against Indigenous leadership (Arsenault 2021). After the outset of war in Ukraine, the Bolsonaro government pushed this agenda further, justifying it as a necessity for the fertilizer industry, since Brazil imports a great deal of its fertilizers from Russia (Brant and Sassine 2022). This is one example of how a cycle of dependence leads to sacrifice zones and sacrifice communities that are easily discarded and/or violated, especially when authoritarian tendencies are already established in the political landscape. Brazilian agribusiness relies heavily on fertilizers because of its monocrop model of production, so mining activities in key Indigenous territories become justifiable in order to sustain industrial agriculture. The Bolsonaro government continues to weaken deforestation safeguards while it sets targets for deforestation reduction through offsetting and other market mechanisms that attract Brazilian agribusiness and financial institutions (Horn and Fernandes 2021). Bolsonaro's government offers denialism of two kinds, the anti-science positions that deny that there is a crisis, but also the kind of denialism that serves to discredit environmental movements and to remove protections and eventually make way for corporations and market-based solutions to environmental crises (Moreno et al. 2021; Horn and Fernandes 2021).

These denialisms are promoted in the context of a fascist imaginary, national chauvinism, promotion of a ferocious capitalism tied to neoliberal reforms, defence of the interests of the extractive bourgeoisie, and growing practices of institutional racism and white supremacist ideology. Matters of exclusion and death became even more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Jair Bolsonaro's promotion of an authoritarian political tripod focused on "guns, virus, and soy" (S. Fernandes 2021). Bolsonaro's anti-ecological perspective is not simply an irrational display of far-right conspiracy theories about climate change, though these are certainly present in *bolsonarismo* as well as most major far-right movements today (Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021, 279). This rationale serves to make room for the almost unlimited exploitation of labour and resources by foreign capital and lucky members of the national capitalist class. With bolsonarismo, lobbying for ecocidal proposals became easier, especially when the very notion of territory is encircled by ideas of private property, to be bought and sold. This goes beyond the perspective on neoextractivism espoused by progressive governments or a traditional approach to developmentalism in Brazil. With the authoritarian far-right, the point is simply to maximize gains and leave no stone unturned. The nationalist rhetoric operates as a legitimacy tool when, in fact, borders and sovereignty will be sold to the highest bidder without concern for community and environmental impact.

Although the Bolsonaro government is openly anti-ecological, other cases of right-wing authoritarianism in Latin America create similar dynamics. The tenure of Jeanine Añez, the interim president of Bolivia after the 2019 coup, was short but intense. The far-right forces in government shared many characteristics with bolsonarismo, such as Christian fundamentalism. Although the progressive government of Morales was heavily criticized for furthering extractivism, carrying its own authoritarian contradictions under liberal democracy, it tried to negotiate this process with redistributive policies that advanced the country's fight against poverty.

Añez's authoritarianism was of a different degree, with overt use of violence, the spreading of fear in Indigenous and campesino communities, and an open politics of ecocide. Pablo Solón highlights this difference:

Morales' MAS government was indeed allied to the agribusiness sector, which it had given broad concessions for years before the change in government. The Añez government was not only allied to agribusiness, it was deeply entrenched in the business [itself] and directly represented agribusiness interests in pursuing new, even more expansive policies. (Solón 2020)

Far-right authoritarianism provides an opportunity to advance capitalist interests without much concern for impact or negotiation with local actors as was necessary in the experiences of the pink tide in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. This is advantageous for the commodity markets and states seeking large amounts of natural resources from the Global South. There are fewer obstacles to extractivism, monoculture agribusiness, polluting industries, and fossil capital when Indigenous and campesino communities are not political subjects valued by the far-right, and violence against them is not only normalized but actually promoted. This is a problem that afflicts such communities throughout Latin America, such that Brazil and Colombia are among the most dangerous countries in the world for environmentalists (Global Witness 2021). With the pink tide, some of this improved through dialogue with social movements and some protections. With right-wing governments, treatment of these groups ranges from a general state of disregard for the impacts caused to them, to a clear directive towards ecocide. In this spectrum of authoritarianism, one can see how the right-wing government of Iván Duque in Colombia is complicit in the institutional persecution of local leaders that are also targeted by paramilitary groups in territorial disputes. Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro is engaged in the direct promotion of violence in rural areas, with efforts to arm the land-owning class, and the criminalization of social movements such as the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). Both cases involve governments established by a history of militia groups with far-right tendencies (Manso 2020; Maciel and Rojas 2021).

Fossil capital necessitates intense extractivism to increase commodity production, doing so by negotiating with the developmentalist Left in the Global South, by creating mechanisms of compensation under green capitalism, or by heightening exploitation to optimal levels with the far right. Far-right authoritarianism gets the job done a lot faster and the scenario of ecological imperialism and dependent capitalism in the Global South creates fertile soil for fossil capital to exacerbate previous contradictions and eventually take everything. As argued by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, "it remains hard to imagine a transposition whereby fossil capital would fight its rearguard battles from the left while the right executed its destruction" (Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021, 476).

Yet, an important distinction is that the alliance between fascism and the destruction of nature can take on a 'green' appearance too, especially in the Global North. Streams of 'ecological fascism', shortened to ecofascism, appear in Europe and in the United States with a defence of pristine national forests and lakes, an appeal to 'blood and soil' arguments that lead white people to make claims to territory as if they were Indigenous communities, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and discourse that blames the poor and the foreign for pollution, environmental destruction, and even climate change itself (Taylor 2019; Boggs 2019). With ecofascism, the conspiracy theory is not about denying the existence of climate change but rather to manipulate the scientific explanation for authoritarian racist objectives, arguing that the poor of the Global South have way too many children, lack environmental consciousness, and will put pressure on the Global North's resources. By denying or distorting the root causes, ecofascism also promotes scientific denialism, even if different from the kind that claims that there is no global warming or that the Amazon rainforest is not at risk, as Bolsonaro would say. Ecofascism recognizes the crisis but is not about saving the Earth, instead deciding who gets to survive on a dying planet. Thus, it mobilizes the climate agenda in authoritarian ways against nature and peoples tightly connected to it. Further, it normalizes discussions over decarbonization and energy transition in the North without any consideration for the provenance of materials and the sharing of important technologies. This is a path for ensuring ecological imperialism and unequal ecological exchange from the Global South to the Global North, in ways that guarantee white supremacist control of ecosystems for richer countries. It is no surprise that although ecofascism is still marginal, there is ample room for its growth in imperialist countries particularly as the ecological crisis escalates.

Ecofascism in the Global North means not only strong borders in Northern countries, but a race to secure resources to transition faster for their own means without any challenge to their own mode of living. Green capitalism needs to sell false solutions to the climate crisis in order to replace commodities, leaving the imperial mode of living of the Global North unchanged (Brand and Wissen 2021, 157). However, this is only possible because the Global North will continue to steep materials in the exploitation of nature elsewhere, particularly in the Global South. An example is the exploitation of one of the key green minerals, lithium, that impacts Chilean and Argentinian environments. Nevertheless, the Global North is still focused on individual electric vehicles rather than a system overhaul. This creates a convenient opportunity both for green capitalist approaches to transition in rich liberal democracies and for authoritarian far-right governments that promote ecocidal extractivism in peripheral countries. It could be, however, even more devastating if ecofascism manages to take the lead in places like Germany, France, Austria, and the United States and furthers practices tied to ecological imperialism. Its advancement may also aid in the creation of pockets of ecofascism within Global South countries by contributing to an elitist and segregationist view of environmental protection, which could lead to what Daniel Aldana Cohen terms an "ecoapartheid" (Aldana Cohen, 2019).

#### **Towards a Framework of Authoritarianism against Nature**

The majority of the literature available on this subject helps to identify standard cases where far-right ideology causes ecological destruction. However, it is important to consider the differences in phenomena of the Global North and the Global South. This means that authoritarianism against nature in the South is embedded in a history of unequal ecological exchange and unequal economic exchange between the periphery and the centre of capitalism that creates and normalizes sacrifice zones for the benefit of industrialization, in places like Latin America, that support or create the mode of living in the United States and Europe. These elements, together, add to a framework for understanding how ecocide and violence against peoples connected with the protection of nature is not the same at the centre and at the margins of capitalism. In fact, there may be conflicts between the interests of workers in Canada and in Bolivia, in ways similar to conflicts between many who live in urban areas in Canada and First Nations communities opposing pipelines in their territories. The difference is that when dealing with geopolitical arrangements and the differences in development in the system of dependent capitalism, ecological imperialism is also a situation that sets authoritarian practices apart in the richer and the poorer countries.

To understand these different expressions of authoritarianism against nature is to be able to map out trends and threats under the already existing ecological crisis. In the case of the Global South, the situation is even more critical due to climate debt, underdevelopment, and the ways that mainstream environmentalism is failing to consider how the South will transition into carbon neutrality when the technologies and resources to do so continue to be concentrated in the North.

This chapter focuses on Latin America for its analysis of how expressions of right-wing authoritarianism connect to capitalism's demand for resources and cheap labour, creating sacrifice zones for the benefit of affluent areas. Yet, authoritarianism against nature in the Global South and the Global North may take on even more sinister characteristics when considering the combination across different political projects and practices. There is need for a broader framework that may help to generate a better understanding of the authoritarian phenomena that further the metabolic rift and prevent transition into a society where the metabolism between humans and nature is regulated and reconciled. Today, the different faces of fossil fascism in the South are not detached from new enclaves of ecofascism in the North. However, as the ecological crisis heightens, the danger

of ecofascism may grow in the periphery as local elites look for ways to protected themselves, while fossil capital attempts to reinvent itself in places like Europe.

# **References**

ctivists-murdered-single-year-worst-figure-record/. Last accessed on 30 June 2022.

Stokes, Doug (2005), *America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia*, London: Zed Books.

# **Neoliberal Authoritarian Urbanism** A Comparative Study of New Patterns of Urban Development in Brazil and Turkey

*Aysegul Can and Hugo Fanton*

#### **Introduction**

Over the last few decades, massive and usually state-led urban redevelopment and housing projects have been implemented all over the world, with more intensity in the Global South, and alliances between entrepreneurs and state authorities have produced new urban policies that combine the evictions of poor people from their territories and the private appropriation of land in favour of capital accumulation processes. What has become known as "neoliberal urbanism" (Smith 1996 and 2002; Brenner 2004; Peck and Tickell 2002) refers to the urban specificities of a macroeconomic process, in which the dominant accumulation pattern promotes a "marketoriented regulatory restructuring" (Peck et al. 2009), in unequal and heterogeneous social, political, and institutional settings.

In this context, which dates back to the profound transformations in the relations between market, state, and society since the mid-1970s, cities have become veritable "institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy experiments" (Peck et al. 2009, 58), that embrace fiscal austerity (Hall 2019), public-private partnerships (Rolnik 2015), property redevelopment accompanied by increasing financialization (Aalbers et al. 2020; Fix 2015), and state repression associated with new strategies of private appropriation of space (Rolnik 2015).

It should be noted that although these phenomena have a broad spatio-temporal spectrum—we are talking here about a global phenomenon which has advanced over at least four decades—in order to properly understand the processes of neoliberalization it is necessary to investigate their general foundations and, at the same time, to carry out "a systematic inquiry into their multifarious institutional forms, developmental tendencies, diverse sociopolitical effects and multiple contradictions" (Peck et al. 2009, 51).

While urban neoliberalism in the Global South and North has exhibited general common features since at least the 1980s, in a post-2008 crisis context there have been some changes in the ways in which neoliberal urbanism is implemented in certain localities. One of the fundamental changes that we observe is an authoritarian turn in urban politics, accentuating coercive means by state and private actors in the imposition of market interests on urban space, while systematically weakening mechanisms that allow the urban poor and marginalized population to defend their interests. This chapter focuses on this dramatic restructuring of city governance in the Global South which we conceptualize as neoliberal authoritarian urbanism (NAU), a restructuring of urban development around the promotion of market-led urban policies and increasing global spatial financialization.

Contemporary expressions of what David Harvey (2003) calls "accumulation by dispossession" are spatialized in an environment where finance and real estate sectors control the urban production according to their interests. As the state, "with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both supporting and promoting these processes" (Harvey 2003, 74), it becomes crucial to analyse the forms of the organization of power that correspond with this pattern of capital accumulation, both in terms of the general economic dynamics of each social formation, and the specific ones—urban, rural, industrial, financial, etc. We will analyse the specificity of urban policies—the NAU—based on the intertwining of "neoliberal urbanism" with the concept of "authoritarian neoliberalism" (Tansel 2017; and Bruff 2014).

This chapter aims to shed light on processes of neoliberal urban regeneration/redevelopment during the implementation of increasingly oppressive, authoritarian, and profit-driven urban policies in the specificity of Brazil and Turkey. The two countries were chosen to investigate the extent of transnational—global—capital's reach and influence based on their seeming difference in culture, governance, urban policy, and location. The choice is based on the understanding that both countries have undergone profound political crises in a post-2008 context, with a significant authoritarian turn. In the Brazilian case, we refer to the coup of 2016 and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, an autocratic leader with fascist tendencies (Singer 2021). In the case of Turkey, the choice is in reference to the institutional changes promoted by the AKP, that fostered an extreme concentration of power. We understand that such changes in the relations of hegemony had profound impacts on urban dynamics, producing an accentuation of coercion that led us to develop the concept of NAU.

We employ the approach of comparative urbanism, based on research conducted in dialogue and with similar methodological tools, such as conducting content analysis of urban policy documents, legislation, and laws, documentary surveys of civil society organizations, and press publications. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the notion of neoliberal authoritarian urbanism is important for understanding the current phase of the capital accumulation process via urbanism in cities, in a dynamic present, and in different realities in the Global South. And, furthermore, that the crises of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism share a common denominator.

# **'Accumulation by Dispossession' and 'Authoritarian Neoliberalism', Shaping NAU**

Under neoliberalism, urban governance is driven by value creation, in which physical infrastructure, housing, transportation, and sanitation become means of capital accumulation: "the aim is to create sufficient synergy within the urbanization process for monopoly rents to be created and realized by both private interests and state powers" (Harvey 2001, 103). The emergence of finance-led urban policy is enabled through the reorganization of urban space according to the interests of capital reproduction. Through governance structures, private property rights and mortgage finance are pushed onto poor populations by state-finance coalitions. Land reforms are conducted, implementing property rights in situations where property-led systems coexisted with other forms of tenure, and global finance, nation state, and local governments integrate into an alliance in cities in favour of land privatization and the creation of financial assets based on urban development (Santos 1996; Aalbers et al. 2020).

The extensive literature on "neoliberal urbanism" points to such trends by emphasizing market-driven state initiatives, especially financial ones, with consequent restructuring of regulatory frameworks, territorial development patterns, and socio-political alliances (Peck et al. 2009). Furthermore, "urban real-estate development—gentrification writ large—has now become a central motive force of urban economic expansion, a pivotal sector in the new urban economies" (Smith 2002, 447).

Although such patterns are still present in the urban environment, it is important to note the inflections present in a post-2008 crisis context. The institutional transformations of neoliberalism in the 1990s and early 2000s sought some degree of coordination of interests between dominant and subordinate classes. The sharp growth of private indebtedness that led to the US housing bubble indicates just that, as it implied the active involvement of different actors in that process, such as sectors of the middle classes and various categories of investors, from small owners to large real estate funds, that turned homes into a financial asset in the mortgage market. Amidst market initiatives to restrict urban policy, some theorists demonstrate that there was also "the deployment of community-based programmes and shadow-state initiatives to combat social exclusion; the promotion of new forms of coordination and interorganizational networking among previously distinct spheres of local state intervention" (Peck et al. 2009, 64) and other initiatives to sugarcoat the pill and promote some degree of legitimacy.

We argue here that this is precisely what has changed. The rise of so-called 'authoritarian populism' and its implications in everyday politics has transformed urban dynamics, and therefore we should give specific attention to the urban implications of the latest authoritarian turn—even though authoritarian populism as a concept was coined over 40 years ago by Stuart Hall, in 1980. In the literature of political economy and also in urban studies, the emergence of more authoritarian neoliberal regimes has been the subject of discussion since the mortgage crisis in 2008 (Adaman and Akbulut 2021; Rodrik 2017; and Rolnik 2019). Some other scholars also noted that neoliberalism as a furthering of free market logic started to reach into every part of society, emphasizing economic agendas and development as the only worthy human activity (Madra and Adaman 2014; Adaman and Akbulut 2021; and Bruff and Tansel 2018). This view highlighted neoliberalism as a specific structure for governance.

The concept we present here of neoliberal authoritarian urbanism is based on an effort to identify, in a more accurate way, "the contemporary mechanisms of neoliberal governance" (Tansel 2017, 3). We followed closely the elaborations of Cemal Burek Tansel and Ian Bruff who emphasize the tendencies accentuating the coercive dimension as "strategies for the reproduction of capital-in-general" (Ayers and Saad-Filho 2014, 4). By using the term neoliberal authoritarian urbanism, we analyse the urban governance part of that neoliberal structure.

The notion of authoritarian neoliberalism expresses "a transformation of the 'normal' operation of the capitalist state" and a "qualitative shift from the intrinsic 'illiberal' propensities of neoliberalism" (Tansel 2017, 3), which operates through legal, coercive, and administrative mechanisms to limit the public dimension of the state—or the realms of consent building—the sphere of popular action and resistance (Bruff 2014, 116), and the "escalation in the state's propensity to employ coercion and legal/extra-legal intimidation" (Tansel 2017, 3).

Also important is the relationship established by the concept between the political form of organization of power and neoliberalism as a regime of capital accumulation. There is an "embodied condition whereby authoritarian neoliberalism subjects individuals, collectives and populations to economic, financial and corporeal discipline" (Tansel 2017, 4). Following Bruff, the governance mechanisms under authoritarian neoliberalism are "increasingly preemptive" (2014, 123), imposing austerity measures or restructuring the space "towards protecting the pillars of neoliberal accumulation" (Tansel 2017, 4). Thus, the concept stresses "a *qualitative* change in how state power is wielded by dominant groups in order to maintain hegemony—specifically, via a range of coercive and legal measures that aim to insulate the state from popular contestation" (Fabry and Sandbeck 2018, 3).

With this chapter we want to contribute to this discussion by contextualizing the "relationship between the changing political terrain of neoliberalism and the new modes of authoritarian governance" in the urban environment (Fabry and Sandbeck 2018, 3). We understand that there is a correspondence between current patterns of urban governance and neoliberal authoritarianism, in an urbanism marked by the accentuation of coercion and legal administrative mechanisms that favour the reproduction of capital in urban space and restrict the space for popular action and resistance.

This is precisely why we base the NAU concept on Harvey's political economy and his formulation that the capitalist "inability to accumulate through expanded reproduction on a sustained basis has been paralleled by a rise in attempts to accumulate by dispossession" (Harvey 2003, 64), with the resulting relationship between space and capital accumulation.The concept is based on the principles of a Marxian "description of primitive accumulation [which] reveals a wide range of processes", such as commodification and privatization of land, suppression of rights to the commons, processes of appropriation of assets, usury, and debt. "The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes" and operates continuously in the reproduction of capitalism, meaning all "the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within capitalism's historical geography up until now" (Harvey 2003, 186).

The direct relationship that urbanism establishes between capital accumulation and space makes urban policy one of the main forms and manifestations of accumulation by dispossession. Spatial power is necessary to take, make, and dominate in the most literal sense (Centner 2008) the reproduction of capital. Consequently, spatial capital can be defined as "all resources accumulated by an actor enabling him or her to benefit, according to their strategy, from using society's spatial dimension" (Lévy and Lussault 2003, 124). Spatial capital is a factor in social differentiation, and also an indicator of social inequality. It shows the patterns of privileged consumption rather than collective consumption and emphasizes that cities are places of struggle as Manuel Castells demonstrated (Castells 1977, 2000, and 2001).

The ability to take and make space not only gives different groups 'holding power' over negotiations and control over space, but also the capacity to mould space through different practices and moments. Harvey adds that although Bourdieu refers to individualized processes—as individuals floating, almost like atoms, "in a sea of structured aesthetic judgments"—concepts such as "collective symbolic capital" linked to urban spaces express the competitive dynamics that now predominate in cities. The aim of Paris, Berlin, New York, Istanbul, or São Paulo is to "raise their quotient of symbolic capital and to increase their marks of distinction so as to better ground their claims to the uniqueness that yields monopoly rent" (Harvey 2001, 103).

In this context, we expose and analyse the cases of Turkey and Brazil, with emphasis on the correlation between urban governance and capital accumulation. The cases explored demonstrate the spatial dimension of capital reproduction, and how this directly impacts the lives of impoverished city inhabitants. The commodification of territories, the dispossession of the commons, and their reappropriation by capital produces, as a combined effect, the urban spoliation of thousands of people and neoliberal advance as a logic of social (de)integration. For this, the state is a central agent, since it organizes the power mechanisms necessary to spatialize capital, in the conformation of what we call here neoliberal authoritarian urbanism.

# **Turkey, Brazil, and the Rise of NAU**

In the last 30 years, the neoliberal urban policies implemented in Turkey and in Brazil have not only increased their policies of land grab and speculation, but also dispossession by capital accumulation (Serin et al. 2020; Rolnik 2015; and Aalbers 2020). This situation has led to many massive urban regeneration and redevelopment projects, and brutal processes of eviction. Naturally, this increase in neoliberal urban policies is associated with a world economy that has been changing since the 1970s. Countries in the Global North experienced the withdrawal of industrial production and therefore a decrease in the primary circuit of capital (Merrifield 2014). Speculation on real estate that works as a secondary circuit of capital started to increase, and capital has shifted over to this, as the primary circuit of capital slowed down. Henri Lefebvre (1996) and Harvey (2005) have talked about these changes and unpacked them many times.This rise in the real estate sector has been the driving factor of urbanization in the Global South (Lees et al. 2015). Urban regeneration and redevelopment projects, and state-led gentrification, started to become perceived as a 'quick fix' for transforming the urbanized areas in Southern countries that needed to catch up economically with their Northern counterparts. This change in economy helps improve the understanding of urbanization, not only in the South but also in the North as well. As Loretta Lees, Hyung Ban Shin, and Ernesto López-Morales put it:

Given that the rise of the secondary circuit of the built environment and the real estate sector is geographically uneven, it is important to understand the geographically and historically uneven ways in which various agents of capital investment, as well as the functions of a range of state apparatuses and hegemonic ideologies, have contributed to both the safeguarding and reproduction of (often speculative) investment in the built environment. (Lees et al. 2015, 449)

These features that are present in both countries are analysed here. We can speak of a rise of 'neoliberal urbanism', that focuses on the commodification of space through mostly profit-led projects and urban decisions resulting in the crisis context of 2008. In the following years, however, by distinct and not concomitant processes, there was an authoritarian rise in both countries. Here, we will seek here to analyse how urban governance was affected and what the similarities and differences are in the two contrasting national contexts.

We now turn to a brief discussion of neoliberal urbanism in Turkey and Brazil respectively. Following that, NAU in both countries and how this affects their major cities will be discussed.

#### Neoliberal Urbanism in Turkey and Brazil

In Turkey, the neoliberal era primarily began in the 1980s. However, it was the 2001 economic crisis that significantly increased neoliberalization as a whole. The economic crisis of 2001 was the biggest one in the history of the republic and Turkey responded to this crisis with widespread neoliberalization, including a significant increase in the real estate sector and privatization (Serin et al. 2020). In the case of Istanbul, this resulted in opening up many state-owned and other forms of land to development through various changes and additions in urban laws and regulations. The Turkish state played two roles in the increasing capital accumulation through urban development: firstly, the national state was the one regulating land use, planning laws, and regulations, and also designating resources; and secondly, it was the body actually constructing the developments and developing the land (Serin et al. 2020).

Another thing that happened in the 1980s was that the Housing Development Administration (TOKI) was established in 1984, with the goal of generating cheap housing. However, TOKI quickly evolved into a highly influential government agency with broad authority over practically every element of the housing market. TOKI was initially an institution that provided low-cost housing with cheap mortgages and low monthly instalments but these houses were for sale and this institution did not create any rental social housing. Most of the working class in Turkey did not have enough financial power, savings, or security to commit to a 10–20-year contract. After its foundation, laws and regulations helped TOKI gain the power to become the biggest land speculator and real estate developer in the country. This authority is now somewhat shared with another important governmental institution, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change (Can, publication forthcoming).

Turkey began to have a growing—but also very unequal—economy by changing urban and municipal law, providing subsidies and tax exemptions to private construction companies, increasing financialization of the housing market, and finally beginning to implement massive urban regeneration, renewal, redevelopment, and infrastructure projects (Yardimci 2020). In Turkey, urban regeneration became a legal term in 2004, and the extended power of TOKI only expedited the centralized application of neoliberal urban politics (Batuman 2013). Many stateled urban redevelopment projects and TOKI-built social housing buildings drove disadvantaged city residents to either leave the neighbourhood and be pushed farther out to the peripheries, or to take out mortgages and become indebted to the state or state-backed banks. This new strategy was extremely different from the traditional Turkish urbanization paradigm, which relied on overlooking squatting and instead advocated for total and full commercialization of the urban landscape (Keyder 2010; Batuman 2015; and Kuyucu and Unsal 2010).

In all Turkish cities, without any citizen engagement in the decision-making and execution process, large regions and neighbourhoods were classified as urban regeneration/renewal areas (Batuman 2015). Squatter areas were targeted initially, but subsequently deteriorating inner-city regions became the focus of urban regeneration efforts (Batuman 2015). As neoliberal urban policies grew more prevalent, formerly destitute and 'undesirable' but historically significant regions of Istanbul's inner city became increasingly valuable, attracting domestic and foreign investment—Tarlabaşı, Bomonti, Sulukule, Talimhane, and so on (Can 2021). Newly constructed high-rise apartments and luxury shopping malls all suggested that the real estate and construction sector was becoming a lucrative capital venture environment, as Neil Smith previously remarked (2002, 446). As a result of both this shift in policy and transition, an ever-expanding and hastily designed urban sprawl has formed, complete with endless shopping malls, vacant high-rise apartment buildings, and massive mosques. Official documents—such as Turkey's Vision 2023—and the creation and implementation of urban megaprojects have helped Istanbul become the metropolis that local and international investors have flocked to as Turkey's growing global city (Dogan and Stupar 2017).

In the Brazilian context, the state is also configured as a fundamental agent in the process of spatial formation of cities in favour of capital interests. Throughout the 20th century, accompanying the industrial expansion, state investment in the urban environment was "a factor of intense differential land valuation" (Kowarick 2000, 23). Under neoliberalism, the state began to combine this with its role in the process of financialization of urban space by promoting financialized investment mechanisms and the transformation of urban land into a financial asset.

Starting in the 1990s, Brazilian national and local governments implemented the 'structural adjustment' of the Washington Consensus, with the adoption of focalized urban policies, as advocated for by international financial organizations, especially the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). This included the creation of "private financial intermediation agencies (enclave agencies), legally independent and responsible for implementing projects and raising funds in the market"; public-private partnerships (PPPs) in urban regeneration projects, gentrification and urban services and infrastructure concessions by private companies; and "the raising of funds in the national and international credit market", with the issuance of public bonds to finance urban projects. This set of measures constituted public action and urban development under the growing control of finance (Arantes 2006, 75).

With monetary stabilization and the advance of financialization, private indebtedness was presented as a housing solution for the middle and upper-income sections of society (Castro 1999, 135). Another consequence of neoliberal urbanism was the "articulation between local real estate developers and national investors" to promote "the construction of new office towers and multi-purpose complexes, which would be rented by multinational companies" (Fix 2011, 121). Excluded from any market alternative, the most vulnerable sectors began to occupy informal settlements, which led, for example, to a 52 percent growth in the number of houses in favelas in São Paulo from 1991–96 (Pasternak 2002, 8).

The rapprochement between the real estate circuit and the capital market gained new energy from the Real Estate Financing System and the Real Estate Investment Funds (FII), created by law in 1993. The novelty of this mechanism lies in the possibility of "pooling resources for investments, without fragmenting the ownership of real estate" (Fix 2011, 126). This is advantageous when stimulating the construction of large commercial towers and malls, as it allows each of the investors to "become the owner of a certain number of quotas" (Fix 2011, 126). In addition, it allows the "attracting [of] investors who were not necessarily interested in using the property. That is, facilitating the untying of use from ownership", so that the development could be deployed as "a financial asset with greater liquidity, placed alongside others in an investor's portfolio" (Fix 2011, 126).

In the 2000s there was a political shift during the election of the Workers' Party (PT) to occupy the Presidency of the Republic, first with Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva—2003–10—and then with his successor Dilma Rousseff—2011–16. It is commonly understood that the new 'developmentalism' in Brazil between 2003–14 that the PT's support of economic policies directly affected urban dynamics. The main used examples are the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), launched in 2007 to stimulate growth by infrastructure investments, and the My House My Life programme (MCMV), which began in 2009 as a measure to mitigate the internal effects of the international financial crisis, and has considerably increased the volume of resources for financing social housing.

During Lula and Rousseff 's governments, there was a significant set of measures in place that were in line with the interests of the construction business and that impacted directly on the cities' dynamics. In addition to the above-mentioned programmes, a special tax regime applicable to real estate developments was adopted, the National Treasury's budget allocated resources to be directed towards the sector, real estate credit was extended, interest rates reduced, and an intensive use of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development resources was given to stimulate the sector. Politically, the articulation of the businessmen with public agents at different levels and spheres, by participating in economic policymaking bodies and in the financing of electoral campaigns, should also be emphasized.

Despite this correspondence between market interests and the policies adopted, there was an accentuation of the consensual component in the coercionconsensus dynamic of the relation between the state and the popular classes in the period. This can be exemplified by: the greater participation of labour income in the national gross aggregate value, resulting from full employment policies and an increase in the minimum wage (Rugitsky 2017; Serrano and Summa 2018); the creation of specific urban policies for the popular classes, such as the My House My Life programme (Rolnik 2015; Maricato 2015); and the mechanisms of participatory democracy that have expanded popular participation in the elaboration and management of public policies (Fernandes 2007; Avritzer 2010; and Dagnino 2014), among others.

Thus, the cities experienced an intensification of the struggles that opposed different forces involved in urban politics. The contradictions spanned themes such as the dispute over land and budget between businessmen and social movements, the definition of criteria for prioritization of income bands in the allocation of resources, the rise of real estate speculation and the degree of state participation in the process involving housing production, and the actions of different popular social and political groups (Rolnik 2015).

As part of this context, homeless social movement organizations1 broadened their social bases and acted in different ways, which make up a historically shaped 'repertoire of interactions' which constitute political-institutional relations, party disputes, parliamentary representation, and negotiation strategies with local and national executive powers. In addition, direct actions such as public manifestations and occupation of empty land and properties in different spaces of the cities, including in central and highly valued areas. The interaction of movements with antagonistic forces and state power involves "much more than formal experiences of institutionalized participation: they also include other practices of dialogue and conflict" permeated by "a tension between the principles of autonomy and political effectiveness" (Tatagiba et al. 2011), which permeates their political and social relations.

However, as a consequence of the 2008 economic crisis the dispute over the macroeconomic management of the country increased when several sectors of the business community started to shift in political terms. Their movement was related to items such as the worsening of the economic crisis in the domestic environment,

1 In Brazil, since the 1970s and 1980s, there have been emerging urban social movements organizing with the homeless population to advocate for the right to housing. They are known as homeless movements, such as the National Union for Popular Housing (UNMP) and the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST).

the advance of state intervention in response to the crisis, the degree of financialization of the economy and of the productive sector, the diminishing rates of profit, the fall in direct investment, pressure over the labour market, and the intensification of the social political struggles and labour union activities (Singer 2018). The change in the political stance of business leaders, along with the absence of organization and massive resistance of the working classes in defence of Rousseff 's measures, resulted in a judicial-parliamentary coup in 2016 and in the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In the conceptualizations of the period after Rousseff 's fall, authors such as André Singer, Alfredo Saad Filho, and Lecio Morais emphasize two combined aspects: the ruling classes' definite break from the social pact established in the constitution of 1988; and the growing coercive forms used to exercise power and implement an extreme orthodox neoliberalism. This is the Brazilian political form of authoritarian neoliberalism, which accentuated the mechanisms of coercion in the organization of power in favour of market interests after the 2016 coup, while excluding the popular classes from access to public policies.

### The NAU in Turkey and Brazil

A construction boom began in the early 2000s in Turkey and as its biggest city and economic capital, Istanbul was affected the most by this boom. The number of construction companies founded doubled and direct investment in housing increased significantly, from USD 6 million to USD 987 million between the years 2004 and 2008 (Balaban 2012). Project-based development in the form of megaprojects, private neighbourhood projects, public-private urban regeneration projects, and so-called social housing projects have become the mainstream ways of providing housing in Turkey and in Istanbul and, therefore, the main tools for furthering the neoliberal transformation of local and urban governance in Istanbul (Perouse 2013; Serin et al. 2020; and Kuyucu and Unsal 2010). A web portal called Yeni Projeler (New Projects) lists a number of projects—2,115 to be exact—in Istanbul by 2018 (Yeni Projeler 2018).

The AKP heavily relied on the tools of authoritarian neoliberalism and developmentalism by utilizing extractive sources such as mining, energy, and construction (Adaman and Akbulut 2021). Through this developmentalism, the AKP garnered popular support and created an image of a 'strong and benevolent state' (see Koch and Valiyev 2016). The urban megaprojects, ever-growing in size, also have the aim of nation-building and the manufacturing of consent from society (Can 2020 and 2013). As the biggest and richest city in Turkey, Istanbul, of course, was subject to the majority of these changes and projects. Especially in the last decade, this urban transformation and the scale of these top-down urban projects has reached unprecedented levels. Having said that, the biggest difference is that the public tenders for all these projects used to be distributed somewhat equally between private companies. However, in line with the increasingly non-democratic forms of governance in Turkey, nowadays, most tenders are only given to pro-government companies. In addition, this ever-shrinking circle of pro-government businesses are able to engage in never-before-seen projects and benefit from them at the maximum level (Oktem 2019). This contributes to the authoritarian nature of urban administration in Turkey. As Kerem Öktem explains skilfully in his chapter:

This business model is facilitated by "Turkey's exit from democracy" (Öktem and Akkoyunlu, 2016), the increasing centralisation of powers in the hand of the president, and the progressive erosion of the rule of law, allowing for the realisation of real estate and infrastructure projects that would otherwise have failed environmental impact assessments and/or municipal oversight or would not have been allowed within the framework of existing zoning plans (Lovering and Türkmen, 2011). With Turkey's increasingly authoritarian drift since around 2011, a coup attempt on 15 July 2016, and the regime change to a hyper-presidential system in June 2018, the construction sector has morphed into one of the economy's few remaining growth engines. (Öktem 2019, 299)

The most renowned mega projects are Istanbul Airport—the third airport—Yazuv Sultan Selim Bridge, and the Çamlıca Mosque, all of which are recent constructions and introduced to the public as being both the biggest and the best (Adaman and Akbulut 2021). These projects managed to garner support from AKP constituencies, usually through the politics of nation building, developmentalism, and growth 'while the whole world is watching us' even though urban megaprojects rarely ever create economic growth or sustainable development for any part of the population, except the ruling elite.

In spite of the insistence by policymakers and both local and national authorities on the fact that most of these urban regeneration and redevelopment projects are proposed and constructed for risk mitigation, earthquake purposes, and with 'significant' social benefit,2 the fact that they mostly target middle and upper-class people—who increase land speculation and squeeze out the urban poor from any neighbourhood that is remotely central—leads most academics and activists to think that there is a more gentrification-seeking agenda (Can 2020; Islam 2010; and Ucal and Kaplan 2020). However, in spite of these increasing authoritarian practices, there is a growing and important urban resistance against these projects and decisions. Most of the controversial urban projects—like the Tarlabaşı Renewal Project, Sulukule Project, and Kanal Istanbul Project—and authoritarian urban decisions were met with important criticism and resistance, one important example

2 For an example of proposed social benefits see the Mayor of Fatih's statements on the Sulukule Project: https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/fatih-belediye-baskanindan-sulukule-ac iklamasi-9779099.

being the Gezi Park protests. This also proved that this increasing neoliberalization coupled with an oppressive approach to urban dissent has resulted in a fundamental reconfiguration of the urban-level hierarchies in which cities are enmeshed, and cities remain crucial theatres for socio-political conflicts as a result (Purcell 2008; Lelandais 2014). In spite of the state's physical and symbolic dominance, social action and resistance within the city aims to modify capitalism's socio-territorial organization at many geographical scales (Purcell 2008; Lelandais 2014).

In Brazil, just like in Turkey, during the past years there has been a significant increase in authoritarian urban policies as well, and as a result many democratic practices were either limited or completely repressed. After the coup against Rousseff in 2016, the national context has changed profoundly, characteristic of a new form of imposition of market interests which accentuate coercion as a key component of politics in general, and urbanism in its specificity. Despite the high growth rates observed between 2005–08, and a rapid economic recovery after the international financial crisis, the political scenario changed profoundly from 2013 onwards.The intensification of social, economic, and political conflicts in the country, especially related to the role of the state in promoting development, resulted in Rousseff 's government shifting towards fiscal austerity policies (Serrano and Summa 2018), which were exacerbated by both the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. During the 2000s, Lulism would have initiated a process of change in the country's class structure, reducing the industrial reserve army, which touched the core of national dependent capitalism and caused a repositioning of the dominant classes in favour of a new political-economic agenda (Singer 2018, 18). It seems that the industrialists, who began the decade participating in a national-corporativist arrangement of a neo-developmentalist character, progressively shifted their position in favour of austerity and a reduction of social rights.

In urban policy, it is possible to list a number of elements that support the notion that there has been an authoritarian rise and the conformation of NAU:

bills propose broadening the concept of terrorism to include popular mobilizations and demonstrations critical of the government.

Other policies can be listed that exemplify this new authoritarian neoliberal phase, such as the precariousness of public services as a result of the approval of Constitutional Amendment 95, which established a limit for social investments in the country. Neoliberal urbanism in Brazil created a period of intense disputes, which at some moments resulted in achievements by social movements from the perspective of rights. The City Statute and the participatory budget are perhaps the bestknown examples of Brazilian urban policy, even during the neoliberal phase, they served as models for the adoption of instruments that imposed limits on the accumulation of capital and guaranteed the right to the city (Fernandes 2007; Avritzer 2010; and Dagnino 2014). These mechanisms, however, were already quite limited by the dominant pattern of accumulation, and were completely annulled by the measures pointed out above that make up the NAU: participatory spheres were closed down, urban development policy was further privatized, housing supply was

3 The data can be seen, in Portuguese, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CIZjXacbUDgMq SaidkIps0ba9BF9q8Ju/view?usp=sharing

focused on the highest income households, state and parastatal violence against social movements increased significantly, and the poorest population was made even more vulnerable to evictions and displacements. Accumulation by dispossession becomes widespread through the private appropriation of land and collective goods that conform urban spaces. In the same historical context in which half of the Brazilian population is in a situation of food insecurity, without having enough resources for three meals a day, and unemployment reaches historic highs, the real estate market announces impressive numbers. In 2020, there was a 57.5 percent growth in real estate financing, with BRL 124 billion released by the banks, and a new growth of 113 percent in the first quarter of 2021. According to data from ABECIP—the Brazilian Association of Real Estate Loans and Savings—operations between January and March 2021 reached a record amount of BRL 43.1 billion, with 187,600 units sold.

Capital accumulation is produced by a dynamic that combines state, parastatal, and paramilitary violence against the popular classes, i.e. police operations, and judicial and extrajudicial expulsion of vulnerable populations from where they live, with the reappropriation of land by real estate and financial agents, construction companies, and speculators, among others.With urban governance geared towards private real estate production, for middle and high-income consumption, and the permanent linking of interests between the financial sector, real estate developers, private investors, and the state, the land previously occupied by homeless families becomes an 'asset'.

In both countries there is a remarkable overlap in terms of neoliberal urban policies and practices and the oppressive way they were implemented. Brazil saw some development of social housing before 2013 and the economic agenda was positioned more towards growth. However, after 2013 there have been clear austerity politics which were complemented by neoliberal policies and authoritarian practices. This has been different in Turkey. First of all, despite the increasing political tension between actors, there has not been a major political change in Turkey since 2002 and the urban agenda has so far followed a neoliberal developmentalist path, most of the time at the expense of the vulnerable urban population. In the case of Brazil, social movements have achieved effective mechanisms of participation in the elaboration and management of urban policies, which resulted in public policies with some degree of inclusion that accentuated the legitimation component in the coercion-consensus binomial present in the period of hegemony under neoliberal urbanism. In the case of Turkey, the coercion that already prevailed in the pre-2008 period was progressively accentuated, with increasing concentration of power and state participation in urban development, which allows us to categorize political relations as authoritarian in the recent period.

Certainly, this growth and development has been very unequal, which has been the case in both countries. Especially recently, as most—if not all—of the housing stock has been constructed for the middle or upper-middle class and most schemes for generating money have benefitted the ruling and business elite. In terms of growing resistance and oppressing that resistance, both countries' civil societies followed a similar path where the importance of solidarity and notions of urban justice have been increasing and urban space has been a strategic arena for demonstrating and organizing for such unrest and discontent. Finally, in both countries, urban laws and regulations have been weaponized and modified to fit the needs of housing capital, instead of the population in need of shelter.

#### **Conclusion: Conceptualizing Neoliberal Authoritarian Urbanism**

There is a neoliberal authoritarian urbanism which promotes capital accumulation in the city space, a financialized governance structure that combines global market interest and local public and private agents. Since the beginning of the neoliberal era, state-finance-led urban policy has been enabled through the dismantling of pre-existing systems and it advances its frontiers by mobilizing state agents, which dismantle existing social and territorial relations and reorganize them according to market interests. What was once a common space occupied by poor families becomes a commodity offered as a new lifestyle for the upper classes. Neoliberal authoritarian urbanism combines historical urban actors such as owners, developers, builders, banks, and often inhabitants with a continuous acceleration of the role of financial investors associated with an increasingly authoritarian state in the development of large urban projects and real estate developments. This growing articulation between autocratic personalities in state power and private actors imposes new challenges on the understanding of urban space production.

As shown by some commentators, the rapprochement between the real estate sector and finance has become closer and more evident in the various financial innovations that have, in turn, mobilized various capital circuits for the financing of real estate developments, with significant effects on urban territories (Fix 2015; Aalbers et al. 2020). The new authoritarian phase, that distinguishes itself from neoliberal urbanism "marks a significant shift away from consensus-based strategies to a model of governance" (Tansel 2017, 11), in which "dominant social groups are less interested in neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise", and produce "the explicit exclusion and marginalization" of the urban poor (Bruff 2014, 116). What we here call neoliberal authoritarian urbanism expresses a new phase of relationship between market and state in the accumulation of capital through urban development. The action of market actors, both global and local, is articulated within authoritarian governance on a national and local scale, no longer as a mere consequence of the known epicentres of dissemination of practices and neoliberal reforms.

There is significant social transformation taking place in Turkey and Brazil. An important part of that transformation is conducted through urban development and there are several common features of regeneration taking place. The neighbourhoods selected for these projects have mostly been areas that are physically deteriorated. Most of the investments and urban policies have been primarily about profit and creating new residential areas for the middle and upper class. Many of the housing investments and housing policies are prepared without including public opinion and with as little information as possible provided to the public. This means that urban planning, which was supposed to be a tool for the public, is reaffirmed as a tool of authoritarian imposition of interests in favour of the business sector and the financially privileged.

Neoliberal urban policies go hand in hand with the increasingly oppressive attitude of the local and national governments of Turkey and Brazil. Both urban governance authorities prioritized the private housing and real estate sector and capital accumulation through the increasing dispossession of the vulnerable urban population. In this regard, the privilege the real estate developers and the middle and upper classes have 'to take and make' space and make it look like 'there was never really any alternative' through the brutal and oppressive displacement processes, with the help of the local and national governments, emphasizes the need for resistance that enables the people to stay in neighbourhoods that are now contested and commodified.

With the rise of NAU and the growing financialization of the global economy, the accumulation of capital through urbanization has imposed itself as a homogenizing pattern globally, despite the profound differences and spatial heterogeneities between the various geographical regions of the world. The countries in focus demonstrate the articulation between state and market in the appropriation of urban space as an accumulation process. Despite their vast differences in terms of culture, language, geography, and state institutions, there is an important overlap in terms of the financialization of the housing market in both countries. Additionally, the fact that both countries' current governments opt to use authoritarian practices to suppress any kind of resistance from the public—while implementing controversial urban projects, especially from the vulnerable urban population, and coddling profit-led companies—supports the idea of this overlap. This oppression makes these locations even more attractive for transnational real estate capital, as international investors understand that they would not have to deal with a public outcry themselves. Additionally, they could benefit from tax exemptions and weakened institutional and bureaucratic checks due to the authoritarian nature of the regimes and these regimes' desire to selectively engage with free market capitalism to stimulate growth.

This is a deepening of the relationship of dependency between state and capital, between the local and the global, which makes it necessary to analyse in combination the transnational structures of the financial market and the role of government-led coalitions in promoting private housing production or megaprojects. The central role of the state in the process of accumulation is shown in public subsidies for low-interest mortgage programmes—the use of public funds to expand financialization, the relationship between state intervention and increasing home ownership rates, and how the states represent the interests of the construction and finance industry.

Thus, we have presented in this chapter the importance of urban dynamics for the understanding of contemporary political phenomena, and vice-versa. The new authoritarianisms are supported by the urban development markets, which in turn accentuate exclusionary dynamics that have historically shaped cities. If this hypothesis is correct, we hope that the category NAU presented here may contribute to the study of these combined phenomena that are profoundly transforming life in cities and imposing new challenges on the working classes, poor, and marginalized populations.

### **References**

Brenner, N. (2004), *New State Spaces*, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bruff, I. (2014), "The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism", *Rethinking Marxism*, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 113–29.

# **Authoritarian Neoliberalism from Below** Subjectivity and Platform Capitalism in Argentina and Brazil

#### *Fábio Luís Franco and Gustavo Robles*

In recent years, after the decline of the so-called Latin American 'pink tide', it became commonplace to speak of an authoritarian turn or the return of neoliberalism to the region. Undoubtedly, the decline of progressivism as the lingua franca of Latin American politics had given way to governments with a marked rightwing profile, explicitly anti-progressive rhetoric, and aggressive agendas of economic flexibilization (Svampa 2020). The governments of Michel Temer, after a coup d'état, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Mauricio Macri in Argentina seemed to reconfigure a new political landscape in Latin America that is somehow reminiscent of the 1990s, the golden age of neoliberalism. But this narrative of the Latin American authoritarian turn rarely considers certain continuities that lie beneath the changes of administration and which are based on slower but constant processes of deployment of what we understand here as neoliberal rationality. Such deployments show the latent continuities between the old progressive years and the new conservative years, whilst letting us understand that authoritarianism is not limited to the lack of the rule of law, nor to the ideological profile of the president in office, nor even to the configuration of the state-form. This is because understanding authoritarianism means also being able to conceptualize manners of production and management of life, manners that involve ideologies and representations of the social world, but also bodily experiences and subjective affections and emotions that are often not directly articulated through public discourses or political actions.

In this chapter, we will explore the subjective dimensions of neoliberal biopolitics (those "manners of production and management of life") by analysing the working conditions in the platform economies in Argentina and Brazil. In our opinion, this approach may shed light on aspects of that authoritarianism spread over society which cannot be fully caught by the narrative of administration changes, and on forms of neoliberal authoritarianism, at a time and in a region in which neoliberalism has lost its seductive power, but not its power to make lives precarious. As we said, we will focus here on the world of work, fundamentally on what is currently known as the platform economy or gig economies, since from there are visible certain key elements of the biopolitical dimension of authoritarianism that involves the organization of labour processes and production of subjective features. These gig economies represent, at the same time and paradoxically, one of the most recent stages of the technological management of labour and one of the deepest stages of labour precarization, which makes these platform economies a privileged place to observe the coexistence between technology and precarization inherent to the new model of neoliberal accumulation, as well as forms of authoritarianism embedded in the management of subjectivities.

In the framework of the global expansion of capital, countries with high levels of informality and precarity, such as Latin American countries, appear as especially favourable environments for the deployment and expansion of these digital economies, due both to the weakness of their legal frameworks, the difficulties for labour market insertion, and the limited infrastructure required (Hidalgo Cordero and Salazar Daza 2020). Although the platform economy is one chapter in a long history of the precarization of labour and life in the societies of the Global South, it is now updated by technologies that have succeeded in extending its control into zones that had hitherto remained at the margins of the exploitative practices of capital: peripheral territories, along with their survival strategies and sociability networks (Franco 2021). Through the promotion of values such as those of flexibility or autonomy, and due to the convenience of their hiring procedures, these companies are often the most immediate employment option among young people and immigrants—and sometimes the only one available—in contexts of recurring economic crisis and structural unemployment (Antunes 2018). Particularly in Argentina and Brazil, companies such as Rappi, PedidosYa, and Glovo started to emerge between 2016 and 2018 reshaping working conditions as well as implying transformations at the level of workers' subjectivities.

As said, this chapter aims to present an approach to the biopolitical dimension of management and control over the workforce in the platform economies to understand authoritarian continuities in societies from the Global South. Towards that end, firstly we will define neoliberalism as a form of political rationality 'from below' since this micropolitical perspective permits inquiry into the subjectivity dimensions of labour management. Secondly, we will offer some comments on the functioning of algorithmic management and, thirdly, an analysis of the impact of the on-demand platforms on workers' subjectivities based on case studies and other research in Argentina and Brazil. In the last section, we will reflect on some theoretical and political aspects of the connection between authoritarianism and neoliberalism in the field of practices and forms of subjectivization.

#### **Neoliberalism from Above and from Below**

The financial crisis of 2008 seems to have exposed the weakness of certain liberal imagery that shaped the political culture of post-war Western societies and, since the 1980s, also of Latin America: an imaginary based on the combination of an institutional rule of law, an open market economy, and liberal values of socialization (Robles 2020a). Nowadays, we witness how this liberal consensus is being challenged by a wave of far-right leaders and political movements around the world, which has led to the question of how to conceptualize the connections between neoliberalism, as the latter phase of the capitalist mode of accumulation, and the (re)emergence of authoritarian and anti-democratic political expressions. However, this discussion had already been present in the first moments of the neoliberal revolution, as shown, for example, in the debate about the "authoritarian statism" after Nicos Poulantzas (2000) towards the end of the 1970s, or about the "authoritarian populism" after Stuart Hall (2007) in the mid-1980s. Currently, and in continuity with those perspectives, the connection between authoritarianism and neoliberalism has been discussed by political theory mainly at macro-political or discursive-ideological levels: in terms, for example, of anti-democratic modifications of the state's structure and functioning (Bruff 2013), of mixtures of authoritarian values and ultraliberal dogmas (Biebricher 2000), of amorphous ideological formations caused by the hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism (Brown 2020), or of neoliberal crisis management strategies (Demirovic 2018).

These multiplicities of perspectives are partly due to the elusiveness of the very concept of neoliberalism, which has become widespread in social sciences to define a new historical period from the 1970s onwards. Despite its condition as a 'newcomer' in social and political thought, multiple approaches and disputes are going around about what neoliberalism means, making it impossible to reach an agreement on its meaning. To give some examples of this situation, in the last decade neoliberalism was defined as a set of ideas on the economy and society (Slobodian 2017), as ways of regimenting the Global South after its decolonization (Borón et al. 1999), as a set of institutional policies carried out by supranational institutions (Harvey 2007), as a de-democratization process (Brown 2015), and as the concrete hegemony of financialization and austerity (Streeck 2013), among others. However, there is a certain line of inquiry that we want to follow up in this chapter that defines neoliberalism as a particular kind of political and practical rationality, since it will allow us, on the one hand, to connect neoliberalism with the ideological production of subjectivities and, on the other hand, to understand its pragmatic functioning beyond the institutional level.

The mentioned perspectives arise from Michel Foucault's 1979 lectures, titled *The Birth of Biopolitics* (2004). There, Foucault defines neoliberalism as a new "art of governmentality" that rules the relation between state, market, and subjects by expanding the market rationality to the entire social field through the generalization of the enterprise model. In this way, neoliberalism is understood as a device that produces practical rationalities, based no longer on exchange but on competition, and modes of subjectivization oriented toward the promotion of human capital. The central point is that this neoliberal understanding of the corporate form as an atom of society has the ideological effect of obscuring the contradiction between capital and labour by transforming the workers into their capitalists. Those ideas have given rise to a research field called 'governmentality studies', which has focused on the techniques, institutions, and reflections on techniques that allow the exercise of specific forms of power over populations (Barry et al. 1996).

Although this research field has produced contributions to inquiry into authoritarian governmentality methods, these contributions have been mostly limited to the analysis of ideas, schools, and theories on authoritarian and racist control over populations (Haidar 2019). On the contrary, our perspective will attempt to directly address the psychosomatic dimensions of biopolitical management in the workplace as, from the neoliberal view, it is up to the individuals to ensure the prosperity of themselves as enterprises: the individuals on their own must invest and manage their capital, improve their skills and competencies, and obtain the income corresponding to their performances. In short, neoliberalism consists of ways of governing through the constant creation and management of freedoms: unlike sovereign regimes, that had tried to constrain the behaviours of subjects, neoliberal governmentality works by setting up a series of technologies, practices, and ideologies that promote free initiative, self-responsibility, and individual selfmanagement. Neoliberalism contains the paradox that its authoritarian premises are included in its definition of freedom (Robles 2020b).

Then, understanding neoliberalism as political rationality allows for light to be shed on the mechanisms of exploitation through a set of everyday tactics of (self-)control and (self-)surveillance, ways of behaving, feeling, and thinking that shape the social world 'from below'. Following this line of thought, Verónica Gago (2014/2017) in her book *La razón neoliberal (Neoliberalism from Below)* coined the concept of "neoliberalism from below" to complement the Foucauldian understanding by bringing up the neoliberal specificities of contemporary Latin American societies. In a simplified topology, neoliberalism "from above" would mean a global accumulation regime associated with transformations at the nation-state level, while "from below" refers to "forms of life that reorganize notions of freedom, calculation, and obedience, projecting a new collective affectivity and rationality" (Gago 2014, 6). This approach is particularly valuable as it tries to explain why neoliberalism is still alive and effective after its crisis of political legitimacy, as she shows through an analysis of the popular and informal economic sectors in Buenos Aires. In Gago's perspective, neoliberalism is always involved in ways of appropriation, alteration, and relaunching from the grassroots, combined and contaminated by

local and traditional know-how, communal strategies, local representations, previous experiences, and cultural values.

Unlike Gago, in this text, we will not focus on the pragmatics and agency strategies of the actors, but on the subjective consequences of the algorithmic organization of work. However, this does not prevent us from speaking of neoliberalism analysed "from below" since we are looking for those authoritarian dimensions of neoliberal systems of management. Thus, this understanding of neoliberalism, a type of political rationality that works from below, leads to a central question of our research: the question of subjectivities. Neoliberalism is basically a way of producing subjectivities through permanently demanding competition, engagement, performance, and self-capitalization. In the last few years, many authors have been creating concepts to refer to this connection between the mechanisms of subjectivization and neoliberal transformations, such as the "entrepreneurial self " (Bröckling 2007), the "achievement-subject" (Han 2014), or the "neoliberal subject" (Dardot and Laval 2009). Although most of these reflections were formulated from experiences from industrialized countries and based on consultants, entrepreneurs, and managers as models of "neoliberal subjectivities", they permit us to reflect on the impact of neoliberal transformations on the subjectivities related to precarious working conditions in the Global South.

In this regard, what we want to analyse in the following sections is a phenomenon that has received scant attention: the subjective effects of the working conditions in platform economies. The theoretical and political meaning of this subject lies in the fact that it will allow us to observe the authoritarian deployment of neoliberal governance at the subjective level, that is, techno-political modes of acting on bodies and psyche that are a necessary condition for the functioning of neoliberal governmentality. Furthermore, we will argue that these techno-political mechanisms of management of subjectivities must be characterized as authoritarian insofar as they systematically produce dispossession of subjective autonomy, psychophysical pathologies, and modes of desymbolization through biopolitical mechanisms of the immunization of labour relations.

#### **Algorithmic Governmentality**

The location-based platform companies have been growing in Brazil and Argentina since 2015 by feeding on the massive unemployment resulting from periodic capitalist crises and the failure of the developmental model's promises of absorption of workers into the formal labour market. The platform economies can be described, in general terms, as companies based on digital infrastructures (platforms) that operate by connecting, through algorithmic technologies, the demand for service with its supply, and which must be understood as part of an extensive course of capitalist readaptation after the crisis of the industrial mode of production in the 1970s (Srnicek 2016). Then, there is a direct relationship between the crisis of overaccumulation and the falling rate of profit that opened up in the 1970s, and the implementation of the algorithmic management of labour. That crisis led to capital going on the offensive against work for the reduction of labour costs and the participation of workers in the distribution of profits, at the same time commencing a process of financialization and increased investment in intangible capital over physical capital, for example machines and installations (Beniger 1989).

However, the emergence of algorithmics must be understood as a continuity but also as a rupture with previous modes of automation, since algorithmics allows the organization of work without investment in physical capital or the development of complex technologies. Algorithms are basically a cheaper and relatively simple technology of work management that can be defined as computational metrics by which decisions are made automatically according to a given structure. After the 2008 financial crisis and the recent crisis of the pandemic, the implementation of algorithmic management (over the more expensive and complex machine or robotic automation) accelerated and became the model of rationalization, control, and exploitation of labour *par excellenc*e of post-growth capitalism (Schaupp 2021). These platform economies carry out their activities in the interstices and legal loopholes and are based on an extractivist logic of data, financial rent, and labour force to the point of exhaustion, both physical and mental.

That can be seen in the case of location-based platform companies that have spread to all the cities of the world in recent years. They are companies whose ondemand workers operate in an anonymous position of intermediary between supply and demand that gives these companies their claim to neutrality, i.e. to belong neither to the sphere of production nor to that of consumption and, crucially, to avoid being labelled as employers. By offering seductive gains at the very beginning of their operations, those companies created an army of workers that has not stopped increasing even if the tariffs are frozen and the individual earnings become too little to make ends meet. Therefore, reflecting on the labour dimension of platform economies points to the heart of this new form of capitalist value extraction, since, as Philipp Staab states, these new digital economies are based on the "alliance between the figures of rent-seeking capital and the consumer" to the detriment of the figure of the producer (Staab 2019, 277), i.e. an alliance between financial capital that seeks quick returns and consumer citizens who pursue lowcost profits at the expense of the intensification of labour exploitation.

As has been widely discussed, neoliberalism sets in motion the permanent process of fragmentation of society into a myriad of individuals identified as microenterprises and mobilized by the relentless pursuit of self-valorization, but with the spread of digital platforms, this process has reached new limits. Among the delivery and shipping app workers, can be identified an ongoing process of hyperindividualization arising from the systematic adoption by app companies of "immunization strategies" (Van Doorn 2017). These strategies consist of measures and procedures of subordination, management, and exploitation of workers that on the one hand make it very difficult for the companies to be held legally accountable, and on the other hand, directly and indirectly, intensify the productivity of the deliverers. The immunization strategies are also associated with the "demutualization of risks" that reaches three main and interrelated levels: health risks, financial risks, and epistemic risks (De Stefano 2016). Following this thread, we advocate for the inclusion of subjective risks linked to dimensions of psychosomatic pathologies, as we will discuss further.

Central to these immunization strategies is the invisible nature of algorithmic power through which companies manage to maximize control and management of labour, as well as the flows between supply and demand, anonymously attributing to the indecipherable calculability of software the allocation of bonuses, oscillation in the value of payments, inconsistencies in the distribution of orders, and even arbitrariness in the definition of suspensions. Hence, as Alexandra Mateescu and Aiha Nguyen (2019, 13) explain: technology such as "algorithmic management ... can serve to shift existing power dynamics and destabilize employment relationships" in terms of (1) "surveillance and control", which creates new speed and efficiency pressures on workers and removes them from the decision-making; (2) "transparency", that creates power asymmetries difficult to be challenged without knowledge of how these systems work; (3) "bias and discrimination", based on consumer-sourced rating systems that "can introduce biased and discriminatory practices towards workers" (ibid., 2) without the company being responsible for those practices; and (4) "accountability", since algorithmic management is used to "distance companies from the effects of their business decisions, obscuring specific decisions made about how a system should function" (ibid., 14).

These forms of immunization, propitiated and sustained by the mode of operation proper to algorithmic governance, directly affect individual and collective efforts to protect against risks, since they increase the sense of arbitrariness and meaninglessness in everyday work, further weakening workers' security in their ability to interpret the apps and make decisions. This is what can be called 'epistemic risk', which concerns the transformation of uncertainty, arbitrariness, and illegibility into algorithmic work-management mechanisms. Everything is happening as if algorithmic power permanently produces the shuffling of the rules of the digital game, forcing workers to frequently revise their room for manoeuvre and leeway, a situation that can be described as an incessant effort on the part of "partners" to "provisionally manage uncertainty" (Guerra 2021, 212).

This immunization of platform companies begins as early as the signing of the employment contract, where workers are usually defined as "collaborators" or "partners", an expression that seeks to dilute the contradictions between capital

and labour by reinforcing the idea of the autonomous and free individual who participates in horizontal labour relations. Companies constantly claim that they are not employers, since the image they intend to give of themselves is, as we said, that of an intermediary between the needs of someone who requires a delivery service (a consumer), with someone who offers a product (for example, a restaurant), and an entrepreneur who offers to transport it (the rider). Appealing to the ideals of individualization of work, entrepreneurship, meritocracy, individual effort, etc., these companies offer an idealized world where there are no bosses, no hierarchies, no fixed schedules, and where the possibility of obtaining a high income depends solely on individual efforts (Diana Menéndez 2019).

As a generalized modus operandi, companies are exempt from the costs and legal obligations imposed by legal labour relations as well as from the burdens of the activities, since it is the 'partners' or 'collaborators' (i.e. the workers) who assume the losses and expenses of their work (traffic accidents, diseases, and contagions during the pandemic, assaults, robberies, vehicle breakdowns, obsolescence or breakage of the smartphone, connectivity problems, etc.). The assumption of costs and burdens by the individual worker also implies, in the absence of the minimum rights and benefits assured by labour legislation, the assumption of health and financial risks. This effectiveness of the platforms in putting their workers outside of the social protection system and assimilating them into the figure of the self-employed entrepreneur is connected not only to the weakness of labour regulation in countries such as Argentina and Brazil but also to the characteristics of algorithmic management which, by depersonalizing the management and control body, fosters an impression of autonomy and flexibility that quickly becomes illusory.

### **Working in Platform Capitalism**

As seen, platform companies manage work tasks through algorithmic immunization mechanisms that take place in day-to-day work, for instance with the immunization of communication flows between the 'partners' and the company, which reduces daily contact between the workers and the company to anonymous notifications and automatic messages. In many cases, communication with the company takes place through call centres located abroad, in countries such as Colombia or Peru, and therefore contact is made with operators who are unfamiliar with the geography and situation of where the workers carry out their tasks, and who can therefore offer few solutions to daily inconveniences. Thus, communication is experienced by the workers as a Sisyphean task, always postponed by unanswered calls, emails that are automatically replied to, or the innumerable intermediate

instances in which other precarious workers give standardized explanations to enquiries. Maurício Santos, a driver for a platform company, expresses the following:

The relationship between the operator and the application is very difficult. You try, but the app gives you ready-made messages; you try with a phone, but it rings and no one answers and, when it answers, sometimes you know more than the person who answers; you call there to ask for guidance, the person asks you questions that make no sense to you ... it's a mess, it's a big mess, and you feel disoriented, and the only solution that comes up is to learn by watching videos on YouTube. (Pessoa Masson and Santos Oliveira 2021)

Cases of temporary suspension or definitive blocking without any justification by the companies, or the so-called *suspensão branca* ('white suspension'), which occurs without the worker knowing that they are being sanctioned, are frequent in this way, in which someone can go for hours or even days without receiving a delivery request without being officially suspended. This can happen for many reasons: receiving bad evaluations, breaching a contractual clause, rejecting a high number of orders, simply because a client complains about something beyond the worker's control, or even in retaliation for having participated in protests or demonstrations against the company (Abílio 2020). Besides that, the arbitrariness of the supposed algorithmic functioning reaches other spheres of the management of platformed labour, such as, for example, the distribution of bonuses for workers who reach a certain goal set by the application. The complaints of workers, in this case, point to the abrupt interruption of delivery requests when someone was close to earning some additional bonus, a practice which causes frustration and spreads distrust of the applications.

Thus, labour tasks in location-based platforms intensify the hyper-individualization of the worker by deepening the spatial decentralization of work as a fundamental condition for full localization. In this sense, performing a just-in-time job means being permanently available to accept tasks that require travel to any place, no matter how far away it may be. This deterritorialization of just-in-time work contributes to the scarcity of opportunities for workers to meet and, therefore, to build emotional and political ties. In this way, workers are at the disposal of the companies all the time, despite only being paid for a fraction of this time: strictly the period concerning the journey from the commercial establishment to the customer's hands. It is increasingly common to find in São Paulo or Buenos Aires, for example, huge groups of delivery people sitting under marquees, grouped in squares or busy streets, concentrating on their smartphones, waiting for an order that may take hours to arrive. The presence of the digital platforms in the workers' lives extends beyond working hours, as the application remains installed on their phones and therefore continues to extract their private data and record their daily activities.

Algorithmic power seeks to individualize the organization of work, something that the workers experience as the condition of being thrown to their fate, as solely and exclusively responsible for their gains and losses, and for survival and resilience strategies. These precarious conditions are aggravated by the structural effects of neoliberalization in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, with weak mechanisms of social protection and state control over companies' compliance with the law, as well as the constant increase in unemployment.This situation of existential anguish is described by Mauricio Santos:

What surprises me most about working with apps, unfortunately, is the feeling that you're on your own, right? You must figure everything out your way. You don't have support. You try ... you try communication, you try something, but if you don't stop to analyse everything and try to solve it yourself, you will be waiting for a miracle to happen practically, that we are alone. So, it is a feeling of loneliness at the beginning. If you don't overcome this barrier of this feeling of work, you end up with psychological damage. (Pessoa Masson and Santos Oliveira 2021)

This psychological damage is registered by health indicators in Brazil and Argentina. For example, in Brazil depression and anxiety are the second-biggest causes of work-related illnesses and the first for musculoskeletal disorders. Psychic damage is also accompanied by significant organic impacts, as the requirement to work 12 to 14 hours a day leads to bone and muscle injuries, as well as diseases associated with the circulatory system or eating disorders. In the workers' accounts, such anxiety is strongly linked to loneliness, the meeting of productivity targets being met with silence, and lack of interaction with managers or supervisors. When the orders do not arrive, the silence of the phone echoes the silence of the companies and customers; however, when the service arrives and the expected 'ding' of the application notification is heard, the anxiety is related to the impossibility of rejecting the order due to the threat of suspension, even if the distances are enormous, the area is dangerous, or there are bad weather conditions.

As Luciana Kasai, a delivery worker, says:

We stay in this distress all day long. If it's not distress because there's no rush; it's distress because you must do a lot, you have to rush, because otherwise they'll complain about you, and you'll be the one who suffers. (Pessoa Masson and Santos Oliveira 2021)

Moreover, the strong feeling of uncertainty about the future, accentuated by the epistemological, financial, and health risks we mentioned earlier, makes room for frequent anxiety crises among workers, with their characteristic bodily manifestations, such as insomnia, tachycardia, or panic attacks. As anxiety, according to a Freudian-Lacanian perspective, is understood as a disorder carried out by processes of subjective destitution, we can here identify the existence of 'subjective

risks'. Indeed, not having a minimum guaranteed income and job permanence, being shaken every time by a new accusation of arbitrary suspension or cancellation of 'partner' accounts, and the almost complete isolation in the carrying out of work tasks. In sum, the exposure of workers to a multiplicity of risks weakens more and more the confidence and self-esteem that the workers have in themselves. Added to this is the daily exposure to multiple forms of violence, including racial or gender-based violence or xenophobia (frequently concerning immigrant workers), competition among colleagues, and, during a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic, the constant fear of getting infected.

The hyper-individualization of tasks associated with algorithmic work management contributes to intensifying the competitive struggle between workers, encouraging the transformation of ties into a myriad of fragmented competitors who fight among themselves to increase individual profits. This hyper-individualization also expresses a process of "political psychologization of work" in which social problems, such as unemployment or job insecurity, are attributed to personal or psychological causes, such as the worker's lack of entrepreneurial attitudes (Morales Muñoz 2020). The companies dictate the rules, charge commissions (and keep a proportion of the worker's profit), establish forms and times of payment and shipping, and even decide on promotions without consulting the worker, who must assume the costs. One example of such cases would be the '2 x 1' deliveries in the Rappi app, in which the worker must make two deliveries for the price of one. As can be seen, this scheme allows for little autonomy or freedom. Rather than an entrepreneur, this is a digitally precarious worker (Scasserra 2019).

In sum, from the analysis of the experience of work in platform economies, we see that algorithmic control produces effects on the subjectivity of workers, not only through entrepreneurial discourse or through the very organization of tasks in the workplace, but also by encouraging workers to consider themselves in the terms in which the control mechanisms define them, i.e. to monitor their behaviour to meet the company's goals and to extend these conduct norms to their colleagues. Neoliberal societal values such as self-regulation and entrepreneurship are combined with symbolic traditional values such as the struggle for survival and the personal strength to legitimize the model of corporate de-responsibilization. In the pandemic, these values have been explicitly promoted by the platform companies: for instance, in Argentina, the company Rappi launched an advertising campaign to promote its workers as "Rappi Heroes" of the pandemic, to which the Association of Platform Personnel (APP) replied with the statement: "we are not heroes but workers claiming our rights" (Brunetto 2020).

However, despite these attempts at the 'desymbolization' of social bonds and ties of camaraderie among workers, workers have not ceased to experiment with forms of counterstrategies and mutual protection: from sabotage actions, private chat groups, online forums, and the blocking of applications, to more complex practices of cooperative self-organization or different struggles for unionization and recognition as workers, not as 'partners'. Examples of these strategies are the creation of the APP union in Argentina after a series of strikes due to unjustified suspensions in 2018 (Del Bono 2019; Negri 2020); or the delivery workers' strike called *breque dos apps* (apps stoppage) occurring throughout Brazil, which so far has engaged workers in Porto Alegre, Belém, Manaus, Niterói, São Paulo, São José dos Campos, Atibaia, Ribeirão Preto, Jundiaí, Paulínia, São Carlos, etc. Those cases show that digital control over working conditions is not a natural law, but a new space for class struggle. Through various tools of struggle, diverse political experiences, and the participation or disinterest of the big unions, the riders are beginning to become an active political subject under the demand to be recognized as workers with rights.

# **On Authoritarian Neoliberalism**

In Brazil and Argentina, the authoritarian wave that emerged in the last few years has been feeding on the failure of the development promises of social inclusion via consumerism and political rights (Féliz 2021). Instead of that perspective, both the discursive matrices of the Bolsonaro and Macri regimes praise entrepreneurial merits while concurring with the idea of social policies being responsible for national economic crises, whether through the overspending of public funds or by stimulating vagrancy among the population (Catanzaro and Ipar 2017). Based on these justifications, governments have been setting up precarization labour policies combined with the systematic demolition of public funding for social welfare. The wage society linked to the import substitution model no longer exists and the growth of non-wage forms of work, related to the digital economy, is the last expression of this transformation. These platform companies have been developing new strategies of accumulation different from those of the former industrial mode of production, strategies that entangle algorithm management as new practices of governing subjectivities at work, which are at the core of the new neoliberal governmentality.

Indeed, they also promote the reconfiguration of the workers' libidinal economy, that is, of the workers' psychic investments in social models responsible for socializing the individual according to norms of behaviour, moral evaluation, and emotional disposition. That libidinal economy of platform capitalism involves both a configuration of the worker's subjectivity in conformity with those capitalist patterns and a psychic economy, understood as "the contemporary investment—techno-scientific, economic, and social—in algorithmic processes of capturing and using psychic and emotional information extracted from our data and actions on digital platforms" (Bruno et al. 2019, 21). Inversely, the algorithmic

power of the platforms not only jeopardizes the psycho-emotional data generated by subjects from their interaction with or through the platforms but also *produces psychological designs* both at behavioural levels and within the subjective dynamics of identification and desire.

Due to such implications, we are convinced that these new techno-political developments should be considered in the current debates on the rise of authoritarianism around the world and on the so-called crisis of democracies. In such debates, the concept of 'authoritarian neoliberalism' has become recurrent as a means of describing an institutional formation under which the reproduction of capital uses the state apparatus to marginalize and repress political and social opposition rather than seeking their explicit consent or co-optation. Some characteristics of authoritarian neoliberalism that are usually pointed out are, for example, the prioritization of legal mechanisms over debates and democratic participation, the centralization of state activity in the executive branch, the increasing use of state repression against opposing political forces, the intervention of the media, etc. (Bruff and Tansel 2019). However, beyond its theoretical productivity, the debates around this concept are often framed in a perspective focused on state functioning or on the ideological-discursive level, perspectives that risk losing pragmatic and biopolitical dimensions of the exercise of power, and which are key dimensions for understanding the persistence of neoliberalism as political rationality in the era of its hegemonic crisis.

Thus, the analysis of the labour market in these platform economies can make visible how neoliberalism survives when no one believes in its heroic tales of progress and welfare anymore. Constant surveillance, evaluation mechanisms, and unjustified suspensions, anonymization of the relationship with the employer, commands from the algorithmic black box, etc. reveal that the authoritarian face of neoliberalism also has its microphysical expression in the world of work, where ideologies of freedom, autonomy, and self-responsibility coexist with the opacity and arbitrariness of algorithmic management. This contradiction between the authoritarian structure of the workplace, as if reproducing a miniature dictatorship of the "private governments" (Anderson 2017) and its ideological legitimization through individualistic values, is one of the silent and persistent phenomena of the current authoritarian regression. This could mean that authoritarianism is not only an expression of the much-mentioned 'crisis of (liberal) democracy' or a crisis of political representation but will also "entail the permutation and crystallization of neoliberal modes of dehumanization involving *new technologies"* (Gambetti 2021). These new technologies and their ideological effects on working subjectivities pose new tasks, both for critical theory and political counterstrategies.

One of these tasks is to overcome the classical dichotomy of consensus versus coercion, ideology versus repression in the authoritarian crisis of neoliberalism. An example of this can be read in *Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution* by Mauricio Lazzarato, where he criticizes the micropolitical approaches of neoliberalism by arguing that, in its current phase, capitalism reproduces itself not only by subjectivizing, producing embodiments, social recognitions, or tacit agreements but also by civil wars, states of exception, class hatreds and repressive violence (Lazzarato 2021). Although many of his observations on the new fascisms are of great value, Lazzarato still maintains a strict dichotomy between ideology and repression to characterize the current authoritarian moment of neoliberalism. This dichotomization is what we wanted to call into question by considering the working conditions of capitalism in the Global South to show that neoliberalism activates ways of subjectivization and ideological discourses that are, at the same time, methods of control, punishment, and surveillance. As an extreme instance of this, we saw recently in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro how militias have been involved as paramilitary forces of certain platform companies to manage workers through violence and harassment (Liberato 2021). Entrepreneurialism and paramilitary violence work together as the Janus face of new digital capitalism in the Global South.