ABSTRACT

Decades of Argentine political history have been characterized by the exercise of government through increasingly coercive forms. This chapter analyzes inflation and the speculative practices associated with it as a result of a particular relation of forces between the main fractions of the bourgeoisie, that is, the most powerful sectors of industrial, financial and agrarian capital. In capitalist society, the work of individuals becomes part of social work only through the relationships that exchange establishes directly between products and indirectly—and through these—between producers. The chapter shows that this relation not only explains the uncontrolled development of speculative practices and the resultant inflation, but that it is also one of the factors that determines the chronic political instability of the country. The economic growth model followed in Argentina since the beginning of the decade of the 1960s constituted the structural framework of a peculiar evolution in the relations of forces between the most important sectors of the bourgeoisie.