Capital Fixity and Mobility in Response to the 2008–09 Crisis: Variegated Neoliberalism in Mexico and Turkey

Abstract

This paper examines the responses to the 2008–09 global financial crisis in Mexico and Turkey as examples of variegated neoliberalism. The simultaneous interests of corporations and banks in the national fixing of capital and their mobility in the form of global investment heavily influenced these states' policy responses to the crisis at the expense of the interests of the poor, workers, and peasantry. Rather than pitching this as evidence of either persistent national differentiation or some Keynesian state resurgence, we argue from a historical materialist geographical framework that the responses of capital and state authorities in Mexico and Turkey actively constitute and reconstitute the global parameters of market regulatory design and neoliberal class rule through each state's distinct domestic policy formation and crisis management processes. The latter is influenced by capitalists' ties to the fixity and motion of capital. While differing in specific content, the form of Mexico's and Turkey's official responses to the crisis ensured continuity in their neoliberal strategies of development and capital accumulation.