From stabilizing development to instant Ruins: Notes on Mexican state form

In this essay, I complicate the standard political economic narrative of Mexico's stabilizing development as one of successful state intervention which managed to tame capitalism. In the first section, I ask whether it is possible that years of literature on the need for strong states, developmental states, and interventionist states have not blinded us to some of the actual functions of the post-war Mexican state, namely as a sink or channel for capital accumulated in the global North, and whether the present role of the state in Mexico might be much more like its past incarnations than we have been led to believe. In the second section, through a close reading of the 2013 housing crisis in Mexico, I test whether there is anything to the assertion of a similarity between the state of Mexico's post-war stabilizing development and the current financialized one. By way of conclusion, I press a case for a political imaginary beyond state regulation of capital.