The presidential elections that took place in Mexico on June 2 delivered the reigning Morena party and its candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, a decisive victory. Founded in 2014 by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, Morena won 60 percent of the vote in a three-way race and a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Sheinbaum took office in October with an indisputable mandate. She campaigned on a promise to continue the policies that AMLO implemented during his tenure as president, which witnessed measurable advances for workers.

Official figures show that real wages surged by approximately 30 percent, labor’s share of income increased by 8 percent, and the earnings of the bottom 10 percent grew by 98.8 percent. Additionally, the country’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, improved, and overall poverty dropped by 8.5 percent, with over nine million people lifted out of poverty — the largest reduction in twenty-two years. Unemployment rates are now the lowest in the region, coupled with a slight decrease in informal labor.

Left-Wing Anti-Corruption Politics

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AMLO retained extraordinarily high approval numbers throughout his tenure, averaging in the mid-60s and hitting closer to 80 percent toward the end of his term. Certainly, progressives of different stripes have taken issue with the seventy-one-year-old leader. During his tenure, critics claim, AMLO did not make a full break with neoliberalism, did not heed the demands of feminists or environmentalists, and strengthened the militarization of public affairs — many big infrastructure projects in Mexico continue to be built and managed by the military. These criticisms are not without merit.

What is incontrovertible, however, is the progress that Morena has made on behalf of the working class, confirmed at the polls in early June. Rightly, this has elicited a renewed interest in the English-speaking world, which for decades has puzzled over the issue of how to revitalize a left centered around the popular classes.

If there was a distinguishing feature of AMLO’s political style, it was his ability to treat neoliberalism as synonymous with corruption. Historically, anti-corruption politics has been the mainstay of the neoliberal right seeking to privatize graft-ridden state industries. In Latin America, at least, the middle and upper classes have been the most reliable constituency for this brand of politics. But AMLO adroitly repurposed anti-corruption politics to garner mass appeal without embracing neoliberal anti-statism or a technocratic anti-politics that empowers unelected officials.

“It sounds harsh, but privatization in Mexico has been synonymous with corruption,” AMLO said in his inaugural speech in December 2018. “Unfortunately, this malady has almost always existed in our country, but what happened during the neoliberal period is unprecedented in modern times — the system as a whole has operated for corruption,” he added. “Political power and economic power have mutually fed and nurtured each other, and the theft of the people’s goods and the nation’s wealth has been established as the modus operandi.”

The key features of the Mexican neoliberal state were an increase in outsourcing of services to private companies, subsidies to a private sector encouraged to compete with state-owned companies (electricity is one of the most egregious examples), mechanisms for ceding control of public monies through privately administered fideicomisos (trusts), and sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of tax evasion. At the heart of AMLO’s diagnosis of his country’s malaise lay a fundamental redefinition of neoliberalism. Contrary to the common belief, neoliberalism was not about the contraction of the state. For AMLO, it represented the instrumentalization of the state to serve the rich.

Republican Austerity

AMLO’s reinterpretation of neoliberalism has lent a sophistication to discussions of the economy that remains alien to much of the anglophone world. Thanks to Morena, the debate in Mexico is not, as in the United States, about small government versus big government — Mexico operated under “big government” during neoliberalism, but it consistently served the upper class through both legal and illegal means. Recognition of this fact provided the basis for a class politics of anti-corruption.

This understanding helps explain the flagship concept of AMLO’s government, which is perhaps counterintuitive: republican austerity. The term refers to the ongoing reorganization and recentralization of public spending with the aim of cutting from the top. Neoliberalism in Mexico, as Morena understands it, does not mean the general contraction of the state but its decentralization and instrumentalization — austerity of a specific type could thus be a tool for combating neoliberalism.

Here the connection to AMLO’s broader diagnosis of corruption is key. Republican austerity looks to fight against corruption through the elimination of intermediaries of all sorts betweenthe state and the citizenry in the distribution of public resources. The vision of AMLO’s government was that these intermediary networks — parts of the private sector, clientelist brokers, NGOs that received government funds, fideicomisos, or simply private companies hired by the state to carry out specific services — facilitated budgetary capture. A push to recentralize government functions that had been outsourced to private or semiprivate entities has therefore been central to Morena’s politics.

In a press conference in May 2021, AMLO tied his political project to a distinctive view of Mexican history:

In our country, capital accumulation did not necessarily occur through the exploitation of the bourgeois or the employer over the worker; capital accumulation in Mexico occurred through corruption. This is not new; it increased in the last stage, in the neoliberal period. . . .  This is not to sideline Marxism, it is not [that discussions] about class struggle, or surplus value are invalid, but rather that the case of Mexico is something special.

There are, of course, many objections one might make to AMLO’s arguments, especially his claim that this form of upward redistribution is a unique feature of Mexican politics. This narrative, however, goes a long way toward explaining the outlook and aims of Morena. More than a series of individual crimes or isolated scandals, for AMLO, corruption is a consequence of a reordering in the state-economy relationship. Neoliberalism was characterized not by the contraction of the government but by its conversion into a reverse-rentier state in which capital drained public money through a series of mechanisms. These ranged from the outsourcing of government functions and overpriced contracting to tax loopholes, creating an unofficial alliance between politicians, businessmen, and expert service providers.

This nexus represents a class faction that is, if not specific to Mexican neoliberalism, especially prominent within it. Its defining feature is that it generates surplus value not from the production and sale of goods in the free market but from the extraction of public resources.

The phenomena that AMLO observed in Mexico have analogues across the globe. The historian Robert Brenner has long argued that the neoliberal period is characterized by upward redistribution through political means. Tax cuts, privatization of public assets at bargain prices, and the socialization of massive private losses, such as the bailout programs after the financial crisis of 2008, are all examples of how the state has intervened in the economy to alter the balance of class power in favor of the rich.

In wealthy countries, much like in the Global South, the state did not simply contract. The economist Thomas Piketty has found that tax revenues in rich countries as a percentage of national income never dropped during the neoliberal period. Neoliberalism was in fact a retooling of the state to more closely reproduce the interests of capital. This fusion of political, administrative, and economic power has undoubtedly made neoliberalism difficult to dislodge. But it has also exposed elites to the kind of moral and political critique advanced most forcefully by AMLO.

This brand of left-wing anti-corruption politics has not only managed to legitimize redistribution but has brought the working class back into the fold of left-wing parties, reversing the trend of dealignment prevalent across much of the rich world.

Edwin F. Ackerman is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and the author of Origins of the Mass Party: Dispossession and the Party- Form in Mexico and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective.