The Contradictory Evolution of “Mediterranean” Neoliberalism in Spain, 1995–2008

Abstract

This paper uses social structures of accumulation theory in combination with Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory in order to analyze the institutional mechanisms that sustained the long economic expansion of the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2008. Productive deficiencies endogenously gave way to several trends that, despite displaying a highly contradictory character when considered in isolation, managed to coalesce into a relatively coherent whole for more than a decade, namely, a massive housing bubble, an explosion of private debt in the face of real wage stagnation, and family economies being submitted to increasing strains. Moreover, their joint occurrence prevented their inherently conflictive nature from acquiring a political expression liable to undo the institutional structure itself, so that a social order was successfully reproduced throughout the whole expansion phase.
JEL Classifications: P16, E11, O11

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Original Manuscript
The Contradictory Evolution of
“Mediterranean” Neoliberalism in
Spain, 1995–2008
Pedro M. Rey-Araújo1
Abstract
This paper uses social structures of accumulation theory in combination with Ernesto Laclau’s
discourse theory in order to analyze the institutional mechanisms that sustained the long
economic expansion of the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2008. Productive deficiencies
endogenously gave way to several trends that, despite displaying a highly contradictory character
when considered in isolation, managed to coalesce into a relatively coherent whole for more
than a decade, namely, a massive housing bubble, an explosion of private debt in the face of
real wage stagnation, and family economies being submitted to increasing strains. Moreover,
their joint occurrence prevented their inherently conflictive nature from acquiring a political
expression liable to undo the institutional structure itself, so that a social order was successfully
reproduced throughout the whole expansion phase.
JEL Classifications: P16, E11, O11
Keywords
social structures of accumulation, Laclau, social order, hegemony
1. Introduction
This paper addresses the institutional bases underpinning the Spanish growth trajectory between
the years 1995 and 2008, when the onset of the Great Recession suddenly interrupted this insti-
tutional arrangement. More than a decade of sustained economic growth, vigorous capital accu-
mulation, labor expansion, and very high social consensus deserved the most laudatory comments
by analysts of various origins. However, the length and gravity of the ensuing Great Recession
threw into light the ultimately precarious nature of such economic expansion. In order to illumi-
nate the institutional determinants of the growth path followed, we make use of social structures
of accumulation (SSA) theory in combination with Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist theory of
hegemony.
882122RRPXXX10.1177/0486613419882122Review of Radical Political EconomicsRey-Araújo
research-article2020
1University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Date received: January 8, 2018
Date accepted: September 19, 2019
Corresponding Author:
Pedro M. Rey-Araújo, University of Santiago de Compostela, Av. das Ciencias, Chalet 1, Campus Universitario Sur,
Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña 15782, Spain.
Email: pedrom.rey@rai.usc.es

2 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
Our main argument is that underlying capital valorization problems endogenously gave way to
several social processes that, despite showing an inherently unsustainable character when consid-
ered in isolation, managed to coalesce into a relatively coherent whole for more than a decade.
Moreover, it was precisely their joint occurrence that prevented the conflict-ridden nature of these
processes from giving birth to political expressions able to destabilize the inner functioning of the
resulting institutional structure. In sum, it made virtue out of necessity. However, despite temporary
complementarities permitting its reproduction over a long time, they could not erase the highly
contradictory nature of its constituent elements. On the contrary, the latter were exacerbated during
the whole expansion phase, thus explaining the singular virulence of the ensuing recession.
The article is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces a modified SSA framework. Section
3 offers a preliminary characterization of recent Spanish experience, while section 4 delineates
its main institutional contours. Section 5 explores the nature of the contradictory social processes
accounting for the length and intensity of the economic expansion. Section 6 considers how those
processes’ mutual occurrence guaranteed widespread social consensus by preventing their under-
side from acquiring full political expression. Section 7 examines how economic downturn was
translated into a breakdown of hegemonic social consensuses. Section 8 concludes.
2. An Expanded SSA Approach
An SSA is the whole set of institutions that frame and structure economic activity in a given
spatial context (Gordon, Edwards, and Reich 1982). These myriad institutions do not exist in
isolation from each other but have to coalesce into an internally coherent whole for economic
activity to proceed in a relatively undisrupted manner over the long run. However, not every set
of institutions would qualify as a successful SSA. In order to become so, firstly, these institutions
ought to pacify to a certain extent the inherently conflictive social relations characteristic of any
capitalist society (Kotz 1994). Second, they ought to mitigate the uncertainty that perennially
pervades capitalist enterprises for investment to take place. Third, temporary complementarities
ought to emerge among these constituent institutions so that the internal dynamics of each do not
unsettle the stability of the whole (Gordon 1980; Lippit 2010). Fourth, a well-functioning SSA
must not compromise its own conditions of existence, among which crucially stand all the care-
related activities, occurring mainly within the private realm, which play a crucial role in ensuring
society’s successful reproduction (e.g., Gibson-Graham 1996). As long as these conditions are
satisfied, profit-making activity will be secured in the long run, thus providing a base of benefi-
ciaries the existence of which will self-reinforce the existing order.
Every SSA fosters numerous tensions and conflicts that are ultimately irreducible to either
class conflict or intra-class competition for, on the one hand, its institutional shape will always
tend to favor the material and/or symbolic welfare of some groups over others, as the social dis-
tribution of material rewards and responsibilities will always be irremediably inegalitarian and,
on the other, every social order is necessarily grounded upon some kind of exclusion (Rey-
Araújo 2018). It follows that social conflict will be ever-present, the pacifying role of institutions
not consisting in suppressing it altogether but in channeling along ways not “unduly disruptive
of accumulation” (Kotz 1994: 55).
However, these various conflicts do not manifest themselves as such in a straightforward man-
ner but give rise, in a strictly non-determinist way, to several heterogeneous political demands.
While these demands are inherently heterogeneous in nature, any social order requires a certain
alignment among them. This process of articulation does not depend upon any essential com-
monality existing among them but, on the contrary, is the result of an eminently political opera-
tion. Following Laclau and Mouffe (2001), we refer to this process through which relations of
hierarchy and commonality among heterogeneous demands are established, while simultane-
ously relegating others to radical invisibility, as hegemony.

Rey-Araújo 3
Whereas some sort of relation among these demands must be established, its exact content
cannot be predetermined ex ante but will be instead the result of the hegemonic struggle itself.
Therefore, hegemony refers precisely to this process through which alliances are forged that
sustain and reinforce the status quo. While the material distribution of responsibilities and out-
comes regarding social reproduction will necessarily be inegalitarian, for a social order to exist
the various agents involved ought to comply to a certain extent with the respective roles allotted
to them, while others must be deprived of the material and symbolic resources needed to disrupt
such an order. Therefore, while the social identities at play, as well as the internal relations among
them, are necessarily contingent, it is strictly necessary that enough material resources are pro-
vided to those occupying a subaltern position for them to show conformity with such an order.1
In sum, while the operation of building up social consensus to sustain the status quo is eminently
political in nature, it is ultimately dependent upon the various material processes underlying it
(Rey-Araújo 2019). Hence, a well-functioning accumulation process is required in order to guar-
antee each group their allotted share of the social output.
However, every well-established SSA harbors internal contradictions that, although successfully
contained for a certain period, will eventually overflow such institutional structure. As soon as its
homeostatic functioning is interrupted, the shared understandings and common expectations that
had previously sustained the former will show their ultimate contingence. Existing alliances among
various social groups start to crumble as the material processes that had glued them together stop
providing a common material ground. That is, systemic crises eventually turn into organic crises
(Rey-Araújo 2019).2 A period of intense political struggle then ensues, from which the institutional
bases regulating the next long-lasting period of social stability might emerge (which, under capital-
ism, necessarily means guaranteeing sustained economic growth and/or accumulation).
In sum, we understand that, first, the “pacifying” role of institutions must not be restricted to
capitalism’s “core” contradictions (i.e., inter-class conflict and intra-class competition) but con-
cerns as well the manifold conflicts that pervade any capitalist society (Lippit 2005; Rey-Araújo
2018). Second, while both the issues at stake and the agents involved in political struggles cannot
be read off straightforwardly from underlying capitalist dynamics, neither of these domains are
wholly unrelated, as the historical evolution of the latter shapes and constrains the terrain where
the former ultimately operate (Rey-Araújo 2019). Third, non-market-mediated activities impli-
cated in social reproduction ought to be considered together with market-mediated ones, insofar
as they operate as the latter’s conditions of existence (Gibson-Graham 1996). Lastly, the internal
coherence of an SSA must not be derived from any a priori hierarchical ordering of its compos-
ing institutions but from the relations of overdetermination and mutual constitution existing
among them. The potential lines of fracture of a given institutional ensemble will be overdeter-
mined by the temporary and context-specific complementarities developed among its institu-
tional blocks along the course of its operation (Lippit 2005; Resnick and Wolff 1987).
3. A “Mediterranean” Liberal SSA: The Case of Spanish
Neoliberalism
Drawing upon Wolfson and Kotz’s (2010) distinction between Liberal and Regulated SSAs, it
is argued that the institutional structure prevailing in Spain during the years 1995–2008 can be
1Of course, how much is “enough” for each of them to be satisfied with their respective roles will be
affected by the hegemonic struggle itself.
2By “systemic crises” we refer to capitalist crises whose overcoming requires a thorough reconstruction
of the whole institutional architecture structuring capitalist activity, that is, the building up of a new SSA,
while we employ the term “organic crises” to refer to the breakdown of the various social consensuses, alli-
ances, and expectations that had co-existed during the previous phase of economic expansion.

4 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
characterized as a Liberal SSA, although one with a distinct “Mediterranean” flavor (Rey-
Araújo 2016),3 whose historical roots are nonetheless to be found in the process of economic
restructuring that Spanish capitalism underwent during the previous decade. Due to its previ-
ous productive specialization in manufactures of medium-to-low technological content, mostly
directed towards satisfying a highly protected internal market, Spanish capital was affected by
strong overaccumulation problems by the early 1980s (Etxezarreta 1991; Nieto 2006). Once
the transition towards a parliamentary democratic regime was completed with the accession of
the Socialist Party to office in 1982, a rigorous orthodox program aimed at recovering capital-
ist profitability was implemented, in the expectation that a sustained attack on labor conditions
and remuneration could help recover previous profit margins (Albarracín 1991; Recio and
Roca 1998).
Spain’s accession to the European Community in 1986 hardened and accelerated the still
ongoing process of capital restructuring, as it was now to be undertaken in a new competitive
scenario where having recourse to protectionist measures was forbidden from the start (Montes
1993). Doubtful of its ability to successfully compete on equal terms with the more developed
industrial sectors of the European “core,” Spanish big capital abandoned its previous positions in
manufacturing to relocate itself to sectors such as finances, utilities, telecommunications, and
real estate (Recio 2009). These are sectors featuring much less international exposure, so that
experienced cost increases could be successfully transferred into prices, and where having close
ties with the state’s high-ranking officials was crucial to ensure a sustained long-term demand
(Etchemendy 2004; Pérez 1999). As a result, a very dual capitalist structure ensued where, on the
one hand, big capital’s specialization in non-tradables significantly increased underlying infla-
tionary pressures and where, on the other hand, myriad technologically backward small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) could only rely upon cost-containment strategies to secure
minimum levels of competitiveness. Therefore, building up a Liberal SSA offered significant
advantages to both segments of the capitalist class, insofar as securing a positive balance in their
distributive struggle with labor proved crucial to compensate for both pro-inflationary dynamics
and downward profitability trends.
Wolfson and Kotz (2010) list five main characteristics of Liberal SSAs in relation to their
regulated counterparts. While not all of them apply to the Spanish case, it is argued that, on the
one hand, the internal coherence of the resulting institutional structure is derived, above all,
from the gradual reinforcement of the power of capital in various different social spheres
while, on the other hand, the underlying crisis tendencies of the resulting structure closely
resemble those typically associated with Liberal SSAs. First, capital-labor relations have been
markedly antagonistic, insofar as capital’s self-valorization problems were attenuated through
a continued onslaught on labor conditions. This is exemplified through several structural fea-
tures of the Spanish labor market, such as the pervasiveness of fixed-term contracts, a very low
union density compared to European standards, or the flat evolution of hourly real wages
throughout the whole expansion phase. Second, Liberal SSAs tend to feature cutthroat compe-
tition among individual capital units. As noted above, the Spanish capital structure is domi-
nated by myriad technologically backward SMEs, with little capacity to undertake product
differentiation, and thus too dependent upon wage containment and external flexibility prac-
tices to compete among themselves in terms of prices rather than quality (Charnock, Purcell,
and Ribera-Fumaz 2014). The type of competition featured by this latter group of firms does
3In short, Liberal SSAs commonly feature antagonistic labor relations, cutthroat inter-capitalist competi-
tion, the relative autonomy of financial capital with respect to industrial capital, a receding role of the state,
and an eminently individualist ideology. Conversely, Regulated SSAs are characterized by cooperative
labor relations, moderate inter-capitalist competition, financial capital subordinated to industrial capital, an
active role of the state, and a general ideology favoring state regulation (Wolfson and Kotz 2010).

Rey-Araújo 5
closely resemble the anarchic, cutthroat competition Wolfson and Kotz identify as distinctive
of Liberal SSAs. Third, financial capital has been (and continues to be) relatively autonomous,
to say the least, over industrial capital. Indeed, many among the most relevant social processes
regarding systemic reproduction are derived, in one way or another, from this stark predomi-
nance of finance capital over not only other subaltern social groups, but also over other com-
peting fractions of the capitalist class itself (e.g., mounting indebtedness, a massive housing
bubble, stagnant wages). However, the role played by the state departs from Wolfson and
Kotz’s (2010) characterization, as it was certainly not one of self-subtraction from the regula-
tion of economic activity. On the contrary, it played a crucial role in securing Spanish capital’s
gradual centralization and internationalization, both through widespread privatization pro-
cesses of previously state-owned enterprises and through various state-sponsored programs
aimed at accelerating its shift from industrial activities to chiefly financial ones (Etchemendy
2004; Juste 2017; López and Rodríguez 2010).
Finally, both its durability and the wide social support it managed to secure cannot be properly
apprehended without acknowledging the idiosyncratic role played by the family institution, one
which imprints a strong “Mediterranean” dimension onto the ensuing SSA.4 Being articulated
around very rigid, traditional, and resilient gender norms, their female members are mostly
responsible for the manifold tasks needed for the household’s ongoing functioning, generally
unpaid, and guided by a strong sense of moral obligation towards other family members. Were
families not acting as “social clearinghouses” helping to cover those manifold social needs left
unsatisfied by both state and markets, the various widespread consensuses that accompanied the
long decade of SSA expansion might have been undone well before the period of SSA decay
eventually consolidated itself.
4. The “Spanish Miracle”: 1995–2008
After a brief expansion during 1986–91, a serious crisis ensued after 1992. Although a timid
recovery was initiated in late 1994, future prospects were definitely bleak. The sharp deindustri-
alization process of the previous decade had left the industrial sector with no capacity to lead a
new recovery through competitive exports. Moreover, the convergence criteria linked to the
future monetary union seemed to offer little room for optimism. On the one hand, by limiting
fiscal deficits and public debt, potential state support in reorganizing the production process
along more socially progressive and/or competitive lines was severely compromised. On the
other, the common currency left internal devaluation as the only macroeconomic policy option
available, thus being likely to reinforce the (seemingly) already exhausted “low-road” pattern of
international insertion. However, this was no impediment to an impressive boost in economic
activity between 1995 and 2007, as manifested in the evolution of real GDP (+54.7 percent),
employment growth (+56.2 percent), or female labor force participation (+23 percent).
Surprisingly, these phenomena did take place over a decade in parallel to stagnating hourly real
wages (−2.54 percent) and labor productivity (−1.1 percent).5 The next sections examine the
4It has been argued that some Mediterranean countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy) share several fea-
tures regarding the mode of integration of families, markets, and the state, thus giving rise to Mediterranean
typology or “welfare regime” (Ferrera 1996; Karamessini 2008; Mingione 1995). The term “Mediterranean”
is used here in that precise sense.
5Wage contention could have been functional to its diachronic evolution in case exports operated as the
main driver of growth in this model. However, it was not exports but internal demand, the component of
aggregate demand, that acted as a decisive pull factor. Therein lies the ultimately paradoxical character of
the Spanish model.

6 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
mechanisms underlying this unsustainable pattern of growth. In what follows, a brief account of
the institutional underpinnings of the Spanish model is offered.6
4.1. The productive sphere
As a result of the industrial restructuring process of the 1980s, aimed at devaluing large masses
of overaccumulated capital in manufacturing, the already well-established sectors of tourism and
real estate gained further prominence as the cornerstones of Spanish productive specialization.
These are sectors that are singularly labor intensive, traditionally low paid, over-reliant upon
informal labor arrangements, and with little scope for productivity gains. Paradoxically, this situ-
ation was no impediment for an impressive upsurge of investment throughout the period under
consideration (accounting for 21.5 percent of GDP in 1995, it reached 30.7 percent in 2007).
Highly motivated by asset-valorization dynamics, it tended to concentrate in those sectors featur-
ing the lowest levels of labor productivity (Mateo 2015; Mateo and Montanyà 2018).
The internal structure of Spanish capital reinforced its dualism throughout the period. On the
one hand, big capital consolidated its shift away from industrial activities, concentrating itself in
a small number of firms, becoming globally competitive but with few technological spillovers,
anchoring in highly sheltered sectors such as construction, telecommunication, and utilities, and
becoming heavily dependent upon protection from the state (Banyuls et al. 2009). On the other
hand, there are numerous SMEs that are very dependent upon domestic demand, which deploy a
weak technological endowment and have become too accustomed to external flexibility practices
(mostly through fixed-term contracts) as their preferred means of adjustment to market fluctua-
tions. In sum, “a few key industrial sectors made the jump to the world market [though] only to
a limited extent, and on the basis of a parallel and related expansion in a number of small capitals
competing to supply low-tech inputs and employing low-wage, casual labor” (Charnock, Purcell,
and Ribera-Fumaz 2014: 67)
This general inability to consistently improve labor productivity throughout the period left
extensive growth as the only development strategy available, that is, a model in which absolute
rather than relative surplus value stood as the crucial ingredient of its diachronic expansion
(Buendía 2018b). Moreover, this strategy was further incentivized by the presence of a vast
industrial reserve army throughout the whole period. Whereas the unemployment rate exceeded
20 percent at the beginning of the growth phase, it took more than ten years of uninterrupted
economic growth, ending in 2005, for it to fall below 10 percent. This situation found its coun-
terpart in a dual labor market, in which high levels of protection offered to core workers, gener-
ally corresponding to the “male breadwinner,” were matched by very high levels of precariousness
for those populating its external layers, mostly women and young and immigrant workers. What
some authors have referred to as a “culture of temporality” (Toharia et al. 2005) had less to do
with a sociocultural trait of Spanish society, and much more with the extension of precariousness
as a rudimentary form of workers’ control and fragmentation (Cano 2007). While many authors
have long complained about a supposed rigidity of the Spanish labor market (e.g., Bentolila and
Dolado 1994; Conde-Ruiz, Felgueroso, and García-Pérez 2011; Estrada, Jimeno, and Malo de
Molina 2009), were it not for the protection offered to core workers in combination with the
internal redistribution of resources that characterize Spanish families, anything resembling a
social order would have probably been simply a chimera (Bettio and Villa 1998; Marí-Klose and
Moreno-Fuentes 2013). Linked to this sharp dualization of the workforce in terms of job protec-
tion, a very polarized workforce regarding educational attainment found itself in growing contra-
diction with a productive model, with notable difficulties in generating jobs fitting those
6The division between productive and reproductive spheres employed below serves merely heuristic
purposes.

Rey-Araújo 7
qualifications (Karamessini 2008). While the spread of tertiary education certificates played a
key role in preserving middle-class aspirations of upward social mobility, this contradiction was
bound to explode as soon as widespread asset revaluation stopped disguising the relentless pre-
carization of the younger layers of the workforce.
4.2. The reproductive sphere
Sharp welfare expansion during the 1980s took place in an international arena already flooded by
the neoliberal tide. However, having attained significant achievements (singularly, quasi-univer-
sal access to health and education), the application of the Maastricht criteria drew the homologa-
tion process relative to the European core to a sudden halt. Since the mid-1990s the main aim of
successive reforms has been to achieve fiscal balance, thus consolidating a fragmented, geo-
graphically uneven welfare system, with a limited redistributive reach (Buendía, Molero-Simarro,
and Murillo 2018; Guillén 2010; Rodriguez-Cabrero 2011) in which a low tax base was trans-
lated into public services underdevelopment rather than into fiscal deficits (Banyuls and Recio
2012).
The Spanish welfare architecture’s numerous lacunae could only be attenuated by the role of
the family, the foremost institution regarding social reproduction within the Spanish political
economy. Exiguous commodification of care services together with very timid public efforts to
unburden women of care responsibilities continued to deliver a situation of “implicit familial-
ism” (Leitner 2003; Saraceno and Keck 2010) where families were forced to undertake numerous
care responsibilities not necessarily out of will but of sheer necessity. Intense intrafamilial trans-
fers marked by strong intergenerational solidarity constitute the family as a primary “shock
absorber” (Tobío 2013), where relatively strong protection offered to the male breadwinner in
conjunction with low-to-moderate old-age pensions served to attenuate the worst effects of the
modality of labor inclusion predominantly offered to women and the young. The ultimate pillar
of the model were the “Spanish Super-women” (Moreno 2004) who, forced by stagnating wages
to enter paid employment, found themselves in growing difficulties throughout the period in
attempting to fulfill the functions that a very asymmetric division of domestic labor kept on
assigning to them (Gálvez, Rodríguez-Madroño, and Domínguez-Serrano 2011). The gravity of
this latent contradiction, and the ways it was provisionally superseded, will be explored in greater
detail in the following section.
5. The Key to Success: Mutually Sustaining Contradictory
Trends
Now that the institutional contours of the Spanish SSA between the years 1995 and 2008 have
been delineated, an explanation is due of how, despite being built upon such seemingly fragile
foundations, it did manage nonetheless to become the envy of its European neighbor countries
regarding its macroeconomic performance. In our view, its sound economic performance during
those years cannot be understood to have occurred in spite of the various internal disequilibria it
harbored. On the contrary, it is precisely the proliferation of contradictory dynamics within itself
that accounts for its apparent and temporary successes. To a great extent inadvertently, at least
from the narrow perspective of orthodox economics, various social processes were operating at
the time which, despite showing a markedly contradictory character when considered in isola-
tion, did manage nonetheless to offer support to each other during more than a decade in such a
manner that their simultaneous occurrence secured their individual reproduction. That is, rela-
tions of complementarity and mutual reinforcement definitely emerged between some of its key
institutional blocks, although the mutual support offered to each other did not serve to attenuate,

8 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
much less to erase, their contradictory character. Quite the contrary, internal contradictions were
further aggravated in the course of the whole phase of expansion, driving the whole social forma-
tion towards an inevitable internal implosion.
These mechanisms closely resemble those identified by Brenner (2006) or Crouch (2009)
among others. Common aspects include the centrality of asset bubbles in assembling together the
various elements of the institutional structure, as well as the relevance played by debt-financed
private consumption in sustaining aggregate demand. However, the scale of the housing bubble,
its spread over the social body, and the role played by the family in attenuating its most devastat-
ing effects, must be appreciated as idiosyncratic features of the Spanish experience. Among these
contradictory trends, three of them are singled out due to their particular relevance in relation to
the reproduction of the institutional edifice, namely, an increasingly distorted accumulation pro-
cess, rising consumption in face of stagnating wages, and an overburdened family.
5.1. An increasingly distorted accumulation process
The fate of the Spanish capitalist accumulation process during the whole period under consider-
ation has been paradoxical, if not tragic. As noted above, the main driver of economic growth
during this period was internal demand, within which the most vigorous component has been
private investment. Despite the gross profit rate showing a markedly downward trend throughout
the period analyzed, very low interest rates derived from European monetary integration served
to attenuate existing valorization problems (Mateo and Montanyà 2018).7 However, they simul-
taneously contributed to give rise to a housing bubble of massive proportions, which managed to
constitute itself as the very central node around which the whole institutional architecture was
articulated (López and Rodríguez 2010).
Breaking up data on gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) by type of asset, it is made apparent
how most of those expenditures found their rationale not in the drive to increase labor productiv-
ity but in the expectation of obtaining future rents in the midst of a process of widespread revalu-
ation. Not only was residential investment GFCF’s most dynamic component but, within
productive investment itself, it was the investment in new constructions that received the bulk of
new funds. As a result, around two-thirds of actual investment expenditures appeared to be linked
to the real estate complex (see figure 1). If, instead, one focuses upon the economic sector under-
taking those expenditures, it can be readily observed that the construction and real estate activi-
ties sectors undertook an increasing share of investment activity throughout the cycle, reaching
almost half of total investment in 2007, the last year of economic expansion (see figure 2).
Moreover, while these two sectors, together with transport and storage, experienced strong price
increases which animated their investment activity, their respective levels of labor productivity
decreased throughout the period. This situation strongly contrasts with the dynamics experienced
by manufacturing and information and communications, whose relative shares within total GFCF
decreased during those same years, influenced by meager prices increases, despite managing to
secure small advances in labor productivity.
While the productive structure of Spanish capital was already quite imbalanced at the begin-
ning of the cycle, leaning too heavily towards non-tradeables and manufactures of medium-to-low
technological content, the growth path followed by the Spanish economy in the upcoming decade
couldn’t help reinforcing those productive deficiencies. While in the end, residential investments
do not partake of the Marxist definition of capital accumulation, for they do not intervene in the
labor process by developing the productive forces (Mateo 2014), they did nonetheless have a
7Mateo and Montanyà (2018) provide various alternative calculations of the rate of profit during these
years. While the intensity of the experienced decline depends on how the the profit rate is calculated, all
estimates they provide invariably show a downward trend throughout the growth phase.

Rey-Araújo 9
preeminent influence over economic activity, as the real estate complex, however overdeveloped,
did have a very strong knock-on effect upon other economic sectors (Mateo and Montanyà 2018).
Moreover, beyond the sectorial shift from agriculture and manufacturing, where better possi-
bilities exist for generating an economic surplus to then be distributed among subaltern groups,
to low-quality services, and to the real estate complex, important internal malfunctions also
affected the composition of productive investment itself (Buendía 2018a). As noted by Álvarez,
Luengo, and Uxó (2013: 95–100), Spain’s production of manufactures with high technological
content was not only well below the EU average during the whole period, but was also
decreasing.
Hence, the antagonistic character of Spanish capitalism, as manifested in its almost complete
incapacity to increase hourly real wages through the whole expansion phase, was ultimately
grounded upon underlying productive deficiencies. Lacking the necessary means to systematically
produce an economic surplus to be then redistributed among various social groups, eroding
profitability placed distributive struggles at the very core of capital’s strategies of survival (Nieto
2006), especially so during the second half of the upward cycle due to the declining trend of the
Figure 1. GFCF by type of asset.
Figure 2. GFCF by sector of activity.

10 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
productivity of capital (Mateo 2017b). Nonetheless, this was absolutely no impediment for
Spanish economic elites to profit heavily from non-orthodox processes of valorization.
Spain’s productive underdevelopment relative to the European core in conjunction with
European Monetary Union membership constituted another core contradiction the Spanish SSA
had to deal with, as current account deficits, driven to a great extent by the strength of internal
demand throughout the whole decade, found their mirror-like image in Germany’s increasing cur-
rent account surpluses, an explosive dynamic that has been starkly accentuated since 2001.
However, despite this having reinforced the internal evolution of a distorted capitalist accumula-
tion process, whose deleterious effects were to be openly manifested after the onset of the Great
Recession, the incoming funds, which served to cover for increasing trade deficits, were ulti-
mately functional to ongoing socioeconomic reproduction, as they played a crucial role in feeding
a massive housing bubble well beyond existing financial resources within the Spanish territory
(Fernández and García 2018). The explosive evolution of housing prices represented the ultimate
anchoring point of the whole institutional assemblage, and crucially underlies the upward trend
followed by both private consumption and investment in the years here under consideration. In
order to account for the severity and intensity of such an extreme speculative process, however,
merely pointing out Spain’s traditional productive specialization is not enough. Instead, several
factors idiosyncratic to the Spanish socioeconomic context ought to be considered.
First, ever since the late 1950s home acquisition has been actively promoted through various
legislative incentives, with the rate of homeownership reaching 87 percent of households in 2007.
Not only was it successful in preventing recurrent mass mobilizations by linking the latter’s fate to
the vagaries of the real estate complex, but it has also been strongly determined by Spanish elites’
tenacity in seeking refuge in housing production in the face of economic turbulence of whichever
type. In more recent years, the “Boyer decree” (1985)—which introduced policy measures such as
income tax breaks after housing acquisitions, irrespective of its future use; the removal of both rent
controls in the private rented market and urban planning restrictions; or the virtual abandonment of
social housing provisioning—could not but reinforce Spaniards’ predilection for homeownership
(Coq-Huelva 2013; Pareja-Eastaway and Sánchez-Martínez 2017; Rodríguez and López 2011).
Second, the euro has played a crucial role, as it helped attract a growing pool of external
liquidity, from transnational corporations’ profits (Aalbers 2017), to European core countries’
current account surpluses (Fernández and García 2018), which found in the Spanish housing
market an appropriate outlet for their desired investment opportunities. While previous asset
bubbles had always ended when the scarcity of national financial resources caused a sudden hike
in interest rates, thus preventing further rounds of investment, the adoption of the euro ensured
that available resources were no longer restricted to those belonging to the national territory
(Naredo 1996, 2009). Spanish financial capital managed to capture increasing quantities of inter-
national monetary resources in order to channel them, in increasing proportions through the
whole expansion phase, to the booming construction sector. This overrepresentation of housing-
related activities within total investment can be easily observed in the proportion of total credit
lent to the construction sector. While it represented 38 percent of the total in 1995, it reached
above 60 percent of the total during the last years of the cycle.
Third, recent Spanish experience provides a paradigmatic example of the existing tradeoff
between housing acquisition and welfare state development, identified by Kemeny (1981) long
ago, as two alternative means of long-term insurance. In this sense, homeownership has acted as
a primitive mechanism of insurance against old-age contingencies, while also acting as an instru-
ment for the intergenerational transmission of wealth (Trifiletti 1999). Building upon cultural
path-dependency and a continuing lack of alternatives, spiraling housing prices for more than a
decade strongly reinforced Spanish families’ preference for housing acquisition as their preferred
mechanism of long-term insurance. Housing became the unacknowledged pillar of Spanish

Rey-Araújo 11
welfare architecture, the hidden element that ultimately accounted for its social effectiveness.
Were it not for this latent complementarity between homeownership inertia and welfare state
underdevelopment, the length of the ensuing housing bubble, the extent of its social penetration,
and its capacity to raise aggregate consumption levels would have been utterly impossible to
attain.
Fourth, the particular way urban planning legislation is promoted in Spain gave way to the
emergence of subnational pro-growth coalitions between local and regional politicians, land
developers, and financial and real estate capital, which Naredo and Montiel (2011) succinctly
termed the “triple alliance.” While urban planning decisions had traditionally been a prerogative
of municipal authorities, the promulgation of the Land Regime Act in 1998 (“Ley de Suelo”) gave
them unrestrained capacities to shift land’s usage at will. Given that the ultimate capacity to
effect such changes belonged to local authorities—and that huge price increases could be instan-
taneously generated through this process—coalitions flourished all through Spanish territory
between the three types of actors mentioned above. As a result of this confluence of interests,
successive rounds of urbanization were attempted.
While sustained revalorization of housing asset prices did explain the impressive upsurge
observed in aggregate private investment, it also underlaid the upward trend of aggregate con-
sumption during those same years. While it reinforced an impoverished productive structure
increasingly incapable of fostering a more productive use of labor power, which in turn con-
strained the flat evolution of real wages during those years, it nonetheless permitted Spanish
households to increase their consumption levels in line with GDP trends, a process to which we
now turn.
5.2. Rising consumption despite wage stagnation
It has just been noted how an increasingly distorted capital accumulation process, whose low-
road pattern of productive specialization was reinforced throughout the whole period, condi-
tioned the diachronic evolution of real wage levels (Mateo 2017a). Despite having received a
massive influx of means of payment susceptible of having improved Spain’s productive capaci-
ties, internal distortions within the accumulation process placed the distributive struggle between
capital and labor at the very core of the former’s strategies for economic survival, manifested
both in the flat evolution of real wages throughout the period and in the spread of inherently
precarious forms of employment. However, these trends were no impediment for aggregate
household consumption levels to rise virtually in line with GDP for these twelve years, which, in
turn, was crucial to attenuating the inherently antagonistic character of the Spanish model by
fostering a generalized acquiescence with the actual configuration of the existing social order.
How, then, could these two apparently antinomic phenomena be reconciled for such a long time?
The answer is to be sought in the way in which the above-mentioned housing bubble allowed for
the emergence of certain social trends whose mutual interrelation accounted for the Spanish
model’s ultimate effectiveness.
First, stagnating real wages coexisted with an impressive upsurge of employment of more
than 8 million new jobs, which allowed the wage share to remain fairly constant throughout the
whole period (Buendía, Molero-Simarro, and Murillo 2018), in turn helping to disguise the
increasing precarization of labor relations and the temporal strains that Spanish workers were
ultimately subjected to (Prieto and Miguélez 2009). When analyzing the sectorial distribution of
the new employment created, the reinforcement of the productive specialization pattern described
above is made clear (see table 1).
Regarding industrial employment, almost 75 percent of net job creation corresponded to the
construction sector, bearing witness to capital’s flight away from manufacturing as it submitted

12 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
to increasing competitive pressures throughout the period and moved towards the oversized real
estate complex. Regarding services, where the bulk of new jobs were found, the low-road pattern
of sectorial specialization is reflected in the impressive growth attained by tourism-related sec-
tors (“retail trade” and “hotels and restaurants”), as well as real estate intermediation. In sum, this
pattern of sectorial specialization, anchored around the “tourism-construction” binomial, played
a significant role in fostering the expansive pattern of development of the Spanish economy.
Centered in productive areas where producing a sustained surplus was an inherently troublesome
task, the antagonistic character of Spanish capitalism emerged as its necessary corollary.
Second, Spanish households had recourse to increasing amounts of debt during the whole
period, partly in order to compensate for widespread wage stagnation, and partly due to their
increasing needs of further liquidity to keep on acquiring new housing properties (see figure 3).
The relation between the housing bubble and households’ increasing leverage is twofold. On the
one hand, in a context in which homeownership was largely the norm, rising housing prices
increased households’ wealth, which in turn allowed them to incur into further rounds of indebt-
edness by using those same housing properties as collaterals. On the other hand, the “reified”
cultural-institutional propensity of Spanish families to acquire new housing properties was com-
pounded by the effect derived from soaring prices, thus strongly enhancing their willingness to
incur higher levels of indebtedness in order to acquire new properties. While some of this new
debt accrued by households was used to finance their rising consumption levels, most of it was
directed towards buying new housing properties during these years, housing loans representing
an increasing share of households’ total liabilities throughout the period, especially during the
last years of the upward phase, when revalorization dynamics were the most intense.
Third, the last atypical source of income that needs to be considered, one which is not even
captured by the Spanish National Accounts system, is the extent of housing prices’ revaloriza-
tion. According to Naredo, Carpintero, and Marcos’ (2008) estimations, while they represented
relatively modest amounts in relation to more traditional sources of income during the first years
Table 1. Employment growth by sector of activity (thousands).
Sector Increase 1994–2007 (absolute) Increase 1994–2007 (relative) (%)
Total 8,369 +69.34
Agriculture −205.2 −18.42
Industry 2,295.7 +62.45
Mining and quarrying −0.8 −1.35
Manufacturing 695.2 +28.87
Elecricity, gas, water 21.5 +23.55
Construction 1,579.8 +141.41
Services 6278.3 +86.27
Retail trade 1047.5 +50.43
Hotels and restaurants 710.9 +96.59
Transport and storage 481.2 +68.32
Financial Intermediation 183.4 +56.89
Real estate 1,425.3 +229.41
Public administration 469.4 +59.98
Education 446.3 +66.05
Health and social work 643.8 +105.96
Community / Social Activities 436.5 +103.36
Household Activities 433.6 +132.64

Rey-Araújo 13
of the upward phase, they even surpassed total employees’ compensation during the years 2004
and 2006. Certainly, while not all of it could have been converted into liquidity susceptible to
funding consumption expenditures, in the second half of the upward phase, when trading activity
on pre-existing housing assets was more intense, vast amounts of money could certainly have
been drawn out successfully. However, it is reasonable to presume that only those households
who owned multiple properties could actually profit from trading on them while their prices were
on the rise. As seen in figure 4, the proportion of households owning multiple properties heavily
increased with the level of household income, as well as the market value of those same assets.
Not only did richer households profit to a much greater extent from spiraling housing prices, but
they were also much better positioned to draw out money by trading on them while their prices
were on the rise. Indeed, as shown by Naredo, Carpintero, and Marcos (2008), around half of the
total expenditure in new property acquisition came from incomes derived from selling pre-exist-
ing properties, whereas one-third of it, on average, came from households’ increasing leverage.
In sum, the Spanish model, despite its many internal deficiencies and disequilibria, did man-
age nonetheless to give rise to other social processes, some of them unexpected, some others
intrinsically contradictory and self-defeating, whose interaction, by offering each other mutual
support, managed to yield an appearance of absolute success well beyond what should have been
expected. In this sense, the relations of mutual constitution and reinforcement among the various
social process just indicated can hardly be overemphasized. For instance, intense employment
growth during those years helped prevent real wages from rising in a sustained fashion, which in
turn called for higher employment participation to support family incomes in a social context
marked by increasing household leverage; stagnating wages, in conjunction with rising real
estate prices encouraged further rounds of household indebtedness, which in turn encouraged
higher rates of employment and activity in order to confront existing leverage; rising consump-
tion levels, in turn, were crucial for obliterating the gradual worsening of labor conditions and
thus for securing widespread social consent with the existing order, and so on.
Therefore, a virtuous cycle ensued among these various social processes as long as housing
prices kept rising, offering each other support while significantly attenuating their individually
contradictory character. However, despite the generalized climate of euphoria it helped to gener-
ate during the central years of the cycle, the Spanish housing bubble, as any other asset bubble,
eventually had to deflate. By constituting itself as the central element of the Spanish institutional
Figure 3. Household debt in relation to household income.

14 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
edifice during those years, as soon as the virtuous dynamics grounding it were interrupted, the
remarkable paths of both consumption and capital accumulation were bound to come to a halt.
5.3. Overburdened women
The family is arguably the foremost institution regarding social reproduction within the Spanish
political economy. In their role as “shock absorbers,” Spanish families cushioned the worst
effects of both a dual labor market that delivered great levels of precariousness to those populat-
ing its external layers and an asymmetric and patchy system of welfare provision. Public policy,
through its very inaction to relieve women from care responsibilities, served to reproduce, legiti-
mize, and reinforce the situation itself (Leitner 2003; Saraceno and Keck 2010).
However, the contradictory growth path followed by Spanish neoliberalism ultimately com-
promised its own foundations, as soaring female participation into paid employment put greater
strain on a welfare regime that was ultimately grounded upon the widespread availability of
women’s unpaid domestic labor. Despite women’s labor force participation still being relatively
low compared to European standards, the change experienced during the last two decades in that
respect is unprecedented. The rate of women’s labor force participation has increased more than
13 percent in barely fifteen years. However, if we confine ourselves to those women in the mid-
dle years of their life (25–54 years), the increase experienced during the period in question
exceeds 20 percent.
Certainly, any social change of such an order is necessarily grounded upon multiple other
processes. While some may not be directly related to the specific institutional equilibria corre-
sponding to Spanish neoliberalism (e.g., long-lasting cultural changes, increasing female enrol-
ment in tertiary education), stagnating average real wages together with surging household
indebtedness have probably acted as strong pull factors in that respect.
It must be stressed that the contradictory character of this process lies not in the absolute value
that female labor force participation had reached, but in the magnitude of its change in the face
of a very resilient and asymmetric domestic division of labor (Gálvez, Rodríguez-Madroño, and
Domínguez-Serrano 2011; Sevilla-Sanz, Gimenez-Nadal, and Fernández 2010) on the one hand,
and public policy inaction to consistently unburden women with care responsibilities, on the
other (León and Pavolini 2014). Moreover, if increasing labor market participation encounters a
labor market that delivers great levels of precariousness to its external layers, where labor usage
flexibility is obtained prominently through the spread of fixed-term contracts instead of other
types of “flexi-time” arrangements and/or part-time jobs, and where maternity is associated with
Figure 4. Households’ multiple housing ownership.

Rey-Araújo 15
either remaining full time or leaving paid employment altogether (Anxo et al. 2007), it is obvious
that a profound “care crisis” that could have compromised social reproduction emerged as a seri-
ous threat (Pérez-Orozco 2014).
The eventual actualization of such a care crisis was partially prevented through the operation
of several social processes whose indefinite perpetuation was clearly impossible to attain. First,
Spanish families kept operating as social clearinghouses in which intense exchanges within the
family permitted a partial amelioration of work–family conflicts (Bettio and Plantenga 2004).
This temporary solution reinforced traditional gender relations, as it was mainly other women
within the family who fulfilled what, in other contexts, would have been public policy duties
(Moreno 2004; Tobío 2013). Second, myriad different strategies of individual resistance were
deployed, such as multitasking and, most significantly, a sharp drop in fertility. In a context
marked by scarce family-oriented policies, resilient traditional gender norms, and rigid labor
conditions regarding time flexibility, Spanish couples opted for postponing childrearing as their
preferred means to balance the excessive temporal demands they had to deal with (Bernardi
2005). Third, the entry of large swathes of immigrants, many of which ended up working in the
informal sector, provided a cheap market-based solution to unsatisfied care needs (Ibáñez and
León 2014).8 Several consecutive regularization programs in conjunction with a large under-
ground sector constituted strong “pull” factors for immigration (Bettio, Simonazzi, and Villa
2006), fostering a reorganization of care provision in which families shifted from providing care
themselves to coordinating informally hired migrant carers (Simonazzi 2009).
In sum, the eventual manifestation of underlying valorization problems was postponed
through the operation of various trends which, despite displaying a highly contradictory charac-
ter when considered in isolation, managed to offer support to each other so that their joint occur-
rence was reinforced over time. For instance, productive deficiencies favored a continuous shift
towards financial and real estate activities, giving rise to speculative dynamics within the latter
which, in turn, both encouraged and enabled increasing leverage levels within the private sector.
This final factor helped sustain ascending consumption levels despite the low-road pattern of
productive specialization fostering widespread wage stagnation. This, in turn, not only incentiv-
ized further households’ indebtedness as well as increasing women’s labor force participation,
but also helped consolidate the already large underground sector of the economy which, among
other things, acted as a strong pull factor for sizable immigration flows. The latter not only served
to cater for unsatisfied care needs derived from growing female labor participation but also pro-
vided a wide reserve army of cheap labor that further reinforced a low-road pattern of sectorial
specialization throughout the period. However, despite the homeostatic functioning of the result-
ing institutional configuration, these several processes also had to provide the conditions neces-
sary for social consensus to be reproduced. The following section offers an account of how their
joint operation prevented the worst effects derived from each from disrupting existing institu-
tional equilibria during the time of their expansion.
6. The Fragile Bases of Social Consensus under Spanish
Neoliberalism
A successful SSA, in order to qualify as such, needs to guarantee its own long-term reproduction,
which not only requires repressing the irreducible crisis tendencies it harbors at a given time and
place, as indicated in the previous section, but also to secure a level of social peace high enough
for it not to be disrupted by widespread contestation (Rey-Araújo 2018). There is therefore a rela-
tion of relative autonomy between the two levels. Whereas widespread social contestation might
8By 1998, Spain had the lowest share of immigrant population among EU-15 countries. Just a decade later,
in 2008, it was already the third highest (Laparra 2011).

16 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
bring the virtuous cycle between the above-mentioned material processes to a halt by effecting
pressures upon its various constitutive moments, a successful interaction among the latter is in
turn required to secure the very material bases upon which existing consensuses are ultimately
grounded.
Under the Spanish “Mediterranean” Liberal SSA, despite the conflict-prone nature of the
social processes that had ultimately grounded economic expansion, widespread social consensus
was definitely attained throughout the period. As long as the above-mentioned social processes
kept on mutually reinforcing each other, potential demands spreading out of each were, to a great
extent, successfully prevented from disrupting the required social peace.
Antagonistic labor relations, manifested in the proliferation of precarious fixed-term contracts
in conjunction with stagnating real wages, did not find political expression around class-related
identities. This erosion of the hegemonic depth of working-class political identities cannot be
understood without taking into account real estate self-valorization dynamics. In a context char-
acterized by widespread homeownership, not only did patrimonial rents partially compensate for
stagnating wages, but they were also crucial in providing access to credit resources that in turn
enabled increasing consumption in face of wage stagnation.9 As noted by López and Rodríguez
(2010), a “middle-class” identification linked to consumption patterns rather than to labor market
status did become hegemonic, obliterating the gradual erosion of labor conditions in public
discourse.
Moreover, intense intra-familial redistribution in combination with relatively high job protec-
tion offered to the male breadwinner and a welfare system skewed towards the needs of the elderly
cushioned the widespread effects of labor precariousness. Micro-solidarity dynamics within the
family thus helped prevent wider opposition from those systematically enjoying the worst modali-
ties of labor inclusion, significantly women and the young. Regarding the former, the “narrow
concept of citizenship” upon which familialist welfare regimes are grounded (in the Spanish case,
intimately linked to its Francoist heritage) prevented wider contestation by women of their modal-
ity of labor inclusion (Torns et al. 2013). Regarding the young, besides family support, middle-
class status linked to tertiary education was fundamental to resignify labor precariousness as a
transitional stage rather than as a clear indication of accelerating proletarianization.
Another issue around which potential unsatisfied demands might have coalesced is welfare
state underdevelopment. In this respect, two main factors should be singled out. On the one hand,
the ideological role played by European Union membership cannot be underestimated. Ever
since the 1980s, European integration was used strategically as a symbol of progress and moder-
nity in order to support a process of convergence in terms of social expenditure. However, even
after such a process was drawn to a halt during the 1990s, EU membership served to legitimize a
sharp turn towards workfare-oriented policy priorities (Clúa-Losada 2015; Moreno and Serrano
2011). On the other hand, the classical tradeoff identified by Kemeny (1981) between homeown-
ership and welfare state expansion, as alternative mechanisms of long-term saving, was exacer-
bated by the effects derived from the housing bubble. Asset-revalorization dynamics around
housing properties contributed to silence potential discomfort with the unevenness and patchi-
ness of the social protection system. Moreover, strong intra-familial transfers compensated the
demographic bias towards the elderly regarding both welfare spending and homeownership, pre-
venting the generational cleavage from acquiring full political expression, thus potentially desta-
bilizing the existing social order.
Lastly, as noted above, the most flagrant absence in the Spanish welfare architecture concerns
family policy. A lack of public interventions to unburden women of care responsibilities is
9Naredo (2006) uses the metaphor of a “virus of speculation spreading through the social body” to graphi-
cally indicate how a housing bubble in conjunction with widespread home-ownership served to erase the
political salience of other social antagonisms.

Rey-Araújo 17
supported by an ideological configuration of social care needs as a gendered private responsibility,
in which a strong sense of moral obligation prevented widespread politicization of the public-
private divide upon which social reproduction ultimately rests (Bruff and Wöhl 2016). In the
words of Flaquer (2001), “what seems to be sui generis of Mediterranean countries is… a circular-
ity between a lack of family policy measures and an absence of demand for such measures.”
Moreover, the possibility of contestation was further demeaned by the widespread availability of
cheap and informal market-based solutions to work-family conflicts, mostly from immigrant
carers.10
In sum, attaining relatively high social consensus was ultimately dependent upon social trends
whose endless reproduction was utterly impossible. For instance, housing revalorization dynam-
ics permitted a successful obliteration of both an increasingly skewed income distribution and
welfare state insufficiencies from public debate; widespread expansion of credit and debt among
private households reinforced a resignification of middle-class status now linked to consumption
patterns instead of labor market outcomes; social conflicts around care provision were partially
ameliorated by large immigration flows, whose entry was further induced by a booming under-
ground economy linked to Spanish productive specialization, and so on.
It must be stressed, however, that despite the capacity of the Spanish model to draw vast layers
of the population into its self-generated consensuses, not all of those who were involved had the
symbolic and material resources to make their own voices heard. Any well-functioning social
order, in order to present itself as a totality, needs to exclude some elements from it (Laclau
1990). Among those whose (potentially critical) voice was prevented from disrupting existing
consensuses one could count, among others, lower-class women, where the intersection between
class and gender divides became the more acute; those without housing properties, who could not
benefit from asset revalorization dynamics and whose destinies where left to the vagaries of the
labor market; the young who could not rely on family support in the face of stagnating wages and
rising housing prices; and, above all, the masses of immigrants deprived of both symbolic recog-
nition and material resources, forced to cater for the needs of the many while enlarging the profits
of the few.
7. A Systemic Crisis Turning Into an Organic Crisis
During the growth phase, from 1995 until 2008, underlying capitalist valorization problems were
prevented from manifesting themselves thanks to the development of a variety of unsustainable
trends which, despite their markedly self-defeating character, managed nonetheless to jointly
reproduce themselves thanks to the mutual support provided by each. Moreover, such temporary
complementarities did not erase their intrinsically contradictory character, so that, by the time
their joint reproduction was no longer possible, it was the whole institutional edifice that crum-
bled down, rather than just one of its individual components (Rey-Araújo 2019). For that reason,
Kotz (2010: 368) has argued that Liberal SSAs “tend to eventually produce a severe structural
crisis of accumulation.” The Spanish experience exemplifies the process of abrupt institutional
decomposition that ensues once a Liberal SSA’s underlying contradictions lethally overflow the
institutional assemblage their very interrelation had helped consolidate.
A massive housing bubble, it has been noted, constituted itself as the central element of the
Spanish “Mediterranean” Liberal SSA. However, once the housing bubble eventually deflated,
the above-mentioned unsustainable trends (i.e., increasing private indebtedness, rising consump-
tion in the face of wage stagnation, a sectorially distorted accumulation process, social care
10The “Dependency Law,” passed in 2006, initially aimed at both raising consciousness about the organiza-
tion of care provision in Spain and to partially reverse it. However, by mostly employing cash transfers, it
ended up consolidating traditional arrangements (Da Roit, Ferrer, and Moreno-Fuentes 2013; Gálvez 2016).

18 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
provision being submitted to greater strains, an enlarging competitiveness gap relative to the
European core, etc.) could no longer be jointly reproduced, ensuring a process of rapid institu-
tional decomposition.
Residential investment began to contract in mid-2007, while housing prices and aggregate con-
sumption started their decline in mid-2008. The interruption of revalorization dynamics in the real
estate sector gradually brought down employment levels (in the last quarter of 2007) as well as the
remaining components of aggregate demand. GFCF started its decline in the first quarter of 2008,
private consumption started in the second, and GDP in the third (Mateo 2017a). A spiraling process of
institutional decomposition and economic activity slowdown ensued, mutually reinforcing each other.
In annual terms, GDP grew by 1.1 percent in the year 2008, the last year recording a positive increase
in real terms prior to 2014; households’ final consumption fell by −0.7 percent in 2008 and a further
−3.7 percent in 2009; imports immediately plummeted (−6.3 percent in 2008, −19.4 percent in 2009);
and GFCF, the ultimate engine of the economic boom from a National Accounts perspective, fell
dramatically by −3.6 percent in 2008 and by −17.2 percent in 2009. In sum, virtually a year sufficed
to reverse the greatest expansionary phase in recent Spanish history, abruptly creating a social night-
mare that had no foreseeable positive future at the time (see figure 5).11
Over the course of a couple of years the various synergies that had sustained previous eco-
nomic expansion were undone, turning them into a vicious circle that austerity policies could not
help but aggravate further, as the contradictory nature of the main trends sustaining previous
economic expansion was further accentuated by their persistently interlocked character. First,
unemployment rates went from a low of 8.2 percent in 2007 to 19.8 percent in 2010, barely three
years later, due to both the previous overreliance upon fixed-term contracts and the breakdown
of the oversized real estate complex. Second, households’ deleveraging strategies were further
complicated by receding labor incomes and households’ nominal wealth levels (mostly real
estate properties). Third, sound public finance soon gave way to ample fiscal deficits due to both
automatic stabilizers and the costs associated with the process of financial bailout and restructur-
ing. Lastly, family economies were led to the brink of collapse as the reprivatization of care
Figure 5. Evolution of GDP components, 2006–15.
11Lack of space prevents us from offering a nuanced chronological treatment of the unfolding of the Spanish
economic crisis. Instead, we refer the reader to Banyuls and Recio (2012, 2015), Carballo-Cruz (2011), or
Calvo-Mendizábal (2014).

Rey-Araújo 19
responsibilities implicit in austerity policies forced an internalization within families of the con-
tradictions developed in the market sphere (Gálvez and Rodríguez-Modroño 2012).
Once patrimonial synergies suddenly ground to a halt, fixed expectations and sedimented agree-
ments were shown to be contingent and social peace increasingly difficult to secure in a sharply
polarized social scenario, as the sudden and fully fledged character of the process of institutional
decomposition characteristic of Liberal SSAs made the dislocatory effects of the crisis upon domi-
nant hegemonic frameworks to be widespread all over the social structure (Rey-Araújo 2019).
Once the homeostatic functioning of the now-crumbling institutional assemblage came to a halt, a
variety of heterogeneous social demands abruptly irrupted into the political arena in a very short
timespan. Moreover, as shown below, these various demands were intimately related to the under-
side of the institutional bases that had regulated the previous economic expansion.
First, chronic welfare state underdevelopment, further aggravated by public sector cuts linked to
austerity policies in conjunction with further privatization schemes, fostered public contestation in
the form of the so-called Mareas (“tides”), focused particularly in health care and education (Clúa-
Losada 2018). Second, linked to the aftermath of the housing bubble, the “Mortgage-Affected
Platform” (PAH, “Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca”) emerged as an activist-based plat-
form that managed to capture great media attention. After housing prices plummeted, many were
left with outstanding debts and little-to-no capacity for repayment. Moreover, according to the
Spanish Mortgage Law, giving the housing property to the credit institution does not cause immedi-
ate debt cancellation. Campaigning for an immediate stop to evictions and in favor of housing
repossessions, the PAH managed to transform individual problems into a collective issue (Flesher-
Fominaya 2015; García-Lamarca 2017). Lastly, whereas the paradigmatic square occupations that
spread through the country during 2011 under the “indignados” banner managed to coalesce vari-
ous heterogeneous demands, they singularly made explicit an underlying generational cleavage that
was already present, although somehow disguised, during the expansion phase (Antentas 2017;
Rodríguez 2016). A welfare system significantly skewed towards the needs of the elders, public
policies promoting homeownership to the detriment of a more progressive taxation, and increasing
labor market precarization among the younger layers of the workforce would have brought the
generational cleavage to the fore were it not for the internal redistribution of resources that charac-
terize Spanish families in conjunction with middle-class aspiration linked to the massive spread of
tertiary education certificates. However, the interruption of asset-revalorization dynamics and the
marked surge of unemployment after 2008 wiped out the material bases upon which the above-
mentioned social consensuses were ultimately grounded.
In sum, a profound breakdown of hegemony ensued after the social processes that had sus-
tained economic expansion ground to a halt. The relative social peace that had accompanied
economic expansion gave way to a situation of increasing social contestation that was intimately
linked to the collapse of the very mechanisms that had grounded economic growth in the first
instance.12
8. Concluding Comments
The economic expansion of the Spanish economy prior to the onset of the Great Recession was a
highly contradictory one. Laudatory comments relative to soaring real GDP, sound public finances,
and high employment growth obliterated the precarious foundations of the aforementioned
expansion as manifested, for instance, in the flat evolution of both average real wages and labor
productivity, increasing external dependence manifested in the current account’s disequilibria,
12Among the chief factors that helped attenuate potentially higher contestation one should cite the high lev-
els of indebtedness that kept haunting Spanish households, large outflows of emigration to the richer coun-
tries of the European core, and the resilience of family cohesion in the face of growing material deprivation.

20 Review of Radical Political Economics 00(0)
mounting levels of private indebtedness, widespread ecological deterioration, a sectorially dis-
torted accumulation process, dropping fertility rates, and social care provision being submitted to
greater strains. Ultimately, the whole institutional edifice was anchored around a housing bubble
of unheard-of proportions, the eventual deflation of which could not help but break down the for-
mer. Astounding levels of indebtedness, an enlarged competitiveness gap relative to the European
core, and sharp social polarization thus marked the resulting social scenario.
Several lessons can be drawn from the recent Spanish experience regarding the determinants
of social order stability and change under capitalism. First, any a priori hierarchical ordering of
social contradictions ought to be discarded in favor of an analysis that appraises how diverse
social processes, in spite of their potentially contradictory character, may coalesce into a rela-
tively coherent whole that guarantees their joint reproduction over time. Second, certain dimen-
sions that are generally neglected in most mainstream political economy analysis must occupy
center stage when analyzing social reproduction, such as the social organization of care provision
or the influx of means of payment not registered in national accounts systems, such as incomes
generated by trading on self-appreciating assets. Third, political economy analyses must inquire
into how the social consensuses needed for a social order’s successful reproduction are generated
by preventing the conflictive nature of social institutions from being translated into political
expressions liable to menace such an order.
The atypical mode of expansion of the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2008, it is
argued, can offer several fruitful lessons in that respect. Despite being grounded upon increas-
ingly worrisome foundations it managed nonetheless to deliver an impressive performance in
certain key macroeconomic indicators. Indeed, it seems that the strength and vitality of the
latter were directly proportional to the intrinsically contradictory and self-defeating character
of the former. Moreover, while the social demands that acquired increasing political salience
during the crisis were certainly overdetermined by the institutional shape of the underlying
social structure and its internal cleavages and disequilibria, no direct transpositions between
the two levels will ever be obtained. Crucially, despite the centrality of capital-labor relations
under capitalism, anti-systemic demands are not restricted to class struggle narrowly under-
stood, but also comprise those demands pointing towards the underlying blocks sustaining the
social structure. In the Spanish case, these would encompass, among others, those referring to
the generational cleavage in the labor market, the gendered organization of care, and the sys-
tem of housing provision.
Appendix
Data on real hourly wages have been calculated as the ratio between total employees’ compensa-
tion and total hours worked, for the whole economy, deflated by the GDP price index. Data on
aggregate hourly labor productivity have been calculated by dividing the real GDP by total hours
worked (source: National Accounts, Spanish National Institute of Statistics).
Data on employment levels refer to total employment, unless otherwise indicated (source:
Labor Force Survey, Spanish National Institute of Statistics).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Pau Belda, Luis Buendía, Melchor Fernández, Lina Gálvez, Ramón Máiz, Terry
McDonough, and José Manuel Naredo, for their comments on previous versions of this paper. I would also
like to acknowledge the exceptional contribution made by Sergio Cámara and Juan Pablo Mateo as review-
ers of this journal, helping me improve the quality of this paper well beyond what I would have been capable
of on my own. All usual disclaimers apply.

Rey-Araújo 21
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work has benefited from the funding coming from the Consolidation and
Structuring of Competitive Re- search Units Grants Project of the Galicia University Sys- tem, Xunta de
Galicia as Competitive Reference Groups (ED431C 2017/44), and also from the Training for Univer- sity
Teaching Staff Plan of the Ministry of Education, Cul- ture and Sports (FPU-2015-01682).
ORCID iD
Pedro M. Rey-Araújo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0008-4633
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Author Biography
Pedro M. Rey Araújo is currently a researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His
research interests include critical political economy, discourse theory, the sociology of time, and critical
theory broadly understood.