The Disintegration of Capitalist Exception Regimes in the Americas: A Gramscian Approach

Abstract

This article examines capitalist exception regimes in the Americas from a Marxist and Gramscian perspective, focusing on structural conditions, relations of force, and state transformations in contexts of hegemonic crisis. It begins with a critique of the liberal “transition to democracy” approach, which reduces political change to a linear process of institutional evolution, while neglecting class contradictions, the reconfiguration of state forms, and the pressures of the imperialist system. Drawing on the concept of the capitalist state as both a condensation of social relations and a strategic field of struggle, the analysis explores how the state of exception emerges as a form of direct domination in the face of the collapse of bourgeois consensus, expressing both the fracture of the historical bloc and the attempt to reorganize it through state violence.

The study demonstrates that these regimes are not anomalies but rather specific forms of power organization under conditions of dependency and structural crisis. Their overcoming does not entail a rupture with class power, but rather its reconfiguration under liberal-democratic forms that incorporate exceptional practices as part of the normalized order. In this sense, regime change should be understood as a hegemonic reconfiguration rather than as a simple democratic restoration. The article concludes that the category of capitalist exception regimes provides a more rigorous framework for analyzing the continuity between dictatorship and democracy in peripheral capitalism, while also offering tools for a critical interpretation of contemporary Latin American politics.