"The social sector represents all those forms that do not compulsively pursue the objectives of the capitalist economy. They have as their antecedent all the community and cooperative forms that have not been able to be subsumed under the logic of profit"

This article by Óscar David Rojas Silva originally appeared in the July 23, 2026 edition of Contralínea, an independent Mexican investigative journalism magazine.

Starting in the 1980s, neoliberalism took hold in universities, according to the work of Sarah Babb [1]. The measurement method used was to analyze the main theorist cited in the theses produced by the Faculty of Economics at UNAM. What this author found was an undeniable break. Whereas from the 1940s to the 1970s the dominant authors were Marx and Keynes, by the lost decade the visions coming from the Austrian School or the University of Chicago began to dominate, as in the case of Milton Friedman or Hayek. This shift also led to a migration from the analysis of political economy, history, philosophy, anthropology, etc. to the inhospitable and cold territories of the econometric model. The science, which previously had at its center the concrete discussion of the State and social problems, was reduced to an abstract discussion of the productivity and rationality that individuals and firms should adopt in order to reach the mythical state of equilibrium.

It was not only Marx, but also Keynes, who were exiled from the epistemic and pedagogical core of the public university. As a consequence, the social sector of the economy was completely erased; every social problem became a stochastic variable within the framework of sterile artifacts of hypermathematization. This, of course, was not accidental, nor simply a course taken by the personal vision of its administrators; it was in fact a great campaign of homogenization under the new paradigm of the market. The damage became the rule in practically the majority of economics schools around the world. The Nobel Prize system plus the oligopolistic control of publishers, journals, and leadership positions made it possible to fully establish that model. The social sector was forgotten and marginalized.

To define the concept, the social sector represents all those forms that do not compulsively pursue the objectives of the capitalist economy. They have as their antecedent all the community and cooperative forms that have not been able to be subsumed under the logic of profit. But we must add that the phenomenon of those forms that are in open conflict under a process of exploitation also enters here, that is, the field of daily work in private companies in which the struggle is for a decent wage. It might seem to be a matter of the private sector, but no, it is also a matter of the social sector.

To expand on this discussion, we must distinguish between the meaning of the corporate private at the scale of large transnational companies, and what small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) mean for the economic metabolism of the different communities. The former is entirely corporate, that is, specialized in immediate speculative profits; the latter correspond to multiple social objectives, which is why this sphere coincides better with the sphere of the social sector. The objective of the collective worker is the reproduction of life, not of capital.

If we consider our conceptualization of a mixed social economy, we observe the three components of the organic economic totality: the state sector, the private sector, and the social sector. The installed neoclassical economics applied a collective epistemicide; it made the issues of the State disappear and attacked them while minimizing the civilizational consequences of the market economy on the population. The dream of progress and the arrival at the supposed modernity of the developed first world was installed in the common imaginary; the economy was then limited to the study of the exclusive needs of the private sector. Hence economic science is confused with a matter of business.

In the face of this crisis, reality itself has taken it upon itself to contradict the automatism and reductionism of this vision. As of today, the renewed centrality of the State in the economy is beyond discussion, as is a widespread concern for the consequences of that development in the realm of ecology, of political relations, and of interpersonal relations. There is talk not only of identity rights but also of essential economic rights that populations demand: education, health, housing, pensions, etc.; an accumulation of needs with chronic problems, always contrasting with the accelerated concentration of wealth in a compact core of the 1 percent.

That is, reality has already generated a structural change on the side of concerns, but it is still necessary that the methods of study also mutate. Today the voices of the Nobel laureates no longer mean much to the community, but there still remains a bureaucracy that, due to the verticality of its structures, hardly finds the internal incentives to renew itself radically. For this reason it is necessary to promote changes in the study programs, not only with the consideration of the topics, but also with the guarantee of epistemological plurality that allows national problems to be addressed from an adequate perspective, that is, not through the vision of the private sector, nor exclusively through the structural approach of the public sector, but through the social sector itself.

There are three elements that I highlight to broaden the perspective of the mixed functioning of the economy. The first is the reform of Article 2 of the Constitution, which recognized Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and communities as subjects of public law, which gave rise to the Fund of Contributions for Social Infrastructure for Indigenous and Afro-Mexican Peoples (FAISPIAM), with a budget for 2026 of 13.5 billion pesos that the communities themselves will decide on in assembly [2]. On the other hand, there is the 2024 reform of Articles 4 and 27, which elevated the Programs for Well-Being to the rank of a constitutional right—universal pension for older adults, pension for people with disabilities, Sembrando Vida, fertilizers, and guaranteed prices—and shielded their budget, which today amounts to practically 1 trillion pesos, an amount that can no longer be reduced in real terms from one year to the next. And, in third place, we have a systematic recovery of the minimum wage, reduction of the workday, profit-sharing, pension reforms, and promotion of union democratization that strengthen the labor world in our country.

In these cases the same underlying movement occurs: what neoclassical economics treated as discretionary welfare spending becomes a constituted right, exactly the displacement that this paradigm had made unthinkable. In fact, the relevance of this mixed recovery is to recall the basic meaning of the social sciences: to know concrete reality in order to be able to transform it; there is no sense, for example, in the growth of GDP if it is not reflected in the sustained improvement of the living conditions of the people. A compelling piece of data on this trend is the 13.4 million Mexicans who left multidimensional poverty since 2018. Recovering this vision now broadens our horizon to identify the new processes and the new ways of measuring them over time; it is about the need not only to distinguish between growth and development, but to give social content to the latter.

All this new need is already occurring in the face of the intense global crisis we are experiencing, which is why the change of methods in the universities must hasten its pace in order to also fulfill its objective as part of this third sector: to incorporate cooperativism, the social economy, and critical thinking into the curriculum, and thus generate the conditions for the community to achieve ever deeper transformations.

Óscar David Rojas Silva is an economist (UdeG) with a master’s and doctorate (UNAM) in the critique of political economy. He is an academic at FES Acatlán, Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Capitalism, and a communicator specialized in critical thinking at Radio del Azufre and Academia del Azufre.

[1] Babb, S. (2003). Proyecto: México. Los economistas del nacionalismo al neoliberalismo. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

[2] Presidency of the Republic. (July 3, 2026). Stenographic version. Justice Plan for the P’urhépecha People. Cherán, Michoacán. www.gob.mx/presidencia/articulos/version-estenografica-plan-de-justicia-para-el-pueblo-p-urhepecha-cheran-michoacan

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