TWO
From rupture to creation: new movements emerge
The 19th and 20th was an uprising – or an insurrection – that marked the entire decade, up ’till today … It is an event that profoundly changed the politics, cultural, society and economy of Argentina. There is a before and an after. As the Mexicans say, is a parting of the waters.
Families sat at home, many before their television sets, in a night that began as so many others: what to watch, what to make for dinner, the regular nightly questions. Then a TV newscaster appeared on every channel and announced that from this moment on all bank accounts were frozen. Silence in the house. The economic crisis was here. People sat in silence, stared at the TV … they waited, they watched and they waited. And then it was heard, outside one window and then another, outside one balcony and another, neighborhood by neighborhood … tac! tac tac! tac tac tac! … People went to their windows, went out onto their balconies and heard the sound. The sound was people banging spoons on pans, spatulas on pots, the sound of the cacerolazo. The sound became a wave, and the wave began to flood the streets. We heard it, and then on the television sets accompanying our solitude, we saw it: newscasters, dumbfounded, captured the first cacerolazos; people in slippers, shorts, robes and tank tops, with children on their shoulders, entire families, out in the streets, tac! tac tac! tac tac tac! hitting their pots and pans. What they were saying was not expressed in words, it was done, bodies spoke, and spoke by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Tac! tac tac! in slippers, tac tac!, old people, tac tac!, children, tac tac tac! The cacerolazo had begun.
The institutions of power did not know what to do, they declared a state of emergency in the morning, falling back on what had always been done: law and order. But the people broke with the past, with what had been done, and no longer stayed at home in fear. They came out onto the streets with even more bodies and sounds – and then the sounds, the tac tac tac! turned into a song. It was a shout of rejection, and a song of affirmation. Que se vayan todos! (‘They all must go!’) was sung, and sung together with their neighbors. It was not just a shout against what was, it was a song sung together, by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. People sang and banged pots, and greeted one another, kissing the cheeks of neighbors who in the past had only been seen, but now, for the first time, were truly being seen. It was a rupture with the past. It was a rupture with obedience, and a rupture with not being together, with not knowing one another. It was a rupture that cracked open history, upon which vast new histories were created.
(From author’s notes based on interviews)
‘One no, many yesses’
‘The 19th and 20th’ is how many in the movements refer to both the moment and process of what took place in Argentina. They are the days when everything broke open. People’s imaginations broke open and new possibilities and imaginaries were created. To speak of ‘the 19th and 20th’ is to speak of the social creation and all that it implies breaking from; it is not to speak of a fixed time or stagnant date. ‘Ya Basta!’ (‘Enough!’) was shouted on that infamous day of 1 January 1994 when the Zapatistas appeared to the world and took over seven cities, declaring that they would not disappear, that they were rejecting 500 years of domination. They took back their land as they shouted ‘No’. The Zapatistas speak of ‘One no and many yesses’.1 In Argentina they shouted and sang, ‘Que se vayan todos!’, and from the 19th and 20th millions of ‘yesses’ have emerged, their singing resonated around the world.
Throughout Latin America over the past ten years, people and communities have been breaking with past ways of organizing themselves and their communities, and with their relationship to institutional power and authority. Decisions are being made in the hands of the people, and being done so collectively and democratically. New and various forms of nonrepresentative democracy are being created as people organize. In Argentina this is called horizontalidad; in Chiapas, Mexico, people are creating new ‘good government councils’; in Oaxaca, Mexico, in the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca); in the regions around Cochabamba, Bolivia in the Regantes, the self-governed and self-policed autonomous communities; and in the highlands of La Paz, in El Alto, in neighborhood councils. Each of these examples of new forms of decision making comes from a break with previous forms of organizing. Not that they are entirely new; in many cases these ‘new’ forms of direct democratic decision making are in part a revival of segments of old practices, such as ‘usos y custumbres’ (‘customs and uses’, as with some indigenous communities), or forms of council decision making that are linked, at least in practice, to older anarchist traditions.
From these new democratic processes people are speaking of new relationships, new selves, new collective selves, new subjects, protagonists, and social subjects. These new relationships form a break from relationships of domination and oppression, a break with silence and from the state, a break with alienation and capitalist modes of production relations and value production.
People have come together, have taken over workplaces to run them in common; they have taken over land to grow crops on so as to feed their communities; they have created alternative forms of education and healthcare. In some places the barter networks that were organized have involved millions of people, bartering services as well as goods. This production of alternative ways of surviving coupled with alternative forms of being and relating is what has created new subjects, new people. This is a new value relationship and a rejection of capitalist mode of relations, as explained by Raul Zibechi when interviewed by the alternative media group, Lavaca in 2010:
I believe that the world of those from below is growing, not only numerically, but also it is becoming stronger, gaining in self-esteem, while also getting more profound and complicated. It is also not just the poor, as they have been, but rather a new generation of poor, from the former middle class. And there are new knowledge and new skills. For example, the ability to self-organize. Before the organization was the union. They had not learned to organize in territory. First they learned to follow leaders, or punteros. Then they learned to self-organize autonomously from the punteros. For example, with time they learned to produce, recuperate workplaces, create gardens and bakeries, all sorts of micro-enterprises for production. From the production for survival, like the communal kitchens, to the production of material. And they learned to organize their own health care, with clinics autonomously constructed by those from below. And spaces of formation of many diverse types, including often the use of popular education.
The break that took place was also with how to think about and organize for change. Linked with horizontalidad and autonomy, and the desire for the creation of new subjectivities, there was a break with political parties telling people what to do and how. As the Argentine sociologist Norma Giarracca, also in conversation with Lavaca, reflecting on ten years since the popular rebellion, explained, ‘The message was: we do not want political representation any more. We want to take our own history into our own hands’ (Lavaca 2010). This was not just a break with parties from formal institutions of power, but also with radical and revolutionary Left parties, from the Peronists to the Trotskyist. Many people broke with the concept of power as a thing, to take or to build for, and rejected that vision within the radical Left. Instead, people are creating a new power, a power with, a power to, power as potencia2 – power as a verb.
What is rupture?
Rupture can come from many places. Sometimes it comes upon us, surprisingly or seemingly surprisingly, as is the case in Argentina, or the Caracazo3 in Venezuela, and sometimes we the people create the rupture, as with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA.
Rupture can be a break that occurs because of outside circumstances, circumstances that are that are not of our creation, even if their ramifications are within our power to prevent: events such as earthquakes, flood, fire, or economic collapse. These ruptures often inspire thousands, even hundreds of thousands, to come together and help one another. When massive collapse happens, often formal institutions of power collapse with them, or go into crisis. People then look to one another, begin to try to find solutions together, and often do so in such ways that are more ‘effective’ and definitely more empowering – ‘affective’. Rebecca Solnit (2009) has done a great deal of work on this question, grounding much of it in disaster sociology and anarchist theory. Her work focuses on a number of global historical examples, from earthquakes in Mexico and Nicaragua to 9/11. She highlights how people find numerous ways to take care of themselves and each another, and how they do it even better than institutional organization of the crisis, when this is the case. Most people who have lived through any moment where formal institutions of power go away, or are forced away, agree with this point. When left alone, when left with one another, people turn to one another and use forms of mutual aid and support. The wake of the break is a beautiful opening up of possibility. This is what was seen in Argentina: the crisis caused the break, the rupture.
However, what is different with the Argentine example is that this creation did not stop: people continued to organize, and did so self-consciously. As Emilio, a movement participant, reflected in an interview in 2009:
The people began to discuss politics when they went into the streets, to say enough of this unsustainable situation that we will not tolerate anymore, and from there began to develop new politics. It is when one questions the existing structures that another way always emerges, it liberates a creative force to do things in another way.
The rupture caused people to go out onto the streets and meet one another, but the new politics of horizontalidad, autogestión, other power, and politica afectiva, combined with creative new ways of meeting their needs and creating new values, kept people on the streets organizing and did not allow the opening that emerged with the crisis to close.
Without these ‘new’ forms of organization helping to facilitate an analysis of power, and doing so together, recognizing one another, and creating changes in subjectivity, the movements in Argentina could have easily gone in the same direction as those in so many other parts of the world when there is a rupture.
These short-term experiences range from France in May 1968 to what is now referred to as the Comuna de Oaxaca, referring to the ninety days in 2006 when the people occupied the zócalo (central park), setting up alternative forms of decision making and survival (Esteva 2008); both of these experiences being the sort of rupture that the Zapatistas refer to, the creation of a break in a politically unsustainable situation. Similar sorts of assemblies and mass democracies have been seen throughout 2011 in Egypt, Greece and Spain. The outcomes of these mass gatherings and prefigurative political formations has yet to be determined, but what is certain is that new relationships are being created. Ruptures that have come from ‘natural’ events – or at least some moment of spark, such as an earthquake or terrorist attack – have witnessed short-term versions of the same. This was seen in New York during and immediately after 9/11.
In addition, rupture can be an intentional break, opening, crack, or as Holloway (2003a) discusses, a fissure. This is more the case with the Zapatistas in Chiapas. The space of creation and mutual aid was desired, and they knew that a rupture might help to facilitate this opening, so they prepared ahead of time the various components necessary to keep open a momentary opening, such as radical forms of horizontal decision making, new values and anti-capitalism, territory and time, a conscious grounding of collective memory in the present, as well as a profound and complicated analysis of power so as to not allow the opening to become co-opted. This is what the Zapatistas were preparing for, for more a decade before they ‘came out’ to the world with their insurrection. The insurrection was not so much a declaration of war as an invitation to new social creation. The Zapatistas announced on the radio day after day after arriving in San Cristobal de las Casas an invitation to do the same in every area. Not a declaration to join them, more an invitation to rebellion.
‘To Open a Crack in History’ (Marcos 2001) is one of the many ways that the Zapatistas refer to what they are doing. Opening this crack in history is to make it a part of a process, to open up possibilities that are changing, and come from as well as going to a place. It is also a conscious opening that they discuss, distinct from the Argentine economic crisis. The Zapatistas carefully chose a time and place to open this crack.
Holloway explains this concept in a piece that he wrote discussing anti-capitalist movements:
Fissures: these are the thousand answers to the question of revolution. Everywhere there are fissures. The struggles of dignity tear open the fabric of capitalist domination. When people stand up against the construction of the airport in Atenco, when they oppose the construction of the highway in Tepeaca, when they stand up against the Plan Puebla Panama, when the students of the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] oppose the introduction of fees, when workers go on strike to resist the introduction of faster rhythms of work, they are saying ‘NO, here no, here capital does not rule!’ Each No is a flame of dignity, a crack in the rule of capital. Each No is a running away, a flight from the rule of capital. No is the starting point of all hope. But it is not enough. We say No to capital in one area, but it keeps on attacking us, separating us from the wealth we create, denying our dignity as active subjects. Yet our dignity is not so easily denied. The No has a momentum that carries us forward.
In each case there was a break and an opening. Something happened such that there are now massive and deep forms of direct democracy and horizontalidad when previously there was not. What is this? Why this shift in forms of decision making? Where did it come from, and why? From what are people breaking such that there is an opening that seems almost to necessitate direct participation?
As rupture is a break, what I am arguing here is that this break necessitates an opening. I am helping to bring to light what comes out of the fissure, at the same time, as a rejection and a creation. Too often social scientists and scholars of revolution focus on the moment of rupture, and use this to explain the historical event. In Russia the focus on revolution is the October Revolution, not the Soviet workers. What would have happened if the focus were on the Soviets and people running society, rather than the state and the concept of the revolution as the rupture? Scholars of Mexican history speak of the earthquake in 1985 as a moment when things changed, but do not look to what was opened up with popular and collective organization in neighborhoods. Rupture in these cases was not the moment of the revolution, or the earthquake, just as with Argentina and Chiapas, the rupture is not just the cacerolazo or the taking of San Cristobal de las Casas. It is the creation of new social relations and communities.
Rupture needs to be understood as a break in ways of doing things, as a shift in people’s imaginations from which new social relationships emerge, relationships that can be, and in the examples I use, that are autonomous from forms of institutional power. (This new way of perceiving and experiencing revolution is based in different conceptions and practices of power and autonomy that will be addressed in the following chapters.)
Rupturing ‘No te metas’ and fear
I believe what detonated the explosion of the 19th and 20th was seeing the lootings, followed by the declaration of the state of siege. It was like something in our collective memory said, ‘No, I am not going to put up with it, I’m not going to take it.’ It began with some cacerolazos, and I remember … boom! People lost their fear, the fear we had from the military era … and well, this is like waking up.
(Conversation with Paloma in Paternal, Buenos Aires, 2003)
The break that Paloma refers to, the declaration of ‘No’, is massive, but that this took place within the context of a state of siege is that much more powerful. After a day of hundreds of thousands cacerolando (banging pots and pans), the state of siege was declared yet people continued to fill the streets, and in even greater numbers. Expelling five governments was also part of the long moment of rupture, but the most important change happened in the space ‘beneath’ the government. Beneath, people went outside and broke a history of silence: the history of ‘no te metas’ – an often-used phrase during the decades of the dictatorship and for years after when ‘democracy’ had returned. Paloma, a small, frail, yet amazingly strong woman in her seventies, explained to me for hours all of what had changed in the aftermath of the 19th and 20th. She spoke of losing fear, of a shift in memory – that an alternative memory was being recovered and something was beginning to grow in that recovery. She says: ‘And now we are advancing. Our advances although small, go … little by little, but they go.’ This rupture with a past and a shift in collective memory went further still. What happened in the streets during those days of rebellion was not only a struggle against something, but simultaneously a creation of something. People began to meet one another on the street and form neighborhood assemblies. They met and began to talk face-to-face about what was going on, and what they were going to do about it. As Ezequiel, someone who was not previously political but who later took on a very active role in the Cid Campeador assembly, described:
What began angrily, with people coming out on the street in a rage, quickly turned joyful. People smiled and mutually recognized that something had changed … It was a very intense feeling that I will never forget.
(Conversation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2002)
The years of the dictatorship were a time of absolute terror. To this day, even with the rupture and changes in society in Argentina, people are slow to speak in detail of the horrors that took place. During my time in Argentina it was only people that I got to know well who shared their experiences and reflections from the time of the dictatorship with me. The dictatorship was a brutal and intentional ripping apart of society through the conducting of mass murders, tortures of every imaginable type, deeply psychological torture combined with physical torture, the creation of fear (in everyone) of everything and everyone else. Trust was broken and replaced with danger, fear, pain, stolen memories and stolen loved ones. Society was ripped open and left to bleed, and people were forced to watch the bleeding.
In 1976 a military coup took power in Argentina, and until 1983 it terrorized the entire country. More than 30,000 people were ‘disappeared’: meaning that they were not to be found again, they no longer existed in society, no bodies, graves, or physical traces. This was a part of the terror campaign on behalf of the government. It was a conscious attempt to take people’s memories, to erase people. This was done during the dictatorship, and repeatedly by government after government with their refusal to punish those responsible for the genocidio (genocide). Government after government refused to aid in any serious way the search for the disappeared bodies, the disappeared mothers, fathers and children. Many explanations are given for this inaction, but I would argue that it was not inaction, but in fact action. By not prosecuting and refusing to find the bodies of those murdered by the state and military, the government continues to keep a significant amount of fear in society. That no te metas was an expression up until 2001 reflects this. That the government declared a state of siege on the night of 19 December, reflects this. The state wanted to keep people in fear, and to a large extent it was successful.
In particular, and perhaps most of all, people continued to fear the police and military. Here Paula explains what the 19th and 20th meant for her in the context of this fear:
For me the 20th was very strange, it was as if something took a hold of me. I’m not a person who is very … I don’t know, really I don’t have much courage, I’m not very brave. I see the police and I run away, terrified. Repression is something I’ve always been very afraid of. I see a policeman and I split, the police scare me very much. Nevertheless, on the 20th I was at home watching television very early with my sister, and we saw how the police were repressing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, using horses and everything, and I was seized with such a powerful indignation that I said, ‘Come on, we’re going!’ It was crazy, because we knew they could kill us – they had killed someone the night before. We headed first to the area of Congreso, in the center of the city, but very close by police were using tear gas so, with another friend as well, we took a different street to get to the Plaza de Mayo. We could see what was happening. We saw the police kill someone right in front of us. I cannot tell you how horrible that was, but it still didn’t deter us – it was something unconscious, you know? We needed to be there.
(Conversation in Paternal, Buenos Aires, 2003)
For some, coming out onto the street was a break with the state telling them what to do and not do. For some it was anger at not having access to their money, and not trusting that the government would give them access to it ever again. And for some it was a break that can be more directly connected to the past.
From the cacerolazo people met one another, explored ways to meet their needs, and did so in horizontal ways. Nonhierarchical social relationships were formed. Argentina has a long history of clientalistic relationships: relationships which have been described by those who study them as ‘domination networks’ (Auyero 2000a). A clientalistic relationship is one ‘based on political subordination in exchange for material rewards’ (Fox 1994: 153). Javier Ayuero (2000b), one of the foremost scholars of clientalism in Argentina, states that political clientalism is a form of social and political control as well as a form of cultural domination. People in unemployed neighborhoods in particular would explain to me repeatedly how they were unable to get anything done without having to go through their local puntero, the political party broker in the clientalistic relationship. This puntero works for the local Peronist Party and their job is to turn out votes at election time, and bodies at the time of political rallies. In exchange for this participation the puntero might be able to get things for people. Because so many of these neighborhoods are completely devastated by poverty, people are often willing – or at least feel forced, so they agree – to function in these relationships. They receive light bulbs in exchange for participation in a rally, shouting some politician’s name or other; hammer and nails in exchange for a vote. This was how most things were done, and to some extent still are in unemployed neighborhoods – but there was a break. There was a rupture in this relationship. The unemployed workers’ movements were born, and consciously broke with these forms of delegation and hierarchy. As a participant in the unemployed workers’ movement of Allen, in the far south of Argentina, explains:
The movement in Allen is surging forth, and from it all the freshness and naturalness of the movement. From the moment that it is born with all that fresh spontaneity, it bursts forth rupturing the social controls that political parties and punteros (party brokers) exercise over the unemployed. The first rupture is the casual dismissal of the punteros, the setting aside of political parties, and seeking one’s own path. Imagine that. And this is done without a previously elaborated theory about this practice, surging as a spontaneous expression of social practice that seeks to carve out a different path, like some sort of quest. Don’t you think?
(Sitrin 2006: 108)
From a dignified worker to dignity
As discussed previously, Peronism is a deeply complicated term and movement in Argentina. There are left-wing and right-wing Peronists, there are those who have supported Perón but not the celebration of workers, there are Peronists who do not feel that Perón empowered workers, but did love them. There are Peronists who do not believe that workers should have power, but should be given the things that they need to survive. There have been guerilla groups that are Peronist and believe in taking power for a workers’ government, and then there are guerilla groups that only wanted to take power so that Perón could come back and do for the working class. The Montoneros who kidnapped and killed a former president of Argentina, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, in the 1970s are Peronists, as is the current president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner.
In this conversation on rupture and creation, what is interesting to examine in relationship to Peronism is the concept of ‘dignity under Peronism’, and how that concept has been consciously retaken and redefined by those in the unemployed and working class movements.
Daniel James is one of the preeminent writers and scholars of Peronism in Argentina. In his article, ‘Rationalisation and Working Class Response: the Context and Limits of Factory Floor Activity in Argentina’, he discusses some of the challenges to workers’ self-activity under Perón. He quotes from a conference of employers that took place to discuss their concerns about low production levels, something for which of course they blamed the workers. The document asserts: ‘while the worker has a right to receive a minimum salary compatible with his needs and his dignity he also has a dignity to achieve a minimum level of output for his day of work’ (1981: 378). The report then concludes that if a worker does not do this, he should be fired without compensation. The point that this passage demonstrates is not that employers might fire workers – of course they would, and consistently do – but the use of the term ‘dignity’.
The dignified worker under Perón is one who works hard and produces. Workers were to feel proud of their work and country: a good worker, a dignified worker was the person who went to work, arrived early, worked hard, maybe even doing overtime, and then went home and was able to buy things for their family due to this hard work. This work and the ability to buy back one’s value with the wages from that work was dignified. In this sense, dignity comes from the relationship of exploitation and subjugation. This is not to belittle the fact that workers did earn higher wages overall under Perón; there was an economic boom, but this did not necessarily mean that workers received higher wages. Sometimes they did, sometimes things were given in the form of infrastructure in neighborhoods such as clinics and schools, although often the funding to create this infrastructure came from a fund controlled by Eva Perón to which workers were obliged to donate (James 1988: 38). Other times, again, particularly under Eva Perón, gifts were given to some workers – not many or often, but in highly symbolic ways – making it look as though she loved the workers and took care of them. Even if this idea of taking care were entirely true – which it was not – it is not the concept of dignity that comes from the workers themselves, and is hardly an emancipatory conception. ‘The Peróns extended dignity to the workers, making work an honorable occupation and creating a powerful group identity’ (Berho 2000: 38). Daniel James speaks of the construction of the dignified working class by Perón as follows: ‘In an important sense the working class was constituted by Peron: its self-identification as a social and political force within national society was, in part at least, constructed by Peronist political discourse’ 1988: 38). This is a really important point: an identity constructed by those who have power over you.
The Peróns did raise workers’ wages and made it possible for workers to buy things that they could not have done before. A possibility of another way of living, a sort of ‘Argentine Dream’ emerged with Perón, as long as one was dignified in the way defined by the government. If you behaved in this dignified way, then you were given dignity.
Dignity cannot be given. This is the cry of the piqueteros (the unemployed) and recuperated workplace movements. Among the slogans of the autonomous MTDs is ‘Dignity, Autonomy and Horizontalidad’. Here, dignity is about creating your own relationship to work and your community. In the MTDs a conscious choice has been made to break with the employer–employee relationship, and they are constructing other ways of surviving, based on micro-enterprises autonomously run within the movement, with gardens and raising animals, by taking over land upon which to build housing and more gardens.4 People who were left on the margins of society have decided to take that margin and make it the center. They are creating dignity in where and who they are. They consciously choose not to sell their labor power to the highest bidder, but instead to create and work together in the neighborhoods. To create a new conception of work and dignity. As two compañeras from MTD Solano explained:
Maba: We started getting some money from the state with these protests, but in the assemblies we discussed fighting for more than the tiny amount of subsidies they threw at us. Together we decided that we had to fight for something much larger, and that’s where the whole idea of fighting for dignity emerged. Fighting for freedom. Fighting with horizontalidad.
Claudia: So, our perspective is grounded in the need for a new construction, no? A new society. I believe that many experiences have appeared which, despite having an objective that attempted to achieve a common good, their way of relating was that of ordering and obeying. I think that many of them fell apart precisely due to the shortcomings of this sort of relationship. This is true because the most important thing is affect, or rather, not something superficial or spectacular, but something that is born from human need – the need to recognize others, to feel like I am recognized, and to recover our self-esteem. That is to say, to recover our dignity.
(Conversation in Lanus, outside Buenos Aires, 2003)
While participants in the recuperated workplace movement do not use the language of dignity in the same way as the unemployed workers’ movement, consciously reclaiming the term from the past, their practices are the same. The basic premise for the occupation and recuperation of a workplace is that the boss and owners have either abandoned the workplace or refused to pay or respect the workers. The rupture here is that workers say ‘Enough is enough’, and over time take the workplace back. There is no engagement with the previous owner or management; it is now between the workers, who rebuild and recreate their work environment without the hierarchy of the past. Workplace after workplace, person after person spoke of no longer tolerating the bad treatment and exploitation of the past. They were rejecting the precarity decided by others, the lack of respect, the lack of dignity, and took over the means of production so as to create better conditions together. As Liliana, an older worker from the Brukman garment factory explained to me, simply and clearly:
We are all older women here, almost all of us are over forty, and our only source of employment is this factory. What we know how to do is work with the machines that are inside. Because of this whole experience I have now begun to think, why does the worker always have to keep quiet? The boss doesn’t pay you, the boss owes you money, and you’re the one that has to leave, to hang your head and go. Well, we made the decision that we weren’t going to be quiet any longer. They’ve done a lot of things to us and I believe that, well, enough already with staying quiet. No? All our lives we kept quiet, in the past we would have left and looked for another job. That’s no longer my way of thinking. I want that to be clear. I want all this corruption that is carried out against us workers to stop. We, as workers, have stopped being stupid, and that’s it. We are steadfast.
(Conversation in Once, Buenos Aires, 2003)5
The formation of new solidarities: ‘El otro soy yo’6
One of the manifestations of the often right-wing nature of the middle class before the rebellion was its rejection of the poor and unemployed. Middle-class neighborhoods would regularly complain about the unemployed shutting down streets and bridges, sitting in front of cafés asking for money, or even riding the trains. These complaints were made to the police: a complaint that was not insignificant within the context of military dictatorship. Worse even than the unemployed, to the middle class, were the cartoneros. Cartoneros are people who collect cardboard by night and sell it to local recycling places by day to collect whatever change it might produce so as to subsist; they are similar to those people in the USA who collect bottles and plastic containers for recycling, and travel from block to block with overflowing supermarket carts. In Argentina this is done by going through the trash in various neighborhoods and collecting the cardboard, sometimes using carts to hold it, and sometimes sharing mule-drawn carts when the quantity warrants it. Poor neighborhoods generally reuse their cardboard or recycle it themselves, so it is the middle-class neighborhoods that the cartoneros go to at night in search of cardboard.
Throughout the late 1990s there were media campaigns led by the middle class attempting to ban the cartoneros from neighborhoods. This was never linked to violence, but other more masked arguments were made, including that some cartoneros use mules to pull their carts and that this is abusive to animals: thus the cartoneros should be banned, since they sometimes arrived with maltreated mules. Often the language used was crass, and as with the unemployed, cartoneros were referred to as ‘dirty and brown’ (they are in fact often darker-skinned, more likely tracing their roots to a mix of Guarani and other indigenous backgrounds).
With the rise of neighborhood assemblies, all of this changed. A new slogan emerged with regard to the piqueteros (the unemployed): ‘Cacerola, Piquetero, una Sola Lucha’ (‘The pot bangers and the unemployed are in one struggle’). As for the cartoneros, they became almost a campaign for the neighborhood assemblies. Some of this was reflected in concrete support, with food being cooked and provided along with places to rest throughout the many neighborhood assemblies that occupied spaces such as banks and cafés, which stayed open at night and served warm milk and food, as well as allowing them to use the bathroom and get warm. In addition – both formally and, from what I could observe, informally – people began to separate their trash.
During my first months living in Argentina I was in the neighborhood of Paternal, a working-class area with the neighborhood assembly of Cid Campeador, located in an occupied Banco de Mayo. This neighborhood separated the trash from cardboard from the first time I arrived. When I moved in 2003 to the more middle-class neighborhood of Palermo Viejo, I found that some people separated the trash and some did not. The more expensive buildings still had their trash in one container at night, but in the more modest dwellings, like my apartment building, people separated the cardboard from the trash. This may not seem that significant, but the meaning was deep. While once the cartoneros were equated with trash, worse even, now these same people who tried to prevent them from even coming into their neighborhoods were going through their own trash so that the cartoneros would not have to do it. This did not happen in all places or with all assemblies, and in fact there were occasions of assembly members not wanting the cartoneros to use the neighborhood space:
One of the central relationships that the neighborhood assemblies made was to the cartoneros. These relationships were ‘uneven’ ranging from direct assistance and cooperation to direct confrontations in the spaces occupied by the assemblies.
(Svampa 2002a: 3)
New movements, groupings and solidarities formed throughout the country. Those groups which had previously existed changed: some drastically, such as the fairly new MTDs; and some only slightly, such as the political parties. Some groups took longer to internalize the changes taking place around them, such as the trade unions, but they were affected and continue to shift and change in the new context.
Neighborhood assemblies
The first, most visible and rapid to organize out of the rebellion were the neighborhood assemblies. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the street, began cacerolando, and then soon after, sometimes within hours or days, began to look to one another and ask what was next. Then, days and weeks later, together they sought ways to meet their needs: from the concrete, such as food and medical attention, to the affective, such as the need for support and the creation of community and companerismo. This new organization took place neighborhood by neighborhood, in predominantly urban areas. Sometimes, in the larger neighborhoods there would be two or even three neighborhood assemblies, such as in the neighborhood of Palermo, a medium-size neighborhood in Buenos Aires that divided into three: Palermo, Palermo Viejo and Palermo Soho. The names of the assemblies were simply taken from the names of the neighborhoods. As far as how the assemblies began meeting, many participants describe chalking on the street or writing on walls, ‘Neighbors meet here, Wednesday 9pm’ and the meeting times and places spread by word of mouth and graffiti.
One assembly, described by an artist and writer who moved to Argentina from the UK soon after learning of the rebellion, wrote:
The local assemblies meet weekly, are particularly popular in middle-class areas and are open to anyone, so long as they don’t represent a political party. The first one I attended involved some 40 people: a breastfeeding mother, a lawyer, a hippy in batik flares, a taxi driver, a nursing student … a slice of Argentinian society standing on a street corner, passing around a megaphone and discussing how to take back control of their lives. It seemed so normal, yet this was perhaps the most extraordinary radical political event I’d ever witnessed: ordinary people discussing self-management, understanding direct democracy and putting it into practice.
The Argentine social scientist, Maristella Svampa, has written a great deal on the phenomenon of the neighborhood assemblies and piquetero movements. She refers to the assemblies as both new and ‘a multidimensional space’:
No one can negate that the fact that the neighborhood assemblies constitute one of the newest expressions of the social mobilizations that live and have been developed sine the 19th and 20th of December of 2001. In the middle of the heterogeneity that characterizes this movement, we believe that the assembly process has created a space where many different dimensions can come together and intersect.
Hundreds of neighborhood assemblies emerged in the first year after the rebellion, each comprising anything from one to 300 participants. One of the neighborhood assemblies that still continues, and remains an important organizing center, is the assembly of Cid Campeador, which occupies a bankrupt Banco de Mayo. The neighborhood of Cid Campeador is lower-middle class, located outside the downtown of Buenos Aires. There are events most nights in the assembly and have been since the first months of the rebellion, ranging from tango and salsa classes to book readings, political discussions, assemblies and cultural events. Throughout the day the assembly is open as a library, community and study space, as well as a popular kitchen for people in need of food. A number of participants reflected to me that the reason that Cid Campeador continues while other assemblies have stopped is that they organize regular events and activities, try to maintain their own agenda in relation to the state, are not dominated by political parties, and continue to maintain their horizontal weekly assemblies.7
Interbarrial
Within a few weeks of the neighborhood assemblies taking off there was a call for an interbarrial (inter-neighborhood assembly). This interbarrial was to be, and was for a year, an assembly of assemblies. It was an incredible display of mass participatory democracy, the likes of which have rarely been seen in history. It has been recorded that at times upwards of 10,000 people participated in the assemblies, each participating as a part of their local assembly. As Svampa describes in the section of an article entitled ‘Interbarrial and the Centenario Park’:
This stage of the ‘cacerolazo’ appeared as key in identifying the emerging movement. It was the most dynamic period. General plenaries had the participation of 100–150 people per assembly [with hundreds of assemblies participating in the plenaries]. From February to March the various commissions began to fully function (health, politics, press, unemployed, among others) and there was support at this stage for the discussion process and action.
The level of organization of the assemblies in Argentina in the interbarrial was profound. At first anyone from an assembly could come along, and when decisions were made, every person had a vote in that decision. Represented at the interbarrial were many hundreds of assemblies and groups, with thousands of people attending, representing many thousands more. The votes were unwieldy, as were the discussions, although most found them incredibly inspiring.
One of the many challenges (as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3), was political party disruption. Here I am speaking of Left political parties, for the most part the Trotskyist Partido Obrero (Workers’ Party) (Svampa 2002b). Individuals in political parties came to the interbarrial and claimed to be part of an assembly, and often that grouping of people would form an ad hoc assembly for this purpose; they then were able to speak in the interbarrial as well as vote. This shifted the discussion away from the neighborhoods’ desires as well as made for an imbalanced vote. Due to this disruption many thousands stopped going to the interbarrial. After only a year the interbarrial no longer met.8
Barter networks
Along with many developing and poor nations, Argentina has a long history of barter and exchange of goods outside the formal market economy. Unique in Argentina, especially after the economic crisis of 2001, the barter network that existed grew exponentially and the forms of exchange expanded beyond any preceding network. The absolute numbers are not known, and estimates range from 2 to 7 million (Alcorta 2007). Throughout this book the reference to barter could mean an exchange of goods for goods, but also might refer to the exchange of various forms of services, such as computer repair for childcare, or psychoanalysis for electrical work.
Unemployed workers’ movements
The unemployed workers’ movement in Argentina arose in the north and south of the country in the 1990s when, in the context of a growing economic crisis, unemployed workers as well as broader-based popular movements organized against local governments and corporations. Generally led by women, unemployed workers in the provinces of Salta, Jujuy, and Neuquén took to the streets by the thousands, blocking major transportation arteries in order to demand subsidies from the government. In a decisive break with the past, this organizing was not done by or through elected leaders, but directly by those in the streets, deciding day-by-day and moment-to-moment what to do next. In some places neighbors came together first, trying to discover what needs existed in the neighborhood, and from there decided to use the tactic of blockading roads (piquetes). It is from this tactic, the piquete, that the name for the unemployed workers’ movements emerged: piqueteros, those who create the piquete. Before the popular rebellion the middle class referred to the piqueteros with disgust, anger and outright hostility. However, for the piqueteros it was something to be proud of and use with dignity and power. On a blockade people would sing and chant, often incorporating the word piquetero. For example, even children sing ‘Piqueteeerrroooo Carajo!’, meaning literally, ‘Piquetero, damn it!’ Or in a positive and proud way, ‘I am a fucking piquetero!’9
Many of the neighborhoods in which the MTDs are now located are on the outskirts of cities, in areas that some might refer to as slums. These are neighborhoods that often do not have paved roads, sometimes no electricity or water, and have a level of unemployment that it is not so much an occurrence as a state of being. One is unemployed, likely to be regularly unemployed, and one’s children face similar prospects (Davis 2006). Not having a location of work – the traditional means of protest for a worker – strike or job action was unavailable, thus the piquete was created. Many talk about the piquete as not only being a space for protest, but for what opens up when the road is shut down. Movement participants sometimes refer to this as free territory, and it is in this freed space that forms of horizontalidad and new subjectivities emerged.
From the piquete, which forced the government to give the first (small) unemployment subsidies in the history of Latin America, many groups became movements, expanding their strategies and tactics beyond, creating autonomous areas upon which they have built housing and gardens, raise livestock, create alternative education and healthcare along with many other subsistence projects. These autonomous projects are organized geographically, MTDs emerging with neighbors in different neighborhoods, many of whom work together in network formations. Whereas once it was the local puntero who decided what the neighborhood participants would have to do to receive subsidies or any sort of relief from the state, now, in the autonomous movements, people are deciding together, without hierarchy, what to do next and where to go.
In other neighborhoods, for example in Solano, outside of Buenos Aires, some of the projects beyond the bakeries and kitchens are things such as fish hatcheries and acupuncture. In the MTD La Matanza, also outside Buenos Aires, the movement has come together with the others in the neighborhood to create a school run by the movement and the neighbors; and in La Plata they are taking over land and building housing. In the MTD Allen there is an autonomous clothing production micro-enterprise that is called ‘Discover’. As a compañera, Patricia, explains:
They named it ‘Discover’ because through the MTD they discovered the value of compañerismo – the value of solidarity. Through the MTD, they discovered experiences that enable one to express oneself beyond words.
(Conversations in Allen and Cipolletti, in Patagonia, 2003)
There are a few dozen MTDs and similar organizations of the unemployed throughout Argentina. Most have emerged in similar way, although not all of the groups emerged using horizontalidad and forms of direct decision making, and some have ambitions either to become political parties or to have direct representation in the government. These sorts of groups are not new in Argentina; they are also some of the many piquetero groups that are now referred to as Piqueteros K (‘K’ standing for Kirchner), meaning that these groups are generally on the side of the government and the wing of the Peronist Party to which the Kirchners belong. For the most part Piqueteros K no longer blocks roads or bridges; instead, it mobilizes outside the congressional building, both demonstrating to receive more subsidies for its members while holding up banners in support of the Kirchners: first Néstor, and then Cristina. This kind of politics is reminiscent of the sorts of mobilization under the rule of the Peróns.
It is important to clarify that the movements to which I refer in this book and with whom I have spent so much time over the past eight years are in no way related to Piqueteros K, and in fact are in opposition to it. That is, not in the confrontational sense, but politically and with regard to a vision of social and political change. The groups I discuss in this book are: MTD Solano, MTD Guernica, MTD La Matanza, MTD Allen, MTD Cipolletti, MTD San Telmo, MTD Almirante Brown and Union de Trabajadores Desocupados (UTD, Union of Unemployed Workers) Mosconi. Of these groups, a few have shifted their positions with regard to their relationship to political parties and state power. MTDs Solano, Cipolletti and Guernica are all struggling to remain autonomous, and most recently how to take what they can from the state while maintaining their own agenda. MTDs San Telmo and Almirante Brown are both a part of a formation that came into being in 2007, the Frente Dario Santillan. This Frente is comprised of those MTDs that are not related to the government or Piqueteros K, but do receive subsidies from the state and organize in neighborhoods in sometimes more vertical ways with regards to distribution of government subsidies. UTD Mosconi has a similar verticality, but is more of a mass movement in itself. Located in the far north of Argentina in Mosconi, near the border with Bolivia, the UTD has thousands of active participants, and in the neighborhoods in which the UTD is organized one gets the feeling, just walking around, that there is a parallel government. Food, barter, healthcare, childcare, beauty parlors and so forth are all organized by its participants. In order to receive their subsidies through the movement participants must be involved in a micro-enterprise. The movement holds individuals accountable for their participation, and the result is a high level of participation. The depth of horizontalidad is a question, and the movement organizes itself with a great deal of hierarchy, but it is not a party either. It is in a middle ground between the more autonomous movements such as MTD Solano and MTD Allen that I go into depth within this book, and the other extreme of the Peronist Piqueteros K. A number of movements still reside in this space. (In Chapter 6, the origins and histories of a few of the unemployed workers’ movements are described.)
Recuperated workplaces
The dozen occupied factories that existed at the start of the 2001 rebellion grew in only two years to include hundreds of workplaces, taken over and run by workers without bosses or hierarchy. Almost every workplace sees itself as an integral part of the community, and the community sees the workplace in the same way. As the workers of the Ceramica Zanon factory in the south of Argentina say: ‘Zanon is of the people.’
Workplaces range from printing presses, metal shops and medical clinics, to cookie, shoe, and balloon factories, as well as a four-star hotel, school, grocery store and daily newspaper. Participants in recuperated workplaces say that what they are doing is not very complicated, quoting the slogan that they have adopted from the Landless Movement in Brazil: ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce.’ Autogestión is the way that most in the recuperated movements describe what they are creating and how. The vast majority of workplaces have equal pay distribution and use horizontalidad as a way of making decisions together. The few workplaces that have variations in pay and use representational forms of decision making are almost always the newer recuperations, with workers who have not had as many years together in the workplace, and generally have not had to resist government repression to defend their recuperation (Hibachi, in Ballve and Prashad 2006). This reflects the deep connection with levels of militancy, trust, and radical democracy. The recuperated workplace movement continues to grow and gather support throughout Argentina, despite threats of eviction by the state and political and physical intimidation by the previous owners. So far, each threat has been met with mobilization by neighbors and various collectives and assemblies to thwart the government’s efforts.
Over time, recuperated workplaces have begun to link with one another, creating barter relationships for their products. (Chapter 6 delves specifically into a number of workplace examples, explaining the history of recuperation and the level of day-to-day functioning, grounded in the new forms of social relationships and values being created.)
Art and media groups
Dozens of art and media groups emerged in Argentina after the rebellion and as a direct result of it. The media in Argentina is corporate-controlled, and the main network, Clarín, is one that Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) ranks among the top corporate-controlled media in the world (McChesney 1997). Activists and movement participants knew from experience, or learned quickly, that the media was not going to cover their activities – and in fact that most of the time it would give out misinformation, preferring instead to cover person-on-person crimes such as robbery and assault. Within months of the popular rebellion, hundreds of groups began to form to create their own media. Some of these were relatively small, such as newsletters for neighborhood assemblies, blogs, email lists and websites for movements.10
In addition to the alternative print media, art groups and collectives came together to tell stories of what was taking place, as well as to participate in public discourse through intervention in public space. This took, and continues to take, the form of graffiti, sometimes referred to as ‘public art’ within the movements and their supporters. Groups such as GAC might stencil commentaries such as an empty plate with a fork and spoon and the words, ‘Nada’, or an image with a police person hitting a smaller person with a baton. Groups also came about to make documentary films and various other artistic video pieces. Plays and public performances were staged with political meanings, as well as dance pieces, performance art, painting and sculpture. However, of all the art forms photography seemed to take off the most, and is one of the forms that continue to this day.
Below are short descriptions of those art and media groups that are either discussed in this text, or whose participants were interviewed. This is merely a small sample of the many more that existed and continue to exist.
Indymedia
In the first months of the popular rebellion, activists from Brazil and Italy came to Argentina to help people who were interested in setting up an independent media source. Established in 1999, in conjunction with the global justice protests in Seattle, WA against the World Trade Organization, Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) was founded to be an open media source to report on people’s movements and activist activity. From November 1999 until 2002, the time that Argentina Indymedia was established, many hundreds of Indymedia sites had been set up around the globe, from large cities in Europe and the USA to small towns in Eastern Europe and Asia. The facilitating group of each Indymedia outlet operates horizontally and is run by volunteers. Most often Indymedia facilitation groups comprise young people who are a part of the movements, and Argentina was no exception to this. A core group of activists, some identifying as anarchists, began Indymedia Argentina with global support. For the first few years after its founding, Indymedia played an important role in sharing media and updates as to movement activity with participants within Argentina and around the world.
Indymedia also played a role in educating activists in how to tell a story or use a camera. Many of those participants who collaborated with Indymedia are now in other photography collectives or groups, such as Sub-coop (Cooperativa de Fotografos, www.sub.coop) and some work with other progressive media, such as MU and Lavaca.
For the most part Indymedia is still an active tool for movements, but much less than in its initial years. This is due in part to political parties on the Left, particularly the Trotskyist, attempting to take over the collective so often that most people have given up the fight and moved on to other projects (conversations with Sebastian 2006, and Nicolas 2009, in Buenos Aires).
The 19th and 20th
The group and monthly newspaper, The 19th and 20th, came about in the months following the popular rebellion and, inspired by what they experienced on those days, named their new paper after it. The 19th and 20th was run horizontally, using forms of consensus decision making, seeing itself as a part of the movements. The artwork and articles in the paper, for the few years that it existed, covered protests, occupations, new movements and networks, and helped to be a tool for movements as well as a reflective forum for discussion and debate.
Argentina Arde
Formed exactly one month after 19 December 2001, on 19 January, Argentina Arde came together as a group for ‘counter-information’. Comprising various subgroups, including video, photography, screenings and newspaper distribution, Argentina Arde is still going at the time of writing. At its high point Argentina Arde had close to 100 people collaborating with it in various working groups, with each group meeting separately and then together monthly as a larger assembly.
Lavaca – MU
Lavaca is a workers cooperative created in 2001 with the objective of generating tools, information and knowledge sharing that helps facilitate the autonomy of people, their organizations and movements. The way we understand autonomy is: The autogestión of personal and collective projects. The free flow of new forms of thinking and doing. The exercise of freedom, understood as a form of social power. So as to develop these objectives we have created a series of tools.
Coop Foto
Coop Foto is a collective of photographers who met during the weeks and months after the rebellion. Most were involved with independent media and photography groups such as Indymedia and Argentina Arde, and in 2006 and 2007 they came together to form a cooperative. Coop Foto describes itself as ‘HIJOS of the 19th and 20th’ (‘Children of the 19th and 20th’), meaning that it has internalized the new forms of social organization and is using them now in the way in which its organizes together with Sub.Coop. It describes its group and ways of relating thus:
We equally divide the money that comes into the cooperative between paying all of us and using it to pay the rent and paying for travel and other things that help facilitate all of us working. The internet and our website plays a large role in allowing us to do all of this. We are the owners of the tools and we invent the methods. Most of all, we have the idea that we intend to reflect on the photography that we do. We produce reports, essays and news as well as have a photo archive: something similar to an agency.
HIJOS
As mentioned in Chapter 1, HIJOS (Hiyas y HIJOS por Identidad y Justicia y contra el Olvido y Silencio – Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) was established in 1995 by the children of the disappeared, the victims of state terrorism during the dictatorship that governed the country from 1976 to 1983. The name HIJOS resonates with the names of other related human rights organizations such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo or the Abuelas (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo).
Mesa de Escrache
The Mesa de Escrache works with others, specifically HIJOS, to intervene in society and public space on issues related to dictatorship, memory and forgetting. Similar to HIJOS, participants in Mesa de Escrache speak to society, rather than looking to the state to solve society’s problems or even to hold those who tortured accountable.
Grupo de Arte Callejero
Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) may only have eight core members, but the effect of its work can be felt all over Buenos Aires and beyond. GAC also includes many dozens of volunteers in the creation of all of its projects. The core members are designers and photographers who use everyday communication tools to communicate social and political issues, often related to state repression and memory of the dictatorship. As mentioned previously, as with HIJOS and Mesa de Escrache, GAC is for memory and against forgetting. It collaborates with dozens of human rights groups, the unemployed workers’ movements and recuperated workplaces.
Conclusion
Most of the above groups and movements could be book topics in and of themselves. I cannot possibly give justice to what each group does and desires. However, this chapter is the beginning of a discussion of the various movements so as to create a general outline of what they are creating and how, what they are breaking from, and ways that relate to questions of longevity and the success of social movements and new social relationships.