Measuring success: affective or contentious politics?
Too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations it sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.
(Kelley 2003b: ix)
There have only been two world revolutions. One took place in 1848, the second took place in 1968. Both were historic failures. Both transformed the world. The fact that both were unplanned, and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous, explains both facts – the fact that they failed, and the fact that they transformed the world.
(Arrighi 2008: 97)
Dreams, dignity, and a yardstick
Social movements are made up of people. People with ideas and dreams, dreams for themselves, dreams for the collective, and dreams for the movements and the world. On occasion these dreams and goals are comparable with those of social scientists who study social movements, who claim to know what constitutes a successful movement. Under a certain interpretation this might suggest that they claim to know the hopes and aspirations of the movement participants. James Petras argues, for example, that a movement must seize state and institutional power in order to be successful. MTD Solano participant Neka says that for her and for the movement, dignity and freedom in and of their relationships is a huge part of what they desire and dream. Who is right? Is Petras really stating that Neka is not successful because she did not take over the state? Does his argument mean that she cannot know what success is for herself or for her movement, that she cannot know her very own dreams and desires?
Photo 7 Movement for Social Dignity – Chipolletti, Patagonia (youth group assembly)
This is an important point too often overlooked by social movement theorists. Who decides what constitutes success? Success can be determined only by those people in struggle, those who are fighting or organizing for something. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argue this at the very beginning of Poor People’s Movements (1979). In fact, they added it to the book’s introduction as a result of many people’s first reaction to the manuscript that they had distributed. Many readers spent much effort arguing what the people in the movements ‘ought’ to have wanted.
What clearly was lacking was a unified political organization (party, movement or combination of both) with roots in the popular neighborhoods, which was capable of creating representative organs to promote class-consciousness and point toward taking state power. As massive and sustained as was the initial rebellious period (December 2001–July 2002) no such political party or movement emerged – instead a multiplicity of localized groups with different agendas soon fell to quarreling over an elusive ‘hegemony’ – driving millions of possible supporters toward local face-to-face groups devoid of any political perspective.
(Petras 2004: 29)
The success of a movement, movement goals, and people’s desires come from those people, those social actors, not those studying them or politically desiring to lead them. In fact, it is against this way of thinking and organizing (be it on the Left or Right) that the movements in Argentina were born. The rupture was with the state or other forms of authority dictating what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. This includes not only governments and politicians, but also Left political parties and scholars. As mentioned previously, ‘Que se vayan todos’ really does mean todos.
What does it mean for people in the movements in Argentina to have been successful? What do other social scientists argue? Is there any place of overlap? What can we learn from this for future interpretation of movements, and is the gap between theory and practice ‘phantasmagorical’, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues?
The distance between the practices of the Latin American left and the classic theories of the left is greater today than ever … From the point of view of theory, a theoretical hodge-podge is never theory. And from the point of view of practice, a posteriori theorising is parasitic.
(de Sousa Santos 2009: 275)
So then, what is a scholar of the movements, who works together with the movements, to do both in terms of methodology and analysis? Many of my friends and compañeros in the movements in Argentina think that this question is waste of time because they have been harmed by theorists, social scientists, and leftist groups theorizing their ways of being and publishing the results of these ‘studies’ so often conducted without their participation. I recall a late-night conversation in the home of Neka and Alberto in the poor peripheral (now politically central) neighborhood of Solano. We were sitting in their recently built kitchen, in a home constructed on taken land, as were their neighbors’ homes, all built collectively. We had just finished a late dinner with many from the community, who also were living in homes collectively constructed from random pieces of wood and cement. We were drinking wine and mate and many people were smoking, as is still the norm in Argentina. It was a nice moment of calm after a filling meal. I decided to use this opportunity, with some people around, to ask their feelings about academics, specifically people who have been writing that they, the piqueteros, and more generally of the movements in Argentina, are at best totally unrealistic, and at worst, dead. Neka responded first. She smiled so openly at me, but also a little condescendingly, and said, ‘So? Marina, don’t worry about them. Who cares what they think? We know what we are doing, and we are doing it well.’ For Neka, Alberto, Claudia, Maba, Claudio, Vladimir, and Ramon, my question was irrelevant. They continue, day in, day out, creating new lives, new social actors, and more dignity. They are succeeding with or without the opinions of outsiders, whether these scholars confirm what the participants already know or not. However, in my opinion, with the wrong framework or researchers asking the wrong questions, the movements can be detrimentally affected.
To clarify, I am not implying that all academics fail to understand or do not even try to understand. In fact, Susan Buck-Morss gave a talk in late 2011 in which she reflected:
As the Egyptian Feminist Nawal Sadaawi, responded last spring: Make your own revolution. The ways forward will be as varied as the people of this world. Feminists globally have taught us the need for such variety. All of these ways forward deserve our solidarity and support. We, the 99 per cent, must refuse to become invisible to each other. The experiments that are going on now in thousands of locations need space, the space that Walter Benjamin called a Spielraum (space of play) to try out doing things differently. And they need time, the slowing of time, the pulling of the emergency brake, so that something new can emerge. This is time that state power wants to cut short, and space that old-style political parties want to foreclose. There is no rush. The slowing of time is itself the new beginning. Every day that this event continues, it performs the possibility that the world can be otherwise. Against the hegemony of the present world order that passes itself off as natural and necessary, global actors are tearing a hole in knowledge. New forms emerge. They nourish our imagination, the most radical power that we as humans have.1
(Personal email communication, 26 January 2011)
This passage comes from her engagement with the new movements in the USA, which in turn are inspired by those movements around the globe in 2011. Her use of Benjamin’s concepts of time and the notion of ‘now-time’, as discussed in earlier chapters (where movement participants speak of not waiting for a future time or event to change things), are more than comparable.
The talk that Buck-Morss gave initially was going to be titled ‘A Communist Ethic’, but she changed the word ‘Communist’ to ‘Commonist’ so as to reflect the changing politics that she sees and in which she is engaged. This is a fine example and one that other scholars and academics could follow: to be willing to change one’s perspective and thus the terms and framing of one’s understanding based on the world around us.
The movements in Argentina are a success and they continue to breathe, live and succeed. Within the movements new subjects are forming and are doing so in tandem with dignity. Often they struggle sometimes just to eat a balanced meal, sometimes a filling meal, but they do continue.
This question of success reminds me of a famous poem by the Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, ‘Tengo’ (‘I Have’). The poem describes in detail what he, the narrator, now has because of the Cuban Revolution. The poem is not about food, housing, or education, or any of the material things that were won from the revolution – things that poor blacks in Cuba did not have beforehand. What he writes is that he now has dignity. He writes of what it feels like to walk down the street. To hold his head high, and know his children will hold their heads high. He writes of how he feels and how he sees himself, and how others see him. What he does say is that now he has education, he can learn to read and write, and he follows those lines with, ‘and to laugh, and to smile’. This kind of success is not as measurable as taking over of the state and making education free and food a right – but it is part of success. In Argentina, the measuring stick, as Neka taught me, is dignity. It is not just about winning a struggle, but about the process which, no matter how or where it takes place, forever transforms people’s ways of seeing themselves and their relationships to others. Paula, an activist in Argentina, reflected on the experiences of the assemblies in this way:
The experiences have produced profound transformations in people, in the subjectivity of people, in people feeling themselves as actors for the first time in their lives. In the assemblies people from all different backgrounds, of different ages and social situations, have come together to discuss and listen to each other, each person’s opinion and voice not being valued more or less than any others. This is extremely important, especially considering how the political parties work, which is the opposite. What is being constructed is a new way to do politics. People are the protagonists, the subjects. If the assemblies disappeared tomorrow, it would not be something so serious because something fundamental has changed in people. People will never again be passive in their lives.
(Conversation in Paternal, Buenos Aires, 2003)
This new way of being is imbued in most everything. It is seen in almost all the new political formations that have come about since the rebellion, groups that assume horizontalidad and a form of prefigurative politics:
In terms of the process of changes in subjectivity, the interesting thing is that this is a social education. Imagine if the assemblies disappeared – we have had the social training of the assembly. The non-hierarchical structure and self-organization is something that you can use in the future and in other political experiences. In this sense, I’m not a pessimist. I can be more pessimistic in the short term, in the sense that I would like it if the assemblies were stronger. But in the long run, what I know now is that the crisis in the 1990s brought about lots of social education. We will learn from all these experiences of self-organization, and the next time we need an assembly we will have had all the experiences from the assemblies of the 19th and 20th.
(Conversation in Paternal, Buenos Aires, 2003)
Claudia goes on to describe why she thinks some academics have a hard time understanding what the movements are doing. She explains this by way of example:
In Chilavert, the neighbors were all there in the intense cold, and they applauded and applauded with such pleasure in seeing what they had accomplished – this is more than the feeling that you are the owner of your experience. It is not a question of property, it is more of a feeling of having given birth. What you see there is that the people are so proud, and their children are walking by themselves [upright] – this is autogestión. … I think that this is something that the academy cannot interpret because it is something you have to see with a deep level of sensibility.
(Conversation in Buenos Aires, late 2009)
This interview, with both Claudia and Sergio from Lavaca, went on for a number of hours, and the question of both academic or intellectual interpretation of the movements came up numerous times. (I also spent most of my time in Buenos Aires during 2009 staying in their home, so the number of informal conversations on this topic is exponential.) The movements are not unequivocally against attempts to theorize their successes and failures; however, they believe that traditional intellectuals have yet to do so accurately. This is in part due to the ‘nature’ of the academy and formal training within education, but it is also very much a consequence of the changing and intuitive nature of the movements, which above all require full and active participation from those interacting with them. As Claudia explains a little later:
I find that there are those who say, it’s all co-opted, all useless, and then when you get directly involved, it is the opposite, and you say, this is full of life. In other words, between the discourse and practice there is a great divorce. I think it will take many years of thinking to figure out how to conceptualize or theorize about what is happening now, it is quite challenging … So, the intellectual, logically, what he does is defends his position and holds his ground, because otherwise this process undermines him.
(Conversation in Buenos Aires, late 2009)
This does not mean that people cannot understand the movements, or help to lend their analysis and meanings. One such person, regularly referred to in this book, is Raul Zibechi, who has spent a great deal of time in Argentina with the movements. In late 2009 he spoke with Lavaca, and regarding questions of whether and how the movements have continued, and how to understand the current situation, he responded:
How to understand what happened on the 19th and 20th? Was it a slogan that then burst with the slogan, ‘They all must go’, that was never concretized? A problem only of the savers? Or is it a point of inflection in history, in the political culture of the country, and with crucial scope for all of what has happened in this decade that is now ending, and in so much of what is continuing to occur?
We are the HIJOS of the 19th and 20th
An interesting phenomenon has arisen with regard to the question of success and longevity of the movements. Young people, those in their thirties, who were teenagers or in their twenties during the rebellion have begun to refer to themselves as ‘HIJOS of the 19th and 20th’. What they mean is not that they became political during the rebellion, although many of them did; they mean that the way that they organize today using horizontalidad is what constitutes them as children of the rebellion. New forms of social relationships and interaction, seeing the means as a part of the end, is what it means to be a child of the 19th and 20th. It is important to note here that this term is being used all over Argentina and even recently in Greece, where a group of neighborhood assemblies collectively translated Horizontalism, the oral history I compiled. They also see themselves as children of the 19th and 20th, and most specifically a part of the history of horizontalism. This is taking place to a growing extent with the spread of the Real Democracy and Occupy movements around the globe, but it is especially present in the conversations in Argentina:
I think that yes, we are children of the 19th and 20th, and in many ways we feel like the heirs of this time. Some people say, well, ‘But the Palermo assembly is no longer, or the Medrano assembly, or another one’, but for us, since we are looking from the inside of this process, the discussion is generated from there, from within the process … It is that we say that we are the children of 2001, because we were formed by everything we lived within the assemblies, the factories, and everything that happened in the streets – it is there that we learned these cooperative principles of horizontalidad.
(Conversation with Nicolas and Gisela, Buenos Aires, late 2009)
What position are academics coming from when studying social movements in Argentina? The framework below is generally conceived of in the USA, within the field of sociology in particular. Most of the movements’ harshest critics whom I have discussed, such as Petras and Robinson, come from this tradition. Additionally, students continue to be trained in this framework, as I was, and those who become teachers in the USA are expected to carry on with it too.
A sociological framework to understand the movements and their success
Social movement theory and contentious politics
The precise definition of a social movement is contested territory in sociological theory. Prior to the 1970s, almost all of the work in the field coming from the USA viewed social protest as a ‘form of deviance or pathology’ (Flacks 2003: 135). However, Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow contributed considerably to what became a shift of this vision to one of understanding social movements as ‘politics by other means‘ (Flacks 2004: 135). Of course, this was along with other social movement pioneers such as Frances Fox Piven and Michael Schwartz. According to Richard Flacks, many of those who played a role in shifting social movement theory were active in the movements of the 1960s, and in order to ‘provide movement activists with intellectual resources they might not readily obtain otherwise’ (Flacks 2003: 136).
Flacks argues that somewhere along the line the motivation shifted and a good deal of the research, or at least published work, resulted in a more ‘“professional” and “disciplinary” definition of purpose’ (2003: 136). As Flacks argues:
A sure sign of it, however, is the proliferation of journal articles in which social movement experience is turned into grist for the testing of hypotheses or the illustration of concepts, as well as writings (including this volume) aimed at establishing critiquing, or refining. Increasingly, the work of younger scholars is driven by the effort to refine theory rather than to contribute to the public knowledge about movements.
(Flacks 2003: 136)
Flacks’ article continues to critique not only the motives behind more recent predominant understandings of social movement theory, but also the theory itself as being limited in both form and content. He sees the framework of ‘resource mobilization’ and ‘political contention’, put forward by Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam, as the predominant understanding in mainstream social movement studies in the USA. Flacks sees this as lacking for two reasons: the analysis focuses on a model rather than the possible flexibility of ideas, and the model does not take into consideration the question of culture. This second critique will be addressed and distinguished from the one I am making later.
In 1998, Meyer and Tarrow defined contentious politics as ‘collective challenges to existing arrangements of power and distribution by people with common purposes and solidarity, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities’ (1998: 4). Further, Meyer and Tarrow view social movements functionally as a ‘way of making claims in national politics’, and congruent with this approach, use the word ‘citizen’ to name social movement actors. To highlight the extent to which Meyer and Tarrow’s conceptualization of social movements is predicated on the nation-state, and to give a sense of the character of the theoretical language that they employ, it may be best to quote one of their concluding questions:
[M]ore fundamentally, precisely because of the increasing incentives to engage in socially controlled collective action in our societies today, can we still regard the social movement in its classical form as a major player in the political struggle? … We have seen that the movement society provides incentives for the professionalization of movement organizations, for their ability to shift into other organizational forms, for their institutionalization, as well as making it profitable for ordinary interest groups to adopt the methods traditionally associated with the social movement. To what extent have these changes done away with the special role of the movement as a challenger to the polity?
(Meyer and Tarrow 1998: 26)
The ‘incentives’ and profitability referred to above derive their fullest force from the ‘political structuring of social movements’ as proposed by Tarrow (1996: 41), whereby movements are understood to be shaped by changes in the structural opportunities, resources, and constraints granted by the political relations and institutions of the nation-state. In this view, citizens mobilize in response to these changes while ‘movement entrepreneurs’ manipulate them systematically.
Charles Tilly (2004) has been the preeminent contemporary definer of social movement theory, specifically the politics of contention. He lays out three criteria:
1. a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities;
2. employment of combinations from among the following forms of political action: creation of special purpose associations and coalitions, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petition drives, statements to and in public media, and pamphleteering; and
3. participants’ concerted public representations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment on the part of themselves, and/or their constituencies.
What is important for this discussion in particular is that this generally accepted framework, as laid out by Tilly and generally accepted, is that it is a framework for social movements where all movements are assumed to be subject to the same social pressures that occur in the field, and addressing different claims is always done in the form of addressing from one body to another, excluding the possibility of self-organization and autonomy, as an anti-capitalist alternative.
There is a significant component of sociological social movement theory that puts forward the politics of contention as a framework for understanding movements and their relationship to various forms of domination and power. A contentious relationship to the state and authoritative powers is always an explicit or implicit part of the theory. A crucial aspect of this argument is that all social movements are in a contentious relationship to the state, or another form or institution with formal ‘power over’, whether demanding reforms from the state or institution or desiring another state or institution. The politics of contention is and continues to be useful in understanding social movements, but the framework does not work for all contemporary movements, specifically the autonomous anti-capitalist movements. These contemporary autonomous movements are attempting to organize themselves outside of the state and traditional forms of hierarchical and institutional power. These are movements that are against capitalism, hierarchy, and concepts of power as a dominating force. Their energy is placed in creating new societies and communities, rather than demanding the state change or asking for things from the state. As the data show, people in these movements are clear in not desiring a contentious relationship to power, but rather in their desire for (and creation of) alternative powers. Either space needs to be made within theories of contention to allow for these new autonomous movements and experiences, or a parallel theory needs to emerge.
McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow are three of the most important and widely read contemporary social movement theorists. In 2001 their book Dynamics of Contention was published, and it is from this that the following definition is taken:
By contentious politics we mean: episodic, public, collective interactions among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.
(McAdam et al. 2001: 5)
Within these contemporary social movements there is a significant network of movements that are consciously developing a politics and practice that cannot be understood within the framework of contention. By this I mean that they do not place their desire for change onto the state or seek to change the state itself. Implicit in their politics is to live in a substantially different society. One of the core differences is the relationship to concepts of power, and particularly the understanding of state power as a potentially positive or liberatory force. These contemporary autonomous movements explicitly state that they do not want to take state power, and that the change they desire cannot come from the state apparati (as described in Chapter 5).
The explanation below by Tilly makes it difficult to find a space to explain the current autonomous social movements, such as those in Argentina, outside the context of contentious politics. It simultaneously traps the movements into a concept of power relations that they seem to be rejecting:
Although I did not speak much of ‘contenders’ before the 1970s, did not explicitly define my subjects as ‘contention’ until the 1980s, and did not start theorizing about ‘contentious politics’ until the 1990s, for half a century a major stream of my work has concerned how, when, where, and why ordinary people make collective claims on public authorities, other holders of power, competitors, enemies, and objects of popular disapproval. For many years I generally avoided the term ‘social movement’ because it sponged up so many different meanings and therefore obscured more than it clarified. Preparing detailed catalogues of contentious events for periods from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries in Western Europe and North America changed my mind.
(Tilly 2004: ix)
Tarrow defines contentious politics as a relationship to those in power, or who possess some dominating power. This again does not allow for those movements which, often after various forms of confrontation and contention, decide no longer to place demands upon the state or other formal institutions of power:
Contentious politics occurs when ordinary people, often in league with more influential citizens, join forces in confrontation with elites, authorities, and opponents. Such confrontations go down to the dawn of history.
Cultural challenges to contention
There is a growing body of literature in the USA that purports to challenge the contentious framework, grounding the criticism in what it claims is a lack of attention paid to movements, such as identity-based movements, which examines changes in moral codes and the identities of people within those movements. This literature deals with movements that place demands on formal institutions of power, such as the state and state agencies, and as yet does not examine movements that are reconceptualizing power – movements that I term autonomous. They address movements such as the feminist movement which, while focusing on the issues of consciousness-raising and so forth, have placed demands on institutions as the main focus of organization, from equal rights to abortion rights.
Flacks addresses this perceived challenge to contention, and while he agrees that there needs to be more space in the understanding of these movements and their attention to internal changes, he also argues that this is not a new framework being put forward:
This ‘culturalist’ perspective suffered a bit from being labeled ‘new social movement theory’. For one thing, there was hardly a ‘theory’ being articulated, but rather a different set of emphases and questions.
(Flacks 2003: 137)
He continues to argue that there is nothing new in this, and I would add that not only is it not historically new, but that all of the movements addressed are those with a contentious relationship to formal institutions of power. This grouping of cultural challenges within the contentious framework is something with which the framers of contention also agree (McAdam et al. 1996; Klandermans 1997; Tarrow 1998; Zald 2000).
My argument is not a cultural challenge, and while many of the autonomous movements place much importance on the internal changes of the movement itself, shifting identities, creating new relationships, and so forth, they are not focused on formal power, but rather on the creation of new and alternative powers. As emphasized previously, this does not mean that they are not engaging with the state (and forms of institutional power), but that the state is not the point of reference; the movement is – as is the creation of new values and new relationships. The movements are not contentious.
Conclusions, implications, and practical applications
Twentieth century history is full of births of worlds that embody ‘old’ social relations. This tumultuous reality has brought disastrous consequences: in general revolutions have not given birth to new worlds, though revolutionaries have tried to build them with the state apparatus. Although a good many revolutions have improved people’s living conditions, which is certainly an important achievement, they have not been able to create new worlds. Despite the unimpeachable goodwill of so many revolutionaries, the fact remains that the state is not the appropriate tool for the creating emancipatory social relations … From this perspective, the most revolutionary thing we can do is strive to create new social relationships within our own territories – relationships that are born of the struggle, and are maintained and expanded by it.
Despite the massive challenges that movements face in Argentina, revolutions continue in people’s day-to-day relationships. This is the point from which my summary and conclusion begin. The subtleties of this point are examined throughout the book, but the ultimate conclusion is simply that the movements have been, and continue to be, successful. In accepting this conclusion, a number of other questions and suppositions must be considered. These are:
• the centrality of horizontal decision making;
• new conceptualizations of power;
• the importance of affect and emotion;
• the creation of new value production;
• the non-contentious political framework nature of the new movements; and
• rethinking the meaning of revolution.
I will address each of these separately, and then discuss the implications of these conclusions for the study of social movements, and an understanding of social change. Linked to these conclusions is the question of how to approach and study these points, that is the need for reexamining traditional methodologies of research.
Centrality of horizontal decision making
Horizontalidad is a point of reference in Argentina, and over the years has become one around the globe. Activists use it as a sort of vernacular to signify that they do not use hierarchy or will not work with political parties. Most recently in Egypt some of the younger activists were describing how they were organizing as horizontalism. A UK Guardian article in February 2011, entitled ‘From Paris to Cairo, these protests are expanding the power of the individual’, Paul Mason (2011) wrote, ‘But the sociology of the movements is only part of the story. Probably the key factor is “horizontalism” which has become the default method of organising.’ At the time of writing people throughout the USA, beginning in New York with Occupy Wall Street, have been organizing in assembly forms, using variations of direct democracy, assuming some sort of horizontal relationships and using the language of horizontalism. In Spain the Democracia Real Ya! movements are organizing horizontally and using assemblies for decision making. In Greece, the movements use direct horizontal democracy. Increasingly, it is becoming an assumption that organizing will be horizontal.
Horizontalism has come to mean a great deal more than only participation in the process of making a decision, but the beginning point and heart of the new relationship is still a person having an active role in what happens around them, and in deciding their fate, or possible future. The examples in this book, of horizontalidad in the various movements in Argentina, from the unemployed and working class to the middle class and indigenous, show the centrality of direct participatory decision making in the larger process and project of social transformation. Without horizontalism the autonomous and autogestiva projects would not be successful. This already seems a given conclusion for many, especially the people involved in social movements, but only ten years ago this was not the case. Political parties as a vehicle for change, and voting as the only way that a group would make a decision, was taken as the rule, not the exception. Argentina has played a tremendous role in shifting the global conversation among activists on how to bring about change in the most empowering way. That change is not only made by what one does, but how one does it, is of equal importance. By sharing the experiences and arguments in this book, I hope to add to the global conversation about how change is created and why there has been such a massive global break with vertical and hierarchical forms of organization.
Power as a noun or a verb?
The contemporary autonomous movements in Argentina, as with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, contribute a tremendous amount to the understanding of power and social change, particularly in the social sciences. When John Holloway published his book, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today in 2002, the Argentine rebellion was in its first months. The argument that Holloway puts forth was met at the time with applause from certain sectors and severe criticism from others. Generally, it was the social movement participants applauding, and the university scholars frowning, and taking power as a means to change remains a deeply contentious issue. However, in the nine years since the book was first published, discussions on power have changed and the movements in Argentina have played a large role in that shift.
This debate on power is not only a discussion on the taking of power, but more generally the concept of power: power as a thing, as something to use, wield, and hold over another, or as a verb, that is active, interactive, and can be dynamic when used together, as a ‘power with’ rather than a ‘power-over’.
There are still many social scientists who continue to see power within the Weberian frame. It is against this rigidity, seeing power as only one thing, that Frances Fox Piven talked about in her address to the American Sociological Association conference in 2007, ‘Can Power from Below Change the World’:
I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life … This kind of interdependent power is not concentrated at the top but is potentially widespread.
(Fox Piven 2008: 5)
It is the above sort of power that is being created in the autonomous movements in Argentina and about which I write (particularly in Chapter 5). The movements’ experiences in Argentina contribute a great deal to this conversation on power and rethinking it in the process of social transformation. It is not presented as the only concept of power, but is meant to be a part of a conversation, to expand the ways in which social scientists in particular see change and how it can be created.
Challenging the contentious politics frame
The potential for the exercise of power from below must, I believe, command the attention of sociologists. But are our intellectual traditions and institutional locations suited to conduct such inquiries?
(Fox Piven 2008: 3)
These newer conceptions of social movements and social change in Argentina can contribute to questioning the preconceived frameworks used for the study of movements. Chapter 8 of this book takes issue with the contentious politics framework for understanding social movements in Argentina, but it is not only the specific framework that is the issue. Conducting a study beginning with a framework rather than trying to understand first what a group or movement is doing (and then searching for the various theories and tools that exist to help understand the phenomenon), is the issue. What this book has tried to do is to expand concepts of power and social movements but also, even more importantly, to challenge the ways in which studies are conducted.
Affective politics and new subjectivities
The seriousness in which participants in the movements in Argentina take emotion, the politics of affect and personal transformation, and the way that it is communicated in this book is, I hope, the beginning of a much larger conversation on the central role of emotion in revolutionary change. Affect and subjectivity have been considered unimportant for too long, relegated to ‘cultural’ interpretation, only peripherally related to ‘real’ politics, or discussed within the context of identity politics such as gender, sexual orientation, or ‘race’.
As the participants in the movements in Argentina show, and as has been demonstrated in this book, without acknowledging a shift in their own subjectivity, their own understanding, and without their movements being based on trust and affection, they would not be as militant. These aspects of affective politics and emotion are notions that do not fit neatly into preconceived frameworks. Hopefully, coupled with a rethinking of methodology, they will become their own area of study.
Value production
Raul Zibechi, along with many other organic intellectuals in Latin America and around the world, has been reconceptualizing value production (de Sousa Santos 1998; Davis 2006; De Angelis 2007; Zibechi 2008a; Holloway 2010; Harvey 2012). Their studies have taken into consideration many of the autonomous movements around the world, as well as more generally the growing urban peripheries where the poor are forced to function outside the system, as the system no longer permits them on the inside:
Production of livelihood in the territories signals a second radical break from the industrial past. The popular sectors have erected for the first time in an urban space a set of independently controlled forms of production. Although these remain connected to and dependent on the market, vast sectors now control their forms and rhythms of production, and are no longer dominated by the rhythms of capital and its division of labor.
Through examination of recuperated workplaces and unemployed workers’ movements, this book hopes to have demonstrated how what is being produced is being done outside the frame of capitalist market production. I do not argue that it is outside capitalism as a whole, but that what determines how much people work, when they work, and what to do with their final product is decided upon by themselves, both together and autonomously. Horizontalidad is the way in which the vast majority of the workplaces function, as it is also the base from which the MTDs organize. What this means is that the movement decides together questions related to production. This then raises incredibly important questions on value production.
What is produced by the autonomous movements and the relationship of that production to the state and capitalist market – or outside of it – is central to the construction of alternative ways of being. The movements in Argentina are not only creating horizontal relationships in which the participants feel better and happier, but in many areas they are finding new ways of surviving, whether by taking over workplaces and running them together, or creating micro-enterprises. In and of themselves these are not answers to the capitalist market, but within the experience, within the creation of alternative ways of producing value, one can begin to see the seeds of an alternative economy that is central to the total transformation of society.
The meaning of revolution
The above arguments and contributions to the discussion on social change, power, production, and social relationships brings the book to one of its most central arguments, which is that of a rethinking of the meaning of revolution.
In the same way that the meaning of revolution for those in the autonomous movements is not that of taking over from the state, the ways in which revolutions are perceived also should be different, subtler, and perhaps quieter. These quieter, everyday revolutions can be seen all over Argentina, if one chooses to see them in the same way as the movements. We can see them in the little girl from MTD Solano who requests an assembly of adults because she does not think that her mother should be allowed to yell at her. We see it in the assembly in the occupied building in Lomas de Zamora, where there is a serious discussion of what to do about a case of sexual harassment of a compañera, and the matter is resolved in a way that all feel to be acceptable. We see it in the discussion of what to do in the occupied grocery store, how to pay the electric bill, or order new supplies. We see it in the exchange of healthcare in a recuperated clinic, with the printing of clinic brochures in a recuperated print shop. These are daily occurrences of which there are thousands in Argentina. Each of these discussions is using horizontalidad and struggling to create autonomously from institutional power – struggling to maintain their own agendas.
Determining success
The first and last question of this book is what it means to be successful; and now, at the end, I add the question of who is to determine this answer. If the perspective is that of the movements, those people creating transformations within themselves and their communities, then the answer is that they now feel more dignity and power – they are social subjects and agents in their lives, finding new ways to survive, together and with affect. They are successful.
Methodology and studying by listening
The methodology used for any study has direct implications on that study and, of course, on the results. It is one thing to read about a movement, and quite another to spend time with it. It is not the same to pay someone to do fieldwork, then to do one’s own – and not all fieldwork is the same. The same is true for one’s intellectual, political, and theoretical frameworks. One’s starting point greatly affects the conclusions, sometimes distorting them so much that the conclusions reached – as with the example of James Petras in Chapter 5 on power – miss the point completely.
To cite Frances Fox Piven, but this time as a question: ‘The potential for the exercise of power from below must, I believe, command the attention of sociologists. But are our intellectual traditions and institutional locations suited to conduct such inquiries[?]’ Are we able to situate ourselves to study these new movements, whether in Argentina, or now Egypt, or another movement that will undoubtedly arise and be outside the traditional framework of analysis?
Fox Piven’s question is one of the things that this book hopes to ask, answer, and then continue to ask. I hope with these pages to push the boundaries of research, by placing research ‘from below’ (Lynd 1993; Brecher 1995) at the heart of it, as well as giving more space to the field of the sociology of narrative (Berger and Quinney 2005; Selbin 2010). Together the intention is to bring forward the voices of those in the movements around the world. Not uncritically, but first methodologically, listening to what people are saying and seeing what they are doing, then finding tools of theory and experience to add to what is being heard and done, and to find ways of working together with the movements. This is an area that many contemporary social movement activists who are also in the academy have come to call ‘co-research’ or ‘militant research’ – or social science for another world. This does not mean uncritically reflecting on the experiences of the movements, but building relationships with those people making history, so as to help to write better the history – their history – with them.