By Katie Rohrer, 2007
I. Introduction: ¿Donde estan los nuevos actores?
“Where are the new actors? Those condemned to hunger, to disappearance, to indignity, those who are left over, the marginal, those who are no longer useful, those condemned to die slowly, the new social desaparecidos, pointing at the powerful of the globalized land. ¡ Basta Ya! ¡Ya Basta! was the furious cry. In the highways hot with fire of burning tires and in the multitudinous assemblies of beating hearts, everyone cried, “We do not agree with the genocide, we want to continue living.” What explanation could be found that is closer to insolence? Some say, mostly the media- that these new actors have come together out of desperation and hunger and it could have been so. I feel that this is not the only reason. I am deeply convinced that we also came together for art. How can a system be opposed, that has demonstrated its devastating efficiency in electing its own executioner? How can it be conveyed that reality is not only that which is emitted from television channels or the complacent news of the corporate system? How can it be understood that those who endure hunger are not guilty such that they should endure hunger? How can it be expressed that no one wants to be unemployed, indigent, UBN (Unsatisfied Basic Needs) as they called us before? As all of this was happening, the majority of the unions sold out to the government; their politics entertained with superficial discourse, they modified their voices as not to anger the powerful, permitting them to continue collecting votes. The intellectuals were co-opted by opportunism, they were all lost… and then the art of social transformation called on new actors.”
- Toty Flores, founding compañero of the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de La Matanza
In the face of economic collapse, mass unemployment, unsatisfied basic needs and structural exclusion wrought by the neoliberalization of Argentina, grassroots neighborhood organizations have come together to create alternative institutions in their communities. This paper will examine some of the strategies and practices deployed by one such group, the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de La Matanza1 (The Unemployed Workers’ Movement of La Matanza) who in 2001, only two months before the national debt crisis, occupied an abandoned school building and began the process of transforming it into a cooperative bakery, sewing shop, free school and community center, El Centro para la Educacion y Formacion de Cultura Comunitaria2 (Center for Education and Formation of Communitarian Culture). Framed by broader questions of agency and subjectivity under globalization, I will detail the experience of everyday life within this space, examining the ongoing, processual struggle for autonomia, (autonomy) horizontalidad (horizontality) and autogestión, (self-management).
Enmeshed in the wobbly grid of boxy houses and unpaved roads in Barrio La Juanita, a minute parcel of the Urban Cone of Buenos Aires, an innovative and unconventional response to social exclusion is taking shape. The MTD-LM have established a multipurpose, autonomous community space and in doing so have not only created jobs through establishing self-managed microenterprises and providing free social services including popular education for local children and adults, but have gone about remaking their lifeworld. I would like to suggest, echoing the self-assessment of many compañeros with whom I had conversations that this project, while highly localized, is one example of a greater global moment of popular intervention from below.
La Juanita is a neighborhood of roughly 20 blocks with about 10,000 residents in Gregorio Laferrere, one of 15 city districts of La Matanza, the largest partition of the urban cone of Buenos Aires, home to over two million inhabitants (Foderá 2002). In La Matanza, industrial landscapes seem to sprawl ceaselessly- packed with factories, paper mills, warehouses and slaughterhouses bisected by highway routes leading in and out of the Federal Capital. This massive urban center was at the heart of Argentina’s industrial production sector before the rise of the military dictatorship of 1976-1983 and the subsequent transformation of the national economy under the neoliberal model over the next three decades. Now the urban cone is afflicted by deep economic depression and veritable social crisis with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country at 34%, where 61.3% of residents live below the poverty line and 47% of the population does not have running water in their homes (Fitz Patrik 2006:120).
Unsatisfied basic needs and corrupt local politics characterize the everyday reality for those living in the urban cone, which has subsequently become somewhat of a political tinderbox. La Matanza has historically been a site of protest, occupation of corporate and military property and disruption of normative activity by labor unions, leftist groups, and radical grassroots neighborhood organizations often referred to as piqueteros, whose blockades of highway traffic, known as cortes de la ruta, have obstructed the movement of capital and law enforcement, and their presence remains strong throughout many of the barrios. La Juanita is located in the midst of this environment. It is the home base of the MTD-LM, one of several grassroots organizations loosely associated under the banner of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement - a decentralized, informal network of similar groups dispersed throughout Argentina, whose projects vary given their location and the needs of their community.
The MTD-LM came together in response to the local and immediate effects of el modelo, the implementation of economic austerity measures and neoliberal policy in Argentina during the 80s and 90s. The majority of the compañeros of the MTD-LM experienced a loss of employment during this time period and as a result endured financial, familial and psychic turmoil. As Soledad, a founding compañera, recalls of the initial convergence of what became the MTD-LM, “we came together with the common problem of not being able to pay the electricity bill” (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006). This was in 1995, at the height of President Carlos Menem’s regime, guided and supported by the International Monetary Fund, when most national industries including transportation, telecommunications, healthcare, water, gas and electricity were privatized. Argentina’s barriers to free trade were lifted and unemployment peaked at almost 20%, increasing 77% in the province of Buenos Aires over a decade. This sudden rationalization of the workforce occurred largely as a result of the reversal of Argentina’s policy of import substitution in 1989. Since the end of World War II this policy had stimulated the growth of the industrial sector. The shift in the Argentine economy toward export-orientation for the global market provoked widespread deindustrialization, where many factories and other workplaces closed and jobs were eliminated (Green 2003:15).
After experiencing unemployment and poverty as a common crisis, neighbors, friends and former co-workers aggregated into a grassroots organization as a means of responding to social exclusion. After several years of community organizing amongst fellow unemployed persons and political militants, assembling blockades to make demands of local politicians, the MTD-LM felt that their projects could be better realized by establishing an autonomous community space of their own. The MTD-LM came to this conclusion after working closely with the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, 3 assisting in expansion of their Universidad Popular. To this end, the MTD-LM and many of their family members occupied an abandoned elementary school in La Juanita in September 2001, only a few months before the Argentine economy fell into crisis in December as a result of the national debt default and subsequent capital flight. The abandoned space was restored by neighborhood residents and members of the MTD-LM and later, legally purchased after an intensive process of expropriation, made possible in part by soliciting non-government aid. Over the subsequent five years, they created a community center which is now composed of several self-managed micro-enterprises: a bakery which provides bread and pastry at a the lowest price in the neighborhood of $1peso per kilogram, a fair-trade textile workshop that exports finished garments both domestically and abroad, as well as a kindergarten, attended both by the children of the compañeros as well many others from La Juanita.
The community center also serves as a free school, where compañeros and neighborhood residents offer and attend classes in literacy, foreign language, computing, arts and crafts and theater. In concert with allied NGOs, El CEFoCC provides free pediatric consultation and health care by a physician who visits twice weekly. There is also a feria Americana which functions much like a flea-market or swap meet, where local residents barter, buy and sell goods and artesanal products each weekday. There are specific strategies at work within El CEFoCC that compose a counter-logic to that of social exclusion such as consensus decision making, operating enterprises cooperatively, sharing resources collectively, providing free education and closing disparities in knowledge and skill. In maintaining an alternative social infrastructure where the state and the market have failed, compañeros and community members are provided for where they would otherwise be socially excluded.
Daily life at El CEFoCC is filled with activity and intensity. Each morning begins with a meeting of all the compañeros, where an agenda is put forward and proposals affecting each aspect El CEFoCC are decided upon by the body of compañeros as a whole, through a process of consensus decision-making. Following this meeting, work strikes up in the productive microenterprises and bread and pastry are constantly cycled through production and sale, and the textile shop seems to transform mountains of materials into finished products. The kindergarteners arrive in a swarm of colorful work-smocks (that are made on-site) and the courtyard echoes with their chatter as they enter the classroom. Neighbors move in and out of the space throughout the afternoon to teach or attend classes, buy bread, or share yerba maté. There are also frequent visits from journalists, often from independent media outlets, students and international interns like myself. Communal meals are prepared and shared in the cooperative and all at once, the buzzing and motion seem to settle as all of La Juanita slips away for siesta for a momentary pause before the space is filled with people and activity once again. Neighbors form long lines while tables are set up for the feria and people pour in to attend.
Evenings are much slower and quieter. All but those living at the community center, the interns and some of the younger compañeros, return home. Dinner is shared, music is often played and typically long, meandering discussions of politics, history and philosophy last long into the night, as energies taper off with daylight to intensify again shortly. Most of all, this community center serves as something of a neighborhood epicenter. It is a gathering place for the MTD-LM, their working compañeros, neighbors and allies who come together, sometimes in syncretic combinations, to go about reinventing everyday life in such a way as to break with hierarchy, scarcity, alienation and exclusion, going beyond the subjection of structural poverty.
Initiating this project marked a definitive turn for the MTD-LM, as they began moving away from a practice based primarily on protest and making demands of government. In 1999 The MTD-LM decided to cease receiving welfare subsidies believing that such a dependency relationship with the political structures allocating these subsidies compromises autonomy and puts their project in danger of cooptation through patronage relations with corrupt local politicians. The MTD-LM also view collaborating with any part of the state apparatus as an unviable avenue for doing politics. This radical departure from their previous praxis and those of other piquetero organizations caused the organization to fragment, reducing its numbers from about 600 to just 6 compañeros (there are now about 30 members of the MTD-LM and over 40 workers). Such a dramatic rupture in the organization forced the MTD-LM to radically reorient their project as a means of survival.
The MTD-LM has also generated an alternative support network to revitalize their praxis and make their projects materially viable. Such a decentralized network also serves as a counter-power to the structures they seek to draw back from: the state, official labor unions, political parties and private corporations. These ad-hoc collaborations also serve as a way to exchange resources, strategies and information with allies. It is this critical interplay between autonomy and association with other entities that not only sustains the projects of the MTD-LM, but is also at the heart of their collective subjectivity. Instead of experiencing the struggle to liberate themselves from the subjection to unemployment and social exclusion either as alienated individuals or as one solitary entity, the MTD-LM hold as a core understanding of their experience, “cuando con otros somos nosotros” 4 (Together with others we become ourselves). This sentiment suggests a dynamic interplay between autonomy and association, between self and other, which positions them as a multiplicity of actors from which their lifeworld, their struggles and their sense of identity evolves and emerges.
The MTD-LM and project CEFoCC did not come into being as a result of the popular uprising in 2001-2002 following the economic and political crisis, but they were certainly part of that cultural and historical moment. This time period could be thought of as critical point of destabilization brought about by the widespread changes to social structures after three decades of neoliberal capitalist intervention. Such a breakdown of paradigms and power structures seems to have provoked creative popular responses to the failure of institutional support systems. It could also be surmised that because the MTD-LM had already gone about developing alternative community infrastructure in the face of social abandonment, they were better equipped to deal with crisis.
During this time period certain specific technologies of popular power arose as a direct response to the failures of the social, political and economic establishment. One such manifestation was the spontaneous formation assembleas populares (popular assemblies) that usually were composed of neighbors who came together to self-govern their local community in a directly democratic fashion, through town meeting style consensus. Another of these tactics is the self-management of enterprise which has involved the expropriation of approximately 160 factories now under worker control in Argentina with approximately 9,100 workers (Monteagudo 2006:9). A third response was the re-emergence of redes de trueque (barter networks not based on a cash economy). These novel institutions, generated largely as grassroots phenomena, can each be observed within the lifeworld of EL CEFoCC as a microcosm of the greater political and cultural zeitgeist, including the cooperative bakery, textile shop and book distribution, the prevalence of consensus-based, horizontal decision-making and daily assemblies of both compañeros and workers. Similarly, the feria Americana operates much like a small trueque. In this way, El CEFoCC is a localized manifestation of greater social movements and alternative uses of popular power in the wake of disappearing or scarce infrastructural supports.
These techniques represent some forms of radical reorganization prompted by erosion of state power and the economy, as well as crisis within psychic and cultural spheres. While the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC may represent only one instantiation of this greater turn and do not constitute a social movement themselves, the qualitative change produced in the lifeworlds of the compañeros can be thought of as a part of a crucial moment of social change in Argentina, and the globalized world. The ways in which specific techniques are employed as a means of enacting agency and struggling against the political, cultural, subjective and psychic oppression experienced under regimes of global capital synchronize and have remarkable similarity and affinity with the strategies employed by the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico or Brazil’s Movimiento Sem Terra (Landless Peoples’ Movement) whose politics tend towards decentralized, politically autonomous and networked groups and communities simultaneously struggling against the local instantiations of capitalist globalization and creating new practices and lifeworlds by establishing sites of organizing often by expropriating land or property.
There are other examples of projects and trends of a similar character that come to mind, including the eco-village and intentional communities movement, the development of alternative infrastructures and underground gift economies found in squatter settlements that exist in European cities, the Mondragon community in the Basque region of Spain, and anarchist and anti-authoritarian affinity groups dispersed throughout the globe. The groups mentioned above represent only a few examples of the constructions of popular power from below that are taking shape in a multiplicity movements and projects across a globalized planet. Resource wars, the bankrupting of national economies, ecological degradation, global warming, widespread increases in poverty and disease epidemics are the pervasive forces which at present, urgently necessitate a world of alternative responses that function not only as short-term survival tactics, but new lifeways that open paths to otros mundos possibles. As Toty explains in a chapter of the MTD-LM’s self published compilation of reflections, this worldview is set in opposition to the fantasy that the global community has reached “the end of history”5 and therefore “only one world is possible” (Flores 2006:201).
I was initially drawn to Argentina by learning of various social movements that arose in response to three decades of neoliberal policy and subsequent economic collapse in late 2001. I was particularly attracted to what I saw as an inspiringly potent form of political and social action that was based not only on opposition to global capitalism, but in creating functional alternatives based on the principles of horizontality, autogestión and autonomy. News of workers occupying, restoring and self-managing factories, farms, schools, hospitals and other services and micro-enterprises seemed to offer an apparently viable instantiation of social capital and socio-economic support networking. At the same time, popular assemblies that arose in neighborhoods throughout the country promised a new kind of inclusive and bottom-up organizing in the face of so many years of social exclusion and fierce hierarchal domination.
The most compelling aspect of these social movements to me was the way in which they seemed to have arisen from below, not as a directive of established and hierarchal institutions such as state governments, political parties or official unions and syndicates. In fact, the epithet Que se vayan todos (They all must leave!) became something of a mantra at this time, for the massive social protests against the state and all official politics, law enforcement, multinational corporations and the International Monetary Fund. This declaration of desire to re-formulate a world free of oppression by authoritarian power structures seemed also to be a will to autonomy, to become the subjects of their own history and to make a world for themselves worth living in. To me, this notion was quite powerful and I wanted to find specific, working examples. Moreover, I wanted to try to understand the social psychology both generated by and generative of social capital and the way in which these new movements and spaces foster a new kind of subjectivity. I had the privilege of connecting with the Argentina Autonomista Project, an organization whose mission involves increasing the visibility of radical grassroots community organizing projects throughout Argentina, and forging ties with other like-minded groups and individuals in the North. I first learned of the MTD-LM during a presentation by program-director Graciela Monteagudo at Hampshire College in 2004, and it was it shortly after that she put me in contact with the organization.
As a member of grassroots anti-authoritarian projects at home, I was personally interested not only in observing, but learning by immersion and direct participation the tactics, strategies and methodologies employed by this exemplary community. I lived with the other young militants of the MTD-LM in a classroom that had been converted to a dormitory. My daily activities usually consisted of attending the morning meeting of all the cooperative members, helping facilitate kindergarten activities, co-teaching literacy or English classes and then often assisting with whatever of the micro-enterprises needed extra labor, the bakery or textile shop. As a result of such intensive, constant personal interactions, I forged friendships with several of the compañeros and as a result, much of my understanding of life at EL CEFoCC is based on and filtered through the subject-subject connections that were made between myself and the compañeros
In my ethnographic presentation of the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC, I am not attempting to bring forward a scientific or historical truth, but rather, I will create narrative descriptions and commentary on a lifeworld as filtered through my own positioning both as an outsider and as a situated subject. I do not see my own role as that of detached analyst of culture, but as a subject of the underlying and overarching power structures that are at work throughout the globalized world. In this way, any statements, images or analyses that emerge, derive from inter-subjective forms of knowledge, embodied in direct experiences that have become ethnographic reconstructions. I do not feel that I can speak beyond such experiences but rather, I will privilege these highly subjective moments as possible illustrations of this lifeworld.
This paper will be an ethnographic exploration of the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC through an examination of the experience of everyday life framed by broader questions of agency and subjectivity under globalization. As a situated subject in many aspects of daily activity at El CEFoCC, I will critically and reflexively analyze the lifeworld that exists within this space as I experienced it in the months of March, April and May of 2006. I am placing this account within a greater context of the social, economic and cultural crises created by decades of neo-liberal economic policy and the MTD-LM’s localized response to these processes.
In the first section, entitled “Desaparición Social”, I will contextualize the emergence of this organization by situating it in a greater historical genealogy of colonialism, neoliberalism and biopower that has produced social exclusion. In the second section, “(Nos)otros: Autonomy and Association”, I will first examine the MTD-LM’s breakage with the welfare system and will then address their strategy of developing an alternative support network. To this end, I will discuss the highly associative experience of the MTD-LM within such a network structure and examine the possibility of agency that these experiences generate. In this section I will also explain the meanings of “rhizomes, sponges and icebergs” that appear in my title. These tropes serve as conceptual modules that illustrate the relationship between MTD-LM and their network, between El CEFoCC and external communities and between nosotros and otros. I discuss these dynamics in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, which I see as having affinities with Dennis Rodger’s pronouncement “¡Son como esponjas!” in reference to their incorporations of external entities into their praxis. Finally, I arrive at the MTD-LM’s own poetic conception of themselves, the iceberg. The MTD-LM borrows this term directly from English, and seems to re-imagine it as a metaphor for their ontological emergence into a field of communication and exchange beyond their own community.
In my third and final section, “Desocupación and Subjectivity: Cultura Comunitaria as Counter-power”, I will address the concept of neoliberal subject formation as it relates to the experiences of MTD-LM and El CEFoCC. Many compañeros speak to the experience of job-loss, exclusion and abandonment by official local and state political structures, as a kind of depersonalization or loss of identity. The formation and development of the MTD-LM both as a political organization and El CEFoCC as a community with its own internal lifeworld seem to have resulted from these displacements. As a response, the MTD-LM have gone about expropriating and repurposing, not unlike their property, concepts and categories such as “work” and the worker as they are traditionally defined. As trabajadores desocupados they have quite literally proclaimed themselves to be workers in spite of unemployment. Here, work has taken on a different meaning than that which exists in capitalist or Marxist discourses. For the MTD-LM, work involves developing and enacting strategies that simultaneously oppose and seek to modify previous modes of existence mediated by neoliberalism, austerity and hierarchy.
Radical anthropologist David Graeber suggests that ethnographic methods can be employed as a means of direct action, to create knowledge and provide analysis about functioning examples of resistance and agency. He explains, “When one carries out an ethnography one observes what people do, and then tries to tease out the hidden symbolic, moral or pragmatic logics that underlie their actions; one tries to get at the way people’s habits and actions makes sense in ways that they are not themselves completely aware of” (2004:11). Throughout this paper, I will attempt to interrogate and unpack the system of meanings and practices created, shared and employed within El CEFoCC in as much as they constitute a valuable set of strategies for survival and resistance not only within a localized context but as they could be of use or have affinities with other like-minded projects. Graeber goes on to identify this approach to ethnography as “one role of a radical intellectual” (2004:12) who makes use of tools within the discipline in order to
look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications for what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions but as contributions, possibilities- as gifts…such a project would actually have two aspects, or moments if you like: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in a constant dialogue. (2004:12)
Graeber’s unorthodox appropriation of ethnographic methodology as a form of activism directly informs my research.
As I identify what I perceive to be viable examples of research strategies, I will also call critical attention to the ways in which these efforts are bound up with and reproduce familiar forms, even as they are undoing other oppressive relations. I will comment on the contradictions, tensions and obstacles to agency that are also present within this lifeworld. Additionally, I will highlight points at which the nosotros becomes problematized by the differing views and experiences amongst the compañeros. I will also make note of instances in which I personally saw dissonance between discourse and practice, yet in doing so will attempt to be reflexive about my own biases and social location and privilege. In this way, I seek not to represent these practices fully realized, but rather, as continuing struggles in highly constraining circumstances. Furthermore, I do not wish to advertise this community as having achieved a complete working model for alternative institutions, but rather wish to portray this particular lifeworld as one possible example of survival and resistance struggling to be realized in dire material conditions. Using research materials from my field study at El CEFoCC, such as recorded interviews and conversation, field notes and primary source literature written by the MTD-LM themselves, as well as relevant theory on globalization, power and subject formation, I will prepare an ethnographic and analytical paper presenting the lifeworld constituted by the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC and examining the possibilities for agency within their praxis.
II. Desaparición Social
A recurring theme in discourse of the MTD-LM and their allies the Madres de Plaza de Mayo,6 is that of desaparición social- literally “social disappearance.” Here, the concept of desaparición makes reference to the kidnapping and murder by paramilitary forces, of over 30,000 Argentine citizens, many of them young people, suspected of subversive political activity during the military dictatorship from 1976-83. During the subsequent “return of democracy” (as it has been referred to) in 1983 with the election of President Raúl Alfonsín, a new kind of desaparición has occurred, implemented concurrently with neoliberal policies. Instead of mass kidnappings and executions, large sectors of the population have become marginalized, made indigent, residing in impoverished areas lacking access to utilities and public services, where many of their basic needs are unsatisfied. This exclusion constitutes a desaparición social- a social death that occurs in zones of abandonment such as the villas7 and barrios in the urban cone of Buenos Aires.
Compañeros from the MTD-LM report an experience of social death through job-loss, a kind of “genocide” (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006) 7 This is one way that the MTD-LM have conceptualized their experience of social exclusion and abandonment by the state. While the destruction of culture, civil society and national economy under neoliberalism is not directly akin to the calculated elimination of a sector of the population, the MTD-LM see the dispossession and impoverishment of the Argentine lower and middle classes as a systematic form of structural violence. Following Foucault, those who have been socially excluded are not murdered by the state, but rather, “let die” (1997:241) as the global elite profit from the neoliberalization of the global south.
Movement ally Carlos March of the charitable Fundación AVINA describes the MTD-LM as the “desaparecidos of democracy” (2006:87). In other words, the rationalization of the workforce and the privatization and dissolution of the public sector, among other structural adjustment policies that were implemented in the 80s and 90s through the present, have made social desaparecidos of the poor and unemployed sectors. In the view of the MTD-LM, it is not only the state and the economy which have played roles in this social disappearance, but also official labor unions that have pandered to the will of bosses and multinational corporate power, political parties that have failed to respond to the needs of the people and theoretical doctrines that have become less than viable in responding to the crisis of neoliberalism. March explains the relationship between the era of totalitarian rule and electoral democracy, pointing out that “The state, during the dictatorship, set out to assassinate activists. The democratic state has set out to disappear citizens”(2006:88).
Disparities in wealth accelerated especially during the 90s with the intensification of neoliberal policy by the International Monetary Fund and the Argentine government known as El Modelo. In 1990, the poorest 10% of the population had 21.5% of the national income; by 1999 at the end of the Menem presidency, it had been reduced to just 1.5% (Rodgers 2004). Since then, these disparities have been further polarized. In 1998 there were ten million poor people in Argentina, while today there are 15 million. Similarly, in 1998, Argentina experienced 11% unemployment and today it has reached 13% (Monteagudo 2006:11). Such economic inequality grew as a result of political and economic policy amounting to a structural form of exclusion that is continuous with the historical trajectory of colonialism through modernity and neo-colonialism in Argentina, though evolving and recomposing throughout this genealogical line. In this way, desaparición social could perhaps be thought through concepts such as Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics” and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of “bare life.”
In his March 17th 1976 Lecture at the College De France, Michel Foucault articulates the modern emergence of biopower and biopolitics, an operation of regulatory regimes and institutions that posses and execute “the power to make live and let die” as opposed to sovereign power which exercises “the right to take life or let live.” (1997:241). Biopower operates diffusely throughout a network of governmental and non-governmental apparatuses, to produce, maintain, measure, record, and proliferate life. Specifically, biopower promotes the life and hygiene of politically qualified and privileged categories, through a process of “racialization.” Here, racialization is not limited to the construct of race alone, but rather could by thought of as a system of classification into ethnic, national, sexual and socio-economic and other categories given the specific historical context. For Foucault, “regulatory mechanisms must be established to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis and compensate for variations within this general population and its aleatory field”(246:1997).
A possible example of the biopolitical regularization and production of life in Argentine modernity can be observed in the policy of import substitution industrialization (ISI). ISI was first employed in Argentina at the end of World War II, as a nationalist development strategy that led to the creation of a large industrial workforce and in theory, a more internally sustainable system of production that makes the national economy less dependent upon foreign imports and stimulates growth of domestic markets and industries. At this time, also, President Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva instituted a number of broad-reaching social welfare strategies under the program of Justicialismo. These included a closure in the gap between the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers, extension of vacation time and holidays, implementation of more comprehensive retirement plans and subsidization of public health and education, as well as nationalization of public industries and services which provided both social security and employment (Foderá 2002). While simultaneously operating diffusely throughout various governmental and non-governmental apparatuses, these measures also seem to constitute a concerted effort on the part of political power structures to “make live” in the biopolitical sense, through promoting economic protection and maintaining social welfare. Despite the implementation of this model, the unemployed became the biopolitically disqualified sector of the population as they were not able to reap the benefits of Justicialismo. Despite this pretense to national populism and the institutional prevalence of social welfare, this regime still operated biopolitically. Certainly, structural adjustment intensified social exclusion and broadened the population of excluded subjects and so this analysis is not meant to evoke nostalgia for the nationalist development project of the Perón era, nor is it meant as an appeal to enlarge the welfare state or call for a workers’ state. Rather, in tracing this genealogy of structural violence and exclusion, I would like to suggest that the state has always failed its subjects. In this way, both regimes, whether dominated by national industry or the interests of global capital are founded on the relation of making live and letting die, even as these categories shift throughout history.
The implementation of the neoliberal model that was first introduced in Argentina in the 1980s and intensified during the 90s through collaborations with foreign investors, Argentine political leaders and the corporate class as well as the International Monetary Fund, resulting in the systematic reversal of import substitution and domestic protectionism. Alongside these changes, austerity measures were also enacted, cutting state spending on social programs and privatizing the formerly public industry while opening the Argentine economy to foreign imports and promoting export orientation for the global market (Green 2001:15). The de-industrialization and reduction of the workforce that ensued, along with a polarization of classes left those who are dependent upon public infrastructure, effectively without social support, save meager welfare subsidies allocated through corrupt local politicians known as punteros, often in return for political patronage. The former industrial production hubs such as La Matanza and the urban cone of Buenos Aires became impoverished, with many factories, schools and other public facilities closing down. These sectors became zones of social exclusion; while the upper classes and foreign investors enjoy the benefits of globalist economic policies, others are effectively “let die”- subject to desaparición social.
In the discussion of the shift from sovereign power to biopower Foucault comments on the qualitative transformation in the visibility of death and execution. Foucault is of course, referring to a shift that occurred in European modernity across the nineteenth century, but this continuum is also quite applicable to Argentine experiences. According to Foucault,
the great public ritualization of death gradually began to disappear or at least to fade away…So much so that death- which has ceased to be one of those spectacular ceremonies in which individuals, the family, the group, and practically the whole of society took part- has become, in contrast, something to be hidden away. (247:1997)
This hidden death8 which occurs in zones of exclusion is directly comparable to desaparición in general, to the clandestine paramilitary kidnappings, murders and disposal of bodies, as well as the desaparición social- the exclusion and marginalization of large sectors of the population under el modelo. Foucault’s biopower is particularly congruent with the progression of desaparición to desaparición social as his definition of death goes beyond the literal destruction of life. Foucault explains, “When I say “killing” I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, of increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on”(1997: 256). This extension of the concept of death coincides with that of MTD-LM, which includes such specific forms of exclusion as unemployment, dissolution of public infrastructure and social supports resulting in unsatisfied basic needs. In this way, Argentine governmentality has gone from physically disappearing citizens to disappearing them socially. The invisible, silent and hidden nature of biopower’s “letting die” is also akin to Giorgio Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer. Agamben refers to a subject whose life has been politically disqualified, who has been reduced to “bare life,” becoming a depoliticized body that may be dispensed with, excluded or killed. For Agamben, “life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originally sacred- that is, that may be killed but not sacrificed- and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty”(83:1995). While Agamben speaks to the sovereign power and Foucault to biopower, the differences in their historical framings do not necessarily negate the similarities in their articulation of the process of social exclusion, but rather, can be thought together as a means of examining desaparición social.
Foucault explores a transition from sovereign power to biopower that could be employed in such a way as to trace a historical line from colonialism through neoliberalism in Argentina. Here, Foucault enters the discourse of biopower as a means of explicating its logic: “The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that in general will make life healthier: healthier and purer” (255:1997). The operations of colonialism and neo-colonialism can be thought through this understanding of sovereign power and biopower, arriving at desaparición social and creating a context for the emergence of zones of exclusion in La Matanza. The very place name, La Matanza, literally meaning “The Slaughter,” refers to the mass murder of the indigenous Querandíes that began in 1536 with Spanish colonial expansion into the pampas9 outward from what became the port city of Buenos Aires (Foderá 2002). This genocide could be thought of as a sovereign eradication of the other for colonial proliferation; the power to “make die” in order to “let live,” where racism functions as an enabler of killing without sacrifice to increase the health of a population deemed politically qualified by those invested with sovereign power: in this case, the Spanish conquistador Diego Mendoza who began to campaign to remove the Querandíes. The destruction of the other seems to suggest a colonial prefiguration of eugenics discourses where the life of the other is declared to be “life devoid of value” (Agamben 138:1995), in so far as it not only has no purpose in increasing the fitness and hygiene of the sovereign, but its death and exclusion would increase the health and vitality of “the good race” the politically qualified sector, the European colonists.
Though located firmly within a modern independent nation state, a similar operation of the power to make die in order to invigorate the purity of the sovereign occurred during the Guerra Sucia, the Dirty War, with the simultaneously extrajudicial and state-sponsored torture, execution and disappearance of Argentine domestic civilians. Cold War discourses of dismantling leftwing power informed this project, where U.S. State Department-backed paramilitaries throughout South America including the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance exterminated unionists, students, leftwing political activists and others allegedly involved in subversive activity. The Dirty War could perhaps be conceived of as an eruption of sovereign power in the midst of the transition to biopower, a less than universally consistent or linear process with aspects of both processes present in different contexts. The logic of the sovereign’s extermination of the indigenous centered on the elimination of the undesirable other as a means of increasing the health and supremacy of the politically and racially qualified while the disappearance of civilians, originally sacred, self-same citizens of the Argentine nation became a new other, the internal enemy. At this time, Argentine citizens were reduced to bare life specifically because of their politics and the threat they posed to the sovereign; however the desaparición also occurred according to a discourse that operated on the principles of biopolitical race war. Following Foucault’s formulation, “As more and more of our number die, the race to which we belong will become purer”(1997:257) such a discourse is observable within the politically motivated extermination of Argentine citizens during the Dirty War. Racialization has erupted here in political terms, as suspected subversives were murdered by the thousands under the pretense of restoring order, and eviscerating the threat of leftists assuming positions of power or having significant influence in civil society. In other words, the regime of sovereign power under the dictatorship was “purified” by removing any threat to its totalitarian rule.
This exercise of sovereign power in Argentina occurred during the dictator’s Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. The National Reorganization Process, often referred to as El Proceso, is characterized by a seizure of political and military power, disabling the legislative branch and abolishing preexisting legal protection of freedom of speech and of the press. The economic reforms instituted under El Proceso anticipated those of neoliberalism, including the privatization of state industry and the solicitation of foreign investment to fund social programs as opposed to state subsidy of infrastructure (Foderá 2002). The period of the dictatorship can be thought of as an interruption of biopower, in which sovereign power re-emerged and made way for the drastic shifts in Argentine social, political and economic formations brought about by neoliberal structural adjustment which in turn brought about a more total and intensified instantiation of biopower.
Nearly 400 years after slaughter of the Querandíes, La Matanza rapidly urbanized and became a hub of industrial production, sustaining the local economy and a massive workforce. Under neoliberal structural adjustment and austerity, production facilities were shut down and jobs were outsourced or altogether eliminated, inverting the biopolitical proliferation of national economic and social hygiene that was characteristic of the development project especially under Perón. The reversal of these discourses and policies created a large population of unemployed among the former industrial workforce, who have been abandoned and excluded. The rationalization of the workforce is a function of biopower, as the smaller sector of existing employment becomes more precious, where the middle and upper classes are smaller and wealthier domestically and globally. What has taken shape is a biopolitical process of making live and letting die, a colonial continuum of sovereign power and biopower, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Each of these processes, leading up to desaparición social under biopower, has included at its foundation, a project of purification in the Foucaultian sense. This genealogy has moved from the literal slaughter of the indigenous to proliferate the colonial project, and the extra-judicial murder of those accused of political subversion as a means of ensuring social and political control under the dictatorship, to the structural exclusion of those whose labor and participation in civil society has become obsolete or redundant to the neoliberal regime. The most recent manifestation of biopower is akin to the neoliberal discourse of economic austerity, where the public sector and state-subsidized programs are slashed in the name of improving the economy, though for Argentina, such policy has actually resulted in financial and social crisis. As biopower and the neoliberal model intensify one another, it seems, almost paradoxically, that the concept of purity has become all the more relevant. Austerity measures such as reduction of the workforce, de-industrialization, outsourcing production and dramatic public spending cuts seem to coincide with this discourse on the level of the Argentine state and economy. This set of relations could also be interpreted as a reaction to the experience of political corruption and unrest, military coup and dictatorship, economic depressions, intervention from outside, i.e. foreign investment and foreign war10.
These destabilizing forces have perhaps served the intensification of biopower, especially biopower that is mediated by structural adjustment. In the case of the rationalization of the workforce, it seems that notion of racialization materialize in socio-economic terms. The population is divided between the employed and the unemployed and also along class lines, delimiting symbolic and spatial dimensions of biopower and separating those who have full access to the resources necessary to sustain biological life through the market and privatized services, and those who are institutionally denied their basic needs as well as assuming active positions within civil society. Upon the loss of political qualification as productive bodies contributing to the national economy, whose life and labor power are no longer of use to the global market, the unemployed have come to embody bare life. In this way, a historical lineage of sovereign power and biopower can be traced from La Matanza of 1536, El Proceso and El Modelo as well as desaparición and desaparición social. Like the indigenous and the desaparecidos, the desocupados are the new internal others who can be killed but not sacrificed, whose death and displacement occurs in silence and anonymity, in the villas, under the shadows of disused or repurposed industrial infrastructure. They too have been disappeared.
This double loss of life-sustaining employment and life-ensuring social support and public service functions in such a way as to both exclude and suspend the poor sectors of the Argentine population in a state of abandonment. It is this dynamic that typifies desaparición social; as the politically qualified minority, is made to live, the other is let die as direct result and perhaps as more active, structured process than is suggested by the phraseology of “letting” die. To be disappeared, not in the sense of being illegally executed, but rather, socially excluded is not simply a passive slippage, but a form of entrapment, a ban that simultaneously serves the purpose of containment and exile.
In response to their shared experiences of exclusion, the MTD-LM have created a community space, El Centro para la Educación y Formación de Cultura Communitaria (Center for Education and Formation of Communitarian Culture) at the virtual nexus of these processes, geographically, historically and politically. EL CEFoCC, like the compañeros’ subject positions as desocupados, are formed but also made possible by the power they are seeking to subvert. This phenomenon might be described by Judith Butler as a “radically conditioned form of agency” that “exceeds the power by which it is enabled”(1997:15) and is one of the possible spaces for agency that navigates the space of the ban. As Soledad explains,
When we became unemployed the state did not give us a response, the political parties did not give us a response, the unions did not give us a response and many times our own families could not understand what was happening and what the consequences would be. As a result, self-management was the only possibility we had in order to live (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006).
Soledad speaks to the experience of being excluded by the political establishment, of disappearing from their constituency, of becoming disqualified from participation in these apparatuses and experiencing biopolitical foreclosure of agency. In this way, the only possible avenue for action in her view is a radical reorientation of power.
When I asked Soledad if she felt that there was any way by which the MTD-LM could make use of official political institutions as a means of meeting the demands or drawing in resources for their projects, she answered bluntly and plainly:
We are at a point now where we don’t even talk to the government. There is a situation right now where the Mafias run the country. It is a complex politics. No one can say that the current government is doing a poor job of dealing with the human rights crimes of the past, of trying people who were part of the dictatorship, but that human rights at the present moment are not being respected. The distribution of wealth is worse than ever, the disparity and the concentration of wealth has increased in the past few years almost 30%. We have been to many different governmental meetings and have talked to them about solidarity economy and they seem interested but no help has come (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006).
Here again, a direct connection is made between the state violence committed against Argentine citizens during the dictatorship and the growing disparities in resources that constitutes social exclusion. Soledad explicitly speaks to the disenfranchisement and political displacement that the MTD-LM has experienced as a result of what she and other compañeros perceive to be an irreconcilable degree of corruption at every level, from local punteros up through the president. This disenfranchisement depoliticizes the unemployed and pushes them closer to bare life. It is clear from Soledad’s terse comments that in her view, the government is an organ of violence, guilty of continuing on in a politics based on human rights violations, despite the present campaign by the Kirchner regime to call attention to the atrocities committed during the dictatorship of 1976-83, including the establishment of a national holiday to mourn the loss of life that occurred during Argentina’s Dirty War.
Soledad’s commentary on the issue echoes that of Fernando, a younger compañero of the MTD-LM. During the 30th anniversary of the dictatorship, Fernando recounts that president Kirchner appeared on television in a public address in which he denounced the crimes of the past, making reference to his compañeros desaparecidos- his “disappeared comrades.” As if equally disturbed by the memory as his recalling, Fernando practically spat out his words when quoting Kirchner, visibly disgusted with what he perceived to be a gross appeal to cultural memory opportunistically instrumentalized by the current government. Fernando explained that his indignation arose from what he saw as a propaganda campaign on the part of the Kirchner regime not only to distance itself from any connection to the past atrocities, but to gloss over current contemporary instances of human rights abuse, including the implementation of neoliberal policy that has led to an intensification of poverty and chronic unemployment. This denunciation of the taking of life by past dictators who enacted sovereign power, aligns well with a contemporary biopolitical logic; the current regime can simultaneously move away from the active, systematic murder of alleged internal enemies and can instead, allow those who are not politically qualified or economically productive, to effectively disappear.
As is observable with neighborhood organizations such as the MTD-LM, the new desaparecidos have attempted to respond to state failure and abandonment by attempting to create a form of more direct democracy that is fundamentally lacking in the post-dictator political regimes of Argentina, and in this way, it seems that these struggles have been the outcropping of marginalization, produced by a need and desire for more inclusive, participatory and horizontal forms of political, economic and social organization. The MTD-LM have worked since 1995 to realize such ideals. In a conversation with Soledad in which I asked her about her personal motivation to work with the MTD-LM she replied,
Wherever we go we find people who have experiences of trying to build a better world, who want diversity, that dream of diverse worlds in which we are all able to feel included. A world where we are not excluded, just as we were excluded as workers in Argentina in the 1990s when the economic policies of this stage of capitalism left thousands upon thousands in the street. This was shown as one stage in economic history but truthfully it was a genocide. For workers the only way to reclaim one’s dignity and transform their reality, is through work. And when they said you’re not needed anymore this was a death sentence to us and our children.” (Bordegaray 2006).
Soledad’s commentary raises the notion of inhabiting different “world” or “worlds” that could serve as zones of inclusion as a direct response to desaparición social. EL CEFoCC is perhaps one such space. Soledad comments on both her individual and collective experience of economic exclusion and social death, and expresses a will to somehow intervene in this process. This desire to resist exclusion speaks both to the value of autonomous spaces that are created in opposition to marginalizing forces and also touches on a need to maintain social connections to other communities and constituencies that can proliferate and maintain life amongst themselves. Perhaps then, there is a critical interdependence between social exclusion and the formation of constituencies that are in some way autonomous, capable becoming zones of inclusion organized by counter-discourse. As David Graeber suggests, “then the question becomes how do we theorize a citizenship outside the state.” (2005:68) The MTD-LM seems to be experimenting with this very possibility and I would like to present some of the ways by which they are constructing a counter-reality within and against preexisting structures.
The MTD-LM will not simply be “let die” and have gone about actively combating desaparición social in several direct ways. Firstly, they have created a space, EL CEFoCC, that could be thought of as a zone of inclusion in which they have fundamentally modified capitalist relations of production through collective ownership and operation of microenterprise, self-managing the bakery, textile shop and literature distribution facility which has served the purpose of not only creating jobs for over 40 previously unemployed people, but also provides funding for the continuation of the project as a whole, and its other components- the adult free school and kindergarten as well as general upkeep of the community center. This inclusive space exists within Barrio La Juanita, where neighborhood residents in addition to the workers and compañeros of the MTD-LM can come together for a range of activities, some overtly political, others educational, but primarily El CEFoCC is a social space where a sense of community and solidarity is palpable; on any given day upwards of one hundred individuals may have come through, not only to exchange goods or services but also to share time together. As a participant in the everyday lifeworld of El CEFoCC, it was clear to me that daily exchanges between compañeros and community members seemed to work against the alienation experienced by the unemployed and the excluded. Proceeding from immensely constraining material and cultural conditions, this project hardly allows biopolitical subjects to escape or transcend the greater hegemonies of biopower and neoliberalism, but instead offers some strategies by which these grassroots activists and community members have attempted to survive desaparición social. Undoubtedly, this group also reproduces a kind of biopolitical “making live” as they put their own agendas into practice and seek to proliferate their own lifeworld. In this way, their efforts do not undo the sovereign ban, or offer an exodus from exclusionary structures but begin to intervene at a local level.
Another integral component of the struggle to resist desaparición enacted by the MTD-LM has occurred through their having generated a network of allies, advocates and benefactors by which they have materially sustained their projects but also created a visibility for themselves. This networking has in turn served the function of promoting their organization, increasing their opportunities to continue build their base of support and in this sense, the efforts of the MTD-LM to create a space that is in a sense, autonomous, are contingent upon their making of diverse connections. These affiliations include charitable humanitarian non-government organizations, Zapatistas, university professors and students, avant-garde fashion designers of fair trade clothing lines, international volunteers from numerous countries, the Landless Rural Workers of Brazil, eminent Argentine pastry chefs, the National Movement of Recovered Factories, media outlets both national and international, independent and mainstream, to name a few of los otros that compose the nosotros that is suggested by the MTD’s slogan cuando con otros somos nosotros (together with others, we become ourselves). This relation, of autonomy that is made possible through a radical form of inclusion and association with other entities will be discussed in depth in later sections, and is at the heart of the MTD-LM’s ongoing efforts to move out of exclusion, to interrupt the biopolitics of unemployment, austerity and exposure to death, come out of desaparición, to reappear.
III. (Nos)otros: Autonomy and Association
The compañeros of the MTD-LM make constant reference to the notion of autonomy as guiding principle of their practice and as a goal that they strive to attain politically. This concept for the MTD-LM at first appears rather abstract and its unfolding within the lifeworld of the organization exists in a complicated tension between autonomy in a literal sense and association with external agents and entities. The desire to obtain autonomy seems to derive from a common experience of social exclusion, political disenfranchisement, abandonment by the state as well as a will to intervene in these processes by creating alternative practices and lifeways. In this way, autonomy could be thought of as an ideal that organizes practice, a product of the history of desaparición and a will to move out of this lineage. The discourse of autonomy and the survival strategies deployed by the MTD-LM in their struggle for autonomy seem to constitute a desire for departure from the biopolitical binary of making live and letting die, or perhaps to fortify their own lifeworld in the face of state abandonment.
The MTD-LM have distanced themselves from the state, the local political apparatus and official unions and parties and have begun a set of concrete practices within their own space that appear qualitatively different from those of traditional capitalism and modern biopower. The MTD-LM participate in oppositional and differential practices through self-managed production, educational programs based on principles of popular pedagogy, horizontal and collective decision-making and also by providing an inclusive and open community space. These are some of the ways in which the MTD-LM moves closer to autonomy. The MTD-LM of course also interact directly with capital, producing bread and pastry for a very localized market but at the same time exporting fair trade textiles for a global market. As I will suggest later, the MTD-LM do not consider themselves to be economically autonomous, but rather, as participating differentially in capitalism.
In fact, an ongoing struggle for autonomy is made possible by and highly contingent upon their participation in such a network. For example, in establishing El Centro para la Educacion y Formacion de Cultura Communitaria in Barrio La Juanita, the MTD-LM have taken up a struggle in order to qualitatively modify the way in which social and economic exchanges take place. The projects and the political discourses that shape them have not simply originated from within the walls of the community center, but rather, could be viewed as the emergent properties of myriad inputs from outside, as is suggested by the slogan, cuando con otros somos nosotros.
While this relationship between autonomy and association may seem paradoxical, it is precisely this tension which enables the MTD-LM to realize their project. To support themselves and the development of their own establishment, the MTD-LM have linked into a network that sustains these practices through their reception of financial assistance from various sources including NGOs, as well as skills, strategies and ideological concepts from other organizations. In this way, the boundaries between the constructs of nosotros and otros- between self and other, exterior and interior have become permeable. For the MTD-LM, autonomy from oppressive and exclusionary processes has come as a result of their participation in an alternative and differential nosotros: one that allows them to survive and to create differential lifeways. This section will examine the ways in which the MTD-LM have both broken with and seek to distance themselves from external paradigms and power structures while remaining critically tied into certain aspects of the system, through traditional and non-traditional channels. The MTD-LM have involved themselves in a network of various agents and organizations beyond their own, allowing them not only to survive, but also informing and shaping their practice. El CEFoCC can be thought of as the geographical site within and around which many of these exchanges take place, the location of an internal construction of nosotros that is made possible by these interactions with otros.
Founded in 1995, the MTD-LM was one of the first piquetero groups in the province of Buenos Aires, formerly capable of rallying thousands of unemployed activists for roadblocks and successfully garnering state subsidies from local government officials (Rodgers 2004). The MTD-LM decided to cease receiving welfare subsidies in 1999, which caused the organization to fragment and all but dissolve, leaving only six compañeros out of over 600. At this time, neighboring piquetero groups the Corriente Clasista y Combativa and the Federación de Trabajadores de la Tierra and La Vivienda y el Habitat, whose membership grew to 10,000, absorbed many defectors from the MTD-LM11 (Isman 2004). The sentiments that brought about this transformative decision will be unpacked in this section as a means of critically examining the discourse of autonomy within the MTD-LM.
As became apparent during the course of several interviews with these founding compañeros, including Toty, Soledad and Jorge, the motivation for this dramatic shift in practice was prompted by a desire to break with asistencialismo or political clientelism and a dependency relationship with the state apparatus that they locate as the cause of their exclusion and unemployment. The rejection of welfare plans could be seen as a decisive shift in the politics and the lifeworld of the MTD-LM, a rupture that confronted the organization with a series of risks, but enabled a certain degree of autonomy and opened up other avenues for survival and for agency.
The primary risk of rejecting welfare subsidies, especially for the unemployed and under-employed, is in essence a question of survival. To have severed ties to what little economic support existed for the compañeros, (corrupt as they may believe the system to be) posed a threat to their very source of sustenance and life. This dilemma immediately raises the question of what alternatives exist (or could be created) to ensure the satisfaction of basic needs in the absence of employment, social services and now, in lieu of welfare subsidies. The MTD-LM have gone about responding to the risk of death through seizure of infrastructure and the establishment of self-managed production. In doing so, they are searching for a means of that goes beyond asistencialismo, and for this reason highly value the notion of autonomy.
The second risk of rejecting welfare plans is political. The organization itself nearly folded and invariably, with the exit of so many former compañeros and such a drastic breakage with previously shared political practice, the preexisting ties to other piquetero groups were damaged. Not only then has the MTD-LM dissolved its connections to the support of the state (meager as it has been) but also, largely collapsed its greater social network. If self-managed production is a possible mode of intervention in unemployment and unsatisfied basic needs, then the development of an alternative support network is the strategy of maintaining political autonomy from the state while ensuring survival. These political and economic methods and tactics will be discussed in greater depth throughout this chapter. The presentation of these interventions will be framed by an explication of the MTD-LM’s construction of a new nosotros after the dissolution of the old, and the establishment of an new support network composed not of the state, political parties, labor unions or formerly allied political organizations but a different and diverse convergence of otros.
Historically, interactions between the state and organized labor unions and more recently, between local functionaries of the state and neighborhood organizations of the unemployed, have instituted clientelism as a major governing mechanism within Argentine politics and society. A brief examination of these historical relationships could perhaps clarify the contemporary status of asistencialismo, providing a possible context for the MTD-LM’s movement away from these relations. From the implementation of Justicialismo under Juan Perón, the Argentine welfare state seems to have functioned in such a way as to maintain social control, preventing mass uprisings, mollifying political dissent and ensuring widespread approval of the state through promoting social security. As Perón stated in 1944, “if the economic order introduced by the state develops production, distribution and circulation, and is directed to the maintenance of social order
and the prosperity of each social group, only then shall social problems be appropriately
solved” (Rousselot in Usami 2004:251). Such a governmental modus operandi speaks directly to the linkage between biopolitical nature of Argentine welfare and clientelism. In this case, the Perón regime had as clients the Argentine workforce and its labor unions.
Japanese political economist Koichi Usami outlines the way in which the majority of the Argentine workforce was supported by welfare measures as Juan Perón came to power, pointing to the fact that between 1944 when Perón was Secretary of Labor and Social Security through 1955 at the time of his deposal, public pension plans provided coverage for working people in the nearly every sector including that of agriculture and industry as well as both self-employed and professional workers. These policies continued even as the Arumburu military government came to power in 1956, broadening these plans to include homemaking service workers. (2004:219)
Here, a clear biopolitical mechanism of protecting and proliferating the life of the politically qualified, in this case the formally employed, can be seen at work. The Perón government demonstrated significant support for organized labor, placing the power to allocate pensions and health insurance directly in the hands of trade unions. The Perónist economic policy of Import Substitution Industrialization and the increase in the industrial workforce that it produced led to a remarkable increase in organized labor where union membership expanded from 500,000 in 1945 to 3 million in 1951 (Santos Martínez qtd. in Usami 2004:224). In this way, the Perón regime maintained its patronage through a characteristically populist, though simultaneously biopolitical welfare system. It is important to note however, that even as Perónist welfare measures covered virtually all of the Argentine workforce, those without formal employment were denied these benefits, creating a category of excluded subjects in the unemployed. This biopolitically disqualified sector would only expand, particularly in the later decades of the 20th century, as public industry was eroded under structural adjustment. These policies made way for private corporate expansion, eliminating the number of formal, secure jobs with living wages as well as social services that these working people provided and also benefited from. In this way, Argentine citizens lacking such employment were caught in a double bind.
During the era of the Dictatorship (1976-83) the Perónist legacy of social welfare and support for organized labor was interrupted, and a process of dismantling both the welfare state and the institutional power of unions ensued. Rather than engendering clientelist relations with organized labor, unions were stripped of their powers for allocating pensions, insurance and other subsides and furthermore, union activists were often persecuted, kidnapped, tortured or disappeared. Instead of wielding political power, union leaders and militants were a direct target of the Dirty War.
Beginning in the 80s and escalating in the 90s, Import Substitution was also eroded by trade liberalization, as per the IMF provision of removing tariffs on cheap imports. This structural adjustment policy forced the Argentine economy to become market-oriented, exporting products rather than selling them domestically. As Graciela Monteagudo explains (2006:2), “the previous model, based on the manufacturing industry, was replaced by a model based on services and financial capital” eliciting a de-industrialization and reduction of the workforce, which in turn led to de-unionization and unemployment. As the post-dictatorship governments of Duhalde and Menem complied with austerity measures suggested by the IMF, privatization of public industry drove union membership and employment down even further, summarily ending the type of clientelist relations that existed between the state and organized labor during the Perón regime; trade union membership plunged by 42.6 per cent from 1985 to 1995, and unemployment peaked in the mid 90s at 15 percent (Usami 2004:232).
Along with this dramatic shift in the Argentine political economy and civil society, the neoliberal model transformed the mechanisms by which political clientelism operates. Because unions ceased to hold their central position as mediators of social welfare, what resulted was, as Gabriela Delamata (2004: 15) suggests, a “general social withdrawal into local spaces and neighborhood organizations.” Thus, with de-unionization there was also “a reshaping of territorial structures as the unemployed and the poor joined the ranks of the urban periphery…” (2004:15). Under the restructured Argentine welfare system of the neoliberal period, state subsidies usually in the form of small, monthly sums of cash, are allocated by local mayors called punteros to individuals, families and neighborhood organizations, including piquetero groups. What remained from the Perón regime in terms of the clientelist relations between large, centralized governing bodies such as the state and labor unions now exist in a radically decentralized and diffuse exchanges at the level of the neighborhood.
Delamata (2004:14) explains, “Eduardo Duhalde, Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires (1991-99) built a strong patronage network by co-opting local leaders and delivering social assistance plans that, in the absence of other institutional assistance, became a main source of material support and of new collective identities”(2004:14). Here Delamata suggests that austerity and de-unionization not only fundamentally altered Argentine political economy, but also produced a social and existential transformation in the experience of unemployed Argentine citizens. Delamata continues, “Confined to the neighborhood, an identity based on the appeal to the ‘basic needs’ of ‘clients’ replaced the ‘old’ Perónist identity of ‘workers’ endowed with a set of acquired collective rights”(2004:14). In this renegotiated manifestation of clientelism the unemployed have been made into politically disqualified subjects by their lack of utility under neoliberalism. At the same time, their survival is in many ways dependent upon the same political power structures by which they have been excluded. The MTD-LM describe these clientelist relations as engendering what they refer to as a “culture of survival” where the unemployed maintain their position of dependence and subordination by relying on a welfare system that barely sustains life, but also requires political compliance. As Soledad recalls, the allocation subsidies are often contingent on “showing up at the support rally of this or that politician or a demonstration by this or that neighborhood organization leader” (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006).
The MTD-LM informed Carlos March that they believe that asistencialismo “points down a path in the opposite direction of recovering a culture of work” (2006:91) and for this reason, they have severed ties with the welfare system. 12 This strategy is in this way bound up with retaining their collective identity as workers despite their subjection to structural unemployment, which is implied by their insistence upon the name trabajadores desocupados.13 These processes of simultaneous exclusion and subjection under neoliberal governmentality as well as the concurrent marginalization and cooptation by political and economic structures, seems to have driven the MTD-LM’s desire for autonomy from the state as well as labor unions, parties and other piquetero groups, and their analysis of these institutions as no longer viable avenues for doing politics or organizing society.
The notion of autonomy has great personal significance to many of the compañeros and seems to be at the core of their movement towards redefining a new collective subjectivity. Many of the compañeros locate the inception of the struggle for autonomy, both symbolically and materially, at the moment of disjuncture with the welfare system. When I asked Soledad why the MTD-LM had chosen to reject welfare subsidies, she began her reply stating, “The state uses perverse formulas of domination and we see them everyday here because we are in a neighborhood where 70% of the people depend on planes trabajar such as Plan Vida and Proyecto Manos por La Obra and we see them as perverse tools”(Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006).
Much in the same way that the majority of the formally employed were once covered by Perónist social welfare, a majority of the unemployed now depend on welfare subsidies as their primary or single form of income. Soledad’s comments convey that the very notion of calling welfare subsidies planes trabajar (work plans) as they are so “perversely” titled, is illustrative of a disturbing irony that these plans have been made available concurrently with the disappearance of employment. The self-contradictory rhetoric of the neoliberal welfare system in Argentina is further highlighted by the specific ways in which these planes trabajar function. Plan Vida is a food distribution program that operates at the provincial level. It was established in the 1990s under the supervision of the Provincial Council for Family and Human Development, with Chiche Hilda Duhalde, the wife of former president Duhalde, as the honorary director general of the program (Usami 2004:230). In the province of Buenos Aires Plan Vida has been allocated through punteros as well as church figures and others with positions of community leadership, often in return for political favors and patronage. The system is set up in such a way that these figures in the community allocate foodstuffs and other necessities such as medicine and toiletries to “qualifying” families, but this qualification is often at the discretion of the local distributor and for this reason results in a high degree of corruption (Usami 2004:230). Literally then, “life plans” are contingent upon subordination to biopower and the arbitrary will of those who wield it at a local level.
Jefes y Jefas de Hogar (Leaders of the Home) is another welfare program that has been implemented in the province of Buenos Aires. A description of this program given by the Argentine Ministry of Work states that “The Jefes de Hogar began in 2002 as a campaign of social inclusion for more than 2 million women and men affected by a crisis without precedent in our country” that will “promote a culture of work and increase employability” (http://www.trabajo.gov.ar/jefes/index.asp). The alleged attributes of this program however, perplexingly enough, seem to run counter to the way in which the Argentine welfare state historically operates and also directly contradicts the lived experience of the MTD-LM, almost parodying the exact words on the matter. The description goes on to explain that “The Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Card permits beneficiaries to withdraw 150 pesos from ATMS at any bank in the country.”
(http://www.trabajo.gov.ar/jefes/index.asp) Minimum wage in Argentina is around 600 pesos a month, and yet the Ministry of Work suggests that less than a quarter of that sum could somehow result in “social inclusion.” Furthermore, it remains unclear as to how a program that provides cash from an ATM intervenes at the structural level as a means of or increases any individual’s employability in such circumstances. These contradictions illustrate certain aspects of the impasse created by the neoliberal Argentine welfare system, and point to possible motivations for the refusal to associate on the part of the MTD-LM.
Soledad continues her account of the decision to reject welfare subsidies, emphasizing the corrupt manner in which they are allocated, and identifying self-managed production as the only alternative to apparently dire circumstances:
In the municipality of 2 million with 70 percent unemployment, the movements that were working in that area had to decide who would eat or who would not eat, who would get the plan or not. So we lost a lot of comrades when we were trying to find a way of creating jobs. We lost a lot of members during that time because they went and got their unemployment subsidies from someone else and were then told that they could not associate with us, because we don’t give out plans. So we had to figure out how to self-manage our own work, to show that we were autonomous, that we were able to do this.
Soledad’s anecdote speaks to the divisiveness of localized welfare allocation and the manner by which movements and organizations are fragmented and co-opted, and others further excluded and disenfranchised by the machinations of clientelism. Soledad also draws a direct connection between the suddenly deepened marginalization experienced by the MTD-LM as a direct result of the welfare system operating within their milieu, and the way in which the remaining compañeros saw the creation of an autonomous space for self-managed work as a recourse. The discourse of autonomy within the MTD-LM can be located at its inception as both a mode of resistance against the system of clientelism and a necessary response to the crisis that it caused their movement.
In a chapter of Cuando con otros somos nosotros entitled Para superar la cultura de sobrevivencia, (Going beyond the culture of survival) Mariel Fitz Patrik asks Toty a question similar to the one I asked Soledad. In his response Toty explains, “We are in the heart of Gran Buenos Aires, where clientelism is the manner of securing votes” (2006: 122). Here, Toty also locates coercive patronage relations as a prompting the MTD-LM’s disengagement from the welfare system. The operation of corrupt punteros and police form a kind of “para-statal power, characteristic of mafias” (Fitz Patrik 2006: 122). The state, in this view, is not a coherent central entity and perhaps even less so in light of neoliberalism. Instead, what amounts to state or federal power is in actuality materialized throughout various institutions that are also capable of enacting their own arbitrary authority. The allocation of welfare subsidies by piquetero and other neighborhood organizations have been used as mechanisms by which these groups maintain membership and loyalty, requiring that their members appear for roll call to keep their names on the list of those receiving welfare plans, or pledge a certain number of hours that they will work each week. Here, the power dynamics of clientelism are reproduced by piquetero organizations themselves, motivating the MTD-LM to move away from these hierarchic dependency relationships. It is important to note that clientelism and political patronage relations are not a recent phenomenon created by the conditions of neoliberalism, but rather, they have seemly changed form as power structures have been reconfigured. It seems that the relations at play between the state, punteros, neighborhood organizations and welfare subjects are the neoliberal manifestation of mechanisms that were also in operation under the Perón regime with labor unions and political parties and formally employed persons.
Given this longstanding history of corruption and cooptation by various institutions in which MTD-LM refuse to participate, Toty declares quite bluntly: “we do not trade votes for food” (Flores, Personal Interview 2006). This statement, which was also the slogan of the MTD-LM during the last local election conveys a concise, militant rejection of clientelism, yet such a position has not come without cost for the compañeros and their families. It was at this point of crisis born of severance with the welfare system that the remaining six compañeros began looking to others outside of their minute contingent. These compañeros went about seeking material support first and foremost, but also new political strategies. Immediately following the near-dissolution of their organization, they began collaborating with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The MTD-LM established affinity with the Madres given their commonality of political praxis; the Madres, like the MTD-LM take an active stance against cooptation by the state and have refused the compensation offered them by the government and also have an official policy against voting.
The relations between these groups proved to be one of mutual aid; the Madres included the MTD-LM in political activities such as their weekly demonstrations and other public actions, and also offered their Universidad Popular as temporary de facto headquarters. Compañeros also attended free university classes at this time and some of them such as Soledad, earned a degree. Working with an established grassroots organization such as the Madres and participating in the daily life of the Universidad Popular allowed the MTD-LM access to ideas, individuals and other organizations that they previously would had not engaged with. It was during this time that the compañeros became aware of other contemporary anti-globalization struggles such as that of the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, and were inspired and informed by these examples.
Contact with students and professors at the university also stimulated a process of reimagining theory and practice for the MTD-LM. As Soledad informed me, it was through these interactions that the compañeros first learned of Free Trade, and operations of institutions such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and international campaigns of resistance in against it. In light of their learning, the MTD-LM re-contextualized their own activity as continuous with these struggles. The Madres also facilitated contact between the MTD-LM and charitable NGOS such as Poder Ciudadano and Fundación Avina, who would later offer financial assistance to the MTD-LM and help to further expand their support network. The MTD-LM observed and would later employ the Madres’ practice of associating with local and global media as a means of generating visibility for their organization, and expanding their base of support. At the same time, the compañeros helped assemble the bookstore and café at the university, took up custodial work maintaining the grounds of the institution and also actively allied with the Madres’ politically, joining their actions in solidarity and assisting in their efforts.
Given their experiences inhabiting the lifeworld of the Madres, the MTD-LM felt that in order to work more effectively toward autonomy, they too would need a physical space for their activities. Following the successful examples of the seizure and occupation of land and infrastructure demonstrated by the Landless Workers Movement and Italian anarchist squatter communities whom they learned of during their time with the Madres, the MTD-LM decided to occupy an abandoned elementary school in Barrio La Juanita, in which they would establish El CEFoCC. In September of 2001, compañeros and their families began staying at the occupied space twenty-four hours a day, clearing it of refuse and debris and rehabilitating it structurally. The compañeros found the abandoned space to be completely emptied of all furniture and equipment, having been ransacked for any salvageable materials. As Toty recounts in the opening chapter of Cuando con otros somos nosotros, what the compañeros initially encountered was a verdadero basural a total garbage dump, demonstrating signs that the abandoned structure had been used as an aguantadero, a space hidden from law enforcement officials, where illicit activity, such as drug-use and distribution was taking place. The compañeros decided to take up round-the-clock shifts living in the space and cleaning it up as best they could. According to Toty, at this time “survival was an art” wherein the compañeros and their families began rationing what little resources they had, while the sales from their self-published bulletin barely covered the costs of the most essential food staples. (Flores 2006: 32)
The MTD-LM along with their children began fashioning small handicrafts out of salvaged and found materials such as arboles de vida, “trees of life” made of wire cable upon which the childrens’ finger-painted drawings were hung like leaves, and ashtrays made of discarded bone from the neighborhood butcher. That November, the compañeros began producing and selling baked goods and investing every cent into the project. With an oven of mud and earth built by the compañeros and a pizza oven donated by a neighbor, the MTD-LM began baking and selling bread. By January 26th, 2002, in the midst of the national economic crisis, the MTD-LM inaugurated El Proyecto CEFoCC.
With the help of neighbors and friends, the compañeros eventually attained some equilibrium of investment and return on their baked goods and finally settled on a recipe for bread that ensured the profitability of the microenterprise. Toty remembers a feeling of amazement and euphoria that he and other compañeros experienced in observing that day after day, the bread was turning out uniformly and selling consistently. The MTD-LM refer to this as the milagro de la multiplicacion de los panes,“the miraculous multiplication of bread.” Toty recounts that in the days that this “miracle” came to pass, a massive branch from the one hundred year old eucalyptus tree in the open air quadrangle of El CEFoCC, fell to the ground in a storm, guaranteeing an abundance of wood for the time being, “another miracle.”(2006:35) Toty observes, “this internal struggle of ours, between reason and feeling, was part of this nosotros that we have today, that gave us a perspective on the world that we found to be totally distinct from that which we had in the time before the crisis of 2001”(2006:36).
Once such a balance in investment and return on the baked goods had been achieved, the MTD-LM began selling bread at a “social price” of 1 peso per kilogram, the lowest price in the neighborhood. In order do so, the MTD-LM spent much of 2002 selling bread at Barrio La Juanita, the Universidad de las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo and in the feria de trueque, a bartering fair set up by marginalized sectors of the population that is organized into various clubes de trueque who use their own currency called creditos to purchase and trade goods of all kinds. The trueque was especially prevalent during the economic crisis of 2001 and subsequent depression of 2002. Profits from these endeavors along with a donation from the Canadian Embassy solicited through the Madres on behalf of El CEFoCC, funded the expansion of the microenterprise and the purchase of necessary equipment to ensure its functioning and to pay the compañeros that assumed more permanent roles as bakers. According to Toty’s anecdotes, the bakery was, during these times, always in danger of closing, especially with the national economy in such dire straits, and with poorer sectors experiencing a heightened level of indigence and scarcity, where two thirds of the population had fallen below the poverty line (Rossmeissl 2006).
For the MTD-LM, the realization of this founding microenterprise in Proyecto CEFoCC marked a significant turning point for compañeros; to be able to feed themselves as well as others in the neighborhood outside the cooperative, in a time of crisis. Toty sees this founding activity of project CEFoCC as part of a larger, decentralized social movement in economia solidaria, (2006:38) or solidarity economy, in concert with other grassroots responses to poverty, depression and the failure of the establishment to maintain life and wellbeing. These activities, which have sustained communities during the most difficult epochs in Argentina’s recent history from the dictatorship through the economic crisis of 2001, have emerged as both a means of survival and as acts of resistance against social and political exclusion. “Paradigms that fall to pieces at any moment where everything is put into question are not at all easy to assimilate with” Toty explains of the precarious political and economic structures that he has watched rise and fall in a short period of time. Despite this almost normative uncertainty which has necessitated creative responses from below, in Toty’s experience, these points of critical instability have given rise to novel social formations. Of such responses, Toty submits that “the potential to transform reality is palpable in every space that is collectively constructed space. The popular assemblies, the unemployed movements, recovered factories, cultural centers, public plazas, cooperative kitchens were the experimentation centers of a collective response which constructed a different kind of nosotros”(Flores 2006:38).
As is demonstrated by these transformations in the lifeworld and praxis of the MTD-LM, the rejection of welfare plans and the struggle for autonomy marked a turning point for the organization, reconstituting their conceptual boundaries and altering the course of their development as a movement. In many ways, this turn away from clientelism completely redefined the MTD-LM and reoriented their project, necessitating the development of an alternative space in which to generate practice and an alternative support network. Despite their often militant proclamations of severance with oppressive external structures, autonomy for the MTD-LM is not based in isolationism; on the contrary, autonomy for the MTD-LM is based in their having broken from certain processes and structures, such as the welfare state, only to reorient themselves in an alternative set of relations. This possibility for is based on the ability to choose with whom to associate, with whom to relate and integrate into their network and with what and whom to attempt a dislocation. Even in their struggle to decrease their participation in structures of exclusion, the MTD-LM are still inextricably enmeshed in both local and global processes, and yet they have also moved away from a dependency relationship with the state and with established power structures that operate on austerity and scarcity. As demonstrated by their initial interaction with the Madres, associations con otros differ from dependency relationships and clientelism as they form connections that are in some way mutually beneficial to all parties; in this sense they are productive and even creative relationships that result in new possibilities and open spaces for further production.
According to Carlos March, El CEFoCC could be thought of as a self-sustaining system of microenterprises where “the whole is much more than the parts and permits the emergence of unforeseen possibilities”(2006: 97). The cooperative interdependence of the microenterprises and the efforts of the compañeros seemed to maintain themselves by this kind of emergence, and also through association with others beyond El CEFoCC. In this way, nosotros is an emergent quality of the interactions between various groups, individuals, and contributions from different sources. This relationship can be observed in nearly every aspect of El CEFoCC and the MTD-LM, both within their internal lifeworld and their associative network.
La Masa Critica, the name of the bakery, which is a double entendre where the word, masa which literally means dough, also implies a kind of emergence, a “critical mass” of inputs and participants that make the project possible. This microenterprise came together in a piece-meal fashion, as a kind of assemblage of equipment, skilled and unskilled labor, outside consultation, consensus decisions by the entire group and even donations from benefactors in disparate regions of the globe. As Toty describes above, the ultimate success in establishing the bakery after a long period of frustration and experimentation seems almost “miraculous” and irreducible to the individual contributions that made it possible, fomenting a cohesive means of sustaining El CEFoCC as a self-managed cooperative. Since 2002, the bakery has made bread and pastry available at low cost to residents of La Juanita and has provided employment for two full-time bakers and several assistants. After paying the bakers’ wages, surplus profits are re-invested in other areas of El CEFoCC such as the kindergarten, adult free school or pediatric clinic, based on need.14 La Masa Critica continues to change and develop as a result of continuous inputs and modifications; The MTD-LM in collaboration with Maru Botana, a renowned pastry chef from the Federal Capital, plans to open a baking school at El CEFoCC where local youth will learn the trade. The inauguration of this program will be made possible through the sale of 3000 pan dulces (artesanal sweet pastries) and a grant from Poder Ciudadano.
Nosotros is in this way constituted by an array of exchanges between different agents who come together in this kind of critical mass. These components from which the lifeworld emerges include: donations of infrastructure from national and international NGOs that make self-managed work possible, the collaboration between the near 40 militants from different generations and various political and educational backgrounds and 40 more workers from the community15, the facilitators of classes, the presence of neighbors and internationals and of course, the kindergarteners of La Juanita and their families. Nosotros is also complimented and extended to encompass representatives from Colombian guerilla organizations and avant-garde fashion designers alike.
In many ways, the fomentation of nosotros within the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC is a response to alienation and social exclusion, and like the concept of autonomy, holds a great deal of significance to many compañeros. When I asked Carlitos to elaborate on his personal definition of nosotros, he explained to me that for him this construction signifies the following: “I don’t go it alone. I think that to go alone would be very difficult, but within an organization, within a movement, within a neighborhood, on this path I believe I can” (Francisetti, Personal Interview 2006). Here Carlitos articulates the importance of association with others and entering into collective spaces; it could perhaps be inferred that such an inclination is a response to the contemporary cultural moment in globalized Argentina, a means of reconstituting the social ties injured by the hyper-individualization of neoliberal subjection. Perhaps then, the formation of nosotros intervenes in the experience of marginalization at the level of the subject. Movement allies Martin Krymkiewicz and Vanesa Aiello suggest this very notion in “La experiencia del nosotros,” their chapter of Cuando con otros somos nosotros, observing that associative experiences within El CEFoCC produce nosotros as a collective subject (2006:161). Similarly, Toty asserts, “El nosotros is a collective vantage point” (Flores, Personal Interview 2006) that is not located in any one individual. Such a sentiment prevailed throughout my conversations with the compañeros, especially in response to my prompts to unpack personal meanings of nosotros. Carlitos continued, “In reality the MTD-LM is not only what Fabian wants or what I want but better yet what a group of people would like and we are then able to build it from nosotros, no?” (Francisetti, Personal Interview 2006).
The concept of nosotros for the MTD-LM is concretized and strengthened through the daily practice of consensus decision making. Each morning the compañeros- both the militants and workers- gather around a long table in the community room, called la cooperativa, to share yerba mate, cigarettes and freshly baked bread and pastry and to discuss the daily agenda. These meetings are also open to interns, guests and any other person who is willing to participate in the consensus process. While the meetings have a very warm and inviting atmosphere, almost to the point of seeming informal or casual, the compañeros were clearly practiced at listening respectfully to one another, putting forward proposals and deciding collectively as to whether or not to put them into practice. To me, the way in which the compañeros adhered to the concept of horizontalidad (horizontality) 16 was remarkable- rarely did I observe compañeros interrupting each other, talking out of turn or diverging from the agenda point at hand.
Having previously participated in consensus meetings in North American anarchist groups, these problems had been recurrent, even among experienced activists. I was personally inspired by a process that was at once organic but informed by an effective methodology wherein a diversity of voices and opinions were articulated and considered in such a way as to reach consensus. In some of these meetings, as will be explored in a later section, highly contentious issues arose, and with them, starkly contrasting positions. There were several occasions, especially with regard to financial decisions affecting microenterprises, where meetings would last long into the afternoon until consensus was obtained. In these cases, as with many of my own experiences of this particular mode of decision-making, all parties involved did not necessarily agree, yet did not vocalize opposition to a proposal and thus demonstrated a consent to the will of the collective. Such a balance between the individual and the collective seems central to the shared meaning of nosotros within the MTD-LM and also provides with content the concept of cultura comunitaria towards which Proyecto CEFoCC strives.
While on the whole, the usage of horizontal decision-making within EL CEFoCC seemed highly effective in setting agendas and directing daily activities in an inclusive and directly democratic manner, there are, in my observation several clear obstacles hindering the actualization of horizontalidad. The most obvious of these problems relates to the highly gendered dimension of communication. While the majority of the compañeros including the workers are female, male voices, tended to dominate conversation, and command the most respect from the group as a whole. There certainly were exceptions to this general trend, in that figures such as Soledad, Silvia, and Claudia the administrative secretary of El CEFoCC, were often very vocal. It seemed to me however, that perhaps owing to deeply inculcated patriarchy and machismo endemic to Argentine culture, many women were consistently silent or spoke only when prompted directly as in a ronda or “go-around” where every participant was asked to voice an opinion or provide feedback on a proposal. It was not as if female voices were silenced or dismissed at any point in my experience or that women were not encouraged to speak, but rather the group as a whole seemed to expect and accept male leadership.
I recall having a conversation with Fernando after a morning meeting where I was particularly frustrated by what to me was a blatant power dynamic that went essentially unquestioned. I expressed my concern to Fernando that the insidious operation of patriarchy compromised the practice of horizontalidad, and he nodded briskly, laughing ironically and asking me, ¿conoces Papa Smurf? My eyes widened as I coughed a perplexed laugh and nodded. “El parece a Toty”17 Fernando snickered softly. I was taken aback by the comparison, especially given the connotations of globalized culture, but felt that perhaps it was both appropriately critical and endearing. Though it seemed Fernando held a private criticism of Toty, this conversation was perhaps the only instance in which issues of power and patriarchy arose. Though in my own experiences of anarchist organizing and the consensus process I have felt comfortable challenging oppressive dynamics of a gendered nature, I remained tentative and reserved, concerned about imposing my criticism as an outsider to the community. These re-emergences of familiar forms of oppression within this alternative and oppositional lifeworld problematizes the fomentation of nosotros, even amidst the ongoing efforts to other forms of domination within the sphere of everyday life. Experiences such as these exemplify the degree to which the construction of nosotros, horizontalidad and cultura comunitaria are very much processual struggles.
Jorge and I often engaged discussions of politics while working in the bakery, which more specifically consisted of Jorge orating at length on topics such as Marxism, globalization or his own experiences in political organizations such as socialist and Trotskyite parties pre-dating his involvement with the MTD-LM, while I attempted both to articulate my own thoughts in a foreign language and interpret Jorge’s fairly cerebral discourse. On one such occasion, where Jorge effortlessly delved into a strident oration while vigorously rolling out dough and systematically fabricating medialunas and facturas by hand, while I clumsily attempted to mimic his movements, I asked him to explain the connection between the oft referenced nosotros and cultura comunitaria.
“We’re trying to construct it” he laughed dryly, letting out a pulse of breath through his nose, his fingers deftly braiding cords of raw dough: “…I believe the importance of communitarian culture has to do with considering the other, not only oneself but the other.” It seems that this active consideration of difference is an integral component of nosotros both within the everyday life at El CEFoCC but also as an outreach strategy for networking and soliciting support from outside. Perhaps also, this valorization of the other comes as a result of the compañeros experiences of having been constituted as the other in their own experiences as biopolitical subjects under neoliberalism. The experience of exclusion could have engendered a tendency toward inclusion of the other within their own lifeworld, as well as a desire to gain autonomy from the structures that marginalize the other.
As the MTD-LM went about the process of recomposing their organization following their near-dissolution in 1999, the remaining compañeros adopted a hard-line politics of autonomy, believing it to be the only means of retaining dignity. As Soledad explains:
In the beginning we were so annoyed with everyone that we wanted to do everything by ourselves. We wanted to produce, commercialize and consume everything ourselves. But we discovered that in order to improve our quality of life we had to do it well, and everyone would be part of this process (Bordegaray, Personal Interview 2006).
In reaction to the various forms of cooptation and the failure of established political institutions, the MTD-LM originally aspired to be completely autonomous in a strict sense, closing their organization completely. It was not long before this strategy proved to be unsustainable, threatening the survival not only of the MTD-LM but the lives of the compañeros and their families and potentially resulting in further marginalization. It was from this dire need for outside support and a reconstruction of practice that the MTD-LM began to participate in relations of production and communication beyond the boundaries of their organization. Such a re-imagining of praxis did not result in a return to previously ineffective modes of struggle, but rather, spurred on a process of association with others beginning with the Madres, that would enable the organization to obtain resources while maintaining internal coherence and political autonomy.
I revisited this issue in conversation with Carlitos, who explained, “It must be recognized that in this place you can’t do business, not in Laferrere. In La Juanita business cannot be done by acquiring resources within, it’s the reverse. It has to do with a transfer of resources from places that have more to places that have less” (Francisetti, Personal Interview 2006). In this regard, Carlitos recognizes that the MTD-LM at their very foundation relies on outside resources that originate from beyond the borders of El CEFoCC, La Matanza and even Argentina, reasserting the distinction between economic and political autonomy. While this redistribution does not constitute a structural change, the redirection of resources from places of privilege to areas of unsatisfied basic needs facilitated by the MTD-LM could be thought of as a direct intervention in the flows of capital which polarize class disparities. Within their own community, such an intervention can be seen as an oppositional manipulation of capital by the MTD-LM, albeit very much within the constraints of existing power structures.
Jorge speaks to this usage of existing flows and relations that is at once a necessary compromise of strict autonomy but also a strategy: “If we were economically autonomous we would still be making bread by hand, we would not have the kindergarten, we would not have the sewing workshop” (Lasarte, Personal Interview 2006). While the MTD-LM have not liberated themselves from capital, they participate in it as a means to their own ends, which are diametrically opposed to those of capitalism. Each of the aforementioned programs at El CEFoCC has been made possible by the aid of more established institutions that typically exist in a higher socioeconomic position, whose power is far reaching. In particular, the bakery equipment and sewing machines currently in use today were acquired by donations from the Canadian and Swiss Embassies respectively, while the kindergarten receives financial assistance from the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. The MTD-LM connected with these institutions through Poder Ciudadano, a contact initially provided them by the Madres at the critical point of instability when the organization was reforming. Association with otros then, fundamentally sustains the organization.
It is important to note that although the MTD-LM seeks out connections with others, their autonomist politics have not been sacrificed. In the same way that the MTD-LM feel that receiving welfare subsidies would compromise their politics, they also refuse any form of assistance or affiliation that comes with any sort of stipulation or seeks to interfere in their internal praxis. Toty elaborates on this autonomist approach to association:
We saw that there were resources circulating in the world, economic resources, primarily money, controlled by organizations and used for different reasons; some good and some bad- and this is the money that comes with conditions…We began to look for start-up capital for our enterprises and we started off on a quest for donations; we only accept donations if we are not conditioned. If there is any kind of condition, we do not accept it, we have rejected such offers in the same way that we reject planes. We rejected credit allocated to us by FUNCAP which is a development foundation, for ten thousand dollars in a very difficult moment in 2002 because we felt that they were trying to impose conditions on us. In 2003 as well we refused a subsidy from the Banco Provincia de Buenos Aires Foundation because the director said to us, ‘You don’t need to say anything about this or publish anything and we won’t have any problems.’ We decided not to accept it. If someone puts conditions on us, we do not accept anything
(Flores, Personal Interview 2006).
While The MTD-LM began seeking donations as a means of acquiring start-up capital for their microenterprises and continue to solicit financial assistance, prospective donors who condition their aid threaten the MTD-LM with political cooptation that is characteristic of the corrupt patronage system of the state and of local punteros. Clearly then, there are identifiable otros that are not admitted into the nosotros delimited by the MTD-LM, even if this results in the forfeiture of resources. The MTD-LM seem to have no illusions that they can totally disengage from capital or completely resist cooptation. As Toty concedes, “there is nothing pure or outside the system” (Flores, Personal Interview 2006), however MTD-LM retain an oppositional consciousness in generating their support network, especially when dealing with entities that do not share their political and practical framework.
Furthermore, assistance garnered from entities that share neither political orientation nor class position with the MTD-LM can be used to dismantle certain power relations once under the control of the MTD-LM and within El CEFoCC. In other words, relations that are initially shaped by inequality including flows of capital that typically reinforce disparity, can be interrupted and modified once utilized in the practice of alternative lifeways. Toty explains one way that this form of agency is possible:
We produce and all the income we earn goes back into the enterprises. In a certain way we prevent any of it from going to some capitalist. For example, when we produce bread it is all entirely destined for consumption by the neighborhood, and this also creates a distinct relationship between compañeros, not a relationship based on profit. When we buy flour it is of course a function of the capitalist system. Taking this into account, it is our intention that the economic relationship has a distinct content; it is not lucrative but rather it is only to sustain and improve our quality of life. We try to create democratic relations between consumer and producer as a question of ethics” (Flores 2006).
Here, the MTD-LM work against the capitalist principle of maximizing profit; instead, bread and pastry are sold at the lowest price in the neighborhood, typically at $1peso per kilogram,18 profits are shared equally within each microenterprise and production is self-managed; there are no bosses nor owners and decisions concerning the microenterprises are made by consensus. In these ways, the MTD-LM have devised a viable means of participation in capitalism that simultaneously undermines some of its mechanisms, transforming social exchanges and experiences at a highly local level, both for the compañeros and their neighbors.
The very notion of generating a support network was itself a strategic appropriation by the MTD-LM. As Toty informed Carlos March, “It has been a quest, a search. We took what happened in Chiapas as a model for the integration of diverse social actors…” (March 2006:105). Not only do the MTD-LM draw resources from above, they also look towards radical grassroots movements; Zapatismo is a recurring referent for the MTD-LM, as a source of inspiration and also as an exemplary Latin American anti-globalist mobilization from which they can learn. In 2004, compañeros from the MTD-LM were invited by the EZLN to observe and participate in activities at the community of Oventic, allowing them direct access to this lifeworld further exposing them to effective modes of autonomous resistance. The concept of decentralized network struggle is one such tactic gleaned from this experience. In the language of the Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional identifies this methodology: “This network of resistance will be the medium in which distinct resistances may support one another. This network of resistance is not an organizing structure…it has no central command or hierarchies…” Although the conditions under which the MTD-LM operate and the history and make-up of the organization differ significantly from those of the Zapatistas, the underlying strategies of opposing hierarchy and of building solidarity between various entities informs their politics of association with others. The MTD-LM returned the invitation and featured a visitor from the EZLN on their radio program, "F.M. Encuentro" that until 2005 aired on a local station in Laferrere for one hour every Sunday. This program was hosted by different compañeros from the MTD-LM and featured interviews with members of other social movements including the Movimiento Sem Terra of Brazil (Landless Peoples’ Movement) the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and even an former member of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).
Of all the associative experiences of the MTD-LM, the relationship between the textile workshop at El CEFoCC and avant-garde fashion designer Martin Churba and his Argentina-based international clothing label, Tramando, is perhaps one of the most remarkable for its seeming juxtaposition. March adumbrates this rather stark contrast in the lifeworlds of Toty Flores and Martin Churba, a connection he helped personally facilitate. What resulted appears to be a mutually beneficial, albeit unorthodox working relationship. The affiliation between a grassroots organization of unemployed poor and a successful avant-garde fashion designer certainly cuts across class lines, political ideology and effectively, across the different social universes constituted by the indigence of Barrio La Juanita, and opulence of Churba’s studio in the posh Barrio Recoleta in the Federal Capital. Of these two separate realities, March informs the reader,
Both existed before Poder Ciudadano connected them, but each one existed, going about their own business; Churba, ignorant of the existence of the textile workshop located in the world of unsatisfied basic needs that is La Matanza and Flores, presupposing the social insensitivity of the fashion world. Two worlds separated by no more than two hundred and fifty blocks. Two hundred and fifty blocks that Toty and Martin dared to traverse (2006:107)
For the striking juxtaposition amounting to an almost surreal memory, I recall one afternoon where Carlos March and Martin Churba came to visit El CEFoCC. Churba cut an almost other-worldly figure, sporting a ruffled pale peach tunic, pastel pink suede Capri pants with buttons up and down the outer seams and a pair of magenta converse high-top sneakers, in contrast with the modest, non-descript or utilitarian garb worn by the compañeros. Nevertheless, Churba and Toty shared lunch together in the cooperativa conversing cordially as if no disparity existed between them. At some point Churba made some comment about how designing and selling fair trade clothing was personally gratifying for him and exposed him to a world he would otherwise have been unaware of. At the time, these comments struck me as maudlin and self-indulgent, but the professional smiling countenances of Toty and Soledad were never compromised.
I also remember Fernando unflinchingly sitting a few seats down from Churba during lunch, and later, privately disclosing to me how absurd it was that other compañeros fraternized with such a “burguesa de mierda.”19 I admitted also that the interaction was daunting to me, given the qualitative differences between these entities. I expressed my concern to Fernando that I couldn’t help but see the character of these kinds of solicitations of non-government entities as somewhat similar to the political patronage relations that the organization so militantly denounces. Fernando shook his head deliberately, and uttered barely above a whisper, “es asistencialismo privada.”20 My eyes likely widened as I made some gesture of surprise at such a sharp reductive critique, but immediately saw some degree of truth in it. Having established friendship with Fernando made me privy to the understanding that while relations based on solidarity, horizontalidad and general conviviality truly were palpable at El CEFoCC, private dissent amidst some of the compañeros points to a more nuanced and complicated reality where the construct of nosotros is not so unitary and coherent as the discourse may suggest on the surface. Despite his personal criticism of this particular business relationship, Fernando never actually vocalized his opinion, likely recognizing the pragmatism of feigning affinity. This experience of the combined reaction to Churba’s presence at El CEFoCC further affirmed my supposition that this kind of networking and affective labor is a strategic form of solicitation, where politics may become almost secondary at the time of social exchange, and even momentarily suspended when dealing with such dissimilar otros whose support and affiliation furthers their greater interests of the collective project. Fernando had implied in other conversations that he wished that the MTD-LM would go about making more horizontal associations with groups in similar social positions or having radical political agendas. It was clear that as a means of sustaining their project , the MTD-LM and in particular ,compañeros like Toty and Soledad were very much focused on the acquisition of resources from endowed institutions with the privilege of allocating capital.
In these moments of questioning spurred on by Fernando’s criticism, I was left wondering, what would the MTD-LM and the lifeworld of El CEFoCC would be like if their resources were obtained only through networking with other organizations in similar situations with common experiences of being marginalized and of organizing from below? If they could have sustained themselves in this way, I can only imagine that their radical discourse and practice would be enriched by participation in an entirely grassroots network. Perhaps this questioning and these ideological preferences of mine filter my analysis and arise from my own “first world” privilege. Ultimately, I feel that the whole project of the MTD-LM and El CEFoCC, though informed by radical politics, is less a manifestation of ideological constructions and more of a creative and necessary response to dire material conditions. While their strategies are born of militant autonomism, they are also very much shaped by the need to cooperate with power as a means of survival. Even so, the MTD-LM do collaborate with other entities whose experiences and political orientation is closer to their own, including Chilavert the self-managed recovered factory and publishing cooperative and other organizations within the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados throughout Argentina as well as international connections within the Zapatista milieu, the Movimiento Sem Terra. By doing international outreach, the MTD-LM have made connections with various unions and grassroots organizations, many of which include groups they became acquainted