Radical media, politics and culture.

Book Review: New Argentine Social Movements: Logic and History

Chuck Morse writes: From: The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books - Volume Two, Number Two --- Winter Spring 2004

New Argentine Social Movements:

Logic and History

Review by Fernando López

Hipótesis 891. Más allá de los piquetes (Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Pickets)
By Colectivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano
Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2002

Genealogía de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movimiento
(Genealogy of the Revolt: Argentina,
Society in Movement)
By Raúl Zibechi
Montevideo-La Plata-Buenos Aires:
Nordan-Letra Libre, 2003

In the last decade Argentines
have been witnesses to and victims of the collapse of the system bequeathed
by the dictatorship of 1976-1983. This system was prolonged by Alfonsín’s
post-dictatorship “hostage democracy,” culminated in the
robbery during Menem’s rule of 1989-1999, and was continued by
De la Rúa. It established immunity for a small group that concentrated
the country’s scarce resources in a few hands while condemning
a third of the population to social exclusion. Faced with this brutality,
our society generated varied and novel forms of resistance, as revealed
in the social explosions that occurred in December 2001. They are called
new social movements because, among other things, the labor organizations
did not participate decisively and the social bases of these movements
were impossible to frame professionally. Likewise, political organizations
did not produce—and could not control—the new movements.

The protagonists of these revolts had been
displaced from their sources of subsistence by the privatization of
state-run businesses or budget cuts in the national and provincial states.
They include landless peasants, those with precarious employment, ex-proletarians,
and those excluded from salaried work in the urban and suburban centers,
all whom achieved visibility in the media by successfully interrupting
the circulation of merchandise on the national highways, thus earning
a denomination that distorted their origins and the conditions of their
existence. They are called piqueteros because the “picket”
[blockade] is their most visible activity.

The first critical texts to report on the
new situation were slow to appear and were not limited to the period
immediately after December 2001. Those reviewed here contribute to the
recent debate about the strategies and modalities assumed by the new
actors in the social conflict. Raúl Zibechi’s Genealogía
de la revuelta: Argentina
, la sociedad en movimiento (Genealogy
of the Revolt: Argentina, Society in Movement
) covers the last
ten years of our history, documenting and analyzing the varied forms
of these new social movements. He begins by reviewing the human rights
movement and two of its paradigmatic organizations, the Madres de Plaza
de Mayo and the HIJOS,(1) and then examines the 1990s, when hundreds
of new groups exploded, and concludes by focusing on the most significant
and novel of these groups, specifically the unemployed groups summed
up under the term piqueteros. On the other hand, Hipótesis
891. Más allá de los piquetes (Hypothesis 891: Beyond
the Pickets
) is a collaborative text written by Colectivo Situaciones
and the MTD de Solano (Unemployed Workers’ Movement of Solano)
that tries to enter the theoretical core of these new social movements.
Colectivo Situationes is a radical collective located in Buenos Aires,
with roots in the student movement of the 1990s, and the MTD de Solano
is an organization now grouping more than 800 families from various
neighborhoods that has been struggling for the dispossessed since August
1997. Its participation in highway blockades and the piquetero movement
is its most well known activity.

Hipótesis 891

From the beginning it is clear that Hipótesis 891 is
an attempt to articulate a subject-object relationship: that is, a self-analysis
of and by one of the emblematic organizations of the new generation
of social movements. Arranged in three parts, the first section describes
the methods employed by Colectivo Situaciones in the elaboration of
the work and the result of the discussion workshops they co-organized
with the MTD de Solano in September and October 2001. The second part,
titled “Multiplicity and Counter-power in the Piquetero Experience,”
which is signed exclusively by Colectivo Situaciones, articulates their
political-theoretical interpretations of this experience. The third
part alternates between the MTD de Solano’s evaluations of the
discussion workshops and the evaluations of Colectivo Situaciones, which
are conclusions of the dialogue. The dialogue explores the last two
years and the way in which the MTD perceived its situation in the crisis
that would affect the country between December 2001 until October 2002.
In the conclusion, they review the visit made by John Holloway (author
of Change the World without Taking Power) to the MTD de Solano’s
community storehouse. The value of this book lies not only in the discussions
derived from the workshops held by Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD
de Solano, but also in the project’s theoretical richness.

Colectivo Situaciones begin the text by
clearly establishing the type of the investigation that they are undertaking.
They not only advance a method, but also take a stand against other
methods of research. They counter-pose the academic theorist—who
“objectifies” from outside and constitutes his or her object
by attributing values to it—to the activist theorist (militante
investigador), who carries out research that puts his or her experience
in relief and searches for insights that will intensify and strengthen
his or her radical practice.

Likewise, they are critical of the methods
of party militants and NGO, “humanitarian” activists. The
first are loathed for their utilitarianism, strategic specialists, and
the absence of dialogue, affinity, or authenticity and their replacement
of these things by “tactics,” agreements, and representation.
They write: “if we sustain the distinction—as we try throughout
this book—between “politics” (understood as the struggle
for power) and the experiences in which processes of the production
of sociability or of [new] values enter in play, we thus can distinguish
the political militant (who founds his or her discourse in some collection
of certainties) from the activist theorist (who organizes his or her
perspective around critical questions with respect to these certainties).”(2)
The second group, the NGO humanitarians, are criticized for holding
an idealized or unchangeable vision of the world and for overemphasizing
(more or less exceptional) efforts in marginalized areas.

In contrast, they argue that activist theory
is unique in the following four ways:

1. The character of the motivation that
sustains the investigation is distinct.

2. The investigation has a practical character (i.e., its goal is to
elaborate a situated, practical hypothesis).

3. The value of the investigated is only measured in specific situations.

4. Its development is already a
result and this result creates an immediate intensification of practice.

Thus they are not advancing a political
line, but rather a critique of “lines” and one that investigates
and criticizes its own circumstances.

An example of this situated, critical perspective
can be found in the MTD de Solano. This group is famous for its horizontal
structure and creation of a counter-power that is not organized around
the goal of seizing the state, but rather the transformation of society
and the construction of new, radicalized webs of sociability. It does
not fight for some postulated, ideal society that is outside of its
experience but to transform its own immediate situation. Its labor consists
of “strengthening different economic, political, cultural-artistic
projects among the residents of the neighborhood and the families linked
to the movement, in order to resolve problems such as unemployment,
hunger, and education, but at the same time manages to produce social
cohesion and multiplies the dimensions of existence (values and senses).”(3)
In a framework of fragmentation, misery, and impotence, the creation
of horizontal forms of work and decision-making, structured around the
principles of autonomy, pluralism, and respect for diversity, re-signify
the highway blockade and the links with the state, converting the later
into non-central instruments.

Colectivo Situaciones’s perspective
has roots in identity, specifically that of the “excluded.”
The “excluded” is one who is not only poor but also outside,
in a territory from which there is no return. In fact, the category
of “exclusion” has little to do with gradations of poverty:
“exclusion is the specific form in which our society includes—represents—an
increasing part of the society, that is ‘produced’ as excluded
and constructed as such.”(4) This use of the idea of exclusion
is successful because it names that which society produces as if it
were something alien to itself and clarifies the fact that the included
and the excluded are part of the same social order.

The power of the new social movements lay
in their capacity to organize exclusion. Although the first data of
identity is a “lack” (the unemployed, as someone who lacks
work), the achievement is the creation of an identity that transcends
the lack to affirm itself in a new practice. And if at first it was
a protest activity—the picket [blockade], and from there the piqueteros—the
economic and social initiatives produced by the movements generate new
identities related to non-exploited, autonomous work. Thus the movements
“do not announce their desire to ‘return to work,’
soliciting the reentry of a segment from the ruined social structure,
that only could accept them in conditions that they have learned to
despise. Neither included, nor excluded, but beyond these representations.”(5)

For Colectivo Situaciones, “The political—the
statist, the party structure—belongs to our societies more like
a machine that registers (misappropriating) the echoes of transformations
underway than a productive site of these transformations.”(6)
Although the end of the centrality of the political was seen as the
end of history by neo-liberals and post-modernists—and the defeat
of the whole project of social transformation—the end of the centrality
of politics is not the end of politics. This work argues that it must
be brought closer to the multiplicity of existence to assist in the
“constitution of nuclei capable of producing a perspective internal
to the experiences of the new sociability, strengthening it and making
bonds, insights, and practical hypotheses.”(7)

Genealogy of the Argentine

The book by Raúl Zibechi has a very different approach. Its great
merit is that it puts the rapidly changing and overwhelming new social
movements in perspective. His work unravels hundreds of social experiences—that
are very unique and yet share common features—and allows us to
enter the history of each experience and the movement as a whole, a
dynamic whole whose forms are being permanently redefined.

In his search for the origins of the new
social movements, he goes as far back as the rise of the Madres de Plaza
de Mayo during the first years of the 1976-1983 dictatorship and, later,
to the formation of the HIJOS in the first years of democracy. He then
covers the youth movements (built around fanzines and street musicians,
etc), the free radio movement around 1989, the creation of the Central
de los Trabajadores Argentinos in 1992, the six Encuentros de Organizaciones
Sociales (Gatherings of Social Organizations) between 1997 and 1999
that became the Coordinadora de Organizaciones Populares Autónomas
(Coordinator of Autonomous Popular Organizations) around 2000, to conclude
with a minuscule history of the movements of the unemployed, who originated
in shanty towns during the dictatorship and reappeared at the end of
the 1990s with the radicalized orientation that is so recognizable today.

What defines these movements as new? For
Zibechi this classification arises when the “instrumental”
and rigid character of the older social movements(8) is compared with
the autonomy and horizontalism of the contemporary movements, which
are created from a base of interpersonal relations and that question
the logic of “representation.” A theoretical affinity with
Colectivo Situaciones is evident when he notes that these movements
do not have their origin in a universalist discourse but, on the contrary,
are generated by particular situations and produce political consequences
without this being their express mission. The spectrum of the participants
in the new social movements was represented in the second Encuentro
de Organizaciones Sociales in March 1998, which was attended by participants
in student and neighborhood groups, independent newspapers and magazines,
low frequency radios, street performance groups, cultural centers, cooperatives,
human rights organizations, NGOs, organizations working of issues of
childhood and health, feminist and sexual minority groups, unemployed
groups, and (minimally) unions. To this it would be necessary to add
the squatters on state-owned and private lands and the new workers’
collectives in the occupied, self-managed factories.

Although the essay focuses on organizations
of the type mentioned, significant space is devoted to analysis of the
Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA),(9) the dissident labor
federation that arose in 1992 and became, for Zibechi, “the movement
advanced experience that the labor movement in Latin America has produced
since the defeat of the 1970s.”(10) He highlights the value of
its territorial work,(11) “something totally exceptional in the
labor movement in any part of the world,” the creation of a youth
movement, and role occupied by the women and their emphasis on gender
in the organization’s development. He highlights its combativity
and internal democracy but notes that this vast and loose organization
did not manage to attract the new social movements, which preferred
to remain autonomous and shape their own networks. Zibechi explains
this as a cultural difference, given the union’s rigid form and
the centrality of votes and elections as means of decision-making. He
displays a long list of reasons for this disconnection, but finally
concludes that “The union of the masses can be as combative as
it wants, but it does not belong to the category of movements that have
emancipation as their ambition. It is inserted in the logic of progress
and postulates the development and evolution of its members in this

This strikes me as a prejudiced conclusion
and one reminiscent of Lenin’s “DIAMAT,”(13) which
only concedes trade-unionist ends to the labor movement and argues that
The Party must bring consciousness to the workers. Here there is the—not
very hidden—presence of the strong “reform versus revolution”
antinomy that polarized the debate on the Left twenty years ago. And
this is curious, because Zibechi’s attempt to rescue “exemplary”
groups, such as the piqueteros, is premised not only on their horizontal
and autonomous practices but also on their concept of revolution, which
is distinct from the “storm the palace” type of the old
Marxist-Leninists. They, on the contrary, are involved in making daily
and invisible changes, made along cultural lines and in small economic
transformations, which would have been seen as reformist by the revolutionaries
of the 1970s.(14) And what does it mean to transform society without
taking power? This implies the generation of other powers, multiple
powers, and creation of a movement replete with small reforms that transform
the relations of domination while generating new areas of emancipation.(15)
Why can’t one argue that the CTA is also making such transformations?
Doesn’t it do so when it produces a territorial organization such
as its Federación de Tierra y Vivienda, which is conceptually
very close to the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil and paves
the way for land seizures by the unemployed, or the self-management
and self-organization of seized factories (to which Zibechi proclaims
his solidarity)? Certainly this is not a flagrant contradiction, at
least as posed like this, especially, when Zibechi himself recognizes
that the CTA raises similar claims, at times in the same terms, as the
Encuentro de Organizaciones Sociales and that CTA Leader “Claudio
Lozano(16) cites the phrase of Subcomandante Marcos “We will what
type of militant or what type of man is generated by a movement that
does not have seizing the state as its objective,”(17) and that
the Secretary General of the CTA, Víctor De Gennaro, says that
“‘the fight is outside of us, but also in our heart’”[…]
and explicitly rejects the culture of delegation to signal that ‘we
do not delegate the solution of our problems. It is necessary to construct
our own power,’ even further, other leaders speak of horizontalism.’”(18)
They are in fact participating in a project of social transformation,
one that is doubtlessly different from that being perused by the new
social movements. But there is more than one project of social transformation:
the question—as always—is to search for the ways that they
can coexist without suffocating one another.

The book continues with an analysis of
the Coordinadora de Trabajadores Desocupados Aníbal Verón
(Coordinator of the Unemployed Workers of Aníbal Verón)
and the MTD de Solano and provisionally closes with commentary on the
crisis that fired the events of December 2001.

Zibichi inevitably advances similar claims
to those made by Colectivo Situaciones and at times cites and reinterprets
them in simpler, more comprehensible language than one typically finds
in their work. However, Zibichi believes that the movements cannot be
understand solely in relation to local conditions but must be placed
in the context of the evolution of these movements at the Latin American
level. Indeed, this is the principal difference between both books,
between the “in situation” perspective of Colectivo Situaciones
and Zibechi’s generalizing framework.

From the prologue on, Zibechi develops
a definition of the struggle that contains two currents: one carries
out the natural struggle for life, “for existence,” and
the other is militarist in essence. He writes that the “daily
struggle to assure sustenance and the reproduction of life consumes
the greater part of the popular sector’s energies. It is a creative
struggle, for life. The other sense [of the struggle], the most frequent
among activists and militants, refers to the struggle as a war or a
confrontation, directed towards the annihilation of a real or imagined
enemy. The difference [between the two] is substantial: while the struggle
as the creation of life requires efforts of solidarity and reciprocity
among human beings, the struggle as the logic of confrontation assumes
the creation of a mechanism specializing in destruction.”(19)
Zibechi believes that the militarist orientation is corrosive for social
movements, given that it reconstructs all the forms of exploitation
and domination against which the emancipatory movement fights. He is
inspired by the indigenous movement, by the experiences of the Zapatista
Army (which Zibechi denies is an army in the traditional sense), and
the Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame in southern Colombia. He affirms
that “that which really changes the world is learning to live
in another way, in a communitarian way…. Fraternity is the key
to social change, not war, not even the class war. Fraternity, the little
sister of threefold motif of the French Revolution, clears the way for
equality and liberty.”(20)

The following quote summarizes in some
sense the conclusions of this work: “The state cannot be a tool
for the emancipation since one cannot structure a society of non-power
relations by means of the conquest of power. Once the logic of power
is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.”(21) Likewise,
“…the past century puts in relief the impossibility of
advancing from power to a new society. The state cannot be used to transform
the world. The role that we attribute to it should be revised.”(22)
From an anarchist perspective, there is the temptation to point out
that this was said by the founders of the anarchist tradition, in the
same terms, more than one hundred years ago and that since then this
knowledge has formed an essential part of libertarian practice. In any
case, it is highly auspicious that a great part of the Left is making
this critique of Leninism, and to see them advocating the construction
of horizontal, autonomous, and complex organizations in which power
is socialized, like any other human necessity.

There is a lot superficial journalism about
the movements analyzed in the texts reviewed here as well as a proliferation
of photographs and statements without any originality. For this reason,
the appearance of these books is especially gratifying, the one more
attentive to the general movement of society and framed in the crisis
of Latin America as a whole and the other more focused on the analysis
of the “concrete situation” and the inner experience of
these new social movements. Both of these works are indispensable for
understanding the crossroads at which Argentina presently finds itself.

Translated from Spanish by Chuck Morse.


1. Hijos por la Identidad, la Justicia,
contra el Olvido y el Silencio—Children for Identity, Justice,
Against Forgetting and Silence.

2. Colectivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano,
Hipótesis 891. Más allá de los piquetes
(Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2002), 17. Regarding the idea of the
activist theorist (militante investigador) that shapes the
activity of Colectivo Situaciones, see Miguel Benasayag and Diego
Sztulwark, Política y Situación. De la potencia
al Contrapoder
(Buenos Aires: De Mano en Mano, 2000).

3. Ibid., 28.

4. Ibid., 30.

5. Ibid., 31.

6. Ibid., 33.

7. Ibid., 34.

8. Comprised of unions, Left political
parties, etc.

9. The Congreso (later Central) de los
Trabajadores Argentinos, which was created in opposition to the monolithic
and bureaucratic Confederación General del Trabajo, had its
base among state workers and teachers (who continue being its most
important sector).

10. Raúl Zibechi, Genealogía
de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movimiento
Plata-Buenos Aires: Nordan-Letra Libre, 2003), 75.

11. The CTA’s Federación
de Tierra y Vivienda groups people from settlements on state lands,
shanty towns, and neighborhood collectives of the unemployed, etc.

12. Raúl Zibechi, Genealogía
de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movimiento
, 76

13. Which is expressly condemned by or
Zibechi in other parts of the book.

14. In fact, they are still seen in this
way by many Left political organizations.

15. See Rebecca DeWitt, “Poststructuralist
Anarchism: An Interview with Todd May,” Perspectives on
Anarchist Theory
Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall, 2000, http://perspectives.anarchist-studies.org/8may.htm

16. Economist and director of the Instituto
de Estudios del CTA.

17. In Isabel Rauber, Profetas del
(Havana: Centro de Recuperación y Difusión
de la Memoria Histórica del Movimiento Popular Latinoamericano,

18. Raúl Zibechi, Genealogía
de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movimiento
, 77.

19. Ibid., 15.

20. Ibid., 18.

21. John Holloway, Cambiar el mundo
sin tomar el poder
(Buenos Aires: Herramienta, 2002), 216.

22. Raúl Zibechi, Genealogía
de la revuelta. Argentina: la sociedad en movimiento
Plata-Buenos Aires: Nordan-Letra Libre, 2003), 202.


From: The
New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books
- Volume
Two, Number Two --- Winter Spring 2004