The Making of Grassroots Politics & Power in Argentina

In Search of Alternatives: The Making of Grassroots Politics and Power in Argentina

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 368–387, 2008

(Comrade) HEIKE SCHAUMBERG University of Manchester, Manchester

TThe regional panorama since the 2001 uprising offers an interesting
background scenario. Huge popular mobilisations swept a left-wing coalition into government in Uruguay in 2004. The indigenous movement leader, Evo Morales, emerged as elected president and partially renationalised Bolivia’s gas reserves. Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez offers consistent defiance to US hegemony, benefiting from high oil prices, important oil deals with China, hungry to feed its own unprecedented economic growth, and a US absorbed in her Middle Eastern military campaigns. Despite some ongoing regional antagonisms, Chavez’s economic and political strategies helped to generate an extraordinary
show of regional unity at the July 2006 Mercosur summit, announcing the death of the Cuba embargo and the birth of a ‘new united Latin America’ ( Annonymous, 2006 ).

These are unpredictable times for the region, but it is clear that a key
facet of the contemporary struggles is that they counter the powerlessness and atomisation of neoliberal society and project the re-making of collective power and politics ‘from below’. With the persistent nature of subaltern struggles, the rise in labour militancy and the electoral move to the Left, Latin America today continues to constitute the ‘weakest link’ in the global neoliberal chain, where subaltern movements condition their governments’ agendas, as the search
for viable alternatives intensifies.

This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power through their dynamic interactions with subal-tern alternatives that emerged in the 2001 uprising in Argentina. In this regard, it counters influential interpretations of these events articulated within John Holloway’s framework of ‘anti-power’, which ignores the reconstruction of the state, and rank and file trade unionism. The article concludes that intensified class and political struggles in the region offer new spaces for contesting hegemonic reinventions of populism and‘top-down’ socialism in Latin America. Keywords : class , neoliberalism , politics , power , resistance , state . Introduction Subaltern responses to neoliberal crisis in Argentina included the Piqueteros, a militant movement of the unemployed demanding ‘genuine work’ and social assistance, es-craches, 1asambleas populares [neighbourhood assemblies] demanding collective ‘self-government’, and workers seizing the means of production...

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