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Title: Argentina, one year on Author: Anarcho Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: Argentina, autonomist Source: Retrieved on 3rd August 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20071207222641/http://anarchism.ws/writers/anarcho/argentina/oneyear.html
It has been a year since the people of Argentina took to the streets to
protest yet more iniquitous government responses to the deepening
economic crisis. Once hailed as a model for neo-liberalism, the popular
uprising exposed the human results of over 20 long years of structural
adjustment plans and “free-market reforms.” The economy is a mess, with
poverty and unemployment at disgusting levels. In the past four years of
recession, the poverty rate has ballooned from 31 to 53 percent of the
population of 37 million, and unemployment has climbed from 14 to 21.4
percent, according to official figures.
The revolt reached massive levels. Seven million workers took part in a
general strike. The president declared a state of emergency when, soon
after, hungry people began looting shops and supermarkets so they could
feed their families. However, Argentineans had had enough. In Buenos
Aires alone, over a million people voiced their anger and disgust at the
discredited political elite by defying the state of emergency and taking
to the streets. Since then, protests have continued.
But what is significant about this revolt is that, as well as taking to
the streets in protest, people have started to organise themselves to
manage their affairs. Seeing the results of leaving it to politicians to
act for them, more and more Argentineans have decided to take their
fates into their own hands, to organise together to try make real
changes to improve their situation. And, in so doing, the basic ideas of
anarchism have been confirmed.
The first development in popular self-management came in the form of
neighbourhood assemblies. After the December protests, the protesters
brought the revolt back home with them. Neighbourhood assemblies quickly
multiplied (for example, by February there were over 50 of them in
Buenos Aires alone). Moreover, they started to federate together to
co-ordinate join activity. In Buenos Aires, an inter-neighbourhood
assembly meets once a week and has an average of 3000 local
co-ordinators from all the city’s neighbourhoods participating in it.
The local assemblies, however, are still autonomous, rotating the work
of organising and co-ordinating the inter-neighbourhood ones.
These assemblies are organised non-hierarchically and are open to almost
everyone. People get a chance to discuss the problems they are facing
and to organise effective ways of dealing with them. Over time, the
assemblies moved beyond discussing and protesting to more direct forms
of action, such as occupying houses, abandoned hospitals and banks,
using them as meeting places, social centres, places for the homeless to
stay, organising alternative schools and cheap health care. For example,
one neighbourhood has transformed a supermarket into a cultural centre
and meeting place, a popular supermarket where they sell, among other
things, the pasta produced in a nearby factory occupied by the workers.
The next stage is to open a theatre in the basement.
The creative potential of people crushed under hierarchy is being
expressed in thousands of ways. Everywhere sees the same determination
to build from the ruins of the crisis a new, better, society. They are
creating new ways of thinking about politics and economics, one based on
direct action and self-management which has nothing to do with parties
or the state. The basic idea of anarchism, self-management, is gaining
support. The idea that “the people must govern through its assemblies”
is being discussed and practised.
Significantly, popular anger is not just turned against the politicians,
but also against their cronies in industry and banks (the capitalist
class). Another direct challenge to the capitalist system is appearing —
the occupation of factories by their workers.
Faced with the closure of their workplaces in the face of the deepening
economic crisis, workers have started to occupy and run them themselves.
Workers have seized control of scores of foundering factories across
Argentina. In some cases, they are doing even better than their previous
owners. It is still early days, with over 100 factories and other
businesses nationwide being taken over. Most of the takeovers have been
of factories, but they have also included a supermarket, a medical
clinic, a Patagonian mine and a Buenos Aires shipyard. Most of the
occupied factories, have introduced an egalitarian pay scale. Equality
is also applied in terms of power, with decisions being made by direct
vote in regular assemblies, with shop stewards and co-ordinators subject
to carrying out the grassroots’ mandate.
Moreover, most of the workplaces have been turned into co-operatives,
rather than socialised (which is to be expected as the movement has just
began). These new co-operatives have survived in the economic crisis for
many reasons. The elimination of the owners’ cut and the higher wages
paid to managerial staff have helped, as has the replacement of a few
minds with that of the whole workforce. Apart from saving thousands of
jobs and softening the precipitous decline of the nation’s once
formidable industrial production, the factory takeovers are showing that
the relationship between capital and labour need not exist. By
restarting production in the occupied factories, the workers have shown
that a class of owners and order givers are not required, that working
people can manage their own productive activity. They have set an
example to the working class that there is an alternative way out of
economic crisis, one which working class people can create by their own
self-activity and self-organisation.
While many of the occupations have been occurring within a legal
framework, with some even renting the factory, the movement has the
potential of being more widespread and becoming more revolutionary. The
danger is that these new worker-owned workplaces become an end in
themselves, with the revolution stopping at the factory doors. Either
the co-operatives will co-operate between themselves and federate
together into worker’s councils or they will slowly but surely
degenerate back towards capitalism. Moreover, they seem limited (just
now!) to expropriating closed workplaces. The next step has to be the
expropriation of all capital by workers’ associations.
Needless to say, have begun to alarm conservatives, who (correctly) view
them as a threat to private property rights. But in an economy that has
so long placed profit above people, these occupations have popular
support and are spreading.
Co-ordination is, correctly, viewed as essential. The workers in the
occupied Zanón ceramics factory in Neuquén, have already convened two
National meetings of occupied factories. 40 neighbourhood assemblies
were also involved in this meeting. Thus links between workplace and
community assemblies are being forged. For example, in March, about 200
people from neighbourhood assemblies and human rights groups converged
on the worker-controlled Brukman textile factory, forcing the retreat of
70 riot police who were acting on a judge’s order to reclaim the
property. The workers of the occupied factories are also raising the
need for a National Congress convened by the assemblies, the picketers
and the occupied factories.
The occupied factories are part of a general tendency for the direct
expropriation of capital by the people. As well as factories,
occupations of houses, supermarkets and hospitals are also occurring.
One anarchist has termed this process as the first time that Zapatismo
has been applied in the cities.
As one young Argentinean woman put it, “I dream of this, that my
children and the children of my comrades could discover this, could find
a way of life here, leave the vices outside. Leave becoming depressive,
turning to the alcohol and the vagrancy that the system gives us and
that they could find this new form of making politics, without political
parties.”
She is a member of the Solano piquetros. Solano is a poor neighbourhood
on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The piqueteros are groups of
unemployed workers who are using their unemployment as a basis for
organising and struggling for a better society. They predate the current
revolt by about 6 years and have developed a new form of struggle — the
road block. They go out en masse and block the main roads and refuse to
move until the government gives in to their demands. In Solano, a
thousand of them take to the streets — and this is just one
neighbourhood in the city.
Just as their tactics are original, so are their ideas. They do not
demand money. Nor do they demand to become mindless wage slaves, doing
boring, meaningless jobs. They want to do work that they want to do,
that they consider important, “genuine work” as they call it. Nor do
they simply want to empower the state to act for them. Just as they take
their own struggle into their own hands, they. also take their lives. It
took them a year of struggle to win the right to decide themselves what
should be done any money and work they manage to extract from the state.
They meet and decide what the priorities are for the neighbourhood —
keeping it clean, repairing the schools, running local services and
industry. They do not wait for the state or capital to solve their
problems, because they know that that will not happen.
While the piqueteros are unemployed, they do not think of that as a bad
thing. They do not want to go back to being exploited. They like to
think of themselves not as unemployed workers but as autonomous workers.
They do not want to restore capitalism but to create something new. In
the words of another woman Solano piquerto: “from this absolute poverty
in which they have submerged us, from this taking away of our dignity
that they tried to impose on all the workers, what we are doing is
building from this poverty the bases perhaps — and perhaps it sounds
very fancy — the bases of a new society. Of a society which is being
born and which can grow with dignity from below. From poverty, but with
dignity, free, independent.”
Where can the Argentinean revolt go now? There are two basic options.
The left will see new elections as the way forward. With a left
government, they argue, different policies could be followed and open
repression of the movement could be prevented. The net effect of this
would be the handing over the movement to new politicians, of
transferring the struggle from the streets and workplaces into
capitalist institutions. The focus of struggle will be placed on a few
leaders, not on the mass of the population.
The only other way is to recognise that the elections are not relevant,
that the struggle is not to win the elections, but to strengthen and
develop all the autonomous struggles and organisations that are taking
place. To build, in other words, a real power in society, a popular
power based on direct democracy, self-organisation and direct action.
This is, after all, the logical implication of ”°Que se vayan todos!,”
the great slogan of the Argentinean uprising — “Out with them all!” And
this slogan is being extended, acquiring a deeper meaning. Political,
social and economic power is being questioned, being fought and
undermined by popular power, self-organised and self-managed in both
workplace and community.
Whether they know it or not, the Argentinean people, like thousands of
other working class people across the world, are applying the principles
of anarchism within and by their struggles. They are showing that
another world is possible and, moreover, creating it in the here and
now. This explains why what is happening in Argentina is important not
just for Argentina. They are applying the same ideas raised by the
Zapatistas when they rose up in Chiapas in 1994, saying °Ya basta!
(Enough!). Like that revolt, the one in Argentina is providing
inspiration for struggle against capitalism throughout the world.
No revolt lasts indefinitely. Either it will go the whole hog and
replace the state and capital by community and workplace assemblies and
their federation (i.e. generalised self-management) or the powers that
be will regain control and the Argentinean people will be made to pay
for the fear they are inspiring in the ruling class. That is why the
“Days of Disobedience” called for the anniversary of the revolt is so
important. We need to show that while Argentinean may be out the news,
but we are still watching and supporting them.
Ultimately, of course, the best support we can give them is to promote
class revolt here.