Grigera, 2006. Argentina on Crisis and a Measure for Class Struggle

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Historical Materialism, volume 14:1 (221248) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006Also available online www.brill.nl

1 Special thanks for insights and debate to Liam Campling, Pablo Ghigliani, GuillermoAlmeyra, Alberto Bonnet and Jorge Sanmartino among others.

Juan Grigera*

Argentina: On Crisis and a Measure for Class Struggle

If you want to make your dreams come true, the

first thing you have to do is wake up.

J.M. Power

Capitalist crises have traditionally been a fruitfularena for Marxist analysis, and an opportunity tocontrast the relative merits of contesting theoriesthrough the prism of the same empirical case.1 Likelightning, though sometimes brief, crises illuminatemany hidden aspects of social life, challenging our visions and forcing us to perform theoreticalgymnastics. Politically, crises challenge our actions,unmask the limits of bourgeois and social-democraticalternatives and open a terrain for new opportunities.

Explaining and interpreting the causes and trendsof the Argentine crisis was never going to be a taskwithout risks. It was risky, both in the sense thatsubsequent events could prove your diagnosis wrong,and, moreover, that it could serve as a misleadingguide during times when political action might be at least locally decisive. This intervention attempts

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222 Juan Grigera

2 Dinerstein 2002.3 Dinerstein 2002, p. 8.4 See Bonnets article in this issue.

to contribute towards a serious and profitable debate on the Argentineancrisis, continuing from Dinersteins piece in a previous issue of this journal.2

The following is an empirical assessment of several of the politicalmobilisations or social movements that emerged in and around the apparentBattle of Buenos Aires. In so doing, it constitutes a reply to Dinersteinsoverly optimistic characterisation of the crisis as the reinvention of politicsas negative politics3 as expressed in the actions and political programmes ofthese mobilisations. To this end, this intervention is divided into four sections,each providing a critical assessment of the more prominent individual socialmovements, namely, factory seizures, unemployed workers, barter clubs, andasambleas.

It should be noted that there are a number of other (more conceptual) points of contestation with Dinersteins analysis that due to the confines ofspace can only be very briefly noted here. First, while I am broadlysympathetic to her article, a striking peculiarity is that although it claims aMarxist theoretical framework, it draws heavily on a general diagnosis ofcrisis that can be traced at least in Argentina to its very immediate populistroots. The article itself explicitly quotes many artifices of a populist diagnosis,and generally relies on their theoretical interpretation of Argentine capitalistdevelopment and macroeconomic cycles since the mid-seventies.

First, Dinerstein relies on the idea of a financial form of accumulationinaugurated in Argentina by the military coup of 1976 and collapsed inDecember 2001. The idea of capital being valorised only financially over thesetwenty-five years is unsound, and this is used to enforce the populist mythof a segmentation of the capitalist class between productive and parasiticcapitals.4 At the same time, stressing a turning point in the beginning of 2002puts forward a misconception: that a new form of capital-labour relation isabout to take place, in order to support the new government (Duhalde, thenKirchner) that present themselves as detached from neoliberalism.

Second, Dinerstein accepts the notion of a supposed process of deindustrial-isation since the mid-1970s, but the figures used to support this position arecontroversial in a number of respects. For example, when assessing the relativeimportance of services vs. manufactures, it difficult to pin down the precise

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Argentina: On Crisis and a Measure for Class Struggle 223

extent of this apparent trend because many factories now outsource the service-side of their productive operations (services that used to done inhouse). Therefore, the representation of the industrial sector in nationalaccounts may not reflect the fact that little transformation of the labour processmight actually have happened. Similarly, from a Marxist perspective, it isawkward to stick to an arbitrary definition of industry and to drop fromanalysis a plethora of capitalist social relationships of production (such asmining, but also most notably agro-industry, which was never based on pettypeasantry and has always been of great importance in Argentina). In otherwords, de-industrialisation should not be conceived as a (foreign/imperialist)deliberate political plan whose ultimate aim is to destroy industry, but shouldultimately be compared to similar trends in the rest of the world and explainedin terms the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, for examplecompetition and the mechanisms of destruction of less productive fixed capital.

Third, the periodisation of her analysis is undertaken following institutionalpolitical changes (the military coup 197683, Alfonsins presidency 19839,Menems presidency 198999, De la Ruas presidency 19992001). But, if wewere to look at class struggle (which is the focus of her analysis), then acompletely different periodisation should probably be applied. For example,if the Convertibility Plan is central to analysis, 1991 should be a turning pointand not 1989. In addition, nowhere can 1999 be seen as a turning point inpolitical economy, macroeconomic policy nor class conflicts. Overbloatedinstitutional politics is sadly reminiscent of positivist historical writing andhas a tendency to obscure hidden ideological decisions.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, an overall ethereal version of classstruggle that fails to be rooted in any kind of analysis of concrete capitalistforces of production is put forward (this, it should be noted, is not an attributeof Dinerstein alone). Class struggle and social relationships are portrayed asthought not subject to any material condition, as if they were forged in ether,that is only in subjects consciousness. The countless structural determinantsof power, such as control of means of production, subsistence and reproductionare silently dropped. Within this frame of analysis, there is never a risk ofbeing wrong. This sort of class struggle comes in and out as a real deus ex-machina explaining cycles of capital accumulation, the end of rgimes,political crises, and so on. Moreover, being unpredictable and omnipresent,class struggle accounts post facto for every event following both high and lowtides of struggle. Not surprisingly, this interpretative framework is unable to

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say much about the near future (in other words, it lacks predictive power).Rebellion becomes, then, the synonym of unexpected results.

In the empirical account of Argentine social movements that follows, I willtry to show that results were not at all unexpected. In so doing, I assumealso that not all theoretical approaches are equally good. A class-struggleanalysis of the Argentine crisis cannot run on into an optimistic view ofrebellion without first giving an account of wages, job conditions, trade unions,and so forth. In the case of Argentina, the rebellion of social movements wasnot accompanied by proletarian struggles. Quite to the contrary, theappropriation of workers income and labour flexibilisation continued evenmore intensively than before 1920 December (1920D).

Rebellion put to paces

So where lie the promising features of the 1920 December rebellion? Advocatesof an optimistic view, despite the worsening living conditions of workingclass, focused on the fostering of social movements, because party politicswas off-scene. A holy quartet is often invoked when sketching the rebellion:there is a general consensus that identifies piqueteros (unemployed workers),seized factories, asambleas and barter clubs as the most dynamic and vanguardistmovements.

The following empirical assessment tries to think about ways of measuringthe prospects of workers struggle. I wish to discuss the extent and potentialof each movement, stressing their subjective and ideological importance. Thatis, for instance, their actual control of means of production and other resources,or the quantity of people involved plus its expected reproduction. In orderto achieve some level of objectivity, I will address two analytical points thatare key to what follows. First, a careful look at the different competing practiceswithin each movement. That is, movements that present themselves asrevolutionary or counterhegemonic (and effectively occupy that ideologicalspace) usually end up with very similar capitalist functional forms, sometimesthe hegemonic response to the same symptom (take for instance the case oftrade unions: even when they can become instruments of the working-classstruggle, bureaucratic ones become capitalist structures of control). Second,having identified the relative importance of revolutionary practices insideeach movement, we should assess their expected growth and their modes ofarticulation. In other words, to asses whether or not enlarged reproduction

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5 Fajn et al. 2003, p. 63.

of anticapitalist social practices is possible, and in which ways they integratewith (or become vulnerable to) capitalist social relationships. Both points areintimately interlinked. This encompasses a complex and diverse set of problems.Just to illustrate the question that, for instance, reproduction might arise: isreproduction even possible (that is, can it subsist through time)? Or aremovements tied to specific and arbitrary initial conditions? What are theconstraints to growth of the reproduction of movements (regionally, socially,quantity of people)? Do these constraints come from the forms of organisation(for example, scale) or from the means of production? Can these constraintsbe overcome? Are they strong enough to survive repression or co-option? Onthe problem of articulation, the issue is to assess the extent to which thearticulation might be a strategic or crucial part of the movement. To whatextent is this set of practices truly autonomous? Can they be controlled andforced to serve capital just through this articulation? Are they strong enoughto subsist without capital? To confront state repression? Using these twoanalytical criteria, I will attempt to measure the extent and future of each ofthe holy quartet vanguard movements.

Occupied factories

Ocupar, resistir e produzirLema of Movimento Sem Terra (MST)

Left activists did not even dream during Menemism that a few years later itwould be possible to occupy a factory in the context of a protest and end upwith workers managing production and becoming factory owners. The almostworld-wide repercussions of a hundred cases (even reported in Bloombergand CNN) has been presented as a paradigmatic example of successful threat to capital or private property and of workers aptitude to produceautonomously.

Several points are of significant interest to Marxists; let us address themin no particular order. First, occupied factories challenge the supposedlyindispensable role of management in production. In most cases (79%)professional workers and managers did not stay in the plant either duringconflicts or afterwards, and yet workers coped with production (80% areproductive).5 Many workers realised labour-knowledge, that is they learned

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6 Fajn et al. 2003, p. 66.7 With the exception of FASINPAT (ex Zanon). See Fajn and Rebon 2005.8 See Palomino 2002 and Fajn and Rebon 2005.9 For instance, Lopez et al. 2002, Godoy and Blanco 2002, or Rebon 2004.

10 Fajn et al. 2003, Chapter 5.

that they knew how to produce without the supervision of foremen or middle-management (when the first product or product line was successfullyproduced after months of conflict, machine repairs and searches for workingcapital, many workers literally collapsed in tears). Around 87% of the occupiedfactories now share their revenues in equal parts, regardless of the job.6

Workers control and self-management might foster a revolution of labourprocesses, even when, so far, this has varying degrees of importance. Wherevermanagement did not remain in the workplace or was not replaced by otherpersonnel with the similar functions, changes in the labour process occurredin many ways. For instance, questions regarding inputs, prices, salaries andwork charges were decided in assemblies, some workers were retrained,sometimes the factory workplace was restructured to give space for otheractivities such as lunch, assemblies, communal or cultural activities, newproducts were produced, or some inputs were replaced (sometimes simplydue to the lack of them). In the medium term, presupposing no fragmentationof labour, the labour process could continue being recast with differentconstraints, perhaps without the usual capitalist constraint of labour control,even when this is not part of the factories agenda.7 (It should be noted thatthe absence of foremen and capitalists is substantially different from situationsof self-employment, where the labour process involves one or very fewworkers.)

Second, the gain in workers self-confidence during occupations providedpolitical fuel for some other struggles, and certainly constituted an advancein the power of labour that will not be easily lost in the future (at the veryleast in these factories). The tool of factory occupations has effectively becomepart of workers toolkit, either as a real choice or a credible threat.8 The preciseimpact both materially (namely, on practices) and ideologically is difficult topredict.9 Even within the bourgeois legal order, the conflicts demonstratedan important capacity to force favourable decisions, such as considering theoccupation process as a labour conflict instead of a violation of privateproperty.10

Finally, we should also take note of the changing direction of labour conflictsin the context of Argentinas capitalist crisis. The occupations usually started

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11 Lavaca 2004. Fajn et al. figures are based on a sample of 83, Rebon on a samplein the city of Buenos Aires of 23.

12 Fajn et al. 2003, p. 159.13 With no more than five or six exceptions, like Zanon or Valero, whose fixed capital

is not older than 10 years. As this is currently very much a delicate question due toassets valuing (for auction or expropriation), data on fixed capital is not generallyavailable. An indirect measure is provided by Fajn et al. 2003, where they show thatthe average age of the factories is 40 years, 75% of them are older than 25 years. Mostof these factories had no re-investment in machinery since the mid-1970s.

14 At an average of 54% of their productive capacity. Fajn et al. 2003.15 Fajn and Rebon 2005, Lavaca 2004.

as defensive conflicts, that is claims for months of overdue salaries or demandsfor the preservation of the workplace (sometimes to prevent auction). Then,as these basic demands remained unsatisfied, new solutions arose. Due salarieswere first earned by selling goods in stock and later defending jobs meantseizing the factory and producing under workers control. Even whenclassifying struggles as defensive and offensive is misleading (as the evolutionof these conflicts show), it should not be forgotten that the typical case is thatworkers assumed control because capitalists ran away from indebted andbankrupted industries while the former were desperately trying to keep ajob and not as a first step of workers control in the construction of a workersstate.

However, despite this relatively optimistic account of the scope of theoccupied factory movement, it is essential to assess more coldly the materialbasis of these transformations and the future prospects of this phenomenon.Two important empirical issues serve to discourage idealising the movementas a whole. First, the aggregate economic importance of occupied factories isquantitatively insignificant. They are at most 14060 cases,11 and are composedof an average of 60 workers, and a mode in the range of 31 to 50.12 An optimisticfigure of 10,000 workers involved in this movement would mean that only0.1 per cent of Argentinas employed workforce or 0.07 per cent of theeconomically active population (around 13.8 million people) are involved inthis movement. The average age of fixed capital of the occupied factories isestimated to be around 30 to 40 years.13 Any estimate of the impact on GNPof these factories would therefore be minute, considering both that their labourproductivity is below average, that they were owned by peripheral fractionsof capital and the fact that they are being used well below full productivecapacity.14 Moreover, the goods and services they produce are in no casecritical or strategic (there is some predominance of small-scale metallurgicalactivities followed by food production).15

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16 Fajn et al. 2003, in 2003 44% of the total production was done a faon.17 Occupied factories head 67% of production for intermediate consumption, that

is, downstream the productive matrix (Universidad de Buenos Aires 2003). In thesame survey workers answered that restrictions of demand where a cause for notproducing at a higher capacity in 46% of cases.

18 More exactly 78%, see Rebon 2004, p. 34.19 Veraz 2003.20 Strictly speaking, we are referring to supervision rather than control (that is, a

situation wherein a workers committee has the right of access to all firm accounts).See, for instance, the case of Rio Turbio in Negro 2002.

The second important empirical issue refers to the combination of temporaland structural restrictions that these factories face. Examples of the first, suchas the indefinite nature of property (that is, it is subject to claims by manyactors such as capitalist owners, creditors, the state, and so forth) and thelack of financial assistance (most notably of working capital), have been moreor less circumvented by many ingenious though not optimal strategies,like the widespread modality of work a faon.16 The structural restrictionsarise more frequently on the side of demand. This restriction is twofold. First,workers in the productive process are separated from the product of theirlabour under capitalist relations of production. This means that problems ofdemand are handled by the capitalists themselves or by other white-collarworkers. Reconstructing relationships of exchange between occupied factoriesand former clients has been troublesome in most cases and impossible inothers, particularly where the demand came from the state. The second majorstructural restriction of demand comes from the configuration of industrythat resulted from the strategy of vertical integration that shaped theindustrialisation process of the 1960s and 1970s. Many occupied factories aretrapped in the commercial relationships of a bigger capitalist holding, andthus dependent of their will.17

Besides approximately twelve cases of recovered business predating 1999,seizures started by the end of 2000, and the majority occurred between October2001 and May 2002.18 Since September 2002 there have been very few newcases, and there are little or no prospects of expansion. Less than a third offirms go bankrupt now (they were more than two thousand per year for theperiod 19952002), and even in the more intense period of occupations theyrepresented 0.02% of them.19 The possibility of workers control where capitalistsare still present, which might serve as a continuation of this process, is nolonger significant.20

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It should be stressed that regardless of the extent to which some occupiedfactories try to stimulate anticapitalist practices, they co-exist with competing(and far more numerous) forms that are functional to capital. That is, nomatter how phenomenologically similar both trends might look inside themovement, occupied factories are sometimes neutralised and others evenserve the interests of capital. In this case, the genesis of the movement isrelevant to explain this aspect of its current structure. As already noted,capitalists left on their own accord the great majority of these factories becausethey were facing (or faking) bankruptcy. Convertibilidad meant lower rates ofprofit and strong international competition, especially in the majority of thesectors where seizures happened. Factories with old fixed capital faced thealternative of re-investing (taking advantage of cheap prices for import ofmachines), or moving non-fixed capital to the financial sector (then encounteringproblems of liquidity of their sunken capital). This is not a linear process, butit becomes clear that expropriation of a seized factory could be of great benefitto capitalists if useless fixed capital is (over)valued by the state and paid toformer owners. It becomes a unique way of regaining capital liquidity whileleaving low productive fixed capital to workers (or whoever). Alternatively,as in 26% of the recovered firms, the owners came to an agreement of rentingmachinery and the building. The extent of this process will depend on boththe extent of and the amounts paid in expropriations and the way formerdebts are handled. Time is again an important factor in this struggle: thedeferment of final expropriation undoubtedly serves capitals interest.

A second source of capitalist hegemony is put to practice through marketpower. The valorisation process and technical dominance are strongdisciplinary forces (because they constantly constraint firms to increaseproductivity and produce surplus-value). In fact, capital worldwide since thelate 1980s has relied on forms of market discipline in many areas (for example,outsourcing), thereby invalidating many co-operativist presumptions. Thequality of fixed capital seized (quantity, productivity, criticality) is even morerelevant, as any generated surplus is subject to appropriation by means ofmonopoly prices over inputs or outputs. Further research on the general andArgentine specificity of the logic of outsourcing and vertical integration (ordomination) is strategically central for this movement.

Finally, there is the importance of capitalist representatives. It is true thatfirms like Brukman and Zanon were in many respects on the left of themovement (for example, they tried not to become co-operatives) and in 2002

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21 UBA 2003.22 Co-operatives have also been used frequently by capitalists to liquidate bankrupted

firms, converting salary debt into initial capital and dissolving the few obligationsleft to workers by making them partners.

were paradigmatic public cases of successful occupied factories. However,the bourgeoisie was quick and strong in presenting and appraising specificforms of occupations over others. Resurrected Fourierism and other forms ofco-operativism were the ideological and legal forms of hegemony. Animpressive robustness in re-establishing capitalist legal order was showntowards the end of 2002. Legal expropriation, as already said, is not only apossible source of bourgeois profit but it also means for the re-instatementof state order, that is, of legality and property rights. By giving legal form tode facto expropriations, the state reacts to a social demand/pressure but alsoreconstructs power as social actors accept its mediation and that (social) spacere-enters the normality of the state remit.

The Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (MNER) became theindisputable leader of occupied factories after 2002, even when a division oncompromise with different bourgeois parties arose, giving birth to MNER andMovimiento Nacional de Fbricas Recuperadas (MNFR) later in 2003. A surveyby the University of Buenos Aires found that 58 per cent of workers citedMNER as the source of support for their struggle (also emphasising the limitedinteraction with other movements).21 At the same time, the Trotskyist left opposition lost the paradigmatic case of Brukman. While contesting co-operativism, Brukman and Zanon were heading for state-ownership underworkers control (a contradictory programme that either incorrectly presumedthe ability to take control of the state or condemned workers to became publicservants). Brukmans workers accepted an alternative to a co-operative fromthe very beginning mainly because the former owner proposed to convertthe firm one month before seizure.22 In a long process that started just beforethe presidential election that elected Nestor Kirchner, Brukman was dislodgedfor several months and returned to the workers only after their agreementto expropriate under the form of a co-operative aligned with MNER, nowthe MNFR. Brukmans workers accused the left activists of forcing confrontationwith the state instead of representing workers interests. By mid-2004, Zanonalso formed a co-operative (called Fabrica Sin Patron or FaSinPat, that is,factory without foreman), and has survived six attempts of dislodgement.Zanon is not aligned with MNER or MNFR, and has not yet been able to

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23 See for instance MTD 2002.

achieve expropriation. In November 2004, the city of Buenos Aires finallyagreed to definitive expropriation of 12 firms, to be paid by the workersthemselves over twenty years.

To sum up, the anticapitalist trend within occupied factories can becharacterised as extremely minoritarian, with interesting prospects but littleor no chance to grow, also highly vulnerable to direct repression, subject todiscipline through the valorisation process, conflicts of management,monopsonic/monopolistic domination through inputs and/or outputs, oldor non-competitive fixed capital and low-profit perspectives.

Unemployed workers

In the shortlist of changes in the Argentinean playground of class struggleduring 1990s, it is not possible to ignore the movements of unemployedworkers. Appearing in 1997 and growing rapidly, they became the vanguardof social resistance (as human rights movements were in their turn duringmilitary coup and most of the 1980s) along with state workers. Thesemovements, frequently called piqueteros (after piquetes or roadblocks, theirmain form of protest), are a direct product of the growth of structuralunemployment and to a lesser extent the breakdown of the state network ofsocial welfare provisioning. These undoubtedly must be conceived of asworker organisations (a fact that the Left of the movement normally stressesin their self-identification and political discourse: in other words, movementsof unemployed workers, and not just the unemployed). The unemployedworkers movements were the inheritors of many trade-union practices, evenwhen the articulation of a common politics and interests with employedworkers is extremely limited. In what follows, I will not discuss the countlesssubtleties of these movements, but simply sketch some outstandingcharacteristics in order to assess trends and their future evolution.

Territoriality is a central feature of these movements whose struggle drawsupon over the identity of the neighbour and benefits from the daily familiarityof social relationships in suburban and rural areas.23 To some extent, oneshould more properly speak of territorial organisations rather thanunemployed workers movements, specifically those that grew outwards fromnucleating neighbours fighting for housing, basic services or land. In manycases, the movement effectively reached a high degree of control of their

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24 Iigo Carrera and Cotarelo 2001.25 Delamata 2004.

(small) local territory, as they do during piquetes. These locally based politicalconstructions found regional horizontal co-ordination in some cases and aregional vertical structure in others. The strength of forms of local power alsoimplied important levels of fragmentation with competing groups sharingthe same neighbourhood or nearby areas, Despite the predictable limits topolitical action, fragmentation also played a defensive role (for example, itmade it impossible for the government to negotiate with piqueteros) and, tosome extent, led to the preservation of diversity.

Roadblocks are the most visible manifestation of the unemployed movements,although reducing these movements to piquetes would be absurd. As one ofthe few effective means of pressure in the 1990s, roadblocks allowed workersexcluded from or marginal to the productive sphere to block the circulationof both labour and commodities. Demonstrations became futile underMenemism and strikes are self-evidently impossible for unemployed workers.Close to the end of the 1990s, roadblocks were adopted by other movements,even employed workers, both because the strength of this form of pressurewas normally higher than strikes in marginal areas of production (such asbankrupt factories or dismantled state services such as education) and becauseit was an implicit recognition or emulation of the vanguard of resistance. Forexample, in the first three quarters of 2001 almost 40 per cent of all protestswere demonstrations and 35 per cent roadblocks, whereas only 24 per centof the latter were conducted by unemployed workers.24

Compared to other forms of protest, roadblocks require a high degree oforganisation, involving many task forces for different activities. During thepiquete, many activities such as communal casseroles, first-aid, activities ofpeer instruction and even music festivals are organised. The asamblea (theassembly of the piquete, composed of those taking part in the roadblock) usedto be normally the only institution exercising sovereignty over negotiations.This form of decision-making normally implies some radicalisation, asassemblies do not tend to wind up the roadblock until some crucial demandsare granted. Among the many differences in roadblocks as applied by eachorganisation (where to block, whether to allow alternative circulation, howlong, what to claim for, and so forth) the practice of assemblies is beingabandoned in vertical organisations (which prefer to resort to hierarchy).25

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26 Social aid programmes grew considerably, from $409 million pesos in 2000, $503million in 2001 (Ministerio de Economia, DGP 2001) to the new programme PlanJefes y Jefas de Hogar, that alone represents $3,240 million pesos, almost 1% of GNPand around 4% of national budget (Impacto macroeconmico del programa Jefes yJefas de Hogar, Ministerio de Trabajo, September 2002). These figures are, of course,smaller than foreign debt services and payments to banks as compensation for thelosses due to pesification (conversion into national currency, the Peso) but twicethe budget spent in high education.

27 Marx ?, Part IV, Chapter 14.

The designation of rotating interlocutors with the government (without anypower of decision-making) is an important mechanism in breaking commonpractices of bureaucratisation and other traditional relationships betweenworkers organisations with the state, and was also a common source ofcomplaint by the government.

State subsidies are by far the most important source of finance of theseorganisations. These are the direct product of historical struggles and anexample of the complexities behind the distribution of the state budget.26

Social plans are mainly personal subsidies for unemployed (misleadinglycategorised as workfare), with an impressive variety in form of assignmentand administration, where between 510% ($8$15) from the monthlyassignment of $120$180 (around US$50) is given to the organisation (on avoluntary or compulsory basis). Despite the complexities of social plans andstate aid, they have not only served as a means of survival for individualunemployed workers, but many movements have tried ingeniously to searchfor ways of socialising their administration and overcoming both staterestrictions and individualism.

Another promising initiative of the unemployed workers movement isemprendimientos productivos [productive ventures]. With varying levels ofsuccess, the movements have managed to start small bakeries and forges,produce concrete bricks, plant small orchards and manufacture diapers, amongother ventures. Generally speaking, they are attempts to both offer a form ofservice to the community and to provide an alternative source of income forthe organisation and its members, or at the least create self-sustained businesses.Economically, these productive ventures are insignificant and the dependenceof the unemployed workers movement upon government social programmesremains total. However, the underlying political importance of these venturesis their contribution to the deepening of unemployed workers self-confidence,allowing them to recover their productive capabilities, sometimes outside thecapitalist machinery,27 which in some few cases was even combined with a

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28 Dinerstein 2002.29 Amato et al. 2002.

commitment to finding alternative, democratic ways of organising production.They were initially financed by a percentage of the social plans and someNGO subsidies, but after 2003 the World Bank and, later, the Kirchneradministration created different lines of state subsidies in the form of loansor mixed subsidies to start productive activities (thereby attempting to convertunemployed workers into small-scale capitalist entrepreneurs).

Besides this general picture, it is important to look closely at the differenceswithin this heterogeneous movement. Despite personal and politicalsympathies, one cannot simply look at the phenomenon of the unemployedmovements through the sole lens of CTD Anibal Vern in 2002, as Dinersteinmistakenly does.28 The indisputable social importance of this phenomenoncannot be equated with the importance of this group alone, even if they werethe most promising political construction.

The functional and political differences in the movement can be assessedmore objectively if we take into account the number of militants, territorialexpansion and the administration of social plans. By the second half of 2002,both FTV (Federacin de Tierra y Vivienda, part of CTA) and CCC (CorrienteClasista y Combativa, affiliated with PCR, a Maoist party) were the biggestorganisations, amounting for 65 per cent of people and 75 per cent ofbeneficiaries of social help plans. Bloque Piquetero follows in number (32per cent of people), then composed mainly of the unemployed/territorialmovements of left parties (PC and Trotskyist), and left nationalists and others(such as Raul Castellss MIJD).29 The remaining 3 per cent of people and 2 per cent of social help was organised around the autonomist movementCorriente de Trabajadores Desocupados (CTD) Anibal Vern (therefore, thevery small comparable size of these movement illustrates the skewed imageryof Dinersteins analysis). It should be noted that this rough quantitative picturehas been subject to countless changes since then as internal disputes (overalliances with Kirchnerism, compromise with horizontal practices, amongothers) have generated rapid transformations and re-arrangements in co-ordination and representation that would be tiresome to deal with here.Without needing to go into further detail, it is clear that both FTV and CCCare now bigger at the expense of neighbourhoods previously aligned withsmaller movements. The geographical distribution of these movements is notavailable as consistent or coherent data, but it is worth pointing out that

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30 Massetti 2003.31 See for instance, Delamata 2004. The PJ distributes and administrates 90% of Plan

Jefes y Jefas.32 Auyero 2000.33 Delamata 2004, Isman 2004.

CTD/MTD is restricted to Great Buenos Aires and Bloque Piquetero has fewmovements outside the province of Buenos Aires while CCC and FTV arethe only two groupings with national coverage (especially the latter).30

In the light of this image of the relative importance of each movement, letus now reconsider the promising features of piqueteros, looking closely at theimportance of different practices and trends within and among thesemovements. First, appropriating a share of state expenditure is at the sametime a victory and an Achilles heel. Besides the nonsense of right-wingdiscourse that identifies state or state bureaucracy as the promoter or evencreator of piqueteros (ignoring that both movements and budget share are thedirect outcome of historical struggle, and that they will not simply disappearif social plans no longer existed), it is clear that a great deal of effort of themovements is directed towards sustaining social plans and finding the beststrategy to relate to the state. The importance of this relationship becomes apoint of vulnerability, as it gives the state a great deal of control, in punishingsome movements and promoting others and in setting the dynamics of conflict(that is, defensive/offensive periods). Despite the relative importance of socialaid as a whole, it is still true that the big partner of these funds is, undoubtedly,the Peronist Party (PJ) and after it the Catholic Church.31 Social programmesare mainly distributed in the context of long-standing clientelist relationships,closely mirroring those that constituted the party-political basis of the PJmediated through state social programmes in the 1980s and early 1990s.32

Some authors even conceive the social movement simply as new mediators ofstate social aid.33 A good deal of unemployed workers discourse is directedto confronting clientelist practices which are deeply rooted in political activitiesin the suburbs. This does not mean, however, that this actually succeeds northat all of them have a genuine intention to overcome clientelism.

Two indications of clientelist tendencies can be used. First the increasingefforts of organisations to have greater control over planes. Despite originally,once granted, it became property of the individual, new programmes, at theorganisations demand, are giving them the power of revocation orreassignment of the plan, thus disciplining the holders. Another indirectindication of clientelism is the lack of political compromise with wider issues.

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34 That is, rank-and-file members of organisations have a clientelist relationshipwith their organisations since they do not care about or are involved in political issues(supposedly meaningful inside the organisation) beyond benefits for theirneighbourhoods.

35 Centro de Estudios Nueva Mayoria, 2005

Even left parties are unable to mobilise the movement for other questionsbesides basic claims of social assistance like food or planes (for instance, co-operation directed towards other social groupings, such as the occupiedfactories movement).34 The political limit of most organisations is rooted inthe pragmatic relationship that their rank-and-file militants establish withthem. A grotesque example of this description is Luis DElia, leader of FTV,one of the biggest organisations, who administers more than 60,000 planes inthe province of Buenos Aires, who faced the stark limits of this politicalconstruction when standing as a candidate for governor of the province ofBuenos Aires, supposedly as part of FTVs strategic politics, but was votedfor by only 43,834 people (0.76 per cent of the electors).

Furthermore, the most important tendency in the unemployed workersmovements is the clear split in strategy regarding compromises with the state.This can be traced at least to Duhaldes government (when some organisationsparticipated in Consejos de Crisis) and later on with transversality and co-optation by Kirchnerism. Besides ideological differences, the state is pushingmovements towards either one strategy or the other, and has since stigmatisedthem in the media as either soft (prone to dialogue, such as FTV or Barriosde Pie) or hard (radical, violent, and so on, such as MIJD, Bloque Piqueteroor MTD). The most radical are frequently forced to physical confrontation inorder to continue receiving their plans, while the others have virtually ceasedroadblocks (in 2003 there were 1,278, against 2,336 in 2002).35 As mentionedabove, the democratic and horizontal institution of the roadblock asamblea isno longer universal, representatives increasingly take its place in negotiations(this is part of the compromise: a prerequisite to avoid tensions with state).

Regarding productive ventures, two hegemonic trends minimalise thepositive aspects noted above. First, populist organisations (CTA, CCC) butalso many left parties (PC, MST) increasingly reproduce hierarchical processesof labour organisation in this small-scale production. Second, MTDs venturesare still vulnerable to trivial state coercion, such as demand for taxes. Moreover,the state has entered the scene with new subsidies, heading a long-termreformulation of unemployed workers as small-scale capitalists and giving

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36 See Ovalles 2002, Pavon 2000, and Crivello 2002.37 Clarin, 19 February 2003.

new shape to these ventures. For instance, state financial aid specifies thelabour process (for example, some subsidies allow for one or two foremenin the structure, who need not be unemployed workers nor beneficiaries ofa plan) and demands a business plan (which might be more or less coherent,but stipulates that production should go to capitalist markets).

The state is playing a selecting role within movements (either via differentialsocial reproduction or more crudely with open repression) in favour of thosethat are more prone to bureaucratisation. In the medium term, this processwill look similar to the origins of trade-union bureaucracies under Peronismbetween c. 194350. What is under dispute here is the mediation betweenworkers and the state, but now for a new segment of the working class. Inother words, we can expect in the short term the rise of a piqueteros bureaucracyjust as we witnessed a trade-union Peronist bureaucracy after 1943.

In sum, the indubitable importance of piqueteros is not to be confused withthe smaller and weaker part of the movement whose social practices try tobe genuinely democratic and/or promote genuine social change. The currentweakness inside the movement stems from its dependence on and vulnerabilityto the state, which can be predicted to worsen as their partners continuefurther down the road of compromise and become a new state-sponsoredbureaucratic organisation to represent unemployed workers.

Barter clubs

The first barter club was opened in Bernal 1 May 1995, and was followed byan important growth both in the number of nodes (clubs) and prosumidores[prosumers or producers/consumers]. By the end of 2000, there were closeto 400 nodes and 320,000 people exchanging goods and services. BetweenOctober 2001 and May 2002 barter clubs reached their peak of participation,with nearly 3 million people and 5,000 nodes.36 After June 2002, the phenomenonreverted back to previous levels and has continually retracted since then; the most optimistic assessments (which initially reported 6 million people) recognise a decline to roughly 100,000 people in 2003.37 According to thissame source (the newspaper Clarin) the number of nodes declined from 6,000to 1,000 in the beginning of 2003.

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38 Puntos, as well as talentos or ecovales are alternatives to crditos. See Illari 2002.39 See Bombal 2002 or Coraggio 1998.

Despite their name, barter clubs are, in fact, alternative monetary markets.Although with some variations, in most cases a pseudo-currency is used toexchange products, the most widely-spread is known as crdito. Yet the notionof commodity exchange is not challenged. At most there are conscious butfutile attempts to establish a Commodity-Money-Commodity cycle, and toavoid accumulation strategies (for instance puntos points have a rule ofoxidation, that is they degrade at a rate of 5 per cent every 4 months).38

While barter clubs were not the only alternative market, especially consideringthe high degrees of informality in the Argentinean economy (namely, economicrelations that might be considered non-capitalistic or beyond state control ofproduction and exchange), their major difference was that they provided aquick and cheap entrance, thus making it possible for common people tosell home-made or used commodities.

Advocates of barter clubs can be found across a wide range of the ideologicalspectrum. The first node was founded by green activists promoting for regionalself-sustainability, but the most structured discourse on bartering makes useof the concepts of balanced exchange and social money, which in somecases combines ideas of solidarity and horizontality.39 According to theseadvocates, the problems of capitalist economy reside in its imbalance or lackof stock money. The more enthusiastic regard barter clubs as a seed of future social transformation, a re-invention of the market, or a powerfulcountercultural construction of a parallel economy, where accumulation,speculation, unfair prices, waste of resources and other vices of the formaleconomy were to be avoided with a wealth of different strategies rangingfrom strict rules to the (re)education of members. The original intentions andideology of the founders of the movement are not anyhow important, aswe will shall see below.

Some interesting features of the barter clubs should be noted. First, is thewidespread experience of a non-state-form of money and market that helpsshape consciousness and denaturalise the historical and social relationshipsbehind these two fundamental institutions of capital. Second, had barter clubsengaged more actively in productive activities (perhaps in close analyticalrelationship with the productive ventures of the unemployed workersmovements), they could have helped workers to develop productive activitiesindependent from the capitalist apparatus. Finally, it should also be recognised

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40 Marchini 2002.41 For instance, for food see Abramovich and Vazquez 2002.42 Abramovich and Vazquez 2002.

that these clubs (as with many others) offer a rich environment for communalexperiences.

The indubitable boom of barter clubs, though, was not related to thedescribed remastering of Proudhonian dreams. Instead, the network grew asit became an important addendum to the meagre basket of survival strategiesin times of crisis.40 This emerging economy that fulfilled crude subsistenceneeds for many is far from being a closed self-contained, self-sustainedeconomy. Productive activities are very limited and most products (or theirraw materials) come either from the formal market or from used commoditiesaccumulated before the crisis.41 The nature of this success also presented aproblem: The very own [sic] development of the system puts forward acontradiction. A massive system that is seen as a medium to solve the mosturgent needs can not be regulated hoping them all to behave [sic] withsolidarity.42 This strategy of survival was in the words of many participantslike a job, one which was never preferred to a formal one.

Political confrontation regarding the future development of barter clubswas present in their very emergence. An earlier split, in 1999, of the networkwould become in the next year the Red Global del Trueque (RGT), whichpromoted social franchising; a system that allowed centralised control ofthe printing of crditos. Social franchising consists of a contract between theco-ordinator of a node and the RGT. The co-ordinator remains responsiblefor following rules and using and accepting crditos within the network. RGThas a monopoly over the issuing of crditos (thus also seigniorage), which aregiven to co-ordinators at the charge of 4 per cent of their value in pesos (i.e.100 crditos cost $4). The RGT soon became the hegemonic network and inJanuary 2001 it signed an agreement with the Secretariat of Small and Middle-sized Enterprises (SEPYME) that lasted half a year. The RGT proposed thento promote social businesses that would have both capital and crditos andwould sell in the formal and barter markets. They would receive a credit ofcrditos to pay their workers salaries and devote part of their product to theformal market and the other part to barter clubs.

The Red del Trueque Solidario (RTS) is a much smaller network (accountingfor roughly 10 per cent of nodes) that in 2001 opposed the RGT practices(especially the project of social franchising and the indiscriminate issuing

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43 Primavera 2001, p. 3.44 Other networks (such as Red de Trueque Zona Oeste) are even smaller than RTS

and will not be dealt here.45 Although the state could have picked on this and prosecuted the members of

barter clubs for any of these issues, it actually overlooked them. Some small merchantsand lawyers raised complaints but had no success at that.

of crditos under the solidarity system) and claimed to respect the initialaims of barter clubs of building relationships of solidarity, reciprocity, equityand transparency.43 RTS focused on a horizontal form of organisation (thatis, organisers should not be distinct from organised, one member one vote,autonomy of nodes, and so on), it promoted assemblies after exchange andmade an important effort in training participants in solidarity and other values.The competition between the two groups (RGT and RTS)44 provided a pertinentlesson on the workings of hegemony: the success of RGT as the dominantform stemmed from the wide-scale distribution of brochures and courses onthe methodology of (its) barter clubs, the extent of distribution and usage ofits crditos, and the better availability of some products at its clubs.

The position of the Left went from a timid support of a popular survivalstrategy with a critique of several misunderstandings of the limits and directionof barter clubs, to an open accusation of the clubs as an ideological fake. Therelation of the state to barter clubs has been that of tolerance when not ofactive support. The passive tolerance of the state refers to many practices thatit ignored, but that raised controversial issues and claims made by lawyersand small merchants (who saw in barter clubs an unfair form of competition),including issues of contestation such as: commercial transactions withouttaxation, the printing of a parallel currency (this was circumvented with thelegal form of a mutual donation as stated in some crditos), payment ofsalaries in crditos, and the sale of food without health standards.45 On theside of active support, some city councils started to interact with barter clubs,accepting crditos as part of tax payments or involving clubs in the tasks oftheir social-welfare departments (usually training, but also supplying scarceor critical products from the formal market). The reaction of the mass mediawas also benevolent and contributed to the public recognition of the clubs.

After mid-2002, practices of corruption and clientelism in the RGT becameapparent, such as the indiscriminate issuing of crditos (and the widespreaduse of falsified ones) and the political use of the network by the powerfulsocial/clientelist network of the Peronist Party. Inflation and local disparitiesof prices became common, and a myriad of forms of speculation arose

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undermining the general performance of the network. By the beginning of2003, the failure of barter clubs was undeniable and the debate inside themovement concentrated on the causes of its own crisis. Besides recognisingthe above causes they added that Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar (2002) injectedlegal currency and destroyed their market. After 2003, the Barter Clubs wereno longer a significant aspect of the emergency economy but a marginalphenomenon of complementary exchange.

Regarding inflation, there was important debate between RGT and RTS onits causes (both utilised a monetarist framework to explain this phenomenon).In fact, troubles arose with the scarcity of production and the total absenceof some vital products such as oil, flour and sugar (commodities that becamethe subject of the greatest variance and volatility in the clubs, and which werealso subject to significant inflation in the formal market). The impact ofinflation on the accumulation of crditos was more significant than that ofoxidation. To avoid inflation, different unsuccessful strategies wereimplemented such as maximum prices, that is members were forbidden tosell products at abusive or unfair prices.

Local disparities in prices occurred not only between urban and rural nodesor between nodes geographically distant to each other; instead marketspeculation and price disparities was a common occurrence even betweennodes relatively close in proximity. People who could afford a trip to a node20 or 30km away could sell their products where prices where higher andbuy somewhere else (for example, sometimes special transport would takeyou to another node and charge you in crditos). There were also other formsof labour appropriation (not counting the classic kinds of corruption andclientelism, like Peronist punteros selling or giving crditos for free) for thosehaving at least small quantities of national currency. For instance, it wasprofitable to buy some products in the formal market and sell them in barterclubs, or to open a node and profit from collecting takings from entrancetickets (paid in pesos or crditos).

Another dimension of the failure of barter clubs was the functional use ofthis parallel social market by the state and the Peronist Party. This use wastwofold: an immediate alternative to actual starvation and social unrest, andan attempt to promote a degraded form of workforce subsistence and socialreproduction (especially suited to long periods of unemployment) or a novelform of articulation with non-capitalist production. The widespread adoptionby thousands of people between October 2001 and May 2002 was grounded

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46 Dinerstein 2002.47 Guerrero 2002.

on the strong conditions of development roughly depicted here. There is, tospeak frankly, nothing revolutionary about barter clubs. They were the mostunjustified inclusion in this holy quartet of Argentine social movements.

Asambleas

Within this empirical survey, the single absolutely new outcome of theDecember rebellion were the asambleas. In contrast to the other movementsthat were only fostered by the crisis, asambleas actually started after the 1920Ddemonstrations. They are the expression of a fraction of the urban middleclass that needed or desired to get politically involved. Dinerstein has dealtwith some of the undeniably interesting features of the asambleas,46 includingtheir appropriation of public space, building of solidarity bindings, the initialideological power of their slogan que se vayan todos!, their intrinsic heterogeneity,their talent to accumulate a cornucopia of social experiences, and their genuineattempt to build direct democracy.

It is notable that asambleas survived competition with capital-functionalforms. For example attempts by municipal governments to subsume asambleasfailed: the city of Buenos Aires tried to give asambleas a place in CGPs (Centrode Gestion Participativa, small communal structures with no power at all),47

and later in 2002 to make them part of the Participatory Budget (a social-democratic fantasy of democracy wherein citizens are permitted to decidehow to spend a trivial part of the budget, amounting to 0.5 per cent of totalbudget). Political parties (especially the Trotskyist Left) also failed to imposea programme on or dominate the asambleas. Overall, the latter managed tosolve contradictions and tensions in their relationships with the state and,with some caveats, with political parties. A generalised rejection of any formof mediation or representation served as an effective counter-tendency tosubsuming forces, and yet this did not imply de-politicisation but rather thelack of any kind of co-ordination.

The problems with the asambleas can be grouped into two main issues: theirlack of relevance and their contradictions and intrinsic limitations. By the endof 2002, despite a peak of general social interest in the phenomenon andimportant levels of participation between January and March 2002, asambleaswere no longer quantitatively relevant. Outside the city of Buenos Aires, they

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48 Bellucci and Mitidieri 2003.49 Ouvia 2002.50 EGES 2003.51 Fernandez 2002.52 Ouvia 2004.

had almost disappeared, and in the city of Buenos Aires they numberedaround 45, with an average level of participation of around 20 people. In2003, a few asambleas tried to overcome the fragmentation of the movementthrough a series of national (Buenos Aires and Rosario) meetings, attendedby 80 to 100 people. Those who managed to survive had generally incorporatedactivities of social aid and/or occupied buildings. They are now part of thepolitical terrain because of historical reasons (namely, their relevance in thepost 1920D rebellion), but it would be a nonsense to consider them morerelevant than the thousands of communal centres, trade unions or studentmovements, for instance. The practice of assemblies, which constituted theirconstitutive character,48 is no longer practised.

Even when most reports recognise the modest quantitative existence ofasambleas, there is a frequent line of argument that consists of assigningsignificant qualitative importance in Argentinean politics to them. Manyasambleologists usually say that the great social measure of asambleas is theirown working existence.49 This kind of nonsense is simply an exhibition ofstrong bias. For instance, another social measure of the political relevanceof asambleas, might be the 2003 elections, where their positions showed anabsolute lack of influence and resounding political failure (in other words,they urged voters to vote blank or spoil their ballot, and the election registered16% more participation than in 2001 and the smallest quantity of blank votessince 1946).50 In a similar vein, asambleas are reported as examples of a newpolitics where power is unimportant or where other priorities are in place:the question is to build collective empowerments.51 In this line of argument,the power of these movements resides in that [asambleas] realise socialrelationships that overcome capitals barbarism.52 The implicit refusal ofrecognition of any kind of quantitative importance in this discourse is to benoted along with this particular kind of postmodern micropolitics. For thepurpose of this article, it is enough to say that these fragile, marginal andnon-scalable (see below) social relationships do not overcome or even representany kind of threat to capital.

The second problematic issue for the asambleas comes from their severeconstraints to growth, their particular vulnerabilities and their limited capacity

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53 See for instance Zibechi 2002. Also the slogan respeten los mandatos, basta deaparatos!, Ouvia 2002.

54 Reaching pathetic levels on 1 May, 2002. Three Trotskyist parties went over apublic dispute on where to attend the act, exhibiting depraved anti-democratic practicesand mutual accusations of lies and falsifying of mandates, that included, for instance,physical violence in the Interbarrial of 21 April 2002.

for integration with other movements. As already noted, the asambleas are ananswer to a need for political participation by a fraction of the middle class,distrustful of party politics. This desire was of great importance because,during the 1990s, the middle class was extremely passive towards the bourgeoisconsensus and took almost no part in protests. The problem is that asambleashave become an autistic answer to this desire. Perhaps most importantly, theyfailed to construct any space of co-ordination among different asambleas: The Interbarrial de Parque Centenario did not survive the bureaucraticpractices of political parties of the traditional Left,53 as asambleologists liketo stress. However, besides taking note of the severe mistakes of left political parties regarding asambleas,54 it should also be said it was impossible for social-democratic political forces (such as the dismembering FREPASO, ARIand CTA) to take part in or link with asambleas in any way. In addition,blaming left parties should not be an excuse for passing over the intrinsicfragility of the asambleas themselves, which are, in essence, a fragmentedgroup of militants (no more than 100150). After the virtual dissolution ofthe Interbarrial by the second half of 2002 it became almost impossible toco-ordinate actions not only with other movements but even between differentasambleas.

Summing up, no matter how progressive or advanced the socialrelationships, forms of decision-making and activities of asambleas are said tobe, their small scale, lack of influence and flawed co-ordination betweenthemselves and other movements render this movement unable to overcomevery narrow limitations. In other words, we cannot assign more importanceto this phenomenon than any other of the various political and socialmovements in contemporary Argentina.

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Concluding remarks

Piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una solaSlogan post 1920 December

Before concluding, a critical point remains to be analysed: it might be arguedthat the holy quartet is much more than the sum of its parts, a reasonableobjection that might challenge the preceding empirical overview of socialmovements which addresses them as regards their individual developments.To counter this point, I will simply point out that even though many similartrends traverse these social movements (such as the contestation of privateproperty both in occupied factories and asambleas, democratisation of instancesof decision-making, involvement of new subjects in left or progressive politics,transformation of labour processes, rediscovery of non-capitalistic practicesof social work, struggles over distribution of the state budget, among others),these are just analytic relationships. That is, despite the importance of commontrends between these movements, as far as they do not imply concrete politicalrelationships, they cannot be a source of optimism in the growth or developmentof these social movements.

The experiences of interaction between them were poor at best. Piqueteroslack any kind of political interaction with active workers in general andoccupied factories in particular. The causes of this lack of co-operation arediverse and perhaps start with the lack of genuine politisation (i.e. a deepcommitment to social change), and the co-opting influence of rising levels of clientelism. Asambleas and piqueteros, despite the slogan of the epigraph,failed to achieve any kind of co-ordination. Despite a few vivifying anecdotesrepeatedly quoted and the efforts of many individual participants to co-ordinate the movements, claims by piqueteros and asambleas were made inpolitical isolation. The limited operative capacity of asambleas played perhapsa decisive role in this failure, along with their class composition. Barter clubsremained isolated, and a timid integration with occupied factories faileddespite its significant political potential and strategic importance (the productiveventures of piqueteros should be re-iterated here).

The bourgeois crisis situation opened by 1920D is now over. Bourgeoisnormality is back in place. The answer, as a class, has come again from a(traumatic) re-arrangement of Peronism known as Kirchnerism. With highlevels of popularity, Kirchnerism combines an anti-liberal rhetoric with apolitical economy of the status quo. Structural neoliberal reforms (flexibilisation,privatisations, state reform) are not even on the agenda of change. A devaluated

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peso, as opposed to convertibilidad, is the only substantial shift from the 1990s.The Left as a whole (including this author) failed totally to presenr anyalternative or make any relevant intervention in the development of the crisis.

This assessment has probably promised far more than I have succeeded indelivering. A thorough measurement of current and future class struggleprobably entails a huge research project. Much of the essential statistical datais simply not available, and it might never be: such research requires substantialcollective effort and, in some cases, it entails critical or strategic informationthat simply cannot be collected. However, this intervention will hopefully besufficient to provide readers with a more sober picture of the limitations ofthe battle of Buenos Aires and the supposed re-invention of politics, andserve as a modest contribution to the forging of left strategies in periods ofcrisis. Our duty as left intellectuals is to discern revolutionary situations fromthose that are not, to distinguish lottery from history, to identify travestiedcapitalist practices from socialist ones, to grasp the strengths and limits ofstruggle, to predict possible outcomes, and to risk opening oneself to errorrather than discussing matters of no importance.

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Documents

Grigera, 2006. Argentina on Crisis and a Measure for Class Struggle