A remarkably, remarkably unsophisticated view of political organization and popular mobilization in Argentina. She seems surprised by what has happened in Argentina over the past year and a half, as if she knows nothing about the history of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, nothing about the history of nineteenth-century anarchism, nothing about the "autonomists" of Spain before and during the Spanish Civil War, and little of what she could have learned from the history of the American left about the interaction between disciplined ideological parties and mass pickup "popular front" meetings.
The stages she observes in Argentina--and thinks have "plenty to teach"--are familiar patterns at least a century old. The takeover of pickup assemblies that claim to represent "the people" by disciplined vanguards with their own ideologies, hierarchical organizations, and ability to dispatch lots of people to outsit all others has been a common pattern since the days of the Jacobin Club: when legitimacy is conferred not by popular election but by the fact of spontaneous participation, those with the ideological and organizational tools organize the largest number of "spontaneous" participants take things over. The withdrawal from action into passivism out of a belief that to form and follow a plan is to automatically recreate the master/slave pattern you are fighting against was a principal source of the lack of power of the original nineteenth-century anarchists.
Only the third pattern--the fact that failure to participate in a democratic election undermined the "autonomists" own strength rather than undermining the legitimacy of the election--is arguably new. And it is a very good sign indeed. After all, throughout all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the only choices history offers on its menu are chaos, dictatorship, and multi-party representative democracy. Try to undermine the third, and you have implicitly voted for either the first or second.
Democracy is not to be found in the streets. What we find in the streets are vanguard parties, the dictatorships they bring, and politics understood not as collective self-government but as expressive theatrical performances.
Posted by DeLong at May 14, 2003 05:17 PM | TrackBackComment: From Pots to Politics: Argentina Was Eager for Change, Yet Is About to Elect a Discredited Has-Been as President
Naomi Klein | Monday May 12, 2003 | The Guardian
In most of the world, it's the sign for peace, but here in Argentina it means war. The index and middle finger, held to form a "V", means, to his followers, "Menem Vuelve" ("Menem will return"). Carlos Menem, poster boy of Latin American neo-liberalism, president for almost all of the 1990s, is looking to get his old job back next Sunday.
Menem's campaign ads show menacing pictures of unemployed workers blockading roads, with a voiceover promising to bring order, even if it means calling in the military. This strategy gave him a slim lead in the first election round, though he will almost certainly lose the run-off to an obscure Peronist governor, Nestor Kirchner, considered the puppet of the current president (and Menem's former vice-president) Eduardo Duhalde.
On December 19 and 20 2001, when Argentinians poured into the streets banging pots and pans and told their politicians "Que se vayan todos" ("Everyone must go"), few would have predicted the current elections would come down to this: a choice between two symbols of the regime that bankrupted the country.
Back then, Argentinians could have been forgiven for believing that they were starting a democratic revolution, one that forced out President Fernando de la Rua and churned through three more presidents in 12 days. The target of these mass demonstrations was the corruption of democracy itself, a system that had turned voting into a hollow ritual while the real power was outsourced to the International Monetary Fund, French water companies and Spanish telecoms operators, with local politicians taking their cut.
Carlos Menem, though he had been out of office for two years, was the uprising's chief villain. Elected in 1989 on a populist platform, Menem did an about-face and gutted public spending, sold off the state and sent hundreds of thousands into unemployment. When Argentinians rejected these policies, it was hugely significant for the globalisation movement. The events of December 2001 were seen in international activist circles as the first national revolt against neo-liberalism, and "You are Enron, We are Argentina" was soon adopted as a chant outside trade summits. Perhaps more importantly, the country seemed on the verge of answering the most persistent question posed to critics of both "free trade" and feeble representative democracies: "What is your alternative?"
With all of their institutions in crisis, hundreds of thousands of Argentinians went back to democracy's first principles: neighbours met on street corners and formed hundreds of popular assemblies. They created trading clubs, health clinics and community kitchens. Close to 200 abandoned factories were taken over by their workers and run as democratic cooperatives. Everywhere you looked, people were voting.
These movements, though small, were dreaming big: national constituent assemblies, participatory budgets, elections to renew every post in the country. And they had broad appeal: a March 2002 newspaper poll found that 50% of Buenos Aires residents believed that the neighbourhood assemblies were "a way forward, a new way of governing". One year later, the movements continue, but barely a trace is left of the wildly hopeful idea that they could some day run the country. Instead, the protagonists of the December revolts have been relegated to a "governability problem" to be debated by politicians and the IMF.
So how did it happen? How did a movement that was building a whole new kind of democracy - direct, decentralised, accountable - give up the national stage to a pair of discredited has-beens? In Argentina, this marginalisation process had three clear stages, each of which has plenty to teach activists hoping to turn protest into sustained political change.
Stage one: Annoy and Conquer. The first blow to the new movements came from the old left as sectarian parties infiltrated the assemblies and tried to drive through their own dogmatic programmes. Pretty soon you couldn't see the sun for the red and black party flags, and a process that drew its strength from the fact that it was normal - something your aunt or teacher participated in - turned into something marginal, not action but "activism". Thousands returned to their homes to escape the tedium.
Stage two: Withdraw and Isolate. The second blow came in response. Rather than challenge sectarian efforts at co-option head-on, many of the assemblies and unemployed unions turned inward and declared themselves "autonomous". While the parties' plans verged on scripture, some autonomists turned not having a plan into its own religion: so wary were they of co-option that any proposal to move from protest to policy was immediately suspect.
These groups continue to do remarkable neighbourhood-based work, building bread ovens, paving roads and challenging their members to let go of their desire for saviours. Yet they have also become far less visible than they were a year ago, less able to offer the country a competing vision for its future.
Stage three: Just Don't Do It. Argentina's screaming and pot-banging went on and on and on. Just when everyone was hoarse and exhausted, the politicians emerged from hiding to call an election. Incredulous, the social movements made a decision not to participate in the electoral farce - to ignore the churnings of the IMF and build "counter-powers" instead.
Fair enough. But as the elections took on a life of their own, the neighbourhood assemblies began to seem out of step. People weren't able to vote for the sentiment behind December 19 and 20, either by casting a ballot or boycotting but demanding deeper democratic reforms, since no concrete platform or political structure emerged from those early, heady discussions. They thus left the legitimacy of the elections dangerously uncontested, and the dream of a new kind of democracy utterly unrepresented.
The campaign slogan that won the first round was the astonishingly vague "Menem knows what to do and he can do it." In other words, maybe Nike was right: people just want to do something, and if things are bad enough, they will settle for anything. Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
'Only the third pattern--the fact that failure to participate in a democratic election undermined the "autonomists" own strength rather than undermining the legitimacy of the election--is arguably new...'
Not so this time either. It shows up in the USSR boycott of the UN that let through their adversaries (which helped the good guys), and the "Aventine Secession" in reaction to a political assassination in Mussolini's early days of rule (which helped the bad guys). It's morally neutral.
The counter was actually worked out by 19th century Fenians who had experienced the double bind of participation lends support, abstaining gives a free kick. (So showing the limits of the boycott they had worked out.) The counter is "join and sabotage" - frustrate the workings of the parliamentary machine. If we can't have it, nobody can.
Anyhow, I just wanted to say that this aspect isn't new either. It's so old it's in the book, along with standard counters.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence on May 14, 2003 05:38 PMI think her assertion that they're about to reelect Menem is rather odd too. Mene dropped ot since it was clear he would have lost by such a wide margin.
Posted by: David Weman (Europundit) on May 14, 2003 05:54 PM>>"Menem did an about-face and gutted public spending"
Has Klein not heard of Argentina's fiscal crisis, a huge part of the cause of that country's economic straits, which Menem did nothing to solve?
More importantly, Philippe Legrain, the chief economist of Britian in Europe, states:
"Charles Derber's People Before Profit is an inchoate anti-globalisation rant. Like Naomi Klein, Derber thinks that poverty can be cured simply by giving people more say. Greater global democracy has become the panacea for anti-globalisers, who make a virtue of their lack of understanding of economics. Yet the slogan "people before profit" is empty. For sure, markets are imperfect, and collective action (by governments or others) is often justified; but politics alone cannot tell us how and what society should produce to satisfy people's needs, as the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated. Without markets - and profits - people are condemned to penury."
The article is here:
http://www.philippelegrain.com/Articles/delusion.html
Brad DeLong says "Democracy is not to be found in the streets. What we find in the streets are vanguard parties, the dictatorships they bring, and politics understood not as collective self-government but as expressive theatrical performances."
I have to take issue with you here. Certainly, street politics is as prone as other forms of politics to take over by those with the most resources. But is "street politics" less democratic or less prone to takeover than "backroom politics" or "lobby politics" or any of the other forms of action that characterise most active democracies? I don't think so.
In fact, I would suggest that the dynamic of "street politics" in the west over the time I have seen it (roughly 25 years) has tended to go the other way. There is a roughly fixed amount of vanguardist groups. While protests are small they have taken leading roles. When protests grow larger they have become proportionally much less influential.
Street politics is always going to be messy, incoherent, and frustrating, but it is none the less valuable for that. There are many times when it has crystallized and focused an opinion that can't get expressed in other ways. Most recently, it delivered a rapid and agenda-setting message to many governments regarding the US invasion of Iraq that those governments had to address. Here in Canada, it is quite possible that the government would have taken a totally different course if there had been no protest (and if the protests did not represent the views of a wide spectrum of people). And the participation of vanguardist groups was, if not totally marginal, certainly not a central facet of the protests.
Posted by: Tom Slee on May 14, 2003 06:50 PMMaybe we mean different things with street politics?
I should mention I commented the post on my blog, seged into attacking anarchism.
Posted by: David Weman on May 14, 2003 08:07 PMMaybe we mean different things with street politics?
I should mention I commented the post on my blog; I segued into attacking anarchism.
Posted by: David Weman on May 14, 2003 08:07 PMThere are a couple of other factors that are critical to understanding how Argentine's feel about the role of government.
Klein mentions that Menem sold off telecoms and water - he did, and much more. Argentines remember very clearly that they once had to wait years to get a phone and that the service was lousy. Under the Spanish the service has been consistently superior. I have never heard an Argentine criticize Menem for this - instead they criticize whatever it is that makes Argentines incapable of making their own phone system that works. Likewise for other state spending. This is a frustration that goes beyond people's impressions of Menem, and the impression I got was that people were more satisfied with the Spanish than they were their own government.
The power dynamic in Argentina historically revolves around civil government, the military, the unions, and popular unrest. As long as IMF funds/Spanish bullion/war contracts etc. enter into the country de facto stability is maintained. Cut the money and the country implodes. 28 years ago the country was being courted by Isabel Peron (President Isabelita, totally lacking Evita's charisma), crippled by major labor strikes, truly governed by the military, with people's armies making strikes on the military or generally wreaking havoc.
Let's get one thing straight about Argentine political history: in the tumble of chaos, disorganized popular movements NEVER come out on top. Labor Unions influence, but NEVER gain top power, either. Every now and then a civilian government pops in, and is toppled by at least two of the other three - in which case los militares step in, usually ceding power back to civilian government at some point.
The other power dynamic in Argentina relates to Buenos Aires and the provinces. This is age old also. The cathedral off Plaza de Mayo depicts Joseph graciously receiving the brothers that had wronged him, and gives them grain. Buenos Aires, as a powerful city overlooking the Parana, was always able to cut external trade to the interior and to Paraguay - and Bonarenses have used this power with severity. "Facundo" by Argentine president Sarmiento (1868-74), deals with the conflict between 'civilization' and 'barbary' by representing the latter as personified by provincial rebel Facundo Quiroga.
So Carlos Menem retreats to La Rioja (his province), drops from the race, and says the following:
"Yo le diría al señor (Néstor Kirchner) que se quede él con el 22 por ciento que yo me quedo con el pueblo", sintetizó haciendo referencia a su anterior competidor.
Dijo, además, que de los dos candidatos que surgieron de la primera vuelta del 27 de abril "uno era del montonerismo (por Kirchner) y otro (por él) de los que supo luchar contra los Montoneros".
(Saam Barrager translation) "I would say to Mr. Nestor Kirchner that he can stay with his 22% but I'll stay with the people." ... [of those that came out of the April 27th preliminary] "one was of the 'montonerismo' [Kirchner] and the other knew how to fight against the Montoneros."
The Montoneros were a 70s terrorist group that did quite a bit of bombing, assassinations, and attempted assassinations. (Them's fightin' words!)
So what would I say about the future?
Menem has spent millions attempting to build a power base. He campaigned avidly in 1999 and 2000 even though he wasn't running for anything. (!)
Popular uprisings will probably include some level of organized violence. Their potency will help determine when and if the military decides to overthrow the civilian government.
I military overthrow will be anything from mild (some deaths, intelligencia roughed up) to severe (30 years ago Videla killed some 30,000).
Labor demonstrations will always be imminent and will consistently exacerbate the situation.
Either a civilian government or military government will desperately try and make baby-step changes to have to avoid major institutional change.
Any way you look slice it, the hopes that popular assemblies will wrestle control of the country, pay off 140 billion in debt, reduce corruption, and implement lasting institution reform is somewhere between 0 and None.
Posted by: Saam Barrager on May 14, 2003 08:19 PM"A remarkably, remarkably unsophisticated view of political organization and popular mobilization in Argentina. She seems surprised by what has happened in Argentina over the past year and a half, as if she knows nothing about the history of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, nothing about the history of nineteenth-century anarchism, nothing about the "autonomists" of Spain before and during the Spanish Civil War, and little of what she could have learned from the history of the American left about the interaction between disciplined ideological parties and mass pickup "popular front" meetings."
Why are you surprised? Naomi Klein has never let ignorance get in the way of her pontifications :-)
Read "No Logo", and it's one howler after another -- no knowledge of history or economics
Posted by: Prashant P Kothari on May 14, 2003 08:30 PMDoes anyone have any information regarding tax evasion and “disrespect” for government institutions (e.g. tax collection) in Argentina?
I have seen some commentators stating that the average Joe in Buenos Aires is just as guilty for Argentina's woes as those Ms. Klein vilifies. Are these commentators credible?
I have a book some thirty years old comparing and contrasting Australia and Argentina then. I keep it for its historical perspective - how insights have changed, what "truths" weren't after all and what insights weren't obvious without hindsight, etc.
But anyway, it did tell me that "Buenos Aires, as a powerful city overlooking the Parana, was always able to cut external trade to the interior and to Paraguay..." isn't 100% accurate. Apparently there was one province that wasn't cut off completely and could even "sanctions bust" for Paraguay a little. I can look up the details if you like.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence on May 14, 2003 10:13 PM"throughout all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the only choices history offers on its menu are chaos, dictatorship, and multi-party representative democracy."
Multi-party representative democracy has done a good job. But I still wish with all the technological innovation going on that there could be some political innovation. Not just innovation with political theory, but in actual practice. My sense though is that we will have to wait until technology just eclipse politics, and hope that something better results.
P.M.Lawrence - yes! That'd be great. Montevideo is the other city overlooking the Parana but has always been decisively less powerful than Argentina (and I still think that's it's geographically malsituated to reverse a blockade - could be wrong!)
I lived in Argentina for two years. I mostly lived in the areas around the city, once in the city itself. (I was a Mormon missionary.) I know nothing about income taxes (though most people I knew didn't have regular jobs, so I reckon they wouldn't be paying anyway.) VAT tax was high and we all paid it.
As far as other forms of 'disrespect'...
Argentines are legally required to vote. I knew a lot of people that jumped through whatever hoop they had to to not have to vote, which always seemed funny because why not just vote?
Any space that is not actively occupied and/or guarded by private security will become occupied. This sometimes includes parks within the city limits. With time people make title deeds to what they're squating on and buy and sell them. In one area that I lived in the city decided to use its own land to build a school and had to buy out and evict people that 'owned' the land that they had purchased from squaters. Another typical sight is buildings half-built or slated for destruction but for which a sudden change of government cut funding for them. There was a huge partially finished hospital in one of my areas that was full of families. (We didn't go within 4 blocks of it at night.) The highway that the militares built from downtown to the airport necessitated destroying a swath of houses, and in the various irregular spaces left behind are mini-shanty towns.
In many areas leaving a home behind for a few weeks is foolish. I heard of a number of instances in which people asked a neighbor to watch the house, and several instances in which an unwatched house was stolen by another family. Dislodging people that don't belong is difficult and expensive, such that abandoning the house or setting it on fire is sometimes the better option. (I saw a news expose in which a man and 4 middle-aged women attacked their own house with hammers to get the occupants out. That worked.) I had a friend that was successfully evicted from a place that she didn't belong, so the legal system does work sometimes.
Housing tends to be an incremental affair. Banks fail often enough and work is intermittent enough that people usually build a foundation and then slowly add stuff to the home as they get cash. Neighborhoods in most of Argentina look to be in a constant struggle between collapse and refurbishing.
Of course registration for vehicles is optional. A $5 bribe always works.
Strangely, trash is collected twice a week rain or shine!
(The list goes on and on.)
Blaming this on 'the people' seems absolutely absurd. They just want jobs and stability. They do what they can to adapt. I would do the same thing. They tend to have little to no faith in government. (Nor should they...)
Posted by: Saam Barrager on May 15, 2003 01:14 AMSo where is democracy to be found in Argentina?
Posted by: Jack on May 15, 2003 04:12 AMIt never ceases to amaze me that anyone takes Naomi Klein seriously. She wrote for the University of Toronto student newspaper when I went there and doesn't seem to have learned anything since.
Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that she's married to the son of a prominent Toronto left-wing columnist (Michele Landsburg).
Posted by: Kevin Brennan on May 15, 2003 07:26 AMCertainly, mobs are to be as muched feared as tyrants -- those two fears undergird the US Constitution. However, I would advice Mr Delong to think twice about telling the people of Leipzig, Prague, Gdansk, Bucharest, or Manila that "democracy is not to be found in the streets." Like all good sound bites, this generalization has some dangerous limits.
Posted by: Howard Rheingold on May 15, 2003 07:44 AMDavid Weman is right, though due to timing, we can only fault Klein for not being able to read the polls (or willfully ignoring them in order to make her story “better”). Menem officially withdrew on the 14th. Klein published on the 12th. Still, Menem’s certain defeat and waffling over whether to hold out for the weekend second-round vote were no mystery by the time Klein’s piece was published.
Now, Argentina has another problem. No matter what one thinks of Kirchner, the guy who won by default (garnering only about 22% of the vote in the first round, Kirchner faced Menem again this weekend – now no Menem), he how has to face governing without ever winning a presidential election. No mandate, lots of hard decisions to make and then sell to the public – looks like a losing proposition to me, both for Kirchner and for Argentina. That's especially true when Menem, without the spine to stick it out and give Kirchner a win, then turns around and gives anything but a "gracious" consession speech. Saam Barrager's grim predictions aren't all that extreme in a situation like this.
Saam's point about not blaming the people raises regrets over institutional longevity and inertia. "People get the government they deserve"...? Or do they get the government the misguided efforts of an earlier generation stuck them with? This is not a very hopeful thought. Political inertia is the last thing Argentina needs, since with the institutions (formal and informal) in place in Argentina, there is plenty of reason to lose hope.
Posted by: K Harris on May 15, 2003 08:30 AMI am from the U.S. but have lived in Argentina for a few years. I have studied this country from afar all my adult life and graduated in political science with a specialization in Latin American studies more than 30 years ago. All of this means little, of course, in some ways, since countries are as hard to understand as the economic decisions people will make are predictable--sort of at times and not at all at others.
The average Argentine does not trust government (for good, sensible reason) and he/she has had to learn to survive in what is essentially a capricious bureaucractic state that generally works for the power elite. (More and more the U.S. seems to fit into this "las Américas" pattern, although the forms of democracy until recently have been more honored in the U.S.--not always saying much.)
I used to think that to understand nations and governments you needed to essentially understand political institutions, both governmental bodies and constitutional principles. But I am coming to see that if you really want to understand "las Américas" it would be quite useful to understand the social and psychological structures and realities of "la familia mafiosa." I believe this applies to all the countries of the Americas, including the U.S. and perhaps excluding Canada to some degree.
Whim, impulse, personal connections, bribes, and pervasive corruption are the reality of Argentine life. Yet, many "average" Argentines are personally quite decent and honest on an individual basis, but wracked by distrust. (The U.S. leadership class needs to understand this, too. Once you are bamboozled by the government, it's hard as hell to win back trust.) Now, none of these comments are all that helpful until you actually experience a country in which unemployment, severe underemployment, and poverty include most of the population, not a minority. And, consider the fact that until the last couple of years, Argentina was a poster child for the IMF and the international banking community. But both of these are like an enormous siphon or vacuum cleaner sucking out of the country as much as possible. The relatively small leadership class collaborates in the process and ex-President Menem was as deeply involved in this as anyone. This is the principle reason why most people rejected him. The principle reason anyone, including perhaps half or more of the business community supported him is because he headed a government that provided the least amount of oversight, regulation, and interference in whatever companies, especially multi-nationals wanted to do--including foreign bankers that swooped in and made a lot of dough over a decade.
While Naomi Klein didn't get it right in her writing about the possibility of Menem's being elected (and while it all looks so clearcut now that Menem has dropped out, many, perhaps most Argentines were not so sure before that). It's hard to understand another country without living there a while, and this means years, like it or not. Furthermore, the people's assemblies were ("are," let's not write them off yet) quite remarkable; they were the desperate attempt to give a voice to those who were not part of the privileged and power elite. Yes, it's frustrating that they have not been more successful, just as it is frustrating and heartbreaking to see what is happening in the U.S. to voices of people who disagree with the current power elite.
Posted by: Mike on May 15, 2003 11:39 AMSaam Barrager wanted me to look something up and post it, and I've only just tracked it down. From page 13 of "Australia and Argentina", by Duncan & Fogarty:-
"...Rosas was nevertheless vulnerable to pressure from other provinces, especially those further up the Parana River with ports of their own to challenge the commercial monopoly of Buenos Aires. One of these, the pampean Province of Entre Rios, developed a sheep raising industry of its own in the 1840s. Trading with the wider world through Uruguay, it took on the representation of the interior provinces, challenging Rosas and Buenos Aires..."
I believe "representation of the interior provinces" meant it could also service Paraguay.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence on May 21, 2003 06:27 PM