AUT: Argentina: Diary of a Revolution

[true leveller <digger_communist@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A short piece by RTS activist John Jordan, published
in yesterday's Guardian alongside an article from
Naomi Klein, though was more insightful than her
piece.

Good website worth having a look at, too
(www.weareeverywhere.org).

Barry.

------

Diary of a revolution
Activist John Jordan gives an eyewitness account of a
country working to forget its past

John Jordan
Saturday January 25, 2003
The Guardian

Rumours of a hurricane

'We know what they are against, but what do they
want?' I was tired of hearing this refrain, targeted
at the global anti-capitalist movements. We knew what
we wanted: another kind of globalisation, where life
comes before money, where direct democracy and
ecological sustainability become the norm, where
progress is defined by the amount of diversity and
dignity in the world, rather than the amount of cash
that changes hands. The problem was that we didn't
know how to get it. Many of us realised that, however
many economic summits we protested against or GM crops
we uprooted, we weren't really bringing the new worlds
we were dreaming of any closer.

In early 2002, while the movements were trying to come
to terms with the fear and uncertainty caused by
September 11 and the war on terror, something happened
that no one expected. Through the movements' emails,
websites and face-to-face gatherings, stories emerged
of a land where politicians were so discredited that
they were ridiculed wherever they went, angry
middle-class women smashed up banks, occupied
factories were run by their workers, ordinary people
held meetings to decide how to run their
neighbourhoods, and thousands of unemployed people
blocked highways, demanding food and jobs. It sounded
like France in 1968 or Spain during the civil war, and
yet it was lasting for months across a country 11
times the size of the UK, in a state that was recently
one of the world's top 20 strongest economies, a
sparkling model of emerging markets, the most
compliant pupil of the International Monetary Fund,
with a capital city known as the 'Paris of Latin
America'. It was happening in Argentina.

I had always wondered what a real grassroots rebellion
would look like, how it would feel, what it would
smell like. I had imagined huge crowds spontaneously
taking to the streets, the smell of teargas drifting
across barricades, the noise of hundreds of thousands
of voices calling for a new world as the government
fled from office and people took control of their
everyday lives. All of these things have happened in
Argentina over the past year, inspiring activists from
as far afield as South Africa, Italy, Thailand and
Belgium to visit and see how a crippling economic
tragedy was being transformed into an extraordinary
laboratory for creating alternative economic models,
to witness the reinvention of politics from the bottom
up.

Last September, after several trips to Argentina, I
decided to give up my job and my flat in England and
move there for an indefinite period, convinced that
the lessons I could learn could one day be applied to
the anti-capitalist movements closer to home. It did
not take me long to realise that it is not the stench
of tear gas or the clamour of the angry crowd, but the
smell of cooking and the gentle chatter of neighbours
meeting late into the night that best reflects the
popular rebellion that is taking place here.

The piqueteros

I met Carlos, an unemployed telephone technician in
his 50s. He is part of the MTD (movement of unemployed
workers), one of the most radical branches of the
enormous unemployed movement, the piqueteros, that
kick-started the rebellion in the mid-1990s with their
road blockades (piquetes), in which families blocked
highways, demanding unemployment subsidies, food and
jobs. We met in a huge, abandoned electronics factory,
which Carlos's group dreams of transforming into a
self-managed organic farm, clinic and media centre. He
said that his most profound political moment since the
December 2001 uprising was seeing three young
piqueteros faint from hunger. 'Our main aim now is to
have enough bread for each other,' he said. 'After
that, we can concentrate on other things.'

The Argentinian media's image of the piqueteros has
been one of masked youths blocking roads with burning
tyres. The everyday reality is very different, but the
smell of baking bread does not make headlines. Their
main work is creating what they call the solidarity
economy, an autonomous, non-profit economic system
based on need. During the roadblocks, they demand a
specific number of unemployment subsidies, and usually
get them from local government. The subsidies are
shared and used to fund community projects. Some
piquetero groups don't delegate leaders to meet
officials, but instead demand that the officials come
to the blockades so that everyone can collectively
decide whether to accept any offers - they have too
often seen leaders and delegates bought off,
corrupted, killed or otherwise tainted by power.

A friend took me to an extraordinary MTD popular
education session. It was held in a back yard in
Admiralte Brown, a huge, sprawling neighbourhood on
the edges of Buenos Aires where hope is in short
supply and unemployment runs at 40-50%. Most of the
participants were in their early 20s. Despite barking
dogs and small children running between chairs, they
seemed intensely focused as Lola, the energetic
facilitator, ran a workshop debating the differences
between MTD and capitalist forms of production.

The level of debate was astounding: these young people
took turns to stand up and eloquently explain how the
different systems are organised, describe their
alienating experiences of working for managers, their
disdain for profit-driven economies and the joy that
collective work provides. After the workshop, Maxi,
one of the founders of the group, took me on a tour
around his neighbourhood. He listed the range of
activities they had organised. 'We have a group
building sewage systems and another that helps people
who only have tin roofs put proper roofs on their
houses. There is a press group that produces our
newsletter and makes links with the outside media. We
have the Copa de Leche, which provides a glass of milk
to children every day. We have a store that
distributes second-hand clothes, two new bakeries, a
vegetable plot and a library.'

That afternoon, we visited one of the two weekly
assemblies that were happening simultaneously in
Admiralte Brown. A group of 70 or more stood in a
circle. They discussed plans for demonstrations, the
problems of the past week, how to get children's
shoes, and how to resolve conflicts between group
members. It was mostly women - earlier, Lola had told
me how women were hit hardest by unemployment: when
there is no food on the table, no clothes for the
children, it is women who are at the sharp end of
poverty. Often the men felt rejected and paralysed by
the loss of identity that followed unemployment, so it
is the women who are first to take part in roadblocks.
'Women's struggle is the pillar of the movement,' Lola
explained.

After the assembly, Maxi showed me the Copa de Leche,
the project that distributes milk to children, housed
in an abandoned municipal building next to a plot of
land the piqueteros had taken down the fences that
surrounded the plot and used them to build the base of
a huge, roaring outdoor oven on the edges of a
football pitch that had probably never seen grass but
was now surrounded by newly-dug vegetable plots.
Fences being pulled down and turned into something
practical struck me as a beautiful metaphor for the
transformation of the private spaces of profit into
shared tools of social change. A transformation that
involves people beginning to build the life that they
want and preparing to defend it - rather than simply
protesting against what they don't want. The
piqueteros know you can gain nothing by winning power.
They don't want to take over the crumbling centre;
they want to reclaim the edges, bring back into their
community life that's worth living. 'We are building
power, not taking it,' is how Maxi described it.

Whenever I asked them what had changed in their lives
since they became involved in the piquetero movement,
they told me that the loneliness and isolation of
unemployment and poverty had disappeared. Tuti, a
punky 21-year-old who is in charge of the piqueteros'
security, said, 'The biggest change was the
relationship with other people in the neighbourhood,
the development of friendship and the possibility of
sharing ... When you're on a roadblock and you have
nothing to eat, the people next to you share their
food. Now I feel I'm living in a large family, my
neighbours are my family.'

The assemblies

A football careers across the bank lobby and hits the
steel door of the vault with a thud. 'Goal!' scream
the kids whose improvised game weaves between the soup
kitchen, art workshops and video screenings in the new
HQ of the Parque Lezama Sur assembly, an occupied
bank.

The local assemblies meet weekly, are particularly
popular in middle-class areas and are open to anyone,
so long as they don't represent a political party. The
first one I attended involved some 40 people: a
breastfeeding mother, a lawyer, a hippy in batik
flares, a taxi driver, a nursing student... a slice of
Argentinian society standing on a street corner,
passing around a megaphone and discussing how to take
back control of their lives. It seemed so normal, yet
this was perhaps the most extraordinary radical
political event I'd ever witnessed: ordinary people
discussing self-management, understanding direct
democracy and putting it into practice.

In the past eight months, there has been a shift that
can best be described as a move away from the politics
of quantity towards that of quality. The various
projects are bearing fruit and, most importantly,
establishing links between assemblies and other parts
of the movement. Despite the rising poverty,
destitution and despair, there are self-managed
neighbourhood assembly projects right across the city.
In one of the several occupied banks, they cook meals
for 150 people every weekend, while on the top floor
independent media activists update their website.
Assemblies plant organic vegetable gardens in vacant
lots, while a self-managed clinic for workers in the
occupied factories is being set up.

The assemblies have also become a stand-by citizens'
force against police repression. Last June, while a
book by asamblistas was being printed at a
self-managed printing firm in Buenos Aires, police
arrived to evict those in the building. A call went
out to the local assembly and literally as the book
was coming off the presses, they were forcing the
police away and securing the building.

In the age of global networks, it is the small-scale
and the local that have the greatest strength,
something that activists in the global anti-capitalist
movement understand and that many in Argentina's
social movements are practising. 'Our groups don't get
big and bureaucratised,' one piquetera told me. 'They
just divide and multiply.' She knows the era of the
giant political monster is over.

THINKING BY DOING

Whether you talk to a middle-class member of an
assembly or an unemployed participant in the piquetero
movement, there is a common understanding that you
can't change society with an overnight revolution.
They understand that change is a step-by-step process
of talking and listening, of dreaming and constructing
alternatives that are rooted in our own
neighbourhoods, and that each neighbourhood, each
participant, each place must be profoundly
interconnected and mutually supported.

'We can't do it on our own, and we shouldn't do it on
our own,' says Fabian, a member of Mocase, the
autonomous peasants' movement from the northern
province of Santiago de L'Estera. 'No one can
construct a new world by themselves.' When I met
Fabian, he was attending a meeting trying to create a
national network of the 'solidarity economy', where
goats from the provinces can be swapped for bread from
piqueteros bakeries, seeds traded for popular
education and so on.

'The resistance can't stand still,' he says. 'It has
to keep moving to keep healthy. We have always made
mistakes. It's important to make mistakes.' He frowns
deeply. 'At first we were like this' - his huge brown
hand jerks like a rollercoaster - 'but now we realise
that sustainable change is slow.' His hand pauses in
midair and begins to trace a gently undulating wave,
gradually rising higher and higher. And it's that
gently undulating wave, like a gentle tide, that best
describes the reinvention of popular politics that is
taking place in Argentina.

'Do you have any hope for what's happening here?' I
ask Pablo, an active member of his assembly.

'I don't feel hope abstractly, only when I'm doing
something do I feel it,' he replies.

In this economically devastated country, hope has
become a verb; not an abstract noun, but a process.
Politics has been freed from the icy grip of
intangible ideologies, liberated from abstract dreams
of a pending revolution. The futile dream of taking
power and running governments has been abandoned, and
politics has returned to the physical processes of
everyday life, to the necessities of the immediate
moment. In Argentina, politics thinks by doing.

· John Jordan is an anti-globalisation activist, and
is a member of a collective currently working on a
book, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise Of
Global Anti-capitalism, to be published later this
year by Verso (weareeverywhere.org).


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