Diary of a Revolution

[tliouk <office@tlio.demon.co.uk>]

>From Argentina: A New kind of Revolution

Out of the ordinary 
by Naomi Klein
Saturday January 25, 2003
The Guardian 
Ref: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,880651,00.html

Diary of a Revolution
by John Jordan
Saturday January 25, 2003
The Guardian 
Ref: http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,880910,00.html


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

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).