I.
We’ve talked a lot about what happened in Argentina during the uprising of December 19th and 20th in 2001 and about the dynamics that anticipated the insurrection. Since then, we’ve been overrun by movements and the new social contexts proliferating throughout the continent.

And yet, we are still discussing the effects of that ferocious, collective rebellion. Indeed, serious interpretive disputes persist about the meanings of the motto made famous during the December mobilizations: “Que se vayan todos, que no quede uno solo” (Throw them all out, don’t leave a single one).

As we see it, that December had three irreversible consequences.

In the first place, the nation-state lost its symbolic functions and political attributes. In a way, the hegemony attained by the market over society was already a sign of the nation-state’s exhaustion. The novelty of December 2001, however, was the eruption of social struggles that were able to think and intervene within the epochal change. From that moment on, radical politics ceased being synonymous with some throwback, arch-conservatism and tired, defensive slogans.

Secondly, neoliberalism’s political forms, which had during the 1990s seemed invincible throughout Latin America, entered into a serious crisis of legitimacy that persists to this day and continues to deepen.

Lastly, what’s already mentioned cannot be understood without taking into account the surge of countless instances of creativity and creation adopted by a diverse set of social movements. Argentina had known the abyss, realized the extraordinariness of the situation, but far from being stricken by fear, impotence and suffering, Argentines struck back with collective experimentation, political imagination and the production of new subjective modalities. Social activity transcended the crisis, defined new forms of cooperation and opened a contemporary political horizon.

II.
It is upon these three foundations that a new governability has been erected in South America since 2003. One thing that makes the government of President Néstor Kirchner different than past governments—at least since 1983, with the return of elections—is that he has effectively used the new conditions set by the social movements to re-insert the country into the global economy.

Some of the more salient events enabling this governability are:

• After 2001, Kirchner knew that traditional state institutions were no longer assumed as a given, making his political movement (kirchnerismo) conscious of the fact that state legitimacy and solidness must be conquered and put into play at every turn. The nature of all current hegemony is precisely its precariousness. In this sense, the state of exception etched into everyone’s sensibilities after 2001 forms the basis of today’s political power.

• A series of initiatives arose that actually inscribed themselves institutionally, confirming the crisis of neoliberalism. Among them, the reform of the Supreme Court (from where the sweetheart privatization deals emerged); purging the heads of the police and military with ties to the dictatorship and repression of previous decades, and the consequent recognition and constitutional legitimacy of social protest; the striking down of impunity laws for the genocide and the official adoption of historic narratives of the human rights movements; initiating a relative degree of autonomy in relation to international lending organizations and the dictates of the “Washington Consensus,” while, in turn, prioritizing Latin American integration aimed at multilateralism, etc. Nonetheless, alongside these achievements are several continuities (neoliberal, statist, clientelistic, mafias) that block inherent possibilities. We’ll briefly mention three fundamental continuities of this kind: the economic priority given to agribusiness and natural resource extraction by transnational corporations, which impede genuine income distribution; social policies oriented towards the recovery of an income generating society under illusion of inclusion that amount to a re-victimization of the poor; complicity with local political machines on a local level that operate under a mafia-like model of business networks and social control.

• Last, and perhaps most decisively, kirchnerismo has created an intricate relationship with Argentina’s new social protagonists, to whom, in fact, the government to a large extent owes its own existence. This complex relationship, which perhaps remains in flux, has not shown much, if any, real political innovation and shows in microcosm the ambivalence of this new governability. The paradox we are now confronted with is that spaces have opened for social movements, but under a rubric that saps them of what gives them their strength: their constitutive capacity. In other words, if not cooptation pure and simple, what exists is the movements’ subordinated inclusion by the government.

The autonomy of the struggles is reduced to the traditional role of a subject with demands. This is true across the board: from those that have organized most formally and visibly, to those that are more diffuse and amorphous. The subordination is not lineal, because it cannot be attributed merely to bad faith on the part of the government, but rather to its lack of imagination. This is a political inability on the part of the movements as well. The problem is the relation itself, not one of its constitutive parts.

When possibilities flow only in one single direction, a situation lacks richness, transformation ceases; neoliberalism—far from disappearing—actually mutates and takes on new forms.

III.
In the face of this new governability, the movements that best expressed radical political action amid the crisis have been consumed by a strange sense of sadness. Those who were immersed in processes of social creativity were suddenly surprised by a call for order, signaling that the party was over. They found themselves separated from their own potential when confronted with a false dilemma: accept the subordinated inclusion afforded by the new governability, or the alternative, being relegated to isolation and dispersion.

Some characteristics of this that we’ve experienced are:

• The imposition of specialists, who arrive on the scene to put order to what is supposedly a chaos of creativity. In this way, anything new or linguistically different is subsumed by disciplinary categories that classify and create hierarchies. The agents of this “innovation” are introduced as experts and stand apart from collective processes of experimentation.

• Modelization: this elevates a single formula to the only viable means deemed worthy of application.

• Nostalgia: being tied to forms and styles that used to work, neglecting the joy of invention for the sake of molds and mandates inherited from the past.

• Emptying collective slogans of all their meaning through their fictionalization, as in the example of “¡que se vayan todos!”

• A “reactionary economism” expressed in thousands of phrases such as “the piqueteros only want to get money without having to work,” or “the middle class only hits the streets when something pinches their pocket books,” and other reactions left over from the financial crisis.

• Disdain for modes of work that socialize production, resulting in a violent viral-like exercise of power, which was made possible by the politicization of the crisis. Naturalization is an interruption of contagion and questioning across the board. It is a government of brands.

• The association of the “micro” with the “small,” through which concrete forms of the revolt are identified with some previous moment that is local and exceptional, part of a “macro” (larger) reality that needs to be administered.

• The mediation of social actors as spectacle, favoring voices that are recognizable, known personalities, idols, who are then blamed for a lack of results.

Before us, then, is a political challenge determined by our autonomy. The impossibility of moving beyond the options of integration or marginalization is depoliticizing.

We can’t simply negate this reality, as if the party is were still going on, feigning a sordid happiness or appealing to some insensible hyper-activism. But neither should we resort to the unjustified pessimism of those that feel the process has utterly failed, or the unbridled optimism of those that celebrate change without recognizing the total ambiguousness of the situation.

But it would be even worse to conform ourselves to autonomy as doctrine, turning our backs to meaningful alliances, which should be the source of our strength and our real potential. Social cooperation breeds creativity, without this cooperation creativity is stifled, it dries up, becomes isolated and loses its political potential, resulting in a morality infused with apathy and resentment.

IV.
In autonomous groups and movements the sadness stems from fear of cooptation and veering from the search for solutions. To escape this straight jacket, autonomy needs to achieve a new maturity. The paradox is that the lucidity now required can only be attained through a new beginning. That is, a new political stage within the new governability will only be opened when, and only when, we regain social initiative in dimensions that have yet to be politicized and thereby reverse the subordination of the movements.

This implies breaking with fixed and illusory binaries. In some cases, as we have noted, we need to avoid falling into false options such as failure and success, or defeat and victory. However, there are polarizations that we think should be considered in greater depth: for instance, the relation between movements and institutions.

Relations between governments and movements can no longer be conceived in classic terms of representation, if for no other reason than that the global is an immediate, unavoidable political reality. Even “government” and “movement” are no longer stable, given or fixed terms, but rather they maintain a fragile consistency in permanent re-constitution, and the nation-state is no longer the primary reference point in defining these relationships. In this sense, it is clear that every conflict and struggle in South America immediately takes on regional dimensions with far-reaching repercussions that affect power as much as realities of struggle elsewhere.

The revolt by residents of Gualeguaychú in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos against the construction a pulp mill mega-factory by a Finnish transnational across the river in Uruguay is a clear case in point. Without going into the details of the conflict, we merely note that it was one of the first times that integration created a real potential for the expansion and joining of forces by the movements. Instead, this case shows how the subordination of the movements’ political autonomy at the base level was actually a threat and counter-productive. When this happens, cooperation is deployed through market mechanisms in which some businessman almost always arises with rhetoric (whether statist, Bolivarian or from the 1970s, it doesn’t matter) ready to cut business deals.

Finally, if this tendency consolidates, then the political space conquered through struggles, which have created a relative autonomy for the continent from global powers, will have been wasted and the opportunity for imagining autonomous development will have closed. Similarly, the chance of using the region’s unprecedented economic growth for a radical redistribution of wealth to definitively modify the neoliberal conditions of our existence will also have been wasted.

V.
We’ve said that maturity can only be gained through a new beginning. In this case, assuming a global dimension in every struggle does not necessarily imply being directly responsible for what happens abroad or making a qualitative leap within the movements to consider geopolitical implications and strategies. The fact is that the global already traverses our singular realities through transnational dynamics. Recognizing, pointing out and crossing the borders erected by these new displacements constitutes a fundamental avenue for politicization within the new governability. This is why we are following closely the way the new subjectivities produced are segmented in a new topology of work and the city.

In the first case, contemporary forms of exploitation delineate a severe separation between the top part of the immaterial labor force, which is well paid and puts into play its creativity in the production process; while the lower rung of the labor force is not only precarious and badly paid, it is also subject to the promises of the image and communication. The incipient struggle of phone operators at the call-centers, with whom we have a shared intuition, have helped us perceive the gravity of this political problem ahead of us.

In the second case, of the new urban cartography, the experience of Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants on the outskirts and in the slums of Buenos Aires have begun to reveal a contemporary critique of the institutions that have recovered an inclusive façade: citizenship, schools, the notion of human rights and work. The true relation between the dynamics activated by neoliberalism and the movements of recent years in Latin America in reality is right around the corner, and this is where the concrete modes of its implementation are most clearly displayed.

To end, we have the impression that political thought and analysis are also now at a new beginning. It’s evident that the challenge is not, as much of the left seems to think, declaring oneself in favor or against the governments. We don’t believe we’re living in a time marked by “definitive solutions,” nor do we see much vitality in debates that claim to glean the true subjects of the transformation or those that look to models for the future—the latter is precisely what was so recently superceded by the imagination of the struggles.

We suggest caution and serenity, so that we gain more sovereignty over our collective and daily lives, which would allow us to elaborate new forms of articulating the multiplicity of temporal and existential levels that make up our commonalities.

Experimenting with the force of abstention, which is not passive but rather very active, would prevent us from being simply dragged along or conquered by whichever government happens to be in office.

The creation of non-state, public spaces requires “concrete policies,” where we show up with our real questions. But the radicalness of this intervention hinges on the collective listening we are willing to instigate.

Reconstructing a new political horizon requires, in the first place, a new militant sensibility.