(This is an excerpt from the Afterword Ezequiel Adamovsky wrote for the book Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis: Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future, edited by Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow & Christopher Wylde and published in the US and the UK by  Palgrave Macmillan, which has just come out)

It is quite remarkable that it is in the United Kingdom that a book is published which offers readers the best and most complete analysis to date of Argentina’s 2001 rebellion and its multiple effects – not only on the economy and politics but also on culture and different forms of resistance. This event and the dynamics that it spawned have provoked particular interest in recent years for obvious reasons. The crises in Greece, Spain, Italy and Iceland, the images of furious citizens on the streets, the blind alleys of adjustment policies that continue to be promoted by the troika of the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank, the possibility of rejecting these in favour of adopting heterodox prescriptions: all of these features steer international attention towards 2001 and its subsequent trajectories. The ‘Argentine case’, depending on the beholder, seems to offer answers, warnings, examples to emulate, and those which should be avoided.

In contrast, in Argentina thirteen years on, the voices interested in remembering the rebellion of 2001 are scarce. No one has forgotten it of course, but a cultural climate has been established under which its memory appears distorted, trivialised or devoid of meaning. Read through the prism of current political attitudes 2001 is portrayed as the ‘hell’ from which we have now escaped; as a moment of anti-politics that the ‘political recovery’ proved to contradict; as a healthy, yet impotent, repudiation of politicians who in the end in defying calls for Que se vayan todos, ‘all remained;’ as a great uprising de-activated by Kirchnerismo’s shrewdness; or as merely a protest involving savers which was resolved as soon as the Corralito opened. Yet these contrasting perspectives agree on one point: that 2001 belongs to a past era. The uprising failed, was overcome and rendered irrelevant. In other words, it is a closed case.

In spite of this impression the presence of vast multitudes on the streets in 2001 continues to have repercussions today. Whilst it is true that the rebellion’s effectiveness has not been linear, and that the inroads made since have been hard to measure, they are no less real. Thirteen years later, the challenge is to be able to read the crisis’ consequences beyond those discourses which seek to make them invisible. The decision of this volume’s editors to return to this question, whilst at the same time avoiding the temptation to pigeonhole their enquiry into the false dichotomies of ‘old’ and ‘new’ is an astute one. In doing so, they have shed light on the complex combination of ruptures and continuities that appear within the plethora of ‘micro-responses’ with which Argentine society confronted the experience of crisis.

 

The economic turn

Although today it is difficult to envision, the fundamental reason for the Argentine economy’s swift recovery is related to the rebellion itself. The outcome would have been very different had there been a continuation of the policies recommended by businessmen and the IMF as a ‘way out’ of the crisis. It was the rebellion that put an end to the eternal adjustment policies and forced the State to acquiesce to an unprecedented increase in social spending, one of the first measures taken by interim President Eduardo Duhalde. The fiscal basis that enabled such spending were also made possible by the popular mobilisation, which imposed a moratorium on external debt repayments and prompted the restoration of export taxes, as decreed by Presidents Adolfo Rodríguez Saa and Duhalde respectively. None of these measures were a remote possibility prior to 2001 (in any case, they were not being proposed by any of the main political forces). The renegotiation of the external debt, which included the largest creditor write offs ever recorded, is unthinkable without considering the presence of the citizens on the streets and their profound questioning of the legitimacy of the financial institutions (it should be remembered that the Buenos Aires banks operated for over a year with their doors and windows boarded up). To be more precise, the recovery stems from the larger share of economic surplus that remained on Argentine soil and was then redistributed. None of these things would have been possible if the 2001 rebellion had not managed to block the route that was being ‘spontaneously’ pursued by the system: the deepening of antipopular measures through hyperinflationary shocks. It was the constant threat of lootings, escraches, revolt, occupation, the roadblock, and of those ‘soviet’ assemblies – as the Argentine daily La Nación called them – that ‘disciplined’ both local and international capital and financial sectors, and in doing so opened a previously inconceivable space for politics. It was into this space that Kirchnerismo manoeuvred itself. The rebellion’s progressive impacts on the evolution of the economy were filtered by policies that had their own limitations and blind spots. In this sense it is correct and necessary to point out the continuities with the past or the current policies’ close relationship to capital’s new strategies of expansion. There is a complex relationship between the consequences of the rebellion and the political expression that managed to propose a way out of the crisis.

 

Political developments

A similar analysis can be applied to the political sphere. Today, as party politics makes a triumphant return, it seems somewhat unfashionable to talk about the rejection of the representative democracy model and of the hopes of social self-organisation that characterised 2001. However, within this realm, the reality of 2001 and the current political panorama are inextricably linked. Since that period, gaining control of the streets has become an unavoidable goal for anyone wishing to voice their demands (including the landowners, as we saw in 2008). Furthermore, the 2001 rebellion and the crisis of legitimacy that characterised it generated profound disorganisation in the party system and the policies that they promised in the public arena. In recent years we have witnessed the irruption, then rapid decline of several major political forces, the rise and fall of political leaders and the still fruitless search of the neoliberal right for avenues and discourses to enable its return. In short, a stable party system remains beyond reach, leaving the way open for continued street mobilisations (including both the more structured ones promoted by the Kirchneristas and the recent anti-government mobilisations that strive to simulate the spontaneity of the 2001 cacerolazos).

In this context, the transformations that Peronism continues to undergo are no less significant. It is worth remembering that in 2001, the debate over its political trajectory was dominated by the neoliberal stance of Carlos Menem and the neoconservative variant of Peronism that was offered by Duhalde. No one would have believed that there would be an opportunity for the unexpected about-face proposed soon after by Néstor Kirchner, who united Peronism’s historical legacy and the ‘progressive’ slogans and values which had traditionally been so distant from it (at least in its hegemonic variant). Kirchner’s rather fortuitous coming to power in 2003 would have been unthinkable without the political vacuum created by the events of 2001. In fact, both his electoral campaign and the initial measures taken by his government gained popular support and legitimacy precisely by adopting the slogans of those who had taken to the streets. Other than these obvious connections, the relationship between the Kirchnerist phenomenon and the rebellion is complex. It is just as inaccurate to argue that as a project Kirchnerismoembodies the political aspirations of 2001 as it is to describe its commitment to these demands as being purely opportunistic or insincere.

 

The State and social movements

The 2001 rebellion – and the extraordinary year that followed – was a time during which capitalism and representative democracy underwent a radical critique, a narrative that is notably absent among today’s major political forces. Although many of its followers imagine Kirchnerismo as spearheading the ‘liberation’ from or the struggle against capital, the government has made it perfectly clear that its brief lies in preserving a ‘normal country’ with a representative State and ‘serious’ capitalism. Despite the fact that in the aftermath of the 2008 conflict with the rural elite the government reverted to several forms of controlled grassroots mobilisation, the Kirchnerist tonic with respect to the social movements has, in fact, been to pursue a strategy of demobilisation. In this respect, the State’s role has been to capture, translate and channel some of the demands of 2001 whilst diffusing those that highlighted more profound changes.

Indeed, the legacy of 2001 seems today to be less visible when it comes to its most radical features. Although the traditional left actively participated in the movements and actions inspired by those days, it did so as an external actor, always catching up with the course of events and with the aim of swelling its own ranks. Few political forces remained as unaffected after 2001 as the traditional left. Those that sought to re-launch an anti-capitalist movement in light of 2001 such as Luis Zamora’s Autodeterminación y Libertad (Self-determination and Freedom) were unable to consolidate such a project. Meanwhile various independent social movements ended up making only a nominal impact, or were incorporated into Kirchnerismo or other forces.

Yet, the rebellion helped to definitively make room for a new culture on the left which was absent from the political traditions of the past. This culture is reflected as much in its ideas as it is in the forms of organisation and struggle adopted by some of the movements that emerged in the aftermath of 2001, ranging from unemployed workers to secondary school students, to a myriad of small trade unions and political and cultural organisations. Whilst its fragmented and dispersed nature is this new left’s main weakness, several organisations are of a significant size with solid experience of organisation. These include the following multisectoral groupings: the (now divided) Darío Santillan People’s Front (FPDS), People’s Movement ‘La Dignidad’ (MPLD), Grassroots Organisations Current (COB) ‘La Brecha’, the Giros Movement; the student grouping – ‘La Mella’ and others and the environmental alliance Union of Citizen Assemblies (UAC). In spite of this diversity, these movements are united in their search for less hierarchical and centralised forms of leadership and organisation, in the multi-sectoral nature of their struggles, in their more ethically-minded nature, and in the persistent construction of autonomous spaces as regards both State and market. In 2013, for the first time, several of these groupings ventured into the terrain of electoral politics whilst refusing to abandon the spirit of Que Se Vayan Todos. It remains to be seen if they can find a way to embed themselves within the political process as ‘parties’ yet at the same time preserve their grassroots base and avoid the risks of heteronomy and hierarchical politics.

 

International reverberations

An evaluation of the repercussions of 2001today would not be complete without at least a few lines about its international impact. Since the Battle of Seattle prevented the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999, a global resistance movement has continued to strike resonance in the struggles against neoliberalism. The attack on the Twin Towers in September 2001 however, initiated a cycle of decline. In this adverse context, the Argentine rebellion served to preserve and spread some of the demands of the new movement globally. The forms of self-organisation and direct action that were experimented with in our country – from the assemblies and barter clubs to the cacerolazos,  piquetes and worker-recovered factories –reverberated around the world, inspiring numerous modes of resistance in a wide range of countries. Indeed, even today we see how the events of 2001 and its aftermath continue to resonate, in Iceland’s cacerolazos or in the Que se vayan todos slogan sung by the Greeks in their rejection of adjustment policies.

Inside Argentina, the notion that we are part of a global movement initially received a lukewarm reception, but has since gained credence. The World Social Forum’s regional gathering in Buenos Aires in 2002 and the mass demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Mar del Plata in 2005 marked the convergence of the local and the global. There can be no doubt that, however uncomfortable it might have been, these events represented momentary interactions between both social movements and several Latin American governments that ultimately facilitated a rejection of one of the contemporary expression of US hegemony in the form of the FTAA.

In conclusion, although the current political context contributes little to its visibility, no one can say that the rebellion of 19 and 20 December 2001 failed to make an impression, nor can anyone be assured that it will not have further repercussions in the future.

(This is an excerpt from the Afterword Ezequiel Adamovsky wrote for the book Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis: Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future, edited by Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow & Christopher Wylde and published in the US and the UK by  Palgrave Macmillan, which has just come out) http://ezequieladamovsky.blogspot.com.ar/

 

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