Amy Goodman: A Look at Argentina’s Economic Rebellion and the Social Movements that Led It

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from Democracy Now!:



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EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: I think the most important thing to take into account was that Argentina, during the 1990s, was the most extreme experiment in neoliberal transformation. We had the most radical program of reforms at that time, which ended up in massive unemployment, impoverishment of more than half of the population of the country, and in 2001, finally, the collapse of the whole economic system. At the same time, we had a crisis of credibility in the political system. Since every single political party was proposing the same types of measures, neoliberal measures, population lost confidence in all politicians at the same time. So we—in 2001, we had the vast majority of the population rejecting neoliberal measures and not having any political alternative in the established political parties as to how to continue ruling this country.

So that was the moment in which the rebellion happened. And the rebellion was basically, at the same time, a rejection of austerity measures and also a rejection of the political system. The main slogan of the rebellion was "They must all go," meaning that all politicians should leave the political scene. So, up until this, there was no political alternative then. But the most interesting aspect of the rebellion was that precisely at that moment, large social movements started to experiment new forms of political representation, new political slogans and programs. And some of the measures that you just mentioned, which Néstor Kirchner took after 2003, were actually the measures that the rebellion itself was proposing. For example, the renewal of the Supreme Court was one of the demands of this vast social movement in 2001.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, the renewal of the Supreme Court?

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, one—Néstor Kirchner is credited with changing the utterly corrupt Supreme Court that we had in the ’90s with a new one that we have now with more or less respectable judges. That was one of the main demands of the rebellion in 2001.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you participate? And, I mean, the significance, for people to understand these protests in 2001, the uprising in the streets? How many people were in the streets? I mean, you had very much, I mean, the middle class out, as well as the students, smashing the windows of banks.

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: That is right. It’s impossible to say how many people participated. But in the rebellion of December 2001, it was millions of people in the streets, in Buenos Aires but also in most of the cities throughout the country. And it was the middle class, but also the lower classes in the outskirts of cities, as well. So it was a very special moment of solidarity between lower and middle classes against these neoliberal measures.

AMY GOODMAN: You have written several books. One of them is called Anti-Capitalism for Beginners: The New Generation of Emancipatory Movements. What do you mean?

EZEQUIEL ADAMOVSKY: Well, that book was about trying to communicate, wider audiences, the ideas that social movements in Argentina were debating at that time. So we had the sense that we were debating all sorts of new ideas, but we didn’t have channels to spread all these ideas to larger audiences. So, the basic idea was that we were experiencing then the birth of a new sort of—a new formula of anti-capitalist movements, different from anti-capitalists of the past, at the same time being inheritors of that tradition, but also experimenting with new ideas and trying to reach better outcomes than the movements of the past. ...........(more)

The complete piece - in transcript, audio and video versions - is at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/12/a_look_at_argentinas_economic_rebellion

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