Politics of the demos vs. Politics of Politicians. Lessons from Argentina

EMILIA CASTORINA

New School University (Nueva York)

Conferencia; New School university Graduate Student Conference "Critical Perspectives in Third World Development"; 2004

New School University (Nueva York)

The aim of this paper is to explore to which extent the displacement of the state and class formation by identity politics and diversity have severed rather than enforced the understanding of new forms of resistance in the Third World. I will take particular issue with the Argentinean case. Not only Argentina represents a paradigmatic case of neo-liberal policies during the 1990s, but also -as its dialectical reverse- there emerged new social and political actors and forms of struggle. The question to be addressed is whether the unemployment movement (“piqueteros”), the social outbreaks (“puebladas”), the neighbors assemblies and the movement of taken factories constitute the new “multitude” (Hardt-Negri), the grass-root movement of the “local” or the “daily-life” (Escobar), or a new form of class struggle. Unlike the “post-development” studies, I will try to reassess the question of social conflicts in political terms. In order to bring the relation between class and state back as a source to understand the novelty of these new forms of action, I will attempt to reframe the notion of class struggle through the tension between “the politics of the demos” and the “politics of politicians”.