Hidden Struggles: Spaces of Power and Resistance in Informal Work in Urban Argentina

Abstract

The year 2001 closed in Argentina with a public exhibition of the power of the people against a corrupt and ineffective government system: massive demonstrations took place in the Plaza de Mayo and were followed by the flight of then President Fernando De la Rua. These demonstrations marked the beginning of both an entrenchment of economic crisis as well as constant public expressions of discontent with the government in the form of cacerolazosöprimarily middle-class citizens demonstrating by banging pots and pansöand street closures by piquiteros, groups of unemployed workers.

Resistance(s) and Collective Social Action

“…Experimentation and biodegradability are the lifeblood of this kind of organizing which increases its resilience and adaptability. Opportunities for subaltern resistance exist in the most mundane and diffi cult circumstances and everyday spaces are key sites for the constitution of alternatives, resistance practices and collective action where resistance does not just necessarily arise in reaction to oppression (see Whitson 2007 ;Pile and Keith 1997 ).…”

On the way to being middle class

“…For many, formal wages were never going to be enough in the long run; labor markets and worker rights could never be adequately stabilized, so residents had to find ways to insert themselves in each other's lives-through continuous appeals for cooperation, supplication, manipulation and deals of all kinds (Holston 1991;Askew 1994;Berner and Korpf 1995;Benjamin 2000;Hansen 2001;Bunnell 2002;Chatterjee 2004;Konings, van Dijk, and Foeken 2006;Lovell 2006;Whitson 2007;Fawaz 2008;Legg 2008;McFarlane 2009;Segre 2010).…”

De-linking entrepreneurship from profit-motivated capitalism: some lessons from an English locality

“…Over the past few decades, nevertheless, there has been a loose grouping of postcapitalist, post-development, post-colonial, post-structuralist and critical scholars who have begun to challenge the notion that capitalism in increasingly hegemonic (e.g., Gibson-Graham, 2006;St Martin, 2005;Whitson, 2007;Williams, 2005;Round, 2008, 2010;Williams and Nadin, 2012a). This literature has de-centred capitalism from its status as extensive, totalising and universal by shining a light on the extensiveness of multifarious non-capitalist economic practices in present-day capitalist societies.…”