Re-imagining economic relations and the role of the social welfare state: Perspectives from an Argentine shantytown

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews in a Buenos Aires shantytown, this research examines how shantytown residents’ perceptions and experiences of inequality, marginality, and injustice shape their beliefs about – and collective initiatives to advance – alternative conceptions of economic rights and welfare-state responsibilities. This paper begins by presenting residents’ perceptions of instrumental relations, injustice, and power dynamics in processes of economic migration and welfare distribution, through which segments of the population are able to take advantage of extant socioeconomic inequalities and the sociostructural position of shantytown residents in order to advance particular politico-economic agendas. The second section of this paper analyzes collective economic projects and critical discourses that members of the shantytown community have developed in response to their perceptions of inequality, marginality, and injustice. These initiatives reject many of the tenets of neoliberalism and economic development in their current configurations on the grounds that these configurations fail to recognize the humanity and dignity of large segments of society, propagate inequalities in economic capital and agency, and exacerbate relationships of force that emerge between people of different resource levels. In conversation with theoretical frameworks on the welfare state and human-rights initiatives, residents’ critical discourses and collective economic projects ultimately suggest that the actualization of economic rights and a more comprehensive welfare agenda depends on beginning to view the fulfillment of basic material thresholds as a means to minimizing relationships of economic dependence and power inequalities instead of as an end in itself. This paper concludes by outlining how residents’ alternative economic projects attempt to advance this agenda within specific and limited contexts, and by developing a theoretically and empirically informed analysis of how a rearticulated role of the state could support this agenda in broader contexts and in an effort to work toward a more just future.