Recent Decouplings between Democracy and Capitalism? Following the Trail of Sociological Problematizations of the Masses in the Argentine Case

Sociology has always been concerned with the problem of the masses. To say “problem,” in the case of the masses, is practically a redundancy: the mere pointing out and characterization of the masses always indicates “something” to be done with them. The same is true, of course, in Argentine sociology. The present paper will deal with the problematization of the masses in that sociology, and to do so it will stretch a historical arc of a little more than a century. In order to make the proposed exercise feasible, only a few “historical plateaus” and some textual evidence will be included. In each of these moments, through different characterizations of the masses, different articulations between capitalism and democracy were also expressed. It is a question of analyzing: a) a first moment (between the 19th and 20th centuries) in which the “crowds” were characterized as a potentially dangerous subject for democracy and capitalism, precisely when the capitalist dimension was making impetuous headway and democracy had very restricted characteristics; b) a second moment in the middle decades of the 20th century, in which capitalism and democracy seemed to go hand in hand, giving a strategic centrality in this articulation to collective entities that came to be called “masses”. And finally we will reach the present moment, c), in which a deep decollectivization of the social and a relative decline of the masses (in reality, it is not the masses themselves that decline, but their predominant formats of manifestation, less directly “physical” or of “co-presence” and much more mediated by social networks). This process has reached the present day, where the “capitalism” dimension seems to unfold by itself, at its own pace and without major counterweights or mediations, and the “democracy” dimension, ritualized and without being completely extinguished, is emptied of substantive content.