Social Movements and the Political Invention of Future. Considering Recent Argentina

During the 1990's, neoliberal policies drove Argentina to huge transformations of the state, economy and labour. The process left a large number of poor and unemployed people and concluded with a monster crisis in 2001. During that time, there was a very important change in the field of social movements. As a consequence of the neoliberal policies, labour movement (which has been the most important movement in whole country contemporary history) diminished roughly its statistical presence in social mobilization. This happened in 1993 and in 1996 a new kind of movements grew up. That was the case of territorial movements, established in the poor neighbourhoods and small towns in a few provinces. They were composed mostly by unemployed, who asked for elementary rights to survive. By the end of the century those movements (often known as piqueteros) reached the main cities suburbs and constitute the most important social and political agent in the country. Since 2003, when a new President was elected, the country began its normalisation. With the recovery of employment, Unions regained strength and power, but the territorial movements, even diminished, didn’t disappear. They have been recognized by political agents, some of then entered the parties, other even the state and many of them still have the capacity to mobilize and defy political system, at the local, province or federal level.

In this paper we analyse this process and consider why and how these new social movements have emerged as political agents and what influence they had in the recent political period. To do that we use a data base of our own (created by the Grupo de Estudios de Acción Colectiva y Protesta Social, that I lead). It has 10000 cases of contentious mobilization actions and goes from 1984 to 2011. The paper include statistical and qualitative analysys.