By LISANDRO BRAGA*
“Presentation” by the author, to the new edition of the book on the lumpenproletariat
“Between 1990 and 1998, successive waves of deindustrialization hit the Buenos Aires conurbation region as a result of privatizations and other neoliberal regulation. Consequently, there was an accelerated process of expulsion from the labor market accompanied by greater job instability. It is worth remembering that a large part of the Argentine unions were co-opted and readily accepted this set of neoliberal reforms and adjustments.
In this way, a significant portion of the workers in the conurban area began to feel completely disoriented politically. However, the political and social consequences for the bureaucratic and clientelist institutions of the Justicialist Party were also enormous, as was the weakening of Peronism among the lower social classes.
Given the lack of effective responses from the government and its institutions to the social problems affecting the region's lumpenproletariat, popular organizations emerged in the neighborhoods that began to organize themselves outside of bureaucratic structures, such as political parties and unions. It was in this context that organizations of the unemployed emerged and a new model of territorial activism emerged in the conurban region. Therefore, between 1990 and 1995, some neighborhoods began to organize to complain about the rates of privatized public services. In 1995, the first commission of the unemployed emerged in the municipality of La Matanza, but it was only in 1996 that the first demonstrations began demanding food assistance.
Such demonstrations took place in May 1996, when several residents of the María Elena and Villa Unión neighborhoods held a demonstration in Plaza San Justo, with significant female participation. Soon after, on September 06, 1996, an important “March against Hunger, Repression and Unemployment” took place in Plaza de Mayo, bringing together approximately two thousand people. The march was the starting point for the emergence of several organizations of the unemployed in several municipalities in the conurbation (SVAMPA & PEREYRA, 2009).
La Matanza is a municipality neighboring the capital of the Republic, with approximately 1.500.000 inhabitants, a population that far exceeds that of 18 of the 23 Argentine provinces (ISMAN, 2004). It is a huge urban agglomeration with a large portion of the population living below the poverty line. According to the newspaper Clarin October 22, 2001: “La Matanza is one of the largest and most difficult municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area: it is estimated that 50% of its one and a half million inhabitants live below the poverty line and that the unemployment rate reaches 30%. Living in this context becomes more complicated every day. People have no money, no safe shelter, no food, no clothes, no medicine. And they have no hope.”
The deteriorating conditions that the municipality of La Matanza has been suffering from began in 1976 with the military coup and have been increasing continuously until reaching their most pronounced phase during the Menemista period (1989-1999). The illegal land occupations in the Conurbano Bonaerense region are indicative of the process of social impoverishment that has affected the region since the period of the last bourgeois dictatorship.
During the period marked by import substitution, the manufacturing sector carried the rest of the economic activities in terms of production and generated several jobs. However, in the 3,7s, the employability coefficient was around -2002%, demonstrating that the industrial sector was largely responsible for the expulsion of labor in the region, that is, for the process of lumpenproletarianization (BASUALDO, 2010; BARRERA & LÓPEZ, 2009; VIANA, XNUMX). In this context, La Matanza ceased to be one of the major industrial centers of the conurbation and became an intensely lumpenproletarianized region. And this reality was not exclusive to this municipality, as several other regions of the country also began to experience an intense process of lumpenproletarianization.
According to a note by Ismael Bermudez, contained in the newspaper Clarin of September 19, 2001, exemplifies the general situation of the Conurbano Bonaerense: “Unemployment has grown four times more (it went from 5,7% to 22,9%) and among heads of families it has multiplied by five (from 3,3% to 17,2%). As a direct result of this situation, in these municipalities almost 40% of the households are made up of people who receive only 20% of the region’s income. This explains why poverty affects almost 50% of the population, which means that its inhabitants or families in the region do not have enough income to cover the costs of purchasing basic goods and services.”
Against this situation of unemployment, precarious living conditions and lack of quality basic public services (daycare centers, schools, health clinics, housing, asphalt, sewage systems, etc.), that is, due to this complete situation of abandonment generated by the neglect of public authorities (municipal, state and federal), several neighborhood organizations emerged in the La Matanza region, which would give rise to a wave of social protests, resulting in the first attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat in the region in 1995. It was in this context that essentially lumpenproletarian organizations emerged and a new form of territorial militancy in the conurban region.
What has been happening in Argentina in the 1990s is part of what has been happening in almost all of modern society since the 1980s. That is, modern society has undergone important transformations in its forms of valuing capital (Toyotism), as well as in its forms of regulating the social relations that guarantee it. The main form of regulating these relations is the neoliberal state.
This emerges with the objective of providing better conditions for capitalist accumulation through the neoliberal regularization of the market, the “removal” of the State from social obligations (health, education, security, employment, etc.) and their transfer to the private sector via the privatization of these obligations and of some strategic sectors previously under State control (energy, water, gas, oil, public transport, telephony, etc.).
Along with the emergence of an essentially lumpenproletarian movement, which began to build strategies to confront the process of lumpenproletarianization and widespread impoverishment, and which hindered the expansion of the achievements necessary for full accumulation, the most authoritarian and repressive face of the neoliberal State also emerged, which, together with communication capital (capitalist communication companies), transformed the struggle for social rights into crimes against order and the protesters as delinquents worthy of being imprisoned or, when not, summarily executed by the penal State, as occurred in the various cases of “easy trigger” (BRAGA, 2024, p. 187-192).
*Lisandro Braga is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR).
Reference
Lisandro Braga. Class in rags: integral accumulation and expansion of the lumpenproletariat. 2nd edition. Goiânia, Ragnatela, 2024. 290 pages. [https://amzn.to/4gTbVdM]
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