2001 as a Murmur, Looting as a Project, and New Promises for Social Change

The economic crisis and the pandemic tinge the 2021 election campaign in Argentina. 20 years after the events of December 2001 it is worth asking about their imprint, lessons, and projection for the future. Is a cycle coming to an end?

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Photo by Movimiento de los Pueblos

Mariano Féliz

Mariano Féliz is a social activist in Argentina. Currently, he mostly works on political education with and within social organizations, and is active in union struggles within the University and Research Center where he is employed. He is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and researcher at the CIG-IDIHCS of the CONICET/UNLP. There, he teaches political economy and conducts research on the transformations of dependent capitalism and its relationship to social struggles. He is mostly concerned about recovering the tradition of Marxian Dependency Theory, showing how it can be articulated with current debates within feminist economics and Marxist ecological debates.

The Alt-Right in Latin America

Following the collapse of left-wing populist movements in Latin America, neoliberal and authoritarian governments have spread all over the region. Clear examples of this resurgence are Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lenin Moreno in Ecuador, and Mauricio Macri in Argentina, not to mention the authoritarian drift of Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. This authoritarian turn at the institutional-political level has been accompanied by ideological changes in public and ‘non-public’ opinion: hate speech, anti-egalitarian discourses, authoritarian values, and an individualistic common sense. Of course, these discourses existed in the past too, but their virulence and the new constellations in which they are inscribed represent an ideological novelty in the Latin American political landscape.

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Javier Villamor, Nicolás Márquez & Agustín Laje at a conference organized by the far-right, ultra-catholic Spanish group "HazteOir". Picture by https://www.flickr.com/photos/hazteoir/

Gustavo Robles

Gustavo Robles studied contemporary history and philosophy, an area in which he received his Ph.D. degree. He has been an Associated Professor at the Department of Education at the National University of La Plata (UNLP), a Postdoc-Researcher at the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (UNLP-CONICET, Argentina), and an Invited Lecturer at different Argentinian Universities. He also carried out doctoral and postdoctoral research stays at different German universities, such as the University of Frankfurt, the University of Jena, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. His areas of research interests are Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary political thought, and social philosophy, and his current project is focused on the connections between subjectivization processes and affective dimensions in current authoritarian neoliberalism. Furthermore, he is an activist in different political and cultural collectives in Argentina and Germany related to issues such as human rights and immigrant working conditions.

Last publications:
"Crisis de la experiencia y (pos)fascismos. Lecturas desde la Teoría Crítica". Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica. N° 13. 312-339. 2021

"La teoría del reconocimiento de Axel Honneth. Análisis crítico". In Comou, Antonio (ed.). Perspectivas en Teoría Social Contemporánea. La Plata: EDULP. 2021

"El fin de algunas ilusiones. Subjetividad y democracia en tiempos de regresión autoritaria". Resistencias. Revista de Filosofía de la Historia. 2(1). 14-27- 2020

"Sobre la dimensión política del resentimiento" (2020). Castalia. Revista de Psicología. 34. 5-23

Institutional Violence in the Time of Coronavirus: Argentina and its Democratic Deficit

The mandatory lockdown and social distancing decreed by the National Government of the Argentine Republic in Decree No. 297/2020 has been the policy designed to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This way of addressing the crisis in a timely and initially efficient manner, in contrast to other countries in the region, gained Argentina international recognition. Simultaneously, the new President of the Nation, Alberto Fernández from the Justicialist Party, (Partido Justicialista, PJ)—also known as the Peronist movement—managed to get a very high level of support from the population by promoting this set of measures to deal with the pandemic. This entailed health, social, and economic measures to protect the most vulnerable sectors and workers.

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Julieta Mira

Julieta Mira has devoted her academic career to studying and researching the central human rights issues of “justice, memory, and truth”, which have a particularly unique and intense meaning for societies that are “dealing with the past”, such as her native Argentina.

Living (and Working) in Pandemic Times. Labour, Care Work, and Struggles in, Against, and Beyond the (Capitalist) Pandemic

The COVID-19 crisis has put our whole lives on pause. Not because life has stopped or ended but because our world as we knew it seems to be coming to an end. We are at the beginning of a new era. This is a capitalist crisis, not a health crisis. This is the latest crisis in the era of capital; the Capitalocene has put us on the verge of annihilation. This crisis has hit us hard and in multiple ways. The resulting global financial crash is hitting every territory, country, and city in a different way. Changes abound in our way of living and working. Social reproduction as a whole is changing and so are social struggles.

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Mariano Féliz

What does authoritarianism mean in times of coronavirus?

In late April, the International Foundation for Freedom, headed by Peruvian Literature Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, issued a statement warning against the rise of authoritarianism in Latin America due to the coronavirus pandemic. Among the signatories were well-known defenders of neoliberal ideas in Latin America and Spain, such as Vargas Llosa himself and the former presidents Mauricio Macri (Argentina), José María Aznar (Spain), and Alvaro Uribe (Colombia). The statement expressed concern “about the measures taken in some countries that have indefinitely restricted basic freedoms and rights” in the name of the combatting the virus.

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