Abstract
Social protest, actions of discontent, and alternative practices are frequently studied as result of opportunities opened up by the dynamic of sociopolitical cycles;2 as the effect of grievances experienced because of durable inequalities,3 or, finally, as the consequence of state withdrawal from its regulatory functions.4 In other words, most accounts of social protest tend to explain social processes, including uprisings and demonstrations, by applying existing theoretical narratives to emerging sociopolitical phenomena, leaving little room for the arrival of new sociopolitical practices outside preestablished conceptual boxes This tendency emphasizes repetition, like for example the idea of “protest cycles,”5 over the emergence of something new, potentially disruptive with lasting consequences, able to change the structures of “path dependencies.”6 In order to be able to detect such transformations, we need to work with unfixed notions of both “the social” and “the political.” To put it bluntly, social subjects operate in specific contexts that condition their actions, but, importantly, the latter in turn can affect the nature of the former. Against this backdrop, the aim of this chapter is to delve into the array of meanings emerging from, primarily, different forms of social protest, on the one hand, and “alternative forms of doing,”7 on the other, in order to understand the meaning of hidden patterns of relationships within apparently dissimilar forms of actions.
Há sempre um grande grau de insatisfação…nós nunca estamos suficientemente organizados. [There is always a major degree of dissatisfaction…we’re never sufficiently organized.]
(Claudia, CUT adviser, interviewed by the author, São Paulo, October 28, 2009)1
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Notes
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The expression was used before as follows: “the subject of power and the state dissolves into other, more basic question … the way in which human activities are organized, the subjection of our doing to the logic of the social cohesion of capitalist society, what Marx called the subordination of concrete to abstract labor.” John Holloway, Change the World without Taking the Power (London: Pluto Press, 2002): xi. The use of doing in the context of this chapter differs from the status of the concept in Holloway’s theoretical edifice. understands doing as essentially embedded in multiple forms of abstract labor, which basically reproduce existing capitalist forms of concrete labor. I also understand doing as obvious human activities, but that are aligned with a more modest theoretical implication. The meaning of doing in this chapter expresses bottom-up forms of work that represent “alternative forms” inasmuch as they have been self-generated outside formal employment or direct state intervention. From Holloway’s perspective, for example, the unemployed who demand work, would fall within the subordination to the multiple forms of concrete and abstract labor. The effect of this type of action would ultimately reproduce neoliberal capitalism rather than pose a challenge to it, which is the opposite thesis of this book.
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© 2014 Juan Pablo Ferrero
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Ferrero, J.P. (2014). Self-organizing: Grass-roots Activation. In: Democracy against Neoliberalism in Argentina and Brazil. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137395023_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137395023_4
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