Abstract
At first glance, Gago’s book promises ethnographic analysis of the urban informal economies of La Salada, near Buenos Aires. However, it surprises by offering a next chapter to work on Argentina’s post-crisis, anti-neoliberal struggles of 2001 and onwards, made famous by the unemployed workers’ movements (MTDs in Spanish-language acronym) (Chatterton, 2005; Clare et al., 2018; Colectivo Situaciones, 2011; Dinerstein, 2015; Sitrin, 2012). Here, I draw out this contribution regarding the politics of autonomy, drawing particularly from Dinerstein (2015).
Gago characterises La Salada as a laboratory of capital’s post-crisis recovery. Under this recovery, La Salada becomes not only a central node in global value chains, notably clothes manufacturing. It is also the frontline of global capital’s experimentation with new modes of value composition and labour organisation, epitomised in a qualitatively new wave of informality, and in hyper-exploited migrant labour Gago captures these developments using Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) theory of the ‘multiplication of labour.’ La Salada also exemplifies the recovery’s close relationship with the neo-developmentalist ‘social pact’ between ‘progressive’ government and rebellious popular classes. Together, these re-accommodations diffuse and partially resolve the dangerous antagonisms unleashed in 2001.
But then comes Gago’s autonomist inversion: these experiments succeed precisely thanks to their recruitment and re-coding of the oppositional subjectivities born of the crisis. Central to these subjectivities, argues Gago, is the powerful claim to abundance and refusal of austerity’s manufactured scarcity; a claim that was expressed, serviced and even expanded by the social and solidarity economies that flourished post-2001. These economies ‘re-socialised’ social reproduction, which under crisis had become de-coupled from both employment and state-mediated welfare. Capital’s recovery, then, depended upon re-purposing these desires, and re-appropriating the socialised – and largely socially reproductive – value they produced. The tremendous vitality of La Salada is therefore driven fundamentally by an excessive pursuit of abundance, albeit now infused with a new affective rationality animated by neoliberal visions of freedom and calculation.
Gago therefore forms part of a new generation of radical social theorists whose central project is to re-imagine political agency beyond the pale, male factory worker. In an attempt to avoid trading historical materialism’s capital- and state-centrism with uncritical celebrations of resistance, this generation deploys a range of heretical (some more, some less so) and libertarian Marxist analyses of the capital–labour relation that seek to not only prioritise the category of labour (struggle) but also expand it: to decolonise, feminise, queer it, if you like.
This project, dubbed ‘minor Marxisms’ (Bailey et al., 2018), has led these heretics to a pronounced shared interest in subjectivity, whether inflected through materialist post-structuralism (Hardt and Negri, 2001; Lazzarato, 2006; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Read, 2003; Shukaitis et al., 2007; Virno, 2003) or otherwise (Dinerstein, 2015; Holloway, 2010). Frictions notwithstanding, then, Dinerstein (2015) unifies them according to their theoretical contributions to what she productively conceptualises as four modes of autonomous politics: negation, affirmation, contradiction and excess.
Gago’s approach here reflects post-operaismo’s brush with Latin America’s ‘native’ autonomous current. 1 Her autonomist inversion offers a productive theoretical solution to the widely recognised ambivalence of informal labour’s subsumption to capital and an important rebuff to uncritical celebration of autonomy and alterity (eg. Gibson-Graham’s (2008) diverse economies). Ambivalence is also conceptualised in her deployment of abigarramiento (Zavaleta Mercado, 2018). Blended with Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2010) chi’xi, for Gago abigarramiento describes a motley, unruly, always-contingent co-existence – at once antagonistic and harmonious – between the logics of neoliberalism, the indigenous communitarianism of Bolivian migrant workers and MTD collectivism. With post-crisis re-composition, abigarramiento replaces the oppositional energies unleashed in 2001 as the primary excess, in Deleuze and Guatarrian terms, to La Salada’s capital assemblages.
On one hand, then, the afterlives she traces of an earlier round of organised resistance are a sobering reminder of capital’s recuperative capacities. On the other hand, abigarramiento’s transmodern excess signals the strategic and transgressive significance of everyday, ‘imperceptible’ politics. 2
My question here – addressed to Gago and fellow travellers alike – is about the relationship between everyday antagonisms and ‘organised’ insubordination: is a moment of subjectivation necessary in order to unleash everyday antagonisms? Or do they have power in and of themselves? In Gago’s account, excess certainly holds transformative power: it is the primary motor of capitalist innovation. How then might we theorise and demonstrate the power of excess to instead generate post-capitalist/colonialist futures?
Furthermore, while I share the commitment to re-imagining political agency, my concern is that imperceptible politics might tend to somewhat eclipse negation – Gago, for example, favours excess. This may be problematic insofar as negation, and contradiction, are surely the more combative of the four modes of autonomy, and the most directly engaged with capital’s movements. Excess and affirmation, meanwhile, are perhaps the least invested in the internal relation between labour and capital, as precisely the source of labour’s always-latent possibility of escape (Bonefeld et al., 1992). Gago’s attention to abigarramiento’s internal contradiction certainly makes her work more balanced in this respect than the likes of Hardt and Negri. Nonetheless, by emphasising excess over and above the other modes of autonomy, I wonder if we open the door still further to recuperation?
Indeed, recuperation is the spectre that haunts me most reading this book. Here in Europe, debates on grassroots, post-crisis movements focus heavily on their territorial politics of social reproduction via solidarity economies (eg. Arampatzi, 2017), and their insurgent, properly political productions of urban space (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014), creating a strong déjà vu for those familiar with the Latin American context. My suggestion is that we make productive use of this déjà vu, and to that end, in what follows, I draw out some of its lessons and epistemological–methodological implications.
The emphasis on prefigurative subjectivity-formation in the literature on crisis and European social movements post-2008 is an important rejoinder to the wider literature’s somewhat flat, tokenistic or simply absent conceptualisation of contention (Bailey and Shibata, 2014). Like Gago, this literature demonstrates that social movements do much more as counter-neoliberalising forces than merely influence the institutional-regulatory configurations that in Brenner et al.’s (2010) rendering continue to hold the real transformative power (Yates and Bakker, 2014). However, as Gago demonstrates, capital also recuperates prefigurative impulses. For me, the lesson we must take from here is to not take our eyes off capital’s ever-creative, crisis-driven development, which is, as I’ve argued, precisely the danger of focussing exclusively on excess and affirmation.
I will now briefly outline some of the specific tools that Gago’s spatial autonomism offers to the balancing act I’m advocating. Firstly, her mobilisation of the social factory – which now in contemporary ‘Southern idiom’ (Campbell, 2018) is composed of the informal settlement-sweatshop-market – attunes her to both the peculiarities of subsumption under capital’s increasingly de-centred circuits, and to the shifting mediations of social reproduction by capital, state, and labour produced by austerity.
Again, her autonomist inversion avoids capital-centrism. In the realm of ‘non-state welfare’, La Salada offers social reproductive subsidies to capital and state through cheapened inclusion via consumption, and ample absorption capacity for micro-finance – while also coursing with abigarrado ‘communitarian capital’. Meanwhile, the strength of the MTDs’ demands forced a new welfare regime and won them a role in administering its small cash benefits. Welfare financialisation has since displaced the MTDs’ role. However, it also re-territorialises neo-developmentalism’s abstract, finance-driven extractivist accumulation model in the metropolitan core, in the form of indebted subjectivities (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2017). In Gago’s reading, such re-territorialisation opens up new sites and forms of antagonism across space and time.
With some theoretical differences aside, Gago ultimately therefore shares Dinerstein’s (2015) idea of Latin America’s pink tide governments as contradictory mediations of the autonomous politics they translate. This perspective would bring much to debate over the European movements’ recent institutional turn, demonstrated in Spain’s municipalist and populist formations alike, Greece’s Syriza, UK’s Corbynism and Turkey’s HDP. Meanwhile, the post-2008 European movement literature would learn from the insight, pursued by both Gago and Dinerstein, that prefigurative practices are just as imbued with contradictions as their institutional translations are.
In light of the four modes of autonomy, prefiguration looks less like the affirmation of a somehow untainted post-capitalist politics, and more like a new creative horizon that nonetheless contains within it the contradictory, negated form of existence from which it is born. Dinerstein’s (2015) Blochian concrete utopias are instructive here, as is the wider Latin American literature on autonomy and territorial politics (for English-language reviews, see Clare et al., 2018; Halvorsen, 2019). Finally, Gago’s spatial approach, along with her empirical exploration of the multiplication of labour, would enrichen the excellent contemporary work on labour differentiation and re-structuring from Marxist-feminist Social Reproduction Theory (Bhattacharya, 2017; Federici, 2012).
Lastly, the déjà vu I’ve identified of course has much to say not only about the coloniality of political economy but of epistemology too. Gago’s work is yet another reminder that, contrary to its (epistemological) peripheralisation, the South in fact acts a laboratory – some might say ‘core’ – for capitalist innovation and dynamism (Lopes De Souza, 2012; Roy, 2009). We must, therefore, be alert to the politics of epistemological displacements such as the one I’ve advocated (Halvorsen, 2018). Epistemological decolonisation demands methods that allows concepts to travel, while simultaneously subverting the persistent colonialist geographies of such circulations. Such methods include Roy and AlSayyad’s (2004) ‘transnational trespassing’ and Mezzadra’s (2011) blending of Chen’s ‘inter-referencing’ (2010) and Colectivo Situaciones’ (2005) ‘resonances’. Intriguingly, both avoid inviting a simple inversion of the North–South direction of epistemological flow. Rather, they drive towards the outright implosion of binary and hierarchical geographies of (epistemological) coloniality in both method and project, giving life to Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) notion of ‘border as method’. Both therefore offer excellent tools to the urgent task of decolonising academic theory and radical praxis alike.