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De la Culpa a la Autogestión: On privilege and solidarity
Liz Mason-Deese and Tim Stallmann
As the neoliberal agenda advances, as capital, merchandise, and technology become increasingly globalized, other forms of relationships and exchange are springing up as well. Intertwined in the tangle of global capitalism grow alternative globalizations of horizontality and solidarity, relationships between people and communities reappropriating channels created by and intended for governments and corporations, and through these cracks in the edifice of global capital we begin to see the light of other possibilities. Or at least that’s the idea.
One prototype of this new form of globalization occurs as student/activists of privilege travel to Third World spaces to work with locally based social movements. The most well-known examples include the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and non-violent resistance to the occupation of Palestinian Territories, although autonomous social movements in Argentina are increasingly popular.
The two of us, both undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill and both active in global justice movements there, traveled to La Matanza, Argentina, to work with the Movement of Unemployed Workers (Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados—MTD) of La Matanza. For two months, we lived and worked in the MTD’s collective, located in an abandoned private school, now retaken and thriving with a bakery, a sewing shop, a preschool, and adult education programs. We soon found that CEFOCC (Centro para la Educación y Formación de Cultura Comunitaria—Center for Education and Community Cultural Development) was much more than a conglomeration of micro-enterprises. One of the first things people of CEFOCC told us when we arrived was “este es un espacio libre,” an autonomous space where we were free to do as we wished without asking permission from anyone, a space where we had to manage ourselves (be autogestionados) because there was nobody there who would direct us. Maybe this was the most difficult for us, for all our capitalist (and anti-capitalist) individuality, we were completely lost without anyone telling us what to do.
Due to this lack of direction, and the cold weather, we spent our first week sitting in the ‘living room’ of the collective, drinking mate and talking with the workers and militants of the MTD. We felt guilty, and to some extent still feel guilty, for this week. We had intended to come to Argentina to work, to learn, to help: not just drink mate and make friends. Looking back, however, this week was probably our most important week in La Matanza, the week that changed us the most. That week, we realized that being autonomous and liberated meant something far different from having the right analysis; we began to understand what it meant that the MTD was engaged in a struggle for life, for joy and dignity through work. And when we began to work, to find our own positions within the dynamic and sometimes chaotic world of CEFOCC, we did so because we wanted to and in ways we knew would be helpful, not because anyone (neither person nor inner sense of justice or custom) told us to. We were beginning to be autogestionados.
The militants of the MTD call this “trabajo con dignidad,” work with dignity – work not just to put food on the table, but as an end in itself; the noblest goal to produce and to have dignity through that production. In work with dignity, there are no bosses and there is a constant struggle to prevent hierarchy from forming, to leave people to work together horizontally, to experiment and create alternative forms of work and economy.
As we continued working to become autogestionados, our relationship to CEFOCC and the other workers/militants changed and we began to experience the space in different ways. CEFOCC was a free space, nothing required permission, but we were not free as individuals to run around wildly. We were not even free as individuals, we were free as a community, as a collective unit, and we had a commitment to each another that had to be maintained at all times. “This isn’t anarchy,” explained Soledad, “there are rules, we just make and enforce them ourselves”.
Situating ourselves within this collective governing/governed body was difficult as foreigners and pasantes (people passing through), but as we began participating in meetings, critiquing and being critiqued, we began operating more as members of the collective then as foreign visitors. From there we began experiencing CEFOCC as a shared space—a space where we not only shared material goods (mate, food, art supplies)—but immaterial goods as well: all our thoughts, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions. This community of sharing was a space where we all worked together to do Silvia’s homework for her classes to get teacher certification, because her certification would benefit the entire collective, because we had all decided that it was a necessary accommodation to the legal system.
We learned through all the knowledge that everyone shared with us; and we taught by sharing our knowledge. But fundamentally, CEFOCC was a space of production, and teaching, learning, and knowing were as much ways of producing as the hours we spent kneading dough in the bakery. The community we began to be a part of was in constant production – the food we ate and the guardapolvos we sold but also our own subjectivities and collectivities and histories. After every important event in the cooperative we would meet to share our individual ways of telling and to construct a new collective story; that everyone, whether one week in the movement or the founding members, might feel able to speak with the ‘we’ of the collective.
Navigating the spaces of La Matanza, we began to carve out places for ourselves, learning, teaching, sharing and producing. But of course, our positions were much more complicated than we could control, and we were constantly struggling with how we might explain and define our roles, sometimes outsiders and sometimes committed militants.
Underneath and around all of this, we struggled constantly with our privilege, economic and otherwise. One way or another, we were paying the militants of the MTD to come and work with them. Not much – a contribution of $150 to the movement and $12 a day for food and lodging, as part of a new micro-enterprise called “receptive tourism”. Students and foreigners had always come to visit the MTD and had always come with an economic advantage, so why not start offering them hot meals and a clean room for a price? It was clearly a fair exchange, but all the same an economic one; and this fact alone made us incredibly uncomfortable.
We were quick at first to insulate ourselves from the whole process – quick to point out that we hadn’t paid, that it was the University instead, that we weren’t the rich foreigners they had thought of in designing the program, as if the chain of privilege that linked us to such things as summer research grants was something outside of our control. We tried to hide our privilege, tried to masquerade as though we were just the same as the locals in the movement, but the fact remained that one way or another we had had access to the $800 plane ticket, the $150, and the $12/day for food and bed that was paying for the livelihoods of Miguel who taught us how to make gnocchi and drink red wine cold with lime juice, Claudia our adopted Chilean mother, Vilma who late one night camped out in the middle of Avenida 9 de Julio told us about how she started being a militant in high school, picketing one road for 17 days at age 16.
So what were we to Vilma, to Claudia and Miguel, if not just a paycheck? What were we to the movement, to our Argentinean hosts, to ourselves? There’s a t-shirt lying in the corner of Tim’s room that still smells like Miguel, that he gave him on his last day. Not to focus on materiality, but objects have meanings, have histories and express things that people could never bring themselves to say. And what we were to the movement was who we were – our red hair, our enthusiasm and pessimism and crabbiness, our queerness and our closets and our dancing. And our privilege. It was easier, from the beginning, to pretend that our privilege meant everything, that it prevented us from having real and deep relationships. Far easier to hide behind our own guilt than to struggle constantly to defeat our own privilege, to push aside the capitalists inside ourselves and open ourselves to real commitments.
And for that matter, what of this privilege we were supposed to have? Certainly in important ways we had access to resources and thus options which our comrades in Argentina never could. But we were all-too-used to assuming that our economic privilege obscured every other possible reading of the situation, every other possible dynamic. Of course we came to La Matanza with economic privilege, with hard capital that was making material changes in the lives of people we’d come to love. We also came with knowledge and with questions, with creativity and fear and blunt stupidity. And with a nagging fear that the dollar signs could put a hex over everything in the world and turn it all fake in an instant.
We came giving capitalism entirely too much credit, perhaps – if paying a fair price to workers autogestionados is even capitalism. We should have been more nimble than all that guilt. Not naïve, mind you, but with the honesty and trust to present ourselves as all that we were and not carve out the North American parts and save them for late night discussions with other foreigners.
While we struggled with our own privilege in relating ourselves to the movement itself, we also were forced for a number of reasons to explain to outsiders our role in the movement, to come up with a back-story for why we were there and what purpose we were serving. Many of our conversations with other foreigners centered around these questions, and we had many of our most frustrating moments trying to fit what was becoming for us a very natural relationship into their worldviews.
We realized, over those two months, that in explaining ourselves our back-stories, and those of others, were ruled by an old idea of privilege and of struggle, hearkening back to the old lines about revolution only being possible on the periphery. That is, the idea that our comrades in Latin America, in Africa and Asia are fighting in a struggle that is fundamentally riven from our own. That we, those with privilege, can support them from the sidelines, that we can even begin trying to pull ourselves away from and against the mechanisms of oppression that would otherwise stealthily define our every move, but that their struggle is fundamentally not our own. This way of thinking starts with some crucial truths: contexts, histories, cultures are radically different, the world is a fragile place and it is always necessary to act with the utmost of care, the sort of care which is necessary can only come from understanding our own tendencies to dominate.
But follow this path further along, let guilt overwhelm, essentialize your economic privilege. Become nothing but a giant dollar sign, and you will reach one of the grand lies of today’s modern world: that we, the privileged, ought to devote ourselves to watching them, the world, for reasons of social justice (nobody does anything ‘just because’, these days). As if watching weren’t enough, we’re charged also with capturing all that we see and taking it back with us so that those not quite as daring/lucky/culturally-aware can know. Duck into your suitcase to pull out your camera or notebook and become instantly transformed into something larger than yourself, a power-player in the new economy of knowledge, a firm believer that good stories told to the right people will trickle-down and change lives for the better. Don’t dare ask whose lives need the changing or who the right people really are and how they got to be that way in the first place, or why you happen to be the chosen story-teller. Questions like that are impossibly hard here in the belly of the beast, better to stick to the back-story. Everyone, repeat:
“I came here to learn, to study, to go back to my country and tell your story to those who have the power to change your life.”
The more enlightened might add:
“I really think that those of us in the developed world have a lot to learn from what you are doing, and I came here to help bring some of that knowledge back with me.”
We struggled with finding our back-story for two months in La Matanza. Being forced to justify ourselves led us to new ground: new ways of approaching our piquetero vacation and of seeing through some old lies. Because in the end, this story is a story is about seeing, or more about watching. About watching and being watched, about the emptiness that they bring and create. About taking photos and taking histories and the inevitable pleasure of conquest that comes in the taking (and about how we fight it every time it comes but all the same it does feel good). And about the lie that we get trapped in from time to time, that watching is doing is nothing more and nothing less than what is necessary.
In the next issue, what we think are some better answers. And why, when you get right down to it, this struggle is as much ours as anybody’s.
