SPECIAL SECTION: LATIN AMERICA

Introduction

TOMAS ZAMOT – THE NEW LABOUR: HOW TO OCCUPY A FACTORY SEBASTIAN HACHER – BOLIVIA’S WAR OF WARS CONRAD HEROLD – FREE TRADE IN THE AMERICAS

In Mute 25 we presented five accounts of life in Argentina during the massive social changes that are occurring there. Since then, there has been unrest throughout the whole of South America: in Venezuela, a ‘popular’ coup apparently sponsored by middle-class interests; in Bolivia, a massive escalation of the ‘War on Drugs’; in Argentina, a crack-down on the social centres and occupied factories by an increasingly militarised police force.

The struggle to find a theoretical/ political system capable of understanding these massive social changes goes on. For some in the social movements within Europe, Argentina has been taken as a model of self-management by the multitude. Others call it ‘mob rule’, bemoaning the troubled state’s attraction for students of Hardt and Negri’s ‘communist manifesto for the era of globalisation’, Empire, and the Italian autonomists. Few have yet focused on the organisation needed to defend ‘the multitude’ against the reinforcement of state rule in South American ‘failed states’. Will they, ultimately, fall under the same military control now presiding in Iraq?

In this issue, we explore some more diverse understandings of the processes ongoing in South America. Sebastian Hacher, an activist and journalist currently living in Bolivia, provides an insight into the use of anti-drugs rhetoric as a powerful political tool, and the current state of resistance to this strategy. Tomas Zamot interviews workers of one of the most well-known occupied factories in Argentina on the eve of the Argentinian authorities’ attempt to evict them. The interview is a product of the months he spent living with the factory’s workers.

Meanwhile, Conrad Herold, a Marxist economist working from Hofstra University in New York, provides an insight into the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (FTAA) that takes a different line from the post-Empire debates on multitudes, non-hierarchical organisation, and the ‘new proletariat’ of the ‘social labourers’. His class-analysis is yet another prism through which to regard contested social-political life in South America: one that gives an insight into the political fallout of regionalist economic policies, and locates them as an important site of social struggle.