A person in the foreground throwing an object amidst flames and smoke during a protest scene in Argentina, 2001.

Double podcast episode about the 2001 uprising in Argentina, which toppled the government, and saw the spread of neighbourhood assemblies and factories taken over by workers. In conversation with Tomas Rothaus, a participant in the uprising and author of Argentina, a Tale of Two Utopias.

Our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Supporters also get access to two exclusive podcast series: Fireside Chats and Radical Reads. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
You can listen to our podcast on the links below, or on any major podcast app. Links to a few below.

Episodes

  • Part 1: The uniqueness of Argentine football culture; the state of the Argentine left/working-class movement in the 1990s; the struggle to save Racing Club from bankruptcy; the beginning of the 2001 uprising. Available without ads here on our Patreon.

Argentina's December uprising – Working Class History

  • Bonus ep 1.1: Football culture in Argentina; politics on the terraces; historical roots of teams in immigrant communities as well as anarchist and socialist workers’ groups; Tomas’ two-day ordeal of trying to buy tickets for Racing Club’s last game of the 2001 season – Available exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.
    Listen to a short preview of the episode below:

Football and Politics in Argentina – Working Class History

Part 2: Tomas’ first-hand account of the 2001 uprising; the spread of neighbourhood assemblies; factories taken over and placed under workers’ control; Argentine politics from left-Peronism to the present far-right government. Available without ads here on our Patreon.

Argentina: From Uprising to Popular Power – Working Class History

State and political violence in Argentina – Working Class History

More info

Book cover for 'Argentina: A Tale of Two Utopias' by Tomas Rothaus, featuring a striking graphic design with themes of anarchism, soccer, and neoliberalism.

Video

Watch Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’ excellent 2004 documentary, The Take, about the wave of factory takeovers by workers in Argentina that took place in the wake of the 2001 uprising

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.
  • Episode graphic: protester in front of the Buenos Aires Obelisk, 20 December 2001. Public domain/Wikimedia Commons.
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
  • Edited by Jesse French

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Transcript

Part 1

In December 2001, a massive uprising took place in Buenos Aires that shook the whole of Argentina and forced the President to flee for his safety. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, ordinary people set up neighbourhood assemblies, occupied land, and took over factories to run them as worker cooperatives, giving an image of a future that workers control. This is Working Class History.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters got early access to this episode without ads, and they also get exclusive access to our two Patreon-only podcast series, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Our supporters can also listen to both parts of this double episode now, as well as two exclusive bonus episodes with more information and context. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Tomas Rothaus: At some point, we had either heard that they were shooting live ammunition as well as rubber bullets or we had already seen a body on the ground… we had to take cover every time we saw a rifle or heard rifle fire because we no longer knew if what they were shooting were rubber bullets or live ammunition…  at one point, we heard a cheer go up randomly and it was that the president had resigned. Not that much later, we heard a helicopter and it was, indeed, the president being evacuated from a rooftop helicopter at the presidential palace because the police considered it too dangerous to try to evacuate him by land.

Matt: This is Tomas Rothaus, author of the fantastic new book, Argentina, A Tale of Two Utopias: Anarchism, Soccer, Neoliberalism, co-published by ourselves and PM Press. The book is a gripping first-hand account of Tomas’ return to Argentina as his football team Racing Club de Avellaneda were on the cusp of winning their first league title in 35 years. What he hadn’t expected, however, was that Argentina would erupt into one of the biggest uprisings in the country’s history. These twin utopias of sporting and political victory run parallel to one another; but as the book shows with its combination of personal experience and historical research, politics and football can often combine in significant and unexpected ways.

If you want to get a copy of the book, order one from our online store, link in the show notes.

We’re going to return to this confrontation outside the presidential palace later on in these episodes. But first, to really understand the twin utopias of football and revolution in Argentina, it’s first necessary to understand the special place that football holds in Argentine society.

Tomas Rothaus: I think it’s difficult to over-estimate the importance of football to Argentine society, in general, and the Argentine working class, in particular. I think I sound biased and I probably am when people say, ‘But in Brazil or in Italy…’ No, you don’t understand. There’s just no comparison. In Argentina, it has taken on… for better or for worse and very likely for worse and not for better. It’s taken on a quasi-religious fervour in many regards. 

As far as Maradona and Messi are concerned, I think we might be seeing the beginnings of new religious mythology that, in hundreds of years, will revolve around Maradona and Messi. This is the level of venerance and importance to people’s lives that these characters now have. I can use the World Cup as a quick example to illustrate. Obviously, Argentina is not a rich country. The masses of our folks do not have tens of thousands of dollars of expendable income to spend, to travel to random, far-off places in the world to see football matches and yet you will regularly see these kinds of pilgrimages of literally tens of thousands of Argentines.

For just an example amongst so many, in South Africa in 2010 were the Quarter Finals against Germany and we were in Cape Town. Again, when I say ‘we’ and I gave you this example as if I wasn’t part of it… I was a young, leftist who, again, was not the kind of person who had thousands of dollars to just be like, ‘Hey, let’s go to South Africa for a month.’ And yet, I saw one of these super-moving commercials for the national team on YouTube and not even on the TV. I thought, ‘How can I not go? What is money?’ 

I took out a loan for a business purpose which I knew from the very first moment that I would turn around immediately and use to buy a plane ticket for my son and myself to go half way across the world. We went from the city where I lived to Amsterdam, to Nairobi and from Nairobi to Johannesburg. We literally slept in the garden shed of a person who I knew from high school. People think of Johannesburg in Africa as being warm. No, it was winter and cold. Again, I’ve gone off topic. The point is that when we were at the Quarter Final, I met a guy who had just arrived and I asked, ‘How did you get here?’ He said, ‘I sold my taxi. After we won the last game, I sold my taxi, my form of livelihood, because of Maradona and I have to be here.’ Stories like that I can multiple by hundreds if not thousands.

Matt: Without doubt, to the mind of the non-football supporter, this seems like wildly irrational behaviour (and in many ways, to be honest, it is… especially given what happened to Argentina in the Quarter Finals that year). But this passion for football in Argentina makes more sense once you understand the very specific structure of its football clubs, and their connection to Argentine social life, in a way that’s very distinct from most sports clubs in places like the US or UK.

Tomas Rothaus: The reason why I think that, obviously, it is relatively unique has to do with the club structure of – pardon the redundancy – clubs in Argentina. They are not – as is the case more and more in Europe or completely in the US – some rich guys’ business venture. These are actual clubs that happen to also have football teams, just like they have a volleyball team, a basketball team and this, that and the other. They don’t just have competitive teams. They have social centres, one or more, based in their neighbourhoods where you go to the gym, where you go to the pool on the weekend, where you go to the bar or restaurant and have dinner at night and where, in many cases – Racing is one of those cases – they also have their own schools. It’s completely possible that your entire life, socially and communally, revolves around this club. Obviously, this fosters an attachment which is much, much deeper than saying, ‘I’m just a spectator paying X amount of money to go and see…’ whatever Russian mogul owns half of the clubs in the UK, for example. 

That’s something I always could never wrap my head around, by the way, and I always argued with people saying, ‘What do you care if the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics at basketball?’ It’s like being fanatical about whether Burger King does better than McDonald’s. What do I care? Yeah, it might be a good show and entertaining but why would that generate in me any kind of deep passion? A club is something that you, yourself, are not just a member of but you give life to and you give form to. They’re active and participatory. We have elections. We have different political groupings within our clubs. It’s an entire microcosm of society.

Matt: Many of Argentina’s football clubs were formed at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, a period that overlaps with the formation of its labour and revolutionary movements. Many clubs were even set up by anarchist and socialist workers’ groups, something which was evident in the club names and colours, and many of these clubs still exist today. Tomas goes into more detail about the historic connections between football and radical politics in Argentina in our bonus episode for these episodes, available for our supporters on Patreon. Link in the show notes.

Anyway, coming back to Tomas, as well as Racing Club he also began following another Buenos Aires football club: Club Atlético Atlanta (this thing of supporting two clubs is another aspect of Argentine football culture that Tomas explains in our bonus episode). Atlanta are a team from the historically Jewish Villa Crespo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires and so the club, itself also linked to the area’s Jewish community, often find themselves the subject of antisemitic attacks by supporters of other clubs. In this context, Tomas (himself also Jewish), found himself drawn to the club as an adolescent and soon getting involved in the activity of Villa Crespo’s more hooligan element.

Tomas Rothaus: It really is a reflection of the very negative parts of our world which I want to try to not minimise because they definitely exist. It really is this social cannibalism where working-class people are fighting each other for no good reason other than they’re from a different neighbourhood or wear a jersey of a different colour. 

In my case, and I always try to be transparent and honest about it, sometimes it’s hard for me to differentiate between what’s the cause, what’s the effect, what’s the nature and what’s the nurture because I was deeply political, I was deeply anti-fascist and I’m also ethnically Jewish. Obviously, I’m not religious but my grandparents fled Nazi Germany, literally. I took deep and immediate offence to antisemitic acts or displays, so that pushed my participation in a lot of these conflicts. In general, if there wasn’t the antisemitic aspect, I usually wouldn’t participate unless there was something going on with the police, in which case, I was very eager to participate [laughter]. I never felt comfortable hitting, chasing or harming another human being just because they were from a different team. That’s crazy. Even as a crazed adolescent, I was a very deeply ideologically-driven adolescent and that, clearly, was not part of my ideology. 

We did have things like the fans of Estudiantes de Caseros pulling out a literal Swastika flag in the middle of the terrace at one match. There were other games where the chants… they’re difficult to translate but it works in Spanish rhythmically, I guess. They were things like ‘Here comes Hitler down the alleyway. We’re all going to go together and kill Jews to make soap.’ There was one match and it was very sad because it was another club which was founded by anarchists and whose jerseys are red and black. Again, very little is left of that in the consciousness of today’s fans. As the Atlanta players took to the field, they threw bars of soap onto the field. 

One of my first appearances, we were travelling to an away match somewhere and suddenly, I remember seeing jerseys that looked kind of like ours but weren’t ours. They were yellow and bluish but it was a darker blue. It was weird. Suddenly, it was raining stones on our bus and we got ambushed by the fans of Comunicaciones who, back then, I think were third or fourth. I didn’t even know who these people were and then suddenly, I had to be fighting for my life against them for some reason.

When we had away fans, they would first let the away fans out of the stadium and they would keep the home fans for 15-30 minutes to give the others time to escape. Our stadium is near a train station, so a lot of fans will come and leave by train. Basically, we had an athletic competition which was the 200 yard sprint. As soon as they would open the gate, we had to sprint to the train station to see if we could catch them before the train left. Again, it’s just idiotic and stupid but a lot of battles took that form around the train station. As you may or may not know, there is Argentine Arsenal that was in the first division for many years. They were in the second division for a couple of years and a few weeks ago, they were relegated to the third division. We tore down all the fencing separating our terrace from theirs and literally chased these people out of the stadium. I remember being a little shocked and surprised at the amount of knives that I saw. 

There was a lot of that and as useless and stupid as a lot of it was, I do have it to thank for how I knew how to manage myself in situations of political combat and conflict that would then come in the years afterwards.

Matt: The period in which Tomas was getting embroiled in what he calls the ‘social cannibalism’ of football violence was also a time of generalised retreat for left politics and the worsening of working-class living conditions.

Tomas Rothaus: I think the headline there would be ‘Defeat and Disarray’ for the left, anarchism or anything of the popular camp. I’m just in Argentina but, obviously, the world over… as of the early ‘90s with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and was based on this whole end-of-history final triumph of capitalism era. In Argentina, we were a microcosm of that stage in history, so to speak. In our case, it was compounded by the military defeat of the left in the ‘70s by the dictatorship and the social defeat of the left in the ‘80s when it just disappeared as a relevant force in the Argentine political sphere. You then combine it with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and so on. In Argentina, as of the early ‘90s, we had to control our rampant hyper-inflation and, by the late ‘80s, we had numbers that are just unimaginable to the First World brain. 

Matt: Indeed, depending on who you talk to, in 1989, the average annual rate of inflation reached somewhere between 2600 and almost 5000%. That means that prices were going up on average at a rate of anywhere between 31 and 39% per month. To get an idea of what that would’ve meant in practice: if you bought a coffee in January for a dollar, by December that same coffee would cost between $26 at the lower end or almost $50 at the top end, depending on whose measurement you were using.

Unsurprisingly, this resulted in widespread rioting and looting around the country. At this point Carlos Menem took over as president, but even so, inflation remained at that same level in 1990 as well.

Tomas Rothaus: Eventually, Menem and Cavallo, his Minister of the Economy & Finance, decreed something called the Convertibility Plan which, very simply put, meant that from then on, one peso equaled one dollar. I’m not going to bore us with the finances of the economic workings of this but for that to be real, your country has to actually have those dollars in reserve. While that was one aspect of it, the other aspects were, of course, deregulation of industry, opening up to foreign imports and, very significantly, lots of privatisation of public infrastructure. I’ll just take the example of the privatisation of infrastructure. That brings in dollars, of course, because you’re selling off infrastructure to foreign investors and this allows you to maintain this convertibility scheme for as long as you can make dollars appear.

The point is that you can only sustain this for so long. That said, while it was being sustained, it was positive for certain sectors of society. For example, a significant part of the Argentine middle class benefitted from this. Those who were able to stay in the job market and who did not lose their jobs due to the industrialisation, lay-offs, factory closures or whatever it may be, they suddenly saw the worth of the currency in which they were paid being substantially more than it was before. For a lot of the Argentine middle and upper-middle class, the ‘90s is remembered as a time of… ‘Oh yeah, I was able to go on vacation to Disneyworld in Miami. I was able to see the world and I had a decent income. 

On the other hand, those who were forced out of the labour market and did lose their jobs experienced a very different reality. Convertibility, because it kills the economy, because it kills trade, because it stems the flow of the local currency, it does a very good job at eliminating inflation but it’s kind of the tranquility of the graveyard. Okay, there’s no inflation but there’s no inflation because there’s no more commerce because people don’t have jobs and because people don’t have income. They can’t buy things. What started to grow in its place was unemployment.

So that’s the crisis that began to grow as, like I said, a slow-burning fuse in the ‘90s in Argentina. You had an ever-growing pool of unemployed people and I think the unemployment rebellion boils over eventually because people start to realise and think, ‘Ah, it’s not me who is failing at life. There’s a systemic problem here because now it’s not just me who doesn’t have a job. It’s my neighbour three houses over who also doesn’t have a job. It’s my friend from school who also lost their job.’ That’s when people start making connections and start organising themselves which is the phenomenon that began to happen in Argentina as of the mid-90s when new forms of workers’ organisations started to develop. Again, the traditional form of workers’ organisation is the trade union but, obviously, if you don’t have a job, you’re unlikely to benefit very much from a trade union. There began to be organisations of unemployed workers which became popularly known, with the passage of time… this might not be a term that’s so familiar to everybody but 20 years ago, anybody on the left anywhere in the world, if you said piquetero, they knew it was the Argentine Unemployed Workers’ Movement who were the ones who did the road blockades and so on. That self-organisation began to appear and I think it’s important to note also that it was very much outside of the structures, obviously, of the traditional unions but also the traditional political parties.

Matt: It’s worth pausing for a moment on the piqueteros as they were a hugely significant movement at the time in Argentina, and also point towards a potential form of struggle able to be used in a time of mass unemployment more generally. Officially known as the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, the piqueteros emerged in response to mass redundancies that were taking place in the mid-nineties. Unemployed people would organise blockades of major highways, like the Horacio Guzman Bridge, Argentina’s main link to Bolivia, demanding jobs and increased welfare. As the movement grew and got closer to Argentina’s major cities, piquetero numbers not only grew (due to the increased population density), but were also able to strangle major arteries to the country’s political and financial centres. In some cases, piquetero groups would refuse any mediation as basically meeting the state on its own terrain. Instead, they would force state representatives to come down and negotiate with them at the blockades themselves.

Interestingly, the rise of the piqueteros took place against the backdrop of a broader weakening of the global working class in the post-Thatcher/Reagan/Cold War era. But, in Argentina, this weakened working class was also reflective of the specific history of dictatorship and repression in Argentina itself. A period of anti-communist state terror gripped the country in the years preceding the 1976 military coup (a terror which would continue until the end of the dictatorship in 1983). This left a noticeable generation gap across the Argentine left.

Tomas Rothaus: When I would sit in on assemblies, mainly of the anarchist movement which, again, I say this with a deep, deep love for those people and those structures and anybody who reads the book will realise that but that doesn’t change the fact that it was deeply, deeply marginal in its relevance to social struggles. There was an age group missing and that you could see, apparently, in other organisations as well. I can’t do the math right now but I think it was the people in their 30s and 40s. I thought, ‘It’s natural. I’ve heard about this,’ and as I got older, I saw it because sometimes people tend to drift away from active political work as life gets stressful, as their jobs get stressful and they’re starting a family. 

But this wasn’t the case here. The number is debated and I don’t want to get into that but there were 30,000 people who were dead or disappeared. Who knows how many were in exile and who knows how many who said, ‘Yeah, it’s all well and good. I survived this and I am not setting foot in any of these environments again because god knows what could happen again tomorrow, in a year or in ten years.’ I don’t use the term lightly but there was a genocide of people who thought a certain way in Argentina in the ‘70s and one of the things that you see after a genocide is that a group of people are missing.

Matt: As we mentioned, what became known as the Dirty War in Argentina began before the dictatorship. For example, under the presidencies of former general Juan Peron and his wife, Isabel, a fascistic paramilitary group was set up called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, known as the Triple-A. They murdered hundreds of workers, left-wingers, communists and other activists.

However, in a way that’s hard to understand for those outside Argentina, what’s known as ‘Peronism’ cannot be defined as a purely right-wing phenomenon.

Tomas Rothaus: Peronismo is a complicated political animal and very difficult to pin. It has taken so many different forms, shapes and iterations over the years. If we want to be strict and we want to answer it within a theoretical framework, is it a left-wing phenomenon? I would answer it, ‘No, of course not.’ It revolves around a military general who went into exile in Francoist Spain and when he returned to Argentina, his right-hand man founded the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (which was essentially a death squad). When millions of people went to the airport at Ezeiza to greet him when he returned from exile, they opened fire on the left-wing Peronist columns killing an unknown number of people, possibly into the hundreds. Yet, with all that said, there were and continue to be very clearly left-wing tendencies that identify with Peronismo because of its social justice doctrine because of its defence of the interests of workers. Again, if I were to be strict and theoretical, it is a class collaborationist ideology which states that national unity is the core principle and that all the different classes need to find a balance in order for the country to progress.

Matt: This massacre that Tomas mentions at Ezeiza airport in 1973 was just one instance in what was a general wave of heavy repression directed against workers and the left. Another element of this was known as ‘Operation Red Snake of the Paraná’, under which hundreds of police and soldiers were sent into the town of Villa Constitución to break the organisation of militant industrial workers. Hundreds of workers were arrested, and others blacklisted and even killed.

Mass killings escalated under the dictatorship, with approximately 30,000 people disappeared, assumed killed – mostly trade union members, socialists and communists. And up to 12% of the victims were Jewish, despite Jewish people constituting less than 1% of the population of Argentina at that time. Over 2000 Jewish people were also imprisoned and tortured by the dictatorship, often in torture chambers decorated with swastikas, photos of Hitler, and with recordings of Hitler speeches playing. Beatings, electric shocks, rape and sexual assault of prisoners was widespread.

The situation was so desperate that Jewish organisations requested support from US and Brazilian governments in the event that a full evacuation of Argentine Jews became needed. It remains the biggest mass killing of Jews anywhere in the world since the end of World War II.

As it happens, the Israeli government was providing arms and military supplies to the dictatorship, flying between $700 million and $2 billion of weapons to Argentina from Tel Aviv.

This repression obviously struck those most associated with the groups who had taken up arms against the Argentine state. The biggest among these were the Montoneros, a left-Peronist guerrilla organisation, but other groups who suffered repression were the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Marxist guerrilla group, and the smaller anarchist Libertarian Resistance group. We go into more detail about the Dirty War and armed struggle in our bonus episode, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

However, repression also struck left organisations unconnected – and even opposed to – the armed struggle, like the Argentine Communist Party.

Tomas Rothaus: The Argentine Communist Party, like many of the traditional Communist parties, was deeply Stalinist. They were well-funded by Moscow and that’s pretty well-documented. They were at odds with the armed organisations of the Argentine left. The Argentine Communist Party, which was relatively big and significant at that time, was not in on the Guevarist armed struggle joke. They saw it as left-wing adventurism, unsurprisingly. ‘What is this crazy talk? This is not what we do.’ They were deeply critical of that.

The Communist Party had the idea that there were conflicting wings of influence within the Argentine military and they defined them as the Pinochetistas who were, obviously, those aligned with Pinochet in Chile and another wing. In their opinion, there was a two-line struggle within the Argentine military. 

Matt: General Augusto Pinochet was the right-wing dictator of Chile who had come to power in a US-backed military coup against the democratically-elected left-wing president, Salvador Allende, in 1973. The other perceived faction, the Communist Party termed the nationalists, or constitutionalists.

Tomas Rothaus: One was much more openly fascistic, repressive and murderous and the other they saw as capable of establishing a civic-military alliance to bring back order and stability to Argentine society which is what the Argentine worker also wants and, therefore, the party is aligned with that. I’m paraphrasing a bit. But, and I’m quoting now from one text: ‘In some provinces, Communist Party organisers were given instructions through radio transmissions straight from Moscow on their party radio even before the local delegates could inform them as to how to best act under this new situation.’ The ‘new situation’ being that the military having taken over power the day before, basically. ‘It advised party members to cooperate with the authorities, to respect citations if they’re told to report to a police station, to do so, to not hide and to announce to the police or the military their membership in the Argentine Communist Party,’ which, in their idea, would serve as a guarantee against repression. In some cases, this was the case, incredibly, but in many cases, it was – ‘Oh, really? Come with us, please.’ 

Of course, once this was all over, they were widely and heavily criticised for this. In the ‘80s, post-dictatorship, they had a kind of rebranding where suddenly Che Guevara was the standard bearer on all their party propaganda and banners. The reality was that they were very against this adventurism.

Matt: This combination of the generalised retreat of the international workers’ movement and the specific history of repression in Argentina meant that the Argentine left was in a general state of disarray during the 1990s. However, this didn’t mean there was no struggle as Tomas noted when he mentioned the increasing activity of the unemployed piquetero movement.

But, in another example of how football and politics are often interrelated (particularly in Argentina), one big struggle that broke out was when the president of Tomas’ beloved Racing Club de Avellaneda officially declared the club bankrupt in 1999. 

Tomas Rothaus: It all went from zero to a hundred. The then president had millions and millions of dollars of unpayable debt back then. I don’t want to waste too much time on that but the then president decided that the best way to reduce the debt and to try and maybe find a way out of the maze was to declare bankruptcy. Some say that that was the reason and others say that the reason was to maybe have it be privatised and be able to buy the club himself.

Matt: Shortly after a trustee of the club went on TV and, in a moment which became infamous in Argentine football history, declared: “Racing Club has ceased to exist.”

Tomas Rothaus: Those were her exact words actually. The logic behind it was that if you’re in bankruptcy proceedings, you have to demonstrate that you have some kind of viable way to generate income so as to pay back your creditors. She was of the opinion that Racing had no road to that and, therefore, the best or the only possible way to pay our creditors would be an auctioning off of the club’s physical assets. It was mainly the stadium and the two social centres, one which was in Avellaneda, a city just outside of Buenos Aires. The other one was in Villa del Parque which is actually in central Buenos Aires. 

Matt: The response from Racing fans to this news was instant.

Tomas Rothaus: Immediately that day, there was a spontaneous mobilisation a few hours later as people got out of work. There were at least several hundred or maybe into the thousands of people in front of the Avellaneda social centre. I recall one guy basically giving a speech that could have come from any random anarcho at a demonstration saying, ‘No politician is going to save us. Businessmen and politicians are who put us in this situation and who got us here. Only the people will save the people.’ 

Soon after the president (the same president who declared the bankruptcy) exited the building and tried to talk to the club members and fans who were there, I don’t think he made it one sentence in… this is also an iconic scene and a picture of it in the book as well… he gets one of those huge stadium drums that we use in South America, in Europe as well… basically, one of those that just goes flying through the air and explodes in his face. He is wearing glasses and you can see the shards of glass flying everywhere. That was the end of him and his speech. 

As a club that no longer existed, it was not allowed to compete on the sporting side of things. As the next weekend rolled around, we were at the beginning of the season and everybody was supposed to play and Racing was not allowed to play. On game day, there was, of course, no match but still, somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 people showed up at the stadium just to hug each other, sing and chant. There was a lot of anger but there was also a lot of very deep sadness. I always say it just because it’s a thing that is so unusual in our patriarchal society, unfortunately, but so many grown men were crying which you probably would never see in other contexts. There were several weeks of that. At one point while we were still in bankruptcy proceedings, we were allowed to continue competing after several weeks. The first match was in Rosario, which is some 300 kilometres away from Buenos Aires. I don’t want to get the numbers wrong but I think 30,000-40,000 people made the trek from one city to the other for the match. Again, in classic Racing style, we, of course, lost.

Matt: While Tomas wasn’t around initially when Racing was declared bankrupt, soon he was back in Buenos Aires to take part in the struggle to save his club.

Tomas Rothaus:  I moved back to Buenos Aires, for maybe a year or a year and some change… my parents lived apart from each other. One lived in Argentina and the other lived in Europe. Sometimes, I had that extra mobility. This was a big reason why I said, ‘Sorry, I need to be there.’ Pretty shortly thereafter, I found myself in Argentina and now we were at the point where there were mass demonstrations to Congress asking for them to pass a law, Patrimonio Historico, to declare the club and its infrastructure of historic importance and, therefore, shield it from bankruptcy, auctioning off, private ownership and things of this sort. 

There were demonstrations, again, with 40-50,000 people. It was pretty massive. But then the day came of auctioning off the social centre and they started with the one downtown. It’s a huge building and, basically, a city block in the middle of Buenos Aires which, inside, has soccer courts, a swimming pool, classrooms and all sorts of social, sporting and cultural activities. It’s a very important part of that neighbourhood. They began with that one because they thought it would be the one with the least symbolic value. They thought it would be the one that would be easiest to auction off with the least resistance. To be fair, we’ll never know because they never made it any further but I’m pretty sure they were right. If they had gone after, god forbid, the actual stadium or the social centre in Avellaneda, I think instead of 20 people barricaded inside when the morning of the auction came, and 500 people outside, they probably would have run into numbers which would have been doubled, tripled or four times that. 

The day of the auction came around and the night before, a group of about 20 people barricaded themselves inside the building before any police arrived or before the perimeter could be secured. About 500 of us showed up to support outside. Eventually, the rumour went around that the auctioneer showed up and that the police were going to try to make their way in to facilitate his entry. We did not take well to that and confrontations ensued. I’m not going to say that we defeated the police there because we didn’t but there was enough chaos with people running back and forth across the street, stones flying in every direction and the cops were throwing stones back at us. The auctioneer had to be shielded as he was chased away. Obviously, the thing was called off. To summarise it, they never tried again. If that auction had gone through that day, who knows what would have happened. That place today would probably be a parking lot because that’s what happened to a lot of these big structures in the inner city. 

Matt: The movement in defence of the club was so powerful that politicians were forced to take notice.

Tomas Rothaus: Eventually, a law was passed protecting not just Racing Club but other smaller neighbourhood clubs like Atlanta and Deportivo Espanol who were in the same situation of bankruptcy and losing their physical infrastructure.

This was one of those cases that warms my heart today because it escapes the idea that it’s just some sporting club. I regularly go past there and sometimes I go in there. If I go in the summer, there are the kids’ summer camps. I actually went in the middle of summer to take photographs for the book. The place is a zoo of smiling, yelling, happy children playing in a huge swimming pool, kicking a ball around on the soccer field, or grilling at the grills. You can see that this place is full of the fabric of community life in a neighbourhood and there is even a plaque at the entrance which reads something to the effect of – ‘To the brave 500 fighters who, with their bodies and their dedication, preserved this space so that we may continue to enjoy it today.’ Every time I go with my poor partner… ‘I’m one of those, you know.’ [laughter]. She’s like, ‘Yeah, I know. Can you shut up now?’ It’s a nice thing because, as activists, we often suffer from burnout and one of the tools against burnout is seeing that what you did mattered. This is an obvious case of, ‘Hey, look, we did something and not only did it matter but it continues to matter.’ Knowing how real estate speculation and business goes in Argentina or most of the world today, I guarantee you this would have been a parking lot if it wasn’t for that day.

Matt: It should also be said that an excellent photo was taken of Tomas that day in the melee between police and Racing supporters.

Tomas Rothaus: I’m literally on the cover of the sports newspaper the day after the attempted auction with a police officer stepping on my head. The headline read… I’m translating it roughly but it works better in Spanish – ‘Despite the pressure, Racing resists.’

Despite what one might thing when you see that image, I did not get arrested that day. Less than 30 seconds later, I was wild and free once again. You have to know how to use all the tools in the toolkit and it’s not always aggression and militancy. When you’re young enough and white-passing enough, you can just look up at the cop and put your best face on like, ‘Oh my god, why are you stepping on my head? This is crazy. I don’t know what’s going on here.’ Maybe they’ll have a moment of doubt and in that moment of doubt, I ran like a deer [laughter].

Matt: For those who want to see that picture, it appears in Tomas’ book and we’ve included a link to buy it on the webpage for this episode in case that’s what finally makes you decide to get a copy.

We’re going to take a quick ad break now. If you’d like to listen to these episodes without ads, then join us on Patreon, where you can listen to both episodes now plus get access to our two, Patreon-only bonus episodes from this miniseries about Argentina. And you’ll also get access to our two Patreon-only series: Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. These episodes are only made possible by our supporters on Patreon, so if you like what we do then join us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Link in the show notes.

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Some listeners might think this story of Racing Club’s bankruptcy and the struggle to save it is just some absurd tangent. But as Tomas explains, the club and its infrastructure were not simply a corporation and its buildings, but an actual public good used by the community, and which that community came out to defend. And, particularly interestingly for these episodes, they defended it in a manner that had clear parallels with the forms of struggle that would spread during the 2001 uprising.

Tomas Rothaus: On the surface, you’re like, ‘What on earth does this have to do with it? What does one thing have to do with the other?’ You dig a little deeper and, first of all, you had these different groups of society that felt disenchanted, disappointed or betrayed by the traditional structures of representation, be it their club politicians or actual state-actor politicians. They saw that the traditional mechanisms not only were no longer offering solutions to their problems but they didn’t even feel represented by them. Instead of wallowing in what we have a lot of today, an individualised and atomised despair, they managed to find each other and construct collective ways of struggling against a reality that they refused to accept and to save either something that is important to them, in the case of Racing, or to fight for their material conditions, in the case of the unemployed workers. Racing members founded a lot of assembly style, directly democratic, self-organised and politically independent structures with which to organise themselves, to organise the struggle and to lead demonstrations, etcetera, as unemployed workers organised structures which were, again, wildly different in the context in which they were born and the objectives that they were fighting for. Likewise, they were assembly oriented, politically independent, direct action oriented, etcetera. 

Those parallels, I think, were very strong. I don’t want to overstate things but I can easily imagine somebody who was involved in Racing’s struggle transferring those things to their struggle as an unemployed person because it is a fact that many of these people were one and the same person who were involved in both of these struggles. They complemented and fed off each other. Again, as a marginal phenomenon, I’m by no way trying to imply that Racing’s struggle was a significant part in what led to 2001 but it was illustrative of a sign of the times where traditional representation was discredited and where people succeeded at taking matters into their own hands collectively.

Matt: As Tomas explained, he left Argentina after just over a year to go back to Europe. However, circumstances meant that he was soon booking a flight to come back to Argentina shortly before the 2001 uprising.

Tomas Rothaus: I came back to Argentina in early December 2001. I don’t know if I’m embarrassed or proud to say, or both… I guess they both apply but I came back not because of uprising was on the horizon. In my defence, I don’t think anybody knew that an uprising of this calibre was on the horizon. I travelled back because Racing was about to win the championship which was something that hadn’t occurred in 35 years and I was of the opinion that if I had been through all the bad times, I was definitely going to be there when the good times finally came. There were three match days left and Racing was first. It looked probable enough that I thought, ‘Alright, it’s time!’ I got on a plane and I found myself in Argentina. That is why I was there in December of 2001.

Matt: However, with increasing strikes and piquetero protests over the years, it would not be long before discontent with Argentina’s neoliberal order would explode into open revolt.

Tomas Rothaus: I remind you again that Argentina had this Convertibility Plan – one peso to one dollar – but it was becoming increasingly unsustainable because there just weren’t enough dollars to sustain it. As rumours of this grew and grew, there were more runs on the bank from the lower middle classes and middle classes who were saying, ‘There are rumours of a devaluation. We should probably take our money out of the bank before it’s worth less.’ Of course, the banking system was already short on dollars and when people started taking out their dollars from the bank, it became even shorter which generated a financial crisis. As that phenomenon was impossible to stop, Cavallo, the Ministry of Economy, in early December, declares something called the corralito which literally means ‘corral’ in Spanish. This limited how much cash you could withdraw per week from the bank. It was 250 pesos per week which was the same as 250 dollars. You also weren’t allowed to open extra accounts to take out more. You really were limited to 250 dollars cash per week. This generated two simultaneous crises and it also aligned interests that, in Argentina, are usually not aligned. Again, if you read the book, you’ll notice that I’m very critical of the Argentine so-called ‘middle class’.

In this case, they saw their pocketbooks and their savings threatened, and they immediately rebelled against this. Which, again, as critical as I may be of many aspects of this class, I would also react very negatively if my savings, which I worked hard for all my life, are in the bank and suddenly, the bank says, ‘Hey, sorry, I’m not giving them to you.’ All the while, there are huge rumours of not only will they not give us our money but, at any moment, our money is going to be worth one third of what it was before or half of what it was before. We were promised that if you put dollars into your bank account, you would be able to withdraw dollars from your bank account. They started protesting outside of banks and banging on pots. They were called the cacerolazos because, literally, there were all these kinds of lower middle class and middle-class families banging pots from their balconies or banging pots outside of banks on the corners.

Matt: However, this economic stress on Argentina’s middle class would have an even harsher – and potentially more volatile – effect on those lower down the social ladder.

Tomas Rothaus: Obviously, Argentina had and still has a huge informal economy and a huge amount of people living in outright poverty. I think the number towards the end of December 2001 was somewhere in the 40% range or maybe 50%. We’re talking about a country with third-world levels of poverty in which there was a huge informal economy and, therefore, there were a lot of people who subsist through selling things on the street or selling things at street lights. If your day-to-day subsistence or the way you are able to get the funds together to buy a plate of food for your family at night is selling snacks at red lights in the middle and upper-class neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires but from one day to the other, the person in the car doesn’t want to buy anything from you because they know they’re severely limited in how much cash they can dispose of, your situation goes from bad to critical in the span of a day or two. You’re not making any money. Again, I feel like a dinosaur having to say this and I don’t know how it is in Europe but, today, in Argentina, the digital wallet methods of payment are so, so widespread. Obviously, 25 years ago, it was cash or it was nothing. That created a very acute problem. One problem was that I can’t access my savings, which is terrible and will make you very angry but you’re still going to eat at night. If your problem is: ‘Hey, I used to make five pesos per day and I could eat at night. Today I made zero,’ it’s not going to take very long before you and people in the same situation might find themselves outside a supermarket saying, ‘Give us food now or we’re going to take it.’ That’s exactly what began happening.

Some were organised by the neighbourhood organisation and unemployed workers’ organisation. Some were truly sporadic and spontaneous. There was a growing wave of looting or attempts to loot at supermarkets. This was very simultaneous to the last match of the season and this weaves in to how I started getting involved and how we started realising this wasn’t just light unrest. I also have to say that there is a bit of a tradition of pre-Christmas season looting in Argentina. Some looting wouldn’t have been necessarily completely out of the ordinary. We were in line to get tickets for the final match. Again, pre-social media, most people didn’t have cell phones and the only connection to the rest of the world was through people who might be sitting there with a radio. It’s obvious to me but maybe not to others just for context. We were in that line for 48 hours, so we were basically cut off from the world for a couple of days. I remember realising and thinking, ‘There are no police here. That’s kind of odd. Normally, for a thing like this, there would be a lot of police. There don’t seem to be any.’ I remember a lady, who had handheld radio, saying, ‘I don’t think cops are going to show up because they seem to be busy with looting and things going on around the city.’

Matt: Tomas goes into more detail about the unbelievable chaos of trying to buy tickets for Racing’s last game of the season in our bonus episode. But, skipping ahead, after this 48-hour ordeal, Tomas got home and fell asleep in a state of absolute exhaustion.

Tomas Rothaus: And I wake up at two or three in the morning. I think the first thing that happened is that I went to the 24-hour magazine and food kiosk to buy the paper and read about what happened the day before and buy some food because I was starving. I remember some random guy in a car yelling at me, basically, the equivalent of – ‘Get off the street, moron!’ I thought, ‘That’s an odd thing to have happen.’ There is nobody around and I’m just walking placidly through my neighbourhood. I remember looking down to see if I had something political on or something from any of my… Atlanta or Racing, because that’s really the only reason why somebody might yell at you, in Argentina, randomly in the street. I had nothing on. I was like, ‘It’s a big city. There’s crazies.’ I didn’t think much more about it. I go buy my things, I come back home and turn on the TV. I’m expecting to be evangelised by some Brazilian evangelical pastor because that’s usually what’s on TV at three in the morning in Argentina

That’s what I was expecting. I turned on the TV and I remember seeing, “Live: The Riots In Front Of Congress”, tear gas flying in all directions and thousands of people. I thought, ‘Did I sleep for a decade? Have I been transported somewhere? What on earth could possibly be happening here?’ I had missed a lot of chapters in 12 hours when I was out like a lamp. Relatively quickly, one of the channels re-ran it and apparently, as the looting got more intense and got closer and closer to the capital… it sounds like we’re in the Hunger Games. Buenos Aires has the outskirts and the capital. The president went on TV sometime in the evening to give a nationally televised speech. Everybody was expecting him to show empathy and compassion and announced maybe some measures of food distribution, he essentially said, ‘Lawlessness will not be tolerated. We will put a stop to this.’ He declared a state of emergency.

Matt: This declaration of a state of emergency had deep echoes in the memories of most Argentines.

Tomas Rothaus: A state of emergency is something that resonates deeply in broad sectors of Argentine society because it’s very much identified with the times of the military when no more than three people could gather on the streets and when basic civil rights and liberties were restricted. Basically, this was the drop that kind of overflowed the glass or the bucket because instead of frightening people and putting an end to things, as he declared that, immediately, pots and pans started ringing out all across Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, we have this phenomenon where people will kind of spontaneously go from their neighbourhoods and walk towards the Congress or the Plaza de Mayo, which is where the presidential palace is, when these kinds of big events happen. Apparently, thousands and thousands of people started streaming out of their homes and apartments and gathering in front of Congress and the Plaza de Mayo. It’s not exactly clear why and it was either just a random repression to clear people or because there might have been attempts to topple some barricades. I really don’t know but the police started a pretty violent repression. And I wanted to go, obviously. What, I was going sit there eating my snacks and watching this on TV?! I thought, ‘Have we lost our minds. I need to be there!’

[outro music]

Matt: That’s all we’ve got time for in this episode. If you’d like to listen to Part 2 now, without ads, then do support us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There you can also listen to two bonus episodes: one on history and politics in Argentine football culture, and another in which Tomas talks to us about the memory of the Dirty War and armed struggle, as well as discussions from the time around protest violence, both exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. Otherwise, part 2 will be out for everyone in the next couple of weeks.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes. 

And if you can’t spare the cash, no worries. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

Also, if you’d like to read Tomas’ excellent book, Argentina: A Tale of Two Utopias, you can get yourself a copy in our online shop; link in the show notes, and as a listener to this podcast you can get 10% off using the discount code WCHPODCAST. We’ll also include a link to the webpage for this episode where you’ll find more information, including further reading, video, images, and sources.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. 

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Matt: Welcome back to our miniseries on the 2001 uprising in Argentina. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I’d suggest you go back and listen to that one first.

[intro music]

Matt: Before we start, a quick note to say that we’re only able to continue making these podcasts because of the support of our listeners on Patreon. If you like what we do and want to help us with our work, join us on patreon.com/workingclasshistory where you can get benefits like early access to ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted books, merch and more. For instance, Patreon supporters got early access to this episode without ads, and they also get exclusive access to our two Patreon-only podcast series, Radical Reads and Fireside Chat. Our Patreon supporters also get access to two exclusive bonus episodes in this miniseries with more information and context. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Matt: At the end of Part 1, Tomas had just woken up following a chaotic two-day ordeal trying to secure tickets for the final game of the Argentine football season in which his beloved team, Racing Club de Avellaneda, were on the cusp of winning their first championship for 35 years. What Tomas had not expected, however, was that when he awoke, his city would be the epicentre of a rebellion that would shake the country’s political system to its core.

At the same time, during our interview, Tomas also wanted to underline that while he was in Argentina both in the immediate lead up to and during the 2001 uprising, he was essentially quite isolated from the movement itself, having lived for so long outside of the country.

Tomas Rothaus: There’s nothing that would make me more uncomfortable than, in any way, shape or form, to give the impression that I had an organising hand in doing the hard work, the grassroots work of organising to prepare the conditions for that uprising.

I had this kind of unique perspective of a person who is Argentine, who is of the left, who kind of knows the structures, the people, the past and the battles but sometimes you miss the forest for the trees. I wasn’t in any organisation. I wasn’t in any sectarian battle because I hadn’t been putting in the work. I was, essentially, a home-grown tourist but who was very much willing to be like, ‘We need people? Yeah, sure, I’ll put on this mask and I’ll be right there.’ That’s how I experienced the uprising.

Matt: This isolation made things potentially quite dangerous.

Tomas Rothaus: This is, after all, South America and our cops do not mess around – I remember thinking… you don’t know where cops are or where demonstrators are. What parts of the city are in the control of whom? You’re completely alone. Again, cops in Argentina can and will kill you or beat you within an inch of your life for sport. I thought, ‘This is a little dangerous. What am I supposed to say? “No, I just showed up. I swear I haven’t done anything yet. Don’t hit me.” That was probably not the safest way to go about things.

Matt: That being the case, and this all happening before the hyper-connected days of social media, Tomas did the only thing he could think of to find out what was going on.

Tomas Rothaus: I had no better idea than to call the offices of the Communist Party of Argentina and because of all the money and influence of Moscow, they still had a few pretty significant physical infrastructure. They have a building near Villa Crespo or in Villa Crespo which has to be worth… I don’t know and I’m not a real estate agent but I would say that that place is worth $300,000 to half a million dollars easy. They had that infrastructure and they had a phone number. I thought, ‘I’m going to call. Maybe they have somebody there because they have an emergency meeting.’ 

So, in fact, I called them up. I don’t know who was more surprised; me because somebody answered the phone or the lady on the other end because somebody was calling The Party in the year 2001 asking for guidance. That was something that probably hadn’t happened since the 1950s [laughter]. After we got past the awkwardness of it, she did say, ‘Yeah, there’s an emergency demonstration called for tomorrow at Congress.’

Matt: Now, at Working Class History, we spend a lot of time talking about systemic or structural issues, social forces, etc etc. But in history, this often just produces the conditions that make one thing or the other possible (and which themselves only become obvious in hindsight). But the spark that makes these conditions explode into specific uprisings or revolts can often be pretty random. In this case, it was that the initial battles that Tomas was watching on TV took place on a Wednesday.

Tomas Rothaus: Again, it’s one of those things we’ll never know but if things would have died down definitively, I don’t think that the march of random leftists would have been enough to spark the uprising that we saw. Every Thursday morning, since the ‘70s, the mothers and grandmothers of those disappeared by the military dictatorship, they get together at Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace to draw attention to the disappearance of their children. 

Matt: These women are known as ‘The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’. As we mentioned in Part 1, approximately 30,000 people (predominantly trade union and left-wing activists) were disappeared by the dictatorship during the Dirty War of the 1970s and 80s. The ‘Mothers’ protests began in the late seventies, the women wearing white headscarves with the names of their disappeared children written on them. This was at huge risk to themselves, and some of the mothers were themselves subsequently disappeared as a result. Despite the return to democracy in 1983, pardon laws were passed, preventing the prosecution of many dictatorship officials responsible for torture, murder, and genocide. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo continued their protests to ensure that the issue of the disappeared would not be forgotten, and to demand that those responsible for the killings be punished. In 2001, these pardon laws were still in effect.

That their protest was taking place, once again, within the context of a state of emergency was hugely symbolic.

Tomas Rothaus: They basically walk in circles, I believe, at 10am or so. By 5am or 6am, things had died down and it was over but a few hours later, the mothers started congregating. As is usually the case and especially so given the context that day, they were joined by some organisers and militants of other organisations so there were some younger people with them as well. We’re talking about maybe a hundred people. It was small. 

For some reason, I guess, because strictly speaking, it was against the state of emergency but somebody who I’m going to say was not politically terribly intelligent… because if I was a political operative on the side of the government, I probably would have said, ‘Let them do their thing,’ but they ordered the mounted police to disperse them. This was broadcast live on all the TV channels or at least the news channels. It was definitely easy to find on live television. It was one of the last things that I saw as I left my apartment to head downtown. It was these sweet old ladies being whipped by men on horseback. The ideological fanatics like me probably don’t need too much prodding but I think many people saw that and said, ‘This regime, this government, this system is out of hand and we’re drawn to action from that.’ I think that mobilised a lot of people downtown and to the Plaza de Mayo and Congress area.

Matt: As Tomas says, it’s difficult to know how things would have played out differently if police hadn’t cracked down on this small demonstration. But these images of police attacking old women whose children had been disappeared by the dictatorship added an extra element of anger to things. This was no usual protest.

Tomas Rothaus: When I got to the Congress, which is where the left-wing demonstration was scheduled to begin from… left-wing demonstrations back then in Argentina weren’t exactly huge affairs. They weren’t terribly combative. Again, I say that as a person who obviously comes from a very, very combative line of anarchism. I remember, pretty quickly, looking around and thinking, ‘This is a very different vibe than what I’m used to in Buenos Aires.’ All around me were hooded faces, slingshots, bars. We haven’t come here to play kind of vibe. 

I remember we headed off in one direction, which I think is the more direct route, to Plaza de Mayo and were immediately met with a wave of tear gas and rubber bullets. We didn’t even make it out of the square that’s in front of the Congress. I don’t know if it was the collective hive mind or those more organised within the demonstration – some of the parties – but the decision was made to turn around and go in another direction. Incredibly, we met no resistance going in the other direction. 

Pretty soon – about 30 or 45 minutes – we were in the vicinity of the Plaza de Mayo and the presidential palace. Again, we were met with non-stop volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. I’m bad at spontaneously putting it into words but it was fighting the kind of which I hadn’t seen in a while. You could feel the anger and the fury. Barricades were being built, not just on the main street as we would advance towards the Plaza de Mayo but on the side streets to avoid us getting flanked by police on motorbikes or on horseback. 

It was metre by metre and it was this cocktail which I do believe was a kind of mix of social and political elements that gave the day its character and made it be what it ended up being. On the one hand, you had a couple of thousand, very politicised, left-wing and Peronist organisers and militants but you could clearly see people just streaming in who had seen it on TV or who were office workers. I remember seeing people in suits and ties who were clearly leaving their jobs or decided to not go to work – I don’t know – but they had not come downtown to participate in an insurrection. They had clearly come down town to go about their daily lives and something about what had happened made them say, ‘Today is the day. Today is not a normal day.’ Suddenly, they were wearing their dress shirts as balaclavas. You could feel that it was a very broad group and a very heterogeneous group of people. It was everywhere from Peronist militants, to left-wing aspiring revolutionaries, to office workers, to disgruntled people. You could tell that people had just lost their fear. It was a different animal to the kind of confrontation that I knew even from the kind of classic anti-globalisation era confrontations where you’re a mob of a couple of thousand anarchos. This was different. 

Matt: The anti-globalisation movement that Tomas mentions here was a movement at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s that saw major protests around the world against meetings held by various global trade and financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the World Bank. Some significant anti-globalisation protests were the 1999 Seattle WTO protest (when around 40,000 demonstrators shut down the talks while hundreds of black bloc anarchists smashed shops and luxury cars in the city centre), and the 2001 Genoa anti-G8 protest (when around 300,000 protesters attempted to blockade the meeting, leading to heavy clashes during which 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani was killed by police).

While this movement was limited in some ways (often restricted to spectacular protests around the meetings of institutions, rather than rooted in people’s everyday lives), in another sense, this movement was also quite incredible, essentially forcing the major institutions of global capitalism to give up on holding its meetings in major cities.

Tomas has actually also written a fascinating account of this movement called Another War Is Possible. We’ll be sure to get Tomas back on the podcast to talk about that book as well. But in the meantime, you can buy the book in our online shop. We’ll include a link on the webpage for this episode. Link in the show notes.

The clashes in Buenos Aires, however, were on a different level to those which took place during the anti-globalisation movement.

Tomas Rothaus: I can’t go through the chronology exactly off the top of my head but, at some point, we had either heard that they were shooting live ammunition as well as rubber bullets or we had already seen a body on the ground. Again, I lose track of which and how it came first but I distinctly remember that not that far into the confrontations, we had to take cover every time we saw a rifle or heard rifle fire because we no longer knew if what they were shooting were rubber bullets or live ammunition. My experience is not unique. It’s literally one that was replicated by thousands and thousands of people. One way or another, you could tell that people had had enough and that fear was not so much a factor anymore. I know that what I’m saying is a delusion. I know that now but I think many of us shared in the delusion in that moment that victory of some kind was literally 200 metres away; that we were going to overrun these cops and that we were going to storm the presidential palace. I feel stupid saying it out loud now.

In those moments, it felt like victory was right there. Speaking of the delusion, the Partido Obrero (the Workers’ Party), which is a Trotskyist party, was one of the largest ones back then and it’s one of the main players in the Trotskyist electoral front today. Their newspaper ran with the cover, a few days later or right around there, ‘The Revolution is Here.’ At least it served to me, as a consolation, that I wasn’t the only one who thought maybe something really incredible was happening here.

Matt: We’ll get onto some of the more longer lasting effects of the uprising later in this episode. But it’s worth remembering that, even if this was not the arrival of ‘The Revolution’, incredible things were happening right there in the middle of the revolt.

Tomas Rothaus: Indeed, at one point, we heard a cheer go up randomly and it was that the president had resigned. Not that much later, we heard a helicopter and it was, indeed, the president being evacuated from a rooftop helicopter at the presidential palace because the police considered it too dangerous to try to evacuate him by land. I witnessed and experienced some incredibly inspiring and beautiful things such as total strangers being in solidarity with each other and people who don’t know each other fighting for a common cause. I saw bars and bar owners opening their spaces and letting people sit there, giving them water and cleaning out their eyes. I remember, at one point, sitting on the doorstep to a building and chatting with some random… I’m going to say middle-aged lady but now that I’m also a little older, she was probably 40 but she seemed like a grandmother to me back then [laughter]. She was a schoolteacher. She wasn’t some wild radical and she had been looting. She was talking about how she had difficulty making ends meet. I forget the details but she told me her specific story of hardship of the time and how she had gotten some things to eat, some clothes and some things that she needed in the looting that happened. 

During these clashes downtown, there was also looting in the rearguard as well. I don’t want to stigmatise people but I remember seeing clearly football hooligans, Barra Brava-style, who has big tummy tattoos everywhere or the kind of guy that, if you’re in the wrong neighbourhood or wrong team, you’d think, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ They were going around merrily with sweets, this Argentine thing, alfajores, and just giving them to random strangers. I thought how it was illustrative of how even those most conditioned to have to fight and suffer for every little bit of material… not even comfort but of material needs, as soon as that scarcity disappeared, the dude was cutting cake with his keychain and giving it to people. It was those kinds of inspiring scenes. 

Matt: Given the severity of the clashes, however, it’s unsurprising that not all of Tomas’ memories were so inspiring.

Tomas Rothaus: Now, they literally existed almost side by side and that’s why I always say that hope and death, beauty and despair… in the case of revolutionary struggle, they tend to exist as two sides of a very, very fine line. They’re not on two distant opposite spectrums. I have those memories just as I have memories of a lifeless body on the ground and people crying, yelling and screaming desperately. That’s just the one that I saw and guys on motorbikes saying, ‘Be careful because there are civilian cars just randomly pulling up and shooting out of cars.’ Also, in those moments, you also don’t know because there are a lot of rumours. You don’t know what’s true or what’s not. A lot of it ended up being true. There’s literally something called the Massacre of the Plaza de Mayo and several people were killed. 

Matt: The Massacre of Plaza de Mayo were a series of police killings that took place on the afternoon of 20 December 2001 in the final hours of De La Rua’s presidency. With the government declaring a state of siege, uniformed and ununiformed police began firing live ammunition into the crowd, killing five.

Some of those killed were Gastón Rivas, a 31-year-old father of three; 27-year-old Diego Lamagna, one of Argentina’s top freestyle cyclists with no history of political activism; and Carlos Almirón, a 23-year-old activist in unemployed and anti-state repression groups.

Argentina’s most read newspaper, Clarín, described the massacre as “an almost unprecedented massacre in the already violent contemporary history of Argentina”.

Tomas Rothaus: Most people who were killed were killed at random and they were killed in these kinds of random situations around the confrontations. I make a big effort in the book to tell their stories, to tell how they died, and to talk about the people who were, many times, strangers who came to their aid and rescue. There’s one person who talks about how there were two people, who were shot and lay dying, and he had to make a brutal decision, the way you would in a war, of triaging them. There is a younger man who has this kind of injury and there is an older person who has this kind of injury. The older person might have kids but who knows how long he has to live. He ended up deciding to go for the younger one just because it’s a person who hasn’t had a chance at living that much of his or her life. 

There are some brutal and vicious scenes of death and suffering. I don’t want to minimise them because they co-existed with all of this narration that I just spoke of. It’s also a sign of what the state is or, in my opinion, what it is inherently and what it becomes explicitly when it sees itself seriously challenged. In this particular case, the repression took 39 lives and injured about 500 people. In 2014, the Secretary of National Security and the Head of Police, as well as approximately ten cops, were, in fact, sentenced for what was considered an illegal repression on that day. Seven others were found not guilty.

Matt: If the 2001 uprising in Argentina had only been a case of the courageous streetfighting and tragic police killings of December 20, then it would already have been an event of great historical importance. And yet, as spectacular as the streetfighting may have been, the more inspiring aspects of the uprising would occur afterwards, in the mass experiments of community and workplace democracy which followed.

Tomas Rothaus: Immediately after the uprising, there was this proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies which were, indeed, as they sound. They were grassroots, directly democratic and they were often held on some strategic street corner of the neighbourhood or in some social clubs sometimes… going back to the importance of the neighbourhood clubs and the gym of whatever social club. The agenda revolved around – ‘How do we fix this or that issue with utility on that street or the other?’ or ‘What families or areas are in need?’ There were these fairs or swap-meets where people could offer not just commodities but also services in exchange and say, ‘I need this. Do you need that?’ It was like mutual aid or solidarity. There was a lot of that.

Matt: In the weeks immediately following the December uprising, 20 assemblies sprang up around Buenos Aires. In the year or so that followed, this would rise to approximately 140 across Argentina involving around 8000 regular participants. These neighbourhood assemblies would also send delegates to weekly general meetings of neighbourhood assemblies known as interbarriales. 

As has been noted by many people, the neighbourhood assemblies were extremely heterogeneous, reflecting the various class, racial and political make ups of the neighbourhoods they were based in. But broadly, the assemblies all came together to discuss the country’s economic crisis, calling for things like the non-payment of Argentina’s external debt, more welfare and jobs, and an overhaul of the political system, which despite its democratic veneer, had been hollowed out by neoliberalism. Assemblies also produced their own journals and websites, organised cultural and political activities, and acted as a site where workers, students, unemployed piqueteros, pensioners, and others could meet, discuss their struggles, and organise solidarity with each other.

One assembly participant commented: 

People reject the political parties. To get out of this crisis requires real politics. These meetings of common people on the street are the fundamental form of doing politics.

Yet these experiments in grassroots direct democracy were just one aspect of what took place in the aftermath of the 2001 uprising.

Tomas Rothaus: What I think is more interesting, not to underplay the importance, significance or the value of the neighbourhood assemblies because they were very interesting experiments and an incredible phenomenon but there was also very much this… I don’t know if wave is the word but there was a significant amount of workplace and factory expropriations. Many places were closing and many owners were abandoning the workplaces or the factories. On a lot of occasions, instead of letting them shut down, the workers took them over and continued operations. Some of these were significant, large places like Zanon, which is a ceramics maker. It exists to this day. Zanon is today called FaSinPat which is short for Fabrica Sin Patrones which is Spanish for ‘Factory Without Bosses’. At one point, it for sure employed at least 400 people. If it’s self-managed, is employed even the word? I don’t know. There were 400 people who worked there.

Matt: We’re going to take a quick ad break now. If you’d like to listen to these episodes without ads, then join us on Patreon, where you can listen to all our episodes ad-free plus get access to our two, Patreon-only bonus episodes for this miniseries (as well as our two Patreon-only series: Radical Reads and Fireside Chat). These episodes are only made possible by our supporters on Patreon, so if you like what we do then join us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Link in the show notes.

[ad break]

Matt: The takeover of the Zanon ceramics factory was, in many ways, the forefather of the wider Argentine factory takeover movement in that period. Their struggle actually predated the uprising as the owner, Luis Zanon, despite receiving millions in corporate subsidies, still ran up huge debts and eventually declared the factory unprofitable. In response, workers took over the factory, arming themselves with slingshots and marbles to defend the site from police incursion (which they would go on to do six separate times, often with support of thousands from the local community). 

After taking control of the factory, workers had to go from just doing their own jobs, to running the entire factory themselves, which was a huge learning process. One worker, Julian, recounted:

we also had to learn a lot of new things which we had not done before… We have developed hidden capabilities which previous, if at all, we only showed in our families. This creativity is suppressed if a boss gives you orders all the time, demands more and more, but gives nothing back. Then you keep to yourself and think: “I will not give him more”. In this period all the creativity blossomed, the pleasure to do things and learn new things… When the company previously had asked you to do that you had said: “Nope, I do my job, the rest is your business. I am already oppressed enough, I will not take on more responsibility, only to be slammed by you even worse afterwards”. But this creativity emerged, we learnt a lot.

When the December uprising broke out, Zanon workers had already been in occupation for some months and, as Tomas mentioned, the factory (now renamed FaSinPat) still exists today as a cooperative. But the movement was far from limited to just Zanon. In reality, the uprising gave momentum to what would turn into a wave of factory takeovers.

Tomas Rothaus: There was the Hotel Bauen which was a relatively well-known, important hotel in downtown Buenos Aires with something like 130 workers. There was Brukman textile factory. There was a place that made chocolates. There’s much more that I’m forgetting. Many of these were not short-lived, couple of weeks or couple of month’s experiments. We’re talking years on end. We’re talking struggles to eventually obtain the legal expropriation of these properties which Zanon/FaSinPat did obtain.

In my opinion, and this is what makes this uprising so relevant, is that not only did thousands and thousands of people see what collective power can mean in practice, as far as on the streets and taking on a government, but thousands and thousands of workers also saw it and thought, ‘This talk from the left-wing crazies that we can actually run our places of work democratically and take decisions over our labour relations is not some fairytale fantasy.’ It’s an experience that now, in Argentina, thousands upon thousands of workers have had in their lives.

Matt: While it’s hard to get a precise idea of how many workplace takeovers there were at the time, estimates for the year following the December 2001 uprising range between somewhere around 100 to 150 workplaces put under workers’ control with the number of workers involved totalling many thousands. These collectivised workplaces came together under the banner of the National Movement of Recovered Enterprises, which still exists today and, in 2022, involved 400 workplaces and a total of around 15,000 workers. In many ways this is similar to what occurred during the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974-75, which is the subject of episodes 41-42 of this podcast.

These workplace takeovers and neighbourhood assemblies meant Argentina became something of a laboratory for anti-capitalist politics. These radical political forms were summed up in one of the famous images from the period with a banner holding the movement’s slogan: “They All Must Go!: Government of the Workers and the Neighbourhood Assemblies.”

But, as Tomas mentioned, they did not succeed in storming the presidential palace, and this government of workers and assemblies never came to pass. However, the uprising did usher in a new period of politics in Argentina, sometimes called ‘Kirchnerism’ in reference to the government of the left-Peronist, Nestor Kirchner, followed by that of his wife, Cristina, which lasted from 2003 to 2015. This period was a very contradictory one for Argentina’s working-class and social movements.

Tomas Rothaus: Between the uprising itself and between the loss of legitimacy of established power and established parties…between the neighbourhood assemblies, the workers’ self-management experiences… all of this put together… after the uprising and after capitalist, bourgeois power reconstituted itself, I think a lot of us had this feeling of: ‘We failed. It’s all nice and good but, clearly, we failed.’ But what took us a little longer to see and to identify… and maybe even to accept as something positive which, as my younger radical self, I didn’t see incremental advances, necessarily, as something positive. I would have only viewed them as escape valves for capitalism or things that make it possible for capitalism to continue existing. 

All this put together in Argentina, what it did was that it very, very clearly, dramatically pulled the Overton window of what was acceptable public discourse to the left. It’s what made possible the Kirchnerist government from 2003 forward. Back then, we had established this common sense consensus, basically, around social justice; that there needs to be a redistribution of wealth; the role of the military as something inherently negative and dangerous to society; that repression is something to be avoided. In most of society, there was a general consensus that this was a bad thing. The Kirchnerist era had a lot of things that I think would have been impossible without the process of the late ‘90s that culminated in 2001. 

Matt: One of these measures was the overturning of the laws pardoning crimes against humanity carried out by the dictatorship, opening the door to prosecutions of some former officials.

Tomas Rothaus: There was the legalisation of same-sex marriage. There was legislation passed to protect Indigenous languages and tongues in Argentina. Again, there was repression against an Indigenous nation. One thing does not eliminate the other, necessarily. There was an attack against the media monopolies by the government to try to break them up. If I had lived in Argentina, I would have been in opposition to that government. It is in the book that Kirchnerismo did actually incorporate large parts of the piquetero movement. Just as Peron saw that he needed to assimilate the trade union movement to guarantee governability in Argentina in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Kirchnerismo understood that, in terms of the unemployed workers’ organisations, they needed to assimilate them and make them part of their power structure if they were to solidify power. At one point in my research, I started trying to find out about what happened to a lot of the organised anarchists who were active in that period. In fact, some of them did end up being consumed by the left-of-centre or left-wing Kirchnerism. I hope it wouldn’t have been how my political activity ended but I feel like I’m not in a position to judge them.

People will get angry because they’ll point out the repressive laws passed by Kirchnerism. Obviously, it’s a centre-left government. It’s not an anarchist utopia. We do need to be clear, that not everything is the same. It’s not black and white. I think the fact that there was that space, obviously, had a lot to do with 2001. 

There were even things where, to bring us back a bit to football and soccer, people would say, ‘Bread and circus.’ Yeah, of course, but for example, we had something called Futbol para Todos (Soccer for Everybody) which was, basically, the government saying that soccer was an important part of the cultural identity of Argentines. It shouldn’t be behind a pay wall. There was no pay-per-view soccer for many years. It was free, for everybody. Of course, this serves the government. Of course, it’s bread and circus but if I forget those strategic things… in principle, am I against this for any reason? No, of course not. Why would I be against it? Culture should be accessible to everybody.

Matt: As Tomas explained, the Kirchenerist era was a paradoxical moment for the Argentine working class: on the one hand, it did see real improvements in ordinary people’s lives, such as around social welfare, healthcare provision, and pensions. But on the other hand, the period also saw incorporation of social and workers’ movement organisations into state bureaucracies, demobilising the very movements that won those improvements. 

This is actually a frequent problem the social movements come up against; that is, when movements become powerful, how do they resist the pitfalls of integration into the system they’re in conflict with? The socialist thinker, Leo Panitch, noted this tension in his essays on the integration of trade unions into national-level institutions deciding on economic policy: for Panitch, rather than bring class struggle into the heart of the state, this top-level institutionalisation served to consolidate power with union bureaucracies and away from the grassroots, and it pushed union leaderships to promote policies like wage restraint to members, and develop mechanisms for disciplining rank-and-file militants who opposed those policies.

Now, Panitch was writing about trade unions in 1960s Europe, particularly the UK and Sweden. But while it might not all apply to the experience of early 21st century Argentina, it does show that the tensions and contradictions of state integration are nothing new.

Tomas Rothaus: I think the grassroots and politically independent structures that grew out of it gradually withered away. A lot of it became institutionalised and was captured by the structures of traditional state infrastructure. A lot of it withered away as the material conditions for people improved. It’s always controversial, as an anarchist or a radical, to grant that systems which aren’t those that we want can provide material improvements but capital always recovers. It’s never enough to wound it. If you wound the interests of capital, they will come back, sooner or later… forgive the redundancy, like a wounded, violent beast. 

I think that’s a big part of the difficulty of the opponent we face in that when capital is wounded – and by wounded I mean pushed back and concessions are forced from it to limit how much wealth it can concentrate, how much wealth it can extract from workers, what conditions it can impose on the masses of society etcetera – it will bide its time but, sooner or later, it will come roaring back in one form or another because that is the inherent nature of it. I think, regardless of the specifics of the Argentine situation, that’s the broader ideological answer to what happened. We were able to keep it at bay for a while and extract concessions from it but, sooner or later, it reconstitutes itself.

Matt: Gradually, Argentina’s period of relatively left-leaning redistributive policies gave way, leading to the present-day crackpot politics of current president, Javier Milei. Milei describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist”, a term originating in the 1970s despite the fact that anarchism, dating back to the 19th century, has its roots in the anti-state wing of the socialist movement with anarchists being instrumental in the formation of some of the world’s first labour unions (including in Argentina, where for many years, the most significant union was the explicitly anarchist FORA). By contrast, the only thing ‘anti-state’ in Milei’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” is its desire to cut state support for social provision; at the same time, Milei’s supposed ‘anti-state’ position doesn’t preclude a closeness to figures and families of the old authoritarian dictatorship.

Aside from the scandals involving his sister (including accusations of corruption, though he has also previously had to publicly deny having sexual relations with her), Milei’s neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ approach to the economy has led to a collapse in living standards: poverty rose to almost 53% in the first year of his presidency, an increase of over 10%.

In the midst of all this, Argentina’s social movements continue to mobilise. Within this movement, Tomas, now back in Buenos Aires, works as part of a project that fuses sports with radical politics called La Cultura del Barrio (which translates to ‘The Culture of the Neighborhood’ in English).

Tomas Rothaus: La Cultura del Barrio, the sporting and social club in Buenos Aires which is exactly an example of – ‘I want to stay active. I want to continue to show that there is an alternative and a different way of living, existing and interacting with one another and of being in solidarity with one another.’ I think there is an incredible value in that, in the middle of Buenos Aires, Villa Crespo is very heterogeneous in that regard. I think it goes from working class, to lower middle class, to middle class. It’s a very central, historic Buenos Aires neighbourhood. It’s where the anarchist library is and it’s literally a kilometre away. Atlanta’s stadium is literally four blocks away. It’s a space that is open to anybody and that, unlike most spaces of the anarchist or anti-authoritarian ghetto, it isn’t just, in theory, open to everybody; it’s, in practice, open to the neighbourhood. It literally has hundreds of dues-paying members who understand though that nobody will ever be turned away because of lack of funds and who this as a space where they can do all sorts of cultural and sporting activities from concerts, to debates, to yoga classes, to boxing. You go there on Monday nights and there is a group of people playing bagpipes in one of the rooms. It really is the neighbourhood having a space where it’s not just us giving a speech and saying, ‘You know you can live differently. You know there can be spaces that are outside of the logic of capital and commodification where you have to spend money.’ It’s in practice. You can go there, you can do things and you can meet with your neighbours. 

Obviously, it doesn’t exist for free and that’s why we do fundraisers. We do a million things but if you don’t have money, nobody is going to turn you away from the door. If you want to come here and hang out today, there’s no expectation of you to spend any money. At the same time, it’s an explicitly, overtly political space. It looks like any of your self-managed, autonomous centres in Germany or Europe. There are Antifa flags everywhere. There is political graffiti. You can’t walk in and out of there and not, at the very least, by osmosis, take a little something from that. Again, I think in times where there isn’t a mass popular struggle… of course, there are struggles and we’re involved in them but we have to be fair and realistic as to how broad they are and how much power they have. In times when we don’t have that, these structures are incredibly important because they’ll be the organising bases when things turn around. We won’t have to start from zero. We won’t have to reinvent the wheel. We won’t have to conquer physical space. We won’t have to find a way to implant ourselves in a neighbourhood. We’ve already been there and we’ve been there for over a decade.

Matt: If you want to learn more about La Cultura del Barrio, we’ll include some photos and links about the club on the webpage for this episode. Link in the show notes.

One thing that kept coming up in our discussion with Tomas was how similar the present day situation in Argentina feels to the years that preceded the uprising: the pursuit of a neoliberal agenda, tying its economy to the US dollar, a greatly diminished left etc etc. Yet, through all of that, Argentina’s working class were able to rise up and bring about real substantive change to people’s lives.

Also, in case you were wondering what happened to Racing Club de Avellaneda: after risking his life for those match tickets, Tomas managed to go to the final game of the season. The result was a 1-1 draw, which meant that Racing (a club which only two years previously was declared to have ceased to exist) won the Argentine league for the first time in 35 years. The newspaper, Clarín, ran the headline: “El día del gran sueño” – “The day of the great dream.”

In football, as in politics, 2001 was a year in which great dreams became reality in Argentina.

Tomas Rothaus: I gave the talks post-2001 in the US about this and I do remember that I would tear up when talking about certain aspects. I think a lot, on 20 December, this feeling of anything being possible. That’s why the book is called A Tale of Two Utopias. Utopia is, almost by definition, something which you aspire to but don’t believe to be achievable or realistic. Suddenly, it felt like it was within a few hundred metres, half an hour, an hour. I understand it was potentially a delusion or was a delusion but to have lived it, whether it be for a few minutes, a few hours, is an incredible thing. 

I’ve always been a big fan of the explicitly anarchist mobilisation or riot. I come from that culture. I feel comfortable. I feel safer there. I feel like there’s less chance of infiltration. But this was obviously different. This wasn’t just a few hundred, very ideological, committed, political young people running around. This was a cross-section of society and that was different and impacted me. Most of all, what I took from it and I think it’s what cemented my anarchism for life. But I don’t know if, without the Argentine uprising, I would have had the political trajectory that I had for the rest of my life because it gave me this idea, or this knowledge, that no matter what you’re going through, no matter what we, as a society, are going through, no matter how bleak the perspectives, apparently, anything is possible at any moment. I don’t need to be told that anything is possible at any point or that so-called ordinary people are capable of extraordinary feats and bravery. I didn’t read it in a book. I lived it. I experienced it. I saw people in suits and ties face down and chase off literal armed murderers in broad daylight in the streets. I’m a very international person and this could have happened anywhere in the world but it did happen to be on the streets that I walked most in my life, so it was even nearer to me. 

To use a cliché, I saw that popular power can make a president flee on a helicopter from a presidential palace. It’s the kind of thing that I read about in the Spanish Civil War or the October Revolution but I saw them with my own eyes in full colour. I think all of that, to me, was a very vivid illustration and it’s the reason (one of many reasons) why I wanted to write this book. It illustrates what happens to the human spirit immediately when scarcity and competition are removed from the equation. Even amongst those most brutally conditioned by the worst material conditions of capitalism, suddenly, the driving force was solidarity. It was mutual aid. It was the beautiful things of the human spirit, not to sound too idealistic. If I’m still an anarchist despite the horrors around us, it’s because that gave me the notion that, apparently, there can and should be hope in any darkness. I think that’s something that’s very useful in times like these.

[outro music]

Matt: That’s it for the main episodes in our miniseries on the 2001 uprising in Argentina. If you want to hear more from Tomas, we’ve produced two special bonus episodes as part of this series: one on the history and politics of Argentine football culture, and a second one where Tomas discusses various topics, like the memory of the Dirty War and armed struggle, as well as discussions around protest violence around the time of the uprising, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes. 

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Also, if you’d like to read Tomas’ excellent book, Argentina: A Tale of Two Utopias, you can get yourself a copy in our online shop; link in the show notes. And as a listener to this podcast you can get 10% off using the discount code WCHPODCAST. 

We’ll also include a link to the webpage for this episode where you’ll find more information, including further reading, video, images, and sources.

Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. 

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

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