Building from heterogeneity: the decomposition and recomposition of the working class viewed from the “popular economy” in Argentina

Abstract

In this statement, I draw on the results of ongoing ethnographical research in Argentina with cooperatives of street vendors that are part of the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP), an organization formed in 2011. The CTEP defines itself as a trade union whose aim is to represent the heterogeneous universe of wageless workers engaged in a diversity of socio-economic activities. These activities include, for example, waste-pickers, subcontracted textile workers, street vendors, farmers, artisans and car-keepers, and state-driven cooperative workers who perform tasks of maintenance of urban public infrastructure (squares, streets, and sidewalks) self-construction and maintenance of housing and other cooperatives derived from initially self-managed processes. It is a population, where very dissimilar trajectories, experiences, and characteristics prevail. I examine the efforts made by the CTEP to forge a unity from this diversity by using the notion of “popular economy” and how this notion came to be constructed as a political claim category that collectively encompasses heterogeneous work experiences and trajectories. Taking this idea as the starting point, I will discuss the way in which the process of political organization that the CTEP embodies can contribute to anthropological debates about the notion of class in the contemporary capitalism. I contend that this organization develops a process of collective construction that makes this heterogeneity a strength and a subject in its own right, rather than a means to the end of transforming workers in the popular economy to fully waged workers.