Working-class, political organization and popular economy in Argentina

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the political processes carried out by the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), a trade union formed recently in Argentina with the aim of representing the heterogeneous universe of wageless workers engaged in a diversity of socio-economic activities: those who are usually considered as part of the “informal” market (like waste-pickers or street vendors) and those who develop unpaid care tasks (like soup kitchens or collective childcare). Based on the ethnographic work carried out with organizations that make up UTEP, I discuss the way in which this process of political organization can contribute to current anthropological debates on the notion of labor in contemporary capitalism in two associated directions. On the one hand, this process underlines the importance of going beyond an analysis focused on wage relations to include the multiplicity and heterogeneity of forms of labor including not only unwaged but also non-commodified relations, practices, and spaces that are not considered as work. On the other hand, it shows the importance of an ethnographic approach to precarity based on the notion of class as a productive category for the analysis of processes of collective organization around varied ways of making a living.