Beyond Co-optation and Autonomy: the Experience of Two Argentinean Social Organizations in the Face of the Left Turn

Abstract

This article analyzes the path of two urban social organizations in Argentina over more than ten years, in relation to their strategies, the state and governments. These are the Frente Popular Darío Santillán (FPDS), which combines an autonomist ideological matrix with Marxist features, and the Movimiento Evita (ME), which has a national-popular matrix and adheres to Peronism. Both organizations have origins “from below”, in the slums on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, and then grew to become large organizations with a presence in several provinces of the country. But in 2003 when Néstor Kirchner assumed the presidency, Argentina experienced a ‘left turn’ (Levitsky and Roberts 2011). The government began to involve social movements in its administration, and the ‘dilemma’ of whether or not social movements should be part of governments became pertinent again (Munck, 1995). ME quickly joined the Kirchnerist governments, which remained in power until 2015, and placed activists in civil service positions, while the FPDS opposed Kirchnerism and stayed out of management positions. This article explains, based on a longitudinal study of the two organizations, how they changed their strategies, to what extent their involvement in the state changed and how they maintained or did not maintain their autonomy from the government. The findings of this research show that the organizations studied managed to avoid both encapsulation in their own demands and co-optation by the state, because they encouraged the participation of their activists in the internal life of the organizations and because they forged a strong identity among their members.