E. IV.2.b. People Power and Direct Democracy in Economic Crisis 2001-2003

The breakdown of the Argentine economy at the end of 2001 prompted a surge of public anger among all sections of the population against the government’s previous policy of selling off public services to multinationals and cutting social services. There were mass demonstrations, repeated a year later and targeting the stock exchange and other financial institutions, and the ‘piqueteros’, jobless workers who threw up road blocks, dramatised the general suffering. But the most remarkable aspect of the popular response was the formation of street-level assemblies that organised the local economy and exchange of goods and services, taking over abandoned property, running communal kitchens, health and education centres and cultural activities. Jobless workers took over and ran around 200 empty factories, in some of which worker control has lasted beyond the return to electoral politics in 2003. Although the Argentinian rebellion and resistance to IMF demands can be seen as part of the world-wide anti-globalisation movement of that period, it was in essence a national response.