On Saturday, January 23rd I attended the first stop in the Ontario-wing of the “Workers Without Bosses“ speaking tour, held in Kitchener-Waterloo. The stop was organized by a local Common Cause member with help from the good folks at Anti-War at Laurier (AWOL) and the KW Community Centre for Social Justice (KWCCSJ).

These are the same people who take much of the credit for building a vibrant activist community in the past few years. From Six Nations solidarity work to anti-Olympics organizing to the opening of the Centre for Social Justice, these hard-working people have made K-W a regional centre of anti-authoritarian, direct action based organizing.

Earlier in the day, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the speaker, Sebastian, a militant with the Argentina-based social anarchist group, Red Libertaria (Libertarian Network). Sebastian is a student of radical Argentinian history and we talked about the anarchist workers movement in early 20th century Argentina, an era where anarchist-socialism dominated the worker's movement.

Some of this material is covered in the recently published book, "Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Mass Anarchism and Syndicalism"written by two members of the South African anarcho-communist organization, Zabalaza and a must read for all anarchists. It turns out Sebastian collaborated with the authors on the Latin American section of the two-volume work.

We also talked about the current situation in Argentina and what has happened to the social movements there since the 2001 economic crisis and social explosion. This was also the subject of Sebastian's talk later that night, in front of a packed house of 40 or so people.

I won't go over his talk in detail. For that you'll have to attend one of the remaining tour stops or tune in on here once we have an audio recording up. But to summarize, the presentation began with a brief history of neoliberal economic policies in Argentina, and the reasons behind the 2001 economic collapse. From here, most of the talk provided an overview of the three main social movements involved in the social uprising: the unemployed workers movement, the factory occupations movement, and the neighbourhood assemblies. If you've seen the documentary "The Take", you'll appreciate how Sebastian brings the story up to date as well as the details added that we don't hear in the film.

For example, the talk makes clear that the social uprising was not as spontaneous as is made to be seen in "The Take". The unemployed workers movement, known as the "piqueteros" for blockading major transportation routes, had been organizing before the uprising. Also, behind the most militant factory occupations, including the Zanon occupation, lay years of patient organizing and struggle, often involving the various radical left groups. In short, while there certainly was a lot of spontaneity to the 2001 uprising, especially among the neighbourhood assemblies, some of the groundwork had been laid in advance.

The picture that emerges 9 years after the uprising is decidedly mixed. With few exceptions, the neighbourhood assemblies have disappeared. But some of them morphed into social centres or neighbourhood cooperatives and many of the participants became radicalised and have swelled the numbers of the radical left, including the anarchist groups. Red Libertaria itself is a product of the uprising's aftermath.

The unemployed workers movement won employment insurance but in the process much of it has been captured by political parties, with a few still clinging to autonomy.

Hundreds of occupied factories remain in the hands of workers, successfully producing with drastic improvements in working conditions. Some factories double as cultural and social spaces: places of work by day, community centres in the evenings. But all struggle to survive in what remains a capitalist economy where competition can turn workers' control into self-managed exploitation. And some bosses have figured out a way to create "fake" cooperatives taking advantage of state subsidies and new legislation.

In short, the Argentinian ruling class and their allies have managed to recover control. They've done this with difficulty using a mixture of repression and cooptation, meeting some of the movements' demands in return for their moderation and bureaucratization. That they were able to stabilize the economy was also central to their ability to regain control.

According to Sebastian, this outcome is due in large part to a major weakness of the 2001 uprising. The movements that emerged knew what they were against: neoliberal capitalism. But they did not have an alternative nor an idea of how to go about building it. For example, Sebastian recounts how his neighbourhood assembly voted to nationalize the banks, without any idea of what this would look like or the power to make it happen.

As for the anarchists, like the rest of the radical left, they lacked the organizational and political unity to pursue a common strategy inside the movements. In one struggle, two groups of anarchists even found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict within the local unemployed workers movement. Division is even worse among other political tendencies.

It is hard not to see the similarities here with more recent uprisings such as the Greek revolt of 2008-2009. And we can see the same thing happening today in Ontario and North America. While there is more anger today towards capitalism and the ruling classes than there has been in decades, no alternative has even begun to capture the popular imagination. And the libertarian, anti-capitalist left is in no position to propose and start really building towards an alternative. I hope that, like last night, those who come to see Sebastian talk will use the time to reflect on the lessons offered by the struggle in Argentina, and will continue the discussion long after Sebastian has rejoined his fellow anarchists in Buenos Aires.