Neighborhood assemblies: Notes as working hypotheses

Abstract

After the events of December 19 and 20, neighborhood assemblies emerged in response to the need to sustain over time a form of struggle whose main referent was the cacerolazos. This form of organization synthesizes a new instance of articulation of popular sectors that tends to overflow the traditional channels of politics, questioning the representative democracy of the bourgeois State. Repeated attempts at co-optation by certain left groups and threats or repression by Justicialist Party gangs and police forces did not diminish their collective practices of horizontality in the neighborhoods. The hypotheses put forward try to explain why, suggesting that the assemblies reflect the strengths rather than the weaknesses of the mass insubordination experienced in Argentina.