Building from heterogeneity: the decomposition and recomposition of the working class viewed from the ?popular economy? in Argentina

MARÍA INÉS FERNÁNDEZ ALAVREZ

Dialectical Anthropology

Springer Netherlands

Año: 2020 p. 57 - 57

0304-4092

n this statement, I draw on the results of ongoing ethnographical research in Argentina with cooperatives of street vendors that are part of the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP), an organization formed in 2011. The CTEP defines itself as a trade union whose aim is to represent the heterogeneous universe of wageless workers engaged in a diversity of socio-economic activities. These activities include, for example, waste-pickers, subcontracted textile workers, street vendors, farmers, artisans and car-keepers, and state-driven cooperative workers who perform tasks of maintenance of urban public infrastructure (squares, streets, and sidewalks) self-construction and maintenance of housing and other cooperatives derived from initially self-managed processes. It is a population, where very dissimilar trajectories, experiences, and characteristics prevail. I examine the efforts made by the CTEP to forge a unity from this diversity by using the notion of ?popular economy