ABSTRACT
Dedicated entirely to our Argentina case study and the research findings, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first section covers the period 1989–2000, incorporating the literature and Latinobarómetro data analysis. It argues that the incremental nature of pauperization, relatively stable macroeconomic environment and dominant discourses which atomized and individualized one’s personal financial circumstances meant that impoverishment was experienced more in isolation. The result was a tendency to seek self-help solutions to their circumstances and principally private ones at that. While labor and social protests were regular, the involvement of the struggling middle class tended to be organized “from above” and “formally,” principally via white-collar trade unions or the representative organizations of small businesses.
The second part is based upon an examination of World Bank and Latinobarómetro survey data and covers the period 2001–02. The generative factors that explain why citizens mobilized to join the revolt and how questions of a growing collective identity, grievance forming and the loss of hegemonic consent to rule by the dominant class contributed to this tendency. How changes in citizens’ attitudes and subjectivities induced a shift in the tendency from “self-blame under Menemismo” in the 1990s to “system attribution” for their circumstances in 2001–02 helps to explain how hegemonic control crumbled are described, such that the neoliberal economic and liberal democratic order faced a severe challenge from the bourgeoning multisectoral protest movement in 2001. Within the struggling middle class, we then examine which biographical characteristics help explain the tendency for some citizens to join protest movements, while others desist from doing so.
