Verónica Gago is a professor for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, and she is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Her research focuses on international social movements, especially feminism and the critique of neoliberal reason.
She is a prominent member of the feminist movement Ni una menos and was part of the militant research group Situaciones. She is author of the books Controversia. Una lengua en el exilio (Biblioteca Nacional, 2012), La razón neoliberal. Economías barrocas y pragmática popular (Tinta Limón, 2014, Traficantes de Sueños, 2015) and La potencia feminista – o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Tinta Limón, 2019), among others. Gago is also a member of the publishing house Tinta Limón Ediciones and writes regularly in various media outlets, especially in Latin America.
One of the most interesting things that we are bearing witness to in Latin America, from the outside, and as described in your book, is that the feminist movement in Latin America and Argentina have pushed the question of the economy and debt into the movement, and, broadly, into common spaces. This is not something happening worldwide despite the economic crisis, and certainly not in our own context where economy is not presented in an approachable way. While activists understand the economic crisis, they do not know how to use it for wider mobilization. I am curious how this developed in Argentina, and how it became almost a daily agenda and a driving force of the movement?
First, I would say that there is a tradition in Argentina of criticism of external debt, and external debt is completely connected to the dictatorship of the 1970s. The beginning of the foreign debt is the beginning of the dictatorship. It was actually the very political project of that time, and both go hand in hand. This, seems to me, to be the departing point.
Now, in its time, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were the ones who protested against the foreign debt imposed by the IMF and other international organizations. They actually named the process “financial terrorism.” For us, this historicity of the movement is very important because they even had a banner saying “against financial terrorism.” Thus, there is an organic relation there with us; to see the connection of repression, violation of human rights and economy, that is not always obvious. And that is a first knot in the genealogy that is very important. In this, the Mothers were so brilliant to make that connection with transnational capital and financialization, inflation as well as living in debt.
The decade of the 80s was marked by democratic transition in all of Latin America but particularly by creating the foreign debt. From the US, what comes in the form of conditioning to democracy, is the demand for economic transition, that is, for creation of debt. The limits of democracy are conditioned by foreign debt, specifically by IMF.
To summarize then. First, we have had a dictatorship, then we had a democratic transition with foreign debt where political militancy such as the Mothers or others have called attention to the connection between transition and debt.
I think that feminism is the third moment in that it connects the foreign debt with the debt of the everydayness. It is feminism here that says “fine, who pays for that external debt?”. It is women who pay for that. Why? Because budget cuts in public and social services mean more work for us. This is where the #niunamenos collective has a significance because it does research into the presence of the external debt into everyday life. Luci Cavallero and I started working on this research but soon what followed were also public actions. For example, the protests we did in 2017 was actually in front of the National Bank of Argentina. From then on, we begin with the real political work on these issues with many workshops, public actions, meetings to try to think together how does foreign debt influence the everyday life: what kind of debt were women required to take on? What kind of discipline does the debt exhort in order to subject women? We also thought in the ways in which the feminist strike could contribute to the interruption of these processes, and that allowed us to ask the question of who are the female workers today? The ones who do not have salaries. And we saw that the condition of debt is the condition of proletariat because the majority of women in debt are the ones who do not have salaries but receive social subsidies.
This is also connected to the period from the 90s and what we called “bankarization of social subsidies” of the country when banks were working on the “financial inclusion” of the poorest populations by forging the debt in terms of the use of the accounts, in accordance with the State. What we saw, of course, instead of inclusion, is the formation of the new debtors and exploitation. So, how do they do it? Every time there is a reduction in the subsidy, and the gap between the social subsidy and inflation grows, the bank either starts with the debt or uses the State’s guarantee to maintain the debt. This is all happening at the moment Argentina reentering IMF in 2018.
All of this brings us to the feminist capacity to translate those political and economic moments into the slogans on the streets. What is interesting is that those slogans were picked up by unions, political organizations, and political parties. And that was the work of feminism – to put the connection, research, and slogans together. Really, the largest protests in Argentine history were in 2022, the Pride, and the slogan was “the debt is with us (nosotres).”1 It is rare that the largest protest be Pride and with that slogan! It also meant to connect the economic autonomy with the question of violence. We asked then “what are these violences that surround women?” Without economic autonomy there is no base to discuss the violence.
All of this, for me, was an interesting process because it succeeds in connecting the present political conjecture (the foreign debt) and the everyday life of women and queers. Finally, the other interesting thing is that the question of debt has turned into the index of poverty. Before it was measured only by income, and now we also have the debt. Unless this connection between income and debt is made, we have no way of understanding of what kind of poverty we are talking about. It was opening of these questions and being really careful it does not end up being only an analytic discourse. We wanted to create out of the capacity to mobilize.
Great. This really brings me to the second question. When one reads your book, one gets a sense that it is not only theoretical but that it addresses the present, happening right now, in the streets, and also in homes. So, how did book continue to live after its publication? What is happening now with it? How is it used further to empower women and mobilize action?
The book was published here in Argentina and different places, in Spanish in 2019, before the pandemic. It was translated to English in 2020. So, there is no pandemic in the book. What I am trying to do with Luci is to address the question of the pandemic in a small book, pamphlet, The House as a Laboratory, finances, living costs, essential work. We have worked with the feminist assembly from a Villa 31 and with a union of renters. The focus we wanted to research was what do finances, living costs, and essential work mean during a pandemic. And also, how a feminist movement had created a language and public actions in order to think through what was happening during the pandemic. What is also interesting from a feminist perspective, how pandemic stopped all the processes we have put into play. It came, and we all went back to our houses, stretched with domestic work to our limits. Without having a conspiracy theory, but something like a counter-revolution happened with the pandemic. It was a negative contingency that affected all the mobilizations and transformations that were already happening since 2017. Now, the crucial thing, even during the pandemic, was to maintain the struggle for abortion, specifically in 2020. And it is amazing we succeeded in December of 2020. The first thing they said, when pandemic broke out, was to get rid of the demand for the abortion in the parliament: other priorities, we cannot discuss it now…And the victory was incredible! Impressive. The first demonstrations during the pandemic…it was amazing!
Since 2022 to present day, we were just discussing March 8th demonstrations, and we agreed that this is the first year when we are capable of going back to the organizing, discussing, and working together but with the greater complexity: pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate change.
The complexity you are mentioning actually brings us to a simple and yet a necessary question. We always get different answers here, and that’s why we ask it: what is feminist solidarity for you?
(Laughing) For me, it is the experience of the international feminist movement in the last few years. I think that the movement restarted an idea of an international solidarity that I would define as a sharing of a political process, or, the ways in which we all have become part of the same political process. I think that this fact brings another layer of connection and closeness. It is also a challenging. In the last several years, for me, the main challenge has been how to combine the massively large movement and its radicality? It goes in different rhythms and moments of rising, and different places, but there is something about the possibility to think togetherness and trying to identify how certain problems and agendas influence each other or other contexts, and how they create a common plane and codes which allow us to interpret different realities that are unknown to us. This is the key, for me. We saw that with the question of abortion because it was also an international success. Everyone else in the world seems to have sensed the joy and happiness when it got approved in Argentina. That kind of affectivity is the key part to solidarity. When you see a photo or see a video, and you can understand what is happening in the other place on the planet. And you can share the joy. And finally, the big part of solidarity is to activate a thought that we are part of the movement. It does not happen all the time, we are experimenting with this. Perhaps it is time to recirculate the word revolution again, even as a dispute.
Interview by: Đurđa Trajković and Galina Maksimović
Translation from Spanish to English: Đurđa Trajković
1 Nosotres is a gender neutral term for “we”.
