Redistribution, suffering, and wellbeing: moral economies of collective politics and the constitution of subjectivities in Argentina's urban peripheries

Abstract

This article analyzes social redistribution processes in Argentina as collective, affective, and ethical disputes through which suffering and forms of wellbeing are managed, establishing specific types of subjectivities. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of moral economies, this study examines how popular movements shape local criteria of justice and dignity to contest the social surplus and respond to state assistance obligations within the field of contention inaugurated by the return to democracy in 1983. Methodologically, it is based on a ethnographic approach that retrieves fieldwork conducted with the unemployed workers' movement in La Matanza, Greater Buenos Aires (2001–2006), and with the Organización Barrial Tupac Amaru in San Salvador de Jujuy (2014–2018). The findings reveal that, in contexts of extreme crisis and material deprivation, the unemployed movement articulated affective commitments around the suffering body, prioritizing the agentic capacity to "get by" (arreglárselas). Conversely, the Tupac Amaru deployed a deliberate project to construct a virtuous and active subject on a large scale, utilizing languages of citizenship to challenge local power relations and reconfigure class, ethnic, and sexual alignments through strict collective regulations over behaviors and bodies. Finally, the article reflects on how the current political-economic agenda of market radicalization in Argentina seeks to break this historical framework of negotiation and containment, resorting to logics of coercion, criminalization, and penal stigmatization of popular organizations.