ILPC 2026

This paper presents results from my doctoral research on practices of militancy and collective organisation of life in popular economy experiences in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, Argentina[1]. My work is part of a broader research project focused on the ethnographic study of the practices of collective organization that "popular sectors" carry out to ensure the production and reproduction of life, considering their relationship with varied modes of domination and government[2].

In this paper, I will focus on the ethnographic fieldwork carried out together with activists and workers of a cooperative formed by garment workers located in a municipality in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires. The process of organisation of this cooperative took place in a popular neighbourhood created by a recent land occupation. A high percentage of migrant workers from Bolivia and Paraguay whose main occupation is the manufacturing of garment in their own homes reside in this neighbourhood.

The creation of this cooperative was driven by a movement that belongs to the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy (CTEP), a union representing workers usually defined as "informal" or "precarious": garment workers, waste pickers, street vendors, among others. In this sense, the cooperative was formed as part of the construction of a union organisation that sought to generate decent work conditions and "rights" for garment workers. In Argentina, the garment manufacturing sector has been a paradigmatic case of the proliferation of illegal, informal or even servile forms of labour in recent decades (Gago, 2014). Numerous studies pointed out that since the 90s a process of "outsourcing" of production was triggered (D'Ovidio, et al, 2007; Aduriz, 2009; Lieutier, 2010; Salgado, 2015). This entailed the transfer of the manufacturing towards informal workshops with extremely precarious working conditions and numerous cases of  human trafficking for labour exploitation have been found in workshops popularly known as "clandestine".

My research revealed that the construction of this cooperative and the union organisation of which it forms a part leaned on family relationships, migratory networks, and solidarity relationships built during the land occupation that gave birth to the neighbourhood. These relationships constituted a capital resource for the garment industry value chains, and also became the condition of possibility for the development of a collective project for the production of "rights". This paper draws on a series of recent studies that analysed the way in which the capitalist restructuring has generated a "multiplication of the proletariat" (Denning, 2011; Carbonella and Kasmir, 2015) and proposed to reflect on their implications for the forms of labour organizing. I contend that the development of this particular form of union organisation among garment workers has politicised a comprehensive set of living conditions in urban contexts from which these workers experienced capital accumulation in everyday life thus articulating militancy, productive work, and the development of collective forms of reproduction of life such as care and the struggle for urban space.