Organizational solidarity in practice in Bolivia and Argentina: Building coalitions of resistance and creativity

Vieta, Marcelo; Heras, Ana Inés
Organization Journal

This article considers organizational solidarity in practice—modes of organizing rooted in solidarity, relationality, coalition-building, and difference. It does so by studying two Latin American illustrative cases: Bolivia’s campesino-indígena movements coalescing traditional practices and urban-neighborhood experiences in order to self-organize socio-political spaces; and Argentina’s worker-led empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises), where workers have been drawing on working-class self-activity to convert companies to cooperatives and self-manage spaces of production. Via a diverse economies approach, the article begins to inventory, describe, and provisionally theorize the recuperations, rearticulations, and creative proposals for organizing social, cultural, and economic life being forged by these diverse groups. The article ultimately unravels four broad commonalities threading and shaping each case: the neoliberal political economic context, collective memory, horizontal organizing, and coalitional possibilities. Though emerging in different national conjunctures and histories, what these two cases bring to the surface are the resistive and creative dimensions of each organizing experience. They are rooted in deeply relational coalitions linked via solidarity in difference, while drawing on collective memories of the past to recreate and reenvision the present and the future beyond the legacies of colonial histories and capitalist-centered actualities.

Suggested citation

Vieta, M. & Heras, A.I. (2022). Organizational solidarity in practice in Bolivia and Argentina: Building coalitions of resistance and creativity.  Organization (29) 2, 271-294. See link at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13505084211066813