Interview Ana

Cecilia Dinerstein

The name of this project – The Art of Organising Hope – refers to the
subtitle of a book by the Buenos Aires born Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (The
Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope).
In it, she explored how alternative practices and discourses were
successfully developed at a time of hope in Latin America. We visited
Ana Cecilia in Bristol – she works as a Professor of Sociology, at the
British University of Bath – to discuss the book and our plans.

The Art of Organising Hope

“Hope is not just the ability to fantasise, but
a tool for taking alternative realities serious-
ly so that they might actually become possible.
With hope, we can make concrete preparations
for alternative ways of organising our societ-
ies – alternatives that are already awaiting in
the present, but which are simply not thought
possible yet. We cannot abandon hope, because
our capacity to dream and aspire collectively
is our only way to make a truly better world.
But hope is something we must learn. The art
of organising hope is this process of learning
hope and rejecting discourses based on sacri-
fice, pain, danger, fear and uncertainty. There
are unexpected moments in history when gov-
erning by fear reaches a cul-de-sac. At such
breaking points, often marked by economic, fi-
nancial or political crisis, fear can give way to
hope.”
“The Argentinean Piqueteros are a great case
of hope against fear. I worked with this move-
ment of unemployed workers (the Movimiento
de Trabajadores Desocupados, MTDs) that
emerged in the mid-nineties at a time of harsh
neo-liberal reforms. They became celebrated
for their courage, resistance, community action
and influence on labour policy. My PhD (1997-
2001), which analysed 100 years of crisis and
resistance in 21st century Argentina, ended
with a chapter on their roadblocks and how this
new form of action put physical and symbolic
limits to the power of abstract money-capital.
This was a time of financial speculation and
privatisation, when factories were closing. Peo-
ple were becoming unemployed, poorer. When
“Hope is not wish
or fantasy, but an
invitation to work
together, to develop
alternatives.”
the financial crisis of 2001 hit the country, it
was clear that the IMF played a significant
part, with seven million people becoming poor
in one year time. Some towns just withered
away, because the main source of income, the
oil company, closed its doors. The Piqueteros
fought back by blocking the roads in each lo-
cality. They changed the rules of the game.
They offered a concrete utopian alternative
that reshaped the relationship between in-
dividuals, society, the rule of money, value
and the state. In my research, I tried to un-
derstand how the lack of a job did not mean
that the subordination of life to money-capi-
tal was ended, because the unemployed still
needed money for their social reproduction.
In a situation of unemployment, there is an
intensification of the subordination of life
to the rule of money and not the other way
around. The unemployed become an unre-
alised labour subjectivity that is abandoned
by capital. This idea of ‘the lack’ is in tune
with Ernst Bloch’s notion of the ‘not yet’. The
subject cannot realize herself as a person be-
cause she is ‘unemployed’, because the system
of money classifies her as excluded. But in re-
ality she is not excluded from anywhere, is
she?”
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 Shauni De Gussem – Athens, Greece
Social reproduction
and its crisis
“We are in the midst of a possibly terminal
crisis of capitalism. In theory, capital always
goes back to labour, because value is created
by labour power, but in practice the develop-
ment of financial capitalism – which is in no
way a deviation from ‘normal capitalism’ but
its new form – has become detached from its
own bases. It is now a volcano about to burst.
Millions of people are suffering and strug-
gling for water, for food, for a home. In Latin
America, the crisis of capitalism is referred
to as a ‘crisis of civilization’. Here, in Europe,
and despite our difficulties, we are still a priv-
ileged minority.”
“The identity of the working class is re-
lated to those who have a job, who work for a
wage and are ‘exploited’ at work. Some time
ago, Marxist Feminism and Autonomia Op-
eraia in Italy brought about a debate on
unpaid work and social reproduction. Marxist
feminists keep questioning Marxism, asking:
how do we theorise the social reproduction
moment and gender in capitalism? How do
we understand women’s struggle within this
framework? We are broadening the notion
of social reproduction. It’s not just about re-
producing life by procreation, and the role of
women in it and at home but it is about all the
institutions that exist in society that sustain
life: schools, education, health care, housing,
culture…”
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Magazine_Ontwerp.indd 5
“The focus on production prevents us from
understanding that many of the struggles
that people face today, concerning housing,
energy, food, land, education, climate, are al-
so labour struggles and class struggles. Why?
We can’t consider production without social
reproduction. If you look at the world in a pro-
ductivist way, Marxism does not work today.
Lots of unemployment. But: production is just
one aspect of the totality. The analysis should
not start with ‘work’ but with the question:
why do we work? Where do we start the anal-
ysis? Why would a worker work hard if she
doesn’t need to? She works because there is
something prior to that, which is disposses-
sion. It’s an ongoing process. The wage we get
has to be high enough in order for us to repro-
duce ourselves, but not so high that we would
not go back to work. Otherwise capitalism
would not work! We go to work in exchange
of a salary because we are dispossessed and
need money to survive. So dispossession (the
conditions to force people to work) is first?
In fact it is production-social reproduction.
There is no beginning or end to this process.”
“Now we are experiencing a process of a
proliferation of different forms of work and la-
bour: people are working, but they are also
taking care of their children, partners, family
members. Men and women help their friends
building houses. In a text I wrote with co-au-
thor Frederick Harry Pitts I called this ‘the
politics of social reproduction’. So what is the
25/10/18 16:25
 ‘working class’? Who is the ‘working class’?
We can’t forget that it is the state that needs
to provide social reproduction. Of course, in
most West-European countries the state does
this, but in other places around the world,
where the welfare state is missing or is weak
or where there is only fragmented World
Bank policy, this welfare is not solid. Neo-lib-
eralism has caused the state to abandon
social reproduction, and as a result of this
many people struggle to survive and struggle
to combine work with realizing other parts
of their identity. For instance, homeless peo-
in
is book
ple fall out of the scope of the trade unions.
litics of A man or woman with no home cannot go to
the words work everyday normally. So who will repre-
tern women.
d multiple sent the homeless? I think the answer is that
eing they are part of the working class, without its
le sites
identity, but they do not have a job and have
alysis and not solved the problem of social reproduction.
ctices
ses Maybe they have started to represent them-
a new selves, in the same way the Piqueteros have
publisher’s
done in Argentina.”
Class Consciousness
“We can see that class consciousness is still
an important issue, but we must emphasise
the social reproduction side of class resis-
tance! The struggles for social reproduction
and the class conflicts they bring about are
part of The Art of Organising Hope. We are
trying to find alternative forms of social re-
production to challenge money and value as a
form of society. Since capital has become very
abstract with financialisation, it is never clear
who is the real enemy. It’s difficult to visual-
ize and to conceive of. But our struggles with,
against and beyond capital are mediated by
the state. Margaret Thatcher introduced 14
pieces of legislation to regulate labour in the
1980s. Nowadays, to go on strike in Britain,
a trade union needs to show an employer that
it has organised a ballot and obtained 50 per-
cent of the vote of union members in favour
of the strike. Also, the employer needs to be
notified 15 days in advance. Needless to say,
it’s almost impossible to organise a general
“It is impossible
to measure the
alternatives by
mainstream standards,
because the people who
create alternatives are
altering the way we
measure success.”
Magazine_Ontwerp.indd 6
strike in the UK. Workers are not paid when
they are on strike. This is not the case in Ar-
gentina or Brazil, where teachers can go on
strike for months. This shows that despite the
fact that neo-liberalism is a global phenome-
non, the nation state, the law and money all
shape our resistances differently.”
Self-government & Autonomy
“The civil societies in Latin America used to
be much more mobilised than in Europe. The
level of welfare provision is lower and repres-
sion is higher. Journalists and union leaders
in Colombia and Nicaragua are literally mur-
dered. In Mexico, women are under constant
lethal attack. In Argentina, there is a reviv-
al of authoritarianism under a democratic
regime, and in Brazil right wing politics are
disastrous. Now that European governments
become increasingly oppressive, now that
the welfare state is under attack and the far
right grow bigger, people in Europe are start-
ing to organise themselves too, engaging in
autonomous principles. The strong Anarchist
and autonomous tradition in both regions is
re-emerging. In my work, I don’t adhere to the
idea that autonomous movements can be ‘out-
side’. Autonomy does not really exist. What
does exist is the principle, the search for, the
struggle for autonomy, and this is always
mediated by the state, this happens ‘with-
in’ capitalist society and not ‘outside’ it. The
state must produce order and will always try
to incorporate autonomous movements. In ad-
dition to this, we need to be careful to give an
account of different autonomous experiences
that already exist, we must decolonise auton-
omy. For example, the autonomous experience
of indigenous communities is crucially differ-
ent from our own experience. When we talk
about ‘creating’ new institutions, we need to
bring coloniality to the discussion, because
practices exist that have worked well for
them, but that have been oppressed and side-
lined for 500 years. Not everything needs to
be ‘new’, some things can be rediscovered and
re-imagined.”
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Sam David – Pristina, Albania
“Despite the fact
that neo-liberalism is
a global phenomenon,
the nation state, the
law and money all
shape our resistances
differently.”
Bloch and Time
“The state will always try to incorporate our
resistances and alternatives in one way or
another. It will try to ‘translate’ them into
policy. But we must focus on producing what
I call excess. Because beyond the contradic-
tions and the disappointments, there are
alternative practices, care, love, poetry, art,
solidarity, that cannot be translated into the
logic of power. Bloch came into it because his
work helped me to establish a connection be-
tween movements, collective actions, social
reproduction and hope. Bloch’s philosophy
can be used to understand social movements
in the global south too.
The whole idea of the ‘not yet’ is beyond
the European culture. For example, Bloch
has been the inspiration behind Liberation
Theology: a new form of understating religion
by Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru and Leonardo
Boff of Brazil. Bloch inspired these priests to
think that the realm of god was here, on earth,
so ‘hope’ is not religious but political and can
lead to liberation. One of the important things
that I like about Ernst Bloch’s philosophy,
and also Walter Benjamin’s, is the way they
treat and alter the notion of time. In judg-
ing an alternative, people often ask: ‘What
did you achieve?’ Well, maybe this question
5
Magazine_Ontwerp.indd 7
is wrong. We don’t have to think in terms of
cause - effect. We are doing something that
has a bearing. It might be changing the way
we think, relate, love, care, live, perform…
It is impossible to measure the alternatives
by mainstream standards, precisely because
people who create alternatives are altering
the way we measure success, at the same
time as they are organising the alternative.
TAOH is already a success in the here and
now. So we would need other measuring tools
to appreciate the power of our actions, differ-
ent from the mainstream and from power.
In this, I like how Bloch refers to ‘non-con-
temporaneity’ and ‘non-synchronicity’. Bloch
states: ‘Not everybody is living on the same
time’. Brexit is probably a good example of
this. Some people are living in a completely
different time than their neighbours or col-
leagues. This notion of non-synchronicity is
important for politics: those creating another
way of living and reproducing life are inhab-
iting (habitando) a different time; a slower,
more creative and more caring time than
the speedy, isolated, individualistic modern
time.”
Imagination
& Concrete Utopias
“The word imagination has been trivialized. ‘I
have a lot of imagination’ or ‘to let our imagi-
nation go’... These expressions are often used
as empty signifiers. Again, I would like to
come back to the notion of the ‘not yet’, be-
cause it opens a space from where to imagine.
I want to change things in life that are not
working, but we must start rejecting empty
words and lies. For example, when some-
one gives a talk about reducing poverty by
2050, we need to learn how to say: ‘I’m sorry,
I don’t know what you are talking about, this
is abstract thinking and talking. How is this
going to happen without you tackling the
conditions that create poverty?’ We are not
creating castles in the air. They are. We are
real. Many people are putting their imagi-
nation at work on concrete things. They try
to build concrete better worlds for now and
not for tomorrow. These are concrete utopias.
This includes indigenous communities who
speak about radical hope, and are inviting us
to imagine how our world could be different,
better and more just.”
“The terms creativity and imagination
don’t necessarily suit everybody. Think of
indigenous communities and their wisdom,
centuries of using their oppressed cosmovi-
sion based on a particular understanding of
25/10/18 16:25
 their land, their plants and trees, their an-
cestors. Their imagination is different. It is
not Eurocentric. We need to learn from each
other. Hope is not a automatic and static
emotion, we can mobilize it, but we need to
learn it too.
“Many social movements involved in the
politics of social reproduction are rejecting
the politics of austerity, and the beginning of
the end of the politics of fear. Austerity pol-
itics, after all, depends on fear. It relies on
worries about the future to justify swingeing
cuts and sacrifices in the present. Creating a
sense of hopelessness is a very efficient way
to quickly implement irreversible structural
economic changes, even if they degrade liv-
ing standards, worsen working conditions,
and generally spread fear and unhappiness.
The market ideology and the discursive
‘retreat’ of the state -key elements of neo-lib-
eralism- are in crisis, and it seems that the
powerful shot themselves in the foot, they
went too far, leaving millions of people un-
protected and adrift.”
The ‘other’ Critical Theory:
Negation and Affirmation
“When we try to organise ‘hope’, we must think
of alternative forms of social reproduction out-
side the world of money. On the other hand, we
need it. But the problem is that money is not
just a means of exchange as gold was before,
a convention. It is the most abstract represen-
tation of the power of capital and therefore the
form in which we reproduce ourselves as soci-
ety. There is a real contradiction here, one that
people are struggling with. In order to repro-
duce ourselves we need money, but in order to
reproduce ourselves we must destroy money
as command over human life. The art of or-
ganising hope is the art of navigating this
contradiction in the best way we can and get
new practices and organisations out of it, it is
about being able to affirm and preserve life
(including animal life and nature).
“In the book Social Sciences for An Other
Politics: Women Theorising without Para-
chutes, written with 11 other female writers,
we have formulated a deep critique of the
notion of negation that overwhelms critical
theory today and confuses affirmation with
positive thinking that accepts the reality of
today’s world. Sara Motta has a chapter in the
book where she criticises Slavoj Žižek as the
male and white ‘prophet of the negation’ that
operates as a subordinator of other voices, and
subordinates other forms of critique that seem
not to count as philosophy! Instead of this neg-
Magazine_Ontwerp.indd 8
ative, white, male, rational critique, she offers
the critique of the female storytellers. It’s by
telling stories that we weave communities.
Our book Women Theorising without Para-
chutes is an invitation to discover that there
are other forms of critique. We must say NO!,
but what happens next? Many critical theo-
rists today, like Adorno, fear positivisation.
So they want to keep negation going, but this
is difficult after the moment of saying NO! be-
cause once we say no, it comes the moment of
affirmation: we must create, anticipate, orga-
nise hope as an affirmation. My point is that
affirmation is a form of negation. For example:
if I am forced into the role of an indigenous
person, treated as ignorant and poor, I say:
‘No, enough is enough!’ But then immediate-
ly I say: ‘I am Ana Cecilia, I am a Zapatista, I
am from Chiapas, I cover my face to be seen,
I am silent to be heard, here I am,’ affirm-
ing my life as a human being since power
has never treated me like that. So affirma-
tion is a tool to negates the oppression and
classification that power enforces on you. Of
course, we should not positivize this identity
to the point that it is naturalised and stops
being an identity of resistance, an identity of
struggle. It is an affirmation that contains
in itself a negation. I think that without this
distinction between affirmation and positiv-
isation, critical theory becomes too abstract
and not related to everyday life. Then it is not
really a critique because it will not take our
humanity and the conditions in which it ex-
ists seriously into consideration. According to
Ernst Bloch, unmasking the political econo-
my is not enough. This is why I am working
on a critical theory of hope. Like Boaventura
de Sousa Santos writes: ‘It’s about discov-
ering what is out there’. What knowledges
exist in the mountains, the fields, the villag-
es, the highlands, the jungles, the cities, the
farms. There is nothing wrong with Europe-
an thinking. It is rich, it is interesting… But
we do need to recognize that other voices have
not been heard, that a line was traced and an
abyss was created between European modern
thinking and the rest.”
Hope Movements
“I co-authored an article with my colleague
Séverine Deneulin, titled ‘hope movements’.
It is about how social mobilizations are now
devoted to contesting development and cre-
ating alternative economic arrangements
conducive to the pursuit of a dignified life.
They don’t just criticize the current state
of affairs, but they actively seek and expe-
6
25/10/18 16:25
 rience new ways of living, inspired by what
Bloch calls the anticipatory consciousness of
the ‘not-yet’ or the not yet conscious. So, we
are talking here about another reality that
lurks in the present but has not yet materi-
alized, but which can already be experienced
because the world is open, because humanity
must be conceived as unfinished possibility.
In our article, we considered that the term ‘so-
cial movements’ was not completely adequate
to capture these mobilizations. We proposed
to name them ‘hope movements’ to inform the
collective actions directed to anticipate alter-
native realities that arise from the openness
of the present one.”
Hope as an Invitation
“There are lots of clever, inspiring, responsible
people in this world that are engaged in the
art of organising hope. Hope here is not a wish
or a fantasy, but an invitation to work togeth-
er, to develop alternatives, going through the
contradictions and confronting oppressions/
repressions that will come from power. This
can start with saying: ‘I don’t want to lose
any more time accepting this or that lie’. At
a time of policy failures, it’s the policy makers
and the policy scholars who have to explain to
me what are they doing to save humanity, be-
cause we need to create new narratives and
7 Naomi Ryckewaert – Surroundings of Shkodra (Shkodër), Albania
Magazine_Ontwerp.indd 9
practices as a matter of life or death. People
are noticing that we live in a wrong society,
and perhaps they are ready for change, even if
they are unsure as how to think about this or
how to act. And honestly, we also need more
publically revered intellectuals to inspire us.
Because we cannot expect new ideas from pol-
iticians anymore - and even if they do have
some ideas, they will be always tied up to a
traditional political party. We must continue
mapping out the alternatives that are emerg-
ing at the grassroots, without forgetting that
we must use certain criteria that indicates in
what ways these alternatives are really over-
coming the problem.”
“And why art? Well… in the old times,
art was never about aesthetics, it was about
surviving. And it still is. Art in the sense of
finding creative ways to explore our poten-
tial, art in the sense of devising strategies,
art as life. Without art, there can’t be life. I
am really proud that you are using the idea
of The Art of Organising Hope to bring peo-
ple together from all over Europe, to engage
in the global politics of hope.”
This interview is an edited
summary of the original
interview by Victoria Deluxe,
4th September 2018, Bristol (UK)
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