Democracia y trabajo en los movimientos populares: Apuntes para una sociología de conceptos fundamentales

Abstract

I start by taking the paths opened by Reinhart Koselleck for conceptual history. When a concept is used, a set of long-term experiences stored and synthesized in the semantic layers formed in various historical experiences is mobilized. The theoretical proposal that I develop here suggests that, in addition to an internal temporal structure, the concepts contain a sociological weave that must be investigated. Indeed, a fundamental concept would be empty of the social world if the ways in which collectives take form –ways that have been recorded, amalgamated and produced in multiple spaces of experience– does not get analyzed. I analyze two popular movements of major importance in recent Argentine history: the land occupation movements and the unemployed movements. For each case, I choose a basic concept in dispute with institutionalized politics. They are democracy and work, respectively. The first one leads me to visualize semantic strata rarely used in transition studies and to reflect on democratic strata from the point of view of the sociological heterogeneity that charges the concept as an index and factor of the sociopolitical experience. The second one takes me to the study of subjective work at the level of people in general and of social leadership. The change in the fundamental concept as the axis of popular struggles (from the period of transition to the period of neoliberalism, from democracy to work) highlights the battle that is being waged for inclusion and that it unfolds in the conceptual field.