The Survival of Words: Revolution and Class Struggle

Abstract

How did Kirchnerismo, initially a motley coalition of progressive Peronists and born-again Menemistas and Duhaldistas trying to scrape together some form of governability from the 2001 default, turn into one of the ‘pink tide’ governments most virulently hated by the Right? Why did long-forgotten concepts and terminologies from the epic past of revolutionary struggle suddenly resurface in the context of what, at least from the viewpoint of the autonomist Left, was hardly more than a mildly redistributive administration of scarcity, aided by the post-millennial commodity boom? In this intervention, historian Javier Trímboli urges us to take seriously some of the discursive anachronisms that flourished during Néstor and Cristina Kirchner’s periods in office (2003–2015), which, he suggests, rather than merely a form of discursive cover for clientelist politics, may have been symptomatic of the way in which some of the foundational fault-lines of modern Argentine society continue to shape political identities, styles and forms of struggle in the present.