Acto político de recordar: conjugando el pasado en el presente de las luchas obreras en Bella Unión, Uruguay

Resumo

In 2015, the leaders of the popular movement of the sugar cane cutters of Bella Unión (Uruguay) were trying to enunciate their own collective autonomy by recovering certain ‘indexes’ of an enigmatic past. This article theorizes such evocations of the past by exploring their possible convergences with the premises of a non-historicist Marxism that is widely identified with the thought of Walter Benjamin. Based on the dialogues and observations carried out in the context of an ethnographic investigation among the militancy of the Unión de Trabajadores Azucareros de Artigas, this work suggests that certain processes of political antagonism find their decisive impulse in what should be called ‘political act of remembrance’, which consists of postulating a relationship of contemporaneity and determination between chronologically separated events. This kind of act allows its protagonists to move from the predictable time of resignation to the experimental time of political action.