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19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism 19 & 20 Notes for a New Social Protagonism Colectivo Situaciones Translated by Nate Holdren and Sebastián Touza 19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism Colectivo Situaciones ISBN 987-96651-4-7 Translated by Nate Holdren and Sebastián Touza Afterword translated by Anna-Maeve Holloway Edited by Jay Blair, Malav Kanuga, and Stevphen Shukaitis Interior Design by Margaret Killjoy Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Original title: 19 y 20: Apuntes para el nuevo protagonismo social Spanish language edition printed in Argentina in April 2002. Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / New York / Port Watson www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Co-published with Common Notions, Brooklyn, NY. www.thisisforever.org | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The politics of the quotations and interventions in this book are not innocent: through them, we have involved friends and com- pañeros, for whose thought and generosity we are thankful. Against our will, all the people who write here must be absolved of any re- sponsibility other than being authors of the lines they sign. We would like to thank very specially María Pía López and Guillermo Korn, who devoted themselves to reading, revising, criticizing, and expanding the manuscripts of this work. To Florencia Lance for supervising, as al- ways, every step of Ediciones De Mano en Mano. To Carlos “Cucho” Fernández, who nurtures and animates, with his aesthetic thinking and graphic art all the publications of this collective and to Lucía Scrimini for her longstanding collaboration and support, and to Diego Ortolani for his lucid presence. To the comrades of Colectivo Situaciones whose constant work make possible and valorize these initiatives. We also would like to note the circumstantial absence of Marcelo Matellanes who, nonetheless, is present here with his ideas. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR ENGLISH EDITION This translation and publication was a labor of love through- out. There are many people without whom this would have never occurred, more than can be easily thanked. The editors and transla- tors offer our thanks to all our compañeros who have supported us. We thank the Colectivo Situaciones. We give particular thanks to the Institute for Anarchist Studies for the initial funding of the transla- tion. The intellectual interest and encouragement was equally impor- tant. Thanks to Jon Beasley-Murray for his comments. And thanks to the Micropolitics Research Group from Goldsmiths for organiz- ing the “Studies in Transversality I: Militant Research” gathering with Colectivo Situaciones in London (held October 12-16, 2009. Many comrades from the Aut-Op-Sy discussion list and the Notas Rojas col- lective contributed to this project in indirect but nonetheless mean- ingful ways. We thank as well Massimo De Angelis and everyone in- volved in the Commoner (www.commoner.org.uk), ephemera (www. ephemeraweb.org), Richard Day, Mark Coté, Greig de Peuter, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Charles Weigl, the Free Association, and the Turbulence collective. The translators wish to thank Malav Kanuga for his input and sup- port and to give particular Stevphen Shukaitis for his encouragement, his engagement and work, and for patience. We are especially grateful to our partners Cecilia and Angelica. This project would not have hap- pened if not for them, and this is only a tiny piece of what they have VI | Colectivo Situaciones given us and for which we are endlessly grateful. We also wish to thank our children Matilda and Kit, born during the life of this project; we look forward to someday discussing these ideas with you. CONTENTS Translator’s Preface . 1 Preface . 15. The Ballad of Buenos Aires . 19. Introduction . 23. The Great Transformation . 31 . From the Market as Utopia to Biopower . 32 The New Social Protagonism: An Ethical Operation . 36 December 19th and 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection . 43 Insurrection Without a Subject . 43 Words and Silences: From Interpretation to the Unrepresentable. 46 Rupture of the Chain of Terror . 49 De-instituent Insurrection . 51 Problems and Challenges . 53 The Positive “No” . 62 Irreversibility . 67 Insurrectional Violence . 70 In the Streets . 73 Situational Thought in Market Conditions . 83. Thought And Consciousness . 83 Knowing and Thinking. 87 Questions of Visibility. 89 Multiplicity and Counterpower in the Piquetero Experience . 95 . The Roadblock as Precedent1 . 95 The Conjuncture and the Options of Thought . 97 Representation . 100 The Inclusion of the Excluded … As Excluded . 103 Piqueteros as a Political Illusion . .106 From Multiplicity to Counterpower . 107 Thinking the Radicality of Struggle . 108 The Case of the MTDs (Unemployed Workers’ Movement) . 110 Identity as Creation. .113 The 19Th and 20Th . .114 Looting, Social Bond, and the Ethic of the Teacher- Militant . 127 . Liberation and Dependency? . 127 Looting . 129 At School . 134 Expression and Representation . 145 Another Logic: Expression . .145 That Obscure Object of Desire . 151 A Paradoxical Situation: The Negation Of Representation From Representation . 152 Shortcuts . 158 Neighborhood Assemblies . 165 . From 19Th and 20Th to the Assembly . .165 The Neighborhood as Space of Subjectification. .167 Political Desperation . 170 Being There. .173 Assemblies and Piquetes . 175 Memory and Nation . 177 The Diffuse Network: From Dispersion to Multiplicity . 187 Consensus and Hegemony . 188 The Neoliberal Revolution. .191 Explicit Network and Disconnection (The Barter Club) . .193 The Norm and the Ethic of Self-Affirmed Marginalization. .194 From Dispersion to Multiplicity . 198 Diffuse Network . 201 Situational Knowledges (The Escraches) . .204 Counterpower. .207 Epilogue . 215 . Appendix 1: On the Barter Club . 217 . Appendix 2: Causes and Happenstance: Dilemmas of Argentina’s New Social Protagonism 225 The Surprise (Rupture, De-institution and Visibility) . 227 Phenomenology of an Apparent Reconstruction . .230 The Ballot Boxes and the Streets . 235 Phenomenology of Counterpower. .238 Appendix 3: That December . Two Years From the 19th and 20th . 245 Afterword: Disquiet In the Impasse . 251 TRANSLator’S PREFACE By Nate Holdren & Sebastian Touza Four Spanish words became part of the universal language of rebellion after a multitude of Argentineans occupied the streets the eve- ning of December 19th 2001: ¡Que se vayan todos! All of them out! The words were thrown at every politician, functionary, economist, journal- ist and at nobody in particular, by thousands of people banging pots and pans and chanting in response to a state of siege declared by the government. The following day, after three dozen had died in street fights with the police, president Fernando de la Rúa resigned. The pe- riod opened by the revolt was of intense social creativity. Hundreds of popular assemblies were created across the country. The unemployed workers movement, whose force had been growing since 1996, ac- quired a new visibility. Many factories and businesses that had gone bankrupt were taken by their workers and began to run under their control. Several of these initiatives came together forming circuits of trade based in solidarity principles helping to provide the necessaries of life for the millions who had been marginalized from an economy crippled by its servile obedience of the dictates of IMF inspectors. The event cut a threshold in history, a before and an after for Argentina that would find a wave of resonances around the world. The revolt surprised analysts, always ready to judge the new with reference to their old interpretive grids. But for many of its protago- nists, it had long been foretold. Argentina had been one of the testing 2 | Colectivo Situaciones grounds for neoliberalism since 1975, shortly before a dictatorship, ini- tially commanded by General Jorge Videla, institutionalized the repres- sion of revolutionary activism, while launching a package of economic reforms that began undoing the labor rights and welfare state policies that had been the result of decades of workers’ struggles. Over 30,000 people were tortured, murdered or disappeared by the regime. After eight years of dictatorship electoral democracy finally returned in 1983. The repression and the military’s large-scale process of so- cial engineering had been successful in demobilizing the population. Neoliberal reforms could now be imposed by consensus. In the 1990s, president Carlos Menem and his finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, in alliance with the labor bureaucracy, undertook sweeping structural adjustment reforms, privatizing nearly every state-run company at ev- ery level of government, deregulating labor and finance markets, peg- ging the peso to the dollar, and leaving nearly forty percent of the popu- lation unemployed or underemployed. During the Menem era, a new generation of activists and new forms of protest slowly emerged. H.I.J.O.S., the organization of the children of the disappeared, came about in 1995 and introduced the practice of escraches creative forms of collective action denouncing the unpunished torturers of their often-revolutionary parents and preserving their mem- ory. In 1996, unemployed workers began to protest blocking roads. Their multiple movements, known as piqueteros, spread throughout the country very quickly. All the attempts of the Peronist government to co-opt the movement proved unsuccessful. To find alternatives to the recession, barter clubs
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