Genocide in the Neighborhood

Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. They have participated in numerous grassroots coresearch activities with unemployed workers, peasant movements, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Their other works appear in translation in 19 and 20: Notes for a New Insurrection and Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thought, Practices, Actions, both published by Common Notions.Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Other writing or translation projects include Face Down (Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, 2013) and the translation of Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Actions, Practices (Common Notions, 2019). He is an editor at Displaced Press and has been investigating new political and artistic movements in Latin American and autonomist political theory for the past twenty years.

“This is a book born in the barricades, neighborhood assemblies, and factory occupations of Argentina’s 2001 uprising against neoliberalism. Written by movement participants, it’s an inspiring account of the rebellion and a grassroots model of how to research and theorize a movement that forged a new way of doing politics from below. The English translation of such a classic book that’s been passed around revolutionary circles for decades is a cause for celebration and hitting the streets!”—Benjamin Dangl, author of The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia“If the insurrection in Argentina that began in December 2001 was our Paris Commune, then Colectivo Situaciones fits well in the position of Karl Marx. As Friedrich Engels was fond of saying, one of Marx’s many talents was to analyze the historical importance of political events as they took place. This book by Colectivo Situaciones, written in the heat of action, certainly demonstrates that same talent in full, delving into the complexity of concrete events while simultaneously stepping back to recognize how our political reality has changed.”—Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire, Multitude, and Assembly “This book composes the fragments of a global discourse, finding in the experience of the Argentinean struggle a style of inquiry that emerges directly from the organization of the struggle.”—Antonio Negri, coauthor of Empire, Multitude, and Assembly“Assemblies may become thinking machines. And experiments of resistance may give rise to alternative experiences of sociability. Colectivo Situaciones develops out of these findings, that emerged within the 2001 resurrection in Argentina, a powerful reflexive research: a truly magnificent effort to explore the potentialities of a future beyond capitalism.”—Stavros Stavrides, author of Towards the City of Thresholds“Twenty years ago, Argentina erupted in blockades and assemblies, occupations, demonstrations, and communal kitchens. In both its circumstances and forms, the 2001 uprising presaged the protests of 2011 and the struggles of our time. Colectivo Situaciones’ 19 & 20 provided both the sharpest analysis of that moment and a model of theoretical practice: nimble, dialogical, embedded in the movements with whom it thought, made in common. To rediscover it today is to do more than reconnect with the recent past; it is inevitably also to ask how it illuminates what we have lived since, and how we can continue to extend its lessons into the future.”—Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization“A long decade before Occupy Wall Street, Argentineans poured into the streets to reject austerity and short the circuits of neoliberal capitalism, proving that state violence was no match for popular refusal. But this is not a book about Argentina or even Latin America as a whole, a brutal laboratory where neoliberalism was imposed in blood and fire. It's about a way of thinking that is also a doing, about what the concrete experience of rebellion teaches us about how the world moves, and how to turn that movement into thought. Find yourself in this book.”—Geo Maher, author of Building the Commune and A World Without Police The 2001 uprising in Argentina is a major flashpoint in a wave of popular struggles that repudiated the neoliberal capitalist order and authored new forms of non-capitalist social construction. Colectivo Situaciones gives us important analyses of the uprising and its legacies, the roots of Argentina’s financial and political crisis, and changes in contemporary forms of anticapitalist mobilization and resistance. Their close attention to grassroots practices of resistance, political organizing, and world-making is emblematic of their method of militant research, which itself has been an inspiration to so many. Those interested in contemporary social movements, political theory, and the history of Argentina and the region will find much to appreciate in this wonderful new edition.—Jennifer S. Ponce de León, author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War

• Preface and Introduction by Brian WhitenerThe Escraches of HIJOS: Reasons & MotivesThe Escraches: 9 Hypotheses for DiscussionColectivo Situaciones in Conversation with HIJOSA Text for the Escrache of Weber (a document of HIJOS)Twelve Hypotheses / Questions Concerning the EscrachesColectivo Situaciones in Conversation with the Mesa de Escrache PopularIf There Is No Justice, There is Escrache: Concerning the discussion with the Mesa de Escrache Popular