Colectivo Situaciones – författare

In 2001 a mass popular uprising overthrew the neoliberal government in Argentina: thousands upon thousands of people, both in organizations and on their own, took to the streets, defying the government's curfew, shouting 'they all must go' until the president was forced to flee by helicopter. The uprising, a response to years of economic and political crisis, cannot be understood without understanding the broader ecology of movements and what Colectivo Situaciones defined as 'new social protagonists': the unemployed blockading highways, neighborhood residents coming together in assemblies, vast segments of the country surviving through alternative currencies and barter networks. This work, translated into English for the first time, brings together the conversations and theorizations of two key participants in that environment: militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Movement of Unemployed Workers of Solano. The encounter and writing in common constituted a formidable experience for all those who participated, bringing to life a novel form of relation between thinking and doing, subject and object of research and political action.

The federal government created a monster. They said it would keep us safe. The monster hatched in November 2002. It was named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An appetite for control and conquest was in its DNA. Its early influences, in the years after 9/11, were paranoia and vengeance. The DHS is the only new department the United States has spawned in this century. With its birth, issues that were previously seen as separate—immigration control, policing, and counter-terrorism—were brought into a single, sprawling entity. Twenty-two preexisting agencies were absorbed into what became the nation’s third largest government department. Today it has a budget of over $100 billion and employs a quarter of a million people. Every danger is now conceived of as a threat to “homeland security,” and as the 9/11 Commission said in 2003, “the American homeland is the planet.”

In an uprising heard around the world, people in Argentina took to the streets on December 19th & 20th, 2001, shouting ';Que se vayan todos!' These words (All of them out!), and the thousands of people banging pots and pans, opened a period of intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse of government after government. Neighborhoods organized themselves into hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, the unemployed workers movement acquired a new visibility, workers took over factories and businesses. Deeply involved in these movements were the activists who made up Colectivo Situaciones.With the embers of that December's aftermath still burning, Colectivo Situaciones militantly researched and wrote 19 and 20. Locating themselves among the ';horizontally organized subjectivities that insisted on not being represented by politicians but maintaining and developing their own powers of political expression' that Micheal Hardt notes in his introduction, Colectivo Situaciones gathers, interrogates, and offers forth the words of unemployed workers, factory occupiers, insurgent intellectuals, and children of the disappeared. From their investigations is revealed the birth of a new social protagonism and the de-institutional power (potencia) they wield.19 and 20 has been praised as this generation's 18th Brumaire and as Marx's analysis of that struggle helped set the stage for, twenty years later, the Paris Commune we find ourselves here. Revisiting and exploring the forms of counterpower that emerged from the shadow of neoliberal rule we find the book's potencia has only grown. In the intervening years the analysis of Colectivo Situaciones has been passed from hand to hand and multitudes of citizens from different countries have learned their own ways to chant Que se vayan todos!, from Iceland to Tunisia, from Spain to Greece, from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter. Colectivo Situaciones' practice of militant research--of engaging with movements' own thought processes--resonates with everyone seeking to think current events and movements, and through that to gather the foundation of a commune for the 21st century.

Another justice is possible. Genocide in the Neighborhood documents the theories, debates, successes, and failures of a rebellious tactic to build popular power and transformative justice.Genocide in the Neighborhood explores the autonomist practice of the “escrache,” a series of public shamings that emerged in the late 1990s to honor the lives of those tens of thousands disappeared and exterminated under the Argentinean military dictatorship (1976 to 1983) and to protest the amnesty granted to perpetrators of state violence.Through a series of hypotheses and two sets of interviews, Colectivo Situaciones highlights the theories, debates, successes, and failures of the escraches—those direct and decentralized ways to agitate for justice that Brian Whitener defines as “something between a march, an action or happening, and a public shaming.”Genocide in the Neighborhood also follows the popular Argentine uprising in 2001, a period of intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse of government after government. The power that ordinary people developed for themselves in public space soon gave birth to a movement of neighborhoods organizing themselves into hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, while the unemployed took over streets and workers occupied factories.These events marked a sea change, a before and an after for Argentina that has since resonated around the world. In its wake, Genocide in the Neighborhood investigates the nature of rebellion, discusses the value of historical and cultural memory to resistance, and tactfully deploys a much-needed model of political resistance that has recently been given new life by feminist groups across Latin America organizing against patriarchal violence.