File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2003/postanarchism.0306, message 125


Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 03:55:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Negri: "The Ballad of Buenos Aires"



Soon the prefix for all messages [postanarchism] will
appear automatically in the subject line but until
then we will have to type it in ourselves - I am
having problems making it work but it shouldn't take
long...that is what those tests were a few days back.

***

"The Ballad of Buenos Aires"

by Toni Negri 

(trans. Nate Holdren*) 

A critique of the Italian edition of the book Notes
for the New Social Protagonism by Colectivo
Situaciones 

This book speaks of the events of the 19th and 20th of
December, 2001 in Argentina, when the inhabitants of
Buenos Aires took to the streets and aimed themselves
at Congress, forcing the flight of the President, and
the successive resignation of the government. But not
only that: it also speaks of before and after the
insurrection, speaks of the new political and social
situation that was aimed at dividing the miltary
dictatorship of 1976-83 and the neoliberal decade
(1989-1999). 
The book -- Piqueteros. The Argentinian Revolt Against
NeoliberalismDeriveApprodi, pg 227 -- the authors tell
us (the Colectivo Situaciones is constituted by a
group of militants) was thought with urgency, written
and published in the space of less than three months.
The original subtitle is Notes for a New Social
Protagonism. In fact, it treats in the form of notes,
theoretical notes and syntheses of discussion by
assemblies, the theory of organization of struggles
and the critique of lived experiences. "Writing in
situation" finds here an example in all ways
innovative: the capacity to combine critical
reflection and investigation materials reaches a level
of true theoretical innovation. Those who, on the
other hand, want to have proof of the newness of this
political writing have no more than to find the
materials that the Colectivo Situaciones have
published frequently since 2001 until the end of 2002
(as a summary of all these materials one can look over
all Hypothesis 891. Beyond the piquetes. In all these
writings, then, the reflections of the collective
cross with that of the grand assemblies of struggle.
Above all with the Movement of the Unemployed Workers
(MST) of Solano.



But fine, what is this Argentinian experience? Do
these writings of the Colectivo Situaciones speak to
us about a new configuration of revolutionary
subjects? Do we find ourselves in front of a new Paris
Commune? It is always dangerous to assimilate ideology
to reality: but perhaps in this vase it is worth the
grief. Here there is something new: it is the act of
violence of engagement with power that permitted, at
the time, the unmaking of the continuity of social and
political relations that have contained Argentine
development, and giving rein to new particular
apparatuses and subjects that constructed new
realities of resistance and desire, of counterpower. 

Argentina, the struggles of its proletariat, the
paradoxical confluence of sectors of the middle class
with them, has convulsed the picture of the
traditional analysis of the class struggles and places
before ofcustomary rituals of the left the creation of
new behaviors, unexpected and untimely. As Marx, in
the Class Struggle in France counterposed the
communards to the socialist Synogogue of Luxemburg,
today since Argentia we find an example of new
constitution of the multitude. The example of the
constitution of the multitude (what we have seen and
continue seeing is also its internal transformation)
has to be seen essentially in the struggles that
"Piqueteros" documents. To a radical institutional
crisis ("there goes everything!" was a cry that
denounced and registered the minority condition to
which the traditional political parties were reduced),
to a consequent lapse of the legitimation of the
representative function (involving generalized public
and private corruption), to a political crisis
(demonstrated by the incapacity to reproduce customary
models of constitutional alliance between social
classes and bourgeious hegemony over the system), to a
financial crisis (of payment of the debt and of
inversion of the flows between the periphery and the
center) and finally to a very profound social crisis
that destroyed capacities productive (extreme
unemployment, savage precarization of labor) and
reproductive (crisis of public education and health),
to all this responded a "multitudinary counterpower"
that organized itself in autonomous systems of
production, of interchange and political organization,
in completely original forms. From workers'
self-management of the factories to the generalized
occupation of public buildings on the part of the
neighborhood assemblies, from the construction of a
new exchange from below (and a new market and new
modalities of interchange) to the revolutionary and
legitimate exercise of force on the part of the
piquetes, there appears here a capacity of autonomous
constitution of the multitudes, that bear an energy of
universal conviction and of egalitarion social
recomposition. The martyrdom of the generations
destroyed by the militarty dictatorship of '70-'80 and
the desperation of peoples that rebelled against
neoliberal globalization in the '90s, find here the
truth of a new experience of radical social
construction.

When today it is said "a new world is possible," if we
don't want to be imbeciles that scratch our bellies
while telling lies, it is necessary to have the
courage to imagine the possibility of a new world, of
not trembling before the threats of the capitalist
apologists, of inventing the possibility of a new
exchange, of its utilization, of thinking that it is
possible to organize labor, a "dignified labor,"
autonomously, of deciding it in common.

Is it possible to change the world without taking
power, or better, is it not the unique manner of
destroying power? Isn't this imagination in action of
the piqueteros and of the MTDs the true and unique
line that can be counterposed as a real alternative to
the couplet reformism-terrorim that the global powers
counterpose to the multitude?

I don't know what can happen in Latin America during
the next decade. I know only that in Latin America a
social laboratory, extreme and effective, is
developing. The distance there is between the
Argentine piqueteros and the Brasilian Lula, beyond
what really will be and how it will be perceived
subjectively, is in every way minimal: the Latin
American laboratory has risen against the
unilateralism of US and global capitalism in an
effective manner. Mutatis mutandi, in Latin America a
subversive breach is being constructed within and
against globalization, and this breach corresponds to
that which the movements in Europe are producing. The
social and political experimentation in Argentina,
with its incredible recompositions between the
organized unemployed and elements of the middle class
impoverished by the IMF, show on the one hand the
construction of the multitude and on the other the
impossibility of opposing resistance within the bounds
of the Nation-State. Just as in the South, civil but
very poor, and in the North, rich but socially
disintegrated, there form piquetes of resistance.

The book by the Colectivo Situaciones composes the
fragments of a global discourse, basing on/in the
experiences of the Argentinian struggle. The communist
political contents of these struggles are evident (it
is evident also that the average western European give
almost no information on this matter). This can and
should be our starting point. When one assumes the
problem of counterpower and takes it, beyond anarchist
or spontaneist experiences, to the present crisis and
to the world in which exodus (which is one of the
figures of counterpower) can develop; when one takes
into account the enormous a-symmetry that there is
between the forms of repression and the insurrectional
development of the multitude; when then the problem of
the "dualism of power" is reproposed in biopolitical
conditions, we begin placing ourselves in "situation."
Thanks to the Argentinian piqueteros that invented
extraordinary forms of protest and of organization
from below, thanks to the popular assemblies that are
reinventing the forms of monetary interchanges and of
management of social services, thanks to the militants
that organized new networks of subversive
communication, thanks, finally, to the Colectivo
Situaciones, who know, in the vital interchange with
the multitudes, to give us critical information and
hopeful reflections.

*re: translation. apologies for any awkwardness or
unclarity in translation. 

===="The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule...power no longer has today any form of legitimization other than emergency."  

- Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, 1996

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