hydrarchist submits:

"The Ballad of Buenos
Aires"

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.