19 and 20

“19 & 20 is a book-event that has become a key for social movements around the world. In it, Colectivo Situaciones practice militant research as an act of listening (escucha) and experimentation that translates the powerful mobilizations that took the streets to end neoliberal plundering (saqueo) into an inspiring and crucial praxis of thinking. Learning from the events instead of imposing old categories on their singularities, this book is a crucial source of inspiration on militant research and situated thinking. A singular work of pedagogy from below, this new edition comes in a timely moment where the deepening of the neoliberal expropriation of life that the pandemic has made so explicit meets with the tenth anniversary of the global uprisings of 201. Today, once again, 19 & 20 offers a crucial map for experimenting in the situated praxis of political thought.” —Susana Draper, coeditor of Femincide and Global Accumulation and author of Afterlives of Confinement and *1968 Mexico

“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

“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

“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

Autorentext
Colectivo Situaciones is a collective of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires. They have participated in numerous grassroots co-research activities with unemployed workers, peasant movements, neighborhood assemblies, and alternative education experiments. Michael Hardt (b. 1960) is a political philosopher and literary theorist, best known for three books he co-authored with Antonio Negri: Empire (2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), and Commonwealth (2009). Michael Hardt is a professor of literature at Duke University and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS.Antonio Negri (b.1933 in Padua, Italy) is an Italian political philosopher and sociologist.

Klappentext
Notes for the next insurrection. A renewed reflection on and a return to the militant research of Colectivo Situaciones twenty years after the Argentinian insurrection.

Zusammenfassung

In an uprising heard around the world, people in Argentina took to the streets on December 19th & 20th, 2001, shouting “¡Qué 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 ¡Qué 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.

Inhalt

Translator’s Preface by Nate Holdren & Sebastian Touza
Preface by Michael Hardt
The Ballad of Buenos Aires by toni negri
Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition by Marcello Tar&igr…