19 and 20

Notes for a New Insurrection (Updated 20th Anniversary Edition)

Colectivo Situaciones, Nate Holdren, Sebastian Touza

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781942173601
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

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.

APPENDIX 1 ON THE BARTER CLUB^*

This short piece on the barter networks in Argentina brings together a series of—more or less provisional—hypotheses from an as yet unfinished investigation: they are only working notes that we present here as an appendix requested by the publisher Virus. Beyond the improvisation that these notes imply, it is necessary to highlight the complexity and extent of the barter phenomena, which has spread throughout the entire country and concerns seven million people. Thus, it is not a marginal experience, but rather the specific form in which millions of people found a solution to a significant part of their existence. At the same time, it is not only a mode of survival but rather another mode of life that seeks to constitute itself beyond the omnipresence of the market and the state. Currently the experience of barter is undergoing a profound crisis as a consequence of the unforeseen growth it experienced after the economic debacle of December. Here we attempt to sketch some of these problems.

1

THE FIRST BARTER club was born on May 1^st, 1995, in Bernal, in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. Its founders belonged to a group of ecologists called Regional Program for Self-Sufficiency, which worked toward the end of the 1980s on self-sustainable productive enterprises. The experiment has its founding myth: the story goes that it all began with an abundant squash harvest that was the result of planting a few seeds in a small terrace. Its owner—one of the three founders—began to hand out squash to neighbors who, in turn, began to give him products in exchange.

In 1996 there were already 17 clubs, which became 40 in 1997, 83 in 1998, 200 in 1999, and grew to 400 in 2000. In addition, they incorporated two networks that already existed but which came to be reorganized around barter: on the one hand, the entrepreneurial experience of the Network of Professionals, which helped make new initiatives possible, and, on the other hand, the Network for the Exchange of Knowledges and Social Cybernetics, which made important methodological contributions, incorporating the exchange of knowledges as a new modality and emphasizing permanent training as condition for the expansion of the network.

Initially, the exchange of products was accomplished by writing down the goods produced and consumed by each prosumer onto forms (prosumer is a term that synthesizes the fundamental characteristic of those who barter: producers and consumers at the same time), which later were turned over to a computer database with which exchange was regulated. As the experiment expanded this method turned out to be insufficient, not only because the labor and the manipulation of such a complexity of flows and exchanges became almost impossible, but also because there was a tendency to centralize the command of information in the Bernal club, where the accounting had been done since the beginning.

The local barter clubs that appeared in the first place constituted themselves later into a network (Global Barter Network) articulated by numerous nodes (barter clubs), mostly after the invention of a social currency (credit) that allowed the connection between different nodes. However, nowadays simple or direct barter also exists: English classes are exchanged for clothing or homemade jam for the label design for those same containers.

2001 was the year of the explosion: the nodes multiplied until there were 1800, and between December 2001 and March of 2002 the number reached 5,000. The network spread throughout the entire country. It is estimated that three million Argentineans live on the exchanges made in barter clubs and many other millions participate in them occasionally.

Such “enlargement” was unleashed by the economic crisis: the imposition of the financial “corralito” in December, together with the growing recession and the rise in grocery prices, added 5,000 people per day to the network.

2

OUR STARTING POINT is a hypothesis that synthesizes our investigation into the barter networks (it would be necessary to take into account the existence of other processes, both parallel and different, yet related through some elements, such as the collective purchases of groceries at wholesale prices undertaken by some neighborhood assemblies, the different production experiments developed by certain movements of unemployed workers, and the occupation of closed factories by the workers once their owners decide they are unprofitable):

In its multiple forms, the new social protagonism faces a challenge: its social production and reproduction; that is to say, the socialization of doing in the material sense. From this perspective, the development of radical experiments depends today on their capacities to construct alternative networks of material production and establish links with those that already exist. If the process opened during the 19^th and 20^th instituted a radical negation of the existing forms of politics, the unfolding of this negativity—or, we could say, its positivity—implies the development of other forms of social relations,¹ of other forms of existence not subordinated to capital, beyond capitalist exclusion, forms that seek to not be recaptured of reabsorbed.² To summarize: the forms of alternative sociability have before them the problem of conceiving and constructing forms of organization that go beyond collective and democratic discussion—generated and affirmed in the assembly process—and that imply practices that entail a material socialization of doing.

In this sense, the barter networks comprise, through “multi-reciprocal exchange”—one of the many concepts that the phenomenon uses to think itself—alternative practices in the relations to money, objects, and instances of production, circulation, exchange, and consumption. Barter attempts to break with the domination of normalized distribution imposed by the market and wagers on the creation of sociabilities of solidarity. In this sense, it is an experience that implies many more dimensions than those of pure economic exchange.

While the notion of the prosumer pursues the dissolution of the difference between “worker” (subject) and “product” (object), because the prosumers seek to maintain the direct and simultaneous experience of being producers of what they offer and consumers of what they obtain in said exchange, the recuperation of the link between production and consumption aims at establishing a regulatory criterion that resists the force of abstraction of the general equivalent (money). In its place, a wager is laid on the production of the social bond, on direct and everyday links, on the putting in common of potentialities and productive capacities, on the generation of a movement of reciprocity and cooperation that does not pursue accumulation, and that appears, rather, as a flow of giving and receiving not determined exclusively by profit. This is why in the space of the barter club there are, on one hand, periodic encounters of exchange (fairs) and administrative meetings, but also, on the other hand, skilltraining, recreation, assistance, and production activities.

Several major problems spring up when it comes to thinking a parallel economy: What form of measure rules the exchange in the networks of the alternative economy? Do elements appear within barter that resituate the commodity character of the products as only one of the dimensions of the exchange? Is there anything beyond the notion of general equivalent that comes to light, a transcendent value that regulates, measures, and legitimates all other values? What elements of symbolic exchange constitute these practices? Is the existence of a social bond—or at least the suspension of the possessive individual—what makes this not strictly utilitarian dimension possible? And in this sense, taking into account the difference made in this book between a society with a market and a market society (Polanyi), does the economic sphere cease to exist—even partially—in the barter clubs as autonomous from the rest of social existence?

The possibilities of buying with “credits” (the name of the currency of barter) reach practically all the areas of the economy and not, as is supposed, only the most urgent areas. Those who go to the barter club find all types of possibilities for consumption, the same that have become prohibitive in the formal market: clothing, decoration items, psychological counseling, hairdressing, music workshops, and a variety that is reformulated depending on the neighborhood and the specificities of each area. That is to say, the multi-reciprocal exchange can only doubtfully be called simply “survival” or “subsistence.” Better, it institutes—as we said—the possibility of another way of life.

In the words of Antonio Negri, the particularization—singularization—of the currency by the base refers—in the case of the barter club—to the incorporation of a dimension of the future, implicit in the fact that, in the exchange, a present good encounters with the promise of a future good. For example: pastries are exchanged for two haircuts. One of the haircuts, inevitably, depends on trust and on the survival of the commitment. Negri insists that a material exodus needs a project for the future because biopolitics is tied to the real, and, at the same time, to the attempt to recuperate some forms of utopia. Marcel Mauss also speaks of the importance of the notion of time in scheduling the countergift.³ The gift, according to Mauss, necessarily comprises the notion of credit, since reciprocal exchange is made with the certainty that a gift will be returned (long-term obligation).

The development of such a vast network of social self-management implied a novel and specific figure of militant activity: the coordinators. In the beginning, the coordinators were the people responsible for creating a new node—bringing together all the available elements—and taking care of the regulatory functions that sprang up from there. If it was necessary to connect productive points in order to escape from impotence, that is to say, from isolation, the coordinators were the ones charged with carrying out a ferocious struggle against isolation. It is a figure that articulates the entrepreneurial capacity, the managerial capacity, and the political capacity. The coordinators are the ones charged with (re)establishing the bonds between productive capacities and community needs, whether it is by shaping a new node of the network or through the modalities that have been set in motion recently, as the (re) construction of pathways for the production and commercialization of food and medicine that connect small producers with social organizations and communities, or as a practical alternative to the multinational networks of production (transgenics).

The coordinators are committed to the self-regulation of prices. It is a complex process with different mechanisms. In some places it consists in the capacity of the node to obtain for itself products from a “basic pool” at a very low price that limits the possible prices. Another example is that 50% of what each node collects with fundraising activities— fundamentally admission fees at the fairs—is returned to the members through the purchase of raw materials that encourage production.

3

MANY SAY, AND with good reason, that the barter clubs are the scene of cases of corruption, speculation, hoarding, and fraud. But these “impurities”—not surprising in a phenomenon of this scale, especially when it arises from the fragmented ground of neoliberal societies—are unable to explain the reasons for the decadence experienced in recent days by the more comprehensive barter networks.

A key point for understanding the present crisis of the barter networks has to do with what economists call the question of the “backing” of the currency—in this case the credit—that is to say, the relation of correspondence between the volume of the product and the money in circulation. To put it directly: one of the deepest causes of the present crisis of the networks of exchange has to do with the productive deficit⁴ in the nodes.

The massification of attendance and the printing of credits was not accompanied by the consequent growth in production—or in variety—which saturated, dried out, and decomposed a good deal of the dynamism displayed by almost all the nodes in operation. It generated an abysmal gap between consumption needs and productive capacity.

At bottom, as is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for 19 and 20
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements for English Edition
• Contents
• Translator’s Preface
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Keeping 2001 Open
• The Ballad of Buenos Aires
• Introduction
• The Great Transformation
• December 19th and 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection
• Situational Thought in Market Conditions
• Multiplicity and Counterpower in the Piquetero Experience
• Looting, Social Bond, and the Ethic of the Teacher-Militant
• Expression and Representation
• Neighborhood Assemblies
• The Diffuse Network: From Dispersion to Multiplicity
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: On the Barter Club
• Appendix 2: Causes and Happenstance: Dilemmas of Argentina’s New Social Protagonism
• Appendix 3: That December… Two Years from the 19th and 20th
• Afterword: Disquiet in the Impasse
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