Hypotheses about Counterpower

“This month Minor Compositions is releasing the first English translation of Hypothesis 891: Beyond the Roadblocks, a book length collaboration between the Argentine militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Unemployed Workers’ Movement of Solano (MTD Solano)”

“Ill Will launched Weavings, a series that aims to make available in English a wide range of theoretical and strategic texts from Latin America’s new emancipatory tradition”

“Colectivo Situaciones summarize this vision of emancipation as follows: “to resist means to create (forms of life).””

“situational thinking is nothing more than the act of reconnecting with our own capacities and circumstances: it means thinking based on the concrete and towards the objective of the concrete”

“The situational, on the other hand, refers to the fact that, based on our experience, we can elaborate a point of view that is practical, but also theoretical, about the issues that concern us”

“potency, or power from below. The roadblock [piquete], self-defense, and punctual offensive attacks are all political forms of violence of those from below”

“The offensive, as a conception of violence, is a weapon of the enemy, of central power, of the “powerful” in general (understanding by “powerful” in general those who control the potency of others)”

“Offensive violence is conquering, colonial, and imperialist. That is why war is the terrain of power”

“Our recent history shows us the risks of militarism and other forms of polarization that tend to constitute counter-power as a mirror of power, dividing everything in two and establishing “symmetries” between the two forces”

“in the roadblock, three different, parallel, and complementary, forms of relation with the state take place: confrontation, negotiation, and indifference”

“The perspective of experiments that sustain themselves through their own capacity, through their potency and their ability to project their energy, derive their strength from the process of self-affirmation”

“Autonomy, independence, and self-affirmation are not obvious and are not achieved once and for all. They are not easy to obtain or easy to sustain once achieved. It is a permanent task”

“class struggle revolves around the fundamental fact that capital tends to dominate the environment, human life, and cultural wealth in an increasingly direct way”

“Class struggle is asymmetric. Capital plays the offensive. It conquers, colonizes. But it also, in a scandalous way, excludes and impoverishes. It is fundamental, in this respect, not to lose site of the fact that capital means control of potency and of subjectivity, of nature and what is produced by science, and in general, the culture of the people”

“Capital is nothing other than a social relation between humans and with nature. It is not possible to fight it as if it were external, as if it had its roots in government headquarters”

“The only way of combating capitalism, as the hegemony of sadness, exploitation, individualism, and the market, is through producing other forms of sociability, other images of happiness, another form of politics”

“the specific type of militancy that emerges as a model in these autonomous networks. It is no longer a specialist in ideologies or confrontations, but in situational operators of thought and skilled craftspeople of production and social reproduction”