Hypothesis 891 : Beyond the Roadblocks

In 2001 a mass popular uprising overthrew the neoliberal government in Argentina: thousands upon thousands of people, both in organizations and on their own, took to the streets, defying the government''s curfew, shouting ''they all must go'' until the president was forced to flee by helicopter. The uprising, a response to years of economic and political crisis, cannot be understood without understanding the broader ecology of movements and what Colectivo Situaciones defined as ''new social protagonists'': the unemployed blockading highways, neighborhood residents coming together in assemblies, vast segments of the country surviving through alternative currencies and barter networks. This work, translated into English for the first time, brings together the conversations and theorizations of two key participants in that environment: militant research collective Colectivo Situaciones and the Movement of Unemployed Workers of Solano. The encounter and writing in common constituted a formidable experience for all those who participated, bringing to life a novel form of relation between thinking and doing, subject and object of research and political action.