A-Infos writes:

(Valencia, Spain, Oct. 25, 2000)—Approximately 2000 people assembled for an unpermitted evening march
to protest the arrest of four squatters on charges of "terrorist
association" and in solidarity with the occupied social center "MALAS
PULGAS", which is under threat of eviction. The march was led by the
families of the arrested. Busses had brought supporters from Madrid
and Barcelona.

Police presence was heavy. Identification was demanded of many
participants and there were two brief scuffles with one protestor
being injured. A benefit concert was held afterwards at the occupied
social center "La Palona"

Photos of the march:
webcast

Spanish text of this report:
indymedia

hydrarchist writes: "Here's part 2 which includes the footnotes."

The programme’s implementation, however, provoked fierce controversy. The complaints began when Menem used the emergency law to institute privatization by decree, and then exploited his powers of appointment to the Supreme Court to impede investigations of malfeasance. Government administrators of the sell-offs were accused of squandering national assets, and of ignoring criteria of efficiency or service. Public Works Minister Roberto Dromi made no effort to create regulatory bodies for the newly formed private monopolies. María Julia Alsogaray, the daughter of one of Argentina’s leading liberal politicians

Political transformations

As he reformed the economy, Menem redrew the political map of Argentina. The most striking changes of the 1990s lay in the eclipse of the military—a dominant force in the country since the nineteenth century—and the steep decline of the once powerful trade unions. The army’s standing had suffered an irreparable blow during the ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s, compounded by humiliating defeat in the Malvinas; they had been ejected from government in disgrace in 1983. Throughout the Alfonsín years, hard-line military factions had fought against cuts in the defence budget and the trials of former junta leaders. Menem adopted a subtler policy. On the one hand, he proclaimed an era of ‘national reconciliation’—200 officers, sentenced for murder or torture on the basis of irrefutable evidence, walked free in his amnesty of October 1989. On the other, he cracked down on the resistance of the extreme-right carapintados, or ‘painted faces’. The last barracks rebellion occurred in December 1990, following Menem’s restoration of relations with Britain. The army command was ordered to crush it, and complied. The ringleader Colonel Mohamed Seineldín, another turco, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

hydrarchist writes: "This article provides a much needed analysis of the economic and social background to the social crisis and revolting that has emerged in Argentina in the last twelve months. It was published in the New Left Review 17, September-October 2002."

Meltdown and pauperization in what was once Latin America’s wealthiest economy. David Rock analyses the social and political longue durée of the largest sovereign default in history, and worst casualty of doctrinal neoliberalism to date.

Racking Argentina

By David Rock

Popular phrotest erupted on the streets of Argentina through the hot December nights of 2001. [1] Crowds from the shanty towns attacked stores and supermarkets; banging their pots and pans, huge demonstrations of mainly middle-class women— cacerolazos—marched on the city centre; the piqueteros, organized groups of the unemployed, threw up road-blocks on highways and bridges. Twenty-seven demonstrators died, including five shot down by the police beneath the grand baroque façades of Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo. The trigger for the fury had been the IMF’s suspension of loans to Argentina, on the grounds that President Fernando De la Rúa’s government had failed to meet its conditions on public-spending cuts. There was a run on the banks, as depositors rushed to get their money out and their pesos converted into dollars. De la Rúa’s Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo slapped on a corralito, a ‘little fence’, to limit the amount of cash that could be withdrawn—leaving many people’s savings trapped in failing banks. On December 20, as the protests intensified, De la Rúa resigned, his helicopter roaring up over the Rosada palace and the clouds of tear gas below.

hydrarchist writes:

"The European Social Forum: Sovereign and Multitude"

J.J. King [jamie@jamie.com]

'There are [...] two primary positions in the response to today's dominant
forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of
nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and
global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the
present form of globalization that is equally global.' [1] (Michael Hardt.)

'Rarely has the corruption of political and administrative life been so
deeply corrosive; rarely has there been such a crisis of representation;
rarely has disillusionment with democracy been so radical. When people talk
about a "crisis of politics", they are effectively saying that the
democratic State no longer functions — and that in fact it has become
irreversibly corrupt in all its principles and organs; the division of
powers; the principles of guarantee; the single individual powers; the rules
of representation; the unitarian dynamic of powers; and the functions of
legality, efficiency and administrative legitimacy. There has been talk of
an "end of history," and if such a thing exists we might certainy identify
it in the end of the constitutional dialectic tto which liberalism and the
mature capitalist State have tied us.' [2] (Antonio Negri.)

Fascists, Anti-Fascists And The State

by Flint, Roundhouse Collective (NEFAC — Baltimore)

"The totalitarian vision of fascists often resonates with the many
statists who wish to unbind their hands from the pretense of 'democratic'
government and civil liberties." — Call for a Revolutionary Anti-Fascist
Bloc

Over the last two years, the neo-nazi National Alliance (NA) has held a
variety of public demonstrations. The NA is the largest, most
well-financed, white supremacist fascist organization in North America.
The most successful venue for them has been Washington, DC. On May 11th,
they had their fifth demonstration. The May demonstration outside the
Israeli embassy, the largest public display of fascists in the U.S. in
decades, numbered over 300 hundred fascists.

WASHINGTON -- (AP, Reuters Digest) Police arrested 649 people, including anti-capitalist
protesters and bystanders, in a show of force as the annual meeting of
the World Bank and the IMF opened here.

Radical demonstrators had threatened to bring the US capital to a
standstill by blocking traffic, but police moved swiftly on pockets of
protesters in central Washington streets, arresting hundreds and
swinging clubs to clear crowds.

c.m. writes "Notes from Washington

SEPTEMBER 26 On Wednesday night metal barricades
blocked off streets surrounding the World Bank and
IMF, and police wearing black and orange rain gear
stood in a steady downpour, turning away people who
tried to pass through streets they had designated as
off limits. At the corner of Pennsylvania and 18th
Street a bus full of police stood at a curb next to
the World Bank Infoshop. Inside the shop were
paperweights, umbrellas, ponchos and the like, bearing
the white and blue World Bank logo. Outside, a cop
carried a case of soda from a van into the bus.

hydrarchist writes "

Remembering the Kwangju Uprising

By George Katsiaficas

Archimedes once declared, “Give me a fixed point and I can move the earth.” Historically speaking, the Kwangju people’s uprising of 1980 is such a fixed point. It was the pivot around which dictatorship was transformed into democracy in South Korea. Twenty years afterwards, its energy resonates strongly across the world. Among other things, its history provides both a glimpse of the free society of the future and a sober and realistic assessment of the role of the U.S. government and its allies in Asia.

hydrarchist writes

Revolution is Ordinary
John Kraniauskas, Radical Philosophy, 115 (Sept. – Oct., 2002), pp. 40-42

John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press, London
and Sterling, 2002. viii + 237 pp., £15.99 pb., 0 7453 1863 0 pb.

Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism, London and Sterling, Pluto Press, 2002. ix + 257 pp.,
£15.99 pb. 0 7453 1606 9 pb.

In his recent anthology of Lenin’s conjunctural writings of 1917, Revolution
At The Gates, Slavoj Zizek insists on the present need for new ‘forms of
politcization’ of the social, now globalized by network capitalism, which
contemplate capitalism’s end. Zizek himself looks, not quite to Leninism as
such (a Stalinist invention), but to Lenin’s exemplary ‘full subjective
engagement’ in a moment of catastrophe he makes his own, which was as much
existential as organizational and theoretical. Zizek refers to this form of
political engagement as a ‘Leninist utopia’. Such quasi-normative
reflections on revolutionary enthusiasm as a mode of individualized being
and becoming (arguably, a culturalist intervention in the realm of the
political overcoded in the language of a philosophy of will) are widespread,

suggesting a shared experience of political crisis.

Graeme Bacque wries:

This morning, Canada's largest and oldest squatter community, the
so-called
'Tent City' located on Toronto's waterfront, was forcefully evicted in a
massive sweep-and-clear operation involving dozens of city cops and
private
security guards. The hardware giant Home Depot (which owns that tract of
land) had earlier this summer bailed out of negotiations aimed at
re-settling Tent City residents and creating interim housing on another
nearby piece of city-owned land. Instead, earlier today without any
warning
at all to residents, they decided to proceed with the eviction of more
than
120 people who had been calling that place home.