Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez Protester demands the right to increase exposure to COVID-19 As far as international scientific research allows us to affirm, nobody chose the pandemic but what we have been able to choose is the way to navigate, counteract or diminish the effects and outcomes that are predicted with tools of political-cultural analysis…
Search Results for: quarantine
Communities Resist and Provide for Themselves in Quarantine
For some time now, the Latin American peoples have been facing various crises. Colonial plundering and impositions are undermining the spiritual and material conditions for a dignified life. Even so, we manage to survive through ancestral, community, solidarity and self-managed resistance. The difficulties caused by the coronavirus have unleashed other forms of resistance. Added to…
Class and Quarantine in Venezuela: A Conversation with Anacaona Marin of El Panal Commune
Cira Pascual Marquina Anacaona Marin is one of the key spokespeople of El Panal – a commune with some 13,000 people in the 23 de Enero barrio in Caracas – and a member of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force. A year ago we interviewed her about communal organization and Chavez’s legacy. Now, in the era…
Quarantine (XII): The Great Test
Reinaldo Iturriza LópezPhoto: Dikó. Cacri Photos Collective Why has the vast majority of Venezuelan society responded by abiding by voluntary quarantine, a circumstance that has been decisive in controlling the spread of the coronavirus? What does this tell us about what we have been and can be as a society? Doesn’t our collective response speak…
Popular Power Will Not Be Quarantined!
Ricardo Vaz Analysing different future scenarios is a very common exercise for Venezuelan political organisations. With constant US pressure, imagining situations of foreign invasions, military coups, early elections, etc. is natural. Leftist organisations look to describe these scenarios before envisioning what their eventual role would be. Nevertheless, no one was prepared to face the coronavirus….
Quarantine (XI): The Fragile Truce
Reinaldo Iturriza López Man with a mask. Cappuccinos, Caracas. Photo: Dikó. Cacri Photos Collective A Slap in the Face for Humanity The news and testimonies coming from the popular neighbourhoods of Guayaquil, Ecuador, about tens and maybe hundreds of corpses in houses and streets (1), is a slap in the face not only for the…
Palestinians Protest Israeli Police Atrocities Under Pretext of Enforcing Quarantine
Peoples Dispatch Hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets in the city of Jaffa in Israel on April 1, Wednesday, to protest atrocities committed by the police under the cover of the COVID-19 restrictions imposed by the government. The Israeli police responded by firing rubber coated bullets and stun grenades and arrested at least four…
Quarantine (X): The Day After the Pandemic
Reinaldo Iturriza López Photo: Giuliano Salvatore Thinking about the world we live in In our homes, as most Venezuelans are, and as it should be, occupied with the care of our sons, daughters and relatives, the occasion is propitious to think about the world in which we live, instead of becoming absorbed in fear. Perhaps…
Quarantine (IX): State of Emergency and the Place of the Popular Majorities
Reinaldo Iturriza López The exception imposed One of my working hypotheses is that when the previously anomic becomes the center of social dynamics, that is, when the anomic becomes a new rule of sociability (1), it is because a state of exception has been imposed. In this case, it is the capitalist economic agents, fundamentally…
Quarantine (VIII): Neoliberalism and Popular Classes: The Mutation in Progress
Reinaldo Iturriza López Photo: Giuliano Salvatore Reorienting the View A process of mutation is underway in Venezuelan society, in the system of government, which affects not only our physicality, but also our ways of feeling and thinking. The “humanitarian rationale”, with its trail of de-citizenization and depoliticization, is gaining ground. One part of the political…
Quarantine (VII): The Restless Neoliberal Dream
Reinaldo Iturriza López Neoliberalism from below In a very schematic way, I would say that the contribution of Veronica Gago in her extraordinary work La razón neoliberal, involves: the recovery of the concepts of governmentality and biopolitics (Foucault) as a starting point for thinking about the question of neoliberalism; the problematization of the concept of…
Quarantine (VI): On the Socialist Art of Governance
Reinaldo Iturriza López To Govern Socially When, in June 2010 (1), I first made use of the concept of governmentality, I did so in order to pose a question that seemed crucial and urgent at the time: what does it mean to govern socially? At that time I identified at least three situations: On the…
