Global Dialogues

The construction of powerlessness as a non-power is an operation of disconnecting bodies from their potencia: their power to act. It expropriates that power and restores it to people as impotence. What does it mean to confront powerlessness? Perhaps the question can be phrased thusly: How can we reconnect with an affect that produces a capacity for action? Who can do what? We might ask—invoking the philosopher Spinoza, and starting from his premise that no one knows what a body can do until it passes into action—what makes us act if we start from a position of not-knowing? What allows us to experience the effectiveness of mobilizing our energy? How is this effectiveness expressed? It is, first, in the joy of the body that releases its potencia. This is not an individualist drift. Quite the contrary: what the philosopher proposes is a theory of the affects of the collective body which, nevertheless, cannot but pass through individual bodies.

It is necessary to provoke passionate investments, to invest mobilization and organization with desire, and to make collective action desirable. Often, it is about constructing an action-image that attracts others. This presupposes a theory—a practice of alliance among bodies, and an economy of the circulation of "affect-ideas" in actions that function as connections. 

We can start from a desire to build community. This is expressed in the need to belong to different groups, to respond to calls to action, to be part of or to "compose" oneself in a strategic manner. Here strategic has a precise meaning: that which increases our power to act.

The far-right movements that champion individualism also know this and dispute the terrain of the collective while simultaneously underestimating it. We see it in how the financial world, through gambling and various speculative dynamics, attempts to build communities among young people; we see it in religious fundamentalisms that interpellate that very desire to be part of a group and inflect it with supremacist and sexist forms.

Capital is defined, as various feminist theorists have argued, by constructing an individual that has no value. If you are not in a social relation commanded by capital (whether as worker, consumer, or debtor) your labor does not count, your creative forces seem to not be truly effective. This is a maneuver that inverts the collective capacity to create value. This is why capital —as a social relation— must first devalue certain bodies and certain territories, so that they later become either free, cheapened for exploitation, or disposable for extraction and extermination.

In opposition to this, the mobilization in so many parts of the world against the genocide in Palestine expresses the persistence of action, of multiple initiatives on different scales and across different terrains of struggle, in the face of power's ultimate spectacle in its current phase. None of these actions immediately dismantles the genocidal power, but they assert themselves against something that power wants: for us to aesthetically enjoy (by consuming images) our own annihilation as humanity. Every act that refuses that enjoyment is an anti-fascist act. Every act that recovers a sensible potential, capable of provoking indignation and action, is an anti-fascist act.

From Argentina, where the far-right government seeks to desensitize and render protests impotent, something important has happened, which was recently reflected at the polls. The persistence of struggles in the street has broken something that seemed immune: the image of the government as invincible thanks to absolute corporate support.

During this period, we have experimented with the construction of a collective body, assembled through alliances forged almost in desperation, as "politics" abandoned those affected and it seemed that protests stood alone against the most brutal powers.

These alliances created a common body, bringing together members of soccer fan clubs, retirees, teachers and students from the public education system, researchers from the national scientific council, healthcare workers, patients and families linked to those institutions, trans-feminist groups, Indigenous communities facing criminalization, cultural workers, street market vendors, and persecuted migrants. Community soup kitchens multiplied to confront hunger, calls to action diversified—many small, others massive—but all persistent, while the media only spoke of Milei's invincible consensus. People with disabilities, one of the sectors most affected by budget cuts along with pensioners, have recently stood out, managing to produce collective images of unexpected force. The most fragile bodies—in the sense that they do not "conform" to the virile and normative idea of strength, and who are also those most damaged by austerity policies—were the ones who demanded that Congress reject the government's decrees.

When we speak of potencia, we invoke another kind of force. Another economy of forces against the proposal of the entrepreneurship of violence encouraged by the global far-right: each person managing their own violences as if it were a private and individual matter, while simultaneously urging us to "consume" the ongoing genocide as a framework of intelligibility and sensibility. 

Let us return to the beginning. How can we confront the feeling of non-power? Perhaps by passing into action in any way possible—however minimal it may seem. Because when we participate in collective struggles, there is an immediate cognitive, sensory, and corporeal effect. Struggle has an effect of expansive pedagogy, at once molecular and transversal. Here there is a reappropriation that passes through the body and that produces a knowledge: a practical knowledge derived from the power to act.

The experience of making community (seeking it where it does not exist; disputing it when it is appropriated; sustaining it in the face of attempts to destroy it) is to be able to act against a regime that teaches us powerlessness, that inoculates the expropriation of our passions, energies, and forces. Cryptofascist dynamics force us into continuous acts of humiliation so that, in response to the feeling of non-power in everyday life, we accept the annihilation of a part of humanity, precisely that of a people struggling against racism and colonialism. Every practice of struggle against that vile transaction is a way, once again, of making a community against powerlessness.

Verónica Gago is a political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and political economy.