Horizontalidad, autogestión y protagonismo en Argentina

Este artículo trata los movimientos sociales autónomos que surgieron después de la crisis económica y la posterior rebelión popular en Argentina en diciembre de 2001. Los movimientos autónomos en la Argentina, como tantos movimientos en el mundo de hoy, son movimientos basados en la creación de nuevas relaciones sociales y comunidades ahora, al mismo tiempo que proyectan nuevas sociedadesy las relaciones en y para el futuro. Son movimientos con una concepción diferente del tiempo y el espacio. Son movimientos queentienden lo individual y lo colectivo como vinculados entre sí. Hay mucho en común entre la experiencia en la Argentina y las prácticas eideas anarquistas. Eso no significa que los que están creando nuevas relaciones y comunidades en la Argentina sean anarquistas. Lo que este artículo intenta hacer es basarse en las experiencias de los movimientos sociales argentinos para iniciar una reflexión sobre lasprácticas e ideas que los anarquistas pueden prestar a los distintos movimientos y comunidades autónomas; y, a su vez, sobre lo que los movimientos autónomos en la Argentina puede dar a las ideas y prácticas anarquistas

Planetary confinement: bio-politics and mutual aid

Michel Foucault’s modes of power (sovereign, disciplinary and bio-politics) have dominated both our understanding of power and norm. It is pretty impossible to think of the organisation of life outside his thinking. Here I argue that the idea and practice of mutual aid, articulated by Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book Mutual Aid (2009) stirs us towards a different understanding of the management of life, bereft of hierarchies and bestowed with co-operation and care. Moreover, as I argue the existence of mutual aid groups and practices challenges the very idea of the norm. This has become even more apparent during the Covid19 pandemic with the surfacing of mutual aid groups globally. It is therefore rather misleading to understand our present as generator of the ‘new normal’, such claims are mere rhetorical devices aiming at keeping us in our place

Remembering obedience and dissent: democratic citizenship and memorials to state violence in Australia and Argentina

Memorials to state violence can be read as cultural ledgers of what constitutes legitimate citizenship practice and acceptable citizen-state relations. I explore the significance of Argentinian and Australian memorials for understanding how past political action shapes a horizon of political possibility. Firstly, I examine how ANZAC memorials celebrate empire, obedience and the status quo. Here, there is a contrived unity of state and citizen that disappears questions of power, difference and dissent on which struggles for the expansion of citizenship in Australia and elsewhere have rested. ANZAC exists in a field of other memorials and cultural texts in Australia that negate politics and possibility for emancipation. Then, I discuss several Argentinian memorials that reflect the diversity of Argentina's politics of memory. Some memory spaces represent an open-ended view of the political process, while others are inseparable from a simplified dictatorship-democracy dichotomy. While questions of popular complicity in the state violence of the 1970s have yet to be memorialised, Argentine memorials nonetheless recognize the legitimacy of dissent as a basis of democratic citizenship. Finally, I draw out the significance of the comparison by discussing memorials in relation to theories of citizen agency. This problematizes the northwest-centric view of democracy as end, and reveals the importance of remembering challenges to power as a basis for ongoing democratization. Argentina's memory debates have created new dialogical networks spanning government and advocacy groups that have secured, momentarily at least, the right to claim rights and possibilities for agonistic memory. Australia's memorials, on the other hand, celebrate neither emancipatory struggles nor their proxies in rights, and are more in line with the contrived consensus characteristic of a securitarian state. Based on a comparison of memorials in relation to theories of democratic citizenship, Australia's political subjectivity is amenable to dedemocratization while Argentina's reflects the possibility of open-ended democratization

B cell OX40L supports T follicular helper cell development and contributes to SLE pathogenesis

OBJECTIVES: TNFSF4 (encodes OX40L) is a susceptibility locus for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Risk alleles increase TNFSF4 expression in cell lines, but the mechanism linking this effect to disease is unclear, and the OX40L-expressing cell types mediating the risk are not clearly established. Blockade of OX40L has been demonstrated to reduce disease severity in several models of autoimmunity, but not in SLE. We sought to investigate its potential therapeutic role in lupus. METHODS: We used a conditional knockout mouse system to investigate the function of OX40L on B and T lymphocytes in systemic autoimmunity. RESULTS: Physiologically, OX40L on both B and T cells contributed to the humoral immune response, but B cell OX40L supported the secondary humoral response and antibody affinity maturation. Our data also indicated that loss of B cell OX40L impeded the generation of splenic T follicular helper cells. We further show that in two models of SLE-a spontaneous congenic model and the H2-IA(bm12) graft-versus-host-induced model-loss of B cell OX40L ameliorates the autoimmune phenotype. This improvement was, in each case, accompanied by a decline in T follicular helper cell numbers. Importantly, the germline knockout did not exhibit a markedly different phenotype from the B cell knockout in these models. CONCLUSIONS: These findings contribute to a model in which genetically determined increased OX40L expression promotes human SLE by several mechanisms, contingent on its cellular expression. The improvement in pathology in two models of systemic autoimmunity indicates that OX40L is an excellent therapeutic target in SLE