Antagonism and possibility in-against-and-beyond crisis: organising everyday life in Mercado Bonpland, Buenos Aires.

The 2001 Argentinian ‘Que se vayan todos’ movement was structured through complex relationships of autonomous politics, horizontal organisation, autogestion, neighbourhood assemblies and state rupture. More than ten years after the 2001 economic, social and political crisis, the reclaimed retail market Mercado Bonpland is an example of the legacy of organising in the Palermo Viejo neighbourhood assembly. Mercado Bonpland demonstrates the development of this organising to support autogestive projects.
This thesis explores how Mercado Bonpland organises in-against-and-beyond the economy, the state and territory. To research the antagonisms and possibility present in struggling to create alternatives through everyday life involved speaking with organisers, shopping, attending events and conducting interviews in Mercado Bonpland. I argue that Mercado Bonpland offers profound insights into the difficulties and possibilities that exist for creating alternative economies, strategic more-than-state relationships and relational territories.
I use the ‘in-against-and-beyond’ framework to critically explore three aspects of everyday life in Mercado Bonpland: economy, state and territory. First, constructing economies in-against-and-beyond means going beyond simple recognitions of ‘diverse economies’ to create practices that are antagonistic to exploitative capitalist social relationships. Second, multiple state relationships demonstrate the power of collective organising, as well as integration with and opposition to state practices. Third, territory as power in place is a powerful organising principle for the market, as well as for its neighbours in the Palermo district.
Taken together, these three relationships demonstrate that the diverse groups that sustain the market are not outside the capitalist system, but rather inhabit a position that is simultaneously in-against-and-beyond capital and challenges its functioning through their collective networks. Antagonistic practices demonstrate the complexities of attempts to simultaneously deal with the necessities of everyday life and the drive to search for more-than-capitalist possibilities.