The Limits of Social Movements: An untimely reflection
Marc Saint-Upéry
ALAI,
América Latina en Movimiento
2004-11-05
Los Límites de los Movimientos
Sociales: Una reflexión intempestiva
In the 1950s and 1960s, people in the French left sometimes avoided speaking certain truths (on the Soviet system, for example) so as to “keep hope alive in Billencourt”[1] for the pro-Communist workers. While I do not share this Jesuitical conception of the truth, I offer these very incomplete and imperfect reflections on the limits of the social movements with no intention of denying hope to the militant cadres that work to construct and to fortify these movements. I intend, rather, to oppose the deceptive and unspoken fallacy that underlies a certain enthusiastic movimientismo, that in my opinion is an uncritical exaltation of the social movements, that is often just a cheap substitute for, and only barely disguises, the comfortable and monolithic certainties of Leninist or foquista [guerrilla] vanguardism. This fallacy takes a correct and extremely important premise – "without the social movements, nothing is possible" – and surreptitiously derives from it an invalid conclusion: "with the social movements, everything (or almost everything) is possible."
In calling a debate on the unanswered questions surrounding social movements, I wanted to concentrate on three subjects: the problem of the relation of social movements to politics; the relation between their "demographic" weight and their political weight; and the question of the "antisystemic" character, or the anticapitalist potential, of these movements.
The dilemma of politics
As soon as they take part in the dispute over the common
good and the social order, social movements move openly and directly to
politics and contribute to the definition of the political agenda.
Nevertheless, the relation of the social movements with politics – much less
politicians – is not usually understood in the sense of state institutions,
public policy and electoral competitions. In the latest debates on social
movements in
One of them is Raúl Zibechi, who has published an article on the "dangerous relations" between social movements and state power.[3] For Zibechi, the contrast between the brief and ill-fated governmental participation of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, once powerful and now debilitated by this experience, and the practice of electoral and institutional participation of theBrazilian landless movement MST, verifies that the real alternatives are constructed essentially outside state spaces, in the “stubborn autonomy” of social and community base areas. However, the reality is a little more complex. Like many social movements, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement was built in large part based on the political, institutional and symbolic reserves of the state – as well as those of the para-state or supra-state constituted by the multilateral and international cooperation agencies [non-governmental organizations]. Its real militance, although cyclical, could almost be characterized in the terms used by García Linera Alvaro to describe the old Bolivian labor movement: “a deep-rooted, accusing spirit confronting the state, bellicose certainly, but demarcated within the boundaries of meaning and modernization propagated by the state.”[4] In general, the diagnosis of Pablo Ospina applies: “The [Ecuadorian] Indian movement navigates between various options that interconnect, separate and diverge: to oppose the power of the state, to turn to the power of the state, to create more or less autonomous spaces of power inside the state.”[5] Yet these “separations” and “divergences” hardly ever break out between the spurious professional politicians and the heroic supporters of social mobilization; rather, the ambivalences of its relation with power systematically cut through every instance of a social movement, from the leadership to the base.[6]
At the heart of this mythical dichotomy between political
power and social anti-power, there is, in Zibechi’s words, a noticeable
confusion between two not necessarily congruent strategic options: a rigorous
distancing from market competition and electoral obligations, as is the case
with MST; and an actively driven, separate and autonomous institution, like the
Zapatista “caracoles” [local
government assemblies] (but not with the Ecuadorian indigenous municipalities,
which promote participation within the framework of the prevailing
legal-administrative order). But the situation on the ground in
In addition, after some very stormy attempts, the Zapatista municipalities renounced the imposition of taxes in the territories under their control, to live essentially on international solidarity and cooperation.[8] Zapatista “counterpower” is kept in a curious ambiguity in the face of the coercive and expropriatory prerogatives that traditionally characterize state power. This ambiguity can be interpreted as a weakness, or as a fertile area of institutional innovation. It demonstrates, at least, that reality does not affirm the twofold schemes of the ideologists of counterpower or antipower.
The case of the Zapatistas is very particular for its creation of armed “self-limited” insurrection and its subsequent trajectory. In any context outside of pure coercion or institutional anarchy, the most general problem of social movements is that their essential “internal institutionality,”[9] while original and autonomous in form, cannot overlook “external” institutionality and the problems that it raises: Who holds sovereignty? Who is the legitimate representative? – and so on. The autonomy of social movements from the political-electoral market, especially its corrupt, “for sale to the highest bidder” versions, is indispensable. To believe, all the same, that this autonomy lessens the problems of the struggle for state power, of the contentious formation of the general will, of the institutionalization of the rules of social coexistence and of public deliberation, of the equitable administration of resources, of the representation of citizens and of their active participation in public matters, is the coarsest of illusions.
The contribution of social movements is not in the unilateral promotion of a spontaneous “direct” or “participatory” democracy against a purely “formal” representative democracy. It takes just a minimum of reflection to understand that workers’ democracy, the soviets, the popular assemblies, or any form of democracy with strong participation of the base populations, should not become spaces for turning militants into professional apparatchiks or for plebiscites of acclamation for the great leader. They need to have rigorous rules and delegative and representative mechanisms, simultaneously impartial, transparent and efficient. In other words, they need to be even more “formal” than representative “bourgeois” democracy. Beyond its anthropologic ingenuousness, the fetishization of the “constituent power” in opposition to the “constituted power” – to use Toni Negri's lexicon – demonstrates a complete miscomprehension of, and maybe a certain scorn for, the dynamics of the democratic institution as the social construction of a public space where the rules give rise to conflicts, and conflicts restructure the rules and transform the actors and their interests. The real political challenge of social movements is there, not in the deceitful dilemma between social purity and institutional contamination.
The dilemma of size
and scope
Some of the more important and active Latin American social movements
are rural movements acting in majority urban societies. It is certain that, despite
the furious smear campaigns carried out by
the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the media, a movement like
the MST has great acceptance in Brazilian opinion. However, we can't confuse
popularity with hegemony. The case of the Zapatistas is illustrative.
Are social movements the majority or the minority in
society? And if they are the minority, to what extent does this condition their
capacity for political and moral leadership in the subaltern sectors? This question,
which, at bottom, brings us back to the classic problem of the “dialectic of quantity
and quality,” is usually ignored or ultimately silenced in the current debates
on social movements in
Generally, while it may appear a trivial consideration, the
frequently minority character of social movements does not receive the
attention it deserves. The silent removal of the subject contributes the same
motivational dynamics as the middle-class intellectuals who are considered
allies of, or close to, social movements and who participate in them in various
ways (solidarity, advice, training, communication, political mediation, etc). Often,
the uprootedness and discomfort of professional intellectuals are due to their
ambiguous social location ("the dominated fraction of the dominant
class," to use Bourdieu's term), to the decline of the moral authority of
book learning and to the relative loss of prestige of specialists not in
directly 'productive' areas, resulting from the joint influence of mass
audiovisual culture and neoliberal technocratic economics. In this frustrating
and disillusioned social universe, to be alongside or within the social
movements is like taking a bath of authenticity, recharging the moral batteries
in the warmth of the popular community and feeling the pulse beat of a
sometimes idealized and sentimentalized people.
From this idea – generally implied – it is very easily extrapolated
that social movements are the potential center of gravity of the popular or subaltern,
or that the supposed “alienation” or “false consciousness” of the unorganized, nonmobilized
sectors of the people are only the distorted image, while the militant popular
movements are the teleological truth. However, a little sociological realism
would show that this is not the case. Several other factors can be mentioned,
without resorting to invoking a capitalist conspiracy to demobilize the masses,
with a much more determinant weight than social movements in the moral,
intellectual and political formation of the subaltern sectors. We mention only
two of them: television and its complex relations with the dynamics of urban
popular culture; and the extraordinary rise of Pentecostal movements. The
important subject of the changes in social consciousness and the public space by
audio-visual means – which are not, nor must they be, unilaterally “negative”
and “alienanted” – are too complex to deal with here. As for the new,
neo-Pentecostal forms of popular religion, they are seen by many observers as a
sui generis form of
modernization-individualization, all combining a range of socio-economic,
therapeutic and ethical-spiritual functions, whose meaning is not univocal.
However, not only their quantitative dimension – they reach between 15% and 20%
of the Latin American population, and proportionately more in the subaltern
sectors[11] – but more importantly, their impact on the moral and material
economy of the popular classes may make them the most massive movement of self-organization
and popular self-advancement in the history of the continent. This phenomenon, which
is just beginning to be explored by religious sociology experts, is still
totally beyond the horizon of reflection of the Latin American left.[12]
So it is not only that the “pulse of the people” beats in all these spaces, but
also that the same increasing plurality, the incongruity and the relative immeasurability
of the various spheres of the popular “lifeworld” considerably complicates the
panorama. That said, while a symbolic, ontological or sociological “center of
gravity” of the people does not exist, that fact does not mean that the subaltern
sectors are evolving in a kind of postmodern limbo of fluidity and hybridity,
forever changing and resistant to any formalization. In spite of the destructurization
of working hours and of the “symbolic precariousness” imposed by the informality
and the socioeconomic complexity of peripheral post-Fordism, the same exigencies
of survival and reproduction against neoliberal penetration themselves trace lines
of fracture and of partial recomposition, and favor the emergence of plebeian
democratic narratives around expressions like “those who do not live on other
people's work”, “the simple and working people”[13] and the various "sins" (sin tierra, sin empleo, sin viviendo; without land, jobs, housing).
In this sense, in decisive circumstances, social movements can still function as
what used to be called “vanguards of the people.”
However, only if the concrete sociological contexts – the more
or less routinized forms of coordination between the movements' protest and
political work and the everyday life of the great majority – are taken into
account, will we be able to rationally evaluate the relative effectiveness, the
scope and the hegemonic and transformative potential of their intervention. For
the same reason, the question (merely "demographic" in appearance) of
size, quality, regularity, cohesion and density of individual and collective
participation in social movements cannot be neglected, as if it is too self-evident
to be analyzed carefully and without ideological or sentimental populist
prejudices. On the other hand, only organizational ingenuity and concrete experimentation
in the "internal institutionalization" of social movements (while
decidedly rejecting the illusion of abstract counterposition of "formal
democracy" and "real democracy," or "participatory
democracy" and "representative democracy"), can give us
instruction as to finding the best way to relate to the (nonmobilized, or less
mobilized) rest of society, and simultaneously to face the dangers of dilution,
opportunism and cooptation, as well as those of professionalization of militants,
sectarianism and disconnection from reality.
The dilemma of
anticapitalism
Are social movements necessarily “antisystemic”? Do they foreshadow, in some way that is not purely rhetorical, the overcoming of the present patterns of production and redistribution of social wealth? In reality, this question divides into two: (1) Can social movements exist without being politically progressive and/or socially emancipatory? (2) Are progressive social movements enscribed with a credible perspective of overthrowing capitalism?
In order to answer the first question, it seems to me
difficult to deny that mobilizations like, for example, those that were
fomented against lawlessness by Juan Carlos Blumberg in Argentina, or the
“March of Silence” against delinquency in México City[14], display all the classic
social movement characteristics defined by sociology.[15] The existence of
clearly “reactionary” social movements - and perhaps of reactionary values in
some progressive movements - can only strengthen my line of argument. However,
for reasons of space and convenience, I am limited to examining the problem of
anticapitalist or socialist potential of social movements generally recognized
as "progressive." The problem has two aspects: the beliefs and
rational expectations of the movements, and the concrete content of its
practices in action and organization.
James Petras, the verbose
This is highly symptomatic of the present ideological
situation of the left in that nobody in
I see two reasons for this slight omission. First, beyond superficial and unconvincing reactions – like: "the Soviet Union was the victim of an imperialist conspiracy," or the reverse: "we never had anything to do with the Soviet model"[19] – in Latin America, the resounding failure of the regimes of Eastern Europe and some of its clients and allies in the third world – not to mention the paradoxical evolution of the People's Republic of China – was never processed properly by the left on the level of theoretical and strategic reflection. This applies a fortiori to a subject that is completely taboo in the Latin American left, what some Cuban official economists discreetly call "the exhaustion of the regime of extensive growth," meaning the catastrophic performance of the Soviet-style command economy on the Caribbean island – subsidized before by the USSR, now by emigration and tourism dollars.[20]
The second reason, intimately tied with the first, is that on the continent there is no reflection, not even the yearning to seriously reflect on the institutional forms, the economic and anthropological incentives and the motivational mechanisms that could make viable, in the medium and long term, a democratic socialism in the world in general, and third world countries in particular.[21]
However, the Latin American anticapitalist and
anti-imperialist left share a tendency to frequently make an escape from
problematizing the concrete institutionality of postcapitalist society by
postulating the existence of an anthropological communitarian and solidaristic
substratum that would recover and revitalize the ability to define the
essential characteristics of an indigenous socialism or an alternative
development model. There exist, obviously, philosophical and ideological
antecedents of this thesis in several syntheses of socialism and romantic populism
that emerged in nineteenth century Europe – we recall the famous debate between
Marx and Vera Zasulich on the Russian mir
(traditional peasant community) – and various equivalent formations working the
same way in other geographic-cultural spaces. Likewise, in
It will be enough to mention the emblematic formulation – midway
between a theory and a catchphrase – of one of the principal opinionmakers of
the continental left, Eduardo Galeano: "It is based on hope and not
nostalgia that we must recover a mode of communitarian production and a way of
life founded not on greed but on solidarity, on ancient liberties and the
identification of human beings with nature. […] A lethal system for the world
and its inhabitants, it befouls the water, annihilates the Earth and poisons
the air and soil, is in violent contradiction with the cultures that maintain
that the Earth is sacred because we, its children, are sacred. These despised and negated cultures deal with
the Earth as their mother and not as raw material and a source of income. Against
the capitalist law of profit, they propose a life of sharing, reciprocity,
mutual aid that in the past inspired Thomas More's utopia and that today helps
to discover the American face of socialism, whose deeper roots lie in the
tradition of the community."
In the same way, but with a more precise lexicon, Anibal
Quijano maintains that “the socially oriented private sector and its nonstate
public sphere,” as they are found in Andean communities, can serve more as a
basis for a “noninstrumental reason” focused "more on the ends than on the
means, and more on liberation than on power.”[22] The apparent ideological
plausibility of this exposition has been considerably strenghthened by the
emergence in several countries, in particular Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador and
Bolivia, of powerful indigenous-rural mobilizations which laid the foundations for
a politically autonomous indianismo –
rejecting the paternalism and "ventriloquism"[23] of traditional
indigenous currents promoted by white-mestizo intellectuals – with the practices
of self-managed organization and reproduction/survival of popular movements
like the Brazilian MST (productive settlements, systems of skills development
and training), the Argentinian piqueteros
(various dining halls, schools, cooperatives and enterprises), or their worker
compatriots of the empresas recuperadas
(worker cooperatives in occupied workspaces). Naturally, to those who would tar
the advocates of a community-inspired indigenous socialism with naivete or
atavism – particularly from the point of view of defending representative
democracy and liberal modernity (either in its neoliberal or more or less
social-democratic variants) and economic and social efficiency – Indianists and
neo-communalists answer in general that they don't seek to return to an idealized
communal agrarian life themselves, nor do they reject the essential conquests
of modernity, but that they arrive at a harmonious synthesis according to the
social and cultural conditions of the Latin American people. In summary,
socialism no longer would be “Soviets plus electricity,” but “ayllu [Incan political unit] plus
optical fiber,” or “self-management plus the Internet.”
Unfortunately, at this level of sociological abstraction,
arguments pro and con can be posed indefinitely without ever reaching a
substantial conclusion. I want to bring them down from the stratospheric
heights of this civilizational debate on modernity and tradition, or on efficiency
and autonomy, and try to land it on the solid ground of concrete interactions
and social evolutions, without teleological prejudices about its content being
either alienating or emancipatory. For that, it is essential to settle accounts
with three systematic tendencies of the Latin American social-comunitarian discourse:
moralism, ideologism and abstract utopianism.
1. Moralism. There is a systematic confusion of
anthropological and economic categories – like the notions of
"reciprocity," "redistribution" and "market" – or
social categories – like "collectivism," "communitarianism,"
and "individualism" – with ethical or motivational categories – like
"egoism" and "altruism." This confusion is very much
connected to the fact that, in the left, debate about collective values,
individual motivations, and forms of social organization, is usually implicit and
emotional, rather than explicit and rational. In addition, the cheap moralism
of certain sides of the left is an indirect effect of the theoretical amoralism
of officially recognized marxisms and, in large part – although with a greater
theoretical and philological complexity – of Marx himself.[24] This is not the
place to enter this complex debate, but it is enough to mention two significant
aspects: a) in epistemological terms, it is well known that, in the ecological
and demographic-cultural context generally used by Marx,
"reciprocity" is a category that can be perfectly reinterpreted in
terms of "rational egoist" strategy[25]; b) on the more normative
level, it is no coincidence that the resurgence of ethical debate in
contemporary neo-Marxism should involve an exhaustive confrontation with
liberal – in the political sense – of theories social and economic justice, nor
that it should be marked by a noticeable convergence with their most radical
ideas.[26]
2. Ideologism. When, for example, the Bolivian kataristas call on their followers to
"remove Marx and Jesus from their head" and to replace them with the
indigenous cosmovisión [worldview], they
bring about a surreptitious denaturalization of the anthropological-cultural
bosses of perception and interpretation of the current reality in the
rural-indigenous communities of the Andean altiplano. The “cosmovisión” of
precapitalist peoples is a contextualized symbolic practice, not a
quasi-universalist doctrine like those of monotheist religions or modern political
philosophies. Notions of "reciprocity" and "community" lose
a great part of their real substance and material effectiveness when they rise to
the status of ideological concepts. I don't want to deny that, in the dialectic
of the "traditional" and the "modern," very often the
emotional coloration that the identitary memory of ancient practices brings to
such-and-such type of "modern" social or economic aspiration plays an important role, in that the partly
imagined past is transformed into a criterion of the desired future by means of
a complicated alchemy of necessities and expectations. In this sense, the
presence and/or recovery of precapitalist communitarian practices can have a
strong emancipatory meaning, and not just for those who directly live or lived
with these practices. However, purely ideological exaltation of a solidaristic
“cosmovisión” of original peoples entails the danger of double talk and double standard, in particular when the rhetoric of
community and reciprocity cover a perfectly classical and “occidental”
strategic rationality,[27] including maximized collective or individual
behaviors that could be absolutely legitimate if they were taken on as they
are, instead of being mystified.
3. Even without getting into the slight problem of the
interaction between the local/national and the global, we can say that not only
is society not a grand ayllu –
including societies like Bolivia, Ecuador or Guatemala – but it cannot be, and does
not have to be.[29] On the other hand, the possible organizational form of a
complex postcapitalist society – and anyone who thinks getting beyond
capitalism, alienation and the division of labor, much less eliminating them
completely, requires unilaterally reducing social complexity, is deeply
mistaken – cannot consist of a simple reproduction of the societal scale of
local interactions based on minga
[indigenous community gathering], ayni
[culture of reciprocity] or mutirão
[Brazilian collective], but requires a sui
generis combination of elements of centralized (state) redistribution,
mercantile interchange and communitarian reciprocity. The fact is, as I
indicated, we do not have a detailed prescription, nor do we know all the
ingredients in this combination – and there is no certainty that they can even be
obtained in a humanly conceivable horizon of possibilities – that would enable
us to build castles in the air, even castles of beautiful pre-Columbian
architecture.
In this sense, the very real vernacular practices[30] of
communitarian reciprocity and solidarity found in the daily life of the Latin
American popular sectors should not function as the ideological standard in getting
beyond the neoliberal model of development, but more modestly, and in
circumstances that have to be determined cautiously, like (1) the forms of
social capital that they can contribute, on a par with other social forms and
dynamics, to a mode of alternative development or to the fight against
dependency and subalternity, and (2) within a concrete sociological substratum
- among other moral and material factors - of an ethical imaginary able to
deconstruct, at least in part, the illusion of the "naturality," the
"necessity" and the "eternality" of capitalist relations of
production and domination. However, no existing linear sociological determinism
exists that can guarantee that, by itself, such-and-such traditional or
communitarian solidaristic practice, or even such-and-such practice of "modern”
and urban popular self-management, has a potential that is “pansocietal” (in
the sense of being applicable to a broad range of social interactions beyond
its own ecological context) or "intermodal" (in the sense of
concretely prefiguring the possible postcapitalist political and economic
institutionalization of a mode of production and social organization[31]). It
is not even necessary to support Hernando
And so we return to the problematic character and the ambivalence of the supposed “antisystemic” character of social movements; not only on the level of its relative ideological indetermination (uncertainties of socialist perspective), but of the movements' pattern of “alternative” practices that seem to justify extrapolations on their anticapitalist potential. I do not mean that social movements are totally prisoners of the visible range of prevailing relations of production and domination, to be modified only in extremely limited and perhaps ephemeral spaces; however, this assumed anticapitalist or postcapitalist potential cannot be evaluated without taking into account the totality of political and ideological mediations, on the one hand, and on the other, of “infrastructural” socio-economic and anthropological conditions that condition their content and range of influence.
Provisional Conclusions
As I said at the outset, the viability of social movements
is a sine qua non for any transformative
dynamic, but the existence of powerful and aggresive social movements is not
enough to infinitely expand the boundaries of the possible. We see in this
illusion a rather anemic, or falsely humble version of the historical optimism
of the traditional socialist workers' movement--one no longer looks to the
infinite wisdom of the party, but to the infinite creativity of the movements--that
was founded on excessively simplified philosophical and epistemological
premises: everything desirable is possible, and, by virtue of the “laws of
history,” everything supposedly possible is inevitable. Nowadays, movements
that take part in the dynamics of
the World Social Forums are happy to
affirm that 'another world is possible,' without taking the trouble to define the paths to this other world. This caution is not so questionable in
itself, but lack of definition can be another form of “living a lie” for a left that often has to deal with
emergencies involving power and leadership. So, new forms must be found to
outline and articulate “minimum program” and “maximum program,” an intensely
political task that no social movement can deal with in isolation.
I
will probably be accused of advocating a mixture of “politico” elitism and
vulgar reformist “posibilismo,” thus demonstrating
the pettiness of my utopian imagination. As the Argentinean comrades of the
Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD) of La Matanza say, the accusation of
reformism does not worry me much, since “It's tough to be attacked as a
reformist when you don't know you are one. But it's good to know it, because
then people can't guilt-trip you."[33] I am perfectly willing to submit to
this type of challenge as long as it comes with a minimum of developed argument
and empirical illustrations. That is why, in a later article that will be able
to perhaps pick up on observations and possible criticisms provoked by these
reflections, I will set out to develop a more positive agenda and try to apply
the famous questions of Kant – What can
I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope? – to the strategic
perspectives of the social movements.
[1] The large Renault auto factory, labor stronghold of the French Communist
Party.
[2] Change The World
Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today,
[3] Raúl Zibechi, “Movimiento social y poder estatal:
relaciones peligrosas”,
[4] Alvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad.
Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en
[5] Fernando Guerrero y Pablo Ospina, El poder de la
comunidad. Ajuste estructural y movimiento indígena en los
[6] In fact, participation in the government of [coup leader and Ecuadorian President] Gutiérrez was not the cause of the crisis and of the division of the movement, as Zibechi suggests. To the contrary, the internal divisions of the CONAIE [Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador], and the electoral appetites of some “social” leaders that oriented [CONAIE’s] Pachakutik “political” movement toward alliance with Gutiérrez, were only a little worse than the lack of a candidate chosen by consensus, and the division of the center-left.
[7] Subcomandante Marcos, “Leer un video,” published in various electronic media.
[8] As reported by Pablo Ospina.
[9] Alvaro García Linera, op. cit.
[10] Some of the more important and active Latin American social
movements are rural movements working in majority urban societies. It is
certain that, in spite of ferocious slander campaigns carried out by the
government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the media, a movement like MST
gained great acceptance in Brazilian opinion. However, one should not confuse
popularity with hegemony. The case of the Zapatistas is quite illustrative.
[11] It is possible to make (obviously imprecise) estimations,
on the bases of the approximate aggregation of national data and the rate of
exceptional growth observed in several countries. See David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of
Protestantism in
[12] The Brazilian sociologist Clara Mafra, for example,
deplores the fact that left feminists are unable to perceive the potential for
self-organization and social reconstruction of women's lives offered by evangelical
churches in the marginalized sectors, in spite of their relatively conservative
conception of gender relations (interview with the author). In many depressed
favelas and barrios, they are the only organizations able to fight against the
tremendous unravelling of the social fabric. See Clara Mafra, Os evangélicos,
Jorge Zahar Editor,
[13] The quoted formulas are from Álvaro García, op. cit.
[14] See Subcomandante Marcos, op. cit.
[15] See, for example, Erik Neveu, Sociología de los
movimientos sociales, Abya Yala,
[16] Mario Hernandez, interview with James Petras, revista La Maza, reproducido in www.rebelion.org, abril de 2004.
[17] Schafik Hándal, “El FMLN y la vigencia
[18] Nobody except proponents of the subversive “exodus” of the movements [Hardt, Negri], and “changing the world without taking power.” Although they are rarely explicit, I suppose they start from the hypothesis that popular organizations in radical rupture from any form of political institutionality or systemic functionality spontaneously exude comunism, like spiders spinning webs. Mutant spiders from science-fiction movies, probably, since one assumes that they could little by little cover the entire planet and radically remodel its material and spiritual infrastructure with this web of self-management.
[19] In a debate in
[20] The formula "exhaustion of the regime of extensive
growth" comes from Luis Suárez Salazar, former director of Centro de
Estudios sobre América in
[21] A notable exception is the Brazilian economist Paul
Singer, historical militant of the PT and specialist of the third sector, that
often mentions classic books of Nove and Kornai: Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism,
Allen & Unwin,
[22] Both authors – Galeano and Quijano – are cited in Jorge Larrain, Identidad y modernidad en América Latina, Oceano, México, 2004.
[23] The notion of political "ventriloquism" comes from the Ecuadoran anthropologist Andrés Guerrero.
[24] See, in particular: Steven Lukes, Marx and Morality, Oxford University Press, 1985; Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, 150, March-April 1985.
[25] Literature on the subject is considerable, although
little has spread outside specialized academic atmospheres. See, among others:
Robert Axelrod, The evolution of
cooperation, Basic Books,
[26] On the subject, Bolivian readers can consult my
article, “El pensamiento filosófico de John Rawls”, in El Juguete Rabioso, 80,
La Paz, May 2003, and my introduction to Amartya Sen, La libertad como
compromiso social, Plural, La Paz, 2003. A good introduction in Castillian,
with ample mention of the Marxist debate, is Will Kymlicka, Filosofía política
contemporanea, Ariel,
[27] That is to say, in fact, universal, in my modest
opinion (not very popular in these times of postcolonial relativism).
[28] Naturally, the indigenous leaders do not have a monopoly on this type of behavior, by far, and often they must “command obedience” and respect perfomance mechanisms of accounts and of democratic assembly control which the traditional political or union leaders are not subject to. Nevertheless, that does not change anything of substance in my argument.
[29] I cannot develop this subject in the space of this article. I will only mention that it conforms to much of the minimum exigencies of sociological realism such as the Marxian conception – totally ignored by various orthodox Marxisms and a large part of the heterodox – of the full development of the individual. On the liberal-romantic type of philosophical individualism of Marx and his aporias, see, among others: Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis. Genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique, Gallimard, París, 1977; Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique. Essai sur l’idée de marché, Seuil, París, 1979; Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1985; Gianfranco La Grassa, Costanzo Preve, La fine di una teoria: il collasso del marxismo storico del Novecento, Uncopli, Milán, 1996.
[30] See Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Boyars,
[31] The term "intermodal" is used by Costanzo
Preve, op. cit., to describe the classic Marxist conception of the industrial
working class, whose historical-structural location anticipates the overthrow
of class society.
[32] Hernando de Soto, El Otro Sendero, Editorial Diana, Mexico 1986; El misterio del capital, Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 2002.
[33] “Seduciendo al capital: el MTD de La Matanza y sus alianzas con los empresarios”, 13/7/2004, www.lavaca.org.
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