el_chavista
28th April 2010, 18:17
An article by Javo Ferreira from the LOR-CI (Revolutionary Workers league - Fourth International) at http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=104177 [in Spanish]
"Between the hybridization of the agrarian world and its populist idealization"
The overwhelming victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia on December 6, exceeding 62% of the votes, tends to consolidate the course set four years ago after the diversion of the revolutionary process in October 2003 and May-June 2005. In the last four years and drawing heavy fighting with the most rancid of the pro-imperialist and landowner reaction, the government of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (AGL) has been gradually laying the groundwork for the construction of a new legal and institutional politics, conjuring the specter of civil war in recent years.
This reconstruction of the Bolivian semi-bourgeois state, despite occasional and important frictions with the imperialism, has been brought forward on behalf of the so-called fighting against the colonial legacy of racism, idealizing forms of social organization, customs and language of indigenous peoples.
However, this "fighting" has been carried out without affecting social economic interests of holders of racism, ie, entrepreneurs, bankers and landowners. In the last four years they have signed new contracts with multinational oil and mineral deposits such as copper, iron or lithium, or 1 million ha. have been distributed to the landless, without affecting the fertile land ownership.
Still, some say, following AGL and Evo Morales that the construction of a new State, which intends to take steps in the decolonization of Bolivian society based on inter-cultural policies, would be a preliminary stage, along with the development of an "Andean Capitalism", in what has come to be called "Community Socialism or Socialism XXI Century."
For the first time after 500 years, indigenous peoples seem to take a leading and decisive role in building the state, based on the recognition of the national character of the 36 indigenous peoples contained in Bolivia.
While the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), after expropriating the Revolution of 1952, tried to enfranchised the Indians on the basis of their homogenization in the "Bolivianhood" dissolving or making some folkloric forms of economic and political organization, and emptying the content of cultural practices, today Evo Morales' MAS (Movement towards Socialism) seeks the enfranchising on the basis of recognition of national and cultural differences. Like the MNR, explicitly proclaiming class alliance, today the complementarity of opposites, characteristic of the indigenous world view, is "refunctionalized" to pursue a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and the landlords.
In this job, the government's team tries to conceptually reconstruct reality, as if it were the product of overlapping between different forms and logic of productions, oppressed by capital, but kept themselves as an almost pure form.
This vision, resembling the superposition of tectonic plates, has tried to deny the hybridization or its organic links with the capitalist economy.
This operation has the advantage of creating a false dichotomy between "Indian" and "Western", setting in the first place not the struggle against capital, but the inter-cultural "Dialogue" and therefore, the institutional re-engineering of it, possibly developing such a dialog as the new face of indigenous autonomy, recognizing certain rights of indigenous peoples.
-------------
This resurgence of the Aymara national sentiment, as any nationalism must appeal to a mythical glorious past, reconstructing the history and recovering the deeds of the indigenous struggle as was the upraising of Willka Zarate, Tupac Katari and many others.
But this Aymara or more generally Indian nationalism, got the urban world as its birthplace, establishing links and institutionalizing its relations with the agricultural world, idealizing the communal forms, being the cities which will redefine the social economic demands of the indigenous movement, such as employment, wages, equal employment opportunities and their schools.
If in Mariategui times it was stated that the Indian problem was the problem of land, today we must say that the Indian question can only be solved in a deep entanglement with the question of "class", with the "social" issue.
For the State from 1952 has legitimacy in time -and thanks to the measures taken, such as land fragmentation, and others- it made progress in internal differentiation of the indigenous movement, incorporating some of its members to join the dominant elite, such as Victor Hugo Cardenas, Fernando Untoja, and many others who prefer to maintain the current state rather than lose their privileges.
Only through the articulation of class actions, ie fighting the fundamental agents of discrimination -bourgeoisie, landowners and government bureaucracy, we can solve the historical legacy of colony racism by the Republic and the "Bolivianhood". There is no possibility of genuine progress in decolonization if you avoid the socialist revolution.
----
We see how the capitalist economy "refunctionalizes" the forms of ownership and organization of other modes of production, depending on the reproduction of capital and market development. Here there is a radical antagonism between communal economy and capitalist economy, so there is a relationship of interdependence, and even more than that, since the communal economy and its system of "aynuqas" (kind of indian land ownership) form organic part of the special economic-social capitalist and rural formation in the Andes.
----
...here there is no semi-feudalism, but there is no formal "subsumption" of labor under capital either, as community members and farmers do not face the market as free men.
The landowner coerces, physical and legal violence, the communities for the respective tax. We are in the presence of transitional forms of work organization whose products are consumed as a financier by the landowner and in some special cases in the transformation of income into capital for mining, but still has not come to develop control capital over labor.
Perry Anderson:
"For a genuine socialist culture be a true culture it should not insatiably seek what is new, defined simply as what comes next, destined to be quickly cornered with the detritus of the old, but rather a culture that multiply what is different, in a variety of competing styles and practices much more than what has never existed before: a diversity based on plurality and complexity of possible forms of life much higher than those of any free community of equals, and would not be divided by class, race or gender. The axes of the aesthetic life would be, in other words, horizontal and not vertical. The schedule would stop bullying or organizing the awareness of art. The vocation of a socialist revolution, in this sense, it is not to prolong or serve modernity, but to abolish it. "[Modernidad y Revolución, Perry Anderson, Leviatan pág. 16, España, 1984, núm. 16 ]
"Between the hybridization of the agrarian world and its populist idealization"
The overwhelming victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia on December 6, exceeding 62% of the votes, tends to consolidate the course set four years ago after the diversion of the revolutionary process in October 2003 and May-June 2005. In the last four years and drawing heavy fighting with the most rancid of the pro-imperialist and landowner reaction, the government of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (AGL) has been gradually laying the groundwork for the construction of a new legal and institutional politics, conjuring the specter of civil war in recent years.
This reconstruction of the Bolivian semi-bourgeois state, despite occasional and important frictions with the imperialism, has been brought forward on behalf of the so-called fighting against the colonial legacy of racism, idealizing forms of social organization, customs and language of indigenous peoples.
However, this "fighting" has been carried out without affecting social economic interests of holders of racism, ie, entrepreneurs, bankers and landowners. In the last four years they have signed new contracts with multinational oil and mineral deposits such as copper, iron or lithium, or 1 million ha. have been distributed to the landless, without affecting the fertile land ownership.
Still, some say, following AGL and Evo Morales that the construction of a new State, which intends to take steps in the decolonization of Bolivian society based on inter-cultural policies, would be a preliminary stage, along with the development of an "Andean Capitalism", in what has come to be called "Community Socialism or Socialism XXI Century."
For the first time after 500 years, indigenous peoples seem to take a leading and decisive role in building the state, based on the recognition of the national character of the 36 indigenous peoples contained in Bolivia.
While the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), after expropriating the Revolution of 1952, tried to enfranchised the Indians on the basis of their homogenization in the "Bolivianhood" dissolving or making some folkloric forms of economic and political organization, and emptying the content of cultural practices, today Evo Morales' MAS (Movement towards Socialism) seeks the enfranchising on the basis of recognition of national and cultural differences. Like the MNR, explicitly proclaiming class alliance, today the complementarity of opposites, characteristic of the indigenous world view, is "refunctionalized" to pursue a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and the landlords.
In this job, the government's team tries to conceptually reconstruct reality, as if it were the product of overlapping between different forms and logic of productions, oppressed by capital, but kept themselves as an almost pure form.
This vision, resembling the superposition of tectonic plates, has tried to deny the hybridization or its organic links with the capitalist economy.
This operation has the advantage of creating a false dichotomy between "Indian" and "Western", setting in the first place not the struggle against capital, but the inter-cultural "Dialogue" and therefore, the institutional re-engineering of it, possibly developing such a dialog as the new face of indigenous autonomy, recognizing certain rights of indigenous peoples.
-------------
This resurgence of the Aymara national sentiment, as any nationalism must appeal to a mythical glorious past, reconstructing the history and recovering the deeds of the indigenous struggle as was the upraising of Willka Zarate, Tupac Katari and many others.
But this Aymara or more generally Indian nationalism, got the urban world as its birthplace, establishing links and institutionalizing its relations with the agricultural world, idealizing the communal forms, being the cities which will redefine the social economic demands of the indigenous movement, such as employment, wages, equal employment opportunities and their schools.
If in Mariategui times it was stated that the Indian problem was the problem of land, today we must say that the Indian question can only be solved in a deep entanglement with the question of "class", with the "social" issue.
For the State from 1952 has legitimacy in time -and thanks to the measures taken, such as land fragmentation, and others- it made progress in internal differentiation of the indigenous movement, incorporating some of its members to join the dominant elite, such as Victor Hugo Cardenas, Fernando Untoja, and many others who prefer to maintain the current state rather than lose their privileges.
Only through the articulation of class actions, ie fighting the fundamental agents of discrimination -bourgeoisie, landowners and government bureaucracy, we can solve the historical legacy of colony racism by the Republic and the "Bolivianhood". There is no possibility of genuine progress in decolonization if you avoid the socialist revolution.
----
We see how the capitalist economy "refunctionalizes" the forms of ownership and organization of other modes of production, depending on the reproduction of capital and market development. Here there is a radical antagonism between communal economy and capitalist economy, so there is a relationship of interdependence, and even more than that, since the communal economy and its system of "aynuqas" (kind of indian land ownership) form organic part of the special economic-social capitalist and rural formation in the Andes.
----
...here there is no semi-feudalism, but there is no formal "subsumption" of labor under capital either, as community members and farmers do not face the market as free men.
The landowner coerces, physical and legal violence, the communities for the respective tax. We are in the presence of transitional forms of work organization whose products are consumed as a financier by the landowner and in some special cases in the transformation of income into capital for mining, but still has not come to develop control capital over labor.
Perry Anderson:
"For a genuine socialist culture be a true culture it should not insatiably seek what is new, defined simply as what comes next, destined to be quickly cornered with the detritus of the old, but rather a culture that multiply what is different, in a variety of competing styles and practices much more than what has never existed before: a diversity based on plurality and complexity of possible forms of life much higher than those of any free community of equals, and would not be divided by class, race or gender. The axes of the aesthetic life would be, in other words, horizontal and not vertical. The schedule would stop bullying or organizing the awareness of art. The vocation of a socialist revolution, in this sense, it is not to prolong or serve modernity, but to abolish it. "[Modernidad y Revolución, Perry Anderson, Leviatan pág. 16, España, 1984, núm. 16 ]