Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Robert Lemieux (1941-2008)

The Quebec media report today the sad news that Robert Lemieux, an outstanding supporter of Quebec independence and leading attorney for political prisoners in the Sixties and early Seventies, died suddenly in his sleep Sunday night. He was 66.

Robert, whom some of us on these lists got to know during the War Measures crisis of 1970, defended many of the leading victims of the Trudeau-Bourassa repression, and was himself a defendant in a showcase trial with Michel Chartrand, Pierre Vallières, Charles Gagnon, and Jacques Larue-Langlois, accused of FLQ membership and seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government. Gagnon and Larue-Langlois were acquitted, and at a second trial the charges against the other three, including Lemieux, who acted as defence counsel, were withdrawn.

I well remember the occasion in 1971 when Lemieux and Michel Chartrand spoke with eloquence and passion — in Her Majesty’s language — to a mass audience that packed Convocation Hall in Toronto. It was probably the largest rally in solidarity with the Québécois ever held in English Canada.

As the article below from today’s Le Devoir indicates, some time after defending many of the War Measures defendants, Lemieux, who was being harassed by the Quebec Bar, withdrew from practice, moved to the remote community of Sept-Îles on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and worked for a while as a gas station attendant. He lator became a workers’ advocate and negotiator in labour and family law, and on occasion returned to Montréal to defend persons being prosecuted for their activities in support of independence and other progressive causes.

– RF

Robert Lemieux (1941-2008) - L'avocat du FLQ s'éteint

Brian Myles
Édition du mardi 22 janvier 2008

[Le Devoir]

L’avocat et militant indépendantiste Robert Lemieux, un ardent défenseur des membres du Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), s’est éteint durant son sommeil à son domicile de Sept-Îles, dans la nuit de dimanche à hier.

M. Lemieux, 66 ans, a été retrouvé hier matin par sa conjointe, Johanne, inerte sur un sofa. Il s’était rendu récemment à l’hôpital en se plaignant de maux de tête et de problèmes de vision. Selon les premières constations des policiers de la Sûreté du Québec (SQ), appelés sur les lieux en matinée, il s’agit d’une mort naturelle. Un décès qui prive le Québec d’un deuxième pilier des droits civiques, deux mois après le décès de l’ex-juge en chef de la Cour suprême, Antonio Lamer.

«C’est une curieuse coïncidence qu’il soit décédé le jour de l’anniversaire de naissance de Martin Luther King. C’était lui aussi un défenseur des libertés publiques au premier degré», fait remarquer l’ex-felquiste Paul Rose. Toute sa vie, Me Lemieux a gardé des contacts avec ses anciens clients du FLQ qu’il a entraînés dans de véritables procès politiques dans les années 70. «Il a fait ces procès en respectant les convictions des gens, et non pas en leur faisant nier leurs gestes, explique Paul Rose. Il avait beaucoup de respect pour l’engagement politique, social et culturel des accusés qu’il défendait.»

Dans la tourmente d’octobre 70

Reçu au Barreau en 1966, Robert Félix Lemieux était promu à une brillante et lucrative carrière d’avocat au terme de ses études parmi les «Anglais» à l’université McGill. Parfaitement bilingue, il décroche un poste au sein du cabinet O’Brien, Home, Hall, Nolan, Saunders, O’Brien et Smythe. En 1966, les Vallières et Gagnon d’un certain Québec en ébullition sociale et politique le détournent irrémédiablement de la pratique conventionnelle du droit. Le Comité d’aide au groupe Vallières-Gagnon, fondé par Jacques Larue-Langlois, cherche de l’aide. Pierre Vallières et Charles Gagnon, les deux principaux idéologues du FLQ, ont été arrêtés à New York lors d’une manifestation devant le siège social de l’ONU. Rapatriés au Canada, ils sont accusés de meurtre en raison de leurs écrits révolutionnaires (c’était avant l’adoption des chartes des droits).

Âgé de 25 ans, Robert Lemieux est «déprimé» chez O’Brien, Haume, Hall, Nolan, Saunders et Smythe. D’autant plus qu’il est un indépendantiste de la première heure qui milite au sein du Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN) de Pierre Bourgault. Il se tourne donc vers l’assistance judiciaire (l’ancêtre de l’aide juridique) pour obtenir des mandats au criminel. Il tombe par hasard sur le dossier de Vallières et Gagnon qu’il accepte de représenter. Le livre de Vallières, Nègres blancs d’Amérique, constitue à ses yeux «un chef-d’œuvre de littérature révolutionnaire». Le jeune avocat mène avec succès son tout premier procès politique et il obtient l’acquittement des deux têtes pensantes du FLQ, ce qui lui vaudra d’être congédié du cabinet O’Brien, Haume, Hall, Nolan, Saunders et Smythe en 1968.

Me Lemieux gagne en notoriété lors de la crise d’octobre 1970, à la suite de l’enlèvement du ministre Pierre Laporte, en agissant à titre de négociateur du FLQ auprès du gouvernement. Il était hors de question qu’il se fasse conduire aux séances de négociation par des policiers de la Sûreté du Québec (SQ). Un jeune reporter judiciaire prometteur, Claude Poirier, devient donc son chauffeur attitré pendant la durée de la crise. La Loi des mesures de guerre, et l’emprisonnement de centaines de militants indépendantistes sans histoire de violence, constitue l’épreuve la plus pénible de sa carrière.

Robert Lemieux a payé un prix pour sa solidarité avec les felquistes. Avec Pierre Vallières, Charles Gagnon, Michel Chartrand et Jacques Larue-Langlois, il est accusé d’appartenance au FLQ et de conspiration séditieuse pour renverser le gouvernement du Canada. À la suite de l’acquittement de Gagnon et de Larue-Langlois lors d’un premier procès, les accusations contre les trois autres seront retirées au fil du deuxième procès. Me Lemieux défendra par la suite de nombreux membres du FLQ impliqués dans les événements d’octobre 70. «Les juges le haïssaient à mort. Il les avait tous contre lui, à part peut-être un ou deux. C’était un plaideur très humain, très authentique. C’était sa force. Un gars ne pouvait pas lui conter n’importe quoi», se souvient Paul Rose.

La célébrité pesait lourd sur ses épaules. Tombé sous le charme de Sept-Îles, ce Montréalais d’origine y déménage en 1974... pour ne jamais en revenir. Lemieux appréciait la mer, les kilomètres de plage sans fin et les grands espaces de la Côte-Nord. Il a vécu pauvrement de son propre aveu, en travaillant momentanément dans une station service, à une époque où il avait des ennuis avec le Barreau du Québec. Robert Lemieux a cependant pratiqué le métier d’avocat toute sa vie, notamment dans le droit du travail et le droit de la famille. Grâce à ses talents de négociateur, il a parfois ramené l’harmonie au sein de couples brisés en apparence, relate Paul Rose. «Ça ne lui donnait pas d’argent, parce que, là, il perdait sa cause. Mais c’était un homme de principe, un des rares avocats qui ne pensaient pas seulement à l’argent», affirme Paul Rose.

Robert Lemieux a continué de défendre certains clients à Montréal, dont Hans Marotte. En 1988, le jeune étudiant devait répondre de 86 accusations pour avoir déroulé une banderole sur la croix du mont Royal et vandalisé des commerces qui ne respectaient pas la loi 101. Me Lemieux avait très bien su demeurer dans le cadre légal, tout en faisant un autre procès politique, cette fois sur la survie du français, se rappelle Hans Marotte. Celui-ci a été condamné à des travaux communautaires pour 33 accusations de méfaits. Par un merveilleux tour de passe-passe, l’accusation la plus importante, concernant la bannière apposée sur la croix du mont Royal, a été retirée. Robert Lemieux avait réussi à semer la pagaille. «Plus personne ne savait à qui appartenait la croix. Plus personne ne pouvait dire si elle avait été donnée ou prêtée à la Ville par la Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Donc, il n’y avait plus de victime!», raconte Hans Marotte en en riant encore.

Michel Chartrand, Robert Lemieux

Michel Chartrand (left) with Robert Lemieux at demonstration of 3,000 in honour of the Patriotes of the 1837-38 insurrection, on the first anniversary of the War Measures crisis, October 16, 1971.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Indianismo and Marxism: The mismatch of two revolutionary rationales

 

Introduction by Richard Fidler -- This important article by Álvaro García Linera, now vice-president of Bolivia, was first published in 2005. It traces the contradictory evolution of the two most influential revolutionary currents in the country's 20th century history and argues that Marxism, as originally interpreted by its Bolivian adherents, failed to address the outstanding concerns of the Indigenous majority. García Linera suggests, however, that the evolution of indianismo in recent decades opens perspectives for a renewal of Marxist thought and potentially the reconciliation of the two currents in a higher synthesis. Although framed within the Bolivian context, his argument clearly has implications for the national and anti-imperialist struggle in other parts of Abya Yale (the indigenous name for the western hemisphere).

Although Bolivia won formal independence from Spain in 1825, its national character remained fragile and incomplete. Not only did it lose significant territories over the years — to Brazil, Chile and, in the 1930s, Paraguay (the Chaco War) — the continuing existence of semifeudal property relations in agriculture deprived its overwhelmingly campesino Indigenous majority of property in land and was the material basis for their oppression as peoples. Indianismo developed among Bolivia's three dozen Indigenous peoples as an ideological reaction to this oppression, but only in recent years has it emerged as a dominant force in the political life of the country, in a process outlined by García Linera in the following article.

The Marxist current, on the other hand, developed primarily among the urban and mining proletariat and paid little heed to the distinct concerns and interests of the Indigenous majority as Indigenous peoples. The Theses of Pulacayo, for example, a political program adopted by the miners' union in 1946 under Trotskyist influence, while singling out agrarian reform as a central demand, advanced no demands that would encompass the Indigenous component within its strategy for permanent revolution. See also “Bolivia – From Colonialism to Indianism” (http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2007/05/bolivia-from-colonialism-to-in...).

“For this Marxism", García Linera writes, “there were neither Indians nor community, and one of the richest veins of classical Marxist thinking was blocked and rejected as an interpretative tool of Bolivian reality.” Insensitivity to the Indigenous reality inhibited the Marxists' ability to win the allegiance of the Indigenous masses, who for decades turned instead toward the nation-building program of a non-Marxist revolutionary nationalism, while developing distinctive Indigenous perspectives within that framework.

Although his article does not explore that classical Marxist vein, García Linera is clearly alluding to the writings of such leading Latin American Marxists as José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a Peruvian whose conceptual theorisation of the Indigenous reality was strongly influenced by the Bolshevik approach to Indigenous peoples and anti-imperialist movements, as well as by a current in Western Marxism represented most famously by Antonio Gramsci that emphasised the importance of national and cultural considerations in the development of mass revolutionary consciousness.

I have translated García Linera’s article from the version published in the Mexican daily La Jornada, December 20, 2007, under the title “Indianismo y Marxismo: El Desencuentro de dos razones revolucionarias”. The ellipses in the translation follow those in La Jornada’s text.

****


Indianismo and Marxism:* The mismatch of two revolutionary rationales

by Álvaro García Linera

Over the last hundred years, five major ideologies or “conceptions of the world” of a rebellious and emancipatory nature have developed in Bolivia. The first of these narratives of social emancipation was anarchism, which managed to articulate the experiences and demands of urban labouring sectors linked to small-scale self-employed and blue-collar work and the retail trades. A presence in some urban working class milieus from the late 19th century, it enjoyed its greatest influence in the 1930s and 1940s. [...]

Another ideology that was rooted in the experiences of previous centuries is what we could call an indianismo of resistance, which arose out of the defeat of the uprising and the indigenous government led by Zárate Willka and Juan Lero, in 1899. Repressed, the ethnic movement acquiesced to a renovation of the pact of subordination with the State through defence of the communitarian lands and access to the education system. The predominantly Aymara indigenous movement combined, in a fragmented way, negotiation by its native authorities with local uprisings until it was replaced by revolutionary nationalism in the middle of the last century.

Revolutionary nationalism and primitive Marxism were two political narratives that emerged simultaneously and strongly after the Chaco War in relatively similar sectors (well-educated middle classes), with similar programs (economic modernisation and construction of the national State) in opposition to the same adversary: the old regime of the oligarchy and the employers.

Unlike this nascent Marxism, for which the problem of power was a rhetorical theme steeped in faithful adherence to the written texts, revolutionary nationalism from the outset developed as an ideology informed by a clear desire for power that had to be resolved in a practical way. It is not accidental that this thinking appealed to the officer corps of the army and that some of its promoters, such as Paz Estenssoro, participated in the administrations of the brief progressive military governments that undermined the conservative political hegemony of the time. Nor is it accidental that, over time, the revolutionary nationalists combined in a decisive way uprisings (1949) with coups d’état (1952) and participation in elections as demonstrations of a clear quest for power.

Taking the leadership of the revolution of 1952 through practical deeds and proposals, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR -- Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) was to make its party program become an entire conception of the world as issuing from the State, leading to a moral and intellectual reform that enjoyed political and cultural hegemony throughout Bolivian society for 35 years, independently of whether the successive governments were civilian or military.

Primitive Marxism

If we can indeed speak of a presence of Marxist thought from the 1920s on, Marxism as a political culture contesting for ideological hegemony gained momentum in the 1940s through the activity of the Partido de Izquierda Revolucionaria (PIR -– Party of the Revolutionary Left), the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR –- Revolutionary Workers Party) and the intellectual production of their leaders: Guillermo Lora, José Aguirre Gainsborg, José Antonio Arce, Arturo Urquidi, etc.

The emergence of Marxism and its social reception was to be distinguished by two constituent processes. The first lay in an ideological production directly linked to the political struggle, which warded off the temptation to engage in an academic Marxism. The main intellectuals who subscribed to this current participated in political activism, either in the parliamentary arena or in the organisation of the masses, and this was reflected in both the theoretical limitations of the intellectual production of that time and the ongoing articulation of their thinking with the practical political evolution of society.

Also significant in this new development was the reception of Marxism and of revolutionary nationalism itself among working people, as a result of a prior modification of the class composition of the economically most important cadres of the Bolivian mining and factory proletariat, which was in the midst of a transition from employment in artisanal workshops to employment by large companies.

However, it was a proletariat that internalised the technical rationalisation of the capitalist modernisation of large companies and that was subjectively inclined to a conception of the world guided by faith in technique as the major productive force, in the homogenisation of the work process and the industrious modernisation of the country [...] and it was in this new proletarian subjectivity now at the centre of the country’s fundamental economic activities that Marxism, as a discourse of modernising rationalisation of society, was to be rooted for decades.

The Marxism of this first period is doubtless an ideology of industrial modernisation of the country in the economic sphere and of consolidation of the national state in the political sphere. Basically, the entire revolutionary program of the distinct Marxist currents of that stage had similar objectives, until the 1980s.

Marxism came to form an extensive political culture among blue-collar and other workers and student sectors based on the supremacy of working-class identity over other identities and a profound belief in the progressive role of industrial technology in the structuring of the economy, in the central role of the State in the ownership and distribution of wealth, in the cultural nationalisation of society around these models and in the historical and class “inferiority” of the country’s predominantly peasant societies.

This modernist and teleological narrative of history, generally adapted from the economics and philosophy manuals, created a cognitive block and the exclusion, epistomologically, of two realities — the peasant and ethnic composition of the country — that were to be the starting point of another emancipatory project which, as time passed, would be superimposed on Marxist ideology itself.

Had the classic reading of the agrarian reality in Marxism been one of formal and actual subsumption, this would have helped to disclose the conditions of exploitation in this sector of production; instead, it was derived on the basis of a (biased) schema that judged according to ownership, the direct workers being lumped together with the “petty bourgeois” of dubious revolutionary loyalty because of their attachment to property.

For this Marxism, there were neither Indians nor community, and one of the richest veins of classical Marxist thinking was blocked and rejected as an interpretative tool of Bolivian reality; furthermore, this position forced the emerging political indianismo to take a firm stand in the ideological struggle in opposition to both the nationalist currents and the Marxists who were rejecting and negating the national agrarian and ethnic communitarian subjects as political productive forces capable of serving as the regenerative powers of the social structure that they were in fact in the Indianist conception.

In the end, a much more exhaustive reading of the indigenous and communitarian subject matter was to come from a new, critical and non-state centred Marxism which, from the closing years of the 20th century and the early 21st, drawing on the thinking advanced by René Zavaleta, sought a reconciliation of indianismo with Marxism that could articulate the processes of production of local and universal consciousness.

Indianismo

The universal franchise, the agrarian reform that put an end to the latifundio [large estates] in the Altiplano [the high Andean plateau] and the valleys, and free and universal education, made the ideology of revolutionary nationalism an horizon of time enveloping a good portion of the imagination of the campesino communities that appealed, in this type of citizenship, recognition and social mobility, for a national and cultural homogenisation capable of displacing and diluting the national ethnic program of resistance that had been gestating for decades. There were moments of decreasing ethnic content in the discourse and ideology of the campesinos, of hope for inclusion as conceived in the state-sponsored proposal for mestizo cultural cohesion and the conversion of the nascent campesino unions into the main support of the nationalist state, both in its mass democratic phase (1952-64) and in the initial stage of its dictatorial phase (1964-74).

The material support for this period of national state hegemony was the growing social differentiation in the countryside, the accelerating decline of the peasant society that gave rise to a rapid growth in the large and intermediate sized cities and the flexibility of the urban labour market that facilitated the belief in a successful mobility from countryside to city through access to stable salaried employment and admission to higher education as a means of social promotion.

The initial setbacks to this projected economic modernisation and nationalisation of the society began to be manifested in the 1970s, when ethnicity in the form of surname, language and skin colour was reverted to by the dominant elites as one more mechanism of selection for social mobility, restoring the old colonial logic of social classification and disqualification which, combined with the social networks and economic status, had stood as the major means of social advancement and decline.

This, added to the tightness of the modern labour market, unable to accommodate the increasing migration, opened up a space of nascent availability for the resurgence of the new vision of the indianista world which, in the preceding 34 years, had traversed a number of periods: the formative period, the period of state cooptation and the period of its conversion into a strategy for power.

Gestation of Katarista indianismo

The first period is the period of gestation of Katarista indianismo. It started as political discourse that began to reinterpret history, language and culture systematically. It was a denunciatory and questioning discourse which, from the standpoint of historical revision, was critical of the inability to fulfill the promises of citizenship, mestizaje [mestizo-isation], political and cultural equalisation with which nationalism had addressed the indigenous campesinos since 1952.

The fundamental contribution in this period is the reinvention of Indianness, but now not as a stigma but as a subject of emancipation, as an historical design, as a political program. It involved a genuine discursive rebirth of the Indian through the vindication and reinvention of their history, past, cultural practices, poverty, virtues, which had a practical effect in the formation of self-identification and organisational forms.

From the outset, indianismo collided with Marxism and confronted it with the same vehemence as it criticised the other major ideology of the period, Christianity, both being considered the major ideological components of contemporary colonial domination.

Based on this strengthening, in opposition, the Katarista indianismo discourse in the late 1970s went on to divide into some major components. The first, the trade unionist, which was to initiate the formation of the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB –- United Union of Farm Workers of Bolivia), an event that symbolically marked the definitive break by the farmworkers union movement with the nationalist state in general and in particular with the campesino military pact that had inaugurated a military trusteeship over the farmers' organisation. The other component was party politics, not only with the formation of the Partido Indio, in the late 1960s, but also the Movimiento Indio Túpak Katari (Mitka) and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpak Katari (MRTK), which were to join, in an incomplete way, in various electoral contests until the late 1980s. The third component, alongside the political and trade union components, was the academic, historiographic and sociological research current that was devoted to a rigorous exposition of this historical revisionism through the study of various instances of uprisings, caudillos (local chiefs) and indigenous claims from the time of the colony to our day.

A second moment in this period of discursive and elite formation of the Aymara identity was to occur in the early 1980s, when there was a slow but growing decentralisation of this discourse; the ideologists and activists of Katarista indianismo fragmented, giving rise to three major currents. The cultural current, which sought refuge in musical circles and religious belief, and is now referred to as the “pachamámicos” [worshipers of Pacha Mama, the Indigenous name for Mother Earth].

A second current, less urban than its predecessor, came to be referred to as the current of the “integrationist” political discourse insofar as it publicised Indian claims as a means of exerting pressure for a degree of recognition within the prevailing state structure. It was a discursive formation of the indigenous as litigants demanding recognition by the State in order to be incorporated within the existing nationhood and citizenship, but without abandoning their own cultural particularities. The Katarista wing of the movement for recognition of Indianness is the one that embodied this position. Here “indigenous” is the absence of equality before the State for a cultural identity (Aymara and Quechua) that thereby becomes a signifier of a lack of rights (equality), of a future (full citizenship) and an identifying distinction (multiculturalism).

The distance from the modernising discourse of revolutionary nationalism is not rooted in this terrible destiny of what has been understood by citizenship and the institutional framework in which to exercise it, but in the recognition of cultural plurality in order to be able to accede to it, which was to be precisely the contribution of the modest liberal discourse to the problematic of the “peoples” and “ethnic groups”.

A third discursive variant of this Katarista indianismo movement was to be a strictly national indigenous one. It involved a discourse that did not ask the State for the right to citizenship, but clearly affirmed that it should be the indigenous themselves who should be the governors of the State because they wanted to be. A state which, precisely because of this Indian presence, would have to constitute itself as another State, another republic, insofar as the contemporary republican state had been a power structure erected on the exclusion and extermination of the indigenous.

From this standpoint, the indigenous then appears not only as a political subject but as a subject of power, of command, of sovereignty. In its initial stage, this discourse took the form of a pan-indigenism, in that it refers to a common Indian identity that extends throughout the continent, with small regional variants. This transnational view of the indigenous civilising structure can be considered expansive of the imagined community insofar as it goes beyond the classic localism of the indigenous demand; yet, at the same time, it presents a weakness in that it minimises the actual differences among the indigenous peoples and the different strategies for integration, dissolution or resistance opted for by each indigenous nationality from among the many republican regimes established since the last century.

That is why a second stage, a current within this indianista component headed by Felipe Quispe and the Ayllus Rojos organisation, made two new contributions. On the one hand, the recognition of a Bolivian popular identity, the product of centuries of bastardised cultural and working-class mestizaje in various urban and rural zones. From this new standpoint, the forms of Bolivian popular identity, such as working class identity, and to some degree the campesino identity in certain regions, appear as collective subjects with which it is necessary to design policies of alliance, agreements of mutual recognition, etc. That was the political significance of the so-called theory of the “two Bolivias”.

The second contribution of this discourse is the specificity of the Aymara indigenous identity. The Aymara Indian appears clearly as a collective identity and as a political subject heading toward self-government, self-determination. Its importance lies in its ability to centre the discourse in specific territorial settings, in verifiable population centres and more compact and effective institutional systems of power and mobilisation than those of pan-indianismo. That it why it can be said that on the basis of this discursive formation, the Indian and indianismo become a strictly national discourse, the discourse of the Aymara indigenous nation.

State co-option

The second period in the construction of the national indigenous discourse is the period of state co-optation. This began in the late 1980s, in periods characterised by a major political frustration of intellectuals and activists in the indigenous movement, insofar as its hopes of converting the strength of the unionised indigenous mass into an electoral force did not yield the anticipated results.

(...) At a time when the society and the parties of the Marxist left were witnessing the brutal disintegration of the identity and strength of the organised working class, the adoption and re-elaboration of an ethnicist discourse appeared to them as an alternative option in those subjects considered most receptive. Hence the conceptual structure with which this declining left appropriated the indigenous discursive construction failed to capture the entirety of the logical structure of this proposal, which had required a dismantling of the colonial and vanguardist framework that characterised the left at that time.

(...) The MNR is the political party which, with greater clarity, detected the significance of the discursive formation of an indigenous nationalism. It viewed it as a danger, as it did the difficulties being experienced by the indigenous movement. Through the alliance with Victor Hugo Cárdenas and a series of intellectuals and activists in the indigenous movement, the MNR converted a rhetorical recognition of the country’s multicultural character into state policy, while the Law of Popular Participation created mechanisms of local upward social mobility that could absorb the discourse and action of a good share of the increasingly discontented indigenous intellectual milieu.

The application of the Law of Popular Participation, while it did contribute in some cases to a notable strengthening of the local union organisations that had managed to establish themselves electorally on the national scene, can also be seen as a fairly sophisticated mechanism of co-option of local leaders and activists, who were beginning to turn and support their struggles and their organisational forms around the municipalities and indigenous bodies expressly created by the state. The autonomous indigenous identity that had been formed since the 1970s, built upon the organisational structure of the “unions”, thus came up against a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of identities of ayllus, municipalities and “ethnicities”.

(...) With the exception of the Great March of 1996 in opposition to the National Institute of Agrarian Reform law, the social protagonism of the social struggles had been displaced from the Aymara altiplano to the coca farming zones of Chapare, where the predominant campesino-type discourse was complemented by some indigenous cultural components.

The indianismo of the 1990s

The third period of this new indianista cycle can be characterised as a strategy for power and it developed in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. Indianismo ceased to be a vestigial ideology of resistance to domination and expanded to become a proto-hegemonic conception of the world attempting to mount a challenge for the cultural and political leadership of society to the neoliberal ideology that had prevailed during the eighteen previous years. In fact, it can now be said that the most important and influential emancipatory conception of the world in the present political life of the country is indianismo, the discursive and organising nucleus of what can today be termed the “new left”.

The material base of this historical positioning of indianismo is the capacity for community-based revolt with which the indigenous communities respond to an increasing deterioration and decline of the campesino community structures and mechanisms of social mobility between the countryside and the city. Manifested as early as the 1970s, the neoliberal reforms of the economy dramatically affected the price system of the urban-rural economic exchanges. With the stagnation of the traditional agrarian productivity and the opening of the free importation of goods, the terms of exchange, usually unfavourable for the campesino economy, drastically worsened, squeezing purchasing power, savings and consumption of campesino families. Added to this was a major tightening of the urban labour market and a decline in income from the limited urban labouring activities that campesino families periodically used to complement their incomes. This restricted the urban-rural complementarity of labour that campesino families used to plan their strategies of collective reproduction.

With the blocking of the mechanisms of social mobility internal and external to the communities, with an accelerated migration to the cities in recent years, but with an increase in the dual residency of some communities belonging to rural zones as conditions of relative productive sustainability (which in the long run were the zones of greater indigenous campesino mobilisation), the point of departure of the revolts and expansion of indianista ideology occurred when the economic liberalisation reforms affected the basic conditions of reproduction of the agrarian and semi-urban community structures (water and land). The growing deterioration of the traditional economic structure of the rural and urban society had resulted in a strengthening of community ties as mechanisms of primary security and collective reproduction. The politicising effect that indianismo had on culture, language, history and skin, the elements specifically used by urban “modernity” to block and legitimate the contraction of the mechanisms of inclusion and social mobility, were the palpable components of a communitarian ideology of emancipation that rapidly eroded the neoliberal ideology. This indianismo drew together a mobilisable, insurrectional and electoral mass force positing the politicisation of the discursive political countryside and consolidating itself as an ideology with state ramifications.

This indianismo, as a strategy of power, presents two variants in today’s situation: one with a moderate profile (the Movimiento al Socialismo -- MAS; Instrumento Politico por la Soberanía de los Pueblos -- IPSP) and another that is radical (Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti -- MIP-CSUTCB). The moderate variant is the one that has been articulated around the campesino unions of the Chapare confronting the cocalero eradication program. Using a campesinista discourse that has come to acquire more ethnic connotations in recent years, the cocalero union members have managed to establish a range of flexible and plural alliances. Calling for a program of inclusion of the indigenous peoples in the power structures and placing greater emphasis on an anti-imperialist posture, this variant can be defined as left indianista because of its capacity to encompass the national-popular, Marxist and left memory formed in previous decades; this has produced a relatively favourable urban, multisectoral and pluriregional reception to its appeals, making it the major parliamentary political force of the left and the principal municipal electoral force in the country.

For its part, the radical indianista current adheres more clearly to a program of total indianisation of the structures of political power. While the campesino theme figures consistently in the discursive repertoire of this indianismo, all of the assertive elements are organised and directed by ethnic identity (“Aymara and Quechua original nations”). That is why this current has been consolidated only in the strictly Aymara urban and rural world, and why it can be considered as a type of national Aymara indianismo.

Notwithstanding their significant differences and conflicts, both currents share similar political trajectories:
(a) Both have the unions and indigenous agrarian communities as their organised social base.

(b) The parliamentary “parties” or “political instruments” are a product of negotiated coalitions of campesino unions and, in the case of the MAS, the urban masses, which have joined together to gain access to parliamentary representation; the “union-mass-party” triad, so characteristic of the old left, has been cast aside, with “party” being read as a parliamentary extension of the union.

(c) Their leadership and a major part of their intellectuals and officialdom (to a larger degree in the MIP) are indigenous Aymaras or Quechua and direct producers, and the incursion into the political arena has taken the form simultaneously of a class and ethnic self-representation.

(d) The ethnic, integrationist identity in some cases, or self-determined in others, is the discursive basis of the political project with which the state is confronted, and the appeal is to the rest of the society, including the salaried working class.

(e) Although democracy is a stage for the presentation of its demands, there is a proposal for the expansion and full development of democracy based on the exercise of non-liberal organisational logic, and the proposition of an agenda of power centred around a type of co-government of nations and peoples.

[This article was first published in the magazine Barataria No. 2, March-April 2005, El Juguete Rabioso (Edición Malatesta: La Paz).]

[Álvaro García Linera, born October 19, 1962 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Completed his undergraduate studies in his native country, then traveled to Mexico and studied mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1985 he returned to Bolivia where he linked up with groups of miners and Indigenous peoples and embarked on a political quest for an Indigenous government for liberation of the peoples. In 1992 he was arrested and jailed for five years for his participation in the command structure of the Ejército Guerrillero Tupak Katari (EGTK –- Tupak Katari Guerrilla Army). From 1997 on, he has devoted himself to teaching and social research as a professor in various universities in Bolivia and as a guest lecturer in various universities in France, Spain, Mexico and Argentina. In 2004, he was awarded the “Agustín Cueva” prize in Social Sciences of the School of Sociology and Polical Science of the Universidad Central del Ecuador. He has published in various languages dozens of essays, academic articles, books and research studies. His most recent works include in particular “Lucha por el poder en Bolivia” in Horizontes y limites des Estado y el poder (Muela del Diablo Editores: La Paz, 2005); Estado multinacional (Editorial Malatesta: La Paz, 2005); Sociología de los movimientos sociales en Bolivia (Diakonia/Oxfam G.B., Plural: La Paz, 2004), and “Los impactos de la capitalización: Evaluación a medio término”, in: Diez años de la capitalización, Luces y Sombras (Presidential delegation for the review and improvement of capitalization, La Paz, 2004). He participated in the 2005 election campaign as Evo Morales’ running mate. On January 21, 2006 he took office as vice-president of Boliva.]

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

March in solidarity with the veil, a Quebec Muslim feminist urges

The statement below was published in the Montréal French-language daily Le Devoir on December 31. This simple but powerful appeal by a Muslim feminist should resonate not only with feminists but with all who think of themselves as progressively minded.

The author, Roksana Bahramitash, Roksana_Bahramitash refers in particular to the demand by a government-appointed organization, the Quebec council on the status of women (CSF), that all public sector employees be banned from wearing any “ostentatious religious symbols” in the workplace. The council was clearly referring not to crucifixes but to such things as the Moslem headscarf or hijab. The CSF call for a ban was the primary recommendation in its brief to the Bouchard-Taylor commission on religious accommodation.

The CSF also asked that the government insert a provision in Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms giving “equality between women and men” priority over freedom of religion. The Charest government was quick to comply, in a bill adopted with little debate by the National Assembly. This interpretative clause, you can be sure, will do nothing to overcome the substantive inequality of women in jobs, income, housing, education or health care.

Muslim feminist Sheema Khan was speaking for many of her faith when she wrote, in The Globe & Mail, that the CSF, in its call to ban the hijab, is “essentially telling Muslim women: ‘We know what is best for you; you can’t possibly wear that thing out of free will, and if you do, you are too oppressed to know any better.’ Call it feminism on testosterone. Imagine telling that to Monia Mazigh — who fearlessly challenged three national governments and their security agencies. Yet, if the council has its way, Ms. Mazigh can never run for public office in her hijab, nor teach at a public university.” (Monia Mazigh, the wife of “war on terror” victim Mahir Arar, is a former NDP candidate and university professor.)

The Bouchard-Tremblay commission, in its public hearings across Quebec this fall, heard many such calls for repression of Muslims and other minorities, and they were given wide media coverage. Sadly lacking were strong expressions of solidarity with the victims of these attacks. Most disquieting was the number of ostensible feminists and others in the left and progressive milieus who kept silent or even joined in the heterophobic chorus.

Widely publicized, for example, was the brief of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CSN), Quebec’s second largest trade union federation. It supported a ban on the hijab in schools and other public institutions and called for a “Charte de la laïcité”, or charter of secularism, “to avoid the anarchy” that the union alleged would result from processing reasonable accommodation cases one by one. A union coalition, the Intersyndicale des femmes, claiming to represent 160,000 women, mostly public service employees, likewise called for a “policy of secularism” and suggested it would not be averse to a ban on the wearing of “religious signs or symbols” by government personnel in contact with the public.

Responding to these appeals, Samaa Elibyari of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women reminded the commission that Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don’t need unions on their back, too, she said.

There were some other dissenting voices. Quebec’s major feminist organization, the federation of women (FFQ), did not call for a ban on the hijab or other symbols of religious belief. FFQ president Michèle Asselin told the commission that “there are many faces to feminism” and that the Federation’s membership included even some Catholic nuns. One of the leaders of the World March of Women in 2005, she noted, was a veiled Muslim.

The new left party, Québec solidaire, expressed its opposition to any legislative ban on the wearing of religious symbols by students or public employees, but urged that the latter not allow their “personal, religious or political beliefs” to interfere with their public duties.

Missing from these and virtually all of the briefs and testimony from organizations of a liberal and progressive bent, however, was any recognition that religious belief is essentially a private matter and, for many oppressed minorities, an integral part of their culture and identity, both collective and individual. Some, like Québec solidaire, objected to the Islamophobia behind the calls to ban the veil, and called for concrete measures to help recent immigrants obtain jobs and learn French. But the overriding theme of most of those appearing before the Bouchard-Taylor commission was the need to define or reassert “Quebec values” and ensure that immigrants and minorities adhere to them. The unions and the left joined in the chorus of voices defending the “rights” of the majority, as if they were under attack.

It was left to the minorities to point out that “Quebec values” are not only the secular feminist, egalitarian, etc. values revered by liberals and progressives, but they also comprise, in day to day practice, the values of a white, misogynist, unequal and racist culture that shamelessly discriminates against all those who don’t conform to the officially propagated image of “modernist” Western — read, imperialist — culture. It is not Muslims and other minorities who need to be educated about “Quebec values” (they are constantly reminded of those!) but the majority who need to be educated about the oppressive nature of their own society’s treatment of its minorities.

In a powerful brief to the commission, Présence Musulmane Montréal denounced “the intellectual arrogance of a certain ethnocentric republican feminism that infantilizes and subjugates Muslim women and interprets for them the meaning they give to their clothing, their relationship to their body and their relationship to their spirituality.”

In the following article Roksana Bahramitash proposes a modest action that could help to refocus public attention on some of the key sources behind today’s Islamophobia, such as Canada’s war in Afghanistan. My translation.

A march of solidarity for the wearing of the veil

by Roksana Bahramitash

Research director at the Canada Research Chair in Islam, Pluralism and Globalization of the University of Montréal

At an informal dinner preceding a congress organized by some feminist faculty members at Wilfrid Laurier University, the participants unanimously expressed their frustration at the present obsession over the wearing of the Islamic veil and the growing Islamophobia.

We decided, as a proposed protest, to consider the possibility of organizing a day of solidarity for the wearing of the Islamic veil on International Women’s Day in 2008. For me, a Muslim woman in Quebec, this proposal is of particular significance. However, such an initiative is not a new idea.

Similar protests occurred before the war in Afghanistan broke out, and there was a march of solidarity for wearing the veil in opposition to the “war on terrorism”. Of immense concern to me, however, in view of the debates that have developed during the hearings of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, is the position taken by the Conseil du statut de la femme (CSF).

The CSF wants State agents to be prohibited from wearing “religious symbols” in public institutions. This approach to defending women’s rights is based on the theory that the Muslim women of Quebec are obliged to wear the veil, an absolutely false idea refuted by my own research among Muslim women in Montréal. It implies that Muslim women have neither the capacity nor the skill to decide by and for themselves what they want, and that they need some Quebec women to defend their own rights.

The CSF’s approach can be construed as an attempt by some Quebec women to impose a trusteeship over Muslim women, the latter being unable to defend their own rights or make correct decisions. How ironic! Are we now in the same situation as those feminists who once fought against decisions concerning women being made by men?

The CSF’s recommendations to the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, and the debate over reasonable accommodation, are a source of consternation, and even anger among Muslim women in Quebec. I have spent some time observing closely the reactions of veiled Muslim women to the Commission’s discussions and the recommendations of the CSF.

Anti-Muslim feeling

My own research among Muslim women shows that there has been a noticeable increase in anti-Muslim sentiment within the Montréal community since the beginning of the public hearings initiated by the Commission and the resulting media coverage. In a focus group formed to discuss the day-to-day issues facing Muslim women, one of the participants said: “I do not feel safe using public transit at night.” She is a Muslim, Black and veiled, and this has become a problem for her when she leaves her office.

Some other members of the group stated that they were encountering a hardening of attitudes among Quebec women and among the employers who have to process job applications by Muslim women.

Although Muslim women are among those with the highest level of education in Canada and Quebec, they have one of the lowest levels of employment. There is a noticeable increase in verbal and physical assault against Muslim women. The CSF’s efforts would have been more useful to Muslim women if it had looked into the issues of racism and sought some solutions to the extremely high unemployment suffered by Muslim women. It would be in the interest of Quebec society to progress beyond some issues that arouse only social tensions and to concentrate on such important issues as poverty and unemployment among minority women.

The origins of the feminist movement in North America go back to the big demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Conseil du statut de la femme has decided not to mobilize against the growing militarization resulting from the Canadian presence in Afghanistan. It has chosen instead to bolster the efforts of those who are arousing Islamophobic sentiments in Quebec. Its efforts to prevent women from exercising their freedom of choice in relation to their clothing prompts us to engage in a march of solidarity on the theme of wearing the veil on the occasion of International Women’s Day in 2008.

Roksana Bahramitash is the author of Liberation from Liberalization: Gender and Globalization in South East Asia. Liberation from Liberalization