‘Beyond capitalism’? Québec solidaire launches debate on its program for social transformation

by Richard Fidler
MONTRÉAL – At a convention held here March 25-27, Québec solidaire concluded the second round in the process of adopting its program. More than 350 delegates from party associations across the province debated and adopted the party’s stance on issues in relation to the economy, ecology and labour. And they reaffirmed their determination to build the party as an independent political alternative, rejecting proposals by QS leaders to seek “tactical agreements” with the capitalist Parti québécois and/or the Parti vert (Greens) that would have allowed reciprocal support of the other party’s candidate in selected ridings.

This was Québec solidaire’s sixth convention since its founding in 2006. Faced with two general elections within the party’s first three years, QS members had adopted election platforms in their first conventions addressed to major issues that could be dealt with in the course of a Quebec government’s term of office, but left the elaboration of a more sweeping program — outlining the party’s overall orientation and strategy “within a perspective of social transformation” — to a more prolonged process of debate.[1]

That process was launched at the party’s fifth convention in November 2009, when delegates adopted positions on the national question, secularism, electoral reform and integration of immigrants.[2] Future program conventions, to be held over the next two years or so, will address such topics as health and social services, education, social and legal justice, culture, agriculture, and international solidarity and altermondialisation (anti-capitalist globalization).

Go beyond capitalism?

The debate on the social and economic issues that were the subject of the March convention promised to reveal an underlying tension within the party that has existed from the outset — one that is familiar to virtually all broadly based organizations and parties of the left. The QS policy commission put the issue directly in its “participation booklet,” a preliminary document posing questions for discussion by the membership:

“As we work on our program, we should spell out the nature and limits of the system, and ask ourselves the following question: isn’t the capitalist system, based as it is on maximizing profit and irresponsible exploitation of nature, the main obstacle to social progress and a healthy relationship to the environment? We need a serious debate on the question so we can determine whether our social problems can be corrected by reforms that respect the logic of the system or if we need to adopt the perspective of going beyond the system.”[3]

This was also the question put by the Québec solidaire leadership in a Manifesto they issued for May Day 2009, entitled “To emerge from the crisis, should we go beyond capitalism?”[4] Although the Manifesto’s specific proposals to overcome the crisis generally failed to go much beyond a timid social liberalism, its anti-capitalist rhetoric met with a very favourable response in the QS ranks. Some members were more critical, however. Among these were François Cyr and Pierre Beaudet.[5] In an article published just as the debate was getting under way, with the suggestive title “Québec solidaire must remain a rainbow coalition,”[6] they argued that the task of a left-wing party is “to fight for immediate changes, realizable within the framework of the present capitalist state and system.”

“The very essence of a large mass party,” they wrote, is that it is “a permanent coalition capable of carrying out the compromises and arbitration that are necessary both in terms of program and the internal equilibrium of its networks.” Québec solidaire should “avoid confining itself to a terrain that is too limited.... it is necessary to unite all those who want to oppose neoliberalism and reaction....
“It is an error to think that the socialist perspective, even in its most interesting recent developments (ecosocialism, for example) now constitutes an alternative in Quebec. It must be admitted, it is not.”

A few QS members responded to Cyr and Beaudet with their own articles. Roger Rashi, a member of the party’s theme commission on environment and energy and of Masse critique, a recognized collective within QS, wrote:[7]

“It is necessary to deepen the basis of unity of Québec solidaire by exploring the ultimate goal of the struggle against neoliberalism, by outlining the basic framework of an alternative, ecological, democratic and self-managed society without social inequality and without poverty, in other words an ecosocialist society. This does not mean eliminating Québec solidaire’s character as a political united front, or if you prefer a rainbow coalition, but it does mean getting this united front to evolve toward going beyond the capitalist system. The objective and subjective conditions are favourable to such an evolution.”

QS members André Frappier, a Montréal leader of the postal workers’ union (CUPW), and Bernard Rioux, a member of the Gauche socialiste collective, argued the case for programmatic clarity around a clear class line:[8]

“...we must seek to attract broader layers of activists to Québec solidaire, in the popular, feminist and trade union movement. But will we do that by making programmatic compromises? And at what level, on what aspect? [Cyr and Beaudet] do not say. They argue that socialist ideas and practices have few roots among the people. That does not hold water. History is full of examples teaching us that the workers movement learns from the struggle.... Whenever parties claiming to be on the left have not indicated clearly where the class interests of the workers movement were situated, where the program confused mass struggle and class struggle, where the ruling classes’ interests were not identified, on each of these occasions the workers movement experienced a terrible defeat....
“What have we learned from the Popular Unity [government] in Chile? From the Popular Front in France? In neither case was the defeat of the workers movement due to an exaggerated radicalism, and certainly not to a lack of broad alliances, but rather to the programmatic confusion that deprived it of all its resources and enabled the bourgeoisie to survive and regain the initiative.”

A ‘serious debate’?
This initial public debate, however, unfolded largely outside the formal structures of Québec solidaire, in a few left journals and on-line blogs.[9] Within the party itself, the “serious debate” on capitalism invited by the QS policy commission did not unfold in the preconvention discussion. One reason lies in the obstacles to conducting general discussions on perspectives within Québec solidaire.

Under the complex procedure the party has chosen for conducting its program debates, initial written submissions by the members (or by “citizens’ circles” composed of both members and non-members) must not exceed 800 words in length. The policy commission then compiles a “perspectives booklet” presenting concise demands based on what it considers the “principal orientations” in these submissions. These are discussed and amended or added to by QS local associations and general assemblies, following which the policy commission produces a “synthesis booklet” that arranges the revised demands by topic and, where appropriate, lists differing resolutions addressed to a particular issue as “options” (up to six, in some cases) for debate and decision at the convention — first in topic workshops, then in plenary session, where delegates are limited to two or three minute interventions from the floor.[10]

Whatever the democratic merits of this procedure — and there are some, to be sure — it effectively precludes lengthier written contributions within the party structures that could outline a general strategic or programmatic framework on the given subjects and allow a broader debate among opposing approaches.[11] Moreover, the party has no public or internal discussion bulletin or even an email discussion list that would allow such debates. And in this round, unlike the previous public debate leading up to the fifth convention, none of the members’ commentaries were published either on the intranet or public websites. (The website itself is dominated by statements on issues of the day by the party’s joint spokespersons, Françoise David, the QS president, and Amir Khadir, its sole elected member of the National Assembly.)

Despite these constraints, on many topics the delegates to this convention revealed a readiness to link demands for immediate reforms to a longer-range perspective of radical democratic and social transformation.

A green energy agenda
At this convention, Québec solidaire voted for a major turn to green energy, including:

• A reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, and by 95% by 2050. Abandonment of fossil fuels by 2030.
• Opposition to carbon taxes, carbon trading and storage schemes, biofuels, and geo-engineering.
• “Public control” over energy firms, defined as majority participation of the state up to and including 100% nationalization as needed. Another proposal, for complete nationalization of energy firms, was defeated. Some delegates voiced concern that Quebec government nationalization might not respect First Nations jurisdictions.
• Prohibition of any new hydro-electric development. Production of renewable energies: solar, geothermal, wind, to limit to the maximum any supplementary resort to hydro-electricity.
• An end to all exploration and development of fossil fuels, such as petroleum in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (Old Harry), shale gas, and LNG ports. Elimination of Quebec’s nuclear reactor system, and an end to the exploration and development of uranium mines. In recent months mass movements have developed in many Quebec communities against local gas and uranium exploration projects, and some delegates mentioned their involvement in these actions.
• Development of electrified transportation to ensure the accessibility, universality “or even gratuity” of public transit. A leaflet distributed at the convention by Montréal members of QS outlined some methods and proposals by which the party could deepen its involvement in the developing movement to stop the Turcot interchange, a major highway intersection. The proposals include a campaign for free public transit, massive expansion of public transit infrastructures, and conversion to efficient green energy sources.
• Support for a new, legally binding international agreement, and participation in the world movement linking climate and social justice. It was noted that this movement is inspired by the alternative peoples’ summit on the environment held at Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010. A table in the convention foyer promoted the “Cochabamba Plus One” conference to be held in mid-April in Montréal, and pamphlets on ecosocialism produced by the Gauche socialiste and Masse critique QS collectives.

Natural Resources
The convention voted by large majorities that the mining and forestry industries should be placed under “public control,” with up to 100% nationalization “as needed.” In both cases, the demand for outright nationalization received substantial support but was defeated. In addition:

• All resource industries to be subject to strict environmental regulations, and no project to be approved without meaningful public consultation in the communities concerned and a veto by local or regional authorities over development plans. Mining royalties to be increased and shared equitably between the resource region and the government.
• In the forest industry, elimination of laws allowing clear cutting and cutting in the boreal forest north of the 49^th parallel. A reduction in disparities between natural and managed forests, and the need for prior agreements with the indigenous people in all regions under aboriginal treaties or land claims.
• Fresh water, whether surface or underground, to be considered a “non-commodified common good accessible to all but the property of no one,” with the state as guardian. Water used by industry and businesses to be considered a “loaned” public property subject to royalties and post-treatment controls.

Trade union and labour rights
Among the programmatic demands adopted by the convention — usually by large majorities, in some cases unanimously — are the following:

• Constitutional protection of the right to join unions, bargain and strike, including the right to political and solidarity strikes (strikes for political objectives and in solidarity with striking workers and students).
• Prohibition of lockouts, and strict controls on layoffs and shutdowns — including mandatory justification before a government agency, protection of company pensions, compulsory retraining and re-employment in similar jobs, etc. State assistance to employees wishing to form local worker coops when companies relocate.
• Union rights for farmworkers and self-employed workers, and the right to multi-employer certifications.
• Right of full employment in safe, stable, socially useful, ecologically sound work free of discrimination, with social protection in case of loss of employment, incapacity and ageing. Affirmative action for women, disabled, visible minorities and indigenous.
• Immediate reduction in the workweek to 35 hours, and “gradual” transition to 32 hours with no loss of pay, compensatory hiring and no speed-up in workload or pace. Legal restrictions on the use of overtime work. Delegates rejected demands for an immediate 32 hour workweek.
• An immediate increase in the minimum wage to the low-income (poverty) threshold for a person working full time, with a “gradual” increase to 50% over this threshold, indexed to the cost of living. This would mean a gradual increase from $10.66 to $15.99 per hour. Proposals to raise the minimum wage by lesser amounts or an immediate $15.99 were rejected.
• Expanded public employment in social services, construction, infrastructures maintenance and environmental clean-up.
• Accessible programs for job retraining, free and funded by employers and government.

Anticapitalism? Or a mixed capitalist economy?
The radical thrust of the positions adopted on the ecology and labour questions — many pointing, at least implicitly, in an anticapitalist direction — was not matched in the decisions on the economy, which necessarily addressed fundamental issues of how Québec solidaire envisages its proposed “democratic transformation” of the economic organization of society. In the plenary debate on “general orientations,” delegates voted by a large majority for a statement declaring, in part:

“To allow collective and democratic control of the principal economic levers of Quebec, QS ultimately intends to go beyond capitalism. It seeks to establish an economic and political system promoting the common good, with greater respect for communities and individuals, that allows us to define the objectives of our lives in respect for the surrounding environment. We propose a plural economy, based on values of equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, liberty, in conditions of ecological balance and efficacy, including the exploration of alternative economic systems.”

Another resolution proposed to abandon “the dual (private-public) economic model” in favour of adopting a “quadripartite model,” composed of

• a social economy composed of enterprises with a social and non-profit objective but also community, collective or cooperative organisms that render innumerable services to the people.
• an essential domestic economy based on the services provided in the family, by natural caregivers (primarily women) and more generally on free or volunteer services that we wish to find means of social recognizing and accounting for at their fair value.
• a public, state and parastate economy, the importance and social role of which in the equitable provision of accessible services to the entire population throughout the territory, inter alia, should be enhanced.
• a private economy composed of private enterprises the purpose of which is to sell products and services and which agree to function in compliance with the collective (social, environmental, etc.) rules that Quebec society establishes.

This mix of “exploring” alternatives, including an “ultimate” anticapitalism, along with promoting a “plural economy” entirely consistent with a regulated capitalism, albeit with a somewhat naive emphasis on the “social economy,” was reflected in many of the proposals adopted under the “economy” rubric.

The emphasis on the “social economy” is a reflection of Québec solidaire’s social composition, its membership, and their activities — heavily weighted to professionals, social workers, and marginalized working class layers unemployed or precariously employed, with very limited trade-union membership. The attention to the “domestic economy” reflects as well the traditions and roots of many QS members in the feminist movement and its recognition that many important economic functions of society go unpaid or underpaid relative to other economic sectors.

Important as these economic sectors are — a recent study found that more than 80,000 people are employed in Montréal alone in the “social economy” of charities, NGOs, and volunteer social agencies — they are at best a complement to the fundamental competitive and exploitative wage-labour dynamic of capitalism.

These ambiguities were reflected in other resolutions on the economy, including:

• Québec solidaire aims for an eventual socialization of economic activities, based on a strengthened public economy (state-owned companies and nationalization of major enterprises in some strategic sectors), a greater role of the social economy (cooperatives, community-owned firms), and a controlled private sector, with much greater emphasis on promoting small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A number of delegates objected that SMEs and organizations operating in the “social economy” are generally low-wage sweatshops, SME owners being bitter opponents of trade unions. Their alternative motions were outvoted.
• Nationalized enterprises are to be operated in a framework of national and democratic planning, with decentralized management including representatives of employees, the community, and First Nations where applicable. Forms of self-management are to be promoted in place of bureaucratic oversight. Delegates were almost evenly divided on whether compensation for nationalized firms should take into account “unpaid taxes, monopolist super-profits, pillaging of resources and pollution”; after three successive hand votes, the motion was referred to the QS policy commission for later consideration.
• Economic growth must cease to be considered an objective in itself. A QS government will take immediate legal, regulatory, fiscal or other measures to discourage over-production, over-indebtedness, and over-consumption.

Thus, the party tends to fall between two stools: immediate demands on major issues that often point beyond capitalism, and a general orientation that is consistent with a perspective of simply reforming capitalism. These ambiguities are probably an accurate reflection of the diversity of perspectives within Québec solidaire’s membership. Still lacking is a comprehensive approach that can help bridge the gap between today’s struggles and an anticapitalist perspective — between the short and longer terms — to help the party demonstrate in the actuality of today’s struggles the need to “go beyond capitalism.” Or, as the QS program definition puts it, “beginning now, to work toward the realization of its social agenda.”[12]

Some important omissions
The convention agenda did not allow sufficient time to cover all the issues before it and some items had to be dropped. Unfortunately, it was decided to postpone to a later convention the debate on some important topics. Among these were Banking and Financial Institutions, where the draft proposals on offer ranged from complete expropriation of the banking system and other financial institutions through to “socialization,” promotion of cooperatives and mutuals, competition by a state bank, or no nationalization at all.

Another postponed topic was Taxation. In its 2008 election platform Québec solidaire called, inter alia, for a 100% capital gains tax (except for family farms), an increase in personal income tax brackets, and exemption of necessities from the Quebec sales tax. Draft program proposals this year included putting salary levels 30 times the minimum wage in the highest tax bracket, reviewing consumption taxes as regressive taxes or even abolishing them outright, adoption of limited succession duties, and shifting the tax burden from individuals to corporations.

Banking and taxation were the subjects on the convention agenda that most clearly posed the national question, since many proposals under these headings could only be implemented by a sovereign Quebec with full jurisdiction in these areas. However, QS leaders have displayed a notable reluctance to formulate their proposals as a program for “another, independent Québec,” despite the party’s formal support of sovereignty. Was this a factor in the proposal to adjust the topics for debate to omit these points?

A party of the ballot boxes... and the streets?
Yet another important omission from the agenda of this phase of program adoption was a decision by the party’s policy commission a few months ago, in the midst of the party debate, to withdraw from discussion at this convention a proposal it had drafted on the relation between Québec solidaire and the social movements (including the trade unions). The draft text outlined a strategy by which QS, “as a party and as a government, should seek to strengthen the capacities of the social movements, encourage their unity in action and participate in them on the basis of a program of social transformation.” It proposed that QS members who belong to the various social movements be encouraged to “network” within the party — that is, coordinate their activities within the unions and other movements around a strategy of reciprocal reinforcement of the movements and the party. This draft text addresses an important lacuna in Québec solidaire’s activities.

Up to now, this extraparliamentary and extra-electoral aspect of the party’s intervention has remained largely under-developed. Since its founding, and particularly since Amir Khadir’s election in 2008, the focus has been increasingly on a strategy of building the party through the ballot box, to the neglect of extra-parliamentary action “in the streets.” A “development plan” adopted at the last National Council meeting, in June 2010, summarized the objectives for the next two years as “advancing our ideas in the population, gaining a greater presence in public debates, electing more MNAs and appreciably increasing our percentage of the vote in the next general elections.”

Québec solidaire works alongside the unions and some social movements in a number of coalitions, such as the pro-independence Conseil de la Souveraineté. But its modest campaign in relation to the public-sector unions’ negotiations with the Quebec government last year, labelled “Courage politique,” failed to mount a clear defense of the unions’ demands and was largely confined to a defence of existing social programs and opposition to privatization. The party has no organized presence as such in the unions; its social base continues to be heavily composed of students and workers in unorganized sectors of the work force such as the “social economy.” This lack of experience in the union milieu no doubt contributed to some of the abstractness of the convention debate on economic models.

‘Tactical agreements’ with other parties?
As it happens, this convention did debate “alliances” — not with trade unions and social movements, but electoral agreements with either the Parti Québécois or the Verts (Greens). Aware of the difficulty of electing more MNA’s under Quebec’s undemocratic first-past-the-post system, the national council had appointed a committee to study possible “tactical agreements” with other parties under which each party would agree not to run a candidate against the other in selected ridings. In its report to the convention, the committee favoured electoral agreements but was divided on which parties to approach.

It ruled out a “strategic alliance” with the Liberals, ADQ and PQ which, it said, “diverge a lot from QS programmatically.” But it put two options before the delegates: (A) a possible tactical agreement with the PQ and/or the Verts; or (B) a possible tactical agreement with the Verts alone, a “strategic alliance” with that party being conceivable if based on the Global Greens Charter, but ruled out for “practical reasons pertaining to internal decisions of the Verts in Quebec.”

The danger in the proposed alliances, of course, was that Québec solidaire might well blur its programmatic differences with the other parties, a major problem in the case of the PQ, a decidedly capitalist party. The proposed agreement with the PQ was sugar-coated with the argument that the PQ might accept such a trade-off as a virtual recognition of the principle of proportional representation. But PQ governments have always resisted implementing any form of PR. Furthermore, the PQ is apprehensive of the growing popularity of QS among many of its traditional supporters. Both QS and the PQ are addressing much the same audience: a progressive working class electorate, which may well be more inclined to vote PQ as a “lesser evil” to the Liberal government. QS needs to find ways to counter that reasoning, not reinforce it.

A third option, of course, was to reject any such alliances. And that is exactly what the delegates did in the opening Friday night plenary session, rejecting appeals from both Amir Khadir and Françoise David, among others, in support of either option A or B.[13]

A CROP-La Presse opinion poll published March 28, the day after the convention ended, will have strengthened QS militants’ hopes for electoral breakthroughs. It reported that both the Parti québécois and the governing Liberals had lost support — the PQ registering 32%, the Liberals 22% in voters’ intentions — while support for Québec solidaire had risen to 15%, far above the barely 4% support it registered in the last Quebec election, when it nevertheless managed to elect Khadir in Mercier riding.

Khadir’s election brought welcome media attention to the party. His effective interventions in the National Assembly have given the party considerable media exposure, and he has been able to address many issues not previously associated with the left.[14] Opinion polls have recently rated him the “most popular” MNA in Quebec, and no doubt this popularity is a major factor in QS’s polling results. It remains to be seen how durable it will be in a general election, however, when voters usually vote to make or unmake governments — and Québec solidaire’s support is strongest among young people, where abstention rates are highest.

‘Radical left’ marginalized?
Addressing a news conference after the convention, Québec solidaire president Françoise David expressed relief that her positions, especially on the “quadripartite economy,” had triumphed. She had feared the influence of “a more radical left,” she said, but was happy that the more left-wing members of the party still recognized that QS was the only party that could truly “go beyond capitalism” and “create other alternatives.”[15]

No matter how many fine resolutions Québec solidaire members adopt in conventions, the reality in QS is that day-to-day policy — and the interpretation and weight given to the party’s formal program — is largely determined by its two “spokespersons,” who virtually monopolize media coverage of the party. Both Françoise David and Amir Khadir took pains during the convention to rally support for their conception of a “plural economy” with ample room for a regulated capitalism. A party news release issued at the close of the convention stressed that the delegates had voted to support “a plural economy in which the social economy — cooperative, non-profit community, public, domestic and private — have their place.”

At the convention itself, only hours after the members’ resounding rejection of tactical or strategic pacts with parties to the right of QS, David took a quite different stance in her closing speech. Centering her remarks on the just-declared federal election campaign, she issued a “solemn appeal” for a united front to defeat the Harper government: “My appeal is addressed not only to the members of Québec solidaire but to all the voters: You must not vote Conservative!” She left open the suggestion that a vote even for the federal Liberals was an acceptable option. A strange position for a party that purports to support Quebec independence! A QS news release explained that the party, while rejecting the Conservatives outright, will not advocate support for any other party, but will urge Québécois to vote for “progressives.”

This position will not satisfy many QS members, of course. We can expect a debate to arise on these issues in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Québec solidaire is launching the third phase of its program debate later this month. It will be addressed to issues of social justice, education policy, healthcare and cultural policy. The party policies will be determined at a convention now scheduled for December of this year.

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[1] A resolution to that effect adopted by this convention defines the party program as “a proposal for democratic transformation of the whole of society over the medium and long term,” as well as “strategies...that will enable Québec solidaire, beginning now, to work toward the realization of its social agenda [projet de société] together with the social movements and the people.” The platform, on the other hand, is said to comprise immediate measures appropriate to specific situations and contexts. See “Définition du programme politique.”
[2] See “Quebec Left Debates Independence Strategy.” The resolutions are published (in French) on the QS website.
[3] Québec solidaire, “Pour une société solidaire et écologique...”, Cahier de participation au programme, Enjeu 2, June 2010, p. 5.
[4] “Pour Sortir de la Crise: Dépasser le Capitalisme? Manifeste de Québec solidaire,” May 1, 2009.
[5] Cyr is a former president of the Union des forces progressistes, a founding component of Québec solidaire. Beaudet is the former director of Alternatives, a Quebec-based international NGO.
[6] Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, “Québec solidaire doit rester une coalition arc-en-ciel,” June 15, 2010.
[7] Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, “Vers un parti anticapitaliste s’inscrivant dans un large mouvement de lutte au néolibéralisme,” August 17, 2010.
[8] Nouveaux Cahiers du Socialisme, “Le défi de Québec solidaire, devenir un parti de transformation écologique et sociale…,” July 6, 2010.
[9] A valuable source of perceptive (and somewhat acerbic) analysis of Québec solidaire’s activities and debates is the blog of Marc Bonhomme, a QS member in Montréal.
[10] In the initial phase of the discussion, the policy commission received about 150 submissions. Following publication of the perspectives booklet, members submitted about 600 amendments and new proposals or comments from about 40 local associations or committees entitled to representation at the convention. (Introduction to the Cahier Synthèse – Programme) This suggests that most of the internal preconvention discussion was on the basis of the perspectives document, with its succinct specific demands.
[11] In a post-convention analysis, Bernard Rioux (QS – Quebec City) lauded the decision “to debate orientations on the basis of proposals for action to attain precise objectives and not general ideological definitions.” This approach, he said, “made it possible to outline the essential tasks before us without obscuring the existing diversity of objectives and strategies in this quest for social transformation that unites Québec solidaire.” But a debate confined to “essentials” meant that the convention “overlooked many issues the party will not always be able to evade. This approach to the debates will have to be modified to allow greater explanation... of the full implications of both the analyses underlying proposals and the strategies that will have to be deployed....” The party needs “more time for discussion and mastery of issues that are not always easy.” Bernard Rioux, “Québec solidaire concrétise son projet de société,” Presse-toi à gauche!, March 29, 2011.
[12] See note 1, above.
[13] For a detailed report on the proposals and debate, see Marc Bonhomme’s blog.
[14] To see Khadir’s interventions in the Assembly (there are hundreds of them since his election), click on http://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/deputes/khadir-amir-25/interventions.html.
[15] “Québec solidaire veut marginaliser sa «gauche radicale».”

People’s Summit in Quebec issues call for antiwar actions

The People’s Summit Against War and Militarism, which met in Montréal November 19-21, was attended by 225 persons from a wide range of organizations. It issued a Joint Declaration endorsed by more than 70 organizations including trade unions, women’s and student organizations, civil liberties groups, and other social movements and grassroots community organizations in Quebec. The declaration is also supported by seven peace groups in English Canada, including the Canadian Peace Alliance. See the list of signatories.

The People’s Summit was called by the Montréal antiwar collective Échec à la Guerre (Stop War), which organized the massive antiwar demonstrations of almost a quarter million in the streets of Montréal in 2003, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In addition to opposing Canada’s war of occupation in Afghanistan, the collective campaigns against Canada’s military spending and military recruitment in educational institutions, and in support of war resisters in the military.

The People’s Summit opened with an address by keynote speaker Jean Bricmont, author of the book Humanitarian Imperialism, and was followed by a day of workshops and panels on the issues and campaigns facing the antiwar movement in the coming period. The participants agreed to publicize and obtain signatures for their Declaration, to continue actions in opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and to campaign for the holding of a wide-ranging public debate on Canadian foreign policy and the role of the Canadian army.

For background on the People’s Summit and the work of Échec à la Guerre, see “People’s Summit Against War and Militarism to be held in Montréal.” Following is the text of the Joint Declaration, which I translated from the French for Socialist Voice.

-- Richard Fidler

For an End to the Logic of War and Domination!

As Quebec organizations devoted to the defense and expansion of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, here and throughout the world,

As citizens of Quebec yearning for peace and justice and anxious to develop international relations of co-operation founded on equality and solidarity,

1. WE ARE OUTRAGED BY:

• Canada’s descent into an increasing spiral of war and curtailment of democracy;
• Canada’s participation since October 2001 in a war of occupation in Afghanistan, sowing death and destruction under the pretext of a fight for democracy, security and women’s rights in that country, and which is now spreading into Pakistan;
• the Canadian parliament’s vote extending that intervention at least until July 2011, in violation of the will of the majority of the population;
• the ceaseless increase in the public funds allocated to this logic of war (in Canada alone, $58 million dollars per day in 2009-2010) to the detriment of social spending and genuine development assistance;
• Canada’s complicity with torture, both of Afghans captured in combat and of some Canadian citizens imprisoned abroad;
• the militarization of Canadian society, which entails increasing violence, especially against women;
• the fear-mongering about a terrorist threat that is exaggerated in order to justify the war and the many measures of surveillance and repression eroding our rights and freedoms;
• the pervasive public relations activities of the Canadian army in major sports, social and family events, and their recruitment campaigns in educational institutions, even the elementary schools;
• the increasingly serious social and environmental effects of the wars and military training exercises; and
• the growing militarization of the Arctic hand in hand with environmentally harmful economic projects and denial of the rights of the Indigenous peoples.

2. WE DENOUNCE THE “HAWKS” HERE IN CANADA

• successive Canadian governments, both Liberal and Conservative, that have led us into this dynamic and justified the war with groundless arguments;
• the major business interests, headed by the Business Council on National Issues, who see only opportunities for profits, especially for the military industry;
• the political parties that implement war policies or oppose them only half-heartedly; and
• the major media, which soft-peddle the opposition of a majority of the population to the war and do not report its tragic consequences for civilian populations.

3. WE CATEGORICALLY REJECT the false discourse of the “war against terrorism” and Canada’s direct or indirect military involvement alongside the United States in the context of a policy designed to extend their hegemony to the planet as a whole, characterized by

• the many wars initiated and conducted in violation of international law, including international humanitarian law: Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Lebanon (2006), Gaza (2009); and others that are apprehended against Iran and North Korea, even with threats of nuclear strikes;
• the hijacking of the UN Security Council, which does not condemn these illegal assaults or the war crimes they entail or the blatant projects of foreign control implemented by the aggressors in violation of international law;
• NATO’s provocative expansion to the East and its dual transformation — as the armed wing of US hegemony intervening throughout the world, and as a proxy for the UN — thereby profoundly discrediting the UN in the eyes of world public opinion;
• the threats and destabilization plans in regard to some countries that refuse to submit to the “New World Order” imposed by the United States; and
• a renewed arms race, including the development of new nuclear weapons and the increased militarization of space.

4. WE CALL ON THE PEOPLE OF QUEBEC TO MOBILIZE to help reverse this destructive world dynamic, by demanding

of the Government of Canada:

• the immediate withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan;
• a large reduction in military spending and the holding of a wide-ranging public debate on Canadian foreign policy, the role of the army, the military industry, and the arms trade;
• an end to Canada’s military partnership with the United States, including Canada’s withdrawal from NATO; and
• an end to its discourse instrumentalizing women’s rights and promoting the “responsibility to protect” in order to justify the war, and a firm condemnation of any intervention that is inconsistent with international law;

and of the international community:

• the democratic renewal of the UN, and in particular full respect for its Charter, a stronger role for the General Assembly and a far-reaching reform of the Security Council, including abolition of the right of veto; and
• the application of Resolution 1325 of the UN Security Council concerning the involvement of women in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and in peace processes.

November 21, 2010

International Left Debates Cuba’s New Economic Measures

First published in Socialist Voice, November 1, 2010

by Richard Fidler
This issue of Socialist Voice draws attention to further commentaries on the implications of the sweeping economic and social measures announced by the Confederation of Cuban Workers (CTC) on September 13. We publish here excerpts from and links to articles by Jorge Martin, the international secretary of Hands Off Venezuela; Frank Josué Solar Cabrales, a social sciences professor in Santiago de Cuba; Helen Yaffe, a scholar in Britain who specializes in Cuba’s revolutionary history; and Ike Nahem, a leading activist in Cuba solidarity work in New York City.

The CTC statement was initially published on the back page of that day’s issue of Granma, the official Cuban CP daily newspaper. An unofficial English translation is available. Detailed regulations governing the implementation of the decision have now been published in the Official Gazette (Spanish only). See issues no. 11, 12 and 13 (labelled “Extraordinaria Especial”).

Jorge Martin’s article, “Where Is Cuba Going? Towards Capitalism or Socialism?” provides some detailed information on the measures and outlines some of the major economic problems confronting Cuba today as a result of the world capitalist recession. He concludes:

“A gulf will open up between the private and public sectors. In a situation where the state is not able to produce good quality industrial and manufactured goods, the private sector will tend to grow at the expense of the state sector. In other words, the capitalist elements will grow and the socialist elements will retreat. …

“The battle between the two trends will not be won by ideological speeches and exhortations but by capital and productivity. Here the crushing weight of the capitalist world economy will prove decisive.”

However, Martin sees hope in developments elsewhere in Latin America:

“In our opinion, the only real way forward for the Cuban revolution is revolutionary internationalism and workers’ democracy. The fate of the Cuban revolution is intimately linked to the fate of the Venezuelan revolution and the Latin American revolution in the first instance, and to the world revolution more generally.”

Cuban Communist Frank Josué Solar Cabrales, in “Which Way for the Cuban Revolution? – A Contribution to the Debate,” shares Martin’s concerns but sees some grounds for optimism:

“There are very positive signs. For example, the repeated references to the central role to be played by workers in the fight against corruption and inefficiency, as well as in economic discussions on the plan in each workplace. Also the appeals made by Raul [Castro] himself for a greater democratization of our Communist Party and the governmental and political structures. …

“There are also the debates, generated as a result of Raul’s speech, the debates at the congresses of the CTC [Confederation of Cuban Workers], the FEU [Federation of University Students] and the UNEAC [National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba], in addition to the constant appeals from the country’s leadership for a frank and open discussion between revolutionaries, as a suitable and healthy method for finding a solution to our problems.”

However, Solar Cabrales points to some “profound shortcomings we still have in that respect.”

“It is necessary that the choice of the way forward should come out of a broad national public debate on all the key issues, so as to incorporate the people into the decision. In that sense I consider as counterproductive the fact, first, that the results of the discussions that took place throughout the country following the speech by Raul on 26 July [2007] in Camagüey were kept secret, and second, that the measures derived from them were studied and determined by only a group of people in the leadership of the Revolution, without popular participation. I also think that the Congress of the Party should not be delayed any longer. The need for it is increasingly clear.”

Helen Yaffe is the author of Che Guevara, The Economics of Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan), a valuable account of Guevara’s thinking on the political economy of Cuba and, more generally, of societies attempting a transition to socialism. In “Cuba: the Drive for Efficiency within Socialism,” she contrasts Cuba’s present economic situation with the disastrous crisis it experienced as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, once the country’s main trading partner. She cites statistics indicating a turnaround in Cuba’s current situation and is optimistic for “future advances.” The new measures, she says, are a sign that “prospects are improving.”

“The type of major adjustment currently proposed in the employment structure could not be risked in a period of vulnerability. Since 2007, the Cuban government has promoted debate and discussion at all levels of society in an effort to achieve national consensus about the need for such changes. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction to economic problems, it is likely that employment changes were in fact postponed until the present period in which prospects are improving and certain preconditions have been established.”

Yaffe dismisses concerns that the new measures will further increase the size of Cuba’s “informal sector” of those who are unemployed, under-employed or lacking steady employment. In her view, the opposite will happen.

“… only a small minority of Cuban workers will be self-employed. Their income will be progressively taxed, they will pay social security and be carefully regulated.

“The result will be to increase both government income and the provision of goods and services in certain areas, leading to price reductions and falling incomes for those operating in the informal sector. This, along with a continued rise in state-sector salaries, will reduce the relative benefit for individuals operating outside the formal sector.  Accompanying the employment changes is a restructuring of the education system to decrease the number of university students and increase technical training and manual skills.”

In “Behind the New Economic Measures in Cuba,” Ike Nahem likewise sees the mass layoffs of state employed workers and related measures as a step forward for the revolution and indeed for the world working class.

“There will be in Cuba no growth of mass unemployment – or as Marx put it a ‘reserve army of labor’ that suppresses the cost of labor power for capitalist employers – and the subsequent growth of poverty and destitution as is now becoming the norm in all of the advanced capitalist economies not to speak of dependent ‘Third World’ capitalist economies. Individuals let go from redundant, unproductive state and government positions will be able to return to university or technical schools for specialized training, with wage support, for new jobs in addition to those choosing to be self-employed, or join newly established co-operatives. Savings from the reductions in state expenses and budgets will go to preserve social services, modernize and improve free medical care and education, and so on. Cuba’s advances in implementing these measures and confronting its serious economic weaknesses is deeply in the interests of the world working class and is in reality a great aid in the developing struggles against capitalist austerity worldwide. …

“What the revolutionary government in Cuba is attempting to consciously and deliberately implement is a process that will lead to the numerical growth, social expansion, growing political weight of industrial workers, agricultural workers, and working farmers – private-family and cooperative. This will be greater than the inevitable rise in petty-bourgeois layers involved in retail services, brokerage, and speculation. These class demographic changes will emerge out of the accompanying decline (a good thing!) in the numbers of bureaucrats in state institutions and enterprises whose official jobs breed demoralization insofar as they register nonproductive activity which, in the framework of scarcity and economic pressure,  can foster corruption and thievery.

“The concomitant growth of petty bourgeois layers will undoubtedly foster relative social inequality, but, of course, this has been happening and reproducing anyway in the form of the so-called ‘black market’ and illegal economic activity unregulated by the workers’ state. And if labor productivity and the social surplus product increases, within the framework of the workers state, the material basis (and also the political basis) for advancing social equality will also advance. Increases in labor productivity and a radical expansion in agricultural output will allow for large savings in foreign exchange currency that can then be used for industrialization and the ‘light industry’ production of consumers products and quality services.”

* * *

Widely divergent analyses. Largely missing so far, in the international debate, are the hard facts on how the new measures are being implemented in Cuba and how the Cubans are responding to this sharp new turn by their revolutionary government.

Mariátegui and the ‘problem of the Indian’ — a critical appreciation by Luis Vitale

Introduction

Luis Vitale, a prominent Chilean revolutionary socialist and prolific Marxist historian, died in Santiago on June 27, 2010. Born in Argentina in 1927, he had moved to Chile at an early age and from the mid-1950s was an active militant in the labour movement and far-left parties, both in that country and in exile, until this century.

Vitale’s political engagement began as a member of the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR), a small party affiliated with the Fourth International. During the late 1950s and throughout the ’60s he was a leader of the Chilean trade union central, the CUT, including the period when it was headed by the legendary Clotario Blest. In 1965 Vitale helped to found the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), drafting its statement of principles.

Forced out of the MIR when it called for a boycott of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular in the 1969 presidential elections, Vitale joined the new Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR). Although he was by then working primarily as a university academic, he was active in the workers’ struggles in the militant cordones industriales as they fought to extend the revolutionary process. Following the military overthrow of the Allende government, Vitale was arrested, tortured, interned in a concentration camp for nine months, but eventually found his way to exile, first in Europe then in Venezuela, before returning to Chile in the early 1990s. In his later years, Vitale described himself as a “libertarian Marxist”.

During the 1960s, Vitale began writing what became his major work, the eight-volume Interpretación Marxista de la Historia de Chile. This was followed by a nine-volume history of Latin America and a host of books on a wide range of topics: social history, the Indigenous peoples; the “social protagonism” of the women’s movement; the environmental crisis; the labour movement; student and other social movements; popular music, etc. — a total of 67 books, 77 pamphlets, 188 learned papers and 209 articles! Many of these works are available on-line (Spanish only).

I have translated below Vitale’s appreciation and critique of the theoretical contributions on the Indigenous question of an early Latin American Marxist, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui. It offers some insightful thinking on such questions as the relationship between ethnicity and class; Indigenous identity, autonomy and self-determination; and the relationship between Indigenous concepts of land and the environment. The paper reveals the vibrancy and relevance of the thought of both Mariátegui and Vitale in today’s context of increasing radicalization of the Indigenous peoples in anticapitalist struggles and political mobilization, and not only in Latin America. To his last breath Luis Vitale was a strong defender of the Mapuche peoples in Chile, and spoke out in defence of the Indigenous militants who are now on a lengthy hunger strike to protest their jailing on “terror” charges based on legislation from the Pinochet dictatorship.

My translation is made from the Spanish text. (See “Vigencia y limitaciones de Mariátegui”, under the heading Pueblos Originarios.) I have added a few notes, signed “Translator”, to those supplied by Vitale.

Despite his prodigious literary output, few of Vitale’s writings are translated into English. Three such articles, however, are available on line and I have referenced them at the conclusion of Vitale’s piece on Mariátegui. The first two, published in 1963, are strong defences of the Cuban revolution and its impact on Latin America. The third article, written in 1964, outlined Vitale’s view on the tasks facing the Chilean left in the years immediately leading up to Allende’s electoral victory.

-- Richard Fidler

 

* * *

Mariátegui’s Contemporary Relevance and

His Limitations Concerning the Original Peoples

by Luis Vitale

Presentation at the International Symposium on “AMAUTA And Its Period”,[1] Lima, September 3-6, 1997

To the memory of Enrique Espinoza (Samuel Glusberg), principal popularizer of the thought of Mariátegui in Chile during the 1940s and 50s

The backbone of Mariátegui’s thinking in the final ten years of his life was the National Question or, more accurately, in the words of Tito Flores Galindo, “this dual axis formed by Marxism and the nation meant that Mariátegui’s life was both a page in Peruvian history and a page in the history of socialism.... As a matter of fact, based on his particular articulation between Marxism and nation, Mariátegui managed to develop a specific way — Peruvian, Indo-American, Andean — of interpreting Marx and, as always, precisely because it was more Peruvian it became universal.”[2]

Without saying so in so many words, Mariátegui posed a revolutionary epistemological problem for his period, and it is still relevant for anyone seeking to fundamentally transform the present capitalist system, which is more neoconservative than liberal: Latin America from Marx, or Marx from Latin America? We know the standpoint of the Latin American Eurocentric Marxists of that time, alluded to by the amauta: “Neither imitation nor copy”.

For Mariátegui, the national question included not only the national anti-imperialist struggle but the Indigenous problematic, an innovation that broke with the orthodoxy of those who continued to cling to Marx’s initial thinking. While Marx certainly did not manage to systematize a theory, he did contribute some criteria on the national question in the epoch of bourgeois ascendency at the time when various nation-states of Europe were being formed. In reference to Latin America, Asia and Africa there is not a single word in the Communist Manifesto and other, later writings on the national question, because it was thought that this question would be resolved when the socialist revolution triumphed in the highly industrialized countries. In Europe this applied as well in the case of the self-determination of the Polish and Irish peoples, but in other cases in Eastern Europe it did not, for they were “peoples without history”, as Hegel said. And Marx was mistaken on the Latin American national question, when he referred to the independence struggles and in particular to Bolívar and the French invasion of Mexico under Maximilian. Lenin signified a qualitative leap with his thesis on the self-determination of peoples, but he made no reference to our America, focused as he was on “the Eastern questions” discussed in the Second Congress of the Communist International (1922).[3]

While not a Marxist, José Martí had a better understanding than any Marxist of the scope of the national question, explaining that it was not limited to imperialist oppression. Together with his Guatemalan compañera, he visited the communities that were heirs to the Mayan splendor, making such original appraisals that he can be considered the precursor on the national question for Latin America. And it still remains to investigate the possible influence on Mariátegui of the thinkers of the nascent and vigorous national and anti-imperialist current headed by the Colombian José María Vargas Vila in his anti-Yankee work Ante los Bárbaros, published in 1912, and his repeated calls for Latin American Unity in opposition to the Pan-American Union. Similarly, it would be strange if Mariátegui, who was well informed, was unaware of the writings of Manuel Ugarte, who in 1910 broke with the Argentine SP of Justo with his book El Porvenir de la América Española (or Latin America), and in 1911 began an extended tour of our America. In 1927 he addressed a Manifesto to the Youth: “América Latina para los latinoamericanos”, writings compiled later in La Nación Latinoamericana (Caracas: Ed. Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978).

In addition to the investigative works of the Peruvian comrades on the national and continental context I would like to add studies that were condensed in volume V of my Historia General de América Latina (1890-1930), where in addition to the thinkers and Yankee assaults, I analyzed the social and economic structure, especially in the evolution of the workers movement, of the middle strata and the struggles of the peasantry and Indigenous movements of those times in the praxis of Mariátegui. The amauta must have derived renewed strength from the revolutionary cycle of 1910 to 1930, expressed in the Indigenous struggles in Ecuador[4] led by Quintín Lame in 1925, which coincided with the anti-oligarchy July [1925] movement in Ecuador; the “Prestes column” in Brazil; and in Colombia the battles of the PSR led by María Cano, the victorious strikes of the oil and railway workers (1926-27) and above all the banana workers strike of 1928, commemorated by García Márquez in Cien años de Soledad. Nor could Mariátegui have been unaware of the Venezuelan general strike (1928) against the lengthy dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, and especially the epic achievement of Sandino.

The heterodoxy of the amauta enabled him, in the subject matter we are discussing, to initiate a break with the Eurocentric conception of socialist politics and unilinear history signified by the positivist idea of “progress”. From that perspective, he once said something that is very profound: “Unanimity is always unproductive.” (Temas de Nuestra América, Lima, 1900,[5] p. 19. The word “nuestra” he may have taken from Martí, who was the first to use it to differentiate this America from the United States of North America and to reaffirm the Latin American identity.) If this heterodox Mariátegui were to listen today to his uncritical apologists, he would say (paraphrasing Marx): I am not a Mariateguista.

Starting from the historical recognition of the contemporary native peoples and their role, Mariátegui was able to pose in a novel way an alternative society to capitalism, Indo-American Socialism, appropriate to the specific features of Latin America unforeseen by the theoreticians of Marxism: “While socialism has born in Europe, like capitalism, it is not specifically or particularly European.... Indo-America, in this world order, can and must have individuality and style.” Hence his eagerness to find the socialist roots in the “communism” of the ancestral Indigenous communities and his novel conception of the Myth as a social force in history, although he fell into an idealization of the Inca empire which clearly was based on a state with obvious social inequalities and governed by a military and priestly bureaucratic caste. The important thing, for Mariátegui, was that the Inca period constituted for the oppressed people a social myth after the Spanish invasion, raised with the best forces of history by the rebellion of Túpac Amaru, which curiously is not analyzed closely by the amauta.

Mariátegui could also rethink a new type of socialism, based on the specific features of the Latin American revolution because he knew how to analyze his dependent and basically agrarian country in which the Indigenous people and peasants constituted, together with the proletariat, the motor force of the revolution — or, in the present sociological terminology, the “new social subjects”, as Flores Galindo says.[6]

His intellectual legacy led him to incorporate in his philosophy of history concepts from ideologues as disparate as Bergson, Nietzsche and Sorel. Some say that Mariátegui did not read the latter until his travels in Europe. Our doubts were dispelled by Guillermo Rouillón and Alberto Flores Galindo, who have demonstrated the contrary. Mariátegui incorporated from Sorel such contributions as his dimension of the social myth, the criticism of the idea of progress, but more than that the antisystemic force of revolutionary syndicalism, even though this exposed him to accusations of anarchism. The orthodox, especially those of the Stalinist International of the 1930s, tried to characterize or pigeon-hole Mariátegui as a Sorellian, or as having amalgamated the ideas of Marx with those of Sorel, apparently unaware that the latter was, in the years immediately prior to the First World War, one of the first, along with Rosa Luxemburg, to be an unyielding critic of the trade union bureaucracy and the reformism of parliamentarist social democracy — questioning the verticalist conception of the party and fundamentally promoting revolutionary syndicalism as distinct from pure libertarianism or abstract anarchism. In this sense, we are of the opinion that Sorel pursued to their ultimate consequences certain considerations by Marx that the renowned Marxists of his time never dared to pursue “to the very end”. Still to be investigated is whether Sorel, on some key points, was more Marxist than many of the epigones. And it is precisely because he enriched historical materialism with the contributions of Sorel and other iconoclastic thinkers that Mariátegui was the most illustrious and heretical Marxist in Latin America.

However, this process of uninterrupted creativity in Mariátegui, suddenly cut short when he was 36, had some limitations that we will take the liberty of discussing before this select audience of Peruvians, more informed than I of the thinking of the amauta.

Interest in Mariátegui’s ideas resurfaced with the frustration that arose as a result of the crisis of so-called socialism and of what to the majority of the leftist spectrum was almost sacrosanct. The centennial of Mariátegui’s birth coincided with the culminating moment of the crisis, stirring the need to search for a new alternative. Even some left-wing Europeans — usually indifferent to or negative about thinkers outside their continent — were at pains to discuss Mariátegui and issues as remote from their anthropological and ethnocentric reality as the situation of the original peoples [pueblos originales] of our America. Having turned their backs to them over a long period, they now turned to apologetics and uncritical applause. Some Argentine communists went so far as to say, in April 1994, that “just as we rejected Gramsci, we also rejected Mariátegui”, without any self-critical acknowledgement that their old leader, Victorio Codovilla, was the architect of this intellectual interment.

Mariátegui’s limitations on the Indigenous question

I want to propose to comrades, especially Peruvian comrades, that we discuss some of Mariátegui’s limitations on this subject in the hope that this will facilitate us in at least two respects: one, to try to understand in his real dimension one of the most relevant thinkers of the 20^th century, not only in Latin America but in the world; two, to contribute to the formulation of a strategic program of the original peoples of today’s world.

A discussion of the first point is timely because the resurrection of Mariátegui’s thought, after being buried for decades, has promoted a tendency to idealization. And strictly speaking, he, like any thinker, is limited to and conditioned by his epoch and, in the last analysis, his discourse reflects the period in which he lived. One of the factors conditioning Mariátegui’s thought was that in his day Marxism was beginning to be codified. Gramsci was one of the few who dared to break through the ideological fence by his defiance of anything that would impose geographical limits on his thinking.

Class reductionism and the concept of the vanguard

Mariátegui was unable — and it was virtually impossible in the theoretical context of the left — to escape class reductionism and the concept of “vanguard”, that is, the introduction from outside, by way of the Party intelligentsia, of revolutionary consciousness or ideas to the proletariat and other oppressed sectors, a conception that Lenin inherited from Kautsky. In this sense, Mariátegui is more orthodox than those who believe and are attached to the resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International — political categories that were at the base of his limitations when he addressed the topic of the original peoples.

His class reductionism permeates his writings, above all in his reply to Luis Alberto Sánchez: “The program we put forward is the program of labour. It is the program of the working classes, without distinction as to coast or mountain, Indian or mestizo.” Nevertheless he agreed: “If in the debate — this is theoretical — we have differentiated the problem of the Indian it is because in practice they are also differentiated.”[7] Anticipating the analysts of the ethnic-class relationship, he noted: “The class factor is complicated by the race factor in a form that a revolutionary policy cannot fail to take into account. The Quechua Indian sees his oppressor in the ‘misti’, in the white.”[8]

The ethnic-class relationship was deepened as the Indigenous, in substantial numbers, were forced to proletarianize or become small shopkeepers and landowners. Yet Mariátegui argued that the revolutionary process had to be hegemonized by the proletariat, as did the Marxists of his time, on the assumption that “the problem of the Indian has to have a social solution. Those who produce it must be the Indians themselves.”[9] The greater the number of workers of Quechua origin, the closer the relationship of ethnicity and class: “In Peru the masses — the working class — are four-fifths Indigenous. Our socialism would not be Peruvian, nor would it continue to be socialism, if it did not solidarize firstly with the Indigenous demands.”[10]

Self-determination and nationality

It should be noted that, notwithstanding this originality for his time, Mariátegui was saying that socialism had to solidarize with the Indigenous demands without saying explicitly that the original peoples could autonomously, without delegation to the party, themselves govern their process toward socialism. Therefore, his program lacks a strategic objective for the Indigenous communities, other than the problem of the land, respect for their language and culture, but not basically recognition that they are one (or more) people-nation, a nationality with the right to self-determination; a people-nation, like the Quechua, Aymara or Mapuche who cohabit in various “nation”-states: Peru and Bolivia (Quechuas), Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (Aymaras), Chile and Argentina (Mapuches). Mariátegui was unable to visualize this, but we can no longer continue to overlook his omissions as they concern the original peoples and, above all, in order to rescue some of the remains of this “orthodox” left that continues to try to impose its ideological terrorism on whoever dares to place on an equal footing (albeit not with such force, perhaps) the proletariat and the original peoples, peasants, other wage-earners in the middle classes, the women’s movements, ecologists, poor inhabitants in the urban peripheral zones, students, youth in general, liberation-theology Christians, pensioners, the elderly, homosexuals, lesbians and other social movements.

Mariátegui failed to clarify that the original peoples had to be autonomous in order to adopt their own politics and their own communitarian type of society inherited from the past and prior to the Spanish colonization and obviously prior to the Peruvian state and society. Because, strictly speaking, the original peoples are not Peruvians or Bolivians or Chileans or Mexicans, etc. although Mariátegui did not say this. That is, concretely, the Quechuas are not Peruvians, they pre-exist the Peruvian state. Behind this omission of Mariátegui was not only his conception of the nation-state but also his desire to formulate a national-political project led by the proletariat (represented by the single party), which, as we know, never respected Indigenous autonomy, with the exception of the Sandinistas after their self-criticism in 1982 in regard to the errors committed initially with the Miskitos.

The question of identity

Failing to recognize clearly that the Quechua and other original peoples are a nationality or a people-nation within the Peruvian state, Mariátegui became lost in a search for the Peruvian identity, going so far as to say that the Spanish conquest “frustrated the only Peruvianism that existed.”[11]

Wrong. The Quechua obviously did not express “Peruvianism” prior to the conquest nor do they now, although they are required to possess identity documents. In any case, Mariátegui lamented that the Quechua were kept at the margin: “[T]he elements of the nationality being developed were unable even to blend or unite. The dense Indigenous layer is kept almost totally outside of the process of formation of that Peruvianism that our self-styled nationalists are in the habit of exciting or inflating.”[12]

Mariátegui failed to pose clearly the right of self-determination of the original peoples because he was unable — perhaps owing to the ideological pressure of those who feared a supposed separatism of the original peoples — to appreciate that the Quechua had for centuries constituted a nationality. With this confused ideological “substratum” it was impossible to address clearly the problem of identity.

Above all, it must be observed, without reservation, that the original peoples, in their majority, have an identity that the Peruvians and other non-Indigenous inhabitants of Latin America, whether mestizos or whites, have failed to grasp. Not even the Blacks and Mulattos have the degree of identity of the original peoples.

Mariátegui realized the difficulties involved in achieving national identity and unity: “In Peru, the problem of unity is much deeper because the task here is not to overcome a plurality of local or regional traditions but to contend with a duality of races, languages and sentiments originating in the Spanish invasion and conquest of Indigenous Peru by a foreign race that has not subsequently fused with the Indigenous race, nor eliminated it or absorbed it.”[13] Nevertheless, Mariátegui continued to insist in many of his writings on the need for national unity with the Quechua and to form with them the Peruvian identity: “The Indian is at the foundation of our nationality in formation.”[14]

The formation of our identity as Latin American mestizos or whites is a process in permanent development. There is no sense that we are seeking in the Indigenous past an identity that we never had, although it is possible to encounter certain roots. The identity is made in historical continuity, in membership in a region, in linguistic idioms, in day-to-day life, in culture, in belonging to a social class. It began to be forged with the revolution for Independence and the rejection of European and North American aggression. Identity will be created in the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggle, as it is likewise reaffirmed in the movements challenging cultural dependency. In any case, that is no single identity. Let us forge a Latin American identity, and as a nation, that at the same time coexists with the Indigenous, Black and class and gender identity, and the identity of territory, whether of a province, a common region, or a city — identities that are never closed or finished in this process with its advances and retreats.

Land and Territory

Mariátegui makes no differentiation between land and territory, like the Latin American left to this day, and continues to insist that the Indigenous problem is solved with the grant of land or the recovery of part of those lands belonging to them before the Spanish and Portuguese invasion.

For the original peoples, territory is an essential category, and it means much more than the demand for land. In today’s terms, territory is the environment, that is, the intimate relationship between human and natural global society. Territory is the habitat of the original people-nation who continue to fight for its reconquest. It is the area in which daily life and communication in a common language are carried on. It is where we work and produce collectively, harmoniously integrating ourselves with nature without damaging it irreversibly.

For mestizo or white peasants land means individual ownership, whereas, for the original peoples it is collective possession (not ownership). Territory is the physical space of the original people-nation and therefore contains identity and culture, which is not only intellectual activity but also songs, dances, specific foods, games, sports and forms of sexuality. In this sense, the cosmovision of the original peoples can help to overcome the dualism between society and nature, the dichotomous criterion of the ideologists of so-called “western civilization”, as if human beings were outside of the environment — the ambiente, and not the medio ambiente popularized by the ecologists, because if the environment encompasses the whole of nature and society it cannot be medio.[15]

In any event, we speak only of “geographical environment” or “natural environment”. Which led — imagine that! — Marx, in one of his many strokes of genius, to say: “One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of humanity. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist.... My relation to my environment is my consciousness.”[16] And he added: “Society is therefore the perfected unity in essence of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.”[17] In other words, the know-it-all European marxologists were not paying attention, because ecology could “alter” the axis of the class struggle. We have made this digression because, as we said earlier, we not only want to discuss Mariátegui but to contribute to the original peoples.

Nation state

Mariátegui failed to disentangle the ideological theorizations behind the concept of the nation state. I am not saying that he talked about the nation state as such, but that his arguments were based on no other conception of the state than the one used by the left of his day. Mariátegui wanted to break with Eurocentrism, but he did not manage to break with the Eurocentric conception of the state.

At no time did he make the necessary distinction between “nation”-state and nationalities. Today we have a deeper understanding of this differentiation, for it is obvious that within a given state there can exist various oppressed nationalities, as in the case of the Spanish state with its Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Andalusian nationalities, each with their own identity, language and ancestral customs. Something similar is happening with the Corsicans in the French state, the Serbs, Bosnians and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia and in other countries of Eastern Europe, especially in the former USSR with the Chechens, Ukrainians and other nationalities — problems unresolved by the so-called “actually existing socialism”. Not to mention the armed conflicts of the Tamil ethnic group in Ceylon [sic] or the Kurds in Iran and, above all, the ethnic wars in the heart of Africa.

Not accidentally, the ideologists of the ruling class coined the term nation-state to justify their subjugation of the pre-existing nationalities with the formation of the state, misnamed nation, as they did in the case of the Sicilians and other nationalities in the so-called “unification” of Italy in the mid-19^th century. The concept of nation-state arose in modern Europe in accordance with a specific mode of production with a strong industrial and agricultural foundation and an expanding internal market, where the agrarian question was closely linked to the national question. As Pierre Vilar argues, until the early 19^th century the state, as a political form, was confused with nationalism as a political ideology.[18]

Otherwise, the nation state — arising out of armed struggle and extolled by most of the left, especially when it is in power — is not a supreme value or an absolute principle, as Hegel thought. Rather, it is a product of history, the appearance and extinguishment of which is commensurate with the existence and end of social classes. So far, no society in transition to socialism has taken steps toward the gradual disappearance of the state, notwithstanding theoretical considerations presented by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Che Guevara, with their thoughts on value theory, the consolidation of socialist consciousness, and women and the new man.

By adhering uncritically to the concept of the nation state, Mariátegui was ideologically blocked from recognizing the Quechua as a people-nation within the Peruvian state. In any case it was virtually impossible in Mariátegui’s time for some theoretician to envisage the multinational, multi-ethnic or pluri-ethnic state or a plurality of nationalities as the Sandinistas or, more recently, the social movements in Colombia, have managed to do. Not even the Zapatistas have raised this concept although they are clear about their identity; they do not use the concept of people-nation although they conduct themselves as such. Is it possibly a new disinformation subterfuge of Subcomandante Marcos aimed at avoiding negative reactions in the Mexican people to the potential separatism of the inhabitants of Chiapas?

While he clearly did not anticipate all the nuances of the national question,[19] Mariátegui was the first Latin American Marxist to incorporate the problematic, although he was more focused on the agrarian question. And he ended with an expression of historic significance: “The Indigenous community still retains sufficient vitality to be converted gradually into the cell of the modern socialist state.... Socialist doctrine can give a modern, constructive meaning to the Indigenous cause.”[20]

In light of the failures of the so-called “socialism”, a socialism without the inverted commas will have to reflect as to whether the future alternative society to liberal neoconservatism should integrate in our Latin American project many of the contributions of Mariátegui and the new social movements. It is not a question of amalgamating Mariátegui’s contributions — which go far beyond the Indigenous question — with those of the social movements, but of integrating them in a theory of revolutionary social change, which leads us to formulate one key thought: If today the revolutionary conception created a century and a half ago (1998 will be the 150^th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto) has proven insufficient, does this not suggest the need for a “refoundation” of the theory of the radical transformation of the present capitalist society to incorporate the contributions of Mariátegui, Che Guevara and the new and old social movements in order to take account of the specificity of Indo-American socialism?

If Mariátegui dared to enrich Marxism with the contributions of Sorel and the Indigenous praxis, we too should dare to incorporate in historical materialism — not as an addition or complement but as an integral part — anti-patriarchal and antisystemic feminism, subversive environmentalism, liberation theology, class-struggle syndicalism, counter-cultural workers and the strategic ideas of the original peoples oriented toward the multi-ethnic or plurinational state.

Mariátegui’s statement in 1925 is more relevant now than ever before: “And from the crisis of this skepticism and this nihilism is born the necessary compassion, strength, decisiveness of a faith and a myth that moves men to live dangerously.”[21] ... “The new generation burns with the desire to go beyond skeptical philosophy. The materials of a new mysticism are being prepared in the contemporary chaos.”[22]

This is our outstanding debt to the amauta. [End of translated article]

See also three articles by Luis Vitale, published in English:

Fidelismo and Marxism

Phases of the Cuban Revolution

Which Road for Chile?

---

[1] Amauta, a Quechua word meaning “elder” or “person of great wisdom”, was the name of Mariátegui’s newspaper. It is used here by Vitale to refer respectfully to Mariátegui himself. – Translator

[2] A. Flores G.: La agonía de Mariátegui, Int. de Apoyo Agrario, 3^rd ed. (Lima, 1989), pp. 22-23.

[3] Sic, actually in 1920. – Translator

[4] An apparent slip. Quintín Lame fought in Colombia, not Ecuador. – Translator

[5] Sic – An obvious typo. Probably should be 1924. See Vol. 12 of the Obra completa of Mariátegui. – Translator

[6] Ibid., p. 191.

[7] Alberto Sanchez: Ideología y Politica (Lima, 1969), p. 233.

[8] Ibid., El problema de las Razas, p. 32.

[9] J.C. Mariátegui, Peruanicemos al Perú (Lima, 1970), p. 33.

[10] J.C. Mariátegui, “Intermezzo Polémico”, published in the magazine Mundial, No. 350, February 25, 1927.

[11] J.C. Mariátegui, “Realismo y futurismo”, in Peruanicemos al Perú, op. cit. p. 26.

[12] Temas de Nuestra América, op. cit., p. 24.

[13] J.C. Mariátegui, Siete Ensayos, p. 261.

[14] “Realismo y Centralismo”, in Siete Ensayos, p. 206.

[15] Vitale makes an important point here. Contemporary Spanish uses both the noun ambiente and the phrase medio ambiente to refer to “the environment”. But the latter term, by attaching ambiente to medio (which means, depending on context, average, half, resources, etc.) refers to something less than the totality of the environment as it is understood by Indigenous peoples. Medio ambiente, literally, can be taken to mean something like “the surrounding environment”, not the whole thing, and thus not necessarily incorporating humanity. – Translator

[16] K. Marx, The German Ideology.

[17] K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

[18] P. Vilar, Iniciación al vocabulario del análisis histórico, (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1982), p. 171.

[19] To be clear, I use “national question” as it is currently used in political sociology and in the left. But in my opinion it is one of the many concepts of Eurocentric origin that the Marxist classics were unable to escape, adhering as they — and the vast majority of our Latin American theoreticians — did to the nation-state category.

Strictly speaking, it is a serious error to attempt to apply the nation-state concept to Latin America, long populated by millions of Indigenous people, since we have various nationalities among the original peoples. Furthermore, the nation-state in each country was precisely the one that seized their lands and overwhelmed their languages and cultures, except in the case of the Guarani. (See Aníbal Quijano, Raza, “etnia” y “nación” en Mariátegui: cuestiones abiertas (Lima: Amauta, 1993), and by the same author, “Colonialidad del poder y democracia en América Latina”, Revista Debate, March-May 1994. There is much to ponder in both essays, as in others by Aníbal.

It is urgent, therefore, to undertake a critical analysis of the conceptualization and traditional sociological, historical, political and cultural terminology, as the feminists are doing in respect to the male chauvinist semantic of the social sciences.

[20] J.C. Mariátegui, Obras, Vol. 2, p. 312 and Obras, Vol. 1, p. 213.

[21] J.C. Mariátegui, “Dos concepciones de la vida”, 9-01-1925, in Obras Politicas, selected and annotated by Rubén Jiménez (Mexico City: Era, 1979), p. 398.

[22] Ibid. p. 398.

Do Indigenous concepts help or hinder in fighting the World’s Climate Crisis?

 A Debate between Pablo Stefanoni and Hugo Blanco
Translated and introduced by Richard Fidler

[This exchange was first published in Socialist Voice, May 24, 2010]

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth¹, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April, has fueled a growing debate in Latin America over the validity and usefulness of traditional Indigenous value systems and forms of organization in resolving the pressing social problems of the region, not least the challenges posed by the climate crisis. We publish here two differing assessments.

• Pablo Stefanoni is the editor of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique.
• Hugo Blanco is a longstanding indigenous leader of the peasant movement in Peru and editor of the newspaper La Lucha Indígena.

The Cochabamba conference was called by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the disastrous United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen last December. It was attended by more than 30,000 activists from over 100 countries. They adopted a People’s Agreement² that assigns responsibility for the climate crisis to the capitalist system and rejects the use of market mechanisms in combating climate change.

Conference participants were critical of the dependency of most semicolonial “Third World” countries on resource-based export strategies that devastate local environments while frustrating attempts at endogenous development in the interests of local and national communities. However, they identified the main culprit as the uneven development intrinsic to imperialism, a system “that has led the richest countries to have an ecological footprint five times bigger than what the planet is able to support.” And they concluded:

“It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings. And in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings. We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of ‘Living Well,’ recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.”

Mother Earth, in the Indigenous languages of Latin America, is known as Pachamama. Prominent among the conference participants were Indigenous peoples, and their thinking and influence were clear in its decisions.

Evo Morales followed up the Cochabamba Conference by presenting its proposals in a major speech at the United Nations³ before the G77 + China, a group of the world’s poorest countries (plus China) that (as he put it) “are the least responsible for climate change and, nonetheless, the most affected by the dire impacts of global warming.” The other South American heads of state, gathered at the UNASUR conference in Buenos Aires on May 4, endorsed the Cochabamba People’s Agreement⁴, urged other member governments to join the effort “to open spaces on the subject of climate change,” and agreed to discuss further such actions at their scheduled meeting in Cancún, Mexico later this year.

The Bolivian government, along with its partners in UNASUR and the anti-imperialist Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), has sought to use tribunes like Cochabamba’s as a means to enhance consciousness and build international support that can help provide these oppressed and exploited countries with greater latitude to resist imperialism and develop their own people-oriented alternative development strategies. The Cochabamba Conference marked an important step forward in this process.

However, that is not the view of Pablo Stefanoni, whose newspaper is the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Dipomatique, the Paris monthly magazine that is influential in the broad left, including in the milieus that organize the World Social Forums. Stefanoni saw the Cochabamba Conference as a diversion from the pressing tasks facing Bolivia. In his opinion, its dominant Indigenous discourse, which he scornfully dismisses as pachamamismo, is an obstacle to efforts to free Bolivia from dependency on resource exports and “prevents Bolivia from being a serious player in the big international leagues.”

Hugo Blanco, responding to Stefanoni, offers a very different, positive assessment of the contribution of Indigenous thinking to the world struggle against the climate crisis.

Related reading: Ian Angus, “Cochabamba: Climate Justice Has a New Program and New Hope for Victory,”⁵ Socialist Voice, April 29, 2010

*********

WHERE IS PACHAMAMISMO TAKING US?

by Pablo Stefanioni
Rebelión, April 28, 2010⁶

The Tiquipaya summit[1] — over and above the chickens, gays and bald men that were given such extensive media coverage, over what could be interpreted as a presidential slip[2] — revealed something of relevance to the future: The process of change is too important to be left in the hands of the pachamámicos. The affectation of ancestral authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin America’s “familiar exoticism” and even more so Bolivia’s (according to Marc Saint-Upéry[3]) but it does not seem capable of contributing anything significant in terms of building a new State, instituting a new model of development, discussing a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and mass participation.

What is more, pachamamismo — a sort of stylish newspeak — serves to dissolve Bolivians’ profound yearnings for change in the deaf ear of a supposed alternative to Western philosophy, even though it is learned in such global spaces as NGO workshops, in the calm of Duke University or in the courses supervised by Catherine Walsh in the Universidad Andina[4] or the FLACSO Ecuador. In the last analysis, as becomes more obvious each time, we are presented with a global new-age Indigenous discourse with scant capacity to reflect the actually existing ethnicities. And, as in the countries of actually existing socialism, this “newspeak” can infinitely expand the hiatus between discourse and reality (why do they say nothing about extractivism and the reprimarización of the economy,[5] for example?), weakening the transformative energies of the society.

So, instead of discussing how to combine developmental expectations with an intelligent eco-environmentalism, the pachamámico discourse offers us a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enigmatic tone, and a naïve reading of the crisis of capitalism and western civilization. Or directly, in interpretative broadsides like that of Fernando Huanacuni, a foreign office official, who told an Argentine newspaper that the earthquake in Haiti was a small warning of the economic-global-cosmic-telluric-educational impetuousness of the Pacha Mama.

Do the politics of Edgar Patana [the elected mayor of El Alto and disputed labour leader] reflect a new spirituality? Does Isaac Ávalos [the senator and peasant leader] intervene in the Senate asking leave of Grandmother Cosmos? Or does Gustavo Torrico [the deputy interior minister] base his management of the police on the criterion that the rights of Pacha Mama (and ants) are more important than human rights?

In Europe there is much greater awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic products) than there is in our country, where in many ways everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed First Nations’ philosophy, often an excuse of some urban intellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the country. Many of the official mistakes in the summit are not unrelated to its having handed over the theme of climate change to the pachamámicos, whose irresponsibility prevents Bolivia from being a serious player in the big international leagues. For many intellectuals, the Bolivian laboratory may provide enormous material for their own investigations, and many NGOs are delighted to fund all kinds of social experiments. But for Bolivians the cost of a new lost opportunity could not be covered by all the cooperation projects combined.

+++++

INDIANISMO AND PACHAMAMISMO

by Pablo Stefanoni
Rebelión⁷, May 05, 2010⁷

My previous column in this newspaper provoked an irate reply from some comrades who (without saying so) consider themselves part of the pachamámica current, which — without any evidence — they seek to transform into a synonym for Indigenous and the sole ideological basis of the current process of change. In reality, indianismo did not exist in the Chapare, and in the Altiplano, Felipe Quispe talked less of Pacha Mama and Pacha Tata[6] than he did of tractors, the Internet, and rural development projects for the commune residents, in the framework of an Aymara nationalist project. Kataristas and Indianistas engage in politics; the pachamamicos the cult of the esoteric. I have never seen a blockade for vivir bien [to live well], although I could be mistaken.

Nor was pachamamismo the discursive basis of the Indigenous rebellions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as Forrest Hylton shows in relation to Chayanta (1927),[7] where the representative chiefs were demanding education and recognition of their authorities and lands in alliance with sectors of the urban left, their pleas laden with modern/western anti-slavery discourse. And in the Forties and Fifties the unions in many regions broke with the conservative role of the traditional authorities in the preservation of a neocolonial status quo.

Many of their categories, such as the chacha-warmi to mention only one,[8] do not stand up to historical investigation, and according to Milton Eyzaguirre have more to do with the imposition of the Catholic vision of marriage than they do with ancestral customs. Does decolonization mean returning to the two republics of the Viceroy Toledo?[9] In the last analysis, there are non-Indigenous pachamámicos and non-pachamámicos Indigenous — possibly the majority — so there is no basis for labelling just any criticism as racist. While it seems profoundly radical, its “philosophical” generality provides no clue to overcoming dependent capitalism, extractivism and rentismo,[10] nor to the construction of a new State or the need for “post-clientelist” forms of politics. While it has little impact in the Government, pachamamismo is a useful discourse for turning any serious debate into hollow “philosophical” rhetoric.

The debate over decolonization cannot overlook the tension between the survival of the ghetto (in the form of preservation of “ancestral” identity and culture or theories of the “good farmer” Indian or, directly, the good Avatar-like ecological savage) and assimilation: access to “universal” culture. Possibly, intermediate between both extremes, there might arise a successful road to decolonization and social and cultural mobility. (In some haciendas the landlords, not exactly supporters of pluriculturalism or multiculturalism, would only allow entrance to priests who would speak Aymara with their Indian tenants; otherwise the latter would learn Castellano and leave.)

Pachamamismo inhibits any serious discussion, for example, of what it is to be Indigenous in the 21st century. How can the Aymara owner of a fleet of minibuses in El Alto and convert to Pentacostalism be compared simply with the resident of a commune in the north of Potosí who continues to produce in the context of an ethnic economy? How is it possible to apply the communitarian model in a country that is majority urban and criss-crossed by all types of hybridization/migration/insertion in global markets, and the rise of an Indigenous/mestizo commercial bourgeoisie? And finally, who elected the globalized pachamámico intellectuals to speak on behalf of the Indigenous of Bolivia and the world? Yes, these are the words of a “mono-thinker”, but they may be worth a response.

+++++

REPLY TO PABLO STEFANONI’S
‘INDIANISMO AND PACHAMAMISMO’

by Hugo Blanco
Lucha Indígena, May 11, 2010⁸

Pablo Stefanoni begins his article “Where is pachamamismo taking us?” by taking his distance from the stupid assessment that the right wing made of the Cochabamba Summit. It seemed that he would analyse the meeting, but apparently anti-Indigenous racism has blinded him and there is no serious assessment.

Let us see what Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher, journalist and coordinator of environmental campaigns in Uruguay, Brazil and Sweden, has to say about this meeting. She is an international lecturer on those subjects and has followed the negotiation of various United Nations environmental treaties:

“The response to the official call for this summit exceeded all expectations, both in numbers attending (35,000) and in content, making it an historic landmark in the international debate on the climate crisis. Faced with the maneuvers of the powerful governments in Copenhagen, Bolivia appealed to the grassroots of the world’s societies to demonstrate their positions and present them to the governments. In both respects it was an overwhelming success. And it strengthened the networks and interactions among the movements….

“A common basis was created for developing understanding, critical analysis and strategies in relation to the climate crisis, enriched by various perspectives from many cultures, peoples, and interest groups on the continent and around the world. The Cochabamba People’s Agreement reflects this.” (http://tinyurl.com/266zcgc⁹)

A serious analysis would have begun by specifically evaluating the conclusions of the meeting, the People’s Agreement mentioned by Ribeiro. Stefanoni does not do that; the only comment he makes of the meeting in another article of his is that “the summit would be of little advantage if it served only to confirm the (deserved) international popularity of our President and to engage in emotional anticapitalism in a tumultuous collective catharsis.”[11]

Stefanoni says “Many of the official mistakes in the summit are not unrelated to its having handed over the theme of climate change to the pachamámicos….”

Who handed it over? Morales, following his correct intervention in Copenhagen, which precisely corresponded to the sentiment of the 100,000 persons who were protesting the inaction of the governments, was the only president who called the summit, not only for the Indigenous but for the people of the world.

No one has handed over the subject of climate change to the Indigenous. They are the ones who day after day are fighting and dying, as they have in Bagua, Peru, in defence of Mother Earth and against the environmental pollution resulting from the action of the big multinational corporations. Currently, the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have shifted towards opposing Correa’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” because of his resource extraction policy. But these ecological battles are of no importance for Stefanoni; they do not amount to civilized ecology. “In Europe there is much greater awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic products) than there is in our country, where in many ways everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed First Nations’ philosophy….”

We agree with the criticisms by the compañeros of Mesa 18 [Working Group 18][12] of the continued resource extraction practices of the Bolivian government. They criticized the government specifically for not being, as Stefanoni puts it, consistently “pachamamista”.

Stefanoni says, among other things, “I have never seen a blockade for ‘vivir bien’, although I could be mistaken.”  In Peru, the environmental battles I mentioned are waged on behalf of “buen vivir” in opposition to capitalism’s teaching that we should “earn more money in the least possible time.” As a woman in those battles recently stated, “I am not going to eat gold.”

“The pachamámico discourse, on this and other points, simply takes the debates onto the terrain of philosophy, a discipline worthy of the greatest respect, except when used as an excuse not to address the burning issues that we must confront.”[13]

We agree that it should not be used as an excuse, but we are entitled to use it to defend Mother Earth, which is not what Stefanoni does when he demands that we abandon our Indigenous way of viewing the world — which, of course, is not his. We are entitled to maintain and develop our identity just as he has the right to maintain his vision of the world.

“The debate over decolonization cannot overlook the tension between the survival of the ghetto (in the form of preservation of ‘ancestral’ identity and culture or theories of the ‘good farmer’ Indian….”

First, let’s talk about the ghetto. The great majority of Indigenous are not and do not want to be a ghetto. (Of course there are exceptions who do have that reverse racist spirit, such as Felipe Quispe, who is respectfully mentioned by Stefanoni.) The Pachacuti party in Ecuador accepts gringos as members, provided they agree with its program. In Peru, we consider ourselves part of the broader mass movement. Morales invited everyone to come to the Cochabamba meeting (unfortunately, many of the Europeans who were in Copenhagen could not attend because their flights were cancelled due to ashes from the volcano in Iceland).

The best example are the Mayas of Chiapas [in Mexico], who have said “We are Indigenous, we are proud of it, we want to be respected as Indigenous. We consider ourselves brothers of all the poor people in Mexico and the world.” Bear in mind that the first international meeting to debate the theme “Against neoliberalism, for humanity,” much before the World Social Forums, was held in the mud of Chiapas in response to the call of the Zapatista Indigenous, and it was attended by representatives from 70 countries.

As to “the good farmer Indian,” of course this is true, we have an age-old heritage of farming that safeguards the soil. Indigenous agriculture does not engage in monoculture, which destroys the soil, nor does it use agrochemicals that likewise destroy the soil as does modern agro-industry which also uses genetically modified organisms and has discovered the wonders of the terminator seed, which cannot be used for reproduction. Indigenous agriculture, among other things, mixes crops and practices crop rotation, which conserves the soil.

“The process of change is too important to be left in the hands of the pachamámicos.”

Who wants to do that? The Indigenous movement, which is fighting for change, appeals to all the people to join in that struggle.

“The affectation of ancestral authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin America’s ‘familiar exoticism’ … but it does not seem capable of contributing anything significant in terms of building a new State, instituting a new model of development, discussing a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and mass participation…. its ‘philosophical’ generality provides no clue to overcoming dependent capitalism, extractivism and rentismo, nor to the construction of a new State….”

The Indigenous community exists in any country in America with an Indigenous population: Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, the United States, Canada. This community holds that it is the collectivity that is in charge (which does not mean there are no communities deformed by the capitalist environment surrounding them). It is, on a small scale, an organism of political power, struggling and coexisting alongside the power of the system.

Struggles against the system strengthen the community as an organism of power. I experienced this personally in the valley of La Convención, in Cusco, Peru, during the struggle for the land. We experienced it last year after the massacre in Bagua, when the police were afraid to enter many forest communities being ruled by the communal government.

We are seeing this strengthening now in Ecuador, as a result of the tension that exists between the Indigenous and “socialism of the 21st century.” In Cauca, Colombia, notwithstanding attacks by the government, the paramilitaries and the FARC,[14] the Indigenous organization is taken to higher levels of the community, and the communities are organized and are joining together.

The best example are the Indigenous of Chiapas, where the Indigenous have been governing themselves for more than 16 years in a collective, truly democratic form through “Juntas de Buen Gobierno” [Councils of Good Government], the members of which serve in rotation and are unpaid. The Zapatista National Liberation Army, which is also Indigenous in composition, does not participate in the government; its members are prohibited from being members of the councils. Its role is to protect the Indigenous communities from the attacks of the “bad government”.

The Indigenous do not “take” power, they build it from below in an authentically democratic form. They do not call it “socialism” because the “socialist” government in Chile has been jailing the Mapuche using Pinochet’s laws, and in Ecuador, as we said, they are struggling against “Socialism of the 21st century.”

Sooner or later, in Bolivia they will be confronting the government of the “Movement toward Socialism”, which is still not the Indigenous democratic government but an anti-imperialist government midway between the oligarchy and the Indigenous and Bolivian population in general, similar to the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela.

We hope that the non-Indigenous population will also participate in building the new society. We are excited by the existence of the “fábricas recuperadas” [occupied and worker-run factories] in Argentina. Probably there are other examples.

The use of the pachamámico language by government agencies and NGOs, which use it to hold back the movement and for other purposes, does not invalidate the Indigenous spirit, the Indigenous cosmovision, the Indigenous language, the Indigenous struggle. “Marxism-Leninism” was also used in the Soviet Union to massacre the workers’ vanguard, which does not invalidate Marxism or Leninism. The so-called democratic neoliberal governments do not invalidate democracy.

Translator’s notes

[1] The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was held April 20-22 in Tiquipaya, a town in Cochabamba Department, Bolivia.

[2] A comment by Evo Morales when addressing the summit was widely misinterpreted internationally. See http://www.misna.org/news.asp?a=1&IDLingua=1&id=270943¹⁰.

[3] See http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2009-February/044800.htm¹¹l.

[4] Catherine E. Walsh is director of the Doctoral Program in Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador. See http://tinyurl.com/2dpgby4¹². FLACSO Ecuador is the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Ecuador section.

[5] Reprimarización, a Spanish neoligism sometimes translated as “re-primarization,” means forcing the economy to produce those low value-added items where it has an absolute competitive advantage — in Bolivia, for example, hydrocarbons extraction for export with little development of refining capacity or endogenous manufacturing.

[6] Respectively, Quechua for Mother Earth and Earth Father. Felipe Quispe heads the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) and has also been general secretary of the United Union Confederation of Working Peasants of Bolivia (CSUTCB). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_Quispe¹³. The Chapare district of Bolivia is the heartland of the Indigenous coca growers, whose union is headed even now by Evo Morales.

[7] See Forrest Hylton, “The Bolivian Blockades in Historical Context”, http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02012003.html¹⁴.

[8] Chacha Warmi: the Quechua principle of two sexes, working together to attain equilibrium in the cosmos. Evo Morales describes his cabinet, which is composed equally of men and women, as an example. Three of the 10 female members are Indigenous social activists.

[9] The Viceroyalty of Peru was one of the two Spanish Viceroyalties in America from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo laid the basis for Spanish rule in Peru from 1569 to 1582. He executed Túpac Amaru, the last Indigenous leader of the Inca state in Peru.

[10] Rentismo refers to economic dependency on royalties and taxes from natural resource extraction.

[11] See “Bolivia Avatar,” http://www.surysur.net/?q=node/13391¹⁵.

[12] Mesa 18 was an informal working group at the Cochabamba summit, in addition to the 17 official working groups, comprised of people from social movements opposed to mining and hydrocarbon policies of the Morales government.

[13] “Bolivia Avatar”, op. cit.

[14] Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the oldest and largest insurgent grouping in that country. FARC guerrillas have been known to attack Indigenous communities.