[P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] Raul Zibechi: Governments and Movements (from around 2009)

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks Peter,

comes very close to what I have observed in Ecuador,

Michel


On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:30 PM, peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> Further to the exchange with Daniel and Michel concerning the state and
> the movements, I contribute this piece by the Uruguayan, Zibechi.
> Interesting for me are its reference to Latin American cases. I do not
> know, of course whether the situations he talks of have changed
> significantly since then, nor if he has (tho recalling a presentation on
> the Brazilian state I heard in Lima not so long ago, I think not.
>
> There is another such Latin American piece I have to find and forward.
> More theoretical than this piece, but likewise informed by intense local
> experience.
>
> Best,
>
> Peter
>
> [image: Share]
> <http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Fpostcapitalistproject.org%2Fnode%2F37&title=Governments%20and%20Movements%3A%20Autonomy%20or%20New%20Forms%20of%20Domination%3F*%20%7C%20Envisioning%20a%20Post-Capitalist%20Order&description=>
>  Governments and Movements: Autonomy or New Forms of Domination?*
> Raúl Zibechi
>
> The end of 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Hugo Chávez's first
> electoral victory (December 6, 1998), which initiated a new period marked
> by the emergence of progressive and left governments in South America. His
> clinching of the presidency was the result of a long process of struggles
> from below, beginning in February 1989 with the *Caracazo*—the first
> great popular insurrection against neoliberalism—which drove into crisis
> the party-system that for decades had sustained elite domination.
>
>             In the years that followed, seven other presidents embodying
> the ongoing political-institutional changes came to power, accounting for a
> total of eight out of ten governments in the region: Luiz Inácio Lula da
> Silva in Brazil, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Michelle
> Bachelet in Chile, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia,
> Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. These
> administrations were made possible—to a greater or lesser degree—by the
> resistance of social movements to the neoliberal model.
>
> In some cases, admittedly, this change at the top level arose from years
> of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other
> countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing
> neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and to an
> extent Argentina). A decade after the start of this process, it is time for
> a brief evaluation of what has happened:
>
> 1.     Beyond the differences between these processes, they share
> something fundamental in common: the return of the state to a central role
> as the driver of change.
>
> 2.     Movements that in the 1990s and early 2000s were the central
> protagonists of resistance to the neoliberal model have been marginalized.
>
> 3.     The dominant contradiction in this period is between the
> governments and right-wing sectors, a change that has sucked movements into
> a statist whirlwind from which most have been unable to escape.
>
> 4.     There are some tendencies—still dispersed—that seek to rebuild the
> movements on new foundations, based on new issues and new forms of
> political action.
>
> The twilight of the "progressive" decade as a source of social, political,
> and economic change makes it necessary for social movements to balance
> their accounts and take stock of the gains and losses this decade has
> brought to popular forces.
>
> *The risks of subordination*
>
>             An initial stage was marked by government subordination of the
> movements, or rather by the movements’ demobilization and division, and the
> fragmentation of their initiatives. Only small nuclei remained in open
> confrontation with the governments, while most slid toward government
> collaboration in exchange for direct economic subsidies (known as *planes
> sociales*) and other material benefits. Many other movement collectives
> simply dissolved.
>
> By contrast, in Chile, Peru, and Colombia, the movements are experiencing
> an era of vibrant activity. In all three countries, indigenous groups are
> taking the lead. In Chile, the Mapuche are recovering from the ravages of
> the Pinochet-era anti-terrorism law, which was reactivated by "socialist"
> President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006). The Mapuche, along with high school
> students and workers from various sectors, particularly mining and
> forestry, have generated a major reactivation of social struggles.
>
> Indigenous communities affected by mining in Peru are vigorously resisting
> through the grassroots Quechua organization Conacami, paying a high price
> in lives and arrests for their struggles. The group is leading the fight
> against genocidal mining projects that leave behind contaminated water
> sources and un-breathable air just to line the pockets of the
> multinationals. CONACAMI fiercely opposes the U.S.-Peru Free Trade
> Agreement (FTA) and President Alan García's neoliberal policies.
>
> In Colombia, the long struggle of the indigenous Nasa represented by the
> ACIN and CRIC has been doubly fruitful.[1]
> <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn1> The broad social
> mobilization known as the "Minga" (literally, collective work), which
> brought together dozens of indigenous groups in October 2008 in Cauca,
> managed to break through a military siege and the militarization of society
> that had immobilized indigenous communities. Cane cutters—most of them
> Afro-Colombians—service workers, neighborhood organizations, and human
> rights activists all joined the indigenous-led Minga.
>
> The example set by these movements, which are beset by and born out of
> adversity, should be a point of inspiration for the rest of the continent's
> movements. The long hunger strike by Mapuche advocate Patricia Troncoso
> between November 2007 and January 2008 and Colombia's indigenous Minga
> share the potent mission of breaking through the isolation and "soft"
> genocide that seek to wipe indigenous groups off the map in an attempt to
> silence their existence as a people.
>
>             In other countries, the panorama for the movements is
> extremely complex. Perhaps the most emblematic case is that of Argentina.
> The vast majority of the *piquetero* movement of unemployed workers has
> been coopted by the state through economic subsidies to families (the *planes
> sociales*) and the awarding of government posts to their leaders. The
> human rights movement—particularly, the Association of the Mothers of the
> Plaza de Mayo, which had played a prominent role in resisting neoliberalism
> during the 1990s—has joined officialdom, becoming an unequivocal defender
> of government policies. Meanwhile many neighborhood assemblies have simply
> disappeared.
>
> Nonetheless, not everything has been a step backward. Over the last five
> years, innumerable collectives have sprung up, many of them focusing on
> environmental issues, such as open-pit mining, forestry, and soy
> mono-cropping. From this process, some 100 local assemblies have emerged
> and are organized into the Union of Citizen Assemblies (UAC), which has
> become one of the most active opponents of multinational mining.
>
> Also in Argentina, campesinos and small farmers formed the National
> Campesino Front, made up of some 200 rural organizations representing
> family and community agriculture against the impetuous advance of soy
> agribusiness. The organization represents long-standing movements (such as
> MOCASE from Santiago del Estero) as well as new organizations of small
> producers, including a handful of collectives from urban peripheries.
>
>             In Brazil, the movements have been incapable of advancing
> beyond their long-standing defensive footing—a position aggravated by the
> Lula government. In Uruguay, despite organized labor's growing
> strength—largely attributable to state protection of labor leaders'
> activities—the movements are far from being an anti-systemic actor, and
> organizational levels among the urban poor remain local and fragmented. The *planes
> sociales* are largely responsible for this weakening of the movements.
>
>             In Bolivia, the situation is quite different. The movements
> have not been defeated and maintain their significant capacity for
> mobilization and pressure over the government and right-wing sectors. The
> September 2008 crisis, for example, was resolved in favor of popular
> sectors thanks to the movement's intense mobilization, which included the
> cordoning off of Santa Cruz and the resistance of Plan 3000—the poor and
> indigenous peripheral suburb of the oligarchic mestizo city.[2]
> <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn2>
>
>             As Raquel Gutiérrez noted about the current conjuncture,
> Bolivian movements have "recovered a margin of political autonomy in
> relation to government decisions," particularly when they see the
> government as incapable of stopping the oligarchy. "But they have no
> inclination to be subordinated when it comes to the fulfillment of their
> demands."[3] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn3>
>
>             The pressure exerted by the movements, however, comes up
> against statist logic, which remains firmly enmeshed in bloated state
> bureaucracies (military, judicial, legislative, ministerial, and
> municipal). Those bureaucracies are reticent to change. Bureaucracies are
> not only conservative by nature, they are also managed by newly empowered
> officials—both elected (deputies, senators, council members, mayors) and
> non-elected (ministers and hundreds of advisers)—whose main ambition is to
> maintain their positions.
>
> *The new forms of domination*
>
>             It is not possible for movements to overcome state dependency
> and subordination without understanding that the new "left" and
> "progressive" governments are exercising new forms of domination. The *planes
> sociales* aimed at "integrating" the poor play a central role in these
> novel modes of social control.
>
>             I recently had the following conversation with a top-level
> official of Uruguay's Ministry of Social Development:
>
>             The official said, "For us, social policies are emancipatory
> policies, not a way of disciplining the poor."
>
> "Is this your personal opinion or is it the ministry's as well?" I
> wondered.
>
> The official replied, "It's not just mine, it's also that of the national
> government and of the Ministry of Social Development. The national
> government did not come here to placate the poor; it came to generate
> opportunities for integration and emancipation."
>
>             Such affirmations, no doubt honest in their intent, implicitly
> undermine the role of social movements by adopting their discourses and
> even their practices. This raises three central questions:
>
> 1. *The end of the old right*: The new governments born from the crisis
> of the first stage of neoliberalism—the period of privatization and
> deregulation—consolidated their rule by destroying right-wing elites'
> traditional bases of domination. These elites had built extensive
> clientelistic networks with local political bosses (*caudillos*), who
> used their role as mediators with state institutions and the electoral
> system to subjugate the poorest sectors.
>
> The movements arose to fight against these elites. The *piquetero* case
> is symptomatic: the piqueteros’ struggle for direct control of the *planes
> sociales* sought to snatch from caudillos their ability to control
> patron-client networks. In confronting the right directly, this wave of
> mobilizations strengthened the piquetero movement and modified Argentina's
> regional political map.
>
> With mixed success, the new governments have sought to displace these
> clientelistic networks, putting government-directed state bureaucracies in
> their place. This is arguably the main "progressive" action of the new
> governments. In the process of dismantling the old elite networks, the
> governments have employed the same language and codes used by the movements
> of organized popular sectors.
>
> 2. *New forms of control*: The crisis of discipline as a way of molding
> bodies in closed spaces was one of the most prominent characteristics of
> the "Revolution of '68." The overwhelming of patriarchal hierarchies and
> the defiance of authority in the workshop, the school, the hospital and the
> barracks forced capital and the state to create new forms of open-air
> social control. They now had to find new ways to deal with the population
> and to maintain security.
>
> The state-backed *planes sociales*, directed by a coterie of NGO
> officials, are how these new forms of domination are being introduced into
> spaces and territories that are impervious to discipline. In these sites,
> the state becomes capillary, working from within, stretching its reach into
> ramshackle neighborhoods that had been bastions of revolt. It works with
> the very sectors that had been organized as movements, but its aim is to
> disorganize them.
>
> The state’s presence no longer manifests itself in the grotesque form of
> the police baton—though, for sure, it's never absent—but rather in the
> subtler form of "social development for citizen integration." For this, the
> state counts on all the knowledge accumulated by NGOs over decades of local
> "cooperation," during which they adopted the "participatory" practices of
> popular education.
>
> Young NGO officials constitute a new army of functionaries who no longer
> wait for children at schools or tend to patients at hospitals, but who
> instead go directly to the territories of poverty and rebelliousness. And
> they have something that makes this job much easier: They have insider
> knowledge of these popular sectors, because many of these officials at one
> time participated in resistance against the neoliberal model; they had been
> militants or, at least, deeply tied to social activism.
>
> Echoing Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, it could be said that
> the *planes sociales* are instruments of biopolitical control in which
> the state classifies people according to their material needs and "restores
> a type of clientelism" (let's call it state-scientific) in which politics
> become irrelevant.[4] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn4>
>
> True, the *planes sociales* help alleviate poverty, but they do not
> change the distribution of income, and they altogether avoid the growing
> concentration of wealth, while leaving the fundamental aspects of the model
> intact. And by affecting the organizational capacity of the movements and
> blocking their ability to grow, the *planes sociales* serve the
> neoliberal drive to turn all of life into a commodity. In this regard, it
> is alarming that left intellectuals are nearly unanimous in viewing the *planes
> sociales* as an achievement of progressive politics.
>
> 3. *An offensive against autonomy*: States now adopt the language of the
> movements, even claiming support for the "critical autonomy" of those
> receiving the *planes sociales*. States have devised mechanisms of
> coordination so that the movements themselves participate in the design of
> the *planes sociales* and are involved in the implementation of local
> policies (never general policies, though, or those that might question the
> model).
>
> The movements are persuaded to undertake a "participatory diagnosis" of
> the neighborhood or town; in fact they are even put in charge of carrying
> out the local charity work. This all falls into the policy of "capacity
> building" designed by the World Bank, which involves choosing which
> ministry each organization is suited to work with.
>
> All of this is aimed at "state building" within the everyday practices of
> popular sectors, and it is done precisely in areas where people had learned
> "movement building." The *planes sociales* are directed straight at the
> heart of territories that were incubators of rebellion. These programs seek
> to neutralize or modify networks and forms of solidarity, reciprocity, and
> mutual assistance that were created by the poor (*los de abajo*) in order
> to survive neoliberalism. Once the social ties and knowledge that assured
> their autonomy have disappeared, these sectors are easier to control.
>
> None of this should be attributed to a supposed malevolence on the part of
> the progressive governments. Whenever the poor have overturned existing
> forms of domination, new and more perfected ones have necessarily taken
> their place. Only by neutralizing these *planes sociales* and overcoming
> their offensive against the autonomy of the poor will the movements be able
> to get back on their feet and resume their march toward emancipation.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>  [1] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref1> [*Ed. Note*: For
> details, see Mario Murillo’s article in *S&D, no. 51* (November 2009).]
>  [2] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref2> [*Ed. Note*:
>  For Plan 3000 resistance to the right wing coup, see Marxa Chávez in *S&D
> no. 51*.]
>  [3] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref3> Raquel
> Rodriguez, “Winds of Civil War in Bolivia: Understanding a Four-party
> Conflict,” Center for International Policy-Americas Program, October 29,
> 2008 (http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5632).
>
>  [4] <http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref4> See Francisco de
> Oliveira, “The Duckbilled Platypus,” *New Left Review* 24,
> November/December 2003.
>
>
> --
>
>    1. *EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism
>    <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [A
>    compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download
>    formats] <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
>    <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
>    2.
> *EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
>    Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
>    <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
>    3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the
>    Global Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
>    4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
>    <http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
>    5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
>    Internationalisms. See Call for Papers <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>,
>    (Deadline: May 1, 2014). *
>    6.
> *Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
>    <http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>*
>    7. *Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
>    Globalised, Informatised Capitalism
>    <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>(2011) Almost 1,000
>    pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980's-90's.*
>    8. *Google Scholar Citation Index:*
>     *http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ
>    <http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ> *
>
>
>    -
>
>
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