<div dir="ltr">thanks Peter,<div><br></div><div>comes very close to what I have observed in Ecuador,</div><div><br></div><div>Michel</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:30 PM, peter waterman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com" target="_blank">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">
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.<br>
<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">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.<br>
<br>
</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Best,<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">Peter<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br><p>
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<h1>Governments and Movements: Autonomy or New Forms of Domination?*</h1>
<div><div><div>
Raúl Zibechi </div>
<div> <p>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 <i>Caracazo</i>—the first great popular
insurrection against neoliberalism—which drove into crisis the
party-system that for decades had sustained elite domination.</p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>2. Movements that in the 1990s and early 2000s were the central
protagonists of resistance to the neoliberal model have been
marginalized.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>The risks of subordination</b></p>
<p> 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 <i>planes sociales</i>) and other material benefits. Many other movement collectives simply dissolved.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In Colombia, the long struggle of the indigenous Nasa represented by the ACIN and CRIC has been doubly fruitful.<a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn1" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftnref1" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[1]</a>
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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p> 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 <i>piquetero</i> movement of unemployed workers has been coopted by the state through economic subsidies to families (the <i>planes sociales</i>)
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> 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 <i>planes sociales</i> are largely responsible for this weakening of the movements.</p>
<p> 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.<a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn2" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftnref2" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[2]</a></p>
<p> 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."<a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn3" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftnref3" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[3]</a></p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p><b>The new forms of domination</b></p>
<p> 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 <i>planes sociales</i> aimed at "integrating" the poor play a central role in these novel modes of social control.</p>
<p> I recently had the following conversation with a top-level official of Uruguay's Ministry of Social Development:</p>
<p> The official said, "For us, social policies are emancipatory policies, not a way of disciplining the poor."</p>
<p>"Is this your personal opinion or is it the ministry's as well?" I wondered.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p> 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:</p>
<p>1. <i>The end of the old right</i>: 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 (<i>caudillos</i>), who used their role as mediators with state institutions and the electoral system to subjugate the poorest sectors.</p>
<p>The movements arose to fight against these elites. The <i>piquetero</i> case is symptomatic: the piqueteros’ struggle for direct control of the <i>planes sociales</i>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>2. <i>New forms of control</i>: 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.</p>
<p>The state-backed <i>planes sociales</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Echoing Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, it could be said that the <i>planes sociales</i>
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.<a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftn4" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftnref4" title="" target="_blank"></span></span><span><span>[4]</a></p>
<p>True, the <i>planes sociales</i> 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 <i>planes sociales</i>
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 <i>planes sociales</i> as an achievement of progressive politics.</p>
<p>3. <i>An offensive against autonomy</i>: States now adopt the language of the movements, even claiming support for the "critical autonomy" of those receiving the <i>planes sociales</i>. States have devised mechanisms of coordination so that the movements themselves participate in the design of the <i>planes sociales</i>
and are involved in the implementation of local policies (never general
policies, though, or those that might question the model).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>planes sociales</i> 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 (<i>los de abajo</i>) in order to survive
neoliberalism. Once the social ties and knowledge that assured their
autonomy have disappeared, these sectors are easier to control.</p>
<p>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 <i>planes sociales</i>
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.<span> </span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%">
<div>
<div><a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref1" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftn1" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[1]</a> [<i>Ed. Note</i>: For details, see Mario Murillo’s article in <b>S&D, no. 51</b> (November 2009).]</div>
</div>
<div>
<div><a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref2" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftn2" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[2]</a> [<i>Ed. Note</i>: For Plan 3000 resistance to the right wing coup, see Marxa Chávez in <b>S&D no. 51</b>.]</div>
</div>
<div>
<div><a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref3" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftn3" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[3]</a>
Raquel Rodriguez, “Winds of Civil War in Bolivia: Understanding a
Four-party Conflict,” Center for International Policy-Americas Program,
October 29, 2008 (<a href="http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5632" target="_blank"></span><span>http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5632</a>).</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div>
<div><a href="http://postcapitalistproject.org/node/37#_ftnref4" name="147ee03d9a4a2afa__ftn4" title="" target="_blank"></span><span>[4]</a> See Francisco de Oliveira, “The Duckbilled Platypus,” <i>New Left Review</i> 24, November/December 2003.</div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div></div></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br clear="all"></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><ol><li><b><font><span></span><font size="1"><span><span>EBook, November 2012:</span> <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/" target="_blank">Recovering
Internationalism</a>. </span><span><font color="#ff0000">[A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]</font></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span></font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><span><span>EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></font>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/<font color="#ff0000"> </a></span></span><span><span><br>
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</li><li><b><font size="1"><span lang="NL">Blog:</span><span lang="NL"> <a href="http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman." target="_blank">http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.</a>
</span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1">Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement Internationalisms. <a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/" target="_blank">See Call for Papers</a>, <font color="#ff0000">(Deadline: May 1, 2014). </font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><a href="http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf" target="_blank"></font></font></span></font><font color="#000000">Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><font color="#000000"> <font color="#ff0000">(2005-Now!)<br>
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<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000">Google Scholar Citation Index:</font></font></font></b><br><span style="display:block"> <b><font size="1"><a href="http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ" target="_blank">http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ</a> </font></b><br>
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